It’s hard to think of a president and an administration ever in the American history more devoted to secrecy than President Bush and his team. If not when it suits Mr. Bush and the Republican camp politically, it is difficult to believe that the public will ever be given a glimpse of those secrets.
But the three declassified pages from what is certainly a voluminous report did not tell us anything more than what any American with a newspaper, television or Internet connection should have already known. The invasion of Iraq was a catastrophic disaster. The current situation will get worse if American forces leave. However, the crucial issue of a suggestion about how to avoid that inevitable disaster was neither provided in the report nor by the president.
But one of the key findings of the National Intelligence Estimate, which represents the consensus of the 16 intelligence agencies, was quite clear that the war in Iraq has greatly increased the threat from terrorism by “shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”
It listed the war in Iraq as the second most important factor in the spread of terrorism — after “entrenched grievances such as corruption, injustice and fear of Western domination.” And that was before April, when the report was completed. Since then, things have got much worse.
But then why the Bush Administration decided to share this piece of information with his U.S. citizens ?
The New York Times claimed as follows : Mr. Bush decided to release this small, selected chunk of the report in reaction to an article on the intelligence assessment that appeared in The Times over the weekend. As a defense of his policies, it serves only to highlight the maddening circular logic that passes for a White House rationale. It goes like this:
The invasion of Iraq has created an entire new army of terrorists who will be emboldened by an American withdrawal. Therefore, the United States has to stay indefinitely and keep fighting those terrorists.
By that logic, the more the United States fights, the longer the war stretches on.
Disclosure of the classified report, and Bush's subsequent move to make public portions of it, has had broad political ramifications. The escalating debate over national security reflects the belief among strategists in both parties that the terrorism issue works to their benefit. The question is how voters will interpret each side's arguments.
For Republicans, the report provides more evidence that Iraq is central to the war on terrorism and can't be abandoned without giving jihadists a crucial victory. Republicans have also sought to portray Democrats as inadequate to the job of protecting the nation, pursuing an election-year strategy of trying to mobilize conservative voters in key districts by arguing that Democrats would "cut and run" from Iraq and thus embolden terrorists.
And for Democrats, it furthers their argument that the 2003 Iraq invasion has inflamed anti-U.S. sentiments in the Muslim world and left the U.S. less safe. Democrats, citing shrinking public support for Bush and the Iraq war in some recent polls, have tried to portray the administration as incompetent.
On the other hand, this incidence also brought out the wisdom of Mr. Rumsfield and his art of debating over this issue in his following remarks :
(Rumsfeld did not specifically criticize or address the controversial intelligence report, but instead commented more broadly about the terrorist question that has gripped the political world since the report was disclosed last week.
"Are more terrorists being created in the world? We don't know. The world doesn't know," said Rumsfeld, adding that there are no good ways to measure "The world doesn't know. There aren't good ways to measure how many terrorists are being trained at camps around the world.") …….
(Rumsfeld said any specific comments on the report should come from Bush. But he added that while it's hard to know how many terrorist are being created, officials have a better idea how many have been killed or captured.) ……
There was offered a split-screen debate between each party's most influential leader this week with Clinton's appearance Sunday and Bush's news conference Tuesday.
Clinton accused Bush of spending billions of dollars in Iraq while losing focus on capturing Bin Laden in or near Afghanistan. "If I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him."
Clinton also criticised Bush's broader agenda of promoting democracy overseas, in particular, in Middle East, subtly contesting the president's frequent argument that
free elections in Iraq and Afghanistan were signs of progress. "
Democracy is about way more than majority rule," "Democracy is about minority rights, individual rights, restraints on power."
Bush on Tuesday declined to respond directly to Clinton's comments even though "I've watched all this finger-pointing and naming of names, and all that stuff," Bush said. "Our objective is to secure the country…. So I'm not going to comment on other comments."
If we look at what happened in Taiwan and Thailand recently, we must admit that Bush-style of democracy has proved to be successful on the voting day of presidential election in these two S.E. Asian countries but unfortunately short-lived. It has failed in Thailand. What will happen in Taiwan remains to be seen. But from what happened in Iraq, we can foretell that the current Taiwan political turmoil will simply drag on and on and on ..............
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本帖最後由 taurus 於 2006-9-29 06:26 PM 編輯 ]
