Finally.
Update: Former CIA director Robert Gates will take over as the new Defense Secretary. This might signal a willingness by Bush to listen to his father’s old advisors. Bush also cited the highly anticipated report from the Iraq Study Group chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton.
Charles Krauthammer makes a powerful argument that the United States should consider the possibility of supporting a decision by Japan to go nuclear:
The immediate effect of Japan’s considering going nuclear would be to concentrate China’s mind on denuclearizing North Korea. China calculates that North Korea is a convenient buffer between it and a dynamic, capitalist South Korea bolstered by American troops. China is quite content with a client regime that is a thorn in our side, keeping us tied down while it pursues its ambitions in the rest of Asia. Pyongyang’s nukes, after all, are pointed not west but east.
Japan’s threatening to go nuclear would alter that calculation. It might even persuade China to squeeze Kim Jong Il as a way to prevent Japan from going nuclear. The Japan card remains the only one that carries even the remote possibility of reversing North Korea’s nuclear program.
Japan’s response to the North Korean threat has been very strong and very insistent on serious sanctions. This is, of course, out of self-interest, not altruism. But that is the point. Japan’s natural interests parallel America’s in the Pacific Rim — maintaining military and political stability, peacefully containing an inexorably expanding China, opposing the gangster regime in Pyongyang, and spreading the liberal democratic model throughout Asia.
Why are we so intent on denying this stable, reliable, democratic ally the means to help us shoulder the burden in a world where so many other allies — the inveterately appeasing South Koreans most notoriously — insist on the free ride?
The balance of power is shifting in Asia as China emerges as a major power. Japan is our ally, and it may be time to play this card with China.
Despite the chaos in Iraq, the neocons are itching for another war. Pat Buchanan destroys their arguments in his latest column.
Krauthammer is pointing out the obvious – the European plan to negotiate their way out of the Iranian nuclear crisis has been a failure. He also points out that Iran has most of the leverage with their threat to cut off their oil supply if attacked or if sanctions are approved.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer any solutions or a clear alternative. Furthermore, he can’t bring himself to criticize the Bush administration, which has gone along with this policy even though they would have preferred a push for sanctions.
Also, Krauthammer will not address the possibility that Bush’s disastrous policies in Iraq have completely undermined any chance of taking on Iran. Krauthammer loves to cite Lybia as evidence that the Iraq war has had a positive effect on other regimes in the Middle East, yet he says nothing about the current maniac running Iran. Did our policies in Iraq have any effect on the elections that brought him to power? Again, only positive effects are open for discussion aong supporters of the war.
Krauthammer is often very persuasive, but he loses credibility by consistently offering rough analysis on the Europeans or the opponents of the war, yet he seems incapable of aiming that same critical fire at this administration.
Over the past several years, numerous statement made by President Bush and his administration have proven to be false, including statements about WMD, the Iraq war, the events preceding 9/11 and issues like torture and domestic spying. We can now add another one to the list – the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001.
During last year’s presidential campaign, President Bush and John Kerry argued over whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Kerry charged that Bush let bin Laden get away by not choosing to “use American forces to hunt down and kill” him. Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.
Now we have the CIA commander on the ground telling his side of the story in a new book to be released. Newsweek breaks the story:
But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. “He was there,” Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen’s remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. “Bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Berntsen says Franks is “a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was.”
I just saw Bernsten interviewed on MSNBC. The man is very credible. Again, we have incompetence from the Bush administration, and then they try to cover it up by denying the truth. Pathetic.
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