Howard Owens has a thoughtful analysis on the aftermath of the Iraqi war (well, duh, all of Mr. Owens' takes are thoughtful; any conservative on my blogroll has to be thoughtful--I ain't linking to a right-wing version of Smythesworld). He doesn't try to soft-pedal the non-discovery of WMD's, or pretend that it doesn't matter in the face of the brutality of Saddam Hussein.

When we attacked Iraq on March 19, I listed what I thought were twelve inarguable points about the war. Since I started this blog last year, I have made any number of statements that I regret, that were unfair, unkind, and/or just plain daffy. Visiting my own site's archives, I find posts that are truly cringe-worthy, exacerbated by the fact that this blog is read by many dozens thousands of people each day. The problem with self-publication and self-editing is that anyone can smell the cerebral farts I cut.

That post was not one of them. If only I could be half as brilliant the rest of the time, I could start charging for the privilege of dispensing my wisdom. That post alone should place my talents in demand as a foreign policy expert; a post in a future Administration awaits.

In particular, Point No. 6 is more interesting now than it was when I wrote it: "The U.S. withheld evidence from the inspectors that might have made discovery of WMD’s possible, but didn’t provide it so as to not minimize the case for going to war." As it turns out, the evidence we "withheld" was that we weren't really sure if Iraq had any WMD's. This is no small thing, since the primary justification we used to attack Iraq before the international community was that they had violated U.N. Resolutions 687 and 1441 in not disarming. Bush also used Iraq's ties to terrorist organizations as a rationale, but since any direct connections to Al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attack were tenuous at best, it took a back seat to the WMD issue. It was most decidedly not that Iraq had a poor human rights record, or that Iraq might have a WMD program in the future, or that a "free" Iraq would get both sides to the table over a Palestinian state. Skepticism about the extent of the Iraqi WMD program was the principal reason France and Germany opposed going to war before the Security Council; for such statesmanship, those countries were deemed part of the "Axis of Weasels".

If we weren't certain that the information we were providing to the world was accurate, but continued to act as if it was, then we were lying. Even if WMD's are ultimately found, it will not lessen that lie; it will only mean that our hunch paid off. A free people do not deserve to be lied to by their government, especially over an issue as fundamental as whether to go to war.