"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

Cracking the Consensus

It seems that the War Consensus is starting to crack. More and more people are being forced to admit two things. One: that none of the Weapons of Mass Distruction that Bush, Powell and others assured us required invading Iraq immediately have been found. Two: that the amount of time, energy and money that went into planning for the destructive part of war dwarfed the time, energy and money sunk into planning for reconstruction by several orders of magnitude, and that this is producing highly undesirable results. People are facing up slowly to the hard reality that the president duped the American people, didn't plan for the end of conflict, and now we're in deep do-do as a result.

This particular realization crested over me last night as I watched Charlie Rose. He had as a guest Evan Thomas, author of a new biography on John Paul Jones (American Terroriest, war hero, and "founder of the nation's navy"), and an associate editor at the somewhat conservative Newsweek.

When the conversation inevitably turned to current events, he was essentially pro-war. "The score [between Republicans and Democrats] on foreign policy is something like 100 to nothing," he said. Wants to write a glowing bio of the neo-cons. Yet he then plainly admitted that the post-war situation was a mess, that the Administration, by virtue of leaving everything to the Pentagon, has no real plan. He said, "we had a plan for oil. There were special forces at the oilfields. Those contracts were lined up months in advance."

"But," he said, "we still don't have power in 80% of Baghdad."

And yet he supported the prez, making it sound like this colossal failure to be prepared for the rebuilding of Iraq is the fault of some mid-level army flunky, and not the Commander in Cheif. Food for thought. At times it sounded like the pro-war coalition might be cracking on the reconstruction issue and that most of the media might swing along with the "war liberals."

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