Actually, I just finished Byron York’s <a href=”http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york062603.asp

” target=”_blank”> very useful piece on the whole WMD/Bush lied thing. Byron addresses the New Republic’s broadside (narrowside?) against the Bush Administration. As Byron notes, TNR’s gripe boils down to their belief that Bush hyped/lied/over-emphasized the nuclear threat from Iraq. I think it’s too soon to tell whether this is true, but it’s certainly a reasonable argument for liberals who supported the war to make.

But I think TNR has a fairly unique problem. They took the editorial position that the war was justified in order to stop Iraq from getting nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons only. Sure, they made the moral and strategic arguments, but they hinged everything on the nuclear threat. Moreover, they rejected the idea that chemical and biological weapons even counted as real WMDs. They still think the war was morally justified, but they’re peeved that the realpolitik argument wasn’t as strong as they believed it was.

Well, this raises an important question: Who cares? I don’t mean this in the dismissive sense since I respect — i.e. care about — the New Republic’s opinions. But if TNR believes the war was morally justified even without the nuclear justification, then their argument boils down to wanting to have it both ways. They want the war to be right and Bush to be wrong. This is intellectually defensible, but not exactly an argument which will rally many adherents on the right or the left. Those who are passionate about the “Bush lied” argument will sail right past TNR and rally to the Nation or Mother Jones. Those who are passionate about defending the war, will sail past TNR going the other direction. In order words, TNR may be right for taking what they see as the middle-of-the-road position (war right, Bush wrong), but the traffic will keep whizzing by them in both the North-bound and South-bound lanes.

TNR has another “Who cares?” problem. When I made the point the other week that I wan’t overly troubled by the failure to find WMD (yet) because I never made the argument that WMD was the only justification for war, a reader tartly noted “Who cares?” The country didn’t go to war based upon your argument for war, we went to war because of what the President said, he argued. The reader was right of course. And this point cuts both ways. The New Republic only cared about the nuclear threat, but the American people cared about the biological and chemical weapon threat too. They aslo cared about the President’s other arguments as well: Saddam is an irredeemable enemy of the US, sanctions don’t work, the region needs democracy etc etc. As Byron notes, the Administration invoked those arguments too. If the New Republic rejected those arguments, well, that’s the New Republic’s problem not Bush’s.