Writer Spencer Ackerman had his “Iraq’d” blog shut down some time ago, but now he’s gotten the full dismissal. He has announced on his blog that he no longer works at the New Republic:

“On Wednesday, The New Republic and I parted ways, ending my four-year association with the magazine. The ostensible reason for my release concerns my relationship with Franklin Foer and the magazine’s other editors. However, the irreconcilable ideological differences between myself and the top editors at the magazine have been clear to me for months now, and clear to them as well.”

Months is the key word. A few years ago in 2003, he seemed to be more in step, writing this:

“It had the feel of a victory lap. After delivering his devastating Iraq presentation to the U.N. Security Council this week, Secretary of State Colin Powell basked in the adulatory glow of the Sunday morning talk shows. Tim Russert brought the trophy, a Gallup poll showing public trust in Powell eclipsing trust in his boss on the Iraq issue by more than two to one(Powell 63 percent, Bush 24 percent). Powell, with military discipline, waved it off. “I just go about my business and don’t worry about polls,” he said, with every muscle in his face struggling valiantly to suppress a pie-eating grin.

But any celebration would be premature. Powell may have been lionized in the press last week for his deft U.N. performance, but his diplomatic skills will face a far greater challenge this week, when his task will be considerably harder than keeping Security Council foreign ministers awake through over 90 minutes of communications intercepts and satellite photos. It is this Friday, after all, that chief weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei will update the Council on the state of Iraqi compliance. At that point, Powell told Russert, the United States will ask the Council to “immediately determine” the fate of Saddam Hussein.

The hitch is that over the weekend the press reported that France and Germany would try to preempt any U.S. action at the Security Council by presenting an alternative proposal to send hundreds more inspectors to Iraq backed with U.N. peacekeepers as a way to enforce the “serious consequences” clause of Resolution 1441. The eleventh-hour proposal–which the Bush administration had to read about in Der Spiegel–could place serious pressure on Britain, where public support for war is rapidly deteriorating, and perhaps on the Bush administration as well.

In the meantime, Powell proved no exception to reports that administration officials were privately fuming that they had to learn about the proposal from reporters. “It’s the wrong issue,” Powell told Russert, demonstrating the approach he may have to pursue in New York this week. “The issue is not more inspectors. The issue is compliance on the part of Saddam Hussein. … If he is not complying, then what is more time for? For what purpose?” While he diplomatically allowed that he had not seen what the French and Germans were proposing, Powell basically nixed the idea, calling it a “diversion, not a solution.” To George Stephanopoulos, who began his Powell interview with questions about the French and German proposal, the secretary was even more dismissive. “What are these blue-helmeted U.N. forces going to do?” Powell sneered, sounding for a moment like Donald Rumsfeld. “Shoot their way into Iraqi compounds?” The proposal, Powell implied, would continue to allow Saddam to force “inspectors to play detectives or Inspector Clouseau, running all over Iraq to look for this material.””

In 2002, Ackerman authored a piece outlining the mechanics of stoking a war with Iraq, seeing widespread international opposition as something to be circumvented rather than taken seriously, writing a piece called “Storm Window: How to Time War in Iraq”:

“For all of their differences over U.S. policy toward Iraq, Brent Scowcroft and Donald Rumsfeld agree on one essential point: Our allies have no appetite for preemptive strikes to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime. “There is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time,” Scowcroft wrote in his now-famous Wall Street Journal op-ed opposing a first-strike against Iraq. During a visit to California‘s Camp Pendleton last Tuesday–a visit designed to bolster support for the strikes–Rumsfeld essentially conceded the point. “It’s less important to have unanimity than it is making the right decision and doing the right thing, even though at the outset it may seem lonesome,” the defense secretary asserted.

But international opposition to a preemptive war on Iraq might not be as steadfast as these two men–and their many supporters on either side of the Iraq debate–seem to think. Writing in The Washington Post last week, Richard Holbrooke, the American ambassador to the United Nations at the end of the Clinton administration, sketched out how it could be done. Basically, the United States would have to go through the U.N. Security Council and obtain a resolution authorizing a new inspections regime–a resolution demanding unfettered access, no timetable for completion, and unconditional acceptance, and authorizing the use of force to punish noncompliance. Although Iraq‘s history completely justifies this sort of treatment, the Iraqis will never accept such stringent international demands. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz yesterday admitted that Iraq will not acknowledge the legitimacy of such a inspections team, stating in Johannesburg that “if [the United Nations] send[s] people who will drag their feet for years without reaching a conclusion as they did for seven and a half years, that’s not going to work.” Assuming Iraq indeed rejects such an inspections regime–and there’s every reason to believe it would, given the history–the resolution would justify waging war. “[F]ew Americans today understand the enormous force, both moral and political, that a Security Council resolution carries in the rest of the world,” Holbrooke wrote. “It mobilizes international opinion, forces concerted action and can mute much criticism.”

Of course, the trick here is getting the Security Council to go along with such a strongly worded resolution in the first place. Of the council’s four other permanent members–Britain, China, France, Russia–each has veto power over resolutions. And each has misgivings, in some cases profound, over war with Iraq.

But that doesn’t mean these misgivings can’t be overcome. It’s at least conceivable–and some would say likely–that even the most steadfast U.S. critics on the council could be won over with the right diplomatic maneuvering. In some cases, it would just be a matter of making visible multilateral gestures to quell mounting international criticism of U.S. policy. In other cases, the United States might have to give other nations certain economic incentives for cooperation.”

“It’s fair to wonder,” indeed, why Ackerman didn’t look in a more substantive way at the doubts about the Iraq war rather than simply looking at the political mechanics of getting there. Here he questions “how successful” Joe Biden would be, in 2003, in raising some questions about the upcoming attack:

“By staging his hearings before the recess, Biden gives Congress a chance to raise questions and establish appropriate criteria for going to war, as he had begun to do during the week. But it’s fair to wonder just how successful this effort can be. No matter how cogent Biden sounds, the administration always has a rhetorical weapon against him. All they have to do is change the subject to the 1991 Gulf War–a subject as likely to leave Biden stammering as it did on Sunday.”

So it’s good that Ackerman now finds himself at odds with the neocons at the New Republic, but it it’s hard to understand where all this (thinly veiled with praise and pleasantries) righteousness (or those “irreconcilable differences”) comes from. Of course, I may not be fully briefed on the latest, the New Republic is a magazine in marked decline and I have glanced at it less over time like many readers, as this page at stateofthenewsmedia.org discusses the circulation problems the magazine has been having:

“According to its own estimates the New Republic has taken a large hit in circulation, dropping by almost 25,000 from 85,904 in 2002 to 61,124 in 2003 (the latest numbers available). That would be a drop of 29% in one year.”