“What is going on now in DC is a three-ring circus, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
If you scroll down, you’ll see that’s from one of the “removed” US Attorneys - even if Karl Rove changed his mind and instructed the Attorney General to put him back in place, he’d rather not return. Maybe it’s just sour grapes. Or maybe he realized all circuses have clowns, but they’re not usually in change.
Consider the late Friday news items of April 27 - what’s released after the week’s new cycle closes, what some hope will just disappeared over the weekend so when everyone gets back to “real life” (work and such) on Monday other matters will have come up and all these things will be ancient history.
It doesn’t help of course that the former CIA Director, George Tenet, was scheduled to appear Sunday evening on CBS’s Sixty Minutes to chat about his new book. That’s too close to the new news cycle opening Monday, and Friday, the Associated Press preview spelled trouble for the powers that be -
The CIA warned the Bush White House seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the U.S. could face a thicket of bad consequences, starting with “anarchy and the territorial breakup” of the country, former CIA Director George Tenet writes in a new book.
CIA analysts wrote the warning at the start of August 2002 and inserted it into a briefing book distributed at an early September meeting of President Bush’s national security team at Camp David, he writes.
The agency analysis painted what Tenet calls additional “worst-case” scenarios: “a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States”; “regime-threatening instability in key Arab states”; and “major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance.”
They blew that off. Cheney notoriously distrusted (and distrusts) the CIA and all the other intelligence agencies - he created his own agency to find out the real truth, from whomever Chalabi and that exile crew could find, like that curveball fellow. Tenet was shut out of that. Tenet does caution against concluding that the CIA “predicted” the difficulties that followed - “Doing so would be disingenuous.” But he did have his people slip the pages in the briefings. They were removed.
With the showdown happening over funding the war forward - Congress, controlled by the Democrats, saying the president can have the funds, and more, if he develops an exit plan, and the president saying he’d rather let the troops starve in the field than let Congress force him to think about an exit - the Tenet stuff doesn’t exactly give anyone a warm fuzzy feeling. What the CIA said way back when - that the Iraq war would fuel Islamic resentment toward the United States and give rise to a new generation of terrorists, or several generations of them - was what the comprehensive report from the whole intelligence community last year said. Duh.
A copy of the book, “At the Center of the Storm,” was purchased by an Associated Press reporter Friday at a retail outlet, ahead of its scheduled Monday release, and it made for a bad Friday.
The book is highly critical of Vice President and other administration officials - led by him, they rushed us into war in Iraq “without serious debate.” The White House had to say Tenet is just confused, as Tenet is saying things like - “There was precious little consideration, that I’m aware of, about the big picture of what would come next.” And this - “While some policy makers were eager to say that we would be greeted as liberators, what they failed to mention is that the intelligence community told them that such a greeting would last only for a limited period.” The word from the White House is that they really did think about it all, and they did what they just had to do.
But Tenet says no one answered the questions -
“What impact would a large American occupying force have in an Arab country in the heart of the Middle East?”
“What kind of political strategy would be necessary to cause the Iraqi society to coalesce in a post-Saddam world and maximize the chances for our success?”
“How would the presence of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, and the possibility of a pro-West Iraqi government, be viewed in Iran? And what might Iran do in reaction?”
Tenet says that “there seemed to be a lack of curiosity in asking these kinds of questions, and the lack of a disciplined process to get the answers before committing the country to war.” The White House says he just didn’t notice that there was.
As for that new agency stretching the intelligence -
It alarmed Tenet and surprised even Bush, the author says, when Cheney issued his now-famous declaration that, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
Chastising Cheney nearly five years later, Tenet writes: “Policy makers have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts.” Here again, Tenet blames himself for not pulling Cheney aside and telling him the WMD assertion was “well beyond what our analysis could support.”
Yeah, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Neither Bush nor Tenet was in charge, you see. The implications are interesting. Who runs things?
Then too, there was this - “A congressional committee on Friday requested documents from the White House and Pentagon describing how and when the Bush administration learned the circumstances of Pat Tillman’s death.” The president said he had no idea the guy didn’t die heroically fighting the bad guys, and would really like to get to the bottom of this - as he too was a victim of misinformation here. The implications are interesting. Who runs things?
As for who runs things at the Department of Justice, late Friday there was this -
The U.S. attorney in Arkansas warned the Justice Department five months before he and seven federal prosecutors were fired that “there may be some stink about this down the road” - in part because of White House involvement.
This man was removed to make room for Karl Rove’s assistant - a lawyer with no courtroom experience at all, but an expert in opposition research and political polling. The president says this is the attorney general’s problem - and he has every confidence Fredo will get to the bottom of it. The attorney general says he doesn’t know about any of it, and he cannot remember much that people say he should know, but he’d really like to get to the bottom of it. The implications are interesting. Who runs things?
In any event, the The Kansas City Star’s Dave Helling got the quote from “resigned” US Attorney Todd Graves - “I value the years I spent at DOJ (Department of Justice) and the friendships I forged there. But the current environment at the Department can only be described as toxic, and I am very thankful I left… What is going on now in DC is a three-ring circus, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
Is it really a circus?
May it is. Late on the same Friday, USAID Administrator and Director of Foreign Assistance Randall Tobias resigned for “personal reasons.” Tobias’s sudden departure was announced late that afternoon at the State Department. Why bury it with a Friday night “news dump?” Over at ABC News’ Justin Rood got the real story. Tobias was on the DC Madame’s customer list. The ‘personal reasons’ for resigning his position at the State Department were REALLY personal. For more on what that’s all about, see TPM Muckraker’s running coverage of that scandal. This is a big oops. The man’s rank is equivalent to Deputy Secretary of State, and AP runs with it -
ABC reported on its Web site late Friday that Tobias confirmed that he had called the Pamela Martin and Associates escort service to have women come to his condo and give him massages. More recently, Tobias told the network, he has been using a service with Central American women.
Tobias, 65, who is married, told ABC News there had been “no sex” during the women’s visits to his condo. His name was on a list of clients given to ABC by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who owns the escort service and has been charged with running a prostitution ring in the nation’s capital.
The man was in charge of our worldwide AIDS programs. And this - “Before joining the administration, Tobias was a director and chairman of Eli Lilly and Co., the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company.”
It was a bad Friday at the White House. What will Fox News say?
The afternoon also brought this -
A senior Justice Department official has resigned after coming under scrutiny in the Department’s expanding investigation of convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to a Justice Department official with knowledge of the case.
Making the situation more awkward for the embattled Department, the official, Robert E. Coughlin II, was deputy chief of staff for the criminal division, which is overseeing the Department’s probe of Abramoff.
He stepped down effective April 6 as investigators in Coughlin’s own division ratcheted up their investigation of lobbyist Kevin Ring, Coughlin’s long-time friend and a key associate of Abramoff.
It’s almost a perfect storm.
The final nail in the coffin (yes, the metaphors have gotten mixed - circuses, storms, carpentry) came from Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, one of the officers responsible for the Army’s success in Tall Afar last year. As a serving Army officer, he does what hew really shouldn’t, and lets it rip in Armed Forces Journal -
The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq’s population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America’s generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as “Fiasco” and “Cobra II.” However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.
Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise “Desert Crossing” demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.
He thinks the military leadership has failed us.
Andrew Sullivan comments -
It is equally true that a president has a responsibility to make sure he gets the best military advice - including advice that he doesn’t want to hear. Bush didn’t. He was out of his depth. And then politics precluded honesty, and we got ourselves into the mess we have.
So who is in charge? And Sullivan quotes an email from a military reader -
I can tell you, Andrew, this guy is not just revered, he’s - and this is no understatement - beloved. His troops are wildly loyal to him and his former commanders routinely call upon him for advice.
The debate is whether or not it is proper for a sitting general officer - whether or not he is charged with the responsibility - to speak out when he is ordered to execute plans he knows full well may be either poorly planned, under-manned, poorly equipped, or dangerously over-reaching. The argument among many in the civilian leadership - both in and outside of the Pentagon - is that they should remain quiet, salute smartly, and simply execute the orders they are given … and that to do otherwise is to be disloyal, to be laying the groundwork for a military coup. Others though, believe that they are indeed charged with presenting their long-studied, long-prepared-for alternative points of view. Points of view which are based upon an adult lifetime of measured responses and reason.
Sullivan -
I’m in the latter camp. Of course, this only applies to 4-stars. A 3-star who has spent his entire adult life working with combat Soldiers or Marines would be wasting all that effort. This speaking out business is not for all officers. But from our 4-star leadership - we demand it - and it is there where our current and recently retired batch have failed us all.
Many of us failed in this war. Many journalists failed to be as skeptical as we should have been; the generals should not have acquiesced in the Cheney-Rumsfeld happy-think. The country has suffered - and the troops who are risking their lives bear the worst. Ultimately, however, this has to be the president’s responsibility. I wonder if he will ever really take it.
That depends on who you think is in charge here?
You also get this from the Lieutenant Colonel -
Despite paying lip service to “transformation” throughout the 1990s, America’s armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War…. Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America’s generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq….
… In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise “Desert Crossing” demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.
… After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America’s generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency…. After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America’s general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public…. The intellectual and moral failures common to America’s general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship.
Phil Carter, who returned last year from a tour in Iraq, is impressed -
This is an incisive and brilliant article - it is precisely the kind of ruthless self-examination which is so necessary for an army at war. Unfortunately, Lt. Col. Yingling is one of the few officers with the moral courage to make this point so far. Although I’ve heard this argument made (in somewhat less sophisticated fashion) by a number of military friends and colleagues, I have not seen it made publicly and on-the-record by many. That speaks to a moral decline within the American military, and perhaps to the triumph of careerism over integrity. Perhaps I’m exaggerating here, but given the scope of these failures, I’m disappointed to see so few officers speaking out like this.
You just don’t to that. Kevin Drum ponders it all -
Here’s a question: Careerism probably explains why criticism like this is so rare among military officers, but why is it also so rare even among civilians? I suspect there are several dynamics at work. First, criticizing the brass seems a little too close to criticizing the troops, and no one wants to be caught anywhere even colorably close to that. Second, especially among liberals, no one wants to take the heat off the Bush administration, and sharp criticism of the military leadership inevitably suggests that the White House might not be entirely to blame for the Iraq debacle. And third, there’s a legitimate question of how strongly general officers should push back against their civilian leadership. There’s a line where that pushback morphs into bureaucratic resistance to presidential will (Bill Clinton ran into this more than once, where military leaders essentially manufactured scenarios that made presidential action impossible), and no one is quite sure where that line is.
These are understandable concerns, but they’re hardly compelling reasons for silence. Among other things, Iraq has made clear not just that our military isn’t equipped to effectively fight non-conventional wars, but that even now it continues to be largely uninterested in fighting non-conventional wars. It would rather have its toys, and in this it’s aided and abetted as it always has been by a Congress more interested in military pork for constituents and contributors than it is in figuring out what our military really ought to look like ten years from now. Yingling’s article is a wakeup call.
Hey, who is in charge?
Things do seem to be spinning out control, and, as James Wolcott explains, the world may be changing -
The thumping success of Rosie on The View, like Keith Olbermann’s ratings insurgence and Jon Stewart’s masterful fencing with John McCain, is testament that the feargrip headlock of the Bush era is well and truly over, the days of deference to daddy-knows-best authority are done.
This, I suspect, bodes ill for Giuliani, a bully with a low tol for backtalk and a snappish temper, and McCain, whose control knob is so loose it’s about to fall off. I recognize it’s early but McCain really is running the screwiest schizo campaign. The message of his candidacy is, These are trying times with ominous horizons, my friends; we have enemies determined to strike, and if we leave Iraq, they will follow us home; and in this struggle between good and evil, America needs a war president who is not only serious about confronting our adversaries, but (unlike our current war president) competent. McCain is packaging himself as a post-9/11 leader, but I wonder if we’re not already in the post-post-9/11 era, one that has left him and Rudy behind, a topic for another time.
Hunter, at “Daily Kos” agrees -
Americans generally know the dangers, certainly - it is impossible to forget - but the way I read the current national zeitgeist, at least, the country is very, very tired of the bogeyman routine used all this time to demand fealty to a particular brand of ultra-hard-right national security incompetence. Is al Qaeda broken up? No. Is bin Laden captured? No. Is Iraq under control? No. Is there any prospect, at any point, of any of these things happening? Not at present.
In fact, at the same time that the administration is telling us that this is the most critical battle ever, a true world war in which our very survival is at stake, and that we’re all one lawnmower-powered airplane away from total destruction, they’re also telling us not to expect that any of those end-game things is going to happen. And security is still bad, treated as a money trough for insincere politicians, and the war continues on with neither an end in sight nor any commitment on the part of the administration to do anything that might make it happen, etc., etc., and nobody, among the leading fearmongers, can propose any different way forward other than various supersized options of doing the same thing, but more so. Mixed messages, to say the least. So why would we listen to this same style of political “leadership” and its alternating storms of smirking apathy and pot-banging panic?
Given that the wheels are coming off (fourth metaphor) on so many fronts, why would we listen? Think about it -
Aside from the right-wing, which has an entire philosophy based around the premise that America is at every possible moment of time always under attack by the underground forces of Aztlan, or atheists, or The Jews, or Europe, how long can normal Americans remain productively terrified of every shadow? There’s only so long you can go being scared out of your wits, and then it gets old, and a routine becomes established. It gets a bit harder to be scared. It gets a lot harder to be scared on cue, certainly, in accordance with whatever we’re supposed to be most afraid of for one particular speech, or one particular campaign stop. And, at long last, you want the people who are in charge of scaring you - er, sorry, “protecting” you - to begin treating things at least with the same seriousness as you are.
I think that’s maybe the beginnings of the post-post-9/11 world that Wolcott is pondering, a one in which the same old political ploys are perhaps taken, finally, to be as offensive as they actually are. It’s not a question of complacency, but simple sturdiness: we will not be afraid of every shadow, we will deal with each day as it comes and try to fight against terrorism with something a bit more substantial than mindless arm-waving. The American population knows the score, and wants grownups in charge - not people that are still, after five and a half years, running around telling us that in spite of their five and a half years of effort, if we only give them more support, and violate a few more laws, and invade a few more countries, it will all work out great.
Collectively, we need to start thinking about what the post-post-9/11 world looks like, a world where terrorism will certainly still exist. It can either be a world of arm-waving fear, or a world of informed resolve, and I think I have a strong preference which of those two things I’d rather hoist the American flag over.
But we’ll all die! No, we won’t. People get it. According to a new CBS News/New York Times poll (PDF format), sixty-four percent of Americans believe we should set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq in 2008, up seven points from just two weeks ago.
Elsewhere at “Daily Kos” you’ll find what is going on around the country.
DeWayne Wickham in the News-Leader of Springfield, Missouri -
Having lost the backing of most Americans for the continued presence of U.S. forces in the middle of Iraq’s civil war, Bush now wants to make this conflict the generals’ war. He wants people to think that congressional Democrats are undermining this nation’s military leaders - not putting the breaks on his war-making power - when they try to force a withdrawal.
Bush bamboozled this nation into war with Iraq. Now he is trying to hoodwink Americans into believing that Congress is intruding upon the prerogatives of the generals he ordered into combat.
Bush knows better - or at least he should.
Pat Murphy in the Idaho Mountain Express -
Americans are doomed for the next 20 months to endure a presidency driven by a personal obsession - to protect a fragile sense of self-importance with denial of reality.
President Bush won’t admit the war in Iraq is lost because he and his architects of the “cakewalk” war would be exposed as wrong. Likewise, President Bush’s “full confidence” in his dunce attorney general, Alberto Gonzales - who lied his way through U.S. Senate questioning by babbling “I don’t recall” and its variation more than 60 times - won’t let him fire Gonzales because it would mean admitting he was wrong to entrust him with the most intellectually challenging and constitutionally most powerful agency in the land.
James Klufeld, Newsday -
Under normal circumstances, I would be appalled by any congressional attempt to tell a president how to run a war. I’ve always been in favor of strong executive authority, especially over national security and foreign affairs. The 535 members of Congress are simply incapable of micromanaging a war.
But these aren’t normal circumstances, and what Congress is doing isn’t trying to micromanage.
What is abnormal now is a president who is either delusional, if you believe his rhetoric, or has a terribly cynical agenda.
There’s only so much you can bury on a Friday night. Folks would like someone vaguely competent in charge.
