During the run-up to the Iraq War, it was fashionable on the right to be dismissive or even insulting towards the UNMOVIC inspectors and Blix's team. Despite having blustered and fought tooth and nail to get Saddam to let the inspectors in, once they were in and were uncovering very little, the tactic shifted from demands that Saddam be held accountable to UN-monitored verification of his disarmament to snide and often blatant dismissals of the competence of Blix's team. After all, we /knew/ that Saddam had "produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas." We /knew/ that he was "building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world". If the UN weapons inspectors were turning up nothing, than this was evidence not only of Saddam's duplicity, but of the incompetence of the inspectors: war was inevitable.

We now know the truth about Iraq's weapons programs--they existed on paper, the things of fantasy dreamed up by men whose stock in trade included deceiving their own leader about just what they had accomplished. These dreams amounted to little more than sketches on scrap paper: doodles of mass distraction.

Meanwhile, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a report today that confirmed what Scott Ritter and many respected and informed sources were saying all along: that Iraq's WMD capabilities were largely eliminated by the end of the first Gulf War and the inspection regimes which followed, and that there was no credible intelligence to support the Administration's politically-driven assertions that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States. The Administration, of course, is in full spin mode over this.

I still wonder how it is possible for anyone to defend, with a straight face, the Bush Administration's repeated claims that they knew not only what /specific/ types and amounts of WMDs Saddam had, but exactly where they were. These claims are impossible to reconcile with the inability of our armed forces, which now have strategic control over the country, to find so much as one single canister of VX or mustard gas, one single gram of anthrax. Our concern over Hussein's purported nuclear program is impossible to reconcile with the fact that US forces went for more than six months without bothering to secure seven of Iraq's nuclear power plants. And the WMD boogeyman that was used to sell this war to the American public--this war that could not wait a few more months, this was that had to happen /right now/ because of what a grave threat Saddam posed to the US--has been slowly ditched by the administration in favor of a fluffier humanitarian rationale. And the astounding thing is that the media is /letting them get away with it/--the press blithely reports everything the Bush Administration says as facts, without pointing out the way the administration's rhetoric has changed and evolved each time their current talking points have been proven to be demonstrably and conclusively without any basis in fact.

At some point, these facts are going to come out, and enough blood is going to be in the water that the press--who largely follow the prevailing winds of public opinion in what they cover, rather than contributing to it--will seize on the indefensible and inconsistent history of the Bush Administration's claims about Iraq. At some point, this country will wake up and realize, as a whole, that they have been lied to. Not on the level of a man lying about a blowjob. Not on the level of a man lying about whether or not he'd raise taxes. Not even on the level of lying about crooked tactics used against one's opponents. The American public will realize that they were lied to, repeatedly and pointedly, about matters of critical national security. They will realize that they were lied to about the fundamental facts on which they were supposed to base committing our armed forces to war.

For lies of this magnitude, there is no defense. There is only, provided justice is done, a prison cell.

Edit: Trickster, one of the guest bloggers over at Tacitus, weighs in on the question of the Bush Administration's dishonesty.