E Pluribus Unum

The mast-head on Andrew Sullivan's blog quotes George Orwell: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Well, he's struggling with the obvious all right -- and losing:

One thing that today's high gas prices strongly suggest is that, whatever else it was, the Iraq war was surely not about oil. If you care about cheap oil above everything else, you'd have found some deal with Saddam, kept the oil fields pumping, and maintained the same realist policy toward Arab and Muslim autocracies we had for decades.

This is like a lawyer arguing that because his client used the wrong combination on a safe, surely he didn't mean to steal anything.

[...]

[A]scribing competence and intellectual rigor to the Bush administration---the assumption that it thought the war though carefully beforehand, weighing the risks and possible consequences, instead of using its patented faith-based approach. Based on what we know now about the prewar planning, and in light of Katrina, Miers, Kerik, Plamegate and everything else, exactly how is that assumption justified?

"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."