It’s best we don’t also forget, in the backwash of the Foley scandal, what else is happening in the world for which this group of Republican miscreants is responsible, Iraq. Frank Rich had an excellent, as usual, column this weekend in which he points out what Arianna Huffington also points out, that for all the hype surrounding Bob Woodward’s new book “State of Denial” it isn’t exactly a beacon of investigative reporting, it has more the ring of restating the obvious to it than revelation of the hitherto unknown. Plus the title is as much a condemnation of Woodward’s own biased authorship these last 5 years as it is of the Bush administration’s conduct, or lack of same, of the invasion of Iraq and the “War on Terror”(sic).

Read Rich’s whole column, it’s worth spending the time on, but here’s an excerpt.

Tonight on “60 Minutes,” Bob Woodward will spill another supposedly shocking intelligence finding revealed in his new book: a secret government prediction that the insurgency will grow worse next year. Who’d have thunk it? Given that the insurgency is growing worse every day right now — last week suicide bombings hit a record high in Baghdad — the real surprise would be if the government predicted an armistice. A poll released last week by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that about 6 in 10 Iraqis approved of attacks on American forces. Tardy investigative reporting is hardly needed to figure out that the insurgency is thriving.

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This war has now gone on so long that we tend to forget the early history that foretold the present. Yet this is the history we must remember now more than ever, because it keeps repeating itself, with ever more tragic results. In the run-up to the war, it should be recalled, the administration did not even bother to commission an N.I.E., a summary of the latest findings from every American intelligence agency, on Iraq’s weapons.

Why not? The answer can be found in what remains the most revealing Iraq war document leaked to date: the Downing Street memo of July 23, 2002, written eight months before the invasion. In that secret report to the Blair government, the head of British intelligence reported on a trip to Washington, where he learned that the Bush administration was fixing the “intelligence and facts” around the predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. If we were going to fix the intelligence anyway, there was no need for an N.I.E., except as window dressing, since it might expose the thinness of the administration’s case.