So let’s try to get this straight. We invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, except he didn’t, and because he was tied in to the attacks of September 11, except he wasn’t. We’re staying in Iraq, President Bush said tonight, because terrorists with the same ideology as those behind 9-11 have congregated there since we arrived.

Iraq is now the “central front” in the war on terror, the president said. And just how did it become that? Whatever the ghastly defects of Hussein’s Iraq, it was not a playground for terrorists. There was no terror in the old Iraq but Hussein’s own, which was a nightmare for his own citizenry, but not a threat to ours. Now, Bush argued, Iraq is in danger of becoming something it never was -- the equivalent of Afghanistan under the Taliban. But it’s Bush’s war that transformed the country and created that threat, if we are to believe Bush’s own assessment of the danger that the Iraqi terrorists pose. -- Harold Meyerson

Also, great comments by Max Blumenthal. And ThinkProgress.org.