President Bush is rewarding his hawkish defense team led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by keeping them on at the Pentagon while getting rid of most of the other Cabinet members.

It's a bizarre way to deal with men partly responsible for the Iraqi catastrophe. Maybe he is letting them stay put until they get it right.

Bush also plans to honor two former advisers who participated in the Iraqi debacle by presenting them with the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the nation's highest civil award -- next week. They include former CIA director George Tenet, the person responsible for the flawed intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. It was Tenet who told Bush it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed those weapons.

It's odd that Tenet should be singled out for honors before the president has received the report from a commission he appointed last February to figure out how U.S. intelligence got it so wrong. The report is due in March but one commissioner, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the panel's work thus far shows that the agency was "dysfunctional" and "needs to be reformed."

Another honoree, L. Paul Bremer, the former administrator of the U.S. Coalition in Iraq, sometimes called the "Viceroy," made a series of blunders in postwar Iraq. One doozey was firing all of Saddam Hussein's party members from the Iraqi government, a move that stripped the Baghdad administration of thousands of people who knew how things worked and, simultaneously, sending them into the ranks of the embittered unemployed and fueling the chaos there.

A third honoree, retired Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, led the swift military victory in Iraq. But in view of the continuing fighting, it was a hollow victory. Franks is also known for his arrogant remark, "We don't do body counts," when asked about Iraqi casualties.

Bush apparently feared that a wholesale changeover at the Pentagon would be interpreted as a concession that the administration had made a mistake in invading Iraq.

Heaven forbid that this administration should ever admit a mistake.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters that the president was pleased that Rumsfeld had agreed to stay on and described him as "someone who is providing very strong leadership during a time of war."

Rumsfeld will use his job extension to spiff-up his legacy before stepping down. That will take some doing. His name is attached to the sadistic treatment of the detainees and prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib, the prison near Baghdad first made infamous in Saddam's "reign of terror." It was there that the brutal dictator imprisoned his political opponents.

Rumsfeld will be known in the history books for his glib callous comments about war: "It's untidy" and "Stuff happens."

In the war council powwow the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld raised the question of strikes against Iraq, according to author Bob Woodward in his book "Bush at War." Woodward said Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz "was committed to a policy of making Iraq a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism."

But while I'm at it, I have a bone to pick with my colleagues in the news media.

When Rumsfeld was strutting before the cameras in the Pentagon briefing room day after day, bragging about the "shock and awe" campaign that was to befall the Iraqis, how many reporters -- if any -- asked Rumsfeld: "Mr. Secretary, are you talking about bombing thousands of innocent people in Iraq to depose one despot, Saddam Hussein?"

Asked recently if he had made any mistakes in the first term, Rumsfeld said it was a "disappointment" that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.

"The fact that one of the bases for going into Iraq, which this administration articulated, was the conviction that they had weapons of mass destruction which would be findable ... so that is clearly a disappointment," he said.

He also said there was no intelligence to indicate the degree of the resistance that the U.S. forces are facing today.

As Rumsfeld runs around these days, trying to repair his former rock-star image, rehabilitation seems unlikely as long as this war continues.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.

© 2004 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer