What Osama really wants...
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| Thu, 07-22-2004 - 11:44am |
http://www.alternet.org/story/19102/
Taking on Imperial Hubris
By Ray McGovern, TomPaine.com. Posted June 30, 2004.
An anonymous CIA analyst has penned a new book that reveals how it's not hatred of our liberal democracy, but hatred of our policies that fuels terrorism.
The book has an apt title: Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. And the author spells out "why." We are losing because of the misguided war on Iraq and the upsurge in terrorism it has engendered.
Sadly, that conclusion was validated last week by the widespread, coordinated attacks by the Iraqi resistance – attacks that brought Vietnam to mind and, specifically, the country-wide "Tet" offensive by Communist forces in early 1968 that made Walter Cronkite and many other Americans realize we had all been badly misled into thinking that that war was winnable.
The final week of formal U.S. occupation of Iraq was a bad one. And the last thing the Bush administration needed was publication of the challenging judgments of a CIA analyst who devoted 17 years to tracking Al Qaeda and other terrorists. That analyst (let's call him Mike) wrote that the Iraqi adventure was "an unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat." He emphasized, "There is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq."
Mike added that the United States has "waged two failed half-wars and, in doing so, left Afghanistan and Iraq seething with anti-U.S. sentiment, fertile grounds for the expansion of Al Qaeda and kindred groups."
Asked yesterday to comment on these biting charges, National Security assistant Condoleezza Rice refused on grounds that she did not know who Anonymous is. Did she not think to ask the CIA? If I had no trouble finding out, certainly she should have none.
Worse still for the administration, during an interview with NBC's Andrea Mitchell on June 23, Mike rubbed salt in White House wounds, subjecting to ridicule the dumbed-down bromide that what motivates bin Laden and his Muslim followers is hatred of our "freedom," our "democracy."
It's the Policy, Stupid!
"It's not hatred of us as a society, it's hatred of our policies," Mike insisted. He gave pride of place to the neuralgic issue of Israel. With candor not often heard on American television, he emphasized "It's very hard in this country to debate policy regarding Israel," adding that bin Laden's "genius" is his ability to exploit those U.S. policies most offensive to Muslims – "Our support for Israel, our presence on the Arabian peninsula, in Afghanistan and Iraq, our support for governments that Muslims believe oppress Muslims."
Asked how bin Laden views the war in Iraq specifically, Mike said bin Laden looks on it as proof of America's hostility toward Muslims; that America "is willing to attack any Muslim country that dares defy it; that it is willing to do almost anything to defend Israel. The war is certainly viewed as an action meant to assist the Israeli state. It is...a godsend for those Muslims who believe as bin Laden does."
Mike drove home this general message again yesterday on ABC's "This Week." He argued that it is U.S. policies that "drive the terrorism," and said failure to change those policies could mean decades of war. Only if the American people learn the truth can more effective policies be fashioned and implemented, he added.
What Sets Mike's Teeth on Edge
Here is where Mike's understated outrage shows through most clearly. The undercurrent in both interviews is that his analysis was offered well before the war but, as he told NBC, "senior bureaucrats in the intelligence community (were unwilling) to take the full truth, an unvarnished truth to the president...Whatever danger was posed by Saddam...was almost irrelevant...the boost that (the war) would give to Al Qaeda was easily seen."
Many experienced intelligence analysts will find it easy to identify with Mike's frustration. Put on your analyst hat for a few minutes and put yourself in his place. You have studied the issue with painstaking professionalism for 17 years and have acquired an expert view of the forces at play and the likely result of this or that policy. You warn, you warn, and you warn, as Mike did. And yet, because of wooden-headedness, stupidity or sycophancy, your superiors disregard your views and you are reduced to looking on helplessly as a calamitous course is set for the country.
Adding insult to injury, you hear Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confess, as he did on June 6 in Singapore, that "The troubling unknown is whether the extremists...are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them. It is quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this."
For self-confident analysts, all this creates powerful incentive to publish their own analysis. Once published there is always a chance it might have some resonance – perhaps even influence. In any event, they will be able to tell their grandchildren: Don't blame me; this is what I tried to get them to understand.
Many of us have been there, done that – including me during the '60s when I had a ringside seat at the crafting of U.S. policy toward Vietnam, while serving as principal CIA analyst of Soviet policy toward Vietnam and China. As U.S. forces got bogged down in the quagmire of Vietnam, senior officials in Washington began to indulge the wishful thought that the Soviets could be pressured or cajoled into "using their influence" to help the United States find a graceful way out – and that, until then, we had to "stay the course."
Though a relatively junior analyst at the time, I had already become convinced that the Soviet Union, in fact, had precious little influence with the Vietnamese Communists, mostly because it had sold them down the river at the Geneva Conference in 1954. If U.S. policymakers thought differently, it was important to send them our own analysis and try to dialogue with them. My conclusions, however, were thought to be unwelcome among policymakers, and so an earlier generation of "senior bureaucrats" refused to send those judgments downtown.
Going Public
In early 1967, I drafted an article in which I documented my case for the judgment that "the USSR's voice counts for little in Hanoi...when it comes to North Vietnam's conduct of the war." After receiving clearance from CIA's Publications Review Board (PRB), the article was published in the scholarly journal, "Problems of Communism." Like me, Anonymous Mike received PRB clearance with no changes required.
While understandable, speculation that clearance of Mike's book betokens an intent by senior CIA officials to take a swipe a those responsible for U.S. mistakes on Iraq and terrorism does not ring true. It is not as unusual as press reports suggest for a serving CIA official to publish a book, although Mike's was, because of the subject, bound to be highly controversial.
In my view, there is good news in the approval he obtained. It is a sign that there remain pockets of professionals at the CIA who are determined to honor their responsibility to protect First Amendment and other Constitutional rights of CIA employees.
I regret to admit that I was not certain this was still a sure thing, in view of the way senior CIA officials have played fast and loose with the Constitution on more consequential matters. Two summers ago, CIA Director George Tenet was a willing co-conspirator in the successful effort by the Bush administration to use counterfeit "intelligence" – including a known forgery – to deceive Congress into ceding its Constitutional power to declare war.
It is a safe assumption, though, that serious CIA analysts are glad to see Mike's book out on the street. His judgments are congruent with what substantive analysts there have been saying for years about Iraq and terrorism – without much sign that policymakers were listening. Perhaps Dr. Rice and other senior officials will get the book and read it. That might help someone like Secretary Rumsfeld, for example, who often refers to the fact that some key factors are "unknown" and/or "unknowable" and complains that he frequently encounters a lack of "situational awareness."
I was embarrassed for Rumsfeld when he was on ABC's "This Week" months ago and tried to field a question about how to reduce the number of terrorists. "How do you persuade people not to become suicide bombers; how do you reduce the number of people attracted to terrorism? No one knows how to reduce that," he complained.
Again, it's the policy. Well before the war in Iraq, CIA analysts provided an assessment intended to educate senior policymakers to the fact that "the forces fueling hatred of the U.S. and fueling Al Qaeda recruiting are not being addressed," and that "the underlying causes that drive terrorists will persist." The assessment cited a Gallup poll of almost 10,000 Muslims in nine countries in which respondents described the United States as "ruthless, aggressive, conceited, arrogant, easily provoked and biased." Again, that was before the attack on Iraq.
Too Little, Too Late?
Over the weekend former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke echoed many of the points made in Mike's book. Clarke said the invasion of Iraq was an "enormous mistake" that is costing untold lives, strengthening Al Qaeda, and breeding a new generation of terrorists. "The hatred that has been engendered by this invasion will last for generations," he added.
Which reminded me: With all due respect – and respect is indeed due the likes of Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil, and Anonymous Mike, who broke fraternity rules in speaking truth – why did they not do so before the war? One of the most depressing facts of the whole experience is the dearth of serving officials who were willing to speak out about the lies while it might have done some good.
Is it legitimate to ask Clarke, O'Neil, and Mike why they waited so long, when – just conceivably – their belated candor might have made a difference? Surely they did not choose to put their publishers preferences as to timing before the cost of "untold lives."
As for intelligence officers, the only ones to blow the whistle publicly before the war are Katherine Gunn of the United Kingdom and Australian intelligence officer Andrew Wilkie. It is a sad commentary that of the hundreds of U.S. intelligence officers with inside knowledge regarding the abuse of intelligence and other indignities regarding Iraq, not one – serving or retired – not one proved willing to risk his/her neck, career, friendships or serene retirement to stave off our country's first war of aggression.
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years from the John F. Kennedy administration to that of George H. W. Bush.

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Renee ~~~
Renee ~~~
This is the only part of your post that I disagree with so please explain why Isreal deserves to be supported and protected by the US. >
This piece explains my opinion on that subject much better than I could explain it myself:
http://www.geocities.com/allies0516/Bruce.html
"Bruce S. Thornton is a professor at Cal State, Fresno. He was a featured guest columnist for FrontPageMag.com on June 14th.
TELL PEOPLE YOU SUPPORT ISRAEL and they often assume that you're either Jewish or a fundamentalist Christian monitoring Israel's starring role in the drama of Apocalypse. As important as ethnic or religious solidarity is, though, supporting Israel is more firmly based on principle, morality, and national interest.
Principle. Israel is a Western society, like ours the heir of Athens and Jerusalem. This means it is a liberal democracy organized politically to protect the rights of individuals and ensure their participation as citizens in the running of the state. Protecting the freedom of the individual person as a person--not as the member of a category--is the primary aim of such a government.
Other features of such a society include: an economic system run to some extent on free-market principles; civilian control of the military; free speech; equality between the sexes; a circumscribed role for religion in government; and a generally secular, rationalist outlook that prizes tolerance and openness rather than the blinkered narrowness of the tribe, clan, or sect. In short, like America Israel is a society of laws rather than powerful men--whether thugs, priests, princes, or bureaucrats-- who monopolize force and run society for their own benefit.
This is the ideal, one that no society, Israel or our own, perfectly realizes. Yet considering that Israel has since its birth lived besieged by incessant aggression against its very existence, the issue is not that Israel compromises on some of these principles in order to survive, but rather that it embodies any of them. An Israeli Arab member of parliament can rise up in the Knesset and publicly criticize the Prime Minister, something he could not do in any other Arab state, at least if he wanted to stay out of jail or survive the night.
As the only liberal democracy in the whole Middle East, then, Israel demands our support-- if we believe in the principle, as we say we do, that such a society is the best way for people to live, no matter what their race, national origin, or religion, for it maximizes the freedom and prosperity of the greatest number of individuals.
Morality. Despite the media's rhetoric of moral equivalence (often the last refuge of the morally bankrupt), there is a clear right and a wrong in this conflict. If we cut through the fog of "checkpoints" and "settlements," we can see clearly the source of the conflict: the Arab attempt to destroy Israel. Does anyone really think that if the Arabs had sincerely accepted Israel in 1948 that the subsequent fifty years would have been as bloody and miserable as they have been for both sides? Quite simply, Israel kills Palestinians and restricts their movements because for fifty years Palestinians have murdered Israelis, egged on by Islamic nations whose populations outnumber Israel 100 to one.
Thus whatever Israel's mistakes or injustices, they have been the byproducts of Israel's attempt to defend its very existence against a sustained, fifty-year assault by terror, guerilla action, and three wholesale military attacks. And whatever the Palestinians have suffered has its ultimate origins in the existence of a critical mass of Arabs who do not accept Israel's right to live and hence compel Israel to defend itself, with all the tragic, unforeseen consequences that always accompany even the just use of force.
The old Greeks understood the moral principle very well: "The doer suffers." He who initiates violence and aggression and threatens another's existence will unleash a defensive response and suffer the consequences. I'm not speaking of the media's "cycle of violence," a phrase that obscures moral responsibility, as though Palestinian murder of civilians and the Israeli defensive response are natural phenomena like the seasons. Violence used to defend is morally different from violence used to destroy.
Finally, there is one critical moral distinction that needs to be affirmed: the inadvertent death of civilians resulting from the use of force to defend one's self is utterly and absolutely different from the planned targeting of civilians to destroy another. A man who shoots at your family while hiding behind his own bears all the responsibility if his family is killed when you defend yourself.
Let us state once more the obvious: if Palestinians stop killing Israelis, Palestinians will stop dying. But the reverse is not true: Oslo has shown that the more Israel accommodates Palestinian aspirations, the more Israelis who will die.
National Interest. In the short-term, defending Israel might appear to be contrary to our national interests. After all, there is no oil in Israel, and supporting her annoys those larger, more strategically placed nations who do possess oil. But this way of thinking is dangerously shortsighted.
Our national interests are more easily served and defended the more liberal democracies there are. Societies of free citizens and free markets are more stable and peaceful, and less prone to aggression against their neighbors. Given that there are no genuinely free societies in the Middle East, it is definitely in our national interest to defend and support a trusted and loyal democratic ally, and to work at creating more such democracies in the region. An ally like Saudi Arabia might serve our short-term interests, but its chronic instability and dysfunctional political order is a time bomb that someday will explode in our faces.
More important, though, after 9/11 we now know that it is very much in our interests to defeat terror, and Israel is the key battleground in the war on terror. Quite simply, if homicide-bombers work in Israel, or even appear to be working, then the rest of the world will regularly suffer from such attacks. Those who think terror is a legitimate instrument for achieving their aims must be utterly and thoroughly defeated and convinced that terror will never result in anything other than their own destruction.
All of us, then, should support Israel--all of us, that is, who believe in a world ruled by law and respectful of individual freedom. As rare and fragile a plant as such freedom has been in human history, principle, morality, and interest all tell us that we cannot afford to see it uprooted anywhere."
Do you know Israeli soldiers molest and torture palestinian youths and kids. Arab's in Palestine feel that they are fighting for their homes and land. Pregnant arab women are stabbed so Israel soldiers don't have to face one more fighter. There are atrocities on both side. I think US politicians likes the countries to keep fighting so they can remain powerful in the world, but US citizens are too naive.
There is propaganda from both sides. You believe what you want to, and I can only believe what I am able to learn by watching and reading. IMO Palestinians mainly use terrorism (targeted at civilians) to achieve their goals, while Israel goes after legitimate military targets (albeit with civilian casualties). But of course this is an area of debate in which neither side has a chance of convincing the other, which is why I didn't really want to go into it in the first place. I stand by my original point, which is that even if America's support of Israel IS wrong and misguided (which I don't believe), OBL has no right or justification to slaughter innocent civilians in order to try and terrorize us into changing the policy. Period. His chosen means negate whatever validity he may or may not have in his goals, IMO.
I can respect the author's argument.
"There is propaganda from both sides."
Ok, make that three problems.
This is where we have a fundamental difference. I believe freedom and self-determination is a universal human desire, not one the US is "imposing" on anyone. History has shown this to be the case time and time again, IMO. In other words, your idea of "converting" is my idea of "liberating".
Again, a fundamental difference. I believe favoritism SHOULD be shown towards those who do not use terrorism to further their ideals over those who do. The future of the planet DEMANDS that this type of favoritism be shown, IMO. This is our position-we are willing to try and work toward compromise with those Palestinians who denounce terrorism, but we will not bow to the brutal tactics of those who support it and foster it, and neither should Israel.
I don't doubt that you are correct about the Israelis lack of innocence. Unfortunately it is impossible to avoid abuses on both sides in a conflict such as this. On balance however I still believe we are on the right side of the issue. I don't agree that the US must stop taking sides. Complete neutrality rarely accomplishes anything-yes, we should be fair, as we have been in condemning the wall for example. But the US has every right and duty to try and protect and further its own national security interests in the region.
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Why don't you answer my question about US supporting Pakistan and the leader Mussarrafe who was supporting the terrorists before 9/11. Why did it team up with Pakistan instead of India to fight against terrorism. Why did it support a terrorist state instead of a democracy? Can you answer me? Why is American population turning a blind eye to US foreign policy in that regard?
The US is not teaming up with Pakistan AGAINST India. We are forcing Pakistan to cooperate with our efforts because we need their help given the fact that much of al quaeda's activities are centered in the Afghan Pakistan border regions. We are not siding with Musharraf against India, we are putting the screws to Musharraf to be on our side or else, and he wisely chose the right path. IMO the fact that Musharraf is now aiding us in the fight against terrorism rather than supporting it can only benefit us all. How this means we are taking Pakistan's side against India I have no idea. As far as I know India is on our side in this matter as well. Perhaps you have information to the contrary, I'd be interested in hearing it.
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