This article, which reacts to a Seymour Hersh article, says it well:
Kirchick writes in Commentary that Hersh “is the leading reportorial expositor of a narrative that has proven very useful to liberals, particularly after it became clear that the intelligence regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was inaccurate, and the swift overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime gave way to a destructive, years-long insurgency.” Hersh “reassured” readers that the case for war against Saddam’s regime was “based on a series of deliberate falsehoods,” instead of flawed intelligence.
It didn’t matter that many on the left endorsed the case for war, or believed that intelligence to be true. By shifting the blame to a bunch of “Straussians” who supposedly lied America into a war, Kirchick argues, Hersh absolved “the liberal establishment, from journalists to elected officials, of intellectual responsibility for their words and actions.”
This is an excellent summary of the American elite’s post-March 2003 world. Kirchick’s analysis is buttressed by countless statements by Democrats, as Norman Podhoretz has previously noted, who made many of the same arguments as the Bush administration during the lead up to the Iraq war. After these statements turned out to be untrue, the Democrats simply blamed Bush and the nefarious (and ubiquitous) “neocons” for making it up. It was, and remains, a politically convenient argument.
Shoot, I remember one argument for not invading that said that if we invaded and destroyed Saddam's regime, the chemical weapons that Saddam had securely stored away could be scattered in the post-war chaos and get in the hands of terrorists!
I still think that there is more to the Iraq WMD story that was hidden in the long "rush to war."
As for Hersh? Feh. I have no use for him--or for those who rely on his work.
UPDATE: This post of a couple years ago--responding to another "Bush lied" charge--explaining what the UN found before the war is instructive.
