hist2004
06-15-2004, 10:40 AM
June 15, 2004
By Clifford May
IRAQ'S FUTURE: This Wednesday, June 16th, the FDD will sponsor a symposium here in Washington on: "Iraq's Future and the War on Terrorism."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CONN) will give the keynote address. Among the panelists discussing how the United States can best succeed militarily and politically in Iraq will be Bill Kristol, Christopher Hitchens, Ambassador Rend al Rahim, Ambassador Mark Ginsberg, Michael Rubin, Lt. Col. Thomas G McInerney, Ralph Peters and Michael O'Hanlon.
MISSED SIGNALS: This is a period of hyper-partisanship. It shouldn't be, because it is increasingly clear that just about everyone -- Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, liberals and libertarians -- misunderstood the developments taking place in the world prior to 9/11.
The White House, Congress, the Intelligence Community all scanned the horizon and missed the gathering storm. Or rather they thought it would be nothing more than a passing shower.
In March of last year, Thomas P. M. Barnett, a professor of warfare analysis, wrote that until the shock of 9/11, it was almost universally assumed that "only an advanced state can truly threaten us. The rest of the world? Those less-developed parts of the world have long been referred to in military plans as the 'Lesser Includeds,' meaning that if we built a military capable of handling a great power's military threat, it would always be sufficient for any minor scenarios we might have to engage in the less-advanced world."
This may help explain why, throughout the 1990s and despite repeated terrorists attacks (e.g. the first WTC bombing, Khobar Towers, embassies in Africa), President Clinton and Vice President Gore saw no strategic threats demanding a robust response. Neither did Republicans in Congress. Instead, intelligence budgets were cut year after year. Special Forces were not expanded. New doctrines and new strategies were not developed.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, up to 20,000 al Qaeda terrorists were trained. But backward Afghanistan was clearly a "Lesser Included" and therefore by definition unable to cook up anything we couldn't handle.
Another way to say this: The Intelligence Community, those they advised in the executive branch, and those that oversaw their work in the legislative branch, all were blinded by their own assumptions.
There should have been those -- at least in the Intelligence Community, the think tank community and the media -- challenging conventional wisdom. No one did so -- not effectively, at any rate.
For more on the failure of congressional oversight, see this op-ed by FDD Senior Fellow Victoria Toensing; it appeared over the weekend in the Washington Post. For more on the need to reform the intelligence committee, and how to go about it, read this piece by Herbert Meyer a former special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council.
FORESIGHT: Writing just before the liberation of Iraq, Tom Barnett did predict -- with what now seems remarkable accuracy -- the situation that would develop in Iraq. He wrote:
"Taking down Saddam, the region's bully-in-chief, will force the US into playing [the role of Leviathan] far more fully than it has over the past several decades, primarily because Iraq is the Yugoslavia of the Middle East -- a crossroads of civilizations that has historically required a dictatorship to keep the peace. As baby-sitting jobs go, this one will be a doozy, making our lengthy efforts in postwar Germany and Japan look simple in retrospect. But it is the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do it, and we are the only country that can."
DRIVING MESSAGES: Colin Powell said last week that he learned from President Reagan that it's not enough to have a vision. You also have to know how to communicate that vision. That's an important part of what we strive to do here at FDD -- day after day.
UN STONEWALL: Readers of this space know that FDD's Claudia Rosett has done spectacular investigative journalism on the UN's Oil-for-Food program. In yesterday's New York Times, columnist William Safire rightly calls that program "the largest financial rip-off in history."
He adds that there is now compelling evidence that Iraqi oil money that was supposed to "supply desperate Iraqis with food or medicine" instead went for "items like construction equipment from Russia, hundreds of Mercedes-Benz limousines from Germany and thousands of bottles of perfume from France." (Why isn't the fabled Arab Street -- or the Muslim Street or the European Street, for that matter -- howling over this outrage?)
Safire also worries whether the investigations now underway can succeed in getting the UN -- an organization accountable to no one -- to release the documents needed to uncover fully who profited from this mega-swindle and who permitted it to take place.
Regards,
Hist2004
By Clifford May
IRAQ'S FUTURE: This Wednesday, June 16th, the FDD will sponsor a symposium here in Washington on: "Iraq's Future and the War on Terrorism."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CONN) will give the keynote address. Among the panelists discussing how the United States can best succeed militarily and politically in Iraq will be Bill Kristol, Christopher Hitchens, Ambassador Rend al Rahim, Ambassador Mark Ginsberg, Michael Rubin, Lt. Col. Thomas G McInerney, Ralph Peters and Michael O'Hanlon.
MISSED SIGNALS: This is a period of hyper-partisanship. It shouldn't be, because it is increasingly clear that just about everyone -- Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, liberals and libertarians -- misunderstood the developments taking place in the world prior to 9/11.
The White House, Congress, the Intelligence Community all scanned the horizon and missed the gathering storm. Or rather they thought it would be nothing more than a passing shower.
In March of last year, Thomas P. M. Barnett, a professor of warfare analysis, wrote that until the shock of 9/11, it was almost universally assumed that "only an advanced state can truly threaten us. The rest of the world? Those less-developed parts of the world have long been referred to in military plans as the 'Lesser Includeds,' meaning that if we built a military capable of handling a great power's military threat, it would always be sufficient for any minor scenarios we might have to engage in the less-advanced world."
This may help explain why, throughout the 1990s and despite repeated terrorists attacks (e.g. the first WTC bombing, Khobar Towers, embassies in Africa), President Clinton and Vice President Gore saw no strategic threats demanding a robust response. Neither did Republicans in Congress. Instead, intelligence budgets were cut year after year. Special Forces were not expanded. New doctrines and new strategies were not developed.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, up to 20,000 al Qaeda terrorists were trained. But backward Afghanistan was clearly a "Lesser Included" and therefore by definition unable to cook up anything we couldn't handle.
Another way to say this: The Intelligence Community, those they advised in the executive branch, and those that oversaw their work in the legislative branch, all were blinded by their own assumptions.
There should have been those -- at least in the Intelligence Community, the think tank community and the media -- challenging conventional wisdom. No one did so -- not effectively, at any rate.
For more on the failure of congressional oversight, see this op-ed by FDD Senior Fellow Victoria Toensing; it appeared over the weekend in the Washington Post. For more on the need to reform the intelligence committee, and how to go about it, read this piece by Herbert Meyer a former special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council.
FORESIGHT: Writing just before the liberation of Iraq, Tom Barnett did predict -- with what now seems remarkable accuracy -- the situation that would develop in Iraq. He wrote:
"Taking down Saddam, the region's bully-in-chief, will force the US into playing [the role of Leviathan] far more fully than it has over the past several decades, primarily because Iraq is the Yugoslavia of the Middle East -- a crossroads of civilizations that has historically required a dictatorship to keep the peace. As baby-sitting jobs go, this one will be a doozy, making our lengthy efforts in postwar Germany and Japan look simple in retrospect. But it is the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do it, and we are the only country that can."
DRIVING MESSAGES: Colin Powell said last week that he learned from President Reagan that it's not enough to have a vision. You also have to know how to communicate that vision. That's an important part of what we strive to do here at FDD -- day after day.
UN STONEWALL: Readers of this space know that FDD's Claudia Rosett has done spectacular investigative journalism on the UN's Oil-for-Food program. In yesterday's New York Times, columnist William Safire rightly calls that program "the largest financial rip-off in history."
He adds that there is now compelling evidence that Iraqi oil money that was supposed to "supply desperate Iraqis with food or medicine" instead went for "items like construction equipment from Russia, hundreds of Mercedes-Benz limousines from Germany and thousands of bottles of perfume from France." (Why isn't the fabled Arab Street -- or the Muslim Street or the European Street, for that matter -- howling over this outrage?)
Safire also worries whether the investigations now underway can succeed in getting the UN -- an organization accountable to no one -- to release the documents needed to uncover fully who profited from this mega-swindle and who permitted it to take place.
Regards,
Hist2004