Dick Cheney's Itchy Trigger Finger

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh revealed how Dick Cheney and administration officials discussed different ways to trigger a war with Iran. Among them:

There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

Manufacturing war. This would be comical if it didn't border on the criminal.

If this lunacy sounds familiar, Kevin Drum reminds us of this:

If this story sounds familiar, that's because it is. In one of David Manning's famous memos describing a prewar meeting between George Bush and Tony Blair, he says that Bush admitted that WMD was unlikely to be found in Iraq and then mused on some possible options for justifying a war anyway:

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

Let me repeat that: possible options for justifying war anyway.

Ana Marie Cox writes, "This is what puts the 'genius' in 'evil genius'"!

Actually, it's what puts the "evil" in "evil genius", more like.

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