The Bush Doctrine In Action

Of course I'd be remiss if I didn't weigh in on today's NY Times front page story detailing how Bush ordered secret raids in multiple countries since 2004 to go after suspected Al Qaeda terrorists.

The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.

This is pretty disturbing on a number of levels: Bush ordered the CIA to invade other countries to go after high-value targets when it wasn't "diplomatically inconvenient" to do so, and the order is a tacit admission that anywhere on Earth was a valid target if the intel was right.

This is real Tom Clancy/"24" level stuff here. A secret program to attack anywhere, anytime, in order to hit "terrorists"? This is the kind of stuff you expect to see in video games or cable TV movies with Dean Cain, not actual US foreign policy. And the fact that several of these strikes had to be canceled because they were "too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence" is ludicrous: the act of invading a sovereign country is an act of war ANYWAY. Since we have plenty of evidence we've done it and other people suspect Bush of doing it, it's kind of annoying to find out that there were strikes even Bush wouldn't authorize.

Does this explain why Bin Laden is still at large? Was he in a country even Bush wouldn't attack? Would President Obama do things differently? How much trouble is Bush in for all this? Where's the "elsewhere" that we did attack?

This raises far more disturbing questions than answers.