The biggest foreign policy mistake

Harry Reid said it,

"This war is a serious situation. It involves the worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country,"

How in the world did we reach a point where the Senate Majority leader would dare say such a thing with troops still in the field? Was it the biggest mistake? My guess is the answer might lie in the rice paddies.

While driving back from the store this morning I heard Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" on the radio. The song provides a clue to Harry Reid's state of mind with the verse, "I had a buddy at Khe Sahn, fighting off the Viet Cong, they're still there, he's all gone".

We've come a long way on our journey back to square one. The conventional wisdom during the late 50s and 60s was "the domino theory" wherein Soviet-style communism would slowly creep across the planet. It was a frightening concept based on what we knew about the Soviets' feelings towards human rights, dissent and religious freedom, therefore it wasn't surprising that two Democrat presidents might try to stop it, especially in light of the Cuban missile crisis. In one decade the entire thing was turned on its ear after a Republican president had taken the reigns.

Through the 90s the conventional wisdom on Iraq was just as frightening on a human rights level, but more so based on Saddam's known proclivities. Similar to Vietnam those wisdoms were based not only on well-established constructs within the intelligence establishment but also on publicly available information and the ominous spectre of 9/11. But like Vietnam, those constructs are now in process of being overturned as we've once again transitioned from Democrat to Republican legacies.

CS Monitor

One example of this colossal about-face might be Michael Scheuer, the CIA analyst who became famous in 2004 for his book "Imperial Hubris". He's a difficult study, at times coming across as fairly run-of-the-mill anti-Bush while at other times virulently anti-Clinton. History books will show him as the inventor of the CIA rendition program in the mid 90s, although the common man might dump that on Bush. He'll be better known as creating the "Bin Laden desk" at Langley.

I recently picked up his book, "Through Our Enemies Eyes", first published in 2002 but later revised in 2006. Scheuer spends a good deal of time trying to convince us we've vastly underestimated bin Laden and the pure passion within al Qaeda, making stock comparisons to American Revolutionary heroes like Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry to help describe the reverence throughout the Muslim world. This is clearly an effort to underscore the nature of AQ compared to legacy terrorists but frankly it's a lurid comparison doomed never to convince even the most backwards hick.

But the most interesting part of the book is the section on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. Here's a snippet, beginning on page 133:

In Sudan, bin Laden decided to acquire and, when possible, use chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons against Islam's enemies. Bin Laden's first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with NIF leaders, Iraq's intelligence service, and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad through its intelligence officers in Sudan, and by a Turabi-brokered June 1994 visit by Iraq's then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan's Corriere della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalists warriors."

Turabi had plans to formulate a "common strategy" with bin Laden and Iraq for subverting pro-US Arab regimes, but the meeting was a get-acquainted session where Hijazi and bin Laden developed good rapport that would "flourish" in the late 1990s.

So far, so good, as these same contacts had been confirmed by others. Hassan al-Turabi's role in bringing terror states together and the meetings between Hijazi and bin Laden in Khartoum had been reported in 1999 by Yossef Bodansky in his book "Bin Laden, the Man Who Declared War on America". It also lines up well with media reports at the time as evidenced by the Sheila MacVicar ABC news report posted on this site many times. Mr. Scheuer goes on to name Abu Hajir al-Iraqi, a longtime bin Laden aide who was arrested after the 1998 Embassy bombings and was supposedly an Iraq-AQ go-between.

Based on the length of time al-Iraqi was in custody there should have been plenty of time to get the truth out of him while he was detained in Egypt (a story in itself) but for some reason he never cracked. Scheuer doesn't mention another Iraqi, Mubarak al-Duri, who the 9/11 Commission tagged as a "WMD procurement" person for al Qaeda (who is apparently no longer a wanted man for some reason) but aside from that he seemed fairly confident at press time of an Iraqi connection to the aspirin factory in Khartoum, writing as much even after Clinton had admitted the bombing was a mistake. Perhaps it's just cocktail party trivia that Sandy Berger has never fully admitted the bombing was a mistake.

In the clear light of a stockpile-free dawn many of these previous assumptions have fluttered away like deflated party balloons. We're currently living under a shiny new veneer of conventional wisdom, which says that Saddam could never had worked with bin Laden due to diametrically opposed ideologies. Oddly enough, Scheuer has now revisited the chapters of his book and added disclaimers, one of which reads in part:

Now, however, I believe that my description and analysis of CBRN and other cooperation between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq in this section--and elsewhere in this book--is incorrect. My judgment is not based on publicly available information, but rather an extensive review of the classified information pertinent to the subject located in the files of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It's rather amazing that an intelligence professional such as Mr. Scheuer, employed by the CIA and one of the foremost experts on bin Laden in the world, could be so wrong right up to the point of our invasion. This should say something about the entire "Bush lied" meme but it tends to fall on deaf ears now. The left might counter by saying everything was based self-serving liars like Chalabi and Curveball, but if so, some within the CIA were perfectly fooled. Thing is, the meetings between Hijazi and bin Laden were not fictoids.

This strange mea culpa phenomenon has occurred across the intelligence and media universe ever since the Decider decided to remove the Butcher, but based on this statement we may never solve the riddle:

This material is not now, of course, available to the public; indeed, it seems likely that most of it will remain classified for many decades, and properly so to protect the Agency's sources and methods.

State secrets, and all. Somehow it seems Valerie Plame's name belongs in this discussion due to her role as a WMD analyst working the Iraq desk at CPD. We'll learn about it in her movie, I guess. And wasn't Joe Wilson an expert on Africa? One has to wonder why he didn't start his debunking a tad earlier.

So, if Iraq wasn't the biggest foreign policy mistake ever, what was? Vietnam, of course. That failed war bred a generation of derision and anti-Americanism and a legacy of spinelessness that factored into the decisions and stratagems of our present adversaries. It's now factoring into the conventional and political perceptions of this war, one with much more immediate threat. It's really not even close.