Douglas Feith was Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 to August 2005. His new book, War and Decision, quotes extensively from previously classified documents, memos, and meetings, to refute the popular wisdom that the driving force of the invasion of Iraq was warmongering, intelligence-politicizing neocons in the Oval Office.

It was a full year after 9/11that Bush sought U. N. pressure on Saddam Hussein to accomplish the disarmament of Iraq —who had started wars; who had flouted 16 U.N. Security Resolutions; who was shooting pilots patrolling no-fly zones; who had slaughtered his people; who was thick with terrorists; who, after his overthrow, was found to be in a position where he could manufacture chemical and biological weapons within 3 to 5 weeks — without going to war. The hope was that Iraq would respond the way Libya would months later.

Feith argues that when people say we should have given the Inspections a few more months to work, they misunderstand: The Inspections would have worked only if Hussein had wanted to cooperate; in that case, Inspectors could have been valuable as verifying that Saddam was not hiding materials and capability.

Where the Bush administration went wrong, says Feith, was in allowing its critics “to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren’t found,” and “not defending the main rationale for invasion — protecting Americans from a genuine threat” (Michael Barone, U.S. News).

Reframing is rethinking. Reconceptualizing. Jesus practiced it in Matthew 12. His wily opponents asked, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” Jesus replied with a question about how they treat their own animals. Then he reframed the question to put it in a clearer light: “Therefore, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”

Scott McClellan’s latest book, now number one on Amazon.com, not only has the White House treading water, but it’s caused a rash of journalist’s remorse. As McClellan accuses the media of being too soft and not liberal enough during the run-up to the Iraq war, some media members are putting their tails between their legs.

Reporters such as Katie Couric are shouting Amen to McClellan’s media-failed-us sermon. She calls the lack of criticism “one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.” Author Greg Mitchell says that, even after five years, “there was almost no [media] self-assessment.” And even before McClellan, in an April speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, award-winning producer, director, and actor Tim Robbins lambasted the media for its lack of scrutiny.

There are big names such as NBC’s Tom Brokaw and ABC’s Charlie Gibson who refuse to lash themselves. But the prevailing sentiment is that the media should adorn black scarves and mourn the death of journalistic integrity.

But does a supposed lack of scrutiny then justify an explosive criticism, even hate, now? A new Harvard study shows the dangers of such a pendulum swing. In February, Radha Iyengar and Jonathan Monten released a study showing that “in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increase by 5-10 percent.” They call this an “emboldenment effect.” As cost-critical statements increase at home, insurgencies increase in Iraq and that translates into lives lost.

So what does this mean? Should public debate be squashed? Certainly not. But is there a way to hold others accountable while remaining tasteful, respectful, and fair? Can we have criticism, especially in the media, without emboldening divisiveness? Ironically, during his criticism-laced talk, Robbins says yes.

Robbins’s climax recognizes language’s power. “You [journalists and broadcasters] have the power to turn this nation away from the hatred and divisive dialogue that has rendered such a corrosive effect on our body politic,” he says. “You can lift us up into a more enlightened age.”

We cannot know exactly which words and statements increase insurgent’s resolve. Terrorist reasoning is flawed and defies logic. But Robbins, Iyengar, and Monten remind us of a piercing truth that must influence current and future dialogue: Life and death are in the power of the tongue.

How much democracy is too much democracy? Last week, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demanded a California-style national referendum on any security agreement decided between the US and the Iraqi government. Washington and Baghdad have yet to respond to al-Sadr’s demand for a democratic check on the process.

At issue is a standards of forces document, written by the US and now in Iraq’s parliament, which will replace the expiring UN resolution allowing foreign military presence in Iraq. A growing Iraqi resistance to the current document, spearheaded by al-Sadr, has focused on the US schedule for withdrawal from Iraq.

Some in the Iraqi government are concerned that the proposal would violate Iraqi sovereignty by establishing permanent US bases, although Washington has stated repeatedly that is not in the plan. Iraqi negotiators have said that they have a “vision and a draft that is different” from the draft before parliament.

Despite a muted political response to al-Sadr’s call for a national vote, the religious leadership of Iraq spoke out in a tour de force of support. The most surprising support came from Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani (who is, by popular respect, the Billy Graham of Iraqi Shiite Islam). On Thursday, the usually reclusive al-Sistani sought out Iraq’s Prime Minister to advise that he organize a national referendum on the security pact. With al-Sistani’s support, a number of other top Shia leaders agreed to protest the agreement.

There was no visible political response. Al-Sadr’s Tuesday pronouncement did not earn him mention in Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday’s State Department press briefings, or any official attention since. The leadership of Iraq has similarly not responded to al-Sadr’s calls.

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, in her remarks at the Iraq Compact Conference this weekend (an economic forum unrelated to the security pact), noted that “The United States, of course, remains committed fully to fostering a sovereign, democratic, prosperous, and unified Iraq.” This echoes a long history of President Bush’s policy of promoting democracy in Iraq since 2004. Al-Sadr’s call for a referendum vote may test that commitment to democracy.

Army Pfc. Monica Brown caught the attention of military leaders when she rescued fellow soldiers during a 2007 convoy attack in Afghanistan. She received a Silver Star last month, the nation’s third highest combat metal, for her selflessness. But her story caught the attention of many more for another reason: What was a woman doing in a combat zone?

A 1994 policy prohibits women from serving in units that engage in direct ground combat. Not surprisingly, then, the issue of women in the military, specifically in combat, is controversial—especially for the Commander in Chief. Since his election, people on both sides of the issue have been calling for the President to state his opinion. In 2003, he appeared vague and undecided, attempting to unload the responsibility of such a piping hot issue on his “commanders.” In 2005, however, he took a clear position: “No women in combat.”

But despite the President’s declaration three years ago, women have a growing presence on the battlefield. Stories like Pfc. Brown’s are becoming the norm as military commanders lose respect for the policy.

In 2005, Lt. Col. Cheri Provancha bent the rules and sent a female to serve as a medic for an infantry company of the 82^nd Airborne. “The Army has to understand the regulation that says women can’t be placed in direct fire situations is archaic and not attainable,” she told The Washington Post. Pfc. Brown’s own commander admitted, “We weren’t supposed to take her out.” Yet he did. So why do officers feel they can so easily disrespect the policy?

The reality is that such a cavalier attitude has been covertly brewing within the military’s top brass for awhile—and it’s starting to work its way down. Three months after the President made his statement, the Army was already disobeying his directive. The American Spectator highlights the hypocrisy:

“Bush’s policy is a de facto women in combat policy. It has sent thousands of women into obvious combat situations while maintaining the technical fiction of these positions as ‘support’ and not combat—a reality which the Pentagon’s practice of handing out ‘Combat Action Badges’ to female soldiers reveals.”

The President has either lost control of his commanders or is saying one thing publicly and ordering another privately. But either way, the nation is desperate for clarity. And no matter where one falls on the issue, as Elaine Donnelly says, “The time for principled leadership is now.”

Anyone hoping for a really controversial papal visit (and some were) would have to be disappointed last week. Pope Benedict XVI didn’t publicly decry the Iraqi war and he praised American generosity, vitality and faith. Still, he wasn’t afraid to tackle some difficult topics.

He addressed the problem of pedophile priests, chiding US bishops for mishandling the problem but also laying some of the blame on society at large: “What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?”

And while he may not have taken George Bush to the “papal woodshed” for the Iraqi war, Pope Benedict did urge “patient diplomacy to resolve conflicts” and promised before he came to privately discuss immigration and the war.

The pope’s immigrant comments raised the ire of anti-immigration Rep. Tom Tancredo. Pope Benedict told U.S. Bishops to help immigrants:

I want to encourage you and your communities to continue to welcome the immigrants who join your ranks today, to share their joys and hopes, to support them in their sorrows and trials, and to help them flourish in their new home. This, indeed, is what your fellow countrymen have done for generations. From the beginning, they have opened their doors to the tired, the poor, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Tancredo said the pope was inappropriately engaging in American politics and speculated that the pope was promoting immigration to prop up the Church’s waning numbers. Another immigrant activist echoed Tancredo, and CNN’s Lou Dobbs was miffed, too. National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez told Tancredo to calm down, noting that the pope made no such specific policy statements. Wall Street Journal editors agreed: “You know the restrictionists have gone head-first into the fever swamps when they denounce a Christian religious leader for sounding like a Christian.”

The pope also made an attempt to diffuse recent tension with the Jewish community after he reinstated a prayer for Jewish conversion in the Latin Mass. Pope Benedict XVI met privately with Jewish leaders and became the first pope to visit a Jewish synagogue in the United States.

In an intriguing SFGate column, Kathleen Parker says she may not agree with the pope, but she takes an comfort in seeing him take a stand:

Even for non-Catholics like me, there’s something comforting about a stubborn pope in a world of moral relativity. Like a strong father, he ignores his children’s pleas for leniency, knowing that his rules, though tough, serve a higher purpose.

The McCain campaign has come out swinging against Obama campaign, calling “absolutely dishonest” the misrepresentation that McCain not only foresees a U.S. troop presence in Iraq for another 100 years, but that he wills it to happen.

McCain’s original comments come from a New Hampshire town hall meeting where he spoke about the possibility of keeping a non-combat presence in Iraq for many years—along the lines of the U.S. military bases in post-war Korea and Germany. Obama himself has indicated the possibility of leaving a long-term strike force in Iraq, despite his intention to begin withdrawing troops immediately.

Voices in the blogosphere denounced Obama’s rhetoric as intentionally misleading, insincere demagoguery and anticipate the Obama campaign will use this particular “talking point” to paint McCain as a war monger in the upcoming Presidential race.

Obama doesn’t need to misrepresent McCain’s position in Iraq to appeal to anti-war voters. Merely telling the truth about their dramatically different positions provides ample ammunition to sway voters on either side of the issue. While Obama has opposed the war from the beginning, McCain — vocally hawkish throughout his political career — was always a strong advocate of preemptive military action. Not only did McCain figure as a vociferous proponent of the 2003 invasion, the LA Times reports that he cosponsored an act in 1998 that made “regime change” in Iraq an official U.S. policy. He repeated his conviction that the Iraqi threat be eliminated in a letter to President Bush in 2001.

In light of the real differences here, it seems an unnecessary exercise in dissemblance and distortion to harp on such a paltry point, unless, of course, someone just wants to play dirty. For Obama, the self-styled candidate of political transcendence, this intentional misrepresentation smacks of the old-school politics he purports to eschew. If his devotees are following this hundred-years hoax, they are apt to be disappointed.

How far does presidential authority go? A controversial military memo tests the limits.

The Bush administration publicly disclosed the 2003 Justice Department memo this week. Written by John Yoo, then the second-ranking official at the Office of Legal Counsel, the memo largely exempts military interrogators from laws prohibiting assault, maiming, and other harsh treatments.

It also narrowly defines torture: pain intense and severe enough to “be associated with serious physical injury” producing death, organ failure or permanent physical damage.

It uses the president’s authority as commander-in-chief to grant interrogators the power to use extreme interrogation methods. “In wartime, it is for the President alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy,” the memo states (Memo: part 1/ part 2). According to a New York Times article, the memo gave the Pentagon much the same authority that another memo gave the CIA months earlier.

Officials eventually withdrew both memos, “But they show how sweeping the Justice Department viewed presidential power to be after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

“This is a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency,” Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School and the Washington College of Law at American University, told NYT. Thomas J. Romig, who at the time was the Army’s judge advocate general, told the Washington Post that the memo appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war. Slate Magazine agreed, saying the memo implies that “military interrogators didn’t have to follow the law because they were defending the country.”

Last year, Bush narrowed the list of approved interrogation techniques in an executive order. According to NYT, intelligence officials have said that such methods as waterboarding are not on the list of currently approved techniques, but that President Bush could still authorize their use during an emergency.

In an article posted in February, Slate argued that Americans are becoming slowly calloused to torture:

Our views on water-boarding seem to be on the same trajectory as our views on sexual humiliation and stress positions—it looked sort of awful at first, but after a few months it seemed more like a fraternity prank. That’s the road we’re headed down with water-boarding. We’ve gone from banning it to trivializing it to justifying it. We are becoming inured to torture at approximately the same rate that it’s becoming legal. How convenient.

New movie Stop-Loss tells the story of a soldier who decides he’s not going back to war. A recent article in the Washington Post tells the story of 16,000 American soldiers who made the same decision.

Phil McDowell joined the Army after 9/11. He served his tour in Iraq and became a sergeant, but he also became disillusioned about the war through personal research and bitterness over the apathy he found back home.

When the Army rescinded his discharge, McDowell joined an estimated 200 Iraq war deserters who have fled to Canada with no promise of asylum. “It would’ve been easy to go to Iraq and have it done with again. But being a sellout to my own beliefs—I just felt it was wrong on so many levels,” McDowell told the Post.

As Senior Airman Preston Reeves told BBC, “Tragedies do happen in war.” MSNBC reported in 2006 that nearly one in 10 American solders who served in Iraq was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The military death toll just passed 4,000.

But McDowell thinks the government lied to him about the reasons for going to and staying in Iraq. To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate Magazine asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to answer the question, “Why did we get it wrong?” One soldier wrote, “I came home in September 2006 frustrated with the strategic direction of the war and alienated from the country that sent me there.”

In an article posted last fall, Slate examined the appropriateness of military dissent among generals when they disagree with the Commander in Chief: “What should the generals do? Disobey? Rally resistance from within? Resign in protest? Retire quietly? Or salute and execute the mission?”

Likewise, what do enlisted men do when they come to the conclusion that their country is wrong? They swore an oath to support, defend, and obey. Do they stand by that commitment when they no longer agree with the decisions being made?

“Individual service members can’t be allowed to make policy,” Lieutenant Commander Travis Moger, a Navy Chaplain and combat veteran who served with Marines in Iraq, told WoW. “You can’t wage war by referendum. Every member of the military knew when he volunteered that he might have to go to war, even an unpopular or unnecessary war. We live in a post-Vietnam America. There is little excuse for someone believing that there was no chance they would ever have to serve in a protracted, problematic conflict.”

McDowell confessed to the Post that the question still haunts him: “What does it mean to desert the Army and abandon your country?”

Listen to a podcast of Oliver North’s column from Thursday, where he states: “Despite a lightning-fast victory over the dictator’s Army, Republican Guards and Fedayeen, the challenge of leaving Iraq better than we found it proved to be daunting and dangerous. Unfortunately, few Americans know what their countrymen in uniform have accomplished in the Land Between the Rivers.”

President Bush mixed faith and foreign policy this week when he addressed the National Religious Broadcasters, prompting the New York Times to write, “Rarely has the president mixed the language of faith and God so closely with talk of war and terrorism.”

Bush spoke of the universality of freedom and couched it in religious terms: “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to all humanity. … We undertake this work because we believe that every human being bears the image of our maker. That’s why we’re doing this. No one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.”

The evangelicals there applauded, but other evangelicals weren’t thrilled. Frank Schaeffer used the speech to spin a diatribe against a “born-again president whose miserable presidency was brought into existence by and aided and abetted by the religious right.” He bemoaned “eight years of failed Republican/Bush misrule-by-fear,” and says seeking the evangelical vote has diminished John McCain.

On God’s Politics, Jim Wallis gives a more measured reply: “We also see the image of God in all those who have become the collateral damage of this awful war, and in the countless American lives snuffed out or broken forever.” He issues “A Call to Lament and Repent.”

The speech comes as Christianity Today interviews Walter Russell Mead about evangelical influence in foreign policy. Mead argues that the Anglo-American world offers “this idea of faith in the future and optimism, a willingness to embrace change and even stimulate change to make a better world.” He cautions, though, that this easily turns into utopianism. He says Christians need to recognize “that humanity is imperfect, that perfection will come only from God, and in God’s time and in God’s way.”