Oil-for-WMD

NRO has posted Claudia Rosett’s column on the ISG report: “Saddam’s sugar daddy.” Nobody has made the related political point more elegantly than Glenn Reynolds: “Kerry’s case collapses.” To which Mickey Kaus adds:

If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that?

And to which Glenn Reynolds (wearing his Instapundit hat) answers: “Bush’s! Everything’s his fault — at least until November 3d…”

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