So Charlie Rose welcomed the tyrant of Damascus, Bashar Assad, to his tv show Monday night, and the dictator obliged with a neat distortion of the recent past. According to Bloomberg (the service, not the loony puritanical mayor of New York): “Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said he cautioned American lawmakers and officials before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that the U.S. would get bogged down in a quagmire after toppling Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. “I told them, you will win the war, no doubt about that, the first war, the military part of it,” Assad said in a television interview with Charlie Rose… “But after you occupied Iraq, you would have chaos, resistance, you will have a swamp.”

Very entertaining. If only the stupid Bush had listened to that wise man in Syria, you see. Except Assad is too clever by half. What actually happened is that he gave an interview before we went into Iraq, and he said (I’m paraphrasing) “yes, the Americans will certainly win the war and topple Saddam. But that is only the beginning. Then we will drive them out, just as we did in Lebanon.”

I don’t have the full transcript, but I’ll bet you that Charlie Rose didn’t ask, “but that wasn’t a quagmire, it was you and the Iranians, wasn’t it, Dr. Assad?”