Is Smart Enough?

At her confirmation yesterday, Hillary Clinton invoked the concept of "smart power" as a guide to American diplomacy.

In his hearings, Education Secretary Arne Duncan cited Barack Obama as a role model for America's school children. “Never before," he said "has being smart been so cool.”

And in another hearing room, Senators were mooning over Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, the nominee for Energy Secretary. Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman enthused over Chu's "insight and vision" to carry out Obama's energy policies.

But is brilliance alone the panacea for all of America's problems? With the possible exception of the Defense Department's Douglas Feith, characterized as the "dumbest effing guy on the planet' by Gen.Tommy Franks, Bush's Neo-Cons were not stupid but blinkered in their perception of how the world works and too arrogant to learn from their mistakes.

The test for all that Obama brainpower will be to avoid replicating the record of JFK's "The Best and the Brightest" whose tunnel vision led to quagmire in Vietnam as surely as the Neo-Cons confidently took us into Iraq disaster and, back home, free-market ruin.

"It doesn’t help," Nicholas Kristof wrote recently, "that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas."

What's encouraging is that, although Obama has surrounded himself with figures like Lawrence Summers and Rahm Emanuel, who never suffer from an excess of doubt, he himself keeps showing the open-mindedness to empathize with opposition and avoid hubris.

Talking about measures to save the economy, the President-Elect said the other day, "“This is not an intellectual exercise, and there’s no pride of authorship. If members of Congress have good ideas, if they can identify a project for me that will create jobs in an efficient way--that does not hamper our ability to, over the long term, get control of our deficit; that is good for the economy--then I’m going to accept it.”

Now that sounds like the smart use of power.

Senate's Slow Learners Speak Out

A duped Bush Administration lied us into Iraq and, with the help of comparable Middle East con men, has been drumming up a war with Iran, the Senate Intelligence Committee disclosed yesterday in two reports, several years after anyone who has been paying attention knew all about it.

One, 170 pages long, accuses the President and Vice President Cheney of "repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath" of 9/11.

According to Committee Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, “The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”

Much of it, as we have known for years, was based on information provided by Ahmad Chalabi, touted by Neo-Cons as the “George Washington of Iraq,” a fugitive from Jordan convicted of bank fraud, who fed the Pentagon intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda for which we paid $33 million over four years, none of which turned out to be true.

The second Senate report details the work of his Iranian counterpart. In December 2001, Douglas Feith sent two Pentagon employees to Rome meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, a middleman already dismissed by the CIA as untrustworthy, who outlined his plan for a change of government in Iran on a napkin.

The plan was pursued through at least May 2003, the report says, with requests for a $7 million loan, money for secret intelligence activity and an Iranian media outlet in Southern California in return for promised photos of suspected terrorists inside Iran and locations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that purportedly had been moved there.

Ghorbanifar turned out to be as reliable as Chalabi, but Feith (described by Gen. Tommy Franks as "the dumbest effing guy on the planet") and other Pentagon Neo-Cons kept feeding his "intelligence" to the White House without telling the CIA, which might have refuted it.

It's good to have the Senate Intelligence Committee putting all this Keystone Kops stuff on the record, however belatedly, although only two Republican members signed on to the reports with the others deeming them a waste of time but failing to comment on the stupidity and duplicity that led to waste of lives and billions of dollars.

Stupidity Plus

Gen. Tommy Franks was off the mark when he called Douglas Feith the dumbest effing guy on the planet. On 60 Minutes tonight, Feith showed that stupidity alone is not enough to describe a clueless academic intoxicated by power and willing to stoop to intellectual dishonesty that would shame any used-car salesman

"What we did after 9/11," he told Steve Kroft, "was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11. Our main goal was preventing the next attack."

"So you're saying," an incredulous Kroft followed up by asking, "you didn't think it was that important to go after the people who were responsible for it--more important to go after people who weren't responsible for it?"

Feith, who helped cook the intelligence to justify the invasion, was pimping his doorstop book that blames everyone else, especially L. Paul Bremer, who ran the Iraq occupation for the first two years, for the ensuing fiasco.

If he had had his way, Feith claims, he would have turned the country over to con man Ahmad Chalabi, who fed him and his Neo-Con rubes $33 million of false information to lie us into the war.

Dumb isn't enough. Try shameless, arrogant and deceitful. There is at least one like him on most campuses. Just our luck that this specimen ended up in Rumsfeld's Defense Department.

"Dumbest Guy on the Planet" Explains It All

At a Neo-Con reunion last night, Don Rumsfeld's Three Stooges, who planned the war in Iraq, got together to blame the mess there on somebody else, L. Paul Bremer, who ran the occupation for the first two years.

Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith told the faithful at the American Enterprise Institute that his plan was not "to be around for many, many months" but that Bremer overruled him, thereby putting the US in today's stalemate.

Feith, labeled by Gen. Tommy Franks as "the dumbest effing guy on the planet," was introduced by former colleague Richard Perle while Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank lover, sat up front and agreed that Feith was "pretty much on the mark."

After hearing about the talk, Bremer told a reporter that Feith's "argument isn't with me," that President Bush told him before leaving for Baghdad to "take our time setting up an interim administration."

In reviewing George Tenet's memoir for the Wall Street Journal, Feith accused the former CIA Director of making up stories about how we got into Iraq. With his own book due for publication is March, Feith is getting a head start on fabricating his own.

Second Dumbest Guy on the Planet

Most of the Cheney crew is gone--Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, famously described by Gen. Tommy Franks as “the dumbest guy on the planet.” But Feith’s replacement as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Eric S. Edelman, is still there to carry on the tradition.

Yesterday he did his mentors proud with a snippy response to Hillary Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had asked about Pentagon planning to bring troops home from Iraq.

In response, Edelman wrote, "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia," adding that "such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks."

Sen. Clinton, who was not thrilled to receive a political lecture in answer to a policy question, plans to take it up with Edelman’s boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The incident may help explain why in 2005 President Bush had to bypass the Senate and use a constitutional power to put Edelman in the job. Rumsfeld had called his predecessor Feith, who masterminded the policy of ignoring the Geneva Conventions that led to Abu Ghraib, "one of the most brilliant individuals in government."

Edelman is right in that mold.