Laura Rozen’s new Mother Jones piece on McCain’s main foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann is a great thing to read today, because it makes you grateful to the current financial implosion for keeping these lunatics out of office:
Brooke says he met Scheunemann in 1996 when he and Chalabi were hitting Capitol Hill to try to drum up increased US government support for the Iraqi opposition. Brooke’s pitch then was that putting pressure on Saddam Hussein was not just the right policy; it was also a vehicle for attacking Bill Clinton, then running for reelection. “I thought it was a good time to educate the Republican Congress…and give them the ammunition they needed to beat the president up.” In Scheunemann and other hardliners on the Hill, Brooke says he found kindred spirits—a clique of Republicans deeply disillusioned with how George H.W. Bush had let both the Cold War and the first Iraq War end without meting out sufficient punishment to America’s adversaries. “These people had a great sense of psychic loss that we had not finished the first Iraq War in the most comprehensive way. They hated George Bush the first.”
The rest is even worse.