See, here’s the thing. People like to point to Saddam’s oppression of his people as why invading Iraq proves that Bush/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz were just amazing misunderstood humanitarian dudes or something, and not war criminals.

But that was never the rationale until after the invasion when it became crystal clear (as many of us had been suggesting in the build-up) that they had lied about a bunch of stuff in making their actual pro-war argument that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and that invading was about US national security.

So let’s have a policy debate, by all means, about whether or not it’s right to invade other countries in order to protect the population from oppressive dictators. But let’s also not pretend that this has anything to do with opposition to the war in Iraq or the propaganda under which it was carried out.