Stygius

Gathered on the beach of this tumid river

Matthew 15:4:

Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.

Vanity Fair:

Neo Culpa

As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself. [snip] According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

And now -- what with hindsight and all -- "if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq."

Read the rest of the piece, which includes comments from other "wise men" (rather, the hollow men) such as Frank Gaffney and Michael Ledeen. This bit of insanity from David Frum is rather telling:

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.

They grope about, and soon will avoid speech.

Decisions decisions

A moment of zen...

The Crab Nebula, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope, via the Washington Post. Also see www.HubbleSite.org.

[Photo Credit: Jeff Hester -- Arizona State University Via Nasa And European Space Ageny Photo]

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Free the bloggers

Posting will continue to be sporadic, light, and otherwise unsatisfactory. In the meantime, I hope my dwindling readership joins in Amnesty International's call to free imprisoned bloggers. To scratch the surface:

Yahoo! via its Chinese partner company, Alibaba, has provided the authorities with private and confidential information about its users that has been used to convict and imprison journalists. It has also agreed to censor and deny access to information. Microsoft shut down the blog of New York Times researcher Zhao Jing on the basis of a government request. The company has also admitted that it responds to directions from the Chinese government in restricting users of MSN Spaces from using certain terms. Google has launched a censored version of its international search engine in China.

Recent abuses reported have included imprisoning people for transmitting news and opinions in emails, chat-rooms and on websites, and denying access to information and opinions on the Internet through content removal and filtering of search engines. At particular risk are those who defend the human rights of others.

'Course correction!'

Think Progress:

During an interview today on ABC’s This Week, President Bush tried to distance himself from what has been his core strategy in Iraq for the last three years. George Stephanopoulos asked about James Baker’s plan to develop a strategy for Iraq that is “between ’stay the course’ and ‘cut and run.’”

Bush responded, ‘We’ve never been stay the course, George!’

Video at the link.

Update: This is going to play like hell in the echo chamber. To properly savor the cognitive distortion, page through this instructive whitehouse.gov search.

Hell . . . what's poor Laura Bush got to be thinking right now?

Well, I say exactly what the President says, that we need to stay the course; that it's really in our interest as Americans to make sure Iraq can build a stable democracy. [September 18, 2006]

Al-Qaeda's "long war"

Is al-Qaeda outthinking our government? Depends on your reading of this Christian Science Monitor piece.

[A] letter that has been translated and released by the US military indicates that Al Qaeda itself sees the continued American presence in Iraq as a boon for the terror network, which has recently shown signs of expanding into the Palestinian territories and North Africa.

The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness ... indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest," says the writer, who goes by the name Atiyah. The letter, released last week, was recovered in the rubble of the Iraqi house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by a US bomb in June.

 

Newsweek:

For the first time since 2001, the NEWSWEEK poll shows that more Americans trust the Democrats than the GOP on moral values and the war on terror. Fully 53 percent of Americans want the Democrats to win control of Congress next month, including 10 percent of Republicans, compared to just 35 percent who want the GOP to retain power. If the election were held today, 51 percent of likely voters would vote for the Democrat in their district versus 39 percent who would vote for the Republican.

Aimlessly "staying the course"

John Warner, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee goes off message at a peculiar time. New York Times:

The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee warned Thursday that the situation in Iraq was “drifting sideways” and said that the United States should consider a “change of course” if violence did not diminish soon.

The chairman, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, expressed particular concern that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had not moved decisively against sectarian militias.

“In two or three months if this thing hasn’t come to fruition and this level of violence is not under control, I think it’s a responsibility of our government to determine: Is there a change of course we should take?” Senator Warner said.

He did not specify what shift might be necessary in Iraq, but he said that the American military had done what it could to stabilize Iraq and that no policy options should be taken “off the table.” He was speaking at a Capitol Hill news conference after returning from a Middle East trip that included a one-day visit to Baghdad.

His comments underscored the growing misgivings of even senior Republicans about the situation in Iraq. They also appeared to be a warning to the Bush administration that it might have to consider different approaches after the November midterm elections.

Bin who?

It's no secret that the Bush Administration came into office with a profoundly different understanding of the post-Cold War landscape than the outgoing Clinton Administration. This was, in part, born out after 9/11 by the state-centric analysis of terrorism put out by then-NSA Rice (mainly to sate the Scowcroftian Realists) while the neoconservative wing of the administration consolidated its takeover of foreign policymaking. This was reflected in her testimony to the 9/11 Commission. From a 2004 Harvard Intl. Review piece:

Rice also admitted her state-centric bias when the commissioners asked her why she had not implemented the counterterrorism recommendations proposed by Richard Clarke in January 2001. It was Rice's view, even in hindsight, that Clarke’s suggestions would lead the United States down the "wrong direction" because they centered on a non-state actor (Al Qaeda) without addressing the relevant states (Afghanistan and Pakistan). According to Rice, state sponsors of terrorism had to be the primary targets of any counterterrorism policy because they cooperate with the most effective terrorist groups.

So no surprises about this self-imposed blindspot towards transnational and subnational threats; which even persisted well after the attacks themselves, and informed the sale of the Iraq war to the American public.

However, the New York Times' report that the 9/11 Commission wasn't informed about a meeting between then-CIA Director Tenet and Rice in the summer of 2001 is telling.

Members of the Sept. 11 commission said Sunday they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a July 2001 White House meeting at which George J. Tenet, then director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, about an imminent attack by Al Qaeda and failed to persuade her to take action.

Details of the meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by Bob Woodward. The White House disputes his account.

The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting, nor did it suggest that there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice, now secretary of state.

Yet Cofer Black was there too:

There has also been no comment on the book from J. Cofer Black, who was Mr. Tenet’s counterterrorism chief, and who, the book says, attended the July 10 meeting and left it frustrated by Ms. Rice’s “brush-off” of the warnings.

Mr. Black is quoted as saying, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.” He did not return calls left at Blackwater, the security firm he joined last year.

The book says Mr. Tenet hurriedly organized the meeting, calling ahead from his car as it traveled to the White House, because he wanted to “shake Rice” into persuading the president to respond to dire intelligence warnings about a possible terrorist strike.

To the Washington Post, Secretary of State Rice disputes the accounts:

She said it was "incomprehensible" that she would have ignored such explicit intelligence or appeals by senior CIA officials.

Showing how significant this revelation is, Rice had to leave adviser Philip Zelikow -- the Commission's ED, ironically enough -- back in the US to figure out the angles while she travels to the Middle East.

All the President's Lies

Keith Olbermann undertakes an archaeological expedition into the the White House's pre-9/11 cluelessness.

Iraq: Essential dilemmas

In agreement with this assessment; quoted in a Laura Rozen post:

The [NIE] notes that ‘victory’ in Iraq would be a blow to the jihadists, and that failure (especially if it led to the establishment of an al-Qaeda sanctuary or if veteran foreign jihadists dispersed out of Iraq to engage in terrorism in other parts of the world) would also be very bad. Thus, the report highlights the essential dilemma Iraq poses for the war on terror: staying fuels the al-Qaeda-inspired movement, creating a net increase in the terrorist threat; while leaving Iraq in chaos would also worsen the threat. The Democrats tend to focus on the first part of the dilemma; the administration focuses on the second part. They are both right (and wrong) -- and the debate would be greatly served by focusing on the dilemma itself.

Bolton toast?

And Steve Clemons declares the Bolton re-nomination dead in committee.

None dare call it NIE?

According to Josh Marshall, the White House is sitting on another document -- this one focused exclusively on Iraq -- that they can't call an NIE since they would then be obliged to share it with congressional leaders.

Punctuation mark reductionism

I was among those appalled that when President Bush, on CNN, outrageously reduced the death and suffering in Iraq to a punctuation mark:

Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy. (emphasis added)

Now, Ian Welsh fills us in on the dog whistle:

The phrase is: "Never put a period where God has put a comma." Which is to say - it ain't over yet, and God may well make it better. So Iraq's bad, but if we trust in God, he'll make it better.

This is the thing about Bush - he is constantly littering his speeches with code words and phrases meant for the religious right. Other people don't hear them, but they do, and most of the time it allows Bush both to say what those who aren't evangelical or born again want to hear, while still reassuring the religious right wants to hear.

Necessary or contingent?

praktike:

More people are asking the question that Greg Djerejian poses here: "Was Failure Pre-Ordained, or Was It Gross Incompetence?"

I'm working on a longer piece about this, so let me give you a short answer: it depends.

Unfortunately, if the incompetence hadn't been pre-ordained, I would be solidly in Greg's camp:

I can't help feeling a more talented team that understood counterinsurgency doctrine, believed in the import of nation-building, didn't go to war with swagger and arrogance, and relied more heavily on regional experts who understood the depths of the ferocity of ethnic tension among Kurds, Shi'a and Sunni--I can't help wondering whether a more convincing effort could have been waged, one where we might have had a better chance at creating a viable, unitary nation-state in Iraq, one moving in a genuinely democratic direction even, rather than crude majoritarianism and incipient civil war.

Ret. Generals slam Rumsfeld

CBS/AP:

Retired military officers on Monday bluntly accused Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of bungling the war in Iraq, saying U.S. troops were sent to fight without the best equipment and that critical facts were hidden from the public.

"I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq," retired Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste said in remarks prepared for a hearing by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

A second witness, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, assessed Rumsfeld as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically ...."

"Mr. Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making," he added in testimony prepared for the hearing, held six weeks before the Nov. 7 midterm elections in which the war is a central issue.

NIE: Iraq war worsens terror threat

New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — 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.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.