Guns, Wars, Stealth & Lies

The silence from the conservative punditocracy over new revelations by George Bush's semi-official biographer that Donald Rumsfeld was evil incarnate as defense secretary is deafening.

So leave it to David Frum to go where his peers won't in writing that while most of the media attention has focused on Robert Draper's revelation that Rumsfeld supervised rosy PowerPoint presentations for The Decider on the Iraq war that included passage from the Bible, here's the clincher:

"Conservatives should be focused instead on a very different question -- an unpleasant one, but one absolutely essential to our indispensable, inevitable but still postponed reckoning with the legacy of the Bush administration. The question is: Why did Iraq go so very badly wrong -- and why, having gone wrong, did it take so ruinously wrong for the administration to shift to a more successful course? Conservatives rightly take pride and comfort in the achievements of the surge. But the surge does not banish all the antecedent questions about Iraq. The surge may have rescued the American position in Iraq from total disaster, but nobody would describe the present situation in Iraq as anything like satisfactory."