The BBC does not mince words with this report. Clearly the Bush administration policies are turning out to be little more than hot air, leaving Iraq a more dangerous place and feeding anti-American sentiments. Since Bush and his team have systematically removed anyone who disagreed with their view of progress (Powell, Garner, etc.) they ultimately have no one left to blame for their failures:

The next stage involves plans to build trenches around Baghdad to make it harder for insurgents and militia groups to get themselves and supplies in.

But no-one believes such a huge city can be sealed off.

And this operation also means the Americans are more exposed to attack. At least 15 soldiers and marines have been killed since Saturday, most in the Baghdad area.

In Washington, much has been made of Bob Woodward’s statements that there are now 800-900 attacks a week.

In fact, such figures were already public.The Washington-based think tank the Brookings Institution has published such statistics on its Iraq Index for some time.

The debate here is not over statistics or how bad things are. It is what to do about it before it is too late.

The answers seem to be running out.

Newsweek’s “State of Denial” covers more of the internal machinations of Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney and Bush as they struggle to shirk accountability:

Indirection? Two or three steps removed? It was inexplicable. Rumsfeld had spent so much time insisting on the chain of command. He was in control; not the Joint Chiefs, not the uniformed military, not the National Security Council or the NSC staff, not the critics or the opiners. How could he not see his role and responsibility?

In a 2004 interview, Garner referred to a relativistic policy “template”:

PALAST:
Garner says his desire for quick elections conflicted with the Bush administration’s economic timetable. Even as they battled to put out oilfield fires, Washington pushed a timetable for privatising oil and other industries.

GARNER:
I think we as Americans – and this isn’t sepia – just we as Americans we tend to like to put our template on things, and our template is good for us, but it is not necessarily good for everybody else. TE Lawrence has a great saying – I wish I could repeat it exactly, I can’t, but it goes something like this: “It is better for them to do it imperfectly than for us to do it for them perfectly because in the end this is their country and you won’t be here very long.” I think that’s good advice.

PALAST:
While Iraqis worried about power and water, Washington’s concern was that Garner impose an elaborate plan to redesign Iraq’s economy on a radical free market model.

Bush put his template on Iraq, and Rumsfeld and Cheney made sure it was his and only his template that would be used. So how can they say today that someone else designed it or that it was not their idea to smash down the square peg of free market economics into a round hole of Iraqi political and social stability?

It is so terribly tragic that the administration’s idea of a free market apparently assumed that security costs would be negligible. Someone completely missed the fact that destruction of essential public services not only creates opportunity for development but even more so for the opposite; far more cost-effective destructive forces (fueled by unguarded stockpiles of weapons), which the US can now scarcely afford to compete with. It seems obvious, but the Bush administration clearly did not appreciate how dangerous it is to remove all the safeguards and structure from a society when you have not figured out a reliable way to prevent exploitation and opportunism by forces other than those you can control.

PALAST:
One year on, the General still worries about the cost of putting economic programmes before democratic elections.

GARNER:
I’m a believer that you don’t want to end the day with more enemies than you started with.