Looks like someone has gotten Secretary of State Colin Powell’s dander up.
Nicholas Kralev examines Powell’s battle for turf and against criticism within the administration.

Apparently some have yet to be won over by our great progress in Iraq:

A former US national security adviser who served in the administration of the first president Bush, warned today that the war in Iraq threatens to grind on for years like the Vietnam conflict.
“It could become a Vietnam in a way that the Vietnam war never did,” Brent Scowcroft said in an interview published in Portuguese weekly newspaper Expresso.
“Our exit from that country did not have grave consequences, while if we wanted to get out of Iraq today, the consequences would be very deep.”
Scowcroft, who led a classified review of US intelligence in 2001 and heads the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board of the current President George W Bush, was an outspoken critic of the US-led invasion of Iraq, arguing it took the focus off the fight against the extremist al-Qaeda network.
He told the newspaper he believed the neoconservatives who strongly backed the invasion did not realise how difficult it would be to foster a democratic system in Iraq once the regime of Saddam Hussein was toppled.
“Their plans are fantastic but very difficult to apply because it is very difficult to implant deep political alterations in a society,” he said.
“This is the problem we are facing in Iraq and we do not have a magic wand to create a democratic society, or create a group of people who aspire to democracy.”

It’s a good thing we have a professional press corps to flush out the really important issues in the presidential campaign debates:

Q. Really fast, last, on a Sunday morning, President Bush has said that freedom and fear have always been at war and God is not neutral between them. He’s made quite clear in these speeches that he feels God is on America’s side. Really quick: Is God on America’s side?

I suppose Pat Robertson and company are trying to make this an issue by portraying Bush as God’s anointed president. But really, what’s a candidate going to say to this? No? And exactly what is the other side which God might be siding with instead? Oh yeah, the “evildoers”–we don’t want God jumping to their side. The candidates should be running campaigns geared to insure that God is on “America’s side,” right?
I think Senator Edwards offered the best possible response to this lame question:

MR. EDWARDS. Well, there’s a wonderful story about Abraham Lincoln during the middle of the Civil War bringing in a group of leaders and at the end of the meeting one of the leaders said, Mr. President, can we pray, can we please join in prayer that God is on our side? And Abraham Lincoln’s response was, I won’t join you in that prayer, but I’ll join you in a prayer that we’re on God’s side.

Exactly.

So what really prompted Jean-Bertrand Aristide to leave Haiti? According to this N.Y. Times story, once the Bush administration saw that Aristide might allow refugees free access to the seas, it applied pressure which lead him to “resign.” But this report suggests he was taken out by force:

HAITIAN leader Jean Bertrand Aristide was taken away from his home by US soldiers, it was claimed today.
A man who said he was a caretaker for the now exiled president told France’s RTL radio station the troops forced Aristide out.
“The American army came to take him away at two in the morning,” the man said.
“The Americans forced him out with weapons.
“It was American soldiers. They came with a helicopter and they took the security guards.

The BBC adds that Aristide “resisted even while going up the stairs to the aircraft.”
In a story which may or may not be related, Venezuelan President Hugo Ch�vez, who claims he has also been threatened by covert U.S. interference, called Bush an “asshole.” A commenter at Daily Kos suggests there may be some linkage here, but so far there’s not not much reporting which substantiates that.

Nothing new here, but it’s illuminating to take a look back at this 1998 Project for the New American Century letter to President Clinton on Iraq which lays out the still-standing argument for removing Saddam Hussein (minus the post-9/11 insertion of terrorism). Take a look at who signed the letter:

Elliott Abrams
Richard L. Armitage
William J. Bennett
Jeffrey Bergner
John Bolton
Paula Dobriansky
Francis Fukuyama
Robert Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad
William Kristol
Richard Perle
Peter W. Rodman
Donald Rumsfeld
William Schneider, Jr.
Vin Weber
Paul Wolfowitz
R. James Woolsey
Robert B. Zoellick

Given the influence these players currently weld both inside and outside the government, should it be any surprise our policy is what it is today? And should there be any remaining question that this policy was crafted long before 9/11?