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The British government tried to rein in U.S. policy in Iraq from the outset of the March 2003 invasion but found itself powerless to do so, a former cabinet minister was quoted on Saturday as saying.

David Blunkett, Home Secretary at the time of the invasion, told newspapers that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could not be diverted from their goal of dismantling the Iraqi Baathist government system.

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Woodward also tells Russert another fascinating nugget of information: Vice-President Cheney cursed him out over the information he revealed about the White House mettings with Henry Kissinger and hung up on him.

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On the tube Republicans can throw anything into the wind without impunity even if the talking head knows it's garbage. Take these two. Rep. Kingston-GA and Rep. McHenry-NC, try to turn the Foley scandal into a Democratic conspiracy. These two weasels–and I use that word lovingly, try to absolve Dennis Hastert's involvement in covering up Foley's sexual proclivities and demand Nancy Pelosi be put under oath.

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On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations."
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Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country's access to the international banking system, branding it a "criminal state" guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence. Whatever the truth, I found on a recent trip to Pyongyang that North Korean leaders view the financial sanctions as the cutting edge of a calculated effort by dominant elements in the administration to undercut the Sept. 19 accord, squeeze the Kim Jong Il regime and eventually force its collapse. My conversations made clear that North Korea's missile tests in July and its threat last week to conduct a nuclear test explosion at an unspecified date "in the future" were directly provoked by the U.S. sanctions.

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Vice President Cheney sometimes starts speeches with a Ronald Reagan quotation about a "happy" nation needing "hope and faith." But not much happy talk follows. Not a lot of hope, either. He does, though, talk about the prospect of "mass death in the United States."

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