The Bushco production of “Iraq, the Occupation of Indeterminate Length” is not playing well with the locals back in the US of A:
According to a new TIME poll, 54% of those surveyed said the U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq has hurt America’s standing in the war on terrorism, vs. 40% who feel it has helped.
A new Gallup poll finds that roughly 2 in 3 Americans urge a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, with 31% wanting this to start immediately.
In response, Donald Rumsfeld, has decided to accuse “significant majority” of Americans of cowardice and appeasement of Islamofascists:
[Rumsfeld Speaking of the attitude in Europe during the 1930’s toward Nazi aggression] A sentiment took root that contended that, if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be appeased, then the carnage and destruction of World War I might be avoided.
It was, as Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.
There was a strange innocence. Someone recently recalled one U.S. senator’s reaction in September 1939, upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II: “Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” Think of that.
Once again we face the same kind of challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.
Today, another enemy – a different kind of enemy – has also made clear its intentions – in places like New York, Bali, London and Madrid. But many have still not learned history’s lessons.
With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?
If that little excerpt wasn’t enough to make Rummy’s point clear, let me spell it out for anyone still confused: Rumsfeld is comparing the “War on Terror,” and specifically our military intervention in Iraq, to the fight against the Nazis in WWII. Specifically, he is suggesting that anyone who supports the withdrawal our troops from Iraq is morally equivalent to those European politicians during the rise of Nazi power and aggression, such as England’s Prime Minister at the time, Neville Chamberlain, who stood by and allowed Hitler to invade Austria and then Czechoslovakia.
(Cont.)
What Appeasement Really Looks Like
Chamberlain, for those of you unfamiliar with the history of the period, met with Hitler in Munich in 1938 at which time he agreed to Hitler’s annexation of a portion of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland in the vain hope that doing so would finally assuage Nazi Germany’s territorial ambitions in Europe and head off the coming conflagration we now refer to as World War II. At the conclusion of the Munich conference, at which he had agreed to the Nazi occupation of the Sudentenland in violation of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, Chamberlain issued his now infamous statement upon arriving back in England:
“My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time.“
“Peace in our time” soon became a bad joke, as Hitler subsequently broke his agreement with England and invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939, shattering hopes that Hitler’s ambitions could be “appeased” through diplomatic efforts such as the Munich conference. When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, England and France declared war on Germany, beginning the greatest war, and the greatest slaughter of human life, in mankind’s history.
So when Rumsfeld makes the comparison between Nazi appeasers such as Chamberlain and those of us who believe the only sane option for America to the catastrophe in Iraq is to withdraw our troops and end the occupation, he is not just dicking around (pardon the pun). He’s slinging a vicious slur at critics of the Administration’s war policies by comparing us to the people who helped bring about the deaths of over 100 million human beings when they failed to stand up to the military buildup of Nazi Germany. Naturally enough, since he’s part of the Bush administration, he’s also dead wrong about who’s really doing the appeasing, and who’s being appeased.
Rumsfeld’s Lie and a Little History Lesson
A brief comparison between the situation in Iraq prior to our invasion and the situation is Europe during the 30’s is all you need to demonstrate the fallacy of Rumsfeld’s slander. Prior to the Bush administration’s disinformation campaign, no one believed Saddam Hussein posed a serious threat to the region or to America’s national security. Saddam had never obtained the ability to make nuclear weapons. The Israeli air strike to Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981 seriously limited Saddam’s nuclear ambitions.
Subsequent air strikes against Iraqi targets by America and its allies during the First Gulf War, and the subsequent UN inspection regime imposed upon Iraq following that war effectively ended Iraq’s nuclear program. The degradation of Saddam’s military as a result of the First Gulf War, and through the subsequent economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations, and the continued air attacks by US and British air forces during the decade of the 90’s, essentially emasculated Iraq’s ability to wage aggressive war. Saddam posed little threat to anyone other than his own people.
The only “weapons of mass destruction” he still retained were a few hundred aging, decaying stocks of chemical munitions left over from the Iran-Iraq war. By the time we invaded in 2003, most of those rounds were no longer viable, and they were never used against US troops during the initial blitzkrieg to Baghdad by Coalition forces. Indeed, to this day, Iraq’s insurgents have never attacked American forces with any such leftover chemical weapons during the entire three plus years we have occupied the country.
So, Iraq is a case study in what appeasement doesn’t look like. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, we fought and defeated his forces and drove them out. Subsequently, we destroyed or degraded whatever was left of his wmd programs through intrusive inspections and sanctions. We continued to bomb his military facilities whenever we felt the need, and enforced a no fly zone across most of the country. At no time did Saddam’s military power even approach a tenth of the capability of the Western forces arrayed against him. He was militarily defeated, economically strangled and diplomatically cut off.
This is the exact opposite of the situation in Europe during the 1930’s. Once Hitler assumed power he began a massive military buildup, including a modernization program for Germany’s forces that outstripped the efforts of his principle potential adversaries, England and France (not to mention every other country in Europe). When he re-militarzed the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles treaty that ended WWI, neither France or England opposed him, though his forces at that time were much weaker than those that France could have fielded to prevent his action.
The French Army, with its one hundred divisions, never budged against the 30,000 lightly armed German soldiers occupying the Rhineland, even though France and Britain were both obligated to preserve the demilitarized zone by the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact of mutual assistance.
The rest, as they say, was history. From that date on, Hitler never backed away from an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy which he referred to as Lebensraum (literally “living space”), a policy which sought the expansion of German territory and the colonization of same by the German peoples. Only his own foolish and premature attack on the Soviet Union in June, 1941, and his equally foolish declaration of war against America following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor (foolish in the sense that he engaged the only two countries who had the resources necessary to defeat his military machine), led to the downfall of his dream of a German Empire on the Eurasian continent.
The Contrast Between Hitler and the War on Terror
The terrorists of Al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11 have no armies, no air forces, no military machine, and they lack the resources to defeat our military in any traditional sense. Like Hitler, they have dreams of an Islamic empire. Unlike Hitler and the Nazis, they lack a state’s resources, both economic and technological, to openly confront their enemies.
Indeed, they (along with the Taliban) are the offspring of the muhajadeen jihadists we financed, trained and armed to act as our proxies in combating the former Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. They have the power to kill innocent people, but they lack the capability to destroy a country. Even in Afghanistan, they were reliant upon their ideological fellow travelers, the Taliban government to provide them a safe haven for their training camps. It was only our invasion of Iraq (a country with no connection to the 9/11 attacks), and the subsequent failure of our policies there, that have gained them recruits from, and credibility among, other Muslims. In effect, we have made their case for them by invading an a Arab country and creating a disaster that has taken the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Americans.
The Bush administration’s conflation of 9/11 into an all encompassing “War on Terror,” and the manner in which it has chosen to prosecute that war (through torture, unlawful detentions and an illegal aggressive war in violation of international law) was a gross overreaction that has fed Arab and Muslim anger toward the United States. Furthermore, the administration’s constant equating of these small, disbursed terrorist groups into a threat equivalent to that faced by America from the Nazis and/or the Soviet Union during the Cold War has done our nation a great disservice. In Hitler and Japan during WWII, we faced enemies who initially had a military far stronger than our own. During the Cold War era, we faced an enemy who possessed enough nuclear weapons by itself to kill our population many times over. Indeed, on several occasions we came perilously close to nuclear annihilation, the most famous and well known being the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For Rumsfeld to claim those of us who seek the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and the end to a failed and deeply flawed approach to combating the terrorists responsible is ludicrous. In fact, I’ll go farther than that. It’s frankly a case of projecting their own failures onto their critics.
You see, the real appeasers in this “War on Terror” are the Republicans, and specifically many current and former members of the Bush administration. They have willingly appeased a country which has known links to Islamic terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda and the Taliban, among others. Which country is that? None other than Pakistan.
The Real Appeasement That’s Been Going On
The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 had significant ties to Pakistan, and in particular to Pakistan’s secretive and powerful intelligence service, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI for short. Specifically, the ISI had close ties to this man, Saeed Sheikh, believed to be intimately involved by many with the planning and execution of the 9/11 plot:
In his roughly two years of freedom before 9/11, Saeed was a very busy terrorist. According to Newsweek, once in Pakistan, Saeed “lived openly–and opulently–in a wealthy Lahore neighborhood. US sources say he did little to hide his connections to terrorist organizations, and even attended swanky parties attended by senior Pakistani government officials.” The US government inferred that he was a “protected asset” of the ISI. [Newsweek, 3/13/02] In fact, his house was given to him by the ISI. [Vanity Fair, 8/02] Even more remarkably, the media reported that Saeed was freely able to return to Britain [Press Trust of India, 1/3/00], just as if he had accepted Britain’s secret amnesty offer. He visited his parents in Britain in 2000 and again in early 2001. [Vanity Fair, 8/02, BBC, 7/16/02, Telegraph, 7/16/02] The British citizens kidnapped by Saeed in 1994 called the government’s decision not to try him a “disgrace” and “scandalous.” [Press Trust of India, 1/3/00]
It as been reported that Saeed helped train the hijackers. [Telegraph, 9/30/01] Presumably this happened in Afghanistan, where he trained others and where he traveled regularly. [New York Times, 2/25/02, National Post, 2/26/02, Guardian, 7/16/02, India Today, 2/25/02] He also reportedly helped devise a secure, encrypted Web-based communications system for al-Qaeda. “His future in the network seemed limitless; there was even talk of one day succeeding bin Laden.” [Vanity Fair, 8/02, Telegraph, 7/16/02]
But at the same time, much of his time was spent working with the ISI. He worked with Ijaz Shah, a former ISI official in charge of handling two terrorist groups, Lieutenant-General Mohammad Aziz Khan, also a former deputy chief of the ISI in charge of relations with Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Brigadier Abdullah, a former ISI officer. He was well known to other senior ISI officers. [National Post, 2/26/02, Guardian, 7/16/02, India Today, 2/25/02] How much of his work with al-Qaeda was done on the orders of the ISI is not known.
Even more curious is the fact that a senior general in the ISI with connections to Saeed Sheikh, Mahmood Ahmed was also linked to the 9/11 plot, and indeed, was actually meeting with Senator Bob Graham of Florida, and Representative (and future CIA Director) Porter Goss, the respective Chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees on the morning of September 11, 2001 as the first plane hit the World Trade Center:
At the time of the attacks, ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed is at a breakfast meeting at the Capitol with the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Senator Bob Graham (D) and Representative Porter Goss (R) (Goss is a 10-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine operations wing). The meeting is said to last at least until the second plane hits the WTC. [Washington Post, 5/18/2002]
The extent to which Saeed Sheikh and Mahmood Ahmed were acting in concert with the 9/11 conspirators may never be fully known. Within a month after 9/11, General Ahmed was forced to resign from his post with the ISI by President Musharraf, probably at the request of the Bush administration, but not before he had represented Pakistan as part of a high level delegation sent to meet with the head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar shortly after September 11th:
Days after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, Islamabad dispatched a high-level diplomatic delegation to Kandahar, the Taliban militia’s stronghold in southern Afghanistan. After the talks failed to secure the handover of bin Laden, Pakistan tried another approach — sending a group of its top Islamic leaders to reason with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s deeply religious commander.
The special government planes that flew the delegations low over the rugged and parched Pakistan-Afghan border toward Kandahar were packed with VIPs — but one passenger wielded more power than all the other delegates combined: Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, the head of the ISI.
Other than forcing Ahmed from his position as head of the ISI, Musharraf has never taken any other action against the former General, nor does it appear that anyone from FBI interviewed him about the role he played with respect to the 9/11 attacks:
October 7, 2001: ISI Director Replaced at US Urging; Role in Funding 9/11 Plot Is One Explanation
ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed is replaced in the face of US pressure after links are discovered between him, Saeed Sheikh, and the funding of the 9/11 attacks. Mahmood instructed Saeed to transfer $100,000 into hijacker Mohamed Atta’s bank account prior to 9/11. This is according to Indian intelligence, which claims the FBI has privately confirmed the story. [Press Trust of India, 10/8/2001; Times of India, 10/9/2001; India Today, 10/15/2001; Daily Excelsior (Jammu), 10/18/2001] … In Western countries, the usual explanation is that Mahmood is fired for being too close to the Taliban. [London Times, 10/9/2001; Guardian, 10/9/2001] The Times of India reports that Indian intelligence helped the FBI discover the link, and says, “A direct link between the ISI and the WTC attack could have enormous repercussions. The US cannot but suspect whether or not there were other senior Pakistani Army commanders who were in the know of things. Evidence of a larger conspiracy could shake US confidence in Pakistan’s ability to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition.” [Times of India, 10/9/2001] There is evidence some ISI officers may have known of a plan to destroy the WTC as early as July 1999. Two other ISI leaders, Lt. Gen. Mohammed Aziz Khan and Lt. Gen. Muzaffar Usmani, are sidelined on the same day as Mahmood. [Fox News, 10/8/2001] Saeed had been working under Khan. … It is believed Mahmood has been living under virtual house arrest in Pakistan (which would seem to imply more than just a difference of opinion over the Taliban), but no charges have been brought against him, and there is no evidence the US has asked to question him. [Asia Times, 1/5/2002]
As for Saeed Sheikh, he was not arrested by Pakistani authorities until after the murder of kidnapped American reporter Daniel Pearl in early 2002:
February 5, 2002: Saeed Sheikh Turns Himself In to Pakistani Authorities
Pakistani police, with the help of the FBI, determine Saeed Sheikh is behind the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, but are unable to find him. They round up about ten of his relatives and threaten to harm them unless he turns himself in. Saeed Sheikh does turn himself in, but to Ijaz Shah, his former ISI boss. [Boston Globe, 2/7/2002; Vanity Fair, 8/2002] The ISI holds Saeed for a week, but fails to tell Pakistani police or anyone else that they have him. This “missing week” is the cause of much speculation. The ISI never tells Pakistani police any details about this week. [Newsweek, 3/11/2002] Saeed also later refuses to discuss the week or his connection to the ISI, only saying, “I will not discuss this subject. I do not want my family to be killed.” He adds, “I know people in the government and they know me and my work.” [Newsweek, 3/13/2002; Vanity Fair, 8/2002]
Saeed Sheikh has never been extradited to America. He was tried and convicted of the murder of Daniel Pearl and was sentenced to be executed by hanging. At present his case is on appeal. In 2004, Michael Meacher, a former British Cabinet Minister in Tony Blair’s government wrote an Op-ed piece for the Guardian, in which he had this to say about Pakistan’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks:
The Pakistan connection
There is evidence of foreign intelligence backing for the 9/11 hijackers. Why is the US government so keen to cover it up?
Michael Meacher
Thursday July 22, 2004
The GuardianOmar Sheikh, a British-born Islamist militant, is waiting to be hanged in Pakistan for a murder he almost certainly didn’t commit – of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. Both the US government and Pearl’s wife have since acknowledged that Sheikh was not responsible. Yet the Pakistani government is refusing to try other suspects newly implicated in Pearl’s kidnap and murder for fear the evidence they produce in court might acquit Sheikh and reveal too much.
Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?
Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to “retire” by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn’t the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court?
Why indeed? But then, perhaps this isn’t too surprising, considering that the Bush administration has yet to take any action against Pakistan for the activities of the head of its nuclear program, AQ Khan in providing North Korea, Libya and possibly Iran with nuclear weapons technology.
During the 1990s, there were intermittent clues from intelligence that AQ Khan was discussing the sale of nuclear technology to countries of concern. By early 2000, intelligence revealed that these were not isolated incidents. It became clear that Khan was at the centre of an international proliferation network. By April 2000, the UK Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) was noting that there was an evolving, and as yet incomplete, picture of the supply of uranium enrichment equipment to at least one customer in the Middle East, thought to be Libya, and evidence linking this activity to Khan.
Dr. Khan has been removed from his official position as head of Pakistan’s Nuclear Program, but he has apparently never been questioned by US authorities about his nuclear proliferation activities. Perhaps this is a direct result of the involvement of prior Republican administrations (Reagan and Bush 41) in helping Pakistan obtain the materials and technology necessary to build its nuclear weaponry in the first place, as I previously detailed in this diary Q: Who Gave Pakistan THE BOMB? A: The GOP Did:
Yes, it’s true, and all thanks to two Republican Presidents who not only willfully ignored evidence of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb making activities, but also aided Pakistan in its acquisition of equipment and materials needed to build nukes from US companies. Furthermore, they violated American laws to do so.
Mark this down in your list of points to bring up whenever Democrats are accused of being weak on National Defense: The reason Pakistan has nuclear weapons is because Presidents Reagan and Bush lied to Congress in order to keep billions of dollars of aid flowing to Pakistan during the 80’s.
In that diary, I essentially revived and condensed a story that Seymour Hersh had first published in the New Yorker in 1993. Here are some excerpts from Hersh’s very damning report about Republican malfeasance and recklessness with respect to Pakistan’s Atomic Bomb:
President Reagan and his national-security aides saw the generals who ran Pakistan as loyal allies in the American proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan: driving the Russians out of Afghanistan was considered far more important than nagging Pakistan about its building of bombs. The Reagan Administration did more than forgo nagging, however; it looked the other way throughout the mid-nineteen-eighties as Pakistan assembled its nuclear arsenal with the aid of many millions of dollars’ worth of restricted, high-tech materials bought inside the United States.
For those of you who think this is all water over the dam by now consider this. As a direct result of Reagan and Bush 41’s assistance in helping Pakistan become a nuclear power, in 1990 Pakistan and India came to brink of a nuclear exchange, one that experts within the CIA believed to have been far more serious than even our own Cuban Missile Crisis:
Richard J. Kerr, an even-tempered, low-key career intelligence officer, who, as deputy director of the C.I.A., coordinated the intelligence reporting in May of 1990, described the confrontation in stark terms: “It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I’ve been in the U.S. government. It may be as close as we’ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.”
[Note:] For those of you who are interested, Kerr was the former CIA officer who the Bush administration tabbed to conduct an internal investigation of the CIA’s intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq war. Hardly a Democratic partisan hack, in other words. Kerr was also a CIA Soviet analyst at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, so he stands in a unique position to compare these two events.
The Big Finish
So, let’s see if I have this straight. We have a Republican President and current members of his administration who will go to any lengths to protect a foreign power with known connections to the 9/11 terrorists, and to other Islamic terrorist organizations. Indeed, it seems that this administration has intentionally pursued a hands off policy toward that power and its “Dictator in all but name” President Musharraf, with respect to his country’s involvement with the sworn enemies of our nation, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Indeed, individuals in Pakistan suspected of involvement in the 9/11 plot, and in the illegal proliferation of nuclear materials and technology have not been interrogated by US authorities, nor has our government sought their extradition from Pakistan in order to try them for their alleged crimes. Furthermore, we have a history of past Republican administrations looking the other way while Pakistan obtained the materials and technology essential to its development of nuclear weapons from American companies. Nuclear weapons, I might add, which are now in the hands of an increasingly unstable government, one perhaps more likely than not to experience a fundamentalist revolution and become the next Islamic Republic.
It seems to me that the true appeasers of the only Islamic terrorist organization to attack our country, and of the rogue state which has supported these dangerous criminals in the past, are President Bush, Vice President Cheney and you, Mr. Rumsfeld. But then, you knew that already, didn’t you?
Rumsfeld’s Speech to teh American Legion