Category ►►► Iran Matters

December 30, 2006

Iran Disputes Call: Takes Ball, Goes Home

Now that the UN Security Council has voted weak-tea sanctions on Iran for its pell-mell sprint for nuclear weapons, Iran has reacted in the professional, adult manner we've come to expect from President Ahmadinejad and his mullah-masters: they have threatened to "accelerate the country's peaceful nuclear program [!] and revise its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency based on national interests":

Iran's parliament voted Wednesday to urge the government to re-examine its ties with the U.N. nuclear agency following a Security Council decision to impose sanctions against Tehran over its disputed nuclear program.

The move signaled that Iran was likely to reduce its cooperation with the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. Iranian state radio predicted that once the bill came into effect, "the agency will become an ineffective and weak body...." [For all those who imagined that until now, the IAEA was a powerful and respected organization before which tyrants trembled in awe.]

"The bill gives a free hand to the government to decide on a range of reactions - from leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to remaining in the International Atomic Energy Agency and negotiating," [Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel] said during the debate in parliament, which was broadcast live on state radio.

Even the French were gobsmacked by this one; the sanctions were so minor, so trivial -- because of opposition by China, Russia, and France to anything stronger -- that everyone expected Iran simply to accept them and move ahead. Thus, their actual reaction, as if someone had come along and filched their favorite toy, had even la Belle France groping for words:

France criticized the move, saying it was "not what we expected from Iran." French Foreign Ministry spokesman Denis Simonneau said the Security Council resolution requires Iran to cooperate fully with the IAEA.

"We therefore renew our call for Iran to respect its commitments and obligations and cooperate actively with the IAEA," Simonneau said. [And we shall follow your future career with great interest...]

Meanwhile, we learn from the New York Times (none of you ever imagined this, I'm sure) that Iran is simultaneously seeking to expand its influence into Afghanistan. I know this is shocking, but don't turn into a mob, please!

The rise of Hezbollah, with Iran's support, has demonstrated the extent of Tehran's sway in Lebanon, and the American toppling of Saddam Hussein has allowed it to expand its influence in Iraq. Iran has been making inroads into Afghanistan, as well. During the tumultuous 1980s and '90s, Iran shipped money and arms to groups fighting first the Soviet occupation and later the Taliban government. But since the United States and its allies ousted the Taliban in 2001, Iran has taken advantage of the central government's weakness to pursue a more nuanced strategy: part reconstruction, part education and part propaganda.

Iran has distributed its largess, more than $200 million in all, mostly here in the west but also in the capital, Kabul. It has set up border posts against the heroin trade, and next year will begin work on new road and construction projects and a rail line linking the countries. In Kabul, its projects include a new medical center and a water testing laboratory....

Still, there are indications of other motives. Iranian radio stations are broadcasting anti-American propaganda into Afghanistan. Moderate Shiite leaders in Afghanistan say Tehran is funneling money to conservative Shiite religious schools and former warlords with longstanding ties to Iranian intelligence agencies.

And as the dispute over Iran's nuclear program has escalated [leading the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran on Dec. 23], Iranian intelligence activity has increased across Afghanistan, American and Afghan officials say. This has included not just surveillance and information collection but the recruitment of a network of pro-Iranian operatives who could attack American targets in Afghanistan. [On Dec. 20 in London, British officials charged the interpreter for NATO's commanding general in Afghanistan with passing secrets to Iran.]

(I only read the first page of the story; it's too long and boring for my mayfly-like attention span. But you're welcome to pore over the rest and report back if there's anything of interest on, say, page 4.)

However, as we noted earlier, much of this "largess" is dependent upon an oil industry that is beginning to crumble. Simply put, the Iranians are so obsessed with getting nukes and building ever more labyrinthian layers of welfare-statism, that they have failed to invest in oil exploration and extraction: the fact that the entire country has just a handful of gasoline refineries is the synecdoche of the problem... such a simple stupidity with such widespread consequences is hard to fathom.

They could still turn it around; but that would require reassessing their national priorities, rather than reassessing their cooperation with the IAEA. If they stay their present course, the money to buy happiness in Afghanistan will dry up, as will the friendly relations: that corner of the globe (if globes can have corners) has never been known for its gratitude.

The collapse of the Iranian oil industry is also something that is well within our power to affect: as historian Arthur Herman wrote in Commentary last month, we could and probably should strike Iran where it would hurt the most... right in their assets:

1. Deploy anti-submarine, anti-suicide-boat forces throughout the Strait of Hormuz; this will prevent Iran from sinking ships in the strait (though which most of everyone's oil passes) and stopping the engine of the world;
2. Followed by a "comprehensive air campaign" to destroy Iran's air defenses;
3. Next, continue the attacks to Iran's nuclear facilities, including infrastructure that supports them (roads, power generators, etc.);
4. Destroy Iran's gasoline refineries and reserves: they already import 40% of their gasoline, having so little refinery space themselves;
5. Deploy SF to seize Iran's offshore oil wells and docks fit for off-loading gasoline from ships.

This would bottle up Iran and put them at our mercy (for a change!) -- we could cut off their gasoline supply at a moment's notice. Keep this scenario in mind, as it plays a role in all to follow.

The Iranians are also, of course, trying to "influence" Iraq -- by sending "senior military officials" into Iraq to attack Iraqi forces, American forces, and to funnel weapons to radical Shiite militias:

In its first official confirmation of last week’s raids, the military said it had confiscated maps, videos, photographs and documents in one of the raids on a site in Baghdad. The military confirmed the arrests of five Iranians, and said three of them had been released.

The Bush administration has described the two Iranians still being held Tuesday night as senior military officials. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell IV, the chief spokesman for the American command, said the military, in the raid, had “gathered specific intelligence from highly credible sources that linked individuals and locations with criminal activities against Iraqi civilians, security forces and coalition force personnel.”

Big Lizards translation: Iranians are coming across the border into Iraq and killing American soldiers. To my mind, that is casus belli... especially when coupled with the persistent successes Iran has had in the last couple of years smuggling factory-built bombs (can't really call them "I" EDs anymore, can we?) to pro-Iranian factions within Iraq:

How are these EFPs ["explosively-formed penetrator"] coming into Iraq? Again, to quote the briefer: "Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps has established smuggling routes to transport men and supplies into Iraq." Who is using them to kill and wound Americans and other coalition troops? "Iran's Revolutionary Guard has a network in Iraq headed by Abu Mustapha al-Sheibani to commit violence against Coalition forces." That doesn't sound like a nation that has any interest in democracy and stability in Iraq.

Here's another long, boring article you can read about Abu Mustapha [or Mustafa] al-Sheibani, since I'm sure none of you has any cool New Year's Eve parties to attend (I know I don't!)

But again, all of these extracurricular activities depend upon Iran having a huge and reliable cash flow from the oil; were something to happen to that -- especially if that "something" is helped along by the United States -- I suspect the mullahs would abruptly pull the Persian carpet out from under al-Shebang, if that really is his name, as swiftly as they'd withdraw military support from Lebanon's Hezbollah.

So I think we have a pretty clear idea of what we need to do, and it shouldn't even be that difficult. In fact, the tensest moments will be trying to persuade Congress that we cannot win the war on jihadism without doing something about Iran... and that does not mean negotiating our surrender to them!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 30, 2006, at the time of 11:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 26, 2006

The Way the Future Wasn't

Talk about "the biter bit," or perhaps people getting their "just desserts" -- Iran appears to be running out of oil, or more accurately, running out of oil revenues:

Iran earns about $50 billion a year in oil exports. The decline is estimated at 10 to 12 percent annually. In less than five years, exports could be halved, and they could disappear by 2015, Stern predicted. [Roger Stern is "an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University."]

The problem is that they're pouring so much of their revenue into their military, into terrorist groups like Hezbollah (and now Hamas), and into nuclear research -- that they have neglected to reinvest in oil exploration and extraction technologies.

Surprise, surprise... another socialist economy that lives in the present and ignores the future. In this case, it allows us to refine our thesis.

We've known for some time that atheism is both a symptom of, and the cause of a lack of belief in the future; when one doesn't believe in the future, one lives for today, and to hell with tomorrow. (Think of Europe, as Mark Steyn notes, where birthrates have plummeted to about half replacement-rate in countries like Spain; a society that does not envision a future does not have children, and vice versa.)

But evidently, there are also some religions that care only about amassing power today and do not think about tomorrow... those religions whose god is concerned more about obeisance to sterile, mindless rituals than about creating a just and decent life for Mankind on Earth (see the comments in Jihadis With Yarmulkes for my definition of "sterile rituals").

They may obsess about "the end times," but not about next year -- and certainly not about 2015! Ahmadinejad doubtless believes that the Twelfth Imam will have returned long before then, so the oil revenues won't matter a whit: Allah will provide for Iran from the treasures of the shattered infidels and dhimmi.

Once again, we see the intimate relationship between what Dennis Prager calls "ethical monotheism" and what we call "futurism," the belief that there is a future that will be controlled by humans for a long time; and that therefore, we had better think very carefully about how our behavior today affects our options in that anthropogenic future.

Note that neither James Watt nor Ronald Reagan ever said that it doesn't matter how many trees we cut down, because Jesus is coming back soon. That supposed quotation is in fact a fabrication of the secular Left. Neither did they believe that, because they believed -- this is integral to the faith of the vast majority of evangelicals -- that since no man knows when Jesus will return (or for Jews, when the messiah will come for the first time), we must therefore create a just and decent society today, and one that will sustain into the undetermined future.

Thus does it appear that the social belief in ethical monotheism is essential for a society to be capitalist, individualist, and to provide liberty.

This is true even if some individual agnostics or atheists are perfectly capable of supporting capitalism, individualism, or liberty themselves (though that's not the betting line): such folks are exceptional... but society needs belief to enforce due consideration of tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow: you cannot build a self-sustaining culture out of the exceptions.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 26, 2006, at the time of 02:22 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

December 22, 2006

Ahmadinejad and the Rope: A Lad Insane

This is our last word about the Iranian elections -- but with a swing (no pun intended; and if you believe that....) Our previous two posts on the Iranian local elections and the elections for members of the "Assembly of Experts" are here:

• Ahmadinejad At the End of His Rope?
• Ahmadinejad's Rope Pulls Taut

So which do you want first -- the good news, or the better news? The good news? All right, we'll save the better for later in the post.

There was no sudden reversal at the end. In other words, the ruling mullahs (via the Council of Guardians -- wasn't Rupert Giles a member of that?) did not abruptly yank the rug out from under the "moderate conservatives" or even the "reformers" (bear in mind that those words have entirely different meanings in Iran than in any other country). Ahmadinejad's allies, his "self sacrificers," deserted him in his hour of need. This led to a very significant loss of power for his faction at the local level and denied him his anticipated power boost in the Assembly of Experts:

Moderate conservatives opposed to Ahmadinejad won a majority of the seats in Friday's elections followed by reformists who were suppressed by hard-liners in 2004, according to final results announced by the Interior Ministry.

The final results also represented a partial comeback for reformists, who were crushed over the past five years by hard-liners who drove them out of the local councils, parliament and the presidency. The reformists favor closer ties with the West and further loosening of social and political restrictions under the Islamic government.

In Tehran, the capital, candidates supporting Mayor Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf, a moderate conservative, won seven of the 15 council seats. Reformists won four, while Ahmadinejad's allies won three. The last seat went to wrestling champion Ali Reza Dabir, who won a gold medal in the 2000 Sydney Olympics and is considered an independent.

Final results for the rest of the country also showed a heavy defeat for Ahmadinejad supporters, and analysts said his allies won less than 20 percent of local council seats nationwide. None of his candidates won seats on the councils in the cities of Shiraz, Bandar Abbas, Sari, Zanjan, Rasht, Ilam, Sanandaj and Kerman. Many councils in other cities were divided along similar proportions as Tehran's.

His faction was likewise pretty roughed up in the election for the Assembly of Experts -- which, while less important over the long haul, is of more immediate moment:

Similar anti-Ahmadinejad sentiment was visible in the final results of a parallel election held to select members of the Assembly of Experts, a conservative body of 86 senior clerics that monitors Iran's supreme leader and chooses his successor....

[Former President Hashemi] Rafsanjani, who supports dialogue with the United States, received the most votes of any Tehran candidate to win re-election to the assembly. Also re-elected was Hasan Rowhani, Iran's former top nuclear negotiator whom Ahmadinejad has repeatedly accused of making too many concessions to the Europeans.

(AP doesn't report whether Ahmadinejad's "religious guru," Ayatollah Muhamad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi was reelected, but we must assume he was.)

So the original prediction from the Saudi government's house newspaper, the Arab Times, turned out to be incorrect in only one detail: they failed to predict the sheer magnitude of Ahmadinejad's failure at the polls. While none of this affects the occult gnome's de facto and de jure power as President of Iran, it shows something that is far more important for long-term prospects in the war on jihadism: the "people" on whom Mahmoud Ahmadinejad relies for his power (he is a Socialst as well as a Shiite jihadi) now recoil from his belligerence, his monomania, and his utter incompetence in the nuts-and-berries aspects of the presidency:

• His challenges to America have become increasingly hysterical and insistent, and most Iranians (a very well educated group) are well aware that a war with the "Great Satan" would be catastrophic for Iran;
• I believe many Iranians must be terrified of Ahmadinejad's obsession with both the destruction of Israel and getting nuclear weapons... put the two together, and anybody with two rials of rationality to rub together must know that if Ahmadinejad manages to frighten Israel enough -- Israel will respond with its own nukes, which everybody has long known it has (I do not believe for one second that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's "slip of the tongue" about nuclear weapons was any sort of mistake... it was a calculated and deliberate act, a threat that cannot be ignored);
• The Iranian economy is in a shambles, since they made the mistake of embracing the idiotic ecnomic system that has never failed to fail wherever it has been tried. Mohammed may have been a general and a prophet, but he certainly was not a market economist.

When quality of life plummets at the same time that national fear and uncertainty rises, and both are attributable to the powers that be; when expectations rise at the same time that results crash; when the middle class, on whose shoulders every country ultimately rides, begins to fear for its very existence... that is the season when revolution ripens.

And in Persia, the vanguard of revolution in all directions, since at least the early 1960s, has been the student class. Certainly, they helped overthrow Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran in 1979; students were the backbone of the Khomeinist revolution and the most ardent and fanatic proponents of Ayatollah Khomeini's Shiite Islamist revolution. The seizure of the U.S. embassy, though ultimately embraced (and taken over) by Teheran, began with students.

Of all people in Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must understand that; he was one of them that day in November 1979. Thus, the new Shah Mahmoud must feel the icy finger of destiny clutching his bowels, now that violent student protests against Ahmadinejad himself have surged (this is the "better news" I warned about uppost):

The student movement, which planned the 1979 seizure of the American Embassy from the same university, Amir Kabir, is reawakening from its recent slumber and may even be spearheading a widespread resistance against Mr. Ahmadinejad. This time the catalysts were academic and personal freedom.

“It is not that simple to break up a president’s speech,” said Alireza Siassirad, a former student political organizer, explaining that an event of that magnitude takes meticulous planning. “I think what happened at Amir Kabir is a very important and a dangerous sign. Students are definitely becoming active again.”

The New York Times article by Nazila Fathi makes the same basic points that Big Lizards has made since before the elections:

The protest, punctuated by shouts of “Death to the dictator,” was the first widely publicized outcry against Mr. Ahmadinejad, one that was reflected Friday in local elections, where voters turned out in droves to vote for his opponents.

The students’ complaints largely mirrored public frustrations over the president’s crackdown on civil liberties, his blundering economic policies and his harsh oratory against the West, which they fear will isolate the country....

The students also complain about the president’s failure to deliver economic growth and jobs. At last week’s protest, which coincided with a now infamous Holocaust conference held by the Foreign Ministry, students chanted, “Forget the Holocaust — do something for us.”

The reaction of Ahmadinejad was equally enlightening: he panicked and fled. He was in such a rush that his convoy "collided several times as they tried to leave." All the while, enraged students were attacking the cars, calling him a Fascist, and trying to smash the windows.

I don't believe most people realize just how serious this combination of loss of political face and a rising anti-government student movement can be. Bear in mind, half of the population of Iran is below the age of 25. (By contrast, the median age in America is almost 37.)

I hope President Bush is paying attention: the time is riper now than ever before for us to make overtures to the "radicals" in Iran... radicals now rebelling against the peculiarly totalitarian brand of Shiite fundamentalism practiced in that country since the 1979 revolution. Were we to make common cause with the students and the populace who are bloody sick and tired of being told what to do and how to do it every second of every day, and watching their economy tank while a devastating war with America and Israel becomes every likelier, we could give not just Ahmadinejad but also the ayatollahs a lot more personally important things to concern them than mucking about in Iraq.

• We could start by openly asking the Iranian leaders -- in some forum where the people of Iran were sure to see it -- why they believe that Persians, one of the oldest and greatest cultures in the world, are too stupid to be trusted with the democracy that their next-door neighbors in Iraq and Afghanistan now enjoy, and which their near neighbor Turkey has successfully exercised for decades.
• Ask why the Iranian people cannot choose to run their own lives.
• Ask why university freedoms granted under President Mohammad Khatami have been revoked by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the ruling mullahs' own choice.
• And ask why the presidential election was rigged by systematically excluding all reformers from the contest. Are the ayatollahs afraid of their own people?

America should pointedly announce that we support freedom and democracy everywhere, even when the democratic vote goes against our interests -- and point to the Palestinian Authority as proof of that. Announce that our support is not only moral but also practical: we will move swiftly to recognize and economically help via trade agreements any new, more democratic government in Iran that takes the place of the undemocratic theocracy.

And say it all in Farsi and Arabic as well as English.

The ayatollahs do well to fear their own subjects: the expression "government by the consent of the governed" is not just a good idea; it's natural law. All governments rule only by the consent of the governed, because every government is vastly outnumbered: Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci's idea of "hegemony," which I define as "perceived fitness to rule," holds precisely that without such overt or covert consent (silence signifies that consent in totalitarian regimes), any government would fall.

The ruler's only inalienable right is the right to issue orders; but with every order, the order-hearer must decide anew whether to be an order-obeyer. If enough choose not to do so... well, you have Romania, Poland, and East Germany in 1989, the USSR in 1991, and of course Iran in 1979.

If indeed we decide (as I think we should) to bomb all of Iran's terrorist training camps, the factories where they make the inappropriately named "IEDs" that are now being used against us in Iraq by Shiite terrorists, and all the nuclear sites (especially Natanz, which should be bombed many times to get at the mass field of Uranium-enriching centrifuges buried deep underground) -- we should first alert the anti-government forces in Iran so they will be ready. Nothing specific, for there will be many government spies within that group. But we should at least ensure that the forces for "democracy" -- not Jeffersonian but at least Ataturkian -- will be ready to strike when the government forces are at their weakest. Especially if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has died, as he is expected to do sooner rather than later.

At that moment, we must actually aid them, rather than abandon them to defeat, as George H.W. Bush did to the Kurds and Shia when they rebelled against Saddam... and as President John F. Kennedy did to the brave freedom fighters who landed at the Bay of Pigs and tried to overthrow Stalinist dictator Fidel Castro in 1961.

We must understand that Iran is an origami tiger: we cannot make the mistake of agreeing with Ahmadinejad that Iran's rise and the West's decline is inevitable, irreversible, and ordained by Fate. They are far weaker than they let on -- and far weaker than the antique media will let us believe. These elections and student protests prove it.

Let us strike while the nail is hot, not sit around fiddling while freedom-fervor cools.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 22, 2006, at the time of 04:30 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 18, 2006

Ahmadinejad's Rope Pulls Taut

Those two Iranian elections we discussed in our last post on the subject (Ahmadinejad At the End of His Rope?) -- for local leaders and members of the absurdly-named Assembly of Experts -- appear so far to be going just the way that this Arab News story predicted (I found out that the site is owned and maintained by the government of Saudi Arabia, Iran's greatest rival in the area).

From our previous post:

Ahmadinejad expected his faction to win a majority of these [local offices]: he counted on a low turnout (ca. 15%), which always favors the radicals (here too!); and he thought the Self-Sacrificers would all ally together, while the anti-Khomeinists would call for boycotts... meaning the less radical voters would stay home, clearing the decks for the foam-flecked slavering jihadis to take power.

Alas for him, what happened was precisely the opposite: the conservatives have called for full participation in the elections, while many of the Self-Sacrificers are sitting it out; and it was the conservative candidates who banded together... as opposed to the radicals, who couldn't agree with each other or put personal animosity aside (perhaps because they were too caught up sacrificing each other).

Now from the Reuters story, first on the turnout numbers:

The Iranian news agency quoted officials citing turnout of around 60 percent of the 46.5 million eligible voters, higher than previous council and assembly votes. Iran's press said the turnout was a blow to Iran's "enemies".

Next, regarding the council members from Teheran, the most important of the local elections: according to Reuters, in the 2003 local elections, Ahmadinejad's allies -- called the "Self Sacrificers" -- nabbed 14 of the 15 Teheran City Council seats, while the reformers had none. But this time, the fotunes of the Self-Sacrifices have begun a decided ebb:

The Tehran City Council race was the main battleground, where Ahmadinejad's supporters competed against backers of another conservative, Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf [he took the place of Ahmadinejad when Ahmadinejad jumped from the Teheran mayorality to president of Iran], and reformists seeking a political comeback.

No official results have been announced but the semi-official Mehr news agency said Qalibaf's backers would get eight Tehran City Council seats, Ahmadinejad's backers four and reformists three. Mehr did not give a source.

So Ahmadinejad's bloc dropped from 14 of 15 seats to 4 of 15 seats... that's a plunge of over 70% of the Self-Sacrificers' power. Other local elections look to be going about the same way.

Finally, there is the election in the Assembly of Experts, which can hire and fire the Supreme Boy Sprout (current occupant: Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei). Here, President Ahmadinejad and his faction expected major movement. From our earlier post:

On the Assembly of Experts front, Ahmadinejad was hoping to pull off a virtual coup d'état: he expected to see elected a number of mullahs who support Ahmadinejad's "theological guru" (yes, that's the term the article uses, funnily enough), Ayatollah Muhamad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi. The idea would be that the Assembly would be assembled of a bunch of Yazdiites, who would then impeach and remove from office the current Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ruled since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died.

Here is what the Arab News predicted (on December 9th this year):

Ahmadinejad's plan to win control of the assembly hit two big snags.

The first was the refusal of the Council of Guardians of the Constitution, a 12-mullah body that must approve all candidates, to allow many of Ahmadinejad's friends to stand for election....

All this means that the council, almost certainly acting under instructions from Khamenehi has arranged things in such a way that no substantial change in the assembly's majority is now possible. By most account only 17 new members may eventually enter the assembly, not enough to upset its pro-Khamenehi majority.

Khamenehi has even allowed Rafsanjani to stand as a candidate, thus indicating a desire to clip Ahmadinejad's wings.

That last line is really amusing, because it turns out that Rafsanjani actually got twice as many votes than did Mesbah-Yazdi. From a later story on Reuters:

In Tehran former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a staunch critic of the president who lost to Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential vote, easily topped the vote. Political analysts said it was a significant comeback for Iran's arch pragmatist powerbroker.

Firebrand cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, a vocal backer of Ahmadinejad, trailed in sixth place with almost half the votes of Rafsanjani but enough to retain his assembly seat. Several other clerics allied to the president and Mesbah-Yazdi failed to win seats.

So far, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be batting zero: a loss of political power in the local arenas; the inability to get his own supporters into key positions on the Assembly of Experts; and a personal slap in the face when Rafsanjani was handily elected to the Assemly... but Mesbah-Yazdi is fighting for his political life!

Let's hope this is a trend and not just an exciting but one-time event: it would be a tremendous boon to the West generally, and to America and Israel in particular, if Ahmadinejad got his nose clipped.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 18, 2006, at the time of 11:42 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 11, 2006

President Bush's Way Forward

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 10, 2006

Ahmadinejad At the End of His Rope?

A fascinating article on the website of Arab News -- which I've never heard of before, but then, I'd never heard of NUMB3RS until a couple of weeks ago, so what do I know? -- dated 19, Dhul Qa'dah, 1427 (which was yesterday, as you know) claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be on the brink of a pair of rabbit punches to the gut (via Drudge).

(I should mention that the date is not certain, and could also be 18 Dhu l'Qa'dah, depending on which of 8 different Moslem calendars one uses.)

There are a couple of elections bubbling up, both to be held Friday (24 or 25, Dhu l'Qa'dah, one presumes, or the 15th of December):

• Local elections around Iran -- mayors, town councils, city aldermen, and village wiseguys;
• Elections for the Assembly of Experts, 86 sages, luminaries, soothsayers, and all-around viziers -- the guys who get to pick the Grand Poobah, or the Master Cylinder, or whatever the top man calls himself (I forget).

Ahmadinejad expected his proxies and toadies to win each of these two elections. In the first election, he wanted his band of radicals, the "Self-Sacrificers," to seize majority control of the local power centers:

At present, the various radical Khomeinist factions that supported Ahmadinejad in the last presidential election control only a third of all local government authorities. The more conservative and business-connected factions, led by former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, control a further 25 percent while the rest have majorities of independents and/or regional groupings that are always open to new alliances.

Ahmadinejad expected his faction to win a majority of these seats: he counted on a low turnout (ca. 15%), which always favors the radicals (here too!); and he thought the Self-Sacrificers would all ally together, while the anti-Khomeinists would call for boycotts... meaning the less radical voters would stay home, clearing the decks for the foam-flecked slavering jihadis to take power.

Alas for him, what happened was precisely the opposite: the conservatives have called for full participation in the elections, while many of the Self-Sacrificers are sitting it out; and it was the conservative candidates who banded together... as opposed to the radicals, who couldn't agree with each other or put personal animosity aside (perhaps because they were too caught up sacrificing each other):

With just days before polling, however, both of Ahmadinejad's calculations appear in doubt. The conservative and moderate groups have abandoned an earlier strategy to boycott the election and presented lists of candidates in more than half of the constituencies. The opposition groups acting outside the regime have also toned down their calls for boycott. Thus, the turnout may be higher than Ahmadinejad had hoped. A higher turnout could mean more middle class voters going to the polls to counterbalance the peasants and the urban poor who constitute the president's electoral base....

Even worse news for him is the failure of the Itharis (Self-sacrificers) group that forms the hard core of his support to form alliances with other radical Khomeinist groups and factions.

On the Assembly of Experts front, Ahmadinejad was hoping to pull off a virtual coup d'état: he expected to see elected a number of mullahs who support Ahmadinejad's "theological guru" (yes, that's the term the article uses, funnily enough), Ayatollah Muhamad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi. The idea would be that the Assembly would be assembled of a bunch of Yazdiites, who would then impeach and remove from office the current Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ruled since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died.

This would have cleared the path for Mesbah-Yazdi to be declared the new Supreme Scout. Ahmadinejad calculated that with the wind of his guru at his back and Legions of Terror at his feet to obey his every command, Ahmadinejad would wield supreme power in the universe, and would be able to name some months after himself.

But evidently, Ayatollah Khamenei got wind of this scheme and set about to ruin it. It seems that you can't be a candidate for the Assembly of Experts until you first pass muster with the Council of Guardians.

(Does anybody else have a hard time taking seriously a country that is run by an Assembly of Experts under the control of a Council of Guardians, commanded by the Supreme Guide, with the advice of Scoutmaster Allan opening the path, and the muscle of the Self-Sacrificers backing them up? Somehow, it reminds me of a bad episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

The Council of Guardians of the Constitution, as everyone knows, comprises 12 grumpy, old men; they are under the de facto command of the Extremely Altitudinous Panjandrum, Ayatollah Khamenei. He appears, upon close examination, to have ruled out of order some of Ahmadinejad's Experts -- and all of Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani's Experts (though he allowed Rafsanjani himself to run; go figure). But the net effect will be that there will be little if any change in the Assembly: meet the new Experts; same as the old Experts.

If this article is accurate, and not just the juvenile prank of some bored office girl with a vivid imagination (which is an accurate description of my first three college love affairs), then one must conclude that Khamenei has decided he doesn't really like Ahmadinejad that much anymore, and he wanted to rattle his cheese. ("The nail that stands up gets the grease," as the Finns say.)

And even if Khamenei kicks it, as some are saying may be about to happen (I'll believe it when I believe it), the current president of Iran won't have any greased pole to power, and may well end up on the losing side of a party power struggle.

Either way, you've got to admit that roasted chestnuts are looking might good around now.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 10, 2006, at the time of 05:35 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 07, 2006

Does Robert Kaplan Read Big Lizards?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

December 05, 2006

XVOA

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

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

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

Hostile Takeover

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

October 30, 2006

Sadr Off!

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 05, 2006

Sadr and Masri: the Final Embrace

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

August 25, 2006

Run Silent, Run Kosher

MAJOR UPDATE: Commenter Jay Tea of WhizBang notes that the German Dolphin submarines are not boomers at all but fast-attack subs; they can fire torpedo-tube launched Popeye Turbo cruise missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. So ignore all the poetic gunk about boomers (which I don't want to delete, as I kind of like it); but the rest of the post, including the point about nuclear second-strike capability, still stands, I believe!

Israel, alone among all the civilized nations in really taking Iran as seriously as it deserves, has just ordered two more nuclear-capable Dolphin submarines from the Germans.

I do not except even the United States. I believe that George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld truly take Iran as seriously as they ought; but they're not the whole government or even the whole of the Executive. In particular, Congress does not really grasp the enormity of the threat from Iran. And since we are not a dictatorship, the president cannot simply decree an appropriate response.

But Israel lies under such immediate and obvious existential threat, that there is likely not a single member of the Israeli cabinet who does not feel Persian fear in the pit of his stomach. They may disagree over what to do, but that is for the same reason that different bomb-squad members may disagree over which wire to cut: everybody understands how dangerous a bomb is, but nobody wants to snip the wrong wire.

However, there are some things everyone in Israel can agree upon; and one of those is that they desperately need a "second strike" capability. To the extent that the Iranians have any rational survival instinct left, if they believe they would be wiped out by Israeli retaliation, they might think a second time about launching a first nuclear strike, should they manage to obtain (by cyclotron or A.Q. Khan) nuclear weapons.

Hence the Dolphins. You will hear a lot about the "first strike" capability of the German subs; but that's not important. The Israelis already have a first-strike ability via land-based missiles. But under an Iranian nuclear strike, all known or even vaguely suspected Israeli missile silos will be hit many times.

Now the "temple weapons" are buried deep and hard; but it's still possible that several nuclear warheads dropped atop them would crack or seal off the top of the silos, rendering the Israeli weapons completely useless. In fact, it doesn't even need to be true: it's a catastrophe even if the Iranians just falsely think it's true.

But even the most powerful nuclear weapon, hundreds of megatons, has one terrible flaw that spoils everything: you must have at least some idea of where your target is in order to shoot at it! That, of course, is precisely the point of a nuclear submarine.

Subs come in two basic flavors: fast-attack and boomers. The former are tactical weapons: you use them to attack surface shipping, other subs, and maybe even aircraft, depending on their armament. They move quickly, and they spend a lot of time at the surface.

A boomer has but one mission: to get lost. It finds a nice, shady, well-protected spot, then sinks to the ocean floor... and stays there, silent, still, waiting with a terrible patience for the end of the world.

Every so often, it will raise a wire antenna just far enough to be able to communicate in short burst-transmissions with the high command, to find out if they still exist. If they do, off to Davy Jones' locker goes the boomer once more, hibernating until the next contact.

If contact is lost, the captain of the sub has to make a decision that spells life or death not just for the sub (a trivial concern) but for potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of other people.

God forbid a captain guesses wrong -- in either direction.

While the rest of the world plays diplomatic footsie with the mad mullahs, Israel, at least, is trying to drag them forward in time. Not to the present; nobody thinks the Iranians are ready for a twenty-first century world. But at least into the era of modernity... the days of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, the geomilitary theory which prevented the West and the Soviet Bloc (and later Red China) from engaging in actual nuclear warfare.

MAD is a deterrant strategy: no bloc can launch a nuclear attack against any of the others, because the attack is certain not to be 100% successful... and the survivors will still have a robust and functional retaliatory capability. Thus, the only certainty is that the attacker will be counterattacked by nukes from a country he just nuked. A country which has already suffered the worst has no reason to shrink from killing tens of millions of the enemy... including as many of the Dear Leaders as they can get.

But MAD is also a quintessentially 20th century strategy; thus, a secondary effect of Israel's move towards a fleet of boomers is that Iran may be dragged, against the will of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his sock puppet, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at least into the last century... which would be a heck of an improvement from its current 7th-century worldview.

(That has always been my biggest objection to the term "Islamofascist": it fools us into believing the jihadis are more sophisticated than they really are, mistaking them for a 20th-century socialist perversion. We mislead ourselves into thinking that they think like we, when in fact they think like bloodthirsty satraps from the Dark Ages.

(The error may be fatal to our civilization. After "know thyself," the second most important dictum in warfare is "know thine enemy like thyself.")

Let's hope the Israelis have the right idea, and that Persia can be delivered, headfirst and screaming, into modernity, like a squawling newborn shoved from the dark womb into the bright light of the outside world. If so, that's more than half the battle -- because we already know how to deal with a modern, totalitarian dictatorship.

Oh, for the good old days of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 25, 2006, at the time of 06:03 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

The "Curious Omission" Gets Curiouser and Curiouser

Three days ago, we noted a curious omission from the New York Times and the Associated Press stories about Israel's commando raid deep into the Bekaa Valley Saturday: while both of those two media sources, as well as the Reuters account, all found occasion to quote chief U.N. envoy to Beirut Terje Roed-Larsen pronouncing Israel's raid "a clear violation of the ceasefire," only Reuters added a second quotation from Mr. Roed-Larsen: that if it were true, as the evidence clearly demonstrates, that Hezbollah were attempting to rearm in Lebanon... then that too would be a violation:

Israel said the operation, in which commandos were airlifted into the area by helicopter, was defensive and was designed to disrupt weapons supplies to Hizbollah from Syria and Iran.

It denied it had violated the resolution, which allows it to act in self-defense, and accused Hizbollah of doing so by smuggling weapons. Roed-Larsen said that if the guerrilla group was [sic] found to have smuggled weapons, it would indeed be in breach of the truce.

Well, here it is, 72 hours later... and now it appears that even Reuters has forgotten that vital piece of information. In a new article, Reuters -- perhaps having been teased unmercifully by its playmates for its unseemly faux pas -- repeats the point that the UN condemned Israel's raid as a violation... but they make no reference whatsoever to the fact that the same UN representative likewise condemned Hezbollah's provocation. Exhibit A:

"From Israel, we expect a renewed effort, this time truly binding, to respect the ceasefire," [Italian] Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema told La Repubblica newspaper.

"It's fair to expect that Hizbollah put down their weapons, but we cannot send our troops to Lebanon if the (Israeli) army keeps shooting."

The U.N.-backed truce was shaken by an Israeli commando raid in eastern Lebanon's Bekaa Valley on Saturday, which the U.N. deemed a ceasefire violation.

Exhibit B:

Israel says Saturday's raid was a defensive action and, as such, does not constitute a breach of U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, which brought the war to an end.

The Jewish state has accused Hizbollah of violating the resolution by smuggling arms from Syria and has said its jets need to fly over Lebanon to counter such activities.

So on the left hand, we have the fact that "the U.N. deemed" Israel's raid violated the ceasefire; while on the right hand, we are told only that "Israel says" they were responding to an earlier violation by Hezbollah, which is merely an "assus[ation]" by (of course) "the Jewish state." Darn those Jews! Cheating again!

But on the third hand, Reuters itself, in the earlier article, admitted that it was not just Israel that considered rearming a violation; the U.N. itself agreed (conditionally), in the person of the rude Mr. Larsen -- I'm sorry, I meant Mr. Roed-Larsen -- an official U.N. spokesman. (The condition was that if Hezbollah tried to rearm, then that would be a violation; Roed-Larsen had not personally investigated whether that was true or not.)

As Sgt. Garcia says in yet another episode of Zorro -- see what I mean about that television show being the font of all wisdom? -- "have you not heard it said, never let your right hand know what your left hand is doing?"

So the omission just got, to quote Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, "curiouser and curiouser."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 22, 2006, at the time of 03:17 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 15, 2006

Tally Ho

Avoiding the patriotic chest-thumping of the Bush administration; dismissing the self-serving doubletalk of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz; brushing off the triumphalist squawking of Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah; and shunning the tantrum of defeatism by Jed Babbin and his ilk, let's take a moment to tally up, in as unbiased a fashion as we can, who won, who lost, and in what ways, in the recent dustup between Israel and Hezbollah.

Alas, much of the result is opaque, depending still on future events. But I'll try my best to make predictions.

Let's go through each player in turn, starting with...

Israel and Hezbollah

The war clearly was not a "win" for Israel; but that does not necessarily mean it was a "loss," either.

The Israeli hostages: Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev remain as hostages in Hezbollah's hands, though securing their release was a major reason that Israel went to war in the first place (not the major reason; that was to decimate -- not obliterate -- the threat posed to Israel by Hezbollah's proximity to the Blue Line border). On this goal, Israel was utterly thwarted.

However, Hezbollah itself was also thwarted on this issue. When Hezbollah sent an 80-man raiding party into Israel to kill some Israeli soldiers and capture hostages, they were slightly successful: they only netted two "bargaining chips," despite a very strong incursion; two, however, is better for Hezbollah than none, so this has to be accounted a minor victory.

However, they didn't seize the hostages simply for fun. They intended to exchange them for duly convicted Hezbollah criminals serving their sentences in Israeli jails for various horrific crimes against Israelis. And on that larger goal, so far Hezbollah appears to have lost, and lost badly.

During the upcoming prisoner exchange, there is every indication that Israel will only offer some of the high muckety-mucks of Hezbollah captured during the war, which isn't at all what Hassan Nasrallah had in mind when he ordered Israeli soldiers grabbed in the first place. In fact, at the end of the war, Israel holds considerably more Hezbollah prisoners of war than Hezbollah holds hostages.

On this issue, far from being a big win for Hezbollah, the terrorists lost big time: they managed to capture two Israeli IDF members, but only at the cost of a much larger number of higher ranking Hezbollah members. I would have to rate this issue either a draw or, if anything, a slight advantage to Israel (I'll discuss the PR damage later).

The Katyusha and other rocket forces: not enough were destroyed, and too many (nearly 4,000) were launched into Israel; Israel did not shoot down any of these missiles; they were never able to stop the launches.

On the other hand, the rockets proved far more effective at scaring Israelis than killing them. On the whole, Hezbollah achieved a minor victory on this issue.

Actual combat at arms: Israel won hands down. At the beginning of the war, there was a boatload of chatter about how much tougher and stronger Hezbollah was than anyone had anticipated. Iran had heavily trained Hezbollah -- the forward-deployed SpecOps branch of the mullah's military -- and they were armed with much more effective anti-personnel, anti-tank, and anti-aircraft weapons. The implication was clear: this time, the Israelis would blunt their swords against the stone wall of Hezbollah resistance.

In reality, Hezbollah was beaten like a bass drum in every face-to-face encounter with Israel. On those few occasions where Olmert actually consented to allow the IDF to fight, they killed the highly trained Hezbollah "soldiers" at a ratio of about 7:1 or 8:1, sometimes much higher. Many of the IDF deaths resulted from sniper fire and rocketry; remove those, and the overall ratio of kills is probably more than 6:1 in Israel's favor.

Hezbollah killed a few Israeli Merkava tanks; but Israel overran numerous Hezbollah "strongholds" and destroyed many rocket launchers (not enough of the latter, however). And Hezbollah, for all its fighting and Israel's hesitation, was nevertheless driven back relentlessly.

Israel gets points for their actual combat victories on the ground.

Hezbollah proximity to the border: prior to the war, Hezbollah enjoyed clear and unchallenged control of all Lebanese territory from somewhat north of the Litani River all the way down to the border, plus the entirety of the Bekaa Valley and large portions of Beirut. To Israel, the most immediately threatening Hezbollah position was that between the Litani and the Blue Line (the internationally accepted border between Israel and Lebanon).

At the moment, Hezbollah no longer controls that portion of Lebanon; but their hold over the rest of their territory further north is undiminished. For Hezbollah to reclaim south Lebanon, the Lebanese Army and the UNIFIL force would both have to abdicate their joint central mission. While that is certainly not outside the realm of possibility, it hasn't happened yet.

And it's unlikely to happen in the next couple of months; as we've said a number of times on Big Lizards, a lot can happen in that time -- including perhaps the collapse of Olmert's Monster and the election of a more stable government with a prime minister and defense minister who will actually fight next time (see infra).

At this point, I must take the data as they currently exist, not a blind guess about what might happen months from now. At the moment, Israel succeeded in pushing Hezbollah back by and large across the Litani. Those ten Katyushas that were fired at Israeli forces last night were fired from central Lebanon -- north of the Litani -- not from the south. This is a major military victory for Israel.

Public relations: this is the point on which Hezbollah achieved its greatest victory, accompanied by Israel's most substantial loss. The world -- not just the Arab world -- is not looking at this war in the nuanced fashion found on this site: they see only that "tiny" Hezbollah stood up to "giant" Israel, toe to toe... and that it was Israel who blinked and begged for a ceasefire.

It's not true' but Hezbollah has been as brilliant at spinning straw into gold as Rumplestiltskin. The world has bought into Nasrallah's fantasy.

Of course, it's the outcome that most of the world (including most of antisemitic Europe) desperately wanted to see; and it's arguable that no matter what happened on the ground, that's the result that Hezbollah would declare and much of the world would believe: Israel could have slaughtered 9,000 Hezbollah fighters and driven the organization all the way back up into Syria, and Nasrallah would still have declared a historic victory while the ummah cheered and shot fireworks.

Nevertheless, Israel badly lost the PR war. The loss was inevitable; but Israel managed to lose it worse than they needed to do.

Political fallout: the stature of Hezbollah has been dramatically enhanced, not only throughout Lebanon but the entire ummah.

But in Lebanon in particular, Hezbollah went from being distrusted invaders from Iran and Syria -- to being national heroes of Lebanese sovereignty and religious heroes of rising Islamic power. If elections are held anytime soon in Lebanon, Hezbollah will surely do much better than they did in the May-June 2005 elections.

In the 2005 race, the Rafik Hariri Martyr List won a clear majority of 72 of the 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament; Hezbollah won 14 seats and were offered two positions in the cabinet. However, if elections were held today, it would not be surprising if Hezbollah nearly reversed that result.

Of course, the Hariri bloc will do everything it can to prevent elections from being held anytime soon; and given a cooling-off period -- and especially if the war resumes later with more positive results for Israel in round two -- it's probable that Hezbollah's actual electoral gains will be kept to a minimum.

Still, I cannot see a situation where they would not pick up seats, no matter how long the ruling bloc manages to delay. Thus, it's a political victory for Hezbollah, but not as much as many might expect.

Contrariwise, the war was little short of electoral disaster for the Olmert government. Already shaky -- a weak coalition between Kadima and Labor with a lot of minor parties needed to make even a bare majority of the Knesset -- the conduct of the war by the two coalition partners, Prime Minister Olmert of Kadima and Defense Minister Peretz, the head of Labor, is widely seen by Israelis across the political spectrum as incompetent to the point of imbecility.

The Israeli Defense Force, the only universally respected institution in Israel, has become open and vocal in their scorn for the political "leadership." I do not see how Olmert's Monster can survive the next few months; a quick vote of no-confidence, followed by general elections 90 days later, will completely change the scene in Israel, one way or another.

Likud is likely the big political winner: they came in only fourth in the last election, running not only behind Kadima and Labor but also the radical Sephardic religious party Shas. Over the next couple of months, I suspect anger at both Kadima and Labor will only deepen, as will the fear of terrorism and Hezbollah on the part of Israeli citizens, no matter what their party. If new elections are held in the next four months, I predict that Likud will win an outright majority, or at least so close to one that they need only ally with other right-leaning parties and can exclude Labor and the Israeli Left altogether.

Kadima will not survive this political catastrophe; I think everyone in Israel now understands that it was a creature entirely of Ariel Sharon, and it should have died with his his permanent incapacitation.

But Likud's victory does not necessarily mean Binyamin Netanyahu's victory. It's hard to tell. Netanyahu may manage to resuscitate a career that many had written off as dead, but it's not certain. I suspect it will definitely lead to the restoration of Shaul Mofaz, demoted to make way for Peretz, to his previous position as Defense Minister (unless he becomes PM).

So the political winners will be Hezbollah in Lebanon and Likud in Israel -- and Israel itself, in my opinion, because I have always hated Labor and I never believed in Kadima's existence for a moment; the losers are the Hariri bloc in Lebanon and Kadima and Labor in Israel.

Iran and Syria

Iran fomented a war between Israel and Hezbollah ("let's you and him fight!"), gained in international prestige as the only Moslem power to successful stand up to Israel, briefly distracted some attention from its own nuclear program, and managed to damage the "Little Satan"... all this while paying only a very small price:

• Iran was not directly attacked;
• Its catspaw Syria was not directly attacked;

• Iran's Hezbollah was cut up some; but the mullahs and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad don't care if Hezbollah members are captured or even killed.

  They're like the cockroach army eternally battling Fat Freddy's Cat in the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers underground comic: break another 1,221,785 soldiers out of egg storage!

The only price they paid was in the poor performance of Hezbollah in the field; this casts much doubt on Hezbollah's ability to serve as a devastating counterattack in the event the United States attacks Iran.

On balance, Iran is a winner in this conflict, as is its sock puppet, Syria, but not huge winners.

The United States

The United States demonstrated that it is willing to give Israel every opportunity to defeat our common enemies; the fact that Israel squandered that opportunity doesn't turn us into losers.

We showed that we could negotiate an agreement through the UN that was considerably more pro-Israel than such agreements usually end up being. UNSCR 1701 clearly ascribed blame for starting the war entirely to Hezbollah, and Hezbollah is held to much harsher terms than is Israel. The agreement is supposed to lock in a number of gains made by Israel -- though whether it will succeed in doing so is doubtful (because of the toothless nature of the United Nations).

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and UN Ambassador John Bolton proved in particular considerably more adroit than previous diplomats (Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright) at eliciting pro-Israeli clauses and killing off anti-Israeli, pro-terrorist clauses; they work very well as a team, and Condi showed that she was neither a lightweight nor an "Arabist."

From what I can tell, Israelis recognize the extraordinary latitude President Bush gave to Olmert, and they are very grateful; their anger seems to be directed entirely at Olmert and Peretz -- and, per Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.Gen. Dan Halutz of the Israeli Air Force -- for not taking advantage of America's defense to press the offensive and really chew up Hezbollah -- Israelis don't blame us for Olmert's ineptness.

On the whole, except insofar as the entire civilized world loses whenever barbarity is not soundly trounced, the United States probably won slightly in this conflict: we proved we had the willingness and the ability to guard the backs of our friends.

The Big Picture

This is why I say that overall, neither Hezbollah nor Israel won this war; both lost. Hezbollah lost the actual ground war worse than Israel did; but Israel lost the PR war worse than did Hezbollah. Iran/Syria and the United States both had slight wins; and Europe showed itself to be, once again, feckless and unreliable.

The result will probably be an emboldened Hezbollah and an increase in morale for radical Islam, but a turn by Israel towards the right and a hardening of attitudes by the Israeli citizenry. Hezbollah's power within the government of Lebanon will probably increase, while Likud will rise quickly within Israel.

Round two of the Clash of the Titans will probably come before the year is out.

I agree that Israel did not do anywhere near as well as it could have, had it a different government. But it's just plain irresponsible to don sackcloth, roll in ashes, and proclaim a total and complete victory by the forces of darkness. For heaven's sake, results were mixed on all sides.

Let's all just get a grip, evaluate all aspects of the war results, and rationally decide on a future course of action.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 15, 2006, at the time of 03:23 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

August 08, 2006

Fortnight to Apocalypse: the Moslem Millennium

Professor Bernard Lewis, who knows more about Islam than any other Westerner (and likely more than virtually any Moslem), paints a chilling portrait of Iranian MAD-ness in today's Wall Street Journal. Alas, it lies behind the iron subscription; but not to worry, Big Lizards shall tell you all you need to know about it. "Never first, always final!"

Professor Lewis contrasts the Soviets, India and Pakistan, and other fairly civilized countries -- nations with every intention of surviving beyond the lifespan of their current leaders -- with the apocalyptic and nihilist worldview of Iran. Against the former, the military concept of "mutual assured destruction," or MAD, actually deterred; the Soviets did not attack us with nukes, because they knew we would respond in kind, and both countries would be utterly annihilated. Thus, the aggressors were stymied in using their most potent weapons.

But Iran has no such fear -- for the Iranian leaders, from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei through the ruling mullahs down to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, believe in an imminent Moslem millenarianism: that any day now, the final, momentous struggle between good and evil will culminate in armageddon.

A great battle will ensue, during which the forces of evil (that's us) will drive the faithful back and back. And as they teeter on the brink of oblivion, driven there by us "world devourers," as the late Ayatollah Khomeini called the infidels, that will trigger the return of the Twelfth Imam, the "Hidden Imam" whom Allah has hidden from the world until that moment arrives. This Muhammed al-Mahdi will personally lead the armies of Islam against the faithless (that is, everybody who isn't a Moslem), defeat and destroy them, and the entire world will be one shining Islamic crescent on a hill.

This version of apocalypse is, of course, no more silly than any other form of millenarianism. The difference is that this millennial group has an army, and air force, a missile force, and will soon have nuclear warheads to fulfill their eschatonian fantasies.

Earlier, I said the Iranian leaders believe this could happen "any day now;" but in fact, there is one date in particular that stands out, both because of historical significance within Islam and also because Ahmadinejad himself has made cryptic references to it: August 22nd by our calendar. In his dry, understated, British way, Prof. Lewis explains:

In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time -- Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined. Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. This was at first reported as "by the end of August," but Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement was more precise.

What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to "the farthest mosque," usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

But what does this mean for us? The leaders of Iran (not necessarily the youthful Persian population) see war, not as a horrible event to be avoided, but rather as the natural state of this world: Islam divides the earth into two spheres, the ummah or "Moslemdom" (the abode of peace), and the sphere of the infidel, which is the abode of strife or war.

Nor do they see even catastrophic losses as defeat, for what matters to them is entirely what happens in the next world, not in this one. Back to Lewis:

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead -- hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

That last sentence contains a variation on the line that Ralph Peters uses in nearly every column, but which appears to have originated with Cal Thomas:

While we argue about the place of God in U.S. society, our enemies are not so conflicted. They believe their god wants us dead. No amount of munitions, money and Marines is going to stay these fanatics from their ordained rounds. To them, death is victory. To us, it is tragedy. They are counting on us not wanting to die. They welcome death as a promotion. They believe we will cut and run if they can spill enough of our blood. We regard our blood as precious. They see theirs as the currency of martyrdom.

August 22nd is but a fortnight away; if the Iranians do not have nuclear weapons today, they will not have them in two weeks, either. But we know they have missiles capable of reaching Israel; and after all, nukes are not the only form that weapons of mass destruction can take.

Will Iran precipitate a conflagration, the final holocaust that will bring back the Hidden Imam and usher in the Moslem Millennium? Since we do not know, we must prepare for the worst: we must be ready with policy in case Iran directly attacks Israel on that date, thus widening a local war into a regional superwar... which could become a hyperwar -- call it the Tenth Crusade -- of Christendom (joined, perhaps, by Atheistan) against the Ummah.

We cannot allow ourselves to be sucker-punched again, as we were on September 11th. This time, we must make it clear that we're well aware of Iran's aspirations, and we're prepared to offer martyrdom to as many jihadis as want it, all to protect our own "abode."

Just a few minutes ago, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (ret), speaking on Hugh Hewitt (which will be the Jed Babbin Show for the next two weeks... is Hugh hiding in the mountains until after August 22nd?), stated that the Israelis have finally decided, as Big Lizards predicted they would, to widen the war: they are sending in a lot more troops under the command of their "number two" directly under Danny Halutz -- by which I presume McInerney means Deputy Chief of the General Staff Moshe Kaplinsky -- with orders to occupy everything south of the Litani River.

McInerney also discussed the multinational force (MNF) that would be required to truly replace the Israelis as a buffer to keep Hezbollah far enough away that they could not restart the war as soon as they were tanned, rested, and ready to resume their march to the apocalypse. Such a force (he envisions French, Italian, and Turkish troops) would have to comprise:

• One and a half to two divisions;
• Enough cavalry (armor) to forcibly disarm, per UNSCR 1559, Hezbollah in despite of Iranian anti-tank missiles;
• Air power;
• A command and control structure of its own;
• Rules of engagement that allow not simply defensive response but pursuit and maybe even pre-emptive attacks;
• And a long committment... years and years.

McInerney recognizes the slim chance of such a force materializing; but he still says (and I agree) that Israel should not even consider withdrawing from Lebanon until either such a force is actually called into operation and ready to deploy... or until Hezbollah is annihilated in Lebanon.

In fact, Israel will have plenty of time: even if nations enough agree to participate in such an MNF, it will literally take months for it to come together, arm, train up, and actually assume positions. During this time, Israel must stay in southern Lebanon, else Hezbollah will flood right back to where they were, and the MNF could not assume its duties (they would be peace-keepers, not peace-makers).

But the first test might come in a scant two weeks; we may be only a fortnight from the "apocalypse." Let's hope not, but we'll know before the month is out.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 08, 2006, at the time of 05:59 PM | Comments (21) | TrackBack

Newsflash: Israel Commits Near War Crime, Almost, Except They Didn't. Quite.

This is a staggering charge that should, if there is a God, swiftly turn American public opinion against the Israelis, who have shown themselves to be such oppressors and aggressors against peaceful Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon. The headline from AP says it all:

Israeli Strike Kills 13 Near Mourners
by Ahmed Mantash [evidently his usual parther in fair and balanced reporting, Moshe Pippik, was unavailable for this effort]

Mourners in a funeral procession for Israeli airstrike victims scattered in panic Tuesday as warplanes again unleashed missiles that hit buildings and killed 13 people, witnesses and officials said.

The first missile struck a building about five minutes after the march by about 1,500 people had passed by, killing one person and wounding five.

In this almost war crime, which would have been an atrocity if the Israelis had actually struck the funeral procession, and was averted only by their underhanded trick of not actually striking the funeral procession, the Israelis had the temerity to strike a building some time after a funeral procession had passed by, frightening the mourners -- who imagined that they must have been the targets, and the Israelis were simply too dilatory and missed them.

Horrors!

To see how terrified these near-martyrs were, who almost suffered what would have been a crime against humanity (if the Israelis had actually done it, that is), just read their terror-stricken response:

The blast was close enough to send mourners screaming, "Allahu akbar!" or "God is great!" Some broke away from the procession, while others continued on.

I hope we all see how evil and horrific those Israelis are: if they had actually committed the despicable act that they didn't commit, targeting innocent mourners in a funeral procession (whose first reaction to being frightened is to scream "Allahu akbar!"), then they would have been obviously evil and horrific; are we going to let them slide from this just charge, merely on the flimsy excuse that they did not, in fact, do it?

I think not. Let heads roll! Let revulsion sweep the world! The Associated Press is absolutely correct to highlight would could have been a ghastly and brutal attack on unarmed mourners, except that they didn't quite attack them. Their obviously concocted claim should not save them from the world's ignominy and opprobrium:

Witnesses said one of the destroyed houses belonged to Sheik Mustafa Khalifeh, a cleric linked to Hezbollah, but it was unclear if he was among the casualties. Most Hezbollah officials have left their homes and offices since the offensive began nearly a month ago.

Ghaziyeh has been targeted several times, but the attacks Monday and Tuesday were the heaviest. The town was overflowing with displaced people, who have swelled its population to 23,000.

After all, besides having the gall to attack a city that contained some displaced people, Israel is holding up the peace process by not agreeing to withdraw completely and trust the word of the hitherto thoroughly compromised Lebanese government that they will, in fact, take up the slack and prevent Hezbollah from returning. In fact, even Hezbollah itself has embraced this plan... which must prove they want only peace:

Lebanon put its offers on the table: pledging up to 15,000 troops to a possible peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon and saying Hezbollah's days of running a state within a state would end. The military plan had added significance since it was backed by the two Hezbollah members on Lebanon's Cabinet - apparently showing a willingness for a lasting pact by the Islamic militants and their main sponsors, Iran and Syria.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora on Tuesday praised Hezbollah's resistance, but said it was time for Lebanon to "impose its full control, authority and presence" over the war-weary country.

"There will be no authority, no one in command, no weapons other than those of the Lebanese state," he said on Al-Arabiya television.

Since it is clear to all with eyes to see that the Lebanese government is not in any way beholden to or even connected with Hezbollah, whose representatives sit not only in parliament but in the cabinet itself, surely such oral assurances should satisfy Israel. What more could they demand?

After all, the world knows that Israel has already been crushed in this war they started; AP has announced ever since Israel rolled into Lebanon that the war was a quagmire and could never be won by the oppressors. I mean, the Israelis. After all, how long can they go on accepting such losses as this?

Some of the fiercest skirmishes broke out around the village of Bint Jbail, a Hezbollah stronghold that Israeli has tried to capture for weeks. An Israeli solider and 25 Hezbollah guerrillas were killed, the Israeli military said.

Hezbollah TV also reported pre-dawn attacks on Israeli forces near the Mediterranean town of Naqoura, about 2 1/2 miles north of the border. The Israeli military said two reserve soldiers were killed in the area.

The latest casualties brought the number of people killed in Lebanon to at least 684, while the Israeli death toll was 100.

And after all, what have the Israelis to fear from this wonderful peace peace proposal, supported unanimously by the foreign ministers of the member states of the Arab League -- a group that is well known to harbor only friendly feelings towards Israel? Lebanon has pledged to ensure their coalition partner Hezbollah has no control over southern Lebanon, which currently dominates the Lebanese Army by superior force of arms, supplied by their patron Iran transshipped through their other patron, Syria (which controlled Lebanon absolutely for 29 years):

Saniora's government voted unanimously to send 15,000 troops to stand between Israel and Hezbollah should a cease-fire take hold and Israeli forces withdraw.

The move was an attempt to show that Lebanon has the will and ability to assert control over its south, where Hezbollah rules with near autonomy bolstered by channels of aid and weapons from Iran and Syria. Lebanon has avoided any attempt to implement a two-year-old U.N. resolution calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah, fearing it could touch off civil unrest....

Qatar Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassem Al Thani warned of "a civil war in Lebanon" between Hezbollah and government forces if the Security Council does not make changes to the U.S.-French draft resolution [that is, if Hezbollah does not get its way]. "Lebanon won't bear it," he told Al-Jazeera.

With such ironclad assurances, surely even Israel must give way at last to world public opinion! After all, the full weight of international condemnation is about to fall across the Israelis' necks, and it must surely destroy them, the way they nearly tried to almost destroy those innocent pallbearers and mourners in what might have been a crime against humanity, if only Israel had actually done it. For lo! see how the quagmire thickens:

In Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Council said it plans to convene a special session this week to consider taking action against Israel for its Lebanon offensive.

Against such force and power arrayed, what aggressor dare stand against?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 08, 2006, at the time of 01:34 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

August 06, 2006

Yet Another "18½ Minute Gap"

Way Back on May 30th, 2005, I posted on Patterico's Pontifications an article titled The 18½ Minute Gap, which I subsequently reposted here on Big Lizards a year later as a "Scaley Classic."

This was the central conceit of that post:

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.... [Emphasis added, as the BL style has changed in the last year and a quarter.]

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.

The surreal argument advanced by Democrats -- now including nearly all of them, other than the soon to be unemployed Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT, 80%) -- is that we should have waited until the last, possible moment before the invasion window closed, just on the off chance that it was all a terrible mistake: that there were no WMD programs, that Saddam Hussein was really a nice guy, and all things black and ugly we thought we knew about him were just lies, spread by his competitors.

And indeed, the Left seized upon as vindication the supposed "failure" to find WMD, which was actually a deliberate decision by the CIA -- which had always opposed the invasion -- to refuse to label as "WMD" any program, device, chemical, or biological sample that had any conceivable non-war purpose, no matter how implausible or even ludicrous.

Thus, 55-gallon drums of Cyclosarin sitting in camouflaged bunkers near empty chemical rocket shells were not chemical-warfare tools; perhaps the Iraqis were simply obsessed with having aphid-free ammo dumps.

And those mobile labs that were described so accurately by Iraqi defectors who had worked on them, and who also described their use in developing chemical and biological munitions, were dismissed by the CIA as "mobile hydrogen-production factilities"... despite the fact that Iraq, being an oil-drililng and refining country, would routinely make tens of thousands of liters of hydrogen commercially and store it in tanks that were a fraction of the weight of those labs -- and of course were already ready for use.

Perhaps, on the very eve of the Coalition invasion, Saddam Hussein was simply focused like a laser beam on protecting Iraq's critical supply of weather balloons.

Rather than acting with alacrity in invading that country when we were pretty sure -- as we are now, especially with the wealth of new finds of the progress of creating WMD and the possible stockpiles moved to Syria -- the Left wanted us to wait until we could prove that Hussein was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. (In fact, it was more like what Patterico wants the standard to be in death-penalty cases: "guilty beyond all possible doubt.")

As this standard would have put the possibility of military action forever out of range under any circumstances, since intelligence gathering is never as certain as all that, accepting it amounts to saying that no matter how serious the threat to the United States, we can never go to war -- even if the bad guys attack us first -- so long as they refuse to admit it was they.

I called that the 18½ Minute Gap; and now we have another example: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah.

As it turns out, Israel (along with most of the rest of us, certainly including myself) thought they dominated that terrorist group so completely that the war would be quick and decisive. And perhaps it would have been, had Israel attacked with the seriousness of purpose of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982 (their last invasion of Lebanon, against Yassir Arafat's PLO, in which Manachem Begin used nine divisions and 800 tanks)... rather than the limp-wristed response of Ehud Barak in 2000: Barak jerked the troops out of Lebanon in such a panicky way that he simulated a rout following a military defeat, which had never actually happened.

For whatever reason, Israel has now discovered that Hezbollah is far stronger than anyone imagined; and the victories Israel has achieved -- and there are several important ones -- are neither decisive nor persuasive. Contrariwise, Israel is in the process of inadvertently convincing the Arab that Israel is a paper camel who can be defeated.

Democrats are triumphant: the hated Zionist entity is being battered, giving leftists the enormous satisfaction of a great, big, fat, wet I told you so! The Left wags its finger in Israel's face, like Mom after you almost shoot your eye out with that BB-gun you finally got, and says, in essence, see? look at all the trouble you bought for yourself by refusing to listen to us... you should have left well enough alone.

But this argument boils down to the question of what is "well enough." Had Israel simply done nothing -- or worked through the "international diplomatic community," which amounts to the same thing -- would they really have been better off than they are right at this very moment?

I say no, they would have been far worse off... even if they end up losing this war. To imagine they'd have been better off, a Democrat must think that this war was avoidable, that it need never have happened. That if Israel hadn't attacked Hezbollah and just suffered the missiles and kidnappings in stoic silence, they would have so impressed the terrorists with their sang froid that the latter would have written a letter like the one Sean Connery (Mulay Achmed Mohammed el-Raisuli the Magnificent, Lord of the Riff, Sultan to the Berbers, Last of the Barbary Pirates) wrote to Brian Keith (Teddy Roosevelt), telling TR that he was the wind to the Raisuli's lion), then bow out of any future conflict with Israel.

But that is errant nonsense. Hezbollah, the "Party of God," believes it has a holy mission to annihilate the Jews. Hezbollah is not a stand-alone terrorist group; in reality, it is nothing less than the third branch of Iran's armed forces -- their forward-deployed special-operations unit. Both Hezbollah and Iran are singing from the same hymnal (er... perhaps I could have chosen a better expression) anent the obliteration of Israel and driving the Jews into the Mediterranean.

Nor are they slackers or fulyaks about it: Iran's frantic effort to develop nuclear warheads for their intermediate-range ballistic missiles raises at least the strong possibility that the purpose of their soon-to-be nukes is not simply to "extort" the rest of the world, but also to set in motion the holocaust that will bring the advent of the "Twelfth imam," Muhammad al-Mahdi, whom Shi'a believe has been hidden from the world by God and will reappear at the end of the reign of the tyrants (non-Moslems), forcing (Shiite) Islam upon the entire world as the global religion.

And Hezbollah's pace of attack on Israel has grown steadily year after year since the 2000 pullout from Lebanon; there is no reason to believe they would abruptly stop or even level off.

The greatest probability is that this war was actually inevitable, not "evitable;" and that if the Israelis hadn't forced it now, the other side would have forced it later... at a time and place and in a manner of their own choosing, when they were even stronger, relative to Israel, than they are today.

Thank God the Israelis responded to Hezbollah's provocation by launching even the limited war that they did at 20 minutes to midnight; because if they had waited until two minutes to midnight, as the Left demanded they should have -- or even two minutes after midnight, as the Left actually believes -- then as bad as it is right now, it would have been a hundred times worse.

In their hearts, I believe most Democrats, liberals, and lefties know this; which means it's not an argument about the means, when and how Israel should have struck, but rather about the end itself: who wins? The Left collectively wants the jihadist savages to win and hated Western civilization to lose.

As to why they want that... well, that's a psychodrama for another day.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 06, 2006, at the time of 01:50 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

August 02, 2006

Airport Blogging: At Last!

Having missed our plane out of Buffalo to La Guardia (customs, navigational difficulties, don't ask), we've got plenty of time to blog while we wait for the next flight.

At long last, the Israelis have done what they should have done in the first place: a solid invasion force of one full division into Lebanon. (Actually, I'd rather see two divisions; but I never spent even one day in the Army, and my Navy experience is less than nothing in a situation like this... so what do I know?)

Israel pressed the first full day of a massive new ground attack, sending 8,000 troops into southern Lebanon on Wednesday and seizing five people it said were Hezbollah fighters in a dramatic airborne raid on a northeastern town. Hezbollah retaliated with its deepest strikes yet into Israel, firing a record number of more than 160 rockets.

Many moons ago, when I blogged on the Gaza pullout (it was back on Captain's Quarters); a, I supported it... but not on the silly grounds that all the other supporters cited. I never had any illusions about a "peace process." Rather, I saw the pullout as an opportunity to make clear that Gaza -- well, the entire Palestinian Authority (PA) -- was a separate country... and as such would be held to the same standards as any other sovereign nation.

In particular, if they engaged in the "normal" sort of terrorist attacks against Israel, the Jewish state would no longer be constrained by the peculiarity of being an occupier; they could respond with the full force of a nation responding to violent attack by another nation... with a war.

Now I was always opposed to the pullout from Lebanon, since Israel never claimed to be or acted as an occupier; it held only a security zone, and only to prevent Hezbollah from getting close enough to attack Israel. They ignored my advice (oddly enough) and pulled out under Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000... worse, Barak kept accelerating the pullout until at the end, it resembled a panicked rout -- despite the fact that Israel never suffered any military defeat.

Ne'ertheless, they departed so precipitously that they left armor behind. They actually had to send Israeli helicopters back into Lebanon to destroy the abandoned Israeli tanks, so as not to hand them over to the Party of God (Hezbollah).

It was the most inexplicable rout in military history, and it set the stage for the current conflict: Hezbollah, not being very bright, concluded from the panicky withdrawal that they must somehow have "defeated the Zionist entity"... and that primed them to attack again, while Israel's attention (they thought) was occupied by Hamas, which had kidnapped an Israeli soldier.

Whew! Thus endeth the history lesson.

The point of this dreary recounting is that, even though I opposed the Lebanon pullout, the same logic that applies in Gaza applies in Lebanon: since Israel departed six years ago, they should have no hesitation treating an attack from Hezbollah (in Lebanon) as an attack from a separate, sovereign country (which technically Lebanon was even before the pullout)... and they can respond with a full-scale invasion.

It took them a long time dithering. Paul Mirengoff over at Power Line basically predicted that the Israelis would not so respond; and for a while, I began to fear he was right. Ehud Olmert, despite being a former Likudnik before helping Ariel Sharon found Kadima, engaged his country in a perfect Kabuki dance of what I would call "pussyfooting": he accepted the advice of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) over that of the Israeli Army (IDF) that Israel could achieve its aim against Hezbollah merely by bombing them sufficiently.

(Yoni the Blogger believes that Olmert is escalating as fast as he thinks the Israeli public will accept... though Yoni wishes it were faster, as do I.)

But Olmert appears, at long last, to have realized that only boots on the ground -- and enough of them -- will be able to "disarm" (that is, kill, mutilate, and destroy) Hezbollah fighters, annihilate the rocket launchers, and drive any survivors across into Syria, where they can fester until such time as that slithery nation becomes enough of a problem that either Israel from the west or American forces from the East makes Syria an offer it cannot refuse.

In addition to simply sending in a division of the IDF, Israel has also sent a commando raid into the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah's main stronghold in Lebanon, into the town of Baalbek, and seized five specific Hezbollah commanders they wanted:

Israeli commandos flew in by helicopter before dawn into the northern town of Baalbek, on the border with Syria, capturing five Hezbollah guerrillas and killing at least 10, said Israel's army chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz.

Witnesses said Israeli forces partially destroyed the Dar al-Hikma hospital in Baalbek, where chief Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahal said fierce fighting raged for more than one hour.

Israel has not yet released the identity of those captured. When asked by The Associated Press whether any were "big fish," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: "They are tasty fishes...."

Olmert said that, although the scene of the fighting is called a hospital, "there are no patients there and there is no hospital, this is a base of the Hezbollah in disguise."

Interestingly, Hezbollah admits that last fact -- albeit between the lines:

A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give official statements to the media, said that Israeli troops captured "four or five" people, but not at the hospital.

He denied they were Hezbollah fighters, saying one was a 60-year-old grocery store owner and two relatives who work in construction.

The hospital, which residents said is financed by an Iranian charity that is close to Hezbollah, was empty of patients at the time of the raid, the guerrilla group said.

AP reports 540 "Lebanese" killed since all the fighting began; but they don't break this down into Hezbollah fighters, Hezbollah supporters (a huge number of Lebanese Shia in southern Lebanon actively support Hezbollah, which they see as their "tribe"), and ordinary Lebanese patriots, whether Moslem or Christian, who oppose Hezbollah (and still continue to give the Israelis intelligence information); the latter constitute a majority in that country, and they were the impetus behind the "Cedar Revolution" that drove Syrian troops out of Lebanon. As usual, the antique media is less than useless: they're actively helping the terrorists by reprinting their propaganda as if it were verified news.

According to Haaretz, at least nine Hezbollah fighters have been killed Wednesday alone (what a wonderful world we live in, where a war that kills a few hundred people is treated as a "massive" conflict!)

Keep watching the skies; I suspect that this latest escalation to a division is just the first. We shall see...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 02, 2006, at the time of 11:15 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 28, 2006

Putting On My "Robert Novak" Hat

We've never seen Big Lizards as a primary news source, or a newspaper, or anything of that ilk. We're not journalists, and we don't engage in reporting. Rather, we like to analyze news and current events, trends and motives, often days after the fact. (Our egocentric motto: "Never first, always final!")

But occasionally I like to put two and two together in a sort of predictive way. Mind, this is all wild speculation, and a substantial part of it comes from a somewhat untrustworthy source, NewsMax.com.

First, we have this:

Hizbullah steps up attacks: Hizbullah steps up attacks: For the first time since the fighting in the north began 17 days ago, Hizbullah launched five Fajr-5 missiles at Israel Friday afternoon. Police officials said that long-range missiles of this type can carry a larger amount of explosives than the rockets that had been fired at Israel so far. A short while later, the IDF reported it had destroyed the rocket launcher used for firing the missiles.

The missiles landed in open areas between Afula and the Beit Shean Valley, causing no injuries.

Wikipedia says that the Fajr-5 missile has a range "75 kilometers, or 50 miles," but this is probably an overestimate (especially as 75 km is actually 46.6 miles, not 50). GlobalSecurity.org gives it a range of only 45 miles (72 km). Still, this is a substantial jump over the 10,000 Soviet/Iranian Katyusha rockets (13 mile range) and the handful of Fajr-3s (25 miles) that Hezbollah has been using; they nearly double their range with the Fajr-5s.

(Additionally, Breitbart reports that Hezbollah has fired a rocket they call a Khaibar-1 -- a made-up name taken from a famous battle at an oasis where Mohammed attacked a settlement of Jews and enslaved them. I can't find out anything about the "Khaibar-1," but it may just be Hezbollah's name for the Fajr-5; the range seems to match up, more or less.)

The point is that Hezbollah is increasing the range and payload of their rockets and missiles. Clearly, their aim is to bring all of Israel into missile range -- especially Tel Aviv, the second largest city in Israel, with a population of 380,000 (Jerusalem's population is 725,000; Haifa has only 278,000).

I'm not sure what range Hezbollah would need to target Tel Aviv, because it depends where they're firing from. According to this distance-calculating website, the distance from Beirut to Tel Aviv is 134 miles (215 km)... so they still need a substantial increase in range, between two and three times what they have now, in order to seriously threaten that city.

But clearly, the Iranians are upping Hezbollah's arsenal; and Iran has many missiles that have a longer range than 150 miles: the oldest Shahab-3, for example, has a range that exceeds 1,300 km (808 miles), and that dates back to 2003; newer models have much longer ranges. It also packs a warhead that masses over 1,000 kg. (The Shahab-3 is derived from the North Korean NoDong-1.)

I suspect it's not a question of "if" but "when" will Hezbollah be able to directly attack Tel Aviv... and it's hard to imagine them having that capability and deciding not to use it. Which brings up the third point. From NewsMax.com (which I again caution is not exactly reliable; but I do believe this piece):

Additionally, Israeli sources say a line in the sand has been drawn: If Hezbollah is "stupid" enough to attack Tel Aviv or its suburbs, "then all bets are off."

While refusing to provide more details, the Israeli warned that if Hezbollah attacked Tel Aviv then the IDF will no longer have any restraints on prospective responses.

While recent Hezbollah attacks have rocketed cities south of the port of Haifa, all have fallen far short of Tel Aviv and its environs ... for now.

U.S. diplomats had no comment.

I do not have a window into the minds of the members of Israel's security cabinet, of course; but I suspect that "all bets are off" and no "restraint on prospective responses" means that if Tel Aviv is struck, the Israeli security cabinet would vote to extend the war directly to Syria, which they just refused to do yesterday. They would also likely vote to authorize close-air support, which they've been reluctant to do due to the probability of large numbers of "civilian" casualties and the PR-hit Israel would take.

This is pure speculation on my part; but I strongly believe that if Hezbollah missiles or rockets struck Tel Aviv, the Israeli people would absolutely demand a direct attack on Syria, which is allowing such trans-shipments from Iran to Hezbollah. If the Olmert government refused, the Olmert government would likely be history, and new snap-elections would put a Likud-centered coalition back in power.

Rather than risk that, I suspect Olmert -- a former Likudnik before helping Ariel Sharon to form Kadima -- would push such an expansion through the security cabinet.

So, to recap (oops, I sound just like a Glenn Greenwald sock puppet!):

• Hezbollah is improving its arsenal, nearly doubling the range of its missiles within the last two weeks;
• The new missiles come from Iran, most likely trans-shipped through Syria;
• They may soon get missiles from their patron, Iran, that have sufficient range to strike Tel Aviv;
• If they get such missiles, Tel Aviv's safety will rely only upon the forbearance and restraint of Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah (thought to be currently hiding in the Iranian embassy in Damascus, according to the Jerusalem Post). If such forbearance and restraint is as noticibly lacking as it has been since 1992, Tel Aviv will be struck;
• If Tel Aviv is struck, the security cabinet is likely to vote to expand the war directly to Syria (the sourcing for this is iffy, but it's certainly not an extraordinary claim).

Thus, I would expect the expansion of the war to include Syria will occur if and only if Syria (or anyone else) allows Hezbollah to receive missiles with ranges sufficient to attack Tel Aviv. This could, of course, occur at any time, since Iran does indeed have such missiles and has shown no reluctance in the past to supply Hezbollah with weaponry to attack Israel -- a country that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmaninejad has said must be "wiped off the map," which is also a long-term policy of the ruling mullahs.

As I said, I think the expansion is a question of when, not if. The only worry is that Israel may come to its senses too late, for Syria is already preparing itself for a likely war.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 28, 2006, at the time of 03:19 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 27, 2006

Der Spiegel Und der Baradei

RealClearPolitics pointed to an interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel of Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Tom Bevan at RCP Blog noted rather cryptically that it was "a rather frightening interview."

Reading the interview itself removed all mystery. Here are some of the lowlights:

SPIEGEL: Are you in favor of an immediate deployment of United Nations peacekeeping troops with a "robust" mandate in southern Lebanon?

ElBaradei: That is the only solution. The bloodbath must be stopped quickly and a cease-fire must be brought about without delay. But what's even more important is a comprehensive solution to the underlying problem. The Palestinian question is the elephant in the room. One cannot constantly treat only the symptoms. The Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have been living under an occupying regime for 39 years now. We should not be satisfied with drafting one road map after the next and merely looking on as they fail.

[You would think that even as insular an organization as the UN would have heard something about the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza!]

~

SPIEGEL: A stabilization force would have to create a buffer zone, which would mean disarming Hezbollah. Is the UN capable of doing this?

ElBaradei: Lebanon will inevitably descend into civil war as long there is no cease-fire. That's why the most important thing is for open combat to stop. And then the force would need a robust mandate. The UN can disarm militias and reduce tensions. The long-term solution, however, is political and not military.

[If the UN can "disarm militias," why haven't they? What are they waiting for?]

~

SPIEGEL: The Israelis have a legitimate need for security. They see their massive attacks as a way to destroy Hezbollah once and for all.

ElBaradei: The more violence they commit, the more they radicalize their enemies..

[Note that he never answers the question. Or even responds to the cockamamie idea that "Israel has a legitimate need for security."]

~

SPIEGEL: But it was the Iranian regime that clearly lied and deceived the West in recent years when it came to its nuclear program. Doesn't Tehran have to accept the offer without conditions and stop its uranium enrichment activities?

ElBaradei: There is no other choice. To our knowledge, however, the Iranians have not accelerated their nuclear research program, which would be a sign of their developing a nuclear program for military use. There are apparently competing political directions in Tehran. And there are many shades of gray....

[About Iran, yes; about Israel, El Baradei doesn't appear to see greyscale.]

There was, however, one highlight at the end of the tunnel. I did like this exchange, right at the end:

SPIEGEL: You have just come from the G-8 summit, where, in addition to the Middle East, energy issues were the main topic of discussion. With the exception of Germany, everyone seems to be betting on new nuclear power plants. Is this the right approach?

ElBaradei: Every state has the right to choose its own approach, just as Germany is doing. In your country, a few nuclear power plants will be in operation for another 20 years, at least according to current plans. Perhaps the Germans will change their views within this period of time, and perhaps they'll decide to extend it. Nuclear energy is undoubtedly experiencing a renaissance. Environmentally friendly nuclear power will play a role in energy policy worldwide. 1.6 billion people, or a quarter of the world's population, have no access to electricity. They'll have no future without affordable energy.

That statement, at least, cannot be logically disputed. Perhaps Mohammed ElBaradei should ceasing heading up the IAEA and instead be offered a new position as United Nations Secretary of Energy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 27, 2006, at the time of 08:06 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

More Proportionalities Than You Can Shake a Snake At

The Democrats' argument that Israel's response is "disproportionate" can mean one of only two things:

• That it's disproportionate to the attack;
• Or that it's disproportionate to the attacker.

The first possibility is easily rebutted: Israel has been attacked by Hezbollah for years and years and years, losing hundreds of citizens to an insane terrorist campaign, Hezbollah's holy pledge to "drive the Jews into the sea."

Arguably, since it was Hezbollah who pioneered (in the Middle East) the tactic of suicide bombings, a tactic later aped by Palestinian groups, the thousands of deaths of innocent Israelis by Hamas, et al, can also be laid to Hezbollah's doorstop.

So the only real chance for the Democrats to make stick a "disproportionality" argument against Israel's assault is to complain that it's just not fair for that big bully to beat up on that little bully. Is that a valid complaint, that Israel's assault is like a trained heavyweight boxer beating up a schoolgirl? If so, that would certainly be a gross disproportionality.

To the extent that liberals make this argument, in their relentless quest to find moral equivalence between Israeli Jews and Hezbollah terrorists (or even to assign the bulk of the guilt to the former), they either foolishly or mendaciously ignore a glaring point: Hezbollah does not act alone or on its own volition.

The organization was created in 1982, by and large by Iran, and they have been a creature of that theocracy ever since. Iran finances and controls Hezbollah in Lebanon through Iran's cat's-paw, Syria -- which comprises an Alawite-Shiite elite class, the Baath Party, ruling over an oppressed Sunni majority.

Thus, in comparing the relative sizes of the dogs in the fight, the real comparison is not Israel to Hezbollah... it's Israel vs. Iran and Syria in a proxy war that happens to be taking place in Lebanon. It's not just that Hezbollah receives its weapons from Iran; Iran also finances it, trains it, directs it, and indeed, Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been found throughout Hezbollah forces, firing missiles and directing the action.

Hezbollah is not Israel's real enemy: it's nothing more than the Iranian and Syrian "Foreign Legion."

So let's take a look at Iran and Syria compared to Israel; I rely upon the CIA World Factbook for these simple statistics:

Iran and Syria vs. Israel

Resource	Iran	Syria	Israel
Population (millions)	69	19	6
Economy (billions purchasing power)	562	72	155
Economy (official exchange rate)	181	26	114
Available military manpower (millions)	15.7	3.5	1.3

As clearly seen, Israel certainly does not overmatch her two real opponents in this war; in fact, it's the other way around: even just Iran alone is larger, richer, and has a much greater available manpower. While Israel has nuclear weapons that still elude Iran (we hope!), Iran boasts a much more robust military than any country or combination of countries Israel has ever faced before.

Hezbollah is just the tip of the oilberg... make no mistake, Israel faces her deadliest test ever. And if there is any "disproportionality," it's much more accurate to say Israeli forces are disproportionately small compared to the enemies they face.

Israel is the "David" facing the "Goliath" of the Ayatollahs, and no amount of Democratic rewrite can obscure that fact.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 27, 2006, at the time of 05:36 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

July 25, 2006

The "Proportionality" Fallacy

I've been pondering and mulling for many days now the charge, absurd on its face, that Israel's response to the attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah is "disproportionate." What has puzzled me all this time is where the silly meme of "proportionality" came from in the first place.

I understand proportionality in, say, criminal sentencing: if a person stole some cash from the church poorbox, it's grossly disproportionate to punish him by cutting off his hand; the severity of the punishment vastly exceeds the mendacity of the crime.

And I understand proportionality in civil lawsuits: if a company produced a dangerously defective product, then tried to cover it up, and if a victim of that product is injured thereby... then it makes perfect sense for that victim not only to receive compensatory damages in the lawsuit (damages to make him whole again, or as much so as possible), but also punitive damages.

Even so, if the company has an annual income of $10 million, it's grossly disproportionate for a jury to award the victim $60 billion in punitive damages.

But how does any of this relate to warfare? The question has baffled me for a long time now, from even before the present ruckus in Lebanon and Gaza. How did a theory of criminal punishment get tacked onto the "law of war?"

And just now, the answer I'd been seeking struck me like a load of hay: those critics squealing about Israel's "disproportionate" response think war is how Israel "punishes" the Arabs.

All of a sudden, other paralogical incongruities fell into place: the Left believes war is not waged in order to gain national-security advantages for one's country; they see it entirely as an extension of the criminal justice system... a tit-for-tat revenge taken against countries that have criminally assaulted one's own. Thus, the Left cannot even understand the conservative argument that terrorism "cannot be defeated by a criminal-justice response but must be treated as an act of war."

To them, all war is a criminal-justice program. Why should the war on jihadi terrorism be any different?

And because they think war in general is a punitive action designed to punish transgressors, they also believe:

• It's wrong to punish countries disproportionately to their "crimes," such as killing more of their soldiers than they killed of yours... it's too much "tat" in the tit-for-tat equation;
• It's wrong to "collectively punish" the people living in the enemy nation by, e.g., dropping bombs;
• In fact, killing enemy combatants is wrong in general, because we're against capital punishment;
• It's wrong to "punish" a country for the actions of a terrorist group within that country;
• It's horrifically wrong to "punish" a country before it has actually committed the crime or even taken steps to commit the crime (pre-emption); that would be the same as putting someone in prison because you thought he might commit a crime in the future;
• It's wrong to go to war without first holding a criminal investigation and finding the enemy country guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the transgression;
• Captured unlawful enemy combatants must be tried in civilian courts (presumably for "conspiracy") with all the protections afforded ordinary criminal defendants;
• Captured unlawful enemy combatants may not be interrogated unless they have a lawyer present, and they cannot be interrogated at all if they "take the Fifth;"
• Once combatants have "served their sentences," which must be "proportionate to the crime they committed," they must be released, even if there is a chance they will return to the front lines and "commit more crimes;" after all, they've paid their debt to society.

As suspicious as I am of any general "Theory of Everything," this revelation (well, to me, anyway) does seem to explain an awful lot about liberal squeamishness anent the Israeli war on Hezbollah, the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other attempts by the civilized world to defend itself against the forces of Islamist barbarity.

(It doesn't explain why liberals supported the carpet bombing of Serbs in Kosovo; but then, they also gave Bill Clinton a pass on a lot of other actual criminal behavior, too. To explain this, we must invoke a different thesis: the Theory of the Charmed Charmer, the lovable rogue who can do no wrong.)

It also explains why the American Left is increasingly bitter and hateful towards Israel: they look at Israel and they see a country that persistently violates the "liberal law of war" by treating warfare as if it were some means of defending the country from attack, instead of a police action.

Thus, to the liberal mind, Israel is like a "rogue cop" who commits serial acts of "police brutality." The Left's reflexive hatred of "the pigs" or "the Man" kicks in, and Ehud Olmert morphs into Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, with Lebanon as the new Democratic National Convention of 1968. "Israel is not there to cause disorder... Israel is there to preserve disorder!"

Arabs (and Persians, to the extent that liberals even know there is a difference) are the long-suffering poor who are always getting shafted by the Man; we need a healthy dose of "social justice," man, to redress the historical imbalances. Power to the people, man! Off the pigs! Free Mumia!

(In fact, wouldn't Arab suicide bombers be seen as heroic followers of Mumia Abu Jamal, giving their lives -- well, the real Mumia hasn't given it yet, alas -- to fight the inherent injustice of the Israeli neocon lobby establishment? Right on, man!)

I believe every Democratic candidate in 2006 and 2008 should be given a hot seat (I don't mean Old Sparky) and asked this question: if terrorists kill 3,000 Americans, how many terrorists will you allow us to kill before you decide our response is "disproportionate?"

Watch 'em squirm.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 25, 2006, at the time of 02:28 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 24, 2006

Resupply Is a Two-Way Street

It's been plastered all over the news recently that Israel has caught Syria resupplying Hezbollah missiles (or trying to, at any rate); see the previous post for our reaction to that news on the Syrian front. But as Gary Larson used to say in the Far Side, "two can play at that game, Hoskins!"

Word has now been leaked (by anonymous "American officials") that we've sent an emergency shipment of precision-guided bombs to Israel in order to allow them to continue the campaign:

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

(A Reader's Digest condensed version of the Times article can be found on Reuters, just in case the Times link stops working.)

This is for those readers here who have been led to believe (by the antique media) that Bush isn't doing anything to help Israel other than chatting them up. We're doing the best things of all: leaning heavily on Syria -- and making sure that Israel has all the precision munitions they need to really grind Hezbollah's face into the offal.

So keep it up, Israel; with the weapons we're supplying you, taking out the entire top Hezbollah leadership should be as easy as shooting drunks in a barrel.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 24, 2006, at the time of 05:17 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

July 21, 2006

A Tale of Two Madams and One Mister

No, not that kind of madam! I mean a pair of "Madam Secretaries of State," Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice.

The first Madam Secretary, appointed by Bill Clinton for no reason other than to be the first president to appoint a woman as secretary of state, was an unmitigated disaster. Albright embraced Yassir Arafat, was bamboozled by Kim Jong-Il, tricked by Iran, cozened by Saddam, and turned a blind eye to Osama bin Laden while he and al-Qaeda prepared the most massive terrorist attack ever to occur on American soil. A magnificent and enviable record of failure and disachievement!

But let's contrast "Madam," as she insisted upon being called, with the other Madam Secretary, Condoleezza Rice. Here is Secretary Rice today, discussing her upcoming trip to the Middle East:

In her briefing for reporters on her trip, Rice said the United States was committed to ending the bloodshed, but didn't want to do it before certain conditions were met.

The United States has said all along that Hezbollah must first turn over the two Israeli soldiers and stop firing missiles into Israel.

"We do seek an end to the current violence, we seek it urgently. We also seek to address the root causes of that violence," she said. "A cease-fire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo."

Rice said that it was important to deal with the "root cause" of the violence, echoing what has been the U.S. position since last week.

And what is that "root cause?" Everybody uses the phrase, but each means a different thing. Most people in Europe and most Democrats in D.C., when they say "root cause of Mid-East violence," mean the presence of Jews in the ummah... which could easily be corrected.

If Israel would just do the manly thing and commit national suicide, then the world would think well of the Jews... briefly. But what does Condi mean by "root cause?"

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ruled out a quick "false promise" cease-fire in the Middle East Friday and defended her decision not to meet with either Syrian or Hezbollah leaders in her upcoming visit to the region.

"Syria knows what it needs to do and Hezbollah is the source of the problem," Rice said at the State Department as she previewed her trip, which begins on Sunday with a first stop in Israel.

What a rare moment of truth and candor from the Department of State! Of course, with John Bolton at the U.N., such moments are starting to come as thick and as fast as oysters. How I'm going to miss this president when his term expires.

(Oh, and notice where her Mid-East trip begins: Israel. In the previous administration, it would have begun with a quick obeisance in Ramallah, some backhanding in Damascus, and an apology-trip to Sabra and Shatila, where Madam would have laid a wreath and danced a foxtrot with Sheikh Nasrallah.)

But here is my favorite statement, and why I still hope that someday, Dr. Condoleezza Rice changes her mind and decides to run for public office:

Resisting calls from the United Nations, Europe and the Arab world, she said an immediate ceasefire would produce a "false promise" that would allow Hizbollah to re-emerge in the future to attack Israel, the top U.S. ally in the region.

"An immediate ceasefire without political conditions does not make sense," she said.

"If you simply look for a ceasefire... we will be back here in six months again," she added. "What I won't do is go to some place and try to get a ceasefire that I know isn't going to last."

I've been scratching my brains for days now, wondering exactly what a "ceasefire" means when one party is a terrorist group. And for more clarity on that point, listen to Ambassador Bolton (it's from an press conference outside the UN Security Council in Foggy Bottom, New York City; I have paragraphed it, so I can refer to Bolton's specific points; via Power Line):

Well look, I think we could have a cessation of hostilities immediately if Hezbollah would stop terrorizing innocent civilians and give up the kidnapped Israeli soldiers. So that to the extent this crisis continues, the cause is Hezbollah.

How you get a ceasefire between one entity, which is a government of a democratically elected state on the one hand, and another entity on the other which is a terrorist gang, no one has yet explained.

The government of Israel, everybody says, has the right to exercise the right of self-defense, which even if there are criticisms of Israeli actions by some, they recognize the fundamental right to self-defense. That’s a legitimate right.

Are there any activities that Hezbollah engages in, militarily that are legitimate? I don’t think so. All of its activities are terrorist and all of them are illegitimate, so I don’t see the balance or the parallelism between the two sides and therefore I think it’s a very fundamental question: how a terrorist group agrees to a ceasefire.

This is like demanding a "ceasefire" between the United States government on the one hand -- and the Salvadoran drug gang Mara Salvatrucha. What the heck is that supposed to mean? Do they negotiate exactly how many kilos of cocaine MS-13 is allowed to smuggle into the country?

You know in a democratically elected government, the theory is that the people ultimately can hold the government accountable when it [agrees to] something and doesn’t live up to it.

How do you hold a terrorist group accountable? Who runs the terrorist group? Who makes the commitment that a terrorist group will abide by a ceasefire?

Say, that is a good question, isn't it? So how come nobody else seems to be asking it besides John and Condi? And here's another good question:

What does a terrorist group think a "ceasefire" is?

Does it really understand a ceasefire as a cessation of hostilities, to be followed by honest negotiation to settle the differences that led to the war in the first place? I think it more likely Hezbollah's understanding of ceasefire is "a pause to reload;" and the ceasefire will last as long as it takes for them to obtain replacements from Iran, through Syria, for all the missiles that Israel destroyed... maybe "six months," as Secretary Rice suggested.

Finally, Bolton finishes his answer with a nice summation of the main point:

These are - you can use the words “cessation of hostilities” or “truce” or "ceasefire.” Nobody has yet explained how a terrorist group and a democratic state come to a mutual ceasefire.

Those are all good questions, and here's another: if Israel were to ink such a ceasefire with Hezbollah... wouldn't that elevate the terrorist group to the level of a sovereign nation? What would be the next demand -- that Israel negotiate a trade agreement with Hezbollah? Perhaps an agreed-upon procedure for releasing Hezbollah killers promptly upon the kidnapping of future IDF soldiers, to avoid all the brouhaha in the future?

Or would Hezbollah be admitted to the United Nations (and probably invited to join the new UN Human Rights Council)?

Israelis should get on their knees and thank the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that at this critical turning point in their existence, their greatest ally has such clear-sighted and morally decent appointees running the United States Department of State. And Americans should thank whatever God we hold dear that we have an Israel that is finally willing to stand up to Hezbollah and Hamas: maybe President Bush can start listening to Israel, Condi, and John; then he himself can begin treating those Iranian-controlled terrorists the way he treats terrorists in al-Qaeda.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 21, 2006, at the time of 01:45 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

July 19, 2006

One Out of One Newspaper Agrees - With Big Lizards!

It's nice to see the antique media finally catching up to the dextrosphere:

Israel is in the best position militarily in its history to mount air strikes against Iran, after a decade of buying U.S.-produced long-range aircraft, penetrating bombs and aerial refueling tankers.

We're a bit late to the table on this one, which should hardly be a surprise. (Our new motto, as soon as I get industrious enough to add it to the logo -- probably later rather than sooner -- is "Never first, always final!") Power Line has already mentioned it briefly, though for some odd reason, they missed the most critically important point: that the Washington Times agrees with Big Lizards.

So let's delve a bit deeper. Here is what Israel has recently purchased:

• 25 F-15I (the I stands for Israel) "Ra'am" attack jets, the Israeli version of the American long-range attack jet, the F-15E "Strike Eagle":

  The F-15E Strike Eagle is a modern United States all-weather strike fighter, designed for long-range interdiction of enemy ground targets deep behind enemy lines....

  The only significant difference remaining between the F-15I and the F-15E is that the F-15Is were delivered without Radar Warning Receivers. Israel installed its own electronic warfare equipment in its F-15s. The F-15Is' missing electronics have been replaced by the Israeli Elisra SPS-2110 Integrated Electronic Warfare System. A central computer and embedded GPS/INS system have also been fitted. All of the aircraft's sensors can be slaved to a helmet-mounted sight, giving both crew members an efficient targeting mechanism that the F-15E does not possess.

  The Ra'am's advanced systems include an APG-70 radar with terrain mapping capability. The sharp picture that the APG-70 provides, regardless of weather conditions and light, makes it possible to locate targets that are otherwise very hard to find - i.e. missile batteries, tanks and structures - even under such adverse conditions as complete fog cover, heavy rain or moonless nights.

• 102 F-16I "Sufa" fighter/attack jets (60 in hand), a modified F-16 "Fighting Falcon", a.k.a. Viper:

  The F-16 Fighting Falcon is a modern multi-role jet fighter aircraft designed in the United States. Designed as a lightweight fighter, it evolved into a successful multi-role aircraft....

  Block 50/52 Plus for Israeli Defense Force - Air Force, with significant Israeli avionics replacing that of American firms (Such as Israeli Aerial Towed Decoy replacing the ALE-50). The addition of Israeli built autonomous aerial combat maneuvering instrumentation systems enables the training exercises to be conducted without the dependence on the ground instrumentation systems, and the helmet mounted sight is also a standard equipment. The F-16I also has the Israeli built removable conformal fuel tanks added.

• 500 U.S. BLU-109 "bunker buster" bombs:

  The BLU-109/B is a hardened penetration bomb used by United States military aircraft. (BLU is an acronym for Bomb Live Unit.) It is intended to smash through concrete shelters and other hardened structures before exploding.

  The Washington Times notes that a BLU-109 "could penetrate the concrete protection around some of Iran's underground facilities, such as the uranium enrichment site at Natanz."

• A fleet of Boeing 707 in-flight "boom and receptacle" refuelers.

The Washington Times interviews Air Force Lt.Gen. Thomas McInerney, who is also a frequent Fox News Channel military analyst (it's fair to call Gen. McInerney "conservative leaning"):

"They have the capability to strike Iran," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney, a former fighter pilot who has trained with Israelis. "It would be limited, though. They could do 30 to 40 'aim points' in the array. I'm not worried about them hitting the targets. They will suffer losses, but they are capable of doing it."

He said Israeli fighter pilots are "the best in the world. I've flown against them. They train better. They get more flying time."

But here is where the Washington Times falls short of the imagination mark. They (and Gen. McInerney) all assume the planes must launch from Israel, then return there when they finish their bombing runs. This misses the possibility of TDYing the Israeli jets to Iraq for long enough to really do a good job -- possibly fighting alongside American jets, but perhaps doing it entirely on their own as well (though I don't know what would be the advantage to the United States of being passive here; our enemies won't be fooled and our friends will be disappointed).

It would be very tricky diplomatically -- assuming Iran had not done something in the meanwhile to make itself even more a pariah than it is now. But I think it very likely they will: they seem quite determined to escalate all the conflicts they've started recently into apocalyptic, existential confrontations. As I said before, they will surely attack Iraq directly before they'll attack Israel directly.

By that point, depending what Iran has done, the Iraqis may be overjoyed to let Israelis use their land to crush the mullahs.

The "peace process" has had plenty of innings, and it hasn't gotten a single run on the board. All I am saying is give war a chance.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 19, 2006, at the time of 04:17 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 18, 2006

Arabs Abandoning "Party of God"

In any discussion about Moslem terrorists, many people -- both defenders of Islam and also those urging military response against the terrorists -- often object to extremists like Tom "Bomb Mecca" Tancredo by saying, "not all Moselems are like that, those are just extremists." But then the question becomes, where are these "non-extremist," moderate moslems? Or as Dafydd put it, where are all the Moslem Methodists?

Well, New York Sun columnist Youssef Ibrahim has found them. And the silent majority is finally speaking out. (Hat tip M. Simon)

Rarely have I seen such an uprising, indeed an intifada, against those little turbaned, bearded men across the Muslim landscape as the one that took place last week. The leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, received a resounding "no" to pulling 350 million Arabs into a war with Israel on his clerical coattails.

The collective "nyet" was spoken by presidents, emirs, and kings at the highest level of government in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Morocco, and at the Arab League's meeting of 22 foreign ministers in Cairo on Saturday. But it was even louder from pundits and ordinary people.

Perhaps the most remarkable and unexpected reaction came from Saudi Arabia, whose foreign minister, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, said bluntly and publicly that Hezbollah's decision to cross the Lebanese border, attack Israel, and kidnap its soldiers has left the Shiite group on its own to face Israel. The unspoken message here was, "We hope they blow you away."

The Arab League put it succinctly in its final communique in Cairo, declaring that "behavior undertaken by some groups [read: Hezbollah and Hamas] in apparent safeguarding of Arab interests does in fact harm those interests, allowing Israel and other parties from outside the Arab world [read: Iran] to wreck havoc with the security and safety of all Arab countries."

There are more remarkable statements from Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya --

"We have lost most of our causes and the largest portions of our lands following fiery speeches and empty promises of struggle coupled with hallucinating, drug-induced political fantasies."

-- and from Tariq Alhomayed:

Tariq Alhomayed, editor in chief of the Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, stuck the dagger in deeper: "Mr. Nasrallah bombastically announced he consulted no one when he decided to attack Israel, nor did he measure Lebanon's need for security, prosperity, and the safety of its people. He said he needs no one's help but God's to fight the fight." Mr. Alhomayed's punch line was, in so many words: Go with God, Sheik Nasrallah, but count the rest of us out.

Ibrahim does acknowledge that much of the refusal to take the part of Hezbollah (despite it being the "Party of God") is Sunni fear of "an ascendant Shiite 'arc of menace' rising out of Iran and peddled in the Sunni world by Syria." But no Moslem nation is jumping to defend Sunni Hamas in the Gaza strip, either.

I don't believe there has been any sea-change in Moslem attitudes towards Jews. This is just belated recognition that the Arab nations (even with Iran added) cannot defeat Israel or even prevent it from scoring military victory wherever it wants in the Middle East.

I guess there's a limit to how many times Arabs must get slashed by the claws of the lion before they finally decide to stop poking it with a stick.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, July 18, 2006, at the time of 02:46 PM | Comments (25) | TrackBack

July 17, 2006

The Word On the "Street"

From Dafydd: N.Z. Bear, he of the Truth-Laid Bear fame, has a marvelous aggregator page of bloggers from all across the Middle East, plus some important and powerful bloggers right here in the United States -- movers and shakers, opinion-mongers, and "pundants" (such as Big Lizards): Crisis In the Middle East. This page is a must-view.

For many years now, Moslem dictators have used the same old trick: whenever their domestic policies hit a wall, they turn around and point a finger at the nearest Jew.

"It is not the time to squabble amongst Moslems. We need to unite against the Israeli aggression. We need to mobilize for freedom. We need to focus on defense." Never mind the economy is in a shambles due to the corruption, incompetence, and stupid policies of the Arab leadership. A quarter of their citizens unemployed and starving, bandits and police working hand in hand intimidating citizens to extort money and favors. That's not the issue; that’s not important. The urgent task is to defeat the Zionist Jews.

The tactic has worked for decades; it still does, to a certain degree. But, more and more Moslems across the world are getting weary of this same old excuse.

They hardly ever see any Jews; how could the Jews be responsible for their misery? They don’t even know what Israelis do, except fight against Palestinians, which concerns nobody. Nobody likes, respects, or cares about the Palestinians as anything other than a political stick to bash the "Zionist entity."

But even the Moslems who are critical of the Israeli “occupation” have strong words for the Palestinians. After all, Israel had, until quite recently, already left Gaza. The most obvious and immediate effect of the twin attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah was to bring the Jews back!

Saudi columnist Yusuf Nasir Al-Suweidan made a prediction on June 25, 2006. At that time, Israelis had not yet invaded Gaza; but he correctly prophecied that Hamas' attack on Israeli would bring about a far worse situation for Palestinians than the status quo... because, he said, this time Israel would not “react like 'harmless lambs.'”

[T]his time, a new reality will be created in the Gaza Strip in which all talk about 'back to square one' will be nothing but wild optimism -- since the [situation] will regress [far beyond that], to a level where it is possible to talk of a plan of deportation [of Palestinians] and demographic change in Gaza, and this [plan] might even be implemented soon. This will turn the Palestinian dream of an independent state into a thing of the past....

The main mistake lies in the fact that the Palestinian organizations did not respond correctly to the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza... and its consequences. Instead of beating their swords into plowshares, pens, and other things that are needed for the development of Palestinian society -- in terms of the economy, society, culture, and so on -- most of them read the developments incorrectly and immaturely. This was exploited by the terrorist networks, that are funded and run by the regimes of the ayatollahs in Tehran and the Ba'th [party] in Syria, and [people] have been taken in by delusions and empty slogans like 'liberation from the river to the sea' [that are heard] among the poor, hungry, and desperate Palestinian masses. At present, what [these masses] need most is food, medicines, clothing, and other essentials _ not explosive belts, car bombs, and the slogan, "Congratulations, oh Martyr, the black-eyed virgin awaits you."

Attacks from Hamas against Israel are nothing new. However illogical, we cannot expect too much from Hamas. But what about the attack from Hezbollah? Israel left Lebanon in the year 2000. Since then, all has been quiet on the northern front. Why should Hezbollah arouse Israel now?

In Lebanon, after Syrian forces left, the power of Hezbollah began to weaken. The pressure to disarm the Hezbollah military wing gets stronger every day. Hezbollah was desperate to do something; they needed to divert the Lebanese citizens attention to somewhere else. But where? Why, the Jews, of course. They had to show the Lebanese that they still "needed" Syrian troops to protect from "Israeli aggression."

But, for some odd reason, this time, the Lebanese are not buying it. As their houses are being bombed, they are not necessarily blaming Israel; as Dafydd said, the public opinion of the Arab and Persian Moslems is up for grabs.

A Lebanese blogger, Fouad, has this to say.

We are ALL guilty. ALL OF US. Emergency hiwar watani session??? I am not sure if I should laugh or puke my guts out on the table. Let it be known to all. We are scared, our lives are on the line, our country is history, but it's all our fault. Each and every one of us. These are the people we elected, these are the people we let freely thrive in their little haven of hatred and murderous ideals, and this is us, scared and incapacitated, failing but to point fingers and complain. Well let me tell you this folks, we pulled our pants down and stuck our naked asses out, and now that we're ******, we really don't have jack **** to complain about.

Now, don’t get me wrong; as Fouad says, "there is no love lost between the lebanese people and the israeli leadership." Fouad and others have plenty to say about Israel’s aggression.

Under the circumstance, I cannot blame them. However, a blogger like Fouad correctly realizes it's Hezbollah who brought this to Lebanon. Israel is simply reacting to terrorist incursion.

Another Lebanese blogger Bob says:

And tomorrow when I will see the destroyed bridge linking my home town of Saida to Beirut, I will only say from the bottom of my heart: Enough! Enough wars, death and destruction! Curse you Hezbollah to hell and back! For all this destruction, for all this death! No it is not Israel fault; it is your own. Curse you!

Even though Hezbollah is hiding among the Lebanese, it is Iran -- and it's client state Syria -- which is behind the attacks. I wish Israel could bypass Lebanon and attack Syria directly. What do Syrian bloggers think of this?

Ammar Abdulhamid, who is Syrian but now lives in Maryland with his wife, has this to say:

[T]he national discourse and the constant calls for mobilization against a declared enemy were at best a diversionary measure meant to postpone any serious consideration of our developmental problems and our ruling regimes’ corruption and inherent authoritarian predilections.

For this reason, I never really believed in the conflict against Israel….

[T]he issue ahead of us if that of Hezbollah and Hamas being wielded as instruments of provocation by Syria and Iran to stir up another national liberation conflict and mobilize us all for the march to hell, with many of us applauding all the way.

All wishful thinking aside, I just don’t think that Israel is going to lose this round, and I think that the going-ons in Lebanon are only a prelude for the eventual and now inevitable confrontation with Syria, with all sorts of disastrous implications and consequences for our people.

I don't think Hamas or Hezbollah -- let alone Syria and Iran -- ever considered the "disastrous implications and consequences" of their acts of war against Israel. They only wanted to remind people of the Jewish threat and convince them they still needed the terrorist armies to protect them from Israel.

Instead, they brought the fury of Israel down upon them like fiery manna from Sheol. This was not in their plan; in fact, they are stunned by Israeli's reaction:

Hezbollah was surprised by Israel's response.

When they dreamed up this plan in January, they thought the Israelis would respond as usual: bomb a few Hezbollah positions on the border, and perhaps attack Palestinian militant camps. They were not expecting the attack to occur at this fragile time with the Palestinians.

Instead, the Israelis massively destroyed Lebanese infrastructure. Bridges throughout South Lebanon have been destroyed. Almost the entire South is without power.

If Hezbollah looked at reality instead of believing their own propaganda, they could have guessed this was going to happen... especialy after they saw what was already going on in Gaza at the precise moment they attacked Israel and kidnapped two soldiers.

True story: when Dafydd and I hiked in Yosemite, we were told not to cook near the camp ground. The smell, the rangers said, will attract bears. Despite all the warnings, some retardo decided to cook a whole mess of sausages on a grill he set up -- right next to his tent, right near our own tent (in Camp Curry).

That night, two black bears came roaring down to the camp ground and scared the heck out of the campers (we were already leaving that night for the Wawona Lodge). Fortunately no human was hurt; but one bear had to be shot by the "danger rangers."

Sure, the bears were the critters directly threatening our lives. But ultimately, the guy who cooked food and drew them down from the mountains should be held more responsible than the bears. The bears were just being bears; this dull-witted chef was being a dangerous fool.

Will the people in the Middle East ever hold their leadership responsible? Will they ever understand who lured the bears into camp? The jury is still out. But at least this time, the opinion of the infamous "Arab street" is up for grabs.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, July 17, 2006, at the time of 04:17 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

Adolf Who?

So he says -- I mean Ahmadinejad -- he says,

"The Zionists think that they are victims of Hitler, but they act like Hitler and behave worse than Genghis Khan," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday. He was quoted by the Iranian News Agency.

Wait, I'm sorry, but I'm not following this... they act like who? Who is this Hitler fellow? Isn't he the one that Mr. Ahmadinejad doesn't believe existed? Or at least, that he doesn't believe did anything particularly blameworthy -- that it's all a Zionist lie.

But now Ahmadinejad says that the Jews are acting like Hitler -- and that makes them worse than Genghis Khan. Why, he couldn't be accusing the "Zionists" of carrying out a Holocaust, could he?

(I wonder if Ahmadinejad pronounced "Genghis Khan" like a certain senator from Beacon Hill does...)

I don't like to judge before all the facts are in, but it's beginning to look as though President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran might have been somewhat inconsistent. But we wouldn't want to condemn the entire antisemitic program just because of a single slip-up. Perhaps an aide will issue a "clarification" later.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 17, 2006, at the time of 01:09 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 16, 2006

Can Israel Strike Iran? Answer: Yup.

Over on Power Line, my favorite blog, Steven den Beste holds forth on the logistical and military nightmare of Israel trying to launch a direct attack on Iran. While den Beste is certainly accurate as far as he goes, his analysis is limited by the fact that he didn't "think outside the box."

...Which happens to be a Big Lizards specialty: so here is how Israel can, indeed, bomb the bejesus out of Iran.

Ground Rules

First, we have to set the stage. Israel isn't going to directly strike Iran just for the heck of it; they would only be driven to that extreme by a massive attack by Iran against Israel. We don't mean just a little plinking with Katyushas or even those C-802 cruise missiles; not just a few casualties in Haifa or even a good hit on an Israeli naval vessel in the Med, even with video footage of Iranian Revolutionary Guards firing the missile.

The only thing that would provoke Israel into making a direct attack on Iran is a massive "Oh My God" strike by Iran directly on Israel -- let's say a missile fired from offshore or the West Bank into Tel Aviv that somehow manages to collapse an office building and kill 10,000 Israelis... something on that order.

Now, such a massive attack would mean all the normal "rules and limits" are off, and the U.S. is willing to help Israel out as much as necessary. Up to but not including (we assume for this exercise) making the attack ourselves. But we'll do anything short of that.

Why would Iran launch such a terrible attack on Israel? Let's take them at their word: Israel is still likely to attack Syria, as that is the nearest nexus from which Hezbollah and Hamas are controlled; and Iranian President Ahmadinejad has threatened that if Israel attacks Syria, Iran will attack Israel. Thus, we take as our working assumption that Iran is retaliating for a major Israeli attack on Syria.

Get Outside the Box

Steven den Beste is utterly correct that Israel isn't likely to order attack jets to take off from Tel Nof, fly to Iran, drop their payloads, fly back, and taxi to the line. They must start from somewhere much closer.

Looking at a map, we notice two countries that directly abut Iran that stand out for some reason: Iraq and Afghanistan. It would actually be much easier to bomb Iran starting from either of these two venues than from Israel.

Most of the WMD research sites in Iran, at least those we know of, are in the west; that is fortunate, because to get to Afghanistan, Israel would have to fly over Iran itself -- which is suboptimal. Thus, we have our first two steps:

1. Get a large number of Israeli attack jets to Baghdad.
2. Disperse them north and south, to Mosul and to Basra.

This does require overflying Syria; but recall that Israel will have already attacked Syria. As part of that attack, the very first thing any respectable air force would do is take out the air defenses. This means that by the time Israel is gearing up to attack Iran, Syria will be blind and deaf as far as tracking aircraft overflying its airspace.

(If they're not already, the Israel should attack them just for that purpose.)

Staying entirely over Syria and then Iraq, the flight distance from the Israeli north to Baghdad appears to be somewhere around 750 miles or less... well within the single-tank range of an F-16I Sufa, the backbone of the Israeli Air Force. Thus, it is possible for Israel to transfer a large number of F-16s to Baghdad -- thence to Mosul and Basra -- without being particularly noticible and without having to use in-flight refueling.

3. Disguise the Israeli planes to look like American planes, just to confuse any watchers.

I suggest they would temporarily paint American markings over the Israeli ones; and once approaching Iraq, the Israeli planes would squawk American IFF frequencies.

A Hop, Skip, and a Jump

Now that the main problem is solved, there are a myriad of excellent targets within range of Israeli F-16s flying out of Mosul in the north, Baghdad in the center, and Basra down south. In-flight refuel would not be necessary, as planes would return to Iraq after each sortie.

The Israelis would remove the temporary US marking from their planes and make no bones about where they're from.

4. Bomb the targets in Iran; the Israelis can take as long as they wish... no hurry to return to Israel.
5. Use targeting downlinks from American AWACs and American and Israeli intelligence on WMD sites in Iran: take those puppies out.

The only serious problem is political: certainly, Iraq is going to be very, very unhappy about Israeli warplanes flying out of Iraq to attack Iran. But again, we're assuming a hugely aggressive Iran that is actually willing to openly attack Israel... which means they're almost certainly launching huge terrorist and military assaults on Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces in Iraq, as well.

Iraq may already by this time have declared war on Iran. But even if they haven't, they will be a lot less squeamish about Israeli jets attacking Iran than they would be, say, today or yesterday -- when there is no overwhelming reason to do so. Finally, if they get totally recalcitrant, what the heck are they going to do about it? It's not like they have their own air force that could stand up to the Israelis or Americans.

Would They? Could They?

Remember, our baseline assumption is an Israel more grim and determined on vengeance than we were in October 2001. When people are that embittered, they're willing to slog through any number of hells to deal death and destruction to the dastards who did the dirt. That in mind, a ferrying trip from Israel to Baghdad, spreading out within Iraq, and then attacking western Iranian targets doesn't seem that implausible to me.

All we needed to show was that it was practical -- not that it was going to happen next Thursday after lunch. And I believe we have demonstrated quod erat demonstrandum.

(It would still make more sense for the United States to carry out the strike ourselves, since we're already there on both sides, as well as along the Persian Gulf in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. And Iran has given us ample casus belli by attacking our troops in Iraq. But that's outside the specific challenge we address here.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 16, 2006, at the time of 01:18 AM | Comments (26) | TrackBack

July 15, 2006

Israeli Warship Hit By Chinese/Iranian Cruise Missile

This is exactly the danger the United States has been warning about ever since 9/11: that rogue states like Iran may begin transferring modern military weaponry to terrorist groups:

In another development, an Israeli military official claimed that Iranian Revolutionary Guards were involved on some level in a missile strike that badly damaged an Israeli naval boat off Lebanon’s capital Beirut on Friday, killing one Israeli sailor and leaving three missing.

The official said the exact role of the Revolutionary Guards was not clear, but the Iranian forces were working closely with Hezbollah in Lebanon, as they have for more than two decades.

Israel’s military initially said that the ship was hit by an unmanned drone aircraft packed with explosives. But the military revised its assessment on Saturday, saying the ship was hit by a radar-guided, C802 missile fired from the Lebanese shore. The missile came from Iran, the military said.

The C-802 -- a.k.a. Ying-Ji-802 or YJ-2, a.k.a. the SACCADE -- is a cruise missile developed by China from the earlier YJ-1 model; the YJ-2 has a turbojet rather than the rocket engine burning solid fuel, as used by the YJ-1.

The weight of the subsonic (0.9 Mach) Yingji-802 is reduced from 815 kilograms to 715 kilograms, but its range is increased from 42 kilometers to 120 kilometers. The 165 kg. (363 lb.) warhead is just as powerful as the earlier version. Since the missile has a small radar reflectivity and is only about five to seven meters above the sea surface when it attacks the target, and since its guidance equipment has strong anti-jamming capability, target ships have a very low success rate in intercepting the missile. The hit probability of the Yingji-802 is estimated to be as high as 98 percent. The Yingji-802 can be launched from airplanes, ships, submarines and land-based vehicles, and is considered along with the US "Harpoon" as among the best anti-ship missiles of the present-day world.

China was to have sold about 150 YJ-2s to Iran following the Gulf War; but when President Bill Clinton's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. John Shalikashivili, complained to the People's Liberation Army of China (a major Clinton campaign donor) that this was destabilizing, the PLA agreed to stop the sales after shipping only 75 of the missiles.

However, Chinese client state North Korea seems to have taken up the slack with Iran -- yet another Clintonian diplomatic success story:

In early 2000 it was reported that North Korea and Iran were jointly developing an advanced version of the C-802 cruise missile. These missiles initially acquired by Iran were not equipped with advanced systems, and the missiles acquired by Iran were rather outdated. Iran turned to North Korea for missile system technology, and the two countries are jointly developing an upgraded version with improved accuracy. ["N. Korea, Iran Jointly Develop Missile: Report" Korea Times February 17, 2000]

Yet another example of President George W. Bush's prescience in noting an "axis of evil" that included not only Iraq and Iran but also the Democratic People's Republic of Korea... a claim widely ridiculed by Democrats (and even some Republicans of the Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft "realist" school of thought) shortly after Bush's 2002 State of the Union Address.

The reported missile-technology cooperation between North Korea and Iran occurred before 9/11... in fact, before George W. Bush was even elected. The "Axis of Evil" exists and predates Bush; he was simply the first to recognize it.

If Israel is indeed correct that their ship was struck by an Iranian C-802, and there is no reason to doubt either their accuracy or their veracity, then that raises a profound question, none of whose answers bode well: who fired the missile?

There are only two possibilities:

1. Hezbollah fired the missile, which means that Iran has transferred some of its precious ASCMs (anti-ship cruise missiles) to their pet terrorist group.

   I find it unlikely in the extreme that Iran would do that if they only have 75 -- 15 of which are attached to patrol boats; if this is the case, then that lends some credence to the story that China actually sold far more YJ-2s to Iran than it ever admitted, or they've manufactured many more themselves;

2. Iran itself fired the missile, either from a Revolutionary Guard missile battery in Lebanon, equipped with Chinese-supplied YJ-2s, or perhaps from indigenous Iranian YJ-2 knock-offs which North Korea helped them develop. In this case, Iran has openly entered into war with Israel, and Israel must respond in kind.

The latter instance puts us on the horns of a pickle: if Israel retaliates against Iran, the mullahcracy will still blame us, since they believe Israel is our sock puppet which would not act without orders from America. This is preposterous; Israel has many times done things we wish they wouldn't (not that an attack on Iran would necessarily fall into that category); but that is what Iran believes, so they will hold the United States responsible and attempt to retaliate against us the only way they can: by a massive terrorist attack.

If in fact Israel declares war on Iran and attacks them, I think it's best for us to grab the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face: if Iran will counterattack against us anyway, we may as well join with the Israelis and make a good job of the attack.

If we hurt Iran badly enough, they may be reluctant or even unable to transfer the large amounts of money, weaponry, and logistics necessary for Hezbollah to be able to pull off an effective terrorist attack. Cripple Iran's ability to use Hezbollah (or Hamas) as a proxy, and you cripple Iran's retaliatory capability... because they certainly will not initiate a missile exchange with a country that has thousands more missiles than they -- and a working ballistic missile defense to boot.

In an upcoming post, Sachi will discuss the amazing Arab reaction to the Israeli-Lebanon-Hezbollah-Hamas war; suffice to say Arab public opinion is up for grabs, unlike in times past, where the mere hint of involvement of Israel would send every Arab Moslem in the world into a frothing frenzy of Jew hatred. Perhaps the trick doesn't work anymore.

Given that new reality, now may be the time to resolve our Iranian problems... at least for a number of years, until they can reconstitute their WMD programs -- if a future president lets them.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 15, 2006, at the time of 02:11 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

July 13, 2006

Here's a How-De-Do

Some Israelis now believe that the rocket attack on Haifa today was not carried out by Hezbollah; they think it might actually have been Iranian Revolutionary Guards themselves manning Katyusha rocket batteries in Lebanon.

I don't know if this will prove to be true; but let's assume it for sake of argument. In that case, Israel would have been directly attacked by Iran... not just via a proxy or cut-out. They would probably decide they had to retaliate: Israel certainly cannot sit still and let Iran attack them with impunity, heh?

Alternatively, suppose Israel decides (as they might well soon decide) to take the fight directly to Damascus; and suppose Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes good his threat today to attack Israel if Israel attacked Syria:

Israeli analysts warned that Syria, which supports Hezbollah and plays host to Hamas' political leader Khaled Mashaal, could be Israel's next target.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said any Israeli attack against Syria would be an aggression on the whole Islamic world and warned of a harsh reaction, the official Iranian news agency reported Friday.

Again, Israel might end up at war with Iran.

But the United States has a mutual-defense alliance with Israel. And regardless of the legalisms of when we are and are not obliged to ride to their defense, American presidents have for decades assured Israel (and Americans) that we would defend that country, were it directly attacked by another country.

So the question is, if Israel declared war on Iran and moved against them -- would we sit and twiddle our toes? Or would we live up to our moral and legal obligations, as we would if, say, Taiwan or South Korea were attacked?

Consider: Iraq, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan -- all countries where we have good military relationships and a huge bunch of soldiers. We surround southern Iran in a "crescent of embrace." We could very well end up in a shootin' war with the mad mullahs... in a matter of days, not months.

So... should we? Would we? Or will we just hum loudly and eat our green eggs and ham?

I hope the Bush administration and Congress have been thinking about this; I'd sure rather we have a plan, rather than having to scramble after being blindsided.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 13, 2006, at the time of 07:09 PM | Comments (50) | TrackBack

June 30, 2006

Mahdi Militia + Iranians = Big Fat Target

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

May 13, 2006

Mahmoud, Son of Xerox

While listening to all the huffing and puffing Iran has been doing lately, how they're going to drive us into the sea if we attack them, a thought just occurred me.

One of the reasons we were so certain that Saddam Hussein had "large stockpiles of WMD" is that the correspondence we obtained, both before and even after the March, 2003 invasion, described those stockpiles in loving detail. Every general was completely convinced -- that some other unit had the CBW rockets and artillery shells.

This is why we were so puzzled when we removed the Baath Party and its petulant leader but then couldn't find any such stockpiles. Oh, we found a great deal of WMD, typically in the form of 55-gallon drums of Cyclosarin pesticide hidden in camouflaged ammunition bunkers near empty chemical munitions (which the Iraq Survey Group -- created by and under the control of the CIA -- refused to count as WMD). But nothing like the vast piles and heaps we expected to find.

Most Iraq watchers today concede that there were no such "stockpiles" since the Gulf War; when we first inspected Iraq's weaponry back in 1991, we were startled by how much he had; we destroyed everything we found over the next few years... and then, twelve years later, we were equally startled by how little he had compared to what his own secret paperwork intimated.

The programs had continued and were poised to recreate the entire arsenal of 1991 as soon as the sanctions were lifted (which, absent the war, would have happened by now). But it turns out that those programs were far less successful and productive than the Republican Guard thought -- which means far less than Saddam himself thought, for he had no reason to trick his own Army into thinking it was stronger than it was.

Which can only mean that Saddam's own scientists were lying to him all along, pretending signficantly greater progress than the reality.

They'd had little success in the nuclear arena, and they were afraid to tell him. They'd had just as little success finding a way to reconstitute their CBW without the inspectors finding out -- and they were afraid to tell him that, too. Instead, they fed Saddam fairy fancies that made him think he was sitting atop the ummah's greatest WMD arsenal outside of Pakistan... when in fact he had bupkis, nothing beyond pesticides in chemical shells (which is so 1980s -- still dangerous to his peers but not particularly to us).

I have described it thus: we thought we were striking Saddam at two minutes to midnight; but in fact, it was twenty minutes to midnight. (I originally used this metaphor on Patterico's Pontifications nearly a year ago; but I think I'll repost it here as a Scaley Classic, immediately following this post.)

That certainly doesn't mean we were wrong; it's actually much better to take out such arsenals while they're still in embryo. It just makes it harder to convince those determined not be convinced.

I have been trying to square what I know about the staggering advances in American military training, tactics, and technology with the grandiose claims of the Iranian military and political leadership... and it suddenly occurred to me that exactly the same dynamic is in place in Iran as Iraq:

• A ruthless dictatorship determined to conquer first the region, then the world;
• A crash program to develop WMD, which are given the highest priority by the rulling mullahs;
• The refusal to accept failure, coupled with impatience for progress;
• And the well-founded suspicion among scientists that reporting slow or no progress might be a quick route to the torture chambers or a beheading.

Is it not likely that the same dynamic produces the same result: that the Iranian scientists are lying in their teeth to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei about the state of Iran's non-traditional weaponry? Is it possible Iran is actually as unarmed -- and unknowing -- as Iraq was?

Obviously, we cannot rely upon this in our planning; but we must at least plan for it, in case we should strike Iran and the anticipated WMD attacks not forthcome. We must ask, if they suddenly discover they don't have the weapons they thought, what is the second thing they'll do (after first executing all the scientists)?

Let's bear this possibility in mind: all of Iran's bragging and blowing may be, as MacBeth put it, "sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 13, 2006, at the time of 06:51 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

April 25, 2006

Iran Strategies 4: the Joint-Stike Attack

This is a modification of Iran Strategies 0: Re-examining the "Default Assault". The first four Iran Strategies (in order of posting) were:

1. Iran Strategies 1: the Guillotine Gambit
2. Iran Strategies 2: Beachhead Bingo, and
3. Iran Strategies 0: Re-examining the "Default Assault"
4. Iran Strategies 3: the Econostrike

In Iran Strategies 0, we discussed "an all-out attack on all known and suspected nuclear sites, in an effort to utterly destroy Iran's entire nuclear program." Iran Strategies 4 is an "add-on" to this approach.

We start with the premise that Iran will surely retaliate for any strike on them (of any magnitude) with everything they have. Fortunately, they don't have much... not yet; the longer we dither, the more they will have available to strike back. Therefore, we must preemptively take out their retaliatory capability at the same time we take out their nuclear sites.

There is very little chance for Iran to attack us militarily. Although there are a bunch of Americans just across their border with Iraq and just across their border with Afghanistan, it would be suicidal (in the non-martyrdom-operation sense) for Iran to send its regular army streaming across either of those two borders.

Presumably, we ourselves would know that we ourselves were about to attack, and we would put our own troops on the absolute highest alert: Iran would have to send its tanks and APCs into the teeth of full-blown American and British resistance, under an airspace that we would totally dominate. It's unlikely that any Iranian armor columns full of old Soviet tanks would survive, and any warplane they sent into the region would be swiftly shot down.

(They do have a monstrous strategy utilizing the Basij: suicide attacks against enemy forces that may include masses of children strapped with bombs charging directly at us. They count on Americans being so sentimental about children -- as quite evidently the Iranian mullahs are not -- that we would find ourselves unable to shoot at them, even knowing that they will blow us all up -- along with themselves.

(But I frankly doubt we would be so self-destructive. If we shoot them, they might die; if we fail to shoot them, they will assuredly die, along with us. I believe our military would grit its collective teeth and open fire.)

So what is left? The only tactic Iran has available by which they might realistically expect to hurt us is terrorism. Although they are connected with several terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, their primary terrorist arm is Hezbollah, which was created by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 to fight the Israelis in Lebanon... and also as an internal parasecurity organization to enforce strict Islamic law. Hezbollah is completely in the pocket of Iran and Syria and would be expected to retaliate anywhere in the world that they could against America, the "Great Satan," in the event we strike Iran's nuclear sites.

But they will also "retaliate" against the "Little Satan," Israel, regardless of whether Israel was involved in the attack. They will strike at Israel just on general principles: they're Jews; they're American allies; they're Jews; they stand in the way of Iranian hegemony over the region; they're a free democracy; and they're Jews.

In other words, Israel will be struck in retaliation if they join us -- and also if they don't. Therefore, there really is no downside to joining us... and potentially a lot of upside.

This points the way to a joint-strike strategy. Simply put:

• America strikes at all of Iran's nuclear sites, those that we know and those we only suspect, in an effort to cripple or destroy their entire program;
• Israel strikes the primary Hezbollah incarnations: both in Gaza and also in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, which snuggles up between the Lebanon Mountains and Syria. Not in Iran; they're too dispersed... it would be needless bombing of civilian targets to no military purpose. But Hezbollah outside Iran, which represents the bigger threat anyway;
• These attacks must be conducted simultaneously; the blow to Iran (and Syria) must be staggering.

The idea, of course, is not only to take out Iran's nuclear capability -- but also cripple its terrorism retaliatory capability. Of course, they wouldn't even be able to complain to the UN about that part of the attack, since officially, they don't admit that Hezbollah in Lebanon or in Gaza has anything to do with them... although in reality, they control it through Syria. (They'll complain plenty about the main strike, though; so whining about Hezbollah won't even be missed!)

Syria won't be able to complain, because officially, they've already pulled out of Lebanon. Anyone left behind is simply a Lebanese citizen with no connection to Syria... and it's just an amazing coincidence that Hezbollah in the Bekaa seems to do exactly what Syria wishes they would do.

Lebanon itself will probably hollar, since it's their own homeland getting bombed; but it will be a sotto voce scream: the new Democrats of the Cedar Revolution will not be crying into the beer they're not supposed to drink at death and destruction being rained down upon the heads of their bitterest enemies, Hezbollah. As a value-added inducement, Israel's attack there will probably also kill scores of Syrian intelligence agents who are hiding out among Hezbollah, waiting for the right time to usher into Lebanon a new "protective engagement" by Syria.

We kill two birds with one stone. (Alternatively, we flush... well, let's skip that metaphor.)

Would the Israelis go along with it? Under Sharon, the answer would have been "absolutely." Alas, I'm not 100% sure of Ehud Olmert, particularly since he plans to name former "firebrand" militant unionista Amir Peretz as Minister of Defense. Still, I suspect that Israel is not going to change its official line that Hezbollah and Iran represent an "existential threat" to the nation of Israel.

So I do believe they would go along with it. The United States Congress would not be involved, as this would be an airstrike ordered by President Bush in his capacity as Commander in Chief -- Congress doesn't come into play... though like the Iranians, they'll scream bloody, blue murder once it's over. They may even try to initiate impeachment proceedings against Bush (we can always hope!)

It might be a good idea not even to warn Congress that we're about to do it, for fear that the Democrats will rush to leak the upcoming operation to the press, so that Iran can do a better job of defending itself. They would argue, "so that, once we see the operation will be futile, we'll call off this attack which clearly violates international law." I'm quite sure that John Kerry would defend such a leak (they would be leaking something that was "true")... as would Kate Martin, one presumes. Let's be charitable and not put temptation in Jay Rockefeller's way.

I wonder if we've even broached this possibility to the Israelis? I sure as heck hope they've at least kicked this can around.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 25, 2006, at the time of 08:45 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 17, 2006

Persian Flippers

Yesterday, the Scotsman newspaper published an article triumphantly announcing that Tony Blair's Britain will refuse to join any military action against Iran. But what I find fascinating is how the stated rationale for the refusal hinges on the crackpot idea that Iran can be negotiated into democracy by clever diplomats:

While the sense of crisis over Iran has been escalated by the fiery rhetoric between Tehran and the West - particularly Washington - many within the British government are now convinced that the impasse can be resolved by repeating the same sort of painstaking diplomatic activity that returned Libya to the international fold.

But would such "painstaking diplomatic activity" have had any effect at all, absent the invasion and overthrow of Baathist-occupied Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein? Do these diplomats recall that those events only occurred because the United States defied the same international diplomatic bodies that object just as vehemently today to a strike against Iran?

Yes, Col. Muammar Qaddafi did finally agree to give up his nuclear weapons programs, after the United States and Great Britain conducted secret talks with Qaddafi beginning in March of 2003; but those talks were going nowhere until December 19th of that year. Not-so-coincidentally, American troops had captured Saddam Hussein just six days earlier.

But the connection between the overthrow and occupation of Iraq, and especially of the capture of Hussein himself, and Libya's surprise announcement seems to have fallen down the rabbit hole, as far as Tony Blair's "favourite think-tank," the Foreign Policy Centre (FPC), is concerned:

"The only long-term solution to Iran's problems is democracy," said Alex Bigham, co-author of the FPC report. "But it cannot be dictated, Iraq-style, or it will backfire. Iran may seem superficially like Iraq but we need to treat Iran more like Libya. Diplomatic engagement must be allowed to run its course. There need to be bigger carrots as well as bigger sticks."

Bigger sticks? Since, in the same breath, the FPC takes all possible "bigger sticks" off the table in favor of negotiations alone, what they actually appear to suggest is a massive bribing of Iran -- a policy former President Bill Clinton followed to rather unfortunate effect.

It is not, I suspect, purely coincidental that four liberals in the U.S. Senate -- Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Dick Lugar (R-IN), the last being chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a leading RINO in the Senate -- chose this moment to issue a call for the United States to reject the military option, cease demanding sanctions, stop saying nasty things about serial assassin and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad... and instead to initiate bilateral talks between the Iranians and us [free registration required to read the Los Angeles Times story].

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and three Democratic colleagues called for direct U.S. talks with Iran to defuse political tension about its nuclear capability and address global concerns about energy supplies.

Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Evan Bayh of Indiana and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut also endorsed talks.

Ever since the Clinton administration, "bilateral talks" has been considered code for offering Iran monetary and political concessions in exchange for the promise to cease nuclear-weapons research. But such agreements from Iran, as from North Korea, are "pie-crust promises," as Mary Poppins might say: "easily made and easily broken." (The Israelis could tell us something about that approach.)

It appears to be a full-court press: liberal American senators urge us to drop everything and offer bribes to Iran for the promise of peace; while at the same time, our best allies in the world, the British, tell us that we're on our own; they won't aid an attack on Iran in any way.

Despite all the forces arrayed against us, and unlike the guys at Power Line, I believe we will attack Iran's nuclear sites if it becomes clear that the internationales have no intention of stopping Iran by any other means. We have three great advantages that cannot be neutralized: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and President George W. Bush.

Time is on the Iran's side, but the "tide in the affairs of men" is on ours. Let us take that tide at the flood.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 17, 2006, at the time of 05:43 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

April 11, 2006

Israeli Gears

Everytime I hear Fred and Mort, or Michael Medved, or any of (it seems) an endless parade of "pundents" opine that we don't need to go after Iran ourselves, because we can just leave it to Israel to take out those pesky nukes... all right, I cringe. I admit it.

This is what I call the Magical Israel Syndrome: the quasi-spiritualist belief in the godlike, supernatural power of the tiny nation of Israel. All they need do is wave a magic yarmulke or toot a mystical shofar, and send the Persian walls a-tumblin' down!

The reality is that the United States is probably the only country in the world that has a chance of hitting nearly all Iran's nuclear research and development sites -- admittedly with intelligence help from the Jewish state. Only we can damage them enough to set them back a few years.

Such a strike requires a coordinated air attack of hundreds of planes and missiles over several days: some to knock out the air defenses, some to jam enemy communications, others to look down upon the battlefield and coordinate the attacks, to engage and destroy enemy fighters, to assess damage after it's over... wait, I'm forgetting something; oh yes -- and actual bombers to drop bombs, since no way would a missile barrage be sufficient. (Necessary but not sufficient.)

It would be much larger than Clinton's 1998 bombing of Iraq (Operation Desert Fox), which used Navy and Marine Corps planes flying off the USS Enterprise, Air Force fighters and B-52 heavy bombers, and a British contingent. The Iran strike will probably be similar in size to the air attacks that preceded the Gulf War or Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Israel has absolutely no experience doing any of this. When was the last time they were at war with a nation that had relatively sophisticated air defenses -- the Yom Kippur War of 1973? They certainly don't have to think about any such coordinated attacks when they shoot a Hellfire missile at the operational leader du jour of Hamas or PIJ. Nor did they use any significant air power when they swept through the West Bank a few years ago, or when they move into Gaza these days.

Israel's 1981 bombing of Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear reactor consisted of eight F-16 Fighting Falcons (a total of sixteen one-tonne bombs) and six F-15 Strike Eagles; it just wasn't in the same universe as what we're talking about against Iran, where there are a score of sites that have publicly been revealed -- plus (I've heard) potentially hundreds of other facilities that should be hit at the same time, else they would simply move the nuclear development to one of them.

We are the only country on the planet with recent experience in such massive attacks; I don't think Great Britain's experience in Dresden (or the Falklands) would be much help.

Israel got its "magical" reputation because of the War of Independence, the Six Day War, and the Yom Kippur War; but the most recent of those was 33 years ago. Besides, those were primarily ground-force battles with troops and tanks. The Israeli Air Force did destroy the Egyptian airfields at the start of the Six Day War, to prevent the handful of Egyptian [Soviet] Badgers from obliterating entire Israeli tank divisions with their huge 20,000-pounders; but Egypt had few sophisticated air defenses... and I believe what they had, they had turned off for some reason.

Folks, Israel is not some gigantic war machine that can just grind through Iranian air defenses and do our dirty work for us. Israel will be invaluable in such an assult; their large number of human spies on the ground in Iran can give us targeting information that we couldn't get any other way, along with alerting us to facilities we might never have known existed. But we will have to do all the heavy lifting ourselves.

Forget Magical Israel Syndrome. If anyone is to attack the Iranian nuclear sites -- it will have to be the United States of America, possibly with British backup, fighter escort, and other ancillary aid. We cannot shuffle our battles off onto the Israelis.

It's like in To Kill a Mockingbird: when the time comes, Atticus Finch has to shoot down the mad dog himself. He can't call the cops or ask Scout to do it for him.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 11, 2006, at the time of 11:56 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Clams Got Legs! Well... Maybe Not

This is one of the few times I cannot legitimately add this post to the category "Media Madness," because on this occasion, the antique media has actually done a pretty creditable job.

The first point to note is that the glib simplification "Iran's gone nuclear!" misses a critical mass of distinctions. What Iran announced today is that they have enriched Uranium Hexafluoride gas (Hex) to about 3.5%.

Yet it is a setback for President Bush, who declared on Monday that one of his goals was to make sure that Iran never obtained the knowledge of how to enrich uranium, even at research-scale levels. They appear to have already passed that point. And if the Iranians have achieved what they said, they clearly would eventually be able to expand the process on an industrial scale and, if they were determined to do so, enrich the uranium to levels that could produce an atomic weapon.

But so far the quanitities that the country has produced appear to be miniscule, and the enrichment level they announced today — 3.5 percent — is far short of what would be required for a weapon.

Typically, a country will use many gas centrifuges, and will run the enriched gas through the separation cycle again and again, leading to higher and higher levels of enrichment. This is called a "cascade," at which Iran has been beavering away for at least the last seven years, and probably since shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

If Iran is telling the truth about their level of enrichment, what it has gotten now is a very small amount of Uranium enriched to reactor level... but far below bomb level. That is, however, a big "if." Since Iran has repeatedly lied throughout this crisis -- and since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows very well that admitting to enrichment any greater than 3% - 3.5% would force the entire world to admit that Iran was headed for nuclear weapons -- he would likely say "3.5%" whether it was really 3.5% or really 7.5%.

So Iran may be a lot closer to bomb-grade Uranium than they're willing to admit.

Even so, it seems highly doubtful they could possibly be anywhere near even the 20% enrichment necessary for a crappy nuke, let alone the 85% needed for a more effective, modern bomb. Still, this announcement makes it very clear there's no stopping them... at least not diplomatically. We had better be prepared for military action -- and sooner rather than later:

Mr. Ahmadinejad also said that Iran was treading a path for the production of industrial fuel and that the country's nuclear activities have been "under complete, unprecedented" supervision by the I.A.E.A.

"Today we are interested to operate under I.A.E.A. supervision what has been achieved. And what is going to be achieved in the future is within the framework of the rights of the nation."

Translating from Ahmadinejad-ese, I think he is asserting that Iran has the right to do whatever it wants within its own borders. Which might be a reasonable argument -- if this were a question of "rights" (of nations or otherwise). But we're less concerned about what "rights" Iran may have than we are with our own national security; one way or another, President Bush will not allow Iran to "go nuclear" (in the nuclear-bomb sense) on his watch:

President Bush on Monday repeated his determination to block Iran from gaining the kind of technical expertise from small-scale enrichment that could become the basis for a larger program capable of producing weapons. "We do not want the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, or the knowledge as to how to make a nuclear weapon," he said.

We're not the only ones worrying about this, of course. But the international bodies that could actually do something effective about the problem (short of a military strike) -- if they had the will -- are yet again trapped by their own internal tug-of-angst, just as they were anent Iraq....

On Wednesday night, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, is scheduled to arrive in Tehran to make another appeal for the country to halt its enrichment program and avoid a confrontation with the West. Iranian officials said that Mr. ElBaradei would face a changed situation, and American officials say they suspect that Iran's strategy is to portray its effort as a fait accompli that cannot be reversed.

Here is the situation on a nutshell, as Big Lizards sees it:

1. Iran admits they have a working gas-centrifuge cascade that can enrich Uranium;
2. However, they only admit to the 164 centrifuges at their Natanz Research Facility (aboveground);

The latest on this point came from former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani:

Earlier in the day, Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who is the head of an important national security council, told the Kuwait News Agency that Iran's nuclear scientists had enriched uranium using a cascade of 164 centrifuges.

An official at the I.A.E.A., who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the announcements appeared to refer to an older cascade at the nuclear center at Natanz. That cascade would be able to enrich uranium by the small amount needed for use as fuel in a nuclear reactor, but producing weapons-grade uranium would require a far larger installation, he said.

Rafsanjani, however, is not the final word; we have reason to believe the Iranians are lying about this, too.

3. The United States and the United Kingdom, contrariwise, believe that the Iranians are working on a much larger, belowground facility at Natanz, one that houses as many as 4,000 gas centrifuges.

This disturbing claim comes via to the left-wing Guardian newspaper of Great Britain (what used to be the Manchester Guardian):

Meanwhile, it was claimed today that Iran had secretly manufactured around 4,000 centrifuges capable of weapons grade uranium enrichment - 25 times the quantity it has admitted to the UN.

If true, this completely changes all the calculations about how fast Iran could actually spin-up their Hex to actual weapons-grade Uranium.

4. The Iranians admit to enriching only up to reactor-grade, 3.5%;
5. But since negotiations began in earnest in 1998, the Iranians have consistently lied, been caught, admitted the lie, and then lied again -- often about the very subject they just got caught lying about last time. We cannot trust any of their claims;
6. However, we probably have a reasonably good idea ourselves (or through intel from Israel, which has a lot more spies in Iran than they ever had in Iraq) of how much enrichment Iran has actually achieved;

Since John Bolton, our representative to the United Nations, is not literally running around with his hair on fire, which he would be if Iran had achieved anything close to 20% -- well, all right... metaphorically on fire -- I think it safe to conclude that it's somewhere between 3.5% and, say, 7% - 8%. Probably on the lower side of that divide (maybe 5%?)

Still, there is absolutely no doubt about it: it's toll the tocsin time. I sure as heck hope the reports are accurate that we have "advanced plans" for attacking Iran... because at this pace, we're gonna need 'em within months, not years.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 11, 2006, at the time of 07:03 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

April 05, 2006

Big Lizards' Iranian Skepticism Confirmed!

A couple of days ago, in I'll Believe It When I Believe It, we were very skeptical about Iran's claims of a whole series of "super new weapons" (now expanded to include an invisible "flying boat" -- hmm... could that refer to a hovercraft, you think? Like the one Sachi and I took to cross the English Channel ten years ago? Or maybe just a low-flying, ground-effect airplane?)

We're very please to see that ThreatsWatch now confirms our skepticism.

If you were wondering what that "Fajr-3 missile" was -- the one "which can avoid radar and hit several targets simultaneously using multiple warheads," as AP breathlessly quoted (quoting a general in Iran's Revolutionary Guards) -- it turns out it wasn't exactly what we thought. We wrote:

And this "supermissile" they're talking about sounds remarkably like a 1960s or 70s era cruise missile... either from Russia or France.

In fact, it was less than that. The Pentagon has determined that it was a Soviet Scud-C, developed in 1965. From ThreatsWatch:

Last week, it was noted that there was no word from NORAD nor the US Military in-theater of a ‘ballistic’ missile launch detection in Iran. Today, we get that word. The Pentagon is saying now that Iran tested an older version of the Scud missile family last week and not any new ICBM development. What was launched in last week’s much publicized Iranian media event was, in fact, a Shahab-2 with a range of 310 miles. The Shahab-2 is the Iranian designation for the Scud-C variant of the Russian design.

Oh, and that super-torpedo, the one that would make all defensive shipborne measures obsolete?

Here's what we wrote:

Let's try it another way: the most plausible explanation is that Russia has given Iran some older Shkvals, and the Iranians repainted them.

This has not yet been verified; but the claimed speed of the Iranian Hoot torpedo -- 223 mph -- is almost exactly the speed clocked by the Russian Shkval: 230 mph. This is far too close a match to be coincidence, especially as they both use the same boutique technique, supercaviation, to achieve those speeds... at the sacrifice of both range and maneuverability: they cannot be steered once fired, so their effective range is much less than the raw range of 7,000 m. The Soviets played around with them from the 1960s through the 90s but finally gave them up as relatively worthless in combat.

So we repeat our final point from last time:

If ever the elite media can stop quaking in their Birkenstocks, perhaps they can interview some American experts on Iran's missile force as to what these missiles likely are, where they came from, and whether we have techniques for dealing with them.

Unless, that is, such facts won't fit the story the media has already drafted.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves!

The "story" the antique media prefers is that America has met its match, bitten off more than it can chew, and is going to be humbled. The Third World powers are using asymmetrical warfare to stymie the great American imperialist warmongers, and that will show that darned President Bush! Anything that undercuts the story is a bigger threat than a Hoot missile and must be suppressed.

Don't look for AP to correct its mistakes; they never retract the really big ones.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 05, 2006, at the time of 06:20 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

April 03, 2006

I'll Believe It When I Believe It

Let's see... the Iranian regime -- known far and wide to be liars and braggarts ("wipe Israel off the map," indeed) -- now claim to have developed, in a scant six years, a super missile that is invisible to any radar and also a super torpedo that can destroy any American warship with a single shot and is as fast as the fastest torpedo ever created, the Russian Shkva.

Note, however, the provenance of all these frightening claims:

Iran conducted its second major test of a new missile within days on Sunday, firing a high-speed torpedo it said no submarine or warship can escape at a time of increased tensions with the U.S. over its nuclear program.

The tests came during war games that Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards have been holding in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea since Friday.

On the maneuvers' first day, Iran said it successfully tested the Fajr-3 missile, which can avoid radar and hit several targets simultaneously using multiple warheads.

"Iran said." All this information comes from only one source: from the Revolutionary Guards missile-force spokesmen; not from any unbiased, third-party expert. The Guard tells AP, and AP tells the world.

And we're supposed to believe this? We're supposed to believe that, although we can evade Russian and Chinese radar, and our subs can evade detection by all the civilized nations of the world, nevertheless, a third-world basket case with a military technology borrowed from Russia, Red China, and NoKo, has out-innovated the United States, by golly.

A country that is years behind even Pakistan at developing a nuclear weapon says it's now the preeminent designer of missile and torpedo technology that renders obsolete all current countermeasures: jamming, evading, and intercepting. Mirabile dictu!

Sure. I'll buy this when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei eats a BLT for brunch.

This all comes at a time when Iran knows we're gearing up for a major strike against them, which would necessarily involve maneuvering our warships into the Gulf of Oman, through the Strait of Hormuz, and into the Persian Gulf (almost certainly with support from the United Arab Emirates, just across the strait from Iran -- assuming we haven't angered them too much between now and the attack by systematically squashing every potential commercial contract with them for anything).

Do you think Iran might possibly have a national interest in making the world, and in particular the United States and Israel, believe that they have developed superweapons that would prevent any such attack?

The new "Iranian" torpedo has a speed almost exactly that of a decade-old Russian fish (flying fish, actually):

The Hoot's speed would make it about three or four times faster than a normal torpedo and as fast as the world's fastest known underwater missile, the Russian-made VA-111 Shkval, developed in 1995. It was not immediately known if the Hoot was based on the Shkval.

Let's try it another way: the most plausible explanation is that Russia has given Iran some older Shkvals, and the Iranians repainted them. And this "supermissile" they're talking about sounds remarkably like a 1960s or 70s era cruise missile... either from Russia or France.

The VA-111 Shkval was developed by Russia primarily for use as an anti-torpedo torpedo, or more properly, anti-torpedo underwater missile: the Shkval ("squall") gets its tremendous speed by using supercavitation:

Supercavitation is the use of cavitation effects to create a large bubble of gas inside a liquid, allowing an object to travel at great speed through the liquid by being wholly enveloped by the bubble. The cavity (i.e., the bubble) reduces the drag on the object and precisely this makes supercavitation an attractive technology: drag is normally about 1,000 times greater in water than in air.

In 1977, Soviet engineers developed the first projectile to use supercavitation: the VA-111 Shkval ("Squall") torpedo. This can travel at 230 mph (100 m/s) underwater, compared to the top speed of about 80 mph (35 m/s) for conventional aquatic craft, but it is reportedly not steerable. Even faster speeds of about 310 mph (ca. 140 m/s) and higher have also been rumored. News of the device reached the West in the 1990s.

Here is the point, though: not being steerable, you only get one shot: the Soviets, then the Russians, meant to use it against an enemy torpedo, or failing that, an enemy submarine. Since many torpedoes use a trailing wire to steer towards the target, forcing the enemy sub to swerve and move would probably sever the wire, making the enemy torpedo easy to dodge.

But such advanced techology requires an equally advanced submarine force, crews that spend months honing their skill in real-world simulations... as we routinely do with sea-based missile interceptors, for example. Even if Russia has shipped some Shkvals to the mullahs (or China has, since they also have a bunch, and they have even more reason to arm Teheran against America than Russia does), they're not likely to have sent entire sub crews along as part of the deal... especially given the terrible consequences of being caught. Advisors, yes; actual crews, I doubt the heck out that.

And that means the Iranians with Shkvals are like gang bangers with AK-47s: they're likely more dangerous to bystanders than the intended target.

But we should look for several more such announcements in the next few months, each one eagerly lapped up by the ghouls at the antique media, eager for the exciting possibility of sunken US warships and a crippled and humbled United States. Maybe we'll hear some of these claims:

• A new super-synthetic-aperature radar that can easily spot any of our "stealth" aircraft;
• An anti-missile shield that will destroy the birds while they're still halfway out of their ship-based launch tubes;
• Particle-beam technology that will disintegrate entire carrier battle groups in a few seconds -- the scene in Mars Attacks! was actually footage from a real Iranian test that the mullahs graciously allowed Tim Burton to use;
• Corner-turning bullets;
• Hezbollah cyborgs;
• Several real, live Djinns from bottles dredged up in the Persian Gulf;
• And of course, get ready for the Iranians to inform the American news media that they've developed nuclear "doomsday" weapons, which have been secretly buried under every major city in the United States. "Touch one single centrifuge at Natanz," President Ahmadinejad will warn, "and all your base are belong to us!"

If ever the elite media can stop quaking in their Birkenstocks, perhaps they can interview some American experts on Iran's missile force as to what these missiles likely are, where they came from, and whether we have techniques for dealing with them.

Unless, that is, such facts won't fit the story the media has already drafted.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 03, 2006, at the time of 05:32 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

March 20, 2006

Mullahlogging

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 06, 2006

Casus Belli Against Iran!

Via Scott Johnson at Power Line (hat tip to Big Lizards commenter MTF), ABC World News Tonight is reporting that American troops have intercepted heavy-duty bombs being smuggled into Iraq... directly from known a bombmaking factory in Iran.

If true, then as John Hinderaker notes, this is clearly an act of war by Iran against the United States.

And, the lizards respond, the perfect casus belli whenever we choose to launch a military assault on that awful country.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 06, 2006, at the time of 07:10 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Al-Jaafari Must Step Down to Unify Iraq

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

Iran Strategies 3: the Econostrike

This is actually the fourth entry in the Big Lizards strategic series, Iran Strategies. The first three (in order of posting) were:

1. Iran Strategies 1: the Guillotine Gambit
2. Iran Strategies 2: Beachhead Bingo, and
3. Iran Strategies 0: Re-examining the "Default Assault"

(Yes, I know it's confusing that 1 and 2 come before 0; deal with it!)

As you might guess from the title, this strategic suggestion focuses on Iran's economy. I think of it as sort of "super economic sanctions." Like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and most other oil-producing Middle-Eastern states, Iran's primary economy is oil export. As the CIA's World Factbook notes,

Iran's economy is marked by a bloated, inefficient state sector, over reliance on the oil sector, and statist policies that create major distortions throughout. Most economic activity is controlled by the state. Private sector activity is typically small-scale - workshops, farming, and services. President KHATAMI has continued to follow the market reform plans of former President RAFSANJANI, with limited progress. Relatively high oil prices in recent years have enabled Iran to amass some $40 billion in foreign exchange reserves, but have not eased economic hardships such as high unemployment and inflation. The proportion of the economy devoted to the development of weapons of mass destruction remains a contentious issue with leading Western nations.

This suggests a soft spot that we should be able to hit with our eyes closed: Iran runs on oil exports; oil exports need a port out of which to ex-; and ports are big, fragile, easily disrupted things. IS3 would function best when combined with IS0, the default strike on the WMD sites: we remove their nuclear development centers and also deny them the resources to reconstitute them anytime soon.

There is no need to hit the oil wells themselves -- which is good, as that could create an ecological catastrophe not only for Iran but for every state in the region. It is enough, I suspect, to lob a few cruise missiles into the port facilities on the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. The object here is not to wipe them out; if there is a revolution that ousts the mullahs, the young people of Iran will need those to recover and fuel (literally) a nascent democracy. Rather, the idea is to render them inoperable for the moment -- and then keep hitting the ports whenever Iran comes close to reopening them.

But that is not enough; we also need to take care of that large "$40 billion in foreign exchange reserves" which Iran could use to purchase necessary food, reconstruction services, and other infrastructure repair and improvements... to "tide them over" until they can restore oil export operations. And that means a "blockade" at both ends.

We can use the Navy to blockade their Persian Gulf ports; but we have no forces on the Caspian, obviously, since it is landlocked. Alas, we need to more or less close Iran's northern shore; it doesn't need to be 100% sealed, just enough to prevent Russia from transshipping materials via the Caspian Sea.

This would be the hardest "backdoor" to close, mostly because of the geopolitical consequences. Fortunately, there is currently no operational pipeline between Iran and Russia; we don't need to create the world's largest oil spill (again!) Any major shipment into Iran must come by cargo vessel (which needs a port) or by rail.

There are two major Iranian ports on the Caspian Sea: Neka (Nekka) and Bandar Anzali. We would likely have already targeted Neka as part of IS0, since it is a suspected nuclear weapons research facility. But the major Iranian port on the Caspian Sea is Bandar Anzali, off in the northwestern corner of Iran, hard up against Azerbaijan. Anzali would have to be on the target list.

This is not a "blockade," of course, but an attack. However, if our strikes were surgical, we could prevent port ops that might include oil export without hurting the fishing industry there... thus (one hopes) not enraging the citizens of Iran any more than would result from any attack at all.

I don't think we need to worry too much about the roads and rail that cross Iran's borders. Iran is surrounded by Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan -- and of course Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, which last three would be right out, of course. Iran has reasonably good relations with its northwestern neighbors, but none except Turkey has the industrial capacity to supply Iran with what it needs to sustain a technological society... and we have been courting Turkey assiduously, via Condoleezza Rice and several other officials, to get them to go along with air strikes on Iran (and Syria) -- or at least sit still for them.

Clearly, Turkey is looking more towards the West than Iran:

In the event that talks fail, Turkey is the only country in Iran's vicinity on which the US has prepositioned tactical nuclear weapons (an estimated 90) that it could deploy against Iranian facilities.

The veritable who's who of US and Israeli officials who processed through Turkey in recent weeks for consultations may be a reflection of this.

First came US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, followed by Federal Bureau of Investigation chief Robert Mueller. Porter Goss, the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency, also visited, just days before the arrival of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization secretary general, Jaap De Hoop Scheffer.

Finally, Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff Dan Halutz held discussions with the head of the Turkish military, General Hilmi Ozkok, and Turkish President Ahmed Necdet Sezer. The leading left-nationalist daily, the Cumhuriyet, reported that talks centered on how to deal with Iran.

I doubt that Iran can count on any aid or help from Turkey, in defiance of an American blockade and attack.

The most serious potential consequences are (a) Russia's reaction, and (b) the world oil market reaction. If the Saudis and other Arabian OPEC countries decide to side with their Persian Islamic "brothers" in Iran and embargo oil to the U.S., that could be very hard. We have reconstituted our strategic petroleum reserves, thanks to George W. Bush (President Clinton had substantially depleted them artificially holding down the price of crude); but that would only last us two to three years. I doubt an embargo could last that long -- but it would cause widespread economic instability and dislocation within the U.S.

But if OPEC remains with us, they could pump and export enough extra oil to make up for Iran. The price need not even rise, as there is excess capacity, or "slack," in the world oil market (OPEC artificially limits oil production to maintain high prices).

The reaction of Russia is definitely dicier. Iran and Russia have been cooperating on a number of projects lately, and the ex-Soviets have shown themselves, when push comes to kick, to be closer to Iran than the United States. Still, I'm not sure what they could do to us. They've got problems of their own in Chechnya and Ukraine; they have a lot of economic deals with the West; and they're still in dire need of industrial modernization. I cannot imagine they want to stick their noses into a shootin' war with the United States -- especially not on behalf of a bunch of Moslem extremists!

As I said, I think IS3 should be undertaken along with the strike on the nuke sites, IS0; under those circumstances, Russia would probably scream and yell in the Security Council... but they really have no power actually to do anything, and they know that.

Clearly, IS3 would be an escalation even over IS0; but it would sure hamper Iran's ability to rebuild its nuclear program following American air and missile strikes. For this reason, it should at least be considered as a "value add-on." It's worth discussing, if anyone here wants to discuss it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 06, 2006, at the time of 04:52 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 27, 2006

It Ain't Even the Quarter

The following is the follow-up post to our previous Scaley Classic, this one posted on Captain's Quarters on July 5th, 2005.

A few days ago, when July was fresh and new, I argued in That Ain't the Half of It that it really doesn't matter whether Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was or was not a leader of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, because the enormity of his undisputed post-revolutionary career as an assassin for the Revolutionary Guard -- during which he murdered hundreds of Iranian dissidents living abroad -- simply overwhelmed the question of whether he was also a student radical.

The only objection that could reasonably be raised (apart from dredging up some evidence to contradict the biography at GlobalSecurity.org) is that Ahmadinejad's homidical vocation, as horrific as it was, was not directed at us, and that we should only be concerned with attacks on America -- which moves the embassy-seizure question back to front and center.

Now I argue that if that is your standard, then again, there are far more serious attacks that Iran has committed against the United States... including the murder of 2,985 people on American soil (mostly Americans) in the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.

Wait -- hold on -- don't turn into a mob! Yes, of course I know that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, which is primarily a Sunni organization, not Shi'ite, like Iran. But I thoroughly support the judgment of the president himself when he said:

And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

Evidence has begun to emerge that the violent and secretive regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran not only applauded the 9/11 attacks, not only gave safe haven to terrorists, but actively collaborated with al-Qaeda on the attacks themselves.

Granted, none of this implicates Mr. Ahmadinejad; but his new boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is involved right up to his turbin.

Some of this evidence is detailed in the new book by Kenneth Timmerman, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, which I have just begun reading.

Fair warning: If you are one of those -- and I know you're out there -- who reject anything written by Timmerman or any other "right wing" author, then gird yourself; I'm going to be discussing several things from this book in future posts as well. Forwarned is four-armed!

Timmerman begins the bombshells in the very first chapter, in which he discusses the testimony from an Iranian defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, who says he gave (or tried to give) critical information to the CIA, back in July of 2001, of an impending terrorist attack on the United States in September... an attack in which Iran had been closely involved with al-Qaeda in the planning phase. Timmerman says that the CIA refused to listen and did not pass the intel up the chain.

Now of course, much of this is he-said, she-said; you are either with Timmerman, or you are with the CIA. But given the track record of the latter, as thoroughly deconstructed by the 9/11 Commission Report on the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11, I know where I'm placing my flutter.

Bear one important note in mind: this entire chapter derives from several interviews that Timmerman conducted with Zakeri. Wherever possible, when Zakeri gave specific information -- such as the descriptions of various top-secret facilities in Iran, the presence of certain personnel in Iran at specific times, and specific documents that Zakeri claimed to have smuggled out of Iran -- Timmerman tested the claims against all publicly available and classified information he was able to obtain, including with American and foreign intelligence agents, with other Iranian defectors, with document examiners, and with prosecutors in Germany who evaluated Zakeri for a terrorism case in which they called him as witness. In each case that Timmerman checked up on Zakeri's specific claims, they were borne out; not a single claim made to Timmerman by Zakeri was contradicted by any specific counter-evidence.

The central claim of this chapter is, in Timmerman's words:

The 9/11 hijackers and al-Qaeda planners had been in constant contact with senior Iranian officials and intelligence officers before September 11. It was not a casual relationship or a chance encounter here and there, but a steady stream of contacts.

These "contacts" began in January 2001, when Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is the founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Osama bin Laden's personal physician, and widely regarded as the number-two man in al-Qaeda, journeyed from Afghanistan to Iran with several other al-Qaeda capos. Zakeri's connection was that he was in charge of the security detail protecting the visitors; he picked them up at the airport and conveyed them to the meeting at a "mountain guesthouse near the town of Varamin, just sough of Tehran", which normally was used by senior officials of Iran.

According to what an Iranian official present at the meeting told his friend Zakeri, Zawahiri was in Iran to seek equipment, forged travel documents, and help in laundering money. I am presuming this meant money collected by various Islamic charities, then laundered to al-Qaeda, a practice we have established, through many successful prosecutions, was the normal way that AQ was funded.

One of Zawahiri's men present was Saif al-Adel, who had worked in the past with Lebanese-born Imad Fayez Mugniyeh. Mugniyeh was a high-ranking official with the Revolutionary Guard's Qods Force, which controlled foreign terrorist operations... and a man well-known personally to Zakeri. Al-Adel and eleven other AQ members stayed on after the meeting to continue working with the Iranians.

The Iranians present were not low-level flunkies, either. The Iranian delegation to this conference included Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, the chief inspector of the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), a clandestine intelligence organization that reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran, who was at the time (and still is) Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the successor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Also present, Ali Akbar Parvaresh, one of the top officers in Section 43 of MOIS; Section 43 is in charge of terrorist operations outside the Middle East and also runs the Varamin safe house. Parvaresh was wanted by the Argentinian government for a bombing in 1994 that killed eighty-six people. Mugniyeh was also in attendance, which is how Zakeri found out what was discussed.

A few months later, in May 2001, another delegation arrived from al-Qaeda... this one led by none other than Osama bin Laden's eldest son, Saad. Saad bin Laden met with all of the members of the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Leader Khamenei, Hashemi Rafsanjani (head of the Expediency Council), Mohammed Yazdi (head of the Guardians Council), Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi (chief of Judiciary), and Ali Meshkini (head of the Assembly of Experts).

Zakeri believes it was at this meeting, on May 4, 2001, that Iran's leaders learned the specifics of bon Laden's plans for the September 11 attack and decided to provide operational assistance. "Everything changed after this," he told me.

Nateq-Nouri subsequently sent a memo to Mustafa Pourghanad, the director of Section 43, conveying Khamenei's orders for "joint operations" with al-Qaeda; this is one of the memos that Zakeri carried with him from Iran when he defected.

Timmerman closes the chapter with the CIA's reaction to all this information from Zakeri:

A female intelligence officer returned my call with a shaking voice. "This man is a serial fabricator," she said, more nervous than indignant. "I have to warn you off of this story."

A few hours later, I received another call, this one from a higher-ranking official. When I asked him to comment on the veracity of Zakeri's warning, he replied angrily, "We have no record that he made any such claim. And he is a fabricator of monumental proportions." But when I asked him whether Zaker was lying about meeting with U.S. officials in Baku on July 26, 2001, this senior official pointedly refused to answer.

Now of course, I can certainly understand the CIA refusing to comment upon the specifics of CIA meetings with defectors from hostile powers. But on the other hand, they repeatedly characterized Zakeri as a "fabricator," yet never once pointed Timmerman to any sources, even public sources, that would tend to discredit Zakeri. So take it for what you will.

But at the very least, the Iranian connection to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack -- and whether the CIA dropped this particular ball in 2001 -- deserves at least as much exploration as that other well-known ball they dropped: the extent of Saddam Hussein's own interaction with al-Qaeda, which the CIA refused to admit for literally years, but which is now thoroughly documented in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on the intelligence failures in Iraq, as well as by recent revelations from Jordan about another high-level Zawahiri meeting, this one in Baghdad.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 27, 2006, at the time of 05:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

That Ain't the Half of It

The following is a Scaley Classic about Iran, first posted on Captain's Quarters on July 1st, 2005. This was Dafydd's first post as a guest blogger on Captain's Quarters.

In a blogpost that the Captain slapped up a few days ago --

Oh. Wait, let me introduce myself: this is Dafydd ab Hugh, guest-blogging for Captain Ed while he recuperates from winning $2.8 million in the World Series of Poker finale, playing (as is his wont for FEC reasons) under the name Tuan Le. If someone posts here under the name "Captain Ed" (including the quotation marks) in the next few weeks, it's actually the nom de plume du jour of well-known labor leader and founder of the Socialist Party of America, Eugene Debs.

I may be the most well-known blogger in the blogosphere who doesn't actually have a blog (yet; shortly). You may remember me from my high-school filmstrip series "It's All About Adhesives."

Getting back to the point at hand, in this post, Captain Ed (the original) noted that evidence is mounting that the recently elected president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was in fact one of the ringleaders of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, where embassy personnel and Marines were held captive for 444 days.

But it turns out, that's just the tip of the sandberg.

Last night (30 June 2005) on Special Report With Brit Hume, Brit's guest was Rob Sobhani, adjunct professor at Georgetown University and frequent contributor to National Review and the Wall Street Journal; Sobhani discussed several questions related to Iran, including the elfin Mr. President Ahmadinejad.

Sobhani did not personally know whether Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage takers; but he did know something about his background. After university, Ahmadinejad joined the Revolutionary Guard and was assigned to a special unit whose mission was to hunt down and assassinate Iranian dissidents and defectors. He was sent on a number of such missions.

If this has gotten any other recent airplay, I've missed it. GlobalSecurity.org has had this information up on its website for several days now:

Ahmadinejad was a senior officer in the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards, stationed at Ramazan Garrison near Kermanshah in western Iran. This was the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards’ "Extra-territorial Operations" -- mounting attacks beyond Iran’s borders. His work in the Revolutionary Guards was related to suppression of dissidents in Iran and abroad. He personally participated in covert operations around the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

With the formation of the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the IRGC, Ahmadinejad became one of its senior commanders. He directed assassinations in the Middle East and Europe, including the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leader Abdorrahman Qassemlou, who was shot dead by senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards in a Vienna flat in July 1989. Ahmadinejad was a key planner of the attack. He was reported to have been involved in planning an attempt on the life of Salman Rushdie....

Ahmadinejad, an unabashed conservative, resurrected the fervor of the 1979 Islamic Revolution during the campaign by saying Iran "did not have a revolution in order to have democracy, but to have an Islamic government." Ahmadinejad had a bloody background. He was responsible for the execution of hundreds of dissidents after the war.

[Emphasis added because my jaw is dropping]

Considering the help Ahmadinejad received from the Guardians Council in this election (vote rigging, ballot stuffing, candidate intimidation, dissident assassination), one wonders whether his job is actually to order the Iranian nuclear attacks on Israel, America, Iraq, the UK, and France (well, probably not France) that the Mullahs see getting less hazy all the time in their Magic 8-Balls.

Perhaps they worried that Rafsanjani, that unreliable fellow, might balk at obliterating half the world in the name of Allah. Considering how many heads Ahmadinejad already has hanging from his belt, he likely wouldn't hesitate any longer than it takes to say "Rumplestiltskin."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 27, 2006, at the time of 05:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 22, 2006

Dubya and Dubai: the Rest of the Story?

An old and very unreliable friend of mine has offered a suggestion that nevertheless seems very likely to strike close to the truth, despite him being very unreliable. And old. So hat-tip to JNS.

I suspect there is a lot more to this deal with DP World than has yet come to light; and I hope the rest never will. But there is no harm in speculating, since anyone who might be interested can speculate as well as I.

We have a very close but quiet working relationship with the United Arab Emirates that dates back to the mid-1970s. Besides trade and military cooperation, they have in particular helped us in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). In fact, I probably wouldn't exaggerate to say they are our most reliable Arab allies in that struggle.

I don't believe we have any military bases in the UAE; at least, I cannot find any listed. But we have rights to use some of their military bases for non-combat ops -- in particular, for refueling purposes to support Operation Iraqi Freedom (we grew significantly closer to the UAE during the first Gulf War). And our militaries and intelligence services have been working hand in glove for a while now.

We also have a huge problem that looms over everything else in the Middle East, overshadowing the (slim) possiblity of civil war in Iraq, the election of a terrorist organization in the Palestinian Authority (to take the place of the previous terrorist organization that ran the joint for decades), and everything else we're worried about: the imminent nuclear arming of Iran. In fact, this is the most dangerous and volatile situation in the world right now, as far as the United States is concerned.

During the Iran-Iraq war, we did not exactly ally with Saddam Hussein; but we certainly interfered in that conflict somewhat on Hussein's side. There was good reason for that: Hussein was simply a Fascist thug and mass murderer, who could be relied upon to prefer his own skin intact; for that reason, he was more predictable and, to some extent, controllable.

But Iran is a different beast: there, mass homicidal mania and an even clearer connection to terrorist groups is coupled with a fanatical jihadist religion obsessed with Armageddon to the point of actual nihilism. I believe many of the top clerics in Iran would gladly pull down the columns that held up the whole world, destroying all, including themselves, if they thought it would please their bloodthirsty vision of God.

George W. Bush is not the kind of man who would "will" that problem to his successor, if he can help it. There is a faint chance we might be able to resolve the situation satisfactorally by diplomatic means; but I doubt it. More likely, we will at some point have to initiate a military attack on Iran in some fashion... and without support from our Arab allies, such an attack will be much harder, less likely to succeed, and far more spendthrift of American lives.

Take a look at this map of Iran:

Look west and what do we see? Iraq, where we have tens of thousands of troops; Saudi Arabia, which will likely be no help at all; and Kuwait, where we have three military bases.

Look north, and we see Turkmenistan -- no help from President Niyazov.

To the east is Afghanistan, where we have bases and about 15,000 troops, and Pakistan, another U.S. ally in the war on Islamist jihadi terrorism -- but one who might not want to incur the wrath of its radical Moslem population.

And now we look south, to Qatar, where we have the al Udeid Air Base... and to the United Arab Emirates, which already allow us to use their military facilities to transport troops, aircraft, and supplies. In addition, the UAE controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which all Iranian oil must move to enter the world petroleum market.

We need support and bases from which to launch either an attack or a blockade, depending on how other events flow. The UAE needs the money from the deal. Can we connect some dots here?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 22, 2006, at the time of 09:42 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

February 15, 2006

Iran Strategies 0: Re-examining the "Default Assault"

It's not easy (and may be impossible) to come up with alternatives to the straightforward attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. So perhaps it's ripe to think a second time about what we need to do if we decide to "just go for it."

First, there are three flavors of attack on Iran:

1. We can do a limited strike of three or four of the best-known facilities, just to try to delay Iran's program and give us more time to decide what to do.
2. Or an all-out attack on all known and suspected nuclear sites, in an effort to utterly destroy Iran's entire nuclear program
3. Or in the spiciest version, a full-scale ground invasion of Iran

Number three is right out, I believe; we simply don't have the resources to deal with full invasions and occupations of Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan all at once. There isn't enough military left after eight years of Mr. Clinton.

Number one is the "limited strike" option. Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation suggests, if we decide to go that route, that we hit Bushehr, a two-reactor (only one is likely working) light-water nuclear power plant; the Uranium enrichment facility at Nantanz, which has both an admitted above-ground section (only admitted after Iran's enrichment program was "outed" by an anti-government group, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq Organization, or MKO), plus and an as-yet secret and vast underground section; and the heavy-water production plant at Arak, which is also the site of a heavy water reactor being constructed.

The problem with the limited strike is that Iran is likely to respond with just as much retaliation for a limited strike as it would for a full-scale assault on its nuclear sites; I don't think anybody imagines they will "hold back" under any circumstances. And we're no more likely to get any allied backing for a limited strike than a bigger one. So in for a penny, in for a Krugerrand... there's no advantage to limiting the strike.

So scratch numbers one and three and go with door number two:

• The all-out attack on all known and suspected nuclear sites, in an effort to utterly destroy Iran's entire nuclear program

We'll stick with this one and see where it leads us. What exactly do we need to do to really pull this off?

The disadvantage to this kind of attack, as I mentioned before (in the Guillotine Gambit and in Iran Strategies 2: Beachhead Bingo), is that we really don't know exactly what Iran has. We know there are at least two dozen sites -- but Iran could have as many as seventy or eighty. Even with the best planning and flawless execution, we're not going to get them all; what remains will be a seed for resumption, if Iran decides to continue down that path.

But we could dramatically increase the number of sites we can hit if we take the obvious precaution of getting Mossad to cooperate with the Pentagon, sharing with us everything they know about nuclear facilities in Iran. Oddly, while the Israelis had very little penetration into Iraq under Saddam Hussein, they have a lot better human intelligence (humint) sources in Persia; they can help a lot by revealing probable sites to us that the CIA would never have a chance of uncovering... and Israel, once convinced that we really are going to attack, would likely decide that they'd rather we hit everything... because Israel, of course, will bear the brunt of the inevitable Iranian counterattack.

So that brings us to a better plan:

• The all-out attack on all known or suspected sites, using intelligence input and perhaps even on-the-ground laser targeting from the Israelis.

Naturally, Iran will respond to such an "outrage against Allah" by throwing everything they can lay their hands on at anybody unlucky enough to lie within reach. They don't have missiles that can reach the United States (that we know of!), but we certainly have assets they can attack right across the border with Iraq.

We also have to assume that Iran has chemical and biological weapons capability, though likely crude; and we should assume they will strike at civilian targets in preference to hardened military ones. Thus, as part of any planning for a strike, we also have to take out any retaliatory forces they have: ballistic and cruise missiles, bombers, even light aircraft and helicopters.

We should cut the roads leading from Iran into Iraq and Afghanistan; and we should also drive some of our forces into the Iran side of the border, hunting out and destroying any "safehouses" and terrorist forces we catch unprepared. My guess is that Iran expects a strike -- but they expect a limited strike, like Clinton used on Hussein: a few days of bombing that they think they can ride out. If we hit them as hard as we're envisioning here, we've got a good chance of "catching them with their pants down," as General Turgidson says in Dr. Strangelove.

But we cannot assume we're safe forever. Iran will eventually strike back, and they will shoot missiles at us, the Israelis, Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly even at Europe, if they have intermediate-range mobile missiles that survive our assault. We need to set up theater anti-missile systems in as many sites as we can realistically do.

Further, we must assume Iran will utilize Hezbollah -- probably its first choice in terrorist organizations, since Iran created Hezbollah and still largely controls it (except for the Lebanon chapter, which is presumably controlled by Bashar Assad in Syria). Thus, it behooves us to strike Hezbollah at the same time we strike Iran.

The Israelis might want to do some bombing runs down the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, where the Syrian-controlled Lebanese Hezbollah is known to have its major strength. While Lebanon itself wouldn't cooperate with Israel in such an attack (I don't think they would), they probably wouldn't be heartbroken to see Hezbollah rolled up.

So now we have the almost-final list of targets:

• An all-out attack on all known or suspected sites, using intelligence and targeting from Israel, coupled with an attack on all retaliatory forces, including missile sites, air bases, Iranian-backed "insurgents" in Shiite Iraq and along the border, and known sites for Hezbollah, and with our own missile-defense facilities in readiness for the inevitable counter-attack.

We should precede the attack with a lot of "psy-ops" -- moving troops all around to confuse the Iranians whether we are or aren't, if we do, when and how we will. But that's a given with any attack and goes without saying (so I shouldn't even have mentioned it, I guess).

But there is one last point... one that will certainly shock Europe -- so we don't dare tell them about it beforehand, because they might very well warn the Iranians.

Iran is also known to have a very cozy relationship with al-Qaeda, which makes no bones about wanting to attack the American homeland again. If Iran is thwarted in other ways (or even if they were successful in counterattacking us), they would certainly turn to al-Qaeda with money, weaponry, intelligence, and other support services, hoping the terrorists could pull off "the big one," the mother of all terrorist attacks that would be so devastating that (the Iranians believe) America would collapse and beg for peace.

So at the same time as we attack Iran and Hezbollah... we must launch simultaneous, well-coordinated, military assaults on all Iranian embassies or diplomatic missions in the United States.

Raid them all, cart off all documents, and we will probably identify a very large percentage of the al-Qaeda sleeper agents within our country. As we know from reporters such as Kenneth Timmerman, top Iranian leaders -- including, for example Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, the chief inspector of the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), a secret organization that reports direction to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- have in the past met directly with top al-Qaeda leaders, such as Ayman Zawahiri and even Saad bin Laden, Osama's eldest son and heir, as some guy on Captain's Quarters once revealed.

Iranians, like Iraqis, and like a great many dictators, keep careful records of their contacts; in particular, they would surely have better lists of al-Qaeda sleepers in the United States than does the FBI or the CIA. While it would cause an "international incident" for us to raid the embassies (including those at the United Nations building), it couldn't be any worse a one than the earful we'll already get for bombing Iran, would it?

So that's my final thought:

• The all-out attack on all known or suspected sites, using intelligence and targeting from Israel, coupled with an attack on all retaliatory forces, including missile sites, air bases, Iranian-backed "insurgents" in Shiite Iraq and along the border, and known sites for Hezbollah, and with our own missile-defense facilities in readiness for the inevitable counter-attack... and including simultaneous military raids on all Iranian embassies, legations, and missions in the United States (including Turtle Bay), plus all suspected Iranian intelligence sites in the U.S., to seize all records that might lead us to al-Qaeda sleeper-cells within our country.

Whew, that's quite a list! But if we're really going to go down this road, it's much better to get it right, even if it means a delay of some months, than to rush it and half-bake the clam. As Machiavelli said (or as he should have said, if he didn't get around to it), "if you strike at the king, you must slay him."

No pussyfooting: if we're going to do it, we have to do it up right!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 15, 2006, at the time of 07:31 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

February 05, 2006

Iran Strategies 2: Beachhead Bingo

In Big Lizards' never-ending desire to be helpful to Mr. Rumsfeld, here is the second in a series of suggestions of possible ways to neutralize Iran's capacity to develop and deploy intermediate-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads... a crisis we all devoutly desire to prevent.

The first suggestion I made was to forget about trying to destroy the nuke sites themselves; there are too many of them, we don't know where they all are, they're widely distributed, and they're very hardened targets. It's not an easy task. Instead, in the Guillotine Gambit, I suggested striking not at the "hand" but rather the "head": a direct strike on the ruling mullahs themselves.

In this post, I suggest a less drastic option that may still have a similar effect. I call it Beachhead Bingo.

The idea, on a nutshell, is to send about 10,000 - 15,000 troops eastward from Iraq in a blitzkreig into Iran. They wouldn't go far... just taking about a 50 to 75 mile strip all along the Iran-Iraq border, but on the Iranian side. Then they dig in hard and deep and prepare to hold their ground no matter what.

We would announce that the purpose of this incursion was simply to stop the terrorists that Iran is allowing to traverse into Iraq; we say nothing about anything nuclear. And indeed, stopping those terrorist incursions would be one of the serendipitous benefits of the strategy; it would help the Iraqis set up a government free of Iranian infiltration. But the real purpose would be to bring about the collapse of the current Iranian regime.

The idea here is to set up an intolerable situation in Iran, where the mullahs -- who only rule by convincing everyone that they're invincible -- will be forced to put up or pull out: they will have to attack our dug-in positions to drive us out of their country.

If they do not, they will lose so much face from their obvious cowardice that it's hard to imagine the government not falling there and then: if a government cannot achieve even the simplest task of preventing another country from forcibly occupying a large swath of its territory, what claim to hegemony can it make?

But if they do attack, the end result will be the same. Iran will have to send its very overrated military forces (and Hezbollah, which is a great terrorist organization but definitely not up to defeating an actual modern army) up against case-hardened American Marines or Army... who, as mentioned, will be deeply dug in and nearly impossible to dislodge.

In fact, I expect the Iranians will break against our line like waves against a cliff. We're really good at this sort of thing. They will of course resort to WMDs, but we will be prepared for that, too, with those full-body protective suits. And even if they have a small nuclear warhead or two, they have to find a way to deliver it... which at the moment means by airplane, helicopter, truck, train, or goatcart... any of which we can interdict and prevent it getting close enough to threaten us.

In the end, when the Iranians reveal that they cannot even expel a few thousand Americans from their own homeland soil, they will be humiliated and completely lose face. I am hoping that their population rises up against them in revolt, seeing that they are "paper Persians," and establishes some sort of democracy like their neighbor to the west. (We might consider coordinating this with Iranian opposition leaders in advance.)

At least it's a strategy I haven't seen anyone else suggest before... either because it's brilliant and new -- or because it's old and really, really stupid!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 05, 2006, at the time of 05:40 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

January 26, 2006

Centrifuge "Spin Cycle"

All Europe is abuzz with Iran's recent tock towards the Russian proposal (following a tick against it, an earlier tock, and the original tick; I may have missed a few cycles of incoherence in there).

The Russian proposal, which I was originally somewhat attracted to myself, until I recently read the Guardian report discussed below, is that Iran cease all Uranium enrichment in exchange for being supplied with low-enriched Uranium by Russia. The Russian Uranium would be enriched enough to work in a power plant but not enough to function as a nuclear warhead.

Uranium is enriched in a centrifuge, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Iran admits to a casade of 164 of them at their Natanz pilot enrichment facility, above-ground. Currently, many of them appear not to be working, though "maintenance" (upgrading? building more of them?) continues.

(I had originally written "non-radioactive" above, but a commenter complained that ²³⁸U was, in fact, radioactive... which it is -- but so trivially that for practical, non-technical purposes, one may as well consider it not radioactive.)

Gas centrifuges spin UF6 [Uranium Hexaflouride] gas at high speeds creating a centrifugal force that separates the isotopes by forcing the heavier U-238 further outward in the centrifuge. Gas centrifuges have been used in Europe for about 30 years for enriching uranium.

So a proposal to supply Iran with 3% low-enriched Uranium would apparently solve the problem.

But the accent is on "apparently;" because if a report in the Guardian (and elsewhere) from August, 2005 about thousands of secret centrifuges underground at Natanz is even remotely accurate, it makes a dog's breakfast of the Russian proposal:

Meanwhile, it was claimed today that Iran had secretly manufactured around 4,000 centrifuges capable of weapons grade uranium enrichment - 25 times the quantity it has admitted to the UN.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, an exiled Iranian dissident who in 2002 helped to uncover almost two decades of covert Iranian nuclear activity, said the centrifuges - rotating machines used in separation processes - were ready to be installed at Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz.

Mr Jafarzadeh, who runs Strategic Policy Consulting, a Washington-based thinktank focusing on Iran and Iraq, said the information - which he described as "very recent" - had come from sources within the Tehran regime that had proved to be accurate in the past.

"These 4,000 centrifuge machines have not been declared to the IAEA, and the regime has kept the production of these machines hidden from the inspectors while the negotiations with the EU have been going on over the past 21 months," Mr Jafarzadeh told the Associated Press.

The Wall Street Journal article linked above gives us some numbers:

The two main halls at the Natanz complex are buried beneath the sands of central Iran, and have room for some 50,000 centrifuges -- enough to produce a year's supply of low-enriched fuel for Iran's Bushehr power plant, or high-enriched uranium for 25 to 30 bombs annually. Iran, which has yet to master the intricacies of centrifuge production and large-batch enrichment, is believed to be years away from that.

The WSJ goes on to reassure us a bit that Iran is "years away" from "centrifuge production and large-batch enrichment;" but since they don't give us a source for that, we don't know if it's solid or simply denial.

But clearly, before any proposal like the Russian one is accepted by the EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany), who are negotiating with Iran in a (probably futile) last-ditch diplomatic effort to resolve the crisis without resorting to sanctions or military action, we need to get better intelligence on the claim by Jafarzadeh of an army of secret centrifuges.

Since the CIA is too busy on its long-running, critical-priority operation to produce regime-change in the United States, and thus has no time to deal with such side issues as Iranian nuclear yields, perhaps we should ask the Israeli Mossad for help on this "burning" question.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 26, 2006, at the time of 04:54 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 29, 2005

Iran Fiddles While Russia Burns

I don't know what to make of this story: Iran now seems rather interested in the same Russian proposal they had earlier sorta-kinda rejected (without actually rejecting -- since Iran is very dependent upon their long-time patron, Russia/USSR). In this proposal, Russia would do all the Uranium enrichment for Iran, receiving the raw ore and shipping the refined nuclear fuel back.

If Russia plays fair (and rationally), the fuel they send Iran will not be weapons grade; but there are several caveats:

• Nobody is really sure how much Russia can be trusted on this; Putin's ambition is vast and subterranean.
• I don't think there is anything in this proposal requiring intrusive inspections of Iran's ongoing nuclear programs, to ensure that they're not just taking the fuel from Russia -- and going ahead with their own military enrichment program anyway.
• We have no way of knowing whether Iran is actually interested or is just "buying time," feigning interest to keep Russia, as well as the EU3 (France, Germany, and the U.K.), from supporting John Bolton's call for U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran.

What worries me most is this:

Iranian officials had previously said they would reject any plan which denied Iran the right to build its own uranium enrichment facilities.

But, in a sudden change of tone, a senior official said on Wednesday Tehran would "seriously and enthusiastically" study the Russian plan.

I'm always deeply suspicious of abrupt changes of mind: I want to know what caused them. Did the U.S. (or Israelis) quietly tell Iran that if nuclear-armed mullahs appear imminent, we might decide to strike before the iron was hot? Did Russian Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov give secret information to Iran, such as "don't worry, we won't really enforce this?" Did the EU3 and Russia tell Iran that this was positively the last chance before they went with the Bolton position?

Without knowing what caused the "sudden change of tone," there's no way to tell whether this is a positive step or the prelude to Armageddon.

The risks are still great:

• There is the primary risk that Iran will get a nuclear weapon and delivery system and will decide to use 'em before they lose 'em;
• Then there is also the secondary risk that either Israel or the United States will attempt a military action against Iran and botch it. As Machiavelli may or may not have said, "if you strike at the king, you must slay him." A failed missile strike or coup attempt would weaken our side, embolden Iran, and win it new friends not only in the Middle East but in the heart of Europe.

I am still optimistic; despite the difficulties in taking out the weapons labs themselves, the Iranians are very vulnerable to what I call the Guillotine Gambit, a direct strike upon the ruling mullahs themselves. This vulnerability exists with any tyranny run by a single man or small group of men. And although it's not at all clear what government would form to take the place of the Council of Guardians of the Revolution, it would be hard to come up with one that was worse -- more violent, more inclined to export violence via terrorism, or more insane.

This is definitely one to watch... is the smoke white or still black?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 29, 2005, at the time of 03:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 17, 2005

They May, But Can They?

Yesterday, Paul over at Power Line (the only Linotype I've actually met in person) wrote the following -- anent a Charles "the Sauerkraut" Krauthammer column on the looming crisis of Iran:

In my view, Krauthammer is wrong only in contending that "no one will do anything about it." It's hard for me to believe that the Israelis will stand by as Iran develops the capacity to incinerate its people. To be sure, the Israelis are loath to launch a unilateral preemptive strike against Iran. They would much prefer that sanctions be applied in an effort to coerce Iran into changing its behavior, and I believe they will afford the U.S. and the Europeans every reasonable opportunity to make this happen. But, as Krauthammer suggests, this track is unlikely to succeed. At bottom, the Europeans do not perceive Iran as a threat to them, and don't much care that they are a threat to Israel and to U.S. interests in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. Accordingly, Israel has refused to rule out a preemptive attack against Iran and, in my view, is prepared to launch one if it runs out of other viable options.

I applaud Paul for his perspicacity in recognizing that something must be done about Iran... the problem is that Israel does not have the capability to "launch a unilateral preemptive strike" that would actually take out Iran's nuclear facilities. In fact, I'm not even sure that we have, short of completely annihilating every military and scientific site we even suspect exists with an apocalyptic rain of nuclear hellfire -- which is politically impossible, unless Iran launches at us first. (I don't even think the American people would accept us doing that if the Iranians launch only at Israel.)

I discussed this before in the Guillotine Gambit (and I discussed President Ahmedinejad's stability -- or lack thereof -- most recently in I Can Hear the Cuckoo Singing In the Cuckooberry Tree). The short version is that the Iranians learned well from the Iraqi disaster at Osirak, when the Israelis bombed and destroyed the nuclear breeder reactor that the French (gotta love 'em!) were building for Saddam to create nuclear weapons.

The Iranians have not concentrated all their baklava in a single Persian slipper; they have split the work up among a large number of facilities (we know of nine, but there are others), each of which is deep underground and hardened against even a nuclear attack. It would take a combination of nuclear bunker-busters (probably more than one per site) followed almost instantaeously by some massively heavy explosives, which could probably be conventional. I'm pretty sure the Israelis don't include bunker-busters among their "Temple Weapons," and in any event, they haven't done enough testing of precisely coordinated multi-weapon attacks on hardened sites... and for that matter, neither have we; we've been focusing our missile tests on ballistic-missile defense (BMD), for obvous reasons.

So it's a good thought, but I think the Israeli Defense Force, magnificent as it is, would be helpless in this particular situation.

The best military tactic is to do -- just what we're doing: work with the Israelis to continue development and deployment of the joint U.S.-Israeli Arrow BMD system, and work up plans for decapitating the mad dog that is Iran by surgical strikes, not on the hardened nuclear arsenal itself, but against the brains who would wield it.

Mullahcraticus delenda est!

(Perhaps some kind soul can correct my Latin, of which I have forgotten more than I ever learned.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 17, 2005, at the time of 01:04 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

December 14, 2005

Persian Slipups

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 08, 2005

I Can Hear the Cuckoo Singing In the Cuckooberry Tree

Move over, Oogo Chavez; you've got competition for this year's Moonbat awards!

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday expressed doubt the Holocaust took place and suggested the Jewish state of Israel be moved to Europe.

His comments, reported by Iran's official IRNA news agency from a news conference he gave in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, follow his call in October for Israel to be "wiped off the map," which sparked widespread international outrage.

I haven't wafted around the blogosphere in the last few hours, so I can only assume this is getting plenty of photonic ridicule on other blogs. But resistance is futile, so here's my stab at it.

Hard-core Holocaust denial -- which not even the ruling mullahs seem willing to endorse -- is an absolute favorite among conspiracy theorists. I suppose that's because the Nazis were practically science fiction themselves, so it's easy to tack on one more layer of conspiracy. Call Holocaust denial the "lazy man's conspiracy," because it takes no wit at all (unlike, say, conspiracies such as the Bilderbergers, the Illuminati, the Bigfoot concealers, or those who say the CIA introduced crack cocaine into America and blew up the New Orleans levees, all to "destroy the black race" -- each of which requires more cleverness at setting up means, opportunity, and motive for the conspiracy). From what I've seen so far, Ahmadinejad is not exactly the shiniest Batarang in Khatami's Bat-Belt... so it's a perfect fit.

(Incidentally, I've always wanted to open a do-it-yourself fast-food franchise and call it Build-a-Burger -- just to freak out the loonies.)

Recall that Ahmadinejad's job before he got his current gig as Iranian president was to fly around the world assassinating apostates -- which to the mullahs means any Iranian who doesn't agree with them on any issue: religious, political, or sartorial. In essence, the president of Iran is now Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano. So this is really recycled homicidal mania.

What's amusing is the other half of Ahmadinejad's statement. Here is the reporting:

Ahmadinejad was quoted by IRNA as saying: "Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw them in jail."

"Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem?" he said.

"If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe -- like in Germany, Austria or other countries -- to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it."

First, it's quite true that some European countries, such as Germany (and West Germany before that, and probably East Germany then too, though I wouldn't swear to it), do in fact criminalize Holocaust denial. Worse, they confuse Holocaust revisionism with Holocaust denial... so that if someone argues that Hitler did kill millions of Jews, but that he used a different method of execution, or that he killed five million (or seven million) instead of six million, or that the non-Jews killed by Hitler were more numerous than the Jews killed by Hitler -- or indeed, virtually any deviation from Holocaust orthodoxy as enunciated by the late Elie Wiesel -- there's always the possibility that his intellectual opponents will make their argument by throwing him in la calabooza.

To me (as a Jew who believes that the orthodox Holocaust narrative is basically correct), this is a profoundly unfree and anti-democratic policy, even for the deniers, let alone the mere revisionists. So five points to Slytherin for Ahmadinejad tweaking the noses of the European moralists. (We're still debating whether to expel Ahmadinejad from the fine House of Slytherin or just feed him to the snake.)

But this is the part I meant: Ahmadinejad's suggestion that the state of Israel be moved to some other "province" in Europe: "you offer part of Europe [for Nuevo Israel] and we will support it," says he.

What's fascinating about this is that this isn't the first time such an offer has been made. The Holocaust deniers at the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) have of course been running with this story for years, claiming this paints the Nazis as more benign. But many other sources who accept the orthodox Holocaust narrative agree that indeed there was such a plan. It originated with the Nazis themselves, who at first were only planning on a mass "ethinic cleansing" of Jews from Europe:

In 1940, the SS had the so-called "Madagascar Plan" to deport the entire Jewish population of Europe to a "reservation" on Madagascar. The "Madagascar Plan" was cancelled because Germany could not defeat Britain and until the British blockade was broken, the "Madagascar Plan" could not be put into effect. Finally, Functionalist historians have made much of a memorandum written by Himmler in May, 1940 explicitly rejecting extermination of the entire Jewish people as "un-German" and going on to recommend to Hitler the "Madagascar Plan" as the preferred "territorial solution" to the "Jewish Question". Not until July 1941 did the term "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" come to mean extermination.

Note that Wikipedia is, of course, a problematic source, being an open-source cyberpaedia with no editorial review. But in this case, the article itself is quite orthodox, and the article on the Madagascar Plan itself seems fairly well sourced. They link to the Jewish Virtual Library, which posts a document written by Franz Rademacher, head of the Judenreferat III der Abteilung Deutschland (Jewish Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), outlining the plan.

You must bear in mind that the Madagasgar plan -- along with the deportations of Jews to European countries during the 1930s -- were not crafted with the welfare of the Jews in mind. Rather, this was the first cut at making the Third Reich "Judenrein," or Jew-free. There is also some evidence that the Reich hoped the forced emigration of hundreds of thousands of poor Jews to neighboring countries would turn the populations of those countries against the Jews, thus spreading antisemitism along with destitute (and helpless) Jewish victims. (If the Jewish family being pushed out weren't already poor, the crippling "emigration tax" made sure they were by the time they actually left.)

The interesting question is whether the Zionists of 1939-40 would actually have been willing to go along with the Madagascar Plan, emigrating from European countries where they were still (for the moment) safe to create a Jewish state in that island colony off the east coast of Africa. On that question, I'm torn but ultimately land on the negative side.

First, Israel did not yet exist, and it was unclear whether it ever would. The Holy Land was under the control of the British Empire, which had signed the Balfour Declaration thirty-three years earlier (promising a Jewish homeland in British Mandatory Palestine), but had taken no steps to implement it, and indeed appeared on the verge of repudiating it. Recall that in the late 1940s, Zionists within what is now Israel and what is now the Palestinian Authority -- including Ariel Sharon, Manachem Begin, Moshe Dayan, and other founding statesmen of Israel -- joined paramilitary groups such as Haganah and especially Irgun and actually fought against the British to force them to implement the plan.

So it's not at all implausible that Zionists of a decade earlier would conclude that the British had no intention of making good on their promise anyway. Would a firm offer from the Nazis tempt them?

Second, it was clear to anybody with a brain that the Nazis were never going to be content to stay in Germany; sooner or later (it turned out to be sooner), they would begin annexing, conquering, or at least helping native Nazi movements in other countries throughout the continent. Therefore, a Jew living in Poland or Russia or France or even Great Britain might well have felt very insecure about his increasingly untenable position (rightly so). The idea of a Jewish state anywhere, even on an island in the Indian Ocean, must have appealed.

However, the Jews had a tremendous attachment to Israel, their Biblical homeland, going back millennia, dating to the destruction of the Second Temple and the explusion of the Jews by the Romans in A.D. 70. The Zionist movement itself -- the movement to build a Jewish state in Israel -- dates to the 19th century. When one of the great early leaders of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, proposed Uganda as a Jewish homeland -- a temporary one, just for Russian Jews in immediate danger from pogroms -- it met with such a firestorm of objection that the movement quickly rejected the idea (though Herzl himself died before the final vote):

At the Sixth Zionist Congress (1903), Herzl proposed the British Uganda Program as a temporary refuge for Jews in Russia in immediate danger. While Herzl made it clear that this program would not affect the ultimate aim of Zionism, a Jewish entity in the Land of Israel, the proposal aroused a storm at the Congress and nearly led to a split in the Zionist movement. The Uganda Program was finally rejected by the Zionist movement at the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905.

Would the Zionists of 1939-40, frustrated by decades of non-movement towards a Jewish state, have been willing to negotiate with the Nazis? Would they have been willing to urge emigration of all Jews from Europe to Madagascar in exchange for promises to leave the Jews alone after that? My guess would be no, because I think they would realize that the Jews would be no safer from Hitler in Madagascar, the Philippines, or even America (although by then we had immigration quotas sharply restricting Jewish immigration into the United States) -- unless Hitler and the Nazis were defeated. Thus, I think they would have recognized that any such offer from Nazi Germany could only be a trap to weaken the economic base of the allies and make conquest easier.

I seem to have wandered far off into the weeds. In any event, not only is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conspiracy theory about the Holocause recycled crackpottery, but so even is his suggestion that Israel be picked up and dumped down somewhere else -- though of course, the direction of dumping is opposite to that of the first suggested version by the Nazis.

Thus, President Ahmadinejad of the Islamic "Republic" of Iran runs strong in the race to be first to be second in the Israel Relocation division of the Moonbat awards.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 08, 2005, at the time of 06:26 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Iran Strategies 1: the Guillotine Gambit

According to Paul at Power Line, Mohammed ElBaradei now agrees with Israel that Iran is just months away from having nuclear weapons. The question before the house is what to do about it.

The direct approach, advocated by quite a few folks, is to strike at and destroy the actual nuclear facilities that are driving towards producing warheads at a frenzied pace.

The problem with the direct approach is that there isn't a single nuclear facility, easily destroyed, as there was in Iraq in 1981, when the Israelis destroyed the breeder reactor at Osirak. The Iranians learned from Saddam Hussein's mistake: they now split up the development of nuclear weapons among a number of facilities.

As of 2003, they had declared nine facilities:

• Tehran Nuclear Research Centre - radioisotope production, waste management
• Kalaye Electric Company (Tehran) - Uranium enrichment; supposedly dismantled
• Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant - breeder reactor
• Isfahan (Esfahan) Nuclear Technology Centre - several reactors and laboratories; fuel manufacturing
• Natanz - Uranium enrichment
• Karaj - storage of radioactive waste
• Lashkar Ab'ad - Uranium laser enrichment plant
• Arak - reactor, radioisotopes, heavy-water production
• Anarak - waste storage

I suspect there are other, undeclared facilities; but I'm not sure how capable our CIA is to find them.

In addition, these sites are heavily guarded (particularly with the new surface-to-air missiles that Russia has just sold Iran), sprawling facilities with much of the important sections buried deep under ground with many feet of concrete between the labs and an incoming missile or bomb. It is unlikely that anything short of a full scale attack, possibly using nuclear "bunker-busters" ourselves, would actually have much chance of destroying or even significantly delaying development.

Worse, as the adage has it, if you strike at the king you must slay him. To strike ineffectually at Iran would be worse than useless: it would drive them closer to Russia, it would make them more secretive, they would definitely kick out ElBaradei's IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), and things would be far worse for us. It would be a suicide to declare war on Iran via a "sneak attack," but then leave unknown or too well protected nuclear facilities still in operation.

The delivery approach, more subtle than the direct approach, seeks to destroy not the nuclear facilities but the means to deliver them on target.

This would be a lot easier if Iran depended upon fixed silos from which to launch the missiles (currently the Shahab-3 and -5). Unfortunately, the Shahab-3 and its successors can be launched from mobile platforms... meaning launch location cannot be pinpointed in advance and bombed.

An alternative is to defend against the incoming missile en route, either intercepting it head-on with a kinetic kill antimissile, or else navigating an antimissile nearby the incoming missile and exploding it, hoping to destroy or damage the incoming missile. This is the route the Israelis are taking with their Arrow II missile interceptors, and the approach the United States is taking to defend ourselves and our allies from an Iranian (or other foreign power's) offensive missiles using land-based and Aegis shipboard ballistic-missile interceptors.

But this presupposes that we have some idea where the missile shot might come from. If Iran passes some missiles with nuclear warheads to Hezbollah, their terrorist enforcement arm, they can shoot at us from a direction we never expected and which is outside the range of any nearby Aegis-equipped ships -- which would not be under land-based radar arrays and possibly unable to intercept the missile anyway.

True, there are other ways to deliver a warhead to target, including carrying it in a truck. This does dramatically increase the time to delivery and makes the whole process more fragile, as the warhead can be intercepted at any of a number of transitional phases -- such as when it crosses the sea to come to America or across the Mediterranean to Europe. Getting a nuke into Israel is probably unworkable.

In any event, it is quite a suboptimal "solution" to let the Iranians get the Bomb, get the missile delivery system, but just hope we're properly positioned to shoot down the incoming armageddon.

The diplomacy approach, in which we negotiate with Iran and come to a reasonable bargain where Iran will agree to forgo development of nuclear weapons in exchange for something of value from us.

Problem:

Iran+Agreement <==> Joe Isuzu+Truth. 'Nuff said?

These are the three traditional methods suggested for preventing Iran from developing or obtaining nuclear weapons. Each has its problems, as I've sketched above.

But there is a fourth way, one that is rarely discussed... which is odd, because I consider it the most promising of all.

The Guillotine Gambit severs the ability of Iran to launch an attack on America or our allies at its source.

The nuclear warhead itself can be considered the fist of Iran; the missile that delivers it is the arm. The Iranian Army is the body of Iran, and Hezbollah is the gluteus maximus... the part that the Iranians must constantly sit on for their own security but which is necessary for a lot of dirty functions they would rather not be seen doing.

But connecting and controlling all of these is the head of Iran -- and that is the weakest link. Uneasy sits the turban on the ruling mullahs; Hezbollah, the army, and even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad all take their orders from them, in particular from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Remove this control, and most likely, the nuclear program would simply stop, as its urgency derives from the fear of Iraq (now substantially gone) and the mullahs' desire to destroy Israel, which would hardly be the same intensity of a motivator in the absence of the "revolutionary" government there today.

I'm not literally calling for mass assassinations (though that would be nice; I picture the final scene of the Godfather). Rather, I would like to see a revitalized CIA trigger another "orange revolution," as arose spontaneously in Ukraine a year ago.

The problem here, of course, lies in that phrase, "a revitalized CIA." (Just think what they could do, if they weren't so busy leaking classified data to try to damage President Bush!)

In the absence of such a CIA, my first move would be to have a long talk with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and MI5, the British national-security service. The questions would be: what can be done to hurry along the collapse of the Iranian mullocracy? When might it happen? Who would be the likely winners -- student groups? the Communists? some "quietist" Shiite movement? Which likely successor rulers are friendly with America, or at least not bitter enemies?

The advantage of the Guillotine Gambit is that it's the only one of the four strategic responses that can be done clandestinely, that doesn't require bringing world opinion around, and that will give us sufficient plausible deniability that it would be hard to pin the revolution on us whether it succeeds or fails. It can be pursued along with any of the other three, quietly and behind the scenes.

The Guillotine Gambit has advantages and applications apart from terminating the nuclear threat from Iran:

• Cut adrift from the mullahs, Hezbollah will lose tremendous power, not just within Iran but within Syria and Lebanon as well.
• A less fanatical government might be very amenable to democracy.
• A large proportion of the Iranian youth, who make up probably two-thirds of Iran's population, are actually pro-America: they like American culture, that is; I don't know what they think of the American government.

This huge wave of people are our natural allies, so long as we don't do anything heavy-handed or imperialistic. An Iraq-style invasion is right out, therefore. Again, Ukraine is the model of what we want to see happen. At the very least, we should be planning how we could bring about such a quiet revolution, or how we would respond if it arose all on its own.

But of course, also keep funding missile defense: belt and suspenders, that's what I say.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 08, 2005, at the time of 05:22 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

December 02, 2005

Shāh Māt

It's said that the oldest chess pieces ever found were pulled out of an excavation in Persia. So perhaps Iran will understand the most recent move of their sworn deadly enemy, Israel.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel carried out a successful test of its missile-interceptor system on Friday when an Arrow II missile downed an incoming rocket designed to simulate an Iranian Shahab-3, the defense ministry said.

The test, the latest in a series, came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel could not accept the emergence of a nuclear-armed Iran, though he steered clear of threatening military action against the Islamic Republic.

But wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves. What does it mean, saying that Iran's "sworn, deadly enemy" is Israel? Let's jump in the Way-Back machine all the way back to a couple of weeks ago. Arnold Beichman wrote this commentary for the Washington Times:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected last August, described openly the other day why Iran needed a nuclear weapon in announcing "Israel must be wiped off the map." Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke for the Iranian government when he called for Israel's destruction. In fact, Iranian Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki told the state-run television "the comments expressed by the president are the declared and specific policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Not even in the worst days of the Cold War did anybody propose the United States or the Soviet Union be "wiped off the map." Mr. Ahmadinejad's genocidal sloganeering has been condemned by the U.N. Security Council, the State Department, both houses of Congress, French President Jacques Chirac, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the European Union, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Australia, Russia and others.

Iran has made such hysterical and chilling threats before. In 2001, the "moderate" former president of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, when he was chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council (and possibly second in power after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei), said something similar:

If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything [in Israel] while it will merely harm the Islamic world.

So it's actually quite reasonable for Israel to assume they're Target Number One in Iran's book of nations to wipe off the map when they get nuclear weapons.

But having nukes is not the same as being able to use them; and in fact the latter is not as easy as one would think. There are only a few ways to get a warhead into an enemy country:

1. You can drive or carry it in overland; this typically requires a coterminous border. Iran-on-the-Persian-Gulf, however, is on the other side of the Middle East from Israel-on-the-Mediterranean. They are separated by about 1,000 miles as the missile flies, but more like 2,000-3,000 miles across the winding, tortuous roadways of that region of the world. Iran would either have to push north through Turkey, then down through Syria; or through a little piece of Iraq down into Kuwait, then into Saudi Arabia for a couple thousand miles to Jordan, then across Jordan into Israel; or else right through the heart of Iraq and the 150,000 Coalition troops, to Jordan, to Israel. None of these is a happy prospect.
2. You can put it on a boat and float it to your target. In this case, however, that would entail a journey of many thousands of miles all the way around the Arabian Peninsula, through the Suez Canal, and then to an Israeli port -- which is probably very heavily guarded.
3. You can fly it on a plane. I suspect, however, that Mosad would already know it was coming and would have cancelled all air travel that originated in Iran -- or wherever they transported the warhead to; Israel is very thorough when their existence is at stake.
4. But the easiest of all is to put the warhead on a missile and fire it at your enemy.

From the Reuters piece linked above:

The Shahab-3, which Iran says has a range of 2,000 km (1,250 miles), is seen by Israel as the main weapon which would be used to target its territory.

Clearly, Iran has been planning on the last: the mere fact that they have been developing the Shahab 3 (and negotiating with North Korea for the advanced technology of the Taep’o-dong 2) tells us that would be preferred delivery route. But in that case, the joint US-Israeli development of the Arrow ("Khetz" in Israel) is a decisive countermove to Iran's entire nuclear program: it does to Iran what the Strategic Defense Initiative did to the Soviet Union.

The Iranian nuclear threat is dissapating even as Iran rushes to complete a nuke or two; what is the point for Iran, stuck off in a corner of the world, to develop a warhead that it cannot deliver?

In other words, checkmate, "the king is no more" -- which, as it happens, is the title of this post... in Persian.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 02, 2005, at the time of 05:24 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

November 11, 2005

Calling Persia's Bluff

Iran has long insisted that its nuclear reactor development is purely for "peaceful" power generation, and that they only need uranium enrichment in order to have a steady supply of fuel for electrical power (aside from their vast oil reserves, one assumes). But the United States and most Western European nations have strongly suspected that Iran is enriching far more Uranium than it needs for power production and plans instead to use it for nuclear warheads.

So in a very clever proposal, Russia -- now joined by the "EU3" (Great Britain, France, and Germany) and also the United States -- has offered Iran a compromise deal:

1. Iran is allowed to proceed with its nuclear reaction plans, except --
2. Iran agrees to give up its Uranium enrichment program; in exchange for which...
3. Russia agrees to enrich Uranium for Iran, taking the entire enrichment program out of the hands of the ruling mullahs.

The beauty of course is that Russia already has all the enriched Uranium (and Plutonium) it could ever use for warheads, so we're not worried about them enriching more. But Russia, which during the Cold War was allied with Iran against Israel, has now become very suspicious of Islamists, due to the ongoing problem in Chechnya and also due to the backlash against Russia (and before them, the Soviet Union) caused by their invasion of Afghanistan, a brutal occupation that spawned the mujahedeen... one of whom broke away from the main, anti-Soviet group the MaK in order to found his own base of operations, called simply "the Base" (in Arabic, al-Qaeda). Hence, the Russians will not be eager to funnel enough enriched Uranium to Iran to allow them to build nuclear bombs; those bombs would be just as likely to end up in the Chechens' hands as Hezbollah's.

Iran gets one concession:

Under the Russian plan, Iran could continue with uranium conversion, the step before enrichment -- something the West had previously wanted Iran to renounce too.

Sure, the deal would prove Iran's peaceful intentions if they took it -- by making it nearly impossible for them to do otherwise. And for that very reason, nobody really expects Iran to accept. But when they reject it, it will be that much harder for Russia or the EU3 to argue that anything about this negotiation is really on the square.

And perhaps that much easier to move on to the next step, which has to be the UN Security Council for significant economic sanctions, with likely even Russia and China refusing to veto the plan.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 01:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 06, 2005

Harry Reid's Babysitting Service

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 Connection : How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America
• Countdown to Crisis : The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran
• 9/11 Commission Report: Staff Statement No. 15, Overview of the Enemy

(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

September 21, 2005

Shia Need Come-to-Jesus Meeting

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

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