President Bush's 'Coalition of the Willing'
— or Orwell Comes to Iraq
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Bush administration has long since lost its ability to shock. But it is still worth noting how attentively it seems to be doctoring the history of its tenure in office and the calamitous war in Iraq.

Our colleague, Thom Shanker, reported this week how administration officials have altered the record of allies who joined the United States in its "coalition of the willing."

Although American forces always made up the overwhelming number of troops in Iraq, it was strongly in the administration's interest to make the list of troop-contributing nations as long as possible. The more countries with boots on the ground, the more it seemed President Bush's adventurism in Iraq was embraced by the rest of the world.

The White House has changed the roster of troop-contributing countries featured on three official lists on its website. There were 45 coalition members on the eve of the Iraq invasion. But revisions to critical documents made it seem as if there were 49, according to researchers from the Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The researchers give the administration the benefit of the doubt saying the changes may have been made "by design or neglect."

We're not inclined to be so charitable knowing how diligently Mr. Bush and his team has fought to keep information secret from the American people and to favorably spin their own successes and failures.

It's notable that what the Bush administration appears to have doctored is not something about the war right now, but rather about how many nations backed the United States when the war began.

George Orwell would not have been surprised by this sort of revisionism. It was, after all, Orwell, who observed: "He who controls the past controls the future."