Countercolumn Dissassembles the DSM

Just in case we delude our reality-based selves into thinking that a smoking gun like the Downing Street Memos will have an immediate impact on all sides of the debate, I bring you an eloquent milblogger's response to teh growing controversy, The Downing Street Memo:

"It also takes a year to plan a military campaign of that size. The idea that it's somehow a scandal that serious planning was underway 9 months before the war is just laughable.

And I regarded war with Iraq as inevitable by August of 2002, myself. Does that mean I was part of some frigging conspiracy? No. It meant I could read the ti leaves, and I could tell that Bush had staked his very presidency upon the disarming of Saddam, and Saddam was not going to budge, and he was never going to be in compliance with the Security Council resolutions, because his weapons program was just too huge to ever give a full accounting for. Nor would he comply witht the terms of the 1991 cease fire.

OK fine. So prudent military planners were prudently making plans and positioning men and equipment, knowing the odds were good for taking out Saddam. I don't think that is the point. The point is that we were committed to going to war before we had just cause, before we built any sort of alliance, before we had any kind of plan for winning the peace. And we went forward on the cynical belief that we could manipulate the UN and diplomacy to justify our intended course.