Thursday, November 24, 2005

The Intelligence Issue - Another Pass

On Saturday I wrote a few paragraphs, then lost them when I cleaned the keyboard! Tip: always save your work before you do anything else. It happens to all of us.

Anyway, here is one of the main points from the original. If we had not failed in Iraq, we would not be so concerned with the intelligence issue now. Since we have failed, we want to find out who is responsible for the failure, and this seems a promising path, both for Bush's political opponents and for people who are simply dismayed by how things have turned out.

Here's another way to put it. This perspective highlights the irrelevance of the issue to the central problem, which is what we should do now. If Bush's operations in Iraq had turned out great, we wouldn't care how dishonest he was in getting us there. Because his operations there have turned out horribly, we'll rightly hold him responsible, and that's true even if he were totally honest in the arguments he used to get us there. Yes, it was maddening to listen to the way he argued his case back when the war was still in the future. Bush lost his credibility with me a long, long time ago. Now, though, we don't need to make judgments about what he says he's going to do. We've seen it. Now we can make judgments about what he has already done. We can see that what he has done is a complete failure.

That's not to say that Bush's honesty is a non-issue. We need to make judgments about his trustworthiness all the time. We don't need to hash out WMD and the CIA's intelligence for the hundredth time, though. We can judge Bush by his own statements here. All of the reasons Bush gave for going into Iraq were false. He has one left, the one that he clings to all the time now. We're going to bring democracy to Iraq and to the region. We're going to prevent a civil war, and help the Iraqi people secure their country. Who believes that anymore? Bush has failed by his own standards. That's the only standard you can judge a leader by. Has the leader achieved what he said he would achieve? Has he made things better, or worse? You answer that for yourself.

Reagan said that heroes aren't braver than the rest of us, they're just braver five minutes longer. I think abou that saying pretty often. It seems that success often comes from the fortitude that let's you stick it out just a little bit longer. You keep going even when you think it's not worth it anymore. Your dream seems further away then ever, but you persevere. That does take courage. Does this principle hold here? Will we succeed in Iraq if we hold on a little longer? Do you think that our current leadership has the capacity to achieve success, given their past record? You answer that for yourself.

Someday, the war in Iraq will end, and the Republicans will take credit for it. They'll say, "See, we told you that peace would come to that country eventually, if we just saw it through." They'll say that even if the end of the war eventually comes about because we left the country. It's not going to end while we're there, that's for sure.

For a long time, defenders of the war kept saying that if we left, a civil war would break out. We had to stay there to prevent that. Now the country's anarchy has deteriorated into civil war: a war of all against all, it seems, except that the country's ethnic groups do keep the conflict more organized than that. Now even the war's most vigorous defenders can't deny what we see all around us there. We have a civil war there now, and we have not been able to prevent it.

Now the war's defenders say that we can't fail in Iraq. We can't signal defeat to our opponents. We can't let the terrorists, as we like to call them, show the world that they can beat us. Soon we'll see that we've been failing in Iraq from the start. Yes, we removed Hussein from power, but that's not what we need to be doing. Saddam Hussein did not attack us on September 11. Let me say that again. Saddam Hussein did not attack us on September 11. He did not help those who did attack us. Let me say that again. He did not help those who did attack us. We cannot go around attacking countries because we think that some people in those countries might want to attack us in the future. Bush has said the opposite: if we think someone in another country might attack us in the future, we have to take action right now. After September 11, preemptive war is a necessity.

Well let's get something straight: the Iraq war was not preemptive and it certainly is not necessary. The commentators' idea that this was a war of choice is absurd. The war is both unnecessary and foolish. If you want to call a foolish mistake a choice, that's fine. It makes you look that much worse, if you admit that your crime was the result of a deliberate choice.

All right, I want to say this part as clearly as I can. The war in Iraq is a crime. That doesn't make criminals of the brave soldiers fighting the war. You can draw your own conclusions about the people who started the war. It doesn't matter what reasons they give to defend their aggression. They believe that the September 11 attacks justify any acts of self-defense they deem necessary. They believe that they have to undertake measures, even measures that violate the United Nations charter, in order to protect the United States from more attacks. They'll never admit that they've done something wrong. But even though the Democrats have been gutless wonders, and have declined to call the war a crime, historians will not be quite as bland. Let's hope they do have the courage to tell the truth. Maybe they'll read these essays someday after I'm gone, and they'll agree. They'll wonder why so few commentators said the truth - that the war is a crime. The only explanation is that no one is willing to say such things in the midst of a war, since it harms morale, and injures our fighting strength.

We have to do whatever is right and just and effective to absolve this crime. We can't win the war that started on September 11 from where we are now. We can't win the war in Iraq, either. To win the first we have to stop fighting the second. To win the first we have to pull out from Iraq and regroup. That is not cutting and running. Regrouping accomplishes a lot of practical tasks on the battlefield. When an army regroups, it readies itself for the next stage of the battle. It takes units that are scattered, leaderless and ineffective and makes them effective again. Weapons and water are distributed, assignments given, and leaders are connected with troops that need new orders. We need to regroup after the Iraq fiasco. We night to regroup in order to fight effectively again. Regrouping is not defeat.

That's not going to happen for the next three years, though, so we have to be patient. In the meantime, we have to find leaders who can help to plan the next stage of the war even though they do not hold power in our government. We have to be ready for the changes that are coming. We may not have hope now of rapid progress anywhere, but we have to act quickly when the time comes. We have to prepare.

That's all for tonight. Please visit The Last Jeffersonian, and please sign up for the journal on the home page if you haven't already!

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Cheney too divisive to right Bush’s ship?

"Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false," Cheney said, decrying the "self-defeating pessimism" of many Democrats. He added that to begin withdrawing from Iraq now, as some lawmakers have suggested, "would be a victory for the terrorists."

We handed our enemies a huge victory when we dropped the first bomb on Baghdad in March 2003. In everything we have done since then, and in everything we have not done, we have made our enemies stronger. The purpose of warfare is to weaken your enemies until they cannot fight you anymore. As long as we follow Mr. Cheney, the opposite will hold: we will become weaker and our enemies will hold the initiative. We have one way to avoid the defeat that Mr. Cheney fears: follow Mr. Murtha.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

House Erupts in War Debate - Los Angeles Times

House Erupts in War Debate - Los Angeles Times

I need to add a few remarks about WMD to the previous remarks about torture.

The debate about intelligence failures and WMD in Iraq are non-issues. We have other problems to solve now. Let the historians analyze this issue.

It is an issue in that we need to know if Bush is trustworthy. He was dishonest in the arguments he made for war. But he adopted a whatever-it-takes approach, and he believed he was doing the right thing. He didn't think that what he was saying was dishonest.

Results are what count. No amount of honesty at the beginning would protect Bush now, when the results are so bad. And no amount of dishonesty at the beginning would matter much now if the results had been good. We're attacking Bush because the war has clearly failed. The arguments he used to justify the mistake won't help us decide what to do now.

So that's the three parts of the argument: (1) It's not an issue now, when we have other problems to solve. (2) Bush's honesty is an issue, but we already know about his dishonesty because he tied Hussein to al Qaeda in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks. (3) The key question now is results, not the nature of the arguments used to justify the war in the first place. The results have been bad, and we want to figure out what to do now.

That's all for now!

Iraq War Criticism Stalks Bush Overseas

Iraq War Criticism Stalks Bush Overseas

So the debate about the war grinds on here. Thanks to John Murtha for his courage and forcefulness. Here's a note I wrote to my spouse about Murtha's stand:

Hi Leslie,

I read a little more about Representative Murtha's remarks, and the White House's reaction. We can just pray now that we really have reached what people call the tipping point on this matter.

The trouble is, pulling out requires people who are adept at dealing with the political situation in Iraq. The administration has proven itself equally incompetent in both political and military matters over there. So we would be pulling out with no plans or preparations for our subsequent policy in Iraq, or elsewhere.

If we can start to look to Congress for leadership, that's great. But people certainly aren't accustomed to looking there.

Steve

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Take yourself back to September 11, 2001, and to the week that followed. What did you think about the future then? We all had different thoughts, in the midst of our shock and unity. Our thoughts about the future were certainly different from those we had on September 10. I've remembered my main thought many times since then: We need someone like Winston Churchill to lead us now, and I don't see any Winston Churchills around. Everyone hoped for the best from President Bush, but instead they got the worst.

Our unity at the time was a good thing. We needed it, both for comfort and to fight back. Now we're divided, so divided that it's hard to recall from day to day how cohesive we were in the days that followed September 11. Good leadership would have taken that cohesiveness and shaped a powerful force to deal with our enemies. Everyone wanted to serve, to do what was necessary. We wanted to do our part. The energy was palpable. I wanted to be an intelligence analyst, because I knew I'd be good at that. The entire country, and the rest of the world with us, was ready to go to work to defeat our enemies.

We dissipated that energy and broke that unity in Iraq. The desire to serve is gone. We don't know what's going to happen, and we certainly don't want to fight any more wars. We still need good leadership. Could you have predicted this unhappy division at this point in the war, this level of divisiveness just four years after the towers went down? What kind of leadership must it take to waste the patriotic response that welled up after the initial attack? If the response had dissipated gradually over the course of a generation or two, one could understand that. People who were too young to remember September 11 might not have the same instinctive feelings about it. But everyone who remembers what happened that day might have been united by that experience. Instead, we're fighting with each other now, just fifty months later. That's due to poor leadership, and terrible mistakes.

More significantly, could you have predicted that one of the main divisive issues would be whether or not we can torture our prisoners of war? The issue speaks for itself. Congress wants to pass a resolution that would prohibit torture: cruel and inhuman treatment, as the current phrase goes. The president and the vice-president say that they need freedom to use methods that will help us obtain information we need. Retired Admiral Stansfield Turner rightly calls Richard Cheney the vice-president for torture in a speech he delivers in England. Who could imagine, on September 12, 2001, that we would stumble on an issue like that only four years later? We cannot fight our enemies when we expend so much energy on an issue like this. We don't need to torture our prisoners, or mistreat them in ways that look like torture, in order to defeat our enemies. The only real motives for torture are revenge and a sense of control, not information. Our leaders believe that the resolution in Congress will tie their hands, make it so much more difficult to prosecute the war successfully. But we all know, again instinctively, that we can succeed in this war without treating our prisoners brutally. We all know it, and we're dismayed that our leaders have brought us to this point.

I've been saying this for so long now, and we must act on it: we need new leadership. We haven't ever tried to ignore our president before, certainly not in wartime, but we need to do that now. We need to find leadership elsewhere. Yes, our president holds a lot of power, but most of it depends on our willingness to follow. Absent that willingness, the president can't lead. We know now that he's unable to lead, and that he does not deserve our loyalty. It's not unpatriotic now to say, "Thank you very much, but we'll find our leaders elsewhere." We have to do it if we want to survive the war, let alone win it. I'd like to say that no mistake is so serious that it's irreparable, but I'm not sure about that. At least we can try to repair this mistake, but we have to do it soon. We can't wait.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

The Intelligence Issue

I can't believe we are still hung up on the issue of intelligence two and a half years into this war. The Democrats say that the Bush administration misled the country into the war by claiming a threat from weapons that didn't exist. Bush responds that the Democrats who voted for the war had access to the same intelligence he did. He says they're hypocrites and ready to rewrite the history of the origins of the war. The war was wrong as a moral decision, and it was wrong as a strategic decision. It was also illegal. The war was wrong on all three grounds, and the arguments required to make that case don't depend on the quality of the intelligence, or on our judgments about its signigicance. Iraq could have possessed all of the weapons materials that Bush said it possessed, and going to war would still have been a huge mistake. The debate about intelligence works to Bush's advantage, because it let's him respond with the kind of arguments he made in his Veteran's Day speech. When I hear the president call his critics deeply irresponsible, I know we have reached the bottom in this discussion.

Opponents of the war should remember something about this discussion. The president is sure he has done the right thing, and he's not going to change his mind. Yet many critics, including Democrats in Congress, talk as if they can change his mind. Remember that reporters and others have challenged Bush on the grounds for war for a long time now. They asked him less than a year into the war how he could justify the attack, given that we had not found any weapons. Bush responded, "What difference does it make?" He continued with the argument we have heard so many times since: The man was a threat. We had to get rid of him. Period.

Well, Bush was right when he said, "What difference does it make?," but not in a way he ever imagined. The weapons issue, and the intelligence issue, don't make a difference, The war was wrong whether or not Hussein had the weapons, or the materials, or the programs, or the desire. The war was justified only if Hussein posed an imminent threat. So rather than analyze the intelligence with hindsight, let's do a little threat analysis. Rather than ask how we could have blundered into a war we can't win because of bad intelligence, let's ask how we can win the war we should be fighting once we understand the threat better.

An imminent threat is one that's real and about to be carried out. It can't be imaginary, or doubtful, or far in the future. A fear is not a threat. A child is afraid of many things that aren't actually dangerous. After September 11, people became afraid of things that weren't actually threats. Iraq was one of them. The Bush administration argued after September 11 that we had to reconceive the threats around us. Before 9/11, we underestimated the potency of our enemies - we underestimated their ability to do us harm. We would not make the same mistake again. Now we would preempt our enemies. We would attack them before they could attack us. We had to redefine our idea of what counted as an imminent threat in the new world that existed after September 11.

Whenever someone argues that it's time to revise a tested principle, watch out. The person is going to advocate a course of action that's unsound. That's not to say that the bits conventional wisdom we use to help us make decisions are the only or the best guides available. Some principles, though, rise above conventional wisdom. They're carefully reasoned and tested through time. They have to do with decisions where a lot is at stake. They're anchored with the lessons and experiences of many generations of people just like us. The principles that tell us when a preemptive war is justifed are among these higher-level rules. They tell us that you can't attack someone simply out of fear. You can't attack someone because you think they might attack you sometime in the future. The threat has to be real and present.

We didn't think that Hussein's military activies justified a preemptive war before 9/11. The only way to argue that Iraq posed an imminent threat after 9/11 was to make a connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda. If Hussein actively cooperated with Al Qaeda, and he had the weapons we said he had, then he was an imminent threat. That's exactly the argument that Bush and his advisors made. They actually tried to convince people that Hussein had helped Al Qaeda carry out the 9/11 attacks. The argument was ridiculous on its face, but enough people believed it that the administration carried the day, and won approval from Congress to go to war. He might have found a way to launch the war even if he had not had enough votes in Congress, and that sense of inevitability about the fighting may have led some Democrats to vote for what they regarded as a foregone conclusion anyway.

Remember, Bush sincerely believes that he's doing what's best for the country. People sometimes admit their mistakes, but they're much less likely to admit incompetence. Bush clearly does not know what he is doing. That's why he says things like, "What difference does it make?" A debate about intelligence makes no logical sense because it really doesn't matter whether or the intelligence was bad or good. He only posed an imminent threat if he was in league with bin Laden, and that charge was laughable. It was so clearly cooked up that only people carried away by fear could believe it. And Bush played upon fear. He's the first president we've had who could accurately be called a fear monger.

A debate about intelligence makes no practical sense either, because no one who launched the war will admit the mistake. No one on the Bush team will say, "Whoa, you're right - we over-estimated the threat from Hussein and attacked the wrong guy as a result. Better go back and rethink this one." If the administration won't rethink its actions, why try to persuade it to do so? The citizenry already believes that Bush blew it. How do the Democrats gain by saying, "You misled us into war"? They don't gain any advantage in the debate, and they give Bush an opportunity to counter-charges. The only reasonable thing to do is to make Bush irrelevant, and to find leadership that's both competent and courageous enough to do everything we need to do. It may take three years or more to do that, but that's okay.








Saturday, November 12, 2005

Bush Contends Partisan Critics Hurt War Effort - New York Times

Bush Contends Partisan Critics Hurt War Effort - New York Times:

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges," Mr. Bush said. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."