What makes it hard for opponents of the Iraq war to hold Bush accountable is the fog that sets into the brain after hearing similar themes dominating the headlines and talking points over and over again. It's easy to identify with the latest optimistic administration or media angle because the past is such a blur.

Because it's hard to recapture the prewar and early-war atmosphere of lies, intimidation, and sheer unreality, we need to seize upon and keep a list of contradictions as they (inevitably) arise in the rhetoric of many hawks as the awful chaos mounts. This list-keeping can serve as a kind of time machine to pull the political discourse (kicking and screaming, no doubt) from its idealization surface toughness into the realism that would allow accountability with regard to a war that has harmed our country's security and Iraq's people so badly.

Case in point: Just now I heard Sen. Thune mention, in the midst of a long, somewhat rambling speech on Iraq, that 18 months ago the Iraqi security forces were just being formed, whereas now we have x number of forces trained. But wait. Eighteen months ago puts us back to around December 2004. Seems to me there had been these debates between presidential candidates just a couple months earlier. When Sen. Kerry criticized Bush for incompetence in the training of Iraqi forces, the president, as I recall, replied proudly, if a bit defensively, that we had trained over 100,000 Iraqis to serve as police officers and soldiers. I know there is apt to be some linguistic hair-splitting that will allow the president's defenders to claim he wasn't lying. But he was shamelessly deceiving us, and now we have a Republican senator and ally of the president inadvertently confirming as much. To be sure, the incompetence of the war is only part of the problem with it; it was a strategic blunder, conceptually. But documenting that incompetence with numbers and the statements of its often increasingly incoherent advocates can help change the political momentum of the country on the issue. Unless we have facts and figures at our disposal, our assertions of incompetence may easily fall on deaf ears as the emotional allure of Rove's enemy-within meme is set aflutter on the nation's airwaves come election season.