IRAQ DID NOT, IT SEEMS, PURCHASE URANIUM from Niger. Democrats therefore say that President Bush is a liar. But they are lying themselves, as a Clifford May tells us in National Review, because that is not what Bush said. What he said in his State of the Union address was:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
...
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.

All that is entirely true. President Bush did not say that Hussein had bought uranium from Niger. Rather, he said that the British believed that Hussein had tried to buy uranium (not that he had succeeded), and that the IAEA said in the 1990's that Hussein was working on nuclear weapons. Both of those are indisputably true statements. Moreover, the British, and, as far as I know, the IAEA, still hold by their claims.

Mr. May also dissects the New York Times piece by Joseph Wilson, a recently retired career diplomat who was asked by Vice-President Cheney to go to Niger to check into the uranium story. Wilson says in the second sentence of his article,

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

But what is his evidence? --That when he went to Niger, the U.S. ambassador there was skeptical that Saddam had tried to buy uranium, that all the Niger officials he talked with denied it, and that if Saddam had tried, he would have been blocked because it would have required approval of Niger government officials and a company controlled by Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and Nigerian interests.

We all know that people from those countries wouldn't lie in exchange for a few million dollars apiece, don't we?

Thus, Mr. Wilson's evidence that the Administration twisted intelligence information boils down to the fact that it ignored his report that nobody in Niger would risk their jobs by telling him the Niger government was lying.

It slips through in Wilson's article that he was on the National Security Council Staff under Clinton. And-- in a bit of honest journalism that does the NYT credit-- he admits that he was a critic of Gulf War II. But what is not mentioned-- but what Mr. May points out-- about Wilson is, that in addition to all the career credentials that are mentioned in the article,

He's an "adjunct scholar" at the Middle East Institute -- which advocates for Saudi interests. The March 1, 2002 issue of the Saudi government-weekly Ain-Al Yaqeen lists the MEI as an "Islamic research institutes supported by the Kingdom."
He's a vehement opponent of the Bush administration which, he wrote in the March 3, 2003 edition of the left-wing Nation magazine, has "imperial ambitions." Under President Bush, he added, the world worries that "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness."
He also wrote that "neoconservatives" have "a stranglehold on the foreign policy of the Republican Party." He said that "the new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our world view are implanted throughout the region, a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme."
He was recently the keynote speaker for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, a far- left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions-- and even the no-fly zones that protected hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered by Saddam.

Returning to the Wilson article, we discover at the very end that Wilson himself thinks it is quite plausible that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, and is sure that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons programs! All that Wilson objects to is that the Administration claimed that Saddam was trying to develop nuclear weapons when Wilson's "information" about Niger was negative. This has to be seen to be believed. Here are Wilson's last three paragraphs:

If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (It's worth remembering that in his March "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Cheney said that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.") At a minimum, Congress, which authorized the use of military force at the president's behest, should want to know if the assertions about Iraq were warranted.
I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program -- all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed.
But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested.

July 18: Here's the Democratic Party site that simply lies about what Bush said (go to the supposed transcript on the site; I don't know if they falsified their soundfile too):

Read His Lips
In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat.
PRESIDENT BUSH: "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [2003 State of the Union]
America took him at his word.
But now we find out that it wasn't true.
Far worse, the Administration knew it wasn't true.

[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.07.14a.htm ]

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