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.

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.

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.

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.

Buried on A14

Washington Post:

CIA Learned in '02 That Bin Laden Had No Iraq Ties, Report Says

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 15, 2006; A14

The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Missing the point...

President Bush's habitual strategy of deliberately missing the point in order to tar one's opponents doesn't work quite as well when the opponent is Colin Powell:

Q    Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.  If a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State feels this way, don't you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you're following a flawed strategy?

THE PRESIDENT: If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic.  I simply can't accept that.  It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective, Terry.

Is the president himself the embodiment of the "compassion and decency of the American people"? That would be the only way his bizarre reply would begin to make any logical sense.

Even if we were to indulge such megalomania, reducing criticism to bad terrorist analogies is really just a variation on Godwin's Law or the argumentum ad nazium. Here is Powell's critique of lousy policy on both moral and pragmatic grounds, which is obviously absent of any "comparison" involving either terrorism or any accusations towards the American people in general:

The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of out fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore it would put our own troops at risk.

As Senator McCain puts it: it's not about them, it's about us!

Cherry picking in Prague

Josh Marshall:

White House repeatedly tried to muscle the CIA into letting them use the bogus Atta in Prague story in Bush and Cheney speeches. 

That's what seems to be lurking under the redactions in the Senate intel report, says Mark Hosenball of Newsweek.

So begins Hosenball's piece:

The claim that terrorist leader Mohamed Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi spy a few months before 9/11 was never substantiated, but that didn’t stop the White House from trying to insert the allegation in presidential speeches, according to classified documents.

Fred Fleitz at work

Carrying the Dick Cheney-John Bolton standard to the committee work of the US House, Frederick Fleitz is staffing for the House Intelligence Comittee. Fleitz is busily writing bunk reports, according to Dafna Linzer:

The report's author, Fredrick Fleitz, is a onetime CIA officer and special assistant to John R. Bolton, the administration's former point man on Iran at the State Department. Bolton, who is now ambassador to the United Nations, had been highly influential during President Bush's first term in drawing up a tough policy that rejected talks with Tehran.

Showing they have no concern about their own credibility, and the harm to the United States' credibility, they are at it again.

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate.

The report is such crap they couldn't even take it in front of the committee for review, but had to end-run it around the Democrats.

Among the allegations in Fleitz's Iran report is that ElBaradei removed a senior inspector from the Iran investigation because he raised "concerns about Iranian deception regarding its nuclear program." The agency said the inspector has not been removed.