Did you catch this? Michael Barone the other day makes an excellent point:"
"The claim is that "neocons...politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have concluded already. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam's hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat. Unfortunately...the administration allowed its critics to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren't found. Here we see at work the liberal fallacy, apparent in debates on gun control, that weapons are the problem rather than the people with the capability and will to use them to kill others. The fact that millions of law-abiding Americans have guns is not a problem; the problem is that criminals can get them and have the will to kill others. Similarly, the fact that France has WMDs is not a problem; the fact that Saddam Hussein had the capability to produce WMDs and the will to use them against us was."
Read the whole thing.
Especially important to grasp is Barone's reference to a "narrative" that the left and other critics of the war have managed to impose on our politics. That is, war opponents have gotten a lot of people to accept as a given something that, as he demonstrates, isn't true. Fundamental: conservatives especially in this day and age must fight against such untrue narratives. (another example comes from the 1990s--the Clintons' demand that tax cuts must be "paid for." Tax cuts mean the government is allowing you, thank goodness, to keep more of your earnings. Keeping more of your own money isn't something you have to "pay for." Yet the Clintons got that accepted by many as gospel truth.)
