Surprise! Former CIA Operative Criticizes Tora Bora

The neverending quest of federal agencies and the individuals who staff[ed] them to shift blame onto someone..., anyone else continues apace. Opposition newspapers, publishing houses, cable channels, the foreign press, and lefty conspiracy theorists have been kept busy for many months cataloguing charges leveled by former federal employees against the administration. It's a thriving concern, one that has padded the retirement accounts of many, boosted ratings for the media fringe, and kept the left wing of the blogosphere humming. The latest volley comes from, where else, the CIA, which charges that Army screw-ups kept them from capturing Osama Bin Laden during the invasion of Afghanistan.

Newsweek reports:

[T]he CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members....

In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora....

There's nothing really new there.

That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members.

And here's the surprise..., ready for this?

Berntsen's book gives, by contrast, a heroic portrayal of CIA activities at Tora Bora and in the war on terror.

Wow! I never saw that coming..., did you?

There's little doubt that at Tora Bora we missed a golden opportunity to snag OBL. What are still highly debatable though are questions regarding the nature of the reasoning that underlay decisions made on the ground and the consequences of that failure. Those are far more important than the finger-pointing exercises currently dominating the discussion.

This is, it must be admitted, standard beltway CYA and part of the CIA's standard practice of leaking and smearing when threatened, but it is important for military and intelligence officials to sort out exactly what went wrong in the borderlands of Afghanistan. Such a book thus has a certain degree of importance, especially as the US reconfigures its military and intelligence forces for the new global environment. And, it is inevitable that Tora Bora will become an important point of discussion in the ongoing debates over just what configuration of forces is best suited to the new missions that are emerging. But in today's polarized political atmosphere the technical debate becomes a weapon in the hands of political operatives, and that is where the trouble begins.

There is a real question as to how useful it is to have these post-mortem arguments while the war is still being waged, but that is not my concern here. Instead, I am mostly worried about the corrosive effect these bureaucratic broadsides have on our political system.

These things aren't really going to hurt Bush. He's a big boy and well able to take care of himself. He rightly branded this stuff "the worst sort of Monday morning quarterbacking." It is the Democrat Party, that suffers the most. This kind of nastiness encourages the worst elements within that party and dismays those of us who long for a responsible Democratic movement to emerge.

Michael Barone puts his finger on the problem. He notes,

a fundamental split in the Democratic Party -- a split among its politicians and its voters.

On the one hand, there are those who believe that this is a fundamentally good country and want to see success in Iraq. On the other hand, there are those who believe this is a fundamentally bad country and want more than anything else to see George W. Bush fail.

Those who do not think this split is real should consult the responses to pollster Scott Rasmussen's question last year. About two-thirds of Americans agreed that the United States is a fair and decent country. Virtually all Bush voters agreed. Kerry voters were split down the middle.

This is a fundamental split. University and media elites, as Thomas Sowell writes in his forthcoming "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," promote a version of history in which all evils are perpetrated by the United States and the West and in which Third World tyrants are assumed to be the voice of virtuous victims. These elites fail to notice that slavery was a universal institution until opposed only by altruists in the West, in late 18th century Britain and 19th century America.

It comes naturally to those liberal politicians whose worldview is set by these elites to suppose that Saddam's Iraq was the land of happy kite-flyers portrayed in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" and that, as Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin said in a carefully prepared speech, American actions in Guantanamo are comparable to acts of the Nazis, Soviets and Khmer Rouge.

It comes naturally to Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean to proclaim that [Osama bin Laden] should be presumed innocent pending trial but that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay should be consigned to jail for offenses with which he has not even been charged.

Half the Senate Democrats attended the Washington premiere of Moore's movie and laughed and cheered its ridicule of Bush and denunciation of American policy -- at a time when Moore proclaimed on his website that "Americans are the stupidest people in the world."

Now, Democrats want to make Guantanamo an issue when, according to Rasmussen, only 20 percent of Americans believe prisoners there are treated unfairly and only 14 percent believe that treatment is similar to Nazi tactics....

[A] party that happily allies itself with the likes of Moveon.org and many of whose leading members have lost the ability to distinguish between opposition to an incumbent administration and rooting for our nation's enemies has got serious problems. Especially when it is called on again, as it will be sooner or later, to govern.

Read it here.

Barone's on to something here. The endless quest of the "progressives" to uncover another scandal to rival Watergate -- one that will open the public's eyes at last to the assumed perfidity of the Republicans -- has poisoned political discourse in this country for a generation. Nasty little monographs, like those being produced by ex-bureaucrats, only feed the feverish fantasies of the left and retard the development of a responsible Democratic leadership.

It's time to call a halt to this foolishness. Let the bureaucrats fight their battles -- that's ultimately for the good, mistakes must be confronted -- but for the sake of the Democratic Party and of the country, keep it from dominating the nation's political discourse.

I'm talkin' to you, Newsweek.