The transition is now complete...

Friedman in the Times today:

President Bush's basic gut instinct about the need to do this is exactly right. His thinking that this could be done on the cheap, though, with little postwar planning, was exactly wrong. Partly as a result, this great moment has already cost America over $100 billion and 10,000 killed and wounded.

That is not sustainable because the road ahead in Iraq is still long. We have to proceed with more wisdom and more allies. But proceed we must, and now we can at least do so with the certainty that partnering with the Iraqi people to build a decent consensual government is not crazy - it's really difficult, but not crazy.

Two points here... one is that I applaud the fact that some folks who have been backers of this venture have still been willing to criticize the post-war planning (or lack thereof) and question whether or not this has really been worth the $200 billion, casualties approaching 20k, and an estimated 100k Iraqi lives thus far (another example is Fareed Zakaria).

However, the second point makes me grind my teeth... in the words you read above, there is a striking omission: WMD's. And he is hardly the only one... nobody asks about it anymore. The media doesn' pay any attention to it anymore, despite the fact that definitive reports have started to come out about it. As far as people are concerned, we invaded to spread democracy. To mention WMD's would be, to used White House parlance, "using the Democrats' terms."

Somebody pinch me please... this has to be a bad dream.