"They just want to think it through."

So said former President Clinton, minutes after his smackdown of Chris Wallace on Fox News, when he went on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and spoke to the policy wonk in each of us:

I‘ve gotten a lot of big crowds this year of people on are unusually quiet because they just want to think. They‘re tired of this labeling and name calling and we‘re not patriotic and all that. They know that‘s all a bunch of bull and they just want to think it through.

Of course, thinking through the reasons given for going into Iraq and the actual results is not helpful to Bush and the Republicans in power who sent us there. What were those reasons?
1. We were told Iraq had WMDs. That turned out not to be the case.
2. We were told Iraq was somehow connected with al Qaeda. That turned out not to be the case.
3. We were told that transforming Iraq would create a domino effect of moderation in the region. That turned out not to be the case.
In fact the opposite has occured. Instead of encouraging our friends, Bush's Iraq debacle has emboldened our enemies. The four pages of the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Bush allowed to be released do not present a picture of progress:

Al-Qa’ida, now merged with Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi’s network, is exploiting the situation in Iraq to attract new recruits and donors and to maintain its leadership role.

Bush's supporters have complained that the leak of portions of the NIE was politically motivated. But it seems to me that having facts and findings that give us more to think about in the weeks before the elections is a good thing. We just want to think it through.