A while back, either just before or after the outbreak of the war, a graduate student (I forget from where) earned his fifteen minutes of fame by announcing he'd identified something like 27 reasons/excuses offered by the adminstration to justify the invasion of Iraq. One highbrow magazine even ran a full-page color chart linking the reasons to the spokespersons who had given them.

The idea was not that we had plenty of good reasons (though perhaps we did). The style of presentation clearly implied that there was no good reason, just a bunch of conflicting bad ones given by political hacks who couldn't keep their story straight.

The 27 or so reasons, by the way, strongly overlapped, and were reducible to about ten. But the point now is that all the current, supposedly "post facto" reasons were enunciated before the war. And some of us thought, as we still do, that most of them were pretty cogent.