There's been a lot of discussion over the last several days (and Greg has his own advice here) on what the administration can do to regain its momentum now that Hurricane Katrina, the failed Miers nomination, the continued situation in Iraq have taken their toll on the administration. While Bill Kristol thinks that Bush has bottomed out, I'm not so sure - things are never so bad they can't get worse. In a way, I'm more than a little bit ahead of the curb on this one because I talked a little bit about this as far back as early in the summer before things seem to have really hit the fan as far as Katrina's concerned.
Here was what I wrote then:
While I don't think there's anyone left, right, or center who wants to conduct a military campaign on the basis of the latest Gallup poll, what I think this poll does reflect is the fact that the American people, even those who support the administration and voted to reelect it, are deeply unhappy with what they perceive as a lack of progress on the subject of Iraq and the apparent lack of a rationale as to why we're there to begin with.To put it another way, the administration went into Iraq with something on the order of 70% of the population supporting it, including (as myself and countless others have noted) a sizeable number of self-described centrists, liberals, and Democrats. The vast majority of those (excluding those in the party establishment, expert, and pundit categories) the administration lost quite early on with the failure to find WMDs and subsequent allegations concerning pre-war intelligence and hasn't in my opinion been able to regain them since. A successful public relations campaign by the administration might have countered this, but internal conflicts within the administration over the post-war reconstruction made that impossible and, when combined with the Plame affair, pretty much solidified the vast majority (again, in terms of the general population) of liberals and Democrats' earlier unease with regard to the administration's conduct of the war, which soon led to a great deal of skepticism and then to open contempt. The party establishment, which near as I can tell had invested a great deal of political capital in the war under the expectation that at least most of the pre-war claims would pan out and they would be able to profit politically from participating in it. As a result, they proved insufficiently critical of the administration on the war in Iraq until it was too late (if you want to see a particularly memorable example of this, go back to Saddam's capture in December 2003 you can find John Edwards on TV talking about how he has always supported the president and the war), thereby leading to the rise of the Howard Dean campaign that drew heavily on many of the same organizational and social networks that had previously come together in the anti-war movement.
The reason I mention all of this is the simple fact as far as I can see is that there is no real way to win these individuals back, particularly many of those who had formerly supported the war, because in order to make the transition they had to come to a number of conclusions about the competence and honesty of the administration (with which I strongly disagree) that, had I come to them, would leave me similarly cynical. Add to that the fact that their opinions are regularly reinforced by those portions of the press, foreign policy establishment, intelligence community, and academia that never had much use for the war or the administration to begin with and you can see the dilemma as far as winning them back over is concerned. As far as many of them are concerned, the best way to fix the situation in Iraq is to neutralize the administration (in the sense of what they see it's ability to do harm) or at least force it to comply with their preferred policies. They tried to do this in the 2004 election and appear to be moving forward with that policy to this day because, simply speaking, they regard the administration as having screwed up Iraq and don't trust it to do a decent job as far as anything else is concerned.
These individuals do not, however, a majority of the electorate, nor do individuals such as myself who support the administration. The mushy middle, for a whole host of reasons, seems to be primarily focused on results at this point. When Iraq was showing progress after the elections, the general mood was quite hopeful. Since those elections, however, there has been very little (from the perspective of the US population) progress and far too much violence for many of them to continue to support the amount of money and lives. And, if I might be so bold, this is compounded by the fact that the administration is perceived as continuing to react to the situation in Iraq rather than being proactive - Bush's recent round of responses in defense of the war, for instance, only came about in response to the bad polls, not Zarqawi's continued penchant for bloodshed. As long as that perception of reacting rather than acting holds up and little visible political progress is made by the Iraqi government, public opposition to the war is likely to increase.
One of the things that had become amazingly apparent to me as far back as the spring of 2004 was that the administration is bound and determined to keep the American people as isolated as possible from how it conducts the war on terrorism. To a certain extent, this makes a great deal of sense politically since the less the public is aware of such things the easier it is to prevent it from being critiqued. As long as the bulk of the American people supported the administration's conduct of the war and things were going well or at least seen as going well (for instance, if the US were to capture or kill Zarqawi tomorrow support for the mission in Iraq would increase dramatically whether or not the event had a discernible impact on the ground, that was fine, but this is no longer the case. This, combined with the traditional conservative belief that the mainstream press cannot be trusted as an ally, especially with regard to a war that many of them feel as having been used to promote, is one of the reasons that whatever strategies the administration adopts for the future need to have an entirely different public relations bent to them, particularly with regard to the issue of correcting inaccurate or misinformation.
For instance, in an insightful post today over at Liberals Against Terrorism warning of the dangers of the Iraqi foreign fighters and Iraq as a terrorist training, Eric Martin repeats a common theme (one that I think that Peter Bergen is the originator of unless someone wants to correct me) that prior to the US invasion there were no Iraqis involved in international terrorism or at least Islamic terrorism. You can find this claim made by entirely respectable and intelligent sources, but it is also entirely untrue.
As Dr. Rohan Gunaratna illustrates in Inside Al Qaeda, there were indeed Iraqis serving in al-Qaeda very early on in its existence, even to the point of operating at the highest levels. Among those listed as being among the group's senior leadership are Abu Ayoub al-Iraqi, the group's first military commander, ruling council members Abu Ibrahim al-Iraqi and Abu Burhan al-Iraqi, senior leaders Abu Ubeidah al-Iraqi and Abu Fahdl al-Iraqi, and so on. And for those who are willing to argue that these individuals were simply isolated cases, the following may be interesting:
Meanwhile, India was pressuring the US government to designate Pakistan a terrorist sponsor in the wake of the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, which was carried out by Afghan-trained and Pakistan-based terrorists, and in response the Americans demanded that Islamabad expel or register the mujahideen based in Pakistan. As many of those who had failed to register with the authorities were arrested, Osama paid for the passage of several hundred of their number who wanted to leave Pakistan. Although over 5,000 mujahideen - 1,142 Egyptians, 981 Saudis, 946 Algerians, 792 Yemenis, 771 Jordanians, 326 Iraqis, 292 Syrians, 234 Sudanese, 199 Libyans, 117 Tunisians and 102 Moroccans - had registered, Pakistan was eager to see the back of them.
Zarqawi was purportedly among the 771 Jordanians who accepted the registration offer, according to the various versions of his backstory floating around. Now granted, the meme that "no Iraqis were terrorists prior to the US invasion" hasn't exactly caught on, but it will unless the administration steps out and rebuts it, in all likelihood it can.
On a similar vein (this time from the right), there this idea that a number of alarmist websites (WorldNetDaily probably being the biggest example) keep trying to peddle as far as al-Qaeda having this secret arsenal of suitcase size nuclear weapons that they are just waiting to unleash at a moment's notice. It was precisely this kind of report that prompted Representative Tancred to make his unfortunate remarks concerning Mecca, which would seem to be reason enough to refute it, as my buddy Rich Miniter does a superb job of here. This is something else that the administration should be doing, but isn't. That may also be one of the reasons why two of the most influential voices covering Iraq from the perspective of the blogosphere have been Arthur Chrenkoff and Bill Roggio. They've more or less been doing a lot of the grunt work for the administration for God knows how many months now, more or less doing the job that the administration should be doing but isn't.
If the administration wants to win back a majority of the population on the issue of Iraq, this public relations strategy has to change in some major ways every bit as much as the substantive policies on the ground. I've discussed the need for this before, but I want to highlight it again here:
1) Admit mistakes. The general consensus of just about everyone on all sides of the Iraq debate is that mistakes were made in the reconstruction. Cordesman offers a fairly concise summary and while, yes, it will give the Democrats political ammunition, I don't really see how this is going to do much to heighten the atypical rhetoric of some of their shriller activists. If anything, admitting mistakes would seem to only serve to force the nuttier anti-war activists into overreach, which appears to be what happened with the whole mini-movement that set itself up around Cindy Sheehan.
2) Educate the public about the threat. Public ignorance about the enemy poses huge problems for dealing with the enemy, especially when you're trying to stress success stories for a policy that are not immediately visible to the short attention spans of the general public. We did the same on the Axis threat in World War 2 and the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, so I don't understand why this is so hard to implement.
3) Substantive defenses of policy. Bush and his deputies have been doing an outstanding job in recent weeks of articulating a defense of the US mission in Iraq, but they waited far too long to do so. This effort should have been launched over a year ago and should have come before the sloganeering, not afterwards. The former looks like a concerted effort to show the American public what we're dealing with here while the latter looks too much like desperation.
Feel free to weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments.
One problem with your suggestion, Bush and his Administration are utterly unable to admit to their mistakes. Matter of fact and record, they would much rather divert your attention than admit an error was made (see today's snake-oil salesman tactic of rousing fear of the "threat" of bird-flu, the "millions" it "can kill" and the need for vast amounts of money to combat this "threat").
Also, this Administration's primary focus has been on secrecy from day one, so there is no way they would educate the public about the threat. Had that been a choice they were willing to make they would have not used snake-oil salesman threat tactics in the 2004 election and bought so many votes due to simple ignorant fear of the "threats this country faced". They would have, but are completely unable to, come out and said, look, these are the dangers to this country and this is why I should still be your president.
That is not Bush's way, he prefers diversion and the simple fear generated by any "threat" he perceives over honesty and truth.
That and the sheer stupidity of over 50% of this country's population is what got him elected (not to mention questionable voting tactics and more beyond in that arena).
And if you question the sheer stupidity of the Americans in the central US just look to Kansas and their "debate" about "Intelligent Design".
Right. Because one overreaching comment that reeks of cultural chauvinism completely cancels out any number of other insightful comments. And Lord knows, the right would never, ever condescend to the left in the same way.
Your intellectual rigor is bulletproof, lurker.
Bush bamboozled the nation two and a half years ago, suggesting Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction even while evidence to the contrary existed in plain sight. Bush also illegitimately connected the 9-11 terrorist attacks and Osama bin Laden to Hussein. Bush’s rush to war in Iraq has yielded physical and financial miseries without bringing the true 9-11 perpetrators to justice.
Bush sold the war spectacularly before the fighting started, but his sales pitch could not survive the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the embarrassing revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, the bungled occupation, the mounting list of dead and wounded, and the rising economic toll.
Bush’s “war on terror” has not brought justice or provided peace and security. Indeed, because of his policies, the spiral of violence has deepened. Unfortunately Bush has no plan to win his war other than repeating his undefined ”stay the course” mantra.
Bush’s “war on terrorism” has failed. Congress should demand that the president change course. End the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. End the cycle of violence. Bring the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks to justice under the rule of international law. Work internationally with law enforcement agencies to prevent future attacks. Strengthen international laws and institutions to protect civilians from violence. Stop supporting oppressive, undemocratic regimes. Redirect U.S. policies to address the deep economic, social, and political inequities that fester throughout the developing world. Demonstrate our country’s enduring commitment to freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in the ways that Americans pursue justice and respond to violent extremism. War is not the answer.
The administration needs to come forward and spread the news about the Iraqi Nuclear Program in Libya which will once and for all put a sock in the mouths in those like the poster named Jeff above.
The original Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, July 29, 2003, Niger-Iraq Uranium Reports Involve Ongoing Libyan Deception Ops, is reprinted in full, below:
Exclusive Special Report
Niger-Iraq Uranium Reports Involve Ongoing Libyan Deception Ops
1. Highly-reliable sources within the Italian intelligence community have confirmed to this Service that the documents — subsequently demonstrated to have been forgeries — introduced by the US and UK governments showing a contact between the Nigerien and the Iraqi governments for the export of uranium were, in fact, produced by the Libyan Government. The documents were used in the State of the Union Address by US Pres. George W. Bush on January 28, 2003, and were widely interpreted as part of the casus belli underwhich the US-led Coalition attacked Iraq in March-April 2003.
2. The Libyan External Security Organization (ESO) passed on, in a single transaction and through a Libyan intermediary, a file of forged documents to Italy’s SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare). According to Italian sources, the documents appeared to be part of a larger, ongoing Libyan double-deception operation designed to discredit US decisionmaking and the US leadership. The documents were designed to take issues which were in fact verifiable — or approximately verifiable — by US intelligence agencies and then provide seemingly valid collateral documentation. By then exposing the “valid collateral documentation” as fake, the premise of the intelligence — and the subsequent US policy — would then be undermined and discredited.
3. US officials in December 2002 publicly claimed that Niger had signed an agreement in 2000 to sell Iraq 500 metric tons of a concentrated form of uranium known as yellowcake. The British Government also presented the IAEA with “Nigerien state documents” that were to prove Nigerien-Iraqi attempts to trade in uranium after the UN embargo on Iraq strictly forbade this. This “documentation” was seen as a key element in the US-UK quest to prove that Iraq was still trying to develop nuclear arms. Niger had supplied Iraq with yellowcake for its nuclear program in the 1980s, which at that time was legal. The British and US governments had tried to prove that Niger recently agreed to resume those shipments, illegal since 1991. US officials claim that Iraq imported uranium from Niger even after 1998 and that more shipments were planned in 2000.1
4. On March 8, 2003, Mohamed El-Baradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN agency, declared that the documentation used by Pres. Bush in his January 28, 2003, speech was forged. The statement by Mr El-Baradei seemed to exonerate the Niger Government in the matter of alleged uranium sales to Iraq, and the Prime Minister of Niger, Hama Hamadou, in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, of London, and published on July 27, 2003, explicitly denied the allegations.
5. Libyan and other sources have told this Service that, in fact, yellowcake was being procured (or at least had been the subject of agreements) from Niger for Iraq during the embargo period, but by the Libyan Government. The yellowcake was being used for weapons development programs by Iraq and Libya (and possibly Egypt, one of the partners in the strategic weapons program) being conducted by joint teams in the Libyan facilities at Sabha and Kufra.2 When asked whether the ESO documentation was designed to cover up and distract from Libyan involvement in the Iraqi nuclear program, one key Libyan source told this Service that this was only part of the objective. This Service was told that it was part of a broader plan, involving other documents and deception operations, designed to more comprehensively discredit US decisionmaking. This Service, on November 8, 2000, discussed how Iraq and Egypt had agreed with Libya in 1999 that Libya should act on behalf of all three countries to procure NoDong-1 strategic weapons-capable ballistic missiles from North Korea. The pattern for Libya-Iraq strategic weapons cooperation — which had been evident even before that time — was thus clearly established in the current context.
6. It seems clear that the Iraqi Government did not need to negotiate directly with the Government of Niger for the procurement of yellowcake. Had it done so, this fact would almost certainly have come to the attention of the Nigerian Intelligence Agency (NIA), given the closeness of Niger-Nigeria relations, and it apparently did not. However, Libyan procurement of fissile material on behalf of Iraq was less noticeable.
7. Italian sources confirmed to this Service that significant sections of the Italian Intelligence Community (IC) had been, at one time or another (including in this latest episode), working in cooperation with the Libyan Government and ESO, usually on the basis of payments made by the Libyans “for services rendered”.
8. The question, at this stage, remains whether the Government of Niger was aware of the onward destination of some of the yellowcake provided to Libyan buyers, and whether or not the Libyan buyers significantly obfuscated their own identities in the procurement process. This would significantly impact how the US would deal with the Government of Niger. It should be expected that the US Government would also request assistance from the Nigerian Government in resolving the matter. The UK Government said that it had confirmation of the supply of yellowcake from Niger to Iraq from “other African intelligence services”, independent of the Italian-routed false documentation.
Footnotes:
1. In the early 1980s, Con Coughlin’s book, Saddam: King of Terror, noted, on p.188: “Before the war [Iran-Iraq] started, Saddam had been promised that the reactor would be ready to produce weapons grade material by July 1981. Although the French, responding to international pressure, were still dragging their feet on supplying Saddam with the enriched uranium necessary to power the Tammuz reactor cores … Iraq was also engaged in a worldwide search for uranium. 120 tons were acquired from Portugal in 1980, and a further 200 tons from Niger.”
2. Sabha, and the region around it, is home to the Libyan Strategic Industries complex and a variety of storage facilities for nuclear, chemical and biological material, laboratories and facilities. Global Information System (GIS) reported on January 7, 2002, that al-Kufra (aka al-Kafra) was the location of a warehouse on the road to Al-Sara military camp which included 1,800 barrels of chemical material and other biological materials which was transferred from Rabta and Tarhunah.
About GIS
Professional Intelligence, Data and Analysis, Updated Daily
The Global Information System (GIS) is a global-coverage, core current strategic intelligence service for use only by governments. It is not available to non-governmental subscribers. GIS represents a base of more than 150,000 pages of data and images on 246 countries and territories, updated daily, along with a constantly-growing database of special reports on a wide range of specialist topics and regional studies.
GIS includes the Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily intelligence briefing, which is issued five days a week, and covers current strategic intelligence issues.
GIS content is issued as "Unclassified". However, it is based on GIS' own worldwide collection (HUMINT) and analysis team, which has been operating in the field for more than three decades. As a result, it has a strong record of major intelligence "firsts", including the accurate forecasting of, for example, the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This was only one of hundreds of major successes by GIS.
GIS is accessible only through password entry or computer IP recognition, to ensure maximum privacy. The system is fully on-line through the Internet, and keyword searchable. It is strenuously non-partisan, given that it provides product for use by governments worldwide. Its confidential data, intelligence and analysis system was built up since 1972 for professional use by senior policymakers, intelligence officials and military research establishments worldwide. The system is based on intelligence and analysis undertaken as a result of massive field collection (HUMINT); and on extensive research and analysis, using primary and open sources intelligence (OSINT), including considerable "open-but-difficult source" OSINT. The System is designed to provide a comprehensive global data system both for governments without extensive global collection and analysis systems as well as for analysts in industrialized states seeking independent, finished intelligence on literally every country and territory in the world.
The use of GIS product can often verify product produced within a classified environment. As a result, governments can more easily refer to GIS reporting — because it is unclassified — which is more "portable", and not subject to the transmission constraints of classified data.
SBD
Jeff,
Your entire post is false. Your misstatements about the intel on WMD has been repeatedly debunked, not least by the bipartisan SSIC report.
Your claim that the President linked 911 to the Iraqis is itself a lie since the White House repeatedly attempted to contradict those who were showing such links such as its repeated denials of the report of Atta and Iraq intel agents meeting in Prague.
But your silly comments about Iraq are just so bizarre and ludicrous that they defy description. The Iraqis have held several national referendums now and are rapidly taking over security of their own country. Your little speech might have almost sounded rational two years ago, but today it just shows your wilful self-deception.
New Attempt to Distract Niger Uranium Export Issue Away From Libyan Rôle
Former US Federal Prosecutor John Loftus in May 2004 confirmed on Fox News some of the earlier 2002, 2003 and 2004 reporting by GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs that Libya had hosted the Iraqi nuclear program, and further detail was added to this in the June 2004 book by GIS Senior Editor Yossef Bodansky, The Secret History of the Iraq War. Loftus, however, failed to note the Niger connection which was literally verified by the deception operation mounted by the Libyan ESO. Loftus told Fox News interviewer Eric Shawn:
Loftus: “I was told about this amazing wiretap where British Intelligence overheard a call from North Korea to Libya saying, 'My god, if the Americans ever go into Iraq, they're going to find out about our nuclear program. And who's going to pay all the Iraqi nuclear scientists in Libya if Saddam falls?’”
Shawn: "You're saying before the war there were Iraqi nuclear scientists working on a potential bomb in Libya before we launched this [war in Iraq]?”
Loftus: "Yeah. This was a treaty signed by a man called Ali Sobree. He was the Foreign Minister of Iraq. And he went to [Libyan leader Mu’ammar al-] Qadhafi and they worked out a whole protocol. Qadhafi would donate a hollowed out mountain in Libya; Iraq would provide the nuclear scientists, and North Korea would provide the uranium. And they would literally make a factory for nuclear weapons. And once that factory was complete, we had lost the war on terrorism. People don't realize that even a small nuclear weapon can kill 300,000 people. That's one hundred 9-11's. So that's why we put [garbled] bin Laden on the back burner — we were really focusing on getting the Ali Sobree protocol — we had to smash that ring."
Shawn: "Now when you talk about Saddam and the war on terror ... your indication is that [US] President [George W.] Bush understood this after 9-11 and he was mostly concerned about a nuclear bomb from Libya or Iraq or Iran."
Loftus: "Eric, that's EXACTLY it. Within a month after 9-11, British wiretaps showed that we had a MAJOR risk. Nuclear weapons in terrorist's hands would be devastating. And that's why the President said: 'OK, we're gonna shift the emphasis from Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. We're gonna go into Iraq - that's where the evidence is - we have to capture Ali Sobree."
Later in the interview Loftus noted:
"It was THE major strategy. Qadhafi has now confirmed he is going to hand the Ali Sobree protocols over to the United States. Sobree, himself, is now in US custody and he is already scheduled as one of the first three witnesses in the trial of Saddam Hussein.”
SBD
Well. I think it is probably traditional to lie to the public about terrorism and counterterrorism, especially the element of state sponsorship. And there is a very, very tortured historical relationship between Iraq, the West, WMDs, and terrorism.
Anyhow, here are a few facts.
1. In February 1993 (on the second anniversary of Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait!), Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center. In June 1993, Clinton bombed the headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service. But there was no connection - that was about the attempt to assassinate Bush in Kuwait. It's just coincidence that this retaliation came one day after the public bust of the "July 4th bombing plot", which was actually a sting operation in the same NYC-Islamist milieu that Ramzi Yousef had used, orchestrated by the FBI.
2. In January 1995, Ramzi Yousef unexpectedly turned up in the Philippines, still at work on mass-casualty terrorism (Bojinka, a plot to blow up planes in midair). Within two months, a team headed by the CIA's Robert Baer was in northern Iraq with the INC, secretly working to overthrow Saddam. There was something odd about the political circumstances behind the dispatch of this team, as evidenced by the account in Baer's book.
3. In 1996, Ramzi Yousef was on trial in New York. Coincidentally, during his trial - on July 17, Iraq's Revolution Day, no less - a plane blew up in midair over New York, killing hundreds. But a very, very lengthy investigation established that it was (probably) an accident.
4. In August 1998, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, leading fairly promptly to missile attacks on al Qaeda facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan. Two months later, the Iraq Liberation Act passed, making, I believe, regime change an official goal for the first time; and two months after that came Operation Desert Fox, which was justified by reference to the WMD threat, notably anthrax. At the time, Stratfor Inc reported that Desert Fox appeared to be accompanied by yet another attempted coup against Saddam - that is, an attempt at regime change.
5. In 2001, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed achieved what Ramzi Yousef never managed, leading fairly promptly to a war in Afghanistan. Then, a year later, the countdown to war against Iraq was initiated, the case for war revolving around the WMD threat. It sounds a little like what happened in 1998 to me - but that must be coincidence too. As must be the appearance of anthrax in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
I gave up just before the 2004 elections, having failed to interest US journalists even in the remarkable little fact that Yousef and KSM come from Kuwait. I live on the other side of the Pacific, so 'giving up' just meant that I turned my attention to my own geopolitical neighborhood. I remain curious about the facts, I remain personally engaged with the USA, but there will be no end to the malaise until the American press itself gets the guts to ask about something deeper and older than Plamegate.
Here's a comment I made at Junkyard blog earlier today:
Remember the Swift boat guys? We neede a 527 to start up with a commercial quoting Bill Clinton, Hans Blix, Richard Butler, Al Gore, Harry Reid, and others on weapons in Iraq. Specific citations that turned out to be wrong.
They could run another commercial citing 20 or so proven pre-war connections between SH and Al Qaeda. Show pictures of Sadaam’s checks being given to suicide bombers. Show pictures of the government building Nidal had his office in. Show the Salman Pak photos again.
Run another one listing all the violations of the Security Council’s resolutions and of the cease fire. Including the small amounts of WMD we did find.
Then run one with American soldiers asking people to support the war and counting off all the elections (federal and local), all the power stations, water stations, schools, sewer systems, and other things we’ve built. You could show before and after pictures. I’m sure there are enough floating out there for a commercial. Show how re-enlistment rates have been higher than ever before. And let the soldiers tell us why they re-enlist.
Four 30 second commercials. If someone put it together I’d give a lot of money for that effort. Not that I have a lot to give, but I’d give till it hurt. And I’ll bet a lot of other people would too. Call it “Americans for a Free Iraq” and run them during every nightly news broadcast and between 12:00 and 1:00 in the afternoon. I didn’t give any money during the campaign because I don’t have much, but if one of these groups would put this thing together I’d give as much as I could. I wanna help in the war effort, but I’m no good for the military. This and staying informed and conversant in the truth is all I can really do.
What do you guys think of this idea? The Loftus quotes are great here but they would be better in a national television campaign. Never mind whether we think the President should be adopting your strategy. Why don't we do it on our own? I'll bet there are more than enough people over at Pajamas Media with experience and expertise enough to put it together technically. After that, or even before, you just start a huge fundraising campaign to publicize our succeses and vindicated motivations. Basically we just outmanuever the Fifth Column in their own medium. We could do big newspaper and radio ads too.
Essentially, don't wait for Bush to take your good idea and use it. Do it yourself and maybe when we start getting results the administration will adapt it's tactics. If Bush is anything he's a pragmatist looking for solutions, conventional wisdom be damned.
No administration admits mistakes. What they do is:
1. Change policy
2. Replace managers
So far things are terrible and look like they may get much worse. I'd say we were in a war.
Iran scares me.
Your intellectual rigor is bulletproof, lurker.Don't talk to me. Take it up with your buddy Bryan.
Byran,
Since it is impossible to defeat stupididy I guess the really smart folks like you are going to be out of political power forever.
A shame really.
My estimate is that you are too smart by half to win elections. If you got 50% stupider your chances would be much better.
Good luck.
SBD: I could believe that Iraq outsourced its nuclear-weapons program to Libya. For a while I even wondered if the Libyan program was a sting, engineered in collusion with Western intelligence - which would, incidentally, make it difficult for anyone to ever tell the truth about it. But I have real doubts, to say the least, about the two GIS reports you reproduce above.
First of all, let's be clear about what sort of entity "Global Information System" is: a private enterprise selling intelligence to governments, mostly small ones by the sound of it, apparently run by two guys (Bodansky and Copley) with an intelligence background. They talk to their professional contacts and sources, they put a summary in the database, and then their government-customers get to read it.
The first story above (a Libyan "double-deception operation") is over two years old and attributed to Italian intelligence. It predates the current revelations in the Italian press about how the forgeries got into circulation, and it seems more likely to be the cover story that SISMI was offering two years ago to anyone who asked, rather than the truth. I don't have a personal theory yet about the source and intent of the forgeries, but I think this "explanation" is bogus.
As for Loftus, all I can say is that he is in a similar position - he is a public purveyor of alleged intelligence secrets, like Bodansky and Copley, like Gordon Thomas, an obviously dubious profession - and 18 months has not produced any further evidence of his alleged "Ali Sobree protocol".