The circus execution of Saddam Hussein has managed to resurrect a man who had become irrelevant to the daily lives of Iraqis. The timing of the event and the atmosphere of it suggest that it was intended by Iraqi prime minister Maliki as a straightforward propitiatory human sacrifice to the followers of Moqtada al-Sadr, whose [...]

Imagine if you will a portrait of George W. Bush wearing a bibulous nose, an Alfred E. Neuman expression and a helmet made of Jack Kemp’s epoxied hair. And then imagine it captioned with the memorable phrase, “The Colossus of Crawford.” If you can’t, which is perfectly normal, not to worry: the original is here, [...]

I was going to write something sarcastic about Fred Kagan, the man who converted Bush to the theology of The Surge, but why bother. It’s not his fault that the president takes him and his co-genius, retired General John Keane, seriously. It is what it is, which isn’t much. Let’s move on.
The man in charge [...]

My long-held assumption about the genesis of the Iraq invasion is that the liberation of Iraq’s oil was only a welcome perk of the larger plan, which was the creation of a US- and Israel-friendly country to serve as the primary host for an expanded US Middle East military presence and a convenient platform from [...]

The Washington Post had a front-page article yesterday on the major surge in Iraqi civilian deaths that occurred during the second half of 2006. The article pins the blame for the surge on sectarian strife stirred up by the bombing of Samarra’s Golden Mosque in February.

But I was puzzled by the graph that accompanies the article…

Earlier today I mentioned a passage from yesterday’s White House briefing in which Tony Snow remarked that the president “has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way” on funding The Surge, Bush’s “new” “plan” for Iraq. No one at the briefing asked exactly what that meant, [...]

“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission … sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. “
It’s hard to choose exactly the right television reference for the administration’s New Way Forward — a very Soviet-sounding designation — in Iraq. [...]

Media Bloggers Association president Robert Cox has secured press credentials to be shared among members of the organization during the upcoming perjury trial of Dick Cheney’s top assistant, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer is tentatively scheduled to participate in the coverage.
The witness list for the high-profile trial is expected to [...]

The National Review is lauding Democratic (sic) Senator Joe Lieberman for warning against “excessive partisanship and rancor” in response to president Bush’s escalation of the Iraq war. Kathryn Lopez posted Lieberman’s enthused endorsement of Bush’s new policy in its entirety, with a note of thanks to Connecticut voters for sending the Senator back to Washington. [...]

By way of explaining how we arrived at the current state of affairs in Iraq, Tony Snow recently trotted out Tommy Franks’ remark about the invasion of Iraq having proved a “catastrophic success.” Bush’s New Way Forward in Iraq seems calculated, deliberately or not, to arrive at the inverse — a successful catastrophe [...]

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, an early supporter of the Iraq invasion and occupation, is ready to roll— conditionally.
In his Friday column, Friedman told the president that “I’ll surge on the condition that you once and for all enlist the entire American people in this war effort, and stop putting it all on [...]

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice granted an interview to three somewhat incurious New York Times reporters on Friday. During the course of it she implied that Iraq would be unsalvageable if Baghdad wasn’t under control by sometime this summer and, in bits and pieces, identified concerns about Iran that echo, sometimes almost verbatim, those [...]

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino came up with the quote of the young year when she told CNN that the Bush administration, in contrast to Iran, “are not the ones being meddlesome and troublesome in Iraq.” No doubt she’s sincere, because her head would explode if she weren’t, but this seems a good time to [...]

The New York Times gave one of its coveted op-ed page columns over to reactionary blogger Glenn Reynolds today, while the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation(RTNDF) is about to bestow its First Amendment Leadership Award upon Fox News chief Roger Ailes.
Reynolds’ Times column, which may well have been ghostwritten by his long-time companion, Mary [...]

The last time former Nixon defense secretary Melvin Laird popped up in the pages of the Washington Post, it was to chide the retired generals who were unloading on Donald Rumsfeld. They didn’t have the big picture, he said, and anyway they had plenty of opportunities to speak up within the chain of command when [...]

Every high profile criminal trial seems to spawn a raft of books, and the Lewis “Scooter” Libby proceeding is certain to do the same. Although the legal question at issue is whether Dick Cheney’s former top aide lied to investigators and a grand jury about his role in outing former CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame, [...]

Washington Post columnist Colbert King noted last month one of the many ironies associated with Bush’s misbegotten war. A number of people have made lists of things on which the money wasted in Iraq could have been invested — in a later column, King revived Martin Luther King’s vivid description of Vietnam as “some demonic, [...]

This year’s State of the Union speech promised little and delivered less. Bush has no domestic policy clout with which to press the few wan policies he mentioned — and no more intention of pushing for “energy independence” now than the previous five times he’s mentioned it — and his credibility in the arenas where [...]

Much attention was paid yesterday to the introduction of Bush capo Karl Rove as the villain behind Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s legal predicament. A Google News search for the names of the two men returned some 1500 results (and counting). But don’t be fooled: Libby v. Rove is a sideshow aimed at diverting the jury’s attention [...]

We mentioned on January 16 that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes is slated to receive the First Amendment Leadership Award from the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF). On March 8, Ailes will join past recipients such as Katherine Graham, the Washington Post publisher who presided over the paper’s Watergate reporting; First Amendment attorney [...]

There’s a revealing tidbit in a “Sporting Scene” article in the current New Yorker that sheds some light on today’s front page Washington Post story about how the Bush administration wants American troops to start killing Iranians in Iraq…

Tim Russert became the first press casualty of the Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial on Thursday, but most of his colleagues neglected to report it**. The host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” was identified, in evidence submitted to bolster the testimony of Dick Cheney aide Cathie Martin, as the vice president’s platform of choice to push [...]

On January 10, Max Boot committed heresy. Best known as an aficionado of all things colonial — jodhpurs, pith helmets, Kipling, the French Foreign Legion, noble wars — Boot spoke words of praise for press coverage of the Iraq invasion and occupation, and warned against the brain-rotting temptation to blame the reporting of bad outcomes [...]

Robert Kagan and Jean Renoir are not soul mates. Renoir’s 1937 film, La Grande Illusion, remains one of the best anti-war films ever made. Kagan’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post, Grand Delusion, is one among a constant ooze of sludge-like shoot-em-up paeans to The Surge that will be remembered, if at all, only as an [...]

Former Time Magazine reporter John Dickerson had a big day at the Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial. On February 7 of last year Dickerson wrote a two-part story for Slate called “Where’s My Subpoena?” The story was his take on both why his name surfaced in connection with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into who blew [...]

Senators Chris Dodd and John Kerry met Army Captain Brian Freeman in Iraq about a month ago. Freeman was killed during that stunning January 20 raid in Karbala. Kerry and Dodd both say his death has increased their determination to oppose the administration’s new last plan. My question is, “Why?”
Why would it take the death [...]

Plame-At-A-Glance™ condenses the whole Plame Affair down to one easy-to-understand flow chart…

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller was on the stand at the Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial today. Miller spent 85 days in the slammer for refusing to testify to a grand jury about conversations with Libby on the subjects of former ambassador Joe Wilson, his CIA wife and the administration’s insistence that Iraq sought [...]