These are the pertinent excerpts from Powell’s Meet the Press appearance:

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is?”

“I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way. And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I’m troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.”

Source: digg

Turning points of history throw up intriguing alternatives. How would the world and the US be different if there had been no invasion in 2003?

Tim Watkin
guardian.co.uk

I went to see Elizabeth: The Golden Age at the cinema this week. Gorgeously shot, but the grand, epic feel of the film overwhelms a pretty average script and ponderous re-telling of events, if you’re asking.

At the same time I’m reading one of those What If? history books, which ponders what might have happened if some detail of history, large or small, had gone the other way. There’s a chapter by history professor Geoffrey Parker asking what if the Spanish had repulsed the English fireships - which Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh so gallantly leads in the film - leaving the Armada free to sail up the Thames and conquer England? What if the Armada had connected with the Duke of Parma’s 27,000 troops, coming from the Brabant to deal to the troublesome, protestant English?

It depends on which alternative scenario you choose, of course. Perhaps Philip II of Spain, the world’s superpower at the time, would have fallen at the next hurdle or been caught by some other upset loss. Nascent democracy and Protestant beliefs may have sprung up elsewhere or later. History may have changed little.

But perhaps, as Parker outlines it, the overseas adventures of Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake would have ceased, leaving North America and the other colonies of the British empire-to-be open to Spain’s influence. Spain would have been left unchecked to crush the Netherlands, and without the need to keep an army there, been free to meddle in Europe, extending Catholicism and the inquisition further, and countering the Lutheran rise in Germany and all the political and religious reformations that went with it. Rather than bankrupting Spain, Philip II would have secured extravagant wealth.

Philip had been so confident of his superpower’s victory against little England. He’d gathered a coalition of the willing that included the Pope’s blessing, money and ships from Tuscany and Mantua, Swiss acquiescence, and support from supposed allies within England. He claimed it was a just war - yes, you can see where I’m going with this. When a freak storm drive the Armada back to port on its first attempt to leave, the Duke leading the expedition questioned whether it was cursed. “One could indeed take this storm as a sign from Our Lord to cease offending Him,” Philip is said to have replied. “But being as just as it is, one cannot believe that He will disband it, but rather will grant it more favour than we could hope … I have dedicated this enterprise to God. Pull yourself together, and do your part!”

The obvious echoes of today got me wondering about the “what ifs?” of the Iraq invasion. Or more precisely, what if there had been no Iraq invasion? The easiest question is how much better off the world would be.

For a start, many tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis would still be alive, as would several thousand troops from the coalition countries. The terrorists born from the resulting anger and grief would not be about their deadly work. Indeed, without the oxygen of Iraq feeding their bitter fires and with the US and more western allies having focused on Afghanistan and the border regions with Pakistan, al-Qaida may be clinging to diminishing relevance in those barren hills. Muslims worldwide would not have been provoked to take a stand against all things western. America would not have sacrificed its principles relating to torture and the Geneva convention, and may not have lost its diplomatic credibility.

In that case, the Bush administration may have continued its first-term, pre-September 11 drift and perhaps been defeated in 2004. Democrats may not have felt compelled to turn to a war hero such as John Kerry, and a resurgent Al Gore may have taken the White House, tackling climate change and perhaps even advancing the Israel-Palestine peace process. Iran, we can be relatively confident, would have remained buffered on its west, and so would be less aggressive in throwing it weight around the region.

But we can’t afford to be romantic. How else would the world be different? If Saddam Hussein was still in power, many Iraqis would still be being terrorized - and killed - by his regime. He would still be destabilizing the Middle East with his bombast and expanding military. Depending on the impact of inspections and sanctions, we may or may know the relative emptiness of his threats. Containment policies in the middle-east would probably have done little to ease the tensions there. Would radical Muslims have seen a less aggressive response by the US as a sign of weakness and been emboldened? Or would the opposite have happened - would their irrelevance have forced them into bolder, more effective acts, with more suicide bombings and more 9/11-style attacks? Would America have had to fight the terrorists at home rather than abroad, as President Bush has so often warned? Might Muslim fighters have bogged the US down in Afghanistan, and forced them to retreat as they did the Russians?

I’d be interested to hear what CiF readers have to say. For me, the question that keeps returning to my mind is: if there had been no Iraq invasion, what would have been the impact on Islam?

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Philip’s defeat by England was the impact it had on the evolution of certain ideas - in particular, the Christian reformation was not cut short and democratic ideals were able to take seed. Think of the implications. Far beyond borders and royal dynasties, ideas are the legacies that survive the centuries and dominate the what ifs of history.

In many ways the US invasion of Iraq sucked the west directly into Islam’s sectarian civil war, and fueled its flames. As Reza Aslan writes in his excellent No God but God, September 11 sparked a civil war - a fitnah - in Islam and “initiated a vibrant discourse among Muslims about the meaning and message of Islam in the 21st century”. Even before Iraq was invaded, the Islamic reformation was underway and would inevitably involved “violence and devastation”.

The folly in Iraq, however, has skewed that debate and multiplied the violence involved. Perhaps Shia and Sunnis would have reached today’s level of hostility without western nations butting in. But what if the west had not made itself such a dominant player in this period of Islamic reformation? Has our involvement only encouraged an extremist line of theology - and its political expression - that might otherwise have wilted on the vine?

Even beyond the multi-generational conflict we have inflamed in the middle-east, it is the energy we’ve given to fundamentalist Islam that I suspect we will regret most in the long-run.

Source: guardian

If John McCain pulls an upset, the world may gain one more grocery bagger
After Tuesday, one way or the other, some pollsters and pundits will have some explaining to do.

It may be those who conducted surveys showing the presidential race tightening to a virtual dead heat in recent days.

Or it may be those in the larger group whose polls have shown Barack Obama comfortably ahead of John McCain, and whose focus has been on not whether the Democrat will win but by how much.

Charlie Cook, long one of Washington’s most venerated political wonks, belongs firmly in the latter category. In his latest column for the National Journal, he opines that McCain “probably can’t win without divine intervention.” In a tease to his subscription-only newsletter, he writes, “Since early September this race has shifted rather dramatically in Obama’s favor. … At this stage, the most relevant question would seem to be: ‘How big will the train wreck be for the Republican Party up and down the ballot in November.’ ”

But let’s give Cook this — if need be, he’s prepared to eat crow, big time.

During a Friday evening appearance on MSNBC, he had this to say about how he would come to grips with a McCain come-from-behind victory: “I’m going to be asking, ‘Paper or plastic.’ Or, ‘Do you want fries with that.’ ”

Others might similarly need to contemplate a career change.

– Don Frederick

Source: LA times blog

The 21st century began late for America, on 11 September 2001. Before that day, the US still defined its role in the world with reference to ideological triumph in the Cold War that had dominated the century just passed. It was the planet’s only superpower and saw itself as a popular champion of global democracy. Few expected the nation to come under attack, least of all the man who had been installed in the White House a year earlier. In 2000, George W Bush was uninterested in foreign affairs. He was ill-equipped to be the first US President of the new millennium.

Mr Bush found moral purpose in response to terrorism, modelling his response on Cold War rhetoric as a battle between good and evil. But he will leave office unable to claim victory. Meanwhile, foreign entanglements led him to neglect economic and social policy. He inherited a budget surplus of $236bn, which was spent on defence and tax cuts for the rich, leaving a deficit of nearly $500bn as the country enters a recession. It is a sad legacy after two terms in office.

So it is no surprise that opinion polls show voters ready to punish the Republican party. Even if John McCain pulls off a surprise victory, beating Barack Obama to the White House, he will have to govern in deference to a Democratic Congress.

For the Senator John McCain of 2007, that would not be a problem. He had a reputation for pragmatic bipartisanship and principled opposition to the excesses of the Bush administration. He sponsored campaign finance reform; he decried state-sanctioned torture; he backed measures to halt climate change; he opposed unaffordable tax cuts. At the start of the campaign, Democrats feared Mr McCain would woo voters in the centre ground, while conservatives feared he would betray their agenda of moral activism against abortion, gun control and gay marriage.

Neither fear was justified. The John McCain of 2008 has abandoned the centre. There have been rightward shifts on climate change and tax, but the change is mostly a matter of tone. Mr McCain has tried to portray Barack Obama as an unpatriotic socialist. But most extraordinary was the selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate. That was an attempt to position Mr McCain as a tribune in the Culture War between secular liberals and religious conservatives that has paralysed US politics for generations. Sarah Palin represents a strand in Republican thinking that sees the party’s mission as perpetual insurgency against an un-American conspiracy run by a cosmopolitan Washington elite.

But the job of a Vice-President is to stand in should the Commander-in-Chief be unable to serve. Ms Palin has disqualified herself from that responsibility by showing a woeful grasp of policy. By promoting her, Mr McCain brought his judgment into question. He also made himself a candidate of old divisions, against Mr Obama’s promise of unity and change.

The long campaign has tested the characters of both candidates, especially when global economic crisis forced them to abandon prepared scripts and perform by instinct. Barack Obama won that contest easily. His policy prescriptions, essentially a redistributive tax agenda, were fairer and more responsible than Mr McCain’s panicky pledge of tax-cuts. In style, Mr McCain’s reaction was slow and choleric, while Mr Obama’s was steely and swift. The Democratic candidate thus refuted what had been the strongest argument against his candidacy - that he lacked leadership stature.

That makes for a marked contrast with the diminished and discredited White House incumbent. George W Bush’s reign is now recognised, even by non-partisan American commentators, as a colossal failure. He spent two terms misapplying the old foreign policy doctrines of the Cold War to a new security threat and exploiting the old enmities of the Culture Wars to shore up his power.

Mr Bush failed the test that history set him: to lead America into the new millennium. America is still waiting for a 21st-century President. It has one ready to serve in Barack Obama.

Source: guardian

What if…
by Jim Gilmore, co-producer of “The Man Who Knew,” with research by Mike Wiser

What if the CIA had shared information with the FBI back in Jan. 2001 about a meeting in Malaysia and a participant named Khallad? It was information that might have helped O’Neill connect the dots to the 9/11 conspirators.

And what if O’Neill had been able to return to Yemen and the FBI’s Cole investigation back in Jan. 2001 to interrograte Fahad al-Quso. Al-Quso had been picked up early in the Cole probe–and al-Quso also had connections to that Malaysia meeting and had met with 9/11 hijackers who had attended it.

In September 2002, agents and officials from the CIA and FBI testified before a joint congressional panel about how their security agencies failed to fully share information about suspected terrorists and their activities in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

As much as anyone working in counterterrorism, John O’Neill knew about this communication breakdown. In fact, just two months before Sept. 11, in a speech to Spanish police on interagency cooperation, he had asked his audience, “How much more successful could we all be if we really knew what our agencies really knew?” O’Neill’s last major FBI investigation — the attack on the USS Cole on Oct. 12, 2000 — was a case study of just how bad inter-agency communication had become.
The story of this intelligence failure begins with a 1999 CIA breakthrough — the interception of communications from an Al Qaeda logistics center in Yemen about a meeting of operatives that would take place in January 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The names of two of the participants were mentioned: Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.

The CIA tracked Almidhar on his way to Malaysia. An agent told FRONTLINE that during a passport check at a stopover, the CIA even got access to his Saudi Arabian passport and learned Almidhar had been issued a multiple-entry visa to the U.S.

Once in Kuala Lumpur, the Al Qaeda operatives were photographed — at the CIA’s request — by Malaysian authorities at a series of meetings. Reportedly, no sound recordings were made, but intelligence sources now believe the meetings were held to plan future Al Qaeda attacks. Among the men captured in the surveillance photos were:

Almidhar and Alhazmi (later hijackers of American Flight 77 which flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11);
Ramzi bin al-Shibh (a Sept. 11 co-conspirator and Mohamed Atta’s roommate. It would not be until after Sept. 11 that bin al-Shibh would be identified in the Malaysia surveillance photos);
Tawfiq bin-Atash — AKA “Khallad” (a suspected intermediary between bin Laden and plotters of the October 2000 USS Cole attack).
The CIA maintains that it did notify the FBI by e-mail of the Malaysia meetings soon after they occurred — and that it did mention Almidhar had a U.S. visa. The FBI, however, states they have no record of this notification.

The CIA admits that it did not inform the bureau that after the Malaysia meetings ended, it tracked Almidhar and Alhazmi to Los Angeles. The CIA further admits that it failed to warn the INS or the State Department, and as a result, the men’s names were not added to a terrorist watch list.

Not one of the men who attended the Malaysia meetings was, at the time, known to have been involved in any crime against the United States, so it is perhaps understandable that the CIA missed the full significance of the meetings. This changed, however, in October 2000, when the USS Cole was attacked in Yemen and 17 sailors were killed. The FBI’s subsequent investigation into the Cole attack would uncover evidence that would make the CIA’s continued withholding of information incomprehensible.
John O’Neill and his FBI investigators were on the scene in Yemen within days of the attack on the Cole. For O’Neill, it was obvious that the attack was an Al Qaeda operation. Within weeks, the investigation led to the arrests of several men.

One young man from an elite Yemeni family, Fahad al-Quso, had been tied to the plot with physical evidence found in an Al Qaeda safe house. At the FBI’s urgings, Yemeni authorities arrested al-Quso in December 2000.

Meanwhile, the search continued for bigger fish in the conspiracy. One was a man known as “Khallad” (real name: Tafiq bin-Atash). The FBI believed Khallad helped plan and run the Cole operation. At this point, what O’Neill and investigators did not know was that Khallad had been on the CIA’s radar screen for about a year because of the surveillance photos taken at the January 2000 Malaysia meeting.

If the CIA now knew — as a result of the Cole probe — that Khallad was an Al Qaeda operative tied to a deadly attack against the U.S., the questions begging to be asked were: Who then were the other Al Qaeda representatives with him at that Malaysia meeting? Where were they now? And were they planning additional attacks?

It appears the CIA never asked those questions.

To read more…

Source: pbs