Libertarian Leanings

The art of second guessing

The William Hamilton of the Washington Post critiques Bob Woodward's new book on the Bush Administration.  The headline reads, Card Urged Bush to Replace Rumsfeld, Woodward Says.  According to Hamilton, Woodward's book, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, describes a Rumsfeld as arrogant, closed minded, and indecisive, and Bush in a state of denial over it, refusing all entreaties to get rid his embattled Secretary of Defense.

We are then provided with supporting excerpts, cataloging the ignored realities.

A year later, Rumsfeld received an even more blunt criticism from Steve Herbits, a longtime friend who according to Woodward has served as an informal adviser to Rumsfeld since he became defense secretary. In a seven-page memo in July, 2005, entitled, "Summary of Post-Iraq Planning and Execution Problems," Herbits listed a series of questions for Rumsfeld:

* "Who made the decision and why didn't we reconstitute the Iraqi Army?"

* "Did no one realize we were going to need Iraqi security forces?"

* "Did no one anticipate the importance of stabilization and how best to achieve it?"

* "Why was the de-Baathification so wide and deep?"

Here's the part that puzzles me.  If we identified and fired the guy responsible for disbanding the Iraqi Army and we reconstituted the army instead, and if we resisted de-Baathification or made it less severe, who can say with any certainty the situation in Iraq would be any more stable or in any way better than it is now?

I suspect the basis of the controversy over Rumsfeld's tactics goes back to a misunderstanding of Bush's strategies.  It was not Bush's plan to knock over Saddam to install younger members of his faction in his place.  The point of going into Iraq was to begin a process of political reform, democratization, in the Middle East.   

Unless the suppression of Saddam is seen to lead to a better life for the Iraqi population, and unless American strength and resolve is used on behalf of all the region's people, not simply the governments of American allies, then a new set of near enemies will certainly arise and have to be dealt with in their turn.

Keeping this strategic objective in mind is key to understanding Rumsfeld's tactics.  Ignoring the strategic objective leads to useless and pointless second guessing.

The feud continues

First it was Bill with his Fox News interview melt down with Chris Wallace.

"I got closer to killing him than anybody's gotten since," Clinton said. "And if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. . . . You got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever, but I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it, but I did try and I did everything I thought I responsibly could."

Next, Condoleezza Rice weighed in to defend the Bush Administration.

'What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years,' she said.

'The notion that somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false,' she added.

Then it was Hillary's turn. 

"I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.,' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team," Hillary Clinton charged.

Today the Weekly Standard disputes Hillary.  According to Thomas Joscelyn, the intelligence community had reached the conclusion that bin Laden intended to attack inside the U.S. during Senator Clinton's tenure as First Lady. 

The warning signs collected during the Clinton administration are outlined in the bipartisan "Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001," which was jointly published by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2002.

The Joint Inquiry outlines a number of U.S. government failures in the years leading up to September 11, 2001. Among the report's findings, the committees concluded that prior to September 11, 2001: The "U.S. Intelligence Community was involved in fighting a 'war' against Bin Laden largely without the benefit of what some would call its most potent weapon in that effort: an alert and committed American public."

The report goes on to list three examples of "information that was shared with senior U.S. Government officials, but was not made available to the American public because of its national security classification." This information was "explicit about the gravity and immediacy of the threat posed by Bin Laden" and included "a classified document" signed by President Clinton in December 1998, which read in part:

"The Intelligence Community has strong indications that Bin Laden intends to conduct or sponsor attacks inside the United States."

There is probably a grain of technical truth in what Senator Clinton said.  Even though that warning was issued in 1998, it was probably not in the title of the classified document that President Bill signed.  But Bill Clinton had a warning. 

Hillary's rhetoric is in keeping with the current Democratic focus.  They're all about getting and enhancing their own power, and not on national security.  We get these hair splitting claims that the Clinton Administration would have done it better, if only.  It's all about who can be blamed -- the Bush Administration of course  -- and never what can be done.  Aside from whatever opposes Bush, they haven't got a single idea.

On politically motivated leaks

Well, I suppose a good question would be, are there any leaks that are not politically motivated.  The press and pro Democratic sources in government have raised it to an art form, as can be seen with disclosure of the most recent secret National Intelligence Estimate.  Leakers use the NIE to claim the war on terror has made terrorism worse.  According to press/Democratic vision, Iraq is a distraction from the War on Terror, and whether or the NIE actually says it is, leakers and leak takers will say it does, and since the NIE is secret, who can dispute them?

..."the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," according to one of the unidentified "intelligence officials" cited in the article. This is supposedly because the war has provoked radical Islamists to hate America even more than they already did before they hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings. If this is the kind of insight we pay our spooks to generate, we're in more trouble than we thought.

Actually, the White House disputes the wisdom of the mainstream press and their sources in the bureaucracy.  And when you come right down to it, they would be in position to know.  With that in mind, Opinion Journal has a suggestion. 

The White House responded yesterday by saying the full NIE on "Trends in Global Terrorism" is far more nuanced and complex than the press reports claim. Spokesman Tony Snow added that one "thing the reports do not say is that war in Iraq has made terrorism worse." So here's our suggestion for President Bush: Declassify the entire NIE.

Declassification is pretty unlikely and probably unnecessary, even though there is a large voting block out there, sometimes calling themselves the "reality based community", who will continue to use the NIE as proof of Administration incompetence, or dishonesty, or corruption, or whatever.  For the Journal, the real issue is the future of Iraq.

The real issue at stake here is a political and policy fight over the future of Iraq. The Democrats claim that Iraq is a "distraction" from the war on terror and so a rapid U.S. withdrawal would leave the U.S. with more resources to fight elsewhere. Mr. Bush says Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror, and that withdrawing would create a vacuum that the Islamists would fill and give them a potential new state-supported base of operations. That's the choice voters really ought to be thinking about as they go to the polls in November, and if the NIE has something useful to say about that debate, Mr. Bush should disarm the selective leakers in his bureaucracy by making it public.

It's true, as we head off to the polls in November, the future of Iraq will hang in the balance.  But in reality the decision is for the future of America.  Iraq just happens to be the issue on which Democrats have pinned their hopes for a return to power.  It's given them their cover to launch political attacks on a wartime President.  But as they search for the right words, the message that will convince Americans that they can be trusted with the nation's defense, it's clear the nation's defense is only a political issue.  As luck would have it, the Democrats happen to be on the wrong side of it.

Republican uptick

The Republican outlook for November is not nearly so grim as prognosticators have been trying to make out. 

A 58 percent majority of Democratic insiders polled by National Journal, as well as an overwhelming 94 percent of Republican insiders, say the Republican National Committee is doing a better job for November than the Democratic National Committee.

Three weeks past the traditional Labor Day kickoff of campaign season, many Republicans are expressing greater optimism for their party's prospects on Election Day, now just six weeks away.

"This is not an election like 1994 and 1974, when we know the outcome is going to be a massive tsunami for one of the two parties," Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman says. "If the election were today, we would lose some seats, but keep our majorities."

According to the Washington Times article, Gallup has the President's approval rating at 44% while Rasmussen has it a 43%.  The problem with which Democrats continue to struggle is their inability to recognize the enemy.  They seem to be more fearful of the evangelical Christians than Islamic terrorists, while George Bush is the more dreaded enemy than was Saddam Hussein.  Democratic incoherence is coming through loud and clear.

The Clinton challenge

Byron York accepted Bill Clinton's challenge when he said, “All I’m asking is if anybody wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book.” So York dragged out the book.

On page 223, Clarke describes a meeting, in late 2000, of the National Security Council “principals” — among them, the heads of the CIA, the FBI, the Attorney General, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretaries of State, Defense. It was just after al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole. But neither the FBI nor the CIA would say that al Qaeda was behind the bombing, and there was little support for a retaliatory strike. Clarke quotes Mike Sheehan, a State Department official, saying in frustration, “What’s it going to take, Dick? Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin’ Martians? The Pentagon brass won’t let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell they won’t even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

That came later. But in October 2000, what would it have taken? A decisive presidential order — which never came.

Whether intentionally or not, Clarke describes a man willing to take the credit but not the responsibility.  Let it be somebody else's decision.

Via MacRanger.

Looting?

A hollywood producer has accused Bill and Hil of "looting", this according to the Washington Times.

The 43-page complaint, which also accuses Mr. Clinton and others involved in Mrs. Clinton's "New York Senate 2000" campaign of taking part in the conspiracy, seeks $30 million in stock losses and $1.9 million in cash. The complaint is part of a pending lawsuit against Mr. Clinton and will be heard by Superior Court Judge Aurelio N. Munoz.

In a telephone interview from his California home, Paul, a convicted felon, said the Clintons "looted" his business to generate the largest contribution to Mrs. Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign in New York. Describing himself as a "disgruntled business associate" and not a "disgruntled contributor," he said the Clintons reneged on promises they made that Mr. Clinton would work with him after he left the White House.

He said he was "cajoled and then coerced" by Mr. Clinton as "an erstwhile future business partner" to make expenditures to benefit the president and his wife.

Draining the swamp

Kerry Langer, a leftist, Australian, anti Vietnam War protester wants to drain the terrorist swamp, which puts her, oddly enough, in the Bush camp. 

There is a deep misunderstanding of the radical strategic change spearheaded by Bush. This is the result of consistent attempts by the Bush administration to describe the new policy in misleading, lowest common denominator terms as a war on terror. But capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and individual terrorists was never what this war was about. The reality is that in order to eliminate terrorism, the US has no choice but to attack the underlying forces of reaction and oppression that create it.

On the website that I write for (www.lastsuperpower.net) we have characterised US policy by using the metaphor draining the swamps. Eliminating individual mosquitoes is a losing battle, it's necessary to drain the swamp that breeds them. The same applies to ridding the world of terrorism.

That would be the George Bush camp.

Clinton and bin Laden

The Washington Post reports that Bill Clinton got very testy with Chris Wallace during a Fox News interview to be aired today.

"I got closer to killing him than anybody's gotten since," Clinton said. "And if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. . . . You got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever, but I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it, but I did try and I did everything I thought I responsibly could."

Clinton said he had expected to discuss his climate change initiative during the interview but was blindsided when Wallace asked him why he hadn't put bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business.  Be that as it may, in another Post article reporting that a classified National Intelligence Estimate says that the war in Iraq has increased the terrorist threat, there is this quote from a 1997 NIE.

National Intelligence Estimates have often sparked controversy, both for what they have said and what they have omitted. A 1997 estimate, the last on global terrorism before the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks, mentioned bin Laden in only three sentences, describing him only as a "terrorist financier" and making no reference at all to al-Qaeda.

It should be noted that this particular article has the benefit of contributions from Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks who has recently released a book based on the premise that Iraq is Vietnam.  In the words of one reviewer,

Mr. Ricks' imbalanced book gives voice to every possible criticism of the war. Implicit in the book is a utopian standard for warfare that has never been achieved in human history.

And so it is with most Post reporting on Iraq, terrorism, Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda.  All fault lies with the Bush Administration.  In the wake of ABC's "The Path to 9/11", the mainstream press, particularly the Washington Post, leap to the defense of the The Clinton Administration.  Eight years of the Clinton presidency are ignored by the liberal media so we can focus instead on the eight months between the time George Bush took office and the day the planes flew into the World Trade. 

And in this effort, the icing on the cake comes in the last paragraph of the NIE article, where Bush Administration is taken to task for increasing rather than reducing the threat of terrorism.

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."

The really big hole in Washington Post reporting is that they've missed the underlying strategy behind the invasion of Iraq.  In a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy in November of 2003, Bush put it this way.

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.

But for the Post the real battle is not against terrorism, it's about whether or not Democrats can retake the levers of power in Washington.  So they argue that Bill Clinton did more, would have done better, tried harder, would have gotten bin Laden.  Meanwhile, bin Laden might already be dead.

Rumor has it...

Osama bin Laden is dead.  Gateway Pundit reports that has Osama bin Laden died in his cave, having succumbed to typhoid in August.  According GP, doctors were unable to reach him in time.  From the Khaleej Times Online:

Osama bin Laden is dead: French paper
(DPA)

23 September 2006

PARIS - Saudi intelligence services have determined that terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden died of typhoid in August, the French regional daily L’Est Republicain reported on its website on Saturday.

News ERT.gr:

A French regional newspaper quoted a French secret service report on Saturday as saying that Saudi Arabia is convinced that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden died of typhoid in Pakistan last month. L’Est Republicain printed what it said was a copy of the report dated 21 September and said it was shown to President Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and France’s interior and defence ministers on the same day.

"According to a usually reliable source, the Saudi services are now convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead," the document said.

NDTV.com:

NDTV Correspondent

Saturday, September 23, 2006 (Paris):

A newspaper in France says Al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden died of typhoid in Pakistan, but there is no confirmation of the report.

However, Pakastani government officials have their doubts.

Pakistan has received no information from any foreign government that would corroborate a French newspaper report on Saturday that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden died of typhoid in Pakistan, a senior government official said.

"No government has shared any such information with us so far, which is the normal thing to do under such circumstances," the official, who has close knowledge of intelligence matters, said on condition of anonymity.

A senior official in Pakistan's Interior Ministry also said: "We have no information about Osama's death."

The French government is also unable to confirm the report.

France looks into bin Laden death report

By ELAINE GANLEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

PARIS -- President Jacques Chirac said Saturday that information contained in a leaked intelligence document raising the possibility that Osama bin Laden may have died of typhoid in Pakistan last month is "in no way whatsoever confirmed."

The U.S. government can't confirm the story, either.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government is unable to confirm a French newspaper report that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is believed to have died last month in Pakistan, a U.S. counterterrorism official said on Saturday.

"We cannot confirm the account," said the official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue. "It's quite possible (that) there was some talk of this, but in terms of being able to confirm this, that I can't do."

I suspect a new bin Laden audio tape will be coming to the surface soon, and I wonder if there will be anything in it to confirm or refute the rumors.

Baseball tonight

The New Hampshire Senior Baseball League is playing a series of games to benefit the Boys & Girls Clubs in New Hampshire.  First game is tonight.

Legends Game - Friday - Sept 22, 2006
Holman Stadium 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Time 6:00 - 9:00 PM
Guests: Bill Lee, Johnny Peskey, Dennis Boyd

Manager - Ken Scupp
Team 1
Team Player
1 Pro B. Lee
2 Nationals R. Lambert
3 Grays J. Cronin
4 Grays G. Skilogianis
5 BowSox J. Yablonski
6 Aces P. Aubin
7 Falcons R Zielinski
8 Grays D. Knight
9 Aces T. Bowler
10 Warriors R. Ferrogamo
11 Grays J. Sacco
12 Aces B. Hatch
13 Falcons K. Scupp

Manager - Frank De Maria
Team 2
Team Player
1 Nationals A Lavelle
2 Grays S. Doucette
3 Granite R. Amidon
4 Grays N. Roswick
5 Aces T. McWilliams
6 Aces Mike Hoyt
7 Aces B. Crockett
8 Granite T. Mason
9 BowSox B. Collucio
10 Warriors B. Doyle
11 Royals A. Rogers
12 Nationals P. Medici
13 Warriors J. Byrne
14 Grays R. Pansetti
15. Pro D. Boyd

By the looks of things I'll be getting the chance to step up to the plate against Oil Can Boyd.  I'll let you know if I get a hit.

Update:  I got a couple of hits.  Neither was off the Can.  The Oil Can didn't take the mound, but truth be told, I don't think it was the prospect of facing my bat that kept him off it.  The Spaceman pitched the last two innings for our team, finishing off a 9 to 1 victory in 10 innnings.  We were leading 9 to 1 after 9 innings but decided to keep playing until they kicked us out.  Curfew was 9:00pm.

In my last at bat I doubled -- shot over the center fielder's head.  Don't be too impressed, the average age on the field was 57, so it didn't have to be all that far over his head.  But it was a stand up double, none the less.  We had fun!