I'm with you on someone having to be crazy to think we'd have a happy Iraq that we could have left in a few months, and that a big part of what was said prior to the war was just PR bullshit. It wasn't just think-tank nuts on Fox, though; one of the top Pentagon guys said, under oath in front of Congress, that the total cost of post-war reconstruction would be less than two billion.

Even if you say they were spinning rather than stupid, I see three problems:

1. When is it ok for leaders in democracies to lie to their citizens for reasons of state? I"ll grant that "never" is too simple an answer. If that's your standard, you need to attack FDR before WWII just as much as Bush. I don't put the need to attack Iraq in the same league, but even if I did I'd like to keep misleading the public as something we're not comfortable with even when justified.

2. I think it's only reasonable that if the govt does build support for war via overly optimistic predictions about the war and its aftermath, it should expect to be held to those standards. Yes, it may be crazy to expect the Pentagon to have worked magic in Iraq in two years, but before the war, they basically promised to work magic. If you put out happy stories to build support, in my book you lose the moral high ground when you try to complain afterwards that you're being held to unreasonable standards.

3. If the PR crowds out the policy, you've got trouble. We clearly did not do all that we might have to prepare for a difficult, protracted occupation. In my current job I work with senior military officers, some of whom were deeply involved with planning the war, and they certainly felt pressure to make happy assumptions, or to not plan for certain parts of the campaign because "somebody else" was handling that (when it was clear no one was). It was very clear to them that the right answer for the Pentagon was that post-war reconstruction would be relatively cheap and quick -- and especially, not bloody -- and that plans based on alternate assumptions were not welcome.

Moreover, these officers had much interaction with political appointees at DoD, and from what I gather, for many of those officials the rosy scenario was NOT just propoganda: those officials really believed it'd be quick and easy, with flowers being thrown, not IEDs.

The officers I work with would agree with Tom about media bias and the lack of good news coverage today, they supported the decision to go to war, etc.. The picture I get from them, though, is that the neocon crowd (many of them, at least) did underestimate how tough the "nation-building" mission would be, and did think US involvement really could be kept to a few months and a few billion dollars. Obviously that could be those officials keeping their game faces on all the time, and the military has some axes of its own to grind. But still, even if it was just spin, we allowed it to have concrete negative effects on the war effort.