Bush really doesn’t know what he’s doing. At best, he’s a dupe for people who believe that we can create Middle Eastern allies by force. At worst, he believes that himself.

The Iraq war was originally advertised as a way to protect our nation from imminent threats from Saddam Hussein. Now we’re being told that it’s a good idea because there will be constitutional democracy in the Middle East.

Let’s take a deep breath and recognize that a) such a thing may not actually develop in a meaningful sense, and that b) an Iraqi constitutional democracy may not behave in ways that Bush, or Americans generally, approve of.

Furthermore, it’s probably the case that a lot of Iraqis voted in large part out of the hope that it would get U.S. troops out of their country.

It remains astonishing and worrisome to me that people believe any utterance issuing from George W. Bush’s mouth.