Paul Krugman, in today’s NYTimes column, keeps hammering away on what, to me, is the critical issue of the Iraq mess. How we got into that mess and who is responsible, matters above all else. We cannot begin to address correcting the error until we not only admit the error but hold those responsible for it accountable, all of them not just bush.

Leading the nation wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of democracy. It would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn’t turned into a military and moral quagmire. And we won’t be able to get out of that quagmire until we face up to the reality of how we got in.

and further:

On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its “last throes,” says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.

We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.

The wholesale lies won’t work if we refuse to be intimidated and if we give up the tendency to argue the case within the set of definitions provided by the media and the White House. This isn’t a “war”, it is an invasion and occupation. That matters in terms of definition even if on the ground in Iraq the distinction means little to military or civilians directly affected by it.

We need to separate the “support our boys” urges we all have from “support of their Commander in Chief” and we need to make clear that lack of support for the latter does not equate to lack of support for the former. Republicans desperately want bush and the troops on the ground to be seen as moral equivalents but they are not. The troops aren’t there because they all got together and thought it would be a jolly good thing to go and invade Iraq. They are there because their CiC sent them. They aren’t fighting for him, he’s got them convinced they are fighting for us and in reality and on the ground they are fighting for each other as much as anything. They are doing everything they can to keep each other alive, bush is not only doing little to keep them alive, to honor their committment to country, he is using them to cynically advance an agenda knowing they’ll die if he asks them to.

So he uses the willingness cavalierly, with little understanding of the actual meaning of such a committment and an exploiter’s eye towards the advantages he can gain by using someone else’s sacrifice to his own advantage.

The great cleansing will begin in this country when we admit to ourselves that we have to come to terms with how we got where we are, who is responsible for getting us there, and demand that they be held accountable…on the world stage if necessary.

Only then can we begin to crawl out of this disaster with out country intact.