You are not going to see a lot of pro-Bush commentary on this blog. But the truth needs to be told: The president has not been wrong about everything. His Supreme Court appointments, for instance, have been stellar.

On the Iraq war, for which the Republican party is getting spanked on a Zeusian scale, the president can be faulted on the prosecution. But it’s important to cut through the ideological fog and recall that the instigation and original rationales for invading Iraq were solid. John Lillpop yesterday noted as much:

For example, a popular refrain is that President Bush lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in order to implement a grand strategy fashioned by neo-conservatives well before Bush actually took office. Said strategy was supposedly aimed at using military force to install democratic regimes friendly to the U.S. throughout the Middle East.

However, the left has never adequately answered the following question. If Bush knew there was no WMD, why would he send 150,000 troops into Iraq since his “lie” would be immediately exposed by invading coalition forces and reported by a large contingent of media embedded within those forces?

NOT acting on the information available would have constituted criminal negligence by the Bush administration. As it turned out, there was a connection between Saddam and major terrorist groups. More importantly, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction programs in place to be activated as soon as international pressure and watchdogs let up.

As Lillpop notes quite clearly, the “Bush lied” charge is a fallacy. Bush acted on intelligence that was affirmed by his very recent predecessors in the Clinton administration and, in fact, throughout the world. Innumerable pieces of evidence of Iraq’s support for international terrorism, including the terrorist training facilities in Iraq should have been sufficient for Democrats and media intelligentsia to acknowledge that Saddam in 2003 was a clear and present danger. And at the time, for the most part, they did.

But the ugly head of politics has been reared for some time now, and many Americans are unaware or have forgotten that the Bush administration was on solid ground with the decision to invade Iraq.