Over the weekend, there were two must-read posts that together provide an excellent overview of the administration's mendacity on Iraq.
Josh Marshall first addresses the difficulty of cataloguing the lies:
Chronicling the full measure of the Bush administration's mendacity with regards to the war is a difficult task -- not because of a dearth of evidence for it but because of its so many layers, all its multidimensionality. It's almost like one of those Russian egg novelties in which each layer opened reveals another layer beneath it.and then proceeds to take a stab at it, outlining in broad terms just what the administration lied about.
Kevin Drum addresses the question of whether they were really lying, or sincerely believed in what they were telling us. He comes down on the side of lying:
The case for manipulation is pretty strong. It relies on several things, but I think the most important of them has been the discovery that the administration deliberately suppressed dissenting views on some of the most important pieces of evidence that they used to bolster their case for war.and provides succinct summaries on five separate pieces of information that were deliberately withheld.
This is valuable work. As Josh Marshall says in another post,
What this country will end up needing is something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission because what the country needs is not so much for particular people to go to jail but for the lies and the lies to cover up earlier lies to stop. The country can't get past what has happened or move forward until we can get the truth on the table, deal with it and move on.Until that time, people like Marshall and Drum (and others who are busily measuring the distance between truth and what Bush et al. are saying) are the next best thing.
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