Clumsy Leadership
The furor over Dubai's planned takeover of some U.S. ports is a sign of how out of control the ‘war on terror’ has become.
Web-Exclusive Commentary
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 12:53 p.m. ET Feb. 22, 2006
Feb. 22, 2006 - Revolutionaries need several ingredients to succeed: charisma, for one; organization, for another. But what they need most of all is an incompetent regime, one that makes their ideas look good by comparison. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," William Wordsworth famously wrote after the French Revolution, romanticizing the "enfants de la patrie" who marched on the Bastille. But no one ever quotes the next line in his poem about the "meager, stale, forbidding " old regime that collapsed so easily there. The early Bolsheviks were nobodies in Russia before the 1917 Revolution, but thanks to the combined ineptitude of Tsar Nicholas II and Alexander Kerensky—the first one representing bumbling monarchy, the latter the most indecisive sort of democracy—Lenin and Co. established their "dictatorship of the proletariat" with a swiftness that surprised even them.
Listening this week to the latest excerpts from Osama bin Laden's and Ayman al Zawahiri's taped messages, it is hard not to marvel at how lucky these would-be revolutionaries have been in their enemy. Who would have thought that, four and a half years on, facing down the mightiest power in history, this sociopathic pair would still be out there talking trash, their continued existence a daily desecration of the memory of the 9/11 dead? Or that bin Laden and Zawahiri would have been able to whip what had been a bare ember of “global jihad”—one barely smoldering on 9/10/01—into a global conflagration? Was that a smirk I detected on Zawahiri's face as he advised George W. Bush that it was not too late for him to convert to Islam? You could not miss the contempt in bin Laden’s voice when, in a tape said to be several months old, he mocked Bush's aircraft carrier-staged declaration in April 2003 that major conflict in Iraq had ended.
What a contrast to four years ago, when the rapid collapse of the Taliban caught bin Laden by surprise as he sought to escape the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora. It was probably the last time, we must now conclude, that the terror impresario was surprised at all. As Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge of the operation, records in his new book "Jawbreaker," (Crown, 2005) bin Laden told his followers, "Forgive me," and apologized for getting them pinned down by the Americans (Berntsen's men were listening on radio). Bin Laden then asked them to pray. And, lo, a miracle occurred. As Berntsen stewed in frustration over the Pentagon’s refusal to rush in more troops to encircle the trapped “sheikh,’ bin Laden was allowed to flee. And not only did Bush stop talking about the man he wanted “dead or alive,” the president began to shift U.S. Special Forces (in particular the Arabic-speaking 5th Group, which had built close relations with its Afghan allies) and Predator drones to the Iraq theater.
It is time to have an accounting of just how badly run, and conceived, this "war on terror" has been.
more at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11500950/site/newsweek/
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