Hey, you go to war with the delusions you have.

In his recent NRO article, "The WMD Scandal That Wasn’t," Rich Lowry feigns subdued ecstasy over the recently released report from the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (short title: How Bush Screwed the Pooch).

It's devastating. Not just for U.S. intelligence, which is portrayed as hapless and bungling, but for Bush critics who have vested so much in the argument that Bush officials pressured intelligence agencies to support the case for war. . . . Cut to Page 50 of the WMD report: "The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs."

Well, I guess that would be a hard blow to those who believe the Bush Administration leaned heavy on the intelligence agencies.

But Lowry knows better than to go near certain other commission conclusions. Remember: It's the pages Lowry's not telling you to "cut to" that are the most damning for the Bush Administration. Here's a concise summary from the Washington Post.

Of all the claims U.S. intelligence made about Iraq's arsenal in the fall and winter of 2002, it was a handful of new charges that seemed the most significant: secret purchases of uranium from Africa, biological weapons being made in mobile laboratories, and pilotless planes that could disperse anthrax or sarin gas into the air above U.S. cities.

By the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein of the deadly weapons he was allegedly trying to build, every piece of fresh evidence had been tested -- and disproved -- by U.N. inspectors, according to a report commissioned by the president and released Thursday.

Months before U.S. troops attacked Iraq in March 2003, the IAEA challenged every piece of evidence the Bush administration offered to support claims of a nuclear program there, according to the commission.

In January, IAEA inspectors discovered that documents showing Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger were forged. But the CIA chose to stick to the claim for another six months.

Two years earlier, the IAEA disputed CIA claims that Iraq was trying to buy black-market aluminum tubes for a nuclear program. The IAEA assessment, which turned out to be accurate, was first shared with U.S. intelligence in July 2001, according to the authors of the presidential commission report.

Blix's U.N. group tested evidence supplied by an Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball," whose tales of mobile bioweapons laboratories turned out to be fabrications, according to the report. Among Curveball's claims was that an Iraqi facility had been redesigned, with a temporary wall, to allow mobile laboratories to slip in and out undetected.

"When United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) inspectors visited the site on Feb. 9, 2003, they found that the wall was a permanent structure and could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the commissioners wrote.

Just to reiterate: By the time the Iraq War began, every piece of fresh evidence put forward by the Bush Administration as justification for a preventive war "had been tested -- and disproved -- by U.N. inspectors."

Now that's what I call devastating.
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UPDATE: Okay, let's cut to Page 8. . . via Eric Umansky comes this cogent observation.

The most important sentence in the commission report:

"We were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the
intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence
Community," - Page 8.