Good, Bad, Ugly
February 8th, 2007If I had a prayer emoticon — if I used emoticons — I’d put it right after this story. Old Gore supporters and political allies are starting a draft Gore effort. The significance of this is: the effort to draft Gore is no longer just a grassroots measure but there is substantial insider support. I’m not going to hold my breath, but I’m glad to see the movement, all the same, because Al Gore is everything this country needs at the exact time it needs it.
I’ve said that a million times. Or, at least, thirty something. On this blog, anyway.
Sidney Blumenthal pitches in with more serious news.
Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush’s escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.
The profoundly pessimistic thinking that permeates the senior military and the intelligence community, however, is forbidden in the sanitized atmosphere of mind-cure boosterism that surrounds Bush. “He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on Jan. 24 about the “surge” tactic. “I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’ And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.’” She repeated his words: “‘I told them that they had to.’ That was the end of it. That’s the way it is.”
On Feb. 2, the National Intelligence Council, representing all intelligence agencies, issued a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, as harsh an antidote to wishful thinking as could be imagined. “The Intelligence Community judges that the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, al-Qaida and Sunni insurgent attacks on Coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence. Nonetheless, the term ‘civil war’ accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements.”
The report described an Iraqi government, army and police force that cannot meet these challenges in any foreseeable time frame and a reversal of “the negative trends driving Iraq’s current trajectory” occurring only through a dream sequence in which all the warring sects and factions, in some unexplained way, suddenly make peace with one another. Nor does the NIE suggest that this imaginary scenario might ever come to pass. Instead, it proceeds to describe the potential for “an abrupt increase in communal and insurgent violence and a shift in Iraq’s trajectory from gradual decline to rapid deterioration with grave humanitarian, political, and security consequences.”
Stunning, isn’t it? The more we learn about the inner intelligence, the less reason to be optimistic. Maybe the President knows something that isn’t being revealed through the press but I doubt it, and I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with any further reason to trust Bush in Iraq or to believe that there’s anything we can do at this point.
As for this, and this, let’s just say that these are the most ridiculous news stories I’ve read in a while.