Some of you guys just don't get it. He wrapped the evidence around his desires. He used the (known to him at the time to be) false BS about Iraq trying to get uranium from Nigeria. Wayne, that was a bold-face lie. Period. His own CIA told him that it was a forgery before his state of the union address. Despite all facts suggesting that this was not the case, he still sold that bs to Congress and to the American people.
As shown by the Downing Street memo, he not only conned America, but Britain as well. Wayne, would you call that memo 'proof?' Probably not in your eyes.
As far as 'approval' goes, no, I definitely don't think we need the UN's approval, but I guess the ironic thing is that everybody else was right and we were wrong. GW, would you concede that, or are we still working on the theory that rogue Russian forces swooped in and took every last piece of evidence of WMD?
Or maybe he was able to get every last canister of mustard gas up to Syria without anybody noticing. Not the inspectors, not the satellites. Nothing and nobody.
Or just maybe, we were totally wrong and every UN inspector was right and Hans Blix was right and every report from our CIA and everybody else that states that their program was dormant since 1991 was right.
It's easy to convince Congress when 80% of the 'evidence' came from disgruntled ex-Iraqis. It's also easy when you take the slightest affirmative scraps from the CIA and blow them up and ignore anything that was contradictory. It's easy when you point to some balsa wood model airplane with a range of 40 miles and say that we are threatened by that piece of junk.
You see, before the invasion, Congress didn't get to see all of contradictory information. If they had, perhaps they would have come to a different conclusion.
So yeah, Congress approved it and there were plenty of quotes attributed to Democrats that mentioned WMD. Well, that's because they trusted that the Presidents information was the slightest bit accurate. Somebody like Barbara Boxer, or even John Kerry, really is hardly more privy to all relevant information than we are. They spat back out the same information that they were fed by Bush & co. And every last bit of it was wrong. Yet you guys still defend them.
There was never one scrap of evidence, ever, linking Saddam to Osama, yet Cheney and Rice both tried that one. That's called a lie, or maybe just a horrible, hopeful guess.