Cohen laughed at anyone who still doubted that Saddam Hussein possessed hidden WMD stockpiles.
"The evidence he [Powell] presented to the United Nations--some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail--had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them," Cohen wrote. "Only a fool--or possibly a Frenchman--could conclude otherwise."
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the failure to discover the imaginary WMD stockpiles, Post editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt made a rare and grudging apology. Hiatt acknowledged that the Post should have been more skeptical.
"If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction," Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. "If that's not true, it would have been better not to say it."- [CJR, March/April 2004]
Nevertheless, the Post's editorial pages continued to attack American citizens who dared challenge Bush's case for war, such as the Post's assaults on former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson whose criticism led the Bush administration to expose Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA officer. [See Consortiumnews.com's "WPost Is a Neocon Propaganda Sheet."]
Cohen's Obtuse Record
On the Plame case, Cohen also took up the neocon banner, defending Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis Libby, who was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with Plame's outing. Cohen joined an Inside-the-Beltway pundit riot against Libby's 30-month jail sentence and helped build up support for Bush's decision to commute Libby's sentence, sparing him jail time.
Cohen called the Libby case "a mountain out of a molehill" and poked fun at Americans who thought the invasion of Iraq might have been a bad idea.
"They thought--if "thought" can be used in this context--that if the thread was pulled on who had leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to [columnist] Robert D. Novak, the effort to snooker an entire nation into war would unravel and this would show . . . who knows? Something," Cohen wrote.
That Cohen was wrong about WMD and the case for war in Iraq should not have come as a surprise. His cluelessness is almost legendary. On nearly every major development of the past couple of decades, Cohen has missed the point or gotten it dead wrong.
For example, during the Florida recount battle in 2000, Cohen cared less about whom the voters wanted in the White House than the Washington insiders' certainty that George W. Bush would be a uniter, not a divider.
"The nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse," Cohen wrote. "That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush." [For more, see Consortiumnews.com's "Is WP's Cohen the Dumbest Columnist?"]
Perhaps even more troubling than the Post's stupidity, however, is the racism that seems to underlie the smirking attitude within the Post's editorial offices about the humiliation, torture and slaughter of Arabs and other Muslims.
Do Richard Cohen and his editors think it's funny that Cheney and Bush saw nothing wrong with subjecting Muslim detainees to forced nudity (often in front of women), to days on end of sleep deprivation, to confinement in painful stress positions and to waterboarding?
If not, why the snotty tone of Cohen's column? "Blogger Alert"; "political catfight conducted by bloggers"-; "soupçon of doubt"?
