Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot - over.: War on terror

Showing posts with label War on terror. Show all posts

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Bush has lost the war.

It is now completely clear that Bush has lost the war. Not his voluntary diversion into Iraq, the idiocy that was supposed to somehow remake the middle east. No, bush has completely lost the war on Terrorism. From the Associated Press by way of Yahoo News we get the most recent report on the real enemy of America (other then the conservatives, racists and religious extremists who make up today's Republican Party.) The real enemy? Al Qaeda.

WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded al-Qaida has rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, The Associated Press has learned. The conclusion suggests that the group that launched the most devastating terror attack on the United States has been able to regroup along the Afghan-Pakistani border despite nearly six years of bombings, war and other tactics aimed at crippling it. [Snip]

Counterterrorism analysts produced the document, titled "Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West." The document focuses on the terror group's safe haven in Pakistan and makes a range of observations about the threat posed to the United States and its allies, officials said.

Al-Qaida is "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago" and has "regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," the official said, paraphrasing the report's conclusions. "They are showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States."

The group also has created "the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in using European operatives," the official quoted the report as saying.

At the same time, this official said, the report speaks of "significant gaps in intelligence" so U.S. authorities may be ignorant of potential or planned attacks.

John Kringen, who heads the CIA's analysis directorate, echoed the concerns about al-Qaida's resurgence during testimony and conversations with reporters at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.

"They seem to be fairly well settled into the safe haven and the ungoverned spaces of Pakistan," Kringen testified. "We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications. We see that activity rising."

So while Bush has been spending American tax money money like he was the spendthrift alcoholic son of an extremely wealthy father and telling American service people to lay down their lives in the great side-track of Iraq, al Qaeda has been quietly rebuilding all it lost from the invasion into Afghanistan and becoming an even greater threat to America.

Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld carefully allowed bin Laden to escape when he was surrounded at the complex at Tora Bora. For this great service, Gen. Tommy Franks was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The misbegotten war in Iraq has since drained American resources from Afghanistan where they could have been applied directly to al Qaeda, while creating a diversion in Iraq that has attracted Jihadists from all over the Arab world to attack Americans. Iraq has also created the greatest motivator for Jihadists to join al Qaeda that that organization has ever had, while attracting otherwise unrelated terrorist groups to use the name al Qaeda in order to build up their own reputation and recruiting power.

The result has been sharply reduced resources available to actually fight al Qaeda troops, allowing them to grow more powerful based largely on their reputation for being able to "stick it to the Americans" in Iraq.

There has never been a better example of utter incompetence in the Presidential Office than George W. Bush. Nearly six years now he has supposedly fought against al Qaeda, with the result that al Qaeda is at least as powerful now as they were six years ago on 9/11.

Consider this for an example of extreme incompetence in action. The so-called war on terror couldn't have gone much worse for America if Bush had simply continued to ignore terrorism after 9/11 as he did before that date.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Taunts from a "Christian" Terrorist

The Bush administration and American conservatives generally keep trying to make the point that the GWOT (Global War on Terror) against the so-called "Islamofascist Terrorists" is the new world war, on par with and more dangerous than the Cold War with the USSR and Soviet Communism.

Really?

How is Osama bin Laden any different from the Fundamentalist "Christian" organization called "the Army of God" which sends out terrorists to kill because the rest of America will not accept their demands that abortions be criminalized? Cliff Schecter points out how one of "the Army of God's" anointed terrorists taunts his victims from his federal prison cell. Several points need to be made to counter the propaganda and misinformation put out by the Bush administration, by the conservatives, and by the Republican political media led by FOX TV "news."

America is not involved in "World War IV." The "West" is not fighting a unified Islamic enemy. There is no "unified Terrorist enemy!" And terrorism is a tactic used by small groups who are trying to disrupt a state, but it is a tactic used by bandit forces rather than by armies.

Fighting bandits and pirates has been a constant problem for nations for centuries, but it is not war. When the early American government put down Shays Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, they were not fighting against armies. They were using the military to dispatch rioters or their equivalent.

OK. Eric Rudolph set bombs to support the Army of God in its fight against abortion. He was a terrorist, but he was not a soldier. Of course, Rudolph was not as successful by the standards of body count as another American terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, either. Both were terrorists, however, and neither was Islamic. Neither were soldiers, and neither was involved in a real war. Mohammed Atta was a terrorist, and when evaluated by body count, he was a lot more successful than either Eric Rudolph or Timothy McVeigh. Atta was not a soldier either, however. He was just another terrorist - a violent bandit - who happened onto a tactic that was unusually successful in killing a large number of people.

There are terrorist organizations around the world. In fact there are quite a few. The U.S. State Department puts out a list of known terrorist organizations by country which can be reviewed here. There are also National Liberation organizations that use terrorist tactics. They range from Communist to right-wing organizations, and would include the liberation fighters in Nicaragua, which were supported by Ronald Reagan and Oliver North.

Wikipedia offers a much more comprehensive (but less reliable) "List of non-governmental organizations accused of using terrorism." The list of categories of such organizations is interesting.

The variety of types of organizations using the tactic of terrorism is rather surprising.

So why are the American right-wing propagandists (including the Bush administration and FOX "News") working so hard to emphasize the religious aspects of Middle East terrorism? I have to conclude that it is much easier to justify a preemptive war started by America on religious grounds than on political ones.

Armies are not very good at chasing down bandits. Ask Black Jack Pershing after he came back from his fruitless effort to chase down Pancho Villa in Mexico before WW I. But increased Intelligence and Special Operations efforts are covered by classification and don't get much Press, except when they fail. Successes remain classified. So how does a right-wing politician look tough without sending in another division? He doesn't.

Defining the battle against those who attacked America as Islamo-fascist terrorists allows the right-wingers to blame all Muslims. That fits their racial prejudices as well as making the problem into a religious one. It justifies turning America into an Armed Camp and making everyone afraid, so that those who fear can elect the right-wingers.

The fact is Eric Rudolph and the conservative right-wingers like Rudolph Gulianni are very similar. They need each other, and they react to social problems similarly. Pass a law against what they oppose and set up a police force to enforce that law without exceptions. Remove all limitations on how the people being investigates are treated, and don't worry too much if a few innocents get hurt in the process. Both Eric Rudolph and Rudolph Gulianni sell themselves as being tough on the "bad guys." The real difference is that Eric Rudolph was using violence to try to change the law, while Rudolph Gulianni would prefer to change the law first, then use it to justify violence.

Those of us on the outside of this system need to remember - just don't ask either Eric or Rudy who the "bad guys" are. You'll quickly find yourself on their list, just for questioning them. The "bad guys" are their enemies, not our enemies. Remember that and watch your back - and watch for abandoned packs in public places.

Monday, April 09, 2007

Bush-league incompetence in war since 9/11

Just read this from Joe Galloway today:

Masters of the art of war

By Joseph Galloway
An ever more combative President Bush last week denounced the Democratic majority in the House and Senate for attempting to substitute its tactical and strategic judgment for that of our military commanders on the ground in Iraq.

Heaven forbid.

How dare Washington politicians attempt to dictate benchmarks for measuring the effectiveness of the ineffective Iraqi government or lay down timelines for beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from a war gone bad?

The president's indignation might resonate more loudly with the American people if it were not so heavily laden with hypocrisy.

Shall we call to mind that for six years Bush and his senior cohorts -- Vice President Dick Cheney and the unlamented former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- rode roughshod over the best advice of their military commanders?

Remember Afghanistan? Remember how we blew the best chance ever at destroying Osama bin Laden and the top leadership of al Qaeda because we didn't have enough American forces on the ground to seal off all the escape routes from Tora Bora?

Or how American troops were killed and wounded in Operation Anaconda because they didn't have artillery support when they so desperately needed it?

And why was this?

It was because Rumsfeld, that paragon of military expertise who (like his bosses) had never heard a shot fired in anger, had dictated that no more than 7,000 American troops would be permitted to set foot in Afghanistan and had ordered the Army to leave its artillery pieces behind.

How did Rumsfeld arrive at that arbitrary manpower ceiling of 7,000 pairs of boots on the ground and not one pair more? God only knows. He was determined to prove that high-tech weaponry had rendered obsolete old-fashioned ideas about how you seize and control an enemy's territory.

The Army would have no need of its artillery fire support. The Air Force, with its satellite-guided smart bombs and its AC-130 gunships, would provide all the fire support that the old-fashioned ground-pounders would ever need.

So when we finally tracked Osama and his merry band of murderous thugs to the cave stronghold of Tora Bora, our military commanders had no choice but to depend on three Afghan warlords to seal the escape routes into Pakistan. Instead, the warlords set up what amounted to toll booths and happily sold get-out-of-jail-free cards to Osama and Company.

When reconnaissance photos showed the escaping terrorists' campfires in the mountains, the warlords said they belonged to shepherds, who presumably were feeding snow to their sheep.

And while Army artillery is on call 24/7 to provide a shield of hot steel to their infantry brothers in snow, sleet or heavy mountain clouds, the Air Force still is loath to fly expensive jet fighters through zero-zero weather full of 12,000-foot granite peaks. It already had decreed that the highly effective AC-130 gunships with their Gatling guns and 105mm artillery pieces were too vulnerable to fly during daylight hours.

That's just Afghanistan. Then came Iraq.

Here Rumsfeld, with the obvious approval of Cheney and Bush, tampered and tinkered with literally everything. He threw out a war plan, which had been drawn up based on everything the generals had learned about war in that part of the world, that called for an invasion force of 450,000 American and allied troops. Rumsfeld determined that a figure of something like 100,000 would be more than enough and threw out five years of planning and war games.

When Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki reluctantly offered an opinion to a senator that it would require "several hundred thousand troops" to secure and occupy Iraq, Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz hurried to Capitol Hill to dismiss that estimate as "outlandish." After all, Wolfowitz said, we all know that Iraq has none of the ethnic divisions of a place like Afghanistan and thus would be easier to subdue.

So we invaded Iraq with half the troops we needed to occupy and pacify the country. When Baghdad fell, there was no plan and no troops to keep the mobs from looting government offices and destroying everything from power and sewage plants to hospitals and army camps and schools. No troops available to occupy and pacify the heart of Saddam Hussein's power base among the Sunnis of the Anbar province. No troops to secure the vast ammunition dumps or secure the borders.

Rumsfeld and his bosses forbade the generals to plan for a long occupation or nation-building. Why plan for those things when we'd be leaving Iraq within six months, by the summer of 2003? Nation-building and the creation of a new government were not our job, they said. Instead, we'd just turn Iraq over to the Pentagon's good friend Ahmad Chalabi and his fellow Iraqi exiles.

We now know how well Bush has commanded the military; how accurate his and Cheney's and Rumsfeld's predictions were and what masters they were of the art of war. Mission Accomplished. Last throes. A few dead-enders. A little untidiness.

Now Bush would have us believe that he always listens to his military commanders, that he's outraged that a mere majority of both houses of Congress would presume to substitute their judgment for his ... er, his commanders.

After all, he's not merely the commander in chief; he's The Decider.

Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. He is also co-author of the book "We were soldiers once...and young." from which the excellent movie "We were Soldiers" was made.

[I have copied this editorial under the exception to the copyright law for purposes of discussion - editor.]