We're coming up on the anniversary of the Bushite invasion of Iraq, a disaster that ranks among the worst foreign policy blunders in American history. By any rational standard the war has been a catastrophic failure. After all, you can't succeed at anything if none of your stated reasons for trying it in the first place have panned out. The WMDs weren't there. Saddam Hussein wasn't going to give any of these nonexistent WMDs to Al Qaeda. Democracy has not marched into the Arab world, or anywhere else, for that matter. Among Arabs, the US is not seen as a liberator but as a hypocritical bully. The only sensible way to categorize the decision to invade is as the incoherent bastard child of 19th-century imperialism. It was and remains arrogant and foolish and very, very bloody. A lot of people are dead to no sane end --dead for hubris, profiteering, and idiocy.

Of course, there are those who disagree. These people are, in a word, lunatics. "Cultists" also fits. Or "freaks." "Cretins." "Wingnuts."

A harsh assessment, to be sure, but hey, it's the truth. The stout defenders of the decision to go to war in the first place like to get all upset about the "9/11 was an inside job" crowd, but they're just as far out there, every bit as obnoxious, and have a far louder public megaphone. They're goofy and smarmy like Scientologists, only without Tom Cruise's undeniably excellent hair.

Stephen Hayes, for instance, still thinks there were too WMDS and Saddam & Osama were, like, totally fucking!11!ONE11! Rob Farley's response to Hayes is the correct one, though I'd add that it's pretty funny that Greater Wingnuttia is getting all hepped up about a report that was clearly meant to make the best case for Iraq's Ties to Teh Islamisistic Bin Laden Terr'ists as could possibly be made... only to have the government deliberately sit on the report because the evidence for such a proposition was thinner than Nicole Ritchie right after Ramadan. If this report said what Hayes pretends it does, there would have been a fucking speech from the Oval Office, not just a shriek from the rubber rooms at the Weekly Standard. Duh. Paranoid, ignorant gits.

But Hayes is not the only kook out there. Here's an entertaining giggle from one of the daintier flowers in the Red State chuckle-patch, referring specifically to Hayes' bleatings:

what we do know about the report suggests that those who are so certain the original justification for the war was so fatally flawed that it has rendered the entire enterprise invalid might want to reconsider their position in the light of what we know now as opposed to what we knew in 2003. Based on that knowledge, they might want to give some thought to an alternate history of the last five years--a history in which we did not invade Iraq. Would we now be consumed with Obama's pastor and Spitzer's hooker, or would our attention be on more serious threats to our national security?

Fortunately for all of us, that's a question we don't have to answer.

Never mind all the dead people! The two trillion dollars down the shitter!

Elvis has Saddam's WMD's in Bigfoot's UFO, and they're about to parachute them down on Bin Laden's backyard barbecue on his pool deck. Quick, let's invade Paraguay.

Fuck.