Part 5 of a retrospective series on why 1)the Iraq war was a bad idea, and 2) Jonah Goldberg is a putz.

Goldberg says WMD are not important. Goldberg is wrong.

Goldberg's next two sentences are real doozies:

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is a side issue. The WMD fiasco was a global intelligence failure, but calling Saddam Hussein's bluff after 9/11 was the right thing to do.

Side issue, my ass. As detailed in Iraq and WMD: Quick, go back and check the spider hole! Iraq's WMD, the threat they presented to the U.S., and the need to disarm Saddam were given by the Bush administration as the reasons for going to war. Consequently, the failure to find WMD is no mere side issue. It is at the very core of why the war was a mistake.

And the claim that it was all due to a "global intelligence failure" is bullshit. By claiming otherwise, Goldberg is himself engaging in "cowardly buck-passing." It has been proven that there were no WMD or even viable WMD programs. Moreover, that was pretty much known before the war. Want proof? Go the Cosmic Wheel Index. Go the the main heading of "Iraq," then the subheading of "WMD, intel related thereto." Read the proof for yourself. Follow the links and you will see that our own intelligence largely disproved the claims of WMD. Our own intelligence showed that the primary reason given for the war was crap. Moreover, the Bush administration manipulated the NIE and what was presented to Congress so that much of that intelligence was not disclosed.

But let's move on to Goldberg's assertion about calling Saddam's bluff. News flash--that bluff was in the process of being called through the U.N. inspections. Hans Blix kept saying there was no evidence of WMD. Had the inspections continued, in all likelihood what was proved by David Kay after the war would have been established by Blix. Yet the U.N. inspections were halted because we went ahead and started the war. Let me put this another way. There was a way to "call Saddam's bluff" other than the war, and that way was to continue the inspections.

It was known before the war that U.S. intelligence indicated there were no WMD. It was known before the war that the U.N inspections were showing that WMD did not exist. I would thus maintain that, contrary to Goldberg's lames ass assertions, Bush went to war precisely because of what was known.

Up next: Facts known before the war showing that post-war Iraq was going to be a mess.