Everything you say is true, but I don't think that if Bush had gone to Congress and laid out things as you expressed them, Congress would have authorized the use of force against Iraq.
Thinking further down the road, we really have yet to come to terms with the horrible blow to the credibility of our intelligence gathering abilities, because things haven't really fully resolved yet.
There's the "Bush liiiieeeeeed" crowd, and there's the "well, how you you KNOW there aren't WMD?" crowd, and the rest of us are sort of in the middle.
But I am trying to put myself into the shoes of a senator or a congress critter, next time around, and I just don't feel inspired. I mean, if Tenet and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Powell and Cheney and Rice and Bush all appeared in unison to promise me that this time, this time, they really know that the WMD are in Syria, I probably wouldn't believe it, even with a notarized bill of freight signed by Assad himself. |
