"When you're in trouble, blame somebody else." That's a basic rule of playground politics. We might expect to see that tactic being used in grade school, but not in Washington. And especially not when so many lives are at stake.

Feeling pressured by a growing anti-war sentiment among voters and increasing calls for a change of course in Iraq, politically-dominated officials in the Pentagon chose this week to lash out at one of their higher-profile critics on the Democratic side of the aisles. Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman sent a sharply-worded letter to Senator Hillary Clinton on July 16, responding to questions she raised back in May in which she asked the Pentagon to detail how it is planning for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq. She had inquired about logistical planning for such a scenario, pointing out that whenever troops do leave Iraq it will be no simple task to transport all the people, equipment and vehicles back out of the country in the face of probable hostile opposition on the ground there.

Undersecretary Edelman's surprising response was essentially to accuse Senator Clinton, a leading Presidential candidate and an established member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, of seeking to aid and abet the enemy. Edelman wrote, "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. ... Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.”

If questioning the administration's policies in Iraq is anti-American, then according to all the latest polls more than three-quarters of Americans are guilty as charged. If calling upon the Administration to change its course in Iraq is aiding the enemy, then a growing coalition of Senators and Representatives from both sides of the aisles is guilty as charged. If asking the military to consider contingency plans for withdrawing safely from Iraq is abetting the terrorists, then everyone from Generals Pace and Petraeus on down is guilty as charged.

Senator Kerry has always been ready to defend his fellow Democrats against political attacks, and he released this statement in support of Senator Clinton:

This Administration reminds us every day that they will say anything, do anything, and twist any truth to avoid accountability. Their latest assault on Sen. Clinton comes from a tired partisan playbook and it’s a disgrace. They ought to be planning to save lives -- not plotting to save face.

One of the great tragedies of the war in Iraq has been a total lack of planning by the Administration. Failure to plan for protecting troops with the right equipment, failure to plan for treating specialized injuries and failure to anticipate the bloody civil war.

I think it is entirely appropriate for the Pentagon to show how it is planning for the eventual redeployment of troops out of Iraq. We have a right and responsibility to know that our troops will return home in an orderly and safe manner and every reason to be skeptical given the reckless way our troops were put in harm’s way.

Senator Clinton was right to ask the Pentagon for answers and the Administration’s smear tactics in response are wrong but not surprising.”

That the Pentagon chose Senator Clinton to be the target of this canard attempt to reframe the discussion in slanted and self-serving terms at this critical point in time seems especially ill-considered, and it has resulted in a great deal of undesired blowback against the White House. Bloggers, newspaper columnists, radio talk-show hosts, and average Joes and Janes on the streets of America all seem to be taken aback by the unnecessary anger and the inappropriate rhetoric of Edelman's attack on Senator Clinton. As MSNBC news commentator Keith Olbermann put it in a scathing 'Special Comment' on his evening broadcast last night,

It is one of the great, dark, evil lessons, of history.

A country — a government — a military machine — can screw up a war seven ways to Sunday. It can get thousands of its people killed. It can risk the safety of its citizens. It can destroy the fabric of its nation.

But as long as it can identify a scapegoat, it can regain or even gain power.

The Bush administration has opened this Pandora’s Box about Iraq. It has found its scapegoats: Hillary Clinton and us.

[...]

The fault, brought down, as if a sermon from this mount of hypocrisy and slaughter by a nearly anonymous undersecretary of defense, has tonight been laid on the doorstep of... Sen. Hillary Clinton and, by extension, at the doorstep of every American — the now-vast majority of us — who have dared to criticize this war or protest it or merely ask questions about it or simply, plaintively, innocently, honestly, plead, “Don’t take my son; don’t take my daughter.”

[...]

A spokesman for the senator says Mr. Edelman’s remarks are “at once both outrageous and dangerous.” Those terms are entirely appropriate and may, in fact, understate the risk the Edelman letter poses to our way of life and all that our fighting men and women are risking, have risked, and have lost, in Iraq.

Senator Clinton was right to ask the Pentagon about its plans for extricating or sons and daughters safely from Iraq. Senator Kerry was right to speak up boldly in her defense. As he has pointed out before, dissent is not unpatriotic; disagreement is not the same thing as dissent; and asking for answers is not the same thing as attacking an administration in any case.

Undersecretary Edelman and those in the administration to whom he reports are completely wrong to accuse Americans of aiding the enemy when all those Americans are asking is to know how those in the White House intend to extricate us from the unnecessary, unwinnable quagmire in Iraq that the Bush administration foisted upon the rest of us under false pretenses.