David Wurmser

In New York Magazine, Kurt Andersen offers an agonized but honorable take on the liberal taboo on talking about Israel, and says that Walt and Mearsheimer "have been both strenuously ignored and unjustly besmirched as anti-Semites." Good for him. But when it comes to the Iraq war, Andersen doesn't buy their argument that the U.S. invaded Iraq "primarily to indulge the Israel lobby."

Myself, I'm still waiting to hear the true reasons we invaded Iraq. In the meantime, I like Mearsheimer's line, that Israel's interests were a necessary but not sufficient factor.  read more »

I'd offer two more data points in the discussion, about two warmongering thinktankers and their supporters who played important roles in getting us into this disaster:

Under this heading, from time to time I'm going to dig up some of the sage advice the neocons and their fellow travelers offered us as they pushed the country toward war in Iraq.

First at bat is David Wurmser, last said to be working as an adviser on the Middle East to Vice President Dick Cheney. In this passage, he mocks the argument that invading Iraq would cause chaos:

"We are gulled by erroneous assertions about the evils of Arab Shi'ism and by the oft-chanted mantra of the 'danger' of the breakup of Arab states that would follow the decentralization of power." [From Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein]

Huh. Now what was that mantra? And who was gulled? More to come.