I’ve said it since the beginning, and now the government has confirmed it.

President Bush’s justification for entering the war in Iraq has been verified as being false information.

According to a Sept. 8 article from CNN, a Senate Intelligence Committee report officially announced that Saddam Hussein had no connections to al-Qaeda.

The Bush administration previously inferred that because Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been in Iraq previous to the war that Iraq had ties to his terrorist involvement with al-Qaeda.

Now, the committee’s report is saying that the Iraqi government “did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.”

The timing of the report’s release could make an impact on elections in November. Right now, Republicans are playing the “We must win the war on terror” card as much as they can. This may put a little change to that.

Now that the truth is exposed that our justification for going to war was a falsehood, the Democratic Party has a new card in its hand.

According to John D. Rockefeller, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Bush administration “exploited the deep sense of insecurity among Americans in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, leading a large majority of Americans to believe — contrary to the intelligence assessments at the time — that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attacks.”

Committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) responded by saying that Democratic interpretations of the report “are little more than a vehicle to advance election-year political charges” and that Democrats “continue to use the committee to try and rewrite history, insisting that they were deliberately duped into supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Can Roberts honestly believe his own charges of the Democrats rewriting history to say they were “deliberately duped” into the Iraq War?

What would he prefer to call it? The Democratic Party was provided with false evidence about nuclear weapons programs in Iraq and about Saddam Hussein’s involvement with al-Qaeda. They used this evidence as part of their stance on why our country should go to war.

What part of this is rewriting history? Is there something I’m missing here? Republicans fill Democrat’s heads with false information, get them to agree to enter a war based on this information and then accuse them of rewriting history to get their way. And we blame the Democrats?

Thousands of American men and women have given their lives fighting in Iraq, and now we have evidence that the reason they are there is invalid. What does this say about our country? About our moral standards?

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, there was severe doubt about Iraq’s involvement, but we entered the conflict anyway. It’s a sad thing to look at what has happened since then and realize this all could have been avoided.