CIA vs. the Bush White House
of the blog Right Wing Nuthouse has been writing for some time about the CIA's not so secret war against the Bush Administration, especially in light of the Agency's failures leading up to 9/11. Tonight, in the wake of the Libby indictments, the seeming exhoneration of Karl Rove, and the continuing attempt by Joe Wilson to construct lies around his visit to Niger and his subsequent report to the intelligence community, our man Rick wonders aloud whether a trial will finally reveal to the public at war the extent to which senior CIA officials have gone to discredit this President. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing (bold emphases are mine):
In a series of articles I began last July entitled “ ,” I have tried to give context and meaning to the CIA’s war against the Administration and how that war has its roots in both partisan politics and bureaucratic infighting. But at bottom, what the Plame Affair reveals about the CIA is a culture of incompetence whose principals will do anything to avoid responsibility for their mistakes.
This is more than just simple bureacratic CYA.
It is one thing for officials to hide some boondoggle or another in the Department of Health and Human Services. It is quite something else to miss 9/11 or be wrong about Saddam’s WMD’s.
One would think that by this time, the CIA would be used to owning up to its spectacular incompetence.
Blessed with technical intelligence gathering capabilities that boggle the mind as well as some of the best minds in the country, one would believe that the CIA has its finger on the pulse of events around the world and with penetrating analysis, give our elected leaders a heads-up about what is coming down the pike that might be a threat to the United States and our vital interests.
Think again. While it is undoubtedly true that the CIA has assisted in heading off many threats to the US and its interests, it has also had several conspicuous and, in hindsight, puzzling failures.
What these failures reveal is a system that does not punish incompetence – even when mistakes lead to the kind of tragedy we experienced on 9/11. Rather, a huge amount of effort is expended in either trying to explain away the errors or worse, attack those who attempt to find an explanation for the incompetence.
We have seen both tactics on display in the Plame Affair.
The CIA’s failures in Iraq go all the way back to the first Gulf War when the Administration of George Bush #41 was taken completely by surprise when Saddam invaded Kuwait. This despite a huge build-up of Iraqi forces on Kuwait’s border prior to the invasion as well as many overt threats by Saddam against the Kuwaiti’s for pumping too much oil thus keeping the price depressed.
Following tactics that they repeated when it was discovered that Saddam’s huge stockpiles of WMD were a chimera, the CIA began to leak cherry-picked analysis which revealed that the the Agency did indeed believe that Saddam was going to invade, that it was the policymakers who missed the clear signals emanating from Langely.
The problem, of course, is that those analyses were ignored in the run-up to the invasion as both the State Department and the CIA were telling the White House that Saddam was simply doing some saber rattling in order to get the Kuwaitis to cut back oil production.
The consequences of the CIA’s mistaken analysis about Saddam’s intentions were huge. It has since been revealed by former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that Saddam never anticipated the angry reaction from the United States that led to war.
Just imagine what a strong statement from President Bush warning Saddam about the consequences of an invasion could have accomplished.
What the CIA analysis of Saddam’s intentions at that time revealed was a clear bias toward what has become known as the realpolitik faction in government who believed that Saddam was a vital ally and bulwark against radical Islam. There may have been a case to be made for such thinking prior to 9/11 as several high level Bush #41 Administration officials such as National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker believed.
But as Howard Fineman points out in this article from October, 2003 in , opposition to that policy came from the Department of Defense which, at that time, was headed up by current Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney:
Behind the scenes or openly, at war or at peace, the United States has been debating what to do in, with and about Iraq for more than 20 years. We always have been of two minds. One faction, led by the CIA and State Department, favored using secular forces in Iraq—Saddam Hussein and his Baathists—as a counterweight to even more radical elements, from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran to the Palestinian terrorists in the Levant.
The other faction, including Dick Cheney and the “neo-cons,” has long held a different view: that, with their huge oil reserves and lust for power (and dreams of recreating Baghdad’s ancient role in the Arab world), the Baathists had to be permanently weakened and isolated, if not destroyed. This group cheered when, more than 20 years ago in a secret airstrike, the Israelis destroyed a nuclear reactor Saddam had been trying to build, a reactor that could have given him the ultimate WMD.
The “we-can-use Saddam” faction held the upper hand right up to the moment he invaded Kuwait a decade ago.
Until then, the administration of Bush One (with its close CIA ties) had been hoping to talk sense with Saddam. Indeed, the last American to speak to Saddam before the war was none other than Joe Wilson, who was the State Department charge’ d’affaires in Baghdad. Fluent in French, with years of experience in Africa, he remained behind in Iraq after the United States withdrew its ambassador, and won high marks for bravery and steadfastness, supervising the protection of Americans there at the start of the first Gulf War.
But, as a diplomat, he didn’t want the Americans to “march all the way to Baghdad.” Cheney, always a careful bureaucrat, publicly supported the decision. Wilson was for repelling a tyrant who grabbed land, but not for regime change by force.
Choosing Wilson then to go to Niger to check out the yellowcake story does not seem such a stretch when placed in the context of a faction at the CIA who thought that their judgment about what kind of threat Saddam presented was superior to that of individuals who the American people elected to make those kinds of decisions. By sending Wilson, the CIA knew full well what the result of his “investigation” would be.
So why weren’t Wilson’s conclusions widely disseminated by the CIA?
Speculation in this regard has run the gamut from a CIA “set-up” of the Administration to simple bureaucratic incompetence. Given a choice, I would settle on the latter. While it may be true that the CIA was trying to undercut the Administration’s case for war, it would be a stretch to believe that they knew there were no large stockpiles of WMD and thus, any use of Wilson’s “report” would be to demonstrate the “twisting” of intelligence charged by many on the left.
What may be true is that by not having Wilson sign a confidentiality agreement, they wished his “findings” to receive the widest possible distribution. Wilson’s contacts in the press included both Walter Pincus of the Washington Post and Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times, two reporters who eventually did publish very selective information about his trip Wilson himself admits to to reporters for months prior to his OpEd in the New York Times in early July, 2003. This would seem to indicate that the selective leaking of classified information carried out by a partisan cabal at the CIA for more than a year prior to the election last November was done not just to discredit the Administration’s Iraq War case but also to politically damage the President so as to cause his defeat for re-election.
For those who were puzzled by why the Bush Administration was trying to push back against Wilson more than a month prior to his public acknowledgment of the Niger trip as both Cheney and Libby were discussing Wislon-Plame in early June, one need look no further than the Administration’s recognition that they were in the midst of a partisan political attack by a known Democratic party sympathizer who was running around Washington trying to discredit the Bush Administration by giving a skewed account of his CIA “mission” to national security reporters. If they could connect Wilson to both the nepotistic actions of his wife and the partisan cabal in the CIA who, along with those seeking to cover up the Agency’s incompetence with regard to WMD’s wanted to show the Administration “twisted” intelligence on Iraq, Cheney-Libby would be able to blunt the impact of the attack.
What is the connection between lack of WMD and the Administration countering of Wilson?
The answer is Valerie Plame whose associates in the Counterproliferation Department at the agency were responsible both for sending Wilson to Niger and giving the Administration uncredible reports with regard to WMD in Iraq in the first place. Any attempt to understand the prosecution of Libby must begin with Valerie Plame herself and her part in the leaking and bureaucratic backbiting that led the Administration to its current dilemma.
Will this part of the story ever fully be revealed?
If Scooter Libby goes to trial rather than take a plea deal, it is very possible that the full role of the CIA and their war against the Administration will be revealed. Otherwise, the entire matter will simply remain an interesting footnote in the history of the Iraq War.
UPDATE
“gets it”.
..
“.
..[Is] there a serious journalist among the mainstream media who thinks the story in the Libby case might be the CIA’s efforts to defeat the president.
Isn’t that the big story?”
Does “get it?”
“This leaves two possibilities.
One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn’t care much about Plame’s status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.”
Once again, Mr.
Reynolds proves that his gift for understating the obvious with devastating effect is the best around.
How about ?
Come on, we see through this – if the CIA prepared a formal report, it would be subpoenaed as evidence, and the jury would laugh out loud at the “no damage” assessment.
So the CIA filed a criminal referral in 2003, got the White House tied up in a two year investigation, and now they are laughing out loud. Well played, especially if you like a spy service that shrugs off executive oversight by inventing crimes and playing dirty tricks.
Perfectly said.
This may sound far-fetched, but it almost makes one wonder whether Fitzgerald's has an entirely different goal in bringing these charges: exposing the CIA. Before you laugh this one away, consider the facts: Fitzgerald is in a no-lose situation. If Libby goes to trial, the CIA's role in trying to bring down a President of the United States will be revealed.
If not, perhaps a minor sentence for Libby in a plea bargain? Although this indictment never should have seen the light of day--in that revealing Plame's name turns out not to have been a crime (or at least not worth pursuing in court)--it may be that Fitzgerald was sickened by what he saw, sickened that unelected elites conspired to bring down a President who they were supposed to be serving. Meanwhile even a Libby conviction for the charges will not severely damage the Bush Administration--whereas an indictment of Rove would have been a heavy blow.
Far-fetched? Perhaps. Time will tell if the CIA will be exposed for what it has done.
But I will say this--as much as I was dismayed by the charges brought against Libby, and as much as I tried, I saw something in Fitzgerald's presentation and determination that was hard to dislike. And the end result of his actions could be that the cabal at the CIA--who tried to engineer a Coup d'Etat against a President at war against an enemy unlike one we have ever faced--will be tossed out like the traitorous chattel they all are.
UPDATE: adds to what to Mr.
Moran has done by exploring the role of Judith Miller in this matter; and it fits like a glove with the CIA treachery outlined above. Published in Real Clear Politics: this is a must read:
The savage left-wing attack on Judith Miller from inside and outside of the New York Times completely misses the point. She is under attack for being a lackey of the Bush Administration when she failed to do the administration and the public a big favor.
She could have done a potential Pulitzer Prize-winning story that could have broken the Joseph Wilson case wide open. It is a story exposing the Wilson mission to Africa as a CIA operation designed to undermine President Bush.
For 85 days in jail, Miller protected her source, Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, but the fact remains that she never used the explosive information Libby gave her.
Now we know, according to Miller's account, that Libby told her about a CIA war with the Bush Administration over Iraq intelligence and that he vociferously complained to her about CIA leaks to the press. But Miller decided that what Libby told her was not newsworthy. Why?
We were critical of Miller from the start because she went to jail rather than testify under oath and tell the truth before a grand jury. Eventually, she did testify, under questionable and mysterious circumstances. She claims she insisted that her testimony be restricted to her conversations with Libby.
Clearly, Miller had a relationship with Libby as a source. On that matter, she is "guilty" as charged. But the media attacks on Miller really show her critics do not regard Libby as a source worth protecting.
Libby, according to columnist Frank Rich, is a "neocon" who misled the nation to get us into the Iraq War. On the other hand, Wilson is supposed to be a hero and whistleblower. He came back from Africa, after investigating the Iraq-uranium link, and concluded that the Bush Administration was lying.
His wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, had her identity revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak because Bush officials were upset that her husband had told the truth. At least this is their version of the facts.
But if Miller was too cozy with the White House, why didn't she rush into print with Libby's version of events and use him as an anonymous source?
Miller couldn't even be counted on to do a story based on high-level information provided to her by the vice president's top aide. It was information that was not only true but explosive. Libby was letting Miller in on the real story of the Wilson affair--that the CIA was out to get the President, and that the agency was using Wilson to get Bush.
The fact that she didn't write a story has been cited many times, supposedly to prove that Miller should never have been called by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald before the grand jury. If she didn't write a story, we were told, she shouldn't have to be ordered to talk about her sources. Fitzgerald obviously believed the information she had about her sources was relevant to the case.
And it was. But Miller didn't write any of this up at the time. That's mighty strange behavior for a pawn of the administration.
In my recent special report on this matter, former prosecutor Joseph diGenova called the Wilson mission a CIA "covert operation" against Bush. Like the Novak column, a Miller story about this matter could have raised questions about the purpose of the trip and who was behind it. But if Miller had done such a story for the Times, the impact could have been enormous.
After all, the Times was the chosen vessel for Wilson to write his column claiming there was no Iraq uranium deal with Niger.
Miller could have revealed that Wilson was recommended for the mission by his own wife, a CIA employee. His wife's role was critically important because a truly undercover CIA operative would not recommend her husband for an overseas trip and then expect to maintain her "secret" identity as he proceeded to write an article for the New York Times and become a public spectacle because of it.
Her role in the trip means that she was not undercover in any real sense of the word.
As I have noted previously, Herbert Romerstein, a former professional staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, says that Plame's involvement in sending her husband on the CIA mission to Africa meant that when Wilson went public about it, foreign intelligence services would investigate all of his family members for possible CIA connections. Those intelligence services would not simply assume that he went on the mission because he was a former diplomat.
They would investigate his wife. And that would inevitably lead to unraveling the facts about Valerie Wilson, or Valerie Plame, and her involvement with the CIA. Romerstein says that Plame's role in arranging the mission for her husband is solid proof that she was not concerned about having her "cover" blown because she was not truly under cover.
By any account, she was hardly a James Bond-type. Plame's "cover," a company called "Brewster-Jennings Associates," was so flimsy that she used it as her affiliation when she made a 1999 contribution to Al Gore for president. She identified herself as "Valerie Wilson" in this case.
The same Federal Election Commission records showing her contribution to Gore also reveal a $372 contribution to America Coming Together, when the group was organizing to defeat Bush.
If Miller had done some extra digging, she would have discovered that, contrary to what Wilson said publicly in the Times, his findings were interpreted by many officials as additional evidence of an Iraqi interest in obtaining uranium. This kind of story, if it had been published in the New York Times, could have completely undermined Wilson's credibility.
It would have made it ridiculous for the Times to subsequently demand the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush White House. The Times went ahead and made that editorial demand, only to have it backfire on the paper when Fitzgerald demanded Miller's testimony.
The CIA obviously knew the facts of the case.
Nevertheless, with Wilson and the media, led by the Times, generating a feeding frenzy over the publication of his wife's name and affiliation, the agency pushed for a Justice Department investigation, on the false premise that revealing her identity was a crime. This is what started it all. It was the perfect way to divert attention from a much-needed investigation of the CIA, the ultimate source of the questionable intelligence that the administration used to make the case for the Iraq War.
Eventually, some members of the press caught up with some parts of the truth. Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post was honest enough to admit, when the evidence came out, that Wilson had misrepresented his wife's role. Schmidt reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee report found that he was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, "contrary to what he has said publicly.
" By then, however, the media feeding frenzy was well underway and the facts of the case were being buried or shunted aside. And this takes us to where we are today--wondering whether Fitzgerald will indict Bush officials for making conflicting statements about the facts of the case. If the investigation was a real desire for truth and justice, Fitzgerald would drop the case and accuse the CIA of pursuing the matter for an illegitimate political reason.
It's the CIA--not the White House--that should be under investigation.
If Miller deserves criticism, it is for failing to write the story when Libby handed it to her on a silver platter. She had the perfect opportunity to set the record straight about some misinformation that had already appeared in her own paper.
After all, it was Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who had asserted, in a May 6, 2003, column, that "I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger.
" We now know that Wilson was the source of this information, and that it was false. He whitewashed the nature of the CIA role in the trip because he wanted to protect his wife. Wilson wanted people to think that the Vice President's office was somehow behind his mission.
We also know, because of Miller's account of her testimony under oath, that it was because of this misinformation that Libby talked to Miller and wanted to get out the other side of the story. The Vice President's office, said by the liberal press to be at the center of the CIA leak "conspiracy," was justifiably outraged over Wilson going public with misleading information about his mission and blasting the administration in the process. Miller also testified that she thought Plame's CIA connection "potentially newsworthy.
" You bet it was. But she didn't write the story. This is where Miller failed her paper and the public.
Consider the record of the Times in this case. Editorially, the Times called for the investigation but didn't want to cooperate with it. The paper also published the misleading Wilson and Kristof columns.
And yet Miller, who didn't write anything, is the Times journalist under fire in the press because she wrote stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs before the war and later talked to Libby about how the CIA had gotten the facts wrong! Miller has become a target even though it's her colleagues who put the misleading Wilson column into the paper, published Kristof's erroneous account, and called for the probe that resulted in Miller serving jail time.
Miller's WMD stories are said by the hard left to be evidence of her reliance on the Bush Administration for information.
In fact, it shows her dependence on the same sources that told the administration that Iraq had WMD. Those sources included CIA director George Tenet, a Clinton holdover, who told Bush that finding WMD in Iraq was a "slam dunk."
We are still left with the mystery of why Miller didn't write anything based on what Libby told her.
She says she proposed a story. Miller and/or her editors may have been persuaded to drop it by other sources, who may have been in the CIA. It makes perfect sense.
The CIA had been behind the Wilson trip from the beginning and, as Libby told Miller, had been trying to undercut the administration's Iraq policy and divert attention from the agency's poor performance on Iraqi WMD. The CIA did not want the full extent of its role uncovered and decided that the best way to divert attention from its own shabby performance was to accuse Bush officials of violating the law against identifying covert agents. This was one covert operation by the CIA on top of another.
Miller watched the whole thing play out and refused to tell her own paper and the public what was really happening.
Miller says that she only talked to the grand jury about her conversations with Libby. She said she wanted to protect other sources she used on other stories.
Miller's 2001 book, Germs, on "Biological weapons and America's secret war," has several references to her other sources. Some are unnamed "analysts" at the CIA.
My own recent special report on this matter struck a chord with readers, one of whom said it is a case of "the CIA undermining and eliminating a president.
" But Bush is still hanging on, dismissing the stream of stories on the case as "background noise." Staying above the fray, when he has come under assault by America's premier intelligence service, Bush is letting CIA director Porter Goss do the necessary job of cleaning house at this corrupt agency.
If some of Bush's aides now go down on dubious charges of having faulty or inconsistent memories about the case, they could try to blow the whistle on the CIA in court.
The CIA would most likely try to censor the proceedings on grounds of "national security" and protecting agency "operations." For the sake of maintaining our democratic form of government and reigning in rogue elements at the CIA, the truth must come out.
DiscerningTexan, 10/31/2005 07:20:00 PM Despite the fact that the left and their willing cohorts in the mainstream media will attempt to paint Harriet Miers' decision to withdraw her nomination for the Supreme Court as a "defeat" for President Bush, both Ms. Miers' decision and the timing of it portent well for a strong rebound for the President and Republicans—just in time for the 2006 mid-term elections.Initially, I supported Ms.
Miers for several reasons, primarily because President Bush has had a tremendous record for picking judges for the Courts of Appeals, and for the Supreme Court (John Roberts), indicating to me that he was very serious about keeping his campaign promise to not appoint activist judges. Unlike his father, this President Bush has demonstrated clearly that he was committed to fill Court vacancies with judges who would interpret the Constitution, rather than to try to rewrite it. In fact, the initial anti-Miers rhetoric from the right seemed to me to be an incredible overreaction—especially considering Bush's aforementioned track record and his personal day to day dealings with Ms.
Miers. But with all of that said, I cannot help but believe that Ms. Miers has done the President a tremendous service for a number of reasons:
1.
She may not indeed have been a strict Constitutionalist as advertised – Although as I said I trusted the President, some documents surfaced yesterday that raised serious questions as to whether Miers truly is a Constitutionalist--or whether she is a Judicial Activist in disguise. In particular, some quotes in yesterday's from the 1990's were real eyebrow-raisers for me:
Miers also defended judges who order lawmakers to address social concerns. While judicial activism is derided by many conservatives, Miers said that sometimes "officials would rather abandon to the courts the hard questions so they can respond to constituents: I did not want to do that -- the court is making me.
"
Miers blamed the legislators for what she called an "unacceptable" school funding plan and for ducking tough issues such as imposing a state income tax.
"My basic message here is that when you hear the courts blamed for activism or intrusion where they do not belong, stop and examine what the elected leadership has done to solve the problem at issue," she said.
At a speech later that summer titled "Women and Courage," Miers went further.
Citing statistics that showed Texas's relatively high poverty rates, Miers said the public should not blame judges when courts step in to solve such problems.
"Allowing conditions to exist so long and get so bad that resort to the courts is the only answer has not served our state well," she said. "Politicians who would cry 'The courts made me do it' or 'I did not do that -- the courts did' should not be tolerated.
"
This does not sound to me like someone who disavows Judicial Activism.
2. The Republican Base had begun to come apart at the seams – When the President nominated Ms.
Miers, the initial reaction of the right truly came as a shock to me. After all, the President had been stellar in his nominations prior to the Miers appointment, and Judge Roberts made the Senate Democrats look like complete fools.
But immediately, people I respect a lot, such as Charles Krauthammer, Laura Ingraham, George Will, and Bill Kristol, seemed to come completely unglued.
I didn't get it. And Senate Republicans did not seem to step up to the plate either (except for the barely-contained glee of opposition Democrat leader Harry Reid..
.) And it only got worse from there.
As Miers made the rounds in the Senate, from all appearances she was not in top form on a number of occasions--in fact she did not seem to garner the level of commitment necessary to win in the Judiciary Committee, much less on the Senate floor.
The second problem with the President straying from his base (or vice versa) was that he may really need that base to rally around him in the very near future. If a comes down tomorrow against Scooter Libby, the President needs more than anything a highly-energized base to go to the mattresses for this Presidency—because you know the media sharks will be in a feeding frenzy. Hell, Chris Matthews will probably implode if no indictments come down.
..
So.
..this is by no means an easy time to be President.
One has to admire how steely Bush has been in staunchly supporting this just war against Islamofascism in the wake of an avalanche of Vietnam/Watergate era negative journalism. But if other Republicans are to rally behind President Bush--(as Republicans rallied around Reagan during Iran/Contra, and Democrats rallied around Clinton during Whitewater, Jennifer Flowers, Juanita Broderick, Travelgate, Document gate, and last but not least, Monica and the Impeachment of the President for lying to a grand jury and obstructing justice)--then President Bush has simply got to stay true to his principles and to the promises that got him (and his fellow Republicans in both houses) elected in the first place.
3.
A battle was looming over confidential documents from the White House – Because Ms. Miers had virtually no paper trail, the hue and cry was loud and persistent for the President to turn over documents from Ms. Miers' current role of giving legal advice to the President.
This put the President in the unfortunate position of appearing that he had something to hide in denying the Senate these documents--even if they would have helped Meirs' confirmation.
But the President was right in refusing to cave to this pressure: giving in to these clearly unreasonable demands so would not only have shattered the attorney-client privilege that every citizen has a right to, (much less the President of the United States)—it would also have made it very difficult for future Presidents to claim any level of Executive Privilege and conduct confidential business in the White House. Every President has a right to confidential legal advice.
To have turned over confidential documents relevant to his current Presidency to save the candidacy of his nominee might have harmed President Bush, but it definitely would have done irreparable damage to the office of the Presidency. If the President's lawyer can't give confidential advice to the President, who can?
In a way, Harriet Miers showed the world today that, more than anything else, she is loyal to the man she serves as Counsel.
And she showed that she is a class act in doing her President and her country a huge service by sparing him the humiliation of a divisive battle within his own party at a time when the support of that party might be critically important to his Presidency.
The other silver lining in this "cloud" is that the President has now been given the freedom to really rally and energize his base—and simultaneously deflect attention from this Plamegate farce—by nominating someone like Janice Rogers Brown (let me repeat those three words -- Janice - Rogers - Brown---oh, OK Mike McConnell would do too..
.) to the court and finally taking on head to head the failed ideology of the Democrats once and for all.
In a way Miers' unselfish act is going to allow the President an opportunity to take off the gloves and really show the country what he and the Republican Party stand for.
President Bush now has a chance to take lemons and make sweet lemonade. But he must not blow it this time: this is indeed a crossroads in this Administration. If the President steps up to the plate--and nominates a jurist with the appropriate credentials, intellect, and reverence for the integrity of the Constitution as the unimpeachable law of the land--it could be the genesis of not only a Supreme Court that finally once again begins to reflect the true intent of the founding fathers, but of an overwhelming Republicn sweep in the 2006 elections.
Once the Democrats and the left in general are shown to be the intellectually vacant frauds that they really are, for all the world and the American public to see, the public will make the right decision for its future.
Second chances like this must not be squandered. My guess is that this one will not be.
Thank you Ms. Miers for your service to your country, and for taking one for the team.
Smurfs at war: a fable leading to a Caliphate?
As always, waxes about as eloquently as anyone breathing today. His latest target is the beyond ridiculous UNICEF "Bomb the Smurfs" ad campaign:
I yield to no one in my disdain for the United Nations and all its works, but I did find myself warming up to Unicef the other day. Last week, on Belgian television, the UN children's agency premiered the first adult movie featuring the Smurfs.
By "adult", I don't mean it was a blue movie. Only the characters were blue. But it was an adult movie in the sense that the Smurfs were massacred during an air strike on their village, until, in the final scene, only Baby Smurf is left, weeping alone surrounded by wall-to-wall Smurf corpses.
It's the first Smurf snurf movie.
Well, I thought, say what you like about the UN, but any organisation that wants to bomb the Smurfs can't be all bad. Instead of those wimps at Dudley council banning Piglet like a bunch of nancy boys, why couldn't they make some blockbuster video nuking the Hundred-Acre Wood and leaving Pooh to die in a radioactive Heffalump pit?
My mistake. Apparently Unicef made the short film as a fundraiser to highlight how children are the principal victims of war. As Baby Smurf wails amid the shattered ruins, we see the words: "Don't let war affect the lives of children.
"
Oh, well. It's not clear from the Smurf carnage whether their village is a sovereign jurisdiction - the ultimate blue state - or whether they're merely some hapless minority within a multi-ethnic nation, the Kosovars to Elmo's Slobodan. But either way the warplanes come and blue body parts are exploding all over the village.
Good luck to Unicef and all. But I can't help thinking that, if you are that concerned for children in war zones, you might have done something closer to what real conflict is like in those places. In Rwanda, Sudan and a big chunk of west Africa, air strikes are few and far between.
Instead, millions get hacked to death by machetes. Even on the very borders of Eutopia, hundreds of thousands died in the Balkans in mostly low-tech, non-state-of-the-art ways.
In 2003, Charles Onyango-Obbo wrote a fascinating column in the East African musing on the resurgence of cannibalism, after reports that Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo were making surviving members of their victims' families eat the body parts of their loved ones.
"While colonialism is bad," he said, "the coloniser who arrives by plane, vehicle or ship is better - because he will have to build an airport, road or harbour - than the one who, like the Ugandan army, arrived and withdrew from most of eastern Congo on foot." Just so. If you're going to be attacked, it's best to be attacked by a relatively advanced enemy.
Compared to being force-fed Grandfather Smurf's genitals, having his village strafed in some clinical air strike is about the least worst option for Baby Smurf.
Why would Unicef show such an implausible form of Smurficide ? Well, whether intentionally or not, they are evoking the war that most of their audience - in Belgium and beyond - is opposed to: the Iraq war, where the invader did indeed have an air force.
That's how the average Western "progressive" still conceives of warfare, as something the big bullying Pentagon does to weak victims.
But this week is a week to remember that there are worse things than war that "affect the lives of children". If I were Papa Smurf, I wouldn't want Baby Smurf to grow up in Saddam's Iraq.
I don't mean just because we'd be the beleaguered minority of Smurfistan, to be gassed and shovelled into mass graves.
Even if we were part of Saddam's own approved class living in the Smurfi Triangle, it's still a life permanently fixed between terror and resignation, in which all a parent's hopes for his children are subordinate to the whims of a psycho state.
That Iraq is gone now - not because of Unicef and the other transnational institutions that confer respectability on dictatorships, but because America, Britain and a few others were prepared to go to war.
As the Guardian harrumphed on Saturday: "People who opposed the war in Iraq will find it hard to stomach attempts to present the referendum as a triumph."
Fair enough. For my part, I find it hard to stomach the degrees of support offered to the "insurgency" by George Galloway, John Pilger, Tariq Ali and Michael Moore.
But it's not about what I or the Guardian find hard to stomach. Peripheral though they may be to the concerns of the "peace" crowd, it is in the end about the Iraqi people, and, as with all the previous will-they-won't-they deadlines, at the eleventh hour they managed to rouse themselves and pull it off.
Sixteen out of Iraq's 18 provinces - including Sunni-majority ones - voted for the most liberal, democratic, federal and pluralist constitution in the Middle East.
Sorry to make the Guardian throw up, but that is indeed a "triumph".
Whatever the Americans got wrong, they got one big thing right - that, if you persevered, Iraq had the potential to function as a free society in a part of the world where no such thing has ever existed.
That was a long shot, and much sneered at, not least by British "conservatives".
But Washington judged correctly: given the radicalisation of the Arab world, and the Arabification of the Islamic world, and the Islamification of much of the rest of the world, in the end you have to fix the problem at source.
In his book The Clash Of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington has a section on "Islam's Bloody Borders". "The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts," he writes, "have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims.
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That looping boundary is never not in the news. Last week, it was Nalchik in the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, where the Islamists killed more than 60 people. The week before, it was Bali, again.
Different regimes on the looping boundary try different strategies: in Indonesia, appeasement; in Chechnya, the Russians have reduced Grozny to rubble and still not got anywhere. Pushing back the Islamists on their ever expanding margins will never work. Reforming the heart of the Muslim world just might.
Sometimes war is worth it. And, if you don't think so, look at the opening scenes of that Unicef video - Smurfs singing, dancing, gambolling merrily - and try to imagine living in a Smurf enclave in a province that wants to introduce Sharia.
Yes I am still alive...
Been extremely busy with business in Sao Paulo Brazil. I have been keeping an eye on the "news" as portrayed by CNN, the only game in town. They of course are treating the Saddam Hussein trial as an "illegal" act.
I guess that means the Nurenberg trails were "illegal" too. After all, we need to have compassion for a guy who has murdered hundreds of thousands of political opponents. Especially if it will paint Bush in an inappropriate light.
All I could think of yesterday when Saddam was refusing to give his name were the lyrics:
"Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game...
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Personally this "devil" is not getting much "sympathy" from these quarters.
Glenn Reynolds has a trascript up on the President's response to a question about the potential for an Avian Flu epidemic. The President's answer tells me two things:
- That this has already gotten serious attention at the highest levels of government--and my inference is: it is because the situation is serious.
- That the President is already considering what might be considered by some to be "drastic" measures.
Again, this points to the seriousness of the Avian Flu, should it reach our shores
Q Mr.
President, you've been thinking a lot about pandemic flu and the risks in the United States if that should occur. I was wondering, Secretary Leavitt has said that first responders in the states and local governments are not prepared for something like that. To what extent are you concerned about that after Katrina and Rita?
And is that one of the reasons you're interested in the idea of using defense assets to respond to something as broad and long-lasting as a flu might be?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. Thank you for the question.
I am concerned about avian flu. I am concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world. I am -- I have thought through the scenarios of what an avian flu outbreak could mean.
I tried to get a better handle on what the decision-making process would be by reading Mr. Barry's book on the influenza outbreak in 1918. I would recommend it.
The policy decisions for a President in dealing with an avian flu outbreak are difficult. One example: If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country, and how do you then enforce a quarantine? When -- it's one thing to shut down airplanes; it's another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu.
And who best to be able to effect a quarantine? One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move.
And so that's why I put it on the table.
I think it's an important debate for Congress to have. I noticed the other day, evidently, some governors didn't like it. I understand that.
I was the commander-in-chief of the National Guard, and proudly so, and, frankly, I didn't want the President telling me how to be the commander-in-chief of the Texas Guard. But Congress needs to take a look at circumstances that may need to vest the capacity of the President to move beyond that debate. And one such catastrophe, or one such challenge could be an avian flu outbreak.
Secondly -- wait a minute, this is an important subject. Secondly, during my meetings at the United Nations, not only did I speak about it publicly, I spoke about it privately to as many leaders as I could find, about the need for there to be awareness, one, of the issue; and, two, reporting, rapid reporting to WHO, so that we can deal with a potential pandemic. The reporting needs to be not only on the birds that have fallen ill, but also on tracing the capacity of the virus to go from bird to person, to person.
That's when it gets dangerous, when it goes bird-person-person. And we need to know on a real-time basis as quickly as possible, the facts, so that the scientific community, the world scientific community can analyze the facts and begin to deal with it.
Obviously, the best way to deal with a pandemic is to isolate it and keep it isolated in the region in which it begins.
As you know, there's been a lot of reporting of different flocks that have fallen ill with the H5N1 virus. And we've also got some cases of the virus being transmitted to person, and we're watching very carefully.
Thirdly, the development of a vaccine -- I've spent time with Tony Fauci on the subject.
Obviously, it would be helpful if we had a breakthrough in the capacity to develop a vaccine that would enable us to feel comfortable here at home that not only would first responders be able to be vaccinated, but as many Americans as possible, and people around the world. But, unfortunately, there is a -- we're just not that far down the manufacturing process. And there's a spray, as you know, that can maybe help arrest the spread of the disease, which is in relatively limited supply.
So one of the issues is how do we encourage the manufacturing capacity of the country, and maybe the world, to be prepared to deal with the outbreak of a pandemic. In other words, can we surge enough production to be able to help deal with the issue?
I take this issue very seriously, and I appreciate you bringing it to our attention.
The people of the country ought to rest assured that we're doing everything we can: We're watching it, we're careful, we're in communications with the world. I'm not predicting an outbreak; I'm just suggesting to you that we better be thinking about it. And we are.
And we're more than thinking about it; we're trying to put plans in place, and one of the plans -- back to where your original question came -- was, if we need to take some significant action, how best to do so. And I think the President ought to have all options on the table to understand what the consequences are, but -- all assets on the table -- not options -- assets on the table to be able to deal with something this significant.
Nice that someone's paying attention.
It does suggest, though, that the Bush Administration is thinking of increasing the military role in disaster response.
UPDATE: The notes: "The government's response to the threat of the flu is arguably more important than the hullaballoo over a Supreme Court nominee. Let's see how -- and where -- the press plays these comments.
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And a commenter there adds: "Exercise for the press: What plans do the federal, state, and major municipal governments have in place to deal with an H5N1 pandemic? If a H-to-H transmissible pneumo- and neurotropic virus with 50% mortality arrives in Los Angeles tomorrow, precisely what will be done? This isn't a warplan, it's a public health crisis whose disposition we need to understand *before* it takes place.
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