Robert Dreyfuss, writing at Tom Paine, has some ideas about the looming catastrophe that is Iraq:

With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration’s policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq.

The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney— to no avail— that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war. They said so before the war, during it and in the aftermath, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the U.S. intelligence community’s chief Middle East analyst, from Wayne White, the State Department’s chief intelligence analyst on Iraq and from two CIA Baghdad station chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that pre-war intelligence on Iraq was distorted by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.

Keen observers have pointed out for some time that the mission Mr Bush claims God sent him on was flawed. One just doesn’t “civilize” and “Christianize” a country by the sword. It didn’t work in the Middle Ages and it won’t work in the 21st century. All those who actually knew what Iraq was like – those who invested their lives in learning about the Middle East in general, and Iraq in particular - were sneeringly despised, and vilified when they dared to speak up, interjecting that what those armchair Napoleons lied and schemed about couldn’t happen. Excoriated with all the sycophancy the RWNM is famous for, which by the way is standard operating procedure with nay-sayers of any stripe. The basic rule is: when confronted with facts, ramp up the volume four notches and begin the ad hominem attacks.

James Wolcott has some thoughts on all that:

Poor President Bush, prince of fools. He let the neoconservative creative destructors play upon his religiosity (and Cheney's power hunger) and persuade him that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be a transformative moment that would set democracy and freedom in motion across the region, and crown him in history with Churchillian honor. I believe Bush wanted democracy in Iraq, or convinced himself that he believed it after the Chalabi-as-chess-king scheme fell through, because such belief flatters his pride in his own idealism. But the intellectual architects of the policy didn't care. If there was peace and stability in the new Iraq that would strength America's power in the region and bolster Israeli security, fine; if Iraq fissured into factional strife, fire, and chaos, better still.

I’m a bit more sanguine than Mr Wolcott, but sadly not as eloquent. For the True Believers of PNAC this was the Holy Grail of American Weltpolitik for the 21st and 22nd century. Given the ebbing of world power exercised by the Soviet Union after the breakup of that political entity, they saw an opportunity to sew up a large portion of geography by creating an overseas empire before China began casting farther afield for spheres of influence. Energized by their exploding economy, the Chinese would soon be starving for new sources of raw materials, as Japan was in the 1930s, and there was a fairly small window if opportunity. Mr Bush, of course, was driven by a simpler goal: money for himself and his cronies, and the political power that money provides.
Mr Dreyfuss again:

"For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn’t even alarming: they just didn’t care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans to John Bolton’s arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney’s shadow National Security Council in the Office of the Vice President from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.
"In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous 'Clean Break' paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : 'The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.' After Saddam, Iraq would 'be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,' he wrote. 'Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.' Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to 'expedite' such a collapse. 'The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.'

So they knew the chaos was coming, planned for it, and indeed implemented it in every way possible. Chaos provides distraction, diverts the eye from what is really happening. Many of us are hardly surprised to see these thoughts finally articulated.

"Such black neoconservative fantasies—which view the Middle East as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will—have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real."

The deaths of hundreds of thousands are of little consequence when measured against the economic gains planned by these people.