Joe Conason busts Thomas Friedman for his WMD flip flop. Friedman, who once talked about things like international legitimacy and going to war under false pretenses, now seems to say that because Saddam Hussein was a brutal, murderous dictator, it’s all good. The truth is that WMD never really did matter, at least to the people making the decisions. They wanted to show the (Arab) world that we’re not to be trifled with, had a major hate going for Saddam Hussein, wanted to help out Israel, and liked Iraq’s geographical location, so they made up a reason for us to go to war, and here we are. Why did everyone at the UN press us so hard on the WMD issue? Because they knew, just like everyone who was paying attention, that the WMD talk was a big lie and being ordered by the US to just suck it up and pretend like it wasn’t a lie pissed them off. Is that really so hard to understand? In a sense, Friedman is right — except in the wrong way. Most people in the world aren’t going to see the war as legitimate regardless of whether or not WMD are found.