Top 10 Letters

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

*1*

In his article "There They Go Again," Paul Mirengoff claims that mainstream Democrats are crafting their positions on matters of war and peace based on political calculations, not the national interest.

To buttress this unsubstantiated claim, Mirengoff argues that liberal think-tanks and Clinton-era security analysts are providing their blessings. He cites Richard Clarke and me as examples of individuals who fall into this category.

But as Mirengoff well knows, Richard Clarke has worked for all of the presidents from Ronald Reagan up to, and including, George W. Bush, and I spent five years as an assistant secretary of defense for Ronald Reagan.

Mirengoff also implies that my position on the strategic redeployment of our forces has changed because I work for a think-tank that is run by John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton's chief of staff. This is like arguing that Robert Kagan's position on the invasion of Iraq is influenced by the fact that his boss at the Carnegie Endowment is Jessica Matthews, who worked in the Carter and Clinton administrations. Or that Max Boot's position on the war is influenced by the fact that his boss at the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, worked in the administrations of Reagan and the two Bushes. It is clear that Mirengoff has no idea how think-tanks really work.

Mirengoff further distorts my position by noting, out of context, that last June I stated that setting a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq would be a mistake. And indeed it would have been a mistake before the Iraqis approved the constitution and had the general election. Mirengoff also know this since we discussed it on a Voice of America broadcast on December 1, 2005.

If Mirengoff had taken the time to read the proposal that my colleague Brian Katulis and I developed (which we tried unsuccessfully to publish in The Weekly Standard), he would have noticed that we said that the redeployment of our forces would begin in 2006 after the election and would be completed by the end of 2007, but would involve leaving military advisors and counterterrorist units in Iraq, 14,000 troops in Kuwait, and Marines over the horizon. This is hardly what Mirengoff claims is a "slow motion cut and run strategy."

Mirengoff's critique of the policies advocated by some Democrats (primarily Jack Murtha, whom Mirengoff never mentions) and their partners (presumably Clarke and me) is also flawed and misleading, and contradicts the recent statements of President Bush and Generals Casey and Abizaid about the nature of the insurgency, the impacts of the large American occupation, and the fact that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily.

--Larry Korb

Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Senior Advisor to the Center for Defense Information

*2*

Long after everyone else has given it up, Thomas Joscelyn and The Weekly Standard continue to hold a cadaver's grip on the notion that there was a serious relationship between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. So let's review the bidding: Michael Scheuer has written that he changed his mind on the issue and concluded that there was no such relationship. Richard Clarke, whom Joscelyn cites as an advocate of the belief in an Iraqi-jihadist alliance, clearly also revised his views after 1998-1999, perhaps in part because of the intelligence review his staff conducted. The 9/11 Commission, the most authoritative source on the issue, came to the conclusion that there was no collaborative relationship between Baghdad and al Qaeda.

The Bush administration has given up making this argument in the face of an overwhelming amount of analysis, and the obvious failure to find any incriminating material during the exploitation of the Iraqi intelligence service files. (Indeed, the source that they relied on for many of their allegations, Ibn al Shaykh al Libi, was believed to be a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency even before top administration officials began citing him.) In my new book The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right, written with Steven Simon, we cite former senior military officers and senior intelligence officials in the Pentagon and the CIA who could find no evidence of serious cooperation. To quote the headline of Stephen Hayes's original article that presented the "intelligence" on the bin Laden-Saddam relationship: "Case Closed."