Iraq War Enabler Hits Familiar Notes in the 'Times'

You might think The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg would be anxious to avoid the topic of nuclear proliferation. But then you would be seriously underestimating his chutzpah.

On the op-ed page of today's New York Times, Goldberg beats an ominous tattoo on his anti-proliferation drum. "The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America," he writes. "[N]othing else matters."

On its own, this line of argument isn't all that controversial (unless you think that, say, earmarks are the real transcendent issue of the day). But flash back to 2002, when Goldberg helped stampede the U.S. to war in Iraq with his reporting in The New Yorker. "There is some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities," he wrote then. "But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon."

How influential was Goldberg's reporting? Both George Bush and Dick Cheney reportedly cited Goldberg's 16,000-word piece "The Great Terror" in making their case for invading Iraq. But these days, Goldberg doesn't seem to want the credit he's earned. "The Bush administration did the nation no service by pre-empting an Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction program that no longer existed in any meaningful way," he writes in the Times -- with no mention of his own role in helping the administration form its conclusions.

I'm all for keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists. But maybe the anti-proliferation cause could use a less compromised spokesman?