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Jewish World Review June 5, 2002 / 24 Sivan, 5762
Michael Ledeen
And yet this is an enormous mistake, and not just because the very idea of the United States working for the
creation of an "integrated security force" for Yasser Arafat is one of those seemingly clever ideas that falls
apart upon close examination. It is breathtakingly stupid for any American official - let alone the director of
Central Intelligence - to work to improve the discipline and power of a terrorist force that has already
murdered several Americans. You can easily imagine the lawsuits, can't you?
But that is only the beginning of the stupidity. Tenet's mission throws his own reliability into serious doubt,
and undermines the credibility of anything on the Middle East coming out of the Intelligence Community. The
director of Central Intelligence is supposed to guarantee our policymakers reliable, bias-free information so
that they can make policy. But once the DCI is engaged on behalf of a particular policy, anything the Agency
says about that policy, or related subjects, is automatically suspect, since he has a personal stake in the
assessment.
If somebody else - say, someone from the uniformed services - worked with Arafat, then we might have
some confidence in, say, the CIA's ability to tell us what was actually going on. But not this way.
The whole idea is terrible, and it should never have been proposed to Tenet in the first place. But even so, he
should have had the courage to reject it. He should have told the president that if he were ordered to do this
thing, he would resign from the intelligence position and simply become a special emissary or an NSC
consultant, or a member of the Foreign Service. The DCI must not do it if he wants the intelligence
community to be believable.
It's hard to tell the origin of this very bad idea. A friend of mine thinks it's actually an Israeli idea, which
makes sense since in recent years the Israelis have specialized in ideas that are too clever by half. It might
also be a State Department idea, since our diplomats are quite capable of such thoughts. Whatever the
source, it's profoundly alarming to see that the president, the secretary of state, and the DCI have all found it
attractive, when its main consequences will surely be to strengthen Arafat's ability to kill innocent civilians,
intimidate his Palestinian opponents, and gravely weaken the stature of the DCI.
As with so much of the current confusion, all of this derives from a fundamental misunderstanding of the
current situation. Unable or unwilling to recognize that it is impossible to bring about a serious peace between
Israel and the Palestinians unless Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia support it (and the current leaders of
those countries will never support it, which is why they are the targets of the war against terrorism), the Bush
administration, egged on by the Saudis, the Egyptians, and the Europeans, is desperately looking for a magic
formula. They have bought into the big lie that we can't wage war against the terror states until there is peace
between Israel and the Palestinians.
They have it backwards. If we destroy the terror masters in Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, and Riyadh, we
might have a chance of brokering a durable peace. Without that, it's hopeless. The terror now afflicting Israel
is not a purely Palestinian operation. Iran, Iraq, and Syria are all deeply involved, and Saudi Arabia foots
many of the bills. Therefore there can be no "peace" until and unless we win the war...first.
So let's get on with the war. Faster, please.
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06/03/02: Ridiculous, even for a journalist
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