Andanh.com

Let's go back and consider how the world looked in the winter of 2006-07. Iraq was in free fall, with horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing that sent a steady stream of bad news across the world media. The American public delivered a stunning electoral judgment against the Iraq war, the Republican Party and President Bush.

Expert opinion swung behind the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for handing off more of the problems to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria. Republicans on Capitol Hill were quietly contemptuous of the president while Democrats were loudly so.

Democratic leaders such as Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., considered the war lost. Barack Obama called for a U.S. withdrawal starting in the spring of 2007.

The arguments floating around opinion pages and seminar rooms were overwhelmingly against the idea of a surge: A mere 20,000 additional troops would not make a difference. The U.S. presence provoked violence, rather than diminished it. The more the United States did, the less the Iraqis would step up to do. Iraq was in a civil war, and it was insanity to put American troops in the middle of it.

Almost every top general was against the surge. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was against it, according to recent reports. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called for a smaller U.S. presence, not a bigger one.

The U.S. Justice Department is easily the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country. If used for the wrong purposes, its ability to commit the vast resources of the federal government against an individual or group can do great damage to lives and careers.

For that reason, laws and rules have been adopted to prevent the hijacking of the Justice Department to advance a partisan or ideological cause. But that's exactly what the Bush administration did.

"It's a tragedy because, for many years, the only agency that really had a standing as the untouchable agency from partisan politics was the Justice Department," said David Iglesias, a former U.S. attorney and stalwart Republican fired because he refused to use his authority for partisan purposes. "And unfortunately, what's happened over the past couple of years has tarred it with a very, very ugly brush."

The campaign to turn the Justice Department into an enforcement arm of the Republican Party extended even to its hiring of legal interns.

By federal law and by longtime tradition, legal internships at the Justice Department had been awarded strictly on the basis of merit. But in the Bush administration, well-qualified students deemed to have some sort of hidden liberal bent were systematically rejected; less-qualified students with poorer academic records but a record of conservative activism were hired instead. It was affirmative action for the dumb but partisan.