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The Iraq CliffNotes
# Former dictator-of-choice and Rumsfeld photo-op buddy, Saddam Hussein, had untold stashes of WMD and was an imminent threat to the United States and its allies. The US and its Coaliton partners would rid Saddam of his WMD and would be greeted as liberators with flowers and fruit roll-ups.

# The regime of Saddam Hussein was dispatched in quick order but somehow, the fighting continued. There was no insurgency, the Administration avowed, just some pesky throwbacks who couldn't accept the obvious goodness of the American invasion. They'd be rounded up soon enough.

# George W. Bush put on a cod piece and landed on the set of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Kate O'Beirne fainted. Ann Coulter orgasmed. Mission accomplished.

# Still, despite the brilliance and sheer manliness of the President's performance, some Iraqi frowns refused to be turned upside down. Looting was rife. But this was just what happens when you have freedom, Secretary Rumsfeld said with a wave of the hand. Expect peace and democracy any second now.

# Fighting increased. Terrorists from around the world joined in. The death toll mounted.

# All part of the plan, said the flypaper theorists. Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, intoned a triumphant president.

# Saddam's sons were captured. Now everything will calm down, the peanut gallery averred. Mysterously, the fighting continued, and neither the flowers, the fruit roll-ups nor the WMD were anywhere to be seen.

# Such a mystery.

# The American Administrator sacked all those in the Iraqi police and army, to flush out the latent Baathist influence. Good plan. That'd fix everything.

# Still no sign of the WMD, but haven't you seen the memo? This wasn't really about the WMD anyway.

# An interim constitution was drawn up, and certainly that would fix everything as Iraqis began to take control.

# The insurgency, now acknowledged by the administration but downplayed, grew. It was foreign terrorists; it was opportunists; it was hardliners. They would be dealt with in quick order....