After disastrously invading and occupying Iraq, one of the justifications President Bush frequently offered for sustaining the enormous U.S. costs in lives and resources was that we were developing a “key ally” in the Middle East:

Together we’ll help Iraq become a strong democracy that protects the rights of its people and is a key ally in the war on terror. [9/22/05]

Our mission in Iraq is clear. … We’re helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We’re advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. [6/28/05]

Freedom will prevail in Iraq; freedom will prevail in the Middle East; and as the hope of freedom spreads to nations that have not known it, these countries will become allies in the cause of peace. [3/20/06]

The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss notes that — in a central test of the U.S. alliance with Iraq — our “key ally” is instead more eager to disassociate itself completely from the United States:

Just as they did during Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, Iraq’s leaders are now showing where their true sympathies lie. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Da’wa Party “issued a statement condemning the attacks and calling on Islamic countries to cut relations with Israel and end all ’secret and public talks’ with it.”

Khalid Hussain of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) told Gulf News “We have obligations towards Palestine and all Iraqi people are in solidarity with the people in Palestine, and we will support the people in Gaza.” [...]

“Iraqi resistance groups have to retaliate against the Israeli aggression on Gaza by escalating their operations against the US military in Iraq since the US position is in favour of this aggression, firstly, and secondly because the United States and Israel are both enemies of the Arabs,” Omar Al Kubaisi, an activist of the Sunni Muslim Clerics Association.

Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Sistani has also condemned the Gaza strikes. Duss concludes, “Looking on the bright side, if one can call it that, as with opposition to the U.S. occupation, Gaza is an issue on which Iraqis have achieved rare political consensus.”

Of the various premises on which the U.S. invasion of Iraq was sold to the American people, one of the most bizarre was that a post-Saddam Iraqi government would be friendly to Israel. As with claims about WMD and Al Qaeda connections, this one has proved to be a work of imagination.

Just as they did during Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, Iraq’s leaders are now showing where their true sympathies lie. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Da’wa Party “issued a statement condemning the attacks and calling on Islamic countries to cut relations with Israel and end all ‘secret and public talks’ with it.”

Khalid Hussain of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) told Gulf News “We have obligations towards Palestine and all Iraqi people are in solidarity with the people in Palestine, and we will support the people in Gaza.”

Liwa Smeisim, Head of the Sadr’s political movement, has called for demonstrations in various Iraqi cities in solidarity with the people of Gaza and is also raising money to send to Gaza.

“Palestinian blood which was shed in Gaza and Iraqi blood which was shed in the Iraqi city of Kadhimiya [in reference to the bombing, which occurred in Baghdad at the time of the Israeli aggression on Gaza] is one blood,” Omar Abdul Sattar of the Islamic Party told Gulf News.

Iraqi parliamentarians called for the convening of a special session of parliament to discuss the situation in Gaza and the nature of the Iraqi move to support the Palestinians and stop Israeli aggression.

“Iraqi resistance groups have to retaliate against the Israeli aggression on Gaza by escalating their operations against the US military in Iraq since the US position is in favour of this aggression, firstly, and secondly because the United States and Israel are both enemies of the Arabs,” Omar Al Kubaisi, an activist of the Sunni Muslim Clerics Association.

Iraq’s senior Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Sistani also issued a statement condemning the Gaza strikes. (Juan Cole has the English translation.) Iraqis all over the country expressed solidarity with the Palestinians.

Looking on the bright side, if one can call it that, as with opposition to the U.S. occupation, Gaza is an issue on which Iraqis have achieved rare political consensus.

Commenting on Israel’s attack on Gaza, NRO’s Andy McCarthy wonders whether the strikes will “demonstrate that terrorism is a loser for those who vote for it.”

The question is whether the Palestinian people are educable. Which brings me back to the first point: the Palestinians voted to put in power — i.e., vest with the power of a quasi-sovereign government — a terrorist organization which thinks legitimate governing consists of bringing about the annihilation of its sovereign neighbor and, meantime, targeting the said neighbor’s civilian population with bombing attacks. When you do that, you make yourself a target.

It’s one thing to defend Israel’s disproportionate attacks as a legitimate attempt to destroy Hamas’ capacity to launch rockets into Israel, but it’s quite another to defend them as an attempt to “educate” the Palestinian people. The former is debatable, the latter is a forthright embrace of terrorism, the use of force against civilians to achieve a political goal.

McCarthy’s advocacy of violence against people who vote the wrong way raises an obvious question. Granting, for the moment, McCarthy’s simplistic interpretation of Hamas’ election, (which was more a vote against Fatah’s incompetence and corruption than it was for Israel’s destruction) if Palestinian civilians have made themselves targets by voting into power a party that advocates the destruction of Israel, have Israeli civilians made themselves targets by voting into power successive governments that have continued a military occupation while expropriating Palestinian land? Have Americans made themselves targets by voting in governments that support that occupation? According to McCarthy’s reasoning, the answer to both questions is yes.

This is very similar to the justification offered by Osama bin Laden for attacks on American civilians in his November 2002 “Letter to the American People“:

The American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.[...]

This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.

Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy. And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.

This is the rhetorical company in which McCarthy now finds himself. While we shouldn’t be surprised that there are many things that conservative extremists from all cultures agree on, decent and reasonable people should agree that there is no legitimate justification for intentional violence against civilians, by anyone.

This morning on CBS, Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver interviewed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In a portion of the interview that does not appear to have aired, Braver noted the results of the recent Pew Global Attitudes survey which found that “the U.S. image abroad is suffering almost everywhere.” Braver prompted Rice saying, “It has to be more than just a perception problem.” Rice dismissed the poll’s results, claiming that the Bush administration has “left a lot of good foundations”:

Q: Looking at the big picture of what’s the whole foreign policy of this Administration – you come out of the academic tradition so I think it’s fair to ask, what kind of grade do you give yourself and this Administration on foreign policy?

RICE: Oh, I don’t know. It depends on the subject. I’m sure that there are some that deserve an A-plus and some that deserve a lot less. … We’ve left a lot of good foundations.

Q: You know, you say that, but the Pew Global Attitudes Project released a new report very recently. On the very first page it says, “The U.S. image abroad is suffering almost everywhere.” … It has to be more than just a perception problem.

RICE: No. Rita, first of all, it depends on where you’re talking about. In two of the most populous countries, China and India, the United States is not just well regarded for its policies, but well regarded.

When pressed further, Rice responded by saying, “It’s not a popularity contest.”

While the U.S. is indeed well-regarded in India, Rice’s claim that the U.S. is “well regarded” in China is puzzling. The Pew Survey that Braver noted found that in China, the U.S. is viewed favorably by just 41 percent of the country. Similarly, just 30 percent of China has confidence in the Bush administration. A BBC poll from April of this year found similar results for many other nations around the world.

Overall, the Bush administration’s foreign policy agenda has seen few successes. U.S. influence abroad is predicted to decline over the next 20 years. The U.S. military is weaker now than it was five years ago, while the State Department is suffering from staffing shortages and low morale. The recent violence in Israel dramatically highlights the fact that Bush largely ignored the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

No matter how many times Rice repeats herself, the fact that the world does not look kindly on the Bush administration’s foreign policy record will not change.

Also during the interview, Rice would soon “start to thank this president for what he’s done.”

As conservatives grapple with Bush’s foreign policy legacy, a number of writers have lamented Bush’s retreat from the democracy promotion aspect of the Bush Doctrine. (I’ve argued that the flaws of Bush’s foreign policy itself have necessitated that retreat.)

In the Washington Times, Daniel Gallington takes a different approach. He argues that democracy promotion has been a waste of time, but that the other part of the Bush Doctrine — the part where America attacks other countries — has been a huge success.

Sad, because part of the doctrine — “preemption” — will continue to be U.S. policy, however it may be described by the Obama administration. Ironically perhaps, it’s the “democracy” part of the Bush Doctrine that has failed under the Bush administration, primarily because of fuzzy thinking and poor execution at the senior policy level.

The idea behind preemption is simple: Because our free (and soft-target) society is so vulnerable to Sept. 11-style sneak attacks from terrorists, we have adopted a policy to attack the attackers before they attack us.[...]

No American political administration, Republican, Democrat, liberal or conservative — anything short of a pacifist one — would stand by and do nothing if it were convinced that an attack on America was about to take place.

The reason none of this seems very controversial is that it has nothing to do with the Bush Doctrine, which asserted not the right of preemption, but of prevention, the right of the United States to attack any country that it determined may pose a threat in the future.

The careless confusion of these two terms has been a common problem in discussions of Bush’s foreign policy, as it’s enabled supporters of the Bush Doctrine to pretend that it’s less radical than it actually is.

Just as do all nation states, America under an Obama administration will continue to assert the right of preemption. But it will also hopefully abjure the right of prevention, which in its single application — Iraq — has proven completely calamitous.

As for the U.S.’s “‘democracy’ policy in Iraq”, Gallington is not having it:

Come on, the various religious and tribal factions there don’t want anything to do with democracy because it requires compromise – and they can’t do that any more than anyone else in the region. These aren’t Republicans and Democrats; these are people (mostly poorly educated and highly indoctrinated men) who have long sworn to kill each other for various sins and atrocities of the past – and have taken turns doing it over the past few thousand years.

Meanwhile, while all this killing was going on, we in the glorious civilized West were sitting around in libraries writing constitutions. No, that’s a joke. The truth is that, in terms of raw numbers, Europe probably engaged in more mass murder in the twentieth century alone than the previous thousand years in the Middle East.

I’m always grateful when conservatives engage in this sort of naked, ignorant bigotry, though. It’s good to let readers know where they, and we, really stand.

Yesterday, the Iraqi government announced its intention to expel the anti-Iranian Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK) from Iraq:

“The Iraqi government is responsible for their security and it continues to implement its plans to shut down the camp and to either deport its population to their country or to a third country,” it said in a statement after the visit led by Iraqi national security advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie.

“Remaining in Iraq is not an option for them,” the statement added.

The MEK, also known as the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI), is the largest and most militant group opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

MEK was founded in the 1960s by a group of college-educated Iranian leftists opposed to the country’s pro-Western ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Although the group took part in the 1979 Islamic revolution that replaced the shah with a Shiite Islamist regime, MEK’s ideology, a blend of Marxism and Islamism, put it at odds with the post-revolutionary government. In 1981, the group was driven from its bases on the Iran-Iraq border and resettled in Paris, where it began supporting Iraq in its eight-year war against Khomeini’s Iran. In 1986, MEK moved its headquarters to Iraq where it received its primary support to attack the regime in Iran.

While it’s now understood that, despite the Bush administration’s claims, Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have any significant relationship with Al Qaeda, Saddam did have relationships with other terrorist organizations, one of which was the MEK. In addition to receiving financial, logistical and material support from from Saddam to carry out attacks inside Iran, “MEK forces also assisted the Iraq regime in the repression of Kurds and other minorities in northern Iraq.”

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Sec. Donald Rumsfeld declared the MEK “protected persons” under the Fourth Geneva Conventions, which is to say that a designated terrorist group known to have carried out attacks that killed Americans enjoyed greater legal protections than your average Iraqi picked up after curfew. The decision to protect the MEK — possibly for the purpose of carrying out future attacks against Iran — also revealed one of the underlying premises of the U.S. war on terror — the idea that we would make “no distinction” between terrorists and those who harbor them — to be just empty rhetoric.

This was not lost on Iran. Understandably irritated by the U.S.’s sheltering and protecting an anti-Iranian terrorist organization, the Iranian government has long demanded that the U.S. disband the MEK and and repatriate its members. (In 1981, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali al-Khamenei, who was then the president, survived an MEK bomb attack in which he lost the use of his right arm.) Now it seems they may get their wish.

Interestingly, the Iraqi government’s announcement was made just days before Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is due to visit Tehran. Clearly, the decision to grant one of Tehran’s dearest requests and expel a US-allied, anti-Iranian terrorist organization represents another huge blow to the theory that Tehran enjoys influence in the Iraqi government.

In an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace yesterday morning, Vice President Cheney defended the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, and claimed that the congressional leaders briefed on the program wholeheartedly approved. In fact, Cheney claimed, when the White House asked if it needed congressional approval for the program, they unanimously agreed it did not:

CHENEY: We briefed them on the program and what we’d achieved and how it worked and asked them should we continue the program. They were unanimous, Republican and Democrat alike. All agreed: Absolutely essential to continue the program. I then said, Do we need to come to the Congress and get additional legislating authorization to continue what we’re doing? They said absolutely not. Don’t do it.

Watch it:

Cheney’s startling claims run directly counter to accounts by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). Rather than asking for congressional input, Pelosi and Rockefeller said in 2005 that Cheney simply informed them of what was going on — and ignored their objections:

PELOSI: The Bush Administration considered these briefings to be notification, not a request for approval. As is my practice whenever I am notified about such intelligence activities, I expressed my strong concerns during these briefings.

ROCKEFELLER: The record needs to be set clear that the Administration never afforded members briefed on the program an opportunity to either approve or disapprove the NSA program.

Other congressional members who attended those briefings have said that they were told only the barest outlines of the program. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Jane Harman (D-CA) said that the White House never disclosed that it was skirting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. Former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) said the same thing:

The assumption was that if we did that, we would do it pursuant to the law, the law that regulates the surveillance of national security issues. And there was no suggestion that we were going to begin eavesdropping on United States citizens without following the full law. … There was no reference made to the fact that we were going to use that as the subterfuge to begin unwarranted, illegal — and I think unconstitutional — eavesdropping on American citizens.

What’s more, Rockefeller, then vice-chairman of the Intelligence Committee, wrote a hand-written letter to Cheney in 2003 to “reiterate [his] concerns” about the wiretapping program. “I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities,” he wrote.

Cheney claims to have suggested seeking congressional approval right away. However, the White House put up a stiff fight just a few years later, when Congress finally sought to impose oversight of the wiretapping program. The Vice President has already presented misleading information about the dates and frequency of these supposed briefings; now he appears to be offering misleading descriptions of them.

Ten years ago today, Ray LaHood was gaveling in House impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Today, President-elect Barack Obama announced that he would be serving as the next Secretary of Transportation.

LaHood is a moderate Republican who has broken with his party over Amtrak funding, voting yes last summer to expand passenger rail service. He also broke with the GOP on the Saving Energy Through Transportation Act. In 2005, he told the Peoria Journal-Star, “We’ve got a good Amtrak system in Illinois and I don’t think we want to destroy it by talking about privatization.”

Friends of the Earth responded to the LaHood nomination by saying: “While his overall record on energy and environment issues is poor, LaHood has in recent years broken with many in his party to support crucial investments in passenger rail and public transportation, and he is a member of the Congressional Bike Caucus.” LaHood also supported the bicycle commuter benefit bill.

But while LaHood has certain strengths, working long hours away from home doesn’t appear to be one of them. When Democrats ousted the right-wing Do-Nothing Congress in 2006, LaHood worried about returning to a five-day work week:

Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), 61, one of those who announced he’s packing it in, said that the Democrats’ new five-day workweek made traveling back home that much more difficult.

“I do think the schedule and the flying is a huge pain for people, particularly those who are from the Midwest or even further West,” he said, adding that it’s “probably the worst part of the job.”

“I think that has played into these retirement announcements,” said the seven-term congressman from Peoria.

In May 2007, LaHood was part of an 11-person group that went to the White House to urge Bush to change direction on Iraq, a brazen act which earned him the wrath of Karl Rove. LaHood continued to support the Bush strategy in Iraq.

Over the last two years — after announcing his early retirement from the House — LaHood has been more open to criticizing Republicans. “The [GOP] strategy is to lay low and then blame [Democrats] for not getting anything done,” he said. “The truth is, we all lose.” He also heralded the new House leadership: “They [Democratic leaders] can send their members home crowing about their accomplishments, and they’ve done it in a bipartisan way, which is exactly what they promised to do.”

Last night on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) ardently defended the Bush administration’s torture policy, echoing Vice President Cheney’s claim that torture yielded life-saving results. He pointed to waterboarding Abu Zubayda and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was remarkably successful. “After this procedure,” Duncan said, “we got enormously valuable information that saved American lives.” Watch it:

Despite Hunter’s claims, the torture of Abu Zubayda and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed provided next to zero useful intelligence, as a recent Vanity Fair article revealed:

But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total f*cking bullsh*t.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

In fact, the article explained that the “intelligence” gleaned from Zubayda was false information about non-existent links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein — information the Bush administration seized on as a major part of its argument for the Iraq war, as a former Pentagon analyst explained:

“The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.” [...]

“The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence. … It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective.”

Rather than “saving American lives,” torturing Zubayda provided false intelligence that led to a catastrophic war that killed more than 4,000 Americans. What’s more, as former interrogators and military officials have said, torture has directly led to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers through its use as an effective recruiting tool for al Qaeda and insurgents.

The New York Times reports that “up to 35 officials in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior ranking as high as general have been arrested over the past three days with some of them accused of quietly working to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.”

The arrests, confirmed by officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security as well as the prime minister’s office, included four generals. The officials also said that the arrests had come at the hand of an elite counterterrorism force that reports directly to the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Maliki’s creation of military units answerable only to himself and the inner circle of his Da’wa Party has been a growing issue. Musings on Iraq had this overview in October:

Since the security operation in Basra in March 2008 Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been organizing local tribes to back the security forces and his government. So far these Tribal Support Councils have been established in Basra, Maysan, Babil, Wasit, Karbala, Dhi Qar, and Baghdad provinces. They are paid $21,000 by Baghdad when they first form, then receive $10,000 a month afterwards. They answer directly to Maliki’s office.

This has caused increasing tensions with the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC) who rules most of the south. The SIIC is afraid that Maliki will use these sheikhs to help his Dawa party gain seats in the upcoming provincial elections. The Prime Minister has publicly declared that the councils are non-partisan in nature, and that he would disband any that are allied with a party, but their political nature is apparent to everyone.

Recently, a tribal leader in southern Iraq publicly said what has been an open secret for months now that the Tribal Support Councils are meant to sway voters to Maliki’s Dawa party. Sheikh Nabil Sagban, the head of the Fatla tribe and a Tribal Support Council in Qadisiyah, said that the provincial elections are causing increasing tensions between Dawa and the SIIC. Each one is looking to gain followers before the balloting in early 2009. The tribes are in the middle as they can influence large numbers of Iraqis, especially in rural areas. The coming of a Support Council to the Fatla area of Qadisiyah seemed to work for Maliki as the sheikh declared he would vote for Dawa, and that he would tell his tribesmen to do the same.

In November, Iraq’s presidential council demanded that Maliki “suspend pro-government tribal councils so their legality could be reviewed.”

“We demand that you intervene to order a halt to the work of these councils until there is agreement about them, in order to provide administrative and legal cover for them,” the council said in a letter posted on its website.

The so-called Support Councils have already drawn fire from Iraq’s two main Kurdish parties, who earlier this month accused Maliki of creating his own militias to consolidate Baghdad’s grip on ethnically mixed regions.

While the Kurds in the north and Maliki’s Shia rivals in the south accuse Maliki of using these militias to strengthen his party’s hold in advance of January elections, Maliki has apparently learned from his Bush administration sponsors in that you can do pretty much anything you want as long as you call it “fighting terrorism.”

In recent days, Vice President Cheney has been vociferously defending the Bush administration’s detention policies. On Monday, he told Rush Limbaugh that Guantanamo Bay has been “very well run” and mocked President-elect Obama’s promise to close the facility. “I think they’ll discover that trying to close it is a very hard proposition,” said Cheney. More from the interview:

CHENEY: Remember, these are unlawful combatants. These are people who don’t belong to any recognized military force. They don’t obey the rules of warfare. They’re unlawful combatants. And you can’t — if you’re not going to have a place to locate them like Guantanamo, then you either have to bring them here to the continental United States — and I don’t know any member of Congress who’s volunteering to have al Qaeda terrorists deposited in his district — or you’ve got to turn them over to some foreign government.

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will continue to serve under Obama, disputed Cheney’s skepticism. While Gates admitted that shutting down Guantanamo would be difficult, he said that all the potential problems are “solvable.” “I would like to see it closed,” said Gates. “And I think it will be a high priority for the new administration.” Watch it:

In his first weeks as Bush’s defense secretary, Gates also argued that Guantanamo needed to be shut down. According to the New York Times, Gates “urged that trials of terrorism suspects be moved to the United States, both to make them more credible and because Guantánamo’s continued existence hampered the broader war effort, administration officials said.” However, he was overruled by Cheney and then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales. (CAP’s Ken Gude has put together a plan on how to safely close Guantanamo and transfer the detainees.)

Transcript: Read more

This morning, CNN aired an exit interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. During the interview, reporter Zain Verjee asked Rice if she “regretted her role in the Iraq war.” Rice responded by saying that she had no regrets about the war and is “absolutely so proud” of invading Iraq:

QUESTION: Do you regret your role in the Iraq war?

SECRETARY RICE: I absolutely am so proud that we liberated Iraq.

QUESTION: Really?

SECRETARY RICE: Absolutely. And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Watch it:

Rice’s pride is misplaced. Indeed, leaving aside the fact that the war was predicated on false intelligence, Rice cannot credibly argue as a “political scientist” that invading Iraq was in the interest of the U.S. “geostrategically.”

Indeed, Iraq posed no military threat to the United States in 2003. As Rice herself explained in July of 2001, Saddam Hussein had been unable to reconstitute himself militarily following the 1991 Gulf War. More importantly, the invasion of Iraq destabilized the region and empowered Iran politically and militarily. And contrary to neo-conservative predictions, Iran accelerated its nuclear weapons program in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Contrary to Rice’s assessment of the strategic value of the war in Iraq, a group of the some of the nation’s most celebrated political scientists argued in a paid advertisement in the New York Times on the eve of the Iraq war that the invasion was not in America’s strategic interests and predicted several of the negative effects of the war:

View the full ad here.

Despite her pride, Rice was — and remains — wrong about invading Iraq.

In an interview earlier this week, Vice President Cheney admitted to personally approving the torture of high-profile detainees. In a new interview with the Washington Times, Cheney stridently defended the Bush administration’s torture policies, saying, “I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do.” He added emphatically that he would “do exactly the same thing again.”

Most audaciously, Cheney specifically defended the morality of torture, suggesting that it would have been immoral for the United States to not torture:

“In my mind, the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in, on January 20 of 2001, to protect and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. And that’s what we’ve done,” he said. [...]

“I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said.

Cheney insisted that the torture policies he helped craft were “directly responsible for the fact that we’ve been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for 7 1/2 years.”

Torture has endangered, not protected, American lives. Military experts say that the U.S.’s torture policies have been the single greatest recruiting tool for al Qaeda. A former interrogator who worked in Iraq stated unequivocally, “The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001.”

Rather than keeping us safe, former FBI special agent Jack Cloonan warned that Cheney’s torture policies will lead directly to another domestic terrorist attack:

Based on my experience in talking to Al Qaida members, I am persuaded that revenge in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland is coming; that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans; and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.

Cheney appeared unconcerned about the possibility of being held legally responsible for what many are calling an admission of war crimes. He insisted that waterboarding was not torture, and explained, “We spent a great deal of time and effort getting legal advice.” However, speaking on MSNBC last night, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) said, “You can’t just suddenly change something that is illegal into something that is legal by having a lawyer write an opinion that saying it’s legal.”

The Bush White House is in full-throttle spin mode, attempting to repair the President’s badly tarnished legacy. This afternoon, Fox News lent a hand in the effort to revise history. In an interview with White House press spokesman Tony Fratto, Fox anchor Jon Scott claimed that, prior to 9/11, “nobody was thinking” that terrorists could fly planes into buildings as an act of terrorism. Fratto agreed:

SCOTT: Back to the 9/11 attacks, which happened after all pretty early in this president’s first term, I mean nobody was thinking that there’d be terrorists flying 767s into buildings at that point. …

FRATTO: That’s true. I mean, no one could have anticipated that kind of attack — or very few people.

Watch it:

In fact, intelligence analysts had been warning for some time that terrorists could hijack planes. On December 4, 1998, for example, the Clinton administration received a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” The Clinton administration responded by convening its top counterterrorism experts and heightening security at airports around the nation.

On August 6, 2001, the Bush administration received a President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” The memo warned:

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a —- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

Moreover, the Federal Aviation Administration “had indeed considered the possibility that terrorists would hijack a plane and use it as a weapon,” and in 2001 it distributed a CD-ROM presentation to airlines and airports that cited the possibility of a suicide hijacking.

In response to that threat warning, the Bush administration did nothing. The 9/11 Commission reports, “We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States.”

In the latest stop in his “legacy tour,” President Bush spoke at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania earlier today.

Choosing the War College for the one of the last legs of Bush’s victory limp is deeply ironic. As Dan Froomkin notes, “more than a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, the War College published a prescient report — Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario — that the White House essentially ignored.”

As James Fallows wrote for the Atlantic in 2004, the report warned of ethnic and regional tensions, advised that Iraqis would quickly turn against an occupying force and set out a 135-item checklist of key tasks that might have avoided disaster.

Then, in December of 2003, the college published a scathing report saying the war in Iraq was not only distracting from the real war on terror, but that Bush was pursuing an “unrealistic” quest that might lead to wars with states posing no serious threat.

Bush nevertheless chose the War College as the site of a major speech about the war in May 2004 — a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to reverse the growing tide of public discontent over a campaign that had turned increasingly violent.

But the real purpose of siting the speech at the War College was to allow Bush one of his final opportunities to bask in the reflected glory of the United States military. Throughout his presidency, Bush has made much of his role as commander-in-chief. He has regularly used the accoutrements of soldiery to cultivate an image of himself as a “war leader.” This is pretty unseemly for someone who, when he was of age, used his family’s connections to avoid combat in a war he claims to have supported. But it’s even more so given that few, if any, American leaders in history have more poorly served America’s military than George W. Bush.

As Center for American Progress senior fellow Lawrence Korb said in congressional testimony in July 2007, “America’s ground forces are stretched to their breaking point.”

Not since the aftermath of the Vietnam War has the U.S. Army been so depleted…The Army is severely overstretched and its overall readiness has significantly declined. As Gen. Colin Powell noted last December [2006] well before the surge, the active Army is about broken, and as Gen. Barry McCaffrey pointed out when we testified together before the Senate Armed Services Committee in April [2007], “the ground combat capability of the U.S. armed forces is shot.” The Marine Corps is suffering from the same strains as the Army, and the situation for the Army National Guard is even worse.

A March 2008 survey of military officers conducted by Foreign Policy and the Center for a New American Security found that “the U.S. military is ‘severely strained‘ by two large-scale occupations in the Middle East, other troop deployments, and problems recruiting.”

“They see a force stretched dangerously thin and a country ill-prepared for the next fight,” said the report, ‘The U.S. Military Index,’ which polled 3,400 current and former high-level military officers.

Sixty percent of the officers surveyed said that the military is weaker now than it was five years ago, often citing the number of troops deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush is of course right to praise the service of America’s fighting forces. But it’s also important to recognize that, in exchange for volunteering to put their lives on the line, the men and women of our military enter into a bargain with the American people. They sign up based upon the understanding that they and their families will be taken care of, and that their sacrifice will not be thrown away in unnecessary wars and grinding occupations to implement unrealistic schemes sold with dishonest arguments. George W. Bush has violated this bargain. That is a part of his legacy that he cannot escape, no matter how many flags he stands before.

During a press conference yesterday in New York, a reporter asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to “look philosophically” at the state of diplomacy after eight years of the Bush administration and to think of “lessons we can draw out.” Rice then took the opportunity to polish up her boss’s record with the United Nations:

RICE: I think that the United States, under President Bush, has actually used the mechanisms and the councils of the United Nations more than they’ve been used maybe ever, whether it is insisting that Security Council resolutions that have been passed be respected, [or] whether it is seeking to deal with human rights and tyranny cases like Zimbabwe or Burma.

Indeed, the Bush White House has been spending a lot of time lately trying to rewrite the history of the last eight years, mainly due to the fact that President Bush’s failed policies have made him one of the most unpopular outgoing U.S. presidents in modern history.

But Rice has been playing along as well and this latest attempt at legacy building has no basis in reality. The Bush administration’s complete disregard of the U.N.’s will during the run-up to the Iraq war is the obvious example. The administration completely ignored the work of the U.N.’s weapons inspectors (UNMOVIC) at that time and instead attacked Iraq on false WMD pretenses before they could finish the job. Moreover, in 2004, then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called the U.S.-led invasion illegal and “not in conformity with the U.N. charter.”

In 2004, the Bush administration also tried (and failed) to remove Mohamed El-Baradei as head of the IAEA — the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog — for being too soft on Iran.

But to top it all off, in 2005, President Bush installed U.N. hater and fervent war hawk John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the world body. Bush wanted Bolton so badly, he “resorted to the 17-month recess appointment to circumvent” opposition to Bolton in the Senate. Bolton famously said “there is no such thing as the United Nations” and if the U.N. building in New York “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

Bush even found space to criticize the U.N. in his final address to the general assembly, saying the organization “only pass[es] resolutions decrying terrorist attacks after they occur” instead of doing something to prevent them “in the first place.”

In 2006, Annan’s deputy, Mark Malloch Brown noted that “[i]n recent years the enormously divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to define an unhappy marriage” between the U.S. and the U.N. Indeed, new U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said he looks forward to “a new era of partnership” with Obama.

In a new interview with ABC News, Vice President Cheney claimed that the the case for war had nothing to do with whether Saddam Hussein had WMD; America would have invaded anyway. Today on MSNBC’s Hardball, right-wing commentator Frank Gaffney defended Cheney’s remarks, saying that the “real reason” the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq was because Saddam was a “mortal threat” to the United States.

Host Chris Matthews was appalled that Gaffney seemed to feel no guilt or remorse than 4,000 Americans died because of the right wing’s mistakes. Gaffney replied that while it was “regrettable” anyone had to die, they “did have to die”:

MATTHEWS: You guys sold the war as a nuclear threat to the United States. A nuclear weapon was going to be delivered by a nuclear delivery device. It was going to take the weapon and drop it here. You sold every trick you could to get us into this war. Now you’re back pedaling. And I do find it astounding. The Vice President of the United States is —

GAFFNEY: How do you feel, Chris?

MATTHEWS: This is how I feel. Four thousand people are dead because of how you feel. And Frank, you’re wrong about this because you don’t even seem to care your facts were wrong.

GAFFNEY: Chris, there were —

MATTHEWS: You admit your facts were wrong and it doesn’t bother you.

GAFFNEY: May I state my position rather than you stating it? May I do that? My position is that it’s regrettable that any Americans died. It is regrettable that they had to die, but I believe they did have to die.

Watch it:

Four thousand Americans didn’t die in Iraq because they had to. They died because of the Bush administration’s hubris. Matt Yglesias explains:

The harsh reality is that this was not a noble undertaking done for good reasons. It was a criminal enterprise launched by madmen cheered on by a chorus of fools and cowards. And it’s seen as such by virtually everyone all around the world — including but by no means limited to the Arab world.

But it’s impolitic to point this out in the United States, and it’s clear that even a president-elect who had the wisdom not to be suckered in by the War Fever of 2002 has no intention of really acting to marginalize the bad actors. Which, I think, makes sense for his political objectives. But if Americans want to play a constructive role in world affairs, it’s vitally important for us to get in touch with the reality of what the past eight years of US foreign policy have been and how they’re seen and understood by people who aren’t stirred by the shibboleths of American patriotism.

Max Boot discovers that there’s no such thing as Santa:

The president has consistently talked a good game when it comes to democracy promotion, stopping weapons proliferation and other important goals, but his actions have just as consistently fallen short. Inaction is defensible — because there is always a good case to be made for caution in international affairs. But why then has his rhetoric been so incautious? The combination leads to the suspicion that there is no underlying strategy, merely a disconnect between what the White House speechwriters churn out and what the rest of the government actually does.

Can Boot really be this credulous? Or is he truly among the last to grasp that an administration staffed by some of the least liberal people in American politics — people who themselves have shown nothing but disdain for the actual procedures and processes of democracy — was not particularly suited to the task of cultivating liberal democracy abroad?

Meanwhile, bemoaning the heartless realpolitik of the Obama administration that hasn’t even begun yet, Fouad Ajami strings these words together on the page:

[The] Obama reticence about those burning grounds of the Islamic world is, in part, a matter of biography. The Islamic faith was the faith of his father. A candidate with the middle name of Hussein could not afford soaring rhetoric about the ability of freedom to survive on Islamic soil.

Just to be clear: In addition to pre-emptively condemning President Obama’s as-yet-hypothetical foreign policy, Ajami also locates the reason for Obama’s imaginary abandonment of freedom’s cause in Obama’s father’s Muslim background. This is more than just silly, this is dangerously close to Daniel Pipes territory.

Ajami continues:

In contrast, George W. Bush had been free and confident enough to take up the cause of reform and drastic change in the Islamic world. True, he did not know much about the ways of those lands, but neither did Woodrow Wilson. His doctrine of self-determination in the aftermath of the Great War, and the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, endures as the most consequential and revolutionary American message taken to the lands of old empires.[...]

A circle was closed between that Wilsonian policy and the massive American push into Arab and Islamic lands by George W. Bush.

One thing is sure to go with Mr. Bush when he departs to Crawford, Texas: his “diplomacy of freedom.” That diplomacy — which propelled the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which drove the Syrians out of Lebanon after they had all but destroyed the sovereignty of that country, and had challenged pro-American allies in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula — is gone for good.

So, in contrast to Obama, whose ethnic/religious/cultural background makes him alien to the principle of self-determination, George W. Bush had the confidence to take up the white man’s burden. And didn’t it work great for a while! Until it didn’t. Good lord.

Antique cultural essentialism aside, as with Jackson Diehl last Friday, what neither Boot nor Ajami seem able to grasp is that while Bush’s ideas about promoting democracy in the Middle East may have been admirable, his actual plans for promoting democracy the Middle East were deeply and irretrievably stupid. In the end, Bush’s pro-freedom rhetoric has proved hollow because his pro-freedom policies consisted of kidnapping, torture, and indefinite detention, invading and occupying foreign countries, enabling a sectarian civil war in which hundreds of thousands were killed and maimed and several millions displaced, all of which contributed to previously unseen levels of anti-Americanism while further empowering some of the most conservative, undemocratic forces in the region. The question Boot and Ajami should be asking is why they went along with it.

Our guest blogger is Maggie Fick, Special Assistant on the policy team at the ENOUGH Project.

Last week, the New York Times, Human Rights Watch, and the Enough Project provided detailed accounts of the summary executions of an estimated 150 civilians by rebel leader Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP militia in the key town of Kiwanja in eastern Congo. While the rebels terrorized the population of Kiwanja in what HRW called “one of the worst killing sprees” in North Kivu province in the past two years, a contingent of over 100 U.N. peacekeepers was stationed less than a mile away. The New York Times called the Kiwanja massacre a “textbook example” of the continuing failure of MONUC (Mission of the United Nations Organization in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the world’s largest international peacekeeping force, to protect Congolese people.

Some have already characterized MONUC’s tragic failure in Kiwanja as a “lack of capacity” problem among UN peacekeeping missions. I agree with UN Dispatch blogger Mark Leon Goldberg, who argues that Kiwanja should not be used as a chance to rant against UN peacekeeping. However, an Enough Project report released yesterday makes the important argument that MONUC’s consistent failure to protect civilians and deter ongoing violence is due “less to inadequate force levels and more to a glaring lack of political will” in the international community.

When the Security Council renews MONUC’s mandate (pdf) this month, it must work with troop-contributing countries to make explicit that peacekeepers can and should use deadly force to defend civilians against armed groups (including the predatory Congolese army). Furthermore, the Security Council should make clear that failure to execute this mandate will not be tolerated.

On the subject of political will, it should be noted that MONUC will yet again be left out to dry unless the international community throws its full weight behind sustained diplomatic efforts to deal with the root causes of the chronic crisis in Congo: the FDLR, the illicit trade in minerals, longstanding land and citizenship issues, and the war economy that has allowed warring parties — including regional governments — to reap profits from the warfare in Congo for over a decade.

Today, Vice President Cheney continued the Bush administration’s legacy tour by appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Limbaugh’s hard-hitting questions included, “What are you most proud of?” and praise such as, “Over the years when I’ve spoken to you, you have purposely avoided any partisanship, because I know that this has been a policy of the administration.

At one point, Limbaugh mocked President-elect Obama’s promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Cheney agreed and defended Guantanamo, saying that it has been “very well run”:

CHENEY: I think so. I think Guantanamo has been very well run. I think if you look at it from the perspective of the requirements we had, once you go out and capture a bunch of terrorists, as we did in Afghanistan and elsewhere, then you’ve got to have some place to put them. If you bring them here to the U.S. and put them in our local court system, then they are entitled to all kinds of rights that we extend only to American citizens. [...]

So Guantanamo has been very, very valuable. And I think they’ll discover that trying to close it is a very hard proposition.

Listen here:

One reason that Obama has a better chance of closing Guantanamo is that he won’t have Cheney over his shoulder. President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have all said that they would like to close the detention facility. However, these efforts have been repeatedly blocked by officials in Cheney’s office, who object to moving detainees into the United States.

Guantanamo is not well-run, and its presence is putting U.S. servicemembers at risk rather than saving lives. As former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora has explained, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are “the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq.” (CAP’s Ken Gude has put together a plan on how to safely close Guantanamo and transfer the detainees.)

In recent months, other current and former White House officials have been out highlighting Guantanamo as a positive part of Bush’s legacy. Last week, former attorney general John Ashcroft said that detaining terror suspects has been a “humanitarian act,” and Rice disputed that the U.S. image has been “tarnished” by torture.

Transcript: Read more