From Skimble comes the report of the administration's post war plans for Iraq.

Barbara Bodine, Queen of Baghdad.

CNN reports that the postwar Iraq state will be governed by none other than terrorists' friend and former ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine. A central sector, including Baghdad, will be administered by Barbara Bodine, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, the sources said. She served in that post in October 2000, when the destroyer USS Cole was bombed in Aden harbor. Barbara was central to defeating the FBI's counterterrorism investigation of the USS Cole bombing in Yemen while she was ambassador there as reported by PBS Frontline.

That investigation was headed by John O'Neill, the maverick FBI counterterrorism expert who was forced out of the bureau in August 2001 because he wouldn't act appropriately worshipful of his inept superiors like interim FBI director Tom Pickard. O'Neill had the names of two of the hijackers who flew into the Pentagon on his desk one month before 9-11, when he was kicked out the FBI door. He subsequently took a job which turned out to be his last ? John O'Neill died in the attack on his new employer, the World Trade Center in New York City.

Barbara Bodine, the new Queen of Baghdad, is ironically enough the same person who forced O'Neill out of Yemen in 2001 as he tried to connect the Al-Qaeda dots back to Osama bin Laden, who had known ties to Yemen and who is not now, and never was, Iraqi.

Barbara Bodine is a harbinger of death. She stymied the USS Cole investigation, and helped to prevent the one man who was figuring out Osama bin Laden's real story from acting effectively. Her presence in the scheme for postwar Baghdad expands the arguments about incompetence and deception as basic principles of Bush foreign policy.

And the neo-conseravtive hawks have the temerity to suggest that war will bring forth the flowering of democracy in Iraq and, then, across the Middle East, when, in fact they have no intention of allowing anything as messys as democracy blossom in Iraq. I mean, after all, consider Turkey. The ironies in the story of Mr. O'Neill are amazing. But the proposed appointment of Ms. Bodine to this post, which will require no Congressional approval or oversight, is unbelievable. While Al Qu'eda has had no connection with Iraq up to this point, you can be sure that they will find welcome in the chaos that follows the invasion and partition of the country, and Ms. Bodine will be there to obligingly turn a blind eye, again.