Missing the point...

... and kissing ass.

The Post's editorial misses the point of the growing mass of evidence for duplicity utterly, of course. Quoting:

The larger question is how, or even whether, decisions about preemptive war can be made in the absence of unambiguous intelligence. This is not hypothetical: Whoever wins November's election may face a similar dilemma. Extremist anti-American governments or terrorists may acquire weapons of mass destruction, and neither al Qaeda nor the rulers of Iran and North Korea are inclined to transparency. The case of Iraq has shown that it is possible that the intelligence on which a war decision may be based may later prove to be mostly wrong. Does that mean the president cannot act in such cases? That's a question Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry would do well to discuss.

BS, on an impressive scale. The problem with the intelligence wasn't mere 'ambiguity'. The problem was wilful, knowing distortion.

Yes, there's always ambiguity in intelligence. But there are levels of certainty, and there's also a point at which reasonable doubt no longer applies. Where sensible people discuss such things, the certainty is qualified and quantified as well as possible, and usually, you can be certain enough. So that last question is a red herring. Of course you can act where some ambiguity exists, if you honestly assess enough of the evidence is compelling enough that a mistake here and there doesn't really change the overall risk.

And that's the most you're ever risking, when you're honest. And that's the problem. They weren't honest.

'Mistakes' like the one the US administration is now claiming to have made just do not happen. Yes, you sometimes get details wrong. But several weapons programs that simply weren't there? That's a bit more than a detail. These are things that intelligence can reliably detect, if they're really there, even if there are issues surrounding scale and progress at any given instant.

So you can actually conclude, quite safely, that it wasn't a 'mistake'. That's the point.

It's not that the intelligence was 'mostly wrong'. It's that the administration chose to ignore the intelligence it didn't want to hear, and listened to plenty that it should have known it should have ignored, just because it confirmed the story it wanted to tell its citizenry and the world.

The administration knew the bioweapons source was an unreliable drunk, and they knew the tubes weren't for nukes. But that didn't matter. They weren't looking for evidence. They were looking for a pretext. So they tortured the evidence until they could convince themselves they heard it saying what they wanted to hear, and then they got their war--even if almost no one outside their country believed them for an instant.

This is just obvious now. It pretty much always was. And the Post's view goes well past merely giving these goons too much credit, all the way to actually spinning it for them.

Sad, really. Guys, you're just not a newspaper any more. Hand in your badges.