PONDERING THE UNTHINKABLES

THREE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD ASK OURSELVES ABOUT FORGOTTEN LESSONS

By Ted Pincus

What are the three most urgent issues facing American society today? Isn’t it time to look at new solutions based on lessons we’ve repeatedly learned to our sorrow? Is it madness not to question what we’re doing?

As a 75-year-old PR man I have to admit that our folly in all three dilemmas is caring too much about public opinion. We’re seriously jeopardizing our future by fixating on how other people will view us.

The three unthinkable questions we must address are:

• Is it time for us to stop trying to solve the world’s civil wars by risking our sons’ necks and treasury?

• Why can’t we take off the gloves and finish al Qaeda?

• Why don’t we act promptly to neutralize nuclear Iran before it’s too late?

WE MUST EXIT AFGHANISTAN

Being a referee in civil wars has always been no-win.

We’ve seemed to learn nothing from history. Vainly trying to mix into domestic ethnic and sectarian conflicts has only cost us –and the host country—bloodshed and billions. Fifteen years of futility in Viet Nam taught us nothing, despite the loss of 47,244 American lives, with 103,329 injured, millions of civilian lives there, and gigantic sums that should have gone toward Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society crusade to fight hunger and poverty.

On Jan 4, 1971, Richard Nixon proudly proclaimed “The end is in sight.” On April 3 of that year, South Viet Nam’s President Thieu and his corrupt administration were re-elected, unopposed. In May 1972, the Paris Peace Talks collapsed. In October, Henry Kissinger meets quietly with Le Duc Tho and makes concessions. On Jan.27,1973, Nixon announces a cease fire agreement that will bring “peace with honor.” In Dec., 1974, North Viet Nam violates the agreement by attacking Phuoc Long province and overruns Da Nang in March, when 100,000 SVN soldiers surrender after being abandoned by their commanding officers. On April 29, the ignominious finale arrived with the panicked rescue of the last 7,000 U.S. troops and key Viet Namese officials by helicopter at Saigon, while our Tan Son Nhut air base was looted and thousands of civilians begged for asylum at our embassy compound.

Sound familiar?

Much fresher in our memories should be the Bush follies in Iraq where our well intentioned initiative to remove a petty tyrant gave us accidental ownership of a full blown sectarian civil war bred by centuries of seething Shiite-Sunni hatred. After more than six years as a hapless referee,losing over 4000 lives and a trillion of treasury (which turned a half-trillion federal surplus into a projected 1.5 trillion deficit for fiscal 2010), we’re in the quagmire again. Our generals have declared victory one more time of course. But the almost daily bloodshed between the two sects (with Kurds caught in the crossfire) continues unabated.

(In 2004 I wrote an editorial for the Chicago Sun Times detailing that the only hope for a true exit from Iraq with honor would be to separate the adversaries by a three-way partitioning under NATO supervision. It caught the eye of House Intl. Relations Chairman Henry Hyde who endorsed and circulated the piece in congress, before it hit a wall with Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.)

While we now proudly rely on the 600,000 man strength of a revitalized Iraqi army, which we term “self-sufficient”, as we slink away in a noble exit strategy and call it a day, the Nouri al-Maliki government perpetuates the strife by denying the Sunni a fair share.

Does any of this tell us that it’s overdue for us to exit Afghanistan? Here’s a nation with another 32.7 million people—80% Sunni M

uslim and 20% Shiite, the precise opposite mix of Iraq. Equally fanatical, equally corrupt and producer of 93% of the world’s opium. A remarkable 44% of the population is under 14, and the literacy rate nationwide is 28% (12% for females). Overrun by everyone from Alexander to the Mongols to the Russians, torn by ethnic strife in between, and more lately raped by the Taliban, the nation has never had a break.

Once more, in good conscience, we’ve stepped into the fray.We’ve tried to protect a Karzai government that is not only one of the world’s most corrupt but –based on the August 2009 election travesty—should likely not even be legitimately in power. We’ve been investing over $4 billion per month in this holding action, along with the lives of 43,000 American troops at risk, backed by 32,000 NATO troops. To date, we’ve lost 812 lives, including 48 in August. And while U.S. Commander Stanley McChrystal says the Taliban are winning this civil war and we face rising casualties, the plan is to boost our troop strength to 68,000 by December. If another year there could cost us 500 or 700 American boys, is it truly worth the price?

To what end? Nobody has even begun to define an exit strategy. And does the world care if we leave? Will we be derided as betraying humanity if we slink off the stage again? Remember, the Afghans see us not as saviors but as occupiers like the Ruskies, and want us gone. The latest ABC News poll of Gary Langer shows Afghan favorable views of the U.S. have plummeted from 85% in 2005 to 47% now. In neighboring Pakistan, says Pew Research, 13% say they have confidence in Obama, whose support is even exceeded by Osama Bin Laden with 18%.

If we leave, why worry about opinion at all? Did we worry when we stood idle and watched 800,000 Tutsi slaughtered in the Rwanda Hutu genocide? Or when Sri Lanka was torn apart by civil war? Or Myanmar taken over and oppressed by a military junta? Were we embarrassed to watch from the sidelines as China took over Tibet? Or as 1.6 million were killed in the ongoing Congolese civil war? Or as 200,000 innocents have been killed in Darfur and another two million displaced by an indicted tyrant whom nobody, including an impotent U.N., will arrest? And if we’re so concerned about the virulent rise of muslim fundamentalism, why are we sitting on our hands while it sweeps Somalia, Mali, Niger and Mauritania (where al Qaeda is now called AQIM).

And if the question of “selective” aid to certain causes isn’t enough reason to reconsider our Afghan commitment what about the dollar cost trade-offs? Our losing investment in Iraq and our currently rising one in Afghanistan have contributed hugely to the $10 trillion federal deficit handed to Obama. The biggest tragedy of all –beyond wasted dollars and wasted lives—is that it has crowded out the monumental humanitarian challenges we face: providing adequate health care and education and curtailing poverty here at home, and fighting hunger abroad. Although our defense budget is now 21% of our total it equals our whole social security budget (which some say is threadbare) and almost equals the 23% that we spend on health care. And that’s before the reform legislation aiming to aid millions of Americans without care.

Consider that our trillion dollar defense budget today almost equals the military budgets of all other nations combined. Our Navy’s battle fleet –despite cutbacks—is still larger than the next 13 navies of the world combined. Our total defense budget is now exceeding 4.7% of our gross domestic product.

It’s time to stop the madness. We simply can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman.

WE MUST FIND AND FINISH AL QAEDA

Think about it. Until 9/11, nobody –not Nazi Germany, imperial Japan or Cold War Russia—really threatened our survival. But today our nation is at physical risk from the fanatical tactics of a virtually unseen enemy: less than a few thousand ill-clothed and ill-equipped members of al Qaeda. Before realizing the new realities of a world without rules of engagement, we endured the lessons of the Beirut marine barracks debacle, the Khobar Towers disaster in Dharan, 9/11, the Nairobi embassy attack, the destroyer Cole attack, the Locherbie air disaster and the narrowly avoided simultaneous destruction of 10 transatlantic airliners in an Islamic fundamentalist plot foiled by Scotland Yard.

While congress, the ACLU and Amnesty International fiercely abide by their noble ideals to preserve principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention, realities have raced far ahead of this anachronism. There are no more uniformed armies against us with elegant tank formations and fancy command centers –only hit and run criminals. No navy challenges our ships—only pirates in tiny rag tag motorboats. There is no gentleman’s war any more. The guidelines of gallantry, civility and rules in global conflict have become meaningless in the face of an innocent human shield, a roadside IED, a suicide belt on an elderly woman, or a rocket propelled grenade launched by a young man in shorts and sandals from a hospital window.

And these insidious threats may pale in comparison to the day when one anonymous terrorist detonates a single nuclear device in the center of a major city. Against whom would we retaliate? All bets would be off.

This is why –in a future year—we’ll look back in remorse, wonder and perhaps fury at the well-intentioned efforts of many Americans to cling to yesterday’s idea of fair play. The very ramparts that are our first line of defense are under moralistic, irrational attack. In the name of “privacy” our NSA is handcuffed in its ability to intercept wireless communications among the invisibles out to kill us. FBI search warrants are more difficult to obtain. The CIA is under fire for almost every effort designed to learn global terrorism’s next plots and destroy its leadership if possible.

Although congressmen sat by and watched the Bush and then Obama administrations accelerate the series of Predator drone attacks that have been the only successful method of destroying al Qaeda and Taliban leadership since 9/11, they suddenly panicked and sanctimoniously condemned a CIA plan –uncovered this year—to covertly assassinate certain targeted terrorist leaders.

And after castigating,deflating and deforming the nation’s entire intelligence community during the Clinton years and most pointedly post 9/11 for ineptitude, we are now on a vendetta to persecute and prosecute many of the CIA operatives who have silently put their lives on the line to protect us against this unique,intractable enemy. Why? Because they were over-zealous in their attempts to pry vital, life-and-death intelligence out of terrorist detainees. Were there mistakes made? Yes, as in every war. Were there abuses? Yes. But the same CIA interrogators who drew out of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ,after waterboarding, a torrent of information that has saved many lives, are now being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for overreaching. Even though Holder himself as Deputy Attorney General in 2002, told CNN that Guantanamo detainees were “not in fact entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention,” he has suddenly turned puritanical and reversed his view. He’s mounting a messianic campaign to have a special prosecutor crucify the CIA perpetrators –based on a 2004 report, just released by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, citing some isolated instances of abuse and coercion.

But what the 2004 also abundantly details is that the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the program quietly, effectively and within the law” and that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support to interrogators.” It also glaringly spotlights that the CIA top brass and Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees had full knowledge of all “enhanced interrogation” techniques and raised no alarm. Nor should they have done so. The report discloses a wide array of terrorist plots around the globe that were foiled after detainee interrogations. These included the apprehension of Jose Padilla and Binyan Mohammed, who were about to detonate a “dirty” radioactive bomb; an unknown al Qaeda cell in Karachi planning to pilot an aircraft assault in the U.S; a plot to attack the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; and another to hijack an aircraft that could be flown into Heathrow; and yet another to attack a California high rise; and another plot to sever the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

Almost no intelligence officials are advocating that rogue interrogation should be allowed and laws violated. What the disclosures are telling us is that the laws themselves must be modified for our own survival in an increasingly lawless world unfit for polite niceties. The concept is now new. Pre-emptive strikes against dangerous criminals have been accepted by civilized society for centuries. Witness the duties of a police sniper blowing the head off a hostage-taking kidnapper—without any courtesy of explaining Miranda rights, arrest, indictment or trial. Similarly, what American mayor –faced with a criminal whose secret,ticking time bomb is about to level a downtown area—would not demand any and every kind of interrogation to discover its location and save lives of his citizens?

The biggest time bomb ever is now ticking. And instead of turning more boys into IED fodder pursuing Taliban crazies in the barren Afghan hills, why not spend far, far less of our resources to intensify the one strategy that really works—Predator drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban high command in South Waziristan and Kandahar Province? The Defense Dept. has budgeted only $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) worldwide for 2010—a price less than one month cost of continuing our futile conventional war in Afghanistan. But cost effectiveness aside, this single weapon is our only means of decapitating global terrorism while risking no more American lives. And if we left Afghanistan tomorrow the UAV could still be launched from Pakistan or other secure locations.

On the same theme, and with the same irony, our nation is now turning with vengeance upon the mercenary units that have been aiding the CIA and our Special Forces – the private contractors at Blackwater (now renamed Xe) and similar groups that have proven themselves in some of our dirtiest tasks. While they too have had rogue elements and incidents , they are more than willing to do the jobs, for a fee, that nobody else wants. With little fanfare, and only minor public outcry until now, there are almost 120,000 of these contractors in Iraq and 74,000 in Afghanistan.

Imagine what magnitude of funds could be diverted to America’s social causes if we were to bring home most of these surrogates from Asia, along with our troops. We’d be plugging the biggest financial drain our nation has ever faced and sparing lives of countless boys and girls.

WE MUST NEUTRALIZE A NUCLEAR IRAN

No case of nationalized terrorism and potential hostage-taking in the world today could be any clearer or more threatening than the relentless Iranian drive to develop a nuclear bomb.

Once again, the lessons we endured so painfully are staring at us this year. In each instance, a megalomaniac promises death and destruction, then delivers it to an incredulous population. Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden.

Now there is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, promising to “wipe Israel off the map” and bring retribution to that Great Satan America. Despite a ravaged economy, propped up only by crude oil exports, Iran has been steadily developing weaponry. Its new Shahab -3ER missile with a 2000 Km range can reach Turkey, and its long range ballistic BM 25 can reach 3500 Km targets like Athens and Budapest. Its satellite launching capabilities could be converted into ICBM launchers that would put cities like Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw well within range, not to mention Tel Aviv of course which would be hit by much lesser equipment (like the Shahab-2) if launched from Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

And carrying what? Inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency report that this summer Iran has amassed 4,592 centrifuges and 3,325 pounds of enriched uranium –enough to produce two nuclear bombs. The world’s response? While free world leaders in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany are ready to propose sanctions to the U.N. Security Council if Iran does not drop the current charade by an Obama-imposed deadline of Sept. 30, it is general knowledge that this effort will continue to be stymied by vetoes of Russia and China, of whom Iran is a multi-billion dollar client.

As so eloquently dramatized by Freidrich Durrenmatt’s play, “The Visit”, money talks, and when someone says “It’s not the money it’s the principle,” you can be sure it’s the money. Thus while the diplomatic waltz continues endlessly, every month brings precious time for Iran to bury its Natanz nuclear facilities in deeper cover and obtain even more sophisticated electronic air defense technology from Russia.

Accordingly, in a conclusion similar to the obvious option that we strike at the heart of al Qaeda before it strikes us again, we must act now to eliminate Iran’s death factory. Harvard’s pre-eminent Alan Dershowitz says it best in one of the seminal treatises of our time: his book “Pre-emption”. In this modern era when there is a clear and present threat it is imperative that the intended victim strike first, not second. There may be no second chance. Israel began teaching the civilized world this axiom in 1967, and to everyone’s secret relief, in 1981 when it took out Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor, and again in 2006 when it destroyed a developing nuclear facility in Syria.

Everyone says a nuclear Iran “cannot be tolerated.” Yet inaction itself is de facto tolerance, even implied approval. Can Israel act successfully alone? Perhaps. But it will likely need U.S. help at least in supplying bunker-buster bombs, Iraq territorial overflight authorization, and aerial refueling.

• * *

Regarding all three of these imperatives, our undoing may be simply a sad case of national dementia—the faded memories of prior threats among us seniors, and the fact that our proliferating juniors were not even born to witness the tragedies of Munich, the Tet Offensive, or Rwandan genocide. In fact some were mere teeny-boppers when 9/11 occurred. Some are just now trying to figure out why we’re placing 68,000 of our favorite sons in harm’s way to protect a land of rubble populated by 93% of the world’s opium growers.

No need perhaps to belabor the George Santayana warning that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We already are.

* * *

PONDERING THE UNTHINKABLES

THREE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD ASK OURSELVES ABOUT FORGOTTEN LESSONS

By Ted Pincus

What are the three most urgent issues facing American society today? Isn’t it time to look at new solutions based on lessons we’ve repeatedly learned to our sorrow? Is it madness not to question what we’re doing?

As a 75-year-old PR man I have to admit that our folly in all three dilemmas is caring too much about public opinion. We’re seriously jeopardizing our future by fixating on how other people will view us.

The three unthinkable questions we must address are:

• Is it time for us to stop trying to solve the world’s civil wars by risking our sons’ necks and treasury?

• Why can’t we take off the gloves and finish al Qaeda?

• Why don’t we act promptly to neutralize nuclear Iran before it’s too late?

WE MUST EXIT AFGHANISTAN

Being a referee in civil wars has always been no-win.

We’ve seemed to learn nothing from history. Vainly trying to mix into domestic ethnic and sectarian conflicts has only cost us –and the host country—bloodshed and billions. Fifteen years of futility in Viet Nam taught us nothing, despite the loss of 47,244 American lives, with 103,329 injured, millions of civilian lives there, and gigantic sums that should have gone toward Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society crusade to fight hunger and poverty.

On Jan 4, 1971, Richard Nixon proudly proclaimed “The end is in sight.” On April 3 of that year, South Viet Nam’s President Thieu and his corrupt administration were re-elected, unopposed. In May 1972, the Paris Peace Talks collapsed. In October, Henry Kissinger meets quietly with Le Duc Tho and makes concessions. On Jan.27,1973, Nixon announces a cease fire agreement that will bring “peace with honor.” In Dec., 1974, North Viet Nam violates the agreement by attacking Phuoc Long province and overruns Da Nang in March, when 100,000 SVN soldiers surrender after being abandoned by their commanding officers. On April 29, the ignominious finale arrived with the panicked rescue of the last 7,000 U.S. troops and key Viet Namese officials by helicopter at Saigon, while our Tan Son Nhut air base was looted and thousands of civilians begged for asylum at our embassy compound.

Sound familiar?

Much fresher in our memories should be the Bush follies in Iraq where our well intentioned initiative to remove a petty tyrant gave us accidental ownership of a full blown sectarian civil war bred by centuries of seething Shiite-Sunni hatred. After more than six years as a hapless referee,losing over 4000 lives and a trillion of treasury (which turned a half-trillion federal surplus into a projected 1.5 trillion deficit for fiscal 2010), we’re in the quagmire again. Our generals have declared victory one more time of course. But the almost daily bloodshed between the two sects (with Kurds caught in the crossfire) continues unabated.

(In 2004 I wrote an editorial for the Chicago Sun Times detailing that the only hope for a true exit from Iraq with honor would be to separate the adversaries by a three-way partitioning under NATO supervision. It caught the eye of House Intl. Relations Chairman Henry Hyde who endorsed and circulated the piece in congress, before it hit a wall with Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.)

While we now proudly rely on the 600,000 man strength of a revitalized Iraqi army, which we term “self-sufficient”, as we slink away in a noble exit strategy and call it a day, the Nouri al-Maliki government perpetuates the strife by denying the Sunni a fair share.

Does any of this tell us that it’s overdue for us to exit Afghanistan? Here’s a nation with another 32.7 million people—80% Sunni M

uslim and 20% Shiite, the precise opposite mix of Iraq. Equally fanatical, equally corrupt and producer of 93% of the world’s opium. A remarkable 44% of the population is under 14, and the literacy rate nationwide is 28% (12% for females). Overrun by everyone from Alexander to the Mongols to the Russians, torn by ethnic strife in between, and more lately raped by the Taliban, the nation has never had a break.

Once more, in good conscience, we’ve stepped into the fray.We’ve tried to protect a Karzai government that is not only one of the world’s most corrupt but –based on the August 2009 election travesty—should likely not even be legitimately in power. We’ve been investing over $4 billion per month in this holding action, along with the lives of 43,000 American troops at risk, backed by 32,000 NATO troops. To date, we’ve lost 812 lives, including 48 in August. And while U.S. Commander Stanley McChrystal says the Taliban are winning this civil war and we face rising casualties, the plan is to boost our troop strength to 68,000 by December. If another year there could cost us 500 or 700 American boys, is it truly worth the price?

To what end? Nobody has even begun to define an exit strategy. And does the world care if we leave? Will we be derided as betraying humanity if we slink off the stage again? Remember, the Afghans see us not as saviors but as occupiers like the Ruskies, and want us gone. The latest ABC News poll of Gary Langer shows Afghan favorable views of the U.S. have plummeted from 85% in 2005 to 47% now. In neighboring Pakistan, says Pew Research, 13% say they have confidence in Obama, whose support is even exceeded by Osama Bin Laden with 18%.

If we leave, why worry about opinion at all? Did we worry when we stood idle and watched 800,000 Tutsi slaughtered in the Rwanda Hutu genocide? Or when Sri Lanka was torn apart by civil war? Or Myanmar taken over and oppressed by a military junta? Were we embarrassed to watch from the sidelines as China took over Tibet? Or as 1.6 million were killed in the ongoing Congolese civil war? Or as 200,000 innocents have been killed in Darfur and another two million displaced by an indicted tyrant whom nobody, including an impotent U.N., will arrest? And if we’re so concerned about the virulent rise of muslim fundamentalism, why are we sitting on our hands while it sweeps Somalia, Mali, Niger and Mauritania (where al Qaeda is now called AQIM).

And if the question of “selective” aid to certain causes isn’t enough reason to reconsider our Afghan commitment what about the dollar cost trade-offs? Our losing investment in Iraq and our currently rising one in Afghanistan have contributed hugely to the $10 trillion federal deficit handed to Obama. The biggest tragedy of all –beyond wasted dollars and wasted lives—is that it has crowded out the monumental humanitarian challenges we face: providing adequate health care and education and curtailing poverty here at home, and fighting hunger abroad. Although our defense budget is now 21% of our total it equals our whole social security budget (which some say is threadbare) and almost equals the 23% that we spend on health care. And that’s before the reform legislation aiming to aid millions of Americans without care.

Consider that our trillion dollar defense budget today almost equals the military budgets of all other nations combined. Our Navy’s battle fleet –despite cutbacks—is still larger than the next 13 navies of the world combined. Our total defense budget is now exceeding 4.7% of our gross domestic product.

It’s time to stop the madness. We simply can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman.

WE MUST FIND AND FINISH AL QAEDA

Think about it. Until 9/11, nobody –not Nazi Germany, imperial Japan or Cold War Russia—really threatened our survival. But today our nation is at physical risk from the fanatical tactics of a virtually unseen enemy: less than a few thousand ill-clothed and ill-equipped members of al Qaeda. Before realizing the new realities of a world without rules of engagement, we endured the lessons of the Beirut marine barracks debacle, the Khobar Towers disaster in Dharan, 9/11, the Nairobi embassy attack, the destroyer Cole attack, the Locherbie air disaster and the narrowly avoided simultaneous destruction of 10 transatlantic airliners in an Islamic fundamentalist plot foiled by Scotland Yard.

While congress, the ACLU and Amnesty International fiercely abide by their noble ideals to preserve principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention, realities have raced far ahead of this anachronism. There are no more uniformed armies against us with elegant tank formations and fancy command centers –only hit and run criminals. No navy challenges our ships—only pirates in tiny rag tag motorboats. There is no gentleman’s war any more. The guidelines of gallantry, civility and rules in global conflict have become meaningless in the face of an innocent human shield, a roadside IED, a suicide belt on an elderly woman, or a rocket propelled grenade launched by a young man in shorts and sandals from a hospital window.

And these insidious threats may pale in comparison to the day when one anonymous terrorist detonates a single nuclear device in the center of a major city. Against whom would we retaliate? All bets would be off.

This is why –in a future year—we’ll look back in remorse, wonder and perhaps fury at the well-intentioned efforts of many Americans to cling to yesterday’s idea of fair play. The very ramparts that are our first line of defense are under moralistic, irrational attack. In the name of “privacy” our NSA is handcuffed in its ability to intercept wireless communications among the invisibles out to kill us. FBI search warrants are more difficult to obtain. The CIA is under fire for almost every effort designed to learn global terrorism’s next plots and destroy its leadership if possible.

Although congressmen sat by and watched the Bush and then Obama administrations accelerate the series of Predator drone attacks that have been the only successful method of destroying al Qaeda and Taliban leadership since 9/11, they suddenly panicked and sanctimoniously condemned a CIA plan –uncovered this year—to covertly assassinate certain targeted terrorist leaders.

And after castigating,deflating and deforming the nation’s entire intelligence community during the Clinton years and most pointedly post 9/11 for ineptitude, we are now on a vendetta to persecute and prosecute many of the CIA operatives who have silently put their lives on the line to protect us against this unique,intractable enemy. Why? Because they were over-zealous in their attempts to pry vital, life-and-death intelligence out of terrorist detainees. Were there mistakes made? Yes, as in every war. Were there abuses? Yes. But the same CIA interrogators who drew out of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ,after waterboarding, a torrent of information that has saved many lives, are now being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for overreaching. Even though Holder himself as Deputy Attorney General in 2002, told CNN that Guantanamo detainees were “not in fact entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention,” he has suddenly turned puritanical and reversed his view. He’s mounting a messianic campaign to have a special prosecutor crucify the CIA perpetrators –based on a 2004 report, just released by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, citing some isolated instances of abuse and coercion.

But what the 2004 also abundantly details is that the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the program quietly, effectively and within the law” and that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support to interrogators.” It also glaringly spotlights that the CIA top brass and Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees had full knowledge of all “enhanced interrogation” techniques and raised no alarm. Nor should they have done so. The report discloses a wide array of terrorist plots around the globe that were foiled after detainee interrogations. These included the apprehension of Jose Padilla and Binyan Mohammed, who were about to detonate a “dirty” radioactive bomb; an unknown al Qaeda cell in Karachi planning to pilot an aircraft assault in the U.S; a plot to attack the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; and another to hijack an aircraft that could be flown into Heathrow; and yet another to attack a California high rise; and another plot to sever the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

Almost no intelligence officials are advocating that rogue interrogation should be allowed and laws violated. What the disclosures are telling us is that the laws themselves must be modified for our own survival in an increasingly lawless world unfit for polite niceties. The concept is now new. Pre-emptive strikes against dangerous criminals have been accepted by civilized society for centuries. Witness the duties of a police sniper blowing the head off a hostage-taking kidnapper—without any courtesy of explaining Miranda rights, arrest, indictment or trial. Similarly, what American mayor –faced with a criminal whose secret,ticking time bomb is about to level a downtown area—would not demand any and every kind of interrogation to discover its location and save lives of his citizens?

The biggest time bomb ever is now ticking. And instead of turning more boys into IED fodder pursuing Taliban crazies in the barren Afghan hills, why not spend far, far less of our resources to intensify the one strategy that really works—Predator drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban high command in South Waziristan and Kandahar Province? The Defense Dept. has budgeted only $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) worldwide for 2010—a price less than one month cost of continuing our futile conventional war in Afghanistan. But cost effectiveness aside, this single weapon is our only means of decapitating global terrorism while risking no more American lives. And if we left Afghanistan tomorrow the UAV could still be launched from Pakistan or other secure locations.

On the same theme, and with the same irony, our nation is now turning with vengeance upon the mercenary units that have been aiding the CIA and our Special Forces – the private contractors at Blackwater (now renamed Xe) and similar groups that have proven themselves in some of our dirtiest tasks. While they too have had rogue elements and incidents , they are more than willing to do the jobs, for a fee, that nobody else wants. With little fanfare, and only minor public outcry until now, there are almost 120,000 of these contractors in Iraq and 74,000 in Afghanistan.

Imagine what magnitude of funds could be diverted to America’s social causes if we were to bring home most of these surrogates from Asia, along with our troops. We’d be plugging the biggest financial drain our nation has ever faced and sparing lives of countless boys and girls.

WE MUST NEUTRALIZE A NUCLEAR IRAN

No case of nationalized terrorism and potential hostage-taking in the world today could be any clearer or more threatening than the relentless Iranian drive to develop a nuclear bomb.

Once again, the lessons we endured so painfully are staring at us this year. In each instance, a megalomaniac promises death and destruction, then delivers it to an incredulous population. Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden.

Now there is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, promising to “wipe Israel off the map” and bring retribution to that Great Satan America. Despite a ravaged economy, propped up only by crude oil exports, Iran has been steadily developing weaponry. Its new Shahab -3ER missile with a 2000 Km range can reach Turkey, and its long range ballistic BM 25 can reach 3500 Km targets like Athens and Budapest. Its satellite launching capabilities could be converted into ICBM launchers that would put cities like Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw well within range, not to mention Tel Aviv of course which would be hit by much lesser equipment (like the Shahab-2) if launched from Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

And carrying what? Inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency report that this summer Iran has amassed 4,592 centrifuges and 3,325 pounds of enriched uranium –enough to produce two nuclear bombs. The world’s response? While free world leaders in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany are ready to propose sanctions to the U.N. Security Council if Iran does not drop the current charade by an Obama-imposed deadline of Sept. 30, it is general knowledge that this effort will continue to be stymied by vetoes of Russia and China, of whom Iran is a multi-billion dollar client.

As so eloquently dramatized by Freidrich Durrenmatt’s play, “The Visit”, money talks, and when someone says “It’s not the money it’s the principle,” you can be sure it’s the money. Thus while the diplomatic waltz continues endlessly, every month brings precious time for Iran to bury its Natanz nuclear facilities in deeper cover and obtain even more sophisticated electronic air defense technology from Russia.

Accordingly, in a conclusion similar to the obvious option that we strike at the heart of al Qaeda before it strikes us again, we must act now to eliminate Iran’s death factory. Harvard’s pre-eminent Alan Dershowitz says it best in one of the seminal treatises of our time: his book “Pre-emption”. In this modern era when there is a clear and present threat it is imperative that the intended victim strike first, not second. There may be no second chance. Israel began teaching the civilized world this axiom in 1967, and to everyone’s secret relief, in 1981 when it took out Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor, and again in 2006 when it destroyed a developing nuclear facility in Syria.

Everyone says a nuclear Iran “cannot be tolerated.” Yet inaction itself is de facto tolerance, even implied approval. Can Israel act successfully alone? Perhaps. But it will likely need U.S. help at least in supplying bunker-buster bombs, Iraq territorial overflight authorization, and aerial refueling.

• * *

Regarding all three of these imperatives, our undoing may be simply a sad case of national dementia—the faded memories of prior threats among us seniors, and the fact that our proliferating juniors were not even born to witness the tragedies of Munich, the Tet Offensive, or Rwandan genocide. In fact some were mere teeny-boppers when 9/11 occurred. Some are just now trying to figure out why we’re placing 68,000 of our favorite sons in harm’s way to protect a land of rubble populated by 93% of the world’s opium growers.

No need perhaps to belabor the George Santayana warning that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We already are.

* * *

PONDERING THE UNTHINKABLES

THREE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD ASK OURSELVES ABOUT FORGOTTEN LESSONS

By Ted Pincus

What are the three most urgent issues facing American society today? Isn’t it time to look at new solutions based on lessons we’ve repeatedly learned to our sorrow? Is it madness not to question what we’re doing?

As a 75-year-old PR man I have to admit that our folly in all three dilemmas is caring too much about public opinion. We’re seriously jeopardizing our future by fixating on how other people will view us.

The three unthinkable questions we must address are:

• Is it time for us to stop trying to solve the world’s civil wars by risking our sons’ necks and treasury?

• Why can’t we take off the gloves and finish al Qaeda?

• Why don’t we act promptly to neutralize nuclear Iran before it’s too late?

WE MUST EXIT AFGHANISTAN

Being a referee in civil wars has always been no-win.

We’ve seemed to learn nothing from history. Vainly trying to mix into domestic ethnic and sectarian conflicts has only cost us –and the host country—bloodshed and billions. Fifteen years of futility in Viet Nam taught us nothing, despite the loss of 47,244 American lives, with 103,329 injured, millions of civilian lives there, and gigantic sums that should have gone toward Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society crusade to fight hunger and poverty.

On Jan 4, 1971, Richard Nixon proudly proclaimed “The end is in sight.” On April 3 of that year, South Viet Nam’s President Thieu and his corrupt administration were re-elected, unopposed. In May 1972, the Paris Peace Talks collapsed. In October, Henry Kissinger meets quietly with Le Duc Tho and makes concessions. On Jan.27,1973, Nixon announces a cease fire agreement that will bring “peace with honor.” In Dec., 1974, North Viet Nam violates the agreement by attacking Phuoc Long province and overruns Da Nang in March, when 100,000 SVN soldiers surrender after being abandoned by their commanding officers. On April 29, the ignominious finale arrived with the panicked rescue of the last 7,000 U.S. troops and key Viet Namese officials by helicopter at Saigon, while our Tan Son Nhut air base was looted and thousands of civilians begged for asylum at our embassy compound.

Sound familiar?

Much fresher in our memories should be the Bush follies in Iraq where our well intentioned initiative to remove a petty tyrant gave us accidental ownership of a full blown sectarian civil war bred by centuries of seething Shiite-Sunni hatred. After more than six years as a hapless referee,losing over 4000 lives and a trillion of treasury (which turned a half-trillion federal surplus into a projected 1.5 trillion deficit for fiscal 2010), we’re in the quagmire again. Our generals have declared victory one more time of course. But the almost daily bloodshed between the two sects (with Kurds caught in the crossfire) continues unabated.

(In 2004 I wrote an editorial for the Chicago Sun Times detailing that the only hope for a true exit from Iraq with honor would be to separate the adversaries by a three-way partitioning under NATO supervision. It caught the eye of House Intl. Relations Chairman Henry Hyde who endorsed and circulated the piece in congress, before it hit a wall with Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.)

While we now proudly rely on the 600,000 man strength of a revitalized Iraqi army, which we term “self-sufficient”, as we slink away in a noble exit strategy and call it a day, the Nouri al-Maliki government perpetuates the strife by denying the Sunni a fair share.

Does any of this tell us that it’s overdue for us to exit Afghanistan? Here’s a nation with another 32.7 million people—80% Sunni M

uslim and 20% Shiite, the precise opposite mix of Iraq. Equally fanatical, equally corrupt and producer of 93% of the world’s opium. A remarkable 44% of the population is under 14, and the literacy rate nationwide is 28% (12% for females). Overrun by everyone from Alexander to the Mongols to the Russians, torn by ethnic strife in between, and more lately raped by the Taliban, the nation has never had a break.

Once more, in good conscience, we’ve stepped into the fray.We’ve tried to protect a Karzai government that is not only one of the world’s most corrupt but –based on the August 2009 election travesty—should likely not even be legitimately in power. We’ve been investing over $4 billion per month in this holding action, along with the lives of 43,000 American troops at risk, backed by 32,000 NATO troops. To date, we’ve lost 812 lives, including 48 in August. And while U.S. Commander Stanley McChrystal says the Taliban are winning this civil war and we face rising casualties, the plan is to boost our troop strength to 68,000 by December. If another year there could cost us 500 or 700 American boys, is it truly worth the price?

To what end? Nobody has even begun to define an exit strategy. And does the world care if we leave? Will we be derided as betraying humanity if we slink off the stage again? Remember, the Afghans see us not as saviors but as occupiers like the Ruskies, and want us gone. The latest ABC News poll of Gary Langer shows Afghan favorable views of the U.S. have plummeted from 85% in 2005 to 47% now. In neighboring Pakistan, says Pew Research, 13% say they have confidence in Obama, whose support is even exceeded by Osama Bin Laden with 18%.

If we leave, why worry about opinion at all? Did we worry when we stood idle and watched 800,000 Tutsi slaughtered in the Rwanda Hutu genocide? Or when Sri Lanka was torn apart by civil war? Or Myanmar taken over and oppressed by a military junta? Were we embarrassed to watch from the sidelines as China took over Tibet? Or as 1.6 million were killed in the ongoing Congolese civil war? Or as 200,000 innocents have been killed in Darfur and another two million displaced by an indicted tyrant whom nobody, including an impotent U.N., will arrest? And if we’re so concerned about the virulent rise of muslim fundamentalism, why are we sitting on our hands while it sweeps Somalia, Mali, Niger and Mauritania (where al Qaeda is now called AQIM).

And if the question of “selective” aid to certain causes isn’t enough reason to reconsider our Afghan commitment what about the dollar cost trade-offs? Our losing investment in Iraq and our currently rising one in Afghanistan have contributed hugely to the $10 trillion federal deficit handed to Obama. The biggest tragedy of all –beyond wasted dollars and wasted lives—is that it has crowded out the monumental humanitarian challenges we face: providing adequate health care and education and curtailing poverty here at home, and fighting hunger abroad. Although our defense budget is now 21% of our total it equals our whole social security budget (which some say is threadbare) and almost equals the 23% that we spend on health care. And that’s before the reform legislation aiming to aid millions of Americans without care.

Consider that our trillion dollar defense budget today almost equals the military budgets of all other nations combined. Our Navy’s battle fleet –despite cutbacks—is still larger than the next 13 navies of the world combined. Our total defense budget is now exceeding 4.7% of our gross domestic product.

It’s time to stop the madness. We simply can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman.

WE MUST FIND AND FINISH AL QAEDA

Think about it. Until 9/11, nobody –not Nazi Germany, imperial Japan or Cold War Russia—really threatened our survival. But today our nation is at physical risk from the fanatical tactics of a virtually unseen enemy: less than a few thousand ill-clothed and ill-equipped members of al Qaeda. Before realizing the new realities of a world without rules of engagement, we endured the lessons of the Beirut marine barracks debacle, the Khobar Towers disaster in Dharan, 9/11, the Nairobi embassy attack, the destroyer Cole attack, the Locherbie air disaster and the narrowly avoided simultaneous destruction of 10 transatlantic airliners in an Islamic fundamentalist plot foiled by Scotland Yard.

While congress, the ACLU and Amnesty International fiercely abide by their noble ideals to preserve principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention, realities have raced far ahead of this anachronism. There are no more uniformed armies against us with elegant tank formations and fancy command centers –only hit and run criminals. No navy challenges our ships—only pirates in tiny rag tag motorboats. There is no gentleman’s war any more. The guidelines of gallantry, civility and rules in global conflict have become meaningless in the face of an innocent human shield, a roadside IED, a suicide belt on an elderly woman, or a rocket propelled grenade launched by a young man in shorts and sandals from a hospital window.

And these insidious threats may pale in comparison to the day when one anonymous terrorist detonates a single nuclear device in the center of a major city. Against whom would we retaliate? All bets would be off.

This is why –in a future year—we’ll look back in remorse, wonder and perhaps fury at the well-intentioned efforts of many Americans to cling to yesterday’s idea of fair play. The very ramparts that are our first line of defense are under moralistic, irrational attack. In the name of “privacy” our NSA is handcuffed in its ability to intercept wireless communications among the invisibles out to kill us. FBI search warrants are more difficult to obtain. The CIA is under fire for almost every effort designed to learn global terrorism’s next plots and destroy its leadership if possible.

Although congressmen sat by and watched the Bush and then Obama administrations accelerate the series of Predator drone attacks that have been the only successful method of destroying al Qaeda and Taliban leadership since 9/11, they suddenly panicked and sanctimoniously condemned a CIA plan –uncovered this year—to covertly assassinate certain targeted terrorist leaders.

And after castigating,deflating and deforming the nation’s entire intelligence community during the Clinton years and most pointedly post 9/11 for ineptitude, we are now on a vendetta to persecute and prosecute many of the CIA operatives who have silently put their lives on the line to protect us against this unique,intractable enemy. Why? Because they were over-zealous in their attempts to pry vital, life-and-death intelligence out of terrorist detainees. Were there mistakes made? Yes, as in every war. Were there abuses? Yes. But the same CIA interrogators who drew out of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ,after waterboarding, a torrent of information that has saved many lives, are now being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for overreaching. Even though Holder himself as Deputy Attorney General in 2002, told CNN that Guantanamo detainees were “not in fact entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention,” he has suddenly turned puritanical and reversed his view. He’s mounting a messianic campaign to have a special prosecutor crucify the CIA perpetrators –based on a 2004 report, just released by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, citing some isolated instances of abuse and coercion.

But what the 2004 also abundantly details is that the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the program quietly, effectively and within the law” and that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support to interrogators.” It also glaringly spotlights that the CIA top brass and Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees had full knowledge of all “enhanced interrogation” techniques and raised no alarm. Nor should they have done so. The report discloses a wide array of terrorist plots around the globe that were foiled after detainee interrogations. These included the apprehension of Jose Padilla and Binyan Mohammed, who were about to detonate a “dirty” radioactive bomb; an unknown al Qaeda cell in Karachi planning to pilot an aircraft assault in the U.S; a plot to attack the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; and another to hijack an aircraft that could be flown into Heathrow; and yet another to attack a California high rise; and another plot to sever the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

Almost no intelligence officials are advocating that rogue interrogation should be allowed and laws violated. What the disclosures are telling us is that the laws themselves must be modified for our own survival in an increasingly lawless world unfit for polite niceties. The concept is now new. Pre-emptive strikes against dangerous criminals have been accepted by civilized society for centuries. Witness the duties of a police sniper blowing the head off a hostage-taking kidnapper—without any courtesy of explaining Miranda rights, arrest, indictment or trial. Similarly, what American mayor –faced with a criminal whose secret,ticking time bomb is about to level a downtown area—would not demand any and every kind of interrogation to discover its location and save lives of his citizens?

The biggest time bomb ever is now ticking. And instead of turning more boys into IED fodder pursuing Taliban crazies in the barren Afghan hills, why not spend far, far less of our resources to intensify the one strategy that really works—Predator drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban high command in South Waziristan and Kandahar Province? The Defense Dept. has budgeted only $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) worldwide for 2010—a price less than one month cost of continuing our futile conventional war in Afghanistan. But cost effectiveness aside, this single weapon is our only means of decapitating global terrorism while risking no more American lives. And if we left Afghanistan tomorrow the UAV could still be launched from Pakistan or other secure locations.

On the same theme, and with the same irony, our nation is now turning with vengeance upon the mercenary units that have been aiding the CIA and our Special Forces – the private contractors at Blackwater (now renamed Xe) and similar groups that have proven themselves in some of our dirtiest tasks. While they too have had rogue elements and incidents , they are more than willing to do the jobs, for a fee, that nobody else wants. With little fanfare, and only minor public outcry until now, there are almost 120,000 of these contractors in Iraq and 74,000 in Afghanistan.

Imagine what magnitude of funds could be diverted to America’s social causes if we were to bring home most of these surrogates from Asia, along with our troops. We’d be plugging the biggest financial drain our nation has ever faced and sparing lives of countless boys and girls.

WE MUST NEUTRALIZE A NUCLEAR IRAN

No case of nationalized terrorism and potential hostage-taking in the world today could be any clearer or more threatening than the relentless Iranian drive to develop a nuclear bomb.

Once again, the lessons we endured so painfully are staring at us this year. In each instance, a megalomaniac promises death and destruction, then delivers it to an incredulous population. Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden.

Now there is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, promising to “wipe Israel off the map” and bring retribution to that Great Satan America. Despite a ravaged economy, propped up only by crude oil exports, Iran has been steadily developing weaponry. Its new Shahab -3ER missile with a 2000 Km range can reach Turkey, and its long range ballistic BM 25 can reach 3500 Km targets like Athens and Budapest. Its satellite launching capabilities could be converted into ICBM launchers that would put cities like Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw well within range, not to mention Tel Aviv of course which would be hit by much lesser equipment (like the Shahab-2) if launched from Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

And carrying what? Inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency report that this summer Iran has amassed 4,592 centrifuges and 3,325 pounds of enriched uranium –enough to produce two nuclear bombs. The world’s response? While free world leaders in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany are ready to propose sanctions to the U.N. Security Council if Iran does not drop the current charade by an Obama-imposed deadline of Sept. 30, it is general knowledge that this effort will continue to be stymied by vetoes of Russia and China, of whom Iran is a multi-billion dollar client.

As so eloquently dramatized by Freidrich Durrenmatt’s play, “The Visit”, money talks, and when someone says “It’s not the money it’s the principle,” you can be sure it’s the money. Thus while the diplomatic waltz continues endlessly, every month brings precious time for Iran to bury its Natanz nuclear facilities in deeper cover and obtain even more sophisticated electronic air defense technology from Russia.

Accordingly, in a conclusion similar to the obvious option that we strike at the heart of al Qaeda before it strikes us again, we must act now to eliminate Iran’s death factory. Harvard’s pre-eminent Alan Dershowitz says it best in one of the seminal treatises of our time: his book “Pre-emption”. In this modern era when there is a clear and present threat it is imperative that the intended victim strike first, not second. There may be no second chance. Israel began teaching the civilized world this axiom in 1967, and to everyone’s secret relief, in 1981 when it took out Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor, and again in 2006 when it destroyed a developing nuclear facility in Syria.

Everyone says a nuclear Iran “cannot be tolerated.” Yet inaction itself is de facto tolerance, even implied approval. Can Israel act successfully alone? Perhaps. But it will likely need U.S. help at least in supplying bunker-buster bombs, Iraq territorial overflight authorization, and aerial refueling.

• * *

Regarding all three of these imperatives, our undoing may be simply a sad case of national dementia—the faded memories of prior threats among us seniors, and the fact that our proliferating juniors were not even born to witness the tragedies of Munich, the Tet Offensive, or Rwandan genocide. In fact some were mere teeny-boppers when 9/11 occurred. Some are just now trying to figure out why we’re placing 68,000 of our favorite sons in harm’s way to protect a land of rubble populated by 93% of the world’s opium growers.

No need perhaps to belabor the George Santayana warning that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We already are.

* * *

PONDERING THE UNTHINKABLES

THREE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD ASK OURSELVES ABOUT FORGOTTEN LESSONS

By Ted Pincus

What are the three most urgent issues facing American society today? Isn’t it time to look at new solutions based on lessons we’ve repeatedly learned to our sorrow? Is it madness not to question what we’re doing?

As a 75-year-old PR man I have to admit that our folly in all three dilemmas is caring too much about public opinion. We’re seriously jeopardizing our future by fixating on how other people will view us.

The three unthinkable questions we must address are:

• Is it time for us to stop trying to solve the world’s civil wars by risking our sons’ necks and treasury?

• Why can’t we take off the gloves and finish al Qaeda?

• Why don’t we act promptly to neutralize nuclear Iran before it’s too late?

WE MUST EXIT AFGHANISTAN

Being a referee in civil wars has always been no-win.

We’ve seemed to learn nothing from history. Vainly trying to mix into domestic ethnic and sectarian conflicts has only cost us –and the host country—bloodshed and billions. Fifteen years of futility in Viet Nam taught us nothing, despite the loss of 47,244 American lives, with 103,329 injured, millions of civilian lives there, and gigantic sums that should have gone toward Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society crusade to fight hunger and poverty.

On Jan 4, 1971, Richard Nixon proudly proclaimed “The end is in sight.” On April 3 of that year, South Viet Nam’s President Thieu and his corrupt administration were re-elected, unopposed. In May 1972, the Paris Peace Talks collapsed. In October, Henry Kissinger meets quietly with Le Duc Tho and makes concessions. On Jan.27,1973, Nixon announces a cease fire agreement that will bring “peace with honor.” In Dec., 1974, North Viet Nam violates the agreement by attacking Phuoc Long province and overruns Da Nang in March, when 100,000 SVN soldiers surrender after being abandoned by their commanding officers. On April 29, the ignominious finale arrived with the panicked rescue of the last 7,000 U.S. troops and key Viet Namese officials by helicopter at Saigon, while our Tan Son Nhut air base was looted and thousands of civilians begged for asylum at our embassy compound.

Sound familiar?

Much fresher in our memories should be the Bush follies in Iraq where our well intentioned initiative to remove a petty tyrant gave us accidental ownership of a full blown sectarian civil war bred by centuries of seething Shiite-Sunni hatred. After more than six years as a hapless referee,losing over 4000 lives and a trillion of treasury (which turned a half-trillion federal surplus into a projected 1.5 trillion deficit for fiscal 2010), we’re in the quagmire again. Our generals have declared victory one more time of course. But the almost daily bloodshed between the two sects (with Kurds caught in the crossfire) continues unabated.

(In 2004 I wrote an editorial for the Chicago Sun Times detailing that the only hope for a true exit from Iraq with honor would be to separate the adversaries by a three-way partitioning under NATO supervision. It caught the eye of House Intl. Relations Chairman Henry Hyde who endorsed and circulated the piece in congress, before it hit a wall with Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.)

While we now proudly rely on the 600,000 man strength of a revitalized Iraqi army, which we term “self-sufficient”, as we slink away in a noble exit strategy and call it a day, the Nouri al-Maliki government perpetuates the strife by denying the Sunni a fair share.

Does any of this tell us that it’s overdue for us to exit Afghanistan? Here’s a nation with another 32.7 million people—80% Sunni M

uslim and 20% Shiite, the precise opposite mix of Iraq. Equally fanatical, equally corrupt and producer of 93% of the world’s opium. A remarkable 44% of the population is under 14, and the literacy rate nationwide is 28% (12% for females). Overrun by everyone from Alexander to the Mongols to the Russians, torn by ethnic strife in between, and more lately raped by the Taliban, the nation has never had a break.

Once more, in good conscience, we’ve stepped into the fray.We’ve tried to protect a Karzai government that is not only one of the world’s most corrupt but –based on the August 2009 election travesty—should likely not even be legitimately in power. We’ve been investing over $4 billion per month in this holding action, along with the lives of 43,000 American troops at risk, backed by 32,000 NATO troops. To date, we’ve lost 812 lives, including 48 in August. And while U.S. Commander Stanley McChrystal says the Taliban are winning this civil war and we face rising casualties, the plan is to boost our troop strength to 68,000 by December. If another year there could cost us 500 or 700 American boys, is it truly worth the price?

To what end? Nobody has even begun to define an exit strategy. And does the world care if we leave? Will we be derided as betraying humanity if we slink off the stage again? Remember, the Afghans see us not as saviors but as occupiers like the Ruskies, and want us gone. The latest ABC News poll of Gary Langer shows Afghan favorable views of the U.S. have plummeted from 85% in 2005 to 47% now. In neighboring Pakistan, says Pew Research, 13% say they have confidence in Obama, whose support is even exceeded by Osama Bin Laden with 18%.

If we leave, why worry about opinion at all? Did we worry when we stood idle and watched 800,000 Tutsi slaughtered in the Rwanda Hutu genocide? Or when Sri Lanka was torn apart by civil war? Or Myanmar taken over and oppressed by a military junta? Were we embarrassed to watch from the sidelines as China took over Tibet? Or as 1.6 million were killed in the ongoing Congolese civil war? Or as 200,000 innocents have been killed in Darfur and another two million displaced by an indicted tyrant whom nobody, including an impotent U.N., will arrest? And if we’re so concerned about the virulent rise of muslim fundamentalism, why are we sitting on our hands while it sweeps Somalia, Mali, Niger and Mauritania (where al Qaeda is now called AQIM).

And if the question of “selective” aid to certain causes isn’t enough reason to reconsider our Afghan commitment what about the dollar cost trade-offs? Our losing investment in Iraq and our currently rising one in Afghanistan have contributed hugely to the $10 trillion federal deficit handed to Obama. The biggest tragedy of all –beyond wasted dollars and wasted lives—is that it has crowded out the monumental humanitarian challenges we face: providing adequate health care and education and curtailing poverty here at home, and fighting hunger abroad. Although our defense budget is now 21% of our total it equals our whole social security budget (which some say is threadbare) and almost equals the 23% that we spend on health care. And that’s before the reform legislation aiming to aid millions of Americans without care.

Consider that our trillion dollar defense budget today almost equals the military budgets of all other nations combined. Our Navy’s battle fleet –despite cutbacks—is still larger than the next 13 navies of the world combined. Our total defense budget is now exceeding 4.7% of our gross domestic product.

It’s time to stop the madness. We simply can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman.

WE MUST FIND AND FINISH AL QAEDA

Think about it. Until 9/11, nobody –not Nazi Germany, imperial Japan or Cold War Russia—really threatened our survival. But today our nation is at physical risk from the fanatical tactics of a virtually unseen enemy: less than a few thousand ill-clothed and ill-equipped members of al Qaeda. Before realizing the new realities of a world without rules of engagement, we endured the lessons of the Beirut marine barracks debacle, the Khobar Towers disaster in Dharan, 9/11, the Nairobi embassy attack, the destroyer Cole attack, the Locherbie air disaster and the narrowly avoided simultaneous destruction of 10 transatlantic airliners in an Islamic fundamentalist plot foiled by Scotland Yard.

While congress, the ACLU and Amnesty International fiercely abide by their noble ideals to preserve principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention, realities have raced far ahead of this anachronism. There are no more uniformed armies against us with elegant tank formations and fancy command centers –only hit and run criminals. No navy challenges our ships—only pirates in tiny rag tag motorboats. There is no gentleman’s war any more. The guidelines of gallantry, civility and rules in global conflict have become meaningless in the face of an innocent human shield, a roadside IED, a suicide belt on an elderly woman, or a rocket propelled grenade launched by a young man in shorts and sandals from a hospital window.

And these insidious threats may pale in comparison to the day when one anonymous terrorist detonates a single nuclear device in the center of a major city. Against whom would we retaliate? All bets would be off.

This is why –in a future year—we’ll look back in remorse, wonder and perhaps fury at the well-intentioned efforts of many Americans to cling to yesterday’s idea of fair play. The very ramparts that are our first line of defense are under moralistic, irrational attack. In the name of “privacy” our NSA is handcuffed in its ability to intercept wireless communications among the invisibles out to kill us. FBI search warrants are more difficult to obtain. The CIA is under fire for almost every effort designed to learn global terrorism’s next plots and destroy its leadership if possible.

Although congressmen sat by and watched the Bush and then Obama administrations accelerate the series of Predator drone attacks that have been the only successful method of destroying al Qaeda and Taliban leadership since 9/11, they suddenly panicked and sanctimoniously condemned a CIA plan –uncovered this year—to covertly assassinate certain targeted terrorist leaders.

And after castigating,deflating and deforming the nation’s entire intelligence community during the Clinton years and most pointedly post 9/11 for ineptitude, we are now on a vendetta to persecute and prosecute many of the CIA operatives who have silently put their lives on the line to protect us against this unique,intractable enemy. Why? Because they were over-zealous in their attempts to pry vital, life-and-death intelligence out of terrorist detainees. Were there mistakes made? Yes, as in every war. Were there abuses? Yes. But the same CIA interrogators who drew out of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ,after waterboarding, a torrent of information that has saved many lives, are now being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for overreaching. Even though Holder himself as Deputy Attorney General in 2002, told CNN that Guantanamo detainees were “not in fact entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention,” he has suddenly turned puritanical and reversed his view. He’s mounting a messianic campaign to have a special prosecutor crucify the CIA perpetrators –based on a 2004 report, just released by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, citing some isolated instances of abuse and coercion.

But what the 2004 also abundantly details is that the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the program quietly, effectively and within the law” and that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support to interrogators.” It also glaringly spotlights that the CIA top brass and Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees had full knowledge of all “enhanced interrogation” techniques and raised no alarm. Nor should they have done so. The report discloses a wide array of terrorist plots around the globe that were foiled after detainee interrogations. These included the apprehension of Jose Padilla and Binyan Mohammed, who were about to detonate a “dirty” radioactive bomb; an unknown al Qaeda cell in Karachi planning to pilot an aircraft assault in the U.S; a plot to attack the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; and another to hijack an aircraft that could be flown into Heathrow; and yet another to attack a California high rise; and another plot to sever the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

Almost no intelligence officials are advocating that rogue interrogation should be allowed and laws violated. What the disclosures are telling us is that the laws themselves must be modified for our own survival in an increasingly lawless world unfit for polite niceties. The concept is now new. Pre-emptive strikes against dangerous criminals have been accepted by civilized society for centuries. Witness the duties of a police sniper blowing the head off a hostage-taking kidnapper—without any courtesy of explaining Miranda rights, arrest, indictment or trial. Similarly, what American mayor –faced with a criminal whose secret,ticking time bomb is about to level a downtown area—would not demand any and every kind of interrogation to discover its location and save lives of his citizens?

The biggest time bomb ever is now ticking. And instead of turning more boys into IED fodder pursuing Taliban crazies in the barren Afghan hills, why not spend far, far less of our resources to intensify the one strategy that really works—Predator drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban high command in South Waziristan and Kandahar Province? The Defense Dept. has budgeted only $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) worldwide for 2010—a price less than one month cost of continuing our futile conventional war in Afghanistan. But cost effectiveness aside, this single weapon is our only means of decapitating global terrorism while risking no more American lives. And if we left Afghanistan tomorrow the UAV could still be launched from Pakistan or other secure locations.

On the same theme, and with the same irony, our nation is now turning with vengeance upon the mercenary units that have been aiding the CIA and our Special Forces – the private contractors at Blackwater (now renamed Xe) and similar groups that have proven themselves in some of our dirtiest tasks. While they too have had rogue elements and incidents , they are more than willing to do the jobs, for a fee, that nobody else wants. With little fanfare, and only minor public outcry until now, there are almost 120,000 of these contractors in Iraq and 74,000 in Afghanistan.

Imagine what magnitude of funds could be diverted to America’s social causes if we were to bring home most of these surrogates from Asia, along with our troops. We’d be plugging the biggest financial drain our nation has ever faced and sparing lives of countless boys and girls.

WE MUST NEUTRALIZE A NUCLEAR IRAN

No case of nationalized terrorism and potential hostage-taking in the world today could be any clearer or more threatening than the relentless Iranian drive to develop a nuclear bomb.

Once again, the lessons we endured so painfully are staring at us this year. In each instance, a megalomaniac promises death and destruction, then delivers it to an incredulous population. Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden.

Now there is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, promising to “wipe Israel off the map” and bring retribution to that Great Satan America. Despite a ravaged economy, propped up only by crude oil exports, Iran has been steadily developing weaponry. Its new Shahab -3ER missile with a 2000 Km range can reach Turkey, and its long range ballistic BM 25 can reach 3500 Km targets like Athens and Budapest. Its satellite launching capabilities could be converted into ICBM launchers that would put cities like Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw well within range, not to mention Tel Aviv of course which would be hit by much lesser equipment (like the Shahab-2) if launched from Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

And carrying what? Inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency report that this summer Iran has amassed 4,592 centrifuges and 3,325 pounds of enriched uranium –enough to produce two nuclear bombs. The world’s response? While free world leaders in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany are ready to propose sanctions to the U.N. Security Council if Iran does not drop the current charade by an Obama-imposed deadline of Sept. 30, it is general knowledge that this effort will continue to be stymied by vetoes of Russia and China, of whom Iran is a multi-billion dollar client.

As so eloquently dramatized by Freidrich Durrenmatt’s play, “The Visit”, money talks, and when someone says “It’s not the money it’s the principle,” you can be sure it’s the money. Thus while the diplomatic waltz continues endlessly, every month brings precious time for Iran to bury its Natanz nuclear facilities in deeper cover and obtain even more sophisticated electronic air defense technology from Russia.

Accordingly, in a conclusion similar to the obvious option that we strike at the heart of al Qaeda before it strikes us again, we must act now to eliminate Iran’s death factory. Harvard’s pre-eminent Alan Dershowitz says it best in one of the seminal treatises of our time: his book “Pre-emption”. In this modern era when there is a clear and present threat it is imperative that the intended victim strike first, not second. There may be no second chance. Israel began teaching the civilized world this axiom in 1967, and to everyone’s secret relief, in 1981 when it took out Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor, and again in 2006 when it destroyed a developing nuclear facility in Syria.

Everyone says a nuclear Iran “cannot be tolerated.” Yet inaction itself is de facto tolerance, even implied approval. Can Israel act successfully alone? Perhaps. But it will likely need U.S. help at least in supplying bunker-buster bombs, Iraq territorial overflight authorization, and aerial refueling.

• * *

Regarding all three of these imperatives, our undoing may be simply a sad case of national dementia—the faded memories of prior threats among us seniors, and the fact that our proliferating juniors were not even born to witness the tragedies of Munich, the Tet Offensive, or Rwandan genocide. In fact some were mere teeny-boppers when 9/11 occurred. Some are just now trying to figure out why we’re placing 68,000 of our favorite sons in harm’s way to protect a land of rubble populated by 93% of the world’s opium growers.

No need perhaps to belabor the George Santayana warning that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We already are.

* * *

PONDERING THE UNTHINKABLES

THREE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD ASK OURSELVES ABOUT FORGOTTEN LESSONS

By Ted Pincus

What are the three most urgent issues facing American society today? Isn’t it time to look at new solutions based on lessons we’ve repeatedly learned to our sorrow? Is it madness not to question what we’re doing?

As a 75-year-old PR man I have to admit that our folly in all three dilemmas is caring too much about public opinion. We’re seriously jeopardizing our future by fixating on how other people will view us.

The three unthinkable questions we must address are:

• Is it time for us to stop trying to solve the world’s civil wars by risking our sons’ necks and treasury?

• Why can’t we take off the gloves and finish al Qaeda?

• Why don’t we act promptly to neutralize nuclear Iran before it’s too late?

WE MUST EXIT AFGHANISTAN

Being a referee in civil wars has always been no-win.

We’ve seemed to learn nothing from history. Vainly trying to mix into domestic ethnic and sectarian conflicts has only cost us –and the host country—bloodshed and billions. Fifteen years of futility in Viet Nam taught us nothing, despite the loss of 47,244 American lives, with 103,329 injured, millions of civilian lives there, and gigantic sums that should have gone toward Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society crusade to fight hunger and poverty.

On Jan 4, 1971, Richard Nixon proudly proclaimed “The end is in sight.” On April 3 of that year, South Viet Nam’s President Thieu and his corrupt administration were re-elected, unopposed. In May 1972, the Paris Peace Talks collapsed. In October, Henry Kissinger meets quietly with Le Duc Tho and makes concessions. On Jan.27,1973, Nixon announces a cease fire agreement that will bring “peace with honor.” In Dec., 1974, North Viet Nam violates the agreement by attacking Phuoc Long province and overruns Da Nang in March, when 100,000 SVN soldiers surrender after being abandoned by their commanding officers. On April 29, the ignominious finale arrived with the panicked rescue of the last 7,000 U.S. troops and key Viet Namese officials by helicopter at Saigon, while our Tan Son Nhut air base was looted and thousands of civilians begged for asylum at our embassy compound.

Sound familiar?

Much fresher in our memories should be the Bush follies in Iraq where our well intentioned initiative to remove a petty tyrant gave us accidental ownership of a full blown sectarian civil war bred by centuries of seething Shiite-Sunni hatred. After more than six years as a hapless referee,losing over 4000 lives and a trillion of treasury (which turned a half-trillion federal surplus into a projected 1.5 trillion deficit for fiscal 2010), we’re in the quagmire again. Our generals have declared victory one more time of course. But the almost daily bloodshed between the two sects (with Kurds caught in the crossfire) continues unabated.

(In 2004 I wrote an editorial for the Chicago Sun Times detailing that the only hope for a true exit from Iraq with honor would be to separate the adversaries by a three-way partitioning under NATO supervision. It caught the eye of House Intl. Relations Chairman Henry Hyde who endorsed and circulated the piece in congress, before it hit a wall with Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.)

While we now proudly rely on the 600,000 man strength of a revitalized Iraqi army, which we term “self-sufficient”, as we slink away in a noble exit strategy and call it a day, the Nouri al-Maliki government perpetuates the strife by denying the Sunni a fair share.

Does any of this tell us that it’s overdue for us to exit Afghanistan? Here’s a nation with another 32.7 million people—80% Sunni M

uslim and 20% Shiite, the precise opposite mix of Iraq. Equally fanatical, equally corrupt and producer of 93% of the world’s opium. A remarkable 44% of the population is under 14, and the literacy rate nationwide is 28% (12% for females). Overrun by everyone from Alexander to the Mongols to the Russians, torn by ethnic strife in between, and more lately raped by the Taliban, the nation has never had a break.

Once more, in good conscience, we’ve stepped into the fray.We’ve tried to protect a Karzai government that is not only one of the world’s most corrupt but –based on the August 2009 election travesty—should likely not even be legitimately in power. We’ve been investing over $4 billion per month in this holding action, along with the lives of 43,000 American troops at risk, backed by 32,000 NATO troops. To date, we’ve lost 812 lives, including 48 in August. And while U.S. Commander Stanley McChrystal says the Taliban are winning this civil war and we face rising casualties, the plan is to boost our troop strength to 68,000 by December. If another year there could cost us 500 or 700 American boys, is it truly worth the price?

To what end? Nobody has even begun to define an exit strategy. And does the world care if we leave? Will we be derided as betraying humanity if we slink off the stage again? Remember, the Afghans see us not as saviors but as occupiers like the Ruskies, and want us gone. The latest ABC News poll of Gary Langer shows Afghan favorable views of the U.S. have plummeted from 85% in 2005 to 47% now. In neighboring Pakistan, says Pew Research, 13% say they have confidence in Obama, whose support is even exceeded by Osama Bin Laden with 18%.

If we leave, why worry about opinion at all? Did we worry when we stood idle and watched 800,000 Tutsi slaughtered in the Rwanda Hutu genocide? Or when Sri Lanka was torn apart by civil war? Or Myanmar taken over and oppressed by a military junta? Were we embarrassed to watch from the sidelines as China took over Tibet? Or as 1.6 million were killed in the ongoing Congolese civil war? Or as 200,000 innocents have been killed in Darfur and another two million displaced by an indicted tyrant whom nobody, including an impotent U.N., will arrest? And if we’re so concerned about the virulent rise of muslim fundamentalism, why are we sitting on our hands while it sweeps Somalia, Mali, Niger and Mauritania (where al Qaeda is now called AQIM).

And if the question of “selective” aid to certain causes isn’t enough reason to reconsider our Afghan commitment what about the dollar cost trade-offs? Our losing investment in Iraq and our currently rising one in Afghanistan have contributed hugely to the $10 trillion federal deficit handed to Obama. The biggest tragedy of all –beyond wasted dollars and wasted lives—is that it has crowded out the monumental humanitarian challenges we face: providing adequate health care and education and curtailing poverty here at home, and fighting hunger abroad. Although our defense budget is now 21% of our total it equals our whole social security budget (which some say is threadbare) and almost equals the 23% that we spend on health care. And that’s before the reform legislation aiming to aid millions of Americans without care.

Consider that our trillion dollar defense budget today almost equals the military budgets of all other nations combined. Our Navy’s battle fleet –despite cutbacks—is still larger than the next 13 navies of the world combined. Our total defense budget is now exceeding 4.7% of our gross domestic product.

It’s time to stop the madness. We simply can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman.

WE MUST FIND AND FINISH AL QAEDA

Think about it. Until 9/11, nobody –not Nazi Germany, imperial Japan or Cold War Russia—really threatened our survival. But today our nation is at physical risk from the fanatical tactics of a virtually unseen enemy: less than a few thousand ill-clothed and ill-equipped members of al Qaeda. Before realizing the new realities of a world without rules of engagement, we endured the lessons of the Beirut marine barracks debacle, the Khobar Towers disaster in Dharan, 9/11, the Nairobi embassy attack, the destroyer Cole attack, the Locherbie air disaster and the narrowly avoided simultaneous destruction of 10 transatlantic airliners in an Islamic fundamentalist plot foiled by Scotland Yard.

While congress, the ACLU and Amnesty International fiercely abide by their noble ideals to preserve principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention, realities have raced far ahead of this anachronism. There are no more uniformed armies against us with elegant tank formations and fancy command centers –only hit and run criminals. No navy challenges our ships—only pirates in tiny rag tag motorboats. There is no gentleman’s war any more. The guidelines of gallantry, civility and rules in global conflict have become meaningless in the face of an innocent human shield, a roadside IED, a suicide belt on an elderly woman, or a rocket propelled grenade launched by a young man in shorts and sandals from a hospital window.

And these insidious threats may pale in comparison to the day when one anonymous terrorist detonates a single nuclear device in the center of a major city. Against whom would we retaliate? All bets would be off.

This is why –in a future year—we’ll look back in remorse, wonder and perhaps fury at the well-intentioned efforts of many Americans to cling to yesterday’s idea of fair play. The very ramparts that are our first line of defense are under moralistic, irrational attack. In the name of “privacy” our NSA is handcuffed in its ability to intercept wireless communications among the invisibles out to kill us. FBI search warrants are more difficult to obtain. The CIA is under fire for almost every effort designed to learn global terrorism’s next plots and destroy its leadership if possible.

Although congressmen sat by and watched the Bush and then Obama administrations accelerate the series of Predator drone attacks that have been the only successful method of destroying al Qaeda and Taliban leadership since 9/11, they suddenly panicked and sanctimoniously condemned a CIA plan –uncovered this year—to covertly assassinate certain targeted terrorist leaders.

And after castigating,deflating and deforming the nation’s entire intelligence community during the Clinton years and most pointedly post 9/11 for ineptitude, we are now on a vendetta to persecute and prosecute many of the CIA operatives who have silently put their lives on the line to protect us against this unique,intractable enemy. Why? Because they were over-zealous in their attempts to pry vital, life-and-death intelligence out of terrorist detainees. Were there mistakes made? Yes, as in every war. Were there abuses? Yes. But the same CIA interrogators who drew out of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ,after waterboarding, a torrent of information that has saved many lives, are now being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for overreaching. Even though Holder himself as Deputy Attorney General in 2002, told CNN that Guantanamo detainees were “not in fact entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention,” he has suddenly turned puritanical and reversed his view. He’s mounting a messianic campaign to have a special prosecutor crucify the CIA perpetrators –based on a 2004 report, just released by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, citing some isolated instances of abuse and coercion.

But what the 2004 also abundantly details is that the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the program quietly, effectively and within the law” and that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support to interrogators.” It also glaringly spotlights that the CIA top brass and Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees had full knowledge of all “enhanced interrogation” techniques and raised no alarm. Nor should they have done so. The report discloses a wide array of terrorist plots around the globe that were foiled after detainee interrogations. These included the apprehension of Jose Padilla and Binyan Mohammed, who were about to detonate a “dirty” radioactive bomb; an unknown al Qaeda cell in Karachi planning to pilot an aircraft assault in the U.S; a plot to attack the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; and another to hijack an aircraft that could be flown into Heathrow; and yet another to attack a California high rise; and another plot to sever the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

Almost no intelligence officials are advocating that rogue interrogation should be allowed and laws violated. What the disclosures are telling us is that the laws themselves must be modified for our own survival in an increasingly lawless world unfit for polite niceties. The concept is now new. Pre-emptive strikes against dangerous criminals have been accepted by civilized society for centuries. Witness the duties of a police sniper blowing the head off a hostage-taking kidnapper—without any courtesy of explaining Miranda rights, arrest, indictment or trial. Similarly, what American mayor –faced with a criminal whose secret,ticking time bomb is about to level a downtown area—would not demand any and every kind of interrogation to discover its location and save lives of his citizens?

The biggest time bomb ever is now ticking. And instead of turning more boys into IED fodder pursuing Taliban crazies in the barren Afghan hills, why not spend far, far less of our resources to intensify the one strategy that really works—Predator drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban high command in South Waziristan and Kandahar Province? The Defense Dept. has budgeted only $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) worldwide for 2010—a price less than one month cost of continuing our futile conventional war in Afghanistan. But cost effectiveness aside, this single weapon is our only means of decapitating global terrorism while risking no more American lives. And if we left Afghanistan tomorrow the UAV could still be launched from Pakistan or other secure locations.

On the same theme, and with the same irony, our nation is now turning with vengeance upon the mercenary units that have been aiding the CIA and our Special Forces – the private contractors at Blackwater (now renamed Xe) and similar groups that have proven themselves in some of our dirtiest tasks. While they too have had rogue elements and incidents , they are more than willing to do the jobs, for a fee, that nobody else wants. With little fanfare, and only minor public outcry until now, there are almost 120,000 of these contractors in Iraq and 74,000 in Afghanistan.

Imagine what magnitude of funds could be diverted to America’s social causes if we were to bring home most of these surrogates from Asia, along with our troops. We’d be plugging the biggest financial drain our nation has ever faced and sparing lives of countless boys and girls.

WE MUST NEUTRALIZE A NUCLEAR IRAN

No case of nationalized terrorism and potential hostage-taking in the world today could be any clearer or more threatening than the relentless Iranian drive to develop a nuclear bomb.

Once again, the lessons we endured so painfully are staring at us this year. In each instance, a megalomaniac promises death and destruction, then delivers it to an incredulous population. Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden.

Now there is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, promising to “wipe Israel off the map” and bring retribution to that Great Satan America. Despite a ravaged economy, propped up only by crude oil exports, Iran has been steadily developing weaponry. Its new Shahab -3ER missile with a 2000 Km range can reach Turkey, and its long range ballistic BM 25 can reach 3500 Km targets like Athens and Budapest. Its satellite launching capabilities could be converted into ICBM launchers that would put cities like Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw well within range, not to mention Tel Aviv of course which would be hit by much lesser equipment (like the Shahab-2) if launched from Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

And carrying what? Inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency report that this summer Iran has amassed 4,592 centrifuges and 3,325 pounds of enriched uranium –enough to produce two nuclear bombs. The world’s response? While free world leaders in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany are ready to propose sanctions to the U.N. Security Council if Iran does not drop the current charade by an Obama-imposed deadline of Sept. 30, it is general knowledge that this effort will continue to be stymied by vetoes of Russia and China, of whom Iran is a multi-billion dollar client.

As so eloquently dramatized by Freidrich Durrenmatt’s play, “The Visit”, money talks, and when someone says “It’s not the money it’s the principle,” you can be sure it’s the money. Thus while the diplomatic waltz continues endlessly, every month brings precious time for Iran to bury its Natanz nuclear facilities in deeper cover and obtain even more sophisticated electronic air defense technology from Russia.

Accordingly, in a conclusion similar to the obvious option that we strike at the heart of al Qaeda before it strikes us again, we must act now to eliminate Iran’s death factory. Harvard’s pre-eminent Alan Dershowitz says it best in one of the seminal treatises of our time: his book “Pre-emption”. In this modern era when there is a clear and present threat it is imperative that the intended victim strike first, not second. There may be no second chance. Israel began teaching the civilized world this axiom in 1967, and to everyone’s secret relief, in 1981 when it took out Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor, and again in 2006 when it destroyed a developing nuclear facility in Syria.

Everyone says a nuclear Iran “cannot be tolerated.” Yet inaction itself is de facto tolerance, even implied approval. Can Israel act successfully alone? Perhaps. But it will likely need U.S. help at least in supplying bunker-buster bombs, Iraq territorial overflight authorization, and aerial refueling.

• * *

Regarding all three of these imperatives, our undoing may be simply a sad case of national dementia—the faded memories of prior threats among us seniors, and the fact that our proliferating juniors were not even born to witness the tragedies of Munich, the Tet Offensive, or Rwandan genocide. In fact some were mere teeny-boppers when 9/11 occurred. Some are just now trying to figure out why we’re placing 68,000 of our favorite sons in harm’s way to protect a land of rubble populated by 93% of the world’s opium growers.

No need perhaps to belabor the George Santayana warning that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We already are.

* * *

PONDERING THE UNTHINKABLES

THREE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD ASK OURSELVES ABOUT FORGOTTEN LESSONS

By Ted Pincus

What are the three most urgent issues facing American society today? Isn’t it time to look at new solutions based on lessons we’ve repeatedly learned to our sorrow? Is it madness not to question what we’re doing?

As a 75-year-old PR man I have to admit that our folly in all three dilemmas is caring too much about public opinion. We’re seriously jeopardizing our future by fixating on how other people will view us.

The three unthinkable questions we must address are:

• Is it time for us to stop trying to solve the world’s civil wars by risking our sons’ necks and treasury?

• Why can’t we take off the gloves and finish al Qaeda?

• Why don’t we act promptly to neutralize nuclear Iran before it’s too late?

WE MUST EXIT AFGHANISTAN

Being a referee in civil wars has always been no-win.

We’ve seemed to learn nothing from history. Vainly trying to mix into domestic ethnic and sectarian conflicts has only cost us –and the host country—bloodshed and billions. Fifteen years of futility in Viet Nam taught us nothing, despite the loss of 47,244 American lives, with 103,329 injured, millions of civilian lives there, and gigantic sums that should have gone toward Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society crusade to fight hunger and poverty.

On Jan 4, 1971, Richard Nixon proudly proclaimed “The end is in sight.” On April 3 of that year, South Viet Nam’s President Thieu and his corrupt administration were re-elected, unopposed. In May 1972, the Paris Peace Talks collapsed. In October, Henry Kissinger meets quietly with Le Duc Tho and makes concessions. On Jan.27,1973, Nixon announces a cease fire agreement that will bring “peace with honor.” In Dec., 1974, North Viet Nam violates the agreement by attacking Phuoc Long province and overruns Da Nang in March, when 100,000 SVN soldiers surrender after being abandoned by their commanding officers. On April 29, the ignominious finale arrived with the panicked rescue of the last 7,000 U.S. troops and key Viet Namese officials by helicopter at Saigon, while our Tan Son Nhut air base was looted and thousands of civilians begged for asylum at our embassy compound.

Sound familiar?

Much fresher in our memories should be the Bush follies in Iraq where our well intentioned initiative to remove a petty tyrant gave us accidental ownership of a full blown sectarian civil war bred by centuries of seething Shiite-Sunni hatred. After more than six years as a hapless referee,losing over 4000 lives and a trillion of treasury (which turned a half-trillion federal surplus into a projected 1.5 trillion deficit for fiscal 2010), we’re in the quagmire again. Our generals have declared victory one more time of course. But the almost daily bloodshed between the two sects (with Kurds caught in the crossfire) continues unabated.

(In 2004 I wrote an editorial for the Chicago Sun Times detailing that the only hope for a true exit from Iraq with honor would be to separate the adversaries by a three-way partitioning under NATO supervision. It caught the eye of House Intl. Relations Chairman Henry Hyde who endorsed and circulated the piece in congress, before it hit a wall with Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.)

While we now proudly rely on the 600,000 man strength of a revitalized Iraqi army, which we term “self-sufficient”, as we slink away in a noble exit strategy and call it a day, the Nouri al-Maliki government perpetuates the strife by denying the Sunni a fair share.

Does any of this tell us that it’s overdue for us to exit Afghanistan? Here’s a nation with another 32.7 million people—80% Sunni M

uslim and 20% Shiite, the precise opposite mix of Iraq. Equally fanatical, equally corrupt and producer of 93% of the world’s opium. A remarkable 44% of the population is under 14, and the literacy rate nationwide is 28% (12% for females). Overrun by everyone from Alexander to the Mongols to the Russians, torn by ethnic strife in between, and more lately raped by the Taliban, the nation has never had a break.

Once more, in good conscience, we’ve stepped into the fray.We’ve tried to protect a Karzai government that is not only one of the world’s most corrupt but –based on the August 2009 election travesty—should likely not even be legitimately in power. We’ve been investing over $4 billion per month in this holding action, along with the lives of 43,000 American troops at risk, backed by 32,000 NATO troops. To date, we’ve lost 812 lives, including 48 in August. And while U.S. Commander Stanley McChrystal says the Taliban are winning this civil war and we face rising casualties, the plan is to boost our troop strength to 68,000 by December. If another year there could cost us 500 or 700 American boys, is it truly worth the price?

To what end? Nobody has even begun to define an exit strategy. And does the world care if we leave? Will we be derided as betraying humanity if we slink off the stage again? Remember, the Afghans see us not as saviors but as occupiers like the Ruskies, and want us gone. The latest ABC News poll of Gary Langer shows Afghan favorable views of the U.S. have plummeted from 85% in 2005 to 47% now. In neighboring Pakistan, says Pew Research, 13% say they have confidence in Obama, whose support is even exceeded by Osama Bin Laden with 18%.

If we leave, why worry about opinion at all? Did we worry when we stood idle and watched 800,000 Tutsi slaughtered in the Rwanda Hutu genocide? Or when Sri Lanka was torn apart by civil war? Or Myanmar taken over and oppressed by a military junta? Were we embarrassed to watch from the sidelines as China took over Tibet? Or as 1.6 million were killed in the ongoing Congolese civil war? Or as 200,000 innocents have been killed in Darfur and another two million displaced by an indicted tyrant whom nobody, including an impotent U.N., will arrest? And if we’re so concerned about the virulent rise of muslim fundamentalism, why are we sitting on our hands while it sweeps Somalia, Mali, Niger and Mauritania (where al Qaeda is now called AQIM).

And if the question of “selective” aid to certain causes isn’t enough reason to reconsider our Afghan commitment what about the dollar cost trade-offs? Our losing investment in Iraq and our currently rising one in Afghanistan have contributed hugely to the $10 trillion federal deficit handed to Obama. The biggest tragedy of all –beyond wasted dollars and wasted lives—is that it has crowded out the monumental humanitarian challenges we face: providing adequate health care and education and curtailing poverty here at home, and fighting hunger abroad. Although our defense budget is now 21% of our total it equals our whole social security budget (which some say is threadbare) and almost equals the 23% that we spend on health care. And that’s before the reform legislation aiming to aid millions of Americans without care.

Consider that our trillion dollar defense budget today almost equals the military budgets of all other nations combined. Our Navy’s battle fleet –despite cutbacks—is still larger than the next 13 navies of the world combined. Our total defense budget is now exceeding 4.7% of our gross domestic product.

It’s time to stop the madness. We simply can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman.

WE MUST FIND AND FINISH AL QAEDA

Think about it. Until 9/11, nobody –not Nazi Germany, imperial Japan or Cold War Russia—really threatened our survival. But today our nation is at physical risk from the fanatical tactics of a virtually unseen enemy: less than a few thousand ill-clothed and ill-equipped members of al Qaeda. Before realizing the new realities of a world without rules of engagement, we endured the lessons of the Beirut marine barracks debacle, the Khobar Towers disaster in Dharan, 9/11, the Nairobi embassy attack, the destroyer Cole attack, the Locherbie air disaster and the narrowly avoided simultaneous destruction of 10 transatlantic airliners in an Islamic fundamentalist plot foiled by Scotland Yard.

While congress, the ACLU and Amnesty International fiercely abide by their noble ideals to preserve principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention, realities have raced far ahead of this anachronism. There are no more uniformed armies against us with elegant tank formations and fancy command centers –only hit and run criminals. No navy challenges our ships—only pirates in tiny rag tag motorboats. There is no gentleman’s war any more. The guidelines of gallantry, civility and rules in global conflict have become meaningless in the face of an innocent human shield, a roadside IED, a suicide belt on an elderly woman, or a rocket propelled grenade launched by a young man in shorts and sandals from a hospital window.

And these insidious threats may pale in comparison to the day when one anonymous terrorist detonates a single nuclear device in the center of a major city. Against whom would we retaliate? All bets would be off.

This is why –in a future year—we’ll look back in remorse, wonder and perhaps fury at the well-intentioned efforts of many Americans to cling to yesterday’s idea of fair play. The very ramparts that are our first line of defense are under moralistic, irrational attack. In the name of “privacy” our NSA is handcuffed in its ability to intercept wireless communications among the invisibles out to kill us. FBI search warrants are more difficult to obtain. The CIA is under fire for almost every effort designed to learn global terrorism’s next plots and destroy its leadership if possible.

Although congressmen sat by and watched the Bush and then Obama administrations accelerate the series of Predator drone attacks that have been the only successful method of destroying al Qaeda and Taliban leadership since 9/11, they suddenly panicked and sanctimoniously condemned a CIA plan –uncovered this year—to covertly assassinate certain targeted terrorist leaders.

And after castigating,deflating and deforming the nation’s entire intelligence community during the Clinton years and most pointedly post 9/11 for ineptitude, we are now on a vendetta to persecute and prosecute many of the CIA operatives who have silently put their lives on the line to protect us against this unique,intractable enemy. Why? Because they were over-zealous in their attempts to pry vital, life-and-death intelligence out of terrorist detainees. Were there mistakes made? Yes, as in every war. Were there abuses? Yes. But the same CIA interrogators who drew out of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ,after waterboarding, a torrent of information that has saved many lives, are now being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for overreaching. Even though Holder himself as Deputy Attorney General in 2002, told CNN that Guantanamo detainees were “not in fact entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention,” he has suddenly turned puritanical and reversed his view. He’s mounting a messianic campaign to have a special prosecutor crucify the CIA perpetrators –based on a 2004 report, just released by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, citing some isolated instances of abuse and coercion.

But what the 2004 also abundantly details is that the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the program quietly, effectively and within the law” and that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support to interrogators.” It also glaringly spotlights that the CIA top brass and Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees had full knowledge of all “enhanced interrogation” techniques and raised no alarm. Nor should they have done so. The report discloses a wide array of terrorist plots around the globe that were foiled after detainee interrogations. These included the apprehension of Jose Padilla and Binyan Mohammed, who were about to detonate a “dirty” radioactive bomb; an unknown al Qaeda cell in Karachi planning to pilot an aircraft assault in the U.S; a plot to attack the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; and another to hijack an aircraft that could be flown into Heathrow; and yet another to attack a California high rise; and another plot to sever the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

Almost no intelligence officials are advocating that rogue interrogation should be allowed and laws violated. What the disclosures are telling us is that the laws themselves must be modified for our own survival in an increasingly lawless world unfit for polite niceties. The concept is now new. Pre-emptive strikes against dangerous criminals have been accepted by civilized society for centuries. Witness the duties of a police sniper blowing the head off a hostage-taking kidnapper—without any courtesy of explaining Miranda rights, arrest, indictment or trial. Similarly, what American mayor –faced with a criminal whose secret,ticking time bomb is about to level a downtown area—would not demand any and every kind of interrogation to discover its location and save lives of his citizens?

The biggest time bomb ever is now ticking. And instead of turning more boys into IED fodder pursuing Taliban crazies in the barren Afghan hills, why not spend far, far less of our resources to intensify the one strategy that really works—Predator drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban high command in South Waziristan and Kandahar Province? The Defense Dept. has budgeted only $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) worldwide for 2010—a price less than one month cost of continuing our futile conventional war in Afghanistan. But cost effectiveness aside, this single weapon is our only means of decapitating global terrorism while risking no more American lives. And if we left Afghanistan tomorrow the UAV could still be launched from Pakistan or other secure locations.

On the same theme, and with the same irony, our nation is now turning with vengeance upon the mercenary units that have been aiding the CIA and our Special Forces – the private contractors at Blackwater (now renamed Xe) and similar groups that have proven themselves in some of our dirtiest tasks. While they too have had rogue elements and incidents , they are more than willing to do the jobs, for a fee, that nobody else wants. With little fanfare, and only minor public outcry until now, there are almost 120,000 of these contractors in Iraq and 74,000 in Afghanistan.

Imagine what magnitude of funds could be diverted to America’s social causes if we were to bring home most of these surrogates from Asia, along with our troops. We’d be plugging the biggest financial drain our nation has ever faced and sparing lives of countless boys and girls.

WE MUST NEUTRALIZE A NUCLEAR IRAN

No case of nationalized terrorism and potential hostage-taking in the world today could be any clearer or more threatening than the relentless Iranian drive to develop a nuclear bomb.

Once again, the lessons we endured so painfully are staring at us this year. In each instance, a megalomaniac promises death and destruction, then delivers it to an incredulous population. Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden.

Now there is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, promising to “wipe Israel off the map” and bring retribution to that Great Satan America. Despite a ravaged economy, propped up only by crude oil exports, Iran has been steadily developing weaponry. Its new Shahab -3ER missile with a 2000 Km range can reach Turkey, and its long range ballistic BM 25 can reach 3500 Km targets like Athens and Budapest. Its satellite launching capabilities could be converted into ICBM launchers that would put cities like Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw well within range, not to mention Tel Aviv of course which would be hit by much lesser equipment (like the Shahab-2) if launched from Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

And carrying what? Inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency report that this summer Iran has amassed 4,592 centrifuges and 3,325 pounds of enriched uranium –enough to produce two nuclear bombs. The world’s response? While free world leaders in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany are ready to propose sanctions to the U.N. Security Council if Iran does not drop the current charade by an Obama-imposed deadline of Sept. 30, it is general knowledge that this effort will continue to be stymied by vetoes of Russia and China, of whom Iran is a multi-billion dollar client.

As so eloquently dramatized by Freidrich Durrenmatt’s play, “The Visit”, money talks, and when someone says “It’s not the money it’s the principle,” you can be sure it’s the money. Thus while the diplomatic waltz continues endlessly, every month brings precious time for Iran to bury its Natanz nuclear facilities in deeper cover and obtain even more sophisticated electronic air defense technology from Russia.

Accordingly, in a conclusion similar to the obvious option that we strike at the heart of al Qaeda before it strikes us again, we must act now to eliminate Iran’s death factory. Harvard’s pre-eminent Alan Dershowitz says it best in one of the seminal treatises of our time: his book “Pre-emption”. In this modern era when there is a clear and present threat it is imperative that the intended victim strike first, not second. There may be no second chance. Israel began teaching the civilized world this axiom in 1967, and to everyone’s secret relief, in 1981 when it took out Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor, and again in 2006 when it destroyed a developing nuclear facility in Syria.

Everyone says a nuclear Iran “cannot be tolerated.” Yet inaction itself is de facto tolerance, even implied approval. Can Israel act successfully alone? Perhaps. But it will likely need U.S. help at least in supplying bunker-buster bombs, Iraq territorial overflight authorization, and aerial refueling.

• * *

Regarding all three of these imperatives, our undoing may be simply a sad case of national dementia—the faded memories of prior threats among us seniors, and the fact that our proliferating juniors were not even born to witness the tragedies of Munich, the Tet Offensive, or Rwandan genocide. In fact some were mere teeny-boppers when 9/11 occurred. Some are just now trying to figure out why we’re placing 68,000 of our favorite sons in harm’s way to protect a land of rubble populated by 93% of the world’s opium growers.

No need perhaps to belabor the George Santayana warning that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We already are.

* * *

PONDERING THE UNTHINKABLES

THREE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD ASK OURSELVES ABOUT FORGOTTEN LESSONS

By Ted Pincus

What are the three most urgent issues facing American society today? Isn’t it time to look at new solutions based on lessons we’ve repeatedly learned to our sorrow? Is it madness not to question what we’re doing?

As a 75-year-old PR man I have to admit that our folly in all three dilemmas is caring too much about public opinion. We’re seriously jeopardizing our future by fixating on how other people will view us.

The three unthinkable questions we must address are:

• Is it time for us to stop trying to solve the world’s civil wars by risking our sons’ necks and treasury?

• Why can’t we take off the gloves and finish al Qaeda?

• Why don’t we act promptly to neutralize nuclear Iran before it’s too late?

WE MUST EXIT AFGHANISTAN

Being a referee in civil wars has always been no-win.

We’ve seemed to learn nothing from history. Vainly trying to mix into domestic ethnic and sectarian conflicts has only cost us –and the host country—bloodshed and billions. Fifteen years of futility in Viet Nam taught us nothing, despite the loss of 47,244 American lives, with 103,329 injured, millions of civilian lives there, and gigantic sums that should have gone toward Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society crusade to fight hunger and poverty.

On Jan 4, 1971, Richard Nixon proudly proclaimed “The end is in sight.” On April 3 of that year, South Viet Nam’s President Thieu and his corrupt administration were re-elected, unopposed. In May 1972, the Paris Peace Talks collapsed. In October, Henry Kissinger meets quietly with Le Duc Tho and makes concessions. On Jan.27,1973, Nixon announces a cease fire agreement that will bring “peace with honor.” In Dec., 1974, North Viet Nam violates the agreement by attacking Phuoc Long province and overruns Da Nang in March, when 100,000 SVN soldiers surrender after being abandoned by their commanding officers. On April 29, the ignominious finale arrived with the panicked rescue of the last 7,000 U.S. troops and key Viet Namese officials by helicopter at Saigon, while our Tan Son Nhut air base was looted and thousands of civilians begged for asylum at our embassy compound.

Sound familiar?

Much fresher in our memories should be the Bush follies in Iraq where our well intentioned initiative to remove a petty tyrant gave us accidental ownership of a full blown sectarian civil war bred by centuries of seething Shiite-Sunni hatred. After more than six years as a hapless referee,losing over 4000 lives and a trillion of treasury (which turned a half-trillion federal surplus into a projected 1.5 trillion deficit for fiscal 2010), we’re in the quagmire again. Our generals have declared victory one more time of course. But the almost daily bloodshed between the two sects (with Kurds caught in the crossfire) continues unabated.

(In 2004 I wrote an editorial for the Chicago Sun Times detailing that the only hope for a true exit from Iraq with honor would be to separate the adversaries by a three-way partitioning under NATO supervision. It caught the eye of House Intl. Relations Chairman Henry Hyde who endorsed and circulated the piece in congress, before it hit a wall with Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.)

While we now proudly rely on the 600,000 man strength of a revitalized Iraqi army, which we term “self-sufficient”, as we slink away in a noble exit strategy and call it a day, the Nouri al-Maliki government perpetuates the strife by denying the Sunni a fair share.

Does any of this tell us that it’s overdue for us to exit Afghanistan? Here’s a nation with another 32.7 million people—80% Sunni M

uslim and 20% Shiite, the precise opposite mix of Iraq. Equally fanatical, equally corrupt and producer of 93% of the world’s opium. A remarkable 44% of the population is under 14, and the literacy rate nationwide is 28% (12% for females). Overrun by everyone from Alexander to the Mongols to the Russians, torn by ethnic strife in between, and more lately raped by the Taliban, the nation has never had a break.

Once more, in good conscience, we’ve stepped into the fray.We’ve tried to protect a Karzai government that is not only one of the world’s most corrupt but –based on the August 2009 election travesty—should likely not even be legitimately in power. We’ve been investing over $4 billion per month in this holding action, along with the lives of 43,000 American troops at risk, backed by 32,000 NATO troops. To date, we’ve lost 812 lives, including 48 in August. And while U.S. Commander Stanley McChrystal says the Taliban are winning this civil war and we face rising casualties, the plan is to boost our troop strength to 68,000 by December. If another year there could cost us 500 or 700 American boys, is it truly worth the price?

To what end? Nobody has even begun to define an exit strategy. And does the world care if we leave? Will we be derided as betraying humanity if we slink off the stage again? Remember, the Afghans see us not as saviors but as occupiers like the Ruskies, and want us gone. The latest ABC News poll of Gary Langer shows Afghan favorable views of the U.S. have plummeted from 85% in 2005 to 47% now. In neighboring Pakistan, says Pew Research, 13% say they have confidence in Obama, whose support is even exceeded by Osama Bin Laden with 18%.

If we leave, why worry about opinion at all? Did we worry when we stood idle and watched 800,000 Tutsi slaughtered in the Rwanda Hutu genocide? Or when Sri Lanka was torn apart by civil war? Or Myanmar taken over and oppressed by a military junta? Were we embarrassed to watch from the sidelines as China took over Tibet? Or as 1.6 million were killed in the ongoing Congolese civil war? Or as 200,000 innocents have been killed in Darfur and another two million displaced by an indicted tyrant whom nobody, including an impotent U.N., will arrest? And if we’re so concerned about the virulent rise of muslim fundamentalism, why are we sitting on our hands while it sweeps Somalia, Mali, Niger and Mauritania (where al Qaeda is now called AQIM).

And if the question of “selective” aid to certain causes isn’t enough reason to reconsider our Afghan commitment what about the dollar cost trade-offs? Our losing investment in Iraq and our currently rising one in Afghanistan have contributed hugely to the $10 trillion federal deficit handed to Obama. The biggest tragedy of all –beyond wasted dollars and wasted lives—is that it has crowded out the monumental humanitarian challenges we face: providing adequate health care and education and curtailing poverty here at home, and fighting hunger abroad. Although our defense budget is now 21% of our total it equals our whole social security budget (which some say is threadbare) and almost equals the 23% that we spend on health care. And that’s before the reform legislation aiming to aid millions of Americans without care.

Consider that our trillion dollar defense budget today almost equals the military budgets of all other nations combined. Our Navy’s battle fleet –despite cutbacks—is still larger than the next 13 navies of the world combined. Our total defense budget is now exceeding 4.7% of our gross domestic product.

It’s time to stop the madness. We simply can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman.

WE MUST FIND AND FINISH AL QAEDA

Think about it. Until 9/11, nobody –not Nazi Germany, imperial Japan or Cold War Russia—really threatened our survival. But today our nation is at physical risk from the fanatical tactics of a virtually unseen enemy: less than a few thousand ill-clothed and ill-equipped members of al Qaeda. Before realizing the new realities of a world without rules of engagement, we endured the lessons of the Beirut marine barracks debacle, the Khobar Towers disaster in Dharan, 9/11, the Nairobi embassy attack, the destroyer Cole attack, the Locherbie air disaster and the narrowly avoided simultaneous destruction of 10 transatlantic airliners in an Islamic fundamentalist plot foiled by Scotland Yard.

While congress, the ACLU and Amnesty International fiercely abide by their noble ideals to preserve principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention, realities have raced far ahead of this anachronism. There are no more uniformed armies against us with elegant tank formations and fancy command centers –only hit and run criminals. No navy challenges our ships—only pirates in tiny rag tag motorboats. There is no gentleman’s war any more. The guidelines of gallantry, civility and rules in global conflict have become meaningless in the face of an innocent human shield, a roadside IED, a suicide belt on an elderly woman, or a rocket propelled grenade launched by a young man in shorts and sandals from a hospital window.

And these insidious threats may pale in comparison to the day when one anonymous terrorist detonates a single nuclear device in the center of a major city. Against whom would we retaliate? All bets would be off.

This is why –in a future year—we’ll look back in remorse, wonder and perhaps fury at the well-intentioned efforts of many Americans to cling to yesterday’s idea of fair play. The very ramparts that are our first line of defense are under moralistic, irrational attack. In the name of “privacy” our NSA is handcuffed in its ability to intercept wireless communications among the invisibles out to kill us. FBI search warrants are more difficult to obtain. The CIA is under fire for almost every effort designed to learn global terrorism’s next plots and destroy its leadership if possible.

Although congressmen sat by and watched the Bush and then Obama administrations accelerate the series of Predator drone attacks that have been the only successful method of destroying al Qaeda and Taliban leadership since 9/11, they suddenly panicked and sanctimoniously condemned a CIA plan –uncovered this year—to covertly assassinate certain targeted terrorist leaders.

And after castigating,deflating and deforming the nation’s entire intelligence community during the Clinton years and most pointedly post 9/11 for ineptitude, we are now on a vendetta to persecute and prosecute many of the CIA operatives who have silently put their lives on the line to protect us against this unique,intractable enemy. Why? Because they were over-zealous in their attempts to pry vital, life-and-death intelligence out of terrorist detainees. Were there mistakes made? Yes, as in every war. Were there abuses? Yes. But the same CIA interrogators who drew out of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ,after waterboarding, a torrent of information that has saved many lives, are now being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for overreaching. Even though Holder himself as Deputy Attorney General in 2002, told CNN that Guantanamo detainees were “not in fact entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention,” he has suddenly turned puritanical and reversed his view. He’s mounting a messianic campaign to have a special prosecutor crucify the CIA perpetrators –based on a 2004 report, just released by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, citing some isolated instances of abuse and coercion.

But what the 2004 also abundantly details is that the CIA “invested immense time and effort to implement the program quietly, effectively and within the law” and that the agency “generally provided good guidance and support to interrogators.” It also glaringly spotlights that the CIA top brass and Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees had full knowledge of all “enhanced interrogation” techniques and raised no alarm. Nor should they have done so. The report discloses a wide array of terrorist plots around the globe that were foiled after detainee interrogations. These included the apprehension of Jose Padilla and Binyan Mohammed, who were about to detonate a “dirty” radioactive bomb; an unknown al Qaeda cell in Karachi planning to pilot an aircraft assault in the U.S; a plot to attack the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; and another to hijack an aircraft that could be flown into Heathrow; and yet another to attack a California high rise; and another plot to sever the lines of suspension bridges in New York.

Almost no intelligence officials are advocating that rogue interrogation should be allowed and laws violated. What the disclosures are telling us is that the laws themselves must be modified for our own survival in an increasingly lawless world unfit for polite niceties. The concept is now new. Pre-emptive strikes against dangerous criminals have been accepted by civilized society for centuries. Witness the duties of a police sniper blowing the head off a hostage-taking kidnapper—without any courtesy of explaining Miranda rights, arrest, indictment or trial. Similarly, what American mayor –faced with a criminal whose secret,ticking time bomb is about to level a downtown area—would not demand any and every kind of interrogation to discover its location and save lives of his citizens?

The biggest time bomb ever is now ticking. And instead of turning more boys into IED fodder pursuing Taliban crazies in the barren Afghan hills, why not spend far, far less of our resources to intensify the one strategy that really works—Predator drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban high command in South Waziristan and Kandahar Province? The Defense Dept. has budgeted only $3.5 billion for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) worldwide for 2010—a price less than one month cost of continuing our futile conventional war in Afghanistan. But cost effectiveness aside, this single weapon is our only means of decapitating global terrorism while risking no more American lives. And if we left Afghanistan tomorrow the UAV could still be launched from Pakistan or other secure locations.

On the same theme, and with the same irony, our nation is now turning with vengeance upon the mercenary units that have been aiding the CIA and our Special Forces – the private contractors at Blackwater (now renamed Xe) and similar groups that have proven themselves in some of our dirtiest tasks. While they too have had rogue elements and incidents , they are more than willing to do the jobs, for a fee, that nobody else wants. With little fanfare, and only minor public outcry until now, there are almost 120,000 of these contractors in Iraq and 74,000 in Afghanistan.

Imagine what magnitude of funds could be diverted to America’s social causes if we were to bring home most of these surrogates from Asia, along with our troops. We’d be plugging the biggest financial drain our nation has ever faced and sparing lives of countless boys and girls.

WE MUST NEUTRALIZE A NUCLEAR IRAN

No case of nationalized terrorism and potential hostage-taking in the world today could be any clearer or more threatening than the relentless Iranian drive to develop a nuclear bomb.

Once again, the lessons we endured so painfully are staring at us this year. In each instance, a megalomaniac promises death and destruction, then delivers it to an incredulous population. Kaiser Wilhelm, Adolph Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden.

Now there is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, promising to “wipe Israel off the map” and bring retribution to that Great Satan America. Despite a ravaged economy, propped up only by crude oil exports, Iran has been steadily developing weaponry. Its new Shahab -3ER missile with a 2000 Km range can reach Turkey, and its long range ballistic BM 25 can reach 3500 Km targets like Athens and Budapest. Its satellite launching capabilities could be converted into ICBM launchers that would put cities like Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw well within range, not to mention Tel Aviv of course which would be hit by much lesser equipment (like the Shahab-2) if launched from Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

And carrying what? Inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency report that this summer Iran has amassed 4,592 centrifuges and 3,325 pounds of enriched uranium –enough to produce two nuclear bombs. The world’s response? While free world leaders in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany are ready to propose sanctions to the U.N. Security Council if Iran does not drop the current charade by an Obama-imposed deadline of Sept. 30, it is general knowledge that this effort will continue to be stymied by vetoes of Russia and China, of whom Iran is a multi-billion dollar client.

As so eloquently dramatized by Freidrich Durrenmatt’s play, “The Visit”, money talks, and when someone says “It’s not the money it’s the principle,” you can be sure it’s the money. Thus while the diplomatic waltz continues endlessly, every month brings precious time for Iran to bury its Natanz nuclear facilities in deeper cover and obtain even more sophisticated electronic air defense technology from Russia.

Accordingly, in a conclusion similar to the obvious option that we strike at the heart of al Qaeda before it strikes us again, we must act now to eliminate Iran’s death factory. Harvard’s pre-eminent Alan Dershowitz says it best in one of the seminal treatises of our time: his book “Pre-emption”. In this modern era when there is a clear and present threat it is imperative that the intended victim strike first, not second. There may be no second chance. Israel began teaching the civilized world this axiom in 1967, and to everyone’s secret relief, in 1981 when it took out Saddam’s Osirak nuclear reactor, and again in 2006 when it destroyed a developing nuclear facility in Syria.

Everyone says a nuclear Iran “cannot be tolerated.” Yet inaction itself is de facto tolerance, even implied approval. Can Israel act successfully alone? Perhaps. But it will likely need U.S. help at least in supplying bunker-buster bombs, Iraq territorial overflight authorization, and aerial refueling.

• * *

Regarding all three of these imperatives, our undoing may be simply a sad case of national dementia—the faded memories of prior threats among us seniors, and the fact that our proliferating juniors were not even born to witness the tragedies of Munich, the Tet Offensive, or Rwandan genocide. In fact some were mere teeny-boppers when 9/11 occurred. Some are just now trying to figure out why we’re placing 68,000 of our favorite sons in harm’s way to protect a land of rubble populated by 93% of the world’s opium growers.

No need perhaps to belabor the George Santayana warning that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. We already are.

* * *