Drum’s Occasional Outbursts of Compulsive Centrism

Kevin Drum (Calpundit, Washington Monthly’s “Political Animal” blog) is one of the best liberal bloggers around, but every once in awhile he seems to become seized by a driving need to pander to Beltway pundits of the David Broder variety. Just the other day, he said:

I continue to think that the issue of Iraq's WMD is a difficult one. As I've noted before, there's no question that the administration manipulated the WMD intelligence. At the same time, though, it also seems clear that they, along with the intelligence community, really did believe Iraq was actively producing chemical and biological weapons. (Not nukes, though. The "mushroom cloud" talk was pretty clearly just for show.) http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_02/008196.php

Difficult? Consider this comment from one of the many disgusted readers:

The issue of WMD is only "difficult" if you accepted the administration's position the UN inspectors were at best incompetent and at worst pro-Saddam. If you recall, the inspectors tried to find evidence that would support the administration's conclusions -- uranium ore, aluminum tubes, mobile labs, etc -- and every time found no reason to accept the conclusions. Hans Blix bent over backwards to give the administration's arguments room and they still never had weight, before and after Powell's UN speech.

The inspectors conclusions, coupled with Washington's campaign to damn them and the UN from the beginning, was what made my decision on WMDs anything but "difficult".

Amen! Back in August and September of 2002, with Cheney and Bush declaring no doubt whatsoever that Saddam was developing nukes, and still soaring from the 9-11 political windfall, we had little choice but to tentatively accept the “mushroom cloud” thesis as at least a possibility. But the artful shift in phrasing from “nuclear” and “biological” weapons to the less specific talking-point mantra, “weapons of mass destruction” – somewhere in the November 2002 timeframe -- was certainly a strong hint that we were being played. The inspector’s actual findings, combined with the deliberate trashing of Blix by the Administration and its media lackeys early in 2003, put it beyond dispute that we were being lied to big-time. Difficult? Only if you are trying desperately to show you can split the difference.