Reviewing a new book about Donald Rumsfeld in Sunday’s Washington Post, CNAS honcho Nathaniel Fick gets at one of the often overlooked but mustn’t-be-forgotten aspects of why the Iraq war happened.

Fick writes that “the two biggest questions about his tenure at the Pentagon — why the United States invaded Iraq, and why it so bungled the aftermath of the Hussein regime’s fall — are often answered with only the simplest of explanations: ideology and hubris.”

In this meticulously researched and compelling book, veteran Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham acknowledges these contributors to the national-security travails of the Bush years, but he highlights another as well: the secretary of defense’s unwavering commitment to military transformation, his vision of a leaner, more lethal Department of Defense. The early phases of the war in Afghanistan apparently vindicated this concept, while the prospect of war in Iraq promised a wider proving ground for it — but the nasty counterinsurgency campaign that followed threatened to undermine it.

Among the various elements of “transformation,” Rumsfeld envisioned a lighter, faster, and more deadly combat force with high-tech support providing a comprehensive view of the battle space. And after 9/11, he really wanted an opportunity to reestablish U.S. credibility by unleashing such a force — he was after a “teaching moment” for anyone who doubted American power.

As Richard Clarke told CBS in 2004, invading Iraq was immediately discussed after 9/11:

As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.

Rumsfeld’s belief in a technologically transformed military, and his desire for an appropriate stage upon which to demonstrate that military’s deadly effectiveness, dovetailed with the neoconservatives’ fantasy of quickly and simply knocking off Saddam Hussein’s regime and installing a friendly government in its place. And the result was that we’ve spent six years (and counting) and about a trillion dollars (and counting) demonstrating the limits of American military power.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) wrote a blog post for Townhall.com today in which she falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants will be covered by the proposed health care bill:

“The relationship between illegal immigrants and our nation’s health care system is one that cannot be overlooked. In 2006, the Census Bureau reported that there were 46.6 million people without health insurance of which about 9.5 million were not United States citizens…It’s clear that a bill that is silent on eligibility means a bill that includes illegal immigrants.”

To begin with, both the House and Senate health care bills explicitly state that health care benefits will only apply to legal U.S. residents. President Obama himself has said that undocumented immigrants should not be covered under a new health care plan.

Bachmann also criticizes House Democrats for voting against what she calls “a commonsense amendment that would have ensured that illegal immigrants are not covered.” However, that same amendment would have also given private insurance providers unprecedented access to sensitive income and identity information while curtailing all of the privacy and redress responsibilities that the Social Security Act requires of government agencies.

Bachmann doesn’t point out that 9.5 million of uninsured noncitizens that she cites includes both legal and undocumented immigrants. In general, all immigrants incur less health care costs and less expensive care than native-born Americans. Health care costs for the average immigrant ($1,797 per capita) are 55% lower than health care costs for the average U.S.-born person ($3,702 per capita). Ultimately, U.S. citizens make up the majority of those who are uninsured and that’s where the debate should focus.

Bachmann has repeatedly invoked “fear-mongering right-wing rhetoric” to block health care reform.

As Pakistan’s anti-terrorism court begins the long process of trying five suspects in last November’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it’s worth revisiting the triangular relationship between the Pakistani public, the government and militant groups that will determine whether or not the militants can be defeated. For once, there’s some good news: the Pakistani public, while remaining overwhelmingly anti-American, has turned decisively against militants.

Eighty-one percent of Pakistanis now see “Islamist militants and Taliban in FATA and settled areas” as a “critical threat,” while 67 percent view the “activities of religious militants in Pakistan as a whole” as a similarly critical threat. There is little support for Taliban governance – the government leads the Taliban by forty points in providing “effective and timely justice,” “preventing corruption,” and “helping the poor.” Significantly, in each case double digits say that both or neither will do better job, and the government only scores above 50 points in the justice category. These results indicate that while there’s little appetite for Taliban rule and general confidence in the government, the latter is weak and has much room to grow.

Al Qaeda, as distinct from Pakistani militants, is also seen as a critical threat. Eighty-two percent of Pakistanis now view al Qaeda as such, double from 41 percent in September 2007. But while 88 percent think al Qaeda should not be allowed to operate training camps in Pakistan and 74 percent thinks the government should use military force to close the camps if necessary, only 12 percent actually think there are al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan. Moreover, while 62 percent of Pakistanis oppose al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, 59 percent say they “share many of its attitudes toward the U.S.” What’s perhaps most disturbing is that a quarter of Pakistanis share both al Qaeda’s attitudes and approval of its methods – a significant reservoir of support in a critical country.

Part of these results can no doubt be explained by the Pakistani military’s long-standing cultivation of and support for militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, the chief organizational suspect behind the Mumbai attacks. Pakistan’s notoriously unreliable and self-serving Inter-Services Intelligence agency leaked today that membership in LeT is about 150,000 people and that its members “were good people” who could be controlled. While there’s still uncertainty as to the actual relationship of LeT to the military, the fact that someone in ISI (described as a “midlevel officer”) still talks about controlling the group indicates that the culture of militant support within the Pakistani military may be far harder to uproot than the militants themselves.

After steamrolling through Swat with artillery and airstrikes (creating 2 million refugees in the process), the Pakistani military has put offensive operations in the tribal regions on hold. As one local politician with the largely secular Awami National Party put it, “It’s an insane dream to expect anything different from the Pakistani government… The Taliban are the brainchildren of the Pakistan army for the last 30 years. They are their own people.”

For years the Pakistani military has been playing a double game with the United States -– supporting its favorite militants, giving up those that posed too much of a problem, and taking money from the United States in the process. Now it’s embarking on a double game with its own population, a population that now supports overwhelmingly operations against militant groups that have begun targeting Pakistan itself.