. . . the U.S. intelligence community and Senator John Warner. As noted in previous posts here, the spooks have vetted a declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, only a small portion of which was released earlier in the month. The report concludes that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki may not have the ability or capacity to “push forward” legislative reforms and states that improvements in the security situation, political system and economy are not likely unless...

The concept of the coincidence — like bumping into a long-lost friend on the street whom you had dreamt about the night before — has undergone a metamorphosis of a sort as my dotage approaches. I have come to see these “events” as being more predestinated than merely coincidental. And usually for a reason. So it was when I brought home two movie DVDs the other day that I pretty much had chosen at random from a selection of nearly 4,000 titles. One movie, Everything is Illuminated,...

Today’s Iraq war cold shower is brought to you by President Bush’s media advisors, who in an extraordinarily dumb move got the president to invoke in a speech today “the tragedy of Vietnam” to bolster support for his own war. In other words, bring up the worst defeat in American military history to defend staying the course in Iraq. I suppose this is yet another example of a beleaguered president appealing to his prune-like base, or something, because there are but a few...

December 14, 2004: President Bush awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to former CIA Director George Tenet, saying he had played a “pivotal roles in great events,” an allusion to the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also receiving the medal are retired General Tommy Franks, who oversaw combat in Afghanistan and the initial invasion of Iraq, and former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer. August 21, 2007: A report released...

The global warming police – as well as the deniers – are out in force in the wake of mighty Hurricane Dean’s march across the Caribbean and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Dean has put up some impressive numbers: It is one of the 10 most intense Atlantic hurricanes of the last century. It is the first Category 5 hurricane in 25 years to make landfall in the Atlantic basin. There were sustained winds of 165 miles an hour and gusts to 200 mph when it made landfall in Mexico....

Today’s Iraq war cold shower is brought to you by Nouri al-Maliki. As the surge shows some signs of success in the run-up to the White House-doctored September progress report, the utter dysfunction of Al-Maliki’s government is like a banshee’s wail over the cities, villages and deserts of Iraq. And you can bet it is being heard in Teheran and Damascus. How many times have I written that there cannot be a military solution without a political solution? Like 20 some times in recent...

Even the Republican Party’s own pollsters say that it will take a miracle for the GOP to keep the White House, let alone regain control of Congress, in 2008. Despite a slight uptick in poll numbers because of some success with the surge strategy, George Bush remains a deeply unpopular president and a substantial majority of Americans see the Iraq war for what it is – a failure. Yet most Republican presidential wannabes are not only not trying to distance themselves from their president...

I gave nearly two years of my life to Orenthal James “O.J.” Simpson, which of course is a pittance compared to the price Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman paid. I drew some lessons from the 20 months I covered the murder investigation and criminal and civil trials: First, while bizarre is one of the most overused words in the news media lexicon, the saga of O.J. Simpson is beyond bizarre. Second, no one who got sucked into or willingly entered the black hole that was the Trial...

I’ve been pretty tough on the prez — calling him everything from a coward to a crackpot — but there is one thing that I have not criticized him for: His messianic faith-based convictions. Well, Mr. Bush, time’s up. By way of introduction to this subject, I should note that there is an aspect of George Bush’s life of which I am deeply respectful: His successful battle to overcome a drinking problem and probably a drug problem, as well. (Although some would say that...

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton chat after the Democratic presidential debate this morning in Iowa. You can surely do better than that. What caption would you write for this photo?

I have read with bemusement the stories of dissatisfied iPhone users. There have been many accounts of dropped calls, and a guy writing at the Popular Science blog is sending his pricey iPhone back to Apple for repairs for the second time in only a month and a half of ownership. Explains John Mahoney: “Considering all these frustrating weaknesses along with an incredibly high cost of ownership of some fairly buggy hardware, and I’m starting to wonder what kind of revolt lies in store...

Irish and British newspapers have reported that the Danish culture minister, Brian Mikkelsen, has offered an official apology for the destruction and havoc the Vikings wrecked on Ireland more than 1,000 years ago. But in an interview with the Danish newspaper Politiken, Mikkelsen denied having said the S-word during a visit to Dublin to mark the arrival of the replica Viking ship, Havhingsten (the Sea Stallion): “What I mentioned in my speech was ‘it did a lot of damages to the Irish...

I got piled on a bit yesterday in a comments thread — and really blistered in a private email or two — over my view that Rudy Giuliani is a resume without a man and unelectable. This shameless one-trick pony has banged the 9/11 drum relentlessly, but is so craven at heart that he could not help himself and insulted the many brave first responders and clean-up crews who labored at Ground Zero by boasting that he had been at the ruins “as often, if not more” than those workers. Now...

Steven Green On Monday, I revisited the tragic story of Abeer Qassim Hamza, the 13-year-old Iraqi girl who was repeatedly raped and along with her parents and sister, murdered by a posse of U.S. soldiers led by Private First Class Steven Green, a 21-year-old boy-man with homicidal tendencies and a criminal record of which the Army was well aware. My commentary got a fair number of initial hits, but like the waves emanating out from a pebble tossed into a pond, it has gotten more and more day by...

It Takes a Village There has been a breakthrough in the political logjam in Iraq. The Associated Press reports that: “Iraq’s political leaders emerged Thursday from three days of crisis talks with a new alliance that seeks to save the crumbling U.S.-backed government.” Oh, goody! But wait a goshdarned minute: The reshaped power bloc includes no Sunnis. Fooled again. In other news in the run-up to the breathlessly awaited progress report to be given or not given in public or not...

The great journalist David Halberstam left us a timely gift before his untimely death earlier this year — an eloquent essay in which he argues that George Bush’s verison of history, like the Iraq war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance and a total disdain for the facts. Halberstam knows history, and while I stand in his shadow, so do I, which means that Bush’s exerable and frequent comparisons of the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Harry Truman, to cite two of the...

Many people — too many — get an unpleasant surprise when they are hospitalized: They end up worse off than when they were admitted because they get an infection during treatment. About 100,000 patients die from these infections each year and they cost hundreds of millions of dollars to treat, often because of catheters that are implanted for days or weeks at a time, but we really don’t know the exact number or the offending hospitals because they are notoriously secretive about...

Bomb victims won’t get to read progress report. The back story to the anxiously awaited Iraq progress report to be delivered next month by General David Petraeus keeps getting fascinatinger and fascinatinger. First we learned – and certainly not from the White House – that despite President Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, it will be written by the White House. Now comes word that...

A jury returned two guilty verdicts in the case of so-called “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla this afternoon, but no matter how it ruled this man — who is an American citizen — already had been convicted in the court of public opinion by a people inured to the Bush administration-approved coercive techniques. As the Christian Science Monitor puts it in an editorial: “Yet, when it came time to put Padilla on trial, the government’s case in Miami included no mention...

The notion that there could be anything resembling a popular uprising in the U.S. these days is silly. But what would happen if the Bush administration takes us into a war against Iran? While I am not paranoid by nature (although I would appreciate it if you’d stop looking at me that way), evidence is mounting that the White House is seriously contemplating doing just that. In its latest rendition of “9/11 Is Good For What Ails Us,” the administration has carefully leaked its plan...

The great thing about having no interest in breathlessly covering every jot and tittle in a presidential race that still is 15 looong months from the finish line is that I can drop in whenever I damned well please, whether it is to opine on the paucity of candidates’ offspring in the military or Mitt Romney’s crazy pet tricks. Which leads me to today’s installment on a guy even less electable than Romney — Rudy “The Teflon Don” Giuliani — who in word and...

General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, may have a surprise up his sleeve when he gives the much anticipated September progress report on the war. The Los Angeles Times reports that Petraeus will recommend removing American troops from several areas where commanders believe security has improved, possibly including Al Anbar province where much has been made of tribal leaders uniting against Al Qaeda, and turning over security in those areas to Iraqi forces. This partial pullback...

Is former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, onetime collegiate wrestling champion, fitness freak and an all-around tough guy who preferred to stand at his Pentagon desk rather than sit, losing his stuff? According to a gossipy report in the WaPo, the people accompanying the 75-year-old Rumsfeld when he lunched last week at Morton’s in Washington had to help him onto an escalator, held his elbow and opened doors for him. A Republican tipster told the WaPo that “he looked old,” although...

Don Imus has reached a settlement with CBS over his multimillion-dollar contract and is negotiating to resume his broadcasting career. The settlement pre-empts the dismissed radio personality’s threatened $120 million breach-of-contract lawsuit at a time when he is taking steps to make a comeback with WABC-AM, the flagship station in the once huge network of radio stations that carried his talk show until he was dismissed after creating an uproar over his racist and sexist comments about the...

“Our military has increasing moral authority in Iraq, but the same cannot be said for our government at home. In fact, it’s in moral deficit. . . . Washington has no moral clout in Iraq. Washington looks like a circus act. The authority is coming from our military. The importance of this fact would be difficult to understate.” — MICHAEL YON * There is nothing funny about an unnecessary war that has taken nearly 4,000 American lives and many tens of thousands of Iraqi lives....