The C-Word

"The Nov. 8 memo was prepared for Mr. Bush and his top deputies by Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and senior aides on the staff of the National Security Council after a trip by Mr. Hadley to Baghdad.

"The memo suggests that if Mr. Maliki fails to carry out a series of specified steps, it may ultimately be necessary to press him to reconfigure his parliamentary bloc, a step the United States could support by providing 'monetary support to moderate groups,' and by sending thousands of additional American troops to Baghdad to make up for what the document suggests is a current shortage of Iraqi forces."

My, this is turning into a leaky administration.

Dick Polman examines the administration's no-civil-war stance:

"Bush is basically stuck with his denial, because if he was to admit that Iraq was embroiled in a civil war, he would then be virtually declaring that the signature mission of his White House tenure had irrevocably failed; and if he did that, he would come under even more pressure to scale back the number of U.S. troops, since few Americans would see the wisdom of allowing our fighting men and women to remain trapped in a civil war. Indeed, the White House has known this for many months; back in August, a White House aide told Newsweek, 'If there's a full-blown civil war, the president isn't going to allow our forces to be caught in the crossfire.'"

NYT columnist Nick Kristof compiles some damning quotes under the headline, "The Cowards Turned Out to Be Right":

"For several years, the White House and its Dobermans helpfully pointed out the real enemy in Iraq: those lazy, wimpish foreign correspondents who were so foolish and unpatriotic that they reported that we faced grave difficulties in Iraq.

"To Paul Wolfowitz, the essential problem was that journalists were cowards. 'Part of our problem is a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors,' Mr. Wolfowitz said in 2004. He later added, 'The story isn't being described accurately.'

"Don Rumsfeld agreed but suggested that the problem was treason: 'Interestingly, all of the exaggerations seem to be on one side. It isn't as though there simply have been a series of random errors on both sides of issues. On the contrary, the steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists and to discourage those who hope for success in Iraq.'

"As for Dick Cheney, he saw the flaw in journalists as indolence. 'The press is, with all due respect -- there are exceptions -- oftentimes lazy, often simply reports what someone else in the press says without doing their homework.'

"Mr. Cheney and the others might have better spent their time reading the coverage of Iraq rather than insulting it, because in retrospect those brave reporters based in Baghdad got the downward spiral right."

This USA Today blog has the lowdown on accusations that the Associated Press was wrong in reporting that Shiites burned six Sunni men to death; the AP stands by its story.