Excellent take-down of the defenses now being used by the Administration (and their shills in the media) for justifying the Iraqi war: that everyone believed Iraq had WMD's, not just the President. I would add an additional bit of mendacity: that skeptics of the WMD claim are overlooking the fact that Saddam was a monster, the so-called "mass graves" argument. In fact, almost everyone, from Pat Robertson to Noam Chomsky, pretty much agreed that Saddam was a bad guy before the war. Since the planet is filled with nasty dictators, and the U.S. military can't be everywhere at the same time, that rationale won't sell the public on a war unless that dictator is an imminent threat. In Kosovo, President Clinton was able to sell the humanitarian rationale for intervention to NATO, and we went in with French support. And it worked.

For whatever reason, the brutality of Hussein's regime was always a tertiary issue with Bush, behind the WMD and "links to Osama" rationales. Secretary Powell's speech before the UN mainly focused on the weapons, and our justification for going to war, that Iraq had failed to comply with UN Resolutions 687 and 1441, dealt specifically with provisions concerning WMD's. France, Germany and Russia did not agree that the threat was imminent, and for that reason were tagged with the label, "The Axis of Weasels". The Axis of Weasels were most decidedly not of the opinion that Saddam was a nice guy.

But on the issue of WMD's, the Weasels were right. They nailed it. Rather than dissing the French for loving Jerry Lewis, lame rock-n-roll, pretentious filmmaking, and being unappreciative for American support in the two world wars, we should be praising them, for loving Clint Eastwood, John Coltrane, Jules and Jim, and saving our bacon during the Revolutionary War. And for an astute, cautious foreign policy that has now been vindicated.

And no, the fact that Saddam was a monster doesn't justify the rigid certainty that Bush and other used to start a war over WMDs. It means the Iraqis who are still alive, whose families and property survived the war intact, can have a brighter future. For that reason alone, I'm glad we won the war. But as an American, I have to deal with the consequences that my government might have lied to me about what it knew before the war. Already, our government is hinting that Iran has WMD's, as well as ties to terrorists. Those hints may be true, but I have no reason to give Donald Rumsfeld the benefit of the doubt. And I doubt other countries will too, especially since the "coalition of the willing" seems to have been treated as a collection of suckers.

Moreover, unlike Iraq, Iran is not exactly a death camp. There is an opposition to the mullahs, an opposition with democratic legitimacy. In terms of civil liberties, it is about as free a country as Singapore, a nation we have not placed in the axis of evil. On the other hand, it has supported terrorism. They may be responsible for the deaths of Amercian servicemen still in Iraq. A case can be made that Iran is a much more imminent threat than Iraq was, but who in this Administration can now credibly make that case. At best, they're incompetent bunglers who put American (and Iraqi) lives in peril due to faulty intelligence. At worst, they're liars.

And that won't be set aside, simply because Saddam was a thug. Warbloggers who make ad hominem attacks on their opponents are no better than pundits who make crude sexist remarks about the Dixie Chicks: they're all idiots. Who perhaps would be more comfortable living in Iran.