Time for a Debate

But rather than, say, actually refute the critics, Wehner rehashes tired old arguments, as if no new evidence had ever come to light.

Wehner writes of the critics: "Like swallows to Capistrano, they keep returning to the same allegations--the president misled the country in order to justify the Iraq war; his administration pressured intelligence agencies to bias their judgments; Saddam Hussein turned out to be no threat since he didn't possess weapons of mass destruction; and helping democracy take root in the Middle East was a postwar rationalization. The problem with these charges is that they are false and can be shown to be so--and yet people continue to believe, and spread, them. Let me examine each in turn."

To refute the argument that Bush misled Americans to convince them to go to war, for instance, Wehner cites the White House-appointed Silberman-Robb commission's conclusion that some intelligence was overhyped. But he neglects to mention that the commission was not allowed to examine how Bush used or misused that information.

Nor does Wehner address such recent articles as this Murray Waas piece from the National Journal in March: "Two highly classified intelligence reports delivered directly to President Bush before the Iraq war cast doubt on key public assertions made by the president, Vice President Cheney, and other administration officials as justifications for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, according to records and knowledgeable sources."

Wehner attacks the argument that the Bush administration pressured intelligence agencies to bias their judgments by citing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report.

But this is a straw-man argument. Critics aren't so much arguing that intelligence agencies were pressured -- even though the Silberman-Robb commission did note that the agencies were abundantly aware of what their bosses wanted to hear. The argument is more that the intelligence was cherry picked and, when it didn't suit the White House's purposes, was largely ignored.

See, for instance, former CIA official Paul Pillar in Foreign Affairs.

Wehner also argues: "[N]o serious person would justify a war based on information he knows to be false and which would be shown to be false within months after the war concluded."

But the he-couldn't-have-been-that-stupid defense may not carry a lot of weight these days.

Speaking of Wehner

Dan Balz profiled Wehner in The Washington Post in December 2004.

Wehner maintains a famous e-mail list of conservatives, to whom he sends frequent and highly confidential missives.

Some, along the lines of his famously leaked January 2005 e-mail on the then-upcoming campaign to remake Social Security, offer remarkably frank insights into White House thinking.