Quote from Doubter:
"According to Krugman, the Bush administration is to be held accountable both for not being sufficiently alarmist with respect to intelligence estimates prior to 9/11 and then for being unduly alarmist with those same intelligence estimates after 9/11.
Think about the absurdity and hypocrisy of this for a moment: Krugman wants to vilify the Bush administration for not piecing together scraps of intelligence, speculation and theory to "predict and prevent" a one-in-a-million terrorist attack scenario and then turn around and vilify the administration when they take seriously intelligence reports - reports that the British government continues to stand by even to this very moment - that Hussein attempted to purchase material to make a nuclear bomb.
The ridiculousness of this part of Krugman's argument does, I think, put a nice highlight on why this issue may not damage President Bush the way the Democrats hope and may even backfire on them in a big way.
Rather than offer up a clear cut case that "BUSH LIED!", what the Niger/uranium story does indicate explicitly to voters in this country is that if there is even the slightest indication that terrorists or rogue regimes around the world are trying to get their hands on WMD's, President Bush is willing to act swiftly and forcefully to take them down and defend America. This stands in stark - and I mean STARK- contrast to Howard "Let's Send Troops to Liberia but Not Iraq" Dean and most of the rest of the Dem presidential hopefuls."
It appears you're quoting someone. Who?
The logic is excellent. I also love the arguments that are coming from some of the harshest Bush critics on this subject - such as Chris Matthews, who almost always manages to express a confoundingly ill-informed and idiotic kneejerk perspective on any newly emerging controversy. Supposedly, according to Matthews or the Win Without War people, among others, the nuclear connection as in the controversial Niger item was a critical element of the case for war. The Bush Administration knew, they say, that any hint that SH was looking for nukes would seal the deal with the public. That's the supposed explanation for the inclusion of an item that the CIA felt uncomfortable about its own ability to back up.
It now appears that the famous 16 words were technically and factually accurate: There really was intelligence held and still maintained with high confidence by the British (probably obtained from the French - see article above) that the Iraqis were seeking nuclear materials in Africa. By the critics' logic (lets pretend for a second that logic matters), the case for the war has thus been made - deal sealed, game over.
Unless the report of David Kay's survey team reveals that SH and his sons had undergone a spiritual transformation and had committed themselves strictly to conflict resolution along Ghandian lines, the story that finally emerges about what SH really did and was really aiming for is very likely to break this self-constructed "no real threat" straw man in two. Even if nothing new emerges (very unlikely), the evidence that is already on the public record, and is virtually undisputed - I mean the history of SH's past defiance, aggression, terrorist connections, and mass murderous oppression - is more than enough for most Americans to support the war policy.
We'll also see soon whether the observers who see the post-war glass as half or less empty are more right than those who take the opposing view. Considering that most of those in the former group are the same ones who were talking quagmire and defeat both in Afghanistan and Iraq, who thought Franks' war plan was shaping up as criminally inept, who were sure that the battle for Baghdad would look like the battle for Stalingrad, who bought all the first totally erroneous headlines about the Museum looting story, and so on, and so on, I'm comfortable betting on the latter group.