Now we can say for sure that Iraq has imploded. Meghan O'Sullivan, Special Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, has resigned.
Here's how the NYTdescribed her role in an article by Bumiller, June 2006:
At the end of each day, President Bush gets a three-to-four-page memo from the National Security Council staff about developments over the previous 24 hours in Iraq. The document, said to be written in the crisp, compelling style that the president prefers, can cover a range of issues — the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, new nominees for cabinet posts or the progress, or lack of it, in ending the three-year insurgency.
The person responsible for the memo is someone who is largely unknown outside the administration, but who colleagues say is instrumental in shaping Mr. Bush's views: Meghan L. O'Sullivan, the 36-year-old deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, and the most senior official working on those nations full time at the White House.
The Nation had another story about O'Sullivan:
She is a protégé of Richard Haass, who left the State Department as policy director in July 2003 and became president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and she is neither a neocon nor an ideologue. She has even earned the suspicion of conservatives for having proposed engaging with Iran and for suggesting--before 9/11--that it is unproductive to brand a state a "rogue regime." The problem is that O'Sullivan, who is in her mid-30s, is not an expert in the field and does not have the stature to take on heavyweights in the Administration (say, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld). Worse, she has two briefs: Afghanistan and Iraq. Either project would (or should) be more than a 24/7 job for a senior Administration official. As a Congressional aide quips, "It's too much to ask anyone to handle two policy failures at once. And what we have now is Administration policy-making that happens mostly by drift, with the White House not caring all that much about it. They'd rather see Afghanistan as 'mission accomplished' and move on."
So what about the Iraq implosion? Larry Diamond summed it up in the NYT article.
Her future is tied to Iraq: her colleagues say she could be national security adviser someday — or something much less.
"The reality is that if Iraq implodes, she'll probably go nowhere," Mr. Diamond said. "Because she will have been associated in an integral way with one of the biggest failures in the history of American foreign policy."
Ms. O'Sullivan is undaunted. "I'm able to focus on the fact that we're building a relationship with Iraq," she said, "that will have benefits to Iraq and America over the long term."
Bye, bye. We hardly knew you.