Try as they will, Conservatives have not really been able to make a good argument that Obama, by moving away from the failed foreign policies of the Bush Administration, has in reality made America less safe. Instead they have responded with a series of knee jerk reactions aimed at the obstruction and rejection of anything and everything that Obama has either done or proposed. Conservatives have fallen back on the now hackneyed idea that they alone are the ones who can keep America safe and that the Democrats in general and liberals in particular will, or deliberately want to, weaken America. In his last book “A Time to Fight” James Webb, decorated Vietnam veteran; former Reagan era SECNAV; Republican turned Democrat; and now Senator from Virginia, devoted an entire chapter to explaining how such an argument by Republicans was no longer tenable or one that they can legitimately promote. Obama has in reality kept in place much of the prior Administration’s policies and procedures that are embodied in the Patriot Act, the wiretapping law and the continued operation of Guantanamo. To date the Obama Administration has recaptured an American merchant ship from Somali Pirates and, in concert with federal and local authorities, uncovered a possible terror ring based in New York and Denver.
Anyone who has followed closely the events surrounding the War in Iraq knows that it is not, and was not, the central front in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Rather, it is the trans Afghanistan-Pakistan border where the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are and it is here that they continue to operate putting together attacks on London, Madrid, etc. It is from this region that they continue to attack our troops in Afghanistan and beyond that have destabilized large parts of Pakistan. Thus the point has already been proven. The central front in the G.W.O.T. is where the enemy is and not where Bush, Cheney, Coulter, Limbaugh, Malkin, O’Reilly or any other Conservative defines it to be. The ironic thing is that Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan was the only brilliant move of his eight years in office. He then went on to drop the ball by invading Iraq and leaving the enemy alone, allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and become as dangerous as they were on 9/10/01. There have been volumes written to the point that the invasion of Iraq did nothing to make America safer. The conclusion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that Iraq had played no part in the attacks of 9/11 and Bush himself would later admit so publicly and on national television. Seeing as it is generally agreed that Iraq was never a factor in the 9/11 attacks, and that Al Qaeda remains open for business on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, there is not much more to say in disproving Conservative claims that the actions of the present Administration, as currently carried out in Iraq, will necessarily jeopardize American security interests. If America is attacked by a resurgent Al Qaeda would that be the fault of the Obama Administration or a result of George Bush’s failure to consolidate his initial victory in Afghanistan? Had we spent 800 billion dollars in Afghanistan instead of Iraq what threat if any would we now face? While it is true that Obama has taken ownership of the trans AFPAK conflict, its also true that he inherited from the Bush Administration a set of circumstances there, which are fraught with difficult and dangerous choices, none of which are clear-cut or that guarantee American success.
Many Conservatives will go to the grave insisting that invading Iraq was the right thing to do because they fail to see that their ideas as to what makes America either safe or a great nation may not in fact be always and everywhere valid. There are those on the right who continue to try to make the case that we could have eventually won in Vietnam because we never lost a major combat action against the Communists. They will insist on this very narrow historical fact while at the same time being blind to, or ignoring the reality that Communism in Indochina, at that time, was a vehicle for the achievement of nationalist aims. In their myopic focus on combat capabilities they will continue to ignore the fact that successive South Vietnamese governments were too corrupt to act as a foundation for democracy. They will insist that “American Exceptionalism” would triumph over a people that first took up arms against a foreign invader a thousand years before William the Conqueror left Normandy to invade England in 1066.
If America is attacked again, it won’t automatically be the fault of the Barack Obama. What if the attacker was motivated to strike because of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or the loss of a family member during the occupation of Iraq? What if that attacker was moved to action as a result of the policies of the Bush Administration rather than Barack Obama’s decision to reduce troop levels in Iraq? Would that attack be attributed to the current administration or the last? Conservatives have made a big deal about saying that during the Bush years we were not attacked again, but as Richard Wolfe of Newsweek pointed out, terror attacks skyrocketed worldwide after we invaded Iraq. What about those American service personnel that were killed or wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan at the hands of those motivated to action by the invasion of Iraq, don’t they count as Americans that have been attacked? More to the point, this country was attacked when the Republicans controlled the Presidency, Congress, and the majority of statehouses. As David Sanger points out in his latest book, “The Inheritance”: “The plan for dealing with al Qaeda had been sitting on Condoleezza Rice’s desk on the morning of September 11, waiting for discussion.” In the final analysis it is almost impossible for Conservatives to make the argument that their policies have made us safer seeing as, according to the Center for International and Strategic Studies, the number of people recruited into Islamic terror organizations soared exponentially after the invasion of Iraq thereby dramatically increasing the number of our potential enemies. Conservatives like Ann Coulter would claim that Bush created “a flytrap for Islamic crazies in Iraq”, whereby they could be dispatched with by American forces. It would be more accurate to say that we created a trap of our own within which our troops were needlessly put in harms way for the sake of some misconceived NeoConservative pipe dream. Is it cheaper for a radicalized Muslim to scrape together the cost of a one way ticket to the United States, procure a passport and visa and then forage about this country in search of a terror cell or is it economically and in practical terms more effective to come up with bus fare to Syria and then walk across the border and join in an ongoing insurgency where one could even be paid to carry out attacks against Americans?
We were susceptible to an attack on 9/11 because, among other things, we never thought this sort of thing could happen. We became infinitely safer just by paying attention to security threats thereafter. If we get hit again it may very well be the case that we did so because we did not take the time and spend the money to “harden” critical strategic components of our infrastructure like rail systems, water and power supplies, ports and most importantly chemical plants. Have the failed policies of the Bush era created an opportunity for someone radicalized and now prone to action as a result of those policies to actually carry out an attack on America? If, in the words of Homeland Security expert Stephen Flynn, had we spent billions on infrastructure defense instead of wasting those resources in the Iraq misadventure, we would be infinitely safer. Who then would we legitimately blame for another attack on America, Barack Obama or George Bush and the NeoConservative claque that led us into the Iraq misadventure in the first place?
Steven J. Gulitti
Iron Workers Local # 697
New York City
10/17/2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Ann Coulter’s History Lesson
If only Ms. Coulter would be honest enough to admit that she is a bona-fide political satirist, in a tongue in cheek sort of way, her commentaries would be both funny and entertaining. However it is in her attempts at serious political commentary that she falls far short of the mark in saying anything that is either intelligent or historically accurate. Ms. Coulters’ latest attempt at analyzing military affairs in Southwest Asia shows just to what extent she has wandered out of her league and has now entered into a realm where she is neither a qualified or competent commentator.
Her recent article: “Natural Born Losers”; which appeared on 14 October, is just another case in point in a continuing litany of misconceived and misguided missives. In this latest attempt at maligning the Obama Administration, Coulter claims that Obama’s difficult choices in Afghanistan are his alone, uninfluenced by the previous administrations’ efforts there or the course of Afghanistan’s history. Coulter points out that President Bush had “removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan” as if they had been eradicated down to the last man and their ideology obliterated from every hollow and ridge in the region. Coulter tries to make the argument that Bush’s invasion of Iraq constitutes some sort of military masterstroke whereby he purposely created a showdown with Islamic extremists. In Coulter’s own words:” By design, Iraq was the central front on the war on terrorism” and that Iraq would become a “flytrap for Islamic crazies.” In reality, anyone who has taken the time to read any of the National Intelligence Estimates produced during the height of the Iraqi insurgency knows that the intelligence community never attributed Al Qaeda’ with more than a five to seven percent participation rate in the violence and mayhem that beset Iraq at that time. The cold fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the insurgents that we killed in Iraq were Iraqis and not fighters backed by or ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda. The argument that we were fighting them there so we would not have to fight them on the streets of America is as conceptually flawed today as it was during Vietnam. In reality some of our own occupation polices in Iraq would come to produce many of the Islamic extremists that we would face off against in this supposed “flytrap.” On this years’ anniversary of 9/11, General Charles C. Krulak, retired Commandant of the Marine Corp and a former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Central Command, General Joseph P. Hoar, took Vice president Cheney to task on policies of “enhanced interrogation and its affect on terrorist recruitment. To quote the Generals: “In the fear that followed 9/11, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to “take off the gloves.” As a former Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Mr. Cheney and others who orchestrated America’s disastrous trip to “the dark side” continue to assert – against all evidence -- that torture “worked” and that our country is better off for having gone there.”
Coulter claims: “ The most important part of warfare is picking your battlefield, and President Bush picked Iraq for a reason.” Well Bush may very well have had a reason for picking Iraq as a battlefield. But if it was for the purposes of eliminating those who were behind the 9/11 terror attacks he was as off course militarily as Coulter is in her attempts at political and military analysis. Consider the following lesson from the Second World War. In the run up to hostilities the Roosevelt Administration knew that Germany was the more formidable foe. A week after Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. At that time Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were Axis allies. Spain and Portugal were fascist neutrals who allowed their citizens to voluntarily serve with the Germans in Russia. Although we were initially attacked by Japan, we focused our primary war effort on the unconditional defeat of Germany and those of it’s European allies directly involved in the war. We did not invade Spain and Portugal on the pretense that they were in some way involved in the attack on the Pacific Fleet or that they would play a meaningful part in the European Theater. Invading Iraq as a follow on to 9/11 is about as conceptually valid an approach to defeating Islamic terror as an invasion of the Iberian Peninsula after the attack on Pearl Harbor would have been in defeating 20th Century Fascism.
Beyond Iraq, Coulter takes up the situation in Iran, trying to relate our present problems there to Jimmy Carter’s presiding over that country’s “regime change”, insinuating that a weak Carter abbetted the Iranian Revolution. She implies that the recent Iranian post election protests were in fact a drive for American style democracy that has been derailed by Barack Obama’s reluctance to insert himself into Iran’s politics and thereby employ the leverage of “American Exceptionalism”. She suggests that America can somehow create a democratic revolution in this nation that continues to harbor strong anti-American sentiment inspite of it’s internal political discord. But with Iran, like Iraq, Coulter again reveals her absence of an appreciation of history. She never attributes America’s role in the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew a legitimate government in Iran, and installed the repressive regime of the Shah, with the present antipithy Iranians feel twoards the United States. It doesn’t take an Arnold Toynbee to understand that this event alone would be enough to fuel a legacy of anti-American sentiment even if the Shah’s regime had not been one of the most repressive of the Cold War era. Coulter makes much of the recent Iranian street protests but never admits that the protestors were marching and fighting for a more perfect Iran and not for an overthrow of the existing political system. She is either blind to, or ignorant of the fact that the protestors choose the color green for their banners, green being the primary color of Islam.
For all of her syncophantic acclaim for the bygone era of George Bush and Dick Cheney, Coulter seems to ignore the real foreign policy legacy of the previous administration. David Sanger in his recent book, “The Inheritance” lays out a comprehensive analysis of the foreign policy mistakes of the Bush years and the consequences which we now must live with. Sanger points out that while we have been bogged down in Iraq, North Korea went from zero nuclear warheads to between three or five; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan; Al Qaeda has destabilized much of Pakistan; the Iranians are closer than ever to an atomic weapon and terror has surged across the rest of the Islamic world. So while George Bush had some semblance of a reason for invading Iraq, the end result is that America is now facing a world far more dangerous than it did on September 12, 2001. Ms. Coulter can employ all of the pretzel logic she wants to in trying to tie any and every foreign policy setback to Barack Obama for whatever justification she conjures up, but the more she tries the more she reveals her own shortcomings both in the realm of political analysis and that inherent in her lackluster grasp of history.
Steve Gulitti
New York City
10/15/09
Her recent article: “Natural Born Losers”; which appeared on 14 October, is just another case in point in a continuing litany of misconceived and misguided missives. In this latest attempt at maligning the Obama Administration, Coulter claims that Obama’s difficult choices in Afghanistan are his alone, uninfluenced by the previous administrations’ efforts there or the course of Afghanistan’s history. Coulter points out that President Bush had “removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan” as if they had been eradicated down to the last man and their ideology obliterated from every hollow and ridge in the region. Coulter tries to make the argument that Bush’s invasion of Iraq constitutes some sort of military masterstroke whereby he purposely created a showdown with Islamic extremists. In Coulter’s own words:” By design, Iraq was the central front on the war on terrorism” and that Iraq would become a “flytrap for Islamic crazies.” In reality, anyone who has taken the time to read any of the National Intelligence Estimates produced during the height of the Iraqi insurgency knows that the intelligence community never attributed Al Qaeda’ with more than a five to seven percent participation rate in the violence and mayhem that beset Iraq at that time. The cold fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the insurgents that we killed in Iraq were Iraqis and not fighters backed by or ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda. The argument that we were fighting them there so we would not have to fight them on the streets of America is as conceptually flawed today as it was during Vietnam. In reality some of our own occupation polices in Iraq would come to produce many of the Islamic extremists that we would face off against in this supposed “flytrap.” On this years’ anniversary of 9/11, General Charles C. Krulak, retired Commandant of the Marine Corp and a former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Central Command, General Joseph P. Hoar, took Vice president Cheney to task on policies of “enhanced interrogation and its affect on terrorist recruitment. To quote the Generals: “In the fear that followed 9/11, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to “take off the gloves.” As a former Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Mr. Cheney and others who orchestrated America’s disastrous trip to “the dark side” continue to assert – against all evidence -- that torture “worked” and that our country is better off for having gone there.”
Coulter claims: “ The most important part of warfare is picking your battlefield, and President Bush picked Iraq for a reason.” Well Bush may very well have had a reason for picking Iraq as a battlefield. But if it was for the purposes of eliminating those who were behind the 9/11 terror attacks he was as off course militarily as Coulter is in her attempts at political and military analysis. Consider the following lesson from the Second World War. In the run up to hostilities the Roosevelt Administration knew that Germany was the more formidable foe. A week after Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. At that time Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were Axis allies. Spain and Portugal were fascist neutrals who allowed their citizens to voluntarily serve with the Germans in Russia. Although we were initially attacked by Japan, we focused our primary war effort on the unconditional defeat of Germany and those of it’s European allies directly involved in the war. We did not invade Spain and Portugal on the pretense that they were in some way involved in the attack on the Pacific Fleet or that they would play a meaningful part in the European Theater. Invading Iraq as a follow on to 9/11 is about as conceptually valid an approach to defeating Islamic terror as an invasion of the Iberian Peninsula after the attack on Pearl Harbor would have been in defeating 20th Century Fascism.
Beyond Iraq, Coulter takes up the situation in Iran, trying to relate our present problems there to Jimmy Carter’s presiding over that country’s “regime change”, insinuating that a weak Carter abbetted the Iranian Revolution. She implies that the recent Iranian post election protests were in fact a drive for American style democracy that has been derailed by Barack Obama’s reluctance to insert himself into Iran’s politics and thereby employ the leverage of “American Exceptionalism”. She suggests that America can somehow create a democratic revolution in this nation that continues to harbor strong anti-American sentiment inspite of it’s internal political discord. But with Iran, like Iraq, Coulter again reveals her absence of an appreciation of history. She never attributes America’s role in the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew a legitimate government in Iran, and installed the repressive regime of the Shah, with the present antipithy Iranians feel twoards the United States. It doesn’t take an Arnold Toynbee to understand that this event alone would be enough to fuel a legacy of anti-American sentiment even if the Shah’s regime had not been one of the most repressive of the Cold War era. Coulter makes much of the recent Iranian street protests but never admits that the protestors were marching and fighting for a more perfect Iran and not for an overthrow of the existing political system. She is either blind to, or ignorant of the fact that the protestors choose the color green for their banners, green being the primary color of Islam.
For all of her syncophantic acclaim for the bygone era of George Bush and Dick Cheney, Coulter seems to ignore the real foreign policy legacy of the previous administration. David Sanger in his recent book, “The Inheritance” lays out a comprehensive analysis of the foreign policy mistakes of the Bush years and the consequences which we now must live with. Sanger points out that while we have been bogged down in Iraq, North Korea went from zero nuclear warheads to between three or five; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan; Al Qaeda has destabilized much of Pakistan; the Iranians are closer than ever to an atomic weapon and terror has surged across the rest of the Islamic world. So while George Bush had some semblance of a reason for invading Iraq, the end result is that America is now facing a world far more dangerous than it did on September 12, 2001. Ms. Coulter can employ all of the pretzel logic she wants to in trying to tie any and every foreign policy setback to Barack Obama for whatever justification she conjures up, but the more she tries the more she reveals her own shortcomings both in the realm of political analysis and that inherent in her lackluster grasp of history.
Steve Gulitti
New York City
10/15/09
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