Top Ten Reasons Why Sy Hersh’s New Article Should Scare the Stuffing Out of You

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Read, and weep:

10. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a whackjob who is determine to enrich uranium.

9. Our President, George W. Bush, has a messiah complex and is convinced that “saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

8. The Pentagon is already engaging in clandestine activities, called “force protection,” that can be classified as military, not intelligence, operations; e.g., preparing a battlefield. Such activities are not subject to congressional oversight.

7. U.S. military planners believe that bombing Iran will cause Iranians to rise up and overthrow the mullahs who rule them. Most Middle East experts think this notion is right up there with Cheney’s “Iraqis will greet us with flowers” delusion.

6. A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said: “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.”

5. The White House has been talking to members of Congress about Iran. However, the only ones they’re talking to are the same bunch who led the charge against Iraq.

4. “The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. ‘Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,’ the former senior intelligence official said. ‘”Decisive” is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.’

3. “He went on, ‘Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out’—remove the nuclear option—’they’re shouted down.'”

2. Bombing Iran could “provoke ‘a chain reaction’ of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world.”

1. See reasons #9.

Rightie Watch

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A rightie blogger is outraged that Eleanor Clift, best known as the token liberal on “The McLaughlin Group,” is biased in favor of liberalism.

Any faithful watcher of “The McLaughlin Group” knows that one of the most transparently biased members of the antique media over the past two decades has been Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. Week in and week out, Eleanor rips apart every Republican on the political landscape while oozing nothing but adoration for those on the opposite side of the aisle even when they are found guilty of serious transgressions.

The other regulars, including Tony Blankley, Pat Buchanan, and McLaughlin himself are, of course, the very measure of objectivity. Snort.

Clift’s op-ed posted at Newsweek’s website on Friday is a fine example. After somewhat misrepresenting the seriousness of the recent allegations that have emerged from Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff I. Lewis Libby concerning unclassified information from a National Intelligence Estimate by President Bush, Clift went right into a stump speech: “The only way the American people can stop Bush’s imperial expansion of power short is to turn out in massive numbers to take back one or the other body of Congress from Republican control.”

My goodness, Eleanor: You’re supposed to be a journalist. This isn’t reporting.

Of course it’s not reporting, you stupid twit. Newsweek clearly labels the op-editorial as “commentary” in big red letters. That means it’s the columnist’s personal opinion and analysis.

It won’t surprise you that the blogger who can’t tell the difference between commentary and reporting has dedicated his blog to “exposing and combating liberal media bias.” If you define liberal media bias as “everything I don’t want to hear because it contradicts MY biases,” and you’re an idiot to boot, there’s no question that liberal bias in media is as common as onions. People with functioning frontal lobes might not agree, of course.

The Clift op ed, btw, is pretty good. The first page, anyway. On the second page she devolves into Joe Biden apologia.

Yesterday I commented on this E.J. Dionne column about the ongoing crisis in American conservatism. Well, the same rightie genius linked above came up with this excuse:

I guess E.J. must have written this piece before this morning’s announcement by the Labor Department that the economy added more jobs in the past three months than in any first quarter since before the stock market bubble collapsed, and that over five million jobs have been added since Conservatives fought for tax cuts in 2003.

Conservatism’s dead, E.J.? Hardly.

About that announcement, see Hale Stewart, “Bush’s Job Creation Record Worst of Last 40 Years (Still).”

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research the last recession ended in November 2001. That means we have had 54 months of an economic recovery. First, notice how Bush uses May 2003 as the starting point of his comparison? Why is he doing this? Because May 2003 is the lowest point of establishment job creation in his administration. Since the actual trough in November 2001 Bush’s economy has created 4,083,000 jobs. At the same point (54 months) all other expansions of the last 40 years had created more jobs.

At 54 months,

The expansion starting in February 1961 created 6,550,000 jobs

The expansion starting in November 1970 created 6,240,000 jobs

The expansion starting in March 1975 created 13,565,000 jobs

The expansion starting in November 1982 created 12,366,000 jobs

The expansion starting in March 1991 created 8,718,000 jobs.

Therefore, Bush’s economy would have to create 2,157,000 jobs to be second to last on this list.

There is no way that Bush can create enough jobs to increase his rank to 4th on the list. At this point, he will go down as presiding over the weakest records of job creation of the second half to the 20th century.

The excitement when Bush’s economy squeezes out some jobs is akin to watching, say, a trained pig push a ball with his nose. The wonder is not that the pig is so skilled, but that it can do the trick at all.

As the Lies Unravel

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John Dean has a new column at FindLaw that separates fact from assumption about Bush’s role in Plamegate. In particular, Dean challenges the assumption made by most news reports that the President didn’t do anything illegal when he authorized leaks as Scooter Libby alleged. Later in this post I point to allegations from Knight Ridder reporters that the right-wing media echo chamber, in particular Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard, was a participant in a White House disinformation campaign. But I want to address the legal/illegal question first.

The new leak revelation “has been accompanied by a number of public misstatements, which call for correction,” writes Dean. One of these misstatements is that Bush authorized the release of Valerie Plame’s covert status at the CIA. I haven’t personally seen anyone make that claim, but I guess Dean has. In fact, Fitzgerald’s filing says on page 27 that the President didn’t know what Libby and Cheney were up to regarding Plame (see “plausible deniability“). “The filing does indicate that the President authorized the release of classified information,” Dean says, “but it was different information — a National Intelligence Estimate that had been classified pursuant to an executive order.” Dean also notes that what Libby told the Grand Jury about what Bush allegedly said to Cheney is hearsay.

On the other hand …

Dean says it is not necessarily true that the President didn’t do anything illegal, as many news stories claim. Here’s the critical part of Dean’s column:

Assuming that Libby’s testimony is accurate, did the President do anything wrong by so declassifying the NIE? Given the fact that the national security classification system is created by executive order of the president, it would appear logical that the president has authority to unilaterally and selective declassify anything he might wish. However, that is not the way any president has ever written the executive orders governing these activities. To the contrary, the orders set forth rather detailed declassification procedures.

In addition, there is law that says that when a president issues an executive order he must either amend that executive order, or follow it just as others within the executive branch are required to do. At present, we have so few facts it is difficult to know what precisely Bush did and how he did it, and thus whether or not this law is applicable. There is also the problem that no one has standing in court to challenge a president’s refusal to follow his own rules. But voters may take note of the disposition of this administration to play by the rules, and put a Democratic Congress in place to keep an eye on the last two years of the Bush/Cheney presidency.

What is apparent, however, based on Fitzgerald’s filing, is that no one other than Bush, Cheney, Libby and apparently Addington was aware of this unilateral and selective declassification – if, indeed, the NIE was declassified. The secrecy surely suggests cover-up. For example, Fitzgerald notes that Libby “consciously decided not to make [then Deputy National Security Adviser] Hadley aware of the fact that defendant [Libby] himself had already been disseminating the NIE by leaking it to reporters while Mr. Hadley sought to get it formally declassified.” (Also, CIA Director George Tenet apparently was not aware of the partial declassification by Bush.)

Whatever authority Bush may or may not have had, however, it is crystal clear that Vice President Cheney did not have any authority to unilaterally and selectively declassify the NIE.

Recently, Cheney made the public claim (to Brit Hume of Fox News) that he had authority to declassify national security information. Learning of this, Congressman Henry Waxman asked the Congressional Reference Service of the Library of Congress, which issues non-partisan reports, whether Cheney was right. CRS found that the Vice President has limited declassification authority, generally speaking. And their report shows Cheney had no authority in this instance — only in situations where the Vice President had been the authority to classify the material in the first place, could the Vice President have the authority to unilaterally declassify it.

There’s more. Fitzgerald’s filing implies that the NIE was not declassified at the time it was leaked, but retroactively (boldface mine):

Fitzgerald reports that Libby “testified that he was specifically authorized … to disclose the key judgments of the classified NIE to Miller” because the information “was ‘pretty definite’ against Ambassador Wilson… and that the Vice President thought that it was ‘very important’ for the key judgments of the NIE to come out.”

When Libby raised the problem of discussing the NIE with Miller because of its classified status, the filing reports that Libby “testified that the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized” Libby to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE. (Emphasis added.)

The word “later” here, in the filing, is crucially ambiguous: Did the President authorized Libby’s actions before Libby actually revealed the classified information to Miller, or afterward? The distinction may make a large difference in Libby’s defense: If the authorization was retroactive, then Libby initially revealed classified information without permission to do so; thus, he would have reason to lie.

In addition, Cheney’s counsel (now Chief of Staff) “opined that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document.” (Emphasis added.)

Again, the language here is telling. The filing says that the President’s actions “amounted to” declassification, not that the President had unilaterally declassified the material. To the contrary, it appears the material was not declassified for several days.

So, based on what we know so far, we cannot say whether the President did or didn’t do anything illegal when he authorized the NIE information to be released. It appears Cheney, on the other hand, exceeded his declassification authority.

Even if the President was within the law, that doesn’t mean he was within the right. Warren Strobel and Ron Hutcheson of Knight Ridder write that the new revelation is part of “a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration’s political agenda.”

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials have reacted angrily at unauthorized leaks, such as the exposure of a domestic wiretapping program and a network of secret CIA prisons, both of which are now the subject of far-reaching investigations.

But secret information that supports their policies, particularly about the Iraq war, has surfaced everywhere from the U.N. Security Council to major newspapers and magazines. Much of the information that the administration leaked or declassified, however, has proved to be incomplete, exaggerated, incorrect or fabricated.

In other words, they selectively leak lies and misinformation to throw media off the scent of what they’re really up to.

On Friday, White House officials said that the administration declassified information to rebut charges that Bush was manipulating intelligence.

Without specifically acknowledging Bush’s actions in the Libby case, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters: “There were irresponsible and unfounded accusations being made against the administration suggesting that we had manipulated or misused that intelligence. We felt it was very much in the public interest that what information could be declassified be declassified.”

Except that what the Administration selectively declassified (if indeed it was declassified) and leaked was false, and the “irresponsible and unfounded accusations” were, in fact, true. And the Bush Administration knew it at the time. Which means they sure as hell know now, even if they won’t admit it.

Strobel and Hutcheson provide a list of Bushie-generated misinformation that I won’t repeat here. However, I got a kick out of this bit toward the end of the article —

In November 2003, the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard published highly classified raw intelligence purporting to a show a link between Saddam and al-Qaida.

The Pentagon disavowed the report. But in early January 2004, Cheney told the Rocky Mountain News newspaper that the magazine report was the “best source of information” about the Saddam/al-Qaida connection. That connection has never been proved.

I’m pretty sure this is the article in question. I remember this article well; it was linked to robustly by the rightie blogosphere and cited by many other news sources as the definitive proof that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda. But it appears that Stephen Hayes was filling the Judy Miller role for the Weekly Standard — Cheney would dictate to Hayes what to write, and then later Cheney would cite the Hayes article as if it were independent corroboration of his assertions. And the righties embraced it all as gospel.

Who says the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy is a myth?

Speaking of the VRWC, the Bush Bitter Enders are working overtime to crank out excuses. I haven’t surveyed the entire Right Blogosphere, but the dumbest excuse I’ve seen so far comes from Riehl World View. Truly, the Riehl post is a study in pathological denial, but the best part is from this old NewsMax post about alleged Clinton Administration leaks about Paula Jones and Linda Tripp! Yes, bless us, the Clinton did it too dodge! And, of course, discrediting Linda Tripp about a BJ is so much more significant than spreading disinformation about national security intelligence and a war that is tearing the nation apart. Oh, wait …

See also: The Reaction, “Follow the Mendacity”

Still Irrelevant

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E.J. Dionne on the GOP meltdown:

President Bush inadvertently underscored the weakness of the Republican agenda when he flew to Bridgeport, Conn., on Wednesday to campaign for his health savings accounts, known as HSAs. Virtually no one other than the president — oh, and perhaps a few ideologues and insurance companies — sees HSAs as anything approaching a comprehensive solution to the nation’s growing health-care problem.

Senate Republicans have already dropped HSAs from their budget, and Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the Finance Committee chairman, has been openly skeptical about doing anything on HSAs this year. The president was thus campaigning for a doomed idea in Connecticut when, just over the border in Massachusetts, a bipartisan majority in the legislature was passing a visionary plan requiring all residents to buy health insurance and providing subsidies for those who can’t afford the full freight. The contrast between the policy energy that exists in many states and the intellectual torpor in Washington could not have been more stark.

Remember what I said about Bush becoming irrelevant?

Dionne’s point is that conservatism is becoming irrelevant. It may be a little early to make that pronouncement, but we’re certainly stumbling in that direction. Just start counting the many ways in which this nation is bleeped up, and then trace the problem back to its source — policies based on conservative ideology. And this is exactly why the Republican-controlled federal government can’t solve those problems. “Republicans are paralyzed because they can’t deal with the core problems without walking away from their earlier policy choices,” says Dionne.

Why is the federal government so impotent to reform the nation’s health care mess? Because of conservatives. For years we haven’t even been able to have a coherent national discussion on health care, because righties shout it down. So the President goes on the road to sell meaningless tweaks as some kind of solution, and he’s so irrelevant even his own party is ignoring him.

Why are we in Iraq? You know the answer to that one.

Why do we have a bleeping out-of-control deficit? “It took no great genius to see that cutting taxes in a time of war and other security threats would create large problems,” says Dionne. “The contradiction between the current majority’s small-government rhetoric and heavy federal spending has been visible for years.” Visible to anyone but righties. As long as Democrats were in control of at least part of the federal government and were the ones mostly responsible for writing the budget, righties could jeer about “tax and spend liberals.” But given the responsibility of making the hard choices themselves, righties proved they can’t do it.

“Big spending on war, defense and prescription drugs for the elderly, combined with big tax cuts, produces a fiscal squeeze,” says Dionne. Not to mention the uncontrolled pork. At this point the only solution is to either raise taxes or declare bankruptcy and turn the country over to the foreign banks who hold most of our IOUs. But you know the Republicans’ heads would explode before they’d raise taxes. They’ll put the nation in hock to China first.

Bottom line, hard-right ideology doesn’t work in the real world. In that way it’s like Marxism — sounds good when you talk about it, turns out bad when you try to do it.

This is not to say that we should run all conservatives out of town. We’ll always need people at the government table making an argument against excess spending, social engineering, and foreign entanglements — what conservatives used to argue about. It’s a necessary counterweight to some of the flightier impulses of liberals.

But I tend to be skeptical of ideology, period. (See Jonathan Chait, “The Anti-Dogma Dogma“). Ideologies are, IMO, just interfaces to reality. They make the world easier to understand by limiting one’s choices and narrowing one’s focus. But it’s the stuff ideologues refuse to acknowledge — because it’s not written into the interface — that always trips ’em up. And this is just as true of leftie ideology as it is of rightie ideology.

But liberalism is, IMO, less an ideology than a value. John F. Kennedy said,

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

Conservatism, on the other hand, seems to be rooted in the idea that people must be controlled by authority. And if they can’t be controlled by law, then they will be controlled by lies, manipulation, deceit, and propaganda. And right now the same deluded rightie Kool-Aiders who yap about Bush promoting “freedom” are sowing the seeds of totalitarianism as fast as they can.

Yet we can hope they are also sowing the seeds of their own self-destruction. The results of their own actions have boxed them in. They can’t even address our nation’s problems because, more often than not, it was their lamebrain policies that caused the problems, or else made an existing problem worse. And “stay the course” is not a policy, especially when most Americans can see we’re going the wrong way.

The extent to which Democrats signed on to rightie policies in the past — out of fear or political expedience or because they were righties themselves all along — compromises them, of course. Just when we need a pride of lions, we get a pond full of toads. But that’s another rant.

Let’s end on a positive note. If you want another clue to Bush’s irrelevancy, check out yesterday’s Froomkin column.

President Bush is throwing Vice President Cheney to the wolves — or, more specifically, to the Nationals fans.

According to longstanding precedent, one of the two of them had to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the home opener of Washington’s home team on Tuesday — and face the inevitable boos and catcalls.

Bush is sending Cheney.

Heh.

Maybe

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Tonight on Countdown, John Dean told Keith Olbermann that if President Bush did indeed “authorize” Scooter Libby to release classified information to the press, the act may or may not be legal. According to Dean, although Presidents do have the authority to release classified information, there are procedures they are (by law) supposed to follow to do so. Also, it is questionable whether the information Scooter leaked to the press was officially declassified, since it appears no one in the CIA or other intelligence agencies knew about it.

I’m sure there will be more details tomorrow.

Presidential Authorizations

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Murray Waas:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff has testified that President Bush authorized him to disclose the contents of a highly classified intelligence assessment to the media to defend the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq, according to papers filed in federal court on Wednesday by Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case.

Here’s the document itself. Below is, I think, the critical part, which is from pages 19-21. I’ll start with the paragraph before to provide a bit of context. Fitzgerald is explaining why Libby doesn’t need all the classified files he says he needs in order to defend himself.

At some point after the publication of the July 6, 2003 Op Ed by Mr. Wilson, Vice President Cheney, defendant’s immediate superior, expressed concerns to defendant regarding whether Mr. Wilson’s trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson’s wife. And, in considering “context,” there was press reporting that the Vice President had dispatched Mr. Wilson on the trip (which in fact was not accurate). Disclosing the belief that Mr. Wilson’s wife sent him on the Niger trip was one way for defendant to contradict the assertion that the Vice President had done so, while at the same time undercutting Mr. Wilson’s credibility if Mr. Wilson were perceived to have received the assignment on account of nepotism. The context for defendant’s disclosures in the course of defending the Office of the Vice President will not be fleshed out in any files of CIA or State Department or NSC employees that might reflect what they thought. Put slightly differently, the thoughts and impressions of CIA, State Department, and NSC employees, absent any evidence that these thoughts and impressions were conveyed to defendant, simply cannot shed light on defendant’s state of mind at the time of his alleged criminal conduct. See United States v. Secord, 726 F.Supp. 845, 848-49 (D.D.C. 1989) (“The subjective state of mind which Defendant Secord wishes to prove could have arisen solely from conversations in which he participated, correspondence which he himself read, meetings which he himself attended. . . . The point is simply that Defendant’s state of mind can come only from what he hears or sees. Defendant is entitled to discover materials which evidence his personal knowledge about or belief in the legality of the Enterprise.”).

Nor would such documents of the CIA, NSC and the State Department place in context the importance of the conversations in which defendant participated. Defendant’s participation in a critical conversation with Judith Miller on July 8 (discussed further below) occurred only after the Vice President advised defendant that the President specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the NIE. Defendant testified that the circumstances of his conversation with reporter Miller – getting approval from the President through the Vice President to discuss material that would be classified but for that approval – were unique in his recollection. Defendant further testified that on July 12, 2003, he was specifically directed by the Vice President to speak to the press in place of Cathie Martin (then the communications person for the Vice President) regarding the NIE and Wilson. Defendant was instructed to provide what was for him an extremely rare “on the record” statement, and to provide “background” and “deep background” statements, and to provide information contained in a document defendant understood to be the cable authored by Mr. Wilson. During the conversations that followed on July 12, defendant discussed Ms. Wilson’s employment with both Matthew Cooper (for the first time) and Judith Miller (for the third time). Even if someone else in some other agency thought that the controversy about Mr. Wilson and/or his wife was a trifle, that person’s state of mind would be irrelevant to the importance and focus defendant placed on the matter and the importance he attached to the surrounding conversations he was directed to engage in by the Vice President.

Likewise, documents from other agencies that defendant never saw will not provide context for defendant’s grand jury testimony regarding these events. Defendant testified that he did not discuss the CIA employment of Ambassador Wilson’s wife with reporter Judith Miller on July 8, 2003 and that he could not have done so because he had forgotten by that time that he had learned about Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment a month earlier from the Vice President. Nor could such documents explain defendant’s testimony disclaiming having discussed Ms. Wilson’s employment with various other government officials prior to July 10, 2003, or his testimony that he was “taken aback” when journalist Tim Russert asked about Ms. Wilson’s employment with the CIA on July 12, 2003. Accordingly, none of the documents requested by defendant could possibly support the defense that the specific perjury specifications are mere “snippets” of conversation he “may have misremembered.”

Eriposte noticed some oddities on page 23.

[Update: Paul Kiel finds something significant on page 24; see also Josh Marshall.]

This doesn’t mean Bush was in on Plamegate from the beginning, however, and the document doesn’t say that Bush’s authorization was specifically about Joe Wilson. Fitz writes on p. 27:

During this time, while the President was unaware of the role that the Vice President’s Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser had in fact played in disclosing Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment, defendant implored White House officials to have a public statement issued exonerating him.

The righties will make much of that sentence, but they will miss the point. As Waas explained, the President authorized disclosure of sensitive ingelligence to defend his decision to go to war in Iraq. It wouldn’t’ surprise me if Bush were kept out of the loop of the Plame-Wilson smear — it’s the old “plausible deniability” game — but the charge is that Bush authorized release of sensitive intelligence for purely political purposes. I assume this is not illegal — the President can disclose anything he wants [Update: See Josh Marshall on this point.] — but it’s still sleazy.

Waas:

One former senior official said: “They [the leakers] might have tipped people to our eavesdropping capacities, and other serious sources and methods issues. But to what end? The information was never presented to the public because it was bunk in the first place.”

These are the same people who won’t submit to FISA oversight because this might magically permit “the enemy” to know how the NSA conducts its data mining, or whatever it’s doing.

See also: Bob Schieffer rips the White House

“Like tethered goats to the killing fields …”

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Sidney Blumenthal has a must-read article in today’s Guardian (emphasis added).

Since the Iraqi elections in January, US foreign service officers at the Baghdad embassy have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables describing drastically worsening conditions. Violence from incipient communal civil war is rapidly rising. Last month there were eight times as many assassinations committed by Shia militias as terrorist murders by Sunni insurgents. The insurgency, according to the reports, also continues to mutate. Meanwhile, President Bush’s strategy of training Iraqi police and army to take over from coalition forces – “when they stand up, we’ll stand down” – is perversely and portentously accelerating the strife. State department officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions of order and security is fuelling civil war.

Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far, two top attaches at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that are too upsetting.

The Bush administration’s preferred response to increasing disintegration is to act as if it has a strategy that is succeeding.

This is, of course, the way the Bushies have operated since the days Dubya was governor of Texas. But it’s one thing to claim, for example, that Texas tax policies were a success when in fact they were not. Now the Bushies are flushing Iraq, not to mention an incalculable number of lives, down the toilet and calling it victory.

It gets even more amazing …

Under the pretence that Iraq is being pacified, the military is partially withdrawing from hostile towns in the countryside and parts of Baghdad. By reducing the number of soldiers, the administration can claim its policy is working going into the midterm elections. But the jobs the military doesn’t want to perform are being sloughed off on state department “provisional reconstruction teams” (PRTs) led by foreign service officers. The rationale is that they will win Iraqi hearts-and-minds by organising civil functions.

Blood and destruction just to get Republicans elected in a midterm election. Awesome. But, says Blumenthal, the Pentagon has informed the State Department it will not provide security for the foreign service officers. The PRTs are supposed to hire mercenaries if they want protection.

The state department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau was correct in its scepticism before the war about Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMDs, but was ignored. The department was correct in its assessment in its 17-volume Future of Iraq project about the immense effort required for reconstruction after the war, but it was disregarded. Now its reports from Iraq are correct, but their authors are being punished. Foreign service officers are to be sent out like tethered goats to the killing fields. When these misbegotten projects inevitably fail, the department will be blamed. Passive resistance to these assignments reflects anticipation of impending disaster, including the likely murder of diplomats.

But, hey, what’s a few beheaded diplomats if it’ll help win the midterm elections?

Best of all, the Secretary of State has “washed her hands” of her own department. Unfortunately her exceptional skills, most notably her talent for looking straight at a camera and lying her ass off, do not translate into effective management of the State Department. She has handed the task of coaxing diplomats into being tethered goats to an underling while she flits about the world getting her face in the news.

While the state department was racked last week by collapsing morale, Rice travelled to England to visit the constituency of Jack Straw. She declared that though the Bush administration had committed “tactical errors, thousands of them” in Iraq, it is right on the strategy. Then she and Straw took a magic carpet to Baghdad to try to overthrow Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari in favour of a more pliable character.

Juan Cole reports today that the magic carpet ride didn’t help.

Iraqi politicians said on Wednesday that the visit to Iraq of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw had proved counter-productive. Positions actually hardened with the visit. Haider al-Abadi said, “All it’s doing is hardening the position of people who are supporting Jaafari . . . They shouldn’t have come to Baghdad.”

Meanwhile — today Josh White reports in the Washington Post that Rummy has taken offense at Condi’s charge that the U.S. made thousands of tactical errors in Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he did not know what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was talking about when she said last week that the United States had made thousands of “tactical errors” in handling the war in Iraq, a statement she later said was meant figuratively.

Speaking during a radio interview on WDAY in Fargo, N.D., on Tuesday, Rumsfeld said calling changes in military tactics during the war “errors” reflects a lack of understanding of warfare. Rumsfeld defended his war plan for Iraq but added that such plans inevitably do not survive first contact with the enemy.

Unfortunately, Rummy’s achievements as Secretary of Defense reveal a lack of understanding of the entire bleeping time-space continuum. See also Sadly, No.