The invasion of Iraq has gone fabulously well, exceeding everyone's expectations ? certainly exceeding the doomsday scenarios of liberals. The Bush-haters' pre-war predictions ? hundreds of thousands dead, chemical attacks on our troops, retaliatory terrorist attacks in the United States, an invasion by Turkey, oil facilities in flames and apocalyptic environmental consequences ? have proven to be about as accurate as Bill Clinton's "legally accurate" statements about Monica Lewinsky.

Inasmuch as they can't cite any actual failures in Iraq, liberals busy themselves by claiming the administration somehow "misled" them about the war.

As I understand it, there would be no lunatics shouting "Bush lied, kids died!" if Paul Wolfowitz had admitted before the war that Saddam "probably hadn't rebuilt his nuclear program" ? the one that was unilaterally blown up by the Israelis in 1981, thank God. What Wolfowitz should have said is that "proof beyond a reasonable doubt is the way you think about law enforcement, and I think we're much closer to being in a state of war than being in a judicial proceeding."

Liberals would be all sugar and sweetness if only ? instead of blathering about nukes, nukes, nukes ? Wolfowitz had forthrightly conceded back in 2002 that "there's an awful lot we don't know, an awful lot that we may never know, and we've got to think differently about standards of proof here."

Also, I assume we wouldn't be hearing that the administration is frustrated by its failure to instantly create a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq if Wolfowitz had said something like, "[W]ell, Japan isn't Jeffersonian democracy, either." If only Wolfowitz had lowered expectations by saying that "even if [Iraq] makes it only Romanian style, that's still such an advance over anywhere else in the Arab world."

Also, the media would have no grounds for complaint if Wolfowitz had said Iraqi democracy "is not the president's declared purpose of 'regime change' in Iraq, which is to get rid of a very bad man." If only he had mentioned that Saddam Hussein "has been known to have children tortured in front of their parents."

But guess what? That is exactly what Wolfowitz did say! All these quotes are from a Sept. 22, 2002, article in the New York Times magazine written by Bill Keller, now editor-in-chief at the seditious rag. The last paragraph about Saddam's torture of children are Keller's paraphrases of Wolfowitz; the rest are direct quotes from the wily neoconservative himself.

But you'd have to put liberals in Abu Ghraib to get them to tell the truth about what people were saying before the war ? and then the problem would be that most liberals would enjoy those activities. (No torture has yet been devised that could get a liberal to mention the poor, beleaguered Kurds dancing in the streets because Saddam is gone.) Continued...