What is the sound of one shoe dropping?

The Anonymous Liberal has more on the gang that couldn't forge straight.

Modus Operandi

Remember last year when former CIA analyst Ray McGovern accused Vice President Dick Cheney of being behind the Niger forgeries?

Now Ron Suskind claims in his new book that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein that would state that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq.

From the linked Politico article: “It is not the sort of offense, such as assault or burglary, that carries specific penalties, for example, a fine or jail time,” Suskind writes. “It is much broader than that. It pertains to the White House’s knowingly misusing an arm of government, the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings.”

I seriously doubt that this will lead to impeachment proceedings, and that doesn't really bother me. Sure, I'd like to see it happen, but I'm sympathetic to the argument that at this point in the election cycle impeachment proceedings might be counterproductive to the aim of making sure Barack Obama wins the election in November. What does bother me somewhat is the possibility that Congress won't even make a serious effort to investigate the truth of Suskind's claims, and that even if they attempt to do so the White House will successfully stonewall the investigation, as they have countless times before. But what bothers me the most is the likelihood that the vast majority of the American public won't get even slightly angry about this, that we won't see the sort of public outrage about this that would make Congress seriously consider impeachment. Instead, the public will be distracted by the thought that in some way Barack Obama is somehow the political equivalent of Paris Hilton. I hope I'm wrong about this, but I fear I'm not.

Grrrrrrrr.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

President Bush says, "I strongly believe that democracy will trump totalitarianism every time."



That's a fine thing to believe, but how is that relevant to the current situation in Iraq? Yes, our democracy made mincemeat of Saddam Hussein's totalitarian regime, but that regime is long gone. What replaced it was neither democracy nor totalitarianism, but chaos. The current situation is, according to the best information I can gather, a free-for-all. Whoever has the most firepower in a given locale controls it, but only for as long as they remain. The U.S. could arguably keep the peace in any given Baghdad city block indefinitely by keeping a sufficient number of troops there, but our troops can't be everywhere at once, and by all accounts chaos returns the moment they move on to the next block.

I know that Bush would like to frame the issue in terms of fighting totalitarianism, or "Islamofascism," but that's not what we're fighting in Iraq. We're fighting anybody and everybody with a gun or an improvised explosive who feels like taking a shot at us. And Bush consistently fails to give us any indication that he understands this. He wants to fight totalitarianism, and while a totalitarian regime may eventually emerge from the chaos of Iraq, there is no totalitarian regime there today. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we must deal with the enemy we have, not the enemy we wish we had.

Rock may beat Scissors every time, but we're not fighting Scissors right now.