Iraq war is not a liberal vs. conservative issue

Much of the negative email I get accuses me of running a "liberal" website with a "liberal" bias. I certainly take no offense at being called "liberal", and if I were writing about health care or gay rights I could understand why readers would call this a liberal site (and if I were writing about tax policy or gun control they would call me a moderate; if I were writing about drug policy they would call me a libertarian). But on this issue, George W. Bush's war in Iraq and it's detrimental effect on the war against Islamist terrorists, I do not present a liberal or conservative point of view. This is about good foreign policy vs. bad foreign policy; good military planning vs. bad military planning; the right way to fight internationl terrorism vs. the wrong way. There is nothing "liberal" or "conservative" about 1029 Americans dying in a war we didn't need to fight.

Today I present for you some points of view that come from people who could in no way be called "liberal". One is a colonel in the British army, one is a senior CIA officer, and two are Republicans in the US Senate.

Let's start with the CIA:

Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the attacks, despite repeated pleas from the unit's leaders for reinforcements, a senior C.I.A. officer with extensive counterterrorism experience has told Congress.

The bin Laden unit is stretched so thin that it relies on inexperienced officers rotated in and out every 60 to 90 days, and they leave before they know enough to be able to perform any meaningful work, according to a letter the C.I.A. officer has written to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

"There has been no systematic effort to groom Al Qaeda expertise" among C.I.A. officers since Sept. 11, 2001, according to the letter, written by Michael F. Scheuer, the former chief of the agency's bin Laden unit and the author of a best-selling book that is critical of the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror.

Mr. Scheuer's book is Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. You might want to give it a read.

On the other side of the pond, a British colonel who led troops in Iraq claims, as I have, that there appeared to be no plan for what to do after the invasion.

A British Army officer who won praise for a rousing speech to troops in Iraq has accused the US and UK of failing to plan for after the war. Colonel Tim Collins, who has now left the Army, said they should have given more thought to what would happen after Saddam Hussein was deposed.

Col Collins told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that in hindsight he had questioned the coalition's motivation for attacking Iraq when preparations for the aftermath were not made.

"There was very little preparation or thought for what would follow on after the invasion itself," he said.

"Nature abhors a vacuum and so do politics. If you knock something down you must be prepared to put something in its place or live with the consequences."

He said the evidence pointed towards the invasion being a "cynical war" inevitable to vent anger on Saddam Hussein's regime, with no regard to the consequences for Iraqis.

"In which case it's a form of common assault," he said.

His criticism of planning echoes the findings of a new parliamentary report. The parliamentary Public Accounts Committee says planning for the post-war period in Iraq was not well thought out, leaving British troops with much to do.

Finally, we turn to two Republican Senators.

Two leading Republican legislators yesterday attacked the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, in one of the strongest indictments of the administration's Iraq policy from members of President Bush's party.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard testimony from State Department officials seeking to divert almost 20 percent of the $18.4 billion in US reconstruction funds to security operations instead of public works projects and economic development.

But the hearing quickly became a forum for attacking what the Republican committee chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, referred to as the "dancing-in-the-street crowd" that wrongly predicted that Iraqis would be celebrating after the fall of Saddam Hussein a year and a half ago. He said the same White House officials have repeatedly failed to make necessary course changes.

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, addressing two of the State Department's point men on Iraq, said the pace of reconstruction has been ''beyond pitiful. It's embarrassing. It is now in the zone of dangerous."

"You don't win the hearts and minds of the people at the end of a barrel of a gun," Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran, said.

As for the original architects of the Iraq war, he added: "Maybe we ought to have a hearing with the inventors of this, have them come back up, all these smart guys that got us in there and said, 'Don't worry.' "

I could write a whole column about why the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are so poorly defined as to be almost meaningless, but suffice it to say that when people resort to name-calling it is because they have no rational arguments to make. And so it is with defenders of Bush's war in Iraq and abandonment of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Bush's defenders have no defense, so they resort to accusations of liberalism, lack of patriotism, or, as happened to me at an anti-war rally recently, shoving giant crosses in our faces. The comedian Bill Maher said recently that Bush's strategy is to make us feel good without actually doing anything. While that might be what I look for in a chiropractor, it's not a good quality in a president.