May 19, 2008 • Vol. 13, No. 34
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Egypt imports over two billion dollars in US aid annually but apparently has exported the bulk of the foreign jihadists in Iraq. Syria’s the number two exporter and, despite repeated US warnings going back to 2003, remains the “main passageway for suicide bombers in Iraq.” From the Gulf Times:
The US military said yesterday that it has several hundred foreign fighters in custody in Iraq and that most of them come from Egypt, followed by Syria, Sudan and Saudi Arabia.
“We have several hundred foreign fighters in captivity at this point of time and the greatest number come out of Egypt,” spokesman Major General William Caldwell told reporters.
If Rudy Giuliani does run for president, here’s a target he should pound away on -- the media’s role (led by the New York Times) in undermining the War on Terror -- and a line he should repeat over and over again on the stump – America isn't perfect but we do a hell of a lot of good in the world. There’s plenty to work with on both counts. Republicans would be extremely receptive to such a Reaganite message, and given his background he’s (along with Sen. McCain) just the person to deliver it. They hate the arrogance of the media in publishing the details of top-secret programs for our enemies to read, and I bet would look quite favorably on a candidate who passionately took on the anti-Americanism of the Left. So far, no presumptive presidential candidate has fully tapped into this sentiment. Rudy should consider doing so.
From the International Herald Tribune:
BRUSSELS Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt of Belgium has asked the Justice Ministry to investigate whether a banking consortium here broke the law when it aided the U.S. government's anti-terrorism activities by providing it with confidential information about international money transfers.
The group, known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or Swift, has come under scrutiny following a report last week by The New York Times….
Heather MacDonald and Gabriel Schoenfeld explain the recklessness of the New York Times here and here.
Tyler Drumheller, former head of the CIA's European ops, is on a roll. He will soon have a book out on what he witnessed in the run-up to the Iraq War. And judging from the fawning pre-release press it’s a very good bet that his book will soon be quoted ad nauseam by Frank Rich, the editors of the New York Times, Howard Dean, the House and Senate Democratic leadership, and the rest of the anti-Bush ideologues. In late April, a 60 Minutes segment focused on Drumheller’s role in getting Naji Sabri, Iraq’s ex-foreign minister’s, to spill the beans on Saddam’s nuclear program prior to the war. But Drumheller and the producers of 60 Minutes failed to inform viewers, for example, that Sabri also said that biological research was ongoing despite Saddam’s denials and that Saddam has dispersed chemical weapons to loyal tribes (see April 24 60 Minutes of Distortion post here.) Today, the Washington Post gives Drumheller front-page coverage on his role in the Iraqi mobile biological labs controversy. Again, like 60 Minutes, he’s the hero – an image I’m sure his book won’t contradict.
Today's Wall Street Journal has an insightful editorial on the House Republicans’ assault on what is really the president’s immigration plan – a plan that Mayor Giuliani believes strengthens our national security. “The Kennedy bill” is how some House members refer to the Senate bill. But I don’t remember all those House Republicans who voted for the “No Child Left Behind Act” refer to that legislation as “the Kennedy bill.” He, of course, was a primary Senate backer of the act. The Journal editors argue that the House enforcement-only position is bad policy and bad politics. They write:
Even if all of this somehow works this election year, the long term damage to the GOP could be considerable. Pete Wilson demonized illegal aliens to win re-election as California Governor in 1994, but at the price of alienating Latino voters for a decade. The smarter Republicans--President Bush, Karl Rove, Senator John McCain, Colorado Governor Bill Owens and Florida Governor Jeb Bush--understand that the GOP can't sustain its majority without a larger share of the Hispanic vote. Making Mr. Tancredo the spokesman on this issue is a surefire way to make Hispanics into permanent Democrats.
All this brings me to the comments of Don Goldwater, who is seeking the GOP nod to run against Arizona governor Napolitano. His recent remarks, covered in a local paper, concerning his illegal immigration plan are now being picked-up in the Hispanic media and likely soon by national media outlets. From the Arizona Republic:
Goldwater promised to put undocumented workers in a “tent city” at the border. “It’s my intention to take illegals and put them down at the border in a tent city and use them as labor to build the fence and clean up the desert they are tearing up,” said Goldwater, who didn’t offer any specifics for his plans that some construe as unconstitutional.
Republican leaders should roundly and categorically denounce his plan before it unfairly tars the party of Reagan. They may also want to take a second look at the immigration proposal put forth by conservative Mike Pence of Indiana, who, as the Journal notes, offers Republicans “a way out of their political mess.”
If you can get your hands on a copy of today's Wall Street Journal, I highly recommend reading former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s piece on the Clinton administration’s handling of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The Clinton folks, particularly Secretary Albright and VP Gore, don’t mention Khobar or any of this in their regular excoriations of the Bush administration.
Beijing's been no help on North Korea, coddles Iran and showers the dictatorship in Khartoum with arms that end up in the hands of the killers in Darfur. No doubt China has been a good place to do business but, so far, there’s little evidence that it has changed the character of the regime for the better. The long-term bet is that it will. Let’s hope.
David Satterfield, senior advisor to Secretary Rice on Iraq, made news in an interview with the Al-Hayat daily. According to Satterfield, Syria remains a “main passageway for suicide bombers in Iraq” and Iran and its proxy Hizbullah have been behind some roadside bombing attacks in Iraq.
Iran is involved in a certain behavior in Iraq, that to a certain extent involves Hizbullah which is actively taking part in acts of violence that are causing the deaths of Iraqi, American, British [soldiers] as well as other members of the coalition forces….
Iran's participation in violence have also taken different faces and perhaps the most damaging is the spread of advanced explosive devices and this must stop. I will not go into further detail.
No doubt Damascus and Tehran have also been keeping an eye on the troop withdrawal debate going on in the U.S. Senate.
Unilateralism, preemption, a hostile world reaction -- the good folks at the American Prospect must be gasping for air after reading this piece from President Clinton’s two top defense officials. Merits aside, it sure caught me by surprise and makes me wonder if Secretary Perry has had second thoughts on the 1994 deal his administration cut with the North Koreans.
From the Hartford Courant:
A somber Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman stood alone on the Democratic side of the Senate Wednesday and broke with his colleagues on the Iraq war, announcing he would oppose today two Democratic-authored blueprints for pulling American troops out of Iraq.
Lieberman, the first and so far only Democrat to declare plans to vote against both measures, spoke near the end of a tense day of partisan debate over Iraq policy….
"I fear that it would also send another message to our terrorist enemies and to the sectarian militias in Iraq," Lieberman argued, "that America is not prepared to see this fight through until the Iraqis themselves can take over."
A while back, Sen. Lieberman headed up the Democratic Leadership Council, a group formed in part to combat the party’s leftward drift on national security. I have searched the DLC web site to find out whether they support or oppose the primary withdrawal amendment sponsored by Democratic Senator Carl Levin. I found nothing except for a call for a "real debate on Iraq." But that debate is happening now on the Senate floor and the DLC is MIA. But at least one former DLCer isn’t ducking.
Sen. McCain argued on the Senate floor today that Democratic troop withdrawal plans would only strengthen the insurgency and allow Zawahiri to achieve his top priority to “expel the Americans” from Iraq. Democratic plans would also repeat the mistakes we made in pre-9/11 Afghanistan, where we abandoned that nation to the Taliban and al Qaeda. McCain also dismissed so-called “strategic redeployment” plans pushed by folks like Howard Dean as “nonsense” and added that American policy should be “win the war,” not run for exits.
Some highlights from Sen. McCain’s speech:
The amendment we are debating now states the sense of Congress that the President should begin the phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq this year, and that he should submit to Congress a plan with dates for this redeployment. Such a move would be, I believe, a significant step on the road to disaster….
By signaling that an end to the American intervention is near, we will alienate our friends, who fear an insurgent victory and tempt undecideds to join the anti-government ranks.
Not every member of this body agreed with the decision to topple Saddam Hussein. But when our country went to war, we incurred a moral duty to not abandon the people of Iraq to terrorists and killers. If we withdraw prematurely, risking all-out civil war, we will have done precisely that….
In pre-9/11 Afghanistan, terrorists found sanctuary to train and plan attacks with impunity. We know that there are today in Iraq terrorists who are planning attacks against Americans. We cannot make this fatal mistake twice….
Whether or not members of this body believed that Iraq was part of the war on terror in 2003, it is simply incontrovertible that the war on terror is being fought there today. Al-Qaeda is present in Iraq. Jihadists continue to cross the borders. Suicide bombers target American troops, government personnel, and civilians. If we leave Iraq prematurely, the jihadists will interpret the withdrawal as the triumph of their brutal tactics against our power. And I do not believe they will stop with Iraq….
The letter released last year from Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s lieutenant, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, draws out the implications. The Zawahiri letter is predicated on the assumption that the United States will leave Iraq, and that al Qaeda’s real game begins as soon as we abandon the country. In his missive, Zawahiri lays out a four stage plan – establish a caliphate in Iraq, extend the “jihad wave” to the secular countries neighboring Iraq, clash with Israel – none of which shall commence until the completion of stage one: expel the Americans from Iraq. Zawahiri observes that the collapse of American power in Vietnam, “and how they ran and left their agents,” suggests that “we must be ready starting now.”
We can’t let them start, now or ever. We must stay in Iraq until the government there has fully functioning security forces that can keep the insurgents at bay, and ultimately defeat them. Some argue that it is our very presence in Iraq that has created the insurgency, and that if we end the occupation, we end the insurgency. But, in fact, by ending military operations, we are likely to empower the insurgency. The fighting is not simply against coalition forces; rather, the insurgents target the Iraqi government, opposing militias, and various sects and ethnicities….
A few observers have argued that the U.S. has an option of somehow pulling our troops from Iraq but still managing things from afar. But this is nonsense. The United States will have no leverage to manage things once we have left the country. The battle in Iraq, which is likely to remain counterinsurgency in character, is ill-suited to the extensive use of airpower, which would be the foremost instrument available to us from outside. We could no more prevail in Iraq from outside than we could win the war in Vietnam by continuing to bomb the North. As tempting as it is to seek a solution that would let us both draw down our troops and preserve our military options in Iraq, that solution does not exist. The options on the table have been there from the beginning. Withdraw and fail, or commit and succeed….
America’s first goal in Iraq is to win the war – and that all other policy decisions support, and are subordinate to, the successful completion of our mission.
No one should have any illusions about the costs of this conflict, as it has been waged thus far or as it will be waged as we move ahead. But neither should anyone have illusions about the role of Iraq in the war on terror today. It has become a central battleground in our fight against those who wish us grave harm, and we cannot wish away this fundamental truth.
The U.S government murdered thousands of its own citizens on September 11, 2001. That theory has been circulating among an assortment of America haters, Jew haters, paranoids … and a few professors at U.S. universities. An upcoming cover story in The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at a group called “Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors – more in the humanities than in the sciences – from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.” The co-chair of the group, Steven E. Jones, is from, of all places, Brigham Young University and has been roundly denounced by his colleagues at the Utah campus. Jones and the others believe preplanted explosives took down the World Trade Centers. Why? In order to “manipulate Americans” into supporting policies, as the conspiracy thinking goes, that seek world domination through the barrel of a gun and to fatten the profits of the oil companies and weapons manufactures. Another “scholar,” David Ray Griffin, wrote the book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, “exposing to the American people and the world the truth about 9/11.” A blurb on the book’s jacket reads:
The most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation on the Bush administration’s relationship to that historic and troubling event.
The blurb’s author isn’t some obscure academic. It’s Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, best-selling author and frequent speaker at American universities across the country. The good news is that unlike Zinn most other academics in the U.S. believe “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” are just a bunch of crackpots.
The Kerry magic lives on. From today's New York Times:
In drawing up a schedule for the Wednesday session, the Democratic leadership has arranged for its plan to be debated first, pushing Mr. Kerry and his proposal into the evening, too late for the nightly television news, to starve it of some attention.
Senate Democrats have been loath to express their opinions publicly, determined to emphasize a united front. But interviews suggest a frustration with Mr. Kerry, never popular among the caucus, and still unpopular among many Democrats for failing to defeat a president they considered vulnerable. Privately, some of his Democratic peers complain that he is too focused on the next presidential campaign.
Australia has been a very good friend of the United States. They remain steadfast in Iraq and Afghanistan, work closely with our military in the Pacific region, and have led the coalition trying to bring security and stability to East Timor. The government of Prime Minister John Howard has also been engaged in a defense build-up that will continue into the next decade. Now only if some of our friends in Europe would see the light.
From Reuters:
Australia has updated plans to spend more than 51 billion Australian dollars ($38 billion) to build up its military in a move Defence Minister Brendan Nelson said on June 20 would match defense capabilities with potential threats.
The 10-year Defence Capability Plan, last updated in 2004, outlines spending on new ships, planes and weapons….
It also allows the military to further commit to the Lockheed-Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The government hopes to buy up to 100 F-35s for 16 billion Australian dollars, with a final decision due in late 2008.
Nelson said the major features of the new capability plan include 3.7 billion Australian dollars to further rationalize Australia’s military helicopter fleet, maintenance and pilot training, and 750 million Australian dollars to upgrade army artillery.
It also includes around one billion Australian dollars to refurbish or replace the C-130 Hercules and Caribou aircraft fleets, and more than one billion Australian dollars to improve military satellite communications.
He said some projects remained confidential, but almost half of the 51 billion Australian dollars would be spent on electronics, 26 percent on aerospace, 11 percent on new ships and just seven percent on weapons and ammunition.
Howard Dean had a lot to say last night on Hardball. He wants to abandon Iraq’s elected government under the guise of “redeployment” and believes the president “created a situation where terrorists now are in Iraq, where they were not before.”
He does have a point -- sort of. According to Richard Clarke, by the end of 2000 “perhaps over 10,000 terrorists” had trained in al Qaeda camps inside Afghanistan before dispersing to "probably between 5o-60 counties.” So there may be some who left their post-camp location to enter Iraq following the coalition invasion in March 2003. But we also apparently know that two who trained in those camps, Zarqawi and his alleged successor al-Masri, were in Iraq in 2002.
From the June 10, 2006 Washington Post:
After the U.S.-led multinational attack that overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan, Zarqawi appeared on a U.S. list of most-wanted al-Qaeda terrorists still at large in early 2002. Intelligence officials said that at some time during the summer of that year, Zarqawi spent two months in Baghdad, where he received medical treatment for an undisclosed problem with his leg.
From General Tommy Franks’ memoir, American Soldier:
One known terrorist, a Jordanian-born Palestinian named Abu Musab Zarqawi who had joined al Qaeda in Afghanistan -- where he specialized in developing chemical and biological weapons -- was now confirmed to operate from one of the camps in Iraq. Badly wounded fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan, Zarqawi had received medical treatment in Baghdad before setting up with Ansar al Islam. And evidence suggested that he had been joined there by other al Qaeda leaders, who had been ushered through Baghdad and given safe passage into northern Iraq by Iraqi security forces....[p. 332] And while many al Qaeda leaders had been killed [in Afghanistan], others had sought sanctuary in Iraq. [p. 403]
From the June 9, 2006 New York Times:
Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, an aide to the top American commander here, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., told reporters at a briefing that United States commanders had identified the man most likely to take over as Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, an Egyptian militant who uses the nom de guerre Abu al-Masri. General Caldwell said Mr. Masri had been in Iraq since 2002, and had played a major role in organizing suicide bombings around Baghdad.
Gen. Caldwell also noted that al-Masri arrived in Iraq before Zarqawi. All this must have slipped Chairman Dean’s mind.
In some areas of Iraq, too heavy a footprint hasn’t been the problem. The lack of one has, but that may be changing in the wake of the president’s recent Camp David meeting.
From AP:
Hundreds of American and Iraqi troops backed by a U.S. gunship pushed into an insurgent-infested section of eastern Ramadi, expanding their campaign to bolster their presence in one of Iraq’s most violent cities….
“It’s one of the first steps to moving into areas of the city that have not had a large coalition or Iraqi presence for a long time, if ever,” said Col. Sean MacFarland, commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division that oversees the city.
This lack of a footprint has been a recurring theme.
From a May 30, 2006 Washington Post piece:
...Marine officers on the ground have been open for more than a year now about needing more troops in Anbar, whose Sunni population, remoteness and comparative lawlessness have made it a stronghold for the insurgency. Anbar borders Syria, a conduit for some of the weapons, money and fighters.
From the April 26, 2006 Stars and Strips:
U.S. troops entered Mukhisa and the adjacent town of Abu Kharma on Sunday after hearing that the region is home to foreign fighters, members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group and financiers behind roadside bomb and mortar attacks, said Lt. Col. Thomas Fisher, battalion commander....
One obstacle his troops face is that the two towns’ contact with coalition forces over the past three years has consisted of three raids, in which hundreds of townspeople were arrested only to be released later, Fisher said.
“When you neglect a town and don’t engage the population, the terrorists who are here and the insurgents can tell them anything they want, and they will believe it because there is no one else telling them anything different,” he said.
Nearly two years ago from the New York Times:
After the battle here in September [2004] the military left behind fewer than 500 troops to patrol a region twice the size of Connecticut. With so few troops and the local police force in shambles, insurgents came back and turned Tal Afar, a dusty, agrarian city of about 200,000 people, into a way station for the trafficking of arms and insurgent fighters from nearby Syria -- and a ghost town of terrorized residents afraid to open their stores, walk the streets or send their children to school.
It is a cycle that has been repeated in rebellious cities throughout Iraq, and particularly those in the Sunni Arab regions west and north of Baghdad, where the insurgency's roots run deepest.
''We have a finite number of troops,'' said Maj. Chris Kennedy, executive officer of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which arrived in Tal Afar several weeks ago. ''But if you pull out of an area and don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country. In the past, the problem has been we haven't been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where we've cleared the insurgents out.''
(Robert Kagan weighs in on the Pew poll in today's Washington Post and notes: "No one should lightly dismiss the current hostility toward the United States. International legitimacy matters. It is important in itself, and it affects others' willingness to work with us. But neither should we be paralyzed by the unavoidable resentments that our power creates. If we refrained from action out of fear that others around the world would be angry with us, then we would never act. And count on it: They'd blame us for that, too.")
Posted on June 16, 2006:
On Wednesday, the New York Times ran a front-page headline, “Global Image Of the U.S. Is Worsening,” based on the latest Pew poll of international attitudes toward the U.S. Of the 14 nations polled, only Russia and Pakistan view the U.S. more favorably today than they did in 1999/2000. Among the Islamic nations, favorable opinion of the US dropped sharply following our invasion of Afghanistan and accelerated downward following the ouster of Saddam. But even favorable opinion in non-Islamic nations (save France and Russia) slid downward after Afghanistan before plummeting post-Iraq. Thus, on balance and taking Pew’s numbers at face value, America was viewed more favorably prior to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But did our higher favorable ratings necessarily translate into more security? Did it discourage al Qaeda from setting up terror training camps where up to 10,000 may have passed through, including Zarqawi and his successor in Iraq, al-Masri? Did it matter to the terrorists who met in Kuala Lumpur in 2000 to plot the September 11 attacks or those who struck our barracks in Dhahran, our embassies in Africa and the USS Cole? Do you think the world’s favorable opinion of the US would have cratered if we had launched a massive attack on those camps in Afghanistan prior to September 11?
So while we should always work to enhance our image abroad, there will be times when our national security policies don’t poll well in the world. Post-September 11 is one of those.
Secretary Rice to the Southern Baptist Convention last week:
And when necessary, we are bringing justice to the terrorists. (Applause.) This is the fate that our troops delivered last week to the terrorist Zarqawi and now he will never harm, he will never murder, he will never terrorize innocent people again. (Applause.) That is what America stands for.
Yesterday's revelation of a terrorist plot to release poison gas in a NYC subway brings to mind the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo -- an attack that might have killed tens of thousands if the gas had been more effectively disbursed. In fact, Clinton officials would cite the attack in explaining why Saddam Hussein must be disarmed.
On November 15, 1997, for example, President Clinton told an audience that Americans should not view the current crisis with Iraq [at the time the administration was preparing the nation for possible military action] as a “replay” of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, he told people to
think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.
The same month Time magazine ran a piece, "America the Vulnerable," that stated:
officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call "strategic crime." By that they mean the merging of the output from a government’s arsenals, like Saddam’s biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups, who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them.
We still don't know what intelligence these officials based their "deep worry" on or whether that intelligence made its way into any of the president’s daily intelligence briefs.
From the Hotline's Blog:
June 19, 2006
Gore Won't Back Lieberman...Won't Oppose Him, Either, But...
Hat tip: The Note:
HUNT: "Sir, We only have about 30 seconds left, let me switch subjects for one final question. You opposed the Iraq war in 2002, your running mate in 2000, Joe Lieberman, had a different view, he supported the war. He's running against an anti-war candidate now. Who are you for?"
GORE: "I am not involved. I typically do not get involved in Democratic primaries. Joe is my close friend, Joe & Hadassah are close to Tipper and me and it would be very difficult for me to ever oppose him. But I don't get involved in primaries typically. He's a great guy and he's right on a lot of other issues."
I’m not surprised the former vice president is sticking it to his running mate. Gore’s been spending lots of time with the same folks seeking Lieberman's ouster. He has even pushed the “Bush lied” on Iraq wmd nonsense even though he told an audience in San Francisco in September 2002 that Saddam had “stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.” Sounds like the perfect 2008 candidate for the Democrats to rally around.
Conservative columnist George Will isn't a fan of the House-passed immigration bill. He believes it’s bad policy and bad politics. A few months back, he criticized “faux conservatives” for trying to pin the “amnesty” moniker on the Senate-passed bill.
[C]onservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal immigrants on a path out of society's crevices and into citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives absurdly call this price tag on legal status "amnesty." Actually, it would prevent the emergence of a sullen, simmering subculture of the permanently marginalized, akin to the Arab ghettos in France. The House-passed bill, making it a felony to be in the country illegally, would make 11 million people permanently ineligible for legal status. To what end?
And in today’s Washington Post Will argues that the GOP risks inflicting long-term political damage if it stumbles on immigration.
So, safely assuming that the House-Senate conference fails to produce a compromise acceptable to both houses, when Congress returns to Washington after the Labor Day recess, the House may again pass essentially what it passed in December….
The cost of this, paid in the coin of lost support among Latinos, the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority, may be reckoned later, for years. Remember this: Out West, feelings of all sorts about immigration policy are particularly intense, and if John Kerry had won a total of 127,014 more votes in New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, states with burgeoning Latino populations, he would have carried those states and won the election. But for now, the minds of Republican candidates are concentrated on a shorter time horizon -- the next 4 1/2 months.
On Wednesday, the New York Times ran a front-page headline, “Global Image Of the U.S. Is Worsening,” based on the latest Pew poll of international attitudes toward the U.S. Of the 14 nations polled, only Russia and Pakistan view the U.S. more favorably today than they did in 1999/2000. Among the Islamic nations, favorable opinion of the US dropped sharply following our invasion of Afghanistan and accelerated downward following the ouster of Saddam. But even favorable opinion in non-Islamic nations (save France and Russia) slid downward after Afghanistan before plummeting post-Iraq. Thus, on balance and taking Pew’s numbers at face value, America was viewed more favorably prior to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But did our higher favorable ratings necessarily translate into more security? Did it discourage al Qaeda from setting up terror training camps where up to 10,000 may have passed through, including Zarqawi and his successor in Iraq, al-Masri? Did it matter to the terrorists who met in Kuala Lumpur in 2000 to plot the September 11 attacks or those who struck our barracks in Dhahran, our embassies in Africa and the USS Cole? Do you think the world’s favorable opinion of the US would have cratered if we had launched a massive attack on those camps in Afghanistan prior to September 11?
So while we should always work to enhance our image abroad, there will be times when our national security policies don’t poll well in the world. Post-September 11 is one of those.
Many of the Democrats who voted against their leadership represent districts that Nancy Pelosi could never win. A few more votes along the lines of today’s, combined with a message that a Democratic House means Speaker Pelosi, could pay dividends in some of these districts in November. For the record, three GOPers defected.
The vice president had this to say yesterday on Fox News on Sen. Kerry's latest position on the Iraq War:
I guess I'm not surprised at John Kerry switching his position yet again. ... He did in fact support our efforts in Iraq initially. He says he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. Now I suppose this is sort of a complete 180-degree turn that he'd started during the last campaign. The fact of the matter is they're making the charge, Kerry is now, that somehow he was misled. He wasn't misled. He saw the same intelligence all the rest of us saw.
His comment reminded me of Kerry’s lecturing of President Bush during the 2004 campaign. Kerry lavished praise on Bush’s father for putting a UN-backed coalition together to kick Saddam out of Kuwait. But he never mentioned his vote against the 1990 Senate resolution authorizing force against Saddam. Guess it didn't pass his “global test” of legitimacy.
Last December, some Democrats and some in the media were up in arms about a Pentagon operation that “paid Iraqi newspapers to carry positive news about U.S. efforts in Iraq.” The Washington Post added:
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to the Defense Department's inspector general asking for an investigation into the program and the Lincoln Group contract. Kennedy called it "a devious scheme to place favorable propaganda in Iraqi newspapers."
And Tim Russert brought the issue up on Meet the Press. Well, one nugget from the purported text of the al Qaeda document released today suggests that our wartime media operation hit its target:
3. By undertaking a media campaign against the resistance resulting in weakening its influence inside the country and presenting its work as harmful to the population rather than being beneficial to the population.
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(Update: From AP: "Although the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the document was found in al-Zarqawi's hideout following a June 7 airstrike that killed him, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said the document had in fact been found in a previous raid as part of an ongoing three-week operation to track al-Zarqawi. 'We can verify that this information did come off some kind of computer asset that was at a safe location,' he said. 'This was prior to the al-Zarqawi safe house.'")
Iraq's national security advisor has released the purported text of a document, found in the Zarqawi safe house that was blasted by the U.S. Air Force, calling for a review of the “current bleak situation” in Iraq. In it, al Qaeda in Iraq views the continued presence of American forces as “harmful to the resistance.”
As an overall picture, time has been an element in affecting negatively the forces of the occupying countries, due to the losses they sustain economically in human lives, which are increasing with time. However, here in Iraq, time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance….
In other words, the fact that America hasn’t “cut and run” has dealt a blow to al Qaeda’s plans for Iraq. Why is the American presence “harmful to the resistance”?
1. By allowing the American forces to form the forces of the National Guard, to reinforce them and enable them to undertake military operations against the resistance.
2. By undertaking massive arrest operations, invading regions that have an impact on the resistance, and hence causing the resistance to lose many of its elements.
3. By undertaking a media campaign against the resistance resulting in weakening its influence inside the country and presenting its work as harmful to the population rather than being beneficial to the population.
4. By tightening the resistance's financial outlets, restricting its moral options and by confiscating its ammunition and weapons.
5. By creating a big division among the ranks of the resistance and jeopardizing its attack operations, it has weakened its influence and internal support of its elements, thus resulting in a decline of the resistance's assaults.
6. By allowing an increase in the number of countries and elements supporting the occupation or at least allowing to become neutral in their stand toward us in contrast to their previous stand or refusal of the occupation.
7. By taking advantage of the resistance's mistakes and magnifying them in order to misinform.
Because the Americans won’t exit, the document suggests trying “to entangle the American forces into another war against another country [Iran] or with another of our enemy force…” to take the pressure off the terror group. Al Qaeda’s desire to get U.S. forces out of Iraq was highlighted last July in Zawahiri’s letter to Zarqawi. “The first stage," he wrote, is to “expel the Americans from Iraq.” He also counseled Zarqawi to be prepared because,
things may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam-and how they ran and left their agents-is noteworthy. Because of that, we must be ready starting now, before events overtake us, and before we are surprised by the conspiracies of the Americans and the United Nations and their plans to fill the void behind them. We must take the initiative and impose a fait accompli upon our enemies, instead of the enemy imposing one on us, wherein our lot would be to merely resist their schemes.
Those who oppose Democratic demands for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq should highlight the above during debate on the House and Senate floor and in the media. As William Kristol has noted: let’s not “give Zarqawi a victory in death that he could not achieve in life.”
Stars and Strips has published a special edition entitled “Heroes: A Nation Honors Valor in the War on Terror.” The newspaper’s Patrick Dickson writes: “This publication captures but a glimpse of the deeds U.S. servicemembers have performed in distant lands. We honor all those who persevere in the cause of liberty.”
"Mr. President, as commander-in-chief. how did you feel when you heard the news that American forces had put an end to Zarqawi, the brutal terrorist responsible for the deaths of so many Americans?" Oh, you didn’t hear that question from a reporter at today’s press conference in the White House Rose Garden. Neither did I. In fact, the usual “why shouldn't Guantanamo be closed?” mantra was asked well before someone got around to asking about the successful strike against one of the most brutal individuals on earth – and even then the reporter couldn’t resist putting a negative spin on the question. Take a look for yourself here.
Gov. Tom Vilsack wants to bring to Iowa the same crowd that regularly pummels the group he heads, the “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council. From the New York Times:
“As successful as YearlyKos was this year, in 2007 it should be even bigger and more influential. Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa and a likely presidential candidate, is already lobbying for it to be held in Iowa -- the site of the first presidential caucuses in 2008."
What’s next? An invitation to Michael Moore to join the DLC leadership team?
Democrats are set to roll out their policy agenda because "if we don't define what we stand for,” said a Pelosi spokesman, “they'll define it for us.” But increasingly Democrats are defining themselves on Iraq.
Senator John Kerry yesterday to a gathering of liberals at the "Take Back America" conference:
It was right to dissent from a war in 1971 that was wrong and could not be won. And now, in 2006, it is both a right and an obligation for Americans to stand up to a president who is wrong today.
The not-so-conservative editors of the Boston Globe must love this piece today by their own Jeff Jacoby:
WHEN IRAQ'S Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced last week that a US air strike had killed terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi reporters burst into cheers and applause. It was a heartwarming -- and to American eyes, unnatural -- show of joy. Most American journalists would think it unseemly to cheer anything said at a press conference, even the news that a sadistic mass murderer had finally met his end.
Important and welcome as Zarqawi's assassination was, it didn't put a dent in the quagmire-of-the-week mindset that depicts the war as a fiasco wrapped in a scandal inside a failure.
"We were absolutely right to remove him from power and we have no excuses to make for it," said Karl Rove yesterday to New Hampshire Republicans. He also suggested that Republicans should quit being punching bags for the Democrats. It’s the “cutting and running” crowd, Rove charged, who should explain their “profoundly wrong” policy that “would provide a launching pad for the terrorists to strike the United States and the West" (see here, here and here). Bravo. Sen. John Kerry, who voted for the war then turned against it, will soon be on the Senate floor arguing that his troop withdrawal plan really isn’t the equivalent of running up the white flag. But voters will know better. Republicans should follow Rove’s advice. They should make Democrats (with a few notable exceptions) squirm for wanting to keep Saddam in power and remind voters of the strategic and moral consequences of adopting the Democrats’ “cut and run” plans. Republicans should repeat William Kristol’s line: let’s not “give Zarqawi a victory in death that he could not achieve in life.”
The Defense Department has released the bios of the three who committed suicide in Gitmo:
Ali Abdullah Ahmed, the Yemeni, was a mid- to high-level al Qaeda operative with links to principal al Qaeda facilitators and senior membership, according to information released by DoD. Throughout his time at Guantanamo Bay, Ahmed was noncompliant and hostile to the guard force, and he was a long-term hunger striker from late 2005 to May 2006. Ahmed had been formally recommended for continued detention in Guantanamo Bay.
Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi al-Utaybi, a Saudi, was a member of Jama'at Tabligh, a militant recruitment group for al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist groups, according to the DoD release. Jama'at Tabligh has been used by al Qaeda to cover travel throughout the world and has been banned in Saudi Arabia since the 1980s. Utaybi had been recommended for transfer to another country for continued detention in that country.
Yassar Talal al-Zahrani, a Saudi, was an actual front line fighter for the Taliban who had traveled to Afghanistan to take up arms against anti-Taliban forces, according to the release. Zahrani facilitated weapons purchases for Taliban offensives against U.S. and coalition forces. He was captured by Afghan forces and participated in an Afghan prison uprising in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, that resulted in the November 2001 death of CIA officer Johnny Michael Spann.
Iran's Ahmadinejad has some fans in Germany:
This is the latest chapter in Berlin's difficult relations with Iran which has gained sympathy among Germany's far right. The Government banned a Holocaust denial conference last year featuring the leader of the far-right National Party (NPD) and the Iranian leadership. The NPD has also adopted the Iranian team as its World Cup favourite.About 200 members of the NPD staged a rally in Gelsenkirchen on Saturday calling for "solidarity with Iran".
Yesterday's New York Times reports, in paragraph 18, that the French believed Zarqawi was active in Europe before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, a point often missed in the media’s coverage of his death:
…French counterterrorism officials said they found Mr. Zarqawi's handiwork in a Chechen-trained terrorist cell in the suburbs of Paris that was broken up in December 2002. Chemicals, bomb-making materials and a chemical weapons protection suit were found in the men's possession, together with elements for a remote control detonator.
Beginning in paragraph two, the same piece also notes:
[Zarqawi’s] recruiting efforts, according to high-ranking Jordanian security officials interviewed Saturday, were threefold: He sought volunteers to fight in Iraq and others to become suicide bombers there, but he also recruited about 300 who went to Iraq for terrorist training and sent them back to their home countries, where they await orders to carry out strikes.
There have been scattered reports that Iraq had become a training ground, but Jordan's assessment was the first to offer firm numbers.
Of a range of intelligence experts in the United States, Europe and Jordan interviewed about Mr. Zarqawi's reach, only the Jordanians offered such detail.
Counterterrorism officials in the United States said that they, too, had seen a flow of terrorists into Iraq from other countries, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, seeking training under Mr. Zarqawi and his associates.
But they said that they believed the ''bleed out'' of people trained and sent home to await orders was probably significantly lower than 300.
Contrast that number to those who trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan from the 1990s on before dispersing to dozens of other nations. Richard Clarke, a national security official in the Clinton and Bush administrations, told PBS’s Frontline the following in March 2002:
I think the intelligence community, the FBI, were unanimous, certainly throughout the year 2000 into 2001, that there was in fact a very widespread Al Qaeda network around the world in probably between 50-60 countries -- that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan; that we didn't really know who those people were.
He continued:
Question: But didn't you push for military action after the Cole?
Clarke: Yes, that's one of the exceptions.
Question: How important is that exception?
I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed. So many, many trained and indoctrinated Al Qaeda terrorists, which now we have to hunt down country by country, many of them would not be trained and would not be indoctrinated, because there wouldn't have been a safe place to do it if we had destroyed the camps earlier.
While we don’t know how many of these terrorists are now operating in Iraq or have been killed there, we do know that a large-scale terrorist “conveyor belt” was operating before the U.S. mounted a sustained and serious campaign against al Qaeda and well before coalition forces invaded Iraq. Perhaps someone will make all these points during the upcoming debate on Iraq in the House and Senate or the next time they are interviewed by Chris Matthews or Tim Russert on the Iraq "bleed out."
This is how a senior White House official characterized the stakes involved in the Iraq discussions the president is having at Camp David today and tomorrow. Last week, Ambassador Khalilzad acknowledged that the security situation in Baghdad has deteriorated the last few months. And retired General Barry McCaffrey calls the city the “central battlefield of the insurgency.” With Zarqawi dead, the conventional wisdom of the media is that the Camp David meeting will end with word that US troop levels will be drawdown, as General Casey suggested yesterday. But don’t be surprised if just the opposite happens – at least in the short term and perhaps only in the western approaches to Baghdad. The president may be drawing on the lessons advanced in Eliot Cohen’s "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime," a book on his summer reading list a few years back.
Who will be the first Democrat to call for an investigation of this claim?
In the wake of his death, we should remember that the insurgency deepened and Zarqawi thrived primarily because we had deployed too few troops, argues Reuel Marc Gerecht in the current Weekly Standard. He also warns, “we nor the Iraqis are going to find salvation through good intelligence and smart bombs” alone.
The dimensions of Zarqawi's possible success are thus enormous--greater than what bin Laden accomplished on September 11. Zarqawi was the right man, with the right tactics, at the right moment. In all probability, he would not have mattered if the United States had actually occupied the Sunni Triangle after the deposing of Saddam Hussein, thereby giving the fallen Sunni Arab community a chance to breathe before they became sentimentally and physically enmeshed by the homegrown insurgency and imported holy war.
But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chose not to send more troops to Iraq after the fall of Saddam, even after it became blindingly obvious that the insurgents, not the Americans, controlled the roads throughout the Sunni Triangle. General John Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, married Rumsfeld's mania for new-age warfare and his lack of interest in post-Saddam Iraqi society with a very new-age, "light footprint" approach to counterinsurgency.
As this thinking has it, American forces, if deployed in large numbers, are more likely to provoke trouble than secure the peace. We are, as General Abizaid likes to say, "antibodies" in the Muslim Middle East. This is an odd position to hold after three years of ever-worsening insurgency--especially when violence has dropped in Iraq every time the Bush administration has increased U.S. troop levels for a national election. It's an odd position to hold after the victory in Tal Afar, where the American command saturated the town with U.S. troops, and the freed Sunni Arab residents were thankful.
It may well be that the manner of Zarqawi's death will send the wrong signal to the U.S. military, which seems determined to continue its "intelligence-driven" counterinsurgency. Good intelligence was followed by laser-guided munitions--just the kind of action that warms Secretary Rumsfeld's heart. But neither we nor the Iraqis are going to find salvation through good intelligence and smart bombs.
If we continue on this "easy" path, we will only guarantee that Abu Musab al Zarqawi's name will endure. Odds are decent that a historian looking back on our sojourn in Mesopotamia and the Iraqis' valiant effort to create a democracy on the ruins of Saddam's totalitarianism will find on our epitaph some tribute to Zarqawi, our monument no doubt safely inside the Green Zone, far from the carnage that this most savage of terrorists fathered.
The Bush administration may not have a more opportune time to decisively swing the war against the insurgents. Zarqawi is dead, and Iraq’s new defense and interior ministers are in place. The Wall Street Journal weighs in that “now’s the time to secure Baghdad,” and the editors of the National Review show common cause with Sen. McCain on Iraq. They write:
If Maliki, in these conditions, says he needs, say, another 20,000 U.S. troops to finally secure Baghdad, Bush shouldn’t hesitate.
This would bring howls and comparisons to the escalation in Vietnam. But we suspect the public would be willing to swallow it, if such an increase in troops levels is persuasively linked to a plan for victory. The comparisons to Vietnam are more aptly made about the status quo, which has featured steadily ebbing domestic support and an arguably decaying situation on the ground. In sheer political terms, Bush is probably better off taking action—even what seems a risky action in an election year—than “staying the course” with the same old resolute, reassuring talk.
In other words, do what it takes to win. Only someone in total denial wouldn't recognize that the current strategy for securing the Baghdad area isn’t getting the job done, as Reuel Marc Gerecht, Frederick Kagan, and others have noted.
Above all, we must not "give Zarqawi a victory in death that he could not achieve in life."
From today's New York Times:
On Thursday night, Israeli planes attacked a training camp of the Popular Resistance Committees in an old Israeli settlement west of Rafah, killing four people and wounding seven.
This is the top priority of al Qaeda in Iraq. “The first stage,” Zawahiri wrote last July in his strategy letter to Zarqawi, is to “expel the Americans from Iraq.” He also counseled Zarqawi to be prepared because “things may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam-and how they ran and left their agents-is noteworthy. Becau | | | |
