Republican leaders have for now headed off a full-blown investigation into the Bush administration’s prewar claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But unless inspection teams come up with something soon that President George W. Bush can call a smoking gun, a formal inquiry is inevitable.
The stakes are too high to gloss over what got us to this point. Bush created the expectation that large stores of chemical and biological weapons would be found in Iraq and that Saddam had an active nuclear program. Nothing of consequence has yet been uncovered—suggesting either a colossal intelligence failure or the selective use and manipulation of the data that was available to suit the administration’s political aims.
These are serious charges that go to both the administration’s candor and its competence. The only predicate to a policy of preemption is good intelligence, so you know what you’re preempting. If you don’t have that, the new Bush foreign policy has no merit.
Of course, there's a gratuitous slam on the Dems in here, but it looks like the CW is turning rancid for aWol very fast. Maybe the "Mission Accomplished" codpiece-fest on the Abraham Lincoln really was that jumping-the-shark moment we've all been dreaming of.
Then again, can the Thugs truly be so arrogant and incompetent that they haven't put a backup scheme for "discovering" the weapons in place, presumably in a Faux exclusive? Is this any way to run an empire?