Clinton on Iraq

Jim Henley asks why no liberal bloggers have linked to this Mother Jones article detailing the Clinton administration's bad faith on the Iraqi WMD issue over the years. I can't speak for anyone else, but as for me, well, I've been out of town. But since I have written half a dozen times about the Clinton bad faith on Iraq, in which the determination to prevent the lifting of sanctions led to the corruption and then abandonment of UNSCOM, Ackerman's article just repeats things I've been saying for years. For example: "Clinton's Iraq policy was pretty horrible too. The Clinton administration lied a lot about Iraq, played politics with the lives of the Iraqi people, defended and intensified the sanctions long after they had lost any justification or international support. The collapse of Security Council consensus came in the late 1990s under Clinton, and the 1998 Desert Fox bombing foreshadowed Bush's war."

But it is a good article, one with a message which bears repeating: " Faced with the need to justify an economically devastating and internationally unpopular embargo of Iraq, the Clinton administration engaged in a pattern of stretching and distorting weapons data to bolster their claim that Saddam Hussein was still hiding an illicit arsenal." That hypocrisy cost the United States dearly in the Middle East and in the world.

UPDATE: for the record, I didn't respond to the silly "why don't X bloggers talk about Y" charge because of Glenn Reynolds. God forbid. Reynolds is like that obtuse and irritating colleague who makes you cringe whenever he raises his hand during a meeting, because you know exactly what he's going to say before he says it, because what he says is going to be tendentious, and because nobody really cares what he says by this point anyway. No, I responded because when Jim Henley, who I like and respect, asks the same question I assume that he is sincerely puzzled and not just trying to score cheap points. Benefit of the doubt to those who deserve it.