Let’s be clear: To want to extricate our nation from Bush’s failing adventurism in Iraq is not defeatism. It’s a natural reaction to paying a high price for a foolish and deceit-riddled policy.

Much of the American public supported the U.S. attack on Iraq because the Administration led them to believe that Iraq posed a threat to us by a) aiding and abetting Al Qaeda and b) developing Weapons of Mass Destruction that could be reasonably expected to be deployed against us.

In other words, we were threatened by Iraq and needed to pre-emptively attack to eliminate that threat.

More and more poeple are coming to see that that neither (a) nor (b) were true, and, as the Downing Street Memo shows, these were poorly established and largely irrelevant to the U.S. Administration’s urge to attack Iraq. Furthermore, our attack upon and occupation of Iraq has created a nexus of terrorism where one didn’t exist before.

Now we are being asked to support the war to support democracy in Iraq and so that we don’t “lose” in Iraq. No doubt many people are also concerned about pulling out and having 2,000 Americans die in vain.

But the deaths of those Americans should not be on the conscience of those who believed the President’s arguments about WMD and terrorism. (Nor, of course, should people who never believed Bush.)

No, the blame for those needless deaths lies squarely on those who deceived the American public, who would never have supported going to war for the reasons now being given.

It grieves me that so many young Americans have been killed or maimed in service of Bush’s foolishness and deceit, but it must be faced. He started the war under false pretexts, and the American public is not going to stick with it, now that the truth is coming out.

We have been failed by our leaders, and the sooner we realize it, the sooner we can rectify the situation, no matter how painful that will be.

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently had the nerve to quote FDR in defense of Bush’s Iraq policy:

“Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart.

“You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us.”

To my mind, this reads as an indictment of the Bush Administration. Bush of course, has not had confidence in Americans’ ability to know the truth — and at the same time support his policies — hence his duplicity. And who can have confidence that this administration will not keep relevant information from us? Just think of the way the Army has lied about the death of Pat Tillman and the capture and rescue of Jessica Lynch. Think of the deception about WMD. Think about the failure to account for billions in lost reconstruction money. The list goes on and on and on.

I have had my trust in democracy sorely tested these last four years; as ugly as the mess in Iraq is, America’s waning support is doing a lot to restore my confidence in my fellow citizens.

I’ll admit a reluctance to abandon Iraq to the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but I’ll take every opportunity to excoriate Bush for the disaster he’s created for America and Iraq, even as I support cleaning up the wreckage as best we can.