The American Spectator

p> WMD Backlash (posted 5/1/03 1:50 a.m.) br> The other day Richard Cohen wrote one of his better columns that managed to be both witty and smart. A friend who liked it summed up its key point this way: “The Mideast already has a democracy the Arabs can emulate, but won’t — Israel.” /p>

Alas, because Cohen as is his wont was too clever by half, everyone else has fixated on an earlier point. Even Howard Kurtz made a rare mention of his colleague to highlight it: namely, that it looks like Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction for us to go to war over. It seems we’ve been “snookered.”

And that’s to put it kindly. As Kurtz noted, there’s an “WMD backlash” at work, with lots of liberal pundits lacing into President Bush for misleading the nation about the threat Saddam posed. Two arch-libs cited by Kurtz, namely the knee-jerk anti-Bushies Paul Krugman and Joe Conason, say the alleged absence of WMD raises cast doubt on the administration’s “credibility.” (But since those two haven’t exactly accepted the Bush presidency’s legitimacy, why should they find anything about it to be credible?)

Lack of “credibility” is also cited in a recent column by Molly Ivins, a more jovial version of Krugman and Conason. She thinks Bush is in real trouble now for overselling the WMD argument. Unfortunately, her own bias does her in. She alleges Saddam has no WMD even as she insists we have the receipts for the WMD we supposedly sold to Saddam in the early 1980s.

What’s interesting about the WMD backlash is that it’s really a backlash against an important column by the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman last Sunday, and as such speaks volumes about the left’s absolute indifference to human suffering and yearning for freedom. Writing about the discovery of skull “exhumed … from a graveyard filled with other victims of Saddam’s torture,” Friedman observes in two truly remarkable passages:

“Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue). It is clear that in ending Saddam’s tyranny, a huge human engine for mass destruction has been broken….

“Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the U.N.’s approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here. It toppled one of the most evil regimes on the face of the earth, and I don’t think we know even a fraction of how deep that evil went. Fair-minded people have to acknowledge that. Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No way.”

That’s not the way the liberal mind likes to think. Times reader response to Friedman’s column, if the letters the paper prominently ran on Tuesday (“Did the Case for War Hold Up?”) are any indication, were uniformly hostile to Friedman’s sentiments. The first reader said he’s not celebrating the end of Saddam’s regime because that would justify the administration’s “pre-emptive” policies in disregard “for the decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” A second reader rejected Friedman’s argument because it would make the administration’s failure to find WMD “moot” and suggests “the ends have justified the means.” A third found nothing to celebrate because we’d (supposedly) supported Saddam two decades ago. Two additional letters, in response to a Times editorial, say the administration has “a lot of explaining to do” regarding its failure to locate WMD and that “history will question President Bush’s motives in perpetuity” if WMD aren’t found.

Perhaps most revealing is what letter writer number four notes with a deep frown on his face, I’m sure: that “the world should brace for the possibility that disarming Saddam Hussein was never the primary reason for invading Iraq, but rather a pretext for deposing an anti-Western regime and remaking the politics of the Arab region.” Think the world is strong enough to face such a shocking possibility? Now it’s one thing to think such a project is more than the U.S. can handle in a hopelessly unstable region. But the good liberal apparently thinks it’s simply criminal to think of getting rid of any regime hostile to the West.