Restoring my anti-Bush credibility

Marcus thinks I was too easy on the Bush administration here. My point, though, was the quite narrow one that there was some justification for beleiving that Saddam posessed some WMD, and that the administration seems to have sincerely beleived he did.

I don’t like to speculate about motives since I don’t have access to what goes on in the minds of our rulers. What I do think is that the administration “massaged” the evidence to make it look like the threat was more dire than it actually was (and perhaps more dire than they believed it was). The very term “weapons of mass destruction” itself conflates nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, which vary widely in their destructive power and in the ease with which they can be deployed. The evidence that Saddam had an advanced nuclear weapons program was the weakest part of the case made by the administration at the time, and yet it was the idea that Saddam would pass a nuke to a terrorist group that made the most powerful seeming case for war. (By contrast, a Saddam armed with just biological and chemical weapons was not sufficient justification for war in my view, unless we had concrete evidence that he had or was about to deploy them against Americans via terrorist proxies.)

So, yeah, I’m willing to attribute a fair degree of mendacity to the case for war as it was actually made. But it seems to have been a case with a small kernel of truth at its core.