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No Semblance of Accountability
Perhaps the most striking thing about the official acknowledgment that the two-year hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is over is the fact that it was greeted by most with a collective shrug of the shoulders and an almost cheerful defense of what many of us view as utterly indefensible. "Based on what we know today," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters, "the president would have taken the same action because this is about protecting the American people."

Sorry, Scott, but what we know today suggests all too strongly that invading Iraq was not about protecting the American people. Not even close. Even if Saddam Hussein, vile as he was and is, had possessed weapons of mass destruction, his third-rate tinpot regime, weakened by an eight-year war with Iran, by defeat in the first Gulf War, and by a decade of economic sanctions, would have posed little or no threat to the American people. Americans were put in harm's way and more than 1,300 have died as a result of a deliberate decision to invade a country whose neighbors did not especially fear it, and whose chances of delivering even a glancing blow to the world's sole remaining superpower were close to zero....

...Then there's the president himself, who bears the ultimate responsibility for a decision based on a tissue of misinformation and outright deception. In an interview with Barbara Walters scheduled to air tonight, he seems incapable of taking the kind of full responsibility a genuinely strong leader would take. He's got to spread it around to others. "I felt [felt??!!]," he is reported to say, "like we'd find weapons of mass destruction – like many others here in the United States, many around the world. ... We need to find out what went wrong in the intelligence gathering. ... Saddam was dangerous, and the world is safer without him in power."

At least he stays on message. But this is not a political campaign in which he is trolling for votes and hanging on the next poll results. It is a war in which Americans have been killed and wounded. A responsible, accountable leader wouldn't whine that others seem to have been mistaken, too (especially when his administration did so much of the exaggerated and politically shaded reporting that led so many to believe that if a president was so darned certain it was likely there was something to it). He would acknowledge that the rationale for war was at least in part mistaken, accept full responsibility (and maybe fire a few people), and resolve to move on toward a constructive result despite the difficulties into which his mistaken decision-making had plunged the country....

...Not only has there been no accountability demanded of those who committed such errors of judgment, there seems to be no sense of embarrassment as the major prewar justifications for invading Iraq have crumbled one by one. There was no operational link to al-Qaeda? There turned out to be no weapons of mass destruction? Never mind. Saddam was a really, really bad ruler and we've found mass graves that documented the fact. We're building democracy and transforming the Middle East – even as the White House purposely lowers expectations about just how democratic and representative the elections scheduled for the end of the month are likely to be.

This is a far cry from any remotely sensible understanding of how a free society operates. In a truly free society, the essence of freedom is responsibility. You make your choices without outright coercion, and you live with the consequences of your choices without blaming others or assuming that others have some kind of obligation to bail you out when things go badly.

This refusal to demand anything resembling accountability used to be anathema to conservatives. But conservatives don't seem to have any clear principles these days, or they place their faith in leaders rather than principles. So the general conservative response to the absence of WMD has been a resounding "So what?" Admit that a leader might have made a mistake? Hold a leader accountable? This is modern America, where state power assures that if it is not quite possible to repeal reality, it is at least possible to make sure that no leader ever pays a real price for a blunder....