Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

What I'm describing here, Marshall, is that while September 11th has commonly been referred

to as a failure of the imagination, the Iraq War was the opposite. It was a fail, it was

the imagination run a month. It was people imagining worst case scenarios that if we don't

do this, something awful is going to happen. And continually what we would hear in the ensuing

months as Bush began to be very explicit about what he believed was the Saddam threat.

Explicit to the American public, he would say, you can only imagine, we can only imagine

that Saddam would love to be involved in the next attack, hand over his weapons of mass

destruction to Al-Qaeda, and walk away without so much as a fingerprint. Every part of that

scenario is made up. He didn't have weapons, he didn't confederate with Al-Qaeda, and he

didn't want to do a sim.

We've got a crazy mid-summer week for breaking points. Publishing schedule so unfortunately,

Sagar cannot join this episode, but as we committed earlier in the season, we are going to publish

these as much as possible and not take breaks. Quick note for anyone who is interested in the

podcasting space, when we do not publish an episode or we do something lighter like a Q&A episode,

our downloads just collapse by a decent amount. It takes a little bit of time to get them back up

again. So we are just going to keep consistently publishing as much as possible. Of course,

there'll be a bit more of a break between the Christmas season, but we're just going to keep

on going because it's been really heartening to know if there's all these people here who are

tuning into the conversations with Godless of how we're setting everything up. But to the actual

show itself, I've wanted to do this episode forever. I'm speaking with Robert Draper. He's a writer

large for the Neertimes magazine, and he's the author of To Start a War, How the Bush Administration

...