Even taking into account where these particular rites go forward -- Washington, D.C. -- the exercise is almost incomparably loopy. No weapons of mass destruction yet? Might it have occurred, at any rate to the milder of the critics, that it can take a while to find stuff stashed (assuming that to be the case) in order to deceive the whole wide world? That Iraq has possessed WMDs or the capacity to make them is indisputable -- Scud missiles, bulk chemical warfare agents, bulk liquid anthrax, thousands of liters of nuclear enrichment equipment. We demanded for 14 years that the Iraqis surrender these materials; finally, we sent Dr. Blix to look for them. That wasn't time enough? We should have waited?
But we didn't wait. Does this bring us, intellectually, morally, to repudiation of the whole war? We could certainly stammer out some kind of apology, beginning with "Oops." If only we'd known our leaders were lying! Congress at that point could consider a bill -- possibly Dennis Kucinich would introduce it -- to apologize to Saddam, Qusay and Chemical Ali (if still available). We could restore, probably, the gold bathroom fixtures. We could smooth over the mass destruction sites where victims of the regime -- hundreds of thousands in number, it would seem -- were disposed of by, shall we say, conventional means and then quietly buried.
The moral absurdities in which the Democratic critics tangle themselves go on endlessly: not least, the worse-than-absurdity of picking apart your own government during a war and holding it up to ridicule before countries disposed already to believe the worst about it and its motives.
Oh, brilliant, Sen. Graham, just brilliant.