White House spokesperson Trent Duffy was asked today about how President Bush felt about Cindy Sheehan and what plans he had for the American soldiers fighting in Iraq:

Q Does the President feel that over the last couple of days he’s made an effective and convincing case that Cindy Sheehan is misguided in her feelings about the war and what should happen to the troops?

Duffy responded by quoting the 9/11 Report, saying:

Well, first of all, the President has spoken continuously about the way he approaches this war, following September 11th, 2001. On September 14th, 2001, he stood at the National Cathedral and told all of America that this was going to be a very long and difficult war, and that there were going to be some very trying moments; but that because of what happened on 9/11, that we had to view the world in a different way.

The bipartisan 9/11 commission wrote all about this in chapter two. The name of that chapter is called, The Foundation of the New Terrorism. And the bipartisan commission members wrote about the U.S. reaction to terrorist acts overseas in the years leading up to 9/11. They reached a fundamental conclusion: When America takes a single step backwards in the face of terrorism overseas, it brings the terrorists 50 steps closer to our own shores.

That’s true: The second chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report is indeed named “The Foundation of the New Terrorism.” If the White House had read the actual chapter, however, they would have found the report actually shreds any White House attempts to equate Iraq with 9/11.

On page 66, for example, the report flatly states there was “no evidence” of any collaborative relationship between Saddam and 9/11 and no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with al Qaeda in “developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

(For more on what the 9/11 report actually says, here’s an online, bookmarked copy.)

Note to White House: Before you quote reports to back up bogus justifications, it would be wise to actually read them.

President Bush and his followers have now launched a full-scale defense of his policy in Iraq and a full-on assault on his detractors. And yet their weapon of choice is spin, not strategy. Listening to the president speak about Iraq this week, one had the feeling that he must be living in a parallel universe. Is he unwilling to level with the American people about the cold reality that is Iraq today? Or is he unaware of the minefield he has walked the country into?

The truth hurts. More than 60 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since President Bush went on vacation. Iraq’s interim government has twice missed the deadline for presenting a constitution. The current draft of the constitution not only threatens to create an illiberal Shia theocracy that doesn’t respect the rights of women and religious minorities, but also risks intensifying the current undeclared sectarian civil war. And the president’s approval rating has dropped to an all-time low of 36 percent – lower than Richard Nixon’s approval rating at the height of Watergate. Cindy Sheehan is not the only American who thinks that things aren’t going so well in Iraq.

The White House’s solution to its problems? Sending the president to the friendly environs of Utah and Idaho and putting its spinmeister Dan Bartlett on television to simply insist that “we have the right strategy to prevail.”

As a former White House chief of staff, I can say that the most important duty of a senior advisor is not to say “yes, sir,” but to honestly present the facts and the options available to the country. If the president’s advisors can’t confront the truth or don’t have the courage to tell the president the truth, they shouldn’t have taken the job in the first place.

Instead of spending time plotting motorcade routes to avoid Cindy Sheehan protests, the president’s advisors should be spending their time laying out the situation on the ground and the impact the war is having on terrorist networks, regional stability, sectarian conflict within Iraq, our overstretched ground forces, and U.S. security.

The Center for American Progress has drafted a memo that outlines the facts and challenges in Iraq. This is the memo that the White House Iraq Group should – but probably won’t – send the president.

Read it here.

It hasn’t taken John Bolton long to undermine UN reform efforts. Just three weeks after his recess appointment, Bolton is reversing the work of U.S. negotiators and is seeking to “scrap much of a draft plan for comprehensive UN reform just weeks before it is to be adopted at a world summit.”

In a clear effort to throw a wrench in the gears of UN reform, Bolton wants to “launch line-by-line negotiations on the document, starting from scratch.” Another Bolton idea: “replace the current 38-page draft with a punchier three-page version.”

Line-by-line negotiations would be a disaster. American diplomats were deeply involved in the writing of the draft plan to begin with — reopening the debate on these issues would put the reform effort back at square one. Not to mention the effort to replace the draft with a three page document. How in the world do you reform the UN with a three page document?

The fact is you don’t. It seems that Bolton’s real motive is to turn the September world summit into a fiasco by either making sure that nothing is agreed to, or by making sure that what is agreed to is devoid of any significant reform.

Bolton was sent to the UN not to reform it, but to undermine it, and he’s already hard at work.

– Max Bergmann