neoconservadroid

Why didn't the Bush administration kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi when it had the chance?

That it had opportunities to take out the Jordanian-born jihadist has been clear since Secretary of State Colin Powell devoted a long section of his February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council. In those remarks, which were given to underscore the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, Powell dwelt at length on the terrorist camp in Khurmal, in the pre-invasion Kurdish enclave. It was at that camp that Zarqawi, other jihadists who had fled Afghanistan, and Kurdish radicals were training and producing the poison ricin and cyanide.

....In recent months, the mystery of the administration's inaction has only grown. News reports—including, most recently, one in the Wall Street Journal this week—make it clear that military leaders and the CIA felt Zarqawi was a threat that could and should be removed. On at least three occasions between mid-2002 and the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon presented plans to the White House to destroy the Khurmal camp. Each time the White House declined to act or did not respond at all.

It is impossible to see that refusal as anything other than an enormous blunder.

....It seems never to have occurred to President Bush and his advisers that in a globalized world, where borders are porous and technologies of massive destructiveness are available, hidden networks can be far more dangerous than a state, which can be threatened and contained. Yet that surely has been the lesson of the last three years. It is an added irony that the administration's inability to fully assimilate the threat from "non-state actors" is leading, thanks in part to Zarqawi, to the failure of its effort to reinvent Iraq as a stable democracy in the Middle East.

// posted by Unknown @ 8:54 AM   permalink  0 comments

It is a cliche of American conservatives that liberal and even centrist Democrats are sympathetic to Communism. Yet today it is the Republican Party leadership and rank-and-file right-wing activists who are using Stalinist techniques in an attempt to intimidate opposition, create an alternate, ideologically-based "reality," and enforce acceptance of that false "reality." Behind these techniques is an even more frightening reality - Stalinist-style rhetoric and ways of thought now dominate the political discourses of the American Right.

I should state right now that obviously the Bush administration and its supporters do not have Stalinist economic policies and do not engage in domestic mass murder of the Stalinist sort. I'm saying rather that there are important parallels in mentality, propaganda, and methods of intimidating dissent between the Republican Party leadership today and the Stalinist regime

As a student of the origins of Stalinist culture and propaganda, I have become more and more aware of the Stalinist tactics and mentality of much of the American Right since the virulent Clinton-hating publicity campaigns of the 1990s. The words "treason," "traitors," "unity," and "patriotism" are a good place to start in understanding this. Stalin was a great patriot and hunter of "traitors." Accusing political opponents of treason, lack of patriotism, or lack of resolution in the face of an external threat is quintessentially Stalinist. It has become a staple of Republican rhetoric since the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda massacre. On right-wing talk radio and conservative websites, and in publications of such commentators as Ann Coulter it is routine to accuse the entire Democratic party of treason. These accusations erode the assumption, essential for a functioning democracy, that there can be a patriotic "loyal opposition" to the party in power.

Relentless insistence on unity, on the existence of an unprecedented and overwhelming external threat, and on the total moral depravity of political opposition were all integral to Stalinist propaganda, and they are a growing part of conservative rhetoric in the United States today. Hate campaigns against "wealthy" peasants, "bourgeois" engineers and professors, and "enemies of the people" became central to Stalinism. A hate campaign against gays and lesbians is a keystone of President Bush's reelection campaign, and expressions of hatred against all Muslims on right-wing websites and by talk show commentators such as Jay Severin and Michael Savage are common. "Liberals" are constant targets of charges of treason and psychopathology. Calls for their elimination (means unspecified) by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk are not uncommon.

// posted by Unknown @ 4:22 PM   permalink  0 comments

A Democratic U.S. Senator on Thursday accused a senior Pentagon official of distorting intelligence information to back claims of links between Iraq and al Qaeda in the run-up to last year's U.S.-led invasion.

A report issued by Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also questioned assertions of pre-war links between Baghdad and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who since the invasion has emerged as a leader in the anti-U.S. insurgency.

The report, compiled by the committee's Democratic staff, criticized the Office of Special Plans, which operated under the auspices of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.

It was released less than two weeks before the U.S. presidential election, in which President Bush's handling of Iraq is a major issue.

The report said Feith's office looked at evidence "through a different lens, one that was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

Democrats have frequently accused Feith and other hawks in the Bush administration of manipulating data supplied by the CIA and other sources to bolster the case for invading Iraq.

The 46-page report argued that Pentagon assertions of a link between al Qaeda and Iraq's President Saddam Hussein were not supported by intelligence reports on which they were purportedly based.

// posted by Unknown @ 7:54 PM   permalink  0 comments

The Republicans' united front masks a growing struggle sparked by the president's hawkish and ambitious foreign policy--one that may burst into the open soon after the polls close, whoever wins. "Most conservatives are not comfortable with the neocons," Viguerie says. He decries the neocons as "overbearing" and "immensely influential. . . . They want to be the world's policeman. We don't feel our role is to be Don Quixote, righting all the wrongs in the world."

Viguerie's disquiet is widely shared by veteran conservative activists, who are increasingly blaming neoconservatives for placing Iraq at the center of the war on terrorism. "I'm hearing more discussion about foreign policy and the direction of the country than I have heard probably in the last 35 years," says Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

// posted by Unknown @ 9:20 AM   permalink  0 comments

Many detainees at Guantánamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases.

....In guided tours of Guantánamo provided to the news media and members of Congress, the military authorities contended that the system of rewards and punishments affected only issues like whether the inmates could be deprived of books, blankets and toilet articles. The interrogation sessions themselves, the officials consistently said, did not employ any harsh treatment but were devised only to build a trusting relationship between the interrogator and the detainee.

// posted by Unknown @ 3:37 PM   permalink  0 comments

Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples, but the direct consequence, Hersh says, of ''the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion -- and eye-for-an-eye retribution -- in fighting terrorism.''

// posted by Unknown @ 9:24 AM   permalink  0 comments

seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

....Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis at King's College London, says: "The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There's no real evidence that all these groups are connected." Crispin Black, a senior government intelligence analyst until 2002, is more cautious but admits the terrorist threat presented by politicians and the media is "out of date and too one-dimensional. We think there is a bit of a gulf between the terrorists' ambition and their ability to pull it off."

....The Power of Nightmares began as an investigation of something else, the rise of modern American conservatism. Curtis was interested in Leo Strauss, a political philosopher at the university of Chicago in the 50s who rejected the liberalism of postwar America as amoral and who thought that the country could be rescued by a revived belief in America's unique role to battle evil in the world. Strauss's certainty and his emphasis on the use of grand myths as a higher form of political propaganda created a group of influential disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, now the US deputy defence secretary. They came to prominence by talking up the Russian threat during the cold war and have applied a similar strategy in the war on terror.

As Curtis traced the rise of the "Straussians", he came to a conclusion that would form the basis for The Power of Nightmares. Straussian conservatism had a previously unsuspected amount in common with Islamism: from origins in the 50s, to a formative belief that liberalism was the enemy, to an actual period of Islamist-Straussian collaboration against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan in the 80s (both movements have proved adept at finding new foes to keep them going). Although the Islamists and the Straussians have fallen out since then, as the attacks on America in 2001 graphically demonstrated, they are in another way, Curtis concludes, collaborating still: in sustaining the "fantasy" of the war on terror.

// posted by Unknown @ 9:45 PM   permalink  0 comments

"How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"

Apparently you just need 8 positions to take over the US government: Chief, Near East and South Asia division of the Department of Defense; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy; Deputy Secretary of Defense; Secretary of Defense; Undersecretary of State for Arms Control; Chairman, Defense Policy Board; Vice President; Chief of Staff to the Vice President; and Deputy National Security Adviser. Of course, it only works if you have a president who needs radio signals to be told what to say and do (see below). If you don't know who held the positions mentioned during 2002-2003, do look them up on google.com, and then compare the holders of these offices to the members of the Project for a New American Century and the signers of the 1996 policy statement done for Israel's Likud Party, "A Clean Break." Both "A Clean Break" and the PNAC documents insisted back in the 1990s on a war against Iraq.

// posted by Unknown @ 9:07 AM   permalink  0 comments

Echoing increasingly threatening noises from the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, neo-cons are calling for Washington to undertake covert action, at the very least, to oust what some of them call the ''terror masters'' in Tehran as part of a more general ''World War IV'' against alleged Arab and Islamic extremism.

Some neo-cons are even complaining that if Bush had been serious about the ''war on terrorism'', he should have taken on Iran after Afghanistan, rather than Iraq.

''Had we seen the war for what it was, we would not have started with Iraq, but with Iran, the mother of modern Islamic terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah, the ally of al-Qaeda, the sponsor of Zarqawi, the longtime sponsor of Fatah and the backbone of Hamas'', wrote part-time Pentagon consultant Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) this week.

// posted by Unknown @ 1:45 PM   permalink  0 comments

L. Paul Bremer, speaking Monday at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, said "horrid" looting was occurring when he arrived to head the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad on May 6, 2003.

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Bremer said. "We never had enough troops on the ground."

"I hope tonight Mr. Cheney can acknowledge those mistakes," the Democratic presidential candidate said. "I hope Mr. Cheney can take responsibility."

// posted by Unknown @ 9:15 AM   permalink  0 comments

Families of the 35 children who died in a string of bombings in Baghdad blamed American troops for the tragedy, accusing them of attracting insurgents to a ceremony where the attacks occurred.

By Friday, tents had sprung up in the el-Amel neighborhood in Baghdad to accommodate mourners who gathered to share their grief from the Thursday attack. In the carnage, several explosions ripped into a crowd gathered to celebrate the inauguration of a new, much needed sewage plant.

Residents said that before the start of the celebration, U.S. soldiers called upon the children through loudspeakers to join the crowd, promising them sweets. There were an unusually large number around because the long school holidays were nearing an end.

"I blame the Americans for this tragedy. They wanted to make human shields out of our children. They should have kept the children away from danger," said Abdel-Hadi al-Badri, a cleric a the al-Mubashroun al-Ashra mosque, breaking down in tears during Friday prayers.

Al-Badri's son lost his right leg in the explosion after he ignored his father's warnings to stay away from the U.S. troops....

"The Americans are the first terrorists and the people who carried out the attack are the second terrorists," he added. It was the largest number of children killed in any single insurgent attack since the conflict erupted 17 months ago.

Al-Badri's is a common lament here. Confronted by daily bombings, kidnappings, deadly crossfires and soaring violent crime, many Iraqis blame most of their ills on the Americans. Many say that they and their children would not be dying today had the U.S. not invaded their country 17 months ago.

// posted by Unknown @ 3:33 PM   permalink  0 comments

....the violent insurgency in Iraq, which has tied down 140,000 U.S. troops, has all but removed Americans' stomach for a similar pre-emptive engagement against an enemy who has not actually launched or prepared an imminent attack on the United States.

Iraq "will leave a long and damaging legacy," said Fred Ikle, a senior government arms control expert for decades who has argued that the United States must be more willing to use military might to achieve its goals. "It will inhibit us more than is good for our future. We fumbled."

Ikle was one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative group that has long pressed for a more muscular American military posture, and includes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- key architects of the Iraq war -- among its members.

Ikle's views are echoed by other prominent neoconservative thinkers.

"The appetite for this kind of action in the country is pretty low at the moment," said Max Boot, a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Boot, an early supporter of the Iraq war, said that the United States is likely to launch small-scale pre-emptive strikes as needed in the future, much as Israel does against its enemies, but not the kind of large-scale attacks that were at the center of the Bush doctrine's aim of pressuring enemies to change or risk being destroyed.

"If, by some miracle, Iraq looks better in a few years, maybe there will be greater interest in the idea," said Boot.

// posted by Unknown @ 11:07 AM   permalink  0 comments