Chris Shays says to be patient. Joe Lieberman says we're making progress.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

It's almost beyond parody. Every few months, one or both of them goes to Iraq, says we're going through some tough times, but if we all stick with it, support the troops and clap really hard, there are better days just around the corner. It's exhausting.

And it's insulting.

Has Lieberman ever seen a problem with the way things were going in Iraq? Actually, he did, back in late 2003 when he thought he might be president. It wouldn't have worked to agree wholeheartedly with the guy he was trying to unseat, so Joe found a few things he didn't like. Once that little pipe dream was over, it was back to all happy news all the time from Baghdad.

Shays, similarly, went through his own period of doubt. It happened to coincide with an election he looked likely to lose to an anti-war candidate. Safely back in office, though, things are looking up again.

They've both made selective use of convenient statistics to try and prove their point. In late 2005, Lieberman tried to tell us that because Iraqis were buying more cell phones, that meant the economy was growing and the insurgency was losing its potency.

It's an interesting thesis. He hasn't, though, mentioned lately how favorable the cell phone-to-car bomb ratio is looking.

Shays, on his most recent trip, cited progress in the sprawling Anbar province, recently thought to be lost to sectarian violence.

Advertisement
Today, tribal sheiks are encouraging young people to help the Americans, not kill them. It's all very heartwarming.

But the American public, 28-percenters aside, is way ahead of these two. There's only one metric anyone wants to hear about, and we got another reminder of it last week, on Memorial Day.

Our troops keep dying, and it keeps getting worse.

The death toll for April and May was the worst of any two-month period in the war.

More troops are dying because we're ``surging'' troops into Baghdad in an effort to establish security there. It's part of the strategy enacted by Gen. David Petraeus, the leader of American forces in Iraq, who is reportedly the nation's No. 1 expert in waging counterinsurgency campaigns.

But you don't need to be a military expert to question what's going on. Our troops are dying, more now than ever, and we're seeing nothing for their sacrifice. We went to war based on lies. Not on half-truths or misperceptions - lies. We chose war as a first resort, not last.

And then we have to remind ourselves again how we got here. How a group of administration officials who wanted to go to war with Iraq from Day 1 took advantage of 9/11 and got us into Baghdad.

Shays, in April, said he saw no point in finally, five years later, demanding answers about that sorry period in our history.

That must mean he's OK with it.

He, like Lieberman and everyone else who still thinks all we need to win is ``a strong will,'' sticks to the canard that, well, the U.N. thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs and France thought so and Germany thought so and Bill Clinton thought so; naturally, we had to go to war.

That ignores the fact that no one - no one - thought pre-invasion Iraq was a threat to the United States. It ignores the fact that ``weapons of mass destruction'' is at best a made-up term - nuclear weapons cause mass destruction; chemical or biological arms don't. They are deadly and cause human misery, but they can't level a city. But that's the image we were supposed to have - that Iraq's arms were going to kill us.

It didn't even pass the laugh test. Iraq, the president said, could at any time decide to pass along its weapons to shadowy al-Qaida types who would then sneak them into our country and kill us all. This ignored the fact that, if that situation had come to pass, those terrorists would have been much more likely to use the weapons on Saddam himself. They hated each other.

Our government told us to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting at the same time they were telling us that Iraq's chemical weapons were going to kill us. They took advantage of our fears to hype a nonexistent threat.

There was no evidence Iraq was going nuclear. But since the facts were inconvenient, they lied. They insinuated - but were careful never to come right out and say - that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. It was shocking in its dishonesty. It has never been fully acknowledged.

As to why we really went to war in Iraq and why we're still there, we'll probably never know. And yet Shays and Lieberman continue, to this day, to deny that history; to say that ``victory'' is possible, to say nothing of definable; to imply that it won't be much longer before everything turns around.

It's sickening.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the

Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or via

e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.