[OddjobXL]

Weekly Standard? Wait, that sounds oddly familiar. Now why would that be? Oh, right - William Kristol's magazine. Now why would I be any more at ease trusting material this guy gave a thumbs up to (correction actually wrote!)? Isn't there a link to the original article anywhere? I'm guessing not, or at least not easily found. Seems these two links, when you google, are precisely the first two that come up defending Wolfowitz. Hey, I do that too sometimes. It's part of why I get into these debates. You always learn something new and sometimes that means hitting the old google to defend a point you might have stepped too far out on.

...reading...reading...reading...

Alright, seems to me that once you wade through the defensiveness and rhetoric, and if you trust a secret tape recording the Pentagon made of the interview and only entrusted William Kristol with, Kristol has something of a point. He claims the interviewer made Wolfowitz sound like a nut because he conflated the answer about Saudi Arabia with that about WMD. I'm even willing to grant that this tape is probably legitimate because this is such a minor point if you were really going to distort evidence you'd do something much more useful than this.

Ultimately, the statement that deciding to make the focus on WMD because it was convenient stands. Now I don't doubt that many intelligence services, including our own and even the CIA, suspected there were probably chemical weapons in Iraq. But that never was the whole WMD case. The stuff people actually remember has to do with mushroom clouds and Saddam's association with al Qaida. Hell, Kristol even sings that song when he talks about the al Qaida people killed in Northern Iraq without bothering to mention that is Kurdish controlled Iraq which even back then was known. What wasn't common knowledge at the time was that our intelligence services asked permission to take them out before the invasion, before they could scatter, and they were told no because it would undermine the case for war.

You starting to see where I'm coming from? I'm not some freak wearing a papermache Uncle Sam head and prancing around in protest marches to pick up hairy chicks. I'm no actual expert on these issues either. But I am a guy who has been reading waaaay too much for too long to believe alot of stuff some people still insist on seeing as the gospel truth.