SPINNING….Glenn Reynolds quotes David Adesnik today about the missing WMD: “….the question everyone is now asking is ‘Did Bush lie?’ rather than ‘Did the United States have good cause to invade Iraq without the express written consent of the Security Council?’” Glenn comments:
Read the whole thing, which suggests that there’s as much spinning going on from self-justifying antiwar revisionists as there ever was from the Bush Administrations.
So I did, and apparently he missed David’s very next paragraph:
While I suspect that Bush himself did not lie, there is considerable evidence that high-ranking officials, possibly including the Vice President, knew in advance of the State of the Union address that Iraq had not purchased uranium from Niger. If so, all of the officials involved in that process of deception should be severely disciplined.
David is right to say that Saddam’s non-cooperation remains a mystery if he really didn’t have any WMD, but I think it’s safe to say that the spinning these days is coming from the pro-war crowd, not the other way around. After all, so far there’s no WMD, there’s no al-Qaeda connection, we’ve caved into Osama by withdrawing troops from Saudi Arabia (which remains our best pal in the region), and our dedication to the democratic reconstruction of Iraq is starting to look kind of ragged.
Of course, as always, there’s a way to put all this to rest: Bush could show us the intelligence reports that demonstrated Iraq’s WMD programs and al-Qaeda connections. If they look reasonable, he’s vindicated, even if they don’t pan out. It’s funny how many little mysteries there are that could be cleared up in exactly that way, and equally funny that in every single one of those cases Bush has done nothing but stonewall.
Funny indeed.
