What I wish Kerry would find a way to make people understand is that Bush has been a failure in the War on Terror.(Tom Schallar of DailyKos offers his advice.) As Fallows shows, throughout 2002, as the War on Terror was supposedly heating up, in fact the administration turned almost total attention to preparing for Iraq. As a result: Afghanistan was "left to fester"; our allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan continued on their merry undemocratic ways; our military is now overstretched and may not be capable of blunting a threat by North Korea or China or Iran in their regions; North Korea and Iran accelerated their nuclear programs to the extent that we now have far fewer options of dealing with them than we did two years ago; recruitment for Al Qaeda increased dramatically; over $150 billion has been spent in Iraq that could have been spent defending us (or on job creation, health care etc); our power in the world had actually eroded;
Here are just a few quotes that tell us how things worked within the administration:
It is hard to find a counterterrorism specialist who thinks that the Iraq War has reduced rather than increased the threat to the United States.
And here is the startling part. There is no evidence that the President and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the "opportunity costs" and tradeoffs in their decision to invade Iraq. No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose. ...
The Administration apparently did not consider questions like "If we pursue the war on terror by invading Iraq, might we incite even more terror in the long run?" and "If we commit so many of our troops this way, what possibilities will we be giving up?" ...
So by the spring [of 2002], after six months in which to consider its strategy, the Administration had radically narrowed its choices. Its expert staffers were deflected toward Iraq—and away from Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Israel-Palestine, the hunt for bin Laden, the assault on al-Qaeda, even China and Taiwan. Its diplomats were not squeezing Pakistan as hard as possible about chasing al-Qaeda, or Saudi Arabia about cracking down on extremists, because the United States needed their help—or at least acquiescence—in the coming war with Iraq. Its most senior officials were working out the operational details of a plan whose fundamental wisdom they had seldom, if ever, stopped to examine. ...
In March of 2003, just after combat began in Iraq, President Hosni Mubarak, of Egypt, warned that if the United States invaded, "instead of having one bin Laden, we will have one hundred bin Ladens." Six months later, when the combat was over, Rumsfeld wrote in a confidential memo quoted in Plan of Attack, "We lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas [Islamic schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us? … The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions." Six months after that, as violence surged in occupied Iraq, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, reported that al-Qaeda was galvanized by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As of mid-2004 it had at least 18,000 operatives in sixty countries. "Al Qaeda has fully reconstituted [and] set its sights firmly on the USA and its closest Western allies in Europe," the report said. Meanwhile, a British parliamentary report warns that Afghanistan is likely to "implode" for lack of support.
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