Why We Went To War

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers nails it:

Speaking of sand in people's eyes, check your own. How on God's green earth, after all that's been made public, can you still write "I have yet to be even nearly convinced that Plamegate reveals some massive conspiracy to deceive the public in advance about the rationale for the Iraq war"?

Read Barton Gellman's piece in the WaPo this morning, "A Leak, Then a Deluge." Can you honestly say after reading this that the issue of the Niger yellowcake was the fault of the intelligence community? Show me where you make that case.

Every single fact points to the American intelligence community (and others) fighting to establish the falsity of the yellowcake claims, and to the administration's insistence on including those claims despite repeated clear indications that they were false.

Why would they do that? Are they that stupid? No. They knew the reports were bogus. Same as the aluminum tubes. Same as the Iraq-al Qeada connection. But they were good enough: in the fog of events, they would serve the purpose. Get the country into war, and then justify the war by 1) success, and 2) holding up whatever old WMD they found still remaining from 1991. In the blazing glory of that Roman triumph, all those inconvenient prewar details would be forgotten. Only, it didn't turn out that way, did it? There has been no success -- at least, no clear-cut glorious victory. There were no old stockpiles of WMD. Shock. Dismay. Why do you think they spent umpty-odd bazillion dollars searching for those old WMD, yet could not manage to secure known ammo dumps? Priorities.

Andrew, face it: they conned us into this war. Maybe the war was worth fighting. Saddam was a bastard. But that's not the issue. The issue is our democracy. The issue is America. We cannot run this country on lies, secrecy and manipulation. Fitzgerald just made the most eloquent argument for truth as the basis of our justice system, and therefore the gravity and necessity of indictments on perjury and obstruction. Apply his arguments to our political system. They are exactly the same. Without truth we are done for. We're on the long slide down into darkness."

Kudos to Andrew for posting this, even though his own response (not included above) is near worthless.