Lying, Italian-style: In the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush had so few supporters among European leaders that it’s hard not to remember who they were: Tony Blair in the U.K. and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

But now, on the eve of his visit to Washington - and with his poll numbers at home tanking as much as Bush’s are here - Berlusconi is lying about his attitude toward Bush’s harebrained crusade to conquer Islam:

For years, he has been one of President Bush’s most loyal supporters in Europe, a leader who steadfastly backed the U.S.-led war in Iraq and one of the few on the continent to send troops to help out.

So it came as something of a surprise this weekend when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi revealed his reservations about the war, on the eve of a visit to Washington no less.

“I tried repeatedly to convince the American president not to go to war,” Berlusconi told an interviewer with the La7 television channel. “I was never convinced that war was the best system to achieve democracy in a country that had to emerge from a bloody dictatorship. I maintained that military action should be avoided.”

This is a prime example of how conservative corruption does not respect international boundaries - and of how rats desert each other when the ship is sinking.