And guess what? There never was.

The sublime Sidney Blumenthal on Condi (registration required):

This May, as the situation in Iraq drastically worsened, Rice directed the senior staff that she wants no more reporting from U.S. embassies. She announced in the meeting, according to one participant, that people write memos only for each other and that no one else reads them. She said she didn't and wouldn't read them. Instead of writing reports, the diplomats should "sell America," she insisted. "We are salesmen for America!"

On Tuesday, kicking off the midterm elections campaign, Bush delivered a speech that cited Osama bin Laden's screeds, Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?" and Hitler's "Mein Kampf," and promised "complete victory" in Iraq. Rice contributed her own comparison of the "war on terror" to the American Civil War. "I'm sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold," she said.

But the more delirious the rhetoric, the more hollow the policy. "There is no plan for Iraq," a senior national security official with the highest intelligence clearance and access to the relevant memos told me. "There is no plan. No plan."