Carpe Datum

Not Just a River in Egypt

As I linked yesterday, it looks like the search for WMD's in Iraq is finally over. You can imagine this presents a fresh challenge for the ConservaBorg, who are never, ever wrong. Not to worry, though, the warbloggers have come up with all kinds of justifications after the fact to prove that they were right all along.

First, as the president's own spokesman is arguing, Spetember 11th changed everything. Apparently, September 11th made it ok to invade any country we want under whatever rationale we feel like coming up with. The fact that this administration can continue to link the Iraq War with September 11th is a pretty sad commentary on the Moron Americans who saw fit to put these guys back into office. Why bother trying anything new if they're still buying all your stale old shit?

Another argument is that, well, everyone else thought Iraq had WMD's. After all, lots of prominent Democrats also insisted Iraq had WMD's, and that's been true since even before Clinton was president. There are so many ways this argument is bogus. For starters...

None of those entities went to war with Iraq, and Bush did . Also, none of them stood in front of the world and pointed to maps declaring depots of WMD and WMD-related materials that were about as accurate as a randomly generated SimCity map. [...]

The issue with "everyone believed it" is that Bush acted of his own accord. Not only that, but he had additional information past the cited assessments of the Clinton/Bush I/Reagan governments, et. al. The UN and the IAEA were there, telling him it was increasingly looking like Iraq was either significantly less armed, or unarmed with WMD, even as we were gearing up for war. In fact, he later flat-out lied and declared that Iraq wouldn't let in the inspectors that he wasn't listening to, when in fact, he had requested them withdrawn so that the bombing campaign could begin.

Bush, committing both the "Coalition" (inasmuch as it ever existed outside of the U.S. and Britain) and Iraq to war, had a higher burden of proof than any of those other nations, and a duty to further investigate the claim before acting on it. He investigated it. All the new information he received prior to the invasion told him he was wrong. And he still chose to go in, in part based off of old and less informed assessments, in fact utilizing them because they told him what he wanted to hear. There is no blaming Canada or Clinton for this. There's also no blaming them for the specific claims made (i.e., any of the numerous "smoking gun" comments) that none of those other entities were making in any relevant time period. Unless, somehow, intelligence assessments from 1988 represent the zenith of America's knowledge about the world.

(And the three presidents claim is disingenuous to the extreme, considering that twelve years passed between the last time Saddam had WMD and the invasion. Nine presidents before Clinton believed that the Soviet Union existed and exerted direct political control over several Eastern European countries. Clinton didn't, in part because the Soviet Union no longer existed . If he'd treated Russia like the USSR because other countries and presidents asserted its existence years ago, he would have been widely ridiculed as an idiot. The same rationale, when applied here, is somehow an excuse for Bush, for no rational reason whatsoever.) [...]

If your idea of responsibility is saying that Bush is a cipher who blindly trusts whatever Bill Clinton said (an accusation of stupidity even most liberals won't make), then [the warblogger] argument makes sense. If, however, you believe that when a leader goes to war, it's ultimately because they want to go to war for the reasons they state, then yes, Bush is uniquely responsible for being seriously wrong.

Lots of good comments in that Pandagon entry I pointed to, as well. Including this:

There's a big difference between:
1) believing (as most intelligence services did) that Saddam may have had a few residual, still dangerous unconventional chemical weapons and that continuing inspections were needed to find out if this were so and neutralize any remaining capability Saddam may have had,

and 2) believing that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program so advanced that he was on the brink of launching a massive attack on the United Staes, requiring an immediate, full scale invasion and occupation of the country.

Also, The Poor Man has a very nice table summarizing the results of Rathergate vs WMDgate. Then there is this from Tom Toles:

Posted by Observer at January 13, 2005 09:03 AM