Bush Tries To Distract From The Conservative Record On Terrorism»

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

Ambassador Ryan Crocker meets with Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qumi in Baghdad, May 2007.

Reaching into the same old bag of tricks of politicizing national security, President Bush used a speech on the floor of the Israeli Knesset to divert attention from his administration’s record on terrorism and attack his political opponents in the United States.

It’s a little jarring to see an American president use a speech while visiting a major ally to engage in politics at home, but there’s nothing new in this approach -– President Bush has used national security as a domestic wedge issue unlike any president in the history of the United States. It was a winning formula politically for conservatives for a while in 2002 and 2004, but by 2005 the approach ran out of steam, collapsing under the weight of the Bush administration’s steady stream of failures around the globe, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this speech is that President Bush seems not only disconnected from the harsh realities of today’s Middle East -– he also seems disconnected from his own policies and their impacts on three counts:

1. Bush forgets that his own administration and other countries have engaged Iran. A focus of Bush’s speech was Iran and the very real threat it poses to stability in the Middle East. Ironically, the Bush administration itself has sent key officials on numerous occasions to meet with Iranian officials –- whether it was most recently sending U.S. diplomats to meetings on numerous occasions with Iranian officials to discuss Iraq, or coordinating closely with Iran in the early years of the Afghanistan war. Moreover, key U.S. allies like Britain, Germany, and France all engage Iran on a regular basis and in fact have embassies in Tehran. Did President Bush really mean to call these allies appeasers too? For example, should the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who met recently with Iranian officials, ask for an apology from Bush? What about most of the leaders of the Iraqi government, which is closely aligned with Iran? Should they be offended too?

2. Bush tries to avoid the fact that his policies have strengthened the hands of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and undermined Middle East security. A second irony in Bush’s speech is linked directly with today’s headlines –- that the Lebanese government was forced to reverse itself in the face of a violent takeover last week by the terrorist group Hezbollah. This comes less than a year after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip violently. These events are directly related to numerous policy failures by the Bush administration – including the failure to deliver support to pragmatic allies in the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon. As a result, the Lebanese and Palestinian people have suffered from violence, instability, and economic stagnation. And as a result, Israel’s security has been weakened -– another irony given that Bush was speaking on the floor of the Israeli parliament.

3. Bush ignores the 2002-2008 conservative record on terrorism. A broader blind spot that comes crystal clear from Bush’s speech today –- he is incapable of acknowledging that his administration’s policies have been ineffective in responding to the threats posed by global terrorist groups. This blind spot is perhaps understandable, because Bush has invested so much of his legacy in a strategy that has led to a more than four-fold increase in global terrorist attacks by 2005, a trend that has only increased in the three years since.

It might have been easier for President Bush to point the finger at his domestic critics in the early years of his administration and get away with it. But in the last nine months of a lame duck administration, it is time that President Bush stopped running away from his own record and face the reality of his own dismal record on terrorism. Al Qaeda remains a threat, its top leadership like Ayman Zawahiri regularly taunts the United States, and Iran has seen historic expansion of its influence throughout the Middle East –- all national embarrassments that no number of speeches by President Bush can cover up.

Jeffrey Goldberg Still Fighting The Last War»

Only six posts into his new blog, and Jeffrey Goldberg is back up to his old tricks, pushing bad intel on Iraq:

The energetic Reihan Salam has an interesting, and sane, post about the widely-ignored Institute for Defense Analyses study on possible connections between Saddam’s regime and Islamist terror organizations. Among other things, the report disproves the orthodox CIA view that ideological and theological differences between Ba’athists and Islamists kept them from cooperating. You can read Eli Lake’s story about the report here.

Goldberg is referring to this study, “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights From Captured Iraqi Documents,” which examined “more than 600,000 Iraqi documents, audio and video records” captured by U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion.

A more accurate rendering of the study’s findings is that, despite the many assertions to the contrary by the Bush administration and its media spear-carriers like Jeffrey Goldberg, an exhaustive review revealed no evidence of a meaningful relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The report’s abstract states that the “documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network,” though they did indicate some contacts between members of Saddam’s regime and groups affiliated with Al Qaeda.

A Google search reveals Goldberg’s contention that the IDA study “was widely ignored” to be nonsense. In fact, the study was widely discussed and interrogated both in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere, including on this blog. What has been ignored, and rightly, are the rather pathetic attempts by neoconservatives to spin the report into a vindication of their views, which is where Eli Lake’s article comes in.

Lake’s article in the NY Sun, which has been relentlessly and repeatedly referenced by the right-wing blogosphere (a phenomenon which, while certainly revealing of how low conservatives’ standards of evidence fall when they get desperate, neither lends the article credibility nor accuracy) provides a classic example of attempting to derive capabilities from intentions.

No one denied, then or now, that Saddam Hussein wanted to hurt America; what the IDA report confirmed, however, was that, as of 2003, Saddam Hussein had neither the competence nor the capability to do so. This was cause for vigilance, but certainly not for an American invasion and occupation which continues to this day. Goldberg’s continuing effort to carve out a small island of vindication on the point of “Baathist-Islamist cooperation” while deflecting blame for his own role in getting up the Iraq invasion by acting as a conduit for pro-war propaganda, indicates that he still doesn’t get this.

State Department: ‘The Internet Is A Virtual Safe Haven’ For Terrorism»

In a briefing yesterday on the State Department’s 2007 Country Reports on Terrorism, Coordinator of the Office for Counter-terrorism Dell L. Dailey stated that “terrorists consider information operations a principle part of their effort, use the Internet for propaganda, recruiting, fundraising, and increasingly for training. It has made the Internet a virtual safe haven.”

Two other new reports confirm this trend, highlighting the great extent to which Al Qaeda has perfected its use of new media technology to attract, indoctrinate, and share tactics and technology with new recruits. In addition to offering a look into the 21st century jihad, both of these reports underscore the fact that the war in Iraq has been both a propaganda and training bonanza for Al Qaeda.

The first report, The Al Qaeda Media Nexus (pdf) published in March by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, explores the global internet media network which used to disseminate and reinforce Al Qaeda’s message. The report notes that “the ‘original’ Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden accounts for a mere fraction of jihadist media production,” and that the vast majority (78%) of global jihadist media is focused on the war in Iraq.

The second, The Al Qaeda Media Machine (pdf), which is published in the May-June issue of Military Review, says that “Al Qaeda has established itself as a virtual state that communicates with it’s ‘citizens’ and cultivates an even larger audience through masterful use of the media, with heavy reliance on the Internet.”

For every conventional video performance by Bin Laden that appears on Al Jazeera and other major television outlets, there are hundreds of online videos that proselytize, recruit, and train the Al Qaeda constituency.

One of the recruiting videos reportedly included a “Top 20″ IED attacks by AQI on U.S. troops in Iraq. In addition to using the internet to send propaganda to exhort potential fighters to jihad, the report also noted that “the online training curriculum has expanded to include small unit infantry tactics and intelligence operations.” Read the rest of this entry »