Spring Is Richer Now

Since The New York Times pulled its subscription-only cone of silence down over its opinion writers, I have to admit that I haven't frequented its site as much as I once did. After Frank Rich went on leave to write his book, I'd check it out from time to time, but it no longer functioned as a regular stop on my Websurfing rounds. I knew Rich was coming back in the spring, so I'd been trying to check every Sunday since mid-March just in case. Unfortunately, I never quite made it over there last week, but when someone came by my site last night searching for frank rich peking duck, only to be followed a couple of hours later by someone else searching for donkey o.d., I knew the game was afoot. Sure enough, I went to the Times (feel free to go in the front door if you're a subscriber), and last week--the week I missed--saw Rich's triumphant return. The Peking Duck has it for your free reading pleasure. Here's just a hint:

Looking back at "Mission Accomplished" now is like playing that childhood game of "What's wrong with this picture?" It wasn't just the banner or the "Top Gun" joyride or the declaration of the end of "major combat operations" that was bogus. Everything was fake except the troops.

"We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools," Mr. Bush said on that glorious day. Three years later we know, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, that our corrupt, Enron-like Iraq reconstruction effort has yielded at most 20 of those 142 promised hospitals. But we did build a palace for ourselves. The only building project on time and on budget, USA Today reported, is a $592 million embassy complex in the Green Zone on acreage the size of 80 football fields. Symbolically enough, it will have its own water-treatment plant and power generator to provide the basic services that we still have not restored to pre-invasion levels for the poor unwashed Iraqis beyond the American bunker.

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Set against this reality, the debate about Donald Rumsfeld's future is as much of a sideshow as the installation of a slicker Fleischer-McClellan marketer in the White House press room. The defense secretary's catastrophic mistakes in Iraq cannot be undone now, and any successor would still be beholden to the policy set from above. Mr. Rumsfeld is merely a useful, even essential, scapegoat for the hawks in politics and punditland who are now embarrassed to have signed on to this fiasco. For conservative hawks, he's a convenient way to deflect blame from where it most belongs: with the commander in chief. For liberal hawks, attacking Mr. Rumsfeld for his poor execution of the war means never having to say you're sorry for leaping on (and abetting) the blatant propaganda bandwagon that took us there. But their history can't be rewritten any more than Mr. Bush's can: the war's failures were manifestly foretold by the administration's arrogance and haste during the run-up.

Check it out.