A LIAR AND A MORON?

The good news for the president is that the left is still obsessing about his “lies” and his stupidity. The question of lying, however, is obviously an important one. Did, on current evidence, the president deliberately mislead the public on the imminence of the threat of WMDs under Saddam? I’ve read a lot of critiques now – and it seems obvious that a few parts of the administration’s multi-faceted and drawn-out case for deposing Saddam were, to put it kindly, hyped. But the evidence unearthed by The New Republic’s estimable John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman ultimately amounts to an argument that the administration exaggerated the intelligence estimates on Iraq’s nuclear capacity and its ties to al Qaeda. I think we’ll soon know more about both arguments. But there’s a premise here that strikes me as off-base. The premise is that after 9/11, only rock-solid evidence of illicit weapons prgrams and proven ties to terrorists could justify a pre-emptive war to depose Saddam. But the point of 9/11 was surely the opposite: that the burden of proof now lay on people denying such a threat, not those fearing it. Would I rather we had an administration that remained Solomon-like in the face of inevitably limited and muddled intelligence and sought the kind of rock-solid consensus on everything that would satisfy Jacques Chirac or the BBC (or John Kerry)? Or would I rather we had a president who realized that post-9/11 it was prudent to be highly concerned about such weapons and connections and better, by and large, to be safe than sorry? Condi was clear about this distinction: “There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” I don’t think that’s hype. I think it’s prudence. Do I wish in retrospect that the Bushies – and more pertinently, the Blairites – had been doubly careful in not saying things that couldn’t be proven? Yes. Does this prove them to be liars and irresponsible leaders? Nope, as even the New York Times concedes. It simply shows that they used all sorts of inevitably hazy pieces of intelligence in order to remove what was clearly a potential danger to the region and the world. They screwed up in a few small ways. They triumphed in the one big way that mattered. No historical revisionism will change that.