UPDATE [9-22-04] by nadezhda

In honor of his plea for the second coming of Henry Kissinger, Seymour Hersh has just been promoted to the position of new Grand Heresiarch of the Order of the Shrill. (The Shrill Blog, 125 links from 95 sources on Technorati, and growing daily!)

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Seymour Hersh is not one of Henry Kissinger's favorite people, and the feeling appears to be mutual. That makes this quote from Hersh in Salon all that more delicious. (BTW, it's a great interview by Mary Jacoby covering Hersh's new book Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, which includes an expansion of his prior reporting on Abu Ghraib and new reporting on the widely-hailed at the time, but poorly executed, Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan.)

You're an expert on Henry Kissinger. Is there someone who ...

I'm an expert on the side of Henry Kissinger that lied like most people breathed.

Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?

Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn't it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn't believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that's moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.

So Hersh's answer to the puzzle praktike suggested a while back -- surely the smartest of these guys had to have a broader strategic agenda that wasn't so naive -- is "no, they really are true believers, which is why they're so uniquely dangerous."

Does this sound like a man with a plan?

I stumbled across this transcript of an interview Doug Feith gave to the Washington Post on February 21, 2003, just under four weeks before the invasion of Iraq.   more »

George W. Bush:

We appreciate the sacrifice of the men and women who wear the uniform. They're serving in a great cause. We mourn every loss of life. We'll honor their memories by completing the mission.

September 8, 2004

Sentiments we deeply share. But let us pray that a US government does not once again make the mistake of confusing sentiment with foreign policy.

Obviously, we’re there and all of the criticisms of it have been beaten to death at this point. Like the French and Germans in WWI, critics and proponents of the Iraq war have been chewing up the same ground for several years to no good end. I’m not interested in having the debate so much as I am concerned with thinking about why we are having that debate and where different kinds of people sort themselves out.   more »