Two weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that more than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the “United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Husseinâs alleged weapons of mass destruction.” Everyone fully recognizes that there are no weapons to be found, but bureaucratic hurdles keep inspectors where they aren’t needed. “The inspectors acknowledge that their chief task — disarming Iraq — was largely fulfilled long ago. But, they say, their masters at the U.N. Security Council have been unable to agree to either shut down their effort or revise their mandate to make their work more relevant,” the Post explained.
Two weeks later, good news: the pointless hunt is nearing an end.
The search for Saddam Husseinâs weapons of mass destruction appears close to an official conclusion, several years after their absence became a foregone one.
The United States and Britain have circulated a new proposal to the members of the United Nations Security Council to âterminate immediately the mandatesâ of the weapons inspectors. Staff meetings on the latest proposal have already taken place, and officials say that the permanent Council members, each of whom has veto power, seem ready to let the inspection group â the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission â meet its end.
Two weeks ago, Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraqâs deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, said, âThis is really absurd. Weâre approaching five years now of this exercise in futility.”
Finally, the exercise appears ready to come to a merciful conclusion — several years too late.
Today’s Must Read: sifting through Sy Hersh’s latest in The New Yorker — on Don Rumsfeld, the CIA black sites still in operation, and the special ops the Pentagon doesn’t want anyone to know about.
Petraeus says that conditions on the ground in Iraq will not have improved enough by September to justify a troop drawdown. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.
Federal grand jury investigating Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) ties to corrupt Alaskan oil company.
Missed the Sunday talk shows? Not to worry. We do our best to puzzle out just what exactly to expect from the Iraq progress report coming in September in todayâs Sunday Show Roundup edition of TPMtv …
Edwards blasts General Petraeus for suggesting long-term presence in Iraq. Will other Dems follow?
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) looks into the White House’s use of outside email addresses and doesn’t like what he sees.
The destruction of Karl Rove’s and other White House officials’ emails, he says, is “the most serious breach of the Presidential Records Act in the 30-year history of the law.”
What happens when Congress tells a federal agency to do one thing and then President Bush, appending one of his many, many signing statements to a bill, says another?
A government report suggests that in some cases, agencies might be following the president.
Thinking back over the blather last week over Sen. Reid’s (D-NV) comments about Gen. Pace, it’s quite astonishing that the White House could with a straight face attack Reid for questioning Pace’s competence only day’s after they’d fired him. Think about that. The White House fires Pace as part of its many-month effort to sack everyone from the Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon. And Reid is in hot water for questioning the man’s abilities?
But setting aside abilities, politicians can criticize generals. That is after all the very nature of our political system. And it is a symptom of the deeply decayed and desperate state of the Iraq War debate that this is even a question. We are now far past the point of supporting the troops in their mission, ensuring that they are properly armed and protected, or anything else tied to respecting and honoring the overwhelmingly very young men and women who are paying with risk to their lives for the decisions we collectively make here at home.
Now apparently even criticism of the policy/strategy level command in Washington (this is after all what the JCS are) is beyond the pale, a sign of denigration of the military itself.
We can say whatever we want about double standards, that Sen. McCain (R-AZ) said even more to the face of the then-actual commander of American forces in Iraq (Gen. Casey) not long ago. But that’s just a partisan distraction.
The real issue here is shaking ourselves loose from the degradation of our own civic and republican collective character that the war has brought us. Some principles are clear and worth repeating: You can’t have a war for democracy fought by people whose principles are authoritarian and anti-democratic. It’s not a throwaway line or a barb. It’s the only pivot around which to understand the Bush years.
A few days ago, Andrew Sullivan linked to this rancid post by Glenn Reynolds previewing the coming claims that the war was sabotaged by the critics of the war who had more or less no power whatsoever during the entire prosecution of it.
But Reynolds’ post and all his prefab reader emails should put us on notice that the architects of this and its dead-ender supports plan to lie their way out of this war just as they lied their way into it — now whipping up a dust storm of rationalizations for their failures, imbecilities and lies much as the original entry into the conflict was floated on phoney claims about weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent ties between the past Iraqi regime and al Qaeda.
The only antidote to the advance of this sort of authoritarian mentality and strategy of organized lying that it is inevitably built on is the truth. Not that we can know the truth ourselves with any confidence or consistency. But we can take stock of the facts of the case as honestly as we can and speak them frankly. And that means breaking out of, ignoring, as many rhetorical bait and switch games as possible.
Obama unleashes sharp attack on his own campaign staff over Hillary “Punjab” oppo document controversy.
Late Update: Obama releases new statement taking full responsibility for the screwup.