Total Information Awareness

This is just bizarre. Apparently President Bush has had the gun that Saddam was captured with mounted and put on display in the White House, and he shows it off to select visitors. "He really liked showing it off," Time quoted a visitor as saying. "He was really proud of it." Next thing you know, we are going to hear stories of Bush learning to play the fiddle....

The rest of the article can be found here.

William E. Odom, a retired three star general and the head of the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration, says that President Bush should "eat a little humble pie," admit the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and seek U.N. forces to take over for U.S. troops. Odom argues that Iraq will never become a liberal democracy. He also warns that "we've also nearly broken the U.S. Army by over-extension and over-commitment."

Below are excerpts from an interview given to the Council on Foreign Relations:

"It was not in our interest to enter Iraq in the first place. It was, however, in the interest of Osama bin Laden for us to destroy a secular Arab leader; it was very much in the interest of the Iranians because they wanted revenge against Saddam Hussein for Iraq's invasion in 1980.

Our presence in Iraq risks turning it into a country that could become the base for terrorist operations and organizations like al Qaeda. Of the three war aims that the president set out-destruction of weapons of mass destruction, overthrowing Saddam's regime, and creating a liberal democracy there-the first has supposedly been accomplished, although it seems to have been accomplished before we invaded; the second, as I just pointed out, was not in our interest, it's more in our opponents' interest; and the third I don't think is possible.

Our creating a liberal democracy there is not going to happen any time soon. We're more likely to have an illiberal democracy with theocratic rulers, very much as in Iran. And any Iraqi [leader] who has much legitimacy with the population cannot afford to be pro-Western or pro-United States. Therefore, once U.S. forces leave, it is almost inevitable that an anti-Western, anti-U.S. regime will arise. I don't see that as an outcome that makes sense for the United States. In fact, it struck me when we invaded last year that if we did it without European and East Asian support, we were risking losing our alliance in Europe in exchange for Iraq, and that is a very undesirable exchange."

I think I know what the neo-conservative rebuttal will be: "General Odom is an un-patriotic, appeaser, anti-Semitic, Clintonite, supporter of John Kerry, and a terrorist looking to profit on the sale of his upcoming book (nevermind the fact he hasn't written one)"

Thomas Friedman, in yesterday's Op-Ed column, lays out a thoughtful and innovative series of measures to be taken as part of a forward looking foreign policy, in partial response to the utter lack of vision emanating from the Bush White House.

Friedman takes the all important step from criticism to affirmative proposal, a step that is easy to overlook amidst the charged discourse of an election year in a politically polarized environment. It is much easier to criticize than it is to propose solutions, because solutions are hard to come by while criticism is often obvious, especially when observing the consistently incompetent foreign policy conducted by the Bush administration.

Also of note, Friedman actually proposes some politically sensitive, yet well reasoned, solutions such as a 50 cent "patriot tax" on gasoline, the proceeds of which would be used to help fund the military actions currently under way and also fund research into alternative fuel technologies. This is a similar tax to the one John Kerry supported almost a decade ago, for which the Bush campaign has misleadingly portrayed as his current position. Not that a 50 cent gas tax should be viewed, necessarily, as a bad thing, as Friedman points out.

The column can be found here.

Yesterday, The New York Times has issued a rare, if not unprecedented, broad correction for the pre-war coverage by the esteemed paper. According to the Times, "we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge."

In particular, the Times acknowledges shortcomings in the rigor and balance in the coverage of WMDs in Iraq and illusory ties to al Qaeda reported on in the run-up to the invasion.

While they accept responsibility for the errors and misrepresentations, the editors point to a now infamous source of misinformation upon which they relied: Ahmed Chalabi and his coterie of defectors.

"The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmed Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one."

So the Times admits to passing on hyped, propogandized and erroneous reports exaggerating Iraq's WMD capacities and ties to al Qaeda, and in many cases these articles were in turn relied on by other periodicals in an echo-chamber effect.

But some have suggested that this apology did not go far enough. Considering that one of the mistakes acknowledged was the failure to place articles correcting or qualifying prior articles as prominently as the original front page accusations, it is important to note that this mea culpa was also buried deep within the paper well beyond the reach of the front page.

A valuable and informative assessment of the mistakes and mishandling of pre-war coverage by the Times, as well as the Washington Post, Knight-Ridder, CNN, and other media sources can be found here. I strongly recommend it.

The rest of the article can be found here.

On Wednesday the National Archives released over 20,000 pages of records of telephone conversations of then National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger. The release came only after a lawsuit by the non-profit National Security Archive forced the release over the objections of Kissinger.

The parallels in some of the discussions to today's events are eerie. "News had just broken of a terrible wrongdoing committed by American soldiers, and the secretary of defense and the national security adviser debated whether there was any way to stop newspapers and television news programs from showing graphic photographs of the victims."

"'They're pretty terrible,'" said Melvin R. Laird, the secretary of defense, of the color photographs of the men, women and children killed in the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam."

"'There are so many kids just laying there; these pictures are authentic,'" Mr. Laird said.

But I suppose that John Kerry was completely out of line when he suggested that there were war crimes and atrocities being committed in Vietnam.

The rest of the article can be found here.

Yesterday, I wrote how The International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), a pro-war non-partisan think tank located in London, in its annual survey of world affairs, confirmed what many have feared: that the mismanagement of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has actually hurt the efforts of the war against radical Muslim terrorists.

But I failed to point out the pro-war pedigree of the IISS:

"The IISS has strong establishment links, with former US and British government officials among its members. The Foreign Office contributed £100,000 towards the setting up of its headquarters in central London, and Baroness Thatcher and Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, then secretary general of NATO, attended the opening.

The IISS dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, published on 9 September 2002, was edited by Gary Samore, formerly of the US State Department, and presented by Dr John Chipman, a former NATO fellow. It was immediately seized on by Bush and Blair administrations as providing 'proof' that Saddam was just months away from launching a chemical and biological, or even a nuclear attack. Large parts of the IISS document were subsequently recycled in the now notorious Downing Street dossier, published with a foreword by the Prime Minister, the following week."

And there are several new details about the report that have been presented in an article appearing in the British newspaper, The Independent:

"The US and British occupation of Iraq has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and made the world a less safe place, according to a leading London-based think-tank.

The assessment, by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), states that the occupation has become 'a potent global recruitment pretext' for al-Qa'ida, which now has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike Western targets.

The IISS report, published yesterday, says that the Iraq invasion 'galvanised' al-Qa'ida while weakening the campaign against terrorism. At the same time it has split the Western alliance, leaving the US and Britain isolated.

The report amounts to a sustained condemnation of US and British tactics, especially during the post-war period. Beginning with the decision of Paul Bremer, the US head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), to dissolve the Iraqi army - leaving a security vacuum - it criticises the occupation tactics of American troops who stayed in large fortified bases and only emerged in heavily armed patrols.

The report adds that later swoops, which led to mass arrests, and aggressive house searches 'perversely inspired insurgent violence'.

Jonathan Stevenson, the editor of the survey, said: 'Invading Iraq damaged the war on terror, there is no doubt about that. It has strengthened rather than weakened al-Qa'ida.'

The report also highlights the shortcomings of US policy after the toppling of Saddam. It says: 'The lawlessness and looting that greeted the liberation of Baghdad on 9 April 2003 was replaced by widespread criminality, violence and instability. A year later, US troops and newly constituted Iraqi forces faced an insurgency that had become a solid obstacle to rebuilding the country and moving it towards democracy and stability.'

Unable to cope with the situation, the US is now acquiescing to the formation of new private militias similar to the one patrolling Fallujah, says the IISS.

The CPA, says the report, has little knowledge of the area it is meant to control. And Iraqi exiles brought back to the country by the Americans to become the new political elite 'are very unpopular ... they have not managed to penetrate Iraqi society, mobilise support or engender allegiance'."

Nicholas Kristof, in today's Op-Ed column, has done a fine job of describing just how dire the situation is in Israel, and how this is undermining our efforts in Iraq, in the Middle East and in our war against the spread of radical anti-American Islam.

As Kristof puts it, "Our embrace of Mr. Sharon hobbles us in Iraq even more than those photos from Abu Ghraib. Iraqis (in contrast with, say, Kuwaitis) genuinely sympathize with the Palestinians, and everywhere I've been in Iraq ordinary people have asked me why Americans provide the weapons Mr. Sharon uses to kill Palestinians."

He also points out that both Kerry and Bush have refused to criticize Sharon despite the open letter to the Bush administration penned by 50 former U.S. diplomats composed of bi-partisan policymakers. Of course, given the fact that Howard Dean was excoriated by both parties and the media when he had the temerity to suggest that the U.S. should be "even-handed" with Israel and the Palestinians during the Democratic primaries, is it any wonder why neither Kerry nor Bush has taken a tougher stance with Sharon. Kristof quotes the letter as saying:

"You have proved that the United States is not an evenhanded peace partner. . . . Your unqualified support of Sharon's extrajudicial assassinations, Israel's Berlin Wall-like barrier, its harsh military measures in occupied territories, and now your endorsement of Sharon's unilateral plan are costing our country its credibility, prestige and friends. This endorsement is not even in the best interests of Israel."

Following up on the point that Sharon's policies have actually been bad for Israel, he states, "Indeed, my guess is that Mr. Sharon has done more to undermine Israel's long-term security than Yasir Arafat ever did. Mr. Sharon's actions have knocked the legs out from under Palestinian moderates and have bolstered Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mr. Sharon means well 'he wants to stop terrorism' but his policies have led Palestinians to turn to Islamic extremists rather than secular nationalists. Now even the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist group, has found God and quotes from the Koran.

Particularly in a new age when terrorist attacks could use W.M.D. to kill perhaps thousands at a time, Israel can achieve safety only through a peace agreement with the Palestinians. A model is the unofficial Geneva accord of last October, reached between courageous Israelis and Palestinians "the very people we should be supporting."

Salon.com does a spectacular expose of Douglas Feith, the neo-conservative stalwart who occupies the number 3 civilian post in the Pentagon, behind Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. While Feith, the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy, might be number 3 in the Pentagon, he is number 1 in terms of mistakes, scandals and blunders, or as Chris Suellentrop puts it, a sort of "Michael Dukakis in reverse: ideology without competence."

Among his many policy highlights, "Feith oversaw the two offices that have since been criticized for politicizing intelligence and for inadequately planning for the occupation [of Iraq]. The first group was known as the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit, and it was established to find links between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. The group issued a report about connections between Iraq and al-Qaida that Rumsfeld had Feith deliver to CIA Director George Tenet in August 2002. This was reportedly the same report that Vice President Cheney recently called 'your best source of information' on the links between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

But the report has been widely discredited. Tenet told a congressional committee in March that Cheney was mistaken about its reliability. And Daniel Benjamin, former director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, wrote in Slate that, far from proving Saddam-Osama ties, "the document lends substance to the frequently voiced criticism that some in the Bush administration have misused intelligence to advance their policy goals."

The other office Feith oversees, the Office of Special Plans, probably wrought even worse damage that the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit: Its job was postwar planning, which even many conservatives now admit has been a disaster. As USA Today's Walter Shapiro put it this month when he summed up a one-year anniversary panel discussion on Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute (hardly a bastion of the antiwar left): 'An easy summary of the overall impression fostered by the panel would be: Right war, wrong postwar plan.'" Not to mention the role that the Office of Special Plans played in hyping up intelligence about WMDs in Iraq in an effort to circumvent the CIA and provide the administration with the backing for its arguments.

Given this impressive track record, it should come as no surprise that Feith's office is in charge of Iraq's military prisons, including Abu Ghraib. In fact, as Suellentrop points out, 'It was Feith who devised the legal solution for getting around the Geneva Conventions' prohibition on physically or psychologically coercing prisoners of war into talking. As a Pentagon official in the 1980s, Feith had laid out the argument that terrorists didn't deserve protection under the Geneva Conventions. Once the war on terrorism started, all he had to do was implement it. And even more damning than his legal rule-making is Feith's reported reaction to complaints by military Judge Advocate General lawyers about the new, looser interrogation rules. 'They said he had a dismissive, if not derisive, attitude toward the Geneva Conventions,' Scott Horton, a lawyer who was approached by six outraged JAG officers last year, told the Chicago Tribune. "One of them said he calls it 'law in the service of terror.'"

In his speech on Monday night, President Bush sought to downplay the abuse, torture and murder of detainees by U.S. military personnel, intelligence personnel and civilian contractors claiming that the actions were limited to the Abu Ghraib prison and were conducted "by a few American troops who disregarded our country and disregarded our values." In addition, he proposed razing the Abu Ghraib prison, as if the prison itself were the problem and that its destruction would wash away the sins of the abusers.

Unfortunately, the "few bad apples" theory and the one prison gone wild theory, have become increasingly discredited. The latest blow to this combination of wishful thinking and willful ignorance comes in the form of a survey prepared by the U.S. Army which is reported in today's New York Times. The survey, dated May 5, "is a synopsis prepared by the Criminal Investigation Command at the request of Army officials."

According to this survey, the abuse, torture and homicides of detainees involved many more military units than previously reported (certainly more than 7 MPs from one unit), occurred at more locations than Abu Ghraib (both inside Iraq and in Afghanistan), and occurred over a much larger time frame than claimed by Bush administration officials.

In terms of time frame, the report concludes that, "The cases from Iraq date back to April 15, 2003, a few days after Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in a Baghdad square, and they extend up to last month, when a prisoner detained by Navy commandos died in a suspected case of homicide blamed on 'blunt force trauma to the torso and positional asphyxia.'"

The types of abuse described in the report range from physical assaults and a sexual assault by three male military personnel on a female detainee, to homicide. Also of note, the report indicates an increase in the number of deaths in custody than previously reported. "At a Pentagon briefing on Friday, a senior military official and a senior Pentagon medical official said the Army was investigating the deaths of 37 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, an increase from at least 25 deaths that a senior Army general described on May 4."

The investigations into the deaths have been hampered by decisions made by the Army early on in the process. "Among the 37 prisoners who have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army did not conduct autopsies and says it cannot determine the causes of the deaths."

Among the various locales that are mentioned in the report are two incidents "from Afghanistan in December 2002, where two prisoners died in one week at what was known as the Bagram Collection Point, where interrogations were overseen by a platoon from Company A, 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg. On March 4, 2003, The New York Times reported on the two deaths, noting that the cause given on one of the death certificates was 'homicide,' a result of 'blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease.' It was signed by an Army pathologist."

Another problem area was the detention center in center in Samarra, north of Baghdad. "In what appeared to be a serious case of abuse over a prolonged period of time, unidentified enlisted members of the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion, part of the California National Guard, were accused of abusing Iraqi detainees" at this detention center.

As the picture of widespread, cross-border, systematic and intentional abuse and torture becomes clearer, I wonder how much longer pundits and politicians can cling to the spin driven claim that a few bad apples misrepresented official policy? Especially when the reports describing the abuse are emerging from within the ranks of the U.S. Army, not "do-gooder" human rights groups. When will this administration take responsibility for the reckless policies by senior civilian officials in the Pentagon that led to these horrific conditions that have so compromised our efforts in the war in Iraq and the separate war against radical Islamist terrorists?

Yet another well-respected and bipartisan, if not right leaning, figure with ties to the Bush administration has had the courage to come out and criticize the President's policies. This time it is retired General Anthony Zinni, whose criticisms were summarized in an interview that aired this past Sunday on 60 Minutes.

By way of background:

"Retired General Anthony Zinni is one of the most respected and outspoken military leaders of the past two decades.

From 1997 to 2000, he was commander-in-chief of the United States Central Command, in charge of all American troops in the Middle East. That was the same job held by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf before him, and Gen. Tommy Franks after...

Zinni spent more than 40 years serving his country as a warrior and diplomat, rising from a young lieutenant in Vietnam to four-star general with a reputation for candor...

Following his retirement from the Marine Corps, the Bush administration thought so highly of Zinni that it appointed him to one of its highest diplomatic posts -- special envoy to the Middle East."

The heart of his criticism, as reported on the 60 Minutes broadcast:

"But Zinni broke ranks with the administration over the war in Iraq, and now, in his harshest criticism yet, he says senior officials at the Pentagon are guilty of dereliction of duty -- and that the time has come for heads to roll.

'There has been poor strategic thinking in this,' says Zinni. 'There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to "stay the course," the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure.'

'In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.'

'I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning,' says Zinni. 'The president is owed the finest strategic thinking. He is owed the finest operational planning. He is owed the finest tactical execution on the ground. He got the latter. He didn't get the first two.'"

Although hindsight is 20/20, Zinni was raising these same alarms and leveling these same criticisms before the first shot was ever fired:

"Zinni says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time - with the wrong strategy. And he was saying it before the U.S. invasion. In the months leading up to the war, while still Middle East envoy, Zinni carried the message to Congress: 'This is, in my view, the worst time to take this on. And I don't feel it needs to be done now.'"

Of course, Zinni had some very esteemed, and well decorated, company from within the ranks of the military elite. As reported in the broadcast:

"But he wasn't the only former military leader with doubts about the invasion of Iraq. Former General and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, and former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki all voiced their reservations.

'I can't speak for all generals, certainly. But I know we felt that this situation was contained. Saddam was effectively contained. The no-fly, no-drive zones. The sanctions that were imposed on him,' says Zinni.

'Now, at the same time, we had this war on terrorism. We were fighting al Qaeda. We were engaged in Afghanistan. We were looking at 'cells' in 60 countries. We were looking at threats that we were receiving information on and intelligence on. And I think most of the generals felt, let's deal with this one at a time. Let's deal with this threat from terrorism, from al Qaeda.'

Zinni says he blames the Pentagon for what happened. 'I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it - certain elements in there certainly - even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility,' he says.

'But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most.'

Adds Zinni: 'If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go.'

'Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced.'

Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the administration known as "the neo-conservatives" who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel. They include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle; National Security Council member Eliot Abrams; and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby."

Consistent with what has emerged as a nefarious pattern, after General Zinni first began publicly making his criticism of the administration and its various ideological wings, he encountered the same type of personal, vindictive and reckless attacks that were made against other administration insiders such as former Secretary of Treasury Paul O'Neill, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, former head of faith based initiatives John DiIulio, former ambassador Joseph Wilson (and his wife Valerie Plame), and others. Zinni recounted his experience thusly:

"And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested."

This priceless tidbit was lifted from The New Republic:

"Remember the Iraq Stabilization Group? Unveiled with much ballyhoo back in October, it was seen as Condi Rice's attempt to tear Iraq policy-making away from the fumbling Pentagon and centralize things at the White House.

In today's Washington Post, [The New Republic] alum and national treasure Dana Milbank presents a timely update on what has become of the four NSC staffers who were tapped to head the group:


"We're making good progress in Iraq," Bush said when asked about the group [in October]. "Condi's team is going to make sure that the efforts continue to be coordinated so that we continue to make progress." As described by administration officials, the group would have four components: counterterrorism, run by Frances F. Townsend; economic development, run by Gary R. Edson; political transition, run by Robert D. Blackwill; and public relations, run by Anna M. Perez.

And where are they now?

Perez has decamped for Hollywood, taking a job last month overseeing communications for NBC as it acquires Vivendi Universal Entertainment. The Hollywood Reporter ran a statement from Perez saying, "There couldn't be a more exciting time to join NBC as it prepares to become one of the world's largest and most dynamic media companies." Perez has been succeeded by Jim Wilkinson.

Townsend, too, has turned her attention to non-Iraq matters. Bush announced April 30 that she would become his homeland security adviser -- continuing to hold down her counterterrorism duties "until a replacement has been identified."

Edson remains on the job, but only nominally. Colleagues say he is focused almost entirely on being Bush's "sherpa" for the upcoming Group of Eight summit of world leaders, which the United States is hosting in Georgia next month.

That leaves Blackwill, the former ambassador to India, who is functioning as a one-man Iraq Stabilization Group. And while Blackwill remains devoted entirely to Iraq, he is being spread a bit thin: Bush announced April 19 that in addition to working with the United Nations and concentrating on "issues related to Iraq's governance," Blackwill would also become Bush's "presidential envoy to Iraq," serving with the new ambassador, John D. Negroponte.


What's really amazing about this is that the original purpose of the Iraq Stabilization Group was to do what the NSC was supposed to be doing anyway -- coordinating national security policy. When Condi Rice announced that she had created a splashy new group to do just that, it was the equivalent of, say, Communications Director Dan Bartlett announcing that he had assembled a group of press aides to coordinate the administration's communications strategy. That is, of course, his job.

So what happened to Rice's group? There are probably two possibilities. One is that Rice tried and failed to get control of the administration's Iraq policy. The other is that the announcement of the group was mostly just a public relations gimmick meant to help change the story back during a patch of rough news in October. Either way, the interagency process on Iraq still seems dysfunctional."

My quote of the day provided by the L.A. Times with a little introduction:

"Bush is facing a near-crisis of confidence over Iraq among many opinion leaders. On Sunday night, for example, retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the former commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Middle East and a former special envoy for Bush in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, said that Bush's current policy in Iraq was headed for disaster.

"'To think that we are going to, quote, stay the course — this course is headed over Niagara Falls,' Zinni said on CBS's 60 Minutes."

The International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), a non-partisan think tank located in Great Britain, in its annual survey of world affairs, has confirmed what many have feared: that the mismanagement of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has actually hurt the efforts of the war against radical Muslim terrorists.

At the onset of the execution of the war in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Bush administration, made a decision to conduct military operations with a minimum number of actual U.S. troops on the ground. This policy was dictated partly by the theory of combat advocated by Rumsfeld, that the U.S. could achieve its goals with a smaller, fast-moving, technologically advanced force, but moreso by the impending need for a large number of troops for the invasion of Iraq, which was already being planned at that stage. Committing a large number of troops in Afghanistan would have delayed the eventual invasion of Iraq.

The lack of adequate troop strength had devastating effects on the ability of the U.S. military to seal off the borders, particularly the oft-used crossing along the southeastern border with Pakistan, and to locate and capture senior members of Al-Qaeda seeking escape. As noted in the IISS study, "Driving the terror network out of Afghanistan in late 2001 appears to have benefited the group, which dispersed to many countries, making it almost invisible and hard to combat..."

The war in Iraq has also had a paradoxical effect on the war against radical terrorists, by providing Osama Bin Laden and other radicals with a recruitment tool that well exceeded their means and ability to concoct on their own. The enormous costs of the Iraq campaign (already in excess of $200 billion), the alienation of crucial allies, the steady stream of images of dead and mutilated civilians, images of tortured, abused and murdered detainees, and the use of the language of crusades by Bush and other senior military officials "has arguably focused the energies and resources of al Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition that appeared so formidable" after the Afghan intervention, the IISS survey said.

The long-term outlook expressed in the report was not promising either. "Efforts to defeat al Qaeda will take time and might accelerate only if there are political developments that now seem elusive, such as the democratization of Iraq and the resolution of conflict in Israel," the report said.

The report also echoed the conventional wisdom regarding troop strength requirements in Iraq. "It could take up to 500,000 U.S. and allied troops to effectively police Iraq and restore political stability," IISS researcher Christopher Langton told a news conference. When Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki made this recommendation before the war, Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz said that he was, "wildly off the mark." Currently there are approximately 150,000 U.S. and allied troops in Iraq.

The Washington Post reports on this report here

"An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," the book co-authored by neo-conservative champions Richard Perle and David Frum, lays out the neo-conservative manifesto for radically re-assessing U.S. foreign policies and goals in the post-9/11 world. Among the many recommendations, the authors call for either direct U.S. military action, or simply fomenting and funding armed uprisings, against Syria, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Lybia, to name a few. This series of preemptive, or perhaps more accurately preventitive, wars would be fought for the dual purpose of ensuring our security from these potentially hostile nations, as well as spreading democracy to these totalitarian states.

Furthermore, the authors take an extremely hostile and confrontational view of the U.N., and even the European Union, arguing that the U.N. is an enemy to peace, and that we must "acknowledge that a more closely integrated Europe is no longer an unqualified American interest." They urge, instead that we act unilaterally.

So, along with an extremely ambitious and misguided policy prescription for the use of American military prowess in numerous countries around the globe, they advise against earnestly seeking contributions from the international community, with the exception of Great Britain.

Hopefully Frum, Perle and their neo-con cohorts are learning some valuable lessons about the challenges faced when even an extremely effective fighting force, such as the U.S. military, attempts to conduct a successful war and subsequent reconstruction in a more or less unilateral fashion. Maybe they are also learning about the logistical and troop strength shortcomings of even this fighting force, which should temper their grandiose vision of a series of wars spanning several continents and bodies of water.

In addition, the current travails in Iraq must be informing the neo-conservative movement about just how overly optimistic the belief that democracy can be spread at the barrel of the gun is. But why did would it take the current turmoil in Iraq to teach what history has already shown, by overwhelming evidence, to be the case?

As quoted from an article appearing in The Nation:

"The record is clear--most of the democratic transitions that have taken place in the world in the past two centuries have had nothing to do with foreign military intervention or military pressure, while most US military interventions abroad have left dictatorship, not democracy, in their wake. The two cases that neocons constantly return to, Germany and Japan, are among the few cases where democracy has been restored (not created ex nihilo) as the result of a US invasion. The Soviet bloc democratized itself from within in the 1990s, even though the United States did not bomb Moscow, impose a martial-law governor on the Poles or imprison former Hungarian Communist officials without charges in barbed-wire camps. In Latin America, Mexico became a multiparty democracy instead of a one-party dictatorship without US Marines posing for photos in the presidential mansion in Mexico City, and it was not necessary for American soldiers to kill tens of thousands of Argentines, Chileans and Brazilians for democracy to take root in those countries.

One must hope that American soldiers leave behind a functioning democracy in Iraq--rather than the dysfunctional autocracies and kleptocracies that were the legacy of US military occupations in the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Mexico. But it is likely that, if and when liberal democracy comes to the Muslim world in general and to the Arab world in particular, the gradual, largely bloodless transition will resemble those in Soviet Europe and Latin America and will not be the result of US military action or intimidation. The neocons--and the humanitarian hawks on the left--are simply wrong about how best to spread democracy."

In the latest reminder of just how daunting the task of implementing democracy via invasion is, U.S. military and civilian authorities in Iraq are trying to confront the increasingly thorny issue of the ubiquitous armed militias currently operating in Iraq under scores of different banners, and representing a wide range of ethnic and religious groups. In what is the latest catch-22 to confront U.S. policy makers, the two possible courses of action each present their own dangers.

The first option is leaving the militias intact and somehow trying to coopt and assimilate them into Iraqi national security forces but the problem is, as excerpted from an article in today's New York Times, 'We are not going to get free and fair elections, and we are not going to get sustainable democracy of any kind in Iraq unless we make some kind of progress in demobilizing these militias,' said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority."

The other option, actively disbanding the militias through force and coercion, is also a risky and problematic endeavor. As quoted from the same New York Times article:

"In a news conference this month, Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the commander of the American division that has been battling the Mahdi Army, said he might be willing to accept members of that militia into a new, 4,000-man security force he and his men are creating to police areas like Karbala and Najaf.

'If the militia dissolves tomorrow, what I've got is 600 unemployed young men on my hands,' General Dempsey said. 'Some of them are probably decent young men who have been badly led astray.'"

I remember distinctly the way 2002 began in Washington. New Year's Day was below freezing and blustery. The next day was worse. That day, January 2, I trudged several hundred yards across the vast parking lots of the Pentagon. I was being pulled apart by the wind and was ready to feel sorry for myself, until I was shamed by the sight of miserable, frozen Army sentries at the numerous outdoor security posts that had been manned non-stop since the September 11 attacks.

I was going for an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. At the time, Wolfowitz's name and face were not yet familiar worldwide. He was known in Washington for offering big-picture explanations of the Administration's foreign-policy goals—a task for which the President was unsuited, the Vice President was unavailable, and most other senior Administration officials were, for various reasons, inappropriate. The National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was still playing a background role; the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was mainly dealing with immediate operational questions in his daily briefings about the war in Afghanistan; the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was already known to be on the losing side of most internal policy struggles.

After the interview I wrote a short article about Wolfowitz and his views for the March 2002 issue of this magazine. In some ways the outlook and choices he described then still fit the world situation two and a half years later. Even at the time, the possibility that the Administration's next move in the war on terror would be against Iraq, whether or not Iraq proved to be involved in the 9/11 hijackings, was under active discussion. When talking with me Wolfowitz touched briefly on the case for removing Saddam Hussein, in the context of the general need to reduce tyranny in the Arab-Islamic world.

But in most ways the assumptions and tone of the conversation now seem impossibly remote. At the beginning of 2002 the United States still operated in a climate of worldwide sympathy and solidarity. A broad range of allies supported its anti-Taliban efforts in Afghanistan, and virtually no international Muslim leaders had denounced them. President Bush was still being celebrated for his eloquent speech expressing American resolve, before a joint session of Congress on September 20. His deftness in managing domestic and international symbols was typified by his hosting an end-of-Ramadan ceremony at the White House in mid-December, even as battle raged in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, on the Pakistani border. At the start of 2002 fewer than 10,000 U.S. soldiers were deployed overseas as part of the war on terror, and a dozen Americans had died in combat. The United States had not captured Osama bin Laden, but it had routed the Taliban leadership that sheltered him, and seemed to have put al-Qaeda on the run.

Because of the quick and, for Americans, nearly bloodless victory over the Taliban, the Administration's national-security team had come to epitomize competence. During our talk Wolfowitz referred to "one reason this group of people work very well together," by which he meant that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and many others, including himself, had collaborated for years, from the Reagan Administration through the 1991 Gulf War and afterward. From this experience they had developed a shared understanding of the nuances of "how to use force effectively," which they were now applying. In retrospect, the remarkable thing about Wolfowitz's comment was the assumption—which I then had no reason to challenge—that Bush's foreign-policy team was like a great business or sporting dynasty, which should be examined for secrets of success.

As I listen to the tape of that interview now, something else stands out: how expansive and unhurried even Wolfowitz sounded. "Even" Wolfowitz because since then he has become the symbol of an unrelenting drive toward war with Iraq. We now know that within the Administration he was urging the case for "regime change" there immediately after 9/11. But when speaking for the record, more than a year before that war began, he stressed how broad a range of challenges the United States would have to address, and over how many years, if it wanted to contain the sources of terrorism. It would need to find ways to "lance the boil" of growing anti-Americanism, as it had done during the Reagan years by supporting democratic reform in South Korea and the Philippines. It would have to lead the Western world in celebrating and welcoming Turkey as the most successfully modernized Muslim country. It would need to understand that in the long run the most important part of America's policy was its moral example—that America stands for things "the rest of the world wants for itself."

I also remember the way 2002 ended. By late December some 200,000 members of the U.S. armed forces were en route to staging areas surrounding Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people had turned out on the streets of London, Rome, Madrid, and other cities to protest the impending war. That it was impending was obvious, despite ongoing negotiations at the United Nations. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld had asked to see plans for a possible invasion of Iraq. Congress voted to authorize the war in October. Immediately after the vote, planning bureaus inside the Pentagon were told to be ready for combat at any point between then and the following April. (Operation Iraqi Freedom actually began on March 19.) Declaring that it was impossible to make predictions about a war that might not occur, the Administration refused to discuss plans for the war's aftermath—or its potential cost. In December the President fired Lawrence Lindsey, his chief economic adviser, after Lindsey offered a guess that the total cost might be $100 billion to $200 billion. As it happened, Lindsey's controversial estimate held up very well. By this summer, fifteen months after fighting began in Iraq, appropriations for war and occupation there totaled about $150 billion. With more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers still based in Iraq, the outlays will continue indefinitely at a rate of about $5 billion a month—much of it for fuel, ammunition, spare parts, and other operational needs. All this is at striking variance with the pre-war insistence by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz that Iraq's oil money, plus contributions from allies, would minimize the financial burden on Americans.

Despite the rout of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, terror attacks, especially against Americans and Europeans, were rising at the end of 2002 and would continue to rise through 2003. Some 400 people worldwide had died in terror attacks in 2000, and some 300 in 2001, apart from the 3,000-plus killed on September 11. In 2002 more than 700 were killed, including 200 when a bomb exploded outside a Bali nightclub in October.

Whereas at the beginning of the year Paul Wolfowitz had sounded expansive about the many avenues the United States had to pursue in order to meet the terror threat, by the end of the year the focus was solely on Iraq, and the Administration's tone was urgent. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Vice President Cheney said in a major speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars just before Labor Day. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." Two weeks later, as Congress prepared for its vote to authorize the war, Condoleezza Rice said on CNN, "We do know that [Saddam Hussein] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon … We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

On the last day of the year President Bush told reporters at his ranch in Texas, "I hope this Iraq situation will be resolved peacefully. One of my New Year's resolutions is to work to deal with these situations in a way so that they're resolved peacefully." As he spoke, every operating branch of the government was preparing for war.

September 11, 2001, has so often been described as a "hinge event" that it is tempting to think no other events could rival its significance. Indeed, as a single shocking moment that changed Americans' previous assumptions, the only modern comparisons are Pearl Harbor and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But as 9/11 enters history, it seems likely that the aftermath, especially the decisions made during 2002, will prove to be as significant as the attack itself. It is obviously too early to know the full historical effect of the Iraq campaign. The biggest question about post-Saddam Iraq—whether it is headed toward stability or toward new tyranny and chaos—may not be answered for years.

But the biggest question about the United States—whether its response to 9/11 has made it safer or more vulnerable—can begin to be answered. Over the past two years I have been talking with a group of people at the working level of America's anti-terrorism efforts. Most are in the military, the intelligence agencies, and the diplomatic service; some are in think tanks and nongovernmental agencies. I have come to trust them, because most of them have no partisan ax to grind with the Administration (in the nature of things, soldiers and spies are mainly Republicans), and because they have so far been proved right. In the year before combat started in Iraq, they warned that occupying the country would be far harder than conquering it. As the occupation began, they pointed out the existence of plans and warnings the Administration seemed determined to ignore.

As a political matter, whether the United States is now safer or more vulnerable is of course ferociously controversial. That the war was necessary—and beneficial—is the Bush Administration's central claim. That it was not is the central claim of its critics. But among national-security professionals there is surprisingly little controversy. Except for those in government and in the opinion industries whose job it is to defend the Administration's record, they tend to see America's response to 9/11 as a catastrophe. I have sat through arguments among soldiers and scholars about whether the invasion of Iraq should be considered the worst strategic error in American history—or only the worst since Vietnam. Some of these people argue that the United States had no choice but to fight, given a pre-war consensus among its intelligence agencies that Iraq actually had WMD supplies. Many say that things in Iraq will eventually look much better than they do now. But about the conduct and effect of the war in Iraq one view prevails: it has increased the threats America faces, and has reduced the military, financial, and diplomatic tools with which we can respond.

"Let me tell you my gut feeling," a senior figure at one of America's military-sponsored think tanks told me recently, after we had talked for twenty minutes about details of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. "If I can be blunt, the Administration is full of shit. In my view we are much, much worse off now than when we went into Iraq. That is not a partisan position. I voted for these guys. But I think they are incompetent, and I have had a very close perspective on what is happening. Certainly in the long run we have harmed ourselves. We are playing to the enemy's political advantage. Whatever tactical victories we may gain along the way, this will prove to be a strategic blunder."

This man will not let me use his name, because he is still involved in military policy. He cited the experiences of Joseph Wilson, Richard Clarke, and Generals Eric Shinseki and Anthony Zinni to illustrate the personal risks of openly expressing his dissenting view. But I am quoting him anonymously—as I will quote some others—because his words are representative of what one hears at the working level.

To a surprising extent their indictment doesn't concentrate on the aspect of the problem most often discussed in public: exactly why the United States got the WMD threat so wrong. Nor does it involve a problem I have previously discussed in this magazine (see "Blind Into Baghdad," January/February Atlantic): the Administration's failure, whether deliberate or inadvertent, to make use of the careful and extensive planning for postwar Iraq that had been carried out by the State Department, the CIA, various branches of the military, and many other organizations. Rather, these professionals argue that by the end of 2002 the decisions the Administration had made—and avoided making—through the course of the year had left the nation less safe, with fewer positive options. Step by step through 2002 America's war on terror became little more than its preparation for war in Iraq.

Because of that shift, the United States succeeded in removing Saddam Hussein, but at this cost: The first front in the war on terror, Afghanistan, was left to fester, as attention and money were drained toward Iraq. This in turn left more havens in Afghanistan in which terrorist groups could reconstitute themselves; a resurgent opium-poppy economy to finance them; and more of the disorder and brutality the United States had hoped to eliminate. Whether or not the strong international alliance that began the assault on the Taliban might have brought real order to Afghanistan is impossible to say. It never had the chance, because America's premature withdrawal soon fractured the alliance and curtailed postwar reconstruction. Indeed, the campaign in Afghanistan was warped and limited from the start, by a pre-existing desire to save troops for Iraq.

A full inventory of the costs of war in Iraq goes on. President Bush began 2002 with a warning that North Korea and Iran, not just Iraq, threatened the world because of the nuclear weapons they were developing. With the United States preoccupied by Iraq, these other two countries surged ahead. They have been playing a game of chess, or nerves, against America—and if they have not exactly won, they have advanced by several moves. Because it lost time and squandered resources, the United States now has no good options for dealing with either country. It has fewer deployable soldiers and weapons; it has less international leverage through the "soft power" of its alliances and treaties; it even has worse intelligence, because so many resources are directed toward Iraq.

At the beginning of 2002 the United States imported over 50 percent of its oil. In two years we have increased that figure by nearly 10 percent. The need for imported oil is the fundamental reason the United States must be deferential in its relationship with Saudi Arabia. Revenue from that oil is the fundamental reason that extremist groups based in Saudi Arabia were so rich. After the first oil shocks, in the mid-1970s, the United States took steps that reduced its imports of Persian Gulf oil. The Bush Administration could have made similar steps a basic part of its anti-terrorism strategy, and could have counted on making progress: through most of 2002 the Administration could assume bipartisan support for nearly anything it proposed. But its only such suggestion was drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Before America went to war in Iraq, its military power seemed limitless. There was less need to actually apply it when all adversaries knew that any time we did so we would win. Now the limits on our military's manpower and sustainability are all too obvious. For example, the Administration announced this summer that in order to maintain troop levels in Iraq, it would withdraw 12,500 soldiers from South Korea. The North Koreans, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Syrians, and others who have always needed to take into account the chance of U.S. military intervention now realize that America has no stomach for additional wars. Before Iraq the U.S. military was turning away qualified applicants. Now it applies "stop-loss" policies that forbid retirement or resignation by volunteers, and it has mobilized the National Guard and Reserves in a way not seen since World War II.

Because of outlays for Iraq, the United States cannot spend $150 billion for other defensive purposes. Some nine million shipping containers enter American ports each year; only two percent of them are physically inspected, because inspecting more would be too expensive. The Department of Homeland Security, created after 9/11, is a vast grab-bag of federal agencies, from the Coast Guard to the Border Patrol to the former Immigration and Naturalization Service; ongoing operations in Iraq cost significantly more each month than all Homeland Security expenses combined. The department has sought to help cities large and small to improve their "first responder" systems, especially with better communications for their fire and emergency medical services. This summer a survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that fewer than a quarter of 231 major cities under review had received any of the aid they expected. An internal budget memo from the Administration was leaked this past spring. It said that outlays for virtually all domestic programs, including homeland security, would have to be cut in 2005—and the federal budget deficit would still be more than $450 billion.

Worst of all, the government-wide effort to wage war in Iraq crowded out efforts to design a broader strategy against Islamic extremists and terrorists; to this day the Administration has articulated no comprehensive long-term plan. It dismissed out of hand any connection between policies toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and increasing tension with many Islamic states. Regime change in Iraq, it said, would have a sweeping symbolic effect on worldwide sources of terror. That seems to have been true—but in the opposite way from what the President intended. It is hard to find a counterterrorism specialist who thinks that the Iraq War has reduced rather than increased the threat to the United States.

And here is the startling part. There is no evidence that the President and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the "opportunity costs" and tradeoffs in their decision to invade Iraq. No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose.

The Prelude: Late 2001

Success in war requires an understanding of who the enemy is, what resources can be used against him, and how victory will be defined. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 America's expert agencies concluded that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were almost certainly responsible for the attacks—and that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was providing them with sanctuary. Within the government there was almost no dispute, then or later, about the legitimacy and importance of destroying that stronghold. Indeed, the main criticism of the initial anti-Taliban campaign was that it took so long to start.

In his book Against All Enemies the former terrorism adviser Richard Clarke says it was "plainly obvious" after September 11 that "al Qaeda's sanctuary in Taliban-run Afghanistan had to be occupied by U.S. forces and the al Qaeda leaders killed." It was therefore unfortunate that the move against the Taliban was "slow and small." Soon after the attacks President Bush created an interagency Campaign Coordination Committee to devise responses to al-Qaeda, and named Clarke its co-chairman. Clarke told me that this group urged a "rapid, no-holds-barred" retaliation in Afghanistan—including an immediate dispatch of troops to Afghanistan's borders to cut off al-Qaeda escape routes.

But the Administration was unwilling to use overwhelming power in Afghanistan. The only authorized account of how the "principals"—the big shots of the Administration—felt and thought at this time is in Bob Woodward's books Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004), both based on interviews with the President and his senior advisers. To judge by Bush at War, Woodward's more laudatory account, a major reason for delay in attacking the Taliban had to do with "CSAR"—combat search and rescue teams. These were meant to be in place before the first aerial missions, so that they could go to the aid of any American pilot who might be downed. Preparations took weeks. They involved negotiations with the governments of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for basing rights, the slow process of creating and equipping support airstrips in remote mountainous regions, and the redeployment of far-flung aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf.

"The slowness was in part because the military weren't ready and they needed to move in the logistics support, the refueling aircraft, all of that," Richard Clarke told me. "But through this time the President kept saying to the Taliban, 'You still have an opportunity to come clean with us.' Which I thought—and the State Department thought—was silly. We'd already told them in advance that if this happened we were going to hold them personally responsible." Laurence Pope, a former ambassador to Chad, made a similar point when I spoke with him. Through the late 1990s Pope was the political adviser to General Zinni, who as the head of U.S. Central Command was responsible for Iraq and Afghanistan. Pope had run war games concerning assaults on both countries. "We had warned the Taliban repeatedly about Osama bin Laden," he told me, referring to the late Clinton years. "There was no question [after 9/11] that we had to take them on and deny that sanctuary to al-Qaeda. We should have focused like a laser on bin Laden and taking down al-Qaeda, breaking crockery in the neighborhood if necessary."

The crockery he was referring to included the government of Pakistan, which viewed the Pashtun tribal areas along the Afghan border as ungovernable. In the view of Pope and some others, the United States should have insisted on going into these areas right away, either with Pakistani troops or on its own—equipped with money to buy support, weapons, or both. This might have caused some regional and international disruption—but less than later invading Iraq.

It was on October 6, three and a half weeks after the attacks, that President Bush issued his final warning that "time was running out" for the Taliban to turn over bin Laden. The first cruise-missile strikes occurred the next day. The first paramilitary teams from the CIA and Special Forces arrived shortly thereafter; the first regular U.S. combat troops were deployed in late November. Thus, while the United States prepared for its response, Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the rest of their ruling Shura Council had almost two months to flee and hide.

Opinions vary about exactly how much difference it would have made if the United States had killed or captured al-Qaeda's leaders while the World Trade Center ruins were still smoldering. But no one disputes that the United States needed to move immediately against al-Qaeda, and in the most complete and decisive way possible. And there is little disagreement about what happened next. The military and diplomatic effort in Afghanistan was handicapped from the start because the Administration had other concerns, and it ended badly even though it started well.

Winter 2001—2002: War on the Cheap

By the beginning of 2002 U.S. and Northern Alliance forces had beaten the Taliban but lost bin Laden. At that point the United States faced a consequential choice: to bear down even harder in Afghanistan, or to shift the emphasis in the global war on terror (GWOT, as it is known in the trade) somewhere else.

A version of this choice between Afghanistan and "somewhere else" had in fact been made at the very start of the Administration's response to the 9/11 attacks. As Clarke, Woodward, and others have reported, during the top-level meetings at Camp David immediately after the attacks Paul Wolfowitz forcefully argued that Saddam Hussein was so threatening, and his overthrow was so "doable," that he had to be included in the initial military response. "The 'Afghanistan first' argument prevailed, basically for the reasons that Colin Powell advocated," Richard Clarke told me. "He said that the American people just aren't going to understand if you don't do something in Afghanistan right away—and that the lack of causal connection between Iraq and 9/11 would make it difficult to make the case for that war."

But Afghanistan first did not mean Afghanistan only. Clarke reminded me that he had prepared a memo on anti-terrorism strategy for the President's review before September 11. When it came back, on September 17, Clarke noticed only one significant change: the addition of a paragraph asking the Defense Department to prepare war plans for Iraq. Throughout the fall and winter, as U.S. troops were deployed in Afghanistan, Bush asked for and received increasingly detailed briefings from General Tommy Franks about the forces that might later be necessary in Iraq. According to many people who observed the process, the stated and unstated need to be ready for Saddam Hussein put a serious crimp in the U.S. effort against bin Laden and the Taliban.

The need to reserve troops for a likely second front in Iraq was one factor, though not the only one, in the design of the U.S. battle plan for Afghanistan. Many in the press (including me) marveled at America's rapid move against the Taliban for the ingenuity of its tactics. Instead of sending in many thousands of soldiers, the Administration left much of the actual fighting to the tribes of the Northern Alliance. Although the U.S. forces proved unable to go in fast, they certainly went in light—the Special Forces soldiers who chose targets for circling B-52s while picking their way through mountains on horseback being the most famous example. And they very quickly won. All this was exactly in keeping with the "transformation" doctrine that Donald Rumsfeld had been emphasizing in the Pentagon, and it reflected Rumsfeld's determination to show that a transformed military could substitute precision, technology, and imagination for sheer manpower.

But as would later become so obvious in Iraq, ousting a regime is one thing, and controlling or even pacifying a country is something else. For a significant group of military and diplomatic officials within the U.S. government, winning this "second war," for post-combat stability in Afghanistan, was a crucial step in the Administration's long-term efforts against al-Qaeda. Afghanistan had, after all, been the site of al-Qaeda's main training camps. The Taliban who harbored al-Qaeda had originally come to power as an alternative to warlordism and an economy based on extortion and drugs, so the United States could ill afford to let the country revert to the same rule and economy.

In removing the Taliban, the United States had acted as a genuine liberator. It came to the task with clean hands and broad international support. It had learned from the Soviet Union the folly of trying to hold Afghanistan by force. But it did not have to control the entire country to show that U.S. intervention could have lasting positive effects. What it needed, according to the "second war" group, was a sustained military, financial, and diplomatic effort to keep Afghanistan from sinking back toward chaos and thus becoming a terrorist haven once again.

"Had we seen Afghanistan as anything other than a sideshow," says Larry Goodson, a scholar at the Army War College who spent much of 2002 in Afghanistan, "we could have stepped up both the economic and security presence much more quickly than we did. Had Iraq not been what we were ginning up for in 2002, when the security situation in Afghanistan was collapsing, we might have come much more quickly to the peacekeeping and 'nation-building' strategy we're beginning to employ now." Iraq, of course, was what we were ginning up for, and the effects on Afghanistan were more important, if subtler, than has generally been discussed.

I asked officials, soldiers, and spies whether they had witnessed tradeoffs—specific transfers of manpower—that materially affected U.S. success in Afghanistan, and the response of Thomas White was typical: not really. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, White was Secretary of the Army. Like most other people I spoke with, he offered an example or two of Iraq-Afghanistan tradeoffs, mainly involving strain on Special Forces or limits on electronic intelligence from the National Security Agency. Another man told me that NSA satellites had to be "boreholed" in a different direction—that is, aimed directly at sites in Iraq, rather than at Afghanistan. But no one said that changes like these had really been decisive. What did matter, according to White and nearly everyone else I spoke with, was the knowledge that the "center of gravity" of the anti-terrorism campaign was about to shift to Iraq. That dictated not just the vaunted "lightness" of the invasion but also the decision to designate allies for crucial tasks: the Northern Alliance for initial combat, and the Pakistanis for closing the border so that al-Qaeda leaders would not escape. In the end neither ally performed its duty the way the Americans had hoped. The Northern Alliance was far more motivated to seize Kabul than to hunt for bin Laden. The Pakistanis barely pretended to patrol the border. In its recent "after-action reports" the U.S. military has been increasingly critical of its own management of this campaign, but delegating the real work to less motivated allies seems to have been the uncorrectable error.

The desire to limit U.S. commitment had at least as great an effect on what happened after the fall of the Taliban. James Dobbins, who was the Bush Administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and its first representative in liberated Kabul, told me that three decisions in the early months "really shaped" the outcome in Afghanistan. "One was that U.S. forces were not going to do peacekeeping of any sort, under any circumstances. They would remain available to hunt down Osama bin Laden and find renegade Taliban, but they were not going to have any role in providing security for the country at large. The second was that we would oppose anybody else's playing this role outside Kabul. And this was at a time when there was a good deal of interest from other countries in doing so." A significant reason for refusing help, according to Dobbins, was that accepting it would inevitably have tied up more American resources in Afghanistan, especially for airlifting donated supplies to foreign-led peacekeeping stations in the hinterland. The third decision was that U.S. forces would not engage in any counter-narcotics activities. One effect these policies had was to prolong the disorder in Afghanistan and increase the odds against a stable government. The absence of American or international peacekeepers guaranteed that the writ of the new Karzai government would extend, at best, to Kabul itself.

"I can't prove this, but I believe they didn't want to put in a lot of regular infantry because they wanted to hold it in reserve," Richard Clarke explains. "And the issue is the infantry. A rational military planner who was told to stabilize Afghanistan after the Taliban was gone, and who was not told that we might soon be doing Iraq, would probably have put in three times the number of infantry, plus all the logistics support 'tail.' He would have put in more civil-affairs units, too. Based on everything I heard at the time, I believe I can make a good guess that the plan for Afghanistan was affected by a predisposition to go into Iraq. The result of that is that they didn't have enough people to go in and stabilize the country, nor enough people to make sure these guys didn't get out."

The Administration later placed great emphasis on making Iraq a showcase of Islamic progress: a society that, once freed from tyranny, would demonstrate steady advancement toward civil order, economic improvement, and, ultimately, democracy. Although Afghanistan is a far wilder, poorer country, it might have provided a better showcase, and sooner. There was no controversy about America's involvement; the rest of the world was ready to provide aid; if it wasn't going to become rich, it could become demonstrably less poor. The amount of money and manpower sufficient to transform Afghanistan would have been a tiny fraction of what America decided to commit in Iraq. But the opportunity was missed, and Afghanistan began a descent to its pre-Taliban warlord state.

Spring 2002: Chaos and Closed Minds

Early 2002 was the Administration's first chance to look beyond its initial retaliation in Afghanistan. This could have been a time to think broadly about America's vulnerabilities and to ask what problems might have been overlooked in the immediate response to 9/11. At this point the United States still had comfortable reserves of all elements of international power, "hard" and "soft" alike.

As the fighting wound down in Tora Bora, the Administration could in principle have matched a list of serious problems with a list of possible solutions. In his State of the Union speech, in late January, President Bush had named Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an "axis of evil." The Administration might have weighed the relative urgency of those three threats, including uncontested evidence that North Korea was furthest along in developing nuclear weapons. It might have launched an all-out effort to understand al-Qaeda's strengths and weaknesses—and to exploit the weak points. It might have asked whether relations with Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia needed fundamental reconsideration. For decades we had struck an inglorious bargain with the regimes in those countries: we would overlook their internal repression and their role as havens for Islamic extremists; they would not oppose us on first-order foreign-policy issues—demonstrating, for instance, a relative moderation toward Israel. And the Saudis would be cooperative about providing oil. Maybe, after serious examination, this bargain would still seem to be the right one, despite the newly manifest dangers of Islamic extremism. But the time to ask the question was early in 2002.

The Administration might also have asked whether its approach to Israel and the Palestinians needed reconsideration. Before 9/11 it had declared a hands-off policy toward Israel and the PLO, but sooner or later all Bush's predecessors had come around to a "land for peace" bargain as the only plausible solution in the Middle East. The new Administration would never have more leverage or a more opportune moment for imposing such a deal than soon after it was attacked.

Conceivably the Administration could have asked other questions—about energy policy, about manpower in the military, about the fiscal base for a sustained war. This was an opportunity created by crisis. At the top level of the Administration attention swung fast, and with little discussion, exclusively to Iraq. This sent a signal to the working levels, where daily routines increasingly gave way to preparations for war, steadily denuding the organizations that might have been thinking about other challenges.

The Administration apparently did not consider questions like "If we pursue the war on terror by invading Iraq, might we incite even more terror in the long run?" and "If we commit so many of our troops this way, what possibilities will we be giving up?" But Bush "did not think of this, intellectually, as a comparative decision," I was told by Senator Bob Graham, of Florida, who voted against the war resolution for fear it would hurt the fight against terrorism. "It was a single decision: he saw Saddam Hussein as an evil person who had to be removed." The firsthand accounts of the Administration's decision-making indicate that the President spent most of his time looking at evidence of Saddam Hussein's threat, and significant but smaller amounts of time trying to build his coalition and hearing about the invasion plans. A man who participated in high-level planning for both Afghanistan and Iraq—and who is unnamed here because he still works for the government—told me, "There was absolutely no debate in the normal sense. There are only six or eight of them who make the decisions, and they only talk to each other. And if you disagree with them in public, they'll come after you, the way they did with Shinseki."

The three known exceptions to this pattern actually underscore the limits on top-level talks. One was the discussions at Camp David just after 9/11: they led to "Afghanistan first," which delayed rather than forestalled the concentration on Iraq. The second was Colin Powell's "You break it, you've bought it" warning to the President in the summer of 2002: far from leading to serious questions about the war, it did not even persuade the Administration to use the postwar plans devised by the State Department, the Army, and the CIA. The third was a long memo from Rumsfeld to Bush a few months before the war began, when a campaign against Iraq was a foregone conclusion. As excerpted in Plan of Attack, it listed twenty-nine ways in which an invasion could backfire. "Iraq could successfully best the U.S. in public relations and persuade the world that it was a war against Muslims" was one. "There could be higher than expected collateral damage" was another. But even this memo was couched in terms of "making sure that we had done everything humanly possible to prepare [the President] for what could go wrong, to prepare so things would go right," Rumsfeld explained to Bob Woodward. And its only apparent effect was that Bush called in his military commanders to look at the war plans.

Discussions at the top were distorted in yet another way—by an unspoken effect of disagreements over the Middle East. Some connections between Iraq policy and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are obvious. One pro-war argument was "The road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad"—that is, once the United States had removed Saddam Hussein and the threat he posed to Israel, it could lean more effectively on Ariel Sharon and the Likud government to accept the right deal. According to this logic, America could also lean more effectively on the Palestinians and their supporters, because of the new strength it would have demonstrated by liberating Iraq. The contrary argument—"The road to Baghdad leads through Jerusalem"—appears to have been raised mainly by Tony Blair. Its point was that if the United States first took a tougher line with Sharon and recognized that the Palestinians, too, had grievances, it would have a much easier time getting allied support and Arab acquiescence for removing Saddam Hussein. There is no evidence that this was ever significantly discussed inside the Administration.

"The groups on either side of the Iraq debate basically didn't trust each other," a former senior official in the Administration told me—and the people "on either side" he was speaking of all worked for George Bush. (He, too, insisted on anonymity because he has ongoing dealings with the government.) "If it wasn't clear why you were saying these skeptical things about invading Iraq, there was naturally the suspicion that you were saying [them] because you opposed the Israeli position. So any argument became suspect." Suspicion ran just as strongly the other way—that officials were steadfast for war because they supported the Israeli position. In this (admittedly oversimplified) schema, the CIA, the State Department, and the uniformed military were the most skeptical of war—and, in the view of war supporters, were also the most critical of Israel. The White House (Bush, Cheney, Rice) and the Defense Department's civilian leadership were the most pro-war—and the most pro-Israel. Objectively, all these people agreed far more than they differed, but their mutual suspicions further muted dissenting views.

At the next level down, different problems had the same effect: difficulty in thinking broadly about threats and responses. An obscure-sounding bureaucratic change contributed. At the start of his second term Bill Clinton had signed PDD 56, a presidential decision directive about handling international emergencies. The idea was that, like it or not, a chaotic world would continually involve the United States in "complex contingency operations." These were efforts, like the ones in the Balkans and East Africa, in which soldiers, diplomats, relief workers, reconstruction experts, economists, legal authorities, and many other officials from many different institutions would need to work together if any of them were to succeed. The directive set up a system for coordinating these campaigns, so that no one organization dominated the others or operated unilaterally.

When it took office, the Bush Administration revoked this plan and began working on a replacement. But nothing was on hand as of September 11. For months the response to the attacks was managed by a variety of ad hoc groups. The Campaign Coordination Committee, run by Richard Clarke and his colleague Franklin Miller, oversaw strategies against al-Qaeda. The new Domestic Preparedness Committee, run by John Ashcroft's deputy, Larry Thompson, oversaw internal-security measures. And the "principals"—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, and a few others, including Wolfowitz, Powell's deputy Richard Armitage, and Cheney's aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby—met frequently to plan the showdown with Iraq. There was no established way to make sure that State knew what Defense was doing and vice versa, as became disastrously obvious after the fall of Baghdad. And there was no recognized venue for opportunity-cost discussions about the emerging Iraq policy, even if anyone had wanted them.

In the absence of other plans, initiative on every issue was increasingly taken in the Pentagon. And within the Pentagon the emphasis increasingly moved toward Iraq. In March of 2002, when U.S. troops were still engaged in Operation Anaconda on the Afghan-Pakistani border, and combat in Iraq was still a year away, inside the government Afghanistan had begun to seem like yesterday's problem. When asked about Iraq at a press conference on March 13, Bush said merely, "All options are on the table." By that time Tommy Franks had answered Bush's request for battle plans and lists of potential bombing targets in Iraq.

The more experienced in government the people I interviewed were, the more likely they were to stress the importance of the mental shift in the spring of 2002. When I asked Richard Clarke whether preparations for Iraq had really taken anything crucial from Afghanistan or other efforts, he said yes, unquestionably. "They took one thing that people on the outside find hard to believe or appreciate," he said. "Management time. We're a huge government, and we have hundreds of thousands of people involved in national security. Therefore you would think we could walk and chew gum at the same time. I've never found that to be true. You've got one National Security Adviser and one CIA director, and they each have one deputy. The same is true in Defense. Interestingly in terms of the military, both of these wars took place in the same 'CINCdom'"—by which Clarke meant that both were in the realm of Tommy Franks's Central Command, rather than in two different theaters. "It just is not credible that the principals and the deputies paid as much attention to Afghanistan or the war against al-Qaeda as they should have."

According to Michael Scheuer, a career CIA officer who spent the late 1990s as head of the agency's anti-bin Laden team, the shift of attention had another destructive effect on efforts to battle al-Qaeda: the diversion of members of that team and the Agency's limited supply of Arabic-speakers and Middle East specialists to support the mounting demand for intelligence on Iraq. (Because Scheuer is still on active duty at the CIA, the Agency allowed him to publish his recent book, Imperial Hubris, a harsh criticism of U.S. approaches to controlling terrorism, only as "Anonymous." After we spoke, his identity was disclosed by Jason Vest, in the Boston Phoenix; when I met him, he declined to give his name and was introduced simply as "Mike.") "With a finite number of people who have any kind of pertinent experience," Scheuer told me, "there is unquestionably a sucking away of resources from Afghanistan and al-Qaeda to Iraq, just because it was a much bigger effort."

Scheuer observed that George Tenet had claimed early in 2003 that there was enough expertise and manpower to handle both Iraq and al-Qaeda. "From inside the system that sounded like a very questionable judgment," Scheuer said. "You start with a large group of people who have worked bin Laden and al-Qaeda and Sunni terrorism for years—and worked it every day since 9/11. Then you move a lot of people out to work the Iraq issue, and instead you have a lot of people who come in for ninety days or one hundred and twenty days, then leave. It's like any other profession. Over time you make connections. A name comes up, and there's nothing on file in the last two years—but you remember that five years ago there was a guy with that name doing acts in the Philippines. If you don't have an institutional memory, you don't make the connection. When they talk about connecting the dots, the computers are important. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is that human being who's been working this issue for five or six years. You can have the best computers in the world, and you can have an ocean of information, but if you have a guy who's only been there for three weeks or three months, you're very weak."

Laurence Pope, the former ambassador, told me that Iraq monomania was particularly destructive in the spring of 2002 because of the opportunity that came and went in Afghanistan. "There was a moment of six months or so when we could have put much more pressure on the tribal areas [to get al-Qaeda], and on Pakistan, and done a better job of reconstruction in Afghanistan," he said. "In reality, the Beltway can only do one thing at a time, and because of the attention to Iraq, what should have happened in Afghanistan didn't."

So by the spring, after six months in which to consider its strategy, the Administration had radically narrowed its choices. Its expert staffers were deflected toward Iraq—and away from Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Israel-Palestine, the hunt for bin Laden, the assault on al-Qaeda, even China and Taiwan. Its diplomats were not squeezing Pakistan as hard as possible about chasing al-Qaeda, or Saudi Arabia about cracking down on extremists, because the United States needed their help—or at least acquiescence—in the coming war with Iraq. Its most senior officials were working out the operational details of a plan whose fundamental wisdom they had seldom, if ever, stopped to examine.

Summer and Fall: The One-Front War

President Bush's first major statement about his post-9/11 foreign policy had come in his State of the Union address. His second came on June 1, when he gave the graduation speech at West Point. It carefully laid out the case for a new doctrine of "pre-emptive" war. Bush didn't say "Iraq" or "Saddam Hussein," but his meaning was unmistakable. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies," he said. "We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long." A few weeks later Condoleezza Rice presented a fuller version of the concept, and Dick Cheney hammered home his warnings that Saddam Hussein had, beyond all doubt, acquired weapons of mass destruction. In September, Donald Rumsfeld said at a news conference that the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was "not debatable." By October, Bush had practically stopped referring to Osama bin Laden in his press statements; he said of Saddam Hussein, "This is the guy that tried to kill my dad."

The Democrats still controlled the Senate, but on October 11 Majority Leader Tom Daschle led John Kerry, John Edwards, and twenty-six other Democrats in voting to authorize the war. (Authorization passed the Senate 77–23; most Democrats in the House voted against it, but it still carried there, by 296 to 133.) Democratic officials were desperate to get the vote behind them, so that in the impending midterm elections they could not be blamed for hampering the war on terrorism—in which, the Administration said, war in Iraq played an integral part.

The Cyclops-like nature of the Administration's perception of risk became more evident. Uncertain evidence about Iraq was read in the most pessimistic fashion; much more reliable evidence about other threats was ignored. Of the three members of the "axis of evil," Iraq had made the sketchiest progress toward developing nuclear weapons. In October, just before the Iraq War vote, a delegation of Americans in Pyongyang found that North Korea's nuclear-weapons program was actually up and running. As the weeks wore on, North Korea became more and more brazen. In December it reactivated a nuclear processing plant it had closed eight years earlier as part of a deal with the United States. Soon thereafter it kicked out inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and announced that it would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea was dropping even the pretense that it was not developing nuclear bombs.

Meanwhile, in August of 2002, an Iranian opposition group revealed the existence of two previously secret nuclear facilities, in Natanz and Arak. The first was devoted to uranium enrichment, the second to heavy-water production, which is a step toward producing plutonium. Months before the vote on war with Iraq, then, the United States had very strong indications that Iran was pursuing two paths toward atomic weaponry: uranium and plutonium. The indications from North Korea were at least as strong. If the very worst pre-war suspicions about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction had turned out to be true, the nuclear stakes would still have been lower than those in North Korea or Iran.

"How will history judge this period, in terms of the opportunity costs of invading Iraq?" said John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, when we spoke. "I think the opportunity cost is going to be North Korea and Iran. I mean, in 2002 it became obvious that Iran has a full-blown nuclear-weapons program under way, no ifs or buts. For the next eighteen months or so, before it's running, we have the opportunity to blow it up. But this Iraq adventure will give blowing up your enemies a bad name. The concern now has to be that the 'Iraq syndrome' will make us flinch from blowing up people who really need to be blown up."

Bombing North Korea's reactor has never been an option, since North Korea has so many retaliatory forces so close to Seoul. But whatever choices the United States had at the beginning of 2002, it has fewer and worse ones now. The North Koreans are that much further along in their program; the U.S. military is under that much more strain; international hostility to U.S. policies is that much greater. "At the rate North Korea is pumping out bomb material," Pike said, "the Japanese will realize that the missile defense we've sold them will not save them. And they will conclude that only weaponizing their plutonium will enable them to sleep easily at night. And then you'll have South Korea and Taiwan …" and on through other ripple-effect scenarios. Pike says that the United States has little leverage to prevent any of this, and therefore can't afford to waste any more time in acting against North Korea.

"Are we better off in basic security than before we invaded Iraq?" asks Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the Air War College and the author of the recent Dark Victory, a book about the Iraq War. "The answer is no. An unnecessary war has consumed American Army and other ground resources, to the point where we have nothing left in the cupboard for another contingency—for instance, should the North Koreans decide that with the Americans completely absorbed in Iraq, now is the time to do something."

"We really have four armies," an Army officer involved in Pentagon planning for the Iraq War told me. "There's the one that's deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. There's the one that's left back home in Fort Hood and other places. There's the 'modular Army,' of new brigade-sized units that are supposed to be rotated in and out of locations easily. There's the Guard and Reserve. And every one of them is being chewed up by the ops tempo." "Ops tempo" means the pace of operations, and when it is too high, equipment and supplies are being used faster than they can be replaced, troops are being deployed far longer than they expected, and training is being pared back further than it should. "We're really in dire straits with resourcing," he said. "There's not enough armor for Humvees. There's not enough fifty-caliber machine guns for the Hundred and First Airborne or the Tenth Mountain Division. A country that can't field heavy machine guns for its army—there's something wrong with the way we're doing business."

"The stress of war has hit all the services, but none harder than the Army," Sydney Freedberg wrote recently in National Journal. "The crucial shortfall is not in money or machines, but in manpower." More than a third of the Army's 500,000 active-duty soldiers are in Iraq or Kuwait. Freedberg referred to a study showing that fifteen of the Army's thirty-four active-duty combat units were currently deployed overseas, and wrote, "That means that nearly as many units are abroad as at home, when historical experience shows that a long-term commitment, as with the British in Northern Ireland, requires three or four units recuperating and training for each one deployed." In the long run the U.S. military needs either more people or fewer responsibilities. At the moment, because of Iraq, it has very little slack for dealing with other emergencies that might arise.

Winter: Misreading the Enemy

President Bush's first major speech after 9/11, on September 20, 2001, was one of the outstanding addresses given by a modern President. But it introduced a destructive concept that Bush used more and more insistently through 2002. "Why do they hate us?" he asked about the terrorists. He answered that they hate what is best in us: "They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government … They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." As he boiled down this thought in subsequent comments it became "They hate us for who we are" and "They hate us because we are free."

There may be people who have studied, fought against, or tried to infiltrate al-Qaeda and who agree with Bush's statement. But I have never met any. The soldiers, spies, academics, and diplomats I have interviewed are unanimous in saying that "They hate us for who we are" is dangerous claptrap. Dangerous because it is so lazily self-justifying and self-deluding: the only thing we could possibly be doing wrong is being so excellent. Claptrap because it reflects so little knowledge of how Islamic extremism has evolved.

"There are very few people in the world who are going to kill themselves so we can't vote in the Iowa caucuses," Michael Scheuer said to me. "But there's a lot of them who are willing to die because we're helping the Israelis, or because we're helping Putin against the Chechens, or because we keep oil prices low so Muslims lose money." Jeffrey Record said, "Clearly they do not like American society. They think it's far too libertine, democratic, Christian. But that's not the reason they attack us. If it were, they would have attacked a lot of other Western countries too. I don't notice them putting bombs in Norway. It's a combination of who we are and also our behavior."

This summer's report of the 9/11 Commission, without associating this view with Bush, was emphatic in rejecting the "hate us for who we are" view. The commission said this about the motivation of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, whom it identified as the "mastermind of the 9/11 attacks": "KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel." In discussing long-term strategies for dealing with extremist groups the commission said, "America's policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world." The most striking aspect of the commission's analysis is that it offered any thoughts at all about the right long-term response to Islamic extremists. The 9/11 Commission was one of several groups seeking to fill the void left by the Administration's failure to put forward any comprehensive battle plan for a long-term campaign against terrorism. By its actions the Administration showed that the only terrorism problem it recognized was Saddam Hussein's regime, plus the al-Qaeda leaders shown on its "most wanted" lists.

The distinction between who we are and what we do matters, because it bears on the largest question about the Iraq War: Will it bring less or more Islamic terrorism? If violent extremism is purely vengeful and irrational, there is no hope except to crush it. Any brutality along the way is an unavoidable cost. But if it is based on logic of any sort, a clear understanding of its principles could help us to weaken its appeal—and to choose tactics that are not self-defeating.

A later article will describe insights about controlling terrorism. For now the point is the strong working-level consensus that terrorists are "logical," if hideously brutal, and that the steps in 2002 that led to war have broadened the extremists' base. In March of 2003, just after combat began in Iraq, President Hosni Mubarak, of Egypt, warned that if the United States invaded, "instead of having one bin Laden, we will have one hundred bin Ladens." Six months later, when the combat was over, Rumsfeld wrote in a confidential memo quoted in Plan of Attack, "We lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas [Islamic schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us? … The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions." Six months after that, as violence surged in occupied Iraq, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, reported that al-Qaeda was galvanized by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As of mid-2004 it had at least 18,000 operatives in sixty countries. "Al Qaeda has fully reconstituted [and] set its sights firmly on the USA and its closest Western allies in Europe," the report said. Meanwhile, a British parliamentary report warns that Afghanistan is likely to "implode" for lack of support.

"I have been saying for years, Osama bin Laden could never have done it without us," a civilian adviser to the Pentagon told me this summer. "We have continued to play to his political advantage and to confirm, in the eyes of his constituency, the very claims he made about us." Those claims are that the United States will travel far to suppress Muslims, that it will occupy their holy sites, that it will oppose the rise of Islamic governments, and that it will take their resources. "We got to Baghdad," Michael Scheuer said, "and the first thing Rumsfeld said is, 'We'll accept any government as long as it's not Islamic.' It draws their attention to bin Laden's argument that the United States is leading the West to annihilate Islam." The Administration had come a long way from the end-of-Ramadan ceremony at the White House.

What Happened in a Year

o govern is to choose, and the choices made in 2002 were fateful. The United States began that year shocked and wounded, but with tremendous strategic advantages. Its population was more closely united behind its leadership than it had been in fifty years. World opinion was strongly sympathetic. Longtime allies were eager to help; longtime antagonists were silent. The federal budget was nearly in balance, making ambitious projects feasible. The U.S. military was superbly equipped, trained, and prepared. An immediate foe was evident—and vulnerable—in Afghanistan. For the longer-term effort against Islamic extremism the Administration could draw on a mature school of thought from academics, regional specialists, and its own intelligence agencies. All that was required was to think broadly about the threats to the country, and creatively about the responses.

The Bush Administration chose another path. Implicitly at the beginning of 2002, and as a matter of formal policy by the end, it placed all other considerations second to regime change in Iraq. It hampered the campaign in Afghanistan before fighting began and wound it down prematurely, along the way losing the chance to capture Osama bin Laden. It turned a blind eye to misdeeds in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and to WMD threats from North Korea and Iran far more serious than any posed by Saddam Hussein, all in the name of moving toward a showdown with Iraq. It overused and wore out its army in invading Iraq—without committing enough troops for a successful occupation. It saddled the United States with ongoing costs that dwarf its spending for domestic security. And by every available measure it only worsened the risk of future terrorism. In every sense 2002 was a lost year.

Much of the blogosphere and related foreign policy circles are abuzz with talk about Iraqi elections scheduled to be held in just under two weeks - and to what degree those elections might impact the future of Iraq. Many Iraqis may not end up going to the polls on the 30th out of security concerns and/or disenchantment with the process, and still others may feel compelled to take part in elections that they perceive as somewhat tainted and illegitimate - not an altogether outlandish claim considering there is an occupying army in their midst. Further, it is unclear if the regime that emerges from this electoral exercise will enjoy the endorsement of enough of the Iraqi people to begin moving that country toward unity, stability, and sovereignty. Nevertheless, channeling our lexically enigmatic Secretary of Defense: these are the elections we have, if not the ones we wish we had, so it is in all of our best interest to insure that they are designed and carried out in a way that is most conducive to the formation of a stable, peaceful, and democratic Iraq.

As such, I thought it would be an ideal time to follow up on some themes I have been covering on TIA, and to consider some of the lessons we have learned up until this point. An unvarnished appraisal of certain aspects of the past two years, and the relevant history, should help to inform some of the choices we can make vis a vis the elections and the resulting governing body, thereby increasing the prospects for success. The alternative to stability, a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, is so dire a scenario that prudence demands that all of us, even those among us who were opposed to this endeavor from the outset, should put our energies behind working for solutions. If it helps, imagine you are counseling President Kerry on what he might do had he inherited this labyrinth of Catch-22's from the Bush administration (one reason Kerry's loss had a silver lining of sorts).

Such a thought exercise has a way of demanding a certain level of intellectual discipline and seriousness, the lack of which publius lamented yesterday. It is far easier to criticize than it is to propose alternatives, especially when you accurately predicted before the fact many of the problems currently plaguing our mission. But now is not the time for smugness or spite, no matter how tempting those thoughts are (and trust me, I am often tempted).

Democracy Now?

In order to try to formulate a winning strategy in this phase of the Iraq conflict, it is important to look at some of the historical precedents involved, and how these might impact our decisions. Before I begin, I want to preemptively strike down the claim that any discussion of the difficulties of democracy promotion through military invasion is tantamount to claiming that Muslims and/or Arabs are incapable of democracy. That is nonsense, but at the same time, there are very real cultural, historical, and political factors that could and should influence the manner in which we seek to help Muslims to attain democratic reform.

As an aside, I find it mildly amusing that the pro-war camp accuses the Left of racism in this manner when the pro-war camp itself so often takes such a hostile position regarding the Muslim world that they are allegedly trying to help - advocating genocide (Glenn Reynolds), the indiscriminate "nuking" of a Muslim city (Savage), the flattening of Fallujah, or downplaying the torture and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib (who Army Intelligence and the ICRC say were 70-90% innocent). And of course, there is the prevalent meme that Muslims only understand force, not other forms of entreaty, or as Charles Krauthammer once said in a radio interview, if you want to win their hearts and minds, you have grab their balls and squeeze hard. Liberal hawk Fareed Zakaria made the following observation:

The Republican convention had two alternating approaches toward foreigners. On the one hand, it repeatedly ridiculed them. The cheapest applause lines in New York last week were ones that ended in "the French," "Paris" or, worst of all, "the United Nations," which was probably meant to conjure up images of envious Third Worlders plotting against America. On the other hand, Republicans constantly declared they were going to deliver the blessings of liberty to the far corners of the world. This is the party's dilemma -- it wishes to spread liberty to people whom it doesn't really like. [emphasis added]

The truth is, there is a lot of space along the spectrum of democracy promotion between apathy and military invasion, and advocating a position along this continuum is not the equivalent of an ethnic critique. First a perspective on nation building via military involvement from conservative historian Francis Fukuyama:

America has been involved in approximately 18 nation-building projects between its conquest of the Philippines in 1899 and the current occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the overall record is not a pretty one. The cases of unambiguous success-Germany, Japan, and South Korea-were all ones in which U.S. forces came and then stayed indefinitely. In the first two cases, we were not nation-building at all, but only re-legitimizing societies that had very powerful states. In all of the other cases, the U.S. either left nothing behind in terms of self-sustaining institutions, or else made things worse by creating, as in the case of Nicaragua, a modern army and police but no lasting rule of law.

From Fukuyama, and others, we see that America's record at nation building is not overly impressive. On top of that, Iraq itself presented many unique challenges and complications. Again, Fukuyama:

Though I, more than most people, am associated with the idea that history's arrow points to democracy, I have never believed that democracies can be created anywhere and everywhere through sheer political will. Prior to the Iraq War, there were many reasons for thinking that building a democratic Iraq was a task of a complexity that would be nearly unmanageable. Some reasons had to do with the nature of Iraqi society: the fact that it would be decompressing rapidly from totalitarianism, its ethnic divisions, the role of politicized religion, the society's propensity for violence, its tribal structure and the dominance of extended kin and patronage networks, and its susceptibility to influence from other parts of the Middle East that were passionately anti-American.

There is a good reason why many conservatives and liberals are somewhat averse to projects that seek to implant a democracy de novo in a given nation or region. Almost every democratic transition that has taken place in the world in the past two centuries has had nothing to do with foreign military intervention, military pressure, or an outside regime directing the process. While I believe, to some degree, in the inevitability of democratic change, I also appreciate that such changes require certain prerequisite financial conditions and other institutional development that is difficult to generate as an alien power on an ad hoc basis. Writing in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Edward Luttwak regrets the dearth of democrats in Iraq.

Of course, many Iraqis would deny the need for any such instruction, viewing democracy as a simple affair that any child can understand. That is certainly the opinion of the spokesmen of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, for example. They have insistently advocated early elections in Iraq, brushing aside the need for procedural and substantive preparations as basic as the compilation of voter rolls, and seeing no need to allow time for the gathering of consensus by structured political parties. However moderate he may be, the pronouncements attributed to Sistani reveal a confusion between democracy and the dictatorial rule of the majority, for they imply that whoever wins 50.01 percent of the vote should have all of the governing power. That much became clear when Sistani's spokesmen vehemently rejected Kurdish demands for constitutional guarantees of minority rights. Shiite majority rule could thus end up being as undemocratic as the traditional Sunni-Arab ascendancy was.

Credibility Gulch

I want to focus on the last item Fukuyama listed in his assessment of the challenges of nation building that are distinctly "Iraqi" in nature, because it is still bedeviling us today: anti-Americanism. It is no secret that the Muslim world has been a hotbed of virulent anti-Americanism for the better part of the past half-century. Understanding this phenomenon requires a, forgive the phrase, nuanced approach. At least a portion of this anti-Americanism is logically connected to American foreign policy initiatives in the region during the period in question. For much of the Cold War and beyond, for better and for worse, America has pursued a rugged form of realpolitik - charting a course that is designed to maintain a stable supply of affordable oil while countering incursions by the former U.S.S.R. and other regional foes. In the process, U.S. priorities have not always been consistent with democracy promotion, leading us to endorse, support, arm, and fund numerous brutal despots and fanatics (including Saddam, Osama, and the House of Saud to name a few).

Probably our most egregious example of myopia came in 1953 when the CIA instigated and orchestrated a coup that toppled Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and replaced the nascent democracy with a dictatorship - headed by the oppressive Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi (the Shah). The Islamic Revolution, spearheaded by the Ayatollah Khomeini, was strengthened and enlivened by anger at the heavy-handed tactics of the Shah. Many of our problems with Iran can be traced back to these events.

And of course no discussion of anti-Americanism in the Middle East would be complete without mentioning Israel. Since the Nixon administration, and before that time to a lesser extent, U.S. foreign policy has championed the Israeli government, no matter the ruling faction, with an almost unprecedented level of support. I am a firm believer in the alliance with Israel, but there are dimensions of the relationship that may be counterproductive. We have adopted a position by which the Israeli regime is above reproach, no matter their transgression, which in turn has led to a lack of concern for the plight of the Palestinian people. This double standard has not been lost on the Muslim population.

But there is also another dimension to the anti-Americanism that runs rampant in the region, one that is wholly divorced from logic and reality. America has become the favored scapegoat for all manner of malady that plagues the denizens of this part of the globe - politician, theologian and businessman alike. Rumors and conspiracies abound, some contradictory in nature, and others so bizarre they go beyond science fiction. This is not accidental though. The regimes in the area, even allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, deflect their citizens' ire on to America in order to distract their respective populations from the inequities and injustices they propagate.

Regardless of the source of these hostilities and suspicions, they have greatly impacted our ability to promote the message and ideals of America in this part of the world. In many ways, this noxious blend of conspiratorial propaganda, scapegoating, and legitimate grievance have likely doomed our mission in Iraq from the outset, even if you assume that our intentions were noble and that democracy promotion was, and is, a central tenet of the operation. For example, today when ex-Baathist insurgents target Shiite moderates and those cooperating with the interim government, it is not uncommon to hear the local Shiites mischaracterize the car bombs used as missile attacks from the US (the two are hard to distinguish from a bystander's perceptive) - despite the lack of a cogent rationale for the US to attack those elements of Iraqi society most amenable to its presence. Edward Luttwak provides some historical reference points.

The very word "guerrilla" acquired its present meaning from the ferocious insurgency of the illiterate Spanish poor against their would-be liberators under the leadership of their traditional oppressors. On July 6, 1808, King Joseph of Spain presented a draft constitution that for the first time in Spain's history offered an independent judiciary, freedom of the press, and the abolition of the remaining feudal privileges of the aristocracy and the church. Ecclesiastical overlords still owned 3,148 towns and villages, which were inhabited by some of Europe's most wretched tenants. Yet the Spanish peasantry did not rise to demand the immediate implementation of the new constitution. Instead, they obeyed the priests, who summoned them to fight against the ungodly innovations of the foreign invader--for Joseph was the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte and had been placed on the Spanish throne by French troops a month earlier. That was all that mattered for most Spaniards--not what was proposed, but who proposed it.

By then the French should have known better. In 1799 the same thing had happened in Naples, whose liberals, supported by the French, were massacred by the very peasants and plebeians they wanted to emancipate, mustered into a militia of the "Holy Faith" by Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo (the scion, coincidentally, of Calabria's most powerful landowning family). Ruffo easily persuaded his followers that all promises of merely material betterment were irrelevant, because the real aim of the French and the liberals was to destroy the Catholic religion in the service of Satan. Spain's clergy repeated Ruffo's ploy, and their illiterate followers could not know that the very first clause of Joseph's draft constitution had declared the Roman Apostolic Catholic church the only one allowed in Spain.

The same dynamic is playing itself out in Iraq now, down to the ineffectual enshrinement of Islam in the draft constitution and the emergence of truculent clerical warlords. Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, both Shiite and Sunni clerics have been repeating over and over again that the Americans and their mostly "Christian" allies are in Iraq to destroy Islam in its cultural heartland, as well as to steal the country's oil. The clerics dismiss all talk of democracy and human rights by the invaders as mere hypocrisy--except for women's rights, which are promoted in earnest, the clerics say, to induce Iraqi daughters and wives to dishonor their families by aping the shameless disobedience of Western women.

Carts, Horses and Windows

Luttwak offers a valuable insight: sometimes our intentions are not the determining factor in the outcome of our endeavors because perception of our motive can trump reality (perhaps an understatement). Some analysts and historians, like Fukuyama, noted that with this backdrop of anti-Americanism it was impossible to maintain the support of the people long enough, and to the degree needed to succeed. Others incorrectly argued that our invasion of Iraq would meet with the instant approval of the populous, and actually turn the tide of public opinion in our favor throughout the entire region - laying the groundwork for such far reaching and grandiose notions as peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. According to this camp, invading Iraq would endear us to the locals.
This marked a singular strategic error: We needed to first address some of the causes of anti-American vitriol before we attempted to insert ourselves so prominently in the region. In putting the cart before the horse, we have greatly undermined our efforts. According to James Dobbins writing in Foreign Affairs:

In the eyes of the Iraqi people and of all the neighboring populations, the U.S. mission in Iraq lacks legitimacy and credibility. Only by dramatically recasting the American role in the region can such perceptions begin to be changed. Until then, U.S. military operations in Iraq will continue to inspire local resistance, radicalize neighboring populations, and discourage international cooperation....

What efforts the Bush administration has made to forge regional and international cooperation have centered on democratization and counterterrorism. Both campaigns have considerable merit and potentially broad appeal; regimes in the region fear terrorism, and their people desire more democracy. Unfortunately, both projects have been irredeemably compromised in the eyes of Arab constituencies because the United States has chosen occupied Arab lands on which to test them. Whatever the logic of trying to sow democracy in Palestine and Iraq first, the United States' attempts to do so have largely undermined its broader efforts. Until Washington's democratization campaign can be purged of its association with pre-emption and occupation, it will have little resonance in the region....

Peace in Iraq and peace in the broader Middle East should be pursued on their own merits, but they cannot be entirely divorced. To the Arab people, the United States' resort to pre-emption, occupation, and aggressive counterterrorism, with its high collateral damage and numerous civilian casualties, is barely distinguishable from Israeli practices. Israel may have given up on winning over the Palestinian people long ago, but the United States cannot afford to do the same in Iraq or elsewhere in the region. One crucial way the United States can demonstrate its sincerity toward the Arab world is to reengage in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the United States will have little success in enlisting the Iraqi population, neighboring governments, and the international community to bring peace to Iraq if it cannot reposition itself as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. However dim the prospects for quick progress in settling the issues of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, Washington must be seen as giving them its highest attention.

At the very least, the Bush administration needed to seize on the very narrow window of opportunity that existed immediately after the fall of Saddam in order to win over the support of the Iraqi population through the provision of security and other diplomatic efforts. Unfortunately, security was not established and, consequently, the CPA failed to actively engage an Iraqi population already predisposed to mistrust. As a result of this, and also stemming from unrealistic expectations on the part of Iraqis regarding America's ability to rebuild their country, the U.S. has assumed the familiar role of conspiratorial target and object of blame for all afflictions.

Of course, it didn't help matters that the CPA seemed more interested in recruiting loyalists than in enlisting the aid of experts, and in pursuing right-wing economic theories at the expense of other civic minded endeavors. The war's supporters are quick to point to the examples of Germany and Japan as an indicator of the time required and commitment needed to muddle through as a response to these critiques. Perhaps a lesson can be drawn from the German and Japanese experiences, according to Luttwak:

The mass instruction of Germans and Japanese about the norms and modes of democratic governance, already much facilitated by pre-existing if imperfect democratic institutions, was advanced by mass media of all kinds as well as by countless educational efforts. The work was done by local teachers, preachers, journalists, and publicists who adopted as their own the democratic values proclaimed by the occupiers. But the locals were recruited, instructed, motivated, and guided by occupation political officers, whose own cultural understanding was enhanced by much communing with ordinary Germans and Japanese. In Iraq, by contrast, none of this has occurred. An already difficult task has been made altogether impossible by the refusal of Iraqi teachers, journalists, and publicists--let alone preachers--to be instructed and to instruct others in democratic ways. In any case, unlike Germany or Japan after 1945, Iraq after 2003 never became secure enough for occupation personnel to operate effectively, let alone to carry out mass political education in every city and town, as was done in Germany and Japan.

So we find ourselves at the present juncture: with an insurgency raging through large swathes of the country, and an election that threatens to exclude entire demographic groups from the process. The Sunni regions of the country are in near open revolt, moderate Shiites, under the guidance of Sistani, seem to be just barely tolerating our presence and biding their time until the elections are over (although radicals like al-Sadr have been more confrontational), and the Kurds are nervous spectators trying to restrain their urge to divorce themselves from this less than attractive union.

With the future of Iraq teetering on a precipice, the United States can ill afford to abandon this nation to the whims of its more extreme elements. We must look for a way to pry open the window again, and get Iraq back on track toward some fruitful resolution. In some ways, the secret to saving Iraq may lie in a bit of pop-Buddhist thought: let it go. I will attempt to explain how in Part II.

It is the close races that establish the reputations of great political strategists, and few have ever been closer than the 2000 presidential election. From the tumult of the lengthy recount, the absentee-ballot dispute, the charges of voter fraud, and, ultimately, the Supreme Court decision, George W. Bush emerged victorious by a margin of 537 votes in Florida—enough to elevate him to the presidency, and his chief strategist, Karl Rove, to the status of legend.

But the 2000 election was not Rove's closest race. That had come earlier, and serves as a greater testament to his skill. In 1994 a group called the Business Council of Alabama appealed to Rove to help run a slate of Republican candidates for the state supreme court. This would not have seemed a plum assignment to most consultants. No Republican had been elected to that court in more than a century. But the council was hopeful, in large part because Rove had faced precisely this scenario in Texas several years before, and had managed to get elected, in rapid succession, a Republican chief justice and a number of associate justices, and was well on his way to turning an all-Democratic court all Republican. Rove took the job.

The most important candidate among the four he would run that year was a retired judge and Alabama institution by the name of Perry O. Hooper, of whom it is still fondly remarked that in the lean years before Rove arrived he practically constituted the state's Republican Party by himself. A courtly man with an ornery streak and a stately head of white hair, Hooper seemed typecast for the role of southern chief justice, a role he hoped to wrest from the popular Democratic incumbent, Ernest "Sonny" Hornsby.

At the time, judicial races in Alabama were customarily low-key affairs. "Campaigning" tended to entail little more than presenting one's qualifications at a meeting of the bar association, and because the state was so staunchly Democratic, sometimes not even that much was required. It was not uncommon for a judge to step down before the end of his term and handpick a successor, who then ran unopposed.

All that changed in 1994. Rove brought to Alabama a formula, honed in Texas, for winning judicial races. It involved demonizing Democrats as pawns of the plaintiffs' bar and stoking populist resentment with tales of outrageous verdicts. At Rove's behest, Hooper and his fellow Republican candidates focused relentlessly on a single case involving an Alabama doctor from the richest part of the state who had sued BMW after discovering that, prior to delivery, his new car had been damaged by acid rain and repainted, diminishing its value. After a trial revealed this practice to be widespread, a jury slapped the automaker with $4 million in punitive damages. "It was the poster-child case of outrageous verdicts," says Bill Smith, a political consultant who got his start working for Rove on these and other Alabama races. "Karl figured out the vocabulary on the BMW case and others like it that point out not just liberal behavior but outrageous decisions that make you mad as hell."

Throughout the summer the Republican candidates barnstormed the state, invoking the decision at every stop as an example of "jackpot justice" perpetuated by "wealthy personal-injury trial lawyers"—phrases developed by Rove that have since been widely adopted. To channel anger over such verdicts toward the incumbent Democratic justices, Rove highlighted their long-standing practice of soliciting campaign donations from trial lawyers—just as Republicans (which Rove did not say) solicit them from business interests. One particularly damaging ad run by the Hooper campaign was a fictionalized scene featuring a lawyer receiving an unwanted telephone solicitation from an unseen Chief Justice Hornsby, before whom, viewers were given to understand, the lawyer had a case pending. The ad, and the unseemly practices on which it was based, drew national attention from Tom Brokaw and NBC's Nightly News.

The attacks began to have the desired effect. Judicial races that no one had expected to be competitive suddenly narrowed, and media attention—especially to Hooper's race after the "dialing for dollars" ad—became widespread. Then Rove turned up the heat. "There was a whole barrage of negative attacks that came in the last two weeks of our campaign," says Joe Perkins, who managed Hornsby's campaign along with those of the other Democrats Rove was working against. "In our polling I sensed a movement and warned our clients."

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James's upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove's client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby's campaign declared victory.

Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. "Karl called the next morning," says a former Rove staffer. "He said, 'We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We've got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'" Rove explained how this was to be done. "Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper's election," the staffer continued, "and then to undermine the other side's support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that." (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.

As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, "We have endured lies in this campaign, but I'll be damned if I will accept outright thievery." The recount stretched on, and Hooper's campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby's lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes.

The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby's campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren't notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. "The last marching order we had from Karl," says a former employee, "was 'Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we're going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'"

Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters' intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had "substantially complied" with the law. Hooper's lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, "They steal elections they don't like." Public opinion began tilting toward him.

The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby's legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.

When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove's closest race. "On the afternoon of October the nineteenth," Hooper recalled, "I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife's garden, and she hollered out the back door, 'Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you're the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'" In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. "That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow," he said.

In the decade since, the recount and the court battle have faded into obscurity, save for one brief period, late in 2000, when they suddenly became relevant again. Almost as if to remind Al Gore's campaign of Rove's skill when faced with a recount, the case was revived in a flurry of legal briefs in the Supreme Court case of Bush v. Gore—including one filed by the State of Alabama on behalf of George W. Bush.

This summer, with the presidential race looking as if it would be every bit as close as the one in 2000, I spent several months examining the narrowest races in Karl Rove's career to better understand the tendencies and tactics of the man who will arguably have more influence than anyone else over how this election unfolds. Rove has already generated a remarkable body of literature, including several notable books and numerous magazine and newspaper articles. I spoke to many of Rove's former candidates and their opponents; to his past and present colleagues and the people who faced off against them; and to political insiders and journalists—primarily in Texas and Alabama, where Rove has done the majority of his campaign work. I learned much about Rove that hasn't made it into the public sphere.

One of the striking things about his record is how few close races Rove has been involved with—primarily because he usually wins in a walk. In the relatively rare instances when he is in a tight race, he tends to win that, too. Although Rove first rose to political prominence as a specialist in direct-mail fundraising (and worked on hundreds of races in that capacity), mail is only one facet of a campaign, and rarely the deciding factor. So I focused on races in which Rove was the primary strategist, and therefore in a position at least roughly analogous to the one he holds in this presidential race. The last strategist before Rove to win a Republican presidential election was his former colleague Lee Atwater, who by the time of the 1988 campaign had a career record of 28—4. To my knowledge, no one has calculated such a figure for Rove. As far as I can determine, in races he has run for statewide or national office or Congress, starting in 1986, Rove's career record is a truly impressive 34—7.

The mythologizing portrayals of a "boy genius" that characterized so much media coverage of Rove after 2000, and especially after the Republicans' triumphant sweep in the midterm elections, struck me as sorely out of date when I began this project. The Bush Administration was suffering through the worst of the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the President's approval ratings were plummeting. Clearly, there are many differences between the circumstances in which Rove has been victorious in the past and those he faces now. But that is no reason to discount his record. By any standard he is an extremely talented political strategist whose skill at understanding how to run campaigns and motivate voters would be impressive even if he used no extreme tactics. But he does use them. Anyone who takes an honest look at his history will come away awed by Rove's power, when challenged, to draw on an animal ferocity that far exceeds the chest-thumping bravado common to professional political operatives. Having studied what happens when Karl Rove is cornered, I came away with two overriding impressions. One was a new appreciation for his mastery of campaigning. The other was astonishment at the degree to which, despite all that's been written about him, Rove's fiercest tendencies have been elided in national media coverage.

Democrats who want to feel sanguine about the coming election might well find comfort in the particulars of Rove's career. Several of his usual advantages are lacking this time around, conspicuously in geography. As a direct-mail consultant, Rove worked for races across the country, in blue states as well as red. The nature of that work mostly entailed identifying conservatives and motivating them to donate money—a fine skill for one in his current position as Bush's chief strategist, but not the equivalent of running a campaign. Rove compiled his stellar record in Texas and Alabama—and, of course, in the 2000 presidential election, even if his candidate lost the popular vote. During the period in which he rose to power, both states, deeply conservative, were transitioning from a firmly Democratic electorate to a firmly Republican one. A charge frequently levied against Rove by beleaguered Democratic consultants in Texas and Alabama is that he merely "surfed the wave" of the demographic change. This ignores his political talent. It's true, though, that for most of his career Rove has enjoyed a kind of home-field advantage, and in this election he does not.

A surprising number of Rove's former colleagues believe that his unprecedented success in Texas, where for years his candidates rarely faced serious challenges, has fostered what in the boxing world would be known as a "tomato-can" syndrome. Like a heavyweight champion who lets down his guard after beating up a series of hapless "tomato-can" opponents, Rove, they fear, may have been blinded to current national realities by hubris. "I think Karl's success in Texas is almost a hindrance," a veteran strategist who worked with him in that state told me. "The rest of the country doesn't emulate Texas in terms of voting behavior. But sometimes you see his southern roots in Texas and his experience in Alabama kind of overtake him, and he seems to think the United States is one big-ass Texas."

Several consultants pointed to the issue of gay marriage, which one described as a perfect Texas wedge issue because it would attract culturally conservative Democrats in the eastern part of the state—"the rednecks," as he put it—who are normally the key to winning statewide office. But he doubted that the issue would have the same effect in the less conservative battleground states that are expected to decide this election.

Rove is also riding on less of a decisive financial advantage than the one he normally enjoys. In their book Bush's Brain, James Moore and Wayne Slater explain how Rove's success as a fundraiser provided the impetus for his move into political consulting, and how, once established in that capacity, he consolidated his power by controlling candidates' access to major donors, usually ensuring that his clients were better funded than their opponents. This enabled him to engage in what amounted to asymmetric warfare against anyone who challenged his candidates. The authors recount an anecdote in which Priscilla Owen—then a Houston judge, later a controversial Bush appointee to the federal bench—approached a rich Republican donor whose job it was to vet candidates, and explained that she was thinking about running for the Texas Supreme Court. "Have you talked to Karl Rove?" he inquired. Taking the hint, she replied, "No, but I plan to." After Rove agreed to support her, she won handily, outspending her opponent. A similar imbalance applied in 2000, when Bush outspent Gore by a wide margin. But this year John Kerry's extraordinary and unexpected ability to raise money has largely closed the gap.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the current campaign that Rove's most notable tendency in close races has been to go negative against his opponent, early and often. One of the first highlights of his career was the famously tight 1986 Texas governor's race, in which his candidate and mentor, the Republican oilman Bill Clements, sought to oust the Democratic incumbent Mark White. The race is legendary in Texas political lore for Rove's discovery that his office was bugged—news of which, coincidentally or not, distracted attention from an evening debate in which his candidate was expected to fare poorly. More pertinent to the current campaign is a strategy memo Rove wrote for his client prior to the race, which is now filed among Clements's papers in the Texas A&M University library. Quoting Napoleon, the memo says, "The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack."

Though it is forever fashionable to denounce negative campaigning, every political expert understands that it can be extremely effective. Rove's career has borne this out perhaps better than any other modern political consultant's. But his very success leaves him precariously positioned if Bush stalls or founders. Once a negative course is set, it is nearly impossible to change; the perpetrator is usually stained for good. Furthermore, Rove's method is to plot out elaborate strategies well in advance of the campaign, and stick to them vigilantly. John Deardourff, Rove's media consultant for races in Texas and Alabama, says, "This rap Bush has of never changing his mind and never admitting a mistake—that's Karl! That's where it comes from." It is a tribute to Rove's strategic skill that he is so often right.

Throughout his career Rove has been able to stage-manage races to an extraordinary degree. This is possibly his least appreciated skill. The most revealing time in his career was 1994, when Rove fought more close races than in any other year, and managed to dictate the dynamic in every one of them. He pulled off highly unlikely upsets for Perry Hooper in Alabama (a race overwhelmingly about trial lawyer excesses) and George W. Bush in Texas (a race dominated by Bush's platform of welfare, juvenile-justice, tort, and public-school reform). However impressive, all but one of his races have been conducted at the state level, and thus have been comparatively insular affairs, unimpeded by the glare of the national media or a troublesome global issue like violence in Iraq—both of which could threaten Rove's ability to control this race.

In the rare instances when he has failed to set the terms of debate, Rove hasn't fared nearly so well. Four years ago, in a race to succeed Hooper, who was retiring as Alabama's chief justice, Rove lined up support from a majority of the state's important Republicans behind his candidate, an associate justice named Harold See. Like most of Rove's clients, See had an enormous financial advantage and ran a brutally negative campaign—but he was nonetheless trounced by Roy Moore, the "Ten Commandments" judge, who succeeded in making the race about religion. This loss may have helped Rove to recognize the power of religion as a political motivator: from the question of gay marriage to organizing churches for Bush, it features prominently in his playbook for the current election.

If there is any compelling reason to think that Rove may be out of his depth in this election, it is an odd lacuna in his storied career: no one I spoke with could recall his ever having to run an incumbent in a tough re-election race. This is partly a by-product of his dominance. Rove's power in Texas was such that he could essentially handpick his candidates, and once elected, they rarely lost. And he spent most of his career in the favorable terrain of the Deep South. One reason Rove was spared re-election fights is that as demographic changes swept across the South, and Republicans in Texas and Alabama began displacing Democrats, the likelihood that a Democrat could depose a sitting Republican became remote. Rove has long excelled at knocking off incumbents in tight races. Now, at last, he must defend one.

Despite all this, there are significant reasons to believe that Rove can pull it off this time. One is his prior experience in close races. Another is his preparedness and attention to detail, to which any discussion with a longtime Rove colleague invariably turns. "The thing that was most important to him was the mechanics: making certain that the campaign could block and tackle," recalls a staffer who worked for Rove's direct-mail firm in the 1980s and 1990s. Rove would typically begin a race by constructing seven-layer spreadsheets of the electoral history of a particular office, charting where votes for each candidate had originated and which groups had supplied them. In the 1980s these data led Rove to conclude that his candidates ought to target "ticket-splitters"—Texans who supported Ronald Reagan for President but voted Democratic in downballot races.

Rove's direct-mail experience had provided him with a nuanced understanding of precisely what motivates ticket-splitters. According to Karl Rove & Co. data on the 1994 Texas governor's race, Rove was aware, for instance, that households that received a single piece of mail turned out for Bush at a rate of 15.45 percent, and those that received three pieces at a rate of 50.83 percent. Turnout peaked at seven pieces (57.88 percent), after which enthusiasm for Bush presumably gave way to feelings of inundation, and support began to drop.

Rove's thirst for efficient advantage extended even to marketing. According to a former employee, rather than use costly dinners and Dallas Cowboys tickets to draw clients' attention, as other consultants did, Rove affixed antique stamps (though not valuable ones) to the weekly financial summaries he mailed to clients; he would send workers to estate sales to hunt out supplies.

When Rove arrived in Alabama, in 1994, his clients were initially puzzled as to why he was having them campaign in rural and less populated parts of the state rather than the urban areas they were accustomed to. It turned out that he had run an electoral regression analysis on each of the state's sixty-seven counties, and for efficiency's sake he put his four judicial candidates together on a bus trip to the counties with the highest percentage of ticket-splitters. "Karl got us focused on the fact that it was a matter of convincing Democratic voters who were already conservative to vote for Republican candidates," Mark Montiel, a candidate on the trip, explains, "because that was who best expressed their views."

Among Rove's other innovations was a savvy use of language, developed for speaking to the conservative base about judicial races. Candidates were to attack "liberal activist judges" and to present themselves as "people who will strictly interpret the law and not rewrite it from the bench." A former Rove staffer explained to me that the term "activist judges" motivates all sorts of people for very different reasons. If you're a religious conservative, he said, it means judges who established abortion rights or who interpret Massachusetts's equal-protection clause as applying to gays. If you're a business conservative, it means those who allow exorbitant jury awards. And in Alabama especially, the term conjures up those who forced integration. "The attraction of calling yourself a 'strict constructionist,'" as Rove's candidates did, this staffer explained, "is that you can attract business conservatives, social conservatives, and moderates who simply want a reasonable standard of justice."

As with direct mail, Rove was skilled at reaching specific voter segments with television commercials, buying air time only during programs that he believed would attract the audience he was trying to reach. In his Alabama races he was known particularly to withhold advertising from The Oprah Winfrey Show and similar afternoon programming—"trimming a media buy," as it is known in the trade. Bill Smith, who worked on a series of close races with Rove in Alabama, says, "There's a real overlap in what he specialized in professionally and what you need to do in a tight race." Whether he is seeking donors in a direct-mail fundraising campaign or manipulating a particular demographic sliver to win a close race, Rove's professional goal has been strikingly consistent: to reach the right people.

How Rove has conducted himself while winning campaigns is a subject of no small controversy in political circles. It is frequently said of him, in hushed tones when political folks are doing the talking, that he leaves a trail of damage in his wake—a reference to the substantial number of people who have been hurt, politically and personally, through their encounters with him. Rove's reputation for winning is eclipsed only by his reputation for ruthlessness, and examples abound of his apparent willingness to cross moral and ethical lines.

In the opening pages of Bush's Brain, Wayne Slater describes an encounter with Rove while covering the 2000 campaign for the Dallas Morning News. Slater had written an article for that day's paper detailing Rove's history of dirty tricks, including a 1973 conference he had organized for young Republicans on how to orchestrate them. Rove was furious. "You're trying to ruin me!" Slater recalls him shouting. The anecdote points up one of the paradoxes of Rove's career. Articles like Slater's are surprisingly few, yet as I interviewed people who knew Rove, they brought up examples of unscrupulous tactics—some of them breathtaking—as a matter of course.

A typical instance occurred in the hard-fought 1996 race for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court between Rove's client, Harold See, then a University of Alabama law professor, and the Democratic incumbent, Kenneth Ingram. According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up—absent any trace of who was behind them—viciously attacking See and his family. "We were trying to craft a message to reach some of the blue-collar, lower-middle-class people," the staffer says. "You'd roll it up, put a rubber band around it, and paperboy it at houses late at night. I was told, 'Do not hand it to anybody, do not tell anybody who you're with, and if you can, borrow a car that doesn't have your tags.' So I borrowed a buddy's car [and drove] down the middle of the street … I had Hefty bags stuffed full of these rolled-up pamphlets, and I'd cruise the designated neighborhoods, throwing these things out with both hands and literally driving with my knees." The ploy left Rove's opponent at a loss. Ingram's staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order "to create a backlash against the Democrat," as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it to me. Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family. "They just beat you down to your knees," Ingram said of being on the receiving end of Rove's attacks. See won the race.

Some of Rove's darker tactics cut even closer to the bone. One constant throughout his career is the prevalence of whisper campaigns against opponents. The 2000 primary campaign, for example, featured a widely disseminated rumor that John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, had betrayed his country under interrogation and been rendered mentally unfit for office. More often a Rove campaign questions an opponent's sexual orientation. Bush's 1994 race against Ann Richards featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record—when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for "appointing avowed homosexual activists" to state jobs.

Another example of Rove's methods involves a former ally of Rove's from Texas, John Weaver, who, coincidentally, managed McCain's bid in 2000. Many Republican operatives in Texas tell the story of another close race of sorts: a competition in the 1980s to become the dominant Republican consultant in Texas. In 1986 Weaver and Rove both worked on Bill Clements's successful campaign for governor, after which Weaver was named executive director of the state Republican Party. Both were emerging as leading consultants, but Weaver's star seemed to be rising faster. The details vary slightly according to which insider tells the story, but the main point is always the same: after Weaver went into business for himself and lured away one of Rove's top employees, Rove spread a rumor that Weaver had made a pass at a young man at a state Republican function. Weaver won't reply to the smear, but those close to him told me of their outrage at the nearly two-decades-old lie. Weaver was first made unwelcome in some Texas Republican circles, and eventually, following McCain's 2000 campaign, he left the Republican Party altogether. He has continued an active and successful career as a political consultant—in Texas and Alabama, among other states—and is currently working for McCain as a Democrat.

But no other example of Rove's extreme tactics that I encountered quite compares to what occurred during another 1994 judicial campaign in Alabama. In that year Harold See first ran for the supreme court, becoming the rare Rove client to lose a close race. His opponent, Mark Kennedy, an incumbent Democratic justice and, as George Wallace's son-in-law, a member in good standing of Alabama's first family of politics, was no stranger to hardball politics. "The Wallace family history and what they all went through, that's pretty rough politics," says Joe Perkins, who managed Kennedy's campaign. "But it was a whole new dimension with Rove."

This August, I had lunch with Kennedy near his office in Montgomery. I had hoped to discuss how it was that he had beaten one of the savviest political strategists in modern history, and I expected to hear more of the raucous campaign tales that are a staple of Alabama politics. Neither Kennedy nor our meeting was anything like what I had anticipated. A small man, impeccably dressed and well-mannered, Kennedy appeared to derive little satisfaction from having beaten Rove. In fact, he seemed shaken, even ten years later. He quietly explained how Rove's arrival had poisoned the judicial climate by putting politics above matters of law and justice—"collateral damage," he called it, from the win-at-all-costs attitude that now prevails in judicial races.

He talked about the viciousness of the "slash-and-burn" campaign, and how Rove appealed to the worst elements of human nature. "People vote in Alabama for two reasons," Kennedy told me. "Anger and fear. It's a state that votes against somebody rather than for them. Rove understood how to put his finger right on the trigger point." Kennedy seemed most bothered by the personal nature of the attacks, which, in addition to the usual anti-trial-lawyer litany, had included charges that he was mingling campaign funds with those of a nonprofit children's foundation he was involved with. In the end he eked out a victory by less than one percentage point.

Kennedy leaned forward and said, "After the race my wife, Peggy, was at the supermarket checkout line. She picked up a copy of Reader's Digest and nearly collapsed on her watermelon. She called me and said, 'Sit down. You're not going to believe this.'" Her husband was featured in an article on "America's worst judges." Kennedy attributed this to Rove's attacks.

When his term on the court ended, he chose not to run for re-election. I later learned another reason why. Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove's signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.

Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."

Earlier this year the lone Democrat on the Alabama Supreme Court announced his retirement. There's an excellent chance that on Election Day the court will at last become entirely Republican.

Almost from the beginning Karl Rove has signaled that he expects a close 2004 election, and he has run George W. Bush's re-election effort accordingly. While John Kerry's campaign has made an extraordinary effort to gather moderate voters to his liberal base by stressing its candidate's decorated war record and centrist views, Rove—in contrast to 2000's invitingly gauzy message of "compassionate conservatism"—has returned to his traditional strength: motivating the base of conservative voters.

Bush's campaign has naturally focused on the battleground states, but Rove's strategy can be decoded by looking at the targets of emphasis within those states. They are predominantly solid Republican areas such as Pensacola, Florida, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Rove's gambit is to improve Bush's margins in places where the President fared well in the 2000 election, just enough—a few points higher among Catholics, evangelicals, Hispanics—to prevail once more. To achieve this he is following the lessons of tight races past, buying television time in solidly red Fargo, North Dakota, because the airwaves also reach the neighboring swing state of Minnesota, and in solidly blue Burlington, Vermont, so as to draw a few more voters to Bush in the battle for New Hampshire, next door.

Rather than soften Bush's appeal to reach moderates, Rove, as he has done throughout his career, is attempting to control the debate by expertly spotlighting issues sure to inspire his core constituency: the drive for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the pronouncements about love of country, the unremitting attack against anything in an opponent that seems impregnable. All these tactics stand out in Rove's most memorable past victories.

Privately, Rove has been challenged and even denounced for his approach. A common refrain I heard from Republican consultants a few months ago was that his approach is foolish, because for the sake of an ideologically intense campaign, Rove is ceding to the Democrats the moderates Kerry is pursuing. And, these consultants fear, it puts Bush in jeopardy of seeing outside events decide the race.

But an interesting thing happened as I worked on this piece. Early in the summer, as Bush was struggling, even Rove's allies professed to doubt his ability to control the dynamics of the race in view of an unrelenting stream of bad news from Iraq. Several insisted that he was in over his head—with an emphasis that seemed to go deeper than mere professional envy. Yet by August, when attacks by the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were dominating the front pages, such comments had become rarer. Then they died away entirely.

If this year stays true to past form, the campaign will get nastier in the closing weeks, and without anyone's quite registering it, Rove will be right back in his element. He seems to understand—indeed, to count on—the media's unwillingness or inability, whether from squeamishness, laziness, or professional caution, ever to give a full estimate of him or his work. It is ultimately not just Rove's skill but his character that allows him to perform on an entirely different plane. Along with remarkable strategic skills, he has both an understanding of the media's unstated self-limitations and a willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

Rove isn't bracing for a close race. He's depending on it.

This article by John Dizard, a columnist from the Financial Times, provides a comprehensive background and historical context for the rise and fall of Ahmed Chalabi. Dizard details how Chalabi spun fairy tale yarns for the eager neo-conservatives in order to achieve his policy aims, the toppling of Saddam Hussein, and personal aspirations, to take over as leader of Iraq post-invasion.

He also makes the point that the neo-cons should have known better, given Chalabi's checkered past and propensity for double-dealing. He is, after all, a convicted felon who has had financial dealings with groups like Hezbollah and individuals like Saddam Hussein himself.

Furthermore, the neo-con's acceptance of Chalabi's outlandish predictions betrays a distinctive lack of knowledge of the region's history, people and political movements. As Dizard points out, the neo-cons, acting on the narrative Chalabi fed them, made errors of policy and forecast that would have been obvious to a competent history teacher with a specialization in the Middle East region.

Dizard speculates that there will be casualties from within the Bush team resulting from the disastrous and myopic relationship with Chalabi, particularly Douglas Feith and possibly even Paul Wolfowitz.

The rest of this extremely informative piece can be found here (you have to watch a 5 second Web advertisement in order to get access to Salon.com but it is well worth the wait)

Author Greg Palast has provided a chilling account of a little known company called ChoicePoint, of Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. ChoicePoint is in the business of maintaining an extensive DNA identification database containing millions of samples from citizens of the United States and several foreign countries. Their long-term plans, however, are even grander:

"an insider at ChoicePoint says the chairman told him about a longer-term plan. 'Derek [Smith] said that it is his hope to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States,' from birth to death and beyond linked to all other data on a person. The plan, said the source, is for now kept under wraps because Smith expects "resistance" from the public."

Among the troubling revelations of this piece is the role that ChoicePoint played in the 2000 presidential election:

"Before the 2000 election, Choice-Point unit Database Technologies, under a $4 million no-bid contract under the control of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was paid to identify felons who had illegally registered to vote. The ChoicePoint outfit altogether fingered 94,000 Florida residents. As it turned out, less than 3,000 had a verifiable criminal record; almost everyone on the list had the right to vote. The tens of thousands of "purged" citizens had something in common besides their innocence: The list was, in the majority, made up of African Americans and Hispanics, overwhelmingly Democratic voters. And that determined the race in which Harris named Bush the winner by 537 votes."

What is most troubling about ChoicePoint, and its desire to compile DNA profiles for every living, and some dead, humans, is the propensity for this information to be used for improper purposes. A glimmer of the nefarious possibilities can be ascertained from this observation analysis of "ChoicePoint's contract with Mr. John Ashcroft's Justice Department. A no-bid $67-million deal offered profiles on any citizen in half a dozen nations. The choice of citizens to spy on caught my eye. While the September 11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, ChoicePoint's menu offered records on Venezuelans, Brazilians, Nicaraguans, Argentinians and Mexicans.

What do these nations have in common besides a lack of involvement in the September 11 attacks? Coincidentally, each is in the throes of major electoral contests in which the leading candidates-presidents Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva of Brazil, Nestor Kirchner of Argentina and Mexico City mayor Andres Lopez Obrador-have had the nerve to challenge the globalization demands of George Bush.

When Mexico discovered ChoicePoint had its citizen files, the nation threatened company executives with criminal charges. ChoicePoint protested its innocence and offered to destroy the files of any nation that requests it."

The article continues:

"More disconcerting was a handwritten note in government files recommending ChoicePoint for more work because the company 'is very responsive to [U.S.] Marshals Service and has made enhancements to their public information database to meet our needs.' Uh, oh. If ChoicePoint obtained special info for Big Brother, then officialdom crossed a legal line. As the privacy institute's attorney Chris Hoofnagle explains, the law permits the government to access private databases that are freely available on the commercial market. But private companies may not create wide-ranging files on U.S. citizens for the government. In other words, if the FBI can't spy on Americans without probable cause for suspicion, it can't get around the law by handing the espionage work to a contractor. It's not a small difference. The law in question is the Bill of Rights. Those Amendments prohibit our government from investigating us unless there's reason to believe we are criminals."

President Bush's commission on public diplomacy recently noted that in nine Muslim and Arab nations only 12% of respondents surveyed believed that "Americans respect Arab/Islamic values." Such attitudes, the commission argued, create a toxic atmosphere of anti-Americanism that cripples U.S. foreign policy and helps terrorists.

Apparently, the Bush administration has not taken this report seriously, and a series of blunders, too numerous to mention, have only exacerbated this perception in the Muslim world. Sidney Blumenthal has written a short piece in The Guardian focusing on one aspect of this foreign policy disaster, the controversial role of General William Boykin.

General Boykin's name first appeared in the national spotlight in October of 2003, when it was revealed in various media outlets that the General had made dozens of addresses to evangelical Christian groups during which time he "allied himself with a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles to evangelism. Its manifesto - Warrior Message - summons "warriors in this spiritual war for souls of this nation and the world ... "

Among the more controversial aspects of the presentations General Boykin made while on the Evangelical lecture circuit, was how he "staged a traveling slide show around the country where he displayed pictures of Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. 'Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army,' he preached. They 'will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.'"

Speaking of his battle with a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin stated, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

Although not a denigration of the Muslim faith like his other statements, this statement, discussing the election of President Bush, does shed light on the religious fervor under which he operates: "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there."

While statements like these from a senior U.S. military official surely contribute to the perception that Americans do not respect Muslim people and the Muslim faith, especially while the U.S. is conducting two wars in two separate Muslim countries, the Bush administration has been loathe to discipline General Boykin let alone criticize him. When asked about these remarks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to condemn them, explaining, "We’re a free people." President Bush went a little farther by saying, that Boykin "doesn't reflect my point of view or the point of view of this administration."

Still, Boykin remained in the theater of operations. As Blumenthal reports, "he was at the heart of a secret operation to "Gitmoize" (Guantánamo is known in the US as Gitmo) the Abu Ghraib prison. He had flown to Guantánamo, where he met Major General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of Camp X-Ray. Boykin ordered Miller to fly to Iraq and extend X-Ray methods to the prison system there, on Rumsfeld's orders."

Boykin's role in setting the methods for interrogation and abuse at Abu Ghraib are slowly emerging, but given the track record of statements could it be any worse that this General in particular is involved. Could Osama Bin Laden have written a better script for his recruitment literature?

To anyone who hasn't read Seymour Hersh's latest article, I must reiterate that it is one of the most probing pieces of investigative journalism that I have ever read. As well as tracing the chain of command and executive decisions that lead to the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees, Hersh describes the intellectual underpinnings for the type of sexual humiliation that was used. His discoveries further cast in doubt the implausible theory that six or seven MPs from Maryland and West Virginia had the intellectual sophistication to know the most effective means of breaking down Arab prisoners. Here is a telling excerpt:

"The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was 'The Arab Mind,' a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. 'The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,' Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, 'or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.' The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.' In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—'one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.'"

When the second plane hit the tower the sound was deafening and the shades on my window blew in violently, remarkable considering the fact that the windows faced the opposite direction of the World Trade Center. I was getting ready to leave for work and had the television tuned to CNN as the situation was unfolding. My apartment was situated on Pearl St., in between John St. and Maiden Lane, roughly four blocks from the World Trade Center so leaving my apartment became imperative. The subway was no longer an option so I joined the masses of travelers on foot walking uptown in what had the surreal appearance of a trail of white collar refugees. Glancing over my left shoulder I saw the Twin Towers burning. All around me, debris and paper was raining down.

My apartment was uninhabitable for two weeks, as the water and electricity were both not working, not to mention the fact that transportation below Canal St. was limited to walking, and even then the national guard posted in lower Manhattan discouraged the journey and only allowed visits to residents who could prove their status.

After the second week, though, the water and electricity were on-line, and my landlord informed me, through the management company representative, that they considered the apartment inhabitable and would begin charging rent again (they had magnanimously decided to provide a two-week reprieve immediately following the attacks).

I complained that the air was not safe, and that adequate clean-up had not even begun, let alone been completed. My protests were scoffed at by the management company. The woman I spoke to took a smug and condescending tone of voice when she told me that, "of course the air was safe, even the EPA has said so." When I protested further that the EPA may not know all they need to know, and that even then they may have a reason to mislead the public in order to get Wall St. back to work, she actually laughed at me. Laughed, and suggested that my theory was "a little paranoid."

I delayed returning beyond the two weeks, but only by a week, as my rent charges were ongoing and I was outliving my welcome on my friend's couch. I didn't feel great about it, but even I began to doubt my earlier skepticism and thought that surely the EPA would not put the health of so many in jeopardy.

You can imagine the anger I am experiencing now that reports are emerging about just how very dangerous the air was in that area for months after 9/11. As Newsweek is reporting, doctors and experts studying the environmental impact of the collapse of the towers are concluding that the air "within a 10-block radius," and possibly more, contained a cocktail of harmful pollutants including "asbestos, lead and polychlorinated biphenyls (or PCBs) in addition to pulverized cement and glass fibers."

My landlord, New York City officials and those in charge of the clean up efforts believed that "the air was safe after the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman declared it so a week after the attacks (a statement she has since been widely criticized for making)."

The EPA was pressured by the Bush administration to make statements about the safety of the air that ran counter to the scientific data available at the time, and were at best premature and overly optimistic, but more likely deceptive.

Even worse than urging workers to return to work before conditions were safe, "no one was insisting that workers wear respirators," says Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, chair of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine and director of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York..."I wouldn't fault anyone in the first 48 hours during the immediate response," he adds, "but for months afterward most workers at Ground Zero were still not wearing respirators and, in my mind, that is a terrible failure in regulation and it’s going to result in a lot of diseases that could have been prevented."

Now, many of the firefighters, police officers, construction workers, and other relief workers are facing widespread health effects, the full extent of which will not be known for years. So, too, are those that returned to work and residences in the weeks immediately following the attacks, myself included. Many of these heroic figures, myself excluded, are suffering from debilitating health effects that prevent them from returning to work, yet government agencies have been reluctant to recognize their claims, subjecting them to months of fighting through a sea of paperwork and bureacratic run-around. Contrast that reality with the images of 9/11 that the Bush administration is so eager to portray in maudlin campaign commercials.

The question remains, however, if the EPA, and the federal and local governments were willing to risk the health of courageous Americans willing to help in this City's, and this nation's, most dire of moments, what are they going to do to make it right or acknowledge their mistakes?

I'm not holding my breath.

As I have said on this site before, John McCain is a man of integrity and political honesty. He is one of a dying breed in the increasingly extreme conservative Republican Party who is willing to put common sense and pragmatism ahead of ideological and political concerns. Furthermore, he is actually a true conservative, philosophically speaking, who believes in fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets and a reluctance to tinker with the Constitution for the sake of political campaigns.

McCain's honesty and integrity is apparently ruffling some feathers in his own party. Especially McCain's suggestion that the wealthiest Americans should sacrifice a portion of the windfall provided by Bush's tax cuts in order to fund the war effort and trim the historically, and perilously, out of control budget deficits.

The response yesterday from Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois), was a vicious attack on McCain's credentials as a Republican and also the suggestion that McCain does not understand "sacrifice." Just a reminder to Hastert and his fellow Republicans, John McCain spent years being abused and tortured in a POW camp in Vietnam after his fighter jet was shot down. McCain actually refused early release from this prison's hell because it was gained because of his connections, and he refused to take advantage of his connections while his fellow soldiers would have to remain in the POW camp. My guess is, and it is just a guess, John McCain knows more about sacrifice than Dennis Hastert.

As reported on CNN:

The exchange started when a reporter asked: "Can I combine a two issues, Iraq and taxes? I heard a speech from John McCain the other day..."

Hastert: "Who?"

Reporter: "John McCain."

Hastert: "Where's he from?"

Reporter: "He's a Republican from Arizona."

Hastert: "A Republican?"

Amid nervous laughter, the reporter continued with his question: "Anyway, his observation was never before when we've been at war have we been worrying about cutting taxes and his question was, 'Where's the sacrifice?' "

Hastert: "If you want to see the sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda. There's the sacrifice in this country. We're trying to make sure they have the ability to fight this war, that they have the wherewithal to be able to do it. And, at the same time, we have to react to keep this country strong."

McCain responded with a sensible argument:

"'The Speaker is correct in that nothing we are called upon to do comes close to matching the heroism of our troops," McCain said.

"All we are called upon to do is not spend our nation into bankruptcy while our soldiers risk their lives. I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility. Apparently those days are long gone for some in our party.'"

Despite almost unanimous public outcry, even some form of condemnation from the Bush administration, the Sharon government is pushing ahead with the violent incursion into the Gaza Strip carried out under the cheery sounding euphemism, "Operation Rainbow."

Today, as reported on CNN:

"Israeli forces in southern Gaza have killed at least six Palestinians in the latest military operation in Rafah, Palestinian security sources said Thursday.

Israeli Apache helicopters fired four rockets in the southern Gaza town, and one of them hit a house, killing four people, the sources said.

The sources also reported a 3-year-old boy died from shock after Israeli forces shelled his neighborhood, but he was not directly killed by Israeli fire."

Although the Bush administration issued a statement saying "we do not see that its operations in Gaza in the last few days serve the purposes of peace and security," the U.S. abstained from a vote in the U.N. on a resolution, which passed, condemning the killing of Palestinian civilians in southern Gaza and calling on Israel to stop demolishing homes there.

According to a senior Army officer who served in Iraq, "Army officials in Iraq responded late last year to an International Committee of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.) report of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison by trying to curtail the international agency's spot inspections of the prison.

After the I.C.R.C. observed abuses in one cellblock on two unannounced inspections in October and complained in writing on Nov. 6, the military responded that inspectors should make appointments before visiting the cellblock."

This was counter to the Army's official response that they provided unfettered access to the I.C.R.C. and promptly began an investigation after receiving the initial report. The timeline is less than convincing, however.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, said, "We followed the rules, and we gave unrestricted access to the I.C.R.C., and it validated our operations, actually." Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of Army intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 11, "As soon as we hear about one of those allegations, an investigation should begin right away and we shouldn't wait for it."

The first official report came on Nov. 6, but the Army did not begin an investigation until Dec. 24, more than a month and a half later. In the interim, the Army decided to limit the ability of the I.C.R.C. to make surprise visits, or according to a senior Army officer, "The position that they were taking was that the I.C.R.C. could not have unrestricted access to those particular cellblocks."

The story is reported in today's New York Times.

As I have said before on this site, beatings that result in the death of the detainee should be put under the category of torture, not abuse, for those that wish to parse the legal definitions of the two. Below is an account of one of the detainees that died while being interrogated by various U.S. military, intelligence and civilian organizations. This one in particular was being interrogated by the CIA, as reported in today's New York Times:

"Central Intelligence Agency officers who brought a hooded man to Abu Ghraib ordered military guards at the prison not to remove the empty sandbag that covered his head, according to the sworn testimony of a military guard. Only after the prisoner slumped over dead during questioning was the hood removed, revealing that the man had severe facial injuries.

The incident was described in testimony at a closed hearing early last month in the case of Sgt. Javal S. Davis, one of the accused prison guards. The statements were made by two members of Sergeant Davis's unit, Specialists Bruce Brown and Jason A. Kenner. Their testimony appears to provide fresh clues to the mysterious death of a man identified by the American authorities only by his last name, Jamadi.

Mr. Jamadi is believed to be the man whose body was packed in ice and photographed at Abu Ghraib. The picture, among a group that depicted degrading treatment of detainees, has circulated widely on computer networks as one of most graphic images in the prisoner abuse scandal."

In a report issued yesterday by Amnesty International (compiled before the recent incursions into Gaza as described in the post below), Amnesty has condemned the widespread destruction of homes in Israel and the Occupited territories. Citing the Geneva Convention, Amnesty describes these actions as war crimes:

"More than 3,000 homes, vast areas of agricultural land and hundreds of other properties have been destroyed by the Israeli army and security forces in Israel and the Occupied Territories in the past three and a half years. Tens of thousands of men, women and children have been made homeless or have lost their livelihood. Thousands of other houses have been damaged, and tens of thousands of others are under threat of demolition, their occupants living in fear of homelessness. House demolitions are usually carried out without warning, often at night, and the occupants are forcibly evicted with no time to salvage their belongings. Often the only warning is the rumbling of the Israeli army's US-made Caterpillar bulldozers beginning to tear down the walls of their homes. The victims are often amongst the poorest and most disadvantaged. In most cases the justification given by the Israeli authorities for the destruction is 'military/security needs', while in other cases it is the lack of building permits. The result is the same: families are left homeless and destitute, forced to rely on relatives, friends and humanitarian organizations for shelter and subsistence. . . .

According to Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, 'extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly' is a grave breach, and hence, a war crime."

The rest of the report can be found here.

In what has grotesquely been named, "Operation Rainbow," Israeli military forces, earlier this week, began the biggest incursion into the Gaza Strip since the Palestinian uprising began nearly four years ago.

Yesterday, as reported by Reuters:

"Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles have demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes in one of the most destructive incidents in the Gaza Strip in recent years.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), 2,197 people have already been made homeless and 191 homes razed throughout Gaza in the past few days.

The worst affected area is Rafah, on the border between Egypt and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where 1,064 people lost their homes in 48 hours.

More than 30 Palestinians have died and many others who are critically injured are unable to reach hospitals due to curfews and restrictions on movement imposed by Israeli forces."

Today the situation got even worse. As reported in the Washington Post:

"An Israeli tank and helicopter fired on rock-throwing Palestinian demonstrators Wednesday, killing at least 12 people and wounding dozens of others, according to witnesses. Israeli media put the number of dead at 22...

As they marched along the main street here, a group of them got within about 800 feet of the cordon, with some in the front throwing rocks towards an Israeli tank, witnesses said.

At that point, the tank opened fire on an electrical pylon above the crowd, hitting some of the Palestinians with shrapnel. Then the tank and an Israeli assault helicopter fired at the crowd itself, witnesses said."

As reported on CNN:

"Video of the scene from The Associated Press showed dozens of wounded, some of them children. The crowd was protesting Israel's Tuesday attack in the Tel Sultan neighborhood in Rafah."

These horrific, and criminal, acts of violence could not come at a worse time for the U.S. as out image around the World has been tarnished almost beyond repair (at least in the near term) by the conduct of the war in Iraq, and the prisoner torture scandal in particular. Now the World will see images of American made weapons, like Apache helicopters and Abrams tanks, firing on rock throwing protesters and refugee camps leaving mutilated and dismembered children among the dead. In what will further harm our image, there will be no strong condemnation of these events from either the Bush administration or the Kerry campaign, especially in an election year, let alone any type of actual pressure placed on the government of Ariel Sharon to disengage from this bloody and destructive incursion.

If we want to fight a comprehensive war on terrorism, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict must be resolved. It is not the magic bullet, but it is one crucial step without which there can be no victory. Acknowledging Arafat's role in the violence does not help the process if there is also no recognition of the brutality and bad faith of Ariel Sharon.

I cringe when I learn about Palestinian suicide bombers brutally murdering Israeli civilians, men, women and children. I am equally sickened by the targeting of civilians and wanton destruction of homes and lives when conducted by the Israeli military. Neither is acceptable or constructive.

This story is a nice follow up to one that I posted last week regarding the fact that the Bush administration passed up the opportunity to take out Abu Musab Zarqawi, not once, not twice, but three times. Zarqawi is behind the murder of Nick Berg and is also believed to be responsible for the deaths of 700 others in Iraq since the invasion.

Conservative columnist David Brooks seems to have a reinvigorated sense of optimism concerning our mission in Iraq. The erstwhile supporter of the invasion, who had subsequently experienced doubts about the wisdom of this war, has reemerged from his cocoon of uncertainty to declare that the current administration is about to "muddle its way to success" in Iraq. His sanguine outlook is based on a thesis he draws from an observation of American History:

"American history sometimes seems to be the same story repeated over and over again. Some group of big-dreaming but foolhardy adventurers head out to eradicate some evil and to realize some golden future. They get halfway along their journey and find they are unprepared for the harsh reality they suddenly face. It's too late to turn back, so they reinvent their mission. They toss out illusions and adopt an almost desperate pragmatism. They never do realize the utopia they initially dreamed about, but they do build something better than what came before."

In essence, Brooks is saying that although there have been mistakes and miscalculations, and unreal expectations, America will eventually get it right, even though the eventual outcome might be a somewhat tempered version of the original grandiose goal. Something akin to the famous quote by Sir Winston Churchill, "You can trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they have tried every other alternative."

Brooks points to two major moments in American history to support his thesis: the colonists in Jamestown and the settlers' early attempts out West. While these two episodes fit nicely into the pattern he describes, there are certainly other notable examples that run counter to his predictions. For example, our efforts in Vietnam seem to fit nicely into the first part of his pattern ("foolhardy adventurers head out to eradicate some evil and to realize some golden future. They get halfway along their journey and find they are unprepared for the harsh reality they suddenly face"), but the outcome was not nearly as rosy as his thesis would predict.

Instead of adapting to the realities on the ground, the U.S. military remained locked in to the destructive and counterproductive policies that governed the initial stages of the war. Through stubbornness and political face-saving concerns, we prolonged the war and increased the resistance, which in turn led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers, and many times that number of Vietnamese. Shortly after American forces departed, the South was overrun by North Vietnamese forces and there was nothing we could point to that would suggest that we had built "something better than what came before." Instead what was left were mass graves, active land mines, a population traumatized and terrorized by decades of war, families torn apart by conflict and loss and many fatherless children.

I will be the first to admit that the Vietnam analogy is overused and somewhat inaccurate when applied to the current crisis in Iraq, but in this sense it is an appropriate comparison. My deepest fear is that America will be forced to beat a hasty and premature retreat from Iraq and that the country will undergo a period of violence and brutality, possibly even a civil war, and that the eventual ruling faction that emerges may not be much better than Saddam Hussein. Furthermore, I fear that our actions in Iraq will seriously compromise our efforts to conduct operations against terrorists worldwide. Much of our money will have been spent, alliances strained, credibility lost, and anger in the Muslim world will be at such a fevered pitch that extremists will be able to recruit many more terrorists and that they will all enjoy more popular support and legitimacy. I hope that I am wrong and the Brooks is right, but I take no solace from history's lessons.

The rest of Brooks' column can be found here.

After more than $27 million in payments made over four years for intelligence reports on WMDs and ties to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, that internal reviews by the United States government have found to be "useless, misleading or even fabricated," the Bush administration has finally decided to stop payments to Ahmed Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress.

Chalabi, who in 1989 was convicted, in abstentia, in Jordan for fraud and embezzlement for his role as chairman of Petra Bank, was and still is highly regarded by civilians in the Pentagon, partricularly Paul Wolfowitz, as well as administration officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney. In fact, his supporters in the Bush administration, believing his claims of popular support amongst the Iraqi population, intended to make Chalabi the first Prime Minister of post-Saddam Iraq. Unfortunately for Chalabi and his proponents, it soon became clear after the invasion that the Iraqi in exile, who left Iraq at the age of 7 in the same year that the Dodgers left Brooklyn, was not trusted, known or particularly well-liked amongst the Iraqi populous, and he would not be accepted or supported as a leader.

Like an addict unable to shake a destructive habit, the Bush administration continues to make payments of approximately $340,000 a month to Chalabi despite the fact that the intelligence he provided in the run-up to the invasion regarding WMDs, Al-Qaeda ties, the expected reaction of the Iraqi people to U.S. forces and his own popular mandate as a leader has been described as either incorrect or deceitful, and has led to many of the mistakes made in arguing for the invasion and the subsequent mismanagement of the reconstruction. The good news is that these sizable payments will cease on June 30, the date of the handover of limited sovereignty to a still unknown and unidentified Iraqi governing body.

The New York Times is covering this story here.

Alexander St. John, writing from Tokyo, has some book recommendations:

In view of what's come to light in Iraq over the past few weeks, there are a few books that might be of interest. First, "Jarhead", about Marines in the First Gulf War, written by a jarhead himself, provides insight into the sickening behavior exhibited by the MPs at the prison. Sadly, the military breeds a culture of dehumanization which is difficult to undue, especially when buzzwords like "camel jockeys," "terrorists," "evil doers," "ragheads" and the like become the nouns of choice for personnel 'liberating' Iraq.

As much as these soldiers would like to lay all of the blame at the feet of military intelligence, and the influence of clandestine operations originating in the Pentagon, suspect that they received a great deal of pleasure from the power they felt from their actions (judging from the gleeful expression on the face of England herself, her statement that she posed in that picture against her will was the only thing funny about this incident).

The sad thing about this event and so many other events I see going on in Iraq, is that it confirms what so many have suspected: that the majority of Americans, on some level, believe that they are superior to all other races and cultures and that people of color are in some way inferior. This is the same mentality that the British fostered as they 'indirectly ruled' much of the world during the peak of the British Empire. These 'brown cultures' are children, incapable of governing themselves, liberating themselves or doing much of anything else. At the very least, it is easier to dehumanize a military foe that is of different ethnicity and appearance, and dehumanization leads to brutality, abuse and disrespect.

As evidence of this lack of respect and regard, we only tally up our own war dead and not the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis that are being killed. To put this in perspective, approximately 3,000 innocent Americans were tragically killed on 9/11. In Iraq, estimates of innocent civilian casualties range from 10,000 - 20,000.

This lack of cultural respect and sensitivity has also colored many of the military's tactics that have proved most offensive to Iraqis, including invasive home searches and the rough treatment of women. In addition, Iraqis themselves were largely shut out of the reconstruction process, with the lucrative contracts being awarded to American and European firms instead, despite the extensive experience that Iraqis have in rebuilding their country after war (they have done it before after all). Iraqis were left to fight over sub-contracts and small time work orders, that amounted to little in terms of work or compensation. The lack of work and involvement in the reconstruction has increased the mistrust and suspicion that Iraqis have for the U.S. occupation authority.

For incredible reading in this vein of thought, I recommend John Dower's "War Without Mercy", an incredible account of the role of race in the war between the U.S. and Japan during WWII. Additionally, "Empire and the English Character," by Kathryn Tidrick, provides some interesting historical views of British mentality towards governing foreign peoples - much of it being seen again in the current situation with Bush and Iraq.

As a head's up to any readers of the YoungTurk, this site will be moving to a new URL effective late tonight or early tomorrow morning. Consistent with the name of the new site, "Total Information Awareness," the new site will be located at:

http://tianews.blogspot.com/

Also, I wish to give credit where credit is due, and in fairness I owe the inspiration for the name of my site to Pentagon Adm. John Poindexter, who chose the Orwellian name "Total Information Awareness" for the highly controversial computer program that would have allowed the CIA, FBI and other intelligence apparatuses to mine information from the Internet in such a widespread and unfettered way that civil libertarians, both liberals and conservatives objected. The Congress eventually cut funding for TIA, but a renamed version is currently being considered. Conservative columnist William Safire discusses the status of this legislation, and the recommendations of a panel appointed by the Pentagon to analyze the proposals, in his column in today's New York Times.

Yet another bombshell quote from the Seymour Hersh article posted below (As quoted from an internal report on the insurgency in Iraq prepared for the U.S. military, made available to Seymour Hersh):

"'Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council'—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—'as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.'"

As I have said before, there is no finer journalist in the United States, and perhaps the World, than Seymour Hersh. This man embodies what it means to be a journalist, and fully embraces the journalist's role in a democracy: to provide an honest, even-handed yet probing report on the activities of the government of the people. This article grants him his share of well-deserved praise.

His latest article, appearing in the May 24th edition of the New Yorker, is yet another example of his tireless quest to uncover the truth behind the public statements made by governments with something to hide. This article should also put to rest the ludicrous theory that the widespread systemic abuse that occurred in Iraq and elsewhere, a very small amount of which was photographed, was committed by a few low-level MPs acting on their own initiative. This quote sums up the conclusion of his recent inquiries:

"The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror."

The rest of the article is another must-read from the World's Greatest.

In an earlier post, I highlighted an article that described the current state of prisons in America, and the abuse that regulary occurs behind the walls of these institutions that have operated for too long beyond the pale of public oversight and investigation. One of the few positive outcomes that could result from the otherwise disastrous Iraqi prison abuse scandal, would be greater public and governmental scrutiny of the American prison system.

The unfortunate truth is that prisoners in our own prison system are regularly subjected to physical violence and sexual humiliation (including being paraded around naked in front of other prisoners) at the hands of prison officials. In addition, there is an indifference to prisoner on prisoner violence and sexual predation, which has the effect of terrorizing the prison population even though the primary actions in these instances are at the hands of other inmates.

These same prisons fail to provide inmates with adequate medical attention and psychiatric services, and also fail to institute adequate preventive measures for the transmission of infectious disease. The lack of effective medical and psychiatric treatments, which increase risks for society when these infected and/or psychotic inmates are released, are the result of cost-cutting measures in the now privatized prison system.

An Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times describes these problems, and the wisdom of instituting some form of oversight and review of the otherwise secretive prison system. Hopefully the American electorate, and our elected officials, can bring such change about without the impetus provided by a series of gruesome photographs depicting our own abuse scandal.

I strongly recommend this piece (described in my prior post). Here is another extremely insightful excerpt:

"The military component of the war on terrorism has had some significant success. A high proportion of those who associated with bin Laden between 1996 and 2001 are now either dead or in prison. Bin Laden's own ability to commission and instigate terror attacks has been severely curtailed. Enhanced cooperation between intelligence organizations around the world and increased security budgets have made it much harder for terrorists to move their funds across borders or to successfully organize and execute attacks.

However, if countries are to win the war on terror, they must eradicate enemies without creating new ones. They also need to deny those militants with whom negotiation is impossible the support of local populations. Such support assists and, in the minds of the militants, morally legitimizes their actions. If Western countries are to succeed, they must marry the hard component of military force to the soft component of cultural appeal. There is nothing weak about this approach. As any senior military officer with experience in counterinsurgency warfare will tell you, it makes good sense. The invasion of Iraq, though entirely justifiable from a humanitarian perspective, has made this task more pressing.

Bin Laden is a propagandist, directing his efforts at attracting those Muslims who have hitherto shunned his extremist message. He knows that only through mass participation in his project will he have any chance of success. His worldview is receiving immeasurably more support around the globe than it was two years ago, let alone 15 years ago when he began serious campaigning. The objective of Western countries is to eliminate the threat of terror, or at least to manage it in a way that does not seriously impinge on the daily lives of its citizens. Bin Laden's aim is to radicalize and mobilize. He is closer to achieving his goals than the West is to deterring him."

The rest of the piece can be found here.

I said, repeatedly, that countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have a lot more to do with terrorism and the radical brand of Islam that underlies it than Iraq. Below is an excerpt taken from a comprehensive and informative piece about al-Qaeda and the nature of radical Islamic terrorism appearing on the ForeignPolicy.com website. This portion details Saudi Arabia's role in the spread of Wahhabism:

"Saudi Arabia has contributed significantly to the spread of radicalism through the government-subsidized export of its Wahhabist strand of hard-line Islam. This policy arose from the turmoil of the late 1970s, when outrage over government corruption and the royal family's decadence prompted hundreds of Islamic radicals to occupy the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The 1978-79 Shiite revolution in Iran threatened Saudi leadership in the Muslim world and offered a cautionary tale of the fate that could await the House of Saud. In an effort to appeal to religious conservatives and counter the Iranian regime, the royal family gave the Wahhabi clerics more influence at home and a mandate to expand their ideology abroad.

Since then, Saudi money disbursed through quasi-governmental organizations such as the Muslim World League has built hundreds of mosques throughout the world. The Saudis provide hard-line clerics with stipends and offer financial incentives to those who forsake previous patterns of worship. In Pakistan, money from the Persian Gulf has funded the massive expansion of madrasas (Islamic schools) that indoctrinate young students with virulent, anti-Western dogma. This Saudi-funded proselytism has enormously damaged long-standing tolerant and pluralist traditions of Islamic observance in East and West Africa, the Far East, and Central Asia. Wahhabism was virtually unknown in northern Iraq until a massive push by Gulf-based missionaries in the early 1990s. And many of the mosques known for radical activity in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada were built with donations from private and state sources in Saudi Arabia.

The inequities of the Saudi system—in which most people are very poor and ruled by a super-rich clique—continues to create a sense of disenfranchisement that allows extremism to flourish. Many of the most militant preachers (and some of the Saudi hijackers who perpetrated the September 11 terrorist attacks) come from marginalized tribes and provinces. A more inclusive style of government and a more just redistribution of resources would undercut the legitimacy of local militants and deny radicals new recruits. Yet, while such reforms might slow the spread of Wahhabism and associated strands outside Saudi Arabia, in much of the world the damage has already been done. As with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saudi Arabia is one of the many causes of modern Islamic militancy, but it has no monopoly on blame."

The rest of the piece can be found here.

Christian Weller from the Center for American Progress has just released an economic report that is less than sanguine. It is summarized as follows:

"This is an “upside down” economy, whereby profits are soaring to record heights, while personal income grew at the slowest rate in any recovery. The lack of income growth threatens the sustainability of the recovery. So far, households have compensated for the lack of income growth by borrowing more. This cannot continue endlessly. Unless consumption is financed out of income, economic growth is likely to slow. Historical precedent supports the notion that stronger income growth means stronger economic growth. When income growth was stronger in a recovery, households increased their debt less, governments borrowed less, and the trade balance improved more. In sharp contrast, this recovery has seen comparatively low economic growth rates, record household debt, deteriorating government finances, and record trade deficit levels. Because the distribution of national income gains was upside down, this recovery is debt driven and hence less sustainable than otherwise would be the case."

The full report can be viewed here.

As the White House recently unveiled one of the crown jewels of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit law, the vaunted discount drug cards, the vast majority of seniors remain either mystified by the magnitude of choices of cards and benefits or unimpressed with the discounts afforded, or both.

Part of the problem is that there are 73 competing cards. Each card offers a different package of discounts for a different set of medications. Senior's that take more than one prescription drug must try to figure out which plan offers the best combined savings for all of their prescription drug needs, since no two cards are the same in terms of benefits and coverage. For example, one card may offer savings for Lipitor and Ambien but not Vioxx and Fosamax, while another might offer savings on Vioxx and Lipitor but not Fosamax and Ambien, and so on. Considering that most seniors take a multitude of different prescription drugs, this system is complex, confusing and in most cases ineffective.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that the entities that offer the discount cards can change the benefits offered at any time, while seniors are required to make a one-year commitment to the cards that cost up to $30 each. So even if a senior is successful in weeding through the 70+ cards to find the one that presents the best package of savings for his or her particular needs, the card company can change the discounts, or eliminate them completely. Not exactly a good deal.

Furthermore, it is not clear if these "discount" cards represent any real savings anyway, as many senior's have claimed. Apparently, many of the "discounts" do not equal the savings that seniors can find from Canadian pharmacies, from existing state or union plans and from low-cost outlets in the United States. A study by the Committee on Government Reform in the U.S. House of Representatives, completed this April, came to the following conclusion:

"Conclusion

This analysis compares discounted prices and prices currently available to Medicare beneficiaries with the prices that will be available with the new Medicare discount drug cards. It finds that the prices with the cards are far higher than discounted prices, such as those available in Canada or via the Federal Supply Schedule. And it finds that Medicare beneficiaries already have access to the same prices offered by the discount drug cards, through outlets such as Drugstore.com and Costco.com. Thus, the new Medicare discount drug cards appear to offer few advantages."

The full report can be found here.

So if the Medicare discount drug cards do not offer substantial savings for seniors, and they remain subject to the whim of the entities offering the cards, what is the purpose of issuing them? David Sirota does a good job of detailing the influence that pharmaceutical companies and other health profession industries had on the crafting of the underlying legislation, and how these cards represent a windfall for these industries while the actual savings for seniors were diluted to the point of non-existence. His piece can be found here.

The ultra-liberal, anti-American Financial Times has an interesting take on the foreign policy of President Bush. I think this quote sums it up:

"He is not up to the job. This is not a moral judgment, but a practical one. The world is too complex and dangerous for the pious simplicities and arrogant unilateralism of George W. Bush."

But that quote does not do full justice to a very well written, non-partisan and nuanced piece appearing in the right-leaning capitalist bible. I strongly recommend you read the full article here.

In further evidence that the prisoner abuse scandal marked the moment that Donald Rumsfeld jumped the shark (see my prior post for an explanation of shark jumping), conservative columnist Max Boot has joined the bi-partisan chorus calling for Rumsfeld's resignation. The full story can be found here.

As quoted from the Crossfire transcripts, this is Tucker Carlson's opinion on the invasion of Iraq:

"I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," he said. "It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually."

With lines like:

"The Bush hawks, so fixated on making the Middle East look more like America, have made America look un-American. Should we really be reduced to defending ourselves by saying at least we don't behead people?"

and

"The hawks, who promised us garlands in Iraq, should have recalled the words of the historian Daniel Boorstin, who warned that planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers."

Maureen Dowd is winning over my heart and mind. The rest of her piece can be found here.

That is the defense that Donald Rumsfeld appears to be using to explain his role in the prisoner abuse scandal (quoted from Thomas Friedman's Op-ed piece in today's New York Times). Interesting take, but what I want to focus on is the defense of Donald Rumsfeld's performance by President Bussh, Vice President Cheney and other members of the administration. Vice President Cheney went as far as to say that Donald Rumsfeld "is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had."

Condoleeza Rice said, "Don Rumsfeld was effective before all this began, and he's effective now, and he's going to be effective in the future, because he has the complete confidence of the president."

Bush echoed similar sentiments. The fact that the administration is circling the wagons around their embattled defense secretary should come as no surprise considering this administration's aversion to admitting any wrong, and absolute failure to require that anyone take responsibility for any of a series of colossal mistakes (as pointed out much more eloquently in noted conservative thinker George Will's piece posted below).

What is a cause of concern, though, is the actual track record of "the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had." Upon closer inspection, it appears that Rumsfeld's decisions, and indecision, have been fraught with error and misguided predictions. For now, I will only focus on the invasion of Iraq, and the related lead-up.

1. Rumsfeld's Pentagon created the now infamous "Office of Special Plans" which took raw intelligence reports on Iraq and turned them into the most exaggerated, deceptive and propagandized intelligence regarding Iraq's fictional WMDs and the fictional connections to al-Qaeda. These reports, which were used to form the basis of the arguments for going to war and which Colin Powell relied on for his speech before the U.N., are now totally invalidated and proven to be wrong. These errors have cause enormous damage to the credibility of our intelligence gathering capabilities and will make it more difficult for subsequent administrations to convince the world community of the need for military action in the future. For an insightful first person analysis of the Office of Special Plans from a Pentagon insider, click here.

2. Rumsfeld was consistently wrong on crucial predictions regarding the nature and scope of the war in Iraq. Rumsfeld, and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, claimed that the war would cost less than $20-$50 billion, and that the rest of the reconstruction would be paid out of Iraqi oil proceeds. To date it has cost about $200 billion through next year, and the final bill will likely exceed that amount. Rumsfeld was off by a staggering amount.

3. Rumsfeld said that the U.S. would need fewer than 100,000 troops to conduct the invasion and post-war reconstruction. Then Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, suggested that, based on former peacekeeping missions, we would need more in the neighborhood of 250,000-500,000 troops. Rumsfeld said he was "off the mark," but agreed to increase troop levels for the operation to between 100,000 and 150,000. The failure to stop the post-war looting, restore law and order, seal off the borders from the incursions of foreign fighters, and adequately staff the prisons and detention centers were all a direct result of the insufficient troop presence in Iraq. Shinseki was right, Rumsfeld was wrong, and the consequences have been disastrous on many levels.

4. Rumsfeld claimed that our troop presence would be reduced to 30,000 by the fall of 2003. It is now the spring of 2004, and we are maintaining our troop levels at 135,000, and it appears that the increased troop levels will be necessary for the immediate and near term future. Rumsfeld was very wrong.

5. Relying on the fantastic claims of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi (who left Iraq the same year the Dodgers left Brooklyn), Rumsfeld claimed that the troops would be greeted as liberators with flowers and candies, and that Chalabi would enjoy widespread support in his rapid ascendancy to the leadership of Iraq. This reliance partly informed Rumsfeld's other predictions on troop strength, costs of the war, probability of looting and duration of troop presence. The CIA and Military Intelligence found Chalabi to be extremely unreliable, but Rumsfeld ignored their concerns.

Rumsfeld was wrong, but despite these errors, Chalabi continues to receive $340,000 a month (over $4 million a year) to collect intelligence in Iraq for Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. Last time I checked, Chalabi was in talks to sell the Pentagon a bridge.

6. The International Red Cross has been reporting on prisoner abuse "tantamount to torture" from as far back as March 2003. Major General Taguba conducted an internal investigation that was completed in early February 2004. Still, Rumsfeld never told the President of these reports and investigations, leaving Bush to learn about the abuses from 60 Minutes II. Even more troubling, Rumsfeld himself admitted to not reading the Taguba report (to date, it is still not known if he has read it), and had only viewed the now infamous photographs on May 6, several days after they aired on national television. Rumsfeld was wrong not to take these allegations seriously, not to read Taguba's report, not to look at the pictures, and, almost inexcusably, not to inform the President Bush.

In addition, it appears that, at best, Rumsfeld was ineffectual in controlling interrogation tactics and techniques ordered by Military Intelligence, CIA and civilian interrogators. The possibility remains, however, that Rumsfeld knew of these orders and gave his consent.

The fact that Rumsfeld is not even considering resigning is consistent with an environment in which mistakes go unpunished, lapses go uncorrected and errors in judgment go unadmonished. Given this environment, and his dubious track record, why would any rational American believe that "Don Rumsfeld was effective before all this began, and he's effective now, and he's going to be effective in the future"?

This is truly amazing:

"According to polls, President Bush's popularity has been dwindling since the Iraq war heated up again last month, but has it really come to this? A Wisconsin daily newspaper, in a novel twist, has resorted to asking readers to send in pro-Bush letters to the editor to balance out the many critical of the President.

In a notice to its readers, The Post-Crescent of Appleton, Wis. (weekday circulation 54,193), observed that with the presidential race heating up, the editors have found themselves in a "quandary." They feel their Views page takes "the political and social temperature of the Valley." But now the question is: "How can we balance the perspectives and topics of our letters when many of our submissions have been coming only from one side?""

Of course, this raises the question: If the Views page takes the political temperature of the Valley, why does it need to solicit pro-Bush letters?

The rest of the article can be found here.

This is a fine piece by George Will, who on his occasions of non-partisanship, has a unique and powerful way of summarizing a given issue:

No Flinching From the Facts

By George F. Will
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Washington Post, Page A19

Listen to the language. It is always a leading indicator of moral confusion.

The lawyer for a soldier charged in the Iraq prison abuse investigation was explaining a photograph. It showed some Americans standing over a pile of naked Iraqis: "Intelligence officers came into the facility, pulled two men out of their cells, took them away, brought them back with a third prisoner, ordered the MPs to undress all of them, and then started interrogating them, and had them . . . in this position where they're all embracing each other."

"Embracing."

The lawyer's client probably will offer -- this should deepen Americans' queasiness -- the Nuremberg defense: I was only obeying orders. If the abuse was the result of orders -- or of the absence of them -- fault must extend up the chain of command.

So, forgive the lawyer's language. But note what it betokens: a flinching from facts. Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.

And some people will be corrupted by dominating. That is why the leaders of empires must be watchful. Very watchful. Donald Rumsfeld is clearly shattered by the corruption he tardily comprehended. Testifying to Congress last week, he seemed saturated with a sadness that bespeaks his deep decency and his horror at the vast injury done to the nation by elements of the department he administers. He knows that he failed the president. And he knows that his extraordinary record of government service -- few public careers, including presidential ones, can match Rumsfeld's -- has been tarnished.

How should he, and we, think about what comes next? Consider an axiom, a principle, two questions and then a second axiom.

The first axiom is: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. Leave aside the question of who or what failed before Sept. 11, 2001. But who lost his or her job because the president's 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud -- the story of Iraq's attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging preemptive war -- weapons of mass destruction -- was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today's insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable.

The principle is: The response by the nation's government must express horror, shame and contrition proportional to the evil done to others, and the harm done to the nation, by agents of the government.

Americans are almost certainly going to die in violence made worse in Iraq, and not only there, by the substantial aid some Americans, in their torture of Iraqi prisoners, have given to our enemies in this war. And by the appallingly dilatory response to the certain torture and probable murder committed in that prison.

The nation's response must, of course, include swift and public prosecutions. And the destruction of that prison. And punctilious conformity to legal obligations -- and, now, to some optional procedures -- concerning persons in American custody. But this is not enough.

One question is: Are the nation's efforts in the deepening global war -- the world is more menacing than it was a year ago -- helped or hindered by Rumsfeld's continuation as the appointed American most conspicuously identified with the conduct of the war? This is not a simple call. But being experienced, he will know how to make the call. Being honorable, he will so do.

He knows his Macbeth and will recognize the framing of the second question: Were he to resign, would discerning people say that nothing in his public life became him like the leaving of it?

This nation has always needed an ethic about the resignation of public officials. Such an ethic cannot be codified. It must grow in controlling power from precedent to precedent, as an unwritten common law, distilled from the behavior of uncommonly honorable men and women who understand the stakes. A nation, especially one doing the business of empire, needs high officials to be highly attentive to what is done in their departments -- attentive far down the chain of command, as though their very jobs depended on it.

Finally, the second axiom. It is from Charles de Gaulle: The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Another example of the brilliance of The Daily Show is this exchnage between host Jon Stewart and cast-mate Rob Corddry:

Corddry: How does one report the facts in an unbiased way when the facts themselves are biased?

Stewart: I'm sorry, Rob, did you say the facts are biased?

Corddry: That's right Jon. From the names of our fallen soldiers to the gradual withdrawal of our allies to the growing insurgency, it's become all too clear that facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda.

According to NBC News, the Bush administration had three opportunities, before the invasion of Iraq, to decimate the terrorist camp of, and kill, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida who is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq including the recent beheading of David Berg. What is shocking is the rationale for scuttling the three plans proposed by the Pentagon:


"Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late — Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. “Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq,” Cressey added.

And despite the Bush administration’s tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they strike, Zarqawi’s killing streak continues today."

The rest of this must read article can be found here.

There is a holy trinity of quality on television these days emanating from the studios at Comedy Central. South Park is hilariously irreverent, Dave Chappelle is hitting his stride and then some and the Daily Show is awash in the glow of an election year. Check out this exchange between Daily Show host Jon Stewart and cast-mate Stephen Colbert:

The Daily Show, 5/11/04:

Jon Stewart: Stephen, what do you think about this idea that we are hearing from Rumsfeld, and now Sen. Inhofe, that the press was somehow irresponsible for releasing these photos of abuse?

Stephen Colbert: Jon, I agree entirely with Secy Rumsfeld that the release of these photos was deplorable, but these actions of a few rogue journalists do not represent the vast majority of the American media.

Stewart: The journalists did something wrong?

Colbert: I'm just saying those journalists don't represent the journalists I know. The journalists I know love America, but now all anybody wants to talk about is the bad journalists--the journalists that hurt America.

But what they don't talk about is all the amazingly damaging things we haven't reported on. Who didn't uncover the flaws in our pre-war intelligence? Who gave a free pass on the Saddam-al Queda connection? Who dropped Aghanistan from the headlines at the first whiff of this Iraqi snipehunt? The United States press corps, that's who. Heck, we didn't even put this story on the front page. We tried to bury it on "60 Minutes II." Who's on that--Charlie Rose and Anglela Lansbury?

Stewart: Stephen, what do you think is at play here?

Colbert: Politics, Jon, that's what. Pure and simple. I think it's pretty suspicious that these tortures took place during a Presidential campaign. This is a clear cut case of partisan sadism. You know, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure those Iraqi prisoners want Bush out of office too. You know I wouldn't be a bit surprised if a pile of hooded, naked Iraqis has a job waiting for them in the Kerry Administration.

I think the criticism that the Bush administration does not highly regard the international community, or seek to include other nations in its policies is overstated. After all, it appears that we took an international approach to the torture of innocent detainees. We treated Afghanis inclusively, as well as the many nations represented at Gitmo.

My reaction to the despair of many Democrats at the inability of Kerry to gain in the polls over the past two months, which have been nothing short of disastrous for Bush's policy goals in Iraq, is an emphatic: Calm Down!!!!

It is more than premature to complain about a campaign so early, in May, that is actually polling quite well: in a dead-heat with the incumbent. In fact, both candidates' approval ratings put Kerry in a better position than Clinton was in 1999 and Reagan in 1979. Campaigns take time to unfold, and to define candidates, and people must not expect instant gratification from the ambiguous world of polling. Such misguided panic on the part of some in the Democratic Party gives potential voters the wrong impression and is counterproductive at best.

For a discussion of current poll numbers, and the historical nuances of presidential polls, check out this piece written by a director of the Pew Research Center (a widely respected non-partisan polling organization)

This Op-Ed piece, appearing in today's New York Times, punches holes in the ludicrous theory that the widespread, systemic abuse and torture of detainees in Iraq was the work of seven soldiers working on their own:


"The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team. That cynical approach was on display yesterday morning in the second Abu Ghraib hearing in the Senate, a body that finally seemed to be assuming its responsibility for overseeing the executive branch after a year of silently watching the bungled Iraq occupation.

The senators called one witness for the morning session, the courageous and forthright Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who ran the Army's major investigation into Abu Ghraib. But the Defense Department also sent Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, to upstage him. Mr. Cambone read an opening statement that said Donald Rumsfeld was deeply committed to the Geneva Conventions protecting the rights of prisoners, that everyone knew it and that any deviation had to come from "the command level." A few Republican senators loyally followed the script, like Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who offered the astounding comment that he was "more outraged by the outrage" than by the treatment of prisoners. After all, he said, they were probably guilty of something.

These silly arguments not only obscure the despicable treatment of the prisoners, most of whom are not guilty of anything, but also ignore the evidence so far. While some of the particularly sick examples of sexual degradation may turn out to be isolated events, General Taguba's testimony, and a Red Cross report from Iraq, made it plain that the abuse of prisoners by the American military and intelligence agencies was systemic. The Red Cross said prisoners of military intelligence were routinely stripped, with their hands bound behind their backs, and posed with women's underwear over their heads. It said they were "sometimes photographed in this position."

The Red Cross report, published by The Wall Street Journal, said that Iraqi prisoners — 70 to 90 percent of whom apparently did nothing wrong — were routinely abused when they were arrested, and their wives and mothers threatened. The Iraqi police, who operate under American control and are eventually supposed to help replace the occupation forces, are even worse — sending those who won't pay bribes to prison camps, and beating and burning prisoners, according to the report.

The Red Cross said most prisoners were treated better once they got into the general population at the larger camps, except those who were held by military intelligence. "In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel," the report said.

It was alarming yesterday to hear General Taguba report that military commanders had eased the rules four times last year to permit guards to use "lethal force" on unruly prisoners. The hearing also disclosed that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, had authorized the presence of attack dogs during interrogation sessions. It wasn't very comforting that he had directed that these dogs be muzzled.

These practices go well beyond any gray area of American values, international law or the Geneva Conventions. Mr. Cambone tried to argue that Mr. Rumsfeld had made it clear to everyone that the prisoners in Iraq were covered by those conventions. But Mr. Rumsfeld's public statements have been ambiguous at best, and General Taguba said that, in any case, the Abu Ghraib guards had received no training. All the senators, government officials and generals assembled in that hearing room yesterday could not figure out who had been in charge at Abu Ghraib and which rules applied to the Iraqi prisoners. How were untrained reservists who had been plucked from their private lives to guard the prisoners supposed to have managed it?

General Sanchez did give some misguided orders involving the Abu Ghraib prison and prisoners in general. But the deeply flawed mission in which he participates is the responsibility of the Bush administration. It was Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld, not General Sanchez, who failed to anticipate the violence and chaos that followed the invasion of Iraq, and sent American soldiers out to handle it without the necessary resources, manpower and training."

By JASON STRAZIUSO
The Associated Press
5/11/2004, 2:34 p.m. ET


WEST CHESTER, Pa. (AP) — The family of an American civilian shown beheaded on an Islamic militant Web site huddled in in tears Tuesday after learning of the existence of the graphic videotape.

The video showed Nick Berg, 26, in a staged execution carried out by an al-Qaida affiliated group. The video said the killing was to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.

"My name is Nick Berg, my father's name is Michael, my mother's name is Suzanne," the man said on the video before being killed. "I have a brother and sister, David and Sara. I live in ... Philadelphia."

Berg's family said U.S. State Department officials on Monday had told them Berg was decapitated. The family, though, had wanted that information to remain private.

When told about news of the Web site Nick Berg's father, brother and sister, collapsed to the ground in a tearful hug in their front yard.

"I knew he was decapitated before," said the father, Michael Berg. "That manner is preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn't want it to become public."

Michael Berg lashed out at the U.S. military and Bush administration, saying his son might still be alive had he not been detained by U.S. officials in Iraq without being charged and without access to a lawyer. (emphasis added)

Nick Berg, a small telecommunications business owner, spoke to his parents on March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30. But Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days.

His father, Michael, said his son wasn't allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.

FBI agents visited Berg's parents in West Chester on March 31 and told the family they were trying to confirm their son's identity. On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day Berg was released. He told his parents he hadn't been mistreated.

Michael Berg said he blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son's death. He said if his son hadn't been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave the country before the violence worsened.

"I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights this thing has caused," he said. "I don't think this administration is committed to democracy." (emphasis added)

The Bergs last heard from their son April 9, when he said he would come home by way of Jordan.

Berg had traveled several times to Third World countries to help spread technology, his family said. He had previously traveled to Kenya and Ghana, where they said he had purchased a $900 brick-making press for a poor village, the family said.

Berg's mother, Suzanne Berg, said her son was in Iraq to help rebuild communication antennas.

"He had this idea that he could help rebuild the infrastructure," she said.

Michael Berg described himself as fervently anti-war, but said his son disagreed with him.

"He was a Bush supporter," Berg said. "He looked at it as bringing democracy to a country that didn't have it."

Suzanne Berg said she was told her son's body would be transported to Kuwait and then to Dover, Del. She said the family had been trying for weeks to learn where their son was but that federal officials had not been helpful.

"I went through this with them for weeks," she said. "I basically ended up doing most of the investigating myself."

This editorial appeared in the Military Times:

Editorial: A failure of leadership at the highest levels



Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.

There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

In addition to the scores of prisoners who were humiliated and demeaned, at least 14 have died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has ruled at least two of those homicides. This is not the way a free people keeps its captives or wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious world.

How tragically ironic that the American military, which was welcomed to Baghdad by the euphoric Iraqi people a year ago as a liberating force that ended 30 years of tyranny, would today stand guilty of dehumanizing torture in the same Abu Ghraib prison used by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen.

One can only wonder why the prison wasn’t razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime.

Army commanders in Iraq bear responsibility for running a prison where there was no legal adviser to the commander, and no ultimate responsibility taken for the care and treatment of the prisoners.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also shares in the shame. Myers asked “60 Minutes II” to hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put U.S. troops at risk. But when the report was aired, a week later, Myers still hadn’t read Taguba’s report, which had been completed in March. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also failed to read the report until after the scandal broke in the media.

By then, of course, it was too late.

Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world.

If their staffs failed to alert Myers and Rumsfeld, shame on them. But shame, too, on the chairman and secretary, who failed to inform even President Bush.

He was left to learn of the explosive scandal from media reports instead of from his own military leaders.

On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness — a failure that amounts to professional negligence.

To date, the Army has moved to court-martial the six soldiers suspected of abusing Iraqi detainees and has reprimanded six others.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the MP brigade that ran Abu Ghraib, has received a letter of admonishment and also faces possible disciplinary action.

That’s good, but not good enough.

This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.

— Military Times editorial, May 17 issue

I generally stay well clear of conspiracy theories, but this article appearing in today's Washington Post raises some troubling questions by recounting how:

"Six air traffic controllers provided accounts of their communications with hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2001, on a tape recording that was later destroyed by a Federal Aviation Administration manager, according to a government investigative report issued yesterday."

What is most troubling is the way the FAA manager went about destroying the recording by:

"crushing it with his hand, cutting it into small pieces and depositing the pieces into several trash cans, the report said."

That seems to be pretty extreme measures unless there is something on that tape that is worth hiding.

Rather than working hard to create a Constitution for Iraq, why don't we just give them ours? We're not using it.

This article by James Q. Whitman from the Washington Post (May 10, 2004) provides an interesting perspective on prisoner abuse at home and abroad:

"It has emerged that two of the MPs implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal have worked as corrections officers in the United States. One hopes and prays that nothing like the horrors of Abu Ghraib happened on their watches at home. Nevertheless, the very fact that American prison guards were involved in such barbarism abroad raises a question that ought to disturb all of us: Is what happened in Iraq in any way typical of what happens in domestic American punishment?

This is not a question many of us want to face at the moment: Our sense of shame and horror is quite overwhelming enough when we focus only on Iraq. But the sad truth is that we have every reason to take the question seriously. When it comes to degradation in
punishment, it's not just a question of Iraq. It's about degradation at home as well. We will not be able to digest the lessons of Abu Ghraib unless when understand as much.

Over the past few years, I have been studying the forms of criminal punishment in America and abroad, and I have learned that the American attitude toward degradation in punishment has become dramatically different from that in other countries. Americans
simply do not understand how shocking our forms of punishment can seem to foreign observers.

Take Germany and France. Degradation is regarded as so unacceptable in those countries that they have generally banned the use of prison uniforms -- a far cry from stripping prisoners naked to humiliate them. And that is only the beginning. Prisoners are supposed
to be treated like ordinary human beings in continental Europe, entitled to ordinary respect. Thus inmates have privacy rights in Europe -- which means, for example, that they are not housed behind barred doors. Certainly continental inmates are not obliged
to use toilets in the open view of guards of the opposite sex, as they may be in America. In a country such as Germany, ordinary labor law applies to prison inmates, giving them the same kinds of protections accorded workers in the outside world. There are even
rules requiring that prisoners be addressed respectfully, as Herr So-and-So.

Imagine how America looks to punishment professionals from such countries. It's not just about the photos of grinning MPs engaged in gleeful forms of humiliation in Iraq. It's not just about our previous international scandal of this kind -- the one surrounding photos of prisoners taken in Afghanistan, chained and blindfolded on an airplane floor as they were carted to Guantanamo Bay. It's not just about ostentatiously degrading practices such as the chain gang. It's about everyday American criminal punishment, in ordinary American prisons.

What has happened in our country? There was a time when America was regarded as a model of civilized punishment. A century and a half ago, de Tocqueville was convinced that America would always be a model of mildness. In 1945 Americans could still look upon
Germany and feel pride that we had not succumbed to the German sort of barbarism. Today things are very different. We incarcerate at a rate staggeringly higher than other Western countries. We criminalize a far wider range of conduct. We are a country known
worldwide for our exceptionally punitive practices -- not least when it comes to degradation.

Terrible evil has come out of the Abu Ghraib scandal for America. It's hard to imagine how the damage to our international standing can be repaired. But some good can come from it if it brings us to recognize the barbarity of any punishment system, abroad or at home,
that does not recoil from practices of degradation."
__________________________
The writer is professor of comparative law at Yale Law School and the author of "Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe."

As I have argued on this page, one of the main reasons that I opposed the invasion of Iraq was, and is, the lack of connection to Al-Qaeda and the Islamist terrorists that attacked us on 9/11 and continue to seek our annihilation.

First, there was no connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. In fact, Saddam's strongly secular brand of Islam in Iraq was anathema to the Wahhabist Al-Qaeda, and this made Saddam one of their targets not allies.

Second, there is the fact that the invasion of Iraq, and the unavoidable killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children would further radicalize the region and provide the most efficient recruitment tool Osama could imagine. That is until the recent images of abuse, torture, murder and rape emerged which have surpassed in potency simple pictures of slaughtered civilians. The conduct of this war has made more allies than enemies in the region and beyond. Al-Qaeda's job has been made easier not harder.

Finally, the entanglement in Iraq has diverted an overwhelming percentage of our military, intelligence and economic resources ($150-$200 Billion to date). This has left us unable to finish the job in Afghanistan (which is teetering on chaos and a return of the Taliban), and to address real Al-Qaeda sponsored terrorist threats in other regions.

As an article in today's New York Times points out, that region has emerged:

"The American campaign against terrorism is opening a new front in a region that military officials fear could become the next base for Al Qaeda — the largely ungoverned swath of territory stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Western Sahara's Atlantic coast.

Generals here at the United States European Command, which oversees the area, say the vast, arid region is a new Afghanistan, with well-financed bands of Islamic militants recruiting, training and arming themselves. Terrorist attacks like the one on March 11 in Madrid that killed 191 people seem to have a North African link, investigators say, and may presage others in Europe."

Given the severity of the threat emerging in this region, consider what we are spending on the problem, and then consider what we are spending in Iraq:

"The program, called the Pan-Sahel Initiative, was begun with $7 million and focused on Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad. It is being expanded to include Senegal and possibly other countries. The European Command has asked for $125 million for the region over five years."

I hope that they get the $125 million over five years that they ask for, and that this amount is enough. Somehow, I doubt it since Iraq is fast becoming a black hole for defense and intelligence spending.

The rest of the article can be found here.

This Reuters article is priceless:


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As others condemned the reported abuse of Iraqi prisoners, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe on Tuesday expressed outrage at the worldwide outrage over the treatment by American soldiers of those he called "terrorists" and "murderers."
"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," the Oklahoma Republican said at a U.S. Senate hearing probing the scandal.

"These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations," Inhofe said. "If they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."


So Inhofe claims that these prisoners were not in for traffic violations, but as I posted earlier:

"Coalition military intelligence officers estimated that about 70 percent to 90 percent of the thousands of prisoners detained in Iraq had been "arrested by mistake," according to a report by Red Cross given to the Bush administration last year and leaked this week.

The report also said the mistreatment of prisoners apparently tolerated by U.S. and other coalition forces in Iraq involved widespread abuse that was "in some cases tantamount to torture."

The rest of the article can be found here

Even Rupert Murdoch's New York Post is reporting the grim fact that, "Up to 90 percent of Iraqi detainees were arrested 'by mistake,' according to coalition intelligence officers cited in a Red Cross report disclosed yesterday."

More disturbing still, "The Red Cross has emphasized that the report was only a summary of its repeated attempts in person and in writing from March to November 2003 to get U.S. officials to stop abuses."

The International Red Cross (IRC) was repeatedly bringing the torture and abuse of prisoners to the attention of the U.S. Military from as far back as March of 2003 (14 months ago). Of course, if the IRC discovered the abuse on its limited inspection visits, it is also safe to assume that the abuse was obvious to members of the U.S. Military conducting the detentions around the clock, above the rank of the seven low ranking soldiers currently implicated.

The debate over stem-cell research has recently recruited a seemingly unlikely ally: Nancy Reagan. The Conservative movement icon has written to George Bush urging him to overturn the ban on federal funding for stem-cell research, and last Saturday she spoke out publicly about the potential benefits of stem-cell research and the diseases that research would target (including Alzheimers which her husband Ronald Reagan suffers from). Of the maladies and diseases that are believed to be the initial targets of the majority of research are cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers, diabetes, Parkinson's, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries.

Opponents to stem-cell research consist mostly of pro-life religious organizations, predominately Christian, including, but not limited to, Catholics, Baptists and Methodists. According to Richard Doerflinger, spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, pro-life groups will explain to voters that embryonic stem-cell cloning is "unpromising for cures" and offers "a gateway to all kinds of possible genetic engineering in humans."

While this is a clearly a moral issue to be decided by individual Americans, I take exception to the statements by Doerflinger and others within the opposition that stem-cell research is "unpromising for cures" and otherwise unlikely to provide meaningful scientific breakthroughs. In debates of science, and scientific value, it is important to take the advice of actual scientists not theologians.

After all, the Catholic Church, historically, used to burn heretic scientists at the stake if they claimed that the Earth was round not flat, or that the Sun was the center of the Universe, not the Earth. In addition, Christian movements in the United States today have made relentless efforts to rid public school textbooks and curricula of the mention and tutelage of the Theory of Evolution, in favor of the teaching of religious Creationism. In States such as Georgia and Kansas considerable inroads have been made. In Kansas, between 1999 and 2001, the State had banned the teaching of Evolution in public schools. In a decision in 2002, Kansas reinstated the teaching of Evolution. In many counties in Georgia, Creationism must be taught along with Evolution, and Georgia recently reversed itself from a decision to replace the word "evolution" with the phrase "biological changes over time" in textbooks and curricula.

I am not attempting to demean religious beliefs, I just believe that the scientific process should determine good science, not theologians with firmly held pre-conceived notions.

Time Magazine has a solid summary of the evolving debate here

There have been public statements by some Catholic clergy, and other factions within the Catholic Church, seeking to deny John Kerry, and other Catholic Democratic lawmakers, communion and to chastise those priests that offer communion to these "bad" Catholics. The basis for the desired exclusion is the position of Kerry, and his Democratic colleagues, on the issue of abortion. They are pro-choice, which runs counter to the official position of the Catholic Church.

These moves raise the specter of concern over split loyalties and the influence of the Pope and the Vatican in American politics when a Catholic candidate is running for office. This concern was a big hurdle for Catholic candidate John F. Kennedy's during his run for the presidency. Kennedy's tenure, however, allayed most of these fears and it appeared that American Catholic politicians would be able to put the Constitution above the Papacy, and act with the concerns of their constituencies being paramount to the concerns of the clergy.

Now, it appears that members of the Catholic clergy might wipe away years of evidence to the contrary and ignite the old fears again. While that is deeply troubling, what is even more troubling is the fact that there appears to be a partisan motivation to it. For example, there is seemingly no call to deny communion to Catholic Republican politicians that are pro-choice. In fact, most of the Catholic Republican politicians that are pro-choice are also pro-death penalty, which is also against Catholic teaching. On top of that, most of the same pro-choice, pro-death penalty politicians are also pro-war in Iraq, which has been condemned by the Vatican.

So, while I don't advise this as a course of action, if the Catholic clergy wants to prevent John Kerry from receiving communion, then they should be even more adamant with the following list of Catholic Republican lawmakers (to name but a few) who are not only pro-choice but also pro-death penalty and pro-war:

1. Rudolph Giuliani
2. George Pataki
3. Tom Ridge
4. Arnold Schwarzenegger
5. Christie Todd Whitman

More from Andrew Sullivan's bout of conscience:


"THE CASE STANDS - JUST: There were two fundamental reasons for war against Iraq. The first was the threat of weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam Hussein, weapons that in the wake of 9/11, posed an intolerable threat to world security. That reason has not been destroyed by subsequent events, but it has been deeply shaken. The United States made its case before the entire world on the basis of actual stockpiles of dangerous weaponry. No such stockpiles existed. Yes, the infrastructure was there, the intent was there, the potential was there - all good cause for concern. Yes, the alternative of maintaining porous sanctions - a regime that both impoverished and punished the Iraqi people while empowering and enriching Saddam and his U.N. allies - was awful. But the case the U.S. actually made has been disproved. There is no getting around that. The second case, and one I stressed more at the time, was the moral one. The removal of Saddam was an unalloyed good. His was a repugnant, evil regime and turning the country into a more open and democratic place was both worthy in itself and a vital strategic goal in turning the region around. It was going to be a demonstration of an alternative to the autocracies of the Arab world, a way to break the dangerous cycle that had led to Islamism and al Qaeda and 9/11 and a future too grim to contemplate. The narrative of liberation was critical to the success of the mission - politically and militarily. This was never going to be easy, but it was worth trying. It was vital to reverse the Islamist narrative that pitted American values against Muslim dignity. The reason Abu Ghraib is such a catastrophe is that it has destroyed this narrative. It has turned the image of this war into the war that the America-hating left always said it was: a brutal, imperialist, racist occupation, designed to humiliate another culture. Abu Ghraib is Noam Chomsky's narrative turned into images more stunning, more damaging, more powerful than a million polemics from Ted Rall or Susan Sontag. It is Osama's dream propaganda coup. It is Chirac's fantasy of vindication. It is Tony Blair's nightmare. And, whether they are directly responsible or not, the people who ran this war are answerable to America, to America's allies, to Iraq, for the astonishing setback we have now encountered on their watch."

Well known Conservative pundit, and avid supporter of the war in Iraq, Andrew Sullivan, has come to some realizations about this foreign policy debacle. Some of the recent posts on his blog have been outright revelation.

Here is one of my favorites:

"THE INEXCUSABLE: The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong. I sensed the hubris of this administration after the fall of Baghdad, but I didn't sense how they would grotesquely under-man the post-war occupation, bungle the maintenance of security, short-change an absolutely vital mission, dismiss constructive criticism, ignore even their allies (like the Brits), and fail to shift swiftly enough when events span out of control. This was never going to be an easy venture; and we shouldn't expect perfection. There were bound to be revolts and terrorist infractions. The job is immense; and many of us have rallied to the administration's defense in difficult times, aware of the immense difficulties involved. But to have allowed the situation to slide into where we now are, to have a military so poorly managed and under-staffed that what we have seen out of Abu Ghraib was either the result of a) chaos, b) policy or c) some awful combination of the two, is inexcusable. It is a betrayal of all those soldiers who have done amazing work, who are genuine heroes, of all those Iraqis who have risked their lives for our and their future, of ordinary Americans who trusted their president and defense secretary to get this right. To have humiliated the United States by presenting false and misleading intelligence and then to have allowed something like Abu Ghraib to happen - after a year of other, compounded errors - is unforgivable. By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control. We are at war; and our war leaders have given the enemy their biggest propaganda coup imaginable, while refusing to acknowledge their own palpable errors and misjudgments. They have, alas, scant credibility left and must be called to account. Shock has now led - and should lead - to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it."

If anyone is still clinging to the illusion that the prisoner abuse and torture was the product of six or seven rogue MPs, please read this detailed and informative article appearing in today's Washington Post.

Here is a look at some excerpts from the International Red Cross Report on the abuse of Iragi detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq, as taken from an article in today's Washington Post. It appears to contradict the Bush administration's take on the situation:


"Abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was broad and "not individual acts" as President Bush has argued, according to a Red Cross report disclosed today.

Bush has said the abuses were the result of the "wrongdoing of a few."

However, the report says "the use of ill-treatment against (Iraqi) persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by" coalition forces.

A senior Red Cross official added: "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system."

"ICRC (Red Cross) delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogators," according to the confidential report. The 24-page document was confirmed as authentic by the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) after it was published today by the Wall Street Journal.

The Red Cross report says its delegates saw how detainees at Abu Ghraib were kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness." It said it found evidence supporting prisoners' allegations of other forms of abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation.

Among the evidence were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with the abuse that prisoners alleged, it said.

The report cites abuses – some "tantamount to torture" – including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of "imminent execution."

"These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence value."'

The agency said arrests allegedly tended to follow a pattern.

"Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property," the report said.

"Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people," it said. "Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles."

Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations, said the report had been given to U.S. officials in February, but it only summarized what the agency had been telling U.S. officials in detail between March and November 2003 "either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions."

Kraehenbuehl said the abuse of prisoners represents more than isolated acts, and that the problems were not limited to Abu Ghraib.

"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," he said, declining to give further details.

Kraehenbuehl said the ICRC regretted the publication and said it would have preferred sticking to its policy of confidential discussions with coalition authorities because the United States had been making progress toward meeting its demands.

The report said the abuses were primarily during the interrogation stage by military intelligence.

Once the detainees were moved to regular prison facilities, the abuses typically stopped, it said."

From the May 3rd, Show:

LIMBAUGH: You know, if you look at -- if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don't know if it's just me, but it looks just like anything you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I'm -- yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City -- the movie. I mean, I don't -- it's just me.

(Allegations from the Taguba Report and the International Red Cross Report include multiple incidents each of: beatings, sodomy, rape and murder to name a few)

From the May 4 Rush Limbaugh Show:

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men --

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

(Allegations from the Taguba Report and the International Red Cross Report include multiple incidents each of: beatings, sodomy, rape and murder to name a few)

As further evidence of "compassionate conservativism," the Bush administration is launching an assault on Section 8 housing vouchers that:

"go primarily to families that live at or below the poverty level, in households that include children, disabled people or the elderly. These families pay 30 percent of their incomes toward rent and the Section 8 vouchers pay the rest. Some cities give priority to battered women, many of them with children, who have to find a new place to live to escape danger."

Apparently, the Bush administration is looking at ways to cut costs from a budget that is facing enormous and unprecedented deficits due, in most part, to a historic series of tax cuts that disproportionately favor the wealthiest Americans. As Harvard economist Paul Krugman pointed out recently, the United States has never cut taxes in a time of war until the Bush administration did so - twice. Actually, to date, Krugman has not been able to identify any society or civilization in the history of the World that cut taxes while waging war.

If that is compassionate conservativism, what does regular conservativism look like?

The rest of the above quoted piece can be found here.

The following is background information provided for this post.

Kinds Of Blue [Fingers]

Since I've been indulging in a little self congratulatory posting lately, I thought I would look back at what I was saying about the Iraq election as early as December 1, 2004 (and before that though I can't find the post):

Iraq is uniquely problematic in some respects in that the elections themselves will bring to a head many of the simmering ethnic tensions that have thus far remained under wraps while the insurgency has raged on in its stead. In an inversion of conventional wisdom, elections could be the precursor to civil war between the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds who will each be vying for the mantle of power that elections will bestow.

For anyone following the increasingly spirited jockeying for power going on in Iraq as the newly elected blocs try to realize their often disparate goals, the earlier predictions of insurmountable obstacles appear at least potentially prescient - though hopefully there is another way.

Although the differences run deep, the recent manifestations stem from some of the logistical requirements in the nascent government. Because a two-thirds majority in the legislature is needed to pick a ruling cabinet (known as the "Presidency Council") which will in turn pick the Prime Minister, the dominant Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) which has roughly 50% of the seats in parliament, has had to reach out to other factions in order to form a government, at least for these initial steps. Within this dynamic, the Kurdish bloc, with around 20% of the seats has emerged as the most attractive partner to the UIA - or for any other faction that would seek to reach the 66% threshold.

Realizing this, the Kurdish group has been trying to maximize on its new found leverage by pushing for several guarantees from the UIA before forming a government and picking a cabinet. The salient issues for the Kurds are autonomy (they want guarantees of more, whereas the Shiites would prefer uninterrupted control of the entire nation), religious influence in the law (the Kurds want less than the Shiites), one of their own for President (Jalal Talabani), and the control over the oil rich city of Kirkuk (the Kurds want it, but so does everybody else).

For a look at just one issue, Kirkuk, praktike cites this Spencer Ackerman piece:

This is a headache Jaafari [the presumptive UIA pick for Prime Minister] clearly doesn't want: It's hard to overstate how massive a step acquiescing to Kurdish control of Kirkuk would be. Last week, the Alliance pick for prime minister was quoted as saying that "such a sensitive issue [as Kirkuk] should not be discussed under the interim government and should be discussed when we have stability, when there is a parliament and a permanent constitution"...

The Alliance doesn't want to give up Kirkuk. One of Jaafari's Da'wa colleagues recently told Radio Sawa, "Kirkuk has never and will never be a Kurdish city. Kirkuk is more Arabic than Kurdish." But we're about to learn just how valuable Kirkuk is to the Shia, since intransigence serves Kurdish interests--after all, the Shia are chomping [sic] at the bit to finally form a government and rule Iraq. What's more, Kurdish control of Tamim province--which hosts Kirkuk--virtually ensures that the Kurds can take the city eventually through a provincial vote to join Kurdistan. The Kurds seem to be telling the Shia that there's an easy way and a hard way to settle Kirkuk, but the outcome is preordained. We may soon know whether the Shia are prepared to agree.

As suggested above, the UIA has not acquiesced to all the Kurdish demands. While the Kurds are content to draw out the process and increase the pressure on the UIA, such delays are causing anxiety and anger in other quarters.

As negotiations over the formation of a new government drag on, many Iraqis who overcame fears of attacks at polling stations and threats of retaliation are beginning to wonder why the process is taking so long, and whether voting was worth the risk....

"They turned their backs on the people because they're busy dividing shares in the government," said Yousif Mohammed Tahir, 30, an electrician in the northern city of Mosul. "The security situation is worse than before. They promised a better life, but they lied."

In addition, two members of the UIA recently left the coalition citing the delays in forming a government as the cause for their defections (although there are other factors at work, such as the interference of Chalabi and Allawi, each trying to strengthen their hand in their own respective bids for the Prime Minister's office by luring members of the UIA to their own sympathetic factions).

Either way, it is clear that further delays are not in the interest of the UIA, and that is why Sistani recently stepped into the fray and pushed for a firm deadline of March 15th to conclude negotiations with the 16th of March designated as the day parliament will be convened regardless of whether or not there is a deal consummated. In addition, Kurdish brinkmanship is beginning to raise the ire of the Shiite population who view Kurdish demands as extortion, and an un-democratic form of blackmail over the process by a minority group. Though not enough on its own to force an imminent clash, or tear the nation asunder, posturing such as this only reinforces the ethnic cleavages that have been playing an increasingly prominent role in the political life of post-invasion Iraq. And the above says nothing about how to incorporate the Sunni population into the new Iraq.

The conservative punditry has recently taken swipes at John Kerry over the various claims he made concerning atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers upon his return from combat in the Vietnam War (I will continue to refer to this conflict as a "war" despite the fact that Congress never designated it as such - it is what it is). Some of the most unfair attacks claim that Kerry said that "all" soldiers committed atrocities. This is not what Kerry said though. He pointed out that atrocities were being carried out by some U.S. military personnel. To counter this point, some conservative pundits have even gone as far as to claim that this was a lie, and that there were not atrocities committed at all. This dangerous brand of historical revisionism is easily refuted by the facts.

The most famous incident of war crimes in Vietnam was the My Lai massacre, in which over 500 unarmed civilians, the majority of which were women and children, were executed by Charlie Company, a unit of the Americal Division's 11th Infantry Brigade.

There were, of course, numerous other incidences of atrocities and war crimes. In a recent piece of investigative journalism, three reporters from the Toledo Blade were awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for their work uncovering the systematic atrocities committed by the Tiger Force, a special unit made up of soldiers from the Army's 101st Airborne's 1st battalion/327th Infantry Regiment. These atrocities were documented and investigated by the Army. A list of articles detailing these far reaching and widespread atrocities can be found here.

The sad truth is that atrocities are inextricably linked to the mental anguish that war creates, and are a thus an ugly component in practically every major armed conflict. Pretending like atrocities don't exist doesn't make it so. In fact, this type of willful ignorance can lead policy makers to overestimate the efficacy of war as a substitute for other less bellicose tactics in foreign policy.

John Kerry displayed great courage and bravery in acting as a spokesman, bringing these horrific events to the knowledge of the American people. His truth-telling helped to convince the majority of Americans of the futility of a war in which you had to raze a village to save it. As a result of his deeds, and the actions of other like-minded individuals, the wall at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. is that much shorter.

The re-cap below, taken from an article by Eric Alterman, captures the insincerity of Sinclair Broadcasting in its decision not to air the Nightline episode in which Ted Koppel read the names and showed the faces of the 721 US soldiers who had died in Iraq as of the date of broadcast.

"Barry Faber, Sinclair vice president and general counsel, told the Washington Post that they had chosen to censor Nightline because they believed the program's "motivation is to focus attention solely on people who have died in the war in order to push public opinion toward the United States getting out of Iraq." Faber suggested that the reading of the names of the dead would "unduly influence people."

A Sinclair press release demanded to know why Koppel did not read "the names of the thousands of private citizens killed in terrorist attacks since and including the events of September 11, 2001. In his answer, we believe you will find the real motivation behind his action scheduled for this Friday." Well, the answer is, he did--on the first anniversary of 9/11--but don't bother Sinclair with facts. "The average viewer who watches the show is not going to remember that," Faber replied to Post reporter Lisa de Moraes, who pointed it out to him."

The rest of the piece can be found here.

As alluded to in my prior post, below is a nifty synopsis of the type of tactics employed by the Bush campaign in the South Carolina primary contest between Bush and McCain. This type of attack gives credence to Kerry's off the record remarks that the Bush team are "crooked" and "dirty":

"It didn't take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa's orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.

Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.

Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.

Some aspects of this smear were hardly so subtle. Bob Jones University professor Richard Hand sent an e-mail to "fellow South Carolinians" stating that McCain had "chosen to sire children without marriage." It didn't take long for mainstream media to carry the charge. CNN interviewed Hand and put him on the spot: "Professor, you say that this man had children out of wedlock. He did not have children out of wedlock." Hand replied, "Wait a minute, that's a universal negative. Can you prove that there aren't any?"


I seem to remember that logic being used to argue that Saddam had WMDs. How can you prove he didn't? It was a "universal negative."

The rest of the piece, published by a non-profit bipartisan organization, can be found here.

Let me take this time to state openly that, although I disagree with Senator John McCain, Republican-AZ, on many issues, he displays more integrity than most politicians in Washington (of course this is a relative statement). On many issues, such as global warming, campaign finance reform, the gay marriage amendment, the conduct of the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, gun control, and others, McCain has taken the principled stand, contrary to his party's dictates, and in some cases, contrary to public opinion.

Consider some bills that contain his legislative stamp: the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 1997, the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act (a bill to help curtail the emission of greenhouse gases as mentioned below), his work on a patients' bill of rights he sponsored with Democrats Edward Kennedy and John Edwards (in opposition to the White House's preferred version) and his teaming up with Democrats on legislation supporting drug-patent reform and background checks at gun shows.

No darling of the Christian conservative right, he displays the type of intellectual honesty and common sense that would tempt me to cast my first vote for a Republican should that opportunity ever arise. Of course, the Bush campaign of 2000 made that possibility a remote one with an unprecedented intra-party smear campaign that included accusations ranging from emotional and psychological instability to fathering an African American child out of wedlock. That last one, dreamt up by Karl Rove, played particularly well in the South Carolina primary.

It should come as no surprise that he was particularly tough with Donald Rumsfeld today during Rumsfeld's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. McCain displayed little tolerance for Rumsfeld's typical evasiveness, demanding an answer regarding the chain of command for Abu Ghraib and which agency, in particular, was in charge of the interrogations. I was proud.

In a piece discussing how "Sen. James Inhofe, a staunch conservative Republican from Oklahoma and chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, received an award for his support of 'rational, science-based thinking and policy-making,'" Chris Mooney from the Center for American Progress, takes an insightful look at the politicization of science, and the abuse of fact in favor of ideology.

As he points out, the award winning Senator is "the same Inhofe who has suggested that human-caused global warming is a "hoax" - a fringe view that should hardly form the scientific basis for policy decisions. But no matter: Inhofe's award came from the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, a group that received 80 percent of its funding from the National Association of Manufacturers as of 1997, according to a contemporary expose in the Wall Street Journal, and that today receives funding from ExxonMobil."

He adds, "In fact, during last year's Senate debate over the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, Inhofe's arguments against the bill were as much scientific - or rather, pseudoscientific - as economic. You can hardly blame him: A wide range of industries, most notoriously tobacco, have realized that sowing doubt about science is a great way of preventing policy action. Given that scientific findings are never absolutely definitive and always open to subsequent revision, this game is almost too easy to play."

You can find the rest of the article here.

The New York Times editorial page accurately summarizes the fallout from the prisoner torture scandal:

"The United States has been humiliated to a point where government officials could not release this year's international human rights report this week for fear of being scoffed at by the rest of the world. The reputation of its brave soldiers has been tarred, and the job of its diplomats made immeasurably harder because members of the American military tortured and humiliated Arab prisoners in ways guaranteed to inflame Muslim hearts everywhere. And this abuse was not an isolated event, as we know now and as Mr. Rumsfeld should have known, given the flood of complaints and reports directed to his office over the last year."

Joining the ranks of President Bush (although belated), Condoleeza Rice, General Kimmit and others, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has apologized to the Iraqi detainees that were abused and tortured by American military personnel in Abu Ghraib prison.

Now if only we could get someone in the Bush administration, other than Richard Clarke, to apologize to the families of the victims of 9/11.....

As many predicted, the War in Iraq has dealt a crushing blow to the image of the U.S. in the Muslim world. As if our standing couldn't get any lower after the double whammy of the protracted violence of April, resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties, and Bush's sudden reversal of 50 years of U.S. foreign policy concerning the Israeli/Palestinian by acknowledging Israel's right to territories in the West Bank and to deny Palestinian refugees the right to return to territory within Israel, along comes the atomic bomb of PR disasters: photographic evidence of widespread and systematic abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib (Saddam's notorious "torture chamber").

Also, as predicted, the deterioration of the U.S.'s image in this region has produced more sympathizers for Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, and has apparently radicalized young men in the region spawning more able bodied and impassioned jihadists. This makes terrorism worse, not better. We are less safe now, than before the War in Iraq.

For a nice roundup of these facts, check out this article in the Christian Science Monitor.

It appears that the International Red Cross was "fully aware of the full spectrum of abuses of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and had repeatedly urged the United States to take corrective action, a spokesman for the humanitarian organization said today."

So, if the Red Cross knew about the abuse, and asked U.S. officials to remedy these conditions, why did Bush have to learn about the situation from 60 Minutes II?

One other thing, if the Red Cross knew about the abuse, and had written "regular reports" to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, how likely is it that this was the conduct of six soldiers acting on their own? Did the Red Cross just happen to interview a steady stream of prisoners that were abused by these same six soldiers, or was the abuse in fact more widespread? And if there were regular reports of widespread abuse, why did it take so long for action to be taken?

The AP is reporting that President Bush finally apologized for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. The apology came, a day late, in a press appearance with King Abdullah of Jordan. The story can be found here.

The excerpt below is taken from an article appearing in today's New York Times. So if cabinet members and military personnel offer apologies, and Mclellan can issue a statement that the President is sorry after acknowledging that the President offered no apology during his interviews, then why didn't Bush just say he was sorry when he had the ear of the Muslim world and the Iraqi people? Apparently, there is no philosophical or policy reason for withholding the apology (hence the recent round of apologies), just gross incompetence:


"Although the president did not apologize, his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, did so in interviews with Arab broadcasters on Tuesday. The new commandant of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, also apologized to the Iraqi people, as did the military spokesman in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt.

Asked why the president had passed up the opportunity to apologize directly to Iraqis and Muslims in the Middle East who were particularly offended by the nature of the abuse, his spokesman, Scott McClellan, offered an apology in Mr. Bush's stead.

"The president is sorry for what occurred and the pain that it has caused," Mr. McClellan said at the daily White House news briefing. "It does not represent what America stands for. America stands for much better than what happened.""

First of all, I would like to say that President Bush's decision to submit to interviews by two Middle East television networks in order to show remorse for, and explain America's disgust at, the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners was a much needed and important gesture. It certainly will not significantly improve our standing in the Muslim world anytime soon, but it was still the right course of action.

Unfortunately, even this latest effort at diplomacy was fraught with error of judgment, and once again the blinders of ideology interfered with the efficacy of the message. As is his stubborn insistence, President Bush never uttered the phrase, "I'm sorry." Obviously Bush was not directly responsible for the prisoner abuse, but it happened under his watch as Commander in Chief, and, as he is all too fond of pointing out, he is a wartime President. Furthermore, these words out of the President's mouth would have made the appearance more effective in conveying this nation's contrition to the Muslim world, and restoring at least a sliver of credibility to the U.S. led effort in Iraq and abroad. If this administration is serious about its goals of creating a stable and democratic Iraq, bold action is needed, and a tepid show of remorse is not going to overcome the images emerging from this scandal.

In addition, the Bush administration made a big blunder by shutting Al Jazeera out of the equation. Acting on the administration's open animosity for Al Jazeera, and the belief that Al Jazeera has an agenda that runs counter to the administration's goals, the Bush team would not grant access to Al Jazeera, instead opting for two other Arab networks: Al Arabiya and Al-Hurra (the latter being a U.S. funded network broadcasting out of Virginia and enjoying very little credibility in the Arab world). The problem with this decision is that Al Arabiya and Al-Hurra combined reach 20 million homes. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, reaches over 25 million homes. While there is some crossover in the reach of each network, the point is that Bush could have disseminated his message to more homes had he allowed access to Al Jazeera.

Instead of trying to make a point, or sending a message to Al Jazeera, the administration should have decided that the goal of Bush's appearances was to improve our standing in the Muslim world at this most dire of moments, and that the best way to achieve this goal was to reach the most Arab households as possible. Leave the feud with Al Jazeera for another interview on another topic on another day.

Today's Editorial page for the Washington Post contains an illuminating piece on the policies that fostered the environment for prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example:

"The horrific abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries. His Pentagon ruled that the United States would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions; that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed; and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and without any independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable.

The Taguba report and others by human rights groups reveal that the detention system Mr. Rumsfeld oversees has become so grossly distorted that military police have abused or tortured prisoners under the direction of civilian contractors and intelligence officers outside the military chain of command -- not in "exceptional" cases, as Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday, but systematically. Army guards have held "ghost" prisoners detained by the CIA and even hidden these prisoners from the International Red Cross. Meanwhile, Mr. Rumsfeld's contempt for the Geneva Conventions has trickled down: The Taguba report says that guards at Abu Ghraib had not been instructed on them and that no copies were posted in the facility."

The Washington Post has acquired several more photographs of Iraq prisoner abuse. I think these photos will make it difficult for anyone in the administration to claim that the abuses were the actions of six soldiers acting on their own initiative. There are certainly more than six sets of boots that are visible. Furthermore, General Antonio Taguba's report cited "widespread" and "systematic" abuse. This language is inconsistent with the claim of limited and isolated incidences.

The article discussing the new photographs can be found here and the photo gallery can be found here, just click on the link to enter.

If you are not already registered at the Washington Post, it is free and easy.

It appears that Thomas Friedman from the New York Times thinks that Rumsfeld has jumped the shark. In today's Op-ed, he calls on Bush to fire Rumsfeld, "today, not tomorrow or next month, today." Keep in mind, this is from someone who supported the war in Iraq and still holds out hope for a positive resolution, although his prescription for success is, in my opinion, beyond the ability and will of the Bush administration. One major sticking point: It involves admitting mistake.

In an unprecedented display of cabinet level discord, White House officials, under the order of President Bush, have made public the fact that the President chastised Donald Rumsfeld over his handling of the growing prisoner abuse scandal yesterday. In particular, Bush was upset that Rumsfeld had not informed him of the scandal earlier and, according to Bush, "he only learned the graphic details of the abuse after watching the telecast of 60 Minutes II last Wednesday."

As a testament to the magnitude of the scandal, Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, according to an article in today's New York Times, "has told one Bush adviser that he believes that it will take a generation for the United States to live this scandal down in the Arab world."

According to the Times, Rumsfeld also faced increasing pressure from members of both parties on Capitol Hill:


"No member of the Senate had any clue," said Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. "This is entirely unacceptable. I think it's a total washout as far as communications, and it has to be rectified."

Democrats were even more caustic. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, stopped just short of calling for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, saying that if the blame went all the way to Mr. Rumsfeld's office, he should step down. "This is a disaster of significant proportions," Mr. Biden said. "It calls for accountability and quickly."


Senator Trent Lott, Republican from Mississippi, complained that members of the Senate were not given copies of the Taguba Report, that Seymour Hersh relied on in writing his piece in The New Yorker. According to an irate Lott, he had to download a copy from the NPR website. I wonder if Lott will consider the value of National Public Radio the next time the funding bill comes up?

So the question remains, given the mounting criticism from both parties, and the President himself, has Donald Rumsfeld jumped the shark? If so, can you identify the moment when the darling of the White House press corp, known for his witty, if vague, responses, who endeared himself to millions of Americans especially during his Afghanistan press conferences, jumped?

Definition of Terms: "Jumping the Shark:" As defined on the website, is the seminal moment when you know that something has reached its peak, and from then on it is all downhill. Taken literally, it was the episode of Happy Days when the Fonz jumped the shark on a pair of water skis marking the point where the show began its spiral of decay that culminated with the introduction of Ted McGinley and the spinoffs of Joanie and Chachi.

In the most recent bout of reflexive double-speak from the folks that brought you compassionate conservatism and the Clear Skies Initiative (which wreaks havoc on the Clean Air Act), Rupublicans in Congress and in the administration are claiming that Democrats and the labor unions are trying to deny overtime protections for millions of workers.

The specious argument is not technically a lie, but is about as close as you can come without asking for a definition of "is." The controversy centers around the new overtime rules that the Bush Labor Department is planning on implementing in August. While the new rules will increase overtime eligibility for millions of workers by raising the threshold annual salary from $8,060 to $23,660, the new rules will also eliminate overtime guarantees for millions more American workers by exempting entire classes of workers. In fact, in response to mounting pressure, the rules have already been re-written to explicitly guarantee protection to police officers, firefighters, other emergency and public safety workers and licensed practical nurses, groups that would probably have lost protection under the rules as originally written. Despite these concessions, there is still fear that the regulations would eliminate coverage for millions of workers not specifically exempted.

In an effort to allay these fears, the Senate, aided by the defection of five Republican Senators, voted in favor of a catch-all amendment designed to ensure that the new Labor Department regulations would not deny overtime protection to any category of worker now qualified to receive overtime protection (not just those exempted by the Labor Department's re-write).

Surprisingly, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao is now trying to construe this blanket exemption as an effort by the Democrats to deny overtime protection to many workers. "The Harkin amendment puts at risk the new, stronger overtime protections for police, firefighters, blue-collar workers and millions of other Americans guaranteed by the department's final rules," Ms. Chao said. "As the issue moves to the House, we will continue to expose the misinformation campaign against the rules and strengthen overtime rights for workers."

So, if I may paraphrase, the Democrats and the labor unions have just put forth an amendment to Labor Department regulations in an effort to help big business at the expense of American workers, but the Bush administration, consistent with its policies and ideology, will not stand for this unabashed attempt at lining the pockets of corporate America at the expense of the little people.

Somewhere, George Orwell just did a cartwheel.

For those who have not read it yet, the now famous Seymour Hersh article that broke the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal can be found here.

For those who wish to see the images, there are links in the right hand column. I believe you have to click twice. A warning, though, there are graphic images.

Is there a break in the ranks? It appears that the one-time love affair between the Bush administration and the neoconservatives is on the rocks. Not only are the neocons losing ground in the policy shaping hierarchy within the White House and the Pentagon, as evidenced by the recent outreach to the international community and the U.N., but it appears that the neocons are starting to bite back. Although always a bit more moderate than his fellow neocons, Robert Kagan has recently taken a swipe at the Commander in Chief himself in this piece. The tone seems to signify that the honeymoon might be over as illustrated by this excerpt referring to Bush:

"His commitment to stay the course in Iraq seems utterly genuine. Yet he continues to tolerate policymakers, military advisers and a dysfunctional policymaking apparatus that are making the achievement of his goals less and less likely. He does not seem to demand better answers, or any answers, from those who serve him. It's not even clear that he understands how bad the situation in Iraq is or how close he is to losing public support for the war, a support that once lost may be impossible to regain. Bush politicos may take comfort from polls that show the public still trusts Bush more than Kerry when it comes to conducting the war. That won't be worth much, however, if the public turns against the war itself. The tragedy may be that Bush will not understand until it is too late. In which case we will lose in Iraq, and the dire consequences that he has rightly warned of will be upon us."

Paul Starobin from the National Journal has put together a provocative piece examining the historical evolution, successes and failures of Zionism and the state of Israel.

As reported by the Washington Post:

"Of the 35 criminal investigations into specific cases of possible mistreatment of detainees begun by the Army in the past year-and-a-half, 25 have involved deaths and 10 resulted from allegations of assault, said Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, the Army's provost marshal and head of the service's Criminal Investigation Division. The large majority of the cases occurred in Iraq."

All the gory details are available here

With the release of his new book, The Politics of Truth, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson has been making the rounds on the poli-talk circuit discussing the controversy at the heart of his book:

Who in the Bush administration leaked the fact that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative after Wilson pointed out that the claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger was false and had no business in President Bush's state of the union address?

Adding to the outrage over this blatantly illegal activity is that Plame's specialty was in the field of weapons of mass destruction non-proliferation. So, in essence, someone in the administration decided that sending a message to other would-be truth tellers was more important than the continued effort against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, Wilson joins a growing list of former Bush administration officials who have been critical of the deceptive tactics, ideological blinders and hidden agendas within the White House. In all cases, the response has been a personal attack rather than a refutation of the arguments on the merits, which have been consistent in tone and substance. Now Wilson, who was described as a "true American hero" in 1991 by then President George H. W. Bush, will join the ranks of the career Republicans to be labeled disgruntled former employees, closet liberals, opportuning profit seekers, Kerry campaign operatives, etc.

In the book, Wilson suggests that the leak came from Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Other names mentioned by Wilson as possible sources of the leak are Karl Rove and Elliot Abrams. In response to these accusations last October, White House spokesman Scott Mclellan categorically denied the involvement of either Libby, Rove or Abrams. At the same time, the White House claims it does not know who leaked the information. This of course raises several questions:

How can you categorically deny the involvement of certain individuals if you don't know who leaked the information? Unless you know who committed the crime, or can rule out a suspect based on incontrovertible evidence, how can you say someone is innocent? What information does the White House have that would enable them to say, without a doubt, that is wasn't Libby, Rove or Abrams?

Amid the swirl of foreign policy rhetoric, the term "neocon" (short for neoconservative) has been tossed around more frequently than dice at a craps table to describe the Bush administration's foreign policy apparatus, and at times the entire Republican Party.

I'm not sure this description is 100% accurate, although the recent war in Iraq certainly makes it appear this way. In truth though, there is an underlying tension in the conservative movement, between the neocons and the realists. Even the term neocon is not monolithic, and many of its adherents espouse differing views on many aspects of the overall theory. There is an excellent parsing of the philosophical tensions here, but in a nutshell the common themes are as follows:

"Contempt for international organizations and the concept of multilateralism; impatience with traditional balance-of-power diplomacy; a cultish devotion to the use of military power; an outspoken belief in the superiority of Western culture and political institutions; a messianic vision of America's mission to "civilize" the world, which at times (Max Boot) makes them sound like caricatures of old-fashioned European imperialists. And of course: an intense identification with the state of Israel, and a willingness, even eagerness, to use American power to protect and further Israeli security interests."

A couple of thoughts regarding the fact that our intrepid Commander in Chief refused to appear before the 9/11 commission without Vice President Cheney, and even then refused to give answer questions under oath:

First, could you imagine a scenario in which George Bush Sr. would have ever refused to appear before a commission unless his VP, Dan Quayle, were present? Or that George Bush Sr. would feel insecure without Quayle (feel free to insert other President/Vice President tandems in the above stated analogy)?

Second, why does a President who feels so comfortable invoking the name of "Jesus" and "The Almighty" in speeches justifying his policies regarding everything from war, the Patriot Act and taxes to the environment, labor policy and eductation, suddenly feel so uncomfortable swearing to God that he will tell the truth to the 9/11 commission?

Just asking.......