You Don’t Expect Us To Do Our Job, Do You?

by dday

It’s really quite an incredible statement.

The White House said Wednesday that the failure to capture Osama bin Laden in the seven years since the Sept. 11 attacks shows the limitations of military and intelligence power.

“This is not the movies. We don’t have super powers,” said White House press secretary Dana Perino. “But what we do have is very dedicated people who are working with our allies and trying to bring (al-Qaida leaders) to justice.”

First of all, this is the BUSH White House saying that there are limits to military power, the guys who unleashed Shock and Awe, the guys who invaded unilterally, the belligerent, arrogant hotheads who are always willing to threaten force against anyone at any time. There are apparently limits to intelligence, too, this coming from the ones who would toss aside privacy, civil liberties protections, the Fourth Amendment and both domestic and international laws and treaties against torture, in the name of gathering intelligence.

Then they claim it’s not the movies. They can’t just stride in like cowboys and say “Wanted, Dead or Alive” and dress up in a fighting costume and take out the bad guys, you know?

Finally, they say they don’t have super powers, they can’t snap their fingers to bring bin Laden to justice, it’s a long slog that requires lots of effort.

This is of course why all the effort put into going into Afghanistan and trapping bin Laden and his counterparts in the Tora Bore Mountains was called off, because it was going too well, I guess, and everyone knows these things take time:

When [did you become] … aware that Iraq was topic A or B inside the foreign policy side of this administration?

I became aware of the significance of Iraq in February of 2002, when I was told that this administration had made the decision to begin to de-emphasize Afghanistan in order to get ready for Iraq, and that it wasn’t just a theoretical decision; it was an operational decision that resulted in personnel and assets which had been important in the early phases of the Afghanistan war being redeployed to the disadvantage of victory in Afghanistan. …

They must have known at that time that both philosophically and at a personal level, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were adversaries. The idea that they had collaborated in 9/11 was absurd.

How did you hear about it, that they were headed in this direction in February of 2002?

Well, I heard about it during a briefing at Central Command [CENTCOM], which is located in Tampa, Fla., on the Afghanistan war. The briefing was very positive. Things were going well; victory appeared to be close at hand. Then I was told in a private meeting that no, that wasn’t the case; that in fact, we were beginning to recede from the war in Afghanistan precisely to get ready for Iraq.

Who told you?

Gen. Tommy Franks.

Take me into the meeting. What’s happening? …

The general said, “Senator, I would like to speak with you privately.” We went into his room, and he proceeded to tell me that they weren’t fighting a war in Afghanistan; that they were, in fact, beginning to redeploy assets. He particularly mentioned special operations personnel and the Predator unmanned aircraft as examples of assets that were being redeployed from Afghanistan to get ready for Iraq.

He then laid out what he thought the strategy should be for victory in the war on terror: Finish the job in Afghanistan; move to other areas that had large numbers of cells of Al Qaeda — Somalia, Yemen being number one and number two. He went on to say that Iraq was a special case, that our intelligence there was very poor, and that the Europeans knew more about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction than we did.

But they don’t have super-powers, OK?

Now, in recent weeks the commando raids and drone attacks at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have increased, and clearly there’s an effort to make an October Surprise out of this very issue. So all this could be an expectations game. But Perino is right, in one respect. It IS very hard to capture Al Qaeda leaders when you de-emphasize their capture for 6 years to go on a happy hunting trip in Iraq. So reversing that all in a matter of a couple months is not entirely likely.

See also the fact that we are a rapidly deteriorating state with reduced influence in the world as our bloated military becomes increasingly irrelevant. The problem is that Republicans and neocons associate weapons with super powers, and their ineffectiveness at targeting terrorists with them is becoming clear. Perino didn’t know how much truth she was offering.

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