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If you have actually read Strauss then most of the nonsense written about the Straussians starts to seem rather silly.

Strauss was uninterested in current political issues, and in the end he was just a professor at the University of Chicago. Anyone who went to the U of Chicago and studied liberal arts probably had him for a professor. To point out U of Chicago alumni as some kind of cult is nonsense. Mainly if you have waded through some of Strauss's work. He is just another guy who writes turgid prose. He is not Jesus, and I don't consider him to be any particular genius.

You have to notice that the whole WMD argument is of interest primarily to people who opposed the war. People who favored the war talk about the previous 12 year war, they talk about Saddam's ambitions, they talk about his very real connections to terrorism, and they talk about his symbolic value to Islamic militants world wide. They talk about the strategic value in turning Iraq into a secular, humane place in terms of its effect on Islamic fascism of both the secular and the Wahab varieties.

For them, WMD is a non-issue, or at most a tangential issue. They primarily brought it up as a part of the UN efforts. Opponents of the war say now that this was our rationale for war, but that is false. At the time, they complained that we offered too many reasons for going to war, that our reasoning wasn't focused enough. That is because until the UN debate, we never focused on WMD.

The people worried about WMD and its existence or non-existence are the people who oppose the war under any circumstances, who refuse to admit Saddam's role in terror operations, and who are uninterested in anything more than a pin-prick attack on our enemies. That means that it is a bogus argument.

It is the nature of espionage that everything is done under the radar, under the table, and done in such a way as to be deniable. Consequently you are never going to have complete knowledge of anything in that world. All you are ever going to have are little points of information where the operations inadvertently break the surface. If you are unwilling to tie those points of information together into a coherent whole, nothing and no one can force you to do so.

But it is the job of a president and his national security advisors to look at those points of disparate data and make sense of them, and to act on them. Such actions are always going to look precipitous to people who don't want to act, and refuse to connect the dots. And such dots of data are never going to be a ready-for-criminal-prosecution case that will satisfy those who aren't interested in acting.

But I connected the dots years ago, and have been waiting for someone to see what I saw and act upon it. Others here at this website have seen it, and after a decade of willful blindness we finally have a team in the White House that are willing to act.

Call me a Straussian if you want to. Saddam needed to go. I had his number back in the seventies, and after 9/11 it was crystal clear to me that it was a three-step process; Afghanistan, Iraq, followed by heavy pressure on Riyadh. We have already wiped out several of Riyadh's operations and we are seeing the beginnings of tectonic shifts in Saudi Arabia right now. The earth is moving in Iran as well. After thirty years of seeing Americans killed by these people, I don't apologize.