Seymour Hersh's piece is a long and sad piece about self-delusion. A must read.

THE STOVEPIPE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic—and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm” generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
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  thanks to The Agonist

Rumsfield has a reality surge...

Rumsfeld questions war on terrorism

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioned whether the United States was doing enough to win the war on terrorism, citing “mixed results” in the fight against al-Qaida in a pointed memo to top Pentagon officials last week.
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Rumsfeld's war-on-terror memo   thanks to Counterspin Central

Here are Billmon's observations on Rummy's unseemly realization of reality...

Looking for a Better Body Count

But others are working real hard to keep that pesky reality at bay...

Bush’s News War
Fed up with the gloom-and-doom coverage of the conflict, the White House is taking aim at the press

It started out as a little crowd control in Baghdad. But as U.S. troops entered the streets to restore order earlier this month, the protest turned ugly.

SOMEONE THREW A homemade grenade at the Americans, wounding 13 servicemen. According to the Oct. 8 Daily Threat Assessment—the Coalition’s internal casualty report, which was shown to NEWSWEEK—eight soldiers were wounded seriously enough to be evacuated to military hospitals. Yet at a press conference the next day, there was no mention of the attack. Pushed by reporters, U.S. officials would only say the incident was under investigation. It was as if the ambush, and the casualties, had never happened.

In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis.
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  thanks to Eschaton

The Rosy Scenario Rides Again

But that reality is just going to hang around...

US Deaths in Vietnam and Iraq by Month   thanks to Badattitudes Journal

The war that could destroy both armies

The United States possesses the best-trained and best-equipped offensive force in the world, which it spends about US$400 billion annually to sustain, more than the combined total of all other major military powers. Yet there is no more eroding effect on an offensive force than duties of occupation. Soldiers are ideally non-thinking, order-taking killing machines, and as such cannot be effective police officers. Good policing requires members of the police force to think, evaluate and make moral judgments, which in turn makes them ineffective soldiers. Killing opponent soldiers on the battlefield is honorable by military code, while killing civilians by armed police, even in self-defense, turns any police force into a tool of oppression. This has been a military truism from the time of the Roman legions down to the German Wehrmacht.
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Another story of how soldiers are only making things worse...

Civilization...

As soon as Amal protested about letting the dog sniff her bag because of the Quran inside, the soldier grabbed the Quran, threw it out of the bag and proceeded to check it. The lady was horrified and the dozens of employees who were waiting to be checked moved forward in a rage at having the Quran thrown to the ground. Amal was put in hand-cuffs and taken away and the raging mob was greeted with the butts of rifles.

The Iraqi Police arrived to try to intervene, and found the mob had increased in number because it had turned from a security check into a demonstration. One of the stations showed police officers tearing off their "IP" badge- a black arm badge to identify them as Iraqi Police and shouting at the camera, "We don't want the badge- we signed up to help the people, not see our Quran thrown to the ground…"

Some journalists say that journalists' cameras were confiscated by the troops…

This is horrible. It made my blood boil just hearing about it- I can't imagine what the people who were witnessing it felt. You do not touch the Quran. Why is it so hard to understand that some things are sacred to people?!

How would the troops feel if Iraqis began flinging around Holy Bibles or Torahs and burning crosses?! They would be horrified and angry because you do not touch a person's faith…

But that's where the difference is: the majority of Iraqis have a deep respect for other cultures and religions… and that's what civilization is. It's not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers and McDonalds; It's having enough security in your own faith and culture to allow people the sanctity of theirs…
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Evangelicals in Congress seek to Shape Iraqi Constitution

Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. have inserted provisions into the legislation that would authorize $87 bn. for Iraq, according to Knight Ridder. The legislation instructs the Coalition Provisional Authority to work to ensure that the new Iraqi constitution protects freedom of religion, especially freedom of evangelical Christians to proselytize in Iraq.
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Occupation Fuels the Resistance
An Interview with Tariq Ali