Foreign policy mistake

Shorter John Tierney: I was opposed to the Iraq war, but no one should be punished for lying about the rationale.

No one deserves to be indicted on conspiracy charges for belonging to a group that believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Foreign policy mistakes are not against the law.

Right. A mere foreign policy mistake.

At what point does the punditocracy hold the administration accountable for the debacle in Iraq? This isn't about disputed intelligence -- the canard that "everyone thought" Iraq had "WMD." Sure, but not "everyone" decided to attack and slime Hans Blix; not everyone decided to order weapons inspectors out of Iraq; not everyone decided to attack and impugn the IAEA's elBaradei; not everyone used a senior reporter for the New York Times to propogandize the run-up to the invasion of Iraq; not everyone decided to encourage columnists to infer that Joe Wilson was a partisan attack dog, sent to Niger on a boondoggle engineered by his wife.

Once again and with feeling, who knows what Fitzgerald has found? Personally, I could care less about perjury charges. War crimes indictments are more my cup of tea in this case. But Tierney's -- and other's -- argument that this was just a case of politics, of policy disagreements, whistles past the graveyard of facts that the administration was hell bent on war with Iraq and anyone who got in the way by pointing out uncomfortable facts or asked difficult questions was quickly attacked and removed.

Regarding Fitzgerald, I don't get the sense that he is indicting anybody based on a "foreign policy mistake," but rather on lying to the grand jury and subborning perjury (writes Tierney, "a vaguely clunky - and unsuccessful - attempt to coach her testimony"). Criminalizing politics? No, just criminals.