TUESDAY AYEM BRIEFING

Paul Bremer now says, "We never had enough troops on the ground" in Iraq. This confirms Tom Friedman's description of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, noted in his column on Sunday, as "just enough troops to lose."

Meantime, if you didn't read Sunday's immense, detailed report by David Barst and Jeff Gerth on how the White House conjured so-called "irrefutable evidence" of Saddam Hussein's purported nuclear weapons program out of intelligence based on wrong factual data in order to justify the invasion of Iraq, while suppressing contrary intelligence and doubts by nuclear experts, you can read an editorial summarizing the report today: "The Nuclear Bomb That Wasn't."

The editorial not only dismisses the prevaricatin' prez's "frequent claim that Congress had the same information he had" when it voted to authorize the invasion, it accuses top administration officials of dishonesty and selling the world a bill of goods. It specifically names Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, calling for her resignation because of incompetence at the very least. As Paul Krugman also writes this morning for the umpteenth time: "Yes, Virginia, we were misled into war."

In a parallel universe, David "Bobo" Brooks goes on his merry way this morning about "Quickening the Tempo in Iraq," with the dim notion that the U.S. may soon be able to set realistic goals there. He adduces his evidence in large part from a conversaton he had yesterday with Rumsfeld, who told him "Iraq had 'a crack' at being a success." Grasping at straws, Bobo concludes: "At least he's not overhyping."