No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Bill Buckley - Who Screwed Up?

National Review Online

The Bush administration has a grave problem in the matter of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Jim Lacey, a Time correspondent embedded with the l0lst Airborne Division, summarizes his analysis in National Review. He writes that "there are some simple truths that many seem to be forgetting: l) At one time, Saddam had an extensive WMD program and enough chemical weapons and toxins to annihilate the eastern United States; 2) in the past, he used those weapons against his enemies, internal and external; and 3) he was an aggressive dictator who tortured and massacred his own people and bullied and periodically invaded neighboring countries."

Agree with all the above and you are still entitled to ask: Where is all that stuff?

[Much of Buckley's article skipped here]

There are those who take an easy position here. It is to conclude, like the New York Times's hysterical Paul Krugman, that Bush and Cheney are, very simply, liars. Those who reasonably doubt that George Bush and Dick Cheney would consciously lie to Congress and the American people and Tony Blair and for that matter the entire world, are, again reasonably, asked to look for other explanations.

We do need to have a much better explanation than any we have had. Going to war to abort Husseinism is justified. But we are nevertheless entitled to know: How was intelligence information, presented as conclusive, so apparently illusory? Who was it, on the assembly line between the first man who spotted what he took to be WMD activity in Iraq, and the Defense Intelligence Agency and the President of the United States who beamed out to the world, not suspicions of WMD activity, but affirmations of it, who screwed up? Who deceived, or was carried away? And what vaccines have our leaders taken to guard against other deceptions of like character?

I don't think that Bush et al see themselves as liars. I see them instead as ideologues who filter the information they accept based on what their ideology says must be right or wrong. Since they "know" what "must be true" and what "must be false", they automatically weight the information they receive based on that knowledge. They also evaluate the people they work with the same way. Those who disagree with things that "must be true" are soon excluded from working groups.

In any case, however, the result is that they have lied to the American people and the world about the justification for the preemptive war against Iraq. No matter how rotten Hussein and his regime was, they didn't sell the war on that basis. They sold it based on the immediate danger of WMDs (which has to mean nukes). When a sales person sells you one thing and delivers another, that is bait-and-switch. They may not see themselves as liars, but those of us who were lied to certainly should recognize that they are.
posted by Richard at 3:34 AM