According to Tbogg, this article originally contained the following passage:
Bremer spent part of the day at the White House, where he apparently met with senior foreign policy officials that included Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA chief George Tenet. He did not meet with President Bush, though officials said he may do so before he returns to Baghdad.
Maybe somebody realized it didn’t look so good for the President to be out of the loop when the Iraq Administrator is in town, because the article is now headlined “Bush, senior advisers to meet on Iraq,” and the paragraph TBogg posts is nowhere to be found.
On a related note, Josh tries to figure out what’s really going on in these meetings:
Is Bremer out? Is he being promoted? Suspended? Two weeks ago the rumor was that he was trying to resign.
I’ve heard every rumor under the sun today. And all that seems really clear is that something major is about to happen on the ground in the US occupation.
Almost two weeks ago now, Bremer had consultations with senior Pentagon officials. And the chatter out of those meetings said that Bremer had grown deeply pessimistic about his job in Iraq and that John Abizaid, chief of the US Central Command, was advocating some sort of decisive move back toward actual war-fighting to arrest the rapidly deteriorating security situation.
Are we headed back to “major combat operations”? How many more people are going to lose their lives, how many more babies will never know their fathers, how many wives will lose their husbands (or vice versa), because the administration blundered into this thing with absolutely no idea what to do if things didn’t turn out according to the neocon fantasy playbook?