Frankly, what Townhall or the NRO says is unimportant to me. I no longer believe them and their journalistic integrity is borderline at best in my mind.
I of course disagree about their integrity, and if integrity is an issue its Larry Elder's integrity not the web site where his article is posted. In any case even if his integrity was questionable it doesn't refute the argument. It reasonable to not accept someone as a source of facts if you don't think they are honest but an argument cares not for the honesty of the person arguing it. Logically it stands and falls on its own.
For that matter most of the argument isn't in Elder's own words. It's quotes from James Woolsey, Bill Clinton, David Kay, and various foreign leaders. Are you saying that they all lack integrity so much that you shouldn't even listen to their statements even if only to refute them?
The main argument that is entirely in Elder's own words is that our intelligence has failed use time and time again about WMD, both giving false positives and false negatives. He mentions - "After the first Gulf War in 1991, the advanced nature of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program shocked intelligence analysts. Nuclear bomb testing in India and Pakistan came as a surprise, as did the advanced nature of Iran's and Libya's WMD programs." - But their where other cases as well. North Korea was further along then we originally thought. In the cold war their was the famous, and it turns out false "missile gap". These failures are largely due to the fact that intelligence can't always be right, it involves guesswork and uncertainties but even considering that I think we need to improve out human intelligence our signal intercept and photo intel is excellent but there are many gaps in human intelligence.
Really, Tim, the NRO lost me when one of their articles suggested we might have to declare war on France.
The article you posted starts out by saying that someone has to be rabidly anti Bush to suggest the president lied. You all just don't get it. There is a growing number of Americans who once were pro Bush who think he lied about WMDs......and they are angry.
NRO and Townhall can point out all the people who thought that Saddam might have WMDs but that does not change the fact that a responsible, competent, intelligent president would have let the weapons inspectors do their job before throwing this nation into a war that could go on indefinitely and cost us lives and billions of dollars. The fact that Mr. Bush was so anxious to start the war when there was no clear and present danger nor immediate danger from Saddam and when there are no WMDs in Iraq makes it very suspect that Bush knew what the inspectors would not find and decided to strike while the striking was good. Only an ardent Bush supporter could ignore that possibility.
I suspect Mr. Bush will go down in infamy for this misdeed. The NRO and Townhall can write all the refutals they want but it won't changed that eventuality one bit.
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