Professor Cole rips Georgie a new one

This is blistering:

For all the world like a latter day Gen. Jack Ripper as depicted in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Bush was going to fly a US spy plane over Iraq painted in UN colors, in hopes Saddam would have it shot down, so as to provoke a war (and 'protect our precious bodily fluids?'). This crackpot idea doesn't make any sense to me, and suggests the truth of the rumors that Bush never really did give up drinking heavily (or maybe it can only be explained by doing lines). The UN doesn't have spy planes and everyone knows it. And, wouldn't Secretary General Kofi Annan have pointed this out?

...

The memo also makes clear that Bush and Blair had already decided to go to war no matter what, regardless of the United Nations Security Council. Bush had "pencilled in" March 10 (was it an item in his social calendar?) Blair committed to the plan, though he preferred a second UNSC resolution. That he committed in advance is embarrassing to him, since he only received British parliamentary approval to so commit on March 18, a month and a half later. Blair's office refused to comment on the memo, discussed in a new edition of Philippe Sands's Lawless World.

I know there are some sitting around and saying, "so we all know Bush wanted this war from the beginning".

This seems to ignore two things:

1. Starting a war without justification is not just a "War Crime" it is the very definition of a war crime. This isn't some new post-World War Two concept, it has been been the accepted basis of International Law since Hugo Grotius and morally a crime for even longer.

2. Bush has always, always denied this truth. By saying "so we all knew" it legitimizes Presidential lying on a far more substantive and deadly scale than denying you had sexual relations with a woman who gave you a blowjob.