Creepy Defense Briefings

Robert Draper, writing for GQ Magazine, has a disturbing report about the defense briefings Donald Rumsfeld provided to George Bush. (Slide show with briefings here; Story by Draper here.) The briefings are striking for their slick, triumphant military themed photographs coupled with Bible verses.

Frank Rich has some related commentary in the New York Times.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Rich says that Rumsfeld, not typically given to displays of piety, was cynically playing on Bush’s sense of religion. He was also playing with fire since this would magnify the Muslim world’s sense that Bush was prosecuting a holy war.