It's time to talk
Josh Marshall pulls alot together in this article from yesterday's TPM; an attempt to show the importance of pre-war discussion. Namely, he answers to the question of 'who cares how Bush sold the war?'

Because it is a concrete, demonstrable example of the administration's bad faith in how it led the country to war.

The article has a greater point to it- almost a question really. The general idea is this: To what extent should we, as voters, want our leaders to decide on a course of action and pursue it without full disclosure to the public. Let me quote some material here:

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. I have little doubt that many in the administration and in certain think-tanks in DC who really don't like much of what they've been reading on this website recently will have little to disagree with in that description.

And here comes the kicker:

It's important to note that this theory of the war actually does have a lot to do with stopping terrorism and the generalized instability of region -- but in a way that is almost infinitely more complex than the Saddam-WMD-hand -off-to-al-Qaida idea that the administration pushed in the build-up to the war.

It's much more complicated, much more complex, and vastly more difficult to achieve. It's not that the main war-hawks didn't believe there were WMD or that rooting them out wouldn't have been a great coup for US national security. But it is almost as if administration war-hawks told the public a vastly simplified, fairy-tale version of the Iraq war's connection to stopping terrorism and justified this benign deception because the story contained a deeper truth, almost in the way we tell children similar stories because their minds aren't advanced enough to grasp or process all the factual details connected to the lessons or messages we're trying to convey. Got all that? Good.

So, to use Marshall's analogy, should we be told fairy tales? This is not a thetorical question- it is something on which I'm undecided. There is no way for an administration to fully educate the electorate, nor should it. We elect these folks to act as proxy policy wonks, don't we. Furthermore, it is odd to imagine every politician pitching their plans with concessions on the weakness of the idea.
On the other hand, there is, perhaps, a line. Usually, while a politician can't/won't outline every detail of a proposed policy, we do assume that the goal, the end result, is as they portray it. Thus, while we don't learn every detail of a health care plan, we hold the leader accountable to their promise of, eg, cheaper drugs, broader coverage, or what have you. Marshall's point in this article is that we were duped regarding the goal of the war; we were told a "fairy tale" that was oversimplified possibly to the extent of straghtaway deception. And we were handed this line by people who, it seems, do not think we deserved to think through the complex issue and deliberate.
Its time to have a discussion. Not so much about african uranium, but about what we want as voters. Apathy or responsibility. I choose the latter.