War motivations.

Remember the Jon Stewart's interview with ex-Clinton aide Nancy Soderberg? She was there to promote her ill-timed book, "The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might," and he brought up the positive post-war developments. Stewart, of course, had been ridiculing the decision to go into Iraq all along. Now he said:

Do you think that the people of Lebanon would have had, sort of, the courage of their conviction, having not seen--not only the invasion but the election which followed? It's almost as though that the Iraqi election has emboldened this crazy--something's going on over there. I'm smelling something. ...Do you think they're the guys to--do they understand what they've unleashed? Because at a certain point, I almost feel like, if they had just come out at the very beginning and said, "Here's my plan: I'm going to invade Iraq. We'll get rid of a bad guy because that will drain the swamp"--if they hadn't done the whole "nuclear cloud," you know, if they hadn't scared the pants off of everybody, and just said straight up, honestly, what was going on, I think I'd almost--I'd have no cognitive dissonance, no mixed feelings.

So a talking point of war opponents is: even if good things are happening now, since they said they were going in for weapons of mass distruction, they deserve little or no credit for these side effects.

Right Wing News collects a lot of statements by supporters of the war, many dating back to before the invasion, making predictions of the sort that war opponents now suggest they never heard.

Of course, there is still the problem that the administration choose to sell the idea of going to war on the WMD point. So I do think something remains of the anti-war talking point. The revamped talking point should be: you didn't think enough of democracy to be up front about that as the goal. And the answer to that is: and you didn't think enough of democracy that you would have signed on to the war effort if we had.