Just to be clear, I never said -- or meant to imply -- that liberal hawks didn't consider the weapons a central reason to invade Iraq. I merely said that their arguments didn't rely on "Iraq's threat to us, or connection to 9/11." Insofar as the weapons were considered important, it was in the context of a Dead Man's Gamble narrative, wherein Crazy Mad Saddam Hussein would threaten to detonate a nuke in Saudi Arabia or Tel Aviv unless we let him invade Kuwait without interference. The reason that's important in retrospect is that Saddam's direct threat to America was the central case made by the Bush administration, and the fact that this rationale was completely non-credible was utterly dismissed by the hawks. The policy was evaluated in a vacuum, rather than in the words and emphases of those who would be carrying it out.
