Iraq War: 'The Fruit Of A Poisoned Tree'

Although they come from rather different places, Thomas Ricks and Michael Totten are two of the giants of Iraq war journalism, and that's saying something considering what a sucky job the news media has done in covering the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history.

They recently had a chat that is a must read, and two things jumped out at me: Ricks' view that "everything in Iraq is the fruit of a poisoned tree" because the pre-emptive invasion was based on false premises, and that the transition to Barack Obama actually began in Iraq two years before it began back home.

This is because the Bush administration had screwed things up so badly that they turned the war over to its internal critics. The result was the Surge.