> I'd make a clarification here: most antiwar activists I know were
> skeptical over what _George Bush_ was claiming-- it wasn't based on
> anything more than a reflexive stance. With a few exceptions, I saw very
> little substantive argument from the Left that Saddam had no WMDs.
I think you're falling into a trap here, Brian. No one argued that there was none because it is impossible to prove a negative. But the entire world, starting with Hans Blix and Mohamed El-Baradei, argued that there was no firm evidence that any existed which is as close a reasonable person can get to that assertion.
And there was nothing secret about it. The UN inspectors asked for the US's best information, looked in every place it suggested, had no trouble inspecting them by their own account, and found nothing. El-Baradei said point blank there was no sign of a nuclear weapons program. Blix by the end was looking for unaccounted-for stocks of chemical and biological weaspons (which if they still existed would have expired) and precursor chemicals (which if they existed, by definition would not constitute an imminent threat). They found some missiles, and they were duly destroyed.
So while they were keeping an open mind and being thorough, on the eve of war they said very clearly they had found no evidence of WMD. This judgment couldn't have been more public.
The US and UK were alone in the world in saying the inspectors' reports were not trustworthy. They didn't go to war on the basis of bad intelligence. They went to war on the basis of no intelligence. They simply refused to believe the very public evidence that the entire world had before it and that everyone else believed. Their only counterevidence was their own convictions.
In short, the entire world, not just the left, claimed very loudly and unmistakably that the threat from Iraq was minimal. The only difference now is that it turns out it wasn't just minimal, it was *nonexistent.*
For the Condi Rices and Kissinger's of the world to go around claiming "Well, nobody said the threat was nonexistent" is jesuitical. They're right -- we claimed it was pitifully tiny, not nonexistent. So we were even righter than we knew. And they were even wronger.
And the supine American media certainly can be condemned for taking the unsupported word of the US government over the publicly available evidence.
When now either those policy makers or the media claim now that "no one thought different" it simply reveals them as people who live in a cult-bubble of their own convictions, for whom the world outside is an illusion. Just the people we want to have in charge ;o)
The stunned surprise of the establishment is that they assume that if the US does anything it has a good reason. That's what makes them the establishment. And that's what they mean when they say no one thought different -- that everyone in the establishment makes this same assumption.
And that's what stuns them: that their fundamental assumption might have been wrong. That there really might have been no good reason at all -- just like everyone outside the establishment said all along.
Michael