Remember how W. Bush blew off the August 6, 2001 CIA memo -- "Osama determined to strike in the

[JHB]

6. I remember after the US Cole bombing...

...the neocons advised "Bomb Saddam". It didn't matter that there was no hint of him being involved, we "had to show the Arab Street that you don't mess with us."

The administration, not being a pack of ideologues rebreathing each others' hot air, took the more sensible course of finding out who did it so that we could retaliate against the actual culprits. That took up most of the remaining three months of his term, and the information was handed to the incoming administration.

Which did nothing.

Filled with chickenhawk neocons from the PNAC Gallery, they'd spent the previous eight years shouting "bomb Saddam" every time something happened in the Middle East, and sneering at Clinton for being "obsessed" with "a guy in a tent". "Non-state actors aren't A serious threat", they thought, and they thought they knew more than anyone and everyone else.

They were wrong then. They're still wrong.

And they've never learned. They haven't learned a damn thing.