This New York Times article’s description of the Bush administration’s confused attempts to deal with the Al Qaeda threat emanating from Pakistan’s tribal areas is yet more evidence against conservatives’ claims that they can more effectively manage anti-terrorism:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.[...]

The White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.[...]

Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.

The Center for America Progress’s Brian Katulis wrote last week that “Pakistan is most likely to create the biggest headache for the next U.S. president.”

[Pakistan] is the country that U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly cited as the most important haven and training ground for global terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. It is also the place that is the best guess among intelligence agencies for where top Al Qaeda leaders like Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri currently reside. Military and intelligence officials have warned that the next terrorist attack will most likely come from Pakistan.

In order to invade and occupy country where Al Qaeda wasn’t, President Bush diverted resources away from where Al Qaeda was, allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and reorganize and continue to plot against America. Many of the most prominent people responsible for this brilliant plan are now advising John McCain. Read more

During a press conference in Pennsylvania today, New York Times reporter John Broder asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) if he shared the concern of “senior Pentagon officials” about the rise of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and if the U.S. has the “resources to devote to fighting those enemies there given the surge in Iraq.” “Yes and yes,” replied McCain brusquely.

McCain then began to take another question, but broke it off to “elaborate a bit” on the situation in Afghanistan. “To somehow think that it’s an either or situation, either Afghanistan or Iraq, is a fundamental misreading of the situation in the Middle East,” said McCain.

He then said “it’s not just a matter of more troops”:

MCCAIN: It’s not an either or situation. We need to succeed in Iraq and I am confident that we can succeed in Afghanistan. But it’s not just a matter of more troops. It is a matter of a whole lot of other factors, including those, and not exclusive to those ones that I just outlined.

Watch it:

McCain’s claims are at odds with the opinion of top military leaders, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen. Just last week, Mullen said that Afghanistan is “an economy-of-force campaign,” which means that “we don’t have enough forces there.” Read more

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Just a few weeks ago, Senator John McCain endorsed President George W. Bush’s criticism that diplomatic engagement with Iran would be appeasement.

Now it seems McCain has open the door to his war cabinet to someone who has called for U.S. negotiations “without preconditions” with Iran.

Kori Schake, a research fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, former National Security Council and State Department official in the Bush administration, and former advisor to Rudy Giuliani, wrote an article last spring in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review, that in the case of Iran and its nuclear program, “We could assist our own case significantly by agreeing to negotiations without preconditions.”

Her article outlines a persuasive case against John McCain’s stated Iran position:

Opponents of negotiations argue that opening them would give away valuable leverage, reward Iranian misbehavior, and send a signal of weakness. They are mistaken on at least two of those points. If negotiations with the U.S. were such valuable leverage, the Iranians would likely have taken last summer’s deal. Moreover, the leverage argument assumes that negotiating with the Iranians is of more value to them than to us, which is at least questionable. If the Iranians are bent on nuclear weapons development, they will be unaffected by negotiations, whereas we will solidify domestic and international backing and have a direct channel of communication that could reduce miscalculation and expand our opportunities to separate the Iranian government from its people. Even if negotiations do not constrain the Iranian nuclear program, they will strengthen our standing and could help open up Iranian society.

Engaging with the Iranian government is an idea more anathema to American policymakers than it is to Iranian dissidents; they have confidence we can conduct diplomacy, as we did with the Soviet Union, without legitimizing the regime. In refusing to negotiate we help a dictatorial government control information; through negotiations, we further our aims and reduce their ability to mischaracterize our actions. If the Iranians are not bent on nuclear-weapons development, negotiations will give us a better understanding of tradeoffs that would constrain them.

In the same piece, Schake also argued that the United States should increase its threshold for military action against Iran to the actual testing of a nuclear weapon rather than uranium enrichment.

Schake joined the McCain team sometime this year and took part in this national security conference call with reporters earlier this month. Schake was even sent out to defend McCain’s position on Iran from Congressional critics of McCain’s 2005 vote against sanctions on Iran.

Yesterday morning on Fox News, former UN Ambassador John Bolton claimed Israel has to make a decision to bomb Iran soon, partly because they need to do it with a U.S. President in office who would support the unilateral strike:

I think their calculation has to be they want the support — at least after-the-fact — from the United States, and therefore, I think doing it during President Bush’s term makes a lot of sense. I don’t think they’ll do it before our election because you can’t calculate what the impact would be, and of course after the election, they’ll know who will be President — and that would factor into their decision as well.

In the interview, Bolton also made the case for preventive war against Iran. “I don’t personally believe in just-in-time non-proliferation,” he said. “Our intelligence on Iran is far from perfect,” Bolton conceded. Yet Iran’s “strategic objective” and “rhetoric from their leadership” is enough to justify war. Watch it:

Bolton was even more explicit in an interview with Israel Insider. “Bolton said that if Senator Obama is elected in November, Israel could not afford to wait until he takes office on January 20, before taking action. ‘An Obama victory would rule out military action by the Israelis because they would fear the consequences given the approach Obama has taken to foreign policy.’” Read more

In examining some of the bad thinking that caused the U.S. to invade Iraq, Time‘s Joe Klein wrote “the fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives — people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary — plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.”

This elicited a response from Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman, who accused Klein of trafficking in anti-Semitic canards, insisting that “whether or not one feels that America’s war on Iraq was justified, the charge that it is being fought by the United States on behalf of Israel is both offensive and categorically false.”

Klein responded, “I have never said that Jewish neocons were the primary reason we went to war in Iraq”:

The reason we went to war was that George Bush was foolish and uninformed, and his primary advisors were even more foolishly bellicose. But Jewish neoconservatives certainly played a subsidiary role in providing an intellectual rationale for the war. In a 2003 column, I called their arguments “the casus belli that dare not speak its name.” The notion of a “benign domino theory”–benign, that is, for the interests of Israel—was certainly abroad in the community during that time.

The “benign domino theory” is rooted in The Clean Break Strategy, a national security proposal written for Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu by a committee chaired by Richard Perle, and which also included Doug Feith and David Wurmser, along some other hardline pro-Likud think tankers.

To call the Clean Break “nutty” is to commit felony understatement. Indeed, the paper seems to have been written while on a peyote-fueled vision quest out in the middle of the Negev desert. For one example, it advocated replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime with a Hashemite monarchy. That’s right, not content with merely figuratively repeating the mistakes of the past, this gang of geniuses wanted to literally repeat the mistakes of the past.

Fortunately for Israel, Netanyahu was encouraged by the Clinton administration to ignore the Clean Break recommendations. Unfortunately for the United States — and, it turns out, for Israel — George W. Bush incorporated many of the paper’s ideas into the post-9/11 U.S. national security strategy for the Middle East. Read more

Our guest blogger is Sean Duggan, National Security Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In the latest sign that the cost of the war in Iraq will continue to be tallied long after the last U.S. combat troops leave the country, Pentagon officials and members of Congress yesterday estimated that the Pentagon faces more than $100 billion bill to repair and replace worn out or destroyed equipment, vehicles and weapons.

The Army’s reset bill has tremendous implications for the Pentagon’s plan to expand the size of the ground forces by nearly 92,000. According to Congressman John Murtha (D-PA), the cost of replenishing equipment lost in Iraq makes the Pentagon’s plan to add nearly 100,000 new soldiers and Marines unrealistic. Although new troops would help reduce repeated, lengthy deployments, there are other more pressing demands, Murtha said. “It’s going to come from personnel cuts,” Murtha said, in reference to where the Pentagon would cut funding in order to pay for the equipment reset. “That’s where it’s going to come from. They know it.”

Top Pentagon leaders are beginning to recognize that they are going to face a choice between a larger force and restoring equipment damaged or destroyed in Iraq. “We must reset, reconstitute and revitalize our ground forces,” said Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Senate hearing in May. However, the costs “will force us to a smaller military or force us away from any kind of modernization or programs that we need for the future.”

The Center for Amerian Progress has been warning about the growing ground force equipment crisis for over two years. “Like its personnel,” the 2006 report, Army Equipment After Iraq, pointed out, “the Army’s inventory of equipment is exhibiting increasing signs of combat-related stress. That stress is already eroding the readiness of units outside Iraq and could eventually impede operations within Iraq.” Since the Center released its first in-depth analysis (pdf) of the Army equipment shortage in April of 2006, both the amount of equipment lost and the cumulatve price of replacing Army equipment has grown greatly.

Indeed, today’s $100 billion estimate may be tens of billions of dollars off the mark, according to a recent study (pdf) by the Government Accountability Office. Earlier this year, the GAO estimated that the overall cost of resetting Army equipment and reconstituting prepositioned stocks will come to nearly $130 billion. If one adds the cost of increasing the number and equipment of new Army units as well as equipping restructured modular units, this total jumps to over $191 billion.

In August 2006, the Center released a follow-up report (pdf) on Marine Corps equipment that, like the situation in the Army, found the projected cost of resetting and recovering Marine equipment to be large and growing. “To maintain acceptable readiness levels,” the report noted, “the Marines have been taking equipment from non-deployed units and drawing down Maritime Prepositioned stocks, including equipment stored in Europe, thus limiting their ability to respond to contingencies outside of Iraq.”

Proving once again that being demonstrably and disastrously wrong on the most important national security questions of the day is no barrier to influence in American politics — provided, of course, that one is always careful to err on the side of war — the Washington Post gives Richard Perle yet another opportunity to be wrong again, this time on Iran.

Echoing the manner in which he calmly assured us of the threat represented by Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMDs, Perle asserts that “the Iranians… are relentlessly building a nuclear weapons program.” Perle attacks Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for placing too high a value on “coalition building” in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program:

Coalitions, even successful multilateral ones, are instruments, tools, means to an end. They are important and useful, sometimes essential, but they are not, and must not be seen as, ends in themselves. Confusion on this point can lead to claims of success when failure is staring you in the face.

While the above statement is particularly funny coming from the guy who claimed that “we have already won in Iraq” because “Saddam will not be sharing WMD with anyone,” it’s interesting that Perle’s jeremiad against multilateralism is delivered on the day that President Bush essentially acknowledged he had the wrong approach on North Korea for years. Perle now makes the same argument for Iran that people like John Bolton made for North Korea.

After years of ineffective bluster that only allowed North Korea to develop and test a nuclear weapon, today’s step forward on addressing North Korea’s nuclear program proves that tough diplomacy and engagement with adversaries can make America safer.

And the last five years of the Iraq debacle prove that Richard Perle is to be ignored at all costs.

Today, President Bush announced that North Korea has turned over a statement describing its nuclear program, prompting Bush to lift sanctions and rescind its designation as a state sponsor of terror. The news is a step “toward reintegration into the world community and rapprochement with the United States,” the New York Times observed.

But the developments come after seven wasted years by the Bush administration. In his book, State of Denial, Bob Woodward reported that in a conversation between then-Gov. George W. Bush and former Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, Bush wondered why North Korea even mattered:

George W. pulled Bandar aside.
“Bandar, I guess you’re the best asshole who knows about the world. Explain to me one thing.”
“Governor, what is it?”
“Why should I care about North Korea?”
Bandar said he didn’t really know. It was one of the few countries that he did not work on for King Fahd.
“I get these briefings on all parts of the world,” Bush said, “and everybody is talking to me about North Korea.”

Through aggressive diplomacy, President Clinton reached the Agreed Framework in 1994, under which North Korea agreed to freeze nuclear production for the next eight years. In 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the administration will “pick up where President Clinton left off.” But Bush objected to returning to Clinton’s diplomatic approach. A quick recap of what followed:

January 2002: Bush labels North Korea a member of the “Axis of Evil.”

December 2003. Vice President Cheney: “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.”

April 2005: North Korea appears to unload nuclear reactor with up to another 15 kg of weapons-grade plutonium.

October 2006: North Korea tests nuclear bomb.

The Bush White House accused Clinton of sending “flowers and chocolates” and instead took Cheney’s hard line. In fact, Bush once shouted to Woodward, “I loathe Kim Jong Il!” and mocked the dictator at a dinner with senators, calling him a “pygmy.” In the meantime, North Korea continued to acquire greater nuclear ability.

Today, the Bush administration still refuses to use similar diplomacy with Iran. As blogger Steve Clemons noted, “We ‘engaged’ North Korea and blew it with Iran.”