Here is corroboration (there is much more) of Richard
Clarke's charge (one uttered by both Sen. Bob Graham
D-Fraudida, and Gen. Wesley Clark D-NATO during the
Democratic primary season)that the _resident took
vital resources away from the hunt for Bin Laden and
Al Qaeda and threw them instead into his foolish
military adventure in Iraq...
Dave Moniz, Steven Komarow, USA Today: In 2002, troops from the 5th Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures. The CIA, meanwhile, was stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan. When the White House raised a new priority, it took specialists away from the Afghanistan effort to ensure Iraq was covered.
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-03-28-troop-shifts_x.htm?csp=24
Shifts from bin Laden hunt evoke questions
By Dave Moniz and Steven Komarow, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — In 2002, troops from the 5th Special
Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were
pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in
Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment:
Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in
Spanish cultures.
The CIA, meanwhile, was stretched badly in its
capacity to collect, translate and analyze information
coming from Afghanistan. When the White House raised a
new priority, it took specialists away from the
Afghanistan effort to ensure Iraq was covered.
Those were just two of the tradeoffs required because
of what the Pentagon and CIA acknowledge is a shortage
of key personnel to fight the war on terrorism. The
question of how much those shifts prevented progress
against al-Qaeda and other terrorists is putting the
Bush administration on the defensive.
Even before the invasion, the wisdom of shifting
resources from the bin Laden hunt to the war in Iraq
was raised privately by top military officials and
publicly by Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and others. Now
it's being hotly debated again following an
election-year critique of the Bush administration by
its former counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke.
"If we catch him (bin Laden) this summer, which I
expect, it's two years too late," Clarke said Sunday
on NBC's Meet the Press. "Because during those two
years when forces were diverted to Iraq ... al-Qaeda
has metamorphosized into a hydra-headed organization
with cells that are operating autonomously, like the
cells that operated in Madrid recently."
The Bush administration says the hunt for bin Laden
continued throughout the war in Iraq. Officials say
it's wrong to speculate that he would have been
captured, or other terrorist attacks prevented, if the
Iraq war hadn't happened. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, speaking on ABC's This Week, called the
example of the Special Forces switch "simplistic."
But the Pentagon tacitly acknowledged a problem last
year, after the Iraq invasion. It created a new
organization, Task Force 121, to better oversee
commando operations in the region and ensure a faster
response when terrorists can be struck.
Now gaps in capability are being closed as the
administration puts record amounts of money into
military and spy agencies. More spy aircraft such as
the Predator drone are arriving. More troops are
getting Arabic training at Fort Bragg in North
Carolina. CIA Director George Tenet said this month
that the agency is filling shortfalls, especially
among translators.
Still, the question lingers: Did opening a second
front hurt the main effort to defeat terrorism?
Bob Andrews, former head of a Pentagon office that
oversaw special operations, says that removing Saddam
Hussein was a good idea but "a distraction." The war
in Iraq, Andrews notes, entailed the largest
deployment of special operations forces — about 10,000
—since the Vietnam War. That's about 25% of all U.S.
commandos.
It also siphoned spy aircraft and light infantry
soldiers. Iraq proved such a drain, one former
Pentagon official notes, that there were no AWACS
radar jets to track drug-trafficking aircraft in South
America.
Saddam was not an immediate threat. "This has been a
real diversion from the longer struggle against
jihadists," especially in the intelligence field, he
says.
Stan Florer, a retired Army colonel and former Green
Beret, agrees that Iraq diverted enormous military and
intelligence assets. But he argues that long-standing
disputes with Saddam needed to be addressed: "This was
tearing at us all the time. It was a bleeding wound
with Saddam calling the shots in the Middle East."