Category Archives: Iraq War

NIEs, Nays, Neighs

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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.

Our Baby Boy

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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.

Punctuate This

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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

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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.

Which Side Are We On, Again?

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The President ended his remarks today by saying “All civilized nations are bound together in this struggle between moderation and extremism.”

Could be. But I fear most of the moderate world thinks the U.S. is playing in the “extremist” league.

I gave the transcript and the New York Times synopsis a skim. A couple of paragraphs from the latter that leaped out at me —

Mr. Bush said Al Qaeda terrorists now consider Iraq “the central front” of a war that they hope will end in a “caliphate” governed by the dictates of “violent Islamic radicalism” across the entire Middle East. Destroying the new democratic Iraq is essential to their evil aspirations, he said.

That depends on which violent Islamic radicals we’re talking about. If we’re talking about Shi’ite violent Islamic radicals, they don’t need to destroy the Iraqi government. They can control the Iraqi government.

If we’re talking about Sunni violent Islamic radicals, on the other hand, I ‘spect they think Iraq is just fine the way it is — violent and occupied by Americans. The billions we’re dumping into Iraq fits in nicely with bin Laden’s “bleed until bankruptcy” plan, which Bush mentioned in his speech without noting how well White House policies fit bin Laden’s agenda.

“It is foolish to think you can negotiate with them,” Mr. Bush said. No one in either major party has suggested negotiating with terrorists, although many Democrats and some Republicans have criticized the conduct of the war in Iraq. Some critics have called for a phased withdrawal of American troops from the country.

I believe that in Bush World, disagreeing with Bush is the same thing as negotiating with terrorists, even though no negotiating with terrorists actually takes place. See previous post on the rightie definition of “appeasement.”

Here’s some more from the New York Times:

In the case of Iran, which the report singles out as “the most active state sponsor of terrorism,’’ Mr. Bush is also currently seeking to win agreement at the United Nations Security Council for sanctions to punish Iran for refusing the council’s request that it halt nuclear enrichment.

“Most troubling is the potential WMD-terrorism nexus that emanates from Tehran,’’ the report said.

The possibility that Saddam Hussein might develop “weapons of mass destruction” and pass them to terrorists was the prime reason Mr. Bush gave in 2003 for ordering the invasion of Iraq.

Are the neocons fixin’ to attack Iran? Is the Pope German?

I’m all out of blogging time, so in conclusion — what Dam Froomkin says. Feel free to discuss among yourselves.

Appease This

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Eugene Robinson demonstrates why he’s one of my favorite columnists.

Ever since the president settled on “Islamic fascists” as the enemy in his war on terrorism, he has taken every opportunity to evoke the specter of World War II. We are engaged in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” Bush told the Legionnaires. …

… Rumsfeld went furthest of all in claiming that it is, in fact, 1939 — that the jihadist terror movement presents the same kind of threat to the world that Hitler did when he invaded Poland. He set up a straw man, warning that those who do not see the threat as clearly as he does are as blind as those who tried to appease Hitler. But he doesn’t specify who he’s talking about. Who wants to appease terrorists? Is it Democrats? Nervous Republicans who’ve seen the latest polls?

Nobody wants to appease terrorists. But some people have a different idea of how to fight them. The president is right when he says this conflict is unlike other wars, but he seems to miss the essential difference: It has to be fought in a way that doesn’t create two new terrorists for each one who is killed.

That’s not what the president wants to talk about, though. Between now and November, he wants to talk about a war that we can all agree on, even if it has no bearing on the war being fought today. Yes, Mr. President, Hitler was bad. And your point would be?

Here’s a maha rule: Labeling something isn’t the same thing as understanding it.

Some years ago I got into a flame on a U.S. Civil War usenet forum when someone wrote that all you need to know about antebellum slaveowners was that they were fascists. And I wrote back, no, they weren’t. The political and economic philosophies of the old plantation class differed in several significant ways from those of Hitler or Mussolini. Calling the slaveowners “fascists” doesn’t tell you anything about them at all. (Then, of course, I was accused of defending slavery because I said slaveowners weren’t fascists.)

The two of us were using the word fascist for different purposes. I was using it to refer to a particular ideology defined here as “A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.” Whatever else you want to say about the antebellum slaveowners, they sure as shootin’ didn’t like centralization of authority under a dictator. They were rabid antifederalists and anti-statists, and in many ways they were the forefathers of today’s libertarians.

But the other writer was using fascist as a synonym for demon. I suspect that if I had pressed him to define fascism as a political/economic ideology (I may have; I don’t remember) he couldn’t have done it. Demonization absolved the writer from understanding how and why a particular group of human beings oppressed another group of human beings.

It makes about as much sense to call Islamic jihadists “fascists” as it does to say that all those Mississippi plantation owners were fascists. As Eugene Robinson says,

Perhaps because the term “fascist” doesn’t really describe the transnational jihadist movement, Bush went further with the Legionnaires. He called the jihadists “the successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians” as well. The fact is that the jihadists are pretty much sui generis — they aren’t fascists or Nazis and certainly aren’t communists, but yes, you could make a good argument for “totalitarians.” I guess one out of four isn’t bad.

If you spend much time on Internet forums or blogs at all, sooner or later you’ll run into the “fascism is socialism” theory common among mal-educated righties. The theory works this way: Since fascism is totalitarian, and since socialism is just watered-down communism (according to rightie ideology), and communism is totalitarian, then socialism and fascism are exactly the same thing. And they all belong on the Left, with liberals, which means liberals are totalitarians. And since totalitarianism is on the Left, then the Right stands for freedom and democracy. And, of course, the next step after that is to claim that we must allow the President to break wiretap laws and violate the Fourth Amendment to preserve our freedom.

People who think this way judge action to be good or evil not by what is done, but who does it. What “they” do is evil. What “we” do is good. (Even if it’s the same thing “they” did.)

What Jimmy Carter said about fundamentalists could be true of any group of people. He said:

The fundamentalists believe they have a unique relationship with God, and that they and their ideas are God’s ideas and God’s premises on the particular issue. Therefore, by definition since they are speaking for God anyone who disagrees with them is inherently wrong. And the next step is: Those who disagree with them are inherently inferior, and in extreme cases — as is the case with some fundamentalists around the world — it makes your opponents sub-humans, so that their lives are not significant. Another thing is that a fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality. And so this administration, for instance, has a policy of just refusing to talk to someone who is in strong disagreement with them — which is also a radical departure from past history. So these are the kinds of things that cause me concern. And, of course, fundamentalists don’t believe they can make mistakes, so when we permit the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, it’s just impossible for a fundamentalist to admit that a mistake was made.

Let’s change a few words–

The [nationalists] believe they have a unique relationship with [their nation], and that they and their ideas are [the only legitimate ideas] on the particular issue. Therefore, by definition since they are [correct] anyone who disagrees with them is inherently wrong. And the next step is: Those who disagree with them are inherently inferior, and in extreme cases — as is the case with some [nationalists] around the world — it makes your opponents sub-humans, so that their lives are not significant. Another thing is that a [nationalist] can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality. And so [nationalist leader], for instance, has a policy of just refusing to talk to someone who is in strong disagreement with them — which is also a radical departure from past history. So these are the kinds of things that cause me concern. And, of course, [nationalists] don’t believe they can make mistakes, so when we permit [atrocities], it’s just impossible for a [nationalist] to admit that a mistake was made.

You could substitute any knee-jerk ideology, Left or Right, for “nationalists.” You could substitute any religion that insists on orthodoxy, which is most of ’em. Unquestioning and fanatical acceptance of just about any belief system will take you to the same place — where “we” are righteous and “they” are demons.

Ironically, that’s the place where “demons” are born. The first step in becoming a perpetrator of oppression and atrocities is to start making judgments about who’s fully human and who isn’t.

Studying the political, historical, cultural, social, and economic factors that foster oppression could help us learn how to prevent oppression, or at least recognize when a society is moving into the danger zone in which systemic oppression can occur. However, such study requires acknowledging that one’s enemies or oppressors are human. The Right fosters a rhetorical culture in which such recognition is a sign of weakness and “appeasement.”

Appease, btw, is another word that has a different meaning to righties than to the rest of us. The dictionary says it means —

1. To bring peace, quiet, or calm to; soothe. 2. To satisfy or relieve: appease one’s thirst. 3. To pacify or attempt to pacify (an enemy) by granting concessions, often at the expense of principle.

For our purposes that third definition is the most operative one. And offhand I can’t think of anyone suggesting that terrorists will leave us alone if we grant them concessions.

But to a rightie, “appease” doesn’t mean making consessions or buying off our enemies. It means being soft. For example — Sean Hannity said,

But in all seriousness, it drives you crazy when we talk about being weak on defense, you’re appeasers, the NSA program you don’t want, the Patriot Act program you don’t want, data mining you don’t want. You want to close Guantánamo Bay. I think that’s weak on the most important issue of our time: our national security. I think the Republicans, if they get that message out, and the president started that today, we will win.

I don’t see how any of that translates into “concessions” to terrorists. And (as Alan Holmes rebutted) I am not aware of anyone who doesn’t think potential terrorists shouldn’t be under surveillance or that that government shouldn’t pursue any possible source of intelligence. We want these things done, but we want it done under the law. Nobody says that apprehended terrorists shouldn’t be locked up, but we need to be careful that the people we are locking up really are dangerous terrorists.

If anything, it’s righties who fit the dictionary definition of “appeasers.” They are appeasing their own worst instincts at the expense of long-established American principles about liberty and justice.

Of course, the real purpose behind demonization — or the fascistization, if you will — of Islamic radicals is to clothe anti-Muslim bigotry as righteousness and claim entitlement to do anything we want to Muslims and Muslim nations in the name of fighting terrorism. It also enables demonizers to deny the reality that “anything we want” might incite once-moderate Muslims into violence against us. Even to consider that our actions might have unfortunate political consequences is tantamount to “appeasement” as righties use the word.

Eugene Robinson:

To those who point out that Iraq wasn’t a nexus of terrorism until we invaded, Cheney responds, “They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway.”

Huh? The terrorists who attacked on Sept. 11 didn’t come from Iraq. Except in Cheney’s mind, I don’t know where the fact that we were attacked by terrorists trained in Afghanistan (and sent by Osama bin Laden, who’s probably now in Pakistan) somehow mitigates the fact that we’ve made Iraq a hotbed of terrorism.

Yet Cheney’s words reflect a common logical fallacy on the Right. Again, this is all about assuming entitlement to do whatever we want in the Middle East; our actions don’t have consequences, after all.

Related stuff to read:

Fareed Zakaria, “The Year of Living Fearfully,” Newsweek

“Will Fear Strike Out?” Buzzflash editorial

Jason Miller, “Inalienable Human Rights are not Privileges,” Thomas Paine’s Corner

Matthew Schofield, “Mideast strife is bad news for peacemakers, good news for extremists,” McClatchy Newspapers

Mark Hosenball, “Iraq: A Sweeping, Secret New Report,” Newsweek

H.D.S. Greenway, “Hypocrisy in sowing democracy,” The Boston Globe

David Rohde, “In Afghanistan, a Symbol for Change, Then Failure,” The New York Times

Judge Not

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I didn’t comment on the kidnapping of two Fox newsmen in Iraq. This was not because I didn’t care, but because I had nothing original to say beyond “gee, I hope they get home OK.”

Now that they are home, they’re being slammed by righties because they didn’t die.

I’m serious. Check out this post, titled “Kidnapped Fox Newsmen Let Us Down By Not Dying.” [Update: OK, I was snookered. This post is a satire. I missed it. Me bad.]

At first, conservative bloggers were pulling for Centanni and Wiig. They clamored for their release and attacked their kidnappers, knowing that the more they blogged about it, the more likely that the kidnappers would capitulate in the face of this virtual onslaught and release them.

The forces of evil tremble in fear of the wrath of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders.

They were outraged that the story wasn’t getting the attention it deserved from mainstream media and speculated that it was because of bias against Fox News. … Although Fox News President Roger Ailes later revealed that he had asked the rest of the media to keep a lid on its reporting while negotiations were going on, which might have accounted for the lack of stories by the MSM,”

Ya think?

“that does not negate the possibility that they did, in fact, have contempt for the Fox News journalists anyway.

Nor does it negate the possibility that every professional journalist in America prayed mightily for the safety of the two Fox News guys. But now that the newsmen are released, the Right wishes them dead. A rightie named David Warren explains why. [Note: This post is not a satire.]

They were told to convert to Islam under implicit threat (blindfolded and hand-tied, they could not judge what threat), and agreed to make the propaganda broadcasts to guarantee their own safety. That much we can understand, as conventional cowardice. (Understand; not forgive.) But it is obvious from their later statements that they never thought twice; that they could see nothing wrong in serving the enemy, so long as it meant they’d be safe.

I assume they are not Christians (few journalists are), but had they ever been instructed in that faith, they might have grasped that conversion to Islam means denial of Christ, and that is something many millions of Christians (few of them intellectuals) have refused to do, even at the cost of excruciating deaths. Christianity still lives, because of such martyrs. Not suicide bombers: but truly defenceless martyrs.

Jesus said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” (Matthew 7:1-2, King James version) I’m not saying Mr. Warren won’t be allowed into heaven, but Saint Peter is gonna make Mr. Warren write the first two verses of Matthew about 20 million times on the celestial blackboard first.

[Update: More about Warren here.]

But let’s go back to the writer of the first post cited, who calls himself Jon Swift.

Michelle Malkin even quoted some liberals who expressed contempt for Fox News and seemed to feel the men deserved to be kidnapped, including such well-known and respected thinkers on the Left as Bob Laurence, the TV critic for the San Diego Tribune and former Snohomish County, Wash., Democrat party official Mike Whitney. They seemed to be speaking the unexpressed thoughts of all liberals.

First off, let me express gratitude to this blogger for telling me that the TV critic for the San Diego Tribune is a “well-known and respected thinker on the Left.” I generally don’t look to TV critics for political insight; maybe I’ve been missing something.

Next: We lefties do express contempt for Fox News, but “seemed to feel the men deserved to be kidnapped”? Really? Of course every groups has its assholes. But here is Mr. Swift’s first example of liberals expressing contempt: Glenn Greenwald, who wrote:

Justifying the targeting of Fox News journalists in a war zone, on the ground that they are so biased in favor of the Bush administration that they are basically propaganda agents, is outrageous. It is in everyone’s interests to ensure that journalists of all stripes are free to operate in war zones and report on what is happening without fear of being targeted, and there is no legitimate moral basis for celebrating attacks on them. For that reason, anyone publicly justifying the Fox kidnappings would be viciously stigmatized and probably permanently shunned.

Hello? But then Glenn linked to a Power Line post by John Hinderaker, who wrote in a different context:

Given Reuters’s coverage of the conflict in Lebanon, it would perhaps be understandable if the Israelis started firing on Reuters vehicles.

So if a leftie wishes death on a journalists it’s bad, but if a rightie does it, that’s just fine.

Another example of an evil liberal expressing contempt for the Fox News journalists came from Bob Laurence, TV critic of the San Diego Union-Tribune. But in the linked article Laurence does not express contempt for the journalists. Instead, he speculates that the lack of MSM coverage reflects some coolness between Fox and the rest of the media.

Starting at the top with Roger Ailes, the Fox sales pitch has been to deride other media, to declare itself the one source of the real truth, the sole source of ‘fair and accurate’ news reporting. As a result, there’s not a reservoir of kinship or good will with Fox on the part of the rest of the news media. You can’t keep insulting people and then expect friendship when you need it.

That’s actually not too far from what the righties were saying — the MSM is not covering the story because they don’t like Fox News. And it’s no where near expressing contempt for the captured journalists or wishing they come to harm.

But at last, the frantic search through the Internets for liberals being hateful turned up former Snohomish County, Wash., Democrat party official Mike Whitney. Whitney wrote an opinion piece that does veer rather close to saying the journalists deserved to be kidnapped because they work for Fox News.

And you know the rightie rule — if one “liberal” says something nasty, no matter how obscure that liberal may be, he is “speaking the unexpressed thoughts of all liberals.”

I love the way righties believe they understand our thoughts even when we don’t express them.

For the record, I think Whitney is out of line, and that no journalist attempting to cover a war deserves to be kidnapped or fired upon by anyone for any reason. There, Mr. Swift; that’s an expressed thought.

The Gambler

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Fred Kaplan writes in Slate:

In his speech this morning before the American Legion’s national convention, President George W. Bush may have gone a bridge too far. It was the first of several speeches he plans to deliver in the coming days to rally support for the war in Iraq (and, not incidentally, for Republicans in November). But one passage in particular reveals that the campaign is getting desperate:

    The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq.

Here’s the question: Does anybody believe this? If you do, then you must ask the president why he hasn’t reactivated the draft, printed war bonds, doubled the military budget, and strenuously rallied allies to the cause.

If, as he said in this speech, the war in Iraq really is the front line in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century”; if our foes there are the “successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists”; if victory is “as important” as it was in Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal—then those are just some of the steps that a committed president would feel justified in demanding.

The Administration’s “fascist” campaign is desperation itself. At least twice before in the past year the President went on the offensive on Iraq, making highly publicized series of speeches in which he attempted to sound statesmanlike and resolute and sincere and all that. Both offensives failed. So if statesmanlike didn’t work, maybe mad dog crazy will. It’s all he’s got left.

But the morass in Iraq is the natural outcome of Bush’s weenieness. Ordering the all-out effort a “victory” would require is too politically risky. So he doesn’t do it. Admitting to the mistake and preparing to withdraw is, um, admitting a mistake. He can’t do that, either. George W. Bush isn’t man enough to either advance or retreat, and our troops pay the price.

Last week Julian E. Barnes wrote for the Los Angeles Times,

The Marine Corps said Tuesday that it would begin calling Marines back to active-duty service on an involuntary basis to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan — the latest sign that the American force is under strain and a signal that the military is having trouble persuading young veterans to return.

Marine commanders will call up formerly active-duty service members now classified as reservists because the Corps failed to find enough volunteers among its emergency reserve pool to fill jobs in combat zones. The call-ups will begin in several months, summoning as many as 2,500 reservists at a time to serve for a year or more.

The Pentagon has had to scramble to meet the manpower requirements of the Iraq war, which have not abated in the face of a continuing insurgency and growing civil strife. Earlier this year, the military called forward its reserve force in Kuwait, sending one battalion to Baghdad and two to Ramadi. Last month, the yearlong deployment of the Army’s Alaska-based 172nd Stryker Brigade was extended by four months to provide extra soldiers to roll back escalating sectarian violence in Baghdad.

For much of the conflict, the Army also has had to use “stop-loss orders” — which keep soldiers in their units even after their active-duty commitments are complete — as well as involuntary call-ups of its reservists. Both actions have been criticized as a “back-door draft” and are unpopular with service members, many of whom say they have already done their part.

“You can send Marines back for a third or fourth time, but you have to understand you are destroying their lives,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “It is not what they intended the all-volunteer military to look like.”

Reuters reported yesterday that the U.S. recently increased the number of troops in Iraq, to 140,000. That’s 13,000 more than five weeks ago. Prediction: A week or so before the midterm elections, the White House will announce a big troop withdrawal and send 13,000 troops home.

Kaplan points to “the glaring mismatch between the president’s gargantuan depiction of the threat and the relatively paltry resources he’s mustered to fight it.” As a result, in many ways earlier gains are slipping away. For example, as Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay write for McClatchy Newspapers, al Qaeda and the Taliban are taking back Afghanistan.

Five years ago, the United States fired its first shots in the post-9/11 war on terror here in Afghanistan, evicting al Qaida and toppling the Taliban regime that hosted Osama bin Laden’s network.

Today, the United States and its allies are struggling to halt advances by a resurgent Taliban and al Qaida fighters in large swaths of this still desperately poor and unstable country.

“Things are going very badly,” admitted an official with the allied military forces, who asked not to be identified because the issue is so sensitive. “We’ve arrived at a situation where things are significantly worse than we anticipated.”

The trends in Afghanistan appear to mirror the global war on terror a half-decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Bush administration and allied governments have won battle after battle, but appear to be in danger of losing the war.

As a result of Bush’s half-assed warmaking, “the threat from anti-Western Islamic extremists has rebounded, mutated and grown,” say Strobel and Landay.

Much has been written about how Bush boldly rolled the dice on his presidency by invading Iraq. But what he threw on the table wasn’t his presidency, it was our nation. He has squandered our military resources; the lives of our troops; our moral authority; and the respect our nation earned through two world wars, the Cold War, and a century or so of foreign policy and diplomacy. Big stakes. But when the risk is personal, he loses his nerve. He hasn’t antied up enough of his own chips by taking the personal and political risks real leadership sometimes requires.

I’m sure you’ve seen the warning signs that the Bushies are preparing for military action against Iran. Glenn Greenwald has a good post up that reviews some of the signs, and concludes:

All of that means one of two things (or some combination of both): (1) the President has decided already that we are going to wage some sort of military attack on Iran and is saying the same things as he said once he decided to wage war on Iraq while pretending to have not yet decided pending “diplomatic efforts”; and/or (2) the White House is trying to have its top officials, including the President, sound like Michael Ledeen because that’s necessary to (a) motivate its crazed warmonger base itching for more wars and/or (b) enable Karl Rove to create the warrior/appeaser dichotomy that has worked so well electorally for Rove for two straight elections (and for Republicans for 35 years).

The only way to stop this fool is to take away his chips and evict him from the casino.

Tweety Scores

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I missed Hardball last night, but by many accounts it was a real barn burner. Dday of Daily Kos writes,

Chris Matthews just pummeled, PUMMELED Van Taylor (only Republican Iraq War vet running for Congress on the Republican side, in Texas), and Paul Hackett piled on, calling out Taylor as nothing but an apologist.

Crooks & Liars has the video.

John Amato, Huffington Post:

Tonight on Hardball we got a rare glimpse of what a debate between a Republican Iraq War Vet and a Democratic Iraq War Vet looks like. Or should I say the Republican Iraq War Vet, at least as far as candidates for Congress go.

It was Republican Van Taylor, who’s running against Democrat Chet Edwards in TX-17.

He’s one of a tiny number of challengers the NRCC says they’re supporting, and they’re already going low against Edwards — you’ll hear Taylor accuse Edwards of not “supporting the troops” even though Edwards is beloved by the military community for work on national veterans issues and his work with the local vets community on things like PTSD. It’s a big part of why he survived Tom DeLay’s redistricting garbage. …

…The contrast between Taylor’s regurgitated Ken Mehlman talking points and Paul Hackett’s heartfelt, passionate outrage is just shocking. And you’ll see the same kind of sincerity from Tammy Duckworth and Patrick Murphy on our side. If you’ve never seen Paul Hackett before, you’re in for a real treat and will soon realize why he instantaneously gained so much respect in the blogosphere.

See also Bob Geiger.

The Mission Creep

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Reactions to yesterday’s press conference, in which the President vowed repeatedly to “complete the mission” in Iraq:

PRESIDENT BUSH EMPHASIZED no fewer than 10 times in his news conference Monday that U.S. forces would not leave Iraq “before the job is done.” It’s a clever piece of rhetoric, appealing to Americans’ sense of duty as well as their pride. Just one question: What was that job again?

Is it to end the sectarian violence in Iraq? Prevent terrorists from flocking to the United States? Bring democracy to Iraq and thus provide a beacon for reformers throughout the Middle East? …

… At times, the loudest noise at his news conference was the sound of mission creep. [Editorial, Los Angeles Times]

***

For a moment there, I was almost encouraged. George W. Bush, the most resolutely incurious and inflexible of presidents, was reported last week to have been surprised at seeing Iraqi citizens — who ought to be grateful beneficiaries of the American occupation, I mean “liberation” — demonstrating in support of Hezbollah and against Israel.

Surprise would be a start, since it would mean the Decider was admitting novel facts to his settled base of knowledge and reacting to them. Alas, it seems the door to the presidential mind is still locked tight. “I don’t remember being surprised,” he said at his news conference yesterday. “I’m not sure what they mean by that.”

I’m guessing “they” might mean that when you try to impose your simplistic, black-and-white template on a kaleidoscopic world, and you end up setting the Middle East on fire, either you’re surprised or you’re not paying attention. But that’s just me. [Eugene Robinson, “President on Another Planet,” Washington Post]

***

One exchange did not inspire confidence. A reporter asked,

    Mr. President, I’d like to go back to Iraq. You’ve continually cited the elections, the new government, its progress in Iraq, and yet the violence has gotten worse in certain areas. You’ve had to go to Baghdad again. Is it not time for a new strategy? And if not, why not?

Bush responded,

    You’ve covered the Pentagon, you know that the Pentagon is constantly adjusting tactics because they have the flexibility from the White House to do so.

The reporter–who was not asking about tactics–interrupted:

    I’m talking about strategy.

Bush then said:

    The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and their dreams, which is a democratic society. That’s the strategy.

Actually, that’s not a strategy. That’s a goal. A commander in chief should know the difference. A strategy is how one goes about–in a general way–accomplishing goals. Tactics are how one implements the strategy. [David Corn]


I’ve blogged about the Administration’s confusing goals for strategy before. It’s plain Bush does not know what the word strategy means.

Pretty much regardless of what he was asked, Bush had the same answer: That anything short of his policies is tantamount to surrendering to terrorists and would be disastrous.

Bush seemed much happier reframing the questions than answering them.

“And the question facing this country is, will — do we, one, understand the threat to America? In other words, do we understand that a failed — failed states in the Middle East are a direct threat to our country’s security? And secondly, will we continue to stay engaged in helping reformers, in working to advance liberty, to defeat an ideology that doesn’t believe in freedom?” he asked. [Dan Froomkin, “President on a Mission,” Washingtonpost.com]

In this case Bush confuses execution with intention. If you disagree with his policies, it must be because you disagree with his intentions for Iraq. He can’t admit that whatever we’re doing in Iraq shows no promise of fulfilling those intentions. I’ve written about this disconnect before, too, such as here. And here’s a Washington Post op ed from last May by law professor David Cole, who says that the President’s “war” against terrorism is all about rhetoric and symbolism, not substance. “Tough talk in news conferences, overheated charges that evaporate under scrutiny and executions for symbolic purposes will not make us safer,” Cole wrote. Yet that’s all we’re getting from this President.

The sad thing is that he’s right about what a catastrophe it would be if Iraq became a failed state, or a satellite of Iran, but seems to me it’s heading in that direction anyway.

The exchange I described in the last post, in which Bush tried once again to associate September 11 and Iraq, got considerable attention in the press. Jim Rutenberg writes for The New York Times,

The White House has argued that the Iraq war remains potent politically for Republicans when they cast it part of the broader war on terror, although the administration has found it at times difficult to make that case.

When Mr. Bush referred to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in reference to a question about Iraq today, a reporter pressed him, asking, “What did Iraq have to do with that?” Mr. Bush responded somewhat testily, “Nothing,” and added, “Nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack.”

In the run-up to the invasion in March 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney did call attention to the theory, since discredited, that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers might have met in Prague before the attacks with an Iraqi intelligence officer.

In general, however, Mr. Bush struck a different tone than the vice president has used in recent weeks, including Mr. Cheney’s suggestion two weeks ago that implied that Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary against Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut would embolden “Al Qaeda types.”

I watched a little bit of Hardball last night — as flawed as Hardball is, at least it hasn’t been taken hostage by JonBenet Ramsey news, as has Countdown — on which Rick Santorum claimed there was a meeting in Prague, and we did too find WMDs in Iraq, and Chris “Tweety” Matthews sat there like a bump on a log and didn’t challenge him. Grrr. But Tweety and others pointed out Bush’s words — “Nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack,” leaves open the possibility that Saddam Hussein was associated with the attack, somehow, even though there is no proof (outside of neocons’ fertile imaginations) of such association.

[Update: — Molly Ivins, “Let the Truth-Telling Begin,” Truthdig:

The Bushies are having the hardest time trying to un-lie now. For example, at his Monday press conference the president asserted, “Nobody’s ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the [Sept. 11] attack.”

How true: What Vice President Cheney in December 2001 said about links between 9/11 and Iraq was that it was “pretty well confirmed” that hijacking ringleader Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence. On June 17, 2004, Cheney said: “We have never been able to confirm that, nor have we been able to knock it down, we just don’t know. … I can’t refute the Czech claim, I can’t prove the Czech claim, I just don’t know.”

In July 2004, the CIA’s own report stated the agency did not have “any credible information” that the alleged meeting ever took place. The CIA said the whole concoction was based on a single source “whose veracity … has been questioned” and that the Iraqi official allegedly involved was in U.S. custody and denied the meeting ever took place. The 9/11 commission had already concluded that the meeting never occurred.

Cheney has a consistent pattern of exaggeration on intelligence related to Iraq. The tragedy is that at least half the American people believed Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 plot—and most soldiers serving in Iraq still believe this.

Go, Molly.]

There were several questions about Katrina yesterday, also, and I plan to elaborate in the next post.