More on Cheney's Poor Judgment and al Qaida

The other day, I pointed out that the Bush Administration had al Qaida on the ropes and failed to finish the job in late 2001 and 2002; Cheney's posturing comments against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi avoid the obvious: that Cheney's incompetent policies have done much to enable al Qaida to come back. Truthout has a long article by Robert Parry of Consortium News that explains in much detail why the vice president is so wrong:

Vice President Dick Cheney says he stands by his accusation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would "validate the al-Qaeda strategy." And he apparently thinks he got the better of this latest war of words.

However, if Pelosi ever goes beyond complaining that Cheney is impugning her "patriotism" – while Cheney counters that he is only questioning her "judgment" – she might point out that it is the Bush administration that has "validated" al-Qaeda's 9/11 strategy over the past five years.

Captured al-Qaeda documents reveal that Osama bin Laden's principal goal in the 9/11attacks was to lure the United States into a clumsy counterattack in the Middle East that would alienate Muslims, help al-Qaeda recruit more jihadists and bog down the American military in a no-win war.

Though bin Laden was mistaken in believing that Afghanistan would become the central front, he was right in pretty much every other part of his plan. At the time of 9/11, al-Qaeda was a fringe player in the Muslim world, with its leaders driven into exile and holed up in the mountains of Afghanistan.

I don't agree with everything that Parry says but he adds a number of useful details. There should be no doubt at this late stage of the war that Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld are responsible for the fiasco in Iraq, the failure to deal fully with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan by rushing off to Iraq, and subsequently the resurgence of al Qaida.

The Incompetent and Deceptive Mr. Cheney

Vice President Dick Cheney is discovering the hard way that you can't run away from your problems by taking trips overseas that probably should be handled, in any case, by the State Department. Or, at the very minimum, by someone with credibility (63% of Americans no longer trust Bush—or Cheney, for that matter—on intelligence issues).

The jury for the Scooter Libby trial is still deliberating and could conceivably refuse to convict Scooter Libby of perjury and obstruction of justice despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Money can buy favorable legal results in this country. We've seen that many times now in the last fifteen years. There's speculation that Scooter Libby might have won his case during jury selection, with the help of an expensive gimmick used by some lawyers who employ jury experts who know how to get a jury that has good odds of reaching a not guilty verdict, or, at the very least, a hung decision. That's not justice at work. It's good old fashioned money at work. We don't know yet if the gimmick will work or not, but the longer the jury deliberates, the better it is for the defense.

The problem for Dick Cheney is that nobody is fooled: he's a liar, a political manipulator and an incompetent. Dick Cheney used Scooter Libby to out covert CIA operative Valerie Plame and we know it. Washington is not a comfortable place for Dick Cheney these days. Too many of his fiascos are coming out. But his belligerence and arrogance continues as we hear in this story from ABC News:

Pelosi called Cheney's words "beneath the dignity of the debate we're engaged in and a disservice to our men and women in uniform, whom we all support."

But Cheney is holding firm on his original comments.

"I am not sure what part of it that Nancy disagreed with," Cheney told ABC News during an interview today in Sydney, Australia. "She accused me of questioning her patriotism. I didn't question her patriotism, I questioned her judgment."

Cheney said: "The point I made, and I'll make it again, is that al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That's their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we'll quit and go home."

If Dick Cheney knows so much about al Qaida, then where was the Bush Administration in the months before 9/11? Where was Dick Cheney when the outgoing Clinton Administration warned officials of the incoming Bush Administration? Where was Dick Cheney when it was obvious there was no significant al Qaida connection when we invaded Iraq in 2003?

Cheney's blunders and deceptions are endless but let's look again at a critical assertion he made in the quote above and that he has made before and think about it carefully. In the above statement, Cheney says: "...al Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will." Stop the presses. Think a moment. In late 2001, we had al Qaida on the ropes. It was the United States that was breaking the will of al Qaida. Let's not slip over that point. I'll repeat it again: in late 2001, we had al Qaida on the ropes. It was the United States that was breaking the will of al Qaida.

And then Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld got bored with Afghanistan. It wasn't a big enough war for them. They were obsessed with Iraq and were flummoxed when they couldn't make a credible case for war. So they made something up, inserted those sixteen words, and fixed the evidence around a reckless policy and left the war in Afghanistan behind on the back burner. Five years of blunders, incompetence and arrogance on the part of Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld put us at risk of pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. And Cheney wants to compound the error by starting a war with Iran, or tricking Iran into starting that war, or whatever nonsense he has in mind that he hasn't bothered to tell us. What the Bush Administration should be doing is working on a regional settlement that can only come if we talk with all the neighbors, including Syria and Iran.

Democrats have repeatedly called for finishing the job in Afghanistan. Several Republicans Bush and Cheney have chosen to ignore have also called for properly finishing the job in Afghanistan. Various foreign policy experts have warned that putting al Qaida on the back burner was a serious strategic mistake.

Well, this is where we are: Dick Cheney has no credibililty. George W. Bush has no credibility. You will not gain the needed credibility by attacking your critics who have done little more than point out world class strategic blunders that can not go on unaddressed. Whatever imperial games, or neoconservative games, or oil games that the Bush inner circle has been engaging in for the past few years no longer have any credible chance of reaching a reasonable result that will do most Americans any good. From now on, rebuilding our foreign policy, reestablishing our credibility, repairing our military, winding down in Iraq while we do what we can to stabilize the region with talks and political settlements, and finishing the job in Afghanistan are the only goals the Bush Administration should be pursuing. And it is the obligation of Congress, a co-equal branch of government, to keep the Bush inner circle from dragging us into any further adventures. Bush's presidency is over. And Dick Cheney should do the decent thing and resign.

Frank Rich on Al Qaida

Iraq didn't have a nuclear program worthy of the name but we attacked anyway. We attacked and Iran decided it might be time to at least pretend to have a nuclear program. We haven't attacked them yet but Cheney is thinking about it while Bush.... handles public relations?

The organization that attacked us on 9/11 was al Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden, all of whom were largely in Afghanistan at the time. Osama bin Laden escaped. Into Pakistan. Which has nuclear weapons. Which has a military that may not be totally loyal to President Musharraf. Afghanistan, which seemed to be a winnable war back in late 2001, has been dangerously neglected. The Taliban is threatening to make headway again. Al Qaida, in the meantime, seems to be growing strong again by basing itself across the Afghan border in the Northwest Territories of Pakistan, where the Pakistani military refuses to go. And Bush and Cheney are digging a hole in Iraq debating whether to support the Sunnis or the Shiites or some secular coalition that exists only in their imagination. We have a problem.

Frank Rich of The New York Times has an article on the serious potential threat of a regrouped al Qaida (via Truthout):

The White House doesn't want to hear it.... That's why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, "are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States" ... Al Qaeda is "on the march" rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces - it's "not ready for transition," according to the Pentagon's last report - but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

This is why the entire debate about the Iraq "surge" is as much a sideshow as Britney's scalp. More troops in Baghdad are irrelevant to what's going down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war's critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it's revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. ...

(snip)

... It is precisely by pouring still more of our finite military and intelligence resources down the drain in Iraq that we are tragically ignoring the lessons of 9/11. Instead of showing resolve, as Mr. Bush supposes, his botch of the Iraq war has revealed American weakness. Our catastrophic occupation spawned terrorists in a country where they didn't used to be, and to pretend that Iraq is now their central front only adds to the disaster. As Mr. Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official, reiterated last week: "Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to address the threat to America, that's where it is." It's typical of Mr. Bush's self-righteousness, however, that he would rather punt on that threat than own up to a mistake.

That mistake - dropping the ball on Al Qaeda - was compounded last fall when Mr. Bush committed his second major blunder in the war on terror. The occasion was the September revelation that our supposed ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, had negotiated a "truce" with the Taliban in North Waziristan, a tribal region in his country at the Afghanistan border. This truce was actually a retreat by Pakistan, which even released Qaeda prisoners in its custody. Yet the Bush White House denied any of this was happening. ...

I'm not sure what to make of Scheuer's statements, but there is this to consider: Bush and Cheney have bluffed and lied and bluffed again so often in the last five years that they can't even keep track of the consequences and permutations anymore. In foreign policy, you don't bluff unless you know exactly what you're doing; that does not describe George W. Bush or Dick Cheney this late in the day. Some potentially dangerous bluffs have been called. I won't say which ones though some of the more obvious ones are apparent to most people. The incompetence and ideological recklessness of Bush and Cheney is clearly endangering the United States.

We have a choice: we either regroup and begin serious talks with our enemies and friends in the Middle East or we drift into wider wars necessitating a draft and the neglect of any real future for years to come. Bush and Cheney, as things now stand, are on a slippery slope that may lead to a greater disaster of their own making in two or three trouble spots in the Middle East. And they have neglected al Qaida, to our nation's peril. Bush and Cheney have shown us how not to fight the 'war on terror.'

President Bush's Al Qaida/Iraq Connection

We know al Qaida didn't have much of a presence, if any, at the time the United States was making its case for war in Iraq. Zarqawi, an independent terrorist/criminal thug who was holed up in the mountains of northeast Iraq, later called himself a member of al Qaida but that was more a propaganda move on his part (Bush was much obliged). It turns out we had apparently three chances to take out Zarqawi before the war began but Bush turned down the opportunities. Ironically, the invasion enabled Zarqawi to move around freely in the general chaos. I'm not clear about a number of things within the White House but clearly Bush gets obsessed when things aren't going well and he gets a name like Zarqawi. So an effort was made to track down Zarqawi and he was killed. The chaos in Iraq, of course, has gotten worse since Zarqawi's death, largely because Zarqawi was a relatively minor player and the problems in Iraq are largely political, requiring political solutions rather than military solutions.

We are told al Qaida operates in west Iraq but the ones telling us are the less than reliable members of the Bush Administration. American Pundit has a post on Bush's usual al Qaida propaganda:

Ted Galen Carpenter of the so-called "libertarian" Cato Institute wrote a little op-ed that sums it all up: There are only about a thousand foreign fighters in all of Iraq. Does anybody really think a thousand foreigners are going to take over a country of 26 million people? That's what President Bush would have you believe when he spouts crap like, "We didn’t drive Al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan only to let them set up a new safe haven in a free Iraq."

In addition to the raw numbers, Carpenter points out that polls show 94% of Sunnis, 98% of Shiites and 100% of Kurds in Iraq just plain do not like al-Qaeda...

(snip)

In a State of the Union address filled with spin and outright fabrication, the President's assertion that al-Qaeda could take over Iraq was a jaw-dropper. It's exactly the kind of baseless fear-mongering that sucked us into Iraq in the first place.

It's worth noting that several militias in Iraq have more than 10,000 members which makes al Qaida indeed a bit player, though they grab headlines because they specialize in suicide attacks, propaganda and violent melodrama.

Frankly, I'm losing track of how many groups are fighting in Iraq. Iraq has been compared to the chaos in Lebanon that has existed at various times over the last thirty years—and it's a useful comparison—but I have another comparison to offer. Although Iraq is a small country, the many factions remind me of China during the first half of the twentieth century with its many warlords and divisions. No European power could control that kind of mess once it was unleashed. The truth is that we don't know enough about all the factions to pretend we can control Iraq. Or at least without violating all our principles. I fear there are American right wingers who say, so what?

But here's the bottom line: without staying in Iraq as a colonial power, and we already are operating like a colonial power, there is no way that Iraq is going to become a democracy any time soon in any form that is meaningful. So the basic fact remains that there is little left to accomplish in Iraq except to wind down as carefully as we can to miminize the chaos and the potential for regional conflict. Other than damage control, we have no other purpose there at this point.