This reader seems to sum up the criticisms I’m getting from most liberal or anti-Bush readers:

Jonah– Real quickly… Stripped of lots of ifs and buts…
(1) When you send troops to war you have to be really really sure about what you’re doing. Yes, lots of Democrats thought that Saddam was doing bad things… but Clinton didn’t invade. Bush did. He had to be sure he was right. He was wrong.
(2) The Bush administration did _not_ make really sure they got it right– they pressured the CIA to come up with the politically correct conclusions. See
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=a/9fvk+gc2u0urk+YDplFD==. So yes, Dems had access to intel, but that info was off kilter because of the efforts of the administration. Hence, Pelosi said the other day that if she had the intel then that she has now, she would not have voted for the war.
(3) In addition, the administration made sensationalistic claims in public, which many Dems believed, and vs which intel professionals couldn’t get their contrary beliefs out about– ie, “mushroom cloud,” “bulletproof” evidence linking Saddam and al Qaeda, “we will be greeted as liberators,” etc.
(4) You write, “In their America, partisanship begins at the water’s edge.” You must mean in Congress’s America… see http://www.slate.com/id/27730/, Will Saletan, May 7, 1999. Saletan: “You can be sure of only two things: Each
party is arguing exactly the opposite of what it argued the last time a Republican president led the nation into war, and exactly the opposite of what it
will argue next time.” Republicans argue that:
1. The atrocities are America’s fault.
2. The failure of diplomacy to avert the war is
America’s fault.
3. Congress should not support the war.
4. We can’t win.
5. Don’t believe U.S. propaganda.
6. Give peace a chance.
7. We have no choice but to compromise.
8. We’re eager to compromise.
9. We’ll back off first.
(5) FWIW, I think that you are risking damaging your reputation by attacking Dems like this. The story of the skewing of intel has been kicking around for a
couple years, and new stuff comes out from time to time. It is far from craven to look into the misuse of intelligence. I don’t see why that should be a partisan issue. An investigation will show that both the Bush II and Clinton administrations were off. Bush was right to act, but was not as cautious with intel as he should be before sending people to war.

Me: I’ve got to disappear for a while so anyone else around here is free to chime in. But, very quickly.

1. This strikes me as ahistorical and cheap. Bill Clinton was not responding to 9/11 (he was merely fomenting the preconditions which lead to it). The intelligence we had was the best we were going to get. Politics are about moments. There was a window of opportunity to do the right thing and get rid of a menace after 9/11. The sanctions regime was falling apart (and, we now know, the sanctions regime was a moral horror perpetrated by the UN with the help of our allies). If you believe getting rid of Saddam is the right thing to do (as I did and do), then dickering for another decade of UN sanctions, inspections and the like is folly.

Oh, and I suppose it’s okay for Bill Clinton to have lied and dropped bombs, just so long as he didn’t actually invade? And if he didn’t lie using the same intelligence as Bush, how come Bush is a liar?

2. So Jay Rockefeller didn’t have access to intelligence when he said Iraq was an imminent threat? How does that work? The Bush White House somehow tricked the Germans into believing Saddam would have nukes inside of three years? I don’t buy it.

3. I agree that the White House made claims about being greeted as liberators and he was less than absolutely right (Though the extent to which we weren’t greeted by many Iraqis as liberators has been exaggerated). This points to the real intelligence failure of the war plan. And is an area of legitimate criticism of the White House and the CIA, as Rich has written about at length. As for the mushroom cloud, I don’t see how this is markedly different from the comments made about the Iraqi nuclear program by Rockefeller and others.

4. Will Saletan is talking about Yugoslavia here. That’s a more complicated and less analogous issue because, while I supported Clinton on Yugoslavia (as did National Review, Bob Dole and John McCain by the way) one cannot make the case that toppling Milosevic was even remotely as justified in terms of our national interests. Indeed, if you supported topping Milosevic on humanitarian grounds but didn’t support toppling Saddam, you are a hypocrite. Milosevic killed fewer people than Saddam did. Saddam’s reign promised to result in even more deaths than Milosevic’s. And, the evidence of Saddam’s barbarity was vastly better documented. If you want to use Yugoslavia as an example of Trent Lott’s or Tom Delay’s hypocrisy, you need to take into account that toppling Saddam was not only a humanitarian issue, but a national security issue.

5. Spare me. I’ll worry about my reputation, thanks very much. Will there be new revelations that make Bush look worse? Maybe. But I doubt it considering how many investigations we’ve had already. What is craven is for the Democrats to call Bush a liar, for the reasons I’ve already explained.