Sleepless Senate Awakens Iraqi Unity

Forget democracy and Iraqi self-determination as motivating factors for reconciling the internal differences plaguing their parliament. It seems that all it took to accomplish such a feat was the mental image of Ted Kennedy or Harry Reid in pajamas. The all-night Senate slumber party this week to debate troop withdrawal from Iraq was reported with amusement and no shortage of mockery by the American media, and ultimately the amendment to withdraw U.S. troops by April 2008 went down to inglorious defeat. Senator Levin (D-MI) argued at length that the Iraqis simply had not done enough to secure their own country, and virtually every Democrat who participated in the amendment debate cited Iraqi internal divisions and "civil war" as the primary reasons to withdraw American troops from the conflict. I disagree completely with those characterizations of the situation in Iraq, but perhaps the Democrats' emotional anti-Iraqi rhetoric lighted a few fires under certain factions within Iraq's parliament.

It may just be coincidence, but perhaps Iraqi parliamentarians, surely watching the captivating "Sleepless in the Senate" production via satellite, took note that while this particular troop withdrawal amendment failed passage in the Senate, others are sure to follow. They likely realized that the only way to blunt the criticism was to demonstrate unity in purpose among Shi'ite and Sunni members of parliament. That is one possible explanation for a news report Thursday that should have been heralded in the media as a great breakthrough in Iraq but was largely relegated to obscurity through beneath the fold attention. Credit Reuters for placing the headline "Sunni Bloc Ends Boycott of Iraqi Parliament" as the lead international news story at Reuters.com for a few hours Thursday.

Reuters reported that Sunni Arabs, who had staged a boycott of the Iraqi parliament since June, decided Thursday to end the boycott and work with the majority Shi'ite bloc to work on "very important legislation." The Sunni Arabs constitute 44 of the 275 seats in Iraq's parliament, making the passage of legislation without that bloc a difficult task that has bogged down Iraq's legislative attempts at unity. When combined with 30 Shi'ite followers of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who ended their boycott of parliament earlier this week, the end result was that 74 disgruntled Iraqis of varying religious sentiments returned to parliament to rebut accusations from the House and Senate that unity of Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis is not possible.

In typical fashion, the Washington Post determined that this effort at reconciliation might bring good news from Iraq and hope for its future, and the Post immediately buried the Reuters wire story at the bottom of its online front page, where only avid news observers might stumble upon it. It is sadly ironic that the main reason given in the Senate Sleepover for withdrawing our troops was that Iraq is engulfed in a hopeless "civil war," yet when Iraq's minority members of parliament set aside their differences with the majority and vowed to work together to secure Iraq's sovereignty and security, neither the Democrats in Congress nor the liberal media wanted to give that sign of progress any meaningful attention. Clearly, while they waxed philosophical (Sen. Schumer, D-NY) or emotional (Sen. Kennedy) about the "quagmire" in Iraq, none had any sincere desire for an actual reconciliation of Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq. The prospect that President Bush might be right about the instinctive human thirst for freedom in Iraq was just too politically frightening for the chorus of critics to consider or patiently nurture.

The Iraqi government still faces rough seas ahead, but at least now it will face challenges with a full complement of Shi'ite and Sunni leaders who presently appear committed to proving the sleep-deprived Senate critics wrong. Yet as the Senate Snoozefest demonstrated, if our Congress actually put in the kind of work hours that most Americans do each week, the number of world crises they could solve, even in their pajamas, would be impressive.

Photo Credit: McClatchey Washington Bureau

Technorati Tags:
Senate, Iraqi Parliament, Sunni, Shia, Boycott, Troop Withdrawal, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, Moqtada al-Sadr

NIE Shows CIA, State in Denial on Iran

Portions of the much anticipated new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) will be released to the public today, and finally average citizens will get a clear view of the end product funded by their taxes. After more than two years of meetings, conferences, briefings, draft sessions, and revisions, the American intelligence agencies’ NIE concludes only that there is no consensus between them on very fundamental issues. The “major points” made by the report are truly shocking revelations that no one outside of an intelligence agency could possibly have concluded without all of that specialized training and experience (sarcasm off):

-Al Qaeda is still trying to get its hands on a variety of WMDs and, gasp, would use them if it possessed them.

-Al Qaeda has regrouped and restored most of the ingredients necessary to launch a major terrorist attack against the U.S. homeland.

-Al Qaeda, another gasp, is working hard to place operatives in the U.S.

-The U.S. faces “a persistent and evolving terrorist threat” for at least the next three years. The predicted main sources for that threat are, third gasp, Islamic terrorist groups, particularly Al Qaeda. The threat to the U.S. comes from “the undiminished intent to attack the homeland and a continued effort by terrorist groups to adapt and improve their capabilities.”

Of course, NIE summaries released to the public are sanitized of any classified information or source references, but the level of sanitization for this NIE is insulting to Americans who do not have access to the full report. Capital Cloak readers are intelligent and interested in matters of national security and intelligence. You did not need the NIE, representing millions of dollars and thousands of hours of research, to tell you what you already knew: Islamic terrorists want to kill Americans in America with any weapon they can acquire. In my profession, we knew these things long before 9/11, and anyone who did not learn these lessons after 9/11 continues to live in a fantasy world of “if we leave them alone they will leave us alone.” What then was the purpose of the NIE and all of the media hoopla surrounding it?

Like most NIE’s, the one released today contains the official conclusions of the sixteen agencies that comprise the intelligence community. If nothing else, NIE’s offer a glimpse at the functionality and ideology of each agency, and often the gulf between certain agencies are nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in these documents. Sometimes inter-agency disagreements are little more than technical trivia, but disputes also can create institutional paralysis. When several major agencies offer divergent opinions of the same issue, it leaves the executive and legislative branches that rely on those opinions for policy decision-making in a difficult position. Unfortunately, as the NY Sun reported today, the new NIE includes a critical point of disagreement between agencies on what is likely the most important issue currently facing America: Iran.

Despite clear and increasing evidence that al Qaeda’s resurgence is occurring not only in Pakistan’s mountains but also in Iran, analysts within the State Department and CIA argue in the new NIE that Iran’s Quds Force, terrorist special forces units designed to support terror operations and report directly to Iran’s supreme leader, are acting independently of Iran’s official government in their funding, equipping, and transporting al Qaeda terrorists who have attacked and continue to attack American troops in Iraq. According to these two agencies, the simple fact that Iran is a Shia nation while al Qaeda is run by radical Sunnis makes collaboration between the two groups against a common enemy unlikely if not impossible. They appear convinced that Iran’s government is not giving orders to the Quds Force to assist al Qaeda terrorists with their fight against the U.S. in Iraq.

That conclusion is incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded. It is true that al Qaeda’s Sunnis view Iran’s Shia population as “infidels” under a technical Koranic interpretation, but the differences between the two are far easier to overcome than the religious and cultural divide between Islam and non-Islamic nations and cultures. Thus it is far more logical to conclude that Shia-Sunni collaboration against the West is not only possible but extremely likely, and if the combined effort succeeds in defeating Western cultures, these two differing branches of Islam could then turn their attentions or contentions to each other. But don’t try to convince anyone at State or the CIA, they are convinced that the two are not capable of working together. Extending that flawed logic to its equally flawed conclusion, these two departments apparently believe that Sunni terrorists would refuse to join with Shia terrorists in a war against Israel. It is much more logical to conclude that branches of the same religion would gladly join hands and martyr themselves in a war against the U.S. or Israel, as doing so is necessary to bringing about their ultimate goal: a global Islamic state under Sharia law.

National Review’s Michael Ledeen nicely countered the flawed thinking behind the estimate that the Quds Force acts independently:

Instead, every new revelation about Iran’s role in the terror war is greeted with the pathetic mantra “but this does not prove that the regime itself is involved.” As if General Suleimani of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force would dare launch operation after operation against us in Iraq without the explicit approval of his commander-in-chief, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Do our analysts not know that the Revolutionary Guards were created for the explicit purpose of responding to the whims of the Supreme Leader? Whenever the Guards move, they do so precisely because “the regime” has willed it.

While Americans should be insulted by the common sense vanilla plainness of the public portions of the new NIE, we should also be concerned that two of the most influential agencies in any administration, the CIA and State Department, refuse to recognize that the Defense Department, which has infinitely more sources of information in the region at this time, is warning that Iran, despite a doctrinal religious difference with al Qaeda Sunnis, is actively supporting the terrorists in Iraq and killing our troops. Iranian weaponry and explosives are found in ever-increasing numbers within Iraq. Those weapons and IEDs did not leave Iranian supply facilities on their own or without the approval of Iran’s government.

The liberal media jumped out in front of this issue long ago, accusing the Bush administration and specifically Vice President Cheney, of pushing for action against Iran, branding such recommendations as “war mongering.” Yet it should be noted that counterterrorism expert and bitter Bush critic Richard Clarke’s deputy Roger Cressey told the NY Sun that when President Bush took the fight to the Taliban after 9/11, al Qaeda relocated its operational centers to two areas: Pakistan and Iran. Cressey described known meetings and meet locations of al Qaeda leaders in Iran and made it quite clear that the Shia Iranian government had no qualms about allowing and even embracing al Qaeda within its borders because they share common enemies, the U.S. and Israel. Those who casually toss out accusations like “war mongering” should remember that it was the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report, highly revered in liberal circles, that first reported publicly Iranian ties and assistance to eight of the 9/11 hijackers, with Iran’s government offering them passage into and out of Afghanistan.

What liberal critics and apparently the CIA and State Department fail to grasp is the concept of war. They mistakenly sit idly by, tinkering with foreign policy “solutions,” waiting for Iran to formally declare war on the U.S., and only then will they choose to recognize war-like behaviors for what they are and recommend decisive action to defend America. Unfortunately, the days of nations notifying each other through declarations of war are long gone, and whether or not State and CIA officials recognize it, Iran is conducting a war against the U.S., allowing well funded proxies to fight it for them. Another term for such proxies is mercenaries, and even liberals cannot deny that England’s employment of Hessian mercenaries against America in the Revolutionary War did not make Hessians responsible for the war itself. While Iran’s proxies kill our troops with no repercussions resulting for the mullahs, Iran continues to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons production with no intention of stopping or being induced to stop by sanctions or other diplomatic methods.

In war, there is logic behind meeting the enemy on a “neutral” battlefield. In this case, Iran is taking the fight to us in Iraq, attempting (very half-heartedly) to conceal its involvement, while making sure that Iraqi, not Iranian, citizens are killed in the battles and crossfire. At some point, however, defeating an enemy requires destroying his resources, production capabilities, and governmental centers. This is why it is so critical that the U.S. remain and stabilize Iraq; victory there will set the stage for the coming conflict with the world’s largest state sponsor of terror and soon to be its number one WMD threat.

The boots on the ground in Iraq insist that Iran is already at war with us. Hopefully the CIA and State Department will come to recognize this fact instead of holding tenaciously to the ridiculous notion that differing Islamic radicals groups cannot work together to hasten our demise.

Technorati Tags:
NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, Iran, Quds Force, Al Qaeda, Islamic Terrorists, CIA, State Department, 9/11 Commission

82nd Airborne Casualties Prove Hagel Wrong

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), a war critic and collaborator with Democrats on every effort to undermine President Bush’s executive war powers, returned this weekend from his fifth trip to Iraq. What wisdom has Senator Hagel gleaned from these trips? The following is from his opinion column in Sunday’s Washington Post:

We must start by understanding what's really happening in Iraq. According to the National Intelligence Estimate released in February, the conflict has become a "self-sustaining inter-sectarian struggle between Shia and Sunnis" and also includes "extensive Shia-on-Shia violence." This means that Iraq is being consumed by sectarian warfare, much of it driven by Shiite or Sunni militias -- not al-Qaeda terrorists. Yes, there are admirers of Osama bin Laden in the country, including a full-blown al-Qaeda branch. But terrorists are not the core problem; Sunni-Shiite violence is.... American occupation cannot stop a civil war in Iraq. Our military, superb as it is, can only do so much.

Senator Hagel’s assessment that Iraq is a “civil war” not driven by al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups is identical to the Democratic talking points endlessly spouted by Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, despite assurances from several generals on the ground in Iraq who insist that Iraq is not in a state of civil war. For a Senator with access to intelligence estimates to argue that terrorists are not the core problem in Iraq is utterly disingenuous. Al-Qaeda itself would soon demonstrate the fallacy of Senator Hagel’s opinion.

Today’s headline AP article “Al Qaeda-Linked Sunnis Claim Bombing” opened with this sentence:

An al Qaeda-linked group posted a Web statement today claiming responsibility for a suicide truck bombing that killed nine U.S. paratroopers and wounded 20 in the worst attack on American ground forces in Iraq in more than a year.

The fallen U.S. soldiers, all members of the Army 82nd Airborne Division, would certainly take issue with Hagel’s ill-informed dismissal of al Qaeda as a minor annoyance in Iraq, if they had not been killed by al Qaeda. This bombing illustrated a couple of important truths: first, Congressional “fact finding” trips never produce any facts, as they are carefully scripted and Congressmen take them to increase their own political stature rather than seeking any real understanding of core issues; second, like Iran’s constant destabilizing war on America via Iraq, al Qaeda is part of a massive effort by outside forces to foment turmoil and the spectre of Iraqi civil war. This is an organized propaganda campaign that Congressmen, with shallow understanding of the intelligence they are supposed to review, swallow hook, line, and sinker.

It is unfathomable that Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, could have come away from five trips to Iraq with the opinion that neighboring nations and terrorist networks are not the core problem in Iraq. Hagel fails to grasp the concept that Iran and al Qaeda, like China in Vietnam, are directly impacting the course of the war and America’s resolve to endure setbacks and casualties. Removing the weaponry, funding, and manpower injected into Iraq like a virus by Iran, Syria, and al Qaeda would afford Iraqis an opportunity to resolve cultural issues between Sunni and Shia in an environment without car bombs, IEDs, and snipers. It is the terrorists and outside interlopers that desperately want to prevent Iraqis from living together under an elected government. Stem the flow of destabilizing elements into Iraq, and the Iraqis will justify our faith in their commitment to freedom.