Paul Bremer now
says, “We never had enough troops on the ground” in Iraq. This
confirms Tom Friedman’s description of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, noted in his
column on Sunday, as “just enough troops to
lose.”
Meantime, if you didn’t read Sunday’s immense, detailed report by
David Barst and Jeff Gerth on how the White House conjured so-called “irrefutable evidence” of
Saddam Hussein’s purported nuclear weapons program out of intelligence based on wrong factual
data in order to justify the invasion of Iraq, while suppressing contrary intelligence and doubts by
nuclear experts, you can read an editorial summarizing the report today: “The Nuclear Bomb That
Wasn’t.”
The editorial not only dismisses the prevaricatin’ prez’s “frequent claim that Congress
had the same information he had” when it voted to authorize the invasion, it accuses top
administration officials of dishonesty and selling the world a bill of goods. It specifically names
Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, calling for her resignation
because of incompetence at the very least. As Paul Krugman also writes this morning for the umpteenth
time: “Yes, Virginia, we were misled into war.”
In a parallel universe, David “Bobo” Brooks goes on his merry way this morning about
“Quickening the Tempo in
Iraq,” with the dim notion that the U.S. may soon be able to set realistic
goals there. He adduces his evidence in large part from a conversaton he had yesterday with
Rumsfeld, who told him “Iraq had ‘a crack’ at being a success.” Grasping at straws, Bobo
concludes: “At least he’s not overhyping.”
