Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he warned President Bush before U.S. troops invaded Iraq that the United States would sustain casualties but that Bush responded, ''Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties.''
The media has missed the major import of this statement--not a pre-war overconfidence about American military might and Iraqi weakness--but rather what it reveals about our expectations about the use of WMDs. If Bush had truly believed in the stockpiles of WMDs, shouldn't he have expected significant casualties?