But the perception that the neocons — including Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith — have been routed, or are in retreat, could not be further from the truth. They are as firmly in control of the levers of real power in the government as they were in the yearlong, synchronized buildup to their war in Iraq. Not a single National Security Council or Pentagon official who eagerly rode the bandwagon for the war has been fired. Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and aide John Hannah continue to enjoy the full confidence of the vice president.

In the media, it is the same story. Rupert Murdoch has not suffered a sudden fit of shame and forced William Kristol to relinquish control of the Weekly Standard. Time magazine and the Washington Post have not shown one iota of embarrassment that they continue to provide a platform for columnist Charles Krauthammer, whose histrionics have now ascended into a call for our next “preemptive” war — this time with Iran. If that happens, of course, hundreds, probably many thousands, of young Americans will pay with their lives for a new wave of appalling bungles. And if the past is prologue, no neocon in government should ever expect to lose a job.

None of these characters (like the president) has said as much as an “I am sorry” or “I was mistaken” over their major assumptions and assertions about Iraq, every one of which has been proved wrong. They have shown no capacity whatsoever for self-criticism, so it is not surprising that they do not seem interested in self-correction that might prevent a repeat of their policy catastrophes.

What are all these wrong predictions, which are now at risk of being relegated down the memory hole as Orwellian nonhistory that never happened? There are at least 21.

First, that the Iraqi army would instantly collapse as soon as U.S. forces crossed their border in a “cakewalk.”

Second, that Ahmed Chalabi, now charged by our own puppet Iraqi government with money laundering and counterfeiting, would quickly emerge as the popular natural leader of Iraq once President Saddam Hussein was toppled.

Third, that because no serious anti-American guerrilla operations could ever get established Iraq, only a small number of U.S. troops would have to remain after the fall of Saddam.

Fourth, that strong links between Saddam and al-Qaida would be found following our occupation.

Fifth, that overwhelming evidence of weapons of mass destruction would quickly be uncovered by U.S. troops.

Sixth, that the U.S. occupation of Iraq would discredit and weaken al-Qaida throughout the Arab and wider Muslim world.

Seventh, that Iraq would quickly develop a stable democracy after the fall of Saddam.

Eighth, that Sunni and Shiite forces would never find common cause against U.S. forces.

Ninth, that reconstruction in Iraq would occur quickly and easily (disproving the State Department’s far more cautious assessment of how difficult it would be).

Tenth, that NATO didn’t matter and we could safely ignore it in occupying Iraq.

Eleventh, that the United Nations didn’t matter and that we could safely ignore it as well.

Twelfth, that we could put together a militarily significant “coalition of the willing” — which recalcitrant allies like France and Germany would quickly regret not joining and thus finally be prevailed upon to send in troops to ease the burden on our own forces in Iraq.

Thirteenth, that leaders of countries such as Japan, Spain and Poland who took the plunge and sent forces to Iraq would not suffer enfeebling electoral or political losses as consequences of doing so.

Fourteenth, that Iraq’s oil could be made to flow again on a lucrative scale within a few months of the invasion, and pay for everything from conquest to reconstruction.

Fifteenth, that the occupation of Iraq and opening up of its oil fields would rapidly cause global oil prices to drop back into the range of $20-$25 a barrel, if not even lower — breaking the cartel power of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries led by Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Sixteenth, that the toppling of Saddam would demoralize the Palestinians and break the back of the second Palestinian intifada, thereby ending the wave of suicide-bombing massacres of Israeli civilians.

Seventeenth, that the occupation and remaking of Iraq would quickly boost the prospects for stable, pro-American democracies throughout the Middle East. (The prophets at the American Enterprise Institute, home to Lynn Cheney and, since he left the Pentagon, Perle, were particularly hot to trot on that one.)

Eighteenth, that the CIA and other primary elements of the U.S. intelligence community who could not be bullied or manipulated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz and their acolytes in the Pentagon could be ignored forever.

Nineteenth, that L. Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority (heavily staffed by neocons, almost all of whom have since prudently fled back to suburban Washington) could ignore the intelligence assessments and policy recommendations of the U.S. Army on the ground.

Twentieth, that last spring’s crackdown on Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr would be quickly and easily carried out and that he would enjoy no significant support from the wider Iraqi Shiite community.

Twenty-first, that any insurgency in Iraq would be carried out solely by embittered old Saddam loyalists and evil outside agents, none of whom would be able to operate for long because they would find no significant support among the wider Iraqi community. (Krauthammer was particularly enthusiastic about that one.)

Some liberal hawks, such as Joshua Micah Marshall, David Remnick, Michael O’Hanlon, Kenneth Pollack and even Thomas Friedman, have actually had the grace to admit they were mistaken. But none of the stalwarts of the Washington Post editorial page has yet done so. The Post has published no editorial accounting of how it allowed itself to be misled by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and others on WMD and everything else involving the war until its conscience awoke over Abu Ghraib. The newspaper’s editorial board cannot shake its Stockholm syndrome, perhaps because it is a voluntary hostage. And naturally, not a single neocon has confessed error.

What a contrast to Vietnam! Within two and half years of major U.S. ground troops being committed, President Johnson had already dropped Defense Secretary Robert McNamara overboard. Then Johnson himself decided he had to abandon his hopes of reelection. That decision, 36 years on, looks like a paragon of self-denial, patriotism and nobility in the interest of genuine peace compared with the crass and desperate efforts to cling to power of the current White House incumbent.

The only senior official to fall in the Bush administration, strangely enough, is the only one appointed by President Clinton: former CIA Director George Tenet. None of those who endlessly pressured or disparaged the U.S. intelligence community or cooked up the flow of now utterly discredited intelligence estimates for Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith have even been demoted, let alone lost their jobs. The almost unknown Harold Rhode, the longtime right-hand man of serial plotter Michael Ledeen at the AEI, continues to whisper his sweet nothings into Rumsfeld’s ear as his advisor on Islamic affairs. And Ledeen, Rhode’s mentor and partner as far back as the days of the Iran-Contra fiasco, has been openly trumpeting the deadly dangers of Iran and the need to take preventive action against it in the National Review Online.

With their every dream, ambition and prediction for Iraq in ruins, the Bush administration and its neocon court are now in a panic. What can they do next? How can they distract the American people from their catastrophic and incompetent record on Iraq before the November election?

The answer is simple. It was stated quite expressly by Rice this past weekend: Don’t worry about our failure to find any evidence of WMD after our preemptive war on Iraq — we may be forced to take such preemptive action very soon against its neighbor, Iran.

If that October surprise doesn’t rally voters back around Bush and ensure four more years for him and the neocons, what will?

The pattern of preparation for this is all too familiar from the buildup to war with Iraq. First, the war drums are sounded by the same old “experts”; then they are amplified by alarmist columnists. Once you see Krauthammer or Ledeen opining, as they have over the past two months, that Iran’s nuclear capability poses the gravest possible threat to Civilization as We Know It, and that The World Cannot Afford to Wait and Negotiate, then you can guarantee — conveniently close to the election to panic voters into supporting the president — that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will pick up the chorus.

Ledeen has already written at least two columns on the subject. Krauthammer, prophet of the Iraq war, has made quite clear his determination to unleash a new one. In his July 23 Post column he wrote: “The long awaited revolution [in Iran] is not happening. Which makes the question of preemptive attack all the more urgent … If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of the ‘Great Satan’ will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or preemptive strike.”

From the perspective of the chimerical and deranged weltpolitik, or “global strategy,” of the neocons, targeting Iran is not merely a tactic of desperation but the fulfillment of what their plans were from the beginning. For the subjugation of Iraq under the puppet Chalabi was always seen as only the first step toward toppling target No. 2 — Iran — in the president’s famous “axis of evil.”

Chalabi, of course, blotted his copybook by being exposed as having been entirely compromised by Iranian intelligence in the first place (though many would still rather defend him and slander the integrity of the institutions of U.S. intelligence that exposed him). And so the unfortunate Iyad Allawi was hastily shoehorned into the high-risk job of prime minister of Iraq that had been lovingly prepared for Chalabi. But the neocon goal remains the same: Use the new, “strong fortress” of pro-American Iraq as the launching point to destabilize and topple the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In reality, of course, Iraq is anything but a fortress. The embattled U.S. troops there are on the defensive — an understaffed, overstretched, exhausted force in a nation that has almost universally rejected them and about which they were given tragically inadequate preparation.

However, blaming Iran for America’s continued failure to tame Iraq conveniently creates a new demon, distracting the public once again from the incompetence and irresponsibility of those who plunged the United States into that quagmire in the first place. And once a new, far bigger conflict has been generated and Bush has been safely reelected, the American public can presumably be rallied around the flag once again.

Certainly, Iran’s steady moves toward acquiring nuclear weapons are a major challenge for the United States and the rest of the world. But there are other ways to deal with them. Joseph Stalin’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in 1949 did not prompt the United States to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. And although Mao Zedong killed at least 30 million of his own people with lunatic policies, massacres, purges and wild utopian experiments, neither Democratic nor Republican presidents ever came close to considering a preemptive nuclear attack against the People’s Republic of China when it developed thermonuclear weapons in the 1960s. Why, then, is an action that could very well trigger nuclear warfare with Iran urgent and vital now when it was not necessary against far more dictatorial regimes that slaughtered infinitely larger numbers of people in the past?

Can Bush and his neocons get away with such an outrageous thing a second time after being so thoroughly discredited the first time? Why not? They got away with it before.

Even Tenet’s fig-leaf excuse for his resignation reflected the transparent mediocrity that so endeared him to Bush. After hanging on for a full seven years under two presidents as one of the longest-serving U.S. intelligence chiefs, and lacking the decency and self-respect to resign for either the 9/11 or the Iraq fiascoes, Tenet still asserted that he was going only, as he put it, for “the well-being of my wonderful family.”

Despite his manifest failings, Tenet was arguably the least culpable — apart from Secretary of State Colin Powell — of all of Bush’s top appointees for the catastrophe in Iraq. Democratic House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California got it exactly right: “I think there are many more people who are responsible for the mess that the administration has created,” she said.

Tenet and his agency had nothing to do with the awful abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. The CIA’s assessments on Iraq were vastly more reliable and accurate than the self-serving pronouncements and outright lies of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, which were fervently promoted by Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and their neocons. It is top civilian officials in the Pentagon who now must take lie detector tests to supposedly ascertain which of them leaked to Chalabi crucial data on U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities in Iran. Not a single member of Tenet’s huge bureaucracy has come under suspicion, though Chalabi and his neocon allies will no doubt accuse them yet.

But for all his devotion to Bush, Tenet was the obvious scapegoat for two reasons above all. First, President Clinton appointed him. This alone made him the obvious choice. He was not ultimately, to use Margaret Thatcher’s pithy phrase, “one of us.” As Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Calif., chairman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, said, “The president won’t be able evade responsibility by having, frankly, somebody appointed by Bill Clinton resign.”

Second, as much as Bush appears to have valued Tenet’s courtier-like skills and ability to meet the president’s demanding “comfort level” requirements (the only quality apart from blind ideological acquiescence he demands from any of his most senior officials), Tenet was not his closest enabler. While Tenet provided false encouragement to Bush in his irresponsible actions — the notorious “slam-dunk” on WMD, for example — Bush has other more reliable and abasing enablers, such as Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, to serve as emotional crutches.

In trying to play to the president’s rapidly fraying base, losing Tenet clearly makes some short-term political sense for Bush. Had he axed Rummy, armchair warriors around the country led by the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh would have had a hissy fit. Even if he had kept Rumsfeld, but prevailed upon him to get rid of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz or Undersecretaries of Defense Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone — the geniuses who, at the very least, “let” Abu Ghraib happen — then the neocon cabal, small in number but overwhelming in screeching power, would have howled the house down in their wildest banshee chorus.

Tenet’s resignation will play well, at least for the moment, with Bush’s most loyal and uncritical base, the phalanx of true-believing, Christian right, Southern and heartland conservatives who overwhelmingly comprise his majority in the House of Representatives. Sure enough, there has not been a whisper of criticism from that quarter. “I welcome the change at the top of the agency,” said Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn.

Bush loyalists in the Senate were equally supportive. “I do think this is a positive move, for him personally and for the agency,” said former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi.

But the drumbeat of reactions from most congressmen on Capitol Hill was as clearly divided as any red-blue map of America in November 2000 — with Democrats invariably calling for more heads to roll and Republicans avoiding the topic.

The only apparent division within Republican ranks, at this early stage, was personal rather than political, though it was a highly revealing one. Partisans like Simmons, Lott and many others lost no time in dumping on Tenet. More moderate and independent-minded senators like Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised Tenet as a decent man who had done his best, though Roberts also said he was glad to see him go.

In the rare exception of a House Republican standing out from the lockstep crowd, Rep. Porter Goss of Florida also praised the fallen intelligence chief as a man who had done the best he or anyone else could to rebuild the agency. “Just boatloads of stuff have been dumped on him by all kinds of people,” he pointed out.

Tenet’s departure will not change the current dynamic of partisan politics immediately. But even if it does not blow apart Bush’s fragile coalition, it is unlikely to appease the anger building up against the president outside it. The Republican Party’s core bases will remain loyal, but the broader constituencies the party has taken for granted for so long will continue to unravel.

In Washington and among the national media that thrive there, Tenet’s fall vastly overshadowed Rumsfeld’s approval of a new “stop-loss” policy that may keep scores of thousands of exhausted U.S. troops, including Army reservists and National Guard members, in Iraq for up to 18 months longer. Nor has this harsh and discriminatory policy, which penalizes the most idealistic and selfless of “red” America’s patriotic core, gone unnoticed by the families and friends of those who are going to pay the price.

The true architects of catastrophe in Iraq continue to sit safely in the Pentagon. Will the American people be satisfied with Tenet’s gesture? Not if the count of body bags coming home continues its relentless rise. And it assuredly will.

The previous careers of some of the key Bush officials appointed to oversee policy in Iraq leave little doubt about how far they are willing to go. In the past they have gone that far and beyond, without limit. They have countenanced, covered up, excused and turned a blind eye to the killing of hundreds, even thousands, including the indiscriminate murder of women and children. It is an indisputable matter of public record.

The selection of Negroponte, most recently the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been presented in the U.S. media as a triumph of moderation and internationalism in the Bush administration’s quavering policy toward Iraq. Negroponte’s key qualification for his new assignment is supposedly his success in working with diplomats from other nations at the U.N.

But Negroponte above all else is an old Central America hand from the darkest chapter of the Reagan administration’s policy of confronting, containing and eventually rolling back left-wing guerrilla movements in the 1980s. He was U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 and oversaw the growth of U.S. military aid to the viciously repressive military government from $4 million a year to $77.4 million a year. Flouting an act of Congress, he created a covert scheme to funnel money to the Nicaraguan Contras through Honduras. Speaking of Negroponte and other U.S. officials working with him, a former Honduran congressman said, “Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.”

Negroponte supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base, the Abu Ghraib prison of its time, which critics charged was being used as a secret torture and murder center. It is also where Contra rebels were trained to fight Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinista government. In August 2001, excavations confirmed that the supposedly wild and paranoid rumors about torture at that prison were true. The remains of at least 185 people, including two Americans, were discovered there.

It is also a matter of record that Negroponte took no action to rein in, let alone expose, the activities of the Honduran armed forces’ own special intelligence unit, Battalion 3-16. Indeed, he helped conceal its murderous activities, reportedly including the killing of U.S. missionaries, from Congress. Battalion 3-16 was trained by advisors from the CIA and the Argentine junta.

In 1981, 32 Salvadoran nuns and other women who fled to Honduras after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero were “disappeared” while Negroponte was ambassador. He asserted he knew nothing about it. But in 1996 Jack Binns, President Carter’s ambassador to Honduras, told the Baltimore Sun that the women were tortured and thrown from helicopters to their deaths by the Honduran secret police. Rick Chidester, a U.S. Foreign Service officer serving in the embassy under Negroponte who submitted the 1982 report to the State Department on the human rights situation in Honduras, said that he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions before it was sent to Foggy Bottom.

In 1982, the State Department’s annual human rights report on Honduras, prepared by Negroponte, found “no evidence of systematic violation of judicial procedures” and praised the country’s dictator, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez. The next year’s report was even more positive, observing that there are “no political prisoners in Honduras.” In 1988, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported that “there were many kidnappings and disappearances in Honduras from 1981 to 1984 and that those acts were attributable to the Armed Forces of Honduras.” The CIA inspector general’s heavily classified 1988 report said “the Honduran military [had] committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned.” It noted that Negroponte actively discouraged U.S. Embassy officers from reporting these abuses.

When Negroponte was nominated by President Bush to be ambassador to the United Nations, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., the most knowledgeable member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Latin American affairs, said: “Based upon the Committee’s review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government-perpetuated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in Embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports.”

Clearly, such a U.S. ambassador in Baghdad would not turn squeamish if either Chalabi, the Rumsfeld team’s former favorite, or some lucky future “strongman” — yet to be plucked from obscurity — took such hard actions to stabilize Iraq.

Ironically, there are striking parallels between the background of Negroponte, who has devoted his life to rolling back the scourges of Central American rebels and now extremist Islamists, and the background of Chalabi, the convicted super-bank swindler who faces 22 years of hard labor if he ever makes the mistake of setting foot again in Jordan, where he was convicted of looting the Petra Bank.

Negroponte, like Chalabi, is the product of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan world of wealthy Mediterranean wheeler-dealers who made it big in Reagan-era Washington by promoting ruthless crusades in Third World countries that had suddenly become hot pawns for would-be master strategists.

Chalabi came from an elite Iraqi family that grew immensely wealthy under the sham democracy fostered by Britain in Iraq from the 1920s to the military coup of 1958. His family’s fortune and his own intellectual brilliance got him into MIT, where he did very well.

Negroponte’s father was a shipping tycoon from Greece. John was born in London, and the family migrated to the United States. Their wealth and Negroponte’s own gifts propelled him to Exeter and Yale. He rose like a rocket in the Republican sphere of Washington in the 1970s and 1980s. As an aide to Henry Kissinger, who was President Nixon’s national security advisor, Negroponte proved his bona fides as a tough guy of the right by attacking Kissinger as too soft on the North Vietnamese during the Paris peace talks.

Another man turns out to be the political and bureaucratic mentor and enabler of both Negroponte and Chalabi: the man who directed and protected the anything-goes counterinsurgency policies in Latin America in the 1980s, and who was rapidly advanced by the team of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to play a similar role for Iraq 20 years later — our old friend Elliott Abrams, now senior director for Near East, Southwest Asian and North African affairs on the National Security Council.

Abrams, in the classic neocon style, is a “phony tough,” to use the term coined by late, great columnist Stewart Alsop about the inept Watergate plotters led by Nixon. In Iraq as in Latin America, such people eagerly boast of their “realism” and “ruthlessness” — the latter of which is only too apparent in their willingness to condone or provide political cover for human rights abuses.

For ideologues like Abrams, operators like Negroponte and Chalabi are essential. They can actually do the dirty work of dealing with tyrants and torturers face to face. The Negropontes of the world, of course, are not torturers themselves; they do not have to be. Their history is to protect and reassure with respectable political cover the people who are.

Abrams at first glance would appear to have zero qualifications for his latest assignment on the NSC. He has never even pretended to be a Middle East expert. But like Negroponte, Abrams turned a blind eye to human rights violations and the Geneva Conventions and chose to ignore, even deliberately mislead, Congress in his drive to cover for U.S. allies that did the dirty work of torturing and slaughtering to pacify key regions of Central America two decades ago. In the Iran-Contra scandal, Abrams pleaded guilty to two counts of lying to Congress, and was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.

In his years as assistant secretary of state dealing with Latin America in the Reagan administration, as David Corn wrote in the Nation in 2001, “One Abrams specialty was massacre denial. During a ‘Nightline’ appearance in 1985, he was asked about reports that the US-funded Salvadoran military had slaughtered civilians at two sites the previous summer. Abrams maintained that no such events had occurred.” In fact, as Corn continued, in 1993 a U.N. truth commission “examined 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador” and “attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the Reagan-assisted right-wing military and its death-squad allies.”

Why has the notorious Central America A-team been reassembled 20 years later to oversee the pacification and supposed transfer of sovereignty in Iraq? Before the revelations of the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison, no one in the mainstream U.S. media would have dared raise — and most would not even have dreamed of — the possibility that behind the rhetoric of turning Iraq into a shining city on a hill for the rest of the Middle East, some U.S. policymakers and their think-tank acolytes might be prepared to unleash policies that would not be for the squeamish, to put it mildly.

No doubt it shocked the old Central America hands when the Abu Ghraib prison abuses blew up into a national political scandal that catalyzed the plummeting of President Bush’s approval ratings. The well-documented torture and massacres in Central America, on a vastly greater scale, never came close to setting off a fraction of this furor. Nor did they occur after an immensely controversial war in which hundreds of Americans have died, or involve ordinary U.S. enlisted soldiers, G.I. Janes as well as G.I. Joes. And the unfortunate Maya Indians did not have al-Jazeera and other TV networks beaming their sufferings straight to the wider world.

Had Abu Ghraib never been exposed, and had Ahmed Chalabi managed to avoid finally exhausting the patience of his indulgent Pentagon protectors, he might eventually have taken over as prime minister of a supposedly democratic Iraq and imposed, to his heart’s content, all the “tough but necessary” measures he advocated in his Aug. 31, 2003, Washington Post Outlook section article. Chalabi urged a crackdown: “Coalition forces need to move quickly to arrest and question thousands of people” (the names of whom his Iraqi National Congress would provide).

“Some of these steps will cause disruption to innocent people and will spawn some short-term resentment towards the coalition, but they must be taken,” Chalabi wrote. Then, presumably, Ambassador Negroponte in Baghdad, backed by the National Security Council’s Abrams in Washington, would have heard no evil and seen no evil.

Even now, it is probably a safe bet that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others are still hoping to come up with some plausible and presentable strongman for Iraq, convinced that if he is given a free hand to do the dirty work he deems necessary, the tidal waves of Sunni and Shiite rage alike will soon be made to go away.

There is one important difference between today’s Iraq and Middle East and Central America 20 years ago. It was one thing for a handful of U.S. intelligence operatives and special operations officers and troops bred to discretion and secrecy to work in the shadows with our allies then. It is quite another thing when entirely decent U.S. soldiers — we still don’t know how many — are encouraged or ordered to carry out such abhorrent activities on a major scale themselves.

The dirty war of Abu Ghraib is out of the bottle, and Abrams and Negroponte will not be able to provide the kind of politically acceptable cover for tough measures they specialized in long ago, which the practitioners of the Central American model were confident would also pacify Iraq. Negroponte will head to Baghdad come July as an enabler without, for once, having a strongman to enable — and without the reliable Honduran Army to do the dirty work. But those methods could only work in the shadows, not in unrelenting light. He arrives at his post in Baghdad with the whole world watching.

Warner, not usually the most reckless or outspoken member of his party, was not alone in his outrage. “No member of the Senate had any clue” about the Abu Ghraib outrages, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the New York Times. “This is entirely unacceptable. I think it is a total washout.”

The Abu Ghraib revelations unleashed a pent-up tidal wave of resentment at the cavalier way that Bush and co. have kept congressional leaders in the dark over crucial and highly charged issues, one after another. Lawmakers are appalled that Rumsfeld sat on a detailed report from Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba about the Abu Ghraib situation for weeks and that they had to learn so much from, of all places, the Web site of the one information source that good Republican conservatives despise even more than the New York Times — National Public Radio. Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was furious that his committee had been kept in the dark too. “That’s unacceptable,” he told reporters on May 5.

Even Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the former Senate Republican leader, told the New York Times, “I don’t feel good at all about what I’m finding out about who didn’t know what.” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the avatar of Reagan Republicanism over the past quarter century, was the most outraged and plain-spoken of the lot: “It’s abysmal; it’s criminal,” he said. And if, or rather when, the allegations are proved true, “somebody needs to go to jail,” he added.

The revelations of repeated torture and extraordinary humiliation of Arab prisoners in Iraq have obviously appalled lawmakers, Republican and Democrat alike. But there is a lot more to it than that. For the first time in this administration, Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska no longer look like an incorrigibly romantic idealist (Hagel) or an embittered, jealous presidential wannabe (McCain), both with Vietnam on the brain. Suddenly they look like prescient leaders of their party and the good consciences of the Senate.

How badly has this continuing scandal hurt the president’s clout on Capitol Hill? Far more than he, his staff or even Republican lawmakers themselves yet realize.

Unease, a smoldering anger and even fear at being cut out of the loop by Rumsfeld and his Pentagon have been building for months on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate. Powerful mainstream senators like Warner, Lugar and Roberts are now saying in public things that would have gotten them in boiling hot water only a few weeks ago. These men will still not go as far as McCain or Hagel in blasting administration policy or Rumsfeld forthrightly. But they have come a long way already, baby. Rumsfeld is without a doubt on the skids with them. And the president’s evident determination to hang on to “his” Rummy through thick and thin is going to strain relations even more.

The White House and the Pentagon have systematically shut the Senate out of the consultative process on Iraq in a way not seen since World War I. The horrific pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib therefore did not hit a political vacuum or a strong buffer of support for the president and his defense secretary. Instead, they have served, some Senate GOP staffers privately say, to focus and harden fears and resentments that have been building for months.

The House is a tougher nut to crack. Historically, House members usually do not concern themselves with many foreign affairs issues — with the exception of hot-button ones of particular interest to influential lobbies or groups in their own districts. Also, the GOP majority of recent years under the leadership of Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas has been especially uniform in its views and in harmony with Bush on them. So far, no one there has broken ranks, and there have not been any independent, grim and public expressions of concern from House Republican leaders comparable to what has already been uttered by their Senate counterparts.

But talk to some House staffers who are privy to the thoughts and concerns of their congressmen and sometimes surprising expressions of anger and frustration come forth.

These so far fall into two categories: The first is that the czar, in this case the president, is still wise and good and just, and that it is his pesky advisors who are to blame. A remarkable amount of anger appears to be spreading in GOP House staff circles against Rumsfeld and the supposedly brilliant group of neoconservative intellectuals around him, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith — those who pushed the conquest and occupation of Iraq so remorselessly yet now appear to have not the slightest clue what to do next.

The second reaction is found less commonly among House staffers but is even more remarkable. That is the expressed belief of Republican conservatives that to retain the power that really matters (their majority in the House, with continuing control over its committees and fiscal powers), they may have to sacrifice the power that they regard as more superficial and transient: Bush’s holding on to the White House.

According to this line of thought (and I have been unable to ascertain from staffers how many Republican congressmen hold such a view), Bush, Rumsfeld and their hawks have already made such a mess out of Iraq that the next president, be it Bush or John Kerry, is certain to be on a hiding to nothing as he struggles with the war’s consequences next year. Indeed, it is inevitable that there will be a massive popular backlash against the sitting president, Republican or Democrat, come the midterm elections of 2006. Far better, therefore, that Kerry win in November and still be hemmed in on the domestic front by a Republican House majority that is then free of the albatross of Iraq. If Bush wins in November, according to this belief, there is a very real danger that after 12 years the GOP will lose the jewel in its crown — control of the House — in 2006.

For the moment, however, members of the House are silent. GOP leaders are keeping their heads down, hoping the whole mess will go away in the next news cycle. Whatever the unease and resentment building against Bush there, he still has several months to rally the faithful, jut his jaw and look manly. House members will not distance themselves from a president who shares their core beliefs before the fall and, even then, only if come September he is looking like as much a lost cause as his father did by that time in his unsuccessful reelection campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992.

In the Senate, Bush’s problems are far more immediate: If the Abu Ghraib scandal continues to metastasize, as it shows every likelihood of doing, then the biggest pressures Bush will face to drop his beloved Rumsfeld will come not from the big, bad media so many Republican true believers still believe to be liberal, or the supposedly wimpy Democrats on the Hill, but from the leaders of the Republican Senate majority themselves. Majority Leader Bill Frist, of course, is a Bush loyalist and totally onboard with the White House. But the Tennessee doctor has been strikingly out of step with his own committee chairmen of Foreign Relations, Intelligence and Armed Services on the issue.

The danger is real enough for Bush, staffers for mainstream Republican senators say, that the two hard-charging mavericks, Hagel and McCain, may set their party’s tone, or even agenda, on dealing with Rumsfeld. Other Republican senators are already so disgusted with Rumsfeld’s bungles that they at the very best will not publicly defend him. The 92-to-nothing bipartisan resolution passed on Monday condemning the Abu Ghraib abuses signals that the turning point is very close, and may already have been reached. GOP Senate leaders showed none of the usual efforts to delay or water down a resolution that, after all, was highly damning to the administration run by their own party.

If there was a single moment when congressional Republicans’ doubts about Iraq germinated and started to bloom, it was when Bush was forced to unleash his $87 billion request for rebuilding Iraq last August. As luck would have it, the request came out just as Islamic guerrillas in Iraq assassinated Shiite Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, United Nations special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and several hundred of their officials, supporters and other victims in a blitz of bombings.

Successful politicians, especially in a system like that of the United States — where every congressional seat is up for grabs, at least theoretically, every two years — cannot afford the luxury of the neocon fantasy of bringing American-style democracy to Iraq. They keep their seats for a lot longer than two years by delivering the bacon and the pork for their constituents and by being plugged in to what the folks back home are thinking. And the remorseless rise in body bags coming home from Vietnam — sorry, Iraq — combined with the unyielding refusal of the reviving economy to generate well-paying new jobs, alarms them. Even the growing casualties and death toll did not seem to matter so long as the people running things in the Pentagon and the White House still looked as if they knew what they were doing.

But that is no longer the case. Bush remains convinced that Rumsfeld is a genius. Almost no one in the Senate majority, apart from Frist and a couple of other true believers, agrees anymore. Even in the House, the murmurings of staff members have grown into a chorus of cicadas.

Many congressional leaders had circulated with Rumsfeld on May 1 at the annual White House Press Correspondents dinner as the Abu Ghraib story was breaking, and the carefree way he and Wolfowitz enjoyed themselves that evening is now also reverberating on Capitol Hill. What for so long seemed the secretary’s greatest asset — his blasé coolness and imperturbability through every crisis — is being widely reinterpreted as arrogant and even reckless delusion.

Yet as Bush made clear in his visit to the Pentagon Monday morning, he remains determined to keep Rummy on — a determination that should be taken literally. For this president is, to quote the one book he appears to ever seriously consult, “an Israelite without guile.” He could not bring himself to acknowledge a single personal mistake or error of judgment when pressed four times in his press conference last month. Nor could he bring himself to personally apologize to the Iraqi people for the torture and abuse revelations when he went on Arab television, supposedly with the express purpose of doing so. All this pales compared with the magnitude of error and miscalculation he would have to admit, however tacitly, if he dropped Rumsfeld now.

By keeping Rummy, Wolfie, Dougie and the gang on, the new gap between Bush and seasoned Senate loyalists like Hatch and Lott could grow into a Grand Canyon. Bush probably imagines that his House majority is made of sterner stuff, but by no means all of them are. The House is far more responsible to public opinion than the Senate is, and historically, in times of crisis, congressmen tend to defer to outspoken senators on issues of national security and foreign affairs — as presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson have discovered to their cost.

If it were not for the steady stream of catastrophes followed by bombshells erupting from Iraq, Bush would be looking good. Kerry’s performance so far has been lackluster, and the Bush-Cheney campaign’s $60 million ad blitz in early spring drove up Kerry’s negatives to satisfyingly high numbers. Even the flat jobs growth rate — boosted only by part-time jobs devoid of health benefits — could be massaged into a feel-good numbness.

But Iraq will not stay quiet. It will not stop coughing up horrifying and disgusting surprises. Bush and Rumsfeld appear to be genuinely unconcerned by this, but Capitol Hill Republicans clearly are coming to see it very differently. They are professional politicians who cannot afford to live in a permanent fantasy in which they imagine themselves walking in the steps of Winston Churchill.

Chalabi, longtime exile leader, has never had a power base within Iraq. He is a smooth operator, convicted of embezzling millions from the Petra Bank of Jordan — sentenced in absentia to 22 years of hard labor — but championed by the neoconservatives of Washington. They had lined up Chalabi to be their man in Baghdad years before the conquest of Iraq. Although he is a Shiia, the 60-year-old Chalabi had not lived there since age 12, and when he returned he surrounded himself with a U.S.-paid personal militia but had no political following. Without his U.S. sponsors, he would not last five minutes as a force. He is widely suspected of profiting enormously from U.S. contracts in the country. After the war, Chalabi proudly boasted of providing misleading intelligence to the U.S. government that was indispensable in spurring the invasion. He remains on the Pentagon’s payroll — $340,000 a month — not counting the $40 million that he’s received at the insistence of the Republican-dominated Congress over the past decade. He is a focal point of mistrust on all sides within Iraq.

Just as Bremer will not make the slightest move without the approval of his Pentagon bosses, the Defense Department policymakers continue to rely on Chalabi alone for their political assessments on Iraq. In private conversation, as in public, they remain amazingly enthusiastic about Chalabi’s supposed political skills, and even genius, and proclaim repeatedly that he is the only man with the brilliance to hold Iraq together and make it work. Give Chalabi a free hand after June 30 and give him all the U.S. firepower he wants to crush his foes — this is their master plan; there is no other.

The CPA actually had some “hard” data to support this wildly inaccurate interpretation. For U.S. military intelligence assessments in Iraq had concluded that al-Sadr was a fading force. The crowds attending his sermons were smaller. The number of armed supporters he could count on to exert his will was decreasing. The tone of his public pronouncements was becoming shriller and more desperate as the June 30 hand-over date to Iraqi leaders approved by the U.S. authorities came closer.

This information was not false or wishful thinking. It appears to have been entirely accurate. The problem was that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, without whose say-so Bremer does not even dare to breathe, misinterpreted it. By moving against al-Sadr when they did not have to, they revived the firebrand’s credibility throughout Iraq’s 65 percent majority Shiite community. And they also opened the door for something neoconservative pundits had unanimously agreed was impossible: They made common ground between Sadr’s Shiite supporters and the Sunni Islamist guerrillas who have been fighting the United States implacably in their own heartland of central Iraq.

There is no way that the move against al-Sadr was undertaken without Chalabi’s prior knowledge and explicit approval. Instead, given the extraordinary degree to which the Pentagon policymakers and Vice President Dick Cheney continue to privately disparage the far more accurate, sober and reliable professional assessments of the U.S. Army’s own tactical military intelligence in Iraq, it appears clear that, yet again, Chalabi was the tail that wagged the dog. He could have been expected to urge the move on al-Sadr in the first place.

The benefit to him is obvious. Chalabi believes — as do his still-worshipful Pentagon backers — that he has the blessing of supposedly moderate Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the mainstream chief religious authority of the Iraqi Shiites, to take power on July 1 with the force of 110,000 U.S. soldiers and their automatic weapons behind him.

However, just as the neocons lead President Bush by the nose, and Chalabi leads them by the nose, Sistani and the Iranians have been leading him by the nose.

Sistani’s policy toward the CPA and Chalabi has been no different from the way he survived as an ayatollah all those years under Saddam Hussein, which was no mean feat. Sistani is playing a cautious waiting game and avoiding the ire of those who currently are top dog in Baghdad. He will drop Chalabi — and the United States — at the drop of a hat as soon it becomes clear that they cannot run or tame Iraq.

Chalabi and the neocon geniuses in the Pentagon are all willfully blind to the wafer-thin nature of the “support” they enjoy from Sistani. From their perspective, Muqtada al-Sadr was the only fly left in the ointment. Much better, from Chalabi’s point of view, to have the United States to do the dirty work and get al-Sadr out of the way so that he could then emerge as Iraq’s unifying leader with his hands clean on July 1 rather than risk the opprobrium of eliminating al-Sadr himself.

Of course, it has not worked out that way. Instead, the Shiite rising has spread like wildfire across all southern and central Iraq. The Sunni insurgents have rallied to al-Sadr’s cause as well. The worst thing that could possibly happen now is that al-Sadr, whom Bremer rapidly proclaimed an outlaw, may be killed by U.S. forces, thereby activating the most passionate and extreme martyrdom emotions of young Shiites across Iraq. And as soon as the rising began, the much-touted Iraqi police and security forces that Bremer had claimed were progressing so impressively turned tail and ran from every confrontation.

The myth of Iraqization of this war is now dead. The Pentagon masterminds remain determined to push Chalabi through as prime minister and absolute ruler of Iraq de facto on July 1. GOP heavyweights have even been assured around Washington that hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks from U.S. companies to Chalabi to do business in Iraq will be used for a good cause: to spread democracy in — read, destabilize — neighboring Saudi Arabia and Iran.

But the al-Sadr revolt means Chalabi will now only be able to rule on the shoulders of at least 110,000 U.S. soldiers. It may take twice as many. That means that Iraq will not settle down nicely in time for the Republican National Convention in New York. Far from dramatically reducing the level of U.S casualties by Iraqizing security, the hand-over will almost certainly dramatically boost the scale and rate of U.S. fatalities and casualties. U.S. forces will not be able to remain in the passive-reactive mode of hunkering down in their bivouacs that they have followed in recent months in central Iraq to reduce casualties. They will likely be forced to take the offensive in cities across Iraq on a far wider front against infinitely more enemies than they had faced before April 2.

This latest catastrophic bungle by Bremer and his bosses to clear the way for Chalabi is the biggest yet. You think this is bad? To quote Al Jolson, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”