Howard Dean's Saliva
Mood:  accident prone
With unprecedented precision of force and great care to spare the population, the United States and its friends went into Iraq and overthrew one of the worst tyrants of the last half-century. We were and are right to have done this for a great number of reasons, few of which are intelligible to the Springer-type voter-oid (or, to his somewhat more sophisticated cousin, the still-traumatized Floridians-for-Gore voter). But what we have now is the media desperate to open a crack in the armor of this President ---and it will do so with this terribly hot issue of whether Bush was lying to the world about the Iraqis seeking uranium from Africa. Well, let's call this what it is and be done with it.

Bush was wrong to have included this claim in his State of the Union address. It was gratuitous and, had he been more careful, he would not have used it. Someone on the TV made the good point that Bush the Elder, being the former head of the CIA, would certainly not have made such a poor choice.

Okay, so the President oversold us on all the reasons why Saddam and the Baathists needed to be driven from Iraq. Maybe he believed that the uranium claim was just one more stick of kindling to toss onto the fire to get people's attention. Regardless, this is no crime, no matter how anxious Howard Dean and the liberals are to make it one.

It just so happens that Saddam and his regime did, at one point, seek to develop a nuclear program. And it is absolutely certain that Saddam was in possession of multiple kinds of extremely dangerous chemicals and biotoxins. We still don't know the full extent of these programs or what their status was when we liberated Iraq. There are still plenty of Iraqi psychopaths that we haven't liquidated yet who, if they could, would try to use those weapons of mass murder against us and their own people. Do the self-loathing, Bush-haters doubt that? They can be angry all they want about the President's error in judgement in advertising some low-grade intelligence (now known to be false), but what does that mean in the broader context? The isolationism of the Democratic Party continues to be one of the oddest developments of the early 21st Century. Who would've guessed that the party of Wilson and FDR and Truman would be such a bunch of ostriches with their heads in the sand?