A conservative asks some of the same questions as Don and the others, although he's not quite so eager to immediately hang Bush from the yardarm.

There are those who take an easy position here. It is to conclude, like the New York Times's hysterical Paul Krugman, that Bush and Cheney are, very simply, liars. Those who reasonably doubt that George Bush and Dick Cheney would consciously lie to Congress and the American people and Tony Blair and for that matter the entire world, are, again reasonably, asked to look for other explanations.

We do need to have a much better explanation than any we have had. Going to war to abort Husseinism is justified. But we are nevertheless entitled to know: How was intelligence information, presented as conclusive, so apparently illusory? Who was it, on the assembly line between the first man who spotted what he took to be WMD activity in Iraq, and the Defense Intelligence Agency and the President of the United States who beamed out to the world, not suspicions of WMD activity, but affirmations of it, who screwed up? Who deceived, or was carried away? And what vaccines have our leaders taken to guard against other deceptions of like character?

While I will jump on anyone that calls Bush a "liar" based on current evidence, I am not opposed to further investigation of this. A lot depends on who's doing the investigating.

The last sentence in Buckley's article is an important point. If (and I say "if," since it may be that Iraq was just damn good at hiding things) there is a screwup--unintentional or not--in our intelligence system, what kind of information is it delivering even now on North Korea, Iran, and the rest?

And, as we found out on Sept. 11, an intelligence network that misses something can cause just as much damage as one that sees things that may not be there.