As the "long national nightmare" draws to a close I want to enter a preemptive protest to all future historians.  Do not lay this past eight years of the systematic destruction of American values entirely at the feet of George W. Bush.  To do so would allow the real culprits to escape with their place in this story untarnished by their crimes.

Bush is an insignificant, shallow, foolish man.  A man of no substance.  A cardboard cutout of trivial posturing, sold to an inattentive public, immersed in navel gazing.  He lacks the strength of character, intellect, or moral bearings to have committed the crimes for which his administration will be held accountable for generations.

I watched No End in Sight again the other day. And the part that angered me the most this time through was the realization of how long Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Armitage have been influencing policy. So I did a quick audit of some of the Bush Administration's top Cabinet members and officials. Most of this information was taken from Wikipedia and I checked most of the sources listed. I highlight the total number of years active, but the dates these people were active is also noteworthy.

I shall let the evidence speak for itself.

(Anyone else I should audit? Let me know.)

The second in a series of Iraq war studies has been released by the Army's Combined Arms Center.  The study concludes that "planning" for post-Saddam Iraq was ". . . not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began."

"Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect."

Remember:  The Republicans are supposed to be the experts in national security and John McSame wants another 100 years of this nonsense.

Paul Watson Contends there's a: Corporate Media Blackout On Bilderberg Meeting. He says:

"...Ben Bernanke, Condoleezza Rice", Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton(see UPDATE) "amongst a host of other global power brokers have all convened in Chantilly Virginia to secretly discuss the future of the world - yet not one mainstream U.S. corporate media outlet has uttered a single word about the 2008 Bilderberg conference...do you still not think it odd that not one mainstream U.S. press outlet has even mentioned it in passing?...

"...A mere book signing by an ex-politician would generate at least a few headlines, yet we have dozens of CEO’s, European and Federal Reserve banking and finance kingpins, Prime Ministers, European royalty, NSA officials, professors from top Universities, NATO and UN officials, oil company chairmen, and foreign policy luminaries meeting behind closed doors and yet not one single U.S. media report..."

More Below the Fold:

I have been a fairly run-of-the-mill critic of the Bush administration and bad U.S. policy in general for much of my time as a Kossack. I think the hiring of former FEMA Director Michael Brown was idiotic, and I think Paul Wolfowitz's Medal of Freedom cheapens the honor associated with other winners, who manage to gain their respectability in this country by means other than planning the invasions of other countries.

I would love very dearly to see jailed those who signed off on torture. I would love to see abstinence-only education dropped and banned like the idiocy it is and the school of "thought" behind it exposed for the theosophy, not science, it stems from.

I hate where this country has been going, but I am even less fond of where it will yet go before the American people are allowed to take the wheel back from a reckless teenager who just wanted to know how many fire hydrants and schoolchildren he could run over before someone stopped him.

And it's a good thing the Sedition Act of 1918, passed on this date by Congress, was repealed in 1921, or my ass would in the slammer faster than you could say "Me too!"

Let's not forget what actually happened 5 years ago and who did what to enable it. Shining light on this truth is still the primary weapon against McBush.

This 2002 USA Today story is very instructive. From McCain's last major European tour.

Sen. John McCain warned Saturday that the USA is prepared to make Iraq its next target in a widening military campaign against global terrorism.

Please note this humble story contains images of graphic violence. In fact, I consider them atrocities. In any event, the images and text in this diary may not be appropriate for children of any age.

March 19 is a day that I, like many of you, will never forget. It was on this day five years ago the U.S. invaded Iraq. Still we remain, in defiance of the majority of Americans who voted against Bush and against war; in contemptuous disregard of the international communities, the countries that were our strongest allies; even in our own Congress, George Bush's will be done, forever and ever, amen.
1125 days.

The life of the American conservative is a perpetual crisis of cognitive dissonance, especially when it comes to the run-up to the Iraq war.  So three new stories this week are certain to cause right-wing minds to explode, or at least to seek the safe harbor of denial.  

First came word of a new book from Rumsfeld aide Douglas Feith revealing that President Bush declared "war is inevitable" in December 2002, months before UN weapons inspectors produced their report on Iraq's WMD.  Later this week, the Pentagon will release the results of its massive study of pre-war intelligence confirming that Saddam and Al Qaeda had no operational relationship.  Last, the Senate Intelligence Committee will soon publish its long-delayed critique of the Bush administration's claims in the buildup to war with Iraq.

Hello again.  I'm the editor of Editor & Publisher and some of you have linked to my articles there during the past few years.  I started posting here one week ago.  The first posting previewed my new book So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq.  Since then I have put up other war-related columns.

Today I offer a look back at that key moment exactly five years ago when the two top Pentagon chiefs, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, totally misrepresented -- some would say lied -- about how easy the post-Saddam  period in Iraq would go down.  Three ways later we invaded.  You know the rest.

The principal justification for the so-called "surge" was to give the Iraqi government some breathing room in order to achieve the elusive goal of "power sharing" between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds necessary to bringing about some as-yet unidentified measure of stability.  The recent news that Iraq’s presidential council has once again shot itself in the foot comes as no surprise to those of us who have been skeptical from the start about the sincerity of these individuals, their real agenda, and that of the Bush Administration.

We knew they'd find a way to sneak him back into the administration.  The Boston Globe reports:

Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president and former deputy secretary of defense who was instrumental in the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, has been named chairman of a panel that advises the State Department on arms-control issues.

"Arms control", as in WMDs.  Oh, the irony...

In case you're wondering where Wolfowitz has been since his demise last year as president of the World Bank, he's been hanging out with the sensitive, thoughtful souls at the American Enterprise Institute.

The State Department panel that he will chair is the ISAB, or the International Security Advisory Board.  As described on the State Department website:

The Secretary of State's International Security Advisory Board (formerly called the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board (ACNAB)) provides the Department with independent insight and advice on all aspects of arms control, disarmament, international security, and related aspects of public diplomacy. The ISAB is sponsored and overseen by the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security. The Board provides its recommendations directly to the Secretary of State.

The Boston Globe article continues with a great quote from an expert in the field of nuclear nonproliferation:

Joseph Cirincione, a senior fellow and director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based policy research group, criticized Wolfowitz's appointment.

"The advice given by Paul Wolfowitz over the past six years ranks among the worst provided by any defense official in history," Cirincione said. "I have no idea why anyone would want more."

As Arms Control Wonk's Jeffrey Lewis mentioned here and here, it's noteworthy that Wolfowitz will be chairing a panel that already leans to the right.  It includes Kathleen Bailey, Amb. Robert Joseph, and Keith B. Payne, who are members of a right wing think tank that has advocated the development of nuclear "bunker busters".  The board also includes James R. Schlesinger (Secretary of Defense under Presidents Nixon and Ford), and former CIA director R. James Woolsey (1993-1995), who, on September 12, 2001, claimed that "the most likely, certainly not the only possibility [behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks) is Iraq."

One of the other board members is William van Cleave, who, like Wolfowitz, was a member of the infamous "Team B", way back when George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA:

The outside experts on Team B were led by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes and included such well-known hawks as Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, and Paul Wolfowitz. Not surprisingly, Team B concluded that the intelligence specialists had badly underestimated the threat because they relied too heavily on hard data, instead of extrapolating the Soviets' intentions from ideology.[1] According to some Team B members, "the principal threat to our nation, to world peace, and to the cause of human freedom was the Soviet drive for dominance based upon an unparalleled military buildup."[2]

Although the Team B report contained little factual data, it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, whose members included Ronald Reagan, and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.  But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate.

[snip]

Team B was right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. In 1989, the agency published an internal review of the threat assessments from 1974 to 1986. The report concluded that the Soviet threat had been "substantially overestimated" every year. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the selection of Team B members yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases.[4] Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate.

In other words, Wolfowitz learned the art of threat inflation way back during the Cold War, and perfected it in the buildup to the Iraq war.  So, he'll definitely be in good company in his new job.

So, what's the next threat inflation project?  Iran?

Maybe it's the clarion call of his old colleague, Donald Rumsfeld, that tugs at his heartstrings of public service.

Wolfowitz Returns to U.S. Government as Adviser

Egad!

I'm giving this it's own thread because it really needs some attention.  There's a thread on KOS this morning that Rice has appointed Wolfowitz to the arms control section of the State Department.

http://www.dailykos.com/...

In another classic example of the motto of the Bush/Cheney administration, "We take care of our own", Paul Wolfowitz has been hired by Condoleeza Rice at the Department of State.

My company is shipping jobs to Asia as fast as it can.  Jobs are being transferred to ‘tertiary sites’.  Isn’t that cute?  That’s what we call offshoring now, transferring jobs to ‘tertiary sites’.  

From a corporate viewpoint, these ‘job transfers’ save hundreds of millions in labor costs each year, freeing the money up for big bonuses.  George Soros also reminds us that corporations see opportunities to make money in China and India in the coming radical realignment of the global economy.

If there were no disasters, how would Republicans and corporations profit?  

Wow this guy is like the mole in "Whack-A-Mole". He just keeps popping back up in the oddest places.

Paul "my spit is my hair tonic" Wolfowitz, liar, war criminal, and all around low-life, has now, after being disgraced and humiliated and forced to leave his position at the World Bank (for being an all around low-life) has landed a new gig, as the head of a State Department advisory panel on -- get this! -- disarmament!  

Paul Wolfowitz is yet again working for our government.

Wolfowitz to head US arms panel

Paul Wolfowitz, the former president of the World Bank, is to head a new US advisory panel on arms control and disarmament, the US state department has said.

From here

So when a nice document comes out talking about all the falsehoods leading to our war, with Wolfowitz being one of the prime figures, what do they do? Hire him again.

With the release of the new report by the The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) on the 900+ lies used by the Bush junta to foment Iraq war-fever and invasion justifications (link: http://www.nytimes.com/... ), one would think it would be "front-page" news at every MSM outlet in the nation, ....but it's not.

One would also think that there would have been calls this morning by Democratic leaders for hearings, investigations, and impeachment proceedings, ....but there's not.

Why?