Fuck, Bush is an idiot - his own spies tell him the Iraq War made terrorism worse & he can't see it (or he does & can't publicly admit it, poor sod)

1. A War on Intelligence -- by Robert Scheer

You would think that a consensus report from all 16 U.S. intelligence services concluding that he has blown the war on terror would be a really big deal to the president. But that assumes that George W. Bush values intelligence.

Clearly, he does not. So the news that a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concludes the threat of terror against the United States has increased since 9/11, largely thanks to his irrational invasion of Iraq, has not disturbed Bush’s branded “what me worry” countenance.

Instead, predictably, the administration’s response to the leaked conclusions of the shared assessments of both civilian and military intelligence agencies was the same old historically ignorant claptrap that leaves U.S. policies completely out of the equation.

“Their hatred for freedom and liberty did not develop overnight,” said White House spokesman Peter Watkins. “Those seeds were planted decades ago.” What seeds are those? It was “decades ago” that the CIA encouraged Muslim fanatics worldwide to go to Afghanistan to fight a holy war against a secular regime backed by the Russians. The end result of that engagement was— after their troop withdrawal and the consequent U.S. attention deficit—a devolution into civil war, warlordism and, eventually, the takeover of the country by Osama bin Laden’s friends, the religiously extreme and oppressive Taliban. Sound familiar?

It should: The same deadly process has been taking place under Bush’s watch in Iraq since our idiotic invasion in 2003. If the Bush administration were serious about protecting us from terrorist attacks, it would end the ineffectual “war on terror” model and instead treat terrorism as a pathology that needs to be clinically and relentlessly excised. If terror groups such as Al Qaeda are a cancer in the world’s body politic, as the intelligence estimate suggests, then the goal should be to surgically isolate and neutralize the malignant cells.

“We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere,” reads a section of the National Intelligence Estimate that Bush declassified on Tuesday. “The Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.” A few Washington leaders do seem to be taking this sobering assessment seriously. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) told CNN he was “very concerned” about the estimate, adding, “My feeling is that the war in Iraq has intensified Islam fundamentalism and radicalism.” But the rest of his party, and their cheerleaders in the media, fell into line, including the occasionally independent Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who seemed to suggest that U.S. policy decisions don’t matter at all. “If it wasn’t Iraq, it’d be Afghanistan that [terrorists] would use as a method of continuing their recruitment,” said McCain, without offering evidence of this flip claim.

Much more considered was the testimony this week of retired Maj. Gen. John R.S. Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 and served as a senior military assistant to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

“If we had seriously laid out and considered the full range of requirements for the war in Iraq, we would likely have taken a different course of action that would have maintained a clear focus on our main effort in Afghanistan, not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents,” said Batiste in joining other retired generals in calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Bush administration, he charged, “did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq.”

Of course, unlike McCain, the retired generals can speak the truth because they are not running for office based on a record of six years of lousy GOP leadership. But those not wedded to the short-term fortunes of the Republican Party in an election year should welcome the nonpartisan sanity being offered by the intelligence agencies and military brass. With his security policy, Bush’s alleged strong suit, exposed as a clear failure, it is time for the nation’s political middle to make a corrective move and give Congress back to the opposition to provide a check and balance on this arrogant administration.

In the name of defending our security, the Bush administration has suppressed any intelligence information it could, ignoring the public’s right to know, as much as is feasible, what is being done in its name. We must never forget that our system of government is based on the utility of freedom that truth will expose error—and just such an accounting is long overdue.

(E-mail: rscheer(at symbol)truthdig.com)


2. Blowback From Iraq
Giving Terrorism a Reason to Exist
By CAMILO MEJIA

According to a report by 16 U.S. Spy agencies leaked to The New York Times, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped create more global terrorism and energize jihadist ideology throughout the world since the 9/11 attacks. The intelligence report, completed in April of this year but still classified, contradicts more optimistic assessments by both The White House and the House Intelligence Committee, which have claimed that America and its Allies are safer since the September 11 attacks. The report, however, also supports what critics of the war, especially dissenting U.S. veterans, have been saying all along, that the war in Iraq is actually creating more terrorism.

On March 15, 2004, just before surrendering to military authorities after refusing to return to the war, I gave a press conference to both national and international media. A reporter from Univision asked me if there was a difference between what was being reported in the U.S. about soldiers in Iraq and my experience there. I told her that morale amongst U.S. troops, contrary to media reports, was really low because we lacked a sense of mission and because "we were all lied to about weapons of mass destruction and connections between Iraq and terrorism to justify the war. In reality, we're giving terrorism a reason to exist with this war." Fast forward to the New York Times article and you have the exact same thing, only this time reported by 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, two and a half years later!

Part of the problem is that the public tends to believe what the government and the corporate media present, through its hordes of loyal analysts and experts, as fact, while readily dismissing the first-hand experience and information brought back by the very same service men and women they allowed their government to send to war without a real justification. A more serious problem, however, would be for the people of the United States to allow this "new report" to be misused for political gain rather than for a more appropriate action: the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq.

If unchallenged, the misuse of the report would simply aid top Republicans in bashing their second-term president in order to secure their party's next presidential nomination. Only six weeks away from national elections, the intelligence report would also aid Democrats in their quest to regain control of both houses of Congress. But regardless of which party takes home the trophy, what constituents should not lose from sight, during either election, is that with the Iraq War increasing terrorist threats to the United States, there could be no better reason--nor a more appropriate time--to demand from the government the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq.

At the heart of this mess is not simply which party is to blame for sending our troops into a bound-to-fail military adventure that actually energized global terrorism--in reality both parties obediently stood behind the president as his administration led the country to war--but also how to best utilize the information to do right by both the Iraqi people and our own military, all while making the world a safer place. The choice is clear, end the occupation of Iraq and bring all the troops home.

Camilo E. Mejia , a former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, served nine months in a U.S. Army jail for refusing to return to his Florida Guard Unit in Iraq. His Iraq War memoir, Road From Ar Ramadi The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejia , will be published by The New Press in the spring of 2007.


3. Multiplying the Enemy -- by Derrick Z. Jackson

President Bush first declared Iraq to be the ``central front" in his war on terror in a nationally televised address in September of 2003, just before the second anniversary of 9/11. "Two years ago, I told Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front," he said.

Even then, top intelligence officials were worried about such rhetoric. The very next month, a National Intelligence Estimate warned -- in a story unknown until Knight Ridder broke it this year -- that the unrelenting violence in Iraq after the US invasion was over local conditions and the presence of US forces. It was not inspired by foreign terrorism, as the White House kept saying.

"Frankly, senior officials simply weren't ready to pay attention to analysis that didn't conform to their own optimistic scenarios," Robert Hutchings, chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, told Knight Ridder.

Despite every rationale for the lengthy war being proven false, the "central front" declaration remains the centerpiece of propaganda. Bush repeated the ``central front" line two times apiece in fund-raising speeches last week in Orlando and Tampa.

In the Tampa speech, he said, "Iraq is a central front in this war on terror, and we've got a plan to defeat the enemy."

This rhetoric is a central affront to the American people. His plan is multiplying the enemy.

"The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," a US intelligence official told The New York Times in a story Sunday on a classified National Intelligence Estimate on the terror threat. The estimate represents the consensus conclusions of all 16 US spy agencies.

In its story on the estimate, The Los Angeles Times quoted another intelligence insider as saying, "Things like the Iraq war have given the terrorists recruiting tools and places to ply their trade and a training ground."

The Washington Post's version said the invasion and occupation of Iraq is now the "leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda." As the White House boasts of incremental victories as individual Al Qaeda leaders are killed, the National Intelligence Estimate says that terror networks are spreading like cancer around the planet. Even though Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is himself on the run and much less able to personally direct attacks, according to the Post's account of the National Intelligence Estimate, "his status as the ideological leader of a global movement that appeals to disaffected Muslims has vastly increased."

Hutchings, now a diplomat in residence at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, said nothing about the new estimate surprises him. He warned publicly at the beginning of 2005 that Iraq could replace Afghanistan as "a magnet for international terrorist activity."

He said Monday over the telephone, "Us against them has won us more enemies than anything else."

In a speech he gave at the University of Virginia in 2004, Hutchings counseled that "we should not assume that 'we' and 'they' have nothing in common . . . Our frame of mind -- even as we are waging a resolute campaign against international terrorism -- should be that we are not engaged in a fight to the finish with radical Islam. This is not a clash of civilizations but rather a defense of our shared humanity and a search to find common ground."

Yet just this month, in his address on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Bush upped the ante on that kind of rhetoric as well. "This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations," he told the nation. ``In truth it is a struggle for civilization."

Hutchings said the latest news should not disintegrate into a partisan hammering of Bush ("I don't think the Democrats have covered themselves with glory on Iraq," he said). What concerns him, he said, is that for the United States to have any chance against terrorism, US leaders have to drop the stark war terminology. "We can't kill enough people to keep us safe," Hutchings said. "It's not a matter of being tough or soft on terrorism. It's a matter of being smart." He said a smart policy would be one that delegitimizes jihads by de linking them from legitimate regional economic and political grievances.

"Right now we throw everything into the war on terror," he said.