Lesson to Bush from Britain

[dajoki]

Slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2147499

Looking for Intel in All the Wrong Places
What Washington can learn from Britain's foiled terror plot.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006, at 6:07 PM ET

<<snip>>

There's a broader lesson here, and it speaks to the Bush administration's present jam throughout the Middle East and in other danger zones. If the British had adopted the same policy toward dealing with Pakistan that Bush has adopted toward dealing with, say, Syria or Iran (namely, it's an evil regime, and we don't speak with evil regimes), then a lot of passenger planes would have shattered and spilled into the ocean, hundreds or thousands of people would have died, and the world would have suddenly been plunged into very scary territory.

It is time to ask: Which is the more "moral" course—to shun odious regimes as a matter of principle or to take unpleasant steps that might prevent mass terror?

<<snip>>

In this light, it's worth looking back at an article http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/030728fa_fact by Seymour Hersh in the July 28, 2003, issue of The New Yorker. Hersh reported that, in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Syria emerged as "one of the CIA's most effective intelligence allies in the fight against al-Qaeda." Syria had hundreds of files on al-Qaida, including dossiers on those who had participated—or wanted to participate—in the 9/11 attacks. Syrian spies had penetrated al-Qaida cells throughout the Middle East, and Syrian President Bashar Assad was passing on loads of data to the CIA and the FBI. Some of these tips apparently foiled al-Qaida plots, including a plan to fly an explosives-laden glider into the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet headquarters.

Assad's interests in this exchange were straightforward. As he explained to Hersh, al-Qaida had links to Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, which posed a threat to Assad's own government. "The need to cooperate was self-evident," he said. Hersh noted a more opportunistic motive: Assad wanted to get off the official U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism; doing so would have allowed Syria to receive aid and investment.

In a passage that's even more intriguing now than it was three years ago, Hersh reported that, in the fall of 2002, Gen. Hassan Khalil, head of Syrian military intelligence, told Washington that, in exchange for reopened relationships, Syria would impose restrictions on the political and military actions of Hezbollah.

A huge interagency feud broke out over what to do about the Syrian offer. The State Department and the CIA, which particularly valued Syria's intelligence pipeline, favored pursuing the talks. The civilian leaders in the Pentagon opposed the move; they were in the midst of planning the invasion of Iraq, and "regime change" in Syria was next on their to-do list.

The debate was soon moot. Once the war in Iraq began, Assad stopped the flow. Yet there he was, a few months later, telling Hersh that he was willing to turn the spigot back on again—to no response from the Bush administration.

[Clark2008]

1. Bush and the neocons never learned the art of diplomacy.

They want to "solve" every problem militarily, risking both soldier and civilian lives, so their mouth-breathing followers can chant, "USA! USA!" without impunity. It never occurs to them that, to find fleas, you might have to pet the dog.

Geez-us Ka-rist on a trailer hitch. What a mess this foul administration has created.