Writing in the Wall Street Journal, White House aide Peter Wehner attacks a series of “antiwar myths” about the war in Iraq, many of which are straw men that he pummels ritualistically.

For instance, in a supposed refutation of the claim that the Bush administration promoted false intelligence about Iraq, he writes:

[N]o serious person would justify a war based on information he knows to be false and which would be shown to be false within months after the war concluded. It is not as if the WMD stockpile question was one that wasn’t going to be answered for a century to come.

I agree. But there are few serious people in the highest ranks of the Bush administration. To take just one example, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other officials repeatedly asserted that truck trailers found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons units despite numerous intelligence analyses to the contrary. The aluminum tubes story is similar. (And let’s not forget all the other claims the Bush administration made after they were proven to be false.)

At another point, Wehner attacks the claim that “promoting democracy in the Middle East is a postwar rationalization”:

“The president now says that the war is really about the spread of democracy in the Middle East. This effort at after-the-fact justification was only made necessary because the primary rationale was so sadly lacking in fact,” according to Nancy Pelosi.

In fact, President Bush argued for democracy taking root in Iraq before the war began.

The key word here is “primary.” The primary rationale was, of course, the supposed intersection of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda, neither of which were substantiated. The fact that President Bush “argued for democracy” before the war does not make it his primary rationale. What Pelosi said is perfectly accurate. The primary rationale for the war shifted to democracy after the initial (primary) rationale collapsed.

Wehner concludes his opus by suggesting that critics of the war are soft on Saddam Hussein:

These, then, are the urban legends we must counter, else falsehoods become conventional wisdom. And what a strange world it is: For many antiwar critics, the president is faulted for the war, and he, not the former dictator of Iraq, inspires rage. The liberator rather than the oppressor provokes hatred. It is as if we have stepped through the political looking glass, into a world turned upside down and inside out.

This loathsome tactic has become all too common in the debate over Iraq since 2002.

There are other, highly arguable claims in Wehner’s piece, but the intent is clear — to gloss over the Bush administration’s failings and smear its critics at a time when the war in Iraq has become increasingly unpopular. Wehner is, after all, the director of the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives.