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I did find THIS opinion piece in the WSJ that seems NOW to strike a note with me -- I have, for many years, felt that "Bush could do no wrong." Now I begin to wonder if ALL politicians are corrupt!! I certainly think the Liberals would be worse than Bush, but I now fear for our Republic.
September 11 was not so much a discrete event as part of a continuum. It was the result of broad strategic failures that, preceding it by decades, continue to this day and are likely to continue on. It is as if the country has lost, as exemplified by the Left now out of power, a great deal of the will to self-preservation, and, as exemplified by the Right now in charge, not a little of its capacity for self-defense. Our politics and policies have somehow been parceled out to opportunists like Michael Moore -- purveyor of conspiracy theories and hatreds, whose presentation, unclean in every respect, is honored nonetheless by the controlling rump of Democrats -- and to Bushmen like "Kip" Hawley of Homeland Security, father of the proposal to allow carry-on ice-picks, bows and arrows, and knives with blades up to five-inches long.
What the above quote ignores is the very harmful role of the media whose sole purpose is to create chaos -- and eagerly turn on the strong guy whether he is conservative or liberal. Even more basically, what the article from which this quote was taken misses is that "society" has failed to do anything about the obvious need for improvement in morality at the grassroots level. That probably needs some change in morality at the very top -- and that is where Clinton set the terrible role model example. Bush "seems" so honorable, but how about the fact that he seems to "accept" the immorality of the Clinton years without current comment??
A "moral group" must have an "ethical duty" that anyone who observes a wrongful act must DO something about it -- one of the least active actions would be to report it to some proper authority. The "proper authority" must be one that does not "strike back" at the person making the report, and must be one that will investigate whichever of these reports seems worthy of investigation -- without being swayed by "politics." The person who observes a wrongful act and DOES NOT report it is guilty, equally, with the person performing the wrongful act.
I have an optimistic view of the future, however, based on "other data."
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CIA asked Dutch Govt not to act against AQ Khan: Report
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In a major disclosure, former Dutch Premier Ruud Lubbers has said the Netherlands government in 1975 and in 1986 had refrained from acting against disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadir Khan following requests from the US Central Intelligence Agency, media reports said.
Dutch newspapers, Telegraaf, NRC Handelsblad, and Radio ARGOS quoted Lubbers as saying that the country's security agency, BVD, had also asked the Ministry of Economic Affairs in 1975, then headed by him, not to act against Khan.
"I think the American intelligence agency put into practice what is very common there; just give us all the information. And do not arrest that man; just let him go ahead. We will have him followed and that way gain more information," Lubbers told VPRO Argos Radio in an interview.
According to the interview transcript, he asked: "What are we doing here? We have watched this man for ten years already. Apparently, he is up to some fairly serious things.... And again I'm told: No, just leave it to the intelligence agencies.... Yes, in hindsight that is very stupid indeed".
The Economic Affairs Ministry, then headed by Lubbers, had in its purview Urenco, the uranium enrichment firm in Almelo where Khan worked in 1975 when suspicions about his spying had arisen in the Dutch government circles.
Lubbers, who later rose to become the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, also said, "I seem to recall from those days that I had once asked whether it is sufficient to merely deny him entry or should we do more. The answer I was given at that time was that the American intelligence agency preferred not to arrest the man but to have him followed".
In the radio interview, he maintained that Khan was "caught in the act" by the security regime in Urenco which "reported it to the BVD (Dutch intelligence agency). The BVD reported it to its counterpart in Washington.
"The counterpart in Washington then follows a course that amounts to: let him go and we will gain more information. And that is where things start to go wrong," Lubbers said.
The Dutch newspapers, Telegraaf and NRC Handelsblad, also reported that the matter was debated in the Netherlands Parliament and that a Dutch businessman appeared before the local courts on charges of trying to supply parts for nuclear bombs to Khan.
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| CIA asked Dutch Govt not to act against AQ Khan: Report Hindustan Times, India - In a major disclosure, former Dutch Premier Ruud Lubbers has said the Netherlands government in 1975 and in 1986 had refrained from acting against disgraced ... CIA asked Dutch govt not to act against AQ Khan CIA asked Dutch govt not to act against AQ Khan: Report |
| CIA had asked Dutch Govt not to act against Abdul Qadir Khan Newindpress, India - ... DELHI: In a major disclosure, former Dutch Premier Ruud Lubbers has said ... Khan following requests from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), media reports ... |
| Dutch say CIA resisted Khan arrest ISN, Switzerland - Former prime minister Ruud Lubbers said Dutch authorities came close to arresting Khan twice, first in 1975 and later in 1986, but the CIA requested that they ... |
| ‘Dutch let Khan go at CIA’s request’ Pakistan Dawn, Pakistan - ... possibilities to continue with the proceedings against Dr Khan but the authorities again backed off at the request of the CIA, according to Mr Lubbers, who had ... |
| Why did CIA shield AQ Khan? The Tribune, India - ... According to Dr Lubbers, the CIA argued that if Dr Khan was left free they would be able to follow him and keep track of his activities in respect of the ... |
| CIA allowed nuke spy to continue CMAQ, Canada - ... Lubbers - in 1975 minister of Economy: "When asked, the CIA told us to let him just go on, and not to arrest or stop Kahn working at or visiting the Urenco ... |
| Netherlands released AQ Khan on CIA orders:- Webindia123, India - ... technicality. Lubbers, by then prime minister, said he had wanted to pursue the matter but was advised against this by the CIA. Lubbers ... |
| CIA Bailed Out AQ Khan: Ex-Dutch PM SouthAsia Network, Asia - Ruud Lubbers said the CIA had asked the Netherlands in 1975 not to prosecute Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is now dubbed the father of Pakistan's atom bomb. ... |
| Pak's N-father baled out by CIA Times of India, India - ... not deny disclosures by former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers that Dutch intelligence had Khan on its radar and wanted to prosecute him but CIA asked that ... |
| US protected Pak nuke scientist: Dutch ex-PM GG2.net, UK - ... Khan to get more information," public radio quoted Lubbers as saying. The CIA declined to comment on the remarks made by Lubbers. ... |
Berger fined $50,000 for taking documents
Indianapolis Star, United States -
Washington -- A federal judge Thursday ordered former national security adviser Sandy Berger to pay a $50,000 fine and give up his security clearance for three ...
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September 9, 2005 |
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'They Are All So Wrong' By MARK HELPRIN September 11 was not so much a discrete event as part of a continuum. It was the result of broad strategic failures that, preceding it by decades, continue to this day and are likely to continue on. It is as if the country has lost, as exemplified by the Left now out of power, a great deal of the will to self-preservation, and, as exemplified by the Right now in charge, not a little of its capacity for self-defense. Our politics and policies have somehow been parceled out to opportunists like Michael Moore -- purveyor of conspiracy theories and hatreds, whose presentation, unclean in every respect, is honored nonetheless by the controlling rump of Democrats -- and to Bushmen like "Kip" Hawley of Homeland Security, father of the proposal to allow carry-on ice-picks, bows and arrows, and knives with blades up to five-inches long. * * *![['They Are All So Wrong']](/images2/ED-AD356_helpri09082005194006.jpg)
For more than 20 years prior to September 11, Islamic terrorists imprisoned and murdered our diplomats and military personnel, destroyed our civil aviation, machine-gunned our civilians, razed our embassies, attacked an American warship and, in 1993, the U.S. itself. For varying reasons, none legitimate, we hesitated to mount an offensive against the terrorists' infrastructure, hunt them down, eliminate a single rogue regime that supported them, or properly disconcert our fatted allies whose robes they infested. This was comparable in its way to Munich. Only in 2001, when it became obvious to any rational being that we must, did we retaliate, but even then in the face of domestic pressure to judicialize the response, which was exactly what we had done all along. The underlying corollary to this reflex of appeasement is the notion that our military options are constrained financially, as if we are not a nation of stupendous wealth and it has not been the American tradition since the Civil War to spend, in support of war, with the intensity of war itself. In 1945, we devoted 38.5% of GNP to defense, the equivalent of $4.76 trillion now. The current $400 billion defense budget is a twelfth of that and only 3.2% of GDP, as opposed to the average of 5.7% of GNP in the peacetime years between 1940 and 2000. A false sense of constraint has arisen in every quarter of society. It is the ethos of the administration, the press, the civilian side of the Pentagon, and many of the prominent uniformed military brought to high rank in recent years. They are all so wrong. In violating established tradition and throwing aside advantage and elemental common sense, they waste American lives. And for what? What moral construction would allow anyone to spend more than 2,000 dead and tens of thousands of wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan -- so far -- while insisting without major exception that cutting costs is a virtue? When is holding back from one's troops at war the reinforcements, armor and basic equipment they need a virtue rather than a sin? Is it not the duty of the secretary of defense, his chiefs, and the wide array of generals to press energetically -- even to the point of resignation -- for whatever is necessary (not the minimum, but a safe surplus) to support the armies in the field? If they do not, who will? Had the president gone to Congress on September 12 and asked for almost anything, he would have been granted it. But he never did. This was a fundamental strategic error. If you must go to war, do not do so hesitantly, with half a heart. And in answer to the rationale that the casualties of this war are relatively light, one does not decently measure casualties against those of previous wars, but in terms of whether they can be avoided. Apart from the paucity of armored vehicles, body armor, and other staples of battle, the chief problem of prosecuting the Iraq war has been the size and scale of the force. Despite inaccurate claims of unprecedented speed in the advance to Baghdad, the three weeks of halting action it took to get there, with lines of supply that are to this day poorly protected, were both spur and instruction for the insurgency. In what is only apparently a paradox, the military objective should have been less the conquest of territory and echelons than of morale, and, to accomplish this, territory and echelons would have to have been subdued with the blinding speed, shock and awe of the Six-Day and Gulf wars. The instant the Arab world realized that the promised shock and awe had not materialized, the insurgency was born. We then nurtured it by deploying a fraction of the ratio (10:1) long experience indicates is necessary for suppression; by dismissing the enemy as mere "thugs," when, although they are thugs and worse, they have the thousand-year motivation of their civilization defending its heartland from Persians, Mongols, Shiites, and now Christians; and by gratuitously elevating our aims from the purely defensive to the transcendental, while steadily diluting the little power we have in the hope of forcing the entire Arab and Muslim worlds to a new politics. From a country where they have been held down in their beleaguered enclaves for two-and-a-half years, how are 140,000 soldiers to transform the highly aggressive and deeply rooted political cultures of 1.2 billion people? * * *Ceaselessly, we court strategic error. At the end of the Cold War, assuming that history had concluded, we discarded too much military power. This continues through the present, rationalized by reference to transformation. But it is yet further error to believe that military-technical evolution can make up for the kind of deficiencies and poor strategic judgments from which no machine can save an army. Continual and remarkable innovation is both indispensable and expensive, but President Clinton required budgetary choice between innovation and everything else, and his successor has yet to disagree. The root of the error that offers transformation as a substitute for so much that is crucial is the conviction that having both would exceed reasonable military expenditures and somehow break the common weal. Having made many wrong choices, we find ourselves at yet another strategic crossroads, where invisibly to the general public we are about to choose wrongly again. We are reshaping the military into a gendarmerie, configured for small wars, counterinsurgency, peacekeeping and nation-building, all at the expense of the type of force that could deter or defeat a rising China. Although we need a gendarmerie, we cannot do without heavy formations and the many additional ships required for a navy -- now less than half the size of the Reagan fleet and shrinking -- to exploit our natural advantage in the Pacific. The U.S. will chase every terrorist mouse (which is good, unless it means also neglecting the core competencies of the armed forces), while lessening and dispersing its power, and moving from previous centers of gravity (Europe, the Western Pacific) to Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East. This will create a long and open alley through which China will run. Among other things, by placing markers in every trouble spot, we will probably be tied down and distracted, taxingly and often, to our enemies' delight. When China completes its run up the broad alley we have afforded it, it will much sooner be the other pole in a once-again bipolar world, which will create the opportunity for terrorists in the guise of liberation movements to gather under its wing, as they did with the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. Ironically, in reconfiguring the military to focus primarily on terrorism, we may not only give China a great opening, but create for the terrorists a new lease on life. The war in Iraq has been poorly planned and executed from the beginning, and now, like a hurricane over warm water, the insurgency is in a position to take immense energy from the fundamental divisions in that nation. The rise of Chinese military power, although lately noted, has met with no response. America's borders are open, its cities vulnerable, its civil defense nonexistent, its armies stretched thin. We have taken only deeply inadequate steps to prepare for and forestall a viral pandemic that by the testimony of experts is a high probability and could kill scores of millions in this country alone. That we do not see relatively simple and necessary courses of action, and are not led and inspired to them, represents a catastrophic failure of leadership that bridges party lines. Perhaps this and previous administrations have had an effective policy just too difficult to comprehend because they have ingeniously sheltered it under the pretense of their incompetence. But failing that, the legacy of this generation's presidents will be promiscuous declarations and alliances, badly defined war aims, opportunities inexplicably forgone, ill-supported troops sent into the field, a country at risk without adequate civil protections, and a military shaped to fight neither the last war nor this one nor the next. Mr. Helprin, a Journal contributing editor, is Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Hillsdale College. He is the author, most recently, of "Freddy and Fredericka" (Penguin, 2005).
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