Best post of the year. So far, anyway. One winning paragraph of many:

*I wasn’t born yesterday.* I had heard of the Middle East before September 12, 2001. I knew that many of the loudest advocates for war with Iraq were so-called national-greatness conservatives who spent the 1990s arguing that war was good for the soul. I remembered Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter and Michael Ledeen as the knaves and fools of Iran-Contra, and drew the appropriate conclusions about the Bush Administration wanting to employ them: it was an administration of knaves and fools.