Maybe I'm giving Paul Wolfowitz too much credit, but I don't think this was mere incompetence. I think the administration's hard-liners are deliberately sabotaging reconciliation.

Surely this wasn't just about reserving contracts for administration cronies. Yes, Halliburton is profiteering in Iraq -- will apologists finally concede the point, now that a Pentagon audit finds overcharging? And reports suggest a scandal in Bechtel's vaunted school-repair program. But I've always found claims that profiteering was the motive for the Iraq war -- as opposed to a fringe benefit -- as implausible as claims that the war was about fighting terrorism. There are deeper motives here.

[...]

These are tough times for the architects of the "Bush doctrine" of unilateralism and preventive war. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their fellow Project for a New American Century alumni viewed Iraq as a pilot project, one that would validate their views and clear the way for further regime changes. (Hence Wolfowitz's line about "future efforts.")

Instead, the venture has turned sour -- and many insiders see Baker's mission as part of an effort by veterans of the first Bush administration to extricate George W. Bush from the hard-liners' clutches. If the mission collapses amid acrimony over contracts, that's a good thing from the hard-liners' point of view.

Bear in mind that there is plenty of evidence of policy freebooting by administration hawks, such as the clandestine meetings last summer between Pentagon officials working for Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy and planning -- and a key player in the misrepresentation of the Iraqi threat -- and Iranians of dubious repute. Remember also that blowups by the hard-liners, just when the conciliators seem to be getting somewhere, have been a pattern.