War is fun, if you're not the one who's dying. Or if you're the guy playing with the little plastic soldiers and tanks on your desk and shouting "boom!" before knocking over the soldiers with the tank and taking prisoners by flicking the soldiers off the desk and onto the floor.

The guy at the desk is George W. Bush. The plastic soldiers represents the lives of our sons and daughters. When George W. walks around the Oval Office in bare feet and accidently steps on a plastic soldier, I'm sure it hurts like hell. But it's nothing like the loss of a leg or an eye.

That distinction was lost on President Ding-Dong in early 2003. We know from the so-called Downing Street Memos that a secret meeting between British and American diplomats revealed that the case for war was being manipulated to show that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. When news of the Downing Street Memos broke a few years ago, the media looked the other way and the American public yawned, if they knew about it to begin with.

Some more smoking gun memos surfaced a few weeks ago, this time from Spain. Same story. According to ThinkProgress.org,

the Spanish newspaper El Pais published a transcript of a discussion between President Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in February 2003 in which Bush told Aznar that the U.S. would go to war with Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein with or without a UN resolution:

“We must take him right now. We have shown an incredible degree of patience until now. There are two weeks left. In two weeks we will be militarily ready.”

Though Aznar asked Bush to “have a little patience” and urged, “It is very important to have a [UN] resolution,” Bush pushed for war throughout the meeting, telling the Spanish Prime Minister, “We will be in Baghdad by the end of March.”

Just a few days later, Bush insisted to the American public that war with Iraq was not a certainty.

This memo shows Bush just itchin' for war, describing the tedious process of diplomacy as "Chinese Water Torture." His swagger in boasting about the coming war drips off the page. Like a child who can't wait for the toy soldiers to arrive in the mail. More analysis here, including a transcript of the memo.