As Korb told me, “What the Saudis allowed the United States to do over in that part of the world was to set up a de facto infrastructure by purchasing airfields, by purchasing very modern ports, by purchasing a lot of American equipment–theoretically to support their forces, by buying a lot of American equipment that would use the same type of facilities that our forces needed…. The provision of additional equipment, the AWACS, early warning airborne system, F-15 fighters… Plus there was a great deal of work done in terms of building facilities – the port facilities and the air fields that were so crucial to our ability to be able to deploy the force rapidly and then to conduct combat operations from Saudi Arabia, were developed in the 1980’s with a major investment on the part of the Saudis, but major involvement by the United States.”… If the Defense Intelligence Agency reported in 1989 that money was flowing from the Saudi Arabian military to Iraq’s secret military procurement network, and that the purpose of the procurement network was to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and the Central Intelligence Agency reported in 1990 that analysts had reliable information that Saudi Arabia had provided five billion dollars to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, one wonders why and how US intelligence could have been so wrong about the state of Saddam’s WMD programs just a decade later.

Although many aspects of the ongoing presidential campaign remain muddled, one thing has become, as a past president with a secret plan to end a war used to put it, “perfectly clear:” there is very little difference between Bush and Kerry when it comes to foreign policy generally — and the war in Iraq in particular.