Mad Social Scientist

TPM meditates on who's reponsible for a war of choice gone wrong:

For myself, it's not so much the horror of what we're seeing itself. Certainly, history is littered with far greater outrages. But how exactly did we find ourselves on the doling out end of this stuff? Morally, how did it happen? And in simply pragmatic terms, since this was a grand gambit for hearts and minds in a region awash in anti-Americanism and autocracy, how exactly did we get here? More than anything, a self-inflicted wound of this magnitude just leaves you speechless.

Matthew Yglesias recalls these lines from Apocalypse Now:

Kurtz: "What did they tell you?"
Willard: "They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound."
Kurtz: "Are my methods unsound?"
Willard: "I don't see any method, at all, sir."