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I'm still in the middle of of reading Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, and once I'm done I'll have quite a bit to say about what I've learned and how its changed my views of this administration and its war.

But in the meantime, Andrew Sullivan has picked up on one of the threads I plan to explore in detail. Although there were in fact a limited number of people involved in the drive to take us to war with Iraq, each of the players had their own reasons for doing so.

Andrew believes, as I now do, that with our president, it was a "fundamentalist mindset" that played the critical role. Having made the decision, he has been both unwilling and unable to reconsider it, necessitating his endless emphasis on "staying the course" under any and all circumstances. What's missing from this explanation, however, is an understanding of how he arrived at the initial decision in the first place. There, I think Fiasco adds an extraordinarily important piece to the puzzle, one which I have yet to hear aired elsewhere.

For those of you who've already picked up your copy of the book, the critical moment comes on page 51. For those who don't, it involves VP Cheney's speech on August 26, 2002 to the 103rd National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It was a moment I only vaguely remember, one of a string of speeches given in the run up to the war that made me feel as if it was all unstoppable. In hindsight, however, it is a moment of critical importance. For the first time, the VP claimed we knew with certainty that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. For the record, Cheney's words:

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth.

The rest of the speech went on to set out what would become the rationale for the war. But that's not surprised me most about it. From Fiasco, this is:

Inside the Bush administration Cheney's speech hit like a preemptive strike. Bush himself had been at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when it was delivered. "My understanding was that the president himself was very surprised at that speech, because it was kind of constraining his options, said a former senior Bush administration. "It had the effect of somewhat limiting the president's options, in my view."

Although that passage is the most clear-cut evidence provided by Ricks that Cheney deliberately acted to constrain the president's options, it is far from the only example cited in the book. Time and again, it seems, the president was outmaneuvered and deliberately blind-sided by his subordinates.

Although this certainly does not paint a positive picture of Bush's leadership, it does, I must admit, force me to rethink his decisions prior to the war. Until now, I had been convinced that Bush himself had made the decision to go to war early on, and that for months he had misled the nation into believing otherwise. Ricks, however, paints a portrait of a president who remained undecided for much longer than I had originally thought. As his subordinates gradually foreclosed both his options and the information available to him, however, he came to the conclusion that war was in fact necessary. And it is at this point that Sullivan's "fundamentalist mindset" came into play - having committed to the decision, Bush never looked back. Worse, having truly convinced himself that the war was both justified and necessary to defend the nation and its people, and having brought himself to a point of not just certainty but faith in that decision, he came to believe that any questioning of the decision was in fact dangerous and unpatriotic.

With Cheney and Rumsfeld, however, it was something else entirely. Sullivan suggests what he's dubbed "the Likud strategy," but from my reading of Fiasco so far, combined with what I've read of Cobra II, I don't buy that explanation. In both cases, I think there are much less extreme (and therefore, in my opinion, much more believable) interpretations possible. I say think, however, because I've not yet completed the book.

More soon, I promise...