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The problem with these newsprint confessions is not that they are craven, insufficient and self-serving, which of course they are. The problem is that, on the whole, they do not correct the pre-war mistakes, but actually further them. The Post would have you believe that its "failure" before the war was its inability/reluctance to punch holes in Bush's WMD claims.
Right. I marched in Washington against the war in February 2003 with about 400,000 people, and I can pretty much guarantee that not more than a handful of those people gave a shit about whether or not Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That's because we knew what the Post and all of these other papers still refuse to admit—this whole thing was never about weapons of mass destruction. Even a five- year-old, much less the literate executive editor of the Washington Post, could have seen, from watching Bush and his cronies make his war case, that they were going in anyway.
For God's sake, Bush was up there in the fall of 2002, warning us that unmanned Iraqi drones were going to spray poison gas on the continental United States. The whole thing—the "threat" of Iraqi attack, the link to terrorism, the dire warnings about Saddam's intentions—it was all bullshit on its face, as stupid, irrelevant and transparent as a cheating husband's excuse. And I don't know a single educated person who didn't think so at the time.
The story shouldn't have been, "Are there WMDs?" The story should have been, "Why are they pulling this stunt? And why now?" That was the real mystery. It still is.
We didn't need a named source in the Pentagon to tell us that. And neither did the Washington Post.
That's about right. By the time March 2003 came around, it was pretty clear that no serious person in the Bush administration really believed in the existence of WMDs. Sure, they believed they would find something which would be enough to get a supine media to pretend that their claims had been validated, but not actual Weapons that were capable of Mass Destruction.
And, yes, 17 or so months later the basic question is rarely asked, let alone answered. Only silly people believe the CIA duped those poor saps in the Bush administration, and even Wolfowitz has admitted that the WMD claim was what they decided to use for "bureaucratic reasons."
So, rather than focusing on WMD or not WMD, it's time to focus on the question that Taibbi asks:
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Why are they pulling this stunt? And why now?
I don't think there's one simple answer, but it was the question then and it's still the question now.