Rove's Book and new info on WMD's in Iraq?

The American Spectator has an article by Joseph Shattan titled the Man Who elected Obama.  The main theme is the fact that is was known by certain people that satellite data showed weapons of mass destruction which were before our invasion secreted out of Iraq and into Syria.  The writer has this to say:

Let me recount a bit of personal history by way of background. About four years ago, around the time when Democrats were heatedly charging that Bush had "lied" about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in order to build a case for war (after all, they argued, if the weapons had existed, why weren't we able to find them after liberating Iraq?), I was having lunch with Dr. Laurie Mylroie, one of America's leading students of terrorism in general, and Iraqi terrorism in particular. Laurie was beside herself with anger. Why wasn't the Bush administration citing Gen. James Clapper, the Director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, who said that satellite imagery proved conclusively that shortly before the war's outbreak, Iraq had transferred its weapons of mass destruction to Syria? Why wasn't it quoting Gen. Georges Sada, deputy chief of Saddam's air force, or Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's chief-of-staff, both of whom also claimed that Saddam's weapons had been transferred to Syria? Why was it so tongue-tied, so unsure of itself, so unwilling to answer its critics? Didn't anybody in the White House realize that if the Democrats' charges went unanswered, they would fatally undermine the entire case for the war?

I wondered the same thing myself.  I am an extreme computer news junkie. I read blogs and have  for many years, well before 9/11.  In the run up to the war I was reading Iraqi blogs. Several of them noted they saw very long trucks taking obvious weapons moving from Iraq into Syria.  And after the WMD discussions started they also wondered why was the truth not coming out. Well, now we know. For one thing, the mainstream media was in no way going to help Bush out by printing the truth. But for the other hand there is this from  the American Spectator article:

Given this background, readers will understand the mixed feelings with which I reacted to Karl Rove's assertion, in a chapter entitled "Bush Was Right on Iraq," that Clapper, Sada and Ya'alon all maintained that Saddam had transferred his weapons of mass destruction to Syria on the eve of the war. On the one hand, I recalled the old saw, "Better late than never." On the other hand, I couldn't help feeling that history might have turned out differently had Karl spoken out sooner.

To his immense credit, Karl makes no effort to deny that he screwed up, big time. "So who was responsible for the failure to respond [to the Democrats' assault]?" he asks. "I was. I should have stepped forward, rung the warning bell, and pressed for full-scale response. I didn't. Preoccupied with the coming campaign and the pressures of the daily schedule in the West Wing, I did not see how damaging this assault was. There were others who could have sounded the alarm, but regardless, I should have."

Rove goes on to call the Democrats' claim that Bush lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction a "poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency," and notes that "by July 2005 a majority of Americans -- 51 percent -- believed that Bush had deliberately misled them."

This number is quite close to the 52 percent of Americans who voted for Obama in 2008. Maybe that's just a coincidence -- but I doubt it.

To the extent that Karl Rove -- one of the finest, ablest, most decent public servants I have ever encountered -- might have prevented all this from happening by responding more forcefully to the Democrats' blood libel, he is responsible for the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency of the United States.

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