Sorcerer's Apprentice Transition

Barack Obama's to-do list just keeps growing as aides tell us he is "closely monitoring" the Gaza crisis even as they keep repeating the one-president-at-a-time mantra.

In the weirdest transition in White House history, the question of being ready on Day One, which was the subject of so much debate earlier this year, has morphed into two months of pre-presidential involvement in bailouts and economic stimulus debates--and now a full-blown foreign policy flap.

According to senior adviser David Axelrod, Condoleeza Rice is keeping the President-Elect up to speed "to get a handle on the situation, so that, when he becomes president on January 20, he has the advantage of all the facts and information leading up to that point."

When the training wheels come off that day, Obama may be hurtling downhill steering his way around a Middle East roadblock as he tries to get to the economic mess.

It's all beginning to look like the sorcerer's apprentice in an overflowing presidential workshop.

The Iffy News From Iraq

Advance word of a new National Intelligence Estimate casts doubt on the idea of "victory" in Iraq, creating problems for both John McCain and Barack Obama on the issue of withdrawal.

"A nearly completed high-level U.S. intelligence analysis warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing the major security and political gains achieved over the last year," the McClatchy Newspapers report today.

Such a prediction undermines McCain's claims of "victory with honor" and complicates Obama's promises to begin immediate withdrawal if and when he takes office.

A consensus of all 16 US intelligence agencies, the new NIE cites as sources of continuing tension the struggle among Sunnis, Kurds and Turkmen for control of oil-rich Kirkuk and the Shiite-dominated central government's stalling over hiring former Sunni insurgents converted, for a price, into members of Awakening groups as well as fragility of the truce by Shiite militias led by Muqtada al Sadr.

Unlike McCain, Gen. David Petraeus is still refusing to proclaim victory, calling the situation "fragile" and "reversible," and the soon-to-be former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice this week publicly said that "nothing is certain in this life. And success in Iraq is not a sure thing."

Meanwhile, our troops continue to die there, albeit at a slower rate, and $10 billion from a strapped economy keeps being poured into the war that should never have started and shows no signs of ending.

Bob Woodward on Bush's Iraq Gamble

The President and Gen. David Petraeus exchanged betting metaphors in planning the Surge, according to Woodward's new book to be published next week.

In January 2007, when Bush told the new Iraq commander that the Surge was an attempt to "double down," Petraeus replied, "Mr. President, this is not double down. This is all in."

Five years and thousands of American lives after the invasion, a disconnected Commander-in-Chief was still being briefed with figures of speech that recall Colin Powell's Pottery Barn warning, "You break it, you own it."

In a preview of "The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008," the Washington Post describes "an administration riven by dissension, either unwilling or slow to confront the deterioration of its strategy in Iraq...

"Publicly, Bush maintained that U.S. forces were 'winning'; privately, he came to believe that the military's long-term strategy of training Iraq security forces and handing over responsibility to the new Iraqi government was failing."

Before the 2006 elections, according to Woodward, Bush asked for a review of the war "under the radar screen" after Condoleezza Rice challenged the wisdom of sending additional troops to Iraq. "You're not getting a clear picture of what's going on," she reportedly told Bush, claiming that Don Rumsfeld was giving him "a fable, a story...that skirted the real problems."

Bush fired Rumsfeld but still maintained an "odd detachment" about the war, telling Woodward, "This is nothing that you hurry" when asked whether he had given advisers a firm deadline for recommending a revised war strategy.

Ultimately, Bush overrode the advice of the Joint Chiefs and became gung-ho in deciding on the Surge, which Woodward concludes worked not simply because of additional troops but "groundbreaking" new covert techniques to find and kill insurgent leaders as well as the decision by Moqtada al-Sadr to rein in his Mahdi Army and the "Anbar Awakening," in which Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda.

Woodward had ended his previous book with the line: "With all Bush’s upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become." He repeats that now, adding: "My reporting for this book showed that to be even more the case than I could have imagined."

Whistle-Blowing MSM Dogs Don't Hear

Behind the media popcorn of Scott McClellan's revelations, relatively unnoticed is a new book by the former American commander in Iraq that should be red meat for historians.

This week's Time has an excerpt from "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story" by Gen. Ricardo Sanchez that nails his Pentagon boss Don Rumsfeld, along with the rest of the Bush Administration, for "gross incompetence and dereliction of duty" at the start of the unfolding disaster.

This is no out-of-the-loop flunky's account of what happened, but the testimony of the man in the middle of it all, one of the generals whose advice Bush maintained he would follow but obviously did not.

The Central Command, Gen. Sanchez writes, had originally planned 12 to 18 months of active troop deployments but then "had completely walked away by simply stating that the war was over...

"That decision set up the United States for a failed first year in Iraq. There is no question about it. And I was supposed to believe that neither the Secretary of Defense nor anybody above him knew anything about it? Impossible! Rumsfeld knew about it. Everybody on the NSC knew about it, including Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Colin Powell. Vice President Cheney knew about it. And President Bush knew about it.

"There's not a doubt in my mind that they all embraced this decision to some degree. And if it had not been for the moral courage of Gen. John Abizaid to stand up to them all and reverse [Gen. Tommy] Franks's troop drawdown order, there's no telling how much more damage would have been done.

"In the meantime, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty."

Amid all the whistle-blowing in Washington these days, this particular one by Gen. Sanchez should be heard loud and clear, but so far the media dogs are not responding to its frequency.

The Potemkin Village of Iraq

Now it's Condoleezza Rice's turn to take a hand in putting up the false front the Bush Administration is trying to construct and pass off as "victory." She follows President Bush last September, Vice President Cheney and the war's heir apparent, John McCain, last month in projecting a perception of peace with smoke and mirrors.

In a surprise trip this weekend, the Secretary of State cheerleads "a coalescing of a center in Iraqi politics in which the Sunni leadership, the Kurdish leadership, and elements of the Shiite leadership that are not associated with these special groups have been working together better than at any time before."

The "special groups" are militias of the Mahdi Army. If the central government continues to attack them, as it did ineptly in Basra this month only to be bailed out by US forces, al-Sadr is threatening "all-out war."

While Rice hailed the coalescing, there were three rocket attacks--the first as she was meeting with Maliki at his office, another while returning to the Green Zone from a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talibani, a third that delayed a ceremony at which she unveiled a plaque commemorating civilian deaths in the Green Zone.

The Secretary's trip recalls President Bush's visit to Anbar province last September to exult over "success" against al Qaeda, achieved by the influx of Surge troops and buying off Sunni tribal leaders. But the Surge troops can't stay forever and, when they leave, will the Sunnis stay bought?

To all the blood and billions being poured into Iraq, add the time and attention of an Administration that should be attending to threats elsewhere in the world and a collapsing economy back home.

But their priorities are clear: Cobble together a Potemkin village of peace in Iraq to help keep the White House in Republican hands and delay the reckoning they will have to face when the American people get a good look behind the façade of "victory" at the wreckage they have created there.

Better Than Bombing: Photo-Op Diplomacy

Confusion is the prevailing mode over an Administration initiative for a 24-hour Mideast conference to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks before President Bush leaves office.

With a target date (maybe) less than two weeks away, there is no firm schedule and no agenda. No invitations have been sent for the meeting at Annapolis, but diplomats from countries hoping to attend have been booking hotel rooms all over Washington for late November and early December.

"No one seems to know what is happening," one senior Arab envoy tells the Washington Post, speaking anonymously to avoid appearing out of the loop. "I am completely lost."

"American officials," the New York Times reports, "are not sure that the negotiations...will succeed. Others worry that...the Bush administration has not done the diplomatic groundwork necessary to get the negotiations off to a rapid and serious start, or that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will not be able to spend the time necessary to keep the parties moving ahead when the difficult issues of borders, security, refugees and Jerusalem surface in all their excruciating detail."

It sounds like something being arranged by those who planned for post-war Iraq, but the good news is that this time they are promoting the long-forgotten "road map" to Mideast peace, and there are no military operations involved.

Nuclear Shell Game

If we had a competent, open-minded and subtle Administration, the questions of what to do about Pakistan would still be dicey. As things stand, our clueless President, out-of-it Secretary of State and politically damaged diplomatic corps seem like rubes at the fair watching Musharraf run his games of repression and promises of free elections with no idea of where the nuclear pea is.

Nightmares that Pakistan might "lose control over a nuclear arsenal of uncertain size--estimated at from 55 to 115 weapons," the New York Times reports, are driving fears in Washington, London and Paris.

The Pakistan president has insisted his nuclear controls are "the best in the world," but, over the years, his assurances about everything have turned out to be full of empty bluster and, now that his control of the country is shaky, can we take the chance of believing him?

In a situation like this, it would be comforting to think that US intelligence assets have some answers but, even if they do, with our "What, me worry?" President and Vice President surrounded by Neo-Cons obsessed with Iran's nuclear potential, is anybody in charge of the titrating of carrots-and-sticks financial aid, covert actions and contingency planning that are needed?

"If General Musharraf is overthrown," the Times reports, "no one is quite sure what will happen to the team he has entrusted to safeguard the arsenal. There is some hope that the military as an institution could reliably keep things under control no matter who is in charge, but that is just a hope.

“'It’s a very professional military,'” said a senior American official who is trying to manage the crisis and insisted on anonymity because the White House has said this problem will not be discussed in public. “'But the truth is, we don’t know how many of the safeguards are institutionalized, and how many are dependent on Musharraf’s guys.'”

In a situation where "don't know" and "hope" could lead to disaster, the track record of this White House is not reassuring. From the outside, it looks as if regime change in Washington is more urgent than in Islamabad.

Cheney's New, Improved War

The Vice-President of the United States is packaging his attack on Iran.

Unfazed by the disaster in Iraq, Cheney’s Neo-Cons are “rolling out” a “new product” exactly as they did in 2002 and, as then, over the resistance of the State Department.

The New York Times reports “Condoleezza Rice has been arguing for a continuation of a diplomatic approach, while officials in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office have advocated a much tougher view. They seek to isolate and contain Iran, and to include greater consideration of a military strike.”

In the Washington Post, retired Gen. Wesley Clark writes, “Think another war can't happen? Think again. Unchastened by the Iraq fiasco, hawks in Vice President Cheney's office have been pushing the use of force...And what would we do with Iran after the bombs stopped falling? We certainly could not occupy the nation with the limited ground forces we have left.”

In the U.K., the Telegraph reports “Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran” and a senior intelligence officer warns “that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq--arming and training militants--would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories” to “provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.”

This follows a U.K. Times story about a speech by a conservative think tank expert saying “military planners were not preparing for ‘pinprick strikes’ against Iran’s nuclear facilities. ‘They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,’ he said.”

The President started the campaign rolling here with an echo of the warnings about Saddam’s WMD in a recent speech to the American Legion: “Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust...We will confront this danger before it is too late.”

Back in May, our bellicose former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton was telling the British, ”We must attack Iran before it gets the bomb” and that “senior White House officials” share his thinking.

So even before the Surge and in the face of public clamor to get out of Iraq, Cheney and his crowd were covertly planning a war against Iran.

About all this, Sen. Bernie Sanders has been warning: "We have got to put pressure on the mass media not to play the same craven role that they played in Iraq, where they essentially collapsed and became a megaphone for Bush's policies.”

He should be telling that to his Congressional colleagues and reminding them that another botched Bush war could create an unprecedented crisis for American democracy.

The Era of Lost Leverage

Now that the Petraeus Show has left town, Washington is in limbo and likely to stay there for some time.

Democrats don’t have the votes to, forgive the expression, move on to mandate troop withdrawal as Congressional Republicans cower under the thin cover of “Return on Success,” depriving anti-war legislators of any leverage to breach the barriers of Bush vetoes.

In Iraq, Bush has no leverage to move Maliki et al toward the national reconciliation that would justify a claim of victory. Just as the Democrats were boxed in by the argument that, if you announce troop withdrawal, the enemy can wait you out so is Bush boxed in by the reality that, in announcing the troops are staying, he has removed any urgency on the part of sectarian factions to settle their differences. They can wait us out and keep hoping to wear us down.

Call it stability, stalemate or quagmire but we need leadership to open new diplomatic possibilities in the Middle East before Cheney persuades his puppet to get us unstuck by attacking Iran.

If they won’t make a move to end the fiasco in Iraq, Congressional Republicans and Condoleeza Rice can save what’s left of their reputations by getting to work to stop that.

A Condoleeza Rice Sighting

After a long disappearing act, the Secretary of State has surfaced, sort of, with a New York Times interview so guarded that her own words appear only toward the end of a long piece with everybody else’s judgments about her tenure with the Bush Administration.

Most are harsh. Former colleagues and students at Stanford University are protesting her planned return to the faculty after serving “an administration that has trashed the basic values of academia: reason, science, expertise, and honesty.”

Colin Powell’s former Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, no rose himself in the Valerie Plame outing, complains about Rice’s performance as National Security Adviser, saying he felt like he was getting on a “gerbil wheel” every morning “and nothing would be resolved, and we’d get off at night, and the next morning we would get back on and do it all over again.”

Rice’s response is a shrug that “if that’s the assessment, you know, I’ll accept people’s assessment,” pointing out it is “a very difficult job because everything is by remote control. You do not own any of the assets.”

Introspection does not come easily to Condoleeza Rice. The interview reports her “falling back on her usual talking points, except this time, those talking points were interspersed with grumbling that she was being asked for personal reflection, something she does not like to do.”

Two books about Rice, almost certain to be critical, are coming out soon and she, of course, will be writing her own memoirs, but readers should not expect much in the way of personal revelation. At one point, she complained to the Times interviewer, “Now you’ve got me trying to psycho-analyze myself.”

No problem. There are plenty of others around who are eager to do that.

Lame Duck a la Bush, Side Order of Rice

While Karl Rove was doing his TV victory lap, another Bush stalwart has been missing in action. Condoleeza Rice, once touted as a possible ’08 Presidential candidate, has been out of sight.

A week ago, there was a public moment as the Secretary of State appointed baseball legend Cal Ripken Jr. the nation’s Sports Envoy, starting with a trip to China.

Since then, we have had Rice’s written statement congratulating the Somalia National Reconciliation Congress on completing Phase One of an agreement to stop killing one another--and silence. At yesterday’s Departmental press briefing, her name was not mentioned.

Ironically, as she was disappearing from media radar this month, Rice was named by GQ Magazine “The Most Powerful Person in Washington,” ahead of George Bush and Dick Cheney, one of the hazards of the long lead time of monthly journalism, as I can testify from experience.

It may be that Rice has reached a critical point in the tension between fierce personal loyalty to George W. Bush and her understanding of what history will say about her tenure as Secretary of State.

For months now, rather than front for the lame duck disaster in Iraq, she has been working the fringes of Middle East policy, trying to establish some communication with Iran, joining Secretary of Defense Gates in urging Saudi Arabia to clamp down on Sunni terrorists and making efforts to unblock the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate.

After Rove’s announced departure, her spokesman announced that she will stay the course of the Bush Presidency. But at this point, Condoleeza Rice may also be keenly aware of what loyalty has been doing to the arc of her life from growing up in segregated Birmingham to being named on Time Magazine’s list of the World’s 100 Most Influential People four times and twice as the Most Powerful Woman in the World by Forbes since the turn of the new century.

Complete career suicide is unlikely to be on her agenda for the future.

Bad Bush Movies

If this Administration were a Hollywood studio, it would have been shut down after the “Heaven’s Gate” of wars in Iraq and the “Ishtar” of disasters in New Orleans.

No one wants to watch, but they still keep grinding them out. Alberto Gonzales is starring in an extravagant remake of “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia,” with a cast of thousands as the bounty hunters.

This week, the cameras roll on a new version of “Into the Mouth of Madness” with Condoleeza Rice and Robert Gates as the intrepid couple looking for answers in places where reality and fantasy are indistinguishable.

Meanwhile, in the White House, George Bush himself is doing a final cut on “Battlefield Earth,” while Dick Cheney prepares for his close-ups in “Godzilla, the Musical.”

"Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?"

The immortal words of Casey Stengel come to mind for the Bush Administration’s latest moves in the Middle East. Casey’s incompetent Mets were only losing baseball games. This bunch is playing with our country’s future.

The most recent tragi-comedy of errors is reported in today’s New York Times:

“The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to total $20 billion over the next decade at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq.”

Counterproductive is a euphemism for exporting radicals to car bomb our troops there while King Abdullah tells Arab heads of state that Americans in Iraq are “an illegal foreign occupation.”

Next week, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates will go to Saudi Arabia to ask the Saudis, please, to “make clear to Sunnis engaged in violence in Iraq that such actions are ‘killing your future.’”

At the same time, to allay the fears of our most reliable ally, the Bush team is promising to increase military aid to Israel to $30.4 billion over the next decade. There is nothing like a little arms race to promote stability in a trigger-happy region.

There may be some devilishly clever, subtle master strategy in all this but, based on past performance, they might do well to consider Casey Stengel’s advice for managing tough situations: “The secret is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”

Worse Than Bush: Blair Knew Better

With his elegant English accent, Tony Blair lent George Bush a confident air of intelligence and rationality as the “Coalition of the Willing” prepared to invade Iraq in 2003.

Now as he prepares to leave office, an altogether different picture emerges. As the Observer sums it up:

“Tony Blair agreed to commit British troops to battle in Iraq in the full knowledge that Washington had failed to make adequate preparations for the postwar reconstruction of the country.

“In a devastating account of the chaotic preparations for the war, which comes as Blair enters his final full week in Downing Street, key No 10 aides and friends of Blair have revealed the Prime Minister repeatedly and unsuccessfully raised his concerns with the White House.”

In view of Blair’s misgivings, Bush offered to let him off the hook. Condoleezza Rice, then our national security adviser, confirms that Bush told Blair he didn’t have to send troops, suggesting “Perhaps there's some other way that Britain can be involved” and that Blair replied: “No, I'm with you.”

All this makes Tony Blair look even worse than Bush. Sensing disaster, he nevertheless did a Winston Churchill impersonation and took his country into Iraq. Our deluded Neo-Cons were true believers, but Blair apparently knew better. Whatever his motives, he has even more to answer for than they do.