Who's zooming who?

From Reuters 9/28/2003:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday there was new U.S. intelligence obtained before the Iraqi war about Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction programs, despite an assertion to the contrary by key congressional leaders.

"The president believes that he had very good intelligence going into the war," Rice said on the "Fox News Sunday" program.

The top aide to President Bush dismissed the finding by leaders of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee that much of the information relied upon was fragmentary or dated back to when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998.

"There was enrichment of the intelligence from 1998 over the period leading up to the war," Rice insisted. "And nothing pointed to a reversal of Saddam Hussein's very active efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

"... It was very clear that this continued and it was a gathering danger."

"Yes, I think I would call it new information and it was certainly enriching the case in the same direction," she added.

He leaned forward on a podium shared with President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and said angrily: ''Imagine a world in which this tyrant had a nuclear weapon. In 1998, my predecessor raided Iraq, based upon the very same intelligence. And in 2003, after the world had demanded he disarm, we decided to disarm him.''

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit" of weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light — through the prism of our experience on 9/11."

the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.

[...] May I just add a p.s. that if I was a Kuwaiti and I heard leaders in Baghdad claiming that Kuwait is still a part of Iraq and it's going to be included in the flag and the seal, if I knew they were continuing to try to find weapons of mass destruction, I would have no doubt in my mind who those weapons were aimed at. They are being aimed at Arabs, not at the United States or at others. Yes, I think we should...he has to be contained until he realizes the errors of his ways.
[Emphasis added]