Tim Blair

Nice strawman you're building there Tim. Apparently if you hit him hard enough he'll fall down.

He's hiding with the WMDs. Poor Bastard.

Straw men ARE appropriate, Stewart, when your'e dealing with non sequiturs. The more absurd they are, the more clearly they expose the logical fallacy inherent in the original 'argument' re WMDs.

Saddam never existed, either :P

Saddam never existed, either :P

Nor does Osama Bin Laden. Come to think of it, wasn't that former Taliban Leader Mullah Omar claimed in the first place? That he couldn't turn over Osama because he didn't know where Osama was?
Yup, another unjustified military attack from the United States of Amerika!

Add to the list my car keys. I can't find them and I have been looking all day. Obviously they never existed. Which is strange, because I can see my car in the lot right now. Why would they sell a car, but not include the car keys?

So you will buy another car which might come with a set of keys.Hey, why sell one car when you can sell two.

I really don't understand why so much effort is being put into defending the indefensible.

Why cannot BOTH it be true that (1) the liberation of Iraq was a good thing and (2) it was a bad thing that various governments exaggerated the threat of WMD in order to build a case for war?

Failure to acknowledge that leads to ridiculous attempts at sleight-of-hand like Tim's implication that the issue whether WMD EVER existed, as opposed to whether they posed a genuine threat to the West.

But, assuming the threat was exaggerated, EVERY nation except for Iraq itself -- including those nations that opposed military action -- exaggerated the threat. The intelligence agencies of Russia, France, Germany and China all came to fundamentally the same conclusion regarding Saddam's biological and chemical stockpiles that the US, British and Australian intelligence agencies did.

Exaggeration is an intentional act. One who exaggerates intends to decieve. Assuming all this nonesensicle "no WMD" argument had any merit, I admit it's pretty easy determining the US's motives for its alleged exaggeration: we wanted to fight a war that the rest of the world didn't want to fight. But what about France's motives? Or Germany's? Or Russia's? Each country (particularly France) was attempting to thwart American action, and an intelligence report that supported US contentions would have undermined that effort. Therefore, France's intelligence reports, if they had been altered for political considerations, would have UNDERstated the threat, not exaggerated it.