The Little Brown Reader

"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."

Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:

"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"

The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.

The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."