Some of my lefty correspondents seem to think they're scoring points by noting that Saddam killed a lot of people because George H.W. Bush didn't remove him in 1991. But I agree. Saddam was left in power because Bush and Powell feared (wrongly) a backlash from Americans after the "highway of death" footage of killed Republican Guards aired on TV. In addition there was -- misplaced -- concern that toppling Saddam would have been wrong, somehow, in light of the U.N. resolutions. I felt at the time that it was a big mistake to leave Saddam in power, and I still do. I don't quite understand, though, how people can say that we should have toppled him in 1991, but that it was wrong to do so in 2003.

Perhaps Glenn is being tongue-in-cheek, but since when did logic ever enter into any attempt to discredit the current administration's efforts in Iraq? The left didn't want us going to war in 1991 any more than they did in 2003, but that doesn't stop them from revising history. Many of the atrocities committed by Hussein can be directly linked to our failure to act then, which the left turns into an indictment of our "meddling" in the Middle East in the first place. That's how they boil everything down to being the fault of Bush (pick either one). That Hussein was a murderous scumbag as soon as he stepped into power (and before) is irrelevant to them. The atrocities committed, in my mind, were enough of a pretext to topple him, although I still believe the WMD will be found. The lack of concrete evidence for WMD is being seized upon by the left as proof that Bush lied to goad the country into war, even though that was not the only pretext upon which military action was undertaken. And the "Bush lied" meme is much worse overseas than it is in the US. I caught William Kristol on Fox News last night speaking about the French, who are openly reporting that the Bush administration lied (in Le Monde, for example) and feeling quite vindicated that they didn't support war.