Monthly Archives: September 2006

NIEs, Nays, Neighs

Posted on by

If anyone ever writes an opera about the Bush Administration (hey, there’s one about Nixon!), I foresee a scene in which a pile of shit is hauled into the White House (Josh Bolten: Osservi, un altro mucchio di defecazione!). Then Karl Rove appears with a shovel, promising to find the pony (Non si preoccupi! Posso trovare il piccolo cavallo!).

This scene might be written around a story by Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung in today’s Washington Post:

In announcing yesterday that he would release the key judgments of a controversial National Intelligence Estimate, President Bush said he agreed with the document’s conclusion “that because of our successes against the leadership of al-Qaeda, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent.”

But the estimate itself posits no such cause and effect. Instead, while it notes that counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged and disrupted al-Qaeda’s leadership, it describes the spreading “global jihadist movement” as fueled largely by forces that al-Qaeda exploits but is not actively directing. They include Iraq, corrupt and unjust governments in Muslim-majority countries, and “pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims.”

The overall estimate is bleak, with minor notes of optimism. It depicts a movement that is likely to grow more quickly than the West’s ability to counter it over the next five years, as the Iraq war continues to breed “deep resentment” throughout the Muslim world, shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and cultivating new supporters for their ideology.

In describing Iraq as “the ’cause celebre’ for jihadists,” the document judges that real and perceived insurgent successes there will “inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere,” while losses would have the opposite effect.

That last sentence amounts to a hoofprint, if not the pony itself. Today Bush apologists expand on the theme that insurgent losses would discourage jihadists to continue the struggle elsewhere, and from there reach the conclusion (as in this Chicago Tribune editorial) that “America’s intervention, in short, is a lot of Mideast thugs’ worst nightmare.”

Damn, some people can find a pony anywhere.

The actual declassified portion of the NIE offers a few sentences of hope that the spread of extremism can yet be stopped. Today some rightie bloggers have seized these sentences — in effect, cherry-picking what was already cherry picked by the White House — to suggest the NIE vindicates Bush policy in Iraq. It takes some mighty shoveling to reach that pony, folks.

Joshua Holland comments:

…here’s the money quote, and the argument we’ll hear from the right’s echo chamber from now until the election:

    In addition, it asserts that if jihadists are perceived to be defeated in Iraq, “fewer fighters would be inspired to carry on the fight.”

Bingo! There’s your justification for an indefinite occupation of Iraq: we have to stay the course until we achieve a “victory” that will so demoralize the “global jihadist movement” that they’ll take their ball and go home.

The fatal flaw in this argument is that America lumps every Islamic political movement that opposes the occupation together and calls them “jihadists.” There’s the rub, because “victory” would mean, of course, a political victory, and in order to actually achieve political stability in Iraq some of those we’ve defined as jihadists would have to be involved in the country’s governance.

What the intelligence analysis is saying — and this is almost certainly true — is that if Iraq were to end up with a pro-U.S., largely secular unity government without any influence from Iran, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, the Badr Brigade or any of the dozen other Iraqi religious groups — Shiite and Sunni — that have opposed the U.S. presence — if all of those elements were effectively wiped out — it would be so demoralizing that Iraq would lose all of its potency as a recruiting tool.

But that particular scenario is never, ever, going to happen — not in a million years. It’s a Catch-22: aside from the fact that a legitimate government has almost zero chance of emerging under U.S. military occupation, if it did it would certainly require that a large chunk of the Iraqi opposition come into the political fold.

And as long as people like Sadr, who’s been called a radical militant and a criminal by the U.S. for three years, have a seat at the table when U.S. troops leave, they’ll make the claim that they defeated the Great Satan and they’ll be hailed as heroes across the Islamic world. Their resistance will be seen as a model for opposing superpower bullying and that’ll just create a thousand new recruiting posters for extremists everywhere.

At last week’s Clinton Global Initiative conference, speaker after speaker said that military actions like the U.S. invasion of Iraq are spreading extremism. Keep this in mind while reading this part of the NIE:

_The jihadists’ greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution — an ultraconservative interpretation of Shariah-based governance spanning the Muslim world — is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims. Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists’ propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.

_Recent condemnations of violence and extremist religious interpretations by a few notable Muslim clerics signal a trend that could facilitate the growth of a constructive alternative to jihadist ideology: peaceful political activism. This also could lead to the consistent and dynamic participation of broader Muslim communities in rejecting violence, reducing the ability of radicals to capitalize on passive community support. In this way, the Muslim mainstream emerges as the most powerful weapon in the war on terror.

Exactly. But every time the Muslim mainstream hears about torture of Islamic prisoners or “coalition” bombs dropping on a Muslim wedding or Muslim families wiped out by Marines who are breaking down from stress, that Muslim mainstream gets a little smaller and weaker. And this is the point righties cannot get into their stupid heads.

I recommend reading the transcript or watching the video of this CGI session from last Thursday. Here’s just a bit, spoken by Queen Rania of Jordan:

I would like to say for example, like two months ago, before the war in Lebanon began. Here’s Lebanon, which is made up of a group of people that are peace-loving. They are very moderate and open and modern by nature. They are the natural allies to the global community. Then this war took place. And innocent civilians were seeing, on a daily basis, bodies of babies being put into plastic bags. The vital infrastructure was destroyed. A quarter of the population was displaced. And I can say that over the course of two months, the Arab public became much more radicalized. Because they saw this injustice. They saw this grief. And even the moderates, what we thought was a moderate majority started to shrink, and you can see this shrinking taking place. And the extreme voices came out as the victorious ones. And you could see that the voice of moderation, the voices that called for peace and diplomacy and engagement, they are losing currency. They are being marginalized.

So, if you want to strengthen the moderates, we have to see ― people have to see the dividends of moderation. They have to see the dividends of peace. And now, they are not seeing them. So again, I just want to say that if we want to gain the moderates, if we want to increase ― it’s almost percentages, you know. The percentage of extremists to moderates. If you want to increase and strengthen your moderate block, then people have to really feel an important difference in their lives. They have to see justice. They have to see ― and as I said, an honest engagement and an interest in their cause.

What the NIE says — the part Bush released, anyway — is that it’s still possible to turn this around. It’s still possible to grow moderation and marginalize extremism. It doesn’t say this will happen; it says it could be done.

However, since the invasion nearly everything the Bush Administration has done in Iraq has had the effect of growing extremism and marginalizing moderates. The declassified portion of the NIE doesn’t specifically say this, which doesn’t mean the part still classified doesn’t. This is what it does say:

Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.

If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide. …

… We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. …

…We assess that the underlying factors fueling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this estimate.

Maha’s summary: Extremism is spreading. Bush’s Iraq policy is among the factors causing it to spread. But it might be possible to shrink extremism.

Let’s guess what the still-classified part of the NIE says.

A. We can shrink extremism by continuing to do the very things we’ve been doing that grew it; or,

B. We can shrink extremism, but we’ll have to change our policies and focus to accomplish this.

Righties will choose A; the rest of us will assume B is the logical answer.

But notice that the bloggers who support torture and rendition and indiscriminate bombing and publication of anti-Muslim cartoons and whatnot are the same bloggers who today are celebrating the “Muslim mainstream” that’s going to end the jihad. Logic is not exactly their strong suit. They’re better at shoveling.

When Operas Attack

Posted on by

The German Opera of Berlin (Deutsche Oper Berlin) has pulled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo from its fall schedule on the advice of police. The production had included a scene featuring the severed heads of Mohammed, Jesus, and the Buddha, and the police worried that Muslims might get violent about it.

If you are familiar with Idomeneo you might wonder how Mohammed, Jesus, and the Buddha wandered into it, since those illustrious figures are not in the libretto. The New York Times has a photograph of a rehearsal — the chorus is dressed in black suits and “blues brothers” porkpie hats. (This is what passes for creativity in opera; take a story based on Greek myth and dress everybody up in the wrong costumes.) I assume the green guy is Neptune, who is in the libretto, and the woman dressed in the black suit (but no hat) is probably a mezzo-soprano playing the role of Idamante, son of Idomeneo, King of Crete. The role was written for a castrato, who are hard to come by these days, and so opera companies usually settle for a mezzo. An occasional tenor will take on the role, but I suspect the vocal range the part requires is not comfortable for most tenors.

In this opera Idomeneo is supposed to sacrifice Idamante to Neptune, but (after about three hours of other stuff) at the end an Oracle says Idomeneo doesn’t have to sacrifice Idamante and everybody lives happily ever after. I wonder if the production in question has a new scene in which Idomeneo sacrificed Mohammed et al. to placate Neptune. As I said, it’s not in the libretto, and it doesn’t actually make sense within the plot, but what the hey.

Today there’s some grumbling on the blogosphere about “political correctness” and how “artistic freedom” is being sacrificed to placate Muslims. To which I say, try performing this critter in the Bible Belt. As soon as the Holy Rollers hear about Jesus’s severed head the opera house is as good as vandalized, if not torched. And every Mozart CD in Alabama — all six of ’em — would be tossed on a bonfire, along with video cassettes and DVDs of “Amadeus.”

For that matter, Madonna recently risked arrest in Germany by performing some techno pop song while suspended crucifixion-style on a mirrored cross, wearing a crown of thorns. In The Netherlands, a priest called in a bomb threat in an attempt to stop the show, and some Russian Orthodox priests declared a “Holy Inquisition” against Madonna and other slanderers of holy imagery. Other Russian believers speared a poster of Madonna — sounds hostile to me.

Get this —

The German authorities will make up their own minds on the crucifixion matter this weekend and also on whether the giant screen, which flashes images ranging from the pope, Osama Bin Laden, US President George W. Bush, Chinese leader Mao Zedong to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, is in bad taste.

Somebody tell the righties that Madonna compared Bush to Bin Laden, Mao, and Mussolini while touring Europe, then watch Madonna get Dixie Chicked.

Certainly it’s wrong to stand in the way of artistic and political expression, but it doesn’t seem to bother the Right unless the ones standing in the way are Muslim.

But what I want to know is — if this Idomeneo production is supposed to be so creative, why bother making Neptune look like Neptune? I would have put Neptune in a red sequined gown and feather boa and have him sing his role while perched on top of a grand piano. Even better, make him a Judy Garland impersonator. That would have been creative.

Update: La Lulu goes on about how those awful Muslims hate everything without noticing that it wasn’t Muslims who cancelled the production, but the opera company, on advice from police who feared the production might incite violence. Also, the Times story linked above says that when the production was first performed, “it aroused controversy among Muslims and Christians.”

We’re Number Six!

Posted on by

Before it slips by, I just want to call this BBC story to your attention.

The US has lost its status as the world’s most competitive economy, according to the World Economic Forum.

The US now ranks only sixth in the body’s league table of global competitiveness, behind Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Singapore.

Risks attached to the large US trade and fiscal deficits prompted its fall.

Now on to regular Shrub snarking — it seems the sections of the NIE that the Boy King declassified say that the Iraq War is fueling global terrorism.

Makes you wonder what the stuff he’s still sitting on says.

Speaking of sitting on reports, Nicole Belle at Crooks & Liars says that Bush has blocked release of a report that says global warming can cause really nasty Katrina-level storms.

Raw Story has more about the comprehensive strategy to attack al Qaeda that Condi says never existed.

Our Baby Boy

Posted on by

The Adolescent-in-Chief is whining that the recent leak of the April NIE was “political.” But he’s going to release “key judgments” of the report so Americans can decide for themselves what it says.

Translation: We’ll let you see it after we’ve scrubbed out the parts that make us look bad.

He’s played fast and loose with NIEs before, remember. He had Scooter Libby release a highly, um, edited version of an NIE as part of their Joe Wilson smear campaign. As explained in Media Matters, the leaked version presented the famous African yellowcake story as a “key judgment.” In fact, the story was not a key judgment, and the unedited NIE revealed the yellowcake story was strongly disputed.

Josh Marshall has found there is another NIE exclusively about Iraq, and he’s leading a charge to have them both released.

We talked to various Hill sources who confirmed its existence. And then Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), ranking member of the House intel committee discussed the report and called for its release at an event at the National Press Club.

Only there was another wrinkle to the sources. Hill sources tell TPMmuckraker that the administration has been sitting on the report, trying to prevent its dissemination before the election, presumably. And it turns out, from what we’ve heard, that this NIE actually hasn’t been given the official “NIE” label because doing that would have required sharing it with various members of Congress.

The President has already said he’s releasing “parts” of the April NIE — which likely means it’ll cleansed of all the important details. But both should be released. The April NIE and this NIE that dare not speak its name too.

Call your Senators and your Representative.

Dan Froomkin provides more juicy bits:

Indeed, the 9/11 Commission Report very diplomatically concluded that both Bush and Clinton could have done more to prevent the terrorist threat.

But up until now, it’s remained a mystery what exactly Bush said to the commissioners when he grudgingly consented to an interview with them in the Oval Office, back in April of 2004.

Pretty much all we knew about that interview was that Bush insisted that it be held in private, unrecorded — and with Vice President Cheney at his side. (See, for instance, my April 8, 2004, column , and this Tom Toles cartoon .)

But yesterday afternoon, Democratic former commission member Richard Ben-Veniste dramatically broke his silence about that meeting in an interview with CNN’s Blitzer. Here’s the transcript . Forgive me for quoting so extensively, but it’s fascinating stuff.

    “BLITZER: All right. You, in your questioning in your investigation, when you were a member of this commission, specifically asked President Bush about efforts after he was inaugurated on January 20, 2001, until 9/11, eight months later, what he and his administration were doing to kill bin Laden, because by then it was certified, it was authorized. It was, in fact, confirmed that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole in December of 2000.

    “BEN-VENISTE: It’s true, Wolf, we had the opportunity to interview President Bush, along with the vice president, and we spent a few hours doing that in the Oval Office. And one of the questions we had and I specifically had was why President Bush did not respond to the Cole attack. And what he told me was that he did not want to launch a cruise missile attack against bin Laden for fear of missing him and bombing the rubble.

    “And then I asked him, ‘Well, what about the Taliban?’ The United States had warned the Taliban, indeed threatened the Taliban on at least three occasions, all of which is set out in our 9/11 Commission final report, that if bin Laden, who had refuge in Afghanistan, were to strike against U.S. interests then we would respond against the Taliban.

    “”BLITZER: Now, that was warnings during the Clinton administration. . . .

    “BEN-VENISTE: That’s correct.

    “BLITZER: . . . the final years of the Clinton administration.

    “BEN-VENISTE: That’s correct.

    “BLITZER: So you the asked the president in the Oval Office — and the vice president — why didn’t you go after the Taliban in those eight months before 9/11 after he was president. What did he say?

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, now that it was established that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole bombing and the president was briefed in January of 2001, soon after he took office, by George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling him of the finding that al Qaeda was responsible, and I said, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you go after the Taliban in order to get them to kick bin Laden out of Afghanistan?’

    “Maybe, just maybe, who knows — we don’t know the answer to that question — but maybe that could have affected the 9/11 plot.

    “BLITZER: What did he say?

    “BEN-VENISTE: He said that no one had told him that we had made that threat. And I found that very discouraging and surprising.

    “BLITZER: Now, I read this report, the 9/11 Commission report. This is a big, thick book. I don’t see anything and I don’t remember seeing anything about this exchange that you had with the president in this report.

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, I had hoped that we had — we would have made both the Clinton interview and the Bush interview a part of our report, but that was not to be. I was outvoted on that question. . . .

    “BLITZER: Now, you haven’t spoken publicly about this, your interview in the Oval Office, together with the other commissioners, the president and the vice president. Why are you doing that right now?

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, I think it’s an important subject. The issue of the Cole is an important subject, and there has been a lot of politicization over this issue, why didn’t President Clinton respond?

    “Well, we set forth in the report the reasons, and that is because the CIA had not given the president the conclusion that al Qaeda was responsible. That did not occur until some point in December. It was reiterated in a briefing to the — to the new president in January….

    “BLITZER: Well, let me stop you for a second. If former President Clinton knew in December. . . .

    “BEN-VENISTE: Right.

    “BLITZER: . . . that the CIA and the FBI had, in his words, certified that al Qaeda was responsible, he was still president until January 20, 2001. He had a month, let’s say, or at least a few weeks to respond.

    “Why didn’t he?

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, I think that was a question of whether a president who would be soon leaving office would initiate an attack against a foreign country, Afghanistan. And I think that was left up to the new administration. But strangely, in the transition there did not seem to be any great interest by the Bush administration, at least none that we found, in pursuing the question of plans which were being drawn up to attack in Afghanistan as a response to the Cole.

    “BLITZER: Now, as best of my recollection, when you went to the Oval Office with your other commissioners, the president and the vice president did that together. That was a joint interview.

    “BEN-VENISTE: At the request of the president.

    “BLITZER: Did the vice president say anything to you? Did he know that this warning had been given to the Taliban, who were then ruling Afghanistan, if there’s another attack on the United States, we’re going to go after you because you harbor al Qaeda? And there was this attack on the USS Cole.

    “BEN-VENISTE: The vice president did not at that point volunteer any information about the Cole.

    “BLITZER: So what’s your — did the president say to you — did the president say, you know, ‘I made a mistake, I wish we would have done something’? What did he say when you continually — when you pressed him? And I know you’re a former prosecutor, you know how to drill, try to press a point.

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, the president made a humorous remark about the fact that — asking me whether I had ever lost an argument, and I reminded him that — or I informed him that I, too, had two daughters. And so we passed that.”

If it weren’t for the fact that he looks older, I’d swear George W. Bush was some random 17-year-old somebody hauled to Washington and installed in the Oval Office as President.

Condiliar Strikes Back

Posted on by

Following up the last post, which describes how the Bush Administration failed to take action to prevent the 9/11 attack — Condi Rice gave the New York Post an exclusive interview rebutting Bill Clinton —

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday accused Bill Clinton of making “flatly false” claims that the Bush administration didn’t lift a finger to stop terrorism before the 9/11 attacks.

Rice hammered Clinton, who leveled his charges in a contentious weekend interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel, for his claims that the Bush administration “did not try” to kill Osama bin Laden in the eight months they controlled the White House before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn’t do that is just flatly false – and I think the 9/11 commission understood that,” Rice said during a wide-ranging meeting with Post editors and reporters.

“What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years,” Rice added.

Rice lies.

I combed through the article looking for all the ways the Bushies were at least as aggressive as what Clinton did. Here’s one:

“I would just suggest that you go back and read the 9/11 commission report on the efforts of the Bush administration in the eight months – things like working to get an armed Predator [drone] that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important,” Rice added.

In the last post I quoted a Newsweek article from 2002 (not free content) which said,

Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the Clinton administration: the CIA’s Predator surveillance plane. Upon leaving office, the Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the Predator back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February 2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill sources say DOD didn’t want the CIA treading on its turf.

Ah, but that’s old information. What did the 9/11 report actually say? I found comments on the drone beginning on page 210:

The main debate during the summer of 2001 concentrated on the one new mechanism for a lethal attack on Bin Ladin–an armed version of the Predator drone.

In the first months of the new administration, questions concerning the Predator became more and more a central focus of dispute. Clarke favored resuming Predator flights over Afghanistan as soon as weather permitted, hoping that they still might provide the elusive “actionable intelligence” to target Bin Ladin with cruise missiles. Learning that the Air Force was thinking of equipping Predators with warheads, Clarke became even more enthusiastic about redeployment.

The CTC chief, Cofer Black, argued against deploying the Predator for reconnaissance purposes. He recalled that the Taliban had spotted a Predator in the fall of 2000 and scrambled their MiG fighters. Black wanted to wait until the armed version was ready.” I do not believe the possible recon value outweighs the risk of possible program termination when the stakes are raised by the Taliban parading a charred Predator in front of CNN,” he wrote. Military officers in the Joint Staff shared this concern. There is some dispute as to whether or not the Deputies Committee endorsed resuming reconnaissance flights at its April 30, 2001, meeting. In any event, Rice and Hadley ultimately went along with the CIA and the Pentagon, holding off on reconnaissance flights until the armed Predator was ready.

The CIA’s senior management saw problems with the armed Predator as well, problems that Clarke and even Black and Allen were inclined to minimize. One (which also applied to reconnaissance flights) was money. A Predator cost about $3 million. If the CIA flew Predators for its own reconnaissance or covert action purposes, it might be able to borrow them from the Air Force, but it was not clear that the Air Force would bear the cost if a vehicle went down. Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz took the position that the CIA should have to pay for it; the CIA disagreed.

Second, Tenet in particular questioned whether he, as Director of Central Intelligence, should operate an armed Predator.” This was new ground,”he told us. Tenet ticked off key questions:What is the chain of command? Who takes the shot? Are America’s leaders comfortable with the CIA doing this, going outside of normal military command and control? Charlie Allen told us that when these questions were discussed at the CIA, he and the Agency’s executive director, A. B.”Buzzy” Krongard, had said that either one of them would be happy to pull the trigger, but Tenet was appalled, telling them that they had no authority to do it, nor did he.

Third, the Hellfire warhead carried by the Predator needed work. It had been built to hit tanks, not people. It needed to be designed to explode in a different way, and even then had to be targeted with extreme precision. In the configuration planned by the Air Force through mid-2001,the Predator’s missile would not be able to hit a moving vehicle.

White House officials had seen the Predator video of the “man in white.” On July 11, Hadley tried to hurry along preparation of the armed system. He directed McLaughlin, Wolfowitz, and Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Richard Myers to deploy Predators capable of being armed no later than September 1. He also directed that they have cost-sharing arrangements in place by August 1. Rice told us that this attempt by Hadley to dictate a solution had failed and that she eventually had to intervene herself.

On August 1, the Deputies Committee met again to discuss the armed Predator. They concluded that it was legal for the CIA to kill Bin Ladin or one of his deputies with the Predator. Such strikes would be acts of self-defense that would not violate the ban on assassinations in Executive Order 12333. The big issues–who would pay for what, who would authorize strikes, and who would pull the trigger–were left for the principals to settle. The Defense Department representatives did not take positions on these issues.

The CIA’s McLaughlin had also been reticent. When Hadley circulated a memorandum attempting to prod the deputies to reach agreement, McLaughlin sent it back with a handwritten comment on the cost-sharing:”we question whether it is advisable to make such an investment before the decision is taken on flying an armed Predator.” For Clarke, this came close to being a final straw. He angrily asked Rice to call Tenet.” Either al Qida is a threat worth acting against or it is not,” Clarke wrote.” CIA leadership has to decide which it is and cease these bi-polar mood swings.”

These debates, though, had little impact in advancing or delaying efforts to make the Predator ready for combat. Those were in the hands of military officers and engineers. General John Jumper had commanded U.S. air forces in Europe and seen Predators used for reconnaissance in the Balkans. He started the program to develop an armed version and, after returning in 2000 to head the Air Combat Command, took direct charge of it.

There were numerous technical problems, especially with the Hellfire missiles. The Air Force tests conducted during the spring were inadequate, so missile testing needed to continue and modifications needed to be made during the summer. Even then, Jumper told us, problems with the equipment persisted. Nevertheless, the Air Force was moving at an extraordinary pace.” In the modern era, since the 1980s,”Jumper said to us,”I would be shocked if you found anything that went faster than this.”

September 2001

The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. On the day of the meeting, Clarke sent Rice an impassioned personal note. He criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts past and present. The “real question” before the principals, he wrote, was “are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal? . . . Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US,” Clarke wrote. “What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”

So, in a nutshell, through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, while Condi and crew were spinning their wheels over an armed Predator, the Bushies never launched even an unarmed Predator. The DOD didn’t want the CIA treading on its turf.

This is Condi’s version of being “at least as aggressive” as the Clinton Administration? At least the Clinton White House made use of unarmed drones to spy on bin Laden. Condi is blowin’ smoke. The Drone exemplifies exactly the opposite of what Condi claims.

There’s more on the dithering over the drones revealed in CBS and Fox News reports from 2003.

Now, let’s go back to the New York Post story for Condi’s other criticism of the Clinton interview.

She also said Clinton’s claims that Richard Clarke – the White House anti-terror guru hyped by Clinton as the country’s “best guy” – had been demoted by Bush were bogus.

“Richard Clarke was the counterterrorism czar when 9/11 happened. And he left when he did not become deputy director of homeland security, some several months later,” she said.

How can you tell when Condi Rice is lying? It’s when her lips are moving. As Fred Kaplan explained,

Clarke wasn’t a Cabinet secretary, but as Clinton’s NCC, he ran the “Principals Committee” meetings on counterterrorism, which were attended by Cabinet secretaries. Two NSC senior directors reported to Clarke directly, and he had reviewing power over relevant sections of the federal budget.

Clarke writes (and nobody has disputed) that when Condi Rice took over the NSC, she kept him onboard and preserved his title but demoted the position. He would no longer participate in, much less run, Principals’ meetings. He would report to deputy secretaries. He would have no staff and would attend no more meetings with budget officials.

Clarke probably resented the slight, took it personally. But he also saw it as a downgrading of the issue, a sign that al-Qaida was no longer taken as the urgent threat that the Clinton White House had come to interpret it. (One less-noted aspect of Clarke’s book is its detailed description of the major steps that Clinton took to combat terrorism.)

The Post staff, in their official function as propagandists and mouthpieces for the VRWC, did not fact check Condi’s remarks. That this exclusive was given to the Post suggests to me that Condi didn’t want the piece fact checked; indeed, she didn’t want the general public looking at it real hard at all. By talking to the New York Post she catapulted the propaganda directly at the Right.

But now I want to go back to the 9/11 Commission Report quote from above. This bit is on page 212:

The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. On the day of the meeting, Clarke sent Rice an impassioned personal note. He criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts past and present. The “real question” before the principals, he wrote, was “are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal? . . . Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US,” Clarke wrote. “What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”


The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. Yeah, real aggressive, Condi. Took you more than seven months to hold a bleeping meeting.

The Principals Committee of the National Security Council was established by Poppy Bush, a.k.a. “41.” Apparently this is a Big Deal committee. Richard Clarke sent a memo to Condi Rice on January 25, 2001, which said “We urgently need . . . a Principals level review on the al Qida network.”

The “urgent” meeting was held, finally, on September 4. In Condi World, urgent and aggressive mean “dither for more than seven months.”

Finally, let’s go back to the New York Post story one more time:

The secretary of state also sharply disputed Clinton’s claim that he “left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy” for the incoming Bush team during the presidential transition in 2001.

“We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,” Rice responded during the hourlong session.

Would it surprise you if I told you Condi is lying? Let’s go back to this page.

Washington, D.C., February 10, 2005 – The National Security Archive today posted the widely-debated, but previously unavailable, January 25, 2001, memo from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice – the first terrorism strategy paper of the Bush administration. The document was central to debates in the 9/11 hearings over the Bush administration’s policies and actions on terrorism before September 11, 2001. Clarke’s memo requests an immediate meeting of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee to discuss broad strategies for combating al-Qaeda by giving counterterrorism aid to the Northern Alliance and Uzbekistan, expanding the counterterrorism budget and responding to the U.S.S. Cole attack. Despite Clarke’s request, there was no Principals Committee meeting on al-Qaeda until September 4, 2001.

The January 25, 2001, memo, recently released to the National Security Archive by the National Security Council, bears a declassification stamp of April 7, 2004, one day prior to Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission on April 8, 2004. Responding to claims that she ignored the al-Qaeda threat before September 11, Rice stated in a March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed, “No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.”

Two days after Rice’s March 22 op-ed, Clarke told the 9/11 Commission, “there’s a lot of debate about whether it’s a plan or a strategy or a series of options — but all of the things we recommended back in January were those things on the table in September. They were done. They were done after September 11th. They were all done. I didn’t really understand why they couldn’t have been done in February.”

Also attached to the original Clarke memo are two Clinton-era documents relating to al-Qaeda. The first, “Tab A December 2000 Paper: Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects,” was released to the National Security Archive along with the Clarke memo. “Tab B, September 1998 Paper: Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida,” also known as the Delenda Plan, was attached to the original memo, but was not released to the Archive and remains under request with the National Security Council.

It appears The NSC is still sitting on Tab B, “Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida.” Or else sometime on September 12, 2001, Condi ran it through a shredder.

Update: More about the “comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda” that Condi doesn’t remember at ThinkProgress. Apparently the 9/11 Commission says she got it.

As the Clinton administration drew to a close, Clarke and his staff developed a policy paper of their own [which] incorporated the CIA’s new ideas from the Blue Sky memo, and posed several near-term policy options. Clarke and his staff proposed a goal to “roll back” al Qaeda over a period of three to five years …[including] covert aid to the Northern Alliance, covert aid to Uzbekistan, and renewed Predator flights in March 2001. A sentence called for military action to destroy al Qaeda command-and control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets. The paper also expressed concern about the presence of al Qaeda operatives in the United States.” [p. 197]


Update update: From the Department o’ Stupid Sheep — Several rightie bloggers, including the Anchoress, complain that “the MSM’ didn’t fact check Clinton. Everything Condi says is, of course, automatically true. None of the sheep bothered to check what she told the New York Post against the 9/11 commission report.

Covering Their Behinds, II

Posted on by

As I keyboard Keith Olbermann is delivering another of his blistering special comments, and I’m not even going to try to condense it. As soon as it’s online I’ll link to it. But the basic subject is Bush’s failures to prevent the September 11 attacks.

And through it all was threaded this bit from the Faux Nooz interview with President Clinton:

WALLACE: Do you think you did enough, sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right.

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

This is something I’ve been saying since the spring of 2002, when Newsweek, Time, and other news sources first reported that the outgoing Clinton Administration had warned the Bushies about bin Laden, but the Bushies did nothing. This is from the May 27, 2002 issue of Newsweek [emphasis added]:

By the end of the Clinton administration, the then national-security adviser Sandy Berger had become “totally preoccupied” with fears of a domestic terror attack, a colleague recalls. True, the Clintonites had failed to act decisively against Al Qaeda, but by the end they were certain of the danger it posed. When, in January 2001, Berger gave Rice her handover briefing, he covered the bin Laden threat in detail, and, sources say, warned her: “You will be spending more time on this issue than on any other.” Rice was alarmed by what she heard, and asked for a strategy review. But the effort was marginalized and scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as the administration committed itself to other priorities, like national missile defense (NMD) and Iraq.

John Ashcroft seemed particularly eager to set a new agenda. In the spring of 2001, the attorney general had an extraordinary confrontation with the then FBI Director Louis Freeh at an annual meeting of special agents in charge in Quantico, Va. The two talked before appearing, and Ashcroft laid out his priorities for Freeh, another Clinton holdover (though no friend of the ex-president’s), “basically violent crime and drugs,” recalls one participant. Freeh replied bluntly that those were not his priorities, and began to talk about terror and counterterrorism. “Ashcroft didn’t want to hear about it,” says a former senior law-enforcement official. (A Justice Department spokeswoman hotly disputed this, saying that in May Ashcroft told a Senate committee terrorism was his “highest priority.”) [Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, “What Went Wrong,” Newsweek, May 27, 2002]

As Glenn Greenwald documents, Republicans in general were sublimely unconcerned about Islamic terrorism during the 2000 election campaign. But even after Sandy Berger’s warnings, the Bush Administration shoved al Qaeda off their plates. For example, the Hart-Rudman commission report on terrorism was released in February 2001 — and ignored. From a Buzzflash interview with Sen. Gary Hart:

HART: Our commission did not have the resources to give detailed projections as to how, when and where. But the fact is that for two years we had said this was going to happen, and one major step that needed to be taken was to coordinate existing federal assets, particularly our border control agencies — Coast Guards, Customs and Border Patrol, and Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. We were very explicit about that, and we had been. And that was our first recommendation to the President. And it was that failure to act — to begin to do that — that I think permitted this event to happen. No one believes in absolute security. But the goal is to make it as difficult for the attackers as possible, and we had not done that. There had been no — to my knowledge — no major step taken by this administration in the period between January and September to stop these attacks, including coordinating the databases and communication systems of the Board of Control Agency and the INS. Everybody since 9/11 that’s looked at the situation has said the porousness of that system is what permitted these people to do what they did. And the question is: what, if anything, did the administration do between January 31st and September the 11th? And the answer is: not very much.

I hope you won’t mind me linking to this little nugget again — a CNN transcript from April 30, 2001:

The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there’s no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and “personalizing terrorism.”

still, Secretary of State Colin Powell says efforts to fight global terrorism will remain consistent.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

POWELL: The results are clear: state sponsors of terrorism are increasingly isolated; terrorist groups on under growing pressure. Terrorists are being brought to justice, we will not let up. But we must also be aware of the nature of the threat before us. Terrorism is a persistent disease.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WOODRUFF: The secretary of state did go on to say that South Asia, particularly Afghanistan, continues to be the focal point for terrorism that is directed against the United States.

Notice he didn’t say Iraq.

And let’s not forget the anecdote from Ron Suskind’s book, The One Perfect Solution. From a review:

The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

Let’s go back to the Newsweek article from 2002:

While Bush may have a point in saying he heard no specific threat, other aspects of the administration’s story weren’t holding up. Last week Rice declared, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center… All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking”; in other words, using passenger jets as hostages. In fact, the government had ample reason to believe that Al Qaeda was no longer interested in traditional terror. The CIA had learned as early as 1995 that Abdul Hakim Murad, an associate of ’93 WTC plotter Ramzi Yousef, had talked about plunging an airliner into the CIA building. Italian authorities had warned of a similar bid at last June’s Genoa summit of the G8 leaders–and they ringed the area with surface-to-air missiles, with CIA cooperation. …

… It wasn’t that Ashcroft and others were unconcerned about these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had an ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department, Secretary Paul O’Neill’s team wanted to roll back almost all forms of government intervention, including laws against money laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terror groups. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the Clinton administration: the CIA’s Predator surveillance plane. Upon leaving office, the Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the Predator back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February 2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill sources say DOD didn’t want the CIA treading on its turf.

And while most of the current controversy is about what America didn’t do defensively, Rumsfeld and Bush didn’t take the offensive, either. Upon entering office, both suggested publicly that the Clinton administration left America with a weak image abroad. The day after the Oct. 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole, the then candidate Bush said “there must be a consequence.” An FBI document dated January 26, 2001–six days after Bush took office–shows that authorities believed they had clear evidence tying the bombers to Al Qaeda. Yet the new administration mounted no retaliation of its own.

By the time the Bushies did get serious and gear up against Al Qaeda, it was too late. The administration says a long process of revamping the strategy against Al Qaeda culminated–in a supreme irony–on Sept. 10, when the directive reached Rice’s desk for Bush’s signature. And yet even then there were questions about how serious the administration really was. The new strategy called for little more aggressive action than Clinton had adopted: arming and financing anti-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan. And on the same day, Ashcroft submitted his budget request, barely mentioning counterterrorism.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who with Republican Sen. Jon Kyl had sent a copy of draft legislation on counterterrorism and homeland defense to Cheney’s office on July 20, also heard some news that day. Feinstein was told by the veep’s top aide, “Scooter” Libby, as Feinstein described it to NEWSWEEK, “that it might be another six months before he would be able to review the material.”

Most of the facts about the Bush Administration’s inattention to warnings have been in the public record since 2002. Yet it’s still controversial, an act of courage, to talk about it in public.

Crooks & Liars has Keith Olbermann’s comments. Highlights:

Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War — though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.

But not this President.

To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been President on September 11th, 2001 — or the nearly eight months that preceded it.

That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the Executive. …

… The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four.

But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it’s all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you.

The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton…but by the same people who got you elected President.

Thus instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it– we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently read the Orwell playbook too quickly.

Thus instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us “safe” ever since — a statement that might range anywhere from Zero, to One Hundred Percent, true.

We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything.

And, of course, the one time you have ever given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush — you got the name of the supposedly targeted Tower in Los Angeles wrong.

Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt; what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack:

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be the textbook definition, Sir, of cowardice.

I’m sure the bleating and whining from the Right about the awful liberal media have already started.

I have compared Clinton’s and Bush’s pre-9/11 terrorism policies many times before, most recently here. I have never claimed that Clinton did everything he might have done to stop bin Laden, but he did a damn lot more than Bush did. And based on their record, the Bushies are the last people on the planet who ought to be taken seriously on terrorism. Yet they thump their chests and declare that they, and only they, have the cojones to keep the nation safe from terrorism. And they are taken seriously.

The Bush Administration didn’t keep the nation safe from terrorism. Spin though they may, that’s as bare-assed a fact as you’re likely to find anywhere on this planet.

See also: Juan Cole’s commentary on the Clinton interview. Glenn Greenwald comments here and here.

Covering Their Behinds

Posted on by

It’s National Rebuttal Day on the Right. The White House is rebutting the National Intelligence Estimate from April that came to public attention yesterday, and the Right Blogosphere is rebutting the Bill Clinton interview on Faux Nooz.

Let’s start with the White House. Richard Serrano writes for the Los Angeles Times:

The White House on Sunday sharply disagreed with a new U.S. intelligence assessment that the war in Iraq is encouraging global terrorism, as Bush administration officials stressed that anti-American fervor in the Muslim world began long before the Sept. 11 attacks. …

… But the White House view, according to Watkins, is that much of the radicals’ rage at the United States and Israel goes back generations and is not linked to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

“Their hatred for freedom and liberty did not develop overnight,” Watkins said. “Those seeds were planted decades ago.”

Let’s get this straight — Before the invasion they blithely ignored Iraq’s violent history and warnings that an invasion could have nasty consequences, in favor of their candy-and-flowers fantasies. But now that the Bushies need an excuse they get interested in history.

He said the administration had sought in Iraq to root out hotbeds of terrorism before they grew. “Instead of waiting while they plot and plan attacks to kill innocent Americans, the United States has taken the initiative to fight back,” Watkins said.

An argument that does not, in fact, rebut the findings of the NIE — that our thrashing around in Iraq is growing extremism rather than reducing it. Intentions are irrelevant.

And I say it’s the War on Extremism, not the War on Terror. Let’s get the name straight.

Payson at Think Progress posts a video of a Bush Press Conference in which the President made claims that were directly opposite what the NIE said. The press conference was in August; the NIE was handed to Bush in April.

Speaking of excuses and intentions, at Slate Michael Kinsley discusses Bush’s ever-shifting explanations regarding “victory” in Iraq. You’ll enjoy this one.

Jeffrey Sachs points out that, assuming Bush’s intention was to control the world’s oil supply, he’s missing the bigger picture.

It is ironic that an administration fixated on the risks of Middle East oil has chosen to spend hundreds of billions – potentially trillions – of dollars to pursue unsuccessful military approaches to problems that can and should be solved at vastly lower cost, through R&D, regulation, and market incentives. The biggest energy crisis of all, it seems, involves the misdirected energy of a US foreign policy built on war rather than scientific discovery and technological progress.


Max Hastings explains why the “struggles against Islamic fundamentalism” are unwinnable as long as Bush and Blair are running the show. It’s going to take new leadership (dare we say, regime change?) before any realistic solutions to the Iraq problem will be found.

In the “poor baby” department — at WaPo, Peter Baker writes that President Bush really, really, really does feel “anguish” over the loss of American soldiers and that all the public bravado is an act. To which I point out that nobody can fake sincerity better than a psychopath.

And in the “they shoulda seen this coming” department — Peter Spiegel writes at the Los Angeles Times that the Army warned Rumsfeld it is billions of dollars short of what it needs.

The Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.

“This is unusual, but hell, we’re in unusual times,” said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.

Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service’s funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.

I’ll move on to the Clinton rebuttals in the next post.

Punctuate This

Posted on by

So if the death and bloodshed in Iraq is just a comma, what punctuation mark is George W. Bush?

I say he’s a colon (:). But some say that in his wild and crazy youth, he was an asterisk (*). As in:

    Bush joined the Texas Air Guard
    Among the clouds to frisk.
    He wouldn’t go to Vietnam
    His little asterisk.

It sorta rhymes.

News That Isn’t News

Posted on by

Karen DeYoung writes in the Washington Post:

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the “centrality” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

Mark Mazzetti writes for the New York Times:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

Like they needed an NIE to figure that out. The White House is still in denial mode, of course.

From DeYoung’s and Mazzetti’s articles, it seems the NIE came to the same general conclusions as the experts consulted in James Fallows’s recent Atlantic Monthly article on national security. I blogged about this article here, here, and here, and probably elsewhere.

In a nutshell: Since September 11, al Qaeda has been scattered around the globe and has become more diffuse, less organized. That’s good and bad; Fallows’s article argues that at the moment the old al Qaeda organization has lost the operational capability to pull off Big Deal attacks such as those of September 11. On the other hand, the myriad independent cells springing up around the globe are harder to track and perfectly capable of nasty little operations such as the London subway bombings.

Still, in some ways we could be making real progress against Islamic terrorism were it not for the war in Iraq. The Fallows, Marzzetti, and DeYoung articles all state plainly that Iraq is growing the threat of terrorism against the United States, not reducing it. DeYoung writes,

According to officials familiar with the document, it describes the situation in Iraq as promoting the spread of radical Islam by providing a focal point, with constant reinforcement of an anti-American message for disaffected Muslims. The Web sites provide a narrative of a war with frequent victories for the insurgents, and describe an occupation that they say regularly targets Islam and its adherents. They also distribute increasingly frequent and sophisticated messages from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Muslims wherever they are to take up arms against the “Crusaders” on behalf of Iraq.

Both Bush and bin Laden now consistently describe the Iraq war as the “central front” of the global war, and both are depending on victory there to set the direction of future struggles far afield. Although intelligence officials believe bin Laden’s ability to direct major terrorist operations has been greatly diminished, his status as the ideological leader of a global movement that appeals to disaffected Muslims has vastly increased. …

…The latest terrorism assessment paints a portrait of a global war in which Iraq is less the central front of actual combat than a unifying battle cry for disparate extremist groups and even individuals. “It is just those kinetic actions that lead to the radicalization of others,” a senior counterterrorism official said earlier this summer. “Surgical strikes? Nothing is surgical about military operations. They tend to have impacts, affects.”

Another problem that Fallows’s experts discussed was the misallocation of resources caused by our focus on Iraq. For example, Fallows writes,

When Americans think of satellite surveillance and the National Security Agency, they are likely to imagine something out of the TV show 24: a limitless set of eyes in the sky that can watch everything, all the time. In fact, even today’s amply funded NSA can watch only a limited number of sites. “Our overhead imagery is dedicated to force protection in Iraq and Afghanistan,” I was told by a former intelligence official who would not let me use his name. He meant that the satellites are tied up following U.S. troops on patrol and in firefights to let them know who might be waiting in ambush. “There are still ammo dumps in Iraq that are open to insurgents,” he said, “but we lack the imagery to cover them—let alone what people might be dreaming up in Thailand or Bangladesh.” Because so many spy satellites are trained on the countries we have invaded, they tell us less than they used to about the rest of the world.

Last I heard, we’re dumping $1.5 billion in Iraq every week. I suspect that money could be put to better use than pissing people off.

Rightie bloggers are in full-bore pooh-pooh mode. Captain Ed writes,

It makes the classic logical fallacy of confusing correlation with causation, and the basic premise can easily be dismissed with a reminder of some basic facts.

Ed then crashes ahead with his “basic facts” without noticing that they support the NIE conclusions.

First and foremost, Islamist radicalism didn’t just start expanding in 2003. The most massive expansion of Islamist radicalism came after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when the Islamists defeated one of the world’s superpowers. Shortly afterwards, the staging of American forces in Saudi Arabia to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait created the most significant impulse for the expansion of organized Islamist radicalism and led directly to the formation of al-Qaeda. It put the US in Wahhabi jihadist crosshairs for the first time.

Righties have a weird inability to grasp large concepts. Islamic radicalism was inflamed when the non-Muslim Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The deployment of non-Muslim Americans in the Middle East in 1990 brought about the formation of al Qaeda. More non-Muslims invading Iraq in 2003 got ’em all whipped up even more. One might conclude that Muslim in the Middle East get really, really pissed off when non-Muslim soldiers mess with their territory.

James Fallows’s experts explain that the American invasion of Iraq and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan run together in some Middle Eastern heads:

So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another.

America’s military action in Afghanistan after 9/11 was different, because that action really was tied to 9/11 and because we allied ourselves to other Muslims — the Northern Alliance — against the Taliban. Unfortunately our loss of focus in Afghanistan allowed bin Laden to escape, and now the Taliban is making a comeback.

BTW, the Captain’s blog post title is “NIE: Ending 12-Year Iraqi Quagmire Made Terrorism Worse,” revealing some confusion on the Captain’s part between a “quagmire” and “containment.” Among other things, American troops didn’t die during the 12-year containment of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the containment sure as hell didn’t cost $1.5 billion every bleeping week. Was the containment perfect? No. Is the Iraq War perfect? Cough.

Another rightie, Rick Moran, falls back on straw-man arguments to criticize the NIE:

I am not disputing the conclusions in this leaked report. I am resisting the implications that some would draw from it; that if only we had not confronted the jihadists or worked to solve the root causes of terrorism, none of this would be true today.

Did anyone actually advise that we should not confront terrorists? Not that I’ve seen. The difference is that some of us think we should have focused on those terrorists who perpetrated acts against America and Americans, and are likely to do so again, rather than squander our attention and resources on every terrorist cell on the planet whether it is likely to strike the U.S. or not.

And as for “if only we had not … worked to solve the root causes of terrorism” — that’s a joke, right?

DeYoung:

But “a really big hole” in the U.S. strategy, a second counterterrorism official said, “is that we focus on the terrorists and very little on how they are created. If you looked at all the resources of the U.S. government, we spent 85, 90 percent on current terrorists, not on how people are radicalized.”

In fact, the Bush Administration hasn’t done a bleeping thing about root causes. All it has done is package Islamic terrorism as a political wedge issue here in the U.S. They don’t even honestly articulate what the root causes are. Instead, they crank out propagandistic sludge like We are at war with enemies who hate our freedoms. We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Victory. Resolve. We can’t cut and run.

Oh, sure, the Bushies have gone through the motions of helping Muslim civilians, but even the famous Iraqi “restructuring” program was more about allowing Bush campaign contributors to exploit Iraq and make a profit from the invasion than it was about helping Iraqis.

Their other big “root cause” initiative was to name bleeping Karen dumb as an eggplant Hughes Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.

I rest my case.