Iraq vet Pete Hegseth on Gen. Sanchez and the surge

Peter Hegseth points out that Gen. Sanchez portrayal of the Iraq War might have been accurate two years ago, but the picture on the ground has changed.

A people drowning in sectarian violence and warped by perpetual vengeance aren't going to immediately engage in political reconciliation. Security improvements must first dampen the violence, lower tensions and restore humanity. This is exactly what Petraeus has done, and we have finally begun providing the tangible security improvements necessary for lasting political solutions at the local and national levels.

Although many hope to convince America otherwise, the Iraq war has fundamentally changed in '07. It's not a civil war anymore. It's the people of Iraq vs. al Qaeda and Iranian proxies, with the U.S.-led Coalition helping the Iraqi people swing their sword of sovereignty.

(New York Post)

That's Hegseth's conclusion. Click the link to see how he got there.

Hat tip to Powerline.

*****

More stupidity from Democrats (I shouldn't be surprised)

The Democrat-controlled Congress is hands-down worse than I ever thought it would be. Very fortunately, part of its ineptitude includes an inability to meet its own legislative goals.

Fresh from their absolutely idiotic insistence of giving official recognition to the Armenian genocide from early last century (straining U.S. relations with Turkey at a critical juncture), Democrats continued to parade their stupidity via their questioning of Michael Mukasey.

Under sharp questioning about the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program, Mukasey said there may be occasions when the president's wartime powers would supersede legal requirements to obtain a warrant to conduct wiretaps.

In such a case, Mukasey said, "the president is not putting somebody above the law; the president is putting somebody within the law. . . . The president doesn't stand above the law. But the law emphatically includes the Constitution."

Judge Mukasey tried to give the Senate committee a lesson in constitutional law--the branches of government are equal, and therefore Congress can't take away the President's powers--but it was pearls before swine. Dim bulb Patrick Leahy didn't get the point:

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he was "troubled by your answer. I see a loophole big enough to drive a truck through."

There you have it! The Constitution: it's a loophole!

(Powerline)(embedded material from the Washington Post)

Democratic leaders have been in full-on meltdown mode ever since their key strategic victory (losing in Iraq) began to slip away.

*****

Franklin Foer: "Fixer"

Scott Johnson of Powerline provides the perfect commentary to match the news concerning Columbia Magazine's profile of Franklin Foer.

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The current issue of Columbia Magazine carries a profile by Tim Warner of New Republic editor Franklin Foer celebrating him as "the fixer" who is resuscitating the magazine. (The profile is not available online at present. Thanks to reader Robert Avery for sending me a copy today.) If not the most poorly timed article in the history of journalism, it is nevertheless laughable in light of the ordeal inflicted on the magazine by its Baghdad fabulist and will to believe him on the part of "the editors."

Progress in Iraq: bad news for Democrats?

Special to the New York Times, via Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack of the (left-favoring) Brookings Institution:

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and

the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
(New York Times)

This is not the narrative that an ideologically left-tilted mainstream media wants to tell.

War-supporting Republicans and, I hope, Iraqis can take considerable comfort in the fact that left-biased news organizations are typically more interested in telling the truth than they are in pushing their ideological and political agendas. It's just that the agenda sometimes makes it challenging for them to tell the truth effectively.

The bigger conflict, here, is for the Democratic Party, which committed itself to defeat in Iraq. Declaring the surge strategy a "failure" within just a few weeks of the full complement of surge forces deploying is just one of the better examples.

So, how does the Democratic-controlled Congress react to the changing face of the ground situation in Iraq? Do they keep pushing for a vote to start a draw-down of forces prior to General Petraeus' September report?

It's possible. After all, the Democrats moved to signal retreat after receiving reports that the Iraqi government has made little progress despite some significant gains on the "benchmarks" concerning the security situation.

The big factor here, it seems, is the public perception angle. So long as the American people are convinced that things in Iraq are deteriorating, they may forgive Democrats for their retreatist/defeatist stance.

If the public perception changes--look out.

Hat tip to Powerline.

CIA sticking it to the administration, 2004

Because I think it's an important story, and because I see no shame in latching onto Powerline's coattails in order to update the reporting, here's more on the bureaucratic war within the executive branch of the US government:

Pillar's "management team" at the CIA, where he was employed as the national intelligence officer on the Near East/South Asia desk, approved the appearance. According to Novak, the ground rules for the speech were based on the "Lindley Rule," which holds that the speaker, his audience and the event are not to be disclosed, "but the substance of what he said can be reported." That substance, apparently, was a harsh assessment of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq.

Think about that: A senior, unelected CIA official--Paul Pillar--was given agency approval to anonymously attack Bush administration policies less than two months before the November 2, 2004, presidential election. That Pillar was among the most strident of these frequent critics--usually in off-the-record speeches to gatherings of foreign policy experts and business leaders--was well known to his colleagues in the intelligence community and to Bush administration policymakers. His was not an isolated case; CIA officials routinely trashed Bush administration policy decisions, often with official approval, in the months leading up to the Iraq War and again before the election. Pillar, who had complained to a CIA spokesman that someone had violated the ground rules by providing his name to Novak, simply got caught.

(Daily Standard)

So, the CIA set up background press conferences ("not for attribution"stuff) so that CIA officers could criticize the policies of their bosses in the Bush administration. That is a jaw-dropper of a story, but I haven't seen the mainstream media pick up on it at all. Even though they were no doubt present at the press conferences where it was being done.

Or most of them (except for the one who identified Paul Pillar's role) thought that secret was worth keeping.

To make the link to the most obvious parallell, Joe Wilson wrote his now-infamous New York Times op-ed piece, "What I didn't Find in Africa," with the permission of the CIA. You can't ordinarily just go on a clandestine CIA mission and later write a public story about it because you feel like it.
***

The CIA has issued an official statement regarding Rowan Scarborough's book about the bureaucratic war ("Sabotage").
Powerline sees it as a classic non-denial denial.

A book on the war within the executive branch

With a hat-tip to (who else?) Powerline, it turns out that Rowan Scarborough was written a book about the attacks on the administration from within the CIA.

Powerline has been pushing the story for months. It will be interesting to see how the book is received.

Exposed: how Bush-hating bureaucrats in the CIA are sabotaging the war on terror

Sabotage

by Rowan Scarborough

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, intelligence collection has become the number-one weapon in the effort to defeat al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden -- a plot penetrated is an attack stopped. And, to the outside observer, the CIA has performed well as a key partner in the Bush administration's war on terror. But as Rowan Scarborough reveals in this groundbreaking new book, significant elements within the CIA are undermining both the President and national security through leaks, false allegations -- and outright sabotage.

(Conservative Book Club)

The attempts by the CIA to set administration policy mirror similar goings-on in the Department of Justice, and reflect a parallel to power exerted by congressional staffers over those representatives who don't stay in office term after term (term limits would tend to increase the power of congressional staffers).

The CIA's "True Confessions" and what to make of it

Via Powerline, we're pointed to this op-ed by Angelo M. Codevilla:

July 2, 2007 -- THE CIA last week released a heavily redacted version of a 1973 report what it considers its fathers' sins. There was nothing new: In the '70s and '80s, agency employees on all sides of the quarrels over what the CIA should do shopped their versions of the report to whoever would listen on the congressional Intelligence Committees (including myself) as well as to the press.

These quarrels were rooted in the deep political, social and personal animosities that split the CIA's founding generation. Riding the post-Vietnam/Watergate wave of U.S. politics, one CIA faction wrote the report to discredit and oust their bureaucratic rivals.

(New York Post)

The piece obviously underscores Powerline's thesis about factions within the executive branch acting to influence policy, including the undermining of the current president (as by giving the OK to Joe Wilson to publish a little piece about his trip to Niger).

Give it a read--it's not particularly long, and it's got some tidbits like this in it:

It is not sufficiently remembered that in the 1950s the CIA helped arm Castro (against the U.S. embassy's wishes) and acted to destabilize the regime he was trying to overthrow. The released report says nothing of this, for the same reason that it mentions nothing about the CIA's sponsorship of Iraq's Ba'ath party, and of its 1959 hiring of a young thug named Saddam Hussein, or of its romance with the PLO. The CIA retains illusions and affections.

MSM continues to massage public opinion on pre-war Iraq

John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog posted an excellent piece of media criticism here.

Hinderaker quotes the Washington Post and then quotes from the source of the Post's information--it doesn't look like a match.

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.
(the Washington Post)

And the source of the "all confirmed" phrasing (from a footnote in the report, as provided by Hinderaker--I haven't been able to link to the source document):

Noteworthy is that post-war debriefs of Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz, al-Tikriti and al-Libi as well as document exploitation by DIA all confirmed that the Intelligence Community [b]was correct: Iraq and al-Qaeda did not cooperate in all categories.[/b] The terms the Intelligence Community used to describe the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda were validated, "no conclusive signs," and "direct cooperation...has not been established."

And this is how various dailies around the country fix the headline:

The Cleveland Plain Dealer:
"Report: Saddam not linked to al-Qaida"

The Pioneer Press:
"Pentagon debunks Saddam ties to al-Qaida"

The Kansas City Star:
"Report disputes prewar link
Hussein and al-Qaida were not directly cooperating before Iraq invasion, text shows."

Not every headline is as misleading as those above.

The Register-Guard (Oregon):
Report: Iraq, al-Qaeda contact limited

That's quite an improvement on the Post version, actually!

The story by Smith goes on to take a whack at Vice President Cheney concerning his statements that the current war in Iraq represents a struggle against al Qaida.
If that isn't a non sequitur then there's no such thing.

And the Post compounds the illogic with a Dan Froomkin column blasting Cheney based on their own inept reporting.

Cheney Sticks to His Delusions

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, April 6, 2007; 1:20 PM

Faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, even President Bush has backed off his earlier inflammatory assertions about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

But Vice President Cheney yesterday, in an interview with right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, continued to stick to his delusional guns.

Inflammatory assertions by Bush? A pity Froomkin offers no examples.

Cheney told Limbaugh that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading al-Qaeda operations in Iraq before the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

"[A]fter we went into Afghanistan and shut him down there, he went to Baghdad, took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq; organized the al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene, and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June. He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra Mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni. This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney said. "And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq." (Think Progress has the audio clip.)

(The Washington Post)

Same total lack of logic, here.
It's a leap worthy of Superman, albeit a leap of illogical thinking rather than a single bound over a tall Metropolis building.
Froomkin starts out by saying that links between Hussein and al Qaida have been discredited, and then mocks Cheney for not being up to speed. The smoking gun is a statement by Cheney that does not refer to any collaboration between the Iraqi government and al Qaida.

As Bugs Bunny would say: "What a maroon."

Not your finest moment, Froomkin.

The most underreported story of 2006 drags on into 2007

The Powerline folks have stayed after this one; I continue to agree that it's a potentially huge story that isn't getting the attention it probably deserves.

That is, the resistance within the executive branch of the federal government to the executive office. Agencies such as the CIA have apparently intentionally leaked information damaging to the administration where whistle-blower statutes seem to offer no protection--and they're getting away with it.

In today's New York Sun Josh Gerstein reports on the government's reponse to his Freedom of Information Act request regarding the Justice Department's leak investigations: "Leak probes stymied, FBI memos show." The story is mystifying. As I read it I wondered why no grand jury has been convened and evidence gathered the old-fashioned way.
(Powerline permalink)