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The Iraqi Convergence - Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post
After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality. Following the Democratic victory last November, panicked Republican senators began rifling the thesaurus to find exactly the right phrase to express exactly the right nuance to establish exactly the right distance from the president's Iraq policy, while Murtha Democrats searched for exactly the right legislative ruse to force a retreat from Iraq without appearing to do so. In the last month, however, as a consensus has emerged about realities in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun. A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the Maliki government remains a disaster. The latest report from the battlefield is from Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a strong critic of the Iraq war. He returned saying essentially what we have heard from Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and various liberal congressmen, the latest being Brian Baird (D-Wash.): Al-Qaeda has been seriously set back as Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala and other provinces switched from the insurgency to our side.
The Next War in Iraq - Joe Klein, Time Magazine
At the Iowa Straw Poll a few weeks ago, just about every Republican presidential candidate who mentioned the war in Iraq cited an Op-Ed piece in the "liberal" New York Times written by two military analysts from the "liberal" Brookings Institution. They had just returned from a brief tour of Iraq where they saw many of the same things I saw on a similar trip in June. They saw the success our military has had in turning Sunni tribes against extremists from al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) but then extrapolated wildly, saying this was a war we "just might win." Predictably, this had the impact of crack cocaine on neoconservatives, producing a euphoric and slightly violent high. The conservative Weekly Standard scurrilously announced that it had helped dash the "hope" of war opponents that Iraq was lost. The Op-Ed will be cited continually in the discussion of the war that will accompany the September reports of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Which is too bad, because it is fundamentally misleading about the next stage of the war. To be sure, the success in the Sunni areas is real, but it may have greater long-term significance in the region than it does in Iraq. We've learned an important lesson in Anbar province: the Islamic-extremist message is a loser. Most Muslims do not want to live without music, television and, especially, tobacco. They don't want their daughters forcibly married to jihadis or their sons shrouded in explosive vests. That is certainly good news, but it's not enough. Indeed, the campaign against AQI may be among the last useful missions for the U.S. military in Iraq. We could drive out every last Islamic extremist, and the country would still be in the midst of a civil war that is trending toward chaos. And make no mistake: the U.S. colonialist insistence on dictating the shape of Iraq's future—framing a constitution, training an Iraqi army and the threat of a permanent U.S. military presence—has exacerbated the chaos.
Another Vietnam? - Max Boot, Wall Street Journal
Ever since the mid-1970s, critics of American military involvement have warned that any decision to deploy armed forces abroad--in Lebanon and El Salvador in the 1980s, in Kuwait, Somalia, and Kosovo in the 1990s, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan--would result in "another Vietnam." Conversely, supporters of those interventions have adamantly resisted any Vietnam comparisons. President George W. Bush boldly abandoned that template with his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Wednesday. In a skillful bit of political jujitsu, he cited Vietnam not as evidence that the Iraq War is unwinnable, but to argue that the costs of giving up the fight would be catastrophic--just as they were in Southeast Asia. This has met with predictable and angry denunciations from antiwar advocates who argue that the consequences of defeat in Vietnam weren't so grave. After all, isn't Vietnam today an emerging economic power that is cultivating friendly ties with the U.S.? True, but that's 30 years after the fact. In the short-term, the costs of defeat were indeed heavy. More than a million people perished in the killing fields of Cambodia, while in Vietnam, those who worked with American forces were consigned, as Mr. Bush noted, to prison camps "where tens of thousands perished." Many more fled as "boat people," he continued, "many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea." That assessment actually understates the terrible repercussions from the American defeat, whose ripples spread around the world. In the late 1970s, America's enemies seized power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were seized aboard the SS Mayaguez (off Cambodia) and in Tehran. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan. It is impossible to prove the connection with the Vietnam War, but there is little doubt that the enfeeblement of a superpower encouraged our enemies to undertake acts of aggression that they might otherwise have shied away from. Indeed, as Mr. Bush noted, jihadists still gain hope from what Ayman al Zawahiri accurately describes as "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents."
Iraq’s Domino Effect – London Daily Telegraph leader
The heat of electioneering in Washington is sending confusing signals about the American commitment to Iraq. On Monday, Senator Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate armed services committee, called on the Iraqi parliament to vote the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, out of office because of his failure to create a political consensus between the different ethnic and religious groups. The day after, George W. Bush confessed to "a certain level of frustration" with the Shia-dominated administration. America appeared to be preparing for withdrawal by blaming the Iraqis for reneging on their side of the bargain, political reform. Yet on Wednesday the President described Mr al-Maliki as "a good man with a difficult job", and reviewed more than 60 years of history, from Imperial Japan through Korea and Vietnam, to persuade his audience that America had to stay the course in Iraq, to meet "the desire for liberty written into the human heart by our Creator". As things stand, the President will not countenance a precipitate withdrawal of American forces, which means that he will bequeath a still heavy Iraqi deployment to his successor in 17 months' time. But the pressure on Mr al-Maliki is set to heighten, and American goals in Iraq are likely to narrow.
Returning to Cambodia – Peter Rodman, National Review
For a long time, when it talked about Iraq, the Bush administration avoided Vietnam references like the plague. This was perhaps a reasonable judgment that, even if useful debating points could be made, any mention of the “V-word” would be a psychological and political disaster. The administration has now dropped the taboo, as we see in the president’s speech Wednesday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. One reason may be that in today’s Iraq debate, the analogies that work in its favor are too strong to pass up. I agree with that. The analogies relate to the situation on the ground and the likely consequences of congressional action. Military historians seem to be converging on a consensus that by the end of 1972, the balance of forces in Vietnam had improved considerably, increasing the prospects for South Vietnam’s survival. That balance of forces was reflected in the Paris Agreement of January 1973, and the (Democratic) Congress then proceeded to pull the props out from under that balance of forces over the next 2 ½ years — abandoning all of Indochina to a bloodbath. This is now a widely accepted narrative of the endgame in Vietnam, and it has haunted the Democrats for a generation. Will tomorrow’s narrative be that the strategic situation in Iraq was starting to improve in 2007 but the Congress tied the president’s hands anyway — tipping events toward an American defeat, dooming Iraq to chaos, emboldening Islamist extremists throughout the Middle East, and demoralizing all our friends in the region who are on the front line against this scourge? How can the president refrain from making this point? Why on earth should he?
Bush's Vietnam Blunder - Jim Hoagland, Washington Post
Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq. Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president. It is not just that Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Wednesday drew on a shaky grasp of history, spotlighted once again his own decision to sit out the Vietnam conflict, and played straight into his critics' most emotive arguments against him and the Republican Party. More important, Bush has called attention to the elephant that will be sitting in the room when his administration makes its politically vital report on Iraq to the nation next month. For Americans, the most important comparison will be this one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms -- whatever those terms are at any given moment.
Fruits of Retreat - John Podhoretz, New York Post
And so the world of conventional wisdom is even now rearing in horror at the mere thought of President Bush daring to compare the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam - or, rather, describing the consequences of losing the war in Iraq by discussing the consequences of our loss in Vietnam and asking the American people if they want to see that disastrous past repeated as our inglorious future. You could almost feel the outrage rising like steam heat from the left side of the blogosphere: Why, doesn't that evil moron know that Vietnam is our analogy? Doesn't he know no one should be permitted to mention Vietnam in any context other than the one we use - as an example of an immoral, pointless and stupid war, a quagmire from which the nation was saved not by heroes on the battlefield abroad but by political opposition at home?
Maroons Rush In - Mackubin Thomas Owens, National Review
The 1972 Easter Offensive provided the proof that Vietnam could survive, albeit with U.S. air and naval support, at least in the short term. The Easter Offensive was the biggest North Vietnamese offensive push of the war, greater in magnitude than either the 1968 Tet offensive or the final assault of 1975. Despite inevitable failures on the part of some units, all in all, the South Vietnamese fought well. Then, having blunted the Communist thrust, they recaptured territory that had been lost to Hanoi. Finally, so effective was the eleven-day "Christmas bombing" campaign (LINEBACKER II) later that year that the British counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson exclaimed, "you had won the war. It was over." Three years later, despite the heroic performance of some ARVN units, South Vietnam collapsed against a much weaker, cobbled-together PAVN offensive. What happened to cause this reversal? First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the country from Vietnam, forced South Vietnam to accept a ceasefire that permitted North Vietnamese forces to remain in South Vietnam. Then in an act that still shames the United States to this day, Congress cut off military and economic assistance to South Vietnam. Finally, President Nixon resigned over Watergate and his successor, constrained by congressional action, defaulted on promises to respond with force to North Vietnamese violations of the peace terms. Of course the president’s reference to Vietnam did not have to do with operational art or strategy but with the consequences of defeat: the abandonment of allies to the tender mercies of Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists, resulting in the death of millions in Cambodia and thousands in Vietnam, the “boat people,” and re-education camps. This abandonment of our Vietnamese allies was a massive moral failure on the part of the United States. It is one we should not repeat in Iraq.
Why America's Pullout from Vietnam Worked – Michael Hirsh, Newsweek
Above all, we have learned that Vietnam and Southeast Asia were never really central fronts in the cold war (although Korea at the time of the outbreak of war in 1950, when Beijing still kowtowed to Moscow and before the Soviet Union and China split, might have fit that bill). The decision to pull out had very little effect on the ultimate outcome. America triumphed in the cold war because it had the right kind of economy—an open one—compared to Moscow and Beijing, and its ideas about freedom were more attractive to the states within the Soviet bloc than their own failed ideas were. The president would like to make the argument that Iraq is about the same struggle. It’s not, for several important reasons. In contrast to the Soviet and Chinese communists, or for that matter the fascists of the 1930s and '40s, Al Qaeda and its ilk have no universalist program, no persuasive alternative ideology to globalization and some brand of democracy. They are nihilists, and they have failed to capture half the world’s attention as communism and socialism once did. So, yes, while a U.S. pullout would no doubt inspire a great deal of Al Qaeda propaganda about how they succeeded in forcing the Americans to withdraw from Iraq as they forced the Soviets to do in Afghanistan, the majority of the world’s elites won’t buy it.
Iraq, Vietnam and McGovernism - Washington Times editorial
The media and the political left have taken umbrage at President Bush's choice of a Vietnam analogy to illustrate the dangers of withdrawal from Iraq. Then, as now, he said Wednesday at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, "people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end... The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.' " This has set off a firestorm. "Historians Question Bush's Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq," read yesterday's New York Times' "news analysis." The president's logic "should persuade few," opined the Los Angeles Times. Both newspapers downplayed the Korea and Japan analogies which Mr. Bush also delivered at the convention. This is more than a little convenient. The president spent much more speech time on Korea and Japan than on Vietnam. Both Korea and Japan stand as rebukes to people who once argued for the purported incompatibility democracy and freedom among peoples who lacked a history thereof. Today we hear it about Middle Eastern peoples instead of Asian ones. Mr. Bush's point is that each was proven wrong in time and that he expects the same to be true in Iraq.
Why Democrats Dread Hearing the V-word - Rosemary Righter, London Times
Why did he do it? Why conjure up unquiet ghosts? Why now? Vietnam is not only, as President Bush rather flatly put it, “a complex and painful subject” for Americans. The V-word is lodged in folk memory as an unwinnable war that America should never have fought, that wasted blood and treasure, and that, most woundingly, bitterly split the nation. Vietnam, even today, is a powerful political toxin. Probably the only American politician who can talk about Vietnam without risk is the war hero John McCain. John Kerry tried the “veteran who wants out of Iraq” line in the 2004 presidential elections; the unwanted effect was to remind the nation of his career as an anti-Vietnam protester. As for Mr Bush, it made sense to keep quiet about a war in which he did not exactly rush to serve. The White House response to the use by anti-war Democrats of the “Vietnam quagmire” analogy has been to point out how different — both in character and in strategic significance — these two conflicts are. Until now. Mr Bush’s quick potted history will be denounced as a distortion of history; there are as many opinions about “what went wrong” as there are toilers in the Vietnam history industry. He must know that to make lessons from Vietnam the core of his appeal for greater American patience in Iraq invites the retort that, as in Vietnam, “we should never have gone in”. His judgment is that what matters more to Americans is “Where do we go from here?” And here he is right that the Vietnam endgame is relevant. Public opinion dictated the timing and manner of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, and could play the same forcing role in Iraq. The consequences for South East Asia were appalling; the scars endure. The uncontroversial core of his message is that the consequences of a political panic over Iraq would be far graver.
Losing is Winning - Cal Thomas, Washington Times
George Orwell, call your office. You can add to your list of opposites ("war is peace," "ignorance is strength" and "freedom is slavery") a new one. It is the emerging plan of congressional Democrats, joined by at least one Democratic presidential candidate: "losing is winning." After years of embracing defeat and openly saying of Iraq "the war is lost" and "this surge is not accomplishing anything" (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, among others), is that a light at the end of the Democrats' dark tunnel? Apparently hoping to head off a potentially positive report next month from the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, some leading Democrats are acknowledging that the surge of American troops is succeeding. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, who recently returned from Iraq with Sen. John Warner, Virginia Republican, says, "The military aspects of President Bush's new strategy in Iraq ... appear to have produced some credible and positive results." Mr. Levin is by no means a neo-con, noting in a conference call with reporters that the purpose of the surge was to help produce a political settlement, which has not yet been achieved. Still, even acknowledging progress on the ground is a far cry from a spokesperson for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said recently that Democratic leaders are "not willing to concede there are positive things to point to" in Iraq. That was less than a month ago, but some are willing to make such a concession now for the same reason they weren't before: politics.
Back to Vietnam - Boston Globe editorial
The Vietnam war is still such a divisive episode in US history that comparisons to Iraq are sure to be clouded by emotion. But President Bush tossed analogies around capriciously this week before the Veterans of Foreign Wars and added a few more from World War II and Korea. Since he broached the subject, it's reasonable to take the comparisons to places he might not want to go. Here's one: It would have been better to surrender South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese communists in the early 1960s than to engage them in a struggle that cost 58,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives before it ended in 1975 with the same result: victory for Hanoi and the suppression of non-communist opposition in the south. Would Bush agree that, similarly, it would have been preferable to allow Saddam Hussein, notwithstanding his evil regime, to remain in power than to engage in a more than four-year war that has torn Iraq apart and cost the lives of 3,700 Americans and many more Iraqis?
The Problem Isn’t Mr. Maliki - New York Times editorial
Blaming the prime minister of Iraq, rather than the president of the United States, for the spectacular failure of American policy, is cynical politics, pure and simple. It is neither fair nor helpful in figuring out how to end America’s biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has been catastrophic for Iraq ever since he took over from the equally disastrous Ibrahim al-Jaafari more than a year ago. America helped engineer Mr. Jaafari’s removal, only to get Mr. Maliki. That tells you something important about whether this is more than a matter of personalities. Mr. Jaafari, as it happens, was Iraq’s first democratically chosen leader under the American-sponsored constitution. Continuing in the Jaafari tradition, Mr. Maliki’s government has fashioned Iraqi security forces into an instrument of Shiite domination and revenge, trying to steer American troops away from Shiite militia strongholds and leaving Sunni Arab civilians unprotected from sectarian terrorism. His government’s deep sectarian urges have also been evident in the continuing failure to enact legislation to fairly share oil revenues and the persistence of rules that bar much of the Sunni middle class from professional employment.
For Now, the Maliki Primary - E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post
Maybe Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki should just enter our primaries next year and Americans could vote up or down on whether he should remain in office. The surest sign of how bad our choices in Iraq have become is the eagerness of both of our political parties to blame the entire mess on the man American officials helped install in his job. After all, it was taken as an American victory back in April 2006 when Maliki replaced Ibrahim al-Jafari, who faced many of the same criticisms as prime minister that Maliki does today. Now, Maliki is the problem. Among Democrats, both Sens. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton have called for replacing him with "a less divisive and more unifying figure," as Clinton put it. On consecutive days, President Bush was against Maliki before he was for him. On Tuesday, he suggested that Iraqi disappointment with Maliki might lead to his ouster. "If the government doesn't respond to the demands of the people," Bush said of the Iraqis, "they will replace the government." On Wednesday, he declared that Maliki was "a good guy, a good man with a difficult job" and added: "I support him." Who knows what the administration's position on Maliki will be by the weekend?
Iraq Vets Respond - David Bellavia, Pete Hegseth, Michael Baumann, Carl Hartmann, David Thul, Knox Nunnally and Joe Worley, Weekly Standard
On Sunday, seven soldiers from the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed in Iraq penned a passionate opinion piece in the New York Times that further illustrates the complexity of what is "really" happening in Iraq. Of the almost 3,000 soldiers from the Army's storied 82nd Airborne Division currently serving in the hottest of Iraqi neighborhoods, seven felt confident enough in their misgivings to sign an opinion piece. They should not be surprised that many of their comrades--including the seven undersigned here--find their work to be misguided. The 2nd Brigade is responsible for two dangerous areas of Baghdad: Adihamiyah and Sadr City. Airborne troopers there have seen the worst al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army can throw at them and the Iraqi people. But the whole story is that the Iraqis and soldiers in their sector have not yet been fully affected by the surge of troops and operations, which have barely been in place two months. Currently, American and Iraqi Forces are clearing sections of southern Baghdad before turning north to the 82nd Airborne's neighborhoods. As such, the portrait these soldiers painted, while surely accurate and honest, is more representative of pre-surge Baghdad: sectarian strife, lawlessness, and indiscriminate slaughter. This is not, however, the picture elsewhere in Iraq, or even most of Baghdad. Additional American combat brigades first surged to the outlying areas around the capital, disrupting the flow of suicide bombers and car bombs and denying haven to al Qaeda.
'To Old Times' - Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
The American troops in Iraq, our men and women, are inspiring, and we all know it. But whenever you say it, you sound like a greasy pol: "I support our valiant troops, though I oppose the war," or "If you oppose the war, you are ignoring the safety and imperiling the sacrifice of our gallant troops." I suspect that in their sophistication--and they are sophisticated--our troops are grimly amused by this. Soldiers are used to being used. They just do their job. We know of the broad humanitarian aspects of the occupation--the hospitals being built, the schools restored, the services administered, the kids treated by armed forces doctors. But then there are all the stories that don't quite make it to the top of the heap, and that in a way tell you more. The lieutenant in the First Cavalry who was concerned about Iraqi kids in the countryside who didn't have shoes, so he wrote home, started a drive, and got 3,000 pairs sent over. The lieutenant colonel from California who spent his off-hours emailing hospitals back home to get a wheelchair for a girl with cerebral palsy. The Internet is littered with these stories. So is Iraq. I always notice the pictures from the wire services, pictures that have nothing to do with government propaganda. The Marine on patrol laughing with the local street kids; the nurse treating the sick mother. A funny thing. We're so used to thinking of American troops as good guys that we forget: They're good guys! They have American class. And it is not possible that the good people of Iraq are not noticing, and that in some way down the road the sum of these acts will not come to have some special meaning, some special weight of its own. The actor Gary Sinise helps run Operation Iraqi Children, which delivers school supplies with the help of U.S. forces. When he visits Baghdad grade schools, the kids yell, "Lieutenant Dan!"--his role in "Forrest Gump," the story of another good man.
Heat, Dust and Marines - Ralph Peters, New York Post
Marine Cpl. William Thomas kicked off his patrol briefing promptly at 5 a.m. The other members of 2nd Squad, 3rd Platoon, Lima Company, listened as if their lives depended on the corporal's instructions. Because their lives would depend on what their squad leader had to say. The briefing covered everything from specific duties to details of the ground we'd cover. The mission: Extend the security perimeter around the outpost, do a "census check" of Iraqi ID cards in a marketplace and gather intelligence. "First fire team - security. Second team in support, evacuate any prisoners. Third team - assault element." When the corporal concluded, the company first sergeant, Jim Lanham, a rugged Tennessean who carries himself like Burt Lancaster in "From Here To Eternity," offered his own bit of coaching: "I want to see weapons up. At all times. No matter how tired you feel."
Iran's Hangmen Work Overtime to Silence Opposition - Con Coughlin, London Daily Telegraph
Stonings, hangings, floggings, purges. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might claim that United Nations sanctions can't hurt his country, but that is not how it feels for Iran's long-suffering population which now finds itself on the receiving end of one of the most brutal purges witnessed since the 1979 Islamic revolution. The most visible manifestation of the new oppression sweeping Iran has been the wave of public executions and floggings carried out in Teheran and provincial capitals over recent weeks in a blatant attempt by the regime to intimidate political opponents. The official government line is that the punishments are part of its "Plan to Enforce Moral Behaviour" It's the same kind of argument that was used immediately after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took control to purge the country of its prosperous, secular middle class and secure his hold on power. Now Mr Ahmadinejad is adopting similar tactics in a desperate attempt to keep his embattled regime in power. Although Iran has one of the world's highest execution rates, until recently most of the sentences were carried out within the confines of prisons such a Teheran's notorious Evin complex. But this month diplomats at the Japanese and Australian embassies in the capital were alarmed to find the bodies of two convicted criminals hanging from cranes stationed directly outside their office windows.
Fooled by Winds of Reform - Camelia Entekhabifard, New York Times
As a journalist and writer in Iran, I have often compared myself, and many of my colleagues and friends at other Iranian newspapers, to those mushrooms. In 1992, when I started working in Tehran, I was very careful about what I would report. That is, until right after the election of Mohammad Khatami, the reformist president, in 1997. Then I, like so many other journalists, quickly went to work for the country’s leading reformist papers. Moderate clerics began using those newspapers as conduits for challenging religion-based laws, like the restrictive dress code and death by stoning. President Khatami brought reform to the political system and exposed the involvement of Iranian intelligence agents in the murder of a number of intellectuals. Every day, Iranian journalists, with the encouragement of the Iranian people, disclosed news or challenged the system. We trusted that the changes that had come about would remain and that we would be protected by the government we had elected. The last newspaper I worked for in Iran — Zan — was closed by the judiciary in the spring of 1999. I was in the United States at that time, and as soon as I returned to Tehran, I was arrested. The government held me in solitary confinement for three months, and during that time I confessed to crimes I never committed and did whatever a human being could do to save his or her life. I now wonder if all the opportunities we had seen for reform were really illusions created to trick us. Did the Iranian government encourage a fleeting era of reform in order to identify its opponents so as to come after them? Was President Khatami’s election the thunderstorm that ultimately allowed the government to hunt us down?
Power-sharing in Pakistan - Washington Times editorial
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf will indeed resign his military commission by the end of the year, said Pakistan's minister of information, Syed Anwar Mahmood, in an interview this week: "President Musharraf will be quitting as the army's chief of staff at the end of the year. He has said so himself." How Gen. Musharraf intended to deal with the issue of holding his dual offices, which Pakistan's constitution bars him from doing, was one major question mark in Pakistan's upcoming elections. The issue won't be settled, of course, until Gen. Musharraf actually completes the transition to civilian life. (After the 2002 election, Gen. Musharraf granted himself an exemption.) It's important, though, that Gen. Musharraf not only made the promise but has a senior member of his government in Washington reiterating it unequivocally.
U.S. is an Overwhelming Force for Good – Kevin Rudd, The Australian
For the 21st century to be a truly pacific century, a truly peaceful one, it must still have an international rules-based order. It was important for the century just gone, and will be just as important for the century just unfolding. And you cannot deliver a rules-based order in the absence of the underlying ballast of US global strategic power. Carefully husbanded, selectively deployed - without that a rules-based order ultimately withers. America today, moreover, should not disengage from the world post-Iraq and I say that as someone who has been for almost five years a continuing and consistent opponent of the war in Iraq. But I say that despite Iraq, the world needs America. I say that despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world. It is time we sang that from the world's rooftops. When you look around the council of nations, you cannot often say that about others. Whether you are looking at those who need nourishment in the rice fields and the disused factories of North Korea or those in need of food aid in West Darfur. Whichever of the world's hell holes I have travelled to in recent years, there I see America's helping hand at work. Whoever wins the next presidential election and however Iraq is resolved, let there be no retreat of America from the world. Let there be no retreat of America from the Asia-Pacific region. Let there be no retreat of America from our region.
A Global Awakening in Congress? - Viola Herms Drath, Washington Times
Congress is in recess and at home trying to assess the mood of the country. In scrutinizing their current standing among their constituency, one can be fairly sure foreign relations will not be on the agenda. Still, questions about the quagmire in Iraq and the explosive Middle East in general haunt our conflicted lawmakers wherever they appear. Traditionally relegated to the congressional back burner, foreign affairs have unexpectedly become local issues. From Missouri to Maine, our lawmakers grapple with whether to take the approach of "traditionalists," who, says former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, "believe in operating within the traditions of 20th-century foreign policy — that one proceeds in foreign policy in conjunction with, or reaching out to our friends, allies and international organizations." Or they might follow the " transformationalists," who argue "that September 11 [2001] showed that the world environment was deteriorating rapidly and we had to be bold. Friends and allies would only hold us back," according to Mr. Scowcroft. Sheltered by oceans for centuries and secure in their superpower status as guarantors of freedom and human rights, Americans paid scant attention to the political developments and power struggles abroad. They did not have to. They proudly supported various administrations in their effort to advance democracy on the international front, focusing on American aid, technical assistance, free enterprise and economic merits of globalization among struggling nations. Occupied with grassroots politics, Congress left foreign relations and diplomacy more or less to the "experts."
Failure at the CIA - Rich Lowry, New York Post / Real Clear Politics
The new report from the CIA's inspector general about the spy agency's pre-9/11 failings could be titled, "What We Did During Our Holiday From History." The stretch between the end of the Cold War and the Sept. 11 attacks was supposed to be a shiny new era of globalized peace and prosperity, to which an intelligence service was considered quaintly irrelevant. The CIA conformed to the zeitgeist by remaining quaintly irrelevant. George Tenet presided over the agency, failing his way to the second-longest tenure of any director of central intelligence, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a $4 million book advance. He made the Peter Principle work for him not just by advancing to his level of incompetence, but by benefiting from it handsomely. Congressional Democrats pushed for the release of the scathing IG report, completed back in June 2005, to embarrass the Bush administration. But most of the failures identified in the report took place during the Clinton administration, which set the CIA's skewed priorities and selected Tenet in the first place. President Bush should be embarrassed only because he didn't fire Tenet upon taking office or after 9/11, while Bush also has failed to undertake a serious retooling of the sclerotic bureaucracy that is the CIA.
The Path to 9/11 - Michael Scheuer, Washington Times
This week's release of the CIAs inspector general's (IG) report on agency operations before September 11 is important. Because of the report, the CIA now stands as not only the U.S. government's most successful counterterrorism entity, but also its most honest. The report rightfully indicts former CIA director George Tenet for what can be described as a lack of "manliness." The report makes clear that nothing heroic was expected or even needed from Mr. Tenet. If Mr. Tenet simply had had the moral courage to use the statutory powers vested in him by Congress to compel the intelligence community to operate optimally, he would have been respected and remembered as one of the best DCIs. He did not have the courage, and all Americans have suffered as a result. That said, I suspect that over the long run no one will suffer, in quiet moments, more than Mr. Tenet. Noticeably lacking from the CIA IG's report, however, was the other half of the IG's assigned task: recognition and praise for those CIA officers who worked, endured, risked and succeeded against al Qaeda during a time when, like the British Army in the Great War, they were "lions led by asses." I had the honor to lead many of these men and women from several posts for a decade, and I believe the IG is derelict in not listing their achievements against al-Qaeda between 1995 and today.
Six Years Later, We're Still Vulnerable - Amy Zegart, Los Angeles Times
CIA Director Michael V. Hayden finally declassified 19 pages of the agency's voluminous internal 9/11 review on Tuesday. Now we know why the CIA fought Congress to keep that report deep-sixed for the last two years: It points fingers, outlining exactly who screwed up and how. At the top of the hit list: former CIA Director George J. Tenet, former clandestine service chief James L. Pavitt and former Counterterrorism Center Director J. Cofer Black. But there's just one problem: These guys aren't to blame for 9/11. It's comforting and easy to find fault with a few men at the top. But the ugly reality is that 9/11 stemmed from a far more frightening cause: the inability of our entire intelligence system to adapt to the rise of terrorism after the Cold War ended. Organizational breakdown, not individual error, is the key to understanding what went wrong -- and what is still wrong six years later. Intelligence officials and policymakers often complain that hindsight is 20/20. But terrorism wasn't some far-fetched menace that nobody saw coming before 9/11. Every annual CIA threat assessment to Congress between 1994 and 2001 listed Al Qaeda among the most serious dangers to U.S. national security. Terrorism warranted mention in every State of the Union address in that period too. In the decade leading up to 9/11, a dozen different blue-ribbon reports examined U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities and warned that reforms were urgently needed. They issued a combined total of 340 recommendations. Almost none were implemented before 9/11. Most produced no action whatsoever. No meeting. No memo. No phone call.
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