May 19, 2008 • Vol. 13, No. 34
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
« August 2006 |
Main
| October 2006 »
A big rap against Hillary Clinton getting the Democratic presidential nod has been that her position on the Iraq War has put her at odds with the party’s anti-war base. Lefty bloggers and prominent liberal journals like The Nation have pounded away at her for not doing a John Kerry-like flip-flop on the war. But if the past few weeks prove anything, it shows the power of the Clinton political machine.
A couple weeks back, Bill Clinton arranged a meeting with liberal bloggers in his New York City office. The bloggers “came away with stars in their eyes,” in the words of Paul West of the Baltimore Sun. Last weekend, the former president went after Fox News and conservatives, to the applause of the Democratic base. Democratic politicians and Clinton operatives also joined in the Fox bashing. Hillary Clinton then jumped in by hitting President Bush for not doing enough prior to September 11. She followed that by blasting the president over the terrorist detainee bill – a bill that gives “the Bush-Cheney Administration a blank check – a blank check to torture, to create secret courts using secret evidence, to detain people…” – again to the wild applause of the Democratic base.
So in the blink of an eye, the Clintons fired up the base, took it to the Republicans and dominated the headlines. Come primary time, the Clinton machine will much more formidable than people realize should the New York senator make a run. Of course, the general election is another matter. Stay tuned.
I assume many modern-day Democrats would view FDR as an extra-constitutional tyrant running a “thinly veiled military dictatorship.” From today’s Washington Post:
The [terrorist detainee] bill contains some protections unavailable to the eight Nazi saboteurs who came ashore in the United States in 1942 and were captured two weeks later. Six were executed that year after a closed military trial on the fifth floor of Justice Department headquarters. That proceeding was upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision it explained two months after the electrocutions.
Also, the Democratic Leadership Council’s Marshall Wittmann offers some tough words:
It is safe to say that America is providing non-state combatant detainees more rights and better treatment than any other nation would do under similar circumstances. These military tribunals compare favorably with any others in our own history from Washington to Lincoln to FDR. The hysteria about "tyranny" in America is truly inappropriate.
America accords extraordinary rights even to our enemies who would use all means necessary to kill us and our families. How many countries in the history of civilization would give these rights to killers who refuse to abide by the rules of war and who don't exactly adhere to international treaties? The congressional debate over the last few days was not over "torture" but rather setting reasonable procedures to interrogate and address the status of stateless terrorists and their enablers who refuse to abide by the rules of war.
It comes down to a clash of perspectives between those who view the fight against Jihadists as a criminal action against a gang versus those who view it as a war against a terrorist movement that rejects the normal rules of combat. If you believe the former, the detainees should have access to all of the protections and rights of the American legal system. If your perspective is that this is a war, then the normal protections that are championed by the ACLU for American citizens do not apply.
America remains the great hope of liberalism in a world threatened by reactionaries who seek to repeal civilization and return us to the seventh century. For the sake of the soul of progressivism, it is time for liberals to speak these truths.
Anti-Bush animus is leading lefties to lose perspective and adopt the old "Blame America First" mentality. The enemy is not us.
(Today's Christian Science Monitor has more on his bid for a Security Council seat: “One country that supports Venezuela's campaign is China, which is perhaps not enthralled with the Chávez rhetoric but is lured by the idea of more countries holding its worldview on the Council. China has not been shy about its preference to see greater respect in Security Council deliberations for nation-states' rights, and less attention to individuals' universal rights - ideas implicit in Chávez's discourse.”)
Posted on August 9, 2006:
This fall the UN will vote to replace the current non-permanent members of the Security Council with new nations. Though little reported in the media, for many weeks Hugo Chavez has been traveling the globe trolling for enough votes from regimes opposed to the U.S. to get on the Council. He’s been offering cut-rate oil deals and has signed agreements to buy weapons. His latest campaign swing brought him to Tehran, where he lavished praise on the regime for standing up to the Americans. Now, he’s taken up the cause of Hezbollah and has accused Israel of perpetrating a “new Holocaust” in Lebanon. On Monday, Israel withdrew its ambassador to Venezuela. Earlier, Chavez recalled Venezuela’s charge d’affaires to Israel. In a recent televised speech, the BBC reports, Chavez said that he had
no interest in maintaining diplomatic relations, or offices, or businesses, or anything with a state like Israel….
Israel has gone mad. It's attacking, doing the same thing to the Palestinian and Lebanese people that they have criticised - and with reason - the Holocaust. But this is a new Holocaust.
At least one very senior Republican I know of believes the Bush administration must make denying Chavez a seat on the Council a top priority. Specifically, all U.S. ambassadors should let their host country know that the U.S. government would view a vote for Chavez as an unfriendly act. The administration should also encourage a friendlier nation in Latin America to seek a Security Council seat.
One thing is for sure: If Chavez succeeds, it would be very bad news for the U.S.
The Senate passed the terrorist detainee bill tonight, 65 to 34. The minority leader opposed final passage, as did all the prospective Democratic presidential candidates – Bayh, Biden, Kerry, Feingold, and Hillary Clinton. Here’s Sen. Clinton’s statement opposing the bill:
The Senate, under the authority of the Republican Majority and with the blessing and encouragement of the Bush-Cheney Administration, is doing a great disservice to our history, our principles, our citizens, and our soldiers. The deliberative process is being broken under the pressure of partisanship and the policy that results is a travesty….
Once again, there are those who are willing to stay a course that is not working, giving the Bush-Cheney Administration a blank check – a blank check to torture, to create secret courts using secret evidence, to detain people, including Americans, to be free of judicial oversight and accountability, to put our troops in greater danger.
And here is McCain’s urging its passage:
This legislation will allow the CIA to continue interrogating prisoners within the boundaries established in the bill. Let me state this flatly: it was never our purpose to prevent the CIA from detaining and interrogating terrorists. On the contrary, it is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to do so. At the same time, the CIA’s interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act….
Finally, I would note that there has been opposition to this legislation from some quarters, including the New York Times editorial page. Without getting into a point-by-point rebuttal here on the floor, I would simply say that I have been reading the Congressional Record trying to find the bill that page so vociferously denounced. The hyperbolic attack is aimed not at any bill this body is today debating, nor even at the Administration’s original position. I can only presume that some would prefer that Congress simply ignore the Hamdan decision, and pass no legislation at all. That, I suggest to my colleagues, would be a travesty.
(The House also passed legislation yesterday authorizing a robust terrorist wiretapping program. 177 Democrats voted against final passage, including Hoyer and Tauscher.)
To understand just how much the Democratic center has collapsed look no further than Maryland Congressman Steny Hoyer. Last September, Roll Call reported that Hoyer had cobbled together a dozen or so of his colleagues "to shape the Democratic strategy on national security issues and battle perceptions that the party is weak on defense." Hoyer also said that Democrats had lost the “national election because of national security” and because of a “lack of confidence of the American public.” A few months later, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (CA), a member of Hoyer's group and also onetime vice chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, co-sponsored legislation with Rep. John Conyers (MI) calling for the termination of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program -- a program Gen. Hayden said "has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States." Tauscher dubbed the Bush administration's actions "despicable.”
Fast forward to yesterday’s House vote on the terrorist detainee legislation. Hoyer (along with Tauscher) was one of 160 Democrats who opposed the bill. Why? The bill "is really more about who we are as a people than it is about those who seek to harm us,” said Hoyer. “Defending America requires us to marshal the full range of our power: diplomatic and military, economic and moral. And when our moral standing is eroded, our international credibility is diminished as well." Actually, the bill, as Sen. McCain explained, keeps a critical wartime intelligence program going so we can disrupt al Qaeda operations to attack us.
Look, [the] ACLU and the New York Times don't like the agreement, but we think this will recognize, people will recognize that it defends both our values and our security. Some want the CIA not to be able to carry out this program. That was never our intent. And--but it was--it's very important that we have this tool to collect intelligence.
Democrats have now backed themselves into a corner with the ACLU and the New York Times. Republicans may want to note it.
A reader emails on this ("Al-Qaida in Iraq: 4,000 Insurgents Dead") AP piece:
Yikes. You mean they have an actual number? Do the guys who wrote the NIE think the Iraq war created more than 4000 active, fighting terrorists?
Senator Clinton made the following statement on the NIE on September 25:
Its findings as described in the press are deeply distressing because they confirm what a lot of us feared that the policies pursued by this administration have not worked and therefore we are breeding terrorists who will not only take aim at us but at our friends and allies including innocent Iraqis who try to get up and go on with their lives. I have been a strong critic of the administration's policies from the very beginning - the way they have conducted themselves, the decisions they have made the strategic blunder after blunder that they are responsible for. I would hope that they would listen to other people and obviously they haven't been willing to do that which is why this election in November is so important.
Does the senator now believe that it was a “strategic blunder” to take Saddam out in March 2003?
Does she agree that Iraq was a “cause celebre” for al Qaeda prior to the invasion?
Does she believe it would be a “strategic blunder” for President Bush to follow the advice of the Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and the other Ned Lamont Democrats and withdraw from Iraq?
Would such a policy “breed” more “terrorists who will not only take aim at us but at our friends and allies including innocent Iraqis”?
Ned Lamont is still getting trounced in the polls, reports the Hartford Courant:
Lieberman maintains a 10-point advantage among likely voters in the poll, leading Lamont 49 percent to 39 percent in a three-way race. Republican Alan Schlesinger trails with 5 percent….
The Quinnipiac poll showed that Lieberman has higher favorability ratings among likely voters, 51 percent to Lamont's 31 percent. While Lamont has slightly higher favorability numbers among Democrats (47 percent to 43 percent), Lieberman far outdistances his challenger among likely Republican and unaffiliated voters. Seventy percent of Republicans view Lieberman favorably compared to 12 percent for Lamont, and 48 percent of independent voters view Lieberman favorably compared to 30 percent for Lamont.
Meanwhile, Marshall Wittmann over at the DLC writes:
It appears that the vaunted grassroots campaign is running dry for cash. The Hartford Courant,
"Democrat Ned Lamont is reaching for his hefty checkbook yet again. The multimillionaire businessman wrote a $750,000 check this week to help fund his campaign against Sen. Joe Lieberman, the three-term incumbent running as an independent after losing the Democratic nod to Lamont."
People power!!!!
Reuters reports:
Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans on Wednesday not to bow to fears of Islamic violence after a Berlin opera house canceled a Mozart work over concerns some scenes could enrage Muslims and pose a security risk.
"I think the cancellation was a mistake. I think self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practise violence in the name of Islam," she told reporters. "It makes no sense to retreat."
Merkel's comments, which echoed those of other senior German politicians, fueled a row over the cancellation of Mozart's "Idomeneo" that overshadowed a government-sponsored conference to promote dialogue with the country's 3.2 million Muslims.
Merkel joins Australia’s John Howard in not knuckling under to threats and intimidation.
Given Sen. Hillary Clinton's remark yesterday,
I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team,"
has the Richard Clarke-authored Millennium after-action report on the Clinton administration’s anti-terror efforts ever been made public? From the 9/11 report, Staff Statement Number 8:
In a January 2000 note to Berger, Clarke reported that the CSG drew two main conclusions from the Millennium crisis. First, it had concluded that U.S.-led disruption efforts “have not put too much of a dent” into Bin Ladin’s network abroad. Second, it feared that “sleeper cells” or other links to foreign terrorist groups had taken root in the United States. Berger then led a formal Millennium after-action review....
In 1998, bin Laden officially declared war on all Americans. It was the “individual duty for every Muslim,” bin Laden declared, “to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military.” His declaration was apparently an effective recruitment tool. By 2001, al Qaeda had trained in Afghanistan “perhaps over 10,000 terrorists,” according to Richard Clarke, before they dispersed to "probably between 5o-60 counties." The 1998 war declaration/recruitment propaganda listed the “crimes and sins committed by the Americans” against Muslims. At the top of list was Iraq:
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Charles Krauthammer put all this into perspective in light of the NIE last night on Fox News:
On the one hand it is a "cause celebre," it attracts jihads. But in fact, Iraq before 9/11 was a "cause celebre." If you look at the declaration of war that Osama issued in 1998 against the United States, Iraq, with reasons No. 1 and No. 2.
No. 2 was the sanctions embargo, killing Iraqi children, that was a reason to go to war against America due 9/11. No. 1 was the stationing of American troops, infidels if the holy places of the Mecca and Medina, meaning our troops in Saudi Arabia who were there protecting against Saddam. So, Iraq has always been a factor.
On the other hand, the factor is that if we fight the jihads in Iraq and we succeed, then that will be a defeat for jihad. It's on the one hand and on the other, the idea that it is the cause of the spreading of terrorism is absurd. It was propaganda in the press and it was not a reflection of reality….
[L]ook, when we attacked Japan, the home islands, it increased a recruitment for kamikazes. Was that a reason not to attack the Japanese home islands? If you're going to hit the bad guy, of course he's going to get upset about it. Big deal. What's new about that?
And, secondly, look, if it is a magnet, just this week a guy called Omar Faruq, the head of al Qaeda in Southeast Asia was killed in Basra, by the British. He was a guy who ordinarily would be in Southeast Asia planning attacks on Americans, on Australians, et cetera. He went to Iraq, he died in Iraq. If that's a magnet -- and a lot of them go to Iraq and die in Iraq. It's a good thing.
Andrew McCarthy has more here on Iraq and al Qaeda recruitment.
From AFP:
Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has put rewriting the US-imposed pacifist constitution at the top of his agenda, a move that could lead to a more active military role overseas but alarm neighboring countries.
Abe, who took office Tuesday as Japan's first prime minister born after World War II, has been vague on much of his platform but has passionately vowed to revise the constitution, saying he wanted to "write it with my own hand."
"I belong to the post-World War II generation. The era dominated by the preconceived idea that the constitution should never be changed is over," Abe said during the campaign.
But experts said the process of rewriting the constitution would likely be slow and methodical as Abe seeks to win over skeptics both at home and abroad.
Here's the "Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States dated April 2006." Among other things, the NIE, which Democrats have embraced, indicates that a jihadist failure in Iraq would hurt their cause. It will be interesting to listen to Democrats explain how their troop withdrawal plans for Iraq would hasten that failure. As I noted earlier today, Democrats can’t even convince sympathetic generals to buy into what they’re selling on the cut-and-run front. Sen. McConnell has it right:
Whoever leaked this report forgot to mention a key finding of the intelligence community: If we defeat the terrorists in Iraq, there will be fewer terrorists inspired to carry on the fight. In other words, defeating terrorists in Iraq not only secures that new democracy, but prevents future attacks here at home. This is a dramatically different message than the selective leaks to the media.
It’s important to remember that terror attacks against the United States didn’t start the day our troops entered Baghdad, and they won’t end if we leave Iraq to the terrorists.
Also, Robert Kagan makes some excellent points on the NIE in today’s Washington Post.
The Supreme Court ruled against aspects of the president’s policy on the handling of those captured in the war we are engaged in. The elected president then goes to Congress seeking legislation that is consistent with the Court’s Hamdan decision. He comes to an agreement with Senators McCain, Graham and Warner on bill language. Elected officials will soon debate and vote on that language on the Senate floor. Amendments to that language will also be debated and voted on. What ever passes the Senate must then be reconciled with the House bill before both houses vote again on the final measure. Once passed, the bill will hit the president’s desk for his signature. And even after that, the Supreme Court can still weigh-in. Some disagreed with Sen. McCain’s role in all this and now, because they disagree with the compromise bill, are lecturing him on torture and implying that his actions in brokering a bill that keeps a critical intelligence program operating have aided the creation of a “thinly veiled military dictatorship.” I'd venture to guess that Sen. McCain has much more insight into the nature of military dictatorships than most of his critics.
The folks at Britain's Henry Jackson Society have an interesting response (click on "latest editorial") to David Cameron’s recent foreign policy speech that I discussed two weeks ago. They write:
The cherry picking between the Hurd-Rifkind school of realism and the liberal interventionism of William Gladstone and Tony Blair is unsustainable. Mr. Cameron must realise now that the severe security and strategic challenges facing Britain and the international community calls for a coherent foreign policy which does not attempt to be all things to all people. Hesitation, indecision and muddled thinking are not what the present dangerous circumstances call for. Mr. Cameron’s speech exposes two competing world-views and two competing conceptions of Britain’s role in the world. Sooner or later he will have to choose which one it is that he truly believes is best for Britain’s security and prosperity.
From CBS News:
SMITH: I want to go back now to Michael Scheuer once again. Let's talk about what President Clinton had to say on Fox yesterday. He basically laid blame at the feet of the CIA and the FBI for not being able to certify or verify that Osama bin Laden was responsible for a number of different attacks. Does that ring true to you?
Mr. MICHAEL SCHEUER (CBS News Terrorism Analyst): No, sir, I don't think so. The president seems to be able--the former president seems to be able to deny facts with impunity. Bin Laden is alive today because Mr. Clinton, Mr. Sandy Berger, and Mr. Richard Clarke refused to kill him. That's the bottom line. And every time he says what he says to Chris Wallace on Fox...
SMITH: Mm-hmm.
Mr. SCHEUER: ...he defames the CIA, especially, and the men and women who risked their lives to give his administration repeated chances to kill bin Laden.
SMITH: All right, is the Bush administration any less responsible for not finishing the job in Tora Bora?
Mr. SCHEUER: Oh, I think--I think there's plenty of blame to go around, sir, but the fact of the matter is that the Bush administration had one chance that they botched and the Clinton administration had eight to 10 chances that they refused to try. At least at Tora Bora our forces were on the ground. We didn't push the point. But it's just an incredible kind of situation for the American people over the weekend to hear their former president mislead them.
Yesterday, the Democrats got together with some retired generals who’ve been highly critical of Sec. Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq War. The generals spoke before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, but, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank notes, they also delivered a message the Democrats didn’t want to hear.
But Democrats, while celebrating Batiste's criticism of the administration, exercised some selective listening at the hearing when Batiste and his colleagues offered their solution: more troops, more money and more time in Iraq.
"We must mobilize our country for a protracted challenge," Batiste warned.
"We better be planning for at least a minimum of a decade or longer," contributed retired Marine Col. Thomas Hammes.
"We are, conservatively, 60,000 soldiers short," added retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of building the Iraqi Security Forces.
That last remark caused Schumer to shake his head, indicating he was not so sure. And, indeed, the retired officers' recommendations were off-message for the Democrats. Six of the seven Democrats at the hearing supported legislation calling for the start of a troop withdrawal from Iraq this year. One, Richard Durbin (Ill.), voted for the pullout to be mostly complete by next summer.
Is any of this cited on the Democratic Policy Committee website or in the press releases put out following the "hearing"? Not a chance. On troop levels the generals have a point, as the National Review's Rich Lowry and the Standard's William Kristol explain here.
One way to send a message to Hugo Chavez, as Sen. McCain argues, is for Senate Democrats to stop obstructing the confirmation of John Bolton as UN Ambassador. From the AP:
Bolton Derides Venezuela Airport Protest
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- U.S. Ambassador John Bolton on Monday derided the Venezuelan foreign minister's protest over being detained at a New York airport as ''street theater'' and propaganda.
Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro claimed officials tried to frisk and handcuff him at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he left the annual U.N. General Assembly session on Saturday. Screeners grew suspicious when Maduro used cash to purchase a one-way ticket to Miami shortly before the flight was to leave, U.S. officials said….
The U.S. State Department has apologized for Maduro's treatment, but Bolton was less conciliatory.
''There was no 'incident' at the airport -- this was Venezuelan street theater,'' Bolton said. ''He did not request the courtesies we would have extended to get him through the airport. He purchased his ticket at a time and in a manner and with funding such that he was asked to go to secondary screening and he objected to that.''
''And the first thing he did was call the press and speak to them in Spanish, so this is propaganda,'' Bolton said….
President Clinton also claimed on Fox News yesterday that “all the right-wingers” believed he was “too obsessed” with bin Laden, that he “did too much” in going after the al Qaeda head. The reality is a bit different. Many conservatives applauded Clinton’s decision to strike in Sudan and Afghanistan following the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. In November 1998, for example, Andrew McCarthy wrote a lengthy piece in the Weekly Standard in support of the strikes, but he also explained why the Clinton administration’s overall approach to combating the terror threat was woefully inadequate. Similar to what Reuel Marc Gerecht would argue in the wake of the USS Cole bombing, McCarthy pushed the administration to treat international terrorism as “a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue.” He wrote:
Does the administration actually grasp the nature of the threat we face? Following the August 20 retaliatory strikes, secretary of state Madeleine Albright and national security adviser Samuel Berger rejected the predictable "wag the dog" accusations with solemn admonitions that, in terrorism, the United States has suddenly been confronted with a "new war" -- one we would now have to be prepared to fight, alone if necessary. This was exceedingly curious. There is nothing at all "new" about radical Islam's terrorist war against the United States. It has been going on since the late 1980s. It has been openly declared since the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, which killed six, injured over a thousand, and caused nearly $ 1 billion in damage. Its leaders, moreover, have been promising for more than five years that in pursuing this war, they would kill American civilians and bomb American military installations and embassies overseas….
Such an adversary will not be defeated by the techniques the president recommended at the U.N. -- increased international cooperation in the prosecution and extradition of terrorists. These are necessary steps, but breathtakingly inadequate. A military threat calls for a military response….
In the main, international terrorism is a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue. There is a severe limit to the circumstances in which it is either possible or prudent to apprehend terrorists overseas only to swaddle them in the rights of American defendants -- including education them, through the extensive discovery our system mandates, as to what we know about them and the precious and regrettably scarce sources of that information. Terrorists, furthermore, see the world in gimlet-eyed simplicity. They are not swayed by our breathless pursuit of international conventions that are broken with impunity, weapons-inspection regimes that we lack the stomach to police, or "peace processes" that become hideous euphemisms for body counts. These convey weakness. What impresses them is the certainty that force will swiftly and surely be met with exponentially superior force. That alone is a meaningful deterrent.
The Weekly Standard
November 2, 1998
HEADLINE: THE SUDAN CONNECTION;
The Missing Link in U.S. Terrorism Policy
BYLINE: By Andrew C. McCarthy;
Andrew C. McCarthy, formerly chief trial counsel at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, was the lead prosecutor at the terrorism trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others.
BODY:
At the very moment last month when Americans watched the videotape of their chief executive weaseling through testimony before a federal grand jury, President Clinton was addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York on international terrorism. To those who watch terrorism closely, the president's remarks and the accompanying atmosphere were profoundly disheartening. It was clear from the timing that the administration sees terrorism as a "winning issue" -- one that both illustrates the president's engagement in a matter of grave importance and reminds the public of the need for an energetic commander in chief. But Clinton's speech was a disaster. It succeeded only in spotlighting the dangerous uncertainty and incompetence of the administration's policy.
In many respects it was a boilerplate speech. There was the multilateralism one has come to expect from speeches at the U.N. (the president spoke not of American leadership in fighting terrorism but of the "common obligations" of nations to protect our "common destiny"). There was a tough-sounding summons "to step up extradition and prosecution" of terrorists. And there was the usual call for signing toothless "global antiterror" conventions. None of this was out of t ordinary. But noticeably and alarmingly absent -- especially after the president correctly portrayed the rising danger from global terror organizations bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction -- was any call for increased military readiness to meet the threat.
The omission was all the more pregnant since, in context, it seemed to signal a retreat from the decisive action the administration took on August 20, when it retaliated with cruise-missile strikes for he bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The American attack targeted sites in Afghanistan and Sudan linked to the wealthy exiled Saudi terrorist, Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for the embassy attacks. Indeed, according to defense secretary William Cohen, the missiles were targeted directly at the camp in Afghanistan where bin Laden was staying. Sudan, for its part, has been a lifeline for bin Laden throughout his fierce, years-long anti-American campaign.
The military strike was thus a fitting response. Yet the president shrank from defending it. Just minutes before he spoke at the U.N., secretary general Kofi Annan offered a none-too-veiled rebuke of the unilateral American action. And the day before, the New York Times had reported on the continued hand-wringing at the State Department, which is dissatisfied with the (ever-increasing) level of proof that the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory we bombed was in fact being used at bin Laden's behest to make nerve gas. At the most opportune possible moment, the president declined to speak in defense of his own military response to terrorism.
Does the administration actually grasp the nature of the threat we face? Following the August 20 retaliatory strikes, secretary of state Madeleine Albright and national security adviser Samuel Berger rejected the predictable "wag the dog" accusations with solemn admonitions that, in terrorism, the United States has suddenly been confronted with a "new war" -- one we would now have to be prepared to fight, alone if necessary. This was exceedingly curious. There is nothing at all "new" about radical Islam's terrorist war against the United States. It has been going on since the late 1980s. It has been openly declared since the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, which killed six, injured over a thousand, and caused nearly $ 1 billion in damage. Its leaders, moreover, have been promising for more than five years that in pursuing this war, they would kill American civilians and bomb American military installations and embassies overseas.
Since the World Trade Center attack, investigators have traced Osama bin Laden and his organization -- Al Qaeda, or "the Base" -- to several catastrophic attacks on Americans: the 1993 ambush of U.S. soldiers in Somalia during Operation Restore Hope (18 killed), the November 1995 bombing of the American military training center in Riyadh (six killed), and the June 1996 bombing of he Khobar towers in the American military complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (19 killed). Along the way, bin Laden has also been linked to sundry assassination plots against President Clinton and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, among others.
Most alarming, documents recently unsealed in federal court in New York make explicit something that has been assumed for years. Bin Laden's Al Qaeda has formed an alliance with three of the world's most ruthless practitioners of terror: Sudan's National Islamic Front, headed by Hassan al-Turabi; the Iranian sponsored Hezbollah organization; and the Islamic Group headed by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman -- who is serving a life sentence in federal prison following his 1995 conviction (along with 11 underlings) for waging a war of urban terrorism that included the World Trade Center attack and an even more ambitious plot to bomb other New York City landmarks.
That is why, in the aftermath of the cruise-missile launchings, the question bedeviling terrorism-watchers was not whether the American retaliatory strikes targeted a bona fide foe. The question was, Why on earth did Washington take so long to make use of the military option? Now, however, we must ask -- and you can bet bin Laden is also asking -- Was the impetus for acting a realistic appreciation of the international threat, or the need to find surcease from domestic scandal?
The question arises not from cynicism about the administration's motives but from its thoroughly inept handling of the questions surrounding the Sudanese strike. When officials have come to a rational understanding about a real threat, one expects they will be able to make a cogent case for their actions. And the investigative record supporting the cruise-missile strikes is so rich, the administration should easily have been able to defend them. Instead, an operation against an eminently worthy target, Sudan, is being discredited by the Clinton administration itself, with a series of conflicting explanations narrowly centered on the nature of the chemical plant we targeted. Indeed, hardly a day goes by without continued anonymous bickering over the attack between CIA agents and State Department officials in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
The critical error was twofold. Because the administration's foreign-policy attention span is gnat-like and its aversion to prudent military measures immense, it failed to prepare the country -- even after the August 7 mass murders at our embassies in Nairobi and Dares Salaam -- for the need to respond with force. Then, after the deed was done, the administration allowed the debate on the Sudanese strike to focus solely on the goings-on at the Al Shifa plant, rather than on Sudan generally. As a result, the propriety of our self-defense has come to rest on such minutiae as the reliability of soil samples, when, from the mountaintops, the State Department should have been proclaiming the prodigious record of anit-American terror complied since the early 1990s by Hassan al-Turabi, Sudan's de facto sovereign.
Turabi's National Islamic Front has ruled Sudan amid continuing civil strife since 1989, when a military coup wrested control from the democratic government. While his coy manner, fluent English, and Western education have frequently charmed the media here and in Europe, Turabi is a fierce opponent of the U.S. government, of the secular Egyptian government, and of the Saudi regime. He is a friend of radical Islam, of the Hamas and Hezbollah organizations -- ever counseling his longtime associate Yasser Arafat towards greater intransigence in dealing with Israel. Turabi is also an intimate of bin Laden, whom Sudan officially took in when the Saudi ruling family expelled him in 1994.
For Turabi, providing safe harbor for terrorists was nothing new. Indeed, in 1991, bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization was permitted to move its entire command-and-control structure into Sudan from Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the criminal charges recently unsealed in federal court in Manhattan recount, bin Laden's and Turabi's organizations worked in lock-step: setting up training camps to prepare for terrorist actions, working to obtain sophisticated communications equipment to facilitate their secret activities, and trying to acquire nuclear and chemical weapons.
Sudan offered a congenial atmosphere for a grand alliance of terrorists. In Afghanistan, where traditionally hostile Shia and Sunni Muslims had fought in tandem against the Soviets, bin Laden watched firsthand as the cohesiveness evaporated into bitter infighting once the common Soviet enemy left. Safely ensconced in Sudan, he reflected on how much the radical cause might advance if his Sunni forces could combine with the Shiites of Hezbollah, who are legendarily adept in explosives techniques, to focus on their common enemies: the United States, Israel, and the secular governments in Islamic countries. In Sudan, where Hezbollah had long been welcome, such liaison was possible; thus, under Turabi's wing, joint Al Qaeda-Hezbollah strategies flourished, and bin Laden's guerrillas began shuttling for bomb schooling between Sudan and Iran.
Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman was also frequently at the receiving end of Turabi's hospitality. Like Turabi and bin Laden, Abdel Rahman -- whose Islamic Group is the leading resistance organization in neighboring Egypt and carried out the 1981 murder of Anwar Sadat for the high crime of making peace with Israel -- perceived great benefit in joint ventures with other extremist fundamentalist groups, including Shiites. And like bin Laden, Abdel Rahman has been the beneficiary of generous Sudanese patronage. Thanks to the broad investigations surrounding Rahman's trial in the World Trade Center bombing, we have extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the Sudanese assistance to Abdel Rahman's terrorist operations in the United States and abroad.
By the late 1980s, Abdel Rahman had succeeded in forming a violently anti-American jihad army in the New York metropolitan area, committed to executing terror operations -- both here and overseas -- aimed at withering U.S. support for Israel. Even before the sheik relocated to the United States in 1990 -- aboard flights originating in Sudan -- terrorists like El Sayyid Nosair and Mahmud Abouhalima, who planned the World Trade Center bombing, were referring to Abdel Rahman as their leader in cryptic telephone reports to him about paramilitary exercises they had organized in remote areas of New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Documents seized from Nosair's home showed longstanding plans to blow up skyscrapers and other sites of political significance. In mid-1992, those plans were stepped up with the arrival in New York of Ramzi Yousef and Ahmed Ajaj -- straight from Peshawar, Pakistan, where bin Laden's Al Qaeda was headquartered before moving to Sudan.
Abdel Rahman, the renowned "emir of jihad," had more in common with bin Laden than cozy ties with Sudan's Hassan al-Turabi. Their agendas were joined at the hip. Both Abdel Rahman and bin Laden vigorously urged their subordinates to attack American armed forces in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. And their organizations have long worked hand in hand. As federal prosecutors investigating the recent embassy bombings revealed in court last month, Wadih el Hage, a chief lieutenant in bin Laden's organization, is a longtime associate of Nosair and once sought to supply arms for Abouhalima. Moreover, when Ramzi Yousef and Ahmed Ajaj arrived from Peshawar for their rendezvous with Abdel Rahman's New York henchmen in 1992, they were carrying bomb-making manuals annotated with the phone number of a bin Laden contact -- a number Abdel Rahman frequently called from his Jersey City apartment.
After they landed at New York's JFK International Airport, Ajaj was arrested for attempting to enter the U.S. illegally. Yousef, however, managed to persuade customs officials to release him on a bare promise to show up for future immigration proceedings. He, Abouhalima, and several assistants then set about building the powerful urea-nitrate bomb that would be set off under the World Trade Center. Abouhalima turned for assistance in testing explosive chemicals to a young Sudanese immigrant named Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali. A polished English speaker, Siddig Ali had key contacts in Turabi's National Islamic Front, including at Sudan's U.N. mission in New York. He became a translator and aide-de-camp for Abdel Rahman.
Immediately after the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center bombing, Siddig Ali made arrangements for Abouhalima and his family to flee to Sudan, where their safety would be assured. Unwisely, while en route, Abouhalima stopped to visit relatives in Egypt, where he was arrested. When Hosni Mubarak's government agreed to extradite him to the Untied States to face trial for the bombing, an enraged Siddig Ali confided to an associate named Abdo Haggag (a covert informant who later became a U.S. government witness) that the time had come to fulfill Sheik Abdel Rahman's longstanding call for Mubarak's assassination.
The Egyptian president was scheduled for a state visit to the Untied States. Siddig Ali, using his Turabi connections, called officials at Sudan's U.N. mission. Deputy consul Ahmed Yousef, after admonishing Siddig Ali that it was better to discuss such matters in person, told him Mubarak's itinerary -- which was to include an overnight stay at Manhattan's posh Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Siddig Ali reconnoitered the site, ordered the weaponry needed for his plan (grenades and high-power firearms) from an associate in New York, and sketched diagrams for deploying his Sudanese paramilitary recruits during the anticipated attack. The plot was betrayed by Haggag, who confided it to an Egyptian government official. As a result, Mubarak avoided New York during his U.S. trip. Siddig Ali assured Abdel Rahman that the assassination effort would continue, anticipating a renewed attempt in September 1993, when Mubarak was scheduled to return for a U.N. function.
Meanwhile, Siddig Ali had bigger fish fry to fry. Picking up where the World Trade Center bombers had left off, he spent the spring of 1993 designing a series of simultaneous bombing of New York City landmarks. This plan, too, was foiled by his unlucky choice of accomplices: As his bomb technician, Siddig Ali drafted an Egyptian named Emad Salem who had been an FBI informant since 1991. Following the Trade Center bombing, Salem agreed to record conversations for the FBI, and the result was a trove of insight -- including Siddig Ali's explanation that his information about Mubarak's itinerary had come from the "highest level" of the Sudanese government.
After scouting a number of potential targets that included army installations, the Javits Federal Building (which houses the FBI's New York field office), and the George Washington Bridge, Siddig Ali settled on three: the United Nations headquarters and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, which connect Manhattan to New Jersey. The operation against the tunnels was to be as simple as it was horrifying. Siddig Ali would direct his Sudanese underlings to steal four cars, two for stowing bombs to be left in the middle of each tunnel, an two in which to flee from the targets minutes before the explosion. Car theft would avoid the tell-tale error of the World Trade Center bombers, who were found because one of them had rented under his true name the van that had carried the bomb.
The U.N. plot, because of the presence of security guards, was more demanding. But consular officials at the Sudanese mission agreed to provide access to the complex so that Siddig Ali could study the site. They would also supply diplomatic license plates. By affixing the plates to another stolen, bomb-laden car, Siddig Ali would forestall questions at the entrance and be able park in an area that promised maximum carnage. Siddig Ali anticipated fleeing undetected to the Philippines and then to Sudan, using travel papers provided by the Sudanese mission.
Siddig Ali did not merely speak incessantly of his Sudanese government contacts. He actually brought Emad Salem to the U.N. mission, where the consul, Siraj el-Din, rolled out the red carpet for his honored guests (who were in the middle of planning a massive bombing). Siddig Ali later explained that Turabi's consular officials were committed to jihad and worked to bring those of similar mind to the Untied States. Such immigrants included the men who were then involved in constructing explosives for bombing the U.N. and the tunnels. Siddig Ali advised Salem that the tactical plan for the U.N. attack would have to include provisions for keeping Sudanese mission personnel out of harm's way.
By the time Siddig Ali spoke with deputy consul Yousef on May 23, 1993, his telephone was wiretapped by federal agents. Having been gulled into believing Salem had "swept" his home and telephone to detect bugging devices, Siddig Ali comforted Yousef with the assurance that his telephone was "good and clean." With the bombing plans already well underway, Siddig Ali cryptically asserted: "May God grant you . . . the ability to repulse the enemies . . . the ones who are here . . . Because we are ready, we are watching the situation. . . . Strong conspiracies are being weaved in the darkness." After Siddig Ali repeated that he and the others were "red to die" if necessary, Yousef spoke of the "cost" of "confronting the West" and invoked Islamic scripture in adding, "We are not going to prevail by outnumbering you, but rather God's wrath is focused upon you." Siddig Ali concurred: "Yes, we'll fight them with this religion."
This call took place as contacts in the Sudanese mission were putting Siddig Ali in touch with Mohammed Saleh, a Hamas operative who owned two gas stations in Yonkers. Eventually, Saleh contributed over 200 gallons of diesel fuel for the construction of the bombs that were to be deployed at the U.N. and in the tunnels. In a startling conversation recorded by Salem on June 4, 1993, Saleh bragged of his long-standing association with Sudan's Turabi, recounted Hamas terror operations in Israel, and agreed with Siddig Ali that priority should be given to a plan to murder U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutors-Ghali. Siddig Ali has explained to Salem that he and deputy counsel Yousef considered plans to kill Boutros-Ghali but ultimately shelved them out of fear that a successor might prove worse for militant Muslims.
As the bombing plans progressed, Siddig Ali assured Salem that the current plot was not the only thing in store for the United States. The ware would also be taken overseas against American military bases and embassies -- particularly if the World Trade Center bombers were convicted and received life sentences. This only served to underscore the threat made by the bombers -- in letter to the New York Times and other media outlers -- of more and greater bloodshed if the United States did not heed their demand to abandon Israel and Middle East affairs.
In mid-June 1993, Siddig Ali brought another Sudanese associate, Tarig Elhassan, into the bombing conspiracy. Elhassan consulted a Sudanese engineer for a study of the tunnels and the George Washington Bridge, later recalling how he had told the engineer the results would be sent to Sudan, to the Hamas and Fatah organizations, and to similar groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Siddig Ali agreed that it was essential "to collect information for the future" because of what he perceived as the likelihood of American retaliation against Sudan if its connection to the landmarks-boombing plot were later discovered.
On June 24, 1993, at 2 A.M. in a dank Queens garage serving as a makeshift safehouse, Siddig Ali, Elhassan, and three of their countrymen were arrested with on other man (an American named Victor Alvarez, who was called "Mohammed the Spanish") in the act of mixing fertilizer and fuel oil. At this Yonkers home, Mohammed Saleh was also arrested, carrying on his person contact numbers for the Sudanese consul Siraj el-Din, deputy consul Ahmed Yousef, and a diplomat at the Sudanese embassy in Washington. The would-be bombers, Abdel Rahman, and Nosair were all convicted in 1995 of seditious conspiracy to levy war against the United States. The Sudanese consular officials, el-Din and Yousef, were expelled from the United States as personae non gratae.
Yet, just as the World Trade Center bombers and Siddig Ali predicted, the war was even then being taken overseas. By late 1993 in Sudan, Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda was not merely producing firearms and explosives in conjunction with Sudan's ruling National Islamic Front and Hezbollah; it was making efforts to procure enriched uranium for the development of unclear weapons. At the same time, bin Laden issued fatwas to all his followers declaring that the United States was an enemy of Islam and that attacking its forces was a sacred obligation. Among the principal justifications he cited was the imprisonment of Sheik Abdel Rahman. From Sudan, Al Qaeda guerrillas were sent to recruit and train fighters in Somalia. The dearly attacks against American troops in Mogadishu soon followed.
While still headquartered in Sudan, bin Laden proceeded to orchestrate not just bombings of U.S. military installations in Saudi Arabia but another nearly successful assassination attempt on Mubarak -- this one in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. That attack was carried out in 1995 by guerrillas trained in Sudan. The next year, bin Laden's Al Qaeda moved its headquarters form Sudan back to Afghanistan, where the Taliban were consolidating their holds on power. The Sudanese camps, however, continued to function. In early 1998, some six months before Al Qaeda explosives razed our embassies in east Africa, bin Laden joined the Islamic Group in a public declaration calling for resources to be pooled for the purpose of killing Americans -- including civilians -- anywhere in the world.
For a brief period in August, it looked as if the Clinton administration understood the facts of the situation: The United States is under hostile, military attack from a capable adversary committed to terrorism as a method. That adversary is an international amalgam, and Sudan is a significant member -- in common parlance, an enemy, and one without whom the terrorists' venture could not succeed. Such an adversary will not be defeated by the techniques the president recommended at the U.N. -- increased international cooperation in the prosecution and extradition of terrorists. These are necessary steps, but breathtakingly inadequate. A military threat calls for a military response.
Former president Jimmy Carter and the New York Times, to name two, have recently jointed the orchestra of Neros fiddling for official inquiries into the good faith of our retaliatory strike against the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory -- preoccupied with learning whether it was actually processing deadly VX gas (as the Clinton administration first asserted), "merely" storing VX (or precursor chemicals) among legitimate medicinal supplies, or had no connection to never gas or bin Laden. Surely, the choice of targets can be debated, but no one in the administration, it seems, is prepared with the brief to make the case that should have been made in the first place: Sudan has threatened our vital interests with impunity for years. And while civilian casualties are a regrettable fact of life in times of war, responsibility of our retaliatory use of force belongs not to U.S. analysts but squarely on the shoulders of Hassan al-Turabi.
In the main, international terrorism is a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue. There is a severe limit to the circumstances in which it is either possible or prudent to apprehend terrorists overseas only to swaddle them in the rights of American defendants -- including education them, through the extensive discovery our system mandates, as to what we know about them and the precious and regrettably scarce sources of that information. Terrorists, furthermore, see the world in gimlet-eyed simplicity. They are not swayed by our breathless pursuit of international conventions that are broken with impunity, weapons-inspection regimes that we lack the stomach to police, or "peace processes" that become hideous euphemisms for body counts. These convey weakness. What impresses them is the certainty that force will swiftly and surely be met with exponentially superior force. That alone is a meaningful deterrent.
What is most needed in the war against terror is increased, military spending and preparedness, and a missile-defense system for the day in the not-too-distant future when Osama bin Laden or someone like him is capable of launching weapons of mass destruction at the United Stats, our soldiers, diplomats, and citizens abroad, and our allies. That requires making the case, straightforwardly and without apology, about who our enemies are. Sudan would be a good place to start.
"So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me. What I want to know is…."
President Clinton's remark aired on the very day two of the nation’s most prominent papers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, ran above-the-fold stories on a classified National Intelligence Estimate, selectively leaked by a Bush detractor no doubt, that purportedly concluded last April that the Iraq War has bolstered terrorist recruitment. Six weeks before the November election that NIE appears in the press, and the Democrats are busy putting out press releases crowing about it. “Hit job,” anyone?
In his Fox News interview, President Clinton stated:
All of President Bush’s neo-cons thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn’t do enough said I did too much — same people.
Not quite. In fact, this magazine published two cover pieces by contributing editor Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the “right-wing/neocon” American Enterprise Institute, which criticized both the Clinton and Bush administrations for NOT forcefully responding "enough" to bin Laden following the USS Cole bombing.
From “G-Men, East of Suez: A serious anti-terrorism policy would unleash the military, not deploy the Justice Department,” October 30, 2000:
More important, the FBI's methods reveal, again, the strategic vacuum at the heart of the Clinton administration's counterterrorist policies. Trying to arrest and prosecute terrorists--treating terrorism as crime--actually endangers American power overseas. Traditional realpolitik and gunboat diplomacy--the only meaningful responses to terrorists who kill Americans--gets cast aside in favor of far-off prosecutions that may well do more damage to America than terrorism….
The State Department and the National Security Council, of course, cannot conceive of doing anything more forceful than utter reproaches and reprimands, which inevitably preface new appeals to the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service with very close links to the Taliban, to do something about bin Laden. If bin Laden is discovered to be behind the attack on the USS Cole before January 2001, the Clinton administration, given the past, can be expected to fire more cruise missiles at tent and mud-brick Afghan training camps. CIA director George Tenet and his minions will complement the attack by leaking to the press that "we now have bin Laden in a box." Counterterrorism budgets in Washington will inevitably go up, further increasing the possible size of the next FBI-led team sent overseas to investigate a bombing.
From “A Cowering Superpower: It's time to fight back against terrorism,” July 30, 2001:
Usama bin Laden and his terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, scored an impressive victory by nearly sinking the Cole, yet Washington still has not responded. Our fear is pure oxygen to Islamic militants. Every alert, particularly when it panics U.S. military and diplomatic personnel, sends an adrenaline rush into the central nervous system of men truly convinced that with God’s help and the right explosives they can crack the will of the infidels who are, in their eyes, destroying the one true faith.
Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to yank the Marines out of Jordan is, when viewed from the mud-brick and cinder-block ghettos of the Middle East, an extraordinary triumph, further proof that the martyrs of the Cole attack died gloriously. America’s military leaders may think that they’re being prudent with our soldiers; the average man in the streets of Amman certainly knows better. Terrorism is war by unconventional means. Its ultimate objective is the psychological debilitation of the enemy through fear. In the fight against terrorism, the U.S. military’s ever-more exclusive focus on "force protection" diminishes the awe in which America is held abroad, the ultimate guarantor of the safety of U.S. civilians and soldiers, especially in lands where hostility to the West rests near the surface.
Senator McCain made some important points today on CBS’ Face the Nation. He pointed out that al Qaeda has recruited successfully over the years by highlighting its “successes” against the U.S., which is why “we need to prevail in Iraq.” Indeed, in the 1990s bin Laden would claim that Mogadishu and other events showed that America was "a paper tiger" and "a weak horse." He and his followers would use such imagery as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda, "the strong horse" in bin Laden's words, throughout the decade. In fact, though little reported in the media, al Qaeda had recruited and trained thousands before September 11, 2001. Richard Clarke told PBS' Frontline that by the end of 2000 al Qaeda had a presence "in probably between 50-60 countries [and] that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan." ”
McCain also called for a larger Army and Marine Corps, criticized the position of the ACLU and the New York Times on the recent terrorist interrogation deal, and said that Democrats should stop obstructing the confirmation of John Bolton as UN Ambassador – particularly after the “two-bit dictators” traveled to the UN in New York to trash the U.S. president. McCain…
On Jihadist Recruitment and Winning in Iraq:
I think that it's obvious that the difficulties we've experienced in Iraq have certainly emboldened [them]. Lack of success always does that. But I would also argue that these people didn't need any motivation to attack us on September 11th. According to their history--and there's some validity to it--this begins with bombing of the--and killing the Marines in Beirut, and then Somalia, and now other, quote, "successes" of theirs. But I would--I think it would argue that we need to prevail in Iraq, and that if we fail, then our problems would be much more complicated. But if it wasn't Iraq, it'd be Afghanistan; if it wasn't Afghanistan, it would be others that they would use as a method of continuing their recruitment….
This town, as we all know, there's nothing secret in our nation's capital. All I can do is say I think the president recently has laid out our challenges very well in Iraq. We all know that things are not going as well as we want it to. The Marine intelligence report that was leaked about Anbar Province, and the difficulty--this is long and hard and tough. But the benefits of success are enormous, and the consequences of failure are enormous. So frankly it doesn't astound me that we would get an intelligence report that if we're not succeeding as well as we had hoped, that that would encourage the enemy.
I think the tactics have been flawed, and that's been well documented and chronicled. We didn't have enough troops over there, the looting shouldn't have taken place, the difficulties in not anticipating the enormous challenges of bringing democracy and stability to a place that has been ruled by an absolute, terrible, repressive dictator for many years. That doesn't mean to me that, therefore, we should then plan on leaving. It means that we should fix the mistakes; it means that we have to make progress….
On the Need for a Bigger Army and Marine Corps (also see the current Weekly Standard editorial here):
We've got to expand, and should have five years ago, six years ago, expand the Army and the Marine Corps…. We live in a very dangerous world, and we not only need to have the equipment--which by the way, the Guard is having a problem with getting their equipment replaced--but we also need the personnel as well….
On the ACLU, NY Times:
Look, [the] ACLU and the New York Times don't like the agreement, but we think this will recognize, people will recognize that it defends both our values and our security. Some want the CIA not to be able to carry out this program. That was never our intent. And--but it was--it's very important that we have this tool to collect intelligence.
On the Democrats and John Bolton:
But I would--I would say that this is an argument to get John Bolton confirmed as our UN ambassador. He's smart, he's tough, he would respond to these guys. And he could talk back to these two-bit dictators who have the air fare to New York. And I hope my Democrat friends will stop holding up the nomination of John Bolton.
Howard Dean may believe "THE fight on terror" is in Afghanistan. But the reality is the fight is global, as Tony Blair recently noted. Here's another example of what Blair's talking about from Reuters:
MANILA, Sept 22 - Islamic militants from Indonesia have been training radicals in the southern Philippines in bomb-making, local officials said on Friday after the seizure of explosive devices at a guerrilla base in a remote island.
On Aug. 4, soldiers found a stockpile of improvised bombs, some fashioned out of howitzer and mortar rounds, with electronic anti-tamper sensors and digital timers at a hideout of the Abu Sayyaf, the most violent of Islamic separatist groups in the Philippines….
"Some of the improvised bombs we saw in Jolo bore striking similarities to the lunchbox-type explosives found in the house where Azahari was killed," an intelligence officer told Reuters.
The official was referring Azahari Husin, a Malaysian engineer who was the top bomb-maker for Jemaah Islamiah, a group fighting for a pan-Islamic state across large parts of Asia.
Azahari, who was killed in 2005 in a raid on an Indonesian safehouse being used by Jemaah, allegedly designed the bombs used in the 2002 Bali bomb attacks and explosions at the Marriott hotel and Australian Embassy in Jakarta….
"These improvised bombs show a capability heretofore unseen among local terrorist groups," Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz told a forum in Manila on Thursday.
"Close similarities to improvised bombs being used in the Middle East and Afghanistan have been noted."
Here's the transcript from President Clinton's anger-filled interview with Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace. The interview will air tomorrow. Clinton does make a few valid points, but he also neglects to mention many others. I’ll write more on this later.
(From AP: Bombings inflame tensions in Kosovo -- Over the past week, there have been four bombings…. But parliament speaker Kole Berisha insists the violence is a deliberate attempt to destabilize Kosovo at a delicate stage in its drive for statehood…. But the chances of more violence like the March 2004 riots that killed 19 people and displaced thousands "are unfortunately rather high," warned Alex Anderson, Kosovo project director for the International Crisis Group….)
Posted on September 15, 2006:
There will likely be more violent acts like this one as the current final status talks draw to a close -- and possibly for some time after. From AP:
Kosovo interior minister's car bombed
Fri Sep 15, 6:29 AM ET
A bomb placed under the Kosovo interior minister's car exploded early Friday in an eastern town in the U.N.-run province, police said.
No one was hurt by the blast, which occurred a few hours before Serbian and ethnic Albanian negotiators in Vienna, Austria, resumed contentious U.N.-brokered talks on Kosovo's future status.
Kosovo's parliament speaker said he considered the explosion to be directed against the talks.
(If you get a chance, read Charles Krauthammer's excellent piece in today’s Washington Post. He writes: “And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour. In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.” John Howard isn’t one of those followers.)
Posted on September 21, 2006:
As I have noted many times, Australian Prime Minister John Howard is a rock-solid U.S. ally and a strong world leader in the War on Terror. He hasn’t taken the David Cameron path of backpedaling on the decision to remove Saddam from power or that of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero who ran away from Iraq. And Howard hasn’t shied away from speaking out on the Pope’s recent comments and the ensuing intimation campaign, which, as the Wall Street Journal put it, is “trying to proscribe how free societies discuss one of the world's major religions.” An avid Standard reader from Australia sends along this interesting interview Howard gave on Australian TV on Tuesday. Some highlights:
TONY JONES: Now, PM, let's move on to other issues: As you'd be well aware, the Pope has provoked anger in the Muslim world after quoting a 14th century emperor who accused the Prophet Mohammed of inspiring evil and inhuman human ideas and spreading his word by the sword. Now Australia's leading Catholic has called, again, for an examination of whether the Koran, and what the Koran, in fact, has written about violence.
JOHN HOWARD: Yes.
TONY JONES: Do you think Cardinal Pell has a point in focusing on what the Koran has written about violence?
JOHN HOWARD: Well I think the cardinal has a point in making the point that it's a strange form of restraint to respond to words you disagree with, with demonstrations and threats of violence. The Islamic community is perfectly entitled to criticise the Pope and the Pope is perfectly entitled, and other religious leaders are perfectly entitled, to express their views about other religions. But we're all meant to believe in | | | |
