Reply #241: It's that "doesn't feel quite right" that has me wondering.

[TahitiNut]

There's a core political cabal in the madministration, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle, and (maybe, but doubtful) Rice. I don't think Clarke was in that cabal. At the same time, I wonder if he's being played, even if he's not a player. The only things we're seeing "unraveling" are the second layer of politically ablative facades.

WMD was an ablative facade. Imminent threat was an ablative facade. These facades can be burnt away and the "intelligence community" and "prior administration" are heat sinks. Now we're seeing the "human error" facade getting burnt away. To choose another metaphor, it's like layers of the onion. We're getting much, much closer to the idea of LIHOP ... and maybe MIHOP. I just wonder if the next layers will be finally burnt away and we see that.

Hell, some people still believe Afghanistan was about OBL. (They offered to extradite him given "probable cause.") It wasn't. It was about petrochemicals and privatized control of the pipeline. (The Taliban were willing to have the pipeline. They just didn't want it to be privately owned by global corporatists. That was the impasse.)

Some people still believe there were WMD in Iraq in 2002. Some people still believe Iraq was an "imminent threat" to the US. Some people still believe the intelligence data was wrong. Hell, some people still believe this madministration is honest.