That Pesky Historical Record

From Newsweek:

June 15 - Two senior British government officials today acknowledged as authentic a series of 2002 pre-Iraq war memos stating that Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program was "effectively frozen" and that there was "no recent evidence" of Iraqi ties to international terrorism—private conclusions that contradicted two key pillars of the Bush administration's public case for the invasion in March 2003.

Not that this will diminish the chorus of administration defenders fighting a rear-guard action to convince people that the British memos are all forgeries. Sorry, guys.

The arguments that 'bad intelligence' was responsible, and that 'everyone agreed' about Saddam's threat, are just wrong. There was no way we were going to wake up to a mushroom cloud, and there were plenty of people who knew that to be the case, well before we attacked.

The administration and its Rethuglican allies have gotten a lot of mileage from the tactic of rewriting history to match their current rhetoric. In their busy lives, many Americans can't really remember the details of politics for very long, and the news media in general seem to either be woefully Google-impaired, or to have forgotten their Lexis/Nexis passwords. They've been able to get away with this for a long time.

Lately, though, the historical record keeps cropping up. Not that it's slowing them down. Condoleeza Rice was on TV this weekend, saying

[T]he administration, I think, has said to the American people that it is a generational commitment to Iraq.

You remember that, right? Didn't they say 'Saddam is an imminent threat and we have to disarm him, lest we have a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud, even if it takes us generations to rebuild afterward?' You remember when a groundswell of public opinion drove Congress to pass the "Semper Iraq" resolution, don't you? Why, even when we handed over sovereignity only a year ago, there was that moving speech about looking forward to the day when the sons and daughters, or grandsons and daughters of the American troops now deployed would be able to finally fold the flag and bring our forces home. My, that was a stirring image, wasn't it?

The Think Progress blog is all over it. My favorite quote is from Dick "Last Throes" Cheney:

...my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly, . . . (in) weeks rather than months."

Maybe Condi meant generations of fruit flies?