Spinning Duelfer

The liberal media can't read. That's the only explanation for two days of absurd coverage of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) report, chaired by Charles A. Duelfer. As I noted yesterday, the findings strongly support President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Yet Kerry's press partisans are in denial, as many in the blogosphere point out. Still the media is unembarrassed, according to today's NY Post and Washington Times:

"Gotcha, Mr. President." This was the consensus of the headlines from nearly every daily newspaper yesterday responding to the CIA's Iraq Survey Group report on Iraq's prewar weapons programs. Yes, the report found no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. It also concluded that whatever illicit weapons Saddam Hussein did possess were most likely destroyed just after the 1991 Gulf War in accordance with U.N. sanctions. But were these the findings that the report highlighted in the first line of its Key Findings summary? No. "Saddam [Hussein] so dominated the Iraqi Regime that its strategic intent was his alone," the summary begins. "He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted."

Facts don't matter to the biased press: today's AP story claims Saddam "had no programs to make either them or nuclear bombs, and had little ability - or immediate plans - to revive those programs."--exactly the opposite of the ISG report's findings! (See Powerline's fisk of yesterday's AP fairy tale.)

And nothing will change the crazy 42 percent of America convinced that "Bush = Hitler," writes Jonah Goldberg:

[T]here's no denying that the Bush administration has offered several different rationales to bolster its case for the Iraq war.

Oh, wait, it can be denied. In fact, it's being denied zealously now that the Iraq Survey Group has concluded in its final report that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction when we invaded. The president's critics now insist that Bush made only one case for war.

To his critics, it seems, Bush's error is that he offered too many reasons to go to war, except when he offered too few. When the news is that no WMDs have been found, WMDs become Bush's only reason to go to war. Back when the WMD angle had yet to be verified, the problem was that Bush offered too many rationales. Which is it?

Pundit Mickey Kaus is confused:

I don't understand things everyone else seems to understand! For example . . . If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that? Why doesn't Bush make that argument--talking about Saddam's actions in the years before the U.S. invasion instead of Saddam's "intent" to have WMDs at some point in the future? (It wouldn't necessarily make the Iraq war prudent, but it would make Americans feel more comfortable about it than what Bush has been telling them.)

John Kerry can't read either. The Senator's spinning Duelfer too--but he can't claim ignorance of the facts. According to Jonah Goldberg, that makes his spin even more outrageous:

Bush "lied" because he believed the same intelligence John Kerry believed. Bush "lied" even though John Edwards called the threat from Iraq "imminent" -- something Bush never did. No one bothers to ask how it could be possible that Bush lied. How could he have known there were no WMDs? No one bothers to wonder why Tony Blair isn't a liar. Indeed, no one bothers to ask whether the Great Diplomat and Alliance Builder believes our oldest and truest allies Great Britain and Australia are lead by equally contemptible liars. Of course, they can't be liars -- they are merely part of the coalition of the bribed. In John Kerry's world, it's a defense to say your oldest friends aren't dishonest, they're merely whores.

The media and the Democrats are too lazy and too biased to consider a serious and documented report confirming Saddam's longstanding efforts to acquire WMDs. It's easier for them, and Kerry, to blame it on Bush. And that's a disgrace.