Mr. Bush has survived not finding of the weapons of mass destruction for two reasons. One is that Americans have come to be sure that Saddam was an unusually bad man and a threat to whatever stability the Mideast enjoys. The other is that Americans believe Mr. Bush himself honestly believed Saddam was a threat. If Bill Clinton, who thought Iraq had WMDs, had invaded Iraq post-9/11 and not found them, he would have been thrown out of office. That's because no one ever believed what Mr. Clinton said, and they wouldn't have believed his explanations. They assumed most of what he did had a cynical and self-serving basis. Mr. Bush doesn't have that problem, because regular people don't think he's a habitual liar. (This is why in presidential elections character trumps everything. It's not some abstraction, it has practical and daily presidential applications.)She's not quite right, though, I think. Recall that Bill Clinton did start a war and then it turned out that his supposed reason was totally false. That was the Kosovo War, which had as its justification the massacre of thousands of Kosovo Muslims by Serbs. After the war, it turned out there was little or no massacre--- and that the Administration claims had no justification at the time. In fact, the Kosovo Muslims have since then been busy, with U.N. protection, been persecuting the Kosovo Serbs worse than the Belgrade Serbs ever persecuted them. The absence of massacres was obvious immediately after the war. Yet there was little mention, and no political harm to Clinton.
Note, too, that this worked the other direction for Clinton too. 800,000 people were massacred in Rwanda. The U.S. stood by and did worse than nothing--- we stopped the U.N. from making even feeble efforts to prevent the killing. This did Clinton no political harm.
Perhaps, then, we need to elaborate on the theory of character. Good character is one of Bush's assets, and it is indeed a reason why not finding actual WMD's has not hurt him (though, in addition, I thought he never said there were actual WMD's-- rather, it was to prevent the threat from becoming imminent that a war was necessary). But Clinton won elections-- at least his 1996 election-- despite everyone knowing he was an unprincipled liar. Those who voted for him thought he had other advantages which made up for his moral deficiencies. After a certain point, when he was caught lying it didn't hurt him, because it was "old news". Indeed, if he had been caught raping someone (again) in 1995, would it have mattered? I don't think so.
[in full at 04.04.23a.htm]
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