I just stumbled across Goldberg's essay a few minutes ago. Required Reading right up there with Denbeste. Required email forwarding to your liberal friends. Damn good stuff. He sounds just like Ace. (sorry, Ace, it'll have to be kiss-ups until my financial situation allows real currency.)

Since I spend a lot more time here than at Karol's site, I'm tossing out a duplicate of my posting there, in response to the several people who thought first to bash on Goldberg & Bush, for comment and derision:
-------------
For anyone who took the time to read Duelfer's report, two things would be clear.

First, sanctions were NOT working, and were designed such that they'd never work, with the connivance of the French, Germans, Russians, Chinese, and a good portion of the internal UN hierarchy. Second, the report left no doubt about the intent and ability of Hussein's regime to quickly resume WMD efforts as soon as they and their paid stooges just mentioned had succeeded in removing sanctions.

Mr. Goldberg has regularly made an excellent point about the duality of claims about the current administration: At one hand, they're supposedly stupid. Dumb as a bag of hammers. At the other, they're unspeakably evil and conniving. So much so that they're able to lie, cheat, steal, and fake their way through every barrier. If the latter were true, the former couldn't be. And if the latter were true, WMD would simply have been placed where it could be found. Oddly, that didn't occur. Why not? Because the administration, like all its predecessors and contemporaries believed that of which Saddam was trying to convince them.

I'm a big fan of the adage that it's OK to believe what one wants to believe, but believing it doesn't necessarily make it the truth. This was the case for the administration and the rest of the world with respect to WMD. It wasn't the case with WMD intent and ability. And it's not the case for those who continue to claim that "Bush lied".

WMD was one of the justifications, and it was presented as the primary justification, for "bureaucratic reasons". I find it a bit disingenous to see a claim (as I did from one poster at Alarmingnews) that "if there were other reasons, those should have been made prior to the war, and only those reasons". There were other reasons, and they were made. Claiming that these "other" reasons should have been the only ones is plain silliness.
-------------

Many of the arguments along these lines (Bush Lied!) give me a monster headache, just due to the attempts at sucking all the intelligence from the conversation.