by YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

Triumphalists are getting off on Iraq again, intoning hallelujah songs as they did after staging the fall of Saddam's statue then again and again, sweet lullabies to send us into blissful sleep and wake to a new dawn. The composers and orchestrators -- Blair, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Straw, Hoon and Rice -- still believe history is on their side.

Bush visited his troops at Camp Victory in Iraq this month and said: "Iraq had a record of supporting terror, of developing and using weapons of mass destruction, was routinely firing at American military personnel, systematically violating U.N. resolutions ... Iraqis, once afraid to leave their homes are going back to school and shopping in malls ... American troops are returning home because of success." Only one shoe and one without a sharp stiletto was hurled at him by Muntadar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi who begged to differ.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, also in Iraq, spun his own fairy tale of Baghdad, where everyone is living happily ever after and British soldiers come home proud heroes. The reality is that some of our soldiers are broken -- physically and mentally -- fighting this illegal and unpopular war and that too many did terrible things in the land of endless tears. General Sir Mike Jackson now blames the Americans for their "appalling" decisions. And yet he too insists the campaign was a success.

Even the choral backers of Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, once oh-so-influential, sound tinny now, out of tune. In a new book, "The Liberal Defense Of Murder," Richard Seymour names many usually enlightened individuals who cheered on the disgraceful crusade and have now gone silent. Others who supported the adventure have escaped through passages of ingenious exculpation. Most Tories, for example, now say they were hypnotized by the government's false dossiers.

Really? Even hard-of-hearing Mrs. Kirkpatrick down the road -- she's 79 -- understood that we were being deceived.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/393218_iraqonline23.html

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