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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (4913)	8/20/2002 5:14:13 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Bush's Summer Reading List Hints at Iraq By Dana Milbank, washingtonpost.com Tuesday, August 20, 2002; Page A11 washingtonpost.com Looking for signs about President Bush's thinking on an Iraq attack? Check out his vacation reading. This vital intelligence comes from an interview with the industrious Associated Press reporter Scott Lindlaw, who went on a brush-clearing, pickup-riding, sweating-and-bleeding tour of the Bush ranch outside Waco last week. The president disclosed that he has been reading "Supreme Command," a new book by Eliot A. Cohen, a neoconservative hardliner on Iraq with the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. In his reading choice, Bush seems to be following the advice of Bill Kristol, the arch-neoconservative who has been using his Weekly Standard magazine to chide Bush for being too soft on Saddam Hussein. It is Kristol's blurb, after all, on the back cover of Cohen's book suggesting: "If I could ask President Bush to read one book, this would be it." Former Quayle man Kristol, suspected of playing puppeteer to a number of hawkish officials in the Bush Pentagon and National Security Council, appears to have added the marionette-in-chief to his act. "I was tickled pink," Cohen said of the president's summer reading selection, although Bush is no Oprah. "The Amazon numbers spiked for a little bit then went back down." (Monday's Amazon.com sales rank: 5,498) Cohen's central message is the same as Clemenceau's: "War is too important to be left to the generals." It is a study about the importance of civilian leadership and its responsibility to probe and harass the military brass, who are chronically full of reservations about any war. Cohen said this does not necessarily mean the bombing begins at noon. The book is the result of 15 years of work and is meant, he says, to apply to any military action -- not necessarily Iraq. But other hawks see particular relevance for Cohen's book now as Bush confronts doubts from the Pentagon brass about an assault on Iraq. Kristol wasn't recommending the book so Bush could have a fuller understanding of Appomattox. Kristol, in his current issue, accuses those raising doubts about a U.S. attack on Iraq of trying "to stop President Bush from setting American foreign policy on a course of moral clarity and global leadership." Kristol is gloating about Bush's reading. "I stand by my blurb," he said. Cohen himself, in an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "Generals, Politicians and Iraq," criticized people in the Pentagon for their tendency "to whinge to the press" about their doubts surrounding an Iraq attack. Bush's disclosure of his summer reading seemed deliberate during an interview in which he was otherwise less forthcoming. As the AP reporternoted: "Spotting a herd of cattle, he says simply, 'Bovine.' Minutes pass before he says another word." It is noteworthy that Bush should devote his precious time to reading Cohen's book about the importance of civilian leadership resisting whining generals, instead of paying attention to the whining general whose op-ed article appeared in the Journal the day after Cohen's: Brent Scowcroft. Retired Gen. Scowcroft argued that a U.S. attack on Iraq could backfire badly and devastate the war on terrorism. Of the dueling opinion pieces, Scowcroft's article got by far the most attention, including lead-story treatment in the New York Times. That's because Scowcroft, who was national security adviser in the first Bush administration, is extremely close to the current president's father. The informed speculation in Washington is that Bush did not ask Scowcroft to voice those views, but that Scowcroft acted on his own after hearing the former president's worry that his son was being led by hardliners into an ill-advised attack on Iraq. When it comes to foreign policy, Bush and Scowcroft, who collaborated on the former president's memoirs, have always appeared to be a case of human cloning. With Scowcroft's establishment wing of Republican foreign policy in open revolt, the Iraq policy has become a proxy war for the 30-year feud between Republican hardliners and moderates on foreign policy. The question remains whether Bush will side with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the neoconservative civilian leadership at the Pentagon or Colin L. Powell, the establishment types at State and the cautious Joint Chiefs of Staff. One of the deciding votes, Vice President Cheney, appears already to have turned his back on his old colleagues from the first Bush administration and sided with the hardliners. The other deciding vote, Bush himself, is in Texas reading a neoconservative guide to warfare. If Saddam Hussein collapses as quickly as the skeptics of an Iraq attack, everything will work out fine.

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (4913)	8/20/2002 5:22:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

US wary of Pakistan intelligence services' links to al-Qa'ida By Robert Fisk in Islamabad 21 July 2002 news.independent.co.uk The FBI is becoming almost as distrustful of its Pakistani counterpart as the CIA is of the warlords across the border in Afghanistan. During the trial of journalist Daniel Pearl's murderers – which ended with the conviction of the British public schoolboy Omar Sheikh – one small but disturbing fact never made its way into the headlines: that one of the co-accused was a former Pakistani police officer. The final testimony of the trial – released only yesterday morning – must owe something to his evidence. It revealed, for example, that Mr Pearl made two escape attempts from his captors and that it was this which prompted them to murder him. Three Yemenis were brought in to perform his throat-cutting. But all we know of the ex-cop is that – even at the time of his arrest – he was still working for the Pakistan Special Branch. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the powerful state institution which helped arm Afghan fighters against the Soviets and then supported the Taliban, was supposedly reformed once the Pakistani President, General Pervez Musharraf, joined President George Bush's "war on terrorism". Few in Pakistan believe it. There are rumours, for example, that intelligence officers helped to hide three al-Qa'ida members after a gun battle in a village in Waziristan, in the border tribal territories on 25 June in which 10 soldiers were killed. US agents in Pakistan suspect that several of their raids on remote villages in Waziristan were betrayed to al-Qa'ida operatives in advance. Since then, both the FBI and the Pakistan army have preferred not to inform local police officers of their activities. Although authorities in Islamabad insist that US forces cannot operate alone inside Pakistani territory, recent reports suggest the contrary. Last week, for example, three Pakistani tribesmen were apparently picked up by US troops from the border town of Angoor Adda and flown across the frontier to the US base at Birmal in Afghanistan. It also appears that American forces have been using their old Afghan device of handing out wads of cash in return for local tribal loyalty. If Pakistan can deny America is waging an undercover war on its territory, it is far more difficult to conceal the involvement of a police Rangers inspector, Waseem Akhtar, in the conspiracy to murder General Musharraf during his visit to Karachi on 26 April. And there is evidence that the explosives to be used in the failed attack were subsequently employed in the suicide bombing of the US con- sulate in Karachi on 14 June. Because of the past co-operation between the Taliban – and by extension al-Qa'ida and Pakistan's intelligence services – many Pakistan Special Branch and Field Security Wing officers are working blind, forced to build up entirely new files on militants who remain well known to elements of the ISI. Only patient police work in Karachi, for instance, uncovered hitherto unknown connections between Islamist and secular groups, leading to a series of arrests. All in all, the civil police and the Americans might learn more by talking to the ISI. But no one is sure for whom their individual members work.