Lying vs. Justification

We liberals have been knocking Bush for a while now about those missing WMD. But have we been taking too high a road? As with pretty much everything, nothing is ever just black or white. Ben Fritz at Spinsanity explains. Snippets:

Making sense of such a heated and rapidly evolving debate can be extremely difficult. At this point, though, two things are clear. One is that, as with many intense political battles, some on both sides are stepping well beyond the limits of reasonable discourse and making vicious and unfounded accusations about their opponents. Even more notably, however, in many cases, both sides are talking past the other, making claims that are largely true, but don't engage the arguments of the other side.

Much more remarkable in this debate than this sort of inflammatory rhetoric has been the inability of both sides to engage the other sides' points. While liberals point to specific instances of deception by the administration and call for investigations into whether intelligence may have been altered or ignored by the President and his aides, conservatives respond by pointing out that several different organizations and people have accused Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction and defending the war based on other rationales.

In reality, then, the question is whether these two issues can be considered separately. As previously cited work on this site and a recent article in The New Republic, amongst others, show, there can be no doubt that the Bush administration made deceptive statements in specific instances about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and its connections to terrorism. But the administration and its defenders correctly point out that many world leaders and intelligence experts have believed Iraq possessed these types of weapons or was in the process of making them. And supporters of the war have every right to consider the war justified by these assessments or to point to other rationales for the war besides weapons of mass destruction.