Ten Years Later, David Frum Can't Get the Most Basic Facts About Iraq Right

Okay, so everything the Bush administration said about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction was wrong. But you can't blame them! It's hard to know what's going on inside a secretive dictatorship!

So we invaded Iraq, and spent several billion dollars investigating the subject of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, with the CIA producing a gigantic report that's available to anyone on earth with an internet connection.

And yet ten years later, David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who coined the term "axis of evil," still cannot get the most basic fucking facts right about this:

The main reason that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program dwindled away after 1996 was that Saddam had run short of money with oil prices falling to $20 a barrel and less.

Here's what the CIA says on its website:

Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program...

Iraq did not possess a nuclear device, nor had it tried to reconstitute a capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991...

What I appreciate most about this is that Frum isn't just wrong. If you read the rest of that paragraph about Iraq and nuclear weapons, you'll see he takes his wrong foundation and then, totally confident in his sophisticated knowledge of this subject, builds an entire mansion of wrong self-justification on top of it.

—Jon Schwarz