Pierce writes: "I don't know why people are acting shocked - SHOCKED! - by one particular revelation from Peter Baker's new book about the Avignon Presidency."



Former president George W. Bush. (photo: Getty Images)

Iraq: The Bush Gang's Excellent Adventure

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

don't know why people are acting shocked - SHOCKED! - by one particular revelation from Peter Baker's new book about the Avignon Presidency.

A book written by New York Times reporter Peter Baker reveals the take of a senior official from former President George W. Bush's administration, who is quoted as saying that America went into Iraq to 'find somebody's ass to kick'. Baker's book titled, 'Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House', reveals some astonishing details about the Iraq War. The anonymous official claims that the only reason US went into Iraq was to look for a fight adding that Afghanistan was too easy...

This is no surprise. Paul O'Neill told us years ago that Iraq was on the schedule from about thirty seconds after the Supreme Court handed the presidency to C-Plus Augustus. Donald Rumsfeld, that old bag of sins, said pretty much the same thing on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. And he said it again at the same time that they were launching their excellent adventure. And wasn't this essentially the same guiding principle that lay behind the remark that should have decent people spitting on Thomas Friedman to this day?

We spent nearly a decade as a nation, and we lost 5000 of our fellow citizens, and, as a nation, we killed somewhere north of 100,000 Iraqis, because we were led through a period of national trauma by a claque of plutocratic sociopaths with the collective emotional maturity of a junior-high nose tackle. One day, historians are going to drink heavily.