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Observer Comment Extra: Weapons of Mass Distraction

President Bush wouldn't want to talk about the many issues which the Iraq crisis is obscuring

Sunday September 29, 2002
By Dan Plesch



Dan Plesch is author of 'Sheriff and Outlaws in the Global Village' and Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (http://www.rusi.org/. He writes a monthly online commentary for Observer Worldview -- you can read his previous pieces here. Additional research by Avnish Patel



Having failed to give priority to tackling Al Qaeda and rejected advice to do so, the Administration then failed twice to conduct competent military operations against the Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership.

Just talking about invading Iraq has a very useful effect for President Bush. It stops a public debate about his catastrophic record as President. Indeed, had President Clinton or any Democrat a similar record, impeachment would already be underway.

Leave to one side President Bush's much discussed habit of walking away from international agreements and his willful introduction of anarchy into international security. Take instead what might be central Republican tests of this administration. The President doing in the war on terrorism or the war on drugs? He would be judged on the United States' economic performance and the health of the stock market, and might be expected to uphold the financial probity of US capitalism. Yet, in all of these areas, the President's record is one of failure.

President Bush and his officials failed to give adequate priority to Al Qaeda despite much advice that they should do so. In waging the war on Afghanistan, they made several tactical blunders that allowed the enemy leaders to escape. They have not yet accounted for these errors.

The administration had plenty of advice about Al-Qaeda. In January 2001, the outgoing National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, personally briefs Condeleeza Rice, his replacement, on a plan to stop Al Qaeda. Rice merely starts a slow process of policy review. Meanwhile various parts of the intelligence community are pushing the ideas of attacks with aircraft and terrorists engaging in flight training in the US.

These include the plan foiled by the French to fly a hijacked jet into the Eiffel Tower and the plot in the Philippines to hijack 11 passenger planes simultaneously over the Pacific as well as the now famous 'Phoenix memo' from an FBI agent warning of terrorist flight training. In response to these pushes, there is no equivalent 'pull' from the top of the administration looking for and drawing in this intelligence. The US Congress decided last week to appoint an independent commission looking into failures leading up to 9/11. In my view, a Gore administration which had failed to act would already have been drummed out of office.
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2002 Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited.

Dan