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

To: lurqer who wrote (34388)	1/7/2004 2:20:35 AM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Well, duh! Unrealistic Iraq timetable limits chances of success According to the timetable announced in November, the Iraqi Governing Council is supposed to draft and adopt an interim constitution by Feb. 28. By May 31, the Iraqi people are scheduled to meet and hold caucuses around the country to elect members of an interim government. And by June 30, they are expected to have a new Iraqi government up and running, allowing the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to officially go out of existence. If that schedule sounds overly ambitious, it is. The end of June looms less than six months away, and given the circumstances on the ground in Iraq, ending our occupation by then would be little short of miraculous. In fact, it would be foolhardy to treat the June 30 goal as a date set in concrete. Yes, we should cede control to the Iraqis as soon as possible, but if we push too much responsibility on them too early, we raise the odds of Iraqi failure. And yes, timetables have their uses -- they can focus attention and create pressure for progress -- but they can also restrict flexibility. As the Bush administration has learned, the option of changing course as circumstances demand is essential in trying to manage the crisis in Iraq. There's another issue as well. The capture of Saddam Hussein has not slowed the rate of violence in Iraq, and military officials have been quite clear in predicting that guerrilla attacks and terrorism will remain a serious threat through June and beyond. There is also no reasonable expectation that Iraqi police or military will be ready by then to play a significant role. In other words, even if the occupation officially ends on schedule, U.S. troops will still be patrolling the country and be responsible for security. Tens of thousands of U.S. and coalition troops will still have to enforce what amounts to American-imposed martial law. In addition, most of the money to run the Iraqi government and to finance reconstruction will continue to come from the United States, and U.S. officials are not about to cede control of that money to the Iraqis. So even after we announce the official end of the occupation and tell the Iraqis and the world that we are no longer in charge, in truth, we will retain most of the real power. Imagine, then, Iraq on July 1. The Iraqi people will be told that they are now self-governing, that their fate is now in their own hands. Yet when they walk out their front doors, U.S. troops will still control the streets, telling them where they can go and what they can do; U.S. bureaucrats will still control the purse strings. Under those circumstances, the promise of sovereignty cannot help but seem a cruelly false illusion. So how can the emerging Iraqi government be seen as anything but a puppet regime? How can it be given the credibility and independence that it needs, both within Iraq and in the international community? The answer lies with the United Nations and perhaps NATO. If U.N. officials, not Americans, are seen as making the decisions about reconstruction, and if U.S. troops are by then operating under NATO or U.N. leadership, the promise of democratic self-government would seem far more real to the Iraqis. And that, after all, is supposed to be our ultimate goal. ajc.com 'Course the schedule was set by the reelection of GWB, more than anything else. JMO lurqer

To: lurqer who wrote (34388)	1/7/2004 7:55:12 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Plame leak shameful no matter how the White House spins it hillnews.com January 7, 2004 By JOSH MARSHALL With its current battles in the snowy wastes of Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic Party may be, for the moment, a house divided against itself. But Democrats at least have the consolation of the Plame investigation, which continues to validate their least generous suspicions about how the Bush White House operates and underscore the president’s seeming indifference to recklessness and law-breaking among high-level members of his own staff. As you know, last week Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from further involvement in the Plame case. Ashcroft deputy James Comey then appointed Peter Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney from Chicago, to take over the investigation. But a more telling development has come in subsequent days as key defenders of the White House have begun to change their line of defense. Their tactic lately is no longer to deny that some key White House officials tipped columnist Robert Novak off to the fact that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert employee of the CIA. These days, they just say that it wasn’t a crime. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of pleading no contest: Yes, we did it. But so what? As prominent Republican defense lawyer and former congressional staffer Victoria Toensing told The Washington Post last week, it probably wasn’t a crime because the perpetrators didn’t know Plame was undercover, as opposed to some garden variety agency 9-to-5 worker. And, for the leak to be a crime, the law in question says that the leakers had to know. Toensing’s comments were followed in the same Post article by concessions, from GOP legal sources in touch with the White House, that the earlier denials by White House spokesman Scott McClellan were actually non-denial denials. So where does this leave us? Let’s start by remembering why Toensing’s surmise is almost certainly false and then consider why it would hardly be better if it were true. First, did they know? Let’s start with the most direct evidence we have. When Novak penned his column, he called Plame an “agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” In the intelligence world, the term “operative” has a more specific meaning than it does in everyday English. It almost always refers to a clandestine agent rather than an analyst. And as I noted in this column Oct. 15, a review of Novak’s past columns shows that he always uses the word in that way — to refer to an undercover agent. Every time. After the Plame story first caught fire at the end of September, Novak tried to pass his use of the word “operative” off as a careless mistake. But for such a seasoned reporter, that excuse hardly passes the laugh test. There’s no credible way of getting around the conclusion that Novak knew Plame was covert. And if Novak knew, that means his sources knew. And if his sources knew, well … that’s game, set, match. But, again, let’s consider the quite unlikely possibility that the perps in the Plame case didn’t know what Plame did at the CIA. At trial, that might let them slip free. But in substantive terms it would if anything make it worse. Here’s why. We know that White House leakers knew that Plame was involved in weapons-of-mass-destruction work. Novak said so. And, more important, the whole reason for leaking her identity in the first place was their claim that she had somehow arranged for her husband, Joe Wilson, to be sent to Niger to investigate the uranium claims. We now know, or seem to know, that Plame was not then involved in an operation in which her life would be put into immediate danger if her identity were revealed or an operation that, if compromised, would have immediate and grave repercussions for American national security. But the defense now being floated out of the White House is that the perps didn’t really have any clear idea what she did — only that she worked at the CIA and was involved in controlling the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In other words, they disclosed her identity without making any attempt to ascertain whether the disclosure might put her in harm’s way or scuttle a major anti-proliferation operation. For all they knew, Plame was then involved in a clandestine effort to take down a band of terrorists who were smuggling uranium from Pakistan into Germany for later use against the United States. Yet the leakers made no effort to find out. If true, that would amount to a stunningly reckless indifference to protecting American lives and U.S. national security. But this appears to be exactly what the White House and its defenders are trying to say happened. No matter how you slice it, top White House officials acted in a way that should disqualify them from future service on the president’s staff. Unfortunately, the president doesn’t seem to mind. ____________________ Josh Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each Wednesday. Email: jmarshall@thehill.com