Musical chairs.

• Position: Comment - Appointments of government officials

George W. Bush is relying more heavily than ever on a tiny group of neoconservatives and loyalists, who are playing a game of musical chairs in Washington.

Paul Wolfowitz goes from the Pentagon to the World Bank.

Bush taps John Bolton to rise from his State Department post up to the United Nations.

Zalmay Khalilzad jumps from Kabul to Baghdad as U.S. ambassador.

When is the horrible music going to stop?

It's the score of the Project for the New American Century.

Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, and Bolton are all alums of the project, as are, not incidentally, Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff), and Donald Rumsfeld. This is the crew that is running the empire. All but Bolton signed the founding statement of the Project for the New American Century on June 3, 1997. It demanded that the United States "increase defense spending significantly" and "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values."

All but Cheney and Libby signed the project's January 26, 1998, letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to attack Iraq. And not the least of the reasons was that if Saddam got weapons of mass destruction, "a significant portion of the world's oil supply ... will be put at hazard." (That's a reminder that protecting oil supplies was, in fact, one of the reasons for the war.)

It is this clique that misled the country into war, not the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which were merely feeding the President the information he and these ideologues so desperately sought.

And despite all the lies, deceptions, and blunders of this palace guard, no one is held to account. Instead, they retain their positions or get promoted.

Wolfowitz now sits in the Robert McNamara memorial seat at the World Bank. As Reagan's ambassador to Indonesia, Wolfowitz cozied up to Suharto and helped oversee a disastrous liberalization of the Indonesian economy, which "plunged tens of millions into abject poverty," according to Jeffrey Winters, an associate professor of political economy at Northwestern University. If that is Wolfowitz's idea of development, the people of the Third World will be in for harder times.

But even more than his paltry experience on issues relating to development, Wolfowitz compiled a record as deputy secretary of defense that disqualifies him.

When the President's counterintelligence expert Richard Clarke tried to warn him about Osama bin Laden in a meeting in April 2001, Wolfowitz responded: "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden. ... You give bin Laden too much credit."

Wolfowitz was obsessed, instead, with Iraq, and in White House meetings immediately following September 11, it was Wolfowitz, more than anyone, who was...