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The Washington battlefield
For liberalhawk... Lightly EFL
The second battleground of the Iraq war is Washington where the conflict sparked a succession of factional power struggles. In 21st century Washington, promising careers are crushed, reputations die, but not people, They stay alive to fight the next battle, and to sabotage one another. Take the recent flap over who will be top honcho in the running and reconstruction of newly liberated Iraq. According to the State Department, the new boss will be Paul Bremer, a former chief of the State Department's Counter-Terrorism Bureau. According to the Pentagon, however, the man in charge is still former Lt. Gen. Jay Garner.
Wasn't Bremer supposed to be appointed last week?
On his flight to Damascus, Secretary of State Colin Powell would not comment on the stories about Bremer. But coincidentally also in a plane returning from Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lavished praise on the work Garner was doing, but did not mention Bremer. News of Bremer's appointment was first leaked late last week. The resulting flap is the latest skirmish in the ongoing battle inside the National Security Council where the Pentagon's civilian leaders have fought tooth and nail for control over everything from which Iraqis get invited to town hall meetings (and which do not), to the broadcasters the U.S. government plans to hire for Iraq's new state run media. Both sides routinely accuse the other of supporting ex-Baathists. In the past two weeks, senior Pentagon leaders have whispered to reporters and lawmakers that the intelligence from the CIA was atrocious during Operation Iraqi Freedom. They mention the two apparently failed strikes against Saddam Hussein, and the failure to find the missing leader, who is still believed to be alive and somewhere in his country.
Tasting raisins with Osama, I'd say.
Meanwhile, the CIA has trashed the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi exile leader, Ahmad Chalabi, for being financially corrupt, too close to the Iranian government and unpopular in Iraq itself.
Recent NY Sun had an interesting editorial on this case--seems Chalabi was prosecuted in a court never before used against anyone else, and in fact only set up days before handing down his conviction.
The 2004 budget for the Pentagon requests full funding for a new undersecretary of defense to analyze intelligence, a position that would likely formalize the independent analysis the Pentagon provided to the president in the policy debates leading up to new Iraq war. All of which is part of a larger picture of incoherence in the Bush administration's Middle East policy. When President George W. Bush called for "new and different leadership" for the Palestinian Authority, the Pentagon took this as a cue to cultivate leaders with no connections at all to Yasser Arafat.
You mean Arafat hasn't killed them all?
The State Department, on the other hand, seized the opportunity to recruit Arafat's deputy in the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Abu Mazen. While Abu Mazen has distanced himself from Arafat, the hawks in the administration felt the diplomats had betrayed the president. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said publicly on April 22 what so many hawks had said privately, when he called the new peace plan published this week a "deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president's policies procedurally." Such statements are dangerously close to alleging treason. But the State Department did not shy away from the rhetorical battle. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Beth Jones called Gingrich "an idiot," while another senior State Department official suggested Gingrich may have forgotten to take his medications.
Of course, they could all be right.
This nastiness reflects an administration that has yet to settle basic internal debates on vital questions of U.S. national security. For example, there is no consensus on who the enemy is. Senior hawks like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz would contend America is at war with all states that sponsor terrorist organizations and pursue weapons of mass destruction.
Uh, yeah, that's what Bush said.
Therefore, America's foreign policy goals should lead eventually to ending these regimes. Powell and the CIA believe such states can be coopted to do America's dirty work against an enemy that is distinct from states, the global terrorist organization. This group would agree with former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot when he said shortly after September 11, 2001: "Al-Qaida is the ultimate NGO." Whether America's diplomats should work with bad states to crack down on worse actors, or work to undermine those states, needs to be resolved. If it is not, expect to see more bickering and even less coherence.
First one, then the other. Simple, huh?
Posted by: someone 2003-05-04
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=13849