Former CIA agent and The American Conservative magazine contributing editor Philip Giraldi confronts America’s march to war with Iran.

The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg calls on national government employees to take secret documents pertaining to the upcoming war with Iran and give them to the Congress and the press as a last ditch effort to stop this war.

Excerpt from Gregg Easterbrook’s Page 2 column for ESPN today “Another Season of Bad Predictions:”

Bad Iraq Predictions: “I predict Iraq won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree the war was worth it.” — Jonah Goldberg in the National Review Online in 2005. The media watchdog group FAIR points out that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, a prominent advocate of the United States invasion of Iraq, since 2003 has predicted on at least nine occasions that the Iraq situation would be resolved in less than a year. “I think that we’re going to know after six to nine months whether this project [the Iraq war] has any chance of succeeding,” Friedman told Oprah Winfrey in January 2006. “The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq,” Friedman said on the “Today Show” in March 2006. So Iraq is must be resolved now, right? Friedman in late November 2006: It will be “either 10 months or 10 years” before the Iraq situation is settled. And why has the United States involvement in Iraq gone so badly? Friedman in November 2006: “Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule and a crippling decade of United Nations sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist. Had we properly occupied the country and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course.” So how come Friedman didn’t tell us this before thousands died?

It is unforgivable that American soldiers are being put in this position.

Soldiers from the Army’s 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment converged this week on a religiously mixed north Baghdad neighborhood of auto parts stores and “chop shops” that Iraqi commanders believed was used to rig deadly car bombs.

Moving door to door, Iraqi and U.S. soldiers smashed padlocks with sledge hammers, clipped through wire gates and rifled through hundreds of buildings as Iraqi mechanics, their hands slick with grease and motor oil, peered from nearby shops.

Instead of discovering a network of clandestine car bomb factories, the soldiers instead found only a few Kalashnikov rifles, eight grenades and some wire.

“We’re told this new surge is going to be more intelligence-based instead of just hitting random sites,” said Staff Sgt. Jamie Slagle, 31, of Morrisville, Mo., as he flipped through a stack of unused stickers. “But that’s what seems to me to still be going on.”

U.S. officials have urged Iraqis to be patient and have cautioned that the new security operation could take months to show results. That’s a hard message to swallow for Iraqis who have endured years of violence _ including a triple car-bombing Monday that killed at least 78 people in the heart of the capital.

The U.S. military has advertised some successes, including the discovery of 14 weapons caches during a series of raids and patrols in Baghdad during the week that ended last Friday. On Thursday, U.S. and Iraqi troops arrested two members of a car bomb-making cell in Amiriyah, a Sunni neighborhood near Baghdad airport, the command said.

But for the soldiers of the 23rd Regiment, the results of the new phase have been disappointing so far. Some of them fear that the delays in kicking off the new security operation may have given Sunni and Shiite extremists time to flee the capital or hide their weapons.

“Why are they sending us ground pounding?” asked Spc. Kevin Gibson, 26, of Shiloh, Ohio, as he slumped on a dusty couch in an abandoned office after a day of futile searches.

Are they just training them to be cops when they get home or what?

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Ph.D. tells how she witnessed Douglas Feith and his WINEP/JINSA/AEI buddies deliberately lie the people of this country into war in Iraq.

Her best articles on the subject are here, here, here, here, and here. See also this, this and this.

My previous interviews of her here.