PRELUDE TO DISASTER

If you missed James Bamford's interview of David J. Rothkopf, author of the new book "Running the World," which ran twice Sunday on C-SPAN, beseech the network (email: online@c-span.org) to post the video in its online archive pronto, before Georgie Boy's speech on Tuesday night.

Rothkopf's cool, penetrating assessment of the Cheney-Rummy tag team and of Condoleeza ("Ms. Mushroom Cloud") Rice -- as well as previous architects of American power from Kissinger to Brezinski and Scrowcroft to Powell -- provides an inside look at the current U.S. regime and its failed foreign policy of war. The interview will leave you slack-jawed with admiration for Rothkopf's calm, intellectual dissection of what has gone wrong.

Meantime, Bob Herbert reminds us this morning:

The war in Iraq was sold to the American public the way a cheap car salesman sells a lemon. Dick Cheney assured the nation that Americans in Iraq would be "greeted as liberators." Kenneth Adelman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board said the war would be a "cakewalk." And Donald Rumsfeld said on National Public Radio: "I can't say if the use of force would last five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."

Now compare that with Rummy Boy's latest declaration: "The insurgency could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years." And he actually wants us to believe his latest line of bullshit: "We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win." Uh-huh. When Georgie Boy offers that crock Tuesday night, which I'm betting he will, we oughta pelt him with tomatos and give him the hook.