With Friends Like These, Can Dubya Afford Enemies?

The coming election season has often been made out to be liberal versus conservative, Republican against Democrat. But what happens when conservatives start revolting against the President, such as Pat Buchanan calling for the impeachment of the President for his inaction over illegal immigration? That isn't something I would think would be an impeachable offense, but Mr. Buchanan marches to a different drummer.

Long time readers of his columns would know the conservative viewpoints of Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger. Thursday's column returns to one of his favorite topics:

What happened to the George W. we first elected?
Thursday, September 28, 2006

A wise man once said that whenever America goes to war, "The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well-defined." What happened to that guy? He got elected president, that's what. And all that power seems to have gone to George W. Bush's head, crowding out any wisdom rattling around in there.

The release the other day of the National Intelligence Estimate provides further proof of how far Bush has strayed from the principles of small-government conservatism he espoused when he
first ran for president back in 2000. At that time, he also observed, "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building." Once in office, however, Bush decided to start building nations almost halfway around the globe.

The result, says the NIE, is that the failed nation-building experiment in Iraq has become a cause celebre" for Islamic terrorists all over the world. Coincidentally enough, the release of the report, which represents the consensus of the nation's intelligence agencies, came right after another significant milestone in the so-called "War on Terror." Last week, the American death toll from the nation-building exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq invasion grew to exceed the death toll of 2,973 resulting from the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Almost all of those deaths are the result of Bush's abandonment of the two principles he embraced as a candidate: the need for overwhelming force and for an exit strategy. Those were excellent principles, but he seemed to have forgotten them in the heady days after the Iraq invasion.

"There are some who feel like conditions are such that they can attack us there," said Bush on July 1, 2003. "My answer is bring them on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."

Oops. It turns out that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had neglected to come up with a plan for the security situation. And that in turn permitted Iraq, which was almost entirely devoid of terrorists under Saddam Hussein, to become a hotbed of terrorism. Here's what the NIE says about that:

"We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere."

Bush reacted to the report by stating of the terrorists, "My judgment is, if we weren't in Iraq, they'd find some other excuse, because they have ambitions."

But if we weren't in Iraq, the terrorists couldn't attack us at will with primitive weapons.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA operative, has compiled on his Web site (http://noquarter.typepad.com) a bar graph of terror attacks on Americans as reported by the State Department in its publication "Patterns of Global Terrorism." The graph shows worldwide terror incidents running at less than 500 annually from 1992 to 2003. Then suddenly in 2004 the attacks skyrocketed to more than 2,500 a year as the Iraqi insurgency picked up steam.

"The Bush administration has played politics with the numbers," Johnson told me. "They initially were not going to publish the report because the number of terrorist incidents had surged so dramatically. It would be difficult to explain how they were winning the war on terror when the number of incidents was rising."

The ostensible reason for the invasion of Iraq was the threat that Saddam supposedly posed to the United States. But even before the invasion, the CIA had been telling Bush that Iraq's efforts at terrorism were directed toward Israel and Iran, not the U.S., Johnson said.

"Once you decide the CIA is the enemy, you ignore what they tell you," said Johnson.

Instead of listening to the intelligence experts, Bush paid attention to the various neoconservative think-tank types, the "true believers," in the words of Bob Baer, another former CIA agent who worked in the Mideast. The neocons' poor planning got thousands of Americans killed while stoking the terrorist movement, he said.

"It's as if al Qaeda were running the White House," said Baer. "I don't see how they could do it any better. Everything we do is as if we were fueling a jihad."

In 1995, Baer was involved in fomenting a coup inside Iraq that involved five Iraqi generals who would have deposed Saddam and replaced him with what Baer calls "a Saddam light."

"A light police state is what we wanted," he said. "The only people who are going to police the Iraqis are Iraqis."

Instead, we got Bush's grandiose scheme to create a democracy. That sounds good in theory, but in practice it meant handing Iraq over to the Shi'a majority, thus creating a new ally for Iran and its anti-American leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"Ahmadinejad probably gets up each morning and looks in the mirror and pinches himself and
says, 'I can't believe it.'"

I can't believe it, either. This sure wasn't what candidate Bush promised us back in 2000. Here's another quote from that campaign: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road."

Well, at least he got that right.

Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist. He may be reached at pmulshine@starledger.com.

Fix the UN

Last week saw the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly at its headquarters in New York City. As is customary of late, it has featured speeches by such notable orators as President Bush, and the usual psuedo-statesmen like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. The former offered nothing new beyond variations of his stock "we are spreading freedom and democracy to those who desperately need it" pitch, and the other two used the captive audience - at least for Chavez, as the hall during Ahmadinejad's speech was about a third full - to criticize and condemn the United States. Chavez actually made personal attacks against the President, calling him "the devil" no less than eight times. Stuff like this is supposed to be impolite in the august body that is the United Nations, but as they say, this isn't your father's United Nations.

Say what you will about the President of the United States - and there is a lot to say, indeed - but he does have a point about the UN being out of control. In the last forty or so years, since most of the traditional colonial powers have beat feet out of Africa and Asia, there has been a dramatic increase in the membership of the UN, most of it being countries led by people with less than a firm grip on reality. (John Farmer has an excellent column on the current state of the UN in Friday's Newark Star-Ledger.)

Since we are one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, we contribute something like 25% of the UN's annual budget, and the UN is actually headquartered in New York, it would be bad form to boycott the annual fest bashing us. And since we are supposed to be above that sort of thing, that's why we sit there and listen. As many a politician had proudly noted afterward, people like Chavez can come to the United States and say things that he himself would never allow any of his countrymen to say.

That hasn't stopped the usual calls for radical change at the United Nations, "radical" meaning "get lost." Why should we allow such antics to go on here in our own country, when the vast majority of the people who make up the UN hate our guts, or so they refrain goes. And I would have to admit, there is some validity in that point of view. And to effect such "change" would be a bad thing.

Winston Churchill's famous quote about democracy, that it is horrible except for just about every other form of government, can be applied to the UN, as well. No, the place doesn't do our bidding, nor is it supposed to. We sometimes forget that although we consume a quarter of the world's oil production, have perhaps the world's strongest economy, and certainly the strongest military (notice I didn't say "largest"), we are, population-wise, a mere fraction of the world, less than 5%. This may come as a shock to some people out there, but there are other people on this planet as well. Even though more wars have been fought in the last 50 years than in all the previous years combined, most of those have been the piddling regional kind, the type that has popped up because nobody really cared what went on there, anyway. Suddenly giving people there own governments in those Third World countries that never had one without any instructions on how to run it will tend to do that.

But there is a forum for the world to work out its problems, and imperfect that it might be, the UN is the best that we've got. Lately, we have turned to NATO to put muscle behind our intentions, and perhaps that is the way it should be. Maybe the UN really shouldn't have its own armed force, since you aren't going to get 190-plus member states to agree on anything, beyond how many scoops to put in the coffee urn at one of those fancy-pants gatherings.

Going back to that whole 5% of the world thing, we have to try. Having a permanent seat on the Security Council should count for something. To start with, find somebody else than John Bolton, who has all the smoothness of 40-grit sandpaper, to be the United States' UN Representative. He may be somebody who gets things done in Washington, but stuff like that doesn't fly with the champaign and caviar set.

Really making an effort to include everybody else on the really important issues, especially the Chinese and the Russians, since they have lots of people and lots of weapons, and the French, since they hold one of the vetoes, is also a good idea. The British are already on board, and everybody else is just gravy. It's fine to eventually just give up if you aren't going to get what you're looking for, but not after doing it for show. Everybody else knows that, and that isn't something out of "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

And for cryin' out loud, stop talking about how we should get rid of the United Nations, and send them to some place that might appreciate it more. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York said the other day on WABC-AM that the UN contributes $2.5 Billion dollars to the city economy yearly. Do you really think that the Germans should get that?

Five Years Later

Today has been a little difficult. I must confess that I only directly knew one person who died at the World Trade Center, one of the Port Authority Police Officers who I had worked with at another job. Today has been much harder for his family, his girlfriend and his closest friends.

Nonetheless, I am scrupulously avoiding most coverage of the day because I cannot bear to listen to the politicians drone on and on about how we must be vigilant in the so-called "War on Terror", and hear how the President wants this tool or that power in this conflict. As far as I am concerned, he has squandered pretty much all the opportunities given to him in the last five years, and especially those right after that September day, a day which caused even the leftist French daily LeMonde to proclaim "We are all Americans."

Meanwhile, we must listen to Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney go on separate Sunday morning talk shows and read from the same script. George Tenet probably wants to hang himself right about now. But then again, this Administration has a history of hanging people out to dry, friend and foe alike. (Tenet, Michael Brown, Valerie Plame, Katherine "No more recounts for my friend George" Harris...). Particularly galling is Rice's continued insistence that "clearly, we are safer, but not yet safe." What has she been smoking?

So, what has and what has not changed in the last five years?

Osama bin Laden is still out there.

American forces are in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no end in sight to either conflict, and no apparent idea of what that end would actually look like. Thousands have been killed and tens of thousands more wounded, and that's just for the Americans. In an odd twist, Iraq has become the Central Front in the War On Terror, as every jihadist with a dream of blowing himself and everybody nearby to bits streams in from far and wide to learn just how to do that.

There is still a hole in Lower Manhattan. Only now are the architects coming together to produce something in the way of a memorial and replace what was lost.

A huge bureacracy has been created in Washington, called the Department of Homeland Security. Given what we know about its response to Hurricane Katrina, its lack of effective security at various airports, and the ongoing fiasco with the FBI computer system, maybe we should call it something else.

A surplus of some 160 billion dollars in the Federal Budget has morphed into a yearly deficit of $400 billion or more. Something like 80 spending bills have crossed the President's desk. Guess how many he has vetoed? Better yet, guess how many total bills he has vetoed?

8,000 illegals cross the border with Mexico daily. What is the government waiting for?

Notice any more security around your local power plant, chemical factory, rail yard, reservoir? Me neither.

So, what has changed in the last five years?

Not much, apparently.