Head Of Mush

Matthew Yglesias in this post notices that Donald Rumsfeld and the the blindered neocon faction of the GOP still don't seem to understand terrorism. He says:

Rogue states are bad -- don't get me wrong -- but in a fundamental sense the terrorism problem has nothing to do with them. The fact that Iran sponsors a regional terrorist enterprise (Hezbollah) and that Iraq and North Korea both did so in the past (and Iraq to a small extent continued up until Saddam's fall) is interesting, but not really relevant to the terrorism problem that the United States faces. Rumsfeld -- and Rice, and Bush -- don't get that.


They have been convinced, it seems since the beginning of time, that the only real threat to America and apple pie is the fearsome rogue state. And you can trace this completely erroneous line of reasoning as it applies to islamic terrorism to our good friend, the crazed Laurie Mylroie and her insistence that the first World Trade Center bombing was the work of Saddam Hussein. And you can go even further back to the notion that communism would be defeated only through a series of military victories against the states that adopted it. It appears that these folks' biggest problem in life, and the reason they should never be allowed to have unfettered power, is that their thinking is so fossilized that they can never, ever let go of an idea once they have adopted it, no matter what the facts and circumstances.

They are now so deeply confused by their own twisted worldview that nobody knows what the hell they are thinking. It is true, as Matt points out, that the threat of "rogue states" like Iran and North Korea are real and require extreme vigilance. It is also true that the War On Terrorism is really a war against a bunch of loose knit organizations held together by ideology and purpose rather than a state sponsor or central location. They are two separate threats, each difficult and each distinct.

There is one exception, however, and its a biggie. There is a rogue state out there that has openly supplied nuclear arms to other rogue states, is under the despotic undemocratic rule of a military junta and is deeply involved in the spread of islamic fundamentalist ideology. The government could easily fall into the hands of the wacko Wahabist faction that forms a significant part of the current president's ruling coalition. Yet our Secretary of State was just there last week passing out high fives as a great ally in the War on Terror. The war they insist can only be won by confronting militarily the rogue states that could someday give arms to the terrorists.

The New York Times put it this way in an editorial today:

Washington failed to protest when General Musharraf cut short the prosecution of the nuclear scientist at the center of the scandal, Abdul Qadeer Khan, with a presidential pardon. It did not object when he blocked the investigation of any military involvement. The least the administration can do now is to press privately for a full accounting. Americans are at least as threatened by rogue states and terrorists armed with Pakistani nuclear blueprints and bomb fuel as they are by fugitives holed up in South Waziristan.

Pakistan's official version of the nuclear transfers ? that civilian scientists acted entirely on their own for purely financial reasons ? defies belief. There is no way sensitive nuclear hardware and uranium could have been transported out of Pakistan without the knowledge and complicity of the country's all-powerful military high command and intelligence agencies. And Washington cannot know that the network has been shut down until its enablers and protectors have been identified.

Washington also needs to insist on an end to the ambiguous relations between Pakistan and the Taliban, which have allowed fighters to cross the Afghan border and attack American troops. The problem is, in part, a legacy of the Pakistani Army's close cooperation with the Taliban until General Musharraf officially severed these ties after 9/11. A more recent complication comes from the alliances General Musharraf has made with Islamist extremist parties to prop up his dictatorial rule. These parties, which are ideologically close to the Taliban, now wield substantial power along the Afghan border.

Instead of urging General Musharraf to stop maneuvering against unfettered elections and Pakistan's main secular parties, Mr. Powell lavished undeserved praise upon him for democratic progress. Such declarations diminish American credibility as a consistent force for democracy. Behind a constitutional facade, General Musharraf rules as a military dictator, accountable to no civilian authority and basing his power on Pakistan's armed forces. It is the army high command that General Musharraf must negotiate with if he truly wants to move against the Taliban, Kashmiri terrorist groups or the nuclear weapons establishment.

Mr. Powell struck a somewhat surreal note in Islamabad when he announced that Washington was preparing to designate Pakistan a "major non-NATO ally," easing access to military sales. Pakistan's efforts to capture Dr. Zawahiri are welcome, but it is excessive to offer even a symbolic promotion to one of America's least reliable allies.


Yes, well, there is an election coming up and nothing is more important than staging a big ole "Mission Accomplished" celebration that features bin Laden's head on pike.

I realize that countries like Pakistan need to be handled deftly. I'm not unhappy that they haven't sent John Bolton over there to call Mushareff a scumbag on Pakistani television. (Would that they would keep him away from North Korea.) It may even be smart to "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" in this situation. If this team had shown even a tiny bit of real diplomatic and tactical finesse during the last three years I might think that's what they were doing. But they haven't and they're not:

India Saturday warned the U.S. decision granting major non-NATO ally status to Pakistan will impact bilateral ties between New Delhi and Washington.

A foreign ministry spokesman expressed surprise that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was in New Delhi two days prior to the announcement and did not mention the decision to Indian officials.

Navtej Sarna said: "The Secretary of State was in India just two days before this statement was made in Islamabad. While he was in India, there was much emphasis on India-US strategic partnership. It is disappointing that he did not share with us this decision of the United States government."

Indian officials were reportedly embarrassed at being caught unawares.

"We are studying the details of this decision, which has significant implications for India-U.S. relations," Sarna said in a statement.



In a case where you have two nuclear powers, bitter rivals, seething with religious animosity and territorial disputes you go out of your way to insult the one that has no record of supporting islamic terrorism or selling nuclear weapons to our enemies and openly reward the one that does. And you do this in the name of fighting terrorism and rogue states.

They call this moral clarity.

Clearly, there is no Bush doctrine, and no deep belief in anything except the tired irrelevancy that Stalinist regimes like Saddam's and the DPRK must be defeated in the name of fighting communism. That is all these people know and it's all they will ever know. They do not understand the dangers of the post cold war world just as they didn't understand the threats of the cold war.

And it cannot be ignored that we have a leader who is an idiot. Here's the image of leadership that Karl Rove is running on, from the halcyon days of 2002. I know that those of us in blogland are aware that it is a fantasy, but a good number of Americans are not:

Lacking his father's deep reservoir of experience to draw upon, how does Bush resolve his advisers' titanic disagreements? He goes with his gut. He relies on an instinctive sense of who is good and who is bad overseas?and then he sticks at all costs with the call he has made. His confidence in this process has grown with his success in Afghanistan He took to heart the lesson that he should trust his moral sense and have faith in what a former Clinton aide, not without admiration, calls "rising dominoes"?the sense that if Bush unfurls a big bright flag and marches toward the mountains, the world will follow.

But when the world doesn't follow, Bush often just keeps marching. His defenders like to point out that the President's foreign policy has had no serious failures caused by allies' rebelling against him. That proves, they say, that raw power determines international politics. As a senior Bush adviser bluntly declared earlier this year: "The way to win international acceptance is to win. That's called diplomacy: winning." If other countries get restive, U.S. officials say, who cares? Even ganged up, they will be weaker than the U.S. alone. The President summed up his lead-a-lonely-but-moral-crusade approach to foreign policy in April when he was asked whether he understood that Palestinians consider the Israeli occupation to be a form of terrorism.

That's when he said, "Look, my job isn't to try to nuance. I think moral clarity is important, if you believe in freedom. And people can make all kinds of excuses, but there are some truths involved. And one of the truths is, they're sending suicide killers in because they hate Israel. That's a truth. I know people don't like it when I say there's evil, this is evil versus good. But that's not going to stop me from saying what I think is right."


(If other countries get restive, U.S. officials say, who cares? Even ganged up, they will be weaker than the U.S. alone. That is another dangerous fallacy that animates the neocons. Again, there is no threat but the threat of a Stalinist rogue state. We'll have faith-base missile defense up by next fall and then everything will be perfect.)

Although much of the assessment in the Time article has been proven wrong --- his allies did rebel and there have been real consequences --- that image has remained in the minds of many. John Kerry's team must find a succinct way of showing that this puerile nonsense about the braindead boy-man's PB&J filled gut has made the world far less safe than it was on September 11th, 2001. Bush's team continues to operate like a bunch of amateurs, refusing to learn from mistakes and screwing things up over and over again. Kerry must counter this absurd impression of Bush as having a gut of steel when what he really has is a head of mush. The sickness in this administration all flows from that.