Bush team's forgetfulness is damaging his record on Iraq war

George W. Bush is telling the world says he was “sickened . . . when we didn’t find weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.

How, I would like to know, did he feel when 550 metric tons of yellowcake were finally, secretly and successfully extracted from Iraq in the summer or 2008?

From the AP, July 5, 2008:

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

Closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy — since when were they opened?

As noted in April of this year, Karl Rove made the startling admission in his memoir that he was responsible for the Bush administration’s failure to flog the evidence that WMD had been removed from Iraq in the lengthy run-up to the US invasion and after. Essentially, he writes oh-so-sincerely, he was just preoccupied with other things and, shoot, didn’t notice all the damage the daily, monthly, yearly hammering (Bush-lied-People-died) was doing.

As for this one secret three-month operation in 2008 to remove yellowcake from the 23,000 acre Tuwaitha nuclear complex 12 miles south of Baghdad — following the military’s extraction “four devices for controlled radiation exposure from the former nuclear complex” that “contain elements of high radioactivity that could potentially be used in a weapon”? Frankly, we’re just lucky to have this anomolous AP story in the first place (print it out while it’s available.)

I guess somebody somewhere came to a decision-point not to acknowledge any of it for any reason ever. We just don’t know why.