CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that
ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001
Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing
titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" by going
fishing. On this Aug. 6 the president was no less determined to shrug off bad
news. Though 14 marine reservists had been killed days earlier by a roadside
bomb in Haditha, his national radio address that morning made no mention of
Iraq. Once again Mr. Bush was in his bubble, ensuring that he wouldn't see Ms.
Sheehan coming. So it goes with a president who hasn't foreseen any of the
setbacks in the war he fabricated against an enemy who did not attack inside the
United States in 2001.

When these setbacks happen in Iraq itself, the administration punts. But
when they happen at home, there's a game plan. Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer
be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove
tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White
House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift
Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a
president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other
priorities" during Vietnam.
The most prominent smear victims have been Bush
political opponents with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John
Kerry. But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism
czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly
challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December.
The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson - the diplomat described by the
first President Bush as "courageous" and "a true American hero" for confronting
Saddam to save American hostages in 1991 - was so toxic it may yet send its
perpetrators to jail.

True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where
she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing
blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws,
her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her
association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11." Rush
Limbaugh went so far as to declare that Ms. Sheehan's "story is nothing more
than forged documents - there's nothing about it that's real."

But this time the Swift Boating failed, utterly, and that failure is yet
another revealing historical marker in this summer's collapse of political
support for the Iraq war.

When the Bush mob attacks critics like Ms. Sheehan, its highest
priority is to change the subject. If we talk about Richard Clarke's character,
then we stop talking about the administration's pre-9/11 inattentiveness to
terrorism. If Thomas Wilson is trashed as an insubordinate plant of the "liberal
media," we forget the Pentagon's abysmal failure to give our troops adequate
armor (a failure that persists today, eight months after he spoke up). If we
focus on Joseph Wilson's wife, we lose the big picture of how the administration
twisted intelligence to gin up the threat of Saddam's nonexistent W.M.D.'s.

The hope this time was that we'd change the subject to Cindy Sheehan's
"wacko" rhetoric and the opportunistic left-wing groups that have attached
themselves to her like barnacles. That way we would forget about her dead son.
But if much of the 24/7 media has taken the bait, much of the public has not.

The backdrops against which Ms. Sheehan stands - both that of Mr. Bush's
what-me-worry vacation and that of Iraq itself - are perfectly synergistic with
her message of unequal sacrifice and fruitless carnage. Her point would endure
even if the messenger were shot by a gun-waving Crawford hothead or she never
returned to Texas from her ailing mother's bedside or the president folded the
media circus by actually meeting with her.

The public knows that what matters this time is Casey Sheehan's story, not
the mother who symbolizes it. Cindy Sheehan's bashers, you'll notice, almost
never tell her son's story. They are afraid to go there because this young man's
life and death encapsulate not just the noble intentions of those who went to
fight this war but also the hubris, incompetence and recklessness of those who
gave the marching orders....

Casey Sheehan's death in Iraq could not be more representative of the war's mismanagement and failure, but it is hardly singular. Another mother who has journeyed to Crawford, Celeste Zappala, wrote last Sunday in New York's Daily News of how her son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was also killed in April 2004 - in Baghdad, where he was providing security for the Iraq Survey Group, which was charged with looking for W.M.D.'s "well beyond the admission by David Kay that they didn't exist."

As Ms. Zappala noted with rage, her son's death came only a few weeks after Mr. Bush regaled the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association banquet in Washington with a scripted comedy routine featuring photos of him pretending to look for W.M.D.'s in the Oval Office. "We'd like to know if he still finds humor in the fabrications that justified the war that killed my son," Ms. Zappala wrote. (Perhaps so: surely it was a joke that one of the emissaries Mr. Bush sent to Cindy Sheehan in Crawford was Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser who took responsibility for allowing the 16 errant words about doomsday uranium into the president's prewar State of the Union speech.)

Mr. Bush's stand-up shtick for the Beltway press corps wasn't some aberration; it was part of the White House's political plan for keeping the home front cool. America was to yuk it up, party on and spend its tax cuts heedlessly while the sacrifice of an inadequately manned all-volunteer army in Iraq was kept out of most Americans' sight and minds. This is why the Pentagon issued a directive at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom forbidding news coverage of "deceased military personnel returning to or departing from" air bases. It's why Mr. Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, has not attended funeral services for the military dead. It's why January's presidential inauguration, though nominally dedicated to the troops, was a gilded $40 million jamboree at which the word Iraq was banished from the Inaugural Address.

On March 20, 2005, George W. Bush rapidly returned to Washington from
another Crawford vacation so he could intervene in the Terry Schiavo case by signing Republican legislation requiring doctors to restore Schiavo's feeding tube.

But now, he has found it too difficult to take a few minutes out of his five-week vacation to meet Cindy Sheehan, who simply wants to know the reason
that her son is dead.

U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a
suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals
believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians, military
officials said Saturday.

Monday's early morning raid found 11 precursor agents, "some of them quite
dangerous by themselves," a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, said
in Baghdad.

Combined, the chemicals would yield an agent capable of "lingering hazards" for those exposed to it, Boylan said. The likely targets would have been "coalition and
Iraqi security forces, and Iraqi civilians," partly because the chemicals would
be difficult to keep from spreading over a wide area, he said.

Boylan said the suspected lab was new, dating from some time after
the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration cited
evidence that Saddam Hussein's government was manufacturing weapons of mass
destruction as the main justification for the invasion. No such weapons or
factories were found.

"You can support the troops but not the president."

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're
going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come
home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a
foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet
to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed
our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These
strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the
administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a
clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."

"I had doubts about the... campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think
we had done enough in the diplomatic area."

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is
often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning
that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague
objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions
are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is
no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no
contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There
is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation
defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic
plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no
plan today"

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the
President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."

"You can support the troops but not the president." --Rep Tom Delay
(R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're
going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."
--Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come
home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
--Sean Hannity, Fox
News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a
foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet
to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed
our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These
strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy." --Sen. Rick Santorum
(R-PA)

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the
administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a
clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy." --Karen Hughes,
speaking on behalf of George W. Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area." --Senator Trent Lott
(R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is
often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that
lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives
and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still
unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable.
There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for
mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to
bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what
vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war
when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to
explain to us what the exit strategy is." --Governor George W. Bush
(R-TX)

One of the freelancers with several Times articles to his credit recently used a
pejorative quotation from an anonymous source that ran afoul of one of The
Times's guidelines - as was duly noted in a subsequent editors' note in the
paper. "The Times's policy does not permit the granting of anonymity to
confidential news sources 'as cover for a personal or partisan attack,'
" the note said.

The freelancer acknowledged to me, "I should have known the rules. Technically, I should have gone to the Web and read the rules."

Talk Left discusses the latest Plame information which is interesting. I want to focus in on this part:

Finally, the new information once again highlights the importance of
the testimony of journalists in uncovering whether anyone might have broken the
law by disclosing classified information regarding Plame. That is because both
Rove and I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick
Cheney—who are at the center of the Plame investigation—have said that they did
not learn of Plame's employment with the CIA from classified government
information, but rather journalists; without the testimony of journalists,
prosecutors have been unable to get to the bottom of the matter.

Certainly part of this investigation is what did Rove/Libby tell
journalists. That is, were they the leakers? This is where the "journalist
protecting source" stuff comes in.

The other part of this now is, obviously, "what did journalists tell
Rove/Libby?" I know I'm just a blogger with limited ethics, but I have no idea
how this falls under any kind of source protection concept. It'd be one thing if
it were some double super secret that Rove and Libby ever talked to the press.
That is, if they were genuine whistleblowers such that the very fact that they
talked to the press at all was secret. But apparently part of their testimony
involves admitting they talked to journalists and claiming those journalists
told them that Plame was a CIA op.This falls under source confidentiality
protection how? I can't think of any reason that Judith Miller shouldn't answer
the following question:

Did you inform Karl Rove or Scooter Libby that Joe Wilson's wife was a
CIA operative?

There's no source confidentialy issue there at all, not even in the fevered
imagination of Bill Keller.

LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day,
President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for
Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he
insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?

A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own
allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq
plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32
percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two
presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson
then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted
further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long
extrication from that quagmire....

It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11
and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young
Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from
a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the
start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had
served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio.
Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48
percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district
that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.

These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel,
are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call."
The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no
avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and
their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed
the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as
"a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a
matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need
to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a
grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's
inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics
from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a
9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's
"Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not
because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered
"better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was
easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk
"war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al
Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."

But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a
doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last
year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I
look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he
learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions."
But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr.
Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the
general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be
required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security
that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11
- "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as
if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it....

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet"
about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice
president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The
country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes
the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the
fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck
us four years ago next month.