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Notes -
I recall that Sharon told Putin (who was leading a push for WMD inspectors to verify whether Iraq did have WMDs) that the time for inspections was over, it was too late. His spokesman Ra'anan Gissen certainly went around spruking the WMD story.
Netanyahu was publishing op-eds calling for war. Foreign minister Shimon Peres said on CNN that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and that the United States "cannot sit and wait." A month later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post recommending that the Bush administration "should, first of all, focus on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein."
Netanyahu was of course in favor of the war, and promoted to Bush his own fake intelligence in a way that (as the source of the quote I quoted discusses actually) that bypasses both Mossad and Sharon.
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