Another insightful contribution to the debate about pre-war judgments and arguments:
"The probable fiasco of our Iraq policy leaves many of the war’s opponents, like Krugman, feeling vindicated and often smug. Shouldn’t they be as disappointed as any of us that having failed to prevent it, the war didn’t at least work out for the best? Well, this is among the less appealing aspects of human nature that the utopian left often ignores until it exhibits those qualities themselves.
The same correspondent wisely and generously offers, ‘If you supported him and the invasion of Iraq‚Äîwell, that’s understandable. But if people balked ‚Äî well that’s understandable, too.’ However, those on the left like Krugman don‚Äôt acknowledge difficult choices and honest judgment calls. Everything ‘was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts‚Ķ. [P]undits who failed to notice the administration’s mendacity a long time ago either weren’t doing their homework, or deliberately turned a blind eye to the evidence.’ Because the Krugmans cannot see clearly past their own ideological predispositions, it doesn’t occur to them that for others, descriptors like ‘rush to war,’ after twelve years of sanctions and cat and mouse games, seemed completely thoughtless.
Similarly, opponents of military action often denied the reality of any threat from Iraq not by claiming the absence of WMD, but by confidently asserting that a secularist dictator like Hussein would never cooperate with fundamentalist Moslems like Al Qaeda by providing them with WMD. I spent much of 2002 and 2003 asking such people if they had ever heard of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
The point is there were reasonable arguments to be made on both sides, but there are those who will never acknowledge as much. Claims now that there were general claims then of an absence of WMD are an attempt to rewrite history and achieve a kind of retroactive, total victory over the perceived ‘real enemy’ ‚Äì GWB.
Along the same lines are attempts to suggest that you were extreme in your warning of what to expect from some on the left. There may not have been material assistance, but it remains a fact that the American Sociological Association cheered in 2004 when Arundhati Roy said in a speech before it: ‘The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle.’ Chomsky called the U.S. ‘a leading terrorist state.’ And many on the left believe it. Katha Pollitt, in the pages of the Nation, called the American flag a symbol of ‘jingoism vengeance, and war.’ And Not in Our Name, on its website, and many of the thousands of participants in the rallies organized by International ANSWER made clear who they believed the enemy to be ‚Äì and it was neither Saddam Hussein nor Al Qaeda. I could go on.
As always, there are many lessons to be learned from our errors, including those of electing someone to the presidency as ill prepared for the office as George Bush, and the arguably criminal incompetence with which the war has been waged. But we won’t learn those lessons by allowing history to be manufactured for the satisfactions of cheap political one-upmanship."
Agreed.
The evidence that George W. Bush was spinning WMDs was "obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts." It just wasn’t obvious to the top military leaders in Iraq three months before the invasion. Some of them, even after they had been told by Saddam that the cupboard was bare, found Colin Powell’s presentation convincing. 
The Dish 