Mainstream media, seemingly always looking for the path of least resistance, has decided on the form they'll use for the biggest question facing all GOP candidates: "Would you have gone to war with Iraq?" It goes like this: "Knowing what we know now about WMDs, would you have gone to war with Iraq? As if the first inkling that anything was amiss was some months into the war when a few soldiers scratching their heads in an empty desert said they couldn't find any WMDs after all.
The question is an easy softball for the candidates and an interesting bit of framing. It's also an historically ignorant way to ask the question, though I'll leave it to others to speculate whether it's by design or incompetence.
The phrase "Knowing what we know now" implies that the Bush administration knew nothing at all about the true situation with WMDs beforehand, that all we have on this issue is hindsight. In fact, before the war, at Dick Cheney's insistence, Ambassador Joseph Wilson investigated the "yellowcake uranium" issue and informed Cheney it was a hoax.
Again, in the days before the war started, UN weapons inspectors, who had finally gotten full access to Iraq's facilities -and who had comlpleted their inspections- concluded there was no evidence of WMDs, nuclear or biological. There was also no evidence that Iraq and Al-Queda were cooperating; in fact most Middle East experts found the idea ludicrous as Iraq was a decidedly secular state and, if anything, the two appeared quite at odds.
Add to this the well documented fact that a report entitled "Al Queda determined to strike in US" was given to Bush a month before 9/11. It wasn't just mailed to him, it came in an unusually long daily briefing -and it certainly wasn't the first time the subject had come up as top security advisers such as Richard Clark have recounted.
None of this stopped Cheney from sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN to fear monger about Al Queda, Iraq, yellowcake and mobile biolabs, something Powell feels he was basically set up for.
The issue about the Iraq war has never been that our reasons for going turned out to be wrong, but that they were intentionally fabricated beforehand. So the question should instead be "Knowing what we knew then, would you have gone to war?"
Let's see if anyone in the news media frames the question properly. But, don't hold your breath.