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.