No one cares, except those like Pincus who were ignored during the run-up to unnecessary, costly war in Iraq when they flagged flagrant lies and distortions coming from the cynical Bush administration. Now look at us (from The Economist):
Old habits from Saddam Hussein’s era are becoming familiar again. Torture is routine in government detention centres. “Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.
The domestic-security apparatus is at its busiest since Saddam was overthrown six years ago, especially in the capital. . . . Journalists are prominent victims of Iraq’s judicial system. In July one was arrested for photographing a Baghdad traffic jam, after his pictures were deemed "negative" for mocking Mr Maliki’s assertion that life in the capital was improving. Last year Iraq dropped to 158th place out of 173 -- its lowest ranking since the American invasion -- in a press-freedom table drawn up by Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based lobby, which detects a decline in freedom in many countries.
The government recently announced plans to censor imported books as well as the internet, saying it wanted to ban hate screeds and pornography. But human-rights monitors fear this may presage a first step towards a wider web of censorship.
(h/t Glenn Greenwald)
And Greenwald:
So what was accomplished by the whole venture? Aside from the grotesque immorality, criminality, loss of innocent life and the disappearance of untold billions upon billions of dollars, the only real change seems to be that we replaced one brutal tyrant with another, although the one that used to be there at least was an enemy of and check against our Current Enemy (Iran, the nation against whom Tom Friedman assures us we are waging a new Cold War), while the one that is there now is a strong ally, perhaps even a client, of those Persian Hitlers. So -- other than finding an excellent way to prop up our National Security State -- the one thing we "accomplished" with the invasion of Iraq was to provide the largest possible benefit to the country that is supposedly our Greatest Enemy.
We never learn the lesson, because we don't want to, that things don't work out well when we invade, bomb, occupy and try to re-make other countries. Does anyone believe that, if and when we stop waging war in Afghanistan, the results will be any better?
Ahhh, Afghanistan, remember that?
The New Republic:
But, if the definition of success isn't clear to the Obama team, the definition of defeat may be. Bush argued unabashedly that Iraq had become "the central front in the war on terror" and that withdrawing before the country had stabilized would hand Al Qaeda not only a strategic but a moral victory. Current administration officials don't publicly articulate the same rationale when discussing Afghanistan. But former CIA official Bruce Riedel, a regional expert who led the White House's Afghanistan-Pakistan review earlier this year, cited it at the Brookings panel held in August. "The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World. This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s," Riedel said. "[T]he stakes are enormous."
Finally, Obama may have one last thing in common with Bush: personal pride. Bush was determined to prevail in Iraq because he had invaded it. And, while Obama, of course, had nothing to do with the invasion of Afghanistan, he has long supported the campaign there--including during the presidential campaign as a foil for his opposition to the Iraq war. Speaking before a group of veterans last month, Obama called Afghanistan a "war of necessity"--a phrase which politically invests him deeper in the fight. "The president has boxed himself in," says one person who has advised the administration on military strategy. "The worst possible place to be is that our justification for being in a war is that we're in a war."
Ultimately, it was only when Bush was honest with himself and the nation about Iraq--admitting that conditions were dire and ordering his politically poisonous troop surge--that he was able to avoid defeat there. Obama is already facing a strong temptation to limit America's costs in Afghanistan. But, if Obama's commitment to stabilizing that country is as serious as it sounds, he should be as mindful of GWB as he is of LBJ. Otherwise, he risks a war that leads to a resounding WTF.
Just like Bush! Amazing! So back to where we started: Bush and Walter Pincus.
This is sickening:
Under President George W. Bush, the President's Daily Brief -- the highly classified intelligence paper delivered each morning to the White House -- rose to "an unprecedented level of importance," with negative consequences for the intelligence community, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution.
These included "skewing intelligence production away from deeper research and arms-length analysis" and driving analysts to choose "the latest, attention-grabbing clandestine reports from the field," says the study, released Tuesday, called "The U.S. Intelligence Community and Foreign Policy: Getting Analysis Right."
At times, Bush had analysts who had been working on high-concern issues he read about in the daily brief, or PDB, conduct hour-long "deep dives" on those topics, with top policymakers present. "Not infrequently the briefings and surrounding discussions by key players would produce immediate policy decisions," the study says.
Sounds like whoring out the White House to policy experts for their approval of their foreign policy decisions. Am I being naive?
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