Another left-wing meme

This time it's similar to Helen Thomas' tendentious question at the press conference last week. The Mahablog quotes this from Peking Duck:

In ordinary times, it would be a bombshell: A secret memo proves that our president told his people a series of lies leading to wanton and needless death and destruction. He had planned to wage his war no matter what, and was even prepared to create fake evidence to justify the invasion. It was never about unconventional weapons. The calls to disarm were bogus. It was to be war from day one. In ordinary times, he’d be impeached.

Whether that is true or not seems irrelevant, since Saddam kept playing games, apparently thinking that if the UN inspectors found no WMD, Bush would look foolish and back down and that the U.N. sanctions would disappear soon thereafter. It's still all about the WMD for these people, but they see something sinister in Bush and Blair's discussions of preparations for war.

As Tom Bevan at RCP has a different interpretation, since Saddam was still stalling and failing to give "immediate, accurate and complete disclosure of his WMD programs" and was still not cooperating with the Inspectors. It may be that he already suspected, as I did, that the WMD had been moved already. In the end, it was Saddam's long failure to abide by the cease-fire obligations he had undertaken and his failure to come completely clean that made it necessary to overthrow him.

The apparently "Smoking Gun" memo doesn't really prove much, given Saddam's defiance and evasion. The critics of the war would have it that Bush was dead set on war and nothing would turn him from it. Anybody who had watched Saddam over the previous 30 years could hardly think he was about to have a major change of character. He had started 2 wars with his neighbors, and gassed his own subjects and otherwise attempted ethnic cleansing. I wouldn't have wasted my time with the U.N. since it was clear that it would never support us, and what help would it have been if it had?

After 9/11, Bush may have felt that deposing Saddam was necessary, to keep Al Qaeda from just turning to him for shelter. I don't know. But I do know that striking terrorism at its roots by building a liberal democracy in the heart of the region seemed quite shrewd and audacious to me. It was and still is a gamble, but it's one that could give Arabs and Persians something to aspire to, and therefore worth trying.

The new meme is probably aimed at giving a cause for censure or impeachment, but it's pretty hard to do that with a national election in the meantime that showed that the nation was behind the President.