“The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history,” said Retired Army Lt. Gen. William

Odom, a Vietnam veteran.

Nieman

Watchdog > Ask This > What’s wrong with cutting and running?

The US invasion of Iraq only serves the interest of:

1)

Osama bin Laden (it made Iraq safe for al Qaeda, positioned US military personnel in places where al Qaeda operatives can kill them

occasionally, helps radicalize youth throughout the Arab and Muslim world, alienates America’s most important and strongest allies – the

Europeans – and squanders US military resources that otherwise might be finishing off al Qaeda in Pakistan.);

2) The Iranians

(who were invaded by Saddam and who suffered massive casualties in an eight year war with Iraq.);

3) And the extremists in both

Palestinian and Israeli political circles (who don’t really want a peace settlement without the utter destruction of the other side, and

probably believe that bogging the United States down in a war in Iraq that will surely become a war between the United States and most of

the rest of Arab world gives them the time and cover to wipe out the other side.) …

The first step, of course, is to establish

as conventional wisdom the fact that the war was never in the US interest and has not become so. It is such an obvious case to make that

I find it difficult to believe many pundits and political leaders have not already made it repeatedly.

Lieutenant General

William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. He was Director of the

National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988 [mjh: under Raygun]
—–

BTC News »

Worst national security administration ever

The Bush administration and Republicans in general have made national security

their defining theme since 911, but as is so often the case, the record belies the rhetoric. On almost every front — foreign policy, the

military, intelligence, even security related domestic issues such as the deficit — the administration have damaged the country’s

security, sometimes in ways that may take a generation to repair.

Since 911, the administration have corrupted our intelligence

agencies; led the country into a ruinous war on false pretenses; added nearly $2 trillion to the national debt (and counting); increased

the trade deficit; increased the poverty rate; emasculated critically important federal agencies (such as FEMA); slighted our allies

abroad; broken a variety of international laws; and, on at least two occasions, compromised our own and other countries’ security by

leaking the identities of secret intelligence assets for purely political reasons.

Changing the Subject — Back

Jimmy Carter Speaks

The former president is on a book tour, and visited with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show this morning.

“In the last five years, there has been a profound and radical change in the basic policies or moral values of our

country,” Carter said. The existence of secret CIA prisons, as exposed by The Post, “is just one indication of what has been

done in this administration to change policies that have persisted all the way through our history,” he said. …

Carter had quite

a list of grievances against Bush. The “insistence by our government that the CIA or others have the right to torture prisoners,” the

doctrine of pre-emptive war, “the abandonment of basic human rights, the derogation of American civil liberties and personal privacy, the

vast rewarding in a time of war of extremely rich Americans at the expense of working class people, the abandonment of protecting the

American environment — all of these things, are massive and radical departures from what our country has seen under every

president in the past 100 or more years. . . .

“It’s this administration vs. every administration that has

preceded it.”

Another Thunderbolt from Wilkerson

“Mr. WILKERSON: What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president’s office, began to

create an environment — and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer [Addington,

incidentally, was promoted this week to the position of vice presidential chief of staff, replacing his indicted former boss, Scooter

Libby], was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions.

Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view,

what we’ve seen.

“INSKEEP: We have to get more detail about that because the military will say, the Pentagon will say they’ve

investigated this repeatedly and that all the investigations have found that the abuses were committed by a relatively small number of

people at relatively low levels. What hard evidence takes those abuses up the chain of command and lands them in the vice president’s

office, which is where you’re placing it?

“Mr. WILKERSON: I’m privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the

secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this

paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s

office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms — I’ll give you

that — that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We’re not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence,

and, oh, by the way, here’s some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with

the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.

“You just — if you’re a military man, you know that you just don’t do

these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway, there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage

of that. There are those in the leadership who will feel so pressured that they have to produce intelligence that it doesn’t matter

whether it’s actionable or not as long as they can get the volume in. They have to do what they have to do to get it, and so you’ve

just given in essence, though you may not know it, carte blanche for a lot of problems to occur.”
—–

Former Insider Lashes Out
By Dan

Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, October 20, 2005; 1:12 PM

It didn’t make the front page this morning, but

it seems to me that it’s a big deal when a former top administration official declares that a secret cabal led by the vice

president has hijacked U.S. foreign policy, inveigled the president, condoned torture and crippled the ability of the government to

respond to emergencies.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell until both men

resigned in January, unleashed his blistering attack on the Bush White House yesterday at a luncheon at a Washington think tank. …

“The comments, made at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, were the harshest attack on the administration by a

former senior official since criticisms by Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism czar, and Paul O’Neill, former Treasury

secretary, early last year.”
—–

The White House Stonewall

It seems that Addington is who Libby turned to,

after his breakfast with New York Times reporter Judy Miller, when he needed more information about Plame. …

Addington was one

of the authors of the White House memo that critics said justified the use of torture on terrorism suspects. And he formally requested

that a website making fun of Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, take down its material.