This is disgusting. I heard about this but the story isn’t done justice until you see this arrogant teacher purposely humiliate a child with totally slanted and context-lacking argument, and until you see the pain on the child’s face and her fellow students staring at her.

Before we get to part 2 of the interview, may I pause for a quick rant? Because that failed gotcha moment bugs me.

I’m not a big fan of The Daily Show, quite the opposite. Not that I don’t like it because it’s hosted by an uber-liberal, Jon Stewart. That is what it is. People can choose to watch that or not, and I’m cool with that. What I’m not cool with is shows that completely blur the line between entertainment and news.

For example, I don’t like Keith Olbermann at all. But when people tune in they know it’s a commentary show, an answer to the ratings war with Fox News’ Bill O’Rielly, also an on-the-air columnist or commentary personality, if you will. They know, or at least should know, that he’s not relaying news, but opinion. When people complain about media bias on the right, they say “O’Rielly” or “Rush Limbaugh.” But that confuses the argument — these guys aren’t news anchors, and they never claim to be. They’re opinionators.

This is why I have the hard problem with persons like Katie Couric or Brian Williams, who are supposed to be objective journalists, but whose slant just oozes out of their skin.

The problem I have with the Jon Stewart Show is that he’s commentary masked as a legitimate news anchor.

For example, A Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism poll found in 2007 that among those surveyed Jon Steward ranked fourth behind Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and cable host Anderson Cooper (i.e., tied with) as a “journalist they most admired.”

Note that word “journalist.” Now maybe Stewart doesn’t himself claim to be a journalist. But one doesn’t rank that high among actual news anchors unless they’re trying.

The poll results found, “Republicans in 2007 tended to bear the brunt of ridicule from Stewart and his crew. From July 1 through November 1, Stewart’s humor targeted Republicans more than three times as often as Democrats. The Bush administration alone was the focus of almost a quarter (22%) of the segments in this time period.”

Well, folks, when you have that much slant, that’s not journalism. That’s commentary. Period.

What you get as a result of turning a comedian into a journalist, then, is a backfiring gotcha moment such as in the Tony Blair interview, where Stewart (and presumably his audience) might not know (until corrected) that Argentina, during the Falklands War, wasn’t a democracy. How often do the masses learn inaccurate news from this show? Impossible to know.

And on that note, I’ll turn it over to Mr. Blair, who can defend himself better than any second rate blogger.

Why the Surge Worked
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

Earlier this week in Baghdad, Gen. David Petraeus took a final bow before leaving for his new job atop U.S. Central Command. Over the past 20 months, the outgoing military chief in Iraq oversaw a new strategy and “surge” of five brigades that turned American war fortunes around. Back in Washington, a retired four-star general little known outside the Beltway or the military could claim a chunk of credit for this success, too.
[The Weekend Interview] Terry Shoffner

Not that Jack Keane would. Public attention, such as his front-page photograph in the Washington Post last week, makes him uneasy — a sentiment that he expresses with a bluff New York accent and no sign of false modesty. A close friend and mentor to Gen. Petraeus, he talks down his contribution to the Iraq war effort: “Minimal,” “just another set of eyes,” “given more credit than I deserved in all of that.”

Talk to others, however, and the unusual and critical role he played these past two years becomes clear. Gen. Keane helped conceive the new Iraq war strategy and then sell it to the White House. He advised on its implementation, visiting Iraq often and reporting back to the president and vice president. As recounted in Bob Woodward’s new book, “The War Within,” George W. Bush stiffed his Joint Chiefs of Staff, who opposed the surge, and made Gen. Keane his back channel to the Petraeus command in Baghdad. The Pentagon “almost presided over an American defeat in Iraq, and Jack Keane helped save the day,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Born into an English-Irish family in Manhattan, Gen. Keane was raised on the Yankees and went up to Fordham for college. In his 37 years in the military he served in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Iraq was another story. Soon after Baghdad fell he noted “a little bit of arrogance,” and says he and other senior military leaders “let down” their political masters by failing to anticipate that Saddam Hussein’s loyalists made preparations for the insurgency.

Three months into the war, Gen. Keane visited Iraq as the Army’s deputy chief of staff. “I felt we had a low-level insurgency on our hands and I had a long plane ride home as a result of it, because I thought my Army was ill-prepared to fight that kind of war and it would take time for us to figure it out.” His was a lonely view at the time. Gen. Keane passed on a promotion to Army chief for personal reasons but kept up with Iraq.

For the next three years, Donald Rumsfeld and the senior generals pushed a “short-war” scenario, “which was to get a political solution quickly, transition to the Iraqis security quickly, and get out,” says Gen. Keane. “It didn’t work. And why didn’t it work? Because the enemy voted and they took advantage. The fact that we did not adjust to what the enemy was doing to us and the Iraqis were not capable of standing by themselves — that was our major failure. . . . It took us all a while to understand the war and [that] we had the wrong strategy to fight it. Where I parted from those leaders [at the Pentagon] is when we knew the facts — and the facts were pretty evident in 2005 and compelling in 2006 — and those facts were simply that we could not protect the population and the levels of violence were just out of control.”

In late 2006, after the midterm election debacle for Republicans, pressure rose for a quick if dishonorable exit from Iraq. Gen. Keane met Frederick Kagan, who was putting together a report on an alternative strategy for Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute. On Dec. 11, both men found themselves at the White House to push the plan. Congress, the Joint Chiefs, Iraq commander Gen. George Casey and the Iraq Study Group all wanted a fast drawdown. President Bush ignored their advice. Gen. Petraeus was sent out in February to oversee the new, risky and politically unpopular surge.

Even Gen. Keane didn’t expect the new strategy to work so fast. “It’s a stunning turnaround, and I think people will study it for years because it’s unparalleled in counterinsurgency practice,” he says. “All the gains we’ve achieved against al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency, the Iranians in the south are sustainable” — a slight pause here — “if we’re smart about it and not let them regroup and get back into it.”

Gen. Keane wants to make sure people understand why the surge worked. “I have a theory” about the unexpectedly fast turnaround, he says. “Whether they be Sunni, Shia or Kurd, anyone who was being touched by that war after four years was fed up with it. And I think once a solution was being provided, once they saw the Americans were truly willing to take risks and die to protect their women and children and their way of life, they decided one, to protect the Americans, and two, to turn in the enemies that were around them who were intimidating and terrorizing them; that gave them the courage to do it.”

He adds that the so-called Sunni Awakening, and the effective surrender of Shia radical Moqtada Sadr and his Mahdi Army, depended upon the surge. “I’m not sure [the Sunni Awakening] would have spread to the other provinces without the U.S. [military] presence. We needed forces that we didn’t previously have for the Sunnis to be able to rely on us to protect them.” Sadr saw his lieutenants killed in the American push, and didn’t want to share their fate.

Looking ahead, Gen. Keane still considers a robust American ground force “the secret to success” in Iraq. “It is a myth for people to assert that by pulling away from the Iraqis, by pulling away from the Iraqi political process, that somehow that becomes a catalyst to do things that they would not do because of our presence. That is fundamentally wrong. It is our presence that is helping Iraqis move forward.”

In his view, the U.S. ought to focus on cementing recent gains. First comes helping the Sunnis back into the political system. The majority Shiite government hasn’t yet agreed to hold provincial elections later this year, and until it does and those polls are held, the U.S. can’t withdraw any more troops, he says.

Sectarian tensions remain a worry. Last month in the northeastern city of Baquba, government forces detained 1,000 Sunnis, mostly members of the Sons of Iraq, a nationwide militia funded by the U.S. and composed of many former Sunni insurgents. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki promised to vet and take a fifth of the 90,000-strong force into his security services, but as with the provincial elections, he hasn’t yet delivered. “It appears that Maliki is using the guise of security to enhance his political base and to diminish his political opponents,” says Gen. Keane, citing the Baquba incident. “That is a danger and that is something we should not tolerate.”

Another potential threat looms from Iran. Though Tehran and its surrogates were hammered in the Maliki government’s successful spring offensive on Basra, “we know they’re coming back,” says Gen. Keane. Iran wants a weak Iraqi central government unaligned with America. “We know that they intend to come back on the kinetic side, attack U.S. forces exclusively with less attacks, but more spectacular. I don’t believe for a minute they’re going to be able to resurge and be successful as long as we stay on top of it, keep our head in the game, maintain our force presence in the south.”

The surge turned things around on another difficult front, Washington. “Despite the fact that President Bush did preside over a strategy that was failing for three plus years, and he has been criticized for that,” says Gen. Keane, “he also deserves a significant amount of credit because all around him people were advocating a failed strategy, particularly key leaders around him, and he had the wherewithal to make a tough decision that flew certainly in the face of political opposition even in his own party.”

Gen. Keane says he understands why there was resentment among the Joint Chiefs at seeing the president change course against their wishes and follow a retired general’s recommendations on strategy and staffing in a war zone. But he considers his role perfectly appropriate. “In my mind, I think a president has a right to seek advice and counsel any place he chooses,” he says. “I certainly wasn’t forcing myself on them.”

The U.S. came “within weeks or months” of defeat in Iraq in 2006, he says. The consequences of that were “unacceptable” for the region, “not to speak of an institution that I loved.” And what about the military chiefs who thought the extra battalions and extended service tours would be too much of a strain on American forces? “When people talk about stress and strain on a force, the stress and strain that would come from having to live with a humiliating defeat would be quite staggering.”

As for any suggestions that he’s the other general who saved the U.S. from such a failure in Iraq, Gen. Keane waves them away. “To be frank about it, given the talents of Gen. Petraeus and the talent that he had around him on his own staff, if I look back on it and am honest with myself, they would have accomplished all the same results if I had never gone to Iraq.”

Why, after all the assistance we’ve given to Iraq over the past five years, was the first major Iraqi oil deal signed with China and not with an American or even a western company? The answer is, in part, because three Democratic senators [Senators Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, and Claire McCaskill] intervened in Iraqi domestic politics earlier this year to prevent Iraq from signing short-term agreements with Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, Chevron, and BP.

– Fred Kagan.

Read the rest.

Here’s William McGurn with another great commentary, this time regarding all those pre-emptive pessimists and the Iraqi civil war that never was. I guess that’s a dangerous boast, as a President Obama could yank out our forces and that civil war might occur. But no less dangerous a boast than those who used the term without due evidence.

If the editors of the New York Times changed the paper’s line on Iraq and no one called them on it, would it make a noise? Like the proverbial tree falling in an empty forest?

Something of the kind seems to have happened to the Times use of “civil war” to describe the conflict in Iraq. In the fall of 2006, the Times began insisting Iraq was in a civil war. And in the year that followed, the paper’s editorials routinely castigated George W. Bush for refusing to acknowledge it.

Here’s a small sample:

• Nov. 29, 2006: “At this point, it’s hard to tell who is more out of touch: President Bush, who continues to insist that Iraq has not descended into civil war, or Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki . . .”
• Jan. 11, 2007 (the day after the president announced the surge): “The nation needs an eyes-wide-open recognition that the only goal left is to get the U.S. military out of this civil war in a way that could minimize the slaughter of Iraqis and reduce the chances that the chaos Mr. Bush unleashed will engulf Iraq’s neighbors.”
• March 27, 2007: “As disjointed as the Democrats have been, their approach makes far more sense than Mr. Bush’s denial of Iraq’s civil war . . .”
• July 8, 2007: “One of Mr. Bush’s arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. The war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out.”
• Oct. 23, 2007: “If [the Bush administration] doesn’t now move quickly [on Turkey's threat to cross the border to attack Kurdish rebels], Iraq’s disastrous civil war could spiral into an even bigger disaster — a regional war.”

And these are only a smattering of what by my count are at least 16 editorials from November 2006 to November 2007 all unequivocally asserting an Iraqi civil war.

As someone who was in Mr. Bush’s speechwriting shop at the time, I remember the horrible stories coming out of Iraq — Sunni men kidnapped and killed by Shia death squads; Shia innocents murdered by Sunnis; Kurds being driven from their homes, and so on. The violence was real, it reflected religious divisions, and on the face of it, civil war was a reasonable description.

So why did the president resist the characterization? The answer is that he resisted using “civil war” for the same reason the Times likely embraced it: It was a loaded term.

If the conflict in Iraq was really a civil war, the implication was, first, that the United States had no place being there; second, that it was hopeless. That’s one reason at least five of the editorials that used the words “civil war” also used the word “unending” or “unwinnable.” If you find yourself in the middle of a civil war that is unwinnable, logic allows for only one conclusion: Pull out.

This, in fact, is the same logic that MoveOn.org invoked in the ad the Times infamously ran the day Gen. David Petraeus testified before Congress. Remove the inflammatory “General Betray Us” language, and the MoveOn argument was pretty much what the Times had been saying: The U.S. was in the middle of an “unwinnable religious civil war,” and our leaders were in denial.

MoveOn.org and the Times, of course, weren’t alone. In what Keith Olbermann described as a “Walter Cronkite moment,” NBC News in November 2006 also branded Iraq a civil war. On air later that same evening, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell cited experts who were saying that calling the conflict a civil war “could further erode public support for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq.”

Yet now NBC too has stopped using civil war. Which earlier this year prompted Ed Gillespie, a senior White House staffer, to send a letter to NBC News President Steve Capus. “Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war?” Mr. Gillespie asked. “If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?”

Good question, and one worth asking the Times. The fact is, though some of its columnists call Iraq a civil war, the Times hasn’t run an editorial saying so since last November. Could that editorial silence be the Gray Lady’s way of admitting a mistake? If I were the president, I think I’d take that as a “yes.”

Even the New York Time’s chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon, agrees that Sarah Palin wasn’t linking 9-11 to Saddam Hussein in her speech to military troops last week.

On Ms. Palin’s claim in her speech to the troops that they will “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”: I do not interpret this as an echo of the discredited view that Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9-11 attacks; such an interpretation does not make much sense. Mr. Hussein is long gone.

I think Ms. Palin’s comments were intended as an acknowledgment that an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Iraq is still active, though diminished.

… Bottom line: Ms. Palin was wrong that the troops in Iraq will confront the very Al Qaeda terrorists who planned 9/11, but she was right they may contend with terrorists who are affiliated with the organization that did and who pose a mortal threat to civilians in Iraq and perhaps elsewhere.

But Gordon does exactly what others have done: attributed words to Palin that she never said. Palin never said our troops would “confront the very Al Qaeda terrorists who planned 9/11.” Indeed, it’s an assumption that the “thousands of Americans” Palin mentioned in her speech were the 9/11 victims. She didn’t even use the words 9/11. The “thousands of Americans” could be a reference to the thousands of soldiers, Americans all, that al Qaeda in Iraq terrorists have, in part, killed.

Also, I think Gordon’s statement that “Al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the war, but they are there now” is very naive.

Saddam Hussein spent millions of dollars funding and even training Islamic radicals, who at very least were exported to Palestine to kill Israelis. While such individuals may not have called themselves by a brand name, like AQI, it’s just silly to argue that armed and trained Islamic extremists were not living in Iraq prior to the invasion. It also glosses over the fact that Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Baghdad prior to the US invasion of Iraq. At very least the Hussein regime knew of Zarqawi and allowed his existence because Zarqawi fought against the pro-democracy Kurds of Northern Iraq (thus undercutting once more the argument that al Qaeda was Saddam’s enemy).

Likewise, Abdul Rahman Yasin, a co-conspirator in the 1993 WTC bombing — of the cell led by Ramzi Yousef, nephew of 9-11 mastermind Khalid Mohammed — also fled to Iraq and was protected by, in what Iraq called “house arrest,” the Hussein regime. (The “house arrest” excuse is empty. One should be reminded that the Hussein regime frequently tortured persons as innocuous as Olympic atheletes but left Yasin alone).

To Gordon’s credit, he justifiably admonishes Palin for two more unfair attacks: (1) That NATO membership of The Ukraine or Georgia would, in theory, protect them from attack from Russia as it would be considered an attack on NATO itself, and (2) that the definition of The Bush Doctrine is highly debatable. See previous post here.

It’s true too, because I’ve always believed that The Bush Doctrine regarded no distinction between terror groups and their state protectors (which was the entire defense of the Taliban, and rationale for the doctrine and invasion of Afghanistan in the first place), but did NOT regard the notion of pre-emption, which in my mind is somewhat self-evident.

Good commentary by William McGurn

When Abraham Lincoln famously sent word to Gen. George McClellan that he’d like to “borrow” the army if the general wasn’t planning on using it, the commander of Union forces likely did not take it kindly. McClellan, after all, was a man whose letters home referred to Lincoln as an “idiot,” “a well-meaning baboon” and other colorful language.

In the first few pages of “The War Within,” Bob Woodward opens with another presidential remark that offended another wartime general. This time the recipient was the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey. During a videoconference with Baghdad, the president said, “George, we’re not playing for a tie. I want to make sure we all understand this.” Gen. Casey, Mr. Woodward writes, took this as “an affront to his dignity that he would long remember.”

Whether or not Gen. Casey long remembered, “The War Within” makes clear his disdain for his commander in chief. If the views and remarks attributed to Gen. Casey are not accurate, Mr. Woodward has done him a grave injustice. If they are accurate, they come as further evidence of the obstacles President George W. Bush had to overcome to get his commanders to start winning in Iraq.

Opening with Gen. Casey also says something about Mr. Woodward. There’s a case, I suppose, for using the general who opposed the surge to open what is hailed as the definitive account of that surge (not to mention using Robert McNamara, the Defense secretary who helped lose Vietnam to end the book). Surely, however, that would be the same case for wrapping the definitive account of the strategy that brought Robert E. Lee to Appomattox around Gen. McClellan.

Gen. Casey, after all, was the commander who all along maintained that the solution in Iraq was for America to draw down its forces — even after the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. He was the commander who later that year was given his own chance to secure Baghdad with Operations Together Forward I and II, and failed. Most of all, he is the commander who was wrong when the president was right to insist that Baghdad could be secured and al Qaeda dealt a harsh blow with more troops.

Gen. Casey’s continued adherence to a failed strategy does not make him a dishonorable man. It does make him an odd choice to serve as the foundation for the charge that the president was out of touch with the war. As evidence, both the general and the journalist point to questions about how many of the enemy we were killing as a sign that “the president did not get it.”

Then again, maybe it’s Gen. Casey and Mr. Woodward who did not get it. The questions the president asked were driven by something everyone in the West Wing worried about. Every night for years, Americans tuning into the evening news were greeted by the same image from Iraq: a burning car or Humvee, accompanied by a fresh report about soldiers or Marines who’d been blown up by an improvised explosive device or suicide bomb.

Nor did these images exist in a vacuum. A media obsessed with body counts featured grim roll calls of the dead, marking each macabre “milestone” — 1,500 war dead, 2,000 war dead — along the way. In this context, was it really unreasonable for a president to ask his commander on the ground if we were fighting back, when it sure didn’t look that way to the American people?

The same might be said of the one truly original take offered by Mr. Woodward. This is his curious assertion that it’s not the surge that has produced the great reduction in violence in Iraq. The reduced violence, he says, is the result of the increased lethality of covert operations against terrorist leaders and operatives.

Which brings up two interesting points. First, we are led to find fault with a president allegedly obsessed with a “kill the bastards” approach to Iraq. But then we are asked to accept that the reason we’re now seeing success in Iraq because we’re . . . killing the bastards.

Second, the surge was a shift in mission, not simply an addition of five brigades. Until the surge, we had pursued a political solution, hoping that the answer to Iraq was the rise of a democratic government that would persuade Iraqis to come together for their future. The surge, by contrast, finally recognized the obvious: Until Iraqis started feeling safe in their own homes and neighborhoods, there would be no compromise or rebuilding.

Sophisticates have never liked Mr. Bush for his preference for words like “win” and “victory” to describe what America is trying to do in Iraq. And if Mr. Woodward’s latest contribution is any clue, they’ll never forgive him for doing something even worse: proving it can be done.

Former “Blind Shiek” federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy asks: “What Is It With Democrats and Imaginary Sniper Fire?”

Add Joe Biden to the list of prominent Democrats who’ve had to “revise” the claim that they’ve been shot at in a war zone. (Or, better, add the claim that he’s been shot at to the list of things Biden has said about himself that turn out to, er, need revising.)

At the Dems’ CNN/YouTube debate, Biden began began one of his characteristic bloviations by chiding the Bush administration, “Let’s start telling the truth.” That’s the Revision Squad’s cue to get on red alert. He proceeded to discuss Iraq’s Green Zone: “You better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone, where I have been seven times and shot at.” (Emphasis added.)

Well, not exactly. Last month the Hill reported that, when pressed, Biden had to concede that he wasn’t sure he’d actually been shot at … just that there were three occasions — only one of which, it turns out, happened in the Green Zone — when “he felt that he was shot at or might have been shot at.” Thinking about the Green Zone incident now, he told the paper, a more accurate comment would have been: “I was near where a shot landed.”

An even more accurate comment would have been that he was in Iraq while a war was going on. As he now recalled it, he and another senator were shaving inside a Green Zone building when a “shot” was fired outside that caused no danger to anyone inside. Indeed, Biden’s staff later revised the revision to say that the “shot” had really been mortar fire “a few hundred yards away” which “rattled the building” where Biden was getting ready for the day.

Biden just can’t help himself. And it’s bizarre since the two other incidents he described, assuming they happened the way he says they happened, sound plenty scary enough — there was no reason to exaggerate or to misstate them as having involved the Green Zone. Evidently, they involved air travel. Once, Biden says, a bullet narrowly missed a helicopter he was flying in (enroute to Baghdad from the Green Zone). Another time, Biden was riding in a C-130 when the plane’s anti-missile system activated, indicating that they may have been fired on by surface to air missiles — though, when pressed, Biden does not offer any description of actually coming under fire.

A Biden staffer concluded: “The nuance of being shot at or shot near means nothing in a war zone. The point Sen. Biden was making is that Iraq is a dangerous place — for our troops, for Iraqis, for everyone.”

The nuance of being shot at or shot near?

In any event, Biden wants us inexperienced rubes to know that “Iraq is a dangerous place.” You can see why Obama would want such a font of foreign-policy wisdom by his side.

[WSJ] For U.S. politics, it is worth recalling that that 2006 Washington Post story became part of a Beltway consensus that defeat in Iraq was inevitable. Democrats made withdrawal the center of their campaign to retake Congress, Republicans like Senator John Warner became media darlings for saying the war couldn’t be won, and the James Baker-Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group laid out a bipartisan road to retreat. According to memos disclosed Sunday in the New York Times, even senior officials at the State Department and Pentagon opposed the surge. President Bush, heeding Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno as well as John McCain, overruled the defeatists and ordered a renewed U.S. commitment to Iraq.

The Anbar handover is above all a tribute to the hundreds of Americans who have fought and died in places like Fallujah, Ramadi and Hit over these last five years. Over the horizon of history, we tend to recall only the successes in previous wars at such places as Guadalcanal, Peleliu and the Chosin Reservoir. We forget that those wars and battles were also marked by terrible blunders and setbacks, both political and military. What mattered is that our troops, and our country, had the determination to fight to an ultimate victory. So it is with the heroes of Anbar.

This isn’t really timely, as the report came out in July, but it’s still a solid op-ed and retort of the “Bush lied” line (beyond the obvious one that if he did so did all these Democrats).

[Fred Hiatt, Washington Post] Search the Internet for “Bush Lied” products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic “Bush Lied, People Died” bumper sticker is only the beginning.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, set out to provide the official foundation for what has become not only a thriving business but, more important, an article of faith among millions of Americans. And in releasing a committee report Thursday, he claimed to have accomplished his mission, though he did not use the L-word.

“In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent,” he said.

There’s no question that the administration, and particularly Vice President Cheney, spoke with too much certainty at times and failed to anticipate or prepare the American people for the enormous undertaking in Iraq.

But dive into Rockefeller’s report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

On Iraq’s nuclear weapons program? The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president’s statements “were substantiated by intelligence information.”

On chemical weapons, then? “Substantiated by intelligence information.”

On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.” Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles? “Generally substantiated by available intelligence.” Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.”

As you read through the report, you begin to think maybe you’ve mistakenly picked up the minority dissent. But, no, this is the Rockefeller indictment. So, you think, the smoking gun must appear in the section on Bush’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to terrorism.

But statements regarding Iraq’s support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda “were substantiated by intelligence information.” Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda “were substantiated by the intelligence assessments,” and statements regarding Iraq’s contacts with al-Qaeda “were substantiated by intelligence information.” The report is left to complain about “implications” and statements that “left the impression” that those contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation.

In the report’s final section, the committee takes issue with Bush’s statements about Saddam Hussein’s intentions and what the future might have held. But was that really a question of misrepresenting intelligence, or was it a question of judgment that politicians are expected to make?

After all, it was not Bush, but Rockefeller, who said in October 2002: “There has been some debate over how ‘imminent’ a threat Iraq poses. I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat. I also believe after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. . . . To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? I do not think we can.”

Rockefeller was reminded of that statement by the committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), who with three other Republican senators filed a minority dissent that includes many other such statements from Democratic senators who had access to the intelligence reports that Bush read. The dissenters assert that they were cut out of the report’s preparation, allowing for a great deal of skewing and partisanship, but that even so, “the reports essentially validate what we have been saying all along: that policymakers’ statements were substantiated by the intelligence.”

Why does it matter, at this late date? The Rockefeller report will not cause a spike in “Bush Lied” mug sales, and the Bond dissent will not lead anyone to scrape the “Bush Lied” bumper sticker off his or her car.

But the phony “Bush lied” story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

And it trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.

For the next president, it may be Iran’s nuclear program, or al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan, or, more likely, some potential horror that today no one even imagines. When that time comes, there will be plenty of warnings to heed from the Iraq experience, without the need to fictionalize more.