Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has some reasonable complaints regarding WMD. For one, that Perle has long complained that the CIA didn't have the goods on Saddam, and now complains that they sold the President a bill of goods.

If true, sure, that's a searing indictment of Perle. And a zillion other politicians who ever said anything inconsistent. It isn't that I don't consider such charges important -- I do -- it's just that in today's political culture, such charges are too numerous to mention.

Is that particular kind of error a high offense? Great. Then I hope Josh is not voting for Kerry, or even taking him seriously. Kerry wanted to cut intelligence-gathering capabilities, and now complains we should have had better ones. Hey, if Perle's inconsistency is "mendacity", what Kerry (and Clark) are offering are no better.

Look, perhaps I've got a screwed up view, but it's hard for me to get impassioned when things are turning out as I've expected.

What follows is my own view of the whole situation. Looks totally reasonable to me, so I can't understand why I seem to be nearly alone in holding it, or at least in spelling it out this way. I say this as a conservative, but nonpartisan voter, and someone who did not vote for the current President, so there's no need here to defend "my guy".

Issue #1: Compliance with international law. When inspections were thwarted -- from 1992 on -- I always said the issue wasn't whether there was or wasn't WMD, but whether Saddam wanted it, and whether he was the kind of guy who would abide by his committment to UN 1411. He clearly did, and he clearly didn't.

Look, on issues like having banned weapons, most nations are assumed innocent until proven guilty. But Iraq in the 90s was not "most nations", and our policly needed to be that unless we could thoroughly prove the opposite, we were required to treat any noncompliance as though it were proof of hostile intent and capability.

Saddam's Iraq was tried and "found guilty" (clearly so!) of being a rogue state when Saddam used WMD against Iran, invaded Kuwait, lobbed missles at Israel, and threatened Saudi Arabia. He was arrested in the Gulf War. And UN Resolution 1411 were the terms and conditions of his parole. And parole officers use very different standards for dealing with felons than we do when those presumed innocent: resistance and evasion is enough to return the prisoner to incarceration. With good reason! Please try to understand this, folks.

I wanted President Clinton to take 1411 seriously by pressing to make sure UNSCOM never met any resistance -- including to the point of using threat of military force. Instead, the Iraqi game was, even at the very end, to stop the inspectors, deny them access to some facility, or impede their progress for a period of time before finally allowing them into some facility. Some people called this compliance. I never have.

It's not because I'm a conservative. It's just because I'm not an idiot who was born yesterday. This is a stance I've maintained since after the first gulf war, not some position Bush and his cabinet "brainwashed" me into holding.

So when the Democrats charge Bush and his crew "brainwashed" the American public, they're insulting idiots like me who were, somehow amazingly being brainwashed by the then-governor of Texas through the entire Clinton administration.

Talk about crediting one's enemies with supernatural powers!

Issue #2: WMD intelligence sources. Clinton thought Iraq had WMD. Blair, pre-Bush, thought Iraq had WMD. France thought Iraq had WMD. So did Israel. Heck, it looks like Saddam might have thought Iraq had WMD.

Leave Bush out of the picture for once. Look at every piece of intelligence that his administration never had the chance to manipulate or change -- either beause it was gathered before his ascendancy, or because it was gathered outside of his reach. What picture emerges?

One of a rogue nation with a desire to influence events worldwide by any means necessary. Two attempted assassinations against American presidents outta be a tipoff here, folks. It's not for nothing that President Clinton's official policy became regime change.

To my eyes, it looks like charges of trying to pin the Bush administration as being the source of incorrect (?) assessments of Iraqi capabilities is nothing short of insane. As far as I can see, I'm being asked to believe that the governor of Texas caused President Clinton to believe in WMD that didn't exist in 1998.

Issue #3: What if there was no WMD? Where was everyone at the start of the Iraq war? I ask this because I seem to be the only one who remembers that it was nearly a year between when we "pretty much" decided, yes, we were going to do this thing and when the forces were actually put in place and started their work. And certainly 5-6 months of the writing being quite visibly "on the wall".

During this time (starting around December, I believe), I said that I wouldn't be suprised if Saddam was destroying his WMD capabilities right now. Yes, he's a bit deluded, but it looked to me like the writing was on the wall, and he's a rich guy (assuming he kept his power) -- he did it once, and could do it again -- and how better to stick it to his adversary? Seemed perfectly plausable at the time, and I said so. (I was also concerned about the possibility Saddam was shipping some of his toys to friends for safekeeping.)

Where was everyone when it was reported that Saddam sent a message through back channels -- a Jordanian businessman, if I remember correctly -- saying he'd destroyed all his WMD and was ready to submit to inspections?

So now I'm supposed to be shocked -- SHOCKED! -- and betrayed to learn that Kay reports there were no "large stockpiles" of WMD in the "months leading up to" the Iraq war?

Look, even we just assume Saddam had no deployable weapons as far back as the start of the Bush presidency, and we could have known that, would that have meant Saddam wasn't a threat, worth a potential military confrontation?

Of course not: Given his aversion to inspections, we would have had to assume he had serious capabilities. Not just on the hotly-contested nuclear front, but to produce even small quantities of bioweapons and chemical agents which would be very useful against Saddam's enemies, either delivered by terrorists or his own agents.

The litmus test was his willingness to be inspected. He failed. Repeatedly.

And again, no, I don't consider five successful visits, followed by one halted attempt to be a successful weapons inspection regime. If that's your stance, you and I will never see eye to eye: I maintain a search hasn't been performed until the cops were able to look everywhere, not just everywhere in the apartment except that one locked drawer. A gun could be in there. A stick of dynamite. Anthrax.

Why is this so difficult for everyone to understand?

Side note: Bush's WMD confusion.

In contrast, during this same period of time, my left-leaning friends were telling me they expected we'd find evidence of WMD because any administration willing to deliberately falsify WMD intelligence would certainly also not be below planting it in Iraq. (And I agree with that line of reasoning, given the first assumption.)

So when we went in, and Bush failed to plant the evidence, indeed, failed to find it at all but appeared to be actually honestly expecting it to be there and looking around for pre-existing evidence -- like the trucks, this blew their theory.

At least Michael Moore had the integrity -- though not intelligence -- to honestly admit this was the only way out. To claim that the intelligence was knowingly faked, but Bush was too stupid to plant the WMD. Again, not very logically consistent, but at least Moore stuck to his theory.

I don't know what my liberal friends finally concluded -- they refused to talk to me further about it lately. Can't they see that Bush -- evil, brilliant, scheming, mind-controlling, manipulative Bush who could control the intelligence community, manifacture intelligence, and mislead the British, the French, the Israelis, etc. with no leaks -- wouldn't then suddenly get stupid and -- duh! -- forget to plant the big vial of bacterial culture he'd purchased in advance from Russian back-channels?

No instead there we were, appointing Kay, who is no pawn, but is quite clearly is willing to tell the truth as he sees it (even when it looks embarassing to the administration) to wander around Iraq looking for actual evidence of a WMD program Bush supposedly flat-out knew didn't exist? And then Bush, lately looking genuinely irritated at press conferences at how things turned out?

Friends, these aren't the actions of a knowing deceiver. Could the drive to war have unconsciously "colored" intelligence reports? Though it doesn't currently look that way, I can't say it's impossible. But if so, that's not a knowing deception. Poor judgement, and beaucratic dysfunctionalism, perhaps indeed, but not a "lie".

Of course, the simplest possible hypothesis to me -- the one I expect Occam's razor favors -- is that the intelligence community actually had good reasons to think Saddam had WMD. And that Bush was no different than any leader in the western world in his assessments of such. Not terribly exciting, I know, but very consistent with the data...

These "good reasons" could include:

(a) That Saddam and his highest official also thought they had WMD, but did not, because of the tendancy to lie to leaders in a dictatorship.

(b) That Saddam didn't have WMD and knew it, but wanted others to fear him.

Before the war, liberals argued both that Saddam didn't have WMD AND that he had it and would use it in a military conflict, leading to loss of American lives. Given that we know many of our enemies believed Americans cannot stomach the threat of loss of American lives (an impression which gained some credence under the previous administration) there's no reason to imagine Saddam might not have thought such threats would act as a deterrence against military action. Disinformation.

(c) That Saddam actually did have WMD or nascent capabilities, but got rid of such before the war. Again, the scientist who gave Kay the set of active bacterial culture told him he had been ordered to destroy it. Why, then, are we supposed to be suprised or find it difficult to consider this particular scenario? Especially when that's where the evidence points?

The value of a stock is determined by the those actively trading it, not those who silently hold their stock, thinking it's priced about right, but the tiny minority who are loudly yelling "buy!" or "sell!"

Likewise, I've been keeping silent on this issue, other then reporting a few interesting news tidbits. But I see this as a tempest in a teapot: Actually having WMD wasn't the issue, and regardless, I expected Saddam could have destroyed the stuff, and all the evidence I can find is entirely consistent with that.

And yes, our intelligence agencies could use some improvement. I said that when we missed the fall of the Soviet Union.

But so what? We have problems with all federal branches of government: The national endowment for the arts is pointless; the EPA has been screwed up (though in different ways) under Clinton and Bush; the IRS has serious issues as well, inside sources tell me that the Department of Education is a mess where whole groups of people do nothing all day long, the NSA is complely outside public scrutiny, and NASA is mired in a dysfunctional arrogant culture as well.

So what? I'm a lousy conservative for heaven's sakes! You're not going to suprise or shock me by saying our government is screwed up or inefficient! That's what I'm trying to get you all to learn!

Welcome to the real world, folks.

Please readjust your expectations accordingly.