National security: performance

SUMMARY

Despite all of the Republican caterwauling, George Bush was outperformed not only by Obama but also by Clinton, in the hunt for Usama bin Laden. The Republican track record, and the words and actions of the next generation of Republican "leaders", suggest that dire consequences could ensue if the GOP regained control of national security policy.


CLINTON AND BIN LADEN

Obama has made it clear, repeatedly, that he didn’t catch bin Laden all by himself. But the guy who deserves more credit isn’t Bush, or his torture team. It’s Bill Clinton.

Clinton, before 911, before anybody knew what a bin Laden was, reversed the policy of treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue, and made it a national security issue. He built a special unit in 1996 that was specifically focused on nailing bin Laden, because Clinton perceived the danger which the Republicans didn’t care about. Also in that year a grand jury began proceedings against bin Laden, and eventually he was indicted. In 1997 Clinton proclaimed al-Qa’ida a worldwide terror threat. In 1998 Clinton worked to prove bin Laden was connected to the attacks on our embassies in Africa.

In 1998 Clinton sent missiles into Afghanistan, which came closer than Bush ever did, to killing bin Laden: Clinton only missed killing bin Laden by a couple of hours. Despite the fact that the intelligence was flimsy, that civilians might be hurt, that air refueling might be needed, that word of the attack might leak, and that foreign airspace would be used for the attack, Clinton gave the “go” order. Gutsy. He also bombed a factory suspected of being a bin Laden chemical weapons plant.

Clinton set up bombing attacks and attacks by the Special Forces; he kept Special Forces personnel and choppers at the ready for possible attacks. Clinton authorized secret coordination with other countries to kill bin Laden. In 1999 Clinton set up a team of 60 commandos to kill bin Laden, to include equipment, training, the works; he even offered Pakistan economic incentives to help make it happen. A coup in Pakistan ended that effort, but several Clinton officials warned the Bush team throughout 2000 and 2001 that al-Qa’ida was a threat, warnings which the Bush gang ignored: nine days after the inauguration, the Bush administration had already decided that Saddam was Job One.

During all of this, Clinton had to hold firm to his purpose, even though Janet Reno and other aides were worried that the hunt for bin Laden might be illegal, and the generals were so hostile to Clinton that they repeatedly refused his orders to come up with attack plans, until finally he made it a direct order. In other words, Clinton made a serious effort against bin Laden. The main thing the Republicans contributed, was to impeach Clinton while he was attacking Usama.


Clinton has much more grounds than Bush, to claim partial credit for the hunt for bin Laden, but you don’t hear him whining, do you? That’s because Clinton is everything Bush is not: a classy patriot.

COMPARING OBAMA AND BUSH IN THE WAR ON TERROR

Bush turned down two opportunities to take custody of bin Laden, he fouled up the hunt for bin Laden in Tora Bora by rejecting the commanders’ pleas for more troops even though we were only a mile away from bin Laden, he said he didn’t care about bin Laden, he shut down the Bin Laden unit, and he took Pakistan’s word for it when they said they didn’t know where bin Laden was. And all this was after 911, when Bush would have had carte blanche to do whatever was needed. The Bush team clearly put so little thought into bin Laden, that a decade later Rumsfeld was still mispronouncing his name: “bin LAY-den”. In other words, Bush just went through the motions against bin Laden, because all he cared about was Saddam Hussein.

So naturally the Republicans want to give Bush credit for catching Usama. In other news, Republicans give Neville Chamberlain credit for winning WWII!

TORTURE

The myth that Bush “got” bin Laden by launching the torture program has been shot down over and over: by the interrogators who had every motive to brag that their techniques found the vital clues, by their CIA boss, by Donald Rumsfeld, by John McCain, by the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The only people still peddling this “torture is good!” meme are Cheney and of course Bush’s legacy-minders. Cheney has no credibility on this anyway, since he’s been caught lying about torture for years now, and Bush’s own FBI Director shot down Cheney’s lies long before Obama even entered the picture; during all this, Cheney was also working to set up illegal death squads with the power, potentially, to operate in the U.S.

Professional interrogators have made clear that torture, or even normal interrogation with untrained interrogators, is dangerous and ineffective. Torture not only leads to lies, but makes it impossible to separate lies from truth. It also provokes our enemies to recruit more attackers; our torture program was the top recruiting tool for our enemies in Iraq. And it is illegal: we convicted a Japanese soldier after WWII for doing just what the Bush team did; Bush’s Pentagon officials admitted that a hundred people died in our custody with no due process, and at least one third were confirmed or suspected homicides. Prisoners were threatened with the rape and murder of children, with threats to crack open their skulls with power drills, forcing them to defecate in their pants and take enemas. And torture is destructive to our own personnel: one interrogator killed herself rather than use torture, and others may end up in court.

Even worse, a senior Bush official admitted that they speeded up the torture, not for fear of imminent attacks, but because Bush wanted to prove Saddam’s link to 911 and nuclear weapons in time to win the 2002 midterms. The plan failed so they just made the lies up, and as a result they recaptured the Senate. Just absorb that for a minute: the GOP was willing to torture and kill innocent people, just to win a midterm.


REPUBLICANS IN CHARGE?

So the Democrats did better than the Republicans on hunting bin Laden, in managing the policy, the politics, the strategy, the military operations, the tactics, and sheer style. Why does this matter?
Take a look at that now-iconic picture of the Situation Room, with Obama and his team watching the Usama raid. Obama had to consider the intelligence and the recommendations for months, then choose the right order, and choose the right time, and choose the right team. And watch and wait. And try really hard not to think of Jimmy Carter.

Now. Look at that picture, and imagine President Michelle Bachmann in that chair instead. Deciding whether to act, how to act, weighing the potential consequences of failure, the myriad international implications, the complexities of Pakistani politics, etc etc. Now imagine Palin, trying to see Pakistan from her house. Or Donald Trump, Commander In Chief. Or Herman Cain, the pizza man. Or Ron Paul who thinks any action by the military is the work of The Debbil.

And then, picture what kind of people they would choose as their national security team. Who else would be around that table? Who would Palin hire to be her Defense chief, her national security adviser? Does she even know anybody, personally, who has that level of expertise in anything, other than shooting moose? Would she rely on the discredited bunch of Bush hacks to build her national security team? Would we see yahoos like Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton sitting at the table? Would Todd Palin be sitting on the Sit Room table sucking on a Pabst Blue Ribbon?

Another scary sign of where all this could go: a recent Gallup poll asked Republicans who their choice was, to be their foreign policy expert. Their top choice? Sarah Palin. The GOP’s “bench” for 2012 is so thin, that their top pick for foreign policy and national security is the half-a-term governor from Alaska, who has no ability in foreign affairs and didn’t even have a passport until a year or two ago.

This is the woman who asserted that Africa is all one country, who scared the hell out of everybody by flipflopping on the question of war with Russia, who admitted ignorance about Iraq and Iran and the Bush doctrine, whose claim of controlling the Alaska national guard was shot down by the guard commander, who is nevertheless positive that she’s ready to be commander in chief and take that 3AM call.

This woman is their Top Gun, to deal with the world. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the War On Terror, our complex relations with Pakistan and India and China and Russia and Korea, the complex interplay of foreign policy and trade policy, NATO and other global alliances, oil and other global resource issues…The best the Republicans can do, is assign all this to the Airhead from Wasilla. And that also means she’s their Top Gun for dealing with all the sensitivities and complexities of our relations with the Muslim world. Oh. My. God.

Remember all this stuff next year when we’re picking a president. Because we know Obama can do the job. And pick a good team. He proved it vividly.