My pal Jason Vest on the neocon fantasy world:
As images of the bombed United Nations headquarters in Baghdad appeared on television last week, my thoughts turned to a conversation I had with a very senior national-security official (a political appointee with no military experience, not a career bureaucrat) prior to the invasion of Iraq. He earnestly told me that after Saddam Hussein’s fall, Americans would be welcomed in Iraq, and not with a fleeting shower of goodwill but with a “deluge” of “rose water and flowers” that would last in perpetuity. Ahmad Chalabi and American advisers would set up shop to oversee a transition spearheaded by scores of returning Iraqi exiles, who would transform Iraq into a profitable, oil-pumping society. After all, the official said, this wasn’t Afghanistan, where there were lots of religious and tribal differences among the local populations. We wouldn’t need to stay long, and we certainly wouldn’t need the United Nations — which, as far as this official and his compatriots were concerned, could go screw itself. The United States could handle it all. Within a year, he said, Iraq would be a beacon of democracy and stability in the Middle East.
Much more. And on a related note, next week’s cartoon is up early due to the holiday weekend.