that the global community was serious about "an enforceable international system to police WMD." But he conceded that Bush's use of force exceeded that basis for action, writing: "If that was the rationale for going in, why disband the Iraqi army? Remaking Iraq was more than the offense justified and more than we could handle." Saletan concluded that he had erred by entrusting the use of force to an unfit president: "You have to decide whether you trust the administration, not just the idea of the war." Intelligence studies In a series initially posted on November 18, 2007 on Slate.com, Saletan assessed the relationship between race and intelligence, specifically the question of whether race is a genetically determining factor in intelligence. He ultimately did not discount the hypothesis that it is, concluding: "When I look at all the data, studies, and arguments, I see a prima facie case for partial genetic influence." Counterarguments were subsequently published by Richard Nisbett in The New York Times, Stephen Metcalf in Slate and Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. Saletan's fourth entry in his series, entitled "Regrets", acknowledged overlooking ties between one of his primary sources, J. Philippe Rushton, and advocates of white supremacy, saying, "I was negligent in failing to research and report this." In subsequent articles, Saletan reconsidered this subject and argued against racializing discussions of intelligence. In 2008, he called race, as a category of analysis in medical or other biological studies, "the stone age of genetics." He defined scientific racism as "looking and settling for racial analysis when some other combination of categories—economics, culture, genetics—more accurately fits the data. It’s easy to group people by race and compare averages. But it’s pernicious." In 2012, he wrote that "drawing inferences about anyone based on race, sex, religion, or any other crude category is a lousy substitute for inspecting or interacting with that individual." He criticized the application of stereotypes, calling them "an ignorant person’s weak substitute for knowledge." In 2013, he examined sources of racial prejudice and advised readers to reflect on their biases. In 2018, when the race-IQ controversy resurfaced, Saletan revisited his 2007 series, dissected his errors, and advised others not to repeat them. He wrote that "using racial data to make genetic arguments isn’t scientific," because "genes are the mechanism under discussion," and "genes flow between populations as they do between families, blurring racial categories and reshuffling human