"Richard A. Clarke said in a television interview airing Sunday that Bush 'ignored terrorism for months' before the 2001 attacks, then looked to attack Iraq rather than Afghanistan, the nation harboring the terrorist group al-Qaeda, which launched the attacks."
That's from Bloomberg.
It is fair to say that anyone who has seriously reported on this issue, or has read a lot of the good reporting on it, already knows this: namely, that the incoming Bush administration downgraded the attention given to terrorism and al Qaida specifically in the last years of the Clinton administration, and this after being warned by out-going members of the Clinton team that combatting al Qaida should be at the top of their agenda.
In short, they pushed al Qaida and a lot of resources aimed at fighting al Qaida to the backburner until the whole thing blew up in their faces on 9/11.
Their focus, as we've noted before, was on the centrality of states rather than shadowy transnational terrorist groups -- thus their preoccuption with issues like national missile defense.
In any case, as I say, we've basically known this.
But it's another thing to have the person who was there at the center of the action as NSC counter-terrorism czar -- both under Clinton and Bush -- saying on camera that the president ignored terrorism and al Qaida right up until the day of the attacks. Clarke was there. In fact, to the extent that Bush and Rice and Cheney and the rest of the team were ignoring the issue, it would have been Clarke's urgent warnings they were ignoring -- since he was the head of counter-terrorism on the NSC staff.
White House Spokesman Sean McCormick told the New York Times: "The president and his team received briefings on the threat from al-Qaida prior to taking office, and fighting terrorism became a top priority when this administration came into office. We actively pursued the Clinton administration's policies on al-Qaida until we could get into place a more comprehensive policy."
But Clark says that's baloney. And he was the one who headed up Clinton's counter-terrorism policies and Bush's. So who are you going to believe?
Now do you understand why they're stonewalling the 9/11 commission?
And while we're discussing the commission, why do they even really need to stonewall it?
Consider this passage from a piece in today's Times ...
They said the warnings were delivered in urgent post-election intelligence briefings in December 2000 and January 2001 for Condoleezza Rice, who became Mr. Bush's national security adviser; Stephen Hadley, now Ms. Rice's deputy; and Philip D. Zelikow, a member of the Bush transition team, among others.One official scheduled to testify, Richard A. Clarke, who was President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that the warning about the Qaeda threat could not have been made more bluntly to the incoming Bush officials in intelligence briefings that he led.
At the time of the briefings, there was extensive evidence tying Al Qaeda to the bombing in Yemen two months earlier of an American warship, the Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed.
"It was very explicit," Mr. Clarke said of the warning given to the Bush administration officials. "Rice was briefed, and Hadley was briefed, and Zelikow sat in." Mr. Clarke served as Mr. Bush's counterterrorism chief in the early months of the administration, but after Sept. 11 was given a more limited portfolio as the president's cyberterrorism adviser.
Now we know about Rice and Hadley, her deputy. But how about Zelikow? He's a former NSC official from the first Bush administration and a close associate of Rice's. The two of them even wrote a book together.
He was in the key meetings where the warnings -- seemingly ignored -- about al Qaida came up. He seems like someone you'd want to talk to to find out what they were warned about and why they didn't take the warnings more seriously.
Well, you don't have to look far to find him. He runs the 9/11 Commission. Zelikow is the Executive Director of the Commission, which means he has operational control of the investigation under the overall management of the two co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton.
Now, Zelikow is no hack. He's an accomplished Republican foreign policy hand. But Condi Rice and what happened in the hand-off between the administrations is central to the whole 9/11 investigation enterprise.
Does it make sense to have the guy who's running the investigation be one of her close professional colleagues?
The 9/11 families didn't think so either.
--Josh Marshall
Listen carefully to these passages from a new column in Newsweek by Eleanor Clift ...
Kerry knew this was coming. “Bring it on,” he said so often it became his battle cry. Well, now they’ve brought it on, and what is Kerry doing? He’s going on vacation in Idaho, leaving behind the festering story of his unholy bond with foreign leaders. “Before long they’ll be calling him Jacques Kerry,” says a Republican strategist. “It’s only a matter of time.”...
The harsh tone of the attacks this early in the campaign indicates that Bush is willing to drive up his own negatives in order to raise doubts about Kerry. The good news for Kerry is that he fights better when he’s behind, and the way things are going, he’ll soon be behind.
A thought: if your opponent has $100 million to portray you as an effete snob, don't go on vacation to a fancy ski resort in Idaho.
Now read this email from a couple days ago from a very astute Democratic party insider in Washington ...
First, the ballgame will be won or lost in second quarter and early in second quarter. Right now Bush money is gaining him yardage, depicting Kerry as flip-flopper and weak on defense. That's the plan. Simple. Effective. Steamrolling. Fools like Maureen Dowd today echo and enable it in mainstream media, just as she did in 2000. Second, Kerry loses if he can't raise money to buy time to fight back in April. All pundits who say money doesn't matter are wrong, and enable Bush more. Money talks and early money screams. Third, Kerry needs Clinton fundraising and Gore fundraising base badly. Will Clinton really help? Seen any sign of it? Seen him rap Bush lately? Seen Hillary?
This is all true, the Clift passages every bit as much as the email just noted. As the emailer notes, and as we'll return to, this is a very challenging situation. I'm going to note some of the Kerry campaign's mistakes below. But other Democrats need to get off the sidelines too. Now.
(Put Richard Holbrooke, not campaign flacks -- much as I love them -- on every show that will book him. He wants to be Secretary of State. Make him work for it.)
Kerry is now being hit by a barrage of attacks <$Ad$>almost all of which, as I've tried to note here, are based on lies and distortions. They're being organized and planned by the president's partner Karl Rove, a man who has specialized for more than thirty years in vicious campaign tactics (remember McCain in South Carolina) and dirty tricks.
As John Dean notes in his soon to be released book Worse than Watergate -- about which we'll be saying more soon -- even during the Watergate investigation assistant Watergate special prosecutor Richard Davis -- who was tasked with investigating various dirty tricks operations -- was investigating Rove, quizzing Nixon's staffers about Rove's role in various dirty tricks operations.
But you know what? That's life.
Don't complain; fight.
The press is too lazy and insensible to be a watchdog for this sort of business.
Everybody knew who Kerry is going up against. As Clift notes, this is what Kerry told them to bring on. And they're bringing it on. Democrats gave Kerry this chance to take on the president -- whose reelect number is hovering in the low to mid-forties -- because they believed he would fight and that he was electable.
Kerry is a fighter. I saw it first hand during his 1996 senate race against Bill Weld. But Kerry will never successfully parry these hits by getting tangled and stuck in the molasses of the president's lies and distortions. Getting sidetracked into a discussion of legislative maneuvering isn't the answer to the president's attacks; it's precisely what they're trying to elicit.
The answer is simply to say they're lies (while having surrogates and staffers explain why) and then to go on the attack.
For instance, the Kerry campaign should never have let Bush get the upper hand on the issue of combat pay, health care, and getting things like body-armor to front line troops. One need only be a casual reader of the military press to know that the president is extremely vulnerable on these issues.
The Bush campaign against Kerry is already crystal clear: Kerry has no center, no core. That makes him a waffler and weak -- too weak to defend the country in perilous times. That's the whole campaign, the whole message.
The winning campaign against the president is equally clear. He doesn't tell the truth. Almost nothing he has told the American people has turned out to be true (from budgets to jobs, from wmds to his personal past). In many cases, that's because he's lied to them. In others, it's because he's promised things he had no reason to believe were true. In some instances, he just failed to deliver.
As you'll note from the Clift column, Republicans themselves know this is his central vulnerability.
Just as the president only tauntingly alludes to the attacks being mounted by his campaign surrogates, Kerry can't go around calling the president a liar in so many words. But the president's credibility and his ability to deliver on his promises should be the centerpiece of his campaign.
Indeed, the president's loss of <$Ad$>credibility should be central to Kerry's attack on his stewardship of the country's security.
We are accustomed to thinking about a president's and the country's 'credibility' abroad as a factor of his willingness to use force. Credibility is key because it is central to a president's ability to protect the country and advance its interests.
But what we are seeing right now is that the president has lost his credibility with the world. Whether foreign leaders want Bush to be reelected is, from a domestic political perspective, irrelevant. Indeed, it can easily backfire on a candidate who seeks to mobilize it against him.
The key is simply that the president has no credibility. He has lost the trust of the country's allies in part because he has repeatedly deceived them -- dealt with them falsely or simply lied to them. But to a critical degree neither do they fear him. This is what we're seeing as our few remaining allies in Iraq ramp back their deployments in the country (Spain, South Korea, possibly Poland) and abandon our foolishly shortsighted effort to advance our interests by dividing Europe.
Right-wingers in this country are casting this pattern as a cosmic moral drama of appeasement, with the faint of heart cowering before the grand struggle. In fact, the president is reduced to a mix of taunt and begging, pleading with other countries not to abandon him. What is a leader without followers? Not a leader.
The president's campaign ads have heavily pressed the point that when confronted with a threat, he takes action -- but with conspicuous inattention to what action he takes, or whether it makes any sense or diminishes the threat.
The message of these ads amounts to ...
Vote Bush: When Dangers Threaten, You Know He'll Go Berserk!
But again, the president has damaged the country's hard credibility by lying to our allies and isolating us from them. For half a century the United States has been the guardian of a prosperous and increasingly democratic world order. If our allies are really abandoning us and making 'separate peaces' with gangs of murderous religious fanatics what does that tell you about this president's leadership? His credibility abroad or even his ability to use hard power to advance the country's interests?
The president made the mess and he lacks the credibility, thus the strength, to clean it up.
Credibility is the thread that ties this whole election together.
--Josh Marshall
Oops ... Compare these paragraphs from a late afternoon article in the Washington Post to the breathless and wildly over-the-top coverage yesterday on CNN (itals added)...
Several thousand Pakistani army troops have surrounded between 150 and 400 tribal fighters and foreign Islamic guerrillas, some of them associated with al Qaeda, as heavy fighting continued in a remote area near the border with Afghanistan, military officials said Friday.The intensity of the resistance encountered in the rugged hills of South Waziristan has prompted speculation by some military commanders that the tribal fighters and their foreign allies may be protecting senior al Qaeda figures such as Ayman Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician who is Osama bin Laden's top deputy.
...
Senior Pakistan officials said that the foreign fighters include Chechens, Uzbeks and some Arabs, but they said they had no specific evidence that either bin Laden or Zawahiri was in the area.
"Most recent intelligence inputs do not support the perception that either Osama or Ayman are holed up in that vicinity," said a senior military intelligence officer in Peshawar, the capital of the province in northwestern Pakistan that includes the semi-autonomous tribal area of South Waziristan.
"The idea is to send the strongest message yet to the al Qaeda supporters, but who knows? We may hit the jackpot in the process," the official added.
Who knows?<$Ad$>
Anything could happen.
We don't know he's not there! We could hit the jackpot.
Are we in the Hindu Kush or Vegas?
Everybody ran with this story a bit yesterday. But CNN reeeeaaaaaaalllly ran with it, almost certainly because the 'scoop' (or, what shall we call it, maybe the null scoop?) came in an interview CNN's Aaron Brown did with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
(Here's a good story from the LA Times about how all the nets are hurriedly prepositioning their foreign correspondents in Pakistan because they want to be able to go 24/7 when OBL finally gets grabbed.)
This headline in today's Daily Times, a Pakistani paper, sort of sums it up: "CNN ends up with 'much egg on its face'".
(Allow me a moment here to thoroughly relish South Asian English ... Okay, I'm good.)
What made me suspicious about this from the start was the fact that the announcement came right on the day Powell showed up in Islamabad. Helluva coincidence. I'm sure there was a great desire on the part of the Pakistanis to show how thorough a job they are doing hunting al Qaida in the tribal areas. And perhaps this story just got a bit out of control. (What I heard from a very trusted and knowledgable source also led me to believe that CNN was getting way out ahead of the story.)
Maybe he's there. Maybe they'll find him tomorrow. Could be. But for the moment at least I have to agree that CNN does seem to have much egg on its face.
--Josh Marshall
People have been discussing for weeks <$NoAd$>what would be contained in the soon-to-be-released book by former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke (who served under Clinton and Bush).
CBS is rolling the book on 60 Minutes this Sunday night. And here's the press release they just put out ...
Former White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke tells Lesley Stahl that on September 11, 2001 and the day after - when it was clear Al Qaeda had carried out the terrorist attacks - the Bush administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation. Clarke's exclusive interview will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday March 21 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.Clarke was surprised that the attention of administration officials was turning toward Iraq when he expected the focus to be on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. "They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12," says Clarke.
The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of 9/11. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with [the 9/11 attacks],'" he tells Stahl.
Clarke goes on to explain what he believes was the reason for the focus on Iraq. "I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection [between Iraq and Al Qaeda] but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there, saying, 'We've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection,'" says Clarke.
Clarke, who advised four presidents, reveals more about the current administration's reaction to terrorism in his new book, "Against All Enemies."
At least among people who've followed this story closely, these facts are broadly known, at least in their outlines. Of course, hearing the details from the guy in charge of counter-terrorism at NSC sort of bumps it up a notch. I'll be curious to hear from Clarke just how far along plans for a lunge against Iraq really got.
--Josh Marshall
As I hope to discuss this weekend, <$Ad$>I think the Kerry campaign has made some missteps of late -- small and I trust recoverable, but missteps nonetheless. But this article is a little disappointing.
The piece is running today on ABC News and the premise is that Kerry said voting against the $87 billion Iraq supplemental would be "reckless" and "irresponsible" just a few weeks before doing just that.
As we've noted, there were two bills -- one which would fund the $87 billion by rescinding a portion of the president's tax cut, another which would fund it by going $87 billion in to debt. Kerry voted for the first, the latter passed.
The article focuses on an appearance Kerry made on Face The Nation a few weeks before the vote. Doyle McManus asked him whether if his bill failed he would then vote for the other bill. That's a good question. And here was Kerry's response.
I don't think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to — to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running. That's irresponsible. What is responsible is for the administration to do this properly now.
Kerry just ducked the question. He didn't say he would vote for it or that voting against it was irresponsible or reckless. That itself might be something to knock him for.
But here's how ABC characterizes it.
In the interview, Kerry never clearly stated whether he would or would not vote for the $87 billion funding bill, a fact that may offer him some sort of exculpation. But one of the few press outlets to cover his remarks on the subject, the Washington Times, wrote the next day that "Mr. Kerry said he would still vote to authorize the $87 billion. Not doing so, he said, would be 'irresponsible.'"
This is great. Kerry didn't say he would vote for it or that voting against would be irresponsible. But the tendentious misconstrual offered by the right-wing Washington Times says he did. So let's go with that. And contradicting what the Times said constitutes a flip-flop. Pulling in the Times, along with the frequent uses of variants of verb 'seem' are, I think, a sign that it was clear to the author or the editor that they didn't quite have it.
Of the 'political observers' who allegedly validate the flipflop charge, the only one referenced happens to be the author's boss, ABC News political director Mark Halperin.
The Dems were clear at the time that they weren't going to let the $87 billion go unfunded. They were trying to force a change in how it was funded and force some assurances that the administration would cut loose some of its more hopeless policies -- both of which would be vastly better than what happened.
Some of these points are made clear in the piece. But the thrust of the piece points in quite the opposite direction.
I can understand the Republicans using the vote for all its worth. Kerry didn't want to vote for a bad bill. And that gave his opponents a wedge. Politics is politics, I guess. But I'd figure we could do better from the news coverage.
--Josh Marshall
I'm working today on a magazine article about Democrats and foreign policy, and whether they have an effective vision and strategy for confronting the present challenges -- setting aside whatever one thinks of the policies embraced by the current administration. That's got a monopoly on my time today -- as it has for the last few weeks. So let me just put out a few thoughts on the aftermath of Madrid, which I hope to return to, and to dig into in more depth, later.
First, here are four columns on the topic which have appeared in the last several days. I don't agree entirely with any of them. But they each contain important food for thought. They're by Bob Kagan, Anne Applebaum, Jim Pinkerton and Timothy Garton Ash.
It probably won't surprise you to hear that I find the right-wing charges -- now omnipresent in this country -- about Spanish 'appeasement' to be crass, verging on disgusting, not to mention I think simply untrue.
However, I think Ash has a very good point when he writes the following ...
So far as the Spanish voters' intentions are concerned, the election result was not subjectively a victory for al-Qaida. But it is, as Marxists used to say, an objective victory for al-Qaida. The Madrid bombings look likely to do exactly what a message posted on a radical Islamist website months ago said they should do: exploit the election moment to knock Spain out of the "Crusader-Zionist" coalition in Iraq. Conclusion: terror works.
I don't see how you get around that. But I don't think the policy prescription following from that insight is clear. At a minimum<$Ad$> it raises the vexing question of whether we persist in policies or approaches that we realize were mistaken simply because we see that abandoning them, or fundamentally reworking them, might have the perverse effect of encouraging our enemies.
In the case of Spain, if the impression is that the Spanish have been run out of the country, that's a bad thing. This is especially so since our only real hope of success in the country is to dramatically broaden the military presence, to internationalize it, as the now overworked phrase has it, either through the UN or preferably through NATO -- in some version of the Balkan model.
It's worth noting that the new or incoming Spanish government is on record supporting the continued presence of its troops in the country if such an internationalization of the effort occurs.
(One heartening, encouraging sign in today's papers comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reports that "Germany -- which helped thwart Washington's pursuit of a United Nations Security Council endorsement for the invasion -- privately has asked Spain's likely new leadership to tone down its anti-U.S. rhetoric." This is precisely the sort of drawing back from the brink -- and distinguishing rather than conflating these different issues -- that we need right now on all sides.)
If there is anything good that can come out of this Spanish tragedy, and it certainly looks like close to wall to wall bad, it is that it may force us to shake the attitude of denial that we're in about the nature of our coalition. A couple of the columns above are right to talk about the increasing danger this all poses to the Atlantic alliance.
But the truth is that we've just been fooling ourselves with all this mumbojumbo about New Europe and whatever Spain had meant, up to this point, about Western unity. The idea that there was a hawkish, pro-American, anti-dirigiste New Europe that we were allying ourselves with against Old Europe (i.e., Germany and France) was never more than a fantasy or a farce.
There was some variation in attitudes toward our policies in Iraq across the continent -- most notably in Poland. And support was somewhat higher in some countries in the post-Communist east. But by and large popular opposition to our policies was close to overwhelming from one end of the continent to the other.
What we were doing was piggybacking on intra-European struggles over unity, fault lines between the bigger states at the center and the smaller, generally poorer ones, on the periphery. And on the topic of the war, we were relying on leaders who offered their support over the overwhelming opposition of their electorates.
In the short-term that kind of support can be key, especially in a military context. But when dealing with democratic allies, in the medium and long-term, it's a losing game. In this sense, I don't think what's happened in Spain has been a blow to Western unity so much as a wake-up call to an already-existing reality which we must face if we are to wage a real war against Islamist terror as opposed to a war of words over Iraq.
On this latter point I continue to believe what I wrote last August, that "generality, vagueness and abstraction is the problem. They are becoming the engines of policy incoherence and the cover for domestic bad-actors who want to get this country into fights few Americans signed up for."
Some of this chatter about the 'war on terrorism' and 'appeasement' and Iraq as a sign of this or that is just disinformation, abuse and lying. But our real situation is genuinely bedeviled and obscured by how deep we are in a thicket of abstraction. This is a struggle of ideas, big ideas. And it's correct to see it in such terms rather than simply as a matter of police work or military capacity. But it can also makes us stumble, make us stumble or fall prey to the trickery of bad actors.
So, for instance, we have a 'war on terror'. Then we insist that invading Iraq is part of the 'war on terror'. But most of our allies don't agree. And now we have one of our nominal allies in the Iraq war possibly pulling out. So we conclude they've bagged on the 'war on terror' when in fact they seem to have bagged on the Iraq war (through pressing our manichean view can become a self-fulfilling reality.) And now we're told that any rethinking of the Iraq war would be a defeat in the 'war on terror'.
The ins and outs of these arguments are complex, I grant that. Still, I think our preoccupation with abstractions -- itself partly a product of nostalgia -- gets us shadow-boxing with ourselves and our friends rather than fighting our enemies.
As Lincoln once said, and this applies across the ideological spectrum, "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
--Josh Marshall
A short follow-up on the Pew poll of foreign attitudes about the United States. Several readers have written in to question my characterization that the poll "appears to show a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Arab states that are at least nominally allied with the United States. Most daunting, the public in those states is apparently increasingly supportive of suicide bombings."
In fact, they note, the poll actually shows a slackening of anti-American attitudes in the four Muslim countries surveyed.
As Pew phrases it in one of their summaries, "anger toward the United States remains pervasive [in the four Muslim states surveyed], although the level of hatred has eased somewhat and support for the war on terrorism has inched up."
Now, one issue here is who's an Arab and who's a Muslim. But the key is what Pew's comparison point is. And what they're comparing to in that passage principally is the sounding they did in May 2003 -- in other words, about a month after the war. And from a month after the war to now there has been a slackening, although a modest one in those four Muslim states.
There was a spike. And it's true that the numbers have come down a bit from that high. I should have made that more clear. But the valid point of comparison, to me at least, isn't from the point when there was still smoke in the air till now (tempers do cool of course), but rather going back to before the war happened at all and over the period of the build up to it.
For that you need to go back to the data contained in this Pew survey which was released in 2002 but has data from 1999/2000 as well. Looking across that time horizon, which seems to me to the best for judging the impact of recent events, the trend line is quite clear despite coming down a bit from the spike during the war.
My reference of course was to Arab states nominally allied to the United States and the current Pew survey includes hard data on two of these -- though Morocco is actually mixed language and ethnicity. According to Pew, the favorability rating of the US in Jordan in the summer of 2002 was 25%. Just after the war it was 1%. And it has bounced back, if one can say that without too much irony, to 5%.
(Unfortunately, while Pew has pre-war-on-terror numbers for Pakistan and Turkey, they don't seem to have them -- at least not that I can find -- for Jordan. If anybody can point me to such numbers I'd be most obliged if you can send a reference.)
Now to the other point I mentioned.
One of the things that struck me most about these new numbers -- and comparing them with the December 2002 numbers -- were the opinions about the acceptability of suicide bombings.
Now, there's a problem because the questions don't seem to have been posed in the just the same fashion. In the earlier survey (Dec. 2002) the question was whether suicide bombings are acceptable in 'defense of Islam.' In the more recent survey the question was asked with respect to such attacks in Israel/Palestine and then against Americans or Westerners in Iraq.
Again, slightly different questions. But one can still draw some conclusions from the results. And they're not good.
In the earlier survey (and the questions were only asked of Muslims), the only country where Muslims seemed clearly to support suicide bombings was Lebanon (73% support, 21% oppose).
A number of countries were surveyed and after Lebanon the numbers jumped down rapidly, with a bunch of countries between more or less evenly divided. Jordan, for instance, the numbers were 43% for, 48% against.
Now, again, in the current survey they didn't use the straight 'defense of Islam' phrasing. They asked if suicide bombings were okay in those two places. Jordanians now believe suicide bombings are justifiable by Palestinians against Israelis by a margin of 86% to 12%. Against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq they believe they are justified by a margin of 70% to 24%.
In any case, as with all polls, to a get a sense of what they say you really need to dig into the details and the various subsidiary questions that are asked. So here's the link to the new one, the one from May 2003 and the one I've been referencing from 2002.
--Josh Marshall
Are we about to capture Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaida's #2?
Clearly, something is afoot. Reports from the fighting near the Pakistani border say there is heavy resistance which suggests the fighters are protecting a 'high-value' target. What's more there are apparently intelligence reports -- from interviews with captured fighters -- to the effect that al-Zawahiri either has been or remains in just this area.
On the other hand, I don't think you can avoid noting that Secretary of State Colin Powell has been in the neighborhood, most recently in India. And today, the day we hear this announcement, happens to be the very day when Powell came calling in Islamabad with the news that we're designating Pakistan a major non-NATO US ally, which carries not only prestige but significantly facilitates the purchase of US arms.
One needn't assume that the Pakistanis aren't being honest with what they're saying. But I don't think you need to be too imaginative to believe that with Powell in town with a prize in hand there'd be a great desire to put the best face on what may be very ambiguous evidence.
What's more, experts on the running fights through the mountains of Afghanistan in recent years note that these fighters tend to put up fierce fights whether they're protecting a bigwig or not.
All of it adds up to my not really knowing what to make of it. I've talked to several al Qaida experts this afternoon and they don't really seem to know what to make of it either. The best description I could give is to say they each seem like they're in wait-and-see mode, as I guess we all should be.
We'll know soon enough.
--Josh Marshall
Classic. The facts don't mesh with our theory, <$NoAd$>so let's get new facts.
Last night Richard Perle was on Chris Matthews Hardball show and Matthews pressed him on the results of the new Pew poll which appears to show a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Arab states that are at least nominally allied with the United States. Most daunting, the public in those states is apparently increasingly supportive of suicide bombings.
Here's the exchange ...
PERLE: It is appalling and it is very dangerous. It shows you what happens when you allow suicide bombing to go largely unresponded to for as long as we did.We had a decade in which we were attacked again and again and we didn't respond. And, eventually, these thing become entrenched and even fashionable.
MATTHEWS: But you said last year, in 2001, right after 9/11, that if we go in, the idea that it is going to damage us in the Arab world is nonsense. You think that our going into Iraq has not stimulated a higher level of hostility to us that would support this kind of horrible attitude toward our deaths?
PERLE: Because the Arab world was on Saddam's side? What is the logic of that? That they object to the fact that we've liberated 25 million Iraqis?
In other words, the facts don't make sense to me so they're not facts.
If this were just spin to snow Matthews and other barkers it would be one thing. But it's the essence of how these folks think, how they deceive themselves when they're not busy deceiving others.
--Josh Marshall
I touched on precisely this point in my column in The Hill on Wednesday but today in The American Prospect Ivo Daalder makes it more pointedly and concisely. And on top of that, he's Ivo Daalder and I'm not ...
This is the third election of a major ally in which the party running against George Bush won. Look at Germany in '02, South Korea in '03, and now Spain. The message is: If you want to get re-elected, don't go to Crawford. Bush is a political liability -- in Europe, in particular. His foreign policy has trampled on the European views and it's now resulting in the election of governments that do not support his approach.
Think about it. And if it doesn't click with you, pick up a copy of Sun Tzu and think about it again.
--Josh Marshall
The Speaker? Or the Meeker?
Denny Hastert on how it felt getting bamboozled by the White House on the cost of the Medicare bill ...
“Yeah, [the higher cost estimate] was a surprise to us, and [I was] surprised it happened. When the administration comes out and says this is going to be more expensive…[it] makes it tougher on us, kind of sticks it to us.”
The quote is from a piece tomorrow in The Hill, which also notes just how many investigations have already been spawned by this bum's-rush-bill.
--Josh Marshall
Just a thought.
One of the things we hear again and again from the administration is that Saddam Hussein still had both the intention and the capability to build and possess weapons of mass destruction.
Isn't this a logical fallacy?
I mean, if you have the intention to build WMDs and the ability to build them, then you have WMDs. It's about as close to 2 + 2 = 4 as you get in human affairs.
Not that this is the biggest bit of ridiculousness coming out 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days. But it's worth noting.
We can infer from the fact that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction that he lacked either the intention or the ability to have them. Something is missing from the equation. Maybe he had the intention to build them later. Maybe he was working to get back the ability. But he really couldn't have had both.
It's just 'p's and 'q's.
--Josh Marshall
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people. The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other." George W. Bush, Address to the Nation, March 17th, 2003.
--Josh Marshall
You don't get more trenchant than that.
Bob Novak has a column today noting how tragic it apparently is that Illinois is trending increasingly Democratic. So much so, he laments, that the Bush campaign has already essentially written the state off.
Then he writes ...
Illinois also appears to be getting eliminated from serious consideration in the battle between George W. Bush and John Kerry for the presidency because of a change in the way the state is perceived. No longer a classic swing state that could go either way and produce famous standoffs in 1960 and 1976, Illinois is now considered the most reliably Democratic state in the Midwest.The 2000 election had a lot to do with that revised image. Al Gore won 55 percent of the vote to Bush's 43 percent, with a 570,000 vote margin. If Illinois were subtracted from the national totals, Bush actually enjoyed a popular vote plurality in the rest of the country.
Hard to quarrel with that <$Ad$>logic, isn't it?
This vaguely reminds me of the line one often hears in TV commentary about Democrats and their 'dependence' on the African-American vote. It's only the African-American vote, the argument goes, that keeps the Democratic party from becoming a permanent minority party.
That's true of course. But what's the point exactly? Presumably if you scratch out all the votes of a major constituency of any political party that would put a bit of a dent in their electoral fortunes, right?
If you wanted to be a little nasty you might, with equal merit, note that the Republican party's goose would be cooked if we disenfranchised everyone who doesn't believe in evolution.
CNN's Bill Schneider gave an almost textbook version of this line a couple years ago on CNN ...
Judy, how dependent are Democrats on the African-American vote?Without black voters, the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections would have been virtually tied, just like the 2000 election. Oh no, more Florida recounts!
What would have happened if no blacks had voted in 2000? Six states would have shifted from Al Gore to George W. Bush: Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Oregon. Bush would have won by 187 electoral votes, instead of five. A Florida recount? Not necessary.
Right now, there are 50 Democrats in the Senate. How many would be there without African-American voters? We checked the state exit polls for the 1996, 1998, and 2000 elections. If no blacks had voted, many Southern Democrats would not have made it to the Senate. Both Max Cleland and Zell Miller needed black votes to win in Georgia. So did Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Bill Nelson in Florida, John Edwards in North Carolina, and Ernest Hollings in South Carolina.
Black votes were also crucial for Jon Corzine in New Jersey, Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, and Jean Carnahan in Missouri. Washington state and Nevada don't have many black voters, but they were still crucial to the victories of Harry Reid in Nevada and Maria Cantwell in Washington.
Nebraska and Wisconsin don't have many black voters either, but Ben Nelson would have lost Nebraska without them and Russ Feingold would have lost Wisconsin, too, in both cases by less than half-a- percent. Bottom line? Without the African-American vote, the number of Democrats in the Senate would be reduced from 50 to 37.
A hopeless minority. And Jim Jeffords' defection from the GOP would not have meant a thing -- Judy.
I don't want to overstate the point. But nestled down deep in this argument is some sort of perhaps unconscious notion that the Dems are just hopelessly sucking wind among real voters and thus have to resort to padding their totals with blacks.
--Josh Marshall
Again and again I read -- or hear directly from administration supporters -- this excuse that any questioning of the administration's record in foreign affairs, or Iraq, or even on other matters is just a deplorable focusing on the past, a distraction, when the nation faces grave challenges which we need to focus on solving.
This is more than just simple buck-passing. It is a sort of through-the-looking-glass version of how problem-solving and accountability are supposed to work. It also has the perverse benefit of allowing the scope of the administration's failures to become reasons for not discussing those failures -- a sort of self-reinforcing anti-accountability causality loop, with all manner of moral hazards built in.
We've created such a mess that we don't have the time or the luxury to start second-guessing how badly we screwed things up!
I've always been strict about keeping four-letter words off this site. So I apologize for the graphic nature of this analogy. But this is like I come back to my office to find my new employee has taken a crap right on my desk.
Puzzledly and not happy, I say, "What, umm ... what happened here?"
To which he replies, "There you go again, always focusing on the past, how this or that could have been done differently, when what's really important is the future, how we deal with this and other challenges we're going to face."
To which I would reply, "No. The future is exactly what I'm thinking about. And that's why you're fired. Because in the future I can't afford to have anyone working here who craps on my desk, and then when I confront them about it all they can do is dodge responsibility with moronic excuses and try to put the blame on me for asking what the hell is going on."
These guys should be fired too.
And, no, I wouldn't advise the Kerry campaign to base a 30 second ad on this analogy.
--Josh Marshall
This new moveon.org ad about Don Rumsfeld (and the larger issue of administration dishonesty) is very powerful -- in large measure because it's so understated. All it does it replay a brief portion of Rumsfeld's appearance on Face the Nation last Sunday. Give this one a look.
--Josh Marshall
Let me follow up on last night's post on the surreal shamelessness of the president's new TV ad.
As we noted, the new ad uses a very strained argument to allege that Kerry opposed an increase in military combat pay when in fact the White House was caught red-handed and quite publicly trying to cut combat pay for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq only a few months ago.
I mean, how do you top that?
One could speculate about some weird sort of projection. A more likely possibility is that they're accusing Kerry first of that which they were in fact first guilty as a way of innoculating themselves.
All intriguing theories. But I suspect the reality is more banal. They just don't care. It's a handy attack. They've got funds to run the ads. And they figure people's memories are short and the press is too lazy or stupid to call them on it.
Clearly, the Kerry campaign should highlight the inaccuracy of the charge. But I think they should be focusing their fire on the shamelessness, the disrespect for the intelligence of the public and the press.
They simply can't stop lying.
That point should be hit again and again and again. And not simply -- or even primarily -- on the narrow point of dishonesty but on the broader issue of disrespect for the people they're communicating with.
'Disrespect' doesn't quite convey the intended message. But it comes close. It may be closer to 'contempt' though I think the attitude is somehow breezier than that. They don't think any rules apply to them.
They want to say up is down. And they're sure they can get away with it because they think the people who are listening are either chumps or that their trust can be exploited endlessly.
--Josh Marshall
We'll be saying more about this in the coming days, but for now just a heads-up.
For some time we've had problems with slow downloading of TPM and even sporadic outages.
(Someday I will share with you the story of screaming into my cell phone at the Merrimack Restaurant in Manchester two days before the New Hampshire primary, telling the tech support guy that a 48 hour turnaround on an answer to why the site was offline really wasn't good enough.)
In part, this is due to the fact that our soon-to-be-former hosting service just provides egregiously bad service and support. But the overriding issue is that we've simply outgrown the server set-up that had served our needs well enough for most of the three-plus years the site has been online.
To give you a sense of the growth, TPM's traffic is roughly 1000% higher than it was in late 2002 and roughly 300% what it was in late 2003.
In any case, it's taken us a while to get the logistics and financing worked out. But we're in the midst of moving the site over to a new home flowing not only with milk and honey but, more importantly, copious bandwidth and, I'm told, crackerjack support.
With any luck, you won't notice the switch-over other than perhaps seeing that the site appears more quickly.
We'll keep you posted.
--Josh Marshall
More information on what turned the Spanish election. <$NoAd$>This passage comes from an interview on Monday night's Newshour ...
MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Checa, what is your reading of what was the number one thing behind the outcome? In other words, was it Aznar's support for the war against Bush or those people, or was it this public perception that he was trying to withhold information about who was behind the bombing?NICOLAS CHECA: Margaret, I really think what the key issue here is the handling or mishandling of public information in the 48 hours after the tragic events of last Thursday. I think it bears mentioning that the election was a statistical dead heat, according to public polls the morning of the tragedy on Thursday morning well within the margin of error, one or two points. And it was really not until Saturday evening, as Keith in your set-up shared with us, that the government decided to come forward with information as to the arrest of these five suspects linked to al-Qaida.
As an example, it took a personal call from Prime Minister Elect Zapatero to the interior minister, the Spanish homeland security secretary, informing him that the Socialist Party was aware of the arrest and that he was prepared to move forward with that information. It took that kind of information to get the current government to come forward and announce to the country at large that in fact it was not the ETA lead that would generate success down the road in the investigation, but rather the al-Qaida route.
MARGARET WARNER: So you're saying it more than just a public suspicion that they were withholding information, in fact the Zapatero campaign had to essentially pressure the government to release this information?
NICOLAS CHECA: Precisely. Yet there was a report earlier in the afternoon on Saturday coming out of Spanish intelligence agency saying that they were 99 percent confident that ETA was not responsible for the attacks and that all the avenues of the investigation pointed into al-Qaida.
In the early afternoon after the arrests had already been made, the director of the Spanish CIA denied those reports and it was after that that the campaign manager for the Zapatero campaign had to come forward and basically inform public opinion that there was information that was not being shared with the population.
Amazing.
--Josh Marshall
As we noted a few days ago, the vagaries of public opinion are simply too great to accurately measure the response to such a traumatic event as the Madrid bombings over such a short period of time as three days.
But this article in Wednesday's Washington Post makes a strong argument that much of the public tide against the Aznar government wasn't based on anger at him for putting the country in harm's way over Iraq but rather because he tried to deceive the country after the attacks themselves occurred.
(In practice, I suspect both melded together in the public mind.)
This story has been coming into focus slowly in the English-language press (though it was already roiling the Spanish press in the 24 hours just before the election). And the Post piece advances it substantially.
Aznar's government immediately blamed ETA for the bombings based on very little evidence and continued to insist on the ETA theory of the crime even as more and more evidence piled up pointing to an Islamist link.
Aznar himself personally and repeatedly called several major national dailies to press the point that ETA was responsible. As doubts were beginning to mount, Aznar twice called the editor of one Catalan daily El Periodico and "courteously cautioned [the editor] not to be mistaken. ETA was responsible."
Certainly, given Spain's history, a quick rush-to-judgment about ETA's culpability would neither be surprising nor evidence of bad faith. But the article makes a rather good case that there was a coordinated and cynical effort to misdirect public suspicion.
In other words, faced with a great national tragedy, the government tried to deceive the public in order to achieve a political end -- something that is paradoxically heartening since it suggests that, all the recent unpleasantness aside, we Americans and our European brethren seem to share quite a lot in common after all.
--Josh Marshall
As you know, it's now been revealed that the White House threatened the top government Medicare actuary that he'd be fired if he revealed the true costs of the Medicare reform passed last year.
What struck me most about this story was how generally muted the reaction to it was.
I don't think this was because it wasn't reported widely or because people didn't take note. I think people just aren't that surprised that this administration would practice deceit in such a casual, even routine, manner.
It's just not surprising anymore. It's expected. (Pat Moynihan died too soon to see the most bracing example of defining -- governmental -- deviancy down.)
In any case, now we have another example from the latest Bush campaign ad.
This one uses last year's $87 billion Iraq supplemental, and the fact that Kerry voted against it, to accuse him of voting against each of the various line items for troop funding included in the bill.
Now, this is inherently misleading since I believe Kerry, like many other Dems, voted for an alternative bill which would have funded these needs by rescinding part of Bush tax cuts. So to say he voted against these particulars is really a distortion of the legislative process.
(Admittedly, it's not quite as bad as what they tried to pull last week, but still pretty bad. In that case, the President charged Kerry with a reckless plan to cut Intelligence spending in 1995, without mentioning that the agency targeted was was mismanaging the funds in question or, much more importantly, that the Congress, then under Republican control, voted a substantially larger cut than the one Kerry had proposed.)
What's more, the commercial highlights three budget items, each of which were ones the president opposed and had to be bullied into supporting -- by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
The text narration says: ""No body armor for troops in combat. No higher combat pay. No to better health care for reservists and their families. No -- wrong on defense."
What's most bracing about this narration is that this is actually a pretty factual statement if the target is the president, not Kerry.
Now, one claim really stands out here. The ad says Kerry voted no to "higher combat pay."
This is truly a milestone in the long bilious history of gall.
If you watched this debate at the time you'll remember that last summer the Bush administration went to great lengths to cut combat pay for troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to save money for other priorities. They only relented when Democrats, Republicans and most of all military-oriented publications like Army Times expressed so much outrage that they had no choice but abandon the effort.
Here's a snippet from an article which appeared on August 15th, 2003 in the San Francisco Chronicle which gives a brief glimpse of their ignominious retreat ...
The White House quickly backpedaled Thursday on Pentagon plans to cut the combat pay of the 157,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan after disclosure of the idea quickly became a political embarrassment.The Pentagon's support for the idea of rolling back "imminent danger pay" by $75 a month and "family separation allowances" for the American forces by $150 a month collapsed after a story in The Chronicle Thursday generated intense criticism from military families, veterans groups and Democratic candidates seeking to unseat President Bush in 2004.
And so the White House which was pushing to save money by reducing combat pay for troops currently serving in two combat zones is now challenging Kerry's national security bona-fides by alleging that he opposed increases in combat pay.
Sometimes you try to dress it up or package it in some artful way. But the truth is irreducibly blunt: lying and indifference to a factual record often no further away than the google web site is the hallmark of this administration.
Up is down.
--Josh Marshall
Please! No more challenges!
As you know, a couple days ago, Colin Powell challenged John Kerry to come forward with the names of some of the foreign leaders who he says want President Bush turned out of office.
"If he feels it is that important an assertion to make, he ought to list some names. If he can't list names, then perhaps he should find something else to talk about."
After that he apparently upped the ante, denying Kerry's claims that he, Powell, had been undermined or sidelined in administration foreign policy debates.
"Name a specific issue," said Powell, "where it looks like I have been marginalized."
Sorta sad, isn't it?
--Josh Marshall
A brief note on this brouhaha over whether some foreign leaders want president Bush turned out of office in November.
This is the topic of my column tomorrow in The Hill. So I just want to touch on it briefly.
Clearly, the president and his surrogates are hammering John Kerry now over this claim and even accusing him of making the whole thing up to hurt the president.
"Either [Kerry] is straightforward and states who they are," said Scott McClellan, "or the only conclusion one can draw is that he is making it up to attack the president."
Now, I don't think there's any question this was an unwise thing for Kerry to say, not least because it's opened him up to all these attacks which are awkward to answer.
But the idea that he's making this up is laughable. The question isn't whether or which foreign leaders don't want to see George W. Bush get another term. A better question is whether there are any outside of perhaps a half-dozen capitals around the world who do.
(Powell knows this perhaps better than anyone.)
The reason it's unwise to say this -- or at least say it so bluntly -- is precisely because it's so undoubtedly true. And the fact that it's true is a difficult matter politically for both candidates.
--Josh Marshall
A new dispatch from the department of telling delays.
You'll remember that the initial excuse which the White House and congressional Republicans used to oppose the 9/11 commission's request to extend its mandate for two months was the claim that the information was just too damned important to let another two months go by before getting it into policymakers' hands.
Along those lines, see this quote from a new article in Time about the president's new commission on the Iraqi intelligence failure. "Five weeks after being appointed, the group has not met, and it is unclear when it will."
--Josh Marshall
One of the keys for Democrats this election season <$NoAd$>will not only be getting a lot of small donations to Democratic candidates but getting those funds where they can do the most good, where extra money could make the difference in a close race.
Along those lines, the following passage caught my eye.
In the new edition of Charlie Cook's 'Off to the Races' column which is generally positive about the Dems' improving chances in the Senate, there's this passage ...
Republicans might actually get a bit of a break in Illinois. Jack Ryan, an attractive and wealthy former investment banker who was teaching in an inner-city school until recently, is expected to win the GOP primary. The likely Democratic nominee, state Sen. Barack Obama, is equally, if not more, impressive, yet does not have the personal fortune Ryan has. Blair Hull, the fabulously wealthy Democrat, was expected to win the nomination until revelations about his messy divorce and cocaine use in the 1980s doomed his chances. National Democrats had counted on this seat to be the best of all possible worlds, an easy pickup by a self-funding candidate. Now it is likely to be very close and will have to be funded through more traditional -- read difficult -- means.
Here's Obama's website.
--Josh Marshall
I should have a better handle on what's happening in the book world and what's coming down the pike. But too often I find that my knowledge of what new books are out is based on what happens to be on the front display at my local neighborhood bookstore when I come by on late night walks. (Luckily, it's a good bookstore.) Along those lines, this evening I saw that Zbigniew Brzezinski has a new book out, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership.
Brzezinksi, of course, requires no introduction. But his speech back in October at the New American Strategies for Security and Peace conference was one of the most lucid and insightful discussions of the present state of the world and America's role in it that I've heard in some time. (To me it was the highlight of the conference.) So I eagerly purchased a copy.
I'll report back when I've read more.
--Josh Marshall
The results of a very interesting poll (co-sponsored by ABC, the German broadcasting network ARD, the BBC and Japan's NHK) are available at the ABC News website and are really well worth reading. It's a broad survey of Iraqi public opinion one year after the war.
The results (and this is a case where you really want to dig into the details and specifics, not just the headlines) contain findings that will challenge both supporters and opponents of the war.
One detail, which is not surprising really, but still notable, is the stark divergence of views held by the three different ethno-regional groupings.
For instance, 48% of Iraqis say the US was right to invade, versus 39% who say it was wrong. But the breakdown shows that 40% of Arab Iraqis say it was right while 87% of Iraqi Kurds say it was the right thing to do.
There's a similar disparity on the related question of whether Iraq was 'liberated rather than humiliated.' A third of Iraqi Arabs say yes, while 82% of Kurds answered in the affirmative.
Again, not surprising given the history involved, but it's interesting to see in concrete form nonetheless. Many other interesting details are included.
--Josh Marshall
A new CBS/NYT poll. This one with Bush over Kerry 46% to 43%. Other recent soundings include a American Research Group poll (March 9-11) of registered voters, Kerry over Bush 50% to 43%, and a Investor's Business Daily poll (March 8-11) also of registered voters, with Bush over Kerry 46% to 43%.
--Josh Marshall
I’ve been reading emails and articles on the Spanish elections and attacks this morning. And one thing that seems worth keeping in mind for those across the political spectrum in this country is how hard it is for us to make sense of the particulars of just what happened yesterday in Spain.
But general points --- especially ones which are as much about our politics as Spain’s or even Europe’s generally --- seem worthy of discussion.
I notice that on his site yesterday evening Andrew Sullivan portrays the Spanish election results as a straight-up win for bin Laden. He also argues that you cannot on the one hand say that this is al Qaida payback against Spain for supporting the Iraq war and then also argue that the Iraq war itself was irrelevant to the war on terror. If it's irrelevant to the war on terror (i.e., the war against al qaida), Andrew argues, why are the terrorists retaliating?
There is a certain logic to this argument. But I think it's a superficial one --- indeed an incorrect one.
Certainly, I think we have to entertain the possibility that --- to the extent that nations make collective judgments --- the Spanish see the US as caught in a fight with militant Islam and they just want to get out of the way.
But on the whole question of the relationship between terrorism and the Iraq war there’s a very different way to see this from the one Sullivan is proposing.
Just because you’ve inflamed or emboldened your enemies doesn’t mean you’ve used the most effective means of attacking them. Indeed, quite the opposite can be true.
For instance, consider this thought experiment. What if the US, Britain and Spain had attacked and occupied Egypt or Jordan? Do you suppose that Islamic radicals wouldn’t strike at the sponsors of that war much as they seem to have last week?
I suspect there’d be little if any difference.
The point I think is clear. Contrary to what Andrew says, in this case, you can have it both ways. This may be retaliation for Spanish support of the Iraq war without that meaning that hitting Iraq had anything to do with fighting terror in the way Andrew suggests.
Let’s fall back for a moment and think about what this whole fight is about. Al Qaida (and militant Islam generally) sees itself as the inheritor of a world-historical religious movement which, according to their view of cosmology and eschatology, is supposed to be at the vanguard of history. In the orthodox Muslim view of history, the ‘lands of Islam’ expand but they never recede. The Islamic world should be the most powerful, the most advanced by various measures, probably the wealthiest. Viewed from that perspective almost everything about the contemporary world is turned upside down, almost a blasphemy in itself. The US, from their perspective both a secular and a Christian power, is the dominant power even in the heartlands of Islam. Add to this that our secularism is another level of blasphemy. From the perspective of revanchist, militant Islam, almost everything about today’s world is nearly the opposite of what they believe their religion says it should be. (Thus, they're somewhat aggravated.)
So the whole point of this endeavor is to sweep us out of the heartlands of Islam, put Islam back on the march on its frontiers and purify the religion itself within the Abode of Islam, as they call it.
From that point the whole program becomes more muddled and inchoate, but whether they want to reestablish the caliphate within the existing lands of Islam or take over the whole world or whatever doesn’t really matter for our present purposes.
The key point is that it’s not hard to see how invading and occupying part of the heartland of Islam is going to rile them up a bit since it brings into sharper relief their whole worldview of a cataclysmic struggle between the West and Islam. (In itself that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. But even if we supposed there would be positive effects, we'd have to realize that there would be at least short-term negative ones as well.) Whether they use our presence there cynically (as yet another rallying cry to bring followers to their side) or whether it just confirms them in their view of the reality of the situation is also not all that relevant for our present purposes.
We know for instance that over the last several years al Qaida has spoken more and more about Palestine --- an issue with which it didn’t originally seem to have that much interest. And they started to do the same with Iraq just as the US increasingly turned its attention to the country. But again, that doesn’t really prove anything more than al Qaida’s opportunism or their addled worldview, take your pick.
Many of us are familiar with early- and mid-20th century Communists or modern-day LaRouchies who will glom onto almost any movement or issue under the sun in order to use it as a vehicle to advance their own interests and enhance their own power. I don’t think there’s that much difference in this case.
In just such fashion, in the middle decades of the 20th century, Communists sought to infiltrate the American Civil Rights movement --- repeatedly and, by and large, remarkably unsuccessfully. The analogy is imperfect certainly. But the parallels are telling. The point wasn’t that the Civil Rights movement was Communist, but that Communists were trying to use the movement for its own purposes. Attacking the Civil Rights movement as part of attacking Communism wouldn’t have damaged Communism but rather strengthened it since doing so would have tended to push those committed to Civil Rights into the Communists’ arms. Indeed, this was precisely the idea.
Of course, there were those who had their own reasons for attacking both the Communists and the Civil Rights Movement. For them, this equation the Communists were trying to create between Communism and Civil Rights wasn’t a distraction but rather a convenience. And those folks most definitely have their modern-day equivalents among us now as well, though we can focus on that point at a later time.
In any case, just because al Qaida has adopted the Iraq cause as their own doesn’t mean we’ve damaged al Qaida by taking down the Baathist regime --- especially by doing it so incompetently. Just as likely --- in fact far more likely --- is that we’ve just handed them a useful recruiting tool while distracting ourselves from pursuing more effective means of extirpating them.
--Josh Marshall
More deliberate deception from the Vice President of the United States -- something that has become terribly familiar.
The latest example comes from an article today in The New York Times, which quotes the Vice President, at a recent political event, saying that John Kerry has "embraced the strategy of the 1990's, which holds that when we are attacked, we ought to round up those directly responsible, put them on trial, and then call it a day."
He then said that was insufficient because "it leaves the network behind the attacks virtually untouched."
There are so many layers of misinformation here that it's difficult to know where to start. But it probably makes most sense to note that this even misstates his administration's position as even the administration's theorists or idea men themselves understand and articulate it.
The debate is not whether you leave terrorist networks intact. That's the baseline -- rooting out the networks. The real question -- the one on which there may be said to be a true debate -- is whether the terrorist networks are truly independent actors or whether they cannot subsist without states backing them, whether they are in fact the pawns of states.
The Bush approach has been fundamentally the latter one -- a belief in the continuing centrality of states as the actors in international affairs. Thus, the focus on taking down states as a means of combatting al Qaida. The contrary approach is one that actually focuses much more on the terrorist networks.
Cheney has doubly misstated the facts of the matter.
--Josh Marshall
Let me very strongly recommend you go visit gadflyer.com, which is having its official roll-up today. Gadflyer is a mix of Internet magazine and blog, all with a progressive and aggressive bent. Some of the names of the folks involved you'll recognize as writers for progressive publications and others you'll remember as guest-posters on other blogs. In any case, definitely stop by the site and check them out. Their entry into the mix is an exciting and much-needed development. Do go take a look.
--Josh Marshall
I should preface this post by saying that I have only a loose knowledge of Spain's internal politics. But judging by English language press reports in this country and abroad, one can glean some basic outlines about the stunning finish of today's election in the country.
We've long known that Spanish Prime Minister Aznar's support for the Iraq war masked the war's profound unpopularity within Spain. But a good economy and time had pushed Iraq from the political front-burner. And thus Aznar's Popular Party seemed on track for a clear, if not overwhelming victory.
The Madrid attacks pushed Iraq back to the forefront, thus crystallizing opposition to the government. And that opposition was mightily intensified by an apparently widespread and growing belief (also seemingly an accurate one) that the government had deliberately withheld or obscured information about who was behind the attacks so as to avoid the backlash which eventually occurred. Namely, they fixed on blaming ETA -- the Basque separatist group -- despite increasing evidence pointing toward some sort of al Qaida connection.
That seems to be a rough consensus analysis, though it must be extraordinarily difficult to make sense of the volatility of public opinion reacting so rapidly to such a traumatic event.
A couple points suggest themselves.
One of them -- discussed in this article in the Post -- is just how little Spanish or other Western intelligence services seem to have known about this. There was no chatter, no hints. The entire operation seems to have slipped through entirely unnoticed by anyone. That suggests the possibility that we're really flying blind on the actual terrorist threat, or at least that it's quite possible for al Qaida or affiliated groups to launch a major attack without our even getting hints that it's going to occur, let alone being able to stop it.
Another point touches on the assumptions that many seem to bring to this whole event.
Just after the bombings there was a rush of commentary and news coverage to the effect that this was Spain's (and Europe's) 9/11 and that, confronted with the reality of what we're up against, they'd get religion, shall we say, on the war on terror. And in this case the war on terror could be loosely read as the Iraq War.
Now, clearly, that doesn't seem to have happened in Spain. But the issue here isn't simply one of predictive accuracy. The whole line of thinking is based on flawed assumptions and, to a degree, on crediting the administration's spin about why our policies have been so unpopular in Europe.
America and Europe never saw eye-to-eye on how to take down the network of terror cells and associated Islamist terror groups we know as al Qaida. But the disagreements have been greatly overstated. The heart of the matter, the rub, has always been about whether the 'war on terror' in any way included or was in any respect advanced by overthrowing the government of Iraq.
(To frame the matter ungenerously but with real precision, the question came down to whether you fight back against the terrorists by striking back at the terrorists or at someone else.)
Whatever else they thought of the Iraq war, very few people in Europe saw any real logic to the (terror war = Iraq war) equation. Some supported the Iraq war for other reasons. But few saw the two connected as the Bush administration tried to present them. And not a few saw the Iraq adventure as positively counterproductive to stemming the tide of Islamist terror.
Whoever you think is right or wrong in this, that is the nature of the rift over the 'war on terror'.
Now, if that's the war as you see it, that Iraq war was either irrelevant to fighting terror or would itself produce more terorrism, then the apparent response of the Spaniards doesn't seem at all difficult to fathom. Nor is it reducible to facile claims of appeasements.
We'll be reading these tea-leaves for some time to come.
--Josh Marshall
