Getting out the vote... in Israel. At issue? Critical margins in key swing states. And Palestinian Americas are voting too.

Via Andrew Sullivan, somewhat encouraging poll news for Kerry supporters. From Electoral-Vote.com:

There are 54 new polls in 22 states today. Furthermore, the lead has changed in five states, and all five changes favor Kerry. As a result, Kerry has now passed Bush in the electoral college. If today's results are the final results Wednesday morning, John Kerry will be elected as the 44th President of the United States, with 283 votes in the electoral college to George Bush's 246. But don't count on it. Many of Kerry's leads are razor thin. Counting only the strong + weak states, Bush leads 229 to 196, with 113 electoral votes in the tossup category Kerry's leads in the tossup states mean little to nothing.

"As if things weren't complicated enough, here comes the dirt," writes reader Thomas Brooks, forwarding this from the WaPo:

Registered voters who have been somehow unregistered. Democrats who suddenly find they've been re-registered as Republicans. A flier announcing that Election Day has been extended through Wednesday.

Via Atrios, Knight Ridder reports, "Did US Mistakes Let bin Laden Escape from Afghanistan 3 Years Ago?":

Knight Ridder reporters Barry Schlachter of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Jonathan S. Landay and photographers Carl Juste and Peter Andrew Bosch of The Miami Herald were at Tora Bora during the battle, and photographer David Gilkey of the Detroit Free Press and reporter Drew Brown traveled there a year later, interviewed Afghan fighters, retraced al-Qaida escape routes and talked to Pakistani intelligence officers who were tracking al Qaida.

Their reporting found that Franks and other top officials ignored warnings from their own and allied military and intelligence officers that the combination of precision bombing, special operations forces and Afghan forces that had driven the Taliban from northern Afghanistan might not work in the heartland of the country's dominant Pashtun tribe.

While more than 1,200 U.S. Marines sat at an abandoned air base in the desert 80 miles away, Franks and other commanders relied on three Afghan warlords and a small number of American, British and Australian special forces to stop al-Qaida and Taliban fighters from escaping across the mountains into Pakistan.

"We did rely heavily on Afghans because they knew Tora Bora . . . ," Franks wrote.

Military and intelligence officials had warned Franks and others that the two main Afghan commanders, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman, couldn't be trusted, and they proved to be correct. They were slow to move their troops into place and didn't attack until four days after American planes began bombing - leaving time for al-Qaida leaders to escape and leaving behind a rear guard of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek fighters.

"Ali and Zaman both assured our people that they had forces in blocking positions on the Spin Ghar (mountains) when there were, in fact, no people there," said a U.S. military official who played a key role in the campaign. "So besides taking Afghans at their word, we had no plans to bring up sufficient forces to make up for perfidy."

U.S. reconnaissance photos showed what appeared to be campfires at high altitudes along the trails across the mountains into Pakistan. The Afghans said the fires belonged to sheep herders. Instead, "they were exfiltrators, pure and simple," said an American military official.

Zaman and Ali began trying to negotiate an al-Qaida surrender even before they began their ground attack. Then, on the second day of the attack, Zaman declared a cease-fire. Ali and a third commander, Haji Zahir, who joined the attack at the last minute, resumed fighting after a few hours, and the U.S. bombing never stopped. But Zaman left open an escape route through the Waziri Tangi valley.

U.S. intelligence analysts estimated that 1,000 to 1,100 al-Qaida fighters, along with some of the group's top leaders, escaped the American dragnet at Tora Bora.

A Pakistani official later told Knight Ridder that intelligence reports suggested that some 4,000 al-Qaida members escaped and that 50 to 80 top leaders paid Zaman or Ali as much as $40,000 apiece for safe passage out of Tora Bora.

Tom Friedman endorses George Herbert Walker Bush's heir apparent:

So as we approach this critical election of 2004, my advice, dear readers, is this: Vote for the candidate who embodies the ethos of George H. W. Bush - the old guy. Vote for the man who you think would have the same gut feel for nurturing allies and restoring bipartisanship to foreign policy as him. Vote for the man you think understands the importance of facing up to our fiscal responsibilities for the sake of our children. And vote for the man who has the best instincts for balancing realism and idealism and the man who understands the necessity of using energetic U.S. diplomacy to make Israel more secure - by helping to bring it peace with its Arab neighbors, not just more tours from American Christian fundamentalists.

Yes, next Tuesday, vote for the real political heir to George H. W. Bush. I'm sure you know who that is.

You can't argue with failure, can you? Maureen Dowd:

The Bushies' campaign pitch follows their usual backward logic: Because we have failed to make you safe, you should re-elect us to make you safer. Because we haven't caught Osama in three years, you need us to catch Osama in the next four years. Because we didn't bother to secure explosives in Iraq, you can count on us to make sure those explosives aren't used against you.

Via Kevin Drum, former NSC terrorism expert Daniel Benjamin on why Bush let Zarqawi get away:

What seems evident is that the administration viewed Zarqawi as a lower-tier concern, despite his well-known history of running an Afghan terrorist training camp and conducting terrorist operations in Europe. The White House was unwilling to divert any effort from the buildup for war in Iraq to this kind of threat.

The idea that states are the real issue and terrorists and their organizations are of secondary concern has been present throughout the Bush presidency.

A European colleague called today. His newspaper is sending him to Washington on Monday just in case "something happens." He wonders what I am hearing about how the US is going to step up security in light of the new UBL video. I scratched my head and thought, "what extra security precautions?" There's only been talk of who's up/who's down politically because of the UBL tape. No sightings of Ridge or Ashcroft as of this morning [Ridge spoke to reporters this afternoon]. I flew yesterday - security was as normal. It turns out that after a brief discussion, the Bush administration has decided not to raise the terror alert level after all, as described in this AP report. But it is pretty interesting how three years after 9/11, UBL videos don't so much raise one's terror level - either individual or governmental - as become a hot topic of political debate. Is the politics of fear eroding?

Update: The Bush campaign gloating that anything that "makes people nervous ... helps Bush" is utterly disgusting. They sound like the Sopranos. Matt Yglesias and Atrios have the story.

More: Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Hannah Allam point out another difference: that the latest UBL video did not contain an explicit threat:

U.S. counterterrorism experts were struck by the "lack of an explicit threat" and the generally less-warlike tenor of his comments, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. He said, however, that the release of the tape could be the signal for an attack.

G-d bless Eleanor Clift.

Writing in the LA Times, the New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson on the Pentagon allowing massive looting of arms stockpiles in Iraq -- giving an endless arsenal to the insurgents:

Inexplicably, the looting in Baghdad was not halted after a few days, but went on for weeks. Hospitals, museums, ministries and even some of Saddam Hussein's palaces were looted and, in some cases, burned.

The U.S. inaction was bewildering and a source of great anger and frustration to most of the Iraqis I knew. There have been few public explanations from U.S. officials about this, but, off the record, senior U.S. military officers have told me they did not intervene because they had insufficient numbers of troops.

Today, most also acknowledge that this period of anarchy helped lay the foundation for the Iraqi insurgency by souring the perceptions of many Iraqis toward the occupation troops while simultaneously revealing the extent of U.S. intelligence weaknesses to the members of Iraq's fallen regime, who had melted away to watch and wait. It was not long before they began attacking Americans.

And at least some of the weaponry they have been using comes from unguarded arms caches like Al Qaqaa's.

In June 2003, two months after the invasion that toppled Hussein, I visited a vast dumping ground for war detritus on the southern outskirts of Baghdad — just up the road from Al Qaqaa, in fact. There, I found live rocket warheads, howitzer shells and large quantities of live ammunition lying around, being picked over by scavengers and looters. There were no Iraqi sentries or U.S. soldiers in sight.

Whenever I have mentioned my visit to this place to U.S. officials — and the dangers it seemed to pose to U.S. soldiers — the reaction has always been the same: They grimace, acknowledge the problem and, once again, cite the lack of troops to guard such sites.

The problem, of course, is that the war has been made much easier for the insurgents by their easy access to so much bomb-making material, just sitting there for the taking.

Rumsfeld's war indeed.

David Brooks at his hackiest. The point is not who is the most passionate about talking about the war on terrorism. The point is, who is the most effective at fighting it! The Bush administration has substituted rhetoric that gets those like Brooks fired up over effectiveness. Clearly. Otherwise why would UBL still be sending us video postcards?

Update: Reader KL writes to point out a significant mistake -- or intended mistake -- in Brooks' piece today:

In today's column he [Brooks] says the following:

But politics has shaped Kerry's approach to this whole issue. Back in December 2001, when bin Laden was apparently hiding in Tora Bora, Kerry supported the strategy of using Afghans to hunt him down. He told Larry King that our strategy "is having its impact, and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively, and we should continue to do it that way."

But then the political wind shifted, and Kerry recalculated. Now Kerry calls the strategy he supported "outsourcing." When we rely on allies everywhere else around the world, that's multilateral cooperation, but when Bush does it in Afghanistan, it's "outsourcing." In Iraq, Kerry supports using local troops to chase insurgents, but in Afghanistan he is in post hoc opposition.

Of course the actual Kerry quote had nothing to do with using Afghans. It was in response to a specific question about why troops weren't using napalm and flamethrowers to smoke the Taliban out of caves and wasn't even specifically about Tora Bora. From the CNN Larry King transcript:

KING: Mount Holly Springs, Pennsylvania -- hello.

CALLER: Hello. Yes, I would like to ask the panel why they don't use napalm or flamethrowers on those tunnels and caves up there in Afghanistan?

KING: Senator Kerry?

CALLER: My golly, I think they could smoke him out.

KING: Senator Kerry?

KERRY: Well, I think it depends on where you are tactically. They may well be doing that at some point in time. But for the moment, what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way.

Why does Brooks still have a pen? What a partisan hack repeating old Bush campaign talking points that aren't even accurate.

I expect we'll be seeing a correction in the NYT any minute now. Thanks for the letters.

Fearing further chipping away at the separation of church and state, the erosion of civil liberties, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade if Bush gets his nominees for the Supreme Court confirmed, American Jewish groups are rooting for the Democrats to take control of the Senate, the Forward reports:

Polls show that the Democrats have the potential to score an upset in the Senate if they win six or seven out of eight races in South Dakota, Oklahoma, Florida, Alaska, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina and Louisiana.

Such an upset, said one Jewish communal official, "would change everything for us" by leading to a reversal of legislation chipping away at civil rights and church-state separation, while improving the chances for increases in social-service funding.

With Republicans leading the way, the Senate confirmed several of George Bush's more controversial judicial nominees, including those with conservative records on civil rights and church-state issues. . .

As for the upcoming 109th session, the most important issue facing the Senate could be the Supreme Court, with the presidential winner and the next Senate likely to shape the face of the Supreme Court for the next generation.

"That is going to be the 40-year impact of this election, and it is one of our highest priorities," said Nancy Kipnis, national vice president of the National Council of Jewish Women. . .

The addition of one conservative judge to the Supreme Court would jeopardize Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that guarantees the right to an abortion. Even if Roe would not be immediately rolled back by a new mix on the court, Kipnis said, "there will certainly be more infringement and more opportunity for states to impose limitations [on abortion] in a plethora of ways. It will be slipping away and eventually slip back. The danger is clearly there, not only to reproductive rights but also to other civil liberties and fundamental freedoms."

Bush Failed Us on Bin Laden

Over the past three years, why has the Bush administration not devoted the resources -- or worse, decided it's not a priority -- to get this monster? We need a president who realizes it was Al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11.

I'll repeat this. We need a president who realizes it was Al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11 and devotes the full considerable resources of the United States to take him out now. And that leader is demonstrably not Bush.

March 13, 2002 White House Press Conference:

Bush: So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him , Kelly, to be honest with you. . .

Q: But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

Bush: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.

So much for "whatever it takes."

Update: Andrew Sullivan thinks this will tip the election in favor of Bush. Hard to believe. Bush is the guy who failed to get bin Laden. Sullivan goes so far as to say - tipping the election towards Bush is probably what UBL wanted. Given that Bush doesn't seem to care about getting bin Laden, UBL wanting Bush to win makes a certain amount of sense. If Kerry wins, UBL is finished.

Greg Djerejian thinks the opposite.

Iraqis are being killed and dying at 2.5 times the rate since the US invasion than before. More than 100,000 Iraqi have been killed or died as a direct or indirect result of the US invasion, just a year and a half ago, according to a new analysis by Johns Hopkins published in the Lancet, and described in this IHT article:

Iraqis were 2.5 times more likely to die in the 17 months following the invasion than in the 14 months before it. Before the invasion, the most common causes of death in Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and chronic diseases. Afterward, violent death was far ahead of all other causes . . .

The risk of violent death was 58 times higher than before the war, the researchers found. . .

The estimate of 100,000 excess deaths... translates into an average of 166 excess deaths a day since the invasion.

Read it and weep.

Spencer Ackerman has an interview with the lead author of the study.

It's Chalabi's fault. Partly anyhow. So many of the disasters of the US war and post-war in Iraq -- including apparently al Qaqaa getting crossed off the US's priority list -- originate with Chalabi and go through Feith's office to the White House, it defies plausibility even by Hollywood standards. He's like a comic book villain. This from Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay:

Al Qaqaa was on a classified list of Iraqi weapons facilities that the CIA provided to Pentagon and military officials before the invasion, said the U.S. intelligence official.

But when the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command produced their own list of sites that a limited number of U.S. "exploitation teams" should search, priority was given to those identified by exiled Iraqi opposition groups, he said. Al Qaqaa wasn't one of them.

"The top of the list was dominated by nuclear facilities and places where we expected to find chemical and biological weapons," he said. "Iraqi exiles had a very heavy hand in determining which places got looked at first."

When can this guy be put on trial? The fraud he perpetrated on America and Iraq is certainly criminal. The best thing that ever happened and still only a partially told story is whatever happened in the US administration that finally had the US dump Chalabi last spring. If Bob Blackwill is to thank for this, he deserves a major award.

Game over.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al Qaqaa," said David A. Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an I.A.E.A. seal."

One weapons expert said the videotape and some of the agency's photographs of the HMX stockpiles "were such good matches it looked like they were taken by the same camera on the same day."

Independent experts said several other factors - the geography; the number of bunkers; the seals on some of the bunker doors; the boxes, crates and barrels similar to those seen by weapon inspectors - confirm that the videotape was taken at Al Qaqaa.

"There's not another place that you would mistake it for," said Dean Staley, the KSTP reporter, who now works in Seattle.

The accidental news encounter began last year after the invasion, Mr. Staley recalled in an interview. Their Army unit arrived in the region on Friday, April 11, and made camp. The Fifth Battalion of the 101st Airborne's 159th Aviation Brigade flew helicopter missions from the camp in the Iraqi desert, moving troops and supplies to the front.

A week later, on Friday, April 18, two journalists recalled, they joined two soldiers who were driving in a Humvee to investigate the nearby bunkers. Among other things, wandering inside the cavernous buildings offered the prospect of relief from the desert sun.

"It was just by chance that we were able to go," said Joe Caffrey, the team's photographer. "They wanted to go out and we asked to tag along."

Mr. Caffrey provided The New York Times with the latitude and longitude of the camp, which places it between 1.5 and 3 miles southeast of Al Qaqaa bunkers. A commercial satellite photograph of the region shows that the camp was close to the storage site. Mr. Caffrey said the soldiers used bolt cutters to cut through chains with locks on them, as well as seals. He said the seals appeared to be lead disks attached to very thin wires that were wrapped around the doors of the bunker entrances, forming a barrier easily cut in two.

They visited a half dozen bunkers, he said. The gloomy interiors revealed long rows of boxes, crates and barrels, what independent experts said were three kinds of HMX containers shipped to Iraq from France, China and Yugoslavia.

The team opened storage containers, some of which contained white powder that independent experts said was consistent with HMX.

"The soldiers were pretty much in awe of what they were seeing," Mr. Caffrey recalled. "They were saying their E.O.D. - Explosive Ordinance Division, people who blow this kind of stuff up - would have a field day."

Here's more from KSTP showing the IAEA seals.

Those in denial need to find a new preoccupation. It was HMX and it went missing after the US should have been securing such sites.

Friday Update: Tim Dunlop has more.

Via Atrios, ABC's Minneapolis affiliate KSTP has a big scoop. The explosives do appear to have been in al Qaqaa on April 18th when the 101st Airborne was there:

A 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein was in the area where tons of explosives disappeared.

The missing explosives are now an issue in the presidential debate. Democratic candidate John Kerry is accusing President Bush of not securing the site they allegedly disappeared from. President Bush says no one knows if the ammunition was taken before or after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003 when coalition troops moved in to the area.

Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS determined our crew embedded with them may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where that ammunition disappeared. Our crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa. On April 18, 2003 they drove two or three miles north into what is believed to be that area.

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew bunker after bunker of material labelled explosives. Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get in and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.

"We can stick it in those and make some good bombs." a soldier told our crew.

There were what appeared to be fuses for bombs. They also found bags of material men from the 101st couldn't identify, but box after box was clearly marked "explosive."

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

You must watch this video.

Here are some pretty compelling stills the KSTP crew took while embedded with the 101st Airborne, on April 18th, nine days after the fall of Baghdad. It seems these sealed cannisters marked as explosives have identifying numbers that someone should be able to verify? KSTP promises a follow up as soon as they get more information.

The misaddressed emails that a spoof site -- GeorgeWBush.org -- received from people who thought they were really sending them to the Bush campaign are illuminating -- and highly incriminating. Call the lawyers. Is conspiracy to commit election fraud a misdemeanor or a jailable offense?

The respected Jewish newspaper the Forward has the story on one odd element exposed by this site. Basically the members of a "citizens group" of Americans of Middle Eastern descent endorsing Bush came only after the press release was agreed by the public relations firm paid to create the "endorsement." It's a canned endorsement in other words that does not represent a real group, just a PR-created front. Bizarre. [The PR firm by the way, Fahmy Hudome International LLC, is the registered Washington lobbyist for the government of Libya, since July.] But the question is, who is paying them for this campaign?

From Boston: The curse is broken!! Good omen for next week. . .

Arafat unconscious, the AP reports.

Go read Peter Galbraith in the Boston Globe. It's worth noting Galbraith supported the overthrow of Hussein, but believes the US needed to commit many more troops to prevent mass chaos, looting and "disaster":

IN 2003 I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam Hussein's overthrow. For nearly an hour, I described the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion -- the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad . . .

I also described two particularly disturbing incidents . . . On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn't know the building was important. . .

As I pointed out to Wolfowitz, as long as these sites remained unprotected, their deadly materials could end up not with ill-educated slum dwellers but with those who knew exactly what they were doing.

This is apparently what happened. According to an International Atomic Energy Agency report issued earlier this month, there was "widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant to Iraq's nuclear program." This includes nearly 380 tons of high explosives suitable for detonating nuclear weapons or killing American troops. Some of the looting continued for many months -- possibly into 2004. Using heavy machinery, organized gangs took apart, according to the IAEA, "entire buildings that housed high-precision equipment."

This equipment could be anywhere. But one good bet is Iran, which has had allies and agents in Iraq since shortly after the US-led forces arrived.

This was a preventable disaster . . .

I supported President Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. At Wolfowitz's request, I helped advance the case for war . . . But without having planned or provided enough troops, we would be a lot safer if we hadn't gone to war.

With leaders like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Bush apparently deaf to the realities in Iraq, and ideologically resistant to recognizing the facts on the ground, the war on terror is unwinnable. It's not that the goals of a free Iraq aren't worthy. But the US absolutely must for our strength and security get new leadership that is capable of seeing the realities.

The CIA still won't hand over to Congress its Inspector General's report that names names about who should be held accountable for inadequate pre-9/11 intelligence, the NYT reports:

The Central Intelligence Agency has blocked, at least temporarily, the distribution of a draft internal report that identifies individual officers by name in discussing whether anyone should be held accountable for intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of Congress from both parties said.

The delays began in July, at the direction of John E. McLaughlin, then the acting director of central intelligence, and have continued since Porter J. Goss took over as the intelligence chief last month, members of Congress said. The delays have postponed the next step in the process, which calls for the draft report to be reviewed by affected individuals.

It is not known who is named in the report, conducted by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, an independent internal investigator. The review was sought in December 2002 by the joint Congressional committee that investigated intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks. The purpose, that panel said, should be to determine "whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable'' for any mistakes that contributed to the failure to disrupt the attacks.

Goss is sticking his finger in the eye of his former colleague on the House intel committee Jane Harman, and other Senate and Congressional intelligence committee members, including Republican Peter Hoekstra and Sen. John D. Rockefeller. Will anyone remember the obstruction of Congressional oversight the next time it's time to approve a CIA budget?

Can the White House and Justice Department lawyers be prosecuted for war crimes? They are responsible for writing secret memos authorizing the CIA's disappearing of prisoners. Even after the Abu Ghraib revelations. Appalling. And are their tactics proving effective -- at all -- in Iraq? You judge. US and Iraqi death rates are only rising in Iraq by the month. After they inevitably leave government at some point, some will try to return to university law schools to teach. What students would possibly want them at their law school? These people should be treated like the international pariahs they are.

142 newspapers endorse Kerry, including 36 that four years ago endorsed Bush, the WaPo reports. Surprises? The Chicago Sun Times, and Orlando Sentinel, which has previously "backed every Republican since 1968."

"Rumsfeld's War," on PBS's Frontline tonight.

The Washington Post's Daily Tracking poll has the race today at Kerry 50% to Bush's 48% among likely voters, with Nader at 1%. Kerry is up 5% from the 21st October, and Bush is down from 51%. So much for the daily snapshot. Rasmussen has Kerry and Bush tied at 47.8%.

You've undoubtedly heard that Israel's Knesset has approved the Gaza disengagement plan. Here's Ha'aretz's take.

Update: The Haaretz editorial on this issue is worth reading, and points out that the vote came on the ninth anniversary in the Hebrew calendar of the assassination of Rabin:

Today's Knesset vote on the disengagement from Gaza and the dismantling of settlements in the northern West Bank is nothing less than a historic moment in the Israelis' battle for their home. This is the battle for the limited, democratic, humanist, peace-loving Zionist home for which the founders of the state wished. Hence, there is nothing wrong with the fact that the disengagement is unilateral, in the initial stage at least, and that the dismantling of the settlements is being carried out by the Israelis for their own sake, out of the belated and painful understanding that they were born in error.

This battle for the home cannot be won without it being proved to all and sundry that the dismantling of the settlements is indeed possible.

The vote on the disengagement is taking place on the ninth anniversary of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, who paid with his life for the courageous attempt to return Israel to sane borders.

This editorial by Avirama Golan about Israel vs. "Jewish messianic madness" is also interesting. [Thx to Else.]

The National Journal's Carl Cannon on a Kerry cabinet:

. . .With the Clinton experience in mind, Kerry adviser James A. Johnson has been discreetly putting down on paper the beginnings of a Kerry administration.

Last Sunday, he flew to Florida, where Kerry was campaigning, to brief the candidate on his progress so far, ideas for handling the transition, and procedures for vetting candidates.

"Kerry thinks talking about transition is a jinx, even though he knows that the campaign needs to prepare some advance plans for post-election," said one top Kerry adviser.

With the nation at war in Iraq, Osama bin Laden still on the loose, and several long-term alliances fraying at the margins, the need is especially urgent in foreign policy, which is expected to be the subject of Kerry's earliest emphasis.

National Security Team

National Security Adviser -- Rand Beers is the logical choice to be Kerry's in-house national security adviser, because he is playing that role in the campaign. Other qualified candidates are around, too, including Jonathan Winer, who was previously Kerry's security aide in the Senate. Susan Rice, who worked at the National Security Council for Clinton and later in the State Department under Secretary Madeleine Albright, has been one of the Kerry aides leveling harsh criticism of President Bush's foreign policy.

Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael E. O'Hanlon, who has helped write some foreign-policy speeches for Kerry, might also be in line for a high-level job at the NSC, as might -- yes -- Jamie Rubin himself, along with James Steinberg, of Brookings. Some observers have mentioned Richard Holbrooke, although most who did so expect him to be secretary of State. It depends, in part, on what kind of foreign-policy operation Kerry envisions.

Presumably, Kerry will be looking for a bit more harmony between State and the Pentagon than currently exists. But just to be safe, he might tap the strong-willed Holbrooke to run the foreign-policy show out of the White House, a la Henry Kissinger. "Could be," mused one former Clinton administration official. "He has the personality for it."

Secretary of State -- Those close to Kerry keep naming the same two people, Richard Holbrooke and Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., for this post. Holbrooke has plenty of detractors, but many foreign-policy scholars think he might be the right fit for the job in these contentious times. "He's the kind of guy who, even though he has some faults, would be sufficiently tough-minded and sufficiently energetic to perhaps pull off Kerry's promise of bringing off more international support for the Iraq quagmire," says Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich. "This is a guy who bangs heads together."

The loquacious Biden also has a following in Kerryville, partly because he has the complete trust of the candidate. If Kerry was looking for a bipartisan foreign-policy team, two Republican senators, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Richard Lugar of Indiana, enjoy respect in both parties.

Democratic former Maine Sen. George Mitchell, who so ably helped broker a peace deal in Northern Ireland, is mentioned by some Democrats, as is former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., vice-chairman of the 9/11 commission. Timothy Wirth, a former lawmaker with foreign-policy experience, is close to Kerry personally; he represented Colorado in the Senate and now heads the United Nations Foundation. Wirth is qualified to be U.N. ambassador as well -- although some Democrats think that Kerry might retain the recently appointed John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, in that job.

Another name mentioned for a top foreign-policy job is that of retiring Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat.

Defense Secretary -- For the top Pentagon jobs, as with all of the senior national security positions, Kerry's main problem would seem to be choosing from among a glut of highly qualified people. "He's got far more people than he has positions," says John Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org. "[It will be] a very intense game of musical chairs because there are going to be three or four eminently qualified people for every position."

Earlier this year, Kerry himself mentioned four names. Two of them, John Warner of Virginia and John McCain of Arizona, are Republican senators. The other two are Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and former Clinton administration Pentagon chief William Perry.

Levin's availability, like that of other senators, might depend on the makeup of the Senate itself after November 2. "If it gets to 50-50 in the Senate, Levin may decide he'd rather be Armed Services [Committee] chairman," said one former Clinton official. As for Warner and McCain -- and Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., another Republican whose name crops up -- party affiliation could be a handicap.

"The problem with outsourcing DOD to a Republican is that it sends the message that Democrats can't handle national security issues, and that's the wrong message," says Kurt Campbell of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Campbell himself earned a mention, as did another up-and-comer, Richard Danzig, former secretary of the Navy under Clinton.

. . .

Former Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia once let it be known that he'd rather be secretary of State than Defense secretary, but many Democrats nonetheless think he'd be a good fit at the Pentagon. Likewise, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, has his backers. Thompson calls him "a smart choice." Lieberman did not burn his bridges with the nominee; nor did Gen. Wesley Clark, whose support for Kerry has been unwavering. Some say Joseph Biden is a possibility for Defense, if he does not land at State. So also are Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Reps. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, Jack Spratt of South Carolina, and Ike Skelton of Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. Others thought to be under consideration for top posts include Ashton Carter, a Harvard professor with Pentagon experience, and Norman R. Augustine, chairman of Lockheed Martin's executive committee.

One intriguing name that has been added to the mix is that of former Sen.
Gary Hart of Colorado whose 1988 presidential bid was cut short by a sex scandal that looks tame when viewed through a post-Monica prism. "Hart has forgotten more about defense than most people ever knew," says one pro-Hart Democrat. "It's time to bring him back." Other possibilities include Republican former Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, Merrill McPeak, former Air Force chief of staff, who has made television ads for Kerry, and former Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat.

Homeland Security Secretary -- James Lee Witt, who headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency under Clinton to rave reviews, has emerged as one contender for DHS. Another is Rep. Jim Turner of Texas, ranking member on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security and a vocal critic of the administration's approach to improving the safety of ports, planes, and borders -- a recurrent Kerry theme. Still another candidate is Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., who pushed for a Department of Homeland Security before Bush embraced the idea, and who quips that she was Tom Ridge's "headhunter"
-- she got him a real job. Harman, who wrote the original House bill to create a National Intelligence Director, may also be considered for that post. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark's name has also surfaced for Homeland Security chief. A more likely pick might be John Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is another former Clintonite, and the Bush White House consulted him when the department was being assembled. Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, who chaired the 9/11 commission, is another possibility.

Director of National Intelligence -- One reason that Rep. Jane Harman or John Hamre might not get the Department of Homeland Security is that they could be needed at the CIA or in the newly created post of director of national intelligence. In this area, said one liberal intelligence official, "the bench [for Democrats] is perennially the weakest." Another possibility for DNI: Jeffrey Smith, former CIA general counsel. Kerry friend Gary Hart might be a good fit here, some Democrats believe. The same is true of former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana and 9/11 commission chief Thomas H. Kean.

Economic Team

Treasury Secretary -- Most-often mentioned are Wall Street financiers and Kerry campaign advisers Steve Rattner and Roger Altman. Altman, who was deputy Treasury secretary under Clinton, is also mentioned as a possible White House chief of staff. So is James Johnson, another potential Treasury Secretary -- although Democrats are talking about him as a possible White House chief of staff. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has influence with Kerry, although if Rubin takes a new job in government it might be an even higher one -- say, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, should Fed Chairman-for-Life Alan Greenspan ever step down. "How do you not want to be God?" quipped Clinton Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, a Rubin fan.

Rubin's former partner at Goldman Sachs, Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., could land at Treasury -- though Democrats believe he wants to run for governor of New Jersey. Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Clinton's first national economic adviser, could also be considered for a range of jobs, including ambassador to Great Britain. Currently dean of the London Business School, Tyson has expressed interest in returning to Washington to lend her oar to a Kerry administration.

Office of Management and Budget Director -- One Clinton alumnus has floated the names of John Spratt of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee; and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Spratt's counterpart in the Senate. Several other names have arisen as well, including that of Bruce Reed, Clinton's domestic policy adviser and now president of the Democratic Leadership Council; and Gene Sperling, who, like Reed, served all eight years in the Clinton White House, the last four as director of the president's National Economic Council. Sperling has clear qualifications for the job, is interested in it, and has Kerry's trust.

Rest of the Best -- Kerry has the opportunity to build his own crew of economic advisers by filling other posts at the Treasury Department and OMB, as well as at the National Economic Council and the Council of Economic Advisers, both of which operate out of the White House.

One Rubin protege who has had a meteoric career rise is Tim Geithner, who heads the New York Fed. W. Bowman Cutter, who served on Clinton's NEC and in President Carter's OMB, is mentioned by one former Clintonista as a likely pick. Another Rubin favorite is Tom Steyer, a Goldman Sachs alumnus who funded and runs the San Francisco-based Farallon Capital Management, a giant hedge fund for Ivy League universities. Steyer could be in line for a key Treasury post such as undersecretary for domestic finance. Brookings Institution senior fellow Peter Orszag also has impressive credentials. A former Clinton administration colleague mentions him in connection with the top Treasury tax post, or as head of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Democrats think highly of Alan Blinder, a professor at Princeton University and a former Federal Reserve governor; and of Lael Brainard, a senior fellow at Brookings and a former deputy NEC adviser. Brainard is mentioned by one source specifically for U.S. Trade Representative, as is Bill Reinsch, who runs the National Foreign Trade Council. Gary Gensler, a former Treasury undersecretary, is yet another veteran of Goldman Sachs. If Kerry wants to dip into the expertise of the House, he could tap Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee.

Other Departments

Attorney General -- One of Kerry's biggest rounds of applause on the stump has come when he says the first thing he'll do as president is fire Attorney General John Ashcroft. He won't really have to -- Ashcroft will leave on his own -- but a President Kerry would get to replace him as head of the Justice Department. Interviews turned up several likely candidates.

They include former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer, outgoing president of the American Bar Association and a onetime Michigan Supreme Court judge; and Eric Holder and Deval Patrick, who were both top-level lawyers in the Clinton Justice Department. Jamie Gorelick, another veteran of Janet Reno's tenure at Justice, is often mentioned. During her stint on the 9/11 commission, Gorelick fought with Republicans -- though none on the commission itself -- over Ashcroft's contention that she helped build the infamous "wall" that prevented the CIA and FBI from sharing information.

Consequently, she might have confirmation issues. Two other women, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, are also touted for AG. And depending on the success of his Senate race against Pete Coors, Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar might be an attractive choice. He'd be the first Latino to head Justice. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is under consideration; one source also mentioned Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Names being floated for other top-level Justice jobs include famed trial lawyer David Boise, former Clinton White House Counsel Greg Craig, and U.S.
District Judge Sven Holmes of Oklahoma.

Labor Secretary -- Kerry says his secretary will come from organized labor's ranks, but observers don't believe he has Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, or Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, in mind. Both outspokenly backed Howard Dean before the Iowa caucuses.

But other candidates fit the bill. One possible choice is Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. Lynch headed an ironworkers local before being elected to Congress. Another strong candidate is Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters. The firefighters endorsed Kerry early and loudly, and Schaitberger has an impressive resume. Democrats as prominent as Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle have taken to lightheartedly calling Schaitberger "Mr. Secretary," at party meetings.

Others mentioned include Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, and Rep. Dick Gephardt, long a friend to labor when he was in the House leadership. "We're for our guy, but you're not going to upset anyone in labor if you pick Gephardt," said one firefighters union official. "He has the heart of labor."

Education Secretary -- Kerry anointed former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt as the front-runner when he referred to Hunt as "Mr. Education" at a recent campaign rally. "Jim is the consensus candidate," said one person with ties to the campaign. Hunt was one of a cadre of Southern governors in the 1980s and 1990s -- along with Bob Graham, Bill Clinton, Richard Riley, and, yes, George W. Bush -- who helped lead a reform movement to set national standards in public education.

But if Kerry wanted to send a message that he intends to continue the kinds of reforms envisioned in the No Child Left Behind Act, he might choose one of several big-city school administrators with solid Washington and Democratic credentials. They include former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, now the superintendent in Los Angeles; San Diego schools Superintendent Alan Bersin; and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Other candidates include Boston Mayor Tom Menino and his schools chief, Tom Payzant; Virginia Gov.
Mark Warner, who cannot succeed himself; and former West Virginia Gov.
Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board.

Transportation Secretary -- The Kerry campaign has been advised to pick someone with bipartisan appeal, someone like former Federal Aviation Administration chief Jane Garvey or Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, the Democrats' transportation guru in the House. Others mentioned are Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Mike Honda, D-Calif.; Clinton-era Transportation Deputy Secretary Mort Downey; Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels; Pennsylvania Gov.
Ed Rendell; and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Commerce Secretary -- This Cabinet post often goes to a large donor.

Business leaders supportive of Kerry's candidacy include investment banker Steve Rattner; Gateway co-founder Ted Waitt; and John Merrigan, a partner at law firm Piper Rudnick, who has been among Kerry's top D.C. fundraisers.

Some others mentioned by those close to the campaign are Alexis Herman, Labor secretary under Clinton; Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television; and John Thompson, CEO of Symantec, a computer-security company based in Cupertino, Calif. Nobody in history has raised more money for Democrats than DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe has, but the Senate would have to go Democratic before he could win confirmation.

. . .

Health and Human Services Secretary -- Front-runners are former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, and current Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who were both early backers of the Kerry campaign. Other possibilities include retiring Sen. Bob Graham of Florida and retiring Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, and Missouri Gov. Bob Holden.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., is a possible candidate to head HHS or another Cabinet department if he loses his close re-election contest.
Likewise, Rep. Denise Majette, D-Ga., will merit consideration if she loses her Senate race. Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., was an early Kerry supporter.
Former New York Rep. Thomas Downey has also earned mention.

. .

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator -- If Jeanne Shaheen doesn't land at HHS, the EPA post might work for her. Environmentalists laud Shaheen's record as governor of New Hampshire. But there's a big pool of candidates for this job, some of whom would also be considered to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Top contenders for either post include John DeVillars, EPA's regional director for New England during the Clinton administration and secretary of Environmental Affairs for Massachusetts when Kerry was lieutenant governor; New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer; and New Jersey Commissioner of Environmental Protection Brad Campbell.
Mary Nichols, director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment, is respected by environmentalists and has also worked well with industry.

Environmental activists Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and David Hayes, a former deputy Interior secretary under President Clinton, are both close to Kerry.

. . .

Posted by Laura at 03:19 PM

Four years ago, Andrew Sullivan endorsed George W. Bush. This time, Sullivan's endorsing Kerry. Why? Essentially, he's willing to take a gamble on Kerry because he's lost faith in Bush's prosecution of his biggest gamble, the Iraq invasion and post-war:

Equally, [Bush's] presidency can and should be judged on its most fateful decision: to go to war against Iraq without final U.N. approval on the basis of Saddam's stockpiles of weapons and his violation of countless U.N. resolutions. I still believe that his decision was the right one. . .

At the same time, the collapse of the casus belli and the incompetent conduct of the war since the liberation point in an opposite direction. If you are going to do what the Bush administration did in putting all your chips on one big gamble; if you are going to send your secretary of state to the United Nations claiming solid "proof" of Saddam's WMDs; if you are going to engage in a major war of liberation without the cover of international consensus--then you'd better well get all your ducks in a row.

Bush--amazingly--didn't. The lack of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq remains one of the biggest blows to America's international credibility in a generation. The failure to anticipate an insurgency against the coalition remains one of the biggest military miscalculations since Vietnam. And the refusal to send more troops both at the beginning and throughout the occupation remains one of the most pig-headed acts of hubris since the McNamara era. I'm amazed that more war advocates aren't incensed by this mishandling of such critical matters. But even a Bush-supporter, like my friend, Christopher Hitchens, has termed it "near-impeachable" incompetence.

I would add one more thing: Abu Ghraib. . .

[Bush] ran for election as a social moderate. But every single question in domestic social policy has been resolved to favor the hard-core religious right.

Sullivan articulates precisely my concerns about a second Bush presidency, and why I think the "pro-war" people are deluding themselves on Bush's lack of competence and lack of demonstrated commitment of resources and strategic vision to win the war on terrorism.

The Philadelphia Daily News' Will Bunch gives us a dose of much needed optimism: the gist - Kerry is up in Pennsylvania.

He leads by five points among likely voters (49-44) and among registered voters (51-46), and with undecideds breaking for the Democrat there's not much time for President Bush to catch up.
. . .

The majority of the Pennsylvania electorate (52 percent) cares most about one of three things -- the economy, health-care, or the war in Iraq. In each of those areas, nearly two-thirds, or more, are with Kerry.

Bunch says that Bush's strategy of manipulating voters' fear isn't working very well in Pennsylvania. It does seem like undecideds are starting to break for the challenger....We'll see.

Talk about brainwashing. Bush supporters believe Iraq was directly behind 9/11. This from the Boston Globe's Peter Canellos:

The explanation for the Bush divide seemed to come from another poll released last week, this one by the Harris organization. It found sharply diverging views of the facts about Iraq and the 9/11 attacks between Bush's supporters and Democrat John F. Kerry's. In many cases, Bush's supporters -- representing a large swath of the electorate -- went beyond the assertions of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in describing dangers posed by prewar Iraq.

Forty-one percent of all respondents, for instance, agreed that ''Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the US on 9/11." This interpretation persists even after Cheney, in his debate with Democratic rival John Edwards, denied ever suggesting such a thing.

In addition, 38 percent believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded, despite the conclusion of the Iraq Survey Group that none existed.

And a large majority of 62 percent agreed that ''Saddam Hussein had strong links with Al Qaeda," even though the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee said he did not.

What are the consequences that so many people can be taught to believe something not true? They could believe anyone has done it. Those who push such falsehoods should beware. They could become the victims of their own deliberate conspiracy mongering. Because they have demonstrated that for a large number of people the truth doesn't matter, is something to be manipulated. It's a dangerous lesson.

Update: Hitchens may be one of them. But he fails to mention in this that the Bush administration had a DOD-approved plan to take out Zarqawi in 2002 -- and they nixed it. Why is that? Isn't he curious about the Bush administration's motives for leaving Zarqawi in place to behead and explode and kidnap at will? DoD officials are certainly curious. And Hitchens also neglects something that has always struck me-- Iraq surely was less an active base for al Qaeda terrorists than say Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. So what gives? Hitchens demonstrates the presence of only potentially two in the whole country of 20 million people. That's not very impressive. How many al Qaeda operatives are in Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Were there at the time the US invaded Iraq? Hundreds, surely. Including the very top architects of the 9/11 attacks, who Rumsfeld let escape from Tora Bora, and are still in place. Perspective?

Late Tuesday Update: So Hitch is endorsing...Kerry?

Iran is in the midst of profound social change that will lead to democratic transformation, argues journalist and pro-democracy activist Emadeddin Baghi in Tehran in the WaPo today:

Society itself, not the government, creates change. And there are deep transformations occurring in Iran. Out of sight of much of the world, Iran is inching its way toward democracy . . .

These are signs of a movement that will be impossible to stop. The state is facing powerful, irreversible social pressure for reform. If this movement is not responded to -- or, even worse, if it is repressed -- we would welcome another revolution. We've learned from experience that a nonviolent, smooth domestic transformation would be far preferable to any change imposed from external sources.

"Paul Wolfowitz defends his war," an article in the New Yorker.

A really interesting article [from last week] on Kerry's potential cabinet -- with some surprises. Biden or Holbrooke at State -- or Lugar or Hagel? Armitage at DOD? I feel some neoconservatives madly filling in their absentee voter ballots now. Hey -- with talk of a cabinet made up of Lugar, Hagel, and Armitage, isn't this the cabinet of foreign policy internationalists/realists Greg Djerejian thought we'd be getting with a second Bush term? Update: Greg is dreaming. As I was told, Rumsfeld will leave Secretary of Defense only when he is carried out feet first.

More than 760,000 Pan Am flights 103. Spencer Ackerman has more:

How could this have happened? Insufficient military personnel and sustained attention, certainly. But that doesn't explain why the administration didn't devote critical resources to such a dire problem. One likely explanation is ideology. As Bill Keller described in a 2003 article on nuclear proliferation, the Bush administration worries far more about the character of regimes that possess dangerous weapons than about the danger posed by the weapons themselves. That explains, for example, why the administration didn't make securing Russian nuclear material a tier-one priority even after September 11, but turned its counterproliferation attention (such as it is) to Baghdad. I'm not suggesting that the administration consciously chose not to guard Al Qaqaa. But with a national-security outlook that boils down to "no dangerous regime, no danger," it's hardly surprising that securing munitions sites would fall to what one administration official told The New York Times was a "medium priority"--particularly in the triumphal moments of spring 2003, when the administration was mistakenly gloating about a successful war. (It's the same focus on the centrality of states that leads the administration to misunderstand the war on terror.)

In other words, it's not just an intent question. It's also a capabilities and supply question, which the Bush administration has discounted -- allowing the AQ Khans to go essentially unpunished, the Russian nuclear stockpiles, and post-Saddam Iraq stockpiles to go unsecured -- to our mortal danger.

[Thx to D for the staggering math correction -- Kansas public schools, etc..]

Roger Simon is getting worried:

I'm not overly poll-obsessed... [Yeah, right.-ed...] but for the first time since August 23, Rasmussen shows Kerry in the lead in his daily tracking poll (48-46). Real Clear Politics, which does not appear to show Rasmussen in its widely-quoted running poll average, still shows Bush up by 3.1 percent. But I wonder.

A friend voting for Bush writes that his decision essentially comes down to this:

The election is a referendum on the war and I'm for the war. Ideally, I would vote for a pro-war Democrat. Even a Democrat that criticized the President's competence in achieving the goals articulated by the President. But Kerry has gone further than that.

Needless to say, I strongly disagree. I see this election as being a referendum on the incompetence and criminal negligence of the Bush administration in its conduct of the war on terrorism and the post-war in Iraq, and its initial deliberate efforts to falsely conflate the two [now a fait accompli].

Bill Safire is chagrined that Jewish and Arab Americans are united in voting overwhelmingly against Bush and believing Kerry will better represent their interests. Maybe Safire should learn a little something from the citizenry and what they think their true interests are, and why Bush has betrayed them. Bush's mindless support of Sharon at every point is not good policy and not the sign of a true ally. And support for Sharon's unilateral Gaza withdrawal is hardly enough -- even if Sharon is right to withdraw from Gaza and even if some far right Israeli settler fanatics are threatening Sharon with violence, even assassination over it. What's needed is structured US support and pressure and incentives for achieving a two state solution. Not the Bush 'whatever Sharon wants' disengagement plan. Safire is calling on American Jews to support something they know is parochial, unstable and short term as opposed to a real, sustainable peace plan. Mr. Safire, your readers know better than you what is in the US's and Israel's long term national security interests -- a sustainable peace.

Update: The American Prospect's Sarah Wildman notes a very interesting editorial from Ha'aretz today:

The opposition that Sharon's proposal has stirred up is threatening Israel with a civil war. This too is just a prelude to the inevitable: In the Middle East, both among the Israelis and among the Palestinians, anyone who wants peace must prepare for a civil war. This, as Sharon said in a different context, will be the most justified of all Israel's wars. It is not a Charles de Gaulle for whom Israel is waiting, but rather for an Abraham Lincoln, a leader who will know how to make it clear that the subject of the controversy is not some strip of land or other, but rather the authority to decide.

Go read the whole Ha'aretz piece.

Remember when the DOD had plans to strike Zarqawi, and the Bush White House refused to approve them? The WSJ's Scott Paltrow reconstructs the decision today. NBC had already reported back in March that the White House had nixed the DoD's plans to strike Zarqawi, but at that point, the White House was still denying it [and Kevin Drum and Dan Drezner among others, picked up on it]. Now, the White House is no longer denying its fatal misjudgment:

As the toll of mayhem inspired by terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi mounts in Iraq, some former officials and military officers increasingly wonder whether the Bush administration made a mistake months before the start of the war by stopping the military from attacking his camp in the northeastern part of that country.

The Pentagon drew up detailed plans in June 2002, giving the administration a series of options for a military strike on the camp Mr. Zarqawi was running then in remote northeastern Iraq, according to generals who were involved directly in planning the attack and several former White House staffers. They said the camp, near the town of Khurmal, was known to contain Mr. Zarqawi and his supporters as well as al Qaeda fighters, all of whom had fled from Afghanistan. Intelligence indicated the camp was training recruits and making poisons for attacks against the West.

. . .

But the raid on Mr. Zarqawi didn't take place. Months passed with no approval of the plan from the White House, until word came down just weeks before the March 19, 2003, start of the Iraq war that Mr. Bush had rejected any strike on the camp until after an official outbreak of hostilities with Iraq. Ultimately, the camp was hit just after the invasion of Iraq began.

. . .

Administration officials say the attack was set aside for a variety of reasons, including uncertain intelligence reports on Mr. Zarqawi's whereabouts and the difficulties of hitting him within a large complex.

"Because there was never any real-time, actionable intelligence that placed Zarqawi at Khurmal, action taken against the facility would have been ineffective," said Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for the NSC. "It was more effective to deal with the facility as part of the broader strategy, and in fact, the facility was destroyed early in the war." . . .

Some former officials said the intelligence on Mr. Zarqawi's whereabouts was sound. In addition, retired Gen. John M. Keane, the U.S. Army's vice chief of staff when the strike was considered, said that because the camp was isolated in the thinly populated, mountainous borderlands of northeastern Iraq, the risk of collateral damage was minimal. . . .

Gen. Keane characterized the camp "as one of the best targets we ever had," and questioned the decision not to attack it. . .

Why is this story coming out now? Because the fearmongerer in chief Cheney ordered a review of Zarqawi that points out how criminally incompetent his White House has been:

Questions about whether the U.S. missed an opportunity to take out Mr. Zarqawi have been enhanced recently by a CIA report on Mr. Zarqawi, commissioned by Vice President Dick Cheney. Individuals who have been briefed on the report's contents say it specifically cites evidence that Mr. Zarqawi was in the camp during those prewar months. They said the CIA's conclusion was based in part on a review of electronic intercepts, which show that Mr. Zarqawi was using a satellite telephone to discuss matters relating to the camp, and that the intercepts indicated the probability that the calls were being made from inside the camp.

Kind of makes you angry, doesn't it? Those who are supporting the White House because of the war on terror are deluded, or egregiously misinformed. Look at the facts. Look at the record of failure. Look at those beheaded in Iraq. Look at the insurgency the White House never planned for. Look at the fifty killed Iraqi security recruits laid out in rows in the desert yesterday. Look at the raiding of the Al Qaqaa facility and the missing 380 tons of very high explosives, and the administration pressuring Iraq not to report it to the IAEA for fear of elections-season embarrassment. Look at Abu Ghraib. Look at Rumsfeld letting Osama getting away at Tora Bora. Look at their deceit and falling for Chalabi's lies and giving US intelligence to Tehran. Look at North Korea getting a half dozen nuclear weapons and Iran fast on that path. In profoundly serious ways, the Bush administration has betrayed the US's national security interests and failed to provide the competence and means and intellectual honesty to achieve success in both the US war on terrorism and the war in Iraq, from too few troops to a failure to honestly evaluate the nature of the problem.

[thx to SE.]

Update: Belgravia Dispatch's newly engaged Greg Djerejian is desperately rationalizing why he's voting against his gut instinct - that the Bush administration is 'criminally negligent' in its conduct of the Iraq post-war. A true sign of the increasing desperation of his reasoning in the face of the evidence. And as he points out, an increasingly isolated position as well: "It's Kerry Endorsement Season! Wow, it's getting lonely out there! WaPo. TNR. Drezner. Chafetz. Adesnik. Andrew, likely soon?" He forgot, the Des Moines Register. And the New Yorker [apparently -- its first presidential endorsement in history].

You've got to be kidding. From the NYT:

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Saturday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes." . . .

Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.

This is one of those times when changing horses midstream is the only rational thing to do.

"Senators concerned about report CIA secretly removed detainees from Iraq," the AP reports. Uh, if the Senators were so concerned, why didn't we see more hearings and investigations of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo abuses? Why is the only person seemingly investigating these issues Seymour Hersh?

Go read Dana Priest's report on a confidential Justice Department memo authorizing the CIA to secretly remove detainees from Iraq for interrogation, a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The memo was written by Jack L. Goldsmith, former director of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and a professor of law at the University of Chicago.

Here's a letter Goldsmith co-wrote to Foreign Affairs several months before the September 11th attacks:

. . .But the idea that a nation can decide which international laws to embrace is not new and should not be controversial. In a world of diverse cultures, political systems, and power relationships, international law derives its legitimacy and efficacy from national consent. And the power to give consent naturally implies the power to withhold it.

Spiro describes our position as "anti-internationalist." It is not a rejection of international law, however, to examine whether treaties or customary international rules are consistent with U.S. interests and constitutional standards, or to consider how these international norms should best be implemented within the U.S. system. . .

In other words, he was for the US shucking international law when it chooses long before "9/11 changed everything." 9/11 was just a convenient excuse to torture prisoners and deny them any legal representation and stomp on the Geneva Conventions. And just to remind everyone -- those tactics haven't worked. Look at Iraq -- Goldsmith's policies are failing.

Hearings, Senators? Here is your first witness. Here are some more.

Update: David Meyer has more.

A truly terrifying article on Lyndon LaRouche in today's WaPo Sunday magazine:

The desperation in her son's voice jolted Erica Duggan fully awake.

"Mum, I'm in big trouble," Jeremiah, a 22-year-old college student, said into the phone quietly, as though trying not to be overheard . . .

It was March 27, 2003, the eighth day of the war in Iraq. Antiwar sentiment was high across Europe. Erica's idealistic son had gone to Germany to attend an antiwar protest and conference with a group called Nouvelle Solidarité. All Jeremiah told his mother about the group before he left was that its views were "extreme" and that it was affiliated with an American presidential candidate she'd never heard of, a man named Lyndon LaRouche. Now her son's phone call made it clear that something had gone wrong.

"This involves Solidarity," Erica recalls her son saying before he added: "I can't do this. I want out. It is not something I can do.''

Alarmed, she tried to assure her son that he didn't have to do anything with this group that he didn't want to. Then the line went dead. Almost immediately, Jeremiah rang back.

"I'm frightened," she remembers him saying, his voice hushed and strained.

"What is it?" his panicked mother demanded. "Tell me!"

Jeremiah seemed to be having trouble speaking. "He sounded terrified," Erica says. "Because of that I found myself saying, 'I love you.' It just came out. I thought his life was in danger.

"When I said, 'I love you,' then he said to me in a very, very loud voice, 'I want to see you NOW.' "

"Where are you?" his mother cried.

"Wiesbaden," he said.

She had difficulty making out the name of the German city, and she asked him to spell it. Erica's father, a German-born Jew, had fled Hitler's Germany. Most of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. Now her only son was somewhere in Germany, and was telling her that he was in peril.

Jeremiah began spelling Wiesbaden. He wasn't halfway through the letters when the line cut off again.

Thirty-five minutes later, Jeremiah was dead. He lay crumpled on a roadway into town, his arms stretched out before him as if he were a boy again, reaching to catch a ball.

Here's the whole piece.

Brainwashing people, encouraging his followers to contemplate killing themselves for him and his cause, inciting people to hatred and violence -- shouldn't LaRouche be in jail for something more serious than mail fraud?

"Not a single terrorist has been prosecuted in the three years since officials gave the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II," the New York Times reports in a massive Sunday review of the unravelling of the Bush administration's terror prosecution strategy. All the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, with not a single prosecution. Staggering.

Porter Goss and his band of GOP staffers from the Hill are planning to institute reform at the CIA by firing 90 people in a post-elections "purge", Knight Ridder reports [via Matt Yglesias]. Look, the CIA sounds to need some serious reform, but do Goss and his newly arrived Congressional entourage even know where the cafeteria is yet? This seems like tough-guy tactics masquerading as intelligence reform, which Goss had seven years to demand as chair of the Houes intel committee but failed to achieve.

Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments reviewed in Sunday's NYT.

And the Weekly Standard's Tod Lindberg has a (subscription-only) piece, "The Referendum on Neoconservatism," that asserts: "It's already over, and the neocons won." It argues that Kerry has not really repudiated the Bush doctrine but rather its execution:

. . . What we have here, I submit, is not a referendum on neoconservative strategic doctrine but a question of who will best implement that doctrine going forward. The case Kerry states is against neoconservative national security policy not in principle, but as executed.

No doubt appearances can be deceiving. If Kerry wins, there is every reason to expect within his administration a protracted clash between the neorealist elements and the neoliberals. But even the neorealists aren't as neo-real as they used to be. They may favor maintaining a norm of nonintervention (what kind of neorealist wouldn't?), but they will allow for sufficient exceptions on humanitarian and, yes, preventive grounds to satisfy the interventionist impulses of the neoliberals. Equally clearly, Kerry would be every bit as multilateralist at the beginning as the Bush administration was unilateralist--until, as seems likely, he runs up against the limits of his preferred ism, as Bush did before him.

My point is not that there are no foreign policy stakes in the outcome of this election . . . But win or lose, the vindication of neoconservatism has already taken place, in that the Democratic candidate in 2004 has found it impossible to run for the Oval Office on a platform of its repudiation, but rather has embraced its central strategic insights.

The American Conservative magazine endorses . . . Kerry! Talk about October Surprise.

[Thx to D.]

"Emigré Jew's wartime book takes France by storm," reports the Guardian:

Sixty-two years after its author died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, a remarkable and previously unpublished wartime work by an emigré Russian Jew in France has taken the world of publishing by storm.

Suite francaise, the first two parts of what Irène Némirovsky originally intended to be a five-volume epic, has been hailed by ecstatic French critics as "a masterpiece" and "probably the definitive novel of our nation in the second world war". . .

Overwhelming as the praise has been, the story of Irène Némirovsky is as gripping as the 430-page work itself.

Born in February 1903 in Kiev, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker, Irène fled Russia in 1918 and arrived with her family in France the following year. . .

Here's the rest of her story.

Levin, Feith, Iraq, Iran, etc. Open Thread. What should we be reading and paying attention to this weekend?

Update: This WaPo Gellman/Linzer piece, Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide, is really must-read:

...Downing, Bush's first counterterrorism adviser after Sept. 11, said in a 2002 interview that hunting down al Qaeda leaders could do no more than "buy time" for longer-term efforts to stem the jihadist tide. This month he said, "Time is not on our side." . . .

Many of Downing's peers -- and strong majorities of several dozen officers and officials who were interviewed -- agree. They cite a long list of proposals to address terrorism at its roots that have not been carried out. Among them was a plan by Wendy Chamberlin, then ambassador to Pakistan, to offer President Pervez Musharraf a substitute for Saudi funding of a radical network of Islamist schools known as madrasas. Downing backed Chamberlin in the interagency debate, describing education as "the root of many of the recruits for the Islamist movement." Bush promised such support to Musharraf in a meeting soon after Sept. 11, said an official who accompanied him, but the $300 million plan did not survive the White House budget request.

. . .

A central criticism in the Sept. 11 commission's report is that the efforts at nonmilitary suasion overseas lack funding, energy from top leaders and what the commission's executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, called "gravitas."

Most officials interviewed said Bush has not devised an answer to a problem then-CIA Director George J. Tenet identified publicly on Feb. 11, 2003 -- "the numbers of societies and peoples excluded from the benefits of an expanding global economy, where the daily lot is hunger, disease, and displacement -- and that produce large populations of disaffected youth who are prime recruits for our extremist foes."

The president and his most influential advisers, many officials said, do not see those factors -- or U.S. policy overseas -- as primary contributors to the terrorism threat. Bush's explanation, in private and public, is that terrorists hate America for its freedom.

[Thx to Eric Umansky for the heads up.]

Sunday Update: Feith writes a letter in which he sniffs that he simply cannot understand why Levin would think he deceived Congress.

You knew it was bad in Iraq, I know. I did too. But still, reading this, I am struck yet again with the enormity of the disaster:

Hoping to contain the damage, the Army offers the press a tour of the prison. . . When the bus arrives, the reporters file off and approach a massive expanse of tents, each housing twenty-five prisoners. A soldier screams, "No talking to the detainees!" But as soon as the prisoners catch sight of the press corps, pandemonium erupts. Dressed in rags, the Iraqis press their bodies against double layers of barbed wire. There are hundreds of them: shouting, holding up crude signs or crutches. Several wave prosthetic legs. "Where's the freedom?" they shout in Arabic. "Is this the freedom?" A prisoner with a bullhorn denounces Americans in English: "They've taken away our freedom, our liberty, our rights!" The military's staged press tour has devolved into unscripted chaos.

Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal stands frozen. "I feel like I'm in a bad dream," she whispers. "God, what have the Americans done?"

. . .

Josh Hammer and Robert King are missing. It is Sunday evening, May 9th, and no one has heard a word from either of them since morning. . .

Hammer and King were ordered, at gunpoint, into separate cars. Hammer told his captors he was French.

The jihadi wanted proof: "Let me see your passport." Hammer had failed to leave his U.S. passport at the house -- a standard procedure to prevent identification.

"You are American," said the jihadi.

"My mother is French," Hammer improvised.

The jihadi looked at him. "You are American."

It was touch and go for eight hours. The two journalists were shuttled from house to house by fighters armed with pistols, rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs. . .

And then it was over. One of the town's religious leaders had intervened. . .

The next morning, the head of Nicholas Berg, an American civilian contractor, appears on the Internet. Word in Baghdad is that he was killed in Fallujah.

After Robert King returns from Fallujah, he locks himself in his room. He remains there for three days, afraid to leave . . . Hammer returns to Jerusalem.

Paranoia has settled over Baghdad . . .

As other journalists leave Iraq, however, King signs up for an embed with the First Cavalry Division at Camp War Eagle, in Sadr City . . .

In the days leading up to the June 30th hand-over . . . several journalists are ambushed on the outskirts of Baghdad. Four more contractors are killed, this time on the road to the airport. In Fallujah, the U.S.-supported Iraqi Brigade is camped outside the city, while inside, insurgents rule. . .

"This is our doing," King says, looking out at the Green Zone across the river from his hotel. He seems unable to believe that his country has created such a disaster. "This isn't America, what's going on in Iraq," he says. "It's not the America I know. This is scary. If this is America, then we're in deep shit."

Congressional oversight makes a valiant effort at a comeback. Sen. Carl Levin, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC] and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [SSCI] releases a report on the role of the office of the Pentagon's number three official Douglas Feith in alleged extracurricular intelligence analysis and advocacy. Here's the IHT/NYT's Douglas Jehl's take. And here are some highlights from Levin's report:

...B. INFLUENCING THE IC’S REPORT ON “IRAQI SUPPORT FOR TERRORISM”

In addition to developing their own alternative intelligence analysis, Under Secretary Feith’s office was also attempting to convince the [intelligence community] IC to incorporate into a major finished report some of the raw intelligence reports the Feith office believed had been undervalued or ignored by the IC, and to change how the intelligence was characterized . . .

Feith’s staff also pressed dubious information, including criticizing the draft IC report for omitting reference to the “key issue of Atta.” . . .

Documents provided to the SASC indicate that Feith’s staff requested, both verbally and in written form, at least 32 changes to the draft, including inserting raw intelligence reports that had previously been omitted, deleting others, and altering the characterization of certain issues and raw reporting . . .

C. PRESENTING AN “ALTERNATIVE” VIEW DIRECTLY TO POLICYMAKERS
Feith’s staff went beyond interacting with the IC in an attempt to change an IC-issued product. They were also taking their view of the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship directly to senior officials in the Executive branch . . .

Under Secretary Feith’s second charge . . . was that the IC undervalued the importance that both Iraq and al Qaeda would place on concealing a relationship, and therefore that the absence of evidence of such a relationship did not necessarily mean that such a relationship did not exist. Taken to its logical extreme, this argument implies that absence of evidence may in fact be evidence itself – that the fact that no evidence can be found is an indication that evidence exists but is being hidden. But, in fact, the IC’s reluctance to assert an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship was based on the information it possessed, not on hypotheticals, and the IC acknowledged lack of evidence as a factor limiting the strength of their conclusions. . . The reasonableness of the IC’s approach has subsequently been endorsed by the SSCI [and] the 9/11 Commission . . .

Score one or two for the battered and beleaguered but still fighting Reality-Based Community.

Update: Also most noteworthy: how unwilling Feith's office has been to comply with the Senate Armed Services committee's request for documents. Here's what Levin's committee has requested but so far not received from Mr. Feith:

• Two binders of documents being reviewed for a determination of executive privilege

• An unspecified number of documents containing CIA originator-controlled (ORCON) material, already reviewed by the CIA for release, and now being reviewed for a determination of executive privilege

• Documents relating to Feith office staff reviews of or contributions to other agencies’ documents

• Communications from Feith office staff to other agencies and offices related to the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda

• Documents related to information from defectors, including those provided or assisted by the Iraqi National Congress

• Documents or records relating to detainee debriefings cited by Feith as important in helping his office develop its perspective on Iraq-al Qaeda links

More later. But one thing worth pursuing in Levin's report are the "source inflations" Feith is involved in pushing - suggesting third hand foreign sources the US intelligence community has never interviewed are "from a very well-placed source" and the like. Why would Feith do that? And what does that say about his motivations and that of his analysts?

Correction: Levin serves on both the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Select Intelligence committee. He wrote this letter from his position as a a member of the SASC. My error, corrected above. But it raises a point: under whose Congressional oversight jurisdiction should the intelligence related activities of Feith's Pentagon office fall? It seems to exist in an oversight loophole (particularly, as Matt notes, with the Republicans not stepping up the plate on this, to their great shame).

Declare victory, name national security team -- then count the votes.

Senator John F. Kerry, bracing for a potential fight over election results, will not hesitate to declare victory Nov. 2 and defend it, advisers say. He also will be prepared to name a national security team before knowing whether he has secured the presidency.

In short, the Democratic presidential candidate has a simple strategy for Nov. 3 and beyond: Do not repeat Al Gore's mistakes. The Democratic vice president prematurely conceded the 2000 race to George W. Bush in a telephone call, then had to retract his concession after aides said Florida was not lost. He never declared victory, an omission Kerry's advisers -- many of whom worked for Gore -- now think created a sense of inevitability in voters' minds about Bush's presidency. . .

The prospects for another contested election loom with every poll indicating the race is neck and neck. . . .

While the lawyers litigate, political operatives will try to shape public perception. Their goal would be to convince voters that Kerry has the best claim to the presidency and that Republicans are trying to steal it.

Learning from Rove, it seems.

[Thx to JB.]

Wow, Red Sox!!! What a glorious comeback. I think it bodes very well for other Massachusetts underdogs fighting against The Machine.

Met with someone pretty senior in the Kerry/Edwards campaign today. He said Kerry/Edwards are up 6 points in swing states, and Pennsylvania and Ohio are looking very good. Cautious optimism?

Update: Tim Dunlop has also heard similar encouraging news from the swing states.....
This is especially noteworthy:

He [Dunlop's friend] mentioned that not only has Bush not been in Ohio for about a month but that his (Bush's) figures go down when he visits.

More: A pollster analyst friend of a friend writes:

Hey all, it’s a dead even race (45-45 based on RVs [registered voters], 47-47 based on LVs [likely voters]). Get on the bus to Pennsylvania and WVA if you care about the outcome...

Posted by Laura at 05:22 PM

October Surprise predictions: Atrios and Digby have been mulling over what Rove has up his sleeve.

Here's my bet: the Marines, assisted by the Iraqi Security Forces, will nab Zarqawi, who has been built up as the new Osama, from a basement in Fallujah somewhere. His cell phone found on him will have UBL's number in it, and his computer email will show frequent correspondence with Zawahiri. In the week between his capture and election day, US forces will note a massive decrease in the Iraqi insurgency. Chalabi will attempt to take some sort of credit for the key role in the capture.

What do you think?

There's something not quite right about Bush's direct line to You-Know-Who. This from CNN:

The founder of the U.S. Christian Coalition said Tuesday he told President George W. Bush before the invasion of Iraq that he should prepare Americans for the likelihood of casualties, but the president told him, "We're not going to have any casualties."

Pat Robertson, an ardent Bush supporter, said he had that conversation with the president in Nashville, Tennessee, before the March 2003 invasion U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He described Bush in the meeting as "the most self-assured man I've ever met in my life." . . .

"And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.' "

Robertson said the president then told him, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."

The White House has made no reaction to Robertson's comments.

You must read the whole thing.

I think it's time for some sort of gentle intervention. How could anyone be so deluded that he would have thought with an invasion force of a couple hundred thousand people there would be no casualties? What in the world is the diagnosis here? Is he mentally unbalanced? Does he really think he is the Lord's Chosen? What is his reaction that the Lord apparently lied to him about how it would be in Iraq? What kind of Congressional oversight can we hope for here?

Count me very disturbed.

[thx to JR.]

Update: Amy Sullivan has more here.

Some might see this as less than honorable. Our Republican-led Congress, taking care of themselves first. I take it Cheney will decline his flu vaccine this year? And William Safire?

Remember that line, "some pigs are more equal than other pigs?" Ain't it the truth.

Pot, Meet the Tea Kettle. This from William Safire:

Fearmongers in the Kerry campaign are turning any breaking news story they can into a personal threat.

Here's Dick Cheney in Ohio today:

The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us - biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind - to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. You have to get your mind around that concept.

The Mullahs endorse Bush:

The head of Iran's security council said Tuesday that the re-election of President Bush was in Tehran's best interests . . .

Though Iran generally does not publicly wade into U.S. presidential politics, it has a history of preferring Republicans over Democrats, who tend to press human rights issues.

Wouldn't want any Democrats pushing human rights abroad, would we? Autocrats like the Tehran mullacracy and Putin know and appreciate just what they get with Bush - a big pass on human rights issues. And Vevak may have thought it was running Bush foreign policy quite nicely to date, why not make it official? [Just kidding, people, really, Chalabi notwithstanding.]

Meantime, who is running the CIA? This is infuriating. What ever happened to quaint concepts like Congressional oversight?

Joseph Epstein has an incredible appreciation of Isaac Bashevis Singer in the Weekly Standard. It's well worth reading the whole thing - and the works it review - but here's the part where Epstein really reaches some sort of epiphany about what is so profound and uniquely compelling about Singer's work:

IN "PIGEONS" Singer wrote the most beautiful story I know about the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, it does not take on the subject directly but symbolically. The story has to do with one Professor Eibeschutz, a scholar who has taken to feeding the pigeons on the street below his apartment. He tells his Polish maid Tekla that doing so is more important to him than going to synagogue. "God is not hungry for praise," he reasons, "but the pigeons wait each day from sunrise to be fed. There is no better way to serve the Creator than to be kind to his creatures." One recalls here that, when asked why he had turned vegetarian, Singer said that he did it not for his own but for the chicken's sake.

Like many another Singer character, the professor tends to shift into sub species aeternitatis, to ponder the meaning of the universe in the light of eternity. He recalls a passage in the Talmud in which Jews are likened to pigeons. "The pigeon, like the Jew, thrives on peace, quietude, and good will." He also does not mind indulging in teleology, or the consideration of designs and ends in the universe. "It was not easy to have faith in God's benevolence," he thinks, "but God's wisdom shone in each blade of grass, each fly, each blossom and mite."

One day, while out feeding his pigeons, the elderly professor is set upon by a gang of anti-Semitic Polish thugs, and struck in the head by a rock. The injury results in his taking to his bed, where he withers and soon dies. The pigeons, in flight, follow the professor's hearse to the cemetery: "their wings, alternating between sun and shadow, became red as blood and then dark as lead." The story ends on this splendid paragraph:

The following morning broke autumn-like and drab. The skies hung low and rusty. The smoke of the chimneys dropped back, gathering on the tile roofs. A thin rain fell, prickly as needles. During the night someone had painted a swastika on the professor's door. Tekla came out with a bag of feed, but only a few pigeons flew down. They pecked at the food hesitantly, glancing around as if afraid to be caught defying some avian ban. The smell of char and rot came up from the gutter, the acrid smell of imminent destruction.

Which brings me round to the question with which I began: Why I believe that Isaac Bashevis Singer is the only writer of the past fifty years likely to be read with the same interest a hundred years from now. The answer, I believe, is not that Singer is a marvelous storyteller, which he was; nor because his oeuvre presents the most complete record of Ostjuden life before it was obliterated by the Nazis, which it does. No, I think that Singer's fiction will continue to live because he placed his powerful talent in the service of a great theme: the continuing drama of salvation, or finding acceptance in the eyes of God based on the way that one has lived.

This drama of individual salvation was once played in the mind of nearly everyone, from kings to peasants. The Enlightenment and all that followed from it has gone a long way to muffle it. But not for everybody, not for lots of intelligent people who cannot find their answers to life's deepest puzzles in philosophy or science--and distinctly not for Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Somehow, I wound up on the wrong mailing list. Anything interesting here?
Update: Reader S informs the irony-deprived here at W&P that this site's allegiance to Bush is in question.

Matt Yglesias has a good, spooky column at the American Prospect today on Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's Own Private Iraq, free of any unpleasant facts on the ground, or facts in general. As Ron Suskind made clear in his NYT stunner, easy certainty such as that demonstrated by Bush is not a sign of genuine faith, but rather evidence of a total perversion of religious values, which, in one more thoughtful, breeds reflectiveness, moral deliberation, and the capacity for humbleness and doubt (qualities more reflected in fact in Bush's opponent). Bush practices religion the way he exercises on the treadmill and the way he used to drink - automatically, thoughtlessly, as a way to escape something deeper and absolve himself of responsibility for his own conduct and its consequences. He cheapens it. And as James Wolcott reminds us, the people around Bush trying to telegraph Bush's professions of faith for political gain are hardly saints, and display an unusually deep -- and hardly Christian -- contempt for humanity. As Wolcott reminds us, "Karl Rove's shouting into the telephone about a political operative with whom he was not pleased, 'We will f*** him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f***** him.'" He wasn't talking about Saddam Hussein either. Some Christian, huh?

Update: The American Prospect's Ayelish McGarvey has more on Bush's faith as evangelical agit-prop. The Washington Monthly's Amy Sullivan also questioned why Bush who makes such a show of his religious faith doesn't go to church in this piece in The New Republic earlier this month.

Why does Putin want Bush to win? Why is the autocrat rolling back democracy in Russia glad to have Bush in power? Why are so many of the most anti-democratic leaders in the world hoping for a Bush win? And what does it say about Bush's American supporters who talk a lot about democracy promotion that their international allies are the dictators?

It's costly to tell the truth if you work for Sinclair. It will be even costlier to work for Sinclair at all if the advertisers keep fleeing and the stock keeps plummeting [via Atrios]:

Yahoo! Message Boards: SBGI
6265 NC State Employees will sell sinclair . . .10/19/04 09:53 am
6264 SELL YOUR SHARES NOW!!! . . . 10/19/04 09:53 am
6263 General Mills to follow? . . .10/19/04 09:53 am

Bush vs. The New York Times (e.g. a leading member of the Reality-Based Community). From Salon's Eric Boehlert:

On Sunday the RNC sent out e-mails -- one complete with Suskind's photo and voter registration information -- that attacked him professionally and said the passages in question were "third-hand, made-up quotes" designed to "scare seniors."

I usually refrain from this sort of stuff, but this is my strong anecdotal impression: The total mismanagement of the flu vaccine supply this fall is going to hurt Bush with women voters worried about national security. This is just the sort of thing that people are looking to the president/federal government to get right, and the anxiety and frustration at the government's failure to get enough flu supply to meet even half the demand in the US this fall is especially upsetting for those worried about the health of their families. And every day the news just gets more upsetting as now the government tells the elderly not to bother to wait in line, and no one is sure who in each community is going to take charge of the limited flu supply available, and cities around the country are threatening health care workers with fines and jail time for vaccinating those not most at risk. What a screw up by the Bush administration. Heads should truly roll over this, especially you know whose heads, including Mr. Dick "Iraq did the anthrax attacks and they are all coming to kill us" Cheney and George W. "the solution to the nation's health care crisis is to stay healthy" Bush. These guys want to be in charge until it's time to take any accountability and show the remotest degree of imagination or competence in protecting people, when they look like Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumb. No thanks. Can we have the adults already?

Update: Via Wonkette's presidential pool report:

While in the restaurant, a member of your pool shouted out a question to the president: "Are you accountable for the flu vaccine shortage?"

No answer was given.

Go, Red Sox! What a game. . . 5 to 4 for Boston in the 14th inning at Fenway . . . this is a very good omen for Kerry.

Knight-Ridder's Warren Strobel, Jonathan Landay, John Walcott, et al have an important three-part review of the decisions that led to the US failure to win the peace in Iraq, based on documents and interviews with more than three dozen current and former US officials. Here's a snip from the first part, with the devastating title, "Post-war Planning Non-Existent":

The Bush administration's failure to plan to win the peace in Iraq was the product of many of the same problems that plagued the administration's case for war, including wishful thinking, bad information from Iraqi exiles who said Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators and contempt for dissenting opinions.

However, the administration's planning for postwar Iraq differed in one crucial respect from its erroneous pre-war claims about Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and links to al Qaida.

The U.S. intelligence community had been divided about the state of Saddam's weapons programs, but there was little disagreement among experts throughout the government that winning the peace in Iraq could be much harder than winning a war. . .

A half-dozen intelligence reports also warned that American troops could face significant postwar resistance. . .

"It was disseminated. And ignored," said a former senior intelligence official.

Why was it ignored? You know the answer. The should-be post-war planners in Feith's office refused to do any planning, except to lobby to install Ahmad Chalabi, now working with Shiite insurgent Moqtada al Sadr and suspected of passing US intelligence to Iran.

Here's the second part, by Jonathan Landay and John Walcott, on how US reconstruction efforts in Iraq have been overwhelmed by the violence.

Here's part three, which asks:

After nearly 19 months of combat, more than 1,000 American soldiers dead and $119 billion spent, the central question about Iraq isn't whether it will become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East but whether the United States can prevent it from becoming a black hole of instability.

The quotes from Chalabi and supporters in this graphic are worth being reminded of.

Also: BASIC's David Isenberg has an analysis of the private military companies getting contracts in Iraq.

Update: The New York Times plays catch up here:

In the debate over the war and its aftermath, the Bush administration has portrayed the insurgency that is still roiling Iraq today as an unfortunate, and unavoidable, accident of history, an enemy that emerged only after melting away during the rapid American advance toward Baghdad. The sole mistake President Bush has acknowledged in the war is in not foreseeing what he termed that "catastrophic success."

But many military officers and civilian officials who served in Iraq in the spring and summer of 2003 say the administration's miscalculations cost the United States valuable momentum - and enabled an insurgency that was in its early phases to intensify and spread.

Spencer Ackerman has a masterful take on what would be John Kerry's foreign policy. And contrary to some other analysts' take, Ackerman believes that a Kerry foreign policy would promote democracy and human rights in the Middle East, but from the ground up, instead of Bush-style willing it from the top down; chiefly, by reengaging to try to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and by fostering real dialogue with Muslim moderates and trying to further drive a wedge between Islamist militants and Muslim moderates:

One reason the [Bush administration's] Greater Middle East Initiative failed is that it avoided any mention of the real concerns of the Muslim world--in particular, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Political reform in the Arab world hardly depends on resolution of the conflict, but, as Egyptian liberal dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim told BusinessWeek last year, "There is cynicism about whether the U.S. is sincere [about spreading democracy]. A forceful move to deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict evenhandedly has to be the yardstick by which we measure sincerity." But Bush seems to have little regard for the actual concerns of Muslims. Instead, he expects the Islamic world to adopt his agenda uncomplainingly. . .

Kerry would take the exact opposite tack. Far from imposing democracy from the top down, Kerry told a Los Angeles audience in February, "We must support human rights groups, independent media, and labor unions dedicated to building a democratic culture from the grassroots up." In this, Kerry has increasingly echoed Senator Joseph Biden, a leading candidate to be Kerry's secretary of state. . ..

This aspect of Kerry's agenda is surprising. During his career, Kerry has earned a reputation for skepticism about the propriety and the capability of the United States to spread democracy. . . .As recently as May, Kerry gave a sprawling foreign policy interview to The Washington Post in which he emphasized that, in a Kerry administration, "security comes first," as the paper's headline put it. But, to interpret Kerry's focus on security as foreclosing aggressive ideological warfare misunderstands how Kerry conceives of defending the United States. As Biden argues, "Kerry has a much broader notion of national security" than either his caricature or his opponent--a notion that recognizes that only an ideological campaign against Al Qaeda can protect the United States in the long run.

In fact, in addition to communicating U.S. policy more persuasively, Kerry is likely to return the United States to a visible and active role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Kerry has endorsed the road map to a two-state solution, and, in a speech at Georgetown University in January 2003, he insisted on "leading the effort to make peace" through consistent U.S. mediation--an issue he linked with broader U.S. objectives: "American engagement and successful mediation are not only essential to peace in this war-torn area but also critical to the success of our own efforts in the war against terrorism." Indeed, a recent Zogby poll that found outsized majorities in the Muslim world disapproving of the United States also found respondents linking their disapproval to the "unfair foreign policy" that disadvantages the Palestinians.

But, even if the United States exponentially increased its credibility in the Muslim world, it still couldn't hope to discredit Al Qaeda from an Islamic perspective. That can only be accomplished by Muslim scholars and religious authorities. In an interview with Time last month, Kerry argued that winning the war of ideas means "bringing religious leaders together, including moderate mullahs, clerics, imams--pulling the world together in a dialogue about who these extremists really are and how they are hijacking the legitimacy of Islam itself." Indeed, Al Qaeda knows how isolated it truly is from the Islamic mainstream . . .As a result, an opening exists to enlist Islamic authorities against Al Qaeda out of mutual self-interest, which a Kerry administration is likely to exploit.

Here's some worthy weekend reading.

Karl Rove spent more than two hours testifying before the Plame grand jury Friday. As Josh Green's profile of Roveian tactics makes clear, Rove pretty much deserves to face criminal prosecution for something. Whether it be for leaking Plame's name, who knows, but nice to think about him squirming for once. [thx to reader SC]

Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has an oped worth reading in today's Los Angeles Times, on ways short of air strikes to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions. As Clawson points out, any sort of proposed strikes on Iran's nuclear sites would be extremely problematic, because unlike Iraq's Osirak facility which Israel struck in 1981, Iran's nuclear program is dispersed across 20 sites, buried deep underground, and is close to population centers. Also unlikely? An oil embargo, esp. given European and Japanese dependence on Iranian oil and record-high oil prices. What alternatives are there? Clawson writes:

That said, there are military options against Iran other than an Osirak-style raid or an invasion. In an ideal world, the United States could disrupt Iran's nuclear program through covert means, such as corrupting software programs. But it is not clear if U.S. intelligence is in a position to do this.

What America can do — both on its own and with allies — is to contain and deter Iran. Steps to this end could include increasing U.S. military presence around Iran; putting nuclear weapons on U.S. ships off Iran's coast; reinforcing the region's protection against missiles (including accelerating the planned improvement to the Arrow antimissile system in Israel); extending an explicit nuclear umbrella to those threatened by Iran; transferring more advanced weapons to states around Iran (from NATO ally Turkey to the new Iraqi forces to the more stable Arab Gulf states); and so on.

None of these measures is as dramatic as an air raid, but as a package they could show Tehran that Iranians will be less secure if it pursues nuclear weapons. Containment and deterrence can be used to press Iran to accept a diplomatic solution, and they also enhance the ability of the U.S. to apply military force later if need be.

Go read. I have been speaking with Clawson and others recently on these issues, and thought it is worth pointing out as well, that he's spent the past two months in the Gulf in an immersion program to improve his Farsi language skills. Front burner, indeed.

Update: Reader PVK sends this Financial Times opinion piece by Council on Foreign Relations fellows Ray Takeyh and Steven Cook, that offers an alternative proposal on the Iran issue: the US should help address Iran's security concerns, in exchange for demands it abandon its nuclear program

Given the Gulf's central role in Iran's nuclear calculations, the US should take effective measures to craft a regional framework that would not only alleviate Iran's anxieties but potentially usher in a more rational relationship between Washington and Tehran. Such a network could evolve gradually, beginning with confidence-building measures and arms control compacts and, eventually, lead to a full-scale security system that resembles institutions such as the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in
Europe.

Under the auspices of such a regional organisation, the local states could gradually extend their scope of co-operation and devise common markets and free trade zones. Such interlocking security and economic arrangements would give Iran, a historically revisionist state with nuclear aspirations, a stake in upholding a status quo compatible with its national interests. An Iran that enjoys favourable commercial ties with neighbours, a proper relationship with its historic Iraqi competitor and better relations with its perennial US foe may be persuaded that its nuclear plans no longer serve a viable need. . . Far more than the imperious doctrines of pre-emption and selective packaging of incentives, such a subtle policy could ensure that Iran voluntarily restrains its nuclear impulses.

Also writing in the FT, Gareth Evans and Karim Sadjadpour of the International Crisis Group argue that, rather than empower pro-democracy forces in Iran, the US-created chaos in Iraq has emboldened the Iranian regime:

In fact, the chaos there has not intimidated but emboldened the Iranian regime, which appears more stable, more repressive and less amenable to foreign pressure than it has been in over a decade. Meanwhile, Washington can resort only to indignant calls that Tehran cease meddling in its neighbor's affairs.

Over the past several months, conservative hardliners have begun to roll back the few political, economic and social advancements of Iran's reformist era. Whereas student-led pro-democracy protests had been pervasive, for more than a year a disillusioned public has been either silent or silenced. Among Iranians, diffuse hope that the United States could improve their lot has gradually given way to widespread skepticism.

Eli Lake has a nice scoop at the NY Sun. Lake got passed a heap of documents by founding CIA Counter Terrorism Center director Duane Clarridge [and Iran Contra alum], who got them from Ahmad Chalabi, for whom Clarridge has recently been doing some consulting. The documents purport to show that Jordan's King Abdullah, back in 1992 when he was still third in line to the Hashemite throne, attempted to sell arms to Saddam Hussein:

A handwritten letter to Saddam from his late son Uday, dated February 9, 1992, lists prices for old Soviet military equipment and says that then-Prince Abdullah recommended Uday contact an intermediary identified as "Jack al-Khayyat," who could arrange the sale . . . Prince Abdullah sought to import the equipment and then sell it to Iraq for cash payments. . .Saddam declined the sale, saying that his treasury was depleted, in a three-line note written at the end of the document.

So apparently, there was no deal. The Jordan embassy, for its part, says it believes the documents are fake. Clarridge says that Chalabi wouldn't dare pass him fake documents. [hmm...]

But CIA sources tell Lake that in fact the CIA had a plan for any military technology Jordan tried to sell Saddam: to rig it with bugs and back doors to monitor their location and other activities:

According to a former CIA officer who worked on the Iraq issue, the agency attempted to turn the Iraq-Jordan trade to its advantage by modifying equipment that made its way into Iraq. This source said that in some cases this meant making military equipment unusable, but often this meant placing a "satellite badge," or "tagging" missiles or smaller arms that could be used in a war, so American satellites would know their precise locations. The agency also installed bugs, according the sources, on cell phones and other communications equipment going into Iraq. Indeed, Secretary of State Powell in his February 2003 presentation to the U.N. referenced intercepted military communications that he claimed showed an Iraqi effort to conceal weapons of mass destruction from the inspectors.

And how are all these revelations being dealt with? In fine American style: Chalabi is suing Jordan for defamation in American court.

Definitely worth reading the whole piece. Lake does a good job of making explicit what Chalabi's and Clarridge's motives in putting such documents forward are, although it would be worth knowing exactly what kind of work Clarridge has been doing for Chalabi recently. A Straussian might even read this story a second way: as a portrait that reveals some very interesting details about how Chalabi and his allies operate. After all, these documents, even taken at face value (and it's not clear they should be, by any means), show a transaction-that-wasn't. Come to think of it, where have we heard a story line like that recently?

[Thx to reader SD for the correction.]

Bush is destroying the environment, Knight-Ridder's Seth Borenstein reports:

On Bush's watch, America's environment deteriorated in many critical areas - including the quality of air in cities and the quality of water that people drink - and gained in very few.

Knight Ridder compiled 14 pollution-oriented indicators from government and university statistics. Nine of the 14 indicators showed a worsening trend, two showed improvements and three others zigzagged.

Statistics that have worsened:

-Superfund cleanups of toxic waste fell by 52 percent.

-Fish-consumption warnings for rivers doubled.

-Fish-consumption advisories for lakes increased 39 percent.

-The number of beach closings rose 26 percent.

-Civil citations issued to polluters fell 57 percent.

-Criminal pollution prosecutions dropped 17 percent.

-Asthma attacks increased by 6 percent.

-There were small increases in global temperatures and unhealthy air days.

We knew this, but seeing the statistics that prove what we knew is unbearably depressing. Why does Bush hate America's children?

Did Someone Say, Flip Flop?

The North Korea-ization of Bush's Iran policy? It sure sounds like Bush is moving in the other direction on Iran than some of his supporters are championing. Indeed, it sounds like Bush's policy is borrowing from some of Kerry's ideas about providing Iran nuclear fuel. The New York Times reports:

The Bush administration is holding talks with its European allies on a possible package of economic incentives for Iran, including access to imported nuclear fuel, in return for suspension of uranium enrichment activities that are suspected to be part of a nuclear arms program, European and American diplomats said Monday.

The diplomats said that while the administration had not endorsed any incentives for Iran, it was not discouraging Britain, France and Germany from assembling a package that the administration would consider after the American presidential election on Nov. 2, for likely presentation to Tehran later in the month.

Any support of a package of incentives, even if it is to be offered only by the Europeans, would indicate a significant shift in the Bush administration policy of demanding penalties, but not offering inducements, to get Iran to halt activities that are suspected to be for a nuclear arms program.

European diplomats said that the administration was very squeamish about even discussing incentives, in part because it would represent a policy reversal that would provoke a vigorous internal debate, and in part because of the presidential campaign.

Is Robert Blackwill running the National Security Council yet, or what? Is Cheney's entire office on the campaign trail? Is Bolton on vacation? Locked in his office by Armitage? Or are Cheney's Halliburton contacts in Iran successfully imploring him to try to sweeten the deal?

Update: I guess Andrew Sullivan has already made this point.

More: Grumbling from the New York Sun on Bush going soft on Iran. "President Bush himself has been too willing to countenance a European approach. On the campaign trail, Mr. Bush has said of the terrorists, 'You can't negotiate with them.' This would be an excellent moment for the president and his diplomats to keep that in mind." More here.

Monday Update: A friend says the NYT story above was sourced by a "rogue operation from Vienna" -- this is not White House policy. The US is inviting the European troika here to feel them out about Washington's push to have the IAEA refer Iran in noncompliance with the NPT to the UN Security Council. Got that? Bush is not, repeat not, we are to understand, an appeaser on Iran like his opponent. He couldn't be, right? More shots across the bow on just this issue coming tomorrow. Story at eleven.

Seymour Hersh report of a massacre in Iraq. (From Tiny Revolution, via Atrios):

HERSH: I got a call last week from a soldier -- it's different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He's an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It's a place where we claim we've done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.

It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary... It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn't explicit -- we're talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody...

They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he's hysterical. He's totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, "No, you don't understand. That's a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents."

You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts...

You know what I told him? I said, fella, I said: you've complained to the captain. He knows you think they committed murder. Your troops know their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Just shut up. Get through your tour and just shut up. You're going to get a bullet in the back. You don't need that. And that's where we are with this war.

October Surprise? Via Matt Yglesias, at Tapped:

Satellite imagery shows that entire buildings in Iraq have been dismantled. They once housed high-precision equipment that could help a government or terror group make nuclear bombs, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report to the U.N. Security Council.

Equipment and materials helpful in making bombs also have been removed from open storage areas in Iraq and disappeared without a trace, according to the satellite pictures, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said.

While some military goods that disappeared from Iraq after the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, including missile engines, later turned up in scrap yards in the Middle East and Europe, none of the equipment or material known to the IAEA as potentially useful in making nuclear bombs has turned up yet, ElBaradei said.

As Matt summarizes, "Before the war Iraq's nuclear program was years away from bearing a usable weapon and, thanks to the sanctions regime, getting further away. . .Nevertheless, the United States invaded, thus precipitating the evacuation of IAEA inspectors who'd been safeguarding the most advanced elements of the Iraqi nuclear program. . .As a result, instead of being under lock-and-key, bits and pieces of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program are now off God knows where."

Feeling safer yet?

How did the Bush administration so mismanage getting the nation enough flu vaccine for this season? These are the guys who are supposed to protect us from terrorism? from bioterrorism? They can't even protect us from a totally predictable illness that kills 30,000 Americans every year. What a total fraud these guys are, incompetent, terror-hyping frauds. The war on terror exists for BC'04 only as so much advertising.

Update: Flu vaccine is not the sort of thing the free market sorts out, that citizens can go take care of on their own. This is one of those rare things like airport security that we are utterly dependent on the government getting right. And they failed us. And thousands of people will truly die because of it. Now how screwed up is that?

Great moments from the first debate:

KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, "The enemy attacked us."

Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist. They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords...

BUSH: First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that!

Did somebody say, the liberal press? Check out the liberal literati!

And while you're at Slate, check out Judith Shulevitz's take on Philip Roth's much-discussed The Plot Against America. Tomorrow we can expect a response from Nick Lemann on same. I myself haven't got to "Plot" yet, but am currently reading some older Roth, including I Married a Communist and Operation Shylock, so we're getting there. For me, of the Jewish-American novelists, no one compares to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow. Singer's The Family Moskat is the epic novel of Polish Jewry at the turn of the century to the beginning of World War II that recreates an ancestry that, before it perished or emigrated, was struggling with all the forces of modernism that Tolstoy treated in Anna Karenina: secularism vs. tradition, the lure of political ideology and cynicism at politics, beauty, faith and betrayal, urban charms and the folly of society, individual morality and immorality, and loss and violence on such a scale it drains whole cityscapes of their meaning. "The Family Moskat" preserves two generations of Warsaw Jews in all their vitality and bitterness and human struggle that did not just die off but were annihilated or left to hobble forward aware always of that staggering loss. His short stories too are a marvel. As yet, I haven't found such depth or resonance in Roth, he's the Dostoevsky to Singer's Tolstoy, focused more on the political, the topical, not the universal, or perhaps it's just a more Americanized story he's telling.

Update: Lemann's take on the Roth 'emotional condition':

...Writers are human, so even a genius like Roth cannot have an unlimited repertoire to work with. His palette of settings is, increasingly, Jewish Northern New Jersey in the '30s, '40s, and '50s and not much else. He doesn't do protagonists who are, as they say at the Census Bureau, "heads of household," and he doesn't do successful, or even workable, intimate relationships. He doesn't do happiness, contentment, or fulfillment; one might even perversely argue that he presents deep discomfort in the world as the Jewish condition merely as a proxy, because that is really either the human condition, or the Roth condition, or both.

Somewhere along the line—Patrimony, maybe?—Roth began presenting his culture of origin in a positive rather than negative light. But since he doesn't do contentment, this shift in attitude has presented him with the problem of how to continue achieving the characteristic Roth emotional condition, which hasn't changed. The solution, in book after book recently, but never more dramatically than in The Plot Against America, has been to externalize. The source of that towering Rothian discomfort (which is no less deep—possibly deeper, in fact) is the nature of the outside world, not the nature of the Jewish world. Using a preadolescent boy as his protagonist, in addition to being historically and autobiographically convenient, allows him to achieve a note of deep fear and horror at what lies beyond the familiar world of family and neighborhood, and to convey an uncomplicated love of home. Who didn't have those feelings, at that age? On the very first day of Slate's existence, I published an essay here quoting the scene in Portnoy's Complaint where young Alex leaves his neighborhood to gaze longingly at shikses ice-skating. Roth was sort of kidding, but by now the goyim who live beyond the borders of the neighborhood are, with a few exceptions, both horrifying and terrifying, not alluring. The enemy is without, not within—and therefore is Christian, not Jewish.

I wound up thinking of The Plot Against America as a book less about the Holocaust, despite the historical timing, than about pogroms. Indeed, Roth uses the word "pogroms" repeatedly. His neighborhood in Newark is a premodern-feeling place, a shtetl...

And Shulevitz's response:

...Roth is brilliant, though, at showing us how hard it is to see clearly into the immediate future, even when one's life depends on it—and that, too, seems to me to be part of the nowness of the novel. He has taken the counterfactual form and turned it into an ode to the terrors of the provisional and the unforeseen at a moment when fear of what might be about to happen is at an all-time high...

But there is also something flat about the book, something that has to do with its somberness of tone. In the best Roth novels, every sentence works its way up to a little shock and every scene works its way up to an electrification. In this novel, he cultivates an incantatory style that's meant, I think, to honor and celebrate the people he's writing about but winds up being ever so slightly soporific. Roth seems to be restraining himself, perhaps because the topic of fascism is violent enough and writing with ferocity might result in hysteria. But I wonder whether, when we are no longer able to read the book with the sense of urgency inspired by the present moment, it will still feel as necessary as it did when I read it this summer.

Sometimes Matt Drudge comes up with a headline that is a true classic:

POLL: BRITONS FEAR SPIDERS MORE THAN TERRORISTS

Maybe the UK will consider giving asylum to American refugees soon, depending on how things go [but it's looking better and better...].

FBI seizes Indymedia servers. I wonder what is up with this?

The FBI has shut down some 20 sites which were part of an alternative media network known as Indymedia. A US court order forced the firm hosting the material to hand over two servers in the UK used by the group. . . The reasons behind the seizure are unclear but the FBI has reportedly said the action was taken at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities.

But here's a clue:

"Indymedia had been asked last month by the FBI to remove a story about Swiss undercover police from one of the websites hosted at Rackspace," said the group in a statement.

And this is cached on an Indymedia site:

. . . We are unaware as to the reasons for this at this time. We suspect it has to do with an FBI request that we take down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police. They claimed there was threats and personal information, but there was nothing of the sort. The undercover police that were photographed on the page were photographing protesters . . . So this is about Swiss police, on a French site, on a server in England, taken away by American federal police... can I be the first to say WTF?!

Christopher Reeve was a hero. His death is heartbreaking. But his courage, candor and his work to improve the lives of millions of others are truly inspiring.

Just Out: My piece on those advocating destabilizing the Iranian regime, in the Boston Globe Ideas section:

As Iran moves to the front burner, some in Washington are arguing that with a little help exiles and dissidents can topple the mullahs and establish a pro-Western democracy. Sound familiar?
...

Earlier this year, the White House considered a secret policy directive that included a proposal to destabilize the government in Tehran. Preoccupied with the insurgency in post-war Iraq, and facing opposition from the State Department, the Bush administration put further consideration of the plan on hold. But there are signs that it is returning to the fore.

. . .

Here's the first page.

Also in the same issue of Ideas, Jeet Heer and David Wagner have a fascinating profile of the intellectual history of Michael Ledeen, who of course is a strong advocate of the US backing regime change in Iran.

...It's an impressive resume for a man who spent the early part of his career scouring Italian archives to research several serious scholarly works on European fascism. But what's the link between Ledeen the historian and Ledeen the swashbuckling advocate of a hard-line foreign policy? ...

Here's the whole piece.

More housekeeping notes: I'm in St. Louis where the debates will take place tonight, but I will be watching them on TV like everybody else, although my hotel has both the Fox and CNN crews and others who seem to be involved. The arrival of Air Force One temporarily shut down the airspace last night at Lambert when we were supposed to land, and highway 270 was stopped for his convoy for miles below. Despite the inconvenience, the guy in the seat next to me said Bush is up 14 points here and Kerry pulled out his team from Missouri this past week. Rumor from the guy in seat 8E, confirmed by the guy in 7D, was that Bush is supposedly staying with his uncle Bucky here.

My September stats were more than double August's, which were double July's. Currently I have a daily average of 9,022 unique visitors, and my September monthly stats: 182,731 unique visitors, and 1,197,722 total hits.

Update: This is hilarious.

Does Kenneth Starr still bear a grudge against the NYT? The WaPo reports that Judith Miller could be going to jail:

A federal judge held a reporter in contempt Thursday for refusing to divulge confidential sources to prosecutors investigating the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity.

U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan ordered New York Times reporter Judith Miller jailed until she agrees to testify about her sources before a grand jury, but said she could remain free while pursuing an appeal. Miller could be jailed up to 18 months.

Hogan cited Supreme Court rulings that reporters do not have absolute First Amendment protection from testifying about confidential sources. He said there was ample evidence that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, had exhausted other avenues of obtaining key testimony before issuing subpoenas to Miller and other reporters.

"The special counsel has made a limited, deferential approach to the press in this matter," Hogan said.

Fitzgerald is investigating whether a crime was committed when someone leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, whose name was published by syndicated columnist Robert Novak on July 14, 2003. Novak cited two "senior administration officials" as his sources.

This seems to be getting out of control. And what the heck is the deal with Novak? I mean, Miller never even published Plame's name.

Housekeeping Notes: War & Piece is traveling and editing. Posting will be sporadic.

As we reported here a few days ago, via the New York Sun, Larry Franklin has fired his court-appointed attorney. Today, we learn from the LA Times, that Franklin has stopped cooperating with the FBI, and has rejected a plea agreement on lesser charges. And he's hired Plato Cacheris as his new attorney. The LA Times reports:

A Pentagon analyst being investigated for allegedly helping pass secrets to Israel has stopped cooperating with authorities and retained a new lawyer to fight possible espionage charges, sources familiar with the case said Tuesday.

. . .
Federal prosecutors had proposed an agreement under which Franklin would plead guilty to some of the charges. Such agreements usually are done in exchange for leniency and are accompanied by a pledge of cooperation.

But sources said Franklin had rejected a proposed deal because he believed the terms were too onerous. He recently replaced his court-appointed lawyer. "It looks like there is going to be a battle," a source familiar with the case said.

FBI officials have not yet sought charges against Franklin or anyone else in the case, although the breakdown of plea negotiations would appear to raise the odds that he could be charged soon.

The scope of the investigation is believed to encompass a top diplomat at the Israeli Embassy in Washington; two high-ranking analysts at AIPAC; and the Pentagon office in which Franklin works as an Iran analyst, which is headed by Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith. . .

A prominent Washington defense lawyer, Plato Cacheris, confirmed this week that he recently had been retained by Franklin.

"We consider him a loyal American who did not engage in any espionage activities," said Cacheris, the first person representing Franklin to speak on his behalf since the investigation surfaced a month ago. "Any charge of espionage will be met with fierce resistance."

Cacheris has represented a number of accused turncoats, including CIA operative Aldrich H. Ames, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 after confessing to years of spying for the Soviet Union. Cacheris also represented former FBI counterintelligence agent Robert P. Hanssen, also convicted of passing secrets to the Soviets, who received a life sentence in 2002.

Stay tuned.

Andrew Sullivan doesn't think it went very well for Cheney either:

IN BRIEF: Boy was I ever wrong. If last Thursday night's debate was an assisted suicide for president Bush, this debate - just concluded - was a car wreck. And Cheney was road-kill. There were times when it was so overwhelming a debate victory for Edwards that I had to look away. I have to do C-SPAN now, but stay tuned for more post-debate blogging in a little while.

Here's all the fact checking you need. Spencer Ackerman catches Cheney in a bald-faced lie:

A much more familiar dishonesty from Cheney came on the connection between Iraq and September 11--which, as the 9/11 Commission definitively reported, does not exist. "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11," Cheney insisted after Edwards jabbed at him. This is about as close to a flat lie as a skilled politician like Dick Cheney will ever come. To pick just one egregious example, here's what Cheney told Tim Russert in September 2003:

RUSSERT: The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: Sixty-nine percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks. Are you surprised by that?

CHENEY: No. I think it's not surprising that people make that connection.

RUSSERT: But is there a connection?

CHENEY: We don't know. You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn't have any evidence of that. Subsequent to that, we've learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s, that it involved training, for example, on [biological weapons] and [chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the Al Qaeda organization.

We know, for example, in connection with the original World Trade Center bombing in '93 that one of the bombers was Iraqi, returned to Iraq after the attack of '93. And we've learned subsequent to that, since we went into Baghdad and got into the intelligence files, that this individual probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven.

Now, is there a connection between the Iraqi government and the original World Trade Center bombing in '93? We know, as I say, that one of the perpetrators of that act did, in fact, receive support from the Iraqi government after the fact. With respect to 9/11, of course, we've had the story that's been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we've never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know.

Yes, we do, and yes, we knew then: There's no connection. (For good measure, let's point out that there's also no connection between the 1993 World Trade Center attacks and Saddam Hussein; no evidence of anything beyond fleeting conversations between Iraqi intelligence officials and Al Qaeda, mostly in the mid-1990s; no "bomb-making expertise" ever provided by Iraq to Al Qaeda; and no Mohamed Atta-Iraqi meeting in Prague, as the 9/11 Commission concluded.) This particular dishonesty of Cheney's was too egregious even for President Bush, who within days told reporters that there was "no evidence" linking Iraq to September 11.

There were numerous other falsehoods that Cheney deployed last night--such as insisting that "we've never let up on Osama bin Laden," when in fact Special Forces hunting him were redeployed to Iraq. If Edwards was attempting to highlight Cheney's penchant for twisting the truth, he picked a surefire strategy: Get the vice president to move his lips.

Is Cheney really only 63? He genuinely comes across as at least a good ten or fifteen years older.

I agree with Andrew Sullivan's observations on Cheney's apparent exhaustion:

THE COST OF EXHAUSTION: From the beginning of the debate, it seemed to me that the contrast was fundamental. Let's start with superficials - because they do matter in debates. The only way to describe Cheney's performance was exhausted. He looks drained. And you can see why. One of the least understood and reported aspects of the current administration is simply the enormous strain of the past four years. They have endured some of the most testing times any modern president and vice-president have had to encounter. And you can see the strain and exhaustion in both the two principals. I'm not criticizing; in fact, I'm empathizing. But the result is obvious: when confronted with the major issues they have been dealing with day in day out, issues they know intimately and have worked on endlessly, their response is simply what Cheney himself kept saying: "Where do I start?" They have become so enmeshed in running a war that they have become almost unable to articulate its goals and process - and at times seem resentful that they even have to. There was a tone of exasperation in much of Cheney's wooden and often technical responses to political and moral questions. I can't explain the incoherence except fatigue and an awareness deep inside that they have indeed screwed up in some critical respects, that it's obvious to them as well as everyone else, and that they have lost the energy required to brazen their way through it. What I saw last night was a vice-president crumpling under the weight of onerous responsibility. My human response was to hope he'll get some rest. My political response was to wonder why he simply couldn't or wouldn't answer the fundamental questions in front of him in ways that were easy to understand and redolent of conviction.

The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy . . .

A friend sends this, from Slate:

CLEVELAND—Does Dick Cheney know that he told voters watching the vice presidential debate to go to GeorgeSoros.com? In response to a series of attacks from John Edwards on Cheney's tenure as CEO of Halliburton, the vice president said that Kerry and Edwards "know the charges are false. They know that if you go, for example, to factcheck.com, an independent Web site sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details with respect to Halliburton." One roblem with Cheney's rebuttal: He misspoke. He meant to say "factcheck.org.," rather than ".com." George Soros capitalized on Cheney's error, snatched up the URL, and now if you type "factcheck.com" into your browser, you get redirected to a page titled, "Why we must not re-elect President Bush: a personal message from George Soros."

--Indeed, hilarious. Thanks to JB and PA.

Update: Tapped's Jeffrey Dubner has more on the conspiracy.

Headline that proves Edwards' point:

Report Discounts Iraq Arms Threat:
Inspector Says Hussein Lacked Means

Who you gonna believe, Cheney, or: Paul Bremer, Charles Duelfer, David Kay, Jay Garner, Paul O'Neill, Paul Pillar, Richard Clarke, and Thomas Kean?

Helena Cobban: Worth reading here and here. She's recently arrived for a stint in Beirut, and has many interesting observations of the place she has returned after living there for seven years in the 1970s.

Early Debate Blogging: [I'm listening on NPR, while editing a piece...]

Wow, Cheney sounds so shaky and -- old. Shakier than I have ever heard him. Brushed over the al Qaeda-Saddam question faster than I have ever heard him. Rumsfeld has pulled the rug out from under him on that.

Edwards sounds so solid and clear.

Cheney: "I never said there was a connection between Saddam and 9/11." [Oh really?] Clearly an established Iraqi track record on terror. "That's the most likely place for terrorists and WMD to come together." Most likely?? A little late now to speak with some degree of speculation, isn't it?

Here's a flashback: Cheney on the Meet the Press in March 2003, on the eve of the war: "We will be greeted as liberators in Baghdad." It's astonishing how Cheney gets it 100% wrong on almost every single pronouncement and prediction. Read this:

MR. RUSSERT: Many Americans and many people around the world are asking one question: Why is it acceptable for the United States to lead a military attack against a nation that has not attacked the United States? What’s your answer?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: . . But we also have to address the question of where might these terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons? And Saddam Hussein becomes a prime suspect in that regard because of his past track record and because we know he has, in fact, developed these kinds of capabilities, chemical and biological weapons. We know he’s used chemical weapons. We know he’s reconstituted these programs since the Gulf War. We know he’s out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization. . .

MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who’s a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he’s written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

. . .

Now, I can’t say with certainty that there will be no battle for Baghdad. We have to be prepared for that possibility. But, again, I don’t want to convey to the American people the idea that this is a cost-free operation. Nobody can say that. I do think there’s no doubt about the outcome. There’s no question about who is going to prevail if there is military action. And there’s no question but what it is going to be cheaper and less costly to do it now than it will be to wait a year or two years or three years until he’s developed even more deadly weapons, perhaps nuclear weapons. And the consequences then of having to deal with him would be far more costly than will be the circumstances today. Delay does not help.

MR. RUSSERT: The army’s top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree. We need, obviously, a large force and we’ve deployed a large force. To prevail, from a military standpoint, to achieve our objectives, we will need a significant presence there until such time as we can turn things over to the Iraqis themselves. But to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.

Cheney has gotten every fact wrong he offered in this interview. Why should Americans trust him any longer? He's clearly hopelessly, terribly out of touch, for the last century. Retire him.

10:03 p.m.: Funny moment: When Cheney thanked Edwards for his "kind words about my family." F*** you, John, is what it sounded like. "You're welcome," Edwards said, with a straight face.

10:20 p.m.: I think Cheney scored a point here saying he thinks that there are surprising similarities in his and Edward's personal stories. He sounded almost decent for a moment.

Some final thoughts? Edwards more than held his own. Cheney isn't as strong on domestic issues -- and Edwards was especially effective reminding us of all the bills Cheney voted against -- a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr., a resolution in support of Nelson Mandela, against Head Start, etc. And on foreign/national security issues, the evidence is overwhelming that Cheney's pronouncements on Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda are demonstrably false, and more and more (former) Bush officials (Bremer, Rumsfeld, David Kay, O'Neill, Clarke) have come out against Cheney's pronouncements, from troop strength to an al-Qaeda-Saddam link. Edwards was able to clearly and effectively tease out those misleading statements (the amount of the burden in Iraq the US is carrying vs. the 'coalition') and portray them as part of a pattern of a deliberate distortion of the facts. I think a slight lead for Edwards coming out of this debate.

"CIA review finds no evidence Saddam had ties to Islamic terrorists," reports
Knight-Ridder's Warren Strobel, Jonathan Landay and John Walcott today:

A new CIA assessment undercuts the White House's claim that Saddam Hussein maintained ties to al-Qaida, saying there's no conclusive evidence that the regime harbored Osama bin Laden associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The CIA review, which U.S. officials said Monday was requested some months ago by Vice President Dick Cheney, is the latest assessment that calls into question one of President Bush's key justifications for last year's U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The new assessment follows the independent Sept. 11 commission's finding that there was no "collaborative relationship" between the former Iraqi regime and bin Laden's terrorist network.

While intelligence officials cautioned that information about al-Zarqawi remains incomplete, Bush, Cheney and other top officials have publicly made al-Zarqawi the linchpin of their contention that Saddam's Iraq had ties to al-Qaida. Questions about whether the president and other officials overstated the intelligence about Iraq and omitted contradictory information and analysis are now at the center of the campaign debate over Iraq policy.

Since the Sept. 11 commission's judgment in June, Bush and Cheney have repeatedly said that al-Zarqawi was an associate of bin Laden and received safe haven from Saddam. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld backed away Monday from such claims, apparently as a result of the new CIA assessment.

. . .

According to a senior administration official and intelligence officials familiar with the review, at Cheney's request CIA analysts spent several months reviewing new material gathered since Baghdad fell last year and re-examining earlier intelligence.

A U.S. official familiar with the new CIA assessment said intelligence analysts were unable to determine conclusively the nature of the relationship between al-Zarqawi and Saddam.

. . .

The report didn't conclude that Saddam's regime had provided "aid, comfort and succor" to al-Zarqawi, a senior administration official said.

And it's worth pointing out, as Kevin Drum has many times, that the Bush administration had a chance to take out the Ansar al-Islam camp, where Zarqawi was thought to be operating before the war, in territory under the US-UK no-fly zone, and chose not to, because it would eliminate one of their main (false) justifications for the war.

We've all been endangered by the politically motivated security decisions this White House has made at every step of the way.

Bremer speaks, and says many Iraq problems were the result of too few US troops. From the WaPo's Robin Wright and Tom Ricks:

The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on.

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," he said yesterday in a speech at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. "We never had enough troops on the ground."

Bremer's comments were striking because they echoed contentions of many administration critics, including Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, who argue that the U.S. government failed to plan adequately to maintain security in Iraq after the invasion. . .

In a Sept. 17 speech at DePauw University, Bremer said he had frequently raised the problem within the administration and "should have been even more insistent" when his advice was spurned because the situation in Iraq might be different today. "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation, Bremer said.

The not-enough-troops observation is obvious. But what's interesting is that Bremer is publicly saying it. Why was Bremer's advice ignored?

Remember that WSJ reporter's private letter from Baghdad last week, telling how horrific the situation really is there? Well, it's not entirely clear if it's policy, or something else, but it appears the WSJ won't have Farnaz Fassihi reporting on Iraq until after the elections:

So was Fassihi told not to write about Iraq by WSJ editors until after Nov. 2? It seemed an easy matter to resolve, though — as it turns out — very little in this uneasy moment yields to easy resolution.

Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor, was unavailable by phone Thursday, but his spokesman, Robert Christie, accepted a question on his behalf and agreed to put it to the editor: Had Fassihi's e-mail been the subject of discussion among her editors and had they decided that its dissemination should prevent her from writing about Iraq until after Nov. 2?

Christie forwarded Steiger's response by e-mail: "Ms. Fassihi is coming out of Iraq shortly on a long planned vacation. That vacation was planned to, and will, extend past the election."

A follow-up question seemed in order and was sent to Steiger, through Christie, by e-mail: "If this correspondent wishes to write about Iraq for the Wall Street Journal, is she free to do so?"

Steiger's reply, via his spokesman, was this: "She is going on a long-scheduled vacation outside Iraq and has no plans to work during that time."

Fair-minded readers can make of that what they will.

What a way for the newspaper that employed Daniel Pearl to honor the brave. Honestly, if I had a subscription, I would cancel it.

Bye-bye, Poland. So much for the New Europe, huh? It's starting to sound a lot like the Old Europe! I guess the folks in Eastern Europe don't see Iraq as the liberation the Bushies are always talking about. Well, all is not lost. Bush will always have his good friend, Vladimir, that paragon of democracy.

Go read Sam Rosenfeld's post over at Tapped about the Republicans' "legislative dictatorship":

The Boston Globe's lengthy new special report on the Republican congress, the first installment of a three-part series, is the most important article out there right now for anyone who wants to understand how our legislative process is changing under unified GOP control. It's a thorough, sober, and totally eye-opening piece -- even for those close observers of the GOP's momentous and terrifying transformation of congress who've already read the definitive reports of Michael Crowley, Jonathan Chait and our own Robert Kuttner.

What Susan Milligan and her Globe researchers do in this report that is so helpful is actually collate data on procedures like closed rules, floor debate time, and conference committee riders and offer the appropriate comparisons to congressional practice in the past. Their findings should finally put to rest the claim that Democrats were just as ruthless when they were in charge and are now just whining out of sour grapes. What's going on now really is unprecedented.

Go read, and here's the Globe piece.

The New Republic's Martin Peretz is unenthusiastic about Kerry, and his penchant for multilateralism. [via Atrios.] But I think Peretz overestimates Kerry's regard for the UN. Keep in mind that Kerry's chief foreign policy advisor is Holbrooke, who, while a UN supporter, was the most vigorous advocate of bypassing the Security Council when necessary and going straight to NATO, and who does not shy away from the use of force. In particular, the use of force to stop the kinds of atrocities within states that Peretz rightly notes are the main kind of conflict the world needs to deal with these days, and for which the UN is uniquely ill suited. But, what does Peretz have to say about Bush, who was willing to alienate allies and insult the UN in invading Iraq, but has made such a mess of the post-war he's had to beg the UN to come help with the transition and the elections and whatever else they can find in their hearts to help with? And what has Bush, the force-lover, done to help people in Darfur but send strong statements?

If the Middle East had its own version of the Onion, this would be a perfect headline. As it is, it appears with a straight face in alJazeera today [not to be confused with the satellite channel]:

Iran warns Iraq of Israeli agents in Kurdish north

And while they're at it, they might take a look into those reports of Iranian agents in the Shi'ite south as well.

Tom Friedman's back:

Being away has not changed my belief one iota in the importance of producing a decent outcome in Iraq . . . But my time off has clarified for me, even more, that this Bush team can't get us there, and may have so messed things up that no one can. Why? Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology. More troops or radically lower taxes? Lower taxes. Fire an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army or not fire him so as not to anger the Christian right? Don't fire him. Apologize to the U.N. for not finding the W.M.D., and then make the case for why our allies should still join us in Iraq to establish a decent government there? Don't apologize - for anything - because Karl Rove says the "base" won't like it. Impose a "Patriot Tax" of 50 cents a gallon on gasoline to help pay for the war, shrink the deficit and reduce the amount of oil we consume so we send less money to Saudi Arabia? Never. Just tell Americans to go on guzzling. Fire the secretary of defense for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, to show the world how seriously we take this outrage - or do nothing? Do nothing. Firing Mr. Rumsfeld might upset conservatives. Listen to the C.I.A.? Only when it can confirm your ideology. When it disagrees - impugn it or ignore it.

Was at a dinner party last night, with some veteran Hill and Brookings people. And among the notable observations and gossip from folks there, the word on the Hill is that Tom DeLay is finished. A downfall that couldn't happen to a more deserving guy. He's always struck me as an evil character from a David Lynch movie. Apparently, DeLay is in real life basically every bit as despicable as he appears. Works closely with a lobbyist from Hell who championed a loophole allowing no regulation of sweat shops and virtual slavery for Chinese workers working in horrendous sweat shop conditions on the Marshall Islands*. An African lobbyist told me recently about DeLay's other tight associations with another right wing American lobbyist who co-owns a property with a South African apartheid era former defense official, where dogs were set on blacks for sport. May justice be done to these people. There is the redistricting issue, and that is odious in its own way. But then you get these reports from people who deal with DeLay on a daily basis that describe someone of such moral ugliness, who has the chummiest of ties with those who truly trample on the world's poor and most vulnerable. For me, that sort of ugliness overshadows what a demonic political operator DeLay has been.

Along those lines, Washington Post journalist Douglas Farah has an interesting recent post about blood diamonds merchant of death Victor Bout and his DoD contracts. Check it out.

* Correction: Reader Ben Miller notes that what I meant to say here was the Commonwealth for the Northern Marianas, not the Marshall Islands, and he is indeed right, and provides the link to prove it.

Is this for real? From Juan Cole:

I have it from insiders that in April, 2003, Jay Garner let it slip to some of his staff that his charge was to turn Iraq over to Ahmad Chalabi within six months. The staffers were shocked and some contacted the State Department to see if this was known there. It was not. So they blew the whistle on Bush with Colin Powell. I was told that Powell then made a coalition with Tony Blair and that the two of them went to Bush and got him to change his mind.

The plan to put Chalabi in charge of Iraq was frankly idiotic. Chalabi had no grass roots. . . It later came out that some[one] . . . had let it slip to him that the US had broken the Iranian diplomatic codes. Chalabi is chummy with Tehran and let his friends among the Ayatollahs know this tidbit. As a result, the US can no longer closely track the Iranian nuclear program.

Not to distract from the main point, but that's the kind of information that might be useful were one to be concerned about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists.

But, is it for real that Garner was under instructions to install Chalabi? Orders from Doug "Ahmad who?" Feith? Rumsfeld? Cheney? Hey Knight Ridder: get on it!

Banned Pentagon Propaganda Program Alive?

Remember Rumsfeld's idea for the Office of Strategic Influence? That was to be a Pentagon office that would issue propaganda designed to advance the administration's agenda abroad, and perhaps at home? It was supposedly shut down by lawmakers a couple years back, out of concerns it could in practice have the Pentagon lying to the American public. But are we really so sure it has gone away? I am serious here. Congress should investigate whether it has existed in some other form, paid for by other funds, perhaps out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Check this out, from the Washington Post yesterday:

The Bush administration, battling negative perceptions of the Iraq war, is sending Iraqi Americans to deliver what the Pentagon calls "good news" about Iraq to U.S. military bases, and has curtailed distribution of reports showing increasing violence in that country.

The unusual public-relations effort by the Pentagon and the U.S. Agency for International Development comes as details have emerged showing the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush's reelection campaign had been heavily involved in drafting the speech given to Congress last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Combined, they indicate that the federal government is working assiduously to improve Americans' opinions about the Iraq conflict -- a key element of Bush's reelection message. . .

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office has sent commanders of U.S. military facilities a five-page memorandum titled "Guidance to Commanders." The Pentagon, the memo says, is sponsoring a group of Iraqi Americans and former officials from the Coalition Provisional Authority to speak at military bases throughout the United States starting Friday to provide "a first-hand account" of events in Iraq. The Iraqi Americans and the CPA officials worked on establishing the interim Iraqi government. The Iraqi Americans "feel strongly that the benefits of the coalition efforts have not been fully reported," the memo says.

The memo says the presentations are "designed to be uplifting accounts with good news messages." Rumsfeld's office, which will pay for the tour, recommends that the installations seek local news coverage, noting that "these events and presentations are positive public relations opportunities."

I really think Rumsfeld is crossing a line here, skirting close to lying to the American people and to Congress.

Check it out - what is the fate of the Office of Strategic Influence? Did it persist, under another name? Any contractors working this? Public relations firms?

Update: Guess the Pentagon is indeed hiring PR contractors for propaganda efforts. Reader PB sends this article from PR Week, which is about a Pentagon PR campaign targeting Iraqis. But the effort described above is to influence Americans.....:

US military seeking PR help for efforts in the Middle East
Written by Douglas Quenqua
Published on September 27 2004

WASHINGTON: The US military issued two requests for PR help in the Middle East last month, one targeting Iraqis, the other the entire region.

The first, a request for information (RFI), seeks to gauge the interest and capacity among contractors to wage an integrated campaign promoting the US mission in Iraq. Respondents are asked if they have Arabic speakers on staff, how quickly they could relocate to Baghdad, and how much it would cost to run the proposed campaign.

The campaign's objective would be to "inform the Iraqi people of the coalition's goals and gain their support." Proposed methods include outreach to Iraqi media and Sunni, Kurdish, and Shia community leaders; training Iraqis to serve as coalition spokespeople; setting up a rapid-response operation; and developing print, radio, and TV advertisements.

The work would be carried out under the Multi-National Corps-Iraq, or MNC-I - a transitional US authority. Submissions were due September 2; no budget estimate is given.

Also posted last month was a Pentagon RFP requesting media support for its public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East. The recipient of the contract won't be waging a campaign, but will instead serve as an adviser on Arab media and religious happenings for one year. . .

Also: Meantime, who's paying former CPA shill, and Carlyle group employee, Dan Senor to write Allawi's speech to US Congress and coach him?

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, asked Tuesday about similarities between Bush's statements about Iraq and Allawi's speech to Congress last week, said he did not know of any help U.S. officials gave with the speech. . .

But administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the prime minister was coached and aided by the U.S. government, its allies and friends of the administration. Among them was Dan Senor, former spokesman for the CPA who has more recently represented the Bush campaign in media appearances. Senor, who has denied writing the speech, sent Allawi recommended phrases. He also helped Allawi rehearse in New York last week, officials said. Senor declined to comment. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and British Foreign Service officials also helped Allawi with the text and delivery of his remarks.

This is priceless: [Via Atrios]:

A humorous side note, the GOP held a "conference call" with Ken Mehlman in which campaign "Team Leaders" call in to be told what to think and get their talking points for the debate. Atrios, bless his heart, posted the number and the password to be accepted to the conference call. I got in without a problem and, after enduring ten minutes of painful smooth jazz, got to hear firsthand how the Bush campaign was going to spin this.

Mehlman said Kerry started with a credibility gap and ended with a credibility canyon, and babbled in and around this point for five minutes or so. Then they announced that they were going to take three questions. The first was from a "young Republican in Washington." She proceeded to say that Kerry was very credible and that she had decided to vote for him. The second caller said she thought Kerry would make a credible Commander in Chief and the third call took Bush to task for not mentioning the al Quida members not captured.

Mehlman apologized to the Bush supporters listening and acknowledge that the call had obviously attracted some Democrats. We had, essentially, hijacked their own spin distribution and thrown it in the GOP's face. A small, yet hilarious victory for the blogosphere.

Check out Saletan while you're at it:

How can we ask our troops to die for a mistake? We can't. . . Bush can't imagine it, either. So, he offers himself—and you—a way out . . . Therefore, these reports must be rejected. They must be judged not by evidence, but by their offensiveness to the assumptions we embraced when we went to war.

Update: Debate review from the National Review's weblog, the Corner:

KATE, YOUR WORDS GET AROUND [Peter Robinson]

Just appeared on the Fox affiliate out here in San Francisco, discussing the debate with Phil Angelides, the state treasurer and a co-chairman of Kerry's campaign in California. Angelides's opening remark? "Kerry won the debate, but don't take my word for it. Kate O'Beirne, who writes for the very conservative National Review magazine, said she thought Bush was repetitive and tongue-tied."

I was prepared to attack Angelides, of course, but attack the Blessed Kate? I found myself reduced to stammering an agreement that Bush had had better nights.

Let the record show that Kate O'Beirne owes Peter Robinson a beer.

Franklin has fired his court appointed attorney, the New York Sun's Eli Lake reports today [second item]:

Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin, a primary target in the FBI's investigation into alleged Israeli espionage at the Pentagon, has fired his court-appointed attorney, sources told The New York Sun.

Mr. Franklin was appointed an attorney earlier this year after the FBI
discovered a cache of classified documents in his home and threatened to jail
him. His decision to seek new counsel will likely delay deliberations for the grand
jury that was convened early last month as part of the FBI investigation. The
decision also could indicate that he is unwilling to further cooperate with the
FBI.

. . .

Last month, one Pentagon analyst testified before the grand jury. The FBI has
conducted interviews with numerous Pentagon analysts on the Middle East affairs
working under Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. The focus of the
questions has been largely on Mr. Franklin, according to a source who spoke on
the condition of anonymity.

The Two Simonas. I'm a few days late with this, but it's a rare bit of wonderful news out of Iraq that the two Italian aid workers Simona Torretta and Simona Pari, both 29, were freed by their captors in Iraq.

A friend in Italy writes about their return this week, with a couple details that haven't yet made it into the US coverage that I've seen:

The two Simonas in their first public appearance thanked everybody but the government and the government officials that worked quite hard to free them; yesterday they corrected the mistake. Then they expressed their sympathy for the Iraqi people and thanked also the abductors for the good treatement they had given to the four hostages (apparently Miss Simona Torretta is an Islamic convert at the Rome mosque, but her mother --and the rest of the public-- did not know, because the daughter did not want to displease her). It is more than enough to let our medias bark in every possible tone.

Mercy knows no bounds . . .

Update: The Telegraph has more.