Iraq Chaos Causes Bush to Revise War Projections

On Saturday the NY Times reported that President Bush is "scaling back expectations for the Iraqi government" and won't report on the "surge" until at least September.

The President is delaying because he refuses to acknowledge that his "surge", the latest attempt to salvage the Iraq quagmire, is failing just like the U.S “reconstruction” of Iraq, an oxymoron if there ever was one.

The $30 billion reconstruction effort was designed to complement the military effort to stabilize Iraq. Its official goals were to allow the government to function, revitalize the economy, including the oil industry whose revenues would finance the war, and promote good will toward the United States.

But inspectors for a federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, have found that in a sampling of eight projects across the country that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

These new findings come after years of insistence by the President, Vice President, American officials in Baghdad and pro-war activists that too much attention has been paid to the failures in Iraq and not enough to the successes. You’ve surely seen the emails of smiling Iraqi children and rebuilt communities! This new report undermines that pro- war hype and recalls Bob Dylan's refrain "...there's no success like failure. And that failure's no success at all."

Bush is also "scaling back expectations for the Iraqi government" because he surely knows, as Frank Rich reports, that there is none: "... the Maliki “government” can’t meet any benchmarks, even if they were enforced, because that government exists only as a fictional White House talking point. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey said last week, this government doesn’t fully control a single province. Its Parliament, now approaching a scheduled summer recess, has passed no major legislation in months. Iraq’s sole recent democratic achievement is to ban the release of civilian casualty figures, lest they challenge White House happy talk about “progress” in Iraq."

In Saudi Arabia, 172 Al Qeada suspects were arrested for planning to blow up oil installations, and kill politicians- additional proof, as if it were needed, that the US venture in Iraq is in shambles. Buried in the Times report on these developments was an admission that the US occupation of Iraqi was generating more terrorist recruits: “The chaos in Iraq has fueled radical ideology among the region’s youth, while providing an environment for militants to train…Officials said that the suspects had trained abroad, in Somalia, Afghanistan and especially Iraq.'It is the beginning of jihadi operations leaking out of Iraq,' said Abdul Aziz al-Qassim, a retired Saudi judge and moderate Islamic activist. 'It is clear that this is some of the effects of what is happening in Iraq, in terms of training and in terms of learning from the Iraqi experience.'”

So the War continues, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, longer now than US military operations in WWII, reconstruction has failed, and the world is less safe than it was before 9/11 as the US occupation of Iraq generates more and more terrorists! This is the world that the neo-cons and their ideological president have created!

Ex-C.I.A. Chief Assails Cheney on Iraq!

George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, "At the Center of the Storm.”

He writes that top Bush administration officials pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes.

Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Mr. Tenet largely endorses the view of administration critics, such as former Clinton and Bush terrorism Czar, Ricard Clarke, that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda.

The book recounts C.I.A. efforts to fight Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Mr. Tenet’s early warnings about Osama bin Laden. He contends that the urgent appeals of the C.I.A. on terrorism received a lukewarm reception at the Bush White House through most of 2001.“The bureaucracy moved slowly,” and only after the Sept. 11 attacks was the C.I.A. given the counter terrorism powers it had requested earlier in the year.

Tenet's views echo those of Richard Clarke who wrote in his 2004 book, "Against All Enemies": "By late June (2001) Tenet and I were convinced that a major series of attacks was about to come. 'It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one,' Tenet told me. No one could have been more concerned about the al Qaeda threat than George, but he had been unable to find a way to go after the heart of al Qaeda...."

Clarke reports that he and Tenet tried to persuade the administration that al Qaeda posed a real threat at a September 4, 2001 meeting, seven days before the attack on the twin towers. "Rumsfeld, who looked distracted through the session, took the Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq..."

Clarke recounts briefing Condi Rice about al Qaeda" "...her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before..." noting that"... Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley, were still operating with the old Cold War paradigm...."

Clarke presciently concludes his book by saying:" The nation needed thoughtful leadership to deal with the underlying problems September 11 reflected...Instead America got unthinking reactions, ham held responses and a rejection of analysis in favor of perceived wisdom. It has left us left secure. We will pay a price for a long time." Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, George Tenet, apparently agrees.