I assume everyone has read the report in the New York Times telling the story of how the Generals who gave independent assessments of the war in Iraq were fed their lines, monitored and punished with loss of access and contracts by the Pentagon?

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

If you haven’t, go read it now.

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

No doubt it was all very innocent.

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

You remember the Strategy for Victory? How about Stay the Course or When They Stand Up We’ll Stand Down ? What about Cheney’s light at the end of the tunnel or - my personal favourite - a few dead enders?

EJ Dionne has a nice article in TNR arguing that someone - 5 years later - needs to start defining what victory means .

Here is Petraeus’ memorable and candid account of where we stand: “We haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator.” Tell me again: What does success look like?

Supporters of the war say its opponents are locked in the past, stuck on whether or not the war was a good idea in the first place. Whether the war was right or wrong, they say, it’s time to move on and focus on the future.

This has it backward. It’s the war’s backers and architects, including the president, who are trapped in the past. They are so invested in the original decision to invade Iraq that they won’t even consider whether the United States would be better off winding down this commitment, relieving our military of the war’s enormous burdens, and redirecting our foreign policy.

Saint Frank’s column today notices how we are all turning our back on Iraq, even the most passionate among us. But it’s not sustainable.

General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker define victory as “sustainable security” in Iraq. But both Colin Powell and Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, said last week that current troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan are unsustainable and are damaging America’s readiness to meet other security threats. And that’s not all that’s unsustainable. An ailing economy can’t keep floating the war’s $3-billion-a-week cost. A Republican president intent on staying the Bush course will find his vetoes unsustainable after the Democrats increase their majorities in Congress in November. No war can be fought indefinitely if the public has irrevocably turned against it.

NYT has a nice piece about the absurdity of the campaign trail. People are asking the candidates about all kinds of shit like whether to get rid of the penny and the dollar bill and trying to make them eat crap like onion rings and chocolate cake - “Go on! Just have half a fish!” - and all the time the reporters are there with their mics making sure that the candidate doesn’t say anything interesting.

Obama had to deal with this

In Lancaster, Mr. Obama, talked to a woman in tears because disability had left her impoverished, then fielded a question from an impatient fellow convinced that the secret world government was about to impose the Amero, a joint American-Mexican-Canadian currency. Mr. Obama explained that he could not do anything about the Amero because, alas, it did not exist.

immediately followed by this

The pivot comes fast. One minute you are talking about an imaginary currency, and the next you hear life rubbed raw. In Lancaster, Linda Hassel rises, hesitant and pained. Her son is an Army lieutenant. What can you say to mothers and fathers who fear that their sons and daughters have died in vain?

Mr. Obama stood silent before answering. He said that he wore a yellow wristband given to him by a woman in Green Bay, Wis., whose son had died in Iraq. He spoke of crying with her and recognizing the futility of offering comfort. “I meet parents all the time who have lost sons and daughters, but their service to our country is never in vain,” he said. “They have performed magnificently. Our military has acquitted itself with all the honor you could expect. That’s never a waste.”

“Getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” he continued, “that is an accomplishment; trying to reduce and contain violence, that is an accomplishment.”

He stood perched on the edge of the riser. “The failure is on the part of the civilian leadership who did not think through this war and its consequences.”

We want to honor that service going forward, he said; we want to care for maimed veterans and those who remain haunted by war. We will end the countless tours of duty, he said.

“We revere your sacrifice,” he said to Mrs. Hassel. “I am going to make sure that we as a nation are as great as those who sacrifice for us.”

I know it was rehearsed, but still…that was pretty good.

My fellow Americans,

By the end of today, American, Australian and British forces will have launched a large scale invasion of Iraq - a country in the Middle East about which you know very little.

We have tried, over the last weeks and months, to convince you that there is a gathering danger - we never said ‘imminent’ - and that Saddam Hussein will launch an attack using Weapons of Mass Destruction but the reality is that we have very little evidence of that. We do have photos of two suspicious looking Winnebegos that some of our experts tell us could be used to launch weather balloons (but that’s exactly what Saddam would want us to believe if he were trying to conceal chemical weapons!)

You’ll note that we never actually said ‘nuclear weapons’ and if some of my staff have mentioned ‘mushroom clouds’, it’s not their fault if the more gullible among you connected that with our claim that Saddam has nuclear weapons because, clearly, she was thinking of something else.

It’s also not Tony Blair’s fault if, when he said that Saddam could launch a chemical attack with 45 minutes, people would somehow associate that with the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction claim. How was he to know that the press would put it on the front page without noting that he was talking about battlefield weapons?

No, the truth is that the WMD claim is just the ‘bureaucratic reason’ for the invasion. We have been planning this thing for years - despite our recent protestations to the contrary - and the 9/11 attacks, although unrelated to Saddam or to Iraq gave us just the pretext we needed.

We are pretty confident that we’ll find a WWII era shell or two and we’ll claim that that’s what we were talking about all the time and, if we don’t find one of those, we’ll claim that he probably moved them all to Syria. Heh! Heh!

With any luck - and a bit of help from Fox News - 63% of you will become convinced that we did actually find WMDs after all! As for the remainder, we’ll claim that everyone believed Saddam had WMDs - even the French. After all, you won’t remember the distinction between ‘we need to let the inspectors finish the job’ and ‘we are sure he has nuclear weapons’. And he certainly did have chemical weapons back in 1988 - he used them on his own people - back when we were treating Saddam as a friendly. You’ll certainly forget that Rumsfeld claimed to know exactly where they were - ‘in the area of Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat’.

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction program related activities’ by themselves are not nearly scary enough to get the American people behind us which is why we have been playing up the ‘Al Qaeda has ties with Iraq’ angle. We only have one questionable account of someone meeting someone or other in Prague but, if the worst comes to the worst, we can just repeat the story about a senior Al Qaeda operative who went to hospital in Baghdad- that’s clearly a link! And perhaps our invasion will attract a whole bunch of Al Qaeda sympathizers to Iraq - maybe it will even create some - and then we can claim that we are fighting in Iraq to defeat the people who wouldn’t be in Iraq if we hadn’t invaded in the first place? It sounds silly now but, trust me, in a couple of years people will be saying this stuff with a straight face.

Both of these reasons, though, will soon be forgotten and we’ll be justifying the war by referring to the terrible attrocities that Saddam committed while he was ‘Our Man’.

It’s funny how, when you think about it, all the realists, for years to come, will be justifying this war for humanitarian reasons and, if it goes badly, it will discredit the idea of liberal intervention for decades! Hope no other situations arise in the next couple years where a humanitarian intervention really is required or we’ll look pretty silly. <gulp>

The good news is that the costs are expected to be low - Wolfie expects that the war will pay for itself. It certainly won’t cost $100 billion like some people are saying (we fired Lindsey already). Rumsfeld says he’s not sure whether it will last six days or six weeks - it certainly won’t last six months - and the idea that it will take several hundred thousands of troops to secure the country…well that’s just laughable (we fired Shinseki too).

No, my fellow Americans, we are at a turning point in America’s history. After 9/11, when we have the overwhelming support of almost every country in the world - when even Jaques Chirac said that ‘Today, we are all Americans’ - and after the invasion of Afghanistan when even all the muslim countries were cooperating to overcome the Taliban - when there was unprecedented cooperation in the War on Terror and we vowed that we would catch Bin Laden ‘Dead or Alive’ - it is unthinkable that we would squander that goodwill or that our approval rating in pro-American Jordan will drop to 9% or that Bin Laden’s approval rating will exceed mine or that or that tensions between Europe and America will rise to the levels not seen in 50 years or that our armed forces would be stretched beyond sustainable levels or that my administration will routinely slur our political opposition as pro-terrorist or that 4000 American soldiers will die or that the war will cost several trillion dollars or that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will die or that the occupation of Iraq might continue for decades to come.

Given that all of those things are unthinkable, my fellow Americans, I hope I can count on your support until January 2009 when the whole deal becomes the next president’s problem.

But, my fellow Americans, when times get tough and those liberals are reminding you of all these facts and you vaguely remember that you believed my lines and that you questioned your fellow American’s patriotism and that you can barely keep straight all the various justifications and the Plan for Victory and the Strategy for Victory and the temporary surge that lasts for years, just remember that you were all for it and that there was no way to know then what you know now!

God Bless America!

Before the end of this year, the Bush administration will claim that the War in Iraq is nothing to do with the War on Terror and that no-one had ever claimed that success in Iraq was crucial to the War on Terror. The whole thing was made up by the sneaky liberal press to discredit the administration.

Bush will personally make this announcement in a Press Conference and he will use that condescending tone that says “Not only am I right, I have always been right and I don’t know why you are implying that I might have ever suggested otherwise” (like he did on Monday).

I have wanted to say something like this for a long while, but this letter to the NYTimes editor says it perfectly.

As a longtime peace activist who was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, I deeply resent Thomas L. Friedman’s reference to us as “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in.”

We were bitterly opposed to the notion of pre-emptive war and to a devastating attack on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. But one of our major arguments against this ill-planned, ill-executed tragic war was that it would distract energy and resources from a truly effective attack against terrorism and Muslim extremism.

This is exactly what has happened.

The Iraq war (and sadly, now the war in Lebanon) has only strengthened the terrorists, worsened hatred toward us and rendered us less rather than more capable of fighting terrorism.

Ann Edelman
Los Angeles, Aug. 16, 2006

I stopped my subscription to TimesSelect a while ago so I don’t know what Ann is replying to (maybe its time to renew?). It’s good news that the likes of George Will, Thomas Friedman, Andrew Sullivan etc etc etc et al are finally starting to ask the question “What was it all for?” but why do they feel such a strong need to malign the motives of those of us who asked the same question four years ago?

I hasten to add that I have no idea what comes next. I broadly agreed with Kerry’s prescription back in 2004 but it’s not 2004 any more, sadly. Staying will be a disaster, leaving will be a disaster. I hope there will finally be an honest debate and less of the debate-only-encourages-the-terrorists nonsense that Cheney and Bush (and, now, Lieberman) are STILL coming out with.

In my RSS feed this morning, I have three blog entries from otherwise normal-seeming people who suggest that maybe it’s somewhat unusual to invade foreign countries without a really good reason. There was mine, of course, and Ron’s - it was Ron who gave me the courage to blog about a dream - and Scott’s (I was going to blog about what big balls Condi Rice has after seeing her on Meet the Press, but Scott has that covered). The other two were a little more subtle than mine - but, then, I am an extreme moderate.

Such a happenstance reminds me of that September morning a few years back when I really, really wanted to do something but there was nothing I could do. I had a brain flash. I found the huge Stars and Stripes in the back of the cupboard and went to hang it outside. I felt just like that dude in the Tony Orlando song when, on his way home from prison, the whole damn bus is cheering because there are a hundred yellow ribbons.

Maybe I am not the only moderate?

I know almost nothing about Lamont except that he is very, very rich and that he just won the Democratic primary for the senate seat in Connecticut that Joe Lieberman considered his own. For all I know, Lamont may or may not be of the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party.

But this much I do know. Support for an illegal, unprovoked invasion of a foreign country is not a moderate position and opposition to that same invasion is not extreme.

Support for the invasion of Afghanistan - and most people in most countries did support it - was a moderate position. Support for the first Gulf War - and most people in most countries did support it - was a moderate position. Support for the invasion of Iraq - opposed by most people in most countries - was extreme.

It was a distraction from the important business of fighting terrorism. It destroyed the unprecedented global cooperation with and sympathy for America. It has weakened America’s standing in the world and has resulted in the radicalization of large parts of the Muslim world. The Middle East is in flames and the parts that are not burning are supposedly developing nuclear-powered flame-throwers. It turned out that fighting them over there and fighting them over there were not - Surprise! Surprise! - mutually exclusive and there are now rather more of them than there were before.

The people who are responsible for this immoral and disastrous policy - and the people who claimed that criticism of the policy was somehow dangerous or unpatriotic - should not be allowed to escape without consequences. One consequence for politicians in a democracy is that they can lose elections. Joseph Lieberman just lost and for that, for now, I am glad.

I want to address Rob’s comments to my previous post more fully by quoting from Robert Wright’s contemporary analysis from March 2003.

Rob makes two related claims:

1. It’s disingenuous to claim that we knew he didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction at the time because
2. he was ignoring UN inspection demands.

It’s true that we didn’t know for sure whether or not Saddam had WMD but 2) is outright false.

It was thus a surprise to many observers when the Bush administration started agitating for war even though inspectors had been allowed to go wherever they wanted but hadn’t yet found anything.

I don’t remember anyone claiming at the time that Iraq definitely did not have WMD. I did hear lots of frustrated people complaining that, if Bush&Co had any evidence at all, they should just hand it over to Blix and Baradei and catch ‘em red handed. There were also lots of people - some of them French, one of them English - claiming that a second resolution authorizing an escalation of the inspections with specific triggers for war would settle the matter one way or another. Robert Wright suggests that this was all beside the point:

So why didn’t the administration try such a resolution? Lots of reasons, but the biggest one may have been fear of success. From the beginning, Bush wanted not just disarmament but regime change, and he worried that the former would preclude the latter; if inspectors actually found weapons, the world would insist on giving them time to find more weapons, ad infinitum. (Indeed, Bush seems to have signed onto Resolution 1441 on the assumption that Saddam wouldn’t let inspectors into Iraq.)

That was certainly my opinion - that Bush would settle for nothing less than regime change - at the time. Ultimately, I share Wright’s sorrow that this golden opportunity to prove that multi-lateralism - even acting through the oh-so-inept UN - can be successful was squandered. Not squandered, sabotaged.

The question is whether the United Nations offers an institutional framework through which the United States can pursue valid goals–such as disarming and sometimes even deposing regimes that have weapons of mass destruction in violation of international law–more effectively than it can pursue them outside the United Nations. The answer is that, in this case, it almost certainly could have.