Blame, Blindness .  .  .  
Richard Cohen, The Washington Post, Tuesday, February 3, 2004; Page A19

And it ends with this:

But any truth commission worth its name would have to look beyond the government.  It would be instructive to examine the yahoo mood that came over much of the nation once Bush decided to go to war.  The decision -- its urgency -- seemed to come out of nowhere.  Yet most of America fell into line, and in certain segments of the media, the Murdoch press above all, dissent was ridiculed.  On Fox TV, France was called a member of the "axis of weasels" and antiwar demonstrators in Davos were disparaged as "knuckleheads."  Colorful stuff, but wrong, irresponsible and craven. 

I do not take myself off the hook.  The mood got to me, too.  And while I kept insisting that the Bush administration was exaggerating the case for war, was in too much of a hurry and was incapable of assembling a true coalition, I nevertheless went along with the program. 

There is much cause for concern here.  A consensus -- based on false facts, outright lies and exaggerated fears -- took over the nation.  We didn't go on a bender, as we did after Pearl Harbor, and incarcerate a particular ethnic group, but we did go to war when we plainly did not have to.  More than 500 Americans and thousands of Iraqis have died for a mistake.  Peace has not been brought to the Middle East and America is not only no safer than it was, it may well be in even greater danger.  This was no mere failure of intelligence.  This was a failure of character. 

Why?  No newspaper column could provide all the answers.  But we were clearly unnerved by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent -- and now mostly overlooked -- anthrax attacks, which disproportionately affected the news media.  Saddam Hussein provided us with a nifty and useful personification of evil -- not to mention spurious links to al Qaeda.  He was something familiar, Hitler and Stalin all over again.  There was an understandable urge to settle some scores.  Finally, though, there was smugness -- the sort of American exceptionalism that so rankles non-Americans.  No one better exemplified that than Bush himself.  He proclaimed a divine right to unilateralism, oozed a smugness bred of incuriousness and an airy dismissal of dissent.  He knew what he knew with such fiery certainty that even now he seems incapable of facing reality.  He's like a kid who refuses to accept the fact that there is no Santa Claus. 

By all means, proceed with the independent commission.  A huge mistake has been made, and we need to know why.  But if for a moment we think that it was the CIA alone that took us to war, then we will have learned nothing from what happened.  That would be the gravest intelligence failure of them all.

Oh yeah, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an editorial this week with the headline 'Whoops' doesn't work for wars - so I guess a few folks are getting a bit grumpy about things. 

But a deeply frightened and angry population will still reelect (or elect) Bush by a landslide. 

We're a forgiving people, even if a bit too smug for the French. 

Too smug for the French?  Now there's a switch!  Oh, the irony!

And you will also note the Post item mentions that it "would be instructive to examine the yahoo mood that came over much of the nation."  The use of "Yahoo" is curious.  The term was made popular, in its current sense, by Jonathan Swift in Book Four of Gulliver's Travels - you could look it up.  Read it carefully.  But I have mentioned Swift far too often here.