Paving the road to Hell

Matthew Yglesias has a post up at TPMCafe regarding Scooter Libby's testimony and the ultimate meaningless of the question of whether the Bush administration "lied," "misled people" or "were careless" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, which started me thinking about why exactly Bush thinks he has to bomb Iran.

The section of Matt's post that got me thinking was this bit:

More significant to me has been the president's repeated assertion that he would have made the same decisions then even if he had known everything we know now. In other words, the actual facts about the WMDs are, to Bush, entirely irrelevant in assessing the Iraq War. What he does think the relevant considerations are or were I couldn't quite say, but it means we've got a president who's operating on some sort of extremely reckless doctrine about the proper circumstances for the use of force.

It is, as Matt says, deeply weird that the president says that even had he known Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction he would still have invaded. It would be one thing if he were to say that he couldn't have known, but instead we get this line about how he would have done it anyway. What that implies, to me, is that for George Bush what really matters is intentions, rather than capabilities or actions.

Perhaps the most striking example of Bush's bizarre mind-reading act was, of course, his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, at which he said "I was able to get a sense of his soul." The line on Iraq has essentially boiled down to the pathetic argument that even if Saddam didn't have WMDs, and wasn't capable of manufacturing them, he still wanted them. He talks about the "terrorists" writ large in terms of their completely unachievable goals, in such laughably grandiose terms as "a radical Islamic empire stetching from Spain to Indonesia. Time and again, he and his crowd seem to suggest that what really matters is not so much how much of a threat an organization or country is, but how much of a threat they are in their wildest dreams. So he goes haring off after them, invading countries and destroying civil liberties, in the military equivalent of smashing gnats with a two-by-four in a china cabinet. And when it's over, and there are still gnats buzzing around and there are shards of Lomonosovsky Farfor all over the carpet, he justifies it by saying that the gnats wanted to sting him.

Which brings us to Iran. No one disputes that Ahmaninejad is a seriously nasty piece of work. But he's a figurehead, hemmed in by people who, if no less nasty than he, are at the very least more sensible about what the consequences of a nuclear attack on the Americans or Israelis would be. There's absolutely no need to bomb Iran right now, ESPECIALLY WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS. But in the bizarre world of George Bush, his nuttiness by itself makes him as much of a threat as Hitler.

As I say, he's a remarkably stupid man to have risen this far. Let's all hope we're able to laugh about it in ten years time.

Incidentally, one of the funnier dissections of a Bush speech around, The Crazification Factor, was written in response to Bush's dark visions of a Spain-to-Indonesia caliphate. Check it out.