A DISCUSSION ABOUT VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY WITH MICHAEL DUFFY
Assistant Managing Editor, Time
THOMAS DEFRANK
Washington Bureau Chief, New York Daily News”
TODD PURDUM
Vanity Fair”

(I always get a kick out of DeFrank even if he has apparent close ties to the White House … he reminds me of the old-style journalists like Jerry Nachman. But Todd Purdum may have the most revealing comments tonight.)

Uhh, what border controls? Illegal imports of humans, drugs and potential terrorists are flourishing. It’s reportedly a $40 Billion a year business. They have jailed USBP agents for doing their job, and given immunity to drug traffickers only to intimidate the Border Patrol.

Up to that point, I’ve had great respect for and belief of Richard Clarke.

In every administration, there are usually only about a dozen barons who can really initiate and manage meaningful changes in U.S. national security policy. For most of 2006, some of the critical chairs have been vacant, such as the deputy secretary of state (Robert Zoellick is off with the investment bank Goldman Sachs) and the deputy director of national intelligence has been vacant since General Mike Hayden left to become CIA director. With the nation involved in a messy war spiraling toward a bad conclusion, the key cabinet members and other potential change agents are all focusing on only one issue, and it is always the same issue: Iraq.

National Security Council veteran Rand Beers has called this the “herd ball, seven year old’s soccer syndrome” — everyone forgets their particular positions and responsibilities and just trying to get close to the ball. In the end, there are only twelve seats at the conference table in the Situation Room and the barons’ schedules mean that they can seldom meet there together in person or on secure video conference more than about ten hours each week. When things are not first tier, they slip for months, as the first cabinet level meeting on terrorism did, until September 4, 2001.

Without the distraction of the Iraq war, the administration would have spent this past year — indeed, every year since September 11, 2001 — focused on al Qaeda. But beyond that obvious agenda and the broader struggle for peaceful coexistence with (and within) Islam, a number of “fires in the in-box” issues remain unattended, deteriorating and threatening while Washington’s grown up seven-year-olds plays herd ball with Iraq:

— Global Warming: When the possibility of invading Iraq surfaced in 2001, to the extent senior Bush administration officials thought about global warming it was to wonder whether it was caused by human activity or by sunspots. Today, for the world’s scientists and national leaders, that is no longer a question. Instead, they are deeply concerned…

`–Russian revanchism: When President Bush and and Russian president Validimir Putin leave office in rapid succession in 2008 and 2009, it seems likely Russia will be less of a democracy and less inclined to cooperate with Washington than it was six years ago, when Bush stared in the eyes (and looked into the heart) of the Russian leader. In her earlier
role as national security advisor and now as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice would have been a natural to work on key U.S.-Russian issues, given her extensive background in Soviet affairs. But the focus on Iraq has precluded that, even as the troubling issues multiply: Russian Governors are no longer elected, dissidents die mysteriously and probably at the hands of the new KGB, opposition media is suppressed, corporate leaders are jailed or hounded out of the country. Moscow plays petro-politics by dramatically raising the cost of energy to former Soviet republics that do not tow Moscow’s line and threaten to turn
off the pipeline to European nations that are uncooperative. If the implicit Bush strategy was to turn a blind eye to all of this to get Russian cooperation in Iraq and Iran, it has not worked.

– Latin America’s leftist lurch: In the years before the Iraq War, American presidents were welcomed at frequent summits throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. On September 11th, Secretary of State Colin Powell was on a tour of one area of the world where U.S. policies had worked. Friendly and democratic governments were in power in every nation in the hemisphere except Cuba. Formerly debt-ridden economies were widely implementing pro-market reforms, and the United States was broadly welcomed as a partner. Washington seemed confident that if and when Fidel ever died (there was always some doubt), even Cuba would join the democracy/free market club. Today, Fidel has been replaced, but not just by another Cuban dictator. The leader of the new anti-Yankee alliance sweeping the hemisphere is the democratically elected leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Chavez’s anti-U.S. campaign is supported by Cuban intelligence and Venezuelan oil money. By 2006, Venezuela and Cuba were not alone in their vehement opposition to Washington; kindred spirits have been elected in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Having started the administration pledging new cooperation with Mexico, Bush backtracked after 9-11, focusing instead on closing doors to the south, tightening immigration and border controls.

– Africa at war: The genocide spilling from the Darfur region of Sudan into neighboring Chad has captured growing attention in the United States due to belated media coverage and an aggressive advertising campaign by concerned groups, but the prospects of Washington dealing with the problem effectively seem slim. Darfur, however, is only one of a pox of conflicts that, together with HIV/AIDS, are depopulating parts of Africa and robbing it of the potential of mineral, oil and gas deposits. Wars have raged in Congo, Chad, Liberia, Somalia, and Sierre Leone. Were it not for Iraq, Washington might have acted to stop what the Bush administration admits is a genocide in Darfur, or taken steps to prevent the takeover of Somalia by an al Qaeda affiliated group. Unfortunately, even supporting a small presence of U.S. Special Forces to lead a U.N. approved coalition peacekeeping force is beyond the capability of the badly stretched U.S. military.

– Arms control freeze: Once at the top of several administrations’ national security agendas, international arms control has received little attention since in the first months of the Administration the decision was made to walk away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Just as his predecessor’s expertise was on the Soviet Union, current National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley’s past government experience was in arms control and he began to focus on his familiar turf as the number two at NSC early in 2001. Post 9-11, he has had little time to achieve advances in international regimes controlling biological weapons, weapons in space, nuclear testing and proliferation, or the threat of nuclear or radioactive terrorist weapons. For a long time dealing with the nuclear weapons program of Iran was out-sourced to the Europeans, just as the onus of stopping the North Korean nuclear development was placed on Asian nations. The Administration claimed it could not do the talking because it reserved U.S. diplomatic dialogues for nations without “bad behavior,” but to stop two nuclear programs the administration would have need significant senior level bandwidth that was simply not available.

– International crime: In a nationally televised address in 1989 the first President Bush held aloft a bag of cocaine that had been sold near the White House and declared a “War on Drugs.” That effort was later enlarged to deal with the international criminal cartels engaged in trafficking in persons, gun and contraband smuggling, money laundering and
counterfeiting, official corruption, and cyber fraud. I had a hand in drafting the first national strategies to combat international crime and cyber security threats. The momentum from those efforts produced international structures and treaties to combat hidden global crime conglomerates, but the White House level leadership needed to coordinate…
Moreover, the international crime cartels received a major shot in the arm, literally, with the occupation of Afghanistan by NATO forces.

– Pakistan and Afghanistan: Afghanistan does increasingly receive the attention of the senior U.S. policymakers, not because of the narcotics problem, but mainly because the once defeated Taliban again threaten Afghan and coalition forces. No amount of attention to Afghanistan will, however, provide the answer to that nation’s problems. If there is a solution, it is on the other side of the Khyber Pass where a sanctuary has emerged, a
Taliban-like state within a state in western Pakistan. Dealing with that problem is more than Washington has been willing or able to handle, for it involves the complex issue of who governs nuclear armed Pakistan and how. Thus far, Washington has accepted General Musharaff’s half way measures on dealing with the nuclear proliferation network of A.Q. Khan, addressing the terrorist involvement of Pakistani intelligence, and controlling the
Taliban/al Qaeda bases in Wuziristan. Getting Pakistan to do more would require a major and sustained effort by senior US officials, including addressing the long standing tensions with India. Because of Iraq, Washington’s national security barons do not have the hours in their days to manage that, nor the troops need to secure Afghanistan.

As the President contemplates sending even more U.S. forces into the Iraqi sink hole, he should think that staying on there is not just about the thousands of fatalities, the tens of thousands of casualties, the hundreds of billions of dollars of unproductive debt generation, it is also the opportunity cost of taking his national security barons off all of the other jobs they should be doing to address critical problems whose window of opportunity for solution are slamming shut unheard over the wail of Baghdad sirens.”

http://www.goodharborreport.com/node/875?destination=node%2F875

I would liken Washington to a pirate ship. Per the History Channel, the captain served at the pleasure of the crew, and was tried by his peers if unpopular.

Remember, all the wealth in Washington has been taken from the consumer/taxpayer.

It turns out the jury had a distinct beltway background to it.

Almost like a case of spooks’ revenge. Tried by a jury of peers, literally.