Getting traction.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

Funny how it takes a while for a story to get traction.

Bush's deceit over Iraq's elusive weapons of mass destruction--and in particular, his counterfeit sixteen-word passage about uranium from Africa in his State of the Union address--was hardly a secret.

Way back in March, Mohamed ElBaradei, the U.N.'s chief nuclear expert, dismissed the claim about uranium as unfounded and based on an obvious forgery. Then Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker of March 31 made the point again.

Why did it take more than three months for this fact to sink in--that the President of the United States leaned on a forged document and other discredited intelligence to hoodwink the American people into supporting the Iraq War?

Maybe it was revelations by retired U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, who said he personally investigated the uranium claim at the behest of the White House and reported back that there was nothing to it.

Maybe the White House itself, by saying it erred in the State of the Union, opened the floodgates.

Or maybe leading Democrats and pundits decided it was safe to go after Bush only when U.S. soldiers started to die at a rate of one a day.

Whatever the reason, Bush is finally getting his due. Oh, he can say the subject is closed, and he can assert that the intelligence he uses in his speeches is "darn good" (after all, he's just the reader in chief), and he can even belatedly take responsibility for his State of the Union speech. But the American people are increasingly uneasy with this bobbing and weaving, which is a poor imitation of Clinton and Nixon at their worst. First, the Administration bigwigs contend that what Bush said was technically true. Then, they stonewall.

This month, we revisit Iraq, with an on-the-ground report by Nir Rosen and an overview by Rahul Mahajan. I had the pleasure of hearing Mahajan speak in Madison last fall...