Sixteenth in blog series chronicling the administration push to war on Iraq. October, 2001, continued.

The investigation of the anthrax mailings seems to be in full swing, but without genuine progress. Efforts in the administration and in large media outlets to tie the anthrax mailings to Iraq also continue at least intermittently. The bombardment of Afghanistan continues; Osama bin Laden and other major figures associated with 9/11 are for the most part not found.

October 15-31, 2001:

Oct. 16, 2001 – The Washington Post reports that U.S. strikes against Afghanistan are intensifying and that the Pentagon disputes Afghani claims about deaths of civilians:

 “U.S. warplanes struck targets across Afghanistan yesterday in the heaviest day of bombing since the air campaign began, as huge explosions rocked the Afghan capital of Kabul and an Air Force AC-130 gunship fired on the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Pentagon officials said.  

Fifty carrier-based fighter jets and 10 long-range bombers were joined for the first time by the AC-130, one of the most devastating weapons in the U.S. air arsenal. They struck targets throughout the day and into the night, aided in part by what Pentagon officials said was fresh information on Taliban and terrorist positions provided by opposition forces.   

Defense officials declined to disclose the AC-130's mission around Kandahar . . . But the slow-moving aircraft, armed with a 150-mm howitzer and a Gatling gun capable of firing 1,800 rounds per minute, can lay down a withering carpet of fire against ground positions.”         

Oct. 17, 2001 – U.S. attacks on Afghanistan further intensify, as land-based fighter bombers join the fight for the first time. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles, previously stationed in the region to patrol the ‘no-fly zone’ in Iraq airspace, are added to the other kinds of aircraft in the fight, which hits all or most of the poor cities in Afghanistan.

 
Oct. 18, 2001 – CIA is the only one of the agencies receiving the Niger uranium story to write up a finished intelligence report about it, a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief (“Iraq: Nuclear-Related Procurement Efforts”).

Oct. 19, 2001 – In an op-ed titled “Clear Thinking on Coalitions,” neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer writes in the Washington Post that the State Department and Defense are pitted against each other in a dispute over making friends in the Middle East:

 
“This is not just academic debate. It pits the State Department against the Defense Department. The diplomats at State want to make friends. That is their job. The commanders in the Pentagon want to win the war. That is their job. And too many "friends" can get in the way of getting it done.”

Krauthammer writes in response to an op-ed by Brent Scowcroft, a senior adviser to the elder Bush administration:

Scowcroft's view, expressed in a Post op-ed ("Build a Coalition," Oct. 16), is important not just because of his distinguished service as soldier and adviser, but because he has just been appointed chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and thus will be influential in shaping the conduct of the new war.

Scowcroft begins his advocacy of coalition-as-centerpiece by defending our decision in the last war, when he was national security adviser to President G. H. W. Bush, to stop the Gulf War before going to Baghdad and toppling Saddam.

Why? Because of the coalition. "Our Arab allies," explains Scowcroft, "would have deserted us, creating an atmosphere of hostility to the United States in the region."

Creating? We did not go to Baghdad and yet, regardless, the hostility toward us is such that it inspired the worst massacre of Americans in our history.

Much of that hostility derives from that fateful decision to leave Saddam in power in Baghdad in deference to our coalition partners, because we then had to spend a decade containing him with sanctions that have clearly hurt the Iraqi people and inflamed anti-Americanism in the region. Bin Laden himself, in giving reasons for his jihad on America, never fails to cite the starving and bombing of Iraq.”

Note the continuing and unremitting focus on Iraq, in the weeks following 9/11.

The argument here, of course, is the pseudo-macho neocon line used continuously since the first Gulf War, that the U.S. should have ‘gone all the way’ to Baghdad, i.e. should have attacked Baghdad. This would have been a stupid and vicious move, militarily, as we are now seeing. A more balanced argument, from this perspective, would be that the U.S. ‘should have’ swept temporarily into southern Iraq and destroyed Saddam’s military power there, including the Republican Guard. But interestingly, twelve years of neocon cogitating over ‘Baghdad’ seem not to have produced this line of thought or at least not to have emphasized it.

          Prominent neocons in Washington seem never to have been all that interested in weakening Saddam’s grip on his own people by the single militarily effective way of doing so. Perhaps they feared that Saddam might be replaced by his own people, too, without control by Washington.

          Meanwhile, even the sanctions causing the deaths by malnutrition and poor medical care of thousands of Iraqi children, maintained by the Clinton administration under pressure from the neocons and the GOP, are being blamed here on our not having attacked Baghdad before.

          No suggestion that the bloodthirsty saber-rattling from the hard right might have contributed.

Oct. 26, 2001 – Czech officials ‘confirm’ a meeting in Prague in early 2001 between Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, and an Iraqi intelligence agent.

This alleged rendezvous is the only significant incident purportedly involving the 9/11 attackers in conjunction with Iraq and is widely reported in the U.S. The item later turns out to be debunked, like the stories about Iraq’s aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons labs and Niger uranium for making nuclear weapons.

Oct. 29, 2001 – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says in a television interview that the Pentagon favors a takeover of Kabul by Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance. Rumsfeld also says that the U.S. will keep fighting through the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in spite of the resentment that course will arouse in the Middle East and elsewhere.