Recently I received an e-mail from a friend serving in Iraq, telling me that some of his fellow service people are demoralized and are even repeating some of the horse manure excreted by the anti-War left. You know the lame, predicatable, stale litany: no WMD, Bush lied, blah blah blah. I found that disturbing, and I needed to respond. Here’s what I wrote:

All these endless debates about pre-war intelligence are ridiculous as far as I’m concerned. As I have been saying on WLS since well before the war, when I first went on the air in August of 2002, it doesn’t matter whether Saddam Hussein ever had any WMD, although I agree with you that he probably did. (Now that we know that Jay Rockefeller warned the Syrians and Iranians in 2002–nice job, democrats, as usual–that we were coming, he could have easily used that 14-month period–you know, the time that the liberals call the “rush to war”–to unload that stuff). The burden of proof was not on the U.S. or the rest of the international community to prove that he had WMD. The burden of proof was on him to prove he didn’t. Game, set, match. End of story. He rolled the dice and he lost.

The question, and the absolutely only relevant question, in a post-9/11 world is which mistake would be in the interest of the safety and security of the U.S., a Type 1 error or a Type 2 error (as I learned in statistics)?;

that is, the starting premise is Saddam has WMD. If we reject that premise, and we’re wrong (he does have them), we make a Type 1 error. If we believe he does and we’re wrong (he doesn’t), we make a Type 2 error. So which one is in the interest of our national security? Clearly a Type 2 error, which by the worst case scenario is the one we made. The answer should be obvious. All the rest of the blah blah blah on this issue is just pointless babbling as far as I’m concerned.

It’s a shame that some of your fellow soldiers have absorbed some of this intellectually-deficient drivel about WMD, especially since most of the people spewing it are doing so to advance their own personal agendas, either to make money (Michael Moore, for example) or to advance their political careers, or those of their fellow party members, or I should say fellow travelers.

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