Ha Ha Ha! Can probably still link it to Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, no?
 

Wanderer: No, we 'fess up when our facts are wrong. I'm still waiting for Dan Rather to tell me that he's a big fat lier.
 

Dan Rather apologized.

I'm still waiting for Bush to apologize for his "wrong facts," which have lead to thousands of deaths. It remains to be seen if they are justified or not. As Ronald Reagan proved with Iran-Contra, apologizing can go a long way in improving approval ratings and changing one's historical legacy...
 

One man's flashlight is another man's bomb.
 

Please keep in mind that Bush's "wrong facts" were indeed the entire world's "wrong facts," including the previous adminstration's.

Justified? Depends what you mean. Was it justified if it disrupted terror training? (caution: do not click link if you want to maintain the myth that Saddam and Islamists could not work together).

Is it justified if it gave millions of people freedom?

A quote from that second link:

---
Last week, I was talking to an Iraqi-born scholar who works in Washington, Nimrod Raphaeli. He is affiliated with the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). I asked why the Coalition forces receive so little credit on the Marsh Arab front [returning Marsh Arabs to their homes and restoring their environment which had been devastated by Saddam]. He answered,

"People should give the invasion credit for a lot of things. I often say to journalists, 'Just look at the Iraqi press. Look at freedom of association, look at freedom of speech.' These things never existed in Iraq. This is one occupation that brought freedom, not oppression; that brought freedom, not censorship. Where else do you find a military occupation that encourages a free press? This is a unique occupation."

Dr. Raphaeli continued: "People look only at the bad things. People forget that Iraqis can go out and demonstrate — against the government, against the Americans, against anyone. Before, Saddam commanded 100 percent of the vote! People can go out and buy newspapers from the extreme left to the extreme right, including classical communism. I can go on and on about the changes that have taken place in Iraq."

But those positive changes must remain unremarked, lest anyone think that the war has done some good. American security has been enhanced, and so has Western security generally. In the bargain, a lot of people have been liberated.

That's a very good bargain.
---
 

I don't think we will be able to say if the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and thousands of U.S. servicemen justify an invasion based on half-truths and concocted Powerpoint presentations until years down the line. (I should also say that I believed them and supported the War at its outset.)

Links from the Weekly Standard and National Review aren't going to convince me that it was all worth it. (Though I am ecstatic that we saved the Marsh Arabs...).

Let's adopt a wait and see attitude. History will be the judge. In the meantime, Bush needs to come clean in order to regain the support of a majority of the American people. Like it or not.
 

Didn't Bush address this very recently? I admit I can't remember the details.

I wouldn't be so quick to discount something from WS or NR - if it's true, it's true. These are not opinion pieces.

I have to say, and this is nothing Personal, o one who wanders, but the "lied us into war" bit is a little tiresome. If you followed the long, long, long, runup to the war, you'd know there were many varied reasons for the war. Of course, you might have needed to read the Weekly Standard or National Review to get the whole story.

Seems to me no one necessarily cares that we didn't fight the civil war or world war 2 to free the slaves or rescue the Jews, respectively. But I, for one, am pretty damn glad we did.
 

No personal offense taken. I've known you for too long! (I always thought you were more liberal in college...)

I know very very well that there was a "long, long, long, runup to the war," and that there "were many varied reasons for the war."

Unfortunately, that's not what we, the American people, were told.

What conservatives are doing now is called historical revisionism. Bush et al. made several statements as to why we went to war in Iraq and presented them to the American people. Many of them didn't turn out to be true. To now say well the threat of WMDs, etc. really wasn't the real reason we went to war and the fact that they weren't there doesn't matter too much because there are other good reasons I can think of now is to revise history.

I don't know if Bush lied or not and I'm sorry if its tiresome for you to hear that maybe he did. I do know that the reasons he actually gave us for going to war turned out not to be true. There was indeed a long run-up to the war - as we now know Bush intended to go to war before 9-11 ever happened.

Again, as someone who initially supported the war, I can't help but feel deceived and disappointed when I was told we were doing something for some reasons that sounded pretty good, and then it turns out that we were going to war anyway and that those reasons actually weren't true.

Sure I'm glad the Civil War freed the slaves and the end of WWII saved whatever Jews were left in Europe. We have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight for those conflicts. We don't have that for Iraq.

Its much more tiresome to me that thousands and thousands of people have died and the American people had the wool pulled over their eyes in order to justify it. I just find it hard to believe that our leadership had the wool pulled over their eyes as well. It scares me if they did.