From a recent column in Slate on the incompetence of Richard Feith of the Bush administration, a reader makes incisive comment:

Remarks from the Fray:

…The neoconservatives deliberately cherry-picked intelligence that would help them make a case for a war that they just assumed was necessary. They didn't care if any of the reasons they cited were true or not; only that they'd be believed.

They deliberately avoided submitting the Iraq problem to the United Nations Security Council out of fear that they might solve it, peacefully, without the need for an invasion.

Feith emphasized the WMD justification because he obviously thought that the Army would find SOMETHING connected to a WMD program that could then be used to justify the war retroactively.

After the war, when no weapons and no links to al-Qaida were found, the emphasis shifted to "building democracy," and all the good America was supposedly doing for the American people.

Was any of this actually thought out? No.

The Administration decided, for no clear reason, that it wanted to invade Iraq, and did so.

The failure to come up with a post-facto rational justification for an inherently irrational action isn't a sign of stupidity or brilliance.

It's just what happens when insanity paints you into a corner.

--Thrasymachus

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Somehow I just have to love that last line.

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