My respect for the political intelligence on this site has just dropped faster than the second weekend's gross of "Matrix: Revolutions", when I read compleat idiocy like this post by Robin Burk, where he takes the Feith Memo as if it was something more than the sixth-rate toilet paper subsitute it was a year ago (and still is today).

AS EVERY OTHER POLITICAL BLOG ON THE PLANET HAS ALREADY POINTED OUT 48 HOURS AGO, this is nothing but a re-hash of the baloney that moron PseudoCon Feith and his "Office of Special Plans" cherrypicked a year ago to justify the PseudoCon war in Iraq.

Hell, even the PENTAGON released a press release THIS PAST SATURDAY stating that nothing in the "classified annex" of that report was of any value!!!!!!

That "money quote" is standard-issue crap from Ahmed Chalabi, who even the Pentagon now admits couldn't find the zipper on his fly with both hands on a clear day with a 24-hour advance notice, let alone a site full of Al Qaeda terrorists or WMDs!! (Most likely because he'd be too busy using both hands to pick your pocket)

Robin Burk: can you spell "moron" the same way on three consecutive attempts??? I doubt it. You are what AL calls an "Idiotarian" if you still believe PseudoCon bullshit at this late date.

What are you, Robin, a standard-issue Generation Y-bother political illiterate???? You sure seem like it.

Tom Cleaver

My respect for the political intelligence on this site has just dropped faster than the second weekend's gross of "Matrix: Revolutions", when I read compleat idiocy like this post by Robin Burk, where he takes the Feith Memo as if it was something more than the sixth-rate toilet paper subsitute it was a year ago (and still is today).

AS EVERY OTHER POLITICAL BLOG ON THE PLANET HAS ALREADY POINTED OUT 48 HOURS AGO, this is nothing but a re-hash of the baloney that moron PseudoCon Feith and his "Office of Special Plans" cherrypicked a year ago to justify the PseudoCon war in Iraq.

Hell, even the PENTAGON released a press release THIS PAST SATURDAY stating that nothing in the "classified annex" of that report was of any value!!!!!!

That "money quote" is standard-issue crap from Ahmed Chalabi, who even the Pentagon now admits couldn't find the zipper on his fly with both hands on a clear day with a 24-hour advance notice, let alone a site full of Al Qaeda terrorists or WMDs!! (Most likely because he'd be too busy using both hands to pick your pocket)

Robin Burk: can you spell "moron" the same way on three consecutive attempts??? I doubt it. You are what AL calls an "Idiotarian" if you still believe PseudoCon bullshit at this late date.

What are you, Robin, a standard-issue Generation Y-bother political illiterate???? You sure seem like it.

Tom Cleaver

"AS EVERY OTHER POLITICAL BLOG ON THE PLANET HAS ALREADY POINTED OUT 48 HOURS AGO, this is nothing but a re-hash of the baloney that moron PseudoCon Feith and his "Office of Special Plans" cherrypicked a year ago to justify the PseudoCon war in Iraq."

I read a lot of political blogs and about 2/3 of them are not spinning it your way.

I've responded to Tom in the comments section of the second article, below.

If actually took the time to read the Pentagon statement on the subject, it states that what we are dealing with is "raw" (or "pre-spun," if you prefer) information in regards to Iraq and al-Qaeda.

More to the point, the Pentagon statement also says that only one instance of the evidence actually came from the DIA, where Chalabi and Co had the most credibility. Furthermore, Chalabi and everything he passed on to the Pentagon would not alter statements made by either Ibn Shaykh al-Libi or a "senior Iraqi intelligence officer" to US interrogators. The anti-war movement bought Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's denials of an Iraq connection hook, line, and sinker without bothering to notice that such denials are in direct contradiction of the 1998 indictment of bin Laden, which was issued long before Bush even thought of invading Iraq.

I am currently examining all of the data and trying to separate fact from fiction in this regard by comparing the information available in the memo to open source material. By Thursday I should have finished the story and plan to post it here as a special analysis for Winds of Change.

Tom-

This is generally a pretty calm and reasonable site; I often don't agree with the posts or comments I find here, but I'd like to think that I am polite in my discussion of the issues. I've also developed a respect for the intellectual integrity and good intentions of our hosts. You'll find that if you either aren't precise in your language or your facts, someone will point it out in short order; if you're rude on top of this, you're making sure nobody will listen to you.

I don't believe either that I or Douglas Feith is qualified to interpret raw intelligence, so I will withold judgement on the memo itself. I suggest you do the same, Tom.

Don't confuse the messanger with the message. Douglas Feith did not write the stuff anymore than you paperboy wrote the New York Times (Although, I was beginning to wonder ...;))

The memo has no conclusions, just data which the DoD said as much. The DoD news release said that they had not come to conclusions on the material not that it was untrue.

Of, certain people will dance out "fromer intelligence officials" who will probably say the memo is untrue, false, fattening, can cause cancer to mice and iraqis, etc. But how do we know those people are in any position to comment on it either.

And Tom, your world is much smaller than ours. That should be hint enough

regards

I'm with Tom here. If nothing else, it's a disgrace not to include with this memo any link to the [LINK] Pentagon's repudiation of it, to put it in context. And yes, if you read bureaucratese, it's a repudiation, not least because of the haste with which it was issued.

First, absolutely nothing in this memo is "new"; it's a summary of pre-existing "information". So the fact that the overall intelligence community's analysis of the Saddam/AQ connection come out at tenuous says it all. I put the scare quotes on "information" because some or all of the points might be false.

Second, Feith's reputation for analysis of intelligence isn't very high right now, given that his Office of Special Plans has been wrong on almost everything (e.g., WMD).

Third, and perhaps most significant, this "memo" is like listening to the prosecutor's side of the case only, or maybe something even weaker. If you asked the intelligence community for all of their raw intelligence on flying saucers, you would get much more than 50 points. Nevertheless, we're not living in terror of UFO attacks, and this site isn't yet endorsing the existence of space aliens (although with standards like the ones in this post, that may be temporary). It's just that the Feith memo leaves out all of the contrary information. It makes no pretense to being part of an objective analysis of the situation, which the follow-up press release from the Pentagon makes abundantly clear.

Anyone who believes that they can read the memo and "judge for themselves" is living in a fantasy. Analyzing intelligence isn't a job for amateurs, and every single one of the 50 points in Feith's memo may have a dozen other points indicating the opposite. We don't know, and that issue is smack at the center of the controversy over guys like Feith cherry picking the reports that support their views and ignoring everything else. Raw intelligence like this is worthless except to professional analysts and proves nothing.

Case "closed", my foot. Once before I caught this site calling "suspected" Al Qaeda terrorists "confirmed", but I thought that was a combination of innocent error and wishful thinking. This post isn't. It's about as honest as excerpting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Wasn't there supposed to be a report on Iraqi newspapers in this briefing? Or is it in there, and I'm just suffering from residual 'monday eyes'?

I'm with Andrew Sullivan and others on the Pentagon press release. If you read it carefully, you see that they are careful to state that this is raw intelligence.

In other words, they are clearly stating they did NOT interpret it or bias it or select the parts they wanted. THAT is the point of the Pentagon press release, IMO.

I'm not an intel analyst and people I know who might be qualified to interpret intel aren't talking, at least not to me, about the material cited in this report. But one thing I do know is this: there is never any such thing as totally unambiguous intelligence on the most pressing issues. Even things like photos taken from space need -- and have always needed -- interpretation. Humint, intelligence gathered by human agents, is often the most ambiguous.

Humint was pushed aside to some degree during the last decade+ as we developed better technical means of information gathering. That decision, like the decision after Vietnam to push important military functions to the Reserves in order to make it harder for a President to go to war, was made for a good reason. Arguably, those decisions have also unfortunately cost us in our current situation.

Some Senators demanded to know the raw intel that lay behind Feith's testimony. He provided some of that and the famous memo is an unclassified summary of that raw intel. The Pentagon simply confirmed that status, nothing more and nothing less.

I suppose I should clarify that I post comments under my usual signature of 'rkb'.

Robin Burk

"Once before I caught this site calling 'suspected' Al Qaeda terrorists 'confirmed', but I thought that was a combination of innocent error and wishful thinking."

As the individual who wrote that Iraq Report, let me point out that I acknowledged it as soon as you pointed that out and even wrote up an apology on my own blog.

"And yes, if you read bureaucratese, it's a repudiation, not least because of the haste with which it was issued."

I disagree. Nowhere in the Pentagon statement does it say that the information contained in the memo was false or inaccurate, merely that it was simply raw data and didn't draw any conclusions. As I point out in my upcoming analysis, this is even better to us from an observer's perspective because the information in question has yet to be hyped, sexed-up, ect, but the vice president's office as has been alleged by members of the anti-war camp.

"First, absolutely nothing in this memo is 'new'; it's a summary of pre-existing 'information'. So the fact that the overall intelligence community's analysis of the Saddam/AQ connection come out at tenuous says it all. I put the scare quotes on 'information' because some or all of the points might be false."

CIA Director Tenet evidently had a different opinion when he addressed Congress on emerging threats in February 2003 and restated much of the information contained within the memo, but then what does he know?

I agree with you that it isn't new information, but anybody who read the thing could tell you that. After all, the last time date that we are given in the memo refers to a "senior Iraqi intelligence officer" telling US interrogators that Iraq worked with al-Qaeda in May 2003.

More to the point, there are number of conflicts between the memo and what we know publicly about bin Laden's timeline, some of which are extremely difficult to reconcile. I address this on my analysis, but you'll have to wait till Thursday to read it.

"Second, Feith's reputation for analysis of intelligence isn't very high right now, given that his Office of Special Plans has been wrong on almost everything (e.g., WMD)."

It does not follow that just because Feith was wrong on pre-war intelligence in regard to WMDs (and the jury's still out on that one) that he therefore wrong about a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, that's a logical fallacy. More to the point, according to the Pentagon statement on the subject, only one of the analyses of the raw data contained in the memo that was leaked to the Standard even came out of the DoD to begin with.

"Third, and perhaps most significant, this "memo" is like listening to the prosecutor's side of the case only, or maybe something even weaker. If you asked the intelligence community for all of their raw intelligence on flying saucers, you would get much more than 50 points. Nevertheless, we're not living in terror of UFO attacks, and this site isn't yet endorsing the existence of space aliens (although with standards like the ones in this post, that may be temporary)."

OTOH, as I address in my analysis, a lot of the information contained within the memo fits very well with what can be confirmed from open sources ranging from 1998 to 2003. So at the very least now it would strongly appear that the raw data conforms with what we can gather from press reports years before Bush ever even thought of invading Iraq. If you can find that kind corroboration for UFOs from both US intelligence and mainstream media sources, I'd sure as heck like to see it.

"It makes no pretense to being part of an objective analysis of the situation, which the follow-up press release from the Pentagon makes abundantly clear."

Nor should we regard it as such. On the other hand, it does give us an opportunity for those of us with an open mind in regards to a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda to evaluate this evidence in connection with what we already know from mainstream media sources. More to the point, if it was an analysis those opposed to the war would seize upon as being "sexed-up," a la the British dossier, especially if it had anything remotely to do with the Neoconservative Cabal™.

"We don't know, and that issue is smack at the center of the controversy over guys like Feith cherry picking the reports that support their views and ignoring everything else. Raw intelligence like this is worthless except to professional analysts and proves nothing."

OTOH, if that raw intelligence is in line with what can already be learned in large part from press reports and various claims that form a large part of the crux of the alternative POV (like the denials by Zubaydah and KSM that you yourself cited from the Atlantic Monthly, IIRC) are in direct contradiction with items that have no relation to the war like the 1998 November indictment of bin Laden, then we can make an educated guess that perhaps it is at least possible that the raw intelligence is accurate.

George, the report on Iraqi newspapers mentioned in the Other Topics section was actually the reference to the Iraq: The Good, Bad and Ugly site. Things got moved around and that wasn't removed from the list - sorry.

Robin

First, I'd like to emphasize that Dan Darling did correct the confirmed/suspected error as soon as it was brought to his attention. I was contrasting this commendable behavior with the current post, which fails even to mention, much less quote or link, the rather significant follow-on memo from the Pentagon. Since it's evident from Comments that the author is familiar with the memo, I call that a deliberate exercise of very poor editorial judgment.

As to the Feith memo itself, I certainly do not believe that all fifty items are false. Although some of the items are probably false, my real disagreement is with the implications of whatever claims turn out to be true. I expect that Saddam had some contact with Al Qaeda; I suspect that if we were to track our own Middle Eastern intelligence assets as closely, we would find that some of them (and hence the USA) had contact with Al Qaeda. The overall judgment, based on currently available evidence, of everyone inside the government other than the Office of Special Plans is nevertheless against any sort of operational relationship.

I don't see why OSP's terrible track record in interpreting intelligence (Feith-based intelligence!) can not be held against them now. Everyone was wrong, but some, like OSP, were wronger than others. You'd change car mechanics for less.

I think my claim about the Pentagon's repudiation has been misunderstood. They are not disclaiming the contents of the memo, provided that the context for the memo, and the fact its data have neither been analyzed nor confirmed, are understood, but they most certainly are trashing the "Case Closed" headline under which the Weekly Standard ran excerpts. I think, if I've read correctly, that agrees with Dan Darling's take on it, except we are certainly choosing to emphasize different aspects of the question. The original RKB post, omitting any mention of the Pentagon memo, is a different matter.

I agree with Andrew that you owe it to your readers to post the DoD release.

I would also stress that you change the text to read something like:

"A leaked memo written by Douglas Feith of the Office of Special Plans for the Senate Intelligence Committee references raw intelligence that, if true, points to longstanding contacts and recent cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda."

I'll take some responsibility for not also linking to the Pentagon press release. Since I am not a regular contributor, I had to get my input to Joe early. I had not read the Pentagon's comments at that time.

I do, however, stand by my analysis of those comments - I think they are carefully pointing out the nature of the material and making NO claims for it otherwise.

Rumsfeld and his crew are very careful with words, especially in situations like this. So is Dr. Rice.

It's about as honest as excerpting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Andrew, that's accusing Robin of lying outright by posting a known fake. If you have evidence that the Feith memo is a czarist forgery (or any other kind of forgery) you should post it, and we'll judge for ourselves.

Otherwise retract and apologize.

Unlike their critics, eh Robin?

I wish Rumsfeld and his crew were more careful with planning, and Dr. Rice was more careful when there are mistakes to be made.

Andrew, I often agree with you, but the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was a low blow.

Robin, you say above "a leaked intelligence report details longstanding contacts and recent cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

Yet you said above "the famous memo is an unclassified summary of that raw intel."

Your original post should reflect that this is raw intel, and does not detail contacts, it details alleged contacts.

See the difference?

Praktika,

I wrote "summary of raw intel" because that's what it is. No details are given in the memo as to specific dates, source of collection or direct quotes from intercepts. What is given is a summary account of each collection. And yes, of course such accounts are alleged to be true by those who reported them. And we can of course retain our skepticism.

On the other hand, what some here have alleged is that the memo is an interpretation of intelligence, if only by omission. That itself is a misrepresentation. Feith did not compose this memo to publically argue a case. He composed it, so far as I can tell from the public accounts, to comply with a Senate request regarding the intelligence accounts that underlay his testimony from this summer. Any interpretation he may have made of these intel accounts was made prior to that testimony.

Notice that this means that the memo may include items which have since been disproven or at least for which there is countervailing information now. Dan Darling's efforts to lay this all out will be invaluable for us all. But remember the provenance of the memo - Feith was responding to a request for the data on which he depended then.

My own opinion, when I wrote the WOW post and now, is that there appear to have been sufficient detailed intelligence accounts to suggest strongly that a working connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda had been formed, months before the start of the war. None of us here, though, knows what other intelligence accounts might have been received and if they might have suggested otherwise. So none of us is in any position to judge whether that assessment was well-founded.

What we do know from this memo, I think, is what Feith and others believed to be true about Hussein's regime last Fall, namely that he had moved from passively encouraging terror networks to actively supporting al-Qaeda after 9/11.

As I wrote a few minutes ago in a comment on the second article, the question of our intelligence agencies is a huge and contentious one right now. I know what my impressions are on that topic, but like yours and those of other commenters, they remain just that - relatively uninformed impressions.

Trying to sort through all of this will be a challenge for years to come, I suspect. But we should be careful not to become so cynical that we are paralyzed. At West Point the cadets, who will be officers in places like Iraq shortly, are taught that to seek a perfect analysis on the battlefield is to become dead quickly. We should and must hold our leaders to account for the judgements they make. But it is a huge mistake to insist that they always be correct and that no action be taken - in the face of serious threats - until perfect information has been achieved.

You're right, comparing Robin's post to a known forgery was unfair. I got caught up in my own hyperbole, and I retract and apologize for that.

I certainly do not retract that (1) the original post's failure to make any mention of the Pentagon's contextualization of Feith's work was improper and (2) Feith's prior history of drawing erroneous conclusions fitting his pro-war beliefs founded in credulous belief in raw intelligence that turns out to be mistaken (even faked) suggests taking his new work at a heavy discount to truth. It's very frustrating for us anti-war types to realize that 20% of Americans believe not only that we found WMD in Iraq but that they were used against American troops during the war. We can hardly expect to win the battle over policy when we are losing the battle over reality.

Two very good liberal hawk statements on the Feith Memo are Josh Marshall HERE and David Adesnik HERE, search for "SHOE TO DROP"

(I was watching Fox News Sunday this morning and saw Fred Barnes --- Executive Editor of the Standard --- go almost apoplectic about how devastating and case-closing a piece it is.)

[snip]And Feith set up his own intelligence shop at the Pentagon to review all the raw data and find what the CIA and others had missed, misinterpreted or buried.

They came up with a raft of purported connections between Saddam and al Qaida. But when they presented their findings to professional analysts in the rest of the Intelligence Community, most notably at the CIA, the consensus was that those findings didn't pass the laugh-test.

[snip]With the exception of some tidbits from interviews with Iraqis now in custody, this is, to all appearances, the same bill of particulars that Feith's shop put together in 2002 and which was panned by the analysts in the rest of the Intel community.

[snip] More to the point, there's now a record. These are the folks, remember, who had the most outlandish reads on the extent of Iraq's WMD capacities and the most roseate predictions about the ease of the post-war reconstruction. So their record of interpreting raw intelligence is, shall we say, objectively poor.

I'd like to believe that such a connection [Saddam/AQ –AJL]existed, but for the moment I'm not buying it.

Something just seems wrong. Why has the information turned up now? Why would the White House sit on information that would vindicate its decision to invade Iraq? [snip] Another set of concerns are raised by Matt Yglesias. The information in question is contained in a memo from Doug Feith's office at the Pentagon. Given Feith's connection to the controversial Office of Special Plans (OSP), one has to wonder. Even if you don't accept Matt's premise that the OSP is an operations center for partisan hacks intent on distorting the intelligence process, it is fair to ask why this memo didn't come from a source with greater public credibility.

You know, Andrew, I think I'd be more skeptical if this memo had come from somewhere other than OSP. In that case, it would have been written for public consumption.

Keep in mind the fact that this was a response to a specific request from the Senate to Feith! Where else would it have come from than OSP?

I understand your point, though. OSP is controversial because it bypasses established agencies. Some believe that's because Cheney & Rumsfeld wanted to distort intelligence and politicize it. Others think that's because the existing agencies already were hopelessly politicized and had proven themselves incompetant, especially for humint (human-collected intelligence, i.e. spy work).

As I said below, I have my own suspicions on the matter but the only people who know for sure aren't posting on this list. :-)

rkb:

But "summary of raw intel" was in the comments, not in the thread.

If we're looking for links to Al Qaeda in the region, they're everywhere--Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran...Iraq is on the bottom of the list.

Regardless, this is all a sideshow. The real reason we're in Iraq is to effect the grand strategic realignment of the Middle East. And that's what's really worth debating.

Robin, perhaps I am wrong, but I don't believe the Intelligence Committee asked Feith specifically for anything. The Pentagon memo says that the request for information was given to the "Department", which I think in context means DoD in the whole. Feith was allowed to include his memo as an annex to the report, to present his office's (minority?) view, and which was then leaked (despite the classified status) to provide partisan hacks with fodder for inaccurate triumphalist editorials.

Several outlets, including the New York Post, The Washington Times and FOX News, ran with the story. There was just one problem: On Saturday, the Pentagon issued a press release stating that "news reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq ... are inaccurate."

Despite this, the New York Post on Monday titled its editorial on the subject: "Bush Was Right."

No, I'm wrong, I see that the Cmte did ask Feith specifically. The Pentagon is actually emphasizing that, I guess as a way of disassociating themselves from any conclusions one might draw from it.

As to the leak, my point stands. (Indeed, I'd say it's self-evident.)

Hmmm ... the Pentagon denied there was new information in the memo. That doesn't suggest disassociating themselves from Feith to me. Quite the opposite, it means that Feith wasn't providing new claims here -- that in fact, what is in the memo is what was believed and acted upon back in July.

Again, remember that the memo was written for the committee. No doubt it's leak was intentional, as leaks tend to be -- but first and foremost it was written in response to the committee's demand for the intel that Feith referred to in his testimony months ago.

Friends, I find many intelligent, thoughtful posts here and seek only to add a small proviso:

From first-hand experience gathering US intelligence on mountain-tops just on the south side of the North Korean DMZ, AND from work as a Traffic Analyst, it becomes clear that meaningful intelligence IS a collection of threads, any one or two of which might justifiably be disregarded.

Yet when taken in the aggregate, they weave a startlingly clear picture of what we're examining, be it the xenophobic Stalinist NorKs or the brutal Saddamite regime.

Even peremptory study of the human brain reveals two hemispheres, the logical male left and the holistic female right. They have DIFFERENT functions, and logic does not, nay cannot, apply to the right-brain. It understands in a holistic manner, glomming or grokking or GETTING it all, from what was said, and NOT said, and the speed of its saying and from its context and from the body language and the nuances and the idioms and the pauses and the mistakes made in saying it...

Then the left-brain gets ahold of it and seeks to apply logic, ideation, seriation and hard reason to the package. "What's the bottom line?"

But good intel is an artful science, a scientific art, which mixes and respects BOTH processes to arrive at valuable intelligence based on existing human reality.

I urge us all to respect the fuzzy and at times irritatingly indeterminate nature of intelligence, even at the national level. I've been there, done that, and its REALLY DIFFICULT to walk even one mile in those shoes, Folks...

Never mind Cleaver. He is an idiot and a child molester. People like him are the reason we have Miranda laws

I would add to Sharpshooter's post that having a "Team B" look at intelligence, and come to different conclusions that the intel community disagrees with, is not unusual.

As Pejman noted in his Reagan tribute (linked here a while ago), that was the exact state of affairs vis-a-vis the Soviet Union under Reagan. "Team B", even with the Director of the CIA running cover, took a huge amount of flak and had all kinds of people in the intel community and State saying they were crazy.

Except that they turned out, in the end, to be right.

The truth about intelligence is that it is almost never definitive, and pieces of it (and sometimes the whole picture) are usually flat wrong. Sometimes the "Team Bs" of the world will get that big picture right, and act as a proper corrective. Sometimes they won't, because they too are human. You're always going to be acting on partial information - and you have to act anyway.

And then acting creates new information (vid. Saddam's massive trove of archives, the more massive declassified Soviet archives, etc.), and the picture changes again.

This is confusing to outside observers, but entirely normal. What's left, therefore, in a shadow/intel war like The First Terrorist War is will and determination to confront hostility at both the state and non-state levels, and destroy their will and capability to wage the war the Islamists have been fighting for over 20 years now. A point Armed Liberal has returned to often.

The ongoing argument I have with Andrew is more basic: I believe that his response in advance of a clearly labelled attack is inevitably academic/legalistic inaction, or fig leaves like asking the Saudis and Iranians nicely, and then pretending they're doing something about the problem while they in fact stoke the fires.

I think that's a deadly approach in the international 'hood. I also think that if that's the preferred approach when dealing with anyone above failed state status, then debates on the intel are pretty much beside the point.

Like Andrew, I would support action in related but side-show places like Sudan. Unlike Andrew, I believe the USA has bigger fish to fry if it wants to make a difference right now. I don't know if Andrew believes in expanding the military to allow it to take on stuff like Sudan, so I can't compare. I do, but I'll also mention that if this international cooperation we hear about is so valuable, why hasn't anyone who is supposed to be so helpful done anything of use in Sudan - and what does that say about their will and their value elsewhere?

My conclusions on those subjects are a matter of record. They are part of the reason why I believe this will be a long and difficult war.

Still, I believe it's one worth waging. Preferably with allies who will join and contribute in a serious way, as many have. But, as the man said... "If necessary, for years. If necessary, alone."

As Newsweek’s Farred Zakaria, a moderately conservative war supporter, has observed, “In retrospect, Team B’s conclusions were wildly off the mark.” It argued, for instance, that back in 1976, the Soviets enjoyed "a large and expanding Gross National Product." It credited them with double the number Backfire bombers the nation could actually produce. It turns out that even the CIA’s much pilloried estimates for Soviet military capabilities were far too generous. Sounding very much as if he were talking about Iraqi WMD capabilities 30 years later, Rumsfeld claimed, “No doubt exists about the capabilities of the Soviet armed forces."

In fact, in 1989 the agency admitted that, contrary to the Team B analysis, it had "substantially overestimated" the Soviet threat in almost every aspect.

So, they were right that the USSR was not a nice place? OK, conceded. In terms of tangible military intelligence, the discovered nothing. Earth to conservatives, come in please…

5497 http://www.e-roulette.info

8598 http://www.e-roulette.info

6241 http://www.e-roulette.info