Spectator Article, "Karl Rove The Man Who Elected Obama

I was just passed a link to an article in The Spectator, "Karl Rove The Man Who Elected Obama" (http://spectator.org/archives/2010/04/05/the-man-who-elected-barack-oba), from The Spectator, an online magazine that proudly features "The Largest Selection of Liberal-baiting Merchandise on the Net!"

The thesis is more or less that Karl Rove "admits" in his memoirs that there was ample proof that Iraq had "WMD"s, but he, Karl Rove, was too busy to thwart the Democrats' malicious claims that Bush "lied" (his quotes) on WMDs, and this led to Obama's election.

It seems like kind of a gratuitous way of getting Obama and Rove in the same sentence.

The author of the article relates his own experience: "I was having lunch with Dr. Laurie Mylroie, one of America's leading students of terrorism in general, and Iraqi terrorism in particular. Laurie was beside herself with anger. Why wasn't the Bush administration citing Gen. James Clapper, the Director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, who said that satellite imagery proved conclusively that shortly before the war's outbreak, Iraq had transferred its weapons of mass destruction to Syria?"

So we have it on Mylroie's authority that, according to Clapper, satellite imagery "proved conclusively that Iraq had transferred its weapons of mass destruction to Syria?

What sort of authority is Mylroie? A quote from Daniel Pipes, from his web site says about her "Everything, everything, everything was connected to Saddam," said her former collaborator, Daniel Pipes. She also became hostile toward old friends and colleagues who didn't see the world her way. When Pipes publicly endorsed the predominant view that anti-U.S. terrorism was caused primarily by radical Islamic fundamentalists and questioned her Saddam-centric view of world terrorism, Mylroie accused Pipes of endangering the welfare of the republic. "My charge against you is that you are, at the periphery, responsible for the death of Americans," she e-mailed Pipes on March 7, 1999. "And furthermore, that more Americans will die, if people continue to listen to your version of events."

I'm pretty sure Pipes is too much of a radical conservative for me, and Mylroie is too much for him.

Still, we have an assertion that 'satellite imagery "proved conclusively that Iraq had transferred its weapons of mass destruction to Syria'.

Later in the article, Rove is paraphrased from his book "in a chapter entitled "Bush Was Right on Iraq," [Rove said] that Clapper, Sada and Ya'alon all maintained that Saddam had transferred his weapons of mass destruction to Syria on the eve of the war.
A bit of a step down from "conclusive proof".

It seems likely to me that this is old news given a new spin by Rove, with Rove's sort of "mea culpa" to give it some extra credibility.

Shattan rather surprisingly asks, of the Bush administration, "Why was it so tongue-tied, so unsure of itself, so unwilling to answer its critics?" Does anyone else remember it that way?