It was supposed to be, as President Bush called it, "a defining moment in the history of Iraq." And it might just be. But certainly not in the way that Bush meant it. Instead, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's offensive in Basra and Baghdad against Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's forces has confirmed his government's essential weakness.

Consider: with Maliki's campaign stalled, a parliamentary delegation from Maliki's own coalition went off to Iran to broker a deal with Sadr. And the terms of that deal, which involves the release of hundreds of detained Sadr followers and the return of his followers displaced by raids and violence, will surely strengthen Sadr's political position. That's assuming, of course, that the deal holds and the fighting actually stops. All of the papers report that fighting has not stopped in Baghdad and Basra. And while it's unclear whether the deal will actually last, it's crystal clear what the deal means for Maliki. The New York Times sees no upside:

The negotiations with Mr. Sadr were seen as a serious blow for... Maliki, who had vowed that he would see the Basra campaign through to a military victory and who has been harshly criticized even within his own coalition for the stalled assault.

Last week, Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Kadir al-Obeidi, conceded that the government’s military efforts in Basra have met with far more resistance than was expected. Many Iraqi politicians say that Mr. Maliki’s political capital has been severely depleted by the Basra campaign and that he is in the curious position of having to turn to Mr. Sadr, a longtime rival, for a way out.

And it was a chance for Mr. Sadr to flaunt his power, commanding both armed force and political strength that can forcefully challenge the other dominant Shiite parties, including Mr. Maliki’s Dawa movement and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq....

After [Sadr's] statement was released Sunday, a spokesman for Mr. Maliki, Ali al-Dabbagh, appearing on the television station Iraqiya, said that the government welcomed the action and that Mr. Sadr’s gesture demonstrated his “concern for Iraq and Iraqis.” And he insisted that the government offensive in Basra was not aimed specifically at Mr. Sadr’s militiamen but rather against rogue Shiite factions there, seemingly trying to leave room to maneuver with Mr. Sadr’s political organization.

A fighter from Sadr's Mahdi Army in Baghdad, speaking to The Washington Post, sees things similarly: "The fighting has proved they have learned a lesson. The government is dead from our point of view."

As we noted earlier this month, the intelligence community has been working towards producing a new national intelligence estimate on Iraq, and it's likely to be completed in the next several weeks. It is also, unlike the last several NIEs on Iraq and last year's report on Iran, likely to be kept secret. The report, like the last two NIEs on Iraq, will take stock of the situation there -- both military and political.

That's because Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell thinks it's bad policy to release declassified versions of the reports' key judgments. It's part of his general philosophy that public debate about intelligence issues kills Americans.

So The Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports today that McConnell's deputy said that the NIE process is "getting a makeover by senior intelligence officials to improve its credibility" -- meaning that they want to make sure that no dodgy information (e.g. aluminum tubes) makes it in there.

Which is all well and good, but as Pincus points out, "these changes will be incorporated in the classified NIE on Iraq, but the public probably will not have a chance to judge them." Once the NIE is completed, the National Intelligence Board, of which McConnell is chairman, will decide whether to declassify anything for release. He's already said as a matter of policy that NIEs should be kept quiet. The Iran NIE -- which undercut the administration's public statements about Iran's nuclear capabilities -- was only released out of a fear that its contents would be leaked to the media.

It remains to be seen whether McConnell will have his way. The Hill has so far been quiet on whether there ought to be a declassified version. I put the question to the chairmen of the two intelligence committees -- Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) this morning, and I'll let you know what I hear.

Update: A spokesman for Sen. Rockefeller replies: “Our office won’t have any comment on the report until it is finished.”

Confused about what's going on in Basra? So is pretty much everyone.

For years, Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army was one of the main destabilizing forces in Iraq. But last summer, he agreed to a cease fire, a move that everyone agrees has done a tremendous amount to diminish the violence in recent months. He renewed the cease fire last month.

But Sadr's group has splintered. And Shiite militias, some connected to Sadr and some not, have been mixing it up in the southern city of Basra. The British haded over control of the province to the Iraqi government in December, and things have been downhill since then.

For weeks (or months), Iraqi forces (with U.S. encouragement) have planned an offensive to reclaim Basra from these rogue militias. Besides the violence, there's the problem of corrupt militias having control of the city's valuable ports. And as the Iraqi general in charge of southern Iraq argued, the militias has to be moved out before the elections this fall, or they might forever take hold.

So the offensive was finally launched this week, with Iraqi forces moving in on the ground with British and U.S. support by air. It came as a surprise to no one, even Sadr's people, one of whom tells The Los Angeles Times that Sadr has initially agreed to support the crackdown, provided that it targeted 'outlaws.'"

But now Mahdi representatives say that the offensive is not so "targeted." And Sadr issued a statement two weeks ago permitting the Mahdi Army to fire on U.S. and Iraqi forces in self-defense. So no matter the talk of "outlaws," everyone perceives this as a hit against Sadr.

So now it's chaos, as the operation deepens in Basra and there are clashes in Baghdad -- where the Iraqi forces are also attacking "special groups" (as an American official calls them, meaning Shiite militias with Iranian backing) with American support. Shiite insurgents have responded in part by firing rockets into the Green Zone. There's also a good deal of violence between the rival Shiite militias in Baghdad and elsewhere.

The big question for everyone is whether the cease fire will hold up. Sadr loyalists, the LA Times reports, "accuse his Shiite rivals in the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party of using the Iraqi army and police to round up the cleric's followers ahead of the elections."

The Washington Post reports that Sadr " is under immense pressure from senior loyalists to lift the cease-fire order." The New York Times gives a vivid sense of how close the situation is to tipping:

Many places in Baghdad were tense. At a checkpoint downtown, a policeman’s radio crackled with the news of the sniper shooting of a police officer in a nearby neighborhood. “We’ve heard that Sadr has canceled the cease-fire, is this true?” he asked motorists whose car he was searching....

Saeed Ammar, a government employee, said he was standing near policemen in the Huriya neighborhood on Tuesday morning when he was approached by Mahdi Army members. “They told me not to stand near checkpoints. They said, ‘We are waiting for the word from Moktada Sadr to attack the checkpoints — it may come at any moment.’ “

So far, though, Sadr has only responded by calling for a nationwide civil disobedience campaign. His statement: "we call on all Iraqis to show restraint, throughout Iraq, as a first step. If the government does not respect the demands of the masses, then the second step will be disobedience in Baghdad and the rest of the provinces." The cease fire is still in effect.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has gone down to Basra to monitor the campaign and has issued an ultimatum for the militia members to lay down their arms.

As the Post observes it's an awkward time for the biggest test yet of the preparedness of the Iraqi forces: "It was unclear why U.S. forces would take part in a broad armed challenge to Sadr and his thousands-strong militia on the eve of Petraeus's assessment, which the Bush administration has said would greatly influence its decision on whether to draw down troop levels."

And White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, as always, has put the brightest face possible on things: "I would characterize it as a bold decision — precisely what the critics have asked to see in Iraq, more movement by the Iraqi Security Forces."

When Gen. David Petraeus made his big trip to Congress last September, he came armed with a full deck of slides. But none of them captured the U.S. strategy in Iraq quite like this one:

In it, you can see a neat illustration of how we’re going to eventually get out of Iraq. By July, as you can see above, the U.S. force level will return to the approximate size it was preceding the surge. After that, well... the question marks begin.

According to the chart, the date for the subsequent drawdown was to be determined this month (the "decision point"). But it won't be, The Washington Post and New York Times report this morning.

When Petraeus returns to Congress in a couple weeks for his next big briefing, he will give a good idea of how many U.S. troops will remain in Iraq as of July. But beyond that, nothing. From the Times:

During the briefing to the president, General Petraeus laid out a number of potential options, the officials said, but avoided using the term “pause.” That word has gained traction here in Washington over recent weeks to describe the plateau in troop levels that is widely expected to last through the fall elections and perhaps beyond.

Instead, he described the weeks after the departure of the extra brigades ordered to Iraq in January 2007 as a period of “consolidation and evaluation,” a phrase first used publicly by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates during a visit to Iraq in February.

The officials said that Mr. Bush and General Petraeus, recognizing public and Congressional wariness about the toll of the war, would publicly hold out the possibly of withdrawing more troops, but only if conditions allowed it. Mr. Bush, in particular, is eager to end his presidency with the appearance that things are getting better in Iraq.

The Times concludes that "it now appears likely that any decision on major reductions in American troops from Iraq will be left to the next president." A state of affairs that should surprise no one, as the administration has ably kicked the can down the road with promises of dramatic improvement just six months away. Perhaps the only happy development from all this is that the administration has decided to chuck the farcical six month reviews and instead concentrate on a smaller review every month by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military’s Central Command, where, away from the distraction of noisy public debate, the military can privately ascertain whether it's safe to draw down troops in the last months of Bush's presidency.

4,000 dead U.S. soldiers and five years later, Frontline takes stock in a two part, four and half hour series. The first part airs tonight, so check it out.

"We don't have any Thomas Jeffersons here."

That's a Marine captain in The Washington Post's front page story this morning on the state of affairs in Fallujah. You're not likely to ever read a more sobering narrative about Iraq -- or a more quotable one. The focus of the piece is the city's police chief, Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie, a former member of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, turned insurgent turned police chief. Zobaie, and the people around him, have a talent for putting things succinctly.

The Post's Sudarsan Raghavan writes that "American ideals that were among the justifications for the 2003 invasion, such as promoting democracy and human rights, are giving way to values drawn from Iraq's traditions and tribal culture, such as respect, fear and brutality." Or, as Zobaie puts it:

"I have realized that Americans love the strong guy."

And here's Zobaie's defense of his police force's treatment of prisoners -- a statement apparently made without irony:

"We never tortured anybody," he said. "Sometimes we beat them during the first hours of capture."

U.S. Army Maj. Mike Cava, a military judge advocate, on the deplorable standards in the jail run by Zobaie, where inmates are not given meals and sit in cells without air conditioning (last summer, six detainees died of heatstroke):

"It's a typical Iraqi jail. Their standards are different than ours. They just do things the Iraqi way."

Capt. Mohammed Yousef from Zobaie's police force:

"Since Saddam Hussein until now, Iraq obeys only the force," Yousef said. "We are practicing the same old procedures."

Sheik Abu Abdul Salman, an imam who calls Zobaie's control of Fallujah "worse than Saddam Hussein":

Salman, the imam, said Zobaie controls the city with "a fire fist."

"But to be honest, security is restored under this guy," he said. "We have a saying in Iraq: 'Fever is better than death.' We were dead. Life stopped at 2 p.m. Everybody was afraid of themselves, including me. If he didn't use the force, the security wouldn't be restored. We don't like the weak man."

And back to Zobaie:

"If you go through the history of Iraq, you will see that only the tough guy can control the country," he said. He rattled off the names of every leader since Iraq's monarchy ended in 1958 with a bloody coup. Hussein, he said, had lasted the longest in power....

What Zobaie wants is for the U.S. military to hand over full control of Fallujah. He believes Iraq's current leaders are not strong enough. Asked whether democracy could ever bloom here, he replied: "No democracy in Iraq. Ever."

"When the Americans leave the city," he said, "I'll be tougher with the people."

Well, that wasn't so hard, was it? After somewhat absurdly refusing to post an exhaustive report on the operational links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq online (there were no links), the Pentagon has finally reversed course.

Dick Cheney: master diplomat, negotiator and conciliator?!

Ever since late February, the Iraqi government had been deadlocked over legislation that laid out guidelines for provincial elections. That was because one man on Iraq's three-member Presidency Council had objected to the law, calling it unconstitutional. The law would pave the way for the elections to take place on October 1st, a development that would be sure to have an effect on the U.S. election just a month later.

But yesterday, that member, Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi, suddenly withdrew his objection. The move came just two days after Vice President Dick Cheney met with Mehdi. So did Cheney have anything to do with that change? Well, it depends on who you ask. From The New York Times::

[Laith Shubar, an adviser to Mr. Mehdi,] said that Mr. Cheney had called Mr. Mehdi in February to ask about his objections to the law, but that the issue did not come up again when Mr. Cheney visited Mr. Mehdi here this week. A spokesman for Mr. Cheney said he could not comment on the meeting, but in an interview on Wednesday with ABC News, Mr. Cheney said, referring to Mr. Mehdi: “I talked with him about that, and a number of others. They expect they’ll have that resolved shortly.”

Shubar says the reversal came because Mehdi "received a promise from the Parliament speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashadani, that lawmakers would discuss the possibility of making changes to the legislation." Sounds like pretty thin gruel.

Meanwhile, the Times reports:

Early on Wednesday morning, American forces accidentally killed three Iraqi police officers, including a lieutenant in the special forces, just outside Hawija, a Sunni town about 140 miles north of Baghdad, an American military statement said. The statement said the officers were shot and another wounded when the Iraqi police, responding to a call for assistance, entered “at a high rate of speed” a cordoned area where American forces were operating about 2:30 a.m..

The police lieutenant, Abdul Amir Hamid Salih, 39, had escaped five assassination attempts and had to change his cellphone number every week because of death threats from insurgents, said his father, Hamid Salih. Lieutenant Salih’s house was burned down six months ago by insurgents, who offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who killed him, his father said.

Hamid Kareem Hussein, the wounded police officer, said, “We were surprised when the Americans asked us for help at night, so we went to this village and we faced gunfire.

“The lieutenant said, ‘Call them on the loudspeaker and tell them we are policemen and that they asked for us,’ and then everything cut out and I didn’t feel anything,” he said, adding, “It’s a tragedy. I hate the police, and I hate Iraq.”

I think everyone can agree that if you go to the trouble of organizing an Iraqi political reconciliation conference, it's generally a bad sign if a number of key players don't even show up.

The idea behind the conference pushed by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was to have a national "dialogue."

The largest Sunni bloc, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's party, and a prominent minority party of Shiites and Sunnis all boycotted the conference. No representatives of the insurgency (either Baathist or militia members) were there. Supporters of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr walked out of the conference, as did a prominent Sunni tribal leader who's been key to the so-called "Anbar Awakening."

Typical of Iraq, the boycotters don't even concur on their reason for boycotting. The New York Times focuses on pique by some blocs that they didn't get a proper invitation (Maliki's people say everybody got an official invitation). The AP reports that one Sunni bloc "said they would not participate in the conference until Shiite lawmakers address their political demands" -- so they won't talk reconciliation until their grievances are reconciled. And then there's a more direct explanation from that Anbar tribal leader, who's quoted in The Los Angeles Times (under the headline "A no-reconciliation conference"):

The organizer noted that Sunni tribes, which have revolted against Al Qaeda in Iraq, attended the conference. But one of their main leaders, Sheik Sulaiman, decided to lead his delegation out of the conference.

"I didn't stay any longer than it took me to smoke my cigarette. It was a total failure, because the Iraqi politicians are a failure," Sulaiman said.

This is why even Gen. David Petraeus says that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation."

Happy 5th Anniversary, everybody.

Beyond the decision to invade in the first place, it was no doubt the most disastrous decision of the war. In May of 2003, the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi Army, rendering more than 200,000 armed Iraqis angry and unemployed. This morning, The New York Times provides the most detailed account yet of how the decision went down. It's not pretty.

The original plan, concocted by the seasoned and competent Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, was to not disband the army. Only the Republican Guard would be disbanded. The reason was clear, according to a March, 2003 PowerPoint presentation given at a National Security Council meeting. Said one slide of the presentation: “Cannot immediately demobilize 250K-300K personnel and put on the street.”

Exactly whose idea it was to disband the army, no one can say. No, Paul Bremer won't take the credit for it. But Bremer and his deputy did champion the idea. And in late May, he told the president and his aides that he was going to disband the Iraqi Army the next day. The president signed off on it. But it's pretty remarkable who did not:

Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was never asked for advice, and was in Paris when the May 22 meeting was held.

Mr. Powell, who views the decree as a major blunder, later asked Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, for an explanation.

“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”

And then there's the question of whether Bremer consulted the military command in Iraq about the decision. Funny story, that. The senior commander there at the time, Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, had clearly opposed the idea of disbanding the army. And when the time came to see if he would sign off on the plan to disband the army, Bremer assigned a retired officer on his staff, Col. Greg Gardner, to check in on McKiernan. For some reason, the two sides can't seem to agree on whether McKiernan signed off:

Mr. Bremer’s headquarters was in the Green Zone in central Baghdad, while General McKiernan’s was at a base near the Baghdad airport several miles away. Colonel Gardner said that there were problems with telephone communications but that he finally reached a member of General McKiernan’s staff who told him that the general accepted the decree.

“I got the impression that Lieutenant General McKiernan was not all that keen about the course of action,” Colonel Gardner said, “but was clearly told that he did endorse the draft.” Colonel Gardner added that he could not recall the name of the staff officer he spoke with.

General McKiernan, however, asserted that he neither reviewed nor backed the decree. “I never saw that order and never concurred,” he said. “That is absolutely false.”

Lt. Gen. J. D. Thurman, who serves as the Army’s chief operations officer and was the top operations officer for General McKiernan at the time, had a similar recollection. “We did not get a chance to make a comment,” he said in an e-mail message. “Not sure they wanted to hear what we had to say.”

Bremer did apparently notify Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld before the decree and says that Rumsfeld approved in a phone conversation. If that is the case, Rumsfeld doesn't seem to have thought much about it. And if you sense a pattern here, it's that those who might have thought much about it weren't consulted:

“Anyone who is experienced in the ways of Washington knows the difference between an open, transparent policy process and slamming something through the system,” said Franklin C. Miller, the senior director for Defense Policy and Arms Control, who played an important role on the National Security Council in overseeing plans for the postwar phase. “The most portentous decision of the occupation was carried out stealthily and without giving the president’s principal advisers an opportunity to consider it and give the president their views.”

Yesterday, news broke that the Pentagon had decided to squelch release of a study that had definitively concluded that there were no operational links between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda, a major underpinning of the case for war. There would be no press conference and the report would not be emailed to reporters. Anyone who wanted it would have to get it by mail.

As I observed, it was a disappointingly lame effort at suppressing inconvenient information from the administration that's set the gold standard.

We were told by the Joint Forces Command that our copy was mailed today. But ABC News has already got its copy and posted it for all to see. So here you go (pdf). Behold! "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e. direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda."

Did you think that just because taxpayers funded a study that showed conclusively there was no operational link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda that it would be released without a fuss? Well, this is the Bush administration we're talking about here -- a group who've shown themselves over the years to be masters at disappearing inconvenient information. It looks like we've got another addition to our ever-growing catalog.

From ABC News:

The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online.

The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

It won't be emailed to reporters and it won't be posted online.

I have to say, though, that this method of squelching leaves much to be desired. Maybe they're losing their touch, but the way you squelch a report -- as the Army showed with a 2005 RAND Corporation report that upbraided the administration for inadequately preparing for the postwar occupation -- is to keep it really quiet. (Even better, as a cursory browse of our list will show, is to make sure the report never gets written at all.)

But McClatchy and ABC News have already published stories on the report's findings. And ABC even has a link (pdf) to the report's executive summary. And, really, some nosy reporter is just going to post a link to the entire report at some point if you're mailing the darn thing out. So what gives? I expect more.

In his statement announcing his resignation today, Adm. William Fallon "cited the disrespect of the President in a recent magazine article, the resulting embarrassment, perceptions of differences between his views and Administration Policies and the resulting distraction from CENTCOM missions."

That article, of course, was Thomas P.M. Barnett's 7,500-word hagiographical profile of Fallon in this issue of Esquire. Below are the key excerpts to give you an idea of why Fallon might have been so uncomfortable with it:

[W]hile Admiral Fallon's boss, President George W. Bush, regularly trash-talks his way to World War III and his administration casually casts Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as this century's Hitler (a crown it has awarded once before, to deadly effect), it's left to Fallon-and apparently Fallon alone-to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: "This constant drumbeat of conflict . . . is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."

What America needs, Fallon says, is a "combination of strength and willingness to engage."

Those are fighting words to your average neocon-not to mention your average supporter of Israel, a good many of whom in Washington seem never to have served a minute in uniform. But utter those words for print and you can easily find yourself defending your indifference to "nuclear holocaust."

How does Fallon get away with so brazenly challenging his commander in chief?

The answer is that he might not get away with it for much longer. President Bush is not accustomed to a subordinate who speaks his mind as freely as Fallon does, and the president may have had enough….

…well-placed observers now say that it will come as no surprise if Fallon is relieved of his command before his time is up next spring, maybe as early as this summer, in favor of a commander the White House considers to be more pliable. If that were to happen, it may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year and don't want a commander standing in their way.

And later in the piece:

Read more »

Just out from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as commander of CENTOM:

“I am concerned that the resignation of Admiral William J. Fallon, commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and a military leader with more than three decades of command experience, is yet another example that independence and the frank, open airing of experts’ views are not welcomed in this Administration.

“It is also a sign that the Administration is blind to the growing costs and consequences of the Iraq war, which has so damaged America’s security interests in the Middle East and beyond. Democrats will continue to examine these matters very closely in the coming weeks and months.”

If there's one thing the Bush Administration has demonstrated, it's the difficulty of proving a negative.

It took a number of months after the invasion of weapons inspectors crawling all over Iraq to show that Saddam Hussein did not, in fact, have weapons of mass destruction. And it's time to chalk up another victory for completeness.

A good portion of those 935 false statements uttered by administration officials in the run-up to the invasion had to do with claims of Iraq ties to Al Qaeda. That was, in part, thanks to the intelligence shenanigans of Doug Feith at the Pentagon, but of course it was an administration-wide mentality. Which explains that even after the 9/11 Commission found that there was no significant relationship, they kept on pleading the point.

Well, I think it's time to finally consider this negative proven:

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

So what's next?

The once-hotly anticipated Phase II report, now a punchline, is finally on its way. And, well. From The Los Angeles Times:

After an acrimonious investigation that spanned four years, the Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a detailed critique of the Bush administration's claims in the buildup to war with Iraq, congressional officials said.

The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.

But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.

I can't wait to read it. It's pretty clear that Sen. Pat Roberts' (R-KS) years of stonewalling, together with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) slow-rolling, has produced a report that no one will want to read at a time when no one will care to read it.

Luckily the Center for Public Integrity and Fund for Independence in Journalism have already done the job.

How are things really going in Iraq? And should the American public know about it?

Next month, The Washington Post reports, the intelligence community will complete a national intelligence estimate on the situation in Iraq. If Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell has his way, the estimate will stay classified.

That's because McConnell is no fan of public debate of intelligence issues. He's said that all this debate about the surveillance bill " means that some Americans are going to die." And he thinks that NIEs should stay secret.

It was a policy that he tried to maintain with regard to the recent NIE on Iran -- which effectively undercut the administration's increasing alarmism about the nuclear threat of Iran by proclaiming that the intelligence community thought that Iran had suspended its nuclear program. McConnell and the administration only begrudgingly agreed to release that NIE, he explained to Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker, due to "the fear that, if we didn't release it, it would leak, and the Administration at that point would be accused of hiding information."

The intel community produced two NIEs last year, one in January (which used the phrase "civil war"), the other in August. Declassified versions of the key findings were released for each. Both sized up the shifting universe of security threats and emphasized the perilous political situation in the country.

This time around, however, things might be different. McConnell decreed in October that NIEs should no longer be released. And:

Intelligence officials said that the National Intelligence Board -- made up of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies plus McConnell -- will decide whether to release the Iraq judgments once the estimate is completed. But they made clear that they lean toward a return to the traditional practice of keeping such documents secret.

So here's the question. The NIE, which is apparently expected to be issued in April, would most likely be the last word from the intelligence community on the situation in Iraq before the election. Will the administration be able to keep it under wraps? Or will the fear of the report leaking again force it out into the open?

Viktor Bout, the famed Russian arms smuggler, supplier to anybody anywhere in the world who could pay the right price (such as, say, Liberia's Charles Taylor, FARC in Colombia, and the U.S. military), has been nabbed in Thailand. From the AP:

One of the world's most notorious arms dealers was arrested Thursday in Bangkok on allegations that he supplied Colombian rebels with arms and explosives, Thai police said.

Russian Viktor Bout was arrested in his hotel room in the capital, Bangkok, on a warrant issued by a Thai court, said Police Lt. Gen. Pongpat Chayapan, head of the Crime Suppression Bureau. The warrant stemmed from an earlier one issued by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, he said.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman "congratulated" Thai police for the arrest but could not provide details about the role U.S. officials played in it.

Funny, that last bit, since journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun reported in their book on Bout, "Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Plans, and the Man Who Makes War Possible," that both the U.S. military and defense contractors KBR and Dyncorp had used Bout's services in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

Even after President Bush signed an order freezing Bout's assets, the Pentagon continued using his planes, they reported, to get reconstruction supplies into Baghdad. All in all, they say, his planes flew hundreds of flights from 2003 to 2006, even after his work for the Defense Department was exposed in 2004. Bout may have been an international criminal, but he got the job done.

But now Thai police have nabbed him. So congrats!

Update: Turns out that U.S. authorities were in on the bust, which was a "four-month sting by the Drug Enforcement Administration with secret help from security officials in four other nations." Go figure.

As we noted yesterday, the administration is determined to strike a longterm security agreement with Iraq while avoiding the Constitutional requirement that the Senate ratify treaties.

To avoid that outcome, the administration has said that any agreement with Iraq will contain no security guarantee -- just an agreement that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq. Voila! no treaty.

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) isn't convinced. And during a hearing Tuesday before a House foreign affairs subcommittee, he grilled the State Department's Iraq coordinator about the deal.

But in a State Department official's written reply to Ackerman's questions (which you can see here), the administration showed that it has another trick up its sleeve.

Congress doesn't have to approve any agreement with Iraq, the official writes, because it already has... sorta. That came in the form of the 2002 Iraq war authorization, which authorized force to neutralize the "continuing threat posed by Iraq." Apparently in the administration view, that was also a blanket authorization for the ensuing occupation of Iraq.

Ackerman, speaking yesterday, wasn't convinced: "I don't think anybody argues today that Saddam Hussein is a threat," he said. "Is it the government of Iraq that's a threat?"

But if he doesn't buy that, then there's also Congress' post-9/11 authorization, the official writes, which "authorized the President to use all necessary and appropriate force against nations, organizations, or persons involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States." Because the president has said that the invasion was consistent with that authorization, it apparently is. Or at least by their way of seeing things.

Still skeptical? Oh! But there's more. "In addition, Congress has repeatedly provided funding for the Iraq war, both in regular appropriations cycles and in supplemental appropriations." Little did they know that with their annual appropriations, they were tacitly approving a longterm deal.

Evidently, the adminstration is convinced that if they continue to throw enough stuff at the wall, something will stick.

For some reason, Dems in Congress remain unconvinced. Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA) even told the Post that the letter "creates the basis for a constitutional confrontation."

While there's a lot of attention on picking a new president, you might not want to take your eye off the current one.

The idea, once scandalous, that Bush would just be handing the Iraq mess off to his successor is now an accepted reality. But he won't be doing it in an informal way, either.

Since last year, the administration has been working towards a long-term security agreement with Iraq, an "enduring relationship," as they had it. The basic outlines were clear: a long-term American troop presence in Iraq and preferential treatment for American investments in return for a guarantee of security for the Iraqis.

To give you an idea of the outline, the Iraqis said that it would be silly to expect that Iraq would be able to defend itself alone until at least 2018. Forever seems a fair conservative estimate.

But there was a problem. There was a strong case to be made that for the administration to strike such a deal without the consent of the Senate was unconstitutional. Democrats were set to fight such a move.

You know what Bush and Cheney think about asking Congress for anything. So, abruptly, the administration's position changed. The administration would be striking a long-term pact along the same lines, but there would be no security guarantee. None at all. According to the letter of the agreement, if Iraq were attacked, we'd just let it burn.

For some reason, some cynics think this is just a workaround. Without the actual security guarantee, the administration can hammer out the treaty without any hassle from Congress.

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) is such a cynic. And yesterday Ackerman had the opportunity to press David Satterfield, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, about the deal. The exchange, printed today in The Washington Post, had that taint of absurdity so common to Congressional testimony from administration officials:

Update: Here's video of Ackerman's questioning.

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