Fred Hiatt’s preposterous editorial denouncing anyone who accuses Bush of having “lied” about Iraq has sparked renewed interest in this question. On some level, though, it’s completely absurd that this question has dominated our national debate with, in particular, the “serious” and “grownup” position being that you can never say Bush lied. After all, we’re right now in the middle of a major presidential campaign. The campaign, as campaigns tend to be, is waged by big league politicians. And I’ve heard Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the rest all try to mislead the voters on a whole variety of subjects over the course of the months.

Nobody finds this particularly shocking. Indeed, anyone who doesn’t recognize that there’s a lot of BS and hocus pocus out there on the campaign trail would be dismissed as a naive child.

Meanwhile, the war sales pitch was deeply dishonest. No fair-minded person could possibly deny that the overall effect of the way the administration talked about Iraq was designed to get people to believe that there was a short-term threat that Saddam Hussein would transfer a nuclear weapon to al-Qaeda for use against the United States of America. It’s equally clear that this was not supported by the evidence. But more to the point, it’s perfectly clear that the whole pitch was made in bad faith. The administration had a different, more nuanced and more medium-term set of concerns about Iraq. It believed that preventive war was the best way to deal with those concerns. And it also believed, correctly I think, that the public would not support an action of pure “anticipatory self-defense.” Thus they took bits and pieces of real intelligence plus some very flimsy stuff plus some made up stuff plus some rhetorical excess and they weaved their dishonest tapestry.

The reason a lot of people seem reluctant to admit that this is what happened is that they were in on the scam. No doubt Fred Hiatt understood perfectly well that the administration was presenting an alarmist account of the Iraq issue, calculated to induce panic and misunderstanding rather than accurate assessments of the situation. It’s just that Hiatt believed, as did most elites on the right and the hawkish segment of the left, that the sheeplike American were insufficiently attuned to the genius of aggressive warfare and that a good scare story was needed to roust them from their isolationist slumbers.

But then it turned out that the war was a disaster, and the much-feared “isolationist” impulse which said that war is a tool to be used to counter bona fide aggression rather than on speculative ventures was vindicated. So now everyone wants to pretend that it was an honest mistake, some kind of whacky mix-up like the time I took a huge gulp of vodka thinking it was water then spit it out all over the table, rather than a serious ideas-driven blunder that deserves to discredit the ideas that motivated it.

They’re having an election over there, too. And Dr. Irak and Ilan Goldenberg see things breaking down into two blocs — a nationalist bloc of Sadrists and Sunnis who favor nationalism and a strong central state, and a competing bloc of Kurds, ISCI, and Dawa who favor decentralization and collaboration with the U.S. and Iran.

It’s an interesting turn of events. Interesting, in particular, because it’s kind of paradoxical for ISCI and Dawa, in particular, to be both so close to the United States and so close to Iran. And even more interesting because it seems odd for the in-power coalition to be in favor of decentralization while the out-of-power coalition is skeptical of it. And last it’s interesting because in an abstract sense you’d think the Sunnis, as a minority, would generally line up with the Kurds and be in favor of decentralization. To some extent I think what you’re seeing here is that the presence of a huge American occupying army as a political issue in Iraq is distorting the lens through which some parties see their interests.

But of course lurking behind all this is the question of what the United States wants to do. The Bush administration has consistently used its considerable ability to influence Iraqi politics in order to try to bring to power leaders it regards as friendly to the American troop presence. An Obama administration looking for a graceful way to exit would have different incentives.

It seems the World Food Program’s Humanitarian Air Service needs to cut relief activities in Sudan thanks to countries being unwilling to pony up the $77 million that’s needed.

I expect, naturally, that every conservative and liberal hawk writer who’s penned dozens of articles bemoaning the fact that the UN has stopped unilateral militarism from rescuing Darfur will also speak out against this. After all, it’s not like this is a group of people who just likes macho posturing and is only interested in helping other people when the method of helping them is killing someone. Not like that at all. Doubtless all the folks who editorialized in favor of an invasion of Burma just haven’t spoken out about this helicopter problem yet because they’re too busy. Or maybe they have a principled objection to cost-effective, logistically feasible methods of humanitarianism.

Looks like the permanent occupation plan may not go through as intended:

Faced with stiff Iraqi opposition, it is “very possible” the U.S. may have to extend an existing U.N. mandate, said a senior administration official close to the talks. That would mean major decisions about how U.S. forces operate in Iraq could be left to the next president, including how much authority the U.S. must give Iraqis over military operations and how quickly the handover takes place.

Leaving decisions about how U.S. forces operate in Iraq up to the next president sounds like an awfully good idea to me. It’ll let us, among other things, debate this issue in our presidential election. My understanding is that Barack Obama, like most Americans, and like most Iraqis, wants American troops to come home pretty soon. John McCain, by contrast, like George W. Bush, wants them to stay for 100 or 10,000 or whatever years irrespective of the cost and irrespective of Iraqi opinion. It seems like a disagreement worth airing.