Eric Edelman is still lying for the Vice President. Edelman, from 2001, served as Dick Cheney's chief adviser on matters related to national security and Iraq. Since then Edelman has succeeded Douglas Feith, the man who ran the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, as undersecretary of defense for policy. And he is still lying on Cheney's behalf. I caught up with him yesterday at the Council on Foreign Relations. More on that, in a second. First, some background.
Three years ago, the Bush-Cheney team told us over and over that it was necessary to attack Iraq because Iraq was a central front in the war on terrorism. Right after 9/11, we now know, Bush personally insisted that Iraq was the chief culprit in that attack, even though the CIA demonstrated decisively that Al Qaeda was responsible for it and that Al Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq. Vice President Cheney was the lead Liar-in-Chief about alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda ties, insisting for example that Iraqi spies met with AQ operatives in Prague and repeatedly linking Baghdad to bin Laden. None of these ties existed. But we went to war anyway.
Now that the war is underway, and going badly, President Bush and his minions are still insisting, against all evidence, that Iraq is still at the heart of the war on terrorism. In his recent Annapolis speech, in the hefty Victory in Iraq document, and in other statements from administration officials, the Bush team is still misrepresenting the enemy. In fact, our real opponents in Iraq are not Al Qaeda, but the Iraqi resistance led by secular Baathists, former Iraqi military and intelligence officials, and a vast underground army of unhappy Sunnis, what U.S. intelligence calls POI's ("pissed off Iraqis"). But just as Bush lied about the terrorist threat from Iraq in 2003, he is doing it again: he is claiming that the real enemy in Iraq are Al Qeda-linked jihadists -- even though virtually all analysts of the war in Iraq say that the jihadists are only about 4 per cent of the fighters that U.S. forces face.
Which brings us to Edelman. Speaking at CFR yesterday, Edelman cited a long list of jihadist web site ravings, including one in which he quoted bin Laden claiming that the jihadists' goal in Iraq was to turn that country into the base for a new, worldwide Caliphate, a political-religious empire that Edelman warned would take over first the Middle East, then Europe, then the world. He ignored the reality that whatever outlandish claims bin Laden makes (and bin Laden is not in Iraq and has little leverage even over the small band of jihadists there), there is no chance that bin Laden's wild fantasies could come true. Certainly they do not represent an existential threat to world security, except in the sense that Al Qaeda can blow up things in London or Madrid. But Edelman presented the war in Iraq as the only way to prevent bin Laden from creating his worldwide Evil Calipjhate. (In the press corps, sitting in the back, there were audible titters at the stupidity of Edelman's claims.)
Now, it is true that more and more bin Laden-style terrorists are going to Iraq to join the jihad. But if they are going, and it is far from clear that they are going in large numbers, they are going because we are there. In other words, by staying in Iraq, we are helping Al Qaeda-minded jihadists expand their ranks.
Still, the reality in Iraq is that the opposition to the U.S. occupation is primarily secular and nationalist, not Islamist.
So when it came my turn to ask a question, I asked Edelman, first, if as Cheney's chief national security aide, he had participated in the administration's effort to arm-twist the CIA to skew intelligence about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And I asked him if he thought that the Pentagon inspector-general's investigation of Feith and the OSP was justified. (Amazingly, even though I spoke politiely, breifly, and without any inflammatory rhetoric, some in the posh CFR audience threw catcalls my way while I was speaking.) Edelman lied again, denying that he was involved in any pressure against the CIA, telling me to ask CIA officials if they felt pressured. (I have already asked, and many of them told me: Yes, they did.) And he refused to comment on the IG investigation of Feith, which parallels the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence so-called Phase II investigation of pre-war abuses of intelligence. "Iraq," he said, "is a central front in the War on Terror."