There are two great conversations about the war in Iraq going on right now.  One revolves around the beginning and the other revolves around the end.

How the hell did we end up in this mess?  Henry correctly sums up the debate.

The issue, as the Economist’s journalists know bloody well, isn’t whether the Bush administration believed at one point that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It’s whether or not the Bush administration mendaciously manipulated intelligence to make the public case for their beliefs.

My guess is that Bush pushed and pulled the evidence, as Henry said, to make a stronger case.  He didn’t intentionally lie, but like Dan Rather, he approached the truth with ideological blinders.  He had no doubt that WMD* were there. Somewhere.  He wanted to get into this war so badly that he rushed things along and spun the meager evidence. 

Are ideological blinders a punishable offense worthy of impeachment?  I don’t know.  There is so much blame to go around.  We can’t deny that a whole lot of Democrats went along with this.  And Tony Blair.  And that guy from Poland. 

I’m not ready to go down that road yet, because we still have guys in Iraq.  I would rather figure out how and when to get out, and then start nailing the administration to the wall. 

Do we just withdraw tomorrow leaving the country to swallow itself up and ditching our allies within Iraq?  I don’t feel right about that.  I’m with Andrew Sullivan on this one.

It’s not intellectually easy to continue supporting a war when you’ve lost faith in the honesty and competence of the president who’s leading it, but what choice do we have? There are other good people struggling to make this work: Casey, Rice, Khalilzad, McCain; and the thousands of troops who are risking their lives in this project. They key is to grasp how little we know, how badly we’ve screwed up, but also not to throw in the towel when, in fact, there is still a chance for leveraging the current situation to our and to Iraqis’ advantage. One thing I wish were more insisted upon. It’s not just that we have no interest in seeing Iraq degenerate into a brutal civil and possibly regional war. By removing Saddam, we created this vacuum. We own it. We have a moral responsibility to see this through.

Seeing through a disaster that originated in hubris.  It really sucks.

* I always thought that WMD would make a great name for an 80s-style heavy metal band.