Well this just proves not only that the Bush Administration never accepts responsibility for its mistakes, but refuses even to acknowledge when it screws up. Bush, Cheney Concede Saddam Had No WMDs [YahooNews.com].

As I’ve blogged previously, without weapons of mass destruction, the only reason to go to war in Iraq was to topple Saddam Hussein because he was a tyrant — to protect the human rights of Iraquis. That’s the most liberal rationale for war imaginable, even if the whole notion of “nation building” (which is what the United States is indeed engaged in in Iraq these days) had not been so firmly rejected by George W. before the 2000 elections.

The President likes to say that “9/11 shanged everything.” Yes, it did. But one thing it did not change is that using American military power to build democracy in the Third World is both quixotic and short-sighted. Liberty is only gained by revolution. Revolution has to come from within, not abroad. If the American Revolution were to have been imposed by the French — George Washington’s ally during the Reolutionary War — there would be no America today. One only says “give me liberty or give me death” if one is fighting for one’s own liberty. Foreigners cannot create liberty at the point of a gun.

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The chief U.S. weapons-hunter in occupied Iraq, David Kay, now says that “we are very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons. I don’t think they exist.” Ex-Iraq Arms Hunter Blames Data for Failure | LATimes.com. So White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan announced in reaction that “Saddam Hussein’s regime was a gathering threat, and in a post-Sept. 11 world, we must confront gathering threats before it is too late.”

That’s well and true. But is it necessary to lie to your own people, and the world, in order to do so? The sad part is that the Bushies would have had the same overwhelming support of Americans — and the same opposition from the goodie-goodies and pacificsts at the UN and the EU — had they come straight and not manufactured stories about Saddam’s WMD stockpiles. Now, in hindsight, the whole thing is looking very much silly.

It’s way too late to argue that imminent threat of WMDs was not the principal justification for the war. That the Bush Administration’s continued efforts to try to deny and deflect reality shows only their disdain for real democracy or their underlying hubris — or maybe both.

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In a major speech today, Sen. Ted Kennedy said the Iraq war was a ”political product” marketed by the Bush administration to win elections. ”The war has made America more hated in the world,” Kennedy said. ”And it has made our people more vulnerable to attacks both here and overseas.”

I don’t think any reasonable person would argue with this. It is also the case, however, that Saddam was a tyrant and deserved to be deposed. But as I have commented previously, without a clear and present danger — the immediate threat posed by WMDs and bio-terror weapons that Pres. Bush assured America and the world Saddam possessed and was ready to use — then the only reason to go to war was to protect the human rights of Iraqis. I personally don’t think the war can be justified on that basis alone and am convinced that the electorate would opposed the war if it were presented in that correct fashion.

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Terry M. Neal points out in the Washington Post that without the rationale of WMDs, the White House and the President’s defenders have reverted to their fall-back humanitarian position — that the removal of Saddam Hussein was justification enough for the Iraq war. That’s a tradionally liberal perspective, souding a lot like the discredited Jimmy Carter “human rights” campaign of the late 1970s. Odd that when pressed to justify the war, Bush reverts to the very liberal ideas he, his father and their mentor Ronald Regan so vehemently oppose on principle.

The Administration now finds the human rights card a compelling rationale for the war — one with which the left finds it difficult to disagree.

As Neal concludes, whatever the case, the argument that it is a good thing that Hussein is gone and the argument that the Bush Administration may have lied to or misled the public on the issue of weapons of mass destruction “are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true. And if they are, the former fact won’t exonerate the President if the latter is true as well.”

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America and the Bush Administration are taking a worldwide and much-deserved beating after Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said yesterday that the US “did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass murder.” For instance, the Candian Globe and Mail reports that “US Changes Reason for Invading Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s comments come on the heels of a White House announcement that a previous assertion that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Africa was false. President Bush had included the accusation in his January 28 State of the Union address, even though Sec. of State Powell refused one week later to make the same claim to the United Nations.

Since Iraqi WMDs are proving elusive at best, this is certainly not going to help the standing of the United States in the global community. Unilateralism is one thing — something I most definitely can approve of — but ginning up fake rationales is quite another. Indeed, conservatives like Dan Pipes have taken things even further than the Administration, arguing that:

WMD was never the basic reason for the war. Nor was it the horrid repression in Iraq. Or the danger Saddam posed to his neighbors.

Talk about political damage control!! Using a public justification that is different from the hidden internal reason for the Iraq war, and one that is increasingly being shown to be based on false or overstated intelligence, makes the Iraq invasion seem much more like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — a deliberate lie that launched the Vietman War — than the liberation mission it was advertised as to the American people and the world at large.

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Newsweek’s lead political story asks, finally, “Where are Iraq’s WMDs?” Nowhere is the answer, so far. Bush says the weapons of mass destruction have been found, but all he’s got is a few mobile labs without even residue in them. The intelligence community complains it was pressured, but the political bigwigs reply they just wanted “analysis” of the intelligence data. Probably a contradiction in terms. So the Pentagon’s top policy adviser held a rare press briefing Wednesday to try to rebut accusations that senior civilian policy makers had politicized intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq and to justify war on Saddam Hussein. Somebody’s lying here.

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Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told the high-powered Council on Foreign Relations yesterday that Iraq “may have” destroyed all its weapons of mass destruction before the war. [Yahoo! News]. So without WMDs or terrorists harbored in Baghdad, what was the war for?

Ted Koppel remarked last night on Nightline that the rationale for the war is looking increasingly shaky in the absence of proof of WMDs or support for Al Qaeda. And as ABC reported several weeks ago, “To build its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but some officials now privately acknowledge the White House had a very different reason for war — a global show of American power and democracy.”

The Bush administration is superb at constantly re-defining reality, but at some point the real world will catch up, and catch on!!

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