It’s true: If we can’t find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq it will be a political disaster, if not domestically than certainly internationally. I’m still confident we’ll find them. I don’t think it would be a moral problem — Milosovic didn’t have WMD and he was worth toppling, right? But it’s a no-brainer that if the what-if scenario came true, we’d have a lot of ’splaining to do. Fair enough.

But so would the anti-war crowd too. Just as the Alterman’s of the world have done another zig-zag and claimed they knew this would be a short war all along, they are now playing coy about the existence of WMD in Iraq. Alterman begins his blog today with a smirking jab:

Welcome to Day ?? of the Iraq War of Still No Weapons of Mass Destruction. Let’s see: No significant Al-Qaeda ties, no nukes, no WMD. We had to go to war in Iraq again, why? Oh yeah, never mind. We won.

Well, just to be clear Alterman and indeed almost all of the antiwar crowd were on record saying they had no doubt that Saddam had WMD. The debate was about what to do about it. If now they want to pretend like this was always a question mark, I hope they won’t be cavalier when it’s eventually discovered. And, heaven forbid, if it isn’t discovered they are not completely off the hook either — because they agreed with the hawks about the nature of the problem, just not the proposed solution. If you say we should starve the rattle snake and I say we should just blast a shotgun into the hole, you don’t get unlimited rights to crow if the serpent turns out to be non-poisonous.