Simon, Maureen Dowd! You mean the elderly schoolgirl of the NYT. Doesnt get any lighter weight than that.

Regarding the various interviews with Feith, they all just show what a trivial medium TV is when people are out to score cheap and boring points - eg the war has gone badly, you didnt anticipate x and y. All of which can be said about any war. What the book shows, and what nobody else here seems serious enough to contemplate, is that the situation with Iraq had been a mess for a long time and was unravelling fast. The Feith book shows a bunch of policy makers -bureaucrats and political appointees - grappling with a situation where there was no easy or safe decision to be made. They were aware that 9/11 could have been 30,000 dead. They didn't know what was coming next, but they now knew that there was no limit to the scale of attack if the weapons were available.

You can read the book and still disagree with the decision, but then you have to contemplate the messiness that was likely to eventuate in other forms. Most of the comments here seem almost unhinged in comparison to Feith's account of political leaders struggling with a situation in which there was no easy, or even good, decision to be made.

Stumbling upon this discussion is like chancing upon a conference of UFO enthusiasts. Naomi Klein for gods sakes! Klein v Friedman - you must be joking. Read something serious first, not a conspiracy theorist whackjob. An account from the inside is a good place to begin. Try for a starter a view from the inside of US policy: War and Decision, by D J Feith, former under secretary for Defence.