Damned If You Do Dept.

In The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol takes the New York Times to task over its misleading coverage of the 9/11 Commission report. Kristol poses this important question to those doubting our course of action:

Could the president of the United States have simply left Saddam in power, with sanctions coming off, reconstituting his weapons programs, confident that Saddam and al Qaeda would not work together again in the future? Would this have been a reasonable course of action?

The answer, of course, is no. And had we taken this course, the criticism over the long haul might have been worse than for what we did, which was to free a country and take down a dangerous dictator. Bush was going to be a target of the left whichever action he'd taken.