Why it matters...

Matt Yglesias has a superb note on the importance of the WMD issue. I've been in various discussions with folks who either do not think the issue matters (WMD was just one of several reasons to oust Hussein) or think that, even if WMD was a major reason, the good of ousting Hussein outweighs the bad of having had some misinformation on motives. Those of you who have gripes...i refer you to the comments section.
I think Matt does a superb job responding to the later reasoning ( 'would you rather Hussein still be in power'). Here's McCain's voicing of that line:

"Does anyone believe that the United States, the Iraqi people or the Arab world would be better off if Hussein were still in power, if 8-year-old children were still held in Iraqi prisons, if Hussein were still threatening his neighbors?"

To be sure, that seems logical. The problem is in its over-simplification. Here's Matt:

"Of course in one sense it's not a complicated question at all. Saddam Hussein was a very bad man running a very bad regime and I'm not going to shed any tears over its departure from the scene. Nevertheless, as conservatives more than anyone ought to realize, one can't evaluate the merits of a government program by simply looking at whether or not it has accomplished anything good. Rather, one needs to consider whether or not the initiative in question accomplished more good than the available alternatives.

Consider a town where ten houses simultaneously catch fire and the local authorities only have the resources to put out one blaze. Seven of the houses, fortunately, are unoccupied, but one contains a single person trapped inside, while a second house contains a likewise trapped family and a third house has two cats inside. Then the fire marshal arrives on the scene brandishing a stack of evidence purporting to show that hidden behind the walls of the cat house is a secret day care center and dozens of small children will burn alive if the fire isn't put out. The trucks come, the house is saved while the other nine burn, and then the firefighters come inside only to discover that there was no daycare center after all, just the cats. All of a sudden the sudden the town is in an uproar - the fire marshal got the facts all wrong. Then the marshal turns to his critics, points at the saved cats and asks 'would it really have been better if I'd just let these cats die?'"
...
"So from the point of view of American security is it a good thing that Saddam Hussein is gone?

The answer, in a sense, is yes, but it would have been a far better thing if the Bush administration had focused on these other more pressing problems rather than choosing the glamour of a conventional war. From a purely humanitarian perspective, too, while those Iraqis who haven't yet been killed by errant bombs or lack of clean water will be better off than they would have been under Saddam Hussein, the world has hardly become such a pleasant place that there was nothing else the United States could have done to help. Money could simply have been spent on foreign aid, or if military actions are your cup of tea the US could have contributed to peacekeeping operations in the Congo or in Liberia. Everyone knows that America doesn't have the capacity to do everything it would be nice to do - we must choose our battles, both literally and figuratively. This is why finding weapons of mass destruction matters, not because I harbor nostalgia for the Ba'athist state but because I want to know whether or not the president has chosen wisely."

I've clipped alot- its really good in its entirety though, so go give a read.
Here's what I want to know from those dissenters of this post- do you agree that it is important, in a patriotic sense (national pride) that we find out whether 1) there are WMD, 2) if no, was intellegence screwed, 3) if intellegence wasn't screwed, were we misled, 4) if we were misled, is that particularly bad in light of it being war?