This has been decisively litigated so many times, I'm skeptical that any relitigation is of any value whatsoever. But since the Krauthammers of the universe keep slugging away in an abyss of illogic and disinformation, I suppose it's incumbent on us less benighted scribblers to slug back, to match punch for punch. That's the war-room theory, anyway, even if its utility is in question — which is to say, I'm beginning to think that perhaps if we just ignored them …
It’s a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?
First, the question is not just a hypothetical, but an inherently impossible hypothetical. It contradicts itself. Had we known there were no weapons of mass destruction, the very question would not have arisen.
But of course "we" — meaning Bush, Cheney, Rice & Assoc. — did know what we know now. U.S. intelligence was muddled, uncertain, contradictory and often screamingly premonitory. It offered no assurances that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD most foul, especially that of the nuclear variety. This, the Bush administration knew, so it tortured the available intelligence until its interpretations of that intelligence and its outright defiance of stated cautions supported what the Bush administration was hellbent on doing all along: invading Iraq.
There is nothing, as in nothing at all, inherently impossible or impossibly hypothetical or self-contradictory about the question being hurled at today's neocon pols. Not a goddamn thing. The American military's invading discovery and confirmation of a negative — that our intel's expressed doubts were inexpressibly valid — were but a squandering of thousands of lives and vast resources that any responsible administration would have avoided.
And with that, the rest of Krauthammer's argument — a characteristically blind bashing of the Obama administration's subsequent sins — falls apart. "We" knew a helluva lot more than we let on in 2003, but we went ahead anyway. Hence a lot of us should be in orange today, and their pardoning cheerleaders should merely be seen as the frantic, cornered imbeciles they are.