When it was announced that William Kristol had been hired as a columnist for the New York Times, the editorial page editor dismissed critics of the move as intolerant, saying that Kristol was a "a serious, respected conservative intellectual." Well, that's one way to look at it. But I think the words of Ernest Benn provide a more accurate description of the wisdom of Mr. Kristol:

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

That one line perfectly encapsulates the career of William Kristol. And in fact, because he has been so consistently, so overwhelmingly wrong on so many occasions, I soon realized that it could not be covered in just one sitting, and so today I will focus on his writings between the terrorist attacks on September 11th and the United States invasion of Iraq.

In 1997, William Kristol co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative think tank created to, "rally support for a vigorous and principled policy of American international involvement," with one of the key goals of that vigorous policy being the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. And with the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Kristol was handed the, "catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor," that he and his merry band of warmongers had dreamed of. Nine days later, in an open letter to George Bush, the drumbeat for war with Iraq began:

It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.

It should be noted here that while Kristol allowed for the possibility that Saddam Hussein wasn't involved in the September 11th attack, he was quick to embrace the notion, and even after the 9/11 Commission debunked any connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda three years later, Kristol continued to insist that the connection existed. Of course he also continued to insist that Hussein had WMD, but that's a story for another Sunday. But the bottomline here was, Saddam Hussein must go and anything less would mean surrender.

And in the months that followed, Kristol resorted to distortions and fear-mongering to press the case for war:

Last week we lost more than 6,000 Americans to terrorism. How many more could we lose in a world where Saddam Hussein continues to thrive and continues his quest for weapons of mass destruction? Do we really want to find out? The Iraqi threat is enormous. It gets bigger with every day that passes. It is a tough and dangerous decision to send American soldiers to fight and possibly die in Iraq. But it is more horrible to watch men and women leap to their deaths from flaming skyscrapers.

...even as he downplayed the difficulty of such an undertaking:

Yes, it is essential to capture bin Laden and destroy al Qaeda. It is necessary to stabilize Afghanistan and back a functioning government there. And, yes, we have to roll up the al Qaeda operations in other troublesome parts of the world...But none of this precludes dealing with Iraq, or makes the obligation of dealing with Iraq less urgent. The United States can, after all, walk and chew gum at the same time. The president's duty is no longer to make the case for war or to prepare the nation for a necessary war. It is to win it as quickly, as decisively and with as few casualties as possible. The case for war, over the past few weeks, required clarity and truth. Victory in war, over the next few weeks or months, will require using the fog of war--creating that fog--to keep Hussein off balance, wishful and confused. We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together.

Actually, saying he's wrong doesn't even begin to describe the mendacity of William Kristol. Here is a man who wasn't satified with the deaths of 2,996 people on September 11th, instead claiming that more than 6,000 died in his own bloodlust for Saddam Hussein. A man who used the horrible images of people leaping to their death from the World Trade Center to justify soldiers possibly dying in Iraq. Who dismissed the strain fighting two wars would have on our military forces as walking and chewing gum, because after all, it would only last a few weeks or months. And who ignored history in rejecting the possibility that Iraq would be torn apart by sectarian strife.

And 18 months after William Kristol began beating the drums for war, and two days before George Bush obliged him, Kristol wrote:

But we feel no joy and little satisfaction... We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction...History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.

Actually, I'm guessing that there were champagne corks popping. After writing more than 30 columns in the 18 months betweeen September 11th and the invasion that advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein, it's a bit more than disingenuous for Mr. Kristol to claim he felt no joy or satisfaction. Of course he may have been able to pull it off had he left out the gratuitous dig at the people who opposed the war. The ones who history and reality have proven to be right.

And next week, I will clarify just how wrong Mr. Kristol was and is about weapons of mass destruction and the war in Iraq.