According to this history of the 2002-03 run-up to the war, there was broad consensus, domestically and internationally, about Saddam's WMD. You can find a thorough debunk in Fred Kaplan's November 2005 Slate piece . I'm more interested in how this argument works and why it's being deployed.

I will have to wait until a transcript of the film is available before I can detail everything irritating about it. What prompts me to write today, though, is a tried and true argument in defense of the war that Perle reprises: "we all believed Saddam had WMD." This is the zombie of Iraq War debate arguments. It stubbornly refuses to die and will continue to be a distraction until it is finally killed off.

Do you want to know who gets my hackles up? Richard Perle. I'd be happy to just let his voice fade away, along with other proponents of the Iraq War, but there he was on our televisions again last week as part of the PBS "America at a Crossroads" series. Perle had his own documentary in the series, "The Case for War - In Defense of Freedom" , which follows him through recent travels (and encounters with critics) to elucidate his worldview.

The aim here is to tame the historic strategic blunder of the Iraq War, shrink it down to an honest mistake (a sincere and unwitting error), and spread the ownership (and blame) all the way around. According to the proverb, failures are said to be orphans. But denying paternity of this war is difficult, so it must have as many parents as possible. ...it takes a village...

In this village, everyone saw the same information and reached the same conclusions. Indeed, supporters of the war seem to be accusing the skeptics of being newfound in their skepticism; it is the latter, supposedly, who are distancing themselves from failure. The controversy is all after-the-fact, rather than before. Where was everybody?

In reality, of course, the war has been fraught with controversy from the very beginning. If everyone saw the same information, what was the big deal about the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake from Niger? Why did Colin Powell spend all those late nights at Langley and then insist George Tenet sit behind him at the UN Security Council? Why couldn't the US muster the votes in the Council? And what was all that fuss over inspections? (Hats off to the alert washingtonpost.com webchat participant from Alexandria who pressed Perle on exactly this point with regard to Hans Blix; it's the next-to-last question). And why has there been such delay and tug of war over a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation into the possible manipulation of intelligence?

As we know, the advocates of the Iraq invasion pushed it with the hardest of hard-sells. The Congress surely should have hit the brakes on the rush to war. But E.J. Dionne wrote perhaps the best column on the politics of Iraq when he reminded us that, far from being allowed to reach their own conclusions, congressmembers were told that their vote on the war was a test of their willingness to defend the nation.

Wars of necessity sell themselves. Wars of choice should be a matter of choice -- tough calls that demand just the kind of deliberation that a democracy is supposed to be good at. But it takes a certain temerity to ram through a decision to go to war and try to spread the blame when it doesn't work out.