What's Bush's Big Secret?

"'Obviously, to the extent innocent life was lost, you know, I'm saddened,' the president said at a wide-ranging news conference. 'Our objective is to protect innocent life. And we've got a lot of brave souls in the theater working hard to protect innocent life.'"

Sabrina Tavernise and James Glanz write in the New York Times: "Iraq's Ministry of Interior has concluded that employees of a private American security firm fired an unprovoked barrage in the shooting last Sunday in which at least eight Iraqis were killed and is proposing a radical reshaping of the way American diplomats and contractors here are protected. . . .

"The document concludes that the dozens of foreign security companies here should be replaced by Iraqi companies, and that a law that has given the companies immunity for years be scrapped."

But don't count on it. Tavernise and Glanz note that "while Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has demanded that the State Department drop Blackwater as its protector, security industry experts say that such an outcome is highly unlikely because American officials rely heavily on the company, setting the two sides on a diplomatic collision course."

Michael Hirsh writes in his Newsweek.com column: "Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in nightmarish dystopian fiction, like '1984,' or in fevered passages from Dostoevsky -- or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist purges and the Dark Ages. Well, that universe exists today. It is called Iraq. And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush.

"The moral vacuum of Iraq -- where Blackwater USA guards can kill 10 or 20 Iraqis on a whim and never be prosecuted for it -- did not happen by accident. It is yet another example of something the Bush administration could have prevented with the right measures but simply did not bother about as it rushed into invading and occupying another country. . . .

"As anyone who has been in Iraq (like me) knows, on the ground the unspoken rule of Bush's counterinsurgency efforts over the past four years has been that almost all Iraqis, at least the males, are guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings at the hands of security firms and sometimes U.S. military units are arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis have no recourse whatever to justice except in a few cases like Haditha. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have a furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control. . . .

"Remember the scene at the beginning of the movie 'Braveheart,' when the evil English lord claims droit du seigneur -- the right to deflower Mel Gibson's bride -- over the powerless Scots? Well, that medieval reality is something like what Iraqis are living with today. This is the 'model' George W. Bush will bequeath to the world."

Almost News

Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "Yesterday's news conference was just minutes old when President Bush made a startling announcement.

"'Mandela's dead,' he said.

"There was a gasp in the White House briefing room at this news, which would no doubt surprise the 89-year-old Nelson Mandela himself.

"Fortunately, the president quickly clarified that he was not speaking of the sainted South African but of his equivalents in Iraq. 'Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas,' he explained.