[FightThePower!]

Flame away. I know that many people on this board will don't like Baer, perhaps they think he is self serving and is trying to sell books. I say we ignore his warnings at our great risk. I have long said that we are not serious about winning this war, the other side is. See the following quote:

"It’s pure spin. We deal with it superficially. We follow current events; we get a paragraph in the newspaper about Zarqawi or whatever it is. And then we get on with life. It’s not the way [the Iranians] deal with the world. They think they’re in mortal combat against the United States. Their survival is based on this conflict. Our attitude is, “Give us the oil.” We don’t take this part of the world seriously and yet it is so important to us. Iran has always been looked at like a crazy uncle in the attic: Every once in a while he starts knocking things around and breaks a window, but otherwise we just ignore him."

Iran won't quit until we are dead or they are dead. What will it take for the United States to get serious? In my mind, it would take a nuclear attack on our soil. I hope we can avoid that, but I doubt we will.

[msnimje]

More importantly, why are you reading MotherJones?

[91B]

We should have dealt with Iran. I’m not saying attack it; I’m saying we should have taken it seriously.

WTF-typical lefty/CIA/State dept bullcrap. Don't do anything, just look serious. He keeps talking about "Neocons" and how dangerous they are, but you can't get any more serious than the administration has been since 9/11. Guys like this make me want to puke.

[marron]

We should have dealt with Iran. I’m not saying attack it; I’m saying we should have taken it seriously.

Thats not an answer. Thats an evasion. It gives the appearance of answering the question without answering it.

[Sans-Culotte]

I agree that the war should be "more serious", but the thrust of the article is that Bush made a mistake by taking on Iraq instead of Iran. Had it been the other way around, the article would have said we underestimated Saddam and his Al Qaeda ties, and should have attacked him first.

In short, the article IMO is not about how to fight a "more serious" war, but how Bush lied, led us into the "wrong wae", etc.

[RedRover]

That was the big lie: That Saddam had something to do with 9/11—not the WMD—the connection between Saddam and bin Laden. We were spun on that and we were spun on the famous Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence, which was a complete lie.

You're wasting your time looking for wisdom from a fool.

[GATOR NAVY]

Six months later, 241 Marines and soldiers were killed when their Beirut barracks were torn apart by a truck carrying 12,000 pounds of dynamite, which detonated the largest nonnuclear explosion since World War II.

Only Mother Jones would believe that 6 tons of dynamite was "the largest nonnuclear explosion since World War II."

With 1,375 tons of explosives packed into the peaks, April 5, 1958 was the date set for detonation . On that day, at 9:31 a.m., Dr. Victor Dolmage, consulting engineer for the Ministry of Public Works, pushed the plunger that set off the largest non-nuclear explosion ever.

The Taming of the Rock

[StJacques]

Based on what I just read, Baer is the perfect example of why we have such a big problem with the CIA. He consistently positions himself outside the current conventional wisdom on the Middle East, tells us just enough about how serious this matter is because we're dealing with capable people of dangerous intent -- that's CIA speak for "my problem is bigger than yours so give me the resources" which we now convert into ". . . give me the attention" -- but at the same time he suggests absolutely nothing in the way of policies that will lead to solutions. He leaves us hopelessly adrift in the "nuances" of the many-tiered and complex layers of a culture whose historical traditions reach back for thousands of years and . . . .

This is the guy you always run into at those downtown parties who is over in the corner holding but never smoking his Moroccan briar pipe -- because Algerian briar is so passée -- thrilling the poor housewives who've never been farther than fifty miles from their hometowns with strange and fascinating tales of his time in exotic lands and who, after you wake up the next morning and think about it, never said a damn thing.

I'm not trying to suggest to anyone that there is such a thing as simple solutions or that we haven't made mistakes in intelligence. But sooner or later in a worldwide confrontation with terror that has all the aspects of a true war one must make choices about where the fight will be made. Baer is one of those who is going to stand around and throw cold water on every possible option.

[denydenydeny]

I stopped reading here:

Baer has also just published his first spy novel, Blow the House Down, which offers an alternative—and he stresses, fictional—theory of who was behind September 11.

People who further the lurid fantasies of the 9/11 conspiracy moonbats--even in a novel--deserve absolutely none of my time. Sorry.

[GeronL]

the worst magazine ever

BTW- it'd be a lot worse than he thinks if the muzzies win WW3/4

[msnimje]

Baer is playing checkers and the president is playing chess.

Iran is now sandwiched in between about a quarter of a million coalition troops plus a lot of pissed off Iraqis and Afghanis.

Iran very well may be "taken" without a single drop of blood or bomb.

[kcvl]

September 12, 2003

Robert Baer, Former CIA Case Officer and Author of "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude."


BAER: I could have sat down and done a list of all my former colleagues from the CIA who ended up on the Saudi Arabian payroll. Some of them are known, like Ray Close. Others have gone public, but there are others that haven’t. A bunch of my colleagues went to work for a public consulting firm where the initial capital was paid for by the Saudi embassy to lobby the Hill for the Gulf countries. A former member of the National Security Council under Reagan set this up. And it’s not like it’s a secret. Even Bandar [Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi prince and U.S. ambassador] has said, according to the Washington Post, that if I take care of people coming out of office, the new ones coming in are going to be a lot friendlier to Saudi Arabia once it gets known.


Smart people in the Middle East tell me that there are a lot of Saudis heading into Iraq right now to set up cells to attack American troops. There was an article recently about it – I think it was in the Christian Science Monitor. And Bremer has even said it. What to do? I offer one solution, which is Syria, 1982, where they confronted a fundamentalist problem. And I’ve been criticized by people that say that you can’t shell cities like Asad did in ’82.


There's a Syrian who's been convicted in Chicago and he has a Saudi wife. The Saudi embassy issued her a passport so was able to flee the U.S.; even though she was part of the case and shouldn’t have left. And the Saudis didn't really let us question Bayyumi [Bayyumi had showed up in San Diego with thousands of dollars and helped settle two Saudi 9/11 hijackers] But it was a controlled interrogation.


The Interior Minister said that 9/11 is a Zionist conspiracy. He said the Saudis had nothing to do with it. He stiffed Freeh [Louis Freeh, former FBI director] when he went out there in ’96 – just refused to see him. I don’t care what Freeh says now. He refused to see him, and no one did anything. The Saudis, and their arrogance, have gotten away with this for a long time because they think they have enough money to buy people off. Their attitude is: You don’t want to buy our oil, don’t buy it. We’ll sell someplace else. And what would happen if they did impose another embargo? Do we invade? I offer that possibility at the end of my book, but that’s if nothing else works. If the place is ready to go down, you have to consider it.

It wouldn't be an Iraq-like invasion with the stated goal of imposing democracy. An invasion of Saudi Arabia would be to save our economy.

[GOPJ]

Yeah. I think Ahmadinejad’s letter to us was an offer for us to surrender [to him]. We’re courting disaster. I find the Iranians very sophisticated. They’re by far the most sophisticated player in the Gulf. They don’t really deal in spin like we do at the policy level. They take this very seriously. They’re capable people. They consider themselves a civilization that’s equal to ours intellectually. They’ll go on for hours about this, how just because we invented the computer doesn’t make us superior.

ping