THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

*1* In his article "There They Go Again," Paul Mirengoff claims that mainstream Democrats are crafting their positions on matters of war and peace based on political calculations, not the national interest.

To buttress this unsubstantiated claim, Mirengoff argues that liberal think-tanks and Clinton-era security analysts are providing their blessings. He cites Richard Clarke and me as examples of individuals who fall into this category.

But as Mirengoff well knows, Richard Clarke has worked for all of the presidents from Ronald Reagan up to, and including, George W. Bush, and I spent five years as an assistant secretary of defense for Ronald Reagan.

Mirengoff also implies that my position on the strategic redeployment of our forces has changed because I work for a think-tank that is run by John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton's chief of staff. This is like arguing that Robert Kagan's position on the invasion of Iraq is influenced by the fact that his boss at the Carnegie Endowment is Jessica Matthews, who worked in the Carter and Clinton administrations. Or that Max Boot's position on the war is influenced by the fact that his boss at the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, worked in the administrations of Reagan and the two Bushes. It is clear that Mirengoff has no idea how think-tanks really work.

Mirengoff further distorts my position by noting, out of context, that last June I stated that setting a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq would be a mistake. And indeed it would have been a mistake before the Iraqis approved the constitution and had the general election. Mirengoff also know this since we discussed it on a Voice of America broadcast on December 1, 2005.

If Mirengoff had taken the time to read the proposal that my colleague Brian Katulis and I developed (which we tried unsuccessfully to publish in The Weekly Standard), he would have noticed that we said that the redeployment of our forces would begin in 2006 after the election and would be completed by the end of 2007, but would involve leaving military advisors and counterterrorist units in Iraq, 14,000 troops in Kuwait, and Marines over the horizon. This is hardly what Mirengoff claims is a "slow motion cut and run strategy."

Mirengoff's critique of the policies advocated by some Democrats (primarily Jack Murtha, whom Mirengoff never mentions) and their partners (presumably Clarke and me) is also flawed and misleading, and contradicts the recent statements of President Bush and Generals Casey and Abizaid about the nature of the insurgency, the impacts of the large American occupation, and the fact that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily.

--Larry Korb
Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Senior Advisor to the Center for Defense Information

*2* Long after everyone else has given it up, Thomas Joscelyn and The Weekly Standard continue to hold a cadaver's grip on the notion that there was a serious relationship between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. So let's review the bidding: Michael Scheuer has written that he changed his mind on the issue and concluded that there was no such relationship. Richard Clarke, whom Joscelyn cites as an advocate of the belief in an Iraqi-jihadist alliance, clearly also revised his views after 1998-1999, perhaps in part because of the intelligence review his staff conducted. The 9/11 Commission, the most authoritative source on the issue, came to the conclusion that there was no collaborative relationship between Baghdad and al Qaeda.

The Bush administration has given up making this argument in the face of an overwhelming amount of analysis, and the obvious failure to find any incriminating material during the exploitation of the Iraqi intelligence service files. (Indeed, the source that they relied on for many of their allegations, Ibn al Shaykh al Libi, was believed to be a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency even before top administration officials began citing him.) In my new book The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right, written with Steven Simon, we cite former senior military officers and senior intelligence officials in the Pentagon and the CIA who could find no evidence of serious cooperation. To quote the headline of Stephen Hayes's original article that presented the "intelligence" on the bin Laden-Saddam relationship: "Case Closed."

On the specific issue of Iraqi involvement in the al Shifa plant, which bin Laden had invested in and which Joscelyn cites as evidence of my tortuous logic, there are three points to be made: First, I have acknowledged repeatedly that this is the closest the two parties came, and I practically invited administration supporters to take this on board in the sidebar to my original Slate article about Hayes's piece about the "Feith Annex." Second, Joscelyn seems to find it inconceivable that the Iraqis would not know about the bin Laden investment in the al Shifa plant if the United States did. Well, Joscelyn does not know much about the incompetents who worked for Saddam's intelligence service. Third, even if the Iraqis did know about al Qaeda's involvement, it is likely that they expected the Sudanese to keep bin Laden under control and away from the chemical weapons much as they had kept him away from nuclear materials earlier in the decade. As you may recall, bin Laden was swindled by a former Sudanese government minister who sold him radioactive junk, portraying it as fissile material that the Saudi believed would be the core of a nuclear weapon. The government of Hassan al-Turabi milked bin Laden at every opportunity.

At this point, the only possible explanations for refusing to give up the idea of a bin Laden-Saddam alliance are dogmatism and embarrassment.

--Daniel Benjamin

Thomas Joscelyn responds:

Benjamin begins his response with an appeal to the conventional wisdom. In so doing, he further demonstrates that he is willing to advance any argument in favor of his cause. He first cites Michael Scheuer's flip-flop and Richard Clarke's "revision" as evidence in favor of his position. Anyone else may wonder why it is that these two critics were once able to openly worry about Saddam's desire to help al Qaeda acquire WMD technology, or bin Laden's possible "boogie to Baghdad," but not Benjamin. That they now dismiss the notion of any relationship is good enough for him.

Both of these self-styled critics--like Benjamin--have fashioned careers as detractors of the war in Iraq. Of course, there would not be much of a market for their wares if they conceded any role for Saddam in al Qaeda's terror network. But instead of blindly accepting their newfound conclusions, wouldn't it be wise to investigate the actual evidence?

Here we get to the heart of this matter: no matter what the evidence, Benjamin can invent an ad hoc reason to dismiss it. The Iraqis were giving VX nerve gas technology to al Qaeda in Sudan (at several sites, including a plant called al-Shifa)? No matter. The Iraqis must not have known, because--generally speaking--Iraqi intelligence was "incompetent." Or, if you prefer, even if they did know (time for a little mind-reading) they must have expected "the Sudanese to keep bin Laden under control and away from the chemical weapons."

That Benjamin feels comfortable reading Saddam's mind is somewhat puzzling. We now know that during his tenure at the National Security Council and thereafter, the U.S. intelligence community had no good human intelligence assets within Saddam's regime. But, this has not stopped him from dismissing other evidence in a similar manner.

Saddam supported al Qaeda's affiliate in Northern Iraq, Ansar al Islam, which facilitated the fallback of al Qaeda after 9/11? No matter. Benjamin argues "there is no other indication that Mr. Hussein has changed his fundamental policy"--as if there were a fundamental policy that needed changing. (See "Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies," the New York Times, September 30, 2002)

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi roamed freely around Saddam's Iraq (not just northern Iraq) before the war and became the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq afterwards? No problem. Zarqawi is not really a full-fledged al Qaeda member and the "charge that Zarqawi was collaborating with Hussein's regime has long since crumbled." ("Zarqawi: Face of the Insurgency," the New York Times, September 18, 2005) That a top al Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, says differently does not matter to Benjamin.

In 2003, Benjamin applied this same amount of analytical rigor to the so-called "Feith annex" when he pretended to debunk the memo for Slate without even having read the actual document. He simply picked a few parts of Steven Hayes's reporting on the memo that he (wrongly) found objectionable and used them to reject that "gusher" of evidence in its entirety. One wonders: does he think that the National Security Agency intercepts of communications between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda summarized in the memo do not exist?

But in his casual dismissal of the "Feith annex" he (as he also notes in his reply) chided the Bush administration for not using al-Shifa as an example of collaboration. This is typical of Benjamin: he argues that Iraq was giving VX nerve gas technology to al Qaeda in Sudan, but then argues that this isn't evidence of a real relationship, and yet he chastises the Bush administration for not citing it.

Ironically, Benjamin was granted his wish last month when the White House cited the Clinton administration's destruction of al-Shifa in a rebuttal of a New York Times editorial.

In short, Benjamin has never been one to let evidence get in the way of a good paradigm. Whether it be al-Shifa, or Ansar al-Islam, or Zarqawi, Benjamin can find a way to explain away the evidence. He then laments that his approach to these matters does not currently guide our national security policies.

I must admit that I am rather glad that the current administration has forsaken his approach to these matters. After all, I cannot think of a more dogmatic or embarrassing way to review intelligence.

*3* I commend Thomas Joscelyn for continuing his efforts to counter the illogical propaganda put forward by people who presumably are embarrassed by their past errors of judgment. The "debate" in my country reflects that in the United States, with prominence given to calls for troop withdrawals from Iraq but without any logical argument about the probable consequences. In light of current poll figures, do Americans realize that if we don't defeat the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if America withdraws as in Vietnam, America's real allies will, in the future, wonder if they should back American foreign policy objectives. Debate about the flawed intelligence that got us into Iraq or the known relationship between Iraqi Intelligence and al Qaeda in the 90's seems to me to be an exercise with little merit.

--Keith Hancock
Adelaide, Australia

*4* Just a quick note to correct two points in John Hinderaker's article. First, there was no classified information in either of my books, Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies' Eyes. The Agency reviewed every line of both books and found nothing classified. More important, I intended then and intend now to abide by the secrecy agreement I signed at the start of my CIA career in 1982 and by which I am still bound. Second, it is true that the Agency under Director Tenet allowed me to be interviewed about my book Imperial Hubris as long as the book was misinterpreted to be an all-out attack on the Bush Administration. In fact, the book mentions Mr. Bush--or Mr. Clinton, for that matter--very few times, and underlines that my opposition to the Iraq war is based on it breaking the back of the American effort to eliminate al Qaeda and my personal aversion to offensive wars of choice. Imperial Hubris is overwhelmingly focused on how the last several American presidents have been very ill-served by the senior leaders of the intelligence community. Indeed, I resigned from an Agency I love in order to publicly damn the feckless 9/11 Commission, which failed to find any personal failure or negligence among intelligence community leaders even though dozens of serving officers provided the commissioners with clear documentary evidence of that failure.

If the book became part of the presidential election campaign in 2004 it was because Tenet and his lieutenants delayed its publication so long that it appeared on the eve of the Democratic Convention--the manuscript was submitted for the regulation 30-day review period on January 5, 2004--and because they forbid me from talking to the media once I began, in interviews, to make it clear that the book was not an attack on President Bush, but rather on Tenet and his colleagues.

--Michael F. Scheuer

*5* I thank Larry Miller for this wonderful column. From my perspective, as a retired Naval officer whose father was a World War II veteran, it is a blessing, if not an outright miracle, that we still have young people in our country willing to make this commitment in the face of the overwhelming sea-change in support from the political, academic, and journalistic communities since my father's time. I wonder if Howard Dean, Senators Kerry and Durbin, and Rep. Murtha will also pray for your nephew's family. If so, their actions appear to me contrary to their voiced concern.

I have greatly missed Miller's regular columns over the past year. Here's hoping this last offering indicates his return.

--Thomas R. Himes, M.D.

*6* Stephen Schwartz is bullish on Kosovo, and as someone who was stationed in Kosovo for six months nearly five years ago, I respect the aspirations of the Kosovars. However, due to the small size of the territory, I think that the region would be more stable if Kosovo was merged with either Montenegro or Albania, the latter as part of a loose confederation similar to that existing between Montenegro and Serbia. Most Kosovars, in my experience, don't seem to realize that their independence was won for them by NATO, not the KLA/UCK, and so the international community rightfully has some say about their future. I think most Europeans are leery of winding up with another basket-case economy on their doorstep. I hope the Kosovars are as entrepreneurial as Schwartz seems to think--and not just as smugglers and narcotics traffickers. Regardless, there is still much work to do in Kosovo.

--Thomas Mitchell

*7* I enjoyed Irwin M. Stelzer's Power Down, but I hope that he will dwell a bit more next time on the nuclear alternative. Three Mile Island, of course, scared many off of nuclear, but I still see it as a good, reliable source of energy. They are using it all over Europe, and, with the exception of Chernobyl, there have been no serious incidents.

--Richard Connors

*8* I very much enjoy reading Irwin M. Stelzer's articles, but nuclear power is a non-starter. Storage of spent fuel rods is only half the story. All types of energy are potentially hazardous, but only with nuclear power will the inevitable accident contaminate a large area for as much as one thousand years. We simply must go another way for our energy needs.

--Greg Allison

*9* Unfortunately, Stelzer leaves out the possibility of spending money on space solar power. This technology would allow us to collect solar energy from orbit and transmit the power to a receiving station on the ground. There would be no emissions and no foreign oil sources to contend with, just a hefty development cost up front.

--Bart Leahy

*10* Robert Kagan has written an exceptional piece and offered us a realistic appraisal. The administration would do well to follow Kagan's advice and tell it like it is, instead of juking and jiving in response to the attacks of critics. Let's have truth in advertising: We're going to prevail, we're going to win, but at this stage it's a war of quasi-attrition. Although our footprint in Iraq may need to remain large for the foreseeable future, steady and consistent progress is virtually guaranteed.

--Charles R. Vail