A Twin Wars Update: Crisis, What Crisis?

Chuck Hagel is the first prominent Republican to come right out and say what many fear.

US troops are "losing" the Iraq war, and that "things aren't getting better, they're getting worse."

"The White House is completely disconnected from reality," said Hagel. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq," said Hagel, who added that increasingly, fellow Republicans are coming to share his view.

John McCain, the number two Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and Joe Biden, the number one Democrat on the same committee don't think it's quite that bad, but both agree that the Bush House is being 'economical with the truth' (that's a Brit euphemism for lying by ommission).

"I think we should tell people it's not going to be short," McCain said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"I'd rather say two or three years and be surprised a year from now than say everything's fine and then be disappointed a year or two from now," he said.

Biden was asked on CBS's "Face the Nation" if the administration has been telling Americans the truth about the situation in Iraq. He said, "No, they're not telling the truth. ... I think the American people know how tough this is going to be."

"I think the American people, if you lay out a plan and tell them the truth about how hard it's going to be, and why you think it's important, they'll stick," said Biden, who recently visited Iraq for the fifth time.

"I think the administration figures they've got to paint a rosy picture in order to keep the American people in the game. And the exact opposite is happening," said Biden.

So why such pessimism? After all, the Vice President says insurgency is in its ''last throes" and President Bush says he will settle for "nothing less than victory".

Well, maybe it was his admission when he said in a recent speech that:

Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror.

Catch that? "Now made", i.e. Iraq was not a central front in the war on terror before the invasion.

Or maybe it's reports like that from Leslie Gelb, a former Pentagon official, journalist, and president of the Council on Foreign Relations:

a man with considerable political and military knowledge, [who] came back from a fact-finding trip in Iraq talking about the ''gap between those who work there, who were really careful of every word they uttered of prediction or analysis, and the expansive, sometimes, I think, totally unrealistic optimism you hear from people back in Washington."
In a report to the council, Gelb was scathing about America efforts to train an Iraqi army. ''If you ask any Iraqi leader, they will tell you these people can't fight. They just aren't trained. And yet we're cranking them out like rabbits." As for plans to train a 10 division Iraqi army by next year, Gelb was scathing. ''It became very apparent to me that these 10 divisions were to fight some future war against Iran. It had nothing to do, nothing to do," with taking Iraq over from the Americans and fighting the insurgents.

Or maybe it's the fact that the US Army recruiters have failed to meet their targets for four straight months, beginning in February, and have just four months before their fiscal year ends Sept. 30 to sign up almost half of their annual 80,000 goal. Military.com repeats a report from the Miami Herald that in trying to keep pace with the shortfall, the Army is dropping standards; a policy queerly at odds with the objective of creating a streamlined high-tech force for the war on terror.

Creating that force "will require more ability and more competence, not less, for the soldier in tomorrow's Army," said retired Lt. Gen. Marc Cisneros of Corpus Christi, Texas.
"More troubling to me is the fact that lowering standards impacts on a moral issue," Cisneros said. "If young people aren't enlisting, that tells me we are not doing the right thing over there [in Iraq]. If our leaders can't see that, the damage will go deeper than it did in Vietnam."

Or maybe it's because top officers like Joint Chief's head-honcho Gen. Richard B. Myers are pessimistic, saying that the insurgency is as strong as it was a year ago and that Iraq-style insurgencies commonly last 7 to 12 years. Or like Richard C. Clarke, a national security advisor to three Presidents who writes that the "American military has been seriously damaged" by the adventure in Iraq :

With almost every unit in the Army on the conveyor belt into and out of Iraq, few units are really combat-ready for other missions. If the North Korean regime that is often called crazy were to roll its huge army the few kilometers into South Korea, significant American reinforcements would be a long time coming. This raises the possibility that the United States may have to resort to nuclear weapons to stop the North Koreans, as has been contemplated with increasing seriousness since the last Nuclear Posture Review in 2002.

Or maybe it's the evidence that invading Iraq has hurt the war on terror, partly because it led to some truly awful choices of allies. U.S. counter-terrorism authorities say that the detention of a Lodi, Calif.-based group of Pakistani men this month underscores a serious problem: the Islamabad government's failure to dismantle hundreds of jihadist training camps.

"There is tremendous overlap, and that is the problem, between Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Pakistani authorities and the Kashmiri groups," said [Bruce Hoffman, a chairman of the Rand Corp. and a counter-terrorism consultant to the U.S. government] , who has observed the Pakistani militant groups for decades. "The overt connections may have been broken but there are wheels within wheels, and who the group actually is affiliated with is hard to tell."

Hoffman and several U.S. officials said the groups frequently splinter and re-form, but that increasingly, "it doesn't matter which group they join because they are all feeders to each other [and many have] bought in completely to Bin Laden's ideology" of waging war against the United States and its allies.

Some of us have believed that Musharraf of Pakistan has being playing a double-bluff the whole time in an attempt to hang on to power.

Or maybe it's the way Osama BinLaden is still at large even if the CIA knows where he is, as Porter Goss revealed in a recent Time interview:

WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN? That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.

IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA OF WHERE HE IS. WHERE? I have an excellent idea of where he is. What's the next question?

Anyone want to guess which "sovereign state" is posing such a blockage to killing Osama? Spell it with me - P...A..K..I...

Or it could be the FBI's utter failure to treat terrorism as a special case, instead treating it just like any other crime. Ummm...remember John Kerry getting a hard time for suggesting exactly that last year? Well, sworn testimony from top FBI officials is downright scary:

"A bombing case is a bombing case," said Dale Watson, the FBI's terrorism chief in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001. "A crime scene in a bank robbery case is the same as a crime scene, you know, across the board."

The FBI's current terror-fighting chief, Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald, said his first terrorism training came "on the job" when he moved to headquarters to oversee anti-terrorism strategy two years ago.

Asked about his grasp of Middle Eastern culture and history, Bald responded: "I wish that I had it. It would be nice."

"You need leadership. You don't need subject matter expertise," Bald testified in an ongoing FBI employment case. "It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an official for a position in a counterterrorism position."

Or maybe it is all of the above, and much, much more besides. Chuck Hagel may be wrong when he describes this administration's policy as "disconnected from reality", which would mean they are criminally incompetent.

The only other possibility is that they are deliberately saying one thing while doing another, which would make them criminal liars.