Category ►►► Iraq Matters

January 11, 2007

Building a Case for Casus Belli

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

It's a sad fact that in today's world, no good deed goes unpunished. America is the most generous of all countries, not just of our treasure but our blood: no other country on earth would have led a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein when it was so much easier just to mass troops along Iraq's border and threaten war -- in order to extort a huge oil-lease jackpot, like everyone else was doing.

No other country contributed as much to Tsunami relief as did we. No country has done as much to help the poor around the world. No other country has stood up to tyranny and injustice as we have. And what do we get in exchange? Faugh.

Yes, I said "faugh," and I meant it to sting!

Now we have the ludicrous situation where Iran is frantically trying to develop nuclear weapons; Iran controls the largest terrorist organization on the planet; Iran repeatedly -- incessantly -- nakedly threatens to obliterate another nation, wiping Israel from the map; Iran has been caught red-handed shipping high explosives into Iraq to kill Americans... yet we still would become world outcasts were we to attack Iran without iron-clad evidence that they had declared war on us first.

Unfortunately, we cannot live without international commerce; the days of Fortress America are long gone, if they ever existed at all. Therefore, before actually doing anything about Iran -- the "Herman Option," for example -- we must build the case for casus belli.

Fortunately, it shouldn't be a hard case to build... and even more fortunately, we have a president who seems determined to lay out exactly such a case. Thus, today we raided an Iranian government building in Irbil (not a consulate, as has been erroneously reported) and captured six Iranians:

The forces entered the building about 3 a.m., detaining the Iranians and confiscating computers and documents, two senior local Kurdish officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information. Irbil is a city in the Kurdish-controlled northern part of Iraq, 220 miles from Baghdad.

A resident living near the building said the troops used stun bombs and brought down an Iranian flag from the roof. As the operation went on, two helicopters flew overhead, the resident said on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

At the Pentagon, a senior U.S. military official said the building was not a consulate and did not have any diplomatic status. The six Iranians were taken in a "cordon-and-knock" operation, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

I'm not sure why, but the extraordinarily ungrateful Kurds seem to be hopping mad. But the Iranians are showing a great deal of restraint... the kind one shows when one has been caught with his hand in the milk bottle:

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told state-run radio the raid was "against a diplomatic mission" since the "presence of Iranian staffers in Irbil was legal." Hosseini claimed the action by coalition forces reflected a "continuation of pressure" on Iran, aiming to "create tension" between Iraq and its neighbors.

Note the tortured logic to imply what they seem wary of saying out loud, lest they be called up on to prove it: they do not actually claim that those in the building have "diplomatic immunity," but boy do they try to imply it! Evidently, any Iranian in Iraq legally is, therefore, on a "diplomatic mission." What does that say about those Iranians in Iraq illegally... such as those four we caught in December? We're still holding two of them; the other two actually did have diplomatic immunity -- which shows the Iranians are not shy about asserting it when they can prove their case.

And what about this minor incident? Do the Iranians think we've forgotten that we seized from Iraqi Shiite militia members a batch of Iranian-made weapons and munitions -- with a manufacturer's date of 2006?

U.S. officials say they have found smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories. According to a senior defense official, coalition forces have recently seized Iranian-made weapons and munitions that bear manufacturing dates in 2006.

This suggests, say the sources, that the material is going directly from Iranian factories to Shia militias, rather than taking a roundabout path through the black market. "There is no way this could be done without (Iranian) government approval," says a senior official....

Evidence is mounting, too, that the most powerful militia in Iraq, Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, is receiving training support from the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hezbollah.

Each of these incidents is just another brick in the wall; but when the wall has enough bricks, I believe we're actually going to drop it on someone: something along the lines of the "Herman Option;" and in Bush's speech announcing it (while it's already going on), I believe he will lay out each piece, brick after brick, until even the Democrats will be stymied.

After all, what will they argue: that we should announce to the world that it's open season on Americans?

In his most recent Mullings (the January 11th, 2007 edition), Rich Galen notes an interesting conundrum for those Democrats who have come out hard and angry against President Bush's new strategy:

  • If the change in strategy works, and we make measurable and unambiguous progress in the Iraq War, then the bitching and moaning Democrats will look like cowardly, defeatist, un-American dolts;
  • If the change in strategy fails, then what are they going to say? "See, we told you America was finished!"

Americans love a winner; but even if we lose -- and everyone has to lose now and again -- they still love a man who goes down swinging, rather than one who won't even step up to the plate, because he knows he's going to strike out anyway.

So let's give George the bat and get the hell out of his way.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 11, 2007, at the time of 11:58 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

President Bush Speaks - FAQ

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

(With a cool nod towards Dean Barnett, who does this sort of thing a lot on Hugh Hewitt's blog.)

Q: Didn't Bush seem really nervous last night?

Somewhat; I wouldn't say "really." My guess is that he and his national-security team were working on the speech right up until the day of delivery, so the president had no time to thoroughly rehearse some parts of it.

But how he delivered the speech is less important than the content: the new plan sounds a lot better than the old plan.

Q: What makes you think this will work? Adding more troops never worked before!

Although it gets all the headlines, "adding more troops" is not the most important change in strategy enunciated last night.

The big-box media would love to have Americans believe that all we're doing is "adding more troops." Put it that way, and you get substantially negative reactions ranging from disappointment among Republicans to outright frothing at the ears by Democrats. AP-Ipsos and ABC/Washington Post polls found that large majorities -- weighted heavily towards Democrats, as usual -- opposed "sending more troops to Iraq" and thought it wouldn't work. While the polls are fundamentally flawed (see next post), it's clear that if we were merely sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq, nothing would change.

The more important changes are:

  • A redeployment of troops -- 18 Iraqi brigades (more than 60,000 soldiers) and five American brigades (17,500 soldiers and/or Marines) -- within Iraq to be able to capture and hold strategic chokepoints within Baghdad; and an additional 4,000 American forces and an unknown number of Iraqis into Anbar Province, home of the Sunni terrorists, including al-Qaeda, to work with local tribal sheikhs -- who have recently turned strongly against al-Qaeda -- in sealing the border with Syria;
  • A committment to "hold" captured territory much longer than before, up to 18 months, to prevent the return of enemy forces; this provides the critical middle section of "capture, hold, release": take control of territory used by the enemy; hold it for a significant period time to thoroughly scour it of enemy presence; release the territory to local Iraqi forces to maintain security and keep the enemy from returning;
  • A committment (probably written) from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that no combatants are off-limits, including Shiite militias (e.g., the Badr Brigades and the Mahdi Militia);
  • A significant loosening of the rules of engagement (ROE) against those combatants.

Without these changes, simply adding 21,500 soldiers under the old rules and understandings would indeed be futile. Fortunately, George W. Bush and his military advisors are not utter fools, as the Democrats imagine they are (simple projection, I assume).

Q: What are "rules of engagement?"

Rules that govern when a military (or police) unit is allowed to use force, and what level of force is allowed under what circumstances. Such ROE can range from absolutely restrictive -- as in our Beirut deployment as "peacekeepers" in 1983, where even the sentries were unable simply to fire upon a vehicle for trying to run the barrier -- to almost wide open, as in a "free fire zone," where American forces are permitted to open fire on any identifiable enemy soldiers, no matter what they're doing (except surrendering), without receiving specific permission first.

Until now, we have operated under a frighteningly restrictive ROE. For example, we were not allowed to attack known armed militia forces merely because they appeared in public heavily armed; we had to wait until they did something, then apply to the Iraqi government for permission (unless they attacked us, of course).

I don't know how loose they will now be; but I suspect that Bush put it pretty harshly to Maliki in their recent 2-hour video conference: if Maliki wants to remain prime minister, he will have to get over his love affair with Muqtada Sadr and actually give us license to fight this war as a real war.

The troop "surge" will take at least a month or so (we'll probably bring the new troops in from Kuwait, where they're already sitting); but the change in ROE can happen immediately.

If we shortly begin hearing about many more engagements with first Sunni terrorists, then Shiite militias, it will be a very, very good sign.

Q: What difference do rules of engagement make anyway? Can't we already attack anyone who atttacks us or attacks Iraqi civilans?

Not necessarily. Under the current ROE, we need permission from the Iraqis to undertake virtually any sustained operation. Worse, as Tony Snow just explained it on Hugh Hewitt, we can be in the middle of an operation -- for instance, when we had cordoned off Sadr City, the Mahdi Militia's neighborhood of Baghdad, and were going house to house to root them out -- and suddenly, the commander receives a cell-phone call from the Minister of the Interior or some high-ranking member of parliament saying "I'm getting complaints... stop what you're doing and back off," or "you just arrested an insurgent, but he's my third cousin... release him at once!" -- and we would have to do it.

As of right now, that's finished: we forced agreement from Maliki that no terrorist, combatant, or lawbreaker is off-limits... including Muqtada Sadr himself; and that we don't have to get permission for every operation first. Even if Maliki later tries to back out of that agreement, we can simply ignore him or other interfering ministers, because we already have a binding agreement.

Q: But will this so-called "new strategy work?" None of Bush's other plans have worked!

I cannot possibly say that it will; but it has a much great chance of working than any previous strategy we have used: it's different in many ways from previous strategies.

We tried strategy A; when it didn't work, we tried B; when that didn't work, we tried C. Now we're trying D: the naive approach is to assume that three failures means that all subsequent attempts must likewise fail (it's a trend!) But this is an infantile projection: every plan is different; the failure of one doesn't mean another won't succeed.

This is a very different plan specifically developed after careful analysis of previous failures; it clearly has a better chance of success by definition.

Q: Then why the heck didn't we do this in the first place? Why didn't Bush just skip A, B, and C and jump directly to the working strategy, D?

Because there is no way to know, before trying a strategy, that it won't work. It's easy in hindsight to say that obviously, A, B, and C were doomed to failure. But unless your Magic 8-Ball works better than mine (mine is stuck on "Ask again later"), you know that precisely because they were tried and didn't work.

Q: Wait -- doesn't that mean we don't know for sure that this new strategy will work any better?

Yes, it means that. There is no certainty this side of the grave. But we have a pretty good idea what will happen if we fail... so unless you have a better strategy to win the war, I'm uninterested in hearing your complaints about other people's strategies.

Q: Hasn't this war been a complete failure from beginning to end? Shouldn't we just admit that we have been defeated and bring our boys home?

Let me quote from one expert analyst of what Bush has accomplished so far in the Iraq War:

And we have given the Iraqis so much. We have deposed their dictator. We dug him out of a hole in the ground and forced him to face the courts of his own people. We've given the Iraqi people a chance to draft their own constitution, hold their own free elections and establish their own government.

We Americans, and a few allies, have protected Iraq when no one else would.

This speaker is not exactly a Bush lover; but he is quite correct: each of these events he describes was a tremendous victory -- achieved against all the dire democratic predictions of doom and defeat.

Now the Democrats are making dire predictions of doom and defeat for this new strategy, as well. If anybody has a really, really bad record on such predictions... it's the Democrats, not the administration.

Q: When did you become a paid shill for the Repuglicans under Herr Bushitler?

On October 11th. That's when I received my first check for $87,000. I have received regular checks in that same amount every month since then... though I'm getting a little impatient for this month's check. Hey, Bushitler -- what the heck is going on with your accounts payable department?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 11, 2007, at the time of 04:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 07, 2007

So Where IS Lieutenant Kije?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

At long last, after weeks of fumfahing around, the Associated Press has labored and labored and finally given birth -- to a mouse.

They managed to cajole a spokesman of the Iraq Ministry of the Interior (MOI), Brigadier Abdul-Karim Khalaf (who has also been quoted on Reuters, albeit in other contexts -- so I'm willing to accept that he, at least, exists) into admitting the existence of a Police Captain Jamil Hussein -- actually Jamil Gholaiem (or Ghlaim) Hussein -- working at the Khadra police station. So here is at least a candidate for Baghdad's own Lt. Kijé!

For those who have forgotten the earlier Big Lizards post already (yes, we are eminently forgettable), in the 1927 tale by Yury Tynyanov, the entirely ficticious Lt. Kijé is "invented" when the Czar mishears a word in his general's report. As it is death to contradict the Czar, the general must concoct a series of adventures of the mythical lieutenant. Soon it becomes a game, where everybody in the Czar's court is telling fantastical farces of daring-do by the elusive Lt. Kijé.

But half a mo'; has anyone besides AP spoken to Lt. Kijé himself about this? Back on December 21st, the MOI questioned Ghlaim (or Gholaiem), and as our dearest Michelle reports, he denied being the Jamil Hussein who was blabbing to AP:

Meanwhile, my CPATT sources informed me today that MOI officials have now questioned Captain Jamil Ghlaim at MOI headquarters. Ghlaim continues to deny speaking to AP or any other media outlet.

I may be the last skeptic standing; but I must point out, in a loud and clear voice, that we still have no independent verification that the Jamil Hussein reportedly found by the MOI is the same Jamil Hussein repeatedly interviewed by AP. We have only AP's word for it -- and a denial by Lt. Kijé himself. At the moment, the identified Jamil Ghlaim (or Gholaiem) Hussein remains as elusive as Elwood P. Dowd's 8-foot tall invisible rabbit, Harvey. (Is Jamil a Pookah?)

Of course, I'm not entirely sure I trust the MOI about Hussein's denial, either: JGH could have lied to avoid prosecution. But at the very least, if the issue is the credibility of Gholaiem (or Ghlaim) as a source, then the fact that he is inclined to lie whenever he finds it pays is certainly worth at least a mention, I should think. So I ask again: has any news source besides AP actually questioned Jamil Ghlaim (or Gholaiem) Hussein of the Khadra police station about the 62 stories for which he was allegedly AP's principal source, including more than a dozen where he was actually named?

Let's assume Hussein is not, in fact, the blabbermouth; since the AP source was explicitly identified as "Jamil Hussein" at "Khandra," didn't Jamil Gholaiem (or Ghlaim) Hussein wonder why he was being quoted, if he actually never spoke to AP? Did he think there was another Lt. Kijé of the same name, working at the same police station as he? Or does he just not read the papers?

On the other hand, if we assume he is the AP source -- then did he actually deny it to the MOI? And why hasn't he spoken to any other new agency to verify his existence, reaffirm all of his claims, and clear his good name (or names)?

Since we now know that at least one Jamil exists in a disclosed location, it should be child's play for Reuters, the Times, the Times, the Post, CNN, or some other newspaper or television network to hound the guy into an interview with them: have they? For that matter, has anybody -- other than AP -- even interviewed Brigadier Khalaf and asked him about Jamil Hussein?

I get the strong sense that a lot of news agencies are reluctant (to the point of phobic) to investigate further, lest they uncover the sordid underbelly of the rampant, promiscuous use of Iraqi "stringers" to gather putative news stories... and just how much of the last three years reporting out of Iraq may have been concocted by sources driven by their own, private agendas.

Imagine, by analogy, that everthing ever reported about global warming came from officials of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international agency that brought us the Kyoto Protocol; yet the news wires, newspapers, and TV news networks consistently failed to note the inherent bias of sourcing from the primary political organization pushing global-warming theory... especially as global-warming skeptics are never quoted. (Oh, wait...)

Meanwhile, in a long but fascinating post Friday, Confederate Yankee recaps the actual content of the AP reporting on the Burning Sunnis story, which has shifted like the desert sands of Iraq itself... and which relies, not only upon the unsupported testimony of Jamil Hussein -- who may or may not be Jamil Ghlaim (or Gholaiem) Hussein -- but also in part upon the pronunciamentos of the Association of Muslim Scholars, or the Ulema Council.

The Ulema Council is split between one faction of Sunni clerics and scholars who merely issue fatwas ordering Sunnis not to cooperate with the Iraqi government, and another faction that actively collaborates with al-Qaeda in suicide bombings against "infidels," very liberally construed. (Can we call this second faction the Baghdad Ten?)

Which faction did AP interview to get the poop on the "inflammatory" burning of Sunni mosques and the Sunnis contained therein? The merely anti-Shiite government faction, or the Sunni terrorist faction? They don't tell us. (And don't blame me for the pun above; it's Confederate Yankee's pun, sir.)

But before we even get into the specifics of what Lt. Kijé claimed in the scores of stories where he was the primary source (often the only source)... can't we at least settle the question of whether the AP's Jamil Hussein really is the same person as the Jamil Gholaiem (or Ghlaim) Hussein working at the Khadra police station? Something akin to an admission by Hussein himself (and a retraction of his earlier denial) -- carried by some news organization other than AP.

Then, perhaps, we can move on to the actual substance of the charges.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 07, 2007, at the time of 04:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 06, 2007

Media Matters In the Meme Streets of Baghdad - iii

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Continued yet again from previous post...

The great mosaic

Boehlert wags his finger, pointing out that in the same week this "six burnt alive" story came out, hundreds more were killed:

Keep in mind that in the seven days surrounding the Burned Alive story, hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis were killed in sectarian violence.

To date, warbloggers have not raised serious questions about any of those slayings or the reporting surrounding them. Yet viewing Iraq through the soda straw that is the Burned Alive story, they insist the press, thanks to its pro-terrorist sympathies, is creating the illusion of "chaos" in Iraq.

This is simple misdirection. "Warbloggers" rightly focus on the particular source for this story, "Police Capt.Jamil Hussein," who has figured prominently in more than 60 AP articles in the last two years. It is not unfair to say that Jamil Hussein, who we have labeled Baghdad's own Lieutenant Kije, is AP's "go-to guy" whenever they need a story about innocent Sunni victims being brutalized and butchered by Shiite death squads, under the complacent eyes, if not direct orders, of the Iraqi government. That is, whenever AP needs to spread the meme that the new Iraqi government is just as bad -- nay, far worse! -- than the Baathist hell it replaces.

If he is not a reliable source -- or worse, if he does not actually exist (and despite AP's claim to have verified his existence, we still don't know for sure from independent reporters not employed by AP) -- then what are we to make of these 62 stories we have read during the last two years? Those stories are the only evidence we have of systematic, widespread slaughter of Sunnis by death squads.

Did they really happen? Did they happen the way Lt. Kije claimed? Did he make them all up? Even “warbloggers, who have virtually no serious journalism experience among” are allowed to wonder whether we can take seriously a source who gets wrong as many fundamental facts as Hussein did. At what point are we entitled, even duty bound, to say we will no longer believe a fellow who is extraordinarily reckless with the truth (or extraordinarily reckless with lies, take your pick).

But it's not just Lt. Kije; Boehlert also neglects to mention that another Iraqi “official,” Lt. Abdel-Razzaq, who has been featured in 23 AP articles, was held for questioning by the Iraqi government for unauthorized press contacts. (Hat tip Flopping Aces)

Now, Boehlert certainly has a point in one respect:

The AP also didn't think much of CENTCOM's suggestion that reporters only quote people found on the government's approved list of sources.

This is self-evident; reporters should never agree to accept only official sources, official stories, or get the approval of officials before publishing. But Boehlert seems oddly unconversant with the shameful (and admitted) history of "reporting" by his beloved mainstream media in Iraq. In 2003, after the Coalition invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Eason Jordan admitted in a New York Times editorial that CNN (and all other journalists) had deliberately reported Baathist propaganda during the Saddam era... because it was more urgent to keep their Baghdad bureaus than to tell the truth about that brutal regime.

Even by Boehlert's own standards, this should be even worse than chastising low-ranking police officers because they anointed themselves media sources, a task normally falling to higher-ranking official spokesmen. So... can we at least agree that Eason Jordan and Capt. Hussein and Lt. Abdel-Razzaq were perhaps not all honorable men?

As Boehlert never tires of reminding us (as if we should scuff our feet in shame), we are not professional journalists. We don't work on newspapers. Heck, we didn't even graduate from the Columbia School of Journalism (though Bill O'Reilly did; what does Eric Boehlert think of him?)

We cannot look into every story coming out of Iraq; we must, of necessity, pick and choose: We can spot check. The method is used all the time in a manufacturing; if the failure rate of sampling is too great, the entire batch is considered a failure.

It may seem like we are picking on a small stone of a big mosaic. But what the heck does Boehlert think makes up the big mosaic in the first place but the same small stones we're spot-checking? If too many stones turn out not to be true, then what can we conclude about the entire mosaic?

The bloodthirsty warbloggers

Eric Boehlert concludes that we have a secret motive for demanding on-the-ground reporting by American reporters, rather than simply taking the word of stringers, who could as easily be terrorist sympathizers as honest native journalists. Boehlert does not consider any of us to be honorable men. He believes that deep down, we're hoping to see journalists slain (yet Boehlert echoes the charge leveled earlier by Eason Jordan, and I thought we already agreed Jordan might not be an honorable man... oh, let it slide):

To watch warbloggers taunt journalists for being cowards is also unsettling. Curt at Flopping Aces wrote: "If the reporters would leave their comfy hotel rooms and actually go out and survey the scenes themselves then I am sure we would get a completely different picture." Honestly, is there any irony sharper than members of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, blogging comfortably from their air-conditioned stateside offices while obsessively googling AP dispatches in search of phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that don't meet the right-wing standard of excellence, lecturing on-the-ground news reporters about the need to witness the Iraq conflict up close?… [Curt, the "fighting keyboardist," spent five years in the United States Marine Corps, followed by six years as a police officer. Just FYI.]

The notion is demented, but given their wild online rants, I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest that warbloggers want journalists to venture into exceedingly dangerous sections of Iraq because warbloggers want journalists to get killed. That's how deep their hatred for the press runs... Also, by publicly demanding the AP "produce" Capt. Hussein -- for him to hold some sort of a press conference and announce his presence at a time when Iraqi police officers are being targeted daily for assassination [Sunni police officers?] -- indicates that warbloggers don't much care whether Hussein lives or dies either, as long as they can peddle their anti-media rants.

Whew! Perhaps one of the multiple layers of mainstream-media editing at Media Matters could speak to Boehlert about the length of his paragraphs.

Putting aside his curt dismissal of Curt as a member of the "101st Fighting Keyboardists" (another unkindness from this honorable man?), Boehlert appears ignorant of such embedded bloggers such as Bill Roggio, Michael Yon, and Michael Fumento, who have each embedded with the military many times, traveling outside the Green Zone and into danger. Not to mention all the mil-bloggers who have actually fought in Iraq and currently fighting. (And also not to mention the upcoming embedding, if that's exactly the word I mean, of Michelle Malkin herself in Iraq.)

Where does Boehlert blog from, one wonders? As an honorable man, I am certain he spends quite a bit of time in the Iraq or Afghanistan war zone. If he has any military background, he certainly doesn't mention it in his presumably self-written bio over at the Huffington Post, where he also blogs (some posts may simply be crossposted with Media Matters, including this one).

The conspiracy of shared vision

There is indeed an elite "conspiracy" of a very particular sort, the kind enunciated in Thomas Sowell's seminal work the Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy... the conspiracy of shared vision.

Those who hold this shared vision (the "anointed") need not meet and decide in advance what they will write, what narrative will permeate their stories; they simply all believe the same things, a shared quasi-religious gestalt that bursts forth like Athena from Zeus's brow, full-formed and insistent. The gestalt colors everything the reporter says or writes, all he believes, every story he pursues.

Yesterday, the gestalt was that Iraq was a "quagmire" that would send "20,000" American soldiers home in "body bags." Today, the gestalt is that we only win in Iraq if it becomes violence free, a paradise on Earth; and since that is impossible, we can only prepare ourselves for the inevitable "emerging defeat." When enough agencies report the same message over and over again, the meme becomes 'the truth" in some grotesque, McLuhanesque sense.

"Warbloggers" are painfully aware of this dynamic. The Goliath media are much stronger than any number of blogging Davids. Their access to the people dwarfs ours. So what could cause Eric Boehlert, probably speaking for far more of the elites than he is willing to claim, to become annoyed enough (or scared enough) to post such a personalized attack against a handful of people?

Perhaps because Boehlert is aware that a meme need not be shouted from the rooftops (via the big-box media) in order to grow, thrive, and ultimately replace the standard media gestalt itself: it only needs to be more powerful than the memes it feeds upon... which, in the case of the vision of the anointed, is not particularly difficult: the standard media gestalt requires you to believe six impossible things before breakfast (such as that only white Europeans can handle democracy, that Shia and Sunni kill each other in Iraq because of Israel, that the more terrorists we kill the more there are, that Iraq was calm and peaceful under Saddam Hussein, and so forth).

Hence this frantic attempt to stamp it out, like a campfire spreading to the surrounding weeds. But I doubt it will work; "warbloggers" are unlikely to be cowed by Eric Boehlert. This is the only true sense in which "information wants to be free": not that books and CDs anthropomorphically "want" to be distributed for free to pimply faced teenagers who expect something for nothing -- but that truth will ultimately prevail; it cannot be suppressed forever.

Thus, this honorable men -- all these honorable men -- trying to hard to save us from ourselves, to use the vision-vaccine to innoculate us against free inquiry, are on a fool's errand; they're tilting at winos. The future looms; they know that every year, more of the population rejects them as the final arbiters of reality and seeks alternatives.

The Boehlerts know, deep down, that their hegemony won't last much longer. They just want a few more quiet years to publish their books (Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, by Eric Boehlert) and write their gestalt-stories... then get out while the getting's good.

Here was a Boehlert! when comes such another?

And that's the last word.

(Dafydd ab Hugh contributed to this post.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 06, 2007, at the time of 02:46 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Media Matters In the Meme Streets of Baghdad - B

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Continued from previous post...

You put your left foot in...

If the mainstream media has no agenda, and their misreporting can solely be blamed upon the fog of war, we should see the mistakes benefiting the both sides equally; half the time, they should wrongly report a great American victory that turns out not to be so great after all. I now pause for readers to wrack their memories to recall the last time AP, Reuters, CNN, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Herald, the Wall Street Journal, or Media Matters did so.

Go ahead; I'll wait.

Curiously enough, every time a major media source blows a story, they do so by publishing something that advances the message of the "emerging defeat" in Iraq, and that only thing we can do is to manage that inevitable defeat. (Similarly, mistakes on restaurant bills always seem to be in the restaurant’s favor.)

We have never read a headline such as “American troops kills 100 terrorists,” only to find out later that we bombed a simple wedding party. It is always the other way around; the wedding-party meme always comes first, followed by a quiet correction in a little box at the bottom of an inside page.

But let us not call it an MSM conspiracy or say that Boehlert is a part of it; for they are all honorable men, and honorable men would not sling such libelous accusations without rock-solid proof.

Let us instead examine some of the stringers upon whose reports the media (especially AP) rely:

Snuff films on Haifa Street: In December 2004, masked gunmen pulled two Iraqi election workers out of their car in broad daylight and assassinated them. An AP photographer-stringer just happened to be standing a few yards away, snapping pictures of the multiple homicide. The terrorists just happened to let him live. They even let him keep his camera and film. This was fortuitous, since the report earned an AP reporter a Pulitzer Prize.

After initial denials, AP first admitted that the photographer had been tipped off; then at last, they revealed the rest of the dirt on the endless supply of stringers ready and willing to accomodate "[i]nsurgents [who] want their stories told as much as other people." As Power Line's John Hinderaker concluded:

That makes the admission pretty well complete, I think. The AP is using photographers who have relationships with the terrorists; this is for the purpose of helping to tell the terrorists' "stories." The photographers don't have to swear allegiance to the terrorists--gosh, that's reassuring--but they have "family and tribal relations" with them. And they aren't embedded--I'm not sure I believe that--but they don't need to be either, since the terrorists tip them off when they are about to commit an act that they want filmed.

Stringing AP along: In April 2006, Bilal Hussein was taken into US custody as a member of a terrorist group. Hussein had been working as an AP photographer-stringer; he had sent AP a series of pictures taken inside the terrorists’ training camp.

He also snapped a picture of terrorists boldly posing by the body of a murdered Italian journalist. But perhaps Hussein was only tipped-off by, not embedded with, the killers.

PhotoShop phantasies: In August 2006, Reuters had to fire their Lebanese photographer-stringer Adnan Hajj, after his photo-shopped pictures were exposed by some sharp-eyed bloggers.

These are not isolated cases; the major news media have published hundreds of such photographs by Iraqi photographer-stringers, and thousands of stories by Iraqi writer-stringers. The standard media narrative of tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, as well as the entire case for "the emerging defeat" in Iraq (as Eric Boehlert gleefully puts it), is based upon the concatenation of these questionable stories... many of which have all the earmarks of enemy propaganda disseminated via the reliably compliant (and incurious) American and international media.

How can we ever know how much of what we read and see about Iraq is real, how much exaggerated, and how much simply defeatist fabrication? Is Eric Boehlert even curious to know the answer himself? Or does he, like Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles' magnum opus, believe the people will think what the media tells us to think?

If that is what he believes, and if he is right, then thank heavens they are all honorable men: just imagine what mischief they could concoct were they not!

Believing is seeing

Meet Salam Daher, AKA Abu Shadi Jradi, AKA Abdel Qader, AKA Green Helmet Guy (how many names do Moslem extremists get to use?)

In July 2006, in Qana Lebanon, in the aftermath of an Israeli attack on a rocket-launching site, the photograph of a Lebanese "civil defense worker," his face anguished as he held a dead child in his arms, was plastered across the front pages of newspapers around the globe. Yet there was something odd about the guy, a discordant note. Many bloggers pointed out that he had been photographed throughout the day for hours, ghoulishly holding up the same dead child in various poses.

Green Helmet Guy told reporters conflicting stories about the number of children found dead. And then, Germany's NDR found footage of this guy directing scenes, using the dead body of a child as a prop, toted to the site from storage somewhere. Not only that... Green Helmet Guy had done the exact, same thing 10 years ago:

This is nothing new. In Gaza, Palestinians have been staging battles and coaching witnesses for years. We even have a name for it: Pallywood. Here is an 18 minute video from YouTube, taken during the second intifada from 2000 to 2002:

For the first ten minutes, you will see Palestinians staging various events:

  • A man shoots into a building as if he were defending himself; but the building is actually deserted;
  • Civilians direct soldiers and crowds of "innocent bystanders" (extras) how to act prior to filming a scene;
  • Footage of a funeral march in Jenin, after the "Jenin massacre," where the pallbearers accidentally drop the corpse from a stretcher -- and the dead fellow obligingly hops back aboard.

But the most telling footage starts about the 11th minute: an interview conducted by a Palestinian “reporter” with a new mother and father and with the doctor who had just delivered their baby at the local hospital. (I wonder if the reporter is a stringer for AP?)

On the way to the hospital, the reporter discusses with his staff what kind of story he is looking for: the terrible conditions that Palestinians must endure because of the wicked Israelis. At the hospital, the reporter tells the doctor that the young couple must say that the road was so dangerous, they couldn't get to hospital in time... and the young husband had to deliver the baby all by himself. In fact the doctor had delivered a healthy baby in the hospital few hours earlier.

Chillingly, all three subjects -- father, mother, and doctor -- agree; they give the interview, describing the terrible ordeal that never occurred.

How many times have we heard that eyewitnesses, bystanders, and doctors had all "verified" some calamitous event caused by the Israelis, the Americans, or our Coalition partners in Iraq? Oh, wait, here's one:

For the record, along with Hussein, the AP based its Burned Alive reporting on an account from Imad al-Hashimi, a Sunni elder who told Al-Arabiya television about the killings. (He later recanted his story after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.) The AP also spoke to three independent eyewitnesses (two shopkeepers and a physician) and confirmed the story with hospital and morgue workers.

This is from the very piece by Eric Boehlert that is the subject of this discussion.

Please also notice that the "Sunni elder" recanted... but that this was "after being visited by a representative of the defense minister." Not that Boehlert is implying any threats, intimidation, or torture... he would never do such a thing without a shred of evidence, for Boehlert is an honorable man.

So are they all. All honorable men.

Continued yet again next post...

(Dafydd ab Hugh contributed to this post)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 06, 2007, at the time of 02:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 05, 2007

Media Matters In the Meme Streets of Baghdad - 1

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

The Iraq war -- indeed, the larger GWOJ (global war against jihadism) -- is as much a propaganda war, a war of ideas and "memes," as it is a shooting war. Paul Josef Goebbels understood the power of propaganda; so too did Tojo, Walter Cronkite, and so does al-Qaeda, of course. Alas, it appears that both the Bush administration and the GOP are completely clueless in this respect.

The Democrats and the elite media, to the extent they are not the same entity, understand perfectly, however.

When CNN broadcast the al-Qaeda propaganda video showing an American soldier being killed by a terrorist sniper, terrorists gloated that our sensationalist media was always willing to help them out by showing their recruiting videos on the nightly news. The media, for reasons of their own which appear more compelling to them than national security, long ago decided to work with America's enemies; the most charitable conclusion is that they're so deathly afraid of American military might becoming American imperialism, that they would rather see an America defeated, humbled, and on its knees than triumphant, dominant, and ascendent.

To think that the internationalists in the elite media are cheerleaders for success in Iraq, let alone the larger GWOJ, is naïve; to imagine that the tilt is so subtle that ordinary readers don't realize it -- is downright insulting.

Yet that is exactly what columnist Eric Boehlert, from Media Matters for America, does in "Michelle Malkin fiddles while Baghdad burns." Boehlert, and many others like him in the drive-by media, criticize sites such as Michelle Malkin, Flopping Aces, and Confederate Yankee (from the best of intentions!) They call us -- he didn't mention Big Lizards, but I feel some solidarity with the ones he did -- they call us "warbloggers," who are “chronically incorrect” and uninterested in the truth... unlike the perennially truth-seeking mainstream media. (Hat tip, who else? Michelle Malkin.)

In fact, while I wouldn't say Boehlert has it exactly backwards -- there are many bloggers (even "warbloggers") who are just as biased (or corrupt) as Mary Mapes and Eason Jordan -- the mere fact that there is so much more big political money in the professional media than in the blogosphere itself argues in favor of more honesty within the latter.

For Boehlert is an honourable man; so are they all, all honourable men

In fact, Boehlert himself gives us a perfect example of the deep, underlying, and contemptuous atitude of the elites in the professional media towards the upstarts "who have virtually no serious journalism experience among them." In his lengthy harangue on his Media Matters blog, he attempts to discredit Michelle Malkin -- the bête noire he seems to fear more than the rest of the blogosphere combined -- with an off-topic and puzzling slap:

It should be noted that Malkin's breathless excitement over the AP story nearly matches the enthusiasm she used to spread online smears about the press in the spring of 2005 during the Terri Schiavo right-to-die controversy. That's when Malkin backed the novel conspiracy theory that press reports about how congressional Republicans had drafted a talking-points memo in order to properly spin the Schiavo story were all wrong. In fact, according to Malkin's fact-free analysis, an unknown Democratic operative had concocted the phony GOP talking-points memo and duped the media in order to make Republicans look bad.

This was a big story, in which the honest and honorable media reported not only that a Republican wrote it -- true, Brian Darling, legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL, 100%) -- but also that the Republicans distributed it to the party faithful on Capitol Hill -- which turned out to be completely false: Martinez gave it to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA, 100%), and it was then leaked to the media. By charging Malkin with having "backed the novel conspiracy theory" that Democrats wrote the memo, he paints her as a delusional loon who can simply be dismissed.

But wait... did she really push that "conspiracy theory?"

As proof she did, Boehlert links to another post on Media Matters -- attributed to "J.W.," though there is nobody listed on the masthead of Media Matters with those initials; not only does J.W. not back up Boehlert's accusation, he says precisely nothing about Malkin's position:

[Josh] Claybourn [of In the Agora] posted a March 26 blog entry claiming that four anonymous GOP Senate staffers had accused a Reid aide of distributing "distributing forged 'talking points' to members of the media and claiming Republican authorship. Though this information has since been excised from the post [J.W. must mean excised from the Claybourn post], conservative syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, who has been actively following this subplot on her blog, stated in an April 7 post that In the Agora originally identified them as staff members of Martinez and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA).

So all that J.W. is saying is that Malkin correctly reported that a Josh Claybourn post identified staffers for Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) and then-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) as the culprits behind the false charge that the Schiavo memo was written by a Democrat. J.W. says nothing remotely like Boehlert's claim that Malkin said "an unknown Democratic operative had concocted the phony GOP talking-points memo." Eric Boehlert simply made that charge up.

But of course, Eric Boehlert is an honorable man.

In fact, it's even worse: Michelle Malkin was skeptical of Claybourn's informants' information from the beginning. On March 26th -- nearly two weeks before the J.W. post above -- Malkin published a post titled Eyewitnesses?, question mark included. In it, she quoted from the Claybourn post, then added this:

I don't buy it. Here's why:

[We skip her five reasons for rejecting the In the Agora accusation.]

Unless someone is prepared to stand up and publicly point the finger at a specific individual and explain the decision to delay disclosing the true source of the memo, I can only conclude that ITA's sources are probably lying.

Note not only Boehlert's peculiar relationship with the truth of the matter -- saying that Malkin had championed the idea that the Shiavo memo was written by Democrats, when in fact she immediately rejected it -- but also the fact that he is so dismissive of those of us who didn't go to J-school, that he thinks we won't even bestir ourselves to follow his link and see what Malkin actually said. He believes he is safe, because "warbloggers" are either too stupid or too lazy to do the least bit of research.

Eric Boehlert believes his own arrogant fantasy of pajama-clad losers warblogging from their mothers' basements. But Boehlert is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men.

The blogosphere -- threat or menace?

Boehlert's main subject, however, is the recently discredited and partially retracted Associated Press story about four mosques being "burned" and six Iraqi Sunnis being doused with kerosine and burnt alive; he latches hold of this story and tries to demonstrate how paranoid are the "warbloggers" he despises.

(Before reading further, please first read Patterico's excellent summary of what we know (as of today) AP got wrong about that story.)

In his post, Boehlert shows utter contempt towards any blogger who dares question elite media reporting (rather than simply receiving it like tablets from Mount Sinai). He mocks the very notion that the MSM could be willing accomplices (or useful idiots), out to make us lose the war in Iraq... just as Walter Cronkite helped us lose Vietnam by falsely (and deliberately) reporting the Tet Offensive -- a Viet Cong attack that failed catastrophically, resulting in the destruction of the Viet Cong as a serious military force -- as a tremendous enemy victory that meant America had already lost the war.

Boehlert equates "warbloggers" like Michelle Malkin and Confederate Yankee with lunatic conspiracy theorists, disdaining as "illogical obsession" our suspicions about the accuracy, and even the veracity, of Iraqi and Afghan stringers and informers. He crows that we only question the MSM because we cannot face the reality that we lost the war (which certainly would be news to the American military personnel fighting in Iraq; and to the Iraqis; and for that matter, to al-Qaeda or Muqtada Sadr or whomever we're supposed to have lost the war to).

Boehlert's central j'accuse is that we "warbloggers" ignore the carnage of sectarian violence, clinging instead to irrelevant minor discrepancies (such as non-existent mosque burnings and burnt Sunnis who cannot be found) like “a ray of hope.”

And he also tries to slip another one across. Unable to seriously damage the credibility of "warbloggers" by actually finding errors or maladroit reasoning in their war-related posts, Boehlert embarks upon a campaign of drive-by discrediting: he finds some post somewhere, typically unrelated or only tangentially related to the war, where the warblogger in his crosshairs wrote something to which Boehlert objects. He then trots this out as more evidence of the "warblogger" being "unhinged," "obsessed," "demented," or harboring "unbridled hatred of Arabs and Muslims" and wanting to see journalists "get killed":

Warning: Confederate Yankee is the same warblogger who recently posted a Reuters photo of an elderly Iraqi woman wrapped in a headscarf and crying beside a coffin. Confederate Yankee sensed foul play and claimed the picture had been mischievously doctored by the wire service because the Iraqi woman's face was actually George Bush's mug superimposed onto the picture. I kid you not.

Actually, "kid you" he does... because following the link to Confederate Yankee makes it perfectly clear that Bob Owens was simply joking, for heaven's sake. (Strangely, Boehlert never links directly to a blog; instead, he always links to a Media Matters redirect to the link target. I don't know why he does this; perhaps it's a pompous Media Matters house rule. But it's annoying, since I actually must click through to every source to get the URL, rather than right-clicking and selecting "Copy link location".)

Here is what Confederate Yankee writes:

Apparently, even nominal quantities of over-the-counter cold medications can cause you to see the most interesting things.

I know this, because this Reuters picture has all the earmarks of a crudely-edited PhotoShop, from the rather odd smudges and apparent artifacts around the heads of the two women on the left when the photo is enlarged, to the rather uncanny resemblance that one person in the picture has to someone I feel I should know.

After Adnan Hajj, Reuters wouldn't fall for this sort of stuff again, would they?

It’s a good thing I can chalk this up to cough syrup. If not, I might have to start questioning the media’s accuracy.

If Boehlert cannot figure out that this is a joke, then he shares his sense of humor with John Kerry. The alternative is that Boehlert knew it was a joke, but he decided to pretend it was serious, in order to discredit Owens. But I cannot imagine he would do such a thing, for Boehlert is an honorable man.

Warning: Having now seen two examples of Eric Boehlert confabulating false charges against the "warbloggers," who seem to haunt his dreams at night, I will follow the links on each and every such accusation that he makes from now on. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me 217 times in the same post, and I'll resign from the blogosphere in disgrace.

Baghdad mosques are burning down, burning down, burning down

Here is Boehlert in full cry, expounding his thesis like Marc Antony bestriding Caesar's dagger-riven body (so Boehlert's head does not explode, I confess that all emphasis is added for clarity):

By inflating the disputed incident into a monumentally important press story, warbloggers, who have excitedly pounded the story for weeks, convinced themselves that blame for the United States' emerging defeat in Iraq lay squarely at the feet of the press. Specifically, warbloggers claim that American journalists, too cowardly to go get the news themselves, are relying on local Iraqi news stringers who have obvious sympathies for terrorists and who purposefully push propaganda into the news stream -- the way Hussein did with the Burned Alive story -- to create the illusion of turmoil. Warbloggers, who have virtually no serious journalism experience among them, announced that what's coming out of Iraq today is not news at all, but simply terrorist press releases -- "a pack of lies" -- regurgitated by reporters (or "traitors") who want to see the insurgents succeed....

But warbloggers aren't interested in an honest, factual debate about a single instance of journalistic accountability. And they're not really interested in the specifics of the Burned Alive story. They're interested in wide-ranging conspiracy theories and silencing skeptical voices.

Shakespeare weeps with envy.

But Boehlert is no fool; he knows that the MSM, like everyone else (including Boehlert himself), has an agenda. Boehlert is unhinged because the media elite, which he is part of, no longer dominates the news cycle, as they used to do before first talk radio, then the blogosphere threatened their monopoly. "Warbloggers" (many of whom are former soldiers) ask too many inconvenient questions; and it is Boehlert, not Malkin or Owens or the fellows at Power Line, who is rather desperate to "silence skeptical voices."

But Boehlert is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men.

Continued next post...

(Dafydd ab Hugh contributed to this post)

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 05, 2007, at the time of 09:07 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 03, 2007

All Right, He Died Like a Man

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In the end, Saddam Hussein died like a man.

There, I said it. It's an interesting phenomenon: that a despicable scum may nevertheless go to his death with courage and grace. I first encountered the idea in William Shakespeare's MacBeth: at the end, with Birnam wood come to Dunsinane, confronted with the fact that MacDuff was "not of woman born," and now in full knowledge that he is doomed to die in this very duel... nevertheless, MacBeth neither cries nor whimpers nor rails at his fate, but calls out:

I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet,
And to be baited with the rabble's curse.
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'

MacBeth, Act V, Scene VIII

I tripped across it again in Mark Twain's wonderful book Roughing It, mostly reporting his trip out west with his brother Orion Clemens, who had just been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada.

In the section about the "road agent," John Slade, Twain (this is nonfiction) describes how the man was originally hired by the Overland Stage Company to run all the outlaws out of the territory near the stage line. Slade succeeded by astounding acts of bravery and brutality; eventually, outlaws avoided the Overland stage like taxes. But Slade grew bored and began terrorizing ordinary people in drunken shooting sprees through the town. He would rage and pick fights, once even burning a buliding. Later, when he sobered up, he was contrite and paid the damages... but it was just too much.

Eventually, he became such a bully and a menace that a hundred miners from the silver fields felt compelled to lynch him. But -- and here's the part this leads into -- when Slade's time came, he stood up, looked them in the eye, and put his own head into the noose. Slade died like a man, and folks remembered that.

~

I recently watched the cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution. Now, I'm extremely squeamish about watching innocent people being murdered; I simply won't do it. I've never seen an al-Qaeda beheading video, and I never shall. But I have no problem at all watching guilty people being executed, whether by hanging, gas, lethal injection, or even Old Sparky. I've seen videos, and I would jump at the chance to witness an actual execution live.

So I watched with interest... and what I saw was a horrific mass murderer -- his bodycount a minimum of 300,000, perhaps as many as 5,000,000, depending on who you believe -- who nevertheless walked to his doom as a man, not a whipped dog. He must finally have understood that this was it: no last-minute reprieve, the Americans wouldn't save him, and his French, Russian, and Chinese pals cut him from their speed-dials. But as some grotesque Lefty I know remarked (broken clocks), the only person at that hanging to show any dignity or understanding of the solemnity of the proceedings was... Saddam Hussein.

For me, the capper was when Hussein heard that Sadrite idiot shouting "Muqtada! Muqtada!" The dictator sneered at the shouter and sarcastically asked, "Muqtada?" Then he says something that can be translated as "do you consider this bravery?" or "do you consider this acting like a man?"

He refused a hood or blindfold; he didn't struggle futilely or blubber like a baby. He didn't beg. He stepped forward calmly into oblivion.

I read an account by one of the execution witnesses who said he "saw fear" in Hussein's eyes; but I think that man was just whistling past the gravy train: I saw a man, standing amid a shriek of capering baboons.

I do not believe Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, would have died as well or as bravely in similar circumstances.

~

As I watched, I remembered I had seen this scene before! But where? Yesterday it came back... the second of Richard Lester's productions of the Alexandre Dumas classic the Three Musketeers (the movie is called the Four Musketeers) begins with the attempted execution of Cardinal Richelieu's spy, Rochefort -- played by the inestimable Christopher Lee.

He is in the course of being shot by a firing squad in the Huguenot city of La Rochelle, where he has been caught spying. They're taking forever at their task, having to prime their muskets, load their muskets, and so forth. A man comes up with a blindfold for Rochefort, but he is stymied by the fact that the spy once lost an eye and wears a patch. At length, Rochefort suggests, "I'll close one eye."

At last, the men line up, aim, and fire... and every shot misses. At this point, an exasperated Rochefort rolls his eye and says, "I could die of old age..."

I wonder if Hussein had seen the movie?

~

As I said, it's an interesting phenomenon: Saddam Hussein was one of the worst human beings ever to have lived, and if there is a God, as I hope there is, Hussein is right now burning in hellfire hotter than a thousand suns, breathing Cyclosarin gas and having his feet perpetually mutilated in a plastic shredder. But he was also a man; a despicable a man, but man nonetheless.

In George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, when Joan of Arc is put to the flame, one of the English soldiers steps forward and gives her a pair of sticks, tied into a cross, for her to hold. It was his one act of kindness in a life of brutish, thuggish, violence... and for that mercy, one day in every year, God allows him out of Hell.

Hussein was much worse a human being than that poor, vulgar soldier who was only following orders. But for the way he died, I believe Saddam Hussein will also get that one night of paradise -- perhaps only once each century.

I'm terribly glad he's dead, and I applaud the Iraqis for having the guts and good sense to string him up. Let's get on with the show trials for the rest of his atrocities. (I very much support show trials in cases like this; I mean, it's not as if Hussein could claim he had an alibi!)

Yet I cannot help but admire the way he went; and I hope, if my time ever comes, I can match the grace and dignity of that evil dictator.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 03, 2007, at the time of 02:44 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 01, 2007

Saddam's Execution "Upsets" Saddamites

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

In a stunning display of perspicacity and sophisticated nuancing, if I'm allowed to coin that neologism, the drive-by media has discovered that long-time supporters of Saddam Hussein in Iraq are irked that he was hanged.

No, really:

Rage over the hanging of Saddam Hussein spilled into the streets in many parts of the Sunni Muslim heartland Monday, especially in Samarra where a mob of angry protesters broke the locks off the badly damaged Shiite Golden Dome mosque and marched through carrying a mock coffin and photo of the executed former leader.

Sunni extremists had blown apart the glistening dome on the Shiite holy place 10 months earlier, setting in motion the sectarian slaughter that now grips the troubled land.

(I love that parenthetical second paragraph... just in case the Shia had forgotten their rage, in the joy of seeing Saddam dancing on air, AP helpfully reminds them.)

So, what are we talking about, how large a "mob of angry protesters?" Was it ten thousand rallying in Samarra? A hundred thousand rocking Baghdad? Oh, here it is:

In northern Baghdad, hundreds of Sunnis conducted a demonstration to mourn Saddam in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood.

"The Baath party and Baathists still exist in Iraq, and nobody can marginalize it," said Samir al-Obaidi, 48, who attended a Saddam memorial in the Azamiyah neighborhood. [Is he perhaps a Baathist?]

In Dor, 77 miles north of Baghdad, hundreds more took to the streets to inaugurate a giant mosaic of Saddam. Children carried toy guns and men fired into the air. ["A giant mosaic of Saddam."]

Mourners at a mosque in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit slaughtered sheep as a sacrifice for their former leader. The mosque's walls were lined with condolence cards from tribes in southern Iraq and Jordan who were unable to travel to the memorial.

Great Scott, if we add hundreds to hundreds, we get hundreds -- possibly a thousand. Out of a population of 8.5 million Sunnis. Evidently, they're not quite as upset with Saddam's execution as feminists in America are that abortion rights have been slightly trimmed, or as illegal immigrants are here that they might be made, ah, "illegal." Amazingly, however, Saddam's execution gets the old razzberry from his most ardent Baathist supporters.

(In fact, the "good news" is that, so far at least, it's not hundreds or thousands, or even just thousands.)

The rest of the story consists of the writer salivating over the final deaths that occurred in Iraq on the last day of 2006: two U.S. soldiers, six Sunni insurgents, and the alleged finding of "the bodies of 40 handcuffed, blindfolded and bullet-riddled bodies" -- don't you love the multiple layers of editing in the elite media?

I write "alleged" because of the discovery that AP's long-time police source for such stories, "police captain Jamil Hussein," the Lieutenant Kije of Baghdad, has been shown not to exist... or at least AP cannot produce him, he doesn't appear on the payroll of the Interior Ministry (as all other National Police do), and nobody else can find hide nor hair of him. He appears instead to be an anonymous Sunni propagandist stringer working for AP. Thus, we can no longer trust any claim that AP makes about "police" reporting the finding of dead bodies.

In fact, here is how they phrased it:

Police reported finding the bodies of 40 handcuffed, blindfolded and bullet-riddled bodies in Baghdad on the first day of the New Year. A police official, who refused to be named out of security fears, said "15 of these bodies [were] found in one place," the largely industrial Sheik Omar district in northern Baghdad.

Perhaps the Associated Press has retired the "Jamil Hussein" house name but hasn't yet thought up a replacement.

The only grafs that could possibly be considered "news" in this entire story are that we raided the offices of a Sunni member of parliament who is believed to be an insurgent running an al-Qaeda safe house (or not so safe, as it turns out)... a supposition made more plausible by the fact that when we went to his office -- the suspected site -- we were met with heavy military resistance:

Also, U.S. forces killed six people in a raid on the Baghdad offices of a top Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, on suspicion it was being used as an al-Qaida safe house, the military and Iraqi police said.

The U.S. military said [they] took on heavy fire from automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades as they sought to enter the building. Al-Mutlaq is a senior member of the National Dialogue Front, which holds 11 of the 275 seats in Iraq's parliament....

Ground troops were backed by helicopters that "engaged the enemy with precision point target machine gun fire," the military said. It was unclear whether the deaths resulted from the ground assault or fire from U.S. helicopters.

Shouldn't the headline have read "U.S. Forces Storm al-Qaeda Safe House," and the lede have noted that the house was the Baghdad office of Member of Parliament Saleh al-Mutlaq? Then they could have dropped all the useless fluff about former Baathists being upset that Iraq hanged Saddam and simply included eight column inches of white space.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 01, 2007, at the time of 03:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 29, 2006

Clinton Judge Has Opportunity to Shine! - UPDATED

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATE: see below.

In a desperate, 11th-hour publicity stunt, Saddam's lawyers have filed for a stay of execution of his, ah, execution -- and they've filed in a United States district court:

Hussein's lawyers filed documents Friday afternoon asking for a stay of execution. The 21-page request was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

Attorneys argued that because Hussein also faces a civil lawsuit in Washington, he has rights as a civil defendant that would be violated if he is executed. He has not received notice of those rights and the consequences that the lawsuit would have on his estate, his attorneys said.

"To protect those rights, defendant Saddam Hussein requests an order of this court providing a stay of his execution until further notice of this court," attorney Nicholas Gilman wrote.

Another condemned Iraqi convict, former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court Awad Hamed al-Bandar, filed a similar motion yesterday and was denied; that denial is under appeal, but it's hard to believe the D.C. Circus would rule that foreigners being tried by foreign courts for foreign crimes committed in foreign countries against foreign victims were nevertheless protected by the United States Constitution: we're not Belgium.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly was appointed to the bench by President William Jefferson Clinton in 1997... so this is her opportunity to strike a blow against the by-now universal belief that the Clinton judges are all a bunch of wild-eyed maniacs, yahoos, termagants, and misanthropes who will stoop to committing any monkeyshines that may be necessary to come to the politically correct decision. She should look (former U.S. Attorney General under LBJ and current -- or recent -- Saddam defense lawyer) Ramsey Clark in the eye, adjust her glasses, and ask, "are you out of your frigging mind?"

Then she can tell him that if he files any more frivolities, he can jolly well appear before her at six o'clock the next morning and explain why he should not be tossed in her courtroom clink for making overtly risible motions in a federal court, which simply must be valid cause for a contempt citation, if this is a sane world.

Clearly, no American civil court has jurisdiction to prevent Iraq from executing its own criminals on its own soil, for heaven's sake... whether he is or is not a defendant in a civil trial here. But if we want to make the point clear, we should hand over custody of Saddam Hussien immediately to the Iraqis... so that even if Judge Kollar-Kotelly reverts to type, we can simply shrug and say "we currently have no prisoner by that name."

Let them file for a stay with the Iraqis, if they want; they're the ones executing the bugger, not us. Or perhaps they can file with the Warty Bliggens Court of Cosmic Justice (convened in a frog-pond somewhere in Belgium, no doubt). But not here.

Come come, judge -- redeem your peer-group and tell Mr. Clark to go boil an owl. Let Saddam go to his Maker, and be done with him.

UPDATE December 29th, 2006, 7:18: Judge Kollar-Kotelly shone; she rejected the Hail Mary, if that's the appropriate phrase.

Within a matter of hours -- or minutes -- Saddam's feet will have nothing beneath them but air.

UPDATE December 29th, 2006, 7:23:

Consummatum est

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 29, 2006, at the time of 02:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 27, 2006

Careful What You Threaten; You Might Have to Deliver

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Muqtada Sadr's faction in Iraq is up in arms -- not quite literally yet -- because we killed a top Sadr aide who was also an "improvised explosive device facilitator" and "implicated in a bomb attack on a police chief in October."

The Mahdi Miltia, while insisting that Saheb al-Amiri was not a member, nevertheless threatened retaliation for his death (go figure). Reuters warns the United States that we'd better watch out and, presumably, stop killing Mahdi Militia bomb-makers (yes, I confess I believe American military spokespeople in preference to Sadr's propagandists):

Najaf, home to Iraq's top Shi'ite clerics, was the site of a 2004 rebellion against U.S. forces by militias loyal to Sadr, who also has power bases in Baghdad.

Another uprising against U.S. forces by Sadr Mehdi Army militias would be a major headache for the U.S. military, which has 135,000 troops in a country gripped by Shi'ite-Sunni strife.

But is that really true? Would it really be a "headache" for us? Or would it, contrariwise, be a great gift to us -- allowing us to tear into the Mahdi Militia without having to get a permission slip from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki?

If Sadr were to order his Mighty Morphin Mahdi Militia to assail American forces, to take a third bite at the apple by investing Najaf, I think it would be a dream come true: there is no way that Maliki -- already compromised by his close connection with Sadr -- could order us to ignore the Mahdi Militia doing something as over-the-top as capturing a city and declaring themselves a power separate from the Iraqi government... certainly not when the largest Shiite political party, the SCIRI, is already scheming to oust Maliki for being too beholden to Sadr (thus to Iran).

The Sadr bloc, which comprises 30 members of parliament and six cabinet ministers, have been boycotting Maliki's government since he met President Bush last month.

The best that Maliki could do would be to stay silent, say nothing while we turned upon Sadr and his merry men and ground the militia into a shadow of itself. This would yield three great outcomes:

  • It would severely damage the most violent and destructive Shiite militia in Iraq;
  • It would cripple Nouri al-Maliki by hurting his patron, making it much easier to oust him (or alternatively, to induce him to switch parties from Islamic Dawa to SCIRI and repudiate Sadr);
  • Finally, by knocking Sadr out of the power block, it would even more seriously cripple Iran.

Unfortunately for us, all of the players can make the same calculation; thus, it's extraordinarily unlikely that the Mahdi Militia will actually attack American forces, or Iraqi forces, or anything else that could serve as casus belli to draw the United States into a pitched battle that we couldn't possibly lose.

Now that I think about it, there are a lot more cards on the table today than there were in November. We have:

  • A restive Mahdi Militia that might make a critical mistake and open themselves up to a terrible defeat;
  • A fairly open attempt to remove Maliki and substitute someone from SCIRI, who will be very happy to go after Sadr hammer and nail (the attempt is not viewed happily by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, but I doubt he can stop the attempt);
  • Proof positive that Iran is directly killing Americans and Iraqis in Iraq --
  • -- and whose economy is tanking and oil revenues running dry
  • -- whose students are in open revolt and whose citizens are voting against President Ahmadinejad --
  • -- and which just spat in the face of the UN Security Council so blatantly that even the French were stunned.

We already had the best starting hand (the U.S. military), and now we've picked up a lot of good cards. We should be feeling pretty good about our chances right about now.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 27, 2006, at the time of 11:58 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 20, 2006

Solvalogging: Jamil Hussein... Baghdad's Own Lieutenant Kije

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

So John over at Power Line sez,

I assume that Associated Press reporters don't just make stuff up, and, when in doubt, attribute it to a fictitious character named Jamil Hussein.

Bah, humbug, sez I. I think that is exactly what they have done in this case!

In a 1927 short story by Yury Tynyanov, a Russian general is reading a report to Czar Paul I; the czar mishears a word and thinks the general is talking about a "Lieutenant Kijé," who sounds like a brave and brilliant fellow. Czar Paul demands to hear more about him.

As it is death to contradict the czar, the general makes up several wonderful missions and adventures of the entirely fictitious Lieutenant Kijé. Soon other commanders join in the fun; eventually, there is an entire cottage industry of Kijé sightings, Kijé adventures, and Kijé romances. Lt. Kijé eventually gets married -- and while the czar never seems to run into the fellow himself, the soldiers sure do enjoy all the vodka the czar supplies!

The story was turned into a movie in 1934 by Aleksandr Fajntsimmer, with music by Prokofiev (the music is much more famous than either the movie or the story).

I see an exact parallel to AP. Whenever a journalist is concocting a story, especially one designed to fit snug and tight into The Story (the predetermined vision that fills the reporter even before heading out to Iraq or Afghanistan or Upper Iguana), he typically ends up with a handful of important, tendentious points he desires to make... but which no actual named source is quite willing to supply. At that point, our intrepid reporter has only three options:

  • He can just shrug and let them go; but this runs afoul of the primary duty of the profession of journalism: to save the world from the likes of George W. Bush and other sordid Republicans;
  • He can simply make the points himself in his own voice; but this gets him in trouble with the managing editor, unless he has a big enough name that he's been dubbed a "news rainmaker," allowed to blatantly interject his own idiot opinions into alleged news stories (e.g., Bob Woodward's "interview" of Bill Casey);
  • If he's not the type only interested in reporting facts, and he's not a rainmaker, then there is but one surefire technique available to him, which is taught in the upper-division classes at J-school: he can simply invent a source and attribute those essential points of The Story to him.

But it's hard work to fabricate a source, complete with a believable name, a sufficiently impressive but safely vague enough background, and a job profile that would put him in the thick of whatever things the reporter is assigned to cover.

I'm sure at some point it has occurred to every reporter that it would be quite useful to have a small handbook of pre-fab fictional sources. That way, rather than straining to create one himself -- and perhaps coming up with "Sheikh Omar Kayyam al-Arglebargle, a Baghdad greengrocer and turbin adjuster," who travels all over the country witnessing war crimes the way Jessica Fletcher witnesses murders at every dinner party she attends -- the cub reporter can just thumb through the Handbook of Purely Believable Sources (Pure-BS) and find one to take the blame.

The Pure-BS would presumably group them by province; it wouldn't do to cite Police Captain Jamil "Kijé" Hussein in a story about American atrocities in Anbar, and have somebody else cite him the same day about Sunni crimes against humanity in Sadr City! But it probably wouldn't divide the provinces themselves up much, because that would require the reporter to actually know where he was, or to risk embarassment by having to ask his driver. Thus, the various reporters (stringers and actual AP employees) just use Jamil Hussein solely on the basis of how recently he's been cited and whether there is another fictitious source waiting his own turn.

Presumably, Reuters, CNN, and the Times each has its own handbook; we could test the theory for each media outlet by looking for those sources who get cited most often without any visible signs of existing. (Look for them not appearing on any payroll, never being seen by anybody but the reporter, or being described in the article as a six-foot tall rabbit named Mohammed al-Pooka). But perhaps they can "loan out" a particularly juicy Kijé to a rival for a fee.

Just like the "real" Lt. Kijé, now that the heat's on AP, look for Police Captain Jamil Hussein to suddenly turn up dead... murdered by a joint American/Shiite death squad who found out where he lives because Michelle Malkin and other right-wing bloggers outed him -- those dirty spoilsports!

I'm appalled by the lack of creativity and imagination in the blogosphere. Must it always be left to Big Lizards to suggest the obvious explanation for everything?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 20, 2006, at the time of 06:10 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

December 13, 2006

Jefferson Would Be Ticked...

Blogomania , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

...And he's a bad-ass you don't want to mess with: he was 6'3" at a time when the average height of a man was closer to 5'3"; that would be rather like being 6'10" today -- and he was no wimp, either.

There is a phrase that grates on my eye every time I read it... and that seems to be quite a lot anymore.

The most recent use was by Dean Barnett, an intelligent guy, even by my exalted standards, whose blogposts on Hugh Hewitt's blog I normally read with pleasure. But in the midst of one of Dean's infamous Q&A posts, he wrote the following (the boldface and numbering are Dean's):

11) So, the big question: Can the Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis live peacefully alongside each other?

It depends on how fundamentalist and radicalized each sect in Iraq is. We know each sect has its elements that are bent on violence. The question is whether these elements are fringe groups or the mainstream. If they’re fringe groups, they can be destroyed and peace could break out. If they’re the mainstream, there’s no hope.

12) So what if they’re the mainstream? Then what?

Then the country has to be broken up, with the Sunnis getting a piece and the Shiites getting a piece and the Kurds holding onto their piece.

13) That’s disappointing. It doesn’t quite match the original vision of an Islamic Jeffersonian democracy that swirled about our heads three years ago, does it?

Radical Shiites and radical Sunnis have as much interest in living in a Jeffersonian Democracy as the typical American has living under Sharia. The quicker we come to peace with that fact, the better.

The question is, can any of you figure out what particular phrase leapt out at me as something that makes me want to go to Dean's house and run my fingernails across his chalkboard, so he understands how I feel?

And guess what? I'm going to be a total jagoff -- and not tell you the answer until you click the "Slither On" button. Hah. (But please take some time first, and get your guess firmly in mind.)

I suspect all but three of our regular commenters (you know who you are!) will have correctly picked out the phrase "Jeffersonian Democracy" as the offender. It's just about the biggest straw-man argument lobbed against Bush's Iraq policy, used only by right-wingers and libertarians who want to heap scorn upon the very idea that non-Europeans could possibly have a functioning democracy... and I sincerely believe it to be racist in its very essence.

First, nobody has ever used that phrase except those who oppose the very idea of trying to plant a democracy in the Middle East; I support the policy of Iraqi democracy... but try searching on "Jeffersonian" on Big Lizards and see how many times the phrase "Jeffersonian democracy" is used: until this post, the score was 0.

Second, nobody in the Bush administration has ever said he expected to see a Jeffersonian (that is, "perfect") democracy in Iraq. All any supporter of the policy has ever said is that a democracy could be set up there -- and it's obvious from context that the example they had in mind was the democracy (and it is one) in Turkey, another Islamic country.

Turkey is not a nice place (by European standards); it's violent; there are clashes between ethnic groups that result in dead pickles. There is terrorism. There are Islamists, and in fact they won the last elections.

But it is, by Allah, a functioning, secure, and honest democracy. For eight decades, they've had civil rights; they've had real elections; and they've generally abided by the results, even when the ruling party is ousted... even in spite of at least four coups d'état: in each case, after a few years, the ruling military relinquished control to civilian authorities again (most recently following the Islamist victory in 1996).

In Turkey, the army frequently acts as a "moderator," preventing any swings too far to left or right: when they intervene, it's generally to oust an extremist government in favor of moderation. I fully expect the American-trained New Iraqi Army to serve the same function, preventing either a Muqtada Sadr or a Musab Zarqawi coming to power.

Despite such military intervention, to quote that bastion of 100% perfect -- dare I say Jeffersonian? -- information, Wikipedia:

Turkey is a democratic, secular, constitutional republic whose political system was established in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk following the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It is a founding member of the United Nations, the OIC, the OECD and the OSCE, a member state of the Council of Europe since 1949 and of the NATO since 1952, and is currently in accession negotiations with the European Union, being an associate member since 1964. [I excised all the footnotes: they looked silly, and I wasn't about to insert seven links into one paragraph.]

I agree that Iraq started off on the wrong foot by adopting a European-style parliamentary system, rather than becoming a constitutional republic like the United States; but with as many parties as they have (dozens), it was probably the only system that would get a majority of Iraqis to support it. Nevertheless, three elections later, it's frankly ridiculous to argue that democracy isn't "working" in Iraq.

It's violent and bloody; but so was Greece during their civil war from 1946 to 1949, during which they finally crushed the Communist insurgency. The Britannica says that more than 50,000 combatants were killed during those three years, plus many tens of thousands of non-combatants who got in the way -- and that may not even count those who died in the first phase, 1942-1944, during which the right-wing socialists (quasi-Fascists) fought the left-wing socialists (Communists) to see who would lead the resistance to Nazi occupation of Greece. (Hugh Hewitt was just talking about it on his show today, which sparked my curiosity, causing me to look it up.)

That is, more Greeks were butchered during that war than all but the most hysterical estimates of Iraqis killed since the liberation. Yet nobody today says that Greeks are incapable of governing as a democracy.

And certainly, many times more Americans died during our Civil War -- more than 800,000 -- than in Iraq; more even as a percent of our population then. Yet nobody would dare claim we were not a democracy in 1864, even in spite of the suspension of habeus corpus: for Abraham Lincoln had to stand for re-election right in the middle of the campaign... and he had to run against his former top general, George McClellan, whom he had dismissed for inaction!

Finally, the Iraqi democracy has shown a remarkable resilience: despite horrific attacks, deformations, and a campaign of mindless murder that beggars the imagination, not one single party has broken away from parliament and declared the democracy experiment dead. They're still plugging away. Even the attempt to oust Nouri al-Maliki is being conducted according to the Iraqi constitution: the SCIRI, the Kurds, the Sunni, and the seculars are trying to vote down Maliki's government with a "no confidence" referendum.

Thus, Dean Barnett's sarcasm notwithstanding, the Iraq democracy is faring far better than the pessimists (like Barnett) could have imagined. Iraq is not even in a civil war; yet Barnett has the bizarre idea that a functioning democracy somehow doesn't count if there are a lot of deaths... but only when we're talking about non-Europeans. When countries whose citizens are of European extraction experience years of violent bloodshed, we still allow them to be called democracies -- whether it's Greece, the United States, or Northern Ireland.

I suspect that Dean is not even aware of his double standard; he's a nice guy, with his head well-screwed-on anent other topics. But he just reacts viscerally (via the reptilian part of his brain) to the very idea of democracy in an Arab country.

I can't really fault Dean; my friend and worth co-conspirator Brad Linaweaver is exactly the same way: he understands and agrees that the "Realist" school of propping up a "friendly" dictator doesn't work and probably never did work well... but still he cannot wrap his brain around the idea that non-Europeans are advanced enough to create a functioning, stable democracy. (For some reason, Japanese and Koreans count as Europeans in this game.)

In Brad's case, he's more straightforward. Alas, Dean Barnett reacts by setting the bar impossible high: for God's sake, not even the United States is a "Jeffersonian democracy!"

So anyway, the next time you see that phrase... just bear in mind that it's a shibboleth of conservatives that serves no purpose but to mock the idea that Arabs can form a democracy -- and it's illogical, counter-empirical, and darned offensive.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 13, 2006, at the time of 04:02 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 11, 2006

President Bush's Way Forward

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I heard a strange rumor a couple of days ago, but I couldn't find any substantiation, so I didn't blog on it. But of a sudden, it has burst forth in the form of an article on Yahoo by a couple of AP stringers, Hamza Hendawi and Qassim Abdul-Zahra. (I Googled them, but they appear to be run-of-the-mill reporters; I didn't see anything weird or suspicious about either reporter.)

It appears that there is now a serious push, backed (and possibly fomented) by the Bush Administration, to oust the incompetent Nouri al-Maliki, number-two in the (Shiite) Islamic Dawa Party, from his position as Iraqi prime minister. The ouster would be entirely legal, in the form of a vote of no confidence, which requires only a simple majority of the members of parliament.

I suspect replacing Maliki is one of the "new directions in Iraq" Bush has had in mind for some time, hence his own version of "the way forward," to counter the "diplomatic offensive" and draw-down recommended by the Iraq Study Group (the Baker-Hamilton commission).

(Captain Ed blogged about this earlier, but I didn't see his post until after I wrote this. Still, we tackle different aspects of the same story; both are worth reading!)

The talks are aimed at forming a new parliamentary bloc that would seek to replace the current government and that would likely exclude supporters of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a vehement opponent of the U.S. military presence.

The new alliance would be led by senior Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim [of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI] , who met with President Bush last week. Al-Hakim, however, was not expected to be the next prime minister because he prefers the role of powerbroker, staying above the grinding day-to-day running of the country.

A key figure in the proposed alliance, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab [of the Iraqi Islamic Party], left for Washington on Sunday for a meeting with Bush at least three weeks ahead of schedule.

For those keeping score, that's two of the top politicians in the bloc both meeting with President Bush within a week of each other: there is no question but that the Bush administration is at least closely involved with the attempt to oust Maliki.

Maliki has long been unable -- or unwilling -- to do anything to rein in the murderous Mahdi Militia; which is hardly surprising, since that militant death squad is led by Maliki's own master (and Iranian puppet), Muqtada Sadr. Sadr has almost single-handedly kept Maliki in power, having planted him on the petal throne last May. And so long as the Mahdi continues to murder Iraqis by the thousands, its rivals among the Sunni tribes (including both al-Qaeda and renegade former Baathists) and even among other Shiite groups (include the Badr Brigades, now called the Badr Organization, of SCIRI) will refuse to stand down.

Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Militia is believed to be responsible for the majority of the internecine butchery in Iraq; if they were to lose power, perhaps along with Maliki's Dawa Party, it would be a strong blow to Iran, Sadr's patron: while SCIRI too has some ties to Iran, they are nowhere near as deep as Dawa's... whose leader, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is the former and equally incompetent prime minister (Maliki is merely the deputy leader, even though he is the current PM).

Both Dawa and SCIRI were based in Teheran during the Iran-Iraq war, and both received support from Iran; but SCIRI has no equivalent to the Iranian agent Muqtada Sadr... who, while not being a member of any established party, has forged a very close working relationship with Maliki, serving as Iran's conduit into the heart of the Iraqi government.

This is certainly not a done deal yet; there is a major hurdle to overcome:

The groups engaged in talks have yet to agree on a leader, said lawmaker Hameed Maalah, a senior official of al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI.

One likely candidate for prime minister, however, was said to be Iraq's other vice president, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite who was al-Hakim's choice for the prime minister's job before al-Maliki emerged as a compromise candidate and won.

Sadr, Maliki, and everyone who still profits from the chaos of Iraq will of course fight viciously to retain the status quo, especially as they are hopeful that, with the Democrats controlling Congress, America's defeat and withdrawal is just around the corner. (I don't believe it is; but what matters is what Sadr believes, not I.) Still, the bloc of Sunnis, Kurds, and Shia hoping to replace Maliki claims that it has the 138 votes out of 275 that it needs to prevail:

Al-Maliki's government, under the Iraqi constitution, could be ousted if a simple majority of parliament's 275 members opposed it in a vote of confidence. Parties in the talks expressed confidence they had enough votes.

"The question of confidence in this government must be reconsidered," Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni Arab, told legislators Sunday. "Why should we continue to support it? For its failure?"

If Maliki were to be removed in favor of a new prime minister from SCIRI, Sadr would lose a large portion of his power. If the new government moved decisively against the militias (and disbanded the Badr Organization), as is expected -- Maliki's failure to do so is the driving force behind the attempt to remove him -- it would be a stunning breakthrough in "winning the peace" in Iraq.

Bush could absolutely point to this as tremendous progress in Iraq, and the body count would plummet. If they could sustain this progress for a year or so, we could begin cautiously withdrawing American troops from that country, while still maintaining enough force to stop any attempt by Sadr (or Iran directly) to seize control again.

(Not surprisingly, James Baker's ISG did not so much as suggest "regime change" in Iraq as part of the plan to win, even perfectly legal regime change. Baker's "Realism" philosophy always prefers negotiating with the devil it knows to dealing with the unknown.)

Let's hope that they are indeed powerful enough, perhaps with Bush's help, to force a vote of no confidence in Nouri Kamel al-Maliki, causing his government to fall and a new one, based upon this bloc, to be formed. This probably represents our best chance for palpable movement towards victory in Iraq.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 11, 2006, at the time of 03:48 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

December 07, 2006

Does Robert Kaplan Read Big Lizards?

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Syrian Slitherings
Hatched by Dafydd

Robert Kaplan, author of the seminal book Imperial Grunts, completely agrees with the Big Lizards take on the ISG report.

He agrees on both the good, such as the fact that many of the 79 recommendations are Bush policies that the Democrats have been fighting for years; and the bad, such as James Baker's peculiar belief that we can talk the Iranians into helping stabilize Iraq as a democracy because, after all, "the Humungus is a reasonable man."

In fact, Kaplan agrees so much about the report -- even using nearly identical phrases to describe it -- that were it not for my firm conviction that we're a flea on the hair on the wart on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea compared to someone like Robert Kaplan, I would wonder whether he had actually read our two posts!

But we are, so he didn't. Ne'ertheless, he still agrees; two thoughts with but a single mind between them, or however that expression goes. And if you don't believe me, just read the transcript of Kaplan's interview on Hugh Hewitt, whenever Duane puts it up on Hugh's transcript archive page.

That that, Hugh.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 07, 2006, at the time of 04:34 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Important Readers Note

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Syrian Slitherings
Hatched by Dafydd

Big Lizards analyzed the entire James Baker-Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group report in a pair of posts yesterday:

  1. Skip the Dicta; Read the Recommendations - Part Uno
  2. Skip the Dicta; Read the Recommendations - Part Zwei

It's important that we make clear the purpose of our posts. Many people deride the report on the grounds that the ISG really want us to withdraw, but they were too craven to call for it outright... so they instead (this theory goes) recommended "withdrawal lite."

Maybe, maybe not. Big Lizards could not care less what the commission thought it was doing.

I approached this analysis entirely, ah, analytically: given the facts on the ground and in D.C., the political reality that the voters will demand that President Bush accept most (if not all) of the ISG's 79 recommendations, can he do so while still fighting for true victory in Iraq?

And the answer I came up with was: yes he can.

Mind, I consider most of the ISG's recommendations silly and unworldly. Jed Babbin, whom I mostly disagree with, hit the nail with a needle:

The ISG report has all the attributes -- and all of the failings -- of an academic study. It is both theoretically sound and thoroughly inapplicable outside the laboratories of the schools of diplomacy.

The great majority of the 79 Commandments, including the entire "diplomatic offensive," by which we're going to persuade Iran to act against its own interests and help us stabilize Iraq as a democracy, is nought but a big time waster.

But since it only wastes the time of people whose time I consider valueless -- diplomats, even good ones like John Bolton -- I brush that aside. Besides, if properly construed, even the "diplomatic offensive" could conceivably be of some use... if we send someone like Bolton, who would use it as an opportunity to issue a series of ultimata to Iran and its organ-grinder's monkey, Syria.

In fewer words, Bush can take these recommendations and run with them. Most recapitulate what he's been trying to do anyway; and with the extra "bottom," or gravitas that the ISG adds, he will better be able to counter the Democratic floccillation, as they try to pick off this or that vital national-security program.

So take the analysis for what it is: not an examination into the motives or ultimate goal of the commission members, but rather as an examination of whether there are any underwater mines in the ISG report that will blow the Iraq war -- hence the larger GWOT -- out of the water.

And the answer is no, if President Bush chooses not to let it. Everything the report proposes can be squared with winning the war and standing up a stable, functioning democracy in Iraq (which, as a irrelevant aside, is clearly what the entire operative second section of the ISG report assumes is the ultimate goal).

Bush can accept the document and make frequent reference to it, even as he takes the upcoming Pentagon assessment as his actual lodestone. He might even get a little mileage out of it, in terms of holding the Democrats' noses to the fire on some of Bush's policies.

So everyone stop kvetching and bellyaching, and let's get back to our regularly scheduled war!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 07, 2006, at the time of 02:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 06, 2006

Skip the Dicta; Read the Recommendations - Part Zwei

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Syrian Slitherings
Hatched by Dafydd

This is the continuation of the previous post about the Iraq Study Group's final report....

(The report itself, in case you've forgotten in all the excitement, can be found here.)

Watcha gonna do about me?

Or us, actually; by "us," I mean "US," of course... what is the U.S.'s role in creating "national reconciliation" in Iraq? Here is how the commission steps into the fray:

The presence of U.S. forces in Iraq is a key topic of interest in a national reconciliation dialogue. The point is not for the United States to set timetables or deadlines for withdrawal, an approach that we oppose. The point is for the United States and Iraq to make clear their shared interest in the orderly departure of U.S. forces as Iraqi forces take on the security mission. A successful national reconciliation dialogue will advance that departure date.

Again, not bad as a principle; implementing it won't be a piece of pudding, however, as we have to balance the effects on all the different groups in Iraq of a United States threat to leave: such a threat might be effective on moderate Sunni and Shiite groups, who understand the fragility of the newborn democracy; but Sunni terrorists and Shiite militias would both love for us to leave -- for the former, because of the chaos this would cause, allowing Iraq to become like Sudan; and for the latter, because they could embark upon a Hitlerian "final solution" to the Sunni question.

I don't agree with the second part of recommendation 35; here is the explanation that precedes it (the recommendation itself is just to implement this explanation):

Violence cannot end unless dialogue begins, and the dialogue must involve those who wield power, not simply those who hold political office. The United States must try to talk directly to Grand Ayatollah Sistani and must consider appointing a highlevel American Shia Muslim to serve as an emissary to him. The United States must also try to talk directly to Moqtada al-Sadr, to militia leaders, and to insurgent leaders. The United Nations can help facilitate contacts.

I believe that here, James Baker has allowed his Realist bias towards negotiation -- which always requires at least two negotiating partners -- to cloud the obvious (to me) judgment that Muqtada Sadr is no more a negotiating partner than was Yassir Arafat, or than is al-Qaeda today; the actual recommendation specifically excludes talking with al-Qaeda... I would do the same for Sadr. In addition to being a bloodthirsty butcher who has nothing constructive to add to any "national reconciliation," he is also a paid agent of Iran; in other words, he is a traitor to his country and the catspaw of Teheran.

Instead of talking to him, we should simply kill him and the entire inner cadre of the Mahdi Militia.

Killing Sadr (and his butt monkeys) would go a long way towards ending Iran's easy access to the Iraqi parliament; it would send a message to the mullahs (the only kind they understand); and once the dust settles, it would dramatically improve chances of a true national reconciliation.

After that point, it would make sense to "talk directly... to militia leaders, and to insurgent leaders." To quote the thoroughly unquotable Arafat, "of course you make peace with your enemies; you can't make peace with your friends. With my friends, I make business!"

Recommendation 38 -- that we allow "neutral international experts as advisors to the Iraqi government on the processes of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration" -- is a sin; but it's a venial one. They will of course interfere with necessary military action, but I doubt they can interfere very much.

Withdrawal from fancies of withdrawal

The most important thing in the ISG report is the thing that wasn't in the ISG report, the dog that didn't bark, as Sherlock Holmes noted: the complete lack of any demand for any significant immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

-- Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, "Silver Blaze," the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1893.

Originally, a couple of months ago, the Democrats were jubilant (and many conservatives bitter and despairing) at the widely reported claim that the ISG report was going to call for a phased withdrawal of troops to begin immediately, lending an air of authority to the Democrats' campaign promise. But when we read the actual report itself, we discover that once again, the Democrats have been betrayed by their own supposed informants on the committee (mostly likely Lee Hamilton and Leon Panetta). In the end, this is what the report says:

While [the national reconciliation] process is under way, and to facilitate it, the United States should significantly increase the number of U.S. military personnel, including combat troops, imbedded in and supporting Iraqi Army units. As these actions proceed, we could begin to move combat forces out of Iraq. The primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq should evolve to one of supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over primary responsibility for combat operations. We should continue to maintain support forces, rapid-reaction forces, special operations forces, intelligence units, search-and-rescue units, and force protection units.

Most of this is straight out of the Bush administration's playbook. The ISG recommends embeds in all Iraqi Army units, all the way down to company level. How many soldiers do they envision doing this?

Such a mission could involve 10,000 to 20,000 American troops instead of the 3,000 to 4,000 now in this role. This increase in imbedded troops could be carried out without an aggregate increase over time in the total number of troops in Iraq by making a corresponding decrease in troops assigned to U.S. combat brigades.

The Pentagon report is likely to recommend something substantially similar, though they may also want to use U.S. troops more directly to disrupt violence in places like Anbar and Baghdad provinces... a possibilty that the ISG report itself raises, if done on a temporary basis. (Everything is "on a temporary basis;" Bush certainly doesn't contemplate leaving 150,000 troops in Iraq for the next thirty years!)

The report does, of course, recommend an eventual drawdown of U.S. forces; but that too has been our policy from the very beginning; this is nothing new. The ISG is looking at a timeframe of about a year and a half:

While these efforts are building up, and as additional Iraqi brigades are being deployed, U.S. combat brigades could begin to move out of Iraq. By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq.

About the only thing the Democrats get out of this is a little bit of face saving: they can say to their constituents, "see? We did get at least some defeatism into the thing... don't hate us!"

As far as capping overall force level, Newsweek reports today that the man incoming Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 100%) appointed as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX, 80%), wants to significantly increase the level of American troops in Iraq to squash the militias, and has explicitly allied himself with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ, 80%) on this issue:

In a surprise twist in the debate over Iraq, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the soon-to-be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a stepped up effort to “dismantle the militias.”

Given that Silvestre echos the views of "experts" that the Democrats themselves trotted out during the election, such as Gen. Eric Shinseki, it will be very easy for Bush to accept the recommendation of more embeds -- but to do so via an increase of the force level, rather than holding it steady, as the ISG suggested.

Even the ISG itself recognizes the possible need for a short-term "surge" of U.S. forces to stabilize Iraq:

We could, however, support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad, or to speed up the training and equipping mission, if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective.

(Pulling together the views of Rep. Silvestre, Gen. Shinseki, Gen. Pace, and the unanimous report of the Iraq Survey Group, President Bush can call the troop increase an act of "national reconciliation" for the United States!)

And what will the slow, steady reduction of forces, which has been the policy of the Bush administration from the very beginning, leave us in the region? From the ISG report:

At that time, U.S. combat forces in Iraq could be deployed only in units embedded with Iraqi forces, in rapid-reaction and special operations teams, and in training, equipping, advising, force protection, and search and rescue [oh, is that all?]. Intelligence and support efforts would continue [ah, there we go -- the last two components!]. Even after the United States has moved all combat brigades out of Iraq, we would maintain a considerable military presence in the region, with our still significant force in Iraq and with our powerful air, ground, and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, as well as an increased presence in Afghanistan.

By the way, for those who thought the ISG would demand we hand Iraq over to Iran and Syria, the report envisions four "missions" for the remaining U.S. forces; three are just what you would expect -- but here is number four:

Deter even more destructive interference in Iraq by Syria and Iran.

Sounds good to me!

There follows a long list of recommendations for the repair and maintenance of equipment (and troops) as they return from Iraq, and for continued training of U.S. forces back home. I have no objection.

The police are there to preserve disorder!"

Much of the foregoing has been acceptable but not particularly helpful (not unhelpful either); its only utility is in the many cases of a Bush-administration policy that Congress was loathe to fund, but whose prospects will rise now that Bush can wave the ISG report in their faces and threaten to denounce them as refusing to follow it (that's a congressional disincentive).

But here's a suggestion that I think is actually innovative and a great idea: the ISG recommends that the Iraqi National Police and the Border Police shift from the Interior Ministry to Defense.

The Ministry of the Interior is riddled with corruption and Shiite sectarianism, and its has repeatedly been accused -- with a great deal of justification -- of running death squads out of police stations and filling the police ranks with boatloads of Mahdi Militia and Badr Brigades members. Contrariwise, the Defense Ministry has done a much better job with the Iraqi Army, which the police agencies would thus join as paramilitaries.

Most Sunnis trust the army far more than they trust the police; and even the Shia admit that the army has been fair, even when it fights against the militias. Removing the national cops from the dreaded Ministry of the Interior is an inspired stroke which can only have come from the mind of commissioner Ed Meese.

Left to Interior would be control of local (not national) police, prosecutions and investigations, and payroll for all the police, including those transferred to the operational control of the Ministry of Defense.

Other than this one new idea, the ISG proposes only that current Bush administration programs to train, embed with, reform, and improve the technological capabilities of the Iraqi police forces should continue, harder and faster.

The last 18 of the total 79 recommendations are technical suggestions relating to the Oil Ministry, to American intelligence collection and analysis (such as hiring more people who speak Arabic and retaining analysts who have studied the Iraq insurgency, terrorist groups, and militias), and to budgeting for the war; you're not particularly interested in any of them. (And if you really are, they start on page 83 of the document, 101 of the PDF.)

Hey, Big Lizards reads these things so you don't have to!

"And in conclusion..." whereupon thunderous applause spontaneously erupts

The most important point I want to make is the one that I suspect nobody else will make: the tone of the report. There is very little hectoring in the second section; it's all confined to the first one, which is why I opined (all right, a bit tongue in cheek) that the Assessment section was the one written by the Democrats.

In fact, throughout the operative section, the Way Forward, the ISG assumes that the purpose of the report is to suggest ways to win in Iraq... if by "win" we mean establishing a stable democracy in Iraq that has the military, police, and judicial strength to crush al-Qaeda, disband the militias, and pull together as a coherent national unit.

Even when they drift into Realist fancies and follies, such as the useless blathering on and on about "regional conferences" and "international dialogs" and "the unconditional calling and holding of meetings," it's quite clear that the ultimate purpose is not to transition Iraq to a dictatorship with "our own guy" planted on the throne, as I was afraid it might be, given James Baker's political leanings.

This ISG report will never be mistaken for something Henry Kissinger could have written.

It recommends an initial period of no reductions in force, but a shifting of priorities in the direction that the Bush administration has said all along it wants to go, but which it hasn't really done enough of yet. Even there, the report itself recognizes that there might be advantages -- political as well as military -- to a temporary bump, or "surge," of American muscle... a sentiment that is shared by powerful voices as diverse as the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the former Chief of Staff of the United States Army, and the incoming Democratic chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Thus, the defeatist Democrats will almost certainly be stymied in their long dream of an immediate "redeployment" of U.S. troops to next-door Okinawa.

There are a few recommendations that are actually interesting, notably the notion that the Iraqi national cops be shifted from Interior to Defense and made a part of the Iraqi Army. And a lot of technical recommendations that look good, and which the Bush administration has tried to get for a long time now, but which the parsimonious (when it comes to defense and intelligence) Democrats have thwarted -- including more spending on reconstruction, on the military, and on the clandestine agencies, and an almost Rumsfeldian reorganization of the latter.

The focus on useless diplomacy will eat up a lot of the brainpower and company time of the liberals and internationalists, while the rest of the country gets on with the business of winning the war and rebuilding Iraq in a stable, functioning democracy.

All in all, if you can ignore the smarmy and offensive lecturing at the beginning -- think of it as a very extended forward; the actual meat of the document isn't bad at all. Certainly the president can easily follow all of its recommendations as part of his own adamantine intention to fight this war to victory and not bring the troops home except as victors.

...No matter what Hugh Hewitt, Bill Kristol, and Christopher Hitchens say.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 06, 2006, at the time of 08:05 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Skip the Dicta; Read the Recommendations - Part Uno

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Syrian Slitherings
Hatched by Dafydd

Ah, I think I know how the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Survey Group managed to get unanimous agreement for a report that is, on the whole, nowhere near as bad or dangerous as we were led to believe. The members clearly cut a deal between themselves:

  • The Democrats on the panel got to write all the nasty, Bush-bashing spin and hype of the introductory "Assessment" section of the report (and script the press conference) -- which was the role they relished and had demanded from the git go;
  • The Republicans wrote the actual recommendations in section II, "the Way Forward" -- that is, the operational part of the report.

(In legal terms, the Democrats wrote the dicta, but the GOP wrote the holdings.)

Thus, the first part is full of snide and arrogant analysis of how "bleak" and "dire" the situation is, which will allow perpetually backward-looking Democrats to spend the next two years rattling on about how terrible it was to invade Iraq in the first place. But the fairly open-ended and helpful recommendations in Section II are not too onerous on their face, and many are readily adaptable to the strategy of winning in Iraq that will come from the Pentagon group headed by Gen. Peter Pace, Commandant of the Marine Corps and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I leave the discussion of dicta to others (since that part really irritates me anyway); I'm more interested in what the ISG considers "the way forward," and how it can be achieved only through victory, not by the Democrats' dream of defeat, defeat, and more defeat.

A note on structure: as this post got very long (I read the entire report and discuss most of it), I'm splitting it into two posts that will be posted more or less simultaneously. This is Part Uno, as you have doubtless already gathered.

Part Zwei will follow. Again, this is unlikely to shock many of you.

"Buckle your seat belts, gentlemen; it's going to be a bumpy night!"

The "diplomatic offensive"

Let's start with recommendation 1 of the Iraq Study Group's report (actually, the first two, since the second is really part of the first), just to get a flavor of what we're dealing with and how we can work with it for victory. (Don't worry, Big Lizards is not going to plough rigidly and lugubriously through every, last one of the 79 recommendations.)

RECOMMENDATION 1: The United States, working with the Iraqi government, should launch the comprehensive New Diplomatic Offensive to deal with the problems of Iraq and of the region. This new diplomatic offensive should be launched before December 31, 2006.

RECOMMENDATION 2: The goals of the diplomatic offensive as it relates to regional players should be to:

i. Support the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq.

ii. Stop destabilizing interventions and actions by Iraq’s neighbors.

iii. Secure Iraq’s borders, including the use of joint patrols with neighboring countries.

iv. Prevent the expansion of the instability and conflict beyond Iraq’s borders.

v. Promote economic assistance, commerce, trade, political support, and, if possible, military assistance for the Iraqi government from non-neighboring Muslim nations.

vi. Energize countries to support national political reconciliation in Iraq.

vii. Validate Iraq’s legitimacy by resuming diplomatic relations, where appropriate, and reestablishing embassies in Baghdad.

viii. Assist Iraq in establishing active working embassies in key capitals in the region (for example, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia).

ix. Help Iraq reach a mutually acceptable agreement on Kirkuk.

x. Assist the Iraqi government in achieving certain security, political, and economic milestones, including better performance on issues such as national reconciliation, equitable distribution of oil revenues, and the dismantling of militias.

Admittedly, this is mostly nonsense on stilts; neither Iran nor Syria has any interest in any of these specific initiatives. But the ISG is correct that Iran has its own problems with disunity: the Arab, Azeri, and Kurdish populations of Iran are always in danger of trying to break away... and that, of course, is a good example of a "disincentive" we can offer Iran to get them to back off from supporting Muqtada Sadr and other Iraqi Shia: we let them know that if they continue trying to destabilize Iraq, perhaps we should begin helping Kurds and Azeri in Iran that are interested in learning more about democracy, freedom -- and independence. (You'll read about "disincentives" later in this post; just keep this one in mind.)

But of course, all depends upon who, exactly, is tasked on the American side to deal with these negotiations. As this is a special envoy, not a permanent position, it's important to remember that the appointment does not require Senate confirmation.

Thus, since one of our finest ambassadors is currently at liberty, I strongly urge that the head of the diplomatic "offensive" be Ambassador John Bolton. As we certainly also need someone with extensive military experience in the region, Bolton's chief military attaché could be Gen. John Abizaid or Gen. Casey, both of whom are near the end of their current tours, and each of whom needs a political tour in order to burnish his credentials for an eventual shot at being the next Chief of Staff of the United States Army.

With the negotiations in the hands of Bolton (or someone like him), I would not worry about this "diplomatic offensive."

"Dealing" with Iran (oh, and Syria)

We skip many recommendations, all of which center on sundry "groups" that we can set up so that Bolton (or whoever) doesn't have to shuttle between different cities to carry out these negotiations. Let's jump right to the first really controversial one: "dealing with Iran and Syria," as the report puts it.

(Dealing? As in, Monty Hall and Let's Make a Deal? I doubt that's in the cards.)

Here is the first part that you're not likely to hear from talk radio and maybe not even on some other blogs:

The Study Group recognizes that U.S. relationships with Iran and Syria involve difficult issues that must be resolved. Diplomatic talks should be extensive and substantive, and they will require a balancing of interests. The United States has diplomatic, economic, and military disincentives available in approaches to both Iran and Syria. However, the United States should also consider incentives to try to engage them constructively, much as it did successfully with Libya.

What is a "disincentive?" Well, the dictionary says it's "something that prevents or discourages action; a deterrent." That is, we say to Iran, "if you continue supplying men, material, munitions, and training to Iraqi Shia, we're going to do the following horrible things: A, B, C..."

(For example, do you recall that bit -- I warned you it would be on the test -- about us threatening to encourage Arab, Azeri, or Kurdish minorities within Iran to break away if the Iranians continue their assault on Iraq? That is a perfect example of the kind of "disincentives" we can use.)

I'll bet you hadn't heard that that was in the report, did you? Not if all you did was listen to talk radio and read most other blogs.

From the sentence structure, it's quite clear that the ISG expects disincentives, not incentives, to be the default mode: they caution President Bush not to use disincentives alone... hey, look, here are some incentives you can also use!

Whether or not that's what the ISG had in mind, that is what they wrote: and it's perfectly reasonable for Bush to take it that way and say, "look, here I am doing just what the commission recommended: giving a disincentivizing ultimatum to Iran and Syria."

The list of specific steps that Iran can take aren't bad:

  • "Iran should stem the flow of equipment, technology, and training to any group resorting to violence in Iraq."
  • "Iran should make clear its support for the territorial integrity of Iraq as a unified state, as well as its respect for the sovereignty of Iraq and its government."
  • "Iran can use its influence, especially over Shia groups in Iraq, to encourage national reconciliation."
  • "Iran can also, in the right circumstances, help in the economic reconstruction of Iraq."

Only the last one is problematical; and even there, the weasel-words "right circumstances" allows Bush to put that last one off until the right circumstances prevail: that is, until Iran has become a democratic state like Iraq.

F--- the Jews

Naturally, the ISG being co-charied by James Baker, due deference must be paid to Baker's "poor King Charles' head," his bête noir: Israel.

The title of this section of the post refers to Baker's infamous (alleged) comment to "a colleague" -- later identified as Jack Kemp, I believe -- during a conversation about Israel while Baker was George Herbert Walker Bush's secretary of state: "f--- the Jews, they didn't vote for us anyway!" Baker denies he ever said it.

This entire section is imminently ignorable, as the five recommendations it contains all boil down to nothing beyond "the unconditional calling and holding of meetings."

Hear hear! Have some more meetings. Have as many meetings as we can stuff into a fiscal year. If the Palestinians and the Syrians remain intrasigent, refusing to rein in Hamas and Hezbollah, then Bush (and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert -- say, shouldn't Israel pass a law barring anyone named "Ehud" from holding public office?) can legitimately and honorably say "we followed those B-H recommendations to the letter: we unconditionally called and held several meetings, by gum.

Now can we get on with it?

Afghanistan

The ISG says to send more troops and money, amounts unspecified. Any objections?

Iraq milestones and suchlike

Note the great specificity of the next set of recommendations for Iraq itself to achieve:

  • Recommendation 19: "[T]there must be action by the Iraqi government to make substantial progress toward the achievement of milestones.... [T]the President should convey as much detail as possible about the substance of these exchanges in order to keep the American people, the Iraqi people, and the countries in the region well informed."
  • Recommendation 20: If Iraq "demonstrates political will" and "substantial progress" towards these unspecified milestones, we should "continue political, military, and economic support for the Iraqi government."
  • Recommendation 21: If they blow us off, we should "reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government."
  • Recommendation 22: Ritual formula: we should say we don't "seek" military bases in Iraq; but if they ask us to keep a presence there permanently, we should consider it, just as we would "in the case of any other government." (In other words, they have to ask; we can only nudge them, not order them.)
  • Recommendation 23: "The President should restate that the United States does not seek to control Iraq’s oil."

While the ISG didn't enunciate its own set of milestones, it more or less accepts (recommendation 25) the milestones suggested by Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself. It's a laundry list, some elements of which are easily achievable ("approval of the Provincial Election Law and setting an election date"); others are ambitious but possible ("provincial elections" by June); while some are dubious, to say the least ("Iraqi control of provinces" by September). You can read them for yourself; they're on page 63 of the report (page 81 in the PDF).

Come together

The longest non-diplomatic subsection of the operative section is all about achieving "national reconciliation" in Iraq; this is divided into what the Iraqis need to do, and what we need to do. Most of the recommendations here are obvious, common-sense stuff. But here are a few that might provoke some interest...

Right off, the commission makes another bold and unexpected statement, sparking great rejoicing:

U.S. forces can help provide stability for a time to enable Iraqi leaders to negotiate political solutions, but they cannot stop the violence -- or even contain it -- if there is no underlying political agreement among Iraqis about the future of their country.

Um... okay.

Recommendation 27 says that de-Baathification has gone far enough; with the exception of top Saddam Hussein officials, Iraq should start letting people back into low levels of government even if they were members of the Baath Party under Hussein.

I actually have no problem with this; Hussein completely controlled Iraq for 24 years, and the Baathists ran the joint for the previous 16 years before that. Thus, for forty years, the only way to get ahead in Iraq was to join the Baath Party, which was the only legal political party anyway. It's hardly surprising that scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers, policemen, and military personnel became "Baathists."

To permanently and forever exclude these people from participating in the recreation of Iraq is unjust; but much more important, it's profoundly foolish ("it is worse than a crime; it is a blunder," as Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe said of the execution of the Duc d'Enghien). Heck, if we could put ex-Nazi Wernher von Braun in charge of the United States rocket and missile program, then surely the Iraqis can allow ex-Baathist scientists to work in the Ministry of Technology, or whatever they call the thing.

I'm glad the Republican Guards dispersed, and I wish we had done so in a more systematic way with the national police. But that was then, this is now: many members of the New Iraqi Army are military veterans, and many cops were cops before. Some of these people cause problems, especially in the police, which were never properly purged... but that's the price you pay for revolution, especially when externally applied.

(The ISG actually has a really interesting idea for the Iraqi national police forces; but that has its own subhead in the next post.)

The reality is that the Iraqis need certain people, even if they were Baathists in another life. An excellent step to make this process much less threatening would be to carry out the execution of Saddam Hussein as expected in January; since Hussein was the Baath Party from 1979 onward, and is thus the only embodiment of the party that most ex-Baathists can remember, Hussein's execution will make him "the death of the party."

Recommendation 28 warns against distributing oil revenues by "region," which is code for religious sect: if revenues were disbursed according to region, then the Kurds and Shia would get it all, and the Sunni -- in the middle region, which has no oil fields -- would get bubkes. That's hardly the way to bring Sunnis into the fold! Again, I think we all agree that cutting the Sunnis out of all oil revenue is a prescription for civil war.

To be continued next post...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 06, 2006, at the time of 08:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 05, 2006

Not "Last" - Try "Next of Many"

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal leapt upon the convulsing Iraq-war dogpile with a contrarian argument: rather than discussing how best to manage a withdrawal, as the uninformed media demand, most of the uniformed military recommends sending more troops into Iraq to secure Baghdad and increase trainers and embeds in the Iraqi Army (per Captain's Quarters). From the Journal story, which is free for the moment -- get 'em while they're hot:

As demands mount to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, a growing number of senior military officials are arguing that the only way to salvage the situation is to add more U.S. forces and more U.S. money.

Outside the military, most of the debate is focused on a U.S. troop withdrawal. But inside the Pentagon, the recent dismissal of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has given some new life to arguments by military officers who say the U.S. must pour more troops and money into the country to expand the Iraqi army -- the one institution in Iraq that has shown some promise -- and stabilize the capital.

We've discussed this quite a bit on Big Lizards over the last few months, most recently here:

We also noted that noted historian Victor Davis Hanson opines that we don't really need to increase the force level; all we need do, he says, is change the rules of engagement (ROEs) to allow fighting more aggressively; from the second of the two posts above:

Historian Victor Davis Hanson is thinking along the same lines. Here is how he ended a recent column on NRO:

So yes, let us talk about sending more troops, or taking them out altogether, or cry about bad news coverage. But the truth is that, if they were given more tactical leeway to go on the offensive, we would already have enough soldiers in Iraq to win a victory that even a hostile media will have to acknowledge and enemies watching must respect -- but only if we persevere here at home in this latest climate of renewed hysteria.

But after thinking a second time, I believe it's better that we do send more troops. It would produce several undeniable benefits:

  • It would dismay our enemies to see that the net effect of their multi-year effort to influence the American electoral process resulted, not in an "immediate withdrawal" of troops from Iraq -- but in an immediate increase instead;
  • It would hearten our Iraqi allies and perhaps finally convince them that they're not about to be overwhelmed by either al-Qaeda terrorists or Iranian-backed Shiite militias; the more Iraqis shift to having hope for the future, the fewer will be willing to stake all on those 72 raisins in paradise (as their raisins d'etre)... and the more will be willing to risk dying for their new country by joining the army to fight the murderers;
  • We really do need more embedded American soldiers in Iraqi military units; the Iraqi Army does not have the long, long history of honorable service to their country that we have, and they need longer supervision than a couple of years;
  • We desperately need to crack down on Iran, Syria, and even Saudi Arabia, all of whom are still funneling men, munitions, and miltary intelligence across the borders... where they're used to kill Americans as well as Iraqis; if we were to shut the borders entirely except for a few checkpoints (each manned by hundreds of American and Iraqi troops), and undertake to destroy -- no questions asked -- any vehicle or group of men crossing the frontiers anywhere but at a legal checkpoint, we would significantly reduce the resupply for terrorists and militias.

As conservatives never tire of telling us, no country is truly sovereign until it can control its own borders: what is true for the United States is even more true for Iraq, surrounded as it is by deadly enemies.

On that last point, our cheeks (at both ends) should be flushed red to read this story from ABC News online, where we have seized from Iraqi Shiite militia members a batch of Iranian-made weapons and munitions -- with a manufacturer's date of this year, 2006:

U.S. officials say they have found smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories. According to a senior defense official, coalition forces have recently seized Iranian-made weapons and munitions that bear manufacturing dates in 2006.

This suggests, say the sources, that the material is going directly from Iranian factories to Shia militias, rather than taking a roundabout path through the black market. "There is no way this could be done without (Iranian) government approval," says a senior official.

Iran has been supplying both equipment and training for their puppet Muqtada Sadr and his Mahdi Militia, including:

  • Advanced, armor-piercing IEDs;
  • Anti-tank weapons;
  • Terrorism training and support from Hezbollah in Lebanon;
  • And actual Hezbollah terrorist personnel from Syria into Iraq.

(I reckon that will be a major "bargaining chip" we can use when we "talk" to Iran...)

The post linked above from Captain's Quarters, as well as earlier Big Lizards posts, have covered all the top points; but one phrase in the WSJ article really jumped out at me, because the drive-by media -- which sadly includes the news division of the Journal, thought not the editorial page -- has been using the same phrase for some time now:

Rumsfeld Exit Revives Push to Boost Troops, Money in One Last Effort to Stabilize Baghdad....

Senior military officials seeking to make one last push to stabilize Baghdad might find a receptive ear with President Bush.

And here's one we linked in the Guardian Spills the Beans post from the UK Guardian almost three weeks ago:

President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers, according to sources familiar with the administration's internal deliberations.

Note that, despite the wildly misleading quotation marks, we do not, in fact, have a direct quotation from President Bush saying "a last big push." The Guardian is in reality quoting unnamed "sources familiar with the administration's internal deliberations." In fact, if Bush actually said "a last big push," I'd be so stunned, you could knock me over with a bank.

Why would he say "last?" Does the Guardian -- and now the Wall Street Journal -- expect us to believe this is some sort of diabolical bargain Bush has made with the forces of evil; that if this push doesn't work, then he'll prematurely withdraw and leave our Iraqi allies holding his sack?

Far more likely that this is just another invention of the liberal left and its natural allies in the elite media: all right, maybe Bush is in such deep denial that he thinks Iraq is still winnable... but I'm sure that after America fails one "last" time, he'll come to his senses and join the party of defeatism.

How about this reformulation: the US and its allies must make a renewed push to win the war in Iraq; and if that is only partially successful... then, b'God, we'll do it again and again and again, until we achieve victory.

Which is, of course, what every American wants. Right?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 05, 2006, at the time of 07:15 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

XVOA

Cultures and Contortions , Future of Civilization , Global War on Jihadism , Hezbollah Horrors , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In the last two posts on Big Lizards, we discussed demography, democracy, and Americanism:

  • Reading Between the Steyns: Little Endians and Big Endians
    Regardless of the Realists and liberals at the Iraq Study Group -- and the forest-missing microwarriors and isolationists now populating the conservative movement -- defeating al-Qaeda is an important but very minor goal. The true war for survival of the West, the GWOT, will be vision battling vision for the soul of Mankind: and either Islam or Individualism will win.
  • Borg Culture: Steyn, Jihad, and the End of Predestinarianism:

    Americanism, by whatever name, is the only ideology ready to hand that we can export to counter the death-cult of militant jihadism and win the war for the soul of the world. We mustn't be afraid to shove raw, naked Americanism down the throats of the rest of the world... it's the physic for the pathogen of jihad.

All right, we know what to do and why we need to do it; but how do we do it? How can we "shove raw, naked Americanism down the throats of the rest of the world?"

Let's start with the fundamentals. I have always thought that the best way to teach any subject, from civics to calculus, is to take a historical approach: things happen for reasons; seeing the historical progression makes it a lot easier to understand what we do and why it works (or doesn't work).

Take affirmative action. You can't understand why it's a controversy, why we're even talking about it, without knowing about Jim Crow laws; and you can't understand those without first learning about Reconstruction; and for that, you need to know about the Civil War; and understanding the Civil War requires an examination of slavery; and that takes us all the way back to the Constitutional Convention and the great compromise.

What do foreigners learn about us by this? They learn that we really take seriously the concept of all people being equal under the law; that we have struggled to lift everyone up; that sometimes we go to far trying to help the underdog and need to get back to first principles. And in subtext, it shows how freedom of speech really works, that we're free to criticize the government, and how a real dialog can develop because of this freedom.

In other words, to show the truth about America -- hence Americanism -- we must teach American history to the rest of the world... most of which is woefully ignorant of the subject. (So are most Americans; but believe me, as little as our citizens know about our own history, people in Japan and Italy -- let alone in Iraq and Yemen -- know even less.)

But how can we teach American history to people who live in foreign countries? Must we invade and conquer their school systems, assuming they even have any? Fortunately, there is an easier way...

Television has become the universal language of the world. Even villages in remote locations often have access to a television (perhaps only one in the chief's hut); and certainly most people who live in cities, even in Islamic countries, have TVs. So the idea here would be for the United States to disseminate programming that teaches American history.

Often, the real history is very much at odds with what jihadist or totalitarian governments tell their people about the "Great Satan;" so why would any of these countries allow such broadcasts? The answer is that they wouldn't... so we do it without their consent -- and if they don't like it, too damn bad. Part of fighting a war of ideas is that we cannot be fastidious about the "sovereign right" of nations to malign us and suppress the truth about America's astonishing contribution to the world.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, a reader of the Anniston Star wrote this in a letter to the editor:

The next time you feel doubts about the direction of this country, remember this:

The only two defining forces that have ever been willing to die for you are: (1) Jesus Christ and (2) the American soldier! One died for your soul and the other for your freedom -- even to read this!

I don't know if this is original with James W. Anderson from Talladega, Alabama (Vietnam 1967-68), or if he heard or read it somewhere; but I'm happy to give him credit until another claimant comes along. It's an amazing insight, no matter who originated it... and one that virtually nobody outside the United States really understands. So no pussyfooting.

There are several nuts-and-bolts considerations for this project:

  • The shows themselves cannot be dry, academic productions; we can make a signal available, but we obviously cannot force people to watch it.

Now, there's no way that a documentary produced by the State Department could be anything but video death... so we need to hire real professional writers, directors, and producers instead. Better yet, a wealth of such shows has already been produced, from documentaries like the Day the Universe Changed and the Adams Chronicles to movies like Gettysburg and the Patriot. We could go a long way just broadcasting these excellent productions.

  • We cannot rely on people speaking English well enough to be able to follow such movies and television series; they must be translated and dubbed.

And by translated, I mean into every language necessary to spread Americanism throughout the world, from Polish to Croatian to Arabic to Pashtun to Farsi to Nubian, and so forth. This must be treated as a major national-security program -- with money and manpower to match. I'd like to see the XVOA (eXtreme Voice of America) funded as well as NASA is ($20 billion), or at least the National Science Foundation ($5½ billion).

In addition, we need to find native speakers of each of these languages, preferably with acting experience, for dubbing. For obscure languages that are hard to find here (not that many, with the number of immigrants we have from everywhere!) we may need to find native speakers and train them to act. As with Bullwinkle and Rocky, each actor may need to play multiple voices.

And we need to pay top dollar... so that aspiring actors are attracted to this project even with the competition.

  • We need to put people on the task of finding every possible way to disseminate these dubbed programs everywhere in the world.

Buying a channel (or several) on every satellite TV system is just the beginning; we also need to find a way around governments that go around smashing satellite receivers and jamming transmissions. If necessary (and I think it often is), we should take out jamming stations in enemy countries with cruise missiles. Let 'em scream... what are they going to do about it, declare war on us?

What we're talking about is not just Voice of America, but a super-sized, hyperthyroid, 24/7 American history and propaganda machine. Our biggest worry is the Democrats, who may decide this is the perfect venue to spread anti-Americanism faster than ever before; for this reason, I suggest keeping the XVOA in the hands of the Administration, which is much less likely than Congress to be overtly hostile to the country, even if a Democrat is elected.

Every aspect of American history illuminates one or more elements of Americanism, showing where we came from, what we've gone through, and who we really are. This would do far more for our image in the world (including the ummah) than sending billions to Bangladesh the next time they have a flood (that would be next rainy season) or to Thailand the next time they have a Tsunami (that would be next earthquake season): even when we do that, the local governments lie to the people and tell them all the rescue efforts and food and medical aid came from themselves, not from us.

It would do much more to spread Americanism than would tens of billions spent on foreign aid -- nearly all of which goes to dictators who, again, disburse it as if it came from their own pockets.

And it would be far more effective countering jihadism than the haphazard mix of "American" soft-core porn movies and TV jiggle shows -- from American Pie to Baywatch to Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold -- that inundate the world, showing the worst aspects of America exaggerated beyond all reason by Hollywood's addiction to sensationalism. (At least, it would show them that we have a better side.)

Visual imagery is powerful, and movies already influence people everywhere. Why shouldn't America, which invented motion pictures and is the most relentless purveyor of them, be able to use them more effectively than jihadis to "sell" our ideology?

This is just the first cut; does any of you have other ideas for spreading the ideology of individualism, freedom, and capitalism?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 05, 2006, at the time of 05:16 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

December 04, 2006

Borg Culture: Steyn, Jihad, and the End of Predestinarianism

Cultures and Contortions , Global War on Jihadism , Hezbollah Horrors , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

A commenter on our previous post, Robert Schwartz, quoted a fellow who writes at the Asia Times online under the improbable name of "Spengler" (I cannot find out his full name):

The Islamic world now views the pontiff as an existential threat, and with reason. Jihad is not merely the whim of a despotic divinity, as the pope implied. It is much more: jihad is the fundamental sacrament of Islam, the Muslim cognate of the Lord's Supper in Christianity, that is, the unique form of sacrifice by which the individual believer communes with the Transcendent. To denounce jihad on theological grounds is a blow at the foundations of Islam, in effect a papal call for the conversion of the Muslims.

But is this really true? We all know Moslems who do not believe in or practice jihad as the terrorists believe in it and practice it. Besides my personal acquaintances, which it may not be fair to cite (since you don't know them), there are also well known people like the fellows at Iraq the Model, as well as those not well known but whose existence everyone knows about: Moslem American soldiers, CIA officers, policemen, firemen, doctors, lawyers, and shopkeepers -- who don't, as a rule, advocate or support jihad as the Taliban or the Iranian mullahs do.

So it is possible, even though jihadism is a very powerful ideology that has taken control of a large portion of the ummah. Isn't there some ideology that can infect Islam as thoroughly as has jihadism, a "counter-ideology" that is positive and life-affirming, not a death cult, and which does not require Moslems to convert to Christianity?

Yes, there is... and we all know it, even if we rarely think of it in those terms.

Transforming jihad

The most important point to bear in mind is that such questions as the actual meaning of jihad are answered by cultural, not religious force: I don't believe that the jihadis in Iraq or Gaza believe in militant jihad because they've been religously persuaded by theological argument -- but because all their neighbors believe it.

The way to change that belief is to create swaths of territory (real estate) in which the cultural belief is that jihad is an individual inner struggle against sin, rather than an external war against sinners; a struggle that each individual must freely choose, or it's meaningless; and most important, one that can have immediate material benefits to each individual person, rather than nothing but the promise of eventual "paradise" in the afterlife.

We must create a large territory within the ummah where everyone is surrounded by others who believe the same thing... thus, by the natural human desire to avoid cognitive dissonance, the psychological pressure will be towards sanity.

Ideology and counter-ideology

But how do you get those core swaths in the first place? You must beat down militant jihadism with that counter-ideology I mentioned above; and that requires a very powerful, adaptable, and cohesive counter-ideology; we must directly counter jihadism with an equally strong (or superior) ideology which does as good a job of promoting a sense of community and pulling together as jihadism does.

This is difficult to find but not impossible. In fact, we already have just such a counter-ideology:

  • Individualism, as contrary as it may sound, is part of that ideology, as we've seen in our own country. By vigorously supporting the rights of the individual -- which Europe, Japan, and Canada don't support -- America has become the most cohesive and communal country in Christendom. This despite frequent denunciations of individualism by, e.g., the pope and other European religious leaders of Christianity.
  • Freedom is another component of that counter-ideology; and again, we find more of that in the United States than in any other country.
  • Finally, capitalism, which is the greatest engine of wealth creation ever invented, is absolutely critical... because the hope of wealth by individual effort -- capitalism -- as opposed to wealth by tribal or political affiliation (socialism), is vital in any war that hopes to defeat "holy warriors," who primarily appeal to the poor by saying, in effect, "join our tribe and we will support you."

Individualism plus freedom plus capitalism... we already have a catchy name for that ideology, which has served as a counter-ideology for 230 years against jihadism, against Communism, against Fascism and Naziism, against imperialism, and again monarchism: we call it Americanism.

Ideological synthesis: Americanism

Note that Americanism is neither religious nor secular but can exist in both kinds of subculture: evangelical Christians here still believe in Americanism, as do people like myself who are not religious at all, and in fact come from a non-Christian cultural background as well. And so do American Moslems; Americanism does not require giving up Islam in favor of Christianity (pace, Ann Coulter!)

The rest of the "West" -- Europe, Canada, Japan, and Israel -- have no unique ideology that binds them together as a people the way the combination of freedom, individual rights, and capitalism do here; the French have nothing to counter jihadism when it comes a-courtin'.

So our first great task is to convert our allies to Americanism (which will probably require a different name!); that alone would likely give them enough hope for the future that they start breeding again, which is an excellent start for our cultural defense. But it has a more immediate effect: Americanism is confident enough to believe that it can convert those who immigrate here, what we call "assimilation." But assimilation is a two-way function: American culture is Borg culture. We add bits and pieces of new cultures to American culture, and in return, we Americanize new immigrants.

What else can we say about the power of Americanism?

  • America is far richer with a more robust economy than any other Western country;
  • We as a culture (despite tolerating individuals who don't fit that profile) retain a vigorous warrior spirit that leads us to savagely defend what we see to be ours;
  • We remain intensely curious and pursue science and techological improvement more than any other nation on the planet;
  • We think of ourselves as Americans first, everything else second... even liberals who are in fact internationalists still must do ritual obeisance to calling themselves Americans ("hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue");
  • We are the most religiously free country on the planet -- the First Amendment guarantees it -- as well as the most religous free country on the planet (that is, we have more churchgoers than any other country that does not compel religious observance);
  • And we at least breed at the replacement level -- though not evenly: even there, it's precisely those areas that most exemplify Americanism (individualism + freedom + capitalism), the so-called "red" states and "red" communities, that breed at significantly more than replacement rate; and it's the "blue" areas that are the least Americanist and the most Europeanist that don't really hold up their end.

These are all unmistakable signs of a vibrant, confident, and growing cultural identity -- which can only be explained by the planetary success of the ideology we're calling Americanism. There is no other explanation: we have the same language as countries that are not so successful (Great Britain, Canada, Grenada); we have the same religions as other failed countries (Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Scandanavia); and we have a hodge-podge of many races living here, along with polyglot millions for whom English is a second language.

We have the same democratic government -- though with a uniquely American flavor, a constitutional republic as opposed to a parliamentary democracy -- as the entire rest of the West; but even there, the ideology came first and propelled our Founding Fathers to create the first democracy in an era of kings as a representative, constitutional republic. Those democracies that followed (leave England out for a moment) tended to organize themselves along the lines of the French Revolution... which has turned out to be far less successful a model than ours.

(England's Parliament goes all the way back to the nobles who wrested some control from the king in Magna Carta, the "great charter;" it is, like the American system, sui generis. However, it's still too close to the continental model and has proven less able to maintain its distinct cultural identity than Americanism. Propinquity may play a role here: we were protected from the European cultural decline by a great ocean.)

The distinctions between America and the world are nontrivial and nonrandom:

  • We are the most capitalistic nation on the planet, and we're the richest;
  • We are the freest country, and we're the country with the most immigration;
  • We have the most religious freedom of any country, yet we have the most freely embraced religion;
  • We are the most individualist country -- and the country with the greatest percent of citizens ready and willing to defend it.

That last point is not a contradiction, though most throughout the world would think so: individualism leads to a greater sense of community than does collectivism... it's not a contradiction, but it is a paradox. For example, the more individualist a community, the more charitable are the individuals in it... because they see charity as the duty of individuals, not the State.

This extends upward: even when government action is required, real Americans prefer that action be conducted at the lowest possible level of government, where we have the most control: city instead of county, county instead of state, state instead of national... and always national over international. Americanism is the ideology of self-control, self-governance, and self-sufficiency. It is ultimately empowering, while jihadism is ultimately infantalizing.

American culture as Borg culture: resistance is futile

Many anti-immigrant politicians (such as Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-CO, 100%) and pseudo-politicians (like Pat Buchanan) push the false meme that Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants "don't assimilate." This is complete nonsense. There is always a loud and angry fringe element that marches in the streets waving Mexican flags... but look at the numbers: in the biggest rally against the House bill that made illegal immigration illegal (I'm being unfair here just for a giggle), they got a few hundred thousand people -- most of whom were not waving Mexican flags.

This in a county that has literally millions of Hispanics, most either directly or ancestrally from Mexico. The population of Los Angeles County is about 10 million; there are 4.65 million Hispanics and only 3 million non-Hispanic whites. So for the first rally, which the Aztlan separatists successfully portrayed as just anti-bill, not anti-American, they still only got 10% of the Hispanic population (at most) to show up and march.

Subsequent marches, after the anti-Americanism of the march leaders was made clear, drew far fewer participants, closer to 1%. And even there, we're just talking about marching; how many Hispanic separatist terrorists are there? Answer: zero.

Our immigrants assimilate, and they partially assimilate (change) the culture; that confidence in our own ideology is one of the things that makes us strong: in Osama's terms, we act like the strong horse, we have confidence that we're the strong horse, therefore we are the strong horse... even with the Democratic Party weighing us down.

There are always exceptions, and of course, some immigrants never Americanize. But unlike in Europe, even if the immigrants themselves resist -- resistance is ultimately futile, because their children belong to us. In France, the children of Algerian Moslem immigrants are much more anti-France and jihadist than their parents (it's the kids leading the French intifada, not the parents); but in America, it works just the opposite: each succeeding generation is more American and less inclined towards the "old country" than the previous.

Expand that outward: there is nothing magical about our mountains, our rivers, or our plains that is any different that the geographical features of other countries; the thing that converts Irish and Italians, Canadians and Cambodians, Nicaraguans and Nigereans is the ideology of Americanism... and the ideology can be exported.

The exception proves the pudding: Americanism, by whatever name, is the only ideology ready to hand that we can export to counter the death-cult of militant jihadism and win the war for the soul of the world. We mustn't be afraid to shove raw, naked Americanism down the throats of the rest of the world... it's the physic for the pathogen of jihad.

The way forward

This is the way forward, to borrow a phrase that will probably permeate the Baker-Hamilton report (and already trips from the lips of National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley almost every time he goes on a Sunday yak show): export the "stronger horse," Americanism, to the rest of the world -- starting with our new allies in Eastern Europe and moving to our old allies in Western Europe, thence beyond the pale to Africa, Araby, and the Orient. Americanism comes ready to adapt to any other culture, any other country: you can have a capitalist, free, and individualist Frenchism, Germanism, Britishism, and even Iraqism, if we but try.

We have right now one of the most Americanist presidents of recent years; George W. Bush isn't as good a communicator as Ronald Reagan, but he's every bit as Americanist. By contrast, BIll Clinton and George H.W. Bush, as well as Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and of course Jimmy Carter, were more Europeanist: they all looked to Europe for a lead; they truly believed international organizations (the U.N. or even NATO) were the wave of the future; and I can't imagine any of them believing that "America is the greatest nation on God's green Earth," to rip a phrase from Michael Medved.

But I'm utterly certain that both Reagan and Bush-43 believe (and believed) exactly that, deep in their souls. That, ultimately, is why I do not fear that Bush will use the ISG report as a fig leaf to cover retreat from Iraq, or even from the mission to democratize that country: for George W. Bush, renouncing that policy would be the same as renouncing his religious faith and becoming an atheist.

And that he will not do... no matter how much "pressure" the Democrats bring to bear.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 04, 2006, at the time of 05:54 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Reading Between the Steyns: Little Endians and Big Endians

Cultures and Contortions , Global War on Jihadism , Hezbollah Horrors , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The Discordians were (are?) a crazy bunch of weirdos who had some truly great ideas. Led by Malaclypse the Younger (usually Gregory Hill) and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (typically Kerry Thornley), and later joined by science-fiction author Robert Anton Wilson (usually writing as Mordecai Malignatus), they invented a whole new religion disguised as an elaborate joke disguised as a religion.

They also invented the Law of Fives, the Sacred Chao (a "chao" -- pronounced cow -- is a single unit of chaos) with its associated Hodge and Podge, and the myth of Eris and the golden apple. (Well, they didn't actually invent the last; the ancient Greeks did. But the Discordians pontificated about it a lot.)

They also invented a great game called Po that I've used endlessly to my amusement and enlightenment (and to my neighbors' annoyance and reporting to the authorities). The idea is that you take two contradictory concepts, say "fire" and "water." Then you write them in a line with the word "po" in between.

Po stands for some relationship: this begins the game, which is to find what relationship the po stands for and what is the result of the equation. In this case, we have "fire po water," and the most obvious answer is that po =
"heats," and the solution is "steam." You could say this game of po gave us the industrial age, when humans realized that by superheating water, they could produce steam that would drive steam engines.

(The Discordians would point out that po could also equal "puts out," and the result of "fire po water" would be a soggy campfire. Some solutions are more useful than others.)

Well, the past is prologue. (And what follows is epilogue, since there is no actual content to this post, at least nothing worth reading.) I have been metaphorically devouring Mark Steyn's book America Alone: the End of the World as We Know It; and I have also just read the New York Times' breathless speculation about what will be in the Baker-Hamilton report from the Iraq Study Group and how the president will respond to it.

Steyn, the demography predestinarian, believes that the plummeting birthrate of the West (minus the United States) will inevitably (or at least barring a miracle) lead to the countries of continental Europe being denuded of Europeans, who will be replaced by Moslems, bringing Europe fully into the ummah.

The Times is jazzed about its own prediction -- based upon leaks to them from "commission members" and "officials familiar with" the report (excuse our presumption in assuming that those commission members willing to leak to the New York Times are probably in Lee Hamilton's group of Democrats, rather than James Baker's cabal of "Realist" Republicans).

These leaks to the Times indicate the ISG will recommend we abandon the idea of democratizing the Middle East and withdraw to the "Realist" position (now apparently shared by some of the lads at Power Line) of sitting in our Iraq-based Fortress of Solitude, striking at al-Qaeda when they mass together, and otherwise allowing Iraq to turn into a Shiite dictatorship... but an America-friendly dictatorship (hah). I don't know that the ISG will suggest this course, but they may well.

I know this post is jumping around like a liberal ducking facts, but I'm actually going somewhere with this. Using the game of Po, the secret to my widespread failure, I get this: "Steyn po ISG." The po in this case is "eats," and the result anent Iraq is this very interesting formulation:

In the long run of the war on jihadism, planting a stable democracy in Iraq is far more important than defeating al-Qaeda.

Take a moment and think about that: it's the exact opposite of the Power Line position, which has become the mainstream position: that our only legitimate interest in Iraq is stomping al-Qaeda in Iraq; promoting stable democracy -- or even stopping the gangland war between militias and death squads -- is an irrelevant conceit that we must abandon, in our Realist way, for the good, old-fashioned, .time-honored, and extraordinarily successful tactic of allying with certain dictators against other dictators.

I think I can prove it. Suppose we succeed in destroying the organization formerly led by Musab Zarqawi and now by Hamza Muhajir, but we allow the bloody massacres to continue until the Sunni of Iraq flee into Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. This would leave nothing but Kurdistan in the north -- and in central and south Iraq, a Shia-dominated Iraqi government under the thumb of Muqtada Sadr, hence under the grandthumb of Hezbollah and the great-grandthumb of Iran. Haven't we just jumped out of the pot and into the kettle?

In the short view, if southern Iraq simply becomes part of Greater Iran, we have just helped our greatest non-Communist enemy to become vastly stronger.

But in the long view, it's even worse. If Steyn is right that Europe is committing societal suicide, and white Christian Europeans are abdicating sovereignty over the continent to the influx of Moslems... then how can we stop it? There are only two ways:

  • We could possibly find some inducement for Europeans to have more babies. This is true terra incognita: the problem is not physical impotence but the loss of belief in the future, which leads (Steyn argues persuasively) to a turning inward towards the present, towards pure narcissism: live for today, and damn tomorrow!
  • Alternatively, we could go the American route (which seems to be working here): rather than stop the substitution of Moslems for Christians in Europe, we could try to create a new Moslem ideology to compete with Islamism and jihad. So far as I can think, the only ideology that could prove strong enough is freedom, individualism, and true capitalism.

This way, as Moslems sweep into control in Europe, they will have effectively been Westernized: this is Islam shorn of its totalitarianism, its tribalism, and its worship of death over life.

What difference does it make to drive al-Qaeda out of Iraq if they just regenerate in Sudan, Pakistan/Kashmir, or Saudi Arabia? For that matter, so what even if we wipe al-Qaeda out of existence entirely -- if that just cleans the docks for Iranian-Hezbollah jihadis instead? As Caiaphas sings in Jesus Christ, Superstar, "we need a more permanent solution to our problem."

Al-Qaeda is a symptom; the symptom is itself dangerous and must be treated... but we'll never be safe, in the Middle East, Europe, or here in America, unless we likewise cure the disease itself. And the disease is a death-cult ideology that is sweeping the fastest-growing and most aggressive culture on the planet.

We need to introduce anti-jihadism leukocytes into Islam's circulatory system. I have actually been arguing this point since long before Big Lizards began, during a long-running discussion, "Are We There Yet?," in the Heinlein Journal in the 1990s; and I continued this discussion in the first week of this blog in my post Where Are All the Moslem Methodists?

Simply put, we need to break the link between Islam and jihad. Just as Christendom finally broke the link between Christianity, crusades, and combustion of heretics, the ummah must do the same -- or World War IV will dwarf its three predecessors, each of which has been more horrific than the last.

We would probably win; but what world would we inherit as our prize? Would enough people survive to maintain civilization? Alternatively, the Moslems could "win" -- but the cost would be even greater, as it's only the science, medicine, technology, and creativity of the Western world that keeps Islam afloat. There are 1.2 billion Moslems today; but during Islam's "Golden Age" (A.D. 700-1400 -- and yes, the irony of the dating is delicious), the entire human population of the earth never exceeded 300 million, which is about all that a pre-technological planet can sustain.

Thus, even if the jihadis succeeded in converting everyone to a Taliban-style Islam, the cost would be the destruction of 75% of all Moslems on Earth. The ummah would consist of scattered, disconnected villages dotting the otherwise unpeopled wilderness. Oh, joy.

Regardless of the Realists and liberals at the Iraq Study Group -- and the forest-missing microwarriors and isolationists now populating the conservative movement -- defeating al-Qaeda is an important but very minor goal. The true war for survival of the West, the GWOT, will be vision battling vision for the soul of Mankind: and either Islam or Individualism will win.

We need to turn our attention to that war; and for that reason, Mark Steyn (whether he realizes it or not) makes a wonderful case for the expansive goal of President Bush to plant a functioning democracy in the heart of the Arab-Moslem-jihadi Middle East.

Nothing less will save our children's children's children.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 04, 2006, at the time of 04:30 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

November 29, 2006

Nancy Drew She Ain't

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Incoming (as in artillery) Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 100%), responds to a press conference by President Bush. First the president:

"There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place [in Iraq], fomented, in my opinion, because of these attacks by al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal," Bush said. "And we will work with the Maliki government to defeat these elements."

Now from the same article, we have the response by Nancy Pelosi, second in succession to the presidency (and who Rich Galen of Mullings fame has taken to calling "Pelosium-2007," evidently confusing her with the Polonium-210 that was used to assassinate former Russian spy turned dissident Alexander Litvinenko). After hearing Bush discuss the violence fomented in large part by al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group formerly headed by Musab Zarqawi (until we finally killed him), and now by Hamza Muhajir, the divine Ms. P. opines:

"My thoughts on the president's representations are well-known," Pelosi said. "The 9/11 Commission dismissed that notion a long time ago and I feel sad that the president is resorting to it again."

Blink. Blink blink.

Can it really be true that Nancy Pelosi has never heard of Zarqawi, Muhajir, and al-Qaeda in Iraq, hence misunderstood Bush to be talking about the larger al-Qaeda run by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri?

For some reason I can't put my finger on, this reminds me of the scene in the movie the Shining, where Shelly Duvall (Olive Oyl) discovers that the entire manuscript of the book that Jack Nicholson (the Joker) has been writing for months consists of nothing but "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," repeated thousands and thousands of times... you know, that moment of frisson when we realize that old Jack didn't just go insane... he's been a stark, raving lunatic for months -- and Duvall has been sleeping right next to him that whole time.

I don't know why this latest Pelosi escapade brought that scene to mind. Never mind, forget I even brought it up.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 29, 2006, at the time of 05:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hostile Takeover

Global War on Jihadism , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , Syrian Slitherings
Hatched by Dafydd

I've been thinking about Iraq lately.

All right, all right; I rarely think about anything but Iraq lately, unless it's to think about Iran. Or Syria. Or the GWOT in general. A few days discussing the principles behind police raids was a welcome respite. But here I am again, like a junkie, back in Iraq (mentally).

Yep, I'm goin' to Mes'potamia in my mind.

The Iraq war was really two main phases. Some folks split it finer, but that's more detail than I want at the moment. Broadly speaking, we had the kick-out-the-Baathists phase I -- which was a screaming success -- and the build-up-a-stable-democracy phase II... which has been less than a screaming success. I wouldn't say phase II was a failure; but it was sure going a lot better a year ago than it is today.

For some reason, this reminded me of the classic example of a start-up technology company: they often have an incredible first two or three years; they introduce radical and highly profitable technological advances, allowing them to capture a small but still significant market share... but then they tend to stagnate.

Suddenly, they can't do anything right: they mismanage their IPO; they start having labor problems; QC becomes a big problem, and they're swamped with help-desk calls. They promote their smartest engineers to head up the European division, and within six months they're hopelessly mired in regulatory purgatory. They drop a bundle on TV advertising -- and sales actually go down, rather than up!

The Midas touch has turned to a black thumb. What's going on? How did they go from gold to grunge in such a short time?

Often the very person who made them such a success at the very beginning -- the entrepeneur who started the company and whose vision has been guiding it all along -- is precisely the reason they fail later. The successful engineer is not only creative and innovative, he is easily bored by the mundane reality of running a middling large company. Of course he is; if he weren't, then he probably would have continued working where he was before starting his own company!

The very act of starting a new company implies the entrepeneur prefers to roll the dice than slog through the day-to-day quagmire of corporate shenanigans. But when a company reaches a certain size, it needs an innovator at the helm far less than it needs a steady and experienced player who knows how to work the machine and where all the metaphors are buried.

Innovation is essential; but it's less essential than really knowing how to get a payroll out, how to mollify the workers and (if necessary) deal with the unions, and yes, how to grease the skids of foreign regulatory systems: who you must pay off to get certified for retail sales in Upper Iguana.

The company no longer needs an entrepeneur at the helm: it needs a CEO.

But the founder will rarely leave his baby voluntarily; thus, unless the board of directors ousts him and hires an actual corporate-manager CEO, the company will probably founder, becoming yet another failed start-up.

I think you may see where I'm going with this...

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been one of the most innovative SecDefs in American history; a recent article or blogpost I read about him said he had initiated over one hundred major reforms at the Pentagon. His "snowflakes" (Post-It notes asking tough questions or suggesting alternative ways to think about some problem) are legendary.

And he had a tremendous impact on the American military, probably moreso than any SecDef in the last forty years.

But Rumsfeld has also antagonized the hell out of the E-ring of that five-sided building. He has become the lightning rod for everybody who hates American hegemony. He has been subject to scurrilous and vicious attacks by former generals, foreign defense ministers, the U.N., NATO, and many other representatives of "the military industrial complex" around the world.

In other words, Rumsfeld, like the classic entrepeneur with a cool start-up, has been long (very long) on innovation but quite short on management and people-relations. For a good, long while, that was exactly what we needed.

But now that the Iraq war has shifted into a new state -- call it phase II.V, if you want -- where what it needs is finesse, management, diplomacy (to drag in more coalition allies and make them actually fight), diplomacy (to wheedle a reluctant Democratic Congress aboard), diplomacy (to sooth the ruffled feathers of the brass and hold their hands while the reforms creak slowly forward), and above all, diplomacy (to do a better job explaining to the American voters what the heck we're doing)... well, I think maybe it's time for the entrepeneur to step aside in favor of the experienced CEO.

Robert Gates may be just the fellow:

  • He's a career bureaucrat who rose up the ranks of the CIA from a mere analyst to the Director of Central Intelligence... probably the only man ever to do that; so he knows how to play a bureaucracy probably better than anyone currently in government. (In that respect, the Pentagon is likely little different from Langley.)
  • He has served in the White Houses of five different presidents, both Democratic and Republican; so he knows how to talk to both sides of the aisle and cajole them into doing what the current president needs to have done.
  • He worked closely with James Baker -- and with Ronald Reagan.
  • He can convincingly peddle the line that he had nothing to do with getting us into Iraq... but now that we're there, we'd bloody well better win, not lose.
  • He has credentials both as a "neocon hawk" (with Reagan against the Soviet Union) and as a "moderate realist" with Baker and Scowcroft... so he will probably get along better with various factions within the GOP.
  • And he might turn out to be better at communicating with everyone that Rumsfeld was -- which frankly wouldn't be hard, as the current SecDef is notoriously prickly and closemouthed.

The reforms that Rumsfeld initiated have become part of the system; the best person to shepherd them through now is probably someone who is part of that system, not an outsider imposing it from above. Such monomaniacal brilliance was necessary to kick-start reform in the first place; the insiders were too comfortable endlessly refighting World War II. But now that the bureaucratic reform ball is a-roll, I suspect we need a bureaucrat (who isn't afraid of innovation) to keep it rolling in the right direction.

The entrepeneur vs. the CEO; I have always suspected that the larger a corporation, the more it resembles government. I think we're about to see just how far that analogy applies.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 29, 2006, at the time of 05:26 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 21, 2006

Good Hunting in Ramadi

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

After surviving three weeks in Virginia before, during, and after the election mania, followed by three weeks underway a-sea, I am finally back on land. As usual I did not get sick at all in the stormy weather on board. But I am quite land-sick at this moment! Now if I can somehow find my way back to California just before Thanksgiving without living the nightmare of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, I will be OK.

Now let's get back to the serious business of war shall we?

If the terrorists and "insurgents" in Iraq thought Democrats taking both houses meant American defeat in Iraq, they are devastatingly mistaken. Last week, American and Iraqi forces engaged in a series of attacks against Sunni terrorists, killing and apprehending a large number of targets without any deaths of our own. Bill Roggio reports: (Hat tip Belmont Club)

In Kirkuk, the 3rd Battalion, 1st Brigade, 5th Division of Iraqi Army, in conjunction with the 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division conducted a brigade sized operation in and around the northern city of Kirkuk. The operation, originally announced on November 16th, was a major success. The Iraqi Army and U.S. forces killed nearly 50 insurgents and captured an additional 20 in a raid on a "large cache complex." "The caches included over 400,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, 15,000 rounds of heavy machine gun ammunition, five mortar bipods, three heavy machine guns, three anti-tank weapons, two recoilless rifles and numerous mortar rounds, grenades, flares and artillery rounds," according to Multinational Forces Iraq. The soldiers also found materials to make roadside bombs as well as "propaganda materials and a large amount of U.S. dollars." Seven al-Qaeda were detained in a separate raid in Kirkuk.

In Baquba, Iraqi and U.S. Army forces engaged Sunni insurgents. Eighteen were killed and 19 wounded, although it is not clear if these were insurgents or if civilians are included. Multinational Forces Iraq has not released information on the contact. [No] Iraqi or U.S. soldiers were killed in the fighting. On Saturday, Coalition forces killed nine insurgents and captured two during a raid in Yusifiyah. [The missing word "no" at the start of the last sentence is clear from Roggio's earlier summation that "in each engagement, Sunni insurgents took massive casualties with no U.S. or Iraq forces killed" and by the odd sentence structure. -- Dafydd]

In Ramadi, the flashpoint of the the Sunni insurgency in Anbar province, and arguably the most dangerous city in Iraq outside of Baghdad, Iraqi and U.S. forces conducted two large raids over the past week. On November 13 and 14, U.S. forces killed 11 insurgents in 3 separate incidents. The insurgents were emplacing roadside bombs and were engaged with tank and small arms fire....

On Saturday, Coalition forces killed 8 insurgents and detained 2 during a morning raid in Ramadi.

This kind of lopsided victory is typical of our battles against terrorists. Then why, you may ask, do "insurgents" keep on fighting?

There are two major reasons:

  • The western media, American reporters in the lead, keep telling them that any moment now, Americans are going to lose interest in the war and quit. If the terrorists will just persist, eventually they will win. (There are always plenty more where their lost comrades came from -- or so our own media keeps telling them!)
  • Second, we have not yet seriously engaged either Iran or its sock puppet Syria along the borders, putting an end to those two terrorist states supply of weapons, manpower, and terrorist training to the Iraqi Shia, specifically to the Mahdi Militia of Iranian agent Muqtada Sadr... who continue to kill ordinary Sunni at an alarming rate.

    Because of that, as Bill Roggio points out, Sunni terrorists believe they must "fight back"... not only against Iraqi Shia but also against American forces, who they see not as neutral arbiters but active collaborators in the "genocide" of Sunnis in Iraq.

I cannot completly blame them for believing that, since we pushed for this government and we're not forcing them to crack down on the Shiite militias -- so far, at least. But the Sunni must come to realize that siding with al-Qaeda and fighting against Americans is not the way to ensure their safety. Contrariwise, it's a certain path to their own ultimate destruction.

I believe we could seal the borders, if we were willing to continuously patrol them by air and change the rules of engagement (ROE) such that we simply fire missiles upon any vehicles or bodies of men crossing the border anywhere but one or two checkpoints manned by heavy joint American and New Iraqi Army forces. So far, we have not done so, at least so far as I've heard.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson is thinking along the same lines. Here is how he ended a recent column on NRO:

So yes, let us talk about sending more troops, or taking them out altogether, or cry about bad news coverage. But the truth is that, if they were given more tactical leeway to go on the offensive, we would already have enough soldiers in Iraq to win a victory that even a hostile media will have to acknowledge and enemies watching must respect — but only if we persevere here at home in this latest climate of renewed hysteria.

The time is now: we must disband all the Shiite militias, starting with the Mahdi Militia -- and Muqtada Sadr must go. Permanently. As long as they (and he) exist, there will be no peace in Iraq.

But, saying and doing are not the same thing. In the battle against the Shiite militias, American forces are facing the same problem we faced back in 2004 against al-Qaeda in Fallujah and elsewhere: while we have overwhelmingly superior forces and we win every battle, even after taking territory we cannot hold it. The enemy simply trickles back as soon as we leave. (In fact, that was Hussein's very intelligent resistance plan from the very beginning, something we didn't realize until two years after we invaded.) This is the "whack-a-mole" situation, and it's very hard to break out of that routine.

The way we resolved the Fallujah situation was to train up Iraqi troops -- and then use them to secure the cities we captured: Americans conquered, Iraqis held. The danger is that we cannot trust the Iraqi troops entirely: many of them are sympathetic to the Shiite militias. I still believe that is the only workable approach; but we need more American troops to keep and eye on the Iraqis as they hold the territories.

It will take time to purge the Shiite militia members from the Iraqi Army and police forces. But if we can secure the area temporarily with American troops, we will have time to clean up the Iraqi forces and kill off militia. Pace Victor Davis Hanson, but maybe that would be a good reason to send 20,000 or 25,000 more American troops to Iraq: to serve as occupation forces. (With such emphasis on lightning-war as we've had recently, could we even successfully occupy territory? I think we would still remember how to do that.)

I hope Americans will have the political will to commit ourselves to this. It can be done. Military victory can be achieved. All we need is a renewed commitment.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 21, 2006, at the time of 07:01 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 20, 2006

Four "Conservatives" In Search of an Ideology

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Again, the New York Times demonstrates its extraordinary cluelessness about any politics to the right of Bill Clinton.

In today's bizarre media outing, they headline that Henry Kissinger now says that "victory in Iraq is not possible" (which is only accurate if you sort of squint and lean over to one side as you read Kissinger's actual quotation) -- and then go on to dub him as one of "a growing number of leading conservatives" criticizing the Bush administration's handling of the war.

"Well there's your problem on a nutshell!"

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who regularly advises President Bush on Iraq, said today that a full military victory was no longer possible there. He thus joined a growing number of leading conservatives openly challenging the administration’s conduct of the war and positive forecasts for it.

“If you mean, by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” Mr. Kissinger told BBC News.

Ah; so what Mr. K. is really saying is that he's pessimistic about the attention span of the American public. After watching the results of the election, I can see how a dour cynic like Kissinger could arrive at that conclusion. Being neither dour nor cynical myself, I don't share his defeatism... but regardless, he certainly is not saying that military victory is impossible -- just that he doesn't believe the public will sit still for one.

Fiddle de dee; that's not my point. My focus is the title the Times bestowed, dubbing Dr. Kissinger "Knight of the Conservative Countenance." Heavens to Murgatroyd, if the writer or any of the thirteen layers of editors had troubled to read Kissinger's Wikipedia entry, they would have discovered that he was flatly described as a "liberal Republican" whose first non-academic job was as a paid advisor to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York.

(He's best known for working for President Richard Nixon -- also not a conservative. Nixon introduced affirmative action, revenue sharing, and détente with the Soviet Union, the last being the brainchild of Kissinger himself. Nixon was also the president who said "we're all Keynesians on this bus.")

Joining Kissinger in the tank are such "leading conservatives" as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ, 80%) -- "a respected figure on military matters" -- Sen. Lindsay "JAG-man" Graham (R-SC, 96%), and the Mouth of the Potomac, Kenneth Adelman; who after making ludicrously pollyanna predictions about the ease of the Iraq war ("it'll be a cakewalk!") -- now has grown disillusioned that, three years on, we haven't democratized the entire Middle East. ("Aren't we there yet?")

What is striking is that not a single one of these people could credibly be called a conservative by anyone with the least familiarity with the conservative ideology:

  • Adelman is a typical neocon, though perhaps more muddled, impatient, and whiny than most;
  • Graham, during the entire year of 2006, paraded as a Homer-Simpson populist on virtually every important issue, from judges to terrorist interrogations to the conduct of the war;
  • McCain's only religion is McCainism, and he's the pope of it;
  • And Henry Kissinger is the very model of a modern realpolitik.

These folks all live, breathe, and work worlds apart from Ronald Reagan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, or even John Bolton: they do not decide... they temporize. Instead of a compass, they carry a weathercock strapped to their backs.

It would be as if we were to proclaim that "leading liberals" now opposed tax increases -- and cited for our examples Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE, 55%), senator-elect Jim Webb, and former governor and senator Zell Miller!

But what is most remarkable is that the Times musters this mob in motley to present the appearance of "conservative" dissent on the future conduct of the war, to buttress the call for withdrawal from Iraq (the Times is ecumenical: they do not mind whether withdrawal is immediate or phased).

Yet each and every one of these gentlemen (no ladies, I notice -- is the New York Times going soft?) in fact calls for just the opposite: the addition of more troops, not fewer, to secure Iraq. Even in this very article, they all reject cutting and running out of hand. Yes, even "Hammerin' Hank" Kissinger:

Mr. Kissinger, in the BBC interview, said the United States must open talks with Iraq’s neighbors, pointedly including Iran, if progress is to be achieved in Iraq. Mr. Bush has said the United States is ready for such talks, but only if Iran moves to halt its nuclear enrichment work. American officials say low-level talks with Syria have produced little progress.

But Mr. Kissinger also said that a hasty withdrawal from Iraq would have “disastrous consequences,” leaving not only Iraq but neighboring countries with large Shiite populations destabilized for years.

He said the United States would probably have to plot a road between military victory and total withdrawal.

Whatever that means -- if anything at all -- it sure doesn't mean what John Murtha or Carl Levin mean! So what does the Times mean? (If it means anything at all, either.)

Quote of the day goes to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, 100%) -- who probably is not being touted by the Times as one of those "leading conservatives." He has thoughts about how effective diplomacy could be, were we just to give it a chance... and he has a singular example in mind:

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, cited Mr. Kissinger’s own negotiations with the North Vietnamese in arguing for engagement with Iran and Syria.

“If you pursue legitimate diplomacy, the way Henry Kissinger did when he made multiple trips, night after night, day after day, twisting arms, working; if you make the effort that Jim Baker did to build a legitimate coalition, I’m confident we can do what’s necessary to get the neighborhood — and I include in that Iran and Syria — to take greater stakes,” Mr. Kerry told Fox News.

Yes, well Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy certainly worked wonders in Vietnam. (Just imagine... were it not for the Boat People, where would dwellers in the inner city go to buy groceries each week?)

I'm always puzzled why organizations like the New York Times cannot seem to comprehend the modern conservative. You needn't be one; I'm not, but I daresay I have a better handle on the breed than does Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger, jr., despite my lack of investigative resources, bureau chiefs on every continent, and multiple layers of editing.

Maybe the Times should open a Bureau of Conservatism? If they can find a translator who speaks the language, that is.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 20, 2006, at the time of 06:21 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 16, 2006

Take Him At His Word

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

After being crushed by Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD, 95%) in the bruising battle to be number 2 -- there, there, Rep. Murtha, you'll always be number 2 in my book! -- John Murtha (D-PA, 75%) made the following petulant comment:

Murtha will chair the powerful defense subcommittee with responsibility for the war in Iraq and the Pentagon budget. "Nancy asked me to set a policy for the Democratic Party. Most of the party signed onto it," he said, referring to pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq.

All right, let's take him at his word. There will likely be 232 Democrats in the 110th. Congress. Half of 232 is 116; so "most" is 117. Let's be generous and say 150, or 65%.

That would leave 82 Democrats who do not "sign onto" the Murtha-Pelosi defeat-retreat. Add in the 203 Republicans, and you get a solid majority against "redeployment to Okinawa" of 285, or 66% of Congress.

Even if some Republicans despair and want to throw in the towel -- though nobody has found a single House Republican willing to say so -- you would have to lose 67 Republicans to get a majority in the House to vote defeatist. And that's assuming that when Murtha said "most," he really meant an overwhelming "most," not a bare "most."

Even if he did mean overwhelming, it would have to be virtually unanimous, assuming the Republicans stick together (which they likely will; no Republican ran on a campaign promise to yank the troops out immediately, handing Iraq over to the terrorists, so far as I know). With 203 nays, the Democrats would have to hold all but 14 members to a campaign to ensure defeat in Iraq, a remarkable percentage of 94% of House Democrats anxious to spit on the graves of 2,800 brave American soldiers and Marines.

I think it will be virtually impossible to get a defeatist vote out of the Congress, either house; let alone a big enough one to override an inevitable veto by President Bush (which would require all the Democrats plus nearly 30% of the Republicans). John and Nancy are out of luck in more ways than one today.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 16, 2006, at the time of 12:00 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

The Guardian Spills the Beans

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In a longish and fascinating article linked by Drudge, the left-wing U.K. Guardian (once the Manchester Guardian) offers us more analysis and realistic speculation than any American newspaper I've yet read. It's definitely worth reading in its entirety.

The basic thrust is here:

President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers, according to sources familiar with the administration's internal deliberations.

I have read that George W. Bush is a very good poker player. I'm just a tyro, but I do know this much...

Suppose you're playing Hold 'Em. You're at the turn (the second to last face-up card dealt), and you have two pair and four to a flush. The only other guy left in the hand puts a really big bet down. Do you:

  1. Fold;
  2. Call his bet; or
  3. Raise?

There's no hard and fast answer, naturally. But were I the player, I would raise -- and I would go all in. The only other viable option is to fold; you're guaranteed to lose the hand, but you limit your losses. The worst decision, in my opinion, would be to call the bet... because then you're playing to his tempo, not yours.

If you go all in, you suddenly throw your opponent into his own quandry: he thought his hand was worth X, and now he has to decide if it's worth five times X. Good chance he'll fold: maybe you have a flush, maybe a full house -- is he willing to risk it?

You see? He's playing at your pace; or in military terms, at your operational tempo. That's why you raise -- and raise big. Here's the Guardian on Bush's decision and the impact it will have:

Mr Bush's refusal to give ground, coming in the teeth of growing calls in the US and Britain for a radical rethink or a swift exit, is having a decisive impact on the policy review being conducted by the Iraq Study Group chaired by Bush family loyalist James Baker, the sources said.

Although the panel's work is not complete, its recommendations are expected to be built around a four-point "victory strategy" developed by Pentagon officials advising the group. The strategy, along with other related proposals, is being circulated in draft form and has been discussed in separate closed sessions with Mr Baker and the vice-president Dick Cheney, an Iraq war hawk.

The four points are:

  1. Increase, rather than decrease the force level, possibly by 20,000 (I doubt the Guardian knows the exact number);
  2. More "regional cooperation," meaning more of Iraq's neighbors need to be persuaded that a full-scale civil war benefits nobody and is a disaster for many -- Turkey, for example, which is terrified of a widespread movement to create independent "Kurdistan" with the Kurds from Iraq and Turkey; and also Jorday, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia certainly don't want millions of Sunni refugees pouring across their poorly defended borders;
  3. A renewed push to get the Iraqi Sunni and Shia to "just get along," as Rodney King said; I don't believe the Iraqis really want a civil war: but that means a clampdown on the death squads and militias and a reinvigorated Sunni population ratting out more of the al-Qaeda terrorists.

    (3) can be helped a lot by (1), as I suspect a lot of Iraqis assumed that if the Democrats won, we would pull out instantly. If instead we send more troops and prove we're staying, we'll start getting more actionable intelligence;

  4. Pushing Congress hard to really get behind the war with more resources. This may be tricky, but if the Guardian and Big Lizards are right that the Iraq Study Group will recommend raising instead of folding, and with the anti-Rumsfeldian generals agreeing, the Democrats will be trapped between Scylla and Charybdis, caught between Iraq and a hard peace: they'll probably agree because otherwise, they'll be seen as the obstructionists -- a very bad move for the majority party.

Here is the neo-leftist take on the choice:

"You've got to remember, whatever the Democrats say, it's Bush still calling the shots. He believes it's a matter of political will. That's what [Henry] Kissinger told him. And he's going to stick with it," a former senior administration official said. "He [Bush] is in a state of denial about Iraq. Nobody else is any more. But he is. But he knows he's got less than a year, maybe six months, to make it work. If it fails, I expect the withdrawal process to begin next fall."

Gee, I wonder who that "former senior administration official" could be? A former secretary of state, perhaps? Or maybe his former loose-lipped, shaven-head deputy? I am still amazed that so many people at such high levels of government are so determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. How can they still be so invested in failure and disgrace?

The official added: "Bush has said 'no' to withdrawal, so what else do you have? The Baker report will be a set of ideas, more realistic than in the past, that can be used as political tools. What they're going to say is: lower the goals, forget about the democracy crap, put more resources in, do it."

I think "the official" is still mad that President Bush wouldn't listen to his wise counsel of doing absolutely nothing.

There is this possibility, raised by the Guardian: maybe the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group was all set to say "let's declare defeat and go home." But maybe after Monday's talk with President Bush, they realized -- as Big Lizards suggested -- that if the commander in chief were adamant about not quitting, but the ISG made that their primary recommendation, they would be dismissed out of hand like insolent lackeys.

Rather than be humiliated like that (this theory goes), they are rewriting their conclusions and recommendations to something that is acceptable to the administration. That way, their advice might be heeded, and they look like they actually matter.

If this is what happened, it's a marvelous illustration of the power of a willful president for whom defeat is not an option. That is far more in keeping with Bush's previous history anent the Iraq and Afghanistan battles and the larger GWOT itself, than the silly suggestions from some quarters that Bush was about to quit, withdraw, and hand Iraq over to the tender mercies of Iran and Syria.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 16, 2006, at the time of 02:00 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 15, 2006

Won't Say "We Told You So," But...

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Long, long ago (I mean last Saturday), we posted the speech that we hoped -- and thought -- President Bush would be making some time in December or January. The essence was this (this is supposed to be Bush speaking):

I always said that when it came to waging wars, I would always listen first to the professionals who actually have the responsibility for victory. After having consulted extensively with the commanders on the ground, and with both the new leaders in Congress and also those of my own party, I have concluded that I was wrong, and the critics were right. We sent enough troops to overthrow Saddam Hussein and win the war. But after major combat operations ended, I did not leave enough troops in Iraq to secure the peace.

So tonight I am announcing that I have decided to send an additional 75,000 troops to Iraq. The command staff shall submit a report as soon as possible detailing exactly how many more personnel of each service we need and where we need them.

Specifically, we pointed to three major goals that we simply had to achieve in order to win in Iraq:

  1. "Secure Iraq's borders with both Iran and Syria;"
  2. "Secure the Iraq frontier, primarily in the province of Anbar;"
  3. "Secure the capital city of Baghdad, where more than 20% of the entire population of Iraq lives."

The consensus around the blogosphere (both hemispheres) was that the Democrats -- many of whom ran on a Murtha-esque "yank 'em out now" or Sen. Carl Levin's (D-MI, 100%) "Murtha Lite" -- had thereby painted themselves into a hole: they would have to push for some species of withdrawal, whether it was total or just a draw-down. (To remind you, Levin is the senator whose spectacles are superglued to the bulb of his proboscis.)

But now, a whole new paradigm has burst forth, like whoever it was from the other fellow's brow; and it's being argued by none other than the New York Times, epitome of left-wingwallowing, with a headline that gives away the plot twist... Get Out Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say:

One of the most resonant arguments in the debate over Iraq holds that the United States can move forward by pulling its troops back, as part of a phased withdrawal. If American troops begin to leave and the remaining forces assume a more limited role, the argument holds, it will galvanize the Iraqi government to assume more responsibility for securing and rebuilding Iraq....

But this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.

If this sounds familiar, it's because you read it here first (or at least "earlier"). For example, Big Lizards:

Certainly there is no consensus of the American people to give up, to surrender, to withdraw and leave Iraq to be dismembered by Iran and Syria. Americans aren't Spaniards.

Rather, Democrats were elected on a considerably more nuanced platform: they promised only a "change of course" in Iraq, mostly because they couldn't agree among themselves: John Murtha never convinced Anthony Zinni, and Eric Shinseki never persuaded Harry Reid.

The New York Times:

Anthony C. Zinni, the former head of the United States Central Command and one of the retired generals who called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, argued that any substantial reduction of American forces over the next several months would be more likely to accelerate the slide to civil war than stop it....

Instead of taking troops out, General Zinni said, it would make more sense to consider deploying additional American forces over the next six months to “regain momentum” as part of a broader effort to stabilize Iraq that would create more jobs, foster political reconciliation and develop more effective Iraqi security forces.

I would hate to think that the Times was taking its cue from Big Lizards for the proper response to win the Iraq war! If so, then why can't I get above 2,000 visitors a day "circulation?" (Of course, all the drive-by media may be headed down where Big Lizards is; maybe we'll pass them on the way up?)

John Batiste, another one of the "anti-Rumsfeldians," has chimed in supporting the Zinni proposal:

“The point of the proposal is to force the Iraqis to take hold of the situation politically,” Mr. [Carl] Levin said.

But some current and retired military officers say the situation in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq is too precarious to start thinning out the number of American troops. In addition, they worry that some Shiite leaders would see the reduction of American troops as an opportunity to unleash their militias against the Sunnis and engage in wholesale ethnic cleansing to consolidate their control of the capital [Baghdad].

John Batiste, a retired Army major general who also joined in the call for Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation, described the Congressional proposals for troop withdrawals as “terribly naïve.”

“There are lots of things that have to happen to set them up for success,” General Batiste, who commanded a division in Iraq, said in an interview, describing the Iraqi government. “Until they happen, it does not matter what we tell Maliki....”

Indeed, General Batiste has recently written that pending the training of an effective Iraqi force, it may be necessary to deploy tens of thousands of additional “coalition troops.” General Batiste said he hoped that Arab and other foreign nations could be encouraged to send troops. [Fat chance, unless by "Arab and other foreign nationals," he means Syria and Iran -- who would be overjoyed to send armies into Iraq!]

And what exactly should be the goals of these new American forces? Rather, "Coalition" forces... assuming there are any countries left in the West besides us who can actually fight. The Times answers that question:

  • Reduce Iraqi unemployment;
  • Secure Iraq's borders with both Iran and Syria;
  • "Enlist more cooperation" from tribal sheikhs -- in the Iraq frontier, primarily in the province of Anbar;
  • Weaken or crush the militias -- which primarily plague "the capital," i.e., Baghdad.

Finally, Kenneth M. Pollack, a Brookings Institution guy, argues that pulling out now will make a bona-fide civil war inevitable; as Wikipedia puts it, "the Brookings Institution is a center-left think tank, based in Washington, D.C.... currently headed by Strobe Talbott."

This is precisely the fig leaf the Democrats can use, if they choose, to turn on a dime and give a nickle change. Especially if the Iraq Study Group (the Jim Baker commission) recommends a troop increase, as I suspect they will, instead of a pull-out: then the momentum for sending in a bunch of troops to secure borders, borderlands, and Baghdad will become irresistable.

At least, let's keep our fingers crossed: not only will it make the war infinitely more winnable than if we were to pull out prematurely (like Onan did) -- which is the most important consideration -- but secondarily, it will enrage the nutroots and cause them to go all-out to force a Kossack wack-job on the party as the 2008 presidential nominee. I don't know if they'll succeed... but I like the idea of la bataille royale within the Democratic Party for the next two years!

One more thing; take a look at the last line from our previous post:

By the way... if I'm right, and the Democrats are willing to go for a change in this direction instead of insisting on that direction, then I predict they will also go ahead and confirm Robert Gates as SecDef.

And compare to Sen. Harry Reid's (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%) "top priority" that we quoted from an AP story yesterday:

[110th Congress Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid told The Associated Press that a top priority for the remainder of the lame-duck session will be confirming Robert Gates as defense secretary, succeeding Donald H. Rumsfeld. "The sooner we can move it forward the sooner we can get rid of Rumsfeld," he said.

Heh again.

The Democrats might surprise me and prove more stubborn and mulish in their demand for an American defeat than I imagined. But on the other hand, don't be too surprised if next month, or else at the beginning of the new year, you hear Bush give a (better written) version of the speech from our ancient post of four days ago.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 15, 2006, at the time of 04:42 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

November 13, 2006

More Evidence Bush HASN'T Changed His Mind About Iraq

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

The elite media is starting to backstep from its initial preposterous claims that President Bush planned to order a quick withdrawal from Iraq, handing it over to Iran and its lapdog, Syria.

An AP story today confirms the president's stability on the Iraq war and his rejection of any timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops. It's now quite clear that the intention of both the U.S. and the U.K. is victory in Iraq -- not retreat and defeat:

President Bush traded ideas on Iraq with a bipartisan commission Monday and promised to work with the incoming Democratic majority toward "common objectives." At the same time, he renewed his opposition to any timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops....

Asked about proposals by [incoming Chairman of the Senate Armed Serviced Committee Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI, 100%)] and others for a phased troop reduction, Bush said, "I believe it is very important ... for people making suggestions to recognize that the best military options depend upon the conditions on the ground."

Even liberal Republican Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME, 32%) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC, 96%) rejected a timetable, along with moderate John Warner (R-VA, 88%), current Armed Services chairman; not a single Republican was quoted supporting even the Levin proposal (withdrawal over 4 to 6 months), let alone John Murtha's (D-PA, 75%) demand for "immediate withdrawal." So Bush and the Republicans in Congress are still completely in agreement on this point. (Point of order: while Graham has a higher partisanship rating than does Warner, that is from 2005; this year, Graham has taken a sharp turn to the left and is currently one of the more liberal senators in the Republican caucus.)

But what about the meme being spread by the media yesterday and earlier that President Bush was about to hand Iraq over to Iran and Syria to "stabilize," which many in-BEDDD bloggers on the right were panicking about? Yesterday, I responded to that meme with a certain amount of scorn; but I had only my own judgment about Bush's committment to rely upon.

Today, there is evidence that the focus on Iran and Syria remains a "get-tough" policy, not appeasement. With Britain's lame-duck Prime Minister Tony Blair's tough speech, in which he essentially made Iran and Syria "a message they cannot refuse," and with the parade of high-level American security officials to Iraq to bitch-slap Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki for not disbanding the Iranian-backed Shiite militias, it's clear the only message being sent to Iran and Syria is to back off from Iraq or face total isolation:

The reference to Iraq's neighbors [Iran and Syria] coincided with a call by British Prime Minister Tony Blair for Iran and Syria to help stem bloodshed in Iraq and to join efforts to stabilize the Middle East.

In a major foreign policy speech Monday night, Blair warned there would be no incentives or concessions for doing so and that any failure to assist would lead to international isolation for the two countries.

As the definition of appeasement requires specific "incentives or concessions" -- "if we let you have Czechoslovakia, will you please give us peace in our time?" -- this is very heartening news. I certainly don't know whether it will work; unless we show a lot more muscle on the border, I doubt it. But this is clearly a stick-speech, not a carrot-speech.

A piece in the (London/UK) Times about Blair's speech confirms both the PM's ultimatum to Iran and Syria and also President Bush's committment to a free Iraq -- and his lack of interest in pressuring Israel to give up more concessions for "the peace process" (a.k.a., the process in pieces):

Mr Blair said there could be a new “partnership” with Iran if it stopped supporting terrorism in Iraq and gave up its nuclear ambitions. Syria and Iran could choose partnership or isolation, he said....

Mr Blair said that the choice for Iran was clear. “They help the Middle East peace process, not hinder it; they stop supporting terrorism in Lebanon or Iraq and they abide by, not flout, their international obligations. In that case, a new partnership is possible. Or, alternatively, they face the consequence of not doing so: isolation.”

Here is the Times on Bush's response to Syria (which the paper had earlier erroneously identified as one of "two countries once dubbed by President Bush as part of the 'axis of evil'" (the axis of evil actually comprised Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, not Syria):

But Mr Bush also had harsh words for Syria, a country with which, unlike Iran, the US has diplomatic relations. The President said that Syria should stop interfering in Lebanon and “harbouring extremists” and must begin helping “this young democracy in Iraq succeed”.

Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to the United States, said that his country was willing to engage with Britain and America.

I really adore this truculent paragraph in the Times about Bush and Israel:

And, in words clearly directed at Mr Bush as he prepares for his final two years in power, Mr Blair called for the United States to lead a new drive towards peace in the Middle East, including peace in Palestine and the Lebanon, arguing that ultimately it was the only way to defeat al-Qaeda....

The Prime Minister still hopes to persuade the US to engage fully in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, but frustrated British diplomats in Washington say that the White House shows no real sign of being interested in the subject. Mr Bush yesterday said that he had discussed with Mr Olmert the two-state solution and the need for the Palestinian government to embrace the principles behind the road map for the Middle East peace process, but made it clear that their talks had focused on Iran and Iraq.

Heh.

Back to the AP article about various American defense officials pressuring Maliki to disband the Shiite militias:

Abizaid was the third top U.S. official to visit Iraq since Oct. 30, and the meeting came a day after al-Maliki promised to shake up his government in a bid to end the sectarian slaughter.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was first to visit, followed five days later by U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

Before Abizaid pushed the same theme, Negroponte also demanded that al-Maliki disband militias by year's end - but was met with a flat rejection. Al-Maliki told Negroponte such a move would be political suicide. Al-Maliki, a Shiite, relies heavily on two major Shiite political groups which run the heavily armed militias.

In Monday's meeting, the government said, Abizaid "emphasized the multinational forces' commitment to training Iraqi security forces to handle security in all Iraqi provinces." [That is, the New Iraqi Army and the Iraqi National Police -- not private militias, especially not the Mahdi Militia, which is controlled by Iran through Muqtada Sadr, or the Badr Brigades, which are at the least heavily supported by Iran.]

Note that, while Hadley and Negroponte delivered this message before the election, Abizaid affirmed the same demand today, not only after the election but after speculation that Bush would pull out of Iraq and hand it over to Iran -- and Iran's Iraqi militias.

This back-and-forth highlights the central conundrum in Iraq: Muqtada Sadr, the most pro-Iran politician (and militia leader) in Iraq, was the kingmaker who put Maliki on the throne and who keeps him there. But the United States is getting angrier and angrier about Maliki's refusal (or inability) to rein in the Shiite militias... both Sadr's Mahdi Militia, which is overtly pro-Iranian, and also their bitter enemy, the Badr Brigades (controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, the strongest political opponents of Nouri al-Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party).

At some point, loggerheads will come to a head, and Maliki will be forced either to fish or get off the pot: he will have to choose between Sadr and Bush, because he won't be able to have the support of both. His attempt to get permission from the ruling parties to "shake up" his cabinet might be his first steps towards freeing himself from Muqtada Sadr's control; if Maliki succeeds, he might be able to substitute some SCIRI support for Sadr, thus freezing Sadr out of the government.

But in any event, it does appear that President Bush hasn't changed; he doesn't support withdrawal of U.S. troops; he isn't going to hand Iraq over to Iran and Syria; and even Tony Blair offered an ultimatum, not appeasement, to those two troublemaking states.

Surprise!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 13, 2006, at the time of 07:57 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

November 12, 2006

In-BEDDD Bloggers

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I'm coining a new phrase: Bush Election-Disappointment Depression Disorder, or BEDDD. (And that's just where some of them should be staying for a while, until they start to recover; I also recommend plenty of fluids.)

I've talked about this before, but it's not getting any better; rather, it seems to be sweeping the Right like an epidemic, despite the best efforts of Captain Ed, Hugh Hewitt, and myself. And one of the most seriously infected is my all-time favorite blog, Power Line. Read this post and see if you concur with my diagnosis (the indented bits come from the Kansas City Star article Power Line links):

The commission’s discussions are said to be focused on an option presented by a panel of experts that the United States concede that the situation in Iraq cannot be stabilized and make plans for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Iraq "cannot be stabilized"? That strikes me as a ridiculous statement. One can legitimately ask whether Iraq can be stabilized at acceptable political, military or financial cost. But that would require some hard analysis of what the stakes are and what those costs may be. Notwithstanding the results of Tuesday's election, I think the American people are adult enough for such a discussion.

[Director of National Intelligence John] Negroponte reportedly has come to agree with what is expected to be the most controversial of recommendations from the Baker group: that the United States approach Iran, and, in tandem with Israel, approach Syria, for help with Iraq, according to a source familiar with Negroponte’s thinking.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but this sounds like the kind of harebrained scheme that only a team of foreign policy "realists" could come up with. Why on God's green earth would Iran and Syria, individually or in tandem, help us to pacify Iraq? Both have been doing everything in their power to create disorder in Iraq for the last three years, presumably because they think it is in their interest to do so. How, exactly, do the "realists" expect to change those countries' assessments of their interests?

Puzzling: so John Hinderaker now believes that President Bush, who has fought against incredible odds to invade Iraq and then to maintain the U.S. presence there, specifically to prevent Iraq from becoming a safe haven for terrorists and jihadis, will now embrace a supposed recommendation that we simply negotiate with Iran -- the foremost sponsor of terrorism and the most jihadist state in the world -- and its sock puppet Syria to let them take over Iraq.

And what is the sourcing for these remarkable claims by the Kansas City Star? Let's examine the remarkably persuasive citations:

A top U.S. intelligence official has been meeting with Middle East counterparts to discuss proposals expected from the Baker commission on Iraq, Middle East sources have told Newsday....

The commission’s discussions are said to be focused on an option presented by a panel of experts that the United States concede that the situation in Iraq cannot be stabilized and make plans for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops.

An alternative proposal, that the United States commit money and troops toward stabilizing Iraq before a withdrawal, appears less likely of adoption, according to sources familiar with the proposals.... [Say, this "alternative proposal" sounds remarkably familiar... where have I heard it before? And why didn't Power Line mention this part of the article?]

Negroponte reportedly has come to agree with what is expected to be the most controversial of recommendations from the Baker group: that the United States approach Iran, and, in tandem with Israel, approach Syria, for help with Iraq, according to a source familiar with Negroponte’s thinking. A spokesman for Negroponte did not respond to a request for comment Friday....

Whether [a pledge not to attack Iran from Iraq] would be enough to persuade Iran to be more helpful in Iraq is not clear, analysts say. Iranian intelligence officials are said to be extremely worried about a precipitous U.S. pullout from Iraq, and resulting chaos, in the wake of Tuesday’s elections....

“[Secretary Designate of Defense Robert] Gates’ world is Brent Scowcroft and Baker and a whole bunch of people who felt the door had been slammed in their face,” one former official who has discussed Iraq at length with Gates said Thursday. “The door is about to reopen.”

Well! Who could argue with that?

So what do we really have? The elite media, which is well known to obscure, distort, and outright fabricate evidence (Rathergate) to push "the story," whatever it is, publishes articles to the effect that a chastened and vacillating President Bush has decided to throw the conservatives under the bus, convert to liberalism, and has brought Bob Gates in to the Pentagon in order to cut a treasonous deal with Iran to subdivide Iraq.

All this so Bush can quickly yank the troops out of Iraq, thus turning against every last jot and tittle of what he has deeply believed and passionately argued about Iraq, Afghanistan, the GWOT, terrorism, Iran, Syria, and Israel... and every single source they cite is anonymous!

Yet we believe them!

This is almost ritualistically unhinged blather from the antique media, with the usual lack of any sourcing whatsoever. Why does any of us take it seriously?

Let's turn it around: suppose the same paper wrote the same tripe; but instead of saying it was Bush who was so anxious to get out of Iraq that he was willing to hand it over to our greatest enemies in the Middle East, suppose the Kansas City Star claimed that the American military, the soldiers and Marines, were calling for this. And suppose the same level of non-citation.

Would anybody in the dextrosphere believe a word of this folderol? Would any of us believe that the rank and file of the Army or the Marines were so anxious to bug out that they wanted us to hand over the real estate they fought and bled and died for to the enemy?

So why, praytell, do we believe it of the president? President Bush has been at least as stalwart and steadfast on this issue as has any member of the military.

If this turns out to be true, then I and nearly every Republican -- and even a huge number of Democrats -- will recoil in horror from the remains of what had been the Bush administration. They might even themselves call for impeachment... and the congressional Democrats, in that circumstance, would be only too glad to oblige. I would applaud such a man being hounded from office.

But for now, I haven't seen one scrap of evidence beyond the self-serving claims of the media. Remember, there is a "story" in progress here; the story is:

  1. The Republicans will suffer a catastrophic landslide in the 2006 midterm elections;
  2. The voters will repudiate the Iraq war, demand an immediately pull-out, and vent their spleens on the GOP candidates en masse;
  3. The Democrats will take over and immediately take steps to implement the Murtha Mandate: declare defeat and come home, or rather, redeploy just around the corner to Okinawa;
  4. The craven and feckless George W. Bush will turn on a weathervane and support the Murtha Mandate, thus proving that he and every other Republican is an unprincipled bastard who believes in nothing at all, and who has confessed to lying to everybody all along;
  5. The terrorists will be so moved and grateful to the Democrats for exposing the American tyrant that they will beat their swords into ploughhorses and study war no more;
  6. The Democrats will move on from victory to victory, John Edwards (or Hillary, or what-you-may-call-um) will be elected president, and the GOP will cease to exist, to be replaced by the Greens, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Gay Marriage Party;
  7. The unified and triumphant Left will spread its fecundity to the stars.

Of these plot elements in the Grand Story of the American media, not even number 1 has come to pass: in fact, the Democratic electoral victory fell far short of a landslide and doesn't even look necessarily permanent. But already, the Star and other farsighted newspapers and broadcast TV news stations are working on convincing us of number 4.

In the meanwhile, they're going to have a dickens of a time with number 2, as a new survey by Newsweek reveals. Huge majorities of Americans supported the "legislative priorities" of the Democratic party:

  • 92% support the feds lowering drug prices for Medicare recipients by negotiating directly with drug companies;
  • 89% support increasing the minimum wage;
  • 88% support decreasing the rate of federally guaranteed student loans.

(Wow, three historic legislative revolutions there!)

But then this suddenly bubbled up; naturally, the headline made no reference to these findings [hat tip to Sachi, who e-mailed this to me today]:

While a bare majority of 51 percent called the Democrats' victory "a good thing," even more said they were concerned about some of the actions a Democratic Congress might take, including 78 percent who were somewhat or very concerned that it would seek too hasty a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Another 69 percent said they were concerned that the new Congress would keep the administration "from doing what is necessary to combat terrorism," and two-thirds said they were concerned it would spend too much time investigating the administration and Republican scandals.

Wait, I think I get it: Bush has become a weathercock who shifts with every political wind... which is why he will now cast all of his principles aside, go against everything he has ever argued, and spit upon the graves of American soldiers and Marines in order to implement a policy that is wildly unpopular among American adults.

Yeah. I believe it. And tomorrow, CNN will announce that Laura Bush has decided to join a hippie free-love commune in Big Sur.

Why are we always so quick to believe every horrible claim about President George W. Bush? I think the answer is twofold:

First, because, sad to say, what Thomas Sowell said about liberals in the Vision of the Anointed appears nowadays to apply equally well to conservatives: they have a vision; whoever shares the vision completely is one of the anointed and can do no wrong. But deviating from the vision in even the smallest degree of belief or ritual leads to excommunication; apostates are assumed to be unprincipled tyrants who will do every wicked thing for no reason other than nihilism and the joy of being beastly.

Bush deviates from the vision on one very important issue: rather than being a small-government conservative, he is a big-government conservative. Thus, he is utterly untrustworthy, and he's just looking for an excuse to stab us in the back -- so we'd better knife his back before he gets the chance!

Second, because I strongly believe that George W. Bush is still being punished for the sins of George H. W. Bush, the Judas-betrayer of Ronald Reagan. For after all, doesn't the Bible itself (Exodus 20:5) say...

I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of thy fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me.

(Or if you prefer the Jewish version...)

For I the Lord your God am an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me.

Bush the elder betrayed the god of conservatism; so many conservatives, who seem to believe moral weakness is a genetic trait (found on chromosome 19, perhaps), have assumed from the very beginning that Bush the younger was just waiting for a chance to do the same. Whether it's Harriet Miers, Dubai Ports World, or throwing Iraq to Iran like a baby to a hungry lion, these lay-a-BEDDDs are predisposed to believe the absolute worst of President Bush.

It's not just unseemly or even unjust; it's creepy. Why don't we all just back off and at least wait to see (a) what the Baker commission's recommendations are, (b) how Bush responds to them, and (c) what he can persuade the Democrats to do? It won't be long before we find out all of these; and there is nothing we can do in the meantime to affect the outcome of any of them anyway.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 12, 2006, at the time of 11:35 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

November 11, 2006

Bush's Iraq Speech Next January

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATE: I am remiss in forgetting to tip my hat to commenter jp phish, whose comment in a previous post started this train of thought down the narrow-gauge railway of my mind! Oops...

Contrary to popular belief (especially in the dextrosphere), the Democrats were not elected to control of Congress on a "platform" of withdrawing from Iraq: they were never that unified.

Certainly there is no consensus of the American people to give up, to surrender, to withdraw and leave Iraq to be dismembered by Iran and Syria. Americans aren't Spaniards.

Rather, Democrats were elected on a considerably more nuanced platform: they promised only a "change of course" in Iraq, mostly because they couldn't agree among themselves: John Murtha never convinced Anthony Zinni, and Eric Shinseki never persuaded Harry Reid.

Now of course, to most of the Democratic leadership, "change of course" meant "redeploy to Okinawa." But the very circumlocutions they used prove that they weren't certain that the American people would come along for the defeatism ride.

Actual words matter; and as the only Democratic policy everyone could agree on was to gainsay Bush's "stay the course" mantra -- that leaves the door wide open for Democrats to spin on a dish, now that they are responsible to more than just the nutroots, and argue the exact opposite course from the one many of them championed before the election.

Shortly after the 110th Congress convenes, I believe George W. Bush should demand network time; and he should make the following speech (imagine this being rewritten by Peggy Noonan, to give it that real Ronald Reagan Iran-Contra mea culpa flavor):

Good evening, my fellow Americans. The election of last November was decided on many issues: some, like eliminating corruption and scandal, we can all agree on. Others are more controversial.

The Iraq war is a controversial issue. Some Americans, good Americans who love their country, believe the fight is unwinnable. They believe the only option left to us is to leave defeated, since they do not believe we can leave victorious. I don't agree, and neither do most Americans.

Others believe we should withdraw to secure bases inside Iraq and let the New Iraqi Army that we helped the Iraqis build handle the rest of the fighting. They worry that if we continue to patrol, more Americans will die, and that our national will cannot withstand that. Again, I do not agree: we must continue to patrol and remain in close contact with the Iraqi people, because that is how we gather actionable intelligence to strike at the terrorists among them: if we don't interact with ordinary Iraqis on a day to day basis, we won't find out who the evil-doers are and where we can find them.

But for some time, many insightful Americans, both inside and outside government, have argued that we had not too many, but too few troops in Iraq to finish the job, secure victory against the terrorists and jihadis, and establish a thriving democracy, however different from ours it may appear, in the middle of the Middle East.

I have resisted ordering a major increase, because I know that the bigger the American footprint, the harder it will be in the end for Iraqis to see themselves as responsible for their own country. But the chorus has become a consensus; and now, even the generals on the ground in Iraq agree.

I always said that when it came to waging wars, I would always listen first to the professionals who actually have the responsibility for victory. After having consulted extensively with the commanders on the ground, and with both the new leaders in Congress and also those of my own party, I have concluded that I was wrong, and the critics were right. We sent enough troops to overthrow Saddam Hussein and win the war. But after major combat operations ended, I did not leave enough troops in Iraq to secure the peace.

So tonight I am announcing that I have decided to send an additional 75,000 troops to Iraq. The command staff shall submit a report as soon as possible detailing exactly how many more personnel of each service we need and where we need them. But we have three goals that must be satisfied in order to win this war:

We must secure Iraq's borders with both Iran and Syria. Both of those countries continue to smuggle weapons, explosives, and terrorists into Iraq. Until we can plug those leaks, we can never defeat the jihadis, because Iran and its proxy Syria can just send more.

We must secure the Iraq frontier, primarily in the province of Anbar. This is where many of the Sunni terrorists are based.

And finally, we must secure the capital city of Baghdad, where more than 20% of the entire population of Iraq lives. This means we must dismantle the Shiite militias, including the Iranian controlled Mahdi Militia of Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Brigades, which also have close ties with the ruling mullahs in Iran. The bulk of our new forces will be sent to Baghdad.

The new troops will stay at least a year. But they will not leave until the job is done. That is why they volunteered for this dangerous duty: to finish the job and win the war.

We will consult with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. And as much as we can, we will work side by side with the Iraqi Army with the blessing of the Iraqi government. But we invaded Iraq in the first place for a purpose: not just to free the Iraqi people, but to protect the United States of America by denying al-Qaeda and other jihadist terror groups a safe haven in which they can plot their war against us, develop weapons of mass destruction to use against us, and from which they can strike out and kill Americans anywhere in the world, including the American homeland.

The United States will not leave Iraq without fulfiling that purpose. We are steadfast in adversity, we are courageous in combat. Until we are assured that Iraq will never again ally itself with extremism, terrorism, and never again threaten naked aggression against the rest of the world, including against American interests and even America itself, we will not falter or fail. We will do what must be done to protect ourselves, now and in the future.

I call upon Congress to pass a bipartisan bill to authorize this temporary increase in the level of force. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and their countparts in the Republican Party, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Mike Pence, have already consulted their party caucuses in Congress. And we have all agreed that the only way to win a war is for everybody to pull together in the same direction.

Many members of Congress from both sides of the aisle made excellent contributions, and I thank them for their support. With the bravery and courage of the American soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine, and with the help and blessing of God, we shall prevail in this world-wide war against jihad, and in its most important battlefield, Iraq.

And now, all we need is for every American to have the same courage as those facing enemy bullets, bombs, and RPGs. Let's show the bombers and beheaders in Iraq what it really means to face a united America. They wanted a war with the West. They have one. Now let's make them rue the day they picked a fight with the United States of America.

Thank you, and may God bless every one of us.

Americans wanted several things anent Iraq:

  • A change of course to something that worked better and more visibly;
  • Bipartisan action from Congress;
  • A clear understanding why we're in it in the first place. We know what the Iraqis got out of overthrowing Saddam, but what's in it for us?

I hope that most Americans (unlike Nancy Pelosi) will be able to decide whether it's more important for us to win in Iraq or to leave Iraq... and that they will choose victory over defeat.

(The number 75,000 is arbitrary; it would be replaced with whatever figure Gen. George Casey, Commander, Multi-National Force-Iraq, recommends after consulting all the commanders on the ground, the Secretary of Defense, and -- close your eyes, quick! -- the Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress.)

By the way... if I'm right, and the Democrats are willing to go for a change in this direction instead of insisting on that direction, then I predict they will also go ahead and confirm Robert Gates as SecDef.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2006, at the time of 10:18 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

November 06, 2006

Maliki's Life of Quiet Desperation

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

In the wake of Saddam Hussein's death sentence, we should be jubilant; but we are not, because a dark, uncertain cloud still hovers over our heads.

Last week's joint operation with Coalition (American) and Iraqi troops in Baghdad caught many high-value-targets. This is the good news; Bill Roggio reports:

On Saturday, Iraqi special forces, backed by U.S. advisers, conducted a raid inside Sadr City, the Baghdad bastion of Iranian proxy Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army. Three members of a "murder, kidnapping cell" were detained during the raid, and the Mahdi Army fired on Iraqi forces with small arms and RPGs as they departed.

This is the first operation inside Sadr City after Prime Minister Nouri Maliki ordered the lifting of the week-long cordon around Sadr City last Tuesday. On that same day, an operation inside Sadr City netted three terror cell suspects. The order to lift the cordon was hotly opposed by the U.S. military, and Iraqi's vice president also strongly disagreed with the decision. Serious questions have been raised about Maliki's commitment to quell the violence in Baghdad and suppress the power of Sadr's Shiite death squads.

The questions arise from the fact that Prime Minister Maliki heavily leans upon Sadr's political support to remain in office. He may not be wholly owned subsidiary of Sadr (as Sadr is surely an agent of Iran); Maliki shows occasional signs of independence, unlike his predecessor. But at the very least, he is torn between two teams of horses pulling in opposite directions.

The bad news is that Maliki is getting increasingly obstructionist against our effort to curb sectarian and tribal fighting. I'm sure readers heard about Maliki's controversial demand:

Mr. Maliki’s public declaration [lifting the Sadr City blockade] seemed at first to catch American commanders off guard. But by nightfall, American troops had abandoned all the positions in eastern and central Baghdad that they had set up last week with Iraqi forces as part of a search for a missing American soldier. The checkpoints had snarled traffic and disrupted daily life and commerce throughout the eastern part of the city.

The language of the declaration, which implied that Mr. Maliki had the power to command American forces, seemed to overstep his authority and to be aimed at placating his Shiite constituency.

The withdrawal was greeted with jubilation in the streets of Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite enclave where the Americans have focused their manhunt and where anti-American sentiment runs high.

I understand that Maliki is walking a tightrope, to use a different metaphore. He needs to look tough for the benefit of his constituency; he dares not be seen as an American puppet. But when the prime minister of Iraq is incapable of even trying to disarm the Shiite militas (either the Mahdi Militia or the Badr Brigades), he is hardly in the position to dictate terms to American forces.

And we shouldn't be obeying him as if he were an actual, functioning head of state: he is at best a junior partner in this enterprise; if Iraq wants us to respect their sovereignty, then they should act so as to deserve respect.

I get the feeling that Maliki is not expecting Americans to stay much longer. I wonder where he could have gotten that idea? He's banking on the idea that Sadr will survive and become a powerful political player in Iraq... but that American troops will soon redeploy over the horizon to Okinawa.

When that happens (reasons Maliki), he wants to be on the side of the Pit Bull, not the Pekingese: acting like a swaggering leather-boy against the mighty Americans probably seems like necessary performance art.

But like many others who underestimated Americans, Maliki is dead wrong. No matter what happens tomorrow, we're not leaving before we settle with Sadr and his Mahdi Militia, and then the Badr Brigades. The president has a lot of plenary power, even against a hostile Congress... as Ronald Reagan proved again and again: he, not the Squeaker of the House or the Majority Leader of the Senate, is the Commander in Chief; the president, not Congress, orders the troops around... especially as we already have an authorization for the use of force, which has the same legal consequence as a declaration of war.

I don't know why everyone underestimates our troops; yes, if you look at old history (in Clinton's time), America had a disturbing habit of bugging out... but that has not been true since the current president was elected. Why look to history when contemporary reality belies it?

We win battle after battle, and yet everyone (especially everyone with a "D" after his name) imagines defeat is always around the next corner (see today's astonishing paean to defeatism in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, via Power Line).

Of course, if you believe the Democrats' rhetoric -- and you believe they're going to win control of both houses of Congress -- then you would have to conclude that we'll engage in a "strategic rearward advance" before the job is done. All the elite media say so!

Al-Qaeda and Muqtada Sadr believe that if (when!) our congress turns Democratic, the terrorists will win. And they believe that the more people they slaughter, the more likely Democrats will take the control of Congress.

In fact, it's precisely the opposite: the more we are attacked, especially if we're attacked again in our homeland, the angrier Americans will get. Voters are hincky about the Iraq war, not because they're frightened of being attacked, but because the defeatists have convinced the American people that we're losing the war (by the timeworn technique of shouting it long enough and loudly enough that people start to believe it).

Maybe it will take a new president in 2009 to convince Americans that we really are winning (and some demonstrable, visible, and undeniable progress on the ground in Iraq); see Victor Davis Hanson's brilliant opinion piece on his blog yesterday, about which more later. For now:

Long forgotten is the inspired campaign that removed a vicious dictator in three weeks. Nor is much credit given to the idealistic efforts to foster democracy rather than just ignoring the chaos that follows war — as we did after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, or following our precipitous departure from Lebanon and Somalia. And we do not appreciate anymore that Syria was forced to vacate Lebanon; that Libya gave up its WMD arsenal; that Pakistan came clean about Dr. Khan; and that there have been the faint beginnings of local elections in the Gulf monarchies.

But in spite of all this, all Nouri al-Maliki cares about is his personal political future. How did Iraqi get stuck with this oaf? (Oh, that's right: because they were desperate to get rid of the previous Sadrite: Ibrahim al-Jaafari!)

Maliki is wrong about another point, too: Sadr will not last too much longer. Someone kill him long before we leave Iraq. And very soon now, Maliki and the rest of the Shia will have to decide whether to fish or get off the pot... because if he is still tied to Sadr when Sadr goes down, he'll drag Maliki to the bottom of the Euphrates River like a Jersey canary with a lead weight chained to his ankle.

Hm... not a bad image!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 06, 2006, at the time of 05:54 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 03, 2006

Will Saddam Get the Drop?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The tribunal trying Saddam Hussein and many of his lieutenants expects to announce the verdict Sunday, the London Times reports; and most expect it to be guilty with the death penalty for "crimes against humanity" -- which might be the first time such a sentence has been handed out for that charge since the Nuremburg Trials. Or were there any others in between?

Saddam, his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Taha Yassin Ramadan, his Vice President, and Awad al-Bandhar, a judge, face possible death sentences for the execution of 148 Shia villagers from the town of Dujail after a failed 1982 assassination attempt on the then Iraqi leader. Four others face lighter sentences. Saddam is likely to win the right to appeal against any death sentence.

Meanwhile, lots of folks are expecting Sunni terrorists to launch a horrific wave of violence when Saddam is sentenced to death; but frankly, I doubt it: such predictions are predicated upon the idea that until now, the terrorists have been "holding back," but now they'll really be hopping mad. I think that's rot: these murderous butchers been going flat out for three or four months now; the pedal's to the metal, and I don't think there's any more horsepower in that engine.

But the real question for me is, even assuming Saddam is sentenced to death... will he ever actually be executed? Or will the Europeans or the U.N. or the Humane Society meddle to prevent it, on the grounds that:

  • We don't know for absolute, 100% certain that Saddam really ordered mass executions in the town of Dujail, or that he was really the dictator of Iraq. He could have had an evil twin.
  • Even if he did it, maybe he was insane; look at him before the invasion: he must have been inhaling junk food! (Hey, it worked for Dan White.)
  • Finally, even if Hussein personally ordered the executions and was in his right mind when he did so, we can't execute him because it would be a barbaric and un-Christian to put to death a man merely because he slaughtered between 300,000 and 5,000,000 people over a few decades. And it wouldn't be fair; you're singling him out... after all, nobody ever executed Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or Nicolae Ceauşescu. (All right, maybe Ceauşescu; but that was more like a revolution -- a people's revolution! -- so it doesn't count.)

As much as I doubt there will be "civil war" if Saddam is sentenced to death, that's just how much I doubt he will ever actually dance on air, be fried, gassed, needled, or given a haircut. I expect that, yet again, la Belle France will ride to the rescue of another mass-murdering dictator.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 03, 2006, at the time of 11:48 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

October 30, 2006

Time Flies When Killing Nothing But Innocent Bystanders

Blogomania , Elections , Iraq Matters , Polling Keeps a-Rolling , Science - Bogus
Hatched by Dafydd

By now, everybody and his unkie's monkle knows about the Lancet survey that purports to show that the Iraq invasion has killed about 655,000 extra Iraqis -- nearly all of them innocent.

Actually, since the Lancet's survey only went through July 2006, and assuming the rate is unabated, a total of more than 704,000 "extra deaths" should have occurred by now, the end of October 2006. I shall accordingly use this figure hence.

They arrived at this figure by interviewing a small number of grieving survivors (2,000 households) and asking them, offhand, how many members of their family have been killed by the wicked infidels (actually, they asked how many had died since the invasion; I doubt the significance escaped the respondents' notice).

Then they projected this figure throughout the entire population of Iraq to get a figure that is about 14 times the (likely inflated) "maximum" figure on Iraq Body Count, 49,760, and more than 20 times the more commonly accepted figure of 35,000.

Oddly enough, however, they must not be burying their dead, because mortuary records don't show anywhere near that many burials over the last 43 months, a fact at which even the Lancet hints.

Amazingly enough, it appears that half of all extended families in Iraq have lost someone -- assuming no overlap at all: I assumed that an extended family in Iraq would consist of a mother and father, an average of three kids, an average of three living grandparents (recall that grandparents in such a society could easily be in their late thirties or early forties), an average of five living aunts and uncles, who between them would have produced about eight cousins.

I'm probably underestimating much of this -- which would mean even more families would have to have lost members to evil, wicked Coalition soldiers, in order to arrive at Lancet's (reprojected) 704,000 figure. If there is overlap, that would increase the number of families that would have had deaths: each death would kill a father, an uncle, and a cousin, of three different households, perhaps.

To put it another way, if this guess were true, the war would have considerably more than doubled the national annual death rate of Iraq (5.37 per 1,000 per year), according to the latest figures from the CIA's World Factbook (or even 5.5, as Lancet calculates it).

What would it have taken to produce such a staggeringly huge death rate? The Belmont Club can help with that; they note that the Israelis bombed the heck out of Lebanon for 34 days, and only managed to kill 1,300 Lebanese (all of them innocent, once again; it's remarkable how luckless the innocent are in these Moslem countries, while the guilty seem to lead charmed lives... perhaps somebody down there likes them).

Whenever I see numbers, I have to whip out my calculator and play. It's a nasty habit, I know; but I'm too old a dog to change Spot now.

The Lebanese death rate works out to about 38 per day -- and that's with heavy, continuous bombing, shelling, and massive, daily assaults. Let's assume that same rate of death in Iraq; how long would it take to kill 704,000 people? A simple division: it would take 18,526 days, or approximately 50 years and 9 months.

Hm. Well, that doesn't quite work out, does it!

On the other hand, we have a lot more soldiers in Iraq than the Israelis had in Lebanon... so let's look at it the other direction: assume that we have killed 704,000 people in Iraq since the invasion, which began on March 19th, 2003; what is the daily rate of killing we would have to be seeing? (Lancet concluded that 601,000 of the 655,000 deaths were violent; projected forward, that would mean 646,000 of the 704,000.)

Again, it's a simple calculation, complicated only because we must first figure out how many days it's been: from invasion to March 19th, 2006 is 1,096 days (because 2004 was a leap year), plus 225 days since then, for a grand total of 1,321 days.

704,000 divided by 1,321 equals 533 innocent civilians dying each and every day, Sundays and holidays included. (Actually, since this is an Islamic country, we would expect to see more deaths during the Sabbath -- which is actually Friday, not Sunday -- and during holiday periods, like Ramadan.) If we restrict it to violent deaths, that's 487 violent deaths per day.

There was a lull from the end of major combat operations, May 1st, 2003, until the insurgency and terrorist activity really started to uptick, say about April 4th, 2004 with First Fallujah. But on the other hand, we would assume a very much increased daily rate during the month of MCO; even if they don't quite balance, it probably doesn't change much... we can assume the daily rate after the insurgency and terrorism started to be somewhere between 550 and 650 extra deaths per day.

I doubt even the wildest-eyed anti-war fanatic sincerely believes that all the reporters, non-governmental organizations, government departments, and the other medical researchers in Iraq (who actually check physical evidence, rather than relying upon surveys) could possibly have missed an additional 500 civilians dying per day, 460 of them killed violently -- and nearly all by Coalition forces, if you can believe the Iraqi respondents. But of course, figures don't lie!

The researchers assure us that asking Iraqi respondents how many have died is perfectly sound methodology. They don't need to look at death certificates, hospital records, or mortuary records; first, those hard data may be unavailable... and second, they don't yield a high enough number of extra deaths:

When death certificates were not available, there were good reasons, say the authors. "We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded. Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths," they write.

Fabricating deaths simply isn't done in Iraqi culture... quick, somebody, alert the Green Helmet Guy!

But I still want to know where the weekly quota of 3,731 bodies is being stashed; I should think that by now, every graveyard in the country would have been filled up, and the bodies would have to be packed into warehouses (refrigerated, one hopes) until the country can decide where to put them. Sort of like nuclear waste, I reckon.

If somebody can show me a photograph of a warehouse with bodies stacked like cordwood, or else dozens of mass graves dug post-Saddam, then I will believe it. Until then, I'm afraid I'm going to have to maintain a bit of skepticism about the Lancet's figure. It's conceivable that their methods are unsound.

So how does this relate to the election, as the category list indicates? Well, just an example of the goofy results that you can get from a poll when you deliberately disconnect it from any external, reality-based cross-checking.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 30, 2006, at the time of 06:06 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Sadr Off!

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line makes a good point about the efficacy of putting Muqtada Sadr down. But it started a flock of seagulls in my brain.

Jack Kelly, national-security writer for the the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade, penned (phosphored?) a column forthrightly titled "We must get rid of al-Sadr." First, I must note that I'm very, very unimpressed by both the writing and thinking of Mr. Kelly. His column is written about at the level of a typical blog (Power Line is far more literate); it's conclusory and dismissive and drips with such sweeping opinion-mongering as "and people wonder why U.S. policy in Iraq is failing," and "it will be embarrassing for President Bush to admit the failure of the Iraqi government."

(Generally, Kelly thinks very little of the Iraq government; I certainly get the sense he thinks we'd all be better off if Iraq were our colony, much as the Congo belonged to France and Belgium.)

What's more, the only source he cites for anything is an anonymous "Army sergeant in a Baghdad intelligence unit," who e-mailed -- not Jack Kelly -- but the WSJ's James Taranto! Presumably, Kelly doesn't even know himself who the sergeant is or how qualified he is to make observations. Mr. Sergeant says just what Kelly longs to hear; to nobody's amazement, Kelly quotes Mr. Sergeant.

Nevertheless, the idea that we should kill Sadr is a good one. But I really wish I didn't have Mr. Kelly on my side, for he makes no particular argument at all how killing Sadr would help anyone -- nor does he consider any consequences other than Bush's "embarassing" admission of putative failure and a glib reference to an "uprising," as if that were of no consequence.

Paul has noticed this lack as well:

I wonder whether bringing down a given milita and/or its leader would make much difference at this point. My understanding is that the Shia militias exist mainly to inflict harm upon, and do battle with, the Sunnis. Given the "demand" for such units, it's questionable whether we can cut off the supply.

So let me fill in the missing argument that Mr. Kelly could not seem to articulate.

First, on the basic level, Paul is correct: killing Sadr would not put the Mahdi Militia out of existence. Actually, I would suggest killing not just Sadr, but the number two and number three guys, all more or less simultaneously (within a few days of each other). This would leave the lower tier people wondering which of them would become the new leader.

Let 'em fight it out.

Second, Paul asserts that there is a fixed "demand" on the part of Shia for killing Sunnis; but I'm not persuaded. Iraq has always been more tribal than sectarian. Many of the biggest tribes include both Sunni and Shiite members; and until Saddam came along and set the two sects at each other's throats (quite deliberately), they knocked together quite decently in Iraq.

I don't think the war between Shia and Sunni has gone on long enough in Iraq to have become the new norm. I don't even think the Shia thought of Saddam's as a "Sunni" dictatorship... more likely as the dictatorship of the Tikriti tribe, which included Shia, Sunni, and even a prominent Christian (Tariq Aziz).

I don't see this "demand" for continued butchery among most Iraqis... else we'd see Baghdad levels of sectarian slayings in the rest of the country. Were such demand universal, we would see armies of tens of thousands of Shia (and Sunni) fanning out across the country; it would be an actual civil war, not a tit for tat series of spree killings.

Rather, I suspect the killing continues because a small but very determined group of people thinks the gang-war is "winnable," and each person sees himself as the victor. It's less like the Civil War and more like the Mafia wars of mid-20th-century New York City: those, too, went on for decades... yet at no time could one say that the Italian population of that city "demanded" such killings.

If the leadership of that small cadre which is carrying out the slaughters were to be removed (by any means necessary), I cannot imagine that the Shia and Sunni residents of Baghdad would pine for the good old days of death squads committing 100 murders a day.

But what other effects would there be? Kelly casually mentions an "uprising" that would follow us snuffing Sadr; but he doesn't seem to lose any sleep over it:

If we act against Mr. Sadr, there will be an uprising. It will be bloody. But continued inaction pretty much guarantees slow motion defeat.

Well, yeah; but nobody is calling for "continued inaction." The Bush administration is not inactive; it's just active doing things other than what Mr. Kelly wants them to do.

But would there really be an uprising? Why? And who would lead it? Sadr, whatever his deficiencies in intelligence and theological knowledge (and they seem to be legion), has an immense personal charisma... obviously, otherwise that fat, unlettered slob wouldn't be the head of the strongest militia in Iraq. The Mahdi Militia gives all the appearance of being a cult of personality revolving around Muqtada Sadr's head.

By the same reasoning, Musab Zarqawi must have been astonishingly charismatic (it's a local function; he might not have impressed a gathering of Elks in Minnetonka). Zarqawi led al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia in two major uprisings in Fallujah... yet when we killed him, I recall no massive uprising in his honor or memory.

Uprisings rarely happen sponteneously; riots happen spontaneously, but uprisings need leadership. The Badr Brigades are not going to mourn the passing of Sadr; nor will the Shia, and the Kurds won't care. The secularists under Iyad Allawi will be glad to see the back of him. So the only group we must fret over is the specific sect of Shiite militiamen who owe allegiance to Muqtada Sadr himself.

I'm sure some of them may try to take revenge; but if the Badr Brigades are doing their job, as soon as they realize Sadr has been whacked, they will launch an attack on their greatest enemy -- meaning those Iraqis closest to them in belief, custom, and history, the Mighty Mahdi Militia. What with the external attack and the War of the Roses going on to decide succession to Sadr, I doubt anybody in al-Mahdi will have much energy to devote to attacking Americans for a while.

But I still haven't articulated the good that would come of this... that is, aside from the sheer schadenfreude of seeing Sadr's earthly remains. First and foremost, Sadr is Iran's toehold in Iraq: he is Iran's go-to guy. Of course they would get someone else; but it would take time, they would be in disarray until they did, and he would not likely be as powerful and charismatic as Sadr.

But here is the hidden charm. I believe Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would actually like to see the militias disarmed. Not because he's a good guy; don't mistake my point. Rather, I think Maliki reasons thus:

  1. I am the titular tribal warlord of Iraq.
  2. Yet I control no personal forces: the army and police belong to the state, not me personally; and I control none of the large militias.
  3. Now that I'm on top, it's time to blow the whistle and end the game. If the militias would all just "softly and suddenly vanish away," then there would be nobody who could challenge my military authority (except the infidels, and they don't really care anyway).
  4. But I cannot actually go after the militias... because that would require me to crack down on Moqtada Sadr, and I desperately need his voting bloc to stay in power.

Kelly referred vaguely and in passing to this point:

To maintain this fiction [of the Iraqi government], we won't take actions Mr. Maliki doesn't approve of. But he depends upon the 28 votes Mr. Sadr controls in the Iraqi parliament in order to maintain his tenuous grasp on power. Prodding from the United States has so far been insufficient to get him to give them up. Mr. Maliki has declared which side he's on, and it isn't ours.

True; but it's not Sadr's side, either. Maliki is on one and only one side: his own.

If Sadr were killed, and if Maliki were clearly not involved, then what would the "28" do? I can't see them allying with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), for they control the Badr Brigades. And they're certainly not going to support a Sunni or a Kurd.

This leaves the Dawa Party as the only other powerful Shiite political party. The head of Dawa is Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and his principal deputy is (ta da!) Nouri al-Maliki. Jaafari cannot be prime minister again; he was the one chucked out last time and is completely unacceptable to SCIRI, to the Sunnis, to the Kurds, and to the secularists.

So the only choice left for the 28 seats currently controlled by Sadr, in the event of his untimely demise, would be to continue supporting Maliki, as they have been doing all along.

Thus, were the Coalition to kill off Sadr, Maliki would still have the 28 votes of Sadr... but no Sadr sticking his hand up Maliki's badonkadonk (eew) to work the PM's mouth. Not only that, but with Mahdi in such distress, Maliki would have the green light to crack down hard on the Badr Brigades... the other Shiite party's militia. After all, Mahdi would be out of commission for a while.

So we would get a "twofer" -- the Mahdi Militia would be bereft of its leadership, leaving it to flop around like a beheaded snake; and the government of Iraq would likely move heavily against the Badr Brigades... and maybe even against the Mahdi Militia, once Maliki is sure of his power base in the absence of Muqtada Sadr.

Sometimes, when a situation has crystalized in a very unuseful position, the best thing we can do is vigorously shake the box: whatever we end up with will probably be better than what we have now.

I think this is one of those times. Rolling my eyes at the rest of Mr. Kelly's column, I second his call for us to put Sadr down.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 30, 2006, at the time of 03:11 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 19, 2006

Jonah and the Wail: the Virtue of Ignorance

Blogomania , Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae
Hatched by Dafydd

This is one of those rare moments when I must vehemently disagree with Patterico, one of the people who got me into blogging in the first place (quite literally: Patterico's Pontificaitons was the first of two sites that allowed me on as a guest blogger). He gives a one-handed round of applause to neocon columnist Jonah Goldberg -- who now reverses himself, arguing that going into Iraq was "a mistake."

Interestingly, Goldberg, and by extension Patterico, make a pretty big whopper of a mistake themselves.

Here is Goldberg, as linked by Patterico:

I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.

But that's no excuse. Truth is truth. And the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003.

Oh, I quite agree: if Congress had known in 2002 that Iraq was only twenty minutes to midnight, instead of two minutes to midnight, it would have punted on the invasion. Congress would instead have settled upon a really, really, really strong letter to Saddam, asking him to be nicer.

But that's not the definition of a mistake, Jonah Goldberg notwithstanding. After all, had Congress known just how bad the Civil War would get, with 600,000 dead Americans and a nation ravaged by all four horsemen of the Apocalypse, it's very likely they never would have voted to go to war; they would have accepted the secession of the Confederate States of America instead.

I do not believe it was a mistake for the Union to fight the Civil War. So thank God they didn't know what was going to happen.

Suppose we'd had perfect knowledge of what would transpire in Iraq, and therefore, as we all (Jonah, Patterico, and I) conclude, we did not invade Iraq. What would have happened then? This is the question that neither Goldberg nor Patterico essay to answer... but I will.

  1. The Iraq sanctions regime would have collapsed.

This was already well on its way, as the sanctions were routinely circumvented and outright violated by European powers, even while the U.N.-mandated regime was still in place. Doesn't anybody remember that this was exactly what the Oil for Food scandal was all about?

European nations were already applying heavy pressure on the U.N. to drop the sanctions, which were "killing millions of Iraqi children" (remember? doesn't anybody remember?) Even Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group agrees that the sanctions were likely going away very quickly, certainly de facto and likely de jure as well:

Saddam was surprised by the swiftness of Iraq’s defeat. The quick end to Saddam’s Regime brought a similarly rapid end to its pursuit of sanctions relief, a goal it had been palpably close to achieving.

With increasingly shrill and bizarre claims of the death and destruction caused by sanctions, and the hundreds of oil deals Saddam cut with various countries that would only be implemented once sanctions were lifted, pressure to do so would have been irresistable.

And even if we used our veto power to keep them on the books, that is the only place they would exist: in the real world, sanctions only work when other countries cooperate. Europe had long ceased cooperating.

  1. When sanctions did collapse -- even if simply de facto, by rampant cheating and by European "inspectors" turning a blind eye -- Saddam was set to resume WMD development, using the knowledge, personnel, and WMD programs he had carefully retained from 1991 to 2003.

The ISG says this, too:

The Regime made a token effort to comply with the disarmament process, but the Iraqis never intended to meet the spirit of the UNSC’s resolutions. Outward acts of compliance belied a covert desire to resume WMD activities. Several senior officials also either inferred or heard Saddam say that he reserved the right to resume WMD research after sanctions.

I think, after the revelations of Oil for Fraud, few reading this post think it at all farfetched that sanctions were already on life support and would have died entirely... probably in months, not years; and that when they did, Saddam Hussein had no intention of turning over a new leaf and becoming a peaceful member of the community of nations.

  1. Having once lifted sanctions, it would be politically impossible to reinstate them -- as France and Russia both have veto power as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council;

Does the picture become clear? It's true that we almost certainly would not have invaded Iraq had we "known then what we know now" about the cost in blood and treasure... and that failure would have been a dreadful mistake of historic proportions -- far worse, in retrospect, than the decision not to oust Hussein in 1991, following the Gulf War.

  1. There is very strong evidence of an increasing tempo of cooperation between Hussein and al-Qaeda, as well as cooperation with more traditional terrorist groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Evidence even from the 9/11 Commission (which admitted a few connections), but much more elsewhere, including here, for example.

  1. Saddam Hussein would have recreated his chemical and biological weapons, but this time attaching them to longer-range missiles that could strike any country in the Middle East.
  2. He probably would not have been able to develop working nukes on his own; but he could eventually have bought them from North Korea or perhaps Pakistan;
  3. He would have become the dominant player in the the region, and would very likely have funneled WMD to terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, with the international reach to strike in the United States.
  4. We would have had an American intifada -- and our response to further WMD attacks within our own country would have been a draconian clampdown on civil liberties here that would truly undercut the Constitution... unlike the minor and trivial "infringements" of the USA Patriot Act.

It amazes me that neither Goldberg nor Patterico even considers the question of what would have happened had we not invaded Iraq in March of 2003. Both buy into the idea that, if we would have made a different decision then, knowing how hard it would be, that the other decision would necessarily be better than the one we made.

We stumbled into the Iraq War by our own ignorance: but this was another one of those astonishingly fortuitous accidents that lead people like Michael Medved to believe that God directly intervenes in human affairs. While I wouldn't go that far, I will say this, echoing what I said above about the Civil War:

Thank God we didn't know in 2002 what we know now about the Iraq War! The "rational" response to that knowledge would have been a catastrophe for American security... and indeed for the entire war against jihad.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 19, 2006, at the time of 05:18 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

October 18, 2006

Bush Is Right: Iraq Is Like Vietnam

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

...But not quite the way George Snuffleupagus meant it, and likely not the way other Democrats mean when they hurl the charge.

What am I talking about? (Do I know?) Oh, yes, it's this interview by Snuffleupagus of the president, which includes this exchange of which ABC makes much:

President Bush said in a one-on-one interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that a newspaper column comparing the current fighting in Iraq to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which was widely seen as the turning point in that war, might be accurate.

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.

"He could be right," the president said, before adding, "There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."

Oh no! Bush is comparing Iraq to Vietnam! That means even he thinks we're doomed, right? What else could it possibly mean?

Well, it might mean that George W. Bush knows considerably more about the history of the Vietnam War than do George Snuffleupagus, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Harry "Invasion of the Landsnatchers" Reid, or any of a number of lefty bloggers.

Let's start with the basics. We all agree that, in the end, taking everything (including the politics) into account, we lost the Vietnam War. But that's about as much agreement as we're likely to get.

It is an article of deeply held faith among Democrats that the obscenely powerful North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their allies in the South, the invincible People's Liberation Armed Forces (Vietcong, or VC), crushed and annihilated the American forces, sending us reeling back like the Nazis (that would be us) from the gates of Leningrad and Stalingrad, torn to pieces by the Mighty Red Army -- that would be the NVA and the VC.

That is, Democrats believe (the way Christians believe in the resurrection of Jesus) that we Fascist, American, running-dog imperialists were militarily beaten by the people's revolution, and that was why we lost Vietnam.

The vision Democrats have of Vietnam is of mobs of hundreds of thousands of cowardly American troops fleeing in panic, deserting by the tens of thousands, being gunned down from behind by the victorious NVA. I'm not exaggerating; talk to any Democrat about the Vietnam War, and you will quickly realize that is exactly the picture that is seared, seared in his imagination.

The "proof" they offer for this bizarre fantasy is the Tet Offensive, a desperate attack by the NVA and the VC, which Wikipedia describes thus:

The Tết Offensive (January 30, 1968 - June 8, 1969) was a series of operational offensives during the Vietnam War, coordinated between battalion strength elements of the National Liberation Front's People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF or Viet Cong) and divisional strength elements of the North Vietnam's People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), against South Vietnam's Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and United States military and other ARVN-allied forces.... The offensive began spectacularly during celebrations of the Lunar New Year, and sporadic operations associated with the offensive continued into 1969.

So divisions of the NVA poured across the border, while simultaneously, battalions of VC launched vicious attacks on virtually every major city in Vietnam. The idea was that, since (the Communists believed) the Americans and the government of South Vietnam were so unpopular, such an attack would trigger a nation-wide uprising, a revolution that would sweep the hated Capitalist pigs into the sea.

When Democrats say "Iraq is this generation's Vietnam," that is the context they mean: that Iraq is "unwinnable," as they claim Vietnam was; and that the Iraqi freedom-fighters have won battle after battle against the Fascist American imperialists. Soon, the Democrats fervently hope, America will be beaten and humbled (like on September 11th), and their own guilt at not being born poor, or at least black, will be mildly assuaged.

Well, the Tet Offensive didn't quite work out the way that the Commies planned -- or that the Democrats believe:

The Tết Offensive can be considered a crushing military defeat for the Communist forces, as neither the Viet Cong nor the North Vietnamese army achieved any of their tactical goals. Furthermore, the operational cost of the offensive was dangerously high, with the Viet Cong essentially crippled by the huge losses inflicted by South Vietnamese and other Allied forces.

Ah, but there is one other major pro-Communist force in 1968 that we haven't reckoned with yet: the American elite media, which desperately hoped for a catastrophic defeat of the American forces by North Vietnam and the National Front. Led by "Uncle" Walter Cronkite, the news media brazenly lied about the hammerblows that disintegrated the revolutionary forces; they reported instead that the attack was a historic victory for the Communists:

Many people, both at the time and in retrospect, have criticized the U.S. media for the negative light in which it portrayed both the war in general and the Tết Offensive in particular. Earle Wheeler, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained of "all the doom and gloom we see in the U.S. press" after Tết.

The most famous example of an anti-war attitude on the part of an influential press figure was Walter Cronkite's special report on the war of February 27, 1968. After touring the ruined streets and battlefields of the Tết Offensive and interviewing discouraged soldiers and officers in the field, he directly criticized the military leadership and the Johnson administration: "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest cloud." He concluded by saying that the U.S. was "mired in a stalemate" and called for a negotiated end [that is, for an American surrender] to the conflict.

While the Tet Offensive was a military defeat of colossal proportions for the Communists, our own media turned it into a equally huge Communist victory via their relentless propaganda:

Nevertheless, the Offensive is widely considered a turning point of the war in Vietnam, with the NLF and PAVN winning an enormous psychological and propaganda victory.... The Tết Offensive is frequently seen as an example of the value of propaganda, media influence and popular opinion in the pursuit of military objectives.

It is clear from the context of the interview, even in the snippets that ABC chose to highlight in their online story, that President Bush is well aware of the real meaning of Tet; he makes it quite plain in the next thing he says after the bit quoted at the top of this post:

"George, my gut tells me that they have all along been trying to inflict enough damage that we'd leave," Bush said. "And the leaders of al Qaeda have made that very clear. Look, here's how I view it. First of all, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. They are dangerous. They are lethal. They are trying to not only kill American troops, but they're trying to foment sectarian violence. They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause [the] government to withdraw."

In other words, the president correctly understands that the only sense in which the enemy in Iraq is "winning" is in the propaganda that they inspire and provoke among the persistently anti-American news media... as represented in this case by one George Robert Snuffleupagus, late communications director for President Bill Clinton -- now the victorious strongman of what used to be This Week With David Brinkley.

And its only victory would be if the antique media terrified enough people that they forced us into premature withdrawal of our troops, before they finished the job.

The Democrats want to negotiate a treaty with the terrorists determining how fast we hand Iraq over to al-Qaeda; this puts the Dems in the position of defeatists who declared in 1943 that we could never win the Pacific or European wars -- and who demanded that we negotiate a "settlement" with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan over how quickly they would be handed the entire eastern hemisphere.

And President Bush is absolutely correct: in the sense of political theater masquerading as warfare, Iraq indeed is very like unto Vietnam.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 18, 2006, at the time of 11:25 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack

October 05, 2006

Sadr and Masri: the Final Embrace

Good News! , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

Excuse me, does anybody remember that there's a war on?

There is a lot to talk about in Iraq. So let's not lose focus; there is a lot more serious stuff going on than some stupid Republican creep and a bunch of Democratic political creeps.

It may be noble for us to keep our moral standard high (to the point of absurdity). But the bottom line is, if we lose this election, we will lose the war. It is just that simple; the Democrats have promised us a shameful defeat if they're elected, and this is one Democratic promise I believe!

Now, the important news. As Dafydd pointed out yesterday on Iraqi Police Bust Iraqi Police Brigade , there are several operations going on to clean out the militias. Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail reports that Coalition forces -- "CF" -- are finally cracking down on Moqtada Sadr's Mahdi "army" in the city of Diwaniyah, outside of Baghdad.

While much of the public's perceptions of the efforts against Sadr are shaped by operations in Sadr City in Baghdad, the Coalition and Iraqi government are chipping away at his power base outside of Baghdad. The series of raids and clashes, often masked as efforts against “criminals,” “thugs,” “death squads,” and “kidnappers,” are being conducted against the extreme elements of Sadr and his Mahdi Army. The goal is to remove Sadr from a position of influence, either by force or his surrender, and split his power base. Sadr's lieutenants are being systematically targeted, which will drive him to either fight or withdraw.

A window into these operations is available in the city of Diwaniyah. A joint U.S. and Iraqi operation, dubbed Constant Solidarity has been announced at the end of September. The operation is made up of elements of the 8th Iraqi Army Division, supported the soldiers of the Fires Brigade (artillery), 4th Infantry Division. The purpose is to “weed out more than 2,000 terrorists in and around the city of Diwaniyah.” Diwaniyah is a Sadr stronghold, the “terrorists” being referred to here are the Madhi Army. To demonstrate the seriousness of the operation, the U.S. has deployed MLRS launchers (Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System) in the region to hit back at the Madhi Army.

The operation, Constant Solidarity, has been going on since the beginning of September. But the first battle with the Mahdi army occurred on August 27th and 28th, when Iraqi Army forces killed 50 Sadrites, with a loss of only 20 of their own soldiers. Since then, CF has conducted various raids, including raiding the office of one of Sadr's top clerics.

In another action, according to Roggio, Operation Wilderness captured 32 of Sadr's death-squad terrorists. "On the 21st, another raid netted 'Salah al-Obeidi, a close colleague of firebrand Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, [who] was picked up from his home in Najaf along with cleric Bassim al-Ghuraifi,' according to Sadr's own office."

All this is designed to paint Sadr into a hole (as Dafydd says), and it is working: Sadr and his close allies are now calling for a "peaceful fight." Obivously, Sadr wants to survive politically; but I'm not so sure his militia members agree. They didn't join up for peace and reconciliation; they just want to kill Sunnis on behalf of Iran.

I have heard that Muqtada Sadr is losing control of his Mahdi milita. Without Sadr's Iranian connection, the rest of the militia won't have access to all the logistic help they need (intelligence) to conduct death-squad operations. That is a good thing -- for the good guys; but the Mahdi killers, none of whom have much chance of ending up in the government themselves, are seeing their happy, little excuse for serial torture and murder floundering... and they're not obeying Sadr's orders to quit fighting and start supporting his political ambitions instead.

Meanwhile, back at the al-Qaeda chicken ranch, CENTCOM's press release announced that "Coalition forces detained a former driver and personal assistant of Abu Ayyub al-Masri [the current leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq] along with 31 others during a series of 11 raids targeting al-Qaida in Iraq activities in the Baghdad area Sept. 28":

This is the second close associate of Abu Ayyub al-Masri captured in September, also believed to have been one of his personal drivers. Intelligence indicates his participation in the 2005 bombings of the Sheraton and the Al Hamra hotels in Baghdad that killed a total of 16 people and injured 65 others.

Three days after this operation, the Iraqi government released a video of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the al-Qaida in Iraq leader, instructing terrorists on how to build vehicle borne improvised explosive devices from the inside of a tanker truck. Intelligence indicates the suspected terrorist captured was working directly for Abu Ayyub al-Masri when the video was created.

Now, the game is afoot in the hunt for al-Masri himself. There was an earlier unconfirmed report on al-Arabiya TV, which the U.S. never bought, that al-Masri was killed during a raid; but subsequent DNA testing showed it was not he. However, just as with Musab Zarqawi -- who was finally killed after a series of his subordinates were captured and turned into singing canaries -- Masri's days on Earth can be measured in very small numbers.

So, folks, let's keep at it. Things are looking up. But we still have a lot to do in Iraq; this is no time to get distracted by the Foley Bergere.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 05, 2006, at the time of 05:19 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 04, 2006

Iraqi Police Bust Iraqi Police Brigade

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Stealing a march on my colleague in crime here, I'm going to scoop Sachi on a piece of good news:

Iraqi authorities have taken a brigade of up to 700 policemen out of service and put members under investigation for "possible complicity" with death squads following a mass kidnapping earlier this week, the U.S. military said Wednesday....

The Iraqi police officers were decommissioned following a kidnapping Sunday when gunmen stormed a frozen food plant in the Amil district, abducted 24 workers and shot two others. The bodies of seven of the workers were found hours later but the fate of the others remains unknown.

The action appeared aimed at signaling a new seriousness in tackling police collusion with militias at a time when the government is under increased pressure to put an end to the Shiite-Sunni violence that has killed thousands this year and threatened to tear Iraq apart.

That last paragraph is no hyperbole. Everyone has known for some time that the Shia-dominated Iraqi National Police was at least turning a blind eye to Shiite militias massacring Sunnis (and rival Shia) in their relentless, sub-rosa campaign of murder and revenge; at worst, many assume that police units were actually engaged in such mass murder themselves. But the general feeling among nearly all Sunnis and even a great many Shia who actually care about their country was that the Shia-controlled government would never crack down on their "allies" in the police.

But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has finally realized that the survival of his government, indeed, the survival of Iraq as a nation, depends upon stopping the tit-for-tat butchery from breaking out into a full-scale civil war. He offered a new "security plan" a few days ago that was praised and widely accepted by all parties... and this is the first bit of "earnest money" in that plan:

The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said the Iraqi police brigade in the area had been ordered to stand down and was being retrained.

"There was some possible complicity in allowing death squad elements to move freely when they should have been impeding them," he told a Baghdad news conference. "The forces in the unit have not put their full allegiance to the government of Iraq and gave their allegiance to others," he said....

The Iraqi Interior Ministry said Tuesday that the commander of the unit, a lieutenant colonel, had been detained for investigation and the major general who commands the battalion that includes the brigade had been suspended temporarily and ordered transferred.

Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the chief ministry spokesman, said a random selection of troops in the suspended unit were being investigated for ties to militias.

This is major-league serious stuff. The investigated soldiers who turn out to have such militia ties will be prosecuted; if found guilty of killings, they may be executed under Iraqi law (which has the death penalty available). I don't know if this is likely, but it's certainly my preferred punishment.

And the commander of the brigade himself, if found to be complicit, should -- in my opinion -- also be executed. Hanged, in a proper legal way. In fact, even if there is no evidence that he knew about any militia ties, he should still be convicted in a court-martial of criminal malfeasance for failing to stop his own troops from participating in or enabling death-squads. At the very least, he should spend at least 5-7 years in a military penitentiary... Abu Ghraib, newly restored to Iraqi control, springs to mind.

That new security plan I mentioned sounds very promising, too. It includes several new ideas, of which one of the most intriguing is the creation of joint Sunni-Shiite "neighborhood watch" style committees to track violence. I firmly believe most Sunni and Shia just want the killings to stop; they're not interested in "defeating" the other -- they just want to live in peace.

While this is characterized as "vague" by the New York Times, it's actually perfectly clear. They even explain it themselves... once you get past all the defeatism, death-triumphalism (more dead Iraqis, more dead Americans, hoo-hah!), and attempts to drive away readers before reaching the good stuff. The negative occupies about two-thirds of the entire piece; once you get back to the actual story promised by the headline, see if this makes sense:

In an effort to make some strides against militias, Mr. Maliki’s security plan would create local committees of political leaders, tribal sheiks, clerics and members of the security forces that would monitor security in every Baghdad neighborhood....

The committees would have no control over the security forces and would instead function as arbitrators of local sectarian disputes, intelligence gatherers for security forces, and as a bridge between civilians and the police and army, according to lawmakers involved in drafting the plan.

“These commissions will never have any authority to lead or command security forces,” said Jalaladin al-Sagheir, a Shiite member of Parliament. “It will just let the people know that they are a part of their district’s protection.”

The local committees will report to a “central commission for peace and security,” which will work with Iraqi armed forces. There will also be a new commission for monitoring the news media, but no other details were available. The plan will be reviewed by lawmakers every month.

(That last point is probably to ensure that a supposed "news" organization isn't simply a communications relay from terrorist leaders to their troops in the field. Hm, tempting...)

This pretty specific plan actually addresses the "root cause" of much of the violence: I believe both the insecurity that makes people join or support militias and the license they think they enjoy to do anything they want (which also contributes to recruitment) stem from a single catastrophic problem: alienation. When people feel alienated from their own government -- not a part of society, disconnected from those who live around them -- they become afraid of those others, and they simultaneously see them as less than human, easily killed without a pang of conscience.

That sort of alienation from society is the major factor behind crime in the United States -- the criminal's idea that he's not really part of society, a predator on the outside looking in.

Thus, the best solution to terrorism, mass killings (whether "sectarian" or part of a power-struggle), and yes, even ordinary crime is to include as many people as possible into the arc of society. When people feel they truly belong to the society, and that the government is as much a part of society as they, they are enormously less likely to take up arms to kill their fellow countrymen.

Thus, to the extent that neighborhood-watch style committees comprising both Sunni and Shiite representatives can bridge that yawning chasm between the average Iraqi and his government, they will significantly diminish the number of borderline cases who ultimately decide to join death squads. Changing the center typically changes the margin; and if you retract the extremity of the margin, eventually you reach a tipping point where being in a death squad makes a person feel more alienated, not less.

At that point, roving death squads become unsustainable... as in the United States and other civilized countries.

(Note that in France, the riots were driven by the sense of alienation from French society by the rampaging youths of Algerian descent; this analysis is pretty universal. And no, I didn't invent it... I'm not that smart!)

Thus, I see great cause for optimism. I think that al-Maliki, whether by design or fortuitous accident, has hit upon a strategy that has a very good chance of success. Couple it with Operation Together Forward, where the U.S. concentrates more and more of its resources to Baghdad to reclaim it from the hard-core terrorists and militiamen and our systematic campaign against Muqtada Sadr outside of Baghdad (to disrupt his power base), and the basic plan emerges:

  1. Kill the current "irredeemables;"
  2. Cut power to the main militia leader, Muqtada Sadr;
  3. Undermine the sense of alienation that drive ordinary Iraqis to support death squads.

There's the plan; looks like a winner from here.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 04, 2006, at the time of 03:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 01, 2006

Ribbons and Strings and Lots of Nice Things

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

I was looking for more good news from Iraq; believe me, there's plenty for this post.

First from Bill Roggio, al-Qaeda's "Emir of Anbar" was killed by Task Force 145:

Task Force 145, the global hunter-killers of high value al-Qeda targets, is conducting a full court press in Iraq. The Kuwaiti News Agency reports al-Qaeda's Emir in Anbar province, Khalid Mahal, and Nasif Al-Mawla, his aide, were killed during an operation in the Thar Thar region. An American intelligence source will not comment on Mahal's death but did state “operations are ongoing."

Bill Crawford has a must-read recap of recent good news from Iraq at National Review Online. Here are some headlines:

  • 1,500 people attended the Iraq national reconciliation meeting;
  • Iraqi Kurds paid for a series of television ads thanking America for removing Saddam Hussein;
  • Iraqi security forces now number more than 300,000; nearly 70 percent of Iraqi battalions have the lead for security in their area of operations;
  • Tourism is returning to Dhi Qar province, which has many archeological sites; under Saddam, the area was closed to tourists and scientists;
  • Marines (with local assistance) captured a high-value insurgent leader during a raid in Saqlawiyah. Residents in the area cheer the Marines;
  • A top al Qaeda terrorist was arrested in Mosul; two others blew themselves up after being surrounded;
  • Thanks to modern insecticides, Iraqi farmers in Diyala had their best date harvest in years;

And congratulations to 1st Lt. Neil Prakash, who received the Silver Star for his part in the battle of Fallujah.

There is plenty more. But I want to talk about this ribbon cutting event:

Soldiers from Company B, 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, took part in a ribbon cutting ceremony Sept. 15 celebrating the re-opening of the Al Bawasil School in Muelha, a town in the northern Babil province, south of Baghdad.

Why is this important? A commenter on my last post said that good news -- such as opening a school -- is simply not "hot news." That may be... but when you look beyond the headlines, each case is unique in how our soldiers overcame the daily obstacles and bridged the divide between two cultures.

Al-Bawasil has many problems; for example, it needed a new middle school, since the closest was 10 miles away. In addition, the unemployment rate was very high in this area: people were eager to work, but there were no jobs.

Under ordinary circumstances, the solution would be obvious: hire all these out of work people to build a new school. But the local area insurgents wouldn't stop the violence against Coalition forces (CF) long enough to let them even start. Roadside bombs and terrorist attacks prevented the CF from getting involved at all in the civil affairs of al-Bawasil.

So what to do? Instead of just walking away in disgust (as most of us would have), the CF called upon the town council and negotiated a deal:

During a meeting with the town council in the spring, CF civil affairs officers brought up the school problems to the council and asked for a stop to the violence in exchange for refurbishment of the school.

“When the people in the area noticed we made the school a priority, the violence stopped,” said [Capt. Aaron] Scheinberg, (civil affairs officer, 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment.) “People in the town are excited and surrounding regions are envious of the improvements made in Muelha.”

Rather than the CF dictating to the council what would happen, they bargained with them, making it appear as if the school were a payoff for stopping the violence. Then they hired the locals to do the actual work, of course, giving them jobs. The council members saved their faces and could even brag to the locals what a hard bargain they drove, forcing the Americans to build a school and give work to the local lads.

“Everything we used for the school is made in Iraq and is of the highest quality available in the country,” said Abdul Raza, Iraqi project contractor. “We took our time with this project and I ensured it received the best materials because the project is for the kids and the kids will be the future of Iraq someday.”

Coalition Forces (CF) prefer to hire local contractors and workers from the area because it is in their best interest to do a good job because they live there, said Capt. Aaron Scheinberg....

“It was easy for me to find workers because most of the people here do not have steady jobs,” said Abdul. “The people actually thanked me for giving them a job. A lot of times we had to split the work between two different groups because there were so many people willing to work to make some money.”

In Iraq, community involvement has its own unique dynamic: Americans supply the money, the Iraqis do the actual work, and the city elders get all the credit!

It's frustrating to me that the people in Al Bawasil have to be told that it's beneficial for them to stop shooting and bombing us while we're trying to help them; it seems so obvious. We can help Iraqis, and we do -- when they let us. One region at a time, we must convince them to help themselves.

After so many decades of brutal infantilization, it's not easy to suddenly grow up in a couple of years.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 01, 2006, at the time of 09:09 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 28, 2006

The New Tora Bora Bazora

Global War on Jihadism , History , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I'm listening to Hugh Hewitt, who (after a completely inaudible "interview" with Mark Steyn via bad cellphone) is now broadcasting the Senate blathering of Sen. Patrick "Leaky" Leahy (D-VT, 100%) about the military tribunals bill. And this is what Leahy just said, word for word, near as I can recollect (and it is seared, seared in my memory):

Even though they [the Bush administration] had him [Osama bin Laden] cornered at Tora Bora, they yanked the special forces out of there to send them into Iraq.

Is it just me?

I was evidently misinformed that the Battle of Tora Bora took place sometime in December of 2001. There was not even a resolution on the table to invade Iraq at that time... the resolution was not even introduced into the Senate until October 2nd, 2002; it passed the Senate without amendment on October 11th, and was signed by the president on the 16th. And we did not send troops there until March of 2003.

So in the consensus reality -- rather than in Leahy's own private version of history -- more than two solid years elapsed between the battle of Tora Bora and the call-up of troops for an invasion of Iraq. Whatever caused us not to kill or capture bin Laden in 2001, it certainly had nothing to do with the not-yet-extant invasion of Iraq.

Has this been the Democrats' plan all along, why they took over the government schools: to so damage Americans' knowledge of history that demented demagogues like Pat Leahy can make risible claims like this on the Senate floor and not be laughed out of Congress?

I eagerly await the transcription in the Congressional Record, to see whether he decides to "revise and extend his remarks."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 28, 2006, at the time of 03:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 27, 2006

Weak Leak Soup, Ctd: Evolution of a Punk Job

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

I was going to put a post up here noting that the president saw fit Tuesday to declassify the "key judgments" of the National Intelligence Estimate from April (the one we discussed here too early Tuesday morn, before the announcement). If you'll recall, on Saturday, the New York Times published a story that claimed -- falsely, we now discover -- that the NIE concluded that the Iraq War had "worsened" the threat from terrorism:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

But when the document itself was released Tuesday, it turns out the key findings were far more mixed and balanced; and nowhere did the NIE say that the Iraq War had made terrorism worse: to use the phrase Hugh Hewitt used all afternoon, the Times got punked. Its sources sold it a bill of goods; and like the Sy Hersh travesty on Abu Ghraib, its reputation (heh) lies in tatters. Tatters.

So the MSM came out swinging, here, here, and here: with grim determination, as soon as the document was made available by the NID, they slapped up their stories saying: it confirms eveything we said before! Don't look! Just take our word for it! We wouldn't lie to you 365 days in a single year, would we? (They're nothing if not persistent!)

So I was going to write a post quoting from AP, Reuters, and the New York Tombs, then quoting from the NIE itself, to make them all look like the farkakte macacas they are. Alas, I spent too long on my hobby of painting extra zeros on all my $10 bills... and you-know-who slithered in ahead of me, posting exactly the article that I was going to post (except mine would have been better; no, really). If only I posted it. Or wrote it. Or came out of my digestive torpor soon enough.

So I'm just posting to let you know I won't be posting on this topic. I think, where one's friends are concerned, it's only polite to keep them apprised of one's good intentions, for future reference.

Well... maybe just a little. This is a brief sketch of what I might have said, if I'd said anything (which I didn't, and I'm not).

Prior to the release, the elite media tried to play the Sy Hersh game of creatively (and tendentiously) misinterpreting classified intelligence someone leaked to them, confident that the "secretive" Bush administration would never dare declassify and release it... thus proving them liars. When Bush double-crossed them, they found themselves like a Wile E. Coyote, when he runs off a cliff but doesn't fall... until he looks down.

For God's sake, don't look down! The MSM's instinctive reaction was to double-down and pretend that the law of gravity had indeed been repealed. Here is how AP began their first story after the publication of the NIE showed the entire world that they had relied upon sources who lied to them (the first link in the "so the MSM came out swinging" paragraph above); this was from late Tuesday morning, shortly after the release:

The war in Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that probably will get worse before it gets better, federal intelligence analysts conclude in a report at odds with President Bush's portrayal of a world growing safer.

In the bleak report, declassified and released Tuesday on Bush's orders, the nation's most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al-Qaida, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach.

Bush and his top advisers have said the formerly classified assessment of global terrorism supported their arguments that the world is safer because of the war. But more than three pages of stark judgments warning about the spread of terrorism contrasted with the administration's glass-half-full declarations.

Note the specific word "bleak," which they used in their story before the release. In fact, this by and large is the same story they ran before the release; all they did was pop the hood and install an aftermarket clause noting that the report had been "declassified and released."

Don't look down!

By early Wednesday, the AP had added a bit more to their article, softening the hard line that the full document completely vindicated their clumsy hit job:

White House release of a previously secret intelligence assessment depicting a growing terrorist threat gives both political parties new ammunition in the election-season fight over the Iraq war.

For Republicans, the excerpts of the document - declassified under orders from President Bush on Tuesday - are more evidence that Iraq is central to the war on terrorism and can't be abandoned without giving jihadists a crucial victory.

For Democrats, the report furthers their argument that the 2003 Iraq invasion has inflamed anti-U.S. sentiments in the Muslim world and left the U.S. less safe.

In a bleak National Intelligence Estimate, the government's top analysts concluded Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists, who are growing in number and geographic reach. If the trend continues, the analysts found, the risks to the U.S. interests at home and abroad will grow.

For the first time, AP recognized that there were points on the side of those supporting the Iraq War; but they refused to get all radical on us and actually quote any of those findings. That would have been asking too much.

And note that the NIE is still characterized as "bleak," which is interesting; throughout these permutations, they cling to that word as a liferaft... despite the fact that it never appears in the NIE key conclusions themselves, and the fact -- easily ascertainable by reading them -- that they present a picture that is neither bleak nor rosey but simply a list of challenges and assessments.

Later on Wednesday afternoon, AP put up this story -- still written by the same reporter, Katherine Shrader. It begins thus:

The White House refused Wednesday to release the rest of a secret intelligence assessment that depicts a growing terrorist threat, as the Bush administration tried to quell election-season criticism that its anti-terror policies are seriously off track.

Note the counterattack; AP begins to lay the groundwork here for an infamous argument made popular in the days of bulletin-board systems: the lurkers support me in e-mail. (I think it even became a "filk song" -- not a typo.) That is, the Bush administration is suppressing secret evidence that would actually prove we were right all along. Over the next few days (or weeks), this argument will take shape within other branches of the Democratic Party besides the antique media:

Oh, sure, the portion that Bush chose to release doesn't explicitly say that the Iraq War was a fiasco that made the world more dangerous for America... that part is in the sections he deliberately chose to leave classified! We demand he release every section, every paragraph, every line -- including the names of all the sources, all the top-secret intel we got from foreign spy agencies, and the names of every intelligence analyst who worked on this report... and if Bush refuses, then you know he's got something he's still hiding!

After a few paragraphs wasted arguing with Tony Snow over the release of the really heavily classified portions of the report, AP continues:

In the bleak National Intelligence Estimate, the government's top analysts concluded Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists, who are growing in number and geographic reach. If the trend continues, the analysts found, the risks to the U.S. interests at home and abroad will grow.

Peppered with questions Wednesday about the report, he [Snow, we presume] said the NIE report was "not designed to draw judgments about success or failure, it's an intelligence document, it's a snapshot."

Snow said the report confirms the importance of the war in Iraq as a bulwark against terrorists. "Iraq has become, for them, the battleground," he said. "If they lose, they lose their bragging rights. They lose their ability to recruit."

He said that a bleak intelligence assessment depicting a growing terrorist threat was only a "snapshot" - not a conclusion

The last line I quote above is especially illuminating; no, I didn't accidentally cut off the period; it's missing in the original. It's clearly an editing mistake; she rewrote the line and separated "bleak" and "snapshot" onto two different lines, then forgot to go back and erase the original (so much for the vaunted "multiple layers of editing!") But note how important it was for Shrader, hence AP, to keep that word "bleak" prominently in the story. She was only dithering whether to place it lower or higher -- and she chose the latter.

AP picks up the Tony Snow argument again:

"The American people deserve the full story, not those parts of it that the Bush administration selects," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned, however, that releasing more of the intelligence assessment could aid terrorists. "We are very cautious and very restrained about the kind of information we want to give al-Qaida," Hoekstra said....

A separate high-level assessment focused solely on Iraq may be coming soon. At least two House Democrats - Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Rep. Jane Harman of California - have questioned whether that report has been stamped "draft" and shelved until after the Nov. 7 elections.

An intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the process, said National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told lawmakers in writing only one month ago that he ordered a new Iraq estimate to be assembled. The estimate on terrorism released Tuesday took about a year to produce.

AP rejects that obviously concocted explanation that an intelligence assessment might take longer than a month to prepare; it's patently obvious to Ms. Shrader that this is just a dodge to avoid releasing a report that would completely vindicate her -- oops, I mean vindicate the Associated Press -- along with the happy side-effect of bringing about the downfall, ah, defeat of the Republicans in the 2006 election. (Secret evidence that would support me...)

It ends with a couple of rollicking quotes from Joe Biden (D-DE, 100%) and John D. Rockefeller (D-WV, 100%), savaging the president and the war without allowing supporters to confuse matters by participating in the discussion. And once again, AP does not quote those paragraphs that actually make Bush's case about the war -- the complete quotation from which the snippet "cause celebre" was cherry-picked:

We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

  • The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

By contrast, here is how the Iraq War's effect was described in the original New York Times story about it that was published when the elite media still thought the NIE would remain forever classified and uncheckable:

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

Clearly, the Times' source is describing an earlier section before the "key judgments" that come later; but equally clearly, that earlier section cannot have concluded that "the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," as the anonymous source smirked; because if it had, then the corresponding key judgment would not have been so supportive of continued fighting in Iraq.

At worst, the early sections might have quoted one official saying such a thing (possibly Jay "100%" Rockefeller). But that is why we don't release the entire NIE: it's like a packet of court filings that contain arguments from both the plaintiff's attorney and the defendant's attorney... you can't just grab a claim from one and act as if it's been proven in court.

If there were such an assessment by one specific person -- and we don't even know that much -- clearly it was not accepted in the final analysis, not even for a candid document that none of the principals thought would ever be released.

So far, most of the mainstream news stories about the released NIE have shied away from quoting this paragraph in full... likely because it so clearly argues the case for the Bush policy: if, at the end of the day, the jihadis are seen to be winner in Iraq, they will be emboldened and their recuitment will soar; contrariwise, if they are seen as failures -- if Iraq remains as a democratic state in control of its own destiny, rather than a Somalia-like failed state full of terrorist training camps -- then the jihadis will suffer a terrible blow, and their recruitment will drop off.

So the real conclusion of the NIE anent Iraq is that we must win at any cost; cutting and running is not a viable option, no matter what Joe Biden and Jay Rockefeller -- or Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francsico, 95%) and John Murtha (D-PA, 75%) -- say.

Eventually, the media will be forced to admit this; it's been widely quoted in blogs and on the radio, and even in a few television programs. It's possible they've already snuck it into a few stories, buried deep.

But it won't help: they've been exposed, as Hersh was, not only as rampant partisans... but as DNC house organs so partisan they're willing, even eager, to lie, or at least pass along lies in reckless disregard for the truth, to further the political ambitions of their Democratic friends in Congress.

In Othello, the Moor of Venice, Shakespeare wrote:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

How much poorer then is a person, an entire organization, that throws its own century-old reputation into the sewer, merely to help elect its favored party into power?

I actually feel sorry for them. What must it be like to live behind those eyes?

Anyway, that's more or less what I would have written. Except I'm not going to post on this topic.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 27, 2006, at the time of 03:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 26, 2006

The Gatekeeper Effect, or, If Iraq Is Getting Better, Why Does the News Keep Getting Worse?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

During the interview with in Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS, Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), said the situation in Iraq is getting better. But how can that be, when the news reports sectarian violence is getting worse everyday?

Just this morning, I heard on the radio that the last two months were "the worst for the Iraqis since the Iraq war started." This sentiment is reflected in the recent USA Today/Gallup poll, which showed that 72% of likely voters believe that "civil war" is occurring in Iraq right now (in the link, scroll down to Gallup).

If things are getting better, why do we hear so much about the violence? Gen. Abizaid explains.

Baghdad's really the key problem. As a matter of fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of the sectarian difficulties that take place in Iraq take place within a 30-mile radius of Baghdad.

In those areas that we've been operating with U.S. forces and Iraqi forces -- and we continue to operate -- there is a decrease. But we're not everywhere. We're moving step by step, section by section, and it will take some time. We will begin to really see whether or not we're being successful in a month or two....

And it certainly -- look, it's a program that involves not just putting military forces on the street, but it also requires that Iraqi and U.S. special forces go after the death squads. We have to target them. We have to do the intelligence work necessary to know where they are. Then we've got to go after them and take them out of action, whether it's by direct military action or some other form.

Guess where 80% to 90% of the reporters in Iraq happen to be? That's right: in Baghdad, right where 80% to 90% of the attacks occur. This is probably not a coincidence; the terrorists know where their natural allies work, and they know the old newspaper adage, "if it bleeds, it leads."

In other words, what we've been hearing about all this time is the violence occuring within the immediate environs of Baghdad, and almost nothing about the rest of Iraq -- which is getting much better almost day by day: Iraq takes charge of Dhi Qar province .

“Today’s transfer of security responsibility in Dhi Qar province from the Multi-National Force – Iraq to the Government of Iraq and civilian controlled Iraqi Security Forces is another sign of progress toward a stable and secure Iraq. Dhi Qar is the second of 18 Provinces to be transitioned. This is an important milestone along the successful path toward Iraq’s capability to govern and protect itself as a sovereign nation.

Another example:Iraq chiefs vow to fight al-Qaeda

Tribal leaders and clerics in Ramadi met last week to decide how to confront the daily bloodshed in their city.

"People are fed up with the acts of those criminals who take Islam as a cover for their crimes," Sheik Fassal al-Guood told the Associated Press news agency on Monday.

He said 15 of the 18 tribes in Ramadi "have sworn to fight those who are killing Sunnis and Shiites", and had put together "20,000 young men".

In fact throughout Jim Lehrer's interview with Gen. Abizaid (remember that? that's what we're talking about), Lehrer's questions reveal his (willful?) ignorance in this subject:

JIM LEHRER: I'm sure you're aware, General, that there's been a lot of commentary back here that the U.S. hasn't put enough effort into the training of Iraqi forces.

Lehrer should have been reading Big Lizards instead of listening to PBS news! We've followed this issue for more than a year:

A well-connected journalist such as Lehrer should know what the coalition forces have been doing and the success they've had; it's his business to know. But most journalists live their waking lives sealed into an elaborate cocoon of left-liberal, anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and anti-Iraq-War propaganda, until it seems as natural an environment as the air. Everyone they know believes the same as they; if they ever hear a discouraging word, it's only when they interview some "Repuglican" -- and you know what they're like.

So maybe Lehrer is simply puzzled: since everyone knows that the Iraq War has been one colossal failure from beginning to end, why doesn't the president just "declare victory" and yank out the troops? All of Lehrer's friends say that's what Bush has to do, in order to avoid being impeached next year when the Democrats control supermajorities in the House and Senate.

His question to Gen. Abizaid has nothing to do with trying to find out what is really happening, and everything to do with making an impression on the audience's mind: the training of Iraqi troops has turned out to be a complete failure, gosh darn it! Why don't you just admit it, General?

Needless to say, Gen. Abizid -- who actually does know what is happening in Iraq -- completely rejects Lehrer's starting premise:

GEN. JOHN ABIZAID: Jim, I really disagree with that. We have put an enormous effort into training and equipping the Iraqi armed forces and security forces. But it's also an enormous effort. It is literally building an institution from the bottom up.

So who is right, Lehrer or Abizaid? Per Bill Roggio's Fourth Rail, the Iraqi Army just arrested a top leader of Ansar al-Sunnah Shura, an Iraqi terrorist group with strong ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq:

The Iraqi government has arrested Muntasir Hamoud Ileiwi al-Jubouri, who the Associated Press describes as a “leader of Ansar al-Sunnah.” But al-Jubouri is not just an average leader in Ansar al-Sunnah, he sits on the terrorist organization's military Shura (or council), the decision making body for military operational issues. Al-Jubouri was captured in Al-Taeyh along with two aides. There is no information at this time if documents or computer equipment was seized along with al-Jubouri. Regardless, his arrest can potentially be a treasure trove of information for Task Force 145 and Iraqi counterterrorism commandos. [Note: Ansar al-Sunnah denies al-Jubouri was captured.]

The Iraqi army also arrested the leader of an insurgent group called the 1920 Revolution Brigades:

Iraqi troops arrested a neighborhood leader of a nationalist insurgency group early on Sunday, a military spokesman said.

Brigadier Qasim al-Musawi would not reveal the suspect's name but said he was the leader for western Baghdad of the 1920 Revolution Brigades insurgent group, which has claimed responsibility for attacks on U.S.-led forces.

"We captured him at 5 a.m. (0100 GMT) this morning, along with seven of his aides, following accurate intelligence information in the Abu Ghraib district," he said. "It was an Iraqi army operation."

Although I don't like to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look as though Gen. John Abizaid, the Commander-in-Chief of CENTCOM, knows more about the Iraq Army than even noted PBS journalist and liberal activist Jim Lehrer.

Speaking of good intelligence, based on a tip, our good friends the Brits have killed an important al-Qaeda operative hiding in Basra, Iraq:

British forces have killed a senior al-Qaeda fugitive in a raid on a house in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, security sources say. Officials named the dead man as Omar al-Farouq, a top lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden in south-east Asia.

Farouq was captured in Indonesia in 2002 but escaped from a US military prison in Afghanistan last year.

British military spokesman Maj Charlie Burbridge said Farouq, whom he called a "very, very significant man" had been tracked across Iraq to Basra. He said about 200 troops surrounded the house, from where they came under fire. A gun battle erupted and Farouq was killed in the exchange.

So if Iraq is getting better, why do we keep hearing nothing but bad news? The problem is the gatekeeper effect: the gatekeeper controls what information is allowed through and what information is kept away from the eyes and ears of the American people. An honest gatekeeper allows information through based upon its reliability; but a partisan gatekeeper never thinks any news is "reliable" if it contradicts what we call The Story -- the predetermined story-line that animates nearly all newspaper and broadcast coverage.

The Story is that Iraq has been a complete pig's breakfast, just as the elite media all predicted it would be. Oh, maybe we didn't get bogged down in the "quagmire" during the initial assault, as they said; but look, now we're trapped in the quagmire of the Iraq Civil War!

The Story provides the framework, and every piece of information is evaluated by how well it fits into The Story. Every fact is compared to this framework; if it fits -- dead American soldiers, dead Iraqi civilians -- the gatekeeper allows it through.

But if it doesn't fit -- peaceful provinces being turned over to the Iraqis, terrorists being captured or killed -- the gatekeeper knows that it must be unreliable... so he spikes it. And the worst part is, he believes he is actually doing his proper job as a journalist; he doesn't think of himself as a partisan... he thinks of himself as one of the "reality-based party" which is interested only in the truth ("just gimmie some truth!")

Jim Lehrer, along with scores of other elite liberals, is not really a journalist: he is a liberal gatekeeper, on the same moral level as the security guard at the gates of a country club, whose job to make sure that only the right kind of people get inside.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 26, 2006, at the time of 05:31 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Weak Leak Soup

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

In keeping with the madly egotistical Big Lizards motto -- Never first, always final -- I've been pondering Saturday's New York Times story about the impact of the Iraq War on the global war on terrorism (GWOT) ever since, er, Saturday. (Maybe Sunday; Saturday, I think I was pondering whether to raise the pot on the strength of a king and a trey with a queen-jack-eight on the flop.)

There is a powerful lot that the Times failed to tell us about that story; my idol, John Hinderaker at Power Line, has a great story up quoting several other passages from that same national intelligence estimate (NIE) (enough with the alphabet soup already!) that tend to undercut, to say the least, the spin put on the thing by the Times, as well as their sidekick and pale shadow, the Washington Post.

But craven that I am, I shrink from duking it out with Power Line, who has the actual factual response pretty well covered. Oh, I could think of better arguments to make against the bizarre claims in the media; but I'd just be making them up, so I'd better not.

Let's instead focus on the problems and deficiencies in the two main antique-media stories... by an amazing coincidence, the two I already linked above. Slither on, dude.

Journalistic clairvoyance

Let's start with a startling admission against interest on the part of the "elite" media:

  1. Neither the New York Times reporters nor the Washington Post reporters have actually seen the NIE. Or any portion of it; they rely entirely upon their various sources' characterization of the NIE.

In other words, they do not actually know if the report "has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks," as the Times puts it in a traditionally quaint run-on sentence; they have absolutely no idea. All they know is that one or more of their (anonymous and undescribable) sources claims that's what it says.

Von Unaussprechlichen Külten

Here's another good one:

  1. Neither the Times nor the Post deigns to name even a single source. Not one. O, for the good old days of Watergate, when Ben Bradlee demanded at least two sources for every claim -- only one of which could be anonymous! (Were that rule in effect today, both the Times and the Post would have to shut down and convert operations to printing vacation brochures and cereal boxes.)

They don't even characterize these sources; for all we know, they could be Oompa-Loompas. Here is how the Times introduces the presumed humans upon whom the entire shebang depends, which they finally get 'round to doing in paragraph 6:

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

So let's see... a senior CIA analyst would count, but so would a junior-grade employee of the Department of Agriculture. An "official" might be an aide to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI, 100%) or Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%), both of whom sit on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (hence could have access) -- or for that matter, an aide to the disgraced, corrupt liar, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL, 90%), who sits on the House equivalent.

But we do know one thing about some of them, courtesy of the Washington Post; we know that some, at least, of these "officials" have a partisan axe to grind:

"It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. "It's stating the obvious."

If this source begins with the idea that it's "obvious" that the Iraq War has caused us to be less safe, then he's hardly an unbiased source for relaying what the NIE has to say about that subject.

Past the expiry date

  1. The assessment was begun in 2002, before the Iraq War began -- and it was completed back in April of this year... five months ago.

An awful lot has changed in the past five months... much of it for the better, including the increasing tempo of turning provinces over to the Iraqis, the stunning buildup of the Iraqi military and national police forces, and of course the death of Musab Zarqawi. But this NIE cannot have taken those changes into account, because they hadn't happened yet when it was written.

The school for wives

Here is a minor point that is emblematic of how easy it is to get so lost, you can't see the forest for the weeds:

The Times notes, in a paragraph notable mainly for being oddly out of place in the article, that one danger is that jihadis fighting in Iraq can learn techniques that they subsequently pass along to others:

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

The implication is clear, if rather unbalanced:

  1. The Times frets that all we're doing in Iraq is training the next generation of jihadis, who will be faster, stronger, and more deadly because of the skill they learn from encounters with American forces.

But this discounts two very important points:

First, that it's the United States, not the jihadis, which has learnt the most from the Iraq War. The American military of 2003 was the most powerful and effective that had ever existed... but that is no longer the case: today, they could get their butts kicked -- by the American military of 2006. We have learned from every encounter, every battle, every victory, and even from the occasional defeat.

Our own effectiveness has grown much faster than that of the jihadis... that's why the death rate of our troops has dropped by nearly 1/3 from "period 3" (from the turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqis to the first set of elections) to "period 5" (from the last set of general elections to today) -- and dropped even further in the last year.

Second, this argument presumes that large numbers of Iraq-based jihadis survive their encounters with the Americans, so that they can pass their experience along to others. In fact, most of those who leave Iraq and head back to their home countries never actually engaged American forces, because we kill or capture a very high percentage of all the terrorists we engage.

In hock to post hoc

Finally, here is the most glaring omission -- whether from the NIE itself or merely from its mischaracterization by the elite media's "sources," we cannot possibly say without seeing the document itself:

  1. The storyline does not consider what might have happened had we not invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein.

A lot would have happened: most analysts believe that Hussein was on the verge of cutting a deal with the Europeans (via the corrupt U.N. "Oil for Fraud" program of direct and indirect bribery) to end the sanctions and inspections. As Charles Duelfer and the Iraq Survey Group (ISG... more letters, I'm afraid) assessed in its final report:

There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise.

Instead of considering this possibility and exploring which American action would have been better for the terrorists -- attacking Iraq or not attacking Iraq -- the argument of both these articles is strictly "post hoc ergo propter hoc": after the fact, therefore because of the fact. The Leftist, anti-war leakers in the CIA or NSA argue (through their sock puppets in the Times and Post) thus:

  1. We invaded Iraq, deposed Hussein, and occupied the country;
  2. Jihadi websites now cite the war to try to drum up recruits;
  3. Therefore, the Iraq War was a boon to jihadis!

But this is logical gibberish: if, after ranting on and on about Hussein, we had let him stay and even lifted sanctions, then that would be cited by jihadi websites to drum up recruits... just as they cite our failures in Somalia and Sudan, our refusal to retaliate for the Cole bombing, and so forth. The jihadis cite anything that shows us either running away or standing and fighting: either way, they'll spin it to their advantage.

If this is the central conceit of the NIE, as opposed to the media's misinterpretation, then this signals a fatal flaw still extant in the raciocination of our top intelligence services: they are still thinking linearally, as if al-Qaeda and its spinoffs and wannabes are really just funny-looking Europeans in headscarves, using Western two-value logic and classical game-theory analysis of their own actions and our responses.

If we keep thinking that way, Western civ will fall.

Moslems in general, and especially Middle-East Moslems, and most especially Middle-Eastern jihadis, think in very different, apocalyptic terms. They don't perform a rational calculus to decide whether, say, to try to explode a nuclear weapon in the middle of a Western city: in fact, the "Hidden Imam" theory of players like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that Mohammed al-Mahdi will arise when the jihadis have precipitated the final battle -- and are losing it badly!

In other words, Ahmadinejad expects to start World War III (or IV, if you count the Cold War), and he expects his side to lose; after which the Mahdi will come, leading the heavenly host of Allah, and wipe away all the infidel armies, ushering in the age of Islam. How do we threaten a man who believes that? Should we threaten not to fight, allowing them to win, and thereby failing to fulfill the conditions that will activate the 12th Imam's return?

If the media's understanding of this not-very-momentous NIE is accurate, then the CIA is still fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War; and we're in desperate trouble indeed!

As the Bangles sang, we've got to "Walk Like an Egyptian" (or a jihadi) to have a prayer of winning this last crusade. Doesn't mean we have to act like they; only that we must be able to think like they, lest we be surprised again and again by their unconventional and unexpected moves.

So nu?

What's wrong with this "report," at least as recounted in the mainstream media? Virtually everything. It's vague, unsourced, unbalanced, and shows clear signs of mental sclerosis.

But if this is not the NIE's real view, then how low the American media has sunk, if this is the best hit piece on the president and the GOP that they can muster in the last weeks before the election.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 26, 2006, at the time of 05:15 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

September 22, 2006

VegasBlogging 1: "Milestones," Or Media Millstones?

Afghan Astonishments , Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

This AP story is one of the most maddening, infurating examples of elite-media manipulation I've seen in months. We start with the bizarre, defamatory, and demented headline:

War Price on U.S. Lives Equal to 9/11

Now the death toll is 9/11 times two. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America's history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.

The latest milestone for a country at war comes without commemoration. It also may well come without the precision of knowing who is the 2,973rd man or woman of arms to die in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, or just when it happens [what, no picture for the Wall of Martyrs?]. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

In the first place... huh? What's the point of this article? I was about to note that we lost fewer than 2,500 at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941; while a quick glance at the right sidebar to this very blog tells you that during the war for which that attack was the starting gun, 400,000 brave American sailors, Marines, soldiers, and airmen (then still part of the Army) were killed.

There is no relation, cause-effect, or connection between the number of people who died in a precipitating incident and the number killed in the war it precipitates. For heaven's sake, wasn't the War to End All Wars "started" by the death of a single arch-duck?

But then I discovered I didn't even need to make the argument -- because Calvin Woodward, the writer of this very article, made the same blasted argument himself... completely undercutting any point the piece itself might have had:

The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more men in each of a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor in the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan. The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.

...But then, immediately he admits he has no point whatsoever, he beetles on, as if he hadn't just shot himself in the mouth:

Despite a death toll that pales next to that of the great wars [another stunning admission against interest!], one casualty milestone after another has been observed and reflected upon this time, especially in Iraq.

[And who's doing the observing and reflecting?]

There was the benchmark of seeing more U.S. troops die in the occupation than in the swift and successful invasion. And the benchmarks of 1,000 dead, 2,000, 2,500.

Now this.

"There's never a good war but if the war's going well and the overall mission remains powerful, these numbers are not what people are focusing on," said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. "If this becomes the subject, then something's gone wrong."

You bloody well bet your bippy "something's gone wrong," Professor Zelizer... but it's not a failure of nerve of the American people: it's that, unlike any other war we fought prior to Vietnam, the post-Vietnam media has eschewed both the principle of "a search for the truth" and even the previous war principle of "may she always be right, but our country, right or wrong."

The new media motto is "Amerika, scourge of the world!" I want to make it absolutely clear that I don't question the media moguls' patriotism. I nakedly assert they have none.

I don't know if Woodward (any relation?) wanted to write this revolting article, or if some AP editor assigned it to him. But he clearly embraced his task with enthusiasm, an almost obscene gloating in the deaths of American military personnel. Perhaps I'm overreacting; but read this and tell me there's no trace of cock-crowing:

As of Friday, the U.S. death toll stood at 2,693 in the Iraq war and 278 in and around Afghanistan, for a total of 2,971, two short of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Pentagon reports 56 military deaths and one civilian Defense Department death in other parts of the world from Operation Enduring Freedom, the anti-terrorism war distinct from Iraq.

Altogether, 3,028 have died abroad since Sept. 11, 2001.

The civilian toll in Iraq hit record highs in the summer, with 6,599 violent deaths reported in July and August alone, the United Nations said this week.

Woodward reels off each number with the gusto of a sports fan reciting stats of his favorite baseball team. I almost get the impression he had them memorized already. (And don't forget, he already admitted that such milestones were meaningless; but not, evidently, to Calvin Woodward.)

The problem is not America. It's not the American people, or the right-wingers, or President Bush, or the neocons.

The problem is AP, Reuters, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the news division of the Wall Street Journal (which is as liberal as all the rest, in contrast to the editorial pages). The problem is Woodward himself, and all those like him -- arch grotesques who dance a little Snoopy dance when they can announce another "milestone" of death... and the milestones become millstones around our country's neck, trying to drag us from victory towards defeat like one of Tony Soprano's enemies sinking slowly into the Hudson River with a pair of cement overshoes.

Look at the language of Calvin Woodward:

  • He tells us each American death statistic in precise detail; but he says nary a word about enemy casualties, which have been staggingly higher.
  • He fails to mention the ouster of the Taliban and of Saddam Hussein, the democratic votes in those countries, the freedom of the people, successes such as the abandonment of nuclear weapons by Lybia's Qadaffi, or the many, many nations that have changed their spots in the last five years and now fight against the terrorists they once tolerated.
  • He triumphantly announces that civilian deaths in Iraq "hit record highs in the summer," without troubling to mention that after that peak, they receded very significantly.
  • And he uses misleading statistics to suggest comparisons of Iraq to WWII (to Iraq's detriment), when in fact the situations are incomparable.

That last point bears looking at:

A new study on the war dead and where they come from suggests that the notion of "rich man's war, poor man's fight" has become a little truer over time.

Among the Americans killed in the Iraq war, 34 percent have come from communities reporting the lowest levels of family income. Half come from middle income communities and only 17 percent from the highest income level.

That's a change from World War II, when all income groups were represented about equally. In Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, the poor have made up a progressively larger share of casualties, by this analysis.

The accusation is clear from the first paragraph above: "rich men" started the war, but they're sending "poor men" to fight it for them. I'm sure the statistic he cites is accurate; but I'm equally sure it's meaningless. What difference does it make whether a recruit comes from a community "reporting the lowest" or "the highest income level?" If you really want to argue that rich men are sending the poor to their deaths -- you need to look at the income level of the actual soldiers, not the "communities" from which they come.

And who chooses what constitutes a "community" anyway? If you draw the lines tendentiously enough, you can call any community either poor or rich, depending which is needed for the argument.

And of course, one reason that WWII, Korea, and Vietnam had greater participation by rich "communities" like the wealthy, liberal enclaves in New York, Connecticut, and Hollywood, California is that for those other wars, we had the draft. Does Woodward propose we bring it back, as liberal Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem, 100%) has repeatedly demanded?

The modern, all-volunteer, American military draws disproportionately from the South, not because the South (as a region) is "poor," but because its moral values are more traditional, and because it has a tradition of military service unlike any other region in America. When young men and women in San Francisco, Chicago, Bangor, Philadelphia, and especially Chappaqua are allowed to choose, they tend not to choose to enlist.

Very well; that's freedom for you. But don't, for God's sake, use freedom as a bludgeon against Republicans. There's a limit even to the liberal aphorism "any stick to bash a conservative."

Well... in a decent world, there would be.

It really is time for the antique media to pull up its pants and choose sides (those of them who haven't long ago chosen the side of America's enemies). Until they do, we should not let them get away with standing on the sidelines making snide comments and pulling sarcastic faces. Even New York Times readers deserve better.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 22, 2006, at the time of 07:29 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

September 15, 2006

Whack-a-Mole -- or Seal-a-Hole?

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

The antique media is infamous for burying the lede: not understanding the real point of a story -- or else not wanting us to understand it! -- and instead hiding it deep within the article, where they know few eyes dare to scan (the eyes usually wandering off after the first two or three paragraphs of wretched writing).

In this case, an AP article focuses on a new tactic of digging trenches around Baghdad. The trench idea is interesting and probably smart; anything that makes it tougher for bad guys to creep like moles in the night into Baghdad can't help but be good for the war effort.

But AP lets slip a far more important point 22 paragraphs (out of 31) into the article: that Operation Together Forward, while being the worst-named operation in recent military history (which is saying a lot), designed to clear Baghdad of sectarian militia murders, is in fact working literally like gangbusters:

Both the Bush administration and military have said sectarian killings and violence are surging around Iraq and in the capital, although the military has said the attacks are limited to parts of Baghdad not yet included in the security operation.

In other words, it's working great in those areas where it has been used; and the violence is only spiking in areas that have not yet been subjected to the house-to-house searches and interrogations by the Iraqi Army and National Police and the American soldiers and Marines.

I later confirmed this unsourced claim by referring to a CENTCOM release:

This approach appears to be working in the focus areas, where violence is down, [Army spokesman Maj. Gen. William] Caldwell said.

However, he acknowledged that violence in other parts of Baghdad experienced a “spike” yesterday and noted that terrorist death squads “are clearly targeting civilians outside the focus areas.”

“Overall, Baghdad’s level of sectarian violence has been reduced,” he said, “but remains above the levels of violence we saw before the Golden Mosque bombing in Samarra in late February.”

It's glib and easy to say, "gee, there's still violence in Baghdad -- nothing has changed -- the war is a failure -- let's declare defeat and head home." In fact, that pretty much describes the Democratic Party's “Real Security Act of 2006.” Alas, even some Republican jellyfish, such as Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT, 20%) have wriggled aboard that bandwagon.

Shays doesn't entirely buy the Democratic defeatism; he does not advocate the Democratic position of cutting and running, for example. But the central conceit for all the defeatists is that, "since January of this year there has been no progress," as Shays claims.>

Fortunately, this position is nonsense on stilts.

If you see somebody playing a game where he keeps whacking plastic moles on the head with a mallet over and over again for hours, it would be easy to conclude he's playing Whack-a-Mole. In that game, the moles pop up again and again from the same holes; every time you whack one, it goes down, only to be resurrected moments later.

But when you look closer, you discovered that every time the player whacks a mole, the mallet stays stuck in the hole, permanently blocking it. The player grabs a new mallet and whacks the next one, sealing off another hole. You notice that the moles never come popping up through the sealed holes, only through the holes that are still open... and you also notice that there are a finite number of holes -- and the player is rapidly sealing them up.

This is a new game called Seal-a-Hole, and it has a very different dynamic from Whack-a-Mole: the normal game is one of futility; the game continues until the player gets tired and quits or he runs out of money. But Seal-a-Hole actually has a victory point: when all the holes are sealed, the game is over -- and the player, America, has won.

Even though Seal-a-Hole is not futile, it nevertheless requires a great deal of patience; there are many, many holes, and each hole has a mole who must be whacked. Some of the holes, such as Sadr City, are very big and will require many mallets to properly seal. But if we have the courage and fortitude of our American forebears, we will seal those holes... and we will win.

Like all analogies, this one doesn't "prove" anything. But I hope it gives you a different perspective from which to view the actual evidence of success emanating from the penumbra of Baghdad.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 15, 2006, at the time of 04:47 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 12, 2006

Because We Trusted Bush... Yeah, That's the Ticket!

Elections , Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae
Hatched by Dafydd

The story that Democrats are attacking President Bush over his magnificent, almost Churchillian speech last night is already being adequately covered by many other excellent bloggers. Oh, and also by those guys in the elite media, if anybody still reads them (besides us excellent bloggers, I mean). But I think we've found just a tiny hook that has not yet been exploited. (I was going to say "just a tiny nipple that has not yet been sucked," but I thought that unduly vivid.)

Check out this line from the Reuters story:

Top Democrats on Tuesday accused President George W. Bush of exploiting the September 11 anniversary to boost his faltering Iraq war policy and his party's sagging popularity in an election year. [Good, good -- squeezed two Democratic memes into the very first sentence!]

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said Bush should have tried to recapture a spirit of national unity in a televised Oval Office address on Monday night.

Reid told reporters Democrats had been so confident the Republican Bush would be nonpartisan that they had not sought equal time on television to offer their party's response.

Uh...

Uh...

Uh...

Say what?

Reid told reporters Democrats had been so confident the Republican Bush would be nonpartisan that they had not sought equal time on television to offer their party's response.

...Is it just me? Or does this sound roughly like Danish King Hrothgar saying "I was so confident that Grendel wouldn't come back and slaughter my warriors sixty-five times in a row, that I didn't bother posting any guards around Heorot last night."

(What do you mean, "what the hell are you talking about, Dafydd?" Couldn't you guys manage to stay awake during your high school English Lit classes?)

Considering that the primary meme of the Democrats is that Bush is all politics and no policy, what do you think are the odds that anybody in the DNC thought "the Republican Bush would be nonpartisan" in his prime-time speech on September 11th?

Of course, in reality, he was nonpartisan; he never even mentioned the Democrats (which is probably what really torqued them off). But this is a question of perception: if the Democrats think of Bush as the ultimate political-party animal (tomorrow, Bill Clinton sues for trademark infringement), then how risible is it for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Mirage Hotel and Casino, 100%) to claim it never occurred to them that he would be political?

(Friend Lee reminds me that Charles Krauthammer, in the commentary after that speech on Fox News Channel, correctly distinguished between a speech being political -- which it must be, if it's to talk at all about policy -- and the same speech being partisan, which requires not merely saying "this is my policy" but also "and here's the stupid policy of my opponent.")

So what's the real reason the Democrats didn't ask for equal time -- which I noticed and wondered about myself? Simple: for all the wrangling going on in the GOP these days over immigration, troops levels, and such, it's the Democrats who are in complete policy disarray. Look at their pathetic “Real Security Act of 2006,” where all they could get their caucus to agree on were three bland, vague platitudes -- and that Don Rumsfeld should be canned!

That's it; that's their entire defense + anti-terrorism plan for the looming November elections.

They didn't request equal-response time because they had no idea what they were going to say. An insider who must remain anonymous, but who was privy to the hastily arranged response conference, and who has secretly informed Big Lizards, reports the following minutes from yesterday afternoon:

3:08 PM EDT: Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gaveled the response conf. to order, after a brief struggle with Minority Leader Harry Reid over who controls the gavel, which Rep. Pelosi won by repeatedly kicking Sen. Reid in the chest.

Rep. Pelosi: Shut up. Shut up you in the back, whoever you are. And stop clutching your chest like you're having a cardiac arrest. I took off my shoes before kicking you.

Now we all agree that Bush is essentially Hitler in all important points. But we can't say that. No, I will not recognize you, Russ; trust me, we can't say that. You shut up too, Bernie. We can't say that yet, so what do we say?

8:58 PM EDT: Meeting adjourned following five hours and fifty minutes of discussion; the 87 motions made were all tabled until next week by general consensus. Sen. Reid returned from Bethesda Naval Hospital just seconds before Rep. Pelosi banged the gavel down. No cause-effect should be inferred from the time relation between those two events.

See? No matter how long the media chickens have pecked at the story, there are always a few grains left to digest. I'm sorry, was that too vivid as well?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 12, 2006, at the time of 06:18 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Newsflash: There's Violence in Iraq

Elections , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

As part of the campaign by the antique media to demonstrate "the deteriorating situation in Iraq," which leads directly to "President Bush's plummeting poll ratings" and "the widespread expectation that Democrats will capture one or both houses of Congress in November," Associated Press sent out the following dire story:

Violence killed at least two dozen people across Iraq on Tuesday, including six who died when a car bomb blew up in western Baghdad.

The gist of the story is that, when AP toted up all the reports of killings they received on Tuesday, which is already over in that nation of 26.8 million people, it totaled 24. If this is the norm, then it works out to an annual homicide rate of 32.7 per 100,000... which is more than in the United States but less than Colombia and most other South and Central American countries.

I picture the AP Iraq editors sitting around misty eyed, reminiscing: "Remember the good old days, when we could rely upon a solid triple-digit death toll each and every day?"

What is the world coming to, when newsmen cannot even count upon Iraq, of all places, to yield actionable campaign material for the Left? Perhaps they should remember the stirring words of one of their own, William Randolph Hearst:

"You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war."

AP and Reuters had better get cracking: so little time, so much staging to do!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 12, 2006, at the time of 03:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Sprint for Defeat!

Elections , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The Democrats, after years of threatening, have finally enunciated their own defense/anti-terrorist policy; it appears to be modeled on a pell-mell dash towards the exits, overturning the ottoman and the teakettle in their mad rush:

Mr. Reid and several colleagues offered what they called the “Real Security Act of 2006,” calling for the beginning of a phased withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by the end of this year, a heightened effort to enlist more countries to take part in building a new Iraq, the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and a faster adoption of the recommendations of the independent commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks.

Whew, a blueprint for victory if ever I saw one! Though it loses points for the lack of originality, having a disturbing similarity (approaching plagiarism) to their earlier plans for Vietnam and Somalia, and their mentors' plans for defending la belle France during the late unpleasantness with Germany.

Let's take these one at a time...

"A phased withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by the end of this year"

There are exactly 117 days left until the end of the year, and there are about 150,000 American troops in Iraq. That means the Democrats want a "phased withdrawal" of forces at the rate of 1,282 soldiers every day. (Perhaps more, if they require the Pentagon to stick to the unions' 35-hour work week.) Call it the "battalion a day rout."

Withdrawing 1,300 soldiers a day from Iraq is probably about as fast as we reasonably could do it. So by "phased withdrawal," what they actually mean is yanking them all out at breakneck speed, pedal to the metal, as fast as humanly possible.

When Ehud Barak ordered the mass exodus of Israelis out of Lebanon, he made them flee so fast, they left armor behind; the IDF actually had to send helicopters in to destroy the Israeli Merkava tanks left in Lebanon, lest Hezbollah snatch them up and use them against Israeli towns. I wonder if the American Democrats want us to do that with our Abrams tanks, just for the heck of it?

At that speed, it would be absolutely impossible for the Iraqi Army to keep pace with our hysterical retreat. Vast stretches of Iraq would be left utterly unguarded; they would quickly fill up with militias and terrorists, leaving Iraq rather like Lebanon. Are the Democrats confused about which Western defeat they're trying to recreate?

Perhaps al-Qaeda could supply us extra transports to use to flee in disgrace. No doubt Sen. Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%) would immediately take to the TV screens, with his floppy wrist and weak, ineffectual -- dare I say "reedy" -- voice, crowing that he told us all along that it would end in tears.

If he meant it would end in a Democratic victory in 2006, then yes, the nation would soon be in tears.

"A heightened effort to enlist more countries to take part in building a new Iraq"

What, off in a corner? I'm unsure where exactly this "new Iraq" is supposed to be built: most of the territory in the Middle East is already spoken for... perhaps in the Australian Outback? I understand that's mostly unoccupied, and it's barren enough that the Iraqis might go for it.

Seriously, what on Earth does Harry Reid mean this time? How does he plan for us -- or rather, other countries -- to "build a new Iraq?" Will France depose the current government of Monsieur Maliki?

Who -- besides those "other countries" enlisted -- gets the oil? It seems as if the Iraqis have by and large already decided what sort of government they want: a parliamentary democracy, along with eighteen provinces headed by provincial governors. It's somewhat tribal and somewhat federalist... but I don't think they're anxious to rip it apart and rebuild it.

And certainly not to satisfy Mr. Reid's whim to be seen as the "founding father" of a brand, spanking new Iraq, the model of a major Middle Eastern state as the Democratic Party see the region: caliphates and satrapies controlled by Iran, the Democrats' favorite "Arabic" "republic."

Pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical, but I'm not completely persuaded that Mr. Reid can get the Iraqis to throw over their own political constructs for his.

"The ouster of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld"

Come to think on it, this is the only part of the Democrats' Real Security Act of 2006 that is actually specific, concrete -- and non-negotiable.

Has Donald H. Rumsfeld made mistakes? Sure; he's trusted Democrats to put the country first, for example. Has he made decisions that the American people don't like? Certainly... especially after the unhelpful Democratic Party and their willing accomplices in the elite media get through chewing their newscud.

Has he screwed up so spectacularly that he needs to be removed? Of course not; he's won two major wars and is doing as well against the terrorist/insurgent/sectarian militia challenge as almost anyone could. Have we lost the Iraq War? Only if we elect the Democrats, would could snatch victory from the jaws of a crocodile.

Does Donald Rumsfeld frighten the Democrats? Evidently so.

Have we finished interviewing ourselves? I think so.

"And a faster adoption of the recommendations of the independent commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks"

All right, I'll bite. What "recommendations of the independent commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks" in particular does Mr. Reid mean?

The 9/11 Commission -- sorry, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- offered a huge bunch of recommendations, which were followed by add-ons from numerous other commissions and groups:

  • The Gilmore Commission
  • The Bremer Commission
  • The Joint Inquiry of House and Senate Intelligence Committees
  • The Hart-Rudman Commission

You can read the entire schmear here, if you're really masochistic.

But for those of you who, like me, have the attention span of mayfly, here's the Campbell's Condensed Cream of Commission:

9/11 Cmsn Recs
  1. The U.S. government must attack terrorists and their organizations;

    Afghanistan. Iraq. Al-Qaeda. Got it... check. So how strongly do the Democrats support those attacks today? I'm just asking...

  2. The United States should be willing to make the difficult long-term commitment to the future of Pakistan;

    Pervez Musharraf; foreign aid; joint anti-terrorist operations. What more would Harry Reid do? Hm, maybe a case of bubble bath.

  3. The United States and the international community should make a long-term commitment to a secure and stable Afghanistan;

    NATO -- say, that's a good idea! Why didn't Bush think of that? Oh, wait...

  4. The problems in the U.S.-Saudi relationship must be confronted, openly;

    Hm... I'm sure there must have been a Democratic proposal in the House or Senate to work with Saudi Arabia to reform all the madrasses that preach nothing but hatred towards America, Israel, and the West; but I can't quite bring it to mind.

    Of course, the Bush administration has actually moved the House of Saud pretty significantly in the direction of shutting down al-Qaeda and some of the more radical clerics. I'm going to have to give the Republicans another upcheck on this one.

  5. We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors;

    Let's see: leash-wielding, prisoner stripping, sex-obsessed guards at Abu Ghraib tried and convicted of crimes... check. Soldiers accused of rape or homicide arrested and threatened with the death penalty... check. Official policy opposing torture... check. Allow Red Cross to inspect prisons... check. All right, what more exactly would the Democrats offer, aside from cable TV (with the naked channel) and a high-speed internet connection?

  6. Just as we did in the Cold War, we need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously;

    Er... what is Nancy Pelosi's position on full funding for Voice of America anyway?

  7. The U.S. government should offer to join with other nations in generously supporting a new International Youth Opportunity Fund;

    If this is anything like the Boy Sprouts, we're probably already doing it -- and the Democrats are probably already suing it.

  8. Economic policies that encourage development, more open societies, and opportunities for people to improve the lives of their families and to enhance prospects for their children’s future;

    I think that would be called "Capitalism"... which to the Democrats is "the unknown ideal."

  9. Engaging other nations in developing a comprehensive coalition strategy against Islamist terrorism;

    I think that would be called "Democracy"... which to the Democrats is "the failed policy of the current administration."

  10. The United States should engage its friends to develop a common coalition approach toward the detention and humane treatment of captured terrorists;

    If that means America must move to embrace the average of the interrogation procedures of Europe, then that would mean we should expand our list of acceptable techniques to include the rack, the thumbscrew, and crucifixion.

  11. The U.S. should make a maximum effort to strengthen counterproliferation efforts against weapons of mass destruction by expanding the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Cooperative Threat Reduction program;

    Uh...

    "The Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) is an international effort led by the United States to interdict transfer of banned weapons and weapons technology."

    "The Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program of the United States assists the states of the former Soviet Union in controlling and protecting their nuclear weapons, weapons-usable materials, and delivery systems."

    Now, I don't want to judge before all the evidence is in, but the fact that these are two long-term, ongoing programs of the United States would tend to imply that we're already doing this. But perhaps I've been misinformed.

  12. The U.S. should engage in vigorous efforts to track terrorist financing.

    Unless I miss my guess, that would be the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) terrorist-tracking program. And as I recall, but correct me if I'm wrong, the Democrats demanded it be killed after it was outed by the New York Times.

The American Left is not going to lie on the ground and merely play "speedbump" for the American response to terrorism; they're determined to rear up like underwater reefs and wreck the entire ship of state!

“Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, the American people deserve a government that has learned the lessons of the terrorist attacks,” the Democrats said in a statement. “Bush Republicans have talked tough but failed to protect this country.”

Given that the phrase "protect this country" in this context means protect it from violent attack, I can only conclude that there has been some significant terrorist attack since September 11th, 2001, on the American mainland -- or at least on our embassies, Marine barracks, or the USS Cole -- that Mr. Reid is privy to but which has been successfully concealed from the rest of us. I encourage the minority leader to file an FOIA request to liberate that information, so the Times or the Washington Post can publish it.

Either that or... do you think it possible that the Democrats (I know this is absurd) might finally have snapped, and are having a feverish argument with their own fantasy version of reality, like Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey? (More important, is Jimmy Stewart's character related in any way to Maureen?)

Oops, I might be in trouble under the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 for posting this so close to the November election.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 12, 2006, at the time of 04:50 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

September 10, 2006

No Difference Between Democrats and Republicans? Think Again

Elections , Iraq Matters , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

According to CBS News, Democratic Senator John D. "Jay" Rockefeller (D-WV, 100%) -- who has announced to the world that he's a dimwitted "dupe" of the idiot evil genius George W. Bush -- still thinks that we'd be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in charge of Iraq:

Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq — even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.

He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, "because it is called the 'war on terror.'" [Say, that's pretty hard to refute!]

Does Rockefeller stands [sic] by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn't invade?

"Yes. Yes. [Saddam] wasn't going to attack us. He would've been isolated there," Rockefeller said. "He would have been in control of that country but we wouldn't have depleted our resources preventing us from prosecuting a war on terror which is what this is all about."

It's almost as if Karl Rove has been sending his mind-control beam directly into Jay Rockefeller's head, the latter having forgotten to wear his tinfoil hat. Are the Democrats actually trying to lose the election? If so, I certainly don't want to get in their way; but isn't if awfully precipitous for Rockefeller to rip the mask off before November 7th?

And is Rockefeller the only bloke in the Senate who doesn't understand that if we hadn't invaded Iraq in 2003, then today, in 2006, there wouldn't be any sanctions anymore?

Hussein would not be "isolated;" au contraire, he would be more powerful than at any time in the past fifteen years: he would have restarted his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs; both the Iraq Survey Group and the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report say that was Hussein's intent all along. And European and Latin American representatives would be beetling to Baghdad to genuflect to the great man, hands out for oil allocations.

This is what Rockefeller considers "a better scenario, and a safer scenario" for America. And you want to know the worst part? If the Democrats win the Senate in the upcoming election, Jay Rockefeller will be the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Stick that in your pipe and step on it.

So Jay Rockefeller, nutty as a Froot Loop, would chair the Senate Intelligence Committee -- and spend the next two years investigating Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld... rather than al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Iran. All because some Republicans insist there's "not a dime's worth of difference" between Republicans and Democrats, which means between Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS, 88%) and Chairman Jay Rockefeller.

Yeah, stay home and sulk instead of voting. Better yet, vote for a third-party candidate to "teach the Republicans a lesson." Great idea!

I'm sure hard-core conservative Republicans will be elected in droves in 2008. And their first order of business will be to begin the task of rebuilding half a dozen major American cities that were destroyed by al-Qaeda, while Congress was busy impeaching Bush for intercepting al-Qaeda phone calls.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 10, 2006, at the time of 05:11 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 07, 2006

Deteriorata

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

I've read at least five articles in the antique media in the last week that included some variant on the phrase "the deteriorating situation in Iraq." It was almost as if the entire MSM held a meeting and picked that week's buzz words.

According to the internationally accepted English-language dictionaries, "deteriorating" means "getting worse," of course; evidently, the media is using its own strange, new definition of which we were previously unaware.

In fact, we have several very good measures of how well or ill the Iraq strategy is working. Let's start with the easiest: how do American military personnel in Iraq fare these days?

Not too badly, actually; a lot better than in the previous two years. According to Iraq Coalition Casuality Count, the years 2004, 2005, and the first 250 days of 2006 have seen the following service deaths:

Deaths of American servicemen
and servicewomen in Iraq
Year Deaths Days Average per day
2004 848 366 2.32
2005 846 365 2.32
2006 480 250 1.92

That's a drop of 17% over 2005; and as the handoffs from Coalition forces to Iraqis continues, that number will continue to drop, as fewer American troops will be patrolling dangerous sections of Iraq. That may not be a stunning drop; but it sure as shootin' isn't any kind of an increase. Thus, by the standard of deaths (and the broader category of casualties) of our troops, Iraq is getting better, not worse.

Another metric is the number of civilians killed, wounded, or even attacked; after all, the whole purpose of an army is to do the fighting for the civilian population. If more and more Iraqi civilians were being killed every month, then that would inarguably be an example of things getting worse.

And we all know that things certain did get worse in July: Sunni and Shia militias turned on each other and began a wave of brutal "executions" and other murders. But July was more than a month ago; and the Iraqi security forces (the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi National Police, and the local, provincial police), along with their Coalition partners, responded to the spike in violence.

But was the response successful, or are the killings still proceeding apace? Alas, the website we just used doesn't report this number; instead, it combines Iraqi civilians and Iraqi military deaths into one lump sum -- which is rather useless when we're trying to separate the two.

The reality is that Operation Together Forward, despite its rather unfortunate name, has been quite successful, according to the best possible source: Multi-National Force -- Iraq, the Coalition itself.

MNF-Iraq spokesman, Maj.Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, gave a presentation and slide show to the press yesterday demonstrating how casualties, homicides, and attacks against civilians have all dropped markedly in Baghdad. But I haven't seen one word of this show up in the elite media today... so evidently, it didn't take.

(That's hardly a departure for them; as Sachi notes, they ignored the steady political and reconstruction progress made up to July, and they are ignoring the entire recovery after the July spike in violence. They focus like a laser beam, as Clinton used to say, on one bad month and pretend that's the norm.)

But in fact, we have some very cool slides from Caldwell's presentation that demonstrate this improvement in the Iraq endeavor (hat tip to Soldier's Dad; see the rest of the slides at the MNF-Iraq link above).

First, civilian killings in Baghdad -- the worst of the three provinces that are lagging the other 15:



Comparing sectarian casualties in Baghdad from July to August 2006

Comparing sectarian killings in Baghdad from July to August 2006

Gen. Caldwell, in his presentation, explains this slide:

This is what it was in density, with red being the most dense, the highest number of those who have been murdered executed being found in this location here, and then somewhat more right in the center, right up here, and to where it's less dense, down. This is across the entire Baghdad city area. These are deaths that are reported, that are recorded, that we know about. And this is what it looked like in July. This is what it looked like in August, based on the casualty figures, as reported.

And then up in the Kadhimiya and the Mansour areas, you can see literally almost down to nothing here and then a little bit here.

As easily seen, sectarian and terroristic homicides have plummeted since Operation Together Forward began. That's not a "deterioration," that's a strong improvement... and you can see it graphically with your own eyes.

"All right, Mr. Lizard," I hear you kvetch, "so much for actual deaths; but what about attacks themselves? Aren't they still rising, even if killings are decreasing?"

All right, let's take a look at another slide:



Comparing sectarian casualties in Baghdad from July to August 2006

Here is Caldwell on this slide (reparagraphed for clarity):

One more indicator that operations are in fact reducing the amount of attacks on civilians is shown here on this graph. What I'd like to do is talk you through.

This is the baseline in March. Without getting into specific, exact casualty figures, this is the casualty figures as we reported them, as we tracked them during the month of March.

We found in the month of April we had about a 3-percent increase over that baseline of March, and in the May time frame we had about a 39 percent increase from, again, the baseline in March. By the July time frame, we had experienced a 73 percent increase in the number of casualties -- these are murders, execution, indirect fire, IEDs, whatever it was -- attacks that were being levied on civilians within the Baghdad area.

And then in August, August 7th is when you saw that the operations commenced, Operation Together Forward phase two. This month at the end of the month it's an 8 percent increase from the baseline back in March.

That is a 38% drop in attacks in a single month of Operation Together Forward. (The only bad thing about this operation is the name; couldn't they change it to Operation Guardian Angel, or something?)

Caldwell continues:

Again, what this shows is the cycle of retaliatory violence has been slowed in the target areas as we have specifically focused our efforts here within the Baghdad area. Again, we remain very cautiously optimistic about these figures, but we also recognize that the real measurement of this progress isn't just this month's but rather the sustainment of this over the long period of time. As we said many times before, this operation is going to be conducted over many months, not over several weeks.

This is part of the greatest story never told: the increasing tempo of our success in Iraq. The antique media is terrified of reporting on any of this... because it utterly undermines the Story, which is -- here comes what we in the writing biz dub the "callback" -- which is "the deteriorating situation in Iraq."

Oh, how I wish I could lock the mainstream news anchors, the elite newspaper editors, and the wire-service presidents in a room and ask them a few questions, then just keep asking and asking until they finally broke down and answered. (All right, maybe just a soupçon of waterboarding.) For people who yammer endlessly about "the public's right to know," they're remarkably unforthcoming about anything that might hurt their patrons, the Democrats.

I'm still trying to sort out which newsmen are actively evil... and which are just useful idiots.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 07, 2006, at the time of 08:13 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Good Hunting Over the Weekend

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Headlines in the various wire services during the weekend were still the same old recycled Democratic talking points: Another U.S. soldier killed in action! Setbacks, quagmire! The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have failed... it's time to declare defeat and head to Okinawa!

Sometimes I feel the media ghoulishly enjoy counting bodies, especialy our own guys and gals. But even AP could not ignore this remarkable achievement of Canadian troops in Afghanistan:

NATO: 200 Taliban, 4 Canadians Killed

PASHMUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Warplanes and artillery pounded Taliban fighters hiding in orchards Sunday during a big Afghan-NATO offensive that the alliance said killed more than 200 militants in its first two days. Four Canadian soldiers also were killed.

Oh, Canada! The Taliban has attacked the NATO forces from time to time; but it always ends the same way: lopsided defeat. I don't understand why they keep on doing thing that don't work... unless it's just a mass expression of "suicide by soldier."

Given that the terrorists believe "death is a promotion" (as Ralph Peters puts it, paraphrasing Cal Thomas), we really do need to consider the possibility that the Taliban knows their attacks will fail, and they'll die in droves -- yet they continue anyway as an act of martyrdom.

Meanwhile in Iraq, we had quite a weekend, according to CENTCOM. I wonder if you saw these headlines in the antique media:

Iraqi and US Security Forces Capture 30 Insurgents, 38 Suspected Insurgents, Over Weekend Ops in Western al-Anbar Province

Iraqi police and soldiers, along with U.S. Marines and soldiers from Regimental Combat Team 7, detained 30 confirmed insurgents and 38 suspected insurgents over the weekend throughout the western Al Anbar Province, Iraq.

Over the weekend, Iraqi and Coalition forces carried out numerous operations throughout Iraq, and the results were spectacular:

  • "In Rawah, 50 miles east of the Iraqi-Syrian border, Iraqi police identified and detained 18 of the 38 captured suspected insurgents."
  • "In Hit, 70 miles northwest of Ramadi, Iraqi and U.S. soldiers detained one known insurgent and 10 suspected insurgents Sunday."
  • "Through a variety of counterinsurgency operations Saturday and Sunday, Iraqi police, Iraqi soldiers, and U.S. Marines captured 27 known insurgents and four suspected insurgents in the Haditha Triad, a cluster of three cities -- Haditha, Barwanah, and Haqlaniyah."
  • "In Sa'dah, a town just east of the Iraqi-Syrian border, U.S. Marines captured six more suspected insurgents Saturday. Marines also discovered an ordnance cache near the border on Saturday. The cache consisted of 120 mm rockets, 155 mm rockets, and 122 mm rockets."

We've got even more good news from Camp Fallujah, according to Maj.Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, spokesman for Multi-National Force -- Iraq.

During recent clearing operations in Adhamiyah - as part of Operation Together Forward - Iraqi forces and Soldiers from the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Multi-National Division – Baghdad, captured an improvised-explosive device-making facility. The find included a supply of bomb-making components, three mortar caches and engineering manuals.

On the heels of success in Adhamiyah, Marines from Regimental Combat Team 5, moving as part of Operation Rubicon, recently uncovered hundreds of weapons and combated insurgents in running gun battles in the town of Mushin, west of Habbaniyah.

If you'll recall, I promised that some of the security responsibilities were going to be handed over to Iraqis this month; but there was a brief delay. The elite media portrayed this as a "setback" for President Bush, implying the hand-over was never going to happen.

But of course, it turned out to be just what the Pentagon said it was: a brief miscommunication about certain duties and responsibilities. And now it's gone through with no problem:

Iraqi Soldiers Take the Lead

Soldiers of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division transferred responsibility of security for the majority of the Kirkuk Province to two battalions of the Iraqi Army during a ceremony at an Iraqi military compound just outside of Kirkuk, Aug. 31.

“With this ceremony, we complete the transfer of security responsibilities from our friends, the Coalition Forces, to our Brigade,” said Maj. Gen. Anwar, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 4th Iraqi Army Division. Two battalions in the multi-ethnic (Arab, Kurdish, Turkomen) 2nd Brigade had previously assumed security responsibilities in other sectors of the Kirkuk Province. This ceremony, with the final two battalions assuming responsibility, demonstrates the readiness of Iraqi Army forces in the province....

The event marks the third time this year that Coalition Forces have transferred responsibility to Iraqi Security Forces in the 1st BCT’s area of operations in and around the Kirkuk Province. The ceremony now places the majority of the province in Iraqi control. The city of Kirkuk and the village of Hawijah remain under the control of coalition forces.

And finally, the Coalition (which means the United States) has begun the process of handing over complete control of the New Iraqi Army, which we built, to the Iraqi government, which was elected by the Iraqi people. Today we handed over control of one of the ten Iraqi divisions, plus the Iraqi Air Force and Navy:

Iraq Takes Over Command of Armed Forces

On Thursday, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed a document taking control of Iraq's small naval and air forces and the 8th Iraqi Army Division, based in the south....

Handing over control of the country's security to Iraqi forces is vital to any eventual drawdown of U.S. forces here. After disbanding the remaining Iraqi army following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, coalition forces have been training the new Iraqi military.

The nine other Iraqi divisions remain under U.S. control, with authority gradually being transferred. U.S. military officials said there was no specific timetable for the transition but U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said Wednesday the Iraqis have "talked about perhaps two divisions a month."

AP, however, was far more enthused about a row that erupted between Sunni and Shiite members of the Iraqi parliament, which began when Sunni legislator Saleh al-Mutlaq accused the Shia of seeking "the division of Iraq." AP devotes more than half the story to that irrelevant non-news, instead of the hand-over in the headline.

(And I'm certain it's only a coincidence that such uncontrollable outbursts of unrelated, spurious copy in news stories -- "Spurrette's Syndrome," as Dafydd calls is -- always act to undermine any good news for President Bush, the Republicans, and the country. It's just "the luck of the draw" that Spurrette's Syndrome never interrupts or undermines bad news!)

So, folks, things are looking good. Let's stay the course, even if that means tacking back and forth a bit, to respond to changing conditions and enemy tactics.

Good hunting.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 07, 2006, at the time of 04:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 01, 2006

That (Not So) Gloomy Pentagon Report

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Or, Sen. Harry Reid Demands America Declare Defeat and Go Home

The wires and the antique media are abuzz with the report they've been salivating for; here are their headlines:

Meanwhile, Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%), reacted with his usual brand of triumphal defeatism:

In response to the Pentagon's report Friday, the Senate's top Democrat, Harry Reid of Nevada, said it showed the Bush administration is "increasingly disconnected from the facts on the ground in Iraq."

"It is time for a new direction to end the war in Iraq, win the war on terror, and give the American people the real security they deserve," Reid said.

The report covers the period from Nouri al-Maliki becoming prime minister (late May) to August 11th; but that means it misses the period of declining Iraqi violence that we discussed in Disconnections, It's Time For Maliki to Sadr Off, and more generally in "The Last Men Standing".

Here is AP on the new report, just to give you a flavor of the excited coverage:

Sectarian violence is spreading in Iraq and the security problems have become more complex than at any time since the U.S. invasion in 2003, a Pentagon report said Friday.

In a notably gloomy report to Congress, the Pentagon reported that illegal militias have become more entrenched, especially in Baghdad neighborhoods where they are seen as providers of both security and basic social services.

The report described a rising tide of sectarian violence, fed in part by interference from neighboring Iran and Syria and driven by a "vocal minority" of religious extremists who oppose the idea of a democratic Iraq.

Death squads targeting mainly Iraqi civilians are a growing problem, heightening the risk of civil war, the report said.

Well, you get the idea. Naturally, not a single one of these sources links to the report itself; I still haven't found such a link, and I'd be grateful to any Lizardite who can supply one in the comments section.

But if we don't have the report, we do have a story about the report on the Pentagon's main web page. In it, we find that the report contains several positive points undiscussed by the elite media:

  • The Iraqi government is "getting on its feet," having filled the entire cabinet during this period. The government also has a lot of support from rank and file Iraqis and is doing a good job assuming command and control of the New Iraqi Army and other Iraqi security forces (the National Police, under the control of the Interior Ministry, and local police under the control of provincial governors).
  • "The Iraqi economy is moving along. Estimates put gross domestic product growth in the country at about 4 percent for the year."
  • Oil exports are up, electricity is flowing, water is potable, sewage facilities are operational, and the rest of the country's infrastructure is rapidly recovering... not only from the war but from decades of decay during Saddam Hussein's repellant dictatorship.

The only major problem is security -- though of course that is a huge element of the equation. However, even there, the Iraqis themselves are responding, as the Pentagon story makes clear:

Violence is up, with most of the incidents being Iraqi-on-Iraqi attacks in and around Baghdad. Most of the attacks are in only four of the 18 provinces, the report notes. Fourteen provinces remain fairly peaceful and in one – Muthanna in the south –no coalition forces are operating.

Sullivan said training and equipping of Iraqi forces continues on track. Iraqi security forces are at about 278,000 trained and equipped in the Iraqi Army, National Police and local police. This is an increase of about 14,000 since the May report, he said. [Rear Adm. Bill Sullivan is the Joint Staff’s vice director for strategic plans and policy.]

What’s more, Iraqi forces are assuming the lead in their areas. This allows coalition forces to take a more supporting role. “There are currently five Iraqi divisions, 25 brigades and 85 battalions that are in the lead in their areas,” Sullivan said. “This is a 32 percent increase since the last report.”

Coalition trainers in Iraq are now focusing their attention on combat support, combat service support capabilities – medical, logistics, maintenance and so on. “That will allow the Iraqis to be more independent in their operations,” Sullivan said. “There is also a focus on improving the capabilities of the Ministry of Defense and the Interior Ministry which is required over the long [haul] for the Iraqis to assume full responsibility.”

And the plan is working; civilian casualties declined dramatically, starting just after the period of this report ended... another point the ever-so-fair elite media report only grudgingly, buried deep within the story. The Times:

The period of the study does not cover either a surge in bloody attacks during the past week nor a relatively low number of civilian casualties earlier in the month; a joint American-Iraqi security campaign in Baghdad is expected to contribute to a relatively low civilian death toll for all of August.

And AP:

Col. Thomas Vail, commander of a 101st Airborne brigade operating in the mostly Shiite areas of eastern Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday that an intensified effort to root out insurgents and quell sectarian violence in the capital is bearing fruit, leading to a decrease in sectarian murders in recent days.

And to be strictly fair ourselves, while Reuters doesn't mention this decline in violence in the article on the report, they do have a separate story out now that discusses the highly encouraging drop in violence the last few weeks -- even taking this week into account:

Iraq deaths down despite new carnage
Sep 1, 2006
by Alastair Macdonald

Violent deaths among civilians in Iraq may have fallen by a quarter last month, statistics indicated on Friday, despite a bloody week in Baghdad that ended with 70 dead in a series of explosions late on Thursday.

The partial data, provided by Iraq's Interior Ministry and based on figures from the Health Ministry, tend to confirm U.S. military confidence that a crackdown in the capital has slowed the bloodletting but also that dozens are still dying every day.

Yet the Times also illustrates an annoying tendency towards dissembling. Exhibit:

The assessment provides bad news on a variety of fronts.

It said that Al Qaeda [in Iraq] is active despite the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, because of the group’s “cellular structure,” that the Sunni insurgency is strong and that militias are undiminished.

The implication is that al-Qaeda in Iraq is just as strong as ever, despite us sending Musab Zarqawi on to meet Allah. But that isn't what the report says at all; in fact, it says precisely the opposite. From Reuters:

Conditions that could lead to a civil war exist in Iraq, the Pentagon said in a new report on Friday, as the "core conflict" has changed into one pitting Sunni Muslims against Shi'ites, with the Sunni Arab insurgency [al-Qaeda in Iraq] overshadowed.

But wait... wouldn't a general civil war be even worse than what Zarqawi was doing? Perhaps; but on the other hand, a civil war is primarily dangerous to Iraq, while Zarqawi -- having a wider vision of jihad via his close connection to Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri -- was more dangerous to the United States.

Since our purpose in invading Iraq was not to liberate Iraqis but rather to protect America, even a civil war in Iraq is preferable to a strong al-Qaeda presence there. But in any event, there is no indication that such a war has started; indeed, even Reuters admits the report makes that clear:

"Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq," the report stated, adding that concern about civil war has increased within the Iraqi civilian population.

"Nevertheless, the current violence is not a civil war, and movement toward a civil war can be prevented," added the report, which said the security environment was at its most complex state since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 that toppled President Saddam Hussein.

The Pentagon story underlines this critical point:

The fact that the national government is functioning is “one relevant data point” that shows Iraq is not engaged in a civil war, he said. ["He" is Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.]

So the real bottom line is that:

  • There was a big surge of sectarian violence in Baghdad --
  • Though it fell short of a civil war --
  • And was partially mitigated by a collapse in al-Qaeda in Iraq's terrorist war --
  • That started with the formation of the government...
  • But a major counteroffensive by Coalition and Iraqi forces in recent weeks has started to quell this violence --
  • Even taking into account several major massacres by Sunnis these last few days.

And brief though that summary is, it's deeper than anything you'll read in today's newspapers.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 01, 2006, at the time of 05:51 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 31, 2006

"The Last Men Standing"

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Progress in Iraq is slow, and sometimes it's difficult to discern any at all. All we hear everyday is that another bomb exploded, killing a few dozen more Iraqis.

So how do we tell whether the overall strategy is working? One way is to see how much of the country is ready to be handed over entirely to Iraqi security forces.

The target goal for new (post-Saddam, post Baath) Iraqi security forces is 325,000. This force will mostly be in place by year's end, according to Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who, as commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq (MNSTC-I), is ultimately responsible for all training in Iraq. This is a remarkable achievment... but even so, training the Iraqi forces has not gone as smoothly as we hoped it would.

David Ignatius, who traveled around Baghdad recently with Gen. John Abizaid, Commander of the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), discusses the huge difficulty of this process (re-paragraphed, to make it readable to ordinary humans):

A visit to Iraq leaves me thinking that the right answer is tough love. We don't need radical new plans for federalism, or sharp deadlines for withdrawing American troops, as anxious members of Congress have recently recommended.

Instead, America and Iraq need to agree on a reasonable timetable for the transfer of military control around the country - and stick to it. When provinces meet the schedule, they should be rewarded with more economic assistance. When they miss their deadlines, they should get fewer resources.

For most of the country, that transfer should be possible within six to 12 months. In Baghdad and in Anbar Province, it will take longer. But everyone should understand that America isn't prepared to keep writing a blank check.

Ignatius doesn't pull any punches; there clearly are some areas where the training is making little headway. And throughout Iraq, we're having a tougher time than anyone expected beating some of this thinking into the heads of Iraqis, who come from such a totally different culture than we:

The Iraqi Army was supposed to take control of Qadisiyah and neighboring Wasit Province from coalition forces in September. But that timetable recently slipped to January or February because of worries that the Iraqis aren't yet fully ready. So Iraqi officials here continue to avoid making tough decisions about resources, and local insurgents keep lobbing mortar rounds into the compound where Polish and other coalition troops are working with the United States to maintain order.

Training Iraqi forces has turned out to be not only the most important task, but the most difficult as well. During major combat ops, Coalition forces rolled across Saddam's pathetic military like a Humvee over a sandbox. But taking territory is one thing; holding it is a totally different animal.

The grand strategy of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has turned out to be the only workable solution: the Coalition cannot stay indefinitely; we cannot write Iraq a "blank check," as Ignatius put it. In the end, only Iraqi forces can hold Iraq and keep it from the terrorists.

But that means that the United States trainers and advisors will have to stay in Iraq long after the regular fighting troops have left. Ignatius continues:

[Lt Gen.] Dempsey tells me that next year he hopes to consolidate [the Iraqi security force], teaching the Iraqis mundane skills such as logistics management that make a modern army work. He quotes what was said of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on the need for steady nerve in this process: "Now is the time for 2 in the morning courage." He says the timing of transition "is an art, not a science"....

"The chances of success are good, if we give ourselves time to succeed," says Abizaid.

The Iraqi forces are well equipped; we've seen to that. Their level of combat skills are high and growing; already, they're the strongest Arab military force in the world.

So what is holding them back? The main problem is the Iraqi soldier's mindset and his lack of dicipline, and these derive directly from military deficiencies in Arab culture. Some soldiers still don't get the idea that they are Iraqi soldiers, not tribal militiamen, says Army Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard in a CENTCOM press release:

Pittard confirmed that 100 members of an Iraqi battalion had refused to redeploy to Baghdad. The soldiers were part of the 10th Iraqi Army Division, in southern Iraq’s Maysan province....

“The majority of this particular unit was Shia, and… the leadership of that unit and their soldiers felt like they were needed down there in Maysan in that province,” [Pittard] said.

In a way Iraq as a country is fictional... and I mean that literally. Civilization has always existed in Mesopotamia (literally, "land between the rivers"); in fact, it's considered the cradle of civilization. But it existed as independent caliphates for centuries, and independent city-states for thousands of years before that. The Ottoman Turkish Empire crushed the caliphates in the late 13th century and ruled the region for six hundred years, until the Turks' ill-fated decision to side with the Germans in the Great War brought the Ottomans down.

The region that would become Iraq was later cobbled together by the British from three Turkish regions: Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra. In the 1930s, the new country of Iraq was granted limited liberty by the Brits, who then reoccupied it during the Even Greater War. A series of coups d'etat in the 1950s and 1960s culminated with the Baath Party seizing power in 1968.

In 1979, Saddam Hussein murdered his way to the top of the Party. But his rule over Iraq itself was sustained by controlling a number of different tribes (with his own tribe from Tikrit being the boss) via bribes, threats, and the occasional bloody massacre as demonstration.

But many "Iraqis" never really had an identity as Iraqis; rather, they thought of themselves as the Tikrit tribe or the Mosul tribe, and beyond that, as Sunni, Shia, or Kurd. Given this centuries-old culture, it's very difficult for many Iraqis to grasp the concept that the army is for Iraq, not just to protect one's own region. In trying to democratize Iraq, we've run straight into the Bronze Age wall of essential primitivism.

But the good news is that only a few soldiers refused to be deployed. Most accepted the necessity... and that means that our years of training are truly starting to have an effect. Just today, I read another story about a successful provincial hand over:

Iraqi forces will take over security of a southern province from coalition troops next month, and will have control of most of the country by the end of the year, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Thursday

Dhi Qar will be the second province to come under the full control of Iraqi troops. British troops handed over control of southern Muthana province in July....

On Wednesday, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, said Iraqi troops were on course to take over security control from U.S.-led coalition forces within the next 12-18 months "with very little Coalition support."

Because of these transfers of power from the Coalition to the Iraqis, our allied forces, such as Italy's 1600 troops and Romania's 628 troops, will be able to leave Iraq by the end of this year.

So it seems we take three steps forward then two back. But that's not surprising, nor a sign of failure, considering that we're doing something nobody has ever done before: we are actually taking a pre-modern people and wrenching them into the "now" -- by patience, by demonstration, and even by what David Ignatius would call "tough love" over the long haul. The CENTCOM release continues:

[G]eneral (Pittard) said he sees a long-term job for Coalition training teams with the Iraqi forces.

“Our major mission is to help develop and support the Iraqi security forces, and of course to advise them.… U.S. forces will be here as long as the Iraqi government wants us here,” he said.

“But I'll tell you … after the majority of U.S. forces leave, we'll still see some level of advisory teams that'll still be here. In fact, I feel like we'll be the last men standing at the end of the U.S. presence here."

Slowly but surely, we are making progress. It's not as fast as we wanted, but it is happening. We've been amazingly patient for a country in such a hurry as America!

It would be a dreadful shame if the Democrats were to take control, then simply cut and run -- just when Iraqis need us the most to achieve full self-sufficiency.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 31, 2006, at the time of 11:50 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 29, 2006

It's Time For Maliki to Sadr Off

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

When Sadr arose from the ashes of his failed rebellion of 2004, still sucking air and still in command of a diminished al-Mahti militia in Najaf, many of us suspected he would continue to make trouble. Two years later, we now know he is the trouble.

But first, some good news

Insurgent attacks within Baghdad province averaged about 23 per day during the past week, Caldwell said. He noted that Baghdad’s average daily murder rate dropped 46 percent from July to August.

“And, if you look to just the past few weeks, from the 7th through the 25th of August,” he said, “the murder rate has dropped 50 percent over the daily rate for July.”

Vehicle-bomb attacks also have decreased in recent weeks, up until the renewed enemy improvised-explosive-device attacks that occurred today and over the past weekend, Caldwell said...

Iraqi and U.S. security forces began a stepped-up security campaign across Baghdad Aug. 8 to curtail deadly sectarian violence that had plagued the Iraqi capital city. As of yesterday, Caldwell said, Iraqi troops, with U.S. forces supporting them, had cleared more than 30,000 buildings, found 19 caches, seized more than 700 weapons and detained 70 suspects.

Also the New York Times slipped up yesterday: they actually reported the enemy deaths during the clash between the Mahdi militia and Iraqi troops. The editor must have been asleep at the switch to let this information slip through; but I'm sure a correction will be up on the Times website shortly...

At least 20 gunmen and 8 civilians were killed Monday when the Iraqi Army battled fiercely for hours with members of a militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric, in Diwaniya, Iraqi officials said.

The violence, which one Iraqi general said included militiamen executing Iraqi soldiers in a public square, amounted to the most brazen clashes in recent memory between Iraqi government forces and Mr. Sadr’s militia.... [In this case, "recent memory" means less than two years, one presumes]

So how did this start? Often, readers have the mistaken impression that American and Iraqi soldiers simply set out on patrol, and then they're ambushed by the wily militiamen, like the Americans attacking the hapless British during the Revolutionary War. The way the elite media usually (and deliberately) report the encounters, it's not surprising if Americans think that the enemy always sets the operational tempo, always controls the time and place, and that we're just getting shot up for no good reason.

But that's not how it usually happens at all. In fact, it's the Coalition and the Iraqi Army and police that usually force the issue:

General Ghanimi and other Iraqi Army and police officials said several militias were involved, not just the Mahdi Army. But they said the seed of the violence on Monday was planted a week ago when a roadside bomb they believe was planted by the Mahdi Army killed at least two Iraqi soldiers. Two days later, the Iraqi Army arrested a member of the Mahdi Army....

General Ghanimi, a Sunni, denied torturing the Mahdi detainee, noting that Sadr representatives visited him on Saturday and found him healthy. He said they asked for the accused bomber’s release and when the army refused, fighting broke out as the militias sought [unsuccessfully] to free him from custody.

It was in that fighting, initiated by the Iraqi Army's capture of a top Sadr bombmaker, that the Mahdi militia lost twenty men and were driven off without seizing their prisoner back -- a total defeat.

Gunfire riddled the streets from around 2 a.m. to the early afternoon. Polish troops responsible for the area helped Iraqi soldiers encircle the most violent areas, as American helicopters hovered overhead without dropping bombs, according to an American official who declined to be identified because the information is supposed to be released by the Iraqi Army.

This article does not mention it, but I read in a Japanese newspaper yesterday that ten Iraqi troops were killed; this is a ratio of 2:1 in favor of the Iraqi Army; considering that there are "in excess of 267,000" members of the New Iraqi Army and at most 20,000 members of al-Mahdi, this doesn't end well for Muqtada Sadr.

The problem with Sadr and his Mahdi "army" is not really the strength of the militia but the strength of their political machine within the ruling Shiite coalition. This leads to a lack of political will on the part of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of the Dawa Party to confront Sadr -- who is, in fact, his ally against the other major Shiite group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI:

With sectarian violence soaring, American generals and the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, say that militias are now the single greatest threat to the stability of Iraq and that the Iraqi government must disband them.

But Mr. Maliki has yet to introduce any new policy, and has refrained from strong condemnations of Mr. Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army. Mr. Maliki relies on Mr. Sadr, who is enormously popular among poor Shiites, for political support against rival Shiite politicians. Mr. Sadr controls several ministries and at least 30 seats in Parliament, and he maintains close ties to Mr. Maliki’s political group, the Islamic Dawa Party.

Maliki has objected whenever Coalition troops -- or even the Iraqi Army -- uses heavy force against Sadr and his militia; for example, he denounced the air support we supplied to a raid by the Iraqis on a "Sadr stronghold in Baghdad" in early August.

Yet Mr. Sadr and the Mahdi Army remain an obstacle. Prime Minister Maliki, a Shiite who depends on support from Mr. Sadr’s allies in Parliament, has not confronted Mr. Sadr publicly. Sadr City, a Mahdi bastion, has not been searched or raided in a thorough manner, even though it is one of the capital’s most violent areas.

But his objections are mostly oral and probably for voter consumption. And while he hasn't himself confronted Sadr, he has also not stopped the Iraqi Army from fighting al-Mahdi. There is no indication whether it was Maliki or the Iraqi and Coalition military leaders who have deferred a direct assault on Sadr City until later in the campaign.

Even so, Sadr is still causing problems; and if it turns out that Maliki cannot do it, then perhaps it is time that he should go. But we shall see.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 29, 2006, at the time of 04:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 28, 2006

Disconnections

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

To most of us, the following two statements seem somehow, you know, connected:

  • Deaths of American, Coalition, and Iraqi soldiers, along with civilians, have risen somewhat in the past week or so;
  • The Iraqi Army, with U.S. air support, initiated a major offensive against the mighty al-Mahdi militia of Muqtada Sadr in the past week or so.

But to elite, new-school journalists, these two observations are completely discrete from each other; there is no connection, and the first is only explicable by concluding that we must be losing (or have already lost) the war. Why, what other possible explanation could there be?

A suicide car bomber killed 14 people and wounded 43 outside the Interior Ministry in downtown Baghdad Monday, police said, a day after an upsurge of violence left more than 50 people dead across the country.

In one of the deadliest weekends for the U.S. military in recent months, the U.S. military said seven U.S. soldiers died between Saturday and Sunday night.

Also at least 34 people were killed and dozens injured in gunbattles between Iraqi troops and Shiite militiamen loyal to a popular cleric in the southern city of Diwaniyah, officials said Monday....

[T]he renewed violence undercut Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's claim that government forces were prevailing over insurgents and sectarian extremists.

Despite the deaths, British Defense Minister Des Browne, visiting Baghdad on Monday, said the situation was improving.

Reuters is no better:

Six American soldiers were among more than 60 people killed on Sunday that challenged assertions by Iraqi and U.S. officials that their forces were gaining the upper hand.

Both these quotations contain the same odd meme: that the measure of whether one is "prevailing" is entirely how many of one's own soldiers died that week. No measure of territory captured or secured, plots thwarted, nor provinces handed over to Iraqi forces; not even a comparison count of the number of enemy killed.

Instead, the antique media offers this simplistic formula: if the number of Coalition and civilian casualties rises one week, that is proof that we're no longer "prevailing" or "gaining the upper hand." (Does that mean if it drops the next week, we're back on course? Then how come the media never report that paradigm?)

Back in the real world, we pajama-clad amateurs (I'm actually wearing acceptable streetwear as I type this) realize that when we embark upon a powerful offensive against enemy forces -- in this case, the Iran-backed militia of Sadr -- we're going to incur more casualties than if we just hunkered down in dug-in positions and didn't show an eyebrow above the trenches. Is this really that difficult a concept to grasp?

Is anybody unaware that we lost far more soldiers during the D-Day invasion of Normandy than we did in 1942; but would anyone seriously maintain that we were doing better right after Pearl Harbor than we were while crashing onto Omaha Beach?

Neither of these two stories, nor any others that I read in the MSM, so much as hint at how many of Sadr's men were killed in the same combat. But surely that is needed for the metric above to make any sense: if we lost seven soldiers over the weekend, but we managed to kill several score of the enemy, wouldn't that change the conclusion of whether we're winning or losing?

Evidently not. Nor does the fact that July saw the lowest rate of U.S. troops dying since the Fall of 2003, except for the aberrant month of March, 2006: only 1.48 soldiers, airmen, seamen, or Air Force-men died per day.

In the previous month, it was 2.10 per day; and before that it was 2.55/day; and before that it was 2.73. So far this month, 51 American soldiers and one British soldier have died in Iraq, over a space of 28 days, an average of 1.86 per day -- higher than July, but still well below the average for 2006, for the last two years, and for the entire war (2.27/day).

Civilian and Iraqi Security Force deaths are also down. In July, there was an average of 41.3 per day; but almost all the way through August, the average so far is 31.8 per day, a drop of 23%.

But all it takes is a single flare-up of deaths, due to an offensive initiated by the Iraqis that aims at driving Sadr out of the militia business -- or failing that, out of Iraq itself -- for the news bureaus to begin shrieking and jumping on chairs as if they just spotted a mouse. ("It takes but a single match to set the woods ablaze!")

Can't we get some older correspondents who at least know the most basic characteristics of war?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 28, 2006, at the time of 05:17 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

August 24, 2006

Read All About It! (Just Not In the MSM...)

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

The training of Iraqi security forces, both the New Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police, seems to have fallen off the front pages of the antique media. There is a good reason for this: it's going very well.

"If it bleeds, it leads;" but that means that if it's good news, newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news just aren't interested. Don Henley was right: it's "give us dirty laundry!"

But if you hunt hard enough, you can actually find out what's going on around town... kind of like finding a really good movie hidden among all the theaters showing Snakes On a Plane. Fortunately for you, Big Lizards does the theater-crawling so you don't have to. Here are four great stories about Iraq, all of them very, very good news: one from the Department of Defense's website; one from the website of the Multi-National Force -- Iraq; one from Captain's Quarters (yet another obscure site!); and one from, of all places, USA Today. Enjoy.

Baghdad is still a dangerous place. Just the other day, a group of gunmen open fired on a large crowd of Shiite worshipers, killing 20 and wounding 300. But a quick response from the Iraqi security forces controlled the situation, demonstrating their improved capabilities:

“This was a tremendous demonstration of the increased capabilities of the Iraq security forces and the leadership of the government of Iraq,” Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, a spokesman for Multinational Force Iraq, told reporters during a Baghdad news briefing....

Iraqi security forces quickly responded to these attacks, controlling the situation and killing six of the terrorists and detaining 19 others, Caldwell said....

Iraqi and coalition forces continue to pursue people intent on using violence to impose their beliefs on others. For instance, operations by Iraqi and coalition forces over the past week resulted in the capture of more than 100 known and suspected al Qaeda terrorists and associates and multiple weapons caches....

Iraqi and coalition forces also continue to target death squads. There have been 20 different operations just in the past week conducted specifically against these groups, he said.

Iraqi police forces have had a lot of problems, as we all know. But many months of US training have started to pay off. The first full Iraqi Army division will soon be operating without the mentoring of U.S. advisors, a U.S. Army official who oversees Iraqi security forces’ training; and for the first time, we're seeing the same sort of improvement in the Iraqi police that we saw some time ago in the Iraqi Army:

Brig. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard discussed the formation of the Iraqi National Police and security concerns throughout Iraq in a briefing to reporters....

The INP is a relatively new command in the Ministry of Interior force structure. It was formed from the Police Order Brigade and Commando Brigade.

To become an officer in the INP, a candidate must successfully complete the initial 10-week training program and then train an additional four weeks of follow-up training.

Pittard looked back on his first deployment in Iraq as a point of reference for the Iraqi security forces’ progress, and commented on how much better they are doing now.

“The Iraqis fight and fight well,” he said. “It’s not the same as it was at all two years ago.”

Pacifying Baghdad is still a dangerous job. Policemen are often targeted by both terrorists and radical militiamen. But the Iraqi police department has no shortage of recruits:

More than 500 Iraqi men have joined the police in restive Anbar province -- a focal point of the Sunni Arab insurgency -- in the most successful recruiting drive in the region by U.S. and Iraqi forces, the U.S. military said Tuesday....

U.S. Marines screened thousands of applicants earlier this month in various regions along the western Euphrates River valley before shortlisting the recruits for the Anbar police force, said a statement by the U.S. command…

To combat the insurgency, and sectarian and criminal violence in Baghdad, the Iraqi government and Coalition announced Operation Together Forward. USA Today provides a simplified breakdown of the operation. "The offensive is planned in stages and is designed to avoid an all-out attack. In the first phase, launched July 9, Iraqi security forces positioned checkpoints throughout the city. In the second phase, launched last week, Iraqi forces supported by U.S. troops began isolating and clearing parts of the city block by block. Iraqi security forces will remain to provide security once areas are cleared. When areas are stable, the government will bring economic assistance into blighted neighborhoods." This strategy is essentially what the Marines call the "3 Block War."

Operation Together Forward is focusing on four of the most violent neighborhoods of Baghdad: Doura, Mansour, Shula and Azamiyah. These are neighborhoods where the sectarian violence has been at its worst. Coalition forces have begun operations in Doura and Ameriya. In both cases, the neighborhoods were cordoned off, and each building was searched. "Kilometer after kilometer of barriers emplaced, building what some may call the semblance of a gated community, affording them greater security with ingress and egress routes established and manned by Iraqi security forces with coalition forces in support," as the Multinational Forces - Iraq press release describes the operation in Doura.

A similar strategy of cordon, search, secure and rebuild was successfully executed in Tal Afar, and is currently being executed in the Sunni insurgent stronghold city of Ramadi. Tal Afar, with populations of 170,000 was secured in less than a month, while Ramadi, with a population of 400,000 is still up for grabs.

And here is the new face of the Iraqi police:

The Humvee has barely rolled to a stop, and Iraqi army Col. Talib Abdul Razzaq is already out of the vehicle.

He moves like a politician, stopping on the sidewalk to playfully cuff a young boy on the head and joke with a man selling shoes. He quizzes several people about violence and militias in the neighborhood. Most say the streets have been quiet.

"I'm trying to make people believe in the Iraqi army," Razzaq says at the next stop, where a sidewalk vendor gives him a complimentary sandwich from his cart. "They will feel more safe." Razzaq hands the sandwich to an aide and keeps moving.

Twice a day, Razzaq patrols the troubled neighborhoods in his battalion's sector of Baghdad. He's checking on his troops, who have set up checkpoints in the area. And he's listening to what merchants, local leaders and ordinary people have to say about security in their neighborhoods.

"I am an officer, but my job is like a tribal leader," says Razzaq, who in this polarized society refuses to say whether he is a Shiite Muslim or a Sunni.

So there you have it; we promise, we deliver. I wonder -- how many of these stories made the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post? Maybe they were too busy telling us how Iraq was a lead-lined catastrophe, an utter disaster, how it has collapsed into a full-blown civil war "by any definition" (just like 1864!); so we should just declare defeat and redeploy over the horizon... say, in the Philippines.

I guess tales like these just don't fit The Story.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 24, 2006, at the time of 04:56 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

Peaceful, Easy Baghdad Feeling?

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Has anybody else heard anything about this before today? Or on any other news service besides what we used to call "al-Reuters?" Reuters reports that Baghdad has seen a marked decline in deadly violence in the past fortnight:

Violence in Baghdad has declined in the past two weeks and all but ended in some formerly deadly neighborhoods, the U.S. military said in a cautiously upbeat report on Tuesday on a major security clampdown in the city....

A day after President George W. Bush said he was concerned about civil war and was not about to withdraw U.S. troops, the chief military spokesman in Iraq said he saw no sign of such a conflict but U.S. forces were focusing on breaking sectarian "death squads" from both Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim communities.

Twenty-two raids in the past week against such groups in the capital had led to 37 arrests, Major General William Caldwell told a news conference. He presented statistics showing a 16 percent drop in the daily average of attacks in Baghdad since August 7, at 21 compared to 25 in the preceding two months.

"What we have seen in August is a downturn," Caldwell said, two weeks after beefed up U.S. forces and thousands of Iraqi troops and police launched a new phase of what Iraqi and U.S. leaders have called a make-or-break operation to pacify Baghdad.

The decline is specifically in those areas that were hardest hit by horrific attacks:

Attacks in Dora had dropped to virtually none from 20 to 30 a day, [Caldwell] said, after U.S. and Iraqi forces flooded the area, forcing out militants and sought to win over people with offers of cash and help with municipal projects like collecting trash.

"Most of the shops are still closed," 30-year-old laborer Sabah al-Shujairi said of his part of Dora. "But security is getting better. Before, we used to hear gunshots all over but now you rarely notice a thing. There is a relative calm."

And for those still believing that the perennial leakers of classified information are merely public-spirited whistleblowers with no political axe to juggle, let's read between the lines here:

Figures leaked from the Pentagon last week indicated that the number of bombs planted to hit troops or civilians in July was almost double that in January, a record since the invasion. But Caldwell said there had been a decline since last month.

I notice that the leakers rushed to let news organizations know that July was the bloodiest month in some time, with a death rate that exceeded 100 Iraqi civilians per day; but those same leakers -- still unlocated, still with the same access to new figures -- found no particular urgency in leaking figures showing a significant decline in the death toll this month.

I wonder why not?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 22, 2006, at the time of 03:39 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 21, 2006

Politics by Other Means

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Bill Roggio at Counterterrorism blog outlines how al-Qaeda in Iraq is trying to win the hearts and minds of Sunni Iraqis by bribes and threats.

The late Musab Zarqawi tarnished the image of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda in Iraq by killing too many innocent Iraqis... and often personally cutting off the heads of victims. Even Sunni Iraqis, who had seen Sadam Hussein's treatment of the Shia, were nauseated by the brutality of al-Qaeda.

Zarqawi's successor -- Abu Ayyub al-Masri -- has recognized that killing innocent Iraqis does not gain popularity for al-Qaeda. Recruitment for suicide bombers is not meeting the quota; although they can kill people by the bus load, threats alone are not enough to control the Iraqi people. In order for them to turn Iraq into terrorist haven, they need support from the local community.

In other words, al-Qaeda in Iraq has decided to enter politics. Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, spokesman for multi-naitonal force, explains:

The sectarian violence in and around Baghdad defines the framework of the ongoing conflict in Iraq. Within Baghdad, death squads and terrorists are locked into a mutually reinforcing cycle of sectarian strife, with Sunni and Shi'a extremists portraying themselves as the defenders of their respective sectarian groups.

In regards to al-Qaida in Iraq, their leadership has outlined the end state towards which their propaganda efforts are currently working. Specifically, as given to us by those who have been detained over the last two months, they seek to portray al-Qaida in Iraq as a legitimate political organization to be viewed as the alternative to the legitimate, duly-elected government of Iraq.

Their primary goal in discrediting the government of Iraq is the expulsion of the U.S. from Iraq in order to remove support for the government of Iraq and impose themselves, al-Qaida in Iraq, as the power.

This is yet another reason why it is critical that we stay at least long enough to build up not only the New Iraqi Army (already ready to assume complete authority in 16 of Iraq's 18 provinces), but also the Interior Ministry forces -- the Iraqi police. Once both these groups, plus the national government, are able to function entirely on their own, we can pull most of our troops out, leaving only a small force to assist the Iraqis if need be and also to serve as a platform from which to strike elsewhere in the region.

In mirror-image form, it is equally critical for al-Qaeda to boot us out before the job is done. But aside from influencing the Democratic Party with predigested propaganda distributed through the elite media, how exactly does al-Qaeda plan to acheive this goal?

Al-Qaida in Iraq is making a concerted effort to gain legitimacy by marketing itself to the Iraqi people as a credible, helpful organization that appeals to Iraqis in desperate social and economic situations while projecting a civic-minded image. [That is, by doing in Iraq exactly what Hezbollah does in Lebanon: replace government assistance with their own, so that Iraqis will come to think of al-Qaeda as their "tribe."] They have produced propaganda that blames coalition forces and the Iraqi government for problems such as unemployment, security, government corruption, gas prices and the lack of power, in hopes that this will empower them to take on the role as their protectorate....

In regard to recruitment, al-Qaida in Iraq offers money, cell phones and vehicles to prospective recruits. These items appear somewhat attractive to young men. However, placement and access into the inner circles is won through personal associations, demonstrated loyalty and vetted experience. Key personalities are known associates of trusted members. Abu Uzman (sp) stated that his recruiting plan for the Umar (sic) Brigade relied on his associates talking with people they knew, who then talked to others and so on.

Americans and Coalition forces by and large destroyed the Sunni "resistance" movements against the occupying forces; however, new sectarian violence, instigated by al-Qaeda and fueled by Muqtada Sadr and his al-Mahdi "Army," cannot be so easily wished away.

To create a stable Iraq, we need the support of Iraqi Sunnis, as well as the Shia; Iraq cannot be seen by the Sunnis as a sectarian State. Too, we must be vigilant against al-Qaeda propaganda, and we must purge Shiite extremists; in other words, Sadr must die and the Mahdi Militia be obliterated. Maj. Gen. Caldwell concludes thus:

However, Iraqi security forces, with coalition forces in support, continue to degrade the al-Qaida in Iraq network by removing key to mid-level leadership and aggressively targeting the internal foreign fighter facilitator networks.

As al-Qaida in Iraq attempts to recover from this degradation, they continue to be a primary instigator of sectarian violence in Iraq. A significant portion of detained terrorists are providing clear, actionable intelligence for Iraqi and coalition forces to continue the methodical, deliberate efforts to eliminate terrorism here in Iraq. Iraqi and coalition forces will continue to work closely with each other and with the Iraqi citizens to establish peace and security throughout Iraq.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 21, 2006, at the time of 04:00 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 12, 2006

Good News from Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Mysterious Orient
Hatched by Sachi

Recently, I found myself getting too discouraged to write about good news from Iraq -- simply because I hear too much about bloodshed everyday. But then it got me thinking: hasn't it always been like this? Wasn't this the very reason I decided to start reporting good news in the first place?

Yes, folks, there is plenty to report. Just because we don't hear much about it in the elite media doesn't mean there isn't any.

First, some news from Samawa. Don't bother following the link -- it's all in Japanese! I'll translate it for you:

Orphanage Completed With Private Donations
August 9, 2006, Asahi.com

In Samawa, in southern Iraq, an orphanage was completed using private donations collected from Japan....

The facility is 360 square meters and can hold 240 students. The Lions Club in Saitama prefecture collected the "lion's share" of the 23 million yen building cost ($200,000)....

According to Mr. Ohno [of the Middle East Research Institute of Japan], Iraqi orphans were normally raised by their tribes. But due to the lengthy war, the economical situation had gotten difficult. "It is not safe in Iraq. There are too many deaths. I wanted to help people who are trying so desperately to live," Mr. Ohno said.

On another front, it was widely reported that after three years of deployment, the Japanese Self-Defense Force withdrew from Iraq. However, the Japanese Air Force is still there, still transporting supplies and wounded. Japanese forces have not left Iraq! Not yet, at least.

Meanwhile in Baghdad and Ramadi, US and Iraqi forces captured 60 Shiia militiamen and killed 34 Sunni insurgents. From Reuters :

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. troops rounded up 60 suspected militants overnight in a security clampdown to stem violence in the capital and killed 26 insurgents in a rebel Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad [they mean Ramadi -- the Mgt.]....

The sweep through the southern Baghdad district of Arab Jabour targeted a suspected bomb-making cell linked to attacks across the city of seven million.

"The group has been reported to be planning and conducting training for future attacks, like the attack in Mahmudiya July 17 that killed 42," the U.S. military said in a statement.

In a separate operation in a south Baghdad district called Um al-Maalif, Iraqi soldiers killed eight militants.

Beefed-up U.S. and Iraqi forces this week began a systematic operation to claim back Baghdad's most dangerous rebel strongholds in an attempt to restore security and shore up confidence in the new Shi'ite-led government.

We are completing a lot of great jobs in Iraq... let's keep it up! Murtha or no Murtha, we won't cut and run. "No retreat, no surrender."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 12, 2006, at the time of 11:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 29, 2006

Good News from the Front Lines - News Roundup

Afghan Astonishments , Global War on Jihadism , Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

There is a lot of good news from the two main fronts, Iraq and Afghanistan; but you're not likely to have heard of any of these small victories unless you read a lot of milblogs.

First, Iraqi Army forces took down six death squad suspects. From ThreatsWatch:

Iraqi Army forces conducted a pre-dawn raid in Baghdad on July 25, capturing six targeted insurgents, all of whom are believed to be involved in ‘death squad’ activities.

As coalition force advisers looked on, Iraqi forces raided an objective in southwest Baghdad consisting of four separate buildings and captured the cell leader and five other key members of an insurgent ‘punishment committee.’

Iraqi forces also seized two AK-47 assault rifles, one pistol, and one set of body armor.

The operation occurred without incident; there were no Iraqi or coalition force casualties.

Hm... that's not good: we captured six bad guys but didn't lose any of ours. Does this violate the Fairness Doctrine?

Second, "Capt. B" at Milblogs reports that the U.S. Marines rescued three kidnap victims in Fuhuylat, Iraq:

Marines from 1st Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment rescued three hostages and uncovered a large weapons cache, including a fully-assembled suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, during Operation Spotlight.

The intelligence-driven operation was conducted alongside Iraqi Army soldiers from 2nd and 4th Brigades, 1st Iraqi Army Division recently. The three hostages were personal assistants of Dr. Rafa Hayid Chiad Al-Isawi, an Iraqi government official in Baghdad. They were held by al-Qaeda insurgents for 27 days....

Marines also recovered IEDs and IED-making material, mortar tubes and round, artillery rounds, machine guns, bulk explosives, anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, AK-47 assault rifles, small-arms ammunition and video cameras.

I think I can hear Sen. Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%) already, calling our Marines bullies for not giving the Iraqis a chance. At least, given recent Democratic comments about Israel's "disproportionate" response, I assume that's what Reid would say, if he knew about this raid. Fortunately, he gets his news from the elite media, so he hasn't heard anything. At all.

The situation in Iraq is serious, but Iraqi forces are stepping up to the plate. Alongside American forces, they are raiding and arresting bad guys, not caring whether they're Shia death squad or al-Qaeda combatants.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, coalition forces killed seven terrorists who attacked them. From CENTCOM:

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan – A Coalition patrol killed seven extremists on July 25 after they attacked Coalition forces in the Garmser District of Helmand Province.

There were no Coalition casualties in the fight. The Coalition unit received small arms, rocket-propelled grenade, machine gun and sniper fire from a group of extremists. The Coalition force returned fire, killing five insurgents

Later in the same area, insurgents fired small arms at an Afghan National Army mortar team, with a Coalition embedded tactical training team attached. The combined unit responded with machine gun fire and killed the remaining two insurgents.

“If enemy extremists fire upon Coalition forces, we will respond with deadly accuracy,” said Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, Combined Joint Task Force -76 spokesman. “If they attack Afghan civilians, we will respond just as forcefully. We remain committed to engaging any threats to the peaceful future of the Afghan people.”

Afghan National Security forces continue to maintain a strong presence in the area of Garmser and provide security that will enable reconstruction and humanitarian aid projects to be delivered that will improve the lives of the Afghan people.

I don't know, it sounds awfully disproportionate to me: we inflicted seven deaths, six captures, and released three hostages from those poor, honest terrorists just doing their jobs (kidnapping and terrorizing, butchering the innocent, the usual stuff), without losing a single one of our guys.

Is that allowed under the New international Proportional-War Theory?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, July 29, 2006, at the time of 06:31 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 10, 2006

Not Puppets

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Today, John Hinderaker of Power Line posted a heart-felt demand that we find and execute the terrorist swine who first killed Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas Tucker in Iraq and then mutilated their bodies:

In this instance, [President Bush] should put that reticence behind him and commit the full resources of this nation to avenging our soldiers' murders. And I'm not talking about capturing the perpetrators and feeding them three religiously appropriate meals a day in Guantanamo Bay.

With great respect and unaccustomed humility, I fully understand exactly how he feels; but I think that's about the worst damned idea I've heard in years.

Weak countries are ruled by national sentiments and emotions. Great ones are driven by national interests.

I understand Hindrocket's "cold fury," and he has every right to be furious: these jihadis behave like rabid dogs, then turn around and demand the full panoply of "rights" that properly belong only to actual prisoners of war from countries that fight with honor -- not dishonorable, subhuman targeters of the innocent and eaters of the dead. Still and all, it would be a mistake of almost cosmic proportions for Bush to follow John's advice this time.

Not because of any moral issue. I would happily put a pistol against any terrorist's head and squeeze the trigger, and I would not feel even a single, momentary pang of guilt or grief. However, in this case, committing the "full resources of this nation" to hunting down these barnyard animals is wrong for the same reason that torturing captured terrorists is wrong: because it's an ineffective and counterproductive way to fight this war.

I don't want to lop off the terrorists' hands; I want to waterboard them -- because that actually works.

Right now, the terrorists do not control the targets of the Coalition. They do not control the tempo; they don't control the time, the tools, or the level of tension. They control nothing; they have been reduced to being purely reactive... we pick a time, place, and target to launch an attack; the terrorists try to survive, then try to retaliate.

But they can't, not really; they cannot stand up to us in battle, and they know it. Instead, they're reduced to the cowardly shame of attacking defenseless Moslem women and children; and the whole ummah now considers them a sick in-joke, a thing that is either nauseating, pathetic, or laughable.

Terrorists would love nothing better than to become relevant again, to control the world around them. And what Hindrocket proposes would have exactly that effect: whenever terrorists feel neglected and ignored, all they need do is mutilate a U.S. soldier's corpse, and we rush to "commit the full resources of this nation to avenging our soldiers' murders."

It's structurally similar to paying ransom: we become puppets on a jihadi string, performing a herky-jerky jitterbug whenever they yank on the cords. "Look how weak and impotent the Crusaders are!" they will cry; "we can draw them here, we can draw them over there, we can tie them up for month after month!"

Far better, but very difficult, to do just what President Bush is doing: ignore provocation and go about the inexorable business of grinding them up like summer sausage... at a place and time of our choosing, at a tempo that we dictate, using whatever tools and allies we select. This response takes guts and willpower; but it's frighteningly effective for whomever has the tenacity to see it through.

That is the greatest revenge and will hurt them far more than a bootless hunt through the wilderlands of Anbar and Ninewah, which would probably be about as effective as our futile hunt for Osama bin Laden through the crags and clefts of the Tora Bora Mountains.

We have control right now; we are the wind, they are the sand. Like the old Outer Limits TV show:

We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We can reduce the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear.

That is what I want to see, John. That is why we are prevailing now and will continue until our job here is done.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 10, 2006, at the time of 07:47 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

July 07, 2006

Great News Just Keeps On Coming in Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Iraqi Security Forces, accompanied by U.S. air power, captured two high-ranking commanders in Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Militia yesterday -- though one of the captured lieutenants may have been trying to create his own militia. The ISF also killed or wounded more than thirty of Sadr's fighters.

The two unfortunates are "Abu" Diraa, captured in eastern Baghdad, and Adnan al-Unaybi, arrested 60 miles south of Baghdad, near Hillah. On a cheery note:

An al-Sadr aide, Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji, denounced the Baghdad raid, saying 11 civilians were killed and dozens wounded as U.S. jets fired on the area as people were sleeping on their roofs because of the searing summer temperatures and electricity shortages.

Perhaps Rep. John Murtha (D-PA, 75%) will rise, balancing precariously on his hind legs, and demand an immediate court martial for the pilots and flight officers who committed these war crimes against humanity.

And on an even more cheerier note:

There were no casualties among U.S. or Iraqi soldiers, the Americans said.

There, that's what I'm talking about -- a kill ratio of infinity to one. All right, as you were. Just thought you'd like to hear about these raids. If we don't point these things out -- who will?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 07, 2006, at the time of 04:35 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 02, 2006

Teleblogging 1: Finding Even More of the Wrong Kind of WMDs In Iraq

Iraq Matters , Weapons of Mass Disputation
Hatched by Dafydd

Proving themselves utterly without shame or humility, American forces have insisted upon finding even more chemical weapons in Iraq:

The U.S. military has found more Iraqi weapons in recent months, in addition to the 500 chemical munitions recently reported by the Pentagon, a top defense intelligence official said on Thursday.

Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, did not specify if the newly found weapons were also chemical munitions. But he said he expected more.

"I do not believe we have found all the weapons," he told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, offering few details in an open session that preceded a classified briefing to lawmakers.

He may not have specified, but I doubt he would have bothered telling the Armed Services Committee about finding a cache of AK-47s, IEDs, or cherry bombs -- which he knows nobody on that committee cares about.

At the Armed Services Committee, Maples also asserted that the rockets and artillery rounds that had been found were produced in the 1980s and could not be used as intended.

Ah -- this must be what the pooh-poohers mean by saying (in Mark Steyn's memorable phraseology), that no matter how much WMD we find, it's always the wrong kind. LG Maples' key qualifier, of course, is "used as intended."

Sadly, such autonomic gainsaying is not the exclusive reaction of Democrats or even of Democrats, the State Department, and the CIA; now we have to add the top brass at the Pentagon to the list of those who find it more urgent to find nothing than to find something, even if something is actually there to be found. (I'm probably being too harsh to LG Maples. Consider him a stand-in for the generals I really want to yell at.)

For example, even if the WMD found could not be used "as intended" (that is, being fired from and artillery piece), could it be used not-as-intended to cause death and destruction anyway? Judge for yourself. After first enunciating the soundbite above, he added the following, which completely undercuts the obvious point of the first statement:

If the chemical agent, sarin, was [sic, subjunctive case] removed from the munitions and repackaged, it could be lethal. Its release in a U.S. city, in certain circumstances, would be devastating, Maples said.

Devastating! So is it the wrong kind of WMD or the right kind? To me, it sounds like the right WMD but the wrong delivery system... and I'm very, very glad we got it away from the terrorists before they repackaged it.

Oh, and an addendum. In the category "shouldn't there be an IQ test before someone can run for Congress," here is the entry from Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA, 90%):

"It's very difficult to characterize these as the imminent threat weapons that we were told we were looking for," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a California Democrat.

It has become a full-time profession, with a corner office and a pension plan, to inform Democrats that indeed, Bush never once said that Iraq posed an "imminent threat." Those words were never uttered -- except by shifty politicians and dunderheaded journalists looking to score a cheap knockout of a straw man.

For those who have forgotten, here is what Bush actually said about imminent threats:

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

Readers Digest translation: we can't wait until Iraq becomes an imminent threat, because by then it will be too late to stop it. So let's strike now -- when the threat is not yet imminent.

That is why we needed a new doctrine, the Bush Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Warfare. If Iraq really were an imminent threat, attacking it would have been uncontroversial. It was controversial precisely because we admitted the threat was as yet inchoate -- like a felon stocking up on heavy-duty firearms -- and argued that in today's world, an imminent threat is a realized attack, because once you discover it, it's too late to stop it.

Got it now, Ms. Tauscher?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 02, 2006, at the time of 05:10 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 30, 2006

Mahdi Militia + Iranians = Big Fat Target

Good News! , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Here is an interesting story to wake up to yesterday morning:

Iraqi and U.S. troops battled Shi'ite militiamen in a village northeast of Baghdad on Thursday, and witnesses and police said U.S. helicopters bombed orchards to flush out gunmen hiding there.

Iraqi security officials said Iranian fighters had been captured in the fighting, in which a sniper shot dead the commander of an Iraqi quick reaction force and two of his men. They did not say how the Iranians had been identified.

Let's run through the points of interest:

  • Iraqi Security Forces (police) fighting side by side with Coalition (American) troops. Well, not too interesting; such cooperation has become so routine, it's almost blasé.
  • ...Fighting against a Shiite militia: in fact, Muqtada Sadr's mighty al-Mahdi "Army."

Now that's worth some attention: one of the most urgent tasks facing the Shia-dominated government in Iraq, under Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, has been to persuade Sunni semi-rejectionists that even though the prime minister and the interior minister are both Shia, the country's police forces will still confront the Shiite militias that have terrorized and butchered so many Sunni.

We know that the Iraqi Army and the Interior-Ministry police forces are willing to go toe-to-toe with the Sunni terrorists; but until the ordinary Iraqi Sunni -- like, for example, Mohammed and Omar at Iraq the Model -- can be persuaded that the government cares about their lives, too, it will be very hard to reel in the Sunni hardliners.

This battle will go a long way towards reassuring the Sunni that the police are not just militias with uniforms.

  • And among the militiamen captured were a number of Iranian fighters. This is a very important discovery, since it's clear evidence that Iran is meddling with its neighbor to the west... and also more evidence that Muqtada Sadr, regardless of his denials, is in fact in the Ayatollah's pocket.

This is really great news, as the Iranian deception is coming unraveled. With every passing month, it becomes clearer that Iran is directly trying to seize control of the Shiite areas of Iraq... and harder for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei to pretend otherwise, even to "impartial" European observers.

The story exhibits hallmarks of slovenly writing and muddled thinking:

[The Interior Ministry forces] did not say how the Iranians had been identified.

Uh... perhaps because they spoke Arabic with a Persian accent and were carrying Iranian identification cards? Really, doesn't Reuters suspect that Iraqi Arabs can identify Persians in their midst? They really are very different in language, culture, and even food.

The United States and Britain have accused Shi'ite Iran of meddling in Iraq's affairs and providing military assistance to Iraq's pro-government Shi'ite militias. However, there have been few instances of Iranians actually being captured inside Iraq.

Some Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, are quick to label Shi'ite fighters as Iranian agents. And among the militants are Iraqis who grew up in refugee camps in Iran, speak Iranian-accented Arabic and, in some cases, carry Iranian identity papers.

If they grew up in Iran, speak Persian (Farsi) as their native language, and have Iranian idenfication cards... then what the heck makes them Iraqi? Their ancestory? It's amazing to see the mainstream media embrace the racist position that one's nationality is completely determined by one's blood, not one's allegiance. These fighters are Iranian in outlook, language, and citizenship... but Reuters clearly thinks of them as "Iraqis" because that is the nationality of their progenitors!

Does that mean that my nationality is actually Polish, German, and Welsh, instead of American? With this attitude, it's no wonder that so many lefties are resurrecting the old libel about Jews having "divided loyalties." "The blood is the key!" as a mad scientist in some old horror movie said (I should ask Brad Linaweaver which flick).

If it looks, quacks, and smells like a duck, it's probably not a lampshade.

And of course, this being the antique media, the Ubiquitous Invisible Analyst makes an appearance:

Many analysts are skeptical of the feasibility of disarming large paramilitary groups linked to the most powerful political parties. Without that, however, persuading the Sunni minority to lay down their arms will also be difficult.

And these analysts' names are...? Whoops, sorry, can't reveal our anonymous sources. That's an important secret that we'll never reveal. But we have a great deal on some classified intelligence information!

But the big story is the cooperation between Americans and Iraqis under the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry duking it out with Shiite militiamen -- and capturing Iranian infiltrators in the bargain. All else is dicta.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 30, 2006, at the time of 06:18 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 28, 2006

Samarra Bomber Captured?

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Omar at Iraq the Model reports that the Iraqi Security Forces (we don't know whether it was the army or the police or both) have captured a terrorist who has confessed to bombing the Golden Mosque at Samarra -- the single terrorist attack that stands out for its perfidy, the vile, naked attempt to ignite a civil war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq. (Hat tip to the Belmont Club.)

In a news conference currently being broadcast on TV, Iraq's national security advisor Muwaffak al-Rubaie says Iraqi security forces arrested Abu Qudama al-Tunisi in a raid in the suburb of al-Dhuloiya north of Baghdad.

15 other foreign terrorists were killed in the raid according to al-Rubaie.

The terrorist of Tunisian origin confessed that he was responsible for the attack that destroyed the Askari Shrine in Samarra back in February 22 of this year.

Muwaffak al-Rubaie said the security forces are still searching for Haitham al-Badri who is believed to be the field commander under whom Abu Qudama was operating.

If this is true, then this will probably rival the death of Musab Zarqawi, he should only rot in hell, alava shalom, tied for second behind the capture of Saddam Hussein -- as far as Iraqi Shia are concerned. Qudama's trial (assuming he makes it that far) should be illuminating indeed: did the bomber himself know the possible consequences of such a terrible attack?

Did the Sunni "rank and file" of al-Qaeda in Iraq -- foreign or Iraqi, they're still Sunni -- actually want to see a civil war in which, not only would tens of thousands of Iraqis die (perhaps hundreds of thousands)... but which the Sunni were virtually certain to lose badly? I thought that was one of the most insane acts in this entirely mad campaign of arbitrary assassination and meaningless mayhem.

[Iraq National Security Advisor Muwaffak] al-Rubaie described Al-Badri is a terrorist with connections to elements in the past regime who later became one of the leaders of Ansar al-Sunna and later al-Qaeda organization in Iraq....

Al-Rubaie described ho the bombing was organized and says details were taken from the confessions of the captured Abu Qudama:

4 Saudis, two Iraqis and one Tunisian entered the mosque at night, handcuffed and locked up the guards in a room and spent the night planting the bombs all around the mosque. Next day they kidnapped and murdered Atwar Bahjat while she was trying to cover the news of the bombing.

Bahjat reported for al-Arabiya.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 28, 2006, at the time of 03:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Spare This Man Or We'll Shoot This Country

Iraq Matters , Laughable Lawyers
Hatched by Dafydd

Former American Ramsey Clark, now one of Saddam Hussein's defense lawyers, threatened more murder, mayhem, and anarchy in the streets unless his client is spared the death penalty:

Executing Saddam Hussein would fuel more sectarian violence in Iraq, a U.S. lawyer for the deposed Iraqi leader said on Tuesday.

"That execution would inflame a country that's already incinerating," former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said. "I hope the American people can realize that if there is ever a time to call for an end to executions, it is in this case."

"It'd sure be a shame if something were to, you know, happen to ya... capice?"

Well, now that Ramsey Clark's courtroom antics include blatant extortion -- publicly signalling the Fedayeen Saddam that a massive show of violence might spare the Dear Leader's life -- what is the next level of basement he can fall into? Will he smuggle an IED into the courthouse and hold everyone hostage unless his client is released? Or will he merely tamper with the evidence, as his colleague Leslie Abramson did in the Menendez Brothers trial?

How many defense lawyers suffer from some variant of Stockholm Syndrome, getting so involved in defending their clients -- guilty or innocent -- that they actually become accessories after the fact themselves?

At the end of this trial, I would dearly love to see Counselor Clark arrested... by the Iraqis. After all, we try the consigliere of the Mafia family right alongside the Don; why should the Iraqis let slip this golden ticket to do the world such a favor?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 28, 2006, at the time of 03:20 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 27, 2006

Iraqi Marsh 60% Restored

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

We have been following the progress of the Iraqi Great Salt Marsh, which was systematically drained in the early 1990s by Saddam Hussein as punishment for the Shiite rebellion shortly after the Gulf War. We talked about it before in Swamp Samurai and Swamp Samurai On the Marsh.



Iraq Great Salt Marsh: 1985 to 2000

Shrinkage of the Iraq Marsh: 1985 area (red) to 2000 area (blue)

BBC News, the only elite news source following up on this issue, has an update. According to Abdul Latif Rashid, Iraq's minister for water resources, 60% of the area has been restored. BBC reporters have overflown the area, and this is what they saw:

There were fisherman easing their narrow boats along reedbeds.

In places, we saw traditional marsh Arab villages, floating on thick mats of reeds, water buffalo wallowing alongside.

It sounds pretty good. But here comes "the big but": BBC continues: "the reality for the Marsh Arabs of today is not quite as romantic. Although the water is coming back, they have little else."

Of course, this is the antique media after all; they can't talk about good news without "balancing it" with a leavening of bad:

The government says it has now allocated millions of dollars for the marsh region - aimed at giving people "better services, education, health care and communications", says Mr Rashid, the minister.

But Kamel Mezher and other villagers say they have seen none of these funds....

[T]here are complaints [substantiated? the Beeb doesn't say] that some of the money set aside for marshland development has been misused.

When we are dealing with a country like Iraq, we must face the reality that their local politicians, civil servants, and ordinary Achmeds and Mohammeds are corrupt and incompetent. We shouldn't imagine that everything will run smoothly; it's a miracle when it runs at all!

Violence between small tribes, a lack of developmental planning, and misuse of funds hover always in peripheral vision, waiting to rise up and engulf any good project. For example, how does Iraq balance the needs of real people with the "needs" of nature?

Mr Rashid says some areas could be declared as a national park, to protect the unique wildlife....

He also talks of plans to allow small scale industry in some areas, to provide jobs. He denies there would be a conflict between "environment and development".

Despite the problems, I am encouraged by the progress. If they're to the point of arguing about preserving the environment versus developing the land, that is definitely good news indeed.



Marsh Arabs    Marsh Dwellings

Arab fisherman on the Great Salt Marsh (L); typical Marsh-Arab village (R).

And that's still a pretty picture, too.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 27, 2006, at the time of 11:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 23, 2006

Could We Start Again, Please?

Iraq Matters , Weapons of Mass Disputation
Hatched by Dafydd

Is it Captain Kidd's treasure-hold or Al Capone's vault?

At last, the New York Times has finally deigned to notice that we found a huge bunch of chemical munitions -- WMD -- in Iraq... though only in the context of a story about "hobbyists" who keep alive the search for WMD. Amazingly enough, however, once you finish wincing at the patronizing theme, the story itself isn't half bad. Maybe only 0.25 bad.

Mr. [Dave] Gaubatz, an earnest, Arabic-speaking investigator who spent the first months of the war as an Air Force civilian in southern Iraq, has said he has identified four sites where residents said chemical weapons were buried in concrete bunkers.

The sites were never searched, he said, and he is not going to let anyone forget it.

The Times, they are a-changin'. But why now? I suspect the reasoning of "Pinch" Sulzberger and Bill Keller now embraces two points:

  1. As more and more WMD are found in Iraq, it becomes untenable to continue pretending not to see it. Eventually, the logo of the New York Times will have to encorporate the famous three monkeys.
  2. But -- if the Iraq Survey Group failed to find WMD that was there to be found, and if Bush ran the CIA (via his appointee, George Tenet), hence the ISG... then the "miserable failure" to find WMD can be laid at Bush's feet.

The Times has evidently arrived at the conclusion that the meme "Bush lied about Hussein having WMD" is pretty much played out... but there's still a vein of pure gold in the meme "Bush lied about Hussein not having WMD."

Admittedly, the second meme has more truth to it than the first; the only fly in the soup is that the Democrats, by pushing Meme 1 for so long and so stridently, have disqualified themselves from ever arguing Meme 2: they would have to denounce each other as liars before they could attack President Bush.

Still, that may be too subtle a point for young Pinch, as it requires a universe more than seven days wide, from three days in the past to three days in the future, with a day of rest every "today." (And Bill Keller is reportedly on vacation, ducking the angry response to the Times having outed yet another program to track terrorists.) Certainly, the Times manages both to disparage the WMD hunters while still embracing their main arguments:

Some politicians are outspoken allies in Mr. Gaubatz's cause. He is just one of a vocal and disparate collection of Americans, mostly on the political right, whose search for Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons continues....

The proponents include some members of Congress. Two Republicans, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania held a news conference on Wednesday to announce that, as Mr. Santorum put it, "We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

American intelligence officials hastily scheduled a background briefing for the news media on Thursday to clarify that. Hoekstra and Mr. Santorum were referring to an Army report that described roughly 500 munitions containing "degraded" mustard or sarin gas, all manufactured before the 1991 gulf war and found scattered through Iraq since 2003.

Such shells had previously been reported and do not change the government conclusion, the officials said. [That is, discovering 500 unaccounted-for chemical munitions in Iraq does not change the conclusion that there were no unaccounted-for chemical munitions in Iraq. -- the Mgt.]

Even Fox News gets some favorable press in the press:

Such official statements are unlikely to settle the question for the believers, some of whom have impressive credentials. They include a retired Air Force lieutenant general, Thomas G. McInerney, a commentator on the Fox News Channel who has broadcast that weapons are in three places in Syria and one in Lebanon, moved there with Russian help on the eve of the war.

And they have even had some successes, at least in moving the administration off of its parrot-like repetition that there were no WMDs in Iraq:

The weapons hunters were encouraged in February when tapes of Mr. Hussein's talking with top aides about his arsenal were released at the Intelligence Summit, a private gathering in northern Virginia of 600 former spies, former military officers and hobbyists....

In March, under Congressional pressure, National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte began posting on the Web thousands of captured Iraqi documents. Some intelligence officials opposed the move, fearing a free-for-all of amateur speculation and intrigue.

But the weapons hunters were heartened and began combing the documents for clues.

Mr. Gaubatz, 47, now chief investigator for the Dallas County medical examiner, said he knew some people might call him a kook.

So let's consider the themes in this excerpt: there are bunch of sincere kooks and hobbyists, including retired lieutenant generals and CIA officers, who are still looking for WMD in Iraq -- the existence of which is being denied by the incompetent Bush administration. (Got 'em coming and going.)

But at least they are finally placing before the American people the fact that there was a lot more WMD in Iraq than we were ever told by the Iraq Survey Group -- run by the CIA, which is a child of the State Department. If the ISG could miss 500 artillery shells and rockets loaded with chemicals such as Sarin and mustard gas, couldn't they also have missed jugs of VX and vials of Smallpox and Anthrax?

The entire edifice of "Bush lied about WMD" is crumbling. I doubt that many Americans will be mollified by the Democrats, the antique media, and the State Department (through surrogates in the CIA) saying, "It's all right, Saddam's WMD was from before the Gulf War and is only 80% or 75% as deadly as it was back then... so it doesn't count."

Naturally, the Times continues the charade that weapons of mass destruction were the only reason we went to war with Iraq; lost down the memory hole are all the other casus belli:

  • Repeated violations of the truce agreement that suspended (not ended) the Gulf War;
  • Failure to disclose disposition of WMD (this is different from merely having it; Iraq lied again and again what they did with it);
  • Defiance of multiple U.N. resolutions, most especially United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, but also Resolutions 660, 661, 678, 686., 687, 688, 707, 715, 986, and 1284;
  • Repeated attacks on United States military forces -- including firing upon American aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone;
  • The attempted assassination of a former president of the United States;
  • Ongoing crimes against humanity -- mass murder, ethinic cleansing, and environmental crimes;
  • Harboring international terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda, wanted for committing murderous acts against America (triggering the Bush Doctrine);
  • And most important, that Iraq was an illegitimate military dictatorship whose replacement by democracy and rule of law will start to drain the swamp of jihad in the heart of the ummah.

But the same Times story also touts several impressive achievements of these "hobbyists": not only did they get the NID, John Negroponte, to start putting on the web captured Iraqi intelligence and military documents; not only did they force the release of the report we talked about here; but recently, Gaubatz also got a meeting with officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency to try to persuade them -- at long last -- to start searching sites where residents claim WMDs were buried.

There is no question that most of such claims will fail to pan out. That is the nature of such a hunt... and if David Kay and Charles Duelfer were not in such a blasted hurry to declare defeat and head home, they would have understood that.

We should never have stopped purposefully looking; look how much we've found completely by accident. It's my understanding that the National Ground Intelligence Center is primarily tasked with investigating possible hazards to our troops; when soldiers or Marines stumble across a find that they think might be dangerous -- chemical, radiological, or biological -- they call the NGIC to come out, investigate, and dispose of the dangerous materials.

The NGIC is not out combing the hills and sand dunes, looking for WMD. That was the job of the ISG, which quickly disbanded itself after just a few months in the field.

What if they had they been sent out with a mandate to stay so long as our troops were in Iraq, searching continuously; would they have found these shells? Would they have found the other stuff that Iraq claims but cannot prove to have destroyed? Could they have investigated new claims of Syrian or Sudanese complicity in moving WMD out of Iraq?

Would the CIA have been so quick to dismiss all the WMD we found as "the wrong kind," as Mark Steyn put it, if that attitude were not a ticket to get them back home almost as fast as John Kerry's bogus Purple Hearts?

We'll never know... unless we bite the chemical shell and restart the search. But this time, leave the pathetically political CIA out of the loop. This search is a military matter, and it should be conducted by the Pentagon, using whatever military intelligence or force assets they need.

Mr. President -- could we start again, please? And this time, do it right: no time limit, no geographical limit, and without starting from the assumption, as the ISG did, that "there's no there there."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 23, 2006, at the time of 05:46 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

June 22, 2006

Those Darned 500 Chemical Artillery Shells That Shouldn't Exist

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

So far, besides the Cybercast News System (CNS) article cited in our previous post on this subject, I've found only a few other MSM reports on the WMDs that have been found in Iraq since 2003. Here's the story by Fox News; it's well written and gives us both sides -- actually "fair and balanced," if you like.

(It even links to the 4-page declassified summary of the original document, though it's not particularly informative.)

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

This is, of course, the "bombshell" (sorry) lede of the story... a story that AP, Reuters, and the New York Times have chosen not to even bother covering. Not even to debunk it! The antique media has for the most part left "the liberal man's burden" to tireless lefties, such as Weldon Berger at Betsy the Crow and Ellen at News Hounds, and to the Washington Post (more on that later).

The Santorum argument is that finding WMDs in Iraq means there were WMDs in Iraq to be found... but that the myriad international inspectors and the Iraq Survey Group failed to find; This seems pretty reasonable on its face and hard to counter.

The gist of the argument against is about what we predicted: these are chemical shells from before the 1991 Gulf War, so they don't count.

I'm not sure why they don't count; BTC seems to believe that "degraded" is the same thing as "disintegrated," and therefore these shells are harmless toys. This is preposterous enough that I'm sure Berger doesn't really believe it himself; it's just something you say to calm your troops, reassure them that (as Timothy Leary used to say) "situation normal, nothing has changed."

In fact, we don't know that all of the 500+ shells we found are unfirable; we don't know whether they could be used to deadly effect as IEDs; we don't know whether terrorists are clever enough to extract the Sarin or mustard gas and make their own WMDs; and we don't know how many of these shells have already been sold or given to terrorist groups -- to al-Qaeda In Iraq, for example. So it's a bit thick to dismiss their existence with an airy wave of the hand and a Scroogian "bah, humbug!"

Back to the elite media: the Washington Post is the only representative of that club to lumber forward with a debunking article. Alas, fantasy (literally) collides with reality in a self-indulgent dream world, and fantasy gets the better of it. Here, read this; you wouldn't believe me if I just told you about it:

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered....

The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

This is astonishing on several levels:

  • How on earth does Dafna Linzer (the writer, one of the most anti-Bush writers for the Post) imagine he knows whether or not the Iraqis had "long forgotten" about those hundreds of chemical shells? The translated Iraqi documents make frequent reference to such caches.

    It's clear that Linzer simply added that line -- unsourced -- to make it appear as though the chemical munitions were no threat.

  • In an inversion of the normal rules of evidence, Linzer's point in the first graf above appears to be that we can't have found these chemical shells -- the official DoD report notwithstanding -- because the Pentagon said, back in 2004, that we hadn't found any WMD. Except for the pesky fact of "several crates of the old [chemical] shells" containing Sarin, found that same year... but which don't count, according to unnamed "intelligence officials" and Dafna Linzer.

Look, either we found the 500 shells or we didn't. If we did, then the Pentagon was wrong to close the books in 2004. If we didn't, then the Pentagon is wrong to report today that we did. Either way, whether we found them is not determined by what the Defense Department or the CIA said years ago. This one is a real head-scratcher; does Linzer really believe such nonsense?

The New York Sun has a more straightforward news article:

Since the formal search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was called off in January 2005, the American military has found more than 500 shells of ordinance containing Sarin or mustard gas.

While the shells are believed to date from the Iran-Iraq war, two Republican lawmakers are saying it raises enough questions for the president to order a new search for the biological, chemical and nuclear weapons program he said Saddam Hussein was concealing from the international community before the invasion of Iraq.

Particularly with the wealth of information we've gained from translated Iraqi military and intelligence documents, which were not available or not translated and sorted through in January, 2005... at least some of which refer to specific caches of WMD in specific sites.

The lefty bloggers keep saying the Pentagon has dismissed this report. What they refer to are unidentified "Pentagon officials" who say that these chemical shells were "not the weapons we were looking for." The Sun:

Indeed, unexploded chemical ordinance dating from before 1991 are different from the stockpiles of anthrax and other toxins the then Secretary of State, Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council in January 2003 was awaiting inspectors in Iraq.

Yes, they are different: anthrax and "other toxins" (they mean VX and other nerve agents, as well as biological cultures) are significantly easier to hide than big, heavy artillery shells made out of metal.

And why, exactly, wasn't the Iraq Survey Group looking for Sarin-filled chemical artillery shells in small caches, scattered around the country? Isn't that exactly how we would expect to find an Iraqi WMD "stockpile?" If the ISG wasn't even looking for these, then we certainly should start a new search... and this time, look for everything -- not just for a big warehouse in Tikrit with a sign reading "Achmed's WMD -- Get 'Em While They're Hot!"

The Sun acknowledges the real point -- unlike the Washington Post, which is too busy pooh-poohing:

The latest information about the chemical weapons shells, however, is most damaging to those who suggest the work of former weapons inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer have provided the definitive word on the whereabouts of the suspected WMD, according to the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

"Duelfer after 18 months was not able to find this stuff," Mr. Hoekstra said. "We made this determination that hundreds [of weapons] were found. I think this is a significant quantity. What does this say about all of the other issues that continue to be raised [such as] stuff transported to Syria. I don't believe everything that is out there is credible, but it shows how much we still don't know."

That, of course, is the real lesson here: the ISG searched for a year and a half, after Saddam had been deposed... and they didn't find any of this. But since then, our soldiers and Marines have stumbled across more than five-hundred shells actually loaded with deadly chemicals... does that not speak volumes about the effectiveness of weapons inspectors in general?

If the ISG couldn't find these, under the ideal condition of actually occupying the country they were searching, then it's brutally clear that inspection regimes simply do not work.

Bear that in mind for future engagements.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn on Hugh Hewitt just perfectly encapsulated the line of attack by the Democrats:

No matter what WMD we find, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 22, 2006, at the time of 02:24 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

June 21, 2006

Possible News Flash: WMD Found In Iraq?

Iraq Matters , Weapons of Mass Disputation
Hatched by Dafydd

I can't find any information about this yet -- evidently, it just broke within the last hour or so -- but supposedly, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA, 96%) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI, 100%) just held a presser and announced that we have found a large number of chemical shells (Hugh said "500") filled with Sarin gas in Iraq. This according to Hugh Hewitt, who just announced it during his interview with Chris Hitchens.

Big Lizards has no, zip, zero, nought, nada information about this; in fact, consider this post a plea for further information from anyone who can scrounge something up. We're left saying "wha-? huh-? who ordered the veal cutlet?"

I'm a little skeptical; Hoekstra is chairman of the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence, but Santorum is only chairman of the Senate Republican Conference -- a leadership position but nothing specifically to do with intelligence or armed services (Santorum's committees are Agriculture, Banking, Aging, and Finance). I understand why Hoekstra would deliver such a presser, but why Santorum? It always makes me suspicious when a stunning announcement is made by someone who does not, on paper, have any business making such an announcement.

Neither pol has anything about this on his website, at this moment. And we've been burned before by premature announcements of WMD finds.

We have argued for some time, here at Big Lizards (most recently in Mahmoud, Son of Xerox), that indeed we have found WMD in Iraq: empty chemical shells and rockets sitting in the same camouflaged ammo dump with 55-gallon drums of Cyclosarin is a "chemical weapon" in the same sense that an unloaded 9mm in the same house as a bunch of ammunition is a "firearm," and any felon caught in the second situation would be just as guilty as if the pistol were actually loaded. However, the Iraq Survey Group repeatedly refused to call such finds evidence of WMD.

But this -- if true -- would be a stunning development; not even the CIA would be able to argue that a bunch of shells loaded up with Sarin didn't constitute WMD. But as I said, I'm "Sgt. Schultz" at this moment.

As Matt Drudge likes to say, "developing..."

Help us out here... enquiring minds very much need to know!

UPDATE 4:11 pm: A bit more from Hugh... Santorum and Hoekstra are not talking about a single find; they're saying that since 2003, we have found "over 500" chemical weapons containing either mustard gas or Sarin (more likely, Cyclosarin, in our Lizardly opinion; Iraq was one of the few countries to use Cyclosarin, a pesticide, in chemical weapons... in fact, used in combat).

These are "pre-Gulf War" weapons; but their existence today obviously proves they existed before the current Iraq War began... hence, Bush was right that Iraq had CBW -- and the CIA was wrong about being wrong about WMD. Not only that, but the sacred "inspectors" of UNMOVIC and UNSCOM all failed to find these hundreds of chemical weapons... but I suspect Saddam Hussein knew where they were.

Hugh is interviewing Sen. Santorum right now: evidently, this comes from a partially declassified report from the National Ground Intelligence Center, possibly under the U.S. Army. Evidently, Santorum heard a tip about the existence of this classified report (secret, not top secret); he contacted Hoekstra, who had not heard of it (!) Hoekstra nosed about and found it; then he prevailed upon the "intelligence community" (I guess that would be the NID and the various service heads) to produce an unclassified version for release.

It was finally released at 4:30 pm EDT, and the intelligence committees were briefed a half-hour later; Hoekstra then told what he could legally tell to Santorum, and they called their press conference... which only 4-5 reporters bothered to attend. (That's not "the story," you understand.)

Santorum said that a version of the report was either published on a blog or at least discussed, but he could not remember which one or when that was.

But if we couple this report with several recently declassified and translated documents that, er, document ongoing Iraqi efforts, right up until the current war started, to conceal, disperse, and hide chemical and biological weapons and the nuclear program, then I think we are reaching a point of near certainty: Bush was right after all about WMD in Iraq.

We should eventually be able to find information about this here; but it's not there yet, at least not that I can find.

Commenter Mike has given us a link to a preliminary news report from Cybercast New Service (CNS) about this document. Thanks, Mike!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 21, 2006, at the time of 03:46 PM | Comments (23) | TrackBack

June 20, 2006

Revenge Killing? Hardly

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

In the last couple of days, al-Qaeda in Iraq killed one soldier, then kidnapped and killed two others. It's sad but expected: this is a war, and we're fighting terrorists whose interest in killing goes beyond mere revenge or warfare to a bizarre form of ceremonial cleansing and death worship.

The new leader of AQI, Egyptian-born Hamza Muhajir, a close friend of AQ number two Ayman Zawahiri, took credit for the killings. Big Lizards strongly suspects that sending a close friend and ally of Zawahiri to take over the organization founded by the now-dead Zarqawi is Osama bin Laden's and Ayman Zawahiri's way of regaining the control over al-Qaeda that they lost when Zarqawi, for a long time, became the most brutal and efffective player under the al-Qaeda ("the base") banner.

The home office is trying to recapture the rogue branch office. Zawahiri complained to Zarqawi that the latter's obsession with killing Iraqis was destroying the organization in the hearts and minds of Iraqis and even other Arabs. Zawahiri demanded that AQI focus more on killing the "crusaders" (Americans)... and the first set of killings by Muhajir indeed seem to be following the Zawahiri line, not the pattern set by Zarqawi.

It won't last; Zarqawi turned to killing Iraqi civilians because he discovered just how hard it is to kill Americans, and the same dynamic will force Muhajir down the same bloody road.

There is no guarantee the home office will succeed, even if Muhajir can stick to the Zawahiri plan; there are many more local butchers who will fight to keep control of al-Qaeda in Iraq in Iraq, and not let it return to Waziristan (or wherever OSM is hiding) -- though one major ally of Zarqawi, "Sheikh Mansour," was just killed (see below).

Some call the brutal torture-murder of the American soldiers a "revenge killing" for our successful attack on Musab Zarqawi; but that is ridiculous. Does anyone seriously argue that if we hadn't killed Zarqawi, AQI wouldn't have kidnapped or killed those two American soldiers?

That is what they do. They kidnap westerners and Iraqis alike, then kill them by brutal torture. This was an attack of opportunity, and it didn't start on June 7th.

My heart goes out to the families and friends of fallen soldiers. But please, our boys did not die in vain. Just before the ambush on these soldiers, a U.S. air strike killed a key AQI leader -- described (as usual) as a "religious emir."

Mansour Suleiman Mansour Khalifi al-Mashhadani, or Sheik Mansour, and two foreign fighters were killed as they tried to flee in a vehicle near the town of Youssifiyah, in the so-called Sunni "Triangle of Death."

U.S. coalition forces had been tracking al-Mashhadani for some time, American military spokesman William Caldwell said in announcing his death. He said al-Mashhadani was an Iraqi, 35 to 37 years old, and that one of the men killed with him was an al-Qaida cell leader identified as Abu Tariq.

(Yet another al-Mashhadani! It does seem to be a common Iraqi name: in addition to Ali al-Mashhadani -- the Iraqi "journalism student" and former terrorist suspect who first claimed the US Marines massacred civilians in Haditha; Abdul Rahman al-Mashhadani -- head of the previously unknown Hammurabi Organization for Human Rights and Democracy Monitoring who handed the suspect video to Ali; and the recently killed Mansour Suleiman Mansour Khalifi al-Mashhadani -- see above -- there is also Mahmud Dawud al-Mashhadani, president of the Iraqi Parliament. Perhaps it's a tribal name.)

One more fascinating point about "Sheikh Mansour":

A document seized from an al-Qaida hideout and released by National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie that portrayed the Iraqi insurgency as being in "bleak" shape was directly linked to Mansour, Caldwell said.

Now there's food for thought.

But that attack, wonderful though it was, was not all that we've been up to. While Coalition forces were searching for our two missing solders, we managed to kill or capture even more insurgents:

Caldwell said that Iraqi and American troops involved in the search for the missing soldiers killed three suspected insurgents and detained 34 in fighting that wounded seven U.S. servicemen.

And elsewhere in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - U.S.-led forces killed 15 terror suspects and detained three others during raids Tuesday in a village northeast of Baghdad, the military said. Residents said 13 civilians also were killed.

The military said the raid targeted individuals linked with a suspected senior al-Qaida in Iraq member, but it did not identify him....

Coalition forces found 10 AK-47 assault rifles, a shotgun, a pistol and a crate of explosives at the site, the military said.

So, they killed three of our guys; and meanwhile, we killed 21 and captured 37. If the ambush was to avenge Zarqawi, then incoming AQI leader Hamza Muhajir is off to a grinding halt.

Oh, by the way, the terrorists who fled the US forces were found hiding behind the skirts of local women:

The detained suspects had fled but were found hiding amid nine women, the military said. It said one of the suspects was wounded, but the women were not injured.

How typical. This is the real picture of the "brave" enemy forces we face.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 20, 2006, at the time of 04:29 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Veteran Reporters

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

We have many reporters in Iraq; the major news organizations all send someone (usually many "someones") over there. Yet we rarely get accurate pictures of the battleground. Why?

The most frustrating thing about the antique media's coverage is the lack of perspective. It's true that most reporters are biased against our military; but the reality is much dumber: the reporters are simply too ignorant about the military and warfare to be coherent.

Many reporters have no basic knowledge of the armed services: not only have they never served in the military, they don’t even have a friend who has. Consequently, they don't understand how military operations work, what to expect, how missions are carried out, how long it takes, the overall strategy, or how one battle relates to another. That is why we hear random reporting of a battle here, an engagement there, without anyone ever engaging the reader. We "news consumers" have no idea if we are making any progress, because the media has never told us what "progress" would even look like.

Decades ago, we had a draft. While an army of conscripts has a lot of problems (just ask the Soviets), near universal conscription had one benefit: every male in America had either served himself or at least had close friends, relatives, and coworkers who served; and every woman had brothers, sons, or husbands who were in the military... so everybody knew who the servicemen were; they were not "others" or "outsiders;" the men on the wall peopled our own communities, from doctor to grocer to banker.

Most Americans have lost that connection; a huge chunk of those who serve are now professional, career warriors, and they hang with their own (as do the civilians). Fortunately for us, however, there are some extraordinary people who themselves had distinguished military careers, who then turned to reporting from the frontline after being honorably discharged.

For example, we already know Michael Yon, a former Green Beret who has been in Iraq and Afghanistan since Day 1. And we've followed the exploits of our fellow blogger Bill Roggio, also a former Army Special Forces soldier, once of Fourth Rail but now in Afganistan reporting on the Counterterrorism Blog.

Now we can add two more names to the list: Wade Zirkle, a former Marine Lieutenant who served two deployments to Iraq; and David Bellavia, a former Army Staff Sergeant, one of the many heroes of Second Falluja. (Hat tip Black Five)

Zirkel and Bellavia are the executive director and vice chairman (respectively) of Vets For Freedom, a non profit organization composed of Iraq and Afganistan veterans dedicated to telling the truth about the war. Lest we quote Pontius Pilate, "the truth" is what they, as soldiers and Marines, actually saw and participated in... not the rude caricature that slouches through the halls of Congress, led around by Murtha, Kerry, and Pelosi.

Vets for Freedom was founded by a group of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans who believe in the mission of freedom in the Global War on Terror, but who have become frustrated with the way the operation has been politicized and reported to the home front.

Zirkel and Bellavia have just gotten back to Iraq as journalists and started their reporting. Bellavia is amazed by his completely different perspective as a reporter, rather than a soldier whose sole focus is his own mission:

Baghdad is absolutely beautiful. I mean shockingly majestic. This is a city for years we have been told is unsalvageable and I was amazed to see this level of cleanliness…

I feel that is the first time I have visited Iraq. Deploying to a place during a time of war and playing a part of that offensive operation, it is impossible to have any point of view besides the constant assessment of threat and responsive force. You can't appreciate landscapes or city streets. You are more preoccupied with observing the fine elements of city life and not the larger picture of community and family. You could deploy me to the Guggenheim and I wouldn't comment on anything other than the job at hand. Infantrymen are vigilant, quick tempered toward the enemy and always focused. Today I feel none of those things and that really is a great feeling.

Please read on. And salute when you're finished!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 20, 2006, at the time of 06:34 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 16, 2006

Intrigued, Not Convinced

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Michael Ledeen over at NRO believes the "planning document" seized in a raid shortly before we killed Musab Zarqawi is a "terribly done...shockingly amateurish...unbelievable" forgery by the Iranians.

I'm not convinced; but he does raise some intriguing questions that beg for answers.

The conceit of the piece is that Ledeen is consulting his Ouija Board to channel the spirit of James Jesus Moreno Angleton, a former CIA counterintelligency guy who died in 1987; in the "dialog," JJA refers to this disembodied spirit -- which is Ledeen's way of raising the questions. (Don't ask.)

For example, here is an early exchange:

JJA: Well, the assumption about this piece of paper is that it reflects the thinking of at least one important terrorist leader, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be important.

ML: Obviously.

JJA: So how come this terrorist leader makes so many mistakes? I mean, blatant factual errors. Let’s start with his statement -- #5 in the first set of numbered paragraphs -- that there has been “a decline of the resistance’s assaults.”

ML: Well, our casualties are certainly down, aren’t they?

JJA: Not really. May was one of the worst months since the fall of Saddam. Recently there’s been a dramatic increase in assaults and the number of dead innocents. Precisely the opposite of what the unnamed “leader” says.

May was bad, but April was a lot better. The document itself bears no date; so my first question for Ledeen would be, when does he think it was written? (Note the Breitbart.com has the wrong origin for the document; it came from a raid that preceded the death of Zarqawi.)

In the end, Ledeen concludes that it's a deliberately clumsy forgery by the Iranians in order to sow FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about any other papers we might find. But this still requires the document not to be a blatant fraud, else it wouldn't sow anything but laughter.

E.g., the fake evidence of Iraqi attempts to obtain yellowcake was only effective insofar as it was good enough to be believed; that way, some governments might have based all or part of their analysis on it. Then, when it's shown to be a fake, their entire intelligence structure is discredited. Those countries which rejected the fraud from the very beginning, notably the United Kingdom, were unscathed.

Thus, Ledeen's basic theme is inherently goofy: if it were a fraud by an advanced intelligence agency like Iran's, they wouldn't have put so many mistakes into it; however, we have certainly seen documents from, for example, the Iraq Intelligence Service prior to the invasion, that were sweeping in their inaccuracy... yet still provably authentic. It is entirely possible that a particular terrorist writing a particular document might be behind the times and not know that they had launched more attacks in May; he might well still be operating off of April's numbers, no matter when he wrote it.

So mere mistakes are not convincing to me. Let's move on to Ledeen's other criticisms.

JJA: And then — #6 in that first batch — he says that there’s been “an increase in the number of countries and elements supporting the occupation.” I guess he doesn’t read Italian, does he? And even the Brits have announced they’re going to leave. Again, the opposite of the facts. I could go on, but you get the point, don't you?

I think this is just a clumsy mistake on Ledeen's part (see? anyone can do it!) Probably, the writer of the document is referring to increased support from the ummah, from the Arab Moslem countries:

However, here in Iraq, time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance for the following reasons....

6. By allowing an increase in the number of countries and elements supporting the occupation or at least allowing to become neutral in their stand toward us in contrast to their previous stand or refusal of the occupation.

Over the last year or so, a number of countries, particularly Arab countries -- and especially particularly Jordan and Saudi Arabia -- have offered a lot more help to the US in the GWOT in general and even in matters related to the terrorist threat in Iraq. That is most likely what the writer here is talking about, and Ledeen's claim of factual error in the document is simply wrong itself.

Here is another line of attack where I think Ledeen just plain misunderstands the point of the writer of this document:

JJA: Look at #2 in the second group of numbered paragraphs, the ones that make recommendations. It says that the terrorists should “infiltrate the ranks of the National Guard..... In fact they've done it, as everybody knows. The Iraqi people trust the army but they are terrified by the national guard, precisely because there are so many terrorists and terrorist agents in it.

First of all, Ledeen makes a very elementary mistake: the forces of the Interior Ministry are not called "the National Guard." That word in the document comes from the translation supplied by the Iraqi government; as it is not the standard word used for either the New Iraqi Army (Ministry of Defense) or the Iraqi Police (Interior Ministry), we know that it is a mistranslation.

What we do not know off the bat is what is should have read. But we can deduce; here is the description from the document itself:

1. By allowing the American forces to form the forces of the National Guard, to reinforce them and enable them to undertake military operations against the resistance.

That does not sound like a description of the Iraqi Police; they are more or less intact from the Saddam era. But after we toppled the Baathists, one of the first things we did (it was controversial, but I think necessary) was to disband the Iraqi Army and begin forming a New Iraqi Army. And it is the Iraqi Army, not the Iraqi Police, that we have spent so much time training to "enable them to undertake military operations against the resistance."

Thus, when the translator uses the term National Guard, he clearly refers to the New Iraqi Army -- not the Iraqi Police. Once you realize that, the statements about the "National Guard" make perfect sense, coming from a Sunni terrorist:

Such a study is needed in order to show the best means to accomplish the required goals, especially that the forces of the National Guard have succeeded in forming an enormous shield protecting the American forces and have reduced substantially the losses that were solely suffered by the American forces....

2. To assist some of the people of the resistance to infiltrate the ranks of the National Guard in order to spy on them for the purpose of weakening the ranks of the National Guard when necessary, and to be able to use their modern weapons.

Substitute "New Iraqi Army" for "National Guard" above (instead of substituting "Iraqi Police"), and it all falls into place.

Finally, there is what Ledeen evidently considers his killer argument:

JJA: Aha! It emerges bit by bit, but the whole thrust of the document is that Iran is a sweet innocent, actually an ally of the United States in Iraq, and that the terrorists should do everything possible to foster conflict between Iran and the Americans.

Here is what the document says:

It is not known whether American is serious in its animosity towards Iraq [sic -- Iran], because of the big support Iran is offering to America in its war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Hence, it is necessary first to exaggerate the Iranian danger and to convince America and the west in general, of the real danger coming from Iran, and this would be done by the following.

But again, there is a ready explanation: the Iranians are helping the resistance... but they're mostly helping the Shia, not the Sunni; in fact, Iran-backed Shiite militias (notably that of Muqtada Sadr) are infiltrating the Iraqi Police in order to massacre Sunnis in the centrals areas of Iraq.

Sunni terrorists may well consider this "big support" to the Americans -- who they see as being in league with the Shia.

Thus, nearly all of Ledeen's objections are at least themselves questionable. This is why I say his column intrigues, but it does not convince.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 16, 2006, at the time of 06:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 15, 2006

Untrustworthy Narrator

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

Dafydd's post below about the "treasure trove" of information we seized from al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia before Zarqawi's death missed one interesting point: AP, which reports on the document, doesn't seem to be sure it's really authentic:

The language contained in the document was different from the vocabulary used by al-Qaida statements posted on the Web. For example, it does not refer to the Americans as "Crusaders" nor use the term "rejectionists" to allude to Shiites.

Much of what is in the statement from al-Rubaie echoes results that the U.S. military and the Iraqi government say they are seeking. It also appears to reinforce American and Iraqi arguments that al-Qaida in Iraq and its operatives are a group of imported extremists bent on killing innocent civilians.

I guess they think that U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell might have written it himself, the way they believe our military is always running around planting evidence.

I sure wish they would apply the same level of skepticism to the Haditha accusations.

Dafydd replies: Oops, good catch. My media skept-o-meter is broken today!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 15, 2006, at the time of 04:43 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

That hit on Musab Zarqawi turns out to have been the first shot of a new offensive that has already netted staggering gains, making it one of the most effective operations of the period following the capture of Saddam Hussein:

American and Iraqi forces have carried out 452 raids since last week's killing of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and 104 insurgents were killed during those actions, the U.S. military said Thursday.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the raids were carried out nationwide and led to the discovery of 28 significant arms caches.

He said 255 of the raids were joint operations, while 143 were carried out by Iraqi forces alone. The raids also resulted in the captures of 759 "anti-Iraqi elements."

I make that 863 bad guys we no longer have to worry about... just in the last week.

Meanwhile, the so-called "insurgency" is not just on the ropes... it's in despair. A document which was actually found before the Zarqawi hit portrays a terrorist campaign desperate to turn the Shia against Americans, to foment a war between the United States and Iran, to jump-start the Muqtada Sadr insurgency... anything to take the heat off of themselves:

A blueprint for trying to start a war between the United States and Iran was among a "huge treasure" of documents found in the hideout of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi officials said Thursday. The document, purporting to reflect al-Qaida policy and its cooperation with groups loyal to ousted President Saddam Hussein, also appear to show that the insurgency in Iraq was weakening....

Although the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the document was found in al-Zarqawi's hideout following a June 7 airstrike that killed him, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said the document had in fact been found in a previous raid as part of an ongoing three-week operation to track al-Zarqawi.

The document makes clear that we are winning this war. There is no way that Zarqawi's replacement, Egyptian terror boss Ayyub Masri (a buddy of Ayman Zawahiri, bin Laden's "spiritual leader" and founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad), can possibly hold al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia together as well as Zarqawi, its founder. They will certainly continue plotting terrorist attacks; but they will likely be smaller and less effective, and more likely to be disrupted by Iraqi forces or by Coalition forces. The "director" is dead, and the second unit can't finish the movie.

Amazingly, even the elite media is being forced to report on the increasing tempo of victory. While Anne Frank was hiding in an attic from the Nazis (they would eventually find and murder her and her family), she wrote what is probably the greatest testament to optimism ever penned: "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

My God, what an moving paean for that girl to write in those circumstances.

I don't know if I could go that far; but to paraphrase Frank, in spite of everything, I still believe in the innate rationality of the American voter. He can be fooled for a time, especially when one party has nearly all of the mainstream print and television media in its pocketses... but "you can't fool all of the people all the time," to quote another great optimist.

It's said that a lie can get halfway round the world before Truth finishes lacing up its boots. But here's an addendum that's often forgotten: when Truth finally gets out the door, it stomps the speedy lies as flat as roadkill. The American people will come to their senses in time, just as they did in 2000, 2002, and 2004.

And then we'll find out whether the Democrats exemplify yet another saying: "insanity is doing the same thing in the same way with the same outcome a hundred times, but expecting a different result the hundred and first."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 15, 2006, at the time of 04:17 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

John Kerry's "Murtha Moment"

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, 100%) has been reflecting on his presidential campaign: on the one hand, he did better in the primaries than former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who ran on a radical anti-war platform; on the other hand, Kerry was dogged throughout the general election season by demands to know why he had voted for the war.

But on the other hand, he came up with an answer to why he was still supporting it: "I actually voted against the $87 billion before I voted for it." But on the other hand, that answer didn't sit well with the electorate.

But on the other hand, in his upcoming campaign for the 2008 presidency, he has Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 100% -- "have war chest, will travel") running incongruously to his right; but on the other hand, the Democratic primary voters seem even further to the left than they were in 2004.

Having run out of hands, Kerry finally decided that this time, he will take the Al Gore route: he will run far, far to the left. Accordingly, he has denounced himself for voting for the Iraq War and for supporting it all these years. (We'll see whether Kerry will vote against the $94.5 billion compromise funding legislation next week -- which includes $68.5 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan; "I actually voted against the $68.5 billion before I voted for it.")

And in expiation for his sins, Kerry demanded that the Senate vote on his proposal to withdraw all but the most essential troops from Iraq "by year's end."

Kerry began working on submitting a formal version of this bill. Alas, he was a laggard... and he allowed Assistant Majority Leader (Majority Whip) Mitch McConnell (R-KY, 100%) to get the jump on him:

The Senate vote unfolded unexpectedly as the second-ranking leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., introduced legislation he said was taken from a proposal by Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and war critic. It called for Bush to agree with the Iraqi government on a schedule for withdrawal of combat troops by Dec. 31, 2006.

Kerry protested in his angriest airy monotone, but to no avail:

Democrats sought to curtail floor debate on the proposal, and the vote occurred quickly.

Kerry and other Democrats accused Republicans of political gamesmanship, and promised an authentic debate next week.

And of course, the result fell out just as did the House vote on the Murtha Amendment to "redeploy" U.S. forces in Iraq to "over the horizon" positions (that is, outside the country): on the Kerry amendment, the Senate voted 93 to 6 to reject setting a timetable for U.S. troops to be out of Iraq. Murtha tried to save face by voting against his own resolution; Kerry, however, is made of sterner stuff: he joined with five other Democrats (and no Republicans) to vote in favor of his own proposal:

  • Barbara Boxer (CA, 100%);
  • Tom Harkin (IA, 100%);
  • Edward M. Kennedy (MA, 95%).
  • John Kerry (MA, 100%);
  • Russ Feingold (WI, 100%);
  • Robert Byrd (WV, 95%);

Remember those names, gentle readers; they are the face of today's Democratic Party... the face of retreat and surrender.

In the meanwhile, the Democrats are not yet out of the woods:

The [Senate] vote came alongside a daylong debate in the House, where Republicans defended the war as key to winning the global struggle against terrorism while Democrats excoriated President Bush and his policies.

"We must stand firm in our commitment to fight terrorism and the evil it inflicts throughout the world. We must renew our resolve that the actions of evildoers will not dictate American policy," House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said in remarks laden with references to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The war was "a grotesque mistake," countered the Democratic House leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California. "The administration continues to dig a hole. They refuse to come up and see the light," she said.

The political subtext was clear from the outset.

"Is it al-Qaida or is it America? Let the voters take note of this debate," said Republican Rep. Charles Norwood of Georgia, attacking war critics as defeatists who do not deserve re-election.

Republicans in both the House and the Senate are finally starting to wake up to the fact that an election looms, and that it will be bitterly contested on both domestic and foreign-policy fronts. For the latter, no foreign issue is as politically important (at the moment) as the Iraq War: unless Republicans can turn around some public sentiment on that war, at least among wayward Republicans, they could lose heavily on November 7th.

So they have begun to stage a series of votes that will force Democrats and Republicans to state firmly where they stand. In the Senate, they forced Democrats to repudiate en masse two of their likely presidential candidates: Feingold and Kerry. The alternative was for the Democrats to acquiesce in labeling themselves the "cut and run" party.

And in the House, after the "impassioned" debate, Speaker Denny Hastert (R-IL, 100%) will force a vote on whether the Iraq War is or is not part of the Global War on Terror:

Republicans arranged for the House debate to culminate in a vote either late Thursday or Friday on legislation - a [sense of the House] resolution - that labels the Iraq war part of the larger global fight against terrorism and says an "arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment" of troops is not in the national interest.

This is excellent work so far. You know it's effective for the Republicans by the squeals of outrage from Democrats, accusing the GOP of playing "partisan games." But we need a series of such votes on domestic wedge-issues, too -- from taxes to same-sex marriage to partial-birth abortion to federal control of the schools vs. school vouchers.

The purpose of such votes is to show the differences between the parties... or in some cases, as with the Iraq votes, to show that however much the Democrats may bluster about having better ideas, in fact they have no ideas at all and are reduced to parroting the GOP. Armed with that information, voters can choose whether to vote Republican or Democratic for their own representatives and senators.

This vote, like every vote, is a choice -- not a "referendum."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 15, 2006, at the time of 03:30 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

June 12, 2006

Provenance

Iraq Matters , Israel Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations , Palestinian Perils and Pratfalls
Hatched by Sachi

[Dafydd also contributed extensively to this article.]

We often describe a situation where different parties are saying completely different things, and there is no way to tell which is right, as a case of "he said, she said."

But to the antique media, when the "he" in this equation is a Moslem jihadi, then "he said, she said" usually turns into "he said, and that's good enough for us!"

Take the recent attack at the beach in Gaza, where seven (or eight) Palestinian civilians, including children, were killed by... by what? Palestinian spokesmen who were not present at the time insisted it was by an Israeli shell... and that's good enough for the UK Times online:

Israeli artillery fire killed a Palestinian family who were picnicking on the beach in Gaza yesterday, as the shoreline was packed with people on a Muslim holiday.

Body parts, bloodstained baby carriages and shredded holiday tents were left strewn on the sand near Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, after the late- afternoon strike that killed at least seven people, thought to include the parents and children of one family.

They seem awfully certain it was Israeli artillery fire, and not an errant Qassam rocket, that killed the civilians; but why? What is their source for saying so? They never say; in the entire article, not once does the UK Times online tell us how they know it was the Israelis and not Hamas that fired the deadly weapons.

The New York Times weighs in on the same story -- and takes the same line. After all, just because Hamas is a terrorist organization that specializes in killing innocent men, women, and children, wants to see Israelis all driven into the sea, believes Jews are responsible for all the ills afflicting the Palestinian and Arab peoples, and which has lied many times in the past, doesn't mean we can't take their word when they say that they know for certain that the family was killed by Israeli shelling (that's what the Ouija Board said):

Hamas fired at least 15 Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel on Saturday, ending a tattered 16-month truce with Israel, a day after eight Palestinians were killed on a Gaza beach, apparently by an errant Israeli shell.

"Apparently?" What does that mean? Apparent to whom?

Israeli officials said they regretted any casualties among the innocent as Israel tried to stop the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel by shelling the areas from which they were launched. Defense Minister Amir Peretz sent a message expressing regret to Mr. Abbas, who called the incident "a bloody massacre" and declared three days of mourning.

On Friday, the Israeli Army was shelling a target area popular with rocket launchers 400 yards from the beach. The army believes that a shell fell short or that a dud, previously fired, exploded.

The "army" believes? I guess they mean the Israeli Defense Force... but who exactly within the IDF told them that? Where did they get such information? The New York Times is no more willing to reveal a source for unraveling this mystery than their namesake in London was.

Here is a very interesting pair of sentences from the NYT story. Maybe somebody can figure out "what is wrong with this picture":

Hamas fired at least 15 Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel on Saturday, ending a tattered 16-month truce with Israel....

Since the beginning of the year, Palestinians have fired hundreds of largely inaccurate missiles toward Israel, while Israel has fired more than 5,000 shells into Gaza.

That's a very interesting "truce" Hamas has been observing! What did they do, promise to limit the number of missiles fired at Israel to only "dozens of the inaccurate but potentially deadly Qassam rockets each month," as the UK Times put it?

And if the Qassam is so "inaccurate but potentially deadly" -- it has no guidance system at all -- then isn't it at least equally likely that the explosive thing that killed those eight (or seven) Palestinians on the beach was a Qassam, not an Israeli artilly shell gone awry? How do the two Timeses know to such certainty that the family were accidentally killed by Israelis (a "war crime"), rather than accidentally killed by Hamas militants (a tragic error?)

Associate Press has its own version of the story (this is starting to sound like the movie Rashomon), but it adds an interesting twist:

Pounding on the sand, Houda Ghalia shrieked for her father after he was killed with five of her siblings at a seaside picnic by what Palestinians said was an Israeli shell.

Footage of the 10-year-old screaming "Father! Father!" has played over and over again on television, driving home the devastating impact of what Palestinian leaders are calling "genocidal" and "a war crime...."

Israel expressed regret Saturday for the killing of eight civilians, but stopped short of taking responsibility, saying an investigation was under way.

Israel's military chief said the killings may have resulted from a misfired Palestinian rocket. Palestinians insisted they were caused by an Israeli artillery shell.

So maybe the IDF doesn't think that "a shell fell short or that a dud, previously fired, exploded." At least, the part of the IDF that spoke to AP doesn't agree with the part (if any) that spoke to the New York Times. Never let your AP hand know what your Times hand is doing.

And everybody ignores the undisputed fact that previously, someone from Gaza was shooting Qassam rockets into Israel, despite a supposed "cease fire." Isn't that significant in deciding whether something was a "war crime," let alone "genocide?" (Do Palestinians even know what the word "genocide" means? Palestinians, other Arabs, and most Israelis are actually the same "race": Semites.)

As in Rashomon, we can never know for sure whose errant whatever actually fell on the beach and killed those seven or eight civilians. Even if the Israeli investigation shows that whatever fell left Qassam pieces, not artillery pieces, behind, who will believe them? The world would rather believe Hamas terrorists than Jews.

The same thing can be said about the Haditha "massacre." All we have are the words of anti-American "civilians" who may be in cahoots with the terrorists themselves... and a questionable videotape that only proves that somebody died violently somewhere in Iraq more or less around the time of the claimed "massacre." We don't even know whether those bodies in the video go with that incident or some other incident days earlier or later.

The MSM ignores the not so hidden agenda of the "witnesses" and "reporters;" after all, why bother investigating when you have handy Marines to blame?

This battle is being waged with very sophisticated propaganda tools: on Special Report with Brit Hume Friday night, during the "Grapevine" segment, Jim Angle showed a photograph that was run by the London Times, and later picked up by the Chicago Sun-Times. It showed a number of dead Iraqis stacked up against a wall; the victims' hands were all bound behind their backs, and the wall was riddled with machine-gun bullet holes.

The London Times claimed that the photo showed Iraqis murdered by the US Marines in Haditha. Days later (maybe weeks), it was evidently pointed out to them that the photo did not match any of the witness statements about what supposedly had happened -- even from the Iraqis' point of view. The magazine investigated and discovered that the picture they'd run was actually of a group of Shia who were murdered by Sunni terrorists; it had nothing to do with Haditha or with the Marines.

The London Times (and the Chicago Sun-Times) eventually ran a correction and apologized. But that begs the question: how could a supposedly respectable newspaper editor and publisher look at such a photograph and say, "oh yes, that jolly well looks like just the thing the American Marines would do." What would make them think such a thing?

They might say "where there's smoke, there must be fire." But they, themselves are the ones who put all the "smoke" there in the first place. The only reason people keep thinking that US forces engage in massacres is that the elite media keeps saying so; they say so because it's so obvious to them, everyone knows it; and it's so obvious because, after all, look at all those other unsubstantiated stories of massacres in other newspapers.

It's the most circular of all circular arguments.

But finally, our side is speaking up.

A sergeant who led a squad of U.S. Marines accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha told his lawyer the unit did not intentionally target civilians, followed rules of engagement and did not try to cover up the incident, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The newspaper said Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, 26, told his lawyer several civilians were killed in November when the squad went after insurgents firing on them from a house. But Wuterich said there was no vengeful massacre and described a house-to-house hunt that went awry in a chaotic battlefield, his lawyer said.

"It will forever be his position that everything they did that day was following their rules of engagement and to protect the lives of Marines," said Neal Puckett, who represents Wuterich in the investigations of the deaths.

"He's really upset that people believe that he and his Marines are even capable of intentionally killing innocent civilians," he said.

I am not saying we should blindly believe what SSGT Frank Wuterich says. But we should understand it is still "he said, he said" -- not "he said, and that's good enough for the Times."

I will refrain from expressing my own opinion as to whom I would believe. We should wait for the investigation to be completed... in both incidents.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 12, 2006, at the time of 03:19 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 08, 2006

Musab Zarqawi Dead

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

According to Associated Press, Reuters, and the New York Times, confirmed by Iraqi officials and by the United States military by fingerprints and a direct look at his dead face, the erstwhile leader of al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia has officially attained room temperature.



Zarqawi RIP

Exit Musab Zarqawi

I thought that would be a nice day-brightener for breakfast. Go, team!

From the Times:

Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in an American airstrike on an isolated safe house north of Baghdad at 6.15 p.m. local time on Wednesday, top U.S. and Iraqi officials said on Thursday.

At a joint news conference with Iraq's prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., said Zarqawi's body had been positively identified by fingerprints, "facial recognition" and other indicators. He said seven of Zarqawi's associates had also been killed in the strike.

Reuters explains why it matters that we finally "terminated" Zarqawi (Prime Minister al-Maliki's word):

"Zarqawi didn't have a number two. I can't think of any single person who would succeed Zarqawi.... In terms of effectiveness, there was no single leader in Iraq who could match his ruthlessness and his determination," said Rohan Gumaratna from the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore.

Oh and here's an extra bit of good news (She Who Must Be Obeyed is sleeping now, the more fool she, or she would have gotten to make this announcement): we haven't heard much about this, but the Iraq government has finally filled the two critical ministries that they'd been dithering about for weeks now, Interior (police) and Defense. Still Reuters:

Iraq's parliament approved on Thursday Maliki's candidates for new defense and interior ministers.

By a clear majority, it approved Jawad al-Bolani, a Shi'ite, as interior minister and General Abdel Qader Jassim, a Sunni and until now Iraqi ground forces commander, as defense minister.

Out of 198 deputies present in the 275-seat assembly, 182 voted for Bolani while 142 supported Jassim, the speaker said.

The two key security jobs were left temporarily vacant when Maliki's government of national unity took office on May 20 because of intense wrangling among his coalition partners.

Over at Iraq the Model, Omar has one other piece of information that is interesting:

Al-Maliki said that among the 7 killed with Zarqawi were two women who were responsible for collecting intelligence for the al-Qaeda HQ cell.

I guess even militant Islamist jihadis are forced to make affirmative-action hires...!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 08, 2006, at the time of 04:10 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 05, 2006

Swamp Samurai On the Marsh

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

Back in February, we discussed the Great Salt Marsh in Iraq, home of the Marsh Arabs, in our post Swamp Samurai. Saddam Hussein systematically destroyed the marsh by building numerous dykes and dams, displacing many Marsh Arabs who resided in the area -- first, before the Gulf War, simply to siphon off more water for the Sunni farms; then later to punish the Shiite Marsh Arabs for their rebellion against Hussein in 1991. (That was the rebellion encouraged -- but then not supported -- by President George H.W. Bush, "Bush-41.")

When the Coalitiion ousted Hussein, local Arabs destroyed the dykes. Coalition forces, particularly the Japanese, began restoring the marsh. Those efforts are showing a remarkable result.

Last time we reported that, as of August of 2005, 37% of the Great Salt Marsh had recovered. Now the June issue of BioScience has an update (hat tip Belmont Club):

Reflooding of Iraq's destroyed Mesopotamian marshes since 2003 has resulted in a "remarkable rate of reestablishment" of native invertebrates, plants, fish, and birds, according to an article in the June issue of BioScience.…

Richardson and Hussain report that 39 percent of the former extent of the marshes had been reflooded by September 2005. Despite incomplete data, the researchers found that in many respects the restored marshes they studied are functioning at levels close to those in one marsh that remained undrained. The fast recovery of plant production, overall good water quality, and rapid restoration of most wetland functions seem to indicate that the recovery of ecosystem function is well under way.

There is no way to know whether the increase in reflooding will proceed linearally; but it might give us a thumbnail guess of how long it will take to restore the marsh completely. From August to September 2005, an additional 2% was restored. That is a rate of 24% per year; as a very rough estimate, by September 2006, we might see 63% of the marsh restored, with full restoration by April, 2009.

But there are one-time events that may not reoccur, including a greater than normal snowmelt into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, leading to greater than expected river flows. It's probable the rate of reflooding will slow during the future, drier months:

Richardson and Hussain are not complacent about the marshes' future, however. The researchers point out that water inflow is unlikely to be sufficient to maintain the encouraging trends in coming years.

What we really don't know is how much of the marsh needs to be restored before the Marsh Arabs begin moving back in larger numbers. 90%, or 80%, or even 75% of the marsh may be able to support the full population of Marsh Arabs; we don't know how well it was utilized before the Baathists and Saddam Hussein destroyed it.

It also brings up a point that "environmentalists" never like to admit: nature is incredibly resilient. Anybody who has ever visited a jungle environment, from Africa to South America to Southeast Asia to the mangrove swamps of the Southeast United States -- understands how greedy nature is, always grabbing the land the moment humans turn their backs. Far from being fragile, nature is so powerful that it takes constant maintenance to keep it from encroaching on cities and homes.

We can't really say how long it will take to fully restore the marsh. But for the moment, at least, the work is going very well... not that you would know much about it from the popular press. For some unaccountable reason, "good news" stories out of Iraq seem to bore antique media editors and producers to tears.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 05, 2006, at the time of 03:42 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 04, 2006

The Skeptical Enquirer

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The video report by CNN's Ryan Chilcote is interesting (click on "Watch a Marine's anguish over death").

The video of three child "survivors" of the alleged attack in Haditha was not taken by CNN reporters; they were not allowed to speak to any of the supposed witnesses. Iinstead, a representative of an unidentified human rights organization (which might have been the same Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy, which produced the first videotapes of the supposed witnesses) "went back" to Haditha and videoed the three children.

But unlike CNN's usual uncritical acceptance of any narrative by supposed "victims," Chilcote's seems somewhat skeptical of the children's account. He says they have obviously told the story many times, which implies to us that they were coached. They did not need any probing.

Chicote noted that one of the girls made a very puzzling claim:

I knew the bomb was going to explode. So I covered my ears.

The Iraqi reporter does not follow-up to find out how she knew, or if she really did have foreknowledge; instead, the person from the "human rights group" dismisses it by saying the little girl was just "confused."

That may be true. But it's surprising that a CNN reporter would raise that point, that he was not satisfied with the explanation. If he were there, he would certainly have asked more (and more probing) questions.

I, myself have a question: the surviving children described the "massacre" in detail as a deliberate spree of premeditated, "execution style" murders.

But if that is how it happened, why were these child "witnesses" allowed to live? I can understand if the family members were killed during the fog of war, or in a fit of anger; I could understand that if the Marines were shooting at things in random, the chidren might survive. But if the report is correct, the Marines are supposed to have killed people methodically and at point-blank range... including several other children. In that case, why would they leave anybody alive, especialy witnesses?

We know that children can be coerced to say almost anything; see the McMartin case. Children have only a tenuous grasp of the essential difference between reality and fantasy or the consequences of bearing false witness. They can be browbeaten into falsely accusing their own parents of child molestation just to please the total stranger who is interrogating them. They can be threatened, either directly or by proxy (threatening their survivng relatives).

We also don't know the relationship between the children and the reporters. Children's relatives can be terrorists, terrorists sympathisers, or could have been threatened by terrorists; and "human rights groups" can be front groups for Musab Zaraqawi's al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia group. Each incongruity or unexpected connection forces us to examine the chilredn's stories carefully for internal consistency and consistency with the forensic evidence, as it develops.

Everything yields to the physical evidence; the supposed eyewitness testimony is less than useless, because they cannot be qualified as witneses and they cannot be relied upon to be honest: the city of Haditha is a terrorist stronghold, and many people might come forward and claim to have witnessed the American "atrocity."

If the DNA and ballistics evidence shows conclusively that the bullets which killed the civilians came from the guns used by the Marines -- or alternatively, that they did not -- then any inconsistency of the eyewitnesses' account is irrelevant. Similarly, if the physical evidence itself is inconclusive, the eyewitnesses accounts alone, questionable as they are, cannot be deteminative of the findings.

We must, of course, wait and see. What else can we do? But it's interesting that at least one CNN reporter, who has seen the complete footage of the interviews with the children, is starting to have doubts.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 04, 2006, at the time of 05:19 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

June 02, 2006

Questions? Who Cares? It Bleeds, So It Leads

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Now that the first wave of hysterical overreporting is past -- where antique media sources casually tossed around phrases like "U.S. military officials have since confirmed to Reuters that that version of the events of November 19 was wrong and that the 15 civilians were not killed by the blast but were shot dead" (which "military officials" were those? why can't we find any such confirmation on the record?) -- we are finally starting to get a little skepticism... at least some probing questions.

Alas, aside from one CNN reporter who became suspicious about some of the children's Haditha testimony (which Sachi is working on a post about), all of the questioning is coming from the blogosphere.

But that's actually not bad: I've thought for some time that the best us of blogging is not to engage in original reporting (most of us have no access to the resources necessary to chase down stories), is not opinion-mongering (yeah, get in line, pal!), but rather applying actual skepticism to claims of certainty by the major media.

For example, Sweetness and Light has noted two interesting points about Iraqis involved in the Haditha story:

  • Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani, the reporter who conducted the video interviews of the supposed survivors and witnesses, was just released in January after being held for five months at Abu Ghraib on suspicions that arose in connection with photographs he had in his camera (possibly of terrorists setting up IEDs) and other evidence that connected him with terrorist groups.

    Al-Mashhadani also wrote the major Haditha story for Time Magazine on March 21st, which is still being used by news services today as the template: claims, accusations, even entire phrases are still being lifted from this story... written by an Iraqi stringer who, whether you believe he was innocent or guilty, has more than enough reason to hate the American Marines.

    Additionally, al-Mashhadani shares a last name with the head of the Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy, Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani; Hammurabi is the group that first brought the supposed Haditha "massacre" to Time's attention. Sweetness and Light notes this may not mean much, if it's a tribal name; but the reporter sharing an unusual last name with his primary source should have been investigated by Time before running the story... if only to add "no relation to," if that's the case.

  • Dr. Walid Al-Obeidi, the Haditha doctor who claims to have examined the bodies of the victims of Haditha and claims that they were all "shot in the chest and the head -- from close range" also claims to have himself been tortured by U.S. Marines back in October. Again, regardless whether this is true or false, if he actually believes it, it gives him ample reason to very much want to find that the Marines executed innocent people in November. (And if he doesn't really believe it, but he's saying it anyway, that's even worse.)

(Hat tip for the above to Little Green Footballs, and to commenter MTF, who first brought this to our attention in the comments of another post on this blog. Thanks, both!)

This must be set against the background of a previous claim of American forces -- soldiers, this time -- "massacring" innocent women and children in Ishaqi (north of Baghdad)... a claim that has now been emphatically refuted by a U.S. military investigation of the incident:

U.S. officials described a nighttime raid aimed at finding a specific guerrilla, who then fled the building but was later caught.

U.S. forces at the site began taking direct fire from the building, and the commander at the scene "appropriately reacted by incrementally escalating the use of force from small arms fire to rotary wing aviation, and then to close air support, ultimately eliminating the threat."

A defense official said an AC-130 gunship was called in to help.

As with the Haditha incident, local police forces and local "civilians" (scare-quotes because we really don't know, do we?) had claimed that the troops intentionally massacred the victims at Ishaqi:

Police in Ishaqi [said] five children, four women and two men were shot dead by troops in a house that was then blown up.

They said all the victims were shot in the head, and that the bodies, with hands bound, were dumped in one room before the house was destroyed. Television footage showed the bodies in a morgue. Their wounds were not clear, although one infant had a gaping head wound.

This sounds eerily reminiscent of what is claimed about Haditha; but it turns out to be a complete fabrication. Which is not, of course, evidence that the Marines behaved appropriately at Haditha; we await the forensic evidence to draw any conclusions about that.

But these three points together do make the case that eyewitness testimony and even "expert" opinion are not necessarily as reliable in a country like Iraq, with its tribal affiliations and serious terrorism problem, as they might be in a more civilized country with more institutional safeguards against officials and witnesses simply making stuff up, either due to collusion or because they have been threatened into doing so by the very people who benefit most from these charges: Musab Zarqawi's "al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia" organization.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 02, 2006, at the time of 05:21 PM | Comments (25) | TrackBack

June 01, 2006

Haditha vs. Abu Ghraib

Atrocious Analogies , Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

I want to make perfectly clear what I'm talking about in this post: in the real world, the allegations (no proof or even evidence yet) of what was done at Haditha are of course infinitely worse than what we know happened at Abu Ghraib. A series of deliberate murders of children, women, and non-combatant men is obviously far more horrific than mere humiliation.

That aside, let's turn to the lesser question of politics... which could turn out to be of more moment than the reality.

The politics of Haditha may well determine whether we continue in the Global War on Terrorism. If the anti-war, anti-Bush maniacs can spin this into a Nuremburg trial, where the entire military is indicted for war crimes and atrocities, then the 110th Congress (which begins next January) may severely curtail the war effort... and if there is a Democratic president in 2009, he or she may simply pull us out, willy-nilly. So as sad as it may be to admit, the politics and the policy are inextricably intertwined.

So it's fair to ask, what will the politics of Haditha be?

If a thorough investigation ends up exonerating the Marines, then I believe there will be little problem: the usual suspects (here, in Europe, and in the Middle East) will scream cover-up; but theyr'e always crying "wolf!" anyway. We've already factored in that reaction.

So for analytical purposes, the only case that needs to be looked at is the awful possibility that the charges are at least partly true: that some Marines did, indeed, deliberately kill civilians, possibly even including children.

I am not saying that happened; I am saying that is the only case where we really have to ponder how it may affect the war effort. Any lesser result of the investigation will have no particular effect at all.

Surprisingly, I believe that even if the essential Murtha charge turns out to be true, Haditha will not have as big an impact on public support for the war as Abu Ghraib did. We have spent so much time thinking about the substance, which is much worse than Abu Ghraib, that we've failed adequately to address the politics... which would be much less destructive than Abu Ghraib.

I know a lot of you are incredulous, but walk a few steps with me first.

What was it that caught our attention most about Abu Ghraib? It wasn't concern for the prisoners; we know they're most likely terrorists or at least terrorist supporters. They have killed innocents, and not many Americans care one way or another if they are tormented.

It was not the claim that prisoners were being beaten or threatened with dogs; we all understand that imprisonment is force, and war is deadly force -- and sometimes, those who administer force go too far. We punish them when they do; but we also understand why they did.

No... what stunned and infuriated voters was the sheer perversion of those American troops. Stripping Iraqi prisoners naked? Dressing them in women's clothing? Having a woman dance around and jeer at -- and publicly fondle -- their genitals? This is just weird, disgusting, sick, lurid stuff that belongs in the pages of the National Enquirer, not the playbook of military prison guards.

It was creepy: one of the rumors was that Lynndie England spent a lot of time prancing around the prison nude herself... not only in front of prisoners, taunting them, but the other American soldiers themselves. This claim of exhibitionism, whether true or false, is the kind of abnormal sexuality that preys upon the American sense of decency and morality. We desperately do not want to think of our soldiers as the sort of people who hang out in public restrooms and expose themselves. Any scandal that forces us to do so -- Tailhook, for instance -- outrages the American people more than almost anything imaginable.

It's weird; it's decadent. Worse... it's French.

Americans can understand mere murder, but sensationalism and sexual depravity freak us out. Even after being released from prison, we make convicted flashers register whenever they move into a community; but not criminals convicted of mere murder.

Logical or not, that's how we look at it. Maybe Europeans are different; certainly the U.N. appears to be, considering how blasé they are about allegations that "peacekeepers" and aid workers in Africa forced famine victims to give them sex in exchange for food.

Such debauchery and decadence outrages us far worse, I believe, than would a scandal where some Marines might have snapped under the pressure and turned into the sort of "Ghengis Khan" barbarians of the fevered imagination of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. (Such people certainly were found occasionally in Vietnam; but there is not a shred of evidence John Kerry ever met any among the Swift Boat crews.)

And for that very reason, I believe the public will be far more willing to accept that such things happen in war: it's only the tiniest of minorities (perhaps five Marines out of 950,000 military personnel who have cycled through Iraq, 0.0005%); they will receive the maximum punishment if convicted -- probably death by hanging or firing squad; yet we still must move on with the war, not throw in the towel because some mentally deranged individuals killed civilians without reason.

I do not believe that Haditha will have the same grip on the American psyche that Abu Ghraib did (and still does today). Not because it's not as bad; it's worse in the cosmic sense. But because it's a more understandable kind of "bad."

Any honest person who isn't a dyed-in-the-mud pacifist can think of circumstances where he or she would contemplate committing murder. But how many Americans can even imagine themselves stripping prisoners naked and lovingly slipping women's panties over their heads?

Murder is evil. Abu Ghraib was grotesque.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 01, 2006, at the time of 06:21 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

May 30, 2006

A Warrior's Perspective

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Black Five referred us to Owen West's Op Ed piece in the New York Times. Owen West, a reserve Marine major who served in Iraq, is the founder of Vets for Freedom.

He thinks the warriors who are actually doing the fighting are tired of mean-sprited political bickering by both sides:

One party is overly sanguine, unwilling to acknowledge its errors. The other is overly maudlin, unable to forgive the same. The Bush administration seeks to insulate the public from the reality of war, placing its burden on the few. The press has tried to fill that gap by exposing the raw brutality of the insurgency; but it has often done so without context, leaving a clear implication that we can never win.

I don't think West is being fair to the president; rather, he seems to bend over backwards to blame both sides equally -- even when one side is clearly more culpable than the other. Although Bush has refused to take the MSM bait to expound on "the fifty most deadly errors you've made in your presidency," he has certainly been willing to change strategies and tactics in the Iraq War.

For example, by uparmoring Humvees and then substituting Strykers wherever possible; by changing commanders who were not getting the job done; by vigorously prosecuting those who engaged in crimes (such as at Abu Ghraib); and most especially, by completely revamping the training for the New Iraqi Army and for focusing at last on equivalent training for the Interior Ministry police forces.

Still, I can certainly understand West's frustration. He thinks the reason ordinary Americans are not rallying behind the troops like they did during WWII is that our military is too insulated from public. Our troops are all volunteers... which means a few sectors of the country (such as the South), where military service is a tradition, contribute the lion's share of the troops. Many people, especially in the more liberal districts that we most desperately need to bring into the fold, don't even know a single serviceman:

In the past, the American public could turn to its sons for martial perspective. Soldiers have historically been perhaps the country's truest reflection, a socio-economic cross-section borne from common ideals. The problem is, this war is not being fought by World War II's citizen-soldiers. Nor is it fought by Vietnam's draftees. Its wages are paid by a small cadre of volunteers that composes about one-tenth of 1 percent of the population -- America's warrior class.

The insular nature of this group -- and a war that has spiraled into politicization -- has left the Americans disconnected and confused. It's as if they have been invited into the owner's box to settle a first-quarter disagreement on the coach's play-calling. Not only are they unprepared to talk play selection, most have never even seen a football game.

In the past, we relied upon the draft to force even those who would not ordinarily think of military service into the Army. While it led to terrible conflicts (in Vietnam, but even in World War II), it also created a shared experience of service to society. Everyone in the country had either served himself or had relatives or close friends who had served. Everyone knew who the soldiers were: the soldiers were we, ourselves.

But today, in many parts of the country, soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors are aliens from another planet: most people living in San Francisco or Chicago or the entire state of Vermont don't know what a soldier is or what he (or she!) does; they don't know why he does it; and they certainly can't imagine what he thinks and worries about while doing it.

In a related vein, people have no idea how modern war is fought. All they see are bits and pieces of confusing, bloody pictures; if you probed, you would probably find that 50% of Americans think that war means the indiscriminate killing of everyone in some geographical area. If they think about military aviation at all, they imagine jet-powered B-29s obliterating entire cities in a single night.

But we don't fight like that anymore. We have conventional ordnance (MOABs, Massive Ordnance Air Blast, a.k.a., the Mother Of All Bombs) that can destroy 10 city blocks; but what we actually do nearly all the time is call down Hellfire and brimstone on a single building, leaving the structures on either side virtually untouched. Our weapons are smart; our targets are targeted. It's not that we're the most moral people in the world (though we are)... we don't want to waste explosive power on people who aren't threatening us.

Americans don't know soldiers; and too often, they don't know us. When we read about American troops being killed, we don't find out what killed them until two thirds of the way through the article; only then do we read that two American troops were killed in a terrorist ambush -- in which, by the way, 80 terrorists were slain, 30 wounded, and a dozen high-value targets captured.

America's conscience is one of its greatest strengths. But self-flagellation, especially in the early stages of a war against an enemy whose worldview is uncompromising, is absolutely hazardous. Three years gone and Iraq's most famous soldiers are Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England, a victim and a criminal, respectively. Abu Ghraib remains the most famous battle of the war.

Soldiers are sick of apologizing for a sliver of malcontents who are not at all representative of the new breed. But they are also sick of being pitied. Our warriors are the hunters, not the hunted, and we should celebrate them as we did in the past, for while our tastes have changed, warfare -- and the need to cultivate national guardians -- has not. As Kipling wrote, "The strength of the pack is the wolf."

I wish West had completed that couplet from Kipling's "the Law of the Jungle," from the Jungle Books:

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back --
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

It signals that as much as America needs her warriors, they need, just as desperately, an American culture that accepts and understands them. We cannot allow the "warrior class" to exist as anything but rhetoric; if they become an actual "class" separate from ordinary Americans, then it's only a short leap until they believe that they're better than "Americans."

Contrariwise, it would take only a little shift in perspective for American civilians to believe that the "wolves" are too wild to live. Our only salvation is if everyone is a wolf, and the pack comprises all of us.

This was always the case in America from the Revolution, and it's still true today... though the silver thread that connects "the men on the wall" to those within the city gates is stretching very thin indeed.

Finally, today's debates are not high-spirited so much as mean-spirited. To allow polarizing forces to dominate the argument by insinuating false motives on one side or a lack of patriotism on the other is to obscure long-term security decisions that have to be made now.

We are clashing with an enemy who has been at war with us in one form or another for two decades. Our military response may take decades more.

West is being too short-sighted here: our enemy has been at war with us for more than a dozen centuries!

Our enemy is a militant jihadi version of Islam that believes it has the moral duty to put everyone on Planet Earth to the choice of "convert or die;" they are at war not just with America, not even just with the men of the West; they are at war with modernity itself. For our enemies, they are always riding across the desert of the world "in perilous fight," with Mohammed himself leading the charge.

This is not all Islam; but it is a piece of Islam that cannot be reconciled with the rest of the world, and which seems to grow stronger with every passing year... and will continue to do so until we deal it the decisive blow that sends it reeling backward -- for a few decades. Until the next time.

If we do not understand and embrace those who defend us today, there may be no one left to defend us tomorrow. Let's sweep all the partisan bickering under the rug and focus on what all real Americans support: the defense of the West and modernity -- the virtues and values of this culture -- against those for whom history ended more than a millennium ago.

Surely that's a fight worth prosecuting; even for Democrats.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 30, 2006, at the time of 11:59 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Deliberating On Mistakes

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

According to Omar at Iraq The Model, a CNN report on May 27th that quoted Iraq's foreign minister about Iran's nuclear program seriously mistranslated the comments from Arabic to English.

Here is what CNN reported:

Iran has a right to develop nuclear technology and the international community should drop its demands that Tehran prove it's not trying to build a nuclear weapon, Iraq's foreign minister said Friday....

"Iran doesn't claim that they want to obtain a nuclear weapon or a nuclear bomb, so there is no need that we ask them for any guarantee now," Hoshyar Zebari said after meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki.

But Omar listened to the audio, and he says this is completely wrong. He supplies his own translation:

We respect Iran's and every other nation's right to pursue nuclear technology for research purposes and peaceful use given they accept [giving] the internationally required guarantees that this will not lead to an armament race in the region…

This is almost the polar opposite of what CNN reported, raising the dilemma of whether we trust Omar of Iraq the Model -- or the scion of Ted Turner. (Silly question.)

If it turns out CNN mistakenly reported, out of sheer incompetence, the opposite of what Zebari said, they should fire the translator.

But if the mistranslation were deliberate, rewriting the official statements of Iraqi officials to hew more closely to what CNN would prefer they said, then -- well, then that's just the traditional MO of the mainstream media, isn't it?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 30, 2006, at the time of 04:55 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

May 26, 2006

Big Lizards Has No Opinion. Yet. UPDATED - Hey, It's a Fast-Breaking Story!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

But plenty still to say...

UPDATED: See bottom of post.

Everyone by now must be aware of an investigation by the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service of a number of possible civilian deaths in Haditha last November. Alas, nearly everyone is leaping to a series of conclusions before the investigation is complete.

Some conclude that the Marines committed a war crime, a massacre of up to two dozens civilians, including women and children, just because the Marines got angry. Others conclude that the whole charge is a slanderous lie invented by anti-war activists like Rep. John Murtha (D-PA, 50%). Both sides are drawing conclusions far beyond the available data.

The fact is that we don't yet know the facts. The dribs and drabs we've gotten from Murtha, from the Los Angeles Times, and from other antique media are anything but illuminating; they critically depend upon anonymous sources, and they conceal weasel-words like "may be," "could be" behind a veil of unfounded certainty:

U.S. Marines could face criminal charges, including murder, over the deaths of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians last year, a defense official said on Friday.

The case could prove a further setback for President Bush who described the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal as America's "biggest mistake" and admitted saying "bring 'em on" to insurgents in 2003 may have "sent the wrong message."

Note two arrows in the quiver of journalism's jihad against Bush and the war:

  • First, that the Marines "could" face murder charges. Here is what Reuters' "defense official" actually said -- though you only get this by reading a different article; the explanatory context is dropped from the first article linked:

    The defense official noted that criminal investigations into deaths could lead to murder charges, but was not more specific about possible charges.
  • Second, the usual Tourette's-like eruption of irrelevant but negative commentary about Bush, designed to taint the sample... and therefore make people more likely to believe the worst.

(I've come up with a neologism to describe that last tendency: I shall call it Spurette's Syndrome, a portmanteau word formed by combining "spurious" and "Tourette's.")

What the Defense Department official clearly said was that one of the possible charges resulting from such an investigation would be murder... which should be obvious, as the claim (by an Iraqi "human rights" organization) is that the Marines wantonly killed unarmed women and children. Clearly, if -- a very big "if" -- if the investigation reveals that this is even partially true, all those involved should be charged with murder... and if they're convicted, I want to see them swing.

Yes, even if they are Marines; and even if they were upset by the IED-death of one of their own, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas. There is no excuse, no mitigating factor, no conceivable rational explanation for executing children in front of their parents -- which is what the Hammurabi Organization for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy alleges they did.

Any Marine who did such a thing -- if any of them really did -- has so dishonored the uniform and the Corps that he should first be dishonorably discharged and then hanged by the neck until dead... and everybody in the unit, indeed every Marine we have (via closed-circuit TV), should be forced to watch the hanging.

I don't know when is the last time we executed a member of the military; but if this allegation turns out to be true (I'm still very dubious), we should resurrect the practice.

But how likely is it? What do we actually know? Darned little:

  • So far, we have Iraqi civiilans who died, though the number is disputed;
  • We have a politician (John Murtha) claiming it was a massacre, but who is also known as a serial liar whose primary purpose has become to accuse American military personnel of committing atrocities and war crimes on a Kerryesque campaign;
  • And we have a videotape.

Reuters says it received a videotape of the alleged victims from the abovementioned Hammurabi human-rights group:

A video of people killed in the incident, given to Reuters in March by Iraq's Hammurabi Organization for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy, showed corpses lined up at the local morgue with bullet wounds in the head and chest.

The video showed houses with bullet holes in the walls, pieces of human flesh, pools of blood, and clothes and pots scattered on floors. Residents described a rampage by Marines.

That's what we know (I don't believe Reuters is lying). But what don't we know?

  • We do not know whether the corpses in that video are actually from the incident at Haditha.
  • We do not know whether the gunshots are actually executions -- or shots fired from a distance that hit innocent bystanders.
  • We do not know whether the "bullet holes in the walls, pieces of human flesh, pools of blood, and clothes and pots scattered on floors" betoken deliberate executions or a massive firefight.
  • We do not even know whether those bullet holes were made by M-16s or some other American weapon -- or whether they were made by AK-47s.

None of this information has been released, and no MSM report that I have seen even attempts to show evidence filling these vital lacunae. Here is how the Los Angeles Times luridly describes the supposed incident... and note especially how they characterize the provenance of their information:

Marines from Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have found.

Officials who have seen the findings of the investigations said the filing of criminal charges, including some murder counts, was expected, which would make the Nov. 19 incident the most serious case of alleged U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

Which officials are those? Would they include Rep. Murtha and others of his ilk? Note that the LA Times does not even go so far as to say "military officials," which implies to me that the officials are not military; the Times is perfectly capable of using the longer term when they choose, to make their point stronger -- as here:

Marine officials also confirmed Thursday that an investigation had been opened into an April 26 incident in which troops allegedly killed a civilian in the town of Hamandiya, west of Baghdad.

Though the Times admits -- once -- that their entire source for the content of the report is the Ubiquitous Anonymous Informant, who did not even show editors or writers a copy of the report (the article is based upon what "officials said"), the entire rest of their piece is written in simple, declarative, absolute statements, expressing utter certainty about their story:

An administrative inquiry overseen by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell found that several infantry Marines fatally shot as many as 24 Iraqis and that other Marines either failed to stop them or filed misleading or blatantly false reports.

The report concludes that a dozen Marines acted improperly after a roadside bomb explosion killed a fellow Marine, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas.

Looking for insurgents, the Marines entered several homes and began firing their weapons, according to the report.

What they actually mean is, "according to what some civilian somewhere in the government said about the report, which he claims to have read, but won't show us." But besides being cumbersome, that wouldn't fit the "story" as the LA Times conceives it.

Again, we want to caution: Big Lizards is certainly no more prepared to say that the Marines are innocent than we are to say that they are guilty. We're agnostics on this... but we're militant agnostics: we don't know, and neither do you, dang it!

And neither will anyone know, save a handful of people, until the reports are actually released. Until then, as you read increasingly tabloidesque stories in the elite media, bear in mind not only what you have been told but what you haven't been told... particuarly about the source or sources of this story.

UPDATE, a few minutes later: a story in the New York Times gives more specificity to the allegations, though it adds nothing to the provenance: all is still attributed to anonymous "officials":

Congressional and military officials say the Naval Criminal Investigative Service inquiry is focusing on the actions of a Marine Corps staff sergeant serving as squad leader at the time, but that Marine officials have told members of Congress that up to a dozen other marines in the unit are also under investigation. Officials briefed on the inquiry said that most of the bullets that killed the civilians were now thought to have been "fired by a couple of rifles," as one of them put it....

All of those who discussed the case had to be granted anonymity before they would talk about the findings emerging from the investigation.

So it emerges that the investigation is centered around one or two rogue Marines who may have gone on a several-hour long rampage, and also upon several other Marines, probably to determine whether they tried to cover up the incident -- which would of course depend on whether they knew (or reasonably should have known) that what they were reporting was false. Assuming, that is, that it was false.

If true, this is still an atrocity; but rather than indicting the entire Marine Corps, the investigation appears to have narrowed the focus.

I still believe that if this is true (we're no further on that question), those convicted should be hanged and the rest of the Corps forced to stand at attention and watch. But we're still going to wait for the results to be released, and they certainly will be released publicly, before leaping to either conclusion.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 26, 2006, at the time of 05:50 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

May 25, 2006

Beautiful Pictures from Iraq

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Black Five featured several photographs taken by Staff Sergeant Russell Lee Klika. His photographs are simply amazing. The first feature is here, and the second here. Enjoy.

To whet your appetites, here are a couple samples....



UAV at Sunset    Kids of Iraq

"Soldiers of Charlie Troop, 1st Squadron, 33rd Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, launch a UAV prior to a mission from Camp Hope near Sadr City, Iraq" (L); children of Iraq (R) -- courtesy Black Five

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 25, 2006, at the time of 01:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 22, 2006

Maines Vs. Texas

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters , Make Mine Music
Hatched by Sachi

Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines is digging the hole deeper and deeper. After three years of backlash and a stunted career, she is even more defiant. In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, Maines hijacked a Dixie Chicks concert in Great Britain to announce -- to cheers from her audience -- that she was "ashamed" that President Bush came from Texas.

NEW YORK (AP) - The Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines apologized for disrespecting President Bush during a London concert in 2003. But now, she's taking it back. "I don't feel that way anymore," she told Time magazine for its issue hitting newsstands Monday. "I don't feel he is owed any respect whatsoever."

In fact, Maines never really did "apologize" in the first place. She said something along the lines that the office of the presidency should be respected, no matter who holds it. I don't consider that an apology; and she didn't even mean that much. Now, Maines is repudiating even that half-hearted non-apology (which fooled nobody, by the way.)

To tell the truth, I really don't care what three dumb Chicks think of the president or the war. But I am angry at the relentless attacks on country singers, their fans, country western music, and the American spirit itself. Listen to what Martie Maquire, another band member, thinks of country western fans:

"I'd rather have a small following of really cool people who get it, who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith," Maguire said. "We don't want those kinds of fans. They limit what you can do."

We know what Maines thinks of Toby Keith; but now Reba's fans are also uncool? I take that personally.

The mainstream press has clearly taken the Dixie Chicks side of this "debate;" they even imply that other country stars made death threats against the chicks:

[Natalie Maines' anti-Bush] remarks led to death threats and a backlash from other country stars, including a high-profile spat with Toby Keith. It also stalled what until then had been the group's smashingly successful career.

Now, that also sentence could also be read to mean that Maines' remarks led to death threats -- and they also (separately) led to a "backlash" by other country singers. But it's carefully crafted so that it's equally proper to read it as saying that "other country stars" reacted with "death threats and a backlash." I think the ambiguity is deliberate: it's a "dual use" smear, like Hussein's WMD arsenal, to make it possible to deny bad intent when called to account.

So how about that "high-profile spat with Toby Keith?" This is true; there certainly was one. But what this story ignores is that the feud was started by Maines herself, who deliberately provoked it a year before her 2003 London smear -- possibly because the Chicks considered Toby Keith their biggest rival in country music at the time, and they may have wanted to piggyback on his success and celebrity to promote their own multiple nominations at the upcoming Country Music Awards. Specifically, both the Chicks and Keith were up for Entertainer of the Year in 2002, and only one could win. (Hint: it wasn't the Texas tornado.)

Toby Keith is actually from Oklahoma (though from Clinton and Moore, not from Muskogee); and interestingly, he is a Democrat -- in the Zell Miller mold -- and he opposed the Iraq war (from an isolationist standpoint). The Chicks never "got" Toby Keith, just like they never "got" country music itself: to this day, they seem to think Keith is a right-wing Republican war supporter.

Toby Keith originally did not say a single thing to Maines about her 2003 comment in London (let alone any death threats). But that wasn't when the "feud" began; in fact, it started well before 2003... but the attacks have mostly come from the Dixie Chicks, mainly from Natalie Maines herself.

Back in August of 2002, Natalie Maines made her first public, gratuitously nasty comment about Toby Keith's song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue":

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (LA Daily News) - ABC News Anchor Peter Jennings is apparently not the only celebrity to take issue with Toby Keith's chart-topping country hit, "Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)." Now, the Dixie Chick’s lead singer, Natalie Maines, freely shares her dislike of the song.

"Don't get me started," Maines told the Los Angeles Daily News. "I hate it. It's ignorant, and it makes country music sound ignorant. It targets an entire culture - and not just the bad people who did bad things. You've got to have some tact. Anybody can write, 'We'll put a boot in your ass.' But a lot of people agree with it. The kinds of songs I prefer on the subject are like Bruce Springsteen's new songs."

To which Toby Keith said, "you've got to be in my league as a songwriter before I'll even respond to you."

Since then, he's projected images of Maines and Saddam Hussein on big screens behind the stage when he's performing concerts.

But the most infantile attack after Maines' 2003 comment in London came not from Keith, but from the Dixie Chicks themselves:

On May 21, Maines performed on television at the AMC Awards wearing a F.U.T.K. tee shirt – which viewers declared a definite telling off of T.K. (Toby Keith). According to a Dixie Chicks rep, "It’s my understanding that according to chatter on their web site, Natalie’s T-shirt stands for FREEDOM, UNDERSTANDING, TRUTH, AND KNOWLEDGE."

Yeah. Right.

Around this time, a friend's child, whom Keith was very close to, died of cancer. Suddenly the feud between Maines and him just seemed really trivial, and he started ignoring them. Maines may have thought this meant she won; but the reality is that the Dixie Chicks simply ceased to matter in the world of country music: they lost all their award nominations and their CD sales plummeted.

Toby Keith, meanwhile, went on to become one of the greatest forces in the genre in decades. He now owns his own label and has become an institution.

I think at first the Chicks picked on Keith because they percerved him as a rival. They might have thought that attacking him would create the buzz they needed to sweep the CMA awards and launch a huge career in country.

But they wildly misjudged their audience. Toby Keith was not just a musical rival; after 911, and especially after "Courtesy," Toby Keith had become something much larger... and the Chicks never "got it." Keith came to symbolize the angry, defiant American: defiance of Osama bin Laden, of terrorism, and of European-style appeasement. To many Americans, he came to symbolize the spirit of America itself. Keith, the Okie from Clinton, was more Texan than those three dopey Texans.

Natalie Maines clearly understood the defiance part; that's exactly what angered her about Keith's song. Rather than accepting 9/11 as a just rebuke, rather than being humbled and apologetic for all the horrible things we were doing that brought 9/11 on ourselves, Maines understood that Keith's song -- and it's overwhelming reception across the country and especially among the military -- signalled that Americans did not accept the diminished role in the world that Leftists ordered for us. Instead, we made it plain that we were going to fight back -- violently, just as we'd been attacked violently. Keith was a powerful symbol of that resolve.

The Dixie Chicks gambled -- and they lost. They gambled that country fans were just like most rock fans: uncomfortable with the idea that there was something special and essentially good about America, compared to other countries. Maines and the other Chicks thought country fans were basically like the French.

They did not realize what country western music meant to many Americans. Thinking they were attacking American arrogance, they were really attacking the core values of real America. In doing so, the Dixie Chicks have alienated themselves from real Americans.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 22, 2006, at the time of 01:46 PM | Comments (27) | TrackBack

May 13, 2006

The 18½ Minute Gap

Iraq Matters , Scaley Classics
Hatched by Dafydd

Originally posted on Patterico's Pontifications, May 30th, 2005 -- a blast from the past! Now reprinted here courtesy the Big Lizards Scaley Classics series. Collect the whole set!

Interesting note: while researching my earlier post, I noticed that my very first blogpost anywhere was on Patterico: Sneaking Apples From the Great Wealth Tree, May 27th, 2005. That means my (Dafydd's) first blogospheric anniversary is coming up in only twelve days! In celebration, I will repost that first post of mine here on Big Lizards, for all to see.

(And how many readers will swiftly comment, "say, you've sure gone downhill in the last twelvemonth... what happened?")

The first anniversary of Big Lizards itself is not until September 16th.

Without further uninteresting ado....

~

If you enjoy arguing with Democrats about the validity of the Iraq War (do you also like to dart in front of a bull wearing long, red, flannel underwear?), you will discover that every such discussion always ends the same way: because we didn't find pyramids of carefully labeled nuclear missiles from the Acme WMD Warehouse, the whole war was a "complete fraud"... we had "no reason at all" for going into Iraq; consequently, the exercise was utterly "futile" and a "miserable failure."

(And how did that bull get into red, flannel underwear in the first place?)

It does little good to point out what nobody now denies: that Hussein had many ongoing programs to develop such chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; they just weren't as advanced as we were afraid they were. Given how little intelligence we had about that secretive country, the choice was to trust in Saddam Hussein's restraint and good judgment, or trust in the United States military. "You should have just waited a few more months," the lib invariably intones; "maybe a year. Then we would have known for sure."

In other words, they wanted us to wait until two minutes to midnight. Then we could have moved... unless it turned out our watch was slow.

But now we know that it was not just on WMD that the clock was ticking. As Claudia Rosett, George Russell, and others pointed out, the oil-for-fraud program was already starting to produce the nightmare scenario of terrorist groups with their own revenue streams, independent of individual donors and fundraisers. Articles written for Fox News and National Review Online revealed that at least one company linked to al-Qaeda was already involved in kickback schemes to make millions in profits from the U.N. program -- money that would be directly available to fund al-Qaeda operations, now that Osama bin Laden's personal fortune is long since spent. And it was not just al-Qaeda; several other terrorist organizations also wound up with oil leases, right under the noses of Benon Sevan, Executive Director of the Iraq Programme (Oil for Food), Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and his spawn-of-the-devil Kojo (or is that Cujo?)

Had we waited just a few more months -- waited until two minutes before midnight -- even more high officials in Security-Council governments would have been corrupted; it's entirely possible that, in the end, even Britain would have bowed to international pressure and pulled out of the Operation Iraqi Freedom. Would we still have gone to war, then? I don't think anyone can really say for sure.

So the Left is actually right, for a change: we miserably failed to wait until two minutes to midnight to strike against the tyrant. We struck at twenty till, instead. Maybe even twenty and a half minutes before the witching hour.

Which would make it the second time in history that an 18½ minute gap saved the presidency... and this time, possibly the entire Global War on Terrorism as well.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 13, 2006, at the time of 07:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 10, 2006

An Iraq Death Squad Leader Arrested

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

As Iraqi's new cabinet shapes up, the most challenging task is to rid the country of the violent militias which have infiltrated the Iraqi Security Forces, the police. So it's very good news indeed to hear that a high-ranking general in the Interior Ministry, which controls the Iraqi police, has been arrested for involvement in the infamous Shiite "death squads":

Iraq's interior minister said on Sunday his police had arrested a general in the ministry on suspicion of involvement in kidnaps and death squads.

Bayan Jabor, who is fighting to keep his job in a new government in the face of criticism that he has tolerated Shi'ite militias inside his ministry, made the announcement in an interview on Al Jazeera television.

"We have arrested an officer, a major general... along with 17 people who kidnapped citizens and in some cases killed them. He is now in jail and under investigation," he said.

"We also found a terror group in the 16th brigade that carries out killings of citizens," he added.

Although Reuters is saying that the Interior Minister is fighting to keep his job," that may not be exactly true. A few weeks ago, Jabor said in a TV interview, when it became clear Ibrahim al-Jaafari was being ousted, that he too was retiring as soon as a replacement could be found. But it's possible he changed his mind, or he was only posturing in the first place.

The former prime minister, Jaafari, was hand-picked by Iranian-backed renegade cleric Muqtada Sadr and was long suspected of secretly supporting the death squads of fundamentalist Shia militias (the Badr Brigades and Sadr's own Mahdi Militia) which had thoroughly penetrated the security forces. If that is true, then Jabor must have been complicit as well:

The U.S. ambassador, a key player in the negotiations, has made no secret of the fact that Washington would prefer a new face to lead the ministry.

Mohammed at Iraq the Model reports that the United Iraqi Alliance (the main Shiite bloc of parties that controls the lion's share of seats in the parliament) and the Iraqi National Accord (the primary secular party headed by ex-Baathist, rebel against Hussein, and former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi) agreed that both the Interior Minister and the Defense Minister should come from outside those two blocs.

Since Bayan Jabor is a member of the SCIRI, a Shiite party that is under the UIA umbrella, he will almost certainly not be chosen to remain as Interior Minister.

In any event, the ministry is beginning to clean up itself. Let's hope they succeed.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 10, 2006, at the time of 01:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 04, 2006

Sadr the Gamester

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The most important agenda item for the new Iraqi government's incoming Interior Minister -- not yet chosen -- is to dismantle the militias and incorporate their members into the regular police forces. Not only has the Interior Minister not been picked yet -- according to Iraq the Model's Omar, no one seems eager to take the job... for the precise reason that going after the militias is a daunting prospect!

The biggest obstacle, of course, is the Iranian sock puppet, Muqtada Sadr. His Mahdi Militia is the only one openly refusing to integrate. The May 6th issue of Newsweek contains an interview of Sadr, talking about the future of his so-called "resistance movement."

I do not like the way Newsweek treats Sadr with such deference, describing him as "part of the political establishment." However, he does have power: Sadr was the cause of that four-month gridlock in forming a government, pushing his divisive candidates, such as Ibrahim al-Jaafari. I suppose we must grudgingly admit that, while he is not a part of the "establishment," he is a force with which Iraq must reckon.

In the interview, Sadr insists that his aim has always been to kick the American and other Coalition forces out of Iraq. He argues that his "powerful, loyal, political and military force" will "take Iraq to safety" (by which he means "take Muqtada Sadr to the Caliphate of Iraq").

At the same time, I reach out my hand [to the political parties] to cooperate to make peace in Iraq, to drive away the shadow of the armies of darkness [somebody call Bruce Campbell, quick!] The occupation is the creator of all problems. I pray to Allah to take away the problems and their creator.

Sure. That's why Sadr's Mahdi Militia has been killing Sunnis and Shiite political rivals... just their way of "make[ing] peace in Iraq."

Sadr divides his "resistance" into three "stages":

  1. Peaceful resistance;
  2. His two violent uprisings (in Najaf, the Sadr City slums of Baghdad, and across the Shiite areas);
  3. And now the stage of "political resistance, which we attained by reaching political posts and demanding a timetable for the departure of U.S troops."

Maybe it's just me, but I don't quite recall Sadr ever conducting a "peaceful resistance" stage; but maybe I just missed it. The first we heard of him was when he was credibly accused of assassinating Imam Abdul Majid al-Khoei when he entered the Shrine of Imam Ali; then the next thing we heard was the Najaf takeover, timed to coincide with First Fallujah.

As for the political resistance, his normal method of operation is to "intimidate" rivals -- by murdering them. In other words, Sadr's only known "stage" of resistance is lethal violence.

In the interview, Sadr reached out to Sunni Iraqis, urging them to fight against the occupation forces (that would be us). But before he cooperates with the Sunni, he has few things to say to them:

I address the Sunnis through NEWSWEEK. One, they should specify their stance toward attacks on civilians. After the attack in Samarra, the Sunnis didn't have a clear stance. Two, their stance toward Takfiris [a name for followers of the extremist ideology espoused by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi] is not clear. Three, they should specify their stance toward the Shia. Are we Muslims or not? We will not be satisfied with anything less than that. Four, they should demand the execution of Saddam Hussein. And five, they should specify their stance toward [returning] families who have been displaced [by sectarian violence].

This might all sound reasonable... if we didn't know what Sadr himself has been doing all this time. But he does not even acknowledge the fact that the Mighty al-Mahdi Army is a militia, let alone that it's responsible for many of Sunni (and probably some Shiite) citizens done to death in Iraq. What, me militia? asks Sadr.

Newsweek: The Mahdi Army is supposedly the only faction that hasn't signed on to an agreement to incorporate militias into governing bodies. Can you explain why?

Sadr: The Mahdi Army is not a militia. You can't describe it or specify it as a militia. I issued a statement recently limiting the Mahdi Army personnel to cultural, social and religious acts....

Newsweek:Many people claim that Mahdi Army members have been responsible for sectarian attacks in recent weeks. Others say they're simply defending their neighborhoods that the government cannot defend. What do you say? (Sachi: What a softball question! You just gave him an out!)

Sadr: The Mahdi Army personnel are not sinless. But they are integrating themselves despite the harsh circumstances they live in. (Sachi: What's that supposed to mean?)

Newsweek: Do you think that some people dressed as or appearing like Mahdi Army members have carried out reprisal or vengeance attacks of a sectarian nature?

Sadr: And what are the clothes of the Mahdi Army? So that I can distinguish them from others. They don't have a specific uniform. They are people gathered by love, and faith is their weapon.

Ooh, stop, stop. I can't take anymore; I'll go into sugar shock.

Why are we listening to this palaver? Muqtada Sadr couldn't tell the truth even if his life depended on it, and he were pumped so full of Sodium Pentothol it was squirting out his ears. The only honest sentiment he says is that he hates America and wants American forces to leave... not because he wants peace and stability in Iraq, but because it's easier for him to control Iraq without the Coalition spoiling things. Sadr is nothing but trouble.

Newsweek: Do you recall that at one point the U.S military and political spokesmen said it was their aim to "kill or capture" you? Your reaction now?

Well, my reaction is -- "darn it, I sure wish we still had that plan!"

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 04, 2006, at the time of 04:33 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 03, 2006

Barry Bends

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Wretchard has an important, fascinating, but interminable post up about retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey -- he who commanded the 24th Mechanized Infantry during Desert Storm, later became Bill Clinton's Drug Czar (Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy), and is currently an adjunct professor at West Point.

The Belmont Club post is essential reading; but it's very long. So as long as this post here is, consider this the CliffsNotes version of the Belmont Club post!

First, it's important to note that Gen. McCaffrey was not an Iraq-War supporter. In fact, he was quite a critic from the very beginning; and he's quite antagonistic towards Donald Rumsfeld.

This is important to note before going in: McCaffrey has developed an increasingly optimistic outlook on the war, a complete turnaround from his opinion in 2003, and especially intriguing in light of a New Republic article, written by Lawrence Kaplan, that makes clear McCaffrey's attitude as recently as 2004 towards Rumsfeld -- especially over his planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

(The New Republican article is only available to subscribers from their website; but you can read it at the site of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council here.)

Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey, who has become Rumsfeld's most outspoken critic, asked, "Why would you do this operation with inadequate power?" To McCaffrey, the answer is obvious: "Because you have such a strong ideological view, and you're so confident in your views that you disregard the vehement military advice from, particularly, Army generals who you don't think are very bright."

But in spite of this history, when McCaffrey visited Iraq on a fact-finding mission in June of 2005 -- and even more so when he returned in April of this year -- he was extremely optimistic about the war and its successful outcome.

Did the antique media even bother to report this? Isn't it rather more newsworthy when a widely respected and very experienced critic of the war admits that it has gone a lot better than he expected -- even in the "winning the peace" category -- than it is when long-time critics of the war, such as Weasley Clarke or Anthony Zinni, continue to sing the same defeatist ditty, despite never having gone to investigate its progress?

Shouldn't the McCaffrey memo of April, 2006, have been major, headline news? I reckon not: he came to the wrong conclusion.

In particular, McCaffrey found "simply awe-inspiring" the "morale, fighting effectiveness, and confidence of U.S. combat forces." He also heavily praised the New Iraqi Army:

The Iraqi Army is real, growing, and willing to fight. They now have lead action of a huge and rapidly expanding area and population.... The recruiting now has gotten significant participation by all sectarian groups to include the Sunni.... This is simply a brilliant success story. [Emphasis in Belmont Club post.]

McCaffrey noted "marked improvement" in the previously poorly performing Iraqi Security Force (police). First, the bad:

The police are heavily infiltrated by both the AIF [Anti-Iraqi Forces -- the foreign terrorists] and the Shia militia. They are widely distrusted by the Sunni population. They are incapable of confronting local armed groups. They inherited a culture of inaction, passivity, human rights abuses, and deep corruption.

Now the good:

The Iraqi police are beginning to show marked improvement in capability since MG Joe Peterson took over the program. The National Police Commando Battalions are very capable - a few are simply superb and on par with the best U.S. SWAT units in terms of equipment, courage, and training. Their intelligence collection capability is better than ours in direct HUMINT.

And the future:

This will be a ten year project requiring patience, significant resources, and an international public face.... We absolutely can do this. But this police program is now inadequately resourced.

McCaffrey is, on the whole, very pleased with the job done by his old nemesis from the Gulf War days, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; the general is less sanguine, oddly enough, about the contributions (such as they are) from the State Department:

The U.S. Inter-Agency Support for our strategy in Iraq is grossly inadequate.... U.S. consultants of the IRMO [Iraq Reconstruction Management Office] do not live and work with their Iraqi counterparts, are frequently absent on leave or home consultations, are often in-country for short tours of 90 days to six months, and are frequently gapped with no transfer of institutional knowledge.

McCaffrey seems to believe the problem arose back in 2003, under Secretary of State Colin Powell (or perhaps earlier, in the decades of the State Department's institutional intellectual lethargy). In his 2005 memo, he described the tenure of Paul Bremer as U.S. Administrator of Iraq (head of the Coalition Provisional Authority) thus:

The transitional Bremer-appointed Iraqi government created a weak state of warring factions.

But I think this is overly harsh against Bremer. It's not as if he had anything to work with, after the sudden and complete collapse of the Iraqi-despised Baathist regime, leaving a power vacuum... and the less than stellar performance of the first American "proconsul" of Iraq, retired Gen. Jay Garner. I think that Bremer did the best he could:

  • He formally disbanded Saddam's army, which had fallen apart anyway and was plagued by incompetence, cowardice, and corruption even before the invasion;
  • He ordered full-scale de-Baathification, which was urgently needed if the new government were ever to have credibility with the 80% of the country that was Shiite or Kurdish;
  • And he helped create -- and then handed power to -- the Iraq Interim Governing Council, marking the very first time that majority Shia and Kurds (and women) had a say in their own governing: before the Baathists, Iraq was briefly ruled by a military dictatorship, which had toppled the Sunni Hashemite kingdom, which had taken over from the Ottoman Turks.

(Although Bremer's position was under the Department of Defense, and he reported directly to Rumsfeld, Bremer himself was a career State Department offiical, a protégé of "Hammerin' Hank" Kissinger, and was thoroughly imbued with the State ideology of stability über alles.)

McCaffrey makes two profound and inarguable points in his 2006 memo. Here is the first:

The bottom line is that only the CIA and the U.S. Armed Forces are at war.

...Meaning, of course, that the State Department and other departments of the government (Treasury, Energy, et cetera), as well as all of Congress and the Judiciary, still live in a September 10th world. It is critical to internalize this point if you want to understand the war.

McCaffrey worries about the public's taste for the task flagging, if they don't see us as actually "at war." This might cause the funding to run dry; if we do not sustain our own will to fight here, then as the adage goes, it is entirely possible for us to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:

Iraq cannot sustain the requisite economic recovery without serious U.S. support. The Allies are not going to help. They will not fulfill their pledges. Most of their pledges are loans not grants.

But perhaps even more important is the yawning Grand Canyon of distrust that has separated our own military from the American press... a press which, if it came aboard, could educate the American people (as they did during World War II) and keep their attention riveted on Iraq, where history is being made.

As he notes in the memo from 2005, the difficulties of reporting out of Iraq (coupled with the media's knee-jerk reaction -- unmentioned by McCaffrey -- that the war is illegal, immoral, fattening, and a sign that we live in a Fascist dictatorship) result in the news media sending only "the second team" to Iraq.

The reporters have little to no experience with war, have typically never served in the military, dislike (or even hate) soldiers and military values, report in a facile and tendentious manner, misquote sources, rely upon native sources of unknown provenance (or even known sympathy for the enemy), and in general, hamper, not help, the military effort. It's hardly surprising that, as McCaffrey noted in 2005:

Military leaders on the ground are talking to people they trust instead of talking to all reporters who command the attention of the American people. (We need to educate and support AP, Reuters, Gannet, Hearst, the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc.)

Nearly a year later, and this aspect of the war has actually deteriorated, leading McCaffrey to note that "there is a rapidly growing animosity in our deployed military forces toward the U.S. media. We need to bridge this gap."

The general then writes his other profound inarguability:

Armies do not fight wars - countries fight wars. We need to continue talking to the American people through the press. They will be objective in reporting facts if we facilitate their information gathering mission.

But he is far more optimistic about the Iraqi political scene:

[I]n my view, the Iraqis are likely to successfully create a governing entity. The intelligence picture strongly portrays a population that wants a federal Iraq, wants a national Army, rejects the AIF as a political future for the nation, and is optimistic that their life can be better in the coming years. Unlike the Balkans -- the Iraqis want this to work.

In conclusion, Barry McCaffrey is extremely optimistic -- especially for a guy who was against the war from the git-go:

There is no reason why the U.S. cannot achieve our objectives in Iraq. Our aim must be to create a viable federal state under the rule of law which does not: enslave its own people, threaten its neighbors, or produce weapons of mass destruction. This is a ten year task. We should be able to draw down most of our combat forces in 3-5 years. We have few alternatives to the current US strategy which is painfully but gradually succeeding. This is now a race against time. Do we have the political will, do we have the military power, will we spend the resources required to achieve our aims?

That question at the end of this paragraph is the whole enchilada: to persevere is to prevail; to falter is to fail. It's as simple as that.

(But read the whole thing at the Belmont Club.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 03, 2006, at the time of 07:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 01, 2006

Internal Powell Struggle

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Over the weekend, Colin Powell -- in a thoroughly expected surprise -- joined the revolt of the former generals complaining that we didn't follow the "Powell doctrine" when we invaded Iraq.

The Powell doctrine holds that:

  1. No military action should be undertaken unless the international community -- and especially France and Russia -- applaud it;
  2. And at least twenty Arab nations join it;
  3. And the goal of keeping the coalition intact supercedes all military goals;
  4. And Israel is ordered not to respond even if they're attacked;
  5. And the State Department runs it;
  6. And we first raise an army of "overwhelming force," as determined by Colin Powell, to utterly crush the enemy... until the Europeans get cold feet; at which point we abandon the conflict, declare victory, and head for home.

President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld failed to listen to Colin Powell; so he retaliated yesterday in an interview on a British television network, ITV, by attacking the execution of the war and calling everyone else's competence into question:

Just back from Baghdad and eager to discuss promising developments, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice found herself knocked off message Sunday, forced to defend prewar planning and troop levels against an unlikely critic - Colin Powell, her predecessor at the State Department.

For the Bush administration, it was a rare instance of in-house dissenter going public.

On Rice's mind was the political breakthrough that had brought her and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to Iraq last week and cleared the way for formation of a national unity government.

Yet Powell sideswiped her by revisiting the question of whether the U.S. had a large enough force to oust Saddam Hussein and then secure the peace.

Despite AP's feeble attempt at humor -- "a rare instance" indeed! -- this is a serious, yet all too typical, phenomenon today: the Left has settled upon the tactic of openly trying to wreck the Iraq War in an effort to discredit George W. Bush and the whole idea that countries have national interests that sometimes dictate going to war with other countries that threaten them.

In Colin-land, if we absolutely had to overthrow Saddam... then we should simply have made Iraq a colony, darn it, forever ruled by American colonial governors. Rather than try to build up democracy in the Middle East, we should have -- under the Powell doctrine -- just created an American empire that would control all the oil. (Powell has never been a big fan of democracy, preferring to deal with emirs and presidents-for-life, who can supply "stability" -- entertain him with lavish State functions held in palaces.)

It seems his model is the British Empire of the nineteenth century (or the Russian Empire of the twentieth). Of course, those didn't work out too well in the modern era; but perhaps if we just redouble our efforts, it will all be different this time.

Reuters is somewhat less tendentious about Powell's criticism:

In an interview with a private British television station, Powell said there had been debates about the size of the force and how to deal with the aftermath.

"The aftermath turned out to be much more difficult than anyone had anticipated," said Powell, adding he had favoured a larger military presence to deal with the unforeseen.

Ordinarily, "anyone" would include Powell himself; I'm not sure if he gives himself an exemption, but at least he doesn't overtly claim psychic powers, like some of the other generals. And he makes it plain here that his views were considered... they were just not accepted:

"I made the case to General (Tommy) Franks, to (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld and to the president that I was not sure we had enough troops," he said.

He argued, however, that his view was not ignored but that those responsible for the troop levels believed they had the appropriate number.

I am most amused by the casual assumption of the antique media that if only we had sent two, three, four times the number of troops, then everything would have been much better. It's more than an assumption; they act as if everyone knows this, everyone accepts this, there are no demurs.

They seem oblivious to the fact that more is not always better in warfare: the Soviets spent a force of 100,000 men in a futile effort to conquer and hold Afghanistan; we successfully ousted the Taliban and created a nascent democracy with less than a twentieth of that by relying upon Northern Alliance forces and our own air power; during Operation Anaconda, the American troop presence rose to no more than 10,000. And at virtually no time since, except for one brief spike in 2003, have we kept more than 12,000-15,000 soldiers in that country.

Oddly, nobody seems to complain that we should have used the Powell doctrine in Afghanistan.

Even so, the media has an idée fixe that if only we had sent 500,000, 750,000, or a million men to Iraq -- instead of a paltry 200,000 -- there never would have been any insurgency. Do they imagine that we would leave such a large force (a very significant portion of our entire armed forces) tied down in one country in the Middle East indefinitely? And if not -- what do they think would happen when 80% of those forces left Iraq?

Yet the decision made by Rumsfeld, with extraordinary consultation with the entire warfighting senior staff under Tommy Franks, is offered as à priori proof of incompetence, as if it were mathematically proven to be wrong and need not even be discussed.

In reality, going to war with the army we had, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party were ousted from control in three weeks, and "major combat operations" ended after forty days.

Since then, there have been three major elections, each gaining a larger turnout than the last; 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces are almost completely peaceful, and only one of the remaining four (Anbar) is actually considered critically violent.

We have built an amazingly professional New Iraqi Army of 200,000 plus, an Iraqi Air Force, and an increasingly honest and effective Iraqi police. Oil is flowing; electricity and water are running better in most parts of the country than they were under Saddam. And the Iraqi economy is already better than it was in the last ten years of Saddam Hussein.

But according to Wesley Clarke, Anthony Zinni, Colin Powell, and a half-dozen other malcontents and whiners, everything would have been much better if only we had listened to them -- and followed the Soviet example.

Why now? Why are all these people coming forward today, rather than last year? That's easy to explain, and AP inadvertently does so:

Rice, Bush's national security adviser during the run-up to the war, neither confirmed nor denied Powell's assertion. But she spent a good part of her appearances on three Sunday talk shows reaching into the past to defend the White House, which is trying to highlight the positive to a public increasingly skeptical in this election year of the president's conduct of the war and concerned about the large U.S. military presence.

Simple as that: the grousing generals are coming forward today because the midterm elections will be held in just six months, and the Democrats and September-10th Republicans see an opening to destroy Bush.

The bipartisan Left has six months to convince Americans that the whole war was a catastrophe; that we accomplished nothing; that we might have had a chance were it not for the "incompetence" of Bush and Rumsfeld (if only they had listened to me!); and that our only option at this point is, as Joe Biden suggests, to partition Iraq into three separate regions -- just like Clinton and Clarke did in the success story of Bosnia! -- then declare victory, cut, and run.

Come on in, Colin; the water's fine.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 01, 2006, at the time of 03:30 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

April 24, 2006

Kerry Me Back to Old Baghdaddy

Iraq Matters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

I just heard this on Hugh Hewitt (guest-hosted by the perpetualy bemused Jed Babbin). Surely this must rank right up there with "I actually voted for the eighty-seven billion before I voted against it," if not quite up to the caliber of his "Genghis Khan" accusation of war crimes against the entire Vietnam-era military.

I wish I knew what show this was on; anybody out there in Lizardland who can point me to a transcript, I will be very appreciative and will correct any mistakes in the quotation below [quotation corrected; the comments have the two versions side by side, so readers can judge how close my remembered version was to the actual words. The show was This Week With George Snuffleupagus]. But here is what I heard him say to the best of my recollection, in his very own Boston-Brahmin, ersatz-Kennedy monodrone:

But there is no excuse three and a half years later for American troops to be driving by IEDs and getting blown up. Are you telling me that they can’t drive a truck?

Yeah, that's the problem -- the soldiers are getting blown up by IEDs because they have poor "defensive driving" skills.

If only we had listened to Sen. John Kerry (D-Beacon Hill) and shipped a few thousand high-school Drivers-Ed teachers over to Iraq, the whole problem would be cleared up before you could say "Boston baked beans." When the explosion began, our boys could simply swerve dexterously around it, just like in the movies.

Say, you do know that JFK is making another run for la Casablanca in 2008 (or perhaps starting this year), right? Boy, that gives us Republicans a nice, warm feeling.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 24, 2006, at the time of 05:21 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

April 22, 2006

What's Out Of Place In This Picture?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Iraqi National Assembly meets, everyone more or less agrees on a unity government. This is really good news, though I'm still a bit suspicious about soon-to-be-prime-minister-elect Jawad al-Maliki. The other top slots are filled, nearly all by acclamation.

There is a government now in Iraq. This is deeper than the antique media want to admit; this is what we've been waiting for these last four months. Did we mention Ibrahim al-Jaafari is out?

But what about that mainstream media? Take a look at the first few paragraphs of the AP story. See if you can spot the incongruity, the Thing That Doesn't Belong. I hope I'm not giving too big a hint:

After months of political deadlock, Iraq's parliament convened Saturday to select top leadership posts, launching the process of putting together a new government aimed at pulling the country out of its sectarian strife.

Before the session, Shiite lawmaker Ridha Jawad Taqi said all sides were agreed on a package deal for the top spots: Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, would remain as president for a second term, with Sunni Arab Tariq al-Hashimi and Shiite Adil Abdul-Mahdi holding the two vice-president spots.

Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni, would become parliament speaker with two deputies - Khalid al-Attiyah, a Shiite, and Aref Tayfour, a Kurd.

Suspected insurgents, meanwhile, set off two bombs in a public market in northern Iraq, killing at least two Iraqis and wounding 17. The second blast was timed to hit emergency crews arriving at the scene.

On Friday, the Shiite alliance nominated a tough-talking Shiite politician, Jawad al-Maliki, as prime minister in a move that broke the long impasse over forming a new government.

Sunni Arab and Kurdish politicians signaled they would accept al-Maliki, clearing the way for parliament to elect top leadership positions, including the president.

Did you spot it?

All right then, riddle me this. The headline of the story is Iraqi Lawmakers Meet to Choose New Leaders. It's 27 grafs long.

Nine of the first ten paragraphs are, in fact, about the Iraqi politicians meeting and electing people to various positions. One paragraph is about a couple of Iraqis being killed in "northern Iraq" -- that is, 60 miles from Baghdad, where the parliament is meeting.

What does that paragraph have to do with the story? It's like saying Mandy, who lives in Colorado Springs, had a trigonometry test today; she had studied well, and she earned an A-, which was her best grade all semester. She told all her girlfriends about how well she did. A man was murdered in Tampa, Florida. Mandy's parents were so proud of her score on the trig test that they celebrated by going out to dinner.

Just as an experiment, I ploughed through this boring story about early voting in the city elections in New Orleans. Can you guess what I didn't find? Right you are: I didn't find a single word about the guy in Los Angeles who shot himself yesterday after a high-speed pursuit. Oddly enough, not a word about that in the New Orleans vote story.

Is it just me?

About halfway through the Iraqi parliament story, Qassim Abdul-Zahra (the writer) plunges into a dizzying fugue that attempts to catalog every single death that occurred in Iraq on the same day the National Assembly met. The only purpose I can imagine for this is to reassure AP's natural audience that they needn't worry -- no matter how much progress was made forming a unity government, it was still a wretched, horrible day in Iraq. Thank goodness!

Then the story abruptly lurches back onto the rails, discussing the actual subject for the remaining nine grafs.

This is the execrable tactic of the antique media: no matter how good the news from Iraq is, it must be leavened with layers of awfulness, regardless how incongruous they may be to the subject at hand. Like Mr. Dick in David Copperfield, the newsies may set out to write a straight news story; but sooner or later, poor King Charles's head must creep into it... leaving them puzzled and a little sheepish, since they don't even remember how they ever thought they were going to tie together parliament meeting in Baghdad with a firefighter killed in Muqdadiyah.

What seems to be misplaced is the lost journalists' ethic of simply conveying the relevant facts -- rather than trying to force a certain reader reaction (of despair, in this case), no matter how inappropriate it may be.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 22, 2006, at the time of 07:07 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

April 21, 2006

Maliki On the March - Maybe

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

According to the BBC, the UIA has chosen Jawad al-Maliki, the deputy leader of the Islamic Dawa party, as its new nominee for prime minister of Iraq:

Mr Maliki, a close ally of Mr Jaafari, recently headed a committee which purged members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party from public life, raising fears his nomination might be rejected by Sunni factions.

He has been acting as spokesman both for the Daawa party and for the broader coalition of seven Shia factions which make up the strongest parliamentary bloc and, therefore, has the right to nominate the premier...

He has been in charge of the Daawa party's internal political organisation and has taken an active part in helping formulate the four agreements which Iraqi politicians have already reached on the platform and other structures to underpin a new national unity government.

I think the BBC is being disingenuous here. While it's true that Maliki might be rejected (see below), it wouldn't be because he "recently headed a committee which purged members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party." That's a snide and churlish suggestion, implying that all Sunni were big fans of Saddam and wish the Baathists were back... and quite typical of the British "yellow journalists," who are, if anything, even more desperate to see a real civil war in Iraq than their American counterparts -- as well as perhaps just a bit too cozy with Iran themselves.

Great that Jaafari is gone; but I'm a little concerned about that "close ally of Mr Jaafari" jazz. Does this mean that Maliki is also a close ally of Muqtada Sadr? Did Jaafari get permission from the master to throw in the towel because he knew the fix was in for another Sadr sock puppet to rule?

The best indicator will be the response of the Kurds and the Sunni. They certainly know better than any of us whether an Iraqi politician is controlled by Sadr -- or directly by Sadr's own bosses in Teheran.

Iraq the Model is skeptical:

However, the question remains that; will the real problem be solved by this agreement on the top posts?

I guess not because if any of the two new candidates gets to be the new PM, Iraq will–in my opinion-continue to descend for the next four years in the same way it's been doing since the interim government was installed last year. And after all, the UIA's decision to replace Jafari with al-Adeeb or al-Maliki is a solution designed for preserving the brittle unity of the UIA and not for the creation of a unity government because they know very well that the rest of blocs were hoping to see Abdul Mahdi replace Jafari and maybe the UIA is twisting arms with this new nomination and betting on splitting the lines of the anti-Jafari mass thinking those would not be willing to prolong the deadlock by refusing the new candidates.

Will we see a surprise in tomorrow's session? Will the deadlock remain? Could it be that the Kurds, Sunni and secular blocs are just trying to trick the UIA into approving a presidency council and get the dispute to the parliament to overthrow the UIA's candidate(s) and force their own candidate?

This is what we'll find out tomorrow.

Let's assume Omar is right; how would this work? The National Assembly might vote on all the other positions first, stocking the government except for the prime minister.

If they then reject Jawad al-Maliki, the nominee of the plurality party (the UIA), it's my understanding that other parties are then free to nominate their own candidates. Suppose the Sunni, the Kurds, and the secular Shiite parties were all to nominate the same guy -- Adel Abdul Mahdi of the SCIRI? Even though the SCIRI is a part of the UIA, and Abdul Mahdi was not the UIA nominee... they may decide to vote for their own party member anyway, reasoning that Maliki had his shot and was rejected; he wouldn't be elected in any case.

If the SCIRI joined the Kurds, Sunni, and seculars, that would probably be enough to elect Abdul Mahdi over the objections of the Islamic Dawa Party. But since he is still Shia, presumably he should still get strong support as the elected prime minister from Dawa and the other parties in the UIA. He could be a true "unity leader."

Best of all, Abdul Mahdi is well known as about the bitterest opponent of Sadr and Iran among the well-known Shiite politicians.

As Omar says, we should have a good idea what's happening tomorrow.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 21, 2006, at the time of 04:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Shia Voting on Next PM Candidate

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

It looks like nearly everyone in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the 130-seat Shiite bloc in the Iraqi National Assembly, is more or less assuming that the next candidate for the UIA will be somebody other than Ibrahim al-Jaafari:

Representatives of the seven parties within the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition, were to meet after Friday midday prayers to discuss a replacement for al-Jaafari, whom the Sunnis and Kurds refused to accept to lead a unity government.

Shiite officials said it was unlikely the alliance committee would agree on a single candidate at the meeting and would instead focus on the mechanism for choosing a nominee. If the choice is made by the 130 Shiite parliament members, the committee must decide whether the winner needs two-thirds support or simply a majority, officials said.

Such a vote would probably take place Saturday before an afternoon session of parliament.

Everyone, that is, except Jaafari's "senior advisor":

Adnan al-Kadhimi, a senior adviser to al-Jaafari, said the prime minister was still a candidate. "It is up to the alliance to decide who is its candidate, but that does not mean that the alliance will not nominate al-Jaafari again, " al-Kadhimi told The Associated Press.

Well... yes it does, Mr. Kadhimi; that's pretty much exactly what it means.

Stay tuned to Big Lizards -- same moonbat time, same moonbat URL -- for all the latest moves in the Mesopotamia Mambo!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 21, 2006, at the time of 06:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2006

Clinic Budget Shortfall in Iraq

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Last night, I was watching the ABC evening news (sorry, I like to flip). They were talking -- finally -- about American reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

That's a nice change isn't it? We've been complaining about the near blackout of coverage of all the good things that are happening in Iraq. But then, since ABC is still part of the antique media, they dropped the hammer: they didn't talk about how many schools were built or how many clinics were opened. Instead, they focused like a laser beam on how Americans have squandered reconstruction money by bad planning and incompetency.

This seems to be the media's new counterattack on our criticism. Early this month, the Washington Post reported that we are running out of money to build clinics in Iraq... after "only" completing 20 out of 142 planned clinics:

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A reconstruction contract for the building of 142 primary health centers across Iraq has run out of money, after two years and roughly $200 million, with no more than 20 clinics now expected to be completed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says.

The contract, awarded to U.S. construction giant Parsons Inc. in the flush early days of reconstruction in Iraq, was expected to lay the foundation of a modern health care system for the country, putting quality medical care within reach of all Iraqis.

Parsons, according to the Corps, will walk away from more than 120 clinics that on average are two-thirds finished. Auditors say its failure serves as a warning siren for other U.S. reconstruction efforts coming due this year.

But wait -- we did build twenty clinics as part of this one project... right? When was that reported? I sure don't remember seeing anything about it; at least, not until it could be framed as another American failure.

And more to the point... while the Post clearly wants us to believe that those clinics will never be built -- "walk away from more than 120 clinics" -- what about this statement that immediately follows the one above?

Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Corps of Engineers commander overseeing reconstruction in Iraq, said he still hoped to complete all 142 clinics as promised and was seeking emergency funds from the U.S. military and foreign donors.

"I'm fairly confident," McCoy said.

So we're not talking about a failure; we're talking about a potential failure... one that the federal government is already aware of, already tracking, and already moving to turn into another success. So why all the anger and defeatism?

According to the Post, the reason for the money shortage is that our initial plan did not account for the high cost of security:

Violence for which the United States failed to plan has consumed up to half the $18.4 billion through higher costs to guard project sites and workers and through direct shifts of billions of dollars to ramp up Iraq's police and military.

Granted, we did not correctly assess the danger and cost associated with the security measures. We went overbudget.

But what defense contract doesn't go overbudget? (The entire DOD computer system comes to mind, something about which I'm personally familiar, as well as those multi-hundred-dollar toilet seats... which I'm not personally familiar with!) After all, Iraq is a war zone; nothing is predictable. It's unreasonable to expect us to anticipate everything.

True: some people "predicted" that there would be a huge "insurgency" that would overwhelm us and drive us out of Iraq (Saddam Hussien predicted it, for example). But those same people also predicted that we would be stuck in a "quagmire," that tens of thousands of our soldiers would be killed, and that the urban warfare, the house-to-house fighting would eat our Army alive: they didn't (and still don't) have a good track record, but even a broken clock can be right twice a day.

An editorial in the New York Times argues that we should have forseen everything:

There appears to be plenty of blame to go around for the health clinics fiasco. High on the list comes the Bush administration's stubborn refusal to factor the deteriorating military situation into reconstruction planning. By the time this contract was awarded, in the spring of 2004, it should have been clear that special security measures would be needed in many areas.

But we know about those increased costs now; we've known about them -- and been "factor[ing]" them into "reconstruction planning" -- since 2004, more than a year and a half before the Times' editorial from Monday.

This is what happened: for about a year in 2003-2004, we were trying to train the New Iraqi Army to stand on its own feet; the training was under the direction of Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, and it was a disaster -- not necessarily because of any failing on Eaton's part. But the Iraqi Army was pathetic, incompetent, corrupt, prone to desertion, and especially likely to flee in the face of the enemy or let enemy fighters slip through the noose even when they were surrounded.

This was the period during which the terrorist threat grew, and also the threat from home-grown (but Iranian controlled) "insurgents" like Muqtada Sadr. The response of the Iraqi Army at First Fallujah (April 2004) was typical: many soldiers panicked and fled, and the terrorists were allowed to slip away.

It is totally false for the Washington Post to say that we "failed to plan" for post-war violence. We did plan; our plan was to train-up the New Iraqi Army... it just went badly at first.

We made some adjustments, and now it's working much better; but the damage had been done. By Spring of 2004, the security situation in Iraq had become a lot worse.

We recognized that our training system had completely broken down; in May of 2004, shortly after First Fallujah revealed the deep problems in the Iraqi Army, the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team (CMATT) was rolled into the new Office of Security Transition (OST). Maj. Gen. Eaton retired, and Maj. Gen. David Petraeus (commander of the 101st Airborne during major combat operations in Iraq) was promoted to Lt. Gen. and put in command of the OST. The OST expanded to include not only training the New Iraqi Army but also the police forces.

(Ironically, Maj. Gen. Eaton is one of the retired generals demanding Defense Secretary Rumsfeld resign. Is it possible that Eaton's own replacement and retirement in 2004 was not completely voluntary? I don't know, but it's probably worth thinking about, since some of the other "griping" generals have personal grudges against Rumsfeld.)

Either because of these changes, or maybe just because the Iraqis themselves started to realize their own survival depended upon the Iraqi Army becoming professional, from that moment, the training began to turn around. The difference was easily seen just six months later, in November 2004, when the Iraqi Army performed so much better at Second Fallujah.

Once the Iraqi Army began to flourish, grow, and become much more effective, the "deterioration" of security leveled off, and now things are getting better. Not only are U.S. casualties and deaths lower, so are civilian deaths in Iraq. So maybe Brig. Gen. William McCoy of the Army Corps of Engineers has good reason to believe the rest of those clinics will be completed.

Even the Washington Post had to admit (at the very end of the article) that we've had many notable achievements:

The Corps of Engineers says the campaign has renovated or built 3,000 schools, upgraded 13 hospitals and created hundreds of border forts and police stations.

So, what does this all mean? Despite difficulities, our guys are doing a heck of a job. OK, so we need more money. But now that the new Iraqi security forces are becoming more and more reliable, and the new government is finally -- I hope! -- going to be formed, the prospect is good. From NYT:

Let it not be said that thousands more Iraqis died needlessly because America walked away from its promise of health clinics with less than 15 percent of the job done.

Hey, the New York Times and I finally agree on something!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 20, 2006, at the time of 05:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Ibrahim al-Jaafari Ready to Muck His Hand?

Elections , Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Today, Transitional Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari as much as threw in the towel.

Although he has not resigned, nor has he taken his name out of contention, he agreed to send his nomination back to the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) for a revote.

The dramatic announcement was made shortly before a planned session of the Iraqi parliament to try to jump-start formation of a new government. The Shiites asked that the session be postponed until Saturday or Sunday, after they resolve the issue of al-Jaafari's nomination, said Shiite official Ridha Jawad Taqi.

Jawad al-Maliki, spokesman for the prime minister's Dawa party, told reporters that "circumstances and updates had occurred" prompting al-Jaafari to refer the nomination back to the alliance "so that it take the appropriate decision."

Al-Maliki said the prime minister was not stepping down but "he is not sticking to this post."

This is a stunning breakthrough. I wonder who was big enough to lean on Jaafari and push him outside the tent?

The nomination of Jaafari is what has held up the formation of a permanent government for four months after the December elections, in which a National Assembly was chosen. Fixing a permanent government is the first giant stride in stabilizing Iraq: with a real, elected government and an Interior Ministry not corrupted and controlled by Jaafari's puppetmaster, Muqtada Sadr, all the forces of order -- military and police -- can be focused on stopping the tit-for-tat violence and killing or driving out the terrorists.

The move represents the first sign that al-Jaafari has abandoned his quest to keep the prime minister's post, only a day after he had repeated his steadfast refusal to step down.

Last time, Jaafari won the nomination within the party by a single vote... and that was before the Sunni, the Kurds, the seculars, and even the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) -- the largest party within the UIA itself -- decided that Jaafari was utterly unacceptable under any circumstances.

With a revote, it's virtually impossible that he will be renominated: I firmly believe the nomination of Ibrahim al-Jaafari to be prime minister of Iraq is dead... and with it, the caliphate ambitions of the barely-literate, untutored, barbaric "cleric," Sadr -- he and his al-Mahdi Militia. The nomination will go to someone else in the Islamic Dawa Party (Jaafari's group):

[Jawad] Al-Maliki and another leading Dawa politician, Ali al-Adeeb, have been touted as possible replacements for al-Jaafari.

It won't be Adel Abdul-Mahdi of the SCIRI, the man Jaafari barely edged out last time; that would be too humiliating to the Dawa Party. Dawa and the SCIRI have more or less come to a tacit agreement that if Jaafari leaves, his replacement will also be from Dawa; this is to prevent the UIA from splitting apart at the seams.

Once it's clear Jaafari is sidelined, that clears the decks for various other appointments:

Resolution of the prime minister issue could smooth the way for filling other posts, including the president, two vice presidents, parliament speaker and the two deputy speakers. The Shiites could block Sunni and Kurdish candidates for those positions in retaliation for the standoff over al-Jaafari.

They could, but they won't; fewer Sunni voted in the last election than their percent of the population... and if the UIA cannot form a government, that task will either devolve to one of the other, non-Shiite parties -- or else there will be another election. If there is another election, the Sunni will probably get more seats at the expense of the Shia... and that's the last thing the UIA wants. They won't do anything to rock the boat after Jaafari leaves.

Let's wait until there is a formal announcement, possibly Saturday or Sunday (Iraq time), before popping the champers. The fat lady hasn't actually sung yet... but it sure sounds like she's warming up the old voicebox.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 20, 2006, at the time of 04:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 19, 2006

Still Strong Iraqi Spirits

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

This morning I read an article titled “Two teachers killed in front of students” A subsequent article changed the claim to a school security guard and a teacher being killed; but the most recent news is that both the local Iraqi police and U.S. forces investigated, but neither could find any evidence that such killings had taken place at all:

The Iraqi government said militants killed two people at elementary schools in a mainly Shiite district of Baghdad on Wednesday, but police in the neighborhood denied any attack occurred.

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson also said American military teams went to both schools and found no evidence that any violent incident had taken place at either. It was unclear why the ministry released the statement.

How fleet of foot is rumor, especially when the tall tale is music to the ears of the antique media: horrific violence in Iraq! Bush a miserable failure! Video at eleven!

Then I read this tragic news from Iraq the Model: their brother-in-law was assassinated.

The victim was a doctor who received a degree in a foreign country, then came back after Hussein’s regime fell. He could easily have stayed on safe foreign soil, making a comfortable living with his wife and two children. Instead, he came back to help rebuild his country; he worked at a clinic for poor people who otherwise cannot afford medical care.

Since I started reading Iraq the Model, I cannot help feel like we're friends, even a large extended family. I feel great empathy towards the brothers, Mohammed and Omar; through their blog and others like it (including the blog of their other brother, Ali, which I couldn't get to today), I started to think of the Iraqi people as our brothers and sisters.

They are no longer just strangers in a strange and far-away land. So when something like this happens, it hurts me personally, almost as if I actually knew him.

He was not affiliated with any political party or movement and spent all his time working at the hospital or studying at home and he was dreaming of building a medical center for his specialty to serve the poor who cannot afford going to expensive private clinics.

We didn't know or anticipate that cruel times were waiting for a chance to assassinate the dream and kill the future.

These victims of terrorism -- doctors and schoolteachers (if not the fictional schoolteachers of the Ministry's announcement, there are plenty of others who were real) -- had nothing to do with politics. They were killed for no reason, just for doing something good for the Iraqi people.

Terrorists cannot allow Iraqis to have a stable society; they worship only death, chaos, and destruction. We cannot afford to lose people like Mohammed, Omar, Ali, and their brother in law. Iraq security forces must protect the citizens of Iraq... and for that, we need a stable government immediately, like yesterday!

A good news is that the Iraqi people are strong. Certainly our friends Mohammed and Omar are not giving up; they will continue to fight for Iraq's future.

The terrorists and criminals are targeting all elements of life and they target anyone who wants to do something good for this country…They think by assassinating one of us they could deter us from going forward but will never succeed, they can delay us for years but we will never go back and abandon our dream.

We have vowed to follow the steps of our true martyrs and we will raise the new generation to continue the march, these children of today are the hope and the future.

Unfortunately we cannot say the same thing about Iraqi politicinas. Acting Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari obstinately refuses to step aside, and the gridlock continues. There is something very peculiar about his obsession; Jaafari must know he can never be confirmed, even if every Shia voted for him (which they will not all do). So why is he so adamant in his refusal to withdraw his name?

We believe it has something to do with the future plans of Jaafari's boss, renegade cleric Muqtada Sadr, who controls the largest private militia in Iraq, the Mahdi. For some reason, Sadr seems terrified of somebody else gaining control of the government... including the Ministry of the Interior, which controls the police and prosecutors.

We can all draw our own conclusions... but there is still that untried murder charge hanging over Sadr's head. If the Iraqis wanted him out of the way, and if someone other than Sadr's sock puppet controlled the criminal-justice system, wouldn't that be a convenient way to do it?

The brothers refuse to arm themselves, but I hope they change their mind. There is no shame in protecting their lives with a little help from Colonel Colt. Even so, may God protect our friends in Iraq.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 19, 2006, at the time of 06:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 18, 2006

Politics As Unusual

Future of Warfare , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

The newest wrinkle in the "Seven Days In April" (Tony Blankley's term) conspiracy of generals to unseat Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and hurt Republicans in the November elections) brings the essentially political nature of the rebellion into sharp focus. Oddly, though it's a day old, it's still not being reported in American mainstream news media -- at least not as I write this.

Brit Hume mentioned on Special Report yesterday that the newest addition to the Griping Generals is none other than former NATO commander and former Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark. But I can't find that news on any American news feed (via Google News search; I don't subscribe to the hideously overpriced LexisNexis)... not even on FoxNews.com.

It's reported in foreign news sources, however. ABC News Australia:

A former commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, has joined six other retired United States generals in calling for the resignation of the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

He says Mr Rumsfeld has also lost the confidence of some serving officers, because of his handling of the war in Iraq and because they believe Mr Rumsfeld does not listen to advice.

General Clark, who was a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2004, said Mr Rumsfeld had pushed the US into war in Iraq, before the diplomatic process had ended.

But you won't find it by searching abcnews.go.com here.

The Guardian has it, though they fail to note the political significance:

Mr Rumsfeld's position became more tenuous after six retired generals called for him to quit, followed by the revelation he was "personally involved" in "degrading and abusive" treatment of a Guantánamo Bay detainee, according to an internal military inquiry. On Saturday General Wesley Clark became the seventh ex-commander calling for him to go.

The Guardian misses the fact that Clark is not just an "ex-commander," he was also a candidate for president on the Democratic ticket.

And here's the Beeb, which highlights what the Guardian skipped:

Ex-Nato commander Gen Wesley Clark, who ran for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2004, backed calls for Mr Rumsfeld to resign....

Gen Clark said in a television interview: "I believe secretary Rumsfeld hasn't done an adequate job. He should go."

Gen Clark said he believed Mr Rumsfeld, along with Vice-President Dick Cheney, had helped push the Iraq invasion when there was "no connection with the war on terror".

Gen Clark said the secretary had lost the confidence of some officers in the military who were asking for "somebody in the military chain of command who will listen".

Gen Clark has been a frequent critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

So what is the political component here? Why do we say the addition of Candidate Clark changes the complexion of the criticism? Because it makes it clearer than ever that this is a political revolt against Republican policy, driven by the Democratic Party -- not the concerns of unbiased military professionals.

The leadership role played by Gen. Anthony Zinni -- who, according to Fred Barnes, organized this political stunt by actually telephoning generals to talk them into joining the rebellion -- already pointed towards the real core of dissent, as opposed to the stated reasons: they're unhappy with the 2004 election results and hope to do better in November.

Big Lizards has noted the intensely political nature of Gen. Zinni's opposition to Rumsfeld from our first post on this subject. Zinni is widely expected to be Rumsfeld's replacement if John Kerry wins election in 2008; other Democrats might also consider him. Zinni opposed the "unnecessary" Iraq War from Day-1; he has repeatedly said that sanctions against Saddam Hussein were working and keeping him "in his box."

In 2000, Zinni himself said that Iraq had WMD, active WMD programs, and that there was a danger that terrorists could get WMD from Iraq and other state sponsors of terrorism. But starting just before the 2004 election, Zinni began claiming the opposite, that the Bush administration manipulated pre-war intelligence on WMD to manufacture casus belli.

We noted how the Democrats immediately began using the talking points generated for them by the Gripers to attack the Bush administration. And now the mask is off: a once and Democratic candidate openly joins the ranks of the Gripers.

I believe the Democrats have once again overplayed their hand, as at the Paul Wellstone memorial. When the Gripers only comprised generals who had actually served under Rumsfeld, they could be portrayed as simply worried and concerned that Rumsfeld was screwing up the war.

When General Zinni emerged as the ringleader, however, that started to make clear the political motivation of the group (as well as making the generals themselves seem like sock puppets)... but only to those who followed politics closely enough to know who Zinni was in the 1990s and could be in 2009.

And with the emergency of Wesley Clark, light dawns. Even the most casual follower of current events should remember that Clark ran for president as a Democrat in 2004 then withdrew and campaigned for John Kerry; that he was the preferred candidate of Michael Moore and most of the Hollywood lefties; that he opposed the Iraq War even before it began, testifying against it before Congress in 2002; and that he touts himself as a "progressive" from Little Rock, Arkansas.

Clark should now seize the mantle of "spokesman" from Zinni; Clark is unquestionably the best-known member of the Grumbling Gripers, and one would think that he can get "face time" more easily than Zinni. But the curious reluctance of the antique media even to mention that Clark is now part if the mob seems peculiar... does it mean the MSM realizes how this changes the tenor of the revolt from concerned-but-loyal troops to partisan hacks feeding talking points to the Democratic Party? Or are they just being slow on the uptake, as so often in recent years?

Since the 1960s, the New Left has followed a deliberate policy of infiltration and subversion of great American institutions, twisting them into front groups for "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party": newspapers and television news, movies and television entertainment, schools (public and private), the clergy of several major religions, the Girl Scouts (they're still trying to get inside the Boy Scouts), corporate America, the Civil Rights movement, the AMA and APA, and so forth.

In this, they are only following in the footsteps of the Master, for such subversion was an integral part of the worldwide Communist subversion of the 1930s through the 1950s, the Stalinist period. (The red-diaper babies of the New Left, from the Port Huron Statement on, have basically been Luddite Stalinists, more radical than their pro-industry Communist parents. Their "useful idiots" are progressives, such as Zinni, Clark, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI), and the like.)

It is now clear that they have infiltrated and subverted at least some portion of the military, reaching all the way up to the highest rank (Zinni and Clark are both four-stars). There exists now a slice of the United States Army and the United States Marine Corps that is in fact the military branch of the Democratic Party. They serve the Party, not the country; although the public face comprises entirely retired general officers, they claim they have many allies within the active-duty ranks... and there is no reason to doubt that they do.

Certainly Tony Blankley buys it, per a column from which I got that catchy phrase "Seven Days In April" up top (hat tip, Scott Johnson at Power Line). Blankley references and quotes from a Washington Post column by former ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke:

First, it is clear that the retired generals -- six so far, with more likely to come -- surely are speaking for many of their former colleagues, friends and subordinates who are still inside.... Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who was director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the planning period for the war in Iraq, made this clear in an extraordinary, at times emotional, article in Time magazine this past week when he said he was writing "with the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership." He went on to "challenge those still in uniform . . . to give voice to those who can't -- or don't have the opportunity to -- speak."

Holbrooke is a relentless Democratic campaigner; President Clinton seriously considered him for Secretary of State to replace the retiring Warren Christopher (Clinton picked Madeleine Allbright instead). Holbrooke goes on in that column to insist the generals "are not newly minted doves or covert Democrats." He does not claim, however, that they are not overt Democrats; and indeed, the two ringleaders assuredly are. The rest repeat earlier Democratic talking points (such as that there was "no post-war planning"). [Hat tip to commenter jd watson, who spotted an error in the succession order of Clinton's two Secretaries of State. - the Mgt.]

Holbrooke makes clear his own sympathy with this group of revolting retired and active-duty generals:

The major reason the nation needs a new defense secretary is far more urgent. Put simply, the failed strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be fixed as long as Rumsfeld remains at the epicenter of the chain of command.

Tony Blankley wonders whether a conspiracy among active-duty generals to retire, one by one, and then immediately denounce the Bush administration and the Secretary of Defense, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and Republicans in general might constitute a crime, either under the federal civilian law or the UCMJ:

A "revolt" of several American generals against the secretary of defense (and by implication against the president)? Admittedly, if each general first retires and then speaks out, there would appear to be no violation of law.

But if active generals in a theater of war are planning such a series of events, they may be illegally conspiring together to do that which would be legal if done without agreement. And Ambassador Holbrooke's article is -- if it is not a fiction (which I doubt it is) -- strong evidence of such an agreement. Of course, a conspiracy is merely an agreement against public policy.

Big Lizards is less concerned about that aspect (does Blankley suggest that Alberto Gonzales begin issuing arrest warrants?) than we are curious whether anyone will actually believe in such a drip, drip, drip of sudden and "independent" resignations and denunciamentos -- or whether, with each new "falling star," the public will grow more and more skeptical of the political independence of the group.

Especially when it is led by Wesley Clark, the man who would be president.

Big Lizards anticipates the latter: as we implied a few posts ago and mention supra, the Democrats have yet again overplayed their hand. But then, like the scorpion and the frog, it is their nature to do so.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 18, 2006, at the time of 04:51 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

April 17, 2006

All Right, Shinseki Can Keep His Epaulettes

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Upon reading this story in the New York Times, I will revise my previous statement that Gen. Shinseki should have been drummed out of service for blabbermouthing to Congress his personal position on how many troops were needed for "peacekeeping" in Iraq.

First, the set-up. Everybody agrees on this much:

General Shinseki, who commanded the NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia, testified before Congress in February 2003 that peacekeeping operations in Iraq could require several hundred thousand troops, in part because it was a country with "the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems."

Why was Shinseki wrong to say this?

First of all, generals and other staff (civilian and military) express their opinions privately; they are privately evaluated, and then the President of the United States (POTUS) decides. The content of such privileged communications cannot be divulged: what happens with POTUS stays with POTUS. Without such privacy, policy advisors will be reluctant to give their candid assessments, because they might leak out with unpredictable results.

Second, once a decision is made, the generals do not have the right to tell Congress that the decision is wrong. (And telling Congress is functionally equivalent to calling a press conference and telling the world, because somebody in Congress is sure to do so.)

Such congressional testimony inevitably becomes a political meme that will cause no end of problems forPOTUS and his entire administration. The opposition party will seize upon it (right or wrong) as "evidence" that the Commander in Chief is incompetent, use it to undermine his leadership and stir up anti-war sentiment across the country... which in turn can severely undercut congressional support for the mission.

The Pentagon planners, the service secretaries, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and President George W. Bush had already determined that we needed a smaller peacekeeping force (for good reason: see below) than Gen. Shinseki wanted.

Shinseki's congressional testimony called all that into question, as 535 "armchair Commanders in Chief" got to hear Shinseki's views -- but not the reasons why they were ultimately rejected.

For, third, as it happens, Gen. Shinseki's position was flatly wrong. He was only looking at the immediate military goal. There was a reason why Bush and Rumsfeld decided to do it the way they did.

Bush's overall plan -- enunciated in the January, 2003 State of the Union speech and other speeches before the Iraq war began -- was to democratize the Middle East, starting with Iraq. He believed, and rightly so, in my opinion, that there was no other way to drain the fever swamps, the centuries of accumulated moral filth, poverty, hopelessness, despair, and desperation that bred terrorism the way literal filth breeds disease.

For decades, we followed a policy of "stability, not liberty." But Bush came to believe (again, rightly) that the lack of liberty had not led to stability but its opposite -- chaos and madness, which had its demonic Omega in the 9/11 attacks.

Bush chose, as president, to follow instead a path of liberty -- not stability. Hence, the goal of Iraqi self-reliance was equally or more important than crushing a post-Hussein "insurgency."

You cannot set a country on the path to self-reliance by colonizing it. Had we inundated Iraq with "several hundred thousand troops," not only would that have offered many more American targets without a corresponding increase in effectiveness (we would be sending less-trained personnel and couldn't properly rotate them out, forcing them to stay for much longer tours)... but also, it would infantalize the Iraqis, leading not to self-reliance but greater dependency. We would simply substitute one despotic, condescending ruler for another... ourselves.

I'm sure we would have been an improvement over the Baathists. But we would not have advanced one iota towards the urgent goal of democratizing the region.

So what Gen. Shinseki said was wrong on three counts:

  • He had no authority to reveal the privileged communications between the Commander in Chief and his military and civilian staff;
  • Because Shinseki's recommendation was at odds with the final decision, it became a political football and damaged the president's leadership and public and congresssional support for the mission;
  • And the advice Shinseki gave was simply wrong, because he only understood the military goal... not the equally important, long-term political goal.

What he did was insubordinate. But I now think it likely that he was merely stupidly insubordinate, rather than mendaciously so. This, in particular, is the passage that caught my eye and slightly softened my stance:

General Myers said he believed that news media coverage had overblown the confrontation and had failed to take note that General Shinseki had been "put in a corner" in questioning before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"General Shinseki was forced to make that comment under pressure, pulled a number out, wasn't wedded to it," General Myers said. He also said General Shinseki did not push for more troops after giving his Congressional testimony.

All right, Myers was presumably there; he probably knows the sequence of events. But he is wrong in one particular: Gen. Shinseki was not "forced" to answer that question. He could have refused... just as he would have had some Congressman asked for operational details of the upcoming invasion.

There are some questions you do not answer... and a four-star general who is the Army Chief of Staff is expected to know what those questions are.

I suspect Myers likes Shinseki and is miffed that one of his colleagues got (mildly) chewed out for doing something really stupid. But he still got off easy. As I now believe it was not deliberate politicking but simple dumbth, I agree he should not have been fired (as he was not).

He should have been reprimanded.

Shinseki should have gotten a letter in his file. No one else need see it; he was retiring anyway. But he should have retired knowing that he did something really, really stupid that damaged support for the war by making it seem futile and mismanaged, when in fact all the decisions made were reasonable and had right reason behind them.

Instead, all he got was a mild oral rebuke:

Days later, Mr. Wolfowitz, then the second-ranking official at the Pentagon, called the estimate "wildly off the mark," a sentiment that Mr. Rumsfeld repeated in comments that were widely interpreted in Washington and within the Pentagon as a rebuke of General Shinseki.

Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld then had to go to Congress and do damage control. And to this day, the president still has to defend himself against disingenuous accusations of sending too small a force... mostly from people who wouldn't have invaded Iraq at all.

I believe I understand why everybody behaved the way they did: Shinseki had a brain fart; Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were trying to undo the damage Shinseki's brain fart caused; Bush felt loyal to Shinseki and did not want to damage his career or push him into premature retirement; Myers is in a loyalty tug-o-war between his duty to his former commander and his friendship with Shinseki.

But the reality is that Gen.Shinseki got away with a "senior moment" that should have exacted payment more dear.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 17, 2006, at the time of 05:02 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

April 16, 2006

"Retired Generals," Democrats Join Forces Against Bush

Iraq Matters , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

In a move that shocked exactly no one, Democrats have run with the ball that the "retired generals" handed off to them, accusing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush of incompetence and mismanagement of the war -- and citing the generals, of course, as representing the entire active-duty military:

"My view is that the secretary should step aside," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a potential Democratic presidential candidate, told CBS's "Face the Nation" program. "Besides the fact that the Iraq war has been mismanaged... we should listen to what these generals are saying...."

Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, said the critical comments from the retired generals could be considered a reflection of current senior officers not permitted to criticize Rumsfeld or Bush.

"We need a new direction in Iraq," he said. "We're looking at some incompetency in addition to the arrogance issues that have been raised. ... (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice talked about a thousand tactical mistakes the other day in Iraq the other day. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement."

Once again, we're offered a proxy measurement for morale -- rather than simply asking soldiers about their morale. This is very similar to what the Zogby poll did in February (and which Big Lizards discussed here and here). Dodd assumes that the retired generals who criticize Rumsfeld are representative of "current senior officers" -- but those retired generals who praise Rumsfeld speak only for themselves.

If anybody were in any doubt about the crassly political aspect to those "retired generals," we need only wait a few days to see if any of them now speaks out against having his deeply held, a-political convictions hijacked by the Democratic Party. Since we know they're not shy about voicing their opinions, if they say nothing about Democrats seizing upon their carping to urge people to vote against the Republicans, I think we will have our answer.

Anybody making book on whether a single one of these six retired generals will say, "hey, wait a minute -- I didn't mean everyone should vote Democratic; I just want us to send another 300,000 men to Iraq, even if we have to draft them!"

A man (or woman) who makes general is not stupid... and he is not a political naif. He knows how his words and deeds will be interpreted, because if he didn't, he would have been weeded out long before.

When a bunch of generals, led by persistent Bush critic Anthony Zinni, come forward and all demand that Donald Rumsfeld be fired, they are well aware that the Democrats and the press will seize the golden opportunity. When Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) then do exactly what everyone expected them to do, it's difficult not to conclude that the griping generals have gotten just what they wanted.

But Richardson may have pushed his attack a little too far for credulity:

"What you're seeing is deep frustration in the military," he said, "deep frustration within our troops who are not getting enough armor. ... It is obvious that Secretary Rumsfeld did not listen to them. ... That's why we're in this morass."

Yes, Governor, that's it; the Iraqis have been unable to form a unity government so far because our troops have to muddle along with last month's body armor.

Look for more of these stunts as the election looms, each one dutifully reported by the media as yet another example of the military rising up in righteous rebellion against the hated tyrant.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 16, 2006, at the time of 11:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 08, 2006

Dogfight In the O.K. Mosque

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

"Sectarian" (meaning "al-Qaeda") violence kills scores!

That's what newspaper headlines scream. But wait; something seems a little peculiar about this specific mosque attack:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Three suicide bombers dressed as women killed at least 71 people at a Shi'ite mosque on Friday, the bloodiest attack in Iraq for at least three months.

At least 140 people were also wounded in the attack in north Baghdad, the latest proof of how Iraq's leaders have been unable to tackle sectarian violence as they struggle to form a government.

But why assume the violence is "sectarian" (Shia vs. Sunni)? There's no evidence of that; and there is a simpler explanation the Reuters story fails even to consider. (Good thing the mainstream media don't have a bias.)

What's odd is that this mosque is not one of the million or so "holiest sites in all of Iraq," not like the Golden al-Askariya Mosque in Samara. It is, nevertheless, an important gathering place, though more for political than religious reasons: imporant to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to be specific. This mosque is one of the SCIRI's headquarters.

The SCIRI is the largest Shiite party in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA); they are rivals of the Islamic Dawa Party, whose candidate, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is the appointed prime minister and is running for election under the new, permanent government.

We've had a thing or two to say about Jaafari before:

Iraq the Model explains the connection:

But that's not the most important thing because this mosque is of considerable political significance, the preacher in this mosque is Jalal Addin al-Sagheer, a cleric from the SCIRI who was the first SCIRI member to publicly urge Ibrahim al-Jafari to withdraw his nomination for office.

This mosque is one of the headquarters of the SCIRI and its clerical wing in Baghdad, even that Abdul Aziz al-Hakeem's son Ammar al-Hakkem preaches occasionally in this mosque when sheikh Jalal is not available.

Well, taking that into consideration, we cannot simply assume the culprits are al-Qaeda. It looks like there might be a stronger suspect. Consider the way the attacks were organized (again from Iraq the Model):

Let's also take a look at the planning for the attack that is very well studied too, the suicide bombers did not start striking during Friday prayers when the place is usually heavily guarded and security personnel are at high alert but the first strike came more than 15 minutes later when an attack is less expected and after guards felt they accomplished their mission in protecting the worshippers during the main ceremony to be followed by the other two bombings that took advantage of the state of panic created by the first bombing. This in addition to the use of disguise has of course made the breach easier to make.

It seems that the killers, those who organized the bombings, knew entirely too much about the practices and procedures of a Shiite mosque. They knew just when the guards would relax, allowing them to strike for maximal damages.

We cannot say for sure, of course; but if we had to guess who really is responsible for this attack, renegade Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr actually stands to gain more from an attack on SCIRI headquarters than does Musab Zarqawi, still the military head of al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia (Iraq). Sadr, and his sock-puppet Jaafari, have openly threatened the groups which did not support Jaafari, especially the SCIRI. Could this be a message that they're deadly serious about this power struggle? “Don’t oppose Jaafari!”

But if this is true, this is all the more reason not to confirm Jaafari. If his method of running for office includes killing off the opposition, we can guess how he would rule the country. Iraqis and Americans cannot afford to have this man to become full prime minister.

The Iraqi authorities must vigorously investigate who is behind this attack; if it turns out to be the Mahdi Militia, not al-Qaeda, it would help Iraqis understand that Sadr ain't nothing but a pooch for Iran -- and Jaafari is just Sadr’s lap dog.

Call this case the dogfight at the O.K. mosque

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 08, 2006, at the time of 11:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 05, 2006

When Civil War Is Too Darn Civil

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I had thoughts about the supposed "civil war" in Iraq, but I decided not to bother posting them. I thought nobody would be interested, because -- I assumed -- the claim was so tortuous that it would just be a passing fad.

Boy howdy, was I wrong about that. Here's former Democratic nominee John Kerry, that man who would have been president (but for three hundred thousand votes), tooting the "civil war" horn in his op-ed piece in today's New York Times:

We are now in the third war in Iraq in as many years. The first was against Saddam Hussein and his supposed weapons of mass destruction. The second was against terrorists whom, the administration said, it was better to fight over there than here. Now we find our troops in the middle of an escalating civil war.

So maybe I was also wrong that nobody would be interested in my civil-war ruminations. Here was my point:

What bothers me most about the claim that Iraq is in a civil war is the mendacious motive behind it all. If a fellow were using a consistent definition of civil war for some sociological, political, or military purpose, and that definition was a little looser than I would like, it wouldn't really irritate me. But those who sling around the claim, like Sen. Kerry (D-MA), have a very shifty purpose in mind.

The technique is to redefine some common but horrific term to scoop in far more cases than it ought... but still rely upon the frisson of the original meaning to make readers think the situation is more dire than it is.

For example, the late gender-feminist Andrea Dworkin (Rush Limbaugh would definitely call her a "feminazi") redefined "rape" to include all heterosexual sex. PETA routinely redefines the word "murder" to include the killing of animals, even for food. Both rely upon the very real horror people feel when the contemplate the normal and usual definitions of those words to manipulate them into feeling the same horror for perfectly ordinary activities.

And now "civil war;" I have seen some very wide, obtuse definitions that could apply to virtually any conflict on any level, so long as the fighting takes place all in one country. One writer I know even claims that America in the late 1960s was in a "civil war."

(He refers to the protests and street action against the Vietnam War -- for example, the ructions surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which spawned this infamous mangled explanation by Mayor Richard Daley the elder: "The police in Chicago are not here to create disorder, they are here to preserve disorder!")

In some circumstances, such open-ended definitions can be useful. We can talk about infighting within a club as a civil war, or we can say "John and Mary's divorce turned into a civil war." We could talk about the Basque terrorism in Spain as being a "low-level civil war." And if we made plain how we were using the word and didn't try to imply anything stronger, we'd be on terra firma.

But the Democrats know very well what most people will imagine when they hear that "Iraq is in an escalating civil war": they think of Rwanda, with its hundreds of thousands butchered by machetes. They think of Bosnia or Kosovo; they think of Vietnam, where millions were killed.

Perhaps the more historical minded think of the bloody civil war in Russia after the Czar was deposed, the war between White and Red Communists, or the terrible civil war in Spain between the Fascists, the Communists, and the Anarchists. Americans probably think of Antietam and Shiloh and Gettysburg.

Clearly this is what John Kerry wants us to think, for in his very next breath, he is espousing near defeatism and calling on us to threaten to pull out immediately -- and in any event to leave by the end of the year:

Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America's leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion.... [that we might win]

Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military....

If Iraq's leaders succeed in putting together a government, then we must agree on another deadline: a schedule for withdrawing American combat forces by year's end.

When John Kerry says "civil war," he may have in his mind something like what France is undergoing right now -- riots and general strikes -- plus some terrorism. But it's what he knows is in your minds that is offensive: deliberately relying upon the revulsion that average Americans feel towards actual, full-blown civil war, which would imply total failure of our effort, is undeniably a lie by inuendo.

It's like saying a man is a rapist and murderer, when what you really mean is he beds his wife, and he sometimes kills his own chickens for eats.

It's a vile, craven, boorish debater's trick that plays upon people's natural assumption that distinguished senators don't lie... and it makes me shake with retroactive terror at the thought that Kerry very nearly found himself ensconced in the Oval Office.

I know it's a tiny point, the logical fallacy of using one peculiar meaning of a word, knowing your audience will infer a quite different and much more apocalyptic meaning. There probably isn't even a Latin phrase for it. It's cheap and shoddy; it's the ultimate in "gotcha" arguments. And it is meaningless, except insofar as it may mislead the mentally weak.

So was it even worth bringing up at all? I'm still not sure.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 05, 2006, at the time of 11:59 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

April 03, 2006

Shiite Alliance Splits

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

A couple of weeks ago, Dafydd reported in Al-Jaafari - Teetering On the Edge? that there was a strong indication that the Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), may split over the controversial nomination of Muqtada Sadr's ally, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, as prime minister.

Jaafari is currently the prime minister by appointment, but still under the old Transitional government; he was not elected under the recently approved Iraq constitution. Sadr is, of course, the renegade "cleric" whose Mahdi Militia has gone to war against the Coalition many times in the past three years.

SCIRI (Abdul-Mahdi's party within the UIA) may be about to split from [the Islamic Dawa Party] (al-Jaafari's party) on the question of the prime minister nominee, joining with Kurds and Sunni to form a majority coalition that can nominate Abdul-Mahdi and elect him to the post. This would break the logjam, were it to occur, and the government could finally form.
It seems we were right about that. On Sunday afternoon, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw paid a surprise visit to Iraq, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) announced the split:

It was not clear whether the joint visit by Ms. Rice and Mr. Straw, the top emissaries of the two countries that led the invasion of Iraq three years ago, played a direct role in the fracturing of the Shiite bloc and whether that split would lead to forward movement on forming a new government, which has been stalled for months.

But the developments suggested a new phase in Iraq's convulsions may have started by opening a possibly violent battle for the country's top job between rival Shiite factions, which both have militias backing them up. The incumbent prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, has said he will fight to keep his job, and his principal supporter is Moktada al-Sadr, a rebellious Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army militia has resorted to violence many times to enforce his wishes

I do not believe their visits directly influenced the split, since the SCIRI was never happy with the nomination; Jaafari won by a single vote within the UIA party caucus, amid many violent threats by Sadr against anyone who opposed his candidate. But pressure from both the American and British governments might have been the last straw for Shia who are fed up with a nominee who has no interest even in unifying the Shia, let alone all Iraqis.

Of course the splintering will cause problems for the Shia, especially the religious ones. The UIA does not have a majority of seats in the National Assembly (it has 128 out of 275 seats), but it's the biggest kid on the block. If it fractures, with its largest piece (the SCIRI) pulling out, it will become just another minority party... particularly so if the SCIRI takes the closely allied Badr Organization (Badr Brigade) with it when it leaves.

The SCIRI will have to form an alliance with Kurdish, Sunni, and secular Shiite parties -- such as the Iraqi National Accord, led by Dr. Iyad Allawi, another former prime minister (this time of the Iraq Interim Government, which predated the Transitional National Assembly government).

The eruption among the Shiites could also completely redraw Iraq's political coalitions, if some Shiite politicians leave the bloc amid the feuding to side with other groups in the 275-member Parliament. That would weaken the religious Shiites.

The most likely candidate arising out of such a realliance would be current Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, the man Jaafari barely beat in the UIA caucus. Both Kurds and Sunni have signalled acceptance of Abdul Mahdi. If one or both of those parties could be persuaded to withdraw their current nominees and send Abdul Mahdi's name up, then the anti-Sadrites within the UIA could vote for him without having to split the party itself. If not, then the SCIRI will have to break away and nominate him.

Sadr’s faction will not stand by quietly as their power base erodes further. They will step up the violence and may even try to assassinate candidates opposing Jaafari, such as the SCIRI's Abdul Mahdi or the Iraqi Democratic Movement's Kassim Daoud (the IDM is another party within the UIA bloc).

Sadr's only power is his ability to kill and threaten to kill; he has considerably less of an ideological following today than he did while he was carrying out his (briefly) successful "rebellion" against the occupying forces in Najaf. Take away that ability, and Sadr will fall.

One possibility is that Coalition and Iraqi forces could keep Sadr's Mahdi Militia busy by raiding even more of the Mahdi thugs’ offices. Once an Iraq unity government is established with a more patriotic and moderate prime minister -- one not beholden to Sadr, as Jaafari is -- Sadr might see the writing on the wall (a very appropriate metaphor, since ancient Babylon was where Iraq is now) and flee to his patron, Iran.

If Sadr splits, I am convinced his Mahdi Militia will disband. Some of the members will surely follow Sadr into exile; others will slide seamlessly into other militias (such as the Badr Brigade, now called the Badr Organization), so they can continue fighting against the Sunni terrorists led by the Jordanian Musab Zarqawi. The rest will probably just fade into the background and try to pretend they were never there.

But that constitutes the best-case scenario, which means the odds are against it: it's the Middle East, after all. Let's keep our fingers crossed that at the very least, Jaafari is forced out as prime minister, and someone else takes over who can actually rally all the democratic factions behind him.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 03, 2006, at the time of 02:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 01, 2006

Jill Carroll Now Says Statement Was Coerced

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter who was taken captive in Iraq in January and just released on March 30th, now says that the statement she made saying her captors had never threatened her was coerced, and that she spoke out of fear for her life.

She now says they threatened her life many times:

In a video, recorded before she was freed and posted by her captors on an Islamist Web site, Carroll spoke out against the U.S. military presence. But Carroll said the recording was made under threat. Her editor has said three men were pointing guns at her at the time.

"During my last night in captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video. They told me I would be released if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. So I agreed," she said in a statement read by her editor in Boston.

"Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not."

The kidnappers then "released" her... but what they literally did was transport her to the offices of the Iraqi Islamist Party in Baghdad, a Sunni political party. My guess is that she felt there might be some sort of connection between the party and the terrorists -- in which she is probably correct and probably has better information than any of us, being a reporter working in Iraq. When the Iraqi Islamist Party interviewed her, seeking her statement that the kidnappers had treated her well, she likely believed that the wrong answer might put her right back where she was before:

"At any rate, fearing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear I said I wasn't threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times," she said. "Also, at least two false statements about me have been widely aired: That I refused to travel and cooperate with the U.S. military and that I refused to discuss my captivity with U.S. officials. Again, neither is true."

I hope that all those in the blogosphere who criticized Ms. Carroll for praising her captors even after she was supposedly "free" will correct themselves, noting that she was, in fact, not yet free when she made those statements. (Of course, if anyone can find similar statements she made after she got into the Green Zone or Germany, those would be much harder for her to justify; but I haven't seen any such evidence yet.)

If it turns out that she was condemned solely on the basis of statements made while still in the clutches of the Iraqi Islamist Party -- which might have been a party to the original kidnapping -- then she was very shabbily treated indeed... by American blogs.

Every time something like this happens, it's another slice in the 'sphere. It's another little piece of evidence the Antique Media can trot out to make blogs look less professional. So that we don't end up suffering the death of a thousand cuts, please, let's try to "think a second time" before posting! I know some of you have very itchy trigger fingers; but accuracy is more important than raw speed.

We're never likely to beat the time of the MSM; they have correspondents under every bed. So let's make up for our slower pace by being the thoughtful ones.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 01, 2006, at the time of 03:04 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

March 28, 2006

The Strolling Dead

Iraq Matters , Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

Here is a bizarre update on our three posts of yesterday: AP's Mainscream Media Bias, Iraq Army, Coalition Begin Mahdi Militia Campaign, and Who Is Policing the Police? We Are.

The American military is now flatly asserting that Sadr-linked Shiite leaders in Iraq moved the bodies and staged the scene to falsely accuse Americans of committing a massacre in the Mustafa "mosque." (This presumably would include gruesomely handcuffing some of the bodies post-mortem, to make it look like execution rather than combat, though the article doesn't get into that level of detail.)

U.S. commanders in Iraq on Monday accused powerful Shi'ite groups of moving the corpses of gunmen killed in battle to encourage accusations that U.S.-led troops massacred unarmed worshippers in a mosque.

"After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was. There's been huge misinformation," Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said.

He rejected the accusations of a massacre that prompted the Shi'ite-led government to demand U.S. forces cede control of security but declined to spell out which group he believed moved the bodies.

Well, Big Lizards has no such reticence. All one need do is look at who is screaming the loudest -- and who has the most to gain. "Cui bono?" as the Romans asked: who benefits?

Actually, while LG. Chiarelli wouldn't point a finger (likely because he knows that's beyond his pay grade), he rather roundly hinted:

Chiarelli stood by the U.S. account, disputed by Sadr aides and other Shi'ite leaders but which is broadly in line with police reports and some local witnesses who spoke of a fierce gun battle around the site....

Though he declined to be drawn on the possible involvement of Sadr's Mehdi Army militia, whose political leaders have led condemnation of the raid, Chiarelli said: "I think the backlash has been caused by the folks who set the scene up."

That is, 'the folks who set the scene up are the Sadrites causing the backlash.' Another way to phrase that last sentence is, 'the Sadrites causing the backlash are the folks who set the scene up.' So I think -- like the immortal Barry Goldwater -- in Chiarelli's heart, he knows Big Lizards is right!

Nowadays, we routinely videotape most engagements (many soldiers have helmet cams), so I suspect we can easily prove our case. The only question is -- will Transitional Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari -- the "cui" who most obviously "bonos" -- allow us to?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 28, 2006, at the time of 04:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 27, 2006

Who Is Policing the Police? We Are.

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The New York Times published an amazingly balanced and informative article Friday on our effort to train-up the Iraqi police to the same professional standard that we've trained the Iraqi Army.

Well, "balanced" is a relative term; we are still dealing with the Antique Media, after all. The Times begins by noting the cases where things aren't going well, such as with Firas Sabri Ali, who is admittedly being detained by the Iraqi police (under the Interior Ministry) as "collateral" for his brother, the one the police really want.

"I hope they catch him, because then I'll be released," said Mr. Ali, 38, a soft-spoken man who until his arrest worked for a British security company to support his wife and three sons. "They said, 'You must wait.' I told them: 'There's no law. This is injustice.' "

But with that pro-forma shot out of the way -- I believe such anti-Iraq-democracy anecdotes are formally required by the Sacred Canons of Journalistic Bona-Fides -- the article settles down and shows that American forces actually take seriously such questions of justice and integrity:

Such is the challenge facing the American military as it tries to train the Iraqi security forces to respect the rule of law. Three years after the invasion of Iraq, American troops are no longer simply teaching counterinsurgency techniques; they are trying to school the Iraqis in battling a Sunni-led rebellion without resorting to the tactics of a "dirty war," involving abductions, torture and murder....

The Americans are pushing the Shiite-dominated Iraqi forces to ask judges for arrest warrants, restrain their use of force and ensure detainees' rights.

Couple this policy with the campaign against Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Militia and the political pressure we're bringing to bear on the Shia-dominated Iraq government, and it is very clear that the focus of our attention has shifted from the pre-governmental phase of Iraq's development -- where foreign terrorists like Musab Zarqawi and home-grown insurgents setting off bombs and other terrorist attacks were the chief threat -- to the post-governmental phase, where the most urgent problem is to ensure that the government itself is sustainable as a democratic, representative, just, and inclusive institution.

Much of the problem is due to a simple shortage of judges and facilities. After decades of rule by Saddam Hussein -- and decades more by the Baath Party before that -- there are very few people with actual judicial experience who are not tainted by torture and corruption.

Camp Justice [a makeshift court and police base in northern Baghdad] was never meant to hold prisoners for more than a few weeks. Iraqi law says prisoners to be tried are to be transferred to a Justice Ministry penitentiary after interrogation. But the ministry has been unable to build enough jails to keep pace with arrests. It has 10 centers across Iraq, which hold 7,500 detainees, and an additional 7 are expected to be built, a ministry spokesman said.

So the detainee population at temporary police prisons like the one here, separate from those of the Justice Ministry, has ballooned to more than 10,000 in Baghdad alone, spread across a shadowy network of about 10 centers, an Interior Ministry official said.

But some cases, such as Ali above, are clear cases of abuse themselves.

"The tradition in this country of a law enforcement agency that had absolute power over people, we've got to break them of that," said Maj. Andrew Creel, the departing joint operations officer here. "I think it'll take years. You can't change a cultural mind-set overnight."

But we are making progress. Police recruits at the Public Order Forces acadeny now receive twenty hours of training in respecting the human rights of detainees, two and a half times what they used to get. And we have replaced a number of police and police commanders at units where we have discovered brutality or abuse of prisoners... for example, we replaced the commanders of the Second Public Order Brigade and of the notorious Third Brigade based in Salman Pak.

Col. Gordon Davis Jr., the head of Camp Justice's departing advisory team, praised the Iraqi commander here, Maj. Gen. Mehdi Sabih Hashem al-Garawi, for showing a willingness to embrace human rights....

"I won't say he's gone 180, but he's realized that the best way of getting information is not to beat or abuse detainees," Colonel Davis said as he stood in the operations room, the walls plastered with maps of Baghdad.

"The current generation has been brought up with a certain code and a certain tolerance for abuse," he said in another interview. "They've got to be constantly worked on."

That, alas, is the lasting legacy of Saddam: the Shia are like adults who were abused as children; like them, they imprint the normalcy of abuse and fear -- and inflict them upon others when they have the power. It's very hard to break that cycle, but it must be done if Iraq as a democratic nation is going to endure and serve as a model for others in the Middle East to copy.

The increased attention is paying off in results. In the fall of 2005, American troops made the decision to move in and live with with the Iraqi police units, rather than living separately and simply coming by to inspect once in a while. Now the rate of abuse is much lower, and the Iraqis are more receptive to what we are teaching them about restraint, justice, and rights.

Colonel Davis says the warrant policy has had some effect. Because of it, and because the Iraqis are improving their intelligence gathering, the Public Order Forces no longer round up hundreds of people on each raid, he said. On a typical operation, he added, they may take in a dozen.

After being brought here, the detainees are fingerprinted and have their retinas scanned. A photograph is taken, partly to record their condition at the time of arrest. The Americans have asked the Iraqis to deliver a daily report accounting for all detainees held throughout the division; one recent printout listed 896.

Our strategy is two pronged: on the one hand, we train-up the Iraqi police forces just as we trained up the Iraq Army; and we are seeing the beginnings of the same improvement in professionalism.

On the other hand, we have begun a military campaign against the militias and tribal chiefs who continually try to infiltrate the police and turn them into private armies. Between the two, the Iraq experiment will likely succeed better than nearly anybody today is willing to predict.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 27, 2006, at the time of 06:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Iraq Army, Coalition Begin Mahdi Militia Campaign

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

As Big Lizards reported over the weekend, the Iraqi Army with American advisors clashed with (it is now clear) a unit of Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Militia. From the New York Times:

The country's Shiite political leadership on Monday angrily denounced an American-backed military raid on a Shiite compound that left at least 16 people dead, as political leaders suspended talks over the formation of a new government....

In a statement on Monday about the raid, the American command did not vary much from its original public account Sunday night. It maintained that Iraqi and American troops had raided "multiple structures" but not a mosque, as Shiite leaders have contended, and that troops received fire from "several buildings near the target area." The troops killed 16 insurgents, wounded three, detained 18 other people, discovered a weapons stockpile and released a dental technician who had been taken hostage, the statement said.

But Iraqi government officials and political leaders vociferously disputed the American command's version of events, insisting that Iraqi and American troops had raided the Mustafa mosque, in the Ur neighborhood, as worshippers gathered for evening prayer.

We have highlighted the new information since yesterday: that we and the Iraqi Army discovered a weapons "stockpile" and that we detained eighteen people from the raid. Naturally, Iraqi Shiite officials dispute our version; but they cannot even keep their own stories straight:

But even among Iraqi government and political officials, there were significant differences in their accounts of Sunday's events. Some said the death toll was higher than 20, though there appeared to be consensus that the majority of the victims were members of the Iraq Branch of the Islamic Dawa Party who were meeting at the time of the raid in a party office attached to the mosque.

Khudair al-Khuzaie, the spokesman for the Iraq Branch of the Islamic Dawa Party, said he knew of 16 victims, all of whom were killed in the party's office, which is accessible through a doorway from the mosque's courtyard. Of the victims, he said, 13 were party members and three were civilians visiting the office. None of those 16 victims were [sic] in the mosque to pray, he added. [Note that this actually verifies the U.S. version, as do the statements of residents who witnessed the firefight. -- the Mgt.]

[Haydar al-Abadi, a top advisor to Transitional Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari] said that at least 17 people died, and that there was no armed resistance to the raid. "The executions took place in cold blood," he said.

[Yet witnesses who live in that neighborhood described a furious gun battle that went on for more than an hour, and we recovered a "stockpile" of weapons. -- the Mgt.]

In the hours after the attack, an official in the office of Moktada al-Sadr, the renegade and anti-American Shiite cleric, claimed that members of his Mahdi Army were among the victims. But on Monday, another Sadr representative said no Mahdi Army fighters died in the raid....

At a funeral procession today for victims of the clash, the mood was tense and members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, kept their weapons on prominent display.

The quote from Abadi raises an interesting point. So far, we have heard denunciations of this raid from Abadi, the "top advisor" for Ibrahim al-Jaafari; Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, hand-picked by Jaafari for the position; and Jawad al-Maliki, an "ally" of Jaafari. Jaafari was put into power partly through the support of Muqtada Sadr (which is one reason so many Sunni and Kurish Iraqis oppose his candidacy for prime minister); Sadr has also denounced the raid -- which appears to have been directed against his Mahdi Militia, who controlled that "mosque."

It's actually in dispute whether it was truly a mosque or just an unofficial gathering place for the Mahdi Militia. From Reuters:

One source of confusion over the site may be that the mosque in question, close to Sadr's Sadr City stronghold in northeast Baghdad, was not a traditional religious building but a compound of former Baath party offices converted by Sadr followers.

Do we detecta pattern here? So far, the only "officials" who have been quoted denouncing this raid as a massacre with Americans "entering the Mustafa Shiite mosque and killing worshippers" have been politicians closely connected with Muqtada Sadr -- who controlled the armed compound and whose militia was the target of the raid.

Healing Iraq's Zeyad recounts the incident. (Hat tip Belmont Club)

American forces clashed with Mahdi army militiamen at the Ur district (Hayy Ur), west of Sadr city in Baghdad. It seems an American force attempted to raid a husseiniya in the area and was resisted by militiamen inside.

Between 18 and 21 militiamen have been killed, and the Al-Mustafa Husseiniya was reported to be badly damaged in the ensuing firefight.

This battle has long been coming. The tempo of events makes very clear that there has been a long-expected shift in the Coalition and Iraqi Army strategy:

  • In mid-March, we reported that "the Iraqi Army's 3rd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 6th Iraq Army Division has just taken over security in Sadr City." Sadr City is Muqtada Sadr's stomping ground, named for the renegade cleric's far more respected (and respectable) father.
  • On March 23rd, we posted about an incident in which U.S. forces prevented Sadr's Mahdi militamen from rescuing Shiite pilgrams who were attacked by al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead, the Iraq Army pursued the attackers:

    The United States is pointedly preventing Muqtada Sadr from positioning himself as the savior of the Shia. A senior Shiite cleric, Hazem al-Aaraji, said on the Iraqiya television network that militiamen from the Mahdi Army had been dispatched to save the pilgrims, but that American forces had stopped them.

  • And now, an Iraqi Special Forces unit, with American advisors, has actually raided a "prayer room" controlled by the Mahdi Militia, directly confronting Sadr and his forces for the first time in more than a year.

The conclusion is unmistakable: we have decided that the capacity of foreign Sunni terrorists under Musab Zarqawi to affect the destiny of Iraq has been more or less neutralized; they can still kill people, as they did today, but they are powerless to prevent Iraq from becoming a democratic nation.

Instead, we now conclude that the Shiite militias are the graver danger: they threaten to undermine the legitmacy of the nascent government itself, particularly because of the likely connivance of Transitional Prime Minister al-Jaafari in the increasing murders committed by the Mahdi Militia and the Badr Brigades, the other major Shiite militia.

If indeed the forces of Muqtada Sadr and Ibrahim al-Jaafari are behind much of the "sectarian" violence (which looks more and more like political violence), as most now believe, then it's hardly surprising that Sadr and various allies of Jaafari are the loudest and shrillest voices condemning this raid as a "massacre" of innocent Moslems at prayer in a "mosque"... and playing down the Iraqi Army, who actually conducted it, in favor of blaming the Americans.

We have always believed that Muqtada Sadr is more dangerous to Iraq's future than Zarqawi; Sadr must be stopped... which probably means that he must eventually be killed. He will never give up his ambition to become Caliph of Mesopotamia or his ties to Iran, and both are challenges we cannot ignore. However, Sadr is still a popular figure among poor Shia. Killing him or destroying his mitila will not be well received by many Shiite Iraqis, who see him as a crusading hero.

Usually not-so-anti-America Al-Iraqiya TV is already putting a spin on the story. Zeyad explains.

Al-Iraqiya TV just aired some images from the husseiniya. 17 'guards' were killed. One of the corpses carried a Da'wa party (Iraq organisation) ID, and another carried an ID issued by the Islamic Conference of Iraqi Tribes.

Someone in the background was asking the cameraman to film grenades lying around the corpses, to which the cameraman responded: "I can't show our guys' grenades."

"No, these are American grenades," the man in the background explained.

"Oh, okay I'll film them."

Naturally, even the more moderate Shiia politicians are demanding full investigation; the raid caused a great deal of turmoil, and it must be fully explained to the Iraqi people.

President Talabani said at a news conference that Gen. George W. Casey Jr. agreed to the formation of the joint investigative committee. "I will personally supervise, and we will learn who was responsible," the president said. "Those who are behind this attack must be brought to justice and punished."

While this may sound ominous, like he had already made up his mind that the raid was unlawful, a fuller quotation from the Reuters article is more heartening:

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, who has been hosting the negotiations said: "We have to know the truth about what happened, and we must not be driven by rumours. This is a very dangerous incident which we must investigate."

Omar, a Sunni who blogs at Iraq The Model, wonders what the real motivation is for this investigation/inquisition:

Actually the reactions to this incident are so intense compared the reactions when 30 or 40 beheaded or strangles [Sunni] bodies are found on nearly daily basis in Baghdad in a way that it makes me question the intentions of this part of the government even more...

The raid on the husseiniya is not going to be investigated because those killed were Iraqis or Shia, the government will open an investigation because those killed were Sadrists and because Muqtada feels this raid was targeting his militia and fears that letting this one go without making enough noise will probably encourage the Americans to carry out more raids.

Actually, it is already too late to pressure the Iraqi Army and the Coalition into easing attacks on the Mahdi Milita and the Badr Brigades. The strategy is set and we are implementing it with increasing operational tempo. I doubt we and the Iraq Army will quit until both paramilitary death squads are thoroughly suppressed.

Bill Roggio has a detailed account of the incident.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 27, 2006, at the time of 03:56 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 23, 2006

Good News Unsuppressed

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Gateway Pundit has a wonderful story about the lady who asked the president what to do with a DVD-full of footage her Army broadcast-journalist husband Kent Taylor collected in Iraq during his tour. (Hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power Line, who asks us to spread the word. So we will.)

Kent and. Gayle Taylor attended a recent townhall meeting where President Bush answered questions from ordinary citizens about Iraq and other topics. Taylor complained about the fact that none of the Antique Media was interested in showing the DVD, which included much footage of successful reconstruction in Iraq. She asked the president how she could share this information with America... and he suggested using blogs!

CNN also took note. Last night, Mrs. Taylor and her husband Kent were on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 and able to share some of the DVD (Expose the Left has some of the video). Note that Cooper also had Hugh Hewitt on the show the night before last, and last night he added Michael Yon (along with a returning Hugh) to the mix. It appears that some, at least, in the MSM are starting to realize there really is another side... that it's not just sense vs. nonsense, which has been their position until now.

Kudo to Cooper for picking up the story, even though it took Mrs. Taylor's face to face appeal to the President of the United States to catch Cooper's attention!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 23, 2006, at the time of 04:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Fool Me Once...

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Two days in a row, al-Qaeda terrorists attacked police stations in Iraq. Tuesday's attack in Muqdadiyah was a partial success for the terrorists: they killed 18 Iraqi police and four innocent bystanders, while freeing 30 of their own number who were being held in that jail. But the Iraqi security force killed 10 of the terrorists.

One of Musab Zarqawi's al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia groups, the Mujahaddin Shura Council, took credit on their website, though there is no independent verification that it was indeed they. However, the governor of Diyala province had the police commander and other officers arrested for suspicion of complicity in the attack, which may well be accurate, considering how corrupt the police have been in the very recent past.

One of the major goals of the current training by American forces is to weed out those Iraqi cops who are either corrupt in the old-fashioned sense of taking bribes to turn their backs (or aid a jailbreak) -- or in the really old-fashioned sense of being pure tribalists, seeing their uniforms as license to attack rival tribes under color of authority.

Unlike Tuesday, however, Wednesday's attack was decidedly unsuccessful. In fact, it was a total disaster for the terrorists.

Insurgents attacked a police station Wednesday for a second day in a row, but U.S. and Iraqi forces captured 50 of them after a two-hour gunbattle.

About 60 gunmen attacked the police station in Madain, south of Baghdad, with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles, said police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammadawi. U.S. troops and a special Iraqi police unit responded, catching the insurgents in crossfire, he said.

Four police were killed, including the commander of the special unit, and five were wounded, al-Mohammadawi said. None of the attackers died, and among the captives was a Syrian.

This time, over 80% (50 out of 60) of the attackers were captured. Under interrogation -- perhaps none too gentle, if we let the Iraqis handle it, as we should -- any one of these fifty may reveal vital, operational intel about the cell that launched the attack and possibly others (including, perhaps, Tuesday's attack), and about Syria's involvement in smuggling jihadis into Iraq.

If the foreigner were Yemeni or Jordanian, he would almost certainly be a renegade; but Syria is the only other country in the world run by the Baath Party, it had close ties to Saddam Hussein, and it has an unavowed but obvious policy of interfering in Iraq. Every Syrian capture is a potential treasure-trove of intelligence.

The New York Times also carried this story; some of their facts differ slightly, though the thrust was the same:

Insurgents laid siege today to the headquarters of a police paramilitary unit near the capital, lobbing a volley of mortars that killed at least one senior officer and injured at least five, Interior Ministry officials said.

The police fought back, killing at least five insurgents, a commander in Baghdad said. By nightfall, the police were holding at least 76 people for questioning.

The predawn attack, on an infamous paramilitary force, unfolded as 14 mortars pummeled the former governorate center in the Sunni Arab-dominated town of Salman Pak, 12 miles southeast of Baghdad.

According to Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes, Salman Pak is where one of the terrorist training camps was located during the era of Saddam Hussein. This claim is the subject of a determined, almost desperate push-back by anti-war writers, who take Saddam's word that the camp was really a counter-terrorist training camp.

They have some allies, including Seymour Hersh -- who was caught red-fingered in 2004, lying in the New Yorker about Maj. Gen. Taguba's report on the Abu Ghraib abuses -- and Scott Ritter, the disgraced former U.N. weapons inspector whose views on Iraq made an abrupt 180-degree turn in 1999, and who then received $400,000 from Hussein-connected Detroit businessman Shakir al Khafaji to produce a documentary defending the Iraqi dictator.

The Iraqi police in Salman Pak, even today, have a deserved reputation for ruthlessness and brutality -- which is both good and bad. In this case, that character may have served them well; but they bear watching. At least, they have already mastered fairly sophisticated investigative techniques; referring to the second attack, the New York Times notes:

The police initially detained 146 people, all Iraqis, and then released 70 after testing them for traces of explosives, said Maj. Gen. Mehdi Sabih Hashem al-Garawi, the commander of the 7,700-strong Public Order Forces, which has four brigades operating in Baghdad and the Salman Pak area.

(This may not contradict the AP version, since not all of the 146 people attacked the station; the Times reports that the Third Public Order Brigade in Salman Pak detained only 76 people for explosives residue following the attack, which is not that different from the AP claim that "about 60 gunmen" participated and fifty were detained.)

Al-Qaeda has attacked police stations before. They suffer terrible losses whenever they find themselves up against U.S. troops; but now, at last, the Iraqi police are beginning to catch up to their Iraqi Army counterparts. The police lost one engagement, but they clearly won in the second: the net effect of the two was thirty terrorists freed from jail -- but sixty incapacitated, either by death or capture. A few more "successes" like this, and al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia may be out of business.

In a purely military strategic point of view, the Iraqi police got the upper hand in this two-day exchange. However, the "Tet-lite" propaganda value of the attacks was a big win for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has demonstrated two things for their eager audience in the press corps:

  • The Iraqi police are still distinctly weaker than the Iraqi Army -- not surprising, since "we've only just begun" to train the former.
  • The attacks also showed that al-Qaeda is alive and, if not exactly well, at least functional and able to mobilize large number of personnel. We can't pull a Murtha and send our troops on a strategic rearward advance just yet.

The Times, naturally, finds great cause for optimism that the whole operation to train the Iraqi police is collapsing. Referring to the first strike, they opine:

That highly coordinated strike raised serious questions about the effectiveness of the Iraqi police forces, at a time when President Bush and American commanders are touting the growing capabilities of the police.

Others might note that in a war, battles are both lost and won: what the Times and other media should look at is the overall picture. Clearly, the terrorists are not winning, even against the police (let alone the Iraqi Army).

Although al-Qaeda overwhelmed the police station on Tuesday with 200 people, they still evidently needed inside help to pull it off. On Wednesday, without the help from inside, they were crushed. This tells us something else: when the police (with American help) manage to clean out the bad eggs and develop true esprit de corps, as the Iraqi Army has, the police will become a very effective fighting force, even under the Interior Ministry.

Some other events that the Times inadvertently reports, but to which they give insufficient attention:

  • The Iraqi police have become very proactive.
This afternoon, insurgents in Baghdad attacked two busloads of Shiite pilgrims in two different parts of the city. In all, at least 2 pilgrims were killed and 46 injured. Policemen rushing to the scenes fought the insurgents, and at least two policemen were killed and four injured.

The Times does not tell us how many "insurgents" (terrorists, of course -- they attacked unarmed pilgrims, for heaven's sake) were killed or captured; that doesn't fit the story.

  • The United States is pointedly preventing Muqtada Sadr from positioning himself as the savior of the Shia.
A senior Shiite cleric, Hazem al-Aaraji, said on the Iraqiya television network that militiamen from the Mahdi Army had been dispatched to save the pilgrims, but that American forces had stopped them.
  • The only displacement of populations from Iraq comprise a handful of pro-Saddam Palestinians.
The border between Jordan and Iraq remained closed today, as the two governments tried to deal with scores of Palestinian refugees fleeing sectarian violence in Baghdad. The refugees had left Iraq by the busload last weekend, but were stopped by Jordanian border officials, stranding them at the frontier.

Note "scores," not thousands or even hundreds. The Times notes the Palestinians were "favored by Saddam Hussein," which must rank as one of the understatements of the year.

But each of these sidepoints in the Times article indicate not only that there is no "civil war," but also that the entire war is going our way. Donald Rumsfeld's small-footprint strategy, much disdained by the self-styled Jacksonians in the Republican Party, is actually working quite well.

Perhaps we shouldn't throw him under the bus just yet.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 23, 2006, at the time of 03:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 21, 2006

AP: Saddam, the Frustrated Innocent Victim

Fiskings , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

An Associated Press laugher today from Charles J. Hanley introduces a "frustrated" Saddam Hussein, appealing Iraq's innocence of WMD-related charges to his inner circle, unable to understand why the meanies at the UN and the United States won't believe that Iraq long before gave up any ambition to develop WMD.

Mr. Hanley subsequently asserts -- perhaps forgetting the bright line AP always maintains between commentary and news reporting -- that this is all true: the assertion that Iraq maintained WMD programs (if not "large stockpiles") was a dreadful mistake (or lie) all along, Hussein was innocent, and (Mr. Hanley insists) the Iraq Survey Group's final report completely vindicated Saddam Hussein:

In his final report in October 2004, Charles Duelfer, head of a post-invasion U.S. team of weapons hunters, concluded Iraq and the U.N. inspectors had, indeed, dismantled the nuclear program and destroyed the chemical and biological weapons stockpiles by 1992, and the Iraqis never resumed production.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

-- Wm. Shakespeare, the Tempest

The final dispatch of Charles Duelfer's ISG investigation? Good; let's take that as our "gold standard." Let us compare it to the sheer audacity of Mr. Hanley's misstatements, sly inuendo, and outright fabrications. The result may astonish anyone not familiar with AP's modus operandi.

All right, let's kick on the afterburners and get this crate airborne....

(I know some readers dislike long posts; but sometimes, especially with fiskings, you just gotta do it. Apologies in advance.)

Exasperated, besieged by global pressure, Saddam Hussein and top aides searched for ways in the 1990s to prove to the world they'd given up banned weapons.

"We don't have anything hidden!" the frustrated Iraqi president interjected at one meeting, transcripts show.

At another, in 1996, Saddam wondered whether U.N. inspectors would "roam Iraq for 50 years" in a pointless hunt for weapons of mass destruction. "When is this going to end?" he asked.

Huh... can we figure out any reason -- other than pure anti-Saddam bigorty and prejudice on the part of the international community -- why the UN would intensify inspections in 1996, despite the fact (as Mr. Hanley sees it) that Iraq was not hiding anything, because (he states) they had nothing to hide?

Perhaps we can turn to the gold standard, the final Duelfer report. This is the section discussing the infamous "chicken farm" documents... which Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel had hidden in his chicken ranch, and which he revealed when he defected.

Kamel was one of Saddam Hussein's sons in law. He defected in August 1995 along with another son in law, Col. Saddam Kamel al-Majid; both began cooperating with UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission). Although Kamel insisted that he had ordered all the pre-Gulf War WMD destroyed, the fact that there was so much more than anyone had suspected, more than the UN had found, and tremendously more than Iraq had ever revealed, shook the confidence of the UN that they could rely in any way upon Hussein's cooperation.

(Later, both Kamel and al-Majid were lured back to Iraq, where they were both slain "resisting arrest" by the Iraq security forces.)

When Saddam discovered that Kamel and al-Majid had gone over, he panicked. The Iraqis had no idea what Kamel was telling UNSCOM, but they knew that he knew a lot. They also knew they had to get out in front of the information. Since it was compromised anyway, Saddam believed that they could quickly release the evidence themselves and make some PR gains -- all oriented towards getting the sanctions, including the inspection regime, permanently lifted.

In February 1996, the Iraqis "discovered" the chicken-farm documents and released them to UNSCOM. But Saddam's hopes were dashed that this would help the case to lift the sanctions:

Although Iraq’s release of the “chicken farm” documents initially created a more positive atmosphere with UNSCOM, the relationship grew strained as UNSCOM and the IAEA inspections became more aggressive. The release destroyed the international community’s confidence in the credibility of follow-on Iraqi declarations of cooperation. UNSCOM concluded that it had been successfully deceived by Iraq and that the deception effort was controlled and orchestrated by the highest levels of the former Regime. UNSCOM therefore directed its efforts at facilities associated with very senior members of the Regime and designed inspections to uncover documents rather than weapons. The situation eventually reached an impasse then escalated to crisis and conflict. From this experience, Iraq learned to equate cooperation with UNSCOM with increased scrutiny, prolonged sanctions, and the threat of war. In response, Baghdad sought relief via a weakening of the sanctions regime rather than compliance with it.

Might that possibly explain why UNSCOM increased the frequency and intensity of their inspections in 1996?

Let's see what else Mr. Hanley has to say....

[Inspections] ended in 2004, when U.S. experts, after an exhaustive investigation, confirmed what the men in those meetings were saying: that Iraq had eliminated its weapons of mass destruction long ago, a finding that discredited the Bush administration's stated rationale for invading Iraq in 2003 - to locate WMD.

This is the familiar trope: that the only reason the Bush administration ever enunciated prior to the invasion was WMD... and now that we haven't found "large stockpiles" of WMD, that has "discredited" the "rationale" for the war.

But in fact, each of the following was offered before the war as casus belli:

  • The WMD programs;
  • To enforce UNSC resolutions, particularly 1441;
  • Because of his non-compliance with his treaty obligations, primarily in refusing to cooperate with UNSCOM inspections;
  • Hussein's links with terrorist organizations -- including al-Qaeda, whose members he gave sanctuary to after they were routed from Afghanistan; but also including Hamas and Hezbollah, and (we now discover) al-Qaeda affilliate Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines;
  • Because of his staggering record of crimes against humanity;
  • In order to liberate the Iraqi people from the dictator; these first six can be found, e.g., in the president's 2003 State of the Union Addressed (January 28th);
  • In order to establish a democracy in the heart of the Middle East to serve as a model for other Moslem countries (February 2003);
  • Because Iraq had repeatedly attacked American fighter jets patrolling the no-fly zone and had tried to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in 1999 (both put forward September 2002).

Well, quite a number of enunciated reasons other than WMD, all promoted extensively and very publicly prior to the invasion, which began March 19th, 2003. Yet Mr. Hanley seems completely unaware of, even oblivious to, their existence. Either he has forgotten (most reporters have the memory of a mayfly), or else he never even noticed at the time. I wonder which he would claim?

Here he comes again:

Even as the documents make clear Saddam's regime had given up banned weapons, they also attest to its continued secretiveness: A 1997 document from Iraqi intelligence instructed agencies to keep confidential files away from U.N. teams, and to remove "any forbidden equipment."

Since it's now acknowledged the Iraqis had ended the arms programs by then, the directive may have been aimed at securing stray pieces of equipment, and preserving some secrets from Iraq's 1980s work on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Thus are great nonsense arguments promulgated. Like the King of Hearts in Alice In Wonderland, we begin with the verdict -- that "Iraqis had ended the arms programs by [1997]" -- and any subsequent evidence that they had not (the warning to remove "forbidden equipment") is reinterpreted in light of the preexisting conclusion. It's magic!

What does Mr. Hanley's gold standard say about this time period?

Throughout 1997-1998, Iraq continued efforts to hinder UNSCOM inspections through site sanitization, warning inspection sites prior to the inspectors’ arrival, concealment of sensitive documentation, and intelligence collection on the UN mission.

Pretty odd behavior for a regime that had ended their arms program long before and sought only to preserve a few "secrets" from their WMD efforts a decade earlier.

Saddam's inner circle entertained notions of reviving the programs someday, the newly released documents show. "The factories will remain in our brains," one unidentified participant told Saddam at a meeting, apparently in the early 1990s.

At the same meeting, however, Saddam, who was deposed by the U.S. invasion in 2003 and is now on trial for crimes against humanity, led a discussion about converting chemical weapons factories to beneficial uses.

When a subordinate complained that U.N. inspectors had seized equipment at the plants useful for pharmaceutical and insecticide production, Saddam jumped in, saying they had "no right" to deny the Iraqis the equipment, since "they have ascertained that we have no intention to produce in this field (chemical weapons)."

Not that Mr. Hanley would ever editorialize in the middle of a news story, but -- converting bio-chem factories "to beneficial uses"? Doesn't he actually mean converting to civilian use? How do we know the uses were "beneficial," when there is a persistent charge that what Iraq really did, following the Gulf War, was convert their WMD programs to dual-use capability, military and civilian -- and then argued that having at least a potential civilian capability meant the stockpiles could not be considered WMD.

In the end, the Iraqis persuading the CIA... which of course desperately wanted to be persuaded, since that would damage Bush. And we did find tremendous stockpiles of potential (dual-use) WMD: for example, drums of cyclosarin-based "pesticides" concealed in camouflaged bunkers and ammo dumps, where they sometimes sat within feet of empty chemical rockets and shells. Iraq, by the way, is one of the few countries that used cyclosarin as a chemical weapon (for example, during the Iran-Iraq war). Other countries used the related but far more effective (and impossible to hide as "dual-use") sarin instead of cyclosarin.

Kenneth Timmerman has documented this extensively, for example in his piece in Insight Magazine -- which alas has exceeded its expiry date and is no longer available on Insight's website. It is available on Timmerman's own site, however (though in annoyingly large type).

And in fact, Duelfer himself reported that the Iraqi chemical-weapon scientists had been retained at "civilian" pesticide production facilities, such as the Tariq Company in Fallujah. I wonder why?

So what Mr. Hanley reports, with a straight face, as "converting chemical weapons factories to beneficial uses," actually means, though he may be ignorant of it, converting chemical weapons factories to dual-use capability, knowing this would mean the international community (which includes the American CIA and State Department) would rush to exonerate Saddam Hussein if the dictator gave them even the smallest hook to hang their hats on. As Pat Collins, the Hip Hypnotist, proved, the easiest thing in the world is to hypnotize those who urgently want to be hypnotized.

Repeatedly in the transcripts, Saddam and his lieutenants remind each other that Iraq destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s, and shut down those programs and the nuclear-bomb program, which had never produced a weapon.

The image of Hussein and his top regime officials loudly and emphatically "remind[ing] each other" -- at a meeting they themselves were videotaping -- that they had destroyed all their banned WMD reminds me of the lousy science fiction writing that frequently appeared in magazines edited by Hugo Gernsback in the early 1930s...

"Golly, Will-X2283, it is amazing that today, in 2034, we can sit in comfort while traveling at more than one hundred miles of an hour in this evacuated subway tube."

"Why yes, Jon-K1119! If a traveler from one hundred years ago were to be magically whisked to this time period, he would be amazed not only at our transportation innovations but also by the fact that our underground hydroponics fields can feed four thousands in the same space that, in his day, would only feed four hundreds."

It doesn't seem to occur to Mr. Hanley that videotaped meetings at which people vigorously "remind each other" of facts they all know are probably meant for eventual public consumption... or at least later legal cover.

In any event, Charles Duelfer himself -- Mr. Hanley's gold standard -- noted that Saddam Hussein was very suspicious even of his own top people and concealed from them much of the WMD work that was ongoing. He was contradictory and contrary, often telling a person they had no WMD on one day, and a few days later telling the same person that they had superweapons that would drive the infidels and crusaders from the land.

In any event, whatever top regime officials may have "remind[ed] each other" of during those meetings, the fact remains that in the early 1990s, Saddam had every intention of maintaining and reconstituting his WMD. Duelfer reports in the section "Decline (1991-1996)":

Many former Iraqi officials close to Saddam either heard him say or inferred that he intended to resume WMD programs when sanctions were lifted. Those around him at the time do not believe that he made a decision to permanently abandon WMD programs. Saddam encouraged Iraqi officials to preserve the nation’s scientific brain trust essential for WMD. Saddam told his advisors as early as 1991 that he wanted to keep Iraq’s nuclear scientists fully employed. This theme of preserving personnel resources persisted throughout the sanctions period.

Since the next section of the final report is titled "Recovery (1996-1998)," the alert reader can probably surmise Duelfer's conclusion.

Two quick hits show the extraordinary depth and subtlety of Mr. Hanley's reasoning:

"We played by the rules of the game," Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said at a session in the mid-1990s. "In 1991, our weapons were destroyed."

Why yes... by us. Aziz is quite correct: Iraq's weapons were destroyed in 1991 -- by the Coalition forces operating under UN authority. That is, we destroyed what we found.

But did we find it all? Mr. Hanley has an answer to that, too:

Amer Mohammed Rashid, a top weapons program official, told a 1996 presidential meeting he laid out the facts to the U.N. chief inspector.

"We don't have anything to hide, so we're giving you all the details," he said he told Rolf Ekeus.

Mr. Hanley says that Rashid in fact "laid out all the facts" to Ekeus... but then he quotes Rashid saying only that he told Ekeus that he'd laid out all the facts. Evidently, Amer Mohammed Rashid's word is good enough for Mr. Hanley. After all, the mere fact that a man is a tyrant, a terrorist, and guilty of crimes against humanity is no reason to impugn his character, is it?

And at last we come full circle, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, to where we began, with Mr. Hanley's remarkable claim about the final report of the Iraq Survey Group, written by the CIA's Charles Duelfer:

In his final report in October 2004, Charles Duelfer, head of a post-invasion U.S. team of weapons hunters, concluded Iraq and the U.N. inspectors had, indeed, dismantled the nuclear program and destroyed the chemical and biological weapons stockpiles by 1992, and the Iraqis never resumed production.

So what does Charles Duelfer say for himself about the latter period leading up to the war?

Saddam invested his growing reserves of hard currency in rebuilding his military-industrial complex, increasing its access to dual-use items and materials, and creating numerous military research and development projects. He also emphasized restoring the viability of the IAEC and Iraq’s former nuclear scientists. The departure of UN inspectors and Iraq’s refusal to allow their return permitted MIC to purchase previously restricted dual-use materials and equipment that it needed for both weapons development and civilian applications. In addition, MIC had greater flexibility in adapting civilian technology to military use....

There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise. In addition to preserved capability, we have clear evidence of his intent to resume WMD as soon as sanctions were lifted.

Perhaps I'm not adept at reading between the lies, but that really doesn't look much like saying the WMD programs "never resumed production." To me, it looks more like Iraq was gearing up to go back into full production the moment sanctions were lifted -- and even earlier, using dual-use technologies.

But then, it's Associated Press. Perhaps that's all I really needed to say.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 21, 2006, at the time of 09:28 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Al-Jaafari - Teetering On the Edge?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Earlier this month, Sachi posted Al-Jaafari Must Step Down to Unify Iraq, in which she argued that Interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari is the major reason there has not yet been agreement on a permanent government.

Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), is the leading candidate for next Iraqi Prime Minister; but he is stirring up a hornet's nest across Iraq: the Kurds don’t like him; the Sunnis hate him; and secular Iraqis fear him. Even the top Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- a strong proponent of a unified Iraq -- is suggesting al-Jaafari step aside....

Many believe al-Jaafari is behind a series of killings targeting prominent Sunni clerics and former Baath members, under the guise of the Interior Ministry’s Security Forces, which are infested with Iranian influenced militiamen. Al-Jaafari, of the Islamic Dawa Party (within the UIA coalition), was strongly backed in the Shiite caucus by militia leader Muqtada Sadr, the anti-American militant who occupied Najaf, Sadr City, and Basra during a failed "uprising" in March of 2004, timed to coincide with a similar surge of violence in Sunni Fallujah.

In the "primary" of the UIA, al-Jaafari beat Interim Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) by a single vote; thereafter, the entire UIA insisted that al-Jaafari must be the nominee for prime minister in the permanent government. Boiled down, that is the block in forming a government in Iraq.

But there are persistent and growing indications that the UIA is splintering on this issue now. According to the website AdnKronosInternational -- whose accuracy and veracity is completely unknown -- SCIRI (Abdul-Mahdi's party within the UIA) may be about to split from Dawa (al-Jaafari's party) on the question of the prime minister nominee, joining with Kurds and Sunni to form a majority coalition that can nominate Abdul-Mahdi and elect him to the post. This would break the logjam, were it to occur, and the government could finally form. (Hat tip to Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail.)

Baghdad, 17 March (AKI) - The representatives of the Kurdish list, the Sunni Iraqi Concord Front and much of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) have reportedly reached an accord on a new prime minister. Their agreement not to reconfirm Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister and instead nominate Abdel Mahdi, a leading SCIRI figure and currently vice president, was reported by the al-Arabiya network and confirmed by Sunni deputy, Salman Jumeiri. The nomination of a new prime minister is the main sticking point in efforts to forge a new government in Iraq after the elections in December....

The line-up of those endorsing Abdel Mahdi - who lost narrowly to Jaafari in an internal vote on a prime ministerial candidate - may well exclude MPs from the faction of radical Shiite imam Moqtada al-Sadr and those of the Islamic party Dawa, led by Jaafari.

Ordinarily, we would not put much faith in an unknown website's claim; but this rumor has circulated for several days now, and more people seem to be believing it. For example, Hugh Hewitt mentioned it on his radio show last week, though he gave no specifics. (Of course, Hugh might just have gotten it from the Fourth Rail, as we did!)

Logically, it makes sense: al-Jaafari is Dawa's candidate, and he polled essentially equal with Abdul-Mahdi, being pushed ever so slightly over the top by Muqtada Sadr's powerful influence. If SCIRI can do an end-run around Dawa to get their own guy in the top spot and also be hailed as the saviors of the December election, they would be stupid to turn it down.

I doubt that Dawa will try to punish SCIRI later; Dawa needs the UIA as much as SCIRI, if the Shia are to have their majority. In fact, as Dawa is generally less militant and fundamentalist than SCIRI (though the individuals involved this time reverse that tendency), many Dawa members might be secretly pleased that al-Jaafari -- and the invisible hand of Sadr -- are out of the picture.

And they do, of course, want to light the candle and get the government going; the Iraqi people are getting restless with the bickering.

So let's keep fingers crossed that this isn't just a wild rumor that spread out of control like a California wildfire.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 21, 2006, at the time of 04:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 20, 2006

Iraqi Battalion's First Independent Operation

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Sachi

We have talked about the readiness of the Iraqi Army for months. So it's nice to read a story like this one from the 1st Marine Regiment and the Military Transition Teams (MTTs) who train the Iraqi troops. Iraqi soldiers from the "2-2-7" recently conducted their first independent counterinsurgency operation in the Anbar district:

More than 100 soldiers from the Iraqi Army’s 2nd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 7th Iraqi Army Division conducted their first independently-executed mission to disrupt insurgent operations here March 14.

The soldiers, who were accompanied by a handful of Marines, patrolled through and cleared three kilometers of village just south of the town of Haqlaniyah along the Euphrates River in western Al Anbar Province, northwest of Baghdad. The Marines, outnumbered by the Iraqi soldiers 10 to one, were on hand in an advisory role only.

“It’s good for the Iraqi people not to see us out there and to see the Iraqi Army doing all the work in keeping their community safe,” said Capt. Quintin D. Jones, a Memphis, Tenn., native and member of the Military Transition Team (MTT) here. MTTs are groups of Coalition servicemembers assigned to logistically assist and guide individual Iraqi military units’ transition to independent operations.

The Iraqi-led mission was part of the latest counterinsurgency operation, dubbed “Raging Bull,” conducted by Coalition forces in western Al Anbar Province.

Despite relentless negative reporting from the MSM, I cannot help feeling optmistic about Iraq. That is because I focus on progress, not setbacks.

Of course we need to look at the serious reality of the war; but there must be balance. "Reality" in Iraq has three legs: progress, promise, and cost. But the media teeters precariously on a one-legged stool.

Remember the first Falluja offensive, where Iraqi troops abandoned their posts and fled in the face of the enemy? Today, no Iraqi soldier will show his back to the terrorist vermin infesting his country. These soldiers (we can definitely use that proud term now) are eager to prove their courage and the skills they learned from the best in the world: our own United States Marines.

And today the 1st Marines are proud to count the Iraqi Army as comrades.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 20, 2006, at the time of 02:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Mullahlogging

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line frets that our talks with Iran about Iraq can only spell trouble:

My sense is that such talks are a bad idea. Iran is involved in Iraq because it perceives an interest in supporting our enemies there. To talk Iran into changing course, we would have to offer it an incentive larger than the one that's pushing it to cause trouble now. The only such incentive I can imagine is backing away from our efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

I can think of another. I suspect our talks are more along the lines of Marshall Matt Dillon "talking" with the latest boozed up, sadistic outlaw who thinks he and his gang of five or six dissolute drifters can take over Dodge and do bad things to Miss Kitty... and the "incentive" Bush is offering is the mullahs' continuing residence in this world, rather than the next.

Why, after five years of a president whose fault has more often been talkin' too Texan than crawling on his belly, do worried conservatives still think that any moment now, George W. Bush is going to turn into Neville Ehud Clinton?

This is a very bad habit of the Right (note that I don't mean Paul here; my focus now shifts to the hysterics in the sliver of the Antique Media that leans conservative): they spent so many years in the wilderness, they've homesteaded defeat. The spasm of Right-wing media despair that precedes every election is wearying, and it can prove a self-fulfilling prophecy if allowed to go too far.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 20, 2006, at the time of 02:24 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 19, 2006

Anti-American Protests "Fizzle" On War Anniversary

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Update: See below.

A newspaper headline from years ago is such a marvel of oxymoronia, it is perfection:

Million Mom March Draws Thousands

Keep that headline in mind as you read about the massive, worldwide anti-war protests.

Today, March 19th, 2006, marks the third anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq. Not surprisingly, since the liberation was conducted by the United States, there were coordinated anti-war protests planned across the globe. Record high numbers of people flocked to major cities to protest against the Great Satan... well, not exactly....

In Sydney Australia, back in 2003, 250,000 protesters rallied against the war. Yesterday, a whopping 500 people showed up. Australia has 20 million people, so this is a turnout of 0.0025% of the population.

Around 500 protesters marched through central Sydney, chanting "End the war now" and "Troops out of Iraq." Many campaigners waved placards branding President Bush the "World's No. 1 Terrorist" or expressing concerns that Iran could be the next country to face invasion.

The Associated Press did not let the fizzly turnout dampen their enthusiasm:

Opposition to the war is still evident in Australia, which has some 1,300 troops in and around Iraq. Visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was heckled by campaigners in Sydney this week, who said she had "blood on her hands."

(It's interesting to note that the total number of protesters in Australia was just over a third the number of troops they have in Iraq.)

Perhaps things looked better in London or Tokyo; let's take a peek:

Authorities shut down streets in the heart of London's shopping and theater district for the demonstration, which organizers had predicted would attract up to 100,000 people, but police estimated the crowd was about 15,000 people....

In Tokyo, about 2,000 people rallied in a downtown park, carrying signs saying "Stop the Occupation" as they listened to a series of anti-war speeches.

Great Britain saw a turnout of 0.02%; but Tokyo was truly galvanized, with nearly 0.0016% marching in the streets for World Peace Now!

Japan currenty deploys about 600 troops from the Self Defense Force to Iraq. Japanese polls show that a majority of Japanese still oppose the war; however, since the Iraq War and Japan's deployment began, the Japanese people have shifted very significantly in favor of changing their officially pacifist constitution to one that allows Japan to maintain a regular standing army. Largely due to the precedent set by the Self Defence Force, the Japanese now support the new constitution by nearly two to one (over 60% support).

The second-largest protest was in Turkey. Some 5,000 protesters showed up. Considering it is a Moslem country, 5,000 may seem rather small and insignificant... but still, it represents a staggering 0.007% of the Turkish population. The Turkish government had better watch out: if all these people chose to seize control to express their displeasure at a war that Turkey is not involved in, the Turks might have to mobilize one of their 200 regiments to put them down.

Not to be left out, the mighty Swedes mobilized 1,000 protesters to surround the American embassy. That's 0.01%... a small country, but a doughty batch of protesters!

In Sweden, about 1,000 demonstrators gathered for a rally in Stockholm before a march to the U.S. Embassy. Some protesters carried banners reading "No to U.S. warmongering" and "USA out of Iraq," while others held up a U.S. flag with the white stars replaced by dollar signs.

Yeah, yeah... but does anybody actually care?

Update: Meanwhile, back at le chateau, a few students are up in arms in France (or at least up in les cocktails Molotov). Hat tip Power Line:

The protests, which drew 500,000 people in some 160 cities across the country, were the biggest show yet of escalating anger that is testing the strength of the conservative government before elections next year.

Wow, half a million people. This was by far the biggest protest demonstration of them all, drawing 0.82% of the French population -- more than 40 times the London demonstration in terms of population -- more than 33 times the size in actual numbers.

Alas, we can't really count it -- because they're not protesting the Iraq war. Their boeuf is entirely domestic: the "conservative" government in France wants to change the law to allow employers to fire incompetent employees within first two years, which is currently illegal. (Evidently, the potential of being incompetent is a besetting fear among French youths. Possibly because they spend all their time at l'Université rioting instead of studying.)

In an apparent effort to set fire to a police van serving as a blockade, protesters instead torched the entrance of a nearby Gap store, apparently by accident, engulfing the small porch in flames.

(And before we forget... the "conservative government?" In France? Only in the sense that socialists are slightly to the right of Communists. The Communist Party is very strong in France, by the way, and the French Communist Party has 21 seats in the National Assembly. In fact, adding together the eight radical-left parties, they control 177 of the 577 seats, or 31%. Radical left candidates for president received more than 12.5 million votes in the first round, or 44%. The government of France is not "conservative" by any stretch, and Yahoo is lying again.)

Maybe the French government should expand the military to alleviate the unemployment problem. Oh, wait -- do we really want rampaging French youths to have les fusils?

Best to let sleeping chiens lie, I suppose. As Emily Litella would say....

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 19, 2006, at the time of 01:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 17, 2006

Operation Swarmer: a "Pyrrhic Failure?"

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

The Antique Media's ability to spin a successful operation into a failure never ceases to amaze me.

In an article in today's Time Magazine, Brian Bennett and Al Jallam claim that Operation Swarmer -- the operation just undertaken by the Iraqi Army and the 101st Airborne -- "fizzled," simply because it did not live up to the exciting fantasy that Time mistakenly expected.

Evidently, Time anticipated a spectacular fireworks show that could make a four-color cover, with missiles and Willie Pete and maybe a couple of MOABs (or at least puny, little Daisy Cutters).

But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war.... In fact, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op. What’s more, there were no shots fired at all and the units had met no resistance, said the U.S. and Iraqi commanders.

Time complains that planes and helicopters didn't come screaming in like a World War II strafing run. But this operation was never supposed to be an airstrike; it was an air assault, a fact that even Time itself supposedly understood. The part I clipped out above with the elipses is this parenthetical explanation:

("Air Assault" is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.)

In other words, Time already knew that we weren't planning a huge, Clintonian barrage of missiles all over the place, blowing up wedding parties and Boy Sprout jamborees with glorious abandon. Operation Swarmers was, according to Wretchard of the Belmont Club, a cordon and search operation... which is exactly what the Iraqi Army and the Americans did. And they found a bunch of weaponry and a lot of potential insurgents, making this a very, very successful "fizzle":

Iraqi and U.S. troops on the ground had netted 48 suspected insurgents, 17 of which had already been cleared and released.

This means 31 suspects are still in custody, formerly dangerous terrorists who now are nothing more than intelligence sources for us. Plus, they made it clear that no place in Iraq can be considered "safe" for terrorists... that we and the Iraqi Army can hit anybody anywhere.

The operation, which doubled the population of the flat farmland in one single airlift, was initiated by intelligence from Iraq security forces, says Lt Col Skip Johnson commander of the 187 Battallion, 3rd Combat Brigade of the 101st Airborne. "They have the lead," he said to reporters at the second stop of the tour....

With the Interior Ministry's Samarra commando battalion, the soldiers had found some 300 individual pieces of weaponry like mortars, rockets and plastic explosives in six different locations inside the sparsely populated farming community of over 50 square miles and about 1,500 residents. The raids also uncovered high-powered cordless telephones used as detonators in homemade bombs, medical supplies and insurgent training manuals.

Note that in this air assault, the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police (the "Interior Ministry's Samarra commando battalion") raided together, just as promised as part of the brokered deal to regain control of the police. As we reported Wednesday:

As for the Shiite militia attacking Sunni citizens, there has been an amazing new development: the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries announced yesterday that from now on, anti-terrorist raids will be conducted with the Iraqi Army and the police operating together:

So what is this nonsense about "no shots fired at all?" Is Time saying that the mission "fizzled" because we didn't get shot at and didn't have to return fire? It's a failure when the enemy is overwhelmed by our presence and flees, abandoning its weaponry, equipment, and personnel?

Perhaps "some skeptical military analysts" see Operation Swarmer as a failure, nothing more than a "photo op." But in fact, it was a perfect demonstration of how capable the Iraqi Army has become. They've demonstrated that they are capable of collecting accurate intelligence, dropping into the target area, and efficiently nabbing suspects and weaponry without taking any casualties at all. They only need help with air transportation, not having much of an Air Force yet.

A few more "pyrrhic failures" like this, and Iraq may end up a stable democracy after all!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 17, 2006, at the time of 10:09 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 16, 2006

The Grand Tale of Tal Afar

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Sachi

I am sure readers must remember this thank you letter from Tal Afar Mayor Najim Abdullah Abid al-Jibouri to the commanders and men of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, who, with the 1st Brigade, 3d Division of the Iraqi Army, finally liberated Tal Afar. The letter was widely reported in blogsphere back in February.

Last Sunday,(March 12, 2006, the CBS show 60 minutes featured the current situation in Tal Afar. Much to my surprise, the report by Lara Logan was amazingly balanced.

You should be able to view the video from here (click the "60 Minutes" link in the left sidebar, then click on the link titled "Al Qaeda's Town"); but when I tried, it stopped in the middle. It's RealPlayer: "abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

The quick take: the retaking of Tal Afar is a model for how we will fight such wars in the future... and a great vindication of the vision of President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the other architects of small-footprint warfare.

Tal Afar is located at the Syrian border, in the Ninewa province (sometimes called Nineva). It had been used for years as a conduit for terrorists entering Iraq from Syria. Back in 2004, U.S. troops kicked out the terrorists; but like in Fallujah, there were not enough American toops to hold the town; and the Iraqi troops back then proved unreliable. Inevitably then, when we left Tal Afar, the terrorists came roaring back -- literally with a vengence. The town was overrun by Musab Zarqawi's group al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, who began a spree of revenge killing, torture, and brutal, thuggish rule.

Sharia law as enforced (on the citizens; the terrorists seemed to have special dispensation). And 200,000 citizens of Tal Afer were held hostage. Mayor Najim describes the situation in his letter:

Our city was the main base of operations for Abu Mousab Al Zarqawi. The city was completely held hostage in the hands of his henchmen. Our schools, governmental services, businesses and offices were closed.

Our streets were silent, and no one dared to walk them. Our people were barricaded in their homes out of fear; death awaited them around every corner. Terrorists occupied and controlled the only hospital in the city.

Their savagery reached such a level that they stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young.

After a year of training and building up the Iraqi Army, so that we would have a force that could actually hold a city like Tal Afar (or Fallujah) after we liberate it, we decided in September, 2005, that we were ready at last to recapture the town.

Col. H.R. McMaster is commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry and Multinational Force-Northwest; he now also serves as one of the military's top advisers on fighting the Iraqi insurgency. He described to 60 minutes what the 3d Cav found when they entered Tal Afar.

Masked gunmen led by al Qaeda roamed the streets of Tal Afar at will, publicly executing and kidnapping people. Col. McMaster told 60 Minutes some of the terrorists were foreign fighters, but many were Iraqis from the area. Pictures of their attacks were circulated in videos like one in which you can hear them chanting a call to jihad.

"They had schools for snipers. They had kidnapping and murder classes that were attended by people on the best techniques," says McMaster.

The terrorists they encountered were far more sophisiticated than anyone imagined. Aside from foreign fighters, there were many former soldiers and officers from Saddam's army, men with actual combat experience and training. The enemy organized well, both for combat and extreme brutality:

The colonel says he was surprised to learn the enemy in Tal Afar was so organized. "You had this blending of former military expertise and organizational ability with, with a radical Islamic ideology, and it was fertile ground here."

On September 3, 2005, the fight began. After three days of heavy ground fighting and air strikes, the fire was ceased for two days in order to let citizens escape. But then, three more days of delay were ordered by the Iraqi goverment, allegedly because they were concerned about civilian casualties. However, the recent exposure of "several ranking Defense Ministry officials" as allied with al-Qaeda -- either for money or ideology -- certainly suggests other explanations.

Regardless, this extra respite allowed many of the terrorists to escape as well. Michael Ware, Baghdad bureau chief for Time Magazine, who was embedded with the 3d Cav, explains what happened:

"The al Qaeda presence in Tal Afar was surrounded. And the attack was primed. And then it was stopped dead in its tracks. And so, as the troops I was with battled throughout the day and into the night with al Qaeda fighters so close you could throw a stone and hit them, when we woke up the next morning -- poof -- they were gone!" says Ware....

When the troops finally entered the Sarai section of Tal Afar on the ninth day of the battle, they used tanks to blast holes through buildings so the soldiers could move forward without being exposed.

But after waiting so long, Michael Ware says the momentum was gone; and — so it seemed — was the enemy.

"Where an entire al Qaeda society had existed, the troops that I was with found one body," Ware recalls.

To prove they were not defeated, al Qaeda unleashed 12 suicide bombers in a day of bloodshed in Baghdad. They publicly called it revenge for the loss of Tal Afar, where the U.S. Army calculated enemy dead at 151. Eight Iraqi soldiers and one American were also killed. But Col. McMaster told 60 Minutes that using numbers to measure victory is a mistake.

"Body counts are completely irrelevant. I mean, what is relevant is, 'Is the population secure so that political development, economic development can proceed?'" he explains.

But what happened after the battle is more important: American troops began training the local police, recruiting both Shia and Sunni, and reopened schools and markets. Their success at winning the hearts and minds of the Tal Afar citizens is obvious from the 60 Minutes segment video.

American soldiers like Capt. Jesse Sellars have taken on added responsibilities. On regular patrols through the city, he is part politician and part policeman.

These days, he walks the streets like the pied piper, with crowds of Iraqi children chanting his name. They're the same streets he fought for just a few months ago.

I was struck by the children chanting Capt. Sellars first name like a cerebrity: "Jesse! Jesse!" This raises an important question: Is it actually legal for CBS to show footage favorable to President Bush, Republicans, or the U.S. military? Isn't there something in the Constitution against it?

The segment ends on an upbeat note:

"If anybody tries to operate in Tal Afar, they're gonna be detected and …" the colonel replied.

"But is that a yes, colonel? Are they trying to come back?" Logan asked.

"Oh yes. Of course the enemy is trying to come back. In an insurgency, there’s not going to be a big decisive battle and then the white flags come out and it’s over, OK," says Col. McMaster. "But what we have here is as close to that as you really can get."

The terrorists will come again; it's the Middle East, and they always come. They will slither back into Tal Afar and Fallujah and the Anbar province.

But this time, when they come, they will face Iraqi troops defending the town, province, and country. Training-up the Iraqi Army has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of any of the Democrats -- or Republicans -- in Congress; but the actual boots on the ground, the generals, the service secretaries and Donald Rumsfeld, and of course George W. Bush himself always knew it would turn the tide in the end.

The sentiments of the citizens of Tal Afar toward the American soldiers are summed up in the Mayor's letter. Let's let Mayor Najim have the last word:

God bless this brave Regiment; God bless the families who dedicated these brave men and women.

From the bottom of our hearts we thank the families. They have given us something we will never forget.

To the families of those who have given their holy blood for our land, we all bow to you in reverence and to the souls of your loved ones. Their sacrifice was not in vain. They are not dead, but alive, and their souls hovering around us every second of every minute. They will never be forgotten for giving their precious lives. They have sacrificed that which is most valuable. We see them in the smile of every child, and in every flower growing in this land.

Let America, their families, and the world be proud of their sacrifice for humanity and life.

Finally, no matter how much I write or speak about this brave Regiment, I haven’t the words to describe the courage of its officers and soldiers. I pray to God to grant happiness and health to these legendary heroes and their brave families.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 16, 2006, at the time of 04:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 15, 2006

"One Signature Away"

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In testimony before Congress today, General John Abizaid, CENTCOM commander, confirmed that the Iraqi military intelligence and intelligence agencies uncovered and thwarted a plot by al-Qaeda to infiltrate 421 terrorists into the Iraqi Army -- where they would be stationed at the gates and inside the Green Zone. Their mission would have been to launch a brutal terrorist attack to kill as many Americans and Iraqis and kidnap hundreds of hostages.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, in an interview with The Associated Press, said the 421 Al Qaeda recruits were one bureaucrat's signature away from acceptance into an Iraqi army battalion whose job is to control the gates and main squares in the Green Zone. The plot was discovered three weeks ago.

But the point is that the plot was broken by the Iraqi Army... even though members of the Ministry of Defense were implicated:

A senior Defense Ministry official said the 421 Al Qaeda fighters were actually recruited to storm the U.S. and British embassies and take hostages. Several ranking Defense Ministry officials were jailed in the plot, the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

The fact that the Iraqi Army can operate for the good of Iraq and even arrest its own bosses shows that they are independent, patriotic, and -- as we've said before -- tough as nails. If anything saves Iraq not only from a "civil war" but from pure, unadulterated chaos, it will be the New Iraqi Army.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 15, 2006, at the time of 06:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Iraq's Non-Sectarian "Sectarian" War - New Development

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Yesterday Dafydd talked about the number of young military age men's bodies found in Iraq. Many of them had been toutured and killed execution style. Dafydd suggested this could be a result of vigilantism by Iraqis against the foreign terrorists and their Iraqi allies in Musab Zarqawi's al-Qaed In Mesopotamia group.

The captured Death List of Al Qaeda (hat tip to commenter Jim from California) and an announcement from Sunni Insurgents might shed some light on this issue. First, the "Death List":

Coalition forces in Iraq are believed to have captured some very sensitive al Qaeda documents. Apparently, one of these is a "Death List," giving the names of prominent Iraqis of all factions whom al Qaeda believes opposes its efforts to establish an Islamist state in the country. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the names on the list are of Sunni tribal and religious leaders who have been less than enthusiastic in their support for al Qaeda. Sadly, a number of those on the list have already been slain.

Probably not coincidentally, given that Iraqis are likely to know who is on al-Qaeda's "hit" parade even without having to see documents, Sunni insurgents -- Iraqis still fighting against Americans and until recently allied with Zarqawi -- announced yesterday that they killed a number of foreign terrorists in the Anbar province.

"We have killed a number of the Arabs including Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, Kuwaitis and Jordanians," London Daily Telegraph quoted an insurgent representative in the western province of Anbar as saying.

We have heard about the developing gulf between Zarqawi's Al-Qaeda-in-Irag and Sunni Insurgents for quite some time. But what I did not know was that Sunni Insurgetns formed a special group to combat Al Qaeda.

It became an outright split when a wave of bombings killed scores of people in Anbar resulting in a spate of tit-for-tat killings.

In reaction, the Sunni tribal leaders formed their own anti-al Qaeda militia, the Anbar Revolutionaries. The group has a core membership of about 100 people, all of whom had relatives killed by al Qaeda. It is led by Ahmed Ftaikhan, a former Saddam-era military intelligence officer, the Telegraph reported.

The group claims to have killed 20 foreign fighters and 33 Iraqi sympathizers. The United States has confirmed that six of Zarqawi's deputies were killed in the city of Ramadi in the province.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that an Anbar-based group has claimed it killed five top members of al Qaeda and associated groups in Ramadi.

The claim was posted on an Islamist Web site and attributed to the Anbar Revenge Brigade, the AP reported.

It listed the names of four suspected al Qaeda leaders. The fifth man, it said, was from Ansar al-Sunnah, a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda.

(Tip of the hat to Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail.)

So it is possible that at least some of the bodies found could be of terrorists killed by Sunnis -- either Sunni insurgents or Sunni patriots (which groups may have a large intesection). The "sectarian" war we thought we were witnessing may not be what it seems.

As for the Shiite militia attacking Sunni citizens, there has been an amazing new development: the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries announced yesterday that from now on, anti-terrorist raids will be conducted with the Iraqi Army and the police operating together:

Yesterday, the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries said they have reached an agreement requiring them to conduct all raids jointly, in a bid to stop the operations of death squads masquerading as police commandos.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who controls Iraqi police, is a Shi'ite. Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi is a Sunni Muslim.

This should prevent overly "enthusiastic" Iraqi police from abusing, kidnapping, and even killing Sunnis, as many Sunnis believe, with good reason, has been happening. They trust the Army much more that the police for several reasons:

  • The Iraqi Army was directly trained by the Americans, while we are only just now starting to train the police.
  • The Army is run by a Sunni Iraqi; while the police are under the Interior Ministry, which is run by Bayan Jabr of the United Iraqi Alliance, who is closely allied with the Muqtada Sadr-supported Interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
  • The Iraqi police have been heavily infiltated by Iranian-supported Shiite militias in some areas (notably in Basra and in the Sadr City slum section of Baghdad)... particularly by Muqtada Sadr's al-Mahdi militia; the police are also corrupt and incompetent; and many police stations are simply tribal strike forces, who actually launch attacks on other Iraqi police stations controlled by "enemy tribes."

Joint raids between police and Army would greatly reassure nervous Sunnis, many of whom were just as opposed to Saddam Hussein as were Shia and Kurds... but who have been lumped together with the Tikrit tribe as "Saddamists" by the ruling Shia and often treated as incipient terrorists solely because they are Sunnis and secular, rather than being Shia who want to follow sharia law.

And have we already forgotten that "Death List" from the beginning of this post? It's hard to dismiss the idea that the real reason Shiite "men in black" abuse the Sunnis is that so many Sunni tribal leaders are secularists who oppose "efforts to establish an Islamist state in the country" -- whether a Wahabbist state established by al-Qaeda, or an Iranian-style mullahcracy imposed by radical Shia.

Let us hope that this new policy succeeds.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 15, 2006, at the time of 05:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

SF Vet to Murtha: How can you ask us to leave?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham read a letter on her show that had been sent by an unretired Special-Forces soldier to Congressman Murtha, the veteran and representative who calls for the "immediate redployment" of our troops from Iraq to "over the horizon" positions -- in other words, our immediate withdrawal (which he later amended to say that we start immediately, and it will actually take six months to get out).

The letter is from retired, 60 year old Army paratrooper, Dave Rockwell. Rockwell left the Army in 1992, after 24 yeas in the Special Forces and Airborne Infantry units; but he recently reenlisted and is now deployed with the 10th Mountain Division (former Sen. Bob Dole's old outfit) fighting in Iraq. It was there that he handed the letter to Ingraham, who was doing a morale visit to Iraq at the time (where she was very well received).

The Antique Media -- which ferrets out any disgruntled serviceman who wants to complain -- somehow missed this incredible guy. Here are some excerts from his letter to Murtha; but read the whole thing... it will inspire you.

Although it is difficult to keep up with politics from over here, your comments on immediate withdrawal have been noted by all of us. I cannot tell you the overall sense of discouragement, sense of betrayal and the feeling that few appreciate our efforts your comments have created. 1BCT [1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division] has been frequently deployed in support of the War on Terrorism and we believe it is the correct fight and we believe we are winning. We have seen a significant improvement on the ground since we began combat operations in Baghdad three months ago....

I sincerely believe General Marshall as deeply as I believe your statements have undermined the morale of these young soldiers. I have watched intently as your political party has attempted to use this war for political advantage and find it to be repugnant in the extreme....

How can you ask us to leave? Must we forget all the sacrifices, the deaths, lost limbs, lost marriages and the daily struggle to win?...

Make no mistake, we are winning here. It ain't easy and it may be difficult for you to see from your elevated position. But day in and day out, 24/7 we are pushing out combat patrols, taking the initiative away from the beheaders, limiting their ability to move, resupply and detaining and killing them. We are going to win here. We are going to leave this country far better off than when we started and American is going to be more secure for it. We will make the sacrifice, will you, will America?

Remember 9/11.

The "General Marshall" reference above is to a quotation about troop morale that Rockwell includes, which ends:

With it all things are possible; without it everything else,
planning, preparation, and production, count for naught.
Gen. George C. Marshall

Take a read, Congressman Murtha -- and then shut up.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 15, 2006, at the time of 02:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2006

Who Goes There?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The "Iraq is collapsing into civil war" story du jour is the discovery of somewhere north of eighty bodies in the last twenty-four hours, all killed execution style and dumped in various mass graves:

Police in the past 24 hours have found the bodies of at least 87 people killed by execution-style shootings - a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian reprisal slayings, officials said Tuesday.

The dead included at least 29 bodies stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad.

The bloodshed - the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since bombers destroyed an important Shiite shrine last month - followed weekend attacks in a teeming Shiite slum in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.

But it's important to realize that we're talking about two entirely separate modes of killing in these first three paragraphs:

  1. Young, military-aged men found executed either by gunshot or by garrotte and dumped into mass graves, mostly in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad;
  2. The "weekend attacks" of random people of all ages slain by bomb blasts clearly set by Sunni terrorists, with or without Sadr's connivance; such bombings have been carried out by both Sunni radicals associated with Musab Zarqawi and by Shiite radicals associated with "kingmaker" Muqtada Sadr and his al-Mahdi militia.

Why does the mode of killing make a difference? Killing is killing, right?

Not so fast: it's easy to label Mode-2 killing as terrorism, because the victims comprise anyone who has the terrible luck to be near the bombsite when the device goes off. But it's not at all clear who is being killed by Mode-1 -- and it may be the case that some significant portion are actually known militants and terrorists being killed by citizen vigilante groups.

Here is a piece of information included in the Reuters story but absent from the AP story:

Sadr himself called publicly for restraint on Monday. But in Sadr City, the bodies of men labeled "traitors" were hung from telegraph poles and officials say privately that Shi'ite militia commanders are no longer all heeding clerical appeals for calm.

The standard media assumption is that these killings, even Mode-1, are examples of "sectarian violence," meaning people killed simply for being Shia or Sunni in the wrong neighborhood. But how do the newswriters know that? What evidence is there why those particular people were killed? Do they even know how many of those killed were even Iraqi, and how many were foreign Arabs or even non-Arabs?

Some points to note:

  • So far, I haven't seen a single report of a mass grave containing women and children shot or strangled. Only military-aged men.
  • Although Reuters mentions that some of the bodies were found "bearing signs of torture," they don't actually tell us what "torture" they mean; past misuse of the word (for example, referring to what happened to detainees at Abu Ghraib as "torture") means I cannot simply accept the Antique Media's claim without specifics: for example, does this abuse look more like punishment -- or like abuse during interrogation? Recall that in much of the world, certainly including Iraq, inflicting pain and injury in order to get information is considered normal.
  • The bodies are nearly always dumped in groups, as if a batch of people had been rounded up from the same location and killed together. This could be "people worshipping at the wrong mosque," but it could also be "militants captured in a safehouse."
  • There are persistent reports that the "kidnappers" are often Interior-Ministry police or "men in black." Whether honest or militant themselves, such people might have access to police files of known Sunni militants.

Each of these suggests at least the possibility that some portion of Mode-1 killings are not terrorism but rather vigilantism. Vigilante justice has a very bad reputation, some of it deserved; but even the most anti-vigilante activist has to agree that at least some of the people who have been lynched throughout history were, in fact, guilty of whatever crime was urged against them. Others were innocent... but the moment one accepts that some were guilty, the questions become more pointed: what percent were guilty? how was supposed guilt determined? and what safeguards were in place to prevent innocents being killed?

Most of those lynched are not strangers; they are known within the community -- and known to be violent, dangerous people. Often there are witnesses to the crime, but for whatever reason (standing of the accused, absence of a sitting court, insularity of a minority population, the local courts known to be corrupt or slapdash) it's not practical to try the accused in a court.

Without question, many innocent people have been murdered by vigilante justice. "Known in the community" can also include the guy who owns the land you want to steal, or the surly black ranch hand who can be blamed for "raping" the daughter who in fact had consentual sex with some lowlife white ranch hand. It's impossible to deny that such murders were (and still are) committed under color of vigilantism.

But many innocents have also been killed by constituted justice: Bruno Hauptmann, for example, executed in 1936 for the kidnapping and murder of the child of aviator Charles Lindbergh; or Caryl Chessman, executed in 1960 for being the "Red Light Bandit." For both men, there is at least a strong and very reasonable doubt that he was guilty of the crime. Similarly, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (executed 1927) may or may not have actually been guilty of the murder of Alessandro Berardelli, but their trial certainly cannot be called a model of justice. In most times and places in history, such arbitrary sentences of death are found as often in constituted justice as in vigilante justice.

In Iraq, there is not even a question: orders of magnitude more innocent people were executed legally under court sentence in the days of Saddam Hussein, even measured per month, than have been killed by vigilantism since Hussein's removal -- even if one assumes that every, last person found killed by Mode-1 was innocent, itself a dubious claim.

What we really need for understanding is for the media to begin identifying those killed by Mode-1 and determining which of them is known or strongly suspected to be a member of a terrorist organization, whether Shiite or Sunni. This cannot be determined, by the way, by asking local Shia whether some Shiite fellow tribesman is a "terrorist," because that is a question that can almost never be answered No. At least not safely.

Rather, photographs of the dead taken while they were still alive (if families can be talked into supplying them) should be gathered and mixed in with photos of others clearly not involved; then these photos should be shown in a "photo line-up" to victims and witnesses. Let them pick out anybody they recognize -- and see which such "witness identifications" match up with those who were killed and dumped into mass graves (or left in the back of a pickup truck). And then report honestly on the results.

But of course, that would involve actual journalistic work; and it's so much easier simply to label every death an "apparent sectarian reprisal slaying" and move on to the next piece of bad news. Besides -- "sectarian violence" fits the Iraq civil war story so much better than does the execution of terrorists!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 14, 2006, at the time of 02:25 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

Who Wants Civil War?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Over the weekend, I was going to write about this good news from Iraq, that the Iraqi Army's 3rd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 6th Iraq Army Division has just taken over security in Sadr City. But before I had a chance, I heard this bad news: multiple car bombs (accounts differ as to how many) exploded in Sadr City, killing 58 and wounding more than 200. These bombings have al-Qaeda's and Zarqawi's fingerprints all over them.

It is curious though, why al-Qaeda would choose to bomb that particular place at just such a time.

Sadr City is the stronghold of the notorious Muqtada Sadr and home-base of his militia, the Mahdi "army." In fact, Sadr City is actually (unofficially) named after Sadr's father, who is far more respected, even revered, than Sadr himself has ever been: Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr. The city is practically run by the militia, since the locals do not trust the Iraqi army or the police.

Saadoun al-Sahl, a furniture shop owner, said he counted on private militiamen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to shield him from a recent surge of sectarian killing that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.

“They protect us better than any security agency,” he said. “If I or anyone has a problem, we go to the Mahdi Army to solve it.”

(The similarity to how the Mafia used to "rule" Italian neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, taking the place of police, is striking.)

Right after the Februrary 22, 2006 bombing of the al-Askariya Mosque (the Golden Mosque) in Samarra, Sadr's "men in black" took up arms and launched a number of attacks on Sunni mosques -- some of which used to be Shiite mosques but were forcibly converted by Saddam Hussein. Yet, the Interior Ministry made a deal to have the Mahdi Army to secure the city:

The Shiite-led Interior Ministry, which oversees police, agreed to work with the Mahdi Army in the aftermath of the shrine bombing. Al-Sadr followers in black trousers and yellow button-down shirts manned checkpoints and searched pedestrians with metal detector wands during an unusual daytime curfew that helped curb the worst of the violence.

It is hardly coincidental that the Interior Ministry is run by interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari, also the UIA candidate for permanent prime minister... and who is strongly backed by (surprise!) Muqtada Sadr.

It looks like the Mahdi Army has gained quite a bit of prestige and power, thanks to Zarqawi's group al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia. But now that the Iraqi Army is here, the Mahdi must step aside or be pushed aside. The American-trained army is tough -- unlike the Iraqi police. In fact Col. Hussain Muhsein, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the Iraqi Army, insisted there would be no deals with Mahdi Army:

“The Iraq army does not cooperate with any militias,” Muhsein said. “We follow the orders of the Ministry of Defense.”

Then the Monday bombings occurred. Perfect timing, is it not? If anyone wanted to embarrass the Iraqi Army and increase the appeal of the Mahdi militia, he could not have planned it better. In fact... it's almost as if al-Qaeda and Muqtada Sadr are in cahoots with each other. How is it that multiple car bombs could slip through the cordon of the Iraqi Army surrounding Sadr City? Could this be an inside job carried out by Shia, not Sunnis?

After all, the Mahdi militia needn't slip past anyone: they already control those streets.

Scott from Security Watchtower is asking the same questions:

This attack specifically targeted civilians at markets and is clearly intended to provoke further sectarian fighting and a Shiia response against Sunnis. My initial reaction is to question how four car bombs could've been driven into Sadr City when (1) there is security in and around the Shi'ite neighborhood, (2) there is somewhat limited road accessibility and (3) security forces would have to be in a heightened state of alert due to the sectarian fighting and realize the neighborhood was a target. Amer al-Husseini, a cleric who serves as an aide to al-Sadr, is quoted in Sunday's Independent Online saying "after Sadr City's reaction to the bombing of our holy shrine we were expecting attacks."

One of the terrorists is reportedly an African. How could such an obvious foreigner be free to drive a car filled with explosives through such a close-knit community without the Mahdi miltia noticing?

It is a given that al-Qaeda wants civil war in "the land between two rivers" (Mesopotamia, another name for Iraq). They thrive on chaos and discord. They don't even care who kills whom, so long as Iraq is thrown into turmoil; al-Qaeda can hide and bide and operate in the shadows. Plenty of time to seize control when order collapses... as they did in Sudan and during the civil war in Afghanistan.

That is why they have been trying so desperately to start a sectarian war; but no one has taken the bait. No one, that is, except Muqtada Sadr.

Civil war is also good for Sadr. He doesn't care how many Sunni die, nor even how many Shia: his aim all along has been to become the new Caliph of the Shia, if not all Iraq. Mind, Sadr has denied ordering the attacks on the Sunni mosques; he even called for calm after Monday's attacks (which especially makes sense if he were complicit in them). But such doubletalk is Sadr's stock in trade. As Charles Bronson says in Breakheart Pass, "if a man is a thief and a murderer, it follows he may be a liar as well."

What is happening in Iraq is nothing like a real civil war. There are no armies taking the field against each other. Contrast it with the American civil war, where more than three and a half million troops deployed against each other -- and over half a million soldiers died -- at a time when the American population was only 1.3 times the size of Iraq's population today.

What we see in Iraq is instead a strange and creepy dance between Zarqawi and Sadr. They both want the same thing for now: Armageddon in Iraq. But just as Sunni "insurgents" have leant a bitter lesson, Sadr will also soon discover that Zarqawi destroys everything he touches.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 13, 2006, at the time of 02:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Brits to Reduce Its Forces in Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Polling Keeps a-Rolling
Hatched by Sachi

According to a recent Zogby poll, 72% of U.S. troops believe we should withdraw from Iraq within an year. As Dafydd said, I wish they had asked the troops why.

Today, Britain announced that they are reducing the forces in Iraq by 10 percent. Why?

Because, says Defence Secretary John Reid, "This is a significant reduction which is based largely on the ability of the Iraqis themselves to participate and defend themselves against terrorism, but there is a long, long way to go."

LONDON (AP) - Britain said Monday it will cut its forces in Iraq by 10 percent - a reduction of about 800 troops - by May because Iraqi security forces are becoming more capable of handling security. Defense Secretary John Reid said Britain's commitment to the Iraqi people "remains total"....

Britain had 46,000 military personnel in Iraq during combat operations in March and April 2003. That dropped to 18,000 in May 2004, and to 8.500 at the end of 2005...

At the time of the last withdrawal of British troops in October, Reid said there were 190,000 members of Iraqi security forces trained and equipped. Now the total is 235,000, and 5,000 more joined every month, he said.

Had Zogby troubled to ask the follow-up question, our troops might have said the same thing. Ah, but that's not what they wanted to hear, was it?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 13, 2006, at the time of 02:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 08, 2006

Wanted: Sunni Police Recruits

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Following up on our earlier post, Year of the Police , we continue our look at the American effort to shape up the militia-infested Iraqi police force. The New York Times reports that this task has turned out to be rather difficult.

But it's still good news, because whenever we recognize a problem and "focus like a laser beam," it's well on its way to being solved. "Well begun is half done," as Mary Poppins said.

During last week's sectarian skirmishes, the Iraqi Army, trained by Americans, brought order back to the streets. The army behaved in such an exemplary fashion that Iraqis were both impressed and relieved all across the nation. Not a single soldier abandoned his post and joined the mobs.

By contrast, however, many Iraqi Security Forces -- the police under the Interior Ministry -- stood by and did nothing:

After the bombing, mobs led by Shiite militiamen attacked dozens of Sunni mosques and left hundreds dead. Many police units stood aside, either out of confusion or sectarian loyalties, according to Iraqi witnesses. Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, said Friday that police officers had allowed militiamen through checkpoints in eastern Baghdad, where much of the violence occurred.

We had made a conscious decision to train the army first, leaving the police for later. But "later" is now, and Americans are beginning to implement a number of changes to shape up the Security Force:

  • We are implementing quotas to recruit more Sunnis into the police academies. At the moment, although Shia are only 60% of the population of Iraq, virtually the entire Security Force (99%) are Shiite. This leads to the belief among Sunni and Kurd that the Security Forces are really just the Shiite Forces, and that they will not enforce the law against the Shia -- just against everybody else.
  • We are forcing the Interior Ministry to start "firing Shiite police commanders who appear to tolerate militias." This is a no-brainer; it would be like having captains in the Los Angeles Police Department who have strong ties to the Crips or Bloods. Obviously such people have to go, and they have to go immediately. And humiliatingly... they need not only to be ousted but to lose face; otherwise, they'll be back as soon as our backs are turned.
  • We are forming at least 200 "training teams" of American MPs and retired civilian police. These teams will be sent to Iraqi police stations, even those in locations so remote, they think of themselves more as warlords or tribal chiefs than national police.

The American effort to balance the police forces has met with strong oposition from Shia in the Interior Ministry, which is controlled by Interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, nominated by the Islamic Dawa Party of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) to be permanent prime minister. Al-Jaafari bristles at the idea that the Americans might reform the Security Forces... though he appears happy that we reformed the Iraqi Army:

There is no quick or painless fix. The efforts risk alienating Shiite politicians, who have fiercely resisted attempts to wrest away their control of the security forces. The moves may appeal, though, to recalcitrant Sunni Arabs, whom the Americans want to draw into the political process...

Officials at the most powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI, also part of the UIA], which oversees the Interior Ministry, have lashed out at the Americans, arguing that the majority Shiites had every right to control security, because Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government had used the army and the police to abduct, torture and kill Shiites.

This attitude raises the disturbing possiblity that many in the Interior Ministry see the police as their mechanism for taking revenge against Sunnis in general for decades of tyranny by the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein. Such a program of vengeance would almost certainly cause Iraq to splinter into warring factions... particularly since renegade "cleric" Muqtada Sadr is behind much of the militia infiltration -- and is also responsible for al-Jaafari being nominated as the UIA's candidate for permanent prime minister.

The police units most plagued by militas are the paramilitary forces. No coincidence, the paramilitaries are the units that Shiite politicians are especially keen on personally controlling. The paramilitaries, equivalent to the FBI combined with nationwide "SWAT" teams, operate all over Iraq; they do not have specific districts or jurisdictions.

Sunnis accuse the Interior Ministry of sponsoring secret death squads, who may not actually be police, but who have the disconcerting ability to get hold of paramilitary uniforms when necessary. These death squads -- who also often wear all black and are typically referred to as "men in black" by Sunnis -- kill Sunni clerics, seize Sunni mosques (frequently mosques that used to be Shiite until they were seized and converted by Saddam Hussein) and terrorize ordinary Iraqi citizens, both Sunni and Shia who dare to speak up against them.

In a perfect illustration of the problem, just today, a number of these "men in black" -- again this time wearing police "commando" (paramilitary) uniforms -- kidnapped as many as fifty Iraqi Sunni members of a security company that guarded many businesses in Iraq, including a major cell-phone company:

Gunmen in Interior Ministry commando uniforms stormed the offices of a private security company and kidnapped as many as 50 employees Wednesday, while U.S. and Iraqi patrols reported the discovery of 24 shot or garroted bodies in the capital....

Unidentified attackers hit the al-Rawafid Security Co. at 4:30 p.m. and forced the workers into seven vehicles, including several white SUVs, said Interior Ministry Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi. The victims, including bodyguards, drivers, computer technicians and other employees, did not resist because they assumed their abductors were police special forces working for the Interior Ministry, al-Mohammedawi said.

Interior Ministry Undersecretary Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Khefaji denied any involvement by his department, saying: "It is a terrorist act."

It may well be "a terrorist act;" and the kidnappers may be militia members, likely working for Sadr, and not actually police paramilitaries. But where did they get the uniforms? And without Interior Ministry support, or at least sympathy, why have such militias not been broken up?

When the new police force was formed, the Americans did not require monitoring of the police recruits' religious sect. The Shia took advantage, and the Security Force is now 99% Shia. This staggering overrepresentation of Shia is a festering problem that must be addressed:

American officers say that when they try to talk to Iraqi commanders about the religious or ethnic breakdown of the forces, the commanders tend to shy away from those conversations, as most Iraqis do, saying they prefer to think of themselves as one people rather than in terms of sect.

They may be shy of talking about it, but they are certainly not shy of acting according to their sect's interest.

For much of last year, the Second Public Order Brigade had a particularly bad reputation. It was accused by many Iraqis, especially Sunni Arabs, of detainee torture and illegal killings. Its ranks were filled with men recruited from eastern Baghdad who were loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric who had led two rebellions against the Americans.

This year, we are dramatically increasing the number of American advisors embedded in each Iraqi police batallion, both in the cities and the remote police outposts. I am hopeful that this mentoring program will work; however, the core problem is not the police -- it is the Interior Ministry itself.

The Shiite politicians in the ministry are terribly corrupt with strong ties to militias such as the Mahdi "Army" of Sadr. Until those politicians can think outside of their tribal and religious affiliations -- "as one people rather than in terms of sect" -- fixing the police alone will not solve the problem. If we and the Iraqis don't also fix the Interior Ministry itself, then as soon as the Americans leave, the police will go right back to their old ways.

We urgently need to help the Iraqis institute a culture withing the Security Forces that respects rule of law, not tribal rule. They must deploy a merit system and eschew nepotism. In the old Iraqi Army and police of the Tikriti Saddam Hussein, the ranks were filled with relatives and friends of influential politicians. This is the culture we must eradicate. There is no room in the modern world for "Hutu and Tutsi"-ism.

But in order to do that, the Interior Ministry itself must start hiring more Sunni politicians and cease being the personal fiefdom of "leaders" like al-Jaafari. That will certainly be even harder than reforming the police.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 08, 2006, at the time of 02:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 06, 2006

Al-Jaafari Must Step Down to Unify Iraq

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), is the leading candidate for next Iraqi Prime Minister; but he is stirring up a hornet's nest across Iraq: the Kurds don’t like him; the Sunnis hate him; and secular Iraqis fear him. Even the top Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- a strong proponent of a unified Iraq -- is suggesting al-Jaafari step aside.

Now that Iraq transitional President Jalal Talabani has decided to call the newly elected permanent parliament into session, starting the countdown for forming the government, the UIA has only a short period of time to decide whether to fight to install al-Jaafari over the objections of everyone else or compromise with al-Jaafari's rival, current Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), who is widely acceptable among the various sects in Iraq.

Iraq's president said Monday he would convene the new parliament for the first time next week, beginning a 60-day countdown for lawmakers to elect a new head of state and sign off on a prime minister and Cabinet.

After nightfall, nine key Shiite parliamentarians rushed to an emergency meeting at President Jalal Talabani's Baghdad home to try to change his mind about forcing a showdown in the deepening political crisis and further inflaming sectarian tensions.

Talabani openly opposes al-Jaafari's nomination and is likely forcing the Shia's hand, hoping they will blink.

Talabani, a Kurd, said al-Jaafari was too divisive a figure.

"We want a prime minister who can gather all the political blocs around him, so that the government would be one of national unity," he told a news briefing in Baghdad.

Many believe al-Jaafari is behind a series of killings targeting prominent Sunni clerics and former Baath members, under the guise of the Interior Ministry’s Security Forces, which are infested with Iranian influenced militiamen. Al-Jaafari, of the Islamic Dawa Party (within the UIA coalition), was strongly backed in the Shiite caucus by militia leader Muqtada Sadr, the anti-American militant who occupied Najaf, Sadr City, and Basra during a failed "uprising" in March of 2004, timed to coincide with a similar surge of violence in Sunni Fallujah.

Sadr opposed the Iraqi constitution, supports a "sharia" state, and has consistently been connected with Iran -- and just as persistently, his spokesmen have denied it. However, less than a month ago, Sadr threatened another uprising if the U.S. were to attack Iran:

"If America attacks Iran, there will be a reaction in Iraq, and also if America stays in Iraq, there will be another uprising," he warned.

This does not prove that al-Jaafari follows Iran's lead, of course. And as Omar of Iraq the Model notes, even the main rival Shiite party within the UIA, the SCIRI, has a strong Iranian connection:

I'm not sure if you're familiar with this but did you know the internal charter of the SCIRI states that the party reports to the Murshid, who currently is Khamena'i?

"Khamena'i" refers to Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader of Iran. This isn't exactly surprising, as the SCIRI was formed in 1982 under exile in Iran, where the Iranians recognized it as the "legitimate" rulers of Iraq during the war with Iran. For more than twenty years, the SCIRI was based in Teheran.

Yet despite that, secular Shiia prefer the SCIRI candidate, Abdul-Mahdi; he is equally strong within the Shiite caucus as al-Jaafari but not connected to the notorious Muqtada Sadr.

Abdul-Mahdi lost in the Shiite caucus by one vote to al-Jaafari, who won with the support of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Abdul-Mahdi is backed by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a powerful Shiite leader who is frequently at odds politically with al-Sadr. Both have strong militias behind them.

Underlining the divisions within the Alliance, some Shiite leaders are troubled by al-Jaafari's ties to the radical and openly anti-American al-Sadr.

And the most influential Shia in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has indicated (through an anonymous spokesman, to distance the cleric from the political nature of the announcement) that he would prefer it if al-Jaafari voluntarily withdraw his candidacy:

Two lawmakers from al-Jaafari's Dawa Party hinted Saturday that they got an endorsement for their leader during a meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric.

But a senior al-Sistani aide, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the dispute, said Sunday that the spiritual leader indirectly suggested al-Jaafari step aside.

Abdul-Mahdi may well be a better man to be prime minsiter than al-Jaafari, despite belonging to the SCIRI: although he was exiled from Baathist Iraq, it was in 1969, thirteen years before the SCIRI was formed; and he spent his exile in France, not revolutionary Iran. France is not exactly friendly to American interests; in fact, Ayatollah Khomeini himself was exiled in France before the 1979 Iranian revolution brought him back to rule his home country. But Socialist France is certainly less radical than the Iranian mullahcracy.

The SCIRI is controlled by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim; and the entire al-Hakim family hates Muqtada Sadr (and his followers, including al-Jaafari). Because of the pre-existing rivalry, some of them hold Sadr responsible, or at least complicit, in the 2003 assassination of al-Hakim's brother, the revered Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, who ran the SCIRI until his death.

(The U.S., on the other hand, believes the massive car-bomb was actually planted by Musab Zarqawi and his al-Qaeda In Iraq; the Iraqis claim that Zarqawi's bombmaker -- Abu Omar al-Kurdi -- has confessed to the bombing while in U.S. custody since January 2005.)

Regardless, Adel Abdul-Mahdi opposes Sadr, supports a unified Iraq and the Iraqi constitution, and is more friendly to America than Ibrahim al-Jaafari. I believe many Iraqi politicians are members of political factions based more upon tribal connections than actual ideological agreement; Abdul-Mahdi is probably closer in philosophy to al-Dawa, and al-Jaafari would probably feel more at home in the SCIRI -- sort of like Zell Miller vs. Lincoln Chafee.

Of course, the UIA does not have the two thirds majority in the incoming Iraqi parliament required to push their candidate through; they would need votes from Kurds, Sunnis, and secular Shia (who themselves would likely prefer Achmed Chalabi -- who has also been connected with Sadr, and who also denies it). Even so, the UIA so far seems quite determined to try, and that frets many people, including Omar:

What really worries me here is that the UIA knows this mechanism which is stated in the constitution yet they refuse to change their mind which makes one suspect they have no intention to compromise and they want to do some arm-twisting telling the others to 'either accept Jafari or face the danger of halting the entire political process'. [Emphasis added]

They're playing a very dangerous game that only those who don't care for the unity of the country would dare play.

If the UIA withdraws al-Jaafari and substitutes Abdul-Mahdi, he would likely sail through with little opposition. This would unify Iraq behind the nascent government, surely the best response to the bombing of the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra -- likely engineered by Zarqawi in order to shove Iraq into civil war. Zarqawi has already failed in the civil war plan: if the bombing of the Golden Mosque didn't do it, then neither will anything else that Zarqawi can do. But still, it would be a wonderful blow to the Iraq-War doubters were the Shia to put together a respected and widely accepted government that unified the country and was even pro-America.

Contrariwise, a candidate like al-Jaafari, who divides Iraq into nearly hysterical opposing camps, is very, very bad not only for Iraq but for America's plan to democratize the Middle East.

The UIA is quite open about preferring Sharia to secular law, though they also insist they do not want Iraq to be controlled by Iran. But do they support a unified Iraq? Omar worries that they may be planning for a country divided along sectarian grounds:

The UIA have made it clear that what they want is to either rule the whole country in the way like or rule part of Iraq in the way they like; more precisely in the way their religious references in Najaf and Tehran.

Omar is concerned that the UIA would be perfectly willing to break Iraq into a Shiite sector, a Kurdish sector, and then a weak and economically crippled "Saddamist" sector in the middle -- Omar notes that the UIA uses "Saddamists" the same way they use "Shia," implying that all Sunnis are Baathists.

Now that the power of foreign terrorists is waning in Iraq, Iraninan influenced domestic militias are becoming a more serious problem for Iraq and America. Just as there are Baathist Sunni "bitter enders," who really do want Saddam back, there are also Iraqi Shia who want to see a Teheran-style regime enforcing Shiite sharia on everyone... and they may be willing to settle for a piece of Iraq under sharia rather than the whole under a secular government.

We are going to have to clean up the Interior Ministry and their Security Forces very soon now; we need a "come to Jesus" meeting with the Shia in Iraq. And of course, we must get rid of the vile Muqtada Sadr by any means necessary.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 06, 2006, at the time of 05:22 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 03, 2006

Lessons Learned In the Propaganda War

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

After last December's flap over the Coalition paying Iraqi newspapers to plant "propaganda" -- which is what the New York Times labeled truthful, pro-democracy stories -- even an optimist could be excused for thinking we would, quite naturally, abandon this necessary tactic, due to the drubbing the administration took at the hands of the Antique Media.

(You should remember; this was the biggest scandal of the century, until the NSA al-Qaeda intercepts became the biggest scandal of the century, which was right before the renewal of the Patriot Act became the BSotC, followed quickly by the Dubai Ports deal and the "new" videotape of Bush not being warned that the New Orleans levees would breach.)

The press howled in idealistic outrage, perhaps fretting that we were violating the Iraqis' sacred First Amendment rights; and I, along with most, sighed and assumed that, just like data mining (à la Able Danger), here was one more tool from our toolbox that we would throw into the dustbin of history.

Well, not so! The U.S. military, under Rear Adm. Scott Van Buskirk, actually investigated what we were and were not doing. This is a radical step that the media could not steel themselves to take, preferring to base their stories on rumor and inuendo; they printed many irresponsible and counter-factural howlers, which Big Lizards, among others, documented, here and here).

Lo and behold, after reveiwing RADM Van Buskirk and his report, Army Gen. George Casey, commander of all forces in the region, has decided to continue the practice (and he probably told Buskirk to shine his shoes):

The U.S. military will continue to pay Iraqi media to publish reports favorable to American forces following an investigation into the controversial practice, the top U.S. general in Iraq said on Friday....

Casey said he had not issued an order to halt the payments.

"And, right now, based on the results of the investigation, I do not intend to in the near term," he said.

At a time when everyone agrees al-Qaeda and other terrorists in Iraq are winning the propaganda war (that we keep declining to fight), it was literally deranged for the American news media to demand that we stop the only small bit that we were doing, paying for some good and truthful press. Evidently, the Los Angeles Times (which broke the story) and the New York Times (which wrote up a wider examination of it) thought that, if only we would stop planting stories, that would make the Iraqi press more "free"... beause then, only the anti-democratic terrorists would be paying for stories. (The New York Times will want to charge you $3.95 to read the old article... but you can read the Big Lizards discussion of it for free!)

I don't quite follow the logic of that, but I'm sure there must be some.

In any event, we will continue paying for publication, a standard practice in the Moslem world, for the forseeable future; and perhaps at last we're getting off the mark -- winning victories for the vaunted "hearts and minds" as well as on the battlefield.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 03, 2006, at the time of 05:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 01, 2006

On That Doggone ZogOn Poll

Iraq Matters , Polling Keeps a-Rolling
Hatched by Dafydd

Correction: see below.

Hugh Hewitt is all exercised about the new Zogby poll that leads off with the shocker-header:

U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006!! [Silly exclamation points added, of course, but are in keeping with the Zogby writeup. -- the Mgt]

Hugh seems to support the idea that this poll was deliberately skewed -- well, certainly Zogby's writeup was! -- and might even have been invented out of whole cloth. But we don't need to go anywhere near that far; and indeed, Occam's Razor warns us not to overreach for an explanation.

It does bring to mind an aphorism, however, aimed directly at liberals who plan on using this "data" in their crusade for immediate withdrawal: when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

I am quite certain that Zogby's strengthened all the "anti-war" findings and downplayed those that might be considered "pro-war," took great liberties in interpretation, and heavily weighted the sample to pre-select for specific results; such slovenly polling has been Zogby's stock in trade ever since the Bush administration began... and it shows in his poor prognostication: Hugh points us to an article on Cybercast News Service (which leans right) shortly after the 2004 election that highlighted Zogby's ludicrous "prediction" that Kerry would win 311 electoral votes, possibly including Virginia, thus winning the election in a landslide.

But in fact, in this case, I absolutely believe his poll results might be exactly correct... with one caveat, below. Here are the major results that Zogby announces:

  • Only 20% of the troops want to "heed Bush call to stay 'as long as they are needed'
  • 42% say the U.S. mission is unclear, "hazy"
  • A plurality believes most of the "insurgents" are native Iraqis, but they don't blame ordinary Iraqis for the violence
  • 90% think a major purpose of the war is retaliation for "Saddam's role in 9/11"
  • Most troops oppose using "harsh prisoner interrogation"
  • A plurality are satisfied with their weapons and armor

Stunned? Think the lizard is shedding his scales? What we all have to understand is that you can get any poll result you want -- provided you ask the right questions. The exact wording of the question matters; changing the wording even slightly can flip the results.

For example, consider the difference between asking, "do you believe the president has the right, all on his own, to spy on American citizens without a warrant?" -- versus asking, "do you believe the administration has the authority to intercept phone calls and e-mails from suspected al-Qaeda agents to targets in the United States?"

I put it to you that the first question would receive an overwhelming No response, while the second would receive an equally resounding Yes... yet the first can be spun into, "Americans strongly oppose the NSA intercept program," while the second would yield, "Americans strongly support the NSA intercept program."

That is why it is so critical that we learn the exact questions asked. I will now play a little game... I will construct a series of questions that are reasonable, seem to fit the context of the responses -- yet which could easily yield the exact result spread that Zogby reported, even among our military in Iraq. Ready?

  1. Should American forces remain at the current levels indefinitely, or should we begin drawing down our troops as the Iraqi Army grows more effective? If the latter, when do you expect we should start drawing down our forces? (Immediately/Six months/One year/Longer)
  2. Do you, personally, plan to stay "as long as it takes," even if that means years? Or do you hope to rotate out sooner than that? When do you hope to return home? (Immediately/Six months/One year/Longer)
  3. Has the long-term military strategy been explained to you, or are you only really familiar with your area of operation?
  4. Do foreign fighters constitute a majority of insurgents, or are the insurgents mostly Iraqis?
  5. Which of these are the major reasons for our military presence in Iraq? You may check as many as you wish: (To prevent Saddam Hussein from helping terrorists/To secure and remove any WMD/Because Iraq was in violation of the cease-fire agreement that ended the Gulf War/Because Iraq was firing upon our airplanes/Because Iraq was in violation of U.N. resolutions/Because Iraq played a role with al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks/To stabilize the Middle East/To establish a democracy after the occupation)
  6. Do you believe we should interrogate insurgents using techniques banned by the Geneva Convention?
  7. Do you believe your weapons and armor are adequate to your mission, or would you prefer heavier weapons and thicker armor?

Notes

The first question would be interpreted by some soldiers as what they think we ought to do, come what may; by others as what ought to happen, assuming things continue on the path they're going now; and by other others as what they expect to happen.

Some will interpret "drawing down our troops" as a gradual reduction: "as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Others will think it means yank everyone out precipitously.

Or alternatively, Zogby's analysis -- "Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll shows just one in five troops want to heed Bush call to stay 'as long as they are needed'” -- could refer entirely to question 2, whether the individual soldier personally wants to stay that long, or whether he hopes to rotate home sooner than that.

Until and unless we see the exact wording, we have no way even to guess what individual soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines thought they were answering when they picked a timeframe.

~

As far as being hazy about the overall strategy... well, perhaps this comes as a shock to Mr. Zogby, but the military rarely briefs the grunts about overall strategy of each phase of a military operation.

They're briefed on their own piece of the pattern, probably more thoroughly today than at any time in our history. But I doubt the guys in the South are given a full briefing on the Anbar campaign, and those guys don't get a high-level lecture on exactly what we're doing in the Kurdish north. Since most members of the military are enlisted or junior officers, not flag-rank officers, most won't have been told by the military what the overall strategy is.

That means their only method of finding out is the same way we do: by reading or watching the MSM, by listening to talk radio, and by reading blogs. But our boys and girls over there are probably somewhat busy... and I'll bet they don't have a lot of time to do any of those. So it's actually amazing to me that as many as 58% think they have a pretty good handle on our strategy. I'm sure that number would have been less than half that during World War II!

~

And of course most of the "insurgents" are Iraqis... because the Secretary of Defense has carefully drawn a distinction between native insurgents, like the Sadrites, and foreign terrorists, like Musab Zarqawi. This is a no-brainer: the troops just answered the way they had been taught (and I'll bet Zogby used the word "insurgents," too -- since that is the word he used in his writeup).

~

Some of our troops probably believe that Saddam Hussein was specifically complicit in 9/11; others (including myself, though I'm not a "troop") believe Iraq was in bed with al-Qaeda in many ways and may even have known about the 9/11 attack in advance, and are therefore accessories. Some might read "9/11" and mentally translate that to "terrorist attack;" since Iraq has, indeed, attacked us using terrorism. Or it's possible that the Zogby question didn't even specify the 9/11 attack, but just referred to al-Qaeda or terrorist attacks. We don't know, because John Zogby won't tell us.

~

All of the above is why I consider this poll worthless: not because it was paid for and undertaken on behalf of the Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies; not because Zogby is a notorious liberal and Bush-basher; not because his brother James Zogby is an even more notorious Arabist; and not because Zogby might have just made the whole thing up (I think that is extraordinarily unlikely). [This paragraph contains a correction; James Zogby is an Arabist, not an Islamist; he is a Maronite Christian... but he is the founder and president of the Arab-American Institute.]

It is valueless because, without knowing the exact questions, the order in which they were asked, the demography of the respondents, the time period during which the poll was conducted, and what background information they gave or asked commanders to give, we have no context by which to understand what the responding military personnel meant by their responses.

Until Zogby is more transparent and forthcoming, there is no point in dwelling on this silly poll... though I agree with Hugh that it will be the lead story for at least a week in the Antique Media. When it comes up in conversation, all you need do is fix the liberal who cited it with a steely gaze and ask, "what were the exact questions they asked, please?"

When he admits he has no idea, you say, "then just like in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you can't possibly know what the answer '42' means, can you?"

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 01, 2006, at the time of 06:42 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 27, 2006

Saddam's WMD - the Company Strikes Back

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The information in our previous post, which came proximately from the Investor's Business Daily, appears to have begun with an article by Kenneth R. Timmerman on NewsMax last Sunday, February 19th (based upon a talk the previous day by John A. Shaw at the Intelligence Summit, a non-governmental convention).

Ordinarily, I wouldn't trust NewsMax; but I do trust Timmerman, who has done bravura work in this area and is a very reputable journalist. Timmerman is the author of several well-received books, most recently Countdown to Crisis : The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

John A. Shaw is hardly a partisan, a radical, or a bomb-thrower:

Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the events he described [on February 18th, 2006] occurred [shortly after major combat operations ended in 2003].

Shaw was originally tasked with figuring out what happened to the weapons and WMD programs that Saddam undeniably had after the first Gulf War. But as he was tracking these weapons, he began to develop sources independent of the CIA- and State Department-controlled Iraqi Survey Group:

But as Shaw's office increasingly got involved in ongoing intelligence to identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he also got "a flow of information from British contacts on the ground at the Syrian border and from London" via non-U.S. government contacts.

"The intelligence included multiple sightings of truck convoys, convoys going north to the Syrian border and returning empty," he said. [All emphasis added, here and elsewhere.]

Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British ambassador who had decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed Ukranian-American who was directly plugged in to the head of Ukraine's intelligence service.

The Ukrainians were eager to provide the United States with documents from their own archives on Soviet arms transfers to Iraq and on ongoing Russian assistance to Saddam, to thank America for its help in securing Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union, Shaw said.

Shaw passed along what he was learning to the CIA... and according to Shaw, the CIA not only brushed off the data, they smeared everyone responsible for passing it along, including Shaw himself. In fact, the CIA dismissed it as "Israeli disinformation."

They accused Shaw of having "eaten from the DIA 'rice bowl,'" meaning Shaw had stepped into the turf of the Defense Intelligence Agency. But the sly insinuation that Israelis were behind it all makes me think that elements of the CIA have eaten from the Arabist "rice bowl": Arab spokesmen, and American and British officials in Arab countries who have "gone native," invariably attribute anything they don't want to hear to Zionist propaganda.

I find this very disturbing, as well as efforts by Bush administration officials (such as Larry DiRita, DoD spokesman) to trash Shaw and his sources, according to Shaw:

"Larry DiRita made sure that this story would never grow legs," Shaw said. "He whispered sotto voce [quietly] to journalists that there was no substance to my information and that it was the product of an unbalanced mind."

We'll discuss a possible reason for the actions of the CIA and sub-cabinet level members of the administration later. First, let's get to the meat fo what Shaw reported.

The information Shaw passed along to the CIA and the administration included the following major points:

  • A Soviet general with a close working relationship with Saddam Hussein, Yevgeni Primakov, traveled to Iraq in 2002, leaving shortly after the U.S. invasion began.

    Primakov orchestrated the execution of secret agreements Hussein had concluded with Russia, years earlier, to remove the Russian-supplied and otherwise obtained WMD from Iraq, along with all traces of its existence, in the event of a probable American attack. This would allow Russia to guarantee Iraq was "WMD-free," thus delaying or even stymying Operation Iraqi Freedom.

    American intelligence officers knew about these agreements, which were dubbed Sarandar, or "emergency exit."
  • Primakov brought out two trusted, retired Soviet-era generals -- Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev -- who, as "commercial consultants," supervised GRU (the independent Main Intelligence Directorate of both the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation) and Spetsnaz (SpecOps) troops, along with other Russian military and civilian personnel. The forces operated in civilian clothing, disguised as contractors.

    Maltsev and Achatov had visited Baghdad "no fewer than 20 times" since 1997, and U.S. intelligence was well aware of their connection to Hussein, the GRU, and Spetsnaz. They had all gathered earlier at a planning conference in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan; the conference was "chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu."
  • Sarandar comprised truck convoys, possible Russian commercial air flights, and a pair of Russian ships, which sailed from Umm Qasr to dump "stockpiles of Iraqi WMD" into the Indian Ocean.

The purpose of Sarandar was quite explicit, according to Shaw:

The goal of the clean-up was "to erase all trace of Russian involvement" in Saddam's WMD programs, and "was a masterpiece of military camouflage and deception."

Now back to the burning question. This is explosive stuff that would, were it verified, completely vindicate President Bush's decision to invade Iraq... even for those who believed that Iraq's supposed possession of WMD was the sole legitimate reason to attack. So why would not only the CIA but even the spokesman of the Department of Defense, Larry DiRita, have gone to such pains to trash the intel, smear anyone involved, and try to fob off all the information and all the sources as Israeli stooges?

Shaw suggested that the answer of why the Bush administration had systematically "ignored Russia's involvement" in evacuating Saddam's WMD stockpiles "could be much bigger than anyone has thought," but declined to speculate what exactly was involved.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was less reticent. He thought the reason was Iran.

"With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear programs," he told NewsMax, "the administration needed the Russians, the Chinese and the French, and was not interested in information that would make them look bad."

McInerney agreed that there was "clear evidence" that Saddam had WMD. "Jack Shaw showed when it left Iraq, and how."

If Shaw's claims about the CIA reaction are accurate, then there is an eerie parallel to claims of CIA stifling of another urgent story that also involves Iran: the level of Iranian involvement in the 9/11 attacks themselves. Half of Big Lizards (Dafydd ab Hugh) first discussed this issue on Captain's Quarters back in July, in a post titled It Ain't Even the Quarter; this is a piece that should have been reposted here as a Scaley Classic, but evidently was not... an omission I will remedy in the next two posts, That Ain't the Half of It and It Ain't Even the Quarter.

Kenneth Timmerman, in the Iran book linked above, reports that the CIA went on a rampage of character assassination to quash the idea that there were any high-level meetings between the mullahs of Iran and senior officials of al-Qaeda, including Ayman Zawahiri and even Osama bin Laden's eldest son and heir, Saad bin Laden.

It should be clear by this point that our problem with the CIA's war against the Bush administration has drifted far beyond mere political chicanery and into an actual threat to the United States itself. It is unconscionable that CIA operatives and Bush administration officials should be engaged in actively suppressing intelligence because we're afraid of its effect upon a country that can only be viewed as an enemy of the United States -- an absurdity of bending over backward to accomodate a thuggish, boorish remnant of the Evil Empire.

It is long past time for Bush himself to take the reins, prevent any further attempts to circumscribe acceptable intelligence, and get to the bottom of this bloody affair... not only to exonerate the president's own reputation, but also to protect and secure our nation -- which George W. Bush swore an oath to do.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 27, 2006, at the time of 05:11 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 26, 2006

Saddam's WMD -- Moved to Syria by Russian Special Forces?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

John at Power Line has an incredibly important post up linking an editorial at the Investor's Business Daily -- a very fine newspaper even for political and world events, in addition to its extensive financial listings. From the editorial:

Inconveniently for critics of the war, Saddam made tapes in his version of the Oval Office. These tapes landed in the hands of American intelligence and were recently aired publicly.

The first 12 hours of the tapes — there are hundreds more waiting to be translated — are damning, to say the least. They show conclusively that Bush didn't lie when he cited Saddam's WMD plans as one of the big reasons for taking the dictator out.

Nobody disputes the tapes' authenticity. On them, Saddam talks openly of programs involving biological, chemical and, yes, nuclear weapons.

On the tapes, Hussein is heard being briefed by the scientists responsible for the programs... scientists that the United Nations Special Commission, UNSCOM, were unaware even existed:

Indeed, as late as 2000, Saddam can be heard in his office talking with Iraqi scientists about his ongoing plans to build a nuclear device. At one point, he discusses Iraq's plasma uranium program — something that was missed entirely by U.N. weapons inspectors combing Iraq for WMD.

This is particularly troubling, since it indicates an active, ongoing attempt by Saddam to build an Iraqi nuclear bomb.

"What was most disturbing," said John Tierney, the ex- FBI agent who translated the tapes, "was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission (or UNSCOM, the group set up to look into Iraq's WMD programs)."

Perhaps most chillingly, the tapes record Iraq Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz talking about how easy it would be to set off a WMD in Washington. The comments come shortly after Saddam muses about using "proxies" in a terror attack.

We now believe that the WMD were moved out of Iraq and into Syria and Syria-controlled Lebanon in the months before the war by Russian special forces:

So how was Saddam able to use his "cheat and retreat" tactics without being found out? He had help, according to a former U.S. Defense Department official.

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," said John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense, in comments made at an intelligence summit Feb. 17-20 in Arlington, Va.

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special ops) units out of uniform that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.

This is pretty stunning news... so of course, it's going to be the lead story on all the networks and in every major American newspaper, right? I mean, surely it's more important than Bode Miller's failure to make good on his boasts at the Winter Olympics or whether Bush should have allowed A-rabs to lease cargo operations at six American ports, right?

Let's give it a couple of days and see how many members of the Antique Media pick up on the IBD editorial and start actually reporting on real-world events -- events which retain their currency, not only because claims that "Bush lied, people died" still infect the political dialog like a contagion; but also because if the claims are accurate, then Syria now has access to nuclear, chemical, and biological materials and the ongoing programs and scientists weaponizing them.

Any predictions? My own is that by early next week, Fox News Channel will have reported on this; and by next Sunday, Fox News Channel will have reported on this.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 26, 2006, at the time of 06:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 25, 2006

Iraqi Army Improving, Unless You Read CNN

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

An article Friday on CNN.com falsely implies that the general readiness of Iraqi battalions are dropping:

The only Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded to a level requiring them to fight with American troops backing them up, the Pentagon said Friday....

The battalion, according to the Pentagon, was downgraded from "level one" to "level two" after a recent quarterly assessment of its capabilities.

CNN briefly explains what these levels mean, but they miss the main point:

"Level one" means the battalion is able to fight on its own; "level two" means it requires support from U.S. troops; and "level three" means it must fight alongside U.S. troops.

But the fact is that virtually no foreign military units in the world rise to the standard of "Level One" -- even many British units would not be called Level One. The best armies in the world mostly comprise Level Two battalions. Remember, Level One means the battalion can supply its own logistics, intel, air support, MedEvac, administration, and every other aspect of a modern army. An Iraqi Army battalion can be superb fighters, but still require a US satellite uplink to be done by Americans for targeting purposes -- and that alone would make them Level Two.

The reason that the lone Level One Iraqi unit was downgraded was mostly due to a change of command:

Though officials would not cite a specific reason for downgrading the unit, its readiness level has dropped in the wake of a new commander and numerous changes in the combat and support units, officials said.

The battalion is still deployed, and its status as an independent fighting force could be restored any day, Pentagon officials said.

So by saying "the only Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded," what CNN really means is that the unit is still Level Two, but we're not sure how independent it is until the new commander has been "blooded." That's considerably different from the implication CNN clearly intends us to take away.

And wait, haven't we read this before? Yes, indeed, I blogged about it nearly half a year ago, back in Septermber 2005, in a post titled "Slowly But Surely."

In it I wrote:

[A]ccording to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the level of readiness rating keeps on changing depending on a variety of factors.

For example, initial readiness standards two years ago measured numbers of Iraqi troops. Later, those standards were based on the number of trained troops. Later yet, those standards were based on troops who were trained and equipped. As the bar continued to rise, the numbers dipped a bit, giving an impression that readiness was declining, the secretary explained.

Back in September, there were only one or two Level One battalions. Considering that the bar is raised constantly, the fact that the lone Level One battalion in January was downgraded to Level Two in February is not really bad news; it just reflects the changing nature of war and standards.

The really important metric is not how many elite Level One battalions the Iraqi Army has, but the number of competent Level Two battalions. CNN mentions that as an aside, as if it's of no real importance:

According to the congressionally mandated Iraq security report released Friday, there are 53 Iraqi battalions at level two status, up from 36 in October. There are 45 battalions at level three, according to the report.

Level two battalions have increased from 36 to 53, a 47% increase! Isn't that a tremendous achievement? Wars are won by Level Two battalions; Level One is extraordinary.

There is more; according to the same article,

Overall, Pentagon officials said close to 100 Iraqi army battalions are operational, and more than 100 Iraq Security Force battalions are operational at levels two or three. The security force operations are under the direction of the Iraqi government.

The training level of the Iraqi Security Force, which is under the control of the Iraq Interior Ministry, was considerably behind the level of the Iraqi Army under the U.S. Military's control. But even the Iraqi Security Force now has over 100 battalions of Levels Two and Three. That is great news indeed, for all that CNN wants to focus on what it simplistically sees as the negative.

Here is the best news of all: not a single unit of the Iraqi Army has even been accused of participating in the spasm of violence that followed al-Qaeda's destruction of the Golden Dome mosque. Not one.

Some witnesses have claimed that Iraqi Security Force (police) have been spotted attacking Sunni mosques, but not a single unit of the highly professional, American trained, and non-partisan Iraqi Army. Rather, the army acts as a stabilizing influence on the whole country, instead of the instigator of coups or atrocities, as it was in the Baathist era.

William F. Buckley, jr., is simply wrong. He is an old man, he has not been to Iraq, and he is simply wrong. We have won, not lost; and our Iraqi Army program has been the most successful reconstruction project of all. We turned a band of thugs, torturers, and murderers into a professional and civilized military; who, in history, can say as much?

And that is the best news of all.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, February 25, 2006, at the time of 11:53 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Uncivil Streetwar

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Still no sign of actual civil war in Iraq; but Wretchard at the Belmont Club quotes from Zeyad at Healing Iraq (how's that for stacking links?) about some frightening mini-battles that were raging right around Zeyad's neighborhood between Sunni mosque defenders and "men in black" -- which groups might or might not include Shiite members of the Interior Ministry (cops).

Fortunately, the battles were more like skirmishes, and there were not that many confirmed fatalities or casualties. Wretchard concludes (boldface emphasis added):

Thanks to readers data is coming in, such as the update from Zeyad's site and analysis thereof. The value of collateral confirmation and building a timeline is amply demonstrated. Just a few comments:

  • as per Whit, Fox is reporting a peaceful Baghdad with 10,000 Sunnis, Shi'ites marching for peace in Basra.
  • it's probably good to treat Zeyad's report as a series of unconfirmed reports which are being reported verbatim.
  • What can we say for sure or nearly sure?

    • Mosques are a focus of fighting

    • The fighting in his neighborhood has ended for now.

    • The authorities are trying to keep the lid on

    • Reported incident casualties are fairly low.
  • What can we say as probable?

    • There are small groups racing around fighting actions against each other.
  • What's a maybe?

    • Maybe some units of the National Guard are doing their job

    • Maybe some units of the Interior Ministry are in cahoots with militias

Overall what would be reasonable to conclude? There's some unrest, but Baghdad is not burning -- yet -- and the trends while still unclear are not clearly in the direction of all-out fighting.

It sounds like it's still exciting times in Iraq... but they're not quite ready to re-enact Les Miserables yet. The fragile nationhood still holds.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 25, 2006, at the time of 05:40 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 24, 2006

Civil Peace In Iraq - More of the Story

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

As an update of sorts to Sachi's post, Civil War In Iraq? Not So!, we draw your attention to this Power Line entry by Scott Johnson.

With the day-and-night curfew imposed by the government, the violence has by and large ceased. In fact, Iraq has seen a tremendous outpouring of national unity -- surely the very last thing the venomous terrorists expected or wanted.

From Power Line:

Reader Haider Ajina has forwarded us his translation of a two articles and provided his own commentary on the mosque bombing that John wrote about last night. First Haider provides the translations....

"People of Samarah started local campaign to clean up ruble and start rebuilding the bombed Shrine, while other residence joined a demonstration calling for national unity. The crowd chanted 'Not Sunni Not Shiite...one one national unity.' The governor of Salahudien province announced that the province had received four billion Iraqi Dinars (2,800,000 USD) from the National Government & the Sunni Endowment party to help with rebuilding efforts. Local police reported that thousand of residences have voluntarily gathered at the damaged shrine to clean up debris since sun up. [Emphasis added]

"Local police further reported that thousands of local residences formed a demonstration, which headed to city hall. Demonstrators were chanting 'Not Sunni Not Shiite...one one national unity.' The demonstration dispersed by noon with out incidents.

Ajina goes on to say that:

This bombing in Samarah has brought more unity amongst Iraqis than any other incident since the stampede on the Kahdumiah bridge (when Felujans [mostly Sunni] donated blood for the wounded in Kahdumiah [mostly Shiite] in Baghdad). Iraqi political parties, community leaders, religious leaders, political leaders all are strongly condemning this bombing and asking for national support and help for the people of Samarah. This outpouring of compassion, support and help is what is not being reported.

I believe the terrorists took their last, desperate gamble: bombing the Golden Dome mosque was what they had dreaded doing all along, worrying that instead of fomenting uncivil war, they would bring about the very civil peace they fear. And it appears (so far at least) that the jihadis have lost that bet. After the initial spasm of hysterical violence, peace is now busting out all over Iraq.

And that is good news indeed.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 24, 2006, at the time of 06:50 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 23, 2006

Civil War In Iraq? Not So!

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

I never like reporting bad news. But we must face this serious situation in Iraq. In the last 48 hours, already 130 Iraqis have been killed and numerous Sunni mosques bombed. This wave of violence was sparked by the al Qaeda bombing and destruction of the holiest Shiite shrine in Iraq. It seems that Many Shia -- though not necessarily ordinary Shia -- decided to take law in their own hands.

President Talabani condemned attacks on both sides and invited the political leaders of the Iraq factions to attend a meeting; but so far, Sunnis are boycotting:

The U.N. envoy also stepped in, asking Iraqi leaders to join him in a meeting: "I have invited political, religious and civil leaders to discuss confidence-building measures to ensure the situation remains under control," Ashraf Qazi told Reuters.

But the main Sunni political group said it had pulled out of U.S.-backed talks on forming a coalition following December's parliamentary election and leading clerics traded unusually frank sectarian criticisms that may do little to calm passions.

The iraqi government officially declared a curfew from 8pm to 6pm. Shiite leaders are calling for restraint, but to little effect. Mohammed of "Iraq the Model describes the situation in his neighborhood:

In our neighborhood the Sadr militias seized the local mosque and broadcast Shia religious mourning songs from the mosques loudspeakers. In several other cases, worshippers were turned away by "gunmen in black" who surrounded the closed mosques. Other mosques are encircled by razor-wire to stop anyone from approaching them.

So, is this a beginnig of a civi war? Is al-Qaeda's three year campaign finally going to pay off?

Not so fast, I say. To quote Dennis Prager's favorite expression, let's "think a second time." Mohammed continues:

The sense in the streets and the statements given by some Shia clerics suggest that retaliation attacks are organized and under control and are focusing on mosques frequented by Salafi and Wahabi groups and not those of ordinary Sunnis.

Looking at the geographic distribution of the attacked mosques, I found they were mostly in areas adjacent to Sadr city forming a line that extends from the New Baghdad district in the southeast to al-Hussayniya in the northeast.

The Association of Muslim Scholars is accusing the Sadrists in particular, actually it's not only the Association that accuses the Sadrists, most people here in Baghdad point out the role of Mehdi army of Sadr in carrying out most of the attacks.

The Association is trying to remind Sadr of the their times of solidarity during the battles in Najaf and Fallujah yet they are condemning his message to his followers in which he called for keeping up and escalating the "protests".

So, this is Sadr once again. The ever opportunistic Muqtada Sadr and his al Mahdi "army" are taking advantage of the situation. I always thought letting Sadr go after the Najaf offensive was a mistake; this man and his militia must be dealt with once and for all.

If Iraqi citizens are to have any trust in the new government, they must punish Shia as well as Sunni. The Iraqi government must punish Sadr and his militia. They should treat these men the same way they treat al Queda terrorists and Sunni insurgents. This is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that law and order applies to every Iraqi.

The encouraging thing is that Shiite leaders are condemning these acts of violence. Sadr is not getting any support from ordinary Shia. Even Sunni insurgents are not responding with violence, at least so far.

Bill Roggio of the Fourth Rail has an important set of criteria that would signal a full blown civil war in Iraq:

By all indications, the situation in Iraq is tense, and the threat of continued violence is real. The possibility of a full-scale civil war is quite real as emotions are running high over the destruction of the revered Shiite shrine and the retaliation against Sunni mosques.

But the media has not asked or answered the following question: what exactly are the leading indicators for a full blown civil war - meaning the political leadership of the main Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties no longer wish cooperate, and an open and organized battle between the parties ensues?

The following list contains the main lead indicators a full scale civil War in Iraq is underway....

[Long list omitted; you really should read Roggio's post.]

Iraq has yet to encounter any of the problems stated above. [Emphasis added]

This is a terrible test for all Iraqis: if they are to survive as a democratic country, they are going to have to solve this cricis in a firm but restrained and civilized manner, just as Bush calls for in the Reuters article linked above:

"The voices of reason from all aspects of Iraqi life understand that this bombing is intended to create civil strife," Bush said as the military reported seven more U.S. soldiers had been killed in two separate attacks on Wednesday and American forces in Baghdad adopted a low profile.

Let us pray that Iraqi people will continue to respond with reason and the extraordinary patience they've shown so far.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, February 23, 2006, at the time of 05:03 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 04, 2006

Swamp Samurai

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

When we think of Iraq, we typically think of vast deserts torn by vicious sandstorms. But actually, there used to be a huge swampy area in Iraq -- the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial salt marsh, also known as the Iraqi Marsh, or "Eden of Mesopotamia." (Some Biblical archeologists believe this was the actual historical site of Eden in the Bible; and anthropologists agree it certainly was one of the cradles of human civilization.) Around the marsh, all kinds of plants and animals used to flourish... along with an whole culture that Saddam Hussein tried to wipe out: the Marsh Arabs.

The marsh was systematicaly drained by the Baath Party starting in the 1950s, likely to supply aquaduct water to the more favored Sunni farmers (the Marsh Arabs are Shiite). But in 1991, Saddam Hussein escalated the program in retaliation for a massive Shiite uprising against his rule:

[A] more serious threat emerged in 1991, when Saddam Hussein's regime began building an extensive network of dykes and channels to take water away from the marsh area, which originally extended for almost 9,000 sq km.

Satellite images showed that by 2002, the area had shrunk to only 760 sq km; an estimated 70,000 people were forced into camps in Iran.

The displacing of the Marsh Arabs into refugee camps and the destruction of the marsh itself is one of the "crimes against humanity" with which Hussein is charged and will eventually be tried.

When the marsh was destroyed, so was the livlihood and the culture of the Marsh Arabs. However, immediately after the Coalition invasion brought down Hussein's regime, local Marsh people rushed to destroy the dykes. As soon as reconstruction started, one of the earliest goals of the Coalition was to rechannel the river water back to the Iraqi Marsh to reaquify it. The Coalition got the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) involved; and according to the UNEP, by August of 2005, 37% of water had returned to the marsh.

“The near total destruction of the Iraqi marshlands under the regime of Saddam Hussein was a major ecological and human disaster, robbing the Marsh Arabs of a centuries-old culture and way of life as well as food in the form of fish and that most crucial of natural resources, drinking water," said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP Executive Director. “The evidence of their rapid revival is a positive signal, not only for the environment and the local communities who live there, but must be seen as a contribution to wider peace and security for the Iraqi people and the region as a whole.”

One of the forces leading this marsh revival effort is Japan. The government of Japan has already donated 2 million dollars to the project and plans to spend a total of $11 million. According to my online friend Silverlining, who participated in the recent UNEP conference held in Osaka, Japan is allocating an additional one million dollars to the project this year.

Japan's contribution is not just money. Japanese troops have been in southern Iraq since the end of 2003, many months before the UNEP got involved in July of 2004, helping the locals to restore clean water. (The Japanese troops are also helping open medical clinics in Iraq, something Americans rarely hear about: Iraq the Model's Omar once mentioned that the new clinic in Samawa was opened largely due to Japanese troops' direct efforts. Alas, it was some time ago, and we don't have the link.)

A major problem is that the Iraqi Marsh is a salt marsh with a very high sodium content, moreso now than when it was in its prime. In order to alleviate this problem, Japan employs highly technological desalinization equipment, equipment that needs constant maintenance and occasional repairs. (One of the best desalinization programs in the world is in Israel; but for reasons which should be obvious, Israelis cannot be involved with the program in Iraq.)

The good news is that there are many educated Iraqi civil engineers that the UNEP can reliably task to operate and maintain the desalinization plants. One Japanese official candidly told Silverlining that such a program could not possibly work in a place like sub-Saharan Africa, because there simply are not enough people who could keep it running.

Because of the abdication of the Antique Media from any news reporting about Operation Iraqi Freedom (other than an obsession with death counts), Americans and Europeans know virtually nothing about the numerous reconstruction (and construction) projects going on in Iraq. You would think that the American environmentalist groups would be ecstatic that we're busily restoring wetlands in Iraq; but then, as Ann Coulter says, they would have to be on the same side as the United States.

I have known a little about the marsh project due to my Japanese friends; but the details are not easy to ferret out. I am in contact with Silverlining, trying to extract more information from him, and I will keep you posted.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, February 04, 2006, at the time of 05:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 01, 2006

He Said/They Said

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

All the news on Iraqi reconstruction is grim.

Note that I didn't say "Iraqi reconstruction was grim"... I said all the news was grim, that is, the news from the antique media....

Associated Press:

Insurgents Thwarting Iraq Reconstruction
by Jim Krane
Feb 1, 2006

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - Guerrilla attacks in Iraq have forced the cancellation of more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects, in part because American intelligence failed to predict the brutal insurgency, a U.S. government audit said.

American goals to fix Iraq's infrastructure will never be reached, mainly because insurgents have chased away contractors and forced the diversion of repair funds into security, according to an audit of the Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Program released last week.

The New York Times:

Because of unforeseen security costs, haphazard planning and shifting priorities, the American-financed reconstruction program in Iraq will not complete scores of projects that were promised to help rebuild the country, a federal oversight agency reported yesterday.

Washington Post:

As much as 60 percent of all projects aimed at improving Iraq's water supply, including work on sewer systems and drinking water supplies, will remain unfinished because more than $2.1 billion originally allocated to that purpose was shifted away, according to the report.

Projects related to drinking water that were expected to benefit about 8 million people will now benefit about 2.75 million, the report said. And only two of 10 planned sewerage projects will be completed, though they will serve an additional 4.5 million people.

More than 125 of a planned 425 electricity projects will also be left unfinished, a total that reflects a steep reduction, announced previously by U.S. officials, in the goal for increasing Iraq's generating capacity.

Wow, that must have been some humdinger of an indictment of the wretched, corrupt, feckless, and incompetent Bush administration, right? Well take a look at what the actual report from Stuart W. Bowen, Jr., the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction, actually said:

The SIGIR October 2005 Quarterly Report initially examined the “reconstruction gap”— the difference between what was originally planned for reconstruction in the various sectors and what will actually be delivered. This is not an alarm bell but merely an observation of a current reality: changing conditions in Iraq, including deteriorating security conditions and evolving political and economic priorities required IRRF [Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund] reprogramming that altered sector funding levels and projected outcomes....

These shortfalls are substantially attributable to the autumn 2004 IRRF reprogramming, which reduced the allocations to the Water sector from $4.3 billion to $2.1 billion (down 51.2%). The Electricity sector dropped from $5.560 billion to $4.309 billion (down 22.5%). Allocations to certain other sectors concomitantly increased: the Private Sector Development sector grew by 420%, and the Justice, Public Safety, Infrastructure, and Civil Society sector rose by 70%.

In other words, we had some initial plans at the time of the invasion, March 2003; those plans were solidified in November that year; but as the face of the terrorist campaign in Iraq became clearer, we corrected course, "reprogramming" plans from major projects involving the water and electricity supplies to more basic infrastructure: first and foremost, the development of a private sector in Iraq (which never existed under Saddam Hussein or the Fascist Baath Party), basic justice, and the development of an Iraqi army that -- contrary to the extraordinary claim today by Nanci Pelosi on Anderson Cooper 360 -- was not set up to brutalize the Iraqi people.

Why are these priorities more basic? Because when they are satisfied, Iraq will be able to quell the terrorism itself (as we're now starting to see, particularly in the Anbar province and in Baghdad), thus will be able to pay for its own reconstruction... but if they are not satisfied, then nothing can be done. Period.

Part of the problem with Iraqi reconstruction efforts is the endemic corruption of the Middle East:

SIGIR remains committed to intensifying U.S. efforts to promote an effective anticorruption system within the Iraqi government and commends the U.S. Mission’s efforts thus far to support anticorruption institutions in Iraq. In the October 2005 Quarterly Report, SIGIR urged the Ambassador to hold an anticorruption summit, which he did in November 2005. The summit resulted in a proposal for a joint U.S.-Iraqi Anticorruption Working Group and initial agreement on the need for more training for officials from the Board of Supreme Audit, the Commission on Public Integrity, and the Inspectors General of the Iraqi ministries. The Embassy Anticorruption Working Group previously identified several major priorities, including:

promoting market reforms and reducing subsidies
helping to reinforce the weak law enforcement structure
• creating a public education campaign on the corruption issue

Note that two of the three anti-corruption "major priorities" are exactly what the administration shifted its own priorities to implement: market reforms (a private sector) and beefing up the Iraqi law-enforcement, which requires training not only police but army units as well.

That is to say, as the facts on the ground have changed, we've shifted our priorities to meet the new challenges. Far from being an indictment of the administration, all that this report actually does is clarify how much progress has been made and is likely to be made in the future, identify the continuing challenges, and set priorities and more refined goals for the administration to meet.

It isn't an attack at all; it's nothing more than a normal interim report.

Some of the news stories more or less acknowledge this -- buried deeper in the article, after first tainting the reader's impression with unsupported implications of corruption and incompetence:

"The United States' reconstruction efforts have shown tangible results in improving the Iraqi infrastructure," Inspector General Stuart W. Bowen Jr. wrote in the report, some of which he previewed in testimony to Congress last year but much of which was presented for the first time Thursday. "However, the significant funding change means that many of the originally planned projects will not be completed."

Projects related to drinking water that were expected to benefit about 8 million people will now benefit about 2.75 million, the report said. And only two of 10 planned sewerage projects will be completed, though they will serve an additional 4.5 million people. (Washington Post)

Only 49 of the 136 projects that were originally pledged to improve Iraq's water and sanitation will be finished, with about 300 of an initial 425 projects to provide electricity, the report says ["only!"]....

The report, by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, adds that the overall rebuilding plan was also devised without a clear understanding of the decrepit state of Iraq's infrastructure after decades of war, United Nations-imposed penalties and sheer neglect....

The biggest change in priorities in the rebuilding program came when John D. Negroponte, then the American ambassador to Iraq, shifted $3.46 billion from the reconstruction fund to support projects involving the training of Iraqi security forces, building democratic institutions and developing the private sector in fall 2004. But the report notes that month after month, new shifts took place, amounting to $2.12 billion in additional spending changes through October 2005. (New York Times)

The Times sees an inconstant administration constantly changing course; I see an administration that is flexible and can correct the course when the facts on the ground change. Which do we prefer -- rigid adherence to plans drawn up before the reconstruction had really begun? Or flexibility and the willingness to adapt to the reality that we found in Iraq?

Naturally, if the report had found instead that Bush had done the former, the same newspapers would be excoriating him for not being flexible and adaptable, just as the same Democrats who attacked Bush for his "unilateral" approach to Iraq now attack him for "outsourcing" our response to Iran by bringing in Great Britain, Germany, and France.

I believe the entire Democratic Party has only one principle in common: whatever George W. Bush does, it's wrong!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 01, 2006, at the time of 09:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 29, 2006

New Iraqi Judge Takes Saddam, Lawyers In Hand

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

After the previous senior judge in the trial of Saddam Hussein, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, left in a snit, following intense criticism across Iraq that he had allowed Hussein to seize control of his own trial and use it as a platform for his semi-coherent rants about how badly he was being treated, the new judge who replaced Amin appears to be a "new broom."

Raouf Rasheen Abdel-Rahman began his tenure by expelling one defendant and one of the defense lawyers for shouting at the court. When the entire defense team threatened to walk out, rather than placate them, Abdel-Rahman let them go, appointed temporary defense counsel for that day, and continued with the trial in the absence of one of the defendants and the defense team:

The session, which was the first since Dec. 22, rapidly degenerated into chaos. [Barzan] Ibrahim [Saddam Hussein's half brother] called the court "the daughter of a whore" and refused to sit down. Abdel-Rahman ordered him removed, and Ibrahim scuffled with two guards before they dragged him out of the courtroom.

Then defense lawyer Salih al-Armouti, a Jordanian, was forcibly removed from the court for yelling at Abdel-Rahman.

The entire defense team walked out in protest. "This is an unjust and illegitimate court," Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam's chief lawyer, told the judge on the way out.

At that point, Saddam Hussein began to rant, so he, too, was calmly ordered removed by the new judge. Three witnesses to Hussein's brutality gave their testimony, as the trial proceeded in relative peace. I suspect this entire charade was deliberately staged, in order to test the new judge and see if he would be as pliant as the old. Alas for the defense team, Judge Abdel-Rahman passed with flying colors.

I am much happier with this new judge than I was with Judge Amin -- who I felt gave Hussein and his grandstanding defense lawyers (including American traitor Ramsey Clark) too much latitude to turn the trial into a three-ring circus, or whatever Arabs say when they mean to say a circus... a forty-tent bazaar?

Hussein and his seven co-defendants face a possible sentence of death by hanging:

Defense lawyers criticized the tough approach, saying it was preventing Saddam and his seven co-defendants from getting a fair trial. The eight could face death by hanging if convicted in the killing of at least 140 Shiites after a July 1982 attempt on Saddam's life in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad.

Naturally, "critics" of the trial -- which means the Left in America and Europe -- are already denouncing the new Judge Abdel-Rahman for not giving the defendants a fair trial. They see the trial as a forum for their new innocent martyr, Saddam Hussein, to "testify" (by outbursts) against the "real villain," who should actually be in the dock instead of Hussein, in many leftists' opinions: George W. Bush. But clearly, Abdel-Rahman plans to keep the focus where it should be... on the question of whether Hussein and his henchmen tortured to death nearly a gross of innocent citizens of a town that had the unfortunate distinction of being the location of one of the assassination attempts of the dictator.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who is part of Saddam's defense team but did not attend Sunday's session, denounced the court as "lawless" and repeated calls for it to be moved out of Iraq. [To where... the Hague? Or the International Court of Leftist Opinion at Harvard? - the Mgt.]

"Now the court is seated without the defendants' counsel of choice. This is wrong," Clark said, speaking from New York....

Richard Dicker, the head of the International Justice Program at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the failure to question the witnesses was "probably the most disturbing part of the day."

"The events take us further away from the basic practices of fairness that are necessary in any trial and especially in a trial of this significance," he said.

Ibrahim's comments were "clearly provocative and disrespectful," but Abdel-Rahman was "a little too trigger-happy," he told The Associated Press....

Critics have said the turmoil gives credence to claims that Saddam cannot get a fair trial in a country torn apart by ethnic, religious and tribal divisions and an insurgency comprising large numbers of his supporters.

Michael Scharf, an international law professor who helped train judges for the trial, said Abdel-Rahman has to walk a "tightrope" between maintaining order and fairness.

"The risk is that the judge's tactics will be viewed as too heavy-handed and therefore unfair," said Scharf, head of the international law center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Note that, despite Yahoo's insinuating description above, Michael Scharf does not appear to be one of those "critics." He has been blogging on the Case School of Law website, and his comments seem quite even-handed and temperate. See this entry from January 17th, for example:

This changing of the guard [after Amin quit but before a successor was named] should not be seen as a sign that Judge Amin had bungled the trial (as his critics have asserted). Despite the frequent (and sometimes successful) attempts by the defendants to disrupt and derail the proceedings, in just five trial days (October 19, November 28, December 5, December 21 and December 22), the prosecutor completed an opening statement, and fourteen witnesses testified and were cross-examined by the defense -- a very efficient pace even by American judicial standards. With forty witnesses still to go, the prosecution has already proven the scale of the atrocities, the direct involvement of several of Hussein's co-defendants, and the command hierarchy - the key elements necessary for a conviction in this case. And especially for those who understand Arabic, the testimony of Saddam's victims has been both moving and compelling....

Judge al-Hamash [originally thought to be likely to replace Amin, until al-Hamash came under suspicion of having himself been a secret member of the Baath Party] can use his new position to instill a greater degree of control on the proceedings. He can, for example, insist that for now on Saddam Hussein only speak through his lawyer, rather than address the court and the witnesses directly, except when it is the defendant's turn to testify as a witness on his own behalf. And Judge al-Hamash can enforce this by removing the microphones from the defendants' dock, so that the televised coverage does not pick up any disruptive outbursts....

In taking such actions, Judge al-Hamash must be extremely careful not to appear too heavy handed. If Judge al-Hamash yells at the defendants, for example, as Judge Richard May did during the Milosevic trial at The Hague, it will only play into the defense strategy of trying to cast the proceedings as unfair and illegitimate. As Judge Amin understood, in the long run, it is far more important that the trial be seen as scrupulously fair than for the judge to be seen as winning the battle of the wills against Saddam Hussein.

This strikes me as very fair commentary -- and not as the words of a mere "critic" of the trial, as Yahoo News painted Scharf.

So it appears that the trial is now back on course, after former Judge Amin showed himself a bit too accomodating to Hussein's erratic behavior. Hussein clearly imagines himself still president of Iraq. From the Yahoo News story:

When the [new] judge [Abdel-Rahman] ordered guards to remove him, Saddam — holding a Quran under his arm — became indignant, saying he was choosing to go and referring to his time in power.

"For 35 years I led you, and you say, 'Eject him?'" Saddam said.

"I am a judge and you are a defendant," Abdel-Rahman replied. "And you have violated order in the court. I am implementing the law."

I'm sure Hussein will not quit, however, nor will his unseemly defense team. Hussein will keep energetically trying to derail the proceedings. But as the expression goes, he can rest when he's dead.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 29, 2006, at the time of 04:38 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 25, 2006

Iraq Rebuilding Is Either Going Badly -- Or It Isn't

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Reading through this New York Times article is like decoding a secret document... a secret document that was somehow leaked to the Times (of course).

The New York Times believes the rebuilding effort in Iraq is "badly hobbled;" but the picture that actually emerges from the article (once one decrypts it) is a royal mess that still somehow managed to finish most of the projects it planned, even while dodging terrorist activity, Shiite uprisings, and bureaucratic infighting.

The leaked document is a "highly preliminary" report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, formerly known as the Coalition Provisional Authority Office of Inspector General (CPA-IG). The spokesman from the IG's office, Jim Mitchell, says the report is "incomplete.... It could change significantly before it is finally published." But caveats will never deter the Times from reporting some bad news, when it thinks is has some.

Lost in the article, however, is any context. We've rebuilt countries before, notably Japan and Germany. By all accounts, the former went much better than the latter; which, if either, does the current effort most resemble?

In fact, it's a hybrid: in terms of having to deal with a persistent terrorist and insurgency factor, it's closer to what happened in Germany under international control; but in terms of effectiveness and rate of completion, it resembles the Japanese reconstruction, which was almost entirely American. This seems like quite a remarkable success story, given the environment.

So what exactly is the problem?

In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program.

The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the "ambiguous legal status" of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO.

Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding.

So there are too many competing authorities: State versus DoD, Army versus Navy, NATO versus American officials. In addition, Iraqi ministries got into the contracting game as well, handing out contracts to be paid for with other people's money (ours, mostly).

Basically, there are too many captains on the boat, and it's easy to see why this is a problem. However, this is hardly news; the same conclusion could be drawn about hurricane relief, intelligence gathering, and the normal operation of the United States Congress.

And surprisingly, even before this story saw the light of day, President Bush had already taken measures to address this very issue:

The Corps of Engineers has been given command of the severely criticized office set up by President Bush to oversee some $13 billion of the reconstruction funds.

The shift occurred days before Mr. Bush said the early focus of the rebuilding program on huge public works projects - largely overseen by the office, the Project and Contracting Office - had been flawed.

So what exactly does the NYT want to tell us? First, that the significant problems were in the contracting phase, not in the actual "construction and completion." And second, that there were too few personnel in the main contracting authority, the CPA.

"The impression you get is of an organization that had too little structure on the ground over there, that it had conflicting guidance from the United States," Mr. Hamre said. "It had a very difficult environment and pressures by that environment to quickly move things."

A situation like that, Mr. Hamre said, "creates shortcuts that probably turn into short circuits."

Hamre is president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a sort of "Council on Foreign Relations Lite," with very "State Department/September 10th" thinking. And naturally, by "shortcuts," Hamre means the Left's favorite shibboleth:

The Army appropriated $1.9 million in November 2002 to create a "contingency plan" for what to do if Iraqi forces damaged or destroyed the nation's oil complexes and pipelines. That "task order," under a running contract, went to Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary. The Army later used that task order as a justification for awarding the company a new $1.4 billion noncompetitive contract to restore oil equipment, a program that became one of the most criticized moves of the conflict partly because Vice President Dick Cheney was once the top executive at Halliburton.

Nobody complains about the job they did, by the way; it always boils down to the fact that the job of restoring oil equipment wasn't put up for public bidding... but was instead restricted to the handful of companies that could actually do it, like KB&R. That's like complaining that the contract to put out the oil-well fires after the Gulf War was handed to Red Adair, rather than allowing the wells to burn while McDonalds, Microsoft, and Mercedes-Benz bid on it.

What we are trying to do in Iraq is a huge task in the great unknown, complicated by Zarqawi, Sadr, and other forces of chaos. We need to constantly adjust to the fluid situation in Iraq, and it's hardly surprising that our initial approach to rebuilding was inadequate: nobody really knew how to go about it, because undertaking a Marshall Plan while still fighting high-tech terrorists and unstable Shiite imams has never been done before. But we're working on it, and we're learning: that's all this report is really saying.

And yet, despite all those problems, 1,636 projects of 2,265 originally planned by the office have been completed. That should be the real story... but of course, that would require the Times to stop looking for trouble and start seeing the ongoing solutions.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 25, 2006, at the time of 12:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 17, 2006

The Year of The Police - a Follow-Up

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

In my earlier post, Who Polices the Police?, I noted that the American military was increasing the number of military-police advisors to embed with and train the Iraqi Police.

The Iraqi army was our first priority; but now that we're closing in on our goal there, it's time we turned our attention to the Iraqi cops: while the army is most important for pursuing and destroying terrorist cells, rolling up the foreign jihadi invaders, and sealing the border, the police are essential to follow investigative leads internally, keep the peace, and restore a semblance of justice in Iraq that has not been seen since the days of the British-established Hashemite kingdom -- before first the Iraqi army took over in 1958, then the Baath Party in 1963.

Todays New York Times reports a little more in this subject:

About 80,000 local police officers across Iraq are now certified as trained and equipped, more than halfway toward the goal of 135,000 by early 2007.

But senior commanders, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American officer in Iraq, have vowed to make 2006 "the year of the police" in a tacit acknowledgment that corruption, ineptitude and infiltration in the Iraqi police forces stand in the way of any plan by the Americans to draw down troops this year...

Soldiers from the 49th Military Police Brigade, an Army National Guard unit with headquarters in Fairfield, Calif., will be assigned to police stations in nine major Iraqi cities - Baghdad, Ramadi, Falluja, Najaf, Babil, Kirkuk, Baquba, Samarra and Mosul - as well as to dozens of provincial and district headquarters.

We're ramping up our embeds among the Iraqi police from today's "500 international civilian police advisers" by adding 2,000 MPs -- a fourfold increase. This will of course put a lot more Americans in harm's way, but the danger still pales compared to the danger of allowing Iraq, through corruption, to sink back into the terrorist haven it was under Saddam Hussein. Safety is important, but we do have a mission to perform.

Quite a few of our reserves and National Guardsmen's civilian jobs are with the police, making a perfect mesh. The Iraqis can learn about rights and duties, treating people with respect, but never allowing personal feelings, corruption, or tribal affiliation to get in the way of the disinterested administration of justice.

Lets hope the Iraqis will learn the true meaning of universal law that constrains both prince and peon alike. That is what transformed the ancient Hebrews from a tribal to a national culture, and there is no reason to suppose that it won't have the same effect on another group of nomads wandering the great deserts of the Middle East.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 17, 2006, at the time of 10:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 16, 2006

Talking Sunnis Down From the Ledge

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

You wouldn't know it from reading the American mainstream news, but for the last year or so, the U.S. military has quietly been negotiating with various militant Sunni tribes in Iraq to give up their arms and participate in the political process.

We've known for some time that a rift is growing between the Sunni rejectionists and the foreign al-Qaeda terrorists. Our military has exploited this rift to isolate the jihadis.

Our rationale is that the more militant Sunnis give up fighting and join the democratic Iraqi community, the fewer enemies we ultimately have to face in the final confrontations. At a bare minimum, the Sunni won't interfere while we exterminate those al-Qaeda, Zarqawi and his cohorts, who make a last stand -- which we all know must come eventually. If we could convince some of the militant Sunni that it is to their tribe's benefit to cooperate with us, they may give us valuable intelligence on their erstwhile allies... or even fight alongside us, as their brother Iraqis who accept democracy are doing today.

The strategy is paying greater dividends than we imagined. The Belmont Club has compiled a list of recent conflicts between al-Qaeda and Sunni rejectionists; the fault line between them has widened so much that some formerly militant Sunnis are actually helping the U.S. and Iraqi armies conduct military operations.

The Albu Mahal tribe is now an ally of the Iraqi government, and provides the majority of the troops for the Desert Protection Force, which is a organization of the local tribal fighters that provide for local security and act as scouts for Iraqi Army and U.S. Marines operating in the area.

Unsurprisingly, the international media considers this successful strategy of ours to be a betrayal of President Bush's “stay the course” policy. Through an absurdly literal reading of the metaphor, in which "the course" must always be a straight line, and any deviation left or right is tantamount to a complete repudiation, the Asian and European press agencies crow that America has surrendered -- when in fact, we stand on the threshold of historic victory.

For example, Gereth Porter opines in Asian Times that if the world "understood" our current strategy of persuading former Sunni rejectionists to throw down their guns and support democracy in Iraq, it would cause us "serious political problems":

The Republican Party has just unveiled a new television ad attacking Democratic Party chair Howard Dean for suggesting that the war in Iraq cannot be won.

Renouncing victory over the Sunni insurgents therefore undercuts the president's political strategy of portraying his policy as one of "staying the course" and attacking the Democrats for "cutting and running"…

The new soft line toward the Sunni insurgents is a belated administration response to the conclusion of the US military commanders in Iraq last summer that the Sunni insurgents could not be "defeated" and that there must be a political settlement with them.

Of course, what the commanders actually concluded was that they could not be defeated by military means alone, that there had to be a political component to the push; not only is Bush not "belatedly" accepting this idea, it has been the administration's plan from Day One of the invasion: we always planned to democratize Iraq as the long-term goal for rendering it no longer a threat to America.

In a stunning speech delivered on November 6th, 2003 to the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush made explicit the Bush Doctrine, which calls for democratizing the hellholes of the world -- in particular, the Middle East -- as a way of securing America and liberating the captive peoples across the globe.

In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council are also working together to build a democracy -- and after three decades of tyranny, this work is not easy.... And we're working closely with Iraqi citizens as they prepare a constitution, as they move toward free elections and take increasing responsibility for their own affairs....

This is a massive and difficult undertaking -- it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

We do not come late to the table of Middle-East democracy.

Contrary to Porter's overwrought accusation, negotiating the terms of your enemy’s surrender is not a sign of defeat. It is a sign of victory. We are not the ones giving up fighting in favor of peaceful participation in the political process. We are not the ones outing our former allies' hideouts and attack plans.

To see who is winning and who is losing, let's apply the simple test of asking "cui bono?" Who benefits? Clearly it is the American policy of democratizing Iraq, not the jihadi cause of returning Iraq to tyranny, that benefits from rejectionists giving up the fight and running for office.

Mr. Porter makes like he does not understand that in war, the wise general has many different plans working in parallel. Many are secret; we certainly don't make a habit of sharing our plans with the world -- unless some CIA or NSA snitch drops a dime to the New York Times! (Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would call that strategy "unhelpful.") But that doesn't mean we have no plans.

Cajoling the enemy into abandoning the fight, even while we engage in battle, is not a contradiction: unless our intention is to kill every last Sunni who has ever opposed us, which is absurd on its face, neutralizing the enemy by negotiation is always in order.

One more reason Mr. Porter considers our policy to be proof of "defeat" is that the militant Sunni keep trying to suggest a timetable for our withdrawal:

The insurgents can also increase the pressure on Bush by making public their offer, reportedly made by insurgent leaders to Arab League officials in Cairo last month, to deliver al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Zarqawi, to the Iraqi authorities as part of a peace agreement involving a US withdrawal timetable.

But the Sunni can offer anything they want; it's up to us to decide whether the offer is good enough for us to accept. If we do, it will be because what we gain is more valuable than what we give up; this is no more a "defeat" than it is when you and some seller come to an agreement on a piece of real estate: neither of you is a loser; you're both getting something more valuable to you than you had going in... it's a win-win situation, just as it is when the Sunni propose various incentives for us to leave, and we weigh each one and decide to accept or reject the offer. The final decision is ours, not theirs.

We still have the winning hand, and the rejectionists know it. Last December, when President Bush had pointedly refused to issue any timetable for Coalition withdrawal, the Sunnis still showed up at the polls in unexpectedly strong numbers (a higher percentage of all Iraqis, Sunni, Shia, and Kurd, than showed up for our own vote a month earlier). The Sunni flatly rejected Zarqawi’s threat to escalate his terrorism if Iraqis voted.

Most Sunni rejectionists now understand that they are not in a position to make demands; the best they can do is cushion their fall somewhat. In the fight against the American military, the rejectionists, both Sunni and Shia, have been defeated. They know we can continue this war for at least the next three years, reducing their tribal lands to rubble if we so choose. Therefore, timetable or not, they will in the end have to meet our terms; they must choose whether to live -- or to die.

By and large, they are choosing to live. And that is the ultimate vindication of our winning strategy in Iraq.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 16, 2006, at the time of 01:49 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 11, 2006

"Softly Softly" Accuses U.S. of "Harshly Harshly"

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Does anyone else see the irony in this Reuters story, British officer blisters US Army in Iraq critique?

The U.S. Army has displayed damaging cultural insensitivity in Iraq, while being blinded by unrealistic optimism and predisposed to use maximum force, a senior British officer wrote in a blistering appraisal in a U.S. military publication.

The essay by British Army Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who served with U.S. forces in Iraq from December 2003 to November 2004, appeared in the latest edition of the magazine Military Review, published by the U.S. Army.

(Just as an aside, was it culturally sensitive enough of us to allow Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster to hock and spit in our own Army publication? Would the Brits have returned the favor?)

The British Army's primary area of responsibility has been southern Iraq, and in particular, Basra Province. But Basra is precisely the area where Iranian-backed Shiite militias have taken over the police forces, right under the noses of the Brits.

Back in September, pro-Iranian militiamen in Basra kidnapped two British soldiers and held them hostage. In a daring and successful raid that defied the normal "softly, softly" approach by Great Britain -- hence, in all likelihood, was planned and executed at a level below flag rank -- British troops stormed the Basra police station to rescue their comrades. They discovered they had been moved to the militia headquarters in the city; so the troops then stormed that location and successfully rescued the hostages, killing several Shiite terrorists and arresting others in the process.

Whereupon the British government promptly apologized to the Iran-connected city council and agreed to pay extortion money to keep the council from instigating an anti-British riot. (The AP links have expired, alas; but they can probably be resurrected via Google's cache facility, if one is so inclined.) As we reported back in October:

The joint statement said: "We regret the incidents that took place in Basra on 19 September 2005 at the Serious Crimes Unit.

"We also regret the casualties on both sides and the material damage to public facilities.

"The British government is prepared to pay valid claims for compensation for casualties and material damage in the well-established manner."

The British "softly, softly" policy -- which is just chock-full of cultural sensitivity, brimming over with European pessimism (sorry, "realism"), and predisposed to humbly apologize for any use of force against the enemy -- has been by and large a disaster. They allowed Iranian controlled militias and actual Iranian agents to infiltrate Iraq all the way from Basra to Sadr City; they were next to useless in dealing with Muqtada Sadr; and they wasted a lot of time and squandered moral clarity by complaining that American troops were "insensitive" by, e.g., wearing helmets instead of berets.

I have heard from many sources that the ordinary British soldiers and the junior to mid-level officers are terribly frustrated by their weak posture and wish that their own brigadiers had as much spine as ours... or even as much as their own majors and colonels.

Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster is a textbook example of what is wrong with Europe today -- and of how creeping Euroism is making significant inroads into Great Britain's military, particularly at the senior officer (political) level.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 11, 2006, at the time of 02:31 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 08, 2006

A Shiite Sandwich

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Sometimes, spelunking through a mainstream-media report on Iraq to locate the real story requires a helmet, headlamp, pick, rope, and other caving gear; it's a major expedition into the deepest, darkest depths of the media closet.

The classic technique for burying good news which should be the lede is the mirror image of what a blunt friend of mine, a master of the delicate phrase, always referred to as (I sink into euphemism) a "turd sandwich." (You can guess what he actually said, but please don't post your guesses here, thanks!) When you want to criticize someone, but you want him not simply to tune you out, you must encase the criticism within a sandwich of praise on each side: "your screenplay has excellent character development and flows well; if it has any flaw, it would be that the plot completely falls apart in act three... but I really liked your visual imagery."

The MSM uses the reverse technique: all of the good news is buried in the middle, unmentioned in the headline, and surrounded on both sides by as bad a set of facts as they can report with a straight face. In print, the media will use what media critic Patterico calls the Power of the Jump™: they put nothing but bad news on the first page of a story, saving any good Iraq news for after "the jump," the part following the phrase "continues on page 23," knowing most readers won't.

I call as my fortieth witness the following article from AP.

The most urgent and important news in this story is that the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds have already reached general agreement on a tripartisan government that will be formed by the middle of February, much faster than back in January, 2005 -- and with none of the rancor that marred the earlier election:

Iraq's fractious political groups, meanwhile, could form a coalition government within weeks, Talabani said Saturday....

[Note and remember that I elide one paragraph here; I will return to this point at the end.]

Meeting with Straw in Baghdad, Talabani said Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political groups had agreed in principle on a national unity government that could be formed within a few weeks. Western diplomats in Baghdad have speculated that a government could be in place by the second half of February.

Notice the telltale word "meanwhile" in the first quoted paragraph above. That is a dead giveaway that this was not the first graf of the article, as it should have been. This is great news! But you wouldn't know it unless you read into the middle-end of the story... because the headline is actually a completely unrelated story: 12 Thought Dead After Copter Crash in Iraq.

Sachi was the first to point out this technique to me. When the Associated Press (or any MSM source) wants to bury the lede, their most common technique is to surreptitiously shoehorn it, in the dark of a moonless night, into an article that would give no clue to the reader of the guilty, little nugget of good news buried inside. (Congress uses a similar technique, hiding a provision to spend $300 million of taxpayer money on the Sen. Ima Tachs Hogg Congressional Library within an agricultural bill for Nebraska locust relief.)

The AP story opens describing the terrible deaths of twelve brave Americans whose Blackhawk helicopter crashed; no word yet whether it was due to mechanical failure, weather, or enemy action, and no word as of this writing whether it was full of soldiers or civilians. (The New York Times reports that "Bad weather was thought to have played at least some role.")

AP then segues seamlessly into an account of the three Marines killed today and the two slain yesterday, lingering over the current American military death clock.

The story next dwells with some relish upon the various civilians killed in Iraq today (five), and upon a mosque that we raided (complete with an accusatory quote from the Association of Muslim Scholars, a group that often works hand-in-glove with the terrorists). It discusses a French hostage who was just released and waxes rhapsodic over the number of civilians who have been kidnapped in Iraq since the war began.

Oh, did you know the United States and the Iraqi government have been talking to a very large number of Sunni rejectionists, and that there has been "a recent 'uptick'" in the number of such groups now willing, since the December elections, to enter into discussions to rejoin the greater Iraqi community and turn their backs on the terrorists, further isolating the latter? You'd never know it unless you read deep into this completely unrelated story about a helicopter crash.

And only after all this do we finally come to what should be the real lede, the only piece of actual "news" in this entire article (unless you count the "uptick" as a newslet): negotiations on forming the new, elected government are going much better than anyone expected -- and better than anyone has hitherto reported. AP casually drops the good-news bombshell in paragraph twenty-nine out of thirty-seven.

But then, at the very end -- just to make sure to leave a bad taste even in the mouths of those hardy souls who read deep into what appears, at first glance, to be a typical "bad day in Baghdad" story -- the AP piece ends with the phrase "In other violence Sunday:"... followed by a list of various people shot today.

And there you have it: a good-news sandwich, where the surrounding bread is made up of every piece of bad news AP can find to disguise, bury, and minimize the real story -- the imminent creation of Iraq's first truly democratic, inclusive "national unity government," and the uptick in the number of militant Iraqi groups willing to lay down their arms and join the political process instead.

Oh, and the elision I committed in the quoted paragraphs above, marked by the "...." ellipsis? AP was so bubbling over with bad news they considered more important than the remarkable political story, they even found occasion to insert some right into the middle of the few grafs describing the formation of the government:

Talabani, a Kurd, offered a timeframe on the formation of a government after meeting with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who said Iraqis remain optimistic despite a violent week that saw nearly 200 people killed in two days.

...Just in case you'd forgotten in all the excitement.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 08, 2006, at the time of 01:02 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 04, 2006

Who Polices the Police?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The Romans asked, Qvis Cvstodiet Ipsos Cvstodes.

A number of people who visited Iraq recently said that they were impressed by the quality of Iraqi Army.
For example, CNN's Anderson Cooper, who was in Iraq during December 2005 election, noted on Laura Ingram’s radio show how impressed he was with the Iraqi army units he accompanied.

The Iraqi army excels because they were trained by the U.S. military. Although they don't have as much equipment as we, they make up for it with training, confidence, coolness under fire, and a positive attitude. (See A Few Good Iraqi Men.) Cooper felt safe with them in an unarmored truck with just a single 50-caliber machine-gun mounted on the back.

However, the Iraqi police, under the control of the Interior Ministry, are a totally different story. Cooper got the distinct impression that the police were not professional at all and did not seem to know what they were doing. Corruption and abuse have been serious problems among the Iraqi police since long before Saddam Hussein; it was the Iraqi police, not the army, that ran those wretched Shiite prisons where the U.S. military discovered Sunnis being routinely abused and even tortured -- in the correct meaning of that word -- by Shiite police commandos.

Finally, the American forces have decided to tackle these problems. I don't think they were dilatory; they consciously decided that it was more important to focus first on the army, and only when that was functioning smoothly did they turn to the police problem: law-enforcement requires a functioning nation of consistent laws, which was only possible after the Iraqi and Coalitiion armies gained control of the country.

Dec. 29 - American commanders are planning to increase significantly the number of soldiers advising Iraqi police commando units, in part to curtail abuse that the units are suspected of inflicting on Sunni Arabs, a senior commander in Iraq said Thursday.

Under the plan, which the officer said he expected would be formally approved in a few weeks, the number of advisers working with the Iraqi units would be greatly expanded. The advisers themselves would be under the command of American officers.

American advisers now accompany commando units as part of the vast effort to train and equip security forces to take over the fight against the insurgency and to maintain order.

At first blush, this might seem to contradict our policy of turning more control over to the Iraqi security force. But before we can hand anything over, we first must make sure that Iraqis are capable of assuming that responsibility. That is our primary duty, as only a functioning and responsible Iraq can keep up the fight against international terrorism.

Currently, only seven of the nine police commando units have advisors and none in the regular police stations. Under the new plan, all the units, commando (SWAT teams) and regular police, will have advisors. Also, the total number of advisors will increase by several hundred; in one case, an entire American battalion with more than 500 soldiers will be attached to one particular Iraqi police brigade.

This raises an obvious question: if we're going to be drastically reducing the number of troops in Iraq this year, how can we simultaneously increase the number of police unit advisors by such large numbers? The answer is that we are going to fundamentally shift our tactics, now that we have entered the end-game of nation-building.

The Fourth Infantry Division, which is now preparing to deploy in Baghdad and central Iraq, is being given a substantially larger piece of Iraqi territory than the unit it is replacing, and with fewer troops. The Americans are hoping that Iraqi units can pick up the slack; Iraqi forces operating more or less independently now are in charge of securing 60 percent of the capital.

The troops who are freed up from going on anti-terrorist patrols, thanks to newly trained Iraqi army units, will now be available to become advisors to the police units. I suspect we will see U.S. troop responsibility shift from active combat towards an advisory position, as the Iraqi government stabilizes. This is good for several reasons: first, less combat means fewer American and Coalition casualties; second, a less visible foreign presence (and consequently more Iraqi units patrolling instead) will calm fears that Iraq will be turned into an American colony... the Iraqis can begin to feel free not only from the crushing yoke of Saddam but also from the much milder leash of the "crusaders." Presumably, fewer Iraqi youths will feel alienated and driven towards terrorism and jihad if they don't see as many foreign soldiers walking the streets.

The toughest challenge our military advisors face is the culture of Iraqi police. Unlike the army, the police are often an extension of local tribes, more used to keeping the peace in the local community and supporting the local tribe than enforcing national Iraqi laws. The difficulty comes when local custom and national law clash, or when different tribes go to war -- as we have seen recently in the Gaza strip, where police from one tribe attacked a police station held by another tribe. Tribalism rivals jihadism as the major problem of the Arab (and Persian) Middle East.

Many years ago, I heard an odd story: two immigrants here in America from a third world country got into a fight, and one man killed the other. The killer was arrested and charged with murder; but a few days later, the victim’s family showed up in the police station and said "everything's all right now, you can release him."

Surprised, the DA asked why they didn't want the man who killed their loved one prosecuted. "Because," they patiently explained, as if speaking to an idiot, "the assailant’s family paid compensation for the death, and the whole incident is settled."

Neither family ever did understand why the American police refused to release the suspect... because they simply did not understand that it wasn't just a crime against the tribe, it was a crime against all of the people of the state -- and it could not be "settled" with a monetary payment. He had to stand trial.

This is going to happen over and over in the next few years, as Iraq suffers the slow and often painful growth from a collection of warring tribes to a modern nation-state. The only thing we can do is remind them again and again why they need to make a commitment to nationhood: because losing control over the police means a replication all over Iraq of the situation in Basra, where militiamen with strong ties to Iran and Moqtada Sadr terrorize the citizens and rule as cruelly as the Baath Party did. (Sad to say, the British troops, who had responsibility over this area, really dropped the ball; their "softly, softly" approach was perceived as "weakly, weakly," and they lost their face.)

In the end, the Iraqi people will have to make that choice: tribalism or modern nationhood. But I am confident that with the example of the United States before them, Saddam behind them, and Syria and Iran on either side, they will choose wisely.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 04, 2006, at the time of 12:05 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 03, 2006

Keep Talking, Rep. Big-Moutha!

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

On Friday, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), saved another couple of seats for the Republicans in 2006.

He was once again denouncing the Iraq War, which he has called both unwinnable and morally wrong, and the following exchange occurred, per Reuters:

"Would you join (the military) today?," he was asked in an interview taped on Friday.

"No," replied Murtha of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees defense spending and one of his party's leading spokesmen on military issues.

"And I think you're saying the average guy out there who's considering recruitment is justified in saying 'I don't want to serve'," the interviewer continued.

"Exactly right," said Murtha, who drew White House ire in November after becoming the first ranking Democrat to push for a pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq as soon as it could be done safely.

Perfect. Excellent. So not only are the Democrats opposed to this war and want us to yank the troops out -- quickly, quickly, before we accidentally win -- but they're also now urging Americans not to join the military.

I particularly love this snide aside by Reuters:

Murtha did not respond directly when asked whether a lack of combat experience might have affected the decision-making of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their former top deputies.

This "chickenhawk" charge by a party that has been nakedly anti-military for decades is becoming the biggest running joke of now four electoral cycles. First, I suppose the fact that Donald Rumsfeld's service as a fighter pilot in the Navy began in 1954, the year after the Korean War ended, means it doesn't count for anything.

Second, would Reuters ever dare suggest that President Franklin Roosevelt's "lack of combat experience" -- or indeed any military service whatsoever -- affected his "decision-making" in World War II? Of course not: this is a charge reserved for the handful of leftist Democrats with some military background to hurl indiscriminately at every Republican they dislike, including those who served honorably (I don't recall it coming up in 1996, when Bill Clinton ran against Bob Dole, or in 1992, when Clinton ran against George H.W. Bush).

Republican Party chair Ken Mehlman couldn't have scripted the Murtha interview any better. Between Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace), and Rep. John Murtha, the Republicans won't have to actually write a single campaign commercial before the election: all they need do is just playback the hundreds of bitterly anti-military, anti-defense, anti-American comments made by prominent Democrats and applauded by the rank and file members of the Party.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 03, 2006, at the time of 03:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 02, 2006

Back Lot Iraq

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

When mountaineers climb a mountain, they begin by setting up a base camp, then a series of camps at higher altitudes, so that they can acclimate to the thin air and the cold. For the same reason, US soldiers headed for Iraq spend two or more months training in Kuwait, in order to get acclimated to the brutal environment before heading into the area of operations.

But in fact, by the time they head for Kuwait, our troops have already gone through a much more intense "acclimation" back home in the U.S.: they must first immerse themselves in the Iraqi culture that will soon surround them like water around a fish.

At Fort Dix, New Jersey, the Army runs a 30-acre re-creation of Iraq:

For two months, the group of 157 veterans and rookies has lived on Tiger Base, a 30-acre re-creation of Iraq at Fort Dix, one of two bases in the United States that offers an immersion course for new security forces, said Lt. Col. Norberto Cintron, who is in charge of the training.

They awaken before 5 a.m. and hear Muslim prayer calls five times a day. They eat flavorless food, use portable toilets and sleep on cots, 12 to a tent. In military exercises, simulated grenades and improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, explode, and soldiers like Specialist Kavanaugh dramatize severe or fatal wounds.

I first heard about this training camp a couple of years ago. At that time, the Army hired American actors to play the roles of Iraqi citizens. Our soldiers were mainly training for crowd control in confusing urban situations then. Evidently, that part of the training is still ongoing:

Every day, convoys from the 654th roll through a makeshift Iraqi city with hidden threats. When the men see the sign "The City of Balad Welcomes You," gunners grasp their M-249's and 50-caliber machine guns.

The convoys pass a blue mosque and aluminum shipping containers made to look like buildings, each spray-painted with Arabic or English phrases like "Go home USA." Sometimes snipers shoot blanks at the Humvees, inciting a simulated firefight.

Civilians, including Iraqis living in the United States, occasionally linger in the streets like movie extras. Some are instructed to look friendly and wave, others to grimace and yell in Arabic.

The camp at Fort Dix has improved its simulation, making it both more accurate and immersive since it was first created. We now have many returning servicemen who can contribute their own "lessons learned," as well as more Iraqi-born Americans to stock the town.

I am always amazed by our military's ability to adapt and improve. This seems to be a hallmark of a free society, that the military leaders (uniformed and civilian) value the opinions not only of the officers but also the men and women with stripes on their sleeves. Contrast this attitude to the heirarchical, top-down Russian command... how many years have they been losing the same war in Chechnya? They seem to have learned nothing from that combat; in fact, they still haven't learned the lessons from Afghanistan -- why they lost, and why we won.

I believe that this kind of innovation is exactly why our military will stay on top: America looks to the future, not the past.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 02, 2006, at the time of 06:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 28, 2005

Terrorists' "Human Shield" Tactics Take Toll on Civilians

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

That is what the title of this article should be; instead, the Washington Post misleadingly titled it U.S.Airstrikes Take Toll on Civilians, as if to say that the U.S. military is killing Iraqi civilians indiscriminately.

In recent days, the US military has increased the number and tempo of airstrikes. Terrorists, rapidly losing local support, have taken to hiding amongst unwilling civilians. The terrorists barge into civilian houses, either hoping to use the family as human shields -- or simply to kill them and blame it on Americans.

"I wholeheartedly believe the vast majority of civilians are killed by the insurgency," particularly by improvised bombs, said Col. Michael Denning, the top air officer for the 2nd Marine Division, which is leading the fight against insurgents in Anbar province.

In an interview at a Marine base at Ramadi, Anbar's provincial capital, Denning acknowledged that a city was "a very, very difficult place to fight." He said, however, that "insurgents will kill civilians and try to blame it on us."

Many civilians have been directly killed by the terrorists, and many others have been killed by the US response to terrorist attacks from populated locations. In either case, the root cause is terrorism itself, not the United States.

We don't know the exact number of civilian casualties. Numbers we get from local civiilians, witnesses, and hospital workers, like that "100,000 dead civilians" canard of a few months ago, are notoriously unreliable. Anderson Cooper of CNN, reporting an interview he conducted in a hospital, said that one hospital worker refused to discuss anything in Arabic because he did not want the local policeman to hear what he said; he was afraid for his life if the cops heard him saying what he said. Many local citizens' testimony can be tainted, either by sympathy for the terrorists, or simply by fear of them.

And yet some still think it is important to track down those elusive civilian casualties.

Sarah Sewall, deputy assistant secretary of defense from 1993 to 1996 and now program director for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, said the military's resistance to acknowledging and analyzing so-called collateral damage remained one of the most serious failures of the U.S. air and ground war in Iraq...

"In a conflict like Iraq, where civilian perceptions are as important as the number of weapons caches destroyed, assessing the civilian harm must become a part of the battle damage assessment process if you're going to fight a smart war," she said.

Such numbers might be useful in an academic sense; they might even be beneficial, so long as the're reported in the correct context. However, civilian casualty statistics are almost invariably reported by mainstream American media as the result of American aggression towards the Iraqi people. If civilian perceptions were that important, then announcing civilian casualty numbers out of context would do far more harm than good to the country... assuming anyone at the Post cared about that.

In general then, it is a very bad idea to start reporting civilian casualties; if we did, then the nightly news would report, "in heavy fighting in the Anbar province of Iraq today, two Maines were killed. Following American airstrikes, eight civilians were found dead." They might just forget to add -- "dead, with their throats slit by the terrorists. Oh, and did we mention that forty-eight terrorists were killed by those airstrikes?"

People in Iraq are not stupid. They know that whenever terrorists come to their town, it's bad news. When civilians are killed, the families typically know exactly who to blame.

Near the town of Qaim one day last month, a man who identified himself only as Abdul Aziz said a separate U.S. airstrike killed his grown daughter, Aesha. Four armed men were also found in the rubble of her house, he said.

"I don't blame the Americans. I blame Zarqawi and his group, who were using my daughter's house as a shelter," said Abdul Aziz, referring to Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of the foreign-dominated group al Qaeda in Iraq.

I hope the great majority of Iraqi civilians are like "Abdul Aziz."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 28, 2005, at the time of 11:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Just a Reminder of What We're Fighting FOR: the Gift of Life

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

A story like this warms my heart. Four Iraqi children who had likely fatal heart defects were brought to New York by a U.S. military program; at the Montefiore Medical Center, they were given life-saving heart surgeries.

Wsam is one of four Iraqi children who underwent surgeries in the last week to repair life-threatening congenital heart defects, in a joint effort by an international humanitarian organization and the U.S. military.

Last week a pediatric cardiac team at New York's Montefiore Medical Center performed a complicated procedure to increase blood flow to Wsam's heart and a major aortic artery.

Wsam was discharged this morning from the hospital in good condition, along with two other boys and one girl who also underwent critical heart surgery.

Wsam is 11 years old; the other three kids are Sivar Mohammad (6), Asaid Sibreai (14), and Ashjan Khaled (12). The surgeries were the first of many that will be performed on desperately ill Iraqi children, courtesy of Rotary International's Gift of Life organization; while in America, they stayed at Ronald MacDonald House and local host families. Part of the cost is also borne by the Rachel B. Cooper Foundation.

And who is responsible for bringing all these people together as a Christmas miracle for Moslem children?

The children arrived in New York City from Amman, Jordan, earlier this month after an Army reservist assigned to the U.S. military's Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Center put their families in contact with the Gift of Life International....

In September, Staff Sgt. Marikay Satyrano, a Bronx school teacher stationed in Amman, identified 60 Baghdad children as potential candidates for heart surgery. Working with the Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Center, Satyrano organized trips to Amman for the children and their families so that they could be screened by a Jordanian pediatric cardiologist.

Yes, I know; the primary function of the military is to "kill people and break things." But that is its function, not its purpose. Its purpose, as defined by the American people, is to pursue and defend American interests around the world... and one of America's interests has always been humanitarian relief, whether that takes the form of billions of dollars of monetary and food relief for a dozen countries devastated by a massive tsunami -- or four small surgeries for four young kids who would not have survived to adulthood otherwise.

Darned neocons -- they're everywhere!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 28, 2005, at the time of 08:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 27, 2005

Pangs of Birth

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

UPDATE and bump:

Some of my online nemeses have said that this Iraqi election was a "total failure." Because, they say, as the results of the election started to come in, the minority candidates started to complain about voter fraud. "The Ballots were stuffed with non-residents votes!" "Ballots stolen!" "They cheated!" Angry protesters marched in the streets demanding a recount or even a complete "Mulligan," redoing the election entirely. Some are talking about lawsuits, and an APB was issued for David Boies.

Well... that sounds like every danged election held in the United States where the Democrats lose, doesn't it? If this is the extent of the "failure," I'd call the election a ringing success!

Opponents of the election, the war, and everything say that since religious Shia won so many seats, Iraq will automatically become an Iranian-like theocracy. Encouraged by the Shia victory, some religious extremists (such as Moqtada Sadr's militha) will surge and begin terrorizing the secular Iraqis. Angry Sunnis will take up weapons and start a civil war. It will all end in tears, let me tell you.

Wait, don't panic folks. A few angry words are to be expected: we're talking about the birth of the Iraqi nation here... Iraq and its people have never experienced the democratic process before. If everything went smoothly, without a hitch , that would be a Christmas miracle: as Sgt. Garcia said, if things did not go wrong, it would not seem right.

Although the main Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, got the largest number of seats, they fell short of getting an outright majority. The New York Times explains:

Iraqis voted 10 days ago in a national election to choose members of a four-year Parliament, which will form a government. According to preliminary election results, the Shiite alliance won the single largest chunk of votes, but fell short of the majority required to form a new government by itself. Consequently it will likely need to form an alliance with one or more of the other groups that won a significant amount of votes - the parties of Kurds, Sunnis and secular Iraqis. [Emphasis added]

That means it won't be easy for the UIA to simply govern Iraq as they wish or walk all over everybody else. Also, in some cities, such as Basra in the South, people are already experiencing the Iranian influence up close and personal: Islamist militias with strong ties to Iran have been terrorizing the citizens for quite some time. If the secular parties are smart, they'll use this example to warn the citizens how bad their lives would be if they let Islamists rule.

As for a possible uprising by Sunni terrorists -- what more can they do than they're already doing? Their violent "resistance" had not worked at all. The alliance with al-Qaeda has deteriorated, and some Sunnis simply gave up violence altogether. By now, many Sunnis must have realized that if they get the civil war they've been pushing for, that will be the end of the Sunnis.

The weakened foreign terrorists and small remainder of Sunni rejectionists by themselves cannot possibly overthrow the new Iraqi government; all they can do is anger the Shia enough that they'll sit on the Sunnis' heads. The new and improved Iraqi army will not allow the rebellion to turn into a full-scale civil war.

It's true that corruption within the Iraqi police in the South is a serious problem; but perhaps the Iraqi army can deal with the Iraqi cops!

The government must constantly fight against Iranian influence, Sunni/Wahabbi Islamists, and even secular extremists. But these are the normal pangs of birth, a nation's birth, that every free country had to go through once.

UPDATE December 27th, 2005:

Leaders of the Shia and the Kurds, whose parties won large blocks of seats in the December 15th election, are now reaching out toward Sunni and secular parties to form a coalition government:

The visit of Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim of the Shi'ite Islamist Alliance to the Kurdish capital Arbil opened a series of planned meetings among rival factions intended to ease friction over election results which Sunni and secular parties say have been rigged and to begin building a consensus administration.

"We agreed on the principle of forming a government involving all the parties with a wide popular base," Kurdish regional leader Masoud Barzani told a joint news conference after talks with Hakim, the dominant force in the Alliance.

This bodes well for the Iraqi people -- and badly for the eternal pessimists.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 27, 2005, at the time of 01:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 21, 2005

Air Power Over Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

We've long known that our attacks against the terrorists in Iraq intensified leading up to last Thursday’s election. But we're just starting to find out how much air power was utilized. This AP story has the figures:

The number of U.S. air strikes increased in the weeks leading up to last Thursday's election, from a monthly average of about 35 last summer to more than 60 in September and 120 or more [per month] in October and November. The monthly number of air missions, including refueling and other support flights, grew from 1,111 in September to 1,492 in November, according to figures provided by Central Command Air Force's public affairs office. [Emphasis added]

One of the most effective weapons against the terrorists -- beloved by the troops but considered a "war crime" by former attorney general and current Saddam Hussein defender "Ramzi" Clark -- are the unmanned, remotely controlled Predator drones. While their surveillance capability is pretty well known, many Americans have no idea they're also used for air-to-surface attacks. The RQ-1 Predator (and the Navy/Marine version, the Mariner) carries a pair of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, which have a range of up to five miles and can fly nearly 1,000 mph.

The Hellfire -- yet another silly, reverse-engineered acronym, standing for Helicopter-launched fire-and-forget, even though most models are not fire-and-forget, requiring someone on the ground to continuously "paint" the target with a laser -- is primarily an anti-tank weapon, but it can be used against any fortified position. It typically carries a HEAT (High-Explosive Anti-Tank) warhead, which, despite being designed to destroy Sovet armor, still manages to work pretty well on pickup trucks, SUVs, and VBIEDs (Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices) -- which quickly become Airborne Already-Exploded Devices (AIRBALED).



An RQ-1 Predator Drone    The Hellfire missile fired by the Predator

RQ-1 Predator drone (l) and one of the two Hellfire missiles it carries (r)

From the Associated Press:

The role of the Air Force Predator is not secret but has been largely lost in the clutter of violence on the ground. At least five times this month an unmanned Predator flown remotely by airmen at flight consoles at an Air Force base in Nevada has struck targets in Iraq, mostly in insurgent strongholds in western Anbar province.

Gen. Michael T. Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, said in an interview with reporters at the Pentagon last Tuesday that Predators are attacking targets in either Iraq or Afghanistan "almost every day." He gave no details.

The training of the Iraqi ground and mechanized army has been largely successful. However, Iraq still has virtually no air force. When the American troops finally begin to leave Iraq, we will still need to give the Iraqis air support for some time; but the good news is that training of Irqi airmen has already started.

The action by U.S. aircraft comes with the nascent Iraqi air force having no offensive strike capability. Late last month the crew of one of Iraq's three U.S.-donated C-130 cargo planes flew a mission without a U.S. instructor aboard for the first time.

Hence, previous missions did have American instructors on board; we have been training Iraqi pilots and flight officers for an unknown period of time. The next step is to build up the Iraqi Air Force, probably relying to some extent upon former Saddam Hussein pilots and other aviation officers. If we're worried about the loyalty and reliability of such men, it's easy enough to restrict their role to that of flight instructors and instructors in basic aviation intelligence, meteorology, ground ops, communications, maintenance, and other vital elements that do not put them in the position to fire missiles at anyone.

Iraq also needs a patrol-boat navy to stop terrorists from landing in the Umm Qasr region on the Persion Gulf and to patrol up and down the riverways in Iraq (perhaps Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and his magic hat could pop round and give them some advice and a pep-talk). But an Iraqi navy is a subject for a later post.

Looks like the US still has a lot of work ahead. Thankfully, the longer we're there, the less actual ground combat we will be seeing... and the more our mission will shift to mentoring, training -- and of course, close air support.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 21, 2005, at the time of 06:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Saddam's Temper Tantrum

Crime and Punishment , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Saddam Hussein, who terrorized the citizens of Iraq for over 30 years, is now, in captivity, whining like a spoiled child. He and his attorney have used every trick in a book to delay the trial: the latest is playing the torture card.

The court is simply wasting time by bothering to listen to Hussein's childish lie about being "beaten" by his American captors; it's simple blame-shifting, throwing sand in our eyes. I doubt I'm alone in thinking that, even if it were true, so the hell what? Not that I believe a word from Hussein, considering what he did to so many millions of people for so long -- but even if it were true, do we care if he were roughed up a bit? Does that in any way mitigate his crime? Is bad treatment in jail an ex-post-facto "defense" to crimes against humanity?

"I want to say here, yes, we have been beaten by the Americans and we have been tortured," Saddam said, before gesturing to his seven co-defendants around him, "one by one."

Hussein is still sucking air. He's still balanced on his hind legs. He doesn't have any visible injuries, he isn't in hospital, he is not disfigured: if it were true that he was slapped around, it couldn't possibly be enough to amount to "torture," as Hussein of all people should know.

Evidently, Hussein has a serious problem with memory loss. He would do well to listen to the stories of his own victims. Then perhaps he would know what the word "torture" means.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 21, 2005, at the time of 01:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 15, 2005

"Civilianizing" Is Savage Duty

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

A few days ago, I came across an article about homeless OIF veterans. I thought of blogging about it, but reading passages like these really bothered me:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era.

"When we already have people from Iraq on the streets, my God," said Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. "I have talked to enough (shelters) to know we are getting them. It is happening and this nation is not prepared for that...."

[Seabees Petty Officer Luis Arellano, 34] said that after being quickly pushed out of the military, he could not get help from the VA because of long delays.

"I felt, as well as others (that the military said) 'We can't take care of you on active duty.' We had to sign an agreement that we would follow up with the VA," said Arellano.

"When we got there, the VA was totally full. They said, 'We'll call you.' But I developed depression."

He left his job and wandered for three months, sometimes living in his truck.

That is why I was rather reluctant to discuss it. However, while I was looking for news about the Iraqi election, I came across Sgt. Ron Long's December 8th post. Sgt. Long was one of the ten soldiers who were interviewed by president Bush during the teleconference just before the October vote on the Iraqi constitution.

Sgt. Long served as an Army Combat Medic with the 278th Regimental Combat Team (RCT) in Iraq; he's now safely back in Tennessee. He writes that he is having some difficulties adjusting to a civilian life.

I will be the first to tell you that the transition from combat-life back to day-to-day civilian-life has been tougher than I had expected. The "small" things are the difference. I think that it may only be something that another combat veteran would be able to understand. Don't get me wrong...it is great to be home, but it's just tough adjusting back into normal life. In combat, you tend to have to separate yourself from your emotions or feelings at the time and it may be hard to re-acquaint yourself with your emotions once your home, back with your family. I love my family more than words can describe but I have just pushed myself back into their lives; Lives and routines that they've been used to without a husband or a father. And it works both ways.

So maybe it's time to take a deep breath and take a sympathetic but dispassionate look at the problem.

It's difficult for a civilian like me to imagine what a soldier or Marine goes through on a combat deployment. Shot at and bombed, witnessing the violent deaths of close friends -- "brothers" -- and innocent civilians, including women and children -- unless he learns to detach his emotions, to lock them away somewhere, I think he couldn't get through the day. He cannot allow himself to feel every sorrow and pain, or he would go insane (living in such daily insanity). He can't react to every death the way a civilian would react to seeing a pedestrian killed by a car right in front of his eyes, because the soldier may see that everyday during a battle.

It's not normal for a person to step off to work knowing the chances are pretty good that someone will seriously try to murder him before he goes back "home" to the barracks. The soldier didn't grow up killing bad guys; he has to learn to adapt to the new, obscene reality of days of intense boredom broken up by sudden life-or-death combat. Or rebuilding destroyed buildings, if he's lucky (at least then, he can see creation, instead of just destruction).

He simply has to do his job, because he has no choice. People's lives depend upon him -- not just his buddies in the unit, but tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqi civilians and an unknown number of regular folks back home in the United States, whose lives and freedom could be at risk if the soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine screws up.

A friend of mine, a civilian volunteer who spent some time in Iraq in a non-governmental organization, told me once that she saw so many dead children, women, and old folks blown up by suicide bombers, she couldn't even cry anymore. She felt nothing at the time, while she was in Iraq; she couldn't afford to "feel."

But when she came back home, she suddenly became temporarlily deaf, for no organic reason. Her hearing came back eventually; but that may have been the only way she could deal with the parts of her "tour" that she had suppressed: she had to listen to herself for a while, to the thoughts she couldn't allow herself to think while she and her Iraqi "clients" were still in danger, before she could start listening to her ordinary friends and relatives back in the States.

For someone who goes through such a life-changing experience, it must be hard to adjust to an everyday, simple life back home, in college or at a normal job. Even I, who occasionaly ride a Navy ship for a few weeks, during which I cannot communicate with my husband except via occasional, unreliable e-mail, have difficulty shifting gears to a normal life at home; and that's after only a month and a half of absence. Returning to the world is definitely not a trivial problem; you'd have to expect a certain amount of adjustment problems, even including some homelessness.

At any given moment, we have (more or less) 150,000 troops in Iraq -- sometimes a little more, like now; sometimes a little less. Considering rotation, there must be at least three times as many who have gone through Iraq at some time during the war. That means we likely already have about a half a million Iraq vetrans. Even among ordinary civilians, you would expect to find some homeless people in a city of 500,000.

So it's truly remarkable how few homeless Iraqi vets there are, compared to how many there were among the returning Vietnam veterans:

Interviews and visits to homeless shelters around the Unites States show the number of homeless veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan so far is limited. Of the last 7,500 homeless veterans served by the VA, 50 had served in Iraq. Keaveney, from New Directions in West Los Angeles, said he is treating two homeless veterans from the Army's elite Ranger battalion at his location. U.S.VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans, found nine veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan in a quick survey of nine shelters. Others, like the Maryland Center for Veterans Education and Training in Baltimore, said they do not currently have any veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan in their 170 beds set aside for emergency or transitional housing.

I don't want to minimize the problem; any homeless vet is a tragedy. And like any other bureaucracy, I'm sure the Veterans Administration (VA) is not as efficient as it should be, and many veterans must be frustrated by its slow and complicated procedures. But there's just not much that can realistically be done to change things; when you have to deal with hundreds of thousands of people, personal interaction is impossible; bureaucacy is the only way to handle the caseload.

Having had to deal with Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), I've had more than my share of agony with government idiocy: waiting in line from 3:00 a.m. until noon, then told to come back some other day, because all the slots for counselling for the day were filled; paperwork that goes missing; finally working my way to the front of a forever-line, only to be told I need some other form, not the one the last INS agent gave me. I still deal with it somewhat as a civilian working in the Navy (that cursed Defense Travel Service!) If a veteran has to go through anything like that, that alone can drive you crazy, for sure!

The good news is that the military has improved drastically since the Vietnam days.

I've heard more than once that a soldier in Vietnam who's term was up was plucked from the middle of a battle by a helicopter and 24 to 36 hours later, dropped off back in his hometown... and that was all the "help" he got. How can a man go from killing enemies and being targeted by unseen snipers in the jungle to scooping ice cream or keeping books -- in just one day?

During World War II, it took long enough to get the troops back home by boat from Europe or the Pacific that they had at least some time to adjust from wartime to peacetime thinking. But in Vietnam, they had helos, C-130s, and then passenger jets back to San Francisco or Detroit or Atlanta. Boom, there they were.

Some years ago, Pentagon planners actually sat down and earned their pay by taking a hard look at the end point of a soldier's enlistment, when he would transition back to the world. They decided it was better to have a staged reintroduction back to civilian life following a combat tour, rather that the instant reintroduction during Vietnam. (At least, that's the way it's supposed to work; PO Arellano's experience shows that the system isn't perfect.) Thanks to the changes made between the late-60s, early 70s and today, returning veterans are treated much better.

Peter Dougherty, director of Homeless Veterans Programs at the VA, said services for veterans at risk of becoming homeless have improved exponentially since the Vietnam era. Over the past 30 years, the VA has expanded from 170 hospitals, adding 850 clinics and 206 veteran centers with an increasing emphasis on mental health. The VA also supports around 300 homeless veteran centers like the ones run by U.S.VETS, a partially non-profit organization.

"You probably have close to 10 times the access points for service than you did 30 years ago," Dougherty said. "We may be catching a lot of these folks who are coming back with mental illness or substance abuse" before they become homeless in the first place. Dougherty said the VA serves around 100,000 homeless veterans each year.

It would be very helpful if each returning trooper could get some kind of counselling before he gets back to civilian life. Not everyone has transition problems, but enough do that the service has a moral obligation to help them readjust.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are being fought with a lot of National Guard units... which means that entire units return home as a group; the soldiers are surrounded by people they know from their own home town; and they get a staged withdrawal from the military: they may stay on active duty for a while, even back stateside, before shifting back to the one weekend a month, two weeks a year duty. If veterans can get together and share their experiences during and after their deployment, that must help them a lot.

(I'm not sure how reserve units work; are they more like National Guard -- a bunch of people from the same general geographical area who deploy and then return as a group? Or are they more like the regular services?)

Military clergymen can also help. Sgt. Long links to this article:

"One of my major preparations for being here was to receive the CAV back," Lt. Col. Kevin Wilkerson, joint forces full-time support chaplain with the Tennessee Guard, referring to the 278th RCT which, before it was deployed, was known as the 278th Armored Calvary Regiment.

Wilkerson has worked very closely with the unit and the Family Readiness Group staff in providing support to members and families of the 278th while they were deployed, and now, while they are transitioning back home "to make their return home successful and make their transition easier," he said...

"The soldiers that are having difficulty, they identified them, and then they were referred to various places for assistance," Wilkerson said. The key is, the soldiers that are referred must follow through to get the help in the end.

Regular Army and Maine Corps personnel don't have the advantage of being surrounded by people who grew up in the same small town in Idaho or Connecticut, but at least entire units rotate in and out, I believe, giving them some continuity. And there are many, many more services developed to help them cope with the change of life necessary to detach from the military and rejoin the civilian world once more.

Help is indeed available for returning vets, so they can get back into a life and be just as comfortable watering the lawn and eating at Hometown Buffet as they learned to be patrolling the streets of Mosul and training Iraqi soldiers how to sweep a building.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 15, 2005, at the time of 12:53 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 14, 2005

Persian Slipups

Good News! , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Couple this story --

Police Seize Forged Ballots Headed to Iraq From Iran
by Dexter Filkins
New York Times
December 14th, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 13 - Less than two days before nationwide elections, the Iraqi border police seized a tanker on Tuesday that had just crossed from Iran filled with thousands of forged ballots, an official at the Interior Ministry said.

The tanker was seized in the evening by agents with the American-trained border protection force at the Iraqi town of Badra, after crossing at Munthirya on the Iraqi border, the official said. According to the Iraqi official, the border police found several thousand partly completed ballots inside.

-- with this one (courtesy John at Power Line, who takes the opposite position from what I argue below):

Ex-general says Iranian led torture of detainees
by Paul Martin and Maria Cedrell
The Washington Times
December 13, 2005

BAGHDAD -- An Iraqi general formerly in charge of special Interior Ministry forces said yesterday that a senior Iranian intelligence officer was in charge of a network of detention centers where suspected insurgents were routinely tortured and sometimes killed.

Gen. Muntazar Jasim al-Samarrai spoke to The Washington Times just as Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said he had widened an urgent investigation into complaints of abuse and torture in the country's detention facilities.

...and I say that if they're both true, it all adds up to good news, not bad, for Iraq and the future of the Middle East.

What? How can I say that?

Elementary, my dear Whalid: because we already knew that the Iranians were a bunch of evil theocrats plotting to seize control of the Moslem ummah... whereas, had it turned out that the Iraqi Shia were running those torture centers, or that they had engaged in a massive ballot-stuffing operation, we would have a true political crisis on our hands; because it is precisely the Iraqi Shia who will end up the most powerful block of the four largest that will survive this vote.

The fact that the worst betrayals of freedom are being committed, not by Iraqis betraying their fellow nationals and all the words of democracy and freedom, but rather by the Iranian mullahs who are already Number One on the list of people we want to kill someday soon, is actually a wonderful relief. It's like the episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show where Rob Petrie discovers that his expensive, new watch was stolen, not by one of his close friends, but instead by a professional burglar who had broken into the house. What a relief!

Iranian infiltration and interference is expected and can be dealt with -- not just by us, but by patriotic Iraqis, including Shia. It may be hard; the Iranians may even win some rounds (two other trucks full of ballots are said to have made it past the border guards). But in the end, we're looking for foreign infiltrators, perhaps with some Iraqi traitors supplying the local connection. We're not facing a bona-fide insurgency (which we have not seen to date) that wants to break away from the nation of Iraq and form part of Greater Iran.

On the secret prison-camp story, the Washington Times continues:

Gen. al-Samarrai said the Iranian intelligence officer, Tahseer Nasr Lawandi, works directly under the Kurdish deputy minister, Gen. Hussein Kamel, and is known throughout the ministry as "The Engineer."

"The Engineer was behind the torturing and killing in the ministry and was also in charge of Jadriya prison," said Gen. al-Samarrai, who left the ministry after a dispute with superiors and is now living in Jordan....

Mr. Lawandi, who had been a colonel in the Iranian Mukhabarat intelligence service, was granted Iraqi citizenship May 12, 2004, and awarded the rank of general, Gen. al-Samarrai said by telephone from Amman, Jordan, where he moved his family after two attempts on his life....

The general said Mr. Lawandi had worked with the minister and deputy minister to form a special security service to run the detention and interrogation operation and a separate group called the Wolf Brigade to capture suspects and bring them to the secret locations -- usually under cover of darkness....

Gen. al-Samarrai, a 46-year-old career officer, was ousted from the Interior Ministry in a purge of about 600 staff in July. Many were replaced by hard-line loyalists to new Interior Minister Bayan Jabr Solagh and his allies in the Badr Brigade, a militia affiliated with Iraq's largest Shi'ite religious party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The general said the minister had brought 17,000 Badr organization fighters into the ranks of Interior Ministry forces after Iraq's militias were officially disarmed. Most had received military training in Iran and were infiltrated into Iraq soon after the defeat of dictator Saddam Hussein.

If this story is both true and accurate, it would appear that Interior Minister Solagh would be one of those "Iraqi traitors" I mentioned above; but we don't yet know how much of this is correct, so tread cautiously: there certainly is a great temptation to put all the onus on the foreign jihadis and none on the locals who aid them or even simply turn a blind eye.

It's still a dangerous, deadly situation; but it's aways better to face off against foreigners trying to grab power than a significant portion of one's own population turning traitor. Let's hope the Iraqis and our own forces crack down hard on Iran (and also upon the Iraqis who accept such "allies"), not only by stopping future adventurism but also by punishing Iran for these two schemes. Something permanent, embarassing, and debilitating, perhaps involving Hezbollah, the enforcement arm of the mad mullahs of Iran.

Let them eat sand. But make sure the Iraqis know their real enemies are across their borders -- not across the parliamentary aisle.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 14, 2005, at the time of 07:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 11, 2005

Dario, Fo of the World

Art - Good, Bad, and Bogus , Iraq Matters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

Dario Fo, an überleftist playwright, Nobel Prize winner -- say, where have I heard that combination before? -- and candidate for Mayor of Milan, has rushed into production a play about the lonely vigil of Cindy Sheehan (and presumably her rather massive and worshipful entourage, though I'm not sure whether any of them has a speaking part):

"Peace Mom" received its world premiere in London on Saturday night, starring British actress Frances de la Tour, with both Sheehan and Italian dramatist Fo in the audience.

The one-woman show is based on extracts from Sheehan's letters to Bush and other writings. De la Tour delivered the monologues beneath large pictures of Sheehan's son Casey and a tank in the Iraqi desert in front of a plume of fire....

The play was rushed into production to conclude a day-long conference of activists opposed to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, with de la Tour reading some passages from a script.

But relax; I'm sure the play will be every bit as fair and even-handed as his other farces and satires, which have gotten him kicked out of virtually every theater group he has ever joined, banned (off and on) in most countries, and have drawn death threats from the Italian Left, the Fascisti, condemnation by the Church, and a tear-gas grenade hurled during a performance of one of his plays. (Another play exalted the PLO... and actual members performed in its cast).

"Frances did such an amazing job of conveying my feelings of anger and betrayal," a tearful Sheehan said after the play.

She said she hoped the play would help "put a human face" on the war.

There is a peculiar belief among leftists that if a person manages to enrage people on all sides of the political spectrum, that must mean he is telling the truth (perhaps even speaking it to power). This is, of course, utter nonsense: it is entirely possible to offend everybody merely by being a big enough fugghead. (I just blurted the name "Bill Burkett" out loud, Tourette's-like, for some inexplicable reason.)

Fo, the leftist playwright who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature, said his wife and artistic partner Franca Rame would star in a longer final version of the play in Italy.

I can barely contain my anticipation. I am giddy with excitement.

I suspect "Mother Sheehan," having evidently abandoned her family (including her surviving son), has finally found her ideological soulmate: a man who hates everyone and everything. Surely this must be minute seventeen or eighteeen for Cindy Sheehan by now... I wonder when the bill for overtime will come due?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 11, 2005, at the time of 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 10, 2005

What Has the Times Got Against Coercion Anyway?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Now the New York Times is on a tear because some of the information we obtained about al-Qaeda came (surprisingly enough) from terrorist prisoners who really didn't want to talk to us -- and who therefore required coercion to loosen their tongues. Even more staggering, after ratting out their friends, some of these terrorists claimed that everything we had extracted from them was a lie, and they accused us of torturing them:

Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim
by Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
December 9, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

What is it with the Times and prisoner claims? They seem to believe that the Bush administration cannot be trusted about the war on Islamic jihadism because we have an interest in the issue... but a prisoner who unquestionably has interests at stake is still trusted implicitly by the Times. Note how "said he had fabricated them" above transubstantiates into casual certainty just two paragraphs later:

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used [Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi's] accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

By "now discredited," what Mr. Jehl means is "now recanted." But the fact that a prisoner recants is not a refutation of his earlier claims... a fact that seems to elude the CIA, as they immediately withdrew the intelligence they garnered from those claims. Or did they have another reason to withdraw?

Libi was captured in Pakistan in late 2001, and he was at the time the highest ranking leader of the terror group al-Qaeda. This is not a man unfamiliar with interrogation techniques and how to resist them; but he would also know that nobody is so stupid as to believe without evidence anything said by a prisoner with an agenda to lie -- whether in distress or resting easily in a comfy chair. Libi must have known that anything he said would be thoroughly checked out before it was accepted; so the idea that he just spun wild fantasies to avoid being tortured by the Egyptians (to whom we had rendited him in January of 2002) is absurd on its face.

But this is not the first time the CIA has chosen to accept implicitly and absolutely the words of a terrorist prisoner over and above any other evidence: to this day, the primary reason the CIA refuses to buy the claim by Czech intelligence that 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta met with a top officer of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Prague is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh both deny, from U.S. custody, that such a meeting took place... despite the fact that they do not claim to have been out of the country during that time, nor to have personally seen Atta during that period: only that his movements do not match the timelines that Mohammed and Binalshibh gave to the CIA.

(The other main reason is that Atta's cell phone was used during the period he would have been gone. Considering that his cell phone would likely not have worked in Prague anyway, and that he had roommates, this doesn't exactly leap out as a killer alibi to me.)

The claims of al-Qaeda learning from Iraq how to build and use chemical and biological weapons were almost certainly evaluated in light of other intelligence gleaned from other sources; they may be right, they may be wrong -- but their accuracy is not determined by whether Libi later recanted.

From where I'm sitting (in my living room, actually), it appears as though Libi gave little intelligence until he was rendited to Egypt. Then, after some coercion and intelligence interrogation (of Libi and others), he spilled his guts about the Iraq/al-Qaeda connections.

More than a year later, after we invaded Iraq, when al-Qaeda declared Iraq the line in the sand with the West -- then and only then did Libi suddenly retract his claims, according to Mr. Jehl of the Times:

The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

(Note again the dead certainty in the Times account: the statements may well be controversial or even questionable -- but there is no evidence presented here, or even hinted at, to prove them "false.")

Last, here is a fascinating question-and-answer pair from the article... which Mr. Jehl presents in reverse order and separated by many paragraphs and a page jump, which serve -- perhaps accidentally -- to obscure the fact that the first answers the second.

The question of why the administration relied so heavily on the statements by Mr. Libi has long been a subject of contention. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made public last month unclassified passages from the February 2002 document, which said it was probable that Mr. Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers."

The document showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons.

And the answer, which appears before the question:

A government official said that some intelligence provided by Mr. Libi about Al Qaeda had been accurate, and that Mr. Libi's claims that he had been treated harshly in Egyptian custody had not been corroborated.

I have often wondered: I can't possibly be the only person able to add a pair of integers to get a third. The solution to Carl Levin's conundrum seems pretty clear to me:

Libi is a serial fabricator; of course he is. To quote from the wonderful Charles Bronson movie Breakheart Pass (screenplay by Alistair MacLean, from his novel), "if a man is a thief and murderer, it follows he may be a liar as well." All al-Qaeda leaders are fabricators.

But one doesn't fabricate from nothing. Interrogators already know some information, and they will check out other things the prisoner claims before relying upon them. If he lies, the prisoner will be punished -- probably very harshly.

So what do fabricators do? They tell part of the truth... just not the whole. They lie about some things but not all. And that is how you crack them: you separate and interrogate many people who each have some piece of the puzzle. Then you combine narratives and eliminate obvious lies. You come back to each prisoner with information he likely knows -- information he knows he did not tell you; he believes you know more than you actually do, so his lies will become smaller, and more of what he says is the truth.

Lather, rinse, repeat -- many times, over a space of months. You use coercive techniques to wear him down, not to torture him into screaming out anything he thinks you want to hear, because that is useless to you.

Almost certainly, Libi lied as best he could; equally certainly, he let slip much that was true. His "recantation" therefore is probably designed more to make us doubt what is true than help us eliminate what is false. Why would Libi feel any regret at having misled us, his enemy? Why try to set straight a narrative that is in his interest to keep ambiguous and obscure?

The CIA knows this; they're not utter fools. So they, too, have an agenda: they do not want Libi's confessions to be true, or at least not proven true, because that would help justify the invasion of Iraq... and we already know the CIA is willing to move heaven and earth, and even leak data to smear itself, in order to damage George W. Bush on his signature issue. So after their assessment has been used to justify that invasion, they seize upon the opportunity of Libi's "recantation" to withdraw their own intelligence, thus leaving Bush twisting slowly in the wind.

I may have some details off, but I think the basics are sound. And if that is the case, we have answered the question in the title of this post: the Times, like the CIA, doesn't like rendition and coercive interrogation not because they're seriously worried about the civil liberties of al-Qaeda leaders, but because such tactics can actually wring the truth out of terrorist prisoners.

And they can't handle the truth.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 10, 2005, at the time of 02:39 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 07, 2005

Another Day, Another Life

Everyday Heroes , Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

During my daily surf of MilBlogs, I stumbled onto this one: 365 and a Wakeup. 365 and a Wakeup is one of the finalists in the 2005 Weblog Award's Best Military Blog category. When you read a post like this one, you can easily see why. (I'm working my way through all the MilBlog nominees so I can vote intelligently.)

Thunder6, "Deputy Commander of A Co, 1-184 IN, 3ID in Southern Baghdad," describes a recent encounter with a young mother and her disabled son.

During our last patrol through the shantytowns a young mother waited patiently outside the bustling throng of children hopping back and forth between our vehicles. I don’t remember seeing her arrive, she just suddenly appeared on the outskirts of the roiling flock of children. In that sea of motion she stood as still and resolute as a obsidian tower, her black burkha providing a mute contrast to the gaudy kaleidoscope of children’s clothing. She was clutching a toddler tightly to her chest, and I reflexively assumed she was trying to secure some candy for her child.

It turn out she wasn't there for candy. Her son was feeble and couldn't stand, let alone walk. She was desperately hoping that the Americans could somehow cure him.

Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do medically to help. The child suffered from a congenital birth defect that left him frail and sickly. “Sir, we couldn’t help him even if we were in the States," said the company medic. But the sight of the poor little boy gnawed at Thunder6.

The memory of that wisp of a boy stayed with me, and after a few days I asked SSG Spite if he could think of anything we might be able to do for the family. SSG Spite said that he would see what he could do and then disappeared for the rest of the day. The following day I knocked on SSG Spite’s door and when I walked in I almost dropped my coffee mug in shock. There sat SSG Spite quietly cleaning his weapon… sitting in a wheelchair. SSG Spite seemed to sense my agitation without even turning around and after a pregnant pause he said “Don’t worry sir, I’m fine. The wheelchair is for the kid”. Then he turned around, gave me a sly grin and said “But I had you worried, didn’t I?”. We laughed for a few minutes and then SSG Spite said “If I didn’t feel sorry for the kid I’d keep the wheelchair – this is the best seat in the barracks”.

What kind of "occupiers" would stop and think to help a helpless child? The American kind, that's what.

The next time A-Company patrolled in the area where the woman and her son lived, they brought the wheelchair with them. After struggling their way through mobs of Iraqi children, who were ecstatic to receive the little Iraqi flags that they handed out, they knocked at the door of the woman. They brought her and her son out to their Humvees.

When we arrived SGT Bard opened one of the doors and pulled and tugged until the wheelchair slid through the armored door. I wish I could describe the womans face when we gently picked up her son and placed him in the wheelchair - but there are some emotions words cannot hope to touch.

The Howard Deans, John Kerrys, and Jeff Engelhardts of the world can call our guys and girls any despicable, schoolyard name they want and smear them from now until next November; they can call on us to cut and run and say the world would be better off if Saddam were still in power in Iraq. But the fact of the matter is that guys like Thunder6 are the norm, not the exception; and he and his men are making a world of difference over there. One child, one life at a time.

What's John Kerry done lately?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 07, 2005, at the time of 04:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Big "White" Lie

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

UPDATED: See below.

The American White-Phosphorus War Crime in Fallujah....

This story of a supposed American war atrocity -- a crime against humanity -- has circulated stealthily through the left-wing blogosphere since an Italian TV documentary Fallujah:The Hidden Massacre claimed that the US military used a banned chemical weapon, white phosphorus, to massacre civilians in Fallujah in November of 2004. The documentary aired early last month, marking the first anniversary of the second (and successful) US Fallujah offensive, Operation al-Fajr (translation, "Dawn"), but originally called Phantom Fury, which commenced November 8th last year. [We should note at this point that it is the documentary and the person discussed below that call white phosphorus a "chemical weapon," not Big Lizards. See update at the end of this post. -- BL]

The key, self-proclaimed "witness" to this extrordinary atrocity claim is a "former American soldier" named Jeff Engelhardt. He participates on a group blog, Fight to Survive, a "MilBlog" of a strange sort: the contributers are all supposedly soldiers, all bitterly opposed to the war. In Fight to Survive, "hEkLe" (Engelhardt) claims that he served in the Army in Iraq from February 2004 through February 2005. His unit, he says, was "3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division in Baquba, Iraq." He may well be telling the truth (though I'm skeptical; remember the Winter Soldier project and see below). But sadly, even if he is a legitimate soldier, wearing the uniform doesn't always mean loyalty to the country.

From the anti-Bush retoric in his blog -- venomous even by left-wing standards -- it is obvious that he has been a bitter enemy of the Commander in Chief and the Iraqi war from the beginning. But agenda aside, there are some curious dicrepancies between his interview in November 2005, in which he publicly accused his fellow soldiers of committing war crimes, and the contemporaneous blog account a year earlier of what he saw and did in the last two days of the offensive.

One I noticed right off: Engelhardt refers at one point to a "Bradley tank."

However, upon reaching the front lines, a safety standard was in effect stating that the urban combat was extremely intense. The lightest armored vehicles allowed in sector were Bradley tanks.

Obviously, I was never in the Army, and my husband was Navy. But isn't that thing called a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, or maybe just a Bradley? Maybe in Army slang, soldiers refer to a Bradley as a tank... can anyone who was in the Army confirm or refute this? I've just never seen that term before.

He also refers to Humvees as "trucks," and he writes that "fighter jets" flew in to make "a series of massive air strikes" "terminating whole city blocks at a time." I have no idea whether Army personnel know the difference between fighters and bombers; or maybe he meant F/A-18 Hornets. But the terms just seems a little... off. And has anyone else ever heard of Cobras and Apaches sporting "chain gun missile launchers?" I Googled the term, and the only hits I got were to various reprints of Engelhardt's own post.

A conservative blogger, Michael Moynihan of Stambord: the Stockholm Spectator blog, has pointed out some other discrepancies. However I noticed something else that might have been overlooked, by and large, by those focusing on Engelhardt's repulsive, anti-American rhetoric. (I think I may have seen a brief mention of this point on another MilBlog; unfortunately, I didn't note which one it was at the time, and now it's gone from my memory.)

While Engelhardt's bitter slanders against the United States have caused most decent Americans to discount his claims, this one discrepency is almost conclusive evidence that Engelhardt is making up the whole story: in his contemporaneous blogpost, Engelhardt does not even so much as mention the supposed "massacre" he describes so vividly a year later.

Engelhardt says he drove to Fallujah as an escort during the last couple of days of the operation. He did not participate in the combat itself but just observed from the city limits. In the Italian interview, he says he heard orders issued over the radio to drop white phosphorus, or "Whiskey Pete," on civilian areas of the city:

REPORTER: Were any chemical weapons used in Fallujah?

JEFF ENGELHARDT: From the U.S. military, yeah, absolutely. White phosphorus. Possibly napalm may or may not have been used; I do not know. I do know that white phosphorus was used, which is definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, a chemical weapon.

REPORTER: Is he sure of it?

JEFF ENGELHARDT: Yes. It happened.

REPORTER: How can he be certain?

JEFF ENGELHARDT: Well, it comes across radio as a general transmission. When it happens like that, you hear it on the radio through -- we have speakers in our trucks -- speakers and then the transmission goes to the speakers, so it's audible. And as they'd say, “In five [inaudible], we're going drop some Whiskey Pete.” “Roger. Commence bombing.” I mean, it just comes across the radio, and like, when you hear “Whiskey Pete,” that's the military slang.

Sounds quite definitive, doesn't it? But his contemporaneous account shows he was not so sure at the time...

And as always, the artillery—some rounds were high explosive, some were illumination rounds, some were reported as being white phosphorus (the modern day napalm) [reported? reported by whom? -- BL]. Occasionally, on the outskirts of the isolated impact area, you could hear tanks firing machine guns and blazing their cannons. It was amazing that anything could survive this deadly onslaught. Suddenly a transmition came over the radio approving the request for “bunker-busters”.

How did "reported as being white phosphorus" became "definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, a chemical weapon" one year later? Also notice he writes white phosphorus and a radio transmission in the same paragraph. And yet, he does not mention the order to drop "whisky pete." Instead he writes he heard an oder to drop "bunker-busters," which are completely different animals.

Wouldn't this have been the ideal place to mention the "Whisky Pete" radio transmission -- if he had actually heard such a thing?

Let's continue. In the interview, Engelhardt said that he had seen the evidence of chemical weapon use in Fallujah:

NARRATOR: Contrary to what was said by the U.S. State Department, white phosphorus was not used in the open field to illuminate enemy troops. For this, tracer was used. A rain of fire shot from U.S. helicopters on the city of Fallujah on the night of the 8th of November. [inaudible] will show you in this exceptional documentary, which proves that a chemical agent was used in a massive and indiscriminate way in districts of Fallujah. In the days that followed, U.S. satellite images showed Fallujah burned out and razed to the ground.

[Yet amazingly, photos of Fallujah today show that it must have been completely rebuilt in a single year! -- BL]

JEFF ENGELHARDT: The gases from the warhead of the white phosphorus will disperse in a cloud. And when it makes contact with skin, then it's absolutely irreversible damage, burning of flesh to the bone. It doesn't necessarily burn clothes, but it will burn the skin underneath clothes. And this is why protective masks do not help, because it will burn right through the mask, the rubber of the mask. It will manage to get inside your face. If you breathe it, it will blister your throat and your lungs until you suffocate, and then it will burn you from the inside. It basically reacts to skin, oxygen and water. The only way to stop the burning is with wet mud. But at that point, it's just impossible to stop.

REPORTER: Have you seen the effects of these weapons?

JEFF ENGELHARDT: Yes. Burned. Burned bodies. I mean, it burned children, and it burned women. White phosphorus kills indiscriminately. It's a cloud that will within, in most cases, 150 meters of impact will disperse, and it will burn every human being or animal.

Whether he is qualified to judge the cause of death by simply observing a corpse is an interesting question, but beside the point. The reality is that he never saw those corpses he described... not in Fallujah, anyway, which is what the documentary and his interview were about.

In his blog post, he said he was not involved in the fight. He was far enough away that his superior thought they were safe. He could see a massive amount of bombs being dropped. But the closest they came to his position was about one kilometer away.

Engelhardt in 2004 never mentions he saw any person being killed or body being blown up. In fact his description of the air raid is nothing like that experienced by my father, whose village was bombed by American planes during WWII, when he was a little boy. My grandfather's house was blown to pieces in the raid; the family, including my father, only survived because their bomb shelter was built in the middle of a bamboo grove. (The next-door neighbors' shelter was built underground but in a bare field. None of them survived.)

Engelhardt's description tells me that he was close enough to see buildings being destroyed, but too far to see any individual person being killed. So when was he supposed to have seen these "burned bodies?"

Perhaps he means he saw them later, the aftermath of the bombing. Earlier in the same post, he wrote that his superior was planning on going into the city the next day to access the damage. But Engelhardt's next post is months later, on February 20th, 2005 -- and he never mentions any subsequent visit to Fallujah. Jeff "hEkLe" Engelhardt doesn't mention "Falluja" again until a post on September 14th, 2005... which, coincidentally, is also the next time he mentions the word "phosphorus." But even in this post, he says nothing about having witnessed people burned to death by white phosphorus (or "Whiskey Pete," which term he never uses even once on the Fight to Survive group blog).

Had Engelhardt accompanied the officer the next day -- and if he were telling the truth about the supposed atrocity -- he would have seen many "burned bodies." And had he seen such bodies, there simply is no question that he would have written extensivly about it right there and then in his blog. He seemed to recall in such vivid detail a year later; wouldn't the nightmare of a phosphorus-holocaust have been seared, seared in his memory a few days, not 365 days, after seeing them?

Perhaps, you might suggest, he did see it; but he was afraid to write about it because he was worried he might be arrested and court-martialed if he called his fellow soldiers war criminals or accused the president of ordering a crime against humanity. Such an extordinaly claim could create a backlash. Or maybe he just didn't want to say bad things about America; maybe he's a superpatriot who never thinks ill of his country.

Really? Just read though his blog. He clearly was not afraid to call the commander in chief obscenities and various other slurs. He was not afraid to talk about how brave the "insurgents" were. He was not afraid to write that Americans were conducting massacres in Iraq.

As Stambord quotes....

That veteran—the star witness—is one Jeff Englehart [sic], identified only as a “former soldier” that can “absolutely” confirm that such weapons were deployed in Fallujah. On his blog, written during his time in Iraq, Englehart [sic] quotes Che Guevara (he pompously urges his commanders to read him, to learn the true nature of an insurgency), beseeches his readers to “remove a lying fascist crook from office”, a “lowly criminal scumbag” who is the reincarnation “of John Wayne/Adolph Hitler (sic), the man “responsible for “Operation Iraqi Oppression,” which made use of “’final solution’ type missiles.” On the other hand the “resistance” (Englehart’s [sic] description) in Fallujah was “boldly fighting” his comrades. “What determination!” While some call the “resistors”—who constructed roadside and car bombs and suicide belts from within the city of Fallujah—cowards, Engelhart [sic] “call[s] them brave.” In other words, an unimpeachable witness with no political axe to grind. (After returning from his tour of duty, Engelhart [sic] has signed up with the Cindy Sheehan circus)

In fact, in the very same "hEkLe" post quoted above, Engelhardt writes the following:

Every time an atrocity is revealed through our news outlets, our grasp on this once secular nation slips away. As America grows increasingly disturbed by the images of carnage and violent death of her own sons in arms, its government loses the justification to continue the bloody debacle. Since all these traits are the conventional power’s unavoidable mistakes, the guerrilla campaign will surely succeed. In Iraq’s case, complete destruction of the United States military is impossible, but through perseverance the insurgency will drive us out. This will prove to be the inevitable outcome of the war.

This is not a man afraid to accuse his government and his comrades of committing "atrocities." If Engelhardt had actually seen then what he claimed a year later he saw, he would have written about it on November 19th, 2004. If he had tried to hold it in, he would have exploded like one of those “'final solution' type missiles." He would have cited it as Exhibit A of American war crimes. He would have crowed about it. He would have found an appropriate Che Guevera quote.

Besides, if the US actually used a banned chemical weapon, shouldn't it be investigated? Why didn't Engelhardt report this to the authorities, instead of waiting a year, and telling it to an Italian TV interviewer? (As usual, Leftists wait until they're abroad before bearing false witness against their own country and comrades.)

This entire story is a crock of baloney. I'm pretty sure Engelhardt never even set foot in Fallujah. In fact, he parses his words so carefully, he can honestly claim that he never actually said he personally witnessed an atrocity in Fallujah; he can even claim he never technically said he saw those "burned bodies" in person. Maybe he saw them on television while watching Point of View!

Engelhardt never saw burnt bodies in Fallujah; he never heard any radio transmission ordering white phosphorus to be dropped (commit a war crime -- over an open radio channel?). He is a fraud and a liar.

Even if it turns out he is a soldier, as well.

UPDATE 11:22 by Dafydd:

Commenter Tony B notes that:

It wouldn't be investigated because using willie pete ISN'T a war crime. I'm quite certain we did use it. There are so many things that point to this guy simply not knowing what he's talking about that I am suspicious whether he was even a soldier at all. If he was, he had very little experience with combat equipment.

Tony B turns out to be absolutely correct -- as I suspected when I was editing Sachi's post (we both read all posts that appear on Big Lizards). I checked carefully to make sure that we never made the statement ourselves that WP was a chemical weapon... we simply let Mr. Engelhardt and the Italian interviewer speak for themselves.

Here is GlobalSecurity.Org speaking to the subject:

White phosphorus is not banned by any treaty to which the United States is a signatory. Smokes and obscurants comprise a category of materials that are not used militarily as direct chemical agents. The United States retains its ability to employ incendiaries to hold high-priority military targets at risk in a manner consistent with the principle of proportionality that governs the use of all weapons under existing law. The use of white phosphorus or fuel air explosives are not prohibited or restricted by Protocol II of the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention (CCWC), the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects.

Several commenters have confirmed what Sachi and I thought: terms like "Bradley tank" and "chain gun missile launcher" are not terms that an infantryman would use. Both of us have experience only with the Navy, so we were a little uncertain what the Army terms were... but those just sounded weird. I'm still curious myself whether soldiers refer to their Humvees as "trucks," or whether the word truck is exclusively used to refer to the Army trucks that haul things, those 2-ton or 5-ton things that actually look like real trucks. But again, although I've never heard a soldier refer to a Humvee as a truck, I'm not familiar with Army slang, and maybe it's more common than I thought. Anybody?

Note also that Engelhardt is the only person associated with Fight to Survive who used the phrase "whiskey pete" to refer to white phosphorus, and he only did so in the Italian documentary -- not on the blog itself (as Sachi noted). There is at least one reference from some other FTS author to "willie pete," which a couple of commenters noted is the correct slang.

I wonder if the other blog-authors on FTS have ever actually met Jeff Engelhardt, or if he is just another poster to them? Do they know anything about him other than what he, himself has written?

The more I read, the more suspicious I get about Mr. Engelhardt.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 07, 2005, at the time of 04:06 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

December 06, 2005

The Dean Drive

Elections , Iraq Matters , Politics - National , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

In the 1950s, a crackpot named Norman Dean "invented" what he called, with characteristic modesty, the Dean Drive. This device supposedly produced linear momentum without any reaction mass: that is, Dean claimed it would just zoom off in a straight line without having to expel anything behind it, like a jet or rocket must.

The fabled John W. Campbell, jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction, the best science-fiction magazine ever published, had by then entered his crank phase, championing such cockamamie ideas as the the Hieronymous Device and Dianetics. Campbell siezed upon the Dean Drive as the epitome of his almost religous faith in the ability of backyard inventers to circumvent the fundamental laws of the universe. Like, you know, gravity.

Today, we have a new Dean Drive: the drive by Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean to circumvent the fundamental laws of electoral politics. In this case, by getting the entire Democratic Party to run on a platform of higher taxes at home and defeatism abroad... and imagining that this will levitate the party to victory in 2006 and 2008.

Dean's descent into utter crackpottery began during the 2004 elections, but it continues apace as he desperately battles to bring about a great defeat in Iraq, for which he presumably will claim credit as he runs for president in 2008 (hat tip to the enigmatic eloi, Michelle Malkin). Some samples for your election delectation:

Dean: US Won't Win in Iraq
Posted By: Jim Forsyth
San Antonio WOAI.com
December 5th, 2005

(SAN ANTONIO) -- Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democratic Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years....

"I've seen this before in my life. [From the sidelines, he means. -- the Mgt.] This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

Aha, so the Murtha-Pelosi Proposal is about to become the new sailing orders for the Democratic Party... excellent! (Imagine this said in my best impersonation of Monty Burns.) What other suggestions does Mean Howard Dean have to offer?

"The White House wants us to have a permanent commitment to Iraq. This is an Iraqi problem. President Bush got rid of Saddam Hussein and that was a great thing [that's mighty white of him -- BL], but that could have been done in a very different way. [Perhaps levitating him out of the country by use of the Dean Drive! -- BL] But now that we're there we need to figure out how to leave. 80% of Iraqis want us to leave, and it's their country."

Translation: been there, done that. Time to go. Who's on Letterman tonight? I really love that turn of phrase: "now that we're there we need to figure out how to leave." For such a short trip, we could have walked.

Here's a rather startling claim:

And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion.

Gosh, that will come as a great shock to the Kurdish victims of Zarqawi's terrorism during his (formerly presumed) year running Ansar al-Islam in northern (Kurdistan) Iraq from 2002 to 2003 -- a year before "this invasion," while Saddam Hussein was still firmly in charge. Starting right after Zarqawi received medical treatment in a Baghdad hospital restricted to leading members of Hussein's inner circle.

Governor Doctor Dean seems not only "stuck on stupid" but stuck in the 70s. First, there are the incessant Vietnam comparisons; and now this:

Dean also compared the controversy over pre-war intelligence to the Watergate scandal which brought down Richard Nixon's presidency in 1974.

"What we see today is very much like what was going in Watergate," Dean said.

Well! Who can argue with that?

All I can say, contemplating four more years of Harry Reid (D-Las Vegas) running the Democratic caucus in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as Minority Leader in the House, and Howard Dean as the philosophical mentor of the party as chairman, is "bring -- it -- on!"



Mad How Disease
Victim of Mad How Disease? Dean puts his finger on the root of the problem.

Norman Dean never had any success selling his "Dean Drive": his secretiveness, lying, and raging paranoia always got in the way. That plus the fact that Dean's idea was a nonsensical pile of junk to begin with. I doubt that his contemporary namesake will do any better... and mostly for the same reasons.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 06, 2005, at the time of 04:36 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

A Few Good Iraqi Men

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Finding a real success story disguised as a catastrophe is becoming a hobby of mine. When I go through the familiar pessimistic headlines, I often stumble onto good news hidden in the corners. Take a look at this story from Reuters, which tries so hard to play the Iraqi Army as good, but not, well, good enough. Trying so hard, they don't even notice that they prove exactly the opposite: that the Iraqi soldiers are really as good as it gets.

The success of Iraqi Security Force training is undeniable. More and more Iraqi forces are taking over operations and leading attacks. Even the MSM have to admit the readiness of the Iraqi forces. But being the MSM, they also have to find some way to give it a negative spin. If they can't attack the Iraqis' ability, what can they pick on? Ah, lack of equipment, that's what!

Equipped with little armour or ammunition, [Iraqi Army] soldiers can often be seen wearing balaclavas and toting AK-47 rifles as they ride around in the back of Nissan trucks.

This sounds familier. Weren't the MSM complaining about lack of armored vehicle for the US troops not too long ago? But wait, there is more.

Iraqi soldiers could storm the village, conduct house-to- house searches and round up suspects, but with only a few unarmoured Nissan trucks to ride in, they'd never get out alive.

"We'll need the American military to lead us out of there," he said, noting that the route out of the village would probably be booby-trapped with improvised explosive devices and the Iraqi army didn't have vehicles that could withstand them.

But what's the real story? That Iraqi troops are now capable of leading a raid with the US troops serving only as backup. They just don't have enough Humvees. Well, actually they are short of something even more important:

Even as a group of [Colonel Mohammed Najem] Kharye's men prepared for the village raid by scrutinising a map drawn in the sand and marked with smooth stones, others squatted nearby, still waiting for identification badges.

They can map up and plan the raid, but they don't have enough ID badges! Actually, I wasn't kidding when I said this was "something even more important." But I'll wait until the end of the post to explain what I mean.

Shortage of equipment or lack of logistical support is nothing new. Every army suffers from such problems at one time or another. What's important is the troops' ability to solve the problem by improvising with what they have, to come up with a workaround. The Iraqi army is doing exactly that; this is where Reuters doesn't even understand the real story behind the superficial story they're reporting.

Though attacks on Iraqi forces are frequent, the soldiers do not have the armoured Humvees, Bradley fighting vehicles or tanks that are capable of withstanding bullets and some blasts.

In an attempt to make their Nissan trucks safer, Iraqi soldiers at Khamiss have welded sheet metal to the sides. AK-47 rifles and rocket propelled grenades are their main weapons -- they have not even been given mortar rounds.

Obviously, the better an army is equipped, better off they are. But if the army is not skilled, all the weaponry in the world can't bring a victory. And without the "heart" for combat, neither training nor equipment can make soldiers stick out a fight.

Saddam's army was armed to the teeth and even trained, after a fashion. After the fall of the regime, we found thousands of weapons' caches filled with state of the art weapons (side by side with virtual antiques). How well did that army fight? Confronted with the enemy (us), Saddam's soldiers simply threw away their guns and fled.

Within weeks of Saddam's fall in April 2003, U.S. authorities disbanded Iraq's 400,000-strong armed forces. U.S. officials said this simply formalised the fact that the army had evaporated in the aftermath of the war, with soldiers deserting en masse.

Weaponry and equipment are nice, but they don't make an army. Men (and women like Sgt. Hester) with the will to fight and the training to make it a good one make an army. From the looks of it, the new Iraqi Army has plenty of both -- now.

Even soldiers sometimes forget that; Americans -- heck, Westerners -- have had that kind of "heart" for such a long time, they sometimes forget it's a rare and precious thing. That more than anything else is why Western civilization dominates the world.

I was looking at the website Soldiers For the Truth, and I read a piece by former intelligence officer Michael Gifford. It's a great article; Captain Gifford says the road to getting out of Iraq leads through victory in training up the Iraqi Army... he's definitely no John Kerry! But then he falls into a trap that catches many others:

I spent 6 months training the police of the restive Al Anbar Province of Iraq in the winter and spring of 2004, and that was after 6 months of fighting in the streets along side them. For the few first months, we were wondering why they were deserting in huge numbers, why they were running from firefights. I realized very quickly that we were asking them these questions from inside our armored humvees and from behind our bulletproof vests. No wonder these guys were turning tail and running! I put myself in their shoes, and started to see just how bad they had it.

But wait... if that's the problem -- then why didn't the American Marines run from Iwo Jima? They didn't have any armor then, either. What about Col. Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine Volunteers on Little Round Top at the battle of Gettysburg, repulsing attack after attack from the Confederate forces? At the end of the battle, as the Grays massed for a final attack, Chamberlain realized his men were out of ammunition... so he ordered a bayonet charge which shattered the Confederate ranks.

The 20th Maine didn't have any uparmored Humvees. Neither did the 250 men who defended the Alamo, buying time for Sam Houston to raise a Texican army against Santa Anna.

For that matter, what about the 300 Spartans and their 4,000-5,000 Greek allies who held the gates of Thermopylae against the two-million-man Persian army of Xerxes, led by King Leonidas? At the end, the Spartans sent their allies away to live; but none of the Spartans survived.

The armor doesn't make the man; the man makes the armor.

And then came the body armor--my God, you should have seen the looks on their faces when we issued them new bulletproof vests in the winter of 2003. We went as far as to show them the actual test plates from the vests we were issuing--the plates that we took out to the range and shot--proving that they were able to stop both 9mm and AK47 rounds. A few weeks after their issue, I heard reports from Fallujah that the Iraqi police were really showing some cajones - much, much more confidence.

I don't think Captain Gifford understands what really happened, because it isn't a military question. It wasn't that the Iraqis were no longer afraid of dying. That body armor was a magic spell, the spell of acceptance: they had professional equipment, so they started thinking of themselves as professionals.

The same with the armored Humvees and the improved ammunition. Here is the proof:

Their morale began to increase with the equipment we began to provide. And once we began to outfit them with better uniforms, leather jackets and patches, you could really see their pride begin to swell. And anyone who's worked with the Iraqi Police or Army knows that pride is a huge factor in their morale.

New uniforms and leather jackets aren't the keys to destroying the insurgency, but it shows we give a damn about making sure they're safe and professional looking.

It showed that we treated them as equals -- and they began to perform as equals. And that is what I meant by saying that giving the Iraqi solders ID badges really was more important than Humvees: the badges (the Los Angeles Police Department calls them "shields," which reminds us of the Spartans again) were like the Wizard of Oz giving the Cowardly Lion a medal; the courage was there within him all the time... he just needed someone to help him find it.

Back to Col. Kharye's Iraqi troops and why they really have become "as good as it gets."

But Kharye says morale is high -- especially among soldiers who remember life in Saddam Hussein's army....

"In the past if you made a mistake, you were executed immediately, no questions asked," Kharye said. "Now we can debate the positives and negatives of operations. It's a big difference."

Saddam's army led from the top but the U.S. military is teaching Iraqi officers to encourage lower ranking soldiers to make decisions and take charge, said Arrington.

That is the real story... the one that Reuters missed because their big, fat agenda got in the way again.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 06, 2005, at the time of 02:26 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 05, 2005

Ask The 3/25

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

An all too familiar headline spreads across the AP news stream: Ten Marines Killed by Roadside Bomb. "Worst in Iraq since Aug." it crows. God, they are so giddy to report the deaths of American troops, aren't they?

A couple of months ago, I stumbled across a MilBlog whose author was a soldier writing from Iraq. He had just lost five of his comrades within 48 hours in two separate incidents. He was devastated, morose and angry. But the one thing he was not was despairing: he was proud of his buddies who sacrificed their lives to protect our country.

I don't know which unit (if any) Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) was talking to, but the warriors I read about are not "broken." If anything, after living through the deaths of their friends, they are more detemined than ever to finish what they started.

The Belmont Club frequently introduces such soldiers; for example, Wretchard links to this post:

"We know we made a positive difference," says Cpl. Jeff Schuller of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, who spent all but one week of his eight-month tour with Mayer. "I can't say at what level, but I know that where we were, we made it better than it was when we got there."

It is the simplest measure of success, but for the marine, soldier, or sailor, it may be the only measure of success. In a business where life and death rest on instinctive adherence to thoroughly ingrained lessons, accomplishment is ticked off in a list of orders followed and tasks completed. And by virtually any measure, America's servicemen and women are accomplishing the day-to-day tasks set before them.



Cpls. Jeff Schuller and Stan Mayer
Cpls. Jeff Schuller and Stan Mayer

The 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines -- the "3/25" -- is the unit that lost 15 marines in less than a week - nine of them in one of the deadliest roadside bombings against U.S. forces during the war.

The 3/25 has seen the worst of the war. But the yarns they want to tell us are not stories of loss and futility but fond memories of the Iraqi people whose lives have turned around because of Americans like these soldiers.

Their conversation could be a road map of the kind of stories that military folks say the mainstream media are missing. One colleague made prosthetics for an Iraqi whose hand and foot had been cut off by insurgents. When other members of the unit were sweeping areas for bombs, the medics made a practice of holding impromptu infant clinics on the side of the road.

They remember one Iraqi man who could not hide his joy at the marvel of an electric razor. And at the end of the 3/25's tour, a member of the Iraqi Army said: "Marines are not friends; marines are brothers," says Lt. Richard Malmstrom, the battalion's chaplain.

In Hit, where marines stayed in force to keep the peace, the progress was obvious, say members of the 3/25. The residents started burning trash and fixing roads - a sign that the city was returning to a sense of normalcy. Several times, "people came up to us [and said]: 'There's a bomb on the side of the road. Don't go there,' " says Pfc. Andrew Howland.

For Mayer, who joined the reserves because he wanted to do something bigger than himself, and for Schuller, a third-generation marine, Iraq has given them a sense of achievement. Now when they look at the black-and-white pictures of marines past in the battalion headquarters, "We're adding to that legacy," says Schuller.

This is what they wish to share with the American people - and is also the source of their frustration. Their eight months in Iraq changed their lives, and they believe it has changed the lives of the Iraqis they met as well.

One example of the progress we should focus on is that more and more Iraqi citizens are opening up to American troops. I read a similar story in Bill Roggio's report from Husaybah --

On the way to Hue, 1st Platoon encountered a possible IED. Buried in the ground, tail up, was a mortar round. An Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was called in to destroy the device. The round was not rigged to explode. “Lots of times the locals find rounds and bury them in clear view so we can find them”, said Corporal Gauls.

Ask The Soldiers, which lets ordinary soldiers post thoughts unedited, also talks about this phenomenon.

[A]s far as how do ppl [sic] respond to us, they seem to warm up to us as each passing day. They now realize that we are not here for any other reason but for their independence and for them to be able to be free and have a voice.

Another contributer wrote:

[M]ostly all Iraqi citizens like having us here for example the waving hello as opposed to the finger. Yet, most of them understand that we are here for them not against them.

But the MSM is too busy reporting al-Qaeda's anti American "demonstration" to ask the American soldiers themselves what they think:

An AP Television News video showed the insurgents walking down a shuttered market street and a residential neighborhood, as well as firing four mortar rounds. The masked men, however, appeared relaxed, and the U.S. command dismissed the video as little more than a publicity stunt. [Emphasis added]

If you were actualy in Iraq like this next Marine, you could have seen yet another "publicity stunt" in progress:

Oh, there was a story a few months ago about this "huge protest" in the streets of Ramadi demanding that America leave Iraq forever. To tell the truth about that one; it was about 40-50 bad guys grouped in front of cameras to make the "crowd" seem much bigger than it was and as soon as Humm-Vee's rolled up to the scene, they scattered and seemingly vanished. Yeah, tough dudes alright.

So if mere civilians, who only catch a glimpse of this reality, are frustrated by the MSM's negative crusade against the war, how do you think the troops who are actual eyewitnesses to history? Ask The Soldiers answers that rhetorical question:

If you just read the daily paper and watch the MSM, you would think that we are losing this war on terror and that we are making no progress whatsoever. I say BULL****! Everyday that passes we make progress. We are training the Iraqi soldiers and police forces so that they can deal with this insurgency and the normal problems of a country. [Expletive deleted by Big Lizards.]

As for Murtha's broken-army comment, one more Marine, Major John Tamms, has this to say: (Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds for the quote):

Unmitigated crap. And I don't say this out of defensiveness or service pride - I'll tell you about how far we have had to come in a bit. First, though, a little material for you to mull over. . . .

The constant stream of re-enlistments was a revelation to me. When I was the Executive Officer of the garrison at Bagram Airfield (a job I gladly traded away after 5 months) I had to find room to more than double the size of the Retention Office. I personally administered the oath of re-enlistment to an E-5 and an E-7. The E-5 was a mother of two young children and the E-7 was eligible to retire when we got home!

Broken? Hardly. Is it difficult work? Yes.

Do not mistake hard work for foundering. Respectfully, Rep. Murtha - you are wrong. Dead wrong. [Emphasis added.]

If you really want to know how the war goes, send not for the politician, the protester, or the newspaper man. Just ask the 3/25.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 05, 2005, at the time of 02:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 03, 2005

Ace of Aces

Iraq Matters , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

Ace over at Ace of Spades linked our post Which Hand Do You Choose; as I always do, I read the post that linked us... and boy, am I glad I did.

Ace's own post (below the part where he links us) is just about the clearest, most succinct, and most devastating critique of the entire liberal "cheerleaders for defeatism" clique I've read. Definitely better than our own post that he linked! (Note, this is not simple modesty, because I have none.)

Just a sample to whet the appetite:

Their careers, political and media, depend upon an American defeat in Iraq. They cannot hope for an actual Al Qaeda military victory; that's simply an impossibility. They need Bush to concede defeat in the jaws of victory, and to do that, they need to convince the American public that a war moving towards full victory is actually doomed to certain defeat.

They need this. They cannot recapture power without it. And if convincing the American people to save their asses by forcing Bush to surrender requires them lying about white phosphorus, "propaganda" in Iraqi newspapers, and the like, they'll do so, gladly.

Read the whole post: if this doesn't put it all on a nutshell for you, you're too reductionist!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 03, 2005, at the time of 05:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Buy an Ad, Go to Liberal Heck

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

I've refrained from commenting on the "evil military destroying freedom of the press in Iraq" story because -- unlike the mainstream media -- I actually wanted to get the facts before throwing myself off the Conclusion Cliff. And now we have some.

Recall that the charge, leveled by a group of anonymous "military officials" and published in the Los Angeles Times, was that the American military, as part of a devious, underhanded PsyOps program, was bribing Iraqi newspapers to publish propaganda pieces that were actually written by intelligence officers; the poor newspaper editors, the charge went on, had absolutely no idea that they were being covertly manipulated by their American spymasters, in blatant violation of the Rights of Man, international law, and the Iraqis' sacred First-Amendment rights.

After actually investigating the facts of the case, however, the Pentagon has explained what was really going on. From "Military Explains News Propaganda in Iraq," by Lolita C. Baldor

"If any part of our process does not have our full confidence, we will examine that activity and take appropriate action," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman in Iraq. "If any contractor is failing to perform as we have intended, we will take appropriate action."

Johnson did not specify what changes, if any, might be considered.

The remarks came after days of reports and criticism that the military was covertly planting in the Iraqi media stories that, while factual, gave a slanted, positive view of conditions in Iraq. [One presumes that a slanted, negative view of conditions in Iraq -- which we see every day from the same Los Angeles Times that breathlessly broke the tendentious version of this story -- would have been perfectly fine. -- the Mgt.]

U.S. military officials in Iraq said articles had been offered and published in Iraqi newspapers "as a function of buying advertising and opinion/editorial space, as is customary in Iraq."

Coalition forces compiled the material, and the Washington-based Lincoln Group was authorized to pay Iraqi papers to run the articles, which were supposed to be identified in that way, said Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Warner, who went to the Pentagon Friday for an explanation, said the program was carefully monitored by military leaders and was reviewed by attorneys to ensure it complied with the law.

In other words, the huge "scandal" is that Coalition forces commissioned American soldiers to write "factual" accounts (nobody disputes that they were factual) of military engagements and rebuilding efforts, to counter the malicious lying by the terrorists and the American and international MSM. These accounts were handed to a third party in order to protect the Iraqi newspapers from reprisals by Zarqawi. The stories written by the soldiers were run as ads and paid commentary, which is a normal way to get your message out in Iraq; and they were supposed to have been identified as having been written by American soldiers.

But somehow, attribution didn't always get attached. Who could be responsible for that? Was it deliberate "propaganda," as the Associated Press has taken to calling it?

In fact, the Times even admitted that typically, the stories were identified as adverts, and were sometimes run in special fonts, typographies, and colors. But evidently, not every Iraqi stringer working for the Lincoln Group identified the purchaser as the Coalition when he sold the stories.

Why might they not do this? The answer is easily deduced from the Los Angeles Times story that started the whole "scandal" investigation, "U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press":

After he learned of the source of three paid stories that ran in Al Mada in July, that newspaper's managing editor, Abdul Zahra Zaki, was outraged, immediately summoning a manager of the advertising department to his office.

"I'm very sad," he said. "We have to investigate."

The Iraqis who delivered the articles also reaped modest profits from the arrangements, according to sources and records.

Employees at Al Mada said that a low-key man arrived at the newspaper's offices in downtown Baghdad on July 30 with a large wad of U.S. dollars. He told the editors that he wanted to publish an article titled "Terrorists Attack Sunni Volunteers" in the newspaper.

He paid cash and left no calling card, employees said. He did not want a receipt. The name he gave employees was the same as that of a Lincoln Group worker in the records obtained by The Times. Although editors at Al Mada said he paid $900 to place the article, records show that the man told Lincoln Group that he gave more than $1,200 to the paper.

Al Mada is widely considered the most cerebral and professional of Iraqi newspapers, publishing investigative reports as well as poetry.

Zaki said that if his cash-strapped paper had known that these stories were from the U.S. government, he would have "charged much, much more" to publish them. [Emphasis added -- here, there, and everywhere]

And there you have it. Let's apply Occam's Razor to this conundrum.

  1. The Coalition decides to counter the agitprop of the enemy by employing the powerful engine of the truth.
  2. For this truth, they turned to the actual soldiers in the field, who wrote stories.
  3. Coalition media folks handed them over to the Lincoln Group to be placed with attribution in newspapers.
  4. The Lincoln Group decides the best way to do this is to use Iraqi stringers, just as AP, the L.A. Times, and every other non-Arab news source in the Middle East uses.
  5. The stringers discover that when they inform the newspapers the ads are being bought by the Coalition, they get charged a lot more. They hit on a scheme: they don't tell the newspapers and don't get receipts. The newspapers charge $X dollars to place the stories as ads; the stringers inform the Lincoln Group that they had to fork out $Y, where Y is significantly larger than X. The stringers pocket the difference.

But of course, this reality doesn't make for a good scandal-mongering story; and it also doesn't fulfill the urgent task of portraying the American military and the war effort as sleazy, disreputable, and distasteful. So the Los Angeles Times works itself into a lather of moral indignation -- and Hurricane Plantgate forms off the southwestern coast.

Some of the charges in the L.A. Times story are unintentionally just hilarious. Here are my favorites:

  • "Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said."

    [Hm....]

  • "According to several sources, the process for placing the stories begins when soldiers write "storyboards" of events in Iraq, such as a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid on a suspected insurgent hide-out, or a suicide bomb that killed Iraqi civilians.

    "The storyboards, several of which were obtained by The Times, read more like press releases than news stories. They often contain anonymous quotes from U.S. military officials; it is unclear whether the quotes are authentic."

    [Note: the very same story making this accusation contains not a single named primary source; every source is anonymous! They are identified only as "military officials."]

  • Finally...

  • "'Absolute truth was not an essential element of these stories,' said the senior military official who spent this year in Iraq."

    [Quelle horror!]

So it goes. The whole imbroglio turns out to be a tempest in a molehole. But in the meantime, the Los Angeles Times dumps yet another shovelful of Shinola on the heads of the American military. And the Pentagon now must waste weeks explaining to the allies, the Iraqis, and the American people that no, they were not engaging in some horrible, Soviet-style propaganda campaign; that they're not against freedom of the press; that they're not anti-American; and that they're not fighting dirty, even though the terrorist enemy is and always will.

But that's the way the liberals' covert war against America has always been fought: another day, another slander.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 03, 2005, at the time of 12:03 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 02, 2005

The Dogs That Didn't Bark

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Yesterday, I was talking with a liberal (because I must, Miss Coulter!) about Iraq, and the fact that it has become Ground Zero in the war against Islamic terrorism. I received the standard rejoinder, but I stymied him with a simple question:

Mr. Liberal: But it wasn't "Ground Zero" before we invaded. It was our invasion that drew a huge terrorist army to Iraq.

Mr. Lizard: Then why didn't our presence in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia draw huge terrorist armies to those countries?

Granted, our presence on the "holy soil of Mecca" was the major reason cited by Osama bin Laden why he authorized the 9/11 attacks, though I doubt it really had much to do with the attack (we were actually way out in the desert, at the Prince Sultan Air Base, not Mecca; but one shouldn't expect much geographical accuracy from Osama). But they didn't pour into either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, did they? Well... why not?

The reason is pretty clear: because we were not in either of those two countries to democratize them. There was no danger that we would transform either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait from totalitarian dictatorship to a free country. Therefore, the defenders of the faith had nothing to fear.

It would be easy to understand if al-Qaeda had made Afghanistan its do-or-die last stand: that was their home, and we booted them out. But funnily enough, they haven't. Where are they? The Taliban keeps on fighting there, hoping to seize control once again; but al-Qaeda appears to have abandoned them and that poor, old sod, Mullah Omar -- anybody still remember him? -- to their fates.

But Iraq was another story. All informed Americans still capable of rational thought agree on two propositions: there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but al-Qaeda did not run that joint the way they ran Afghanistan; Hussein did, and nobody else. Iraq was a one-man band before 2003. Nor was it an Islamist state. Yeah, yeah, Hussein added "Allahu Akbar" to the flag; but it was nothing like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan.

So on paper, there is no reason in the world why a Wahabbist, Islamist group-of-groups like al-Qaeda would care one jot what befell Saddam Hussein. In fact, to the extent that kicking out the secular tyrant Hussein could possibly (at least in the mind of an Islamist) lead to the Shiite portions of Iraq joining or at least allying with Iran, an undeniably Islamist state, wouldn't one imagine that the terrorists would welcome the fall of Hussein?

So something else must have drawn them to try to destroy the nascent nationalism in Iraq.

"You will not apply my precept," [Sherlock Holmes] said, shaking his head. "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. When, then, did he come?"
-- Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan; "the Sign of Four;" 1890.

Obviously, in real world induction we can't eliminate all possibilities but one. But in this case, we're on pretty safe ground concluding that what distinguishes Iraq from all those other countries that al-Qaeda could have poured into and made the last stand for militant Islamism but didn't is that Iraq is the only Arab country in the Middle East where America is deliberately and with goodness aforethought trying to establish a functioning Islamic democracy atop the ruins of a military dictatorship. Al-Qaeda and its ideological brotherhood cannot allow liberty and democracy to flourish in the Middle East because that would indeed be the doom of militant Islamism -- whose central precept is totalitarian obedience.

Which was, of course, what was to be proved; quod erat demonstrandum.

So Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and of course George W. Bush are absolutely correct: the terrorists decided to make Iraq the line in the sand between civilization and barbarism, so we must treat it as such as well and drive them out. If we lose in Iraq, we lose across the world; but when we win, that domino will topple the rest -- pulling down not merely Arab dictatorships or even just Islamic theocracies, but tyranny from North Korea and Vietnam, to Zimbabwe and Somalia, to Cuba and Venezuela. People everywhere will see that it's possible to have democracy without having to jettison traditional culture and become Americans.

They attacked -- but we will decide.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 02, 2005, at the time of 05:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 01, 2005

Which Hand Do You Choose?

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Here in the right hand, we have this:

  • Iraq suicide blasts at lowest level in 7 months

    Major General Rich Lynch, top spokesman in Iraq: “In the month of November: only 23 suicide attacks; the lowest we’ve seen in the last seven months, the direct result of the effectiveness of our operations.”

  • 11.5% drop in U.S. fatalities in November

    Fatalities dropped from 96 in October to 85 in November, despite the fact that November was the month of the phenomenally successful Operation Steel Curtain in Anbar and Ninawa, driving the terrorists out of their somewhat-less-than-safe houses along the Syrian border.

  • There are now more than 120 Iraqi Army and Police combat battalions actively fighting against the terrorists

    President Bush: "Of these, about 80 Iraqi battalions are fighting side-by-side with coalition forces, and about 40 others are taking the lead in the fight. Most of these 40 battalions are controlling their own battle space, and conducting their own operations against the terrorists with some coalition support.... At this moment, over 30 Iraqi Army battalions have assumed primary control of their own areas of responsibility. In Baghdad, Iraqi battalions have taken over major sectors of the capital -- including some of the city's toughest neighborhoods."

  • We've officially transferred 90 square miles of the Baghdad province to the Iraqis

    Bush again: "Over a dozen bases in Iraq have been handed over to the Iraqi government -- including Saddam Hussein's former palace in Tikrit, which has served as the coalition headquarters in one of Iraq's most dangerous regions." The current policy of clear and hold has liberated 28 cities from terrorist control; those cities, including such major urban centers as Fallujah and Ramadi, are now controlled by pro-government Iraqis.

  • The Iraqis have held two successful, national, free elections in the past year

    The first in January, electing an interim parliament; number two on October 15th, ratifying the new Iraqi constitution. And a third will be held -- and will doubtless be even more successful than the first -- on December 15th, choosing the first freely elected parliament under a constitution ratified by the people in any Arab (or Persian) country in the Middle East.

  • The terrorists and the Baathist bitter-enders have been unable to hold any territory whatsoever

    Not only that, they have been unable to get a national front off the ground -- a national front is a unified and cohesive ideology that engages the support of a substantial portion of the population. But the goal of the die-hards (Saddam Hussein back on the throne) is rejected even by the Sunnis; and the terrorists' goal (a Mesopotamian caliphate with Zarqawi ruling the joint) is so terrifying to nearly all Iraqis that even with the very significant number of murders of police and army recruits, they continue to flood in... and more and more are Sunnis.

    About the only thing everyone in Iraq agrees on is that eventually the Americans, the British, and other foreign Coalition forces should leave. But since "everyone" includes the Americans and the Brits, this is hardly a problem.

But on the left hand, we have this:

  • To show they are still in charge, terrorists have left some litter and graffiti on a street in the Anbar capital of Ramadi

    After an unsuccessful attack on the U.S. base, in which only one granade was fired with no casualty in our part, "the insurgents [sic] left behind posters and graffiti saying they were members of al-Qaida in Iraq and claiming responsibility for shooting down a U.S. drone. There were no reports of any U.S. drones being shot down, though." (The so-called "insurgency" actually isn't, however; Reuters is simply illiterate. See the continuation of this post for an explanation why.)

  • The foreign terrorists still retain some ability to randomly kill women and children by blowing themselves up

    I'm not sure exactly how this is supposed to help Zarqawi; most Iraqis seem to be less impressed than appalled, and they're deserting the terrorists (and turning them in) in droves. I don't think the two facts are unrelated.

  • The anti-Iraq forces do still maintain their strategic alliance with the U.N. bureaucracy, the internationalist nationalists in much of Europe, Africa, and in Venezuela, and with the American and international mainstream media, film community, and academe

    Again, whether this will ultimately help them is questionable: if a Democrat is elected president, it will likely be a decisive coalition; but the mere fact of its existence works against any Democrat being elected president. Ever.

  • Finally, the cut-and-run policy of cowardice dictated by the gaggle of terrorists, mobsters, and once-weres in Iraq is rapidly becoming the majority position of the Democratic Party

    Although this means the Democrats will likely not win control of any body of the government anytime soon, they can still make mischief by rolling the Republicans whenever they can gather enough cheerleaders for catastrophe to block a vital war bill via the filibuster, or to amend some critical piece of legislation into its mirror opposite by voting en banc, while the right remains fractured over some other, trivial contention.

On this last point, we have House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) coming out firmly in favor of Vietnamizing the Iraqi War, following closely on the heels of famed fair-weather feather Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) lending the shreds and patches of his tattered credibility to the same cause. Today, in an effort to rally the troops, Murtha offered more of his insightful military analysis:

Murtha Says Army Is 'Broken, Worn Out'
Associated Press
Dec 1, 2005

LATROBE, Pa. (AP) - Most U.S. troops will leave Iraq within a year, and the Army is "broken, worn out" and may not be able to meet future military threats to the country's security, Rep. John Murtha said....

Murtha predicted most troops will be out of Iraq within a year.

"I predict he'll make it look like we're staying the course," Murtha said, referring to Bush. "Staying the course is not a policy." [It isn't? -- the Mgt.]

Murtha, 73, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, expressed pessimism about Iraq's stability and said the Iraqis know who the insurgents are, but don't always share that information with U.S. troops. He said a civil war is likely because of ongoing factionalism among Sunni Arabs, and Kurds and Shiites....

Murtha, a decorated Vietnam war veteran, said the Pennsylvania National Guard is "stretched so thin" that it won't be able to send fully equipped units to Iraq next year.

(We don't know how the administration responded to this bizarre rant because AP didn't see fit to ask for comment from anyonewho disagreed with Murtha.)

Democrats in the Senate are nervously shuffling in this same direction, with many a backward look; like Lot's wife, some of these reluctant fainthearts stand a good chance of being turned into a pillar of salt next November... which, contrary to confident prophecies by triumphalist Democrats and dolorous Republicans alike, I predict will be a very good month for Bush and the conservatives.

So... which hand do you choose? The right or the left? Asking myself what I always ask in such cases of moral dilemma -- WWZD? (no, the Z doesn't stand for Zarqawi, Zawahiri, or Zarathustra) -- I think I shall have to lead with the right, Señor.

How about you?

(If you're interested to learn why Rumsfeld was correct and Reuters churlishly wrong about the meaning of insurgency, read on.)

On the all-important diction front, the word "insurgent" does not mean "anyone fighting against any government." Even Reuters admits this -- though they don't understand they have admitted away their whole case.

Nov 29, 2005: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued on Tuesday that the guerrillas fighting U.S.-led foreign forces and the American-backed government in Iraq do not deserve to be called an "insurgency."Rumsfeld instead referred to the guerrillas in Iraq as "the terrorists" and "the enemies of the government." U.S. military statements also have referred to insurgents as "anti-Iraqi forces...."

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines an insurgent as "a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government."

God preserve us from truncated internet definitions!

The next step is to ask, well what is a revolt then? A real dictionary, such as my Websters Third New International, defines a revolt thus: 1 a casting off of allegiance : an uprising against legitimate authority : a renunciation of allegiance and subjection (as to a government). And an uprising is: 1 an act or instance of rising up.

Put them together, and you have the indisputable requirement that an insurgency, revolt, or uprising requires those who formerly accepted allegiance to a government rising up, surging in support of a positive agenda against the policies of the government, then renouncing their allegiance to the government because it won't mend its ways. The impetus must come from within the people themselves, not be foisted upon them by foreigners; a discontent with the government that bubbles up from the heartland of an oppressed people yearning for release.

But neither Zarqawi nor the ex-Baathists hiding out in Syria ever professed allegiance to the current Iraqi government; nor do either of them lift the Iraqi people up on wings of a positive ideology... they simply kill them for daring to side with freedom. Nor do the people have any expressed grievance with the current government, which certainly is not oppressing them; the only grievance among some Iraqi Baathists is that they're no longer in charge, like they used to be.

Words have meanings; and those meanings are not created by dictionaries but merely chronicled (well or badly). The terms insurgency, revolt, and uprising have never been used to mean a case as in Iraq, where a foreign military coalition is fighting to protect the Iraqis from a foreign conglomeration of terrorists, while the remnants of the old, ousted government plink around the edges, hoping to sidle back into power.

The American Revolution was all three. It comprised folks who saw themselves and were seen by all as Englishmen. They first request more freedom, then begged for it, then demanded it -- only revolting from the crown when mad King George III refused even to hear their just demands. The American revolutionaries carefully nurtured the American people along by explaining the concepts of freedom and democracy and how they differed from tyranny and mob rule alike; they journeyed around the colonies preaching liberty and self-determination; and they were joined by at least a third of the entire population (about as many loyalists opposed them, and the rest were neutral and confused).

The Zarqawistas and the Saddamites have done none of this. They have not even tried. Therefore, Rumsfeld is correct: they don't deserve the honorable title of "insurgents." They are terrorists, aristos, and tatterdemalion baby-slayers, nothing more.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 01, 2005, at the time of 05:18 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

November 30, 2005

Ignatius's Flatulent Fatuity

Fiskings , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I must confess, I don't particularly follow David Ignatius's column in the Washington Post. A quick romp through some of his archives tells me I haven't missed much: Ignatius appears to be an off-the-shelf anti-Bush liberal in the mold of, say, Joe Biden; not all the way over to Pat Leahy or Ted Kennedy, but definitely farther left than Joe Leiberman. If you know what I mean.

I could have skipped the trip down memory lane and learned everything I needed to know about Ignatius from today's column, linked by Power Line's Paul Mirengoff: "Rice's Rising Star." Paul boils it down to saying that "if Colin Powell didn't exist, the MSM, in conjuction with the State Department, would have to invent him." He's right, as usual; Ignatius's piece simply simpers over the little nuggets that he thinks indicates Condoleezza Rice is more Kissingeresque than Wolfowitzian (the nuggets are carefully plucked from a bucket that contains a lot of contrary indicators, but no matter). But I think it's worse than that: with its evasiveness, misleading implications, and downright fabrications, it reminds me of the worst of -- well, of Robert Fisk of the inaptly named Independent in the U.K.

Let's dive in, shall we?

While President Bush continues to talk about "staying the course" in Iraq, the nation's top diplomats and military commanders have in fact been changing the course this year to fit changing circumstances. They are planning on significant reductions of U.S. troops once a permanent Iraqi government is chosen in the Dec. 15 elections.

Now, what could the implication of this bit be? I suppose what Ignatius means is that when Bush says "stay the course" he means "never make even the slightest change in troop levels, deployment, personnel, location, mission, or diet. Everything in stasis. Nothing can ever change. Ten years from now, we'll have the same troop level... in fact, the very same soldiers! Nobody will even be allowed to visit the toilet."

I suppose that must be what Ignatius takes from the phrase "stay the course," because elsewise, the predicate would be a grand non-sequitur. I'm not sure what is Mr. Ignatius's native tongue, but the univerally accepted definition of "stay the course" allows for "slighly changing the course to fit changing circumstances, so long as you're not making an inexplicable U-turn in the middle of the road." Similarly, if you're driving along Glendale Avenue, and I tell you to "stay the course," you are still allowed to turn your steering wheel sufficiently to follow the street as it bends; and you can even stop at red lights along the way.

The real question is whether "planning on significant reductions of U.S. troops once a permanent Iraqi government is chosen in the Dec. 15 elections" is or is not the very course that Bush set upon in the first place. In Bush's speech to the Anapolis midshipmen today, he said "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." This phrase caused a slight shiver of déjà-vu... has he ever said that before?

August 2005: As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

June 2005: Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

February 2005, State of the Union Address: We will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out. We are in Iraq to achieve a result: A country that is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors, and able to defend itself. And when that result is achieved, our men and women serving in Iraq will return home with the honor they have earned.

(He should have just thought of saying "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down" last February; he could have saved himself a lot of wind.)

I must say, that seems pretty consistent to me, Dave. Almost like, I don't know, staying the course.

What is intriguing is that the administration's emerging position isn't all that different from the critique offered last week by Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden. Both are talking about cutting U.S. troop strength, relying on Iraqi security forces and brokering a compromise among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Aha, Ignatius has latched onto the dirty, little secret of the Bush administration: the president always looks to Joe Biden for a lead! I'm not sure how exactly this fits into the timeline above; what was Joe Biden (D-DE) saying about our Iraq strategy prior to the State of the Union address nearly a year ago?

On the other hand, I suppose we should consider the faint possibility that the arrow of causality may point the other direction... that Joe Biden (and John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, and all the other Democrats who still make some effort not to appear as mad as a hatter) simply parrots the current Bush agenda -- but whines a lot about it. I'm sure there must be some other explanation, however; one certainly wouldn't expect as distinguished a statesman as Joseph Biden to plagiarize someone else's thoughts.

Rice stands at the intersection of the Iraq debate. Watching her try to find a balance among Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, not to mention Democrats and Republicans, I am reminded that in her younger days, she was a figure skater.

Another illuminating metaphor from Captain Left-Turn. But what is its purpose?

The Gaza agreement was Rice's first real "Kissingerian" moment, and in some of her public comments, she's sounding like a realist in the Kissinger-Scowcroft tradition. The idealistic, belligerent approach of the neoconservatives isn't much in evidence in her State Department.

Oddly, it's also not much in evidence among the neoconservatives. One mostly finds an "idealistic, belligerent approach" among left-liberals in academe, Hollywood, and at the mainstream media... particularly in op-ed columns in the Washington Post.

Colleagues say that she's running the department with confidence and that she's as good at administering her own agency as she was bad at coordinating interagency disputes when she was national security adviser.

Do these "colleagues" give any examples of the latter? How did Condi stack up to, say, Sandy? With colleagues like these....

Oh, wait. I get it: the "colleagues" Ignatius means are his own co-workers at the Post. Foolish me.

Bush doesn't do nuance on foreign policy, but that's not so at Rice's State Department.

Bush appointed Rice and evidently is happy with her "nuance." Do I detect a faint whiff of "Smirky the Wonder Chimp"-ism from Mr. I? Any "nuance" emanating from Bush's foreign policy must of course come from the dame, not from the president.

The Bush-is-a-moron meme is so usefully self-referential: because Bush is a moron, any cleverness in his policies comes naturally from the cabinet official, not Bush; but lo! If the president can't even define his own policies, doesn't that prove that he's a moron after all?

This reminds me of the passage in Mark Twain's wonderful account in Roughing It; but nothing else of this column reminds me of great literature. Twain visited Salt Lake City and obtained a copy of the Book of Mormon. The book professes to be "AN ACCOUNT WRITTEN BY THE HAND OF MORMON, UPON PLATES TAKEN FROM THE PLATES OF NEPHI" (the caps are Twain's). And if that is not sufficient pedigree, the testimony of three witnesses is attached. Twain responds:

Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a man tells me that he has "seen the engravings which are upon the plates," and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either.

Following which is yet another testimonial, this time by eight more witnesses who testify to the veracity of the first boxed set of three witnesses. A total of eleven witnesses (five of them Whitmers) to say they've seen the plates -- which subsequently vanished. Twain again:

And when I am far on the road to conviction, and eight men, be they grammatical or otherwise, come forward and tell me that they have seen the plates too; and not only seen those plates but "hefted" them, I am convinced. I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified.

I think that's the proper approach to take when reading a new column by David Ignatius (did he change his name from Whitmer?) -- make sure you have three witnesses to testify to its veracity... say, Robert Scheer, Paul Krugman, and Gore Vidal. Then scrounge up eight more assorted editors of the Nation, the New Republic, and Mother Jones. And ensure that the original manuscript of the column is inscribed on copper plates that subsequently stroll off.

At that point, even I would be prepared to believe it!

Back to the Angel Ignatius:

Rice's biggest test as secretary of state will be Iran, the center of the volcano that has been shaking the Middle East for the past 30 years. Here again she is pursuing a policy more nuanced than administration rhetoric might suggest. While maintaining a hard line toward the mullahs in Tehran, she is also trying to draw Iran into a network of cooperation on regional security issues.

There he goes again. Is there anybody in the room buying this idea of Condi Rice, Rogue Secretary? (Or should that be Rouge Secretary?) Does anybody truly believe that she's out there, on her own, with no controlling legal authority -- some starkly beautiful but mad concatenation of Al Gore and Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now? I stir. I shift in my seat. I grow restive.

Rice has authorized her ambassadors in Iraq and Afghanistan to meet with their Iranian counterparts to discuss overlapping interests.

She didn't order them killed and eaten? Where was her neocon mind?

In an administration that has been in the doldrums lately, to put it mildly, Rice has been an unusual success story. The figure skater who learned to stay upright on a thin blade is gliding into a perilous new year as the problems of Iraq, Iran and Syria converge.

Aha, now I see why this strained metaphor was used earlier: so it could be used again later, producing equal gibberish. But familiar gibberish we remember from way earlier in the column. Alas, he didn't tell us a third time; if he had, then under the Snark rule, we should be obliged to believe it.

Does she truly speak for this administration on foreign policy? Can she make the Iraq balancing act work? The next few months will give us the measure of the Bush administration's second-term star.

Does David Ignatius truly speak for the quality of columnists in this once great newspaper? Can he figureskate the fine line between vague and vacuous without taking a spill onto the ice of absurdity? Will one more metaphor chill the entire discussion, leaving us wrecked on the rocks?

The problem with this entire column is that it seems vague but is in fact meaningless. The entire piece could be boiled down to Ignatius's fervant desire to see Bride of Powell in the State Department. But even Colin Powell wasn't the Colin Powell that Ignatius remembers: whatever Powell might have done behind the scenes, arguing for delay, inaction, and passivity, in public he always stood up and saluted when the president gave him his marching orders.

Condoleezza Rice is far closer to George W. Bush than Colin Powell ever was, and he is likely closer to the president and his vision than any head of State in my lifetime. She is not just close politically but has been a personal friend, almost part of the family, for years. She is certainly closer than Madeleine Albright was to Bill Clinton or George Schultz and Al Haig were to Ronald Reagan. James Baker did mangle a couple of George H.W. Bush's failed political campaigns, but surely Baker was no closer to Bush than to the many other Republicans whose campaigns he mangled. And Warren Christopher is not close to anybody, except perhaps Keith Richards, from whom he was evidently separated at birth.

Jimmy Carter and Cyrus Vance were not exactly buddies before 1977; likewise for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Dean Rusk was a career State Department man when Kennedy tapped him in 1960, and he stayed on through the Johnson administration; doesn't appear to have been close to either man.

Nope, as far as the best-buddies sweepstakes between presidents and their secretaries of state, Condi Rice and George Bush are it. To imagine that she is "growing in office" and defying President Bush is just cracked: to the extent that she is carrying out more diplomatic policies than she did as National Security Advisor, that simply reflects Bush's own decision, not hers.

Mr. Ignatius, like the brother in the poem, seems to have forgotten an important (if sore) point: the president's "kitchen cabinet" these days simply reflects the whim of the man in the Oval Office -- whoever he is. Gone are the days of William Henry Seward, who conducted his own foreign and military policy as Lincoln's secretary of state, often completely at odds with that of the president. Whatever Condi does is done for the good of the country, as determined by George W. Bush. And if David Ignatius thinks different, he had better tend more to his fiction than his "fact."

From deep 'neath the crypt of St. Giles,
Came a shriek that resounded for miles;
The vicar said "gracious!
Has Brother Ignatius
Forgotten the bishop has piles?"

 

(And now, having thoroughly alienated all LDS and Catholic readers, and having completed the sequence by admitting I ate bacon this morning, I lay down my pen. Keyboard. Whatever.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 30, 2005, at the time of 10:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

It's Official: House Democrats Are Cowards

Iraq Matters , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

Today, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) "came out."

She came out as a craven, an appeaser, a "cheese-eating surrender monkey." One might have thought, from the lopsided vote on cutting and running last week (403 to 3 against, and read all about it here), that the Democrats would at least maintain the facade of moral courage through the next election.

Evidently, that was a bit beyond their powers; for today, Pelosi announced that she now supports the Murtha Madness: an immediate withdrawal, commencing before the December 15th vote in Iraq, that would have all U.S. troops out of Iraq within six months... and to hell with what happens next!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - House of Representatives Minority leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday backed a call by Democratic Rep. John Murtha to quickly start the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

"I will be supporting the Murtha resolution,'' Pelosi said of Murtha's resolution calling for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq at the earliest practicable date.

Naturally, this being Reuters, they had to repeat the canard that John Murtha (D-PA) was a war hawk and a conservative:

Murtha, of Pennsylvania, is a decorated Vietnam veteran and one of Congress' most hawkish Democrats who had supported the Iraq war although he criticized President George W. Bush's handling of it.

The reality, as has been ably demonstrated by Captain Ed and by Paul at Power Line, is that John Murtha was always a fair weather feather. On those deployments that he deigns to support at all (he never supported the mission in Somalia, even back under Bush-41, when it was simply famine relief), he supports military involvement up until the moment we start taking casualties. Then he turns against the deployment and demands the boys be brought home.

Veterans for Common Sense notes that Murtha was already bad-mouthing the Iraq War six months before it even began [Kaus to Patterico to Big Lizards]. And in response to a Washington Post headline, the About-Face of a Hawkish Democrat, Captain Ed wrote:

But that isn't an "about-face" at all. Eighteen months earlier, in May 2004, Murtha had already started demanding that the US pull out of Iraq, although he did it outside of the halls of Congress. As Murray herself reports -- in the sixteenth paragraph -- he told CNN in an interview that further mobilization was impossible, and that made Iraq unwinnable. He started talking up a pullout eight months before the Iraqis held their first election, seventeen months before their constitutional plebescite, and nineteen months before their upcoming elections to elect their first permanent, constitutional republican government.

Even worse, Murray fails to do any research at all on her subject, accepting the Democratic-hawk line without question. Had Murray looked into Murtha's record, she would have found that the Pennsylvania Democrat has a record of only supporting military operations until the first casualties get reported. In fact, the only time prior to 9/11 that America's military faced off against terrorists and warlords in battle, Murtha demanded that Bill Clinton withdraw them immediately from Somalia -- and got what he wanted.

And now Nancy Pelosi has hitched the Democrats' wagon to the plummeting meteor of Jack Murtha. I suppose congratulations are in order: it's always astonishing when a Democrat is actually willing to come out and speak truth to cower!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 30, 2005, at the time of 03:38 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

A Month In the Life

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Bill Roggio from the Fourth Rail is now in Iraq (and now blogging at ThreatsWatch, as Dafydd mentioned). He linked up with the 1st Platoon of Lima Company of the 3rd Marines, 6th Battalion, call sign Jackal 1. Roggio reports an uneventful patrol and having tea with local sheikhs in Husaybah. Yep! You heard me right, in Husaybah.

Both Lieutenant Oren and Corporal Hall explained the successful patrol in Husaybah this afternoon would have been unheard of just three weeks ago prior to Operation Steel Curtain. “Over three weeks ago, we wouldn’t have gotten 200 feet into this city without taking fire”, said Cpl Hall.

Let's flash-back a few weeks to the Battle of Husaybah, courtesy of -- well, of Bill Roggio in a different incarnation:

Saturday, November 5th (Guy Fawkes Day): Operation Steel Curtain in Husaybah

Steel Curtain is directed at the town of Husaybah, and the objectives are to "restore security along the Iraqi-Syrian border and destroy the Al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist network" on the Syrian border. Steel Curtain is a subordinate operation to Hunter, whose objective is to bolster the U.S. and Iraqi presence in the western Anbar region from Qaim to Haditha and deny al Qaeda in Iraq the ability to establish safe havens in the region....

In a recent interview, Maj.Gen. Richard A. Huck, the commanding general of the 2d Marine Division discussed Operation Hunter and the importance of involving the Iraqi Security forces in the fight.

“The Marines and Soldiers assigned to the 2nd Marine Division understand that we won’t be the ones who win this counter-insurgency, it will be the Iraqi soldiers... We do this by partnering our battalions with Iraqi battalions. This is the way we’re going to win. By partnering with Iraqi Security Forces we are gaining a lot of insights previously denied to us... We could walk down the same street ten times and not notice anything out of place, but an Iraqi soldier will notice something his first time on the street. It is not uncommon for them to stop a patrol and say ‘those men over there have Syrian accents’ or ‘that graffiti is anti-government propaganda’. Having the ISF out with us is truly a force multiplier.”

Later That Night: Steel Curtain Update

Coalition forces are wisely using the Desert Protection Force, which is comprised of local tribesmen from the region, to provide intelligence on al Qaeda's activities; "Members of the Iraqi scout platoons, specially recruited soldiers from the Al Qa’im region, are embedded with U.S. and Iraqi infantry companies and are helping to identify insurgent strong points and areas known to contain these homemade bombs."

There are no casualties reported among U.S. or Iraqi forces, and enemy casualties are as of yet unknown. Nine airstrikes have been directed at insurgent safe house, and six IEDs have been neutralized, along with a car bomb.

CNN's Arwa Damon is embedded with the RCT-2, and reports on the estimated size and nature of the enemy resistance; "Soldiers believe insurgents in Husayba -- both foreign and home-grown -- will be the type that will fight to the death. Hundreds of insurgents are suspected to be in the city. Husayba insurgents are believed to be smarter and more experienced, survivors of other battles that move in squads of 12 to 15."

Sunday, November 6th: Steel Curtain and the Anbar Campaign

Day one of Operation Steel Curtain, which is aimed at dislodging al Qaeda from the border town of Husaybah and estabishing a permanent presence of Iraqi troops, has ended....

The street fighting has been reported to have been intense in the center and southwest corner of the city. Over thirty roadside bombs and booby trapped homes have been uncovered, along with two car bombs. "Dozens" of insurgent have been reported to have been killed. No Coalition deaths have been reported....

The avenues to the cities along the Euphrates have been closed, or made vastly more difficult and dangerous to travel with Coalition troops now permanently stationed in Husaybah, Sadah, Qaim, Rawah, Haditha, Haqlaniyah, Barwana, Khan Al Baghdadi, Hit, Ramadi, Habbaniyah, and Fallujah. This is the Anbar Campaign.

Today; now; a new Husaybah, and let's try this again:

Roggio reports an uneventful patrol and having tea with local sheikhs in Husaybah.

Without context, the savage magnitude of the Anbar Campaign is void of meaning. This is what the mainstream media does to truth, squeezes it dry of all context and content and reduces the war to an insipid "one American soldier was killed by an IED today" level. The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

But Roggio is in a Husaybah so calm that patrols are "uneventful" and he can sit and drink tea (was it sweet mint tea, I wonder?) with sheikhs that just a few weeks ago might have been on the other side, for all we know. That's progress!

Roggio also glows about how professional the Iraqi troops were:

They understood and responded to hand signals, maintained their intervals and guarded intersections during crossings. All the while talking to the residents of Husaybah. Other than their uniforms, they were virtually indistinguishable from their Marine counterparts - no small feat.

But of course, Roggio is just one man. His impression alone, informed as it is, is not "best evidence" of the Iraqi troops' competence. But Roggio is not alone. His observation is backed up by the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's discussion during a recent press conference, and by President Bush himself. First Secretary Rumsfeld:

On Tuesday, Rumsfeld gave a preview of the administration's argument that Iraqi security forces are improving. He said about 29 military bases have been turned over to Iraqi control; the Iraqi army has seven division and 31 brigade headquarters in operation, compared with none 16 months ago; the number of Iraqi army battalions "in the fight" is now 95, compared with five 15 months ago, and there are now over 212,000 trained and equipped security forces, compared with 96,000 last year.

Secretary Rumsfeld was not just talking through his hat. The president just delivered a major speech to the midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy at Anapolis this morning, and he echoed Rumsfeld's point (and gave more backing to Bill Roggio's on-the-ground assessment):

At this time last year, there were only a handful of Iraqi battalions ready for combat. Now, there are over 120 Iraqi Army and Police combat battalions in the fight against the terrorists -- typically comprised of between 350 and 800 Iraqi forces. Of these, about 80 Iraqi battalions are fighting side-by-side with coalition forces, and about 40 others are taking the lead in the fight. Most of these 40 battalions are controlling their own battle space, and conducting their own operations against the terrorists with some coalition support....

At this moment, over 30 Iraqi Army battalions have assumed primary control of their own areas of responsibility. In Baghdad, Iraqi battalions have taken over major sectors of the capital -- including some of the city's toughest neighborhoods....

Our coalition has handed over roughly 90 square miles of Baghdad province to Iraqi security forces. Iraqi battalions have taken over responsibility for areas in South-Central Iraq, sectors of Southeast Iraq, sectors of Western Iraq, and sectors of North-Central Iraq. As Iraqi forces take responsibility for more of their own territory, coalition forces can concentrate on training Iraqis and hunting down high-value targets, like the terrorist Zarqawi and his associates.

We're also transferring forward operating bases to Iraqi control. Over a dozen bases in Iraq have been handed over to the Iraqi government -- including Saddam Hussein's former palace in Tikrit, which has served as the coalition headquarters in one of Iraq's most dangerous regions. From many of these bases, the Iraqi security forces are planning and executing operations against the terrorists -- and bringing security and pride to the Iraqi people.

The reason we started to hear from the Pentagon and Condoleezza Rice's State Department about an "event" table (with some projected times attached) -- not a time table -- for US troops' partial withdrawal is the readiness of the Iraqi troops themselves. The military has always had an event-driven victory strategy with projected times; but until now, they kept it private, because it has to be flexible, not certain. Events and milestones are more important than dates.

But the general public -- and more important, the terrorists -- don't always understand the flexible nature of such plans, and they might have taken any announced "time table" as carved in stone. What President Bush just said to the middies at Anapolis about a time table for withdrawal (as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, now advocates) applies to any date certain by which we promise to be gone:

Some are calling for a deadline for withdrawal. Many advocating an artificial timetable for withdrawing our troops are sincere -- but I believe they're sincerely wrong. Pulling our troops out before they've achieved their purpose is not a plan for victory. As Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman said recently, setting an artificial timetable would "discourage our troops because it seems to be heading for the door. It will encourage the terrorists, it will confuse the Iraqi people."

Senator Lieberman is right. Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would send a message across the world that America is a weak and an unreliable ally. Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would send a signal to our enemies -- that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run and abandon its friends. And setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would vindicate the terrorists' tactics of beheadings and suicide bombings and mass murder -- and invite new attacks on America. To all who wear the uniform, I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your Commander-in-Chief.

To allow cabinet members and top generals to openly discuss how we will be withdrawning some of our forces over the next year, the White house must be very confident that the Iraqi Army can handle the terrorists even after the US have left. It is not like the terrorists are holding back; what more could they do, even if they knew we were leaving? Evidently, the president has decided we're doing so well that there is no longer any danger in talking about a responsible, event-driven withdrawal... not the cut-and-run that the Democrats in Congress (including the Minority Leader in the House) are calling for, but a true phased, milestone-driven draw-down.

Of course, this has been the plan all along, which President Bush announced more than two years ago -- to anyone who was actually listening!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 30, 2005, at the time of 02:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 29, 2005

The Anbar Effect

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

A decade or so ago -- oh wait, it was only last Friday; how flime ties -- I somehow accidentally came up with an idea I think is pretty good: the "Afghanistan Effect." One earmark that I may be onto something is the existence of corollaries. Consider the parallel principle I'll now call the Anbar Effect and its impact on future Iraqi politics.

Currently, most Iraqi politicians still more less hate America. Even the ones who should be grateful: after all, we booted out their quarter-century dictator, handed them their country for free (the politicians didn't have to pay), and we're still fighting the terrorists for them. Nevertheless, they still hate us, even as they grit their teeth and call for us to stay another year.

And it makes sense on at least two levels: politically, most Shiites have a problem with us because we're a secular government and a Christian people; most Sunni have a problem with us because they used to be in charge, and we've forced democracy down their throats; and any politician too heavily associated with the United States stands in danger of being assassinated. Psychologically, what is the most natural human reaction to unearned charity? Hint: it's not gratitude. Any psychologist will agree that when you bail someone out when he has done nothing to solve his own problems, the normal reaction is that he will resent and despise you, especially if he's still a beggar and must publicly thank and praise you.

So we're going to have to live with that infuriating irritation... for now. But let's look to the future. All of the ill effects above apply only when the recipient of largess sees himself as just that: a beggar, someone who cannot shift for himself, so the hairy, hidden hand of the rich man must work the machinations behind the scenes and give him what he cannot earn for himself.

None of which applies to the Iraqi Army.

Far from being beggars, the Iraqi Army were trained by Americans, fight alongside the Americans, and have increasingly been in charge of battles, campaigns, and holding cities recaptured from the terrorists. Everything they now know about modern combat they learned from us. And they have learned extremely well: Bill Roggio, once and future proprietor of the Fourth Rail and now blogging from Iraq over at ThreatsWatch, who is currently in Husaybah -- say, wasn't that a combat zone just a couple weeks ago? How (son of) flime ties -- described the performance of the Iraqi Army troops occupying Husaybah thus: "Other than their uniforms, they were virtually indistinguishable from their Marine counterparts. [Emphasis added]"

(For more about Roggio's current venture and the truth he is witnessing first hand, read here.)

They take casualties -- and take cities. They've earned their tremendous respect, not just in blood but in victories. The new Iraqi Army are not the recipients of American charity. Rather, they are our protégés.

The distinction is colossal. A beggar completely lacks self respect because he feels powerless over his fate. He resents and despises his benefactors because he resents and despises himself. But a protégé is anything but helpless: because his benefactor taught him how to fish, rather than simply giving him a fish, he can now provide for himself and his own. He is just bursting with new self-respect (note that I distinguish between earned self-respect and self-confidence and unearned "self-esteem"). And at the deepest level of his psyche, he sees his benefactor, not as an oppressor, but as a liberator.

In contrast to the current crop of Iraqi politicians, who hate America as a fat cat handing out charity, from what I've read Iraqi soldiers see us as mentors who have given them the tools to defend their own country. They feel about us the way those who have been in the military typically feel about their drill instructors: they may hate them during basic, but once they graduate, they're profoundly grateful to them for the rest of their lives. (Especially when the DI doesn't try to remain in control after basic training and become the Thing That Would Not Leave; let's hope we get out quickly -- except for air support as necessary -- after the Iraqi Army is able to defend the country without us.)

Now the final key. What sort of democracy will Iraq eventually resemble? Some have suggested Turkey, but I think that's wrong: Turkey has been a republic since 1923, for one thing. For another, the origins of the Republic of Turkey are almost mirror-opposite that of the Republic of Iraq.

Prior to the Republic, Turkey was the heart of the Ottoman Empire, a six-century empire that at its peak was the most powerful Moslem empire in history, stretching from North Africa all the way around the Mediterranean Sea to besiege Vienna, Austria -- twice. But what eventually destroyed it was losing World War I. That is, the Republic of Turkey was formed from the remnants of an empire whose military was crushed by the "crusader" Allies. Licking their wounds, the Turks formed a modern (and surprisingly free) republic, which is still going strong eight decades later.

Now, it's certainly true that the Iraqi dictatorship was crushed by the "crusader" coalition. But in between that humiliating military loss and the founding of the real Republic of Iraq, that losing army was disbanded and a new army created from scratch. For all the Democratic braying that this was a terrible mistake by Bush, that we should have just kept the old (losing) Iraqi Army under new management, this was in fact one of the most briliant moves by the Bush national-security team, headed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: we fired a losing Saddamite army and instead created and trained-up a winning Iraqi Army. Rather than Iraqis having to be ashamed by the lousy combat performance of Saddam's goons against the Iranians, against the crusaders in the Gulf War, and against the crusaders again in 2003, they can be proud and joyous at the brilliant performance of the new Iraqi Army against the foreign terrorists and Saddamite dead-enders in 2004 and 2005, leading up to a constitution and (next month) the first freely elected Iraqi parliament installed under a freely elected constitution.

With such good feelings abounding for the Iraqi Army, I suspect that the Middle-East democracy that Iraq will most resemble in form is Israel, perversely enough. And in Israel, the fastest and surest route into political power is via the military. Out of eleven male prime ministers, seven got their start either in the resistance to the British prior to Israel's founding in 1948 or in the Israeli Defense Force. Four were actually generals, counting Manachem Begin, leader of Irgun, and Yitzhak Shamir, one of the leaders of Lehi. (The others were Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon; after some hesitation, I decline to include David Ben-Gurion, even though he sorta kinda led Haganah in 1947, because I'm not entirely sure how official this was.)

I suspect this will happen again in Iraq: in later elections, it will surely be a major campaign advantage to be able to say "I commanded the brigade of the Iraqi Army that took and held Fallujah," or Tikrit, or Husaybah. And at that point, the Anbar Effect will kick in: Iraq's second generation of leaders will be heavy with army veterans, returned from the war, who will be strong supporters of the United States.

This doesn't mean they will always vote with us; Israel doesn't always do so, either. But it does mean a major turn-around in how Iraqis see America... driven, I predict, by the attitude of returning Iraqi soldiers who have worked side-by-side with American soldiers and Marines... just as I also predict a turn-around in American attitudes about the Iraq war when the American troops begin coming home in great numbers and telling about how well we did, regardless of what stories the MSM told.

The effect is the same in both cases: the powerful voices of those who actually undertook to defend their nation from harm overpower the purely political barnyard noises against America, freedom, and democracy. And the anti-Americans who have become allies of convenience -- the "insurgents" in Iraq and the mainstream media in the United States -- can become allies in defeat as well.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 29, 2005, at the time of 05:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 28, 2005

Zarqawi: Planting IEDs or Pushing Up Daisies?

Iraq Matters , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

We're still waiting for final word on whether any of the bodies found after the gunfight we discussed here more than a week ago was that of Musab Zarqawi. Last we heard, the Pentagon was testing the DNA... but we haven't heard any results.

Do any of you readers have any more recent information? A definitive answer? You'd think we would have heard one way or the other by now.

Thanks, folks!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 28, 2005, at the time of 02:18 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Know Thine Enemy

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

How can we tell the difference between foreign terrorists, militant Sunnis, and Shiite insurgents? My initial answer to that question is, “who cares?” If they are attacking us, they are our enemies. It doesn’t matter what name they call themselves.

However, our top military spokesman, commenting on the last week’s Iraq Reconciliation conference, tells us that we should understand the difference between these groups in order to know how to fight each type.

"We understand the capabilities, the vulnerabilities and the intentions of each group of the insurgency - the foreign fighters, the Iraqi rejectionists and the Saddamists," said Major-General Rick Lynch....

"The group in the middle, the Iraqi rejectionists - (which) includes the Shia rejectionists and the Sunni rejectionists - we believe that deliberate outreach will allow them to participate in the political process and allow them to become part of the solution and not part of the problem," he said.

In other words, we must separate the various types of Iraqi and foreign fighters and treat them differently. But treat them differently how, and why should we? What is the difference between a Sunni Iraqi setting an IED ambush of an American military convoy and Musab Zarqawi ordering a car-bombing of a Shiite marketplace?

In the Iraqi Reconciliation Conference in Cairo, which brought together Iraqis who support democracy and the new government and the rejectionists who still fight against it, the participants concluded that resistance against occupation is legitimate, but that terrorism is never acceptable:

Although resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent legitimate resistance. Accordingly, we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing and kidnapping that target Iraqi citizens, civilian, humanitarian, governmental institutions, national wealth, places of worship and we call for confronting terrorism immediately. [Emphasis added]

Asked about this language, which clearly implies that violent resistance against Coalition troops is not terrorism, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack seemed reluctant to deal with the issue:

"Although resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent legitimate resistance...I think that, you know, inasmuch as this statement talks about the right -- the legitimate right to peaceful protest, peaceful expression of differences -- absolutely, the United States has no quarrel with that idea.

Mr. McCormack is dancing around the point: the statement does not say that only peaceful resistance is acceptable; it draws a distinction between resistance and terrorism.

So let me answer the question that McCormack ducked: resisting a foreign military occupation force is not an act of terrorism; it is an act of war. The small number of former Saddam supporters and other anti-American Iraqi militants still left are actually attempting, however ham-fistedly, to build a native "insurgency."

Since we are occupying for a good purpose and with the consent of the most legitimate government Iraq has had in recent memory, one can argue that these Saddamites are misguided. We still have every right to fight back against the resistance to protect our own interest (and our own men and women). But the Reconciliation statement is correct: this kind of resistance against an armed and deadly military force is not the same thing as blowing up innocent civilians. The merely misguided can be persuaded to resist peacefully, via the ballot box and in parliament (see Sadr On the Rise, As the Times Sinks to a New Low). The terrorists can only be killed or driven into the desert.

It's clear how native Iraqis resisting the Coalition troops have the support of many other Iraqis who hide them and scrounge food and ammunition. But what about the bloodthirsty foreign terrorists, led by Zarqawi -- the ones who specialize in murdering ordinary Iraqis? How can they be tolerated?

In order for foreign terrorists like al-Qaeda to operate in Iraq, they need local support. No matter what the MSM says, local Sunnis must be actively providing logistic and military support to al-Qaeda. Disrupting this relationship would deal a tremendous blow to the foreign terrorists' operation.

At first, Iraqis must have thought the foreign fighters were there to support the ex-Baathists, under the command of Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, vice-president of Iraq and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, the highest ranking Baathist still on the loose after Saddam Hussein was captured (al-Duri is reported to have died of leukemia on November 11th, 2005; but this has not yet been publicly confirmed by the Pentagon).



The grinning mug of Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri

But as the tide of battle flowed, the Baathists withdrew from the field (to Syria, the other Baathist state, most likely), leaving the terrorists -- primarily Zarqawi's group al-Qaeda in Iraq -- in the driver's seat of the resistance. It seems very clear that as "resistance" more and more began to be synonymous with blowing up Iraqi Shia and occasionally Sunnis, rather than attacking Coalition forces, ordinary Iraqis began to be repelled by the vicious and indiscriminate butchery of their fellow citizens by the foreign terrorist organizations, led by Jordanian Zarqawi.

Thanks to the very successful attacks on al-Qaeda safe houses along the Syrian border and in Baghdad by Coalition and Iraqi forces, local support for the terrorists is waning; Arab culture does not encourage support for losers. Many of the recent attacks on terrorist safehouses were possible only because of tips received from local Sunni citizens, who clearly no longer support the foreign terrorists. Some Sunni tribes went so far as to actively fight against Zarqawi’s men.

This trend is so significant, even an America-hater like Juan Cole had to admit it:

[M]any Iraqi guerrillas are deeply dismayed at the al-Zarqawi group's tactic of targeting civilians and Shiites, and that significant numbers have deserted him to join the Iraqi group, The Islamic Army. Al-Zarqawi's "Qaeda in Mesopotamia" is angry about the desertions and refers to such Iraqis as "apostates." Nevertheless, The Islamic Army provides security to those who have left Zarqawi.

Iraqi insurgents have seen al-Qaeda being utterly defeated whenever they engage American or Iraqi government units. Everyone around the world now knows that the terrorists can do nothing aside from blowing up innocent civilians. The purely Iraqi insurgents, Saddamites and Shia, must have realized by now that they have no hope of winning militarily against the Americans; and the moment is rapidly approaching (if it hasn't already passed) where they have no hope even of defeating the Iraqi Army alone, even if we were to pull a John Murtha and "redeploy" out of Iraq immediately.

If we can convince the Sunni and Shiite insurgents (not the foreign terrorists) that the only way for them to have any kind of power at all is to join the political process, al-Qaeda will be further isolated in Iraq. Without the local support, they cannot possibly survive. They will be forced to flee Iraq as they fled Afghanistan when the Taliban fell, and as they fled Sudan before that.

So it seems we should care whom we are fighting against!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 28, 2005, at the time of 02:14 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 27, 2005

Give Me That Old Time Religion

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Uh oh, now we're really going to get it!

In another bizarre twist, the pitiful remnants of the Baath Party in Iraq have remade themselves as -- holy warriors. Mujahideen. They have changed the name of their party from the Arab Socialist Baath Party to the Arab Baath al-Takfireen: a.k.a., "Arab Bath Moslems-who-declare-fellow-Moslems-to-be-infidels." I'm guessing their new rallying cry will be God is Great! Let us fight holy war to put that socialist atheist back on the throne!

Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, has gone into full panic mode, wailing:

"This is very dangerous. These people now have broader appeal among angry Iraqis and money from Arabs in regional states," he told Reuters in an interview.

"It could take years to defeat them."

Oy vey ismier! What will we do now? Forgive my flippancy, but I have a hard time buying the idea that Iraqis will be fooled into thinking that the anti-Islamic secular internationalst socialists of the Baath Party have suddenly got that old time religion. Religious Sunni and Shia are about as likely to follow the Baathists into jihad as the College of Cardinals are to elect Ted Kennedy Pope, or the Navy to give command of an aircraft carrier to Captain Kangaroo. The Baathists are Islamists like President Nixon was a Quaker.

Here is the timeline of events, as limned by Michael Georgy of Reuters:

Saddam and his pan-Arab socialist Baath party imposed secularism in Iraq throughout decades of iron-fisted rule. Muslim militants either kept their beliefs to themselves or were jailed, or worse.

But Islamic fundamentalism has gained a foothold since a U.S.-led invasion toppled the former president in 2003, with a proliferation of Sunni Arab militants opposed to the Shi'ite- led government backed by Washington. [It's all Bush's fault that there are now Moslems all over Iraq.]

FROM SOCIALISTS TO HOLY WARRIORS

Al Qaeda stepped in, forming loose alliances with Saddam's former Baathists as the insurgency evolved into daily suicide bombings and assassinations that have killed tens of thousands of civilians and security forces.

Shockingly enough, Reuters found occasion to forget that the Shia were already Islamists by most definitions before Saddam fell; that Saddam was already kowtowing to the Islamic Fundamentalists -- by changing Iraq's flag to include the words "Allahu Akbar," for example, as far back as 1991; and that there were already extensive contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda even in Saddam's day. I'm sure over the next few days, they'll find occasion to forget that we did, in fact, find WMD in Iraq, and that Saddam was butchering the Iraqis to the tune of 12,500 per year or 125,000 per year, depending whose figures you believe.

"By embracing militant Islam, Saddam's people have appealed to fellow anti-American Muslims who also want the American troops to leave." [trembled Mowaffaq al-Rubaie]

Saddam, whose trial resumes on Monday, first appeared before his judges clutching an old Koran in his hand. Officials who met Saddam before the last session said he appeared demoralised.

But the national security adviser does not hold the same view of his followers, who are armed with much more than zeal in their new holy war.

"They have very good intelligence," he said.

I was planning to go see Chicken Little tomorrow, but why bother? I can save $8.50 X 2 by just staying home and reading more of the mainstream media.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 27, 2005, at the time of 05:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 26, 2005

Sadr On the Rise, As the Times Sinks to a New Low

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

This New York Times story is both troubling and hopeful, and I'm not sure which is ascendant. Moqtada al-Sadr is back -- actually, he never left, just bided his time and kept his "al Mahdi Militia" -- only now he is throwing himself wholeheartedly into the Iraqi political process... while still maintaining at least some control over his militia.

The al Mahdi Militia seems to have splitered into factions, almost like the IRA splitting into the (Marxist) Official IRA and the (militant) Provisional IRA in the late 1960s. While Sadr remains the spiritual leader of the more violent factions of the terrorist army, it's unclear how much operational control he still has: he claims, through a spokesman, Sheik Abbas al-Rubaie, that he is not involved in the various kidnappings and other terrorist activities of some factions of the al Mahdi militia, and the Times seems to support that view: alas, the Times's main source for that argument is none other than ultra-leftist blogger Juan Cole!

More likely, in my opinion, he has the same sort of control that Yassir Arafat had over the PLO: total control over one faction, influence over most of the others, and perhaps one or two that war with the other al Mahdi factions and actively seek Sadr's death... just as the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine routinely attacked other Palestinian terrorist groups and tried to kill Arafat.

What is undeniable, however, is that Moqtada al-Sadr has become the caliphmaker among the Shia in Iraq -- and that he maintains disturbingly close ties to Iran.

Even as that battle [in which al Mahdi militiamen fought Sunni terrorists] raged on Oct. 27, Mr. Sadr's aides in Baghdad were quietly closing a deal that would signal his official debut as a kingmaker in Iraqi politics, placing his handpicked candidates on the same slate - and on equal footing - with the Shiite governing parties in the December parliamentary elections. The country's rulers had come courting him, and he had forced them to meet his terms.

Wielding violence and political popularity as tools of his authority, Mr. Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has defied the American authorities here since the fall of Saddam Hussein, is cementing his role as one of Iraq's most powerful figures.

Just a year after Mr. Sadr led two fierce uprisings, the Americans are hailing his entry into the elections as the best sign yet that the political process can co-opt insurgents.

The Times does not cite a single piece of evidence that "the Americans are hailing" Sadr's political rise; and considering that one of the few "background expert"-type sources they cite is Cole, I'm suspicious. Did that line get tossed in there because of something Cole told them?

An earlier Knight Ridder story by Matthew Schofield, Once-targetted al-Sadr positions himself to be political kingmaker, was clearly the unacknowledged basis for the Times story -- in fact, so close was the November 6th Schofield story to the November 26th Edward Wong story in the New York Times that it borders perilously on plagiarism, in my opinion. But the Schofield story hits every one of the themes of the later Times story except for the "Americans are hailing" claim, the only new idea in the Wong story. I personally do not recall hearing that Bush administration sources were saying it's wonderful that Sadr was entering into the political process while maintaining his private army, but's possible the Times got it from someone more reliable than Juan Cole.

In any event, it's hard to know what to make of this. On the one hand, it's quite unhelpful that that dreadful man still maintains his terrorist militia, using it to threaten his way into the political process. On the other, if we truly believe in the redeeming force of freedom and democracy, then we must have faith that the very election Sadr bullies his way into will ameliorate the violence and alienation among the poor Shia who currently support him, as they see that democracy can embrace even someone as anti-American as this radical "cleric" (he is considered only semi-literate and nothing to match his father by most Iraqi observers). This will undermine Sadr's military base, even if it buttresses his political base.

On the third hand, his connection with Iran -- some al Mahdi factions have been using Iranian technology to build roadside bombs -- should be enough to worry us, since we certainly don't want the southern part of Iraq to become part of Greater Persia. But on the fourth hand, there is no particular evidence that Iran has managed to inject itself into the election in any significant way, nor that it understands well enough how elections work that it would even know how to do so. I don't know how many hands this monster has, but I'm sure there are at least two or three more.

All told, however, I'm still optimistic: I do have faith in the transformative power of real democracy (not the ersatz variety on display in the Palestinian Authority), and I believe that every terrorist movement is fueled by social alienation and disassociation from governing power: that is its natural manure, as Jefferson wrote about "the blood of patriots and tyrants alike" and "the tree of liberty." To the extent that the hurricane of freedom (and the quite respectable constitution that the Iraqis voted in) blows down the tyranny to admit the seabreeze of capitalism and trade, I believe it will likewise gust away the sands of hate that support a Moqtada al-Sadr. He will find that there is, in fact, no room in a free Iraq for the mighty al Mahdi Militia.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 26, 2005, at the time of 02:43 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

November 20, 2005

Has Zarqawi's Luck Run Out at Last?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Musab Zarqawi has had an amazing number of close scrapes and stunning escapes. The most dramatic was when he was in a car being pursued by American forces, and his driver stopped under a bridge, allowing Zarqawi to leap out and evade apprehension (he had to leave his laptop behind in the car, which was captured with the driver; both yielded much valuable intelligence). He's had such a run that it seems the only explanation is that somebody down there likes him.

But it's possible -- not proven, not even yet claimed by our military, but possible -- that Zarqawi has finally gone to Allah to be sent downstairs to meet his benefactor. (Note that this has been claimed before, and rumors of Zarqawi's death have always been exaggerated in the past.)

All that we really know is that either we or the Iraqis received a tip that very high-value targets of al-Qaeda In Iraq were in a not-so-safe house; the house was surrounded by "U.S. forces" (the particular unit is not named in the article). There was heavy resistance from inside the house, the sort that often characterizes the presence of HVTs.

When the Coalition and Iraqi forces tried to force their way inside, one or more of the occupants set off explosives that destroyed the house, killing everyone inside (eight bodies, one of them female) -- but sadly, also four Iraqi soldiers and ten policemen, according to Omar at Iraq the Model, who cites (and links to) the news site Al Mada. Alas, the site is in Arabic, so I can't read it; if any reader here reads Arabic, please tell me what it says!

(Hat tip to Mudville Gazette for the Iraq the Model link.)

Al Mada has sources that believe one of those killed was Musab Zarqawi, but the United States has not yet conducted DNA tests (or if we have, we have not yet released the results). Let's all keep our fingers crossed that the house turns out to be Zarqawi's tomb.

I have believed for some time that al-Qaeda In Iraq has become a cult of personality, if indeed it was ever anything but. Typically, as in the Palestinian Territory, you have not one but a number of different terrorist groups who spend as much time fighting each other as fighting against the decent. But I have not heard of any other Sunni terrorist groups in Iraq besides Zarqawi's... which leads me to believe that Zarqawi has become an iconic figure to the Sunni-side terrorists, enough so that nobody dared challenge his authority.

If indeed he has been killed, he will be considered a martyr; there's no getting around that. But -- while a dead martyr may be revered, he cannot keep the terrorists from splitting into warring factions the way a living Zarqawi has done. The dead cannot recruit as well as the living, nor can they plot and plan horrific attacks with the same boldness and gut-sense of their victims' vulnerabilities.

If Zarqawi has been slain, the effectiveness of the Iraq jihad will be shattered. Within a few weeks, they will run out of Zarqawi-created operations; they may splinter even sooner than that. In any event, al-Qaeda In Iraq cannot survive the death of its cultic figure, I believe, not in its present form and effectiveness (effective only at slaughtering innocent Iraqi civilians -- but that's bad enough).

So let's hope the evil doer is no longer sucking air. As I have found many occasions to say, all human life has value... but sometimes that value is a negative number.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 20, 2005, at the time of 03:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 19, 2005

Did GOP Blow Murtha Vote?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Over on Power Line, John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson each separately come to the conclusion that the Republicans screwed up by voting, not on the exact wording of the Murtha proposal, but on a nearly identical simplification of it: Much Ado About Nothing, I'm Afraid and Friends, Romans, Clowns, respectively:

John: The House leadership had a golden opportunity to make the Democrats put up or shut up tonight, and I'm afraid they blew it. Rep. John Murtha offered a resolution demanding surrender in Iraq within six months (at least, that's how the New York Times describes it; I haven't seen the actual text, and news reports have varied.) If the House leadership had precipitated a vote on what Murtha actually proposed, we could have had a useful moment of clarity. Instead, however, they scheduled a vote on a resolution calling for immediate withdrawal, which was how Murtha's resolution was widely reported, but, apparently, not quite what it said. That gave the Democrats an easy out; they opposed it, and it failed overwhelmingly (403-3 is the last tally I've seen.)

Scott: Why didn't the Republicans just use Murtha's language? If all but three Democrats wanted to claim that "is hereby terminated" means something other than immediate withdrawal, fine. I think what would have emerged is that the only distinction is that logistics will require that the withdrawal take a certain amount of time, and will not, in that sense, be "immediate." The Democrats would have had to say what they really think about Iraq, or at least pretend to. Instead, they were given an easy out. Since the Republican resolution wasn't the same as Murtha's, they could credibly denounce it as a "sham" and their orchestrated votes against it mean nothing at all.

I disagree, and I believe John and Scott, so caught up in the politics of the vote (as was I until this bleary-eyed moment of clarity this afternoon) have lost sight of the purpose of the vote.

I now believe the purpose was not to humiliate the Democrats, though it certainly succeeded serendipitously at that: look not at the actual vote but rather at the hysterical denunciations of the war, the Republicans, the president, and indeed everyone who didn't believe we should cut and run. Assuming Ken Mehlman was bright enough to have the VCRs rolling, there is fodder here for TV commercials all across America in 2006. Dennis Kucinich's rant, which ended with him shrieking in unintelligible falsetto, like an out-of-control teenage girl in a raging hormone attack, will all by itself be worth at least 7% to Ken Blackwell next year!

For John's and Scott's positions to make sense, they would have to have been hoping that many more Democrats would have voted for the version that Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) actually proposed:

Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.

Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S Marines shall be deployed in the region.

Section 3 The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.

Rather than an attempt to seize political advantage by portraying the Democrats as feckless and irresponsible (which indeed was my original proposal), I believe the Republicans' purpose was to mitigate the damage to troop morale and the psychological boost to the morale of al-Qaeda in Iraq by instantly showing that the United States was not about to withdraw precipitously from that country -- which is how al Jazeera and all the major news sources here had (accurately) reported Rep. Murtha's original proposal.

If this is correct, then what the Republicans did was rise above the instant gratification of watching the Democrats damage their chances in 2006 -- and damage the nation's credibility in the process -- and put the troops' and the country's interests ahead of the GOP's own political interests: the troops were likely shocked and stunned by Murtha's original proposal and may have been terrified they were going to be "Vietnamed" by Congress. Rather than rack up a tidy 50 or 100 Democratic votes for just this policy, thus rattling the troops even further (and giving the terrorists the idea that if only they help the Democrats win in 2006, everything their hearts desire will come to them), the Republicans instead went for an overwhelming rejection of the underlying idea -- demonstrating not only to the terrorists but also our allies and our own military that Congress has absolutely no intention of cutting our soldiers' shanks from under them.

Perhaps it is we pundits who should be embarassed at allowing our desire to see the the Democrats damaged blind us to the very real damage that would concomitantly be done to the war effort itself. I think the Republicans did just fine.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 19, 2005, at the time of 02:06 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

November 18, 2005

Lies and the Lying Congressliars Who Lie Them

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I'm listening to Hugh Hewitt, who keeps cutting to the floor of the House to listen to Liberals Gone Wild (if they hold a wet T-shirt contest, I'm out of here). I heard a rapid-fire, one-two punch of mendacity from the Democrats that I just had to share.

First, I don't know who it was (we didn't hear the announcement), but Democrat 1 said that 15,000 soldiers had been "grievously wounded."

This was followed immediately by Rahm Emmanuel, that paragon of honesty who used to be a top aide for that other paragon of honesty, Bill Clinton; Emmanuel said that we had seen "25,000 wounded" in Iraq.

I found this a fascinating synchronicity, because just last night, I read this Mudville Gazette post:

In [Rep. Murtha's] speech demanding our immediate surrender in Iraq he cited this statistic on casualties over there: "Over 15,500 have been seriously injured".

He's been visiting them in the hospitals, and that's awesome. But he may have gotten that bit of numerical intel from British sources - specifically the UK's Telegraph, who recently claimed

While much was made of the US death toll recently reaching 2,000, little has been said of the 15,000 who have returned home mutilated.

You see, that's not quite right.

There have indeed been over 15,500 wounded. But of those, 8375 returned to duty within 72 hours - so although those wounds weren't funny perhaps those wounds weren't quite serious either. Still, 7347 troops have been wounded severely enough to require over 72 hours recuperation. Furthermore, 2,791 Soldiers were wounded seriously enough to require evacuation to Stateside Army Medical facilities. And 280 amputees have been treated in Army facilities as a result of the war. A lot of unscrupulous types who just want to pretend to "support the troops" ignore these facts in favor of the less correct (and more impressive) claim that 15,500 troops have been seriously wounded, or maimed, or mutilated. The real numbers are big enough - I just can't understand why some feel the need to pad them.

At this point, on Iraq policy, the Democrats have dropped barren reason and left themselves only fury (Rahm Emmanuel), hysteria (Dennis Kucinich), sarcasm (Nancy Pelosi), and bile (the normally gentlemanly Tom Lantos). Speaker after speaker arose from the left side of the aisle claiming that nameless Republicans had "questioned the patriotism" of John Murtha (the "uncheckable anecdote" again).

Samuel Johnson said that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." If so, accusing your opponent of questioning your patriotism, when all he has questioned is your judgment and sanity, is the last refuge of the tongue-tied. Resorting to easily disproven lies about the number of "grievously wounded" is the mark, not of desperation, but of just not giving a damn anymore. Resorting to the infantile attack of calling the president a "liar" and the vice president a "chickenhawk" and "vice president of torture," because you would fight the war differently (if at all), is what Rudyard Kipling called "the mark of the beast."

I am so tired of this Democratic Party. It has never been worse than it is today. I am so tired of the lies, the smears, the hysterical fear mongering, the faux tears, the ersatz outrage at imagined slights. I am so tired of Nancy Pelosi's snide asides; she literally said today that John Murtha had shown "great courage" by "speaking truth to power." I rib you not: she used those very words. She has become a walking parody of a radical San Francisco feminist.

I am tired of the rot that reaches out and touches every member of that party, no matter how sane he was before the 2000 election. The miasma of corruption that follows Democrats around, like the cloud of dust permanently hovering over Pig Pen, has reached out a tendril and struck again... and I am utterly disgusted by it, never more so than today.

I held off on this post until I saw the final vote on the Murtha proposal. Here is the tally:

Republicans: 0 Yea, 215 Nay (16 not voting, probably already home for Thanksgiving);

Democrats: 3 Yea, 187 Nay, 6 voted "present" (6 not voting).

Bernie Sanders: 1 Nay

Well, the Murtha episode is all over but the shouting now... and expect plenty of that, as Republicans take to the weekend talk shows pointing out that the Democrats may talk a good fight about "a war we shouldn't even be in," but when actually put to a vote, they had to suck it up and admit the Republicans are right to stay the course.

And the Democrats will take to the airwaves whining that it was a totally unfair ambush to force them actually to vote on their defeatist and increasingly reality-challenged rhetoric.

So it goes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 18, 2005, at the time of 08:48 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Denny Hastert Finds a Spine

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Or perhaps he simply rented one. In any event, he has wisely scheduled a vote on Mad-Eye Murtha 's document of surrender.

House Republicans, sensing an opportunity for political advantage, maneuvered for a quick vote and swift rejection Friday of a Democratic lawmaker's call for an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq.

"We want to make sure that we support our troops that are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. "We will not retreat."

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi had no immediate reaction to the planned vote.

Quelle surprise. She's already chewed through most of the rugs in her congressional office suite and is commencing on the furniture. The absolute last thing the Democrats wanted at this juncture was actually to be put in the quandry of going on record about what to do in Iraq -- stay and fight or cut and run, abandon our allies, and lunge at American defeat as if it were the brass ring on the merry-go-round.

The "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" is in raptures over the Murtha proposal. MoveOn, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, our old friend Stansfield Turner (who calls Dick Cheney "vice president for torture"), Ramsey Clarke, Noam Chomsky and the like are always overjoyed when they can make America lose a war; and the fact that we would then assuredly be attacked over and over again by terrorists would just be icing on the cake, since they believe we could only respond then by becoming more socialist, more appeasing, weaker... more like France.

But the AP story has the other horn of the dilemma exactly backwards:

By forcing the issue to a vote, Republicans placed many Democrats in a politically unappealing position - whether to side with Murtha and expose themselves to attacks from the White House and congressional Republicans, or whether to oppose him and risk angering the voters that polls show want an end to the conflict.

Yeah, they wish. There has been no poll whatsoever that has ever showed a majority of the American voter (or even a sizable minority) wants us to bolt from Iraq and make all the Democrats' dreams about Vietnam come true. Not a one. Every poll shows that, regardless of whether they support the war or now believe it was not worth fighting, whether they believe the president was correct, wrong but truthful, or that he "lied us into war," Americans nevertheless recognize that the war has become a war against the most evil forces of terrorism and must be won before we can withdraw. Iraq must be left as a functioning democracy that has the ability to defend itself.

And that is the other side of the coin for Democrats: they can either vote against Murtha and infurate the leftmost branch of the party, which happens to be the only branch left with political energy (and necessary cash)... or they can vote with Murtha and reinforce, all over again, exactly why they can never again be trusted with the reins of power. "The Democrats were absolutely right to compare Iraq to Vietnam," the Republicans should argue: "because in both cases, the Democratic Party wants America to surrender to evil and withdraw from the world, hoping that appeasement causes our enemies to take pity on us. They were wrong to cower before Ho Chi Minh in 1974 -- and it's just as despicable to crawl before Zarqawi in 2005."

The other excellent outcome of this vote today -- and I truly hope the argument stretches on over the weekend and into next week, so we can milk this terrible error by the Democrats for all it's worth -- is that it will put all House Republicans on record as well: and I expect that each and every one, the entire 232-member extended family (weird uncles and crackpot cousins included), will vote to defeat John Murtha's craven proposal. They have no need to appease appeasers, as there is no MoveOn wing of the GOP.

This gives them a golden opportunity to get that "mulligan" we all want on the stupid Senate vote: the House can redeem the other side of Capitol Hill. And just because they're not voting, don't expect the Senate Republicans will keep their mouths shut about this; they can erase by their denunciation of this bill the taint of their slap at President Bush a few days ago.

Finally, the Bush administration had better pounce on this over the weekend and beat the Democrats like a taiko drum for the next several months. The meme is obvious: "For three years now, the Democrats have been obsessed, even possessed, with trying to prove that the president lied us into the war, despite all the evidence that convinced even the Democrats themselves just three years ago. And what is the result of this derangement? They become so intent upon making their 'Iraq equals Vietnam' rhetoric into a self-fulfilling prophecy, they're now actually demanding that America surrender to the terrorists, just to enhace the Democrats' political prospects in 2006 and 2008."

Speaker Hastert has shown the excellent political instincts that propelled him into the big chair in the first place. Go, dawg, go!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 18, 2005, at the time of 02:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Who Is John Murtha?

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

The fact that a man steps up, joins the Marines, and does his duty in Korea (one year) and Vietnam (one year) makes him a brave, resourceful, and responsible citizen.

It doesn't necessarily make him bright.

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) has a BA in economics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania -- a minor degree from a minor university. He went into politics at age 36 and has been there ever since (he's 73 now). His seat appears to be totally safe: Wikipedia says his only two close electoral calls were both in primaries; he took the seat from the Republicans in 1974, but that was in the depths of Watergate... since then, it has been a totally safe Democratic seat.

Although he has been in Congress for thirty-one years, his highest rank has been chair/ranking member of an appropriations subcommittee; that is, his subcommittee votes on spending bills. He has never been in the House leadership, minority or majority.

For all of John Murtha's website boasts about his "first-hand knowledge of military and defense issues" that made him "a trusted adviser to presidents of both parties and one of the most effective advocates for the national defense in Washington," I don't see anything in his background that would mark him as particularly knowledgeable about high-level strategy: he seems never to have commanded any unit larger than a company; he doesn't claim to have been through the Naval War College; he has never been Secretary of Defense or a service secretary.

There are twenty-nine Democrats who are members of the House Armed Services Committee (including Loretta Sanchez and Cynthia McKinney), but John Murtha is not one of them.

John Murtha appears to be a reasonably well-respected back bencher, one of the innumerable nomenklatura that litter the halls of the Capitol.

His attack on Dick Cheney as a chickenhawk is fascinating from a psychological standpoint: it seems excessively defensive. In reality, Cheney has had a much more successful career at virtually every level, and in particular in military matters: he was White House Chief of Staff to Gerald Ford at age 34 (the youngest in history); in the House of Reps, he was chairman of the Republican Conference and then Minority Whip (same position as Tom DeLay, except the Republicans were then in the minority).

As Secretary of Defense under Bush-41, Cheney actually sat in the War Room in the Pentagon with the top flag officers, planning strategy for Operation Just Cause (Panama) and Operation Desert Shield/Storm (Kuwait). Murtha, of course, has never done this. In fact, Murtha never served in any administration, so he has no strategic command experience in any way or form.

During the Clinton years, Cheney headed one of the largest companies in the world, Halliburton (currently ranked 654th in the world on the Forbes 2000), market cap around $20 billion, revenues about $20 billion, nearly 100,000 employees under Cheney's management; Halliburton is primarily an energy-construction company, but they do a lot of military contracting... so Cheney saw that side of military strategy as well. And he has now been vice president for five years, intimately involved at every stage with both the Commander in Chief and the current SecDef, his old boss, Don Rumsfeld, during two significant wars and scores of U.S. military involvements around the world.

Murtha is not privy to any highly classified intelligence; Cheney of course sees virtually all of it.

Yes, true: Dick Cheney signed up for a draft reclassification to 3-A (married with children) in 1965, and he was not drafted into Vietnam. He was already twenty-four at the time, just two years from likely not being draftable anyway. BFD.

John Murtha's background -- even in military matters -- doesn't begin to approach Cheney's, and Murtha knows it. The fact that he spent two or three years on active duty (and thirty-five years in the reserves) doesn't alter that essential fact: Murtha has never had any experience with, let alone responsibility for, military strategy... he simply did what he was ordered to do, first as an enlisted Marine, then as a Captain. This is honorable, but it is not a qualification for passing judgment on the strategic progress of a war.

Rep. John Murtha has no qualification to judge whether a war is "unwinnable" or should be abandoned. Dick Cheney does. End of story.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 18, 2005, at the time of 05:01 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

November 17, 2005

"Cut and Run" -- the Slap Back

Iraq Matters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

Antimedia writes in the comments to "Cut and Run" Now Out In the Open that the White House has already responded to Rep. Murtha's call for capitulation to Musab Zarqawi and the merry men of al-Qaeda in Iraq:

Statement by the Press Secretary on Congressman Murtha's Statement

Congressman Murtha is a respected veteran and politician who has a record of supporting a strong America. So it is baffling that he is endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party. The eve of an historic democratic election in Iraq is not the time to surrender to the terrorists. After seeing his statement, we remain baffled -- nowhere does he explain how retreating from Iraq makes America safer.

"The policy positions of Michael Moore... surrender to the terrorists... retreating from Iraq" -- no-siree, this is not the president's father's administration anymore!

This spills more wind into the sails of those of us who desperately want to see Bush really start to fight back against unuseful idiots like Rep. Murtha.

Thanks, Antimedia!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 17, 2005, at the time of 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"Cut and Run" Now Out In the Open

Iraq Matters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

It's good to know that even the Democrats have a few folks who never get the memo.

Hawkish Democrat Calls for Iraq Pullout
Nov 17, 2005
By Liz Sidoti

WASHINGTON (AP) - An influential House Democrat who voted for the Iraq war called Thursday for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, another sign of growing unease in Congress about the conflict.

"It is time for a change in direction," said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., one of Congress' most hawkish Democrats. "Our military is suffering, the future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf region."

House Republicans assailed Murtha's position as one of abandonment and surrender, and accused Democrats of playing politics with the war. "They want us to retreat. They want us to wave the white flag of surrender to the terrorists of the world," Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said in a statement.

Murtha estimated that all U.S. troops could be pulled out within six months. A decorated Vietnam veteran, he choked back tears during his remarks to reporters.

And I suspect the Democratic leadership was choking back rage and fury: here they are, desperately trying to convince the American people that the Democrats can be trusted with national-security policy, that we don't have to worry that they'll cut and run from Iraq if they get into power... and along comes "an influential House Democrat," "one of Congress' most hawkish Democrats," and "a decorated Vietnam veteran" who nakedly says exactly that!

Note that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) refused even to attend Murtha's press conference and was at pains later to distance herself from his tearful offer to surrender the United States to Musab Zarqaqi.

And this is not just some wackjob back-bencher, either... Murtha is about as good as it gets in Democratic circles; he has what passes for gravitas there:

The top Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, Murtha has earned bipartisan respect for his grasp of military issues over three decades in Congress. He planned to introduce a resolution Thursday that, if passed by both the House and the Senate, would force the president to withdraw U.S. troops.

This is about the greatest present that the Democrats could give Bush and the Republicans, and coming at such a critical moment, too! Every Democrat in the House and Senate will once again have to go on record as advocating either an immediate, John-Kerryesque surrender in the global war on terrorism -- thus infuriating the American people -- or else advocating that we follow Bush's strategy of staying the course... thus enraging their paymasters at MoveOn.org, International ANSWER (another stupid acronym), and the Tides Foundation!

Could this possibly get any better?

By the way, two pet peeves of mine. Number one:

First elected to Congress in 1974, Murtha is known as an ally of uniformed officers in the Pentagon and on the battlefield. The perception on Capitol Hill is that when the congressman makes a statement on military issues, he's talking for those in uniform.

The fallacy of using proxy measurements instead of just measuring the actual event of interest

We also see this in the liberal "proof" that there is pervasive "right-wing bias" in the media: the media consist of big corporations -- Knight Ridder, Columbia Broadcasting System, and so forth; but we all know that corporations are right wing; therefore, the New York Times and the Washington Post, being corporations, must be biased towards the right wing.

In law, the principle is that of "best evidence," at least if Perry Mason (my main source of authoritative legal knowledge) knew what he was talking about: the best evidence of what is in, say, a will is the will itself, not someone talking about what he read in the will. You can only introduce the latter when the former is unavailable. In our mass-media example, we have only to look at how they treat liberals vs. conservatives in the actual articles they publish, and we see that they are in fact biased to the left -- as are many corporations. That is the best evidence.

In the Murtha case, surveys of soldiers are readily available; they get polled all the time. And I have never seen a single one where a majority of soldiers or sailors advocated the surrender for which Murtha here calls. So instead of reporting the "perception" that "he's talking for those in uniform," why not simply note that the best evidence indicates he decidedly is not?

Second peeve:

His voice cracked and tears filled his eyes as he related several stories of visiting wounded troops, including one who was blinded and lost both his hands but had been denied a Purple Heart because friendly fire caused his injuries.

"I met with the commandant. I said, 'If you don't give him a Purple Heart, I'll give him one of mine.' And they gave him a Purple Heart," said Murtha, who has two.

The fallacy of the uncheckable anecdote

Name, please? So we can check out whether this really happened as Murtha relates, or whether it's a fabrication, like the atrocity stories of Jimmy Massey (or John Kerry, for that matter), now proven (by testimony of five embedded journalists) to be utter fakes.

This is astonishing... the mainstream Democrat who advocates turning Iraq into Vietnam is the political gift that just keeps on giving! If Ken Mehlman is on his game, we should start seeing Rep. Murtha in Republican television commercials about May or June of next year.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 17, 2005, at the time of 02:53 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

The Torture Club

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

It should hardly be a shock to discover that the so-called Shiite torture prison was in fact run by militias who had infiltrated the local police and security services. Sachi blogged about that general problem more than a month ago, here and here.

Simply put, the same rules that apply to Sunni Arabs in Iraq must apply to the Shia as well: just as the Sunni must reject Zarqawi and other terrorists, the Shia must also reject Sadr and his ilk. But it's unsuprising that they would not be exactly rushing to cast out those who abuse suspected car bombers while the Sunni still aid, abet, conceal, and apologize for those same car-bombers in the first place.

We cannot allow this to be a deal breaker in Iraq. Support for armed extremists -- on both sides -- will gradually diminish as Iraqis come to have more faith in the democratic system with its constitutional protections for the minority and majority populations. But this is something that comes with experience in democracy; it cannot be made to be a precondition of democracy, because then neither will ever happen.

The Iraqis are following the right course here: break up such Shiite gangs when they run across them, get them out of the security services -- but don't delay the elections or other democratization, even though some areas may be voting under a cloud. The vote itself is more important than perfection in the vote.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 17, 2005, at the time of 02:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 16, 2005

Pentagon Needs a Librarian

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Steven Hayes in the current Weekly Standard reports that there are literally millions of pages of seized Iraqi documents we have not yet translated and read, some with very suggestive titles:

  • Locations of Weapons/Ammunition Storage (with map)
  • Formulas and information about Iraq's Chemical Weapons Agents
  • Denial and Deception of WMD and Killing of POWs
  • Chemical Agent Purchase Orders (Dec. 2001)
  • Correspondence between various Iraq organizations giving instructions to hide chemicals and equipment
  • Cleaning chemical suits and how to hide chemicals

And my favorite:

  • IIS reports on How French Campaigns are Financed

These are all titles of documents that have been entered into the HARMONY database, run by the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM); but there is a literal mountain of other documents we have not yet even "eyeballed."

Want to bet that somewhere among those millions of pages are locations of actual "large stockpiles of WMD" that we'll eventually find? If we do, I will make another prediction: no matter where we find them, no matter how well sourced and authenticated the document that leads us there, the Democrats will argue (a) they were planted by Bush; (b) even if they're genuine, they don't count because it's possible to use them for peaceful purposes... a chemical rocket can also be used as a paperweight, for example; (c) they also don't count because the statute of limitations has expired; and (d) why is the Bush administration still obsessing about the past, about the lies they used to lie us into the war, instead of marching boldly into the future, as Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, and Harry Reid want to do?

Read the whole article; it's pretty staggering.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 16, 2005, at the time of 02:39 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 15, 2005

Employment Disincentive

Iraq Matters , Ludicrous Lawsuits
Hatched by Dafydd

Ooo-rah! I have internet connectivity again, don't know for how long.

I have to share this one with y'all; it's too delicious to consume all by myself.... (Hat tip to Lee Porter.)

From the Associated Press:

1,100 Lawyers Leave Saddam Defense Team
By Jamal Halaby, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Amman, Jordan (AP)

Some 1,100 Iraqi lawyers have withdrawn from Saddam Hussein's defense team, citing insufficient protection following the slayings of two peers representing co-defendants of the ousted Iraqi leader.

Yes, isn't it odd? After their client murdered hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of Iraqis, these lawyers are shocked, shocked to find that some Iraqis don't take kindly to the rush of law jockeys to defend the monster. (What is the defense going to be... that it was somebody else, not Saddam Hussein, running Iraq all that time?)

However, the head of the investigative judges in Saddam's dozen cases, Raid Juhi, said Sunday the withdrawal of the defense team "will not affect the work of the court and it will continue its legal measures."

Translation: this is not particularly a trial to discover whether the accused actually did bad things; we pretty much know that. This is a show trial designed to demonstrate to ex-Baathists, once and for all, that they are no longer in charge and never will be again.

There are times when a show trial is the most proper and correct form of judicial proceeding.

After the killing of the first lawyer, defense attorneys announced they would not cooperate with the court and would refuse to appear at the next session until they were satisfied with security.

Laith Kubba, spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said the lawyers twice turned down invitations to move to the Green Zone, where they could be protected by U.S. and other international troops.

The law jockeys demand complete security -- but not from the Americans. Who do they expect to protect them, the Red Crescent? Al Jazeera? Ramsey Clark?

I find this hilarious. 1,100 attorneys can't wait to sign aboard to defend Saddam Hussein; his rights must be protected! But not if their own lives might be in jeopardy (since they refuse our protection).

I reckon these lawyers think more highly of their own skins than they do of the 148 Shiites of Dujail. Who would have imagined it?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 15, 2005, at the time of 11:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Killer Arg

Iraq Matters , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

Apologies in advance; I can only post my own speculation and opinion here, sans any supportive links. You just gotta take my word for it!

On this increasingly infantile argument by the Democrats that "Bush lied us into the war" because he said Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and we supposedly "failed to find any WMD" -- the killer argument here doesn't even need evidence.

Every explosive in Saddam Hussein's arsenal was a "weapon of mass destruction." Every artillery shell, every rocket, every missile of whatever range; each could be used -- and had been used in the past -- to butcher masses of innocent people. I don't know who first said it, but it's again so obvious it needs no specific citation: Hussein was himself a weapon of mass destruction.

So we thought it was "two minutes to midnight" when we attacked him, and it turned out to be maybe twenty minutes to midnight. He wasn't as far along as we thought in developing the really nasty stuff... chemical weapons, biological weapons, nukes. So the hell what? How does this affect the moral question?

Ramsey Clark, former LBJ attorney general and current pain-in-the-neck traitor to the United States, makes the absurd argument that when America fights a war, and the casualty ratio is lopsidedly in our favor, that constittutes a war crime; we have to suffer and bleed just as much as the enemy, or we're morally guilty. Take my word for it; this is pretty much the definitional example of being "stuck on stupid," in Lt. Gen. Russel Honore's memorable phrase. I prefer the tack taken by Gen. George S. Patton, in the words of Francis Ford Copolla's screenplay to the movie Patton: "No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

Broaden it out: it means you take your advantages where you find them. We had no obligation to wait until Hussein was just about to deploy Anthrax and VX rockets, just so we didn't have too great an advantage. The morality of a war isn't determined by how many casualties you suffer: the war is either righteous or it is wrong; it is either worth the risk or it is not; and we have a moral obligation to our soldiers to reduce the risk as far as we possibly can... yes, even by attacking before politely giving the enemy time to kill more American soldiers.

So long as we labored under the delusion that nobody was targeting the United States especially, we could get away with ignoring Hussein: he shot at our planes, we took out his fire-control radar.

But 9/11 changed everything. It became as obvious as the smirk on Howard Dean's lips that we were targetted, that Osama bin Laden was deadly serious when he publicly declared war on us some years ago. And that meant the rules had changed: by the basic law of war, we had the right to defend ourselves, including taking pre-emptive action (which Iraq was not, by the way) against allies of our enemy who posed a specific and credible threat to America or her interests.

The existence of WMDs was irrelevant to the larger moral question; it was just a way to explain the situation to people at the U.N. who don't understand moral arguments, having long since abandoned the belief in right and wrong. What mattered was the intent... and even the Democrats (even today!) admit that Hussein intended to develop any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon he could. No "lie," no "manipulation," no trick: Hussein had the intent and the means, he had the al-Qaeda contacts and the hatred, he was rolling in petrodollars, and "his brain was squirming like a toad."

Maybe he hid them; maybe he was just trying to develop them. Who the hell cares?

Saddam Hussein became a dead man walking the moment the second plane plowed into the second tower. He should have picked better friends.

He could no longer be coddled; he could no longer be tolerated; like John Dillinger, he was too wild to live. We had a moral obligation to America and to the rest of the free world to take the bastard out. Since we're humane folks, we decided to invade and put our own troops at risk, rather than bomb Iraq into rubble and then bounce the rubble, killing hundreds of thousands of relatively innocent civilians. But that was just us being nice.

We suddenly realized Hussein posed an existential threat to the America we grew up in... therefore, after we took care of the Taliban, we moved his name to the top of the list. We attacked at the end of March 2003, and he was ousted a few weeks later.

All else is dicta.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 15, 2005, at the time of 11:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 14, 2005

Off With the Gloves!

Iraq Matters , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The demigods over at Power Line are just going to be ecstatic about this. John Hinderaker worried that Bush's speech a few days ago, defending himself and his administration from the destructive and absurdist "Bush lied, people died" meme was just a one-off, and that the president might decide that, since he had "answered" the charge, he could then just "move on to other things."

This is a pretty good beginning, but it means nothing unless Bush and his surrogates keep up the counter-attack. My fear is that Bush will think that now that he has responded, he can move on to other things. This would be a serious mistake. I think Bush and his surrogates should give the same speech more or less every day for the next month or two. The administration has a lot of catching up to do, and a single speech, or a handful of speeches, won't have any impact.

But today, AP calms our fears:

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (AP) - President Bush, heading to Asia with hopes of improving his image on the world stage, hurled a parting shot at Iraq war critics on Monday, accusing some Democrats of "sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy."

"That is irresponsible," Bush said in prepared remarks he planned to deliver to U.S. forces during a refueling stop in Alaska. Excerpts from the remarks were released by the White House as Bush flew to Elemendorf Air Force Base on the initial leg of an eight-day journey to Japan, South Korea, China and Mongolia.

"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," Bush said in his prepared remarks.

"Only one person manipulated evidence and misled the world - and that person was Saddam Hussein," Bush added.

The president continues the powerful centerpunching he finally began last week:

In his prepared Alaska remarks, Bush noted that some elected Democrats in Congress "have opposed this war all along.

"I disagree with them, but I respect their willingness to take a consistent stand," he said. "Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are playing politics with this issue and sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy."

Rem acu tetigisti, as the Romans said; Bush has touched the point with a needle. Congress does not have access to every jot and tittle of intelligence information that the president does; but the Senate and House Intelligence Committees did, in fact, have access to all of the major conclusions -- and all of the disagreements and caveats -- available to the White House.

Yet twenty-nine Democrats in the Senate (and most Democrats in the House, though that was a voice vote, not a roll call) voted on October 11th, 2002, to authorize the use of force in Iraq, including all of the presidential candidates of 2004 in Congress except for Bob Graham of Florida -- then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), John Edwards (D-NC), Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), and nominee John Kerry (D-MA) -- and several expected candidates for 2008, including Joe Biden (D-DE) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY).

Despite supporting the war in 2002, Edwards, Kerry, Biden and other Democrats (such as Charles Schumer) are leading the pack charging that Bush "lied us into the war." I suppose what they're really claiming is that they voted to send America to war without even having read the relevant intelligence. I don't believe it, but that's what they must be saying.

The minority Republicans (except for Lincoln Chafee) read the intelligence reports and concluded that Saddam Hussein had to go. Some Democrats read the same intelligence reports (or didn't bother) and decided it wasn't enough to go to war; these folks -- Dick Durbin (D-IL), Pat Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), for example -- at the very least have the virtue of consistency: they were agin' it then, they're agin' it now.

But the Democratic Party has a terrible problem: they desperately want to paint Bush as a mindless warmonger who was in possession of credible intelligence that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (despite the fact that we actually found those "large stockpiles" that were promised -- see here and here, most recently), but who "lied" about it just to get us into that war. But they have no answer for the large number of very big-profile Democrats who either looked at the intel and agreed with Bush -- or who couldn't even trouble themselves to look at the intel before voting.

I visualize John Hinderaker standing atop his desk and doing the "Dilbert dance" at the thought that Bush has finally awaked from his year-and-a-half slumber and picked a fight with the lying slime who have done him and the Republican Party -- and the country -- so much damage already.

If John has room up there, I'd like to join him. Now if only Bush would also finally take on the numbskulls who insist that a chemical rocket isn't a chemical weapon if the chemicals are not actually loaded, just sitting alongside in a 55-gallon drum inside the same camouflaged bunker.

Yup. And a gun isn't a gun if you just unload it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 14, 2005, at the time of 04:25 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

November 07, 2005

Post to the Post

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

I wonder if Deborah Orin reads Big Lizards? Somehow I doubt it... though it's a nice thought to contemplate. In any event, I must rise to correct one small point in her otherwise excellent New York Post column on the Joseph Wilson scam, flagged by my favorite blog, Power Line. Actually, though it's a small point in her column, easily corrected, it's a monumental, colossal point in the history of the Iraq war and aftermath.

The column lays out, with perfect clarity, the case that far from wanting to keep the lid on Joe Wilson, the CIA actually encouraged his repeated lies about his trip and what he found (and "didn't find"), even though it knew this would jeopardize the career of his CIA employed wife, Valerie Plame Wilson. In the course of the column, Ms. Orin found occasion to wonder why they would be so complicit in Wilson's attacks on the president; she concluded, with admirable straigtforwardness rare in the MSM, that the CIA was in full CYA mode by the time Wilson went public in mid-2003:

But then, all this came at a time when the CIA division where Wilson's wife worked had an intense need to cover its rear: Remember — they were the ones who (along with every other intel agency in the world) had insisted that Saddam had WMDs — but no WMDs were being found.

The irony of this could choke a horse. The reason that "no WMDs were being found" is that the Iraq Survey Group, a creature of the CIA as well as the Pentagon and the IAEA, was headed at that time by David Kay; and Kay had made a conscious decison not to count as WMD any item that had a dual civilian use. Read how carefully Kay parsed his words when he resigned in January 2004 (via Wikipedia):

I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarized chemical weapons there.

Note that this would elegantly rule out any chemical weapon that was not "deployed" -- that is, rockets made to accept chemical payloads but which were currently empty, even if they were found twenty-five feet away from 55-gallon drums of cyclosarin-based "pesticides" in a camouflaged ammunition bunker. This is akin to cops searching a convicted felon's home and refusing to arrest because all the guns they found were unloaded, thus not "deployed" and "militarized."

So if the CIA was in the doghouse, as clearly it was, its embarassment was entirely of its own making... both for predicting (one can only presume) that we would find warehouses of carefully labeled WMD, all loaded up and ready to fire -- and then after the war, for allowing David Kay to construct a definition of WMD so crabbed and narrow that virtually nothing would qualify except the cartoonish scenario above.

That in turn causes me to wonder whether there were some in the CIA so anti-Iraq War, so anti-President-Bush, that they were willing to sacrifice even the good name of the Company itself, so painstakingly rebuilt from the nadir of the Carter era, if only that would hurt President Bush's reelection chances. If so, all we would have shown (alas) is that the liberal rot was no less advanced within the CIA than within the State Department, academe, and the mainstream media.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 07, 2005, at the time of 01:07 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Oil for Blood

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

NOTE: This story was developed in collabortion between Sachi and Dafydd.

Is the United Nations trying to change the subject from its own complicity -- for literally years -- in the massive theft from the Iraqi people that is the Oil for Food scandal?

According to the New York Times on Saturday, a UN-sponsored auditing board, called the "International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq," is recommending that the United States should "repay as much as $208 million" to Iraq for alleged overcharges by Kellog, Brown and Root (KB&R), a subsidiary of Halliburton that has come under fire before by the Democratic Party and their allies in the press and the UN.

An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary.

The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work. [all emphasis here and elsewhere added]

Even the Development Fund Board isn't quite sure just how much actual money they think should be forked over:

The monitoring board, created by the United Nations specifically to oversee the Development Fund - which includes Iraqi oil revenues but also some money seized from Saddam Hussein's government - said because the audits were continuing, it was too early to say how much of the $208 million should ultimately be paid back.

In other words, it could be $208 million... or it could be zero. Or anything in between. But such irrelevant questions won't stop the UN from playing "let's you and him fight."

Let's open a tab: the UN Board recommends that the United States pay "as much as" $208,000, but doesn't actually know how much of that money is actually overcharge and how much is perfectly legimate; and they also criticized KB&R workmanship but couldn't point to any specifics. They just dropped the last charge without going through all the fuss and bother of finding actual evidence of any wrongdoing.

A spokeswoman for Halliburton, Cathy Mann, said the questions raised in the military audits, carried out in a Pentagon office called the Defense Contract Auditing Agency, had largely focused on issues of paperwork and documentation and alleged nothing about the quality of the work done by K.B.R. The monitoring board relied heavily on the Pentagon audits in drawing its conclusions.

"The auditors have raised questions about the support and the documentation rather than questioning the fact that we have incurred the costs," Ms. Mann said in an e-mail response to questions. "Therefore, it would be completely wrong to say or imply that any of these costs that were incurred at the client's direction for its benefit are 'overcharges.'"

I wonder... how much thought has the Board given to the actual costs of working in Iraq during the chaos starting right after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government? Civilian workers had been subjected to roadside bombings, kidnappings, and even beheadings. In order to attract workers to work in such a hostile environment, KB&R would have to offer much higher salaries than other companies -- not mention enormous insurance premiums and the cost of a large number of security personnel. Since KB&R is a private company, not a government organization, they had to provide security for their own employees.

But there is no evidence the Board considered any of these explanations for the high cost. The Times says they "relied heavily on [earlier] Pentagon audits" in preparing these recommendations; but it does not quote from any of those previous audits; so we have no way of knowing whether the Board's recommendation agrees with the Pentagon's audits or contradicts them.

Why is the United Nations releasing this report, with its hearsay and inuendo, at this particular moment in time? Several reasons leap out: First, there is the continuing investigation into the UN's Oil for Food bribery scheme. With both its own investigation by Paul Volcker and the investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations nipping at the heels of Secretary General Kofi Annan, his family, and cronies over the billions of dollars stolen from the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein with the connivance of the United Nations heirarchy (who took their own bribes and kickbacks), they desperately need someone else to be the villain for a while. Since there seems no way to blame Israel for any of this, the United States is elected.

Second, for those who have always opposed the war to remove Saddam, there is the urgent task of getting more Iraqis to hate the United States and perhaps demand our immediate withdrawal, while there is still time for the Baathists to return:

The monitoring board authority extends only to making recommendations on any reimbursement. It would be up to the United States government to decide whether to make the payments, and who should make them. But Louay Bahry, a former Iraqi academic who is now at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said the board's findings would stoke suspicions on the street in Iraq, where there had always been fears that the United States invaded the country to control its oil resources.

"Something like this will be caught in the Iraqi press and be discussed by the Iraqi general public and will leave a very bad taste in the mouth of the Iraqis," Mr. Bahry said. "It will increase the hostility towards the United States."

And finally, most in the UN would much prefer to see the Democrats in charge in the United States, rather than "warmongers" like George W. Bush and the Republicans. Anything that will further that cause is always in order.

The audits may also come at a bad time for the Bush administration, since Vice President Dick Cheney's former role as chief executive of Halliburton has led to charges, uniformly dismissed by Mr. Cheney and the company, that it received preferential treatment in receiving the contracts. The early Kellogg, Brown & Root contracts in Iraq were "sole sourced," or bid noncompetitively.

"The Bush administration repeatedly gave Halliburton special treatment and allowed the company to gouge both U.S. taxpayers and the Iraqi people," Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a statement on the new audits. "The international auditors have every right to expect a full refund of Halliburton's egregious overcharges."

Speaking of "a full refund," when will the UN pay back all the money they helped loot from Iraq in the last years of Hussein's bloody rule? Perhaps after they do that, we can talk about this tendentious audit.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 07, 2005, at the time of 02:16 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 06, 2005

Go Ahead -- Be Silly!

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I think this is good news. Or maybe it's just silly news.

BlackFive reports that soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, who have problems with houses that have been booby trapped with tiny tripwires (so small they're invisible in the dark) attached to explosives, have found an amazing way to find those tripwire threads: Silly String!

Evidently, they spray the stuff into dark areas; when it floats down, it allegedly is caught by the tripwires, dangling from them. Since Silly String is bright, it makes the booby traps easy to spot and avoid, or to detonate from a safe distance.

Now, I caution that this could be a hoax; I have no way of knowing. It seems pretty reasonable on its face. BlackFive links to this website (not a blog), which has authentic-looking photos of the site author testing the theory in his home. And there's nothing inherently preposterous: Silly String is much, much lighter than a human brushing against a wire: it seems unlikely that it would have enough weight to trip the explosion.

I wonder how old this idea is? Silly String was around in the early seventies; supposedly, it was invented in 1969 -- so theoretically, it could have been used in Vietnam. But you'd think if this trick were a mainstay, BlackFive would have heard of it before. So is this new? Anybody out there use Silly String in previous military engagements to find invisible tripwires?

This is either a spectacularly clever practical joke -- or else it's a spectacular example of American ingenuity and sideways thinking, coming up with a brilliant solution using a child's toy to prevent Coalition and Iraqi forces from being killed by terrorists.

Either way, I reckon it's good news!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 06, 2005, at the time of 02:51 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 05, 2005

American Rambette

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

I was reading "old" history of Operation Iraqi Freedom and remembered the story about Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester. Something suddenly occurred to me that I haven't seen anyone mention so far. The award itself isn't really "news," because the MilBlogs were all over it at the time. But there is a special point to note that I'll get to a few paragraphs down.

Sgt. Hester is the first American woman awarded the Silver Star since World War II. The Silver Star is awarded for "gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force." But what is most interesting about Sgt. Hester is that I think she is the first American woman to be awarded that medal for actually attacking and killing the enemy!

Other recipients all received their medals (sometimes posthumously), whether Silver Star, Navy Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, or even Medal of Honor, for heroically performing their duties during air raids or under fire. But those duties were almost all as nurses (the Medal of Honor winner was a Civil-War surgeon, Dr. Mary Walker), except for a couple of pilots. They bravely stuck to their posts and did their duty despite bombs and gunfire. But their duty was to heal, not to kill.

Sgt. Hester is a Military Policewoman. She was assigned to Raven 42, 617th MP Co, Kentucky National Guard, assigned to the 503rd MP Bn (Fort Bragg), 18th MP Bde. She got her Silver Star on June 16th this year for her gallantry during an ambush on a convoy of supply trucks some months earlier. Raven 42 saw the convoy stopped and they charged directly towards the sound of the gunfire.

After her Humvee came under fire, Sgt. Hester grabbed an M4 carbine and an M203 grenade launcher, jumped into an irrigation ditch being used by Iraqi terrorists to fire on her Hummer crew, and killed at least five jihadis. She had to return to her vehicle once to reload, then ran back to the trench to continue clearing it out. She is America's first medal-winning Rambette!

You can read the After Action Report about her engagement at Blackfive.

Of course, until recently, women were not allowed to carry weapons into combat zones (even as MPs). As time passes, we will probably see more and more awards like Sgt. Hester received. Eventually, a woman will be awarded the Medal of Honor for the same reason Audie Murphy received his: for killing bad guys!

Here is Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester receiving her Silver Star:

Anwrmap.jpg

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 05, 2005, at the time of 06:29 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 03, 2005

Little Demo In Slumberland

Iraq Matters , Politics - National , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

John over at Power Line (easily the second snappiest dresser of those three) mulls the motive behind the Democrats' hysteria -- now -- over pre-war intelligence:

Democratic activists desperately want to block Judge Alito from ascending to the Court, but the reality is that Senate Democrats are powerless to achieve that goal. Alito's qualifications are unassailable, the Democrats are a minority party, and the Republicans are united in the conviction that Alito deserves a vote. A filibuster isn't out of the question, but if the Dems try it, it will fail.

So the Senate Democrats can't come through for their party where it counts. I doubt that the timing of the Month of Valerie is a coincidence; I suspect it is intended mostly to distract the Democratic base from the reality of the Senate Democrats' impotence.

I don't mean to be fip, but I think John has hold of the means, not the motive. He has to grab the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face.

Ever since the catastrophe of 1994, the Democratic Party has lived in a fantasy world of its own devising. Unable to face the reality of losing the House and Senate in 1994, then the presidency in 2000, then the Senate again in 2002 (after Jumpin' Jim Jeffords' defection was discounted), and most recently the 2004 reelection, they have been unable to recover sanity, daily drifting deeper into political schizophrenia... to quote Adam Savage, "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

I don't need a psychiatrist like Charles Krauthammer or Thomas Szasz; the signs are manifest. Most overtly and trivially, there are the two distinct TV shows set in fantasy universes where the Democrats are in charge of everything: the West Wing and Commander In Chief. Arguably, many Democrats demanded a show like CinC because they were unsatisfied with the West Wing -- because they had a few Republican characters who were not totally corrupt raving lunatics.

But the dementia manifests in uglier ways, too: many Democrats still, to this day, refuse to admit that Bush won the election in 2000 or in 2004. A U.S. senator, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), actually tried to prevent the Ohio electoral votes for Bush from being certified in January of this year, presumably on the grounds that John Kerry was the "real" winner there.

Democrats have wallowed in increasingly occult conspiracy theories and nightmarish fantasies, from George W. Bush conspiring with Arabs on the 9/11 attacks to Republicans and the Army Corps of Engineers plotting to blow up the New Orleans levees "to kill the black people." Karl Rove has assumed monstrous significance, as if he were an incarnation of Ernst Stavro Blofeld (for the younger set, Dr. Evil). Creepy cartels of neocons (read "Jew-o-cons") secretly seize control of the world for their nefarious Zionist plans.

Many left-liberals now live in a world that is as thrilling and horrific as the H.P. Lovecraft "Cthulhu" Mythos *, full of dark, eldrich gods, nameless cults, and unspeakable rites. Reliable, old, secret-society paranoia has resurged, of course: the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, even the Illuminati; but new and bizarre cults have formed around the basic template of "Famous Right-Winger X is secretly in league with Evil Villain Y"... for example, Osama bin Laden is actually a Mossad agent working for Ariel Sharon, Bush-41 started the Gulf War in order to build an oil pipeline for Mullah Omar, and Saddam Hussein is actually a mole who has been under Donald Rumsfeld's thumb since the early 1980s. Other brand new (tired old) cult archetypes include the specter of "globalization," with the World Trade Organization taking the place of the Knights Templar or the Hashishim "Assassins;" and the omnipotent, omnipresent Haliburton standing in for Wolfram & Hart in the Buffy spinoff Angel.

Let's be clear about this. Reality does not come packaged in stories; but our brains are hardwired to comprehend events in dramatic form, with heroes, villains, a climax, and a denouement. So we (all of us) dream up "the story of our lives," in which the dreamer is the protagonist, someone or some group is elected to be antagonist, and life becomes a series of chapters, each ending in a cliffhanger.

For Republicans and conservatives, who are in the ascendency and generally happy with life, the tale is a modern-day adventure-romance, typically with a happy ending. But for Democrats and liberals, who have seen nothing but dark chapters for years now, the tome is a Clive Barker bloodfest, a King Lear tale of madness and woe, a science-fiction black comedy like the Matrix, or a Walter-Mitty fantasy of easy triumph and cheap, childish victory, depending how much angst the tale-singer can take before breaking from reality entirely. Read the New York Times quickly, then ask yourself whether it wouldn't have even more verisimilitude with a wicked stepmother and a dragon.

The Democrats have no "plan" for how to use pre-war intelligence against Bush... no more than John Nash (Russell Crowe) had any well thought out purpose for hallucinating "Agent Parcher" (Ed Harris) and his machinations in a Beautiful Mind. They are demon-driven to expose the evil, just as D.A. Jim Garrison was driven to expose the massive conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK (a plot that required the connivance of Lyndon Johnson, the FBI, the Soviets, and the 82nd Airborne). And it doesn't matter that nobody will listen anymore, that Democrats have "no one left to lie to," in Christopher Hitchens' memorable phrase. Like Dr. Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) in Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they are condemned to stagger forever along the street, flagging down cars and screaming the warning: "They're already here! You're next!"

* Spellchecker attempted to correct this to the "Chihuahua Mythos."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 03, 2005, at the time of 11:22 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

November 01, 2005

Weapon of Mass Media Deception

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The absurdity of Harry Reid's tantrum today, forcing the Senate into a rare closed session as a stunt to draw attention to the Democrats' claims that the entire Iraq war was cooked up by Karl Rove and the neocons and sold to Americans by lies and distortions (see virtually any speech by John F. Kerry in 2004) has been ably covered already today by Power Line and by Captain's Quarters. I have little to add to the main points of Paul and Ed.

I'm more interested in the way that the mainstream news media manipulate the story in order to support the Democrats' side of the dispute. Let's start with the easiest to document, the slam dunk. Here is the Associated Press today:

Democrats contend that the unmasking of Valerie Plame was retribution for her husband, Joseph Wilson, publicly challenging the Bush administration's contention that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Africa. That claim was part of the White House's justification for going to war.

Missing in action from this report is the fact that the Butler Report from Great Britain completely affirmed this very contention (actually, Bush said that the British had such evidence), and also that the final, unanimous report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that Joseph Wilson himself told his CIA debriefer that the Nigerien prime minister (and former minister of mines) had stated that the Iraqis conducted secret negotiations to buy something from Niger -- and that the prime minister believed that "something" was yellowcake uranium (as opposed to animal hides or cowpeas, Niger's other exports).

But lying by omission is not the worst of the reporting. In its zeal to cheer the Democrats on, AP has yet again exaggerated beyond the evidence to blatant falsehood about what we actually found in Iraq:

Reid's move shone a spotlight on the continuing controversy over prewar intelligence. Despite administration claims, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and some Democrats have accused the White House of manipulating the information.

While it is true that under the crabbed definition of WMDs used by the U.N. inspectors no "large stockpiles" of chemical or biological weapons have been found, it is completely false to assert, as AP does, that none were. Washington Post, July 3rd, 2004, in a story written by Walter Pincus:

Yesterday's coalition release also said that two other 122-milimeter rounds, found by the Poles on June 16 with help from an Iraqi informer, tested positive for small quantities of sarin but were "so deteriorated" that they would have had "limited to no impact if used by insurgents against coalition forces."

...

Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, told Fox News on June 24 that "some" old sarin and mustard rounds have been discovered in scattered places, demonstrating "that the Iraqi declarations were wrong at least in . . . amount." But Duelfer cautioned he was not ready to make any judgment whether there were any "still concealed" military-capable stockpiles.

Even by the overly strict definition of the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG), these all qualify as "weapons of mass destruction." But more to the point is the definition itself: for Walter Pincus, the Associated Press, the entire mainstream media, the official line of the Democratic Party, and evidently the CIA and State Department themselves, the rockets found (or purchased) by the Poles in 2004 do not count as chemical munitions because the warheads, while manufactured to accept chemicals, were not filled.

Bear in mind that the ISG was led first by David Kay, then by Charles Duelfer. Kay was pushed by the State Department and by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei; and Duelfer was appointed by then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet: all three of these groups have waged relentless political warfare against George W. Bush, against Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in particular, against the conclusion of the "neocons" that Iraq posed a grave and gathering threat to the United States.

Each has persisted in this war-against-the-war long after the major-combat phase of the war itself was won, and the peace began to be waged with such intensity. The primary tactic they have used during this latter period has been to dispute every single WMD find as being something benign -- or at least potentially civilian -- instead of military.

Many times, we found huge drums of cyclosarin-based "pesticides" hidden in camouflaged ammunition bunkers... and many times we found empty chemical rockets and artillery shells, often at the same ammo dumps. But evidently, that doesn't constitute chemical weapons according to the ISG. But if Hussein's regime had actually poured the first into the second, then and only then would they be defined as chemical weapons.

Does this mean that a gun is not a gun if it's not loaded?

Captain Ed discussed this also, way back in April of 2004. He quotes extensively from Kenneth Timmerman's investigative piece in Insight Magazine, April 26th, 2004:

In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors....

But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English? Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory? In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA's) intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order - but found all the same....

But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" [Douglas] Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble. "Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."

(Hanson was an "atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer" who was a civilian analyst in Iraq in summer 2003 working on WMD issues.)

It is well known that the staggering extent of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs was only discovered after he lost the Gulf War. Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons by the tens of thousands were unearthed (often literally) and destroyed by the coalition. Afterward (we have known this for some time from defectors), Hussein decided that Iraq would take a new tack in its never-ending quest for WMD: from then on, all of Iraq's programs were designed to be "dual use": each would have an ostensibly civilian purpose (pesticides, medical research, nuclear power generation) but could quickly -- in some cases within minutes -- be converted to military use.

Therefore, when looking for "stockpiles" of WMD, the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) should have been looking, not for a warehouse full of shells pre-filled with sarin or mustard gas or anthrax, but rather for the precursor components of such: shells and rockets built to accept such chemicals or biological agents in close proximity to the agents themselves... even if they're not actually loaded into the warhead yet.

A rocket that can accept toxic chemicals into its warhead near a 55-gallon drum of cyclosarin-based "pesticide" is a chemical weapon, and it should be defined as such.

At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters - with unpleasant results. "More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump - evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."

That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin - a nerve agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. "Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'" [Emphasis added]

Coalition troops have found mortar shells filled with a mystery liquid that tested positive in the field for being a blister agent (mustard gas, used so horrifically in World War I, is a blister agent); subsequent testing (redefinition) by the ISG disputed that finding. But lost in the shuffle was the question that should have leapt out at everyone: what conceivable purpose is served by placing a liquid inside a mortar shell in the first place?

Putting any sloshing substance inside a ballistic object would obviously throw off the accuracy -- so there must be some advantage that offsets that problem. Can we put our heads together and think of some possibility, a reason why a man like Saddam Hussein would order some liquid to be poured into a rocket or a mortar round?

Even by the most tendentious definition of WMD, we have found some; so AP's overreach is just flatly wrong. But more important, the definition of WMD stockpile itself is wrong. When assessing threat, you dare not take the most benign view that all those drums of cyclosarin, "reference strains" of Anthrax and botulinum, and those empty chemical and biological munitions are unrelated and only coincidentally situated right next to each other in camouflaged bunkers and ammo dumps. You must use the most expansive defintion that takes into account the avowed intent of the Iraqi WMD programs to produce "dual use" chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. And by that definition -- which the ISG would have used in any other context than the CIA's attempt to thwart the Bush Administration's foreign policy -- we have indeed found "large stockpiles" of WMD.

Even if the Democrats -- and their allies in the MSM and the CIA -- don't want to admit it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 01, 2005, at the time of 04:57 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

October 31, 2005

Calling for Iraqi Bill of Rights

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Omar on Iraq the Model reports on a conference he just attended. It was called Oath of Iraq (Ahd Al-Iraq), organized by a number of prominent Iraqi women and including powerful members of the national and tribal governments:

The event was attended by more than a few female Assembly members as well as several tribal sheiks and representatives of other political entities and organizations…one can fairly say that a wide range of social and political the spectrum of Iraq population was well represented in the event.

The group seems to be an attempt to enact an Iraqi bill of rights as the first amendments to the Iraqi constitution. The conferees initially proposed five amendments:

  • A requirement for the explicit definition of the term of art "public order and ethics," which the constitution allows as a limit on certain basic rights and freedoms (speech, press, assembly, peaceful protest). Otherwise, individual judges can invoke it whenever they don't like the free exercise of freedom.

(Someone should warn Omar that even defining it doesn't always work... as we've found out with regard to the Second Amendment, the "interstate commerce" clause, and too many others!)

  • An amendment "to return back to the civil law legislated back in 1959 and to prevent Shareat [Sharia] laws from replacing that law."
  • Clarifying the qualifications of the supreme federal court, the requirement that Sharia judges not outnumber legal judges, and the demand for at least 25% of the court to be female.
  • Requiring the Committee to review all laws to ensure they do not violate the Iraqi constitution.
  • Requiring the Higher Human Rights Committee to review all laws to ensure they do not violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

They had better tread carefully with that last amendment, and with the constitutional invocation (explicit and implicit) of the Universal Declaration. It is a bludgeon used by the United Nations to force conformity with European social-welfare policies and includes such whoppers as....

  • No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
  • Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
  • Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
  • Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
  • Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

And so forth. All these look nice on paper -- but the first is so vague as to justify anything, while the last is out and out Socialism; the others more or less boil down to the requirement that the productive labor on behalf of the unproductive... which seems to violate Article 4:

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

One more amendment was proposed by a tribal sheikh of Sadr City, and this one seems eminently reasonable. As Omar puts it in the post from Iraq the Model:

The entire crowd welcomed the notes of one tribal Sheik from Sadr city who raised an objection to one clause in the punishment law which states that teachers and husbands should not be persecuted if they use disciplinary beating against their students or wives respectively. in his unexpected note, the sheik asked the committee to include correcting this clause in its agenda. [Emphasis added]

Given the abuse of both women and students that is endemic in the Arab Middle East, such an amendment is vital.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 02:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 30, 2005

Iraqi Kumbaya

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Togetherness is breaking out all over Iraq... and I understand that some sort of election might be about to be held. (Pssst! Nobody tell the Democrats... Carville and Begala might head out to drum up support for Hillary in 2008.)

Since the victory of the Iraqi constitution, an amazing thing has happened: in the midst of a terrorist war, Shia, Kurds, and even Sunni have begun to act like civilized people gearing up for an election: they're campaigning, making alliances of political convenience, giving speeches, and I wouldn't be surprised if they kissed a baby or two.

This is remarkable, because less than three years ago, they lived in a dictatorship that had never held a real, contested election in their lifetimes. The success of Iraq gives this skeptic of "nation building" a lot to ponder.

Islam Online reports that it's not just the Iraqi Islamic Party, but all three of the biggest Sunni parties have joined together to urge Sunnis to vote in the December elections -- and to warn them against boycotting this time.

The Conference of the People of Iraq (CPI), the Islamic Party and the Iraqi National Dialogue (IND) joined the political fray in Iraq on October 14 as one entity on October 14 to run in parliamentary elections.

"We want to run as a political bloc in the next elections in order to obtain the best results," IND head Sheikh Khalaf Alayan told reporters on Wednesday.

CPI chief Adnan Al-Dulaimi criticized those who might call for a boycott of the vote, saying they "sought to destroy the country".

"We hope that those who oppose this consultation will not place obstacles in our path," added Islamic Party number two Tareq Al-Hashimi.

In related and very odd -- and probably good -- news, even Muqtada Sadr, renegade functionally illiterate Shiite "scholar" and great disappointment to his revered father has, for the moment at least, given up his Mighty al-Mahti Militia and joined with the Sunni Arabs in Anbar province to present a joint slate of candidates for the Iraqi parliament:

NAJAF, Iraq, October 26, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Shiite leader Moqtada Al-Sadr said Wednesday, October 26, he would present a joint list of candidates with Sunni Arabs in Al-Anbar province to contest the December 15 legislative elections.

The office of the anti-occupation firebrand said it decided to ally itself with the Sunnis due to "the difficult situation facing the country, to prevent the occupier and enemies of Iraq from attaining their goals, to consolidate national identity and to reaffirm its unity," reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Sadr's deputy, Fattah Al-Sheikh, joins eight Sunni candidates on a list for the Anbar representation. While we're not great admirers of the buffoon Sadr (as you can probably tell), at least it's a step in the right direction that he wants to run for Parliament instead of holing himself up in a mosque in Najaf and threatening to destroy the 6,225th most holy site in the entire ummah.

In really unalloyed good news, the largest Islamic association in Iraq, the Association of Muslim Scholars (Hayat Al-Ulama Al-Muslimin), has decided not to call for a boycott this time -- at least for now. With all the major Sunni political groups in Iraq now calling for Sunnis to vote, not boycott, it's likely this Sunni association will do so too.

Regardless of whether we like or dislike various political parties in Iraq, it's just plain better that they fight against each other with political campaigns and parliamentary votes than Kalashnikovs and car bombs.

Let me give over the floor to Mohammed of Iraq the Model; he wrote some stirring words today at the end of a post describing all the new parties and alliances and political factions lining up for the election. It's like there's suddenly politics going on in heart of the Arab Middle East! Western style politics, as in Spain or France. Iraq has made amazing strides in just two and a half years... which is a tribute not only to the Iraqis themselves (of course) but also to a man named George W. Bush.

Here's Mohammed:

[I]t has to be acknowledged that the political experiment in Iraq has matured by far during these two and a half years and the political language slowly began to take more realistic dimensions and we can sense a growing faith in the ways of democracy giving some sort of special divinity to the ballot box which shall remain the only base for building a new Iraq. The more Iraqis believe in elections and in voting as a way to express themselves, the weaker violence becomes and the more isolated the terrorists will be. Iraqis will prove that they do believe in democracy and they do want liberty and justice and the[y] will show the region an example of how partners can work out their differences in spite of all the hardships. [Emphasis added]

Well, he ought to know!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 30, 2005, at the time of 12:38 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 27, 2005

Double Sourced, Double Trouble

Iraq Matters , Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

It is well known that Sens. Norm Coleman and Carl Levin believe that Respect Party MP George Galloway lied under oath when he testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs; when Galloway was being questioned by the two -- and he was unfurling his usual sneer and condescension -- he seems to have forgotten that in addition to sitting on that committee, the two were also the chair and ranking member of one of its subcommittees: the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Galloway has responded with predictable bravado, practically daring Investigations to refer him for indictment. Per the Belmont Club: "I am ready to fly to the US today, if necessary, to face such a charge because it is simply false," he boasted. But perhaps he'll cash in those plane tickets and plan an extended holiday in Switzerland instead after reading the upcoming report by Paul Volcker, who has hardly been considered a serious investigator of U.N. corruption -- given that he reports directly to Kofi Annan, one of key suspects in the case. Surprisingly, however, Volcker's report strikes hard against a number of targets that the Turtle Bay Illuminati would have preferred be protected... including a certain Respect Party MP from Bethnal Green and Bow (HT Dirty Dingus for correcting Galloway's district):

Among those named in the report as receiving oil vouchers that could be sold for a commission were British lawmaker George Galloway, former French UN Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and Russian ultranationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

So it's not just those radical right wingers, Norm Coleman (R-MN) and Carl Levin (D-MI)... it's former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and current Elliot Ness of the United Nations, Paul Volcker. Maybe it's time for George of the Bungle to drop the ludicrous posturing and raspberry blowing and simply confess his guilt and expiate his sins, else he may get the opportunity to see how his rhetoric falls on the ears of an American jury.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 27, 2005, at the time of 03:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Who Are We Fighting For Anyway -- Déjà Vu

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In Lizard's Tongue number 3, I asked the question "who are we fighting for anyway?" If America is the champion of liberty everywhere but guardian only of our own, then why are we fighting in such far-flung lands as Iraq, Afghanistan, Columbia, the Horn of Africa -- and the Philippines?

My answer is the same as President Bush's: because if there ever was a time when we could retire behind the walls of Fortress America, counting on the two oceans to more or less protect us from attack, that era vanished in a blaze of bombings more than thirty years ago.

And today, we see just what the president meant by that. In Suspected Muslim Militants Caught in Philippines, from AP via FoxNews.com, we learn that seven Islamic terrorist converts were just captured in Zamboanga City, at the tip of the Zamboanga penninsula (south) on the island of Mindanao. This is an area of the Philippines that has seen almost continuous battles for a number of years between the terrorist groups Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah (both affilliated with al-Qaeda) on one side and the Philippine Marines and American forces on the other. (The Moro Islamic Liberation Front, MILF, is another Islamic terrorist organization based in Mindanao; but it's currently in peace talks with the Philippine government in Manilla. It does, however, give save haven to members of Abu Sayyaf and JI, from which they can strike against targets across the South Pacific.)

The group whose leader and six other members were just captured, the Rajah Solaiman Revolutionary Movement, is small compared to the two above; but it is also linked to both of them and to al-Qaeda as well. In fact, Philippine authorities on terrorism believe Rajah Solaiman was deliberately recruited and trained by Abu Sayyaf in order to take the terrorist campaign to new level... because the leader of Rajah Solaiman, Hilarion del Rosario Santos III, and most of his followers are Christians who converted to Islam, presumably in order to join the jihad.

This is truly bizarre. They are not Arabs, of course; they are not even natively Islamic. Why on earth would people convert to a religion and immediately begin planting bombs and massacring the innocent in the name of that religion? This indicates that the appeal of lawlessness to the hopeless spans culture and religion: militant Islamism has become the "lingua franca" of barbarity. Anybody or any group with a grievance and smouldering hatred can convert to Islam and receive an immediate terrorism indulgence.

Here is more on Rajah Solaiman from Newsweek International Edition from May 2005:

[Wally] Villanueva calmly entered the office of Norberto Gonzales, national-security adviser to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and in the presence of a NEWSWEEK reporter, surrendered himself.

The nondescript young man, it turns out, was a radical Muslim convert, one of dozens wanted on an arrest warrant in connection to deadly terrorist attacks and recently planned bombings in the Philippines. Filipino authorities hope his ongoing interrogation will reveal the whereabouts of other converts believed to be lurking in Manila, waiting to strike. "This is a bigger threat [than past terrorist plots]," says one official from the government's new antiterrorism task force. "Muslim converts are now one of the strategies that [terrorist groups] like to employ." [Emphasis added]

...

Abu Sayyaf, which dates back to the early 1990s, has promoted its goal of a Muslim state through repeated terrorist attacks and kidnappings. But a previously little-known Islamic group called the Rajah Solaiman Movement, whose membership consists of Filipino Christians who have converted to Islam, is now one of the top worries for the country's intelligence services.

Filipino authorities say the group's members have been trained, financed and directed by Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah, a regional terrorist group with links to Al Qaeda, for at least two years. They claim the movement has dispatched dozens of its operatives to Manila to plan and carry out terrorist attacks.

The AP story makes clear the American military implications of this arrest:

Santos' group allegedly hid about 1,322 pounds of explosives, including TNT, that the military seized in a hideout in Manila's Fairview residential district in March. Soldiers arrested a brother of Santos in connection with the seizure, military officials said.

National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales said the explosives appeared to be intended for a 2,204-pound truck bomb that militants planned to use against the U.S. Embassy. That plot, along with other planned bombings by the group in the capital, was foiled with the seizure of the explosives, he said. [Emphasis added]

This is exactly why "Fortress America" cannot work. There simply is no way to tell whether someone entering the United States is a Filipino Christian -- or a recent convert to militant Islamism bent on jihad. Unless we have a workable plan to hermetically seal-off our borders (including all 12,000 miles of coastline), we cannot rely upon stopping these demonically possessed, sociopathic, "ticking time bombs" at the border. Unless we are forward-deployed, disrupting their plans at the source, we will lose this war.

That is why it is so vital to keep the reins of government out of the hand of the unserious, such as Howard Dean, John Kerry, or even Hillary Clinton, for all that she talks a great fight. Certainly, neither she nor her husband had any plan for aggressively assailing these terrorist groups in their heartland... so instead, we had to deal with them in ours.

It was there in the Philippines that the first glimmerings of the 9/11 attacks were planned. From Robert D. Kaplan's essential Imperial Grunts, about America's forever-war with terrorism around the globe:

It was in Afghanistan that AbuSayyaf's founders, Abduajak Janjalani and Abdul Murad, befriended Mohammed Jamal Khalifa -- Osama bin Laden's brouther-in-law -- and Ramzi Yousef, the organizer of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. In 1995 in Manila, Abdul Murad and Ramzi Yousef planned an attack on Pope John Paul II during the pontiff's upcoming visit to the Phiippines.

Following a fire that erupted as they were mixing explosives, Murad was captured; the Philippine security services are believed to have tortured him.

Murad gave Philippine investigators the password to his computer that was recovered from the burned-out apartment. On the hard disk they found the details of several terrorist plots, including one to use eleven jetliners to crash into CIA headquartes and other prominent buildings in Washington and New York. [Emphasis added]

It was this plot, hatched in Manila, that evolved into the most horrific act of terrorism ever committed on American soil.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 27, 2005, at the time of 06:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 26, 2005

Who Are We Fighting For Anyway? The Lizard's Tongue 3

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I found occasion in the previous post to quote from Major E., a frequent corresponder on Power Line... and it struck me that the question in the title above demands an answer: who are we fighting for in Iraq?

I hope those reading this will make the connection between the sacrifice of the troops and the ever-expanding freedom of the Iraqi people.... Every American deserves to know that the sacrifice made on the streets of Fallujah by US servicemembers last year is what made possible last week the jubilant dancing of Iraqis waving their ink-stained fingers after they had cast the first vote of their lives. The Iraqi people know and appreciate what we have done for them, and I hope that the American people will come to know it more and more as well.

Are we fighting for good of the Iraqis? Should we demand appreciation? Do they owe us a debt they can never repay? Or are we really fighting for ourselves, our own land, our own people?

There is an old saying that America is the champion of freedom everywhere but guardian only of our own. The thought might occur to many that we seem to be guarding the freedom of an awful lot of other people lately -- should we be? Are the neocons right that it's in America's interest, or should we listen to the paleocons who want us to withdraw our troops from all these "foreign entanglements" and just defend the dadblamed country?

For a long time, George W. Bush was simply not making the case. I reckon it seemed so obvious to him that he didn't realize that lots of folks may agree that freedom is good but just plain disagree that the United States is reponsible for dispensing it. But lately, he has done a much more conscientious job of defending his position; and it's time for us to really start to listen. Even when the president's strategery is being misunderestimated, he really does make a whole lot of sense.

I thought to write a post to delve more deeply into the president's argument; but it turned out to be too long for a blog post. So instead, it has become the third instance of the Lizard's Tongue column.

Hence, to see what sense we may make of the grand strategy of George W. Bush, read on to the Lizard's Tongue, o wise!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 26, 2005, at the time of 04:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 25, 2005

Fightin' Room With a (New) View

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

Scott at Power Line has much more on the attempted attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad; their frequent correspondent Major E. has an eyewitness account, and he states that it was clearly a failed attempt at a much larger and more sinister operation than merely setting off some bombs:

The number of terrorists involved and the follow-on small arms attacks make it clear that the overall goal was to use suicide vehicle bombs to breach the security perimeter, then take over the hotel and hold the international guests as hostages. Instead, they failed to achieve those objectives and the attackers were killed.

(SmallTownVeteran is also on top of this story.)

Yes, this wasn't just a failed terrorist attack: it was an attempt to pull off another Beslan Massacre, except instead of children, the hostages would be a bunch of journalists (no jokes, please).

Major E. has a truly insightful pair of paragraphs about the dilemma the Commander-in-Chief faces trying to get more public support for the war (emphasis mine):

Many Americans seem to know the bad news from last year, but not the good news from last week. While I am glad that the public knows that many gave life and limb for Fallujah, I am saddened that so few know the incredibly positive result of that sacrifice. There is so much good happening in Iraq in terms of rebuilding the society and offering the people the priceless opportunity of freedom and democracy, yet so little of the good is being reported in the media. I hope those reading this will make the connection between the sacrifice of the troops and the ever-expanding freedom of the Iraqi people.

Every American deserves to know that the sacrifice made on the streets of Fallujah by US servicemembers last year is what made possible last week the jubilant dancing of Iraqis waving their ink-stained fingers after they had cast the first vote of their lives. The Iraqi people know and appreciate what we have done for them, and I hope that the American people will come to know it more and more as well.

All this by way of introduction to my next post....

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 25, 2005, at the time of 07:37 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Great News for Iraq...

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Predictions
Hatched by Dafydd

...But not-so-great for my petty, vainglorious self: I missed my prediction by one province!

From AP via Fox News:

Iraq's Constitution is Adopted
Tuesday, October 25, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq's landmark constitutional was adopted by a majority of voters during the country's Oct. 15 referendum, election officials said Tuesday.

Results released by the Independent Electoral Commission (search) of Iraq showed that Sunni Arabs, who had sharply opposed the draft document, failed to produce the two-thirds "no" vote they would have needed in at least three of Iraq's 18 provinces to defeat it.

The commission, which had been auditing the referendum results for 10 days, said at a news conference in Baghdad (search) that Ninevah province, had produced a "no" vote of only 55 percent.

The New York Times has some more. Don't forget the new deal they have, where you have to suffer through an advert on your way to the story. Just click the "skip" button in the upper right corner. ( Why can't the ads hide behind the firewall along with the "premium" columnists?)

Alas for me, I had predicted that only one province would muster the necessary two-thirds to reject; Salahaddin messed me up -- but next-door Ninevah saved the day for Iraq.

Still, I had been confident throughout that the Sunni would not get their three; and on that prediction, I was correct. (Shoulda quit while I was ahead... but that doesn't suit my cheerful, optimistic nature!)

A great day for Iraq, and since I had no money riding on my prediction, I'll laugh it off and say a great day for me, too!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 25, 2005, at the time of 05:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Son of Secret Polling Man

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Polling Keeps a-Rolling
Hatched by Dafydd

Omar at Iraq the Model has also blogged about that "secret military poll" reported in the Telegraph. He comes to pretty much the same conclusions as we while adding a caveat that only a local would know...

And by the way, I almost forgot to tell you this; when Iraqis are performing a poll they tend to do so while trying to keep as low a profile as possible for concerns about being misidentified as spies or intelligence gatherers for the coalition, the terrorists or even the government so they try to interview the first person they meet and think is safe to interview forgetting about all the known standards and requirements of correct sample choosing. This alone is enough to weaken the validity of the poll results.

Bottom line, I will personally ignore the results as a whole as I think it cannot add anything of value to a view of the situation here in Iraq, which is a shame, as it might have done so, had they framed the questions in a more scientific manner. I tend to recommend that you not take it seriously as well for these reasons.

Iraq the Model -- which we have blogrolled on the starboard side of your Big Lizards window -- is Sachi's favorite Iraq blog (and she reads four or five Iraqi blogs every day).

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 25, 2005, at the time of 03:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

NOW Will Ya Gimmie Some Fightin' Room?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

Uh oh, Zarqawi's in for it now. The mainstream media thirsts for his blood.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Suicide bombers including one in a cement truck packed with explosives launched a dramatic attack Monday against the Palestine Hotel, where many foreign journalists are based, sending up a giant cloud of smoke and debris over central Baghdad. American troops and journalists escaped without serious injury but at least a half-dozen passers-by were killed....

The cement truck was the last of three vehicles trying to break through the wall outside the hotel. The first car drove up to the wall and exploded, blasting out a section of the concrete. According to the U.S. military, the second car was headed for the fresh breach in the wall but exploded near the 14th Ramadan Mosque when it was engaged by civilian security forces.

Within minutes, the truck made it through the breach but apparently became stuck on a road between the Palestine and the neighboring Sheraton hotel. The truck rocked back and forth and then blew up after a U.S. soldier opened fire on it. Had the truck traveled 20 or 30 yards farther and blown up at the hotel entrance, it could have killed many people inside the Palestine.

So after "a U.S. soldier" saved the lives of countless precious and vital journalists in the Palestine Hotel, do you think they'll start cutting the troops some slack on the endlessly manufactured torture/murder/stealing-Iraqi-oil stories? Or will this be another case of "no good deed goes unpunished?"

For some perverse reason, I'm fascinated by the description of the journalists inside the hotel:

There was minor damage to the hotel, which was last hit in an insurgent rocket attack on Oct. 7, 2004. Moments before the second blast, journalists, photographers and technicians were walking up and down hazy corridors in a state of confusion, urging each other to remain calm, put on flak jackets, and to stay away from windows. Thicker clouds of smoke filled the far end of one hallway, with many people coughing and waving their hands.

The second explosion shook the building momentarily. Confusion and panic again set in, with those inside debating whether to exit, but all eventually deciding to stay in the corridor and sit propped against walls, most in flak jackets. Sounds resembling gunshots could be heard outside.

Strips of floorboards were strewn about and air vents were blown in.

"The impact pushed us forward in our chairs," he said.

He noted that the journalists at the Palestine often can hear the distant blast of other attacks. "But I've never felt blasts as strong or as loud as the ones Monday," [AP journalist Thomas] Wagner said.

Did I misread? Is Wagner actually shocked that blasts right next to his location are louder and stronger than distant blasts? All right; so now he knows what the soldiers and Marines must go through every day. What will he do with that information? Will it change how he and his cohorts report the war?

Our newfound allies will surely fight like demons, swinging their cameras and flinging 3/4-inch tape cassettes at future terrorists.

"These appalling attacks are fresh reminders of the myriad dangerous [sic] facing those who continue to report from Iraq," [the Committee to Protect Journalists] Executive Director Ann Cooper said....

"By attacking the Hotel Palestine, which is commonly known to be home to many foreign journalists, those behind this cowardly attack sought to deliberately target the Western media," the press freedom organization [Reporters Without Borders] stated.

We may have entered uncharted waters here: this could be the very first time the press has condemned a suicide bombing in Iraq. The world is topsy-turvy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 25, 2005, at the time of 02:53 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 24, 2005

And How Are You, Mr. Wilson?

Iraq Matters , Politics - National , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

I am remiss in posting this; Scott from Power Line had this up more than a week ago!

But it's worth noting: the best timeline of the Plame-name blame-game imbroglio is by (no surprise) Stephen Hayes, writing in the Weekly Standard: "The White House, the CIA, and the Wilsons".

Note that the "unuseful idiot" of the category is creepy liar Joseph Wilson -- not Stephen F. Hayes!

Read it and shriek.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 24, 2005, at the time of 04:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Gen. Pace: Thirty-Nine Iraqi Battalions "In the Lead"

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was just this moment a guest on the Hugh Hewitt show, with Jed Babbin (of NRO fame) sitting in for Hugh. Gen. Pace dropped a rather stunning bombshell.

Babbin asked Gen. Pace for an assessment of the Iraqi fighting forces, and the chairman made the following points:

  • There are now over 200,000 Iraqis either in the Iraqi army or the Iraqi police forces.
  • There are over 100 battalions of Iraqi army now considered battle-ready; Gen. Pace said he believed it was actually 117 battalions (which matches other reporting).
  • And in breaking news, the chairman stated that fully one-third of these battalions are already "in the lead" in fighting the terrorists. The other two-thirds are fighting alongside American troops but not yet ready to assume the lead.

Assuming that last figure is correct, that would mean at least thirty-three Iraqi battalions and as many as thirty-nine battalions of the Iraqi army (as many as 39,000 men) are actually taking the lead in fighting for their own country. This is incredibly good news... and even though Sachi is traveling, it deserves to be reported.

I doubt I'll be able to scoop the MilBlogs (some of which you can see blogrolled to the right) -- they probably got this same information weeks ago during one of their weekly breakfast briefings with Gen. Pace -- but at least I have the forlorn hope of scooping Prof. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit!

(I will of course scoop the MSM with this good news... but that would still be true if I sat on it until Shrove Tuesday.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 24, 2005, at the time of 03:44 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

MPM From the MSM

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Plame Blame Game , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Misinformation per minute from the mainstream media, that is. AP has an incredible story up -- with the word "incredible" meant literally: it's hard to count the number of misstatements, malicious manglings, myopic maunderings, and just plain mental missteps. If the author's name were not "Nancy Benac," I would assume Paul Krugman wrote it. (Maybe he has a secret identity.)

Let me just run through a few; but you really should read the original, lest I spoil the best parts.

NOTE: Bulleted points are quotations from the Benac story.

  • CIA officials asked [Joe Wilson] to travel to Africa in February 2002 to check out a report that Niger sold uranium to Iraq in the late 1990s for use in nuclear weapons. Wilson quickly concluded the report was bogus. (Documents related to the purported sale later were exposed as a forgery.)

Actually, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Wilson quietly concluded the opposite... at least, that is what he told his CIA handlers. I'm sure that was just an honest mistake from Ms. Benac, who is an honorable woman. They are all honorable men (and women) at the Associated Press.

Clifford May is the man-on-the-spot at the National Review to debunk this first set of -- misunderstandings (for Nancy Benac is an honorable woman). (And a tip of the hat to Power Line for the link.) From July 12th, 2004:

First:

Ironically, Senate investigators found that at least some of what Wilson told his CIA briefer not only failed to persuade the agency that there was nothing to reports of Niger-Iraq link — his information actually created additional suspicion.

A former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, told Wilson that in June 1999, a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations." Mayaki, knowing how few commodities for export are produced by impoverished Niger [basically just yellowcake and animal hides --DaH], interpreted that to mean that Saddam was seeking uranium.

Second:

Yes, there were fake documents relating to Niger-Iraq sales. But no, those forgeries were not the evidence that convinced British intelligence that Saddam may have been shopping for "yellowcake" uranium. On the contrary, according to some intelligence sources, the forgery was planted in order to be discovered — as a ruse to discredit the story of a Niger-Iraq link, to persuade people there were no grounds for the charge. If that was the plan, it worked like a charm.

But that's not all. The Butler report, yet another British government inquiry, also is expected to conclude this week that British intelligence was correct to say that Saddam sought uranium from Niger. [And so it did. --DaH]

  • The Times' Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days before sharing with the grand jury what she knew. After [I. Lewis "Scooter"] Libby personally assured her that he had waived her pledge of confidentiality, Miller told the grand jury about three conversations with him.

In fact, Libby had "waived her pledge of confidentiality" a year before she reported to la calabooza. If she were in any doubt about his seriousness, she had only to pick up the phone and call him or have her attorney do so. Whatever is the reason for her curious decision to don prison gray, like Joan of Arc, and suffer for the cause -- and speculation is delicious -- it was not uncertainty whether Libby had really, truly, actually waived confidentiality when he signed a document waiving confidentiality.

I'm sure that Nancy Benac knew all this and simply thought it too tedious to bring up, for they are all honorable men. Women. Whatever.

  • One important question is what Bush and Cheney might do if top aides like Rove or Libby are found to have been the leakers. Bush initially pledged to fire any leakers but later gave himself more wiggle room by promising to fire anyone who is found to have committed a crime.

This is pure invention from the MSM, though certes, they are all honorable. Nobody has found any quotation from Bush where he said he would "fire any leakers," or fire anyone who spoke to reporters about Mrs. Wilson, or any other such prejudicial nonsense.

This all stems from a reporter who started asking a question of the president at a press conference. I don't recall the exact wording, but he said as preamble that Bush had promised to fire any leakers, and did he still stand by that pledge.

President Bush tried to answer, but the reporter kept talking, forcing the president to repeat his answer. In a move eerily presaging what was done later to Laura Bush to falsely make it appear as though she were calling Miers critics "sexists," the reporter seized upon the word "yes" that began Bush's answer -- and clearly referred to another point of the question -- to claim that Bush had therefore agreed with the reporter's premise that Bush earlier said he would fire any leakers... notwithstanding the fact that Bush had said no such thing.

Note how this asinine claim has progressed: nobody can find an original quotation of Bush saying he would "fire any leakers;" so the reporter's premise, at least as publicly provable, was factually wrong. But by tacking it onto a question that would certainly draw a "Yes" response (Bush responding that no one convicted of a crime in this affair would have a place in his administration), the reporter could later claim that Bush had retroactively made the reporter's false premise true!

And after that bit of legerdemain, all the news media may take it as read that "Bush initially pledged to fire any leakers." See how easy that was? Though we must absolve Ms. Benac of blame, for she is an honorable woman.

  • In a way, the whole Wilson saga can be traced back to Cheney and Bush. It was Cheney's interest in the alleged Iraq-Niger deal that led the CIA to dispatch Wilson to Africa.

Well, so sayeth Mr. Wilson. He claims that:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report.

But Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor and now Secretary of State, and a hot tomato in both positions, begs to demur. From a CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer, posted by JustOneMinute a couple of years ago:

BLITZER: Who sent [Wilson]?

RICE: Well, it was certainly not a level that had anything to do with the White House, and I do not believe at a level that had anything to do with the leadership of the CIA.

BLITZER: Supposedly, it came at the request of the vice president.

RICE: No, this is simply not true, and this is something that's been perpetuated that we simply have to straighten out.

The vice president did not ask that Joe Wilson go to Niger. The vice president did not know. I don't think he knew who Joe Wilson was, and he certainly didn't know that he was going.

It's still possible that the CIA simply misled poor Joe Wilson into thinking the VP really wanted to know; but if so, why would they send a retired ambassador with no expertise in either Iraq or WMD, no experience as an investigator, and who did not even work for the Company? Heck, they could at least have sent the man's wife instead. In any event, official denials of the administration should disallow AP -- for they are all honorable, all honorable persons -- from stating as fact what is still in dispute.

  • And it [was] Bush's use of the debunked claim in his State of the Union address that led Wilson to publish his doubts.

Just in case you missed it the first time; for being honorable men, they could not do otherwise than to remind you. And women... honorable women.

I'm afraid I have spoilt it for you after all, those intrepid few who read to the end of this post. But don't fret: I'm sure these honorable persons, variously male and female, will give us another incredible story to digest tomorrow!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 24, 2005, at the time of 02:06 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

October 23, 2005

Secret Polling Man

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Polling Keeps a-Rolling
Hatched by Dafydd

Yes, Virginia, there should be a Sanity Clause.

The headline nearly bellows its bias: Secret [Ministry of Defence] poll: Iraqis support attacks on British troops. It's enough to make you leap up off your chair, full five feet up and higher.

But the harder we look, the more elusive the actual data... providing a salutory lesson why we demand a great deal of disclosure before taking any poll seriously. This "survey" is less about finding the truth than it is about creating a truth more palatable to the Telegraph than the actual facts on the ground in Iraq: military cooperation -- a rush of new intelligence tips to American troops -- and that minor election a week ago.

In today's Telegraph, this article alleges that a "secret military poll" conducted by "an Iraqi university research team" (otherwise unnamed for "security reasons") on behalf of Great Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) shows a catastrophic collapse in support for Coalition forces, a huge rise in the number of radicalized Iraqis -- a country on the verge of an explosion of violent attacks on British and American forces by ordinary civilians, who now hate our guts:

Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed.

The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.

You know your poll is in trouble when the results fly in the face not merely of previous polling but of the very actions taken by the people you are attempting to model. In this case, we are asked to believe that "fewer than one per cent" think that Coalition presence helps improve security.

Yet it's pretty clear that the Iraqi Army and police likely think that being trained up to superior fighting units helps security... and if you add up the number of Iraqi military and police who are trained, equipped, and deployed throughout Iraq, you have nearly 200,000, according to MG Rick Lynch, the spokesman for Multi-National Force Iraq:

Between the Iraqi police force and the Iraqi Army for the January elections, there were about 138,000 trained and equipped members of the Iraqi security force. Now the Iraqi police service and the Iraqi Army is over 195,000 trained and equipped and deployed across Iraq.

Add in those who are still being trained and equipped but who are very enthusiastic about their mission and the American trainers, such as the Iraqi mechanized-infantry division that MG Bob Scales (ret) discussed on Brit Hume, which we blogged about here, and you already have over one percent of the Iraqi population without even considering civilians, surely some of whom must support the Coalition. Already, the main claim is dubious -- not a good sign for a survey that somebody -- we're never told who -- demands remain "secret."

Read the Telegraph article and note what they do not tell us: who conducted the survey? Who was surveyed? How many, and how many from each province? What was the margin of error? What were the exact questions? Where did the respondents live? How did the pollster assure a representative sample of Iraqi citizens?

Did they ask about "suicide attacks," or simply "attacks?" The Telegraph article uses both terms almost indistinguishably. What were the conditions of the question about attacks on Coalition forces... was this question in the form "if Coalition forces were to do X, would you then support attacking them?" And if so many Iraqis hate us -- then why do they cooperate so enthusiastically with the security training, intelligence tipping, and constitutional voting that we helped them set up?

Can't the Telegraph give us something? Anything?

Contrast the deafening silence on the entire methodology of this alleged "secret military poll" with the transparency of this poll, conducted by SurveyUSA anent the upcoming special election in California. We blogged it here, because we can be confident of the findings -- since SurveyUSA told us nearly everything we need to know to evaluate or "qualify" the poll itself, as an attorney might say about a witness. And a poll is a sort of witness, as it purports to tell you what people would say if you got them in a room and pumped them full of truth serum.

And what the heck does the Telegraph mean by saying the results were "seen by" the Sunday Telegraph? Did the Ministry of Defence hold up the results and let the reporter, Sean Rayment, glance through the survey? Did he see results, or just a summary? How long was he allowed to look? Did they let him take home a copy? As exactly none of these vital questions were answered, I suspect we can guess what the answers would have been.

A dubious claim does not suddenly become plausible when tarted up by an equally dubious "survey"... especially when we're told nothing about the methodology, when the results fly in the fact of not only previous polling but also the attitudes implied by the increasing level of cooperation we're getting from Iraqi military and civilians (see the previous post, US kills 20 Terrorists in Western Iraq), and the poll itself is allegedly a state secret.

There is a lot less here than meets the eye. Just as a good DA can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, a clever pollster can produce a poll showing anything he wants.

Without a track record for the pollster and full access not only to the survey methods but also a complete list of the questions (in order asked) and raw responses, the "results" reported by the Telegraph are utterly meaningless.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 23, 2005, at the time of 02:57 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

US kills 20 Terrorists in Western Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

On Saturday, American forces conducted a series of raids at the Syrian border. In western Iraq, the Anbar province, 20 terrorists were killed during raids on houses believed to contain foreign al-Qaeda fighters. The U.S. is continuing the offensive, not giving terrorists any breathing space.

A statement said U.S. forces found two large caches of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and bomb making materials, during the raids in the western town of Husayba. It said one insurgent was captured in the operation.

In another raid near Qaim, Coalition forces detained five terrorists and seized a large cache of weapons in an al-Qaeda not-so-safe house. The best news about this good news is how we obtained the intelligence in the first place... from ordinary local Iraqi citizens, who are turning against the foreign al-Qaeda invaders at an astonishing rate:

Intelligence sources and tips from local citizens led coalition forces to the location. Coalition aircraft, using precision guided munitions, destroyed the safe house and weapons cache after coalition forces left the scene.

Elsewhere in Iraq, quick thinking by Iraqi police officers attached to the Khalis Iraqi Police station thwarted a potentially devastating attack on the station.

Shortly after noon, a semitrailer approached the Khalis traffic circle and failed to slow and stop as directed. Guards fired on the vehicle, which then veered to the south. Its payload of explosives detonated when it hit a brick wall, killing a police officer.

A short time later, four mortars were fired at the traffic circle, seriously injuring two children in a nearby field. The children were taken to an Iraqi medical facility for treatment.

As the pace of our offensives increases, more and more foreign fighters have been targeted. This year alone, 376 foreign fighters had been captured and over 400 killed. The Fourth Rail reports:

With an estimated 150 terrorists entering the country monthly, well over half of the year’s total have been killed or captured, an exceedingly high attrition rate. General Lynch also points out that al Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership is often of foreign origin.

Okay, okay: 776 out of 1800 is only 43%, not "well over half." Minor arithmetic errors aside, al-Qaeda’s foreign invaders are clearly losing this war -- "big time."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 23, 2005, at the time of 12:27 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 22, 2005

Zarqawi's Golden Parachute

Iraq Matters , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

Am I the only one who thinks like this? I hope not....

AP is carrying an item titled U.S.: Zarqawi's Terror Network Growing. The first thing that pops into the reader's head, of course, is that US officials are claiming that there are now more terrorists, that we're losing the war (I'm certain that was just the idea they intended to convey). The article claims no such thing, however, only that Musab Zarqawi is expanding his influence and contacts into other terrorist groups in other countries.

WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. intelligence officials say Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has expanded his terrorism campaign in Iraq to extremists in two dozen terror groups scattered across almost 40 countries, creating a network that rivals Osama bin Laden's....

In figures not made public before, counterterrorism officials say that Zarqawi's network of contacts has grown dramatically since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and now includes associates in nearly 40 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Those Muslim extremists are members of at least 24 groups, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to much smaller organizations in Indonesia.

Since this is the Associated Press, there is the obligatory swipe at President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld, albeit subtlely:

He also is helped, said one U.S. intelligence official, by the fact that there is not a large, constant American military presence in Anbar, but rather pockets of forces that are bolstered during operations. Iraq's largely Shiite security forces do not want to go to the Sunni-dominated area, either.

Translation: an anonymous "intelligence official" says We're losing! We're history, man! Bush should have sent in a million soldiers, like we have argued all along -- except for the time we were arguing he shouldn't have gone in at all!

Naturally, those interviewed in the article, when they express an opinion at all, opine that this means his strength is growing.

In interviews, U.S. government officials said the threat to U.S. interests from al-Zarqawi compared with that from bin Laden, whom al-Zarqawi pledged his loyalty to one year ago....

Al-Zarqawi is now seen as the top general who is putting in place al-Qaida's long campaign to establish an Islamic society throughout the Middle East, with Iraq at its heart....

The persistence of their attacks and subsequent media exposure have made al-Zarqawi the public face of al-Qaida and the broader insurgency. He has become so central to al-Qaida's operations that some evidence suggests he is providing money to bin Laden.

But I have own theory, probably idiosyncratic: I think Zarqawi is setting up bolt holes, international affiliations to whom he can flee when he inevitably has to bug out of Iraq... just as Osama bin Laden and his cronies fled to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan when they were booted from Sudan. I suspect that Zarwawi, a streetwise thug who has murdered his way to being capo di tutti capos of the biggest mob in the Arab Middle East, sees the noose tightening around his neck, and he is preparing to escape to some other country... probably simply abandoning all his followers in Iraq except for his closest cadre.

But then, I always was an optimist. We shall soon see.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 22, 2005, at the time of 01:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 19, 2005

This Bloody Teleconference Is Rigged!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

The same Power Line post linked below also pointed me to a nice column from the brilliant and beautiful Michelle Malkin. On the subject of the president's teleconference with American and Iraqi troops anent preparations for the Iraqi elections, Malkin takes up the thread where Sachi and I left it here, here, and here. Perhaps now the MSM will begin to pay attention to the actual questions and answers, which show that it was no accident that the election ran as smoothly as it did.

She also blogged it here; alas, she didn't link Big Lizards -- can't have everything! Besides, her post came some hours before our third one, where we linked to Sgt. Ron Long.

Oops, maybe we should have linked to Michelle! (Actually, we independently read Sgt. Long's post.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 19, 2005, at the time of 05:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 18, 2005

Soldiers' Answers Weren't Scripted

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Politics - National
Hatched by Sachi

When we wrote about the so-called "staged" teleconference between the president, ten American soldiers, and one Iraqi soldier, we introduced Sgt. Ron Long, who actually participated in the conference. We e-mailed Sgt. Long to ask if the soldiers themselves actually wrote their own answers, or if the answers were supplied by (or even edited by) the White House.

Sgt. Long did not respond personally, but he answered the same question in his blog. The blogpost quotes a fellow soldier from the 278th Regimental Combat Team, Lt. Gregg Murphy, who was interviewed by the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Murphy was chosen for the Tikrit teleconference because he had spent the last three months leading an Iraqi army training program near the Iranian border. The article is titled "Soldiers' questions weren't scripted, participant says," by Edward Lee Pitts.

"We wanted to give President Bush a no-kidding assessment of what we have all been working 14- (to) 18-hour days on for the last 11 months," said Lt. Gregg Murphy, of Chattanooga. "We gave him the God’s honest truth as we know it."

Although the soldiers themselves gathered before the teleconference to "brainstorm" what questions President Bush was likely to ask and how best and most accurately they could answer, there was no coercion, suggestion, or even editing by administration personnel.

[Lt. Murphy] said the only guidance the solders received was to avoid using military jargon that would confuse the general public and to write out bullet points to keep their comments concise and clear. Lt. Murphy said writing out key points kept the soldiers from being nervous.

"[Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Allison Barber] did not orchestrate the interview," Lt. Murphy said of the Defense Department employee. "We were nervous, and she put us at ease. Nothing more."

As for the reharsal, Lt. Murphy has this to say:

[T]he military rehearses all the time. "We do that so that when we actually have to execute, there isn’t any confusion," he said. "Rehearsing is why we are so good at what we do."

This should be the final refutation of the initial knee-jerk and entirely predictable -- scripted, if you will -- response by the Associated Press, reprinted in the Washington Post, that smarmily implied (without quite saying) that the soldiers were either too dumb or too intimidated by the president to give honest answers, and that the White House had scripted the entire event.

On the one hand, you can believe the nod-and-a-wink insinuations of a reporter whose only connection to the teleconference is that he saw some of the rehearsal inadvertently broadcast -- footage that does not show even one single reported instance of the White House altering a soldier's answer. Or you can believe the straightforward words of two of the actual participants in the teleconference, a lieutenant and a sergeant who have each spent many months fighting in Iraq (the latter as a combat medic) and are still there on the ground, dealing with Iraqi citizens, Coalition forces, and terrorists on a day-to-day basis.

It's your choice.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 18, 2005, at the time of 03:25 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 17, 2005

US Seizes al-Qaeda Webmaster, Hacks al-Qaeda Website

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The US military captured Abu Dijana, a top propaganda agent for Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Abu Dijana was the Webmaster of a "members-only" website called Al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was responsible for blogging the day-to-day operations of al-Qaeda, such as bombing American convoys, Iraqi police, or citizens exiting from a mosque.

Abu Dijana was so efficient that, within minutes of some brutal act of terrorism, Al-Qaeda in Iraq would take credit on the website, posting video clips and triumphant boast-posts. Intelligence officers and major American media regularly used the site to make official determinations of responsibility.

In one typical case, just three hours after an attack, the site showed video of a man identified as the suicide bomber Abu Musab al-Iraqi, who says, "I have dreamed about this moment. I am sure if my family is watching this they will be more proud of me."

Musab's words are followed by a video of a car he is said to be driving, blowing up in the midst of an American convoy. The incident is replayed again and again with more of Musab's speech superimposed over the ball of flames and smoke rising above the U.S. convoy. "Thank God this day I went to kill many crusaders." His declaration ends, "Today I will be in heaven."

Not only are the attacks themselves coordinated, so is the recording of them. Abu Dijana gathered information of impending attacks and provided equipment to his cell members to record attacks. After each attack, the collected photographs and video were swiftly uploaded to the website.

The most obvious purpose of the website is to webcast terrorist attacks as a propaganda tool, but al-Qaeda also uses the site to recruit volunteers for more suicide bombings and intimidate local citizens. Al-Qaeda members use the site as a communication system as well, to coordinate attacks, train the recruits, and just to report the daily dish for jihadists. It's so popular, it's a wonder they don't have SiteMeter and a listing in the TTLB Ecosystem.

That's why the "al-Qaida in Iraq" site, available to members only, features highly detailed tutorials on bomb-making, strategy for assassinations, and even a workshop on hacking into secret American government Web sites. The Web site claims it has 4,000 members.

For reasons of security, each new member of the site must be approved by a committee of existing members. "It's full of intelligence information and the enemy might use it against us," one member said. With as many as 1,500 members logging on in a single day, the Web site is also an effective security tool for al-Qaida. When its operatives get word of an impending U.S. raid, it puts out flash security warnings to fighters who might be targets.

Evidently this precaution was not sufficient: the webmaster, Abu Dijana himself, was caught in just such a raid.

There are more unsecured websites in Iraq. Americans are closely monitoring such sites and hacking them for information gathering. Not only are we winning the war on land, sea, and air, we're beating them like a dozen eggs in the blogosphere, as well!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 17, 2005, at the time of 09:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

US Air Raid Kills 70 Terrorists

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

On Sunday, several different military operations involving U.S. warplanes, helicopters, and ground troops (both American and Iraqi) killed a total of 70 terrorists.

An American F-15 spotted a group of terrorists burying a roadside bomb in Ramadi; the Eagle dropped a single bomb, killing twenty. Subsequently, according to Reuters:

Another 50 militants were killed in a series of separate strikes, the statement added, saying military commanders had no indications of any U.S. or civilian casualties in the operation.

The military said separately that 18 insurgents had been killed in three separate clashes elsewhere in western Iraq.

Iraq's Defense Ministry said separately U.S. and Iraqi troops had killed 12 insurgents south of Baghdad on Sunday.

The Reuters article is poorly enough written that it's impossible to say whether the thirty deaths detailed above are part of the fifty mentioned earlier, or whether a total of 100 jihadis, not seventy, were killed.

Of course, being the MSM, they had to throw in this kicker:

However, Ramadi police Lieutenant Karim Salim said 20 of those killed were civilians, including some children as young as 11. Doctors in the city had made a similar assessment on Sunday.

I wonder how exactly a doctor can look at a patient brought to a hospital -- alive or dead -- and determine that he was a "civilian?" And what kind of civilian? A terrorist who isn't a member of the armed forces is a civilian, even if he is still a terrorist.

As far as the children who may have died, that is, of course, a despicable evil. But those deaths are the full responsibility of the jihadis who hide among children to fight, using them as human shields. God may have mercy on them, but America should not.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 17, 2005, at the time of 07:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 15, 2005

Bush's Teleconference: the Actual Q&A

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

In the comments section of an earlier post, AP Response to Bush Teleconference Staged!, I asked, “and what WERE the questions and the answers?” All we have heard from the MSM is speculation about whether the TV conference between President Bush and the toops was "staged," meaning scripted; but we have heard nothing about the conference itself. What did the president and the soldiers say? Does anybody know?

After some digging, I found a transcript. As I read it, I understood why the AP had to divert our attention to the trivial non-issue: once again, the MSM is determined to hide "good news from Iraq."

Since they're not going to tell, here are the actual questions and the answers, with commentary.

The ten American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier who participated in this conference are stationed in Tikrit, overseeing the security of the constitutional referendum vote. The purpose of this conference was for President Bush to learn how ready the Coalition and Iraqi security forces were to ensure security during the election.

After President Bush gave a short speech about how important it is for us to stay the course and bring democracy to Iraq, he began asking questions about pre-election operations: what Coalition forces had been doing, what their strategy was, and what was their assessment of Iraqi Army readiness.

Captain Brent Kennedy, who is responsible for coordinating the security response in the area of operation, responded:

Good morning, Mr. President, from Tikrit. I'm Captain Brent Kennedy. To my right is Sergeant Major Akeel from the 5th Iraqi Army Division. We're working together here with the Iraqis in Task Force Liberty for the upcoming referendum. We're surging an operation, called Operation Saratoga, that includes the securing of over 1,250 polling sites. We're working right alongside with the Iraqis as they lead the way in securing these sites.

Captain Dave Smith added that Iraqi forces have been "conducting battalion and brigade-size operations since April." The local Iraqi military themselves coordinated with other Iraqi forces, such as police and local government agencies, Smith added; the Coalition forces took only a supporting role.

When President Bush asked them to assess the security forces’ readiness, Captain Steven Pratt responded:

The Iraqi army and police services, along with coalition support, have conducted many and multiple exercises and rehearsals. Recently we've conducted a command post exercise in which we brought together these Iraqi security forces with emergency service units, and the joint coordination center, in which we all sat around a model and discussed what each one would do at their specific location and what they would do at the referendum.

It was impressive to me to see the cooperation and the communication that took place among the Iraqi forces. Along with the coalition's backing them, we'll have a very successful and effective referendum vote.

Captain David Williams said that voter registration in North-Central Iraq was up 17 percent. “That’s 400,000 new voters in North-Central Iraq, and 100,000 new voters in the al-Salahuddin province.” He said. Captain Williams said that he spoke to his Iraqi counterpart, who told him the Tikrit locals were “ready and eager to vote in this referendum.”

Considering the extremely high turnout for this election (66%), and the extraordinarily low rate of successful violent attacks by the terrorists, it's clear that the information that Bush got from these soldiers was quite accurate on all counts: they and the Iraqis had done a very good job of securing the polling places... and the Iraqis (even the Sunni) were definitely "ready and eager to vote."

Master Sergeant Corine Lombardo reminded the President that she met him in New York, on November 11th, 2001, at Ground Zero, when he recognized the Rainbow Soldiers -- the 42nd Infantry (Rainbow) Division of the Army National Guard. Bush took the opportunity put the soldiers at ease with a bit of ribbing, saying "I thought you looked familiar."

SERGEANT LOMBARDO: Well, thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: I probably look familiar to you, too.

Sergeant Lombardo praised the improvement in the Iraqi forces over the past 10 months.

We've been working side-by-side, training and equipping 18 Iraqi army battalions [in the Tikrit area]. Since we began our partnership, they have improved greatly, and they continue to develop and grow into sustainable forces. Over the next month, we anticipate seeing at least one-third of those Iraqi forces conducting independent operations.

Coalition forces have captured over 50 terrorists and detained thousands, she added.

Then President asked the only Iraqi participant in the conference, Sergeant Major Akeel, whether he had anything to add:

SERGEANT AKEEL: Good morning, Mr. President. Thank you for everything. Thank very much for everything.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, you're welcome.

SERGEANT AKEEL: I like you. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that.

Finally, First Lieutenant Gregg summed up the situation. I can't improve on his words:

Back in January, when we were preparing for that election, we had to lead the way. We set up the coordination, we made the plan. We're really happy to see, during the preparation for this one, sir, they're doing everything. They're making the plans, they're calling each other, they've got it laid out. So on Saturday, sir, we're going to be beside them, we're going to be there to support them through anything. But we can't wait to share in their success with them on Sunday.

In closing, the commander-in-chief thanked the troops -- not only his own, but the Iraqis as well:

I wish I could be there to see you face-to-face, to thank you personally. It's probably a little early for me to go to Tikrit, but one of these days perhaps the situation will be such that I'll be able to get back to Iraq to not only thank our troops, but to thank those brave Iraqis who are standing strong in the face of these foreign fighters and these radicals that are trying to stop the march of freedom.

Finally, as for what kind of “rehearsal” and “staging” went on before the conference, you should read the account of Sergeant Ron Long of Tennesse who was actually there at the conference.

[W]e were told that we would be speaking with the President of the United States, our Commander-in-Chief, President Bush, so I believe that it would have been totally irresponsible for us NOT to prepare some ideas, facts or comments that we wanted to share with the President.

The MSM knows very well that everyone rehearses before a live TV interview, and this was no exception. Participants had to know who would speak when, who would answer which questions, and practice passing the microphone to avoid "strangling" their neighbors with the microphone cord. They practiced speaking out loudly and clearly, both to be audible to the mikes and also to relieve the anxiety of junior officers and non-coms speaking directly to the commander-in-chief.

But that was as far as it went; nobody has managed to find any example of the White House scripting the soldiers' answers or changing what they wanted to say. It is terribly irresponsible of the mainstream media to hint at some sort of administration conspiracy, particularly by using inuendo and ambiguous phrasing. If that is what the Associated Press and the Washington Post want to charge, they should just do so straightforwardly... if they have any actual evidence, that is.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 15, 2005, at the time of 08:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 14, 2005

Scales of Military Justice

Global War on Jihadism , Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

On Tuesday the 11th, Special Report With Brit Hume had a truly inspiring interview with Major General Bob Scales, whose assessment of the Iraqi Army was very good news indeed. They made the transcript available the next day, but I've been dilatory in putting it up here.

First the setup. General Scales went to Iraq to evaluate with his own eyes the combat-readiness of the Greater Iraq Army. He had no particular expectations either way, since he had heard both positive and negative assessments.

We were there for six days. We spent time in Baghdad. And then we went up to a place called Taji, which is the headquarters of the Ninth Iraqi Mechanized Division.

We specifically asked not only to see our American men and women but, "Let's just go up north and talk to the Iraqis, look them straight in the eye, and get a sense of their military readiness," not readiness in terms of readiness reporting, you know, how many vehicles have you got, what's your percent filled and all that.

Instead, we wanted to look at things like, you know, their training, their will to win, the courage factor, bonding, and cohesion, and leadership, and all those intangibles that really make an army effective, rather than just, you know, "How are you equipped?" And, frankly, what I saw was very encouraging.

Scales discussed a particular unit he interacted with extensively while there, a self-created mechanized infantry division, I believe (actually, I'm just assuming infantry, since he didn't say armored cavalry). The unit was only partially formed, but already it was patrolling and fighting the Sunni terrorists around Baghdad. Significantly, 75% of the unit comprised combat veterans. And although they had American embeds, they only numbered a dozen -- in a division that already had eight or nine thousand soldiers.

All in all, General Scales said that the Iraqi Army had 117 battalions, of which 80 were currently fighting alongside American forces, sometimes taking the lead (as in Operation Restoring Rights in Tal Afar).

Scales gave a vivid example of the progress that has been made in just a few months:

SCALES: Remember about eight months ago, Bill Cowan was in here talking about the BIAP [Baghdad International Airport] road, you know, the airport road?

HUME: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, the alley of death.

SCALES: Right. I drove the BIAP road, five miles along that road. And it's clear of the enemy. It's full of commerce. And who's protecting it? The Iraqi Sixth Infantry Division.

And in many ways, they're better than we are, in the sense that they're better able to gather intelligence. I mean, they can spot insurgents by their body language and by how they act and the language they use. They can spot foreigners far better than our soldiers can.

And they're better able to engage these terrorists when they find them oftentimes than our own soldiers are. You know, being part of the culture really means a lot when you're fighting an insurgency.

General Scales' final assessment was tremendously upbeat:

The insurgency is on a steady downward trend, mainly because U.S. forces and Iraqi forces have been successful in cleaning out the ratlines.... But I think the greatest hope is Iraq, Iraq units, the regular army, building them up very quickly so that they can take over the fighting and increase the probability of coming out of this OK.... It's happening.

"Cleaning out the ratlines?" Say... I wonder if MG Scales has been reading Big Lizards? Nah; probably just reading something a little more worthwhile, like the Fourth Rail, instead!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 14, 2005, at the time of 05:36 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 13, 2005

Dawn Breaks Over Iraq - Photos

Blogomania , History , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Black Five has incredible photos of operation River Gate.

We previously blogged about the overall Anbar Campaign here.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 06:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

AP Response to Bush Teleconference Staged!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATE 18:23: See below.

Now the AP has taken to attacking the president for supposedly "staging" a teleconference with soldiers... because they rehearsed in advance which soldier would answer which question.

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged
Oct 13, 2005
by Deb Riechmann

WASHINGTON (AP) - It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

When I first read that paragraph, my Skept-O-Meter™ went off like the Queen Mary's foghorn. What did Ms. Riechmann mean, the questions were "choreographed?" Aren't the questions always choreographed?

During an interview, for example, the interviewer always knows in advance the major questions he will ask, the order he will ask them, and to whom they will be directed (if multiple subjects are being grilled simultaneously). Often the subject also knows, to allow him to do whatever research is necessary to come up with a more detailed answer. Typically, major questions spawn follow-up questions; we have no clue from the AP story whether this happened this time, even though that would reveal much about the charge of being "staged."

So what the heck does Ms. Riechmann mean? How is this different from any other interview situation? Remember, the president is the interviewer, not the subject; he's playing Brit Hume, for a change of pace.

"I'm going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me," [Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Allison] Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued.

"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"

"Captain Smith," Kennedy said.

"Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?" she asked.

"Captain Kennedy," the soldier replied.

And so it went.

Yes... it went, rather than crashed, because the soldiers actually knew in advance the order in which they would speak! They didn't talk over each other or tussle for the microphone. Will Bush's perfidy never stop?

"If the question comes up about partnering - how often do we train with the Iraqi military - who does he go to?" Barber asked.

"That's going to go to Captain Pratt," one of the soldiers said.

"And then if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit - the hometown - and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?" she asked.

And here at last we have the substance of the charge of "choreographing" the questions: that the soldiers knew in advance which of them was the expert in a particular area -- hence who would actually answer the questions pertaining to that area.

This is what the Associated Press is trying to pass off as another "scandal" in the Bush administration. This barely even counts as a college try; Ms. Riechmann may as well have just used the pre-existing template titled Bush the Lying Liar Version 23.

Does even the Left doubt any longer the bias of the press against this president and against Republicans in general? Or do they just go through the motions occasionally, tossing a bit of tainted, gray meat to their base, more or less as a hobby?

Of course, they had to close with an eyebite from somebody hostile to Bush:

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."

I don't know what branch of the service Mr. Rieckhoff served in (if any), but it's evidently one where junior officers stay at the Pentagon and only privates and non-coms actually venture into the field.

I wonder whether he applies that same scorn to a certain fellow who was a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam, the exact equivalent rank to "captain" in the Army or Marines: Lt. John F. Kerry.

UPDATE: I have now listened to the 4:26 audio that National Public Radio made available (hat tip to Octavius), and contrary to some of the commenters to this post and some lefty blogs, such as This Divided State, there is not one, single instance of anybody "coaching [the soldiers] along the way" (as Bryan at TDS claims).

Allison Barber asks one question and listens to Captain Kennedy's answer; she does not tell him to change anything or give him any feedback whatsoever. She runs through a couple of other questions but doesn't wait for the soldiers to answer.

Let me repeat something I said above, because it may not have sunk in. When you are evaluating verbal acuity or mental quickness, you don't want to reveal the questions in advance; you prefer to watch the subject squirm. But when you want to gather solid information, you do give him the questions in advance, so he will be prepared with complete and accurate answers.

President Bush was not giving these soldiers a pop quiz, for heaven's sake. He wanted to hear what they had to say when they'd had a chance to think about it. And even if every one of them had been given an opportunity to rehearse speaking his answer -- on national TV and before the Commander In Chief -- it is neither "staged" nor "choreographed," except in the most technical meaning of those words, and there is no example at all of "coaching."

These are the real opinions of real soldiers who know what the hell they're talking about. Even if half of them are captains.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 05:02 PM | Comments (35) | TrackBack

Dawn Breaks Over Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Dafydd and Sachi conspired on this post.

Bill Roggio's military blog, the Fourth Rail, has several detailed analyses and descriptions of the Anbar Campaign, an overarching military strategy that includes both Iron Fist and River Gate as recent operations. (Hat tip to commenter Terry Gain.) From Recent Operations on the Euphrates:

The current operations must be looked at in the context of the Anbar Campaign, which began in November of 2004 when U.S. and Iraqi forces executed Operation Dawn in Fallujah. Fallujah was al Qaeda’s easternmost headquarters, a safe haven where thousands of terrorists and their insurgent allies operated freely and directed attacks towards the heart of Iraq. Over one thousand terrorists and insurgents were killed and fifteen hundred were captured. Operation Dawn ejected the insurgency from Fallujah, but it was only the beginning of the Anbar Campaign.

The Anbar province is the poinky part in the middle-left (west) of Iraq, roughly hexagonal, which points at Jordan; the northwestern border of Anbar is Syria, and the Euphrates River runs near the northeastern edge. Big city: Ramadi.

The section of Iraq in between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers comprises Salahuddin, spreading northwest from Baghdad, with the Tigris running northwest through it; big city: Samarra; and Ninevah, almost the very north of Iraq; upper Tigris runs right along the big city here, Mosul.

If we understand an earlier post on the Fourth Rail, the Anbar Campaign focuses on these three provinces... basically, in and around the two rivers and the land between them. This is where we find the "ratlines" connecting Syria in the northwest and the terrorists in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad; it is through here that al-Qaeda elements in Syria and Syria itself ship jihadis and weapons: this is one of the two areas we must bring under control if we are to defeat the enemy (the other being the South, where Shiite militias receive arms and terrorists from Iran).

Operation Dawn was aptly named, for it began a year-long squeeze-play that first saw a number of search-and-destroy missions and battalion-sized or smaller operations, coupled with air strikes on al-Qaeda safe houses (or not-so-safe houses, to be more accurate); these were punctuated by some very large operations (corps-sized or larger).

The tempo is increasing. From Operation Dawn (Fallujah in November 2004) to River Blitz (Ramadi, Hit, Baghdadi and Hadithah in February 2005) was three months; another quarter-year elapsed before there was a flurry of operations in May. Since then, not a month has passed without multiple operations.

Not only is Operation Anbar squeezing the terrorists farther and farther west, right to the border with Syria, and seizing both banks of the two rivers, it's also the baptism by fire of the Greater Iraqi Army. From Recent Operations:

The Iraqi security forces have taken an increasingly larger role as operations progressed over the summer. They have a strong presence in Fallujah and Habbaniyah, and are beginning to appear in battalion strength in the Euphrates cities of Ramadi, Hit, Haditha and Rawah. In Tal Afar, the Iraqi Army took the lead and outnumbered U.S. troops three to two.

Through the Anbar Campaign, the Iraqi Army and Coalition forces are isolating the terrorists, ripping up their ratlines, driving them back into Syria, and seizing or destroying bridges that are crucial to the enemy being able to maintain his strength and resources. If that's not good news, I don't know what is!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 05:15 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 12, 2005

British Policy Still Clueless

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Earlier I wrote that "the [British] lion may be old, but it is not toothless." But I might have written in haste.

Yesterday, the UK Government announced that they will pay for the damage they caused during the September raid to rescue two British soldiers, according to BBC.

The joint statement said: "We regret the incidents that took place in Basra on 19 September 2005 at the Serious Crimes Unit.

"We also regret the casualties on both sides and the material damage to public facilities.

"The British government is prepared to pay valid claims for compensation for casualties and material damage in the well-established manner."

This announcement came after British troops arrested twelve insurgents last Friday without the cooperation of the corrupted Basra police, according to an October 7th AP article.

On September 21st, AP reported that after the September rescue raid, the governor of Basra Province, Mohammed al-Waili, publicly "threatened to end all cooperation with British forces unless Prime Minister Tony Blair's government apologizes for the deadly clash with Iraqi police."

The British government has already issued an apology. But Basra's provincial council continued to demand compensation. From the September 21st AP article:

In a statement, the council demanded Britain apologize to Basra's citizens and police and provide compensation for the families of people killed or wounded in the violence.

Why did the Brits choose to reward the terrorists? They decided they needed the cooperation of the officials in Basra Province; it was extortion, plain and simple. The Basra police are largely terrorists themselves now, thanks to the previous "softly, softly" strategy of Great Britain. We haven't heard much about this growing problem, but it has been brewing for a long time now.

Since the beginning, the British prided themselves in their soft approach in Basra and other areas under their jurisdiction. The relatively peaceful situation seemed to justify this strategy, exemplified by their insistance on wearing cloth berets instead of helmets while on patrol. But beneath the surface, Shia militiamen with strong ties to Iran, including the infamous "Mahdi Army" of Mugtada Sadr, slowly (but not so secretly) have taken over the Basra police. By May of this year, the Basra police chief said only one quarter of his men could be trusted.

According to our correspondent Silverlining, there was a bombing near the Iran border last June that killed three British soldiers. The bomb used was very similar to those that Iran provides to Hezbollah. This prompted the British to bring in their Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) for investigation.

Silverlining, who has proved to be an accurate source before, speculates that the kidnapped soldiers were SRR members investigating the Iranian connection inside the Basra police, and that they had been directly responsible for arresting two members of Sadr's terrorist army. In the comments to a previous Big Lizards post, Silverlining wrote:

Sheik Ahmed Majid Farttusi and Sayyid Sajjad are believed to be senior leaders in the police mafia at al-Jameat and commanders of a terrorist group receiving funding and weaponry from Iran.

My own speculation is that British soldiers were kidnapped for retaliation as well as for bargaining chips; they were responding to anger on the part of Iran-supported Shia, and they also intended the British histages to be used as bait in a hostage exchange.

With all this going on, what purpose does it serve the British to kow-tow to the Basra provincial council? True, we need their cooperation; but this is equivalent to paying ransom to kidnappers. What was the point of rescuing them in such a dramatic way, if they then turn around and pay for the damages?

The British have fumbled the ball here. The Basra police and the provincial government are totally corrupt. I don’t know if the British can straighten this out on their own; but the more they show weakness, the more British soldiers will be attacked.

Tony Blair insists that Great Britain will not pull out of Iraq, and the British do continue to make arrests. Just yesterday, Defence Secretary John Reid praised the troops involved in the very raid for which Great Britain now pays compensation and apologizes; so all is not lost by any means.

If the UK does indeed prove true and stays the course, then I would have to say that the lion's gums may be getting a bit mushy, but his fangs haven't fallen out quite yet.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 12, 2005, at the time of 06:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 11, 2005

Big Lizards' Commenter Scoops NYT!

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Back on October 6th, one of our Japanese commenters, Silverlining, noted in the comments to Were British Soldiers Hostages From the Start? that the militiamen who had infiltrated the Basra police were a gang of thugs called "the Jameat."

Some Iraqi policemen in Basra have been acting like gang, indeed: assassination, murder, smuggling, and extortion. Such gang-like policemen, with connection at ministerial level in Baghdad and allegedly funded by Iran, is allowed to carry on with impunity and remains at large and in uniform.

Specifically, the al-Jameat police headquarters in southwestern Basra is the base for about 200 Iraqi policemen and included units of the Internal Affairs Directorate and Serious Crimes Unit, both heavily implicated in a series of abductions and killings in Basra.

The identical information was featured three days later in this October 9th story in the New York Times, In Basra, Militia in Control After Infiltration of Police.

The most feared institution in Iraq's third-largest city is a shadowy force of 200 to 300 police officers known collectively as the Jameat, who dominate the local police, who are said to murder and torture at will and who answer to the leaders of Basra's sectarian militias.

Do we have the greatest commenters, or what?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 11:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Iraqi Constitution Deal Reached

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

AP is reporting that at the last minute, the Iraqi assembly has finally reached agreement between all three major ethnic groups, Shia, Kurd, and Sunni, on the new constitution (hat tip to John at Power Line). The agreement is only with one Sunni group -- the Iraqi Islamic Party -- but it's the first crack in the solid wall of Sunni rejectionism.

Iraqis Reach Breakthrough Deal on Charter
Oct 11, 2005, 8:53 PM (ET)
by Lee Keath

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraqi negotiators reached a breakthrough deal on the constitution Tuesday, and at least one Sunni Arab party said it would now urge its followers to approve the charter in this weekend's referendum. Suicide bombings and other attacks killed more than 50 people in the insurgent campaign aimed at intimidating voters.

Under the deal, the two sides agreed on a mechanism to consider amending the constitution after it is approved in Saturday's referendum. The next parliament, to be formed in December, will set up a commission to consider amendments, which would later have to be approved by parliament and submitted to another referendum.

The most significant addition only changes how future constitutional amendments will be considered. Sunni leaders are worried that the current federalist constitution gives too much autonomy to Shia and Kurds:

The central addition allows the next parliament, which will be formed in Dec. 15 elections, to form the commission, which will have four months to consider changes to the constitution. The changes would be approved by the entire parliament, then a referendum would be held two months later.

That is no guarantee that Sunnis will be able to make the changes they seek. They are likely to have a stronger representation in the next parliament, but would still face a strong Shiite and Kurdish majority that would likely oppose major changes.

This is indeed great news, assuming the agreement holds at least through Saturday's vote. No matter how hard the terrorists try to frighten the Iraqis out of freedom, the people are determine to have their constitution. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope rest of the Sunnis will vote "Yes."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 06:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Thirteen to One

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The other day, I read a familiar headline about US troops getting killed in Iraq: “Six Marines Killed in Iraq Bomb Attacks,” the AP article said. If all we read are the MSM headlines, we almost can’t help feeling a sense of dread. It seems like we are losing, and losing badly.

In our two most recent major offensives in Iraq, Iron Fist and River Gate, we first were told that 1,000 US troops were fighting near the Syrian border; then the next thing we heard was that six soldiers were killed in those operations -- nothing in between! We fought; we died. Is that all?

What did we achieve? What did we win in return? Surely our troops did not die for nothing, no matter what Cindy Sheehan says.

The reality is that our troops have done an incredible job, though you have to hunt hard to find this information. Our troops' achievements are routinely buried in the middle of articles, sandwiched in between accounts of roadside bombs and ambushes. From the AP article linked above, fifteen paragraphs into the story:

On Thursday, warplanes dropped four precision-guided bombs on an abandoned three-story hotel seized by militants in the town of Karabilah, near the Syrian border, the focus of the Iron Fist assault. Twenty militants were killed in the bombardment, the military said. Seven more insurgents were killed when planes destroyed three buildings from which gunmen were firing on Marines, and two gunmen were killed in fighting in Karabilah.

The 29 deaths raised the insurgent death toll in Iron Fist to 71. At least six insurgents have been reported killed in River Gate offensive.

Wait a minute. 77 bad guys verses six good guys. That’s a 13 to 1 kill ratio. Isn’t that a remarkably successful operation? Shouldn’t the headline actually be “Iron Fist’s great success,” or “77 terrorists slain,” or something like that? That is the way the very same news agencies would have written the very same articles during World War II or Korea.

Why are we so shy about telling the American people how many terrorists we are killing or capturing? If we only hear about the cost but not the payoff, how in the world will the American people realize that we are winning, and winning big? Ever since the Korean War, the MSM has been determined to spin every engagement as an American loss, no matter what actually happened.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Iraq, Black Five reports that US Army troops raided two houses of terrorists and captured numerous bomb making devices:

triggerdevices.jpg

How many Army and Marine lives saved does this successful raid represent? You'll never find out by reading the Associated Press.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 02:10 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 07, 2005

Zawahiri to Zarqawi: Your Lifestyle's Too Extreme

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

When the number-two guy in al-Qaeda tells you that you're over the top, you might want to sit down and do some serious rethinking.

The United States recently intercepted a copy of a "letter of instructions and requests" sent in July, 2005 from bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In it, Zawahiri first articulates the al-Qaeda vision of the future:

The letter of instructions and requests outlines a four-stage plan, according to officials: First, expel American forces from Iraq. Second, establish a caliphate over as much of Iraq as possible. Third, extend the jihad to neighboring countries, with specific reference to Egypt and the Levant -- a term that describes Syria and Lebanon. And finally, war against Israel.

For al-Qaeda, kicking the "crusaders" out of Iraq is only a means to an end. Zawahiri understands that in order to realize this grand vision, al-Qaeda needs to win hearts and minds in the Moslem world, starting with the Iraqis; yet he fears that Zarqawi's brutal treatment of hostages is alienating the entire ummah. His sadistic bloodthirst is unhelpful, to use a Rumsfeldism.

Ayman Zawahiri… warns Abu Musab Zarqawi against alienating the Islamic world, and virtually reprimands the Iraqi branch of al Qaeda for beheading hostages and then distributing videotapes…

[H]e rebukes the leader of Iraq's insurgency for its brutal tactics -- noting that hostages can just as effectively be killed with bullets rather than by beheading.

Zawahiri the moderate! Zarqawi does not seem much perturbed by this warning though; he beheaded more hostages only two weeks ago, two months after presumably receiving the letter.

In a perverse way, Zarqawi’s insane urge to torture and kill has actually helped us. Because of his brutishness, no American soldier will ever surrender; they know that, unlike when we fight civilized people, surrender to Zarqawi means disgrace and a horrible death without honor. This makes for very determined warriors indeed.

Even though some Iraqis still cooperate with al-Qaeda, either through fear or powerlust, no one in Iraq, not even the Sunnis, wants to be ruled by Zarqawi; the cost in blood and freedom is too high. In economic terms, al-Qaeda has priced itself right out of the market!

Against this blood-red backdrop, even to the Sunnis, self-rule must seem a real bargain.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 07, 2005, at the time of 06:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

A Tale of Two Stories

Iraq Matters , Polling Keeps a-Rolling , Predictions
Hatched by Dafydd

I have clenched in my reptillian jaws a pair of stories. Both about Iraq; both about the prospects for the constitutional referrendum on October 15th. Both MSM: one is Reuters, the other Associated Press.

Night. And. Day.

(A tip of the hat to Pajamahideen, in the comments of Harry Reid's Babysitting Service, for calling the Reuters story to my attention.)

Here is the Reuters story:

Pollster says weary Iraqis back constitution
04 Oct 2005
Reuters
By Andrew Quinn

BAGHDAD, Oct 4 (Reuters) - Iraqis are exhausted by the country's descent into chaos and most pin their hopes on a new constitution as a first step toward order, the director of one of Iraq's few opinion polling agencies said on Tuesday.

Mehdi Hafedh of the Iraqi Centre for Development and International Dialogue said his latest poll showed support for the draft constitution going into a vote on Oct. 15 was widespread -- even in areas where Sunni Arab groups fighting a bloody campaign to derail the new charter are strong.

Hafedh believes the constitution will be approved. But he's not speaking from a gut feeling or wishful fantasy; unlike anybody else I have read, he actually polled Iraqis on the question.

Hafedh's poll of 3,625 Iraqis between Sept 14-19 showed 79 percent in favour of the new constitution against eight percent opposed. The remainder did not answer the question.

While support was particularly high in the northern Kurdish areas and southern regions dominated by Shi'ites, Hafedh said it also ran at over 50 percent in central provinces known as the heartland of Sunni Arab unrest -- a sign, he said, that the Sunni-Shi'ite split was not as wide as many fear.

"This is exaggerated by political elites who are seeking power and by Western media and analysts," Hafedh said.

"If you go down to the streets, you can't tell who is Sunni and who is Shi'ite. We are all mixed." [emphasis added]

Nobody imagines that the constitution will pull less than 50% of the voters, not even the Sunni "political elites" who are frantically rounding up Sunnis to vote against it. The constitution will only be derailed if any three of the eighteen provinces of Iraq vote against it by a two-to-one majority (more than 66%).

There are four provinces that are majority Sunni; but from what I have read, only three where the Sunnis are so overwhelming a majority that a two-thirds No vote is plausible. Even those provinces, however, are not 100% Sunni. If even 10% of the population are Shiite, and if the Shiite there vote at least as strongly for the constitution as their brethren elsewhere (which would be at least 86%, if Hafedh's poll is accurate among the Shia), the Sunni in that province would need about a 73% No vote to get the overall two-thirds to count for a "rejection" province.

But Hafegh's poll indicated there was "over50 percent" even in those provinces. So the only way the constitution can be rejected is if the poll is stunningly in error -- or if there is a huge turn-around in the next week.

It's not a done deal by any means; but there is great cause for optimism.

(I do actually have a dog in the fight; in a recent post here, I made a prediction:

Dafydd the Great, wearing turbin and holding back of hand to forehead, predicts that no more than one province will muster the necessary 67% rejection. (Actually, I believe none will; but I'm hedging my prediction slightly.)

We'll see if this one works out, or if blows up like my Judiciary-Committee prediction!)

But wait; what about the other story?

This one is so boilerplate, it could have been phoned in from the New York offices of AP:

Many Sunnis to Vote No in Iraq Referendum
Oct 7, 2005
by Thomas Wagner

BAGHDAD (AP) - Like many Sunni Arabs in Iraq, Faleh Hassan opposed the U.S.-led invasion, boycotted the election that brought the interim government to power and plans to vote "no" in the Oct. 15 referendum on the country's draft constitution.

As far as he's concerned, ever since U.S. forces drove Saddam Hussein, a fellow Sunni, from power, Iraq's Kurds and majority Shiites have used democracy to grab an unfair share of power and to penalize the Sunni minority for the many abuses Shiites suffered under Saddam. [emphasis added]

Several things to note: first, there is no quantification; this story is pure "feelings" and no thought: clearly, we are supposed to draw the conclusion that the constitution is going down in flames... despite the fact that nowhere does Wagner explicitly quantify how many Sunnis are likely to vote against it in the Sunni provinces -- which is, of course, the only relevant question in deciding whether it will be adopted.

Second, note the extraordinary number of sources of information Wagner drew from for his literary endeavor: four, counting himself! Much of the story is Wagner's personal recollection of the last Saddam Hussein "referendum," when Hussein was the only candidate on the ballot, and with the Fedayeen Saddam looking over the ballots before they were put into the box. From that wealth of data, we learn that:

Iraq's Sunni Arabs are mobilizing in large numbers to defeat the referendum. Many Sunni politicians believe the document would give Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiites in the south virtual autonomy, control of Iraq's oil wealth in both regions, and leave Sunnis powerless and poor in central and western Iraq.

And one other point is glossed over. Wagner casually admits that in the past, he was willing to report pro-Saddam "news" under duress:

To show off this "democratic reform" to the world, [Saddam Hussein] opened Iraq to hundreds of foreign journalists, including this reporter.

All of us were assigned "a government minder" to monitor the few interviews we won with the frightened general public and to make sure we didn't try to visit any of the many off-limit palaces that Saddam and his family owned.

So for "weeks" in 1995, Thomas Wagner filed stories from Iraq while he was being carefully controlled by Saddam's "government minder[s]." I wonder: during all that time, or even in the eight years between that sham election and the fall of Saddam, did Wagner ever once reveal to his readers that those stories he filed were actually orchestrated by Saddam Hussein to make a democratic silk purse out of the pig's ear of Saddam's tyranny?

I don't find very much charity in my heart for Thomas Wagner. Nor do I feel any great impluse towards believing him now.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 07, 2005, at the time of 04:06 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 06, 2005

Iraqi Children Thank Iraqi Troops

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The Iraqi blog Friends of Democracy organized a touring gallery in many elementay and high schools in Iraq. The gallery displayed childeren's drawings and letters that show their appreciation and love for the Iraqi troops. Some of the heart warming pictures are shown here.

The words and drawings had a wonderful positive effect on the morale of our soldiers and policemen who received them with overwhelming happiness and tears of joy “we’re not going to let them down and these paintings will take their place on the walls in our base” these were the words of one grateful soldier to whom we handed some paintings while his unit was patrolling the streets of Baghdad, the next day we received a call from the officer in command asking for more of these paintings which he described as “a proof on national unity in this confrontation with the powers of evil”.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 06, 2005, at the time of 07:41 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Harry Reid's Babysitting Service

Fiskings , Global War on Jihadism , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

This morning, President Bush delivered yet another exceptionally good speech on the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), this time to the National Endowment for Democracy in D.C. Bush candidly explained where we are now, what our strategy is for the future, how Iraq fits into the plan, and what specifically we're doing to continue winning that smaller war, as well as the larger GWOT itself.

In response Sen. Harry Reid (D-Las Vegas) issued a terse and Kennedy-esque -- Ted Kennedy-esque, that is -- "response" that did not respond to anything the president said; in fact, it clearly was written before the speech, comprising nothing but boilerplate invective from the disloyal opposition. But even so, I will take up the smart man's burden and let you know what Sen. Reid said. It's a tedious task, but somebody gotta do it.

Reid: The Rhetoric Doesn't Match The Reality
Thursday, October 6, 2005

Washington, DC – Democratic Leader Harry Reid released the following statement today on Bush’s continued failure to talk straight to the American people about the war in Iraq:

Failure to "talk straight?" What about Harry Reid's continued failure to use the English language with clarity and precision? What on earth does that phrase, "talk straight," mean anyway? I'm really getting sick of this argument-by-illiterate-catch-phrase... and yes, I do include McCain's "Straight-Talk Express."

"Talk straight" is quite evidently a placeholder phrase, like a movie stand-in: you insert it into a sentence to take the place of what you really mean to say, so you can get the lighting and camera angles right without wasting the real term's time. The problem arises when, after you polish up the sentence, you forget to go back and replace the placeholder with the real words!

In that case, you end up with nothing but airy persiflage: things are looking bad, because the president won't bite the bullet and just do what needs doing. It's gut-check time, Mr. President! It's now or never! The American people eagerly await the straight talk, the real deal... but all you give us is the same-old, same-old. Our patience is not limitless, sir! For the last time, the American people demand to know just exactly where you stand: are you going to stick with the failed policies of the past? Or will you finally, at long last, move forward boldly into the future?

Once again the president had an opportunity to lay out for the American people the facts on the ground in Iraq and his strategy to achieve the military, political and economic success needed in order to bring our troops home.

Uh... yes; exactly like that.

Once again, he failed to do so. Instead, the president continued to falsely assert there is a link between the war in Iraq and the tragedy of September 11th, a link that did not and does not exist.

He did? I just read the speech, and I don't see anything like that in what I read. Of course, I have an unfair advantage over Sen. Reid... I actually did read the speech before attempting to comment on it.

Here is what Bush actually said on this subject, as opposed to what Harry Reid imagined Bush would say a couple of days ago, when Reid actually write his "response":

We know the vision of the radicals because they've openly stated it — in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites. First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions. Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate, quote, their "resources, sons and money to driving the infidels out of their lands." Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993 — only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

Second, the militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments. Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and Jordan for potential takeover. They achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan. Now they've set their sights on Iraq. Bin Laden has stated, "The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It's either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation." The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.

Third, the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.

I'm curious which part of this Reid rejects. Does the good senator argue that al-Qaeda doesn't really mind us being in the Middle East, that they've decided democracy and peace are pretty cool after all, and that they've given up their Blofeldian ambitions of world domination?

Or maybe it's the second paragraph that Reid disputes: perhaps Harry Reid argues that if we pulled out of Iraq instanter, then Zarqawi and his butt-monkey brigade would be mollified and would likewise leave Iraq to return to certain arrest and execution in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Egypt. Or that they would emmigrate out of Iraq to Iran, Syria, Sudan, or Cechnya, but they would retire from the mindless mass murder biz; perhaps they would become shrimp farmers or start a cotton plantation.

If it's Bush's third point that Harry Reid pooh-poohs, then I can only conclude that Nevada's favorite son believes in the power of Islamist jihadi redemption: sure, the terrorist killers may have claimed they want a globe-spanning caliphate from "al-Andaluz" and the Moorish North Africa, the Persian Caliphate eastward to India, the deserts of Arabia, then following the old Ottoman Sultanate through Algiers, Tripoli, Egypt, through Mesopotamia right up against the Caspian Sea in Russia, up around into Europe, across Hungary, and right up to the gates of Vienna, Austria, plus the new elements of the ummah -- Indonesia (the largest Moslem country), Micronesia, the Philippines, and everything in between Australia and China.

Sure, maybe that's what they say; but it's just trash-talk (not straight talk, as Harry Reid gives us). They don't really want nukes, chemical weapons, or biological agents. And Israel? Heck, the jihadis are willing to "live and let live" alongside all those Jews and Crusaders. Don't harsh their mellow, man!

Show of hands: anybody here persuaded by Sen. Reid's read on the Jihadi mindset?

Once again, he failed to do so. Instead, the president continued to falsely assert there is a link between the war in Iraq and the tragedy of September 11th, a link that did not and does not exist.

Harry Reid's homework list:

(The official version of the document from the 9/11 Commission is unsearchable; they seem to have messed up something in the pdf. Here is a searchable version of that same document.)

The truth is the Administration’s mishandling of the war in Iraq has made us less safe and Iraq risks becoming what it was not before the war: a training ground for terrorists.

"Made us less safe." Hm. We're safer with an avowed and bitter enemy of America in charge of the world's second-largest known oil reserve, a military machine that includes missiles and chemical artillery shells, active and ongoing programs to develop nuclear and chemical/biological weapons, and who has deep, extensive, and rapidly expanding alliances with al-Qaeda and other international terrorist groups that desperately desire to destroy America -- than we are with 140,000 American troops in Iraq protecting a democratic state that is about to vote on a constitution (and if they reject it, upon another, and another until they get their democracy)?

Yeah, I can see that... if the pronoun "us" in "made us less safe" stands for "Democrats in Congress," and "safe" refers to their electoral prospects. Indeed, Bush's entire prosecution of the GWOT has made Democratic seats in Congress very unsafe indeed, as the last couple of elections -- and the prospects for 2006 -- have shown. So in that sense, Harry Reid is right about this claim. Ten points for Slytherin!

I do note, however, that while Iraq may have become a training ground for terrorists, what it has mainly trained them to do is to be killed by the thousands by Coalition forces. And it has unquestionably become a training ground for American forces, turning us into the premier urban-terrorist warfare-fighting military on the face of the Earth.

It is clear our window of opportunity is closing in Iraq and the president continues to fail to provide a strategy for success in order to prevent this outcome.

See above, long discussion of Reid's obsession with torturing the English language until it converts.

My Democratic colleagues and I submitted four specific questions to the president about his strategy for Iraq that the American people demand be answered.

Which particular American people would those be? I don't recall being asked. Then again, statistical probability suggests that the vast majority of the people will not, in fact, be questioned for any particular poll. I'm willing to believe that Reid, Kerry, Leahy, Schumer, and Kennedy (and any other colleagues Reid has left) all got together and commissioned Gallup or Pew Research to poll the American people on which particular, specific four questions they demand the president answer, which turned out to be the very four that Reid asks below... so if he could give us a link or even a citation of this poll, it would be very helpful.

Instead of answering those questions, the president offered the same failed approach, stay the course. We cannot continue to stay the course, we must change the course. The American people and our brave men and women in Iraq deserve better.

It's like déjà-vu all over again!

Ah... here come those four questions that were determined by extensive polling among statistically weighted representative samples of the American people:

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE’S KEY QUESTIONS ON IRAQ

  1. How many capable Iraqi forces do we need before we can bring our troops home?
  2. What is the administration doing to forge a political consensus?
  3. What is the administration doing to make Iraq’s neighbors a part of our strategy?
  4. What progress is being made on the reconstruction in Iraq and how do we know taxpayers dollars are being spent wisely?

Let's see if we can answer the senator's questions; then he can say "my job here is done" and head back to the video-poker slots.

How many capable Iraqi forces do we need before we can bring our troops home?

I have no idea how to answer this. What is a "force?" If he means "how many individual soldiers," that's a much larger number than if he means "how many battalions."

And what does he mean by "capable?" Wretchard of the Belmont Club has done a bravura job of analyzing just what we have done so far in building up a free Iraqi army, composed of volunteers led by officers who actually care about democracy and freedom, to take the place of the Saddam's old army, led by would-be military dictators (such as Col. Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, the King of Clubs on my quasi-official Iraqi Deck of Death) and largely manned by wretched Shiite and Kurdish conscripts who desperately didn't want to be there and would flee at the first opportunity.

First the raw numbers. Secretary Rumsfeld reports there are "technically 194,000 Iraqis" in the security forces. In terms of what may properly be referred to as the Iraqi army, General Casey said there were 100 battalions in all. These were divided, in terms of their capability into three categories: Category 1, 2 and 3 -- with Category 1 being the most capable [and available, per Wretchard's update].

The widely circulated report in the press that of 3 Iraqi battalions that were formerly combat ready, only one is currently rated in that status is an example of how the 'quantity of men' issue has been misunderstood. That number turns out to be the number of Iraqi battalions in Category 1, which as we shall see later, is not the critical category at all.

When Democrats disparage the capability level of the Iraqi troops, they refer only to the paucity of "Category 1" battalions; but Category 1 refers to a capability nearly equal that of the United States; and by this measure, virtually no other nation in Christendom has more than one or two such battalions, most not even that. Even Israeli units don't come up to our present capability to fight an urban war against terrorists... though we certainly couldn't have said that prior to the Iraq War. It is the units in the middle capability level, Category 2, that form the backbone of the fighting force in Iraq, as Wretchard explains:

The eightfold increase in company-level operations in five months (from 160 company level operations in May rising to 1,300 in September) is one crude way to estimate the rate of training of Iraqi battalions . If operational tempo has not increased, this suggests that since there are 100 battalions now then there were only about 12 in May and the US military transition teams have been training about 18 new battalions each month. This is a very crude estimate, but it should in the correct order of magnitude.

Of these 100 battalions the truly important number are those in Category 2 (not the Category 1 batts the press was interested in) because it is on these that the operations over the next six months will be fought. The members of Press realized this in the course of the briefing and attempted to get the speakers to state this number without success.

All right, let's pick one measure that Reid might have meant and run with that. What does he mean by asking "how many capable Iraqi [battalions] do we need before we can bring our troops home?" Does he imagine that is the goal: as soon as there are X number of operational Iraqi battalions, we splitski?

This is a perfect example of Democratic illogic. Bush has enunciated a perfectly comprehensible "exist strategy": as soon as the Iraqis begin to be able to take over their own defense, we begin to pull out. This could be accomplished with the 100 battalions in place now, if they improve their capabilities. Or we could raise another fifty battalions who are at the same level as today. Or we could degrade the terrorist ability so much that a mere seventy Iraqi battalions would be enough to drive them out... there are many routes to the victory condition.

Look at it this way. You're driving to the Grand Canyon. When is the trip officially finished -- when you arrive at the parking lot of Bright Angel Lodge? Or do you pull over and park when you have traveled exactly three and a half hours or 210 miles, no matter where you actually are?

What is the administration doing to forge a political consensus?

Among whom? Is this question left over from a previous set of four about, say, Social Security reform?

What is the administration doing to make Iraq’s neighbors a part of our strategy?

Well, we're telling Saudi Arabia to stop exporting jihadi materials to American mosques; we're welcoming Kuwait's and Jordan's recognition of Israel; we're trying to bring Iran's nuclear program before the UN Security Council; we're supporting Turkey's bid to join the European Union; and we're pressuring Syria to pull its intelligence agents out of Lebanon and fighting a riverine campaign along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to seal the Iraq border against Syrian terrorist incursion. Why do you ask, Sen. Reid... has your newspaper been stopped?

What progress is being made on the reconstruction in Iraq and how do we know taxpayers dollars are being spent wisely?

First question in this double-question, reconstruction progress: ca. September 29th, 2005, see this post from Good News Central.

Second question, how we know taxpayer dollars are being spend wisely: we know, obviosuly, because they're being spent by the Bush administration, not by the Democratic Congressional caucus. Was this a trick question?

And that appears to cover the entirety of Sen. Reid's "response." I suspect I'll never have to write this again... because the next time President Bush gives a speech about Iraq -- or about Hurricane Rita, the repeal of the death tax, or the Patriot Act -- Harry Reid will send out this same general, all-purpose "response," and I can just link back to this post.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 06, 2005, at the time of 07:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 05, 2005

Changing Rules in the Middle of the Game - UPDATE and bump

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

UPDATE: See below.

Whenever I hear frustrated Americans complaining about the seemingly slow process of Iraqi democratization, I tell them, "give Iraq a chance; they are not used to this democracy thing; it will take time; they have a lot to learn from us." Well, they might have learned a bit too much from Democratic election committees of Florida 2000.

Over the weekend, the Shia dominated Iraqi parliament changed the rules of the upcoming election. They rigged it so that no matter how the Sunnis vote, the referendum will pass.

Iraq's parliament made a ruling on Sunday determining that for the October 15 referendum to pass, half of those who turn out to vote across the country would have to say, "Yes." However, a clause setting a two-thirds "No" vote in at least three of 18 provinces as a veto on the charter would be interpreted to mean two-thirds of all registered voters, rather than voters on the day. In other words, parliament was interpreting the word "voters" in the interim constitution in two different ways in the same article. [emphasis added]

In other words, the meaning of the word “voters” will be interpreted depending on how the voters voted! "Yes" voters are measured against other voters, while "No" voters are measured against all potential voters. This is just as bad as the infamous hanging chads.

This of course does not sit well with Sunnis.

Sunni Arab moderates threatened Tuesday to boycott the voting after the Shiite-led parliament passed new rules over the weekend that make it effectively impossible for Sunnis to defeat the charter at the ballot box. "Boycotting the referendum is a possible option... because we believe that participating in the voting might be a useless act," said Saleh al-Mutlaq, a leading Sunni politician.

Even the United Nation is perturbed, saying this does not follow international standards.

The United Nations also expressed concern about the new electoral rules, saying they don't meet international standards. U.N. officials have been meeting with Iraqi authorities and are confident that Iraq will ultimately agree to sound electoral rules, spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

The UN is negotiating with the parliament right now. But I don't have much faith in the UN. The United States government echoes the concern, but I don’t know what we can do.

"Ultimately, this will be a sovereign decision by the Iraqis and it's up to the Iraqi National Assembly to decide on the appropriate electoral framework," Dujarric said. "That being said, it is our duty in our role in Iraq to point out when the process does not meet international standards."

This is outrageous. You can't change the rules in the middle. It was wrong when Democrats did it in Florida 2000, and it's still wrong now in Iraq.

What the Iraqi parliament must realize is that Democracy constitutes the rule of law, and the law must apply equally to everyone. That’s the basis of Democracy. The Constitution is the cornerstone of that democracy: if you rig the election to ratify it, what kind of beginning is that?

I put no stock in the UN. They can negotiate all they want; but at the end of the day, the only voice Iraqis listen to is America's. The United States government has to do more than express its "deep concern" and "strongly suggest" that they change the rules back to the original. Hey, we've got the guns; we got to ram this democracy thing down them Iraqis' throats whether they like it or not!

Omar at Iraq the Model sums up my feeling.

I wasn't worried at all when the final draft came with several articles I didn't agree with since I thought my voice would count and could change things in either direction but now? Now I feel like I'm facing a challenge of having my voice ignored and hijacked again and that is something I cannot accept.

Any rules change that causes even the pro-democracy bloggers at Iraq the Model to back away is a terrible miscalculation. Rules are rules -- leave them alone, and just trust the Iraqi people.

UPDATE from Dafydd, 12:40 pm October 5th:

Sachi just e-mailed me that the Iraqi parliament has changed the rule back to the original (hat tip to Matoko Kusanagi and Terry Gain, who noticed and commented around the same time Sachi found the AP article). Via AP:

Sunnis Drop Threat to Boycott Referendum
Oct 5, 12:51 PM (ET)
by Qassim Abdul-Zahra

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraq's parliament voted Wednesday to reverse last-minute changes to rules for next week's referendum on a new constitution after the United Nations said they were unfair. Sunni Arabs responded by dropping their threat to boycott the vote and promised to reject the charter at the polls.

The United Nations, which was supervising the referendum, and U.S. officials had pressed Iraqi leaders to drop the rule change, which would have made it nearly impossible for the constitution to be defeated and jeopardized efforts to bring Sunnis into the political process.

One might, of course, conclude that American opposition to the rule change might perhaps have played slightly more of a role here than the objections of the toothless U.N., which fled Iraq after a single bombing of the U.N. facility there and have only crept back when assured of protection by the United States.

After a brief debate Wednesday, the National Assembly voted 119 to 28 to restore the original voting rules for the referendum. Only about half of the 275-member legislative body turned up for the vote.

The text approved by parliament Wednesday confirmed that the word "voters" throughout the election rules in the interim constitution has a single meaning: those who cast votes.

"The word 'voters' in paragraph (c), article 61 of the Transitional Administrative law, means registered voters who actually cast their votes in the referendum," reads the text, according to deputy speaker Hussain al-Shahristani....

Wednesday's vote came after intensive talks by U.N. and American officials to pressure the Iraqis to reverse the rule change as Sunnis accused the Shiite-led government of fixing the rules to guarantee a victory.

The Sunnis may "promise" to reject the new constitution, but they may find it harder to deliver. Mustering a two-thirds majority against the referendum in three separate provinces will not be as easy as they imagine: for one reason, more Sunnis than Sunni leaders care to admit actually support the constitution, believing that they can change clauses they don't like by subsequent amendment. The bloggers at Iraq the Model fall into this category, as seen in the post today by Mohammed:

Although I have my objections to several articles of the draft constitution, I will certainly respect my people’s choice and I do believe that half a step forward is still better than many steps backward. I still see this constitution as an upgradeable project that can be improved for better performance in the future and it’s much better than the no-constitution-state and the chaos that would accompany that.

UPDATE 2:

Captain Ed is all over this on Captain's Quarters, as well.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 05, 2005, at the time of 12:58 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 02, 2005

Al Qaeda's Plan. What Plan?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

In today’s Reuters’ article, I found this passage:

Interior Minister Bayan Jabor told Reuters that documents seized after troops killed a purported aide to al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, indicated a plan to spread Islamist violence to other Arab countries.

Whenever I hear about a “plan” by al-Qaeda, I have to ask “What plan?” I have no doubt al-Qaeda has the capability to spread Islamist violence thinly around Arab countries. As Army Gen. John Abizaid said, al-Qaeda is like McDonalds -- a franchise: they can always find some local extremists willing to blow people up under the al-Qaeda umbrella. But that is just a mode of operation, a tactic. What is “spread[ing] Islamist violence” supposed to achieve? What is their strategy and ultimate goal? And, how exactly does random violence help achieve that goal?

Gen. Abizaid seems to know the answer:

"They believe in a jihad, a jihad to overthrow the legitimate regimes in the region," he said. "In order to do that, they first must drive America from the region."

Al Qaeda believes the most important prize is Saudi Arabia, which is home to the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. If al Qaeda terrorists manage to take control of Saudi Arabia, they will try to create and expand their influence in the region and establish a caliphate, Abizaid said.

The term harkens back to the immediate successors of Muhammed and means a land led by a supreme secular and religious ruler. Al Qaeda insists that re-establishing a caliphate would mean that one man, as the successor to Muhammad, would possess clear political, military and legal standing as the global Muslim leader.

That sounds more like a daydream than a cohesive plan.

Take Iraq for example. Al-Qaeda has been trying to "spread Islamist violence" there ever since Zarqawi arrived in Northern Iraq ("Kurdistan") in May of 2002, nearly a year before the American invasion; and they have been spreading it at a fierce pace, especially since Hussein’s regime fell, killing an awful lot of people.

But what have they achieved? Have they gained territory? No. Have they succeeded in kicking out the "Crusaders?" No. Have they stopped or even delayed Iraq’s democratic progress? No. Have they won the Iraqi people’s hearts and minds? NO!

In fact they are losing ground. Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabor said.

Foreign Arab militants now numbered fewer than 1,000, compared to between 2,500 and 3,000 six months ago....

(I don’t necessarily believe the exact number the minister states; after all he has his own agenda. But you get the drift.)

We should expect more terrorist attacks as the October 15 referendum on a post-Saddam constitution approaches. But that threat is not likely to deter the Iraqi people; they have shown themselves to be hard to intimidate.

After an opinion poll forecast turnout would be as high as 80 percent, one of Iraq's electoral commissioners said voter registration had gone well, including among the once dominant Sunni Arab minority, which largely boycotted a January election.

Al-Qaeda has overplayed their hand. Their relentless attacks have only hardened the Iraqi people’s determination: they have nothing left to lose by resisting the terrorists' demands. As Minister Jabor put it:

"What can the insurgents do that's worse? There are already car bombs every day."

This reminds me of a philosophical observation by Ann Coulter, which I paraphrase: the terrorists hate us and want to kill us; but if we fight against them, then they will hate us and want to kill us!

Well then, we might as well fight; because unlike Al Qaeda, we do have a plan to win.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 02, 2005, at the time of 03:41 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 30, 2005

Slowly But Surely

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

I posted earlier that Iraqi troops are slowly but surely taking over Iraq's security, one city at the time. The latest example is in and around Karbala, at Forward Operating Base Lima, where Coalition forces and the Greater Iraqi Army (and Iraqi police) just held a transfer ceremony Wednesday.

Iraqi security forces took responsibility for Forward Operating Base Lima from U.S. forces Sept. 28.

Iraqi police, army commanders and government representatives, U.S. representatives, including Army Lt. Col. James Oliver, commander of the 1st Battalion, 198th Armored Brigade, attended the ceremony transferring local security responsibilities to the Iraqi police and the 4th Brigade, 8th Division, Greater Iraqi Army.

American troops had been in Karbala since January this year, providing security and infrastructure support.

(American) troops from the 2nd Battalion, 114th Field Artillery, have assisted the people of Karbala since mid-January, providing security and infrastructure support. Approximately 68 projects, totaling $21.5 million, have been completed to improve the city. The projects included water, sanitation, education, electrical, medical and humanitarian aid.

Some of this work is likely to continue, even after the transfer. But this is now the second Iraqi province where security responsibilities were officially handed over to the Iraqi military.

Good news keeps on coming!

Update:

In testimony before Congress on Thursday, the senior American military commander in Iraq testified about the readiness of the Greater Iraqi Army battalions:

Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who oversees U.S. forces in Iraq, said there are fewer Iraqi battalions at "Level 1" readiness than there were a few months ago.

(Hat tip to wilsonkolb, in the comments.)

But that does not tell the whole story. According to the Department of Defense:

In May, Iraqi security forces conducted about 160 combined or independent operations at the company level and above, Casey said. By September, that number was up to 1,300.

Some 60,000 to 70,000 more Iraqi security forces will be available to provide security during the Oct. 15 referendum than during the January 2005 elections, he said. And by the time the next elections take place, Jan. 15 [2006], Casey said he expects to have about 100,000 more Iraqi security forces.

The growth is so significant, the general said, that he's had to ask for only 2,000 additional coalition troops to help protect the referendum and election progress this year, compared to 12,000 in January [2005].

But then what about that readiness, you may ask? As RBMN pointed out, according to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the level of readiness rating keeps on changing depending on a variety of factors.

For example, initial readiness standards two years ago measured numbers of Iraqi troops. Later, those standards were based on the number of trained troops. Later yet, those standards were based on troops who were trained and equipped. As the bar continued to rise, the numbers dipped a bit, giving an impression that readiness was declining, the secretary explained.

If you just look at the raw numbers, it looks like things are getting worse; but in fact, the situation is actually improving. The “bar” rises or lowers as the needs of the situation change, and as we learn more about the sort of urban terrorist war we’re fighting in Iraq.

The number of Iraqi army troops that are considered in a state of “readiness” will certainly fluctuate up and down for the next several months, until the DoD settles on a single metric to use across all troops in the field.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 30, 2005, at the time of 05:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 27, 2005

Were British Soldiers Hostages From the Start?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

My online friend who posts as "Silverlining," a Japanese MSM journalist who spent some time in Iraq and still has contacts there, offered an interesting speculation regarding the two British soldiers who were arrested by the Basra Police, then handed over to al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi "Army," and were finally rescued by the British Special Forces.

Silverlining thinks that the Mahdi militiamen, who had infiltrated the Basra police, kidnapped those two soldiers to be used as hostages from the very beginning, in retaliation for the British capturing two militiamen. On September 18th, the day before the British soldiers were apprehended, the British had arrested two key figures of al-Sadr's militia.

Sheik Ahmed Majid Farttusi and Sayyid Sajjad were detained in an early morning raid and are accused of being involved in attacks that killed at least nine soldiers, according to a statement from coalition forces.

This caused quite a stir in the area. The next day, during a demonstration by Sadr's supporters demanding their comrades’ release, the British soldiers were “arrested.” Although the police claimed these soldiers were conducting some sort of special undercover operation, the way these soldiers were dressed, Silverlining thinks they were simply a part of the British force, which was trying to contain the demonstration.

As Dafydd posted earlier, three different sects of militia have heavily infiltrated the Basra police. It is not so hard to imagine that some of Sadr’s men in the police got an order for this kidnapping. The fact the police casually handed them over to the militia seems to support his speculation. Perhaps Sadr's men intended to use the soldiers as barganing chips to release the militiamen.

What they did not consider was that the British army does not take kidnapping kindly. They should have known that the lion may be old, but it is not toothless.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 27, 2005, at the time of 11:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 26, 2005

Talk to the Terrorists?

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

We Americans do not negotiate with terrorists. No, we should kill them not to talk to them, shouldn't we?

Well, not exactly. I found this interesting article in Space War.com through Good News Central.

Lt. Col. Bradley Becker who leads 2nd battalion of the 8th Field Artillery Regiment explains. Just before he came to Quayyarah in northwestern Iraq, eleven months ago, Iraqi police and the Army were in a sorry state. He did not think his seven platoons could possibly cover the whole area.

"Anyone who comes to a counter-insurgency thinking it's about killing terrorists is missing the boat," said Becker. "It's really about winning the people. You can kill all the terrorists but then you've pissed people off and created 100 more,"

Since his platoons cannot be everywhere at the same time, he needed to effectively attack certain hot spots, and kill a small number of very key people. This required intelligence. They needed cooperation from the local residents.

I have always thought that, in order for terrorists to freely conduct their activity, they must have local Sunni help, whether through empathy or intimidation. But these people themselves are not necessarily terrorists. If the American military or Iraqi police could show them we are on their side and we can protect them, then some of these people can tell us where the terrorists are. And that is exactly what is happening in Iraq.

Connecting with local leadership is the only way a counter-insurgency campaign can work -- even if the leaders are part of the insurgency.

Time and again, U.S. officers say after a show of real force -- the kind of effectiveness that makes the shieks and imams and villagers think they might be safe if they throw their hat in with the Americans -- tips start to dribble in.

"Then they say 'the real guy you should be going after is X' and we follow another target," Gibler said. "The cycle is never ending. When you kill a bad guy he is going to be backfilled. But as you target these guys eventually they can't rebuild, and then you have real, no kidding security."

We don’t know who the terrorists are. But the people who live there do. It is essential that the security force gains the trust of the local Sunni shiekhs and imams, even if that means talking to marginal terrorist supporters. I am glad our commanders are doing just that.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 26, 2005, at the time of 12:12 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 25, 2005

Iraqi Troops Take Over

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

A round up of good Iraq news posted on other blog sites.

It is hard to believe, I know. But there is tremendous progress being made in Iraq. The American military has trained up to 200,000 Iraqi troops, much more and sooner than expected; as Captain Ed noted, a large number of these Iraqi troops now have battlefield experience. It is even possible we can significantly reduce the number of forces in Iraq by early spring next year.

After bombing two bridges near the Syrian border and severely damaging the infrastructure of terrorists in Najaf, the US military handed over the city’s security to Iraqi forces. In the Belmont Club, Wretchard quotes a September 6th story in the Washington Post about the Najaf battle:

The U.S. military pulled hundreds of troops out of the south city of Najaf on Tuesday, transferring security duties to Iraqi forces and sticking to a schedule that the United States hopes will allow the withdrawal of tens of thousands of its forces by early spring…Other cities in the heavily Shiite south, and in the Kurdish north, are likely to be next.

The Tal-Afar operation was conducted by a combined coalition of Iraqi and American forces. However, it was the 5000 Iraqi troops who conducted house-to-house searches and arrested over 200 terrorists. According to Iraqi officials, 141 rebel fighters were killed as well. In a different post, Wretchard quotes from the Telegraph:

Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, announced the start of the offensive in a statement yesterday morning.

"At 2am today, acting on my orders, Iraqi forces commenced an operation to remove all remaining terrorist elements from the city of Tel Afar," he said. "These forces are operating with support from the Multinational Force."

The readiness of Iraqi troops may have overly encouraged the Iraqi president. From the Washington Post (hat tip Captain’s Quarters):

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said in an interview yesterday that the United States could withdraw as many as 50,000 troops by the end of the year, declaring there are enough Iraqi forces trained and ready to begin assuming control in cities throughout the country.

Of course this does not mean we have any kind of timetable for withdrawal. But it is good to know we are in fact getting ready for it.

The successful operation of Tal-Afar offensive was felt in other parts of Iraq. The Iraq Defense ministry is considering sending Iraqi troops to several Iraqi cities including Samarra, according to Iraq the Model. During a negotiation with Sunni delegate from Samarra, the defense minister had stated that Iraqi troops’ success is encouraging many youths to join the Iraqi Defense Force. He encouraged Sunnis to cooperate with the government as well. In fact, with the memory of Tal-Afar being still fresh in mind, Sunni tribes are peacefully negotiating with the IDF, according to Omar of Iraq the Model.

Iraqi troops are slowly but surely taking charge of Iraqi security; Bush’s nation building concept may well be working here.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 25, 2005, at the time of 04:43 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 21, 2005

Shia Need Come-to-Jesus Meeting

Global War on Jihadism , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

This is profoundly disturbing. We all cheered -- well, except for Cindy and George -- when the Brits raided a jail (and then a private residence) in Basra to rescue their two special-forces comrades.

But the more details come out about the jailing and what happened to the soldiers afterward, the more it appears a reckoning is due between the Coalition forces and the Shia in the Iraqi South.

According to the governor of Basra province, the British soldiers were handed over by Iraqi authorities to Muqtada al-Sadr's terrorist forces, which it pleases him to call the "al-Mahdi Army." Via AP, "Iraqis in Basra Slam 'British Aggression'," September 21st, 2005:

Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr disputed the British account of the raid that followed. He told the British Broadcasting Corp. the two soldiers never left police custody or the jail, were not handed over to militants, and that the British army acted on a "rumor" when it stormed the jail.

But Basra's governor, Mohammed al-Waili, said the two men were indeed moved from the jail. He said they were placed in the custody of the al-Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

"The two British were being kept in a house controlled by militiamen when the rescue operation took place," al-Waili said. "Police who are members of the militia group took them to a nearby house after jail authorities learned the facility was about to be stormed."

These are the same terrorists who tried to rebel against Iraqi authority in mid-2004, seizing the city of Najaf at the same time the Sunni terrorists under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarwawi grabbed Fallujah, killing four American contractors and mutilating their bodies for the TV cameras. This was the worst insurrection of the entire war, the only one that threatened to start an actual national front of resistance to Coalition forces; it was thwarted by the controversial but ultimately successful strategy of abandoning Fallujah for a time while we focused on Najaf and Basra. Once Sadr's "army" was crushed, we eventually returned to Fallujah, this time with a joint Coalition-Iraqi force that could not only conquer the city but hold it in Iraqi hands.

So after all that trouble, why on Earth are Iraqi police in Basra handing captured British soldiers off to Sadr's terrorists?

Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite politician who has criticized the British raid as "a violation of Iraqi sovereignty," acknowledged that one problem coalition forces face is that insurgents have joined the ranks of security forces.

"Iraqi security forces in general, police in particular, in many parts of Iraq, I have to admit, have been penetrated by some of the insurgents, some of the terrorists as well," he said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday night.

Officials in Basra, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared for their lives, said at least 60 percent of the police force there is made up of Shiite militiamen from one of three groups: the Mahdi Army; the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and Hezbollah in Iraq, a small group based in the southern marshlands.

The militias have deep historical, religious and political ties to Iran, where many Shiite political and religious figures took refuge during the rule of Saddam Hussein.

This is grim news indeed; but it need not be catastrophic. Basra clearly needs a thorough sanitizing; and respected Shiite leaders, such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest ranking and most respected Shiite cleric in Iraq, must make it very clear to Iraqi Shia that they must choose. They can either be militiamen, or they can be Iraqis; they cannot be both, as the militias do not have the interests of Iraq at heart.

In fact, there are persistent claims that Sadr himself is an agent of Iran; certainly the Badr Brigade and Hezbollah In Iraq are fully creatures of that vengeful, bloody theocracy. From the Asia Times, "Iraq goes courting in Iran," July 19th, 2005:

If sincere, Tehran could help both Iraqi and US-led forces to better fight the largely Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq by engaging the 15,000 to 20,000 al-Badr Brigade, the military wing of the Shi'ite Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution of Iraq, formed, trained and equipped by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to oppose Saddam.

This astonishing action on the part of Basra police who are also members of the "al-Mahdi Army" terrorist group is a shot across the bow at the Bush administration's handling of the war. We cannot allow Shiite terrorist militias to take over the Iraqi South or North Baghdad any more than we can allow Sunni terrorists to take over the center of Iraq. President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had better take this event seriously and start working with Shiite authorities to cleanse Shiite police forces of terrorist elements. The alternative may be to witness the birth of "Greater Iran."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 21, 2005, at the time of 07:33 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 18, 2005

Predictions, Predictions: the Iraqi Consitutional Vote

Injudicious Judiciary , Iraq Matters , Politics - National , Predictions
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATE: Crash and burn on the prediction about the vote in the Judiciary Committee! Read all about it here.

One of my favorite thrillseeking pastimes is making high-level predictions. Unlike those by psychics, mine are specific and near enough that everyone will remember to check -- thus I dance on the high-adrenaline tightrope between, as Charlie Brown would put it, being a hero or being a goat.

(I actually have a fairly good track record, because I do not make my predicions anywhere near as randomly as I pretend.)

The Iraqi constitution, which their parliament just voted to be put to the Iraqi people, can only be derailed by either a majority vote against (not politically possible) or by its rejection by three provinces, each with more than two-thirds against.

This time, I'll just flip a coin *: Dafydd the Great, wearing turbin and holding back of hand to forehead, predicts that no more than one province will muster the necessary 67% rejection. (Actually, I believe none will; but I'm hedging my prediction slightly.)

In an earlier, unrelated prediction posted on Captain's Quarters about the vote on John Roberts' nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee, I prognosticated that every Democrat on the committee except Ted Kennedy will vote to support Roberts in the vote recommending his nomination to the full Senate.

All of my predictions will have the primary category "Predictions," to make for easy tracking. After each is decided by the quantum vicissitudes of time, I will update it, scoring Dafydd the Great either a hit, a miss, or a mixed result (a wash).

* I'm lying again, as I warned you I might. I don't make my predictions by flipping a coin. I've been following this upcoming election for some time. My thinking was also influenced by this post by Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarters. So there.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 18, 2005, at the time of 05:16 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 17, 2005

Victory Conditional

Global War on Jihadism , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

This story on Fox News raises -- and begs -- the most fascinating question about the GWOT, the Global War on Terrorism; or as I prefer it, the war on militant Islamism.

The story -- "Baghdad Terror Campaign Claims More Lives" -- reels off the usual litany of brutish attacks by the troglodytes who call themselves al-Qaeda In Iraq. Being Fox News, the story also recites a number of military successes that the Coalition has had recently, particularly the Tal Afar and Haditha campaigns along the Syrian border that Wretchard at the Belmont Club has analyzed.

But there is a larger question here: what exactly constitutes victory or defeat in "this" war, whether the referrant of "this" is Iraq or the GWOT itself? To put it in military terminology, what are the victory conditions?

Without knowing the victory conditions, it's impossible to decide whether we're winning or losing. But the Bush administration has done a wretched job articulating just what these are. Come on, guys, we're tough; we can take it!

They've done a better job communicating the goals of the Iraq phase of the GWOT: the victory conditions are (1) a free and democratic Iraq that (2) does not threaten its neighbors or the United States and (3) stands on its own feet, both economically and militarily to (4) deny sanctuary to international terrorism.

But what about the larger war, of which Iraq is only a part? What are the victory conditions anent Iran, for example? Must the mullahs be overthrown for us to have "won," or would permanently preventing them from developing nuclear weapons be sufficient?

And how about our quasi-allies, such as Pakistan or Egypt? Need they become true democracies, at least at the level of Turkey? Or is it enough if they're still ruled by strongmen, but those autarchs fight alongside America to destroy terrorist infestations?

The Pentagon and the White House need to butt heads and come up with a clear set of victory conditions, understandable to the average citizen, by which we can measure success and failure in today's struggle... which is every bit as consequential as the Cold War against Communism or World War II against Fascism.

And perhaps the blogosphere can lead the way... suggestions, anyone?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 17, 2005, at the time of 01:13 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

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