Iraq

Despite Condoleezza Rice's claims to the contrary, the new Robert Woodward book "State of Denial" details a Bush White House that, in 2001, did not take Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda seriously.

The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

The main content of the book, however, focuses on the confusion and dissention within the Bush Administration regarding Iraq -- whether to attack, how to wage the war, how to characterize the resistance, how to win the war.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

The question is when this president is going to accept responsibility for getting us into this war -- and responsibility for getting us out. "Stay the course" until he can pass off the problem to the next president is not a winning strategy.

It's really starting to look like Bush believes his own publicity:

President Bush asserted Friday that critics who claim the
Iraq war has made America less safe embrace "the enemy's propaganda."

Is this the Emperor's New Clothes argument or what?

"You do not create terrorism by fighting terrorism," he told a receptive military audience. "If that ever becomes the mind-set of the policymakers in Washington, it means we'll go back to the old days of waiting to be attacked — and then respond."

Ha! You don't create terrorism by fighting terrorism? What kind of nonsense assertion is that? Obviously it depends upon how you fight terrorism.

Bush's plan is to have no plan. "Stay the course," he says, which is another way of saying he's going to continue to do nothing about Iraq until the next president inherits the problem.

Stay the course = Pass the buck

"Some have selectively quoted from this document to make the case that by fighting the terrorists — by fighting them in Iraq — we are making our people less secure here at home," Bush told the Reserve Officers Association. "This argument buys into the enemy's propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we're provoking them."

Yes, it does, because it's true. Before we invaded Iraq, there weren't thousands upon thousands of terrorists in Iraq plotting against Americans. Now there are.

However, there were and still are terrorists in Afghanistan, the country Bush has largely ignored, the country where 9/11 was planned, the country where al Qaeda was training its terrorists.

Bush's speech to the military group followed one he gave the day before at a GOP fundraiser in Alabama, where he accused Democrats of "obstruction and endless second-guessing" and not having the stomach to persist in Iraq.

To "persist" in Iraq is not a winning strategy. You don't win by "persisting." You don't win through "stay the course" -- especially when there is no course.

You don't win an occupation.

It's pretty obvious now that the Bush Administration plan for Iraq is to string us all along, with American soldiers and Marines dying and tens of thousands of Iraqis dying, until he can finally pass the mess onto others.

That's the Bush way. It's how he did business. It's how he does politics.

Update: The New York Times coverage offers more:

“The Democrats are using the N.I.E. to mislead the American people and justify their policy of withdrawal from Iraq,” the president said. “The American people need to know what withdrawal from Iraq would mean. By withdrawing from Iraq before the job is done, we would be doing exactly what the extremists and terrorists want.”

Mr. Bush has been honing his offensive against Democrats for weeks as his political team seeks to shift the election-year focus from a debate about him and the unpopular war to one about terrorism in general, his party’s efforts to combat it and what he describes as the opposition’s promotion of defeatism and retreat.

It's awfully easy to say for a man who has no winning strategy. Bush's plan to hold out until he can pass the buck is not acceptable to the vast majority of Americans.

It's time to sweep his rubber-stamp congress out of office.

The Bush Administration and their conservative cheerleaders have been doing it for more than five years now: If something goes wrong, pass the buck to Bill Clinton.

Condoleezza Rice is now spinning to blame Bill Clinton:

"The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false - and I think the 9/11 commission understood that," Rice said during a wide-ranging meeting with Post editors and reporters.

This coming from the former National Security Advisor who pushed aside Richard Clarke, the in-house expert on al-Qaeda. This coming from the White House staffer who pretty much ignored the presidential briefing memo about Osama bin Laden's plans to strike within the U.S. This coming from a key player in the Bush Administration, which fought against even having a 9/11 Commission look into 9/11. They didn't want anyone looking into it.

"What we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years," Rice added.

That is just silly.

She also whines about analyses by our own U.S. intelligence agencies that what the Bush Administration is doing is making things worse.

Transitioning to the global war on terror, an animated Rice questioned, "When are we going to stop blaming ourselves for the rise of terrorism?"

This is the perspective problem the entire Bush Administration seems to have: More concern about criticism of them, more concern about the political prospects of the GOP, more concern about spinning themselves into hero status, than any concern in actually doing something effective or at least making sure they're not just making things worse.

When, Condi? When you stop being a major cause of the rise of terrorism.

Asked about recently leaked internal U.S. intelligence estimates that claimed the Iraq war was fueling terrorist recruiting, Rice said: "Now that we're fighting back, of course they are fighting back, too."

"I find it just extraordinary that the argument is, all right, so they're using the fact they're being challenged in the Middle East and challenged in Iraq to recruit, therefore you've made the war on terrorism worse.

"It's as if we were in a good place on Sept. 11. Clearly, we weren't," she added.

Except, Condi, that the terrorists weren't even in Iraq until you and Bush invaded there. The terrorists were in Afghanistan.

Remember Afghanistan? That's the place where Osama has been, by many accounts, all this time. That's where al-Qaeda planned 9/11. That's where the Taliban government sheltered these terrorists.

Remember the Taliban, Condi? They're the guys who are now gaining ground in Afghanistan. (Wouldn't all those troops mired in Iraq come in handy in Afghanistan now?) You try to conflate Iraq and Afghanistan, as if they were the same place.

And you're supposed to be so sophisticated!

"It's a longer-term strategy, and it may even have some short-term down side, but if you don't look at the longer term, you're just leaving the problem to somebody else," she said.

"Some short-term down side." I believe that's what the President calls a "comma".

Via Crooks & Liars, here is a little Olbermann on the blame-it-on-Clinton ridiculousness:

The "free pass" has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush…

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done, to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us — then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture — which doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.And there it is, sir:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

Here are some relevant videos via YouTube:

Clinton refuses to roll over for Chris Wallace on Fox

Part 1

Part 2

Olbermann on Clinton, and the Bush Administration's passing the buck

The headline is:

Democrats cite report to undermine GOP

Note: Yahoo News is using the same URL for this version of the report which had a different headline and different byline. So much for any hope of transparency of process on the part of Yahoo (and/or the Associated Press).

Yahoo and AP are not the only ones playing this game. Some other spin:

The New York Times: "Study of Iraq War and Terror Stirs Strong Political Response"

Democratic lawmakers, responding to an intelligence report that found that the Iraq war has invigorated Islamic radicalism and worsened the global terrorist threat, said the assessment by American spy agencies demonstrated that the Bush administration needed to devise a new strategy for its handling of the war.

Again, the Democratic response is the lead, not the report itself.

USA Today (quoting the AP): "Democrats blast Iraq handling as report says war has increased threat"

Democrats on Sunday seized on an intelligence assessment that said the Iraq war has increased the terrorist threat, saying it was further evidence that Americans should choose new leadership in the November elections.

The Democrats hoped the report would undermine the GOP's image as the party more capable of handling terrorism as the campaign enters its final six-week stretch.

Another major news publication treating the Democrats as the news, and the report itself as just a prop.

The LA Times: "White House Rebuts Bleak Report on Iraq"

The White House on Sunday sharply disagreed with a new U.S. intelligence assessment that the war in Iraq is encouraging global terrorism, as Bush administration officials stressed that anti-American fervor in the Muslim world began long before the Sept. 11 attacks.

White House spokesman Peter Watkins declined to talk specifically about the National Intelligence Estimate, a classified analysis that represents a consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

A little better. At least the focus is on the players reponsible (instead of the Democrats, who aren't).

The question remains: Why are the news media positioning this as a Democratic Party story, and not a national security story?

I note that The Washington Post gets it right: "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Hurting U.S. Terror Fight"

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

"It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. "It's stating the obvious."

Thank you, Washington Post, for reporting the news and not the spin.

The report was completed in April and represented a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government, according to an intelligence official. The official, confirming accounts first published in Sunday's New York Times and Washington Post, spoke on condition of anonymity on Sunday because the report is classified.

"Unfortunately this report is just confirmation that the Bush administration's stay-the-course approach to the Iraq war has not just made the war more difficult and more deadly for our troops, but has also made the war on terror more dangerous for every American," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic effort to take control of the House.

"It's time for a new direction in this country," Emanuel, D-Ill., said in the statement.

"Press reports say our nation's intelligence services have confirmed that
President Bush's repeated missteps in Iraq and his stubborn refusal to change course have made America less safe," said Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. "No election-year White House PR campaign can hide this truth."

Interesting how the AP report emphasizes that the Democrats are talking about the report, and does not emphasize the report itself.

You'd think that national security would be a bigger story than what Congressional Democrats are saying about that report.

You'd think. But the Beltway press can be a bit myopic on these things. They don't see truth, just politicians.

No wonder we're in Iraq in the first place.