According to Frank Rich, GQ will post some very interesting reports from journalist Robert Draper tomorrow:
Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
I don’t expect this to receive too much attention in the media, not with Sykesgate and Pelosigate going on. But it looks like what happened was that the Secretary of Defense bullied a weak-minded president with Biblical quotations while the vice-president was trying to torture people into saying there was a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Just keep walking.
Update. The pictures-with-scripture are up now at GQ. If you have trouble with flash, you can view them as jpegs. Here’s the first one — just up the 01 to 02, etc., to see the others.
Things that you’re liable to read in the BiblePost + Comments (152)