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

In a statement reminiscent of the “first art critic” scene in Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part 1, the civilian head of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command Michael Vickers today soundly rejected a core idea put forth by John McCain for meeting the threats posed by global terrorist groups.

John McCain has called for the creation of a new espionage agency patterned on the Office of Strategic Services, a World War II-era agency that conducted operations behind enemy lines.

Speaking at an event (pdf) at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Assistant Secretary of Defense Vickers, one of the most important figures in the Bush administration’s efforts to address global terrorism, criticized McCain’s proposal, essentially saying it would be a big waste of time while “we’re at war.” Vickers stated his view clearly: “We have the institutions we need.”

McCain has advocated for his new OSS in speeches, and in his Foreign Affairs essay last year. He insists such a new agency “could take risks that our bureaucracies today are afraid to take.”

A cadre of such undercover operatives would allow us to gain the intelligence on terrorist activities that we don’t get today from our high-tech surveillance systems and from a CIA clandestine service that works almost entirely out of our embassies abroad.

McCain national security advisor Randy Scheunemann reiterated McCain’s support of the idea, telling the Washington Times that “while there may be some that think the status quo is just fine, John McCain has seen past failures of the intelligence community firsthand.”

But just as McCain’s half-baked League of Democracies idea is criticized by democracy promotion experts, intelligence and counter-terrorism experts have rejected McCain’s OSS idea as a structural solution. Robert Grenier, a former CIA official, criticized the idea, saying “as so many have before him, Senator McCain is trying to use a structural fix to solve what is fundamentally a leadership problem… To suggest that we could eliminate that by creating a new organization to pull all those elements together is completely unrealistic and in the short term would be enormously destructive.”

This flat-out rejection of a core McCain idea by a top defense and counter-terrorism official in the Bush administration exposes the emptiness of McCain’s national security proposals, something that frankly hasn’t gotten enough scrutiny from the media. John McCain might bluster that he would “follow Bin Laden to the gates of hell,” but his main idea on terrorism is simply to move some bureaucratic boxes around unnecessarily.

Transcript below: Read more

Former Bush administration official Peter Wehner’s latest paean to the Iraq surge contains a lot of what we’ve seen before, but then steps seriously wrong.

Befitting the legacy of Commentary magazine’s longtime editor Norman Podhoretz, Wehner is less concerned with actually considering the practical implications of the moralistic national security policies he champions than he is with wielding that moralism as a bludgeon against his political enemies. Consequently, you will find no mention in Wehner’s article of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed and maimed as a result of the glorious war that Wehner supported and shilled for. No reference to the cleansing and displacement of more than 4 million Iraqis as a result of the invasion and occupation that he continues to insist, in stone defiance of overwhelming, if not conclusive evidence to the contrary, is a foreign policy success. And certainly nothing of the jihadists who are now returning home — better trained, and more deeply indoctrinated — from the front that Wehner would have us believe represents a victory against global jihadism.

Wehner’s purpose is not to consider the Iraq war’s effects on America’s overall national security, but to hail the surge. But even here he stumbles. His assertion that violence in Iraq has returned to almost “normal” levels is accompanied by an unintentionally ironic footnote, which informs us that “‘security incidents’ in Iraq are at levels not seen since early 2004.” Speaking at the Heritage Foundation earlier this month, General David Petraeus noted that attacks had decreased from a high of 180 per day in 2007 to 25 per day. 25 is better than 180, certainly, and our commanders and soldiers deserve recognition for that. But 25 terrorist attacks a day is not normalcy.

Obscuring that point is all in a day’s work for a partisan propagandist like Wehner. It’s part of his job to spin the winning of twenty dollars after the loss of a thousand as proof of George W. Bush’s poker acumen.

But Wehner also writes something that I think requires special attention. Read more