A MoveOn PAC email referenced an unbelievable quote from Condoleezza Rice’s speech at the American Embassy in Baghdad on May 15:

You see, this war came to us, not the other way around. The United States of America, when it was attacked on September 11th, realized that we lived in a world where (inaudible) gather and that we lived in a world in which we had to have a different kind of Middle East if we were ever going to have a permanent peace. It just could not continue to be a Middle East in which dictators like Saddam Hussein paraded around, lived in great palaces, and yet tortured and oppressed and just made mincemeat of this wonderful infrastructure here in Iraq. We just couldn’t let that stand — a man who had been a danger to this region for his entire reign.

As CNN reported with droll understatement:

Although the U.S. decision to launch the war in 2003 was condemned in many nations and the original justification — Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction — turned out to be based on flawed intelligence, Rice said, “This war came to us, no the other way around.”

Rice’s statement is an especially brazen combination of two of the administration’s rhetorical strategies: the attempt to link Iraq and Sept. 11 in the public’s mind, and the post-war revisions of the original rationale for the war, which centered on the threat to America from Saddam’s alleged WMDs. (See the Iraq chapters in All the President’s Spin for more.)