THE "BUSH LIED" MEME

Steven Den Beste thoroughly debunks it in a long, detailed essay, adding:

The new refrain is “Bush lied about the reason for attacking Iraq. He claimed that Iraq tried to purchase Uranium from Africa, and that wasn’t true.” Therefore… only they don’t proceed with the “therefore” because their unspoken therefore is “therefore we shouldn’t have attacked Iraq; we should have pursued other approaches and left Saddam in power.”

And they don’t want to formally say that, since Saddam was a monster and the people of Iraq are incalculably better off now without him. But those making these arguments don’t care about the plight of the people of Iraq, or indeed the plight of impoverished people anywhere else, except in very abstract terms. The dirty little secret of those on the far left making these arguments is that for all their claims of compassion for the downtrodden of the world, they are primarily motivated by hatred of Western culture, especially as manifested in the United States, rather than by love of the people of the rest of the world. [Emphasis mine–Ed]

Which is why they don’t like to talk about how awful it actually was in Iraq before we invaded, because they argued at the time, and implicitly are arguing now, that the status quo there should have been maintained.

Meanwhile, James Taranto adds:

Democrats are complaining that the national-security justifications for liberating Iraq were phony. They’re wrong, of course, but if they actually believe what they’re saying, they should be all the more supportive of the war. “By their own political principles, the less threat Iraq posed to the United States, the more reason there was to wage humanitarian war,” notes Wolfson. “So, just who is deceiving whom?”

As Mark Steyn recently wrote:

Intelligence is a hit-and-miss business. In 1998, when Bill Clinton launched mid-Monica cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan, he hit a Khartoum aspirin factory and missed Osama bin Laden. The claims that the aspirin factory was producing nerve gas and was an al-Qa