"The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists," the president of the United States warned. "If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow."

The secretary of state loyally followed this hard line, defending the U.N. sanctions on Saddam Hussein: "There has never been an embargo against food and medicine. It's just that Hussein has just not chosen to spend his money on that. Instead, he has chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."

Leveraging U.N. resolutions to support military action, the secretary of defense said: "The United Nations has determined that Saddam should not possess chemical or biological or nuclear weapons, and what we have is the obligation to carry out the U.N. declaration."

The officials argued that U.N. inspections weren't enough. "It is ineffectual; it is not able to do its job by its own judgment," the president's national security adviser said of the U.N. inspections regime. "It doesn't provide much deterrence against WMD activity."

The president's congressional loyalists stood behind him. "Iraq is not the only nation in the world to possess weapons of mass destruction," said a prominent senator, sounding a familiar theme, "but it is the only nation with a leader who has used them against his own people."

"For the United States and Britain, an Iraq equipped with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons under the leadership of Saddam Hussein is a threat that almost goes without description," said another hawk, taking aim at the split in the international community. "France, on the other hand, has long established economic and political relationships within the Arab world, and has had a different approach."

Who were the political leaders who, according to critics of the Iraq war, perpetrated this fraud on the American people by making overblown warnings about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Respectively, President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Sen. Tom Daschle and Sen. John Kerry.

They were all speaking in the late 1990s when Clinton bombed Iraq to "degrade" an Iraqi WMD capacity that we are supposed to believe disappeared in the inspection-free years that ensued, only to be resurrected as a false justification for war by the Bush administration.

The failure so far to find WMD in Iraq is a major embarrassment for President Bush, and congressional hearings into the intelligence prior to the Iraq War are welcome. But the post-Iraq debate shouldn't proceed on false pretenses: Everyone this side of famed Iraqi prevaricator Baghdad Bob believed that Iraq had WMD. In the run-up to the war, the United Nations, the "axis of weasel" (France and Germany) and high-profile Democrats all agreed about WMD.

The specific figures in Secretary of State Colin Powell's U.N. presentation about Iraq's unaccounted-for WMD came from U.N. inspectors. France and Germany didn't argue that Saddam had no WMD, but inspections could rid him of them. Clinton and Al Gore dissented from aspects of Bush's policy, but agreed about WMD. "We know," Gore said, "he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons."

The question was what to do about a dictator with ties to terrorism who for 12 years had defied the procedures set out by the world to confirm that he no longer had dangerous weapons. For the Bush administration, Sept. 11 meant erring on the side of safety, and so continuing to accept Saddam's denials and defiance wasn't an option.

As someone once warned: "This is not a time free from peril, especially as a result of the reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals. We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century." Even if the rhetoric was shrill, Bill Clinton had a point.

Well documented article exposing the political left supporting policies during the administration of one of their own which they now oppose under the Bush Administration.

Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the court upheld the use of racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, helps illuminate why the claim that President Bush "lied" about Iraq is nonsense.

In today's Washington Post, defendant Lee Bollinger (the current head of Columbia, who formerly presided over Michigan) cheers the court's ruling as "a great victory for American higher education, and for the nation as a whole." Bollinger had argued, and a five-justice majority agreed, that the "educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body" are a "compelling interest" that justifies a judicially created exception to the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ban racial discrimination.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24684-2003Jun23.html

But does anyone really believe this is why colleges use racial preferences? The purported benefits are dubious; Salon's Joan Walsh, a preference proponent, acknowledges that "pretty much all of the studies that purport to show the educational advantages of a diverse educational experience are controversial; no study's findings have been accepted across ideological lines."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/06/24/affirmative_action/index_np.html

The University of Michigan conducted its own study, the reported results of which were self-contradictory. As Chetly Zarko noted, an executive summary "concluded that Michigan's racial preference programs actually 'stigmatized' African-Americans and 'increasingly polarized' the campus; that 'self-segregation' was common; . . . and that diversity "quite simply . . . does not, in itself, lead to a more informed, educated population." But the university then issued another executive summary reaching precisely the opposite conclusions--and it still refuses to release the study itself.

Besides, how come no one ever talks about integrating places like Howard University or Morehouse College, which are almost entirely black? If diversity is really so wonderful, surely it would be invidious to exclude thousands of blacks from its benefits.

But of course diversity is not really the goal Bollinger and other college administrators are pursuing when they use racial preferences. Bollinger himself gives away the real agenda in his op-ed:

Especially gratifying is the court's statement, quoting Brown v. Board of Education, that " 'education is the very foundation of good citizenship.' For this reason, the diffusion of knowledge and opportunity through public institutions of higher education must be accessible to all individuals regardless of race or ethnicity. . . . Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our Nation is essential if the dream of one Nation, indivisible, is to be realized."

In other words, the real purpose of racial preferences is to extend opportunities to blacks and other minority members, opportunities for which they might not qualify under purely merit-based selection systems.

The goal of expanding opportunities for minorities actually seems a good deal more compelling than that of ensuring a "diverse" student body with its doubtful educational benefits. The problem for Bollinger was that the Supreme Court had already declared it illegal to use racial preferences simply to benefit members of minorities. So he argued the case based on the "diversity" rationale, which Justice Lewis Powell had put forward back in 1978. It was a post hoc rationalization, not the genuine rationale.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, who backs preferences, argues that the diversity argument is a sham:

Intellectual honesty doesn't let me accept O'Connor's basic ends-justifies-the-means approach to upholding the principle. . . . I remain in favor of affirmative action--but not because I think some "critical mass" of three particular minorities so enriched my law school education that the Equal Protection clause ought to have been violated to achieve it. No, I'm for affirmative action for most of the reasons Justice Powell rejected in Bakke and Justice O'Connor rejected [yesterday]: I think we have past wrongs to remedy in this country, and I believe it's critical that certain minorities achieve leadership roles in our most exalted institutions.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2084657/entry/2084733/

Now, one can agree with the outcome of the case but disagree with the reasoning, as Lithwick does. One can disagree with both the reasoning and the outcome, as I do. But one can't fault Bollinger for resting his case on diversity rather than racial preference per se. All he did was emphasize the argument that he thought--correctly, as it turns out--would have the greatest likelihood of persuading those he needed to persuade.

That's exactly what President Bush's more wild-eyed critics accuse him of doing with respect to Iraq. Would they call Lee Bollinger a liar?

The Democrats are without honor.

is one of my favorite journalists.

...is one of my favorite authors of fiction.

... is our favorite author of fiction.

That was me. I'm so imaginative and original!!!!