VENEZUELA'S MAN OF MANY FACES - HUGO CHAVEZ

Unlike Korean leader, Kim Jong IL, who sits on a couple of nuclear devices as tiny as himself and taunts America, Venezuela’s strong man, Hugo Chavez only has to use his country’s oil riches and a microphone to send temperatures rising in Washington.
So how can a former paratrooper like Chavez, whom many Americans are being told is a nasty little dictator with a big mouth, cause so much consternation within the Bush Administration and lead a left wing crusade that is beginning to change the political face of Latin America? The answer is a simple one. Chavez is extremely clever and has been able to tap into growing anti-US feeling at a time when the Bush White House has been so preoccupied with Iraq it has taken its eye off Latin American politics. This at a time when China has been sneaking in through America’s door and forging economic ties with a host of Latin American nations, including Brazil and Argentina.
Chavez has a keen intelligence as well as a face for every political season and a unique knack of being able to speak to the disenchanted masses of Venezuela and its neighbors. He has also closely studied his hero, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who has proved more resilient and harder to dislodge than the last seven American presidents ever thought he would be. Chavez sees in Castro a role model and has employed many of his political tactics such as long televised speeches perfectly tailored to his audiences.
Contrary to popular opinion in the US, Chavez grew up in a family that promoted the values of a good education. He was born in 1945, the second son of two schoolteachers near a small town called Sabeneta. At school he excelled in the arts and was such a fine baseball player that by age fifteen he was selected to play in his country’s national baseball championships. When he turned 17, he joined the Venezuela Academy of Military Sciences and emerged six years later with a degree in Military Arts and Science. He was by then a sub-lieutenant but the Military permitted him to attend the Simon Bolivar University to do a post graduate degree in political science. Simon Bolivar was 19th century political revolutionary who believed in tough leadership to bring order to a country. He also fused ideals from the French Revolution of 1789-99 with Greco-Roman models of government based around a Senate-type political structure.
While at university, Chavez forged close ties to other young military officers who believed in Bolivar’s political principles. Later, when advocating what he called Bolivarism, Chavez defined capitalism as “the road to hell” and said Venezuelans would have to choose between it and socialism which was for those who wanted to “build the kingdom of God here on earth.” In his opinion, Jesus was the first socialist. Chavez left the Bolivar University without completing his post-graduate studies and threw all his energies into building a military career. In a subsequent span of 17 years, he steadily rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and during that period lectured from time to time at the Military Academy. It was there he first became known for long lectures, often laced with an over abundance of colorful phrases and occasionally with risqué jokes and rhymes. But no one doubted his intelligence or his ability to command an audience and to exploit his intimate knowledge of his country’s history. He was also very adept at detecting what an audience wanted to hear and used that knowledge to his advantage. On a personal level he had a stable married life and his first marriage lasted eighteen years but collapsed because of an affair he had with a young, vivacious historian. He married a second time to a journalist but that marriage also failed.
Throughout his life he has talked little about his Roman Catholic faith yet he has inserted references to God and to a “revolutionary Jesus” into his political rhetoric. Some critics have defined his tendency to avoid any discussion of his personal faith to the fact he has flouted his Church’s rules on personal relationships, especially in respect of its laws on marriage and divorce. In the background may be an even more potent reason for him to neglect any mention of his faith. For example, by fusing Marxism and Catholicism into a form of liberation theology, Chavez has consistently ignored the church’s stiff opposition to that form of political philosophy. The last Pope was so opposed to liberation theology, he threatened to excommunicate priests who supported it and the present Pope is no less determined to confront it. Therefore, Chavez prefers to portray himself as a good Christian and not especially a Roman Catholic. But in publicly depicting Christ as a socialist, he has frequently found himself in conflict with both the Catholic and Protestant leaders of his country. That has not stopped him, however, from using Biblical and New Testament references in public speeches to convince the electorate he believes in God. He even recently asked Venezuelans to say prayers for the health of his hero Castro, a self confessed atheistic Marxist-Leninist.
Throughout Chavez’s rise to power, following an abortive coup in 1992 and a successful one in 2,000, he has created an ever widening gulf between the country’s elite and its poor, convincing the poor he is the country’s savior and his brand of socialism will enable them to share in the country’s huge oil wealth. He has benefited politically by being able to exploit the historical failure of US intervention in Latin America and the fact that major corporations for too long exploited Latin America’s natural resources. He has, with some authority, pointed to the fact that successive US administrations shaped their Latin American policies to benefit conglomerates and not the nations in which they were making huge profits.
Chavez has been so successful in doing that, he has become a lightening rod for change across the Latin American continent. He has cleverly used his country’s oil to put himself on as world stage, knowing oil is liquid gold and just as powerful a weapon – and perhaps more politically valuable - than Kim Jong Il’s North Korean bombs. Like most shrewd leaders, Chavez has never shrunk from using broadcasting to get his message across and in doing so has hit all the rights points in his speeches. When he wanted to attack corrupt oil executives, whom he said had bled Venezuela dry in their greed to make money, he described them as living in luxury chalets where they engaged in orgies and drank excessive amounts of whisky. It was a powerful and effective piece of imagery. When he wanted to damage the standing of the Catholic Cardinal who had openly questioned his leadership of the country, he accused him of “not walking in the path of Christ.”
While Chavez has not radically changed the lives of most of his country’s poor he has still managed to launch many social programs and to maintain a large grass roots following. Washington has seen him as the lightning rod for anti-American sentiment and has gone so far as to secretly fund and help organize opposition against him. In so doing, the Bush Administration has exposed its covert hand in Venezuela’s politics and provided Chavez with even more verbal ammunition. No longer are his speeches restricted to Venezuela. He can now appear at the UN and challenge George Bush or go to China and be welcomed like any other world leader, especially one who controls a fifth of the world’s oil reserves.
He appears to have a separate persona to suit any eventuality. Recently, he has taken to writing poems about his love affair with Venezuela and has unashamedly read them on nationwide broadcasts. That is the face of the creative, gentle and thoughtful artistic leader. When authority is called for he is just as likely to don his former paratrooper’s uniform and a clump of medals. He can also look very presidential by wearing an expensively-tailored suit and by talking in grandiose terms about world events. And he can be a man of the people who dresses down and goes out into the countryside to talk to farmers and kiss their children.
Washington underestimated Chavez and by the time the Bush administration realized he was nobody’s fool he was at the height of his game, strutting across the world stage. It becomes difficult to bring down a man like Chavez using the familiar dirty little war tactics the US once promoted in countries like Chile, Nicaragua and so on.
Nowadays, every move Chavez makes is news and it will have to be his own people who decide to get rid of him. Perhaps they will get tired of seeing all of the same Chavez faces which he removes from cold storage when events warrant them. One thing seems certain; he is not going to ride off into the sunset any time soon. And, by the time he does, he will have left an indelible left-wing slant on Latin American politics.

ISRAEL'S LEBANON DEFEAT ALSO LOSS FOR AMERICA

Now the dust has settled in bomb ravaged Lebanon, evidence shows that Israel’s military defeat was bigger than at first thought and it eroded America’s standing in what the Bush administration calls the Muslim street, as well as and in the palaces of America’s few Arab friends.
One of the most starling facts now coming to light is that Hezbollah outmaneuvered Israel military strategists, defeated its counter-intelligence planners and built a sophisticated command and control system. That system allowed Hezbollah’s military leaders to communicate with front line fighters despite the massive Israeli bombing of large parts of the country.
It seems Hezbollah, and not Israel or its Pentagon advisors, learned a lot from studying the Vietnam War, especially the fact that if a guerilla army is well enough dug in to survive heavy bombing, it can later emerge to successfully confront a ground assault. That is how Hezbollah played it. From the outset, Israel arrogantly believed it was facing an inferior opponent and knew where its enemy’s main bunkers and command and control systems were located. All that was needed, Israeli generals thought, was for the Israeli Air force and unmanned drones armed with missiles to destroy all Hezbollah bunkers in a three-day “shock and awe” blitz. That would decapitate the Hezbollah leadership, destroy its weapons dumps and knock out its command systems. As a consequence, Hezbollah front line fighters would have no means of re-supply and would have to emerge from their foxholes to surrender or be shot.
That was a military fantasy born out of Israel’s believe in its own military invincibility. What Israeli generals did not anticipate was that Hezbollah would beat them at their own counter intelligence game. For years, Hezbollah had been cleverly fooling Israeli military planners. It had built bunkers it knew Israeli satellites could see from space and Israeli agents on the ground could photograph but they were decoys. It was a classic military tactic used by the allies during World War 2, especially the British who often used decoy tanks or boats to fool the Luftwaffe. Hezbollah built the decoys at the same time that it secretly constructed the real things - deep, hardened bunkers, many with air-conditioning to hold men, as well as command and control systems, the Hezbollah leadership and a massive arsenal of weapons, including missiles. So while Israeli intelligence was fixated on decoys it lost sight of what was happening under its very nose.
Mossad, the famed Israeli intelligence agency is just beginning to realize that, for years, Hezbollah had also been training highly specialized troops, and front line fighters who could hit and run, using classic guerilla tactics against advancing heavy armor and troops. Like most guerilla armies, a cell structure was employed, whereby each Hezbollah unit assigned to the front line knew what it had to do and the locations of its arms dumps. That meant if a fighter was captured he could only divulge a limited amount of information under tough or brutal interrogation Israeli interrogation.
The effectiveness of Hezbollah’s hit-tech command and control system shocked US and Israeli military analysts because it operated unhindered throughout the 34-day war. It allowed Hezbollah leaders to provide their front lines with information from informers about Israeli troop movements. More importantly, it provided the Hezbollah leadership with a picture of the battlefield that led them to conclude that their Nasr Brigade of several thousand fighters was sufficient to slow down any large Israeli advance. There was, therefore, no need to commit reinforcements from the organization’s 20,000 reserve force which was intended for use in a long war with Israeli.
It has taken until now for Israeli and US military experts to fully comprehend the scale of the Israeli defeat and its implications for both countries. While Hezbollah has maintained a silence on exactly how it defeated the much vaunted Israeli military, figures show that contrary to initial Israeli claims that Hezbollah lost upwards of 500 fighters, the real figure was almost 200. That figure then would be close to the number of Israeli military dead, reflecting just how formidable a foe Hezbollah had proven to be.
For the US military in Iraq, Israel’s defeat had some sobering lessons. First, Israel was too quick to underestimate its enemy because, within days of its bombardment of Lebanon, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and his Cabinet, were in a “George Bush-Mission Accomplished” mood. They believed airpower alone would do the job and, when it didn’t, they expected ground troops to destroy the Hezbollah front lines in a matter of days. But, when the Israeli military moved into Lebanon it found exactly what the US military has discovered in Iraq – it is one thing to seize ground and it is a far different thing to hold it. For example, there was no point during the war when the Israeli army showed itself capable of holding ground. Each time it moved into a bombed out village, it lost vehicles and men and retreated. Even when it stayed in a village, it did not succeed in eliminating all the Hezbollah fighters there. They were too well dug in and were a match for their Israeli counterparts. Dispirited at the end of the war, the Israeli Command - in an act of revenge considered a war crime by many foreign observers - littered wide swathes of Lebanon, including hundreds of town, villages and farmland with cluster bomb droplets which have been killing innocent men, women and children ever since.
On the political front, as well as the military front, Israel lost its mantle of invincibility. In the process, the US lost the little influence it had in the region and found its standing among the majority Shiite population in neighboring Iraq severely weakened. Hezbollah’s victory also put America’s friends in the Middle East on notice that the Muslim street respected Hezbollah and disagreed with the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, who had backed the Israeli-US desire to defeat Hezbollah. Worse still, from a Washington perspective, Israel’s loss was also America’s because Hezbollah’s victory empowered Syria and Iran, as well as Islamist extremists. Ironically, US backing for Israel highlighted once again President Bush’s paradoxical positions on bringing democracy to the Middle East. He supported Israel’s plan to destroy Hezbollah, an organization involved in the democratic process in Lebanon, and also Israel’s desire to wreck Hamas, which was put into power by the Palestinian people in fair elections. The White House also failed to understand why Iraqi Shiites and their leaders, including their Iraqi prime minister, supported Hezbollah and not Israel and America.
The fact is, Shiites have never approved of Israel’s policies in the Middle East and Iraqi Shiites see Hezbollah Shiites as their brothers, just as they do the majority Shiite population in Iran. The lesson that Washington should have learned from the massive Baghdad demonstration in favor of Hezbollah during the 34-day war was that Iraqis have no allegiance to the US. On the contrary, they will willingly oppose Israel and the US if either country attacks Iran. That fact severely weakens the continued US occupation of Iraq and our soldiers in the field.
The failed Israeli military campaign was also a body blow for neo-conservatives and their Israeli allies who believed the defeat of Hezbollah would humiliate its backers, Iran and Syria, and also further the strategy of regime change in the region. Neocons, some of them in the White House, did not even seem to care how many innocents were killed by Israeli air strikes in Lebanon. Neocons were prepared to support a long war by Israeli and applauded Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice when she made the absurd claim that the war Lebanon war represented the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Tony Blair’s support for Israel also weakened his standing in Britain.
There are now concerned voices warning that it is only a matter of time before Israel seeks to restore its cloak of invincibility by finding an excuse to invade Lebanon again and finish the job. Alternatively, Israel could mount an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Either course of action would be disastrous but especially an attack on Iran. It would lead to all out war and would collapse the Middle East, leaving nearly 140,000 US soldiers hostage to attacks from Shiites across the region.

RUMSFELD DEFENDS HIS WAR DOCTRINE

Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, has guaranteed himself a place in military history with what is now called The Rumsfeld Doctrine – the use of light armored forces supported by hi-tech weapons and “shock and awe” air power.
The problem with the Rumsfeld military doctrine is that it has so far been a failure and some of his critics claim he is like a captain going down with his ship. Unfortunately, he is watching the ship sink and could be out of office when it finally sinks. If we eventually have to cut and run from Iraq and Afghanistan because there was no post war planning and a flawed military strategy, Rumsfeld will still refuse to admit he was responsible.
That is increasingly clear because, despite the deepening crises in Iraq and Afghanistan he continues to claim that his doctrine has succeeded and it is only a matter of time before every one else realizes that fact.
On October 7, in an opinion column for the Washington Post he sounded off about Afghanistan, stressing that everything there was not as bad as the media would like to make it. In his view, the country and its people were doing well economically and any set backs were outweighed by achievements. In particular, he was heartened by the opening of a $24 million Coca Cola plant and the building of 25 courthouses. If the situation in Afghanistan was not as serious as everyone knows it is, those example of progress would be laughable.
Rumsfeld tried to sugar coat what he had to say by stating that “today can always look worse than yesterday, or even two months ago.” That statement epitomized the kind of silly platitudes he has become famous for in his lunchtime television conferences at the Pentagon.
“Building a new nation is never a straight, steady climb upwards,” he added, while ignoring much of the reality.
The day his rosy picture of Afghan life was published, General David Richards, the NATO commander who has taken over security of the country, issued a dire warning that Afghanistan was at “a tipping point” and the Afghans could switch their allegiances to the Taliban if reconstruction did not show the population that their lives were being markedly improved.
“They will say, ‘we do not want the Taliban but we would rather have that austere, unpleasant life than another five years of war,” Gen. Richards added, thereby demonstrating that Rumsfeld claim about improved living standards was a deliberate lie.
The General’s stark assessment of the war contrasts sharply with Rumsfeld’s on so many levels. In the Washington Post opinion piece, Rumsfeld avoided all the prickly issues like why 3,000 civilians, as well as Afghan security personnel and coalition forces have been killed this year by a resurgent Taliban and why the British believe Pakistani intelligence is aiding sections of the Taliban. He also sidestepped the fact that NATO has admitted there are insufficient troops and equipment, especially in the dangerous Helmand Province controlled by the British, and that most of the country is outside the control of the Karzai administration in the capital, Kabul. He did not explain why, if Afghans are doing so well economically, as he claims, heroin production has tripled.
Any casual observer of Rumsfeld’s opinion piece would be justified in seeing it as a desperate attempt by him to defend his record and to paint a pleasant but bogus picture of the war in Afghanistan in advance of Congressional elections. But for Rumsfeld, who is a man with a big ego, it is about more than just politicking. It is about his legacy.
So far it is a tarnished legacy and classic examples of his failed war doctrine are to be found in the way he handled the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the major mistakes at the outset of the campaign in Afghanistan was his belief that air strikes and small forces compensated for larger troop deployments. In the siege of the Tora Bora mountains where Osama Bin Laden and his inner circle were holed up in caves – perhaps 3,000 insurgents – Rumsfeld hired out the job of killing and capturing them to Afghan militias, a small group of US Special Forces and heavy air power. The planned failed and Bin Laden and his followers, especially his inner circle, escaped into Pakistan. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld did not change strategy. Instead, neo-conservatives supported his belief that air power, small U.S. forces, with the help of paid war lords, would finally sort out the problem. The outcome as we now know has been a resurgent Taliban. A blind adherence of the White House inner circle to the Rumsfeld Doctrine, even after the Tora Bora debacle, was as much a factor in a failure to defeat the Taliban as the White House decision to shift its focus to Iraq, therein weakening the US military’s capability in Afghanistan.
The invasion of Iraq again followed the Rumsfeld doctrine with the same flawed ingredients, especially the view that there was no need to plan for reconstruction. Smaller forces and airpower would do the job and the Iraqi population would be thrilled. So, the war began with 50 “Shock and Awe” attacks aimed at decapitating the Iraqi leadership but that failed and many innocent civilians were killed. From the outset of the invasion, based on Rumsfeld’s strategy, insufficient numbers of troops were sent to defend the borders and to establish peace. The result was chaos, followed by the widespread looting of Baghdad, which Rumsfeld dismissed at the time as a minor issue. He ignored calls for more boots on the ground while most of the infrastructure, including power plants and the oil industry. Worse, still there were insufficient troops to guard massive arms dumps once controlled by the Iraqi army. Insurgents and Al Qaeda types stole thousands of shells, weapons and explosives from those dumps. Much of that materiel has since been used to kill a large percentage of the 2,700 US casualties and to injure tends of thousands of others. That does not even take into account the tens of thousands of dead civilians. An indication of the deepening crisis in Iraq is that 700 US military personnel were injured in attacks in September in Iraq.
Despite overwhelming evidence of failed policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush continues to defend Rumsfeld and his doctrine and expects the American people to “stay the course.”
In recent weeks, details have emerged that some members of the British Cabinet thought that President Bush gave Rumsfeld too much power. That revelation came from advance publicity about the planned publication of dairies by the former British Home Secretary, David Blunkett.
He wrote that members of the British Cabinet asked British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, tough questions about the Iraq invasion and why there was a distinct lack of plans for post-war reconstruction. According to Blunkett, Rumsfeld was singled out for a lot of criticism by Cabinet members with the exception of Tony Blair. He was put under immense pressure during the invasion and snapped during a Cabinet meeting when Blunkett told him the US and Britain were fighting a hi-tech war without a modern strategy to support it. Blunkett claims that President Bush’s inner circle in his first term was deeply divided about war strategy. That may well be true because Secretary of State, Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force was sacrificed for Rumsfeld’s belief in the use of light ground forces, plenty of bombs and hi-tech control and command systems.

PRESIDENT BUSH'S SECRET ADVISOR

As more U.S. soldiers die in Iraq, and the President tells friends he will stay the course even if his only supporters are his wife ands their dog, Barney, news has leaked out that he is getting advice from a man who knows all about failure. That man is Henry Kissinger, 88, who served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under President Nixon, and as Sec. of State under his successor, Gerald Ford.
According to Washington Post editor, Bob Woodward whose new book “State of Denial” is giving the White House a political headache of serious proportions, Kissinger, 83, has been advising President Bush behind the scenes for some time and is free to visit the White House when he chooses.
The presence of Kissinger within the Bush White House should be no surprise to those who have studied his political career, including his influence on the neoconservative movement and his prominence as a Bilderberger. His role as advisor to this president may help explain some of the president’s view about the war in Iraq and also some of his language. One of Kissinger’s favorite sayings is that “the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.” In other words, never seek alternatives, or as he told some of the most notorious regimes during his stint as a national security advisor, “succeed and get the job done quickly.”
President Bush has consistently made it clear that he will stay the course in Iraq, nor matter what happens, and that any alternatives are unacceptable. Such an inflexible vision of foreign policy fits into the Kissinger thesis that the war in Vietnam was lost because America didn’t stay the course. According to Woodward, Kissinger compares the war Iraq to Vietnam and thinks he is fighting the war in Vietnam all over again, except that this time he intends to win it.
Kissinger has been around the Bush White House for years now but like his own dark political career, he has remained in the shadows. One of his acolytes was Paul Bremmer who was sent to Iraq, post the invasion, to put the country on a peaceful footing. Bremmer worked for Kissinger’s global consulting firm until 22001. In Iraq, he made the mistake of disbanding the Baath Party and the Iraqi army, leaving Shia militias, many of them with Iranian links, to fill the ranks of the new Iraqi army.
Kissinger has emerged from the background this year to make a series of statements furthering the neo-conservative agenda about rebuilding the Middle East and creating a new world order. He has been especially active in articulating views that dovetail with Israel’s perceptions of how America should develop its Middle East strategy. Born a German, of Jewish origin, Kissinger has made no secret of his support for Zionism and his close links to Israel. On September 3, he publicly declared that European nations should put aside their differences with the US because both sides were facing a possible “war of civilizations” that “dwarfed transatlantic mistrust left over from the war in Iraq.” Mankind was facing a “global catastrophe,” he warned, and that meant America and its allies had to start constructing a “new world order.”
If Kissinger’s past teaches anything about his “new world order” it is that he will get into bed with dictators and the cost of his policies in human lives lost will not mean too much to his sensibilities. A brief examination of his days as national security advisor and Secretary of State under presidents Nixon and Ford, confirm his taste for dirty, clandestine wars, as well as an ability to hide the truth from Congress and the American people.
In 1969, he advocated the secret “carpet” bombing of neutral Cambodia that led to the loss of half a million innocent lives and is believed to have contributed to the subsequent rise of the dictator, Pol Pot whose Khmer Rouge militias massacred millions in what became known as “the killing fields.” In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace for negotiating a ceasefire with North Vietnam, even though the war in Vietnam continued for another two years. The prize was shared with a North Vietnamese ceasefire negotiator who refused to accept it on the basis that the ceasefire was a failure. Kissinger did not turn up to receive the prize and had a US ambassador pick it up for him. Many influential people across the globe have since argued that he should never have been given the Nobel Prize and that the Nobel organization was discredited when it awarded it to him.
If Cambodia was an example of his ability to operate in the shadows so was his support for the invasion of East Timor by the corrupt Indonesian regime of General Suharto. Documents have now surfaced showing that a day before the invasion on December 7, 1975, Kissinger told the dictator: “It is important whatever you do, do succeed quickly.” Kissinger was concerned American public opinion would not favor a brutal or prolonged occupation of East Timor that nine days earlier had declared independence from Portugal. The invasion led to the death of almost a quarter of a million Timorese and a subsequent occupation killed almost a third of the population in what Amnesty International called genocide.
But, most critics of Kissinger point to his support for some of the most brutal regimes in the Americas and in particular for “Operation Condor” which was a campaign of kidnapping, torture and murder in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil. In 2,000, the Chilean authorities de-classified a cable dating to 1978 that showed that South American intelligence services, involved in a dirty war period that claimed tens of thousands of lives, talked to each other through a US communications channel based in Panama.
In May 2001, Kissinger was in the Ritz Hotel in Paris when a French judge, Roger Le Loire, served him with a summons requiring him to face questioning over the disappearances of French citizens during Operation Condor. Rather than answer the summons, Kissinger left Paris. The French are not the only people anxious to talk to him. The Chilean Supreme Court this year angered the Bush administration by announcing it too wanted to interview Kissinger about his connections to the now disgraced former Chilean dictator, General Pinochet. Judges in Argentina would also like to talk to him about the period when at least 30,000 people disappeared.
Kissinger is not a popular man in many countries across the globe though his consulting firm has connections to companies worldwide and to regimes like the Saudis. When the White House wanted him to lead a 9/11 investigation he backed off the offer, knowing his business links would be carefully scrutinized. When asked about who his clients were, he declined to answer though it was assumed they included companies in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Kissinger has always kept his friends close, even when they were nasty dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. In a private conversation with Argentine’s foreign minister on October 7, 1976, while that regime was abducting and murdering its opponents, he told him, “I have an old-fashioned view that friends need to be supported……..We won’t cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.”
While Kissinger keeps a low profile and his ties to Dick Cheney and George Bush a secret, another man is busy in the shadows preparing to deliver his own bombshell about the background to the Iraq war and more. That man is the former CIA chief, George Tenet, who is busy writing his memoirs. By all accounts, he is livid that President Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice use him and the CIA as a political football when they are asked to justify why they used the WMD argument to invade Iraq. Recently Cheney repeated the familiar mantra that when the president asked Tenet if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, Tenet replied “it’s a slam dunk, mister president.”
Now it seems Tenet is tiring of being kicked around and being used as a scapegoat. He is going top put the record straight and the Bush White House may well be in for a torrid time politically when he tells his side of the story next year. It would not take a rocket scientist to detect that Tenet talked to Bob Woodward for his book and that it was he, and some of his former CIA inner circle, that told Woodward about the meeting with Condi Rice two months before 9/11. The story goes that Tenet, along with Cofer Black, the State Department counter terrorism coordinator, went to see Rice and warned her about an impending Al Qaeda attack but she didn’t treat their warning seriously. Tenet may also finally address rumors that, before the Iraq war, Dick Cheney personally brow beat the CIA into delivering faulty intelligence and manipulating intelligence to bolster his case for going to war. There is no better man than Tenet to tell us if that happened since he was the man in charge of the CIA at the time. CIA officers past and present have always stood shoulder to shoulder in defending the CIA, not matter the cost to their own reputations. To date, Tenet has allowed the agency to be the fall guy for a failed Iraq war policy. Maybe he has decided it is time to stand up and be counted before the agency hangs him out to dry.

Afghan Mess Predictable

The deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, where parallels are now being drawn with the chaos in Iraq, can be traced to critical failures by the Bush Administration following “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the codename for the invasion of the country in October 2001.
From the moment the White House decided to take down the ruling Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda, too much reliance was placed on overwhelming air power, small Special Forces Units and CIA operatives weighed down with tens of millions of dollars to buy Afghan warlords so their militiamen could do most of the fighting. The warlords, who were happy to take the CIA dollars and send their militias into battle against Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban, were simply motivated by greed. Many of them had poor human rights records and had made their wealth through the heroin trade and connections to international crime syndicates.
A case in point was General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Northern Alliance leader, whose forces took the Taliban stronghold of Mazar-e-Sharif. It was said of Dostum, he had a face for every eventuality. An Uzbek by birth, he stoill charges a fee for heroin smuggled across the Afghan border into Uzbekistan, He once fought for the Soviets in northern Afghanistan in the 1980s but switched sides when he realized a Soviet defeat was imminent. He then joined the Mujihadeen to fight the Soviets and later changed sides again to fight the Mujihadeen. Today, he controls a large slice of Afghanistan and is just as undependable as most of the warlords who run the country. In 2003, evidence emerged that the heroin trade had tripled and that Dostum was protecting heroin growers in his region and levying a fee on heroin trafficked through the territory he controlled. It wasn’t until 2005 that the Pentagon admitted to the massive growth in heroin supplies.
The use of men like Dostum at the outset of the Afghan invasion signaled a Pentagon policy that the war against the Taliban could be handled by well-paid warlords and their militias. Pentagon analysts believed that would avoid a repeat of the Soviet strategy of committing large numbers of infantry forces. While it may have seemed like a good political move by the Bush administration in the autumn of 2001, it became part of an ongoing folly that led to Al Qaeda surviving the US invasion of Afghanistan and to the Taliban re-grouping.
To grasp how US policymakers got it so badly wrong, one only has to look at the events in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in December 2001, just of two months after the invasion. At that time, Osama Bin Laden, his inner circle, and as many as 5,000 Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, were holed up in caves. Instead of sending in a large US force to destroy them, the Pentagon relied on Afghan fighters, backed up by a small contingent of US Special Forces and American air power.
From the outset, Pentagon specialists underestimated the numbers of insurgents in Tora Bora and were reluctant to risk the lives of US marines or rangers by mounting a ground assault. Those same experts did not understand that Afghan fighters were just as likely to take bribes from Al Qaeda and the Taliban as they w ere from the CIA and Pentagon. That was the last time Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts were known because he and all the other insurgents in Tora Bora eventually melted into the mountains bordering Pakistan, and into tribal regions of that country. There were reports Bin Laden bribed the same Afghans the CIA had paid to find and kill him.
If lessons should have been learned from the Tora Bora debacle they were not because another operation codenamed “Anaconda” was launched in March 2002 and it was a failure too. This time, Taliban and Al Qaeda were holed up in Shahi-Kot, mountains southeast of Gardez and insufficient ground pressure was applied to force them into the open. Worse still, the Pakistani military failed to seal the border and hundreds of Taliban fled into tribal areas of Pakistan.
The US reliance on warlords and their militias to build a nation was a dangerous policy which has contributed to the mess the country is in today. All the White House talk about an emerging democracy has been part of a fiction that has obscured a terrible reality. The Taliban is back in business in a big way, construction projects have been abandoned across the country, the heroin trade has has expanded, women have fewer rights than they had following the downfall of the Taliban, corruption is widespread, hundreds of schools have been burned down and the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai is ruling the capital, Kabul, but not the country.
This year in an effort to build a power base he appointed new police chiefs, most of whom had records for humans rights violations and drugs trafficking. He did deals with warlords and even talked about arming militias to fight the Taliban. The prospect of arming even more militias angered Japan and some European nations who argued that it was time to take the gun out of Afghan politics.
Recently reports surfaced that the CIA was continuing to use hard cash to buy the allegiances of warlords. That was hardly surprising because, at the beginning of this year, CIA operatives were seen in villages handing out dollars to buy local support. Afghans queued up to get the money and were required to sign for it. Some were unable to write and were allowed to "make their mark." A source who observed this said it the Afghans saw it as a wonderful opporunity to get a free handout.
One of the major factors in the failure of US policy in Afghanistan was that months into the launching of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Pentagon and White House shifted their focus to Iraq. It is now clear the Bush Administration was unwilling to commit a lot of men and materiel to Afghanistan because it was determined to invade Iraq. More significant, by early 2002, the White House naively believed the Taliban had been defeated and it was only be a matter of time before Osama Bin Laden and what was left of Al Qaeda were rounded up. The euphoria in the White House about the quick take down of the Taliban was best illustrated by the First Lady, Laura Bush, who declared that with the Taliban gone Afghan women had been emancipated
Well, now in the autumn of 2006 the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission has news for Mrs. Bush. Most Afghan women are being forced to wear burqas in public and more than half the female population has suffered physical abuse. Over 60% of Afghan marriages are forced and the majority of marriages involve girls younger than 16. As many as 75% of tuberculosis fatalities are female and 85% of women are illiterate. On September 25, a renowned women’s rights advocate, Safia Amajan, was shot dead by the Taliban, following several death threats. She had requested personal protection from the Karzai government and was denied it. Her death illustrated the lawlessness that is all pervasive in a country the Bush administration continues to claim is an emerging democracy – a success story in the words of President Bush.

Israel's Military Superiority Questioned

If Israel’s invasion of Lebanon proved anything, it was that Israel’s military might was no match for modern guerilla warfare.
When the ceasefire was declared, the Israeli army’s much vaulted invincibility was shattered and Hezbollah was stronger. As a result, Israel was also weakened in the eyes of the Arab world where, for decades, it was the nation capable of crushing any Arab foe.
For the time being, Israel has a nuclear advantage over all other nations in the Middle East but Hezbollah has proved that Israel’s conventional forces were not all they were cracked up to be.
Hezbollah has already held victory rallies and announced that it still retains over 20,000 rockets while the Israeli Cabinet and the military continue to argue about who was responsible for the failed invasion of Lebanon. Israel carpet bombed Lebanon with cluster weapons and phosphorous bombs. It leveled town villages, and most of the capital Beirut, but on the ground its mechanized infantry divisions and Special Forces took a beating from a well organized guerilla force. That force, much like the Vietcong in Vietnam, was dug in over years, waiting for the moment to take on a superior military.
Any competent military historian would have to say it was Vietnam all over again. Israel thought it could bomb Lebanon into submission but it did not understand that modern armies are no match for well organized insurgent forces, a lesson the US is learning in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the height of the bombing in Lebanon, when Lebanese civilians were worst hit, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice declared that the world was seeing the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” and that the Lebanese population would turn against Hezbollah. Like the Israeli government, she and other senior members of the Bush White House, as well as British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, knew a sustained Israeli bombing would destroy the infrastructure of Lebanon. But, they naively believed that Lebanese Christians and Muslims would not blame Israel, or the US and Britain that given a green light to the bombing, but would turn on Hezbollah. They would see that Hezbollah’s recklessness in kidnapping two Israeli soldiers had led to the utter destruction of Lebanon. From the ashes of the country a new democratic movement would emerge with Hezbollah defeated.
That absurd thesis drove the Israelis to bomb civilian areas and to leave 350,000 cluster bomb droplets throughout Lebanon. Condoleezza Rice, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert and Tony Blair got it wrong because Israel’s reaction to the kidnapping of two of its soldiers was excessive and the rest of the world knew it. From the first day of bombing, it was clear Israel had exploited the kidnapping to invade Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah. Plans for such an invasion had been in the works for some time and had the approval of the White House. Unlike Europeans who regarded Hezbollah as part of the political process in Lebanon, neo-conservatives in the White House and Pentagon had always believed Hezbollah needed to be destroyed to teach its backers, Syria and Iran, a lesson. It was just another plank in the neocon thesis of creating regime change across the Middle East. The Israeli military and Pentagon experts thought Hezbollah would be a pushover, but in the end the Israeli military had little stomach for prolonged, close-quarters' combat which was the only type of combat that could have possibly have destroyed an enemy dug into tunnels – an enemy with the overwhelming support of the population.
Israel was so well prepared for the invasion of Lebanon, it unleashed its most sophisticated media blitz in decades, offering interviews to the international news media and providing interpreters. It also made available video footage of its bombing runs and daily footage of the damage caused by Hezbollah rockets. But none of that could erase the international condemnation of the Israeli government’s excessive zeal to bomb Lebanon back to the Stone Age.
On September 22, Hezbollah leader, Sheik Nasrallah, who the Israelis have vowed to assassinate, emerged from the shadows to lead a victory parade in the bombed out suburbs of south Beirut. He told two hundred thousands onlookers that Hezbollah would not give up its arsenal until Lebanon had an army capable of defending the country and it would not be disarmed by UN forces. He also declared that the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers, whom Israel citied as its reason for going to war, would only be released as a part of a prisoner swap with Israel.
Nasrallah carefully timed his victory rally to coincide with Israel’s final pull-out from Lebanon and thereby signaled yet another humiliation for Israel’s military. Overall, Israel failed to enforce its pre-ceasefire demands that only when 15,000 UN troops were in Lebanon, and a portion of that force was placed on the Lebanese border with Syria, would Israeli tanks and infantry be withdrawn from Lebanon. So far, there are only 4.600 UN peacekeepers in Lebanon and none of them is policing the border with Syria. There also is no UN mandate for its soldiers to disarm Hezbollah.
In the final analysis, Israel suffered an ignominious defeat and weakened not only its standing in the Middle East but also that of the US, which applauded the Israeli bombing of Lebanon and supplied the cluster and phosphorous bombs the Israel Air Force and artillery units used on Lebanese civilian areas.