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Excellent article. The one line I take issue with, various forms of which have been floating around this forum for a while now is this: "To lie means to say something one knows to be false." To lie is also to say something one has little reason to believe is true. If I say my neighbor's dog were hit by a car and killed today, I'm lying even though I don't know for sure that I'm wrong. It is also a lie, for all moral purposes, to utter a technical truth that is designed to mislead someone into believing something false. It's a distinction without a difference. What I'm driving at is we don't want to diminish the standard of lying. In the long run, that doesn't serve anyone. Now under these strong standards, I think the administration did tell some fibs in the run up to war. That's what administrations do. I know of no administration, Republican or Democrat, that did not tell similar lies. And none of the administration's fibs change the fact that this war was a just cause that we should have undertaken even without the exaggerations. That, to me, is the bottom line.

Please name one (fib)

I think the administration did tell some fibs in the run up to war.

Please, don't keep us in the dark. What lie did the Bush administration tell to get us into Iraq.

"Now under these strong standards, I think the administration did tell some fibs in the run up to war. That's what administrations do."

At the very least, they assemble facts in such a way as to support their position and minimize the objections. And that's what most people do in everyday life. But regarding war and its justifications, I have read in liberal political journals that one reason Clinton intervened in Kosovo was to send a positive message to the Islamic world, but that motive was NEVER mentioned in public. War undertaken as a PR stunt to impress Muslims never would have flown with the public.

I disagree, the administration believed, as did most members of the Senate, both Democrat and Republican, that Saddam was building a system of WMDs and that he posed and increasing threat to the US, his own people, and the rest of the civilized world. That was not a lie.

Brilliant post! Right on.

There were plenty of reasons for removing Saddam. The most important of which wa that his country was becoming an open haven for jihadist activity. The Ansar al Islam chemical weapons plant in northern Iraq was just one. Baghdad was full of terrorist safehouses for another, also Salmon Pak. Iraqi agents were involved in the first WTC bombing, the OKC bombing, and in 9-11 (a colonel in Saddam's fedayeen was present during the planning). These are facts. WMDs were just the icing on the cake.