They Really Do Just Make Stuff Up

Daniel Benjamin's piece over at Slate caught my eye this morning. It seems the Bush Team has been at it again. Not only are Condi and Rummy going out telling the same stories with the same spin points at separate appearances, they've got their history wrong. Who was it who was complaining about "revisionist historians"? The story that the national security team is spreading is that the Iraq occupation is not so much different than post-war Germany, where bands of Nazi resistance fighters called Werewolves were busy sabotaging the occupation. But reality is a bit different.

It's hard to understand exactly what Rumsfeld was saying, but if he meant that the Nazi resisters killed Americans after the surrender, this would be news. According to America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new study by former Ambassador James Dobbins, who had a lead role in the Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo reconstruction efforts, and a team of RAND Corporation researchers, the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany—and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases—was zero.

Read the whole thing here.

Edit: On the same subject, Josh Marshall on Bush's revisionism. Here.