It appears that we can add “spreading democracy in the Middle East” to the list of reasons for going to war that the Bush administration gave that have proved false. It joins an illustrious list, with weapons of mass destruction, Sadaam’s ties to Al Qaeda, and the claim that attacking them there, before they could attack us here, would make America safer.

As Stephanie noted yesterday, according to a front page article in yesterday’s Washington Post, in the most recent budget the Bush administration has scaled back funding for groups charged with helping build democracy in Iraq through the creation of civil groups and political parties. The article notes, “The president's supplemental Iraq spending request includes just $10 million for democracy promotion, and his proposed budget for fiscal 2007 asks for $63 million, a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars spent each year on Iraq.”

So where are the billions of dollars being spent? Security. Despite being told we’d be greeted as liberators (yet another administration lie), over three years after the invasion, the U.S. is still spending the vast majority of its money in Iraq just trying to secure the country.

The Bush administration offered a number of justifications for war, yet the only consistent theme with all of them has turned out to be that they were false. This war was never a war of necessity, but a war of choice, and as one more excuse for the invasion is proven to be a lie, it yet again becomes clear that our troops have no business risking their lives in Iraq and need to be brought home as soon as possible.