"Charles Krauthammer Day"
I have to admit, the leftists are more clever than their right-wing opponents. It’s too bad they don’t know how market economies work.
This guy celebrates “Charles Krauthammer Day” (HT2 Brad DeLong) because back on April 22, 2003, Krauthammer said:
DR. KRAUTHAMMER: Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don’t have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time. They’ve obviously been deeply hidden, and it will require that we get the information from people who know where they are.
If you’re looking for anthrax and VX gas, which can be hidden in a basement or a closet, in a country the size of Germany, you can understand how in five weeks we might not have stumbled across them.
I understand that from the Austrian point of view, Americans appear rather naive. I can assure you that from the American point of view, Austrians appear rather cynical.
[Laughter.]
I do not want to get sucked into a foreign policy debate; feel free to call me an idiot or a French-loving commie in the comments. I just want to remind everyone that we were clearly told that Saddam HAD WMD IN HIS POSSESSION, and that that’s why we had to invade Iraq pronto. After the weapons didn’t turn up, there was a lot of optimistic revisionist history going on, a la “Bush never said Saddam had WMD, he said he was developing the capacity for them. So I guess you think we should have sat back and let Saddam butcher those people?”
So to repeat, maybe it was a good idea to invade, maybe not. (Personally, I think not.) But what is NOT up for debate is whether the official reason was the clear and present danger of existing stockpiles of WMD. If you doubt that, then please explain why Krauthammer said the above.
