David Corn Bets Brad Blakeman $1000 He's Wrong on Iraq Weapons Inspectors.

Karl Rove is trying to rewrite history with his latest book, and the lengths that the Republicans will go to in order to assist him is best illustrated by the kind of nonsense being spoken here by Brad Blakeman.

Blakeman now claims that the Bush administration did not go to war because of WMD, rather they went to war because Saddam would not allow weapons inspectors into Iraq.

Blakeman: President Bush did not bring us into this war because of WMD. He brought us into the war...

Corn: What!?

Blakeman: ...because Saddam Hussein failed...

Corn: What!?

Blakeman: ...to allow inspections of the sites the U.N. demanded be inspected.

Corn: Brad you're absolutely wrong.

Blakeman: I'm right.

Corn: The inspectors were in. They were for months before the war.

Blakeman: Come on David.

Corn: I'll bet you $1000 right now! $1000 the inspectors were there.

The Republicans are now having to invent their own facts in order to defend what they have done. The fact that the weapons inspectors were inside Iraq is simply undeniable. We all remember Blix's visits to the UN to report on what they were failing to find and how Republicans at the time argued that the fact that they were finding nothing was only further proof of how untrustworthy Saddam was.

And we know that Blix certainly told Tony Blair that Iraq might not have WMD.

The inspectors visited many sites said by intelligence services in the UK, the US and elsewhere to contain WMDs, but had only ever found conventional weapons, documents or nothing at all, he said.

''I think this was one of the most significant things of the whole story,'' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

''We got tips not only from the UK but from other intelligence, the US as well, so perhaps some 100 all in all.

''We had time to go to about three dozen of these sites and in no case did we find any weapons of mass destruction.''

He added: ''We said if this is the best (intelligence), then what is the rest? Doubts arose from that.''

But to claim now, as Blakeman is doing, that the reason the US went to war was because Saddam refused to allow the inspectors into Iraq is just patently false. The cleverest thing Blakeman does in the whole interview is to decline to take Corn's $1,000 bet that he is wrong. Because that's a bet which he would lose hands down.

Tags: Brad Blakeman, David Corn, Iraq war, weapons inspectors, WMD