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September 10, 2003 IS IRAQ A FRONT IN THE WAR ON TERROR?....Here's a peculiar story from last Monday by Knight-Ridder's John Walcott. It's headlined "Analysis: Insiders Slam Bush's Speech," but far from being any kind of real analysis, it's less than 500 words long and it's practically all filler even at that abbreviated length. In fact, although it leads by saying that "some officials" thought Bush's Sunday speech was oversimplified, the real purpose of the article appears to be limited to getting the following paragraph in print:
In other words, Walcott says, winning in Iraq isn't really likely to have a big impact on the wider war on terrorism. There's nothing especially unusual about this sentiment aside from the fact that it came from a very senior official in the Bush administration. So who do you think said it? POSTSCRIPT: "Senior administration official" is a term of art and — if I understand this correctly — applies to only about 20 people in the entire world. So here's an assignment for Josh Marshall: how about making a list of all "senior administration officials" so that fans at home can play along? UPDATE: A knowledgable emailer suggests that Richard Armitage is the most likely source for this quote. That sounds like a reasonable guess to me. Posted by Kevin Drum at September 10, 2003 03:34 PM | TrackBackComments
I vote for Powell or Armitage. I can't imagine any of the senior WH political staff saying it, nor any of the "senior" NSC staff (maybe a professional holdover, but s/he wouldn't be "senior"), nor any other "senior" Cabinet secretary or Deputy. Posted by: bleh at September 10, 2003 03:39 PM | PERMALINKmmm k. Wolfy said WMDs were the only rationale they could all agree upon... so what were the others? Oil, of course. Or, maybe he just received an anonymous email from someone who said "I'm a senior administration official, and I think..." and he took it at face value, as is the practice of Andrew Sullivan. Posted by: hackenkaus at September 10, 2003 03:57 PM | PERMALINKIf "[t]he war in Vietnam was not just about communism..." does anyone have a clue what else it was about? Reducing the oversupply of American youth caused by the post-WWII baby boom? I honestly have no idea to what this official is referring. Posted by: Irfo at September 10, 2003 04:01 PM | PERMALINKIrfo: I assume he means nationalist/anti-colonial sentiment. That is, on the *other* side it was about more than just communism. By analogy, in Iraq we're fighting more than just terrorism, and if we don't understand that we're likely to lose. Or something like that. Posted by: Kevin Drum at September 10, 2003 04:06 PM | PERMALINKI don't know about Walcott, but it pays to remember the Hutton inquiry when one mentions juicy quotes from "senior administration officials", whether one is in the US or the UK. If the quote is legit, though, then Powell and Armitage are the most skeptical of the neocon-type FP. That said, the speech was, if anything, a refutation of neocon foreign policy. Hell, the speech mentioned Powell twice and Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz not at all - there's a diplomatic reason for that. If anyone, it's the hardcore neocon types who would be criticizing Bush's speech, so this article seems sorta left field to me. Posted by: cure at September 10, 2003 04:34 PM | PERMALINKSo are they just removing the goal posts now? Posted by: Palolo lolo at September 10, 2003 04:54 PM | PERMALINKDoes anybody but the Bush administration think that it's even a little bit about terrorism? Explain to me the plausible scenario whereby: 1) We "win" in Iraq. I think the tenet is that "winning" in Iraq precludes the terrorists going home at all because, by definition, they'll all be dead. [In a less extreme variant, their organizations will be so crippled by the war of attrition that they'll be easily mopped up in post-war police raids.] Since I regard this theory as bankrupt, however, you might prefer waiting for someone else to answer... Posted by: Anarch at September 10, 2003 05:03 PM | PERMALINKThat is a silly statement, which ever senior admin official said it. The war in Iraq does not have anything to do with the war on terrorism. Not a damn thing! That has been my primary problem with it from the beginning -- the complete mendacity of this administration. That this senior admin official might suggest something other than terrorism might be at play is really not even slightly interesting. What is interesting is that this would be considered controversial. If all of the Pres. cabinet thinks this war is a part of the war on terrorism, and only one is willing to say that other factors are at work, it is a powerful demonstration of the sick and twisted kind of thinking going on in the White House. We are now living under a gov't not unlike that in Orwell's _1984_. Shameless. Sad. Ridiculous. Posted by: Timothy Klein at September 10, 2003 05:09 PM | PERMALINKWhat may be worth watching is the visible fallout from this "senior
administration official's" comments. What visible or detectable
reactions occur? Kevin, I think you are spot on in noting that this
seemingly inconsequential article was published for the sole purpose of
getting that graf in the paper. It could be a real broomstick in the
bottom of the hornets’ nest. Vietnam has off shore oil reserves. Vietnam was about oil. Point to the map. Show me where Bush (this one or his dad) has gone that is NOT about oil? No fingers needed. But Bush is in genuine trouble, now. I don't think anyone in the administration (senior to junior) thought he'd tank in the polls. Why? Didn't he wear a fun codpiece when he landed on the carrier? Won't women vote for him now? Gee, what does Bush have to do to win back favor? Doesn't our government control the propaganda flow? What's going on here? Why is everybody laughing? Oh. And, why does Bush give his speeches from the hallway? Are we not to be let into the house? Posted by: Carol in California at September 10, 2003 05:23 PM | PERMALINKTwenty seems low for "senior administration officials." There are 14 cabinet secretaries alone (though I wouldn't expect the HUD boss to mouth off on foreign policy). Plus deputies from the core departments - DOD, State, Treasury, and Justice (i.e. FBI director). Non-cabinet bigwigs, like Drug Czar, the chiefs of OMB, CIA, EPA, NSA. The FAA chief might be included on some lists. Then you've got the White House folks: NSC, chief of staff, counsel, communications, Karl Rove. Hell, I'd even put the First Lady on the list. Okay, that's a bit over 2 dozen. So I guess 20 isn't so far off. Posted by: Grumpy at September 10, 2003 06:05 PM | PERMALINKSalm Pax at the BBC: "Yes, I support the ousting of the regime. Most Iraqis don't have any problem with the coalition coming in. We needed their help. It was never going to happen any other way." http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/webchat/webchat_iraq.shtml Posted by: Neil at September 10, 2003 06:37 PM | PERMALINKCarol in California writes: I don't think that offshore oil was at all a factor in Vietnam. The US didn't really start _doing_ offshore oil drilling until the 70's. Oil was cheap and plentiful when the US got involved in VN in the mid-60's (gas at 20 cents a gallon!), there was no reason to go to VN to get oil that was hard to recover. That said, I think oil has a LOT to do with the reasons that we're currently bogged down in Iraq. Posted by: Satan luvvs Repugs at September 10, 2003 08:50 PM | PERMALINKi think its powell, i think hes getting 2nd thoughts about joining up with the bush junta. Posted by: madman at September 10, 2003 09:00 PM | PERMALINKWhat was the war in Vietnam about? I'm not trying to be snarky, but I'm really unaware that we went into Vietnam for any reason other than to stop the progress of Communism. Or is he saying something about the what the Vietnamese people thought about the war? I guess I don't understand the Vietnam side of the equation in that quote to analyze the parallelism. Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at September 10, 2003 09:02 PM | PERMALINKSebastian: as I mentioned above, my guess is that the quote is indeed referring to the other side. That is, the North Vietnamese tapped nationalist sentiment, and we didn't realize how strong that was. Likewise, people in the Middle East have a lot more on their minds than just terrorism, and if we don't understand this we're going to blow it. Anyway, that's my guess. Posted by: Kevin Drum at September 10, 2003 09:52 PM | PERMALINK"Because we can?" Bingo. And why are we talking to North Korea? Because we have to. Posted by: craigie at September 10, 2003 09:56 PM | PERMALINKKevin: "That is, the North Vietnamese tapped nationalist sentiment, and we didn't realize how strong that was." Probably, because at that time no one in any decision making capacity had the slightest idea what was important to Vietnamese people. "Likewise, people in the Middle East have a lot more on their minds than just terrorism, and if we don't understand this we're going to blow it." First hint, stop calling it terrorism. No one thinks of themselves as a terrorist or as supporting terrorism. The big problem of the Middle East is politicized conservative/reactionary Islam and the main source of this is Saudi funding of export-Wahhabism (the Islamic equivalent of snake handling and speaking in tongues) and grassroots opposition to despotic and corrupt local leadership (especially when said corrupt despots have relatively friendly relationships with Western democracies, like the Shah of Iran or Hosni Mubarak). I don't pretend to have many (or any!) answers as to how to address this problem but invading Iraq seems like a detour. Posted by: Michael Farris at September 10, 2003 11:46 PM | PERMALINKHmmm, but calling it terrorism really does point to the difference between Islamism and other discontented movements. There are lots of people in the world. Many of them as or more oppressed than whabbists. Terrorism sets Islamism apart. Maybe it is a symptom of some other societal disfunction, but it is a readily identifiable symptom to an outsider, and it attracts attention. Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at September 11, 2003 01:02 AM | PERMALINKRe Sebastian's recent comment on terrorism: Terrorism is not endemic to Islam or this time and place. It's even been practiced in the US by disaffected minorities and majorities. Recall what occurred in Kansas during the 1850s. I don't object to using the term but it's been applied both widely and selectively by the Administration to the point it's becoming less and less useful as a way to describe something we should be against. Also, I like to remember that the term was invented to describe what the new French state did to it's citizens after their revolution. We, in the US, tend to apply the terrorism label only to non-state initiated violence. For example, Palestinian suicide bombers are not freedom fighting soliders, they're terrorists, but Israeli helicopter pilots firing rockets into civilian populations are not terrorists they're soldiers. I think in this case the original use of the word is pertinent. Posted by: dennisS at September 11, 2003 04:17 AM | PERMALINKSebastian Holsclaw at September 10, 2003 09:02 PM writes "I'm not trying to be snarky, but I'm really unaware that we went into Vietnam for any reason other than to stop the progress of Communism." Your knowledge of the history of the Vietnam War is severely deficient. No surprise. The US involvement in Vietnam was sold to the American people starting in the early 1960's as a war against international Communism. But the fact is that US involvement began years earlier, as a war against the anti-colonialism movement. The Americans were supporting the French against Indochinese attempts to overthrow their French colonialists, and took over the war after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu. In 1954. The record of US dissembling on the subject has been told in many places. Posted by: raj at September 11, 2003 08:40 AM | PERMALINKI don't want to sucked into a whole Vietnam sidenote, but WHY do you think the US was involved in the whole colony question? Worrying about the spread of Communism played a very clear part in that calculation. Terrorism on the scale practiced by Islamists is pretty darn close to unprecedented. Even the IRA never went as hog-wild with the tactic as Islamists have. It is not particularly similar to any of the other terrorist groups you have mentioned, especially in the amount of support it receives. If the administration official meant that we have to deal with it differently than we have dealt with things before, he is correct. The Vietnam analogy just confuses the issue. Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw at September 11, 2003 10:05 AM | PERMALINK"What was the war in Vietnam about? * * * I'm really unaware that we went into Vietnam for any reason other than to stop the progress of Communism." Like you, I'm hard pressed to think of an OFFICIAL reason why we fought Vietnam, other than to stop communism. As a practical matter, the war was more about domestic politics than any real foriegn policy interest of the United States--Republicans like Joe McCarthy and Nixon had got a lot of mileage out of claiming that the Democrats had "lost" China to the communists, and LBJ was not going to let the Republicans make a similar claim that he "lost" Vietnam. Both under Johnson and Nixon, the war was fought more to generate favorable TV coverage than according to any actual strategy having to do with the reality of Vietnam. Of course, the problem with such an approach is that reality can sometime rear its ugly head and bite you in the rear end--as Johnson and Nixon both found out. Indeed I see a lot of parallels between Vietnam and Iraq in this respect. I doubt, however, that this is what a "senior amdinistration official" was trying to tell us--who knows what he really meant? Posted by: rea at September 11, 2003 10:48 AM | PERMALINKThen -- In the 50's & 60's every conflict was viewed as an East-West struggle whether in Africa, S. America, etc. In Vietnam, US was fighting communism. However, he NV leaders were fighting colonialism. (IMHO, they hoodwinked the Russians into providing support for the "glorious workers's revolution".....) Now -- This senior official, if real, is making the point that we again misunderstand the true motivation of the Islamic extremists. 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