Marches of Folly, From Iraq to the Deficit to Drones

It's the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq so there's some reflection.

I watched the Showtime documentary The World According to Dick Cheney and it's pretty good. I didn't learn too much but it was a fair history and a reasonable interview. All though there were a few times I really wanted to ask a followup question. One thing I did learn is that Cheney lied to House Majority Leader Dick Armey to convince him to vote for the war.

As the Times says, "As Mr. Gellman relates in the film, Mr. Cheney privately misled his friend, telling Mr. Armey that the top-secret evidence was actually worse than he had said publicly and that Iraq was close to developing a suitcase nuke that could be used by Qaeda terrorists. Mr. Armey changed his position and voted for war."

Krugman writes Marches of Folly, From Iraq to the Deficit "There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war — having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted — left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington. So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it."

Krugman relates this in the context of current economic policy debate. Glenn Greenwald takes on Charles Krauthammer's false statement about the US Constitution regarding drone strikes. "That italicizied claim from Krauthammer - that "outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule" - is a very common assertion and thus widely believed. But it is factually false. And there can be no reasonable dispute about this."

In Greenwaldian brevity he goes on to cite the logical argument and then the 1957 Supreme Court case Reid v. Covert which decided it.