John Edwards in a Gooberhead

A thorough Fisking by Tod Lindberg of the Washington Times:

"I was wrong," wrote John Edwards in The Washington Post Sunday, repudiating his vote to authorize military action against the Saddam Hussein regime in September 2002. Well, yes, he was wrong. Then, a prudent political calculation for a Democrat with national political aspirations was to support the Bush administration's effort to get Saddam to disarm or take his regime down by force. Now, the prudent calculation to maintain your viability within the late-2005 Democratic Party is to run as far away from your unfortunate 2002 vote as possible -- by presenting yourself as yet another victim of the supposed deception foisted on the American people.

"Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told -- and what many of us believed and argued [!] -- was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003... The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate."

OK, Mr. Edwards, let's pursue your argument: How do we know this? We know this for one reason and one reason only, the only way it was knowable: because we invaded Iraq. We took down the Saddam government, arrested and detained as many senior Iraqi officials and weapons scientists as we could find, questioned them thoroughly, scoured the country for biological and chemical weapons supplies, and found evidence of programs variously abandoned or discontinued or on hold.

While I enjoy Edwards the Goober getting hammered in public by somebody who clearly knows how to do it, I'm still not ready to concede the "no WMD" argument. I mean really, what do you call two tonnes of enriched uranium in the hands of genocidal megalomaniac like Saddam Hussein? I call it a weapon of mass destruction on the hoof. All one needs to do is build a bomb around it. If you already have the uranium, the rest is relatively easy. One could probably buy uranium-less bomb casing off-the-shelf from our good ole buddy A.Q. Khan, your home town nuclear bomb dealer over Pakistan.

G-d, I can't wait to see Saddam toe-tagged. That will end a lot of our troubles there.