"Major Policy Depress"

Slate's Fred Kaplan says what so many people have stated about the fact that Bush duped major cable news networks yesterday, and they seemingly replied, "thank you sir, may I have another."

The president announced no new policy, uttered not one new word about terrorism, foreign policy, or anything else. He did all the things he wanted to do in last Thursday's debate—accuse his opponent of weakness, bad judgment, vacillation, and other forms of flip-floppery—though this time without a moderator to hush the audience, much less an opponent to bite back. And Bush loved it, smiling, smirking, raising his eyebrows, as if to say, "How 'bout that zinger?"

...

It's hard to blame either network for taking the White House's bait. Most presidents would want to deliver, right about now, a major address on the war against terror and the war in Iraq. In the last few days, one blow after another has struck the very foundations of Bush's policies. The fact that, under the circumstances, Bush didn't deliver a major policy address after all, despite his advance word, should embarrass not only CNN and MSNBC but, still more, President Bush.

Bush embarrassed? That doesn't seem likely.

The week's most stunning development may have been the revelation in L. Paul Bremer's remarks, before a group of insurance agents at DePauw University, that we never had enough troops in Iraq, either to secure the country's borders or to provide the stability needed for reconstruction. "The single most important change, the one thing that would have improved the situation," Bremer said, "would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout."

Bremer, of course, was the Bush-appointed head of the U.S.-led occupation authority, so his words on such matters carry weight. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and Rummy's neocon secretariat) have all insisted—before, during, and after the battlefield phase of the war—that they sent enough troops to accomplish the mission. It is worth recalling that when Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, told Congress that successful occupation would require a few hundred thousand troops, he was pushed into early retirement. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called his estimate "wildly off the mark."

Bush already denies making a mistake there.

The second blow to the war's legitimacy came Monday, when Rumsfeld—increasingly a loose cannon—appeared before the Council on Foreign Relations and, during the question-and-answer period, acknowledged that he had seen no evidence showing a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. The Pentagon later released a statement, claiming that Rumsfeld had been "misunderstood." He did not mean to deny the existence of "ties" between the two. However, as has been discussed in this space before, "ties" is a term that is so broad as to be (deliberately) meaningless.

Then came news reports of a CIA analysis—ordered by Cheney—showing that Rumsfeld hadn't been misunderstood at all. The analysis concluded that there probably was no working relationship between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Musab Zarqawi. This is significant in two ways. First, in the lead up to the war last year, the only physical evidence of a Saddam-al-Qaida tie was the presence of Zarqawi's training camp in northern Iraq. The camp was in Kurdish-controlled territory—an awkward caveat, but Bush officials at the time issued other, though looser, material suggesting a possible connection to Saddam himself.

Had the CIA's recent conclusion been reached two years ago, either within the administration or by Congress, the case for going to war would have been greatly weakened.

In short, Bush is a putz.