I try to keep up. I really do. But the official positions on the retroactive reasons for war shift so fast it will make your head spin. Maybe that's why they call it "spin."
I was still shaking my head in amazement about Dick Cheney's claims on Sunday about links between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam's Iraq. But now I see that Rummy and Condi Rice are both saying that, no, we never said anything about connections between Iraq and 9/11. Or, rather, strongly implying that; one has to read their lips rather carefully, to revive a signature phrase of the first Bush Administration.
To be fair, the main prewar reason given for going to war was the "weapons of mass destruction." Now, it looks like we would have needed a time machine to go after Saddam's WMDs. But the Saddam-9/11 connection was also claimed as a supplemental incentive, though that claim was even more tendentious than the WMD hype.
George Paine at Warblogging has a good analysis of this latest turn. But I'm not sure that the Bush Administration's method of deception counts as a Big Lie technique, as he suggests. It seems more like a multiple-lie approach. Or even two lies forward, one lie back.
Tags: iraq war
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