I cannot recommend highly enough Norman Podhoretz’s recent essay “Who Is Lying About Iraq?†(available in html and pdf). It is a singular word of sane analysis among a din of media reporting that merely parrots anti-war talking points. I have been writing about this topic a great deal lately because opponents of the Iraq War have been making hay out of Scooter Libby’s indictment (read here, here, here, and here). They have used the indictment to slander President Bush by claiming he lied in order to dupe the nation into going to war.
The charge is outlandish on its face and is belied by the facts as we know them. The only way for anti-war Democrats and liberals to make such a charge is for them to rewrite the history of how the war began. With the help of the media, they have been able to do just that, with the result that polls are now showing that American support for the war is diminishing.
In this article, Podhoretz makes a good start of reminding us how the war really began and shows how unreasonable it is to conclude that the President had such sinister motives. Even though the facts presented in this essay will be ignored by most of the news reporting you see, you should not ignore them.
(HT: Justin Taylor)