The Washington Post - Washington, D.C.
Jim Hoagland Oct 10, 2002

[George W. Bush]'s immediate predecessors overlooked the genocide against the Kurds, the defiance of the United Nations on weapons of mass destruction, the harboring of terrorists, the breaking of the overly generous cease-fire terms that the United States dictated at the end of the Persian Gulf War and other parts of what Bush on Monday accurately called Iraq's "unique" record of evil. Until the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush and his Cabinet seemed able to also argue information about Iraq round or flat.

A sea change has occurred in official Washington since the president decided last summer that he would soon have to be ready to go to war against Iraq. Public attempts by officials to bury or explain away menacing information about Iraq have largely dried up or gone underground, although the CIA fights a rear-guard action. Now information and intelligence are marshaled to make the case, rather than deflect it.

"You sure write a lot about Iraq," an exasperated editor at The Post said to me in 1998. I took it as an unintended compliment from a colleague who was not eager to devote more space to [Saddam Hussein]'s transgressions then. Bush's determination has cleared news space as well as time at the Pentagon for Iraq.