The Bush administration has responded to a North Korean missile that doesn’t work by activating an anti-missile system that doesn’t work. From Reuters:

The United States has moved its ground-based interceptor missile defense system from test mode to operational amid concerns over an expected North Korean missile launch, a U.S. defense official said on Tuesday. …

“It’s good to be ready,” the official said.

But we’re not “ready.” The interceptors the administration has placed in silos in Alaska have never been realistically tested and are known to have serious operational problems. They have as much chance of hitting an incoming missile as a kid with a slingshot.

Fortunately, the missile the North Koreans may test does not work either. The last time they fired a long-range missile was in 1998, it went about 1300 killometers and failed to put its tiny payload into orbit.

The North Korean test is a political stunt designed to grab some attention. The same can be said of the decision to activate the Alaska site. The North Koreans want to increase their negotiation leverage; the U.S. Missile Defense Agency wants to protect its massive $10 billion annual budget — “more than the entire U.S. Army is spending on research and development” — for a product that doesn’t work.

We have to hope that neither stunt succeeds.

- Joe Cirincione

In his new book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Ron Suskind details the story of Abu Zubaydah – a man President Bush once described as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” Suskind writes that Bush made this claim despite CIA and FBI analysis that showed Zubaydah was “mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be.” (“This guy is insane, [a] certifiable, split personality,” the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst said.)

Nevertheless, “under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.” Ultimately, his story became an example of how torture doesn’t work.

From the Washington Post’s review of the book:

Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep.

Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each…target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

The answer to your question, President Bush, is “no.”

Today, the Senate will debate a pair of amendments that urge the administration to begin a phased redeployment of American troops out of Iraq. Increasingly, progressives and conservatives are unifying behind two very different approaches to resolving the Iraq conflict. Progressives across the spectrum believe that redeployment of U.S. forces must begin immediately:

“[Sen. Jack] Reed (D-RI) said redeployment should begin ‘as quickly as possible’ to ease the strain on the troops, but added that the measure does not establish a pace.”

Joint statement of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA): “Our troops have done their job in Iraq. It is time to redeploy – to help increase stability in Iraq, and more importantly, to strengthen the national security of the United States.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI): “[The amendment] does urge that a phased redeployment begin this year, partly as a way of moving away from an open-ended commitment and a way of avoiding Iraqi dependency on a U.S. security blanket.”

Conservatives, however, remain wedded to Bush’s stay the course rhetoric, unwilling to make any promises of a near-term departure from Iraq. In defense of Bush, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) said:

Retreat is not an option. Those calling for an early withdrawal of American troops from Iraq utterly fail to understand the potentially catastrophic implications of their proposal.

But in fact, the administration and its conservative allies find themselves out of touch with Iraqi sentiment and are growing more and more isolated in their approach. Today, Iraqi National Security Adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, weighed in decidedly in favor of the progressive approach — the immediate start of a redeployment. Al-Rubaie writes:

Iraq’s ambition is to have full control of the country by the end of 2008. In practice this will mean a significant foreign troop reduction. We envisage the U.S. troop presence by year’s end to be under 100,000, with most of the remaining troops to return home by the end of 2007.

Al-Rubaie joins the Iraqi president, Iraqi vice president, and Iraqi prime minister in calling for a withdrawal to begin soon.

UPDATE: At this afternoon’s press briefing, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli was asked about the Al-Rubaie op-ed. “Frankly, I didn’t read it that carefully,” he said.