Okay... let's assume that Bush did lie

I'm not sure that it's going to do much good in persuading my liberal college chums, but there has been some good discussion regarding the "Bush lied..." uh... "argument".

Keith Burgess-Jackson has a logical deconstruction of it in Tech Central Station called Liberal Disingenuousness About the War in Iraq A taste:

The point of these theoretical reflections is this: Even if President Bush lied about Iraqi involvement in the attacks of 9-11 and about the existence, in Iraq, of weapons of mass destruction, all the argumentative work remains to be done! Only absolutist deontologists, [people who believe that lying is ALWAYS wrong] of whom I suspect there are few, say that the fact that President Bush lied disposes of the question whether the war was justified. Everyone else must examine the consequences of the war vis-à-vis the consequences of alternative courses of action-and that has nothing to do with President Bush.

But, hey... "Bush lied, people died." rhymes... I guess it's a Jesse Jackson/liberal thing. "If it rhymes, the idea climbs!"

Fouad Ajami hits the topic from a different angle in an article primarily about how the Iraqis are going to have to step up and take the reigns.

If Mr. Bush and Tony Blair had dispatched a big military force in search of weapons of mass destruction only to end up with a humanitarian war that delivered Iraq from a long nightmare of despotism, the Iraqis will have turned out to be the prime beneficiaries of this campaign. They should not quarrel with their good fortune. In the course of a more normal history, Iraqis would have sacked their own despotism, overturned, on their own, the dictator's monuments and statues, written their own story of rebellion against tyranny. They didn't, and no doubt a measure of their rage, over the last year or so, was the proud attempt of a prickly people to escape that unflattering fact of their history.

Mr. Ajami is right, regardless of the reasons (and Bushitler's veracity...) the Iraqi people are in a better position to develop freedom at home and join the community of nations than ever before.

We've served our own national security interests and given the people of Iraq an opportunity for liberty and pursuit of happiness. We will need to be a challenging combination of supportive and aloof to help them pull this off.