Iraq and Terrorism

by hilzoy

Via TPM: 60 Minutes has a very interesting interview with Tyler Drumheller, the head of covert operations in Europe until his retirement last year. About the report that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger:

“”Most people came to the opinion that there was something questionable about it,” he says.

Asked if that was his reaction, Drumheller says, “That was our reaction from the very beginning. The report didn’t hold together.”

Drumheller says that was the “general feeling” in the agency at that time. “

The most important part:

“Meanwhile, the CIA had made a major intelligence breakthrough on Iraq’s nuclear program. Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, had made a deal to reveal Iraq’s military secrets to the CIA. Drumheller was in charge of the operation.

“This was a very high inner circle of Saddam Hussein. Someone who would know what he was talking about,” Drumheller says. (…)

According to Drumheller, CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.

At that meeting, Drumheller says, “They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis.”

What did this high-level source tell him?

“He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program,” says Drumheller.

“So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam’s inner circle that he didn’t have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?” Bradley asked.

“Yes,” Drumheller replied. He says there was doubt in his mind at all.

“It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us,” Bradley remarked.

“The policy was set,” Drumheller says. “The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister.

But he says he was taken aback by what happened. “The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested,” Drumheller recalls. “And we said, ‘Well, what about the intel?’ And they said, ‘Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'””

His final assessment:

The American people want to believe the president. I have relatives who I’ve tried to talk to about this who say, ‘Well, no, you can’t tell me the president had this information and just ignored it,'” says Drumheller. “But I think over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time.”

And Josh Marshall adds this:

“Drumheller’s account is pretty probative evidence on the question of whether the White House politicized and cherry-picked the Iran intelligence.

So why didn’t we hear about any of this in the reports of those Iraq intel commissions that have given the White House a clean bill of health on distorting the intel and misleading the country about what we knew about Iraq’s alleged WMD programs?

Think about it. It’s devastating evidence against their credibility on a slew of levels.

Did you read in any of those reports — even in a way that would protect sources and methods — that the CIA had turned a key member of the Iraqi regime, that that guy had said there weren’t any active weapons programs, and that the White House lost interest in what he was saying as soon as they realized it didn’t help the case for war? What about what he said about the Niger story?

Did the Robb-Silverman Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee?

I asked Drumheller just those questions when I spoke to him early this evening. He was quite clear. He was interviewed by the Robb-Silverman Commission. Three times apparently.

Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight’s 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely.

Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report.

Now, quite a few of us have been arguing for almost two years now that those reports were fundamentally dishonest in the story they told about why we were so badly misled in the lead up to war. The fact that none of Drumheller’s story managed to find its way into those reports, I think, speaks volumes about the agenda that the writers of those reports were pursuing.

“I was stunned,” Drumheller told me, when so little of the stuff he had told the commission’s and the committee’s investigators ended up in their reports. His colleagues, he said, were equally “in shock” that so little of what they related ended up in the reports either.”

My take on this below the fold.

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by hilzoy

In my fruitless attempt to keep up with at least some of the major stories that have come out while I’ve been busy (and I am still busy), here are three thoughts on the generals who have called for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, and the response to them.

[Update at end.]

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by Slartibartfast

(UPDATED, through the magic of the Internets)

I normally wouldn’t think of posting this, given that it was sort of a personal pi-radians shift in perspective about the whole WaPo semi-kerfluffle regarding purported mobile weapons labs, but rilkefan has made the suggestion, and I’m all about service.

To all-too-briefly summarize, this has been cast as administration embroidery by WaPo and by one group of experts vs two others by Confederate Yankee and Captain’s Quarters.  No, I haven’t bothered to read either of the latter in detail yet; just the ensuing discussion regarding what they have to say about the whole thing.  There’s also some discussion of this over at Protein Wisdom, where I’ve posted my one and only comment in this regard outside of the local neighborhood.

So, my question: what sort of experts were in the other two groups that thought that these were (or might be) mobile bioweapons laboratories?  II’d assume that to be considered an expert, one would have to be familiar with bioweapons manufacture and culturing of biologicals, which in turn would imply some sort of passing familiarity with the equipment necessary to do those things.  Why do I ask?  Well, because of the Duelfer Report account (suggested by frequent commentor Urinated States of America) that mentions nearly a dozen major deficiencies (page 81, Table 1) in the equipment in the more intact of the trailers that pretty much rule out utility for bioweapons manufacture.  Those are just the major ones, mind.

Given that, one wonders: just what was it about either of these trailers that said "mobile bioweapons lab", besides the mobile part?  Or, more to the point, what about the trailers didn’t say "couldn’t possibly be a mobile bioweapons lab", other than the mobility point?  To paraphrase myself: the two teams of experts who thought there was something WMD-related here ought to have Table 1, Page 81 tatooed on their collective foreheads.

Update: Protein Wisdom has a new post up regarding timeline which merits pondering and discussion, but the timeline hasn’t much to do with this post.  This post is more of a what-were-they-thinking kind of thing.

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by hilzoy

Like von, I liked this post by Greg Djerejian. He also says this:

“Democracy exportation is part and parcel of a good deal of America’s foreign policy history, and a strain of American exceptionalism that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But the democratization strategy has to be better understood as a very long generational effort, undertaken soberly and methodically with allies, and not over the barrel of a gun, or via short-term, hastily organized attempts at rather clumsily stoking revolutions via a few dollars disbursed hither dither and the like. The situation in the Middle East is very delicate at the present hour, and Islamists in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and points beyond are in the ascendancy, at least at the present time. Therefore order and stability, at least in the short term, need to trump fanciful talk of moving the entire broader Middle East region into post-Enlightenment democratic governance modalities. The Islamic world is not yet necessarily ready for a steady diet of Jefferson and Montesquieu, yes, even if we open up consulates in remote parts of Indonesia or near the corniche in Alexandria in some essay at ‘transformational’ diplomacy. This does not mean, as the easy straw man argument goes, that Arabs are not constitutionally capable of democracy, much like some said Confucians in Asia weren’t after WWII. But the teeming Cairene masses, say, are likelier to gravitate towards the Muslim Brotherhood than Ayman Nour, alas, at least at this juncture. Let’s be cognizant of such nettlesome realities, yes?”

I think that it is quite likely that democratization in the Middle East will produce results that are not to our liking, in the short run; and I very much hope we have the patience to let it proceed without interfering. But while I share Djerejian’s caution in this regard, I also think it’s worth adding one point:

When I ask myself which political unit has done the most to promote democracy since the fall of the Berlin wall, the answer seems clear: it’s the European Union. The EU has helped immeasurably in the transformation of Eastern European countries into (mostly) functional democracies. Moreover, it is responsible for the one clear success story about democracy promotion in the Muslim world: the enormous changes that have occurred in Turkey over the last fifteen years or so.

When I spent time in Turkey, in the late 80s, it was an utterly repressive state. Villages were razed, people were taken prisoner and tortured for no reason, and freedom of thought was so completely absent that when I arrived for the first time, wearing (by chance) a T-shirt with pictures of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl Marx, with the words ‘Sure, I’m a Marxist!’, all sorts of people took me aside to warn me that I could be jailed for wearing it. Now it is a functioning democracy: obviously imperfect, but still completely, absolutely different from the state I knew. And that is an enormous achievement.

The EU did this by being willing to offer these countries something they wanted — EU membership — and by insisting that they meet fairly rigorous conditions in order to get it. This was not easy for the EU: imagine if we, for instance, proposed trying to achieve economic integration across the Americas. Integrating much poorer economies with one’s own carries real risks (“giant sucking sound”, anyone?) But it was the means by which the EU managed to help a lot of countries make themselves over into functioning democracies, for which, in my view, they deserve a lot of credit.

(Preemptive note: I am not trying to argue that the EU is somehow perfect in this regard. It isn’t. (Cough, former Yugoslavia, cough.) All I want to claim is that it has done a lot in the way of democracy promotion, and that it has thereby done real and lasting good.)

It’s not clear what analogous steps the US could or should take, and I am not suggesting here that we should try anything like this. The point is just that this is also democracy promotion, and that it has been more successful, in more countries, than our invasions.

There’s a reason for this, I think.

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Djerejian:

I want to stress that there are aspects of neo-conservative doctrine that cannot be dismissed out of hand. The world has seen impressive waves of democratization through the 19th and 20th Centuries, and it’s not implausible in the least to hope for further progress on this score, as many neo-conservatives hope and trust. But we have to move forward keenly aware of the resources available to bring to the fore, and we have to inject common sense and realism into our liberty exportation exercises. Spouting on about ending tyranny in the world, in toto, and arrogantly assuming people are clamoring for the American way of life in Damascus and Teheran and Caracas and Le Paz, strikes me as idiotic in the extreme. Let me be plainer: people who are chanting off the roof-tops for another regime change adventure (they know who they are) need to, quite simply, and put somewhat crudely, STFU. And not a moment too soon.

Some serious folk like George Will and William Buckley and Henry Kissinger understand this, but others, like, say, the merry gang of profoundly unserious commentators (a select few aside) at places like The Corner are still in la-la land, where the big issues of the day are enshrining an American right to torture, or buying Danish ham, or talking about the rice pilaf at Gitmo, or so very cheaply beating up on Jill Carroll’s supposed Stockholm syndrome, and other such low-brow fare. WFB is above this inanity, and privately is likely embarrassed, to the extent he even pays attention, when the likes of Derbyshire revel in alerting us that he doesn’t give a damn that 1,000 Egyptians are dead in a ferry disaster. But there are not many left like WFB around to chide, let alone develop, the next generation of conservative commentators, who have become increasingly cretinized in a climate rife with Coulterisms and obscenely dim clowns like Sean Hannity, so as to regain the sobriety and seriousness this country needs in elite policymaking and other opinion-making circles (perhaps George Kennan’s elitism, often derided, isn’t as unworthy as it may appear given this sorry state of affairs). We are in desperate need of advice that isn’t but warmed-over faux Churchillianism a la VDH, or screw the A-rabs, all of ’em, a la Frank Gaffney/Charles Johnson types (Gaffney’s stance on the Dubai ports deal was woefully hysterical), or the oft-exuberant kinda Brit-style neo-colonialist fervor of the Ferguson’s and Hitchen’s (this last too often revealing the excessive zeal of the convert, when it comes to Mesopotamian happenings, anyway).

‘Tis tempting to leave it simply at:  "indeed."  Alternatively, you could read the whole thing.

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by hilzoy

Condoleeza Rice:

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

Tomorrow’s Washington Post:

“An FBI agent who interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui before Sept. 11, 2001, warned his supervisors more than 70 times that Moussaoui was a terrorist and spelled out his suspicions that the al-Qaeda operative was plotting to hijack an airplane, according to federal court testimony yesterday.

Agent Harry Samit told jurors at Moussaoui’s death penalty trial that his efforts to secure a warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings were frustrated at every turn by FBI officials he accused of “criminal negligence.” Samit said he had sought help from a colleague, writing that he was “so desperate to get into Moussaoui’s computer I’ll take anything.”

That was on Sept. 10, 2001. (…)

“You thought a terrorist attack was coming, and you were being obstructed, right?” MacMahon asked.

“Yes, sir,” Samit answered.

Samit said he kept trying to persuade his bosses to authorize the surveillance warrant or a criminal search warrant right up until the day before the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“You never stopped trying, did you?” MacMahon said.

“No, sir,” Samit replied.”

It’s too easy to say that this shows that the FBI was dysfunctional, not that the Bush administration didn’t respond appropriately to what they knew. Part of what you do when you run an organization is to make sure that its parts work effectively: that whatever needs to happen is actually happening. In this case, the administration had been warned by their predecessors that bin Laden, and terrorism more generally, was the greatest threat facing the country. It would not have been impossible for them to try to figure out whether everyone who should have been worried about terrorism actually was, or whether the right systems were in place to ensure that information about terrorist attacks didn’t just disappear into an administrative void.

That’s what effective leadership is all about.

***

One of the things I find most puzzling about Bush’s supporters is their conviction that Bush is doing a good job of keeping us safe. There is one and only one piece of evidence to support this: the fact that we have not been attacked since 9/11. (That will, of course, be cold comfort to, for instance, the UK, Spain, Indonesia, et al.) There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is effective intelligence work. Another is that al Qaeda used up a lot of its most competent people on 9/11, or that such missions require a lot of planning and lead time.

If you look at almost any of the actual steps that might be done to protect us from future terrorist attacks, however, Bush’s record is not just bad; it’s abysmal.

• Securing loose nukes, for instance: this administration has done a terrible job there, and we’ve allowed North Korea, voted “Most Likely To Sell Nukes To Anyone Who Wants Them”, to acquire nuclear weapons.
• Homeland security: just check out the 9/11 Commission’s report card. It’s pretty dismal, especially when you realize that they give grades up to C- just for talking about a problem. We’re doing a miserable job on port security, critical infrastructure protection, securing chemical plants, rail security — all things that should, after 9/11, have been no-brainers.
• Disaster preparedness: Consider the response to Katrina. Be very afraid.
• Bioterrorism protection: We have spent a lot of money on Project Bioshield, which is widely viewed as a giveaway to pharmaceutical companies that even they don’t like. We have cut funding on the public health infrastructure we’d actually need in the event of a bioterrorist attack.

(Actually, I can’t resist posting this paragraph on Project Bioshield, from Time:

“Yet BioShield hasn’t transformed much of anything besides expanding the federal bureaucracy. Most of the big pharmaceutical and biotech firms want nothing to do with developing biodefense drugs. The little companies that are vying for deals say they are being stymied by an opaque and glacially slow contracting process. The one big contract that has been awarded–for 75 million doses of a next-generation anthrax vaccine–is tangled in controversy; it went to a California firm, VaxGen, which in its 10-year history has never brought a drug to market. In the scientific community, biodefense is viewed as yet another boondoggle that is sucking money and resources from critical public-health needs like new antibiotics and vaccines. Indeed, the consensus outside the Administration is that the program is broken before it even gets off the ground. “BioShield has failed miserably,” says Jerome Hauer, a former senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “The intent of BioShield was to attract new companies to get involved in developing countermeasures. It has not only failed to do that; it has kept a lot of other companies away because they’re so concerned about the program’s lack of focus and direction.””

Bear in mind that that program represents most of our bioterrorism preparation.)

In addition to all this, there’s the war in Iraq, which has been a disaster in terms of our national interests and our security. Below the fold, I’m going to reprint an email from Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies to Steve Clemons (who posted it on his blog) that sums it up well.

So why, exactly, does anyone think that Bush is doing a good job of protecting us? Inquiring minds want to know.

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by hilzoy

Brian Tamanaha has a good post at Balkinization. Taking Andrew Sullivan as a representative of those conservatives who are now asking themselves what they got wrong in deciding to support Iraq, he says:

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but:

The first and overarching error of neoconservatives, Mr. Sullivan, is their willingness (nay, eagerness) to use war to achieve their ideological objectives. Neoconservatives see war as a tool, perhaps messy and unpleasant, not to mention expensive, but sometimes useful.

War is the greatest horror we inflict upon one another, destroying bodies and lives, inflicting untold pain, often on innocent bystanders. War must be a last resort, undertaken with great reluctance, when no other option is available–appropriate only when necessary to defend ourselves against an immediate aggressor (as international law recognizes).

That was not the case with Iraq. Bush and the neoconservatives were bent on starting a war in Iraq for their own ideological and personal reasons and they made sure it came about. Bush’s premptive war doctrine, recently reiterated, is more of the same failure to recogize the utimate horror of war.

None of the neoconservative mea culpas I have read have recognized this true (moral and pragmatic) error of their vision and understanding, which is more fundamental than Sullivan’s three so-called “huge errors.” If neoconservatives understood that war is appropriate only as an absolutely last resort to defend ourselves against an attack, the war would never have happened–hence no WMD debacle (because there was not enough to justify war), no offending allies with our arrogance of power, and no attempt to shape another country in our own image. “

This is right. I am not a pacifist. I supported a lot of recent wars, including not just the first Gulf War, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, but also at least one that didn’t happen, namely Rwanda. (Here I differ from Tamanaha: I think that war can also be justified in response to a genuine unfolding humanitarian catastrophe, as distinct from a repressive government that carried out atrocities a decade in the past.) But it is absolutely crucial to recognize what exactly you’re supporting when you support war: namely, one of the most awful things imaginable. No matter how smart our bombs and no matter how well trained our soldiers, horrible things will happen in wars. Children will be blown to bits. People whose only “crime” was to be in the wrong place in the wrong time will get caught in the crossfire. Markets will be shelled, if not deliberately then by accident: there are always accidents in wars. Families will huddle in terror as soldiers shout at them in a language they do not understand, aiming guns at them, ready to shoot if, whether from terror, malice, or sheer confusion, they set a foot wrong.

And that’s without taking into account possibilities like Abu Ghraib.

I recall once talking to an Israeli soldier who had just come back from Lebanon, and who told me the following story: a woman with a baby had approached the wire around their encampment, asking for milk for her child. The soldiers, against regulations, went to give her some. She threw the child over the fence; it was rigged with a bomb, and killed (I think) one of the soldiers. They caught her and at some point someone asked her why she had done what she did. She said: you killed my son, my husband, and my brothers; why not should I not give up my baby as well?

The soldier, whose friend had been killed for his generosity, asked: what kind of animals are these people, that they would do something like that? For better or (more likely) for worse, I thought I could at least dimly glimpse the pitch of grief that might explain it. What I couldn’t understand was: when there are stories like this between two peoples, how on earth can there ever be peace between them? How can either ever possibly forget?

The decision to go to war is not part of a chess game. It’s not an act of national self-assertion. It is, among other things, a decision to deliberately create stories like that. As I said, at times it seems to me the least horrible option. But it is essential to be absolutely clear about what you’re supporting.

But there are a few more points worth mentioning.

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by Katherine

To explain what  I think is at stake with the Feingold censure resolution, I was going to write a post explaining the legal theory that links the NSA program and the torture scandals. It turns out that several months ago Marty Lederman (who I like to think of as the head of the OLC-in-exile) explained it more clearly than I can:

Their argument — just to be clear — is that FISA, and the Torture Act, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the federal assault statute, and the War Crimes Act, and the 60-day-limit provision of the War Powers Resolution — and even the 9/18 AUMF itself (to the extent it is read, as it ought to be, as in some respects limiting the scope of force — and treaties governing the treatment of detainees, and (probably) the Posse Comitatus Act, and who knows how many other laws, are unconstitutional to the extent they limit the President’s discretion in this war. In OLC’s words — written just one week after the AUMF was enacted — neither the WPR nor the AUMF, nor, presumably, any other statute, "can place any limits on the President’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response." "These decisions," OLC wrote, "under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make."

This is the legal theory that originally justified the NSA program. It is exactly the same legal theory that John Yoo relied on when he calmly told Jane Mayer: “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. [Congress] can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” 

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by hilzoy

Hamas seems to have won the Palestinian elections. From the Washington Post:

“The radical Islamic group Hamas won 76 seats in voting for the first Palestinian parliament in a decade, election officials announced Thursday evening, giving it a huge majority in the 132-member body and the right to form the next government. The long-ruling Fatah movement won 43 seats.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and the rest of his Cabinet resigned, effectively acknowledging Hamas claims of a legislative majority before election officials released the results in a news conference.

“This is the choice of the people,” Qureia told reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “It should be respected.”

The Hamas victory ends end the governing Fatah party’s decade-long control of the Palestinian Authority. It also severely complicates Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ policy of pursuing negotiations with Israel under a U.S.-backed peace plan known as the roadmap, which conflicts with Hamas’ platform in several key respects.

Hamas officials in Gaza City, where their victory was greatest, said the group has no plans to negotiate with Israel or recognize Israel’s right to exist. Europe, Israel and the United States classify Hamas, formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, as a terrorist organization.”

My attempts at analysis below the fold.

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by Charles

The Authorization to Use Military Force was tantamount to a declaration of war against al Qaeda.  In my view, signals intelligence is part and parcel of a president’s war-making arsenal and falls under category of "necessary and appropriate force".  In the interests of national security, if the NSA intercepts a communique between Zahawiri and a bloke in New Jersey, I’m not going to have kittens if it’s done without a court order.  However, I would have a litter of twelve if none of the parties involved is Zawahiri or some other known al Qaeda suspect (the NSA’s inserting of persistent cookies into the computers of those who visit the NSA website might give me a contraction).

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by Charles

After absorbing over a week of news regarding the warrantless surveillance by the NSA, I thought I’d write this down to keep it all straight.  Calls for impeachment are serious business, not to be taken lightly or quickly or without good reason, and several of those calls have been made.  From what I’ve seen so far, the person who has written the most clearly on the NSA surveillance matter has been Orrin Kerr, along with a few others such as Cass Sunstein (more from Sunstein here).  Going through the list of fundamental questions:

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by hilzoy

Once upon a time, our senior government officials used to pretend to tell the truth. Sometimes it was only a pretense. But, in general, they did not say things that were obviously, flatly false.

I guess that’s just one more thing that changed on 9/11.

Today, Condoleeza Rice made a speech that was remarkable for its sheer bald-faced dishonesty. I have not tried to pick out all the false statements she made. But here are a few of the more obvious howlers:

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by hilzoy

Now that I have slept a bit, I have decided to post a longer version of my quick take on the President’s new Strategy For Victory.

I completely agree with the President’s take on the consequences of losing in Iraq. (see pp. 5-6. Short version: it would be a disaster.) I only wish the gravity of these consequences had occurred to President Bush before he decided to invade on the cheap, without a plan for the occupation.

However, I think that the President has misidentified the main problem facing Iraq. The main problem, according to the President, is the insurgency:

“The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists affiliated with or inspired by Al Qaida. “

According to me, the insurgents are the main threat to our troops. The main threat to Iraq, however, is the presence of armed militias generally*. The insurgents are the group(s) who attack our troops. But the existence of any armed militia that the government cannot control threatens the Iraqi state and its people. The existence of armed militias means that the Iraqi government cannot enforce its will over those parts of the country controlled by the militias; ultimately, the armed militias threaten Iraq with an all-out civil war.

This entire complex of problems is glossed over in the President’s plan. For instance, on p. 21, “Building representative Iraqi security forces and institutions while guarding against infiltration by elements whose first loyalties are to persons or institutions other than the Iraqi government” is listed as one of the remaining ‘security challenges’, but no solution to this problem is given. Moreover, the plan’s security track relies heavily on training the Iraqi army, and many of the accomplishments it cites concern progress in training that army.

If you think that the main problem is the insurgency, then one solution to this problem is to train Iraqi troops, who will eventually be able to fight the insurgents on their own. The infiltration of the Iraqi security forces by members of militias is, on this view, a secondary problem, since members of other militias might do a perfectly good job of hunting down insurgents. But if you think that the main problem is the existence of armed militias more generally, then it’s not at all clear that training Iraqi troops is the solution, for two reasons.

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The National Strategy on Iraq.  Actually this looks as if it has been cut-and-pasted from a PowerPoint presentation, but otherwise presented without comment*.  Here’s your chance to analyze it before hilzoy has done her usual thorough dissection.  Don’t wait for the back of the book to show up, give it a shot.

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by Charles

I know this has been ground well trod before, but former Nixon defense secretary Melvin Laird put together an informative piece, juxtaposing the history of our past involvement in Vietnam with our present involvement in Iraq.  Several factors caused me to take a second look at Laird.  One, he was a primary architect of Vietnamization, and then this entry stands out:

In spite of Vietnam and the unfolding Watergate affair, which threatened to discredit the entire Nixon administration, Laird retired with his reputation intact.

Such is the taint of Nixon that any of those who worked under him are viewed with hard skepticism.  I knew little of Laird because I was in grade school at the time he was defense secretary, and in his own words, he has been below the radar for the last thirty years.  But when someone with integrity and reasonably good judgment decides to speak up after three decades of relative silence, it’s worthy of notice:

I have kept silent for those 30 years because I never believed that the old guard should meddle in the business of new administrations, especially during a time of war. But the renewed vilification of our role in Vietnam in light of the war in Iraq has prompted me to speak out.

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