A simple Question

You can't possibly be serious here, basso. On second thought, I guess you probably are.

First of all, where do you get the number 140? Every count I can find lists about 45 countries that have committed personnel to Iraq. I'm afraid I don't count countries that, for example, grant airspace use to US planes as members of the coalition.

From what I've found, these countries contributed combat personnel: the US, Great Britain, Australia, Denmark, Poland. Canada has troops under US command, but it does not formally support the invasion. Go ahead and count them if it makes you feel better. By the way, with the exception of the US, the general population of all of the countries listed above was overwhelmingly opposed to the invasion.

Here's a sample of the number of non-combat troops some of our allies have sent to Iraq:

Latvia: 100
Philippines: 80
Albania: 70
Georgia: 70
New Zealand: 61
Croatia: 60
Lithuania: 50
Moldova: 50
Estonia: 43
Macedonia: 37
Kazakhstan: 25

You'll excuse me for not concluding that this type of multinational involvement presents a resounding international mandate.

Let's contrast that with the effort in 1991. These countries supplied combat personnel in Iraq: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, The Netherlands, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, The United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.

I would like to draw your attention particularly to the involvement of Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. That looks a lot like a strong coalition of willing partners highly inclusive of regional neighbors and/or muslim countries capable of globally respected pre-emptive action most anywhere in the near east, middle east or central asia.

 

In addition Afghanistan was aided by the French(they flew the more combat air missions than anybody in the conflict except the U.S.) the Germans, the Brits, etc. The members of that coalition also were there for real support not just in name only like so many of the 'coalition of the willing.'

 

If a country such as the US is going to exercise force in a region from which it is geographically removed, it must unequivocally gain the support, political, military and otherwise, of other countries in the region in question in order to legitimize the use of force in the global arena and, most importantly, help assure long-term success of the initiative.

I mean, this is as plain as day to me.

 

Please don't mention Uzbekistan without holding your nose. Islam Karimov is a tyrant who boils his political enemies alive...literally. He's like Saddam without WMD's....or, uhh, like Saddam.

But anyway, yeah, all countries and coalitions are not created equal. A coalition with major western democracies on board and making proportionate contributions, as well as the major regional players for whose benefit your doing this, is a bit different than Mongolia sending a box of shovels in return for a larger USAID package.

 

"Broadened" the war? I'm so sick of this bogus line of thinking. It's like "broadening" a divorce case to include an ex-girlfriend from high school. As I understand it we missed an opportunity to get Osama when we allegedly had him cornered by trying to leave it to the locals. I'd have preferred we handled that differently. Other than that, my major problem with the Afghanistan thing is that we diverted troops and resources away from dealing with the people who attacked us in order to go after someone who didn't.

The fact that people danced in the streets or burned flags does not equate to a declaration of war or even necessarily an intent to harm. Has Hamas targeted American interests before? I'm not saying they're innocents, but I don't think their opposition to US policy (especially with regard to Israel) ought to put them on a hit list. Anyone who could consider the Iraq was a "broadening" of the Afghanistan action though would surely disagree.

 

Oops. Didn't realize you were asking me about post-9/11 in response to my saying I had a problem with it. My chief beef there is that Bush was clearly set on finding an excuse to parlay 9/11 into an excuse to war on Iraq, facts be damned. I suspected as much when he made his very first address to the nation after 9/11 happened. I remember sitting at a table at Rudyards watching the address. When he said the stuff about not only going after the ones who were responsible but also anyone who'd ever maintained relationships with any terrorists, or whatever it was, I remember my friend John and I turning to each other and almost simultaneously saying, "He's gonna use this as an excuse to go back to war on Iraq."

 

"I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

 

Here's an interesting interview with Richard Clarke

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1175790,00.html
Interview: Richard Clarke

Julian Borger in Washington talks to former White House insider Richard Clarke about US's vulnerability to al-Qaida before the September 11 attack.

Tuesday March 23, 2004

JB: Condoleezza Rice wrote today in response to your book - that the Bush administration did have a strategy for eliminating al-Qaida and that the administration worked on it in the spring and summer of 2001? Is that true?
RC: We developed that strategy in the last several months of the Clinton administration and it was basically an update on that strategy. We briefed Condi on that strategy. The point is that it was done before they came to office and she never held a meeting on it. It was done before she asked for it.

JB: What about the claim that the administration did work hard on the issue?

RC: Its not true. I asked - on January 24 in writing to Condi - urgently for a meeting on cabinet level - the principal's committee - to review the plan and I was told I can't have that. It had to go to the deputies. They had a principals meeting on September 4. Contrast that with the principal's meeting on Iraq, on February 1. So what was urgent for them was Iraq. Al-Qaida was not important to them.

JB: In the plan developed under the Clinton administration, was the potential use of ground forces included?

RC: That option was included in the plan, and the Clinton people had never rejected it. Yes it was there. But when they finally did the ground invasion they kind of botched it, because all they did initially was send special forces with the northern alliance. They did not insert special forces to go in after Bin Laden. They let Bin Laden escape. They only went in two months after.

JB: So were there any principals meetings about al-Qaida in all this time?

RC: It didn't come up in the principal's meetings. Between April and July only four of the 30 or 35 deputy principal meetings touched on al-Qaida. But three of those were mainly about US-Pakistan relations, or US-Afghan relations or South Asian policy, and al-Qaida was just one of the points. One of the meetings looked at the overall plan. It was the July one. April was an initial discussion of terrorism policy writ large and at that meeting I said we had to talk about al-Qaida. And because it was terrorism policy writ large [Paul] Wolfowitz said we have to talk about Iraqi terrorism and I said that's interesting because there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States. There hasn't been any for 8 years. And he said something derisive about how I shouldn't believe the CIA and FBI, that they've been wrong. And I said if you know more than I know tell me what it is, because I've been doing this for 8 years and I don't know about any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the US since 1993. When I said let's start talking about Bin Laden, he said Bin Laden couldn't possibly have attacked the World Trade Centre in '93. One little terrorist group like that couldn't possibly have staged that operation. It must have been Iraq.

JB: So what were all the principal's meetings about then?

RC: There were a lot of meetings on 'Star Wars'. We had a lot of meetings about Russia policy, because Condi is a Russian specialist. There were a lot of meetings on China.

JB: And after the February meeting any more on Iraq?

RC: Yes there were many more, it was central. The buzz in national security staff administration wanted to go after Iraq.

JB: Do you think they came into office with that as a plan?

RC: If you look at the so-called Vulcans group [Bush's pre-election foreign policy advisors] talked about publicly in seminars in Washington. They clearly wanted to go after Iraq and they clearly wanted to do this reshaping of the middle east and they used the tragedy of 9/11 as an excuse to test their theories.

JB: Do you think President Bush was already on board when he came to office.

RC: I think he was. He got his international education from the Vulcans group the previous year. They were people like Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz. They were all espousing this stuff. So he probably had been persuaded. He certainly wasn't hearing any contrary view during this education process.

JB: If there had been meetings on terrorism in that first eight months, do you think it would have made a difference?

RC: Well let me ask you: Contrast December '99 with June and July and August 2001. In December '99 we get similar kinds of evidence that al-Qaida was planning a similar kind of attack. President Clinton asks the national security advisor to hold daily meetings with attorney-general, the CIA, FBI. They go back to their departments from the White House and shake the departments out to the field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies. When the head of the FBI and CIA have to go to the White House every day, things happen and by the way, we prevented the attack. Contrast that with June, July, August 2001 when the president is being briefed virtually every day in his morning intelligence briefing that something is about to happen, and he never chairs a meeting and he never asks Condi rice to chair a meeting about what we're doing about stopping the attacks. She didn't hold one meeting during all those three months. Now, it turns out that buried in the FBI and CIA, there was information about two of these al-Qaida terrorists who turned out to be hijackers [Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi]. We didn't know that. The leadership of the FBI didn't know that, but if the leadership had to report on a daily basis to the White House, he would have shaken the trees and he would have found out those two guys were there. We would have put their pictures on the front page of every newspaper and we probably would have caught them. Now would that have stopped 9/11? I don't know. It would have stopped those two guys, and knowing the FBI the way they can take a thread and pull on it, they would probably have found others.

JB: So might they have stopped the September 11 attacks?

RC: I don't want to say they could have stopped the attacks. But there was a chance.

JB: A reasonable chance? A good chance?

RC: There was a chance, and whatever the probability was, they didn't take it.

JB: Condoleezza Rice argued today that when President Bush was asking you to find evidence linking September 11 to Iraq, he was simply showing due diligence, asking you to explore the options.

RC: That's very funny. There are two ways of asking. There's: 'check every possibility - don't assume its al-Qaida look at everybody'. That's due diligence. Then there's the: 'I want you to find every shred of evidence that it was Iraq and Saddam' - and said in a very emphatic and intimidating way, and the other people who were with me got the same impression as I did. This was not due diligence. This was: 'come back with a memo that says it was an Iraqi attack'.

JB: And when you didn't find any evidence, the memo was bounced back?

RC: Yes

JB: Stephen Hadley [deputy national security advisor] said he bounced it back saying just update this?

RC: Well as soon as he got it he said update it, even though it was very current. Hadley's a good lawyer, he knows how to cover his ass. He not going to write: 'I don't like the answer'. But when your memo is immediately bounced and its got very current information and its bounced back to you and you're told to do over, its pretty clear what the implication is.

JB What do you think drove these people on Iraq?

RC: Some are ideologues - they have a superpower vision of us reshaping the Middle East. Changing the historical balance. Condi Rice has this phrase: 'We needed to change the middle east so terrorists would not fly aircrafts into buildings'.

JB: Do you believe they felt they had to finish what Bush's father started?

RC: That's a big part of it. For Wolfowitz and Cheney feels some guilt for having stopped the war, a couple of days early, not that we should have marched on Baghdad but at least we should have gone after the Republican Guard.

JB: Do you believe there were also political motives.

RC: You have to bifurcate the White House team between the national security types and the political types. For the political types like Karl Rove this has been a godsend. They ran on the war in the congressional elections two years ago. They're running on the war now. They're painting this election as a vote on terrorism, a vote against Osama Bin Laden. And they're succeeding to a certain extent because 70 per cent of American people last year thought that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. But the political benefit clearly a secondary benefit.

JB: Do you believe the administration believed the intelligence on Iraqi WMD?

RC: We all believed Saddam had WMD. What I kept saying was: So what?. They said he could give it to terrorists. But I said he's not that stupid. If he gave WMD to terrorists he would lose power. The question was: Is there an imminent threat or had we contained him? And I thought we had successfully contained him. I didn't see it as a first-tier issue.

JB: Did the Pentagon and the office of special plans play an important role in the processing of intelligence?

RC: Certainly. The people in Rumsfeld's office and in Wolfowitz's operation cherry-picked intelligence to select the intelligence to support their views. They never did the due diligence on the intelligence that professional intelligence analysts are trained to do. [The OSP] would go through the intelligence reports including the ones that the CIA was throwing out. They stitched it together they would send it out, send it over to Cheney. All the stuff that a professional would have thrown out. As soon as 9/11 happened people like Rumsfeld saw it was opportunity. During that first week after September 11, the decision was made. It was confirmed by president We should do Afghanistan first. But the resources necessary to do a good job in Afghanistan were withheld. There was not enough to go in fast, to go in enough to secure the country. Troops were held back. There were 11,000 troops in Afghanistan. There were fewer in whole country than police in the borough of Manhattan

JB: The White House is suggesting that this is sour grapes from a Clinton holdover, scoring political points.

RC: I was a Bush [senior] holdover. I'm not a registered Demcrat. I don't want a job in the Kerry admin. What I want to do is to provide the American people with a set of facts and let them draw their own conclusions.

JB: What conclusions did you draw about President Bush's leadership style.

RC: He doesn't like to read a lot - not terribly interested in analysis. He is very interested in getting to the bottom line. Once he's done he puts a lot of strength behind pushing it, but there's not a lot of analysis before the decision.

JB: Do you think Britain had much influence in the run-up to the war?

RC: They would have done it without Britain. I don't think it made a lot of difference. I think the British were able to help Colin Powell to persuade them to go to the UN. It did go to the UN for a period of time, and it may have helped a little. It may also have forced president to issue a statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He went out there and read the words like he was seeing them for the first time. There hasn't been a lot of follow through, and I don't think the Brits got very much. They got the minimum possible out of us. I think Blair tried to influence the decision making and thought he could do better inside, but his influence was small.

JB: What was Cheney's role in all this.

RC: Quite enormous. Huge. Very quietly and behind the scenes he sat in all the national security meetings chaired by Condi Rice, and no vice president had done that before. He would listen and then give his thoughts. But he bought the compromise that it was al-Qaida first, Iraq second

 

I am going to call bull$h!t on this one. There are 140 countries lined up AGAINST the action in Iraq, not for it. We had a huge coalition for GWI (the action in Iraq that I supported), but only a small group of countries signed on for this one and all of them were mentioned in the SOTU. Bush did not rattle off 140 names.

 

No, because Clarke was calling for covert action by special forces, not a full scale invasion.

Besides, we DID have ironclad evidence on Osama and Al Qaeda, we just had to fabricate the "evidence" on Iraq.

 

Good questions again.

You're asking me to project my mind back before 9/11 to a hypothetical situation and if given all things being equal I would have to say that no I would not have supported a full scale invasion of Afghanistan then because the response at that time would seem disproportionate to the potential threat.

We saw the Cole bombings, the embassy bombings and the '93 attack while those were terrible there was little sense that Al Qaeda could inflict the type of damage of 9/11 by employing that type of strategy. Maybe intelligence and security officials should've but that scenario had never been presented to me as a member of the general public to get my support. OTOH to risk an all out invasion knowing the history of the Russians in Afghanistan and the possibility of fighting through a nuclear armed Pakistan would have seemed a far greater loss of life than what Al Qaeda seemed capable of inflicting. At the same time as you point out the GW Bush Admin was coming on somewhat questionable political footing and with a controversial domestic agenda. I would've found the need for an invasion of Afghanistan hard to swallow and I would bet Congress at the time wouldn't have gone for it either.

Here's where your question become problematic though.

You are trying to paint this as an either we do basically what the Admin did, study the situation, or we have a full scale invasion when I don't believe Clarke was advocating that either. The Admin could've done much more as I said earlier toughening sanctions and diplomatic pressure on Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban, giving aid and intelligence to the Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban, putting pressure on the Saudis and others to cooperate more on catching Al Qaeda or at least stop sending them money and finally a whole range of military action short of all out invasion. While I will concede that these actions may not have stopped 9/11 they would've undercut any criticism like Clarke's that the Admin had not done enough. Right now the Admin's defense is that we were concerned about Al Qaeda enough to spend 8 months studying the problem when even as you point out everyone should've known then that Al Qaeda was a major threat.

This brings me to the second problem with your questions:

By stating your questions you've already conceded that Clarke is right that the GW Bush Admin didn't do enough in regards to Al Qaeda. Your questions are very clever and you do a good job tripping up those of us who have supported Clarke's criticism and have opposed the war in Iraq and the GW Bush Admin in general. The problem for you is that from your previous posts I can tell that you are a Bush supporter and a supporter of the war in Iraq. Your questions to expose what you believe to be our hypocrisy that since we support Clarke's contentions that the Admin didn't do enough about Al Qaeda before 9/11 but we wouldn't have supported an invasion of Afghanistan prior to 9/11 by the GW Bush Admin. also shows that either you have to believe that the GW Bush Admin didn't do enough or else your own trap will prove you too to be a hypocrite.

You dig a deeper hole for yourself by pointing out the Cole, embassy bombings, Khobar Towers and first WTC attack and calling those acts of war. For me personally I call them acts of terrorism, a subtle but key difference. So if you agree those are acts of war then you have to agree that this Admin dawdled in prosecuting that war until it was forced to by the tragedy of 9/11.

 

It is the post-9/11 stuff that is most dam#ing in Clarke's testimony. The Bushies did everything they could to try to implicate Iraq in the attack and even when that failed, continued to plan the action in Iraq even though they KNEW that Saddam had nothing to do with it.

 

You are SO right. Bush's response to 9/11 has been radical- Radically r****ded.

Bush did not put a band aid on the gaping wound of 9/11. He opened up a Whole New gaping wound in Iraq.

Once again- We were attacked by Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, not Hussein and Iraq. We diverted resources from the pursuit of Al Qaeda, to invade Iraq.


From the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1178658,00.html

The fact that the Pentagon pulled the fighting force most equipped for hunting down Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan in March 2002 in order to pre- position it for Iraq cannot be denied.

Fifth Group Special Forces were a rare breed in the US military: they spoke Arabic, Pastun and Dari. They had been in Afghanistan for half a year, had developed a network of local sources and alliances, and believed that they were closing in on bin Laden.

Without warning, they were then given the task of tracking down Saddam. "We were going nuts on the ground about that decision," one of them recalls.

"In spite of the fact that it had taken five months to establish trust, suddenly there were two days to hand over to people who spoke no Dari, Pastun or Arabic, and had no rapport."

Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

 

I would agree with you that the Clinton Admin didn't do enough either the problem is that currently its not Clinton who is up for reelection.

Defenders of this Admin. can't have it both ways either. They can't lay all the blame on the Clinton Admin while try to take all the credit for what happened after 9/11. I think reasonable people can agree that the Clinton Admin didn't do enough and that's what Clarke said. At the same time though 9/11 isn't 1/22 and the GW Bush Admin. has to take some responsibility for what it was and wasn't doing regarding the threat of Al Qaeda between the time it took office and 9/11.

As I said though I will give quite a lot of benefit of doubt regarding whether the GW Bush or Clinton Admins could've stopped 9/11. The record afterwords is important. So here's two questions for you:

1. Do you realistically believe if 9/11 had happened under Clinton's watch Clinton wouldn't have launched a full scale invasion of Afghanistan also?

2. If the GW Bush Admin has been so decisive and focussed on fighting terrorism why did it remove highly specialized personel hunting Al Qaeda from Afghanistan to join the hunt for WMD in Iraq? That strikes me as undercutting an effort to find a neutralize a known threat to deal with a possible one.

 

Polk was the last of the jacksonian Presidents... He said he only wanted to serve one term and he listed his goals. He completed those goals and did not run for a second term. He was tough... not as tough as Jackson, but tough in a political way.
___________
James Knox Polk was born in Mecklenburg County, N.C., on Nov. 2, 1795. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he moved west to Tennessee, was admitted to the bar, and soon became prominent in state politics. In 1825, he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he opposed Adams and, after 1829, became Jackson's floor leader in the fight against the Bank. In 1835, he became Speaker of the House. Four years later, he was elected governor of Tennessee, but was beaten in tries for reelection in 1841 and 1843.

The supporters of Van Buren for the Democratic nomination in 1844 counted on Polk as his running mate, but when Van Buren's stand on Texas alienated Southern support, the convention swung to Polk on the ninth ballot. He was elected over Henry Clay, the Whig candidate. Rapidly disillusioning those who thought that he would not run his own administration, Polk proceeded steadily and precisely to achieve four major objectives—the acquisition of California, the settlement of the Oregon question, the reduction of the tariff, and the establishment of the independent treasury. He also enlarged the Monroe Doctrine to exclude all non-American intervention in American affairs, whether forcible or not, and he forced Mexico into a war that he waged to a successful conclusion.

His wife, Sarah Childress, whom he married in 1824, was a woman of charm and ability. Polk died in Nashville, Tenn., on June 15, 1849.