A joint congressional inquiry reveals that there is not now, nor has there ever been, an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.(Update: This story was corrected; apparently the reporter was misfed by a source. Nonetheless, the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection’s still very shaky.)

Why did Dubya keep saying that in all of his speeches? In fact, in Dubya’s March 17 speech giving Hussein and his boys 48 hours to vamoose, he said Iraq “has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda.”

Up to the last minute, Dubya was straining to tie Iraq and Al Qaeda together tighter than a yellow ribbon ’round the old oak tree. Maybe he just forgot that there was no evidence to back up the bogus claim. That seems to be happening a lot with this administration.

Josh Marshall, as usual, has been all over this:

It would be one thing if the administration had pursued this war because of weapons of mass destruction and, in so doing, pumped up the evidence to strengthen the case. Perhaps, one might hypothesize, they knew there was a lot of chemical and biological weapons production underway and the beginnings of a major push for nuclear weapons and, to seal the deal, said the nuclear program was further along than it was.

But this greatly understates the scope of the problem. Not only was the WMD issue (and the allied issue of Iraq’s connection to al Qaida) systematically exaggerated, the entire WMD issue — and the nexus to non-state terrorist groups like al Qaida — wasn’t even the main reason for the war itself. So the case for war amounted to one dishonesty wrapped inside another — not quite Churchill’s “riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma” but not that far off it either. …

But over time after 9/11 one overriding theory of the war did take shape: it was to get America irrevocably on the ground in the center of the Middle East (thus fundamentally reordering the strategic balance in the region), bring to a head the country’s simmering conflict with its enemies in the region, and kick off a democratic transformation of the region which would over time dissipate the root causes of anti-American terrorism and violence: autocracy, poverty and fanaticism.

That is why we are in Iraq today. That is the theory of this war.

Marshall concludes that this was a much more complex case to make which, frankly, Dubya & Co. didn’t the American public could understand or support. So, when faced with the inescapable difficulty of trying to sell a preemptive war being fought for an uncertain purpose with an unpredictable post-war scenario, the administration [take your pick: hyped / exaggerated / misled / deceived / fabricated / lied] its way into it.

And now, 2,000 more troops are being sent to Liberia to back up the administration’s newfound liberation theology.

It doesn’t matter, now, though. All of this is, as Dubya likes to say, “revisionist history.” The new history being written, day by day, is not about whether the United States government tasks itself with the mission of remaking the entire Middle East, but how well or poorly that mission will be carried out.