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A Wake-up Call From Dennis Blair

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February 19, 2009

Although President Obama has been criticized for many of his appointments, the selection of retired Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence appears to have been a wise choice.  Blair graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1968.  He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar contemporaneously with Bill Clinton.  (However, I doubt that Blair was standing next to Bill when the former President “didn’t inhale”.)  Blair retired from the Navy in 2002.

On Thursday, February 12, Blair appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and surprised his audience with his new threat assessment.  As Tom Gjelten reported for National Public Radio:

National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair’s dramatic report last week — that the economic crisis is now the United States’ top “near-term security concern” — caught some members of Congress by surprise.  But it makes sense.

The global economic downturn could easily change the world. Previously stable countries could become unstable.  The geopolitical lineup could shift sharply, some countries becoming more powerful while others get weaker.  Allies could turn into adversaries.

Pamela Hess of the Associated Press provided this account of the hearing:

Blair’s 49-page statement opened with a detailed description of the economic crisis.  It was a marked departure from threat briefings of years past, which focused first on traditional threats and battlefields like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

“The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications,” he said in a written statement for the committee.

Blair cited the inability of other nations to meet their humanitarian obligations and hostility toward the United States for causing this crisis as potential causes for unrest, as this AFP report disclosed:

“Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period,” Blair said.

“Besides increased economic nationalism, the most likely political fallout for US interests will involve allies and friends not being able to fully meet their defense and humanitarian obligations.”

*   *   *

“It already has increased questioning of US stewardship of the global economy and the international financial structure,” Blair said, with trading partners already upset over a “Buy American” provision in a US stimulus bill.

Rosalie Westenskow of UPI noted Blair’s concern that the impact of climate change, coinciding with the economic crisis, could provide a troublesome combination to facilitate government instability:

“The impacts (of climate change) will worsen existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions,” Blair told senators last week.

As temperatures rise, scientists predict natural disasters like floods and drought will also increase and government instability worldwide is likely to follow, he said.

On February 17, during an interview in Tokyo with Martha Raddatz of ABC News, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ratified Blair’s concern about the security threat posed by the global economic crisis:

“Yes, we have to look at this as part of our threat matrix,” the secretary of state said.  “I know some people have criticized him and said, ‘what does the economy have to do with terrorism.’ That’s a very short-sighted view.  I think what director Blair was saying is that we get fixated sometimes on the headlines of dangers, and that is not in any way to underestimate the continuing threat from terrorism, the instability in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan and elsewhere.”

“But this economic crisis, left unresolved, will create massive unemployment,” she said.  “It will upend governments, it will unfortunately breed instability, and I appreciated his putting that into the context of the threat matrix.”

It’s nice to know that we have an intelligence director who is not wedded to the Bush administration’s fixation on September 11 -style attacks.  As this February 16 editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out:

The new threat isn’t as easy to identify – or vilify – as al Queda, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less serious.

*    *    *

No one knows what form the next wave of instability will take. The United States must start making preparations now – by shoring up our own flailing economy and supporting our allies as much as we possibly can.  Blair’s warning shows how dangerous it will be for Washington to continue battling along the same tired ideological lines that it has for the last several weeks.  This economic crisis could be putting more than our wallets at risk.

Of course, we don’t really need another reason to stay awake at night and worry.  Fortunately, we now have someone in a crucial position, capable of identifying and focusing on new threats.  Thanks for the “heads up” Admiral Blair!

Barack in Iraq

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July 21, 2008

At a fundraiser in Detroit on July 18, John McCain revealed that Barack Obama would be traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan on the weekend of the July 19-20.  For some reason, McCain saw fit to make this indiscrete comment:

I believe that either today or tomorrow, I am not privy to his schedule, Senator Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other Senators.  There will be a Congressional delegation – and I am sure that Senator Obama is going to arrive in Baghdad in a much, much, safer and secure environment than the one that he would have encountered before we started the siege.

Of course, McCain was more than willing to “back up” his claim that Iraq is now safer — with other people’s lives at stake on that bet.  Included in that delegation was McCain’s fellow Viet Nam War veteran, Senator Chuck Hagel.  Senator Hagel is also a Republican (for now) and a true bipartisan (unlike McCain’s traveling companion:  Joe “The Tool” Lieberman).

McCain knows damned well that his trips to Iraq, as well as those of his mentor, George W. Bush, were kept in secrecy until they were concluded.  Nevertheless, McCain chose to disclose the Obama – Hagel trip to Iraq, and risk the lives of his opponent and his fellow Viet Nam War veteran, to potentially fatal consequences.  Why he would have done this, crossed the minds of people other than you and me.  Needless to say, I was outraged by McCain’s security breach.  It reminded me of the similarly traitorous “outing” of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA Case Officer by the Bush Administration, to advance its case for the invasion of Iraq.

On July 18, Richard Wolffe of Newsweek appeared on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”.  During that interview, this exchange took place:

Olbermann:   About this Obama trip, two questions about the mechanics: 1) Why the secrecy about it? and 2) If there is a good reason for that secrecy, why would is Senator McCain try to give away the secret today in Michigan?

Wolffe:  The reason for the secrecy is security, of course, and we in the media have been very careful about what we are putting out there.  You know – security of these trips – and I went with President Bush to Iraq.  Security is tight for a reason.  So it is remarkable that a member of Congress would even speculate that way. Why he did that, I can’t really be sure, but obviously they’re trying to backtrack now.

I have a guess:  Perhaps McCain is just a “snitch” by nature.  Maybe it’s time to look into the rumors from his 2000 Presidential campaign, supporting the notion that McCain made it back from the Hanoi Hilton by “ratting out” his fellow Americans.  The fact that he tried to “rat-out” his fellow Viet Nam veteran, Chuck Hagel, on this trip to Iraq could lend some credence to those claims.  His motives for disclosing the details of this trip were apparently twofold:  Scare Obama, Hagel and the others from that delegation, so they would stay away from Iraq and Afghanistan.  A possible second motive might have been to make sure they would not live to brag about this adventure to Iraq, should they actually undertake it.

At an earlier news conference that morning, McCain claimed that:

He (Obama) would be going to a very different Iraq, if we had done what he wanted to do.

In other words, McRat claimed that Iraq would be much different now than it would have been if the United States had been following Obama’s plan for resolving that war.  In harsh contrast to that lie, we have the July 19 report from Jake Tapper of ABC News:

The White House this afternoon accidentally sent to its extensive distribution list a Reuters story headlined “Iraqi PM Backs Obama Troop Exit Plan – magazine.”

The story relayed how Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told the German magazine Der Spiegel that he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months … “U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,” the prime minister said.

The White House employee had intended to send the article to an internal distribution list, ABC News’ Martha Raddatz reports, but hit the wrong button.

The misfire comes at an odd time for Bush foreign policy, at a time when Obama’s campaign alleges the President is moving closer toward Obama’s recommendations about international relations — sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, discussing a “general time horizon” for U.S. troop withdrawal and launching talks with Iran.

Oops!  It looks as though the handlers for McRat’s own mentor are admitting that Iraq agrees to Obama’s plan for an exit strategy in Iraq and nobody told McRat.

Well …  Obama, Hagel and the network news anchors didn’t “chicken out”.  Beyond that, it looks like they will live to come back here and put McRat where he belongs:  caught in his own McTrap.