Hey, I’m a little late on this, but I cannot let it stand: Ex-Bush speechwriter David Frum, op-edding in Sunday’s New York Times, compared Bush’s war on Iraq with Lincoln’s war on the Confederacy. Yes, that’s right. This is the key passage:

It sometimes seemed to me, as I watched the debate between the administration’s hawks and doves from the inside, that I was witnessing a reprise of the great strategic debates of the Civil War. Back then, official Washington was divided between the realists, who wanted to fight the smallest possible war in order (as they said) to save the Union as it was, and the idealists, who sought the biggest possible victory, even if it meant smashing the old order in the South forever. Today’s realists, like their 19th-century counterparts, are more frightened of change than they are of defeat. At every step, President Bush has opted for the course that offers the hope of a bigger victory — even at the price of a wider war.

So let’s unpack this argument. Frum is telling us that those on the Bush team who believe that we should invade Iraq not just to defend ourselves from Saddam Hussein’s (reported) “weapons of mass destruction” but in order to craft a new, pro-American Middle East order are the contemporary equivalents to those “idealists” in Lincoln’s Washington who wanted to smash the old order of the South. (That would make Paul Wolfowitz a latter-day abolitionist!)

It’s hard to know whether to be insulted on behalf of the anti-slavery idealists — or just to point out the vast difference between fighting a civil war on the soil of one’s own country against secessionists and fighting a war halfway around the world to overthrow an admittedly unjust, but decidedly foreign, ruler.

There may be good arguments to be made by those who feel that the U.S. can depose Saddam and impose a new democratic order in Iraq without making the same mistakes we have made in the past every time we have sent in the Marines to secure Uncle Sam’s interests. (The presence of tons of oil in Iraq makes one suspicious, but never mind that for now.) It does no good, however, to pretend that this is not an imperialist venture at heart, or to try to mask it with absurd historical comparisons to the Civil War and Lincoln’s gradual embrace of emancipation.

Maybe, with the Republican Party just coming off its Trent Lott debacle, Frum is simply doing his best to wrap his team in the old “Party of Lincoln” colors. It won’t wash. The very same issue of the Times that featured Frum’s desperate rhetorical ploy also boasted a lengthy magazine cover story by Michael Ignatieff headlined “The American Empire: Get used to it.”

As far as I can tell, the Bush administration drew a line in the sand for North Korea, North Korea stepped over it and called the U.S. bluff, and now the president’s gang are saying, “Gee, we don’t have any choice but to negotiate here, otherwise North Korea will incinerate Seoul.”

It’s the worst possible position for an international power to be in — with its credibility shot and no apparent plan for either diplomacy or force. How can the otherwise bellicose Bush team have found itself in this mess?

It looks like another example of Bush Syndrome — that way our president has of responding to major events by saying, “Don’t bother me with reality, I’ve already made up my mind.” The syndrome has hitherto been on display in the administration’s economic policy, which has doggedly stuck to precisely the measures least likely to lift us out of the lingering recession because, well, they are what Bush embraced back in 1999. In the case of North Korea, Bush has already determined that Saddam is public enemy number one. Who cares that North Korea is more volatile, closer to nuclear capability and less predictable?

Josh Marshall’s comments today are worth reading.

Henry Kissinger just announced that he’s resigning from the 9/11 investigation commission President Bush appointed him to lead.

It was becoming obvious that, in order to comply with the law and to allay the concerns of the 9/11 victims’ families, Kissinger was going to have to reveal a list of his consulting clients. That, it seems, was far too onerous a price to pay. Or maybe one of the names on the list — the Saudi government? who knows? — would have been problematic under the circumstances.

Well, the man has made his priorities clear.

He’s not the only one: George Mitchell, the former senator whom the Democrats named as their top man on the commission, resigned earlier this week, saying service on this commission would take too much time away from his law practice.

These men are displaying a surprising lack of dedication to helping the nation find explanations for 9/11. Surely each of them could have made the choice they made before accepting appointment to the commission.

Unless there’s something else going on here. Maybe they know something we don’t. If this commission does its job right, it will have to reach conclusions that the government doesn’t want to hear. What Kissinger and Mitchell both seem to be saying is that truth-telling is not worth the trouble.

I have been reading with great interest the recent reports on the front pages of the New York Times and (today) the Wall Street Journal, outlining our government’s plan to invade Iraq in considerable detail.

Presumably there are many people in Iraq, up to and including its dictator, doing the same. It must make for even more interesting reading over there.

Has a war plan ever been quite so brazenly run up the flag pole in full view? What’s really going on here?

There are only a handful of credible scenarios:

(1) This “war plan” is bogus. Our military leaders are planting disinformation in the media. This would be an entirely appropriate tactic on their part; what’s astonishing is that the Pentagon correspondents reporting on the plans do not seem ever to mention the possibility that they are being used.

(2) The “war plan” — which involves a blitzkrieg-like “war of effects” to paralyze the enemy’s command structure with precision-guided attacks — is a deliberate intimidation effort, a chess move on the part of the Bush administration to avoid war entirely by convincing the Iraqis that resistance is futile. In such a scenario, there’s a different kind of disinformation at work — an inflation of the potency of American forces to persuade the enemy to fold. Again, it seems amazing that the reporters who may be serving as a conduit for this propaganda game do not ever raise the possibility that this is their role.

(3) The “war plan” is real, and the administration doesn’t want it revealed, but the Pentagon reporters are just so good at their jobs that they got the story anyway. This is certainly possible, but unlikely, given the extremity and effectiveness of the Bush administration’s press-management techniques.

(4) The “war plan” is real, and it is being intentionally leaked to Pentagon reporters by officials who are so confident of our might and so certain that everything will go as planned that they do not mind letting the enemy in on their playbook. In a way, this is the scariest of the possibilities, because it suggests a troubling level of hubris on the part of our leadership.

Yes, the American military is unmatched in the world today. Yes, we have technology that is several generations ahead of our opponents. But war is hell; the fog of war is real; happenstance and chaos remain powerful players on the battlefield. If the big Iraq attack doesn’t go exactly as planned, this kind of overconfidence may come to look costly and foolish.