There are several gems, but these are my favorites:

"Because most Democrats have opposed the war from the start, and many Republicans no longer support the war per se, but only George Bush. The president has carried this war on his shoulders, and the more he's weakened politically by Katrina, the less he will be able to carry."

Wrong about Democrats, wrong about Republicans, but the overall argument is nonsense. From first to last, Iraq has been a Neocon project with Bush's name on it. The project itself has failed, the buck stops at the White House, and that is why Bush is losing support. I absolutely detest assholes like Friedman who pretend otherwise.

"Can you imagine if Mr. Bush had to go to Congress this week to ask for yet another $100 billion to keep fixing Iraq, when an entire U.S. city needs rebuilding?"

False choice, Tom. We pay for both. Dump the tax cuts if necessary, but don't pretend we can't afford both.

"And the Katrina TV drama is not going away. Hell hath no fury like journalists with a compelling TV story where they get to be the heroes and the government the fools."

Screw you, Friedman. What an insult to profession to purport to be a part of. What you derisively refer to as a "compelling TV story" is a human tragedy of epic proportions - the pictures spoke for themselves, and DHS was shown up as criminally incompetent.

"Mr. Bush says he intends to stay the course there no matter what, but without a constitution embraced by all three communities, there will be no course to stay. The pressure on us to leave will only grow."

Translated into Iraqi - 'Thanks for playing Pax Americana. If you can't now fix the mess we made, we'll just leave. That's the deal. Happy? We don't care. We're just taking care of number one.'

"And if the dikes of stability that U.S. soldiers are holding together in Iraq give way, well, you all will envy the people of New Orleans. Most of them had somewhere to go when their floods hit. You and your neighbors will not."

Again, thanks for playing Pax Americana. If you don't use freedom the way we tell you to and cannot forge an agreement that overlooks hundreds of years of division and hatred, well, you're fucked. Simple. That's the reality.

And "your neighbors" are fucked too. Who's that - Saudi, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Kuwait? Yes, they must also pay for Neocon screw-ups. Evidently, that's the American way.

Ps. To anyone caught up in the floods, who may have lost everything even if you were able to get out, Friedman doesn't speak for me or anyone I know. He will be pilloried for this sick joke of an article.

Quite obviously, the meatiest and most contentious pieces of the investigations will be how responsibility and blame will be apportioned between state and federal officials. And it barely need be said that this just happens to be easy to label as a Democrat versus Republican issue.

So let's look not too far into the future when these reports are published. We know already these investigations are effectively GOP-sponsored and overseen. And let's say there is plenty of criticism that is substantively well directed at the Louisiana state government.

The fact that the investigations were not independent in the first place will automatically trigger further partisan rancor and bitterness. Whatever lessons should be learnt from the disastrous preparation for and response to Katrina will be buried beneath the headline-dominating partisan fights that are guaranteed to break out.

This, however, is precisely what Karl Rove wants. It is what he always wants. He has never missed an opportunity to use a national catastrophe to divide this country politically, and Katrina is no different.

What good might come out of these reports is actually not the administration's key objective. Indeed, pinning the blame at the State level is not the key objective. The key objective is to intensify political divisions in this country further.

I don't think anyone expects the Republicans to rein in Karl Rove and his sickly divisive strategies, so let's hope the Democrats can step up with the right response on this issue. Just expose the GOP strategy for what it is - once again, it's pretty blatant.

Point 1 - Brooks compares 9/11 with Katrina.

The similarities begin and end with the fact thousands of Americans lost their lives. Beyond the body-count, comparisons are wholly irrelevant.

Of course Giuliani took control - of the ghost town that was downtown Manhattan. Unlike 9/11, after Katrina, people were trapped in NO, and taking control of a city with barely a police force to speak of and all communications cut was all but impossible.

On 9/11, there were two types of people - those who could escape, and those who could not and were killed. In NO, there were three types of people - those who could escape, those who could not and were killed, and those who could not and became trapped. It is of course the third category of people in NO that make this tragedy so completely different.

Point 2 - Confidence in civic institutions.

Brooksie starts off okay. The abandonment of the most vulnerable was dreadful, and no questions that it has shaken our confidence in local, state and federal government.

But then he starts lumping in other recent "institutional failures" as if they are relevant comparisons.

Intelligence failures: 9/11 and WMD. On the former, that was a failure to READ and RESPOND to intelligence reports. The latter we can argue till the cows come home, but frankly the main consequence of the WMD malarky was Colin Powell making a tit of himself and America before the UN.

Incompetent Postwar Planning: That was a Neocon failure. Period. They fought the war, they hadn't a clue how to bring the peace. No need to lump the rest of America with this failure.

Enron and Wall St Scandals: Firstly, how are these failures of civic institutions? Sure the SEC hasn't covered itself in glory, but in the end, it WAS a public figure (Eliot Spitzer) who took the fight to big business. Now I'm in no way excusing the crap that went on in Tyco etc, but honestly, the idea that a handful of corrupt businesses constitute civic institution failure is silly.

Scandals at Newspapers and Magazines: See above. Failures of civic institutions? Please.

Steroids in baseball: Ditto

Abu Ghraib: I thought that was the failure of a few bad apples in the military? No, seriously, I would put Abu Ghraib in the Neocon postwar planning failure. So again, on the Pentagon civvies (aka Neocon) doorstep.

Is there anyone who sees a failure of civic institutions in any of these above examples? (Katrina is different. There the FEMA infrastructure undoubtedly failed.)

Point 3 - Elemental violence in human nature

Brooksie waffles through a coach trip of atrocities that he believes will define this decade, ending at the thoroughly predictable Manichean conclusion that good and evil are in conflict and the former is struggling.

I got to deal with one fundamental, typical conservative inconsistency. If there is as Brooks said, an elemental violence in human nature, then we are all evil. Conservatives should pack up any pretension otherwise. You see, as human beings, we are not fundamentally good, evil, violent, peaceful, greedy or generous. We are all of the above. And the problem is not our elemental violent tendencies - it is a shortfall in generosity. That is what is currently wracking America's conscience.

Point 4 - Moral Culture

Trust a conservative to bring this up. For anyone who's made it this far, Brooks has just lamented the elemental evilness of human beings and the fact the poor and vulnerable are being left behind. So for him to then to argue that the moral culture is "strong" is just cheap talk. Katrina has surely taught us that our moral culture has some profound problems, and Brooks is just in a state of denial.

As per usual, Brooks weaves in some halfbaked economic point, in this case, that the economy is also strong. Well, no, and certainly not by historical standards when improving productivity and real wages were measures of strength. The economy is growing, but that on its own is no measure of strength.

Point 5 - Crystal Gazing

No problem with Brooks speculating where the next political leadership will be coming from. What he omits is the fact that the current political class, dominated by plutocrats, is what's on thin ice. 

Perhaps Brooks' problem is that as an insider in this political class, he just can't see beyond the bubble he's in.

She actually starts okay by admitting that the Iraq War has left America thin on the ground in terms of national guard availability. But then there's a watershed sentence which marks her exit from the reality-based community: "The fact that the country and President Bush personally were already mobilized for disaster has saved lives".

Ignorant or dishonest? You tell me. Certainly not listening to any reports from on the ground in New Orleans.

The article continues with an argument that 9/11 changed Bush's philosophy on disaster relief by his recognizing that the response needed to be led at the federal level, and hence the creation of the Office of Homeland Security, which of course absorbed the FEMA. This is I suppose fair enough, except you should not overlook the fact that at the most senior level, OHS and FEMA are run by GOP political fixers and/or lawyers, not the kind of disaster-recovery professionals one might hope for.

The final third of the article however, is the coup de grace for a shameless Bush apologist. This piece (no doubt written for the benefit of a foreign audience) is simply astounding:

"The level of preparedness for a giant storm may not have been obvious outside the country. But the US was prepared for Katrina. All the old and new federal offices worked together and confronted the storm early." [emphasis added]

The bullsh*t continues - according to Shlaes, citizens with "special needs" were ordered to go to the Superdome. And in the next sentence, she reports on the call to evacuate the city. Can she not see the total bankruptcy in morality, planning and leadership where on the one hand an evacuation is called for, but the poor and infirm get left behind?

She concludes her argument that the preparedness was adequate by saying that 30,000 troops will soon be in the affected area. Perhaps one day she'll dial 911, and when the police say they'll arrive soon, she can expect them any time in the next week.

But her final paragraph takes the biscuit. She says the Feds will start spending more on possible catastrophes (eg San Fran earthquake), which is probably quite likely, but then she pulls the oldest wingnut trick and makes a ludicrous and totally unsupportable assertion: "The odds of another natural disaster on a Katrina scale are still less than the odds of a terrorist poisoning of a water source or, heaven forfend, a dirty bomb at an airport".

The knee-jerk reaction to this is to ask - how on earth can you back that up? Of course she can't, but let's stay on offense and ask the more relevant question - why do you think this is the case?

Dealing with the dirty bomb at an airport scenario... for crying out loud, there is no credible scientific study that makes a dirty bomb attack any more deadly than, say, terrorists flying airplanes into Manhattan skyscrapers. In fact the evidence that dirty bombs any more than an outsized conventional bomb would decimate a population is non-existent.

On the poisoning of a water supply - why is this still a risk? Have Homeland Security not started dealing with this scenario? If not, why not?

And Amity's good for a kicking on this point, because she even argues that "those terror odds are currently increasing" - again, WHY? She offers up chaos as the environment in which terror thrives (yes, the chaos of New York, DC, Madrid and London was a real catalyst for terror), and concludes that "most Americans know all this and are trying to rise to the challenges this year has brought".

Amity, sweetie, Americans are beginning to question whether five years of Bush-rule has fomented chaos and uncertainty, and whether they can be trusted with running the American government. This is not politics, this is POLICY, and in what's left of American democracy, the government should always be accountable for policy decisions, regardless of the political climate.

I don't the know the history behind the Soviet reasoning to invade Afghanistan in 1979, but it must be fair to assume that the Soviet people were not told the whole truth, and it is highly dubious that Afghanistan posed any kind of real threat to Moscow. What is clear however, is that once the Soviets were in Afghanistan, the chronology is worryingly familiar.

The Soviet plan was to put in place a system of government that resembled their own. The Soviet military would remain in the country until the Afghan regime could support its own security infrastructure, although there was an expectation that the Soviets would want to keep some kind of permanent military presence there.

Though the Soviets enjoyed a rapid and easy victory over the Afghan government it ousted, the occupation soon ran into difficulties. Omar Azam and his Afghan nationalists mobilized the nucleus of the resistance, and the likes of Bin Laden and Zawahiri joined the mujahideen with their band of Islamic extremists who had been released from Middle Eastern jails in the full knowledge they'd launch themselves at the opportunity to fight the infidel. And so began the the now legendary resistance movement against the Soviet occupation.

When the reality of the Afghan occupation became apparent to the Soviet people, and Gorbachev's government realized the plan was doomed to fail, the exit strategy from the Soviet perspective was focused on ensuring Afghanistan would not become a failed state.

The Reaganites, led by Richard Perle, rebuffed any and all Soviet calls for international help in stabilizing Afghanistan. On live TV, Perle now infamously declared that Afghanistan would take care of itself once the Soviets had left, while the Russian envoy pointedly argued that the jihadists were nothing but trouble and the international community would do well to prevent them getting a toe-hold in Afghanistan.

Well, the Soviets withdrew, and no-one filled the vacuum. Omar Azam was assassinated by the jihadists, and ultimately in a failed state, the Afghan platform for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda was built.

So how does Soviet Afghanistan compare with Iraq?

- Plan for Iraqi system of governance created in our own image - check;
- We occupy until the Iraqis can take care of themselves - check;
- We stay forever in our permanent bases - check;
- Insurgency is a combination of nationalists (Sunnis) and foreign jihadists (led by Zarqawi) - check;
- American public now realize we are in trouble - check;
- Political leadership realises we are in trouble - check;
- Avoidance of a failed state is now the priority - check.

Which brings us to the essential question... How do we extricate ourselves from Iraq? Or in other words, how do we break the Afghan parallel?

The answer to me is clear - we have to admit we have a Soviet Afghanistan redux, and we need international co-operation and help to prevent a complete breakdown of the Iraqi state. This solution would of course require contrition and humility from the Bushies, as their standing on the global stage is hardly favorable. But if anything good is to come out of Iraq - as much for Iraqis as ourselves - we've got to switch to a multilateral agenda, and preventing a failed state a la Afghanistan post-Soviet occupation is surely something the whole world can agree on.