Yesterday, while catching up on my The Economist reading, I read Tony Blair’s recent rundown of his lessons learned while in office. It was largely the same platitudes we’ve been hearing from both London and Washington, but this out-right lie really caught my eye:

We can debate and re-debate the rights or wrongs of removing Saddam. But the reality is that if you took al-Qaeda (in Iraq before Saddam’s fall) out of the conflict in or around Baghdad, without the car bombs aimed at civilians and the destruction of monuments like the Samarra Shrine, it would be possible to calm the situation.

Don’t we have enough information by now — information that was readily available to the leaders who led us into this unnecessary war in 2003 and before — disproving the claim that al-Qaeda was operating in Iraq prior to our invasion that an international leader like Blair would stop repeating it? Who is he? Dick Cheney? In fact, as anyone with any understanding of the differences between secularism, Sunni and Shiite, should know: Saddam disliked al-Qaeda probably as much as we do.