This is a kind of critical point that the press lets the Bush Admin get away with repeatedly. Here's something Cheney said at a press con the other day: The President "sought to eliminate the threat by peaceful diplomatic means, and when all else failed, he acted forcefully to remove the danger."

There was a small amount of diplomacy coming out of the White House in the months leading up to the Iraq War, even though it mostly took the form of threatening and bribing other nations to do what we wanted. But none of this heavy-handed diplomacy was directed towards Iraq. We were bombing Iraq, taking out military targets as early as June 2002 under the pretense that we were defending the "No-Fly Zones." The only diplomacy on this issue in the six months or more leading up to war was convincing, bribing or threatening other nations to support the war that Bush had planned. There was no attempt to prevent the war through diplomacy directed at Iraq. It was diplomacy to facilitate the war, not diplomacy to prevent it.