MONUMENTAL HISTORICAL BLUNDER
But when will the fingers of blame be pointed
at Israel and the Jewish/Zionist neocons?
"He went to war on a monumental blunder over whether
Iraq was a threat. He must now confront the equally hard
truth that the American-led occupation is not the solution
to the insecurity of Iraq but a large part of the problem."
- Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 15 January: Even though there are now harsh establishment critics of the Iraqi invasion/occupation none of the corporate-sponsored publications dare openly and honestly discuss who pushed the U.S. into this "monumental blunder" and thus who should be held considerably responsible for it -- Israel and it's extensive lobby including the senior Jewish/Zionist neocons who do have names and positions - Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Perle, et. al.
Richard Cohen's damning indictment of George Bush on the Op Ed page of The Washington Post this week, and Robin Cook's not sufficient indictment of Tony Blair in The Guardian yesterday are nearly totally sanitized of the basic reality that had it not been for Israeli policies -- both in the Middle East and in Washington -- what has happened would not have happened.
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Hold the elections, then get out
Most of our partners in Iraq are preparing to leave. We should too
Robin Cook
The Guardian - Friday January 14, 2005: The biggest surprise of the White House announcement calling off the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is that there was anyone still out there looking for them. The rest of the planet has known for over a year that there are no WMD to be found in Iraq, and that hunting for them is just as eccentric - and even less interesting - as poring over arcane codes in the hope of unearthing the holy grail.
Nevertheless, we cannot allow the Bush administration to conduct the last rites on the weapons search without reminding Downing Street that this also buries their claim that Iraq was, in the words of the September dossier, "a current and serious threat". A two-year search by 1,000 personnel with a budget of $1bn has found zero threat: no weapons stockpiles; no chemical or biological agents; no nuclear plants; no delivery systems. When Tony Blair was obliged to admit last summer that he could find no weapons, he promised to produce weapons programmes. Now the search has been closed down by Washington without uncovering any such programmes either.
Revealingly, Washington never thought to warn the British of this week's statement. Despite Britain committing a third of its army to the invasion of Iraq, it did not occur to anyone in the White House to pick up the phone and warn the British government in advance of their unilateral decision. Perhaps this latest twist of the knife might finally cure Tony Blair of his delusion that the Bush administration will ever listen to him in return for his loyalty to them.
The immediate pressure for calling off the hunt, as US officials conceded, is the rising danger to any investigator rash enough to venture out of the fortified green zone. The security situation in large parts of Iraq is now so dire that it is the police who often choose to wear masks so that they cannot be recognised, and the insurgents who make no attempt to disguise themselves even in the capital city in broad daylight.
Deteriorating security must not be used as a pretext to delay the election of a representative Iraqi government. The big mistake of the occupying powers lies not in bringing forward elections too quickly, but in delaying them for so long. The Shia communities were furious last year when Paul Bremer pulled the plug on the elections that they had proposed before the handover to any interim government, and at a time when the security situation was not so grave. They would regard it as a betrayal of their patience if they were now again denied the opportunity to translate their popular majority into real political power.
I am mystified, though, why Tony Blair reassures us that the mere fact of elections will reduce the violence. Sunnis seeking to prevent power passing to the Shia majority are not going to abandon their violent resistance out of respect for the outcome of the democratic process.
Nor is his confidence shared by any of the other nations with intelligence-gathering capacity in Iraq. Most of our partners in it are planning to pack their bags and go home as soon as possible after the elections, which is another reason why they cannot be delayed. Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine have either left or announced their intention to do so starting this spring, puncturing Donald Rumsfeld's famous boast that he had the support of what he dubbed New Europe. The Netherlands is committed to complete withdrawal of its troops by mid-March, a source of acute neuralgia in No 10 as it will leave a big hole in the British sector and require the dispatch of over 1,000 more British troops to plug it on the eve of an election campaign.
Downing Street has made it clear to our ambassadors to each of these governments that the top priority is to persuade them to change their minds and keep their troops in Iraq. Such lobbying only reinforces in Europe resentment of the Blair government as the lonely and predictable spokesman for George Bush.
Perhaps Tony Blair should reflect that if so many countries have concluded that their presence in Iraq is not helping, they have a point. The reality is that the heavy-handed application of US firepower does not offer peace and security in Iraq, but guarantees an increasingly strong and violent resistance. The majority of the civilians killed under the occupation have died at the hands of American ordnance, not terrorist bombs, and every civilian killed breeds another 10 insurgents. Falluja has been reduced to rubble and its residents to refugees, with the predictable result that the resistance has not been weakened, but strengthened.
Tony Blair has already had to accept that he went to war on a monumental blunder over whether Iraq was a threat. He must now confront the equally hard truth that the American-led occupation is not the solution to the insecurity of Iraq but a large part of the problem.
Hollow Accountability
By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post - Thursday, January 13, 2005; Page A21: It took no less a sage than President Bush to put the firing of four high-level CBS News employees in perspective: "CBS said they would act. They did. And I hope their actions are such that this doesn't happen again." This from the man who fired not a single person in his entire administration for getting nearly everything wrong about Iraq and taking the nation to war for reasons that did not exist or were downright specious. Lucky for Bush he's only the president of the United States and not the head of CBS.
Let us call the roll: George Tenet, who assured the president that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? A graceful retirement and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Don Rumsfeld, who approved a battle plan of such brilliance that a 30-day war against a weak Third World country is still going on and shows no sign of ending? He stays in the Cabinet.
Condi Rice, the national security adviser who allowed the president to tell the world of Iraq's nuclear weapons program when it had none whatsoever? She is nominated to become secretary of state.
Vice President Cheney, who insisted against all evidence and with no evidence that Iraq was fast becoming a nuclear power, and who maintained that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? He stays on the ticket and remains a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Bush's observation to the Wall Street Journal is the deepest wisdom of a man who has always been protected from his own mistakes and failures, whether it's the oil business gone bust or a wayward youth rescued by equal measures of religion and family connections. His is the privileged view of privilege itself -- that others should do what he would not. For all his pretense of aw-shucks ordinariness, Bush's inner Yale sometimes oozes out. Some people should pay for their mistakes. Some people never have to.
Those who paid at CBS happen to be some of that network's best people. They made a mistake, no doubt about it. They had professional lapses. Again, no doubt about it. But most of them had long and distinguished careers. One of them, in fact, helped break the story about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. They deserved to be reprimanded for putting an apparently bogus (at least the documents were) report on the air. They did not deserve to be fired.
Liars get fired. None of the CBS four lied. Plagiarists get fired. None of the four plagiarized. Incompetents get fired -- and one mistake over the course of an entire career is not proof of incompetence. All these people deserved another chance. Bush would understand that. He always gets another chance.
As others have pointed out, Bush won the election. But even before that, CBS had gotten a bad case of the shakes. It bagged "The Reagans," a biopic that drew the ire of conservatives, not bothering to snip out the offending scenes or in some other way salvage the film. The network lateraled it over to Showtime, the virtually unwatched cable channel owned -- as is CBS -- by Viacom.
Later, "60 Minutes" killed a report about whether the Bush administration had relied on false documents in making the case that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. A CBS spokesman said it would have been "inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election" -- a statement just plain stunning in its implications. First of all, it was late September -- a full month before the election -- and, second, isn't affecting elections what can happen when journalists do their jobs? I mean, are we supposed to withhold the truth because, in addition to making you free, it might make you change your vote? This was a dark day for CBS and for all journalism.
Now it is even darker. The capitulation to Bush and the GOP is nearly complete. After the firings, the White House voiced its approval. So did Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, who, keeping a firm grip on his emotions, did not suggest President Bush take note and do some firings himself. All over this great country, wherever right-wing pundits pund and bloggers blog, a chorus of gleeful approval was raised to the heavens. But in praising accountability, they were unaccountably silent about -- and here let me quote from the CBS report about what went wrong -- the "myopic zeal" of administration figures who got everything wrong, still do and have never been called to account for it. They had everything wrong but the target. It wasn't Iraq that was the pushover; it was CBS.
Iraq war is breeding a new generation of professional terrorists, warns CIA report
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
The Guardian Saturday January 15, 2005 - The chaos of Iraq is giving rise to a new generation of "professional" terrorists who will eventually replace al-Qaida as a global threat, according to a CIA thinktank.
A report by the National Intelligence Council says the war in Iraq has provided a training and recruitment ground for Islamist militants, much as Afghanistan did for the founding generation of al-Qaida during the war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
As new terror organisations emerge on the world stage, al-Qaida will splinter into regional separatist groups, says the report, which forecasts global trends over the next 15 years.
"Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalised' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself," the report says.
It gives warning that veterans of the conflict in Iraq could disperse around the world, exporting their deadly expertise.
Specifically, the report warns that the US faces an increasing risk of an attack involving biological agents, such as anthrax, and that an emerging and more sophisticated generation of terrorists could also use chemical weapons.
The bleak forecast undermines one of the Bush administration's central justifications for invading Iraq: that it was necessary to curb terrorism; that the country was a central front in the "war on terror"; and that the deposed Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had links to al-Qaida's chief, Osama bin Laden.
Instead, the report describes how hundreds of foreign terrorists entered Iraq after the US invasion, and how the insurgency against American forces was viewed by radical Muslims as a war against a foreign occupier, akin to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Terrorists also took advantage of postwar chaos, porous borders and a country awash with weapons.
But unlike the rise of al-Qaida in Afghanistan, the emerging terrorists do not require a geographical base, and are expected to rely increasingly on the internet.
"While taking advantage of sanctuaries around the world to train, terrorists will not need a stationary headquarters to plan and carry out operations," the report says.
"Training materials, targeting guidance, weapons knowhow and fundraising will increasingly be virtual."
The terrorists now recruited and trained in Iraq will eventually become the successor generation to al-Qaida, it predicts. "Al-Qaida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq."
The 119-page report was based on analysis from more than 1,000 US and foreign observers, and is designed to help the White House track world trends up to 2020.
· Staff Sergeant Cardenas Alban was sentenced at a court martial yesterday to a year in jail for the murder of a severely wounded Iraqi teenager in a Baghdad slum district during a Shi'ite uprising last year, the US military said.
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