Like most of you, I wrote a check to pay for my family's income tax last weekend. Unfortunately it looks like most of our money will go to Baghdad this year. And even if he beats George W. Bush in November, John Kerry does not seem to intend to bring to a close the adventure in Iraq any time soon.
"Our country is committed to help the Iraqis build a stable, peaceful and pluralistic society. No matter who is elected president in November, we will persevere in that mission," Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, wrote in the Washington Post April 13. Here we go again.
Make no mistake, it is Bush's fault that our troops are drawing fire and making a new generation of enemies in Iraq. He made the decision to withdraw troops and divert resources from Afghanistan, where al Qaeda really did have bases, in order to invade Iraq. His administration misled Congress and the American people with canards, based upon assumptions and misinformation, that Saddam Hussein was still building weapons of mass destruction -- and possibly even aiding al Qaeda. His rambling April 13 news conference even found Bush repeating the lie that Iraq refused to disarm. [See "Truth Ditched in Rush to War," page 16. See americanprogress.org for updates on Bush administration misstatements.]
Do you remember Afghanistan? Instead of finishing al Qaeda after the rout, the Afghanistan campaign dispersed several hundred, if not thousands, of terrorists to Pakistan and Iran, and from there to other countries, Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to Pakistani prime ministers, wrote April 9 for the Center for American Progress (americanprogress.org). In recent testimony before Congress, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, J. Cofer Black, spoke of anti-terrorist operations in 84 countries and admitted that there were "thousands of Jihadists" in the world.
"This dispersal of al Qaeda after the war in Afghanistan was made possible by the small number of US troops committed to that theater of operation," Haqqani wrote. "Even before the war in Afghanistan was over, the administration was planning the much larger military operation in Iraq. The war of choice was receiving more attention than the war of necessity."
Now there are about 13,000 US troops, marines and Special Forces in Afghanistan, as well as NATO troops (including French troops who have remained there in support of the mopup despite the vilification of France by Bush and the Republican Congress). But Afghanistan remains unstable, controlled largely by warlords and drug traffickers. Its remote provinces, as well as the frontier across the border in Pakistan, still provide havens for Taliban and al Qaeda remnants.
There are 10 times as many US troops in Iraq. They did their jobs, sweeping Saddam's Iraqi army aside -- and finding no WMDs. Then the Bushites said never mind, we were in Iraq to wipe out the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein. Again, the troops did their jobs and found him hiding in a hole.
At first, the US public embraced the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps much of that approval was based on the mistaken assumption that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. In fact, the religious fanatics of al Qaeda had nothing to do with the secular dictatorship of Saddam. But Americans believed a stable, democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq would help to bring stability to the Mideast and make the US more secure.
Now, a year later, Iraqis are demanding to know why the US army is still occupying their country. The Bushites say we are planting the seeds of democracy. But the fundamentalist Shi'ites, who form 60% of the population, reply that they are capable of growing their own democracy. That is precisely what the Bush administration, as well as the Sunni and the Kurdish minorities, fear. The Bush administration plans to build the largest embassy in the world as part of a garrison for US troops to protect American interests (read "Halliburton") in the Mideast. The Shi'ites appear intent on establishing a theocracy similar to the Islamic republic in neighboring Iran -- a democracy, but not necessarily a pro-Western one.
Bush should have been alarmed when Shi'ites came to the aid of their suppposed Sunni rivals during the siege of Fallujah while the US-trained Iraqi army balked at backing up the US troops. There is an old Arab proverb: "Me and my brothers against my cousins, and me and my cousins against outsiders."
On Arab streets Osama bin Laden's popularity is on the rise, even in countries whose governments are allied with the US. Pew Research Center pollsters recently found 65% of Pakistanis, 55% of Jordanians and 45% of Moroccans view bin Laden favorably, while disapproval of the US is increasing.
As long as US troops occupy Iraq's cities and its oilfields, they will be targets and symbols for our enemies to recruit more Islamic terrorists. If Kerry turns over civilian reconstruction to the UN and lets the Iraqis sort out their own internal affairs -- as they eventually must do -- perhaps he can rebuild our relations with foreign allies, make some progress in the fight against terrorism and maybe even divert hundreds of billions of dollars to domestic needs such as health care for every American. But an Iraq solution still starts with defeating Bush.
The public seems to accept the GOP spin that Bush's anti-terrorism policies were basically the same as Clinton's, but Juan Cole, a professor of history and expert on Middle Eastern affairs at the University of Michigan, noted at juancole.com that there was a major difference between Clinton's approach to counter-terrorism and Bush's: Clinton put his counter-terrorism chief at the Cabinet level and allowed him to coordinate counter-terrorism efforts with other Cabinet members.
Cole noted the case of the Millennium Plot, in which al Qaeda planned in December 1999 to blow up Los Angeles International Airport and possibly the Space Needle in Seattle as well as tourist sites in Jordan and a US destroyer off Yeman.
Richard Clarke reveals in his book, Against All Enemies, that the interception by a US customs agent of an al Qaeda operative driving a car full of explosives off a ferry at Port Angeles, Wash., was not an accident. Rather Clarke used his authority to call key Cabinet members and security officials to "battle stations," which filtered down to heightened alerts at customs stations in December 1999 because of increased chatter and because Jordan cracked an al Qaeda cell in Amman.
When Bush took over, he demoted Clarke out of the Cabinet and reduced his authority. Clarke was unable to get Bush administration "principals" to meet on terrorism until a week before the attack -- too late to do any good. When chatter in the summer of 2001 raised Clarke's concerns, he was unable to repeat the "battle-station" procedures that had foiled the Millennium Plot.
Clarke thinks that going to such a heightened level of alert and concerted effort in 2001 might have shaken loose much earlier the information that the CIA knew that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in the US. The INS wasn't informed and did not start looking for them until Aug. 21, 2001. Since the al Qaeda operatives made their plane reservations for Sept. 11 under their own names, a heightened level of alert might have allowed the FBI to spot them.
"So it just is not true that Bush was doing exactly the same thing on terrorism that Clinton was. He didn't have a cabinet-level counter-terrorism czar; he didn't have the routine of principals' meetings on terrorism; he didn't authorize Clarke to go to 'battle stations' and heightened security alert in summer of 2001 the way Clinton had done in December, 1999."
Instead, Dubya went on vacation and al-Qaeda levelled the World Trade Center. -- JMC