From the time it took office the Bush Administration has prided itself on "staying on message" and defining the terms and the language of public debate. We are always moving down "the way forward," the President always knows not only what needs to be done here, but how other countries should behave, and problems--most recently the scandal of the care given disabled veterans at Walter Reed--always belong to some one else. (Tony Snow passed that one over to the Defense Department the other day.) Now, in Iraq, the surge is going to impose security in Baghdad, win the confidence of the Iraqi people for the Maliki government, and continue, as Vice President Cheney said, our "great successes." All this makes it impossible for the press more than intermittently to focus on what is actually happening in Iraq because they always lead with what the Administration says. But some very committed people are keeping score in Iraq, many stories of internal Iraqi politics are coming out, and the truth can be discerned beneath all the blather.
To begin with, as I pointed out over a month ago, we are still losing, not winning, the war in Iraq. That does not mean our men are about to be driven out, but it does mean that the balance of power continues to shift in favor of the enemy. At the rate things are going we shall suffer at least 80 killed in action during the month of February. That will mean a total of 545 Americans killed in action during the last six months, compared to 369 Americans killed in action during the previous six months--an increase of nearly 50%. The number of wounded who did not immediately return to duty (a softer figure) has also increased, from 1257 in March-August 2006 to 1459 (estimated) for the last six months, and the number of wounded who did return to duty is up from 1782 to 2228 in the same period. The enemy is hitting more Americans, more lethally. The loss of half a dozen helicopters in recent weeks, which has contributed to the increased lethality, is a very worrying sign.
And despite some recent press reports, only a minority of those increases have taken place in Baghdad. The outstanding web site icasualties.org , from which these figures are taken, also prints casualties by province. For the March-August '05 period 176 Americans died in Anbar province, always the most violent, and 95 in Baghdad. The figures for the last six months are 199 in Anbar, 176 in Baghdad, which means that while things are getting worse in Baghdad they continue to deteriorate more slowly, from a higher base, in Anbar, as well. And although most provinces in the South seem to be quieting down, Diyala province, northwest of Baghdad along the Iranian border, has already seen more US deaths this year as in the whole of 2006--26 against 20.
The political situation in Iraq, meanwhile, is looking more and more like South Vietnam in 1963, with Prime Minister Maliki in the role of Ngo Dinh Diem. Both face a hostile religious minority--Sunnis (who have been fighting actively, of course, since the occupation) for Maliki, Buddhists for Diem. In both cases the American Administration is pushing them to be conciliatory--and in both cases, they are doing the opposite. For six months, from May 1963 until his overthrow in November, Diem refused to take any Buddhist complaints seriously. Maliki, the Los Angeles Times reports today, has done nothing to get a more moderate de-
Ba'athification policy in place in Iraq--a high American priority. And he has handled a Sunni woman's extraordinary accusations of rape by three Shi'ite soldiers in the most inflammatory possible way, almost immediately dismissing them and claiming that she is an insurgent sympathizer. The United States seems to be caught in the middle of that one, too, because the woman received treatment at an American medical facility, which presumably has a good idea of what actually occurred. Maliki seems to have failed the test that Stephen Hadley set up in his famous memo, but I doubt the Administration will dump him. For one, it would obviously be a most unpopular move; for another, neoconservatives generally hold the view that we lost Vietnam by getting rid of Ngo Dinh Diem. (I do not believe that and have written about it at length in American Tragedy, but it would take us too far afield to get into that now.)
In December and January I posted repeatedly about two alternative policies that the Administration seemed to be weighing: either continuing to push for national reconciliation, or simply "unleashing the Shi'ites." Paradoxically we seem officially to be pursuing the former, but in practice, the latter is continuing apace. That seems to be the most insuperable obstacle to creating the Iraq we had in mind. Another, of course, is the departure from Iraq of nearly two million refugees in the last four years, many of them from the middle class. That in turn is creating problems in Jordan and Syria. Vice President Cheney, meanwhile, is soaking up some media space by accusing Nancy Pelosi of favoring Al Queda. That one the Democrats should take on head on. It is the Administration's policies that have favored Al Queda: by confirming its image of the United States by occupying Muslim nations; by allowing Osama Bin Laden to escape and failing to get real Pakistani cooperation against him; and by creating long-term chaos in one of the richest nations of the Middle East.
How the next President might address all this is a question I owe it to myself and my readers to try to answer. I have been putting that one off, but I pledge to give it a try some time during the next week.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Monday, February 19, 2007
Thinking blog awards
Armchairgeneralist has generously awarded me a "Thinking Blogger Award," something that was started by DKatASilentCacaphony (no relation.) This is an attempt to construct a pyramid, essentially, of thoughtful blogs. Here are the rules:
2. Abuaarvark.com A more relaxed commentary on the same subject by Williams professor Mark Lynch.
3. Nur Al-Cubicle : More comments on the same region featuring the opinions of the foreign press. She's a frequent commenter here as well.
4. Baghdad Burning I don't suppose she needs me to publicize her, and I'm concerned that she hasn't posted anything since Christmas, but her reports from Baghdad are essential.
5. WarHistorian The state of military history.
Let 100 intelligent flowers bloom. . .two new posts from the weekend below.
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.
Congratulations - You've won a "Thinking Blogger" award!
1. Informed Comment Prof. Juan Cole's very comprehensive daily summary of events in Iraq and the Middle East.2. Abuaarvark.com A more relaxed commentary on the same subject by Williams professor Mark Lynch.
3. Nur Al-Cubicle : More comments on the same region featuring the opinions of the foreign press. She's a frequent commenter here as well.
4. Baghdad Burning I don't suppose she needs me to publicize her, and I'm concerned that she hasn't posted anything since Christmas, but her reports from Baghdad are essential.
5. WarHistorian The state of military history.
Let 100 intelligent flowers bloom. . .two new posts from the weekend below.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
How we might have stopped Communism
The other night I heard a presentation by Nathaniel Fick, a young former Marine officer now at the Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, who has written a successful book about his war experiences. At dinner before the presentation he brought up an analogy he had heard lately with international terrorism--the anarchist movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That wasn't a new idea to me, but it set me thinking, and I realized that it could lead to an interesting analogy with the challenge we face in the Arab world today.
On September 16, 1920, a bomb containing 100 pounds of dynamite and several hundred pounds of steel exploded in front of J. P. Morgan and company on Wall Street, killing 38 people and injuring about 400. A nearby leaflet demanded the release of "political prisoners"and claimed responsibility on behalf of "the Anarchist fighters." It is quite likely that the bomb was a reaction to the detention of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts the preceding May for two murders in South Braintree, Massachusetts, the subject of one of my books.
When the bomb went off the lame-duck President, Woodrow Wilson, was gravely ill, and the presidential campaign between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox of Ohio was in progress. But suppose a President of a different type had been in office--how might he have handled the situation?
"The attack on Wall Street," he might have said, "is an attack on the lives and properties of Americans on behalf of a dangerous foreign ideology that today threatens much of the globe in the wake of the World War. That ideology takes many forms--anarchism in southern Europe and here in the United States, Communism in Russia, and other forms of extreme socialism elsewhere. Yet all share the same contempt for property, law, and religion. We can tolerate neither these vicious killers nor those who harbor them. We must stamp out the movement they represent to keep the way to worldwide progress open.
"Amidst all the dangers posed by these movements, the greatest by far is the Bolshevik regime in Russia, which has abolished private property and is establishing itself through a bloody civil war. Russia is a large and established nation with great potential power, reaching intot he heart of Europe. Should the Bolsheviks succeed, revolution will undoubtedly spread through more of Europe, and we shall eventually face it here at home. Should it fail, we will be able to look forward to the further spread of free institutions and a free economy. The choice is clear, and we must not leave it to our children and grandchildren.
"Tomorrow the United States will begin recalling soldiers to arms and working with foreign governments to mount an expeditionary force sufficient to deal effectively with the Bolshevik regime in Russia. The interventions which we have already mounted have provided some safe havens for anti-Communist forces, but they are not enough. We must not remain on the defensive; we must go on the offense, as we did against the German autocrats who unleashed the late war. We must not attempt to restore the Russian Empire; its policies led to its own demise because it failed to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of its people. But we are confident that the Russian people fundamentally desire the freedom and rights that move all peoples, all over the world, and to which the United States is committed, not only for ourselves, but for others who wish to excercise the blessings granted them by the Almighty."
I do not think that such an analysis would have been inferior strategically to the decision to conquer and reshape Iraq because 25 Al Queda activists had perpetrated an extraordinary act of terror within the United States. Would it have worked?
A President calling for such a policy probably could have convinced the Congress to undertake such an expedition--although few European nations, exhausted by war and including many large and powerful socialist parties themselves, would have joined wholeheartedly. It is in my opinion most unlikely that such an intervention would actually have stopped Communism in Russia, although it would undoubtedly have increased the sufferings of the Russian people even further. It might have partitioned the Russian empire; it might have created a longer period of chaos. Neither of those outcomes would necessarily have served the interests of the United States. Indeed, had National Socialism come into power in Germany under such circumstances, Hitler would have stood a much better chance of achieving his aims, since a powerful Soviet state would not have stood in his way.
Instead, the United States, while refusing until 1933 to recognize the Soviet Union, made no attempt to overthrow it. In the 1940s, during a critical war, the Soviets were allies without whom victory would have been very difficult, perhaps even impossible. They became adversaries at the end of the war, but as time goes on and the world order of the second half of the twentieth century continues to disintegrate, I suspect we shall see more and more clearly how the Soviets, along with the United States, actually ran a relatively peaceful, if frightening and imperfect, world, during that time. Nor has their eventual disappearance paved the way for any kind of democratic paradise in the former Soviet Union, least of all in Russia.
The critical difference between the United States in 1920 and the United States in 2001, over and above the difference in Presidential leadership, was that we had not yet fallen in love with the idea that it was our destiny to rule the world, to succour the helpless, and to free the enslaved--especially if they occupied a critical strategic or economic region. And sadly, nearly six years after September 11, we have seen almost no fundamental re-evaluation of those views. Nearly everyone except the President, the Vice President and a few remaining acolytes realize that war in Iraq has been disastrous, but no one seems to be facing the fact (and that is what it is) that no available strategy will create a Middle East in our own image, that we are making it more hostile every day, and that we will have to live with that hostility, as the Europeans did in the early modern period, for generations to come. Instead, the Republican Party is continuing to use the debate on Iraq to try to divide America between those who heroically want to go on fighting a vague Islamist enemy all over the world with all available means, and those cowards who hate America, won't support our troops, and want us to lose. (The same accusation is still against those who predicted, rightly, the Communist victories in China in 1949 and in Vietnam in 1975. When American hubris gets us into trouble, neoconservatives know who to blame: the people who foresaw the trouble in the first place.)
We still live in a world of sovereign states with different values. The interests of the United States will not advance if we keep proclaiming that whatever we want must be right and everyone else has a duty to help make it happen. We are confronted once again--as, really, we have always been--with the need to live amongst peoples and regimes who do not share our beliefs. This is not an insurmountable task by any means; in fact, from 1947 until 2001 we built and sustained large bureaucracies who did the job quite well when they were given a chance to do so. We can still return to that tradition, but time is running short. And I honestly do not think that we can do so until some political leadership is willing to confront our hubris, and the impossibility of achieving the goals that our government has set for us.
On September 16, 1920, a bomb containing 100 pounds of dynamite and several hundred pounds of steel exploded in front of J. P. Morgan and company on Wall Street, killing 38 people and injuring about 400. A nearby leaflet demanded the release of "political prisoners"and claimed responsibility on behalf of "the Anarchist fighters." It is quite likely that the bomb was a reaction to the detention of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts the preceding May for two murders in South Braintree, Massachusetts, the subject of one of my books.
When the bomb went off the lame-duck President, Woodrow Wilson, was gravely ill, and the presidential campaign between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox of Ohio was in progress. But suppose a President of a different type had been in office--how might he have handled the situation?
"The attack on Wall Street," he might have said, "is an attack on the lives and properties of Americans on behalf of a dangerous foreign ideology that today threatens much of the globe in the wake of the World War. That ideology takes many forms--anarchism in southern Europe and here in the United States, Communism in Russia, and other forms of extreme socialism elsewhere. Yet all share the same contempt for property, law, and religion. We can tolerate neither these vicious killers nor those who harbor them. We must stamp out the movement they represent to keep the way to worldwide progress open.
"Amidst all the dangers posed by these movements, the greatest by far is the Bolshevik regime in Russia, which has abolished private property and is establishing itself through a bloody civil war. Russia is a large and established nation with great potential power, reaching intot he heart of Europe. Should the Bolsheviks succeed, revolution will undoubtedly spread through more of Europe, and we shall eventually face it here at home. Should it fail, we will be able to look forward to the further spread of free institutions and a free economy. The choice is clear, and we must not leave it to our children and grandchildren.
"Tomorrow the United States will begin recalling soldiers to arms and working with foreign governments to mount an expeditionary force sufficient to deal effectively with the Bolshevik regime in Russia. The interventions which we have already mounted have provided some safe havens for anti-Communist forces, but they are not enough. We must not remain on the defensive; we must go on the offense, as we did against the German autocrats who unleashed the late war. We must not attempt to restore the Russian Empire; its policies led to its own demise because it failed to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of its people. But we are confident that the Russian people fundamentally desire the freedom and rights that move all peoples, all over the world, and to which the United States is committed, not only for ourselves, but for others who wish to excercise the blessings granted them by the Almighty."
I do not think that such an analysis would have been inferior strategically to the decision to conquer and reshape Iraq because 25 Al Queda activists had perpetrated an extraordinary act of terror within the United States. Would it have worked?
A President calling for such a policy probably could have convinced the Congress to undertake such an expedition--although few European nations, exhausted by war and including many large and powerful socialist parties themselves, would have joined wholeheartedly. It is in my opinion most unlikely that such an intervention would actually have stopped Communism in Russia, although it would undoubtedly have increased the sufferings of the Russian people even further. It might have partitioned the Russian empire; it might have created a longer period of chaos. Neither of those outcomes would necessarily have served the interests of the United States. Indeed, had National Socialism come into power in Germany under such circumstances, Hitler would have stood a much better chance of achieving his aims, since a powerful Soviet state would not have stood in his way.
Instead, the United States, while refusing until 1933 to recognize the Soviet Union, made no attempt to overthrow it. In the 1940s, during a critical war, the Soviets were allies without whom victory would have been very difficult, perhaps even impossible. They became adversaries at the end of the war, but as time goes on and the world order of the second half of the twentieth century continues to disintegrate, I suspect we shall see more and more clearly how the Soviets, along with the United States, actually ran a relatively peaceful, if frightening and imperfect, world, during that time. Nor has their eventual disappearance paved the way for any kind of democratic paradise in the former Soviet Union, least of all in Russia.
The critical difference between the United States in 1920 and the United States in 2001, over and above the difference in Presidential leadership, was that we had not yet fallen in love with the idea that it was our destiny to rule the world, to succour the helpless, and to free the enslaved--especially if they occupied a critical strategic or economic region. And sadly, nearly six years after September 11, we have seen almost no fundamental re-evaluation of those views. Nearly everyone except the President, the Vice President and a few remaining acolytes realize that war in Iraq has been disastrous, but no one seems to be facing the fact (and that is what it is) that no available strategy will create a Middle East in our own image, that we are making it more hostile every day, and that we will have to live with that hostility, as the Europeans did in the early modern period, for generations to come. Instead, the Republican Party is continuing to use the debate on Iraq to try to divide America between those who heroically want to go on fighting a vague Islamist enemy all over the world with all available means, and those cowards who hate America, won't support our troops, and want us to lose. (The same accusation is still against those who predicted, rightly, the Communist victories in China in 1949 and in Vietnam in 1975. When American hubris gets us into trouble, neoconservatives know who to blame: the people who foresaw the trouble in the first place.)
We still live in a world of sovereign states with different values. The interests of the United States will not advance if we keep proclaiming that whatever we want must be right and everyone else has a duty to help make it happen. We are confronted once again--as, really, we have always been--with the need to live amongst peoples and regimes who do not share our beliefs. This is not an insurmountable task by any means; in fact, from 1947 until 2001 we built and sustained large bureaucracies who did the job quite well when they were given a chance to do so. We can still return to that tradition, but time is running short. And I honestly do not think that we can do so until some political leadership is willing to confront our hubris, and the impossibility of achieving the goals that our government has set for us.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Gerrymandering again
On Wednesday I put together a slide show on American politics in the Vietnam era, including both Presidential and Congressional elections, for a class. In so doing (with the help of Wikpedia, which is outstanding for this sort of thing), I noticed that Wikpedia's results included something that I had long been looking for--the total party vote, nationwide, in Congressional elections. Since then I have spent a good deal of time playing with the data since 1946 to try to uncover some patterns.
My goal was primarily to evaluate the combined influence of gerrymandering and luck upon various elections. If the population of the United States were evenly divided into districts (which it is not) and political preferences were evenly distributed, an overall Democratic vote of 53% would produce a real landslide in the House of Representatives, just as a 53% vote for one Presidential candidate usually produces an electoral landslide. Such, however, is not the case, and the distribution of House seats is littered with anomalies. By entering all the data from 1946 to the present, however, I managed to pick out some clear patterns, even though all had exceptions. My goal was to correlate the total percentage vote for the winning party with the number of seats it won, although for simplicity's sake--and because minor-party totals in the last decade have actually amounted to a couple of percentage points in some cases--I settled on the winning party's percentage of the votes cast for Republicans and Democrats as the key variable. The range of that figure is from slightly below 50% (stay tuned for that one) to three Democratic landslides of 1958, 1964, and 1974, in which the Democrats won 56%, 58%, and 59% of the major party vote. Thanks largely to their long-time strength in the South, the Democrats have had of course had a built-in advantage for most of the 1946-2006 period, and the Republican popular vote record is 55%, all the way back in 1946.
Now as many of you know, I was extremely concerned by possible effects of gerrymandering on the 2006 elections and speculated late last summer that they would make it impossible for the Democrats to win control of the House. I turned out to be wrong. The Democrats gained 5.4% of the raw vote from 2004 to 2006, worth 33 new seats, and now hold a total of 233, almost exactly reversing the result in the last Congress. But I was not altogether wrong. In 2004, the Republicans won 232 seats with 51.4% of the major party vote; in 2006 the Democrats won 53.3% of the major party vote--almost two percentage points more--but emerged with just one more seat. The electoral math clearly favors the Republicans now.
The same result emerges from a different kind of comparison--how much is 53% of the major party vote usually worth? The answer, on average, is 246 seats, thirteen more than the Democrats collected (although to be fair, most of the data points come from the era of the Democratic solid south, which does seem, at first glance anyway, to have given the Democrats more seats with less votes, perhaps because southern turnouts were so low.) And as a matter of fact, when the Republicans took over the Congress in 1994, they won only 230 seats with the same 53% of the major party vote, suggesting that they overcame a considerable Democratic districting advantage. That advantage did not last, however--in 1996, the Republicans kept the control of Congress with 228 seats to 217, even though the Democrats actually outpolled them in the popular vote for Congress. (I do not recall seeing any mention of that rather anomalous result at the time, and this was the first I had heard of it.)
It occurred to me midway through this post, however, that I might be asking the wrong question. Perhaps it would make more sense to compare the net gain in the national Congressional vote from one election to the next, and the number of seats into which that gain translated. And that is what I have done, using the Democratic vote as a template (this would produce some minor anomalies when minor parties made a big jump, but they should be minor, and I'm running out of time.) This suggests that the Democrats should indeed have done much, much better than they did the last time out.
The Democratic vote actually increased by 5.4% of the total from 2004 to 2006, which is one of its three biggest gains since 1946. In 1948, an 8% gain (after a 7.5% loss in 1946) won 74 seats for the Democrats; in 1974, when they were starting from a much higher base, it won 49; but last time out it won only 31. The Republicans' three biggest corresponding gains were in 1946 (7.4%, 54 seats); 1966 (64.%, 48 seats); and, mirabile dictu, 1994, when a 5.9% gain translated into 44 new seats.
In any case, the return of the Democrats to majority party status was huge news and has enormous implications for 2008, especially as the Republican candidates' field looks weaker and weaker. But our democracy still faces a substantial road block in the apportionment of districts that left several states with razor-thin Senate races (such as Missouri and Tennessee) without a single contested House race. Let us hope we can move back in the right direction.
My goal was primarily to evaluate the combined influence of gerrymandering and luck upon various elections. If the population of the United States were evenly divided into districts (which it is not) and political preferences were evenly distributed, an overall Democratic vote of 53% would produce a real landslide in the House of Representatives, just as a 53% vote for one Presidential candidate usually produces an electoral landslide. Such, however, is not the case, and the distribution of House seats is littered with anomalies. By entering all the data from 1946 to the present, however, I managed to pick out some clear patterns, even though all had exceptions. My goal was to correlate the total percentage vote for the winning party with the number of seats it won, although for simplicity's sake--and because minor-party totals in the last decade have actually amounted to a couple of percentage points in some cases--I settled on the winning party's percentage of the votes cast for Republicans and Democrats as the key variable. The range of that figure is from slightly below 50% (stay tuned for that one) to three Democratic landslides of 1958, 1964, and 1974, in which the Democrats won 56%, 58%, and 59% of the major party vote. Thanks largely to their long-time strength in the South, the Democrats have had of course had a built-in advantage for most of the 1946-2006 period, and the Republican popular vote record is 55%, all the way back in 1946.
Now as many of you know, I was extremely concerned by possible effects of gerrymandering on the 2006 elections and speculated late last summer that they would make it impossible for the Democrats to win control of the House. I turned out to be wrong. The Democrats gained 5.4% of the raw vote from 2004 to 2006, worth 33 new seats, and now hold a total of 233, almost exactly reversing the result in the last Congress. But I was not altogether wrong. In 2004, the Republicans won 232 seats with 51.4% of the major party vote; in 2006 the Democrats won 53.3% of the major party vote--almost two percentage points more--but emerged with just one more seat. The electoral math clearly favors the Republicans now.
The same result emerges from a different kind of comparison--how much is 53% of the major party vote usually worth? The answer, on average, is 246 seats, thirteen more than the Democrats collected (although to be fair, most of the data points come from the era of the Democratic solid south, which does seem, at first glance anyway, to have given the Democrats more seats with less votes, perhaps because southern turnouts were so low.) And as a matter of fact, when the Republicans took over the Congress in 1994, they won only 230 seats with the same 53% of the major party vote, suggesting that they overcame a considerable Democratic districting advantage. That advantage did not last, however--in 1996, the Republicans kept the control of Congress with 228 seats to 217, even though the Democrats actually outpolled them in the popular vote for Congress. (I do not recall seeing any mention of that rather anomalous result at the time, and this was the first I had heard of it.)
It occurred to me midway through this post, however, that I might be asking the wrong question. Perhaps it would make more sense to compare the net gain in the national Congressional vote from one election to the next, and the number of seats into which that gain translated. And that is what I have done, using the Democratic vote as a template (this would produce some minor anomalies when minor parties made a big jump, but they should be minor, and I'm running out of time.) This suggests that the Democrats should indeed have done much, much better than they did the last time out.
The Democratic vote actually increased by 5.4% of the total from 2004 to 2006, which is one of its three biggest gains since 1946. In 1948, an 8% gain (after a 7.5% loss in 1946) won 74 seats for the Democrats; in 1974, when they were starting from a much higher base, it won 49; but last time out it won only 31. The Republicans' three biggest corresponding gains were in 1946 (7.4%, 54 seats); 1966 (64.%, 48 seats); and, mirabile dictu, 1994, when a 5.9% gain translated into 44 new seats.
In any case, the return of the Democrats to majority party status was huge news and has enormous implications for 2008, especially as the Republican candidates' field looks weaker and weaker. But our democracy still faces a substantial road block in the apportionment of districts that left several states with razor-thin Senate races (such as Missouri and Tennessee) without a single contested House race. Let us hope we can move back in the right direction.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
The Feith Controversy
The Inspector General of the Pentagon released a report last week criticizing Douglas Feith's office of policy analysis for disseminating alternative intelligence, and Feith has gone on an all-out offensive ever since claiming that he did nothing wrong and that his office improved the intelligence product. He claims the CIA was blinded by its own ideological belief that a secular regime like Iraq wouldn't cooperate with Al Queda. (In an op-ed in today's Washington Post Feith has the gall to claim that the coexistence of Al Queda elements and Ba'athists in Iraq today proves his point. Yes, since Feith and his friends destroyed effective authority in Iraq, Al Queda is free to operate there.) Oddly, the executive summary of the IG report--all that has been released--focused on a briefing one of Feith's underlings gave at the White House, but said nothing about a memo that Feith wrote himself to the heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and which some one (?) then linked to the neoconservative Weekly Standard, which promptly published a summary and excerpts on November 24, 2003. Readers may judge for themselves whether this represented new intelligence analysis. Why the major media has said nothing about this memo, as far as I can see, is beyond me. Here's the link:
www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/378fmxyz.asp
The conclusion of the memo was rejected by CIA at the time, rejected by the 9/11 Commission later, and is no longer believed, so far as I know, by anyone--but Feith insists he did nothing wrong.
www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/378fmxyz.asp
The conclusion of the memo was rejected by CIA at the time, rejected by the 9/11 Commission later, and is no longer believed, so far as I know, by anyone--but Feith insists he did nothing wrong.
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