Our guest blogger is Nina Hachigian, a Senior Vice President at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Tibetans are all peaceloving Buddhist monks and the Chinese government instantly quashes all organized dissent. Even though the events of the past two weeks do not fit neatly into these mental slots, Beijing will not be able to convince the western world otherwise unless it changes its Tibet policy quickly and dramatically.

According to the LA Times, Tibetans randomly and savagely beat and killed Chinese “solely on the basis of their ethnicity.” Gangs of Tibetans burned and destroyed Han and Muslim owned shops. The Chinese authorities held back at first — making the situation much worse — and then they used lethal force to stop the violence, firing live ammunition into crowds of people and beating suspects, by some accounts. Eventually, China sent in enough police and equipment to take on Russia.

The resentment that triggered the riots is Beijing¹s doing, and Beijing ultimately has to account for it. Tibetans do not enjoy the automomy they were once promised. Their religious practice is highly compromised, they fear for the survival of their culture, and they are excluded from any positions of real power in their own society. (In a sad irony, the high profile of the Tibet cause in Hollywood and Western Europe, argues Patrick French, may well have worsened the plight of Tibetans, offering symbolic gestures that have made China dig-in but haven’t actually done anything to improve life for Tibetans)

Time is not on Beijing’s side. The Dali Lama condemns violence and does not advocate independence for Tibet. Many Tibetans of the next generation are not so restrained on either score, having grown up on a diet of cultural repression‹some exile groups openly advocate terrorism. Moreover, the basic bargain that has worked in most of China to keep the Communist Party in power — we improve your standard of living and you agree to shut up about us — has not worked and will not work in Tibet.

Beijing’s only choice right now — to ensure the Beijing Olympics are not forever tarnished and to convince the world that it should welcome China’s ascent as a great and responsible power ­is to negotiate sincerely, respectfully and flexibly with the Dali Lama toward true and final autonomy for Tibet. China has a chance to pull an astonishing policy and PR coop — to take a decades old albatross of its neck and have the world leave Beijing not only impressed with the fantastic economic progress of China, but also with the wisdom of the Chinese government. Too bad they probably wont grasp it.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) continues to deny that the Bush administration’s turn to Iraq in late 2001 had any effect on the battle at Tora Bora, according to the LA Times yesterday:

“I know of no one who believes attention to Iraq at that point diverted our attention from Tora Bora,” McCain said. …

“We should have put more boots on the ground there to apprehend [Bin Laden]. Everyone agrees. But I have no reason to believe that because we urged attention to Iraq, it had any tactical effect on the battleground.”

But according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, even before the Tora Bora battle, Bush began meeting with Army Gen. Tommy Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq:

On Nov. 21, 2001, 72 days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush directed Rumsfeld to begin planning for war with Iraq. “Let’s get started on this,” Bush recalled saying. “And get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to.” …

Bush’s order to Rumsfeld began an intensive process in which Franks worked in secret with a small staff, talked almost daily with the defense secretary and met about once a month with Bush.

Similarly, Michael Gordon, co-author of Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, has reported that Franks, in charge of the battle, was upset about Bush’s turn to Iraq:

I was at Tora Bora at that point, in December ’01. The desire to have a war plan for Iraq has already been telegraphed to [General] Tommy Franks at Centcom. Franks is actually struggling with Tora Bora, with his unhappiness with the results in Afghanistan, just as he is on the eve of returning for a very important meeting at Crawford with the President. I think they made a very quick decision that in principle Iraq was next on the agenda.

Reporter Christina Lamb, using Woodward’s book as her source, has said that “there was another reason for Washington’s reluctance to commit troops on the ground” at Tora Bora. According to Woodward, when Gen Tommy Franks received the top-secret message asking for an Iraq war plan within a week, he was incredulous. “They were in the midst of one war in Afghanistan, and now they wanted detailed planning for another? Goddamn,” Franks said, “What the f*** are they talking about?”

– Jordan Michael Smith

This post was submitted through our Blog Fellows program. Make your own contribution — and get paid for it — by clicking here.

On March 13, the Pentagon released a detailed study (pdf) confirming “no direct link between late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the Al-Qaeda network.” The report, which involved the examination of some 600,000 Iraqi government documents and thousands of hours of interrogations of former Hussein regime employees, concluded:

In the period after the 1991 Gulf War, the regime of Saddam Hussein supported a complex and increasingly disparate mix of pan-Arab revolutionary causes and emerging pan-Islamic radical movements. The relationship between Iraq and the forces of pan-Arab socialism was well known and was in fact one of the defining qualities of the Ba’ath movement.

But the relationships between Iraq and the groups advocating radical pan-Islamic doctrines are much more complex. This study found no “smoking gun” (i.e. direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

Nevertheless, some conservatives have, bizarrely, tried to cast the report as a vindication of their wild theories about a Saddam-Al Qaeda alliance. Stephen Hayes, who has built a career on promoting the theory of a Saddam-Al Qaeda “connection” accused the Washington Post of “sowing confusion” for noting that the report indicated no ‘operational relationship’ between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Hayes insists that “the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda need not have been ‘operational’ to have warranted military action to eliminate it.”

Hayes’s Weekly Standard colleague Thomas Joscelyn argued that “it is clear that Saddam saw his support for [terror] organizations in the context of striking his enemies, especially Americans,” and thus that the stated goals of both Saddam and Al Qaeda to “hunt Americans” amounted to a relationship.

On Thursday, Richard Perle attempted a similar sleight-of-hand on the Charlie Rose program. He argued that Saddam’s intelligence officers had “relationships with organization affiliated with Al Qaeda.” Watch it:

Today, the Wall Street Journal placed itself firmly among the conspiracy theorists with an editorial claiming that the new report “buttress[es] the case that the decision to oust Saddam was the right one“:

Five years on, few Iraq myths are as persistent as the notion that the Bush Administration invented a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Yet a new Pentagon report suggests that Iraq’s links to world-wide terror networks, including al Qaeda, were far more extensive than previously understood.

Naturally, it’s getting little or no attention. Press accounts have been misleading or outright distortions, while the Bush Administration seems indifferent. Even John McCain has let the study’s revelations float by. But that doesn’t make the facts any less notable or true.

The editorial goes on to claim that the new report is “inconvenient…for those who want to assert that somehow Saddam could have been easily contained and presented no threat to the U.S.” Leaving aside whether anyone has claimed that Saddam presented “no threat,” the point is that we now know that Saddam didn’t represent nearly the threat that the Bush administration claimed, and that Saddam’s “relationship” with Al Qaeda amounted to little more than a shared hatred of the United States.

More to the point: Does anybody seriously believe that if the report had demonstrated a significant Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, as the Wall Street Journal claims, that Bush administration officials would not trumpet that fact from the rooftops? Of course they would. But, as even the Bush administration now knows, there was no significant connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; those who argued that there was are now exposed as dissemblers and frauds, and they are very upset about it.

Transcript: Read more

Earlier this month, the National Security Network reported on Brookings analyst Michael O’Hanlon’s disproportionate representation in major papers’ op-ed pages. His pro-Iraq war pieces have appeared in “13 pieces in four of the most influential op-ed pages in the country over the past 7 months.”

O’Hanlon, however, isn’t satisfied with his op-ed presence, complaining today that he is a perfect example of the media’s declining interest in Iraq, as he hardly receives Iraq interview requests anymore:

“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”

While O’Hanlon blames the press for his decreased interviews, there is another possibility: his authority on Iraq has declined, as he has repeatedly and inextricably linked himself to Bush’s Iraq policies.

So when O’Hanlon does get the occasional interview, what can we expect to see? On the Today Show this morning, O’Hanlon appeared dismissive of the implications of the 4,000 U.S. troop death milestone in Iraq:

It’s not going to be seen as a major symbolic plateau or threshold or new milestone. It’s just going to be another reminder of the grim toll of war.

Watch it:

With comments like this, the media’s declining interest in interviewing O’Hanlon seems more like a positive development.