Editorial: A failed strategy against Al-Qaida

07/20/2007

Bush's own advisers find little success.


Star Tribune
Published: July 20, 2007


It was predictable that the White House would release a frightening new intelligence bulletin on terrorism this week, just as Senate Democrats were forcing a showdown on President Bush's handling of the Iraq war. Playing the Al-Qaida fear card has worked repeatedly for this administration.

But the president can derive no solace from the new National Intelligence Estimate, and the public should give him none. Voters should read the report for what it is -- a rebuke to the Bush strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and Congress should use it to begin framing a better alternative.

The headline finding in the two pages released this week is that Al-Qaida has rebuilt itself during the past two years and now represents perhaps as great a threat to the United States as it did six years ago. This should be galling to voters, who have given the president great latitude to wage his war against Islamist violence and who must now see how badly he has bungled it. Yet it only confirms what intelligence analysts have been saying for months, some for years, since the administration shifted its attention from the Al-Qaida redoubt in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the fruitless war in Iraq. "Thanks largely to Washington's eagerness to go into Iraq rather than concentrate on hunting down Al-Qaida's leaders, the organization now has a solid base of operations in the badlands of Pakistan," Brookings Institution scholar Bruce Riedel wrote in the May issue of Foreign Affairs. More troubling is the report's conclusion that an Al-Qaida franchise has popped up in Iraq and turned into a tool for recruiting new terrorists, killing Americans and fomenting hatred toward the West.

Bush's homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, tried to turn that finding into the newest reason why Americans have to stay and fight it out in Iraq. But this is looking-glass logic taken to an absurd extreme. If Bush's misjudgments created the problem -- inviting Al-Qaida to take root in Iraq and putting American troops in its cross hairs -- why should voters trust his judgment to solve it?

Now the president and his congressional allies are asking Americans to stand by until September, when Gen. David Petraeus will issue his report on the success of the U.S. troop surge. It's possible that the surge will produce results, but it would be foolish at this late and tragic stage of the debacle to assume so. Instead, Congress should set to work on constructive ways to wind down this conflict. Among the possibilities: Urge Iraq's competing factions to organize a peace summit for post-withdrawal planning; invite the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to draw up a plan for Iraq's internal and external displaced millions; and plan for redeployment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan and the Pakistan border, where there is still some hope that Osama bin Laden can be crushed.