Thursday, October 09, 2003

Great Article by Alan Reynolds

Published at the normally very conservative Townhall (who also print articles by Ann Coulter, David Limbaugh, Ben Shapiro, and so on), Alan Reynolds takes on the contrast between how the Bush Administration presented the WMD evidence before the Iraq war and what they are saying now. He goes through the various rationales for the difference and deflates each of them, concluding with the rationale that the Administration never really said that we faced an imminent threat.

"The latest and least defensible defense of the CIA has been to flatly deny that administration spokesmen ever claimed Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons or that such weapons posed any imminent threat. A Wall Street Journal editorial thus claims, "The Imminence Test and the Stockpile Standard ... are postwar inventions, and political transparently political inventions." That is a remarkable remark, and one that relies entirely on extremely short memories."

So not the best of times for the CIA. Reynolds is a senior fellow at the Cato institute; a libertarian organization that staunchly opposed the war. Not surprisingly, Ms. Coulter doesn't spend a lot of time on them in her work, as that would kind of put the lie to the idea that only traitorous liberals opposed the war.

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