reality-based educator

Last night on Countdown, Keith Olbermann asked Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe about an interview Senator Chuck Hagel gave to a magazine in which Hagel said that when the Senate first received the Iraq war resolution from the Bush administration back in 2002, the resolution gave the Bush administration the right to use force against any country in the Mideast region. Hagel said that he, Richard Lugar and Joe Biden rewrote the resolution to give the administration the right to use force only in Iraq.

Wolffe replied that he knew from interviews he had done at the time that members of the administration wanted the right to use force anywhere in the Mideast region because they thought Iraq was only going to be the first country they invaded and transformed into a democratic state. They believed that Iraq would be a "cakewalk," and once other countries in the region saw the transformative process in Iraq, they thought other strongmen and authoritarian governments in the region would just "topple" and flower into democracies. Or they would invade, as they had done in Iraq, and make them into democracies.

It was like one big, fantastic game of Risk to these stupid idiots. Can you imagine the amount of ignorance, naivete, stupidity and arrogance a preznut and his merry men and women would have to have to think they could transform the Middle East into a cradle of democracy with a few simple invasions with about 140,000 troops?

And as Atrios always notes, these were the people who were considered "serious" before the Iraq war and any critic who pointed out the "cakewalk" in Iraq might turn into something much was worse was considered "not serious" or just a dirty, patchouli-smelling, dope-smoking, tree-hugging hippe.