Alarm Bells
On September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated. He was a leader of the Northern Alliance, fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
I heard about his death on the nightly news, but I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. However, the assassination set off alarms in certain corners of the U.S. intelligence services, who had already seen many indicators that something big was coming.
Two days after Massoud was murdered, terrorists hijacked four planes, flew three of them into buildings, and killed thousands of Americans. The killing of Massoud had been done by al Qaeda, a pre-emptive stroke designed to remove an enemy who might have interfered with the terrorists’ plans and become an effective ally for the U.S. when we responded to the attacks.
Ever since that time, there’s been a part of my brain that looks suspiciously at “minor” news stories, always on the look-out for early warnings of big trouble ahead.
So, while everyone has been obsessing over New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s resignation today, I’m worried about yesterday’s resignation by Admiral William Fallon as head of Central Command.
Admiral Fallon had rankled senior officials of the Bush administration in recent months with comments that emphasized diplomacy over conflict in dealing with Iran, that endorsed further troop withdrawals from Iraq beyond those already under way and that suggested the United States had taken its eye off the military mission in Afghanistan.
Did Bush and Cheney remove an effective leader who might have interfered with some plans they have in mind?
Josh Marshall says Fallon was “apparently too sane for the Bush White House.”
By all accounts, the points of contention between Fallon and Bush administration officials centered on three points: 1) his belief that the indefinite occupation of Iraq is a disaster for the US military, 2) that diplomacy has a central role in American foreign and national security policy, 3) that war is not a credible policy for the US to pursue in dealing with Iran. The last of these was believed to be the key issue.
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It is widely believed in media and political circles that despite the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is back under some kind of adult/mainstream management. In other words, that we’ve left the Cheney/Rumsfeld era behind for a period of Gates/Rice normalcy and that Iran regime change adventurism is safely off the table. But put together what the disagreements with Fallon were about, the fact that the president chose him as someone he thought he could work with not more than one year ago, and the almost unprecedented nature of the resignation and it becomes clear that that assumption must be gravely in error.
Esquire’s profile of Adm. Fallon (strong language) was apparently the last straw for the Bushies. So Fallon is out of the picture, and I’m expecting more war from a White House that doesn’t know how to do anything else.
This time, lots of people are hearing the alarm bells.