From a reader in response to today’s column:

Jonah;
You completely missed the point of the Clinton and Gore quotes, then and now. The purpose of attacking Iraq and of those statements supporting them was to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandals, not because Saddam was dangerous. Everybody knew it then, even Democrats. The trouble with lying is that you have so much to remember, and the Democrats today admit implicitly that they didn’t believe Clinton and Gore then – they only said they did then.
Will the MSM give the Dems a pass on it now is the question. Both the MSM and the Dems seem to have forgotten their lines from 1998.

Me I hear variations of this all the time. And while I think there’s some truth to it, the allegation misses an important point. Even if Clinton was “wagging the dog” as countless people left, right and center suggested, that doesn’t mean he was lying about Saddam’s WMD program. There were too many people inside the Clinton administration who were operating in good faith about what they considered the Iraqi threat — Kenneth Pollack, for example. If Clinton had simply made stuff up, he would have been caught.

Nonetheless, to the extent such charges are true, they condemn the Democrats on the standard they have set. If Bill Clinton was saber rattling — and bomb dropping! — to shore up his political standing, he was not alone. Nancy Pelosi in December of 1998: “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.”

I guess they all lied about Saddam and people died — just to protect their selfish political interests.