Who Lied in Iraq

Anyone who hasn't read Norman Podhoretz article in Commentary on who lied in Iraq should read it now, it is an excellent summation of the facts.

Powerline links to post by Kevin Drum who tries to refute Podhoretz's assesment:

Fair enough. Lots of people did believe that Iraq had WMD before the war. The problem Podhoretz doesn't bother wrestling with, however, is that after the war concluded we discovered that there were also a fair number of people who had been skeptical about Iraqi WMD. INR, for example, thought the African uranium was bogus. DIA thought our prime witness for Iraqi-al-Qaeda WMD collaboration was lying. The Air Force found the evidence on drones to be laughable. DOE didn't believe in the aluminum tubes. None of these dissents was acknowledged by the Bush administration.

I find Drum's rationalization weak. There is always a dissenter and dissenting information. The point is not whether you have dissent, its whether the dissent carries enough weight to overwhelm the risk of doing nothing. The fact that the whole world thought that Saddam had WMD, and one agency did not is not grounds to do nothing. Imagine if the opposite happened: Bush decided not to go war ignoring most intelligence agencies stating that saddam had WMD, and instead relying on the State Department who said Saddam "may not" have WMD. A year later Saddam sells Sarin gas to terrorists which is used to kill 10,000 in the NYC subway... Do you think liberals would be saying that Bush used prudent judgment?

UPDATE: Real Clear Politics also works on Drum.