WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: Deceptions about Deception.

Has anyone ever attempted to rewrite history so quickly? Before history itself had even been written? With shooting still going on in Iraq, the "Bush lied" forces-those, mostly on the left, who claim the administration deceived the country into war-have a new guiding document. In "The First Casualty," New Republic writers John Judis and Spencer Ackerman contend that President Bush "engaged in a pattern of deception" about Iraq, hyping the threat of weapons of mass destruction and "depriv[ing] Congress of its ability to make an informed decision about whether or not to take the country to war." Already, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has hailed the article as "magisterial"-a sure sign that it will have only a glancing relationship with the facts.

And indeed, try as they might, Judis and Ackerman just can't make the case. For starters, they concede that the U.S. "may yet discover the chemical and biological weapons that various governments and the United Nations have long believed Iraq possessed." Well, that would do away with much of their case, wouldn't it? And isn't the belief itself evidence that the war was not based on a deception? Not at all, say Judis and Ackerman, because American forces are "unlikely to find, as the Bush administration had repeatedly predicted, a reconstituted nuclear weapons program or evidence of joint exercises with al-Qaeda- the two most compelling security arguments for the war." In a neat rhetorical turn, Judis and Ackerman select two elements of the administration's broad case against Iraq, declare them to be the "most compelling," and then find them wanting.

But to do so, they have to ignore perhaps the administration's strongest ...