21. Maineman,

Just to set the record straight on a small matter (and this may also help to address some of Cowboy’s previous concerns), I did say in the original essay that “the Neocons were much closer to the truth, while the ironically-named Truthers were far away from it.” The equivalence I attributed to the two camps had naught to do with their respective groundings in reality, but in that fact that each side served as one pole in an entire domestic policy debate which itself was disconnected from the realities of the War on Terror. I’m sorry if I was not clear on that point.

However, that there was as much nonsense on the pro-war side as on the anti-war side cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that public perception of the war was heavily filtered through a prism of Washingtonian self-analysis. The War on Terror has been the most documented war in history, yet also one of the most opaque, for the simple reason that extraneous priorities constantly distorted the presentation of the facts.