Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne says maybe the Bush Administration didn’t lie to get us into war with Iraq. Maybe, he suggests, they just don’t know what they’re doing:

The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda. They did not prepare the American people for an arduous struggle because they honestly didn’t expect one.

How else to explain the fact that the president and his lieutenants consistently played down the costs of the endeavor, the number of troops required, the difficulties of overcoming tensions among the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds? Were they lying? The more logical explanation is that they didn’t know what they were talking about.

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The assertion of the “Downing Street Memo” that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of invasion has understandably become a rallying point for the war’s opponents. But in some ways more devastating are other recently disclosed documents in which British officials warned that “there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” The British worried at the time that “U.S. military plans are virtually silent” on the fact that “a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise.”

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Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska says in the current issue of U.S. News & World Report that “the White House is completely disconnected from reality” and that “it’s like they’re just making it up as they go along.” Unfortunately, the evidence of the past suggests that Hagel’s acerbic formulation may be exactly right. Those who still see the invasion of Iraq as a noble mission don’t need to protect the policy from the war’s critics. They need to rescue it from its architects.

I thought the invasion of Iraq was a terrible idea. Unfortunately, history doesn’t offer do-overs. No matter how bad an idea it was to go in, we are in, and we must deal with that fact. I keep looking for evidence of competence from our government, and I keep getting disappointed.

Before we invaded Iraq, I had a heated argument with a friend who supported the invasion. He asked derisively whether I thought we would lose the war.

I said, “We’ll win the war. But then we’ll lose the peace. Which means we’ll lose the war.”

Please, please, please — prove me wrong.