From the “always been wrong about everything files”
by digby
Jon Schwarz does the honors. It appears the David Frum is dispensing neoconservative “wisdom” about foreign policy again:
[T]en years later, David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who coined the term “axis of evil,” still cannot get the most basic fucking facts right about this:
The main reason that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program dwindled away after 1996 was that Saddam had run short of money with oil prices falling to $20 a barrel and less.
Here’s what the CIA says on its website:
Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program…
Iraq did not possess a nuclear device, nor had it tried to reconstitute a capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991…
What I appreciate most about this is that Frum isn’t just wrong. If you read the rest of that paragraph about Iraq and nuclear weapons, you’ll see he takes his wrong foundation and then, totally confident in his sophisticated knowledge of this subject, builds an entire mansion of wrong self-justification on top of it.
The problem is that it doesn’t matter. He’s a Very Serious Person and will always be taken Very Seriously.