'You Lied to Us'

Yeesh, I'm not really familiar with William Safire, but this column is out to lunch.

Quick — what was the biggest intelligence misjudgment of Gulf War II?

It was the nearly unanimous opinion of the intelligence community, backed by the U.S. and British military, that the 50,000 elite soldiers of Saddam's well-trained, well-equipped Special Republican Guard would put up a fierce battle for Baghdad.

But we see the opposite opinion by some lefties. They put up much fiercer resistance than they expected. Remember that General who said "This isn't the enemy we war gammed against"? It looks like this is just something that got twisted in the stream of propaganda that accompanies any war, and we really don't know what is exactly true. I don't know that you can call it much of an intelligence failure.

Turn now to the charge heard ever more stridently that U.S. and British leaders, in their eagerness to overthrow Saddam and to turn the tide of terror in the Middle East, "hyped" the intelligence that Iraq possessed germ and poison-gas weapons.

"Hype" means "exaggerate." As used by those who were prepared to let Saddam remain in power, it is prelude to a harsh accusation: "You lied to us. You pretended to have evidence that you never had; you twisted dubious intelligence to suit your imperialistic ends, so we were morally right and you were morally wrong."

Well, he's got the meaning down. Now, all that's left is for him to realize that's what happened.

Never mind the mass graves now being unearthed of an estimated 300,000 victims, which together with the million deaths in his wars make Saddam the biggest mass murderer of Muslims in all history.

We knew about that. Bush v1.0 deserted the Kurds after telling them to rise up.

And never mind our discovery of two mobile laboratories designed to produce biological and chemical agents capable of causing mass hysteria and death in any city in the world. Future discoveries will be dismissed as "dual use" or planted by us.

And Kos tells us about the CIA's admitance otherwise.

Long before the C.I.A. dispatched agents to northern Iraq, Kurdish sources were quoted in this space about terrorist operations of Ansar al-Islam, whose 600 members included about 150 "Afghan Arabs" trained by Al Qaeda; after our belated bombing, some escaped to Iran.

That Ansar al-Islam base has no connection to Saddam.

In the meantime, as the crowd that bitterly resents America's mission to root out the sources of terror whips up its intelligence-hoax hype, remember the wise "mistake" we made in overestimating the fighting spirit of Saddam's uniformed bully-boys.

I'd say it's more like we resent our President using our troops to destroy a country that is not a significant source of terror and the act of which will create many more terrorists.