Bookraft

State of War by James Risen $26US Free Press

State of War is one of the flood of books that will be coming out in the next few years about what John Stewart and his satirists at the The Daily Show call Iraq: Mess o'ptamia. Clearly in the third year of the War in Iraq, the constantly upbeat and optimistic pronouncements from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, VicePresident Dick Cheney, and President George Bush have become frayed and worn over - President Bush's popularity is constantly dipping into the low 40's to high 30's range which corresponds with Americans approval of how the war is being conducted.

The War in Iraq has become a surrogate for the War on Terror. What this book describes is the fact that despite the Bush Administration's arguments to the contrary, Iraq a)did not have but the remotest connections to 9/11 attacks, b)did not have an active nuclear program as claimed by Bush and cohorts, and c)had no biological, chemical, or other Weapons of Mass Destruction also insisted upon by Washington. So Iraq was not a hotbed of terrorism and al Qaeda; but since the war was launched without enough troops to secure the country against a counter-insurgency or civil war it has since become "The Super Bowl for Islamic Jihadists and terrorists".

Now this conclusion might appear to be extreme but it is not that of the author - rather his words sound much more prudent: "In effect, Bush has taken an enormous gamble with American policy in the Arab world - and with the lives of American soldiers. He has placed a bet that the popular desire for democracy triggered by the toppling of Saddam Hussein will outpace the rise of Islamic extremism, which has been stoked in part by that same American invasion of Iraq. Bush has unleashed so many competing forces in the Middle East, that no one can safely predict the outcome." So this reader found State of War to be less partisan, politicized or strident than I had expected.

However, it clearly has a bias. James Risen has access to what appears to be at least a dozen or more key CIA insiders and recent "retirees" who tell a tale of their organization being hoodwinked by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice president Cheney and the master of political charm, George W. Bush, a) into either manufacturing intelligence conducive to the "mission or message the administration wanted for its own ends" or being short circuited by those same parties with their own adhoc and often hastily created or expanded intelligence operations. What makes this even more embarrassing for the administration, these makeshift intelligence sources are often times the same ones "who could not connect the dots prior to 9/11".

We will let readers judge the import of intelligence and decision mishaps starting with the admistration's tack of Bypassing Congressional Oversight "by giving lawmakers secret briefings with no staff present and then demanding that they never discuss the matter with anyone, the congressional leaders were paralyzed. As time wore on it became increasingly dificult for dissenters[Democrats] to protest the operation [NSA spying massively on domestic telephone conversations and emails without warrants or court approval], since the White House could argue that they had been receiving briefings for years and had barely complained."

After these dirty tricks, the administration lost the benefit of both Republican as well as Democratic counsel that could have leavened and made more prudent the ensuing set of decisions. But the Bush administration appears to have its own agenda based on the plank of making emergency and wartime powers of the executive branch enhance the president's power.

In the Name of the War, many actions are being taken that cut to the heart of previously protected liberties. None more so then the invasive screening of foreign and domestic telephone and email messages on a massive scale. "One of the most worrisome aspects of NSA{National Security Agency] move into domestic surveillance is that it appears to be part of a broader series of policies and procedures put in place by the Bush administration that threatens to erode civil liberties in the United States. Across the administration, many questionable actions taken in the heat of the moment after the September 11th attacks have quietly become permanent, lowering the bar on what is acceptable when it comes to the governments ability to intrude into the personal lives of average Americans"

Because of the War, the administration has dismantled many established procedures. The reasoning by the administrations is - "The national security bureaucracy is maddeningly slow, lacks creativity, and is risk averse. It is ill-suited to fight a nimble enemy in a war on terrorism. That is clear to anyone who reads the 9/11 Commission Report, which describes how proposals to deal with al Qaeda languished in bureaucratic hell during the Clinton administration and in the first few months of the Bush Administration. Yet this creaking process does serve one purpose very well: it tends to weed out really stupid or dangerous ideas, unethical and even immoral ideas, ideas that could get people killed or could even start wars."

"After 9/11, the moderating influence of the slow-moving bureaucracy were stripped away. The president and his principals - Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and a handful of others - held almost constant, crisis atmosphere meetings, making decisions on the fly. Instead of proposals gradually rising up through the normal layers of the government, they were introduced and imposed from above. Debate was short-circuited. Interagency reviews of new initiatives were conducted on the run. The bureaucracy fell far behind the political leadership on a wide array of policy initiatives".

But nowhere has this errant behavior gone more awry according to Risen than in the cooking of the WMD - Weapons of Mass Destruction intelligence. But here we are clearly getting the CIA's "in our defense" viewpoint. This reviewer has seen some but not nearly enough corraboration. However, the accusations are startling enough that they should be considered libelous and subject to court action if they are not true. For example:
"'Why didn't anybody say anything before the war [about how weak the WMDintelligence was]? I did. And I can tell you it was hard, because nobody wanted to hear it, and they made it very clear that they didn't want to hear it' " is the quote of Tyler Drumheller, chief of CIA'a European Division- Directorate of Operations, on his attempts to convince CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin, that the Iraq WMD intelligence was fundamentally flawed. Risen makes the case that CIA Director Tenet was politized and compromised by George Bush into rendering unto Caesar what Caesar wanted to hear.

The post invasion period in Iraq proved to be far more difficult than anyone had expected given the top planners had filtered out any admonitions warnings or risk assesments based on facts. Unfortunately, the Bush administration and the CIA were still so deeply politicized, the truth took a long time to sink in. So well after "mission accomlished", the administration continued to call for good news and intelligence reports. For example, "The sudden downfall experienced by the CIA station chief following his candid report in November 2003[about the increasing competence of the insurgency] convinced other CIA officers that there was a steep price to be paid for writing unvarnisehed intelligence reports about Iraq ...As the insurgency worsened and the Bush administration fumbled for answers, the consquence to those who provided honest intelligence reporting became more obvious. In late 2004, when a new Iraq CIA station chief wrote another aardwolf reporting on the deadly conditions in Iraq, his political allegiances were quickly questioned by the White House ... It was part of a pattern. 'The people who were running things and the people who were getting promoted were politically responsive to the administration' said one CIA source."

But this politicization extended well beyond the CIA and intelligence and Risen reports the utterly ugly "do nothing stance of Donald Rumsfeld" about narcotics in Afghanistan. Thus despite American Command and Control in Afghanistan, a narco-state is emerging there. Opium production from 2002 to 2005 has doubled every year and is now the biggest source in the world, comprising 90% of European opium and heroin sources. This is an unforgivable misjudgement, yet despite this and the paring down of troop levels in Iraq such that the Peace could not be preserved, being the commander okaying the AbuGhraib attrocities - Donald Rumsfeld continues to serve as he says "at the pleasure of the President".

State of War is easy to read because it is short, 200 pages, larger type, well written. State of War is hard to digest because of the degree of short-sightedness, politization, and sheer incompetence it exposes at the highest level of power in Washington. But the Katrina disaster seems to give domestic proof for the endemic nature of this administration's misfires in the name of the War on Terror. Even more interesting is that the conservative intellgentsia, the George Wills, the David Brooks, the Bill Christols, the Charles Krauthammers have yet to publish counterclaims supporting the brilliance of the strategies of the Bush administration.

This is strange because with the disarming of Colonel Qaddaffi in Libya, the rejection of Syrian influence in Lebanon, the relative modest control of the Islamic tinderbox that is Indonsia - there are some successes to claim for the administration. There should be some eloquent apologists for Bringing Democracy to the World. Instead the litany appears likely to be more of the same as seen in State of War - certainly righteous, more like proud incompetence and sometimes the over-calculated legalistic deviousness of yet another aristocratically Imperial Presidency. How many such presidencies can the US afford as it already has ceded being the number one economic power to China, India and Asia ? And with a weakened economic base, America shall be much more vulnerable to losing its status as innovation and higher education capital of the world. State of War is an indicator of America not prudently using its accumulated goodwill, power and influence - and most tellingly blind to population, religous/cultural, and economic realities of the 21st century.

(c)JBSurveyer 2006