Today’s lead item in the New York Times reports the following:

American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential structure of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified. They say this central characteristic, similar to that of terrorist organizations in Europe and Asia, is what is making the Iraqi insurgency so difficult to destroy. Attack any single part of it, and the rest carries on largely untouched. It cannot be decapitated, because the insurgency, for the most part, has no head. Only recently, American and Iraqi experts say, have they begun to grasp the new organizational structure that, among other things, is making the insurgency so difficult to stop.

Except for that word “new” — is there any evidence that the Iraqi insurgency was ever any more centralized? — this makes eminent sense. In fact, it has seemed fairly obvious for at least two years. Every time I’d hear the latest report of the capture of some former Baathist honcho or “dead-ender” touted by Rumsfeld or Cheney as the beginning of the end for the rebels, I’d just shake my head: they seemed to imagine that the Iraqi insurgency was like the Prussian Army, when anyone could see it was more of a self-organizing network.

What’s impossible to fathom is why it should have been possible for me — on this subject, an armchair journalist and avid pursuer of information online and off, but not a “member of the intelligence community” or consumer of classified information — to understand this as a fundamental aspect of the conflict in Iraq, and yet for it to be something that the experts shaping our policy could “only recently” begin to grasp.

What is it with our experts, anyway? Are these the same experts who thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Are these the same experts who believed that invading Iraq would hurt rather than help Al-Qaida? Are these the same experts who figured out how to topple the Saddam Hussein regime but didn’t spare a thought for how to build something in its place?

Maybe we need some new experts.

(One excellent source on the topic for a long time — someone you could call an expert without irony — has been John Robb, a former military guy who has not only kept tabs on the news but offered his own analytic framework interpreting the phenomenon of what he calls “global guerrillas.”)

The ultimate irony here is that the U.S. military has always justly prided itself on its independence, flexibility and initiative at the small-unit level. Our people, the self-image was, fight smarter and more opportunistically than the other guys. This was true when we thought the “other guys” were the Soviets; it was obviously true when the other guys were Saddam Hussein’s uniformed troops. But in Iraq, we’re now the top-heavy, hierarchical, leaden-footed forces of central control, and our enemies are the wild-card forces with the initiative and the agility. They may be evil people who blow up civilians in suicide attacks, but to believe that they are not smart or, in their own way, courageous, is to doom ourselves to endless casualties and ultimate defeat.

Did we hear about any of this in President Bush’s recent pep talk? Perhaps his experts have not yet grasped it.

Seymour Hersh’s latest report in the New Yorker is profoundly depressing in any number of ways. Here’s one big way: each point Hersh makes brings the parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq debacles into clearer focus.

Sure, there are differences: There’s no draft today. (If there were, it’s hard to imagine the war ever being launched.) And there’s no mass protest movement with the same scale or social impact as the ’60s antiwar movement. (Not yet, at any rate.) Instead of a backdrop of Cold War thermonuclear horror, we’ve got a backdrop of post-9/11 terror nightmares.

But then there are so many similarities.

Let’s see: you’ve got the war that drags on for years without any indication of a clear strategy for winning or any clue as to who it is we’re really fighting or why they’re fighting.

You’ve got the hastily hatched plan to hand the war over to the locals and replace American boots on the ground with American bombs from the air.

You’ve got the score-settling civil war waiting to happen the moment the U.S. leaves.

You’ve got the policymakers attempting to scare the public with domino-theory-style scenarios of global disaster should the U.S. “mission” end in anything but victory — yet no one has offered a credible picture of that victory or a map toward it.

You’ve got the critics in Congress beginning to speak up and say the things that the dissenters in the military have been muzzled from saying.

You’ve got the corrupt president isolated, in denial, unwilling to face the reality of error and disaster, venturing forth only among supportive crowds and listening only to the murmurings of yes-men. (Bush’s millenarian religious belief is, however, unique to his disaster scenario, and unlike either of his Vietnam-era predecessors in disgrace, Johnson and Nixon.)

You’ve even got the beginning of covert operations in neighboring countries: If we could only block those foreign supply routes through Cambodia Syria, then victory would be ours!

Coming of political age as I did in the mid-’70s, my sense of the U.S.’s role in the world has always been shaped by the ghosts of Vietnam. Whatever mistakes we would make in the future, I thought as a teenager, we won’t ever make those ones again. I was naive; I didn’t reckon with the power of revisionist thinking and delusional leadership.

The invasion of Iraq, after all, was planned and managed by men who still think that the only U.S. mistake in Vietnam was not “staying the course.” They are still cherrypicking the intelligence today, just as they did in the selling of the war three years (three years!) ago. The only question now — as we leave the Iraqis to their fate and (under Bush or some clearer-eyed successor) return to the real war with al-Qaeda –is, how long will the madness continue, how many Iraqis and Americans will die, and how bad will the damage to the U.S. military be?

I want to do my little bit to combat the latest big lie from the Bush administration and its allies in Congress, which is that their opponents advocate an immediate precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. Their furious attacks have been in response to Congressman Jack Murtha’s call for a new policy last week. The Congressional Republicans did their very best, with their stunt of a withdrawal resolution on Friday, to muddy the waters and leave the American public with the idea that Murtha just wants to ship home the entire U.S. force tomorrow.

The truth is that Murtha is a conservative hawk of a Democrat who is known as a staunch advocate of the military that he (unlike the leaders of the Executive Branch) served in and fought under. Best as anyone can tell, his surprising and unusual change of heart arose mostly from his concern for the welfare of both individual soldiers and of the entire U.S. military. The guy has sources and connections in the Pentagon, and when he talks about how urgently we need a new plan, you can bet that this is what he is hearing from inside the armed forces.

If you paid attention to what Murtha actually proposed last week (this Slate piece by Fred Kaplan offers a good recap) you know that he didn’t say, “Let’s get out now” — he said, essentially “Let’s get out within six months, moving our troops to a position outside of Iraq, from which they can continue to strike and to influence events without being sitting ducks for suicide bombers.”

That might or might not be a smart plan, but it is at least a plan. The central complaint that most Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans have with the administration is that there’s no plan in sight. Murtha says that the American public is far ahead of the politicians — the people have already made up their minds, the war is a failure. This friend of the military’s response is, let’s get out in an orderly fashion while there’s still a chance of keeping the U.S. military from completely imploding under the pressure of multiple deployments, inadequate equipment, and, most of all, a nonexistent strategy.

Given that we actually do need that military at this moment in history — since there is this other little war still underway, against the people who, unlike Saddam Hussein, really did attack us on 9/11 — it might behoove us to pay some respectful attention to the congressman from Pennsylvania, instead of smearing him.

The coverage over the weekend will presumably make this crystal clear — but, well, maybe not, given how absurdly bad the media record on Iraq for the past three years has been. So let me try to shed one small light on the matter — there will, I hope, be many others, and brighter.

Here is the sequence of events leading up to Friday night’s despicably wacky Bizarro World vote in Congress:

(1) John Murtha, a respected Democratic congressmen, called, earlier this week, for an American pullout from Iraq within six months. Murtha is a decorated Marine Vietnam veteran and a longtime supporter of the military — and of the Iraq war; his position seemed motivated chiefly by sorrow and outrage that the U.S. armed forces have been placed in an impossible position by the Bush administration’s policies.

(2) The Republican response to Murtha was to accuse him of cowardice and of aiding al-Qaida.

(3) Today, Republicans in Congress proposed and, with no debate, forced a vote on a bill calling for the immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. That is not at all what Murtha, who said U.S. forces should leave “at the earliest practicable date,” advocated. It is plainly quite opposite to what the people who proposed the bill want, either. (Isn’t there some sort of parliamentary rule that says that if you propose and sponsor a bill you have to, like, vote for it? Maybe not, but there should be!)

The bill was proposed by the Republicans expressly to discredit Murtha, only they didn’t have the guts or the decency to write a bill that accurately reflected the congressman’s position; they had to misrepresent it, just as their party had to misrepresent the facts to persuade the American people to support this war in the first place.

The bill was not only what Democrats called it — a stunt; it was a deeply dishonest abuse of our legislative process. This seems to be what we have to look forward to from a Republican Party that is losing its grip on the levers of state, with right-wingers and moderates falling out and both trying to distance themselves from an increasingly unpopular president and an administration that is coming apart at the seams, leaking corruption and criminality.

Americans and Iraqis are continuing to die every day thanks to decisions our government made two and a half years ago. Whether you support or oppose the war, whether you agree or disagree with Murtha, you may, perhaps, share my sense of disgust at today’s tableaux of congressional theater of the absurd. We have crossed some new Rubicon into a realm where the old “politics of personal destruction” has been accelerated by tossing the ballast of simple logic overboard. It’s okay, now, to propose bills that stand for the opposite of what you believe in, just as long as you think they might help you win back a few points in the polls.

“We proposed the bill only because we wanted to vote it down!” may seem like a smart bit of parliamentary jujitsu. It has everything going for it but honesty. Whether or not it wins the Republicans the points they’re after, it’s an affront to the military dead — and to the living soldiers who are still stuck in the field. They, along with Murtha, still understand that this is a mortally serious business, even if the Congressional majority doesn’t.

Friday we learned that, according to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Scooter Libby told a series of bald lies to his grand jury. And so now we are hearing the old choral reminder, “it’s the cover-up, stupid.” Cover-ups are, by general acclaim, worse than the crimes they try to hide. This piece from today’s Times Week in Review is typical — it opens with Charles Colson of Watergate infamy declaring, “I don’t know why people don’t learn this lesson.”

According to this line of thinking, the denizens of the Beltway who keep getting caught engaging in cover-ups are all stricken with some similar malady: expedience cut with arrogance and the sense of invulnerability that comes with power.

The problem with this analysis is that it fails to engage with the practical, temporal dynamics of most cover-ups, in which the idea is not to cover something up indefinitely but to cover it up through some significant date — most often, an election. The part of the Watergate cover-up that mattered most was the part that took place between the June 1972 break-in and the November 1972 election; Watergate, we too often forget, was one incident in a massive campaign of election-tampering.

Similarly, Scooter Libby’s apparent lies need to be understood not in the abstract but in their place on the electoral calendar. The Bush administration’s paramount goal through the 2004 election cycle was to prevent an open national debate on the mistakes it had made in the run-up to the Iraq war. When Joe Wilson’s whistleblowing threatened to begin such a debate, Cheney’s office sprung into action; when the smear campaign backfired, the White House damage-control effort aimed to limit any fallout till after the election. That’s why we heard all the broad denials that look so incautious today: the lid had to be kept on this pot (just as the Senate had to be prevented from releasing, or even preparing, reports about White House misuse of intelligence data).

How important — and successful — all this was can be seen in this quote from Fitzgerald’s Friday press conference:

FITZGERALD: I would have wished nothing better that, when the subpoenas were issued in August 2004, witnesses testified then, and we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005. No one would have went to jail.

Here the prosecutor was talking about the delays to his investigation that stemmed from the refusal of journalists, most notably the New York Times’ Judith Miller, to testify. But he also reminds us that, under other circumstances — in which journalists had construed their public responsibilities differently and government officials hadn’t chosen the coverup route — his investigation could well have delivered its verdict on the threshold of a criticially important election.

Maybe, in the absence of a coverup, Fitzgerald would have been left with nothing and no one to indict; or maybe he’d have been able to move more directly against the officials responsible for outing Valerie Plame. We’ll never know, of course. And so this alternate-history timeline of a 2004 election in which voters had a fuller picture of the Bush administration’s desperate, foolish, incompetent sell-the-war campaign remains unreadable.

Just as an act of perjury can thoroughly derail a criminal inquiry and make it impossible for the justice system to come to a clear determination of fact, so a coverup can, if it achieves a short-term goal, sometimes create new “facts on the ground” that no revelatory inquest or subsequent prosecution can roll back.

That is what Scooter Libby’s “coverup” achieved. It was one of the most significant of a series of “kick the can down the road” tactics that helped the Bush team eke out its 2004 win and hang on to power. Whether or not Libby ends up going to jail, I’d say he probably considers that a success.

It is a strange, strange thing to hear the wagon-circling Republican spin on the likely forthcoming White House indictments:

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, speaking on the NBC news program “Meet the Press,” compared the leak investigation with the case of Martha Stewart and her stock sale, “where they couldn’t find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn’t a crime.” Ms. Hutchison said she hoped “that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.”

God forbid a special prosecutor should deliver charges based not on the original crime under investigation but instead on “some perjury technicality”! How soon they forget. A mere seven years ago, such technicalities led the Republican Party to impeach a popular chief executive presiding over an era of peace and prosperity. As it happened, the Starr inquest dug its way through the ancient history of the Clinton family finances for many more years than the Fitzgerald investigation — and, unable to find anything there, ended up prosecuting the president for lies he delivered about a tawdry sex scandal that had zero relevance to any national issue.

The Fitzgerald investigation, on the other hand, may hang on an arcane issue of revealing the identity of a CIA covert operative — but it is rooted in a controversy that is still costing American lives and harming the national interest. The Bush administration led the U.S. into war under false pretenses. It ignored the intelligence it didn’t want to believe and it ballyhooed information that it should have known was lies. Then it waged a brutal “politics of personal destruction” against anyone who questioned its misbegotten policies and the arrogant and incompetent policy-making process that spawned them.

At almost any other time in American history, such events would have naturally and inevitably inspired an independent investigation to find and air the truth. But the Bush administration learned its lesson from the 9/11 commission, and Republican dominance over “all three branches of government” today means that its cover-ups, generally, have been successful.

But it appears that the roundabout path of the Plame inquiry’s special prosecutor will finally begin to bring to light at least some of the heart of the matter. If there is heat, and with any luck some light, around these indictments, it will not be related to issues of anonymous sourcing in the press or the status of a covert agent: it will be about the American public finally getting a clear picture of just how far off the track of truth and sanity Bush and Cheney drove the country in their single-minded determination to invade Iraq.

That’s why the two columns on today’s New York Times op-ed page that attempt to downplay the importance of this issue are so off-base (and why my Salon colleague Joan Walsh is so on target in her analysis today). Nick Kristof argues, “It was wrong for prosecutors to cook up borderline and technical indictments during the Clinton administration, and it would be just as wrong today. Absent very clear evidence of law-breaking, the White House ideologues should be ousted by voters, not by prosecutors.” It remains to be seen what sort of “very clear evidence” Fitzgerald has or doesn’t have. If he has evidence that top White House officials, all the way up to the vice president, lied in an attempt to cover up a campaign of character assassination against a critic who presented evidence of a larger cover-up of a campaign of deception that led the nation into war, I’d say that goes well beyond a “borderline and technical indictment.”

John Tierney offers an even broader preemptive dismissal of the Fitzgerald indictments. His flip headline — “And your point is?” — suggests that the whole scandal is trivial. The CIA didn’t really know what was going on in Iraq; its analyses were all over the map, so we should give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt. So what if they committed the nation to a bloody war of choice based on a mistake? They were just as confused as everyone else! “No one deserves to be indicted on conspiracy charges for belonging to a group that believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Foreign policy mistakes are not against the law.”

No, they are not — but lying about them to a grand jury is. And while some mistakes are made because of bad information, the Iraq mistake was based more on willful arrogance, along with a tendency to shoot messengers like Joe Wilson who bore good information.

This is not about interns and stained dresses; it is about a tragic war that is still being tragically fought. And from where I sit, the 2000 dead American soldiers, and an untallied greater number of dead Iraqis, are owed some truth on a level that the president and vice-president are constitutionally incapable of delivering, or perhaps even comprehending.

Here is how the conversation might go if we could step into a Wayback Machine and travel back to, say, a couple of months after 9/11 to have a little conversation with our previous selves:

“2005?!?! My god, fill me in. These last few weeks have been rough! Give me some hope, okay?”

“Well…”

“Come on! Four years! Where did they finally find Osama? And what did they do to him?”

“Well…”

“I assume the Taliban are long gone from Afghanistan, right? This war we’re fighting can’t take too much longer.”

“Well…”

“And what with the outpouring of international support for the U.S. these days, there must be some wonderful achievements in global cooperation!”

“Well…”

“Oh, yeah, now there are these bizarre anthrax incidents… Who was it, anyway? What a relief it must have been to find that out!”

“Well…”

“You’re not saying very much. What gives?”

“You remember all that talk about Iraq at the start of the first Bush administration? They invaded.”

“Yeah? Don’t tell me — Saddam was behind the anthrax!”

“No, no…”

“Or, what, did he finally find a way to launch his own terrorist attack?”

“Nope.”

“They caught him building a nuke!”

“Well, no.”

“So…?”

“They told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But we never found the weapons, even after we toppled him. Then they told us it didn’t matter because we were building a better democratic Iraq. Then they told us not to give up despite thousands of American casualties, because if we pulled out we’d be dishonoring the soldiers who’d already died.”

“Damn. I guess that means Bush lost the election in ’04, huh?”

“Well…”

“Anyway, the most important thing is that, four years later, the U.S. has had enough time to plan and prepare for another horror. The next time an American city is endangered, we’ll be all set, right? Swift response. Leaders who spring into action. Better communications. Organization. The can-do American spirit.”

“Well…”

“Enough! Get back to the future already! You’re just bumming me out.”

“Hey, you’re bumming me out, too!”