The war on terror might just be "the war on terror"

The WaPo has a disturbing review of Ron Suskind's new book. Really disturbing. It seems to indicate that everything you suspected and feared about the administration's policy-making is true: the president as a moronic puppet, policies designed only to increase their power, and a total lack of interest in success.

The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now." Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."

Plenty more creepy revelations at the link.

UPDATE: More from Suskind-- on Wolf Blitzer's 'Situtation Room,' he states that we intentionally bombed Al Jazeera in Afghanistan, and that (duh) bin Laden wanted Bush to win in 2004. With video.