Hi all; Debka says terror expanding, not being defeated by US, just like the Rumsfeld memo implied:
Rumsfeld Suggests Fighting Madrassas with “Ideas”
Debka, October 26, 2003
The guerrilla rockets that pierced the fortifications surrounding Baghdad’s landmark al Rashid hotel early Sunday, October 26, missed their presumed target, US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Nonetheless, the attack makes the thought-provoking memo penned by his boss Donald Rumsfeld ten days earlier look like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The rockets slammed into this major US personnel center, hours after the decision to lift the curfew over Baghdad in view of “the improved security situation.” The day before, a US Black Hawk helicopter was shot down near Tikrit shortly after Wolfowitz left Saddam’s home town.
Both times, Iraqi guerrillas knew where to find the deputy defense secretary and he had a lucky escape.
The memo – described as “leaked” - was addressed to Wolfowitz and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff. Its two pages contained questions loaded enough to be rhetorical. The points Rumsfeld made include these: The US has no way to measure whether it is winning or losing the global war on terror; we have not made truly “bold moves” to fight terrorists and we are in for “a long, hard slog” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pointing to Iraq’s al Qaeda-linked Ansar al Islam, Rumsfeld asked: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the clerics are recruiting, training and deploying?”
Later, in a briefing to Washington Times staff, he called for a new agency to help fight “a war of ideas” against international terrorism. He suggested a “21st –century information agency in the government” to help in the international battle of ideas, to limit the teaching of terrorism and extremism and to provide better education.”
However, in his memo, he said private organizations could counter Islamist “radical madrassas.”
Clearly, the defense secretary is convinced that the war on terror cannot be won by military victories alone and wants more emphasis on the struggle for hearts and minds. Fighters and defense officials, says Rumsfeld, must start asking themselves: “Are there things we aren’t doing that we might be doing?”
Two other key points made in the memo: “I think it is pretty clear that current (weapons control) regimes aren’t working.” President Bush is in the early stages of a “new approach” to deal with weapons proliferation that will call for greater international cooperation.
In the other, the defense secretary stressed that US intelligence capabilities have been “compromised through spies and through trading of information among rogue nations and terrorist networks.”
This intelligence contest, the most sensitive aspect of the global war on terror, bears directly on the degree of precision manifested by anti-US Iraqi guerrillas – and ultimately in Sunday’s rocket strike against the Baghdad hotel. The point took years to appreciate. It was not immediately accepted that, without hostile spies planted inside America, information trading among terrorist groups and electronic espionage capabilities, the traumatic 9/11 terrorist assault on America could not have been carried out - any more than Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein could have managed to elude American pursuit for so long. Intelligence capabilities are also the key to Yasser Arafat’s sustained long-running terror campaign against Israel.
Many months before September 11, 2001, DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly pointed to serious penetrations of the American intelligence community by terrorist operatives who are actuated not merely by blind hate but by classified information enabling them to pinpoint their attacks.
The fact that Palestinian terror attacks were confined for nine days to targeting military and security personnel – three US CIA security men and six Israeli troops – was no coincidence. It was the outcome of well-informed, pointed decision-making – in this case by Arafat, Syrian president Bashar Assad and Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It is a fact that no civilians died in this period.
Similarly, the disastrous August 19 bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad, in which 22 people were killed and 150 injured, was no random outrage committed by a suicidal bomber looking for a target at the wheel of an explosive-packed truck. Vital inside intelligence enabled the assailant to be sure of murdering Sergio de Mello, the UN secretary’s personal representative in Baghdad and mainstay of US administrator Paul Bremer’s projects for putting Iraq on its feet. Precise information on de Mello’s movements would not have been available in Baghdad’s bazaars – only in Washington, the UN Center in New York, the US command center in Iraq or the targeted official’s own office at UN Headquarters in the Iraqi capital. The terrorists’ successful assassination testifies to this level of inside penetration – and is an example of the sort of “compromised” US intelligence capabilities troubling Rumsfeld.
Were the US defense secretary to assess the main theatres of counter-terror war according to his own yardstick - “Are we capturing etc. more terrorists than the madrassas… are recruiting…?” he would have to admit that enemy resources, recruitment, intelligence and logistical assistance from sponsor-states and cash flow have not diminished. To the contrary, all these resources have expanded.
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debka.com
-- Carl |
