Who Is Lying About Iraq?

That’s the title of Norman Podhoretz’s great piece in the December issue of Commentary. Podhoretz demolishes the canard that the Bush administration lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, not by offering new evidence, but by succinctly and persuasively laying out the facts that demonstrate the absurdity of the charge on which the Democratic Party has apparently decided to risk its fortunes. Podhoretz also disassembles, brick by brick, the structure of lies that Joe Wilson has erected over the last two years. Again, most of the information will be familiar to our readers and other knowledgeable observers, but no one has done a better job of pulling it together and drawing the highly unflattering–to Wilson–inferences. And you may not have seen this quote from a speech Wilson gave three months after the invasion of Iraq:

I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam’s regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.

Here is the conclusion of Podhoretz’s article:

And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq—the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy—have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation, and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals.

That is, of course, what the Democrats’ effort to rewrite history is all about.