Category: World

My estimable fiancée beat me to the punch yesterday with the announcement that Ellen Sirleaf-Johsnson has won the presidency of Liberia.

My congratulations and best wishes to her and to the people of Liberia. There’s a lot of work to be done.

Via Omar at Iraq the Model comes a story that goes farther than almost anything else toward explaining the reasons for the Iraq War.

It is the ultimate of ironies that the American Left would have you believe that President George W. Bush is an incompetent moron who nevertheless managed to dupe the House of Representatives into voting for war in Iraq 296-133, and the Senate 77-23. Notwithstanding that all throughout the Clinton administration, officials from the President on down repeatedly warned about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, when President Bush said exactly the same thing, he was lying.

In December’s Commentary Magazine, Norman Podhoretz takes another swing at this Big Lie:

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.