Hello DC--
If you mean that you can't exchange the e for favicons or other icons
intrinsic to Windows, this is a shortcoming of Vista--one of many. However
you can do this with any folder you would put on the desktop. This is a
contrast to XP. I don't know why the shell team or whoever did this screwed
this up.
I have not been able to change a shortcut icon for one I wanted to select as
in previous Windows OS's but it can be done for a folder icon.
CH
FRANK RICH: Who Really Took Over During That Colonoscopy
THERE was, of course, gallows humor galore when Dick Cheney briefly grabbed
the wheel of our listing ship of state during the presidential colonoscopy
last weekend. Enjoy it while it lasts. A once-durable staple of 21st-century
American humor is in its last throes. We have a new surrogate president now.
Sic transit Cheney. Long live David Petraeus!
It was The Washington Post that first quantified General Petraeus’s
remarkable ascension. President Bush, who mentioned his new Iraq commander’s
name only six times as the surge rolled out in January, has cited him more
than 150 times in public utterances since, including 53 in May alone.
As always with this White House’s propaganda offensives, the message in Mr.
Bush’s relentless repetitions never varies. General Petraeus is the “main
man.†He is the man who gives “candid advice.†Come September, he will be
the man who will give the president and the country their orders about the
war.
And so another constitutional principle can be added to the long list of
those junked by this administration: the quaint notion that our uniformed
officers are supposed to report to civilian leadership. In a de facto
military coup, the commander in chief is now reporting to the commander in
Iraq. We must “wait to see what David has to say,†Mr. Bush says.
Actually, we don’t have to wait. We already know what David will say. He
gave it away to The Times of London last month, when he said that September
“is a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in policy.†In
other words: Damn the report (and that irrelevant Congress that will read
it) — full speed ahead. There will be no change in policy. As Michael Gordon
reported in The New York Times last week, General Petraeus has collaborated
on a classified strategy document that will keep American troops in Iraq
well into 2009 as we wait for the miracles that will somehow bring that
country security and a functioning government.
Though General Petraeus wrote his 1987 Princeton doctoral dissertation on
“The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam,†he has an unshakable
penchant for seeing light at the end of tunnels. It has been three Julys
since he posed for the cover of Newsweek under the headline “Can This Man
Save Iraq?†The magazine noted that the general’s pacification of Mosul was
“a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency the right way.†Four months
later, the police chief installed by General Petraeus defected to the
insurgents, along with most of the Sunni members of the police force. Mosul,
population 1.7 million, is now an insurgent stronghold, according to the
Pentagon’s own June report.
By the time reality ambushed his textbook victory, the general had moved on
to the mission of making Iraqi troops stand up so American troops could
stand down. “Training is on track and increasing in capacity,†he wrote in
The Washington Post in late September 2004, during the endgame of the
American presidential election. He extolled the increased prowess of the
Iraqi fighting forces and the rebuilding of their infrastructure.
The rest is tragic history. Were the Iraqi forces on the trajectory that
General Petraeus asserted in his election-year pep talk, no “surge†would
have been needed more than two years later. We would not be learning at this
late date, as we did only when Gen. Peter Pace was pressed in a Pentagon
briefing this month, that the number of Iraqi battalions operating
independently is in fact falling — now standing at a mere six, down from 10
in March.
But even more revealing is what was happening at the time that General
Petraeus disseminated his sunny 2004 prognosis. The best account is to be
found in “The Occupation of Iraq,†the authoritative chronicle by Ali Allawi
published this year by Yale University Press. Mr. Allawi is not some
anti-American crank. He was the first civilian defense minister of postwar
Iraq and has been an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; his book was
praised by none other than the Iraq war cheerleader Fouad Ajami as
“magnificent.â€
Mr. Allawi writes that the embezzlement of the Iraqi Army’s $1.2 billion
arms procurement budget was happening “under the very noses†of the Security
Transition Command run by General Petraeus: “The saga of the grand theft of
the Ministry of Defense perfectly illustrated the huge gap between the harsh
realities on the ground and the Panglossian spin that permeated official
pronouncements.†Mr. Allawi contrasts the “lyrical†Petraeus pronouncements
in The Post with the harsh realities of the Iraqi forces’ inoperable
helicopters, flimsy bulletproof vests and toy helmets. The huge sums that
might have helped the Iraqis stand up were instead “handed over to
unscrupulous adventurers and former pizza parlor operators.â€
Well, anyone can make a mistake. And when General Petraeus cited soccer
games as an example of “the astonishing signs of normalcy†in Baghdad last
month, he could not have anticipated that car bombs would kill at least 50
Iraqis after the Iraqi team’s poignant victory in the Asian Cup semifinals
last week. This general may well be, as many say, the brightest and bravest
we have. But that doesn’t account for why he has been invested by the White
House and its last-ditch apologists with such singular power over the war.
On “Meet the Press,†Lindsey Graham, one of the Senate’s last gung-ho war
defenders in either party, mentioned General Petraeus 10 times in one
segment, saying he would “not vote for anything†unless “General Petraeus
passes on it.†Desperate hawks on the nation’s op-ed pages not only idolize
the commander daily but denounce any critics of his strategy as deserters,
defeatists and enemies of the troops.
That’s because the Petraeus phenomenon is not about protecting the troops or
American interests but about protecting the president. For all Mr. Bush’s
claims of seeking “candid†advice, he wants nothing of the kind. He sent
that message before the war, with the shunting aside of Eric Shinseki, the
general who dared tell Congress the simple truth that hundreds of thousands
of American troops would be needed to secure Iraq. The message was sent
again when John Abizaid and George Casey were supplanted after they
disagreed with the surge.
Two weeks ago, in his continuing quest for “candid†views, Mr. Bush invited
a claque consisting exclusively of conservative pundits to the White House
and inadvertently revealed the real motive for the Petraeus surrogate
presidency. “The most credible person in the fight at this moment is Gen.
David Petraeus,†he said, in National Review’s account.
To be the “most credible†person in this war team means about as much as
being the most sober tabloid starlet in the Paris-Lindsay cohort. But never
mind. What Mr. Bush meant is that General Petraeus is famous for minding his
press coverage, even to the point of congratulating the ABC News anchor
Charles Gibson for “kicking some butt†in the Nielsen ratings when Mr.
Gibson interviewed him last month. The president, whose 65 percent
disapproval rating is now just one point shy of Richard Nixon’s
pre-resignation nadir, is counting on General Petraeus to be the un-Shinseki
and bestow whatever credibility he has upon White House policies and
pronouncements.
He is delivering, heaven knows. Like Mr. Bush, he has taken to comparing the
utter stalemate in the Iraqi Parliament to “our own debates at the birth of
our nation,†as if the Hamilton-Jefferson disputes were akin to the
Shiite-Sunni bloodletting. He is also starting to echo the administration
line that Al Qaeda is the principal villain in Iraq, a departure from the
more nuanced and realistic picture of the civil-war-torn battlefront he
presented to Senate questioners in his confirmation hearings in January.
Mr. Bush has become so reckless in his own denials of reality that he seems
to think he can get away with saying anything as long as he has his “main
man†to front for him. The president now hammers in the false litany of a
“merger†between Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and what he calls “Al Qaeda in
Iraq†as if he were following the Madison Avenue script declaring that
“Cingular is now the new AT&T.†He doesn’t seem to know that nearly 40 other
groups besides Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia have adopted Al Qaeda’s name or
pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden worldwide since 2003, by the count of
the former C.I.A. counterterrorism official Michael Scheuer. They may follow
us here well before any insurgents in Iraq do.
On Tuesday — a week after the National Intelligence Estimate warned of the
resurgence of bin Laden’s Qaeda in Pakistan — Mr. Bush gave a speech in
which he continued to claim that “Al Qaeda in Iraq†makes Iraq the central
front in the war on terror. He mentioned Al Qaeda 95 times but Pakistan and
Pervez Musharraf not once. Two days later, his own top intelligence
officials refused to endorse his premise when appearing before Congress.
They are all too familiar with the threats that are building to a shrill
pitch this summer.
Should those threats become a reality while America continues to be bogged
down in Iraq, this much is certain: It will all be the fault of President
Petraeus.
July 29, 2007
Editorial
Mr. Gonzales’s Never-Ending Story
President Bush often insists he has to be the decider — ignoring Congress
and the public when it comes to the tough matters on war, terrorism and
torture, even deciding whether an ordinary man in Florida should be allowed
to let his wife die with dignity. Apparently that burden does not apply to
the functioning of one of the most vital government agencies, the Justice
Department.
Americans have been waiting months for Mr. Bush to fire Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales, who long ago proved that he was incompetent and more
recently has proved that he can’t tell the truth. Mr. Bush refused to fire
him after it was clear Mr. Gonzales lied about his role in the political
purge of nine federal prosecutors. And he is still refusing to do so — even
after testimony by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, that suggests that
Mr. Gonzales either lied to Congress about Mr. Bush’s warrantless
wiretapping operation or at the very least twisted the truth so badly that
it amounts to the same thing.
Mr. Gonzales has now told Congress twice that there was no dissent in the
government about Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize the National Security
Agency to spy on Americans’ international calls and e-mails without
obtaining the legally required warrant. Mr. Mueller and James Comey, a
former deputy attorney general, say that is not true. Not only was there
disagreement, but they also say that they almost resigned over the dispute.
Both men say that in March 2004 — when Mr. Gonzales was still the White
House counsel — the Justice Department refused to endorse a continuation of
the wiretapping program because it was illegal. (Mr. Comey was running the
department temporarily because Attorney General John Ashcroft had emergency
surgery.) Unwilling to accept that conclusion, Vice President Dick Cheney
sent Mr. Gonzales and another official to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to
get him to approve the wiretapping.
Mr. Comey and Mr. Mueller intercepted the White House team, and they say
they watched as a groggy Mr. Ashcroft refused to sign off on the wiretapping
and told the White House officials to leave. Mr. Comey said the White House
later modified the eavesdropping program enough for the Justice Department
to sign off.
Last week, Mr. Gonzales denied that account. He told the Senate Judiciary
Committee the dispute was not about the wiretapping operation but was over
“other intelligence activities.†He declined to say what those were.
Lawmakers who have been briefed on the administration’s activities said the
dispute was about the one eavesdropping program that has been disclosed. So
did Mr. Comey. And so did Mr. Mueller, most recently on Thursday in a House
hearing. He said he had kept notes.
That was plain enough. It confirmed what most people long ago concluded:
that Mr. Gonzales is more concerned about doing political-damage control for
Mr. Bush — in this case insisting that there was never a Justice Department
objection to a clearly illegal program — than in doing his duty. But the
White House continued to defend him.
As far as we can tell, there are three possible explanations for Mr.
Gonzales’s talk about a dispute over other — unspecified — intelligence
activities. One, he lied to Congress. Two, he used a bureaucratic dodge to
mislead lawmakers and the public: the spying program was modified after Mr.
Ashcroft refused to endorse it, which made it “different†from the one Mr.
Bush has acknowledged. The third is that there was more wiretapping than has
been disclosed, perhaps even purely domestic wiretapping, and Mr. Gonzales
is helping Mr. Bush cover it up.
Democratic lawmakers are asking for a special prosecutor to look into Mr.
Gonzales’s words and deeds. Solicitor General Paul Clement has a last chance
to show that the Justice Department is still minimally functional by
fulfilling that request.
If that does not happen, Congress should impeach Mr. Gonzales.
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