Is it time to feel sorry for Bush? (Nah ...)

1. Bush the Pitiful -- by Paul Craig Roberts

People are beginning to feel sorry for President George W. Bush. And with good reason.

A new poll by Harris Interactive published in the Financial Times reveals that our traditional European allies regard the United States as a much greater threat to world stability than Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

In European opinion, the axis of evil is Bush’s America.

Almost twice as many British, whose Prime Minister Tony Blair is complicit in Bush’s war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, see the US as the greatest threat to world stability than see Iran as the danger. In Spain three times more people regard the US as the threat than see Iran as the threat. Only in Italy does Iran edge out the US as the greatest perceived threat, a result no doubt due to the propaganda that spews from the media empire of Silvio Berlusconi, the Rupert Murdoch of Italy.

Another reason to feel sorry for Bush is because he is regarded by his own political party and his own Attorney General as a war criminal. Republicans recognize that Bush has committed felonies by violating the US War Crimes Act of 1996 (legislation aimed at the likes of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic). Bush’s Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and the Republican Congress have produced draft legislation that aims to protect Bush retroactively by gutting the 1996 War Crimes Act . Republicans hope to quietly pass this unconstitutional legislation before they are defeated in the November elections.

The fact that retroactive law is prohibited by the US Constitution adds to Bush’s shame.

Bush is also pitied because a large majority of Americans no longer believe in the single over-riding cause of Bush’s presidency – the "war on terror." A recent Ipsos-Public Affairs poll released by the Associated Press shows that 60 percent of Americans believe that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has created more terrorism and that Americans are less safe as a result of invading Iraq.

Talking heads on television now discuss whether Bush is an idiot. The frequency of such discussions is likely to increase as Bush makes such declarations as "the battle for Iraq is now central to the ideological struggle of the 21st century."

Bush evokes more pity, because he has lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Iraq, the Kurds in the north have replaced the Iraqi flag with the Kurdish flag. The rest of Iraq is governed by Sunni insurgents or Shi'ite militias. The US puppet government is powerless and dares not leave its US-protected fortified bunker, and on September 5, the dominant Shi'ite political alliance prepared legislation that would divide Iraq into Kurd, Sunni, and Shi'ite autonomous regions.

Apparently, no one has told Bush that he is spending American lives and money on a cause that the Iraqis themselves have abandoned.

Bush still crows about his defeat of the Taliban. Those of us who have served in the government at high levels wonder every day about Bush’s daily briefing. Does he get one? Who gives it to him? I think Bush’s briefing must come from Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, and William Kristol. Where else could he get such bogus information?

Perhaps Bush’s wife or one of his daughters could smuggle him a copy of the recent report on Afghanistan by the Senlis Council, a security and development policy group that closely monitors the situation in Afghanistan.

According to this report, "Afghanistan is spiraling into uncontrollable violence." The Taliban have regained control over half of the country:

"Despite the international community’s concerted five-year focus on military operations, the security situation in Afghanistan is worse than in 2001. The Taliban now have a strong grip on the southern half of the country. Afghans perceive that the US and NATO troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan are being defeated by the Taliban. The legitimacy of the international community’s presence in Afghanistan is undermined by its incapacity to protect the Afghan population.”

Bush was betrayed by the neoconservatives he appointed, protected, and promoted. Public opinion polls in the Arab and Muslim world show that Bush’s invasions, aggressive stance toward Syria and Iran, and unconditional support for Israeli aggression have created a powerful Islamic political movement that experts say will sweep away the corrupt governments allied with the United States.

The ignorant actions of Bush the Pitiful have marginalized moderate Arabs and destroyed America’s standing both in Muslim lands and the wider world.

Bush has defeated no one, but he has destroyed American’s reputation and his own.


2. Senate Intel Committee Bloodies Bush's Nose -- by Larry C. Johnson

WOW! WOW! and Wow! Message to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney - read it and weep baby. Cheney's newly appointed biographer, Stephen Hayes, is blown out of the water. Bottomline, Saddam rebuffed cooperation with Bin Laden, tried to capture Zarqawi, and did NOT repeat NOT train foreign terrorists at Salman Pak. The Senate Intelligence committee today released Postwar Findings about Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments and The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress as part of its long awaited and long promised Phase II report about the accuracy of the intelligence and it is ugly for the Bushies.

I will do more detailed analysis in the coming days. Here's the down and dirty on the questions about Iraq's links to terrorism:

1. Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qa'ida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Aq'ida to provide material or operational support.

2. Postwar findings have identified only one meeting between representatives of al-Qa'ida and Saddam Hussein's regime reported in prewar intelligence assessments. Postwar findings have identified two occasions, not reported prior to the war, in which Saddam Hussein rebuffed meeting requests from an al-Qa'ida operative.

3. Postwar findings support the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) February 2002 assessment that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was likely intentionally misleading his debriefers when he said that Iraq provided two al-Qa'ida associates with chemical and biological weapons (CBW) training in 2000.... No postwar information has been found that indicates CBW training occurred and the detainee who provided the key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war.

4. Postwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qa'ida training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq.

5. Postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi.

6. Postwar information indicates that the Intelligence Community accurately assessed that al-Qa'ida affiliate group Ansar al-Islam operated in Kurdish-controlled northeastern Iraq, an area that Baghdad had not controlled since 1991.

7. Postwar information supports prewar Intelligence community assessments that there was no credible information that Iraq was complicit in or had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks or any other al-Qa'ida strike...

8. No postwar information indicates that Iraq intended to use al-Qa'ida or any other terrorist group to strike the United States homeland before or during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

(Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and US State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism (as a Deputy Director), has lectured on terrorism and aviation security around the world.)


3. It’s Not Another World War -- by Ted Galen Carpenter (from by the McClatchy-Tribune News Service)

Compared to the lethal menaces of the twentieth century, the strategic threat posed by radical Islamic terrorists is minor league. On September 11th, 2001, the terrorists killed some 3,000 people, and subsequent attacks in Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London and Mumbai have killed hundreds more. Tragic as those deaths are, they pale in comparison to the nearly 100 million deaths of the two world wars.

True to their label, the Islamic terrorists are terrifying, and they can sometimes inflict nasty damage, as we discovered to great sorrow five years ago. But terrorism has always been the strategy of weak parties, not strong ones, and radical Islamic terrorism is no exception.

The closest historical analogy for the radical Islamic terrorist threat is neither the two world wars nor the Cold War. It is the violence perpetrated by anarchist forces during the last third of the nineteenth century. Anarchists committed numerous high-profile assassinations, including a Russian czar, an empress of Austria-Hungary, and President William McKinley. They also fomented numerous bomb plots and riots, including the notorious Haymarket riot in the United States. The Newt Gingriches of that era also overreacted and warned of a dire threat to western civilization. In reality, though, the anarchists were capable only of pinpricks, and life went on.

The radical Islamists are only a little more potent. U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that there are no more than a few thousand Al Qaeda operatives—many of whom are hunkered down in the wilds of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

However fearsome they are, we must keep their threat in perspective. Even in the improbable worst-case scenario—the one in which Al Qaeda gets its hands on a nuclear weapon and somehow figures out how to detonate it (not an easy task)—the scope of destruction, while terrible, would still not begin to rival the horrors of the last century's bloodletting, much less what would have happened if the Cold War had turned hot. There is no realistic prospect of Al Qaeda obtaining thousands of nukes.

Consider the scope of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and its allies in World War II. Germany was the world's number two economic power and had an extraordinarily capable military—probably the best in the world. At the peak of its success, the Wehrmacht managed to conquer most of Europe, and Japanese forces overran most of East Asia. It took the combined military efforts of several great powers to defeat the fascists' bid for global dominance. When the dust settled, more than 50 million people were dead.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the world's number two military power. Moscow dominated Eastern and Central Europe, and its conventional forces could have overrun the rest of the continent and condemned millions more people to communist slavery. With an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons, it was capable of obliterating most American cities and effectively ending modern civilization in the United States. The Soviet Union, like Nazi Germany before it, was a strategic threat of the first magnitude.

Absurd proclamations that America's conflict with Al Qaeda and its radical Islamist allies constitutes the next world war are becoming a growth industry. Newt Gingrich is the latest to sound the alarm, but Norman Podhoretz, publisher of Commentary magazine, Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, and many other pundits and politicians have made the same allegation. Indeed, the only thing these would-be national saviors seem to disagree about is whether the current conflict is World War IV or V instead of World War III.

Yet most countermeasures that the United States and other countries have undertaken are glorified law enforcement tactics rather than full-scale warfare. Last month's airline bombing plot in Britain was disrupted in that way, as were the previous break-ups of Al Qaeda cells in Hamburg and Madrid. With the exception of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, this is the nature of the war against radical Islamic extremists. Whereas once we carpet-bombed our adversaries, we now pursue largely non-military tactics.

We must recognize that terrorism poses a frightening and tragic but manageable threat to the United States. Gingrich, Podhoretz and other panic mongers do us a huge disservice by exaggerating its danger. The only way the current struggle could ever become a world war is if American leaders followed their advice and escalated our response into a war between the West and Islam. As we mourn our dead, we must remember that we have more power than our enemies to worsen our fate. For both the dead and the living, we must make sure that does not happen.

(Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies and co-author of Exiting Iraq: Why the U.S. Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War Against Al Qaeda.)


4. Be Very Afraid
9/11 and the overactive imagination
By Jeff A. Taylor

Back in 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States cited a "failure of imagination" on the part of government officials as the primary anti-terrorism policy shortcoming in 2001. All evidence suggests we have now swung in the opposite direction, to an imagination overdrive that sees terror threats everywhere, without regard to plausibility.

Take the Miami Seven , a collection of street hustlers and martial arts fans who somehow convinced an FBI informant they were about to blow up the Sear Towers in Chicago. Or maybe vice versa: Perhaps because the Justice Department was in a fever to believe such a plot was afoot, a government informant was able to plant a wild idea with a fringe group eager to collect $50,000 in angel investment.

In any event, important counter-terrorism assets were spent on a group with no means to carry out an attack. One can construct, or imagine, any possible plot, but trying to head off all of them diverts you from the real ones. An overactive imagination then becomes as dangerous as an underdeveloped one.

Imagination now trumps plausibility at every turn, as the worldwide fright over smuggled binary explosives on airplanes demonstrated. Even assuming there existed a plan, at some level of initial formulation, to blow 10 planes out of the sky using liquid explosives, the next step in response is evaluating how plausible that idea is.

How hard would it be to acquire the component chemicals? Fairly, but not impossible. How hard would it be conceal them? Not very. How hard would it be to mix them into a bomb on a plane? Very . What is the response? In September 2006, you imagine 10 airplanes exploding and run screaming for the hills.

Terrorism also has become the first explanation of all puzzling actions. Muslim men buy up a bunch of prepaid cell phones at price clubs. Arbitrage by ethnic entrepreneurs looking for resale profits? Or raw materials for hidden IED factories?

Terror is now the go-to argument against anything you do not like. Too many Mexicans streaming across America's southern border for your taste? That becomes an "unsecured border" that also could pose a terrorist threat. Or consider the reason offered by Matthew Auer, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, for why America should not build more nuclear power plants:

As the United States ramps up nuclear power production, thereby generating greater amounts of reusable nuclear fuels and radioactive wastes, nuclear proliferation risks mount. The thousands of new jobs created to mine and process uranium, manufacture, load and unload fuel rods, and transport and store waste represent thousands of additional people with discretion over potent and greatly feared forms of energy.

A full-steam-ahead plan for nuclear energy means millions of additional chances for radioactive products and byproducts to end up in the wrong hands. Nuclear power plants offer one-stop shopping for terrorists: they can be sabotaged or their contents siphoned for weapons.

And most amazing of all, in order to thwart acts of terrorism on U.S. soil, you invade and occupy a nation of 30 million people with 160,000 U.S. troops. No lack of imagination there. In fact, it indicates the extent to which America's anti-terrorism policy has slipped the bonds of reality and made the leap to utter fantasy.

(Jeff A. Taylor , writes Reason Express.)


5. Now We Can See Through Your Masks
War and the Power of Words
By RON JACOBS

The remembrance of the sight remains fixed in my brain. Try as I might, my mind's eye cannot stop seeing the second plane hit that tower. Nor can it erase the sight of that tower collapsing in on itself. Being no more than thirty blocks away that day, I remember the uncertainty I felt. I wasn't afraid and was fortunate that no one I knew was killed or injured (although I didn't find that out until evening). When I heard that an explosion had occurred at the Pentagon, my feelings were a bit different, yet I knew that even though it was a military target, mostly civilian personnel would suffer.

On the streets of New York, uncertainty was the tone of the day, even among those whose fear had turned to anger or overwrought blathering. Indeed, it seemed that the only thing certain among every person I talked with was that the White House would use this tragedy as an excuse to go to war. Five years later, the truth of that certainty is in the news daily.

Indeed, talk of spreading that war to Iran is beginning to reach a fever pitch as I write. It doesn't take a genius to see the ducks being lined up--claims of a deadly enemy with WMD in the Middle East and a need to destroy them now. Regime change in Tehran and huzzahs from Tel Aviv. Stories planted real and false in the press concerning the internal situation in Washington's next target. False dissension from Washington's allies over the course of war. Words being wasted at the UN since Washington's armies will do whatever they want, UN Security Council or not. Threats and ultimatums disguised as diplomacy from the State Department.

Into this scenario comes a book due to be released on September 11, 2006. That's five years after the day described above. Not One More Death (Verso, 2006) is a small book. In fact, it is an oversized pamphlet. However, as any student struggling to write the required number of words to get full credit for a writing assignment knows, it isn't the number of words that have been written, but the quality of the text that those words express. In other words, how well does the writer get their ideas across? How readable is is the text? And so on. Given these criteria, this collection of essays from musicians, writers and political commentators on the war in Iraq certainly passes muster.

The essays in the collection are brief. Although some of these essays have appeared elsewhere, they are worth reading again. The litany of terror, despair, bloodshed and sadness they tell is never diminished. Brian Eno's observation in the opening piece that the problems of today's world need vision and imagination--and that the war on Iraq represents the complete lack of both--is even more obvious in August 2006 as Iraq falls further apart and Israel wages an unmerciful war on Lebanon. Both of these realities are, of course, sanctioned and funded by Washington and London--the primary targets of this collection.

What is often most interesting about the spate of recent books on the war in Iraq is that no matter how gloomy the authors of these books predicted the situation would get in that country when they were doing the final edit (usually at least six months before the work's publication), the situation has turned out to be considerably worse. In short, not only is the suffering of the people and the destruction of the country terrible, it's even worse than we could have imagined. Yet, the tragedy does not stop. Even worse, the opposition to the war seems to be powerless if not completely irrelevant, in spite of its apparent majority in the court of public opinion.

Although this book does not address the apparent disjunction between the war's growing unpopularity and its continuation despite that unpopularity, the publication of Not One More Death is a noble and intelligent effort to help mobilize that opinion. It is by no means an organizing pamphlet, however.

The words written in these pages can provide us with the reasons to oppose the war and its directors, but they can not stop it. Likewise, they can also provide antiwarriors with the conviction that they are correct. Unfortunately, as history has consistently proven, this means very little when it is the warriors that have the weaponry and the will to destroy.

Instead of words, we need action. However, the fact that this book bears the logo of the British antiwar group UK Stop the War is evidence that the authors and the publisher are more than just purveyors of words. Indeed, they are part of the international movement against Washington and London's plans for world domination.

Not One More Death closes with a meditation on words by Michael Faber. It is a piece that could easily have begun the book. I recently finished another book that shared the theme of Faber's essay: the power of words--their danger and potential beauty. That book is the novel The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Random House 2006). Nominally a work written for the young adult market, this work unveils the emotional horrors of war and oppression while simultaneously celebrating the everyday beauty found in human existence. It is the story of an eleven year old German girl who was made an orphan by the Nazis who disappeared her parents because of their communist beliefs.

The tale is narrated by Death. It is death gathering souls and taking them away. Death acknowledging that there are degrees of suffering, but that war is Death's master. The story takes place in the Munich suburb where Dachau was located. This is where the protagonist has been placed with foster parents. Illiterate when she arrives, her foster father teaches her how to read and write. A Jewish man comes to hide in their basement. By the story's second half, the Allied bombing of the village has begun. Like civilians in every modern war, the villagers bear the brunt of the attacks.

Meanwhile, the evil of Dachau continues. Death meditates on both the evil of the state that oppresses and murders its own and the evil of that state's enemy that rains down death on the people in that land in the name of their freedom. The girl meditates on the nature of words. She thinks about their potential for brutality and oppression and wishes that she never learned to read. The she remembers their ability to describe and transmit beauty and hope. This thought causes her to recant her earlier desire.

Another theme these books have in common is their representation and concern for those who always suffer in modern war--the civilians. As the Israeli campaign against Lebanon makes abundantly clear once again, civilians are the true target of all modern wars. Like Not One More Death, The Book Thief is about the casualties that the masters of war ignore. The people that today's generals and politicians call collateral damage, as if their deaths were mere circumstance when, in reality, they are part of the battle plan. Besides that, The Book Thief is one of those tales that seem so simple in its narrative, yet resounds with moral and thematic complexity. Despite its hopeful ending in which Death marvels at the resilience of the human soul, it is not a pretty tale.

Certainly a well-told one, but not pretty. Indeed, the wonderful writing that one finds in both of these texts only serves to highlight the dreadfulness it often describes.

This piece appears in the September 4, 2006 State of Nature in a slightly different form.

(Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way the Wind Blew, a history of the Weather Undergrouind. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net)


6. What we lost
Almost 3,000 Americans died on Sept. 11, 2001. But our losses are still mounting -- in Iraq and at home -- thanks to the bullying, big-lie culture that dominates American politics today.
By Joan Walsh (from Salon.com)

Five years later, I remember odd fragments from Sept. 11, 2001. The kindness in the voice of the co-worker who called to tell me about it; the care and concern I saw everywhere that day, in fact. At my daughter's school-bus stop in the near-dark that morning (yes, many of us sent our kids to school in California, only to have them sent home), not all of the parents knew about the tragedy yet, but I'll never forget the sadness and compassion in the eyes of those who did -- for ourselves, for our children, and also for the people in our group who hadn't seen the television yet. We already knew: Nothing would ever be the same.

We had no idea. As awful as our losses were that day, five years later they're almost incalculable. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said something that moved me at the time -- that the losses were likely to be "more than we can bear." In fact, he was right, even though the death toll was ultimately lower than first expected. The losses from 9/11 may still ultimately be more than we can bear.

The number of Americans who died that day at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa. -- 2,873 -- has been surpassed by the number of American soldiers who've died in the so-called global war on terror, the vast majority -- almost 2,700 -- killed on the utterly unrelated battleground in Iraq. Add in almost 30,000 U.S. military casualties and a reported 46,307 dead Iraqi civilians, according to Iraq Body Count, and the tragedy is staggering -- more than we, or the Iraqi people, should have had to bear. The quick victory in the Afghan war against the Taliban, which had broad national and global support, now seems on the verge of being reversed; every week brings more killing, more repression. This week alone the New York Times reported that the Afghan city known as Little America is now the capital of Taliban resurgence and opium production. Global sympathy in the wake of the attack has turned to global distrust and disdain.

Maybe the loss I regret most was the shimmer of national and international unity we enjoyed after the attack -- the warmth I felt from friends and acquaintances and even strangers those first raw days, a seriousness and purpose I felt more broadly in the following weeks. Like most Americans, I didn't vote for this president. To me, Dec. 12, 2000, the day the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount that Al Gore would have won, is another day of infamy in U.S. history. But I was willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt in the weeks after 9/11, let him build on the global support we'd won and do something thoughtful and effective about al-Qaida. His response in those early weeks seemed uncharacteristically measured; he warned against targeting Muslims, he took almost a month before striking Afghanistan.

Since that time, though, we've seen hubris beyond imagination. We've watched an unbridled executive-branch power grab, warrantless wiretaps, the curtailing of privacy rights; a pervasive smog of secrecy descended to obscure our government. Outrage about torture, rendition and secret prisons here and abroad is dismissed with a flippant "We don't torture" from the president. And all of it has been shellacked with an ugly culture of bullying in which dissent equals treason, shamelessly, five years after the attack. Last week it was Donald Rumsfeld comparing war critics to people who appeased Hitler; this week we had Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying they're the sort who would have ended the Civil War early and let the South keep its slaves. Their intimidation is meant to say that the very freedoms worth fighting for -- the right to dissent, the right to question our government -- might have to be abridged while we fight. Politically, that truly is more than we can bear.

Still, we've seen nothing so brazen as the president's "war on terror" victory lap this 9/11 anniversary week, three speeches to tell us he's made us safer though there's still more to be done, and pay no attention to the carnage in Iraq. Bush's 2006 anniversary shtick is an eerie inversion of his first anniversary shtick in 2002, another election year, when he used the sad occasion as a platform to sell the Iraq war. Back then, you'll recall, he'd changed the subject from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein at least partly because we'd blown our chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at the end of 2001. So he went months without mentioning the man he'd once vowed to capture "dead or alive." The normally quiescent White House press corps was moved to ask him about it at a March 2002 briefing, and here's how Bush replied:

"Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not; we haven't heard from him in a long time. And the idea of focusing on one person is -- really indicates to me people don't understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person ... So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him ... to be honest with you. I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied; that the strategy is clear; that the coalition is strong."

"I just don't spend that much time on him." Fast-forward four years, and suddenly he's spending time on him again -- Bush mentioned bin Laden 17 times in a 44-minute speech Tuesday -- and the reason is obvious: In both Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers aren't well supplied, our strategy isn't clear, the coalition isn't strong. And so this week: Osama is back! And he's as bad as Stalin or Lenin! But we're winning the war on terror anyway! And those secret prisons we wouldn't admit existed? They're out there, all right, but now we're moving the guys we had stashed there to Guantánamo, at least the ones we'll tell you about. (They probably won't talk anymore anyway.) Now we're readying the military tribunals, where you can't see the evidence against them, or how we obtained it. But rest assured, we've gotten a ton of intel out of them that's kept you safe. But we don't torture!

I thought I lost my capacity to be shocked at this administration a long time ago, but Bush's decision to declassify information about our "war on terror" "successes" just in time for the midterm elections is craven and deeply offensive, even for an administration that's made an art form of craven and offensive political cheap shots.

Four years after the first 9/11 anniversary, I have an eerie sense of déjà vu. Back in 2002, some liberals already had anniversary fatigue, since it was clear the administration was going to use the tragedy to gin up support for the Iraq war and demagogue Democrats who opposed it (and even some who supported it). I argued at the time that ignoring the anniversary, being callous about the losses we suffered that day, was wrong. This year I feel even more strongly that it's important to take stock, because of all we lost that day, but more important, all we've lost since.

Despite my disturbing déjà vu, there's reason to believe 2006 will turn out differently from 2002. This time around the midterm elections are looking grim for the GOP, thanks to the war in Iraq, high gas prices and overall gloom about the country's direction. A CBS News/New York Times poll reported Thursday that when asked if the government had done "all it could reasonably be expected to do" to prevent another terror attack, nearly two-thirds of Democrats and Independents said no. Even among Republicans, only 56 percent said yes. Bush's campaign to convince us we're wrong is just beginning, and maybe it will work as it did in 2002 and 2004, but it won't be easy. The great thing about freedom and democracy is we have multiple chances to get things right. Given the erosion of our liberties in the last four years, though, it doesn't seem too much to suggest that getting it wrong again could threaten that very freedom and democracy.


7. Five Years In, Bush Is Losing Terror War -- by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - To consider whether U.S. President George W. Bush is winning his "global war on terror" (GWOT) five years after al Qaeda's devastating 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, one has only to look at the news of the past few days.

In Afghanistan, where the war began, NATO and U.S. forces are struggling to cope with a resurgent Taliban whose guerrillas have killed some two dozen western troops, including two U.S. soldiers in a suicide bombing in Kabul Friday, since Sep. 1.

NATO's U.S. commander, Gen. James L. Jones, admitted Thursday that the alliance was going through a "difficult period" and needs as many as 2,500 more troops, as well as additional aircraft, to bolster ongoing operations in southern Afghanistan, significant parts of which have reportedly fallen under the effective -- if not yet permanent -- control of the Taliban.

The government of neighboring Pakistan, meanwhile, has agreed to withdraw its troops from northern Waziristan, effectively returning full control of the region -- as it did in southern Waziristan last year -- to tribal militias dominated by close allies of the Taliban.

The deal, which reportedly includes the government's releasing al Qaeda suspects in exchange for what is regarded here as the militias' highly dubious pledge to stop cross-border attacks into Afghanistan, has revived a high-level debate -- last engaged immediately after 9/11 -- over whether President Pervez Musharraf's regime is, on balance, a help or a hindrance in Washington's anti-terrorist war.

The news out of Iraq, which both Osama bin Laden and Bush agree should be considered the "central battlefield" in the war between the west and radical Islamists, is hardly more encouraging.

Hopeful assertions by senior officials earlier this year that as many as 30,000 U.S. troops could go home by this fall if security improves have yielded to the fact, confirmed by the Pentagon late last month, that there are now 140,000 troops in theatre -- 10,000 more than the beginning of the summer -- due to growing sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.

Moreover, Thursday's report by the Baghdad morgue that the number of killings last month fell only modestly from the all-time high of nearly 1,855 in July contradicted the Pentagon's claim earlier this week that the additional deployment had succeeded in cutting the death toll in half.

And when combined with reports of increased killings in nearby towns and villages, it tended to confirm what senior U.S. military officers have been publicly suggesting for the past month: that Iraq is indeed moving toward civil war which U.S. forces may be able to slow, but not stop.

Bush himself has seemed in recent appearances to recognize that Iraq is going badly. After long insisting that the country was making "progress" on a variety of fronts, Bush has dropped the word from his Iraq vocabulary and focused instead on the potentially catastrophic consequences for the war on terror if the U.S. withdraws.

Meanwhile, however, the impact of the Iraq war on Muslim "hearts and minds", on which the fate of that war his administration itself has said will depend, has been devastating, according to recent surveys of opinion in Islamic countries stretching from Morocco to Indonesia.

"As the slaughter [in Iraq] continues," according to an essay this week by Alon Ben-Meir, an Israeli international relations professor at New York University, "the Arab and Muslim world are increasingly enraged over the plight of the Iraqi people, with hatred toward the United States reaching new heights."

Adding to that fury, of course, was last month's war between Israel and Hezbollah, depicted in a speech this week by Bush as a proxy battle between the United States and Iran and an integral part of his "war on terrorism."

It succeeded not only in inflaming anti-U.S. opinion throughout the Islamic world, including, significantly, the Shia majority in Iraq, according to most regional experts here, but also in weakening the Sunni-dominated governments -- notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan -- that, as before 9/11, remain Washington's only allies in the region.

While devastating Lebanon, whose 2005 "Cedar Revolution" had been hailed by Bush as a landmark in his efforts to "transform" the Middle East, the war effectively elevated Hezbollah to hero status -- including, significantly, for the region's increasingly popular Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. It also bolstered the positions of its chief sponsors, Syria and Iran, which, along with Hamas and Hezbollah, Bush recently lumped together with al Qaeda as "Islamic fascists."

To many critics, Bush's expansion of his terrorist target list beyond al Qaeda, and particularly to Iraq and perceived enemies of Israel, has been one of the great strategic mistakes in the conduct of his war on terror by effectively transforming what was originally a terrorist criminal conspiracy led by al-Qaeda with the tacit support of the Taliban to a "wide war extending from Lebanon through Afghanistan," as Amb. James Dobbins, Washington's top envoy in negotiations during and after the Afghanistan war, recently put it.

"In a search for moral clarity, the administration has tried to divide the Middle East into good guys and bad guys," he told an audience at the New America Foundation (NAF) late last month. "America tends to treat Middle East diplomacy as a win/lose or zero-sum game in which Syrian, Iranian, Hezbollah or Hamas gains are by definition American losses and vice-versa."

"The result, of course, is the United States always loses, because if you insist that the population of the region choose between Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, on the one hand, or the United States and Israel, on the other, they are going to choose the other side every time," said Dobbins, who currently directs international security programs at the RAND Corporation.

In that context, Washington's enthusiastic support for Israel in its war against Hezbollah could prove as counter-productive to its war against terrorism as the decision to go to war with Iraq without U.N. approval.

Coming at a time when al Qaeda had been successfully expelled from Afghanistan, its operational capabilities severely reduced, and its top leaders either captured or forced into hiding, the Iraq invasion, by appearing to demonstrate that the United States was indeed bent on conquest in the heart of the Islamic world, gave the group new life and new recruits and affiliates. It effectively sowed dragon's teeth not only in the region, but among disaffected Muslims in Western Europe, as well.

Washington might still have been able to limit the damage by engaging Syria and Iran, as well as other regional powers, in efforts to stabilise Iraq after the war -- as it had with Afghanistan's neighbors, including Iran, after the ouster of the Taliban. But, given its drive for "moral clarity" and over-confidence in military power, it rejected the two countries' overtures.

"Five years after 9/11, the United States is losing the war on terrorism," declared Flynt Leverett, who headed the Middle East desk at the National Security Council during Bush's first term, at a forum at the libertarian CATO Institute here Friday.