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The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

... The report "says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," said one American intelligence official.

So, a recap of the Iraq war: there were never any WMDs. The proliferation of government death squads and militias in Iraq means that, compared to the Saddam era, human rights have worsened and torture has increased to record levels. Iranian influence has massively increased, as a result of a Shiite fundamentalist government loyal to Tehran replacing the former anti-Iranian regime. We've squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. And we have - according to the consensus of our own intelligence community - directly worsened the terrorist problem with our invasion, and continue to worsen it with our ongoing occupation.

How can anyone claim with a straight face that this war was a good idea? There are no even theoretical justifications left for it. And all of the Republican election-driven fear-mongering over terrorism ought to be met with this clear, straightforward report documenting that that threat has worsened under this administration directly as a result of its policies and, in particular, as a result of its signature policy - the war in Iraq.

But of course they will claim, with a straight face, the war WAS a good idea. It's just that good things take time, lots of time.

It should be noted too that a French newspaper is reporting that they're in possession of a document with the assessment that Osama bin Laden is dead - see this, where l'Est Republicain cites a memo they claim was obtained from the French counter-espionage agency, the Direction Générale des Services Extérieurs, or the DGSE. The memo says the Saudis are pretty sure Osama bin Laden died in August, from typhus or something. The Saudis say he probably is dead, but they cannot confirm this. No one really knows. It's on all the wires, of course. The word came at dawn on Saturday here in Hollywood with some emails from Our Man in Paris, Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis - some in French. Time Magazine is on it now. But no one is sure of anything.

If this is true it's going to be a bit hard to say we brought him to justice. But we can say God did it - and this proves God is on our side, or something.

Next week the spin will be amazing.

There is only one US move I can think of that could possibly offset Iran's natural advantages in this game of geopolitical chess - the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The objective of such a strike would not only be to destroy Iran's nuclear plants more completely, but to demonstrate to Tehran that the old rules don't apply, that America is prepared to commit even barbarous war crimes if that's what it takes to deter hostile powers from acquiring, or even trying to acquire, nuclear weapons.

It would, in other words, take the logic of preventative war - and Cheney's one percent doctrine - to their ultimate conclusion.

Perhaps saturation bombing - the indiscriminate destruction of Iran's civilian infrastructure and economic resources - could accomplish the same goal. It would, however, take longer, be messier (from the Pentagon's point of view) and wouldn't have the same psychological shock value as the deliberate first use of tactical nuclear weapons. A certain kind of mind (that is, one resembling a vacant lot) might even convince itself that a nuclear strike is actually the more humane option, or that it's what Harry Truman would have done, or some other piece of sophism.

The consequences, of course, would be appalling - for the Iranian people, for the world, for Americans who prefer not to be regarded as the direct, linear heirs of the Nazi Party. But if the overriding objective is to stop Iran from building a bomb - or rather, to make absolutely sure they can't or won't build one - and military force is held to be the only option left on the table, then a tactical nuclear strike, or even multiple strikes, may be the only way to do it.

Matt Yglesias has reported chatter in Washington that the Cheneyites might order such a strike and then deny it, relying on the chaotic aftermath and the residual traces of Iran's own nuclear materials to cover their traces. This sounds absurd to me - I'm reasonably sure it would be technically impossible to hide the tell tale signs of a nuclear detonation. But the fact that it's being talked about - even if just as a cocktail party rumor - is a bad sign. It means the idea is being normalized, injected into the debate, made thinkable. I can already imagine the boys at Fox News awarding Shrub brownie points because he doesn't deny ordering the first use of nuclear weapons.

It's getting very dark in here - the little bit of light left is primarily the result of me trying to convince myself the signs we saw in the run up to the Iraq invasion don't have the same significance this time around. Who knows? Maybe doing the same things and expecting different results isn't crazy after all.

The agreement contains concessions by both sides, although the White House yielded ground on two of the most contentious issues: It agreed to drop one provision that would have narrowly interpreted international standards of prisoner treatment and another allowing defendants to be convicted on evidence they never see.

One potential issue that lingers and could be a problem for House-Senate conferees on the final version of the bill is the question of how to protect classified information which might be brought into evidence in a military tribunal.

Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said he felt "very confident" that the issue could be ironed out in negotiations still to come.

I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a "ticking bomb" case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources.

When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria's predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading" treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

The major step forward in this bill, however, seems to me to be the idea that the president specify in the Federal Register the torture methods he has actually approved. What I don't understand - and what even now good lawyers tell me they don't understand - is why these techniques aren't already published before the bill is passed; or whether they will be published ahead of a torture session or after it; or whether the president can simply withhold this information as he sees fit. Some lawyers say that the president will not be required to issue such regulations and facts; merely permitted to do so. If that's true, it's meaningless. My fear is that this is a ruse; my hope is that it is a window for transparency. It is critical that the president tell the American people and the world what techniques he is using and what standards are being applied in the name of the United States. Sources tell me that there is a gentleman's agreement that waterboarding is now off the table, that sleep deprivation will be restricted to 48 hours (as opposed to 48 days in one case), and that other barbaric practices like hypothermia will cease.

The trouble is: Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Addington are not gentlemen. If we have learned anything these past few years, it is that they are not to be trusted on the torture question, that they have lied repeatedly and knowingly and insistently, that their use of the English language is designed to obfuscate and obscure the reality they are advancing, and the constitutional freedoms they are bent on dismantling. In so far as this bill grants this president discretion in enforcing Geneva, it means that the standards of Geneva will not apply under this president - although they might under a more civilized and competent one.

I should add that it is essential to the integrity of language and law that the word torture not be defined out of existence. Waterboarding, hypothermia, long-time-standing, and various forms of stress positions are torture, have always been torture and always will be torture. What we must do is what Orwell demanded: speak plain English before it evaporates from our discourse, refuse to acquiesce to the corruption of language and decency. In that respect, the press must continue to ask both McCain and all administration representatives whether passing this bill means that waterboarding, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, long-time-standing or stress positions are now illegal and unavailable to the CIA. They must not be allowed to get away with the answer that they will not mention specific techniques. The specifics are everything. And we must not be snowed by abuse of English into saying something is true when it isn't. Until they are completely forthcoming on these critical details, this bill should not be passed.

More important is the bill's definition of "serious physical pain or suffering." One would think that, on any reasonable understanding of ordinary language, the "alternative" CIA techniques do, indeed, result in serious physical suffering, at the very least. Indeed, such serious suffering - and the prospect of ending such suffering by telling one's interrogators what they wish to hear - is the whole point of using such techniques in the first place. But remarkably - and not accidentally - the bill's definition would not cover all such actual "serious physical suffering."

The definition would require, for one thing, a "bodily injury" - something that would not necessarily result from use of the CIA techniques - even though one can of course be subject to great physical suffering without any "physical injury."

What's worse, such physical injury would also have to "involve" at least one of the following:

(1) a substantial risk of death;
(2) extreme physical pain;
(3) a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature, not to include cuts, abrasions, or bruises; or
(4) significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty.

As you can see, this definition simply does not cover many categories of actual serious physical suffering, including, naturally, the physical suffering that ordinarily results from the CIA techniques that have been reported.

The result, unfortunately, is a very constrained conception of what constitutes "cruel treatment" - a much narrower conception than a fair or reasonable interpretation of Geneva Article 3(1)(a) would provide.

And therefore the bill would appear to exclude from the definition of "cruel treatment" many cases of actual cruel treatment prohibited by Common Article 3. And when that occurs, it is likely the Executive will construe the statute - and Common Article 3, as well - to permit some forms of cruel treatment that Geneva in fact proscribes, i.e., the "alternative" CIA techniques. Indeed, it's happened already: The ink was hardly dry on the draft when numerous Administration spokespersons were gleefully informing the press that the bill is a green light to the CIA to reinstitute the "alternative" techniques that Hamdan had effectively interdicted.

Byron York has gone so far as to relate that "both sides appear to believe that the agreement permits the CIA to continue to use sleep deprivation, cold rooms, and other such techniques," even though such techniques do, in fact, constitute a breach of our Geneva obligations.

The bad news is that Mr. Bush, as he made clear yesterday, intends to continue using the CIA to secretly detain and abuse certain terrorist suspects. He will do so by issuing his own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions in an executive order and by relying on questionable Justice Department opinions that authorize such practices as exposing prisoners to hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation.

Under the compromise agreed to yesterday, Congress would recognize his authority to take these steps and prevent prisoners from appealing them to US courts. The bill would also immunize CIA personnel from prosecution for all but the most serious abuses and protect those who in the past violated US law against war crimes.

About the only thing that Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham had to show for their defiance was Mr. Bush's agreement to drop his insistence on allowing prosecutors of suspected terrorists to introduce classified evidence kept secret from the defendant.

... On other issues, the three rebel senators achieved only modest improvements on the White House's original positions. They wanted to bar evidence obtained through coercion. Now, they have agreed to allow it if a judge finds it reliable (which coerced evidence hardly can be) and relevant to guilt or innocence. The way coercion is measured in the bill, even those protections would not apply to the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

The New York Times has the right of it here, limning the pathetic gullibility at the heart of the "compromise." There is nothing in this bill that President Thumbscrews can't ignore. There is nothing in this bill that reins in his feckless and dangerous reinterpretation of the powers of his office. There is nothing in this bill that requires him to take it - or its congressional authors - seriously. Two weeks ago, John Yoo set down in The New York Times the precise philosophical basis on which the administration will sign this bill and then ignore it. The president will decide what a "lesser breach" of the Geneva Conventions is? How can anyone over the age of five give this president that power? And wait until you see the atrocity that I guarantee you is coming down the tracks concerning the fact that the president committed at least 40 impeachable offenses with regard to illegal wiretapping.

And the Democratic Party was nowhere in this debate. It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives - "Aggressive interrogation techniques" - the Democratic Party had… no opinion. On the issue of allowing a demonstrably incompetent president as many of the de facto powers of a despot that you could wedge into a bill without having the Constitution spontaneously combust in the Archives, well, the Democratic Party was more pissed off at Hugo Chavez.

This was as tactically idiotic as it was morally blind. On the subject of what kind of a nation we are, and to what extent we will live up to the best of our ideals, the Democratic Party was as mute and neutral as a stone. Human rights no longer have a viable political constituency in the United States of America. Be enough of a coward, though, and cable news will fit you for a toga.

McCain, the Republican rebel maverick, showed that Republicans are moral and look out for their troops.

Bush, the Republican statesman and leader, showed that he is committed to protecting Americans but that he is willing to listen and compromise when people of good faith express reservations about tactics.

The Democrats showed they are ciphers who don't have the stones to even say a word when the most important moral issue confronting the government is being debated.

… I honestly think it would have been much, much better if they'd have forced their way into the debate and taken a firm stand -- if only to show they give a damn. This is a turn-out election and I have a feeling many a Democrat's stomach will turn as they see this triumph of GOP "leadership" in action. Why bother to vote when the Democrats don't bother to show up?

Political winners, assuming the detainee deal is drafted and goes to a floor vote in the House and Senate:

- Bush: In return for making some concessions, he gets clear guidance for CIA interrogators on what they can and can't do to detainees and he ends an intra-party impasse.

- McCain: Conservative commentators had attacked him for blocking Bush on the detainee tribunals but now he can resume his courtship of the GOP rank and file as he looks to the 2008 presidential nomination.

Probable losers: Civil libertarians who may still object to the tribunals and Democrats who have been laying low on the issue, apparently assuming that McCain-Bush impasse would prevent any deal. "They painted themselves into a corner," said GOP Senate aide Don Stewart. "They said, 'I'm with McCain,' and now McCain has reached an agreement."

So tell me, my fellow Americans:

How does it feel knowing that your government will pass laws permitting the violation of the Geneva Conventions against torture?

How does it feel knowing the taxes you pay from money you earned are going towards the salary of legally sanctioned torturers?

How does it feel knowing that the only political party with an organization large enough to stand in opposition to the American fascists in charge of this country's legislature and executive were actually boasting that they were not going to get involved in one of the most important moral debates of our time?

And how does it feel to have George W. Bush, that paragon of moral probity, mental stability, and well-informed intelligence, granted the legal right to determine what is and isn't torture?

I'll tell you how I feel. I am outraged and ashamed.

Shame, shame, shame on the cowards in both parties that permitted this disgracefully grotesque farce to happen. This is as inexcusable a stupidity as the neglect that permitted the 9/11 attacks, the idiotic reasoning and intellectual blindness that advocated and executed the Bush/Iraq war, and the failure to prepare for Katrina.

What the hell is going on, that a country that prides itself on its heritage of freedom and liberty, that fought such an awful war over the degrading enslavement of human beings - that such a country would vote to permit some of the most repulsive and evil practices human beings are capable of and place the power to do so directly in the hands of a moral midget?

What's happening in Washington now is that the establishment political class - and that includes the military, moderate Republican and Democratic members of Congress, the jabbering pundits and op-ed writers, and the bulk of the think tank denizens - are coming to grips with the stark fact that the war in Iraq is over. And that the United States has lost. It's beginning to sink in, but it won't be confronted directly by the political class until after the November elections. After that, all hell is going to break loose. If the Democrats win back Congress, it will happen faster - but even if the Republicans hang on, the gusting winds on Iraq now buffeting the White House will gather strength to become a full-fledged, Category 5 hurricane.

I pray you to pause and consider. Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object - robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. Today they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused the change? Merely a politician's trick - a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: "Our Country, right or wrong!" An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every schoolhouse in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor - none but those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?

For in a republic, who is "the Country?" Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant - merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is "the Country?"?Is it the newspaper? Is it the pulpit? Is it the school superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who isn't.

The nation has sold its honor for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands. The stupid phrase needed help, and it got another one: "Even if the war be wrong we are in it and must fight it out: we cannot retire from it without dishonor." Why, not even a burglar could have said it better. We cannot withdraw from this sordid raid because to grant peace to those little people on their terms - independence - would dishonor us. You have flung away Adam's phrase - you should take it up and examine it again. He said, "An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war."

You have planted a seed, and it will grow.

Republicans may wish they had waited a day to start the attack ads they've aimed at the foreign-policy credentials of Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders.

… Since the Cold War, American politicians have roughly hewed to Sen. Arthur Vandenberg's principle that "politics should stop at the water's edge." As the parties have become more partisan and contentious in recent years, that rule has mostly been invoked by members of the president's party to criticize their opponents for slights both real and imaginary. Now Charlie Rangel has offered a Vandenberg corollary, one most often associated with the rules that define ethnic humor: Catholics can joke about Catholics. Jews can joke about Jews, etc. (Sen. George Allen, however, should still just stay silent). When it comes to criticizing the president on American soil, only US citizens can participate.

Defending the president may be the patriotic thing to do. But it's also good politics for Democrats as the president's party gears up for a campaign designed to drive home that giving the minority party control of Congress would be only a slight improvement over installing Chavez himself. Hillary Clinton last week railed against a film that features a staged assassination of President Bush in 2007. "I think it's despicable," she said. "I think it's absolutely outrageous. That anyone would even attempt to profit on such a horrible scenario makes me sick." Of course, the former first lady has plenty of personal reasons both past and possibly future to be outraged at films that depict the shooting of a president.

It's not just the Democrats who are bashing foreign leaders to improve their statesman credentials. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has an impressive résumé, but it's a little light on the foreign-policy front. So, when former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami spoke at Harvard University on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Romney denounced him and the school. "State taxpayers should not be providing special treatment to an individual who supports violent jihad and the destruction of Israel," Romney said in a written statement, calling Khatami's visit a "disgrace."

Face facts: Hugo Chavez is a buffoon. But what's with all the outrage over the buffoonish comments?

Liberals and true Conservatives (as apart from Bush cultists) should be truly outraged by the fact that the President, the "leader of the free world," has done so much to lower the respect, integrity and gravitas of that position in the eyes of the world.

The fact that Bush has denigrated his office does not excuse Chavez's buffoonery; but by the same token, the fact that Chavez is a clown and a small-town bully does not alter the fact that Bush's degradation of his office has so lowered the esteem with which that office is viewed and thus extended a sliver of credibility to an otherwise incredible Chavez.

Chavez's farcical performance at the United Nations doesn't make Bush any less of a failure as a President.

On the dominant issue of our time, the president is in denial.

By most reliable accounts, three and a half years into the U.S. occupation, Iraq is in chaos - if not in a state of civil war, then awfully close. But President Bush insists it's not so.

He says the people he talks to assure him that the press coverage about how bad things are in Iraq is not to be trusted.

You might think that the enormous gulf between Bush's perceptions and reality on such a life-and-death topic would be, well, newsworthy. But if members of the Washington press corps consider it news at all, apparently it's old news. They report Bush's assertions about Iraq without noting that his fundamental assessment of the situation is dramatically contradicted by the reporting from their own colleagues on the ground.

And in the rare circumstances when they directly confront the president with observations that conflict with his own, they let it drop too quickly.

BLITZER: I'll read to you what Kofi Annan said on Monday. He said, 'If current patterns of alienation and violence persist much further, there is a grave danger the Iraqi state will break down, possibly in the midst of a full-scale civil war.' Is this what the American people bought into?

BUSH: You know, it's interesting you quoted Kofi. I'd rather quote the people on the ground who are very close to the situation, and who live it day by day, our ambassador [Zalmay Khalizad] or General [George] Casey [the top U.S. military official in Iraq]. I ask this question all the time, tell me what it's like there, and this notion that we're in civil war is just not true according to them. These are the people that live the issue.

… "The Iraqi government and the Iraqi military is committed to keeping this country together. And so therefore, I reject the notion that this country is in civil war based upon experts, not based upon people who are speculating. . . .

"That's how I learn it. I can't learn it - I can't - frankly, can't learn it from your newscasts. What I have got to learn it from is people who are there on the ground.

The fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful.

Was this a Bush "lie" or a Bush "goof"? An argument can be made for both sides. Technically, he's obviously wrong, UN inspectors did obviously go in and then leave shortly before the bombing started. On the other hand, he was probably thinking of that time before the UN resolution when Iraq actually was refusing to allow the inspectors in, at least unconditionally.

As for the question of what the media is to do about Bush's comments… Nothing much.

Although people think journalists are always there, ready to jump all over slips like this, that's pretty much a misconception. Think about it. Although you may think you do, you actually rarely see news media, on their own authority, running around pointing out the lies of public officials. What you actually see is news media running around reporting on some political opponents' claims about the other guy's lies. Try as it might, objective journalism has yet to find a way to independently expose what may or may not be "lies" and even just "goofs" without appearing, maybe with some justification, like they're just pimping for some special interest or political ideology.

But until they can figure out how to do that, the bottom line right now is this: You want to get on someone's case about Bush not being outted on this? Get on Howard Dean and John Kerry. If those two make a case out of this, you can bet your bottom buck that reporters will let the rest of us know about it.

The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the United States and more than 130 other countries since 1984, forbids governments from deliberately inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering on those within their custody or control. Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit.

Then of course, as Andrew Sullivan points out here, in the same speech Bush then demands his own prosecution, by an international tribunal if necessary - "I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture."

Then if you consider what the president says in another speech (see this), he calls himself a war criminal - "the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."

But that's not on the news - that's from UCLA's Mark Kleiman here. The news folks will report it if some bigger fish make the case, or the official opposition. Until then, it's not important, or not "news." And Hugo Chavez doesn't count. Visiting thuggish clowns are not to be taken seriously.

There are rules - save when Anderson cooper lost it in New Orleans, got angry, and became a star. There is decorum.

__

Footnote on Decorum:

What's coming up on the CBS show "60 Minutes" this Sunday - September 25 - is an interesting study in decorum, as Associated Press reports here -

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan says the United States threatened to bomb his country back to the Stone Age after the 9-11 attacks if he did not help America's war on terror.

Musharraf says the threat was delivered by Richard Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state, to Musharraf's intelligence director, the Pakistani leader told CBS-TV's 60 Minutes.

"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,'" Musharraf said in the interview to be shown Sunday on the CBS television network. It was insulting, Musharraf said. "I think it was a very rude remark," he told reporter Steve Kroft.

But, Musharraf said he reacted responsibly. "One has to think and take actions in the interests of the nation and that is what I did," he said.

When I discuss the possibility of an American military strike on Iran with my European friends, they invariably point out that an armed confrontation does not make sense - that it would be unlikely to yield any of the results that American policymakers do want, and that it would be highly likely to yield results that they do not.

I tell them they cannot understand US policy if they insist on passing options through that filter. The "making sense" filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran.

At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the Craziest Goddamn Thing I've Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has (naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80 percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes - in other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran - and then simply deny that we'd done so. Detectable radiation in the area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they were, after all, nuclear facilities we'd just hit.

Now I rather doubt that's going to happen. Typically, Bush dials down the crazy factor a notch or two relative to what comes out of the OVP [Office of the Vice president]. Nevertheless, it's a sobering reminder that we have genuine lunatics operating in the highest councils of government at the moment. It's an extremely dangerous situation.

It is now widely accepted that the Iraq war is one of the greatest foreign policy blunders, if not the greatest, in US history. Some have gone further: The respected Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld argues that it is "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them." Not a few regard Iraq as spelling the beginning of the end of American dominance in the world.

The review goes on to discuss what seems to be Rich's thesis - the Iraq war was waged to get Republicans elected again and again. That's the "sense" that the Europeans who talked with Colonel Sam seem to have overlooked.

Another voice?

On Tuesday, September 19, reporters asked General John Abizaid, the top US military commander for the whole Middle East, whether the United States is currently winning the war in Iraq. The Washington Post dutifully reported his answer - "Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we're winning the war."

That's not very reassuring and not particularly realistic. It makes little sense. But it is an answer, and an honest one.

And here's another voice, from August 25, retired General John Batiste, the former commander of the First Infantry Division in Iraq - "Donald Rumsfeld is still at the helm of the Department of Defense, which is absolutely outrageous. He served up our great military a huge bowl of chicken feces, and ever since then, our military and our country have been trying to turn this bowl into chicken salad. And it’s not working."

You can see the video of that here. (There are words you can't say on national television.)

And from the New York Times item of September 20, on how our government is really unhappy with the current premier of Iraq - he's not doing much of anything but visiting Iran and getting chummy with them - we get this - "To bolster Iraqis' confidence, American generals are spending money on quick reconstruction projects like trash pickup as the military goes through troubled neighborhoods of Baghdad."

Compare and contrast - Condoleezza Rice in a Times interview from October 21, 2000 with this - "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."

But that was Kosovo, of course.

Those two contrasting gems were brought up by Bill Montgomery, at his site Whiskey Bar, where he is either the editor and sole writer, or proprietor - or the barkeep, if you will. And his voice comes next with this -

From crossing guards to trash collectors seems like a demotion to me - especially when the trash includes things like dead dog carcasses with IEDs stuffed inside them. But, hey, be all you can be.

We'll never know if this kind of stuff - nation building as an exercise in court-ordered community service - has made any difference in Iraq, or could have made a difference if more of it had been done more competently. I tend to doubt it, but then in the failure-was-inevitable vs. we-coulda-been-contenders debate, I tend to come down firmly in the inevitability camp.

The question is empirically indeterminate, since we don't have another Iraq to use as a control -- one where the post-conflict reconstruction process goes flawlessly, the U.S. Army is a model of counterinsurgency tact and wisdom and the entire process is guided by the kind of people who gave us the Marshall Plan and the long telegram [see this - AMP], instead of the cast members of a Three Stooges short feature.

However, at least some evidence for the inevitability argument can be found in record of the non-fantasy Iraq occupation.

In his book Fiasco, Tom Ricks lavishes praise on Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of the 101st Airborne division, which was originally given the job of occupying the city of Mosul in northern Iraq. According to Ricks, Petraeus and his officers did everything the counterinsurgency textbooks told them to do. They established unity of command, worked with local leaders, avoided excessive use of firepower, tried not to antagonize or humiliate the locals, were selective in their arrests and interrogations and spread a lot of money around in small, local projects.

Whether it was because of these tactics or for some other reason, nobody contests that Mosul was relatively calm through the early months of the occupation - even after the 101st rotated out. But when the replacement force had to be drawn down to send reinforcements to Fallujah in October 2004, public order in Mosul promptly collapsed, with the police deserting in droves and insurgents taking over whole neighborhoods in the Arab quarter of the city. So much for hearts and minds.

Likewise, we heard a lot in the first two years of the war about the vastly superior counterinsurgency training and tactics of the British Army, and how this was the key to their success in keeping southern Iraq happy and docile. We don't hear nearly so much of that talk these days.

You can certainly argue that Petraeus's effort in Mosul and the British Army's work in the south were both undermined (stabbed in the back, so to speak) by the general incompetence of the CPA, the Cheney Administration, the military bureaucracy in Baghdad, etc. etc. Or, conversely, you can claim the successes were never as successful as they were cracked up to be - that what Petraeus and the Brits really were better at was media relations, not counterinsurgency.

Like I said, it's a counterfactual argument, one that historians no doubt will still be having long after you and me and Gen. Petraeus are all in our graves. But if you think Iraq was doable - that the Cheneyites snatched defeat from the jaws of victory instead of just making a miserable situation even worse - then you need to explain why virtually every other recent nation-building exercise has been as complete or almost as complete a failure : from Somalia to Afghanistan, Sierra Leone to Columbia.

… Under the circumstances, nation building in the Middle East might best be compared to sand castle building - on the beach in the face of a rising tide. We'd probably all be better off if our imperial strategists could come up with a strategy for managing the transition to a more decentralized, fragmented and at times chaotic world, instead of trying to turn back the clock to an earlier day. But, of course, if they were comfortable doing that they probably wouldn't be imperial strategists.

Oh well. It certainly doesn't hurt that the Army is picking up the trash in Baghdad, and it may even help, a little. But if I were them I wouldn't expect to get any tips - non-explosive ones, I mean.

Here then, is some much-needed historical perspective to put Bush's standing in context:

• According to Gallup, on the eve of President John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination, he was suffering the worst job-approval ratings of his presidency - 58 percent.
• In 1968, when the war in Vietnam was claiming hundreds of US casualties each week, President Lyndon Johnson was considered so unpopular that he didn't even run for re-election. Johnson's average Gallup approval rating for that year was 43 percent.
• When Reagan's second term was rocked by the Iran-Contra scandal, his ratings plummeted, all the way down to 43 percent.

A Bipartisan commission quietly started work last spring with a mandate to help the Bush administration rethink its policy toward the war.

… [W]hat makes this particular commission hard to dismiss is that it is led by perhaps the one man who might be able to break through the tight phalanx of senior officials who advise the president and filter his information. That person is the former secretary of state, Republican insider, and consigliere of the Bush family, James A. Baker III.

"The object of our policy has to be to get our little white asses out of there as soon as possible," another working-group participant told me. To do that, he said, Baker must confront the president "like the way a family confronts an alcoholic. You bring everyone in, and you say, 'Look, my friend, it's time to change.'"

According to participants in that meeting, the two chairmen received a blunt assessment this week of viable options for America in Iraq that boiled down to two choices.

One plan would have America begin its exit from Iraq through a phased withdrawal similar to that proposed this spring by Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat of Pennsylvania and former Marine. Another would have America make a last push to internationalize the military occupation of Iraq and open a high-level dialogue with Syria and Iran to persuade them to end their state-sanctioned policy of aiding terrorists who are sabotaging the elected government in Baghdad.

... The Iraq Study Group is likely to be as influential as the 9/11 commission, which Mr. Hamilton cochaired with a former governor of New Jersey, Thomas Keane. While the Iraq panel is not charged with assigning blame on past policy failures, as the 9/11 commission was, it does have the ability to give new legitimacy to a withdrawal strategy and force the administration's hand on policy.

So: Bush should either plan to withdraw from Iraq or else open up talks with Syria and Iran. It's hard to know which of those two options he'd loathe the most, and even with Baker delivering the bad news it's hard to see Bush agreeing to either course. By the time the Iraq Study Group delivers its recommendations officially, though, he might not have much of a choice.

Virtually none of the foreign policy establishment were concerned that invading Iraq was a bad strategy in light of the threat of terrorism. It was obvious that we would inflame the Islamic radicals and create more of them - an American occupying army in the Mideast at a time of rising extremism and anti-American fervor was about as provocative an act as could have been imagined. This argument was glossed over as some sort of appeasement when, in fact, it was extremely salient. Why on earth would you go out of your way to aid the recruitment of your enemy unless it was absolutely necessary? The administration may need to play to its base with useless strongman preening but there was no excuse for liberal hawks not to care about this argument.

But the greatest strategic error was dismissing the possibility that by occupying Iraq it would empower Iran in the process. This was undoubtedly seen as pessimism or immoral realpolitik by the neocons and liberal hawks, but it was a very serious consideration that we are now seeing played out before our very eyes. It's quite clear that the most successful beneficiary of our Iraq policy has been Iraq's longtime rival, Iran. Had Iraq really presented the existential threat the administration claimed, it might have made sense. But nobody but the most deluded of neocons believed that Saddam was planning to launch drone planes filled with nukes and chemical weapons at the US. There should have been more attention paid to the ramifications of empowering Iran before we invaded Iraq by people who should know better. (The great irony is that the administration is now recycling the same fear mongering to use against Iran - instead of "gassed his own people" it's "denies the holocaust." SOS)

So, in the months before we went into Iraq the situation was this:

• The Bush Doctrine was morphing before our eyes into a permission slip for unilateral aggression based on nothing more than guesswork about a possible future threat, degrading our moral authority before the war even started.
• Many of our allies were balking which meant that we would potentially lose valuable cooperation on terrorism and would have a much harder time coalition building in the future.
• Saddam had been successfully contained for more than a decade and could have stayed contained for some time, even if the hyped up threat assessment had turned out to be correct.
• The evidence for terrorist ties between Iraq and al Qaeda was virtually non-existent and there was no reason to believe that they would ever have the same goals. Conversely, invading Iraq was likely to empower Islamic extremism in Iraq and elsewhere.
• We rushed into it as if it were an emergency when Saddam had done nothing for years. This meant that planning (which never happened anyway) would have had to be done on a crisis basis, increasing the chance of mistakes and missteps.
• We were committing our military to a non-urgent long term operation at a time when we needed them to be flexible for the emerging threats of the new era of Islamic extremism.
• We knew that upending the structure of the middle east before we had a chance to fully assess the situation could result in empowering the actors we wanted to marginalize, both state and non-state.

For all those reasons one could see not just that it was an impossible task or that the Bush administration would mess it up, but that it was simply a bad idea when the circumstances after 9/11 dictated that we be smart about national security. 9/11 didn't change everything but you'd think the threat of terrorism and asymmetrical warfare would have changed the neocon and liberal hawk's longtime assumptions about the efficacy of traditional military power. If there was ever a time for realism - in the pure sense of the word - it was then. Instead, we had the right lashing out incoherently at their ancient demons and the liberal hawks naively believing that it was a good idea to express our goodness and greatness through a military action that was quite obviously unnecessary at that moment and for which the risk far outweighed the benefit.

We all know that the result was even worse that we feared. We couldn't know they did no planning at all for the occupation. It didn't occur to us that they would literally bring in twenty-something college Republicans to run the reconstruction. I couldn't imagine they would botch it so thoroughly on every level that we have now exposed ourselves as something of a paper tiger when it comes to such unilateral actions. It's weakened us considerably. (And it's also brought us to a very frightening point...) The abandonment of moral authority with aggressive war and torture, the lost opportunities in Afghanistan, the empowering of Iran are all fall-out from this terrible decision and while we couldn't necessarily know exactly what would happen, there was NO DOUBT that the outcome was unpredictable. Great powers can't afford to run dangerous military experiments with unpredictable results unless it's absolutely necessary. Blowback tends to be rather extreme.

The administration dazzled the nation with a big show and the media was chomping at the bit to have a "real" war that they could cover. But when you stripped away all the hysterical rhetoric it was clear then that even if the Bush administration had been capable of preventing Iraq from descending into chaos and achieving all its goals, liberal hawks should have known that rushing into war in the spring of 2003 was a bad idea anyway.

On the one hand, we are faced with a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, nuclear blackmail and terrorist chaos at the heart of the world's Persian Gulf oil supply, and terrorist-planted nuclear weapons in America's cities. On the other hand, we can choose an economically disruptive war with Iran that will alienate us from the world, push us to and beyond our military limits, and that even then may not even succeed. The by now stock phrase, "there are no good options" doesn't quite do justice to the awful choice we face.