Sep 27, 2006

Are we safer now?

Leaked report presents "chilling" alternative to Bush's version of the war

New York Times News Service

WASHINGTON- Who's a voter supposed to believe?

An upbeat president with little credibility who claims that despite the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan we are winning the war on terror?

Or grim U.S. intelligence experts who suggest in a selectively leaked classified report that far from defeating terrorism, the U.S. war in Iraq is actually fueling it?

President Bush was angry that the leaked portion of the report he had meant to keep secret is undermining his public message as the political campaign season peaks.

So he ordered the remaining classified key judgments from 16 intelligence agencies, including the CIA, also be made public. The president denounced the partial report as "gossip" and complained the leak was politically motivated.

The president has been crusading across the country, wrapping endangered Republican candidates in the political glow of a tough-guy view of fighting terrorism, which the White House considers its strongest issue.

The intelligence estimate, however, presents a chilling alternative. It coincided with former President Clinton blowing his top at a Fox News interviewer who questioned whether Clinton did a sufficient job fighting terrorism before he left office. Clinton thundered that he had repeatedly tried - and failed - to kill Osama bin Laden, while Bush did little to fight terrorism during the eight months of his own presidency before the 9/11 attacks.

Bush, asked about Clinton's accusation, said coldly that he did not intend to "comment on other comments." But he refused to answer a specific question asking whether he had indeed held meetings on the subject.

Pouring on more emotion, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rushed to Bush's defense, claiming the White House had worked hard to curb terrorism from the beginning. She also denied that Clinton had left them a strategic plan that Bush ignored - as Clinton had claimed - but demurred at describing her words as the equivalent of calling Clinton a liar.

The leaked portion of the intelligence report described the war in Irag as a magnet for the recruitment of new terrorists, breeding a new generation of Islamic radicals. Bush tried to stomp out that idea, dismissing the "stirring up a hornets' nest theory" as just an excuse for spreading violence that might be happening anyway.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, three retired military officials - two Army generals and a Marine colonel - testified before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee Monday that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has bungled the war on terror. "Our world is much less safe today than it was on September 11,"Maj. Gen. John Batiste, former commander of the First Infantry Division in Iraq, charged.

All three men said Rumsfeld should step down, but they also called for more troops, more money and more time in Iraq. They did not see how Iraq could safely be abandoned now. If a specific date were set for withdrawal, Batiste said, the result would be "a civil war of some magnitude that will turn into a regional mess."

The Republicans who control the Senate had refused to grant the three critics an official forum, but seven Democrats attended the hearing, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. All but Clinton are on record as calling for the start of a troop withdrawal from Iraq this year.

Bush has been doing his best to drown out the contrarian voices questioning his handling of Iraq, meeting this week with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and scheduling campaign trips to maximize the use of his bully pulpit. But the voices are louder and more frequent anyway.

The recently retired director of the CIA's political Islam Strategic Analysis Program warned this week that Bush's wartime policies have "lost a generation of good will in the Muslim world" and our continued presence in Iraq is "contributing to the violence." In Harpers Magazine's online edition, Emile Nakhleh criticized the administration for ignoring his warnings about the challenges that would be presented by an invasion of Iraq.

He echoed the views of Paul Pillar, the intelligence community's top Middle East analyst for five years until his 2005 retirement, who told Foreign Affairs magazine that an occupation of Iraq would "increase sympathy for terrorists' objectives" that could erupt into "violent conflict." Pillar also complained that the administration "used intelligence not to inform decision-making but to justify a decision already made (to go to war)."

OK, not as many people read Harpers' on line or the Foreign Affairs magazine as listen to Bush and those GOP ads on television. But even prominent Republicans are beginning to doubt the wisdom of Bush's policy of regime change to impose democracy on countries who have no history of it. Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House International Relations Committee, recently gave a speech warning that promoting democracy in other countries may lead not to peace and stability but to revolution.

Hyde, a dedicated Republican, had had an epiphany. Bush's case is increasingly a hard sell.