These guys gotta get their story straight

An integral piece of the Bush Legacy Project is the hard work of polishing the turd that W made in Iraq, and Rove, Bush and Cheney have been been blathering on in one after another "exit interviews" with the absurd notion that the Iraq War is justified/going well/successful. Case in point is of course the shoe-thrower, who Bush famously used as an example of the burgeoning democracy that is breaking out all over Mesopotamia. Aside from the fact that the guy was tortured and jailed without a trial, I suppose he has a point.

But Richard Perle and the neo-cons are reading from a different script, in which he belches:

I am described as an “architect,” and often as “the architect,” of the Iraq War. I certainly supported and argued publicly for the decision to remove Saddam, as I do in what follows. But had I been the architect of that war, our policy would have been very different. […]

But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

ThinkProgress does a great job of pointing out the absurdity of Perle's brazen lie, but the more troubling thing is the inconsistency that the formerly buttoned down Bush foreign policy team displays as they race for the exits from the drunken bash they've thrown themselves. Either the mess-o-potamia was and is a ringing success (Bush/Rove/Cheney) or it wasn't (Perle/Kristol/Feith), but it can't be both.