Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Tony’s Dilemma

Matthew Yglesias has a great post up about the assertion in the Tom Friedman column today that Blair couldn’t make the real case for invasion because of the British public’s shallow dislike for George W. Bush’s personality and because they hadn’t gone through 9/11.

I think that antipathy to the government of George W. Bush is a perfectly sound reason for doubting the humanitarian case for war that Friedman and others on the left have been pushing. The argument would, in short, be that before the war Bush had been given the opportunity to govern one country and he basically made a hash of it. We’ve seen bad budgeting, crony capitalism, social intolerance, large-scale dishonesty, and a wavering commitment to democratic procedure, liberal transparency, and all other norms of good government. Now as Friedman has repeatedly been at pains to point out, winning the peace in Iraq will be a difficult business and it seems eminently reasonable to ask whether or not the person in charge of the operation is up to the task.

I agree that questioning this particular administration’s ability to carry out such an ambitious nation building plan was always perfectly reasonable, even if you agreed with the goals on humanitarian terms. I always thought that the Iraqi people were tough enough to hold out for another couple of years until we could get someone competent in office.

But, I also think that Friedman has completely misunderstood Blair’s dilemma with respect to why he had to make the imminent threat argument. It wasn’t because the British hadn’t experienced 9/11 and therefore needed to be persuaded that they were under threat. The reason Blair had to make the phony case for terrorist ties and WMD was because Americans needed to be persuaded that 9/11 had something to do with Iraq. He knew that this opportunity to remove the tyrant only existed because Bush was willing to frighten the American public into believing that Saddam was involved and that he was planning to launch biological, chemical and nuclear weapons at the US in his next attack.

Imagine if Bush had said in his SOTU, “We were just dramatically attacked by Islamic fundamentalists who have declared holy war on our country. We removed the government that was providing them haven in Afghanistan, but many of them are still hiding there and in Pakistan and their influence continues to grow throughout the Muslim world. Kim Jong Il of North Korea told us that he has nukes and is ready to sell them to terrorists to feed his starving population. Despite these huge immediate challenges, I think this is the perfect moment, with only our good friend Great Britain by our side, to launch a completely unrelated operation to liberate the Iraqi people from the Stalinist tyrant who we have allowed to remain in power for more than 30 years. We think that if we build a democracy in Iraq that terrorists will see the error of their ways eventually.”

In the unlikely event that Americans agreed that this was a good time to begin launching humanitarian operations only very tangentially related to terrorism, he would have run right up against another argument against invading Iraq right after 9/11 which was that invading a middle eastern country immediately in the wake of 9/11 would potentially alienate many of the Arab states that had been helpful in tracking down al Qaeda and was likely to create even more resentment and be a recruiting bonanza for terrorists.

A majority of Americans might have then concluded that a long term and extremely expensive humanitarian mission in Iraq was not worth throwing away our long term alliances and the support of the entire world after 9/11 just when we needed as much global cooperation as possible to combat terrorism. Certainly, people might have at least asked for more than happy talk about “sending messages” and “setting examples” if the cost of unilateralism as measured in lives and tax dollars — much less national security — had ever been discussed.

Friedman, however, persists in his completely unsubstantiated conclusion that America and Britain invading and “building a more decent Iraq would help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive political track and send a message to all the neighboring regimes that Western governments were not going to just sit back and let them incubate suicide bombers and religious totalitarians, whose fanaticism threatened all open societies.”

He has said this over and over again.

Can someone please explain to me why he thinks Iraq’s neighbors would learn the lesson that the invasion proved that the West was not going to let them “incubate suicide bombers and religious totalitarians whose fanaticism threaten all open societies” when Iraq featured none of those problems?!! Does he think that Arab leaders are as stupid as the Americans who bought the mawkish tripe that Saddam was behind 9/11? For Gawd’s sake…

The lesson is that America invaded an Arab country that posed no threat, and had nothing to do with 9/11 because it saw the opportunity to get away with it. As for building “a more decent Iraq,” I’d feel a little bit more confident if that hustler Ahmed Chalabi wasn’t taking over the intelligence apparatus and using it to settle old scores — with Wolfie and Rummy’s enthusiastic permission, evidently.

I admit that as a hater of totalitarians here and elsewhere, I generally agree with Blair that if we have the capability of getting rid of a tyrannical dictator with minimal loss of life and the support of the international community, that it is a worthy goal. Nobody has to make the humanitarian argument to me. But as the British people wisely understood (and you have to wonder why Blair and Friedman didn’t) the problem in this instance was that the President of the United States was an incompetent puppet, his advisors were either ineffectual milquetoasts or radical nutcases, and his timing was cynically opportunistic and counterproductive.

As Yglesias points out, there was absolutely no reason to think that they were going to be any more prudent or competent in this arena than in any other. It was obvious from the beginning that the competing factions of the foreign policy shop in this White House were engaged in a constant tug of war for the ADD-led brain of President Treadmill. The President’s own father had to have his friend Brent Scowcroft write an op-ed piece in the NY Times to persuade him to muzzle Mad Dog Cheney in the run up to the war. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that they weren’t exactly a well oiled machine over there.

I don’t know if Americans will ever face up to the fact that Bush and his cronies either didn’t give a damn about 9/11 or, even more frightening, actually believe that Saddam was behind it. But, Tom Friedman should know better.

The Crazy Aunt (and Uncle) of Iraq Policy

Oh, this is rich. I just noticed that Atrios linked to a post at Abu Aardvaark regarding my very favorite lil’ wacky neocon, Laurie Mylroie:

…Incredibly, Wolfowitz told NBC’s Tim Russert that he didn’t know who was responsible for the Cole and Khobar Tower attacks. But on that question, the agreement is all but unanimous: It wasn’t Saddam, it wasn’t Iraq. It was Osama and al-Qaida.”

What is Wolfowitz talking about? Boehlert doesn’t speculate, but I’m happy to. I would never presume to know the mind of the Wolfowitz, but I have a pretty good idea what is going on here: Wolfowitz is loyal to his friend Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie, for those who haven’t come across her before, has long been kind of the “crazy aunt” of Iraq policy. Obsessed with the idea that Saddam Hussein was behind most of the world’s evil, Mylroie has spun an astonishing web in a series of articles and a very odd book to “prove” that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – as well as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (you may have thought it was Timothy McVeigh, but hello – pay attention, okay?), the 1997 Luxor attacks in Egypt, the Cole bombing, the anthrax attacks, and the cancelation of Firefly (well, maybe not that last one, but he probably *wanted* Firefly canceled).

In her brand new book, “Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror” (yes, you read that title right), Mylroie goes even farther, entering into tinfoil hat-country. According to Mylroie, Iraq was responsible for September 11 – not working with al-Qaeda, not coordinating with al-Qaeda, but actually responsible for it, while cleverly setting al-Qaeda and bin Laden up to take the fall. Yes, Mylroie (who was invited to testify before the 9/11 commission, co-authored a book with Judith Miller, is affiliated with AEI, is good friends with Ahmad Chalabi as well as with Paul Wolfowitz) denies bin Laden’s responsibility for 9/11… (p.51)

Go read the whole post because not only is it informative, it is also funny.

It reminded me that Wolfowitz had actually specifically endorsed some of Mylroie’s crazy rantings in the famous Vanity Fair article, but it had been overlooked in the flap over WMD and the bureaucracy.

Josh Marshall wrote at the time:

So here’s the story with the disputed quotes from Sam Tanenhaus’ article on Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in Vanity Fair. As noted here a couple days ago, the Tanenhaus article says that Wolfowitz is “confident” that Saddam played some role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and that he had “entertained” the notion that Saddam had played some role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as well. (Tanenhaus sources Wolfowitz’s ideas about Oklahoma City to a “longtime friend” of the Deputy Secretary.)

In the portion of his article that discusses his interview, Tanenhaus quotes Wolfowitz on the 1993 bombing and then notes that Wolfowitz declined to comment on Saddam’s possible involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Now, Wolfowitz is also on record as saying that he’s unclear about Cole and Khobar Towers, which his looney friend Mylroie also claims were masterminded by the Godlike and Omnipotent Saddam Hussein.

This is some real crazy-assed thinking and when you combine it with their blind faith in the Iraqi exile hustlers, you really have to question whether we are dealing with people who are working on all cylinders.

Interestingly, when I went back to read the transcript of the vanity Fair interview (which does not contain the refences to 1993 or Oklahoma because while they claim they were off the record) I found this incredible quote from Wolfowitz:

The mistake that Saddam made was in assuming that we would behave in a certain way, i.e. we would never go to war until we’d had six weeks of bombing first. That’s a sort of classic intelligence failure, to have a certain expectation and then see all the evidence in light of that expectation.

Yup. Uh huh. He said it.

Bluff Stuff

Via Josh Marshall I see that a former high level Iraqi officialsays that Saddam destroyed his weapons but wanted the world to be unsure as to whether he had WMD, as a deterrent.

I said this back in June, in response to all these questions asking “why didn’t he fully cooperate?”

Saddam was a strongman dictator who maintained his power, both within the country and in the region, through fear and violence. Kowtowing to the UN and especially to the US would have substantially weakened his reputation as a ruthless tyrant who was willing to do anything to stay in power. If a totalitarian shows weakness, the whole house of cards can come tumbling down. It’s possible that he felt he had to bluff or lose his grip on power from within.

And perhaps he simply made the logical calculation that, as the North Korea situation has shown, the US will not unilaterally invade a nuclear power and will hesitate to put large numbers of troops in the way of lethal unconventional weapons. Anyone in his shoes might have felt it was in his best interests to keep the world guessing about his WMD capabilities and willingness to use them. When it became clear last fall that the US was going to call his bluff, it appears to me that instead of preparing a traditional defense and going down in a blaze of glory, he made plans to go underground or escape (and perhaps live to fight another day.) I doubt very seriously that even crazy Saddam ever entertained the illusion that his army could defeat the US military in a straight up fight. Once that was inevitable, he went to plan B. Plan A was to keep the world guessing as long as he could about what he was really capable of.

I recently read that he thought his troops would fight an urban guerilla war in Baghdad and they didn’t, so the “live to fight another day” theory may be wrong. Nonetheless, I still think it is completely reasonable that Saddam didn’t have the weapons but believed it served his purposes to keep the world guessing and this account gives it some credence.

The big question, however, is whether it is reasonable to believe that the most powerful country in the world bought this 3rd rate dictator’s gamesmanship and if they did, whether it is reasonable that we have a doctrine of preventive war if our top flight, super sophisticated intelligence services are so easily duped.

If the clumsy posturing of a not-too-bright tyrant is now the only evidence we need to launch an invasion then we are in for a very bumpy ride. (And, I would like to propose that we simply start flushing thousand dollar bills down the toilet rather than continue to fund a defense and intelligence apparatus that is incapable of verifying whether or not these claims have any basis in reality.)

In truth, the hyping of the evidence speaks for itself. (And I still think it is thoroughly illogical that the US would have put tens of thousands of troops on the Iraq-Kuwait border in a long term build last winter if we truly believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.)

If Saddam bluffed and we knew he was bluffing (or certainly should have known) then somebody needs to ask what purpose was served for the people of the United States and Britain for their governments to call that bluff.

The Phony

I think this article in Salon is exactly right. It’s certainly a description of Commander Codpiece that’s come up over and over again in conversations I’ve had with Democrats.

Rep. Dick Gephardt made his best and perhaps his only significant contribution to defeating George Bush in 2004 last month, when he derided the president’s “bring ’em on” challenge to Iraqi attacks on American forces. “Enough of the phony macho rhetoric,” Gephardt shot back. The Missouri Democrat’s line was more than just padded flight-suit envy. His jibe hints at the strategy that could put a Democrat back in the White House: convincing Americans that Bush is a phony.

The Democrats can only win if they succeed in undermining the president’s greatest strength: his credibility as a decisive and authentic wartime leader. The problem is that in such uncertain times many Americans instinctively can’t and don’t want to believe that George Bush is screwing them. Until the Democrats change how voters view Bush the man, and then link that to a broader critique of his administration, the Democrats will have a hard time punching through.

[…]

The core problem with the current Democratic strategy is that a piecemeal, issue-by-issue attack on the policies of the administration will not resonate while Bush retains the esteem and even admiration of many ordinary Americans. And a contest based on issues will only get harder as Bush moves from shoring up his base to moderating his image in the lead-up to next fall. Expect the policy lines to blur amid a renewed focus on domestic issues and a revival of the language and imagery of compassionate conservatism.

The Democrats’ greatest danger is to run an issues-based campaign that becomes a ritualized liberal/conservative slanging match. Progressives who are flabbergasted at the audacity of Bush’s agenda seem to think that simply communicating Bush’s policy failures is enough. But this approach will play straight into Karl Rove’s chubby hands and trap Democrats in the defensive, dithering posture that has defined them since the Bush presidency began.

So no matter how bad Bush’s actual record may be, Democrats simply can’t count on fighting the upcoming election on substantive policy grounds alone.

This is an ongoing problem for Democrats. We are earnest and sincere but every time we open our mouths it’s about our 10 point “program” and why is it better. Even my eyes glaze over.

We’d better figure out how to take this personality driven politics to the Republicans.

Besides, Bush IS a phony— he’s a phony Texan, a phony businessman, a phony politician, a phony flyboy, a phony compassionate conservative, and a phony regular guy. He’s actually a phony president. Nobody believes, deep down, that he’s calling the shots.

The only thing authentic about him is his nasty temper and loyalty to big business.

Do We Sense A Pattern?

The CIA objected to claims in the British government’s September dossier on Iraq’s banned weapons programme, the issue at the heart of the Kelly affair, it was revealed yesterday.

It appears that among the CIA’s objections was the much-trumpeted claim that Iraqi forces could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so.

[…]

Yesterday, the FO revealed that the CIA was given a draft of the government’s dossier on September 11 last year, the same day Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s communications director, saw it, according to evidence given to the Commons committee.

The committee asked the FO what “reservations and comments” the CIA had expressed about the September dossier in addition to the Niger uranium story. The FO replied: “The CIA made a number of comments”. It declined to be specific but added: “The JIC chairman incorporated or rejected them as he judged fit.”

How, then, do we explain this, from Dana Milbank’s piece in the W. Post from July 20th?

The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a “Global Message” issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq “could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given.”

[…]

The White House embraced the claim, from a British dossier on Iraq, at the same time it began to promote the dossier’s disputed claim that Iraq sought uranium in Africa.

Bush administration officials last week said the CIA was not consulted about the claim. A senior White House official did not dispute that account, saying presidential remarks such as radio addresses are typically “circulated at the staff level” within the White House only.

But, the CIA was consulted and told the British government that it was false. Unfortunately, they apparently forgot to tell the White House because two weeks later the president made the claim in a Rose Garden appearance on September 26th, and in his radio address two days later.

Lucky for him, he was very careful, just as with the uranium issue, to attribute it to the British government so nobody can say he was technically lying. Whew!

Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s quite amazing that they made more than one wild claim based upon British intelligence that it later turned out our CIA had already rejected. What are the odds of that happening?

At the very least you’d think that since they knew that elements of the dossier were “dodgy” at least since September 28th (or they would have continued to use the “sexy” 45 minute claim) they’d be extra careful about repeating other claims from that document without making sure the CIA had no objections.

Yet, even with memos flying from the CIA director about the African uranium claim, the NSC didn’t put 2 and 2 together and conclude that maybe — just like the “sexed up” 45 minute fantasy that they were forced to give up back in September — it might be prudent to stop repeating it.

Talk about bad luck.

It would be very interesting to find out what other claims in the “dodgy dossier” the CIA objected to back in September 2002.

The Rule of Law Cast Adrift

Kofi Annan asks the right questions:

Suggesting that some world leaders at the coming General Assembly should set aside time for basic discussions on these issues, he said, “if we are going to make preventive action, or war, part of our response to these new threats, what are the rules?”

“Who decides?” he added. “Under what circumstances? Did what happened in Iraq constitute an exception? A precedent others can exploit? What are the rules?”

In effect, three months after President Bush warned that the United Nations might become irrelevant, the secretary general turned a traditional midsummer news conference into a stump speech on the value of international institutions in general and the United Nations in particular.

At one point, recalling the bitter dismissals of the United Nations last winter, he said, with a bare hint of satisfaction, “I did warn those who were bashing the U.N. that they had to be careful because they may need the U.N. soon.”

The answer to Annan’s questions are obvious and should be shared with the American citizenry. They are akin to language in the Bush vs Gore decision.

The doctrine of preventive war is limited to circumstances that George W. Bush sets forth, for the problem of allowing other nations to use the same rationale generally presents many complexities.

Bush decides, under whatever circumstances he wants. Iraq is not an exception, others may NOT exploit the precedent and the rules are what we say they are.

I don’t think that most people are comfortable with the idea that the US isn’t playing by any agreed upon rules. We like to see ourselves as good citizens and responsible world leaders. I doubt that many have any clue that the Bush administration has caused an international crisis with its unilateral foreign policy that observes no discernible rule of law.

And, I do not believe that Americans want to bear the cost of Bush’s military adventurism all alone, whether they favor any particular war or not. The Democrats need to make the case for multi-lateralism by hammering the fact that Bush’s go-it-alone stubbornness means that we pay the entire cost ourselves, in lives as well as money — not to mention the less quantifiable costs in credibility, cooperation and prestige.

Blinded By Faith

Today, one of my favorite blogs,TAPPED says:

One gets the sense that, rather than Bush administration officials regarding the war on terrorism as something new under the sun — something that might require them to think and act differently and rearrange their priorities — they regarded it as an excuse to do everything they had already wanted to do.

This is a very important point. During the 2003 run-up to the invasion (and even before, on Eschaton) I wrote about the intellectual inflexibility of the neconservative claque. From January 5th:

It is true that Iraq could get nukes and Saddam could extort the entire western world by withholding oil and driving up the price. So could other countries, for that matter. No matter who managed to do this, it would not be a pretty picture. But, even Kenneth Pollack, who is held up as the authority on the necessity of invading Iraq, argues that while Saddam will have to be deposed, it is not so immediate a threat that we could not wait long enough to mitigate some of the potentially dangerous repercussions and plan for our long term responsibilities in the region before taking action.

Confronting Saddam could have waited because what is not waiting is the simmering anti-American bloodlust that is sweeping the Middle East, particularly in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Invading Iraq on a thin pretext (which is what is going to happen because this war is already timed for American convenience and nothing else) is possibly going to set off a chain of events that could have been avoided if we handled the situation with a little more sophistication and finesse instead of fulfilling some long held neocon wet dream. And that is the real problem.

The Wolfowitz/Perle school never took terrorism seriously when it was becoming a threat on the world stage and they don’t take it seriously now. The influential CSP issued only 2 reports since the 1998 embassy bombing about the threat of terrorism until 9/11. The PNAC has been wringing their hands about Iraq and pushing for missile defense for years, but terrorism was hardly even on the radar screen. They are about China, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, Israel, US “benevolent” hegemony and missile defense. Period. Anything else will be subsumed under what they believe is the real agenda.

As with the ever changing justifications for the tax cuts for their rich friends, Bush and his foreign policy mavens are so blinkered and myopic and that they pursue their preordained agenda no matter what the current situation. They seem completely incapable of exercising any flexibility in light of changing circumstances. They just find a way to use the changing circumstances to justify what they plan to do anyway.

This is very dangerous. Bush, with his stupid bellicose posturing has created a needless crisis in Asia by challenging a cornered and neurotically proud despot in North Korea into a nuclear standoff. He has escalated the problem with Iraq to one of immediate danger, when it was a medium term threat at worst, and by conflating it with Al Qaeda and Muslim fundamentalism, for no good reason other than political expediency, he has made it a cause for a whole lot of disaffected people in the Mideast and Indian subcontinent to rally to.

It goes on to discuss how much this all has to do with their childlike devotion to the fantasy of missile defense.

It should be clear by now, with all we know about the bogus justifications for invading and occupying Iraq, that the Bush administration does not care about terrorism and is wedded to grandiose unilateralist ideas that were formulated during the cold war and desperately need to be re-evaluated.

This should be the basis for the Democratic critique of Bush’s foreign policy. The world is changing. The neocons refuse to see it.

The Electability Game

In response to a post by Leah over at Eschaton and subsequent discussion of “electability” in the comments thread, a reader named Jennifer Kenney writes something that I think is insightful and worth reiterating.

This is all so ridiculous, to debate electability on the basis of policy positions. Most people – especially most people who are not policy wonks – make decisions with their guts. They like something or don’t based on its innate attractiveness, not on a careful weighing of evidence.

If this were not the case, would anyone truly think that Bush was an asset to our national security? Would he have gotten close enough to steal the election? Would the Dems be thinking about running anybody other than Hillary? Would I ever have thought I was “so in love” with that guy who was “just between jobs right now”? No, no, and Whoa Nelly! People aren’t such rational creatures.

The question isn’t whether Kerry (or anybody else) has the stance on the issues to beat Dean, the question is whether anybody else has the energy and rhetoric to beat him. Most folks aren’t aware of him (or that the primary races have even started). When they become aware of him, they’ll decide whether or not they like him from their guts, not their heads, and once they make that decision they’ll fill in all the logical policy blanks to justify that decision. That’s electability.

She’s right. Political junkies and partisans care about issues. Everybody else votes on a gut feeling or tribal identification. The politicians’ job, among other things, is to project an image and an aura that accurately captures who he is and reassures voters that he can do the job. If the politician is astute about the mood and the direction of the country, he will be able to emphasize those personal qualities that people subconsciously believe is needed at that particular time. (Biography and resume count, too. People use them as short hand.)

The post modern nature of the media makes this more important than ever. Narratives are strangely constructed and often left dangling as the herd rushes off in different directions. Truth and reality are presented as relative to which party you belong to — facts are nothing more than spin points to be debated by the candidate or his “critics.” You can’t blame people for relying more and more on their instincts to guide their political choices. It’s almost impossible for a busy person to sort out the facts and the truth about any candidate.

As much as it pains me to say it, because I thought he was a good man, Al Gore’s biggest failure as a candidate wasn’t a bad strategy and it wasn’t a lack of passion. It was a stilted and uncomfortable speaking style. It is tremendously unfair, but it is the truth. I can’t tell you how many airheaded Democratic voters I spoke to who complained about his personality. He won anyway, to be sure, but it was in spite of that handicap. Most people voted their pocketbooks and if you recall, back in 2000 this country felt invincible.

Bush, on the other hand, did as well as he did because his family name represented staid, waspy, traditional conservatism at a time when a lot of people had come to believe that the most important part of the President’s job was to project an image of rectitude. (Peace and prosperity tend to make the task of governing look easy.) His faux Texan affectations helped to deliver the south, but his policy positions and grasp of the issues was non-existent and nobody expected him to have them. He was chosen for his brand name appeal.

Interestingly, they have spent the last 3 years re-branding him as their former rival, John McCain — the straight talking war hero.

I don’t suggest that the Democrats adopt such a cynical approach. But, we are being luddites if we don’t recognize and consciously adapt to the modern political reality. Politics are now inextricably linked to entertainment values as much as civic tradition. Maybe on some level it always has been. We ignore that at our peril.

FYI: On VH1’s top 200 Pop Icons, Bill Clinton comes in at number 18 and John F Kennedy at 32.

The two most popular Democratic presidents of the last 40 years are considered Pop Icons. The coolest people are always Democrats. We can do this.

0 for 25

Fareed Zakaria wrote something interesting in the June 16th issue of Newsweek. I was aware of this, but now that we know the WMD threat was at best, wildly overstated, it really bears some examination.

For decades some conservatives, including many who now wield great influence, have had a tendency to vastly exaggerate the threat posed by tyrannical regimes.

It all started with the now famous “Team B” exercise. During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director George Bush agreed to allow a team of outside experts to look at the intelligence and come to their own conclusions. Team B–which included Paul Wolfowitz–produced a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated.

In retrospect, Team B’s conclusions were wildly off the mark. Describing the Soviet Union, in 1976, as having “a large and expanding Gross National Product,” it predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome pace. For example, it predicted that the Backfire bomber “probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984.” In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.

The reality was that even the CIA’s own estimates–savaged as too low by Team B–were, in retrospect, gross exaggerations. In 1989, the CIA published an internal review of its threat assessments from 1974 to 1986 and came to the conclusion that every year it had “substantially overestimated” the Soviet threat along all dimensions. For example, in 1975 the CIA forecast that within 10 years the Soviet Union would replace 90 percent of its long-range bombers and missiles. In fact, by 1985, the Soviet Union had been able to replace less than 60 percent of them.

He does not mention that they also never admit they were wrong. Their worldview is set in stone and they are actually a bit paranoid.

Which leads me to this op-ed from today in the NY Times by Lawrence Korb, former deputy defense secretary under Reagan who questions the reasoning behind moving American bases from Germany to eastern Europe:

Since moving to new bases would not save money or improve our strategic flexibility, there must be another motive.

If the neoconservatives had ever changed course even once over the past 40 years, I might be able to buy that it was Rummy’s pique at “old Europe.” But, they have never let facts on the ground alter their plans or their total faith in their original analysis. It’s really quite easy to see why Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld are moving our troops from Germany for no good reason.

It’s because they are planning to defend Eastern Europe from Russia.

I kid you not.

We’ve gone from “Dr Strangelove” to “The Russians Are Coming”

Just read Wolfowitz’s 10 Commandments…er… The Defense Planning Guidance, 1992. From the NY Times

Senior Defense Department officials have said the document will be issued by Defense Secretary Cheney this month. According to a Feb. 18 memorandum from Mr. Wolfowitz’s deputy, Dale A. Vesser, the policy guidance will be issued with a set of “illustrative” scenarios for possible future foreign conflicts that might draw United States military forces into combat.

These scenarios, issued separately to the military services on Feb. 4, were detailed in a New York Times article last month. They postulated regional wars against Iraq and North Korea, as well as a Russian assault on Lithuania and smaller military contingencies that United States forces might confront in the future.

[…]

The draft states that with the elimination of United States short-range nuclear weapons in Europe and similar weapons at sea, the United States should not contemplate any withdrawal of its nuclear-strike aircraft based in Europe and, in the event of a resurgent threat from Russia, “we should plan to defend against such a threat” farther forward on the territories of Eastern Europe “should there be an Alliance decision to do so.”

Nothing must stand in the way of the Master Plan.

And they are always wrong about everything.

The Name’s Chalabi…Ahmed Chalabi

I’ve been meaning to write once again about our good friend in Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi. He is such an interesting fellow and continues to be the favorite talking head of the “New Iraq” on cable television. It seems as if hardly a day goes by that I don’t see him speaking on behalf of Iraqis everywhere.

Slate’s Jack Shafer, who has nailed the intrepid embed Judith Miller to the proverbial wall, reports in this and other articles how reliant Ms Miller was on the ever so helpful Ahmed when she wrote her breathless accounts of the vast arsenal of unconventional weapons everyone knew for a fact were in Iraq. But then, Chalabi has been helpful with the vaunted “strong, solid” Iraqi intelligence for years.

According to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers’ May Report:

With Iraq conquered and Saddam Hussein’s regime deposed, U.S. and Iraqi sources have now provided an account of the unsuccessful strategy of deposing Saddam by a coup d’etat during the 1990’s, an effort reportedly known within CIA by the cryptonum “DBACHILLES” . The failed coup efforts carry some important lessons. They show that Iraqi intelligence penetrated the Iraqi exile-based operations. And they illustrate the damage caused by a long-running feud between Iraqi exile groups and their patrons in Washington. A media-based report follows.

[…]

Complicating the CIA’s coup planning was a similar effort in northern Iraq by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. A CIA officer named Bob Baer was dispatched in January 1995 to coordinate the various covert efforts, but they only got more tangled. Chalabi launched his coup attempt in March 1995, but it was unsuccessful and Baer was summoned home to Washington. Chalabi was convinced that the military-coup plan had been compromised and traveled to Washington in March 1996 to see the new CIA director, John Deutch, and his deputy, George Tenet. He told them the Iraqis had captured an Egyptian courier who was carrying an Inmarsat satellite phone to Shawani’s sons in Baghdad.

When the CIA officials seemed unconvinced, for their own good reasons, Chalabi then went to his friend Richard Perle, a prominent neoconservative. Perle is said to have called Tenet and urged that an outside committee review the Iraq situation. But the coup planning went ahead. DBACHILLES succeeded in reaching a number of senior Iraqi military officers, but was compromised and collapsed in a blood bath in June 1996.

The Iraqis began arresting the coup plotters on June 26. At least 200 officers were seized and more than 80 were executed, including Shawani’s sons. Top CIA officials reportedly blamed Chalabi for exposing the plot, and the recrimination has persisted ever since.

As a follow-on to the coup plotting, in the run-up to, and during the invasion, both Alawi and Shawani played important roles in the US/UK effort to encourage Iraqi officers to surrender or defect. It did not quite work out that way. The Iraqi military did not defect or surrender, they just went home. (Jonkers) (Wash Post, 16 May 2003, page A29 //David Ignatius)

Interesting, but ancient history, right?

Fast forward to The Saq of Iraq, April 27, 2003.

WASHINGTON, April 27 (AFP)

Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi said Sunday that he has “specific information” about links between the terror group al-Qaeda and the Iraqi intelligence service Mukhabarat.

“We have specific information about visits that leaders of al-Qaeda made to Iraq in as late as 2000, and the requests for large amounts of cash,” Chalabi said.

Chalabi, who heads up the US-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), an organization that opposed Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime, added that he could not elaborate “because we want to chase down specifically the information so there will be an actionable case for international authorities — specifically the United States.”

Chalabi’s comments came in response to a question about a report in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper that secret Iraqi intelligence documents found in Baghdad have provided the first evidence of a direct link between Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

[…]

But, lo and behold:

Iraqi “intelligence documents” likely planted. April 29, 2003

[…]

The problem with these documents is that they are being provided by the U.S. military to a few reporters working for a very suspect newspaper, London’s Daily Telegraph (affectionately known as the Daily Torygraph” by those who understand the paper’s right-wing slant). The Telegraph’s April 27 Sunday edition reported that its correspondent in Baghdad, Inigo Gilmore, had been invited into the intelligence headquarters by U.S. troops and miraculously “found” amid the rubble a document indicating that Iraq invited Osama bin Laden to visit Iraq in March 1998.

Gilmore also reported that the CIA had been through the building several times before he found the document. Gilmore added that the CIA must have “missed” the document in their prior searches, an astounding claim since the CIA must have been intimately familiar with the building from their previous intelligence links with the Mukhabarat dating from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Moreover, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including Britain’s MI-6, have refuted claims of a link between bin Laden and Iraq.

And, what a coincidence…

Secret Baath files may help Chalabi settle old scores May 8 2003

Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled financier promoted by the Pentagon as a leader of postwar Iraq, claims to have obtained 25 tonnes of intelligence documents detailing Saddam Hussein’s relationship with foreign governments and Arab leaders.

The files, seized by supporters of his Iraqi National Congress (INC) from Baath party offices and secret police stations, may fuel a fresh round of recriminations and score-settling as politicians meeting in Baghdad struggle to agree the terms of an interim administration.

In interviews with Abu Dhabi television and Newsweek magazine, Chalabi has already threatened to use the papers to damage the Jordanian royal family and the Al-Jazeera television organisation, with which he has had long-running disputes.

The INC offices in London said that some of the documents may be published, but other Iraqi political groups, and the British Foreign Office, called for the files to be returned to the authorities.

The papers were collected from abandoned buildings used by Saddam’s Special Security Organisation (SSO) and the Mukhabarat intelligence service, from Baath party offices, and from the Iraqi army.

Oh yes, this makes a lot of sense:

AFTER THE WAR: INTELLIGENCE; U.S. Said to Seek Help of Ex-Iraqi Spies on Iran July 22, 2003

Baghdad — Relying on the help of an Iraqi political party, the United States has moved to resurrect parts of Iraq’s once-feared intelligence service, with the branch that monitors Iran among the top priorities, former Iraqi agents and politicians say.

The Iraqi National Congress, which is led by Ahmad Chalabi, the longtime exile who is now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, says its senior officials have met with senior members of the so-called Iran and Turkey branch of the Mukhabarat, or Iraqi intelligence, over the past several weeks. The party has received documents from the intelligence officers and recruited them into a reconstituted version of the unit, said Abdulaziz Kubaisi, the Iraqi National Congress official responsible for the recruiting effort.

American officials, he said, are fully informed about what the party is doing. Iraqi intelligence officers who have been asked to rejoin the branch contend that the United States is orchestrating the effort.

“As far as what we do, we are sending back information to the Pentagon, to people who are responsible,” Kubaisi said. “They know the nature of what we’re doing. There is coordination. We have representatives of (U.S. Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld (at the Congress).”

But some Middle East experts said trying to revive the branch before a sovereign government is in place and working through a political party could backfire.

“This sets a bad precedent because you don’t have a government in place, and because Chalabi’s party is a minority and doesn’t represent the majority of Iraqis,” said Edward Walker, former ambassador to Egypt and Israel under former President George Bush and now president of the Middle East Institute, “I think it will be highly controversial to rebuild the intelligence arm when there are so many unresolved questions about Iraqi intelligence from before.”

The effort to reach out to former Iraqi intelligence officials also appears hard to harmonize with the American drive to “de-Baathify” Iraqi society, given the prominence of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein in his government.

A senior American official said concern about Iran was driving some of the discussion about moving quickly to re-establish an intelligence service. The official said the United States recognized that Iraq had a good intelligence apparatus focused on Iran because activities in the neighboring country might affect Iraqi security at home.

People close to the Iran branch said the Americans had also expressed interest in reviving the intelligence service’s Syria branch.

So, recent accounts by the CIA and Iraqis show that Iraqi intelligence infiltrated the exile groups during the 90’s. And, Ahmed Chalabi is suspected of compromising a CIA backed coup in 1995, which is one of the reasons that he’s so mistrusted in intelligence circles today. He tried to implicate one of the Iraqi CIA assets who later went on to help the US in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

He has been revealed as the main source for what seems to be the er…”highly exaggerated” claims of WMD, to the NY Times and one presumes, his pals in the Pentagon.

He is dropped into Iraq by the Pentagon while the war is still going on and finds himself alone in the headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service turning up all kinds of documents that tie Saddam to al Qaeda and other Arab states like his enemies in Jordan (where he was convicted of fraud.)

Now, he is reported to be “resurrecting” the Iraqi Intelligence branch dealing with Iran and possibly Syria even though he is only the head of a nominal political party in Iraq.

I don’t know about you, but it sure seems like Ahmed Chalabi has a rather unusual and focused interest in the Iraqi intelligence apparatus for a guy who hadn’t lived in Iraq for more than 40 years and who is suspected by the CIA of causing at least 80 friendly Iraqi deaths by exposing a coup plot he was not involved in.

This man’s relationship to the top policy makers in the Pentagon needs to be looked at much more closely.

There is something very wrong with this picture.

And, just to illustrate what a true man of the Iraqi people he is, the NY Times reported on July 17th:

A delegation from Iraq’s new Governing Council, scheduled to leave Baghdad for New York, suffered a last minute defection by Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress.

Aides to Mr. Chalabi said there were several reasons for his cancelation. Prominent among them was the transport aircraft provided by the American military, which was not equipped with seats. The delegates were to be strapped onto benches for a flight to Abu Dhabi, an interim destination that also did not meet with Mr. Chalabi’s approval.

In addition to his discontent over the seating arrangements, Mr. Chalabi was reported by his aides to be unhappy that Adnan Pachachi, a 80-year-old former diplomat, had been designated chairman of the delegation in a voice vote while Mr. Chalabi was not present. Mr. Pachachi and Mr. Chalabi are rivals of sorts for leadership on the Governing Council.