I meant to link to omnibus post by Instapundit on the “Bush lied about WMDs” canard a couple days ago, so here ’tis.
For anyone who’s done any serious study of the topic, the notion that the whole WMD angle was a sham is laughable. No one, except the Saddam Hussein government, argued that the regime was not pursuing a WMD program–not the Clinton administration, not the UN, not the French/Germans/Russians (that’s why the sanctions were still in place, duh–they couldn’t countenance actually removing them with such a threat still extant), not a single branch of the military/state/intelligence departments. The regime was never, ever going to just “give up” trying to get those things. It was either end the regime, or maintain a genuinely Orwellian perpetual Cold War of no-fly zones and punitive sanctions that hurt primarily average citizens who had nothing to do with the WMD program, and which were being countervened by the duplicitous regime, as well as by countries with ever-increasing smuggling ties to Iraq’s oil, such as Syria and Turkey (and, yes, France, Russia and Germany).
Besides, if you were going to just fabricate a reason to go to war out of whole cloth, wouldn’t you pick something that wouldn’t necessitate your administration going on the Sunday talk shows week after week insisting that your reason was valid? Give Rumsfeld some credit–even if you think he’s a liar, at least acknowledge he’d be a good liar.
While we’re on the topic of anti-war bullroar, here’s a summary of the quote-unquote looting of Baghdad’s museum.
Finally, to those who say “It must be all about oil–we’re not intervening in the Congo/Burma/Zimbabwe/etc!” I’m sorry, but that argument does no good against me. I strongly, indeed almost maniacally, advocate using the military power of the United States and its allies to depose autocratic regimes and end human rights abuses. Indeed, aside from the direct defense of American lives, I can’t think of a better use for our brave, genuinely heroic armed forces. Which is why a) When Paul Begala says (as he did on a recent Imus show) that no amount of saved Iraqis is worth the death of one Marine, I weep for American “liberalism”; b) I’d be tickled, in a perverse way, to see how the “what about the Congo?” crowd reacted if we were to move in to prevent an atrocious Third World disaster like that. I guarantee you that if a Republican’s in the White House, he’d get compared to Hitler for doing so. As someone–Victor Davis Hanson, maybe?–put it, some people seem to feel it better for nothing to be done than for the right thing to be done by the “wrong person.”