And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his grip on power.

The idea that Saddam Hussein fooled the U.S. into thinking he still had chemical and biological weapons is a very popular myth that has no real evidence behind it. (See Extra!, "Saddam's 'Bluff'"  by Peter Hart, 1-2/04; "From Speculation to History"  by Seth Ackerman, 5-6/04.) Needless to say, when you're complaining that a fictional film isn't factual enough, you want to make sure that your facts aren't fictional.

BROKAW:  And in it, you acknowledge when weapons of mass destruction were not found, everyone was startled and not very happy about that.  If that had been the case before war began, you couldn't have gotten congressional authorization.

ROVE:  Nor in all likelihood U.N. approval, as we had as well.

BROKAW:  Would you have launched the war if you had known there were weapons of mass destruction?

ROVE:  Well, as I say in the book, we would not have had either the authorization from Congress nor the U.N., and we probably would have found other ways to constrain his behavior.

There was no U.N. approval for the Iraq War.

The White House always argued that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 gave them legal cover for the war, but it did not--it warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to disarm.

As the U.N. weapons inspectors were reporting back from Iraq, the White House was seeking a second Security Council vote that would have officially sanctioned military action. That effort was unsuccessful, and the U.S./U.K. attack began without that Security Council approval.

This is not ancient history, nor is particularly obscure; coverage of Iraq and the U.N. weapons inspections in early 2003 was fairly intense, and Brokaw's NBC newscast aired several reports on the U.S. efforts to win U.N. support for a war resolution. (Brokaw himself on March 10, 2003, for example: "Tonight, the French vowed to veto any U.S. war resolution at the U.N., while Secretary of State Powell continued to look for votes and a plan that would allow the United States to go to war with some kind of U.N. approval.")

Rove undoubtedly knows this history, too. What he's counting on is that journalists like Brokaw will either not remember these facts, or will be too polite to bring them up.

Ironically, though, it was the neo-conservative Bush team that argued that culture didn’t matter in Iraq, and that the prospect of democracy and self-rule would automatically bring Iraqis together to bury the past. While many liberals and realists contended that Iraq was an irredeemable tribal hornet's nest and we should not be sticking our hand in there; it was place where the past would always bury the future.

But stick we did, and in so doing we gave Iraqis a chance to do something no other Arab people have ever had a chance to do: freely write their own social contract on how they would like to rule themselves and live together.

Of course, most readers might recall that there was another rationale for invading Iraq--the imminent threat posed by their stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Those did not exist. Many war opponents--presumably some "liberals and realists" among them--opposed the invasion because they thought this threat was exaggerated. Others believed, just as importantly, that it was illegal to attack a country that was not about to launch an imminent attack of its own, regardless of how you feel about that country's leader. The (somewhat racist) notion that war critics saw Iraq as "an irredeemable tribal hornet's nest" is mostly a distraction.

As for Friedman's idea about what the war intended to accomplish:  Was it really to allow Iraqis to "freely write their own social contract on how they would like to rule themselves and live together"? As Anthony Shadid recalled in the New York Times on Sunday, Order No. 1 from Paul Bremer after the invasion banned members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. The effect of that order lingers to this day, as political candidates continue to be banned from participating in Iraqi politics because of their Baathist connections.  Seth Ackerman wrote in Extra! (5-6/05) about the Bush administration's efforts to make the Iraqi elections as undemocratic as possible.

Erasing the inconvenient history of the Iraq War removes the essential lies that were told in order to sell the war.

In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe in was gunned down. Sunnis and Shiites each committed horrific crimes, and the Kurds, whose modern-looking cities and Western ways seemed at first so familiar, turned out to be capable of their own brutality. The Americans, too, did their share of violence, and among the worst they did was wishful thinking, the misreading of the winds and allowing what Yeats called "the blood-dimmed tide" to swell. Could they have stopped it? Probably not. Could it have been stemmed so that it did less damage, saved some of the fathers and brothers, mothers and sons? Yes, almost certainly, yes.

"Americans, too" committed violence in Iraq? Well, yes.  And "among the worst they did was wishful thinking"? Well, that's one way to put it.