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| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 201 Registered: 8-2003 |
 "Why the Rumsfeld memo matters The Nation Thanks to USA Today, the public now knows some of what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld really thinks of the war of terrorism. And thanks to Rumsfeld, the public knows that Bush is spinning when he discusses the war on terrorism. The newspaper obtained an October 16, 2003, memo Rumsfeld wrote to four senior aides, in which he asked, "Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror?" Rumsfeld also noted, "We are having mixed results with Al Qaida." The much-discussed memo was clearly intended to goose his top people--General Richard Myers, General Peter Pace, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith--to think boldly and imaginatively about the war at hand. But Rumsfeld observed, "Today, we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror." He wondered whether more terrorists are being produced on a daily basis than the number of terrorists being captured, killed, deterred or dissuaded by U.S. actions. If Rumsfeld says there is no way to measure success or defeat in the campaign against terrorism, how can George W. Bush declare that he is winning the war? Yet while speaking on September 12 at Fort Stewart in Georgia, before soldiers and families of the Third Infantry Division, Bush said, "We're rolling back the terrorist threat, not on the fringes of its influence but at the heart of its power." As Rumsfeld might put it, according to what metrics, Mr. President? But the Rumsfeld memo is significant beyond its inadvertent truth-telling. Bush has repeatedly said that Iraq is "the central front" in the war on terrorism. Yet Rumsfeld's memo barely mentioned Iraq. Instead, Rumsfeld focused on combating terrorism at its roots, and he asked his aides to bring him ideas to counter the radical Islamic schools--the madrassas--that instruct students to hate the West. As he noted, "Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?" And he asked, "Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course?" With these comments, Rumsfeld veered dangerously close to becoming one of those root-cause-symps who routinely are derided by hawks for arguing that the United States and other nations need to address the forces that fuel anti-Americanism overseas--in the Muslim world and elsewhere. The public disclosure of these views also made Rumsfeld's refusal to criticize Lt. General William Boykin appear all the more curious. Boykin, the newly appointed deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, was recently caught by NBC News and The Los Angeles Times making comments that indicate he believes that Islam is a false religion--he called Allah "an idol"--and that he sees the war on terrorism as a spiritual conflict between "a Christian nation" and heathens. In various press briefings, Rumsfeld has dodged addressing Boykin's remarks. At one point Rumsfeld said he had tried to watch a videotape of one of Boykin's church speeches, but he was unable to make out the words. (Boykin made most of his controversial statements from various church pulpits.) Wait a minute. The Pentagon can analyze communications intercepts and satellite imagery, but it cannot provide the defense secretary a clear rendition of a broadcast videotape? Social conservatives have predictably rallied behind Boykin, trotting out the to-be-expected argument that the poor general is being assailed for his religious views. Now what if he had said something like, "According to my religious views, Judaism is a false religion"? Or, "my religion teaches that black people are inferior to white people"? Would Rumsfeld and Boykin's defenders have been as temperate in their response? Writing in The Washington Times, conservative commentator Tony Blankley noted, "Whether or not American officials chose to call this a religious war, it is unambiguously clear that our enemy, bin Laden and the other terrorists, are motivated by Islamic religious fanaticism.....It shouldn't be a firing offense for the occasional American general to return the compliment." In other words, in this war (religious or not), the United States is entitled to be as extremist and intolerant as its murderous foes. Blankley fondly recounted that when Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met on a cruiser off the coast of Newfoundland on August 9, 1941, they sang "Onward, Christian Soldiers" with the assembled sailors. Does he suggest that Boykin lead the Pentagon masses in singing that same number? Perhaps Bush and Rumsfeld can provide back-up vocals. Boykin's prominent role in the administration's war on terrorism is certainly an impediment to any effort to encourage fundamentalist Islamic institutions to become more moderate. Rumsfeld ended his memo with a wide-open question: "What else should we be considering?" Here's a no-brainer: how about not appointing a Christian jihadist to be one of the leaders of an endeavor that aims to persuade Islamicists that the West is not so bad? Or is that too far outside the box? JUST RELEASED AND A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER: David Corn's new book, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). For more information and a sample, check out the book's official website: www.bushlies.com." http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames /index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=1026 | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 164 Registered: 8-2003 |
"Bali proves that America's war on terror isn't working The US made the mistake of taking its eye off the main target Jonathan Freedland Tuesday October 15, 2002 The Guardian The world has every right to feel angry. Not just with the perpetrators of the Saturday night massacre in Bali, but with the governments who vowed to wage a "war on terror" which would make attacks like it less likely. Of course, no one is accusing our leaders of having a chance to prevent this act of mass murder and deliberately failing to take it. (No one, that is, except the conspiracy obsessives of radical Islamism, already spreading the word that Saturday's bombers were US agents, seeking to justify and intervention.) But there is much western governments promised to do after 9/11 which would at least have obstructed the path of the men who plotted evil last weekend. Washington called it a "war on terror" and, with remarkably little resistance, most of the world's people either signed up for it or acquiesced in it. Prevention of horrors like Saturday's was the new strategy's primary purpose. Yet all too little of that "war" effort has actually materialised. This new global gameplan was meant to have two core elements at least according to its British advocates. First would be a ruthless, unblinking pursuit of al-Qaida. In the pained weeks that followed the attacks on New York and Washington, citizens in the US and beyond imagined the full force of the state - its army, police and the complete battery of its secret services - deployed against the new enemy. Nothing would be allowed to distract from this goal. If that meant unholy alliances, so be it. If that meant temporarily shelving other foreign policy interests, OK: hunting down Osama bin Laden and his henchmen was to be the sole priority. On this view, Afghanistan was merely the beginning. Uprooting the al-Qaida bases that had mushroomed there was necessary, but hardly sufficient. The whole terrifying point about al-Qaida was that it was not located in one targetable territory, neatly confined to one set of borders. Instead it had spread like a vapour to as many as 50 countries, with up to 100,000 militants ready for action. Bombing a few camps would hardly reach this enemy at all. The only way to fight this new fire was with new fire. Since al-Qaida's methods were not those of a conventional army, the response would have to be equally unconventional. The military analyst Martin van Creveld had warned a decade earlier of "asymmetric war" and now the world understood what he meant. He urged armies to put aside their ships and rockets, and take on the enemy on its own terrain. The soldiers of al-Qaida did not march in columns on battlefields but wore jeans, rented apartments and posed as students in Hamburg, Brixton and Florida. To win, our soldiers would have to learn a new language of combat. Last weekend's atrocity has only underlined the tricky, slippery nature of the new enemy. No one is even sure if Bali was an al-Qaida operation or, for that matter, whether such thing as an "al-Qaida operation" even exists. The Indonesian government says it was, noting the expertise required to trigger a series of simultaneous explosions - a knowhow only al-Qaida could possess. Others are doubtful, insisting that Bin Laden's men tend to prefer military, political or culturally iconic targets. It is the homegrown Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah which hits nightclubs and similar symbols of "western decadence". Even if it was the Jemaah group, there might still be an al-Qaida link. It could be subtle, with al-Qaida acting as an inspiration rather than as direct command. This is one more reason why al-Qaida represents such a formidable foe: it is not an organisation in the western sense at all. It may just be an animating idea, spreading fast throughout the Islamic world. Which brings us to the second prong of the war on terror many of us thought we signed up to a year ago. This held that if al-Qaida was truly to be defeated, killing or arresting its activists would not do the trick: lopping off a head today would only make another grow tomorrow. Every counter-terrorist struggle in the world, from Algiers to Belfast, had taught the same lesson: in the end, there can be no military victory over an enemy which enjoys even a limited degree of popular support. Instead, there has to be political action. Not an attempt to compromise with the killers - Bin-Laden is hardly demanding roundtable talks - but to win over the constituency that offers them tacit backing: to drain the sea in which they swim. Taken together, these two elements amounted to a strategy that was tough on terror, tough on the causes of terror. The west would pursue Al-Qaida operatives, even as it moved to address the grievances which made too many in the Muslim world rally to Bin-Laden's flag. That meant, among other things, a new alternative energy strategy, aimed eventually at weaning the west off oil. No longer would the US and others need to manipulate the Middle East just to safeguard their petrol supply. They could let the peoples of the Arab world choose their own governments for once. The US would move its troops out of Saudi Arabia, healing one of the sores Bin-Laden most likes to inflame: the presence of "infidels" on holy Muslim soil. And Washington would pick up where Clinton left off, devoting serious political muscle to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Genuine movement in that area would instantly rob the Islamists of one of their greatest recruiting pitches. Who knows what impact all that might have had? We certainly don't, because it has hardly been tried. Nor has the military component of the war on terror fared much better. Bin-Laden was allowed to vanish, along with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who escaped the wrath of the mightiest army in the world on board a clapped-out motorbike. The jump-suited captives at Camp X-Ray appear too low-level to have much useful to say. Nor do the US intelligence agencies inspire much confidence: they remain at war with each other while their political masters tend to hear only what they want to hear. None of this is a surprise. For the prosecutors of the war on terror - who promised to focus like a laser beam - have let their eye wander. Like the rulers of Orwell's 1984, our leaders have urged us to switch our hatred overnight not from Eastasia to Eurasia but from al-Qaida to Baghdad. Now we are to believe Saddam is the urgent, number one priority. Bali has proved why that is a woeful error. A war on Iraq will win yet more backing for jihadism in the Muslim world, apparently concerning all Bin Laden's most lurid predictions of a clash of west against Islam. A prolonged US occupation of Iraq will be the greatest provocation yet. But it will also be a distraction from the struggle we were all urged to join a year ago. Bali has proved what Clinton argued a fortnight ago: that radical Islamism remains the "most pressing" threat in the world today. Clinton gets that. The only question is, does Tony Blair? And if he does, is he telling George W Bush? " http://www.guardian.co.uk/indonesia/Story/ 0,2763,812084,00.html | ||
| Telson (Pitbull_trader)
Junior Member Username: Pitbull_trader Post Number: 149 Registered: 8-2003 |
 Bush diverted limited resources away from following Al Qaeda, that attacked us, to launching an unprecedented pre-emptive attack on Iraq, that hadn't attacked us, wasn't linked to Al Qaeda, and posed no threat to us. By so doing Bush severely compromised the security of the USA while giving Al Qaeda a massive recruiting drive, using lies and deceit as his sole modus operandi. British intelligence, as per THE MIRROR and THE GUARDIAN articles in the other thread knew, and the CIA knew it too: "Published on Wednesday, October 9, 2002 The New York Times C.I.A. Warns That a U.S. Attack May Ignite Terror by Alison Mitchell and Carl Hulse" Full Story: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines 02/1009-06.htm Of course, a good, non-neoconservative Republican like Brent Scocroft, former National Security Advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford & George Bush senior knew it, too: "There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks. Indeed Saddam's goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them. Don't attack Saddam. It would undermine our antiterror efforts." Wall Street Journal, 15 Aug 2002 Former Nato Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark knew it: Iraq distracts from the War on Terror I think the conflict with Iraq was elective. It was purely elective and it represented a big distraction from the War on Terror. It was not a reinforcement of it. It was a distraction from it. Source: WCGU-FM interview on "Sound Off With Sasha" Jun 27, 2003 And now Rummy is starting to wake up to facts: "The Washington Post Rumsfeld Questions Anti-Terrorism Efforts By Bradley Graham Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, October 23, 2003; Page A01 In a private memo sent last week to his closest Pentagon associates, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called into question his department's efforts to win the war on terrorism, and said it might be necessary to fashion "a new institution" that could better focus the government's campaign. He said the Pentagon had not "yet made truly bold moves" to reshape itself for the ongoing war and said "relatively little effort" had gone into developing "a long-range plan" to defeat terrorism. He also said the United States even lacks a good set of measures to determine how well it is doing in the war. The two-page memo reveals a blunter, less confident assessment of the anti-terrorism campaign than the largely optimistic statements that Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials have conveyed in public. Although Rumsfeld's aides portrayed the memo as an attempt to provoke debate and goad the military into further action, many of the same views have been voiced in private by other senior Pentagon officials. Asked about the memo yesterday, Rumsfeld said it grew out of comments he heard in recent meetings with regional commanders. "The thing about measuring progress in this war is that it's such a fleeting enemy," one high-ranking general said after learning of the memo yesterday. He interpreted Rumsfeld's mention of a possible "new institution" as a reference to discussions about an enhanced interagency task force. "It's something we can't do ourselves," he said. In the memo, dated Oct. 16 and disclosed yesterday by USA Today, Rumsfeld cited "mixed results" in the fight against al Qaeda, saying "a great many" members of the terrorist network remain at large. He noted "reasonable progress" in Iraq capturing or killing the 55 most-wanted members of Saddam Hussein's former government and "somewhat slower progress" in Afghanistan tracking Taliban leaders who had supported al Qaeda. But efforts to combat the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group, which U.S. officials say has reconstituted in Iraq and probably is responsible for a number of recent attacks, "are just getting started," he added. The Pentagon leader predicted that U.S.-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan would ultimately win "in one way or another." But he said victory would come only with "a long, hard slog." He sounded considerably less certain about the prospects of winning the larger, longer war on terrorism -- or even how to measure whether U.S. operations were eliminating more terrorists than radical clerics and Islamic religious schools were producing. "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he wrote. Rumsfeld raised the possibility of creating "a private foundation to entice" the Islamic schools, known as madrassas, to take "a more moderate course." Most of the memo consisted of questions rather than specific proposals. It was addressed to four people: Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary; Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy; Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman. Surprised by the release of the document, Pentagon and White House officials sought to depict it as evidence simply of Rumsfeld doing his job to compel the armed forces to adapt to new threats. "That's exactly what a strong and capable secretary of defense like Secretary Rumsfeld should be doing," said White House press secretary Scott McClellan, traveling with President Bush in Australia. In style, the memo resembles the flurry of challenging notes, dubbed "snowflakes," that Rumsfeld is known to frequently shower on subordinates. "The reason I write those things is -- and ask questions -- is because I find it a useful thing to do," Rumsfeld told reporters yesterday during a visit to Congress. "The department's a big institution with a lot of people, and to operate, it needs to get into a rhythm and go along in a regularized way. . . . "And sometimes one needs to say to a big institution: 'Hey, wait a minute. Let's lift our eyes up and look out across the horizon and say: Are there questions that we ought to be asking ourselves?' " Myers, who appeared with Rumsfeld, said the memo showed a leader prodding his subordinates to do better. "What you're seeing in this memo, I think, is . . . our boss is challenging us with a lot of questions," he said. But Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters that the memo showed Rumsfeld is "beginning to have a bit of an epiphany" and display "a little self-doubt." Biden called the memo "the first sort of introspection that I've even whiffed coming out of the civilian side of the Defense Department." Said retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate, "Secretary Rumsfeld is only now acknowledging what we've known for some time -- that this administration has no plan for Iraq and no long-term strategy for fighting terrorism." The memo echoed a theme that Rumsfeld has voiced repeatedly in the past two years -- concern that the Department of Defense, originally geared to fight big militaries around the world, is too big and slow to effectively fight small groups of terrorists. But Rumsfeld signaled fresh worries that some of the measures taken so far, such as greater use of agile special operations forces, have been "too modest and incremental." "My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?" Rumsfeld wrote. At the same time, he seemed to doubt the armed forces ever could be reshaped sufficiently. "It is not possible to change DOD [Department of Defense] fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror," he said. "An alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DOD or elsewhere -- one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem." He did not elaborate. He also lamented the state of long-term planning in the anti-terrorism war, suggesting that the need remains for "a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists." "The U.S. is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan," Rumsfeld said, "but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions." In one particularly cryptic line near the end of the memo, Rumsfeld asked: "Does the CIA need a new finding?" A finding, signed by the president, provides authority to conduct whatever covert activity is stipulated. Rumsfeld did not indicate the covert activity he had in mind." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles /A3217-2003Oct22.html  |