WMD SPIN-O-RAMA

Rittenhouse is on target: "Truth matters. Credibility counts." Not so long ago we had a little impeachment party as a nation because of a lie in an investigation of a civil matter; this impeachment party was helped along by a crappy statute that was used and abused and has since been abandoned because the whole thing had just gotten too outrageous. Too outrageous for most people, that is.

Now we have an administration that hasn't been able to show us the goods with respect to the declared reason (whatever the real reasons) for a war in which we sacrificed our "blood and treasure" as the saying goes. We hear that Colin Powell thought the evidence was, and I quote, "bullshit." We have a high-ranking official who cites "bureaucratic convienience" for the public rationale for the war. And we have indications that the French may have been right all along (link via Le Show).

Perhaps the WMD's were there, but are now gone (because they are now in the hands of other people who want them), and then the argument that war would create chaos and allow WMD's to spread was correct. Or perhaps the WMD's were not there. If they were not there, the administration either was lying (and the war was fought for other reasons that weren't as defensible) or they were acting on limited information and just made an error.

Maybe WMD's may still be found. But since there is now a serious credibility problem with respect to WMD's, if we're really looking for them, then we should ask for international help in finding them. I'm not quite sure how the administration can accomplish this without looking really foolish, but they should do it anyway, as an admission of the fact that the rest of the world will find international efforts more credible.

Unless the whole point of the war was bravado -- the ability to show that we are willing to go to war even when the evidence is not all that great, in order to scare the bejeezus out of countries that we're afraid of or want to pressure -- and then the WMD's really are irrelevant, and everything is going pretty much according to plan. That idea scares me, actually.