Bush Missing in Action re: War on Terrorism

by Mary

A good percentage of Americans give Bush high marks for his leadership in regards to the war on terrorism. They are unaware how badly he is doing on this front. Bush has forgotten that the real danger is Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. This seems to be a perfect example of Bush and the neocons inability to correctly judge reality.

While they are spending our treasury and the lives of our soldiers on the hunt for Saddam, bin Laden is still free and like a spider at the center of a web, directing his loyal followers throughout the world.

But nearly two years later bin Laden is still out there, and his terrorist group, while tattered, has managed to allegedly carry out several devastating attacks -- including the October 2002 bombing that killed 202 people in Bali, Indonesia, and the May 12 bombings in Saudi Arabia that killed 34 people, including eight Americans.

What alternate reality does the Bush administration live in? Recently Wolfowitz testified before the Senate Intelligence Committe:

"The battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the global war on terror." Wolfowitz says this presumably because he still believes that Saddam Hussein's regime had close ties with Al Qaeda.

But those who worry about Al Qaeda are concerned that the administration has allowed themselves to be distracted.

To the frustration of many of the people involved in the fight against Al Qaeda, the Bush Administration is said to have been distracted by competing priorities - most notably, the war in Iraq. Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan terrorism expert who has analyzed thousands of Al Qaeda documents recovered by various governments, said, "I feel that if they had not gone to Iraq they would have found Osama by now. The best people were moved away from this operation. The best minds were moved to Iraq. It's a great shame. It's the biggest military failure in the war on terrorism so far. The Americans need more resources, and more high-level people exclusively assigned to this task."

Supporters of the Iraq war suggest that this view overlooks longer-term benefits that have yet to be fully appreciated. Ambassador Oakley, for example, said, "I think the war in Iraq has made governments much more cautious about allowing terrorists into their countries - Iran and Syria, for instance - because they can see the consequences to themselves from the U.S."

Many intelligence insiders, however, shared Gunaratna's concerns. Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. official, said that the effort to find bin Laden had "lost at least half of its original strength." He added, "Arabic speakers are in short supply. You still have some intelligence-collection assets in Afghanistan, but mostly it's just small teams looking for signals. That's because of Iraq."

Rand Beers, who until March handled terrorism issues for the National Security Council, told me he had become so concerned about the impact that the war in Iraq was having on the war on terrorism that he quit his job - at the height of the American invasion. Beers, who served on the N.S.C. under Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush, is now an adviser for the Presidential campaign of the Democratic Senator John Kerry. He told me, "I have worried for some time that it became politically inconvenient" for the Bush Administration to "complete operations sufficiently in Afghanistan."

Last February, he said, on the eve of the bombing of Baghdad, the Bush Administration peremptorily drafted an announcement declaring that in Afghanistan the military was moving to "stability operations," a euphemism for military deescalation. "They wanted to make it sound as if there were just a few more stitches needed in the quilt," he said. At the time, in fact, Beers believed that the security situation in Afghanistan was so unstable that Al Qaeda might reconstitute itself there. For instance, a recent U.N. report found that the average number of attacks per month on coalition forces rose from around nine last year to more than thirty since the beginning of 2003.

The Administration, Beers said, ignored such concerns. "They didn't want to call attention to the fact that Osama was still at large and living along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, because they wanted it to look like the only front was Iraq," he said. "Otherwise, the question becomes: If Afghanistan is that bad, why start another war?"

The lust for empire and the oil wealth of the Middle East have prevented the Bush administration from taking the danger from Al Qaeda seriously enough and is one of the points of contention that George Tenet has with this administration. According to Seymour Hersh, the neocons have decided it is better to take the war to Syria despite the fact that Syria has been providing very important information about Al Qaeda.

This month, two retired veterans of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, Vincent Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who now consult on intelligence issues, noted in a newsletter for their private clients that the attacks had been based on "fragmentary and ambiguous" information and had led to increased tension between Rumsfeld and the C.I.A. director, George Tenet.

Tenet's involvement was significant. American intelligence and State Department officials have told me that by early 2002 Syria had emerged as one of the C.I.A.'s most effective intelligence allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, providing an outpouring of information that came to an end only with the invasion of Iraq. (A number of the details of the raid and the intelligence relationship were reported by U.P.I. on July 16th.) Tenet had become one of Syria's champions in the interagency debate over how to deal with its government. His antagonists include civilians in the Pentagon who viewed Syria, despite its intelligence help, as part of the problem. "Tenet has prevented all kinds of action against Syria," one diplomat with knowledge of the interagency discussions told me.

.... snip ....

In Washington, there was anger about what many officials saw as the decision of the Bush Administration to choose confrontation with Syria over day-to-day help against Al Qaeda. In a sense, the issue was not so much Syria itself as a competition between ideology and practicality - and between the drive to go to war in Iraq and the need to fight terrorism - which has created a deep rift in the Bush Administration. The collapse of the liaison relationship has left many C.I.A. operatives especially frustrated. "The guys are unbelievably pissed that we're blowing this away," a former high-level intelligence official told me. "There was a great channel at Aleppo. The Syrians were a lot more willing to help us, but they -- Rumsfeld and his colleagues -- want to go in there next."

It was just a couple of weeks ago that Tenet stopped John Bolton's attempt to make Syria the next target in the war on terror.

The Bush administration has badly bungled Afghanistan, has ignored (and redacted mention of) Saudi Arabia's financial support for Al Qaeda and defocused the efforts on finding and disrupting Al Qaeda with their war on Iraq. No wonder so many professionals in the US intelligence agencies are speaking out these days. When will the Americans know their safety has been compromised by the failure to understand the real threats to our security?