Hillary is right. Whether running for president or playing the lottery, you never know. Here, though, is one constant in a knuckleball world: In any month she can name the past year, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been singing from the same hymnal to the same Democratic choir.
Analysts who've scrubbed the details of their campaigns' policy proposals note that with the exception of one difference in their health-care plans and on talking to Iran, you'll find more variation in the Everly Brothers than between these two Democratic voices.
Which is why Hillary keeps going nuclear.
Because of the iron law of Democratic primaries Run Liberal or Die she couldn't distinguish herself from Obama in any substantive way. The last primary Democrat who tried to go to the pack's right was Joe Lieberman. He was run out of the party. For a candidate locked left on substance, only one big piece of political artillery remains: Get personal.
Thus we heard a former two-term American president say in South Carolina that the Obama victory looked like Jesse Jackson's one win. It's why Hillary intimated that Obama has some weird problem with "white" voters. Or in the campaign's greatest boardinghouse reach, after a debate interlocutor asked Sen. Obama about his relationship with the former terrorist William Ayers, Hillary added arcane detail to the Ayers story.
Whatever tangled synapses of ambition and resentment released the remark about Robert Kennedy's assassination, candidate Clinton's head has spent too much time believing the personal is political. . . . Some say the politics of personal destruction is part of the Clinton DNA. Still, the past three Democratic primary cycles have displayed a liberalish homogeneity on policy. But when the need comes to escalate, the nuclear option is to get personal. Her team knows the drill.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/29/2008 07:04 ||
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#1
WAFF.com thread > MIT RESEARCHER: BARACK OBAMA IS IRANIAN. Article - Researcher believes news may affect US voters opinions of Obama in November 2008???
The U.S. intelligence community has failed. We have failed as a public institution and as a profession. We have failed not because of 9/11, or Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, or Iran's supposed WMD, or the horror stories about renditions and detentions. We have failed because we have not explained ourselves adequately and comprehensibly to the public -- describing our role, the limits within which we work and our view of what can be reasonably expected from us. We have failed because we have allowed ourselves to be caricatured, vilified and misrepresented by people who do not know us, do not like us and do not understand us -- or simply see us as convenient fall guys.
We have been, in a word, supine. And the net result has been a misguided restructuring of the entire intelligence community based on faulty premises. Inside the community, our passivity has meant crippled morale; outside the community, it has meant a severely diminished view of the value of the crucial, difficult tasks we perform. And we have allowed others to burden us with entirely false and unrealistic expectations.
Continued on Page 49
#2
We have failed because we have allowed ourselves to be caricatured, vilified and misrepresented by people who do not know us, do not like us and do not understand us -- or simply see us as convenient fall guys.
Oh, and don't forget being a sock puppet for one political party to feed selected information to your like thinking friends in the MSM. Remember getting the 'right' people in power is more important than the republic. Yeah, I know, it's all for our own good in the end.
#4
Our culture is continually creating inaccurate expectations of government agencies of all sorts. An example is FEMA. People have been led to believe it is an emergency response organization and when crap becomes disastrous in a disaster, they blame FEMA. FEMA's job is to get the states the resources they need to respond, not to be the responder.
Same thing with intelligence. The job is to collect and analyze data within the law. Had we been able to intercept both sides of an international conversation prior to 9/11, things might have been different.
Many times different people will reach different conclusions from analysis of the same data and it is up to some middle level bureaucrat as to which analysis will be give the most weight and passed up the chain. People seem to expect the intelligence agency to be the data collector, analysis center, AND to then take action on that intelligence.
You can't go around saying the government is moronic and then fault them for not doing the superhuman. Its kinda like the "truthers" who claim Bush is such a moron but was able to completely rig 9/11 after only 8 months in office.
One major problem with the intelligence community has been individuals attempting to "make the world a better place" by coloring their product with their own world vision. Another problem is that whenever you get a lot of very smart people together you get a lot of prima donnas. And when two or more prima donnas reach different conclusions, watch out. The fur is going to fly and the knives will start slipping into people's backs.
#5
Summary: US intelligence is a politicized, hidebound bureaucracy, but it's not their fault because nothing would improve even if they did their jobs right.
Huh???
Sounds to me like it's time to completely dissolve the FBI, CIA, and NSA, then rebuild espionage and intellegence services new, from scratch.
#6
Damn good article. I hate this continual blame game by the MSM and these feckless politicians. The old axiom "Success has many fathers, failure only one" surely applies here. All most folks here about via the MSM are the "failures." Celebrating and publicizing IC successes is extremely counterproductive. Lots of things have changed within the IC since the Carter years. Is there more room for improvement? Of course there is and a damn good place to start would be with the Defense Intelligence Agency. As far as WMD and Iraq, the IC got it right! Saddam was an evil bastard just like that idiot in Iran. Just my two cents worth.
#7
After reading this article I feel so sorry for the people in the intelligence community, hardworking professionals who have sacrificed themselves to work for the good of the country without regard to the political winds of the day, people like Valerie Plame. Real heroes.
And I know there are some, but I am now convinced they are in a small minority. It's broken. Let's get a new one.
#8
Perhaps the most important reform for the intelligence agencies would be the prohibition against employing Ivy League graduates. They are an institutional cancer in both corporations and government organizations.
For this reason, recruitment should be limited to State Universities, much like ROTC is used to provide the vast majority of officers to the military, and to some extent, for the same reason.
The US military academies had this same problem prior to the creation of the ROTC program in 1862, and having ROTC in competition with the academies has caused a distinct improvement in their quality.
My view from inside the IC shows his type to be the problem. Hide bound, spineless spinners, trying to always paint with a political brush.
With nitwits like this as ADCI its no wonder our intelligence failed.
And yes, failed analysis is a FAILURE.
Ignore those trucks headed to Syria because they make supporting your little fiefdom's conclusions nearly impossible. Guys like this one, ivory tower types, screwed up ops, and PC-ized the hell out of the analysis branch. They became the woods in which the leakers and other politically driven people hid.
Read more carefully folks - at every point he pushes the "Bush was going to attack anyway" theme. And he smears the efforts in Iraw that are now succeeding, and he NEVER casts blame on the morons in CIA who backed the idiots at State and their screw ups. Sure sign of another whiner trying to pass the buck.
Note that he also does NOT come close to addressing politicizations like the is doing, and politicized leaks as well as bias against thit administration in decisions like allowing certain info to be published and muzzling anyone trying to speak contra these golden boys.
And one thing rings particularly unrtue: if he hasn't heard 1, 2 or 10 things we could have done differently, then he has his ears stopped up because his head is squarely up his ass.
Yes we need to be more direct in representing our profession, and yes it has its limits and inherent flaws.
But those are not excuses to tar others with -they are yardsticks by which to measure ourselves and our actions, and useful to un-f**k a broken system.
And this jackass and those like him are part of the reason why the IC is hosed so bad.
Real Intelligence Failure?
Failure of Bush to fire the lot of them for failing at their job. Starting with Tenet.
Failure to hunt down and JAIL *ALL* those leaking to the NYTimes and other places.
Failure to discipline the PC crowd who covertly and overtly worked COUNTER to the administration intent and orders.
Thats the failure - to allow clowns like this to continue to screw up the IC.
"And if we are going to be serious about improving intelligence analysis, we have to stop publishing the end products -- even in redacted forms that can show up in the pages of this newspaper."
WHENEVER retreat-now activists or their favored presidential aspirant are confronted with our progress in Iraq, their stock reply is, "Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq in 2003."
Well, I happen to agree with Sen. Barack Obama and his supporters on that count: At most, the terrorists had a tenuous connection with Saddam's regime. But it's 2008, not 2003. And our next president will take office in 2009. It's today's reality that matters.
It's as if, in June 1944, critics had argued from facts frozen in June 1939. ("Why invade Normandy? Hitler's content with Czechoslovakia.")
In the course of a war - any war - the situation changes, enemies evolve and goals shift. A war to preserve the Union becomes a war to end slavery; a war to defeat one set of totalitarian systems empowers a new network of tyrannies. It's a rare war whose end can be forecast neatly at its outset.
And you don't get any do-overs.
To date, not one "mainstream media" journalist has pressed the leading advocates of unconditional surrender to describe in detail what might happen after we "bring the troops home now."
There's plenty of unchallenged sloganeering, but no serious debate. This selective political softball and pep-rally journalism serves neither our country nor our political process well.
So, let's bring those quit-Iraq time-travelers back to mid-2008 and fill them in on what's happened since they were ideologically stranded five years ago:
* After our troops reached Baghdad, al Qaeda's leaders made a colossal strategic miscalculation and publicly declared that Iraq was now the central front in their jihad against us. Matter of record, in the enemy's own words.
* Some Iraqi Sunni Arabs, lamenting the national pre-eminence they'd lost, rallied to the terrorists.
* Al Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliates then embarked on a campaign of widespread atrocities: videotaped beheadings, mass bombings of civilians, assassinations, widespread rape (of boys and girls, as well as of women), kidnappings and brutal efforts to dictate the intimate details of Iraqi lives.
* Al Qaeda's savagery alienated the Sunni Arab masses in record time. Suddenly, those American "occupiers" looked like saviors.
* By the millions, Sunni Muslims turned against al Qaeda and turned to the US military, inflicting a catastrophic propaganda defeat on the terrorists.
* Supported by the population, US and Iraqi forces inflicted a massive military defeat on al Qaeda. At present, the terror organization's own Web masters admit that al Qaeda is nearing final collapse in Iraq.
Those are facts.
If we nonetheless quit Iraq in 2009, the defeated remnants of al Qaeda will be able to declare victory, after all. The organization will be able to re-launch itself as the great Muslim victor over the Great Satan. We'll have thrown away a potentially decisive triumph and revived the fortunes of the fanatics who brought us 9/11.
And the above only detailed the defeat of al Qaeda. Far more is happening in Iraq, all of it good: Muqtada al-Sadr and his thugs have suffered a series of lopsided defeats; Muqtada's hiding in Iran, afraid to return; a democratically elected government has finally taken charge in Baghdad - and gained enormously in popularity.
Iraqis look forward to the next round of elections (to the dismay of every Persian Gulf autocracy). Crucial legislation has been refined, passed and implemented. Iraq's economy is booming - and its government has begun paying its own way.
Want more good news? Iran has failed in its bid to take control of Iraq. And our military leaders are drawing down our troop levels according to a sensible plan, with the prospect of more troop cuts to come.
What don't the critics like? Democracy? The defeat of al Qaeda? Muslims turning to the US military for help? Troop cuts? The dramatically improved human-rights situation? What's the problem here?
The answer's simple: Admitting that they've been mistaken about Iraq guts the left's argument for political entitlement. If the otherwise deplorable Bush administration somehow got this one right, it means the left got another big one wrong.
So be prepared for frequent time-machine trips until November. The encouraging reality of today's Iraq will go ignored in favor of an endless mantra of "Al Qaeda wasn't there in 2003 . . ."
The bottom line? Al Qaeda let the war's opponents down.
Neither in 1943 were Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy in French North Africa, under Vichy France with whom we were not at war with nor did we have an authorization to use force or a declaration of war against. Did that deter President Roosevelt from invading? No. Yet it was through that strategic avenue that we were able to confront and expel the Germans and Italians who were in North Africa.
The non-sequitur rebuttal to this truth continues to be "But it was the Invasion of Iraq itself that created the terrorists. The bumper-sticker logic is that had it not been for the liberation of Iraq foreign Jihadists and Iraqi insurgents would have been content to live out their pious lives as simple goat herders. Its great for sloganeering but as a rationalization for their argument not so much.
#4
Plus it glosses over the various terrorists that were known to be living in Iraq during the 1990s and up until the beginning of the war : Abu Nidal is just the most famous of them. So the Left is trying to say the ONLY terrorists that matter are Al-Q, and that we should ignore or even accept other Islamic terrorists like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.
#1
Both Zawahiri and Imam were pious and high-minded, prideful, and rigid in their views. They tended to look at matters of the spirit in the same way they regarded the laws of natureas a series of immutable rules, handed down by God. This mind-set was typical of the engineers and technocrats who disproportionately made up the extremist branch of Salafism, a school of thought intent on returning Islam to the idealized early days of the religion.
Ah. Garbage in, garbage out.
Christianity? Ah, a different matter. A very different matter altogether.
#2
Wow. The more I read, the more I'm impressed. This stuff is BIG.
The argument, in summary, is that the fatwas authorizing collateral muslim damage and betrayal of non-musllim trust are false and unislamic. The members of the Umma are not expendable. I am familiar with the passage which was used to justify muslim collateral damage, and it has to do with Muslim hostages being held by infidels who are making demands of the Muslim armies to withdraw. Mohammed, very properly in my view, pointed out that Allah judges him who wields the sword that kills the Muslim, not the one who "forced" the wielder to kill the muslim. The choice of killing the hostages when negotiations fail still lies with the hostage taker, not the ones rescuing the hostages. Threatening to kill hostages, and being determined to do so, does not transfer responsibility. Consistent application of this would result in a rational enemy, after capturing a Muslim town, releasing the women and children, but keeping the men, based on the knolwedge that Muslims would still attack, so you may as well not waste manpower guarding non-combatants when they could be on the walls shooting at the enemy.
Based on this, the argument can be made that the Americans won in Iraq because they worked very hard to Protect Muslims from Muslim fanatics, and so Allah blessed them for that. This is a win for those who argued for restrictive ROEs to ensure the winning of hearts and minds: According to Dr. Fadl, we doing so puts us on Allah's side. You were right, although not for the right reasons, so I reserve the right to use BBQ sauce to help the crow I have to eat go down easier.
#3
You were right, although not for the right reasons, so I reserve the right to use BBQ sauce to help the crow I have to eat go down easier.
I should correct the bolded portions to: "although not for the ultimately correct reasons". Although the ROEs were killing good people, I objected to them because I didn't think their use was going to generate any good will. I did not believe that the Chief theoretician for the Islamists would be giving us an opening by saying "Muslim ingratitude for infidel hospitality and kindness is a sin".
They're having real problems trying to process Israeli restraint, but I think we should give this time, while pushing back and insisting on consistency in the palestinian issue as well.
#4
What is most significant is that this long well written article is very critical of AQ, criticizes radical islam and brings into focus questions of how the religion of peace could advocate violence. It is even more significant that this is in the New Yorker, a bastion of liberal thought, and a widely read and highly respected publication.
I would agree that Imam has stuck a knife into the phoney jibberish that is radical islam and the silly false fatwas that make no sense...calling for death to all Americans and ignoring the millions of Moslems in America....
Perhaps, just perhaps, AQ is going to finally be exposed to both the liberals and the Islamic community as a criminal organization whose only function is violence and extortion populated by sociopaths and boderline personalities..if not full blown pediphiles (given their appetite for raping boys and girls)or rank serial killers full of murky demons who use jihad to legitimatize their abberent tastes for rape, torture, beheadings and mulitation.
I hope enough people read this and take to heart the fact that we, the US, did NOTHING to deserve the 9/11 attacks and the fact that years and years of phoney posturing by the jihadists blaming the US as the motiviator of their violence is morally, ethically and factually bankrupt.
#5
well not many jihadis read the New Yorker (maybe they are frustrated because they don't get some of the cartoons)or get direct faxes from Asharq Al Awsat.
how widely the views of Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, aka Dr. Fadl are distributed in the Umma depends on the broadcasting policies of Al J, etc.
how widely these views are accepted will be based on the former and on the Friday sermons, the statements of the school deans, and the Kings/princes/dictators of the Arab world, among others.
#6
I hope enough people read this and take to heart the fact that we, the US, did NOTHING to deserve the 9/11 attacks and the fact that years and years of phoney posturing by the jihadists blaming the US as the motiviator of their violence is morally, ethically and factually bankrupt.
Nah, they'll just become America hating Marxists and get full scholarships at our universities were their views will be reinforced and sanctioned.
#7
One of the things I admire about you, Ptah, is that when you realize you were wrong you admit it openly. Not enough of us are capable of that.
I haven't read the article yet, but Dr. Fadl's masterwork has been out for a bit. It elicited a mocking response from, I think, Zawahiri, who wondered how an Egyptian prisoner had access to a fax machine. It's been reported that others have wondered whether Dr. Fadl was forced to write this, or whether he wrote it just to get out of jail. So this has been getting fairly wide distribution amongst those Arabs capable of reading. Friday sermons no doubt remain unchanged for the nonce.
Admission: Im more concerned about Iranian nuclear ambitions than climate change which makes me feel like someone who worried about climate change when everyone was worried about Nuclear Winter in the 80s. I dont have the enthusiasm for fashionable macro-panics. The world abides. Human history, on the other hand, is often jabbed along into the ditch at knife-point by the nuthouse Jew-haters. Its a question of which catastrophe you find more likely.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/29/2008 06:36 ||
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#1
Isn't it funny that NONE of the candidates left seem to believe that there's a need to articulate a strong, non-crack-pipe-laden position on how to keep the less stable people on the planet from getting nuclear bombs?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
