Apparently, a Republican congressman with clout in the intelligence community is trying to prod government agencies to keep looking for WMD. I haven’t done the research to say whether WMD could still be in Iraq, or if they could have been moved to Syria — Iraq is a big country and Syria is hostile, though you’d think someone would have come forward by now — but this effort looks bad and makes the wrong argument.
The case the Right should be making is that the Iraq invasion was justified based on the information available at the time. The main reason we didn’t have better information was that Saddam Hussein broke his agreement to allow inspectors in.
Of course, you could still make the argument that Bush should have gotten better intelligence, and I’m plenty sympathetic to that. (Interesting question: If Saddam broke his post-Gulf War promise and thumbed his nose at the subsequent UN resolutions, yet we knew he wasn’t developing WMD, should we have just let it go?) But one of the main figures, CIA Director George “Slam-Dunk Case” Tenet, served under Clinton as well, so it’s hard to say all the investigators were unqualified Republican hacks. It seems the mistakes made were understandable if not necessarily pardonable.
Unfortunately, no one is saying this, and the administration comes off as simply mistaken. The bungling of the occupation doesn’t help much either.
Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.
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