Month: June 2005

One of the major areas of concern during this global war on terrorism is border security — keeping out those who don’t belong here while keeping the borders flexible enough for normal trade and tourism. Passports should be the primary tool for ensuring security, but as the New York Times reports, passports routinely get issued to people whose applications should raise red flags:

The names of more than 30 fugitives, including 9 murder suspects and one person on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most-wanted list, did not trigger any warnings in a test of the nation’s passport processing system, federal auditors have found.
Insufficient oversight by the State Department allows criminals, illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists to fraudulently obtain a United States passport far too easily, according to a report on the test by the Government Accountability Office to be released Wednesday.
The lapses occurred because passport applications are not routinely checked against comprehensive lists of wanted criminals and suspected terrorists, according to the report, which was provided to The New York Times by an official critical of the State Department who had access to it in advance. For example, one of the 67 suspects included in the test managed to get a passport 17 months after he was first placed on an F.B.I. wanted list, the report said.

The problem isn’t just the issuance of legitimate passports to illegitimate people, but counterfeit rings that have not been adequately addressed, despite leads that could be exploited. All of this points to a system that has a dual danger for the US: it not only leaves us unsecured, but it leaves us with the illusion of security. That illusion has kept us from demanding reform or corrective action up to now.
Passports are critical to border security, but they also unlock all sorts of other doors once inside the United States. Passports allow holders to get driver’s licenses and other forms of identification, along with access to financial systems, and so on. They also allows fugitives or suspects in major crimes or involvement in terrorism to flee the country quickly, if desired. An officially issued US passport is one of the most valuable assets a terrorist could have in his arsenal.
If we want to create not just an illusion of security but start ensuring the safety of our nation, we need to demand more action on investigating and prosecuting passport fraud.
Note: Ironically, this comes up just as I’m applying for a passport myself, to work on a story with some international implications. The story will be some weeks off, but I hope to get the passport secured well before then — and I hope that it comes after a thorough and timely investigation.

Today’s Los Angeles Times runs a scare story on the security holes in the nation’s food supply, focusing on milk production and delivery. In a report that the Department of Health and Human Services wanted to keep quiet, Stanford researchers determined that a third of an ounce of botulinum toxin poured into a milk tanker could kill hundreds of thousands of people and potentially destabilize the food industry:

About a third of an ounce of botulinum toxin poured into a milk truck en route from a dairy farm to a processing plant could cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses, according to a scientific analysis published Tuesday despite efforts by federal officials to keep the details secret.
The study by Lawrence M. Wein and Yifan Liu of Stanford University discusses such questions as how terrorists could release the toxin and what effective amounts might be.
Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said in an accompanying editorial that a terrorist would not learn anything useful from the article about the minimum amount of toxin to use. “And we can detect no other information in this article important for a terrorist that is not already immediately available to anyone who has access to information from the World Wide Web.”
In fact, he said, publication of the article by the academy could be valuable for biodefense.
The analysis, posted Tuesday on the website of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, seeks to quantify security weaknesses in the nation’s milk supply chain and makes recommendations for closing those gaps.

Only after those five sensational paragraphs does a reader learn that the federal government has already begun implementing tighter security on the food supply, including milk production. HHS opposed its release despite the report’s non-classified status because, obviously, it didn’t want to give terrorists any new ideas before the safeguards were completely in place. NAS decided that disclosure was a higher priority than security in this case. And the Los Angeles Times decided that writing this to hype the danger while de-emphasizing the fact that action had already begun to address this added to the comprehension of the issue instead of distracting the reader with fear.
Putting aside the NAS and LAT editorial decisions, this demonstrates that fighting terrorism by waiting around for something to happen and issuing indictments won’t suffice. We can’t afford to wait until terrorists commit a ‘crime’ and then call the FBI to perform an investigation — not unless we don’t mind if a few hundred thousand Americans die before we do anything to stop the Islamofascists. This was one of the lessons of 9/11 that groups like MoveOn didn’t understand in its aftermath. It shows the need to have a forward military strategy in fighting terrorists before they can gather enough strength and resources to pull off a milk run like this.

A read through the editorial pages of the three largest and most influential newspapers in the US shows nothing terribly surprising in terms of their response to George Bush’s speech last night. The Washington Post offers limited and qualified support, while the Los Angeles Times takes the glass-half-empty approach and the New York Times … well, the NYT just takes the MoveOn position of screaming every time 9/11 gets mentioned in connection with fighting terrorists.
The Post acknowledges that the connections between the fight in Iraq are legitimate, something that neither of the other two papers will admit, but claims that Bush erred by giving nothing but the sunny side of the situation in Iraq. They also fault Bush for not explaining how the strategic position changed:

PRESIDENT BUSH sought last night to bolster slipping public support for the war in Iraq by connecting it, once again, to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to the war against terrorism. That connection is not spurious, even if Saddam Hussein was not a collaborator of al Qaeda: Clearly Iraq is now a prime battlefield for Islamic extremists, and success or failure there will do much to determine the outcome of the larger struggle against them. But Mr. Bush didn’t explain how a war meant to remove a tyrant believed to wield weapons of mass destruction turned into a fight against Muslim militants, a transformation caused in part by his administration’s many errors since Saddam Hussein’s defeat more than two years ago. The president also didn’t speak candidly enough about the primary mission the United States now has in Iraq, which is not “hunting down the terrorists” but constructing a stable government in spite of Iraq’s sectarian divisions and violent resistance from the former ruling elite. It’s harder to explain why Americans should die in such a complex and ambitious enterprise than in a fight with international terrorists, but that is the case Mr. Bush most needs to make.

The Post makes two errors in its basic presumptions. First, Saddam did partner with al-Qaeda, long before the war, as the Jordanian government confirmed earlier this year and as intelligence reports have demonstrated. He hosted a conference of Islamist terrorists in 1999 that included both Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and sheltered the latter well before the 2003 invasion. In fact, Jordan asked for the extradition of Zarqawi in 2002, a request Saddam refused, not because he couldn’t be found but because the Ba’athists didn’t want him arrested.
Second, the Post makes the mistake in its second assumption — one that critics make constantly — that the fight has to be about one particular strategy. The fight in Iraq is to establish a stable democratic government, to be sure. It also is about fighting and killing terrorists. Whether one is “primary” over the other is mere academics; the truth is that both are vital to the overall success of the war on terror.
For a media that often derides the intelligence of George Bush, it would often appear that it’s the critics who lack the capability of walking and chewing gum at the same time.
At least the Post remains somewhat supportive of Bush, even if they can’t get past their faulty assumptions. The LAT continues to speak of the “presidential disconnect”, and faults Bush for speaking about 9/11 when talking about Iraq:

President Bush’s pep talk to the nation Tuesday night was a major disappointment. He again rewrote history by lumping together the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the need for war in Iraq, when, in fact, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda. Bush spoke of “difficult and dangerous” work in Iraq that produces “images of violence and bloodshed,” but he glossed over the reality of how bad the situation is. He offered no benchmarks to measure the war’s progress, falling back on exhortations to “complete the mission” with a goal of withdrawing troops “as soon as possible.”

Nowhere in the speech does Bush say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. He mentioned 9/11 five times, in these contexts: Islamofascists declared war on the US, and it reached our shores on 9/11. After 9/11, Bush told Americans we would not wait to be attacked again. The only way for America to lose to the terrorists is to forget the lessons of 9/11. The terrorists want to shake our will in Iraq, just as they tried on 9/11. And after 9/11, Bush warned us that the road ahead would be long and difficult, and that we would need the stamina to see it all the way through to the end.
Now what in the world did the LAT hear? None of those references laid blame for 9/11 on Saddam. However, they do explain why we decided to change course and eliminate the largest and most hostile military threat in Southwest Asia, one that had openly attacked its neighbors twice in a decade and one that had refused to comply with the terms of the cease-fire and sixteen UNSC resolutions. Before 9/11, we thought we could afford to ignore Saddam. After 9/11, whether he had any involvement or not in that particular act, his involvement and association with terrorists simply could no longer be tolerated.
The Gray Lady takes this latest MoveOn meme and moves it even further downfield, as expected:

We did not expect Mr. Bush would apologize for the misinformation that helped lead us into this war, or for the catastrophic mistakes his team made in running the military operation. But we had hoped he would resist the temptation to raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks. We had hoped that he would seize the moment to tell the nation how he will define victory, and to give Americans a specific sense of how he intends to reach that goal – beyond repeating the same wishful scenario that he has been describing since the invasion.
Sadly, Mr. Bush wasted his opportunity last night, giving a speech that only answered questions no one was asking. He told the nation, again and again, that a stable and democratic Iraq would be worth American sacrifices, while the nation was wondering whether American sacrifices could actually produce a stable and democratic Iraq.

Really? In one year after the transfer of sovereignty, we’ve watched the Iraqis create an interim government, hold elections, form an elected representative government, negotiate with their old enemies to push them into the political process, and begin work on a new Iraqi constitution for a permanent democratic government. The Iraqis did all that in less time than we’ve taken to fix a welfare program heading for bankruptcy. In fact, they’ve done all of that in less time than it’s taken Minnesota to come up with a state budget — and we still don’t have one! Should we send in the 82nd Airborne to rescue Minnesotans from the obviously failed experiment in democracy we have here in Saint Paul?
The dominant theme today will be the complaints that Bush exploited 9/11 — complaints that will once again reveal how critics can’t remember what 9/11 actually meant. It showed that we cannot afford to wait for terrorists to wave their flags and tell us where they are, because the only time they’ll do that is when they’re raising those flags over the ruins of American cities. That day taught us that we can no longer ignore serious threats like Saddam Hussein, especially in the Middle East. It showed us the folly of appeasement in exchange for the illusion of stability, which really meant the consignment of tens of millions of people to brutal tyrannies that produce radicals willing to die for no other reason than to kill innocents to promote their ideology.
It showed us that we are at war. We can choose to fight that war here, in the US, or we can choose to fight that war where the terrorists and their state supporters live. I’d rather we opted for the latter, and beat them there before they come over here. Building democracies in their midst creates powerful allies for us in that fight against radicalism, and Iraq’s population and geography provides a strategic key to that success. Too bad that the nation’s newspapers and the critics can’t see past the bloody flag.
UPDATE: Corrected a coding problem. Welcome to Instapundit readers, too!
UPDATE II: The Democratic leadership obviously has the same talking points.

7:00 – The audience is coming to attention as Bush walks across the stage. He looks a bit nervous but as soon as he got to the podium, he looks happy to face this audience.
7:03 – He underscores Iraq as one phase of the overall war on terror, vowing that terrorists will not chase us from the battle with a couple of blows.
7:06 – It appears to me that the soldiers at Fort Bragg have orders not to react. Bush has not paused much in his delivery, as he normally would if he expected applause or cheers, such as a stump speech. His pace, therefore, is better than normal.
7:10 – He will not allow defeat on his watch — nice touch.
7:11 – Notes that only a year ago, Iraqi sovereignty was restored. Notes that progress has been uneven but has kept moving forward. Int’l orgs and nations have pledged $34 billion for reconstruction. Security forces has 160,000 men trained and equipped, and have led a major operation to clear out terrorists from Baghdad. Eight million people voted in the elections. None of this should be news to Americans, but the reminder is what is needed.
7:14 – The strategy has a political track and a military track. Broad outlines of the plan as it has existed all along.
7:16 – Bush stresses the international components of the coalition, underscoring the dozens of nations participating in the war.
7:17 – Three new tactics: partnering coalition units with Iraqi units, working with new Iraqi intelligence service, working closely with the Iraqi ministries on stabilization.
7:18 – “We’ve learned that Iraqis are courageous.”
7:20 – Good explanation, again in broad strokes, why timelines and exit strategies only work for retreats. “It sends the wrong message to the Iraqi people” — well, yeah. It reminds them of 1991, primarily.
7:21 – Also a good point about sending more troops. If we continue to escalate our numbers, it starts looking like a permanent occupation — and it will discourage the Iraqis from standing up for themselves.
7:23 – Eliminate the environments that create the “ideology of murder”, a good way to avoid the mention of Islam in any negative connotation, yet still remain accurate.
7:24 – “The terrorists do not understand America” … They understand some Americans, however.
7:25 – “We fight in Iraq because the terrorists want to kill Americans, and Iraq is where they have made their stand.”
7:27 – Find a way to thank the military – check this site.
7:30 – A good finish to the speech; it looks like he started to choke up when he talked about the high calling of a military career. He spoke for almost exactly 30 minutes, giving a good presentation.
I wish he had given more specifics about the reconstruction — as Beam suggests in the comments, how many schools we’ve rebuilt, how much electricity restored, and so on. He had an opportunity to talk above the heads of the media filters here, and it’s a shame he missed it. Nevertheless, he didn’t sugar coat the issues on the ground and he talked about the necessity of seeing it through.
7:35 – Mort Kondracke on Fox thinks it’s one of the best speeches on the war that Bush has given. He calls it rich in content; I agree.
7:37 – Mara Liasson (NPR) also gives it good marks, and points out that this isn’t a make-or-break moment for Bush, but simply time for him to address the nation on this issue.
7:39 – Brit Hume asks John Warner about the so-called flypaper strategy, and Warner lashes out at quagmire talk.
7:43 – Added link above to MoveOnPAC’s astroturfing site for people who can’t write their own letters to newspaper editors.
7:46 – General Wesley Clark now on Fox … He gives Bush credit for addressing the strategic issues, but faults him for not addressing some of the specifics of bombing rates. He worries that we’re creating terrorists — if we weren’t in Iraq, we wouldn’t have the number of terrorists we have now. In one breath, he says that terrorists can’t get to the Americans in Afghanistan because we’re hard to get to, and then he says we should send more troops to Afghanistan. As always, Clark is mostly incoherent on this point.
7:52 – At least Clark refuses to drink the “exit strategy” Kool-Aid, but he wants the Bush administration to give Americans the statistics on bombings and attacks in the future. Don’t we get plenty of that from the media already? Has anyone missed that data?
7:58 – Carl Cameron says the 82nd Airborne left the auditorium “very enthusiastic”. The Fox gang emphasizes that more engagement from the President on the war with the nation is needed — and I agree. Glenn Reynolds thinks that this speech indicates more will follow, and I hope he’s correct. And thanks for the link, Glenn.
8:02 – John McCain – “Bush laid out a clear exit strategy – when the Iraqis can take over, we will leave.”
8:05 – McCain on the rhetoric coming from Senator Kennedy, et al: “It’s a free country.” Okay … On Durbin: “He hurt his own party … He apologized … I’m a great believer in redemption.” Okay … I guess comity is the highest value.
8:07 – McCain defends the MOU: “I don’t think you will see a filibuster on a Supreme Court nominee.”
8:14 – Oh, goody. Charles Rangel is on the tube now. Time to get a beer.
8:15 – Damn. No beer. And now Rangel claims that Bush planned to kill Saddam before 9/11. If so, he didn’t do much about it — his national-security plan only mentioned tightening the sanctions in place. Rangel says that Bush should go to Europe to get them to take over — when they haven’t even done that in Europe, in Kosovo, which has Truck fascinated at the moment.
8:22 – Newt Gingrich: This was a rational, fact-based speech. He thinks that people will see a “calm, steady purposefulness.”
8:27 – Great point by Gingrich on the idea of this being Bush’s war — that undermines the entire American system. Congress authorized the war, it authorized the funding; this is an American war against a deadly enemy. He also rips Durbin’s remarks as “destructive as any I’ve heard”.
I think that just about closes out the reaction for the speech. Again, I think Bush did a very good job, with just a few missed opportunities. Check my trackbacks for further reactions, and thank you for hanging in there with me tonight.
UPDATE: Get more reaction at PoliPundit and PrairiePundit.

President Bush will give a speech tonight from Fort Bragg to revive American support for the extended effort needed to secure Iraq and establish a major base for the expansion of democracy in the Middle East. With unrelenting negative coverage coming from Baghdad, Bush hopes to use his prime-time address with a presumably enthusiastic Fort Bragg audience to highlight the mission’s successes and the progress made towards democracy. Bush hopes to bolster the national morale and secure a mandate for our continued work in that effort.
According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, that may not be as tough a sale as first predicted. Despite some skepticism about our efforts to reduce the insurgency so far, a majority of Americans already reject the cut-and-run option:

As President Bush prepares to address the nation about Iraq tonight, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that most Americans do not believe the administration’s claims that impressive gains are being made against the insurgency, but a clear majority is willing to keep U.S. forces there for an extended time to stabilize the country.
The survey found that only one in eight Americans currently favors an immediate pullout of U.S. forces, while a solid majority continues to agree with Bush that the United States must remain in Iraq until civil order is restored — a goal that most of those surveyed acknowledge is, at best, several years away.
Amid broad skepticism about Bush’s credibility and whether the war was worth the cost, there were some encouraging signs for the president. A narrow majority — 52 percent — believes that the war has contributed to the long-term security of the United States, a five-point increase from earlier this month.

I had suspected that the supposedly plummeting numbers supporting the war effort and establishment of democracy in Iraq had been overstated, and this appears to confirm those suspicions. The numbers are even more striking when considering the sample, a pool of adults rather than registered voters, which usually tilts such surveys away from Bush and the GOP. In fact, despite the media coverage that focuses almost exclusively on terrorist attacks in Iraq, optimism about Iraq’s future has increased nine points since December, showing that the elections gave Americans a clear idea of the commitment Iraqis have to a democratic future.
Not all of the numbers give Bush much reason to cheer. Majorities fault him for misleading the country into war, his administration of the Iraq phase of the war on terror, and feel that the US has become “bogged down” in Iraq and that we cannot effectively fight elsewhere as a result. Bush has to address those perceptions in his speech tonight to succeed. He has to show that far from being bogged down, American and Coalition troops have accelerated training for Iraqi security forces, that the latter have taken on a larger role in providing security, and that we retain enough global flexibility to address other security risks, such as Syria, Iran, or North Korea.
For his primary goal — extending support for the immediate mission of securing Iraq as a democratic state — the President has a nation waiting to be affirmed in that desire. All he needs to do is to present his case about our many successes in specifics, and he can rally the nation behind him again.
NOTE: I will live blog the speech tonight, which begins at 7 PM CDT.

In another sign that the Iraqis continue to adapt quickly to democratic politics, the spiritual leader of the Shi’a in Iraq gave his blessing to a major concession to his rival Sunnis that could result in greater representation for the former ruling minority in Parliament. That promises to create less tension over the development of the new Iraqi constitution and create serious momentum for the scheduled December elections:

Iraq’s most powerful Shiite cleric appeared to offer a major concession to the Sunni Arab minority on Monday when he indicated that he would support changes in the voting system that would probably give Sunnis more seats in the future parliament.
In a meeting with a group of Sunni and Shiite leaders, the cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, outlined a proposal that would scrap the system used in the January election, according to a secular Shiite political leader, Abdul Aziz al-Yasiri, who was at the meeting. The election had a huge turnout by Shiites and Kurds but was mostly boycotted by Sunni Arabs. …
Under the proposal, voters in national elections would select leaders from each of the 19 provinces instead of choosing from a single country-wide list, as they did in January. The new system would essentially set aside a number of seats for Sunnis roughly proportionate to their numbers in the population, ensuring that no matter how low the Sunni turnout, they would be guaranteed seats.

The change creates a more federalized system, one that benefits not just the Sunnis but also the Kurds, depending on where the boundaries are drawn. The numbers won’t be proportionate to population as such, but more to the provinces that each have as majorities. Once the federal government has established its constitution and electoral procedures, the provinces will create their own electoral governments, giving the ethnic and religious factions even more stability and incentive to work within the system.
This continues the careful politics of Ayatollah Sistani, the Najaf-educated cleric who professes the “quietism” of that school of Shi’ite Islam. His vision of Islam focuses on the spiritual rather than the temporal; his vision of government is one guided by the precepts of Islam but not run by clerics. In that regard, and given the history of religious repression by the Ba’athists, Sistani wants to ensure that the Shi’ite majority get its chance to run Iraq but that the Sunnis and Kurds have enough power to keep the country from falling into chaos.
In fact, while Sistani objected to the previous system of nationwide candidate lists, he allowed them to go forward when the United Nations insisted that any other system could not be implemented quickly enough for the January elections. That system effectively cut out the Sunnis, who boycotted in large numbers but would have won more seats in the central provinces had a federal system been in place. That decision has led to some of the resentment even among those Sunni who did participate. However, the more important objective — that Iraq will convert to democracy despite minority obstructionism and violence — has been made.
The progress in negotiations should energize the Sunni moderates into committing completely to the political process, putting even more pressure on their more radical brethren to admit defeat and lay down their arms. It shows the progress being made in Iraq and that the momentum still rolls towards democratization and freedom — as long as we give the brave Iraqis the support they need to realize their goals.