The legacy of the Shrub

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Is that technically true, though? AFAIK even the president of the US has some limitations, especially when regarding the use of force in another country. This was probably much relaxed after 9/11, but I don't think Clinton could count on the House/Senate being as cooperative in the late 1990's.

 

Did you skip civics class the day they covered checks and balances, T2? The president doesn't approve the budget. Congress does. The president doesn't decide how and where to allocate funding to the CIA and other intelligence operations. Congress does that, too. Bill Clinton repeatedly requested drastic increases in funding for both foreign and domestic anti-terror operations, and those requests were just as repeatedly gutted or flatly denied by a republican congress strong enough to potentially override his veto. He worked with what he had.

 

Bush's legacy is being more informed. little by little, yet at a steady pace, by those who were first-hand witnesses. In the scheme of history they are known as primary sources. Most hardcore, objective historians consider those sources to be impure gold, but gold nevertheless, because from a variety of sources they more or less glean and construct what happened in the past.

I am of course, leading-up to Scott McClellan's new book, which is due to be released. It is a chronicle of what he experienced as GWB's loyal mouthpiece. It confirms what many of the prez's critics have been harping on for the last 8 years, which is essentially that GWB is full of crap. Don't mind my directness, bluntness and lack of subtley in describing what this "individual" has done to this nation, since he snuck into office under the cloud of suspicion that he had just stolen the election from Al Gore.

But the real centerpiece of the dubious accomplishments of GWB will be the Iraq War, which Mick explains like this:

Someone once said, "The Truth will, eventually, see the light of day." Never give up faith in that, even when surrounded by the deceit of propaganda.

It is my opinion that GWB could not recognize the truth, even once placed in front of his face.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24863127/

 

Budgets are somewhat flexible. Every department has discretionary funds -- the President can use those funds. Drew, you were in the military, you know as well as I do when there is a need dictated by the President funds get shifted around to accommodate. If Clinton wanted to pursue Bin Laden, it would have happened.

 

Can we judge Clinton by the "success" that GWB has had in pursuing BL?

 

Please. Having been in intel and knowing how it works, your assertion sounds positively ludicrous. Al Qaida, like most terror groups, uses non-traceable cell phones and free e-mail to communicate. They don't use special encrypted phones or private e-mail because, aside from the fact that such things are easy to trace, they also stick out like a sore thumb to the people looking for such signals. They also regularly switch their phones and e-mail adresses . They don't have two year contracts with verizon that we can trace and monitor and they don't have a brick and mortar shipping address. To find him, we'd have to monitor every single cellular phone in his (assumed) area. Given that we don't know exactly where Bin Laden is, we'd have to monitor more cellular phones than we have linguists.

Short of actually putting a cell phone directly into Bin Laden's hand and geolocating the signal (and assuming Bin Laden doesn't just hand it to someone else to use when he leaves an area, leaving the false impression that he hasn't actually left), the only way to monitor their communications and movements is through human intelligence. Now, the CIA has lots of agents, but how many of them do you think speak native level Arabic? How many of them don't have other, equally pressing tasks? That aside, how many agents would it take to actually get enough of them high enough up in Al-Qaida to actually provide us with actionable intel? Clinton continually asked for funding and the creation of new departments (Bush wasn't the first president to try to establish a department of homeland security) because, as 911 proved, he needed more funding. He needed more people, new infrastructure. To do it, what few discretionary funds he had (that were needed for a lot more than just finding Osama) weren't going to cut it.

All that aside, Clinton very nearly killed Bin Laden. In fact, he came closer than anyone before or since, so if you are using "success" as your standard, he still stands heads above the competition.

 

"Much of the things that are blamed on him [Bush] are made possible by the political climate in the states."--joacqin

I'm not one to let Bush off the hook, or to say he merely represented forces beyond his control, but there is great point in joacqin's remark. Politics here for many years, and with increasing force over time, has resembled less and less any discussion of issues and more and more the promotion of slogans and a product, the product being the candidate, of course. To a certain extent this is true of any democratic election: "Tippicanoe and Tyler too!" and "Fifty-two forty or fight!" date from the 1840's, which perhaps shows how deeply ingrained triviality is in our electoral process. But it has now reached the point where there is a determined attempt to prevent any issue from being discussed except by slogan, which usually takes the form of attacking the other candidate and forcing him to spend his time defending himself from half-baked accusations. Al Gore and John Kerry had it all on the issues in 2000 and 2004, but they allowed the neo-cons to choose the grounds and the weapons, and they paid the price, with a little cheating thrown in. What is so admirable about Obama is that he seems determined not to let this happen to him.

Where I disagree with joacqin is in not seeing Bush as a victim or product of those forces, but rather as an enthusiastic leader of them, with results that have proved little short of disastrous for this country: Iraq, Katrina, Global Warming, Education, Jobs, Health care, Environment, Torture, Alliances; truly a legacy of failure and catastrophy. I believe history will judge G.W. Bush to be the very worst of our presidents. Worse than Buchanan. Worse than Grant. Worse than Harding. The legacy of the neo-cons, who are all so proud of how good they can make themselves appear on paper.

 

That last little phrase is the perfect summation of Bush's presidency. I bolded the last phrase for emphasis, but I certainly don't mean to detract from the rest of the post, which I also largely agree with. While I doubt that Bush came up with a lot of these half-baked ideas on his own, he certainly was the mouthpiece for them, and calling him the "enthusiastic leader" is appropriate. Heck, "failure and catastrophe" can serve a dual role here - it can be not only the slogan of his presidency, but also his epitath.*

*Not saying someone should kill Bush, but when he dies 20 or 30 years from now...

 

Chandos -- I said "pursue" which does not, in any of my dictionaries, mean kill or stop.

Drew -- You danced around my statement, you did not address it. If Clinton had wanted to pursue Bin Laden, it would have happened. To assert the only way of doing this is to track e-mail or cell phones is, in your words "positively ludicrous."

 

Actually, my point is that Clinton did pursue Bin Laden. How do you think we found Bin Laden to launch that strike, anyway? I can pretty much guarantee it was the culmination of years of Human intelligence. Bin Laden was there, and the only reason Clinton didn't successfully kill him is because of Usama's dumb luck in having left the facility without our knowledge. After the strike, Clinton continued to look for him, but Bin Laden had grown more cautious and harder to find.

 

In that case, I agree with you. Although I still think the failed attempt emboldened Bin Laden (and made him more cautious at the same time). Bin Laden fought against the Soviets for years -- he is well trained, highly disciplined and a cunning opponent. I do not fault Clinton for not taking him out, just that the main attempt was not well thought out.

 

Can the same not be said for the last 7 years?

 

T2: It should be pointed out that the only reason the strike failed was because Usama managed to leave without us realizing it through what was essentially dumb luck. Had we attacked even a little earlier, Usama Bin Laden would be dead. Given that he survived only through pure, dumb luck I think the attack would have been more likely to scare the **** out of Bin Laden than to embolden him, because we had just proven that we were capable of locating him and taking him out.

That said, if he really is a religious fanatic rather than the hardened cynic I believe him to be, you probably have a good point. Rather than seeing his survival as a matter of dumb luck, he could have seen it as evidence of divine protection, and that would have emboldened him.

 

Right -- my point exactly. The Tomahawk was a beast to program. We went out to sea with preprogramed targets. But no one could possibly preprogram a tent camp. It would take a minimum of one to two hours to program an attack path for the Tomahawk to strike Osama's camp -- and that's after the location was known and detailed topographical maps obtained (these typically involved reconnaissance photograph quality). All told, it probably took 24 hours to do -- it could possibly be done in eight hours. An airstrike would have been planned and implemented in an hour.

 

Good point, though I kind of doubt that Clinton was the decider behind using Tomahawks to do the job. He may or may not have OK'd it, but it was probably a military adviser* who recommended the Tomahawks, although there's no way to be sure one way or the other. The Tomahawks may also have been employed out of concern for the diplomatic ramifications of flying US military aircraft over Afghanistan. Again, there's no real way to know for sure, so we can't take Clinton entirely off the hook (and he, himself, has stated he regrets the attack).

*I find it unlikely that a civilian appointee would give a flying **** what weapon was employed.

 

The US can hardly blame Bin Laden for surviving and learning from an attempt on his life, and it is plain silly to blame Clinton for missing the opportunity. OBL wasn't there, he already was a very difficult to find target when Clinton ordered the missile strike.

What this shows is that it is imperative that you make your strike hit, and hit the right target. Your intel better be bulletproof or you obliterate another one of those notorious wedding parties, and in that respect cruise missiles are probably even somewhat less of a blunt instrument than a carrier air wing.

I presume an air strike, although it would have obliterated the entire camp, would have been just as futile with OBL absent thatn that cruise missile strike, with greater damage caused physically and politically, so I think that point is moot, just as about the entire blame game (to wit: I am convinced this isn't about drawing 'lessons learned'). In that line of argument enemy skill or accident have no room.

OBL, being smart and putting as a holy warrior his mission before vain martyrdom, is even more elusive now. The US has failed, consistently, even with the considerably greater effort Bush has invested in the hunt, to get OBL ever since 9/11, which tells you something about how capable and resourceful an enemy Bin Laden actually is.

So he is now said to be hiding in Pakistan? Since when would that deter the US from striking him? They routinely do so from their Predator drones for other Al Qaeda related targets from the Horn of Africa to the Pakistani tribal territories. So? Obviously, the only reason they don't do the same for OBL is because they can't find him.

Apparently, the task never was all that simple to begin with.

That it isn't any easier now, has as much to do with Clinton missing OBL then as with Bush/ Rumsfeld trying to do Afghanistan on the cheap because they wanted to force the Greater Middle East into democracy through some creative destruction. In the meanwhile OBL escaped their hired guns at Tora Bora on a cross country motorbike.

In light of that it is just selective arguing to blame Clinton for underestimating OBL, but praising in the same breath Bush for waging his war on terror (I don't mean you T2, I mean pundits who are using some of your arguments).

 

Drew, as I mentioned before, I was out there during that attack -- on an Admiral's staff. The decision to use Tomahawks was completely puzzling to us (and I was part of the Tomahawk team). At the time there was a serious shortage of Tomahawks, the use of which required National Command Center (White House) approval. The decision to use missiles came from the White House (which would include cabinet members).

Good intelligence, acted upon immediately, has a much higher chance of success than waiting 24 hours. The key question is when did Osama leave. A follow on question is whether or not the 8-24 hours it took to formulate and execute a Tomahawk attack was too long -- i.e., would pulling the plug on an airstrike (with possible strike within one hour of notification) have a higher probability of success. If this was a manhunt then forces would have been in place with direct contact to the source of intel. Such a scenario has a very fast response time.

I, for one, believe we should have concentrated on hunting Bin Laden and helping to restore Afghanistan instead of going to Iraq -- but what's done is done. Now, IMO, we need to rebuild Iraq (we broke it, we'd better put it right). Bin Laden has been able to evade the US because we simply do not put very many resources into the hunt. Face it, once Bin Laden is dead the majority of people will believe the threat is also gone. Killing Bin Laden may actually be bad for DHS and DoD.

 

I'll not argue that point, but would again add that, right or wrong, the decision to use the Tomahawk was probably based on the recommendation of a military adviser.

Agreed on point one. On point two, though, I think there are enough people out there who are smart enough to realize that Al-Qaida is bigger than Usama Bin Laden and will do whatever it takes to prevent this from happening. His death (martyrdom) would likely be a rallying cry for jihadists everywhere.

 

On that point we will disagree. The use of the Tomahawk made no tactical sense and went against all strategic planning of the period. Tomahawk resources were extremely limited at the time (due to a manufacturing defect found in a large percentage of the missiles). IIRC, that single attack used the vast majority of forward deployed Tomahawks and depleted the entire available Tomahawks world wide to dangerously low levels (sorry, was going to put in the numbers, but you had a clearance and know the routine ...). This was a huge strategic blunder -- Tomahawks are incredible weapons, one of the primary advantages is assault of compounds near anti-air missile defense platforms. Had problems occurred with North Korea, Iraq, Iran, China, or any other area with AAW capabilities we would have been sending our manned aircraft into highly protected air zones -- I can't imagine top military (professional military) advisors ignoring such issues.

IMO recommendations to use Tomahawk came from civilians and were probably politically motivated (send what the public believes is the 'latest and greatest' weapon and all that garbage).

 

That's definitely possible, too, but I doubt I need to tell you that incompetence is found in any and all walks of life and in all echelons of power. This could have just as easily been motivated by incompetence - military or otherwise - as by politics.