Heard about the latest intelligence "scandal" in Washington? You know, the one about whether an administration that's no longer in office failed to tell Congress about a CIA program that no longer exists, the purpose of which was to kill top terrorists? If that doesn't sound like much of a scandal to you, you're right. But some key House Democrats seem to think otherwise. Last week, they went ballistic and began an investigation into the defunct program.
Based on what's known, it's hard to see what the CIA did wrong here; it appears to have carefully assessed the program and shelved it when it was deemed unworkable. And it's hard to think of a better way for Congress to dash hopes of improved relations with the intelligence agencies.
For those who've been tuned out, here's a quick recap: Last month, new CIA Director Leon Panetta learned about a Bush-era program, launched after 9/11 but apparently never put into operation, to assassinate al-Qaeda operatives. Panetta pulled the plug and fearing a backlash from lawmakers who had been kept in the dark, apparently at the behest of then-Vice President Cheney quickly and confidentially briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees. Was this welcomed as a shot of candor by the new CIA director? Hardly.
It turns out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's allies were still smoldering over a bitter dispute this spring in which she accused the CIA of misleading Congress about harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects during the Bush years. Panetta shot back with a May 15 letter saying it is not the CIA's "policy or practice to mislead Congress."
On June 26, after the aborted hit-squad program was disclosed, about a half dozen Democrats on the intelligence panel wrote to Panetta demanding that he, in essence, take back his May 15 comments. That smacks more of a childish tantrum than strict oversight. Last week, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, announced an investigation into whether federal laws were violated by the defunct covert assassination program or failure to notify Congress.
What's to investigate? Perhaps Cheney was wrong to cloak the whole thing in secrecy (though the law is unclear about what level of planning triggers the congressional notification requirement). But the program itself was a far cry from the CIA abuses attempts to assassinate foreign heads of state and spying on U.S. citizens exposed in the Church Committee investigations of the mid-1970s. Hunting down Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders is, after all, public policy of the United States, carried out every day by unmanned Predator drones in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region.
Democratic leaders seem oblivious to the danger of public feuding and reliving Bush-era controversies. Pelosi told us Tuesday that Panetta "created his own problems" by insisting the CIA doesn't lie, and she sees the panel's investigation as a "modest approach." We see a bungled opportunity to improve relations between Congress and the intelligence community.
Pelosi rightly describes the oversight system as flawed, in which CIA briefers provide snippets of information to different lawmakers at different times, so none really gains an understanding of the full picture. The remedy is changing the system, as Democrats say they're trying to do with new legislation. That beats political peevishness and probes of programs that were never implemented.
Military historian Martin van Creveld said back in 2005 that the American-led invasion of Iraq was "the most foolish war since the Emperor Augustus sent his legions into Germany in 9 B.C. and lost them." Except to correct the date (A.D. 9, in fact), the influential Israeli scholar says his opinion of the Iraq adventure hasn't changed. And as it starts to wind down, with a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces due inside the next 30 months, van Creveld's vision of the U.S. military's final days in Iraq is, well, pretty grim. "Several years ago I wrote an article in which I said the invasion would end exactly like Vietnam, with people hanging from the skids of helicopters," he told me over the phone this week. "I may have exaggerated a bit. But not much."
As President Barack Obama met with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Wednesday, in fact, the big question lurking behind all the official optimism was how best to insure that an orderly U.S. withdrawal does not become a retreat or, in the end, a rout. And the answers are far from clear.
Already there are unsettling omens. Under the security agreement signed by the Bush administration last year, American troops ceased to lead patrols in Baghdad as of June 30. The Maliki government implied they were leaving the cities altogether (which wasn't quite true) and declared the date "National Sovereignty Day." Thousands poured into the streets to celebrate the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of American occupation.
When it turned out there were quite a few U.S. soldiers still around, the public was not pleased, and neither, it appears, were some Iraqi military officers. Col. Ali Fadhil, a brigade commander in Baghdad, told the Associated Press earlier this week that American soldiers could no longer patrol on their own and had to ask permission of the Iraqis, and that was just the way things would have to be from now on. "The American soldiers are in prisonlike bases," he said, none too delicately, "as if they are under house arrest."
Asked to respond, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a press conference: "It is perhaps a measure of our success in Iraq that politics have come to the country." But the American commander in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, was not so diplomatic in an e-mail leaked to The Washington Post. "Maybe something was 'lost in translation,' " he said, referring to the text of the security agreement. "We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I'm sorry, the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible, nor should we be." As he saw it, "our [Iraqi] partners burn our fuel, drive roads cleared by our engineers, live in bases built with our money, operate vehicles fixed with our parts, eat food paid for by our contracts, watch our [surveillance] video feeds, serve citizens with our [funds], and benefit from our air cover."
Indeed. One could almost lose sight of the fact it's the Iraqis' country. Except that the Iraqis don't.
At a press conference by video link on Tuesday, the same Maj. Gen. Dan "Sort-of-Rhymes-With-Soldier" Bolger turned on his all-American charm and used more temperate language. But it's doubtful he did much to ease Iraqi resentment of American arrogance, which runs deep and remains dangerous. The Sons of Iraq, those former insurgents who have decided for the moment to support the Maliki government and work with the Americans, "account for about a third of the fighting strength of the Iraqi forces that protect the people of Baghdad," said Bolger. They are, he said, "the local version of Neighborhood Watch."
In fact, the SOI, as the military calls them, are Sunni, tribal, fiercely proud, and remain a wild card in the very political and potentially very violent deck that's likely to be shuffled and reshuffled over the next two years. "Any Son of Iraq, by definition, is a former insurgent," Bolger said. "And just given human nature, if you've got about 40- to 50,000 of them, there's going to be a couple of them that are going to drift back the other way. And we have seen some of that."
"Iraq is hard, it is going to go on being hard, and it is hard all the time," former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker told a conference in Paris on June 30. And for precisely that reason, when he was negotiating the security agreement with the Iraqi government in 2007 and 2008, he also labored over a less-well-known strategic framework that he calls "a blueprint for a relationship that lasts well beyond 2011." Indeed, that was where Obama and Maliki sought to keep the focus in the Rose Garden on Wednesday. The strategic framework aims to nurture commercial, scientific, legal, cultural, and educational tiesa whole array of soft but potentially powerful stabilizing forces in the relationship.
To which we say "good luck," strategy-wise. But General Bolger at his press conference gave a picture of the down-to-earth tactical decision-making of the American military during the drawdown, and it is disconcertingly uncertain. By next August, a year from now, all U.S. combat operations are supposed to be over, and American troops levels are supposed to have dropped from 130,000 to a "residual force" of 50,000. But it seems nobody has decided where they'll be or precisely what they'll be doing.
"I've seen all kinds of options proposed," said Bolgerfrom "spread out in the countryside, sort of doing training out at ranges and facilities," to deployments "just outside the cities, to assist with counterinsurgency-type training or tasks," to moving troops "out to the borders" to help an Iraqi military that has been focused inward, killing rebellious locals, and start to deal with the problem of "a potential invasion from some unfriendly country." Bolger said he's "seen all those different versions."
In fact, history gives a pretty good sense of what the challenges for the departing Americans are going to be, whether you look at Vietnam in the early 1970s, or the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, or the Israeli pullout from Lebanon in several ugly stages from 1982 to 2000. One of the first things that happens is that erstwhile allies of the departing force start to cut deals withand pass on quantities of intelligence tothe powers that are likely to stay in place. In this case, Iran. If supply lines are long, as they certainly are in Iraq, they become increasingly vulnerable to attack and harassment, as enormous amounts of matériel and the last soldiers traveling with it are pulled out. (The classic horror story from history was the British retreat from Kabul in 1842, when 16,000 people set out for Jalalabad and only one man made it.)
In Iraq, says Van Creveld, by the time the Americans are down to the last few tens of thousands of troops, "it all depends on what the Iraqis themselves want." They might do what the Afghan mujahedin did watching the Russians pull out of Afghanistan in 1988, he says. "They just stood back and jeered." Or they might be busy fighting among themselves. There's always some savage score-settling when occupiers withdraw, and in Iraq the unofficial, unsettled border between Kurdistan and the Arab southern parts of the country already is known as "the trigger line."
Or maybe, and let's hope, the next Iraqi Sovereignty Day will just be a big parade and a big party.
#4
Of course there is always the "apology" option too as well as the parade, retreat, or rout options.
Hundreds of thousands of good men and women served in our military with distinction and honor and many made the ultimate sacrifice. Americans are very proud of our military.
#5
Newsweak. Nuff said? We know which option they're hoping for
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/24/2009 19:38 Comments ||
Top||
#6
The putz teh cite as an "expert" as a military historian who cannot even get a date right?
As for the comparison to Augustus loss in Germany, this guy refuses to acknowledge his error. The legions wre wiped out complete. WE've lost perhaps 5000 over 6+ yerars. And they use this as a valid comparison?
As to basic credibility, how about this quote from a 2003 interview: We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under
And FYI, the referenced comment about "ending as vietnam did" was written for and published at LewRockwell.com
Here is the full quote: " he who fights against the weak and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however, advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if U.S troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did."
The guy has turned into a fucking loon.
Hey Martin van Creveld, have you always been a stupid tool, or are you just working hard at it?
#8
One other comparison that idoit missed: Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese ARMY not the VC (who were basically demolished in Tet '69) - it was a conventional invasion, several armored divisions, infantry, etc.
Hey van Cretan, where is the NVA that your scenarios requires? Hmm?
I could go on and on poking massive holes in thsi crap that Newsweak is allowing this tool to spread.
People like this piss me off to no end - and so do press monkeys that give them a megaphone but do not give equal time to someone that actually knows the fact and can pick apart douchebags like this supposed "military historian" (who seems woefully ignorant of history and more interested in spin than reason or facts).
Hey MSM - wanna see why you are vanishing? Crap like that article. That's why.
#9
As per COUNTERRORISM BLOG + AL QAEDA-IN-THE- MAGHREB [AQIM Militant Group-Network], AQIM has all but denied that, in their view, the ISLAMIST JIHAD IS TO THE DEATH. + that AQIM is in a race/comptetiion wid its fellow WORLD MUJAHIDEEN BROTHERS-COMRADES TO SEE WHOM WILL BE FIRST TO HOLD ISLAMIC PRAYERS INSIDE THE US WHITE HOUSE.
IOW, USA is de facto defeated iff not destroyed.
As said times before, the most decisive and dangerous phase of the WOT lies AHEAD OF US, NOT BEHIND US, ALA 2009-2012/2016 POTUS PERIOD + PAN-ISLAMIST NUCLEARIZATION = STRATEGIC WEAPONIZATION.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
