I know an embarrassing amount about the Iraq/WMD story. One side effect of being familiar with all this crap is I’m acutely aware of the precise way in which every claim made by war proponents was inaccurate. I mean that literally: every claim. Moreover, I don’t mean in hindsight, I mean based on what was known at the time.
Sometimes their claims were 20% false, sometimes 80% false, and sometimes 100% false. But they never once got things 100% right. And curiously enough, every “error” always fell in the same direction, that of making their case appear stronger.
One of these people was then-New Republic editor Peter Beinart, whom I’ve previously said unkind things about, here. So out of idle curiosity, I fact-checked one of Beinart’s statements in a recent interview (reg. req.) about his new book The Good Fight.
I won’t post here everything I wrote, because it’s long and frankly kind of boring if you’re not a huge freak. But if you are a huge freak, you can follow the link and get 100% of your daily recommended allowance of freakitude.