imagine there's no insurgency...it's easy if you try

In reviewing the revisionist history of Donald Rumsfeld's memoir, Republican right wing extremist and National Review Online contributor, Victor Davis Hanson captures the epitome of the Republican Fantasy World:

He is as candid and unapologetic in retirement as he was in government and corporate service. “Take away the insurgency in Iraq,” an acquaintance once told me, “and Donald Rumsfeld would have been a sort of icon of postwar America.” That might now seem obvious, but we don’t yet have the full history — or know the ultimate consequences — of the Iraq War.

Ahhhh yes, if we could just close our eyes and pretend it never happened then Rumsfeld is the greatest Defense Secretary to ever live. If we would just stop focusing on the fact that we are still occupying Iraq, that we still have troops dying there and have already spent a trillion dollars then we would finally realize just how Great and Patriotic the whole thing has been.

Let's focus on reality, just for a brief second.  Obviously what Davis' anonymous aide meant to say was if we could "take away the insurgency, the missing WMD and the fabled tales of ties to 9/11 then Donald Rumsfeld would have been a sort of icon of postwar America."  It wasn't just the insurgency they didn't believe would happen, it was everything they told us in the lead up to war that turned out as a lie too.