White House doesn't try to maintain Balkan or Israeli/Palestinian stability

Laura Rozen quotes the LA Times to explain why the instability in Serbia and Kosovo is a direct result of Bush administration incompetence.

"Far from stabilizing the region, as the Bush administration had forecast, the move by Kosovo has launched a period of volatile uncertainty."

As a former US diplomat involved in the Balkans commented to me today, "There simply is no serious US leadership at this point on Serbia and Kosovo. It is being handled three or four levels down in the bureaucracy."

Then Laura quotes Melman & Raviv explaining why the right-wing Israeli government's use of assassination of terrorist leaders hasn't worked.

"Israel’s experience shows that assassination – or what Israel terms 'targeted killing' – is a double-edged sword. The policy only pays off in a few special cases. When a state deals with a terrorist group that is basically a 'one-man show,' chopping off the snake’s head by killing the leader can neutralize the group – so that can be justified in cost-effectiveness terms. But when a country encounters a highly motivated, solidified and structured terrorist group, killing its senior members proves to be counter-productive. The dead are soon replaced by members who are sometimes more skillful and more determined."

The common thread between the two stories is hands-off attitude of the Bush White House. They have ignored the Kosovo - Serbian situation until it has now blown up in their face, and they have allowed the Israeli right-wing extremist government free rein in its handling of the Israeli - Palestinian problems. In both cases the Bush administration ignorance and failure to get involved is causing greater problems internationally. That refusal to act is further demonstration of the foreign policy incompetence of the Bush administration.

If you don't regularly read Laura Rozen's blog War and Piece you are missing some of the clearest explanations of current events on-line.

Ex-CIA Philip Agee dead at age 72

An interesting piece of American history has just been closed out with the death of ex-CIA agent Philip Agee in Cuba at age 72. Laura Rozen reports on his death, based on a New York Times article.

After he left the CIA, Philip Agee published the book Inside the Company: CIA Diary which described a series of CIA misdeeds, and included "a 22-page list of purported agency operatives." I had always heard that the list included the name and address of the CIA Station Chief in Athens (Richard S. Welch) and resulted in Welch's death, but apparently from the story in the New York Times Welch was not among those named by Agee.

Welch's name apparently was published by a Greek publication, and when Barbara Bush accused Agee of causing Welch's death, he sued her. This from the New York Times article:

She settled the issue by dropping the reference to Agee, who had not mentioned Welch in his book. Instead, she blamed a magazine Agee worked for that also named alleged CIA agents. Agee's defenders said that Welch's identity was already known.

While Agee's actions inspired the law against exposing covert U.S. operatives, he drew a distinction between what he did and the naming of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had raised questions about the basis of President Bush's Iraq policy.

''This is entirely different than what I was doing in the 1970s,'' Agee said at the time. ''This is purely dirty politics in my opinion.''

Agee said that he disclosed the identities of his former colleagues to ''weaken the instrument for carrying out the policy of supporting military dictatorships'' in Greece, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Those regimes ''were supported by the CIA and the human cost was immense: torture, executions, death squads,'' he said.

I guess the story that Agee caused Welch's death is more agit-prop from the CIA aimed to sway American public opinion. (The story that Iranian patrol boats threatened American warship in the Persian Gulf is beginning to appear to be another such US government fiction designed to fool the American public. See this New York Times article by Mike Nizza.)

I had always considered Agee to be a traitor to the U.S., but after what the Bush administration has done by exposing Valerie Plame for purely internal political purposes, the lies about WMD's designed and used to justify the purposeless invasion of Iraq, and the realization that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was in fact a lie designed to justify a massively increased attack on North Vietnam, I find little reason to believe anything that comes from official Washington any more.

Is it possible that the narrative that we Americans have been fed about the Communist take-over of Cuba was simply spin to justify the efforts of the Mafia - CIA dominated brigade of Cuban adventurers who attempted to reverse the very justified revolution against Batista and the Mafia who dominated Post WW II Cuba and exploited the Cuban people? As Agee pointed out in his book, the CIA was supporting a bunch of extremely nasty dictatorships in South and Latin America all in the name of "anti-Communism."

Such speculations have been squashed by the American government, but the Bush administration has demonstrated thoroughly that the U.S. government is simply not a reliable source of information. Who do we trust more today in the story about the Iranian boats harassing the American Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf? The Americans have no more credibility than the Iranians.

That loss of credibility by the U.S.government should go back at least as far as WW II. Everything since then needs to be reevaluated, particularly the relations between Cuba and the U.S. Maybe we should look more closely at Philip Agee's writings.