Dubya keeps on proclaiming Iraq the "central front in the War on Terror", meaning Islamic terrorists. But the 9/11 commission reports that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with al Qaeda. Don't expect him to admit anytime soon that he was wrong.

Dubya also claimed that Saddam had "Weapons of Mass Destruction", and that his claims to the contrary, in hundreds of pages of documented reports, and his cooperation with the UNSCOM inspectors, were all shams and lies. Now you find people claiming that Saddam was conducting a clever campaign to make the world believe that he had the weapons when he knew he didn't. They believe that he was opening his military bases which were empty of weapons, and producing reports documenting the lack of weapons, in order to make the world think he had weapons. It's that hard to admit they were wrong.

Tom Friedman, in today's Times, says that we desperately need to get out of Iraq, because

We can't dictate reform to the Arabs. Look at how even a watered-down reform proposal from the G-8 summit meeting — the Broader Middle East Initiative — was received in the Arab-Muslim world. No one paid any attention to it. The whole concept was dead on arrival because it was made in America, which is now radioactive in the Arab world.

Before the war, he argued for the invasion because he thought it would be a grand opportunity to dictate reform to the Arabs. Not even a passing reference to that support here, nor a hint that he might have earlier said something wrong.

And Rumsfeld claims that he never personally authorized violations of the Geneva conventions. Looks like he's wrong

Jeanne D'arc wants to know why liberals should continue to blog now that it should be obvious to everyone that all this stuff was very, very wrong:

Why I didn't post yesterday

Short version: I felt stupid saying that torture and corruption were bad things. Is there any decent human being on the planet who needs me or anyone else to tell him that? Is there an indecent one whose opinion I have any hope of influencing?

Longer version: Reading the papers yesterday, I started thinking that the challenge has gone out of left-wing blogging. When I first started, about two years ago, it took some thought and some digging to gather information to show that this administration was not the beacon of goodness it pretended to be.

Well, one answer is that there are decent human beings who still believe all this crap. Or who believe some Huntington-esque "clash of civilizations" variation on it, and fail to perceive that by behaving exactly like Osama said we would, and diverting our resources from a direct assault on his organization into the Iraqi sideshow while doing it, we have done him an enormous favor. As long as the bastards keep lying, we must keep answering, or lose the field.

Because it's awfully easy for people who have bought into that stuff to ante up a little more self-deception, and keep shielding themselves from the awful fact that they were wrong. And the only way to stop that is to keep saying, over and over, no. That wasn't true. That excuse won't work...

More: The same goes for anyone, liberal or not, who understood from the beginning of this misadventure that it was being sold on lies...