Tuesday, June 24, 2003

WMD: Departing from the recent Republican revisionism, George Will cuts no slack on the problem of missing weapons:
For the president, the missing weapons are not a political problem. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, says Americans are happily focused on Iraqis liberated rather than WMD not found, so we "feel good about ourselves."

But unless America's foreign policy is New Age therapy to make the public feel mellow, feeling good about the consequences of an action does not obviate the need to assess the original rationale for the action.

This is an important distinction that the Democrats aren't making, but should. The Bush Doctrine was explicitly non-humanitarian, and not about nation-building. To be fair, the administration did cite the tyranny of Saddam, the suffering of the Iraqi people, and the plight of the Kurds, all reasons that quite a few liberals were prepared to get behind. But Bush, in the end, did choose to hang his hat on the WMD peg. If nothing else, we once again have a host of questions to answer about the quality of our intel.

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