Now there's a switch!

Mickey Kaus notes a WaPo story with a headline that's less accusatory than the story.

I like Kaus, but I'm not sure I agree with his Ballot Box Now! campaign. He seems to think they can do without a campaign and accurate means to prevent fraud.

Mickey's touting retired General Anthony Zinni as the Democrats' answer on national security, but I'm not that impressed. Asked whether he feels vindicated because he had reservations about the invasion of Iraq, he responded that he didn't, but " I know the area, I know the people, I know the culture, I know the situation. I knew the intelligence right up until the day of the war and I knew it wasn't there, the threat." Now that may be accurate, but it shows a lack of imagination in connection with the overal war on terrorism. The justification for the war had to be that Saddam posed a threat, but there is a better one that couldn't be stated explicitly. If we can get a working democracy in Iraq, the whole pattern of governments in Arab countries could change. And it may be working better than the Democrats would like.

On the other hand, he seems to have seen through Saddam's game with the U.N. and the American left:

I believed that Saddam Hussein was trying to pull a fast one on the U.N. inspectors in that he wanted them to give him a clean bill of health because they couldn't find a smoking gun. In other words, a stockpile. And I don't believe he had a stockpile. What he was very cleverly doing was building a framework that could start a program once he came out of sanctions.

That's precisely what Kenneth Timmerman and others have been saying. There were large stockpiles of pesticides, far beyond the needs of Iraq's agriculture, which could be easily converted to nerve agents, once the U.N. had eased sanctions.