The Bush administration and Republicans in general have made national security their defining theme since 911, but as is so often the case, the record belies the rhetoric. On almost every front — foreign policy, the military, intelligence, even security related domestic issues such as the deficit — the administration have damaged the country’s security, sometimes in ways that may take a generation to repair.

Since 911, the administration have corrupted our intelligence agencies; led the country into a ruinous war on false pretenses; added nearly $2 trillion to the national debt (and counting); increased the trade deficit; increased the poverty rate; emasculated critically important federal agencies (such as FEMA); slighted our allies abroad; broken a variety of international laws; and, on at least two occasions, compromised our own and other countries’ security by leaking the identities of secret intelligence assets for purely political reasons.

Before 911, the administration downplayed the threat posed by terrorists opposed to the US: counterterrorism efforts didn’t make John Ashcroft’s list of top priorities for the Justice Department and the FBI, and he refused requests for counterrorism budget increases; the position of counterterrorism “czar” was downgraded from a cabinet-level office; the administration failed to respond to alarm bells at the CIA and elsewhere regarding terrorist threats; a counterterrorism group led by Dick Cheney first met only a week before 911; and, of course, there’s the famous “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” presidential intelligence brief described by Condi Rice as a “historical document.”

In recent weeks the administration’s national security record has been hammered by critics, including many Republicans, and by their own behavior. Brent Scowcroft, the national security advisor to both Gerald Ford and the current president’s father but an exile from the inner circle of informal advisors to the current White House occupants, expressed his dissatisfaction with the administration’s foreign policy, and in particular the adventure in Iraq, during interviews for a profile in the current issue of the New Yorker.

When I asked Scowcroft if the son [George W. Bush]was different from the father, he said, “I don’t want to go there,” but his dissatisfaction with the son’s agenda could not have been clearer. When I asked him to name issues on which he agrees with the younger Bush, he said, “Afghanistan.” He paused for twelve seconds. Finally, he said, “I think we’re doing well on Europe,” and left it at that.

The disintegrating relationship between Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice has not escaped the notice of their colleagues from the first Bush Administration. She was a political-science professor at Stanford when, in 1989, Scowcroft hired her to serve as a Soviet expert on the National Security Council. Scowcroft found her bright—“brighter than I was”—and personable, and he brought her all the way inside, to the Bush family circle. When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. “She said, ‘How could you do this to us?’ ” a Scowcroft friend recalled. “What bothered Brent more than Condi yelling at him was the fact that here she is, the national-security adviser, and she’s not interested in hearing what a former national-security adviser had to say.”

Scowcroft’s reptilian approach to foreign policy carries its own internal hazards: neither he nor his realpolitik mentor, Henry Kissinger, hesitated to support Indonesia’s genocidal incursion into East Timor under the leadership of General Suharto, during which more than 200,000 East Timorese were killed — Suharto’s reliably anti-communist military and security forces relieved some 750,000 Indonesians of their lives — and his qualms about Iraq have no foundation in respect for international law, which he cheerfully contravened during the invasion of Panama and the seizure of Manuel Noriega.

So it’s a tough call whether Scowcroft’s “realism,” which led to the support of regimes such as Suharto’s and other dictatorial human rights abuse factories is less morally bankrupt than the Bush administration’s blinkered, homicidal “idealism,” which combines tolerance for dictatorial allies with an unabashed willingness to kill large numbers of foreigners in the name of an increasingly ill defined democracy. But where the invasion of Iraq is concerned, Scowcroft’s instincts were dead on, as demonstrated by the August 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal op-ed article that so irritated Condi Rice.

But the central point is that any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism. Worse, there is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time. So long as that sentiment persists, it would require the U.S. to pursue a virtual go-it-alone strategy against Iraq, making any military operations correspondingly more difficult and expensive. The most serious cost, however, would be to the war on terrorism. Ignoring that clear sentiment would result in a serious degradation in international cooperation with us against terrorism. And make no mistake, we simply cannot win that war without enthusiastic international cooperation, especially on intelligence.

One of Scowcroft’s points — one which has been made repeatedly by any number of critics inside the administration and out — is that Bush has insulated himself against dissenting opinions and allowed the strongest personalities in his administration to suppress debate and dominate his foreign policy agenda in a fashion profoundly inimical to the national interest. One such example of a voice in the wilderness is former Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, whose pre-invasion estimate that the successful occupation of Iraq would require “several hundred thousand” troops effectively ended his career. Another is former chief economic aide Lawrence Lindsay, whose pre-invasion estimate the war could cost as much as $200 billion, in retrospect a conservative forecast, resulted in a quick exit to the private sector. And there have been others as well.

Most recently, the top aide to former secretary of state Colin Powell has taken aim at the administration’s broken foreign policy process and at their fondness for institutionalized torture, both of which have contributed separately and in conjunction to the erosion of our country’s image and security. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff, has accused vice president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Don Rumsfeld of constituting a cabal that essentially hijacked US foreign policy after 911. And he says that the administration’s decision to violate international law — not to mention every precept this country supposedly holds dear — originated within Cheney’s office and percolated down from Don Rumsfeld through the military.

What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president’s office, began to create an environment — and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer, was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions. Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view, what we’ve seen.

I’m privy to the paperwork, both classified and unclassified, that the secretary of State asked me to assemble on how this all got started, what the audit trail was, and when I began to assemble this paperwork, which I no longer have access to, it was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of Defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms — I’ll give you that — that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We’re not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here’s some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.

Tortured Intelligence

Aside from demonstrating the gulf between the administration’s rhetoric on human rights and their actual attitude, torture appears to have played a large role in providing them with one of the major bogus intelligence items used to market the invasion.

When the administration began touting a Saddam-al Qaeda link in 2002, claiming they had evidence Iraq was training al Qaeda followers to use banned weapons, their primary source was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda leader captured in Pakistan not long after 911. Originally held by the FBI, al-Libi was transferred to CIA custody at the personal request of CIA director George Tenet, after which he was flown to Egypt and tortured into producing the bogus Iraq-al Qaeda claims, which were quickly recognized as fabrications by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The [declassified DIA] document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers” in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible” evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.”

For those keeping score, the Cincinnati speech was the one from which CIA director Tenet insisted references to Iraq purchasing uranium from Niger be removed. That latter claim, of course, ultimately made its way into the 2003 State of the Union speech and was renounced by the White House immediately after Valerie Plame’s husband wrote a New York Times op-ed article disputing it and accusing the administration of deliberately twisting pre-invasion intelligence.

Al-Libi’s claims also made their way into Colin Powell’s breathless February, 2003, address to the United Nations security council, more than 11 months after the DIA labeled them not credible.

Despite the evidence that torture produces unreliable intelligence and does damage to US credibility, influence and image that far outweighs any presumed benefits, the White House, and in particular Dick Cheney, continue to argue in favor of including torture and other violations of US and international law in their arsenal.

Tortured Image

Effective counterterrorism efforts require support, or at least the lack of active resistance, from the populations among which terrorists find cover. The exposure of US attempts to find a legal basis for torture in contravention of international law, and the (literally) graphic examples of the resulting actions by US personnel have created the accurate perception that where human rights are concerned, US actions and attitudes are often completely at odds with US rhetoric. Al-Libi’s case, for instance, reflects not only our government’s willingness to countenance torture but also highlights the CIA practice of “extraordinary rendition,” in which prisoners held by the agency are transferred to third countries — Egypt, for al-Libi — where torture is an accepted interrogation technique.

Extraordinary rendition made an extraordinary splash outside the US earlier this year when a large number of CIA agents were charged by Italian authorities with kidnapping a Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan, from where he was flown to Cairo and subjected to serious abuse. Authorities in Sweden and Germany are also investigating instances in which the CIA snatched residents or citizens of those countries.

Those and other American missteps and atrocities are a public diplomacy nightmare for the US, a propaganda bonanza for anti-US terrorists and governments and a threat to cooperation among US and foreign intelligence agencies. For elected governments responsible to electorates whose sensibilities may be more fastidious about torture, kidnapping and preventive wars than is ours, diplomatic cooperation with the US on controversial issues poses increasing risks. For people living in areas of the world where animosity toward the US traditionally runs higher than elsewhere, the much-publicized Abu Ghraib photos and news of other US actions running counter to our human rights and democracy rhetoric make at least passive cooperation with terrorists more likely, and immeasurably increase the difficulty of improving the US image in those regions enough to transform that passive cooperation with terrorists into active opposition to them.

Public diplomacy experts say that perhaps 80% of the negative reactions to the US overseas arise directly from US policies. That leaves public diplomacy practitioners with the difficult task of trying to either explain the virtues of US policies, which is probably impossible with respect to our inexplicable support for torture and extrajudicial activities such as kidnapping people and “rendering” them, and creating the kinds of cultural and academic exchange programs that led to US popularity in previous decades by exporting American values rather more peacefully, in the person of foreigners who came here for education, for athletic training and for arts and other cultural experiences, and then brought their largely favorable impressions of this country home to their own countries.

Unfortunately, the crackdown on education visas and exchange programs since 911 has put a serious damper on those sorts of opportunities, and the Bush administration have yet to demonstrate a serious interest in public diplomacy: although Bush confidante Karen Hughes was recently confirmed as undersecretary of state for that effort, more than six months lapsed between the announcement of her appointment and her assumption of duties; prior to that, the administration had left the position open for much of their tenure. Hughes has received mostly negative reviews to this point, in part because she brings little expertise to the job and in part because objections to US policies aren’t based on minsunderstandings of them but rather a profound antipathy to them, and there’s little she can do about that even if she knew what she was doing.

By accident in some instances and by indifference or malevolence in others, then, the Bush administration have created a climate in which anti-Americanism flourishes and which carries with it increased risk of terrorism, while at the same time making cooperation at the government level more difficult for our allies. (For more on public diplomacy, visit the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy.)

Lips So Loose You Could Use Them for Sails

The Bush administration has a reputation for being extraordinarily tight-lipped by Washington standards. The reputation is overblown — unauthorized leaks threatened to turn the city back into a swamp during the runup to the Iraq invasion, although great chunks of the national press appeared not to notice — but there’s no doubt that the arts of managed leaking and secrecy have reached a post-Watergate apogee under Bush: we hear what we’re supposed to hear, and we hear it through the medium of highly-placed anonymous sources who meet with intrepid reporters at clandestine Washington dinners and cocktail parties or, if you’re Scooter Libby and Judith Miller, over a two hour breakfast at the St. Regis hotel. And we don’t hear what we should hear, such as the composition of Dick Cheney’s energy task force, because the administration go to court or stonewall to avoid producing that sort of information.

But on at least two occasions, top administration officials deliberately leaked information we should never have heard. On both occasions the impetus for the leaks was political, and on both occasions the leaks overtly threatened our national security. The leak with which most people are familiar is the one detailed in this relatively terse document, in which the indictments against former Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby in connection with his outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson are laid out.

Unless another administration official finds cause to leak the damage assessment, we’ll never know the full extent of the damage done by Libby, Karl Rove and whoever else was involved in outing Plame. According to former CIA agent Larry Johnson and others, it will have been considerable.

Training agents such as Plame, 40, costs millions of dollars and requires the time-consuming establishment of elaborate fictions, called “legends,” including in this case the creation of a CIA front company that helped lend plausibility to her trips overseas.

Compounding the damage, the front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, whose name has been reported previously, apparently also was used by other CIA officers whose work now could be at risk, according to Vince Cannistraro, formerly the agency’s chief of counterterrorism operations and analysis.

Now, Plame’s career as a covert operations officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations is over. Those she dealt with - whether on business or not - may be in danger. The DO is conducting an extensive damage assessment.

And Plame’s exposure may make it harder for American spies to convince foreigners to share important secrets with them, U.S. intelligence officials said.

Damaging as it was, the Plame leak may not have been the worst deliberate breach of national security authored by Bush administration officials. In August of last year, someone in the administration leaked the name of an active al Qaeda informant to reporters at the New York Times in an effort to quell doubts about the validity of a terror alert based in part on information obtained from the informant. British and Pakistani officials, who were using the informant until the day his name appeared in The Times, were furious: the leak disrupted a British investigation into a terror cell there that may have included some of the men involved in the London Tube bombings, and of course foreclosed the possibility of future intelligence from the informant.

One expects these sorts of activities from the likes of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, not from the upper echelons of the White House.

The Mother of All Blunders

Iraq is the Pandora’s Box from which virtually all of our post-911 national security threats spring. Retired General William Odom, the National Security Agency director during the Reagan administration and now a resident scholar at the conservative Hudson Institute, recently called Iraq “the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history,” and expanded on the theme in a Nieman Watchdog article. Odom’s arguments, which he and many others advanced before the invasion, include:

While Iraq had no ties to al Qaeda prior to the invasion, it has now become a live-fire urban terror training ground for al Qaeda sympathizers, who are taking their expertise back to their own and other countries;

The invasion has benefited no country more than Iran;

We’re in the process of creating an Islamic state, not the free market, Israel-friendly democracy fantasized by the architects of the war;

pace Eric Shinseki and his ill-fated attempt to warn the administration off attempting to occupy Iraq with too few troops, the US Army is not equipped and never will be to successfully occupy the country.

The invasion of Iraq has crippled the US military and made it unavailable to handle any other major crisis that might arise. In the third year of the war, the Pentagon is still unable to meet the demands for body armor and up-armored vehicles. Recruiting rates are down for both the National Guard and the Army. The private armies roaming Iraq are luring soldiers from some of the military’s most elite Special Forces units, creating a deadly experience gap in crucial areas that impact not only the war in Iraq but any future conflicts as well. The Army is cannibalizing its training units to bolster troop strength in Iraq, thereby degrading the training available to other troops headed into the war.

The damage done to the National Guard affects not only, or perhaps even not primarily, our ability to fight wars: the absence of National Guard troops and equipment played a role in the inability of state and federal agencies to respond when Katrina flattened the Gulf coast.

Aside from the physical damage to the Army, which will take years and many billions of dollars to repair, the war has highlighted the limits of American military power. While no one doubts the US maintains the strongest and most deadly forces in the world, it is now clear that we cannot fight and win an unconventional ground war, which is the only kind of war any sane country would undertake against us.

It is Iraq that has broken this country’s credibility on intelligence matters, both domestically and abroad. When the president, the vice president and the secretaries of state and defense repeatedly make assertions that are either ridiculous on their face or hotly disputed , our ability to persuade allies that we know what we’re doing suffers an enormous blow. If circumstances arise in which military action is genuinely necessary, mustering domestic and overseas support will be decidedly more difficult.

And it is Iraq that has demonstrated what should have been evident from the start: wars beget war crimes that inevitably become public; if we’re to undertake a war, we need to prepare in advance for the damage to our image abroad and our national psyche at home. With luck we’ll never again be saddled with an administration so determined to violate domestic and international law, but there never has been and never will be a war without atrocities. And with luck we will not have so desensitized the nation to the horrors of war, and of institutionalized torture, that those issues are off the table in any future debate.

Our inability to put Iraq together after we blew it up looms extremely large on the public diplomacy front. 30 months after the invasion, power, water and health care are all in shorter supply throughout much of the country than before the invasion. Oil production is down as well, and the problems are due to the botched occupation and what the New York Times describes, rightly, as a reconstruction regime that has gone “sometimes astonishingly” awry. Many Iraqis and much of the rest of the world simply cannot believe that the US is incapable of doing better, and assume that the incompetence on parade must therefore be deliberate. Given the historic corruption of Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, which misplaced more than $10 billion in Iraqi funds and oil revenues, the assumption, although based on inflated regard for American capabilities, seems reasonable: how could Americans be so perfectly inept?

The war has also affected our financial security, contributing to the massive deficits and the nearly 33% growth in the national debt run up by the administration and the drunken sailor pod people who inhabit the fiscally conservative Republican Congress, leaving us ever more vulnerable to the countries who own our debt, principally China and Japan. One of the primary goals of the neoconservatives coming into power was preventing the emergence of alliances or single countries which could challenge our economic and military preeminence; far from achieving that goal, we’ve sold ourselves to those very entities.

Perhaps the only arenas in which Iraq hasn’t affected our domestic security are those of poverty and health care, which burden the economy in a number of ways: both are getting worse, but they would have regardless because the administration aren’t interested in addressing them.

Can We Fix It?

Iraq may not be fixable. Blowing something up is a lot easier than putting it back together. The best solution may well be to leave, let the Iraqis sort themselves out and provide the eventual government with the expertise and money to put their own country back together in whatever fashion most appeals to them. The alternative is to simply do what we’ve been doing and hope the situation improves, a strategy that is, as any number of people have pointed out, among the definitions of insanity.

The other problems — fashioning an effective public diplomacy program, regaining the trust of our allies, rejecting torture and war crimes, reestablishing the integrity of our intelligence services, returning some sanity to our domestic spending policies, reconstituting the military, and etcetera — are remediable. They all arise from the same source: the Bush administration and their irresponsible allies in Congress.

John Dean once described the Watergate scandal as a cancer growing on the presidency. This presidency is a cancer growing on America. Excise it, and we’ll be on the way to recovery.

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Sources:

Office of the Public Debt
National Debt Clock
Global Policy Forum, “International Law Aspects of the Iraq War and Occupation”
Center for American Progress, “Condoleezza Rice’s Credibility Gap”
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New Yorker Profile of Brent Scowcroft, “Breaking Ranks”
Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Saddam,” August 15, 2002
Jonathan Alter, “The Price of Loyalty,” Nov. 7, 2005
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