Grifting foreign policy

Jack Fairweather reconstructs one of the many ways in which we were sold a bogus war at a premium price in "Heroes in Error: How a Fake General, a Pliant Media, and a Master Manipulator Helped Lead the United States Into War."

These are the words of Ahmed Chalabi, definitely a no-apologies kind of guy, but they could just as easily be those of Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz or William Kristol or any of the other prominent PNACers:

“As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. "

I often wonder if Chalabi, the master strategist, ever anticipated the astonishing incompetence of PNAC member Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Oh well. The guy was only an Iraqi ex-pat. He couldn't control everything.