NY Times Editorial Board Passing on a Lie

The Times editorial board is passing on a simply outrageous falsehood in today's editorial, "Losing Ground in Iraq.

To wit:

The only plausible reason for keeping American troops in Iraq is to protect the democratic transformation that President Bush seized upon as a rationale for the invasion after his claims about weapons of mass destruction turned out to be fictitious.

That statement is easily falsified by looking at 1.) President Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, 2.) President Bush's 2002 address to the United Nations, and 3.) The long list of rationales for the congressional use-of-force authorization, only two of which even mentioned WMDs. Each of these three public statements of U.S. policy specifically advocated a democratic transformation, all of which were articulated well before the war, at the highest levels of government, in the most public fashion possible.

It is clear, and the historical record shows, that a democratic transformation of Iraq was part and parcel of the reasoning to go to war from the very beginning.

An intellectually honest editorial board, or one with even passing familiarity with the arguments going both ways preceding the war, would have recognized that. Unfortunately, the rigorous "fact-checking" processes at the New York Times -- the same ones that can't tell a Medal of Honor from a songwriter's award - apparently don't involve going back and looking over the primary documents before furthering this embarrassing meme.

Splash, out

Jason

Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds