Let's not forget Mark Bowden, who wrote on Salon back in late 2002 that he had no idea why the US had not already gone in and brought down Saddam, and predicted it would all go swimmingly. That was about ten months before he wrote a piece about the merits of torture in The Atlantic, and about six months before he wrote a piece about how cool and fun it was to be in a US airforce fighter jet bombing terrorists in Afghanistan. Oh, they weren't all terrorists? Well, those are the breaks, I guess.

Thanks for this. I'm an anthropologist who has lived in the middle east for more than a decade. I speak, read and write Arabic, and have been amazed at what I have learned from friends in DC who work with the DoD. The knowledge of the language, culture, history, and politics of the Middle East is below zero, and no one seems to care. The ignorance is exceeded only by the arrogance. And a lot of people -- Iraqis and Americans -- are going to be paying for this for a generation at least.