I won't allow Bush's crimes to disappear down the memory-hole ...

As I reviewed some of the reports that the UN weapons inspectors submitted to the Security Council in early 2003, my thoughts turned to the Johns Hopkins-MIT study estimating that as many as 950,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion for nothing at all.

Yes, I am "re-hashing" old events and "re-litigating" the debate over the war. I have to because there are, today, liberal hawks (and hawks-hawks, of course) running around defending their support for this insanity because of their deluded notion that everything would have gone swimmingly if not for the bunglers in the White House.

That facile evasion -- the "incompetence dodge" -- must not stand. So humor me for a moment while I recall the most crucial junction, in my view, in the lead-up to the war.

It was March 7, 2003, when Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, briefed the Security Council on the progress of the inspections regime:

In matters relating to process, notably prompt access to sites, we have faced relatively few difficulties and certainly much less than those that were faced by UNSCOM in the period 1991 to 1998. This may well be due to the strong outside pressure.