The no-defense defense

Sounds like a bad football strategy. But it's actually the current Bush administration strategy regards the Iraq war.

Stephen Hayes lays out the entire thing in his latest Weekly Standard column. The admin has been rope-a-doping the Iraq question for awhile now. Hayes explains why:

So for most of his second term the president would claim that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror without stopping to explain why Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.

This reluctance comes not from a lack of arguments to make but from a fear that if the administration aggressively makes its case, the CIA will promptly seek to undermine it through leaks that wind up on the front pages.

He's correct, Bush is leaving all the detailed defenses to the few journalists or pundits willing to go there, like Hayes or Hitchens. Bush is hamstrung by the fact he put most of his eggs in the WMD basket upfront, so he risks sounding cheesy if he resorts to pounding reason B--sort of a casus belli du jour.

One can see the possible tie-in to Plamegate. Libby, talking through Miller, described what he called a "perverted war" between the CIA and WH regards the WMD issue. I'm sure there is some major league bureaucratic arse covering in all bureaucracies involved. It's the culture. But as Hayes says, credible information still exists about Iraq's nefarious ambitions, intel that wasn't created by Chalabi or now discredited tall tales from expat fortune hunters. Why aren't they using it?

For example, Hayes goes on to describe a warehouse in Doha, Qatar that contains documents removed from Iraqi Intelligence after the fall of Baghdad. Some of the doc titiles are real doozies, like "IIS Report on How French Campaigns are Financed", "Improvised Explosive Devices Plan", and "Ricin research and improvement". Perhaps they've not been completely verified yet, but they are ALL sitting there unclassified and unused.

Just throw it on the weirdness pile with everything else: Bin Laden hasn't been caught, yet he's been invisible since the election...we've seen a lot of Saddam , yet he still hasn't been tried...Miller went to jail, got a very strange letter from Libby, and now Libby might be replacing her there...and we still haven't caught that darned anthrax mailer.

(hat tips Powerline, Hatfill Deception)