Right Wing Nut House

To mark Independence Day, al-Qaeda #2 Ayman Zawahiri (just another country doctor turned terrorist) has issued a 90 minute video with a stirring call for Muslims to back the terrorists in Iraq. In fact, the tape also includes a piece from the Islamic State of Iraq terror group - an al-Qaeda “inspired” outfit that Zawahiri seems to be supporting and urging the entire Muslim world to help. This despite assurances by some in the west that al-Qaeda has no presence in Iraq and that every time someone in the Administration says so, they are lying.

Who to believe? Those lying Bushies or the country doctor?

As Americans celebrate the 4th of July today, Al Qaeda’s top deputy Ayman Zawahiri is appearing in a new internet video praising jihadi fighters in Iraq and elsewhere. Dressed in all white and sitting before a news studio background, Zawahiri warns Americans that “Today, the wind - by grace of Allah - is blowing against Washington.”

In the hour and half long video, which surfaced today on the website Strategic Translations, a translation and terror analysis firm, Zawahiri urges his followers to hurry to Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Somalia.

He also offers a message of confidence to the jihadi fighters in prison saying that victory in Iraq and Afghanistan will come soon.

“You must be patient and steadfast,” he says. “Rejoice, for victory is near, with Allah’s permission, and the herds of crusaders have begun to split up and their sole concern has become searching for a way out.”

Entitled “The Advice of One Concerned,” the video has English subtitles and includes clips from other videos and news broadcasts, including one from Al Furqan, the video production arm of the Islamic State of Iraq.

Thankfully, we don’t have to “search” very hard for a way out at all. Just do what the Democrats want and all will be well.

Beyond the words on the tape - and coming on the heels of several botched terrorist attacks in the UK and here - there’s always the thought that this particular tape will trigger a cell somewhere to go into action. And given we’ve already had some warnings about attacks this summer, one certainly hopes that DHS Director Chertoff has a little different attitude about terrorists operating in this country than his rather laid back approach to illegal immigrants. Given some of his recent statements, I’m not so sure.

Meanwhile, the Brits are waking up to the fact that warnings about these recent failed attacks were coming from some very interesting sources. Canon Andrew White, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Reconciliation in the Middle East and the vicar of St. George’s (Anglican) Church in Baghdad came face to face with pure evil at a meeting in Jordan two months ago where a specific warning was issued regarding the most recent attacks in the UK:

Dear Friends,

Just over two months ago I wrote in my Update that I had the worst meeting in my life. I said I have seen the Devil today. I met this awful man in Amman prior to our last major meeting in Baghdad.

I referred to him as the Devil and I even refused to continue the meeting and told the Sheikh who had brought him to me never to let me meet him again.

He told me that they were going to start killing in the UK then the USA. One sentence I remembered but did not understand was “those who cure you will kill you”.

I did not understand this then but in the last two days since the terrorist activities in the UK were brought to a head I was not surprised when there were reports that those arrested were all involved in the health services.

Those terrible words “those who cure you will kill you” suddenly made sense.

The litany of planned killing was horrendous. I do not know why I was told this by an Iraqi Sunni living then in Syria. I passed on this information to our FCO. I then learned that this person was a senior Al Qaeda figure and so was indeed bent on the destruction of innocent lives.

I will never forget this meeting. It remains the worst I have ever had. I hope I never have one like it again.

I find it interesting that this gentleman of the cloth - a liberal’s liberal judging by his record of opposing US-UK actions in the entire Middle East - would easily make the leap of faith and have the intellectual honesty to identify this al-Qaeda agent as “the Devil.” That puts him one step beyond 95% of the liberals in this country who can never seem to make that determination of evil regarding the nature of the enemy. Such black and white concepts aren’t “nuanced” or complicated enough. And what’s the point of being a liberal if you can’t trivialize the momentous and complicate the obvious>?

And as information continues to emerge about the UK terror plotters, one is struck by the prescience of the last National Intelligence Estimate from Iraq that predicted these kind of “do-it-yourself” terror cells that would use al-Qaeda ideology as an inspiration rather than receiving direct aid from the terrorist groups. It should be noted also that the NIE predicted that terrorists trained or blooded in Iraq would begin to inspire and perhaps even advise these homegrown jihadis. Judging by some of the remarks by Zawahiri on this new video, it appears that the al-Qaeda leader is trying to claim these groups as al-Qaeda’s own despite the fact that they have not given them any assistance. What that portends for the future can only be guessed at.

This brings up an issue that I’ve wrestled with since the beginning of the War on Terror: Does confronting the terrorists in and of itself breed more terrorists?

This question has not received the attention it deserves from either the right or the left. At the heart of the query is a big “what if;” if we had not gone into Afghanistan and subsequently Iraq and either responded as a President Gore might have by lobbing a few cruise missiles into al-Qaeda training camps following the 9/11 attacks (Gore may very well have invaded Afghanistan also) or done virtually nothing, what would the state of the worldwide jihad be today? In other words, would it have been better to simply acknowledge that we are going to be attacked every once and a while and concentrate our efforts on policing and prevention?

I throw this out simply to start a discussion not as an indication of what I believe. Given the success we’ve had worldwide in cracking al-Qaeda cells in many major cities around the world, as well as stifling their funding mechanisms, would essentially non-violent methods have worked just as efficiently while, at the same time, not creating additional terrorists for us to deal with?

One might think this is a sophomoric intellectual exercise given we can’t go back and change history. But very soon, following at least a partial withdrawal from Iraq, we are going to have to take a step back and figure out “what’s next?” I doubt very much whether this current crew in charge of our security has done much thinking along these lines so perhaps we should goose them a bit to start seriously considering our options.

For myself, I have no doubt that once we are hit again - and hit again we will be - we will be faced with decisions perhaps more momentous than our decision to go for regime change in Iraq. If confronting terrorism will always breed more terrorists anyway, perhaps continuing to attack the state sponsors of terrorism would be an exercise in futility given the nature of jihad today - not centrally organized and largely home grown. But can the will be summoned to resist what will surely be enormous pressure to hit back at one of these terrorist sponsors?

I’m not the answer man here - just someone with a lot of questions and who is very uneasy given our experiences with fighting terrorism so far. I’d be pleased if as many of you as possible shared your thoughts on this.

I have removed comment moderation to get a discussion going.

I don’t know why some on the left insist on believing that they can impress the hell out of the rest of us lowly, scaredy cat peons by sticking out their chest and trumpeting to the skies how unafraid they are of terrorism and how anyone who even glances at a TV to find out what’s going on in London and Scotland is a moronic pants-wetter. All they are doing is making themselves look like idiots.

They laughably presuppose that our interest denotes fear. Why would they do that? Is it that their own carefully crafted, dismissive attitude toward attacks and potential attacks of this sort is actually designed to prove some kind of superiority they may feel toward the rest of us as far as having an excess of courage and wisdom ? How pathetic - I mean, truly pathetic this is. It shows an emotional immaturity and childlike desire to be recognized that in any other context would call for serious mental health intervention. Instead, they are asked on television as guests of Keith Olbermann:

Whom do you call on in a pinch for expertise about jihadist plots if you’re a guy who hasn’t taken terrorism seriously since 9/11? Why, a guy who hasn’t taken terrorism seriously since before 9/11, of course. It’s a segment six years in the making, starting with Crazy Larry’s now-legendary “stop worrying about terror” op-ed published in July 2001 and continuing through to this morning when he wowed the dKos faithful by pronouncing the car-bomb plot a “crock of crap.”

Olby seems a bit subdued here aside from an obligatory sneer at the “media nodding-head dolls” who don’t have the guts to embrace their paranoia the way he does. Eschewing his usual Trutherish shtick in these circumstances, he opts instead for a weak gotcha about how this single incident puts the lie to Bush’s claim that we’re fighting them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them at home. No mention of the absence of attacks on America since the invasion, no acknowledgment that the guys behind this were probably homegrown and thus already here — the Murrow of our time doesn’t let such trivia get in the way of a good talking point. As for Larry, he sniffs about “yuppie terrorists” who drive Mercedes but naturally doesn’t mention that the Mercedes was ten years old, which means it probably cost considerably less than 10 grand assuming it was purchased recently. He also scoffs at the idea that a bomb this crude could have done much more than torch the car itself and maybe singe a few people within 20 or 30 feet.

For such a dangerous physical specimen as Larry Johnson - who knows the guys who killed cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar (just ask him) - it may be simple for him to exhibit the cool, unflappable demeanor of a counter-terrorism warrior and penetrating analyst on the battle against radical Islamists.

Except that Larry appears to have put on a few pounds since his terrorist killing days and his ability as an analyst is, well - a little less than prescient. Recall our Larry writing less than 60 days before 9/11 that terrorism was far down the list of things we should be worrying about. And then, his take on this most recent incident, informing us that the terrorists were incompetent boobs who couldn’t harm a fly.

Ooops:

The (left-leaning) weapons experts at Danger Room, who are taking this very seriously, beg to differ, as does ABC News, which was told by British officials that the explosion would have been lethal within a “several hundred yard radius.” And then there’s this:

The cell phone had received at least two calls, which should have detonated several gallons of gasoline, but when the calls came in, the bomb failed to go off, the official said.
Had it done so, that blast then would have ignited six to eight tanks of propane in a mist to make a fuel-air explosion, creating a fireball the size of a small house and propelling 18 to 20 boxes of roofing nails around a large area at bullet speed, counterterrorism officials said.

Incompetence? Or just plain dumb luck that many of the 1700 people attending “Ladies Night at Tiger, Tiger escaped with their lives? For some on the left, it doesn’t matter. Even if the bomb had gone off, they still wouldn’t be “scared” and would feel a juvenile sense of superiority over the rest of us bed wetting yip-yips. All because most of us show a healthy amount of interest in this latest attempt by radicals to make Islamic Rage Boy feel a lot better.

The fact that there have been three attempted attacks in the last 24 hours doesn’t matter. One might wonder how many attacks or attempted attacks it would take before some of our lefty friends would deem it appropriate and give us permission to glance at the news and find out what the hell is going on without accusing us of being children cowering against the darkness.

We’ve seen this from the left before, of course. Our “inordinate fear of communism” was a meme used by liberals to show how brave they truly were while us righties were just a bunch of goober chewing, know nothing, bible thumping yawpers. Except while they were busy proving how unafraid they were of communists, conservatives supported leaders who actually confronted and defeated them.

Sound familiar?

Albert Camus wrote “The innocent is the person who explains nothing.” This rather opaque observation describes the left’s increasing stridency when alluding to their guiltlessness in undermining the morale of the American people for carrying on the War in Iraq. In fact, liberals are employing a strategy that attempts to obscure their stated desire that the United States lose the war while at the same time, deflecting attention from a 4 year effort to convince the American people that trying to bring democracy to Iraq was a hopeless exercise in wishful thinking and that the war has been a lost cause from the start.

They deny it, of course. In fact, they get downright nasty if you even try and point it out. They will whine that their criticisms of the war effort have been misconstrued. They were simply trying to help win the war by pointing out the incompetence and wrongheadedness of the Bush Administration. They really had the US interests at heart all along.

Yes, I have an eight foot invisible rabbit as a friend too.

Never wanting for originality and creativity in seeking to defend themselves, the left is employing a tactic that in another time and other circumstances, they profess to abhor. They have adopted the doctrine of preemption while at the same time, using a tried and true favorite analogy that ties the right’s criticism of their curious sense of patriotism to the Nazis.

They claim the right is sharpening their knives in anticipation of employing a “stabbed in the back” defense for our inevitable defeat in Iraq.

It is gratifying that the left has adopted this meme preemptively. Perhaps they can be persuaded to apply pre-emption to other, more important areas of debate such as the well being and survival of the United States. Then again, I haven’t seen any pigs flying lately so I would guess we’ll have to do without any change of heart in that quarter.

This won’t be the first time the left has employed preemption as a tactic in order to go on the offensive against the Bush Administration and the right. You will recall in the immediate - and I mean immediate - aftermath of Katrina, the left was in full throated howl regarding the incompetence and uncaring nature of the relief effort less than 24 hours after hurricane force winds had died down in the stricken city of New Orleans. At a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans were paying attention to the victims of this natural disaster, the left chose to open a vicious personal attack on the President that was unprecedented in modern history in the aftermath of a calamity. Relying on media reports that later turned out to be bogus as well as trotting out the racial angle, and an anti-war meme about the National Guard to boot, the Katrina Narrative was born. The left was able to define the parameters of the debate over the relief effort simply by getting there first with the most ammunition - whether that ammo was based on facts or not.

But this latest attempt at preemption is designed to fulfill the dual purpose of defending the indefensible and changing the dynamic of any postwar debate by raising the specter of conservatives as Nazis. I must say it is a brilliant strategy in that it seeks to completely absolve liberals from any kind of responsibility for undermining the confidence of the American people in the President and the war as well as making themselves appear as the victim of conservative storm troopers.

As far as I can tell, this meme first saw the light of day a year ago in an article by Kevin Baker in Harpers. After helpfully giving the reader some background on the origin of the “stabbed in the back” legend - a legend not started by the National Socialists but rather by the German High Command’s Luddendorf and Von Hindenberg to excuse their defeat by blaming “socialists” in the new Weimer government - Baker connects the theme to modern conservatives and the idea that the very first use of the stabbed in the back (dolchstosslegende) attack on the left was the result of the right’s paranoid fantasies about a “betrayal” at Yalta by FDR:

The right wing’s dolchstosslegende was a small but fateful conspiracy, engineered through “secret diplomacy” at Yalta. Its linchpin was Hiss, a junior State Department aide at Yalta who was now described as a major architect of the pact. Hiss was a perfect villain for the right’s purposes. He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern intellectual right down to his name—and, by implication, possibly a homosexual. He had been publicly exposed by that relentlessly regular guy, Dick Nixon, as an unnatural, un-American element who had used his wiles to sway all of his superiors in the Crimea.

Just how he had accomplished this was never detailed, but it didn’t matter; specificity is anathema to any myth. Bullitt and an equally flamboyant opportunist of the period, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, offered a more general explanation. The Democrats, Mrs. Luce had already charged, “will not, or dare not, tell us the commitments that were overtly or secretly made in moments of war’s extermination by a mortally ill President, and perhaps mortally scared State Department advisers.”

The idea of the “dying President” at Yalta was plausible to much of the public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt looking suddenly, shockingly gaunt and exhausted throughout much of the last year of his life. To the right wing—which had conducted a whispering campaign against Roosevelt throughout his term in office, claiming that his real affliction was not polio but syphilis, and that he, his wife, and various advisers, including Hopkins, were “secret Jews” and Soviet agents—it all made perfect sense. To the many Americans who still loved Roosevelt and whose votes the Republicans needed, FDR himself could now become the Siegfried figure, a dying hero betrayed by the shady, unnatural Hiss.

Note that Baker skillfully mixes legitimate criticisms of Yalta with the paranoid right’s insistence of a conspiracy. For instance, Baker relies on FDR admirers to debunk the notion that Roosevelt was in any way hampered by his declining health. But historians are not of one mind on the issue, most notably Michael Beschloss

Roosevelt’s illnesses toward the end of the war were well known to his inner circle, and Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were openly defying the president by late 1944. And though Beschloss says in his book that Roosevelt wasn’t as easygoing with Stalin as some have suggested, he acknowledges that FDR’s health couldn’t help but affect talks at the 1945 Yalta Conference and afterwards.

“At the very end, Roosevelt was not what he was,” he said. “But he felt he should delay [making certain policy decisions] until the last possible minute.” The catch was, when FDR died in April 1945, nobody knew exactly what he had planned to do, which forced Truman into a quick learning curve.

Baker’s point about Yalta - that it was the best deal that could be gotten at the time - was true up to a point. Should FDR have known that Stalin had no intention of abiding by certain terms of the agreement relating to free elections in Eastern Europe? Roosevelt was no starry eyed worshipper of Stalin and knew perfectly well what the Soviet dictator was capable of. Since we can rule out naivete we are left with cynicism - signing a document that FDR knew would be honored in the breach. This, in fact, was the responsible criticism of the agreement coming from the right. I happen to agree (others don’t) that FDR got the best deal possible at Yalta and that it is over the top to suggest we “sacrificed” Eastern Europe. But there is little doubt that the agreement itself gave Stalin a free hand to meddle in post war elections - especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

We could go on about Yalta as an historical event but Baker used it to highlight what he saw as the original version of the stabbed in the back theme used by the right. No doubt the Birchers, the isolationists, and even some mainstream Republicans signed on to this paranoia. But to compare the right at the time of Robert Taft to the right of today is extraordinarily stupid. With the exception of a few mossbacks, conservatism has evolved far beyond the narrow strictures of the 1950’s with its deadening conformist orthodoxy to become a dynamic intellectual force for change. Even today, with the movement in disarray and the Republican party without a clue, there is incredible dynamism to be found in conservative thought. How that will translate into change and reform is still an unknown but to compare today’s conservatives with the “Who Lost China?” crowd is repulsive and ignorant to boot.

Baker could care less if his exaggerated myth making about conservatives is accurate because he’s not out to prove anything about Yalta, or Viet Nam, or any other historical event except as they can be used to buttress his thesis that the coming post-war debate on Iraq will try and pin the blame for any defeat on the left. But there is a subtle yet significant difference that Baker and others on the left are failing to make clear when preemptively accusing conservatives of contemplating perfidious accusations regarding the left’s loyalty. And that is quite simply, no responsible conservative I know is blaming the left for the monumental blunders, mistakes in judgment, errors of omission and commission made by the Bush Administration in the prosecution of the military aspects of the war in Iraq. The blame there rests solely and exclusively with the President and his people.

What I and I hope other conservatives will blame the left for is a deliberate, coordinated effort to undermine the confidence of the American people in the war by carrying out a campaign of personal destruction against President Bush while positing several crazy, paranoid conspiracy theories of their own.

(Note: I am not going to accuse the media of the same tactics because I believe reporting from Iraq - which has been abominable - can be explained by the fact that this conflict has proven to be impossible to cover in any traditional sense. With 74 journalists killed in Iraq since 2003, the western press has not only been forced to rely on stringers of unknown ability and whose loyalties can only be guessed at but also, they have been extremely limited in their ability to supply background and context to the story of the war. This is a story begging to be told and I suspect it will be soon enough.)

Dinesh D’Souza (I know he’s a bomb thrower but I’m only quoting his research into leftist thoughts on Iraq) supplies some of the evidence to make my case:

It seems that there are many on the left who want Bush to lose in Iraq. “The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible,” Gwyne Dyer writes in a recent book. Michael Moore claims that “the Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘the enemy.’ They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.”

Moore may be right, but what’s striking is that he appears to be cheering them on. He is not unique in his sentiments. “I have a confession,” Gary Kamiya wrote on salon.com after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I have at times secretly wished for things to go wrong, wished for the Iraqis to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage.”

Indeed there are many on the left who seem to hope and work for the war in Iraq to end in dismal failure. Susan Watkins, editor of the New Left Review, affirms that “U.S.-led forces have no business in Iraq” and “the Iraqi people have every right to drive them out.” Political scientist Robert Jensen argues that the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq “and that’s a good thing. I welcome the U.S. defeat.” Sentiments such as this have been expressed by leftists like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Markos Moulitsas.

I agree with Glenn Reynolds that much of this defeatist wish making - a theme that has endured since the war even started - is really all about Bush and the left’s utter and complete hatred of anything and everything he has ever done.

They have posited conspiracy theories involving the wildest, most ridiculous charges of vote stealing in both 2000 and 2004. In fact, one could say that the number one goal of the left these past 6 years has been to delegitimize the President of the United States as the rightfully elected leader of the country. The exaggerated and bogus narratives liberals have used to “explain” why we went into Iraq - from enriching Bush and his cronies to revenge for Saddam’s attempt on his father’s life - would have been laughed out of existence a decade ago but have been given credence by both rabid dog bloggers and mainstream Democrats alike. (The paranoid nature of these conspiracy theories mirror the same nonsense brought out by Baker above.)

And it has worked like a charm. The integrity of the President, his motives, and everything that a Chief Executive depends on to carry out the duties of his office, has been systematically undermined by the most hysterically overwrought charges of “fascism” on the home front and “misleading us into war” overseas. It is an easy step to make from there to preemptively defend yourself using what is basically a Nazi analogy while denying something that no one is actually accusing you of doing. If the war is to be “lost” (and liberals will make damn sure that no matter what happens, they will find themselves in agreement with the enemy and a loss it will be), the strategies of the Bush Administration will be to blame. But please don’t play the innocent when it comes to trying your damndest to destroy the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the Administration.

I’m not ignoring the correlation between everything that has gone wrong in Iraq and a loss of will of the people to continue what by all accounts has been a botched effort to win the peace. But one is forced to wonder if the people would have been more forgiving of the blunders and would be sticking with the Administration today in much larger numbers if the left hadn’t been insidiously chopping the President off at the knees by falsely accusing him of every perfidy known to man.

Jonah Goldberg wonders if the stabbed in the back meme isn’t just a lot of puffery. He responds to a Ross Douhat post where the Atlantic Online blogger uses the Nazi analogy approvingly:

Now, it’s nothing new for liberals to draw invidious comparisons between American conservatives and Nazis, but I’m not clear why Ross so gamely goes along with it. If you read his post today, he uses the “stabbed in the back” phrase uncritically. Why? Why not just talk about the Vietnam syndrome? Or media bashing? Which, after all, is what he’s really talking about anyway. I’m not reflexively opposed to the comparison to the end of WWI Germany, but nobody’s really tried to make it in any serious way. The assertion has simply caught on. In that sense it really is a meme, an idea that spreads around because of its superficial seductiveness alone. (Oh and please spare me the emails from people who seem to know what I write in my book better than I do. You don’t).

And speaking of the Vietnam syndrome, I think Ross is basically wrong when he says that the Vietnam syndrome didn’t help conservatives. Vietnam saturated American politics in myriad ways that helped the Reaganite Right, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, become the party of American confidence. “Morning in America” makes little sense without Vietnam. This is not to say that I think blaming the liberal media is a particularly persuasive explanation on the merits for failure in Iraq (if we fail), but it’s far from clear that an American defeat in Iraq helps those Democrats who seemed, fair or not, determined to make failure a self-fulfilling prophecy. He may be right that if we fail in Iraq, conservatives will shrink their appeal if they blame anyone but themselves. But my guess is that the psychological and geostraategic fallout from failure will be sufficiently enormous and complex that nobody can predict who comes out a winner or a loser from it.

Does the constant drumbeat from the left predicting failure or saying outright we’ve already failed have an effect on the people’s morale and consequently their support for continuing the effort in Iraq? Are they seriously trying to deny that this hasn’t been a deliberate effort to sap the confidence and will of the American people? I think they are. And the way they are doing it is by changing the subject to one where they posit themselves as victims of the right wing smear machine not as perpetrators of actions that by any standard has given aid and comfort to the enemy - who, after all actually counted on the left to perform in this manner since it was the only possible way they could be victorious.

Nice try but it won’t wash.

Every action taken by al-Qaeda, the insurgents, and the militias has been with one eye glued to western media to see how their useful idiots on the left have been reacting to the heartless brutality in killing so many of the innocent thus making Iraq an extraordinarily difficult place to govern. Their strategy has worked to perfection. The left has predictably played their role as destroyer of the people’s will while the Bush Administration has obliged them by committing one mistake after another in trying to defeat them. The combination has been unbeatable - for the enemy.

So yes, blame Bush and his people for what they should be blamed for; the incompetent prosecution of an ill-planned war. But if blaming the left for deliberately seeking to break the will of the American people to carry on the struggle to at least the point we could leave behind some semblance of a viable Iraqi state means that I will be called a back stabber, allow me to coin a phrase: Bring It On.

There has been no greater boon to historians and others seeking the truth of government actions than the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI and Intel agencies hate it. Bureaucrats despise it - mostly because it piles on lots of extra paperwork duties. And Administrations from LBJ’s White House to the present have been embarrassed by what researchers - professional and amateur - have been able to bring to light.

The latest FOIA bombshell comes to us via Judicial Watch. You may recall these folks from the Clinton scandals, specifically their assistance to Paula Jones. At that time, the left accused them of being a right wing smear machine funded by Richard Mellon Scaife.

I wonder what the left is saying about them today?

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released new documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) related to the “expeditious departure” of Saudi nationals, including members of the bin Laden family, from the United States following the 9/11 attacks. According to one of the formerly confidential documents, dated 9/21/2001, terrorist Osama bin Laden may have chartered one of the Saudi flights.

The document states: “ON 9/19/01, A 727 PLANE LEFT LAX, RYAN FLT #441 TO ORLANDO, FL W/ETA (estimated time of arrival) OF 4-5PM. THE PLANE WAS CHARTERED EITHER BY THE SAUDI ARABIAN ROYAL FAMILY OR OSAMA BIN LADEN…THE LA FBI SEARCHED THE PLANE [REDACTED] LUGGAGE, OF WHICH NOTHING UNUSUAL WAS FOUND.” The plane was allowed to depart the United States after making four stops to pick up passengers, ultimately landing in Paris where all passengers disembarked on 9/20/01, according to the document.

Overall, the FBI’s most recent document production includes details of the six flights between 9/14 and 9/24 that evacuated Saudi royals and bin Laden family members. The documents also contain brief interview summaries and occasional notes from intelligence analysts concerning the cursory screening performed prior to the departures. According to the FBI documents, incredibly not a single Saudi national nor any of the bin Laden family members possessed any information of investigative value.

This is more than curious. It is suspicious. At a National Security Council meeting at 3:30 PM on 9/11, CIA Chief George Tenet said that it was “virtually certain” that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were behind the attacks. FBI Director Mueller was also at this meeting and heard Tenet’s analysis, including the NSA’s interception of al-Qaeda communications revealing the terrorists congratulating one another on the success of the operation. (Even the more cautious 9/11 Commission said of this meeting “At about 3:15, President Bush met with his principal advisers through a secure video teleconference. Rice said President Bush began the meeting with the words, “We’re at war,” and that Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said the agency was still assessing who was responsible, but the early signs all pointed to al Qaeda.”)

So if the US government had even an inkling that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, why did they allow a flight out of the country carrying Osama bin Laden? Already a wanted man for the embassy bombings in Africa, what possible excuse involving stupidity, incompetence, or any other human failing could account for this monumental blunder?

Let’s ask Richard Clark:

First, we found no evidence that any flights of Saudi nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopening of national airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001.24 To the contrary, every flight we have identified occurred after national airspace reopened.25

Second, we found no evidence of political intervention. We found no evidence that anyone at the White House above the level of Richard Clarke participated in a decision on the departure of Saudi nationals. The issue came up in one of the many video teleconferences of the interagency group Clarke chaired, and Clarke said he approved of how the FBI was dealing with the matter when it came up for interagency discussion at his level. Clarke told us, “I asked the FBI, Dale Watson . . . to handle that, to check to see if that was all right with them, to see if they wanted access to any of these people, and to get back to me. And if they had no objections, it would be fine with me.” Clarke added, “I have no recollection of clearing it with anybody at the White House.”26

Although White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card remembered someone telling him about the Saudi request shortly after 9/11, he said he had not talked to the Saudis and did not ask anyone to do anything about it. The President and Vice President told us they were not aware of the issue at all until it surfaced much later in the media. None of the officials we interviewed recalled any intervention or direction on this matter from any political appointee.27

To make matters worse, the FBI apparently did not do a thorough job of searching and interrogating the Saudis on those flights - even if Osama was not among them:

Overall, the FBI’s most recent document production includes details of the six flights between 9/14 and 9/24 that evacuated Saudi royals and bin Laden family members. The documents also contain brief interview summaries and occasional notes from intelligence analysts concerning the cursory screening performed prior to the departures. According to the FBI documents, incredibly not a single Saudi national nor any of the bin Laden family members possessed any information of investigative value.

Moreover, the documents contain numerous errors and inconsistencies which call to question the thoroughness of the FBI’s investigation of the Saudi flights. For example, on one document, the FBI claims to have interviewed 20 of 23 passengers on the Ryan International Airlines flight (commonly referred to as the “Bin Laden Family Flight”). On another document, the FBI claims to have interviewed 15 of 22 passengers on the same flight.

It bears repeating that 9/11 Cassandra Richard Clark appears to be responsible for allowing these flights to begin with. Sort of puts a dent in Mr. Clark’s self-proclaimed anti-terrorism bona fides, no? Maybe the next time he shows up on one of the Sunday morning talkies, some intrepid journalist will ask him about this?

Not likely.

Perhaps most shocking to me is that the FBI failed at the most basic level of investigative competence possible; they seemed not to be curious about who was on those flights and what they might know about 9/11. I realize this will bring the 9/11 kooks and loons out of the closet with explanations of the Bush family’s close ties to the Saudis and how they wanted Osama to escape anyway. Unfortunately for them, Richard Clark (no friend of Bush, my tin-foil hat wearing friends) appears to be the highest level government official who knew of these flights in advance and authorized them. There is zero evidence that Bush or Cheney knew of these charters or authorized them in any way.

Another nagging question is what the 9/11 Commission staffers made of these memos when they read them? One would think that a mention of Osama Bin Laden in an FBI report on the Saudi flights would have raised every red flag possible and led to hauling Mueller, Clark, and the investigating agents before the Commission to explain themselves. The fact that Commission staffers either missed these reports or never acted upon them is just more evidence that the Commission itself had flawed investigative procedures.

Or they never saw the reports at all. This raises other, more troubling questions, about what else the FBI failed to give the Commission.

I will say that the idea that Osama was in the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 seems implausible. But given the incompetence of our intelligence, counter intelligence, administrative, and political national security infrastructure that was exposed by 9/11, it is not out of the realm of the impossible.

UPDATE AND AN APOLOGY - SORT OF

This report has been denied outright by the FBI who assures us that they investigated the Saudis thoroughly before allowing them to leave.

While I have no doubt that the Osama angle has been overblown - and I apologize to my readers for being dumb enough to forget what Neo was kind enough to point out in the comments; that Osama was in Afghanistan just hours after the towers fell answering questions about the attack, I still think the Judicial Watch reports raise difficult questions for the FBI and, by extension, the 9/11 Commission.

But my reaction to the idea that Osama may have been on one of the planes or even that he may have chartered one of the flights was so wrong as to be laughable. For that, I apologize.

There is a very good reason I don’t write about the war as much as I used to. Well, there are actually a couple of reasons.

First, I don’t have much of anything to say. Those of you who have stuck with me on this site know my ambivalence about the current mission; that I have absolutely no faith in the Iraqi government to validate the sacrifices our troops are making by doing the things vitally necessary to create a viable, multi-sectarian Iraqi state. The last time I looked, this is still the goal of the mission in Iraq and the government of Nouri al-Maliki is doing everything it can to help that mission fail. The Shias are in control and have no desire to share power. Thus, every single political benchmark that the Administration has laid out for the Iraqi government to achieve in order to measure success is not being met.

It remains to be seen whether Bush will make good on his promise to the American people that if the Iraqi government failed to achieve the political goals he and Maliki agreed upon in Jordan last year, he would start withdrawing the troops, leaving the Iraqi Prime Minister hanging, hoisted on his own sectarian petard.

Another reason I don’t write about the war is that the commenters on this site are broken records. They say the same things in support or opposition of our efforts time and time again regardless of what I write about. That is why comments have been disabled on this post. I’m sick of hearing for the gazillionth time that Bush is an idiot or I’m an idiot for not supporting everything our President does. Not one iota of originality seeps into the discussion. Not one.

Perhaps this is what the American people are sick of regarding the war. The same arguments made by the same people over and over again about who’s to blame, who supports to the troops, who’s a traitor, who’s an unthinking Bushbot.

Reminds me of the movie Airplane! where people start getting sick then committing suicide listening to Stryker’s hard luck story about “Macho Grande” over and over again.

I’m an enabler, of course. No matter what the news from Baghdad, my analysis remains basically the same. The surge is working in some places, not so well in others. The entire Iraqi government - the cabinet, the legislature, religious leadership - is failing to budge on oil revenue sharing, constitutional changes that have been promised, National Reconciliation, and the rest. The troops continue to perform well. There are signs of hope, signs of despair, and signs that when we leave, all hell will break loose. Iran and Syria are still meddling despite our efforts at “dialogue.” Al-Qaeda still sets off car bombs in Baghdad whenever they wish in order to maximize new coverage. And our western press continues to assist them in that endeavor.

At least this time, there is news to report. The Shia holy shrine at Samarra was bombed. On second thought, that’s not really news. It’s happened before. The same appeals for calm are coming from the same people. And the same kind of retaliation can be expected in the coming days that occurred in February of 2006.

Then there are the Democrats who, in a brazen attempt to practice a little self-fulfilling prophecy, have declared the surge a failure. This on the eve of what apparently will be a massive offensive by American troops against death squads, insurgents and al-Qaeda:

Across the main war zones, American formations bolstered by the troop increase are reaching full operational readiness for what the commanders have described as a summer offensive against Qaeda-linked insurgents and Shiite death squads. But the commanders have spoken of intelligence reports pointing to plans by Al Qaeda for a “catastrophic” attack similar to the one at Samarra last year, setting off a new round of mass sectarian killings, driving a deeper wedge between Sunnis and Shiites and thwarting American hopes for greater stability.

At least the Democrats have been consistent. They’ve done everything possible to undermine the war effort to this point. Why stop now?

The real news is contained in a 46 page report compiled by the Pentagon every quarter about violence in Iraq and political progress by the Iraqi government. It is not the slanted coverage offered by the media. It is not a report written by left wing loons or Democratic defeatists. It is written by the military itself. And it does not paint a pretty picture:

Iraqi leaders have made “little progress” on the overarching political goals that the stepped-up security operations are intended to help advance, the report said, calling reconciliation between Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni factions “a serious unfulfilled objective.” Indeed, “some analysts see a growing fragmentation of Iraq,” it said, noting that 36 percent of Iraqis believe “the Iraqi people would be better off if the country were divided into three or more separate countries.”

The 46-page report, mandated quarterly by Congress, tempers the early optimism about the new strategy voiced by senior U.S. officials. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, for instance, in March described progress in Iraq as “so far, so good.” Instead, it depicts limited gains and setbacks and states that it is too soon to judge whether the new approach is working.

Sectarian killings and attacks — which were spiraling late last year — dropped sharply from February to April, but civilian casualties rose slightly, to more than 100 a day. Despite the early drop in sectarian killings, data from the Baghdad morgue gathered by The Washington Post in May show them returning to pre-”surge” levels last month.

Suicide attacks more than doubled across Iraq — from 26 in January to 58 in April — said the report, which covers the three months from mid-February to mid-May.

Violence fell in Baghdad and Anbar province, where the bulk of the 28,700 more U.S. troops are located, but escalated elsewhere as insurgents and militias regroup in eastern and northern Iraq. In Anbar, attacks dropped by about a third, compared with the previous three months, as Sunni tribes have organized against entrenched fighters from al-Qaeda in Iraq, the report said.

Overall, however, violence “has increased in most provinces, particularly in the outlying areas of Baghdad province and Diyala and Ninewa provinces,” the report said. In Diyala’s restive capital of Baqubah, U.S. and Iraq forces “have been unable to diminish rising sectarian violence contributing to the volatile security situation,” it said.

Not very cheery news. And then there is this about our brave allies, the Iraqi military:

While most Iraqi units are performing “up to expectations,” it said, some Iraqi leaders “bypass the standard chain of command” to issue orders on sectarian grounds. It cited “significant evidence” of attacks on Sunni Arabs by the predominantly Shiite government security forces, which have contributed to the displacement of an estimated 2 million Iraqis from their homes.

Shiite militias, which have engaged in the widespread killing and sectarian removal of Sunni residents in Baghdad, now enjoy wide support in the capital, the report said. “In Baghdad, a majority of residents report that militias act in the best interests of the Iraqi people,” it said, while only 20 percent of respondents polled nationwide shared that view. Maliki’s promises to disarm militias have not produced a concrete plan, the report said.

Mass-casualty attacks on Shiite targets by Sunni insurgents, including the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, have increased Shiite wariness of reconciliation, the report said. “The Shi’a dominated government is vulnerable to pressure from large numbers of economically disadvantaged, marginalized Shi’a” who offer “street-level support” for Shiite militias.

Peachy. Our own military is basically saying that rooting out the death squads and disarming the militias, will involve going in without the support of the street level population of Baghdad. I leave it to your imagination what kind of problems that little bit of information can cause.

Al-Maliki is still frozen like a department store manikin, unwilling or unable to move forward with reforms. The Sunnis see the endgame approaching and are desperate for the Americans to stay or at least give them modern arms in order to stave off an even bigger tragedy than the one occurring now. The Kurds continue to tweak the Turks with PPK attacks across the border, making Ankara do a slow burn over both the attacks and our inability to stop them. And Shias in the south are rapidly starting to choose sides in what promises to be a fight for dominance between Iranian backed militias and equally fanatic SIIC cadres.

And we’re worried if the surge is “working?”

But this is not news. It’s been going on for at least a year and nothing we have done or are doing currently is slowing down the momentum of this bloody country careening toward disaster. Yes, things are that bad in Iraq. Our own military says it. Maybe it’s time for the President of the United States to start saying it and at the same time, tell us what he intends to do to stave off disaster.

I would say to my one note lefty friends that removing the troops is not - repeat, is not - the complete answer to this problem. Of course, if your only goal is to see the United States humiliated in order to validate your worldview and make political hay out of the ensuing tragedy then I can see why you’d support such a position.

And I would also say to my equally boring righty friends that the surge may not be a failure but it is irrelevant when placed alongside everything else that is wrong in Iraq. The time has passed for any efforts of our military to make the difference between success and failure in Iraq. The Iraqis themselves have seen to that.

I am rapidly approaching the point of supporting efforts to somehow contain the conflagration so that it doesn’t spill over and start a general Middle East war. This obviously would require a substantial redeployment of our troops. I would like to see them placed somewhere they could prevent a humanitarian catastrophe involving the Sunnis but that might not be possible. Any way you splice it - with the political will for carrying on as we have virtually gone on the Hill in both parties as well as out in the hinterlands among the American people - we better be prepared for a bloody aftermath in Iraq. And we also better get used to the idea that there’s not too much we can do to stop it.

Phew! What a relief.

All these years since 9/11, I was under the mistaken impression that we were engaged in a war with al-Qaeda and its many offshoots, imitators, wannabes, and pretenders. But we have all now been happily disabused of such a stupid notion.

First, it was the Democrats who declared there is no “War on Terror” by banishing the very term from official documents and correspondence. Fine with me. Out of sight, out of mind, I say. There’s plenty of room here in this whole in the sand I’ve dug to stick my head. More the merrier.

And now the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has made it official. Those legal residents of the United States who plan mass murder against innocent American civilians cannot be held by the military as “enemy combatants.” Instead, they are entitled to receive all the help to beat the rap the anti-American left can give them in the form of glory seeking attorneys, a ready made PR machine in the mass media who will make sure he is seen as just some dope who got duped by Osama, and legions of civil liberties absolutists who believe the Constitution of the United States is actually a suicide pact in disguise:

The federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled yesterday that the president may not declare civilians in this country to be “enemy combatants” and have the military hold them indefinitely. The ruling was a stinging rejection of one of the Bush administration’s central assertions about the scope of executive authority to combat terrorism.

The ruling came in the case of Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar now in military custody in Charleston, S.C., who is the only person on the American mainland known to be held as an enemy combatant. The court said the administration may charge Mr. Marri with a crime, deport him or hold him as a material witness in connection with a grand jury investigation.

“But military detention of al-Marri must cease,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the majority of a divided three-judge panel.

The court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, said a fundamental principle is at stake: military detention of someone who had lawfully entered the United States and established connections here, it said, violates the Constitution.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians,” Judge Motz wrote, “even if the president calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country.”

Alright already. I’m an authoritarian-loving, goose stepping, anti-constitutional Bushbot. But that still won’t answer the question the court refused to deal with: Are we at war or not?

If we are not at war, impeach the President, I say. He has grossly overstepped his authority and should be hauled before the Senate and put on trial. Same goes for Cheney and the whole gang at DOJ who have concocted this “War on Terror” thing for purposes of wielding enormous power over the rest of us and putting liberals, homosexuals, atheists, and anti-war demonstrators in concentration camps, declaring them “enemy combatants,” and confiscating their copies of The Noam Chomsky Reader.

Or, if we are at war, we better get deadly serious about making sure that terrorists - whether they be legal residents or not - can’t use the Constitution as a shield to help them escape justice. The very nature of their crimes means that most of the evidence against them has come via highly sensitive intelligence and other “national technical means” like eavesdropping or other forms of communications intercepts. And don’t you know that al-Qaeda and their allies (not to mention our own left wingers) would just love to have those secrets revealed in open court? The military and the government, on the other hand, would probably take a much dimmer view of telling al-Qaeda exactly how we keep an eye on them.

It doesn’t matter now. The Fourt Circuit has ruled we are not at war and that we can all get back to the business of ignoring the threats against us. Until we get hit again, of course. Then we get to go through the same baloney we’ve been experiencing for the last 6 years.

Keith Olbermann took time out from making the world safe for Edward R. Murrow impersonators on his show Monday night to offer some interesting thoughts on the connection between bad news about the Bush Administration (and the proximity to elections) and the exposure of terror plots, the issuance of terror alerts, and government advice on how to prepare for a terrorist assault.

Showing how every time there was a terror plot uncovered or when the old Homeland Security Threat level was bumped up it seemed to coincide with what Olbermann saw as a bad news day for the Administration, the Anti-Murrow sought to prove that there is no such thing as a serious terror threat to the United States, that it is all a case of political smoke and mirrors by an evil and manipulative White House.

No, really. For instance, when the Phoenix FBI agent testified before Congress about her superiors ignoring her warnings about terrorists training in flight schools, Senator Graham remarked that her testimony had inspired other pre-9/11 “whistleblowers” to come forward.

“Just” 4 days later, Keith informs us ominously, then Attorney General Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla for the dirty bomb plot - even though he had already been in custody for a month! (Cue Darth Vader theme.)

What Keith failed to mention is that if we had announced the arrest of Padilla before assuring ourselves that such information would not alert any of Padilla’s co-conspirators, he would have been all over the Administration for blowing an intelligence bonanza. And what is the significance of this happening “just” 4 days after the testimony of the Phoenix FBI agent? Why, none of course - unless you live in the topsy turvy, upside down world of Keith Olbermann and his drooling conspiracy minded netnuts. Why not make the announcement the day after the testimony? Or the next day? Why wait 4 days? Only a blithering idiot wouldn’t see the 4 day gap as totally disproving the idea that the Administration used the announcement to deflect attention from their pre-9/11 failures.

This idea of a political basis for announcing terror threats and raising the level of concern about an attack is a remix of an old recording that was last played all throughout the election of 2004. The netnuts went positively ballistic every time that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge showed his face on TV.

The beauty of this critique is obvious; the left gets to have it both ways. If the Administration hadn’t said anything and an attack occurred, they would be all over the Bushies for not only failing to prevent the attack but for not warning the American people. And since the Administration did get out front in raising the threat level and warning of an attack, the left can claim that it was driven by partisan politics.

Simple. Elegant. And monumentally stupid.

Olbermann’s idea of “bad news” for the Administration is so obtuse as to be beyond belief. He cites Secretary Powell’s speech before the UN on February 5, 2003 where claims of WMD in Iraq were disproven “months later.” But just two days later, amidst the news of anti-war demonstrations around the world, Secretary Ridge raises the threat level to orange.

Excuse me but does anyone else see that particular example of the Administration playing politics with terror alerts to be out and out idiocy? What does Powell’s speech (not disproven for months) have to do with raising the threat level a few days later? And does anyone seriously believe that the Administration could have cared one whit about anti-war demonstrators in Amsterdam? Or the pitifully few 60’s holdovers who turned out in this country? So much so that they went to the trouble and huge expense of raising the threat level?

Keith Olbermann is a loon. And while he made mention of the logical fallacy argument - that just because event A and event B happen to occur at the same time, it doesn’t mean there is a connection between the two - he then descends into the outer darkness to make his point. He states the danger of logical fallacies and then goes ahead and engages in them. This kind of breathtaking stupidity is what Olbermann does best and it’s why the netnuts love him so. His thoughts mirror their paranoid worldview - that terrorism is vastly overblown as a threat to our security and that the Bushies have used the issue to convince Americans “to fear fear itself” according to Keith.

” …from the mind-bending idea that four guys dressed as Pizza Delivery men were going to out-gun all the soldiers at Fort Dix…to the not-too-thought-out plan to blow-up J-F-K Airport… here we go again…”

Yeah…and the idea that 19 guys with box cutters planning to hijack planes and fly them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center is just plain kooky. (Note: For the record, the soldiers at Fort Dix were unarmed. Their weapons were locked up.)

It isn’t just the idea that there is always a political angle to terrorism threats in this country that makes Olbermann’s fantasies so destructive. Anyone so naive as to believe that there isn’t any political calculation in some of the things done by the FBI or DHS doesn’t know government very well. High profile investigations and raids always seem to get wrapped up around budget request time. The same goes, I’m sure, for some terrorism related investigations as well. This is the nature of the beast and trying to change it would be like trying to stop the rain.

But the thought that the Administration systematically used terrorism as a political club to blunt bad news is so outrageous as to reveal Olbermann and those who agree with him to be blissfully ignorant of reality. There is little doubt that Secretary Ridge wanted to be less aggressive in raising the threat level than the White House - not because he didn’t think the threat was bogus but because he thought that the constant yo-yoing of the color coded threat board lessened its impact. But can you chalk that up to politics? Or is there perhaps a more mundane reason such as the Administration wanting to be safe rather than sorry? CYA is a much more realistic - dare I say “reality based” - reason for the threat level rising than any Master Plan by the Bush Administration to use fear as a political weapon.

I’ve written this before half in jest but it bears repeating: Perhaps the best thing that could happen to this country’s preparedness for a terrorist attack is if we elected a Democrat as President. Not because he would do a better job than a Republican. It’s just that Republicans are far less likely to deliberately undermine our battle here at home to stay safe by positing wild, unprovable, paranoid conspiracy theories about the seriousness of the terror threat than the Democrats and their loony netnuts. I doubt very much that the left will disbelieve a Democratic Administration that announces the foiling of a terrorist plot. Nor will there be a whisper about using fear of terrorism as a political weapon.

At the very least, a Democratic Administration will keep the paranoid loons spouting their conspiracy theories relatively quiet for four years. It might be worth it just to enjoy that particular blessing.

UPDATE

Speaking of pooh-poohing the terrorist threat, Michelle has a “Gathering of Ostriches” who prove that Keith Olbermann isn’t the only one who thinks denial is just a river in Egypt.

UPDATE II

If I’d read Allah first, I wouldn’t have bothered:

You’ll note, I hope, that even Olby recognizes how dishonest he’s being. That’s why he feels obliged to mention not once but twice that coincidences do happen and, in his words, “we could probably construct a similar timeline of terror events and their relationship to the haircuts of popular politicians.” Why do it, then? Because, as the Truthers are wont to say, he’s “just asking questions.” Just “airing it,” Sullivan style. Make up your own mind.

He also doesn’t seem to grasp that just because the pipeline plot wasn’t feasible doesn’t mean no attack would have occurred. You’ve got a group of men with homicidal intent willing to travel internationally to bring off their plan. If they’re game for that, they’re probably game for walking into a crowd of people and opening up with automatic weapons and grenades. It won’t take out an airport, but you might very well top the body count from the London bombings two years ago.

Read the whole thing.

News out of Iraq today from the Los Angeles Times, a fierce critic of the war, quotes several anonymous military sources they say are close to General Petreaus, that the government of Prime Minister Maliki will fail to achieve any of the major political goals set by the Administration when the troop surge began:

U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success.

In September, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, is scheduled to present Congress with an assessment of progress in Iraq. Military officers in Baghdad and outside advisors working with Petraeus doubt that the three major goals set by U.S. officials for the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki will be achieved by then.

Enactment of a new law to share Iraq’s oil revenue among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions is the only goal they think might be achieved in time, and even that is considered a long shot. The two other key benchmarks are provincial elections and a deal to allow more Sunni Arabs into government jobs.

With overhauls by the central government stalled and with security in Baghdad still a distant goal, Petraeus’ advisors hope to focus on smaller achievements that they see as signs of progress, including local deals among Iraq’s rival factions to establish areas of peace in some provincial cities.

The political realities facing the Iraqi government are no secret and it doesn’t take high ranking aides to Petreaus to tell us what has been obvious at least since the beginning of April; that Maliki is unable to bring most of the Shia parties along with him (if he himself is even committed to many of these political goals) in an effort to reconcile the country’s factions and bring peace to Iraq.

The fact is, we can point to our great successes in Anbar province and elsewhere in defeating the insurgency and al-Qaeda but if Baghdad continues to bleed the way it does today, there is no way the surge will be seen as a success in any way, shape, or form. Of course, most of the press, the Democrats, and the left have already declared the surge a failure which makes subduing Baghdad even more important. And in this case, we are bedeviled by the fact that the terrorists only have to succeed once and a while in setting off huge bombs that kill dozens of people for the perception to kick in that the surge has been useless.

Couple the continued bloodshed in Baghdad with the inability (or outright refusal) of the Maliki government to deal with sharing oil revenue, de-Baathication, and constitutional changes and you can see where Petreaus aides are coming from. The surge is next to useless without the Iraqi government using any reduction in violence and the subsequent increase in confidence by the people that this would inspire to reach out to the Sunnis who are cooperating with us in Anbar and other provinces and make them partners in rebuilding the country.

What’s the answer then? Apparently, we are beginning to shift the playing field, bypassing the empty suit of a prime minister, and dealing with the problem of reconciliation Anbar-style; by making deals with the Sheiks and their tribes at the local level:

Military officers said they understood that any report that key goals had not been met would add to congressional Democrats’ skepticism. But some counterinsurgency advisors to Petraeus have said it was never realistic to expect that Iraqis would reach agreement on some of their most divisive issues after just a few months of the American troop buildup.

The advisors and military officers say the local deals and advances they see are not insignificant and can be building blocks of wider sectarian reconciliation.

Military officers in Iraq said the efforts included recruiting Sunni Arab nationalists into security forces, forging agreements among neighborhoods of rival sects, establishing new businesses in once-violent areas and shifting local attitudes.

Frederick W. Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and early advocate of the troop buildup, said the military would have few major political accomplishments to report by September. “I think the political progress will be mostly of this local variety,” said Kagan, who recently visited Iraq and met with American commanders.

This is an intriguing approach and once again I weep because we waited 4 years to try it. But the sad fact is, the sands in the hour glass are draining fast and all the signs point to a dramatic political change in September if Petreaus can’t convince lawmakers - and through them the American people - that the progress being made at the local level is worth the expenditure in lives and treasure this war has cost us already.

It is still unclear to me how this progress at the local level will translate into putting the pieces of Iraqi society back together. In some ways, it sounds as if it could actually work to further separate the factions:

The push for smaller, local deals represents a significant shift for the Bush administration, which has emphasized that security in Baghdad has to be the top priority to allow the central government to make progress toward national political reconciliation. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have pressured Iraqi political leaders to reach key agreements by the end of summer.

But Gates said last week that U.S. officials may have over-emphasized the importance of Iraq’s central government.

“One of the concerns that I’ve had,” Gates said, “was whether we had focused too much on central government construction in both Iraq and Afghanistan and not enough on the cultural and historical, provincial, tribal and other entities that have played an important role in the history of both countries.”

The new command has realized that there will be no quick national-level deal on the key issues, said the senior military officer in Baghdad.

“You are talking about Sunnis who had power and Shiites who have power forgetting about what happened over the last 30 years,” the officer said. “How easy is that going to be?”

In Iraq, local leaders have doubts about the central government’s abilities to make a meaningful deal.

“The sheiks are not waiting to see if the law is passed or not,” Kagan said. “The Iraqi local leaders clearly don’t see reconciliation as something that has to come from the top or necessarily should come from the top.”

There is good reason that local leaders don’t trust the central government. They have promised much and delivered nothing. And the fact that it is generally recognized in the country that the writ of Baghdad law does not run much outside of Baghdad itself makes the Sheiks wonder how the central government could enforce any agreements it makes with other factions like the Mahdi Army or the Badr Organization who Sunnis see as largely responsible for the sectarian killings. Perhaps they consider it suicide to trust the national government to rein in the militias through any agreements signed with them.

Frankly, I just don’t think our progress in Anbar and other provinces will be enough to convince the Congress to grant the Administration the time it needs to assist the Iraqis in pacifying their country and leave behind a viable state. The Democrats will return with a vengeance hawking their timetables and advocating a cut off in funds on some date certain. They will be driven by their base of rabid netnuts who are already livid with most Democratic lawmakers for what they see as caving in to the President this last go around on Iraq funding.

And not surprisingly, they will be joined by a substantial number of Republicans who fear for their electoral lives. Just over the horizon, it is easy to discern the political disaster for the GOP if they stick with a lame duck Commander in Chief at less than 30% in the polls who refuses to budge on doing what a majority of Americans want him to do; start bringing the troops home.

It should also not come as a surprise that when both Democrats and Republicans are driven by fear, the chances of something less than desirable for the national interest coming out of this mess are considerably increased. What is needed is rationality and a compromise both sides can live with. What we will probably end up getting is political panic and bitter recriminations over who to blame for our situation.

Meanwhile, Iran continues its winning streak, Syria may very well feel emboldened in its campaign to bring chaos to Lebanon, and our friends in the Middle East wonder about the future.

In case you haven’t noticed recently, we are at war.

You are forgiven if it slipped your mind. The Bush Administration, now that it has its funding for the troops through September, will probably go back to its curiously quiescent attitude about informing the American people of the stakes and warning of the consequences of failure in Iraq. It is one of the great mysteries of this conflict, this on again, off again, start and stop effort by the President to remind us of the fact that 150,000 of our fellow citizens are engaged in a vital conflict that as I write this, is deciding much about our future.

The blockheads at the White House have never gotten it. They’ve never understood that their long, unbroken silences on the war have allowed their political opponents to define every aspect of it - why we invaded, what’s at stake, even what is really going on in Iraq. (It would have helped when bothering to inform us of what was going on there that they had actually been realistic and honest about what was transpiring rather than childishly optimistic and myopic.) And by allowing the Democrats to accuse them of all sorts of perfidy in the lead up to the conflict without constant, detailed, and passionate rebuttals, the President and his people have shattered any hope that the American public would stand by the Administration when the going got tough. The people have bought into the “Bush lied, people died” meme - or some variation - almost universally which has helped sap the will of the electorate to stay with the President on the war.

Of course, other matters also helped sap the will of the people. Blunders on the battle field that turned much of the population against us, misreading the situation on the ground, not changing strategies fast enough to reflect the true nature of the enemy we are fighting all contributed to the people’s sense that the folks running the war are either incompetent or had no workable plan for victory. The tremendous support given the President by the American people in the first few months after the invasion has been pissed away thanks to a political leadership that has not only failed to anticipate what the enemy in Iraq was going to do but also failed to realize the political threat here at home. They underestimated the desire and ability of the left to undermine the war effort by promulgating conspiracy theories, ascribing false motives to their actions, and even twisting the facts to paint a false picture to the American people of the war. The left is very good at storytelling. And the narrative they have so lovingly developed on the war has taken hold with the public thanks to the inexplicable and deplorable refusal of the Administration to defend itself in any useful way.

But as it becomes more and more apparent that our adventure in Iraq will sputter to an unsatisfying and potentially dangerous conclusion, my thoughts turn to those who have given so much in a cause that while good and noble, was mismanaged by their political and military leaders. The abilities, the courage, and the dedication of our military people in Iraq has been horribly misused. And I can’t escape the feeling that many of them will hold resentments when this is all over - resentment towards people like me who stopped being a cheerleader and became a critic (the reasons aren’t important) or perhaps even resentment at a government that gave them a job to do and then lost its way as well as losing the support of the people.

But they are not alone. They are brothers with those who for 230 years have bled out on battlefields all over the world. We like to think of ourselves as a peaceful people but I’m afraid history has a different take on the United States. We have fought wars for independence, for self defense, and to make the words in the Declaration and Constitution mean something. But we have also fought wars of belligerence, for conquest, for empire, and even for spite. And since the end of World War II, we have been at war almost constantly. And that’s not even including the “dirty wars” fought by our intelligence agencies in corners of the world where it seemed a good idea at the time to fight for dominance or for a change in government, or even for commercial interests.

But why we have fought doesn’t really matter. History’s judgement in these matters is, after all, seen through the prism of time with little thought to what kind of nation we have become as a result of those wars. We were a different nation 150, 100, even 50 years ago. We have grown up. We have responsibilities no nation has ever had - not Rome, nor Spain, or England or France when those nations dominated the planet. When a Tsunami devastates the South Pacific, no one thinks of calling in the French or Germans or even the Russians for assistance. They call upon the United States not only because we have the capability but because they know we can’t say no. There is no other nation in the history of human civilization who has had this kind of responsibility.

And that responsibility extends into the military sphere as well. Despite the public criticism, there is an almost universal recognition among the nations of the world that deposing the dictator Saddam was a good thing, a noble cause. What has happened in Iraq since then has been an occasion for much posturing and anti-American domestic politicking by many nations who should know better. They don’t speak German in France because American boys bled and died driving Hitler’s army from that sacred soil. And Soviet troops aren’t occupying Mittel Europa anymore because generations of American boys stood watch in places like Alaska, Germany, Greece, and Great Britain.

Yes, the world forgets. And they hate being reminded of it. It is a debt they will never be able to repay, especially to those sentinels of freedom who faced down the Russians for 45 long years. Or the 100,000 men who sacrificed their lives in Korea and Viet Nam to make Asia the economic dynamo it is today, at peace for the first time in 100 years. Or the Rangers who scaled the cliffs at Point du Hoc on D-Day. Or the Dough boys who rolled up the Kaiser’s armies after the French and British exhausted themselves almost to the point of defeat.

But as we approach another Memorial Day, I am struck by the connection between today’s American soldier and those of 100, even 200 years ago and all the years in between. Whether fighting for land, for empire, or to defend ourselves from an external enemy, the courage and skill with which the American fighting man has fought has been the envy of the world. European military observers from the 19th century marveled at it. And the 20th centuries dictators came to fear it. A combination of discipline and individual initiative that has been the hallmark of the American fighting man for 230 years is unprecedented. Other nations have tried to copy it and failed. It has proven to be an unbeatable combination on the battlefield.

But for all their skill. For all their sacrifices, the American soldier ultimately is only as successful as those who set policy and strategy and point him towards the enemy. In every war America has fought - from the Revolution to Iraq - the ineffable qualities in the American fighting man have been wasted by poor leadership. The Revolution had, among other disasters, General Charles Lee, an incompetent fop of a general. And there was the Congress who insisted Washington attempt to keep New York out of British hands - a disaster that almost ended the war before it started.

The Civil War had a veritable cornucopia of bad generals, stupid mistakes by Lincoln, and a Congress who stuck its nose constantly into the army’s business. The list goes on through World Wars I and II, Korea, Viet Nam and beyond. The fact is, our fighting men have been constantly ill served by those who ask them to die. I suppose war is fraught with this kind of peril. But it doesn’t make it any easier for the men who must suffer the consequences of others mistakes.

On Memorial Day, none of this matters. We don’t think much on why they died or even how they died. All we know and care about is that they died for us. We, the people, asked them to go in harm’s way and they responded courageously, giving that “last full measure of devotion” as Lincoln called it at Gettysburg. Sometimes we may have been wrong. Sometimes the conflict couldn’t be avoided. And sometimes, we were right. Circumstances, blurred by time and softened by memories of loved ones lost, are of secondary consideration. When the political leadership, freely elected by the people, decides to take the United States to war we are duty bound to support our fighting men - even if we disagree with the decision to fight. For in the end, it is their sacrifices that define us as a people.

Congratulations to the netnuts! They have achieved their goal of capturing a large segment of Congressional Democrats and turning them into a quivering mass of genuflecting cretins, unable to buck the will of their most passionate (and off balance) supporters because they’re too frightened of the consequences.

Apparently, House Democrats are prepared to limit funding for the war to two months, answering the call of their online masters to toe the line or risk the disapprobation of the Krazed Kossacks and the rest of the internet ruffians who make up the far left of the party.

For the last couple of weeks, the drumbeat from the netroots regarding the Iraq Supplemental has been about initiating a strategy known as “the short leash.” That is, limit the appropriation to two months and load it up with impossible demands on the Iraqi government to get moving on reform (reforms that won’t be initiated for two years much less two months) and then when the inevitable failure occurs, try the same gambit again with cutting off funding for the extra troops hoping that panicking Republican lawmakers will desert the President and join the Democrats in an attempt to save their political hides.

The strategy has the disadvantage of being transparently ridiculous - especially after Democratic lawmakers swore that they would forgo the limited appropriation path and stick with funding the troops through September. But that was before the netnuts began to ratchet up the pressure on their cowering minions in the House.

Here’s the #2 Democrat in the House just two weeks ago:

Many senators, as well as House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), say they’re not inclined to support a two-month supplemental.

“There are a lot of ideas being discussed, and Mr. Hoyer personally feels that at this time he doesn’t see that particular option moving forward,” said Hoyer spokeswoman Stacey Farnen Bernards.

(HT: Ed Morrissey)

The issue is apparently dead in the Senate with even Harry Reid seeing the stupidity of a two month appropriation.

Even if House Democrats seek to pass a short-term bill, the Senate isn’t yet on board.

“I don’t think that’s the best approach,” Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich) said Friday. “I think it’s too close to the end of the fiscal year for that.”

Senate Democratic aides also downplayed the chances that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) would agree to try to pass short-term funding bills for the war, noting that it likely would tie the Senate floor in knots and prevent Reid from bringing up other Democratic legislative priorities…

And the problem isn’t just Democratic “legislative priorities.” How about a severe disruption in the Department of Defense?

[Secretary of Defense] Gates told the panel that proposals for a short-term funding bill would be very disruptive and “have a huge impact” on contracts to repair and replace equipment. And if Congress votes in July to pull the plug on war funding, “I would have to shut down significant elements of the Department of Defense in August and September because I wouldn’t have the money to pay salaries.”

The fact that House Democrats have apparently become beholden to their most extreme supporters does not bode well for the party heading into 2008. One way or another, the war is going to be winding down by next spring as the Presidential primary season gets underway. And then what? Are Democrats on the Hill simply going to pat the netnuts on the head, thanking them for a job well done, and then expect them to go back to posting cat pictures on their blogs and trading recipes for meatloaf? Not hardly. Kos & Co. have real power now. They can taste it. And they are eager to exercise it.

What that means for the party’s agenda going into the 2008 campaign is unknown. But a lurch to the left, away from the carefully crafted positions of both Hillary and Obama to appeal to the center would almost certainly cause problems for the eventual candidate, giving the Republican ticket the opportunity to fall back on the time honored and very effective strategy of painting their Democratic opponent as an extreme liberal.

It’s proved a winning strategy in the past. And even in a Democratic year as 2008 is shaping up to be, it could prove the difference again.