A reader chimes in:
One of the problems I see in the Drum vs Reynolds argument is that Reynolds has completely bought in to a White House conflation, and Drum hasn’t drawn the necessary distinctions.
Here’s the Instapundit version of the current administration position: “Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.”
This defense only works if you agree to conflate all WMDs as equivalent. The Bushies specifically inflated claims about nuclear weapons; in particular, the Niger yellowcake, and the aluminum tubes. It was the “mushroom cloud” issue that they pimped. Without that, Iraq’s WMD threat boiled down to weak stuff like mustard gas and non-weaponized anthrax. Those kinds of WMDs were dealt with perfectly well by an ongoing containment strategy. The only WMD scary enough to justify invasion was a nuke, and the administration hid all the strong doubts about Iraq’s nukes. The Bushies also pimped one other reason for war: a non-existent link between Saddam and al Qaeda.
I actually side with Glenn on this. I never believed that nukes were the main threat. I was much more concerned with anthrax or smallpox. And I didn’t get the impression before the war that nukes were at the heart of the Bush argument. I can see now how people who weren’t as keen on taking the battle to the enemy as I was could have seized on the nuke issue as the peg on which to hang the war. But that’s their perspective, not mine, and, I suspect, not Bush’s. This debate is a draw. The bottom line is that the president was wrong and waged a war on the basis of intelligence that was soon disproven. Leave all the mind-reading out of it. The public is responding to those facts. And the facts are not really in dispute. We screwed up in a massive way in front of the whole world. If the invasion had gone well, we would have put it behind us by now. But it hasn’t. The key thing now is to do all we can to get a free Iraq in place. We do owe it to the troops not to pull the rug from under them, which is why, despite all my anger at Bush, I still support him as commander-in-chief, and find the Senate vote yesterday repellent. We have no other commander-in-chief for three years. And we must still win.
The Dish 