The Pendragon's Hall

Mort Zuckerman (That's some pig! Sorry--a little reversion to my childhood days.) wrote an unusually balanced editorial for U.S. News & World Report this last week about the new anti-Ira War screed emanating from Congress. His point is the one that Conservatives have been making for the last three years: everyone thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass production--Democrat, Republican, Eastern communist, or Western European socialist. Republicans did not "create" evidence supporting their war; they went with what they knew at the time. It's really the only thing you can judge a person's actions by. Harry Truman had intelligence that the Japanese were ready to fight to the death and that invading the island would cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. After he dropped the bomb, information surfaced that perhaps there would have been a Japanese defection and an invasion might have succeeded. That doesn't matter. Truman took what he knew at the time and acted on it. This is what makes a decisive leader great. (Personally, given what I know of Japanese culture and the subordination they were in to their emperor at the time I doubt that the revisionists are correct--I think an invasion would have been tenfold more costly both to America and Japan.) Zuckerman concludes his article on Iraq, writing: "The failure to have developed a more accurate assessment of Saddam's secret weapons program doesn't mean that going to war was right--and it certainly doesn't justify the way the war was excecuted. These are subjects worthy of grave attention. But to impugn the integrity of our leading officials and poison the atmosphere in which this country is fighting a war is irresponsible politics and it ought to be stopped." I don't know about all of that--I still am relatively sure he had weapons of mass destruction and believe the war was fully justified (after all, the UN tied everything up for fifteen months before the attack began, and these rather porous borders to Syria and Iran which are now teeming with terrorists could have been handy once again). But Mr. Zuckerman's title gets it right: "Foul-Ups--Not Felonies." The media is always willing to believe that mistake made in a Republican administration were deliberate attempts to mislead the public...somehow Bill Clinton just got made a Republican, but I digress. The fact of the matter is, Mr. Clinton and his cronies in 1998 said all the same things that Bush and his people did in 2002. But I've said it before, and I think I'll say it again: the only thing a conservative president can do to please these people is die or bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.