I usually agree with John W. Dean's writings but I think he's somewhat off-base with this widely-quoted piece that suggests George W. Bush might be impeached over the whole notion of lying about Weapons of Mass You-Know-What. For one thing, impeachment is as much a political act as a legal one. Bush could get caught robbing a liquor store right now and unless the polls indicated America wanted it, the Democrats wouldn't lift a pinky to remove him from office. Republicans would but Democrats wouldn't.
The article also gets a quote from Paul Wolfowitz wrong, though it isn't Dean's fault. A newspaper misquoted Wolfowitz and Dean is accurately quoting a misquote. On the other hand, it may be Dean's fault that his column hasn't been corrected yet.
The thing that comes to mind here though is a remark I heard John Dean make years ago with regard to Watergate — a subject he knows too well. This is a paraphrase but it was along the lines of, "One of the reasons that it snowballed to a scandal of such epic proportions is that the guys in the White House were desperate not to look like incompetents. To them that was even worse than looking like liars or criminals. And in trying to deny mistakes they'd made, a lot of them did wind up positioning their actions as lying and lawbreaking simply because that was the only other conceivable explanation." Those are my words not his but I think I'm summarizing what he said, and based on what I read about Watergate, it seemed to be true to some extent.
Something of the sort may be true with regard to these supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction. I mean, clearly some bad intelligence reports were "sold" to Congress and the American people. Even if indisputable Weapons of M.D. are eventually located somewhere, clearly we had not pinpointed their locations, as Colin Powell told the U.N. and other White House officials told everyone else. And because no one at the White House is willing to say, "We screwed up. We didn't listen to the right intelligence people and we believed some faulty reports," it's all getting spun as a question of lying.
The same thing as Watergate? Maybe. But I still don't think it's going to lead to the same conclusion.