They sure know how to package a war

Okay. There's a commentary piece out today by Norman Podhoretz called Who Is Lying About Iraq? Its claim is that "the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq" is a "distortion, misrepresentation, and outright falsification."

Now, as usual, there's some difference in opinion between the liberal and conservative bloggers on this. To Roger L. Simon, for example, the article is "required reading." Tapped, meanwhile, points out:

a suspiciously large number of conservative pundits have been offering out-of-context quotations from [a] Kenneth Pollack article to "prove" that Bush in no sense manipulated intelligence data when selling the Iraq War. Norm Podhoretz is the latest to join this party...Near the end, Pollack concludes:

For the most part, the problems discussed so far have more to do with the methods of Administration officials than with their motives, which were often misguided and dangerous, but were essentially well-intentioned. The one action for which I cannot hold Administration officials blameless is their distortion of intelligence estimates when making the public case for going to war.

And in The Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum says

The problem Podhoretz doesn't bother wrestling with, however, is that after the war concluded we discovered that there were also a fair number of people who had been skeptical about Iraqi WMD...None of these dissents was acknowledged by the Bush administration.

Nor does Podhoretz apply himself to the entire period before the war. He stops his investigation at the end of 2002. But that's not when we went to war. We went to war in March 2003, and by that time UN inspectors had been combing Iraq for months with the help of U.S. intelligence. They found nothing, and an increasing chorus of informed minds was starting to wonder if perhaps there was nothing there.

But you know what? Let's ignore all that. Let's assume for the moment that the war was started in all good faith and intentions, that no one reasonably could have been expected to be skeptical about Iraqi WMD.

Let's assume, too, that all the problems since the war "ended" could not possibly have been forseen. Even though we know that people who had actually fought in wars forsaw them, and the Bush administration--none of whom, IIRC, did-chose to ignore them.

But like I say, forget that. Because something just hit me. The basic case of those conservatives who still wish to defend Bush and his war has now been reduced to: "He's not a liar, he's just an idiot." Seriously. That's all they've got.

Their biggest, loudest claim right now is that a president who takes his countrymen to war on a mistake is somehow better than one who takes his countrymen to war on a lie. I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and say that either way, he probably ought not to be president any more.