Sotheby's to sell a raggedy-ass copy next month in New York City. Habeas corpus not included.

With the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment's momentous move toward a pre-emptive strike on Iran, now's as good a time as any to sell off the Magna Carta. As everyone can see, George W. Bush has poked enough holes in it to reduce its value.

In our era of take no prisoners, but if you do, hold them unlawfully at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and various torture chambers around the world — new AG Michael Mukasey is bound to agree and, more importantly, he'll be much more effective at running that game on us than Alberto Gonzales was. So it makes sense to peddle this piece of civil-liberties paper to the highest bidder.

In December, Sotheby's plans to do just that in New York City. The privately owned copy, dated 1297, is expected to fetch $20 million to $30 million — undercoating included. But after the past seven years of the Bush-Cheney regime's erosion of the ancient document's key provision on habeas corpus, the question is whether it's worth the vellum it's scrawled on.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance in New York City coincides perfectly with the attempt by war hawks Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl to push us into a pre-emptive strike on Iran. Rapping the Iranian ruler's knuckles was so easy that it was bound to stir up the populace and take their minds off the tragedy in Iraq.

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh wrote years ago about the current administration's thirst for Persian blood, and various Israeli officials have beat those drums too.

That's all we need: another war to produce more prisoners whose rights of habeas corpus we can deny.

Too late to ask Bill Kunstler about that.

The most thorough news story so far about putative Attorney General Michael Mukasey comes, not from the mainstream press, but from the Jewish Week. And James D. Besser's extremely well-balanced account cuts right through to the topics of church-state separation, the Patriot Act, and civil liberties.

Faith is an issue when it comes to Mukasey, and that has nothing to do with the Jew-hating websites that are foaming at the mouth about him.

It figures that the Bush administration would replace a dumb but avid opponent of civil liberties — Alberto Gonzales — with a smart but avid opponent of civil liberties, as I pointed out in "War of Terror's New Front: Mukasey." But with the Arab world blowing up all around us, do we have to have an attorney general who's not only an ardent supporter of the Patriot Act but also an avid Zionist?

We already know, as I pointed out earlier, that Mukasey regards the Bill of Rights as less important than the rest of the Constitution because it was tacked-on and that he wants the citizenry to have faith in their government.

The New York Times managed to write an entire story this morning about Mukasey's handling of "war on terror" suspects without mentioning his handling of terror suspects in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. Philip Shenon's story even says this:

"Widely admired"? That's not backed up in the story. "Material witnesses"? That's the Times's euphemism for the thousands of Muslims unjustifiably scooped off our streets by the hysterical AG John Ashcroft (see my August 2004 review of the film Persons of Interest).

The Wall Street Journal is the only mainstream outlet that even mentioned that William Kunstler tried to have Mukasey removed from the 1993 bombing case because of the judge's Orthodox Judaism. But the September 18 Journal piece was misleading, saying that Kunstler wanted him removed because he's Jewish. No, it's because Mukasey is both Orthodox and Zionist. There's a difference between that and simply being Jewish.

The Jewish Week story by Besser you haven't read? Check it out, particularly a telling analysis of Mukasey and civil liberties from, of all people, Marc Stern of the ardently pro-Israel American Jewish Congress:

Now that is interesting: a judge who is a "very deep skeptic" about the legal process concerning terror suspects. Stern accurately notes that the only question is whether Mukasey goes too far. And Besser accurately portrayed the Kunstler v. Mukasey episode:

But Besser stopped there. In fact, Mukasey cleverly had Kunstler removed as the sheik's lawyer. Without context, Shenon's story this morning mentioned a very similar move by Mukasey in an October 2001 case of Osama Awadallah, a college student with no criminal record who was one of thousands of Muslims rounded up on U.S. streets after 9/11:

Talking about bending the law for political purposes. I thought Bush didn't like "activist judges."

Anyway, Besser did a good job in his story by talking to Muslim groups, among others:

Besser's story points out that Mukasey's views on the separation of church and state are not really known. But his story itself helps provide the troubling answer.

First off, Ibrahim Hooper was simply being shrewdly politic about Mukasey. The future AG's status as an Orthodox Jew is highly relevant.

Just as right-wing Christians use their faith as a political bludgeon, so do Mukasey's fellow Orthodox Jews. He's a graduate of the Ramaz School, an Upper East Side school affiliated with Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun (which calls itself "KJ"), and his wife was a teacher there.

Here's the congregation's mission statement. See if it differs much from the kind of politicized religion practiced by the likes of the late, unlamented Jerry Falwell and the alive, unlamented Pat Robertson, among many others:

Church-state separation? No. Political action by a religious organization? Yes. I'm not saying this is remarkable or even right-wing. This is the way most American Jewish congregations look at Israel.

But why do you think that American Muslims protest when their own ties to overseas Muslims are unfairly questioned and even prosecuted?

More to the point of church-state separation: When it comes to most sects of Orthodox Judaism, there ain't no separation. So that's bound to raise some worries about Mukasey from those who defend such a separation.

I guess that, with the hawks like Cheney beating the drums for some kind of war with the mullahs of Iran, we might as well have a Zionist as attorney general.

This oily business of dealing with evil foreign leaders.

New York's tabloids and assorted pols came unglued yesterday about the very idea of Iran's crackpot hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanting to visit Ground Zero.

Where were they when Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime boils people to death, was courted by George W. Bush and Mayor Mike Bloomberg?

Don't let your own blood boil at the thought of a bad guy visiting our sacralized 9/11 site. Condemn it, if you want, but Ahmedinejad was just trying to score political points, as our own pols do all the time at Ground Zero. He got what he wanted: The angry U.S. reaction will play well back home in Tehran, especially with the radical mullahs who really run Iran and like to stir up hatred for the "Great Satan."

Do we even have to say that in international politics, enemies today are pals tomorrow, and vice versa, and that the reasons almost always have to do with greed for money and natural resources?

On the other hand, it would be nice if our press at least reported these events. The Uzbek despot Karimov laid a wreath at Ground Zero in 2002, and there was literally not one word in the U.S. press about it at the time — I'm not talking about criticism or praise but any words at all. Nothing.

So Karimov is not a bad enough guy to get you worked up? Saddam Hussein was brown-nosed by Don Rumsfeld in December 1983. There's no reason to condemn Rumsfeld for that; it was just oil politics — just like the oil politics that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played when they seized upon the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq.

After all, when Texas oil execs questioned Cheney in 1998, when he was still at Halliburton, about the physical dangers of pursuing oil in turbulent parts of Asia, the future vice president and de facto commander in chief told them:

Saddam is gone, but we still don't really have Iraq's oil. We do, however, have such evil people as the Taliban to deal with, right? Well, the Taliban were hailed as Afghan freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan during their triumphant visit to the White House on March 21, 1983. Reagan said at the time:

That's ancient history, huh? In fact, they were still our pals 14 years later. In late 1997, the Taliban were wined and dined at the homes of Bush's pals, the Houston oil execs, during Dubya's reign as the hangingest governor in U.S. history.

The oil schnooks were buttering up the Taliban for pipelines and other bidness, of course. See Wayne Madsen's "Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team" for details.

At least that courting of the Taliban less than 10 years ago was reported at the time. Of the many words in the mainstream press, my favorites are from a December 14, 1997, story by Caroline Lees in the Telegraph (U.K.), in which she describes the Taliban officials' visit to Unocal vice president Martin Miller's palatial Houston home:

Still secret: Corruption in the White House.

Over at Secrecy News, the indefatigable Steven Aftergood has posted a heretofore secret study of Iraqi government corruption.

Even though the Nation's David Corn already wrote about the study, I can't say it would be much of a surprise anyway: The investigating agency, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, knows a lot about corruption.

Anyway, the report notes:

Sounds like the White House. U.S. congressmen and various public-interest groups got nowhere when they tried to probe Dick Cheney's "energy task force" early in the Bush regime.

And the White House has continually tried to call a halt to the excellent investigative work by Stuart Bowen on corruption in Iraq.

It took a British NGO, Christian Aid, to break the news a few years ago that Jerry Bremer, the Barney Fife of Baghdad, couldn't explain why $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue was missing.

Besides that oil-for-slush scandal, we're still waiting to see those millions of White House e-mails the regime is withholding that relate to various scandals. Then there are the missing-weapons scandal and the various KBR scandals — you get the picture.

In any case, this new report on corruption inside Iraq's puppet government is still worth reading. It turns out that we really have planted a seed of our own form of democracy over there.

Obscuring the view of Iraq.

Great timing by the White House for the so-called Petraeus report, which Bush regime staffers are busily writing as we speak: Remembrance of the horrific day six years ago is clouding our view of the Iraq debacle, where more U.S. troops have been killed than the total number of civilians on 9-11.

The Petraeus report won't compete with 9/11 for news space. The report's being released just as rational mourning and irrational jingoism are at their highest, so it'll just be part of it. One person you're not likely to see on TV or in the mainstream press in the next two days is former Reagan DOD official Lawrence Korb, who actually has a plan for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Korb is reduced to peddling on op-ed pages his sane and detailed plan for realistically pulling troops out of Iraq within a year. Over at BTC News, Weldon Berger wonders: "Why isn't Lawrence Korb on CNN non-stop?" Good question. Berger describes Joe Biden's plan as "hallucinatory" and Salon's Glenn Greenwald already cut through the bullshit of Ken Pollack and others who the press now call "critics of the war." Good points.

God help us if there's another attack on this 9/11, and no offense to the people who lost relatives and friends in the infamous attack in 2001 or will lose them because of the toxic cloud, but we still have to step back from that event and look at the present and future. No peacenik, Korb talks rationally about the here and now.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, brilliant U.S. Navy Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Jim Watson captured Ground Zero as a cathedral. Six years later, 9/11 has become sacralized, a piece of state religion, more so in the rest of the country than here in New York City. And that religiosity is only natural after such an unnatural event.

As always, though, religious feeling becomes a power tool in the hands of schnooks, especially those craftsmen in the Bush-Cheney regime. The Petraeus report could have been prepared and released a month ago or two months ago. But the 9/11 anniversary, with ceremonies at all sporting events and speechifying by all elected or wannabe-elected officials throughout the country, will obscure the current tragedy of Iraq, where at least 80,000 people have been killed by our troops and now mostly by terror attacks.

Of course 9/11 should be remembered, and its victims mourned. Should it obscure everything else and should the ceremonies be used to justify the unwarranted invasion of Iraq and continue the "war on terror"? No and no.

While we're deluged with 9/11 stuff over here, this is what's going on over in Iraq, as portrayed in recent IRIN headlines:

• Iraq's food rationing system failing as Ramadan approaches, specialists warn

• Blood sellers find market niche in Baghdad

• Violence, poverty, unemployment fuel rising alcoholism

• Hospitals under pressure as doctors move abroad

• Hospitals in north struggle to contain cholera outbreak

• Translators forced to quit jobs after being targeted by insurgents

• People flee Baghdad district as gunmen impose Shariah law

• Power cuts getting worse, affecting lives

New reports on Iraq confirm previous reports. Further reports coming. The best report, by Larry Korb, goes unreported.

While we're waiting for the Petraeus report — which will be written by the White House, as previously buried in an L.A. Times story — the press is playing up a new report to Congress that says the Iraqi national police force (its army, kind of) won't be ready to handle the chaos until later this century.

But that's old news. The freshest report wasn't commissioned by Congress or the White House or the Pentagon. And it didn't have anything to do with the Senate Democrats trying to "reframe" the "Iraq debate," as the New York Times put it in a detailed story yesterday about that irrelevant bluster.

The most dynamic and relevant report comes from Larry Korb, a high-ranking Defense official under Ronald Reagan, and it's going unreported. Now a senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, Korb released on August 27 an actual plan for pulling out of Iraq. Read "How to Redeploy: Implementing a Responsible Drawdown of U.S. Forces from Iraq" or listen to Korb talk about it, or do both.

More than a week after its release by the mainstream and highly visible think tank, Korb's report hasn't even hit the news pages and has gotten only a little play on op-ed pages. But it's detailed and realistic, compared with all the other pullout plans — of which there are none, except for the Bush-Cheney regime's current strategy, pictured above.

Seriously, Korb's plan is pretty damn good reading, and it comes from someone who's no flaming liberal pinko. But, then, veteran Iraq watcher Tony Cordesman's reports have been consistently ignored since before the 2003 invasion.

Here's what Korb's report says:

That's nice, but how do we do it?

And not only maps. Korb and his collaborators lay out a detailed month-by-month schedule, division and brigade by division and brigade — which equipment to leave and which to take with us, and doing it all with the least danger to our troops and to the Iraqis who haven't already fled their country.

Now that's a report worth reading. Meanwhile, we're deluged in the press with old news and report upon report upon report that say the same things and don't offer solutions, except to "disband" or "start over." Too late for that talk. Stuck in a bad place, our big wheels are spinning and not getting us or our troops anywhere.

Treating the latest of such reports as fresh, the Washington Post puts it this way this morning.

Yes, but the New York Times broke that very report last week, saying:

The Times played the breakdown of the police as a scoop, and the rest of the media followed right along. But that, too, was mostly old news.

Yet another report, way back on June 7, made the same points, as was reported at the time — or, rather, underreported.

That June report was, and is, readily available from the Pentagon. Check it out yourself (PDF). Its details are devastating, especially for a document just sitting there on the Pentagon website. For instance:

Corruption? Oh, brother. The details reported three months ago were staggering:

And who knows how many instances have gone unreported and haven't been investigated? That's because even the investigators are deathly afraid:

But the Pentagon's June report went relatively unnoticed, maybe because of how it ended:

With such a bland summary of explosive facts, further fact-finding was clearly needed. You'd think enough facts have been found. But do we really need to point out that it's always safer for politicians to either "reframe debates" or commission their own studies and reports than to listen to people like Korb and Cordesman and then hammer out hard decisions?

The New York Times pulled out of Iraq coverage even before the war started when it sent in Judy Miller to beat the WMD war drums.

But five years later, it still hasn't re-entered the battle, judging by its inept handling of the Bush-Bremer dustup over who was responsible for disbanding the Iraq Army back in 2003.

Ignoring explosive material published a year ago in the British press and played up practically everywhere in the world but in the major American papers, the Times downplayed SecDef Donald Rumsfeld's role in the tragic blunder of dismantling the army and police, and the paper didn't even mention Dick Cheney.

Over the weekend, Robert Draper, peddling his book Dead Certain, said Bush had been taken aback by the tragic decision announced by Bush regime czar Jerry Bremer to disband Iraq's army in the spring of 2003.

That was in a September 2 Times story by Jim Rutenberg, who apparently hadn't talked to Bremer about Bush's comments. (Rutenberg's story was just a hack job titled "In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy.") Bremer rushed over to the Times and dropped off a bundle of letters that, he claims, show that Bush knew of the plan and liked what Bremer was doing.

Here's how Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews handled the gift from Bremer in the September 4 story:

The Andrews story makes it sound as if Bremer was briefing Rumsfeld about this plan, that the plan was something that Bush and Bremer were hammering out. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In October 2006, David Blunkett, Britain's Home Secretary during the crucial pre-invasion and immediate post-invasion period, told all in an interview with the Guardian (U.K.) and the serialization of his diaries from that time. Unlike Bremer's book published earlier this year, Blunkett was candid about his screw-ups and about what he did — and didn't do. More importantly, he reveals just who was making the big decisions for the U.S. Here's a hint: It wasn't Bremer and it wasn't Bush. From the Guardian story by Patrick Wintour and Julian Glover:

This 2006 story wasn't totally ignored in the U.S. press. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum summed it up well on October 8, 2006:

Drum's right. It wasn't surprising in 2003 that the decision was being made by Rumsfeld and Cheney, not Bremer, and it certainly wasn't surprising in 2006. So why was the Times story so clueless?

This isn't the first time Times reporter Andrews has mishandled a big story. Back in 2004, Andrews blew a vital news angle about corporate tax breaks. Read my October 12, 2004, post, in which I wrote:

If you want something beyond my immature screed, read this October 2004 measured analysis of the corporate tax cuts, courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Joel Friedman.

Regarding the Bremer-Bush dustup and the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, the New Yorker's George Packer parses it and takes the long view. Packer also shrewdly notes that it's not wise to give the Bush regime too much credit for being orderly enough to make decisions. Bush's White House and Pentagon were, and are, a dysfunctional family. Writing about the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, Packer notes:

Lieutenant Colonel Steve Jordan's acquittal of charges in his court-martial over Abu Ghraib tortures should have been no surprise. Only a week ago, some of the most serious charges against Jordan — including that he lied — were dropped just before the court-martial began.

It didn't matter that the Abu Ghraib scandal — and its coverup — reached all the way up to the White House of Dick Cheney. Check out my August 22 piece, "Chains of Command," for links to the Washington Post series on Cheney and to great stuff by the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh.

The Post's Josh White reports today:

What's curious is that White's story today doesn't at least mention the previous dropping of charges. After all, White's excellent August 21 story reported it:

White explained the situation quite well in his earlier story, just before the court-martial trial began:

In any case, don't let Abu Ghraib slip down the memory hole. We've known for a long time that the genesis of the abuse was in D.C., that it was a rogue presidency, not just rogue soldiers. Read Hersh's June story on Taguba and Taguba's own 2004 report.

Zelikow's role in anti-Maliki agitprop raises 9/11 Commission questions

What else is embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supposed to do but counterattack the American politicians who are blasting him? He can't very well agree with their calls for his ouster. And he's already seen as a U.S. puppet by his own populace.

But Salon's Glenn Greenwald summarizes well the murky politics behind the attacks on Maliki by Hillary Clinton and other senators: Former 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow has been lobbying on behalf of Tony Soprano lookalike (and former CIA stooge) Ayad Allawi, who wants to seize the reins from Maliki.

Greenwald notes how this slimy episode destroys Zelikow's credibility, and after all, Zelikow directed the 9/11 Commission. Now Zelikow pulls strings for Allawi, and everybody dances on Maliki's grave.

So I have a related question, or questions: What happened to the numerous juicy tidbits the staff under Zelikow dug up about the Bush regime's machinations before 9/11? For instance, why were morsels about Brian Sheridan, the government's chief counterterrorist adviser, not being replaced until after 9/11 and related stuff about dual-disloyalist Doug Feith not included in the final commission report? I wrote about some key differences between the staff reports (prepared by Zelikow's underlings) and the final report in June 2004.

Now we have an idea why some of that good stuff was left out of the final report: Zelikow was, after all, running the commission staff and no doubt had a major hand in OK'ing the final version of the report.

And here's another question: Why was the commission report initially released without an index? Another nice piece of stonewalling. Zelikow got some 'splainin' to do. That will never happen, at least not in our lifetime.

Anyway, from Greenwald's continually updated piece:

Great stuff, as usual, from Greenwald, who notes:

Allawi was a U.S. stooge when he "ran" the Iraq government. We already know that Bush is a puppet whose strings are pulled by Karl Rove and whose role as commander-in-chief on 9-11 was taken over by Dick Cheney.

I guess it's not news that we're all being led. But just remember that the next time your buttons are pushed by something you read or hear about from your pols, someone like Zelikow may actually be pulling your strings.

Hell, no, we won't go.

Speaking to veterans sure not to boo the president, George W. Bush's handlers have launched a new offensive in the Vietnam War, which has been over for 30 years.

Offensive is right. In essence, if you take a look at our soldiers patrolling in Phuoc Vinh, Vietnam, in 1967-68 and in Iraq's Diyala River Valley in August 2007, Bush is telling 21st century America: "Phuoc you."

It's now the Vietraq War. Forty years ago, we were telling a president, "Hell, no, we won't go!" Now we have a president telling us, "Hell, no, we won't go!" Even though Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who really has no choice if he wants to keep his job and his life, is telling us, "Go."

Over here, we'd better run for cover, because we're likely to hear this rat-a-tat-tat from Bush for awhile. Dick Cheney's regime launched this new war Wednesday in Kansas City at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, having Bush say:

Bush's handlers plan more of the same next week at the American Legion gathering in Reno. As Maura Reynolds and James Gerstenzang reported this morning in the L.A. Times:

Rove, whose name (as I've pointed out) doesn't rhyme with "dove," will go hunting for real doves when he leaves the White House at the end of the month. But he's still on patrol in the West Wing, and we're his pigeons.

All the propaganda isn't coming from the White House. We already knew that, but here's fresh proof. While the excellent McClatchy D.C. Bureau (formerly the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau), headlined its story "Bush Steps up Sales Push to Sustain His Surge in Iraq" (accurately depicting Bush as the regime's salesman), the L.A. Times story carries the softer headline "Bush Has a New Angle on Iraq Debate" (not really accurate because it's his handlers' angle). And the POTUS-pushers didn't write the L.A. Times's sub-headline:

Even the White House's Kevin Sullivan didn't use the adjective "progress." But newspapers and TV are already calling the upcoming Petraeus report, which will be written by the White House, a "progress report." Considering the debacle that is Iraq, how about just calling it a "report" and mentioning that it will be written by the White House?

Instead we'll be inundated in the next couple of weeks — before the report is released on super-jingoistic 9/11 Day — with the words "progress" and "Vietnam." Those words never did quite fit together when JFK, LBJ, and Nixon used them.

To unravel the tortured excuses for Abu Ghraib abuses, go back to June 25, a day of brilliant journalism.

Once so proud of plans for "War on Terror detainees" that they even showed off their special Gitmo chains and other jewelry, the Bush regime's various soldiers are now crying, as the Nazis did, "We were only following orders." Or they're saying, "Hey, I didn't even give the orders."

Blame them, but save the biggest share of blame for their higher-ups — all the way up to Vise President Dick Cheney.

The freshest example is that of Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, whose court-martial right now at Fort Meade, Maryland, for Abu Ghraib abuses that occurred on his watch is a travesty of cover-up upon cover-up.

Despite the fact that the soldiers under Jordan got off by torturing and humiliating prisoners — most of whom were innocent and none of whom were of any intelligence value — Jordan himself will probably get off with a wrist-slap.

Today's account of this extremely important trial is buried on page A14 of the Washington Post:

The news cycles of real news, especially follow-ups, cause so much frustration. How can anyone put his or her hands around what's going on?

Abu Ghraib blazed in the headlines in 2004, but now that details of who did what and when are coming out, it's considered old news. That's why I try to salt my posts with so many links. All we can do is point to some stories that point to the facts and provide context.

And one unmistakable fact is that no matter what happens to Jordan, the torture scandal goes all the way up the chain of command, right into the White House run by Dick Cheney.

When it comes to Abu Ghraib, all you really have to do is focus on just one day's worth of brilliant journalism. Go back to this past June 25 and you'll see what I mean.

Now, I'm not faulting the Post for burying today's Jordan story. It has kicked the ass of the New York Times on almost every topic since the Bush regime came to power. While Jordan's court-martial continues, go back and re-read the Post's stellar series on Cheney, particularly Barton Gellman and Jo Becker's June 25 "Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power," which I wrote about that day. Here's how that Post story began:

Remarkable stuff. Too bad it didn't come out before the November 2004 presidential election.

If you really want to understand how such a coverup happened — and what tragic roles this Colonel Jordan and various other officials played in this sick drama —go back to Seymour Hersh's brilliant piece "The General’s Report: How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties," also published on June 25.

Taguba's investigation (PDF of his report) was circumscribed by his higher-ups, Hersh reveals. And of course now it comes out that Jordan supposedly wasn't read his rights at the proper time and he might skate on serious charges.

What about the people above — way above — Jordan? Hersh's reporting explodes the Bush regime's lame excuse that Abu Ghraib's abuses were the work of a few "rogue soldiers":

Rogue soldiers? No, a rogue presidency.

We already knew that the government of Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was grinding to a halt when cabinet members stopped showing up. Now U.S. pols want to kick out Maliki himself, papers are reporting this morning.

The only question is whether this stooge will flee before he's kicked out.

That's because we're in the strange situation of having stooges over there in chaotic Iraq but not being able to control anything — even them. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Hey, in August 2002, our top leaders were being told what they wanted to hear: that we were supposed to have only 5,000 troops in Iraq by December 2006. Instead, we have more than 25 times that number in August 2007.

In any case, Maliki had better have his affairs in order. From this morning's Times (U.K.) story by Tim Reid:

Interesting, but there are big questions (here and here) about whether the "surge" is working.

And if we pressure al-Maliki to leave, who'll be our next stooge in Baghdead? As Reid's story notes:

You mean we're still waiting? According to the August 2002 plans presented to Don Rumsfeld's Pentagon and Dick Cheney's White House by the Cardassian-sounding U.S. Central Command, we were supposed to have only 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq by December 2006.

It took until February 2007 to pry that "Top Secret Polo Plan" from the government, and that was thanks only to Joyce Battle and Tom Blanton, among others, at the plucky National Security Archive.

Check out the plan's "Tab K" (which includes the above slide) for a look at the 2002 map of Iraq overlaid with U.S. generals' testosterone. It's all full of "shock and awe" and "exploit" and "gain control" and "seize oil." Brother.

It's going to be a hilarious and a frighteningly twisted presidential campaign, judging by the Iowa "debate" moderated by George Stephanopoulos.

The former senior White House adviser (remember this newsmag cover from April '94?) really set it up well in the show, which aired yesterday on ABC:

Heads I win, tails you lose.

You'd never guess that Stephanopoulos was Bill Clinton's former senior adviser, would you? The first question, about whether Obama is experienced enough, was legit — assuming you count Bill's stint as Arkansas governor, while Hillary was Wal-Mart's First Lady, as experience. The second question was ludicrous, nothing more than a slam at Obama — not to mention the bit about who can "bring the country together" — pap left over from Stephanopoulos's long stint as a political operative.

His intro avoided the real questions about Hillary: For one thing, what is her experience? Has she done much during her years in the Senate? Other than vote in October 2002 for the Bush regime's war, that is. The only thing she's run is the health-care task force during the first Clinton administration, and she handled it in the same secretive and business-friendly way that Dick Cheney handled the energy task force during George W. Bush's first term.

The first thing Hillary did when Bill gave her health care to futz with was take the idea of national health care off the table and lock in the heavy, bureaucratized participation of the insurance industry.

So here's another question: Is Hillary anything more than just the carefully groomed and handled representative of the right-of-center Democratic Party establishment?

As for "bringing the country together": It's a democracy. We're not all supposed to agree. And as a republic, we're supposed to hammer out solutions and deals. That's supposed to be the beauty of it.

Stephanopoulos is still a political operative, and he's still marketing the Clintons.

Americans breathe sigh of relief.

If one picture is worth a thousand words, then a 1994 video of Dick Cheney that's zooming around the Internet is priceless.

Actually, Cheney makes the point in less than 300 words that an invasion of Iraq wouldn't be worth it. Remember, this is back in 1994, and Cheney is being questioned about the first Gulf War.

Here's the video on YouTube. And here's the transcript, thanks to the people at Associated Content:

This video is definitely worth 300 words, and though it's deadly funny, it's not worth 3,000 dead Americans.

Toppling Saddam was one thing. But Associated Content also has an intriguing 2006 piece about Cheney topping his wife.

Under the unimaginative headline "Did Dick Cheney Have Sex with His Wife One Night in October of 1965 Simply to Get Out of Vietnam?" Timothy Sexton notes this:

At the time, Cheney was classified 1-A, eligible to be drafted. If he had children, he'd be recla