A bunch of senior State Department officials got booted over security failures at Benghazi. A friend comments, "This is functionally equivalent to the sacking of GOs."

The contrast to the lack of accountability for the Abu Ghraib mess is striking. And I am confident that the prisoner abuse scandal, by outraging Iraqis and fanning the flames of the insurgency, resulted in the deaths of more Americans than did the lapses in Libya.

This is from awhile ago -- Face the Nation on Aug. 28 -- but I've wanted just to put it on the record here.

They are cheap shots. I mean, several of the ones he tosses at me -- you know, he takes great credit for my resignation in 2004. Well, President Bush and I had always agreed that I would leave at the end of 2004. After the election, I stayed on for three more months because I wanted to and because there were some conferences that I wanted to attend and because Dr. Rice hadn't been confirmed. So there's no news there.

He says that I went out of my way not to present by positions to the president but to take them outside of the administration. That's nonsense. The president knows that I told him what I thought about every issue of the day. Mr. Cheney may forget that I'm the one who said to President Bush, if you break it, you own it; and you have got to understand that, if we have to go to war in Iraq, that we have to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase. And Mr. Cheney and many of his colleagues did not prepare for what happened after the fall of Baghdad. And I persuaded the president to take the case to the United Nations to see if it could be solved without war. And if it couldn't be solved without war, we would have people aligned with us.

Mr. Cheney went out immediately after the president made that decision and uncut it by giving two speeches to two veterans' groups that essentially said he didn't believe it would work. That's not the way you support a president.

Then he also says that, you know, I was not supportive of the president's positions. Well, who went to the United Nations and, regrettably, with a lot of false information? It was me. That wasn't Mr. Cheney. I supported the president. I support the president's decisions. I gave the president my best advice.

By Peter Van Buren
Best Defense guest unraveller

When wars end, usually there is a winner and a loser. Greeks burn down the city for the win; Trojans accept a dummy horse for the epic loss, like that. As we near the end of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq, and note the beginning of the State Department occupation (the formal mission handover is Oct. 1), it is a good time to decide who lost and who won, and what that means for the future of Iraq.

For the minority, all-around Washington guy (now stopping off briefly to be Secretary of Defense) Leon Panetta thinks we and the Iraqis sort of won. Leon said, "But the bottom line is, whether it's diplomatic or whether it's military, we've got a long-term relationship with Iraq. We've invested a lot of blood in (Iraq). And regardless of whether you agree or disagree as to how we got into it, the bottom line is that we now have, through a lot of sacrifice, established a ... relatively stable democracy that's trying to work together to lead that country."

Tune into your favorite right-wing blog, and there is lots of mumbo-jumbo about the surge and sacrifices and all that false patriotism stuff that no longer even makes for a good country and western song.

On firmer ground, it is less clear that the United States or Iraq won anything.

The United States lost 4474 soldiers (and counting), with thousands more crippled or wounded, spent a couple of trillion dollars that helped wreck our economy at home, and did not get much in return. Blood for oil? Only in the sense that one of out of every eight U.S. casualties in Iraq died guarding a fuel convoy. Iraqi oil output is stuck at pre-war levels and will be for some time. A drop in world oil prices would wreck the Iraqi economy. Despite Panetta's patter about Iraq being a country willing to work with the United States, Iraq as a political entity follows its own path, virtually allied with Iran and unsupportive of American geopolitical dreams. The U.S. government will sell some military gear to the Iraqis and make some money, but in the end George Bush went to war and all we got was a low-rent dictatorship turned into a low-rent semi-police state. As this is written, it is even unclear if the United States will snag any permanent bases in Iraq, and whether any troops will be allowed to stay on past the end of this December.

As for Iraq being any sort of winner after being stomped on by the U.S. military, no. Iraq had its civil society shredded, underwent eight years of sectarian civil war, saw over 100,000 killed and is home now to a small but bustling al Qaeda franchise. The United States left without brokering a deal between the Kurds and the Arab Iraqis, leaving that kettle on full boil. The United States also failed to establish stable borders for the Kurds, such that the Iranians shell "Kurdistan" from the east, while Turkish jets drop bombs in the west. Turkey is part of NATO -- imagine the U.S. government sitting silently if Germany bombed Poland next week.

What many people do not know is that one reason for the drop in sectarian violence in 2008 was that both sides had done much of the killing they needed to do. The fighting then was a civil war, Shia versus Sunni, and the death toll was high enough on both sides to achieve the level of segregation and redistribution of power desired at that time-they ran out of reasons for the war to continue at that level of intensity. Ominously, however, the Sunnis and Shias did not fully settle the score and so that pot sits bubbling on the stove as well.

Sectarian tensions do still run high in Iraq, and the United States has been left powerless to do anything about it. Except for some technical assistance and perhaps some very low-key special operations help, the U.S. government has taken a sideline seat to the sectarian violence over the last few months, leaving the fight to the Iraqis. Whether zero or 3,000 or 10,000 U.S. troops stay on in Iraq, it is unlikely that such a smaller U.S. force will intervene, given that a larger one declined to do so.

The tinderbox nature of things is such that the Iraqi government is seeking to ban a television drama about events leading up to the historic split in Islam into Sunni and Shiite sects hundreds of years ago. The Iraqi parliament asked that the Communication and Media Commission, a media regulator, ban "Al Hassan and Al Hussein" on the grounds it incites sectarian tensions and misrepresents historical facts. "This TV serial includes sensitive issues in Islamic history. Presenting them in a TV series leads to agitated strife," said Ali Al Alaq, a politician who heads the religious affairs committee.

Needless to say, a glance at the daily news from Iraq will reveal the ongoing steady low hum of suicide bombings and targeted killings that is now all too much a normal part of life. The occasional spectacular attacks (instantly blamed on al Qaeda by the United States) make headlines, but every Iraqi knows it is the regular nature of these killings as much as the death toll itself that is most disruptive to society. Iraq is hardly a winner.

Who won the war? Iran...

Read on

A friend passes along this interesting State Department email, filed over the weekend from Djerba, in southern Tunisia. It is fine, except I wish the writer had said "pro-Qaddafi" forces stedda "pro-Libya" :

Spent a few minutes chatting with the Egyptians in the camp outside the airport and also on board the aircraft in order to answer any questions the refugees may have and to put an American face on the mission as there were no Arabic speaking crew on board. A few points the Egyptians brought up:

All Egyptians felt very well taken care of. They said they had all the food, all the water and all the medicine they needed. They were very thankful to the Tunisian people and the Tunisian government and said they felt very welcome and had been handled with kindness. Egyptians can be seen walking around the airport with Tunisian Flags pinned to their suitcases or clothing. On Friday night, we witnessed a dueling cheerleading match where one group of approximately 200 Egyptians in a cordoned off block in the terminal started shouting cheers to Tunis and waving a single Tunisian flag. A second cordon of Egyptians one-upped the first by singing, waving dozens of Tunisian flags in a spinning dancing circle while they hoisted a Tunisian man in the center of the mass on their shoulders. That's probably my first Egyptian Tunisian Pep Rally.

Read on

Here's a guest post by Jennifer Bernal of CNAS, who went to see the Hillary& Bob Show on Monday:

This afternoon, George Washington University hosted a discussion with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The talk was part of a series of high-profile events organized by the University to get students to engage with members of the government. To complete the celebrity roster, Christiane Amanpour and Frank Sesno moderated the discussion. The event drew hundreds of students to line up for tickets, several of them camping out on the street overnight to make sure they got dibs. Once the office actually opened, said tickets ran out in less than a half hour. (I'd only witnessed such zealous and long-lasting queuing on two past occasions: for sign-ups to the wine-tasting class offered by my college, and for a summer production of Hamlet featuring Jude Law.) 

(Read on)

If you want to understand what is going on, read this -- by far the best thing I've read on the Obama administration's decision to change course on missile defenses facing Russia and Iran.

Kaplan's bottom line:

What will the Russians do now? They've cited the missile-defense plan as the main source of suspicion, the main obstacle to improved relations. Now that Obama has wiped it off the board, will Putin and Medvedev come around -- or will they bring up some other reason, some other excuse, for remaining distant and occasionally hostile? It's in the Kremlin's court.

The only thing I'd add is the lineup that made the decision. President Obama remains a novice in foreign affairs, but he is backed by people who know this subject intimately from a variety of angles -- James Jones (national security advisor, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe),  Gen. Cartwright (vice chairman of Joint Chiefs, former head of U.S. Strategic Command) and Robert Gates (defense secretary, and lifetime Russia expert).

I have no idea where Hilary Clinton is on all this. Am I wrong or is she floundering in her job?

Tambako the Jaguar/flickr