Screaming Penguin

Kevid Drum at Washington Monthly has this to say about another recent intelligence manipulation:

.Laura Rozen points to what ought to be — but sadly isn't — a startling story in the Washington Post today:

In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya.

....But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction. North Korea, according to the intelligence, had supplied uranium hexafluoride — which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium — to Pakistan. It was Pakistan, a key U.S. ally with its own nuclear arsenal, that sold the material to Libya. The U.S. government had no evidence, the officials said, that North Korea knew of the second transaction.

I'm willing to cut Bush some slack on Pakistan. Yes, his policies have been inconsistent and often hypocritical, but Pakistan is genuinely a tough nut: a dictatorship, a nuclear proliferator, and a country with key officials who are sympathetic to radical Islamism; but also a nuclear power, a necessary ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, and an unstable country in a powderkeg region. Bush is hardly the first president to have a tough time figuring out what to do about Pakistan.

No, if anything the President's hipocracy w/r/t Pakistan, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are part of the problem.

Look, the real reason we are in this mess with "terrorism", or more specifically Middle Eastern and Central Asian Islamic Terrorism is because of our Cold War policies. "He may be a bastard, but he is our bastard" is the buy we gave dozens of "friendly" regimes during the Cold War, and now the poor, desperate and downtrodden people who lived under those dictatorial regimes we helped prop up are pissed at us. They associate us with their oppression and they are hungry and angry and ready to be manipulated by whacko billionares on a mission from God.

"Winning the war on terrorism" is going to be, basically, a war fought with PR and economics. We have to make the rest of the Islamic world look like Indonesia and Malaysia, where they make Pentium chips and don't extract natural resources to line the pockets of their oppressive leaders. We have to tell the king of Jordan that jailing a cleric for writing an anti-American editorial in the newspaper makes him a bigger fuckwad than the cleric. More signifigantly, though, we have to break with the "our bastard" foreign policy. All it can do is create a situation in another 50 years that is worse than what we have now.

I remember, Bush gave a speech in 2003 and said something to the affect of "the United States will no longer do business or support countries that do not have real democracy in place." It was a more eloquently written speech than that, which he butchered in his trademark ways, but that what the gist. A few hours later my friend Rob sent me an IM, asking if I had seen it. I was like "Yeah. Did he just tell the Egyptians and Sauds to go fuck themselves?" It was, frankly, the first thing I had seen Bush do that I was 100% behind. Rob (A GOP Partisan) for just a split second had me about to buy the "Bush as bold leader" bit.

The backpedaling started immediately. Within 48 hours everyone in the national security and displomatic corps were on TV going "No, we didn't really mean that."

I am a believer in the "real politik", and yet I am also a believer in conducting our business as a nation according to the actual values we profess -- that means we don't prop up dictators, we don't talk about "The Salvadore Option" in Iraq, we don't torture people, we don't ship Canadian citizens off to Syria to be tortured, then give flak to the Syrians for, you know, being brutal.

It's funny, though -- speaking of values. A certain home run slugger said to congress he didn't want to talk about the past w/r/t his possible use of steroids. Oh the hand wringing. Oh the gnashing of teeth. At the same time, our President has refused to talk about what drugs he may or may not have taken prior to finding Jesus (under his matress I suspect) in 1975. Porter Goss would say before congress a day earlier that "The CIA is not torturing anyone right now" but declined to say whether or not we had tortured anyone in 2004. Why is it moral turpitude of an overpaid dancing monkey on the TV is somehow worthy of more time in the press than our own government?

Maybe our own government has become one of those "our bastards."