What's wrong with this picture?

See if you can spot the absurdity in the following:

Washington (AP, April 18) - National security adviser Condoleezza Rice forcefully disputed on Sunday an assertion that President Bush decided in early January 2003 to invade Iraq, three months before official accounts say the decision was made. ...

In the January meeting, Rice said on CBS' "Face the Nation," she and Bush were at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, considering the Iraq situation. In such sessions, she said, Bush "kind of thinks out loud."

"He said, 'No, I think we probably are going to have to go to war. We're going to have to go to war.' And it was not a decision to go to war," Rice said. "That decision he made in March, when he finally decided to do that." ...

"The president is saying in that conversation, I think the chances are that this is not going to work out any other way. We're going to have to go to war."

Did you spot it? And I don't mean the absurdity of maintaining that a decision to go to war on Iraq had not been made long before January of 2003. I mean within the context of the statement.

In case you don't see it, here it is: The account of the conversation is from Bob Woodward's new book Plan of Attack. And Rice, while claiming to deny Woodward's account, actually confirms it! This is a decision to go to war - the only question remaining was whether it would be necessary to act on that decision. If you say "I'm going to do A unless B happens," you can't say you've made no decision about A. That's especially true if you say, as Rice has Bush saying, "I'm going to do A unless B happens - and I expect B is not going to happen."

If there truly had been no decision, then Bush would have said something more like "I don't think diplomacy is going to work. If it doesn't, we'll have to decide if we're going to go to war over it." But by, again, Rice's own account, Bush didn't say that or anything vaguely approaching it. What he said was that he was committed to going to war on Iraq unless Saddam Hussein did what we told him to do and that he (Bush) knew that wasn't going to happen.

Again, this leaves aside the nonsensical idea that there was no commitment to this long before January, 2003, that all the lies, deceptions, distortions, threats, denunciations, propaganda, and drum-beating for the several months previous were just some kind of charm offensive, and that everything Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke revealed didn't actually happen.

It's just that even within the limits of their own arguments, they are liars. And shameless ones at that.