-Caveat Lector-
KNOW THY ENEMY
The Iraq Connection
Attack Saddam? It may be one of the most momentous choices of the 21st
century.
BY R. JAMES WOOLSEY
Wall Street Journal-Thursday, October 18, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
The professionally prepared and precisely sized anthrax spores that have
infected some 30 congressional staffers and closed down the Capitol and the
office of the governor of New York have made the point forcefully: When you
are at war, the primary task should be to determine whom you are at war
with.
In most wars this is not a problem. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990
the way the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor--with flags flying. Even
in our war two centuries ago with the Barbary Pirates, an enemy with some
loose parallels to al Qaeda, we had no doubt which North African government
sheltered them. Stephen Decatur knew whom to attack.
This time it's different. Although the administration's decision to move
first against the obvious target--the Taliban and their demonic al Qaeda
guests--is sound, there are rising doubts that even a victory in
Afghanistan, and even the capture or death of Osama bin Laden and his
cohorts, will solve the problem. And this is not only because of al Qaeda
operatives and street demonstrations in other countries. Removing bin Laden
and his associates may only amputate one hand of our enemy. There are
substantial and growing indications that a state may, behind the scene, be
involved in the attacks. This is hard for us to deal with because, as Sen.
Dianne Feinstein said recently, "It's a very sobering thing for Americans,
who tend to be upfront dealing with everything, to be faced with something
so clandestine and unknown."
When an enemy has a face and a name, this country can be awesome in its
ability to mobilize quickly for war and win, as we did in both world wars.
But we are now facing an enemy from a part of the world where the major
aspects of war, for many centuries, have been clandestine raids,
assassinations, terror against civilians, and deception. In response to the
challenge "Come out and fight like a man," we will get only smirks in the
shadows and more anthrax, or worse.
Some hold the view that no degree of sophistication--precisely prepared
anthrax, coordination across continents, sophisticated training,
professionally-stolen identities--is enough to indicate the strong
probability of a state's being involved. Such a position was most
succinctly stated by an unnamed FBI official to Seymour Hersh (in the Oct.
8 New Yorker), speaking of the Sept. 11 attackers: "These guys look like a
pickup basketball team. In your wildest dreams, do you think they thought
they'd be able to pull off four hijackings?" But for those of a more
suspicious cast of mind, the degree of complexity and the sophistication of
the attacks against us suggest that we have enough indications of possible
state involvement for the government to be carefully and vigorously
investigating.
One central issue is state involvement in what? If we define the problem in
such a way as to require proof (and make it proof beyond a reasonable
doubt) of state involvement in the Sept. 11 attack itself, we will quite
likely define ourselves out of being able to understand who is at war with
us. Instead, we need to look at the pattern of terrorism against us over
the last decade and reach a considered judgment in light of the whole
picture, even if we cannot prove, to the demanding standards of criminal
law, a state's involvement in the Sept. 11 atrocity itself.
The weakest argument against the possibility of state involvement is
usually implicit--that since al Qaeda is clearly involved in the Sept. 11
and other attacks, a state probably is not. But haven't such people heard
of joint ventures? Do they think that international law imposes some sort
of sole-source contracting requirement for terrorism?
But which state? Well, whichever one turns up when you start looking. Iran,
for example, has to be considered a possibility because--in spite of a
rational president, a number of elected reformers, brave newspaper editors,
and an electorate that solidly supports reform--murderous mullahs still run
the country's intelligence services and instruments of state power. Iran
sponsors Hezbollah and other terrorist groups that are targeted principally
against Israel today but that have attacked us in the past, including quite
possibly at Khobar Towers. Iranian involvement with al Qaeda, even across
the bitter divide between extreme Wahhabi Sunnis and extreme Shiites, is
not impossible.
But by far the more likely candidate for involvement with al Qaeda is Iraq,
for several reasons.
Saddam has gone to great lengths to court Sunni Islamists in recent years,
even restructuring the Iraqi flag to put Allahu Akbar ("God is great") in
his own handwriting across its face. (Even Saddam's soulmate and fellow
hater of religion, Joseph Stalin, didn't think of courting the Russian
Orthodox Church when he needed it after Hitler's invasion by writing across
the face of the Soviet flag in his own hand, "In the name of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit.") This courtship has included terrorist
meetings in Iraq and, according to press reports, at least one visit to the
Taliban capital of Kandahar by the infamous Faruk Hijazi, a senior official
in Iraqi intelligence although nominally the Iraqi ambassador in Ankara,
Turkey.
Saddam has a festering sense of revenge for his humiliation of the Gulf
War, and our conduct at, and after, the war's end has given him added hope,
he believes, for vengeance. In the aftermath of the war, the Iraqi
resistance controlled much of the country, but we watched from the skies
while Saddam mobilized the Republican Guard that we had spared and used it
to massacre the rebels. He is not grateful to us. He has concluded that we
are weak and irresolute, and that we do not dare to confront him even when
we are in a position as strong as we were in the spring of 1991. If he has
confidence that he has successfully hidden his hand in attacking us, he
doubtless has even more confidence in our fecklessness.
His confidence in our fecklessness has some reasonable basis. If the first
Bush administration made one major mistake in not helping the Iraqi
resistance, in the spring of 1991, to finish the job that we had started,
the Clinton administration made eight years of them. In the spring of 1993,
Iraqi Intelligence (i.e., Saddam) tried to assassinate former President
Bush in Kuwait, as confirmed by both CIA and FBI investigations of an
unexploded bomb. President Clinton responded by shooting some cruise
missiles into an empty intelligence headquarters in the middle of the
night. The message--we will ruthlessly use high technology weapons against
cleaning women, night watchmen and masonry--may not have struck as much
fear into Saddam's heart as the administration hoped.
There then began eight years of using law enforcement as the principal
investigative tool and principal sanction against what came to be called
"loose networks" of terrorists. For two reasons, neither one the fault of
those who were doing their best to enforce the law, this had the effect of
making it very difficult to establish any links between terrorists and
foreign governments (although the FBI reportedly found ties between Iran
and the Khobar Towers terrorists).
First, a prosecutor's team is not the right institution to use to look for
an overall assessment of whether there is state sponsorship of a terrorist
act. Indeed, the better the prosecutors are, the more likely they are to
focus like a laser on proving that the people they can get their hands on
have committed the elements of the crime set out by the law--not on a
general search for background information useful to the rest of the
government. A criminal trial is not a general search for truth but rather,
in a sense, a legally circumscribed trial by combat. It makes as much sense
to expect a prosecutor's team to make an overall assessment of state
sponsorship of a terrorist event as it does to ask a Marine company
commander, in the midst of taking a hill, to advise you about the
international alliances of the enemy whose troops he is facing.
Second, Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (perhaps now
being modified by Congress) severely restricts the flow of information to
the rest of the government from investigations when information is obtained
pursuant to a federal grand jury's subpoena. A federal judge might approve
some sharing with, say, a state prosecutor, but there is no provision that
permits sharing with, e.g., the National Security Council or the CIA. Any
such sharing must await the trial, creating a delay of months to years
after the terrorist event.
As a result, during the many months of investigation and the trials of the
defendants for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, little was
done to discover the implications of the fact that one of the indicted
plotters, Abdul Rahman Yasin (who held Iraqi and American citizenship) fled
to Baghdad after talking the FBI in New Jersey into releasing him. There
are indications that both he and Ramzi Yousef, now in prison in Colorado,
may be Iraqi agents, but on some important aspects the trail is very cold.
Other investigations of terrorist incidents in the 1990s were similarly
less than thorough on the question of state sponsorship. One can take the
view that this was an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise desirable law
enforcement focus.
The other, less generous possibility is that the Clinton administration was
engaged here in its trademark behavior of focusing first and foremost on
spin, expectation-adjustment, and short-term public relations, and deriving
policy therefrom. If you assume that all terrorism flows from loose
networks and not state action, then you will usually be able to find at
least someone who was involved in a terrorist attack to convict. You can
then claim success, get some good press and avoid confronting a state. The
alternative approach--a thorough search for any state actor--presents two
PR risks, neither attractive. If you find no state actor, there might be th
e appearance of an investigative failure. If, on the other hand, you find
that a state was involved, you might then risk confrontation, even
conflict, and possibly body bags on the evening news.
This may help account for the spate of recent stories in the press that
seem to suggest that Iraqi government ties to terrorism are not being
checked out, and that reports of such ties surprise senior government
officials. It has been widely reported that the hijacker (some say the lead
hijacker) Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague just before he
came to the U.S. One report suggests that he met with senior Iraqi
intelligence official Hijazi. And, as noted, another report puts Hijazi in
the Taliban capital in 1998. Such reports are invariably followed by
background statements from senior government officials to the effect that,
"We don't know what they talked about so it doesn't prove anything."
Then on Oct. 1, William Safire wrote in the New York Times that al Qaeda's
Abu Abdul Rahman, "financed by bin Laden and armed by Saddam," ambushed and
killed 36 Kurds in Halabja in Northern Iraq. The Kurds retaliated, took 19
terrorists prisoner, and got valuable information from them about the
terrorist-Iraqi connection. "Our top NSC officials," Mr. Safire wryly
notes, "were unaware of this engagement until they read it in The Times."
Then on Oct. 12, Jim Hoagland wrote in the Washington Post that an Iraqi
ex-intelligence officer has told the Iraqi National Congress of specific
sightings of Islamic extremists training for hijacking a Boeing 707 in a
suburb of Baghdad, Salman Pak, a year ago, but that he "was treated
dismissively by CIA officers in Ankara this week. They reportedly showed no
interest in pursuing a possible Iraq connection to Sept. 11." (I checked
yesterday and essentially the same situation still obtains.)
What is going on here? Government bureaucracies do have a way of getting
into comfortable ruts and staying there through inertia. In the present
circumstances, we need to be especially sure that if any of our government
agencies became infected during the 1990s with the Clinton administration
malady of backward reasoning (start with the conclusion you want, then
select the facts you'll look at), they are given the required curative as
soon as possible.
The State Department, for example, negotiates with, and normally tries to
make common cause with, foreign governments. And like any normal group of
people, it seeks a role in the bigger picture for what it does. So it tends
to push for the importance of coalition-building and cordial relations in
the big scheme of things. No doubt we will have more and happier coalition
partners (at least in the short run) if we don't raise the uncomfortable
issue of a possible need to confront Saddam. But is a large coalition that
doesn't move against a state that is at war with us better for the nation
as a whole than a small coalition that moves effectively against a state
that is attacking us? Isn't the first job learning the truth and not
accommodating the views of our least staunch friends?
For its part, the CIA has always had an institutional bias in favor of
information coming from recruited agents rather than volunteers and
defectors. There are exceptions, but in a number of circumstances--some
with which I have long personal familiarity--defectors especially have been
dealt with in less than exemplary fashion by the Agency. Something similar
might be said for democratic resistance groups--their occasional
fractiousness makes them hard to discipline. Sometime during 1995, these
tendencies seem to have joined to produce substantial hostility at Langley
to the Iraqi National Congress. As one wag puts it, "If the INC showed up
out there with Osama's and Saddam's heads on a plate, a number of people
would say, 'I'll bet that's the Pope and the Dalai Lama.' " As in the case
of the State Department, it would be a tragedy of the first order if
bureaucratic inertia of this sort had any hand in keeping us from learning
whom we are at war with.
One must have sympathy for the president as he tries to sort all of this
out. The decision whether to move against Iraq after Afghanistan will be
one of the most difficult and important decisions any American president
has ever made. It is much harder than deciding, even in very difficult
circumstances, whether to confront a clear enemy when there is no
alternative--as after the Confederacy's firing on Fort Sumter, or after
Pearl Harbor.
The best analogy may be--although our condition is far from this
desperate--the choice faced by Churchill at the time of Dunkirk in May
1940, when Britain stood alone and Lord Halifax was pressing for
accommodation, via Mussolini, with Germany. Churchill's decision to reject
Halifax's advice and fight was, in many ways, the hinge of the 20th
century. Early in this new century, President Bush already faces one of its
most momentous choices. He needs the best information any of us can give
him.
__________________
Mr. Woolsey, former director of Central Intelligence, is a lawyer in
Washington.
================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
================================================================
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Chafin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 9:50 PM
Subject: CAS: WSJ: The Iraq Connection
> KNOW THY ENEMY
>
> The Iraq Connection
>
> Attack Saddam? It may be one of the most momentous choices of the 21st
> century.
>
> BY R. JAMES WOOLSEY
>
> Wall Street Journal-Thursday, October 18, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
>
> The professionally prepared and precisely sized anthrax spores that have
> infected some 30 congressional staffers and closed down the Capitol and
> the office of the governor of New York have made the point forcefully:
> When you are at war, the primary task should be to determine whom you
> are at war with.
>
> In most wars this is not a problem. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in
> 1990 the way the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor--with flags
> flying. Even in our war two centuries ago with the Barbary Pirates, an
> enemy with some loose parallels to al Qaeda, we had no doubt which North
> African government sheltered them. Stephen Decatur knew whom to attack.
>
> This time it's different. Although the administration's decision to
> move first against the obvious target--the Taliban and their demonic al
> Qaeda guests--is sound, there are rising doubts that even a victory in
> Afghanistan, and even the capture or death of Osama bin Laden and his
> cohorts, will solve the problem. And this is not only because of al
> Qaeda operatives and street demonstrations in other countries. Removing
> bin Laden and his associates may only amputate one hand of our enemy.
> There are substantial and growing indications that a state may, behind
> the scene, be involved in the attacks. This is hard for us to deal with
> because, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein said recently, "It's a very sobering
> thing for Americans, who tend to be upfront dealing with everything, to
> be faced with something so clandestine and unknown."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> When an enemy has a face and a name, this country can be awesome in its
> ability to mobilize quickly for war and win, as we did in both world
> wars. But we are now facing an enemy from a part of the world where the
> major aspects of war, for many centuries, have been clandestine raids,
> assassinations, terror against civilians, and deception. In response to
> the challenge "Come out and fight like a man," we will get only smirks
> in the shadows and more anthrax, or worse.
>
> Some hold the view that no degree of sophistication--precisely prepared
> anthrax, coordination across continents, sophisticated training,
> professionally-stolen identities--is enough to indicate the strong
> probability of a state's being involved. Such a position was most
> succinctly stated by an unnamed FBI official to Seymour Hersh (in the
> Oct. 8 New Yorker), speaking of the Sept. 11 attackers: "These guys look
> like a pickup basketball team. In your wildest dreams, do you think they
> thought they'd be able to pull off four hijackings?" But for those of a
> more suspicious cast of mind, the degree of complexity and the
> sophistication of the attacks against us suggest that we have enough
> indications of possible state involvement for the government to be
> carefully and vigorously investigating.
>
> One central issue is state involvement in what? If we define the
> problem in such a way as to require proof (and make it proof beyond a
> reasonable doubt) of state involvement in the Sept. 11 attack itself, we
> will quite likely define ourselves out of being able to understand who
> is at war with us. Instead, we need to look at the pattern of terrorism
> against us over the last decade and reach a considered judgment in light
> of the whole picture, even if we cannot prove, to the demanding
> standards of criminal law, a state's involvement in the Sept. 11
> atrocity itself.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The weakest argument against the possibility of state involvement is
> usually implicit--that since al Qaeda is clearly involved in the Sept.
> 11 and other attacks, a state probably is not. But haven't such people
> heard of joint ventures? Do they think that international law imposes
> some sort of sole-source contracting requirement for terrorism?
>
> But which state? Well, whichever one turns up when you start looking.
> Iran, for example, has to be considered a possibility because--in spite
> of a rational president, a number of elected reformers, brave newspaper
> editors, and an electorate that solidly supports reform--murderous
> mullahs still run the country's intelligence services and instruments of
> state power. Iran sponsors Hezbollah and other terrorist groups that are
> targeted principally against Israel today but that have attacked us in
> the past, including quite possibly at Khobar Towers. Iranian involvement
> with al Qaeda, even across the bitter divide between extreme Wahhabi
> Sunnis and extreme Shiites, is not impossible.
>
> But by far the more likely candidate for involvement with al Qaeda is
> Iraq, for several reasons.
>
> Saddam has gone to great lengths to court Sunni Islamists in recent
> years, even restructuring the Iraqi flag to put Allahu Akbar ("God is
> great") in his own handwriting across its face. (Even Saddam's soulmate
> and fellow hater of religion, Joseph Stalin, didn't think of courting
> the Russian Orthodox Church when he needed it after Hitler's invasion by
> writing across the face of the Soviet flag in his own hand, "In the name
> of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.") This courtship has
> included terrorist meetings in Iraq and, according to press reports, at
> least one visit to the Taliban capital of Kandahar by the infamous Faruk
> Hijazi, a senior official in Iraqi intelligence although nominally the
> Iraqi ambassador in Ankara, Turkey.
>
> Saddam has a festering sense of revenge for his humiliation of the Gulf
> War, and our conduct at, and after, the war's end has given him added
> hope, he believes, for vengeance. In the aftermath of the war, the Iraqi
> resistance controlled much of the country, but we watched from the skies
> while Saddam mobilized the Republican Guard that we had spared and used
> it to massacre the rebels. He is not grateful to us. He has concluded
> that we are weak and irresolute, and that we do not dare to confront him
> even when we are in a position as strong as we were in the spring of
> 1991. If he has confidence that he has successfully hidden his hand in
> attacking us, he doubtless has even more confidence in our fecklessness.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> His confidence in our fecklessness has some reasonable basis. If the
> first Bush administration made one major mistake in not helping the
> Iraqi resistance, in the spring of 1991, to finish the job that we had
> started, the Clinton administration made eight years of them. In the
> spring of 1993, Iraqi Intelligence (i.e., Saddam) tried to assassinate
> former President Bush in Kuwait, as confirmed by both CIA and FBI
> investigations of an unexploded bomb. President Clinton responded by
> shooting some cruise missiles into an empty intelligence headquarters in
> the middle of the night. The message--we will ruthlessly use high
> technology weapons against cleaning women, night watchmen and
> masonry--may not have struck as much fear into Saddam's heart as the
> administration hoped.
>
> There then began eight years of using law enforcement as the principal
> investigative tool and principal sanction against what came to be called
> "loose networks" of terrorists. For two reasons, neither one the fault
> of those who were doing their best to enforce the law, this had the
> effect of making it very difficult to establish any links between
> terrorists and foreign governments (although the FBI reportedly found
> ties between Iran and the Khobar Towers terrorists).
>
> First, a prosecutor's team is not the right institution to use to look
> for an overall assessment of whether there is state sponsorship of a
> terrorist act. Indeed, the better the prosecutors are, the more likely
> they are to focus like a laser on proving that the people they can get
> their hands on have committed the elements of the crime set out by the
> law--not on a general search for background information useful to the
> rest of the government. A criminal trial is not a general search for
> truth but rather, in a sense, a legally circumscribed trial by combat.
> It makes as much sense to expect a prosecutor's team to make an overall
> assessment of state sponsorship of a terrorist event as it does to ask a
> Marine company commander, in the midst of taking a hill, to advise you
> about the international alliances of the enemy whose troops he is
> facing.
>
> Second, Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (perhaps
> now being modified by Congress) severely restricts the flow of
> information to the rest of the government from investigations when
> information is obtained pursuant to a federal grand jury's subpoena. A
> federal judge might approve some sharing with, say, a state prosecutor,
> but there is no provision that permits sharing with, e.g., the National
> Security Council or the CIA. Any such sharing must await the trial,
> creating a delay of months to years after the terrorist event.
>
> As a result, during the many months of investigation and the trials of
> the defendants for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, little
> was done to discover the implications of the fact that one of the
> indicted plotters, Abdul Rahman Yasin (who held Iraqi and American
> citizenship) fled to Baghdad after talking the FBI in New Jersey into
> releasing him. There are indications that both he and Ramzi Yousef, now
> in prison in Colorado, may be Iraqi agents, but on some important
> aspects the trail is very cold. Other investigations of terrorist
> incidents in the 1990s were similarly less than thorough on the question
> of state sponsorship. One can take the view that this was an unfortunate
> side effect of an otherwise desirable law enforcement focus.
>
>
>
>
>
> The other, less generous possibility is that the Clinton administration
> was engaged here in its trademark behavior of focusing first and
> foremost on spin, expectation-adjustment, and short-term public
> relations, and deriving policy therefrom. If you assume that all
> terrorism flows from loose networks and not state action, then you will
> usually be able to find at least someone who was involved in a terrorist
> attack to convict. You can then claim success, get some good press and
> avoid confronting a state. The alternative approach--a thorough search
> for any state actor--presents two PR risks, neither attractive. If you
> find no state actor, there might be the appearance of an investigative
> failure. If, on the other hand, you find that a state was involved, you
> might then risk confrontation, even conflict, and possibly body bags on
> the evening news.
>
> This may help account for the spate of recent stories in the press that
> seem to suggest that Iraqi government ties to terrorism are not being
> checked out, and that reports of such ties surprise senior government
> officials. It has been widely reported that the hijacker (some say the
> lead hijacker) Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague just
> before he came to the U.S. One report suggests that he met with senior
> Iraqi intelligence official Hijazi. And, as noted, another report puts
> Hijazi in the Taliban capital in 1998. Such reports are invariably
> followed by background statements from senior government officials to
> the effect that, "We don't know what they talked about so it doesn't
> prove anything."
>
> Then on Oct. 1, William Safire wrote in the New York Times that al
> Qaeda's Abu Abdul Rahman, "financed by bin Laden and armed by Saddam,"
> ambushed and killed 36 Kurds in Halabja in Northern Iraq. The Kurds
> retaliated, took 19 terrorists prisoner, and got valuable information
> from them about the terrorist-Iraqi connection. "Our top NSC officials,"
> Mr. Safire wryly notes, "were unaware of this engagement until they read
> it in The Times."
>
> Then on Oct. 12, Jim Hoagland wrote in the Washington Post that an
> Iraqi ex-intelligence officer has told the Iraqi National Congress of
> specific sightings of Islamic extremists training for hijacking a Boeing
> 707 in a suburb of Baghdad, Salman Pak, a year ago, but that he "was
> treated dismissively by CIA officers in Ankara this week. They
> reportedly showed no interest in pursuing a possible Iraq connection to
> Sept. 11." (I checked yesterday and essentially the same situation still
> obtains.)
>
>
>
>
>
>
> What is going on here? Government bureaucracies do have a way of getting
> into comfortable ruts and staying there through inertia. In the present
> circumstances, we need to be especially sure that if any of our
> government agencies became infected during the 1990s with the Clinton
> administration malady of backward reasoning (start with the conclusion
> you want, then select the facts you'll look at), they are given the
> required curative as soon as possible.
>
> The State Department, for example, negotiates with, and normally tries
> to make common cause with, foreign governments. And like any normal
> group of people, it seeks a role in the bigger picture for what it does.
> So it tends to push for the importance of coalition-building and cordial
> relations in the big scheme of things. No doubt we will have more and
> happier coalition partners (at least in the short run) if we don't raise
> the uncomfortable issue of a possible need to confront Saddam. But is a
> large coalition that doesn't move against a state that is at war with us
> better for the nation as a whole than a small coalition that moves
> effectively against a state that is attacking us? Isn't the first job
> learning the truth and not accommodating the views of our least staunch
> friends?
>
> For its part, the CIA has always had an institutional bias in favor of
> information coming from recruited agents rather than volunteers and
> defectors. There are exceptions, but in a number of circumstances--some
> with which I have long personal familiarity--defectors especially have
> been dealt with in less than exemplary fashion by the Agency. Something
> similar might be said for democratic resistance groups--their occasional
> fractiousness makes them hard to discipline. Sometime during 1995, these
> tendencies seem to have joined to produce substantial hostility at
> Langley to the Iraqi National Congress. As one wag puts it, "If the INC
> showed up out there with Osama's and Saddam's heads on a plate, a number
> of people would say, 'I'll bet that's the Pope and the Dalai Lama.' " As
> in the case of the State Department, it would be a tragedy of the first
> order if bureaucratic inertia of this sort had any hand in keeping us
> from learning whom we are at war with.
>
>
>
>
>
> One must have sympathy for the president as he tries to sort all of this
> out. The decision whether to move against Iraq after Afghanistan will be
> one of the most difficult and important decisions any American president
> has ever made. It is much harder than deciding, even in very difficult
> circumstances, whether to confront a clear enemy when there is no
> alternative--as after the Confederacy's firing on Fort Sumter, or after
> Pearl Harbor.
>
> The best analogy may be--although our condition is far from this
> desperate--the choice faced by Churchill at the time of Dunkirk in May
> 1940, when Britain stood alone and Lord Halifax was pressing for
> accommodation, via Mussolini, with Germany. Churchill's decision to
> reject Halifax's advice and fight was, in many ways, the hinge of the
> 20th century. Early in this new century, President Bush already faces
> one of its most momentous choices. He needs the best information any of
> us can give him.
>
> Mr. Woolsey, former director of Central Intelligence, is a lawyer in
> Washington.
>
==========================================================================
> This mailing list is for discussion of Clinton Administration Scandals.
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> you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send electronic mail to
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the message body put: unsubscribe cas
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