Adrift in the War Against the Terror Masters

I've read that to climb the ladder of the blogosphere, it's never a good idea to crap on one's fellow bloggers (Daily Kos, DU, and Huff & Puff excepted, of course). So when I see something on a Center-Right site that I find not just erroneous but also annoying, I usually follow the classic motherly advice of "not saying anything at all."

The other reason for that is that some critiques I'd be liable to make would sound more than a little hypocritical.

In this case, though, I cannot remain silent.

Mark Noonan can neither write worth a lick nor analyze the Bush Administration with a faint hint of objectivity. And, unfortunately for Blogs for Bush and GOP Bloggers, he's their most prolific contributor.

There, I said it. No need to say it again. And if Matt Margolis wants another contributor at least as prolific as Mark but with wit and insight to boot, he knows where to find me.

The inspiration of this chest clearing is one of Mr. Noonan's posts just this morning:

President Bush took a lot of flack when it was announced that the United States would not block Iran's application for membership in the WTO. I have to admit that even I was taken aback a bit by the move, but unlike the foaming-at-the-mouth critics of the President, I was willing to wait for a full explanation of the issue. In yesterday's press conference, we got it:

"Our decision was to allow them to join the WTO - or to apply to join the WTO - which is not ascension to the WTO, it's the right to make an application - seemed like a reasonable decision to make in order to advance the negotiations with our European partners.

As I suspected, this was sop to the EU in order to allow them to exhaust all diplomatic efforts in getting the Iranian mullahs to see reason. There has been no retreat from the President's oft-stated policy that Iran will not be permitted to build and maintain a nuclear arsenal. Our plate is rather full and a grand confrontation with Iran over nuclear weapons is not something we wish to engage in at this time...so we let the EU do its thing and as they asked for the WTO waiver, we gave it to them...costs us nothing, and it might keep the lid on the pot until either the Iranian mullahs are overthrown or we've got our decks clear to take action as necessary.

Mr. Noonan had better get ready, because I'm about to criticize the President, and I'm not foaming at the mouth, either.

We are - ostensibly - at war with militant Islamist terror organizations and their state sponsors, Iran and Syria. Or at least, we're supposed to be. That war - which had been almost entirely one-sided for the twenty-two years preceding 9/11 - produced spectacular early victories in Afghanistan (liberated within three months) and, after months of needless dithering at and with the UN and "our European partners" that gave rise to post-war problems greater decisiveness and dispatch would have partially or completely averted, Iraq (liberated in three weeks). The end of major combat operations in the latter closed a period of twenty months since the 9/11 attacks.

That was May 2003. Twenty-five months have passed since then. And the question inevitably arises: why have we not moved the regime-change campaign on to either or both of Iraq's meddlesome neighbors?

That's a question that Michael Ledeen has been asking for years now, most recently here:

The Washington Post gets full marks for exposing the alarming lack of seriousness with which President Bush is now dealing with what is euphemistically called "The Global War Against Terrorism." Numerous key positions — including the State Department’s top slot, vacated at the end of last year by Cofer Black, and the head of the new counterterrorism center — are vacant, and the National Security Council is working hard to define our current strategy, led by the impressive Frances Townsend.

After nearly four years?

Indeed, if you talk to military officers engaged in the GWOT, more often than not you will hear a lament, because that war has yet to be defined. Despite all of the President’s tough talk, despite the often extraordinary performance of our soldiers and some notable accomplishments by intelligence officers, the "enemy" remains vague, and we are mainly playing a sucker’s game of responding to attacks and helping those who help us on the ground, as in post-Fallujah Iraq. Our other main claim to fame in fighting terrorism, Afghanistan, is currently suffering from cynical neglect by us and our allies, and from considerable corruption, some of it our own.

Wow. Would that qualify as "foaming at the mouth," Mark? If not, how 'bout this?

In short, as the President’s critics are rightly reminding him, more time has passed since 9/11 than transpired between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of the Japanese empire, and our most lethal enemies are still in power and still killing our people and our friends. It is good that the desire for freedom is now manifest among the oppressed peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia, and it is very good that dramatic strides toward self-government have been taken by the Georgians, Kyrgistanis, Ukrainians, Iraqis, and Lebanese. But it is not good enough. Indeed, it is shameful that we have yet to seriously challenge the legitimacy of the terror masters in Tehran and Damascus, who represent the keystone of the terrorist edifice. [my emphasis]

We know that Iran is terror central. We also know that the mullahs are hell-bent on obtaining nuclear weapons capabilities that would render them immune from any U.S. attempt to topple them. And we know that Boy Assad, the mullahgarchy's junior partner, has been actively aiding the "insurgency" inside Iraq, including the direct use of Syrian troops in combat operations against Coalition forces. As Ledeen goes on to point out...

Our enemies know this, because, to their delight and perhaps their surprise as well, they are still in power throughout the Middle East. Until and unless they are removed, the terror war will continue, our friends in the region will be killed, tortured, and incarcerated, and the President’s vision of regional democratic revolution will go down the memory hole.

It would appear that my suspicions about the Bush GWOT vision were correct. I wrote (over at republicanforum.com) in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom that this was probably going to be the end of "major combat operations" altogether in this war because, after the firestorm of fussing and fuming that preceded and followed Iraq's liberation, the President wouldn't have the stomach to repeat the whole exercise anyplace else absent another catastrophic homeland attack. His hope was that by conquering Saddam Hussein - which was faciliated by all the UN resolutions left in place going back to the first Gulf War, a "multilateralist" edifice that doesn't exist vis-a-vie Iran or Syria - and seeding a liberal democracy in his place, both negative (to other terror masters) and positive (to their oppressed citizenries) messages could be sent that would transform the rest of the Middle East for us without having to lift another finger.

Well, it's two years later, and aside from Lebanon, the "ripples" aren't changing the pond much, to say nothing of "draining the swamp":

President Bush has indeed unleashed the specter of revolution upon the hidebound and tyrannical rulers of the Middle East, but they have not accepted it as their destiny. Indeed, in several of the main battlegrounds — Iran and Syria, for example — advocates of freedom are being rounded up and delivered to jailers, torturers, and executioners....

So far as I can tell, no one in this Administration has denounced the new wave of oppression, as one would have expected them to have done. Why the silence? Does the president believe that democracy will spread even if outspoken democrats are crushed? Does he believe that the Assad regime can be reformed? To speak so clearly for the spread of freedom, and then remain mute when those who rise in support of freedom are bludgeoned, is to repeat the terrible mistake of his father in 1991, who infamously inspired an uprising against Saddam and then abandoned the Shiites and Kurds to mass graves and torture....

Meanwhile, the Iranians and the Syrians continue to support the terror war against us in Iraq. Here again, everyone knows it — nobody raised an eyebrow at the recent rumors that Zarqawi had taken refuge in Iran, because everyone knows he has long had Iranian support for his barbaric actions — yet our leaders are strangely unwilling to draw the obvious conclusion: The regimes must go.

As Rush Limbaugh famously said during the Clinton years, "Words mean things." But if words aren't backed up long enough, their recipients come to see them as bluffing. That's what seems to be happening now. Instead of keeping the tanks right on going into Syria, capturing Damascus and giving Saddam a cell mate to keep him company, and then handing the mullahs an ultimatum - get out or we'll help your people do it for you - we've been hoping that our enemies would emulate Libya's Khaddafy by obligingly capitulating without one [UPDATE: Looks like I may have spoken too soon on that one...]

But it hasn't happened. They've concluded that Iraq was the exception that proves the rule. The only way to change that is to repeat the lesson, starting with Syria. And this the Bush White House evidently isn't willing to do.

Without that next step, the GWOT cannot be won. And isn't winning the war why we re-elected George W. Bush?

If so, his dithering may have already made that victory impossible:

While European negotiators focus on Iran's development of enriched plutonium, U.S. intelligence officials say Tehran already has completed all of the elements required for an atomic bomb.

The news has stunned President Bush, according to Geostrategy Direct, an intelligence news service led by national security reporter Bill Gertz of the Washington Times.

"It's an incredible piece of intelligence that overshadows everything we thought we knew on Iran's nuclear program," one U.S. intelligence source said.

Geostrategy says the intelligence information asserts North Korea this year transferred components to Iran to assemble a plutonium-based nuclear warhead.

"...the entire Iranian uranium enrichment effort appears to have concealed a much more immediate aim," Geostrategy says.

And Zarqawi has taken refuge in Iran...not too long after Osama bin Laden exhorted him to attack the United States "directly." Hmmmm.

If the Bush Administration isn't willing to resume the offensive against the terror masters, the latter don't seem to be nearly as reluctant about returning the favor.

If they succeed, I wonder how many of us will be left alive to "foam at the mouth" in the unpleasant aftermath.

UPDATE: Though, to be fair, the PSI dragnet hasn't been completely porous....