Reward failure?

The NYT leads today with: Month of Talks Fails to Bolster Nuclear Treaty. This headline fails to capture the reality. The NPT talks have ended in failure. Period. Here's the real story (emphasis mine):

The conference, which takes place every five years, had once been seen as a chance to deal with gaping loopholes in the treaty that have allowed a resurgence in the spread of nuclear weapons.

But in the months leading up to the meeting, it became clear that little progress was likely, and in the end the bickering between the United States, which wanted to focus on North Korea and Iran, and countries demanding that Washington shrink its own arsenals, ran so deep that no real negotiations over how to stem proliferation ever took place.

The gulf was so wide that the chairman, Sergio Duarte of Brazil, mused Friday on the question of whether the main treaty to limit the spread of nuclear arms, signed in 1970, was actually further weakened by the session. Asked what the fundamental cause of the failure was, he said, "I think you can write several books on that."

Though President Bush has repeatedly declared that nuclear proliferation, including the risk of terrorists' obtaining a nuclear weapon, is the biggest single threat to the United States, the administration decided against sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the conference, leaving arguments to midlevel diplomats. The 150 or so nations at the conference spent several weeks just arguing about the agenda.

Let's be frank about this. Responsibility for preparing for the quinquennial NPT talks was John Bolton's job. Yet, he was too busy kissing Cheney's ass for the U.N. Ambassador position to bother with something as inconsequential as these talks. John Bolton is as responsible for leaving the talks to the mid-level diplomats and Condi is responsible for not cleaning up the mess that Bolton left in his wake. Yet, the Administration continues to insist that Bolton is "the right man for the job". Right. Someone who has publically expressed utter contempt for the institution, who has repeatedly screwed up on North Korea, Iran and now the NPT talks. He's the "right man" for the critically important position of Ambassador to the U.N.

Huh.

The L.A. Times story makes an important point:

Critics pointed out that during the monthlong conference, the White House asked Congress to fund research on a nuclear "bunker-buster" bomb that could destroy buried weapons stockpiles — a move contrary to the treaty's intentions.

The administration, while criminal, is not stupid. They knew that sending this legislation to the Hill coincident with the NPT talks would serve to highlight their utter disregard for the treaty's provisions agreed under the Clinton administration. This was intentional.

What have we so far? The Preznit says that nuclear proliferation is the biggest single threat to the United States. However, the administrations actions seem to fly in the face of that statement. The administration did not want these talks to be successful. There is simply no other way to assemble all the evidence without your head exploding.

Let's continue. The WaPo reports that two analysts responsible for the debunked intellegence that the aluminium tubes purchased by Iraq constituted clear evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program are reported to have received job performance awards (one infers bonuses) for each of the past three years. Why? They were clearly responsible for botched intellegence that was debunked in less than 24 hours by the U.N. and external experts. Yet, the same intellegence was used repeatedly by Condi, Cheney and Bush to hammer home the false claim that if we did not go to war with Iraq, that we would be witness to a mushroom cloud over Manhattan.

So, what conclusions are we to draw from this repeated pattern of rewarding failure? Afterall, these are not isolated instances. Consider Rumsfeld, Tenet, Wolfowitz, Condi, Snow, Gonzales... the list goes on and on. All of them have f***ed up bigtime, yet have been rewarded with more prestigious jobs, medals, or encouraged to remain at their posts to "keep up the good work". I think that there can be no question but that these are not failures, but successes in the eyes of the administration.

That should be troubling to anyone not in a persistent vegetative state.