Terror Talk Over Dinner

26 September 2006 |permalink | email article

Three presidents - Bush, Musharraf and Karzai – discuss Iraq, Osama bin Laden and the war on terror over dinner at the White House. It’s too bad C-SPAN won’t have a camera in the room to memorialize a moment of truth among so-called “allies.”

For starters, the mini-summit comes at a crucial time for a defensive Bush and in the wake of the release of portions of a classified report by 16 government agencies that blames the war in Iraq for worsening the global terrorist threat.

An angry president, calling it a distortion, said the leak was intended to affect the upcoming midterm elections and ordered other partial portions of the report released.

Unfortunately for the administration, the new material does almost nothing to soften the earlier information, basically saying that that the global jihadist movement is growing and being fueled by the war in Iraq even as it becomes decentralized, making it harder to prevent attacks and identify potential terrorists. 

Bush’s reaction is incomprehensible, considering that no foreign terrorists where in Iraq before the U.S. intervention: “My judgment is, if we weren’t in Iraq, they’d find another excuse, because they have ambitions. They kill in order to achieve their objectives.”

The president, after talks with Afghan Hamid Karzai yesterday, tried deflect the idea that there was “perceived” tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan in undermine the hunt for bin Laden.

This belies the widely published fact that the two presidents, Karzai and Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf, detest each other.

In fact, both governments have accused each other of not doing enough to fight terrorism and get the Al Qaeda leader who’s believed hiding somewhere between their two borders.

But the bombshell story, undercutting Bush’s central mantra, is Musharraf’s statement to CNN yesterday, repeated in his new book, “In the Line of Fire,” which he refused to mention at an earlier news conference with the president, is that the war in Iraq has not made the world safer from terror.

Perceived as in complete agreement with Bush on the war on terror and other issues, Musharraf wrote that he never supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and was a more than reluctant recruit before bowing to U.S. pressure and agreeing to cooperate “in the interests of Pakistan.”

This has been terrible week for a dissembling White House struggling to justify the quaqmire in Iraq. The Bush doctrine, “fight them there so we don’t have to here,” is badly undermined by the Iraq intelligence report.

Clinton admitted in his clever Fox ambush that he tried, but failed, to get bin Laden. The question Democratic candidates must ask now is what specifically 43. did with this information in the months before 9/11 to succeed where 42. failed?

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