There is no plan. There never has been a plan...

For Iraq... for Israel ... for peace:

New York Times reporter Philip Shenon’s new book — The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation — paints a damning portrait of Condoleezza Rice. Shenon argues that Rice was “uninterested in actually advising the President,” but was instead more concerned with being his “closest confidante — specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into action.”

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald prints an extract from Shenon’s book which provides further details about Rice’s incompetence. “Emails from the National Security Council’s counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats” before 9/11, Shenon writes.

[snip]

The former weapons inspector in Iraq — David Kay — passed word to the 9/11 Commission that he believed Rice was the “worst national security adviser” in the history of the job.

Wait... I have a picture for this 'closest confidante' thing:



and maybe even a love letter?



No? Then this one of Rice and her husb... the president will do:



Incompetence has its own reward:

In 2005, an “unprecedented 19 reporters” accompanied Condoleezza Rice on her first trip overseas as Secretary of State. Now, however, things have changed. The Washington Post reports that “vastly fewer reporters” joined Rice on her latest trip to the Middle East:

The three wire services–Associated Press, Reuters and Agence-France Presse–are on board. Bloomberg News and National Public Radio took seats. But only three newspapers–The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Washington Times–are on the plane, down from the standard five. And the networks did not even bother to send a camera crew, let alone a correspondent.

Sidney Blumenthal in 2006 wrote:

A few months after Rice became secretary of state, in July 2005, she transported senior staff to a West Virginia retreat where her head of policy planning, Stephen Krasner, delivered a lecture on the Peace of Westphalia followed by one on the Truman Doctrine to explain the magnitude of Rice - and Bush's - ambition for "transformational diplomacy".

This May, as the situation in Iraq drastically worsened, Rice told senior staff that she wants no more reporting from the embassies. She announced in a meeting that people write memos only for each other, and that no one else reads them. She said she wouldn't read them. Instead of writing reports, the diplomats should "sell America", she insisted. "We are salesmen for America!"

On Tuesday, kicking off the mid-term elections campaign, Bush delivered a speech that cited Bin Laden's screeds, Lenin's What Is To Be Done? and Hitler's Mein Kampf, and promised "complete victory". Rice contributed her own comparison of the "war on terror" to the American civil war. "I'm sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the civil war to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold," she said.

But the more delirious the rhetoric, the more hollow the policy. "There is no plan for Iraq," a senior national security official with the highest intelligence clearance and access to the relevant memos told me. "There is no plan."

We have an incompetent president who has surrounded himself with incompetent sycophants.