Believing Their Own Spin

At one point, Saddam had WMDs. These included poison gas, weaponized Anthrax, and a nuclear program that was close to producing atomic weaponry. After the Gulf war, he agreed to destroy these and UN weapons inspectors monitored his progress. Saddam kept making it harder for the inspectors to do their jobs, finally expelling them in 1998. It was universally assumed that this meant that he was re-arming. (Actually, he was trying to build long-range missiles which were also denied to him by the cease-fire agreement.)

When the Bush administration was making its case for war, they identified a number of reasons that Saddam should be overthrown but they decided to push the WMDs as the primary case (the Downing Street Memo referred to this a "fixing on WMDs".) At the time most prominent Democrats agreed. John Kerry told about going to the CIA and being personally assured that Saddam had WMDs.

The world assumed that Saddam had WMDs but the world was wrong. Saddam was convinced that the only thing that kept him safe from Iran was the threat of WMDs so he hinted that he still had them. Also, some expatriates from Iraq told stories about WMDs in order to incite an invasion.

The Democrats know this. They should have read the same reports that I have.

Yes, Bush said that Saddam had WMDs and Bush was wrong. But being wrong and lying are two different things. If Bush lied then so did Clinton, Gore, and Tony Blair, and a host of others.

Partly because of Joseph Wilson's op-ed column (the one that started the Plame leak investigation), the Bush-haters have been insisting that Bush knew that there were no WMDs and lied about it to the world. They've said this so often that they started believing it.

Many Bush-haters were expecting that the Plame investigation wouldn't stop with who leaked Plame's name. They expected it to continue into the entire WMD issue. When this did not happen, Democrats went ballistic. That is why they shut down the Senate last week. The Democrats were demanding a new investigation, one that would show that Bush lied.

They should be careful. They are not going to get what they want - a declaration that Bush lied, that he ordered reports to be changed, and that he created the forged niger/yellowcake document. It will not happen. The most that they can get is an admission that Bush believed some reports over others. Along the way all of the major Democrats will get tarred right along with Bush. That can't help anyone.

The whole "Bush lied" mantra is being used to try to de-legitamize the war. If they can show that we should not have started it then they can whip up support for an immediate withdrawal. That would be a disaster for Iraq which will degenerate into a nasty civil war, for the US which will lose all claim to superpower status, and for the world. The beneficiaries will be militant Islam which will be able to claim victory over the world's most powerful nation and the America-haters.

I doubt that most of the people chanting "Bush lied" have thought things through all the way. They are too busy calculating how to turn the country against Bush in time for the 2006 congressional elections.

It used to be that politics stopped at the border. No matter what internal politics were going on, polititians were united once the country went to war. The Democrats may soon find out why this was true. If they succeed in pulling down the Bush administration they will be faced with an enemy that they strengthened.