Here is the penultimate paragraph of this New York Times editorial opinion:

Another crucial question is the issue of pre-emptive war—or in the case of Iraq, preventive war. The United States must be prepared to use military force to pre-empt another attack on American soil. In Iraq, Mr. Bush went much further, invading a country that he imagined might someday pose a threat to the United States—not pre-empting an imminent threat but preventing the possibility of a threat. To justify his actions, he persuaded Americans that Saddam Hussein had chemical, biological and, especially, nuclear weapons programs—a claim that proved to be specious.

The final sentence is curious. What better justification could there be for taking down Saddam Hussein than that he had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons? But that’s not what the Times means, is it? The Times is implying that at the time President Bush made these statements, he believed them to be false. In other words, he was lying. This is a terrible charge. If it’s so obvious that President Bush lied, why won’t the Times establish it, by making a case that, at the time he spoke, President Bush believed Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction? And what about the “specious” part? Suppose President Bush believed—falsely—that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. How could that undermine his justification for going to war? Do we evaluate actions by what is in fact the case or by what it is reasonable to believe is the case? Was it not reasonable to believe, in March 2003, that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Didn’t most experts believe that? Didn’t many prominent Democrats believe that? This is a fundamentally dishonest editorial opinion, but we’ve come to expect that from the Times, haven’t we?