. . . as one who at a crucial time in '02 lobbed softballs to Dick Cheney.

It's tragic that Tim Russert unexpectedly died, leaving behind family and friends who loved him.

That said, let's try to keep this in perspective — and not the perspective offered up this afternoon by the Washington Post, which called him "the Democratic operative turned NBC commentator who revolutionized Sunday morning television and infused journalism with his passion for politics."

He did not revolutionize anything. He was a news reader, a media celebrity, not a soldier dying in a futile war.

As our body count in Iraq keeps right on climbing, I'll recall Russert's classic '02 interview of Dick Cheney on Meet the Press as a true exemplar of recent American journalism.

I don't mean that in a nice way.

The exact date was September 8, 2002, as Cheney and his frontman, George W. Bush, were lobbying Americans and members of Congress on the urgent necessity of invading Iraq. This was before the key Senate vote.

We now know they were lying, but many of us were thinking that back in '02. Drowning out the dissenters were most of the U.S. media outlets — not all, but most.

And media celebs such as Russert were playing their roles as wing men for schnooks such as Cheney.

In June 2005, I parsed Russert's '02 interview with Cheney in an item called "Shuck and Awe." So I'm just going to plagiarize myself and re-run that item here. See for yourself:

Shuck and Awe

Before the "shock and awe" of March '03, there was shuck and jive. But the Downing Street Memo and other British government documents revealing Blair-Bush skullduggery in 2002 are not old news.

In fact, the recently released documents offer fresh clues not only about (1) the contempt the Bush and Blair regimes had for the intelligence of the American public and press but also about (2) why the occupation of Iraq has turned into such a horror show.

On March 14, 2002, Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser, David Manning, reported to his boss after meetings with Condi Rice and a National Security Council "team" in D.C., according to a memo leaked three years later:

What do you suppose he meant by "different"? Well, the U.S. press, for one thing, is much more easily gulled—in general, that is.

Only three days before Manning sent that memo to Blair, Dick Cheney (on his way to the Middle East) was in Great Britain meeting with the prime minister. The two regimes' CEOs stood still for a press conference in London, where the reporters aren't afraid to ask tough questions, and the Bush regime can't put on its own dog-and-pony show. Here's an example from the March 11, 2002, press conference, courtesy of a White House transcript:

Cheney's reply? This is how he started it:

Yeah, that was really complex. But I guess compared with the "grilling" he gets from people like Tim Russert (left), it's complex. On September 8, 2002, Russert hosted Cheney on Meet the Press and played slow-pitch with him—open-ended questions, perfect for spinning. Here's one:

Yes, ask the vice president to define a buzz phrase that he and his handlers have spent a lot of time honing. Here's another softball:

Gee, what do you think Cheney will say when you let him off the hook with a stupid-ass "Is that accurate?" appended to an otherwise-promising line of questioning? Here's how Cheney belted that blooper pitch:

Keep in mind, now, that Cheney was making up this shit. The Bush and Blair regimes were "fixing" the intelligence, as the Downing Street Memo, revealed three years too late, put it.

A little later in the Russert interview, Cheney said:

Which provoked this question:

Big problem with this question, Tim. You're asking a question that Cheney cannot answer. He can't speak for others' actions. Instead of pinning him down, you're leaving him room to roam.

Russert could have asked this instead: "Our allies haven't come to that conclusion, and they would have no reason to cover for Saddam. You say 'we know.' Give me a specific example of what 'we know,' and how that is at odds with what our allies' intelligence tells them."

But Russert didn't ask that. Instead, he asked Cheney why our allies hadn't "come to the same conclusion." How in the world could Cheney know "why"? (Except for the fact that he and Blair were making up shit and the allies weren't—but he couldn't very well admit that.) This one was easy for Cheney to hit out of the park:

Oh, so our intelligence was good, eh?

Cheney was just giving himself a pat on the back, because the Bush regime was making it up as it went along, so it could justify an unjustified invasion of Iraq.

So, do you see a difference in the kinds of questions British and American politicians have to face? Democracy is more raucous in Great Britain, and the press—with exceptions—is more docile in America.

Now for the other part of the equation: the disastrous occupation that has followed the unjustified invasion. Go directly to the Downing Street memo itself for that. The memo from Matthew Rycroft to Manning of Manning's meeting with Blair on July 23, 2002, summarized MI6 chief Richard Dearlove's recent visit to D.C. (Dearlove is referred to as "C.") Here's a passage from the memo:

"Little discussion" of the "aftermath," huh? We'd better make sure there's plenty of discussion about that.

The performance of Britain's new PM gives a hint of what the post-Bush era may be like.

George W. Bush's British manservant, Tony Blair, is someplace in the Middle East doing little more than meets-and-greets with Israelis and certain selected Palestinians. It's nothing more than Blair's trying to sweep the shards of broken Iraq under the rug — he helped break it, so he should try to clean it up.

"Manservant" is too distinguished an image. Much of the world will continue to see the bubbly Blair as the Bush regime's loyal little puppy. But now that Gordon Brown is the new British PM, we've entered an era of what John Feffer of the Institute for Policy Studies calls "post-poodle politics."

Brown (left, with Bush) is a different animal. He won't faithfully yip with joy around Bush. He's known to be sober and reserved, more of a St. Bernard than a feisty, cute terrier like Bush's pal Barney.

More importantly, Brown may be more like a St. Bernard, but he won't be coming to the Bush regime's rescue. The British PM is more likely to take several dumps on Bush's carpet.

The way Brown practices foreign policy — even what he's already done as he tries to extract his country from the Iraq debacle — gives us a preview of what a post-Bush regime could look like.

Unfortunately, one step Brown has already taken — halting the influence of his advisers on career civil servants — will probably never happen in U.S. presidential politics. As Ian Davis notes in Foreign Policy in Focus:

In Dick Cheney's Bush regime, a small coterie of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rove, and the like ran roughshod over more pragmatic types like generals Eric Shinseki (on the number of troops needed to "conquer" Iraq) and Tony Zinni (who believed that the road to peace led through Jerusalem instead of Baghdead).

Brown's more likely to rely on his military people in the field than has Blair, let alone the Bush regime. And that means a quicker exit by the Brits from Iraq. Davis says:

Blair's regime didn't seem to have much faith in its people on the ground. Back in 2005, Blair thought so much of his Foreign Office career diplomats that he immediately canned his ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, after Murray — a boil on Blair's butt — had the audacity to denounce Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov's torture tactics.

Don't expect to see any photos of Gordon Brown chatting about the "war on terror" with Cheney on the steps of 10 Downing Street, as Blair did in 2002 during the secret plotting of the Iraq invasion.

And as for Iran? No matter how much Cheney and his crew are itching to pull the trigger, this dog Brown won't hunt. As Davis says:

Finally, Brown won't be stirring up the populace to support the current war on Terra. More from Davis:

Which U.S. presidential candidate sounds the most like Gordon Brown? Well, it ain't Hillary Clinton, who's in thrall to the right-wing American-Israeli lobby. Is it Barack Obama? At least he talks about talking with our dastardly enemies. Like Brown, Obama has little experience in directing foreign policy.

For once, a newspaper editorial — a British one, in the July 30 Daily Mail — sums things up nicely when it comes to the shift from Blair to Brown:

By the time our presidential election rolls around, Brown will have been in office for about a year. His performance should at least give us an idea of what — and who — it may take to start undoing the damage of the Bush era.

One good thing about Rupert Murdoch's looking-good bid for the Wall Street Journal: He won't do much damage to the paper's editorial page.

The news pages, however, are a different matter. Looks as if the Dow Jones board didn't pay much attention to Slate's Jack Shafer, whose one-man campaign to stop this Caesar's seizure has made for entertaining/depressing reading. Last night, the board recommended to the Bancroft family that it accept the press barren's $5 billion offer. Those of us who admire, and depend upon, the Journal's dynamic news pages are left feeling a little barren ourselves.

Not all the Bancrofts are on board, but if the sale goes through, we'll be inundated pretty soon by the Fox Business Channel, which would be propped up by all that snazzy Dow Jones bidness info.

Don't expect this new cable business network to do any groundbreaking exposés of mighty China. Murdoch does more than just pour money into political campaigns of U.S. pols (most of it to Republicans). Shafer has pinned the tail on donkey Murdoch, who has repeatedly caved to Chinese authorities to protect his bidness interests.

The real concern, of course, is the Journal, which is the best daily paper in America. (Editorial pages don't count.) Some people at the Times (U.K.) say Murdoch's purchase didn't hurt their paper. And after all, it was that paper that broke the story of what became known as the Downing Street Memo. Others may point to the fact that, as many people say, Murdoch didn't directly interfere much with the Village Voice when he owned us. That may be true, but he was too savvy to destroy the Voice's lefty-rag rep, and thus its value, and we were small potatoes anyway.

The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, is a business-news behemoth, and business is Murdoch's main business.

Owners and publishers not only gripe at their editors about stories done or not done. They also set budgets. And they have other ways of getting over on their staffs. Citing a 1984 Journal story by Jane Mayer about Murdoch, Shafer makes a good point about the impact of publishers:

It's bad enough that Murdoch has changed the New York Post into a rabid right-wing rag that marched blindly into Cheney's War of Terror. Those things happen — you can't blame Murdoch, after all, for Judy Miller's war propaganda in the New York Times. WSJ reporters are less likely than most to practice the kind of self-censorship that Newfield alluded to, but the WSJ is all about business journalism, and that has a direct impact on Murdoch's global dealings. The Journal's daily revelations of foul bidness practices won't sit well with Murdoch, and the editors under him will feel his heat one way or another.

Shafer (full disclosure: I know him and like him.) dreams of a Wall Street Journal that is as independent of Murdoch as another Murdoch property: The Simpsons.

That won't happen. Murdoch's more of a homer than Homer.

As far as Bush's bitches are concerned, Scooter Libby's release from the threat of prison is da shizzit. I mean, now presidential dawg Miss Beazley can resume playing with her Scooter.

But keep in mind that Libby's trial revealed just how certain it is that Libby was simply Dick Cheney's bitch in the Plamegate scandal and that Cheney ran roughshod over everyone — Bush included — in his quest to get even with CIA agent Valerie Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, for blowing the whistle on the regime's lies about Iraq before the unjustified invasion. Yeah, and just as Miss Beazley is Bush's bitch, Bush is Cheney's.

Don't revisit the whole damned mess. Just take a look at "Trial reveals White House secrets," a concise wrapup of the Libby trial from last March by the BBC's Richard Allen Greene:

Greene neatly and quickly laid out the story and pointed out, in case you've forgotten amid the flurry of stories focusing on Libby's freedom, that

Libby himself testified that Cheney had been "upset" and "disturbed," Greene noted. Just think how much more Libby knows and much more willing he would have been willing to talk if he'd actually been thrown into prison for a while.

As it was, Libby revealed quite a lot during the trial — including something that many of us already knew: that Cheney, not Bush, is the most powerful person in the Bush regime. Greene noted:

And this administration and its GOP flunkies in Congress are so upset about leaks? Please.

Now some of you will point out that it wasn't Libby but rather Richard Armitage who outed Plame as a CIA agent.

That makes the Libby case even more intriguing: If he didn't obstruct justice and lie to cover up the leaking of Plame's name, then what was he covering up?

The details of Cheney's pre-war machinations will eventually come out. Too bad Libby didn't get a chance to sit in a jail cell and start thinking about rolling over — not with Miss Beazley but on top of his boss Cheney.

Grabbing onto the coattails of the Washington Post's brilliant series, "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," Democratic party activists and consultants are wailing that "Dick Cheney is a war criminal."

I guess that makes the whole host of Democrats who went along with the regime's march to war during the crucial Congressional votes of October 2002 "war schlemiels."

The Post series is indeed explosive. As this morning's dispatch, "Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power," by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, shows, Cheney and other top officials personally brainstormed how to violate the Constitution and perfect the torture of Arabs captured during the War of Terror.

Basically, Cheney acts as if he were a sheikh, kind of a Dick of Arabia. No wonder Halliburton, which continues to take cues from ex-CEO Cheney and kept paying a salary to the vice president through at least the first six years of his reign at the White House, has fled to Dubai. The United Arab Emirates is one of the most repressive regimes on Earth. Our own State Department says:

Otherwise, Dubai, where the world's tallest building is being erected, is a great place. It's the dream of people like Cheney. Business and government are one and the same. Most of the workers are foreigners — only 5 percent of Emirati citizens work. Development has run amuck. An oligarchy controls everything.

Burdened by an intolerable climate (as hot as Phoenix and as humid as Houston), Dubai is bursting with outrageous resorts. It's a playpen for the rich — more like a sandbox.

D.C. isn't the greatest place, either, and it's also a playpen, as the Post series points out. From this morning's piece:

Hope there's a special section in the George W. Bush Presidential Libary on Cheney. Actually, that library should be only a wing to Dick Cheney's tome tomb.

Where were the Post and other U.S. media back in the spring of 2005 when the Times of London — one of Rupert Murdoch's papers — revealed what became known as the Downing Street Memo and other documents laying out the furtive plotting in 2002 behind the unjustified invasion of Iraq?

Don Rumsfeld and his Pentagon warhawks are secretly making plans to beat a hasty retreat from Little Bighorn, otherwise known as Iraq, according to a U.K. defense document unearthed yesterday by The Mail on Sunday, whose Simon Walters wrote:

The document, Options For Future UK Force Posture In Iraq, is the first conclusive proof that preparations for a major withdrawal from Iraq are well advanced.

This is of course the exact opposite from the public bluster emanating from George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

What's most fascinating is that the document, a memo to Blair written by Defense Secretary John Reid, reveals that the most important battle of the Iraq debacle is a long-distance war between the Pentagon and the commanders on the ground in Iraq, who warn that the situation is too chaotic for us to drastically reduce our forces there.

Of course, keep in mind that the midterm elections next year could prove extremely damaging to Bush's handlers if we still have 150,000 American soldiers bogged down in the Iraq debacle.

Now this U.K. story, unlike the Downing Street Memo, isn't being ignored by U.S. newspapers. The Washington Post, at least, splashed it on A1 this morning.

The scenario, unfortunately, is playing out exactly like what happened during 2002: The Brits (though not Reid) are urging caution, and the U.S. is blustering ahead—or in this case, the U.S. is trying to get the hell out of Dodge while Dodge is still extremely dodgy.

The memo reveals U.S. plans to pull out about 100,000 troops by early next year, despite the hard, cold fact that Iraq is becoming more chaotic and dangerous by the day.

Only yesterday, scores of people, including Iraqi police recruits, were blown up by insurgents, and sectarian murders and warfare are increasing.

Reid's planning memo, marked "SECRET—UK EYES ONLY," says:

US political military thinking is still evolving.There is a strong US military desire for significant force reductions.

Emerging US plans assume 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006, allowing a reduction in [Allied troops] from 176,000 down to 66,000. There is, however, a debate between the Pentagon/Centcom, who favour a relatively bold reduction in force numbers, and the multinational force in Iraq, whose approach is more cautious.

Walters sums it up this way in his story:

A secret paper written by Defence Secretary John Reid for Tony Blair reveals that many of the 8,500 British troops in Iraq are set to be brought home within three months, with most of the rest returning six months later.

The leaked document, marked Secret: UK Eyes Only, appears to fly in the face of Mr Blair and President Bush's pledges that Allied forces will not quit until Iraq's own forces are strong enough to take control of security.

If British troops pull out, other members of the Alliance are likely to follow. The memo says other international forces in Southern Iraq currently under British control will have to be handled carefully if Britain withdraws. It says they will not feel safe and may also leave.

Embarrassingly, the document says the Americans are split over the plan—and it suggests one of the reasons for getting British troops out is to save money. Mr Reid says cutting UK troop numbers to 3,000 by the middle of next year will save £500 million a year, though it will be 18 months before the cash comes through.

So, are Iraqis ready to take over their own country? Well, we've bombed it and bulldozed and killed tens of thousands of them, and civil war has already started, and men so desperate for jobs that they're even willing to risk their lives joining the Iraqi police force are being killed while they wait in line to sign up.

Looks like our work is done.

Dirty laundry from Downing Street? No problem. Karl Rove has gone directly to the spin cycle.

There's no greater testimony to the skill of Rove (left) at working a crowd of 300 million Americans than the fact that what he's currently spinning against doesn't even get a mention in the ensuing press flap.

In his flammable speech Wednesday to the New York Conservative Party, Rove said:

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

Note the "prepared for war." Even before the smoldering anger over the Iraq invasion's pre-war plot—as revealed by the Downing Street Memo and other British government documents—has burst into flames, the Bush regime is spinning it. Once again, Bush's handlers set the agenda for what is written about.

As to Dick Durbin's ridiculous apology—he just played right into Rove's hands. This isn't the first time someone has used Nazi-era imagery and words to describe the Bush regime's handling of prisoners.

Apparently everybody's forgotten that during the runup to the Iraq war, Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to Pentagon neocon Doug Feith's cabal—which later directed the handling of prisoners— as the "Gestapo office." That morsel was reported by Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack.

What's even more absurd about Rove's attack is his depiction of how tough the Bush regime has been on terrorism. Apparently everybody's forgotten that, according to the 9-11 Commission Report, the incoming Bush administration left unfilled—until after 9/11—the crucial job of assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. The commission called it "the key counter-terrorism policy office in the Pentagon."

And after 9/11, we scaled back the hunt for Osama bin Laden so we could invade Iraq, where we have started something that we can't finish.

Oh, Rove portrays the Bush regime as so tough and dedicated in what it likes to call GWOT—the "Global War on Terror." But none of the stories reporting his bluster mentioned the astonishing high-level bungling since 9/11 by FBI administrators on the very topic of counter-terrorism.

As the AP's John Solomon reported on Monday:

In sworn testimony that contrasts with their promises to the public, the FBI managers who crafted the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorism say expertise about the Mideast or terrorism was not important in choosing the agents they promoted to top jobs.

And they still do not believe such experience is necessary today even as terrorist acts occur across the globe.

The testimony came in a lawsuit against the FBI by an aggrieved agent. Solomon's story continued:

In a development that has escaped public attention, FBI agent Bassem Youssef has questioned under oath many of the FBI's top leaders, including Director Robert Mueller and his predecessor, Louis Freeh, in an effort to show he was passed over for top terrorism jobs despite his expertise. Testimony from his lawsuit was recently sent to Congress.

Those who have held the bureau's top terrorism-fighting jobs since Sept. 11 often said in their testimony that they—and many they have promoted since—had no significant terrorism or Middle East experience. Some could not even explain the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, the two primary groups of Muslims.

Of course, that didn't stop former Attorney General John Ashcroft and his FBI from unjustifiably sweeping thousands of American Muslims off the street and detaining them for months on end for no reason. (Read my review last August of the film Persons of Interest.)

Despite Rove's assault on our intelligence, the fact is that the unwarranted invasion of Iraq has turned that country into the world's prime breeding ground and training camp for terrorists. As Doug Jehl reported Wednesday in the New York Times:

A new classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.

The assessment, completed last month and circulated among government agencies, was described in recent days by several Congressional and intelligence officials. The officials said it made clear that the war was likely to produce a dangerous legacy by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict.

Not that this is a big surprise. But it makes Don Rumsfeld's vow to leave a permanent war to the next generation a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The documents continue to flow out of Britain about the Bush regime's phony war and the Downing Street Memo—which, I note with some defensiveness, I first wrote about on April 30. But you just have to laugh at the brazen lies that gushed from the White House and Pentagon in 2002 after the Bush regime had already decided to go to war.

Yes, I mean the lies that were actually spoken by George W. Bush and Tony Blair. All we can do now is evaluate their skill as liars.

On September 7, 2002, the POTUS propaganda machine announced: "President Bush, Prime Minister Blair Discuss Keeping the Peace." Don't you just love it?

Blair had just arrived at Camp David, and the first anniversary of 9/11 was approaching. While "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invading Iraq, as the Downing Street Memo put it, Bush and Blair were propagandizing. You can almost see the script that the two followed during their September 7, 2002 press conference. Bush was the host, and he began by saying:

I look forward to spending a good three hours talking to our friend about how to keep the peace. This world faces some serious threat—and threats—and we're going to talk about it. We're going to talk about how to promote freedom around the world. We're going to talk about our shared values of—recognizes the worth of every individual.

What a moron. Most pitchmen are at least articulate. Bush continued:

And I'm looking forward to this time. It's awfully thoughtful of Tony to come over here. It's an important meeting, because he's an important ally, an important friend. Welcome.

Oh, yes, it was thoughtful of Tony to visit. Especially because Bush's handlers no doubt realized that Blair, infinitely quicker on his feet than the doofus POTUS, had to do the heavy lifting. The prime minister said:

Thanks. I'm looking very much forward, obviously, to discussing the issues that are preoccupying us at the moment with the President. And I thank him for his kind invitation to come here and his welcome.

The point that I would emphasize to you is that the threat from Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, potentially nuclear weapons capability, that threat is real.

We only need to look at the report from the International Atomic Agency this morning showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapons sites to realize that. And the policy of inaction is not a policy we can responsibly subscribe to. So the purpose of our discussion today is to work out the right strategy for dealing with this, because deal with it we must.

As we now have it confirmed, that's not what Blair's advisers were telling him.

Digression: Incredibly, this was publicly revealed back on September 18, 2004, by Michael Smith, writing for the Telegraph (U.K.). As Smith reported back then, Peter Ricketts, the Foreign Office political director, wrote in a March 22, 2002, memo to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw:

"First the threat, the truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programmes but our tolerance of them post 11th September."

OK, back to the September 7, 2002, press conference at Camp David: After Blair's cock-and-bull, Bush called on a reporter in his own inimitable way, saying, "AP lady."

And "AP lady" asked a hard, specific question:

"Mr. President, can you tell us what conclusive evidence of any nuclear—new evidence you have of nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein?"

Bush's reply was ludicrous at the time for its vagueness. Now we just know he was lying:

We just heard the Prime Minister talk about the new report. I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied—finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic—the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need.

Blair, on the other hand, was a much more facile liar, adding:

Absolutely right. And what we—what we know from what has been going on there for a long period of time is not just the chemical, biological weapons capability, but we know that they were trying to develop nuclear weapons capability. And the importance of this morning's report is it yet again it shows that there is a real issue that has to be tackled here.

I mean, I was just reading coming over here the catalog of attempts by Iraq to conceal its weapons of mass destruction, not to tell the truth about it over—not just over a period of months, but over a period of years. Now, that's why the issue is important. And, of course, it's an issue not just for America, not just for Britain, it's an issue for the whole of the international community. But it is an issue we have to deal with. And that's why I say to you that the policy of inaction, doing nothing about it, is not something we can responsibly adhere to.

What neither of them mentioned at the press conference was that the die had been cast way back on March 8, 2002, as far as the British officials were concerned. That's when they realized that Bush and his handlers had made up their mind even before then. This supposed "catalog" Blair mentioned wasn't the only thing the prime minister had read about Iraq. As Smith's September 2004 story in the Telegraph (U.K.) put it:

… the problem for Mr Blair was that he knew there was no stopping the Americans. That much was clear from the Secret UK Eyes Only "options paper" on Iraq given to him on Friday, March 8, 2002.

The Prime Minister was at Chequers [the British equivalent of Camp David] when he sat down to read it and in need of some good news. He and other ministers had repeatedly told MPs and television interviewers that no decision had been made to go to war but the increasingly belligerent talk coming out of Washington was making even members of his Cabinet jittery.

Mr Bush had reportedly told one aide: "F*** Saddam. We're taking him out". It no longer seemed to be a question of if; all the discussion was of how soon, with increasing talk of an invasion that autumn when conditions on the ground in Iraq would be ideal.

But the Blair and Bush regimes couldn't get it together in time for a fall 2002 invasion. March 2003 would have to do.

Why not let a former CIA guy who used to prepare intelligence briefs for Ronald Reagan remove the scandalous Downing Street Memo and other leaked papers from the spin cycle and examine them for you?

That's basically what Ray McGovern does in "Downing Street II," posted today on TomPaine.com. And, my, my, my, aren't those Bush-Blair drawers all soiled and nasty? Those two boys are a caution!

This isn't the first time McGovern has come up against the dirt about the unjustified invasion of Iraq. A leader of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, he was perhaps the most cogent talking head in Bob Greenwald's well-meaning but somewhat jumbled Uncovered: The War on Iraq, a quickie documentary from 2004. (See my review from last August 16.)

In this TomPaine.com piece, however, McGovern gets to make his own points at his own pace about those smokin' documents revealed May 1 by Michael Smith of the Sunday Times (U.K.). The "Cabinet Office paper," as ace reporter Smith referred to it yesterday, is another morsel atop the previously released Downing Street Memo. And McGovern's analysis of the July 21, 2002, document is sharp:

Pervading the briefing paper is the British leaders' need to square a circle: how to render legal an illegal, unprovoked attack on Iraq—or in the words of the briefing paper, how to go about "creating the conditions … in which we could legally support military action."

And this from McGovern:

The document reeks not only of obsequiousness toward the United States, but also wonderment at Washington's policies—particularly with respect to international law.

I also like that McGovern picked up on the British familiarity with Iraq's brutal summers, something that the Pentagon neocons were obviously ignorant of. The briefing paper suggests that, geez, if there has to be an invasion of Iraq, don't do it any later than January, man, 'cause it gets hot as shit there.

It keeps getting hotter. And the bodies are piling up.

OK, so the Bush and Blair regimes cooked up a plot in 2002 to make an illegal invasion of Iraq look legal. We get it.

But this goes beyond the finally notorious Downing Street Memo. New documents revealed June 12 by DSM-scoop reporter Michael Smith in The Sunday Times (U.K.) indicate that if Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz had listened to the Blair regime's cautions during the secret planning in July 2002, the U.S. wouldn't have screwed up the war.

Unfortunately, the key new British document, a Cabinet Office paper from July 2002, was classified as "U.K. Eyes Only." Here's the document's crucial paragraph No. 8:

The Viability of the Plans

8. The [British] Chiefs of Staff have discussed the viability of US military plans. Their initial view is that there are a number of questions which would have to be answered before they could assess whether the plans are sound. Notably these include the realism of the 'Running Start', the extent to which the plans are proof against Iraqi counter-attack using chemical or biological weapons and the robustness of US assumptions about the bases and about Iraqi (un)willingness to fight.

Note that last phrase: "the robustness of US assumptions about the bases and about Iraqi (un)willingness to fight."

We haven't yet seen the corresponding Pentagon/White House documents containing those "US assumptions"—let's get Alberto Gonzales to send those right over—but clearly the neocon hawks had told the Brits that Iraq would be a pushover. And clearly, the Brits were skeptical.

Oh, brother.

Smith's latest story is of course focused toward a British audience, so he starts it this way:

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

But three years later, the damage has long been done, the invasion happened, and Iraq is melting down. That's what makes Paragraph No. 8 key to understanding the civil war that is now enveloping Iraq.

And on that developing chaos, Tom Lasseter of Knight-Ridder shrewdly wrote on June 12 from Baghdad:

A growing number of senior American military officers in Iraq have concluded that there is no long-term military solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 U.S. troops during the past two years.

Instead, officers say, the only way to end the guerilla war is through Iraqi politics—an arena that so far has been crippled by divisions between Shiite Muslims, whose coalition dominated the January elections, and Sunni Muslims, who are a minority in Iraq but form the base of support for the insurgency.

Gee, a political solution. Lasseter provided the perspective:

The message is markedly different from previous statements by U.S. officials who spoke of quashing the insurgency by rounding up or killing "dead enders" loyal to former dictator Saddam Hussein. As recently as two weeks ago, in a Memorial Day interview on CNN's Larry King Live, Vice President Dick Cheney said he believed the insurgency was in its "last throes."

Delving even deeper into the current horror show is Gwynne Dyer in today's edition of the Beirut weekly Monday Morning. In "Iraq: The Long War," Dyer points out several grim factoids that get drowned out by the propaganda of the Bush regime and the self-censorship of most of the U.S. media—and that never get a hearing on Americans' prime news source, Larry King Live. Here's a sample:

All recent opinion polls show that a clear majority of Iraqis want American forces to leave at once or very soon—two-thirds of Shia Arabs (60 percent of the population) and practically all Sunnite Arabs (20 percent)—with only the Kurdish minority (15 percent) wanting them to stay. But this doesn't have much to do with how long they actually remain. That depends on two things: Washington's assessment of the likely final outcome, and the Iraqi government's judgement about whether or not it can survive without American troops.

The present government of Iraq, finally installed last month after three months of haggling over cabinet posts between the United Iraqi Alliance (i.e., the Shia religious parties) and the Kurds, is not just an appointed puppet government like its predecessor. However, the whole US-supervised political exercise is so suspect that only 185 of the 275 National Assembly members bothered to show up to ratify Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister on May 3, and the Kurdish-Shiite Arab coalition is a shotgun marriage that hides deep and fundamental disagreements about the future of the Iraqi state. Moreover, the Sunnite Arabs are still frozen out.

Dyer's sober analysis—probably more reliable than anything U.S. officials said during the pre-war plotting or since—ends this way:

So the violence will probably continue at around the current level for the next six to nine months at least, and beyond that the future is simply unforeseeable. Whether you choose to call this a civil war or not, the fact is that almost all of the insurgents are Sunni Arabs, while the new Iraqi army and police forces are overwhelmingly Shiites and Kurds. So long as the insurgency continues, the Shia leadership is unlikely to demand the immediate departure of American troops—and so far, the US still seems determined to stay.

It's a long time since the early days of the occupation, when US officials spoke airily about a prolonged occupation of Iraq and only very gradual moves towards putting power back into Iraqi hands, but they have (deliberately or accidentally) created a situation in which key Iraqi players depend on their continued presence. Nor is there any sign that Washington has yet given up its plans for “enduring bases” in Iraq as the strategic center from which it can perpetuate its military domination of the oil-rich Gulf region. This is going to be a long war.

If you're of cannon-fodder age, keep this in mind while you're blitzed this summer by the Pentagon's recruiting campaign. Cheney and Rumsfeld dragged the British into it. You don't have to follow them. Even flipping burgers beats dead-checking.