"Undebated Challenges" and "The collapse of Bush's foreign policy"

[ProSense]

Undebated Challenges

by SHERLE R. SCHWENNINGER

(from the November 19, 2007 issue)

The most damaging part of the Bush foreign policy legacy is not the precipitous decline in American power and influence brought about by the disastrous Iraq occupation. It is the way the Administration's "war on terror" and its neoimperial project in the Middle East have distorted our vision of the world. They magnify out of all proportion what should at worst be minor threats to our national security and ignore much larger developments, such as the extraordinary economic rise of China and India, which are having a much more profound effect on the American way of life.

Just how distorted our vision of the world has become has been on constant display during the primary campaign leading up to the 2008 elections. The major candidates from both parties have followed a foreign policy narrative dominated by Iraq, Iran and Islamic extremism. Promising to see the Iraq War through to a successful conclusion, the Republicans want to extend Bush's policies into a generational war against Islamic extremism, which they see as a new totalitarian threat. Democratic candidates have committed themselves to getting out of Iraq--or at least vastly reducing America's presence there--and to fighting a smarter war against terrorism while restoring America's global leadership. But they, too, seem intent on proving their toughness, even to the point of pursuing many of the same goals that led to the loss of America's standing in the first place.

Neither party seems ready to deal with a radically changed world that in many ways moved on as we got sucked ever more deeply into Bush's Iraq catastrophe. In this sense, the 2008 elections pose a larger challenge: to advance American goals and interests in this new world, it will not be enough merely to repudiate the worst features of Bush's militarism. It will be necessary to rethink American priorities and the very meaning of what American foreign policy is about.

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The Republican Narrative

It is clear that this rethinking will not come from the leading Republican candidates. The GOP narrative of a long war against Islamic extremism is purposely backward-looking, modeled on the earlier struggle against Soviet Communism during the cold war. Yet as Juan Cole suggests, the idea that Islamic extremism poses a threat commensurate with Soviet Communism is patently absurd. Six years after 9/11, it is clear that Al Qaeda does not have the organizational capacity or resources to pose a systematic danger to American lives or interests, and that common-sense counterterrorist measures--better intelligence, more effective border control and internationally coordinated police work--can dramatically reduce the risk of terrorist attack. It is also clear that Al Qaeda does not have the popular appeal in Muslim societies to constitute a threat to any significant government, despite the boost that Bush Administration policies may have given to Al Qaeda recruitment.

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The Democratic Narrative

The leading Democratic candidates understand many of the shortcomings of the Bush Administration's approach to the world. They understand, for example, that America's moral standing has been gravely damaged by Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and by the Administration's disregard for international law, as Oona Hathaway points out. Yet in many key respects they are trapped in the same post-9/11 view of the world.

The Democratic candidates say they want to fight a smarter war against terrorism, but in the end they are adopting policies that seem more designed to prove their toughness than prevent terrorist attacks. This is evident, as William Hartung notes, in their calls for increasing the size of US ground forces and for retaining a military presence in Iraq and neighboring Arab countries, as well as in Afghanistan. Such a visible US presence would serve no useful military mission, but it would give Al Qaeda an ongoing cause to keep its movement alive.

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Think Progress video: Tony Snow challenged on Bush hypocrisy over an acceptable level of violence. This was the exchange at today’s White House press briefing:

Reporter: In October of 2004 John Kerry said, "We have to get to the place where we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." The president said he couldn't disagree more. Cheney called this naive and dangerous, and part of the pre-9/11 mind-set. So does the president now have a pre-9/11 mind-set?

Snow: No, the president does not have a pre-9/11 mind-set. And the fact is -- I'll have to go back and take a look, but my recollection is that there was an attempt to, kind of, minimize some of the security challenges. But I don't want to put words in Senator Kerry's mouth without looking back at the 2004 debate. It is important to realize that you're going to have to use military force, and especially in conjunction with the Iraqis, to address violence that comes from a whole series of factors, whether they be old members of the Baath Party, whether they be Iraqi rejectionists or whether they be foreign fighters coming in and trying to destroy the government.

Senator Kerry, NYT 2004 article:

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''

This analogy struck me as remarkable, if only because it seemed to throw down a big orange marker between Kerry's philosophy and the president's. Kerry, a former prosecutor, was suggesting that the war, if one could call it that, was, if not winnable, then at least controllable. If mobsters could be chased into the back rooms of seedy clubs, then so, too, could terrorists be sent scurrying for their lives into remote caves where they wouldn't harm us. Bush had continually cast himself as the optimist in the race, asserting that he alone saw the liberating potential of American might, and yet his dark vision of unending war suddenly seemed far less hopeful than Kerry's notion that all of this horror -- planes flying into buildings, anxiety about suicide bombers and chemicals in the subway -- could somehow be made to recede until it was barely in our thoughts.

Kerry came to his worldview over the course of a Senate career that has been, by any legislative standard, a quiet affair. Beginning in the late 80's, Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations investigated and exposed connections between Latin American drug dealers and BCCI, the international bank that was helping to launder drug money. That led to more investigations of arms dealers, money laundering and terrorist financing.

Kerry turned his work on the committee into a book on global crime, titled ''The New War,'' published in 1997. He readily admitted to me that the book ''wasn't exclusively on Al Qaeda''; in fact, it barely mentioned the rise of Islamic extremism. But when I spoke to Kerry in August, he said that many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror.

''Of all the records in the Senate, if you don't mind my saying, I think I was ahead of the curve on this entire dark side of globalization,'' he said. ''I think that the Senate committee report on contras, narcotics and drugs, et cetera, is a seminal report. People have based research papers on it. People have based documents on it, movies on it. I think it was a significant piece of work.''

More senior members of the foreign-relations committee, like Joe Biden and Richard Lugar, were far more visible and vocal on the emerging threat of Islamic terrorism. But through his BCCI investigation, Kerry did discover that a wide array of international criminals -- Latin American drug lords, Palestinian terrorists, arms dealers -- had one thing in common: they were able to move money around through the same illicit channels. And he worked hard, and with little credit, to shut those channels down.

In 1988, Kerry successfully proposed an amendment that forced the Treasury Department to negotiate so-called Kerry Agreements with foreign countries. Under these agreements, foreign governments had to promise to keep a close watch on their banks for potential money laundering or they risked losing their access to U.S. markets. Other measures Kerry tried to pass throughout the 90's, virtually all of them blocked by Republican senators on the banking committee, would end up, in the wake of 9/11, in the USA Patriot Act; among other things, these measures subject banks to fines or loss of license if they don't take steps to verify the identities of their customers and to avoid being used for money laundering.

Through his immersion in the global underground, Kerry made connections among disparate criminal and terrorist groups that few other senators interested in foreign policy were making in the 90's. Richard A. Clarke, who coordinated security and counterterrorism policy for George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, credits Kerry with having seen beyond the national-security tableau on which most of his colleagues were focused. ''He was getting it at the same time that people like Tony Lake were getting it, in the '93 -'94 time frame,'' Clarke says, referring to Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security adviser. ''And the 'it' here was that there was a new nonstate-actor threat, and that nonstate-actor threat was a blended threat that didn't fit neatly into the box of organized criminal, or neatly into the box of terrorism. What you found were groups that were all of the above.''

In other words, Kerry was among the first policy makers in Washington to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an entirely new kind of enemy. Americans were conditioned, by two world wars and a long standoff with a rival superpower, to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension between civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however, that Americans were in greater danger from the more shadowy groups he had been investigating -- nonstate actors, armed with cellphones and laptops -- who might detonate suitcase bombs or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to make a point. They lived in remote regions and exploited weak governments. Their goal wasn't to govern states but to destabilize them.

The challenge of beating back these nonstate actors -- not just Islamic terrorists but all kinds of rogue forces -- is what Kerry meant by ''the dark side of globalization.'' He came closest to articulating this as an actual foreign-policy vision in a speech he gave at U.C.L.A. last February. ''The war on terror is not a clash of civilizations,'' he said then. ''It is a clash of civilization against chaos, of the best hopes of humanity against dogmatic fears of progress and the future.''

This stands in significant contrast to the Bush doctrine, which holds that the war on terror, if not exactly a clash of civilizations, is nonetheless a struggle between those states that would promote terrorism and those that would exterminate it. Bush, like Kerry, accepts the premise that America is endangered mainly by a new kind of adversary that claims no state or political entity as its own. But he does not accept the idea that those adversaries can ultimately survive and operate independently of states; in fact, he asserts that terrorist groups are inevitably the subsidiaries of irresponsible regimes. ''We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients,'' the National Security Strategy said, in a typical passage, ''before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.''

By singling out three states in particular- Iraq, North Korea and Iran -- as an ''axis of evil,'' and by invading Iraq on the premise that it did (or at least might) sponsor terrorism, Bush cemented the idea that his war on terror is a war against those states that, in the president's words, are not with us but against us. Many of Bush's advisers spent their careers steeped in cold-war strategy, and their foreign policy is deeply rooted in the idea that states are the only consequential actors on the world stage, and that they can -- and should -- be forced to exercise control over the violent groups that take root within their borders.

Kerry's view, on the other hand, suggests that it is the very premise of civilized states, rather than any one ideology, that is under attack. And no one state, acting alone, can possibly have much impact on the threat, because terrorists will always be able to move around, shelter their money and connect in cyberspace; there are no capitals for a superpower like the United States to bomb, no ambassadors to recall, no economies to sanction. The U.S. military searches for bin Laden, the Russians hunt for the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev and the Israelis fire missiles at Hamas bomb makers; in Kerry's world, these disparate terrorist elements make up a loosely affiliated network of diabolical villains, more connected to one another by tactics and ideology than they are to any one state sponsor. The conflict, in Kerry's formulation, pits the forces of order versus the forces of chaos, and only a unified community of nations can ensure that order prevails.

One can infer from this that if Kerry were able to speak less guardedly, in a less treacherous atmosphere than a political campaign, he might say, as some of his advisers do, that we are not in an actual war on terror. Wars are fought between states or between factions vying for control of a state; Al Qaeda and its many offspring are neither. If Kerry's foreign-policy frame is correct, then law enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only, strategy you can employ against such forces, who need passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish. Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin -- and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.

Audio: Kerry Calls for New Apporach to Fighting Terrorism (June 2007)

An excerpt from Kerry's speech:

What are these myths and misconceptions? There are four principal fallacies that led us into this disastrous war in Iraq—and one that is still being used to justify our presence there today.

The most obvious is the notion that defeating terrorists is primarily a military effort focused on nation-states. The phrase “war on terror” purposefully brings to mind troops deployed to fight armies in battle. And this very mindset tempted the Administration to choose traditional targets like Iraq instead of hunting down non-state actors in Afghanistan. In fact, we now know that some in Don Rumsfeld’s Pentagon initially considered bombing Iraq first instead of Afghanistan because military planners couldn’t find enough Taliban targets to bomb—a vivid illustration of the flaws of an exclusively military-driven, state-centered approach divorced from the actual threats we faced then and still face today.

Make no mistake, the military clearly has a role to play -- sometimes even against another government. Exhibit A is Afghanistan -- where we were right – and we were unified – in overthrowing a regime that harbored the terrorists who attacked our homeland. But this is the exception. Don’t take my word for it. There’s a reason why the Army’s own counterinsurgency manual written by General Petraeus makes clear that using massive military force risks playing into our enemies’ hands. And Osama Bin Laden himself has declared that his strategy is to “provoke and bait” the United States into protracted “bleeding wars” that drain our resources and our national will while painting us as the aggressor in the eyes of the Muslim world. He’s gotten exactly what he wanted in Iraq.

And we know that conventional military force is not the most effective way to destroy terrorists hiding out in sovereign nations. Getting that job done largely falls to our intelligence agencies and special operations forces, and it will always hinge on coordination with countries where terrorists hide – exactly the areas in which we are the least equipped to work effectively. Why does that matter? Because make no mistake, if an attack on America is ever hatched in a Pakistani neighborhood in London, we won’t be bombing Buckingham Palace—we’ll be working with MI5 to hunt down the perpetrators.

The collapse of Bush's foreign policy:

Oct. 24, 2007 | The Bush administration once imagined that its presence in Afghanistan and Iraq would be anchored by friendly neighbors, Turkey to the west and Pakistan to the east. Last week, as the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to deteriorate, the anchors themselves also came loose.

Barnett Rubin: Live Blogging State of Emergency in Pakistan (November 3, 2007)


Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Paksitan, July 2007:

Video: Pakistan's Future: Building Democracy, Or Fueling Extremism?
Chairman Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) conducts a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the future of Pakistan. Panelists include: R. Nicholas Burns, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs; Teresita C. Schaffer, Director, South Asia Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies.
7/25/2007: WASHINGTON, DC: 2 hr. 15 min.

Excerpt from Chairman Kerry's opening statement:

We also have a five year, $750 million dollar plan for winning over the local population in this area, but real concerns have been raised about whether that money can actually be put to good use. We will be very interested to hear your views on the Administration’s strategy for dealing with this very real threat in both the short and long term.

We must also consider the role of U.S. aid in advancing our interests. Since 9/11, we have given Pakistan roughly $10 billion dollars in aid—and likely billions more in covert assistance. Roughly 75% of this aid has gone to reimbursement of counter-terrorism expenses and other security assistance. We clearly have a right to expect more in return for the massive amount of aid we are providing for the fight against terrorism.

We have also reached a critical period for the future of democracy in Pakistan. It is clear that reinforcing our strong commitment to democracy, human rights, and respect for the rule of law is in the best interests of Pakistan and the United States.

President Musharraf’s term is set to expire this fall, and under Pakistani law the National and Provincial Assemblies must conduct new presidential elections by October, with new legislative elections to follow. The Pakistani Supreme Court may have to rule on whether President Musharraf can stay on in his role as chief of the military, and whether he can legally be re-elected by a lame duck Parliament. Now that Chief Justice Chaudhry has been reinstated to the Court, there appears to be a strong possibility that it will rule against President Musharraf on these questions.

We need to be prepared for this eventuality, and the possibility that President Musharraf may leave or be forced out of office. In fact, although he may be hedging on this now, President Musharraf has said in the past that he will relinquish his military role, and Khurshid Kasuri, the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, said during his recent visit that President Musharraf was still planning to do so. We must make it clear that we expect President Musharraf to live up to his promise.

It is also critically important that the upcoming elections are free and fair, and we should work to ensure they are conducted transparently and legitimately. This will send a very important message of support to the people of Pakistan, who are increasingly insistent on restoring true democratic rule, and will help to undermine extremists. We must also continue to raise our strong concerns over unexplained disappearance of some 400 people, the arrest of hundreds of political activists from opposition parties, and the recent crackdown on the media.

Speech September 2006:

Restoring America's Moral Authority

John Kerry - As prepared for delivery

Thank you Bob and Jessica for having me here today. It's an honor to be here at SAIS where for sixty-three years you've been dedicated not just to studying foreign policy but to the broader effort to address emerging threats.

Your voice and influence are needed now more than ever.

So much of what we used to take for granted in national security policy has now been called into question. We used to know that despite our differences in philosophy and in perspective, our two political parties could cooperate to craft international policies in our national interest.

We used to understand that the vast and unique role of the United States in world affairs required a far-sighted and multi-faceted approach to protecting our people and our interests.

We used to value as a national treasure the international alliances and institutions that enhanced our strength, amplified our voice, and reflected our traditions and our ideals in maintaining a free and secure world.

We used to measure America's strength and security by our moral authority, our economic leadership, and our diplomatic skills, as well as by the power of our military.

And we used to say politics stopped at the water's edge.

We used to call on our people to share in the sacrifices demanded by freedom, and our leaders used to raise hopes and inspire trust, not raise fears and demand blind faith.

All of that has changed in a remarkably brief period of time. And in recalling what we've lost, I'm not looking back to the Greatest Generation of World War II, or to the leaders who shaped our Cold War policies and wore down the threat of totalitarian communism. I'm not talking about 30 or 40 or 50 years ago -- I'm talking about what we had just five short years ago on September 12th, 2001.

Five years later, our resources have been diminished and our goodwill has been squandered. And as the 9/11 commission's final report has just told us, Washington is failing to take the basic steps necessary to make us safe. It is an inexplicable abdication of responsibility.

So where do we go from here? Well, I wish we could have a real debate -- a real council of war that brings senators and congressmen of both parties together to forge a winning strategy for America. That's what I think we should do. But since the current administration confuses examination of failed policies with an admission of weakness, and debate with division, that's not possible today. The current administration exploits 9-11 as an excuse to put forth far too much politics and not nearly enough policy.

For years now, many of us have been saying that this administration is not making us safer. Each year, the evidence mounts. Each year, the mistakes compound. Well this year we once again have a chance and a responsibility to change course--and at last to begin fighting an effective War on Terror.

Americans are ready to end this charade. They know the truth. They know we have a Katrina foreign policy - a succession of blunders and failures that have betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it.

The NIE proved beyond any remaining debate that the demagogic drumbeat about fighting terrorists over there instead of here -- even though they weren't in Iraq until we went in, and it's now a civil war we're fighting -- has compromised America's real interests and made us less safe.

The true measure of that is the stark fact that worldwide terrorist attacks are at an all-time high and there are now more terrorists in the world who want to kill Americans than there were at the time of 9/11. And every day that this Administration refuses to face facts and change their failed policy in Iraq is another day they play into the hands of the terrorists. Despite increasing troop levels by nearly 20,000 this summer, this week the number of suicide attacks in Iraq was the highest one-week total yet.

Every time the administration is down in the polls, every time their political opponents at home appear to gain, they trot out of the fear card, instead of reinforcing in Americans "there is nothing to fear but fear itself," they have nothing to offer but fear itself.

That's just a cynical game to try to win an election. I believe we need a game plan to capture and kill Osama Bin Laden, not capture a few Congressional seats.

That is why on the eve of this midterm election, we have a unique responsibility to take this fight into every corner of the nation-not just to oppose what has failed but to propose a new direction that can restore a bipartisan foreign policy and that can defeat jihadist terrorism once and for all.

Last month, Donald Rumsfeld--who should have been fired long ago--gave one of the basest, ugliest speeches I've heard, smearing anyone who disagreed with his disastrous Iraq policy --and dared to say we suffer from moral confusion.

On one thing, we agree: there is a lot of moral confusion around these days.

It is immoral for old men to send young Americans to fight and die in a conflict without a strategy that can work - on a mission that has not weakened terrorism but worsened it.

It is immoral to lie about progress in that war to get through a news cycle or an election.

It is immoral to treat 9/11 as a political pawn - and to continue to excuse the invasion of Iraq by exploiting the 3,000 mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who were lost that day. They were attacked and killed not by Saddam Hussein but by Osama bin Laden.

The leaders of this administration will say anything, do anything, twist any truth, and endanger our nation's character as one America in a desperate ploy to survive a mid term election.

In order to change course, we must level with the American people about the magnitude of the challenge: we must face reality so we can change it.

This starts by leveling with the American people about Iraq's true position in the overall fight against jihadism. The President pretends Iraq is the central front on the war on terror. It is not now, and never has been. Even as we were debating a Senate resolution to change course on Iraq, our intelligence agencies were telling the Administration that their failed policy in Iraq was creating a whole new generation of terrorists and putting our country at greater risk of terrorist attack -- yet they continued to mislead Americans with false claims that the war was making us safer. The truth -- according to our own National Intelligence Estimate -- is that his disastrous decisions have made Iraq a fuel depot for terror - fanning the flames of conflict around the world.

There is simply no way to overstate how Iraq has subverted our efforts to free the world from global terror. It has overstretched our military nearly to the breaking point. It has served as an essential recruitment tool for terrorists. It has divided and pushed away our traditional allies. It has diverted critical billions of dollars from the real front lines against terrorism and from homeland security. It has unleashed dangerous, pent-up forces of radical religious extremism. It has weakened moderate leaders in the Middle East. It has strengthened and played into Iran's hand. It has diminished our moral authority in the world.

The situation in Afghanistan deteriorates steadily, squandering the sacrifices of our troops and allies in the military campaign of 2002. The Taliban is resurgent, and just across the border Pakistan is just one coup away from becoming a radical jihadist state with a full compliment of nuclear weapons. Only Don Rumsfeld could proclaim this a victory.

We have an Iraqi Prime Minister sustained in power by our forces, who will not speak against the Hezbollah terrorists, who will not say that Israel has a right to exist, and who will not condemn the Iranian nuclear program. No American soldier should be asked to stand up for an Iraqi government that won't stand up for freedom and against fear.

Here at home, too many things have not changed in the last five years. We learned on 9/11 painful lessons about the costs of a dysfunctional intelligence system marred by bureaucratic infighting, inadequate resources, and faulty analysis. Yet the 9/11 commission recently gave our own government a failing grade on implementing intelligence reforms.

This is the reality of the world today - a world more dangerous because of the Bush blunders -- and our safety depends-on a winning strategy to reverse this dangerous course and make our country more secure.

There are five principal priorities that demand immediate action: (1) redeploy from Iraq, (2) re-commit to Afghanistan, (3) reduce our dependence on foreign oil, (4) reinforce our homeland defense, and (5) restore America's moral leadership in the world. These "5 R's"-if you want to call them that-- are bold steps Democrats will take to strengthen our national security, and that the Republicans who have set the agenda today resist to our national peril.

We must refocus our military efforts from the failed occupation of Iraq to what we should have been doing all along: tracking down and killing members of al Qaeda and their clones wherever they are. We must redeploy troops from Iraq - maintain enough residual force to complete the training and deter foreign intervention, so we can free up resources to fight the global war on terror.

Republicans want to wrap this strategy in slogans because they're afraid to debate what it really is: it's a redeploy-to-succeed strategy - to succeed in defeating world wide terror, and to succeed in making Iraqis themselves responsible for Iraq.

This is the opposite of the administration's stand-still-and-lose strategy - - it's a clear alternative from a broken policy of "more of the same." Every time President Bush tells the Iraqis we will "stay as long as it takes," he is giving squabbling politicians there an excuse to take as long as they want. All of us want democracy in Iraq but Iraqis must want it for themselves as much as we want it for them. It's long overdue for the president to realize that no American soldier should be sacrificed because Iraqi factions refuse to resolve their ethnic rivalries and their competing grasp for oil revenues.

At each step along the way, the Iraqi leaders have responded only to deadlines-a deadline to transfer authority to a provisional government, a deadline to write a Constitution, a deadline to hold three elections. So we must set another deadline to extricate our troops and get Iraq up on its own two feet-- a clear deadline of July, 2007 to redeploy our combat troops. Make Iraqis stand up for Iraq - and bring our heroes home.

We also desperately need something else this administration disdains: diplomacy. Real diplomacy -- a Dayton-like summit of Iraq and the countries bordering it, the Arab League, NATO, and the Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council. Our own generals have said Iraq can not be solved militarily. Only through negotiation and diplomacy can you stem the growing civil war, and only by setting a deadline to get out can we force Iraq and its neighbors to take diplomacy seriously. In almost every aspect of life -- I mean, in school, at work -- if you tell someone to do something and you don't tell them when you want it, you'll never get it. You see when the test is, then you do what you need to do to get ready. Lets get real-- this will only happen with a deadline.

"Staying the course" isn't far-sighted; it's blind. Leaving our troops in the middle of a civil war isn't resolute; it's reckless. Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America's leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion.

Neither can the Administration pretend that the war in Afghanistan is over or that the peace has been secured. The truth is, we are slipping dangerously backwards. The Taliban insurgency still threatens the Karzai government. The opium trade increased by 60% last year, roadside bomb attacks have more than doubled this year, and suicide attacks have more than tripled. Forty percent of the population is unemployed and ninety percent lack regular electricity

We know the risks of letting Afghanistan become a terrorist haven. Yet the Administration's policy has defined cut and run. Cut and run while Osama bin Laden and his henchmen hide and plot in a lawless no-man's land. Cut and run even as we learn from Pakistani intelligence that the mastermind of the most recent attempt to blow up American airliners was an al Qaeda affiliate operating from Afghanistan. That's right - the same killers who attacked us on 9/11 are still plotting attacks against America and they're still holed up in Afghanistan.

The central front in the war on terror is still in Afghanistan, but this Administration treats it like a sideshow. When did denying al Qaeda a terrorist stronghold in Afghanistan stop being an urgent American priority? How on earth did we end up with seven times more troops in Iraq - which even the Administration now admits had nothing to do with 9/11 - than in Afghanistan, where the killers still roam free?

We need a new policy - the one the president promised when we went into Afghanistan in the first place. Just last Thursday, the Secretary General of NATO called for additional troops, saying "more can be done and should be done," and the top UN official in Afghanistan said last week that more troops and economic aid are urgently needed.

Where NATO allies have pledged troops and assistance, they must follow through. But the United States must lead by example by sending in at least five thousand additional American troops. More elite Special Forces troops, the best counter-insurgency units in the world; more civil affairs forces to bolster reconstruction efforts; and more infantry to secure the border with Pakistan, where attacks from the Taliban have tripled in recent days. More predator drones to find the enemy, more helicopters to allow rapid deployments to confront them, and more heavy combat equipment to make sure we can crush the terrorists.

We must also commit more in development aid. The President's talk of helping rebuild Afghanistan rings hollow when his Administration has appropriated nearly four times more in reconstruction funds for Iraq than for Afghanistan -- and actually cut Afghan aid by 30% this year. We need more reconstruction money -- not less -- to combat the flourishing drug trade and ensure that the elected government in Kabul, helped by the United States, not the Taliban helped by al Qaeda, rebuilds the new Afghanistan.

That's how you win the hearts and minds of the local population, that's how you win a war on terror, that's how you show the world the true face of America.

America also needs a national policy that understands that the great treasury of jihadist terrorism is Mideast oil--that, as Tom Friedman says, we're facing an age of Petro-Authoritarianism where we fund both sides in the war on terror every time we fill up our gas tanks. Nothing will change in the Middle East if autocratic regimes keep pumping prosperity out of the ground to pay off a new generation with petrodollar welfare checks. Our oil money is sustaining the status quo. We must end the Empire of Oil.

We need a revolutionary set of new policies to promote alternative fuels on a crash basis. We need to reverse the tide towards catastrophic global climate change; it's is essential to making the United States a leader in vast new opportunities to develop and market clean energy technologies-but most importantly, energy independence is essential to defeating jihadist terrorism and liberating our country from our bondage to tyrannical, hostile, and unstable regimes. From now on, every American who walks into a polling place can and should vote to kick out anyone who stands in the way of energy independence.

And to really make America safe, it is imperative that we reinforce our homeland defense. It's long past time we fully implemented the 9/11 Commission's recommendations. The President says bin Laden and the terrorists plan to target America's 'weak points.' Our weak points-our borders, our chemical plants, our railways-- are weak because this administration has the wrong priorities. The President's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are not only unfair and unaffordable: they are taking from homeland security. What we have today from this White House is the fiction that you can have national security on the cheap -- and this must end.

We must rearm ourselves at home. Hurricane Katrina showed us in the most tragic way that the Department of Homeland Security is woefully unprepared to handle a natural disaster we know is coming a week in advance, let alone a catastrophic terrorist attack that takes America by surprise. After four years of post-9-11 emergency planning, we left old people on rooftops to die. In 2004, the 9/11 Commission concluded that the Bush Administration should distribute homeland security funding to cities and states based on risk. Yet the Commission's most recent report card gives the government an "F" because this Administration has cut homeland security funding for the states that need it most.

To make America safe we must ensure the rapid development and deployment of reliable technologies to detect the secret transport of deadly materials. For $1.5 billion dollars - less than is spent in a week in Iraq - we could purchase the equipment to scan every cargo container bound for U.S. ports to ensure that it does not contain any weapons of mass destruction.

So these are four specific steps that will start us on the right path - but they alone will not win the war on terror.

Most important, we need to make America be America again. We must restore our moral authority and global leadership by deploying the full arsenal of our national power with smarter diplomacy, stronger alliances, more effective international institutions -- and fidelity to the values we have always stood for as a nation.

We must remember the great lesson of the Cold War when we led the world to confront a common threat. Genuine global leadership is a strategic imperative for America, not a favor we do for other countries. Leading the world's most advanced democracies isn't mushy multilateralism -- it amplifies America's voice, it extends our reach. Working through global institutions doesn't tie our hands - it gives greater strength and legitimacy to our purposes and dampens the fear and resentment that our overwhelming power sometimes triggers in others.

Leadership means talking with countries who aren't our friends. It means engaging directly when our vital national security interests are at stake - even with countries that we strongly disagree with-because treating dialogue as a means rather than an end can help us achieve our goals. As John Kennedy once said, "we must never negotiate out of fear but we must never fear to negotiate." If Richard Nixon could send Henry Kissinger to China, surely George Bush can send a real negotiating team to North Korea.

We must start treating our moral authority as a precious national asset that does not limit our power but magnifies our influence. That seems obvious, but this Administration still doesn't get it. Right now -- today -- they are trying to rush a bill through Congress that will fundamentally undermine our moral authority, put our troops at greater risk, and make our country less safe.

Let me be clear about something--something that it seems few people are willing to say. This bill permits torture. It gives the President the discretion to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions. No matter how much well-intended United States Senators would like to believe otherwise, it gives an Administration that lobbied for torture just what it wanted.

The only guarantee we have that these provisions really will prohibit torture is the word of the President. But we have seen in Iraq the consequences of simply accepting the word of this Administration. No, we cannot just accept the word of this Administration that they will not engage in torture given that everything they've already done and said on this most basic question has already put our troops at greater risk and undermined the very moral authority needed to win the war on terror.

It leaves our moral authority in tatters if the president who seems to have been for torture before he was against it is given a blank check by a Congress that would rather duck the issue and dodge the debate. It is time for the United States Senate to make clear what presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton knew for certain but this Administration prefers to muddy: on the issue of torture, there is no compromise. America will not weaken the values that make us strong.

We need to restore America's moral authority in the world, and we do that by leading according to our best values. That's how we need to define America, and that's how we need to define our foreign policy.

[Toots]

1. I knew America would rue the day it apponted Bush* over Kerry

Kerry has worked hard his whole life for America and Bush* partied hard...

[The Count]

2. How about the day it appointed * over Gore?

The mistake in the title of this thread is that it makes appear as there was a foreign policy at one time in the * administration. In fact, it was the Clinton foreign policy that started collapsing right after the coup.(even before, if you consider Bushco intervention in collapsing the Israel/Palestine talks in 2000)

[globalvillage]

5. You got that right, Toots. n/t

[ProSense]

3. Kick! n/t

[ProSense]

4. Musharraf's Power Play

Musharraf's Power Play

<...>

So, suddenly, after years of terrorist activity, the country is in turmoil, martial law is declared, hundreds of lawyers, judges and activists are rounded up, the press has been silenced, and there is the very real possibility that elections will be suspended. Or perhaps that's the point.

Bush's response is that the situation is "disappointing and disturbing". Sec. Rice calls it "a very big problem".

You don't say? Well, that's a brilliant observation that anyone watching the news could have told us.

<...>

The Senator has repeatedly issued warnings of the powderkeg in Pakistan. He spoke of Pakistan in 2004, and has urged attention to the region time and again since. Yet all of this has fallen on the deaf ears of the Bush administration, and now we are looking at a country in crisis. One with nuclear capabilities.

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