No Apology from Bill Kristol about WMD Lies to Invade Iraq

When the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, a caller criticized his publication for hyping President Bush’s pre-invasion lies about WMD in Iraq, and asked him to apologize to the American public. Kristol refused, saying that the war has been a smashing success.

CALLER: All of y’all hyped that to a degree that was just unimaginable. Even President Bush admitted there were no weapons of mass destruction there. In lieu of that fact — being the fact that there are 4,500 American lives lost there — will you personally apologize to those folks right now? Simple yes or no. Thank you.

KRISTOL: No. I think the war was right, and I think we’ve succeeded in the war. And I think those lives — we should honor those soldiers who gave their lives and who fought so hard, and also were wounded for what they did.

What is the reason for Kristol's blatant arrogance?

Well, on Rachel Maddow’s show, the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss discussed the emergence of the Foreign Policy Institute, the seeming new shelter for disgraced neoconservative foreign policy “experts.” Maddow asked Duss how is it that the architects of the Iraq failure are able to reconstitute themselves:

MADDOW: Here’s the thing I don’t understand about DC and national security policy: Why is it that people who are catastrophically wrong about big important things like foreign policy and war never, like, flunk out of that as a subject? It doesn’t affect our judgment of them apparently at all for the next things they want to do.

DUSS: I think that’s a great question, Rachel. I ask myself that question all the time. There seems to be this special dispensation in American foreign policy that, as long as you are wrong on the side of more military force, then all is forgiven. … As long as you make these errors in favor of more military action, then eventually you’re forgiven and allowed back in the conversation. And everyone just forgets about it.