Moving our troops out is the wrong thing to do, whether you supported this war or not. Easterbrook and his ilk seem to think we can just remove our troops, pretend the whole thing never happened, and just go on to the next war. Like it or not, we have made this commitment to the Iraqi people and we must follow through or risk destroying our credibility even further.
By the way, I found this piece by another conservative, Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, to be a much better summary of the WMD debate:
http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-21-03.html
Quote:
EXCERPT:
The stark contrast between what was said about WMD before the war and what has since been found certainly appears to be a massive failure of intelligence, despite what CIA Director George Tenet says. For numerous pundits who previously went along with the notion Iraq had a formidable arsenal of vaguely identified exotic weapons, however, failure to discover such weapons is now said to be little more than an insignificant annoyance. The real purpose of the war, they tell us, was a humanitarian crusade to get rid of one of the world's nastiest dictators and turn Iraq into a much nicer place, thanks to many billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers.
Numerous explanations and evasions have been created since June to minimize the uncomfortably wide chasm between WMD "intelligence" and reality. The first was to denigrate WMD skeptics as foolishly impatient. In mid-June, national security writer Jack Kelly thought it "at best wildly premature" to complain the supposedly huge stockpiles of WMD had not yet been found. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations likewise found it most likely Saddam "did have something to hide -- and we'll still find it."
More recently, Notra Trulock from Accuracy in Media wrote that "Kay's team still has much work ahead before a final judgment can be made on Iraq's WMD programs." Unfortunately, asking for more and more time is beginning to sound quite desperate and unconvincing.
A second defensive strategy has been to point out that the Clinton administration also expressed anxiety about WMD in Iraq in the late '90s. The bipartisan nature of the intelligence blunder does help to absolve current administration officials from charges of deliberate deception. But it fails to absolve them from charges of being too easily duped by old misinformation. Two wrong presidents do not make one right.
A third technique has been to simply assert, as Daniel Pipes did recently, that "there was indeed massive and undisputed evidence to indicate that the Iraqi regime was building WMD." If the evidence was "undisputed," then why did stubborn people like me keep disputing it?
In reality, the evidence was always flimsy, consisting largely of hearsay, technological fantasy and old paperwork. Anyone who still believes the evidence was massive and beyond dispute should read the half-baked CIA report released last October and the equally misleading British dossier (both available on the Internet). These reports are full of weasel words about precursors, growth media, dual-use capabilities (castor oil factories could make ricin), and suspicious desires and intentions.
A fourth diversion has been to hint Iraq's mysterious weapons and delivery systems were just packed up and shipped off to some other country such as Syria or Lebanon. That story is no way to make our intelligence look more intelligent. If huge stockpiles of lethal weapons and their required delivery systems (e.g., artillery shells or aircraft sprayers) could be moved from one country to another without U.S. satellites and spy planes even noticing, then the CIA would be far more incompetent than its harshest critics ever claimed.
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