Category ►►► Iraq Matters

January 1, 2012

Barack the Peacemocker

Afghan Astonishments , Iraq Matters , Presidential Peculiarities and Pomposities , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

According to my favorite blogger at my favorite blog (and the Associated Press), President Barack H. "Bubble Boy" Obama is currently in secret negotiations with the Taliban -- to be "mediated," if Obama has his way, by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi: a Koran-thumping, jihad-urging, radical-Islamist cleric in Afghanistan.

The bare bones of the agreement our president is hammering out with the Taliban is this:

  • Americans unconditionally withdraw all forces from Afghanistan.
  • We give up all objection to the Taliban returning to power (as part of a "coalition" with the Karzai government * ).
  • We build a headquarters compound for the Taliban.
  • We announce that we are no longer enemies with the Taliban.
  • We release all Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay and allow them to return to Afghanistan -- and resume the activities that landed them in Gitmo in the first place.
  • We issue an apology from the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan; after which Obama goes barefoot and bareheaded to Kandahar, where he bows deeply from the waist and begs forgiveness -- for George W. Bush's wickedness.

(That last bullet point isn't official; I'm just logically extrapolating.)

In the Power Line post, John Hinderacker theorizes about what President B.O. has in mind:

[T]he Afghanistan war is deeply unpopular [it is? I thought that was the good war! -- DaH], and Obama wants to run for re-election next November on the boast that he "ended two wars." The baleful consequences of re-installing the Taliban in Afghanistan will not appear until long after the next election campaign, which is all that Obama cares about.

John implies, I believe, that the maneuver will have the desired effect: Obama will be lionized for being the peacemaker, Bush reviled as a warmonger, and this will give Bubble Boy a swift boost into a second term. But bear in mind that traditionally, the closer we approach an election, the more pessimistic become the lads at Power Line.

I have a different take on the political outcome of Obama "workin' the machinations behind the scenes," as Louis Farrakhan might put it. Rather than a political triumph for Obama, I see a soft spot that even the Republican Party will be able to hit while dead drunk and with one eye tied behind its back -- which, to be honest, is the way it usually campaigns.

Here's the plan. We wait until Barack Obama begins strutting and chest thumping about how he has "ended two wars," then we respond thus:

President Obama has discovered a super-easy way to end any war quickly: just surrender. We prematurely withdraw from Afghanistan at the same time we prematurely withdraw from Iraq, leaving the door wide open to an Iranian invasion; what a diplomatic masterstroke! Obama becomes the first president in American history to lose two wars... simultaneously!

It seems the One We Have Been Waiting For actually believes that surrendering to two different gangs of radical Islamists is America's greatest national-security triumph, and he expects us to reward him with another term. Even worse, these are two wars that we had already won -- that is, until Barack Obama took over and found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Heckuva job, Mr. President.

I have no idea who gave him the cockamamie idea to bring the Taliban back in Afghanistan and to prematurely withdraw from Iraq and allow Iran to take over. It's as if in 1945, after the Germans surrendered in World War II, FDR had entered into secret negotiations with the surviving Nazis to withdraw all American troops, then help restore the Nazi Party to power again in Germany... while simultaneously encouraging the Soviets to seize control of Japan, China, and the Philippines.

Even Jimmy Carter stands in awe of such a colossal concatenation of catastrophe.

Barack Obama has pulled off a feat that none of us thought possible: His foreign and national-security policy has failed even worse than his domestic and economic policy... a breathtaking achievement!

I say, bring it on; how I long to have that debate. What is Obama going to argue? "Look, it has been three months already, and the Taliban has not yet reinstated mass torture-executions of Christians, moderate Moslems, and uppity women!"

Well of course not: Part of Obama's secret deal with the Taliban requires them to hold off until Obama is safely reelected... probably the only clause of the contract they will fulfill; and then only because having Barack Hussein Obama continue to occupy the White House is in the Taliban's best interest, and Iran's as well.

All that's left is to declare all American hydrocarbon fuel off-limits at the very moment the Iranians decide to blockade the Strait of Hormuz; then the cosmic Obasmic failure will be complete, thorough -- and irreversible.

 

* Note that the Taliban and Hamid Karzai's government are deadly, sworn enemies; how's that parlay going to work out?

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 1, 2012, at the time of 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2011

Will "Director" Petraeus Betray Us, or Hooray Us?

Afghan Astonishments , CIA CYA , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

With the news that President Barack H. Obama intends to name Gen. David Petraeus Director of the Central Intelligence Agency -- after current top spook Leon Panetta, who spent a couple of years in the Army, shifts to being Secretary of Defense -- we are left with a series of known (and unknown) unknowns. After all, Petraeus has been in the Army for decades and could not thus enunciate his own political positions and opinions; he could only support the policy of the Commander in Chief under whom he served, whether that was Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, or Obama.

Given that tabula rasa, we must identify at least a few of the conundrums:

  • Most urgently, can Petraeus actually master an out-of-control, leak-crazy, internationalist progressivist CIA... or at least render it somewhat less anti-American?
  • Does the appointment mean that the CIA will actually become more like it's "predecessor," the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II? That is, will the CIA show more interest in furthering America's military aims and less in trying to pick the next president?
  • Does the appointment mean that David Petraeus is interested in heading into electoral politics next?
  • Does it show Petraeus is going to "come out" as a Democrat to run against the Republican incumbent in 2016?
  • Does it mean Obama has changed his mind about the need for the United States to have a strong and vigorous intelligence community to further American goals... or does it mean Petraeus has grown in office and now supports Obamunism, full and stark?
  • What will happen to the Afghanistan war effort as Petraeus withdraws, ushering in Marine Lt.Gen. John R. Allen as Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) -- a man who has no Afghanistan experience whatsoever? Though Gen. Allen certainly does have battlefield experience in the War Against Radical Islamism: He was Deputy Commanding General in al-Anbar province, Iraq, during the Iraq war.

    But what type of commander is he? Is he like Petraeus, with a deep understanding of contemporary counterinsurgency strategy? Or is he more akin to the Shinseki-ites devoted to the Powell Doctrine of endlessly refighting WWII in all the dorky, little countries found in what Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of the Pentagon's New Map, aptly calls the "Non-Integrating Gap?"

I doubt anyone can answer these questions authoritatively at this juncture in time, as Nixon was wont to say; but they are indeed critical queries.

And here is the last and most pregnant:

  • Will the appointment receive vigorous examination during Senate confirmation hearings, in order to answer some of these unknowns, among others? Or will Republicans and Democrats alike give the war hero a pass -- the former because he is a war hero; the latter because he will have been appointed by the Obamacle, whom all Democrats must prop up and buttress in every imaginable way for the 2012 election?

At the moment, President B.O.'s deft and crafty move has handed us a Petraeus in a poke.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 28, 2011, at the time of 5:01 PM | Comments (2)

April 18, 2011

Iraq: Oily "Evidence"

Future of Energy Production , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Shocking news:

Secret documents prove that the Iraq war really was all about stealing their oil!

Well... not really; a close reading of the Independent (U.K.) article discloses far less than meets the eye. Let's have a look, shall we, and see what the memos say -- and more important, what they don't say.

All the "secret memos" appear to come from a single source: Elizabeth Conway Symons, Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean, who was Trade Minister in the United Kingdom from 2001-2003, including when the invasion began. Here's the juicy lede:

Plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves were discussed by government ministers and the world's largest oil companies the year before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, government documents show.

The papers, revealed here for the first time, raise new questions over Britain's involvement in the war, which had divided Tony Blair's cabinet and was voted through only after his claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Secret plans -- exploitation -- clandestine meetings -- claims of WMD. The obvious conclusion to which most readers will leap (or be pushed) is that the evil George W. Bush and his lapdog Tony Blair conspired to loot Iraq of its oil, and that that was the real reason for our invasion. But read a bit deeper, and you find the specifics that debunk the lurid implication.

There were indeed meetings between the government of the United Kingdom and various oil companies, mainly British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell; but what they actually discussed was the feasibility of "lobbying" the United States to open oil sales in Iraq -- not theft, sales -- to companies other than France's TotalFinaElf; under Saddam Hussein, TFE enjoyed a virtual monopoly... primarily because France cheerfully bribed the bloodthirsty dictator, cutting him in for a personal percentage under the table:

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP's behalf because the oil giant feared it was being "locked out" of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: "Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis."

The minister then promised to "report back to the companies before Christmas" on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq "post regime change". Its minutes state: "Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity."

After the invasion and overthrow of the Hussein regime, the monopoly contracts were indeed nullified, allowing oil companies from many countries other than France to bid on the oil, including Dutch, Chinese, and of course British companies. The Iraqis retained ownership of their own wells, oil, and natural gas; and of course they reaped the benefit of the free-market bidding between the companies:

The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq's reserves -- 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.

Last week, Iraq raised its oil output to the highest level for almost decade, 2.7 million barrels a day -- seen as especially important at the moment given the regional volatility and loss of Libyan output. Many opponents of the war suspected that one of Washington's main ambitions in invading Iraq was to secure a cheap and plentiful source of oil.

Note the completely unsourced, vague, and gratuitous non-sequitur at the end of the paragraph above; that is literally the only reference in the story to the pro-Hussein and anti-American conspiracy theory to which the first two paragraphs slyly allude.

To boil a long story down, Bush was urging the Coalition of the Willing to help invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein; and the foreign governments, while signalling their willingness, were also saying that they did not want to be "locked out" of bidding for Iraq's oil.

During the long, criminal reign of Hussein, only the corrupt were allowed access; why should countries like the Netherlands, who had no direct connection to Iraq, fight to liberate that country if they would still be frozen out of normal trade relations? Great Britain felt the same way: "Yes, we'll help... but it's a bit thick to ask us to spill British blood and treasure just to benefit the French."

To me, it seems a reasonable request.

So that's the poop on the insidious Iraqi document-dump drama. How much you want to bet that the usual suspects will rewrite the story to try to vindicate the most insane charges by the loony Left, International ANSWER, anti-war radicals... and somehow blame it all on George W. Bush.

And probably on the Koch brothers as well -- the current bête noire of Progressive-obsessive magpie media, such as the Hufflepuffington Post, Daily Kos, Think Progress, and the New York Times. Birds of an oily feather.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 18, 2011, at the time of 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

July 23, 2010

America's Viceroy

Cabinetwittery , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Having failed to overtake Barack H. Obama in 2008's Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton was unable to realize her bitter ambition to become President of the United States; and she is unlikely ever to get the chance again. But through the perversity of Democratic politics, she may be about to be dubbed, as near as makes no difference, America's first viceroy... who is, as Wikipedia puts it, "a royal official who runs a country or province in the name of and as representative of the Monarch."

For McClatchy News reports that as all American military combat troops and all but 50,000 non-combat troops leave Iraq under the "Status of Forces" agreement with that country, the need for some kind of force protection of State Department personnel will become acute. And the Obama administration has decided that, rather than renegotiate the agreement to allow for protective military personnel to remain in country, the United States will simply create a civilian quasi-military security force under the command of the Secretary of State.

That is, Vice Commander in Chief Hillary Clinton will get her own army to play with:

The arrangement is "one more step in the blurring of the lines between military activities and State Department or diplomatic activities," said Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington research center. "This is no longer (just) the foreign service officer standing in the canape line, and the military out in the field."

"The State Department is trying to become increasingly expeditionary," he said.

The most identifying power of the monarch is command of the military; ergo, handing it over to a lower-level duchess is equivalent to putting her in complete charge of that corner of our foreign policy.

The introduction of a new quasi-military army under State's control doesn't sit well with the more liberal members of Congress, however; recall, the Left was expecting that Obama would gracefully declare defeat in Iraq and go home, allowing "progressives" to argue that the entire Iraq war was a catastrophe and a war crime. They were overjoyed with the agreement negotiated with Iraq, which clearly did not leave enough combat personnel to protect the mission.

But now, defeat is once again imperiled, albeit in a flagrantly unconstitutional way; and the Left is hopping mad:

Already, however, the State Department's requests to the Pentagon for Black Hawk helicopters; 50 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles [MRAPs -- DaH]; fuel trucks; high-tech surveillance systems; and other military gear has encountered flak on Capitol Hill.

Contractors are to operate most of the equipment, and past controversies that involved Pentagon and State Department contractors, including the company formerly known as Blackwater, have left some lawmakers leery.

"The fact that we're transitioning from one poorly managed contracting effort to another part of the federal government that has not excelled at this function either is not particularly comforting," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.

"It's one thing" for contractors to be "peeling potatoes" and driving trucks, McCaskill told McClatchy. "It's another thing for them to be deploying MRAPs and Black Hawk helicopters."

"I know there's a lot of bad choices here," the senator said, adding that she'd choose using the U.S. military to protect diplomats in Iraq. "That's a resource issue."

Claire McCaskill has a 95% rating from the Americans for Democratic Action and was one of the earliest and most ardent Obama campaigners during the primaries and the general election. Perhaps we should keep an eye on other ultra-liberal Democrats in House and Senate to see who else has little trust in the probity and command ability of Gen. Hillary.

Meanwhile, conservatives should oppose the scheme -- I would hope! -- as clearly violative of the United States Constitution, which vests all military command in the president, in his role as Commander in Chief. It's akin to giving a mere cabinet member authority to sign or veto congressional legislation: It subverts our very form of government.

Perhaps between the anti-victory liberals and the pro-Constitution conservatives, we can nip this very, very bad precedent in the bud and do what even McCaskill proposes: Just renegotiate the blasted agreement to allow a protective military force to remain in order to prevent our diplomats and aid workers being shot, blown up, or beheaded.

Honestly, we don't need an American viceroy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 23, 2010, at the time of 6:56 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 17, 2010

Were Iraq Election Candidates Blocked by Iran?

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Gen. Ray Odierno, our top military commander in Iraq, has made a disturbing accusation that clarifies the previously inexplicable action by Iraq's Accountability and Justice Commission. In January, the AJC barred more than 350 Sunni candidates from the March 7th parliamentary elections, claiming they had "ties" to Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party.

While some of the banned candidates were high-ranking members, thus should be preventing from running, most were minor funcitonaries; during the reign of the Baathists, it was virtually impossible for Sunnis to serve in the government without joining, or at least having close ties to, the Baath Party... just as anyone wishing to progress in German politics under Hitler would have to be Nazi Party member or associate. By banning everyone who was in any way connected with the Baath Party, the AJC in effect banned every viable Sunni candidate from the election, a blatant political attack on the Sunni bloc.

Many Iraq-watchers were taken by surprise, because the action puts the entire election in jeopardy. Why would Iraqis want to throw a monkey wrench into their own political future? Gen. Odierno believes he has the answer; from the Washington Times article:

The Iraqi official in charge of a commission that blocked more than 300 politicians from running in next month's elections is working closely with Iran's Quds Force, prompting the top U.S. general in Iraq to voice concerns about Tehran's meddling in Iraq's fragile democracy.

Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, in a speech, accused Ali Faisal al-Lami, the executive director of the Accountability and Justice Commission along with Ahmad Chalabi, the panel's chairman, of being "clearly influenced by Iran."

Gen. Odierno said both men, according to intelligence reports, were in close contact with Abu-Mahdi al-Muhandis, the top Iraqi adviser to Iran's Quds Force commander. The Quds Force comprises Iran's unconventional military units, which have orchestrated anti-U.S. paramilitary and political operations in Iraq.

Ahmad Chalabi is working for Iran? Surprise, surprise, on the Jungle River Cruise tonight! But it's a grave turn of events that al-Qods is also working hand-in-sock-puppet with the Accountability and Justice Commission, who are running the election. As Odierno says, "It is disappointing that someone like [al-Lami] is put in charge of the de-Ba'athification commission."

Odierno says intelligence reports indicate that al-Lami, the AJC executive director, even planned an attack on American forces and Iraqi military and civilian officials in Sadr City.. which by strange coincidence happens to be the stronghold of Iranian minion Muqtada Sadr and his mighty "Mahdi Militia."

Here we see the dazzling genius of President Barack H. Obama's decision to pull troops out of Iraq according to a pre-determined timeline, regardless of facts on the ground: Iran's agents know that if they can ride out the next few months, America will quit the field. Iran will have a free hand to meddle in Iraq's internal affairs to their black heart's content.

Unless, of course, the Obamacle suddenly finds the huevos to stand up to Iran... as he has clearly shown so often in the past year.

But a military crisis may be about to overwhelm the Obamatrons; for Gen. Odierno plans to "re-evaluate the pace of troop reductions in Iraq within 60 days after the March 7 elections in Iraq." One presumes this will include a written report, the terms of which are sure to leak out.

If, as seems likely, Odierno recommends slowing the withdrawal and doing more to fight against al-Qods and other Iranian incursions into Iraq, then what will B.O. do? Will he cave, as he has so far on closing Guantanamo Bay, thus enraging the Left? Or will be be compelled by mounting leftist frustration to draw his foot in the sand, going ahead with the original withdrawal plan regardless of what his own top general says -- thus further eroding voters' respect for his military acumen and leadership (such as they are)?

Either horn of that particular dilemma will damage his political standing. But then, actions -- and particularly inactions -- have consequences. In an ironic twist, Barack Obama may soon be forced to announce that the Obama who insisted upon a firm withdrawal date... is not the Obama he knew.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 17, 2010, at the time of 3:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 18, 2009

Oil Follies - and a Gentle Suggestion

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Today, Iran sent troops into Iraqi territory and seized one of Iraq's oil wells.

This is nothing new; it evidently happens several times every year:

The field is about 500 metres (yards) from an Iranian border fort and about 1 kilometre from an Iraqi border fort, US Colonel Peter Newell said, adding that it falls on the Iraqi side of a border agreed between the two countries.

There are five other similar fields that also fall into disputed territory, he said. [The territory is only "disputed" because Iran covets it. -- DaH]

"What happens is, periodically, about every three or four months, the oil ministry guys from Iraq will go ... to fix something or do some maintenance. They'll paint it in Iraqi colours and throw an Iraqi flag up.

"They'll hang out there for a while, until they get tired, and as soon as they go away, the Iranians come down the hill and paint it Iranian colours and raise an Iranian flag. It happened about three months ago and it will probably happen again."

In keeping with the absurdity of Obamunism, everyone -- Americans and Iraqis alike -- is desperate for a "diplomatic" solution:

"There has been no violence related to this incident and we trust this will be resolved through peaceful diplomacy between the governments of Iraq and Iran," a US military spokesman told AFP at Contingency Operating Base Adder, just outside the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah.

"The oil field is in disputed territory in between Iranian and Iraqi border forts," he said, adding that such incidents occur quite frequently.

To which I respond, "Well there's yer problem right there!"

Nations always have disputes between them... but territorial integrity is the first and most basic component of sovereignty: If a country cannot hang onto its own territory, it may as well hang it up; it's not really a nation.

(And before anyone starts shouting about immigration, yes I believe that a country must be able to control who crosses its borders; but no, we are not being "invaded" by Mexicans. Immigrants are not invaders; they're guests. They may be unwelcome and unwanted guests, but that doesn't make families the equivalent of heavily armed Iranian soldiers.)

Iraq has been entirely too complacent for entirely too long about so-called "disputed" territory; worse, this lackadaisical attitude, in the Age of Barack H. Obama, has even infected the American military forces in Iraq. This is unacceptable; it's primitivism. And rather than enable it, we should help the Iraqis stamp it out and shift to a modernist conception of sovereign territory.

(The same could be said, by the way, about Japan's complacency when South Korea declares the island of Takeshima part of the Republic of Korea, or when Russia plants its flag on the four disputed islands in the Kuril Island chain, in violation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951.)

So I have a suggestion; it should be familiar to our Commander in Chief, coming from Chicago... but it appears he has never heard of such a thing, so I'll enlighten him:

  1. For right now, send a combined U.S. and Iraqi force into the area; the Iranians will amble on out, smirking. We linger at the border for a few weeks, then withdraw. (This step is necessary to feign weakness and set the Iranians up for step 3.)
  2. Inform Iran that this is the last time they will enter the Abu Gharb oil field, the Iraqi side of the al-Fakkah field, or any other Iraqi oil field... but don't tell them what will happen if they do. We keep troops fairly nearby but not close enough to keep the Iranians from doing what comes naturally.
  3. Within a few months, Iran will do it again; we know they will, because we deliberately signalled weakness with step 1. This is the trigger for which we will be waiting: Our troops move into the region; the Iranians withdraw. But instead of stopping at the border, American troops move into Iranian territory, seize some of their oil wells (on the pretext that they are "disputed territory")... and sit on them.
  4. We invite Iraqi oil workers in to start pumping the oil from these wells and driving it back to Iraq. The idea is not just to chase Iran out of Iraq but to force them to serve penance for their sins.
  5. We hold the wells for six months; then we tell Iran that this seizure was their one warning: The next time Iran invades any portion of Iraq, these wells and unspecified other assets will be annexed to Iraq... permanently.

If we are to introduce Iraq into the community of civilized nations, we must first induce them to break from their bad, old Arab traditions that turn nationalism on its head and keep them a backwards, "third world" nation with a few trappings of modernity. Until they think of themselves as a sovereign nation, nationalism will never trump tribalism.

Such a jump is impossible in Afghanistan, at least anytime in the forseeable future; all we can do there is maintain a more or less "tribal-democratic" government (where each tribe gets a vote -- in the form of each person voting) and keep the Taliban and their ilk out of power. But Iraq can be so much more; they can be a powerful American ally in the Middle East into the future. But we must encourage them to stop thinking like their neighbors and start thinking like us.

We cannot allow them to revert to their former ways; the danger to the United States would be dire.

Alas, this is all fantasy: Barack Obama cannot "feign" weakness because he is weak, and only the strong dare such pretense to draw an attack -- an expected attack -- and turn it back on the enemy. Perhaps someday Iran will school Obama on what it means to act from strength, not submission.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 18, 2009, at the time of 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 12, 2009

"I Reject Your Reality..."

Afghan Astonishments , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , Presidential Peculiarities and Pomposities
Hatched by Dafydd

"...And substitute my own!"

So reads a t-shirt often worn by Adam Savage, one of the two original starts of the Discovery Channel's series Mythbusters, which I have slavishly watched since the very first episode (I think that was the episode where they busted the myth of the rocket-propelled car launching into the air).

The tee commemorates a pithy summary Adam Savage delivered on the show, I can even remember whether he meant it optimistically or sarcastically: "I reject your reality and substitute my own!" I remember Adam saying that, but I can't recall now what precipitated the remark. But after today, I suggest he send his wonderful t-shirt to another fellow who now has a greater claim to it: President Barack H. Obama.

Take a look and tell me I'm exaggerating:

President Barack Obama rejected the Afghanistan war options before him and asked for revisions, his defense secretary said Thursday, after the U.S. ambassador in Kabul argued that a significant U.S. troop increase would only prop up a weak, corruption-tainted government.

"I'm not happy with the options reality has offered me; I demand you produce new fantasy options more to my liking!"

Let's take an Eikenberry detour. Yes indeed, he was once a military commander in Afghanistan; but he's not the commander now, and he hasn't been for well over two years -- during which time the situation has changed dramatically. Note that he also left before Gen. David Petraeus achieved such a thorough and remarkable victory in Iraq using a very similar strategy.

In 2007, as the Iraq COIN was picking up, Eikenberry was named Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, and NATO was not officially involved in the Iraq War (as they are in Afghanistan). Thus I see no evidence that Eikenberry has spent any significant time studying the Iraq COIN -- or even talking to David Petraeus, who, as Commander of CENTCOM, is now McChrystal's boss.

Nor was Ambassador Eikenberry a COIN specialist when he wore a uniform instead of a suit. So why should his advice trump McChrystal's in the Obamacle's mind? (Except for the obvious explanation: Because what Eikenberry says, by happenstance or design, precisely matches what Obama wants to hear.)

Eikenberry's argument for why we should abandon Afghanistan is not exactly subtle; I think it boils down to the peculiar idea that the purpose of a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy is to "prop-up" the existing government, whatever it may be; therefore, since we don't like the fellow that Afghan voters elected, Hamid Karzai, we shouldn't prop it up by implementing a COIN strategy. Instead, we should focus on "training" the indiginous Afghan troops.

Most others experts on the subject I've read -- I'm certainly not an expert, so I must rely on others, such as Fred Kagen or David Petraeus -- seem to believe the purpose of COIN is to improve civilian security throughout the country, thus to enlist civilian support for the war effort against the insurgents and deny the latter the chaos and collapse they need to seize the government.

It needn't incorporate any support for the specific civilian government at all, just for the concept of democratic voting. All we need from Karzai is that he not interfere with Afghan troops' participation in COIN-related joint patrols and operations... which is, incidentally, exactly how we go about training the local forces, both military and tribal militia, in the first place. No joint ops -- no training.

Here is the Eikenberry thesis on display:

Obama's ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, who is also a former commander in Afghanistan, twice in the last week voiced strong dissent against sending large numbers of new forces, according to an administration official. That puts him at odds with the current war commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is seeking thousands more troops.

Eikenberry's misgivings, expressed in classified cables to Washington, highlight administration concerns that bolstering the American presence in Afghanistan could make the country more reliant on the U.S., not less. He expressed his objections just ahead of Obama's latest war meeting Wednesday.

But there is an even more disturbing possibility: If AP is accurately recounting Eikenberry's objections (and I don't know that to be the case), then he, too, believes that Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendations consist of nothing but "send 40,000 more troops" -- rather than "implement a COIN strategy, then decide how many troops we need." (McChrystal adds, "Psst... it turns out to be about 40,000 more than we have right now"). This would put the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the same conceptual box as the elite news media.

It's hard to swallow the contention that a former lieutenant general (that's a 3-banger) in the United States Army would be blissfully unaware of what counterinsurgency strategy is, and how it differs from a counter-terrorism strategy... where we "fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt". I hope that's not the problem. But if not, then what makes Eikenberry think he's more fit to opine on Afghanistan than the general that Barack Obama himself hand-picked to do just that? (And who is, as I understand it, an expert on COIN strategy.)

(There is a third, even more disturbing possibility: That Eikenberry knows very well that McChrystal is right, that a COIN strategy is the only one that leads to victory; but the ambassador believes that victory is the last thing Obama wants. In that case, Eikenberry may be quietly conspiring to lose the war, either to give Obama's leftist supporters the terrible American defeat they demand, or to deny President Bush the victory he earned. Or both. I certainly hope this is not what's going through Eikenberry's mind!)

But back to the One, who is ultimately calling the shots here. His philosophy of "I reject your reality and substitute my own" is, in fact, the standard modus vivendi of liberalism. As in:

  • "I reject the reality that one must work hard, or at least smart, to live well; I substitute the reality where I can sit around and smoke pot all day but still receive a national income (big enough to pay for my dope)."
  • "I reject the reality that says the best remedy for bad speech is more good speech; I substitute the reality where we can simply outlaw or ban bad speech, and then all that will be left is good speech."
  • "I reject the reality that increasing health-insurance demand (via mandate) while decreasing supply (by driving companies out of business) will result in much more expensive insurance; I substitute the reality where a complete government takeover will lower costs, improve care, and expand the pool of those covered."
  • "I reject the reality that we need cheap energy; I substitute the reality where we can tax the hell out of it, raise energy costs through the roof (as Obama himself gleefully predicted), declare more and more energy sources off-limits, and therefore make America stronger and more prosperous."
  • "I reject the reality that doubling taxation of the average Joe will leave him with less money to spend; I substitute the reality where doubling taxation results in an explosion of new economic growth, causing the economy to take off like a rocket."
  • "I reject the reality that Israel needs the ability to defend itself, or it will be destroyed; I substitute the reality where, if Israel will only give the Palestinians everything they want, while demanding nothing in return, the latter will be so grateful they will become fast friends with the Jewish state." (Alternatively: "I reject the reality that Jews should be allowed to have a state; I substitute the reality where Jews are so uniquely evil that they are the only "race" who should be barely-tolerated strangers wherever they live.")

To the liberal, reality is infinitely malleable: If you don't like it, just hold your breath, close your eyes, strain really hard, and intensely visualize the new reality. When you open your eyes and gasp in a lungful, the new reality will miraculously have been subbed in!

This seems to work in some environments but not others. It works great in Hollywood; and it works reasonably well in two-party politics -- averaging out to being successful about half the time. However, it doesn't seem to work much at all in warfare, where the default reality has a depressing way of contradicting the happy-facers, rudely and abruptly.

Alas, even that catastrophe could play into the hand of Barack Obama and his incompetocracy; after bargaining down the number of troops we need -- and implementing Slow Joe Biden's counter-terrorism strategy, rather than a COIN strategy -- we might be handed a signal, Vietnam-style defeat. Then B.O. could declare:

  1. "Clearly this means the war was unwinnable from the beginning, and my predecessor should never have invaded Afghanistan in the first place."
  2. "I gave the policy of the previous administration every opportunity; I even sent more troops -- not once, but twice! It's time to admit that the whole adventure was a terrible miscalculation, pull out, accept that defeat was inevitable, and MoveOn."
  3. "Now the whole country understands why I have embarked upon a new era of Strategic Reassurance, talking to our enemies without preconditions, instead of the "cowboy militarism" of the Republican Party.

    "We're going to redouble our efforts to talk Iran and North Korea into doing what's best for America, rather than what's best for themselves. I know we've tried it again and again, and it's never worked yet; but by the Law of Averages, that means we're due to hit the jackpot really soon now!"

In the long run, I don't think a strategy of denying reality is a military winner; and a long-run strategy of hoping for American defeat will not be a political winner in 2010 or 2012. But as John Maynard Keynes is reputed to have said, "In the long run, we're all dead."

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 12, 2009, at the time of 5:55 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 17, 2009

General Jones Flipped Here

Afghan Astonishments , Iraq Matters , Israel Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Consider this post an addendum to our last, Gen. Jones Scoffs at Afghanistan "Surge" - Just Like Failed Iraq "Surge!".

Scott Johnson at Power Line points us to a Michael Goldfarb post on the Weekly Standard blog revealing an astonishing decision by our ancient enemy, President Barack H. Obama's National Security Advisor, Gen. Jim Jones.

As a tiny handful of you may recall, towards the end of our previous post, we noted a disturbing tendency of the top brass in all branches of the military; this trend may become determinative in Jones' final decision whether to support or oppose the recommendation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal that we switch to a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan, which would require adding 40,000 troops. We wrote:

It's not clear whether Jones is himself an anti-war leftist, but it's not uncommon for top generals to drift left as they progress up the heirarchy. It often seems that the bigger the command, the more the commandant "grows in office;" cf. Eric Shinseki, Anthony Zinni, and of course the ultimate recent example, Colin Powell. It's not hard to explain; at the highest levels of command, a general or admiral is less like a military leader and more like a cabinet secretary. Those who head up gargantuan bureaucracies tend to believe in big-bureaucracy solutions to all problems... witness Powell insisting that we could not depose Saddam Hussein without a buildup of half a million troops.

Powell must have known that was impossible; thus, had his advice been accepted, we could not have invaded Iraq at all -- which would have suited Powell (and Shinseki and Zinni, and probably Jones) just fine.

Then we asked and partially answered the critical question:

Does that make such a general a leftist? In the limited sense of having a more Eurocentric (or even more European) viewpoint, yes it does. The reason that European armies typically refuse to fight is that they can't risk their soldiers' lives on anything smaller than the tank battles of the North-Africa campaign. This fits well with the so-called Powell Doctrine: Never send troops unless it's worth refighting World War II... which of course it never seems to be.

In addition to the other strands of evidence we presented, we now have a new piece of the puzzle, via the Weekly Standard blogpost linked above.

There exists a group that calls itself "J Street;" J Street claims to be pro-peace and pro-Israel but is easily demonstrated to be just the opposite: It's pro-Palestinian and very, very anti-Israel, to the point of being antisemitic, in my opinion -- notwithstanding the fact that most members are ethnically Jewish and many are religious Jews as well.

(How can that be? In my worldview, one kind of antisemitism is to insist that of all the peoples in the world, only the Jews have no right to a homeland and must remain nervous, barely tolerated guests in other people's countries. This definition holds no matter the cultural or religious affiliation of the bigot doing the insisting. There are self-hating Jews, just as there are self-hating blacks, gays, and conservatives.)

As Power Line reported, J Street is holding its first annual feast and gabfest soon, and a great many Democratic senators and representatives have signed aboard as "hosts." Alas, so did a couple of Republicans; but it was clear from the outset that many of these sponsors, even many of the Democrats, were fooled by the seemingly pro-Israel rhetoric of J Street: These hosts weren't Israel or Jew haters; they were just useful idiots.

In the last few days, as word hit the street about J Street, their "Gala Dinner" has been shedding sponsors like my old Alaskan Husky used to shed fleas. From the Weekly Standard blogpost:

The anti-Israel organization J Street has been hemorraghing sponsors for its conference as Senators and Congressmen learned of its true agenda. Just in the last few hours, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Reps. Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Leonard Boswell (D-IA), have asked to have their names removed from the host committee. [Sen. Thad Cochran, R-MS, 68%, demanded yesterday that J Street withdraw his name as well. -- DaH]

And then comes the kicker, which is the point of this post that you are reading now...

So J Street has played its hole card: Obama national security advisor Jim Jones has accepted an invitation to participate.

And we now have not just a squabble over J Street. We now have a "teachable moment" about the Obama White House.

To tote up some of the positions of J Street, I must combine information dug up by Michael Goldfarb, Paul Mirengoff, and Scott Johnson:

  • Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset (parliament), is closely associated with J Street; he declared that "to define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end," then went on to compare Israel to "pre-Nazi Germany."
  • Prominent J Street member Henry Siegman compared Israel to South Africa under apartheid; he also appears to support the Walt and Mearsheimer conspiracy theory about a "Jewish lobby" that controls the American government (search on Power Line for many posts about this offensive and antisemitic absurdity -- enthusiastically and monetarily endorsed by Israel's great friend, former President Jimmy Carter);
  • J Street receives much of its funding from Arab-American and Moslem-American organizations, as well as from Palestinian and Iranian lobbying groups;
  • J Street is "bitterly hostile to the democratically-elected government of Israel" (especially now, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu);
  • Another luminary invited to speak at the Gala Dinner is "poet" Josh Healey, who suggests that Israel is at least metaphorically "writing numbers on the wrists of babies born in the ghetto called Gaza," yet another equation of Israel to the Nazis; Healy extols a march he joined for "Palestinian solidarity."

With the notable exception of the Obamacle's high priest, Chief of Staff Rahm Israel Emanuel (yes that's his full name), the most consistently leftist members of Obama's cabinet and administration have adopted anti-Israelism as a core element of their leftist foreign policy: That is, they blame Israel, not Iran, for nearly all the violence in the Middle East and demand "concessions" that would, in fact, be an Israeli suicide pact.

Gen. Jones eagerness to participate in the Gala Dinner of such a group as J Street is a very strong indicator that, at least with regard to foreign policy, he is indeed a leftist, aligning himself much more with antisemites Samantha Power, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Jimmy Carter than with Israel supporters like Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 85% liberal) or Charles "Chuck" Schumer (D-NY, 100%).

Is it too hard to believe that if Jones is in bed with Power -- policywise, I mean; get your rmind out of the gutter! -- on the demonization of Israel, that he's likely to agree with her position, and that of the others in Obama's leftist bloc (including the One Himself), on Afghanistan?

Asked and answered.

Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 17, 2009, at the time of 2:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 16, 2009

Gen. Jones Scoffs at Afghanistan "Surge" - Just Like Failed Iraq "Surge!"

Afghan Astonishments , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I had forgotten this, but President Barack H. Obama's National Security Advisor, former Marine Corps Gen. Jim Jones, in Fall, 2007, called for an early abandonment of Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Iraq -- just before it began to show significant progress that led, less than a year later, to a widely acknowledged victory:

In September 2007, Mr. Jones led a study that called for withdrawing forces, effectively ending President Bush's troop surge. "Significant reductions, consolidations, and realignments would appear to be possible and prudent," that report concluded.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat Nevada, cited the Jones report as evidence that the troop surge had failed.

"It is discouraging that the president stubbornly claims his failed policy is working even as this latest report describes many Iraqi security forces as focused more on fostering civil war than on suppressing it," he said.

Jones was doing the bidding of the anti-war Left then, and he appears to be doing the same now; in fact, like other lefties, he dismisses Gen. Stanley McChrystal's own COIN recommendation for Afghanistan as nothing more than a troop increase, as opposed to a complete change of strategy:

In an interview with The Washington Times, the former Marine general and NATO commander acknowledged his views on Afghanistan have soured in the three years since he left the military. He said security in Afghanistan had deteriorated "because of the [U.S.] failure to see the interaction of security, development, and governance and rule of law." [Darn that previous administration!]

"I think that is coming clear in spades now, that the failure -- the tendency to focus so much on troop strength and not enough on the other factors, the development of the national Afghan police, for example which was on life support for so many years, the development of the Afghan National Army, which has never really gone fast enough - those are things that as we developed a strategy that was released in March were clearly highlighted. And now everybody is turning full-scale attention to them," Mr. Jones said....

Mr. Jones told CNN on Sunday, "I think the end is much more complex than just about adding 'X' number of troops. Afghanistan is a country that's quite large and that swallows up a lot of people."

Despite his earlier study group's warning that the war effort was in danger of faltering, he said on CNN, " I don't foresee the return of the Taliban and I want to be very clear that Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling."

In 2006-7, the cry from the Left was that Iraq was unwinnable. It was the wrong war anyway; we should just declare defeat and yank out the troops, let Iraq go to hell in a handmaiden, and shift all those troops to Afghanistan -- the war we should be fighting! As many have noted, to a liberal, whichever war we're currently fighting is the wrong war; the only good war is the one we're not fighting yet, or which ranks lower on the threat table.

Jones led a war-study group then that concluded the Afghanistan war (the one we should be fighting) was in danger of "faltering" and required many more troops; he opined that the Iraq "surge" had clearly failed, and we should pull troops out of Iraq and send them to Afghanistan... just what then Sen. Obama was saying, among many other liberal Democrats.

But now the Left (except for Cindy Sheehan) has largely abandoned opposition to the Iraq war -- since we inconveniently won it -- and instead focused its ire on Afghanistan... which has become the new "wrong war;" we should be focusing on Pakistan! Behold, Gen. Jones turns on a dime and clearly signals that we thinks we should not "surge" 40,000 troops, we should not switch to the previously successful COIN strategy, and we should not accept Gen. McChrystal's recommendation.

Gone is "the interaction of security, development, and governance and rule of law;" it's time to abandon the failed Afghanistan war and MoveOn.

Do we detect a pattern here?

It's not clear whether Jones is himself an anti-war leftist, but it's not uncommon for top generals to drift left as they progress up the heirarchy. It often seems that the bigger the command, the more the commandant "grows in office;" cf. Eric Shinseki, Anthony Zinni, and of course the ultimate recent example, Colin Powell. It's not hard to explain; at the highest levels of command, a general or admiral is less like a military leader and more like a cabinet secretary. Those who head up gargantuan bureaucracies tend to believe in big-bureaucracy solutions to all problems... witness Powell insisting that we could not depose Saddam Hussein without a buildup of half a million troops.

Powell must have known that was impossible; thus, had his advice been accepted, we could not have invaded Iraq at all -- which would have suited Powell (and Shinseki and Zinni, and probably Jones) just fine.

Does that make such a general a leftist? In the limited sense of having a more Eurocentric (or even more European) viewpoint, yes it does. The reason that European armies typically refuse to fight is that they can't risk their soldiers' lives on anything smaller than the tank battles of the North-Africa campaign. This fits well with the so-called Powell Doctrine: Never send troops unless it's worth refighting World War II... which of course it never seems to be.

Too, James Jones became quite chummy with two senators in 2007: Hillary Clinton and Lindsey Graham (R-SC, 82%). Both follow the liberal line on war; Graham, for example, is further to the left on questions of terrorism intelligence than Sen. John McCain (R-AZ, 63%) (Graham's higher ACU rating comes from policies unrelated to the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis). And of course, he twice refused Condoleezza Rice's offer to become Deputy Secretary of State in the Bush administration but appears to have jumped at the chance to be National Security Advisor in the Obama Administration. Perhaps he just found being NSA more attractive than being a deputy secretary... but it's hard not to conclude he found the current administration more congenial politically, as well.

I believe that the One chose Jim Jones as National Security Advisor precisely because of his willingness to accomodate the anti-war Left's party line, no matter how many knots he must tie himself into; and if Jones wants to keep his job, he knows his duty: Rather than advise the president, he must echo whatever flippant argument Obama invokes against the war we're actually fighting, preferring some hypothetical martial struggle somewhere else, at some future time (and preferably on some other president's watch).

I believe Gen. Jones has already decided to keep his job.

Cross-posted to Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 16, 2009, at the time of 6:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 30, 2009

Withdrawing from Afghanistan, Plus Future Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Pinch Me, I'm Dreaming

Afghan Astonishments , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , Obama Nation , Pakistan Perplexities , Terrorism Intelligence , Terrorist Attacks , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

I just heard Bill Kristol on the Hugh Hewitt show dropping a couple of political bombshells:

  1. First, Kristol now believes for the first time that President Barack H. Obama is paving the groundwork for rejecting Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendation of a COIN strategy for Afghanistan, including increasing troop levels.

Note that it was the Obamacle Himself who appointed McChrystal to head up his present commands, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A), just three months ago; and he it was who ordered McChrystal to undertake a complete review of the Afghanistan policy.

I suspect Obama expected McChrystal to recommend declaring defeat and pulling out. But in response to Obama's order, McChrystal released a 66-page report to continuing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that called for significantly increasing troop levels there and redeploying the force in a counterinsurgency mode, similar to Iraq.

Ever since, as several bloggers have argued (notably John Hinderaker at Power Line), Obama has acted like a man who deeply regrets having picked an actual fighting general in the first place -- and who wants to prepare the American people for the complete rejection of his own appointee's report, in favor of a phased withdrawal from "the war we should be fighting," as some guy named Barack Obama called it during the campaign (in contrast to Iraq, the war we were supposed to lose, one presumes).

  1. Second, and far more shocking, is some political intel that Kristol received from a person who is in "cose contact" with top Defense officials: That holdover George W. Bush Defense Secretary Bob Gates will be asked by Obama to step down at the end of the year... and that Obama plans to name former senator Chuck Hagel, who never met a war he didn't want us to withdraw from, as his new Secretary of Retreat and Defeat.

Hagel was an infantry grunt in Vietnam for two years, leaving shortly after the Tet Offensive; that experience seems to have colored his attitude towards all subsequent conflicts: He sometimes votes for them (as for example the Iraq war); but as soon as the going gets tough, Hagel demands an immediate and aggressive surrender.

  • He was one of only four Republicans in July 2007 who voted in favor of cloture on a bill to force withdrawal from Iraq starting 120 days from that vote; the other three were Olympia Snowe (ME, 12%), Susan Collins (ME, 20%), and Gordon Smith of Oregon, liberals all.
  • In railing against the Iraq COIN strategy of Gen. David Petraeus, Hagel called it "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it's carried out." (I don't recall Hagel ever issuing an apology, or even a statement, after the Petraeus strategy proved decisive in our victory in Iraq.)
  • Speaking about Israeli's incursion into Lebanon to stop Hezbollah's rocket attacks on their northern cities, Hagel blurted out:

    "The sickening slaughter on both sides must end and it must end now.... President Bush must call for an immediate cease-fire. This madness must stop."...

    "How do we realistically believe that a continuation of the systematic destruction of an American friend -- the country and people of Lebanon -- is going to enhance America's image and give us the trust and credibility to lead a lasting and sustained peace effort in the Middle East?" asked Hagel, the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Yes, the perfect man to defend America -- Barack Obama style. I can just picture the furious and manly letters of strong disapproval Hagel will shoot off whenever some dictator funds and gives safe haven to a terrorist group while they blow up another American embassy.

Currently, Chuck Hagel is Chairman of the Board of the Atlantic Council, a foreign-policy think tank cum policy advocacy group that appears to lean heavily towards diplomacy above everything -- talking loudly and forgetting to bring any stick at all, big or small. (E.g., its International Advisory Board is headed by Brent Scowcroft and includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Edelman, Lawrence H. Summers, and a huge inflation of bankers and CEOs of vast multinational corporations.)

Hagel replaced outgoing Chairman Jim Jones, who was tapped to serve as Obama's National Security Advisor; Jones was last seen offering what we called "the weirdest explanation to date for cancelling the long-range ballistic-missile defense system in Eastern Europe -- while simultaneously betraying our allies, Poland and the Czech Republic."

Since the Jim Jones appointment as security sock puppet worked out so well for Obama, it certainly seems plausible that he would go back to the same well to draw out a bucketful of Defense Secretary. Admittedly, Kristol just lost his father, Irving Kristol; but it was hardly the sort of shocking or unanticipated demise that might throw William Kristol into a blue funk and darken his normal optimism.

The threatened appointment of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense would be catastrophic for the war efforts, all of them: Iraq, Afghanistan, the war against the Iran/al-Qaeda axis, intelligence gathering, interrogations, dealing with Pakistan, North Korea, China, Russia... and of course, Hagel would be a disaster for Israel, as he would almost certainly back Obama to the hilt in the latter's quest to force Israel back to the indefensible borders of the pre-Six Day War era. (In exchange for the Palestinian's promise that they might seriously consider deciding whether or not to recognize Israel sometime in the distant and not very likely future.)

Appointing Hagel would seriously diminish our ability to protect our allies or even defend ourselves, and in general would signal the end of American power and leadership in the world, at least for a while (say until 2013). Therefore, I conclude that Obama is already plotting to make the appointment.

I must also conclude that the Senate will swiftly approve the nominee; Hagel was once one of them... therefore, "comity of the Senate" and all that, Republicans will probably support him, though he rarely supported them while in that august body.

And there you have it, your recommended minimum daily allowance of political pessimism and national-defense despair.

Cross-posted (of course) to Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 30, 2009, at the time of 5:39 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 22, 2009

Withdraw for Peace!

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , Obama Nation , Opinions: Nasty, Brutish, and Shortsighted
Hatched by Dafydd

I've been pondering the new Obamic strategy for Iraq: Withdraw from joint patrols to a Fortress of Solitude, withdraw from the successful counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) of Gen. David Petraeus, and announce to the entire world exactly when we are going to withdraw from Iraq altogether. How has that worked out so far?

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on Saturday alleged there had been collaboration between Iraqi security forces and the insurgents whose massive truck bombings killed 95 people three days ago.

Zebari, whose ministry lost 32 workers in the blast at its headquarters, admitted the attacks were a serious security setback and that the government had failed to protect its citizens.

Wednesday's bombings at the ministeries of foreign affairs and finance culminated in the worst day of violence seen in the conflict-hit country in 18 months, with around 600 people also wounded.

It's not that the entire war is falling apart, mind; it's just a small setback -- set back to about 2006, that is, the nadir of the failed "containment" strategy, in which we cached American forces in moated castles, whence they would sally forth to engage any passing enemy army.

The hallmark of COIN was the remarkable cooperation we got from Shia, Sunni, and Kurd, once we made it clear that we were willing to patrol, fight, and if necessary, die alongside Iraqi forces to protect the Iraqi people. It was that commitment to civilian security that finally turned the tide, snatching victory in 2007-8 from the jaws of a 2006 defeat.

But our new Commander in Chief has other ideas; we no longer patrol with Iraqi forces, fight alongside them, or concern ourselves much with protecting the civilian population. Evidently, Barack H. Obama believes that the two years we've been building up the Iraqi military and civilian infrastructure should be plenty. "Enough!" as he is fond of saying in many contexts. It's been such an incredibly long time that surely our Iraqi partners can stand on their own hands by now.

Let's see... we spent fourteen years (1899-1913) in the Philippine jungles, building up indiginous forces (Philippine Scouts) and inculcating Filipinos with radical ideas such as the rule of law and the evil of involuntary slavery, before we could finally put down the Moro (Moslem) Rebellion and set up a functioning civilian republic. That country is still functioning today, with a vibrant economy (after a recession in the 1980s caused by their brief flirtation with socialism under Ferdinand Marcos), and still strongly allied with the United States. This is the model of a successful counterinsurgency followed by successful nation-building.

By contrast, France under Charles De Gaulle -- whipsawed by the socialists abroad and the French Communist Party at home -- pulled their troops out of Algeria prematurely, only three years after the French COIN strategy finally suppressed the Front de Libération Nationale; thus they never gave the 60% majority of Algerians who opposed complete "independence" from France their opportunity to erect civic institutions and security forces to protect and defend the liberties of a free people. And today, the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria is a socialist totalitarian regime with much closer ties to the Middle East than the West.

President Barack H. Obama carefully pondered these historical examples, analyzed them with his unequaled military acumen... then decided to follow the French example. (Of course!) Ergo, today in Iraq...

Zebari said Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had ordered the arrest of 11 senior security officers on Thursday so they could be questioned on how a four-tonne truck had entered an area where even two-tonne vehicles were barred.

He also made the first official admission that the blasts signalled that security gains made in the past year were under serious strain following a series of deadly attacks in recent months.

"They have been moving their attacks... now they have focused on their main concern, their main attention, on Baghdad and this is a dangerous and a serious development and a security setback," said Zebari.

"This has been going on for the last two months. Every week, every two weeks we see a wave of these bombings and killings of innocent people."

I picture Petraeus tearing his hair out in frustration, watching all the gains of COIN poured out onto the Iraqi sands. Our allies are starting to sound desperate, even plaintive:

But Zebari went further and called for a re-appraisal of the country's entire security apparatus as it was not, he said, obtaining sufficient intelligence to counter the enemy threat....

"Sometimes you can't fight these people with checkpoints. You should be mobile. You should go after them you, disrupt and penetrate their network to get human information. This is the key," he added.

Sadly, however, the real "key" would be a change of leadership here in the United States. That is beyond the grasp of Nouri al-Maliki, Hoshyar Zebari, or any other Iraqi; and the Iranian-backed terrorists in Iraq know they have at least three more years to slaughter and butcher before they must worry about that possibility.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 22, 2009, at the time of 10:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 18, 2009

The Price of Presidential Poltroonery

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

On July 2nd, the Iraq government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki unilaterally issued guidelines to the withdrawal of forces agreement; nothing could make more clear how much we have lost by not having President George W. Bush to kick around anymore.

The sudden guidelines, which took American military commanders completely by surprise, included the demand that we cease all joint patrols with Iraqi forces:

In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 -- the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers -- Iraq's top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to "stop all joint patrols" in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to "notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement"....

The new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the two governments. Iraqi leaders increasingly see the agreement as an opportunity to show their citizens that they are now unequivocally in charge and that their dependence on the U.S. military is minimal and waning.

The new "guidelines" also reflect demands from Iran. What's next -- no Jewish Marines allowed in Iraq?

I am convinced this Iraqi betrayal would never have happened under President Bush; of all people in the world, Iraqis are most acutely aware of George W. Bush's resolve, his toughness, and his refusal to compromise American security, even to accomodate the vanity of an ally.

But the new administration is a different kettle of monkeys: Maliki understands that President Barack H. Obama is in full diplomatic retreat virtually everywhere, from Russia to North Korea to China -- even to our allies in Europe and Latin America. (Were I a psychologist or psychiatrist, I might speculate that his insensate hunger to meet other heads of state anytime, anywhere, for any reason, and without any preconditions is perhaps best understood as an unconscious need to be loved and approved, possibly due to being abandoned by his father; but I'm not, so I won't.)

In particular, Maliki sees the Obamacle kow-towing to Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even to the extent of releasing the very Qods Force officers who have been directing the violence and murder by splinter groups of the Mahdi Miliia against not only American and Coalition forces but Iraqis as well:

The strict application of the agreement coincides with what U.S. military officials in Washington say has been an escalation of attacks against their forces by Iranian-backed Shiite extremist groups, to which they have been unable to fully respond....

A spate of high-casualty suicide bombings in Shiite neighborhoods, attributed to al-Qaeda in Iraq and related Sunni insurgent groups, has overshadowed the increase of attacks by Iran-backed Shiite extremists, U.S. official say....

The three primary groups -- Asaib al-Haq, Khataib Hezbollah and the Promised Day Brigades -- emerged from the "special groups" of the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia of radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which terrorized Baghdad and southern Iraq beginning in 2006. All receive training, funding and direction from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.

"One of the things we still have to find out, as we pull out from the cities, is how much effectiveness we're going to have against some of these particular target sets," the military intelligence official said. "That's one of the very sensitive parts of this whole story."

Sensitive -- you think?

Does anybody believe that Barack Obama is ever going to crack down on Iran, in Iraq or anywhere else, so long as there is the faintest thread of a possibility in the One's mind that he can "talk Iran out of" building a nuclear bomb?

Does anybody think Obama would fight to preserve effective rules of engagement from depredations by the Iraqi Council of Representatives (acting as a stalking horse for Iran) -- or even from our own congressional defeatists trying, once again, to cripple our fighting ability?

Or would he just shrug and go with the flow? Especially if he is completely engrossed in trying to enact his domestic agenda to nationalize health care, the entire banking system, and all energy use; raise taxes back to Carter-era rates; and triple the national debt?

I think our military is quite chary of picking a fight with a tough enemy like Qods Force, unless they can be certain that the Commander in Chief will back our hand 100%. Since certainty is certainly lacking, considering the new CinC, I'm not sanguine about our willingness to go after those "three primary groups" of Shia attacking American forces in Iraq.

Worse, Iraqis are extremely sensitive to signs of their allies going wobbly; in the Middle East, an "ally" is a temporary arrangement subject to change at a moment's notice. If Iraqis gain the faintest sense that we cannot be relied upon, then they will find an ally who is more steadfast. Looking around, now that Bush is gone, there are but two other players in Iraq who have been there from the beginning and who appear determined to stay until the bitter end: al-Qaeda and Iran.

I worry that if Obama continues to send a message of weakness, vacillation, and subservience, the Iraqi Shia, in the face of an increasing tempo of attacks from the former, will naturally turn to the latter:

Maliki has occasionally criticized interference by Shiite Iran's Islamic government in Iraqi affairs. But he has also maintained close ties to Iran and has played down U.S. insistence that Iran is deeply involved, through the Quds Force, in training and controlling the Iraqi Shiite extremists.

U.S. intelligence has seen "no discernible increase in Tehran's support to Shia extremists in recent months," and the attack level is still low compared with previous years, U.S. counterterrorism official said. But senior military commanders maintained that Iran still supports the Shiite militias, and that their attacks now focus almost exclusively on U.S. forces.

With the replacement of George Bush by Barack Obama, the mullahs, the bloodthirsty, megalomaniacal, Twelver mullahs, may win after all; and all that blood and treasure will be flushed away. But the most galling part is this: After physically wrenching a brilliant victory around to a humiliating defeat, does anyone expect the One to accept responsibilty for his own stupid decisions?

Of course not; he'll blame Bush. Obama will crow that this proves he was right all along; the war was unwinnable from the start!

There is one possible saving grace: The troop-withdrawal agreement necessarily contains a lot of vagueness and ambiguity (this is, after all, the Middle East). We might interpret it to make Iraq's unnegotiated "guidelines" to withdrawal invalid.

Naturally, that would be a higher level decision than a mere military commander could make. It's political; it transcends strategy. Such a decision requires some stubbornness, resolution, military acumen, and just a little spine. And it must come from the political command, through the Department of Defense, the State Department, the intelligence agencies, and ultimately from the president himself.

Uh oh...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 18, 2009, at the time of 6:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 10, 2009

Obamunism II - the Infection Spreads

Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy , Media Madness , Obama Nation
Hatched by Dafydd

On Monday, in Obamunism - Through the Eyes of a Child, we lit into President Barack H. Obama for enunciating a very juvenile and immature philosophy, one based upon four pillars:

  • Dividing world actors into either heroes or villains (based on whether they're considered generally Left or Right, respectively), as in the comic books of earlier generations (oddly, many comics have a more sophisticated worldview today than does the president);
  • Misapprehending current events in a very superficial, childish way;
  • Rewriting the chaos of history to make it a more exciting and melodramatic story -- complete with plot, conflict, climax, and dénouement (resolution of the climax)... they remember things not the way they happened but the way they should have happened;
  • And magical thinking, in which deep, non-logical or paralogical connections exist between seemingly disconnected events or people, such that doing some apparently irrelevent thing (throwing the ring of power into a volcano) results in some vital consequence (the evil Sauron is destroyed).

Today, Friday -- bookending the week -- I have a perfect example of such pre-pubescent behavior; but this time, it's not just on the part of the president... it has spread through Western civilization at least as far as Merrie Olde England, as the Times (of London) joins in the juvenalia. Thus Obama does not merely enunciate a philosophy of childishness, he exemplifies what is rapidly becoming a movement of childishness.

In a straight-reporting article on Gen. Ray Odierno's fight in Iraq, primarily in the cities of Mosul and Diyala, we read the following description of the so-called "surge," which I prefer to call the counterinsurgency:

Despite the rise in the number of attacks, overall violence is still far below levels of two years ago when the surge of an extra 30,000 US forces -- a strategy created and implemented by General Odierno and his boss, General Petraeus -- was just getting started. That risk paid off, subduing a civil war that was killing thousands of Iraqi civilians and scores of American soldiers every month.

Let's take a look at that one paragraph. First of all, the definition of civil war is not "kills thousands of civilians and scores of soldiers every month." A civil war requires opposing armies -- each drawn from and led by citizens or subjects of the same country -- engaging in actual combat operations.

Neither of these was true in Iraq. There were initially two armies, that of Saddam Hussein and the one fielded by the American-led coalition. After the former collapsed and up until today, there has been only one army: the latter. In addition, there have been various home-staffed but generally foreign-led terrorist groups... and there is even a small force of militants fielded by a foreign power, Iran. But there is not now, nor has there ever been (during the third millennium) a "civil war" in Iraq.

This is story-telling as described above. It's very dramatic to describe the violent conflict from 2004 through 2007 as a "civil war;" the term conjures up images (in America) of horrific battles like Antietam (Sharpsburg) and Gettysburg and hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers on both sides. In Great Britain, readers envision the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, between "cavaliers" (royalists) and "roundheads" (parliamentarians), in which King Charles I was executed by Parliament, his son driven into exile, the monarchy temporarily abolished, and a new government "Protectorate" established under Oliver Cromwell. Man, that's exciting!

By contrast, the reality in Iraq was nothing like that. The government was never in danger of being overthrown by al-Qaeda, which fielded no real army; the terrorists never really governed territory, though they held sway in some areas (e.g., Anbar province); all they could ever do was kill people, more or less at random.

In addition to the storytelling, the paragraph quoted above demonstrates the oversimplification and superficiality of Obamunism, despite coming from across the Atlantic ocean. Note the claimed provenance of the counterinsurgency: "a strategy created and implemented by General Odierno and his boss, General Petraeus."

This puts all the praise squarely upon the military itself, a safe and politically neutral repository... and it denies credit to the civilians (some former military) who actually crafted the plan, particularly the authors of the American Enterprise Institute's report: Fred Kagen and retired Gen. John "Jack" Keane.

Why should the Times want to deny credit to the AEI? Because it is a preeminent politically conservative organization. To grant the AEI its due entails admitting that the conservative approach to the Iraq crisis was correct; while the liberal view of withdrawal from the cities, handing everything over to the Iraqis, and quickly withdrawing from Iraq altogether -- as enunciated by, e.g., Gen. William Casey and retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, along with nearly every liberal Democrat especially including then-Sen. Barack Obama -- was dead wrong, failed, and nearly cost us the war.

(Even worse would have been the madcap scheme pushed by then-Sen. Joe Biden, among many others, to "partition" Iraq into threes, Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. Within a few months, the Sunni regions would all be controlled by al-Qaeda with support from Pakistan; the Shiite regions would all be controlled by Muqtada Sadr and his puppetmasters in Teheran; and Kurdistan would have managed to provoke a war with Turkey.)

Thank goodness the AEI made such a good counter-case.

Finally, note the truly glaring omission among those who should receive credit for the counterinsurgency, which seized victory from a battlefield where the Left had already declared defeat. Who was the one person most responsible for what the press enjoys calling "the surge?" Who was the actual decider? Who took the political heat? Who was called everything from a moron to a Nazi for pushing it?

The Times has surgically removed President George W. Bush from the story; it's as if he wasn't even there. Evidently, these two generals, Petraeus and Odierno, just got it into their heads to totally change the war-fighting strategy in Iraq. They invented the counterinsurgency out of whole cloth and somehow found a way to increase the forces on the ground as well... and all without any input or decision-making by the Commander in Chief!

Imagine how terrible it would be to have to admit, in one of the most respected organs of the elite media, that George W. Bush was right, and Barack H. Obama was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq war... that if we had followed the Obama-Biden-Reid-Pelosi-Kerry recommendation to declare defeat and go home, we would have lost the war; but because Bush instead implemented a strategy of victory, we have won it. If the Left confessed that, how could it ever hold up its head again?

Far better to praise a couple of more or less apolitical generals, pat the troops on the head, and cut all the political actors out of the picture, like a deranged divorcée cutting her ex-husband's head out of all the wedding photos. Or perhaps more appropriately, the Soviet habit of making former heroes of the revolution "vanish" from official photographs when they fall from power.

But the Times only takes its cue from President Obama himself; during his surprise trip to Baghdad Wednesday, he lavished praise on the American military presence there, crediting them with the "surge of troops;" but he pointedly refrained from mentioning President Bush's courageous decision to implement the counterinsurgency strategy in the first place. This has been Obama's modus operandi from the days of the campaign (which still hasn't ended) through the first months of his presidency: Everything bad that happens in America he blames on Bush; but he shifts credit for all the successes of the Bush administration -- and there were many -- to other entities, either liberal (Congress) or neutral (the military).

This is typically juvenile behavior, now being copied by leftists across America and even in supposedly sophisticated Europe. The childishness of our Childe President is spreading like a virulent malaise through an unsanitary grade school. Heaven only knows how long the epidemic will rage.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 10, 2009, at the time of 2:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 7, 2009

I'll Take Both A and B, Patterico

Beggar's Banking Banquet , Blogomania , Econ. 101 , Iraq Matters , Tax Attax , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Patterico published a post yesterday comparing two statements, one by Rush Limbaugh, the other by Huffington Post commentator Lee Stranahan. (Patterico titled his post "More on Limbaugh," ha ha.)

Patterico draws a parallel between the two statements -- not difficult, since Stranahan cooperated by deliberately crafting his to reflect Limbaugh's -- and our friend Patterico appears to believe he has scored a point by noting that both have the same structure (which was Stranahan's point anyway). Here's Patterico:

If I were a liberal, and if Stranahan had had a major national platform where the entire country was discussing his views, I’d want to tell him to find a different way to say what he said. Do you think it would help Democrat politicians to spend days answering questions like: “Do you also want the Iraq war to fail, like Lee Stranahan?” -- and have to spend time explaining to people that Stranahan didn’t really want soldiers to die? I’d tell Stranahan: You want to say you opposed Bush’s policies, great. Stop saying it in a way that makes it sound like you wanted troops to die. Yes, I know you don’t mean that. People will still think you do -- and frankly, you weren’t all that clear about saying you didn’t. You said it, but the implications of what you said could suggest to some that you might not have meant it....

Rush has had a major national platform where the entire country was discussing his views. As a result, I wish he’d find a different way to say what he said. I say to him: If you want to say you oppose Obama’s policies, great. Stop saying it in a way that makes it sound like you want Americans out of work. Yes, I know you don’t mean that. People will still think you do -- and frankly, you weren’t all that clear about saying you didn’t.

Anyone who bristles at hearing the phrase “You’re damn right I wanted the Iraq war to fail.” -- or who can imagine other Americans bristling at that line -- should understand what I’m saying.

I have a very different reaction than Patterico, however: I am offended by neither statement; neither makes me "bristle." I take each as a pronouncement of the core position of its speaker:

  • Rush Limbaugh wants Barack H. Obama's leftist revolution in America to fail utterly, even if that means many thousands of Americans are temporarily hurt economically; Limbaugh hopes and believes this will make America stronger, so that America will become once more the "shining city on a hill" that Ronald Reagan dubbed us, spreading American-style republicanism across the globe.
  • Stranahan wants America's military opposition to the militant Islamism of the Iran/al-Qaeda axis to fail utterly, even if that means many thousands of American soldiers are killed permanently; Stranahan hopes and believes this will make America weaker and more like a European country, so that internationalism will reign supreme and we have one-world government in the model of the United Nations.

What demarcates these polar-opposite worldviews is not the structure of their presentation but the substance of their philosophies; I ringingly endorse Limbaugh's and resoundingly reject Stranahan's.

I share Limbaugh's statement that he hopes Obama fails in his quest to remake America into a socialist state and remake the American citizen into the New Soviet Man... and I reject Stranahan's statement that he hopes the Iraq war fails to stop the tide of militant, fundamentalist Islamism, "jihadism," and terrorism from washing across the entire world, making America an international laughingstock and making it easier for his god, Barack Obama, to utterly transform us into antiAmerica.

I make no apology for being a partisan in that philosophical, political, and military conflict; and I'm astonished that Patterico doesn't see that we can defend Limbaugh's statement on its merits, and attack Stranahan's on its -- using as controversial language as we want -- without offending middle America or being in the least hypocritical: The two philosophies are substantively worlds apart, which is far more important to ordinary people than Stranahan's tendentiously crafted structural similarity.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 7, 2009, at the time of 12:07 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

February 6, 2009

More Obama Drama As Zinni Gets Spinnied

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , Obama Nation
Hatched by Dafydd

The Mack Sennett presidency strikes again, this time ensnaring Anthony Zinni, the media's favorite general -- at least while he was bashing the Iraq war (he wasn't so popular when he came out in support of the counterinsurgency strategy of President George W. Bush, Gen. David Petraeus, and the AEI).

After Gen. Jim Jones was tapped to be President Barack H. Obama's National Security Advisor, he called Zinni and asked if he would be willing to take Ryan Crocker's place as ambassador to Iraq. Zinni jumped at the offer, and Jones started the eight-ball rolling. The most competent presidency in the history of the United States swung ponderously into action:

About two weeks later, General Zinni said, General Jones called back with a formal offer for the Baghdad job, and an appointment with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Jan. 26.

General Zinni said he met for more than an hour with Mrs. Clinton, discussing a wide range of Iraq issues with her; James B. Steinberg, one of her two appointed deputy secretaries; and William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs.

"She thanked me for taking this, and we went over what needed to be done," General Zinni said. "She turned to Steinberg and Burns and said: 'Let’s get the paperwork moving. We’ve got to move on this.'"

The next day, General Zinni said, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called to thank him for taking the job.

But that was the last word on Iraq that General Zinni said he heard from the administration.

William Burns started ducking Zinni's calls; when they did talk, Zinni reports Burns was "increasingly vague" (!) about the appointment. Finally, Zinni heard from Gen. Jones, who had started the whole process; Jones told Zinni that Obama had decide to pick Christopher R. Hill, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, instead of Zinni... but evidently, like little kids afraid to report the vase they broke playing ball in the house, nobody wanted to tell Zinni.

(Christopher Hill is best known for his lengthy and apparently fruitless negotiations with North Korea, which so preoccupied George W. Bush's second term... that whole farce, when the DPRK claimed it had shut down its breeder reactor at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center -- and then a year later, the North Koreans threatened to reactivate it if they didn't get more fuel and money from the U.S.)

So Zinni is out, Hill is in, and the general to this day has no idea what happened, why he was left spinning like a character from Scanners.

But at least Obama isn't weighed down by all that old-style thinking -- like managerial experience, proper planning, inter-office communication, and common courtesy -- that made the Bush administration the object of scorn and ridicule to the new elites. Now is not the time for thinking ahead or making sure the right hand knows what the left hand is washing. Now is the time for action, action, action!

So what was Zinni's reaction?

"As a sorry offer to placate me, they offered ambassador to Saudi," he said in a separate e-mail message, referring to Saudi Arabia. "I told them to stick it where the sun don’t shine."

Sounds like sound advice. Like Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH, 72%), Gen. Anthony Zinni got his first chance for second thoughts about joining Team Obama.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 6, 2009, at the time of 5:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 15, 2009

But in Theory...

Econ. 101 , Globaloney Sandwich , Gun Rights and Occasional Wrongs , Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy , Logical Lacunae , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Of all the crazy memes flogged by Democrats and liberals, this one is, I believe, the most psychotic:

Attorney General-nominee Eric Holder forcefully broke from the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies Thursday, declaring that waterboarding is torture and pledging to prosecute some Guantanamo Bay detainees in U.S. courts.

It was the latest signal that President-elect Barack Obama will chart a new course in combatting terrorism. As recently as last week, Vice President Dick Cheney defended waterboarding, a harsh interrogation tactic that simulates drowning, saying it provided valuable intelligence.

The CIA has used the tactic on at least three terrorism suspects, included alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In past hearings, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, frustrated senators by repeatedly sidestepping questions about waterboarding.

It was the first topic discussed at Holder's confirmation hearing, and he made an unambiguous statement about its nature: "Waterboarding is torture."

As a practical matter, Holder said torture does not lead to reliable intelligence. And on principle, he said the United States needs to live up to its own high standards, even in the face of fear and terrorism.

Let's walk it through; what exactly is Holder saying? Many members of President George W. Bush's administration have testified -- from those interrogators who were directly involved in the interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, each in 2003 (the only time evidence indicates we ever used waterboarding), to experienced military and intelligence experts, to high officials (including, op.cit., Vice President Dick Cheney) -- that waterboarding those three top terrorists in fact yielded a wealth of intelligence; that intel directly led to hundreds of arrests and the disrupting and interdicting of scores of follow-on terrorist attacks against the United States, saving thousands upon thousands of American civilian lives.

Numerous people are in custody in Guantanamo Bay today because we caught them red-handed in the midst of plotting terrorist attacks -- with ample physical evidence to back up the charges -- on the basis of searches and investigations sparked by the intelligence gained from waterboarding Mohammed, Zubayday, and Nashiri.

But no... the Left considers waterboarding to be "torture," and the Left's theory about torture states unequivocally and without exception that "torture does not lead to reliable intelligence."

Ergo, none of the foregoing ever really happened: We didn't actually get intelligence from waterboarding the Three Amigos; we didn't really disrupt any terrorist plots; we didn't actually arrest anyone (or if we did, they were necessarily innocent bystanders); and in fact, we didn't stop further attacks on the country; thus, by a simple deduction, we actually were hit again and again by the terrorists -- and the Bush regime just covered it all up, yet another Bush war crime!

Sure, physical observation appears to indicate that waterboarding, the putative "torture," in fact yielded reliable and even vital intelligence; but appearances can be deceiving. Theory proves this cannot be, so logic dictates we must throw out the observations as obviously flawed.

Oddly, this is the same argumentative technique used in the globaloney debate; perhaps it needs its own name: How about Argument of the Irresistable Theoretical Construct?

  • Your so-called "measurements" claim that the Earth's temperature rise since 1900 correlates almost exactly with solar activity, and there has been no global temperature increase since 1998 (in fact, a decrease). But the theory of anthropogenic ("human created") global warming -- which every legitimate scientist accepts -- belies that claim. Therefore, your measurements must be in error... go and fix them, and don't come back for more funding until you do!
  • According to all supposed observers in Iraq, including those vehemently opposed to the war from the beginning, since the Bush regime implemented the surge, military and civilian deaths have plummeted to the normal base-level of violence found in Arab countries. But as we told you repeatedly, the "surge" could not possibly work, because there is no military solution to military defeat. So who are you going to believe -- the considered weight of expert opinion from nearly all foreign-policy professionals, including some who have won the Nobel Peace Prize... or your own lyin' eyes?
  • All those revisionist historians and economists have been busy tarnishing the reputation of the greatest president of the 20th century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, producing fact after evidence after measurement indicating that none of his New Deal programs did anything to end the Great Depression, that it continued unabated until the beginning of World War II; but it's utterly impossible in theory that programs with such good intentions -- implemented by a brilliant president who was not only the darling of liberal, compassionate professors and socialist progressives and reformers but even of the masses -- could possibly fail. Clearly then, FDR's NRA and other programs restored the American economy and ended the depression... and any claims to the contrary are just mean-spirited attacks by frustrated conservative Republican robber-barons.
  • John Lott and other eggheads have published numerous books purporting to show that increasing civilian ownership of guns decreases, not increases, the homicide and other violent crime rates; but this is absurd on its face: The only purpose of a gun is to kill; and everybody knows that guns are useless in self-defense because the criminal will simply take it away from the victim (and get very angry). So the only explanation for the spate of pro-gun books is... Lott, et al, are being paid off by the NRA! (The other NRA, the bad NRA -- not the good one of the previous example. Nitpicker.)

Argument of the Irresistable Theoretical Construct: Add that one to the list; it will crop up again and again.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 15, 2009, at the time of 3:01 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

July 22, 2008

In This Corner, the NYT: Even Worse Than We Thought!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

The story about the New York Times refusing to run John McCain's op-ed responding to Obama's propaganda piece is "old news"... which wouldn't stop us ordinarily; we love to take on old news -- even ancient history -- if we can offer a unique, lizardly slant on things. But in this case, it had seemed kind of cut and dried, with everything obvious we could say having already been said by, e.g., Power Line and Patterico's Pontiff Vacation (Wolf Howling is on the same track as we).

But here is a rare piece of breaking news on Big Lizards... as in, breaking the facade of elite journalistic objectivity wide open. In a stunningly candid attempt to "defend" his position, the editor of the Times' editorial pages, David Shipley, has admitted that he spiked the McCain op-ed precisely because he doesn't agree with it... despite the fact that "op-ed" -- which literally means "opposite the editorial pages," in terms of its physical placement on the other side of the printed sheet -- has historically also indicated an opinion piece that differs from that of the editors... even at the august NYT:

In an e-mail to the campaign on Friday, David Shipley, an op-ed editor at the newspaper, said he could not accept the piece in its current form, but would look at another version. In the e-mail, released by McCain's campaign, Shipley wrote that McCain's article would "have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory -- with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the senator's Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan."

In other words, sure, we'll publish your opinion piece... when you adopt Barack H. Obama's position on a set timetable for withdrawal, no matter the facts on the ground.

While no legal rule requires a newspaper to be fair -- obviously, or the elite print media wouldn't even exist -- the Times and other top "news"-papers has certainly claimed for decades that they do not discriminate against those candidates they oppose, that they are unbiased in their willingness to allow both sides of contentious issues to be aired, that they are not simply partisan propaganda mills for liberal Democrats. But this brazen new fracas puts paid to that false preening. Shipley has as much as said that he won't publish McCain's response unless McCain relents and "admits" that Obama is right and McCain is wrong on the critical foreign-policy issue of this campaign.

As I've said before, the new motto of the New York Times should be, "all the news we see fit to print!"

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 22, 2008, at the time of 8:29 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

July 6, 2008

War Trauma, Media Style

Afghan Astonishments , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

A judge in upstate New York has set up a special court for veterans, evidently on the media-driven, criminal-justice theory that staggering numbers of vets, far more than ever in the past, are returning PTSD-struck from the parade of horribles in Iraq and Afghanistan:

While the defendants in this court have been arrested on charges that could mean potential prison time and damaging criminal records, they have another important trait in common: All have served their country in the military.

That combination has landed them here, in veterans treatment court, the first of its kind in the country.

[Judge Robert] Russell is the evenhanded quarterback of a courtroom team of veterans advocates and volunteers determined to make this brush with the criminal justice system these veterans' last.

"They look to the right or to the left, they're sitting there with another vet," Russell said, "and it's a more calming, therapeutic environment. Rather than them being of the belief that 'people don't really understand me,' or 'they don't know what it's like' - well, it's a room full of folks who do."

All right; I don't really have any objection to such a special court... in theory; though I have yet to see any evidence that veterans, as a group, tend to be more criminal-minded than civilians who have never seen an actual battlefield. (In fact, I'm of the impression vets are less likely to commit crimes than eternal civilians.)

I would expect such a court to be geared specifically towards those vets with extensive combat experience, having seen their best friends murdered by Islamist terrorists, who have seen children blown to pieces by al-Qaeda bombers. I can imagine a veteran who has had to deal with such death-worshippers and human-sacrificers might have problems adjusting to civilian life.

You know, vets like this guy:

Charles Lewis, who stood before Russell at a recent session, may be exactly the kind of defendant the judge had in mind. The 25-year-old acknowledged walking out in frustration from his last counseling session.

"We all know that you're a good person who at times has done some inappropriate things," Russell told him. "It's time to get past the nonsense, don't you think?"

Lewis nodded in agreement. A jet mechanic four years into what he thought would be a 20-year Navy career, he severely injured his leg on the flight deck of the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2004 and was discharged.

One can only imagine the horrors he must have seen. I don't exactly recall which combat operations in Iraq or Afghanistan used carrier-based aviation, nor do I quite understand exactly what trauma would be faced by a mechanic who stayed on the ship. But it must have been something pretty horrendous to produce such symptoms...

Admittedly stubborn -- he walked out of counseling because he got tired of hearing people complain -- the 25-year-old father of four is only now addressing anxiety and attention disorders linked to his wartime service and the toll it took on his leg and hearing. A 30-day stay in rehab to get off prescription drugs began his path through veterans treatment court.

Here is another obvious case of combat psychosis:

The approach cultivates a sense of trust and understanding, said Guy LaPenna, a 40-year-old veteran with a history of stealing and drug violations. The high-stress life of Navy duty aggravated problems he had before, but he said he left the service an angry alcoholic battling mental health issues.

Russell is "appreciative that we're working so hard," said LaPenna, a high-energy personal trainer. He is following the veterans court program to see a petit larceny charge dismissed, "but the real reward is getting my life back and functioning as a member of society, a productive member of society," he said.

Before I get lynched by vets, I want to say that I don't begrudge any service veteran getting some special treatment later in life; vets give a portion of their lives to their country, it's reasonable that they get some consideration in return.

But when the media begins slinging around words like "post-traumatic stress disorder" causing "anxiety and attention disorders" that are "linked to his wartime service" or "the high-stress life of Navy duty," I honestly expect better examples than four gut-churning years working below decks on an aircraft carrier which never came under attack (none of them have).

Rather than allow what could be a valuable program to be hijacked by anybody who has ever worn a uniform, no matter how far removed from the action or whether he even left the United States, I wish they would direct the benefits to those vets who actually fought and bled for America.

And I really, really wish the elite news media would stop trying to portray all veterans -- even those whose service was more or less indistinguishable from similar jobs in the private sector -- as ticking time bombs just waiting to explode. It's offensive and jarringly tendentious.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 6, 2008, at the time of 10:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 1, 2008

The New "Fairness" Doctrine

Constitutional Maunderings , Crime and Punishment , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , Terrorism Intelligence , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd
Why civilian judges have no business ruling on Gitmo cases...
and why Patterico, with the best of intentions, got it so wrong
.

Patterico has been scathing in his denunciation of the Bush administration and the Pentagon for how they conduct the military tribunals. Back in December, he dubbed the tribunals at Guantanamo Bay "Kafkaesque," saying "they just don’t seem fair." He concludes:

But I do know that the procedures in place now just don’t seem fair. If you can’t find out what evidence the Government has against you; if you can’t present your own evidence; if you are arguing to a tribunal that is told to presume that the Government’s position is correct . . . that’s not fair. It runs a real risk of causing us to hold people who are innocent.

There has to be a better way.

Then today, he crows, or perhaps "views with alarm," that a D.C. circus panel threw out the first enemy-combatant classification by the Pentagon of a detainee:

Add this to the Kafkaseque nature of the tribunals process, which has forced detainees to respond to secret evidence, together with the criticism by a former chief prosecutor that the Administration was rigging trials there to ensure convictions, and the picture is not pretty.

So why do I disagree with Patterico, and why do I think he has gone terribly awry? Consider the last line of his earlier post. The real question here is the very one Patterico begs: "There has to be a better way"... to do -- what?

What's all this then?

"Well there's yer problem, right there!"

Those three judges, the "former chief prosecutor" (Air Force Col. Morris Davis), and Patterico all see these Commission hearings as fundamentally judicial. It's not unreasonable to draw that conclusion, since the result is that those found to be unlawful enemy combatants would be held for periods of time up to life -- and could even be executed.

But reasonable does not mean right... and this conclusion is fundamentally wrong: These hearings are not judicial, nor is their primary purpose justice or punishment; they are military hearings to determine if a detainee is dangerous to the United States.

That is why questions of "fairness" are inappropriate. Fairness is a valid, even vital concern in Patterico's line of work as a deputy district attorney. In civilian trials in civilian courts, the most important underlying issue is justice (of which fairness is an essential component). Practically, the most important question litigated is whether the State has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, by admissible evidence, that the defendant is guilty of the crimes charged.

But military commissions' most important underlying issue is the same as that of every other branch of the military: victory over our enemies. That means safeguarding American citizens and lawful residents and protecting us from international bad guys. Fairness has nothing to do with it.

  • Is it "fair" to bomb a factory during wartime, knowing that at least some of those killed may oppose the war and only be working there under duress, or even as slave labor?
  • Is it "fair" to imprison a captured enemy soldier for years, even if he is a draftee?
  • Is it "fair" to fire upon enemy combatants, even knowing they are using innocent "human shields," who will necessarily be killed as well?

None of these is in any way fair to the innocents (or at least non-guiltys) involved. But in none of these cases is "fairness" the central concern. If any "crime" was committed, it's a war crime; and the prosecution of war crimes is primarily intended to deter our enemies from doing such things in the future, not to bring about abstract justice for acts in the past. For this reason, war-crimes tribunals traditionally grant many fewer "rights" to the accused than are found in civilian trials of ordinary criminals conducted by those same countries.

In the three cases directly above, Patterico would have no difficulty agreeing with me that we cannot invoke abstract "fairness" to refuse to fight in any situation where innocents might be harmed. On the battlefield, nobody except a pacifist absolutist would be so confused; and Patterico is not a lunatic pacifist by any stretch of rhetoric.

But when the military action shifts from the battlefield to a military commission or tribunal, it superficially resembles a courtroom; "counsels" present "evidence" while a (military) "judge" presides. And that is when those who have spent their lifetimes doing yeoman work within the civilian court system, trying to make America a safer and better place, seem to become befuddled. We see this from Patterico to the D.C. Circus to the Supreme Court's Boumediene decision.

It's said that to a carpenter, every problem looks like a nail, and every solution looks like a hammer. To a heart surgeon, every problem looks like a bad coronary artery and every solution looks like a scalpel. And to a lawyer, even many military lawyers, every problem looks like a crime, and every solution looks like a court trial.

Every objection seems to flow from this single, faulty conceptualization of what these commissions are and what they're supposed to do. For example, what about that charge that the commissions are "rigged" against the detainees?

This bloody fight's been rigged!

Col. Davis bases his accusation on three issues: a lack of "openness" at the commission hearings; the use of classified information that neither the detainee nor his counsel is allowed to see (which "could taint the trials in the eyes of international observers"); and that, as the Nation put it in an interview with Davis, "the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees to foreclose the possibility of acquittal."

The piece in that leftist magazine begins thus -- and here is the same misunderstanding, this time flashing in neon letters the size of the Hollywood sign:

Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon's announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes--and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

In the piece, Col. Davis lobs the allegation that Pentagon general counsel William Haynes demanded the tribunals produce nothing but convictions:

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes--the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department.

"[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions.'"

First, I am rather skeptical that Haynes said exactly this. Was Col. Davis literally transcribing the conversation while it was in progress? Or is this his reconstruction of the conversation days, weeks, or perhaps two and a half years later? Is this exactly what Haynes said, or is this Davis' tendentious confabulation, based upon his appalled reaction to what he thought Haynes meant?

But let's leave this question aside... despite the fact that it cuts to the fundamental "fairness" of the accusation. How can Davis be unaware of the fact that earlier commissions conducted by the same Pentagon, taking place at the same Guantanamo Bay, managed to release hundreds of detainees from custody... including some who went right out and committed terrorist acts?

Finally, I truly question Col. Davis' historical understanding of war-crimes tribunals if he unfavorably compares the "fairness" of the military commission hearings today with the Nuremberg trials after World War II... considering that far fewer accused Nazis were "acquitted" than terrorist suspects have already been freed from Guantanamo, and the accused Nazis in 1945 had far fewer "rights" than the Military Commissions Act of 2006 gave to the detainees in Guantanamo Bay... even before the Boumediene decision.

To me, it sounds as if Davis is repeating at least one absurdist Democratic Party talking point, regardless of how many others he rejects. The viral meme "MCAs are nothing like the fair and just Nuremberg trials" can be "caught" by anyone whose mind is rendered susceptible by overly legalistic thinking.

The allegation that the system is "rigged" against acquittals is silly, because it has already acquitted hundreds; it betrays Davis' conclusion that these hearings just aren't "fair" to the "accused."

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble,… “the law is a ass -- a idiot."

In the New York Times article that sparked Patterico's post today, we discover that the D.C. Circuit panel threw out the Pentagon finding against Huzaifa Parhat, an Uighur Moslem from China, because the classified intelligence against him was not as specific and credible as one would demand in a civilian criminal trial:

Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were "affiliated" with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was "associated" with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The ruling released Monday overturned the Pentagon’s finding after a 2004 hearing that Mr. Parhat was an enemy combatant based on that affiliation. He and the 16 other Uighurs were detained after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had "reportedly" occurred and that the connections were "said to" exist, without providing information about the source of such information.

"Those bare facts," the decision said, "cannot sustain the determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant."

But "those bare facts" are all that we ever get from intelligence operations! That is precisely the reason why civilian courts have no business making the determination whether a person detained is truly an enemy combatant... because the standard demanded by a civilian court for a civilian criminal conviction is virtually impossible to meet in the context of terrorists picked up because of intelligence.

(For one major point, because terrorism is so incredibly destructive, we try to grab them before they carry out their schemes... which means, since the detainee didn't actually succeed, that little evidence is available other than supposition.)

Do these judges imagine that before the Marines open fire on a fleeing vehicle, they must have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the vehicle contains terrorists? Intelligence is always vague, almost never confirmed, and frequently obtained from foreign sources who do not reveal where they, themselves got it; but if they've been reliable in the past, we must assume they're reliable now, until and unless they disappoint us more than one usually expects from any intelligence. You cannot demand trial-level specificity and sourcing from covert intelligence; it's just not going to be available.

What the court derided -- quoting from Lewis Carroll's the Hunting of the Snark and mocking the administration -- is as good as it gets... and that's the very reason why a civilian court is not competent to make any of these decisions, let alone all of them, as the Supreme Court has now declared. It's as absurd as expecting the D.C. Circuit to approve missile targets in Pakistan.

One law professor understands this point; I'm pleasantly surprised the Times bothered to quote anyone on the military's side at all:

Some lawyers said the ruling highlighted the difficulties they saw in civilian judges reviewing Guantánamo cases.

“This case displays the inadequacies of having civilian courts inject themselves into military decision-making,” said Glenn M. Sulmasy, a law professor at the Coast Guard Academy and a national security fellow at Harvard.

I wonder if Mr. Sulmasy has more or less experience with the needs of the military than do the three judges in the D.C. Circuit panel who decided the Parhat decision.

Old King Cole was a tortured soul

In today's post, Patterico also calls attention to the upcoming trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of masterminding the bombing of the USS Cole... and the third detainee, along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, who the CIA has said it waterboarded. Patterico notes that Nashiri claims his "confession" was induced by unspecified "torture".

Of course, Nashiri could be fibbing; to paraphrase Charles Bronson in Breakheart Pass, if a man is a thief and murderer, it follows he may be a liar as well. But let's suppose he is telling the truth for once. This point tells us nothing about whether he is or is not a danger: Even if the confession was true, he still might only have given it because of this supposed "torture."

Why do we customarily believe that in civilian trials, coerced confessions cannot be used? Two main reasons:

  1. We believe they are of dubious reliability, since the person being tortured might say anything he thinks his torturers want to hear.

Leaving aside the question of whether waterboarding really constitutes "torture" (it certainly forces people to say things they later wish they hadn't), this objection is easily dismissed: If detailed facts came out during the coerced interrogation that were checked and found to be accurate, and if those facts could only be known by the guilty (such as where the body is hidden, in a murder case), then we may conclude the confessor is guilty.

So that leaves only one reason why coerced confessions are never allowed in court:

  1. Forcing people to testify against themselves is, again, simply unfair; it violates the Fifth Amendment protection against enforced self-incrimination.

But this second point again depends upon thinking that the tribunal is an attempt to mete out justice to a mere criminal, rather than a way for the military to decide whether the country would be safer if we kept the detainee behind bars or even executed him.

Finally, one more purely legal point (bearing in mind I'm not a lawyer): It's plausible to argue that the USA PATRIOT Act allows these tribunals to used evidence obtained for intelligence purposes in military commission hearings, even if the intel itself was obtained by means that would ordinarily render it inadmissible in a civilian court hearing, absent the intelligence angle.

This is a point which I don't believe has ever been addressed by the Supreme Court (not even in Boumediene).

Thus, if we reject "fairness" as the core value we're trying to uphold in the MCA hearings at Guantanamo Bay, and accept instead that the core value is "victory in the war," then we cannot have a hard and fast prohibition on using coerced testimony or even confessions: Again, we're not trying to punish miscreants so much as (a) protect the country from them, and (b) pour l'encouragement des autres.

An army of lawyers

A maxim of the law is that it's better that a thousand guilty criminals go free than a single innocent man be wrongly convicted. But when we're discussing a thousand guilty terrorists, we have to think a second time. When we released Abdullah Salih al-Ajmi from Gitmo (which was clearly a mistake in hindsight), he went right out and killed thirteen innocent Iraqi civilians in a suicide bombing in Mosul.

So if Ajmi is typical, then a thousand guilty terrorists released could kill 13,000 innocent civilians and wound an additional 40,000. That's 53,000 innocent lives destroyed. Some may still believe that's better than keeping one innocent person in Guantanamo Bay... but that is not so obvious to me.

Many folks reading this will object that, even if it's true that judges and lawyers have an overly legalistic bias, it's likewise true that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 had an overly militaristic bias. But the captivity and treatment of enemy combatants, whether lawful or unlawful, is at the core of any military strategy -- thus it's fundamentally a military issue, where the most important issue is victory.

But with Boumediene, the Court has held that henceforth, all major decisions in the detention of combatants -- not just the strictly limited set of decisions that the MCA left up to the D.C. Circuit, but all decisions without exception -- will ultimately be decided by civilian courts, even lowly district courts, by civilian judges who cannot help seeing the "trials" as exercises in legal justice -- where the most important issue is fairness.

Perhaps this new "fairness" doctrine is all for the best; maybe I stubbornly refuse to see the obvious. But certainly nobody on that side of the aisle at any level, from Justice Anthony Kennedy to Patterico, has endeavored to make the case to me that in dealing with terrorists, fairness should trump victory.

I'm listening, but I hear no argument.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 1, 2008, at the time of 7:55 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 30, 2008

So Why Do We Need Gitmo? Let Me Count the Ways...

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

When we capture prisoners of war (POWs), we don't imprison them for punishment; we take them out of commission "for the duration" of the war. That is why they shouldn't get a trial: They're not in the same category as regular "criminals," who can be released without too much damage if the government cannot amass enough evidence for a judge or jury to find them guilty.

POWs -- or in al-Qaeda's case, unlawful enemy combatants -- cannot be released as long as they're likely to attack us again; just like ordinary POWs, terrorists are not held in punishment... they're held to keep them from returning to the fight against us, or at least to be available for a prisoner swap, if the Commander in Chief decides that's in our best interest.

Now let's meet Abu Juheiman al-Kuwaiti, also known as Abdullah Salih al-Ajmi. (Ever notice how many Guantanamo Bay detainees have multiple aliases?) Al-Kuwaiti is a former guest of the Guantanamo Bay resort and gentlemen's club; he's also a former human being -- and newly annointed martyr. Al-Kuwaiti is one of the featured stars in this al-Qaeda promotional video. According to Bill Roggio, he pulled off a spectacular suicide bombing in Mosul last March:

Ajmi was released from Guantanamo Bay and was searching for "a way to reconnect with the jihad." He claimed he was tortured while at Guantanamo Bay.

Ajmi "is seemingly responsible for an earlier truck bombing at the Iraqi Army HQ in the Harmat neighborhood of Mosul on March 23, 2008," said Kazimi. The attack occurred at Combat Outpost Inman, an Iraqi Army base that served as the headquarters for the 1st Battalion, 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Iraqi Army Division.

Thirteen Iraqi soldiers were killed and 42 were wounded after Ajmi drove an armored truck packed [with] an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives through the gate of the outpost and detonated [himself] in a spot between the three main buildings of the compound. The blast destroyed the facades of the three buildings, including the building housing the battalion headquarters.

Get it? We had him, but we had to turn him loose because of earlier Court decisions. We let this man go because we couldn't prove, to the standard of a civilian court, that he was a "criminal."

He's not a criminal; he wanted to kill, not steal. But we set him free, and he rushed straight out and blew himself up... along with thirteen other people, and injuring an additional 42. As a direct result of an earlier Supreme-Court judgment (with Justice Anthony Kennedy casting the swing vote), Ajmi was released back into the wild so he could kill again. (It could have been worse -- an amusement park or a mega-mall on Saturday afternoon.)

Although Ajmi is surely morally responsible for the thirteen Iraqi solders's death, I do not assign him total blame; he is a combatant, and this is what combatants do. But a significant part of the blame falls on the people who do not understand that this is a war, and a vicious war at that... the people who convince themselves that we're merely keeping carjackers and pickpockets in Gitmo, and by jingo, they should get their rights!

These are the people who demand that unlawful enemy combatants be granted the right to file a habeas corpus petition demanding the government show "probable cause" to think they've committed a "crime," just as if they were civilian criminal suspects: "Better a thousand guilty men go free than a single innocent man be wrongfully convicted!"

But those thousand "guilty men" who go free will not just steal a thousand big-screen TV sets: They will murder ten thousand innocent civilians. And there will be nothing left of the "suspects" but their cremains, assuming we could even sort out the mangled body and ashes left from the terrorist from that of his victims, nothing to try, nothing to find either guilty or not guilty. How clever and ideologically pure does that little saying sound now?

Why do people refuse to believe what our enemy says? Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah tell us constantly that they will kill us and our allies whenever they get a chance, as many as they can, as often as they can manage. If the entire world had a single throat, these are the people who would slit it for the sheer joy of killing everyone. If this is religion, it's more like the Aztecs than mainstream Islam.

So why does our military give a "chance" to terrorists who hunger for the Guiness world record for biggest single-incident slaughter of all time? They do because the courts have taken power, and the courts insist that everyone not provably guilty must be released immediately.

It's precisely because such dangerous human-sacrificers exist that Guantanamo Bay must stay in business. John S. McCain wants to close Gitmo; maybe he's right. The way the Court is running, it's no longer safe for us to hold any prisoner in a prison we control. But we need something like Guantanamo Bay, even if it's in Poland, run by the Polish army.

Five members of the Supreme Court plus all the Democrats in the world think that we can just fold Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh -- not to mention Osama bin Laden, when we finally pull him out of his spider hole -- into the general prison population and treat them like "any other criminal;" Barack H. Obama says he'll restore the old Clinton policy of responding to a terrorist strike by shooting off a volley of subpoenas and writs, as we treated John Gotti.

That's like saying we can treat a nuclear bomb, discovered in a terrorist cache found in Minneapolis or Dallas or Manhattan, as if it were a cherry bomb found in a teenager's desk drawer in Burbank.

We desperately need a prison of last resort, where we can store those people who should never, ever, ever be let out -- and to hell with their "rights."

But to hang onto them once we grab them, we also desperately need conservative replacements for Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the next two Supreme-Court justices who will retire. So vote for McCain! This is our one and only chance for many decades to create a Supreme Court that actually cares more about law-abiding Americans than about those who would murder by the millions, if they only could.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 30, 2008, at the time of 4:01 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 11, 2008

Latest and Lamest Attack on McCain

Iraq Matters , Presidential Campaign Camp and Porkinstance
Hatched by Dafydd

Politico reports that Democrats, in a coordinated attack, are once again attacking McCain -- based upon a tendentious, and deliberate misunderstanding of McCain's clear words. It is, without question, the lamest attack yet. (It would have been second lamest, except that no Democratic heavy-hitter jumped aboard the attack that McCain couldn't be president because he was born in the Canal Zone... where his active-duty American naval-officer father was stationed.)

Really? The lamest? See for yourself; here is what McCain said during a television appearance:

The exchange that has Democrats licking their chops began when co-host Matt Lauer asked about the surge strategy in Iraq: “If it's working Senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?”

McCain replied: “No, but that's not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea, Americans are in Japan, American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine. American casualties and the ability to withdraw; we will be able to withdraw. General [David] Petraeus is going to tell us in July when he thinks we are.

“But the key to it is that we don't want any more Americans in harm's way. That way, they will be safe, and serve our country and come home with honor and victory, not in defeat, which is what Senator Obama's proposal would have done. I’m proud of them. And they're doing a great job. And we are succeeding and it's fascinating that Senator Obama still doesn't realize that.”

Without reading the rest of the article just yet, see if you can guess how Democrats from Susan Rice (the anti-Israel foreign-policy advisor to Barack H. Obama) to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, 90%) to Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 85%) have conspired to attack McCain on this answer. I'll bet you can't; it's too stupid to be believed.

All right, time's up; here they go again:

The Obama campaign and Democratic leaders accused Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) of being confused and heartless after he told NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday that it’s “not too important” when U.S. troops return from Iraq.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said on a quickly organized Obama conference call that McCain’s comment was “unbelievably out of touch with the needs and concerns of most Americans,” saying that to families of troops in harm’s way, “To them, it's the most important thing in the world....”

Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was first out of the gate with a statement, calling McCain’s comment “a crystal clear indicator that he just doesn’t get the grave national-security consequences of staying the course. … We need a smart change in strategy to make America more secure, not a commitment to indefinitely keep our troops in an intractable civil war.”

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) said McCain had “displayed a fundamental misunderstanding about the situation in Iraq, our strained military, and American troops and their families.”

This, of course, is exactly the same misreading Democrats used before when they pretended that John McCain said he would be fine with the Iraq war raging for a hundred years... when in fact he said he would be fine with us having troops in Iraq for a hundred years, if they were not being attacked and were not suffering any casualties. Then -- as now -- he made his meaning clear by invoking our decades-long troop deployments in Germany, Japan, and South Korea... in none of which places are we suffering casualties or coming under attack (barring the occasional terrorist attack that can occur anywhere).

Democrats might have claimed an ignorant misunderstanding the first time; but having had their misapprehension corrected once, the innocent excuse that they 'misunderstood' cannot be resurrected. This is enemy action: The Democrats know darned well that McCain meant (then and now) that it doesn't matter whether we withdraw troops from Iraq if our victory results in a lack of casualties; he was not saying that it was "not too important" to a particular soldier's family when he, specifically, comes home.

To illustrate the preposterousness of the Democrat's intentional misreading, I say: "It doesn't matter how many hours a day the factory operates, so long as it meets its goals without overtaxing its labor pool." The Democrat responds, "that's crazy! It makes all the difference in the world whether some poor woman's husband works eight hours a day or 24 hours a day!"

I know what's next: McCain will say "Good morning;" and the nearest Democratic talking head will jump on a table and scream, "How can that heartless bastard think it's good for soldiers' families to live in mourning for a loved one?"

I wonder if individual Democrats ever react to their leaders' antics by feeling a bit queasy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 11, 2008, at the time of 6:49 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 29, 2008

McClellan's Losing Campaign - Part II

Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy , Media Madness , Plame Blame Game , Wordwooze
Hatched by Dafydd

Scott McClellan's pathetic campaign against George W. Bush -- hence for the election of Barack Obama -- continues apace; he keeps talking about more snippets from the book in interviews.

Today, McClellan bores deep into the Plame name blame game, which he sees as a "turning point" in his relationship with the president. But here is an oddity: It was clear to everyone from at least October 28th, 2005 -- the day that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald indicted "Scooter" Libby -- that it was not true that Libby was uninvolved in the inadvertent leak of Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation; and it was also well known by then that Karl Rove had testified five times to Fitzgerald's grand jury, correcting some of his testimony. As I recall, we already knew at that time that the correction involved a conversation Rove had with Matt Cooper of Time Magazine... which clearly implied that Rove, too, had inadvertently revealed Plame's employment.

So by late October, 2005, Scott McClellan already knew that what he told reporters in 2003 was wrong. This was the moral "turning point," he now says.

Yet he continued in his White House employment, after Libby's indictment, for six more months; he did not resign until late April, 2006 -- when he was ousted by new White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten. Some "turning point!"

And once again, not a single charge of McClellan's is backed up by any evidence so far released... and much of it is in fact contradicted by strong, available documentation. (And this complete lack of evidence does indeed make McClellan, as Rove put it, sound like a "liberal blogger!")

Not only that, but McClellan and his new allies in the elite media (didn't they used to despise him?) now stoop to deliberate obscurantism to hide the absurdity of what they're claiming. Viz:

[McClellan] was ordered to say from the press room podium that White House aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were not involved in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press. Later a criminal investigation revealed that they were.

Revealed that they were "involved," yes; revealed that they were criminally culpable? No.

In fact, neither I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, nor Karl Rove, then Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy, was ever indicted for leaking Plame's name or CIA affiliation: Libby was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice, and Rove was never indicted for anything at all.

("Involved" -- what a weasel word! For that matter, Robert Novak, Matt Cooper, and Tim Russert were also "involved," weren't they?)

During the investigation, Richard Armitage, then Deputy Secretary of State to Secretary of State Colin Powell, admitted that he was the first to inadvertently leak to reporter Robert Novak the fact that Lyin' Joe Wilson's wife was in the CIA; Armitage was also never indicted on any charge. Had the leak been intentional, the leaker would almost certainly have been indicted; thus it's a pretty fair conclusion that the Special Counsel believed the leaks were unintentional and inadvertent. (Particularly so since Armitage, like his boss Colin Powell, opposed the Iraq war... so why would be try to "discredit" the guy who was trying to prevent it?)

So yes, Libby and Rove were "involved in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press;" but AP (and McClellan, so far as they report) fail to mention that they were both exonerated of the accusation that they did so deliberately in order to discredit Wilson.

You would think that would be an important part of the story.

Here's another wonderful bit of half-truth misdirection from AP, which they save to the end as the supposed killer-anecdote that demonstrates, to everyone who already suffers from BDS, what a liar and hypocrite is George W. Bush:

And [McClellan] recalled a day in April 2006, when the unfolding perjury case against Libby had revealed that Bush secretly declassified portions of a 2002 intelligence report about Iraq's weapons capabilities to help deflect criticism of his case for war. High-profile criticism was coming from Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, in those days before the war. [Take note that AP doesn't reveal what this "declassified" intelligence report was; but I'll let the beans out of the bag in a moment.]

The president was leaving an event in North Carolina, McClellan recalled, and as they walked to Air Force One a reporter shouted a question: Had the president, who had repeatedly condemned the selective release of secret intelligence, enabled Libby to leak classified information to The New York Times back then to bolster the administration's arguments for war?

McClellan took the question to the president, telling Bush: "He's saying you yourself were the one that authorized the leaking of this information."

"And he said, 'Yeah, I did.' And I was kind of taken aback," McClellan said.

"For me I came to the decision that at that point I needed to look for a way to move on, because it had undermined, I think, a lot of what we had said."

Really? Let's stick a few particulars into that vague and smelly indictment...

First, anytime an administrative official speaks to a news source off the record -- even if fully authorized -- that could be called "leaking." As McClellan himself has done this many times (along with every other White House Press Secretary), he should not feign such horror.

Second, let's clarify what "intelligence report" Bush "declassified" in 2003 or 2004 (not 2006). There are only two possibilities that McClellan could be referencing, and the first is easily dismissed:

  • The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate;
  • Or the 2002 intelligence report on the debriefing of a certain former ambassador who was recommended by his CIA wife to be sent to a certain African country.

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate

President Bush relied upon this estimate, compiled by the CIA, in his decision to ask Congress for an Authorization for the Use of Military Force; an AUMF is the legal equivalent of a declaration of war.

By mid-2003, with the war in full swing, the elite media was abuzz with claims that the 2002 NIE had said that Iraq had no WMD and was not even trying to develop any. In particular, these many stories claimed that the idea that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain Uranium had been "debunked" by the CIA before the war -- and that the war was therefore entirely predicated on a lie.

It turns out that all these stories had a single source: Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who had been sent to Niger by the CIA in response to his CIA wife's nagging of the Agency.

It was absurd that the CIA accepted Plame's suggestion of her husband for the trip. Its purpose was ostensibly to determine whether Saddam Hussein was trying to buy Uranium yellowcake, yet Wilson had no expertise whatsoever in nuclear or WMD investigations. He did, however, have one indispensible qualification: He already believed the story was a fairy tale, even before he left for Africa.

When he returned, and after he was debriefed by his CIA handlers (see below), he covertly went to numerous elite-media sources and told them that he had found that the idea that Hussein was trying to acquire Uranium yellowcake was bunk. Later, he published an op-ed in the New York Times (July 6th, 2003) titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa," in which he peddled the same claim.

As more and more people came to believe, because of this disinformation campaign, that the administration had "lied us into war" (a cherished Democratic mantra), the president decided to declassify parts of the NIE on which he had relied. Not the whole thing, as that would reveal sources and methods; just the "key judgments" that the CIA presented the White House. He did so with great fanfare on July 18th, 2003... the day after Scott McClellan was named White House Press Secretary. This is an important point: McClellan was already the presidential spokesman when Bush announced the declassification of parts of the NIE and distributed it to reporters; and even prior to his promotion, he was the Deputy Press Secretary to Ari Fleischer.

Therefore, I suggest that the NIE cannot be the "2002 intelligence report about Iraq's weapons capabilities" that Bush "declassified," which McClellan now says he first found out about in April of 2006. Obviously, McClellan knew about the declassification of portions of the 2002 NIE way back in 2003... when the rest of the civilized world found out about it.

So this cannot possibly be what AP means above, unless Scott McCellan is dumber than a box of Barbara's boxers. That leaves only one other reasonable possibility:

The 2002 intelligence report on Joe Wilson's debriefing by the CIA

On July 7th, 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a document titled Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. In the section titled "Niger," there is a chapter tantalizingly called "the Former Ambassador." It includes the following summary of the previously classified CIA debriefing of "the former ambassador" -- that is, of Lyin' Joe Wilson -- when he returned from the trip to the African nation of Niger that his CIA wife, Valerlie Plame, wangled for him. The briefing was included in an intelligence report disseminated within intelligence-community circles on March 8, 2002.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee wanted to publish their report, they asked the president to declassify any intelligence in the report that was still classified. Bush complied; we don't know whether Wilson's debriefing was declassified at that point or before, but I don't recall anybody writing about it until after the report came out.

I strongly believe that this is what AP means when they write "Bush secretly declassified portions of a 2002 intelligence report about Iraq's weapons capabilities to help deflect criticism of his case for war." I can think of no other 2002 intelligence report that has made its way into the unclass information world besides these two... and it cannot possibly be the NIE for reasons elucidated above.

But why did this declassification so enrage the Left -- and so horrify Scott McClellan, becoming one of his "turning points?" Let's see what, exactly, former Ambassador Joe Wilson did tell his CIA handlers when he returned. In this case, speculation is unnecessary, because we know exactly what information Wilson gave them from his little Nigerien adventure. From that same chapter linked above:

The intelligence report based on the former ambassador's trip was disseminated on March 8, 2002. The report did not identify the former ambassador by name or as a former ambassador, but described him as "a contact with excellent access who does not have an established reporting record." The report also indicted that the "subsources of the following information knew their remarks could reach the U.S. government and may have intended to influence as well as inform." DO officials told Committee staff that this type of description was routine and was done in order to protect the former ambassador as the source of the information, which they had told him they would do. DO officials also said they alerted WINPAC analysts when the report was being disseminated because they knew the "high priority of the issue." The report was widely distributed in routine channels.

(Redacted) The intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mayaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999, (Redacted) businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq."

And there you have it: In setting straight the record of prewar intelligence on Iraq, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee had to note that former Ambassador Joe Wilson (husband of former CIA employee Valerie Plame) told his CIA handlers that the former prime minister of Niger revealed that an Iraqi delegation tried to meet with him to discuss "expanding commercial relations," which the former prime minister believed was an attempt to purchase Uranium.

Wilson then went to the elite media and lied through his teeth... covertly, at first; but when that failed to bring down the Bush regime, overtly in an op-ed in the NYT. Thus, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report exposed Lyin' Joe Wilson as exactly what he was; and for that, the Left will never forgive either the president who declassified the debriefing or the committee that revealed Joe Wilson to the world.

For reference, here is what President Bush said in his January, 2003 State of the Union address... the very "sixteen words" that Wilson flatly claimed in his op-ed "was not borne out by the facts as I understood them."

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Sounds like an excellent summary of what former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki told former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson.

Selective declassification vs. selective leaking

The elite media and its new sock puppet Scott McClellan make much to-do out of this final point, as if it were the synecdoche that encapsulates McClellan's entire charge:

Had the president, who had repeatedly condemned the selective release of secret intelligence, enabled Libby to leak classified information to The New York Times back then to bolster the administration's arguments for war?

Once again, vagueness to the rescue! There are two ways to "selective[ly] release" classified information; one is completely legal, the other criminal, despicable, and a gross and offensive betrayal of the United States of America:

  1. The president or some Congressional committees can legally declassify specific information, in consultation with the agency that classified it, and release it to the general public, including the news media;
  2. A disgruntled government employee, fighting against the express policy of the elected government, can criminally "leak" the classified information to individual elite reporters he believes are friendly to his cause, in an effort to destroy whatever legal intelligence program he dislikes.

AP is correct: The president has on many occasions decried a "selective release of secret intelligence" of Type 2, such as the leak of details about the Terrorist Surveillance Program (the NSA al-Qaeda telephone intercepts) or our perfectly legal -- nobody even denies this -- voluntary surveillance of the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system, part of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program to find and interdict terrorists' money transfers.

This sort of "selective release" does incalculable damage to our intelligence-gathering capabilities, puts human sources at risk, and alerts death-cult terrorists that they should change their modus operandi to avoid detection by intelligence and law-enforcement agents. Such leaks kill good people and aid and abet al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other evildoers.

But that's not what McClellan is whining about. He was so shocked and horrified that he "came to the decision that at that point [he] needed to look for a way to move on" because the president made no attempt to conceal the fact that he had engaged in a perfectly legal Type 1 "selective release of secret information": He formally declassified part of a CIA debriefing, after consultation with the CIA, possibly even at the request of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee.

Are you able to detect the subtle, miniscule difference between some low-level toady in the NSA leaking details of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, thus shutting off the flow of information about potential al-Qaeda cells in the United States -- and the president declassifying a summary of a debriefing that the Senate Intelligence Committee wanted to release as part of a report on pre-war intelligence, more than a year after the debriefing was conducted?

If so, then you're one up on both the former White House Press Secretary and the elite media!

What McClellan didn't prove in his book

I'm sorry that so many folks are shocked to learn that former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson is a liar; but it's hardly the president's job to keep old intelligence documents classified -- even when the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to publish parts of them -- just to preserve Wilson's reputation... so he can continue to accuse President Bush of lying, when in fact the evidence indicates that all along, the liar was Wilson himself.

And I note, once again, that all of this was printed not only in the Senate report on July 7th, 2004; it was also discussed extensively -- and put into the context of debunking Joe Wilson's lies -- in a July 12th, 2004 column in the National Review by Clifford May. I myself was late to the game; I didn't start blogging (on Patterico's Pontifications) until May of 2005. But by October of that year, I was already posting about this on Big Lizards.

Where the hell was Scott McClellan that he wasn't already aware of this until sometime in April of 2006? The rest of us knew it eight months earlier.

More and more, the evidence indicates that McClellan's faux horror and his "turning points" are entirely fabricated after the fact... and the only two reasons I can imagine are (1) to sell more copies of his book, and (2) to set himself up for a position in the fantasized administration of President Barack Obama.

The saddest part is that even if Obama were elected, then just as with David Brock (anyone remember him?), he would no more give a job to a betrayer like Scott McClellan than he would pluck somebody else's used Kleenex out of the rubbish and blow his own nose into it.

McClellan is burning all his former friends and colleagues for nothing.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 29, 2008, at the time of 6:41 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

May 12, 2008

Greed Is Good - and Sometimes, So Too Is Corruption

Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy
Hatched by Dafydd

One of the joys of writing a blog is the opportunity it gives to mock one's enemies. In this case, we rise to mock the naiveté of the Associated Press... which is shocked, shocked to discover bribery and corruption in the Arab Middle East. (Of course, the other possibility is that AP knows its point is asinine yet mendaciously makes it anyway, hoping to fool its liberal readers.)

AP claims to have just realized, to it's spiritual horror, that Iraqi officials are often corrupt... and that the Bush administration, rather than fall off its high horse, declaim about purity of essence, and order mass arrests of everyone from the Iraq prime minister on down, instead turned a blind eye to low-level skulduggery in order to give the new Iraqi government time to become much more stable -- as it has:

The Bush administration repeatedly ignored corruption at the highest levels within the Iraqi government and kept secret potentially embarrassing information so as not to undermine its relationship with Baghdad, according to two former State Department employees. [Now there's as unbiased a pair of witnesses as I've ever seen!]

Arthur Brennan, who briefly served in Baghdad as head of the department's Office of Accountability and Transparency last year, and James Mattil, who worked as the chief of staff, told Senate Democrats on Monday that their office was understaffed and its warnings and recommendations ignored.... ["If only they had listened to me!"]

The State Department's policies "not only contradicted the anti-corruption mission but indirectly contributed to and has allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi government," Brennan told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

First of all, note that the "former State Department employees" immediately ran to tell "the Senate Democratic Policy Committee -- not, for example, the Inspector General at the State Department, the Department of Justice, or even a real Senate committee (one that has Republicans as well); the SDPC is just an unofficial caucus with no actual investigatory or oversight authority.

That should tell you what desired outcome actually motivated these two witlesses.

Second, what have they discovered? That Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki "eviscerat[ed]" "Iraq's top anti-corruption office." Corruption in an Arab country! Stop the presses!

What purpose does it serve to highlight corruption and bribery in a government that is three years old? Isn't it more important to gain a measure of stability first... and only then start really working on applying the rule of law equally and evenly?

Now that the Iraqis have achieved some real stability (because of the counterinsurgency -- which the Democrats fought hammer and tooth) -- this is probably the right time to start pushing them to become more open and transparent. But we must bear in mind, that goes against literally thousands of years of Arab culture. (Arab tribes ran on corruption long before Islam came along; it wasn't even considered corruption... just what Heinlein called "squeeze.") It will be very hard and take decades to root corruption out of Arab society.

But realistically speaking, corruption rarely brings down a government. If the citizens have a reasonably good assessment of the level of corruption, and it's a level they can deal with, then they may even panic if it suddenly disappears.

Sachi made a point about the endemic nature of corruption around the world: Typically, corruption simply becomes an important part of the infrastructure. What the Soviets called the "nomenklatura," the permanent bureaucracy, is so poorly designed, so badly implemented, so enmeshed into every level of society, and so unrealistic in what they require, that it stifles necessary functions of the government.

Corruption is the universal solvent that eats through decades (centuries!) of accumulated crud and allows the system to work. Take away the corruption from, say, Soviet "republics," Arab states, Near and Far Eastern oligarchies, and prehistoric African or South American cultures flooded with ancient Soviet T-62 tanks and AK-47s... and the State will probably collapse.

Some Americans -- especially ideologically pure liberals, who are irritated whenever reality comes along to ruin the fun -- are spoiled by living in a culture where the level of corruption in New Orleans, Chicago, and Detroit is considered a national shame. In most countries, bribing public official to do their jobs is so routine, there is not even an attempt to hide it from public view; they may even advertise their rates. After all, the next guy needs to know who to pay off!

I believe Democrats themselves realize how foolish this carping and whining sounds; I think they're uneasy about the likelihood that most people who read the news or follow obscure congressional non-committee committees are aware that Arab culture tolerates a much higher level of corruption than American culture; even Europeans are more blasé about it than we. So the Senate Democratic Policy Committee is trying to make it seem as though it's taking "testimony" (it has no such authority) about something more interesting and important than the garden-variety collection of "user fees" (bribes) for doing one's job:

Sen. Byron Dorgan, head of the Democratic Policy Committee, said the testimony was critical in light of upcoming legislation that would appropriate more than $170 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Senate Appropriations Committee, of which Dorgan is a member, is expected to approve the legislation Thursday.

"It is a cruel irony if we are appropriating money next Thursday or did appropriate money last month or last year and that money ends up actually providing the resources for an insurgency in Iraq which ends up killing Americans," said Dorgan, D-N.D.

But corruption and support for insurgency are two completely separate problems. When did Democrats first get het up about the latter? Their only reaction to such revelations in the past has been to demand we surrender, flee the region, and allow it to collapse into complete chaos -- and a haven for those very terrorists.

Unrealistic Democratic posturing is a far more dangerous attitude than letting petty corruption in Iraq slide for a while, until the new democratic nation can perform its most critical tasks without corruption to grease the skids anymore. At least bribery helps make things work; sermonizing about Iraqi original sin is just cutting off your nose to wash your face.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 12, 2008, at the time of 10:44 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

April 30, 2008

Ask Not for Whom the Death Toll Tolls

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

On March 25th, Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered a surprise attack on Sadrite militiamen in Basra. It was such a surprise, he forgot to tell the American forces about it until a couple of days before it began.

We scrambled to catch up with the Iraqi Army to give them the close-air support and logistics they needed. For a while, the battle for Basra seemed a bit dicey; a green Iraqi unit broke and ran during a counterattack, but Maliki was quickly able to replace them with forces he brought in from elsewhere in Iraq. Another front opened in Sadr City, a slum section of Baghdad controlled for many years by the Mahdi Militia; we took the lead there, and we've seen much success.

The fighting has been intense... but at last, with Iraqis in the lead, we're seeing exactly what military experts and even many Democrats have said is essential for Iraq to unite as a viable nation: The Shiite majority has proven that it governs for all Iraq, not just for the Shia... and they did it by finally confronting the Shia insurgent Muqtada Sadr, who has been in hiding in Iran for about a year now, and the Mahdi Militia that he either controls or doesn't fully control, depending who you ask.

Now, after more than a month of fighting, it has become increasingly clear that Maliki's gamble paid off:

  • The Sadrites are in full retreat in Basra and other cities and provinces, and in complete disarray in Sadr City;
  • The Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, has called on his bloc to return to the government in direct reaction to Maliki's campaign against Sadr;
  • Sadr himself has been shown to be near impotent: Recently, he threatened "open war" against the Iraqi government if it did not end the campaign (Operation Knights' Charge) against the Mahdi Militia. One week later, Sadr rescinded the threat and again begged for a ceasefire;
  • Maliki continues the offensive; combat has now changed to mopping up; the Iraqis have demonstrated they can run their own operations and troop movements, needing only logistical and close-air support from us; and most of the political demands of the Democrats upon the Iraq -- including this one -- have been met or are in the process of being met.

Here are the specifics... The return of the wandering Hashemi is a very big story; it's the birth of an Iraq Venus on the half shell:

Iraq's Prime Minister met on Sunday with the Sunni Vice-President to discuss reintegrating Sunni political parties into his Shiite-dominated government as five people died in clashes and a suicide car bombing in Baghdad, police said. [Talk about your non-sequiturs... can anybody imagine a story that begins, "Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton met for a debate last night as 47 Americans were murdered across the country"?

The meeting between Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki and Tariq Al Hashemi came a day after the Sunni leader described the return of his boycotting political bloc, the National Accordance Front, to the Cabinet as a priority....

Al Hashemi has been one of Al Maliki's most bitter critics, accusing him of sectarian favouritism, while the Prime Minister has complained that the Vice-President is blocking key legislation. But Al Hashemi and other Sunni leaders apparently have been swayed by Al Maliki's crackdown against Shiite militias.

And here is the devolution of Sadr's position. Here is Sadr defiant on April 19th:

Anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is threatening a new uprising if an American-Iraqi crackdown against his followers continues.

The cleric says he is giving his final warning to the Iraqi government to stop working with the U.S. military against him or he will "declare an open war until liberation."

Saturday's statement has been posted on al-Sadr's Web site.

The threat to lift a more than seven-month-old cease-fire comes amid fighting between al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia and U.S.-Iraqi troops in Baghdad's Sadr City and the southern city of Basra.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also has said the Sadrists will be politically isolated if the Mahdi Army isn't disbanded.

And here he is with his tail between his legs just seven days later, on April 26th:

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for an end to Iraqi bloodshed on Friday and said his threat of an "open war" applies only to U.S.-led foreign troops -- stepping back from a full-blown confrontation with the government over a crackdown against his followers.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile, took a hard line against al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia and other illegally armed groups, setting conditions for stopping military operations against them that included surrendering weapons.

Al-Sadr's new message, which was read during prayers and posted on his Web site, eased fears that the anti-U.S. cleric was planning to lift a nearly 8-month-old cease-fire, a move that would jeopardize recent security gains....

"I call upon my brothers in the police, army and Mahdi Army to stop the bloodshed," al-Sadr said in the statement. "We should be one hand in achieving justice, security and in supporting the resistance in all of its forms."

All in all, April was a very, very good month in Iraq for the forces of democracy, and a catastrophic month for the terrorist forces of chaos and human sacrifice. So how would you expect the mainstream media to characterize the Battle of Basra and Baghdad, which has routed the Mahdi Militia from the south and shattered many of its elite terrorist cells in Sadr City?

You guessed it: US troop deaths push monthly toll to 7-month high in Iraq:

The killings of five U.S. soldiers in separate attacks in Baghdad pushed the American death toll for April up to 49, making it the deadliest month since September. One soldier died when his vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb. The second died of wounds sustained when he was attacked by small-arms fire, the military said Wednesday. Both incidents occurred Tuesday in northwestern Baghdad.

A third soldier died after being struck by a bomb while on a foot patrol early Wednesday in a northern section of the capital, while another roadside bomb killed two American soldiers in southern Baghdad, the military said in separate statements.

The spike in U.S. troop deaths comes as intense combat has been raging in Sadr City and other neighborhoods between Shiite militants and U.S.-Iraqi troops for more than a month.

In all, at least 4,061 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

"We have said all along that this will be a tough fight and there will be periods where we see these extremists, these criminal groups and al-Qaida terrorists seek to reassert themselves," U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters in Baghdad.

"So, the sacrifice of our troopers, the sacrifice of Iraqi forces and Iraqi citizens reflects this challenge," Bergner said in response to a question about what's behind the increase in American troop deaths.

Trust AP to turn a proactive campaign begun against the most deadly group in Iraq (they've killed several times more innocent Iraqis than al-Qaeda has), the militia that currently most threatens the stability of the Iraqi government, into nothing but a rise in "US troop deaths!"

Worse, AP uses selective quotation to make it appear as though the fight is being taken to us, willy nilly, by the Sadrites as they "reassert themselves." (They just started killing the American Army and Marine victims, who were helpless against the onslaught!) Leaping lizards; is AP ignorant of the operational tempo, or do they know what they're implying is the mirror opposite of reality?

I suppose it never crossed the minds of AP writers Slobodan Lekic, Sinan Salaheddin, and Qassim Abdul-Zahra that anytime democratic forces initiate a major operation against terrorists and insurgents, our death toll will necessarily go up: In military terms, that's normally called being "aggressive" and "taking the fight to the enemy."

Figures I've seen indicate that while we lost 45 soldiers, Marines, and British soldiers in April, the Mahdi Militia appears to have lost somewhere between 400 and 1,000 terrorist killers. Once again, we're in that 15:1 ratio of dead enemies to friendlies. I know the Pentagon hates body-count comparisons... but that's a heck of a victory nonetheless.

Of course, while the Associated Press compares the April, 2008 combat-death figure to that of September, 2007, they don't actually tell us the September figure. I suspect it's because that datum might interfere with "the story," which appears to be -- stop me if you've heard this -- that "the surge," as so many refer to it, has failed. After all, if the intent was to lower casualties, and here we just had the highest death toll in seven months, then good heavens, the surge didn't do a thing!

So what was the number of Coalition deaths back in September? According to Iraq Coalition Casuality Count, it was 69 -- averaging 2.3 per day -- contrasted with 1.63 per day this month. In other words, the death toll in April is still less than 2/3rds that of September. And it's important that in September 2007, the counterinsurgency had already begun having its effect and combat deaths were down. The local peak of coalition combat fatalities was May 2007, when 131 troops died (4.23 per day). April 2008 was only a third of that... and that's during an offensive campaign.

iCasualities also reports that April saw 565 Iraq civilian deaths, compared to 752 in September 2007 and 2,864 in February 2007; April 2008's civilian death toll is only 22% of February 2007. I think most folks would consider a 78% drop in civilian deaths -- which is, after all, the main goal of a counterinsurgency strategy, to protect the civilian population -- a positive thing. But from the lack of interest on the part of the elite media to report on this, I suppose they either don't consider "fewer dead civilians" to be positive, or at the very least, they're not sure. ("We're unbiased journalists, so we can't have any opinion!")

Elite Iraq-war journalists: Can't live with 'em; can't... hm.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 30, 2008, at the time of 4:11 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

April 10, 2008

"Time to Begin to... Focus on the Challenges Posed by Afghanistan"

Afghan Astonishments , Iraq Matters , Presidential Campaign Camp and Porkinstance , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

The wit and wisdom of Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008:

Without mentioning Senator McCain by name, Senator Clinton responded that supporters of the Bush administration's policy often talk about the cost of leaving Iraq, yet ignore the greater cost of continuing the same failed policy....

"I think it is time to begin an orderly process of withdrawing our troops, start rebuilding our military and focusing on the challenges posed by Afghanistan, global terrorist groups and other problems that confront America," she said.

I think it safe to say that if Democrats have one unifying theme to their national-security policy, it is that Iraq is nought but a "distraction" from the real war, which is against al-Qaeda... but only against the branch of al-Qaeda found along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They insist we must immediately withdraw virtually all our forces from Iraq and plant at least a significant portion of them in Afghanistan, to fight the good fight there instead.

Let's not speculate (for this post) about the real motivation behind the call to withdraw from Iraq or even whether Democrats are actually sincere in saying they would vastly increase the forces in Afghanistan. Let's assume complete good faith on their part. (I know it's a stretch, but work with me here.)

My question is -- what more, exactly, do Democrats expect us to do in Afghanistan?

We currently have 31,000 troops in Afghanistan as our component of the NATO mission (the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF); we have already pledged an additional 3,000 Marines for fighting and training purposes (to improve the Afghan National Army). Our ISAF allies have collectively sent an additional 28,000 forces, some of whom fight, while others only participate in nation-building efforts, bringing the total current NATO commitment to 59,000 troops.

The former Chief of Naval Operations of the U.S. Navy, now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, wants this overall figure to increase by 7,500 soldiers and 3,000 military trainers; outgoing ISAF commander Gen. Dan McNeill wants to increase by two combat brigades (3,000-8,000 soldiers or Marines) and one training brigade (1,500-4000 soldiers or Marines):

[U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates said the number of additional combat troops would depend on several things, including the extent of U.S. and NATO success on the battlefield this year, as well as the impact of a new senior U.S. commander taking over in coming months. Gen. David McKiernan is due to replace Gen. Dan McNeill this spring as the top overall commander in Afghanistan.

McNeill has said he believes he needs three more brigades - two for combat and one for training. That translates to roughly 7,500 to 10,000 additional troops. The Bush administration has no realistic hope of getting the NATO allies to send such large numbers.

McKiernan told Congress on Thursday that while he can't yet say how many more troops he would want there, he believes he needs additional combat and aviation forces, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, and training and mentoring teams.

Marines don't use brigades as a normal organizational force; they prefer the regiment. Gen. McNeill is Army, much of our ISAF committment are Marines... so I'm not sure exactly how many troops he calls for. Let's just split the difference between small brigades and big: 5,500 incoming combat troops and 2,750 incoming trainers.

This would mean that we expect our ISAF partners -- all of whom have pledged more troops (France alone will up their committment by at least 700) -- to pony up an additional 3,500 combat troops and 1,750 trainers... unless the next president plans to increase our own committment by more than President Bush has proposed. As noted above, it's unlikely that we can get the full complement from our allies, whose military budgets are woefully small compared to ours (as ours is woefully small, as percent of GDP, compared even to the average of the last 45 years).

However we reach the goal, that would bring the NATO forces in Afghanistan to a total of more than 67,000 combined combat forces and training forces. That, by the way, is all the force that the top commander of ISAF says he needs; he has not called for additional tens of thousands of men.

So what about the Afghan National Army? We have been training them just as we have trained the Iraqi army. As of December 2007, the Afghan army comprised 57,000 soldiers, or about as large as the current ISAF force level. Presumably they are still recruiting, so we can expect tha tnumber to rise along with the NATO forces. But even as they are now, that makes a total integrated army of 116,000 today, rising to about 125,000 over the next year.

(The Afghans are probably not as close to being a modern army in equipment, strategy, and attitude as are the Iraqis, but that is a very high standard; they're certainly far better than they were just a year ago. Fewer units can take the lead, but they generally fight very well when NATO leads.)

So the real question for the Democrats is this: What could we do with, say, 225,000 troops that we can't do with 125,000? If we funneled even just 100,000 of our current 150,000 Iraqi troops into Afghanistan instead, what exactly would the extra brigades be doing that we're not doing successfully now?

And there's where you nit the snag: Afghanistan is even less a force-on-force war than Iraq. When we shifted from the failed "attrition" strategy of Gen. George Casey to the successful counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) of Gen. David Petraeus, we added only 30,000 extra soldiers, an increase of 23%. In Afghanistan, that would mean an increase of only 13,500 NATO troops -- which is only 3,500 more than we're already increasing them.

Is that all the Democrats envision, an additional 3,500 troops? Or are they thinking of something vastly bigger? I have the bizarre image in my head of a Democratic army of 200,000 extra soldiers, all linking hands and walking the length of the border to "find Osama bin Laden!" When (of course) they fail to find him, they'll declare that he, too, was invented by Bush, just like the WMD; there never was a 9/11 attack; and we can go back to Clintonian somnambulism again.

Back to real life. The main point of the so-called "surge" in Iraq was not the increase in troops but the change in strategy; the strategy -- specifically crafted for the Iraq situation -- happened to require 160,000 soldiers, and we only had 130,000 at the time; thus we increased our force structure by the difference.

There's been no such crafting of a COIN strategy in Afghanistan that I know of, because the situation there is not the same as it was in Iraq. But if we eventually do switch to COIN, we will have to evaluate the military needs from scratch... and we might end up increasing forces, but we might end up leaving them the same or even reducing them. The strategy must drive the troop levels, not the other way round. We won't increase troop levels just to increase troop levels, but only as part of a new strategy that demands more soldiers: The strategy comes first; setting force levels is a byproduct of the strategy.

Needless to say, no Democrat -- and no general advising a Democrat -- has crafted such a strategy or reasonably could, since it could only be done by a COIN specialist like Gen. Petraeus who had spent years in Afghanistan and was intimately familiar with the progress of the war and the nature of the enemy right there. So what the heck do candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and other Democratic elected officials, mean by saying we should be "focusing on the challenges posed by Afghanistan, global terrorist groups and other problems that confront America?" What does "focus" mean in this case?

They advocate pulling troops out of Iraq and putting them into Afghanistan. But doing what? Deployed how? Do they mean for combat or training? What mix of Special Forces, air forces, grunts, and administrative/logistics?

How do they want them organized? What strategy should they follow? What would be their rules of engagement? Can ground forces cross into Pakistan in hot pursuit? How about initiating cross-border contact?

Al-Qaeda's presence is mostly in the tribal areas that span the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan -- Balochistan, which also includes a piece of north-eastern Iran; South and North Waziristan in Pakistan; and several other provinces on both sides of the border; the heaviest fighting is currently in southern Afghanistan, which touches both Iran and Pakistan. According to Bill Roggio, attacks are heavy in Kunar in the eastern region, Khost in the southeast, and Helmand and especially Khandahar in the southern region:

According to NATO statistics, “More than 75% of [Afghanistan] experienced less than 1 security incident per quarter per 10,000 people, supporting the assessment that the insurgency is not expanding across [Afghanistan]. 70% of the events occurred in 10% of the districts. The population of these districts is less than 6% of the population of [Afghanistan].” NATO attributes the increase in violence to increased operations by NATO forces.

The problem is that the tribes there do not recognize the border; and there are many trails that cross the Tora Bora mountains or the Hindu Kush, along which al-Qaeda can retreat into Pakistan when we attack (or into Afghanistan when the Pakistani troops attack).

What we really need is a coordinated operation attacking from both sides simultaneously; but we could never get President Musharraf to go along with it... and I suspect we're even less likely to ally with his successor, who will almost certainly be a member either of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (the "N" is for Nawaz Sharif) or the Pakistan People's Party of the late Benazir Bhutto, both of which are more Islamist and less America-friendly than is Musharraf.

Sad to say, I don't think that a single Democrat has even so much as thought about these questions, let alone come up with any answers. The Democratic slogan "Withdraw troops from Iraq and send them to Afghanistan!" has every bit as much semantic content as their other slogan -- "Free Tibet!"... none at all.

At some point, we may well change strategy in Afghanistan to COIN... or we may change to some other strategy. We may decide to launch a pre-emptive attack on Balochistan and Waziristan; or we may end up cutting a deal with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani or caliph-maker Nawaz Sharif, after Pervez Musharraf is voted out.

But there is no way to know at this point what we're going to end up doing, because everything is in flux. Thus it's not not irresponsible, it's imbecilic to announce in early 2008 your military plan for Afghanistan in 2009. It's like a financial manager saying, "in 2009, we're going to sell the following stocks and invest in these others here." How can you possibly know today whether that will be a good decision a year from now?

So even giving the Democrats all benefit of the doubt on sincerity and motive, just taking their pronouncements at face value, I can only conclude, in strict social-science terms, that the Democrats are behaving like poorly trained baboons. Their long-war rhetoric is just empty jingoism, whose only purpose is to make them look tough in advance of elections.

They have no specific plan; they have no grand strategy; they're not even aware that such things are required (or exist). They've never read any books that would explain this to them. They don't even know enough to know that they don't know enough; to borrow a wonderful phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, to the Democrats, military strategy is an "unknown unknown."

I recommend we not put one in la Casablanca. I'm not even comfortable with them sitting on the national-security committees; alas, there's nothing we can do about that.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 10, 2008, at the time of 6:16 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

April 9, 2008

Between the Lines

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy , Media Madness , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Sachi

It's never safe to take at face value anything written by the mainstream media about Iraq. You must always tease the real story from the misleading and sometimes completely fabricated "first draft of history" they publish. But even propaganda can reveal the deeper truth.

It's now clear that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Iraqi army and Iraqi National Police showed decisive leadership and initiative -- perhaps a bit too decisive! -- during the recent Operation Knights' Charge in Basra. Even AP is reluctantly reporting the latest achievement of Nouri al-Maliki... though of course they couch it in dismissive terms:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's faltering crackdown [!] on Shiite militants has won the backing of Sunni Arab and Kurdish parties that fear both the powerful sectarian militias and the effects of failure on Iraq's fragile government.

The emergence of a common cause could help bridge Iraq's political rifts.

The head of the Kurdish self-ruled region, Massoud Barzani, has offered Kurdish troops to help fight anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.

More significantly, Sunni Arab Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi signed off on a statement by President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and the Shiite vice president, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, expressing support for the crackdown in the oil-rich southern city of Basra.

The elite media used to criticize Maliki for not being able to bring other parties together and for not going after Shiite militias (that is, the Mahdi Militia, a.k.a. Jaish al Mahdi, or JAM). It's true that Vice President Hashemi and Prime Minister Maliki have been bitter rivals; but then, now that Hashemi has decided to support Maliki’s effort, how can the "crackdown" be “faltering?” Rather, shouldn't it now be called "strengthening" -- or even that other favorite media word, "mounting?" (I forgot for a moment: Only problems for Republicans are allowed to "mount.")

Political players in the Middle East are not known for backing the underdog; the best conclusion is that Hashemi has correctly assessed that the Basra crackdown is working, so now he wants to join the "strong horse." Of course, the Associated Press has its own defeatist tale of how the Battle of Basra ended:

The Basra crackdown, ostensibly waged against "outlaws" and "criminal gangs," bogged down in the face of fierce resistance and discontent in the ranks of government forces. Major combat eased after al-Sadr asked his militia to stop fighting last Sunday.

But al-Maliki continued his tough rhetoric, threatening to take his crackdown to the Mahdi Army's strongholds in Baghdad. Al-Sadr hinted at retaliation, and the prime minister backed down, freezing raids and arrests targeting the young cleric's supporters.

How can a campaign that ends with the enemy’s surrender be described as “bogged down?” (Thank goodness they didn't say "quagmired.") It's true that Maliki stated that he would halt offensive action for ten days, but not because he was afraid of Sadr’s revenge; if he feared Sadr, he would never have attacked in the first place -- or at least he would have stopped the moment he saw that the JAM was stronger than he expected.

But instead, Maliki responded to the fierce fighting by sending reinforcements into the battle and driving the JAM out of their entrenched positions. Now it's the Iraqi army that patrols the streets of Basra, not the Mahdi Militia.

There's more, much more that we now learn...

Here is what Bill Roggio (you knew he had to come into this debate somewhere!) has to say about the Battle of Basra:

Subsequent to the ceasefire, the Iraqi military announced it was moving reinforcements to Basra, and the next day pushed forces into the ports of Khour al Zubair and Umm Qasr. Iraqi special operations forces and special police units have conducted several raids inside Basra since then, while an Iraqi brigade marched into the heart of a Mahdi-controlled Basra neighborhood on April 2. And two days after Sadr called for a ceasefire, the government maintained a curfew in Sadr City and other Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad. None of this would be happening had Maliki simply caved to Sadr. [So much for the image of the PM cowering in fear of the sidelined Muqtada Sadr... who is himself still hiding in Qom, Iran, and afraid to show his face even in the Shiite areas of Iraq.]

Maliki's governing coalition did not revolt over this operation. When the Iraqi opposition held an emergency session of parliament to oppose the Basra operations, only 54 of the 275 lawmakers attended. AFP reported, "The two main parliamentary blocs--Shiite United Iraqi Alliance and the Kurdish Alliance--were not present for the session which was attended by lawmakers from radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's bloc, the small Shiite Fadhila Party, the secular Iraqi National List and the Sunni National Dialogue Council." The fact that the major political blocs in Iraq's parliament ignored the emergency session is politically significant, and no evidence suggests that Maliki's governing coalition has been jeopardized since then.

(Roggio is now posting at a new website you should all bookmark, Iraq Status Report)

The ten days suspension of offensive operations in the south was meant to give militia members time to lay down their weapons and surrender. Operation Knights' Charge continues against those Iran-trained, Iran-led elements of the JAM that have not stopped their own attacks, according to Roggio, this time writing in the Long War Journal, which he edits.

One of the reasons cited by the elite media to prove that Muqtada Sadr won the Battle of Basra is that Sadr's followers listened to him and stopped fighting when he told them. But it has become increasingly clear that Sadr himself no longer has operational control over the JAM; those element who were actually fighting against the Iraqi army were under the direct leadership of Iranian Qods Force commanders (the so-called "Special Groups")... as is Sadr himself, as Bill Roggio notes in the Long War Journal:

Just as the new Iraqi forces began to arrive in Basrah and US and British forces were gearing up to augment the Iraqi military, Muqtada al Sadr, under orders from Iran’s Qods Force, called for his fighters to withdraw from the streets. Sadr issued a nine-point list of demands, which included that operations cease. Maliki refused and Iraqi and US forces continued to move into Basrah and conduct pinpoint raids against Shia terror groups. More than 200 Mahdi Army fighters were killed, 700 were wounded, and 300 captured during the six days of fighting in Basrah alone.

Despite Sadr’s so-called "order" for them to stand down, some of these Special Groups continue to fight... and continue to be driven out. Eventually, they will have nowhere left to flee to except back into Iran, where they came from.

The media have also criticized Maliki for "not making political progress." Several senators said as much to Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker during the hearings in the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But now, as Maliki successfully reaches out to Kurds and Sunni and gains their support, do the MSM praise his effort? (Is that a rhetorical question?)

Of course they don't. They accuse him of seeking short term political gain for his own interests:

But other motives may have played a role in the crackdown.

Provincial elections are scheduled to be held before Oct. 1 and Shiite parties are gearing up for a tough contest in the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq, where oil-rich Basra and the wealthy religious centers of Najaf and Karbala are prizes.

A successful crackdown in Basra would have boosted the election chances of al-Maliki's Dawa party and his Shiite allies in the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, whose Badr Brigade militia is the Mahdi Army's sworn enemy.

Let's pause a moment to ponder that last sentence. Nouri al-Maliki was originally a client of Muqtada Sadr. The Dawa Party has historically been associated with the JAM; opposing them on the Shiite side, as AP admits, has been the Badr Brigades (now Badr Organization and no longer functioning as a private militia), controlled by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq).

So AP says that Maliki attacked the militia associated with his own Dawa Party, rather than the one associated with the SIIC, in order to get more Shia to vote for both Dawa and the SIIC.

This is as creative an interpretation as their line that the Iraqi forces were utterly crushed, and Muqtada Sadr was on the brink of wiping them out and making himself Caliph of Mesopotamia... when he suddenly had a change of heart and surrendered instead.

If that makes perfect sense to you, you're probably a liberal.

And now, Maliki and the leaders of the other parties in the Iraqi parliament are taking a bold step to isolate the JAM even further -- by barring any party that maintains a militia from even contesting seats in the Iraqi provincial elections this coming October. From the same Long War Journal piece linked above:

Less than two weeks after Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki launched Operation Knights' Assault to clear the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backer militias in Basrah, the Iraqi government is moving to ban Muqtada al Sadr's political movement from participating in the election if it fails to disband the militia. Facing near-unanimous opposition, Sadr said he would seek guidance from senior Shia clerics in Najaf and Qom and disband the Mahdi Army if told to do so, according to one aide. But another Sadr aide denied this.

The pressure on Sadr and his Mahdi Army started on Sunday after Maliki announced the plans to pass legislation to prevent political parties with militias from participating in the political process. "The first step will be adding language to a draft election bill banning parties that operate militias from fielding candidates in provincial balloting this fall," Reuters reported on Sunday. "The government intends to send the draft to parliament within days and hopes to win approval within weeks...."

The legislation is said to have broad support from the major Sunni, Kurdish, and Shia political parties, and is expected to quickly pass through parliament.

This leaves the Sadrists in a pickle: If they disband the JAM, then they're just another (minor) political party in the Shiite alliance. But if they don't, they will be nothing but a militia. At that point, Maliki would have even more support for annihilating all trace of the mighty Mahdi Militia from Iraq: They would be the Iranian version of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But of course, the elite media assure us that Muqtada Sadr won the Battle of Basra, while Prime Minister Maliki was politically ruined.

Yesterday and today, Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker testified on Capitol Hill to various congressional committees. As a glimpse into our political leaders' understanding of such a crucial issue of the Iraq war and how it relates to the larger war against global caliphism, the transcripts of those hearings are illuminating, frightening, and frustrating.

(The transcript for the House Armed Services Committee hearing can be found here; the transcript for Senate Armed Services Committee hearing here; and the transcript for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing here.)

Judging from the Democratic senators’ questions during General David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress this morning, their understanding of the Basra situation is little better than that of the MSM. For that matter, Democratic senators' understanding of Iraq itself, let alone the war, is completely outdated: They imagine it's still 2006, the "civil war" still rages, and a hundred civilians are being slaughtered each day.

But according to Iraq Coalition Casualities, during last month, civilian deaths averaged 27 per day, not 100; but that included the Battle of Basra. February saw only 19 killings per day across the whole country, a drop of more than 80% from the highs of late 2006, before we changed to the counterinsurgency strategy. This stunning turnaround has mostly flown below the Democrats' Iraq-success radar -- which, to be perfectly blunt, is rarely even turned on.

Some of the exchanges are laugh-out-loud funny, such as this between Gen. Petraeus and a certain senator with a "chest full of medals," during the former's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The good senator was trying to get Petraeus to admit that our continued presence in Iraq was the only reason that Iraqis have not stepped up to the plate; if we simply walked away, that would make everything much better:

SEN. KERRY: But isn't there a contradiction, in a sense, in your overall statement of the strategic imperative? Because you've kept mentioning al Qaeda here today. Al Qaeda -- AQI, as we know it today -- first of all didn't exist in Iraq till we got there. The Shi'a have not been deeply interrupted by AQI. The Kurds --

GEN. PETRAEUS: Oh, sir, they were. They were blown up right and left by AQI. That was the height of the sectarian violence.

SEN. KERRY: I understand that. I absolutely understand that. But it is not a fundamental, pervasive -- I mean, most people that I've talked to, Shi'a, and most of the evidence of what's happened in the Anbar province with the Sunni is that once they decided to turn on al Qaeda and not give them a welcome, they have been able to turn around their own security --

GEN. PETRAEUS: And we helped them, sir.

SEN. KERRY: (Inaudible.)

GEN. PETRAEUS: And we cleared Ramadi, we cleared Fallujah, we cleared the belts of Baghdad --

SEN. KERRY: And every plan I've seen --

GEN. PETRAEUS: -- (inaudible) -- Baqubah and everything else.

SEN. KERRY: Every plan I've seen here in Congress that contemplates a drawdown contemplates leaving enough American forces there to aid in the prosecution of al Qaeda and to continue that kind of effort.

GEN. PETRAEUS: That's exactly right, yes, sir.

SEN. KERRY: But then why doesn't that change the political dynamics that demand more reconciliation, more compromise, accommodation, so we resolve the political stalemate which is at the core of the dilemma?

GEN. PETRAEUS: Sure. No, that's -- sir, that's a great question. One of the key aspects is that they are not represented right now. And that's why provincial elections scheduled for no later than October are so important. The Anbar sheikhs, for example, will tell you "We want these elections," Senator, as they, I'm sure, did, because they didn't vote in January 2005. Huge mistake.

SEN. KERRY: (Inaudible.) [By this point, Kerry appears to be just making small squeaking noises.]

GEN. PETRAEUS: And they know it. They'll do much better this time than they did before. More important, even in Nineveh province, where because they didn't vote you have a different ethnic group, actually, that largely is the head of the provincial council. So again, all of those.

SEN. KERRY: (Inaudible.)

GEN. PETRAEUS: Yes, sir. Thank you.

Here is another exchange, this time with Sen. Barbara "Mrs. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" Boxer (D-CA, 80%): She seizes an extremely important, even urgent issue in her teeth; and like a deranged Pekingese, she won't let it go:

SEN. BOXER: If I could say, I agree with you that there are certain factions there that certainly support Iran. That's part of the problem. But my question is this. Ahmadinejad was the first national leader --

AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off mike.)

SEN. BOXER: Can you please cool it back there? Ahmadinejad was the first national leader to be given a state reception by Iraq's government. Iraq President Talabani and Ahmadinejad held hands as they inspected a guard of honor while a brass band played brisk British marching tunes. Children presented the Iranian with flowers. Members of Iraq's Cabinet lined up to greet him, some kissing him on both cheeks. So it's not a question about the militias out there. I'm saying, after all we have done, the Iraqi government kisses the Iranian leader! And our president has to sneak into the country. I don't understand it Isn't it true that after all we've done, Iran has gained ground?

AMB. CROCKER: Senator, Iran and Iranian influence in Iraq is obviously an extremely important issue for us, but it's very much, I think, a mixed bag. And what we saw over these last couple of weeks in Baghdad and in Basra, as the prime minister engaged extremist militias that were supported by Iran. is that it revealed not only what Iran is doing in Iraq, but it produced a backlash against them and a rallying of support for the prime minister in being ready to take them on. Iran by no means has it all its own way in Iraq. Iraqis remember with clarity and bitterness the 1980 to '88 Iran-Iraq war.

SEN. BOXER: Yes. Well, that's my point.

AMB. CROCKER: In which --

SEN. BOXER: And now he's getting kissed on the cheek. That's my point.

AMB. CROCKER: And there was a lot of commentary around among Iraqis, including among Shi'a Iraqis, about just that point; what's he doing here after what they did to us during that war? But Iraqi Shi'a died by the tens, by the hundreds of thousands defending their Arab and Iraqi identity and state against a Persian enemy, and that's, again, deeply felt. It means when Iran's hand is exposed in backing these extremist militias that there is backlash, broadly speaking, in the country, including from Iraq's Shi'a. And I think that's important, and I think it's important that the Iraqi government build on it.

SEN. BOXER: I give up. It is what it is. They kissed him on the cheek. I mean, what they say over the dinner table is one thing, but actually kissed him on the cheek. He got a red carpet treatment and we are losing our sons and daughters every single day for the Iraqis to be free. It is irritating is my point.

AMB. CROCKER: Senator, the vice president was in Iraq just a couple of weeks after that, and he also had a very warm reception.

SEN. BIDEN: Did he get kissed?

AMB. CROCKER: I believe -- (laughter) -- he did get kissed.

SEN. BIDEN: I want to know whether he got kissed. That's all. (Laughter.)

Perhaps the general and the ambassador can educate this sad crew of media manipulators in motley; but somehow I doubt it.

Dafydd adds: "The Lord helps those who help themselves." We should begin an urgent project of homeschooling Senate Democrats.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 9, 2008, at the time of 7:08 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

April 8, 2008

ABC Newsflash: 100% of US Troops In Iraq Plan to Vote Democratic

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

In an ABC News story titled "Surprising Political Endorsements By U.S. Troops," crack reporter Martha Raddatz finds that 80% of all troops interviewed plan to vote for Barack Obama, while 20% plan to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton Rodham. None at all plans to vote for John McCain.

  • 60% of all the soldiers interviewed said the main reason they supported Obama was that he would bring them, personally, home immediately, regardless of whether the job is finished.
  • That includes 20% whose support for Obama was due to the fact that he would "probably support us a lot more." Raddatz helpfully clarified: By "support," that 20% interviewed meant "pulling out troops."
  • 20% cited Obama's "representation for change." I'm not exactly sure what that means, but clearly Republicans are all lying criminals.
  • By contrast, the remaining 20% of all American troops interviewed supported Hillary Clinton, because "we should have a gradual drawdown."
  • No troops whatsoever supported McCain, or indeed made reference to him. It's doubtful that anyone in the military is aware that the Republican Party still exists. Even those who seemed to support the mission generally were not quoted as having any particular preference for president, oddly enough. One can only surmise that soldiers must look down upon veterans with a strong and particular distaste.

Surprisingly enough, the American military in Iraq totally opposes the war and wants an immediate end to it, no matter what happens, according to ABC:

Though the military is generally a more conservative group, soldiers like Sgt. Justin Sarbaum are just as eager for a pull-out as the Democratic candidates. Sarbaum said he wondered which presidential candidate would be able to better the U.S. relationship with rogue nations, such as Iran, so that soldiers are not sent off to another war.

"Iran is obviously a big issue," Sarbaum said, "Here in Iraq for my third time; starting another war right now -- is it really necessary?"

Although some might think that the survey's sample size -- five soldiers -- is somewhat, er, scant, the overwhelming, Saddam-sized support for a Democrat in the White House in 2008 (100% of all soldiers whose interviews ABC printed) surely makes up for not having interviewed, say, 1200 or 1500 soldiers instead of five.

(And in fact, to be fair to ABC, they did interview six additional soldiers but chose not to print their preferences for president. You can't say ABC didn't go the extra mile.)

Based on the astonishing unanimity of opinion, it's very clear that the Army hates George W. Bush as commander in chief and would much prefer Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Once again, the elite media has exposed another myth pushed by Christianist conservatives: that soldiers actually want to win the wars they fight. Now that we know they don't care about the mission -- only their personal safety -- I believe the Democrats can and should make a strong case for dissolving the military entirely.

If voters are concerned about so-called "national security," perhaps a bunch of yeoman farmers (equally divided between the sexes and all races, proportionately represented, except for males without color) -- armed with olive branches, trained doves, horns of plenty, and inflatable puppets -- would do a better job "defending" America than a bunch of warmongers in "uniform."

I believe we all owe ABC a debt of "gratitude" (and a couple of Pullet Surprises) for opening our eyes to the "lies" we have swallowed since 1776.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 8, 2008, at the time of 3:22 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

April 2, 2008

Who Won the B. of B., and Who Lost? Hint: Listen to the Military Guys

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

Power Line asks "the question;" so do the Counterterrorism Blog and Col. Austin Bay. Bill Roggio is too busy answering the question to ask it. The elite media thinks it has the answer, but it's fooling itself (and us), as usual.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line is skeptical of all sides, as is his wont. Alas, in this case, extreme skepticism leads to terminal agnosticism; but I think we have, at the least, a method we can follow to decide who won: Stop paying attention to the spin and just look at the actual facts on the ground.

Uncle!

Start with this one: In any military engagement, the side that calls for a ceasefire soonest and loudest is almost certainly the losing side. Why would the winner be anxious to terminate a successful operation before it's over?

In the case of Operation Knights' Charge, all sides agree that it was Muqtada Sadr who called for a truce, and he did so repeatedly. Buttressing this position is the fact that Sadr accompanied his call for a ceasefire with a series of imperious demands -- for example, that the Iraqi government must immediately release all imprisoned members of the mighty Mahdi Militia who had not yet been convicted of crimes. Yet despite the concession inherent in that last point, nobody, not even the elite media, claim that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has acquiesced to a single demand... but the Mahdi Militia surrendered Basra anyway.

For example, a fawning, almost sycophantic story yesterday on Time Magazine's website mentions the main demand, but then curiously drops the subject without saying whether Maliki accepted it:

One of Sadr's principal demands when he met with the delegation of Shi'ite political leaders to discuss the new cease-fire was that more of his forces be released under the amnesty law. This was to appease his disgruntled followers whose brothers and uncles are the ones behind bars and who feel they have taken an unfair brunt of the surge while former Sunni insurgents are getting paychecks in the Concerned Local Citizens units. Like any good politician, he has to prove he can deliver the goods to his followers -- even if he has to go to war for it.

And there the piece ends! Does anyone think that if reporter Charles Crain had the slightest bit of evidence that Sadr's demand was met, he wouldn't have shouted it from the rooftops? Especially in a piece titled, in typical unbiased fashion, "How Moqtada al-Sadr Won in Basra."

Location, location, location

Another clear indicator is where each side is when the fighting stops. At the beginning of the Battle of Basra, all sources agree that the Mahdi Militia was virtually in control of the city of Basra -- thanks to the British policy of walking softly and carrying a toothpick. The militia patrolled the streets, they shook down citizens, they paraded openly, they held major rallies in public. They kidnapped and killed people at will; they controlled the airport, the seaport, and the oil fields.

Today, it is the Iraqi Army that patrols the streets of Basra; the militia -- again, all sides agree -- has pulled its fighters from the streets and no longer asserts control of the city. From the International Herald Tribune:

Iraqi troops met no significant resistance as a dozen-vehicle convoy drove Wednesday into the Hayaniyah district of central Basra, scene of fierce clashes last week with al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters.

Troops set up checkpoints and searched a few houses before leaving the neighborhood after a couple of hours, witnesses said.

Here is what Bill Roggio says:

While the intensity of operations against the Mahdi Army in Basrah and the South have decreased since Sadr called for his unilateral cease-fire, Iraqi security forces continue to conduct operations. Today the Iraqi Army marched through the Mahdi Army-infested Hayaniyah district in central Basrah. On April 1, the Hillah Special Weapons and Tactics unit captured 20 “smugglers” in Basrah. On March 31, Iraqi Special Operation Forces killed 14 “criminals” during a raid against Mahdi Army forces occupying a school in Basrah.

The Iraqi security forces will continue to clear Basrah, according to the Army. During Sunday’s press briefing, Major General Abdul Aziz said several districts of Basrah were cleared, and these operations would continue. “Our troops managed to clear certain areas in Basra, Najubya, Al Ma’qil, Al Ashshar Wazuber and Garmat Ali and other places as well,” said Aziz. “Starting from today, we will work on clearing the other places from the wanted individuals and criminals and those who are still carrying weapons....”

The Iraqi Army has also moved troops into the ports of Khour al Zubair and Umm Qasr in Basrah province on April 1. The Iraqi troops replaced the facility protection services guards, who are often accused of criminal activities.

Clearly, the Iraqi Army ends the operation (or rather, the major-combat element of it) in a significantly improved position from where they started, while the militia is correspondingly dispossessed. Based on this metric alone, the winner should be clear.

Hip hip, chin chin, to the rhythm section

Another good measure is which side controls the post-combat operational tempo. Here again, there is no dispute, even among those who claim that Sadr won: The Iraqi Army continues its operations, while the militia removes itself from the streets, and it hides. The army continues raiding "safe" houses, arresting wanted militants, securing the area, and sending in reinforcements to hold the territory.

The Potter's Field

The "body count" metric is not always dispositive by itself; but combined with the other measures above, it adds its amicus curiae argument. Hundreds of Mahdi Militia members were killed, hundreds more captured, and hundreds more were wounded. Nobody claiming that Sadr won has even hinted that Iraqi Army casualties were anywhere near that high.

Roggio's latest numbers:

The Mahdi Army has also taken high casualties since the fighting began on March 25. According to an unofficial tally of the open source reporting from the US and Iraqi media and Multinational Forces Iraq, 571 Mahdi Army fighters have been killed, 881 have been wounded, 490 have been captured, and 30 have surrendered over the course of seven days of fighting.

Austin Bay has slightly different numbers (because they are official, so probably err on the side of caution):

A dispute over casualties in the firefights has ensued, as it always does. An Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman alleged that Sadr's militia had been hit hard in six days of fighting, suffering 215 dead, 155 arrested and approximately 600 wounded. The government spokesman gave no casualty figures for Iraqi security forces.

No one, of course, could offer an independent confirmation, but if the numbers are accurate they provide an indirect confirmation of reports that Sadr's Mahdi Militia (Jaish al-Mahdi, hence the acronym JAM) had at least a couple thousand fighters scattered throughout southern Iraq. This is not shocking news, but a reason to launch a limited offensive when opportunity appeared.

Assuming Austin Bay's estimate of 2,000 fighters (before Knights' Charge) in southern Iraq is accurate, that means that Sadr lost at least 18.5% of his force killed or captured, taking the official Iraqi Interior Ministry lowball, and perhaps as much as 53% (!) if Roggio is more accurate. But even a loss of 18% of the southern force and an overall casualty rate of 48% is a staggering blow... particularly to a clandestine organization that will now have a significantly harder time recruiting, since they're no longer seen as being "in charge."

How the elite media tries to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

So how on earth does anyone argue that Sadr was the victor? Very simply; in each case (yes, even with Andrew Cochran's tendentious editorial on the Counterterrorism Blog), those claiming Sadr won -- or more accurately, those claiming that Maliki lost -- completely ignore the facts on the ground and claim that Maliki suffered a political loss because the Iraqi Army didn't grind Sadr's bones to make their pita bread... and do it in six or seven hours, eight tops.

The fact that Sadr is still sucking air, that he can still give orders and have some portion of the militia listen, and the fact that the intrasectarian struggle ain't over yet -- hey, that's good enough to throw Maliki under the tank treads. Time Magazine:

In the view of many American troops and officers, the Mahdi Army had splintered irretrievably into a collection of independent operators and criminal gangs. Now, however, the conclusion of the conflict in Basra shows that when Sadr speaks, the militia listens.

That apparent authority is in marked contrast to the weakness of Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki. He traveled south to Basra with his security ministers to supervise the operation personally. After a few days of intense fighting he extended his previously announced deadline for surrender and offered militants cash in exchange for their weapons. Yet in the cease-fire announcement the militia explicitly reserved the right to hold onto its weapons. And the very fact of the cease-fire flies in the face of Maliki's proclamation that there would be no negotiations. It is Maliki, and not Sadr, who now appears militarily weak and unable to control elements of his own political coalition.

He does? Despite numerous calls by Sunni, Kurdish, and pro-Sadr Shiite elements within Iraq, Maliki not only continued to fight, the army continues its operations against Sadr to this very day. Yet Crain, who seems to have an odd and somewhat disturbing admiration for Muqtada Sadr, insists it was really Sadr who won because when he called on his troops to abandon control of Basra, they listened to him. Such loyalty!

In Cochran's case at the Counterterrorism Blog, the partisan nature is diametrically opposite that of Time, which evidently wishes Sadr (hence Iran) would take control of the entire country. It's clear to me, by contrast, that Cochran is furious that Maliki didn't press the assault until every last Sadr lieutenant, every wanted militant, every member of the militia, every Shia who had ever picked up a gun, and Sadr himself were all dead and dismembered... and the little dog he rode in on, too.

(Killing Sadr would have been a particularly remarkable achievement, since I've seen no evidence that Muqtada Sadr has even returned to Iraq from Iran. Certainly none of the articles I've seen has claimed he's back; when they need a Sadr quotation, they always get it from his spokespeople.)

Despite Time and the Counterterrorism Blog being on opposite sides, they link arms to attack the center in a conspiracy of shared short-term interests. Thus, Cochran agrees with Time that Maliki lost; he believes that Sadr won because he's still sucking air, as if a Monty Pythonesque "I'm not dead yet!" is Sadr's only victory condition:

Based on reports from the area since then, including this morning, I'll conclude that the short-term gains that U.S. forces made are bound to give way to a long-term strategic victory in Iraq for Moqtada al Sadr, the broader Shiite community, and Iran, unless the U.S. redeploys significant numbers of our troops to Shiite strongholds throughout Iraq.

Contradictory signals abound in asymmetric conflicts like the Iraqi offensive. An Iranian general who is a designated terrorist played some significant role in the ceasefire, thus vaildating my prognosis. Sadr's backers in Baghdad are claiming victory today, even as U.S. troops patrol their streets. [Sic; Roggio, et al, say it is the Iraqis patrolling the streets; Cochran offers no evidence that American forces are doing it instead.] The British are now freezing plans to withdraw more troops from that city, signaling a lack of confidence that the Iraqis will secure the area anytime this year. But an admission from a U.S. Army general in Iraq is telling:

"Army Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner said he welcomes the Iraqi government’s commitment to target criminals in Iraq’s second-largest city but he concedes there are challenges. He said most of the Iraqi troops “performed their mission” but some “were not up to the task” and the Iraqi government is investigating what happened. The government was surprised by ferocious resistance from followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to the offensive. The Iraqi campaign in Basra also faced desertions and mutiny in government ranks before a cease-fire order by al-Sadr on Sunday."

The "admission" by Gen. Bergner has been flashed around the news world by the drive-by media; it's their only take-away from the fight: Some Iraqi "security units" (as AP calls them) "were not up to the task." Left unexplained is whether these security units were army or police (both were involved in the fight), how many were not up to the task, and whether they damaged the operation or just didn't fight as effectively as we hoped. If it's a small number of units, mostly from the National Police, and if they were helpful but not as much as demanded by our very high standards, that's a far cry from the media implication -- that the entire Iraqi Army is worthless.

But the last sentence in the Cochran quote above is hardly a surprise: We have long known that some National Police stations were compromised by Sadrites. The main 30-man unit that defected to Sadr's side, or probably was in Sadr's pocket all along, has been captured and disbanded... which is yet another blow to the Mahdi Militia, which now has one fewer covert platoon in the Iraqi National Police.

Victory through superior winning

Reading through Cochran's biography, it appears he was a career bureaucrat (lawyer, CPA) at the Commerce Department, then senior oversight counsel to the House Committee on Financial Services, where he first appears to have gotten experience with counterterrorism... in particular, tracking terrorist groups by the financial trail of breadcrumbs they dribble behind them. This is an incredibly valuable skill, and I have no doubt he is an expert in all fields financial and in the finances of terrorism.

But I don't see any indication of a military background or strategic experience. Consequently, I prefer to listen to the military guys, like Bill Roggio and Austin Bay, rather than financial guys like Andrew Cochran. Particularly when Cochran's analysis doesn't even mention any of the military facts on the ground.

So to answer Paul Mirengoff's question, I would have to say that the clear winners were Nouri al-Maliki and Iraq. Not a single one of these points is even in dispute:

  • It was Sadr who called for the truce, made the Mahdi Militia's surrender conditional, then surrendered anyway even when the conditions were not met by the Iraqi government;
  • The Iraqi Army now controls the territory formerly controlled by the Mahdi Militia;
  • The army has continued operational tempo, while the militia is in hiding, its leader afraid to show his face in public (in Iraq, at least);
  • The militia suffered a loss of at least 18% of its total southern force with another 30% wounded;
  • The most that critics of the war can say is that Sadr "won" by virtue of not being killed (wherever he is) and because his Mahdi Militia was not utterly annihilated and have not utterly repudiated him.

If readers still wish to be agnostic about victory, well, it's a free country... now.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 2, 2008, at the time of 4:35 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

March 31, 2008

Elites vs. Roggio - the Split Widens

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

The elite media, rather than trying to reel in their unsourced and increasingly risible claims of a great patriotic victory by Muqtada Sadr in the battle for Basra and Baghdad, is doubling down. From the Associated Press:

The peace deal between al-Sadr and Iraqi government forces - said to have been brokered in Iran - calmed the violence but left the cleric's Mahdi Army intact and Iraq's U.S.-backed prime minister politically battered and humbled within his own Shiite power base.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had promised to crush the militias that have effectively ruled Basra for nearly three years. The U.S. military launched air strikes in the city to back the Iraqi effort.

But the ferocious response by the Mahdi Army, including rocket fire on the U.S.-controlled Green Zone and attacks throughout the Shiite south, caught the government by surprise and sent officials scrambling for a way out of the crisis.

The confrontation enabled al-Sadr to show that he remains a powerful force capable of challenging the Iraqi government, the Americans and mainstream Shiite parties that have sought for years to marginalize him. And the outcome cast doubt on President Bush's assessment that the Basra battle was "a defining moment" in the history "of a free Iraq."

Bill Roggio's take on the exact, same story from the Long War Journal:

One day after Muqtada al Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army, called for his fighters to abandon combat, the fighting in Basrah has come to a near-halt and the Iraqi security forces are patrolling the streets. While Sadr spokesman said the Iraqi government agreed to Sadr's terms for the ceasefire, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has said the security forces will continue operations in Basrah in the south. Meanwhile, the Mahdi Army took heavy casualties in Basrah, Nasiriyah, Babil, and Baghdad over the weekend, despite Sadr's call for the end of fighting.

Maliki was clear that operations would continue in the South. "The armed groups who refuse al Sadr's announcement and the pardon we offered will be targets, especially those in possession of heavy weapons," Maliki said, referring to the 10 day amnesty period for militias to turn in heavy and medium weapons. "Security operations in Basra will continue to stop all the terrorist and criminal activities along with the organized gangs targeting people...."

The reasons behind Sadr's call for a cessation in fighting remain unknown, but reports indicate the Mahdi Army was having a difficult time sustaining its operations and has taken heavy casualties. "Whatever gains [the Mahdi Army] has made in the field [in Basrah], they were running short of ammunition, food, and water," an anonymous US military officer serving in South told The Long War Journal. "In short [the Mahdi Army] had no ability to sustain the effort.

TIME's sources in Basrah paint a similar picture. "There has been a large-scale retreat of the Mahdi Army in the oil-rich Iraqi port city because of low morale and because ammunition is low due to the closure of the Iranian border," the magazine reported.

I notice that AP writer Robert H. Reed is aided by three AP writers in Baghdad: Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Bushra Juhi and Sinan Salaheddin. I wonder what part of Baghdad they're from and what are their own positions on the Mahdi Militia... if they come from Sadr City and voted for the Sadr Bloc, what would that tell us about the contribution they may have provided to this AP story?

This is why I reject as nonsense the traditional journalistic claim that their own beliefs and political positions have no bearing on the stories they write; we are all to some extent captive of our own pasts. If the question is who "won" a complex factional struggle between Iranian-backed Shia like Muqtada Sadr and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- formerly a protege of Sadr himself, but now backed by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (even though Maliki is from the Dawa Party) -- then it sure as shootin' does matter whether the observer is a supporter or opponent of Muqtada Sadr. How could it not?

Bill Roggio is completely open about his background and his many embedded deployments. But we know nothing at all about Mr. Reed or his various Iraqi (and one American) collaborators.

It's time for staff writers and especially local stringers in the elite media to start outing themselves, as we bloggers routinely do -- even without benefit of those "multiple layers of editing" that make AP and the New York Times and such so unbiased and nonpartisan.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 31, 2008, at the time of 4:36 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 30, 2008

You Be the Jug

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Presidential Campaign Camp and Porkinstance
Hatched by Dafydd

Here's Bill Roggio's take on the possible capitulation by Muqtada Sadr:

Six days after the Iraqi government launched Operation Knights’ Charge in Basrah against the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backed Shia terror groups, Muqtada al Sadr, the Leader of the Mahdi Army, has called for his fighters to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi security forces. Sadr’s call for an end to the fighting comes as his Mahdi Army has taken serious losses since the operation began.

"Sadr has sent a message to his loyalists urging them to end all armed activities," the Al Iraqiya television channel reported. Sadr "disowned anyone attacking the state institutions or parties' offices and headquarters...."

Sadr’s call for an end to fighting by his followers comes as his Mahdi Army has taken high casualties over the past six days. Since the fighting began on Tuesday 358 Mahdi Army fighters were killed, 531 were wounded, 343 were captured, and 30 surrendered. The US and Iraqi security forces have killed 125 Mahdi Army fighters in Baghdad alone, while Iraqi security forces have killed 140 Mahdi fighters in Basra.

From March 25-29 the Mahdi Army had an average of 71 of its fighters killed per day. Sixty-nine fighters have been captured per day, and another 160 have been reported wounded per day during the fighting. The US and Iraqi military never came close to inflicting [such] casualties during the height of major combat operations against al Qaeda in Iraq during the summer and fall of 2007.

Here is the New York Times' version of today's events:

The Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr on Sunday took a step toward ending six days of intense combat between his militia allies and Iraqi and American forces in Basra and Baghdad, saying in a statement that his followers would lay down their arms providing the Iraqi government met a series of demands.

The substance of the nine-point statement, released by Mr. Sadr on Sunday afternoon, was hammered out in elaborate negotiations over the past few days with senior Iraqi officials, some of whom traveled to Iran to meet with Mr. Sadr, according to several officials involved in the negotiations....

Iraqi forces, backed up by American war planes and ground troops, have been in a stalemate with Shiite militias affiliated with Mr. Sadr in Basra for the past six days, in a military operation that has stirred harsh criticism of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Mr. Maliki’s campaign to take back militia-controlled parts of the southern city has met with far more resistance than was expected from militia fighters, Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Kadir al-Obeidi, conceded last week.

Many Iraqi politicians say that Mr. Maliki’s political capital has been severely depleted by the campaign and that he is now in the curious position of having to turn to Mr. Sadr, a longtime rival and now his opponent in battle, for a solution to the crisis....

The move by Mr. Sadr stood in stark contrast to his actions in 2004, when he ordered his militia to fight to the death in the old city of Najaf, suggesting that Mr. Sadr’s political sophistication and skill at military strategizing has grown in the past few years.

So according to Roggio, a beaten Sadr is desperately seeking a face-saving way out of a war he is losing badly. But according to the Times (reporting by Erica Goode), a triumphant Sadr has trapped American forces and feeble, helpless Iraqi lickspittles and lapdogs in a quagmire; and now we are begging Sadr to give us (following our acquiescence to a series of "demands") a face-saving opportunity to run away with our tails between our legs.

I draw two conclusions: First, Bill Roggio, with his infantry background and current military connections (he has embedded with the Army, Marines, the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi National Police many times during the last four years), is far more likely to understand the situation on the ground in Iraq. Therefore, I trust his take on Sadr's surrender more than I trust the Times.

Second, based on the elite-media coverage of Operation Knights' Charge against the Mahdi Militia over the past week, I can only conclude that it must be an election year.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 30, 2008, at the time of 6:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 29, 2008

Elite Media: Never Let Your Right Hand Know What Your Left Hand Is Washing

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

A sample platter of silly contradictions and absurdities in the AP's confusticated account of the Battle of Basra... thank goodness for those "multiple layers of editing" that separate the professional media from blogs!

Take me to your leader

British ground troops, who controlled the city until handing it over to the Iraqis last December, also joined the battle for Basra, firing artillery Saturday for the first time in support of Iraqi forces....

The fight for Basra is crucial for al-Maliki, who flew to Basra earlier this week and is staking his credibility on gaining control of Iraq's second-largest city, which has essentially been held by armed groups for nearly three years.

Who was that masked man?

With the Shiite militiamen defiant, a group of police in Sadr City abandoned their posts and handed over their weapons to al-Sadr's local office. Police forces in Baghdad are believed to be heavily influenced or infiltrated by Mahdi militiamen.

"We can't fight our brothers in the Mahdi Army, so we came here to submit our weapons," one policeman said on condition of anonymity for security reasons....

Iraqi police said that earlier in the day a U.S. warplane strafed a house and killed eight civilians, including two women and one child. They spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release the information.

Wait -- does the claim we killed women and children come from the same anonymous Iraqi police who defected to Sadr? Or does AP have rival, unfriendly anonymous sources?

Depends on what the meaning of "civilian" is...

Iraq's Health Ministry, which is close to the Sadrist movement, on Saturday reported at least 75 civilians have been killed and at least 500 others injured in a week of clashes and airstrikes in Sadr City and other eastern Baghdad neighborhoods.

The U.S. military sharply disputes the claims, having said that most of those killed were militia members.

Well actually, Dude, except for those Mahdi Militia members who also happen to be in the Iraqi Army...

'Ere now, what's all this then?

If you're interested in what's really "goin' down" down south in Mesopotamia, try Bill Roggio instead of the Associated Press. Roggio sums up his post thus:

Fighting in Basrah and Baghdad and throughout much of the South continues as Iraqi security forces and Multinational Forces Iraq press the fight against the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backed terror groups. The Iraqi Army has moved additional forces to Basrah as the US and Iraqi military have conducted significant engagements in Shia areas of Baghdad. The Mahdi Army has taken significant casualties. The US military has denied the Mahdi Army has taken control of checkpoints in Baghdad.

You won't read this in the elite media; it just doesn't fit "the story."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 29, 2008, at the time of 8:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Missing Piece

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

See if you can guess what is missing from this brief news squib about the movie Stop Loss. By "missing," I mean a vital contextual element missing from Nikki Finke's analysis of why Stop Loss and other "Iraq war movies" are doing so badly at the box office:

I'm told #7 Stop-Loss opened to only $1.6 million Friday from just 1,291 plays and should eke out $4+M. Although the drama from MTV Films was the best-reviewed movie opening this weekend, Paramount wasn't expecting much because no Iraq war-themed movie has yet to perform at the box office. "It's not looking good," a studio source told me before the weekend. "No one wants to see Iraq war movies. No matter what we put out there in terms of great cast or trailers, people were completely turned off. It's a function of the marketplace not being ready to address this conflict in a dramatic way because the war itself is something that's unresolved yet. It's a shame because it's a good movie that's just ahead of its time."

Please post a comment that includes a one-sentence observation of what major point Ms. Finke may be missing. (Ignore the poor grammar; she's from the elite media.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 29, 2008, at the time of 7:11 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

March 28, 2008

Newsflash: NYT Misunderstands Modern Warfare!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

This may be quite a shocking story with the potential to shake the worldview of readers of this blog; if there are children reading over your shoulder, they should be sent to bed without their suppers immediately, before you read another line. (Of course, if your kids read faster than you, perhaps they should send you to bed without din-dins.)

Forwarned is four-horned. I don't want to judge before all the facts are in, but it appears from available evidence that the New York Times has only a dim idea of how we conduct modern warfare. And by "modern," I mean all warfare since the introduction of the airplane. First, the factual content:

American warplanes struck targets in the southern port city of Basra late Thursday, joining for the first time an onslaught by Iraqi security forces intended to oust Shiite militias there, according to British and American military officials.

I realize some of you reading this, those with military experience or an interest in military history, may be nodding heads and saying, "yeah, yeah, so what's your point?" After all, we've been using close air support since the Great War... which coincidentally was the first significant war for the United States after the development of heavier-than-air flying machines in December, 1902. (Europeans had a bit of a jump on us here, as they had more wars.)

First, let's introduce one more fascinating fact into the mix:

The strikes by American warplanes in Basra, one on a militia stronghold and a second on a mortar team that was attacking Iraqi forces, were made at the request of the Iraqi Army, said Maj. Tom Holloway, a spokesman for the British Army in Basra.

Major Holloway said that the Americans conducted the air attack because the Iraqi security forces did not have aircraft capable of making such strikes. American and British forces have been flying surveillance runs over Basra since the latest fighting in the city began this week.

“I think the point here is actually that the Iraqis are capable, they are strong and they have been engaging successfully,” Major Holloway said.

All right; so in Basra, Iraqi forces are calling in airstrikes against stubborn targets of Mahdi Militia. Again, what's the point of this post? Isn't that SOP for modern warfare? Of course... and this brings us to the crux of the Times and its "understanding" of that subject. Read on:

But the airstrikes by coalition forces after a four-day stalemate in Basra suggested that the Iraqi military has not, on its own, been able to rout the militias, despite repeated statements by American and Iraqi officials that its fighting capabilities have vastly improved.

In other words, the Times hears that Iraqi army units routinely call in airstrikes during combat, which are supplied by American helicopters and fixed-wing attack aircraft -- and the Times pronounces that a failure of the Iraqi military. Have I missed something vital here?

Let's rephrase the sentence above. Suppose some reporter heard about an American action in which soldiers on the ground called in an airstrike against an enemy position:

But the airstrikes by the [Air Force] after a four-day stalemate in [Upper Iguana] suggested that the [Army Infantry] has not, on its own, been able to rout the militias, despite repeated statements by [Pentagon] officials that [the Infantry's] fighting capabilities have vastly improved.

Do you see why this statement is absurd? It's not a failure of the Infantry when they call for airstrikes from the Air Force, the Marines, the Navy, or even an Army aviation unit; that's how modern warfare has been conducted for decades. It's what distinguishes a modern army from a pre-modern one... coordination between different branches.

The extremely close operational relationship between ground and air forces, which coordinate so well nowadays that they fight as if they were a single unit, is one of the most significant developments of contemporary warfare. And that is exactly what happened in Basra... except in this case, the operational relationship was forged not just between different branches (infantry and aviation) of the same military, but between different branches of two different militaries, Iraq's and America's.

Far from constituting a failure on the Iraqis' part, this is exactly what "success" looks like: the coordination of all branches of allied militaries to achieve victory over the joint enemy.

But the Times doesn't get it; nobody has ever before suggested, so far as I recall, that every time we supply close air support to Iraqi units, that's a black mark against the latter. In reality, this is precisely the relationship we expect and need to see anent the New Iraqi army:

  1. When violence arises, the Iraqis make the initial response;
  2. They evaluate whether the situation can be handled by police or requires military force;
  3. If they decide upon the latter, they build up their own forces and make contact with the enemy, while we ready ourselves in case they need support;
  4. If the Iraqis decide they need support -- close air support, strategic bombing, aerial surveillance, or satellite intelligence -- and they don't have their own helos, fixed-wing aircraft, bombers, drones, or satellites available (they will probably never have MilSats), then they call on us... but it's the Iraqis who coordinate the attack, not the United States.

When all engagements proceed as the one in Basra has, then we can honestly say we have stood up a modern, effective, and independent Iraqi army. At that point, we can withdraw to well-defended bases in Iraq, whence we can sally forth not just to help keep Iraq free -- but also to fight anywhere in the Middle East where American national security requires our military presence.

That's not failure, "Pinch" Sulzberger; that is the face of victory.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 28, 2008, at the time of 3:55 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

March 27, 2008

Iran's Pawn Squirms Under Knights' Assault

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

All right, we've got good news and bad news. Which do you want first?

Why am I asking you?

The good news is that Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is proving steadfast at taking the initiative and maintaining operational tempo (like the military-sounding buzz phrases?) against the Iranian puppet Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Militia, ensconced in Basra, thanks to our British allies, and in the Sadr City slum of Baghdad. Basra is the second-largest city in Iraq and the center of its oil industry, according to Bill Roggio.

The bad news is that the elite news media still doesn't get it.

In the AP story, good and bad news crowd together like fans and hooligans jostling each other at a soccer match:

The Iraqi leader made his pledge to tribal leaders in the Basra area as military operations persisted for a fourth day with stiff resistance.

"We have made up our minds to enter this battle and we will continue until the end. No retreat," al-Maliki said in a speech broadcast on Iraqi state TV.

The events threatened to unravel a Mahdi Army cease-fire and lead to a dramatic escalation in violence after a period of relative calm that had lasted for months.

Let's get to the good stuff first... a line whose significance not even the reporter, Kim Gamel, realizes: "The Iraqi leader made his pledge to tribal leaders in the Basra area..."

What's significant about Maliki's audience is that he is talking to Shiite tribal leaders in Basra... the very people who would have been Sadr's strongest supporters just a year or so before. I highly doubt he would give a speech to his enemies; in Iraq, that's tantamount to suicide (without martyrdom). Thus the logical conclusion is that "salvation councils," by whatever names, are sweeping Shiite Iraq as they did Sunni Iraq, causing the Shia to reject Muqtada Sadr and his Iranian masters just as the Sunni turned on al-Qaeda this year.

Neither in the AP story nor the New York Times version do we find any recognition of this major breakthrough. Nevertheless, it presages a complete defeat of the Shiite insurgents; just as al-Qaeda in Iraq has been driven from pillar to pooch, to the point where they have but a single stronghold left, in Mosul... and in a few months, they will have none.

I anticipate the same fate for Iran's insurgents in Iraq; but the elite media doesn't understand that this is the real lede, not the fact that 5,000 Sadrites paraded around Sadr City with balloons and banners, protesting the crackdown.

Here is a naturally arising example, by the way, of the Argument by Tendentious Redefinition so beloved of the Left:

The demonstrating Sadrists are angry over recent raids and detentions, saying U.S. and Iraqi forces have taken advantage of the August cease-fire to crack down on the movement.

They have accused rival Shiite parties, which control Iraqi security forces, of engineering the arrests to prevent them from mounting an effective campaign after the Iraqi parliament agreed in February to hold provincial elections by the fall.

U.S. commanders have insisted the fight is being led by the Iraqi government and was not against al-Sadr's movement but breakaway factions believed to be funded and trained by Iran, which has denied the allegations.

The word "cease-fire" has two definitions: the order to stop shooting, or a negotiated truce between warring parties. Clearly this putative cease-fire was not the latter sort; neither we nor the Iraqis engaged in any negotiations to craft a truce with the Mahdi Militia.

But if all AP means is that the leader of the militia ordered his people to stop resisting, then what is the problem with "taking advantage" of that partial surrender to go after the holdouts who refuse to lay down their arms? That's a perfectly normal response -- not just here but in the Middle East, as well. Yet the protesters react as if Sadr's declaration of a unilateral cease-fire created a bilateral truce, which the Iraqis have violated.

It seems clear to me that this is the take-away AP pushes: Those dastardly, Bush-backed Iraqis took "advantage" of the trusting Sadrites to violate the cease-fire in a surprise attack!

But of course, a unilateral cease-fire is just that: one-sided. It imposes no moral or ethical obligation on anybody else, so long as a state of hostilities still exists (as clearly it does).

And of course, it's not as if even the Mahdi Militia itself were keeping this so-called "cease-fire." From Bill Roggio's post:

Basrah has seen an uptick in Iranian-backed terror activity since the British withdrew from the city late last year. Political assassinations and intimidation campaigns have been on the rise as the Iranians work to extend their influence in the oil-rich city....

Sadr's Mahdi Army has been formed by Iran's Qods Force along the lines of Lebanese Hezbollah. Imad Mugniyah, the senior Hezbollah military commander who was killed in Syria in February, was among those behind the formation and training of the Mahdi Army. Iran established the Ramazan Corps to run weapons, fighters, and support to the Special Groups, which include significant elements of Sadr's Mahdi Army.

With Sadr himself having, in his own words (per Roggio), "isolat[ed] myself in protest" of his own failure to conquer Iraq, drive out the Americans, and Islamicize the Iraqis, many of his former commanders have left Sadr behind and led their own attacks against the Iraq government and against the Coalition. Maliki had ample reason to go after them hammer and tooth.

Back to the protesters. The Times has more detail on their complaints, since that -- not the successful extension of the counterinsurgency by the Iraq army to Iran's proxies -- is the focus of the story:

In Baghdad, close-packed crowds numbering perhaps 5,000 demonstrated in Sadr City, the focal point of the capital’s protests, taking over the main street, chanting, dancing, holding up banners, and declaring their readiness to continue to oppose the Iraqi Army’s attempt to wrest control of Basra from Mr. Sadr’s Shiite militiamen, a major onslaught that began on Tuesday....

Some of the protesters criticized the United States -- Mr. Sadr considers the Americans occupiers -- but most of their criticism was aimed at Mr. Maliki and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Mr. Hakim leads the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has emerged as a rival political force to Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army and also commands a rival militia, the Badr Organization. [Which, however, has not been attacking anyone lately.]

The protesters criticized what they said was a strengthening alliance between Mr. Hakim’s political group and the Iraqi government to squeeze Mr. Sadr from power. Mr. Maliki’s government depends on support from Mr. Hakim’s party, reducing the need for alliances with the Mahdi Army and making it easier for Mr. Maliki to move against it.

(That shift in support from Muqtada Sadr -- Maliki's original patron -- to Hakim is a direct result of the Mahdi-Militia bloc boycotting the Iraqi parliament for several months last year. Smooth move, Ex-Lax.)

The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on; the Times disgorges the self-description by the protesters themselves, then makes no further comment. My sense is that they side (as usual) with the protesters but are cagey enough to realize that wouldn't go down well with most Americans; so they stand, silent and smug.

But let's ask ourselves: Don't we want "the Iraqi government to squeeze Mr. Sadr from power?" Isn't this the answer to exactly what war critics have decried, that radical Shia would turn Iraq into a theocracy? The Iraq army's Operation Knights' Assault, which (per Roggio) follows a troop buildup that began last August, is precisely aimed at the Iran-backed theocrats in the Mahdi Militia; what more could the Left ask for?

Oh, I forgot; they're only against theocracy and sharia where its allied with America, such as the UAE... where they're the wrong kind of theocrats. When theocracy is anti-American, as in Iran, then the Times is all for it.

Everything the protesters say should make a real American more supportive of Iraq, Maliki, and Operation Knights' Assault; yet by their refusal to take sides between Iran-controlled terrorists and ordinary Iraqis who just want to live their lives, the elite media in fact side with the Sadrites.

Finally, although they're forced to admit it's going fairly well so far, the media wants to assure us that it will all end in tears and defeat. Again from the Times:

American officials have presented the attempts by the Iraqi Army to secure Basra as an example of its ability to carry out a major operation on its own. But a failure there would be a serious embarrassment for the Iraqi government and for the army, as well as for American forces eager to demonstrate that the Iraqi units they have trained can fight effectively on their own.

During a briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday, a British military official said that of the nearly 30,000 Iraqi security forces involved in the assault, almost 16,000 were Basra police forces, which have long been suspected of being infiltrated by the same militias the assault was intended to root out.

I'm not sure I can take seriously such denigration coming from an official of our allies... who sadly failed in their task in Basra, even while we were succeeding in the rest of Iraq. Rather than switch to a counterinsurgency strategy and finish the job, as soon as Tony Blair passed the torch to Gordon Brown, the new prime minister pulled all the British troops back to the Basra airport. From the Guardian in September 2007:

The Iraqi flag flew over Basra Palace today as British troops completed their withdrawal from the city in a move Gordon Brown said was "pre-planned and organised" and not a defeat.

The removal of 550 British troops to the city's airport leaves Basra largely under the control of Iranian-backed Shia militias.

The move came as the US president, George Bush, made a surprise visit to Iraq in an attempt to win support from an increasingly sceptical US public for his "surge" of troops....

The 550 soldiers began handing over control of the palace, the last British stronghold in downtown Basra, to the Iraqi army shortly before 1am local time (2200 BST yesterday), the army said. They then joined the 5,000 other British troops based at an airfield 13 miles away on the fringes of the port city.

And now Basra has become the last redoubt of the mighty Mahdi Militia... and some British bloke sniffs that the operation to clean up the mess the Brits left won't work, because the Basra police are fatally compromised. Thanks, mate.

The hidden assumption is that all members of the Mahdi Militia are true believers who actually declare Muqtada Sadr to be the Mahdi Himself. But as we all know (or ought), a hallmark of powerful political movements is that they force everyone to join the party, literally.

Oskar Schindler likely joined the Nazi Party because it was the only way to do business in Nazi Germany. He obviously had no serious objections to Adolf Hitler -- at first; but by the same token, he was no Horst Wessel either.

The same is likely true for many Shia in Basra or Sadr City who "joined" the militias (Mahdi Militia or the Badr Brigades -- now the Badr Organization). There is no doubt that many members are fanatical fighters; but in addition, a great many are "fair-weather" members. The significance is that the latter can be turned.

Erstwhile "members" of AQI, tribal leaders who supported Musab Zarqawi in 2006, turned against the terrorist leader and against al-Qaeda in general in 2008, once they had a lingering, dyspeptic taste of the caliphate. So too can many "members" of the Mahdi Militia who have "infiltrated" the Basra police forces (alternatively, people who want jobs as policemen in Basra who discover that one of the de facto job requirements is to swear fealty to Muqtada Sadr) will turn, once they see that the federal government really is a government for all Iraqis, as Maliki and George W. Bush have been saying... and not under the leash of the Americans, as Sadr has said (from under the leash of Iran).

That is what counterinsurgency is all about; and that's what our eternal friends the Brits should have been doing in 2007 and 2008, instead of fleeing to the airport and prematurely handing over the province to "the Iraqis," without first inquiring exactly which Iraqis were reaching for it.

But better late than not at all. Let Operation Knights' Assault continue and the good news roll!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 27, 2008, at the time of 6:11 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

March 22, 2008

Democrat: War Without Fascism... What's the Point?

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

No, that's not what freshman senator and longtime congressman Robert Menendez (D-NJ, 90%) intended to say; but if he knew anything about either economics, military strategy, or history, he would have realized what his actual point was:

With U.S. troops entering their sixth year of combat in Iraq, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez demanded Saturday that President Bush give an honest assessment of the costs of the conflict.

You keep using that word, "honest." I do not think it means what you think it means.

Menendez responded, "President Bush should tell us the truth -- that after thousands of lives lost and perhaps [he's not sure?] trillions of American taxpayer dollars, Iraq remains crippled by violence and corruption, still light-years [sic] from building a stable government or a lasting peace." [Does Menendez think a light year is a measure of time?]

"Crippled" should be a comparative term, because what Menendez really means is that Iraq is not as stable or peaceful as the United States, or Great Britain, or Canada. But what about compared to Pakistan, where the Musharaff government is about to fall, the president himself will likely be prosecuted, and civil war may erupt -- where one of the sides will be the Taliban?

Or how about compared to Iran, where internal violence against the Iranian people is endemic, thought crime can be punished with death by stoning, the state employs a terrorist group (Hezbollah) as internal police, and the ruling mullahs are so despised that the government only survives by tyranny and the simulation of elections?

For that matter, Iraq doesn't even look that bad compared to Israel right now: The violence is definitely higher, but at least Iraq is actively fighting against it -- and at least the government more or less accurately represents the desires of the Iraqi people (defeat the terrorists and live in peace).

But I suspect the real explanation of Sen. Menendez's absurdist claim is that he hasn't actually reexamined the condition of Iraq and the progress of the war since he was appointed to replace Jon Corzine in January of 2006. He's completely ignorant of the counterinsurgency and everything that has happened since July of 2007.

The senator argued that the war "has severely depleted the resources and morale of our armed forces" and said Bush should acknowledge "that because of Iraq, we haven't finished the job in Afghanistan, al-Qaida is regrouping and our hunt for America's No. 1 enemy -- Osama bin Laden -- has been compromised."

So Menendez is vexed that we've been so busy nation-building in Iraq that we haven't had time to nation-build in Afghanistan?

The Democrats have a fetish with "finding Osama." I think they envision a human chain of soldiers who would join hands and sweep Afghanistan from one end to the other, eventually netting Mr. Big... a very cooperative Mr. Big who wouldn't, for example, slip across the border into Pakistan or hide out in a cave in the Tora Bora Mountains, laughing at the blundering efforts to find him where he is not.

Although I would love for us to find bin Laden, that is not the central focus of the war against global caliphism. The purpose of the long war is to protect the peace and security of the United States of America; that means defeating the global caliphists, not dropping everything to throw our entire Army into finding one long-disempowered monster.

Bin Laden, far as we can tell, no longer has any operational control over what we loosely call "al-Qaeda." He still has spiritual value, but he will continue to have it even after being captured or killed (caliphism is very big on martyrs). It's far more important that we booted the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan, that they're rising in Pakistan, that we obliterated al-Qaeda in Iraq and turned the Iraqi Sunnis against them and many of the Shia away from Muqtada Sadr and his Iranian masters, and that Europe is succumbing to the temptation to be tolerant of the radically intolerant.

It's important to build a modern, civilized nation in Afghanistan; but that is going to be a much more extensive project than doing the same in Iraq. Afghanistan is far more primitive and barbarous a country; it's civilized than Pakistan, which had the benefit of a couple of centuries of rule by the British Empire.

"New Left" Democrats have the attention span of mayflies. If the war is not all neatly wrapped up after 43 minutes of actual plot (not counting commercials and end credits), like Kosovo, they lose interest and wander away. What does Robert Menendez imagine would happen, if only we pulled 150,000 troops out of Iraq and sent them into Afghanistan?

  1. We would quickly capture bin Laden (who probably isn't even in Afghanistan);
  2. This would cause the collapse of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, so we could all go back to "situation normal, nothing has changed?"

This vision of the long war is frankly childish. It's not too much to ask that in time of war, we elect grownups to the United States Senate.

Finally, we get to the meat of Menendez's complaint, and indeed that of virtually every Democrat in Congress:

Menendez also linked the cost of the war to the United States' faltering economy. "Instead of building barracks in Iraq, we could be helping millions of Americans avoid losing their homes to foreclosure," he said. "Instead of policing the streets of Baghdad, we could be investing in universal health care and a better education system."

There you go: Were it not for the Iraq war, the federal government could take over even more of the nation's economy! Were it not for the money spent on the Iraq war, we could seize control of the housing market; we could offer socialist health care for (rather, force it upon) all American residents, both legal and illegal; and we could finally get rid of those infuriating private schools, which insist upon rowing against the current, countering our vital reeducation efforts in the public schools.

George W. Bush invaded two countries; but he forgot to use that "crisis" to circumvent the normal democratic procecures and reorganize all of society along military lines. The latter is classical fascism... and it is Democrats, not Republicans, who generally practice it (Wilson, FDR, Johnson). If either Obama or Hillary is elected this November, don't imagine for a moment that we'll withdraw from the war against global caliphism; the new Democratic president will simply use the global "crisis" to institute public and private "cooperation and coordination" and eliminate all that wasteful competition of the free market.

We may pull out of Iraq; but when it subsequently collapses, we'll have to go back in; and that will become yet another crisis du jour, to go along with global militant Islamism, global economic collapse (Democrats create the very crises they then exploit), and global warming:

  • To institute socialized medical "alliances" between government and private health-care experts eerily similar to Benito Mussolini's business alliances;
  • To seize control of industry in the name of the environment;
  • To draft "hate-speech" laws and create an American Human Rights Commission that will finally outlaw all that pesky dissent;
  • To reinstate Woodrow Wilson's sedition laws, criminalizing non-cooperation with the Progressivist agenda;
  • To seize more and more national resources through confiscatory taxation and onerous regulation;
  • To use that vast, new revenue stream to reeducate and reform Americans' health and morals -- from what we are allowed to eat, drink, and smoke to what we are allowed to watch, read, and think -- along the lines of It Takes a Village (and Nineteen Eighty-Four);
  • And always, always, to do an end-run around normal democracy, Capitalism, and individual choice... because, during this emergency, there's no time to waste on debate or disputation. The time for selfish indulgence is past; we need action, action, action!

That is what Menendez wants, as does Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%), Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%), and the entire Democratic congressional leadership and the gaggle of committee chairs. This is the core of Progressivism, and has been for more than a century: They long for a terrifying intermarriage between Maximilien Robespierre and Otto von Bismarck, between Jacobite France and totalitarian Prussia.

Had they the opportunity -- under either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama -- they would cast off all restraint and simply implement what they "know" is necessary. After all, they have the vision; how could they allow mere voters to elect the wrong person?

At core, Robert Menendez's great complaint is that we have our war, but we haven't exploited it to get our fascism. Bush has failed to grasp that war is the health of the fascist state... he's completely missed the point of going to war in the first place.

We've squandered the opportunity to abuse the crisis of the moment to implement eternal tyranny over the mind of Man... for our own good, of course. And all for the want of a Democratic president!

Thanks, Senator Menendez, for letting the mask slip. Once again, the choice come November is clear.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 22, 2008, at the time of 4:24 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Failing to Fight the War Machine

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Brad

Here is a rare (too rare!) post from our co-conspirator, Brad Linaweaver.

Brad began his political life at the age of four, during the Spanish-American war; he was a conservative then, but the 1960s made him a libertarian, and he burned his AARP card in protest. Then, after viewing the horrors of 9/11, he rose from his walker to become, for the first time, a spry, robust, athletic supporter of what he termed (with pride) "American imperialism."

But he became disenchanted with the war in recent days. Still sharp as a hammer at 114 years young, Brad has now reverted back to libertarianism, going so far as to brazenly, nakedly support Ron Paul for president (it is indeed a blight for sour eyes). He put his clothes back on to be interviewed by Ron Garmon for City Beat's "The Great Hollywood Peace Parade"... yet another left-wing magazine covering Tinseltown as the center of the universe.

(Oddly enough, these progressive corporate dupes have cleverly designed their website so that it's only readable when using Microsoft Internet Explorer; if you use Netscape or Firefox, the text comes up black on black, which is rather hard to read. You must select all the text in order to peruse the article. I'm sorry, but I just find it hilariously ironic that an über-left film rag plays lickspittle to Bill Gates!)

Here -- extracted for your viewing pleasure from endless ramblings about self-immolating musicians, Code Pinko ANSWERistas, and the inevitable fake coffins, puppets, and inflatable beavers -- is Brad's contribution to this magnum gropus. Without führer adieu, heeeeeeeeere's Bradford...!

~

The Republican Party should not pretend to spread democracy to the benighted regions of the world. That is not in the Republican party's job description. Bush is in the wrong comic book. Bill Buckley thought his Iraq policy “un-conservative,” a fact noted by Fox News in his obituary, which I thought unusually fair and balanced of them.

The left is completely failing to fight the war machine. They won in '06 and have failed ever since. They don’t understand even now how the corporate power-elite runs both parties. George W. Bush is such a happy man these days. Why? He’s done his job, serving his masters well, giving us a foothold in Iraq forever. We will never leave. McCain is being unduly optimistic when he said we’d be there a hundred years. We’ll be in Iraq as long as the American Empire exists. Bush went there for one reason -- to stay there.

They’d rather kill people than develop alternative energy.

~

Back to Dafydd. Needless to say, I'll put up a post relatively soon responding to Brad's post, with which I, ahem, take some issue.

Hatched by Brad on this day, March 22, 2008, at the time of 5:14 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 19, 2008

Bad Break for Barack, Wonderful Win for World

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In a stunning disappointment to the Barack Obama candidacy, the Iraq presidential council did a U-turn today and approved parliament's plan for provincial elections in the fall. Alas, the news is even worse than that: All sides agree that the determinant factor in the reversal was the undiplomatic behavior of Vice President Dick Cheney, who reportedly sternly argued the council into withdrawing its objection.

A confusticated Obama may now have to revamp his line that "[John McCain] completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America's enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades," unless the audacious change-agent intends to argue that a successful, stable democracy itself emboldens our enemies.

From the AP story:

Under strong U.S. pressure, Iraq's presidential council signed off Wednesday on a measure paving the way for provincial elections by the fall, a major step toward easing sectarian rifts as the nation marks the fifth anniversary of the war.

The decision by the council, made up of the country's president and two vice presidents, lays the groundwork for voters to choose new leaders of Iraq's 18 provinces. The elections open the door to greater Sunni representation in regional administrations.

And on the Cheney connection:

The decision by the council came two days after Vice President Dick Cheney visited Baghdad to press Iraqi leaders to overcome their differences and take advantage of a lull in violence to make progress in power-sharing deals to heal sectarian and ethnic divisions.

A spokesman for the biggest Sunni bloc, Saleem Abdullah, said Cheney pushed hard for progress on the provincial elections as well as a long-stalled measure to share the country's oil wealth.

This is one of the four major political "litmus tests" of the success of the counterinsurgency that began last July. The Iraq government must enact:

  1. Provincial elections.

    Elections are now completely signed off at the federal level; it's up to the provinces to design the specifics of each provincial election, much as our own states set up the specifics of gubernatorial and state legislative elections.

  2. A "long-term security arrangement" with the United States to allow us to keep troops there for regional stability.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that Cheney obtained endorsements from the two most powerful Shiite leaders in Iraq (not counting Muqtada Sadr, who is probably still in Iran) for a continued security agreement that would allow us to remain at bases in Iraq. Both Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Sayyed Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq), the largest party in parliament, urged us to stay and gave personal assurances that we would have long-term bases in Iraq for American troops.

  3. An oil-revenue sharing bill.

    According to the same WSJ article --

    There is some reason for hope there too, despite the seemingly endless negotiations that have already taken place over the oil law. After the breakdown in negotiations last year, Kurdistan moved ahead with production agreements with some international oil companies. But Baghdad has responded by essentially freezing those companies out of negotiations for its central government contracts, diminishing their interest.

    And U.S. officials in Iraq say the central government is consolidating its power over oil in other ways. They note privately that the Iraqi central government soon will begin awarding contracts to major multinational oil companies to improve production on the country's giant existing fields, as a likely prelude to contracts for new exploration and production. Kurdistan, meanwhile, has to worry about an eventual cutoff of the revenue sharing that it's now receiving from the central government.

    Iraq's proven oil reserves are so big that only Saudi Arabia's and Iran's are thought to be larger... and Iraq's reserves have barely been tapped so far.

  4. Anti-debaathification laws to allow former members of the Baath Party -- who do not have blood on their hands -- to return to civic life in Iraq.

    When the parliament approved the provincial elections law last month, it was bundled with a general amnesty law that would release all Baathists from prison except for two classes:

    Those held in U.S. custody;

    Those who are charged with or were convicted of specific charges: "terrorism, kidnapping, rape, antiquities smuggling, adultery and homosexuality."

    This was the most important anti-de-Baathification law to pass; the same law also allowed former Baathists (except the above) to once again take jobs in the public sector. Anti-de-Baathification has by most measures been resolved, leading to greater reconciliation.

Given such sweeping, positive political changes since the counterinsurgency produced such a huge drop in killings and al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, the elite media find it ever harder to maintain both party solidarity with the Democrats and also their own credibility. Still, the Democrats been banging the drum and pronouncing that there's no need to worry... all is still lost! (Evidently, the tape loop from 2006 is still running through the heads of the heads of the elite media.)

For real people living in the real world, however, Iraq has turned around and is now a victory at a level it would have been difficult to imagine just eighteen months ago. It appears that even when al-Qaeda and allied terrorists celebrate a historic, holy conquest, it's as ephemeral as Democratic-Party unity.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 19, 2008, at the time of 7:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 15, 2008

Persistence of (the) Vision and the Crisis-Myths of the Fascist Left

Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

I am always amazed by the curious immunity the Left has to truth, no matter how well established, if it doesn't fit what Thomas Sowell calls "the vision of the anointed." A factoid that seems to fit the preexisting story persists forever, regardless of how often debunked... just as creationists cite the same "failures" of evolutionary theory over and over, without regard to lengthy -- sometimes even book-length -- debunking:

  • The "stupidity and illiteracy" of George W. Bush (and Ronald W. Reagan), 1999-2008 (1979-2008);
  • The Mohammed al-Dura "murder by Israelis" in 2000;
  • The Bush "suppression" of the black vote in Florida in the 2000 election;
  • The Florida vote in 2000 that Al Gore would have won if "all the votes" were counted;
  • The "specific warning" from the CIA before the 9/11 attacks of 2001;
  • Our Afghan allies who "deliberately allowed bin Laden to escape" from Tora Bora in 2001;
  • The "Jenin massacre" of 2002;
  • The Bush administration "lying us into war" in 2003;
  • The Iraqi "wedding party" massacre in 2004;
  • Police Captain Jamil "Lt. Kyje" Hussein, 2004-2006;
  • "Murders" in the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina in 2005;
  • The "Iraqi civil war" of 2006-2007;

But one has persisted above all others: The ludicrous Johns Hopkins "survey" that found more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed by the Iraq war. It persists to this day, despite repeated, highly credible debunkings by everyone from statisticians to the military to the Associated Press to the Iraqi government itself. And here it bubbles up again from AP -- an unquestioned bit of lore that has become part of the Left's Iraq-war catechism:

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, 3,987 American soldiers and at least 128 journalists have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led war began. But to me, they were all just numbers until last year.

The best estimate actually available is on a website called Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, which is updated from all reports filed by the international and American elite media, the United States and coalition militaries, and by the Iraq government. As of March 13th, they estimate total Iraqi civilian deaths to be 40,765 plus some unknown number killed before 2005; but civilian casualties were low in the early days of the war (prior to the destruction of the al Askiriya "Golden Dome" mosque in Samarra in 2006).

Thus, the best evidence that comes from actually counting bodies finds only 7% of the original "estimate" from Johns Hopkins, and only 4.7% of their later, upgraded guess of more than a million deaths. But the myth persists and probably will continue to be misreported as fact a hundred years from now, when government-mandated history books will use it to teach the "history" of our imperialist, oil-stealing warmongering in Iraq.

The myth of the 600,000 (or one million) dead Iraqis is successful precisely because it feeds into the general "crisis-myth" of the Left: That America is being led to economic and political disaster (recession, tyranny, loss of rights) by a ruinous war started by the Capitalists to steal Iraq's oil and make billions of dollars for their fat-cat cronies. But really, all the myths above tend to the same overarching story... the imperialist warmongering and crimes against humanity of America and Israel, and the concommitent victimhood of the Left and the ummah.

Before fascism can really take hold, the fascists must discover (or create) an enduring myth of a great crisis that will serve to unify the country under the banner of national socialism; for the Nazis, the myths they finally settled upon were the perfidy of the Jewish "race" (of course) -- and the "martyrdom" of Horst Wessel, a National Socialist street fighter who was killed by a Communist (perhaps even a Jewish Communist!) in 1930.

The triple-crisis comprised the clinging vestiges of Capitalism (which had brought Germany to the disasterous Great War and the Treaty of Versailles, the Nazis preached), the rise of Communism (which threatened to erase national boundaries and put Russians and Slavs above Aryan Germans), and naturally, the mindless genius of the Jews -- who, despite being inferior to Aryans in every way (physically, intellectually, and morally), had managed to foil the rightful ambitions of the master race again and again. Against all three crises stood the bulwark of the Nazi Party.

Wessel came originally from the radical monarchist German National People's Party, but he left them and joined the Nazi Party (and its militant core, the SA "stormtroopers") in 1926. He was an amateur poet as well as a brownshirt, and his poem "Die Fahne hoch" ("Raise the Flag High") became the official Nazi anthem, which today we call the Horst Wessel song.

Although Wessel was a minor player of little account during his lifetime, after he was slain, Josef Goebbels seized upon the "martyr" and turned him into the great, unifying myth-figure of the Nazi movement, according to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. Calling him the "Socialist Christ," Goebbels churned out hundreds of thousands of words of "hagiography" about Wessel and his heroic combat against Capitalists, Communists, and Jews.

The fascist crisis-myth is vital to the movement, whether in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s or America in the 21st century, because of its ability to unify the people (Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!), to crush dissent (stop the mouths of seditionists!), and to rally die Volk behind a leader who will make quick decisions to save them (no time for democracy in such an emergency!).

Fascism's great goal is always the complete unity of the people, the land, and the leader. In practice, of course, eine Reich must become Lebensraum: Socialist states are by nature contraeconomic and can only survive by relentless expansion and conquest; when they run out of land to conquer, they collapse under the bloat of their own unworkable economic policies... as the Soviet Union did in 1991.

They are also by nature totalitarian; and the first step in seizing power is generally to take control of the nation's news sources. By controlling the newspapers and airwaves, they get to write the mythic "first draft of history" without pesky debate or dispute from the peanut gallery. Hence the continued rush of modern American liberals into journalism for the entire twentieth century and what we've experienced of the twenty-first... as well as into other information-hoarding and -controlling fields, such as publishing, teaching, the law, the federal and state bureaucracies, and Hollywood.

This has given the Left command of news and opinion (propaganda mongering), popular novels and histories, children's education and indoctrination, legal interpretation and regulatory regimes, and the great American mass-art forms, television and the movies. Thus they hope to control the totality of information that passes before the eyes, ears, and ultimately the minds of the American people:

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
-- "George Orwell" (Eric Blair), Nineteen Eighty-Four

The American fascist moment came (and went) in the teens, under President Woodrow Wilson; it came and went again in the 1930s and 40s, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It came and went a third time in the 1960s and 70s, with the rise of the fascist New Left and the riots, takeovers, demands, and murders of the SDS and Weathermen, NOW, the Black Panthers, the gay-rights movement, and finally the Symbionese Liberation Army. The Left lives eternally with the audacity of hope that a facist utopia is just around the corner.

The unifying crisis-myth of the first fascist moment was the purification of morals by Prohibition, of the national soul by the Great War, and of the white race by "scientific eugenics." This was summed up by Woodrow Wilson's slogan "100% Americanism," and resulted in mass arrest of "seditionists," press censorship, and rule by presidential decree and executive committee.

The unifying myth of the second fascist moment was first the Great Depression that was "caused by Laissez-Faire Capitalism;" and later by the war against the Nazis and their Japanese allies. These crises resulted in the New Deal, which again allowed the president to bypass all normal democratic channels in the rush to remake the entire country according to a "progressive" (fascist) model -- complete with yet another scapegoat race. (First the Jews, then the blacks, now the Japanese; it's not coincidental that FDR was Wilson's Assistant Secretary of the Navy.)

And the unifying myths of the third American fascist moment were:

  • Consciousness raising via psychedelic drugs, music, street theater, puppets, teach-ins, and protests to produce the new, psychedelicized, socialist man;
  • The rise of feminism against patriarchial oppression;
  • The rise of Black Power against the institutionalized racism of "the system;"
  • The rise of countless other protest movements (parodied by Allan Sherman's "the 'Let's All Call Up AT&T and Protest to the President' March," decrying "all-digit dialing" of telephone numbers). The real, underlying purpose of all these "movements" was to level the entire American establishment ("the Man"), so a radical, Stalinist society could be installed in its place. (Hillary Clinton, the man who would be queen, was deeply enmeshed in this radical movement.)

This "consciousness raising" resulted in the entire panoply of Great Society programs: the civil rights movement, the "war on poverty," the Department of Education, the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Medicare and Medicaid, the National Endowment for the Arts and for the Humanities, and modern radical environmentalism (the Endangered Species Act, the Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts, and so forth). All had the same purpose: the complete nationalization of American life and the end of Federalism.

The last fascist moment was not as successful or totalitarian as the first two, to a large extent because the unifying myths didn't really unify. There was never any national front; the radicals forgot about what the Nazis called the "forgotten man," or what Richard Nixon dubbed at the time the "silent majority."

Thus, the radicals were undercut by "reformers," more moderate in ideology but no less obsessed with power, including the national leader, President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The radical leftists turned on Johnson (and against the Vietnam War, where we clearly were on "the wrong side," they -- including John Kerry -- decided) even during his presidency -- "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" -- forcing him to withdraw from his reelection campaign in 1968. To this day, leftists hate and despise Johnson.

So far, we have not reached any fascist moment today; the forces of liberal fascism -- many of them youths, as the usual pattern has it, but also quite a few aging hippies, Yippies, and other moldy, 60s leftovers -- have been singularly unsuccessful in their quest for a unifying myth... but as we see, it's certainly not for lack of trying.

The problem is still, as it was four decades ago, that the crisis-myths the radicals put forward (see the top of this post) exclude ordinary people; they still have not learned the lesson that you cannot foment a fascist revolution by appealing only to the fringes. Populism, a necessary element of fascism, only works when one appeals to the center of the population.

The radical revolutionary also cannot attack the military itself; he must co-opt it. In the end, all civilian society must be militarized; thus the successful radical must champion and extol martial virtues, such as courage, sacrifice, obedience, and dehumanization of the enemy. Jingoistic chants of "question authority" (or more strongly, "f--- authority") actually undermine the stated goal of revolutionary transformation: The very system the Left wants to impose on the American people is even more authoritarian than what we have now; and the same slogans they sling with such wild abandon are sent stampeding, like Hannibal's elephants, back through the ranks of the attackers.

To produce another fascist moment, the Left will have to abandon its anti-authoritarian rhetoric and refocus on pure, unabashed, and unstinting populism, where the masses have the "right" to whatever material possessions they think will make them happy... money, cars, consumer electronics, food, drugs, free health care, and free sex; but they must combine this with a censorious control of all aspects of Americans' lives, from drinking alcohol to smoking cigarettes to driving recreational vehicles to (naturally) what they can read, watch, or listen to. You have a right to satisfaction of all your material needs -- but only as we specify.

And they will need an all-purpose scapegoat; that is just as essential as populism -- someone to blame for the inevitable crises intentionally provoked and created by the leader.

We're just beginning to see exactly that progression in the alliance of the New Left and the Global Caliphists, which really began with the 1979 Islamist revolution in Iran; say what you will about Wahhabis, Salafis, and Khomeiniites... they know how to unify a people through mass-media propaganda, and they know how to fight. The Left can learn a lot from their new mentors; the rise of extreme antisemitism among American and especially European "Progressives" indicates they've become good students.

Keep your eyes on the liberal crisis-myths. The time to worry is when they start to "make sense" to regular Americans; that is when they become truly dangerous.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 15, 2008, at the time of 6:35 PM | Comments (24) | TrackBack

February 25, 2008

Bombs and Bombast

Afghan Astonishments , Future of Warfare , Immigration Immolations , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , On the Border , Pakistan Perplexities
Hatched by Dafydd

In a post today, Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics gleefully reports that the "virtual fence" program hasn't worked well so far:

Keith Epstein of Businessweek reports that the "virtual fence" all the candidates kept referring to (especially the GOP ones) as the cornerstone of border security turned out to be a miserable failure....

Doesn't this hurt McCain, given that the virtual fence was one of the tools he was counting on to help deliver his promise of "certifying" the security of the border? Will he have commit to building the real "g**damn fence" now?

No, it shouldn't hurt McCain... any more than the early failures of the ballistic missile defense system seriously hurt the BMD program. It just means we have to keep building the physical fence -- while continuing to work on the virtual one.

For some reason, the idea of a virtual fence became the focal point of the ire of immigration-absolutists during the debate last year over McCain-Kennedy. It became vital to anti-plea-bargain conservatives to "debunk" the virtual fence, presumably on the grounds that only a real fence -- three hundred feet high and sixty feet thick, dotted with machine-gun emplacements and sporting a minefield -- could keep out the illegal Mexicans.

They saw the virtual fence as a heavily watered drink some cheapskate bartender was trying to foist on them.

Do I sound a bit caustic? Sorry, I tend to get that way when Republicans act-out like Democrats. In particular, the reflexive bias against technology has always set my teeth on fire.

Democrats in the 1980s became hysterical at the thought of a technological shield against incoming nuclear missiles; and now the conservative wing of the GOP is running around like a chicken with its legs cut off over the possibility of a technological shield against illegal immigration.

I can only conclude that they believe even breathing the words "virtual fence" amounts to "surrender" and "amnesty," as if it were always just a ruse to avoid building a real fence. But the areas suggested for the virtual fence are precisely those that have such rugged terrain that (a) there are hardly any illegal crossings, and (b) it's extremely difficult (if not impossible) to build a "real" fence in the first place.

So that those areas would not be left totally unguarded, various people proposed a network of radar installations, cameras, motion detectors, heat sensors, and a computer system tying it all together... modeled roughly on the Aegis combat system that protects many of our cruisers and destroyers.

Regardless of whether or not this particular version of a virtual fence has worked, we absolutely need one. Believe it or not, keeping out Mexicans is not the only problem we have that requires some sort of barrier:

  • The border with Canada is vastly bigger than the southern border, and it would take a long, long time to toss a fence across it;
  • And then, of course, there's the Gulf of Mexico; terrorists can boat up the Gulf and hop out onto the beach;
  • And there are the Iraqi borders with Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran;
  • And don't forget the borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and (naturally) Iran;
  • Not to mention borders between our allies and their enemiess;
  • Finally, any physical fence that can be built -- can be breached; cf. the fence that used to separate Gaza from Egypt. Even if we could literally build fences separating us from all potential enemies, those fences can be tunneled under, flown over, or blown up.

We need to keep working on the virtual fence because we are soon going to need it -- desperately, and in many, many places. Similarly, it's a darned good thing that we kept working on BMD, despite early failures of the components of the original Strategic Defense Initiative (particle-beam technology, railgun ground launchers, nuclear-powered pulse weapons)... because now we really, really need it for a completely unforseen adversary. Thank goodness we have it.

It's quite reasonable to argue that the virtual fence technology is not yet good enough to rely upon, so we need to build a physical barrier. But it's wrong -- one of those few actions that are always wrong -- to heap scorn upon a technological program because the early alpha-tests weren't entirely successful. Worse than wrong, it's foolish, Luddite, and short-sighted.

By all means, build the physical double-fencing along the southern border with Mexico; but don't delude yourselves that that's all we need. Or that we'll never need the virtual fence. Or even that we'll actually be able to build an effective physical fence everywhere that we need to stop people from coming... or even along the entire southern border itself.

The physical fence is a stopgap; we urgently need to do two things. As Caiaphas says in Jesus Christ Super Star, "We need a more permanent solution to our problem":

  1. Perfect the virtual-fence, smart-card, and employer verification technologies;
  2. Reform our own legal immigration system so that it is rational, just, and above all, predictable, to take the pressure of millions off the wall.

When law-abiding, eager-to-assimilate immigrants see a system that tells them what they need do to be granted residency or citizenship, they will follow the legal brick road. Contrariwise, if they see a system that arbitrarily excludes them, while welcoming much less assimilable immigrants with open arms, the pressure to just give up and sneak into the country, making a better life for their wives and chilren, becomes overwhelming.

(Imagine that you go through four or five years of university, passing all classes and tests; but at the end, somebody hands you a pair of dice... and you only get your diploma if you roll ten or higher.)

Until these two problems are solved, a physical fence is just a very wide target for bombs -- and bombast.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 25, 2008, at the time of 10:09 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 15, 2008

She's a Self-Made Fool

Dancing Democrats , Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy
Hatched by Dafydd

Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) said, just a few days ago, that despite the now impossible to deny military success of the "surge" (how I hate that misleading word, whether Democrat or Republican uses it), the entire Iraq war is lost because the Iraqi government hasn't made any political progress.

Then Wednesday, as if on cue, the Iraqi parliament enacted legislation for provincial elections... resolving one of the three central political -- er -- quagmires standing in the way of building a relatively free and relatively democratic Iraqi nation. (The other two are anti-de-Baathification, which was passed some weeks ago; and oil revenue sharing, which is very close to being fully resolved.)

It appears the Iraqi parliament has accomplished more of its own agenda than has Nancy Pelosi since she and her cronies took over Congress thirteen months ago.

The capper came last night, when the Speaker refused even to call a vote on semi-permanizing the FISA reforms that passed by more than two-thirds in the Senate and had a solid majority already declared for passage in the House. It was simply more important to Nan to:

  • Slime the Bush administration by passing -- on a narrow, party-line vote -- "contempt of Congress" charges against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Chief Counsel Harriet Miers... for not confessing that political appointees were appointed for partially political reasons;
  • Pay off their biggest special-interest donors, the trial lawyers, who want to get rich feeding off the carcass of the telecom industry, which had the misfortune to agree to help the government track down terrorists in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, no good deed goes unpunished -- by Democrat-supporting trial lawyers. (By the way... once the lawyers sue Big Telephone out of existence, who will offer the conference-call service litigators live for?)

Looks like Senate Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) may have to share his booby prize with his sister across the Rotunda.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 15, 2008, at the time of 3:51 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 26, 2008

Twisted-Talk Express

Iraq Matters , Presidential Campaign Camp and Porkinstance
Hatched by Dafydd

If this report is true -- and it certainly seems to be -- then John McCain has done a despicable thing... and has made it clearer than ever that in his heart, he is a Democrat -- and in the Clintonian mold:

John McCain accused Mitt Romney of wanting to withdraw troops from Iraq, drawing immediate protest from his Republican presidential rival who said: "That's simply wrong and it's dishonest, and he should apologize...."

As the two candidates campaigned along the state's southwest coast, McCain sought the upper hand with a new line of criticism, telling reporters in Ft. Meyers about Iraq: "If we surrender and wave a white flag, like Senator Clinton wants to do, and withdraw, as Governor Romney wanted to do, then there will be chaos, genocide, and the cost of American blood and treasure would be dramatically higher."

Minutes earlier, the Arizona senator took a slap at Romney without naming him during a question-and-answer session with Floridians, saying: "Now, one of my opponents wanted to set a date for withdrawal that would have meant disaster."

Mitt Romney immediately and vociferously objected that this was utterly false, and he demanded that McCain apologize; instead, the senator doubled down:

Campaigning later in Sun City, McCain took note of Romney's demand for an apology and said it is his GOP rival who should apologize to U.S. troops in Iraq "who are serving this nation in hard times and good" for his position.

So what is McCain talking about? The Associated Press, generally a reliable corner man for McCain (at least during primary season), has flatly sided with Romney this time, albeit while trying to softpedal McCain's false accusation:

While Romney has never set a public date for withdrawal, he has said that President Bush and Iraqi leaders should have private timetables and benchmarks with which to gauge progress on the war and determine troop levels. He has said publicly that he agrees with Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, that U.S. troops could move to more of an oversight role in 2008.

If this account is true -- and it would be passing strange were AP to lie on behalf of Mitt Romney in order to damage John McCain -- then what does this tell us about Mr. "Straight Talk?" I do believe this account for the most obvious of reasons: I have never heard Romney say anything like what McCain claimed he said, and McCain was unable to produce any quotation from Romney to back up his vile accusation.

Rather, Romney has certainly backed the counterinsurgency strategy since it began, long before it bore fruit; here is a statement from Romney dated January 10th, 2007, in which he flatly, completely, and unreservedly supports the then-new policy.

On May 30th, he again cautioned against withdrawal.

In April, he spoke to the Hill, saying President Bush and President Nouri al-Maliki should have their own, private set of timetables and milestones, to monitor progress in Iraq; he said nothing about any withdrawal, and he emphasized that any such measures of progress should be kept strictly secret:

“There’s no question that the president and Prime Minister al-Maliki [of Iraq] have to have a series of timetables and milestones that they speak about, but those shouldn’t be for public pronouncement. ... You don’t want the enemy to understand how long they have to wait in the weeds until you're going to be gone,” Romney said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

While Romney stopped short of describing his preferred timetables as a path leading to U.S. withdrawal from Iraq [that is, he said nothing whatsoever about withdrawal], the concept of secret guideposts for war policy closely resembles Pryor’s plan, which the centrist Democrat first put in writing last month as an amendment to his leadership’s non-binding resolution on troop redeployment.

Romney says we should have secret milestones to evaluate the war's progress; some Democrat says we should have secret milestones and also a date-certain for withdrawal. Ergo, logically, Romney must support the timed withdrawal as well! We deduce this based upon the well-known rule of inference that if two things are roughly similar in one respect, they must therefore be identical in every respect (the Law of Vague Similarlity Means Complete Equality).

Finally, at a town-hall meeting Romney held last September, Romney detailed his Iraq plan:

Romney, along with all the presidential hopefuls, is keeping a close eye on the briefing that Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Amb. to Iraq Ryan Crocker are set to deliver to Congress next week.

While emphasizing to the New Hampshire audience tonight that to withdraw precipitously would bring considerable "regional consequences," Romney emphasized in some of the most detailed language he's used yet about the conflict that he sees the surge that Petraeus and Crocker are to report on as the first element in a three-step process designed to minimize the American presence in Iraq.

After the surge, Romney said he envisioned a draw-down of U.S. troops where those who remained would take on a "support role" away from the front-lines.

Beyond that phase, Romney said he would then like to move to a "stand-by" posture. "Our troops are out of Iraq and are available if absolutely needed" at this point, he explained.

He said he sees these three phases "happening relatively soon," specifically noting that if progress is made getting to the "support role" could happen next year. But while hoping for the best, Romney noted that he'd be monitoring the situation closely "to see what kind of success we are having at each stage."

Anybody besides John McCain see a "date for withdrawal" in that plan? Perhaps I'm just missing it.

Here's some straight talk: Romney's plan was almost identical to that of Gen. David Petraeus, Adm. William Fallon, and George W. Bush; that is exactly what they have all said all along: After the COIN is successful, we can begin withdrawing troops... cautiously.

I can draw only two possible conclusions from this shameless attack on Mitt Romney by John McCain:

  1. Either Mr. "Straight Talk" has demonstrated that he will (if he gets desperate enough) stoop to fabricating accusations against his enemies... that is, to flatly lying about them;
  2. Or else, that John McCain rejects the Petraeus plan as a betrayal and believes there should never be any drawdown in Iraq; in addition, he doesn't want even internal, secret milestones to gauge our progress there... McCain will simply know, via mystic gnosis, how it's going and what to do next.

That is, John McCain wants us to maintain our current level of 160,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely, no matter what the facts on the ground may be, and no matter what the commanding generals in the field would prefer. I can only conclude that under a John McCain presidency, Navy Captain John "Full Throttle" McCain will simply overrule his own generals and admirals based on his gut feeling and micromanage the war, as Lyndon Johnson did.

Conclusion number one means that McCain is fundamentally dishonest. Number two means that, despite his military leadership being the only real selling point he has ever had, he would in fact be a catastrophic Commander in Chief.

I wonder which conclusion is correct?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 26, 2008, at the time of 3:21 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

January 23, 2008

No Fanfair for the Common Grunt

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

I suppose no news must be good news.

When we stop hearing about Iraq, it does not mean nothing is happening. In fact, many good things happened in Iraq last year; we just didn't read much about it in the press. But Bill Roggio reports significantly diminished Al-Qaeda activities in Iraq:

During a press briefing in Baghdad, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, the Commander of Multinational Corps Iraq, said al Qaeda in Iraq has been ejected from its strongholds in the cities to the rural regions of Iraq.

Al Qaeda in Iraq's network has been significantly degraded, but is still a threat. .... "Although the group remains a dangerous threat, its capabilities have been diminished," said Odierno. "Al Qaeda has been pushed out of urban centers like Baghdad, Ramadi, Fallujah and Baqubah, and forced into isolated rural areas. Many of their top leaders have been eliminated, and finding qualified replacements is increasingly difficult for them." Multinational Forces Iraq also estimates it has significantly degraded al Qaeda's ability to fund operations by dismantling its financier networks and leaders.

Operation Phantom Phoenix, the current nationwide operation targeting al Qaeda's remaining safe havens, was launched on Jan. 8. Iraqi and US forces have captured or killed 121 al Qaeda fighters, wounded 14, and detained an additional 1023 suspects. Al Qaeda's leadership has been hit hard during the operation, with 92 high values targets either killed or captured.

Although most of the missions were US/Iraqi joint operations, Iraqi security forces conducted some completely independent operations, and they were very successful. More and more Iraqis are stepping up to the plate:

Iraq's army and police could be ready to take over security in all 18 provinces by the end of this year as the U.S. military moves toward a less prominent role in the country, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

The Roggio post has some illuminating animation showing the evaporation of al-Qaeda's operational area from December, 2006 to December, 2007 (scroll to the bottom of the post). The difference is so obvious and significant that even honest Democrats, assuming there are any left, can no longer deny that we have by and large won this war and that the counterinsurgency was a brilliant success; it's not exaggerated to say that COIN completely flipped the dynamic of the war.

Powerline has graphs showing the decline of coalition and civilian casualties during 2007, including a 90% decline in sectarian violence in Baghdad from January to December.

So which member of the elite media is reporting this wonderful news, celebrating our incredible sucess? Aside from a few bloggers and some military-related sites, no one is, despite a January 17th press release distributed to the elite media and available online. And Reuters is the only major news service to carry ongoing coverage of operation Phantom Phoenix.

The Boston Globe has some news about increased Iraqi forces. AFP reported on Phantom Phoenix only as an afterthought; the main story was about six American deaths in a booby-trapped house; AFP did not report the overall success of COIN. Fox news posted a story about the reduction of American troops -- without ever mentioning the success that made the troop cuts possible.

Our presidential candidates, both Democrats and Republican, don't mention the war very much anymore; it has become a non-issue. When we seemed on the brink of failure, people couldn't wait to talk about it... how many civilians were blown up today? how many troops were ambushed? quagmire, quagmire!

But here is what actually happened over 2007:



CivilianDeaths9

Civilian deaths in 2007



CoalitionKIA4

Coalition deaths in 2007

Shouldn't this be on the front page of New York Times, rather than "Worries That the Good Times Were a Mirage" and "Heath Ledger, Actor, Is Found Dead at 28"?

It gets harder every day to draw any conclusion except the obvious one: The media elites are downcast that America has finally turned the Iraq war around; they don't want to report our success because they are afraid it will buoy the voters, lead to more successes, and therefore help the eventual Republican nominee: All of the major Republican candidates support victory; all of the major Democratic candidates are deeply invested in defeat.

Victory or defeat; which hand do you choose?

In other words, it's very, very difficult not to conclude that the elite media desperately hope for America to lose -- for the good of the Democratic Party; and that they do everything in their power to bring that about, from suppressing good news to "outing" highly classified intelligence vital to the long war.

Sadly, it's true: The elite news media have become America's new Copperheads.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 23, 2008, at the time of 3:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

How to Lie About Lying

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

This one is simply befuddling:

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

Now, would any disinterested party read the above -- and not think the study authors were accusing President Bush and his administration of deliberately lying us into war? Surely this subtextual implication must have crept in because of bad writing; I can't imagine that the elite media would be so intentionally partisan.

Here are the specific charges:

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

One notes that "Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members" -- isn't that a lovely grammatical construct? -- do not deny that Iraq was "trying to... obtain" WMD, even though they appear to include such claims under the category of "false statements."

Nor do they deny the administration's claim that Iraq had "links" with al-Qaeda. They merely dispute the meaningfulness of those links... and dub that another "false statement" by the president and his administration.

Here is that section from the report itself, from their database of "false statements;" it's a perfect primer on the anatomy of a falsehood:

In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: "Sure." In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of "compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda." What's more, an earlier DIA assessment said that "the nature of the regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear."

This one is instructive to deconstruct:

  1. What they say: "In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: 'Sure.'"

    What they mean: Rumsfeld asserts that relationships exist between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

  2. What they say: "[A]n assessment... found an absence of 'compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda.'"

    What they mean: The later assessment found that there were relationships, but they did not rise to the level of military alliances.

  3. What they say: "[A]n earlier DIA assessment said that 'the nature of the regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear.'"

    What they mean: Before we found out the nature of the relationships, we did not know the nature of the relationships.

If you can find that Rumsfeld's statement (1) -- which evidently consisted of the single word "Sure" -- is falsified by either (2) of (3), please take to the comments and explain it to the rest of us... because to me, laboring under the disadvantage of having been intensely trained only in the lesser rhetorical art of mathematical logic, they appear to be able to exist in the same 'hood without bothering each other.

Here is another "false statement" (we are meant to understand "obvious lie") that the Center discovered, after digging deeply into the substrata of hidden rhetorical diplospeak. I must admit, this one was a marvel of original research that all by itself may justify the report -- if only to bring this one hidden, obscure falsehood to the light of day:

On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement "probably is a hoax."

This is such an out of the blue, never before seen accusation that I haven't had time to formulate a response. He has me there!

Thus the massive database of dishonesty and mountain of mendacity they unearthed, dutifully reported by the Associated Press... with but a single effort to elicit a general response from the administration -- and no attempt whatsoever to delve into these alleged "false statements" to see whether there is even a contradiction between what the administration said and what the Center for Pubic Integrity said. Yet there is also this unanswered (unasked) question that seems somewhat pertinent, at least to me:

How many of these "false statements" were, in fact, believed true by virtually everybody, Republican and Democrat alike, when they were made? How many were parroted by Democrats, including those on the House and Senate Permanent Select Intelligence Committees, who thereby had access to the same intelligence as la Casablanca? The Center doesn't tell, and the incurious media elites don't ask.

This is as close as they come in their executive summary:

Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual "ground truth" regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who's Who of domestic agencies.

On the other hand, a growing number of critics, including a parade of former government officials [Eric Shinseki? Weasely Clark? Bill Clinton?], have publicly -- and in some cases vociferously ["rabidly" would be the better word choice] -- accused the president and his inner circle of ignoring or distorting the available intelligence.

A growing number of critics! Well, who could argue with that?

Here are a couple of inconvenient truths the AP story neglects to tell us:

  • "A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations..."

    The Fund for Independence in Journalism says its "primary purpose is providing legal defense and endowment support for the largest nonprofit, investigative reporting institution in the world, the Center for Public Integrity, and possibly other, similar groups." Eight of the eleven members of the Fund's board of directors are either on the BoD of the Center for Public Integrity, or else are on the Center's Advisory Board. Thus these "two" organizations are actually joined at the hip.

  • "Fund for Independence in Journalism..."

    The Center is heavily funded by George Soros. It has also received funding from Bill Moyers, though some of that money might have actually been from Soros, laundered through Moyers via the Open Society Foundation.

    Other funders include the Streisand Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts (used to be conservative, but in 1987 they veered sharply to the left, and are now a dyed-in-the-wool "progressive" funder), the Los Angeles Times Foundation, and so forth. The Center is a far-left organization funded by far-left millionaires, billionaires, and trusts.

Even the New York Times, in their "me too" article on the data dump, admits that there is nothing new in this release... just a jumble of statements, some of which later turned out to have been erroneous, others which just constitute heresy within the liberal catechism:

There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war. Muckrakers may find browsing the site reminiscent of what Richard M. Nixon used to dismissively call “wallowing in Watergate.”

By "wallowing," the Times means those in the terminal stage of BDS can search for phrases like "mushroom cloud" or "yellowcake" and be rewarded by screens and screens of shrill denunciation of the Bush administration... just as Watergate junkies used to do (without the benefit of computers) in the early 1970s. (Mediocre science-fiction author and liberal "paleotruther" Isaac Asimov called this, evidently without realizing the irony, "getting my Watergate fix.")

The Nixon reference appears to have been suggested by the report itself; the executive summary ends:

Above all, the 935 false statements painstakingly presented here finally help to answer two all-too-familiar questions as they apply to Bush and his top advisers: What did they know, and when did they know it?

I'm certain it's sheer coincidence that this nonsense was spewed across the news sockets during the peak of the election primary season... and right before the primary in Florida, of all states. Had anyone at AP or the Times realized how this might affect the election, I know their independent journalistic integrity would have suggested they hold this non-time-constrained story until afterwards. Say, they could even have used the time to consider whether "Iraq and al-Qaeda had a relationship" and "the relationship didn't amount to direct cooperation" contradict each other.

A less charitable person than I might imagine this "database" was nothing but a mechanical tool to allow good liberals easier access to a tasty "two-minutes hate."

But realizing that the elite media has only our best interests at heart, my only possible conclusion is that, despite the multiple layers of editorial input that must occur at these venues, several important facts just slipped through the cracks:

  • The fact that the Center for Public Integrity is a Left-funded, leftist, activist organization with a serious hatchet to grind with the Bush administration;
  • The fact that the Fund for Independence in Journalism is neither independent, nor is it engaged in journalism (it's a front group of mostly the same people whose purpose is to shield the Center from lawsuits);
  • And the fact that the vast majority of the supposed "false statements" are in fact simply positions with which liberals disagree, or else statements widely accepted at the time that later investigation (after deposing Saddam Hussein) showed to be inaccurate.

I must assume that these self-evident facts must simply have been honestly missed by the gimlet-eyed reporters and editors at AP and the NYT. Heck, even Pinch nods.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 23, 2008, at the time of 1:55 AM | Comments (37) | TrackBack

January 22, 2008

The Rap on MRAPs

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Last Saturday, an attack on an "MRAP" (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle successfully destroyed the vehicle and killed one of the four occupants. But far from a slam, this very attack proves just how effective the MRAP truly is.

Important Note: Bill Roggio argues that, contrary to what the New York Times, AP, and other news sources claim, this was not the first combat death suffered by an occupant of an MRAP. I'll take the word of Roggio over that of the Times anyday; even so, the vehicles are a huge improvement over uparmored Humvees, Bradleys, or even Strykers.

The first point to notice about Saturday's IED attack is that the MRAP did its job well, protecting all those riders who were actually inside the secure area of the vehicle:

Three of the four people aboard suffered only broken feet and lacerations. Pending the results of an investigation, it is unclear yet whether the gunner was killed by the blast or by the vehicle rolling over.

But officers on the scene noted that he was the member of the crew most exposed, and that the vehicle’s secure inner compartment was not compromised and appeared to have done its job by protecting the three other crew members inside. “The crew compartment is intact,” said Capt. Michael Fritz. He said the blast would have been large enough “to take out” a heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

The AP story on the same incident is even more explicit about the success of the MRAP:

"That attack has not ... caused anyone to question the vehicle's lifesaving capacity," [Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff] Morrell said. "To the contrary, the attack reaffirms their survivability."

The soldier who died Saturday was the gunner who sits atop the MRAP vehicle. Morrell said it is still not clear whether he died as a result of the explosion or the rollover. And Maj. Alayne P. Conway, deputy spokeswoman for the 3rd Infantry Division, said the attack and the death are under investigation.

Morrell said the MRAP hit a "very large, deep-buried IED" and that the "force of the explosion blew the MRAP into the air and caused it to overturn." Despite the size of the explosion, he said, the crew compartment "was not compromised" and the three soldiers inside escaped with cuts and broken bones in their feet.

"I think everybody is still amazed at the fact that, despite the size of this bomb, these vehicles are proving to be every bit as strong and as lifesaving as we hoped they would be," said Morrell, adding that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is "more convinced than ever that these vehicles do indeed save lives."

Before we go further, let's give a little background: What is a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, an MRAP, anyway? Here is what I wrote back in May about the Cougar and the Buffalo, two MRAPs that were being acquired at the time:

Enter the MRAP: the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected class of vehicles. The Marines and the Army have more or less settled on the Couger H-series of MRAP and the Buffalo H-series of Mine Protected Route Clearance (MPCV) vehicles, both manufactured by Force Protection Inc... the latter being a somewhat larger version of the Cougar, equipped with a fork-toothed arm for explosive ordnance disposal (the Buffalo's nickname is "the Claw"):



Couger H-series MRAP    Buffalo H-series MPCV

Couger H-series MRAP (L) and Buffalo H-series MPCV (R)

The great innovation of the MRAP is to redesign the undercarriage itself... and to correct the flaw that made our earlier combat vehicles so vulnerable: their underbelly flatness. MRAPs have a V-shaped hull that channels blast effect to the sides of the vehicle, graphically demonstrated here. Even EFPs have trouble penetrating the undercarriage of an MRAP:



MRAP taking blast

MRAP taking blast; explosive force is redirected to sides of vehicle

Much more at the link, of course. I can't seem to find a single news story that tells us exactly what type of MRAP was destroyed; but Noah Shachtman at Wired Magazine reports that some of his readers have said it was actually a Maxxpro, made by Navistar International Corporation -- formerly International Harvester -- not by Force Protection; Shachtman's readers say that is the type of MRAP used by the 1st Battalion of the 30th IR:



MaxxPro MRAP

The MaxxPro MRAP, by Navistar International

Back to the Times:

Rear Adm. Greg Smith, a spokesman for the American military in Baghdad, confirmed that the attack was “the first death resulting from an I.E.D. attack on an MRAP,” but said that he could not comment on specific damage to the vehicle “for force protection reasons.” [See important note above; the rear admiral appears to be misinformed.]

Admiral Smith said the new vehicle had proven “in its short time here in Iraq that it is a much improved vehicle in protecting troops from the effects of improvised explosive devices.”

“However,” he added, “there is no vehicle that can provide absolute protection of its occupants.”

This is not the first fatality, but there have been only a few; yet MRAPs have been hit by IEDs more than a dozen previous times, according to AP -- few of which have resulted in fatalities, even when the vehicle itself was totaled. It's hard to imagine either an uparmored Humvee or even a Bradley surviving so many attacks while allowing so few occupant deaths.

Far from debunking or deflating the MRAP story, this IED attack is likely to make the Marines (who are in charge of the MRAP program for all branches of the military) even more anxious to replace all "outside the wire" Humvees with Cougars, Cheetahs, Buffalos, and other MRAPs.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 22, 2008, at the time of 4:47 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 21, 2008

Petraeus, Shmetraeus; the Real Question Is - Who's Next?

Afghan Astonishments , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

The New York Times carries the vaguely interesting speculation (whic barely even qualifies as news) that top Pentagon brass are trying to decide what to do with Gen. David Petraeus for his next assignment. The choices seem to be:

  • Commander of NATO, which would give him a strong say in what we do in Afghanistan, where our combat mission is led by American NATO troops;
  • Commander of CENTCOM, which would give him an even stronger say, assuming someone can figure out where to stick Adm. William Fallon. Fallon seems to be doing a bang-up job as CENTCOM commander right now and has said that rumors of his death or imminent retirement are greatly exaggerated.

The idea seems to be for President George W. Bush to give Petraeus an appointment and confirmation before leaving office a year from yesterday. If the administration does not, and if a Democrat wins the presidency, the incoming POTUS will surely do everything he can to sabotage Petraeus' career -- taking petty revenge against him for the crime of rejecting the Pelosi-Reid conclusion that we've already lost the Iraq war... and worse, being proven right!

But if Petraeus can serve a term in a less politically charged job (especially as NATO commander), goes this reasoning, then maybe President Hillary (or President Mike, President Barack, President John, President John, President Mitt, President Fred, or Citoyen Ron) will consider kicking him upstairs to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- a gold watch and a window seat.

I don't know. I don't care. He should stay in Iraq as long as possible, then be moved somewhere he can continue to fight... or perhaps train others to fight. I'm far more interested in the question, who will succeed Petraeus as Commander of Multinational Force - Iraq (MNF-I)?

Here, the Times again channels its beloved anonymous sources:

If General Petraeus is shifted from the post as top Iraq commander, two leading candidates to replace him are Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who is running the classified Special Operations activities in Iraq, and Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, a former second-ranking commander in Iraq and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’s senior military assistant....

Of the potential successors for General Petraeus, Generals McChrystal and Chiarelli would bring contrasting styles and backgrounds to the fight. General McChrystal has spent much of his career in the Special Operations forces. He commands those forces in Iraq, which have conducted raids against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the mainly Iraqi group that American intelligence says has foreign leadership, and against Shiite extremists, including cells believed to be backed by Iran....

General McChrystal, a 53-year-old West Point graduate, also commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment and served tours in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and in Afghanistan as chief of staff of the military operation there in 2001 and 2002....

General Chiarelli’s strengths rest heavily on his reputation as one of the most outspoken proponents of a counterinsurgency strategy that gives equal or greater weight to social and economic actions aimed at undermining the enemy as it does to force of arms. General Chiarelli, 57, has served two tours in Iraq, first as head of the First Calvary Division, where he commanded 38,000 troops in securing and rebuilding Baghdad, and later as the second-ranking American officer in Iraq before becoming the senior military aide to Mr. Gates.

In a 2007 essay in Military Review, he wrote: “Unless and until there is a significant reorganization of the U.S. government interagency capabilities, the military is going to be the nation’s instrument of choice in nation-building. We need to accept that reality instead of resisting it, as we have for much of my career.”

There are times in a nation's life when its future lies in the balance, and it is within the power of men to turn the tide of history in one direction -- or the other. In this case, the choice of a successor for Gen. Petraeus appears to leave us with two stark directions:

  • If McChrystal is selected, then we have turned towards a policy of clandestine warfare whose only function is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to fight against our interests; this, to my mind, is to return to the cold war strategy of yesteryear, though against a different foe.
  • But if Chiarelli is chosen instead, we will have turned instead towards a policy of undermining the enemy by denying him the fertile breeding ground of political and legal chaos, resentment, fanaticism, hopelessness, and futility that attends failed states. We will be firmly on the path of nation-building.

I believe the latter would infuriate most conservatives... and I believe it essential that we follow that path nevertheless.

I harken back to the seminal book the Pentagon's New Map, by Thomas P.M. Barnett. Barnett's genius was to recognize that virtually all threats to the United States and our interests came from a narrow swath cut through the middle of the map. The Pentagon had long called this jagged cancer in the world body the "arc of instability;" but Barnett realized it was something more profound: It largely comprises those nations that stubbornly refuses to integrate with the rest of the world's politics, economics, and communications net.

Not that the Non-Integrating Gap (as Barnett calls it) is bereft of political organization; factions are constantly maneuvering to bind all the world's disgruntled postal workers into a single, globe-girdling caliphate... that is, groups like al-Qaeda and countries like Iran engage in the ceaseless struggle of nation-building; but the "nation" they're trying to build is one that offers neither friendship nor a place at the table for us.

Turning to our Special Forces, not simply as tools but as the sharp end of our foreign policy, means abandoning the nation-building field to militant Islamism. You can't beat something with nothing: AQ and the mad mullahs offer something: stability under their rule. If we offer nothing but dark-of-night strikes on people, places, or things that piss us off, then we can never win this war.

Rather, it's absolutely essential that we offer a creative, constructive plan to drain the fever swamps that breed bin Ladens and Mezba-Yazdis and build something functioning in its place; otherwise, we may as well resign ourselves to a generational, existential war that we jolly well may lose.

We cannot simply frighten hirabis into quiessence by clandestine ops and air strikes. We're talking about people for whom, as Cal Thomas put it, "death is a promotion." If hirabis eagerly look forward to dying in order to kill us, how do we "deter" them? Besides, they're not even rational actors, and there is no central caliphate command that can surrender to us.

Gen. Petraeus succeeded because instead of just more killing, he gave the Iraqis a "tomorrow." After tearing down the insurgency, he built something better in its place. He protected the civilian population, helped strengthen the rule of law in Iraq, coordinated the "rebuilding" of that shattered state, made military service a respected career choice for Iraqis for the first time since the Baath Party took over, and in general, spread hope that out of the ashes of Saddam's putative empire, Iraqis could grow the green shoots of normalcy.

We need to follow up with another commander who has the same far-reaching worldview as David Petraeus... not just another Special-Ops marauder who can destroy but cannot build.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 21, 2008, at the time of 7:07 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 10, 2008

Operation Phantom Phoenix

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Two new joint American-Iraqi operations are currently under way in Iraq: Phantom Phoenix and Iron Harvest. The first is nationwide operation, while Iron Harvest focuses on a new al-Qaeda safe haven that had been developing in Diyala province, created by terrorists who were pushed out of Anbar. According to Bill Roggio of Long War Journal, Coalition forces have "launched a series of feints in Diyala to confuse al Qaeda's leadership."

Coalition forces are meeting less resistance than they expected, according to AP:

The top U.S. commander in northern Iraq said Wednesday a nationwide operation launched against insurgents was meeting less resistance than expected, but that troops would pursue the militants until they were dead or pushed out of the country.

Maj. Gen. Mark P. Hertling told reporters in Baghdad that in his area of control alone, 24,000 American troops, 50,000 members of the Iraq army and 80,000 Iraqi police were taking part in the offensive against al-Qaida in Iraq....

First, U.S. and Iraqi forces would try to clear areas of insurgents. Then, Iraqi police would move in to establish some semblance of law and order. Finally, Hertling said, the so-called "Awakening Groups" or "Concerned Local Citizens" -- mostly Sunni fighters who have joined the Americans in the battle against al-Qaida - would be relied upon to maintain stability after troops move out of areas....

Hertling said his troops had killed 20-30 insurgents so far.

Unfortunately, the reason for the light resistance appears to be that the operation was blown, and many of the insurgents fled north to avoid it. Information tends to escape the Iraqi forces. From the Long War Journal post on Iron Harvest:

Both Iron Harvest and Phantom Phoenix "are seeing less resistance than expected," Multinational Forces Iraq reported. "There are expectations that the decrease in resistance can be due to leaks in the [Iraqi security forces] or extremists might have seen an increase in helicopters in their areas prior to the operation."

And from AP:

Hertling said reports that insurgents in Diyala had fled north just before Phantom Phoenix began were probably accurate, a reason troops have met relatively little resistance so far. He also said the insurgen[cy] probably learned of the military's plans in advance.

"Operational security in Iraq is a problem," he said, noting that the Iraqi army uses unsecured cell phones and radios. "I'm sure there is active leaking of communication. That is why we have to keep a tight line on operational security."

It appears that "a tight line" now includes keeping Iraq security forces out of the loop of specific attacks until just before they launch.

I do not understand why Iraqis or anyone else would use unsecured phone lines, given how easily those are intercepted (which should be common knowledge by now). However, communications security is always a number-one concern for any military. Remember, "loose lips sink ships!"

(My father, who handled confidential information all his life as an attorney, is particulary tired of the Japanese media's (or US, for that matter) complete disregard for national security. He even accuses me of talking too much about my work. "'Unclass' does not mean you can disclose to public. It should still be 'need to know basis.'" He is correct about the last, of course; but everything we discuss here at Big Lizards is already disseminated to the public. We never post confidential, classified, or even sensitive information here.)

Unlike the pre-Petrateus days, our counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) requires our troops to remain in the area once we secure it; so once we expel the terrorists -- or even if they flee northward after picking up intel from blabbermouths in the Iraqi Army -- they will never be able to come back. Rremember what happened to Sadr when he fled back to Iran? A few weeks of exile has turned permanent... at least permanent exile from command of any militia units.

It's not necessarily a bad thing that the terrorists fled. With every such retreat, they have fewer and fewer places to go; and eventually, they will run out of options. Bill Roggio reports:

Al Qaeda's attempt to establish a new base of operation in the Mosul region is believed to have been blunted. Yet a series of bombings against Christian churches in the region are believed to be an attempt to stir up sectarian violence in the area, a senior military intelligence officer told The Long War Journal. Al Qaeda has also attempted to increase sectarian violence in the flashpoint city of Kirkuk, where Arab and Kurdish groups are vying for political power in the oil-rich city.

The Samarra region may also be a focal point of Operation Phantom Phoenix. The Samarra-Tarmiyah region is believed to be a command and control node for al Qaeda in Iraq’s central leadership. Multiple media cells and senior al Qaeda in Iraq leaders have been killed or captured in the region, including Abu Abdullah, a regional emir.

Phantom Phoenix may also target the Iranian-backed Special Groups, the Shia terror cells targeting Coalition and Iraqi security forces, Iraqi political leaders, and civilians.

Then can always run away; but unlike the prodigal son, they can't slink home again and expect their former victims to fall on their necks and kill the fatted calf for them. [If they do fall on their necks, it will probably be with scimitars...! -- Dafydd]

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 10, 2008, at the time of 4:21 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 20, 2007

Today's Huckalunacy: Back to the Future? No, Forward to the Past!

Afghan Astonishments , Elections , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Some evangelicals, such as Lee Harris at TCS (Technology, Commerce, Society) Daily, passionately believe that conservatives (and even non-conservatives such as myself) who say bad things about Mike Huckabee's campaign for the presidency, are simply haters who despise religious people. We spend our time nitpicking every word that Huckabee utters, find absurd conspiracies (such as the "floating cross" in his Christmas TV ad that was actually a reflection off his bookshelves), and even fabricate supposed faux pas out of thin air. We are the polar opposites of those believers who see Jesus in a tortilla and the Virgin Mary in a rock formation.

Not so! In fact, I knew absolutely nothing about Huckabee until I began to hear his own words. I have assumed from the git go that he is no more or less religious than that other evangelical, born-again Christian who currently occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And everything I have attacked about Huckabee's campaign has been based upon his own words, either spoken, or in the case of his Foreign Affairs article on his deep, surethoughted foreign policy, written after careful pondering and the hiring of a skillful ghostwriter... thus all, one presumes, the considered position of Gov. Mike Huckabee himself.

So I feel no guilt for bringing to your eyes what I just heard with my own ears, on just about the most friendly venue Huckabee can possibly get: the Michael Medved show, a one-on-one conversation with a pal who has pulled out all the stops to turn his show into a virtual daily campaign spot for Gov. Huckabee.

Today, Medved began by asking Huckabee about the section of his article where he says he wants to build up the military much more rapidly than President Bush is doing. As a reminder, this is what Huckabee wrote, or at least put his name to; I include annotations from myself:

The Bush administration plans to increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps by about 92,000 troops over the next five years. We can and must do this in two to three years. [Considering that the president has just barely met his own expansion rate, how exactly does Huckabee plan to double it? Care to tell us?] I recognize the challenges of increasing our enlistments without lowering standards and of expanding training facilities and personnel, and that is one of the reasons why we must increase our military budget. [How would increasing our DoD budget cause recruits to magically appear -- and to magically get 4-5 years of training in 2-3 years?] Right now, we spend about 3.9 percent of our GDP on defense, compared with about six percent in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan. [At the peak of the Cold War.] We need to return to that six percent level. [So he wants to add another $240 billion per year to the DoD budget... if he has a plan for getting Congress to vote this -- without a staggering tax increase -- does he care to share?] And we must stop using active-duty forces for nation building and return to our policy of using other government agencies to build schools, hospitals, roads, sewage treatment plants, water filtration systems, electrical facilities, and legal and banking systems. [That would be a great idea, if we could recreate the Foreign Office of the British Empire; but when has America done such a thing in the middle of a war? The Marshall Plan came after Germany was utterly razed.] We must marshal the goodwill, ingenuity, and power of our governmental and nongovernmental organizations in coordinating and implementing these essential nonmilitary functions.

If I ever have to undertake a large invasion, I will follow the Powell Doctrine and use overwhelming force. [A force that took months and months to settle in the friendly country of Kuwait -- which had just been invaded by Iraq, thus was willing to allow us to do so. Which country in the Middle East would have been willing to make itself a target over a six-month period prior to launching our own invasion of Iraq?] The notion of an occupation with a "light footprint," which was our model for Iraq, is a contradiction in terms. [Oddly, though, it seemed to work -- as even Gov. Huckabee admits a couple of sentences later.] Liberating a country and occupying it are two different missions. Our invasion of Iraq went well militarily, but the occupation has destroyed the country politically, economically, and socially. [Destroyed it? It appears to be doing significantly better by many measures than it was under Saddam Hussein.] In the former Yugoslavia, we sent 20 peacekeeping soldiers for every thousand civilians. [And say, that's worked out well, hasn't it!] In Iraq, an equivalent ratio would have meant sending a force of 450,000 U.S. troops. [Great leaping horny toads. And where were we to get the extra 200,000+ troops? Can Huckabee the Great conjure 20 divisions out of his hat?] Unlike President George W. Bush, who marginalized General Eric Shinseki, the former army chief of staff, when he recommended sending several hundred thousand troops to Iraq, I would have met with Shinseki privately and carefully weighed his advice. [Before or after he publicly smeared you with his "advice" at a Congressional hearing?] Our generals must be independent advisers, always free to speak without fear of retribution or dismissal. [Where "our generals" includes Eric Shinseki, but not, evidently, Tommy Franks.]

Look at that -- lots of attacks on Huckabee's ideas, yet not a single reference to "knuckle-dragging evanvgelicals" or "protofascist Christian theocrats!"

But Gov. Huckabee's military naïveté is perfectly encapsulated by a pithy, sententious aphorism he just delivered on the show, which is what spurred me to write this post. Here is what he said -- transcript from my own memory (but as you'll see, it would be hard to get this wrong):

Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "You don't go to war with the Army you'd like; you go to war with the Army you have." But I say, you don't go to war with the Army you have... you go to war with the Army you need. And you don't go to war until you have the Army you need!

(Actually, what Rumsfeld said was "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." But Huckabee's paraphrase is near enough to the meaning.)

Think about that for a moment. How many things are wrong with that sentiment?

  1. How do you calculate "the Army you need?"

    Huckabee would use the Powell Doctrine -- where we essentially refight World War II in every military conflict we undertake. The Gulf War was a classic force-on-force confrontation not that different from Patton's North Africa campaign or the Battle of the Bulge. But wars in the future will not much resemble those of the 20th century; and if we're still trying to fight campaigns against agile, assymetrical insurgents with the bigfooted approach of a Colin Powell -- well, look at our Iraq tactics of 2005-2006 and how effective they were.

    And for how many years could we have supported that size of a force in Iraq, by the way?

  2. How long do you wait to go to war, trying to raise the Army you think you need under the Powell Doctrine?

    When Colin Powell fought the Gulf War, he had the advantage of the Reagan Army build-up already under his belt. I understand that Huckabee wants to build up our armed forces; but he's still only talking about another 92,000 troops -- in three years. But he now says we should have used 450,000 soldiers in Iraq, which is more than 200,000 more than we used. So should we have waited six years to attack Iraq?

    What kind of WMD would Saddam Hussein have had by now, had we done nothing for the last six years?

  3. Where exactly would Huckabee have staged an Allied Expeditionary Force of near half a million? Turkey? Kuwait? Iran? Has the governor even thought this through? Which Moslem country was going to allow us to build up such a massive force of crusading Christians on its territory, in the era of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda?
  4. Perhaps Huckabee is covertly saying he wouldn't have invaded Iraq at all; that like President Clinton, he would have been content with occasional bombing runs to "keep Saddam Hussein in his box." And when the sanctions regime collapsed under the weight of the UN's Oil for Fraud bribery scheme, we would have grimly watched -- while building our mighty, Cold-War sized Army -- as Hussein rebuilt his entire arsenal of chemical and biological weaponry.

    (Which, by the way, he might have used against neighboring civilian populations or even his own people, rather than against our soldiers... and the civilian death toll could have been much, much higher... even as high as the ludicrous Lancet guesstimate of 655,000 deaths, or the even more risible Opinion Research claim of 1.2 million.)

    If that is what Huckabee is saying, I wish he would just straightforwardly make that case, so we could confront his arguments... instead of advocating policies that would force us down that road, willy nilly, in future.

  5. And what if our goal to add another 20-30 divisions were delayed indefinitely by a Congress unwilling to increase the military budget by 65%? How long do we wait before going to war... not just in Iraq, but anywhere?

    Years? Decades? Never? But even Huckabee admits that "our invasion of Iraq went well militarily."

    It seems he would preferentially never invade anywhere at all if he couldn't get enough troops to do it more or less like Operation Overlord on D-Day. This is like the king who had the largest army in Europe -- but would never fight for fear of "breaking" it.

Pace, Lee Harris, but this is why so many Republicans don't think much of "President" Mike Huckabee. Those of us who are not captive to the identity-politics of evangelism realize that electing yet another naïve Arkansas governor with no foreign policy experience to the White House is probably a bad idea during an existential war against global hirabah. Heck, the first was bad enough during the American vacation from history!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 20, 2007, at the time of 1:37 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

December 17, 2007

Huckasmears of Yesteryear...

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

I'm almost tempted to start a whole new catagory just for bizarre, liberal conspiracy theories that Mike Huckabee buys into; we'll see.

I've been reading Huckabee's article in Foreign Affairs from the January/February 2008 issue. I'm stunned by how many liberal shibboleths the governor would easily pass. (As I type this, Hugh Hewitt is on the same topic.)

Although the article is current, in fact each of these nutroot smears were originally delivered by Huckabee back in September, when he gave a condensed version of this article as a speech at a conference organized by the magazine; so he's been passing these canards for some time. (In that same speech, by the way, he said he was the only candidate with a Theology degree... which, of course, he does not actually have.)

Let's take a look at a couple.

President Bush took "retribution" against Gen. Eric Shinseki

Here's one that no one has mentioned so far:

In the former Yugoslavia, we sent 20 peacekeeping soldiers for every thousand civilians. In Iraq, an equivalent ratio would have meant sending a force of 450,000 U.S. troops. Unlike President George W. Bush, who marginalized General Eric Shinseki, the former army chief of staff, when he recommended sending several hundred thousand troops to Iraq, I would have met with Shinseki privately and carefully weighed his advice. Our generals must be independent advisers, always free to speak without fear of retribution or dismissal.

Mike Huckabee thinks that Gen. Eric Shinseki was dismissed? This is straight out the Democratic talking points. In fact, Shinseki was sworn in for his fixed, 4-year term as Army Chief of Staff in 1999, and he left office in 2003 -- four years later. Huckabee tries to weasel a bit by saying Bush "marginalized" Shinseki; but rejecting a general's advice is not marginalizing him.

Some Democrats make a big deal out of the fact that the Washington Post had an article in April, 2002, claiming that the Bush admininistration had just announced Shinseki's successor... Jack Keane. This, claim Democrats and liberals (such as Mike Huckabee), "undercut" Shinseki and turned him into a "lame duck," or "marginalized" him, as Huckabee says... and all as an act of "retribution" for Shinseki saying that we would need "several hundred thousand" troops to win in Iraq.

There are a two major problems with this Huckasmear:

  1. Eric Shinseki's successor as Army Chief of Staff was not Jack Keane; it was Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker;
  2. The Post published its article in April, 2002... but Shinseki made his comment about needing "several hundred thousand troops" in congressional testimony in February 2003, ten months after the supposed "retribution." (I've heard of preemptive war, but preemptive retribution?)

Here is a clip from CNN, where Wolf Blitzer does a little fact-checking on Paul Begala, who appears to be Huckabee's main source:

BLITZER: As promised yesterday, we want to do a follow-up now on something Paul Begala said in an exchange with Torie Clarke yesterday in our strategy session. Paul charged that General Eric Shinseki was effectively relieved of duty as Army chief of staff for testifying under oath that the U.S. needed lots more troops to secure Iraq.

We promised to check the facts on that. And here's what we've come up with. This is what we know. General Shinseki served out his full four-year term as the Army chief of staff. But the defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld tapped a successor for Shinseki back in April of 2002, more than a year before his retirement.

That person didn't wind up taking the job, but such an early announcement was indeed embarrassing to Shinseki, and some say it wound up undercutting his clout inside the Pentagon.

Here's a critical point on the timing. The Pentagon was planning for Shinseki's retirement nearly a year before the general testified that several hundred thousand soldiers might be need in post-war Iraq. That testimony got a very quick response from the secretary, that would be Donald Rumsfeld, who charged that Shinseki's assessment was flat out wrong.

Rumsfeld says that suggestions, though, that Shinseki was fired are a myth. Our senior Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre, who's done a lot of reporting on this story, says that Shinseki was certainly ostracized and criticized for his testimony about troop levels in Iraq. But Jamie says Shinseki was not fired. He wound up retiring after serving his full four-year term.

This show aired on March 21, 2006... a year and eight months ago. Yet Mike Huckabee still believes, today, that the "arrogant" President Bush, probably acting from his "bunker mentality," took "retribution" on Gen. Shinseki by "marginaliz[ing]" or "dismiss[ing]" him for saying we would need more troops than Rumsfeld was planning at the time. Gov. Huckabee is way behind even the MSM on correcting a Democrat smear of George W. Bush.

Bush "let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora" by outsourcing the battle to the Afghans

Just one more; the rest must wait for another day, another Huckapost:

When we let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, a region along the Afghan-Pakistani border, in December 2001, we played Brer Fox to his Brer Rabbit.

This is another Democratic talking point against Bush; it was first reported in 2002, starting with the Washington Post, I believe, and then all over the elite media. Every so often, the meme bubbles up again: A 2004 document surfaces that allegedly charges a prisoner with "assist[ing] in the escape of Usama Bin Laden from Tora Bora;" Fox News reports that some Afghan warlord claims he was the one who helped Bin Laden escape Tora Bora, and so forth.

But the fact is that no Army document has ever been presented, and nobody in charge of that battle has ever come forward to say, that we knew then or know today whether Osama bin Laden was personally present at Tora Bora. Jed Babbin did what none of these other news agencies did: He actually interviewed those involved and asked them:

I asked [Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, deputy commander of CENTCOM during the Afghan conflict] to bottom line it: Had the Bush administration concluded that OBL was present in Tora Bora? Was it the gravest error of the war to not commit enough U.S. ground troops? "Rifle" DeLong said, "Somebody could have made that statement, but it sure as hell wasn't the people who fought the war." No one in the military chain of command -- or in the Pentagon in any position of authority -- has reached this phantom "conclusion" that we blew it at Tora Bora....

After the north fell and then Kabul, "...we got word that Osama bin Laden with his leadership -- what was left of it -- could possibly be up in the Tora Bora mountains. We also got word the same day that he could be in Egypt." Reports poured in, some appeared reliable, that OBL could also be in Dubai or in Pakistan. Franks and DeLong concluded, based on the preponderance of the intelligence that OBL was in Tora Bora. U.S. forces couldn't invade Egypt, Pakistan, or Dubai, but they could take a shot at Tora Bora where a substantial number of al Qaeda -- with or without bin Laden -- were hiding. Once again, the Afghanis were integrated with the American and Coalition forces. Nobody "outsourced" the job to them.

Babbin's piece was published on November 1st, 2004. Considering this Huckasmear along with the one above, and his statement that "If I ever have to undertake a large invasion, I will follow the Powell Doctrine and use overwhelming force," and his unattainable demand that we must raise our Defense budget up to what it was during Reagan's term, during the Cold War (that is, add $240 billion annually to bring it up to 6% of the GDP)... I have to wonder whether Huckabee is simply living in the past. Did he stop following the War on Global Hirabah in 2003, or has he read or learned anything more recent than that? (What next... will he demand we bring back the Crusader program?)

And who is is actual advisor on this? We already know he would have believed Eric Shinseki over Tommy Franks; does he also pine for advice from Madeleine Albright, Paul Begala, and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, 95%)?

The more I read about him -- in his own words! -- the more I believe that Huckabee is the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time. If I may quote Friend Lee (notwithstanding Huckabee apologist Michael Medved), "it can't be hush-a-bye time soon enough for Mike Huckabee."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 17, 2007, at the time of 6:12 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 30, 2007

Bored Now; Turn the Page

Dancing Democrats , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The gasps of shock and screams of outrage must have been audible from the pot parlors of Berkeley, to the brahmin bashes on Beacon Hill, to the tea and cucumber sandwich fundraisers in Chappaqua: John Murtha has "gone native!"

And indeed, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA, 65%) -- the poster boy for "immediately" ending the war and redeploying all of our troops to next-door Okinawa, whence they could respond to any sudden terror threat in a scant four or five weeks -- went to Iraq, came back, and made some remarks yesterday about the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy that can only be described as a laudatory about-face:

The Pennsylvania Democrat gave qualified but likely his most glowing remarks Thursday about the Iraq war.

"I think the surge is working, but that's only one element," said Murtha, who chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee. "And the surge is working for a couple of different reasons. And one reason is the increase in troops."

Murtha hastened to assure everyone yesterday he was still for yanking the troops out instanter, and he quickly moved today to claim that the drop in violence in Iraq was another black eye for the Bush administration; still, however, he now finds himself in the growing club of anti-war Democrats who have been forced by circumstance -- or would that be "mugged by reality?" -- into admitting the surge of success by the COIN strategy led by Gen. David Petraeus (Commander Multinational Force - Iraq) and presided over by President George W. Bush.

This singular admission by more and more Democrats may well be responsible for the second leg of our political journey: Now that we are clearly winning, Democrats are simply losing interest in Iraq. They've abruptly grown bored with the Iraq war as an election issue. Now they want to talk about socialist economics, the evils of Bush, and -- ominously enough, from the Democratic perspective -- they want to talk a lot more about illegal immigration:

Congressional Democrats are reporting a striking change in districts across the country: Voters are shifting their attention away from the Iraq war.

Rep. Jim Cooper, a moderate Democrat from Tennessee, said not a single constituent has asked about the war during his nearly two-week long Thanksgiving recess. Rep. Michael E. Capuano, an anti-war Democrat from Massachusetts, said only three of 64 callers on a town hall teleconference asked about Iraq, a reflection that the war may be losing power as a hot-button issue in his strongly Democratic district.

First-term Rep. Nancy Boyda (D-Kan.) -- echoing a view shared by many of her colleagues -- said illegal immigration and economic unease have trumped the Iraq war as the top-ranking concerns of her constituents.

In an interview with Politico, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) attributed the change to a recent reduction of violence and media coverage of the conflict, saying there is scant evidence that more fundamental problems with the Bush administration’s policy are improving. Even so, he agreed voters are certainly talking less about the war. “People are not as engaged daily with the reality of Iraq,” Hoyer said.

The change in mood perceived by Democratic lawmakers comes as one of Congress’ most vocal war critics, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), returned from a trip to Iraq and told reporters Thursday that “the surge is working” to improve security, even though the central government in Baghdad remains “dysfunctional.”

So we're back to Murtha. But he didn't just stop after saying "the surge" was working; he went on to find so many different ways to contradict himself, it beggars the imagination. From the Fox News story:

Murtha, speaking to reporters Thursday in his hometown of Johnstown, Pa., mixed in renewed criticism of the Bush administration's management of the Iraq war, saying it was waged with too few troops, and that it is too costly.

"We can no longer afford to spend $14 billion a month on this war and let our readiness slip," Murtha said.

But, "If you put more forces in, things will work out," he said. [Wouldn't that cost more?]

"But the thing is, the Iraqis have to do this themselves," he added. "We can't win it for them in Afghanistan or Iraq, and provinces they've (Iraqi forces) taken over, we've done better. We can't win."

Has the honorable congressman ever considered medication?

So what is actually causing the sudden deflation of Iraq as an election issue, particularly among Democrats? I think it's pretty clear: Not just Democratic office holders but Americans in general are beginning to accept the reality that we're now winning the Iraq war:

For the first time in a long time, nearly half of Americans express positive opinions about the situation in Iraq. A growing number says the U.S. war effort is going well, while greater percentages also believe the United States is making progress in reducing the number of Iraqi casualties, defeating the insurgents and preventing a civil war in Iraq.

Roughly half of the public (48%) believes the U.S. military effort in Iraq is going very or fairly well. Judgments about the overall situation in Iraq have been improving steadily since the summer. As recently as June, only about a third of Americans (34%) said things were going well in Iraq.

To be specific, currently:

  • 74% of Republicans think we're doing well, up from a low of 51% in February.
  • Democrats who think we're doing well have more than doubled since then, up from 16% to 33% today.
  • Indies have gone from 26% in February to 41% now.
  • Finally, back in January, 42% of respondents said that Iraq was the worst problem facing America today, making it number one; it's still number one... but now, only 32% say it's the worst problem.

And there's your genesis for the loss of interest in the war as a political issue in the upcoming election.

Democrats are still frantically trying to spin away the rising tide of belief that we're winning; they note that the same Pew poll that shows a rise in those who think we're winning has not yet shown any drop in the number of Americans who want the troops to come home. But there is no reason to expect different aspects of public opinion to move in lockstep; even within public-opinion polling, itself a lagging indicator, we have less-lagging and more-lagging elements.

Logically, public opinion on how we're doing must change first; then opinion on what we should do next will change in response somewhat later. Finally, I believe the last thing to change, the "most lagging" of the lagging indicators, would be the public decision on whether the war was worth it.

But I cannot think of a single instance in which a public perception of American victory was not followed by increased willingness to stay and fight -- and also by a retroactive decision that yes, the fight was indeed worth it all: Time mutes all pain.

(Vietnam is not a counterexample, because despite our resounding victory there under Gen. Creighton Abrams, the American public was tricked by leftists such as Walter Cronkite into believing we were losing, when in fact we were winning. There never was a public perception of American victory and still is not today -- though that is finally starting to change, with the advent of talk radio, which drives publishers to publish serious conservative tomes; and by the arrival of "new media," which allows Americans to discuss the new information coming out about Vietnam.)

If the election becomes focused on economics, that is a much easier argument for Republicans to win; they can contrast their own budgetary proposals to the wild taxing and spending that Democrats have already promised. If it becomes focused on illegal immigration, then I don't know if anybody has an advantage -- if anything, slight advantage to Democrats; but that's a far cry from the huge advantage on the Iraq war that Democrats enjoyed in the 2006 election. And of course, there will be a lot less focus on the "Republican culture of corruption," with the Democrats' predictable failure to do anything substantive about the very abuses they screamed about last year... notably earmarks. (And no Mark Foley problem!)

So we're moving in the right direction. I fully expect that by the time the election rolls around, the number of Americans demanding we pull out will have fallen drastically (it's about 50% right now)... and those saying the Iraq invasion was worth it will be well over the 50% line.

At that moment, the Democrats may bitterly regret their long and frantic campaign to cram defeat in Iraq down America's throat. Running against America has rarely been a winning electoral strategy; I believe the Democrats are about to re-experience that painful lesson.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 30, 2007, at the time of 4:56 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 25, 2007

Reducted

Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy , Movie Madness and Fractured Flickers
Hatched by Dafydd

Not a movie review; I haven't seen the movie.

But of course, neither has anybody else. That's the point. According to Box Office Mojo, Brian De Palma's new anti-war, anti-American, anti-soldier tour de farce Redacted, winner of the Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival -- which tells the stirring and subtle story of how American soldiers raped, murdered, and burned a fourteen year old Iraqi girl, and then raped, murdered, and burned her entire family to silence them, and then raped, murdered, and burned the military investigators, then the news reporters who tried to report on it, then families of random American soldiers, then Mr. Whipple, then all the animals at the petting zoo -- has enjoyed a resounding lifetime box office gross of $25,628 dollars.

But wait, that's not entirely fair; that's just the domestic gross. We really should include the international take, too... that would be $71,968 (all from Spain, where the movie opened), for a whopping grand total of $97,596.

Over three days (November 16th, 17th, and 18th), at 15 theaters in its widest release (I believe distributer Mark Cuban has reduced the number of venues since that high point). That works out to a domestic take of 1,700 clams per theater. Assuming a measley two showings per day per theater, and assuming tickets average $8.50 each (factoring in the bargain matinees!), that indicates that about 33 people per showing managed to straggle into the theater, some of whom probably thought they were buying tickets to that animated movie about the mouse who wants to be a cook.

It only seems to be playing at one theater in the LA area now; check your local listings!

Director Brian De Palma is doing everything he can to persuade American audiences to go see the movie:

[De Palma] said the film provided a realistic portrait of U.S. troops and how "the presentation of our troops has been whitewashed" by mainstream media.

De Palma, who looked at the atrocities of conflict in the 1989 film "Casualties of War," which also centers on the rape of a young girl by U.S. soldiers, believes news coverage of wars had changed since the Vietnam War.

"We saw fallen soldiers, we saw suffering Vietnamese. We don't see any of that now," he said. "We see bombs go off, but where do they come down? Who do they hit?"

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was "clearly a mistake," he said, that was perpetuated by "defense contractors, big corporations of America" profiting from the war.

"How many billions of dollars are those companies making? And who gets more famous than ever? The media. There is nothing like a war to fill the airwaves 24 hours a day," he said.

But for some unfathomable reason, moviegoers just aren't responding, no matter how conciliatory De Palma gets. I believe the point of his movie is that the biased, conservative American news media simply refuses to report on the rape and murders in Mahmudiyah, which were ordered by Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon; just as they refused to report on the Rumsfeld-ordered Haditha massacre, the Rumsfeld-ordered sex-torture at Abu Ghraib, the Rumsfeld-ordered butchery of an innocent wedding party, and the well-established fact that nearly all the bombings and sectarian violence in Iraq since 2003 were committed by American soldiers disguised as Sunni al-Qaeda groups and Shiite death squads, and operating under the direct orders of Donald Rumsfeld.

So what do you want to bet... the lesson Hollywood will take from Redacted -- and Lions from Lambs (Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Michael Pena -- $13.8 million domestic), In the Valley of Elah (Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon, Charlize Theron -- $6.7 million), and all the other anti-American, spit-on-the-soldiers movies about innocent Moslem terrorists being mugged, raped, and brutalized by vicious, bloodthirsty, criminal American soldiers -- the lesson Hollywood takes will be... "Gee, I guess Americans just don't like war movies anymore; war has become unpopular at the movies!"

You know, like We Were Soldiers ($78 million domestic), Master and Commander ($94 million), Troy ($133 million), 300 ($211 million), and Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers ($342 million).

The lengths the industry will journey in order to avoid drawing the obvious conclusion -- that Americans don't like being told that we're nothing but a bunch of depraved, murderous, racist thugs, the world hates us, and we're responsible for all the ills that befall innocent people everywhere -- is little short of astonishing. I predict the result of the debacle of this spate of films exploring the war against global hirabah will not be a batch of pro-America movies; instead, they will simply stop making war movies altogether.

I reckon the alternative, that Americans like movies where we're the good guys, is simply too horrible to contemplate.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 25, 2007, at the time of 1:56 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

November 17, 2007

Blood's a Rover

Elections , Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy
Hatched by Dafydd

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.

A.E. Housman, a Shropshire Lad, poem IV

Over on his own blog, frequent commenter Rovin asks what I think the impact of immigration, illegal aliens, the failed immigration bill last year, and the drivers' licences for illegals position of the Democrats will be on the 2008 elections.

In general, I think it cuts slightly against the GOP right now, mostly because if they had passed the bill, they could have beaten the Dems about the head and shoulders for not building the wall. But immigration will not determine this election.

As it stands, if the GOP attacks the Dems for not building the wall, the Democrats can respond that when the Republicans controlled congress, they couldn't even pass an immigration bill with Democratic help. That reminds us of other GOP failures -- such as the failure to rein in spending -- that hurt the Republican argument that we're the adults.

The drivers' license question will not hurt any Democrat with Democratic voters; a few independents might be annoyed, but they won't base their vote on the question. GOP voters might be somewhat more motivated to head to the polls, increasing turnout. On this particular aspect (drivers' licenses for illegal aliens), slight benefit to the GOP.

Look for the Dems to propose a bill similar to what the GOP rejected in 2006, but with real amnesty (not the fake kind that conservatives pretended to find in the previous bill) and with little to no border security provisions. When the Senate GOP filibusters it, the Dems will try to ride that into electoral gain: "The Republicans won't even meet us halfway on immigration... it's 'my way or the highway' to Mitch McConnell!" This will help drive Dems to the polls; slight advantage to the Democrats on this particular aspect.

Added together, they mostly balance out with, as I said, a slight edge to the Democrats.

But I believe this election is going to be dominated by the Great Game being played out right now, where our military is winning a tremendous victory in Iraq -- while the Democrats are desperately trying to force defeat upon us by starving the Army. If the eventual Republican candidate can frame this issue properly, it can inflict a catastrophic blow not only on the Democratic presidential candidate (presumably Hillary) but upon Democratic swing seats in Congress.

The theme should be "they're trying to force another Vietnam-style, manufactured defeat on us, just like they did in 1974."

The biggest danger to the GOP is not that we'll sound alarmist; threats to national security are so serious in people's minds that they won't hold mere alarmism against us, so long as we don't sound hysterical. The biggest danger is that the GOP might be bullied by Democrats and their press gang into muting itself on this issue, so as not to sound "extreme."

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice -- a marvelous saying I just made up. (I'm thinking of making up another one that goes, "Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," but I haven't decided yet.) Let's grab the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face: I don't mean this personally or with any disrespect, but the Democrats surrendered to the Communists in 1974, and now they're trying to surrender to the militant Islamist terrorists in 2008.

In fact, I would love to see the following scenario play out during a debate between the Republican and Democratic nominees: They start arguing about national security. In a desperate ploy to save the Democrat, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asks a stupid question about global warming or some such asinine subject.

And the Republican, instead of answering, says... "If you don't mind, Wolf, we're having a serious discussion about national security. Sen. Clinton can decide which question interests her, but I'm going to stick with the important issue." Then he goes back on the attack against the defeatist Democrats, completely ignoring the global warming stupidity.

Heck, he could go ahead and make nearly the entire debate about national security... why not? Nobody ever won a war by "wishin' and hopin'." You win wars with brains, guts, and steel: the intelligence to come up with a winning strategy; the will to implement it and ride it all the way; and enough men and materiel to achieve victory.

Where are the Democrats on any one of these three utterly necessary resources? They have no plan for winning, no stomach for the fight, and they want to starve the Army to buy health insurance for the entire middle class.

Bang on the theme; force the Democrats to defend their wretched record. Be loud enough that they cannot just walk away. Force them to make the argument that imperialist America is causing all the problems in the world... it will only reinforce what we're saying about Democratic America-hatred.

If the Dems want to argue about who really lost Vietnam, great! That's a fight we can win. And far from being ancient history, we can bring it into the present by pointing out that they're doing the exact, same thing today.

Vietnam was an inevitable defeat? You mean, just like you think the Moslem terrorists will inevitably win this war? Vietnam was an imperialist war of aggression -- so what would you call the Islamist militants' attempt to seize Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan -- which has nuclear missiles -- and even France, Germany, and Australia? What do you call their demand for a world-wide Caliphate... with them in charge?

Our "Sister Souljah" moment will come when the GOP nominee has the guts to talk directly to American Moslems and call on them to join the fight against terrorism and extremism in the name of their religion:

Where are you? Where are the Moslem organizations? Are you going to let the Hamas front-group CAIR speak for you?

This is the American Moslem moment: Stand up, denounce all terrorists -- including the animals who kill Jewish babies in Jerusalem -- and join the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, or the Marines. Sign up with the CIA. Take back your mosques from the radicals and shake some sense into your children. More than any other group in America, this fight needs modern Moslems who love life, and who love liberty and freedom, more than they hate supposed "infidels" and "apostates."

And demand that the Democrats join in this call for national wartime unity. Make them squirm.

If they ignore the issue, then the GOP nominee should accuse them of starving our troops and not even caring how many get killed because of their fecklessness. "Pelosi, Reid, and Hillary Clinton won't even debate the issue... it's not important enough to them. They only want to talk about defeat -- and how much they can raise your taxes to buy more pork."

The lay-off notices that the DoD is going to have to start sending out to civilian employees of the military and to defense contractors, if the Dems keep up this tactic, will deal the Democrats yet another body blow: "The Democrats are forcing the military to shut down, all because they hate George Bush more than they love America."

I'm actually getting a bit more confident about the Congressional elections; I've always been confident about the presidential election. I assumed that the Dems would have learned their lesson and started listening to folks like Rahm Emanuel and John Podesta; instead, they're still listening to Nancy Pelosi and MoveOn.org.

  1. The more we win in Iraq, the more desperate they become to force a loss;
  2. The more desperate they become to force a loss, the more obvious they are;
  3. The more obvious they are, the easier it will be to portray them as cowardly and unAmerican in 2008.

I don't understand why they're doing this; but for as long as they continue, we need to pound on them for betraying American soldiers in the field. It's a powerful theme and one they'll be hard-pressed to refute (original definition).

At some point, if they stop, then we can sound the theme that "we forced the Democrats to come to their senses at long last; now let's hope the damage they did to our military can be reversed, before it's too late."

Follow-up with a series of GOP proposals to support the war and help the troops, and let's see how far we can push them -- incidentally pissing off their anti-American base and depressing their turnout.

I know this isn't the analysis that Rovin was looking for; but honestly, because of the stunning success of the Petraeus counterinsurgency, immigration isn't going to have much of an impact on the presidential or Senate races. It may have a larger affect on congressional and gubernatorial races; but those will be driven by unique, local situations impossible to analyze unless you're living in the middle of them.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 17, 2007, at the time of 4:31 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

November 16, 2007

Iraqis Pass Test: Top Shiites Will Be Tried for Mass Murder

Crime and Punishment , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

A few days ago, we posted Iraq in the Balance: Will the Shia Prosecute Their Own?, that asked the question -- Will the majority Shia be willing to prosecute their own officials who commit a horrific string of human sacrifices... or does "retributative justice" apply only to Sunni terrorists?

We noted the mass-murder cases against two Shiite militia heads (Sadrites) who happened to be high muckety-mucks in the Ministry of Health: Former Deputy Health Minister Hakim al-Zamili, and Brig. Gen. Hamid al-Shammari, head of the Health Ministry security force. ("Happened to be," my eye; Muqtada Sadr demanded they be given those positions, presumably for the very task or murdering helpless Sunnis in hospital.)

A few days ago, the top Iraqi court said there was sufficient evidence to try the two for literally hundreds of gruesome murders they appear to have ordered. But there was a potential thorn in the ointment, as we noted in the earlier Big Lizards piece:

By a quirk of Iraqi law, ministries are allowed to block prosecution of their officials if they decree -- truthfully or not -- that those officials were "carrying out their official duties." Naturally, mass-murdering Iraqi Sunni is not one of the official duties of the Iraqi Health Ministry; but the Interior Ministry (the most powerful ministry in Iraq) has used this dodge in the past to prevent prosecution of rampaging police officials.

This is the crux of the point we made:

The consequences of this decision, no matter which way it falls, are so stark and existential that it's not unreasonable to say this opportunity will either make or break the new democratic Iraq.

The question is whether Iraq has truly turned towards the rule of law... or whether they have just substituted the new boss for the old boss, with business still as usual. And here is the answer in yesterday's New York Times:

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has approved the trial of two Shiite former officials who are accused of killing and kidnapping hundreds of Sunnis, according to American advisers to the Iraqi judicial system.

The case, which could come to trial as early as this month, would be the first that involved bringing to trial such high-ranking Shiites for sectarian crimes.

An Iraqi judge ruled last month that there was sufficient evidence to try the two former officials, who held senior positions in the Health Ministry. But there had been concern that the ministry might try to block the case by invoking a section of the Iraqi criminal law that proscribes the prosecution of officials who are executing their official duties.

The approval to hold a trial was provided in a memo issued earlier this week by the acting health minister. Mr. Maliki has formally endorsed the decision, American officials said.

Take that, Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%)!

The Times understands the importance of this decision:

The case has emerged as a major test of the ability of Iraq’s judicial system to take on difficult cases, particularly those in which the accused are prominent Shiites.

“This case is as important, if not more important, than the Saddam Hussein case,” Michael Walther, a Justice Department official who leads a task force that is advising the Iraqi judicial system, said in a telephone interview. He added that a successful trial would demonstrate that the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government “is ready to prosecute its own.”

Iraq certainly isn't out of the woods yet, not even on this one case: We still have to observe the trial itself to ensure that it's both fair to the defendants themselves and also thorough... not like the way the Jim Crow South used to "try" accused Klansmen (where the opening statement was sometimes immediately followed by a vote to acquit; no need for the jury even to retire).

But so far, the civilian government of Iraq, not just the Iraqi Security Forces, has chosen justice and modernity. If this trial continues appropriately, then we can say that one great pillar of a free, democratic, and stable society has been birthed in the heart of the Arab Middle East: an honest judicial system.

America, her military, and President George W. Bush in particular were the midwives of liberty.

When Sen. Reid and his Democratic friends hear about this, how many will be overjoyed -- and how many will be crushed with the disappointment of opportunity lost?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 16, 2007, at the time of 3:48 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

November 15, 2007

Ever Get That Weird Feeling...

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Have you ever been talking to some stranger -- at a party, at a convention, at work -- and everything seems to be going fine... when all of a sudden, you realize the conversation has lurched southwards? You may not even know when it happened; but of a sudden, you feel the same frisson that infused Shelley Duvall in the Shining when she discovered that the entire novel that her husband Jack Nicholson had written consisted of nothing but endless pages of "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." That moment when you realize you've been talking to a crazy uncle who escaped from his nephew's attic. Well...

"Every place you go you hear about no progress being made in Iraq," said Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid.

"The government is stalemated today, as it was six months ago, as it was two years ago," Reid told reporters, warning US soldiers were caught in the middle of a civil war.

"It is not getting better, it is getting worse," he said.

It's almost as if Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) suddenly started telling us about "tse-tse flies the size of eagles" carrying off young children, which Reid observed during his "nine months in the bush." [Ten points to the first commenter who knows where the tse-tse fly thing came from.] It begins to dawn on the listener that this isn't just Reid playing "Democrats' advocate;" the man truly believes the insanities that he utters.

And that imbues me with an existential terror: If a man with such a tenuous grasp of reality can make his way to the second-most powerful position in the Congress, what does that say about the natural insanity-filters that previously protected us from the worst excesses of parliamentary style democracies? Those filters that are supposed to keep nutbags like David Duke and Ross Perot out of national office -- what happened to them?

Every major newspaper and TV news broadcaster in America has been forced by circumstances to admit that, heck, who'd a thunk it, we appear to have turned the corner and be winning in Iraq now. But Harry Reid can't see it, can't see any of it: "It is not getting better, it is getting worse." (Considering that back in April, Sen. Reid announced that "this war is lost," one wonders how much worse it could be? Is al-Qaeda in Iraq poised to seize control of Kansas?)

  • So Reid thinks it's "worse" now that Gen. David Petraeus, and especially his top counterinsurgency (COIN) aide, Australian Lt.Col. David Kilcullen, have succeeded in turning Iraqi Sunni decisively against al-Qaeda -- even to the point of taking up arms against the terrorists?
  • It's "worse" with the ruling Shia now at least trying to prosecute top Shiite political leaders for crimes against humanity? (We're still waiting to see if this first essay succeeds.)
  • It's "worse" because Iraq's economy is "surging", by many measures already significantly greater than it was under Saddam Hussein?
  • It's "worse" even though thousands of displaced Iraqi families are returning to Iraq, especially Baghdad?
  • It's "worse" despite the huge burst of reconstruction projects, which are no longer being bombed by bin-Ladenites who no longer infest Iraq?

This is quite simply a bizarre and worrisome delusion on a level with "Truther" ravings. But Reid is mostly harmless, because his insanity battles against his raging ineptitude: His inability to get even liberal Republicans to sign onto most of his schemes to declare defeat in Iraq and just "move on" is legendary (and a godsend). But if the filters are unable to weed out the broken Reid and the loopy Ron Paul (and his, ah, interesting supporters) -- would they also fail to weed out the next David Duke?

Without functioning "sanity shields," how do we stop an American Ahmadinejad from being elected president, governor, or senator? I don't fret about a simplistic, unsubtle troll like Rep. John Murtha (D-PA, 65%) or Britain's George Galloway; they have no sway over the Congress anent their madness. The Democratic opposition to the war is not primarily driven by Murtha, who is out of step with his Democratic colleagues on many other issues; it's driven by lunatics like George Soros, a multibillionaire money-changer who has both the intelligence and the resources to turn his fantasy into our nightmarish reality.

I worry about the person who is both insane and intelligent, psychotic but smooth talking. We appear no longer to have a press, punditry, or people who first ask "does this guy connect with the real world as we know it," before asking whether he sounds "sincere." Sincerity is overrated as a lodestone; people can be sincerely demented.

We could survive a hypocritical, lying, vengeance-driven harpy like Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%); we've had them before (Nixon, Clinton 1.0). But I don't know that in this age, we could survive a president like Robert A. Heinlein's "Nehemiah Scudder" or the Dead Zone's "Greg Stillson" -- or alternatively, one of the real-life radical-secularist terrorists of ELF and ALF and infesting International ANSWER.

We desperately need to reinstitute the sanity filter in American politics, asking first whether candidates for public office have all their marbles before we even get to the question of whether we agree with some of their tenets: Republicans are no more helped by Ron Paul than Democrats are by Harry Reid -- or than Independents were by H. Ross Perot.

The best weapon against the reality-challenged is of course mockery: Make fun of them. This is not only effective but highly enjoyable. If you're humorless and dour, a "grim and grisly gruesome Griswold," then at least you can point out the insanities of the insane.

I know if feels like fighting a cripple; but unlike some guy in a wheelchair, who might make an excellent president (though our only experiment was hardly a raging success), some guy or gal who literally mistakes fantasy for reality is neither cute nor lovable (nor even livable) when he's sitting in the big chair with his finger on the button. Time to stuff your pity in a sack and loudly beholdest the beam in your mad-uncle presidential candidate's brain.

On all sides the aisle. Reality is too important to be left to the surreal.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 15, 2007, at the time of 7:35 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

November 8, 2007

Iraq in the Balance: Will the Shia Prosecute Their Own?

Crime and Punishment , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

A surprisingly balanced article from the New York Times on a surprisingly vital question that hasn't gotten anywhere near enough coverage:

An Iraqi judge has ruled that there is enough evidence to try two former Health Ministry officials, both Shiites, in the killing and kidnapping of hundreds of Sunnis, many of them snatched from hospitals by militias, according to American officials who are advising the Iraqi judicial system.

The case, which was referred last week to a three-man tribunal in Baghdad, is the first in which an Iraqi magistrate has recommended that such high-ranking Shiites be tried for sectarian violence. But any trial could still be derailed by the Health Ministry, making the case an important test of the government’s will to administer justice on a nonsectarian basis.

By a quirk of Iraqi law, ministries are allowed to block prosecution of their officials if they decree -- truthfully or not -- that those officials were "carrying out their official duties." Naturally, mass-murdering Iraqi Sunni is not one of the official duties of the Iraqi Health Ministry; but the Interior Ministry (the most powerful ministry in Iraq) has used this dodge in the past to prevent prosecution of rampaging police officials.

The consequences of this decision, no matter which way it falls, are so stark and existential that it's not unreasonable to say this opportunity will either make or break the new democratic Iraq:

  • If Health decides to allow the prosecution to proceed against former Deputy Health Minister Hakim al-Zamili and Brig. Gen. Hamid al-Shammari (al-Shammari was head of the Health Ministry security force), then Sunni all across the country -- indeed, across the entire Middle East -- will finally come to the realization that the democratic revolution is for real, that it's not just "meet the new boss." Iraqi Sunni will flock to the polls for the next election, whenever that is scheduled; and they will participate in the Iraqi government wholeheartedly. Iraq will have shown the world that it's not just a new oppression, this time by the majority against the minority.
  • But if the Health Ministry refuses to allow the case to proceed, then for all Sunni in the region (and mind that the Shia are only a majority in a minority of Moslem countries), the "Iraq experiment" will be proven a colossal failure. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein will still have had utility, but nothing like the effect if a fair and just democracy could arise in its place.

One tribe seizing control from another tribe -- Arabs have already seen and understood this. What was unique was the idea that the oppressors would be ousted in favor of free state that practiced justice and rule of law. That is what has never before been seen in the Arab or Persian Middle East.

The two accused Shiite officials are both Sadrites, and Muqtada Sadr personally secured them their positions; curiously, the government is only trying to prosecute them now because of a terrible fumble by the Mahdi Militia:

The case, which involves officials allied with the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia, would have been difficult for the Iraqi government to take on in the past because Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki received crucial support from Sadr supporters in Parliament.

Since the spring, however, when Sadr ministers withdrew from the government, Mr. Maliki has distanced himself from Mr. Sadr’s supporters, and he has allied himself with a rival Shiite group, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.

Sachi has argued for some time that Sadr made a dreadful mistake by pulling out of the government and then fleeing to Iran; she noted that he was certain to lose control: In tribal countries like Iraq, propinquity is the lodestone of power. If you're not constantly looking down people's necks and breathing over their shoulders, they'll swiftly find some other master to serve.

The Times article recounts the fascinating (if repellant) history of the Mahdi Militia. Modeling itself after the Hezbollah of Iran and Syria (say, there's a shock), the militia began by building hospitals, infiltrating the Health Ministry -- and turning the health industry into a kidnapping, torture, and murder mill. The slaughter was carried out in an organized fashion, by order, and often targeting helpless Sunni already sick or wounded and in hospital... along with their loved ones, who were often kidnapped and butchered when they unwisely came to visit the patient. The two charged individuals together are thought to account for hundreds of these ritualistic human sacrifices.

We should definitely be holding our breath about this story. There are few events that can honestly be called "crisis points," where the fate of a nation balances on the knife-edge of uncertainty; but this qualifies.

So... keep watching the skies.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 8, 2007, at the time of 4:31 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

November 3, 2007

Why Do I Find This CBS Story Less Than Credible?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Right. So I'm reading this CBS story that I Drudged up, and it's telling me that they've outed "Curve Ball." Curve Ball -- sez them -- fabricated a bunch of stories that "drove the U.S. argument for invading Iraq." Why, if it weren't for Curve Ball, that war-criminal Bush would never have been able to lie us into that war, which (according to the Squeaker of the House) is an utter failure!

And I run across this sentence:

More than a hundred summaries of his debriefings were sent to the CIA, which then became a pillar - along with the now-disproved Iraqi quest for uranium for nuclear weapons - for the U.S. decision to bomb and then invade Iraq. The CIA-director George Tenet gave Alwan’s information to Secretary of State Colin Powell to use at the U.N. in his speech justifying military action against Iraq.

They just had to slip it in there, didn't they?

And I sez to myself, sez I, that either:

  1. CBS is so behind the times, they're literally unaware that the Iraq Study Group formally reported that Iraq was indeed on a "quest for uranium for nuclear weapons," and that one source of this datum was none other than Ambassador Joe himself;
  2. Or else they think the readers are so ignorant and stupid they'll never realize CBS just pulled a fast one.

I'm putting my money on Curtain 2, where Carol Merrill is standing. And sadly, there really are a lot of Americans who are that ignorant and stupid.

Oh well. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time -- and CBS reckons that's good enough for the Nielsons. But for me, when a putative news source makes a whopper like that in the part of a story I'm familiar with, I know how much credibility to attach to their claims about the stuff I'm not familiar with at all.

Pre-posting update: I just noticed something else... "became a pillar... for the U.S. decision to bomb and then invade Iraq." What do they mean, bomb and then invade? I recollect we launched one missile attack that we hoped would kill Hussein; but the next day was the ground invasion.

And then I had a revelation (or acid flashback): It was the 1990-1991 Gulf War that began with a lengthy bombing... not this Iraq war! We began the air campaign on January 17th, 1991; and we didn't start the full ground war until more than a month later, February 22nd. Thus, the "bombing" lasted 36 days before the ground game.

But in the 2003 war, we made one air attack on the Dora Farms (where intel said that Hussein might be visiting Uday and Qusay) on March 19th... and then the ground invasion began March 20th. Checking my memory in Wikipedia, I found these telling sentences:

Before the invasion, many observers had expected a lengthy campaign of aerial bombing in advance of any ground action, taking as examples the 1991 Persian Gulf War or the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. In practice, U.S. plans envisioned simultaneous air and ground assaults to decapitate the Iraqi forces as fast as possible (see Shock and Awe), attempting to bypass Iraqi military units and cities in most cases.

You know, I now suspect the CBS newsroom ostentatiously refused to follow the fighting during the U.S. invasion of Iraq; they declined to honor the war with their presence. To those of us who did pay attention four years ago, the timeline is seared in our brains... thus we wouldn't make such a clumsy mistake.

I'll bet CBS didn't follow the invasion, and now they're just relying upon their vague and hazy memories of the Gulf War 16 years ago. What a maroon!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 3, 2007, at the time of 12:48 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

October 14, 2007

Sing Along With Sanchez - Minor Update

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Former Lt.Gen. Ricardo Sanchez gave a very, uh, interesting speech to the annual convention of the Military Reporters and Editors. It's being played as an indictment of President Bush; but in fact, it's -- oh how I hate to say this about a general who served honorably for three decades -- it's a long and bizarre rant against virtually everybody, left and right, Democrat and Republican who had anything to do with Iraq.

The basic thrust seems to be contained in a single paragraph towards the end: That we should have come in using the Powell Doctrine with 500,000 - 750,000 troops, utterly crushed Iraq, taken command of the Republican Guard, installed an Imperial American proconsul -- preferably, given Sanchez's hatred of L. Paul Bremer, a military man, if you catch my drift -- and then used the Baathist Republican Guard to enforce the diktats of the American leader on the Iraqi people.

He seems most vexed that we haven't somehow brought to bear in Iraq all of our political apparatus -- Sanchez believes that "America" must somehow force the two parties to act in concert -- along with all of our economic might (unexplained), to rein in "the Interagency," whatever that is (sorry about the caps, but I'm not going to waste time rewriting it):

AMERICA HAS SENT OUR SOLDIERS OFF TO WAR AND THEY MUST BE SUPPORTED AT ALL COSTS UNTIL WE ACHIEVE VICTORY OR UNTIL OUR POLITICAL LEADERS DECIDE TO BRING THEM HOME. OUR POLITICAL AND MILITARY LEADERS OWE THE SOLDIER ON THE BATTLEFIELD THE STRATEGY, THE POLICIES AND THE RESOURCES TO WIN ONCE COMMITTED TO WAR. AMERICA HAS NOT BEEN FULLY COMMITTED TO WIN THIS WAR. AS THE MILITARY COMMANDERS ON THE GROUND HAVE STATED SINCE THE SUMMER OF 2003, THE U.S. MILITARY ALONE CANNOT WIN THIS WAR. AMERICA MUST MOBILIZE THE INTERAGENCY AND THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF POWER, WHICH HAVE BEEN ABJECT FAILURES TO DATE, IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE VICTORY. OUR NATION HAS NOT FOCUSED ON THE GREATEST CHALLENGE OF OUR LIFETIME. THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC ELEMENTS OF POWER MUST GET BEYOND THE POLITICS TO ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF AMERICA. PARTISAN POLITICS HAVE HINDERED THIS WAR EFFORT AND AMERICA SHOULD NOT ACCEPT THIS. AMERICA MUST DEMAND A UNIFIED NATIONAL STRATEGY THAT GOES WELL BEYOND PARTISAN POLITICS AND PLACES THE COMMON GOOD ABOVE ALL ELSE. TOO OFTEN OUR POLITICIANS HAVE CHOSEN LOYALTY TO THEIR POLITICAL PARTY ABOVE LOYALTY TO THE CONSTITUTION BECAUSE OF THEIR LUST FOR POWER. OUR POLITICIANS MUST REMEMBER THEIR OATH OF OFFICE AND RECOMMIT THEMSELVES TO SERVING OUR NATION AND NOT THEIR OWN SELF-INTERESTS OR POLITICAL PARTY. THE SECURITY OF AMERICA IS AT STAKE AND WE CAN ACCEPT NOTHING LESS. ANYTHING SHORT OF THIS IS UNQUESTIONABLY DERELICTION OF DUTY.

(You'll get no sympathy from me; I had to read the entire speech that way!)

UPDATE: Here is a fully corrected version of the transcript from Michael Yon. Hat tip to commenter SlimGuy.

And here is the paragraph quoted above, in Yon's easlier to read, capitalization-corrected, and reparagraphed version:

America has sent our soldiers off to war and they must be supported at all costs until we achieve victory or until our political leaders decide to bring them home. Our political and military leaders owe the soldier on the battlefield the strategy, the policies and the resources to win once committed to war. America has not been fully committed to win this war. As the military commanders on the ground have stated since the summer of 2003, the U.S. military alone cannot win this war. America must mobilize the interagency and the political and economic elements of power, which have been abject failures to date, in order to achieve victory.

Our nation has not focused on the greatest challenge of our lifetime. The political and economic elements of power must get beyond the politics to ensure the survival of America. Partisan politics have hindered this war effort and America should not accept this. America must demand a unified national strategy that goes well beyond partisan politics and places the common good above all else. Too often our politicians have chosen loyalty to their political party above loyalty to the constitution because of their lust for power.

Our politicians must remember their oath of office and recommit themselves to serving our nation and not their own self-interests or political party. The security of America is at stake and we can accept nothing less. Anything short of this is unquestionably dereliction of duty.

We now continue with the original post...

But here is how the Associated Press portrays it:

The U.S. mission in Iraq is a "nightmare with no end in sight" because of political misjudgments after the fall of Saddam Hussein that continue today, a former chief of U.S.-led forces said Friday.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded coalition troops for a year beginning June 2003, cast a wide net of blame for both political and military shortcomings in Iraq that helped open the way for the insurgency - such as disbanding the Saddam-era military and failing to cement ties with tribal leaders and quickly establish civilian government after Saddam was toppled.

He called current strategies - including the deployment of 30,000 additional forces earlier this year - a "desperate attempt" to make up for years of misguided policies in Iraq.

A quick aside about journalists' ability to read and parse grammatically correct English-language passages. The paragraph from which AP pulled the "nightmare" quoteation above -- in which AP claims that the nightmare is caused by "political misjudgments after the fall of Saddam Hussein that continue today", actually reads thus:

There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight. Since 2003, the Politics of War have been characterized by partisanship as the Republican and Democratic parties struggled for power in Washington. National efforts, to date, have been corrupted by partisan politics that have prevented us from devising effective, executable, supportable solutions.

(This nice, non-cap version is from a new source I just stumbled across; alas, he includes irritating stage directions and annotations... so nothing's perfect.)

So first of all, a disturbingly large percentage of journalists are retarded or illiterate.

Second, John Hinderaker at Power Line -- who is both intellectually capable and literate -- points out the delicious irony of the AP reporting: The entire first half of Lt.Gen. Sanchez's speech lambasted reporters for reporting "propaganda" instead of truthful news, for the purpose of getting stories onto the front page... but somehow, AP didn't consider that half of the speech newsworthy!

But let's just focus on the part of the speech where Gen. Sanchez attacks all the government people and policies, the only part that AP or any other drive-by news source I've read bothered to report.

Third: Good heavens... what is this obsession that some people seem to have for the idea that we shouldn't have "disbanded" the Iraqi army?

Contrariwise, every general I've heard speak on the subject has said that we didn't disband them: They disbanded themselves, fading back into the civilian population. One presumes this was because the former military personnel thought that -- like Arab conquerers -- we would put them all to the sword.

And are we not talking about the very same army and the same Republican Guard which brutalized, tortured, oppressed, and tormented the Iraqi Shia and Kurds (and even many Sunni) for literally decades? What makes either Gen. Sanchez or AP think that putting those same thugs in charge of enforcing the commands of foreign princes would be a good way to stand Iraq up on its own two feet?

Do journalists, Democrats, and certain old generals suggest we should have squashed Iraq flat, like a steamroller over a banana slug? That we should have utterly annihilated the cities, killed millions of Iraqis, firebombed the rubble, then dispersed the population to die of starvation and disease... and therefore leave them so helpless and shellshocked that they would meekly follow our orders -- as we did to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?

Forward to the past, men! Let's relive the most horrific war in all of human history. It's a disturbing position for a modern-day general to take -- and an incomprehensible one for liberals and the elite media.

But if we were not going to fight a "total war" against Iraq, that meant we would have to show, after conquest, that we were not crusaders or conquerers. And that means we could not assume ownership of Saddam Hussein's engines of oppression... no matter how convenient they might be. If our goal was to create a strong and independent Iraq without us killing five million innocent civilians, then we necessarily had to disperse the Iraqi military (though they saved us the trouble by dispersing themselves).

Finally, I have another problem with the speech itself, apart from the reporting about it: Sanchez is simply not a credible, unbiased witness:

  • He only served a single year in Iraq and has been out of the loop since;
  • It was at the very beginning of the war;
  • He had a bitter and angry relationship with Paul Bremer, the top civilian administrator at the time;
  • His career was later torpedoed over the abuses at Abu Ghraib; Sanchez himself says that it was responsible for destroying his career;
  • He appears to have been a follower of Colin Powell, who is hardly a model of fair-mindedness about the Iraq war;
  • And he seems to have a strangely unrealistic conception of how civilian government works... viz:

    "America's political leadership must come together and develop a bipartisan Grand Strategy to achieve victory in this conflict. The simultaneous application of our political, economic, information, and military elements of power is the only coarse of action that will provide a chance of success."

    Which sounds disturbingly like "Why can't Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the entire banking community, the intelligence agencies, and the blogosphere all just get along?"

Reading the speech is like listening to Bo Gritz ramble on, which Friend Lee and I did for four days one evening. At least Gritz did make one joke in the course of his lecture; unlike Sanchez, who sounds as sincere and earnest as a Ron Paul acolyte in the airport.

To try to extract any single piece from this speech's universal critique, while ignoring the rest, is to do both speaker and reader an injustice. (The elite media is unjust. So what else is new?)

I have yet to find a single MilBlogger who defends this speech or the man who made it. Honestly, there is nothing new in this speech, nor does anybody, right or left, emerge unstoned. The Democrats and their "willing accomplices in the media" are once again grasping at the camel's back.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 14, 2007, at the time of 11:32 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

October 12, 2007

The Shia Awaken

Elections , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

We've talked about this in previous posts -- for example, in The "Don't Make Waves!" Theory of Iraqi Politics -- but it occurred to me as soon as I began hearing about the "Anbar awakening" that the same dynamic would apply to the Shiite areas of Iraq: In short order, the Shiite militias were sure to go overboard in their thuggish, homicidal zeal, and begin brutalizing the Shia... just as al-Qaeda in Iraq did against the Sunni. At that moment, time would be ripe for a "Shia awakening," where Iraqi shia would turn on the militias that presume to speak for them.

Surprise, it's starting to happen... and even the New York Times has sat up and taken note:

In a number of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad, residents are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as their only protector against Sunni militants. Now they resent it as a band of street thugs without ideology.

The hardening Shiite feeling in Baghdad opens an opportunity for the American military, which has long struggled against the Mahdi Army, as American commanders rely increasingly on tribes and local leaders in their prosecution of the war.

The Times does a remarkable job (for the elite media) of fairly and in unbiased fashion describing the mechanism of Shiite discontent (apologies for the long quotation):

In interviews, 10 Shiites from four neighborhoods in eastern and western Baghdad described a pattern in which militia members, looking for new sources of income, turned on Shiites....

The street militia of today bears little resemblance to the Mahdi Army of 2004, when Shiites following a cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, battled American soldiers in a burst of Shiite self-assertion. Then, fighters doubled as neighborhood helpers, bringing cooking gas and other necessities to needy families.

Now, three years later, many members have left violence behind, taking jobs in local and national government, while others have plunged into crime, dealing in cars and houses taken from dead or displaced victims of both sects.

Even the demographics have changed. Now, street fighters tend to be young teenagers from errant families, in part the result of American military success. Last fall, the military began an aggressive campaign of arresting senior commanders, leaving behind a power vacuum and directionless junior members.

“Now it’s young guys — no religion, no red lines,” said Abbas, 40, a Shiite car parts dealer in Ameen, a southern Baghdad neighborhood. Abbas’s 22-year-old cousin, Ratib, was shot in the mouth this spring after insulting Mahdi militia members.

“People hate them,” Abbas said. “They want them to disappear from their lives.”

A mouthpiece for Iranian puppet Muqtada Sadr carefully explained that all of the Mahdi Militia members committing criminal violence against Iraqis are actually -- by that very act -- not members of the Mahdi Militia... a useful and fluid redefinition that allows the militia to slough off all accountability for the violence that continues, albeit at a much slower rate.

And as Sachi has argued many times in this blog, when Sadr does return from Iran (like the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Muqtada Sadr was withdrawn to his host country Iran for "further consultations"), he will not only find that the remnants of the Mahdi Militia don't want him or any of his "loyal lieutenants" back, but that there's no more militia to return to anyway.

I may as well go public with a bold prediction I have privately made to several friends: Big Lizards predicts that the Iraq insurgency is going to collapse much faster than anyone has publicly dared suggest. First AQI dangles at the end of its rope (there's a nice visual); now the Shia turn on the Mahdi and Badr militias. So who's minding the insurgency?

The collapse of the insurgency would have happened much earlier, in my opinion, were it not for the intervention of foreign forces. No, I don't mean the United States and the Coalition... I mean Iran's aggressive warmongering and the foreign hirabis from central al-Qaeda. Both Iran and al-Qaeda -- the latter may be funded by the former -- saw a national or ideological interest in fomenting a civil war in Iraq.

However, because of the essentially tribal -- not sectarian -- nature of Iraq, coupled with a cohesive Iraqi identity binding the tribes together, both Iran and al-Qaeda were unsuccessful; there never was a real civil war in Iraq... not even in 2006, after AQI blew up the golden-domed al-Askiri Mosque in Samarra on February 22nd. Both sects carried out a long wave of gangland massacres; but neither fielded armies or set up shadow governments.

As it becomes clear that there never will be a civil war, and that the Iraqis have turned against the joint insurgencies (Sunni against al-Qaeda and Shia against Iran), rather than being driven by fear into the arms of their Islamist "saviors," I strongly believe the principals will pull back. In the long run, neither has the resources to remain engaged in a losing war.

This will happen months before the November elections; and the victory in Iraq will play a major role. Simply put, the Democrats have some small nits against the GOP, but they're old chestnuts such as abortion and tax cuts; the only major new argument was over Iraq. In the 2006 elections, the Iraq war appeared to be a loser -- and so too were the Republicans. But they didn't lose as much as the Democrats had predicted; many voters took a "wait and see" attitude.

And good thing they did. If the war goes as I predict, and the very significant drop in violence we've seen continues, accompanied by a significant drop in the level of U.S. forces in Iraq (possibly to as low as 75,000) and a concommitent drop in American casualties, Iraq will increasingly and correctly be seen as a historic American victory.

Bear in mind, this is no guarantee that the voters will reward the Republicans: A Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson, and a Democratic Congress entered into World War I in 1917, won it handily in 1918... and in that same year, the GOP captured both houses of Congress. Two years later, Republicans solidified their congressional gains and added the presidency, all in a landslide. Even so, it's surely better for the sane party if Iraq is considered a victory, not a defeat.

Let's invite the Times to pen the Mahdi Militia's epitaph:

Ali, the Ur businessman, said he expected the Mahdi Army to be much smaller in the future. People simply do not believe its leaders anymore. “There is no ideology among them anymore,” he said.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 12, 2007, at the time of 11:11 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

October 1, 2007

Gratefully Not Dead: Iraq Civilian and US Military Deaths Plummet

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Fair warning: I am not a military strategist, nor do I play one on the internet. But I am an interested layman, and I've read as much as I can understand about counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy without returning to university.

From what I gather, one of the predictions of classical COIN is that, as the country fighting the insurgents shifts to a more effective COIN strategy, the indicator of success will be a significant drop in both civilian and military casualties, including deaths. (From now on, I will only discuss deaths, because it's hard to get data on non-fatal casualties.)

Insurgents practice asymmetrical warfare: They do not target the armed forces of the country the way an army would, force on force (milspeak for army vs. army in the open battlefield); and they don't precisely seize territory... thus eliminating two methods of evaluating military success in other types of wars.

In fact, the Islamist insurgents don't even seem to set up shadow governments (other than vague "caliphates," which are simply dictatorships by the biggest thug), nor do they attempt to win the "hearts and minds" of the civilians, as e.g. Communist insurgents tried in Vietnam, Korea, the Maylay states, and so forth. Rather, Islamist insurgents rampage through a town, killing civilians in essentially random ways, until they're driven out by COIN forces (as in Fallujah I and II in the pre-COIN period of the Iraq war).

Insurgents mostly target civilians; and even when they do attack the COIN army, they prefer to do so by ambushing patrollers, rather than trying to duke it out with an attacking force (the Taliban's catastrophic record against NATO shows why). In order to survive, an insurgency needs a constant stream of "victories," however small, to convince both the civilians who provide the sea of support for them and even for the insurgency's own members that the insurgency is the "strong horse," and everyone better get aboard. Each mass killing is considered a victory.

If instead they suffer a string of obvious defeats, then they start looking like losers: They lose support not only directly (members killed and captured) but also indirectly through a loss of prestige or "face." Fewer dead civilians and "infidel" soldiers (including IDF) directly translates into a loss of power and hegemony ("perceived fitness to rule," as I define it based on Gramsci). Therefore, the proper measure of COIN success is significantly fewer civilian and Coalition deaths.

When the country fighting the insurgency becomes more effective and begins denying the insurgency a sufficient stream of victories -- substituting instead a steady drip, drip, drip of insurgent defeats in the form of killings and captures and interdiction of attacks -- then two things happen:

  • Some civilian supporters of the insurgency rethink their loyalty, start withdrawing support, and begin instead cooperating with the defending country;
  • The insurgents themselves drift away from their former organizations (from fear and boredom), fading back into the general population... or if that is impossible, crossing the border into some adjoining country (as, e.g., Muqtada Sadr has returned to Iran).

So -- you're way ahead of me -- it's no surprise that a drop in civilian and military casualties is precisely what we've seen in Iraq since the COIN strategy was actually implemented in June: An initial spike of military casualties during the pre-implementation phase of preparing the battlefield, followed by the civilian and military death rate plummeting:

  • According to Iraq Coalition Casualties (iCasualties), civilian deaths in September were 746, the lowest since February 2006, when it was 688; civilian deaths have dropped by nearly 75% from the local high in February.
  • AP reports that civilian deaths in Iraq dropped by 50% in September alone;
  • According to Breitbart, September saw only 70 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq (iCasualties reports only 66, plus 3 non-US Coalition deaths)... the lowest total since July 2006.

Here is a table compiled from the iCasualties 2007 figures; ISF means Iraqi Security Forces, including the Iraqi Army, National Police, and local police:

Iraq insurgency killings in 2007
2007 Month Civilian deaths ISF deaths Coalition deaths Total deaths
January 1,711 91 86 1,888
February 2,864 150 85 3,099
March 2,762 215 82 3,039
April 1,521 300 117 1,938
May 1,782 198 131 2,111
* June 1,148 197 108 1,453
July 1,458 232 87 1,777
August ** 1,598
(1,078)
76 88 1,762
(1,242)
September 746 96 69 881

* COIN implementation actually begins after battlefield prep;

** Figure includes anomalous, one-time bombing of Yazidis that killed 520; parenthetical figures exclude Yazidi bombing.

Here are the data for civilian and total killings in line-chart form. Note that for the chart, we have removed the anomalous Yazidi bombing of August 14th. The reason we chose to do this can be found in a previous post, Civilian Deaths in Iraq Are Up, But They're Really Down:



Iraq insurgency killings 2007

The trendline is clear, even brutally clear: The COIN strategy is working exactly as planned. Barring any significant changes, the Iraq war is, for all military intents and beyond all argument, over; and it has ended in victory for the United States and for a free and democratic Iraq.

What remains is mopping up... which will surely be deadly and surely result in the killings of many innocent civilians and of many American, Coalition, and Iraqi security forces. But the mop-up will not change the final result; the insurgency has been broken.

As al-Qaeda is driven out of Iraq, the ruling Shia see less and less reason to support or tolerate the "death squads," which also kill Shia who don't conform to the militias' crabbed vision of Islam. More Shia will join "Mosul awakening" or "Basra awakening" type organizations and begin informing on militias and their murderous activities.

The major Shiite parties, DAWA and SCIRI, will find it much easier to cut the militias off at the knees than continue funding them and then apologizing for their activities; to the extent the militias will continue to exist at all, they will likely transition to launching occasional attacks on rival Shiite parties in advance of elections, as is the Arabic way of democracy: The days of a hundred throat-slittings a day of randomly selected Sunni Iraqis are gone, and they're not likely ever to return... they were situational, caused by Shiite overreaction to al-Qaeda depredations.

The question now changes to the larger geopolitical conundrum: How to use Iraq as a model for transforming the Middle East and the larger Non-Integrating Gap. In the future, no matter who is president, we shall require Gap countries to become more or less democratic states that are basically secure and basically free; and we shall require them to enter the global grid of communications, capitalism, and political moderation.

As Iraq cools down, its very existence should make it much easier to deal with problems like Iran, Syria, and even countries in other regions, such as North Korea and Venezuela. Too, the final success of the Bush policy will induce other Western nations -- those bold, independent trendsetters -- to jump on the bandwagon. ("Oceania has always supported pre-emptive strikes, covert action, and counterinsurgency!")

All I can say is thank you, Mr. President, for quite literally sticking to your guns. You will be remembered... but not the way Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) fantasizes!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 1, 2007, at the time of 7:18 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

September 24, 2007

Cindy Sheehan's Day of Out-of-Tunement Manifesto

Afghan Astonishments , Asquirmative Action , Dhimmi of the Month , Domestic Terrorism , Drama Kings and Queens , Econ. 101 , Enviro-Mental Cases , Hippy Dippy Peacenik Groove , History of Moral Philosophy , Illiberal Liberalism , Impeachment Imbecilities , Iraq Matters , Kriminal Konspiracies , Liberal Lunacy , Logical Lacunae , News of the Weird , Palestinian Perils and Pratfalls , Politics 101 , Scurrilous Scribblings , Terrorism Intelligence , Unnatural Disasters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

I rarely do this, as you know: I rarely link to some piece and say simply "read this." (I'm too in love with the sound of my own fingers typing on a keyboard.)

But here's an exception. Read Cindy Sheehan's Yom Kippur "sermon," delivered at Michael Lerner's Beyt Tikkun "synogogue;" you will be -- if not exactly glad, then at least agape. (Rabbi Lerner is Hillary Clinton's mentor, author of the Politics of Meaning and other works of Socialist agit-prop masquerading as theology.)

My response (I love this) is entirely contained in the list of categories I had to attach to this post.

(Well, one more thing. It has always been my understanding that Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, is a day for each person to atone for what he, personally, has done wrong -- not "atone" for his enemies failing to live up to his own lofty standards, apologize for all the times America hasn't followed his lead, or wallow in self-righteous indignation that nobody listens to him. 'Nuff said; read the list of categories above.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 24, 2007, at the time of 2:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 21, 2007

COIN-Op War

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Now that General Petraeus' Counter Insurgency (COIN) plan is working, the obvious question is "why didn't we do this sooner?" Mort Kondracke and Fred Barnes agreed with each other last week on the Beltway Boys that "we should have done this back in 2005." But I now believe we could not have done it then or anytime earlier than we did. (This may exonerate Gens. George Casey and John Abizaid.)

This afternoon, I was listening to Hugh Hewitt read from Michael Totton's report from Ramadi. The report was extremely upbeat: After many years of abuse by al-Qaeda, the Sunni tribes are sick and tired of the horrible lives the terrorists forced upon them. When the Americans approached them early this year to join forces against AQI, they were more than ready... they were eager.

With the cooperation of local Sunni tribes, American and Iraqi troops were able to kick al-Qaeda out of Ramadi, completely transforming a once hellish place into, not a Garden of Eden, but at least a place where troops and journalists feel safe without body armor and a helmet. People are now friendly and trustworthy. I heard an identical story from Falluja, and similar ones from the notorious Haifa Street in Bagdhad.

These three observations jibe with what Lt.Col. Dave Kilcullen -- senior COIN advisor to Gen. Petraeus -- wrote in his post at Small Wars Journal describing the development of the "Anbar awakening". Kilcullen paints a portrait of tribal leaders driven to the end of their tether by the rabid authoritarianism and bloodthirst of al-Qaeda, finally snapping and hurling themselves into battle against their erstwhile allies.

The mechanism is clear: Sunnis (and Shia) became so disgusted by and enraged at the high-handed dictatorship of al-Qaeda (or the Shiia militias, depending) that they could not tolerate another minute under the leash. But the operative point that must be understood is that the disgust and anger comes not from the abstract contemplation of rights denied but the palpable experience in thrall to fanatic extremists.

Now to the theory. One vital element of COIN is getting the cooperation of local citizens; a "counterinsurgency" does not work when the whole countryside is against us. The citizens of Anbar, Diyala, Salahuddin, and the Sunni areas of Baghdad must become the eyes and ears of our troops; and they must not betray us to the evil-doers. If the Sunnis sympathize with the insurgents more than they trust us, COIN does not work.

In 2005, neiher Sunni nor Shia trusted Americans; they believed we would side with one or the other faction, try to install an American puppet, or just get tired and leave. They thought of us as conquerors and occupiers. They thought we went to Iraq to steal their oil and their women. When al-Qaeda (or some Shiite Militia) promised to kick out the infidels and bring power to the Iraqis, the people simply believed them.

This was before al-Qaeda forced people to obey Taliban-like rules, and before the leadership began to rape the women and kill the sons of the communities. In other words, when ordinary Iraqis still thought they could coexist with the terrorists.

So how did we go about gaining their trust and their alliance against the insurgency?

I do not believe the Iraqis would ever have been convinced by us simply telling them how evil the terrorists were. I believe the Iraqis needed to experience for themselves the inhuman hatred and violence of al-Qaeda. They needed to come to the conclusion themselves that terrorists are not their friends; in fact, they are the invaders, not Americans. They had to learn what life was like when their rulers considered them inferior beings.

People in Iraq also needed to know that Americans do not give up when going gets tough. They needed to know they could trust us to stay for as long as it took. Iraqis had to overcome anti-Western prejudice and start trusting Americans. They needed the past four years of experience.

I initially supported Secretary Rumsfeld's "small footprint" operation, with MNF-I commander Gen. Casey and CENTCOM commander John Abizaid. Many people now think that was a failure, and I too thought so for a while. But today, I don't think it was either a mistake or failure. The Iraqi people needed to learn just how totalitarian and vicious were al-Qaeda and the Shiite militias.

But if, as Mort and Fred suggested, we had tried this strategy in 2006 of 2005, it would have been an abject failure. The grand military theorist Edward Luttwak believes that if a region is begging to have a war (think of Xugoslavia just after the breakup), you cannot impose a peace upon them until they fight themselves to collapse; then and only then are the combatants willing to look at negotiation with favor. By the same reasoning, then, until the insurgent enablers among the larger population experience the horrors of a one-party sharia state, they cannot know how awful it will be.

Therefore, by luck or by careful planning, we held our ground -- yet allowed the flowering of sharia, so long as it did not directly threaten us. As anyone could anticipate (though few of us did), familiarity bred a great deal of contempt.

But take the personal experience out of the equation, and it would have been darn-near impossible to end up with an "Anbar awakening" -- or a Diyala, Baghdad, or even Basra awakening. Thus, the answer to the question, "why didn't we do this back in 2005?" is that it would not only have fallen apart, it would have increased the distrust and mutual animosity between America and the Iraqis.

Had we done what so many now claim they told us (in retrospect, without witnesses) we should have done, we would still have an insurgency; but we would already have discredited our own COIN operation. In that sense, therefore, it's actually a good thing that we did not decide to try a counterinsurgency until now... so that the unanticipated miracle of the "awakenings" could sweep through Iraq.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 21, 2007, at the time of 4:00 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

September 20, 2007

Democrats -- or Dhimmicrats?

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

And while we're on the subject of roll-call votes, how about this one?

For several days now, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX, 96%) has been pushing an amendment to condemn the MoveOn.org ad that asked "General Petraeus -- or General Betray Us?" He also demanded the Senate support our troops and the man the Senate unanimously confirmed as their leader. The text was as follows:

To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.

But the Democrats were reluctant to vote for such an amendment; in fact, they ducked it the first time, a couple of days ago. Then today, in an effort to undercut support for the Cornyn amendment, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA, 95%) introduced her own version of the amendment:

To reaffirm strong support for all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces and to strongly condemn attacks on the honor, integrity, and patriotism of any individual who is serving or has served honorably in the United States Armed Forces, by any person or organization.

Note the changes: "Full support" has shrunk to "strong support;" the condemnation of "personal attacks" has become a condemnation merely of "attacks" (I suppose calling someone a liar, a stooge, and someone for whom one must suspend disbelief isn't necessarily personal).

But the most important change: Gen. Petraeus -- the actual victim of Democratic hate speech -- has been erased from our memory. He has become an "un-person." Under the Boxer version, all one need do is assert that Petraeus is not honorably serving (all that lying and stooging), and the hate speech can spew forth without condemnation.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) insisted that, notwithstanding the timeline, the Boxer amendment would be voted on first. But Republicans refused to go along with the trick; they refused to agree to the vote and filibustered... and the Democrats were unable to overcome it, losing the vote by 51 to 46 in favor (60 needed)... and that's including Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT, 75%D), who voted in favor of the Boxer amendment.

We fast forward 38 minutes. At long last, the Cornyn amendment came up for a vote. Mind, by this time, there was no alternative to the Cornyn amendment; if it went down, then the Senate would have chosen not to condemn the MoveOn ad and not to support Petraeus and the troops.

Fortunately, it passed... but by only 72 to 25, with 3 not voting. Shockingly enough, not a single vote against the amendment came from a Republican. Nor did any Republican fail to vote. Rather, all 49 Senate Republicans voted "To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces."

24 out of 49 Democrats -- 50% of the caucus -- voted against condemning the ad calling Petraeus a traitor, against supporting the troops, and against supporting the man every, last one of them voted to confirm less than eight months ago... during which time, he turned around the war effort, which now is headed towards victory. Among those voting against condemning the "General Betray Us" ad are presidential candidates Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%) and Chris Dodd (D-CT, 95%).

The other two senators running for the Democratic nomination for president -- Joe Biden (D-DE, 100%) and Barack Obama (D-IL, 95%) -- were too cowardly to cast a vote. Biden also ducked the vote on Barbara "the Underminer" Boxer's amendment, but Obama managed to crawl out of his hole long enough to vote for the weak-tea Boxer version.

Independent Socialist Bernie Sanders (I-VT, not yet rated) voted for the Boxer version but against the Cornyn version; Independent Joe Lieberman voted for both versions.

So there you have it: One party wholeheartedly supports the troops, supports Gen. Petraeus, and condemns the vicious, personal attack by MoveOn.org which questions Petraeus' patriotism.

In the other party, half of the members do not support the troops, do not support their commander, and applaud and join in the attacks on Petraeus' character and patriotism.

Be sure to let your friends know... especially those on the center-left. Perhaps they should consider the depth of hatred this betokens when they step into the little booth in November 2008.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 20, 2007, at the time of 12:37 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

September 17, 2007

Mr. Greenspan Regrets He's Unable to Bash Today

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

And so, as the Democratic euphoria and media hyperventilation of yesterday about Alan Greenspan's remark that "the Iraq war is largely about oil" dies, not with a bang but with a clarification, an awful lot of liberals are busy wiping large ovum deposits off of their faces:

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been "essential" to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Greenspan, who was the country's top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that "the Iraq War is largely about oil." In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was "not the administration's motive," he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.

"I was not saying that that's the administration's motive," Greenspan said in an interview Saturday, "I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential."

Ouch. And if that isn't clear enough:

Greenspan said he had backed Hussein's ouster, either through war or covert action. "I wasn't arguing for war per se," he said. But "to take [Hussein] out, in my judgment, it was something important for the West to do and essential, but I never saw Plan B" -- an alternative to war.

The Washington Post demonstrates the difference between its own rational skepticism about the war and the MoveOn-inspired hysteria of its northern rival, the New York Times:

Critics of the administration have often argued that while Bush cited Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and despotic rule as reasons for the invasion, he was also motivated by a desire to gain access to Iraq's vast oil reserves. Publicly, little evidence has emerged to support that view, although a top-secret National Security Presidential Directive, titled "Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy" and signed by Bush in August 2002 -- seven months before the invasion -- listed as one of many objectives "to minimize disruption in international oil markets."

"Gain[ing] access," of course, amounts to stealing, which is what the Left incessantly accuses Bush of doing (they toss around charges of corruption as if they were routine politicking, akin to Republicans complaining that the Democrats want to raise taxes; this is another legacy of Bill Clinton -- and a preview of what a Hillary-Clinton presidency would be like). But a desire to "minimize disruption in international oil markets" is not remotely like theft, unless we're to believe that stopping a terrorist from bombing an oil pipeline is the same as stealing the oil; the concepts are worlds apart, as rational liberals (there are some) appear to realize.

I know this post has largely been quotation, but I cannot resist the closing paragraphs:

Given [Hussein's evident intent to seize the Strait of Hormuz], "I'm saying taking Saddam out was essential," he said. But he added that he was not implying that the war was an oil grab.

"No, no, no," he said. Getting rid of Hussein achieved the purpose of "making certain that the existing system [of oil markets] continues to work, frankly, until we find other [energy supplies], which ultimately we will."

I wish I had time to surf around and see how many leftie bloggers used the Greenspan quotation yesterday to buttress their insane allegations; but, you know, life is short.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 17, 2007, at the time of 9:28 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

What Would Have Been?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

One of the most difficult kinds of science fiction to write well is the alternative history... which, by a genre convention I'll follow, will henceforth be called "alternate history," or simply alt-hist.

It's not acceptable simply to fantasize wildly about what could have happened had the Spartan 300 been given Star-Trek phasers or had George Washington been born a girl ("She would have led a Womyn's revolution and become the first female president of the United Feminist States of America!") The proper name for that activity is not alternate history but day dreaming.

Rather, one must begin from at least a reasonably good grasp of history (without knowing so much that one simply cannot imagine it going any differently) and proceed by logical extrapolation from a strict and appropriate ruleset of inference. Thus, had President William McKinley survived his assassination attempt (a very plausible scenario, as he lingered for eight days before sucumbing to gangrene), that might have had significant ramifications, as Theodore Roosevelt might never have become president. But if Andrew Johnson had been impeached, it likely wouldn't have changed anything significant: He was nearly powerless to stop the abuses of Reconstruction anyway; it would have made little difference whether he was president or not.

However, the cardinal sin is to consider only the bad or good effects of your alt-hist -- and not the other side of the ledger. Alas, that is precisely the solecism committed by Bob Herbert in his New York Times column Saturday, "the Nightmare Is Here"... and he wasn't even aware he was writing alt-hist! (The column is hidden behind the "TimeSelect" iron curtain; the link is to TruthOut's reposting.)

Herbert can only see the bad things that have arisen from the invasion of Iraq and deposing of Saddam Hussein; he cannot, for the life of him, imagine what would have been, had we not intervened. In this, he replicates the failing of the vast majority of anti-war agit-prop churned out, not only by the drive-by media (in particular, the New York Times), but also by activists, Democratic elected officials, and even limp-wristed RINOs looking for way to ingratiate themselves to their liberal constituents while not infuriating their conservative ones. Herbert cannot seem to visualize the horrific things that might have, probably would have happened, had Powell won out over Cheney in 2003:

When the U.S. launched its "shock and awe" invasion in March 2003, the population of Iraq was about 26 million. The flaming horror unleashed by the invasion has since forced 2.2 million of those Iraqis, nearly a tenth of the population, to flee the country. Many of those who left were professionals marked for death - doctors, lawyers, academics, the very people with the skills necessary to build a viable society....

While more than two million Iraqis have fled to other countries, another two million have been displaced internally.

All right; let's suppose that's true. But how many had to flee under Hussein? How many were arrested, tortured, maimed, or sent into internal exile, such as the Marsh Arabs who used to live around the Great Salt Marsh until Hussein drained the wetlands and expelled them to make room for his Palestinian imports?

And those "professionals marked for death"... were any, by chance, Baathist oppressors and war-crimes collaborators? Must we weep for the forced flight of those who, were it within their power, would still be living as lords among slaves?

The worst aspect of the nightmare, of course, is the rain of death that has descended on Iraq since the U.S. invasion. Controversy has surrounded virtually all attempts to estimate the number of civilian casualties, but no one disputes that the toll is staggering.

The U.S. government has behaved as though these dead Iraqis were not even worth counting. In December 2005, President Bush casually mentioned "30,000, more or less" as the number of Iraqis killed in the war. The White House later said there were no official estimates of Iraqi deaths.

Herbert believes the correct number is somewhere north of 100,000. But how many were murdered by Saddam Hussein during his tenure? Most estimate at least one million over ten years, or 100,000 per year -- or an Iraq "nightmare" every year for a decade. How many would have been killed if Hussein's thirst for blood had not been stifled? By now, about 450,000, more than four times even the expansive, unsourced guesstimate Herbert offers for the number who have been killed by terrorist attack or sectarian strife since March 2003.

But this is only a naive, first cut at the alt-hist of us not invading Iraq, thus allowing Saddam Hussein to continue wielding the iron fist inside the iron glove. Herbert must suppose, in his own alternative, that Hussein's close shave will cause him to turn over a new leaf, to reform, to become a democrat (it would be snarky to suggest he was already a Democrat). To count every killing against President Bush in the cosmic ledger book while not counting any saved lives to his credit can only mean that Herbert believes that there would have been no more massacres, no more war crimes, no more crimes against Humanity committed by Hussein, his venomous offspring, or the Baath Party he led -- if only we hadn't invaded.

Let's look instead at another alternate history, one with, I think, the greater plausibility that results from assuming no 180-degree character evolution. Assuming the principals more or less act as they have in the past, what is the most likely sequence of events if, in the end, Bush could not pull the trigger? Consider the following and ask which sounds more plausible... the implied "good ship Lollipop" plot of Herbert's alternate history, or this:

  1. Saddam Hussein continues his murderous ways, committing several more massacres on the scale of those he carried out against Kurds and Shia before; thus, more hundreds of thousands, or even millions, are slaughtered;
  2. The Europeans continue their cheating on the Oil for Food program, continue accepting bribes from Hussein, and ultimately (as was the trajectory in 2003) eliminate the sanctions entirely -- either de jure, by forcing America to accept the "new way," or at least de facto, by refusing to abide by them; so Hussein gets billions upon billions of petrodollars poured into his pockets, to use as pleases him;
  3. Contacts between Hussein and al-Qaeda continue, accelerate, and eventually ripen into fully funded, well-planned and trained, and heavily armed attacks upon their joint enemies: the United States and Israel;
  4. At last, unwilling to wait longer for his patrimony, either Uday or Qusay Hussein (or both) assassinate the over-long-lived father. The brothers fall short of brotherly love and fall out with each other, throwing Iraq into a real civil war -- not the ersatz variety of gangland slayings that we saw with some regularity in 2005 and 2006. As in a real civil war, both sides field armies. The slaughter is extreme -- even for Arabs.
  5. Growing restive at the loss (a scant thousand years ago) of the Persian empire, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sees his opportunity: Iran invades southern Iraq.
  6. Growing tired of being brutalized, the Kurds see their opportunity and declare independence; immediately, the Kurds in Iran and Turkey follow suit, declaring the independent nation of Kurdistan.
  7. Reacting to the foregoing -- both the Iranian invasion and the Kurish separatism -- Turkey invades northern Iraq.
  8. We now have a five-way gang bang in the heart of the Middle East: Uday vs. Qusay vs. Iran vs. the Kurds vs. Turkey, with al-Qaeda circling above like vultures, waiting to build a perch of blood to hatch their nefarious schemes.
  9. Can Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, France, the United States, the UAE, Qatar, Libya, and Sudan be far behind?

I say that my "mega-mare" is at least as plausible as the "lark's on the wing, snail's on the thorn" alternate history of Bob Herbert. And mine would be so catastrophic that it dwarfs the paltry problems we've had in Iraq.

I don't know about you guys, but the more I think about what would (likely) have been, the gladder I am that we took the plunge. And all because of a scant 537 votes in Florida. Say... now there's nightmarish alternate history for you!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 17, 2007, at the time of 12:58 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 15, 2007

The Times, They Are a-Shamin'

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

The New York Times has become the leading voice for surrender in Iraq. More even than most of the Democrats (or any of the Democratic presidential candidates except, perhaps, Bill Richardson), the Times editors' demand for defeat has become almost hysterical, as if someone had taken their families hostage: "If dat President, whatsisname, Bush don't get outa Iraq, you'll never see yer kids again!"

Unlike most of the Democrats, the Times follows the complete Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY, 95%) line:

  1. Bush lied us into the war in the first place;
  2. Al-Qaeda was never in Iraq before 2003, and probably isn't there today;
  3. Victory is unachievable;
  4. The "surge" is a miserable failure that has actually made things worse militarily;
  5. Notwithstanding (4), the amazing success in Anbar, Diyala, Salahuddin, and Baghdad provinces -- where Sunni tribes have risen up in angry defiance of al-Qaeda, have fought alongside American forces against al-Qaeda, and have more or less driven al-Qaeda out of those provinces -- were not caused by anything America did, and particularly anything President Bush did: They happened "in spite of" the counterinsurgency strategy, not because of it;
  6. All troops should be withdrawn immediately and precipitously, in as ragged a mob and as humiliating a retreat as possible, in order to punish America and teach us a good, hard lesson about electing Republicans;
  7. Any and all resultant damage to the American military, American prestige, American hegemony in the region, stability in the region, the containment of Iran and Syria, and to any American ally in the region (cough-cough the Jews cough-cough) is entirely and exclusively the fault of George W. Bush and the Republicans... even though the GOP has argued consistently against the policy advocated by the Times.

At the moment, they're beavering away at convincing everyone of (4), and they have focused upon two -- only two -- specific complaints they have: that the Iraqi national parliament has been unable so far to pass a bill establishing the rules by which foreign oil leases can be signed by provinces, and that a particular tribal sheikh who was friendly to us, Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, was slain, presumably by al-Qaeda.

This seems a remarkably thin reed on which to base a conclusion of utter despair, hopelessness, and belly-crawling to our enemies. Let's take the last first...

Although it's a tragedy that Abu Risha was assassinated, it's sheer lunacy to imagine that the Sunni response to such an affront will be to meekly return to life under the leash. For heaven's sake, it was precisely this sort of high-handed butchery and depostism that drove the Sunni tribes away from al-Qaeda and into alliance with the Coalition to fight them, as Lt.Col. Dave Kilcullen so ably recounts in an article he wrote for Small Wars Journal, "Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt." The more likely result will be a redoubling of the anti-terrorist combat effort by Sunni Iraqis... which is already an oversimplification, as is virtually everything in the Times' argumentum, as the tribes in question include both Sunni and Shiite members.

That is, if slaughtering tribal sheikhs led to the tribes turning against al-Qaeda in the first place, how can the chowderheaded editors at the New York Times argue that a couple more assassinations will put the djinn back in the bottle?

And as for their triumphant crowing that the oil-revenue-sharing law "seems to be collapsing," the editors should stop sucking up to MoveOn.org and start reading Big Lizards. As I noted some time ago, all of these issues in Iraq will be settled, not by a top-down, authoritarian, nationalist parliament... but by the opposite process: Individuals will settle with individuals, tribe with tribe, province with province, region with region. Once all that is accomplished, then parliament may step in and ratify the "facts on the ground."

As far as the instant case, provinces will simply start negotiating oil leases with various companies... as Kurdistan is now doing:

The legislation has already been presented to the Iraqi Parliament, which has been unable to take virtually any action on it for months. Contributing to the dispute is the decision by the Kurds to begin signing contracts with international oil companies before the federal law is passed. The most recent instance, announced last week on a Kurdish government Web site, was an oil exploration contract with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas.

The Sunni Arabs who removed their support for the deal did so, in part, because of a contract the Kurdish government signed earlier with a company based in the United Arab Emirates, Dana Gas, to develop gas reserves.

Leave aside the obvious double standard... the Democrat-controlled American Congress has yet to ratify a single one of the major budget bills for next fiscal year, which starts October 1st, I believe; they have languished in joint reconciliation committees for months now. Instead, let's cut to the heart of the Chuck Schumer-New York Times position: What the Times sees as "contributing to the dispute" is actually the beginning of the solution. The next step is for the Sunnis to start negotiating their own blasted agreements with Hunt and Dana Gas and Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon, agreements not only to develop the small amount of proven reserves in areas held by mostly Sunni tribes, but also to explore in the untapped and potentially vast reserves of oil and especially natural gas that are just now being reported in those same "Sunni" areas.

Once Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish provinces are signing oil leases like mad, then and only then will the Iraqi parliament move to ratify the system that will, by then, have evolved. Unlike (alas) the court system, the legislature is typically a lagging indicator -- not a leading indicator; they await strident demands from their constituents before they will act... as I would put it, they only work when threatened.

It's the same here as in Iraq... easily shown by the recently enacted (hah) comprehensive immigration reform bill, the privatization of Social Security and Medicare bill, the litigation-reform bill, and the defense-of-marriage constitutional amendment. Or for that matter, those budget bills, which are far less controversial but appear every bit as contentious.

The only available metric right now for how the counterinsurgency strategy is working -- is that contained within the strategy itself: It can only be evaluated by how well it protects the Iraqi population and reduces the violence from al-Qaeda and from Shiite militias, not by proxy measurements: whether the Iraqi parliament has passed a particular bill, how many American troops have been killed recently, or how well it satisfies the deep, defeatist desires of the elite media. And on the only valid metrics, the so-called "surge" has succeeded much better than expected.

All else is dicta.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 15, 2007, at the time of 12:31 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 13, 2007

Two Left Iraq

Blogomania , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

It is, one presumes, just a coincidence; but two familiar Iraqi bloggers both left Iraq within the last few days. Although they lived thousands of miles away, we've come to know them very well... one as a respected thinker and member of the most well-known families of Iraqi bloggers in the dextrosphere; the other as an anti-American hack who bemoans the fall of Saddam Hussein, and is very likely the daughter of a former high-ranking Baathist.

Let's take the last first...

A blogger who has been known to us only as "Riverbend," but whom we Lizards disaffectionately refer to "Rubberband," decided to high-tail it out of Iraq back in April. However, after announcing her intention, she exprienced a series of delays due to curfews and the untimely death of her driver's brother. But a few days ago, Rubberband and her parents and a couple of other familiy members finally found their chance to leave Iraq, and good riddance. Surprise, surprise, their destination was Syria, where they are now ex-pats (along with many and many another Baathist exile).

It was a tearful farewell as we left the house. One of my other aunts and an uncle came to say goodbye the morning of the trip. It was a solemn morning and I’d been preparing myself for the last two days not to cry. You won’t cry, I kept saying, because you’re coming back. You won’t cry because it’s just a little trip like the ones you used to take to Mosul or Basrah before the war. In spite of my assurances to myself of a safe and happy return, I spent several hours before leaving with a huge lump lodged firmly in my throat. My eyes burned and my nose ran in spite of me. I told myself it was an allergy.

The day Rubberband and her family were packing the car, another Iraqi left Iraq. His name is Omar, and he is one of the three brothers who started a blog called Iraq the Model. Rather than congenial Syria, Omar's destination was New York City, where he is now a student. In fact his brother Ali -- who left Iraq the Model couple of years ago to start his own blog -- was already in the US, also going to college:

Just two days ago I arrived in New York City and for the coming two years I will be studying international affairs at Columbia University [Isaac Asimov's old alma mater -- DaH], hopefully by the end of that I will get the master's degree I want!

So far I'm still in the process of settling in and figuring out what I need to do in order to actually start my studies. However posting on this blog will continue and a new post will be coming tomorrow if not tonight.

And by the way, in case some of Ali's old readers are wondering where he is and like to contact him, he's going to college at Stony Brooks [sic] in Long Island [Omar means Ali is at the State University of New York at Stony Brook].

Omar talked about coming to America a few weeks ago. He told us about a horrible traveling experience he had when he went to Jordan to obtain an American visa. According to Omar, Jordan is treating Iraqis really badly.

This is hardly surprising, as the last thing in the world Jordan wants or needs is a flood of Iraqi refugees... particularly given that Saddam Hussein transplanted a number of terrorist-supporting Palestinians into Iraq (displacing the Marsh Arabs on land that used to be, and is slowly being reclaimed by, the Great Salt Marsh) -- and I suspect most Jordanians believe there are already more than enough Palestinians in Jordan. But back to Omar's tale:

[R]ecently our Jordanian brothers came up with a truly outrageous practice of discrimination against Iraqis. All disembarking Iraqi passengers now are taken to special passport counters in a hall separated from the rest of airport facilities regardless of the origin of their flights or the airlines they came aboard. Attached to this hall is what Iraqis call “the prison”.

In case you haven’t heard, Iraqi refugees stopped going to Jordan long time ago now because they know they would be turned away...

The most painful scene was of families of four being torn apart; half of the family would be allowed to enter Jordan while the other half would be rejected and ordered to go back. Many preferred to go home together over being separated like this.

One scene like this nearly turned to a tragedy when an old lady suddenly collapsed on the floor from a case of heart attack from all the stress she suffered that day. If not for the good Iraqi doctor among us, she would have died waiting for the medics to arrive.

Miss Rubberband's family knew of the Jordanian situation; that's one of the reasons they decided to go to Syria. (Another reason, of course, is the willingness of Syria to enroll former Baathists in the only other Baathist regime in the world.)

As far as I know, Rubberband and Omar's family both lived in Baghdad. Both are Sunnis... but what a difference between them! Look at the lives they are leading: When I read Iraq the Model, I always feel optimistic even in the hardest time. But Rubberband makes me feel only bitterness and depression. It is hard to believe they both live in the same city (but then, so do Charles Krauthammer and Chuck Schumer).

But of course, the former represents the Sunnis who did not believe themselves superior to the Shia and Kurds and who were not the elect of Saddam; while the latter is of the class that lorded it over everyone else. It's not suprising that Rubberband would be so bitter against America and the Iraqi Shia; she had such a cushy life until that terrible day.

I wish both families good luck. I hope Omar and Ali will be able to come back soon, armed with the knowledge that will help lead their country into the Functioning Core. And I hope Rubberband sees what is happening in Syria and comes to her senses.

I'm pretty sure I'll bat .500 on those two well-wishes.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 13, 2007, at the time of 3:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 12, 2007

"Surge a Failure, Democrats Tell General"

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

The title -- the headline of a Breitbart story on Gen. David Petraeus' and Ambassador Ryan Crocker's testimony before Congress -- says it all, doesn't it? "Surge a failure, Democrats tell General." I'm sure Petraeus was properly grateful for being instructed.

This is our first post from the Noordam, a Holland-America cruise ship. It turns out to be a bigger pain than expected to post from here: The connection fee is horrendous -- we just dropped $100 for 250 minutes (of which 180 remain); so we must go online, save a bunch of web pages we intend to use, then logout. Then we read the material we downloaded offline and write the post (I'm writing in Netscape Mail). At the end, when the post is finished, I will log on again, paste this text into Movable Type, edit it and check the links, and then post. Yeesh!

Here's the fuller quotation from the story:

Anti-war Senate Democrats bluntly told Iraq commander General David Petraeus Tuesday his troop surge strategy was an abject failure in its prime objective -- forging an Iraqi political settlement. [Or rather, giving Congress a playable reason to surrender.]

Several Senate Republicans [read: RINOs] also expressed unease with US war policy, as the general and US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker endured a roasting on a second day of high-stakes testimony to Congress.

Resorting to the last refuge of a cowardly scoundrel, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE, 100%) asked Petraeus two direct questions about the efficacy of the "surge"... then he proceeded to answer them himself, without inviting the commanding general to confuse matters by participating in the interrogation.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT, 95%) went Biden one better, furiously asking a rhetorical question that tortured the English language until it begged for mercy: "What makes you possibly think that anything further like this is going to produce the results that anybody else has failed to do?" (Senate aides are still trying to pick up the broken pieces of syntax and semantic content Dodd left strewn on the Rotunda floor.) Sen. Lieberman (I-CT, 75%D) must have slid further down in his seat, hoping folks wouldn't think he was with the other fellow at his table.

But that's not what I came to write about (now he tells us!) I actually derived more amusement from the New York Times editorial... which was spoonfed to us on the ship as part of a little digest of the thoughts of the Times, "all the news we see fit to print." In typically condescending fashion, it begins thus:

For months, President Bush has been promising an honest accounting of the situation in Iraq, a fresh look at the war strategy and a new plan for how to extricate the United States from the death spiral of the Iraqi civil war. [Excuse me; perhaps it's my trick memory again, but I sure don't remember that last "promise" from President Bush.] The nation got none of that yesterday from the Congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. It got more excuses for delaying serious decisions for many more months, keeping the war going into 2008 and probably well beyond.

It was just another of the broken promises and false claims of success that we’ve heard from Mr. Bush for years, from shock and awe, to bouquets of roses, to mission accomplished and, most recently, to a major escalation that was supposed to buy Iraqi leaders time to unify their nation. We hope Congress is not fooled by the silver stars, charts and rhetoric of yesterday’s hearing. Even if the so-called surge has created breathing room, Iraq’s sectarian leaders show neither the ability nor the intent to take advantage of it.

Wait... wasn't "shock and awe," which referred to the initial combat phase of Iraq, fulfilled when American forces routed the strongest Arab army in the Middle East in just three weeks? That's less than time than it took the Nazi blitzkrieg ("lightning war") to overrun France.

And there were roses, though I suppose the Democrats have a point that the ousted Baathists, the Democrats' natural constituency, were unhappy. And of course, I'm sure the Times editorialists are at least intelligent enough to understand that the "mission accomplished" banner referred to the mission of that particular carrier, and perhaps secondarily to the successful conclusion of the first phase of major combat operations... not to the entire Iraq war (especially as Bush explained as much in his speech).

Finally, it's astonishing how a prediction of failure by the editors can morph into another example of failure, without ever having to pass through the tedious process of actually coming to pass. "I say it'll never get off the ground... and my prognostication proves the Wright Brothers are a couple of lunatics!"

It's full of boners such as this: "The military does not have the troops to sustain these high levels without further weakening the overstretched Army and denying soldiers their 15 months of home leave before going back to war." Fifteen months of home leave? My, the military certainly has changed; perhaps the soldiers can just spend a year and a quarter lying on the beach and soaking up some rays! This must be similar to the assertion that every moment the president spends away from the White House, no matter what he is doing or how much he works, is to be considered "going on vacation."

The end was so predictable, they probably wrote it in advance of the testimony:

General Petraeus admitted success in Iraq would be neither quick nor easy. Mr. Crocker claimed that success is attainable, but made no guarantee. With that much wiggle room in the prognosis, one would think American leaders would start looking at serious alternative strategies -- like the early, prudent withdrawal of troops that we favor. [And God help the troops that they don't favor!] The American people deserve more than what the general and the diplomat offered them yesterday. [They also deserve more than a "prudent" surrender in the midst of an impressive victory.

For that matter, they deserve more than what was offered by Representative Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. When protesters interrupted the hearing, Mr. Skelton ordered them removed from the room, which is understandable. But then he said that they would be prosecuted. That seemed like an unnecessarily authoritarian response to people who just wanted to be heard.

"[P]eople who just wanted to be heard..." but who did not wish to extend that courtesy to the commanding general, the ambassador, or any Republicans over whose questioning they chose to chant. I definitely want to see prosecution of such serial abusers of other people's First Amendment rights (I refer to my right to hear what Petraeus, Crocker, and everyone else has to say).

Well! Two once-great American institutions have certainly distinguished themselves this week. (Three, if you count the American protester; though I'd only go so far as to say that they need to be institutionalized.)

We had an inkling that this would be the Democrats' "response" to the testimony (where "response" here means "scripted verbal sneering that resembles the choreographed strutting of a professional wrestler"). It's nice to see that they continue to live down to our low expectations of them.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 12, 2007, at the time of 10:23 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Kagen On Jones

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Hugh Hewitt had a little snippet about this Fred Kagan article Thursday, but I decided it needed a more thorough discussion. And besides, it's a good excuse to schedule another post to automagically appear while we're drilling for oil in Alaska, one of the original fourteen colonies that became the United States.

Military analyst Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute -- one of the creators, along with Gen. Jack Keane, of the counterinsurgency strategy currently in use by Gen. David Petraeus -- is rather steamed about the way the media has spun (twisted is the better word) the Iraq report by Retired Marine General Jim Jones. In fact, let's start with Kagan's final sentence:

Presenting the Jones Report as a condemnation of the Iraqi Security Forces, proof of their hopelessness, or support for a rapid withdrawal of American forces or a "change of mission" goes beyond spin. It is simple dishonesty.

There; now the entire rest of this post is officially a flashback.

Who is Gen. Jones? I presume they're talking about Ret. Marine General and 32nd Commandant of the Marine Corps (1999-2003) James L. Jones. After leaving that position, Jones was made Commander of U.S. European Command, and the next day, Supreme Allied Commander of Europe (the two commands have resided in the same general since Matthew Ridgeway in 1952). The latter position, SACEUR, is the top officer at NATO, and descends in spirit from the first "Supreme Allied Commander," Dwight D. Eisenhower, during World War II.

Gen. Jones appears to have no special expertise in counterinsurgency warfare; but he has a lot of combat command experience and appears, from the report, to have thrown himself into the job with vigor, determination, and honesty.

Thus, it is doubly despicable that the Democrats are trying to "recruit" him, without his knowledge or consent, onto their "surrender-now" team.

Back to Kagan:

Some in the media have been remarkably quick to report on leaked copies of reports about Iraq before the average person has a chance to read them. There is a reason, apart from the usual journalistic desire to be first with a story. The reports often don't say what the reporters want them to. First leaks about the National Intelligence Estimate and the report of the Government Accountability Office turned out to have painted them darker -- and in the case of the NIE much darker -- than they actually were. That is even more true of the report of Retired Marine General Jim Jones about the state of the Iraqi Security Forces.

Kagan quotes from the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two newspapers read most often on Capitol Hill (members of Congress are the only important consumers of such scare-stories in the drive-by media) after the Congressional Record, which is typically only read by members ego-scanning for their own names in print. And both newspapers spin the Jones report as if it were some dire condemnation of the war, Donald Rumsfeld, Bob Gates, David Petraeus, and of course, George W. Bush:

The Washington Post made it sound even worse: the report "estimates that '[the Iraqi army] will not be ready to independently fulfill their security role within the next 12 to 18 months' without a substantial U.S. military presence. Logistical self-sufficiency, which it describes as key to independent Iraqi operations, is at least two years away, the report says." Worse still, "the report, which emphasizes the failure of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to achieve key political benchmarks, says that violence will not end without political reconciliation."

But the reality is that, while Jones pulls no punches on areas of operation that simply aren't working well -- notably the Iraqi National Police, though Jones finds they are improving, and the Iraqi parliament, which Jones finds annoying -- in general, he finds much significant enhancement and an impressive stand-alone ability among Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), particularly the Iraqi Special Forces but the rest of the Iraqi Army as well. Those areas where they are deficient are precisely those that nearly all Arab armies have difficulty with:

  • Logistics, "the procurement, distribution, maintenance, and replacement of materiel and personnel," including the supply and transportation of food, water, fuel, ammunition, armor, arms, and actual soldiers;
  • Fire support, especially close air support -- which of course requires attack aircraft, both fixed and rotary, and coordination with ground units (wouldn't be prudent to strafe your own forces). This is a very, very advanced skill (despite being decades old) that few non-Western nations have ever effectively demonstrated; and it's hardly surprising that the new Iraqi Army is not yet able to accomplish what eluded Saddam Hussein for decades;
  • Intelligence, especially including "SigInt" -- which used to be called signals intelligence to distinguish it from HumInt, human intelligence: Any electromagnetnic means of gathering data. Since this usually means satellite photography, EM transmission monitoring, and unmanned aerial vehicles, and since very few third-world nations have launched military satellites or Predators (actually, I think that the precise number is "none"), again, it's hardly a black mark against the Iraqi Army that they don't have the intelligence-gathering mechanisms and analytic skill that we consider vital to modern warfare;
  • Equipment -- does anybody really expect Iraqis to be building MRAPs, Strykers, and MOABs? Secure communications nets? Cruise missiles?
  • Transportation -- or taking over from KBR, or conducting air assaults across scores of miles?

There are some areas where it's disappointing that the Iraqis haven't stepped up better; but even here, they are improving with every month:

  • Command and control -- everybody knows what this is and why it's so hard in a tribal world;
  • Advanced strategies that require a fully functional national government, such as "clear, hold, build" -- "to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable, national Iraqi institutions," as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote.

But Gen. Jones concludes, writes Kagan, that most components of the Iraq end of the Iraq war are moving in the right direction; and they are already very well advanced along the road to complete independence:

In other words, the Iraqi Army has made tremendous strides, is fighting hard and skillfully, and is now a critical component of the counter-terrorism campaign in Iraq, but it cannot continue that campaign without continued Coalition combat and logistics support over the coming months (for more on this, see a new report from the American Enterprise Institute released today, "No Middle Way"). Almost all of the trendlines for the Iraqi Army and for security in Iraq noted in the report are positive.

Kagan acknowledges that not every Iraqi institution has put on its manly gown, girded its loins, and pulled up its socks; the Iraqi National Police is still riddled with militia infiltrations, is corrupt, and does not yet think of itself as "Iraqi" so much as the "muscle" for powerful members of parliament.

When the media quotes Jones as concluding that the Iraqi National Police should be disbanded and reconstructed from scratch, they rather give the impression they're talking about all law-enforcement agencies in country. But that is not so: The "locally recruited" police are doing a very good job. Our focus on a "national police" (like the FBI) is, in my opinion, a misplaced construct of our own culture of nationalism... we imagine everyone more or less thinks like us and wants to solve most problems from the head down, rather than from the ground up.

We have both the uniformity and expanded jurisdiction of a Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal agencies, and also the flexibility and attention to local needs supplied by a city police department or a county sheriff's office; and so too do the Iraqis:

The National Police, the report rightly notes, are broken, and the media has made much of this. But the National Police consist of around 25,000 members, compared to perhaps 300,000 members of the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police. The Iraqi Security Forces can hardly be judged a failure on such grounds.

I have argued before that in a tribal society, reforms must come from the grassroots (or in this case, from the desert sands); the society is simply not set up for top down rule by any means but brutal tyranny and dictatorship. The correspondence here is to focus first on improving the local constabularies in each city, then the provincial cops, and only then the National Police: The first brings immediate security; the second yields communication and widespread order; and the last generates uniformity, predictability, and nationalist sentiment... the last three all vital facets of a finished democracy, but endgames, not opening gambits.

All of which brings us back, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, to the beginning, which was the end:

The issue of [the ISF's] "independent" operations is and always has been a red herring. For Americans concerned about how long their sons and daughters will have to be in harm's way in Iraq, which is everyone, the point isn't how long it will take the Iraqis to operate independently, but how long it will take before they can carry more of the burden of fighting the enemy. The Jones Report makes it clear that they are already carrying a significant part of that burden, and that their ability to do so will increase steadily and rapidly in the coming months--as long as we maintain our presence and our current strategy, which the report clearly judges to be working.

The real question is how many Republicans on the Hill will read the actual report or listen to what Gen. Jones said during his testimony, thus understanding that Jones is in fact far more praising than damning the Iraqis' effort -- and how many will simply skim the fabricated "leak" in the Times and Post and conclude that it's all a waste, and that it's time to pull the plug. That vital unknown, the vision factor, will determine whether we finish the job or abort the mission.

But to paraphrase Anne Frank, I keep my optimism, because in spite of everything I still believe that most congressmen, at heart, actually do care about the country.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 12, 2007, at the time of 6:07 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 4, 2007

NYT Unearths - Then Refutes - Another Stunning Bush Contradiction

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

In yet another blow to the Bush regime, about which criticism continues to mount, the New York Times reports that, contrary to reported claims by President George W. Bush, Iraq envoy L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer did, in fact, inform Bush of Bremer's plan to disband the Iraqi Army and build a new one.

In the same article, the Times also reports that, contrary to their own reported claims, Bush actually never said he wasn't informed, and is not, in fact, in any disagreement with Bremer. But the important thing to bear in mind is that there's a good Bush bashing in there somewhere, if only we can ferret it out.

In addition, while the Times is unable to actually report any specific criticisms of Bremer by various former administration members, the newspaper is prepared to divulge the fact that such ex-officials are reported to have made such attacks. You follow?

First things first: We open with the proof that Bush was reportedly lying when he didn't quite say that he knew nothing about the plan to sack the Iraqi army and build a new one:

A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to “dissolve Saddam’s military and intelligence structures,” a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.

Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happen.”

(Technically, for all legal purposes, we at the Times are not exactly saying that Bush said that, you understand; but the implication is the important thing... and by implication, Bush is a liar! If you forget everything else -- please, we ask you just to remember that much. Just one "two-minutes hate" per day, that's all we ask!)

The cleanup: Technically speaking, Bush meant no such thing: The supposed contradiction is a misunderstanding of a brief oral exchange with the author of a book:

In an interview with Robert Draper, author of the new book, “Dead Certain,” Mr. Bush sounded as if he had been taken aback by the decision, or at least by the need to abandon the original plan to keep the army together. [Where here, "sounded as if" means "can be read that way, if one is determined and sufficiently creative."]

“The policy had been to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” Mr. Bush told the interviewer. When Mr. Draper asked the president how he had reacted when he learned that the policy was being reversed, Mr. Bush replied, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, “This is the policy, what happened?’ ”....

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House is not commenting on Mr. Draper’s book, said Mr. Bush indeed understood the order and was acknowledging in the interview with Mr. Draper that the original plan had proved unworkable.

“The plan was to keep the Iraqi Army intact, and that’s accurate,” the official said. “But by the time Jerry Bremer announced the order, it was fairly clear that the Iraqi Army could not be reconstituted, and the president understood that. He was acknowledging that that was something that did not go as planned.”

But the letters, combined with Mr. Bush’s comments, suggest confusion within the administration about what quickly proved to be a decision with explosive repercussions. [Where here, "suggest confusion" means "our editors here at the Times cannot follow this exchange... therefore, Bush is confused."]

That last point is simply a corollary to the well-known axiom among movie reviewers that if a reviewer cannot follow the plot of a movie, the movie is "confused." If it turns out that the review is the only one who cannot follow the plot, that point is deemed out of order.

On a related note, the decision to disband the Iraqi army is another terrible blow to the Bush administration, against whom criticism continues to mount even higher than it mounted in the first paragraph:

The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. [Please don't be boorish and demand to know who, exactly, widely regards it as a mistake.]

On an unrelated note, it's now widely regarded that it was impossible to keep the Iraqi army intact, and therefore there was no decision to be made... Fate had intervened, according to Bremer -- who is, I might add, the Times' trusted source at the beginning of the article:

“I might add that it was not a controversial decision,” Mr. Bremer said. “The Iraqi Army had disappeared and the only question was whether you were going to recall the army. Recalling the army would have had very practical difficulties, and it would have political consequences. The army had been the main instrument of repression under Saddam Hussein. I would go on to argue that it was the right decision. I’m not second-guessing it.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times has evidently been reading a number of reports and indications:

Mr. Bremer indicated that he had been smoldering for months as other administration officials had distanced themselves from his order....

Some senior administration officials, including the secretary of state at the time, Colin L. Powell, have reportedly said subsequently that they did not know about the decision ahead of time....

General McKiernan reportedly felt unhappy with Mr. Bremer’s plan to slowly build a new Iraqi Army from scratch, as were other American officers. In his farewell meeting with Mr. Bremer in June 2003, he urged him to “go bigger and faster” in fielding a new military.

Thus, as should now be clear, Bush lied and people died. We here at the Times are not exactly sure what he lied about or how those lies caused death and destruction; but there's an opportunity in here somewhere for anti-Bush sentiment to continue to mount ever higher... and by golly, we're pledged to bring such vital reported, potential contradictions to your attention, Mr. Reader!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 4, 2007, at the time of 2:29 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 3, 2007

Civilian Deaths in Iraq Are Up, But They're Really Down

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I have a difficult argument to make. Your natural impulse may be to roll your eyes and accuse me of special pleading... but one's first impulse is often naive.

AP reports, with much fanfare and not a little gloating, that "civilian deaths rose" from 1,760 in July to 1,809 in August. AP's explicit conclusion is that this is a terrible setback for the counterinsurgency:

Civilian deaths rose in August to their second-highest monthly level this year, according to figures compiled Saturday by The Associated Press. That raises questions about whether U.S. strategy is working days before Congress receives landmark reports that will decide the course of the war.

But they embargo a critical fact until later in the article, a point that makes all the difference to their central thesis: The August total includes the huge triple-bombing on August 14th that killed 520 Yazidis (AP's count). The attack occurred far away from the counterinsurgency forces, up in Kurdistan on the Syrian border.

Were it not for that single incident, the civilian death toll would have dropped to 1,289, by far the lowest level this year. So what looks to the naive eye like bad news is, in fact, very good news; the situation is complex and you cannot use a simplistic metric.

Here is where Democrats would doubtless scream foul; but you cannot logically expect that U.S. forces in one part of the country will be able to stop suicide bombings in a completely different part of the country two hundred miles away. When the counterinsurgency expands into Mosul, then will be the time to ask whether we're decreasing the violence there. Until then, the question is not what's happening outside the counterinsurgency but what is happening inside it.

And it was an anomalous attack: Nothing like it had been done before, and it's not likely to be repeated anytime soon. By analogy, suppose you decide you must decrease your monthly expenses. In January, you took home $4,000 and you spend $3,900; in February you spent $3,700; in March it was $3,500. By July, your expenses are down to $3,000.

But then in August, your car's transmission seizes up, and it costs $1,200 to replace it. Your total expenses that month are $3,700; should you wail and moan because you're right back up to where you were in February? No, just the opposite: You should revel in the fact that, were it not for the unexpected car-repairs, you would have spent only $2,500 in August -- a big decrease from July and a huge drop from January.

The $1,200 in car repairs was not a regular expense... it was a one-shot that more than likely will not recur in September and later months. It's absurd to treat it as if it were a harbinger for a massively higher spending in subsequent months.

Getting back to the Iraq death toll, even the 1,809 figure is well below the deaths in November (1,967) and December (2,172), as is the worst month this year, May (1,901). Alas, I cannot find a link to AP's casualty count; but looking at Iraq Coalition Casualties' count of civilian deaths, August (1,598) is only the fifth deadliest month this year, behind (in decreasing order of death toll) February (2,864), March (2,762), May (1,782), and January (1,711): Different counts yield different numbers.

Taking the freakish Yazidi attack out of the equation, the August figure of 1,098 would be the lowest death toll since July 2006, more than a year ago.

To get almost offensively pedantic, considering that we're talking about human lives, the mean average for the first three months of 2007 was 2,445.67. August -- even with the Yazidi bombings -- was 35% below the early average; without the anomalous bombings, it's 55% below the early average.

This is hardly the picture of a "U.S. strategy" that has failed, is in disarray, or is even questionable; rather, it's exactly what a successful counterinsurgency strategy looks like: continued decreasing violence overall (the month to month may fluctuate, especially in response to individual acts of terrorism) -- with the worst violence being pushed outside the area in which we are fighting.

Then, as we succeed in pacifying more areas (such as Anbar and Baghdad), we will expand the counterinsurgency into areas like northwestern Mosul, where the Yazidis were hit.

There are several other nuggets of good news sprinkled through this article ("interred" would be more accurate). First, the Mahdi Militia -- called Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM -- is losing some of its charm:

Many Shiites see the militia as their best protection against Sunni extremists, including al-Qaida, which have carried out similar attacks on Shiites.

However, Mahdi's credibility has been shaken by allegations of extortion, murder, robbery and other crimes committed by members who appear to be beyond the control of the youthful [Muqtada] al-Sadr, who said he would use the six-month hiatus to restructure the force "in a way that helps honor the principles for which it was formed."

Second, we appear to finally have a clue about the value of wartime propaganda, in this case directed against the "special groups" of the JAM; that is, those elements that are sucking from the Iranian udder:

Leaflets scattered around Sadr City urged people to report on Shiite militants who are cooperating with the Iranians, providing a cell phone number and an e-mail address for people to make anonymous tips.

"The criminal Iraqis who work with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are toys under Persian control," read one of the leaflets, which pictured a puppet dancing on strings. "Iranian Revolutionary Guards are interfering in Iraq's affairs while Iraqis are dying."

An excellent start; coupled with our stunning and continuing ascendency over al-Qaeda in Iraq, I'd have to say the war is going better than we have been told even by the White House. President Bush appears to be underselling our achievements there, perhaps giving the Democrats enough rope to tie themselves into a Gordian knot by November 2008.

Good news can be found most anywhere, if you're willing to spelunk for it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 3, 2007, at the time of 7:53 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 29, 2007

The "Maturity Mask" Slips - UPDATED With Embedded YouTube

Iraq Matters , Liberal Lunacy
Hatched by Dafydd

Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA, 80%) has a very, very serious problem: He is a moderately liberal Democrat in a fairly neutral district (WA-3), a district that narrowly went for George Bush in the last two presidential elections. First elected in 1998 by 55%, he won his last three elections by more robust percentages of 62-63%. Baird was handily reelected even in the two years that his district voted for George W. Bush. Cook rates WA-3 as D+0.

He was opposed to the Iraq war from the very beginning, voting against it at every turn.

So what's his problem? Brian Baird's happy career has smashed into the rocks, and the shipwreck began with a dreadful, ghastly decision that Baird made: He foolishly decided to investigate for himself how the counterinsurgency was doing, rather than just taking the word of his leaders, Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) and Rep. John Murtha (D-PA, 65%)... or even his Washington colleague, "Baghdad" Jim McDermott (D-WA, 95%), who earned his sobriquet by flying to Baghdad in 2002 to support Saddam Hussein -- then receiving a $5,000 "donation" from Hussein supporter and Oil-for-Fraud suspect Shakir al Khafaji.

Worse, Baird has one terrible character flaw that spoiled everything: He is honest. Upon returning from seeing the counterinsurgency up close and personal, he wrote an opinion piece for the Seattle Times titled "Our troops have earned more time."

Everybody's got one

The opinion piece could hardly be called pro-Bush; in fact, he harshly condemns the original decision to invade -- but concludes that having started this, we cannot now simply walk away:

The invasion of Iraq may be one of the worst foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation. As tragic and costly as that mistake has been, a precipitous or premature withdrawal of our forces now has the potential to turn the initial errors into an even greater problem just as success looks possible.

As a Democrat who voted against the war from the outset and who has been frankly critical of the administration and the post-invasion strategy, I am convinced by the evidence that the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better. I believe Iraq could have a positive future. Our diplomatic and military leaders in Iraq, their current strategy, and most importantly, our troops and the Iraqi people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to succeed.

A few paragraphs later, Baird explains why he changed his mind:

It is just not realistic to expect Iraq or any other nation to be able to rebuild its government, infrastructure, security forces and economy in just four years. Despite the enormous challenges, the fact is, the situation on the ground in Iraq is improving in multiple and important ways....

Our soldiers are reclaiming ground and capturing or killing high-priority targets on a daily basis. Sheiks and tribal groups are uniting to fight against the extremists and have virtually eliminated al-Qaida from certain areas. The Iraqi military and police are making progress in their training, taking more responsibility for bringing the fight to the insurgents and realizing important victories. Businesses and factories that were once closed are being reopened and people are working again. The infrastructure is gradually being repaired and markets are returning to life....

[T]o walk away now from the recent gains would be to lose all the progress that has been purchased at such a dear price in lives and dollars.

At this point, I'm sure you're all scratching your heads (that is, assuming you haven't already been following the story). Come come, ab Hugh; what is this "very, very serious problem" you keep yammering about?

The problem is that even this slight disagreement with "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" is considered apostasy... and the MoveOn.org Democrats (actually, MoveOn.org itself!) have turned on Baird with the ferocity usually reserved for Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan, and Ann Coulter. According to Aaron Blake at the Washington D.C. insider newspaper the Hill:

Rep. Brian Baird’s (D-Wash.) recent conversion on the Iraq war is beginning to affect more than the national dialogue. On Wednesday, liberal group MoveOn.org announced an ad campaign against the congressman in his own district.

Baird recently returned from a trip to Iraq and reversed his position on a withdrawal timetable, citing military progress in the four-year-old war.

MoveOn is calling the move a “flip-flop” and says it goes against the views of his constituents.

Flip flops vs. changing one's mind

There is a monumental difference between a flip-flop -- changing position because the old position became unpopular -- and wising up, changing position because of new and better information and "thinking a second time," as Dennis Prager puts it.

When John Kerry was against the $87 billion after being for it, he cited no new evidence that the troops should not be supported; he was responding to the yowling set up by the nutroots. But this cannot be the model for Brian Baird... for, as the Politico notes:

“Congressman Baird’s new position, in favor of keeping our troops in an unnwinnable civil war in Iraq, is out of line with the majority of his district and the nation,” said MoveOn's Nita Chaudhary in a statement. “Voters don’t want to continue down a failed path. They want representatives who will stand up to President Bush’s reckless policy and bring our troops home.”

This is likely true: Since the war is still unpopular among a majority of the nation, and since WA-3 is more or less a mirror of America, it's likely the case that a majority of Baird's constituents want to see a troop withdrawal. But of course, a majority of Baird's constituents have never been to Iraq to see for themselves.

Even if the constituents are nowhere near as angry and shrill as those who showed up at the townhall meeting (see below), certainly they're not enthusiastic about staying in Iraq; and Baird must have known that they would not be happy. Therefore, this is an example of Baird wising up, not flip flopping.

What is a man?

But the deeper question is whether your duty as a representative is to "represent" your district at the expense of your own ideas and conscience... or to be your own man or woman, make your own best judgment, and presume that if the voters dislike your choices, you'll hear about it at the next election.

I believe John Adams was in the first camp, believing that being a representative was an act of self-abnegation, becoming nothing more than the mouth of your constituents. Of course, that creates a problem in a mixed district; to truly represent his constituents, the representative must suffer from multiple-personality disorder!

I have always been in the second camp: We don't live in a direct, mob-rule democrazy... we elect a person, not an automaton. I want my representative to exercise his best judgment -- and then I'll exercise mine in even-numbered years.

Most constituents, alas, tend to follow Adams, not ab Hugh; this appears to be true in WA-3 -- at least among those constituents who attend town-hall meetings. Baird attended just such a nutmoot in Vancouver, WA, where he was mauled by orcs -- metaphorically speaking, of course. (Amusing detour: Baird joked, "Somebody said to me, 'Oh man, you're going to get killed tonight. I said, 'No, they get killed in Iraq. I'm going to get criticized.'")

But we have no way of knowing whether that meeting was truly representative of the district, or whether MoveOn.org packed the joint with its own sock puppets, a prank leftists are overly fond of playing.

Arguing for the sock-puppet interpretation:

  • The generally moderate nature of WA-3;
  • A huge percentage of the attendees arrived with anti-war protest signs, many pre-printed, some with Baird's name -- just a week after Baird announced his change of mind. That betokens organization.
  • One of the attendees was none other than Jon Soltz, the anti-war activist, chairman of VoteVets.org, and the former Army captain on a panel at YearlyKos who shouted down the uniformed sergeant who tried to ask the very question that has vexed Brian Baird: What should we do if the counterinsurgency works, regardless of previous position on the war? I do not believe that Jon Soltz lives in Vancouver, or even in Washington state; if a reader has information that he does, please let me know.

    But assuming he does not, that means he was transported there by somebody (either his own organization or perhaps MoveOn) in order to confront Baird. And if somebody is willing to go to that much trouble for Soltz, perhaps that same "somebody" is also willing to ensure that the audience was packed with the "right sort" of constituent.

I believe there is ample reason to doubt that the attendees really represent the third district of Washington. In the meantime, MoveOn has announced that it's going to run an anti-Baird ad campaign in his district, presumably hoping for someone much further Left to beat Baird in the primary. (If they succeed, that previously safe district may become vulnerable to a moderate Republican.)

Convenient Lies in Advertising

I'm sure nobody reading this blog is surprised to learn that MoveOn's ad is deeply dishonest. From the piece in the Hill:

The ad does not make specific reference to Baird’s conversion. Instead, it features a soldier who served in Iraq talking about the amount of resistance troops encountered and at the end asks viewers to tell Baird to bring the troops home.

The soldier in the ad served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 and describes a scene from that time, long before the current troop increase that Baird has cited as the reason for military progress.

Baird voted against the war in 2003 and had opposed it until last month. Republicans have been quick to key on his remarks as evidence of progress in Iraq.

MoveOn disagrees, calling the war “unwinnable.”

This is, of course, a monumental (and dishonest) non-sequitur:

  • Baird is saying that he was against the war from 2003 to early 2007 and supported withdrawal; but now that he has seen the results of the counterinsurgency in mid-late 2007, he no longer supports withdrawal and thinks the troops "deserve" the chance to finish the job.
  • In response, MoveOn says that the fighting was really intense in 2003-2004... so how dare Baird support continuing the fight in 2007!

I haven't seen the ad itself, so I cannot tell whether it makes clear that the soldier's only experience is long before the counterinsurgency phase. (Nor can I tell whether the "soldier" in the MoveOn ad is or is not -- Jon Stolz.) I went to MoveOn's site, but I cannot find the advert there; nor can I find a search function. Eventually, I'm sure it will appear on YouTube.

UPDATE: And here it is! Hat tip to my favorite blogger, John Hinderaker, on my favorite blog, Power Line:



No, the soldier is not Jon Soltz; but no, the advert does not make it clear that the incident described happened back in 2003 or 2004... not recently. While former Sergeant John Bruhns is speaking, white words appear briefly over the bottom of his image reading "John Bruhns, US Army Infantry Sergeant, Baghdad 2003 - '04." That's the only clue.

In the voiceover at the end, a tough-sounding man's voice says "Support our troops; bring them home." Baird's name is not mentioned in the audio; but the words that appear on the screen include "Tell Rep. Baird."

By the way, here is another level of mendacity in this advert: Sgt. Bruhns talks about a protest "in the Abu Ghraib market area" where rioters began shooting at U.S. troops. He goes on to lament that "we were told that we were there to liberate these people; they were shooting at us!"

What Bhuhns and MoveOn fail to mention is that Abu Ghraib is in Anbar province; it was a hotbed of Saddamites before the war (the prison was used by Hussein to house dissidents and others who opposed his rule). If there were a violent riot in Abu Ghraib, it would almost certainly be driven either by "bitter-ender" Baathists or by al-Qaeda.

Contrary to what Bruhns says, those were not the people that we were sent to Iraq to liberate. Those were the oppressors during Hussein's reign, and it's hardly surprising that they should see Americans as their enemies... after all, we had just dislodged them from their well-feathered nests.

(And I'll bet former Nazis didn't like the American presence in Germany after World War II, either.)

Tell me about the rabbits, George...

Since the first surge of Communism in the 1920s (!), the most damaging charge against Democrats has always been that they act like extremely immature teenagers: emotional, unthinking, hormonally driven, and secure in the belief that they are the smartest people in the world... but ultimately acting from pure narcissism.

The accusation is damaging precisely because it's true, and this is a probative example: Baird is not a Bush supporter; he hates Bush almost to BDS levels. He is positively Murthian on the question of whether we should have gone into Iraq at all, calling it "one of the worst foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation."

Worse than World War I, where we jumped into a -- dare I say it -- quagmire in Europe that had already killed millions of people, soldier and civilian? In hindsight, maybe it was good we joined: We broke the stalemate and brought the war to a close, at a cost of a scant 115,000 American soldiers killed. But Woodrow Wilson -- who had campaigned on the slogan "He kept us out of the war" -- did not know that would be the result when he ordered us into the fight.

But if we allow hindsight, then how can Baird say today that it's "one of the worst foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation?" You can't call upon hindsight until the even is behind you.

Yet even with all this, all it takes is a single instance of not obeying orders, and MoveOn calls up the fanatics to measure Baird's beard and make sure his turban is wound the correct way, on pain of Lieber-tatation... just as happened in 2006, when Sen. Joe Lieberman became Independent-CT, rather than Democrat-CT, after a vicious and fraudulent campaign against him by the nutroots resulted in a primary loss to Ned Lamont. This is like the adolescent who gets almost exactly the iPod he wanted for Christmas... but because it's only 1GB instead of 4GP, he rages that it's totally worthless -- and smashes it on the ground.

Democrats with their eyes on 2008 have tried very hard to act like mature adults this cycle. But with this hysterical overreaction to a slight deviation from the liberal catechism, the mask of maturity has slipped to the floor, revealing them for the authoritarian martinets that they naturally are.

It seems that every time the Democrats have the opportunity to climb out the hole they've dug themselves, there is always at least one group of fools whose immediate and ill-considered response is instead to furiously dig the hole deeper.

Insha'Allah, this will be our salvation a year from November.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 29, 2007, at the time of 4:46 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Iranian President Supports Bush Argument on Iraq

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In a surprising development, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today endorsed a key argument made by George W. Bush for maintaining the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq:

"The political power of the occupiers is collapsing rapidly," Ahmadinejad said at a news conference, referring to U.S. troops in Iraq. "Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region. Of course, we are prepared to fill the gap, with the help of neighbors and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation."

President Bush has repeatedly argued, and Democrats have just as frequently rejected the point, that if American forces were to pull out of Iraq, Iran would swoop in and try to seize control, both of a country with many sophisticated weapons systems and of the huge oil reserves in Iraq. Now, with Ahmadinejad confirming that his plans do indeed include invading and taking over Iraq as soon as the inconvenient Americans are gone, Democrats must be wondering what they did to deserve such a betrayal.

The candid admission by Ahmadinejad wrong-footed the Democrats. Ever since the counterinsurgency strategy (which they call the "surge," as if it were nothing more than a few extra troops tossed into the bucket) began producing demonstrable progress, Democratic leaders have scrambled to find a way to applaud the counterinsurgency and the troops fighting the war, while denouncing the war itself. Their current rhetorical tactic is to pretend that they had been saying all along that military victory was inevitable, and focus instead on the lack of political progress at the national level in Iraq:

For Democratic congressional leaders, the dog days of August are looking anything but quiet. Having failed twice to crack GOP opposition and force a major change in war policy, Democrats risk further alienating their restive supporters if the September showdown again ends in stalemate. House Democratic leaders held an early morning conference call yesterday with House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), honing a new message: Of course an influx of U.S. troops has improved security in Iraq, but without any progress on political reconciliation, the sweat and blood of American forces has been for naught.

Big Lizards argued in a previous post that political progress is occurring; but it's happening at levels below that of the national parliament and slowly trickling upward, rather than being mandated by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and propagating downward. But Democrats remain focused on ousting Maliki, seeing him as the weak link in Bush's argument. From the AP story that started this ruckus:

Bush and the U.S. ambassador in Iraq have given blunt assessments of political stagnation in Baghdad, and Bush has said it is up to the Iraqi people to decide if their government deserved to be replaced.

But key Democratic politicians, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, have called for al-Maliki to be replaced because his Shiite-dominated government has been unable to forge national unity....

Ousting al-Maliki, a longtime Shiite political activist, would require a majority vote in the 275-member Iraqi parliament. As long as the Kurdish parties and the main Shiite bloc back al-Maliki, his opponents lack the votes for that.

In a peculiarly cruel twist of fate, the Democratic elite finds itself unfairly disenfranchised in Iraq, unable even to vote Maliki out of office without somehow involving the pesky Iraqis.

(Ahmadinejad backstabbed his erstwhile allies even on this point: "'They rudely say (the Iraqi) prime minister and the constitution must change,' Ahmadinejad said of U.S. critics. 'Who are you? Who has given you the right' to ask for such a change, he added.")

We'll just have to wait to see the Democratic gameplan, how they'll praise Gen. David Petraeus, applaud his stunning progress in Iraq, and then call for a troop withdrawal according to a definite timetable. I doubt even the Democrats yet know how they're going to pull that one off.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 29, 2007, at the time of 3:56 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 28, 2007

NYT: Analogies Are Meaningless (Unless They Favor the Left)

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

The New York Times adopts a particularly cynical, even arch position on analogies: They propound the case that only highly trained historians can make proper analogies of one war to another... and even then, only when those historians are reliably liberal (e.g., teaching classes at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government).

The case is weak. Not once does the Times actually address specifics of the analogy that has them particularly vexed: President George W. Bush's recitation of what happened after our abandonment of Vietnam, as an object lesson of what would surely follow if we abandoned Iraq today. Rather than knock down that claim per se, the elite media (in the avatar of the Times) appear to believe that they need only sneer at the very idea of analogies in general, scoff at the suggestion that Bush knows anything about history... and the rest will follow in a burst of some new class of logic hitherto unknown in the world of rhetoric.

To begin with, they must naturally dispute that Bush knows what he is talking about when he recounts what happened after 1973. Since not even the New York Times can plausibly deny the Vietnamese "reeducation" camps, the Cambodian "killing fields," or the Boat People who washed upon our shores, they must sever the causal connection as best they can.

Again, they cannot simply come out and say there was no link -- that all these things would have happened even if we'd still had hundreds of thousands of troops in South Vietnam -- because that would be patently absurd. So this is the best they can do; and they seem to think it pretty clever indeed:

President Bush sent historians scurrying toward their keyboards last week when he defended the United States occupation of Iraq by arguing that the pullout from Vietnam had led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. His speech was rhetorical jujitsu, an attempt to throw back at his critics their favorite historical analogy -- Vietnam -- for the Iraq war. His argument aroused considerable skepticism from historians and political scientists, who note that the United States’ military action in Vietnam was among the factors that destabilized Cambodia.

Probably true, but so what? The Times statement (citing unnamed "historians and political scientists") is a raging non-sequitur. Regardless of whether there would have been re-education camps and killing fields if we had simply stayed out and allowed Ho Chi Minh to swiftly conquer all of Vietnam, the proximate cause of the human catastrophe was our departure, not our arrival.

The proof is easy:

  • We pulled our last soldiers out of Vietnam in March of 1973; but South Vietnam did not surrender until April 1975, more than two years later.
  • The mass killings by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, culminating in the massacre of two million Cambodians, started in 1975 and continued until Vietnam conquered Cambodia in 1979;
  • And the mass waves of Vietnamese "Boat People" fleeing the victorious Communists started in the late 1970s and continued into the 1980s.

None of the horrific consequences ensued until at least two years after we left, continuing up to ten years. The Vietnam calamity did not occur while we were there but only long after we left. Not even the Times' "historians and political scientists" can deny that inconvenient truth, nor pretend not to understand its implication.

As it happens, and despite the liberal tut-tutting, George Bush's history lesson was exactly correct.

In fact, it is the Times itself that is both glib and errant in its misunderstanding of what happened in Vietnam. One can almost hear the writer of the article, David D. Kirkpatrick, chuckling knowingly as he wrote the following:

Historical analogies in public statements are especially suspect. Talking about Vietnam during the run-up to the war there, for example, United States government officials most often invoked Korea or — with increasing frequency as the escalation began — the appeasement of Hitler, according to a tally by Yuen Foong Khong, a professor of international relations at Oxford. The French retreat from Vietnam in 1954 — a precedent that augured failure — was almost never mentioned.

In private, however, the French defeat came up much more often — far more often than Munich and nearly as often as Korea, Professor Khong concluded in his 1992 book, “Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965.”

Policymakers also sometimes bat away facts that mar their analogies. Before the Vietnam War, for example, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball repeatedly reminded President Lyndon Johnson and his other aides of Vietnam’s overriding differences from both Munich and Korea. Arguing that Vietnam was “sui generis,” Ball predicted that the United States would suffer the same fate as the French in 1954.

With admirable restraint, Kirkpatrick abjures writing, "and as we all know, that's exactly what happened!" Which is good, because that's exactly what didn't happen (as Senior Greco reminds us, one should not argue about the statements a man does not make).

I wasn't kidding about the ultra-liberal Kennedy School of Government, by the way:

The Central Intelligence Agency has worried enough about the pitfalls of drawing historical analogies that two decades ago it spent $400,000 commissioning a course in the subject for senior analysts from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The Kennedy School ran the program until 2001, when the agency itself took it over.

A wealth of military historians have examined the progress of the Vietnam war, first under the "attrition of the enemy" strategy of Gen. William Westmoreland, then under the "counterinsurgency" of Gen. Creighton Abrams. Victor Davis Hanson and Max Boot have been particularly prominent.

Boot notes, for example:

• The danger of winning militarily and losing politically. In 1968, after Gen. Creighton Abrams took over as the senior U.S. military commander in South Vietnam, he began to change the emphasis from the kind of big-unit search-and-destroy tactics that Gen. William Westmoreland had favored, to the sort of population-protection strategy more appropriate for a counterinsurgency. Over the next four years, even as the total number of American combat troops declined, the communists lost ground.

By 1972 most of the south was judged secure and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the U.S. had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived. It was no less viable than South Korea, another artificial state kept in existence by force of arms over many decades. But after the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, we all but cut off South Vietnam, even while its enemies across the borders continued to be resupplied by their patrons in Moscow and Beijing.

Following in Abrams's footsteps, Gen. Petraeus is belatedly pursuing classic counterinsurgency strategies that are paying off. The danger is that American politicians will prematurely pull the plug in Iraq as they did in Vietnam. If they do so, the consequences will be even worse, since Iraq is much more important strategically than Vietnam ever was.

Defeat was not foreordained in Vietnam, Boot says; we chose defeat, though we could have chosen victory. Similarly -- and this is the point the "dummy" Bush was making -- we can choose defeat in Iraq, or we can choose victory; it's up to us.

Victor Davis Hanson disputes the Times' entire pooh-poohing of studying past wars to draw analogies to current or future conflicts. In "Why Study War?," Hanson argues (among other points) that war will always be with us:

We must abandon the naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past.

Since human societies are by nature warlike, we have no choice but to learn from yesterday's defeats to seize victory tomorrow.

Finally, we must recognize that America's enemies (such Ayman Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two) regularly use the "lessons" of our "defeat" in Vietnam thirty years ago to recruit killers of Americans today; they argue that we gave up in Vietnam, and we shall give up in Iraq. And were it up to the elite media, I believe that Zawahiri would be correct.

But it's not up to them; more than anybody else in America, it's up to the president whether we continue with a war or don't. Even in Nixon's case, he could have shifted funds around to maintain an Air-Force presence in South Vietnam and could have fought vigorously for economic aid to that country; he chose instead to allow Congress to zero-out the budget, condemning our allies in the region either to a bitter death by torture or to mad flight to get out.

Today we have a president who has chosen victory -- and a congressional majority that has chosen ignominious defeat. I'll let you know later who wins, but the early rounds are trending strongly towards the strong Executive.

So, far from waving away the president's historical excursion at the VFW, lightyears away from persuading us that military analogies are useless, the actual history of the past century tells us precisely the opposite:

  • That analogies can be drawn;
  • That they can contain important and valuable lessons for future conflicts;
  • And that our enemies incessantly cite our failures as defeatist lessons for future wars.

Even Zawahiri believes that America's behavior in past conflicts is a reliable guide to our future actions; so who are we to dispute so eminent an authority? Once again, the Times is full of itself... and just plain full of it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 28, 2007, at the time of 5:17 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

August 24, 2007

The Ice Man Cometh In From the Cold

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I don't know how much credence to accord this story, but Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri -- the King of Clubs in the "Deck of Death" (or is that the duck of death?); highest ranking Saddamite still free and sucking air; undisputed welterweight champion of the Baath Party; and oft known as "the Ice Man" -- purportedly wants to cut a deal... not the Iraqis, but with us:

The leader of Iraq's banned Baath party, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri [sic], has decided to join efforts by the Iraqi authorities to fight al-Qaeda, one of the party's former top officials, Abu Wisam al-Jashaami, told pan-Arab daily Al Hayat.

"AlDouri has decided to sever ties with al-Qaeda and sign up to the programme of the national resistance, which includes routing Islamist terrorists and opening up dialogue with the Baghdad government and foreign forces," al-Jashaami said.

Al-Douri has decided to deal directly with US forces in Iraq, according to al-Jashaami.



Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri

Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri

(Am I the only person who thinks ad-Douri looks a little like a red-haired G. Gordon Liddy?)

It's quite obvious why he doesn't want to deal with the Iraqi government, though they would eventually have to agree to any deal: He is suspected of complicity in several of Saddam Hussein's war crimes, including the infamous gassing at Halabjah, which killed as many as 5,000 Kurds. The Kurds would likely object today to anyone involved in that attack (or any other genocidal attack on the Kurds) serving in the government or even reentering Iraq with a guarantee against arrest.

The provenance of the Halabja attack has always been foggy; at first, the American Defense Intelligence Agency attributed it to Iran, not Iraq, based (they said) on the type of VX nerve gas used. Later, however, the CIA reanalyzed the attack and concluded it was perpetrated by Iraq.

Testimony by Halabja residents indicates that the town was, at the time or shortly beforehand, occupied by Iranian troops. This raises the possibility that the VX was aimed at the Iranians, and the Kurds were just innocent bystanders... though I doubt Hussein shed many tears: He had just concluded the al-Anfal genocide against the Kurds, massacring between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians, including women and children -- an inhuman campaign carried out by "Chemical" Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, then Secretary General of the Northern Bureau of the Ba'ath Party.

I don't believe either Chemical Ali or Hussein was ever formally charged with the Halabja massacre, which came a little after the al-Anfal genocide; Hussein was hanged for another offense, and Chemical Ali has received five death sentences for al-Anfal.

I don't know how much evidence there is tying ad-Douri to Halabja; but if it's substantial, this may prevent anyone cutting a deal with him. We're not going to forgive mass murder and genocide.

Why is ad-Douri trying to come in out of the cold? Two reasons, I think, one obvious and the other more subtle:

  • He and his men are being chewed up by the American forces on the Syrian border;
  • Even ad-Douri, a native Iraqi, has probably become sickened by the wanton slaughter of Iraqis -- Shia, Kurd, and even Sunni -- by the foreign terrorists who run al-Qaeda in Iraq, his erstwhile allies.

I suspect he has seen what has been done by the Anbar, Diyala, and Baghdad Salvation Councils; and he would like to join with them and even join the government, now that he knows it's not just going to be a Shiite state with the Sunnis relegated to second-class, almost "dhimmi" status (as the Shia were under Hussein, Chemical Ali, and ad-Douri).

There is some documentation for the first motivation:

In return, for cooperating in the fight against al-Qaeda, al-Douri has asked for guarantees over his men's safety and for an end to Iraqi army attacks on his militias.

Recent weeks have seen a first step in this direction, when Baathist fighters cooperated with Iraqi government forces in hunting down al-Qaeda operatives in the volatile Diyala province and in several districts of the capital, Baghadad.

I don't know whether we should or should not accept his offer. If he has just been a military man, fighting for his country (as evil as that country was) and resisting foreign invasion (that is, the United States and other Coalition countries), that's very, very different -- at least to me -- than if he were actively complicit in the crimes against humanity that the former Iraqi regime engaged in as a matter of course. It's akin to the distinction between Erwin Rommel, Kommander, Deutsches Afrika Korps, and Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-Schutzstaffel (SS).

There is also the problem of his complicity with AQI: If he ordered, authorized, or aided in significant terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings, he might have to accept some prison time in exchange for coming home. I don't know how involved he was, compared (e.g.) to the Sunni tribes in the Salvation Councils.

If ad-Douri was more like Rommel than Himmler, then I think we should accept the offer with alacrity, even if it requires a lot of cajoling of the Nouri al-Maliki government. Ad-Douri joining the government would go a long, long way towards anti-de-Baathification (which is necessary -- as was de-Baathification in 2003) and towards bringing the Sunni back into the fold.

But if ad-Douri is more like the SS leader, then we should tell him to go to hell... and do everything in our power to hasten the journey.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 24, 2007, at the time of 1:42 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 23, 2007

Quick Hits - They Say That Ginning Up Is Hard to Do

Iraq Matters , Opinions: Nasty, Brutish, and Shortsighted , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Now I know, I know it's untrue -- if you're in the elite media, that is; if so, then ginning up a controversy, contradiction, confession, corruption, or calamity is as easy as π, no matter how irrational it may seem to ordinary, non-journalist humans.

Our reading material for today's lesson is the short article sent out over the wire (well, over the internets, anyway) about newly hatched Secretary of the Army Pete Geren's insistance that the Pentagon is not going to extend tours of duty in Iraq from 15 months to 18.

I don't know if this is good or bad; Geren has the figures in front of him and I don't. But what caught my eye like an errant fishhook (yes, I know... "eew") was this little attempt at legerdemain... transforming two completely unrelated statements into a "contradiction gotcha":

Asked about comparisons between the current Iraq conflict and the Vietnam War -- a parallel that President Bush drew Wednesday -- Geren said the current conflict is unique.

In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, Bush linked the U.S. pullout from Vietnam to the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and he said the history of U.S. conflicts in Asia have shown that critics of the day are often wrong and that withdrawing from war should never be done for short-term gain.

While saying that "historical analogies help illuminate the present" Geren said the Army "can't be guilty of fighting the last war." The Army, he said, has to consider the unique circumstances of the Iraq conflict and train and equip the soldiers and leaders accordingly.

Oooh, snap! Caught the Bush administration red-fisted in a whipsaw of a contradiction...

  • On the one hand, Bush says that Vietnam taught us that withdrawing in unnecessary defeat leads to terrible consequences;
  • But when the shoe is on the other hand, Secretary Geren says that our soldiers should use different tactics and equipment fighting terrorists in the Iraqi desert than they used fighting Communists in the jungles of vietnam 40 years ago -- completely the opposite of what Bush said!

"John says Mary is too short, but Mary insists the dress is blue, not red. How do you reconcile those two statements... 'Berto?"

We've seen this moonbattery before, of course: The "contradiction" between FBI Director Robert Mueller quoting Deputy Attorney General James Comey saying the Justice Department had trouble with the legality of a classified intelligence-gathering program that had been much talked about -- and current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales saying that the objection was not to the specific element called the Terrorist Surveilance Program, but to a different intelligence-gathering program.

Perjury, obstruction, contempt! Five Democrats sent a referral to the Justice Department, demanding an indictment and investigation -- in that order, I believe -- of Gonzales... but not of Mueller, oddly enough. A couple of days later, when sources came forward to confirm that all three men told the truth (the objection was to the data-mining element, not the TSP), the Democrats quietly dropped the substance of the charge and began rummaging around for a brand new cause of action:

"Well there's yer problem right there... ya got a malfunctioning cause of action; have to remove and replace it with a spanking-new one from the factory!"

Here are some more "contradictions" -- tomorrow's AP stories today!

  • Under intense cross-examination, President Bush finally admited that Saddam Hussein did not plan and execute the September 11th attacks; but then, amazingly, Bush turned around and claimed that al-Qaeda operatives did meet with Iraqi Intelligence Service officers to discuss operational cooperation.
  • Although the president has said that FEMA did everything it reasonably could have or should have done before and after Hurricane Katrina, several of his own fellow travelers in the GOP have instead argued that Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and the Grand Nagus, mayor of Nawluns, failed to evacuate people quickly enough.
  • President Bush has praised the all-volunteer American Army; but apparently, he doesn't like it enough to send his twin daughters into military service.

Evidently, our fine president, like Mr. Whitman, is large and contains multitudes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 23, 2007, at the time of 3:58 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 22, 2007

Actual News, For a Change: France to Mediate in Iraq?

French. Gotta Love 'Em. Don't Know Why. , Iraq Matters , Shrinking the Gap
Hatched by Dafydd

One serendipitous benefit of the recent regime change in la Belle France is that LBF no longer reflexively launches a "Chirac attack" against anything American.

Until former French President "Crock" Jacques Chirac departed, making way for Nicolas Sarkozy -- who is not America-phobic -- France refused to have anything to do with post-invasion Iraq.

Under Chirac, France was a close friend and partner in corruption with Saddam Hussein, protecting him from American sanctions and invasions and such in exchange for billions in oil leases. When Chirac's magic frog leg finally failed, and they could no longer stave off the inevitable ouster of Hussein, the French fled Iraq in a snit (which I believe is a French automobile made by Peugot; the rival huff is from BMW, of course).

But now, under Sarkozy, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, is said (by the International Herald Tribune) to be interested in trying to broker a deal between Shia, Sunni, and Kurds in Iraq, bringing the factions together in a national agreement:

After years of shunning involvement in a war it said was wrong, France now believes it may hold the key to peace in Iraq, proposing itself as an "honest broker" between the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions. [Yes, that's really what the article says: an "honest broker."]

The shift was one of the most concrete consequences yet of the thaw in French-American relations following the election in May of President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose administration no longer feels bound by the adamant refusal to take a role in Iraq that characterized the reign of his predecessor, Jacques Chirac.

I hope Kouchner is allowed to try, and I truly hope he succeeds; such an agreement would benefit everybody:

  • The Iraqis, who could unify against their common enemies: Islamist terrorists of al-Qaeda and Iran;
  • The United States, which could more quickly draw down troops in Iraq;
  • France, which could begin developing and selling Iraqi oil again;
  • George W. Bush and the Republicans, who could point to victory to vindicate their perspicacity and perseverance;
  • The Democrats, who could... oh, wait -- no benefit to the Democrats at all. My bad.

I rather like this possibility. The French have been known as diplomats since the rocks began cooling; and I'm perfectly sanguine (which literally means "bloody," as in a ruddy complexion , I believe) with the arrangement that America does all the fighting in the world, and France and other European countries do most of the talking... so long as the sword always retains right of final refusal, as of course it always does. A France that sees itself as an American ally, not competitor or enemy, could be a tremendous boon in taming the Non-Integrating Gap, where the wild things are.

And that would actually be a blessing for everyone who matters. Even the Democrats, if they could but believe it.

Nevertheless, as Sir William S. Gilbert said, having a ruddy complexion is not at all the same as having a bloody cheek.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 22, 2007, at the time of 4:05 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 20, 2007

Foreign Policy's Ex-Experts

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

I hesitate to take on this task, mostly because I distrust my own objectivity: I can't be absolutely sure that I'm not rationalizing away data just because I don't like it.

But I'm reasonably sure I have a good case, so I'll go ahead and let you be the judge.

Foreign Policy magazine has rather gleefully published an article in which 100+ "foreign-policy experts" speak out against what the magazine calls "the so-called surge;" they ask about lots of things, but this is the question that will get the airplay in the elite media, considering the imminency of Gen. David Petraeus's report:

In the third Terrorism Index, more than 100 of America’s most respected foreign-policy experts see a world that is growing more dangerous, a national security strategy in disrepair, and a war in Iraq that is alarmingly off course.

In this report, Foreign Policy -- a bastion of the liberal and Realist schools of foreign-policy thought -- teamed up with the "progressive" Center for American Progress (Clintonista John Podesta's baby) to pick 108 "foreign-policy experts." In order not to make the report a complete travesty, they made a stab at balance:

The Terrorism Index is survey of more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy experts -- including two former secretaries of state [Madeleine Albright and Lawrence Eagleburger], a national security advisor, intelligence officers, and senior military leaders -- and represents the first comprehensive attempt to determine the U.S. foreign-policy establishment’s assessment of how the United States is fighting the war on terror.

The index is based on the results of a survey designed by the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy. Participants in the survey were selected by Foreign Policy and the Center for American Progress for their expertise in terrorism and U.S. national security. No one currently working in an official U.S. government capacity was invited to participate. [Note that this means no one actually involved in fighting the Iraq war during the counterinsurgency strategy of Gen. Petraeus was surveyed, no matter how much of an "expert" he or she may be.]

The nonscientific survey was administered online from May 23-June 26, 2007. Respondents were asked to self-identify their ideological bias from choices across a spectrum: very conservative, conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, somewhat liberal, liberal, and very liberal. Twenty-five people identified themselves as some level of conservative, 39 identified as moderate, and 44 identified as some level of liberal. To ensure balance, the survey was weighted according to ideology to make the number of weighted liberal respondents equal to the number of conservative respondents. Moderate and conservative respondents remained unweighted.

The results were not just eye-opening, but suspiciously so; as Reuters reports, even 64% of the self-identified "conservatives" in the non-scientific study said that the "troop increase" had either had no effect at all (36%) or had made things worse (28%).

This is completely at odds with what most conservatives I've read are saying, and my suspicion grew about who these "conservatives" really were; the collaboration with John Podesta didn't help. After some poking around, I located Foreign Policy's list of experts... and as I investigated those I didn't already know, a pattern emerged.

You can see it yourself by the two secretaries of state they picked to survey: Madeleine Albright is, of course, a liberal Democratic partisan hack, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton; she will obviously be among the 90% of moderates or liberals among the experts who say the counterinsurgency strategy is failing. No surprise there.

But consider George H.B. Bush's Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger: From everything I can glean, Eagleburger is a dyed in the wood "Realist," in the mold of Henry Kissinger and James Baker, both of whom Eagleburger served under. More than likely, when asked, Eagleburger would describe himself as at least "somewhat conservative," possibly even just "conservative." Yet even more likely, he opposed the Iraq war from the very beginning, as did nearly all the Realists: Kissinger-Baker Realists prefer subtle, diplomatic machinations of dictators like Hussein, rather than confronting evil head-on. Remember, the Realists, to a man, scorned and mocked Ronald Reagan's approach to the Soviet Union; they even objected to identifying it as an "evil empire."

There are far too many "experts" on the Foreign Policy list for me to run through them all; but I went through the first dozen; in that group, I found two obvious Realists: Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Philip Bobbitt, who, in an article in Time Magazine, rejected America fighting "unilateral" wars and called for us to "accept the responsibility of organizing coalitions to fight a chronic, low-intensity war such as the one we are fighting against al-Qaeda." Yep, I'd say Realist.

I found another who may very well have identified himself as "somewhat conservative," but who would almost certainly reject the war: Rand Beers, longtime National Security Council member (under Reagan, Bush-41, Clinton, and Bush-43). Beers resigned from the NSC in protest of the Iraq war... want to bet what his conclusion was about the efficacy of "the so-called surge?"

There are a number of others I can pick out who would almost certainly call themselves "conservatives" -- but who have pretty much opposed the Iraq war from the beginning: I'll bet Richard Clark calls himself "somewhat conservative," as would Larry C. Johnson. More than likely, so did Michael Scheuer, longtime CIA analyst and chief, who claimed that he "did the research" on connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and found "nothing."

Here is the problem: Foreign Policy magazine and the Clintonist Center for American Progress get to define who is a "foreign-policy expert." They are going to pick people they consider to be serious thinkers... and it's incredibly tempting to dismiss one's political opponents as "not serious."

I believe the editors did their level best to come up with a list of bona-fide experts on foreign policy; but they necessarily skewed towards those, whether liberal, moderate, or conservative, who hewed to the Realist line (Podesta would have recruited heavily among Clintonist liberals like Albright). If they did that effectively among the "conservative" and "moderate" groups, and allowed CAP to pick the "liberals," then it's no wonder that 83% of the entire group thinks "the so-called surge" has failed to make things better.

Here is another absurd result from the survey: "Conservatives," by whopping margins, believe that withdrawal from Iraq would:

  • Create instability beyond Iraq;
  • Lead to Iran "filling the power vacuum;"
  • Lead to Iraq splitting into "warring provinces;"
  • Result in "a bloody civil war [that] would rage out of control;"
  • Mean that "Al Qaeda would strengthen globally;

Nevertheless, Foreign Policy magazine would have us believe that a majority of "conservatives" (54%) believes we should withdraw from Iraq over the next 18 months and "redeploy" to Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf... and more "conservatives" (25%) than "liberals" (23%) or "moderates" (18%) support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

This, again, tells me that the "conservatives" selected by the editors of Foreign Policy do not actually represent what I would call post-9/11 conservatives, but rather "September 10th" conservatives -- those for whom the attacks changed very little (if anything at all) about how they view the world. This, coupled with the exclusion of anyone currently fighting (generals or civilians) in the war -- creating an artificial cut-off date for military experts -- has led to a skewed and unrealistic batch of experts, particularly those who self-identify as conservatives: The bias is towards September 10th thinking, such as the Realism school or the Colin Powell "overwhelming force" doctrine.

I think there is good evidence to this effect in this very survey; and for that reason, I put little stock in it. The Foreign Policy editorial board wasn't looking for experts... it were hunting for former experts, ex-experts, the experts of the old, pre-attack paradigm. They went looking for "conservatives" who agreed with them that the war was futile, unnecessary, and already lost, and that we should pull out and concentrate on international coalitions... and by gum, they found a double-handful.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 20, 2007, at the time of 6:03 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

August 17, 2007

Democrat Crowing Causes Sun to Rise

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Urbane Legends and Fussy Fables
Hatched by Dafydd

This is really a hoot, a tempest in a teabag. Somehow, some media maven started a rumor that when Gen. David Petraeus arrives in mid-September, he won't give any public report on Iraq; in fact, he won't even talk to Congress.

The rumor continues that his report will be ghost-written by White House aides, who are too terrified that Petraeus (Bush's puppet) will accidentally spill the beans that the war is actually catastrophically lost... if those brilliant inquisitors of the majority (yes, I mean you, Pat Leahy, D-VT, 95%!) ask a few inconvenient questions.

Aye, Petraeus may have shown some guts standing up to IEDs and EFPs in Iraq; but he will quail at the sight of Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) and Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%). Ergo, Bush will stuff him in the attic and send the Casa Blanca mouthpiece out to mislead the public and obstruct Congress again:

The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday suggested in a story that it wasn't clear yet whether Petraeus would testify in open session, and Thursday, The Washington Post reported that the White House proposed limiting Petraeus and Crocker's testimony to a closed session.

On Thursday, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe adamantly denied those reports.

"Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will testify to the Congress in both open as well as closed sessions prior to the Sept. 15 report. That has always been our intention," Johndroe said, speaking to reporters at President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, where the president is vacationing [by "vacationing," they of course mean "working in the branch office;" Bush doesn't lounge in a hammock reading a mystery novel, any more than Clinton did when he went to Camp David or Reagan did when he shifted locale to the Santa Barbara Ranch. See here now!].

"And I think it's unfortunate that anyone would suggest that (Petraeus and Crocker) would not do that, trying to start a fight where there really isn't one, because this has always been plan, and in fact, it's even called for in the legislation," Johndroe added.

When a reporter followed up at the ranch with a question about the White House possibly arranging for a closed session, Johndroe said: "No, no." And asked if he was denouncing the Post's story, Johndroe said: "Yes. Although I don’t -- I won't use that term that you used. I just don't think it's correct."

And guess who believes this bizarre, unsourced rumor, swallowing the testimony of anonymous "administration officials" over the official word from a named presidential spokesman? You guessed right: Sen. Reid is already caterwauling about the nerve of Bush to diss the Pinky by hiding Petraeus from Congress:

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid didn’t buy the administration's protests and said it would be "unacceptable" if Petraeus and Crocker didn't appear in public.

"The White House's effort to prevent Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker from testifying openly and candidly before Congress about the situation in Iraq is unacceptable," Reid said in a prepared statement.

"Not only does it contradict the law President Bush himself signed in May, but it appears to be yet another politically driven attempt to avoid giving Congress and the American people an honest and open assessment of a war we can all see is headed in the wrong direction," Reid said.

Mind, there has never been a single shred of evidence that Petraeus won't appear... other than speculation by several over-heated members of the feverish, drive-by media, driven mad by having to stick it in D.C. during August, while everyone who's anyone has gotten out.

"I bet Petraeus won't take questions."

"Ya know, I bet he won't even appear! That coward."

"That louse! Bush won't let him appear."

"Haliburton!"

"Yeah, I bet he's too afraid of what Petraeus might say... and if he does appear and take questions, he'll just give us a Tony Snow job, claiming that al-Qaeda is on the run in Iraq, attacks are down, and deaths are down."

"Al-Qaeda? There is no al-Qaeda in Iraq. In fact, there's no al-Qaeda at all. You know, that's the first time fire ever melted --"

"When we all know the war is headed in the wrong direction -- it's getting worse every day! It's already a full blown civil war, tens of thousands of dead American soldiers, millions of slaughtered Iraqis, all to put billions of dollars into Bush's pocket."

"He's stolen his last peso!"

"Haliburton!"

And of course when September 15th rolls around, and Petraeus comes in as planned and testifies publicly and privately before the D.C. dons, Reid and Leahy and all the little squeakers will take credit: "Were it not for our cries of outrage, the Regime would never have let Bush's lickspittle Petraeus out in public!"

Yeah. And if I weren't constantly clacking these rocks together, Los Angeles would be infested with tigers.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 17, 2007, at the time of 4:46 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

August 15, 2007

Horrific Nineveh Bombing Shows Counterinsurgency Working

Iraq Matters , Opinions: Nasty, Brutish, and Shortsighted , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Contrary to the line many elite media are taking, the coordinated quadruple suicide bombings in Nineveh yesterday -- which appear to have killed between 250 and 500 Yazidis, making it the single worst terrorist attack of the entire Iraq war -- have not "dealt a serious blow" to the claim that the new counterinsurgency strategy is working.

In fact, they emphatically demonstrate that it is.

Geography lesson

Consider where the bombing occurred:



al-Qaeda bombing of Yazidi Kurds at Syrian Border

Al-Qaeda bombing of Yazidi Kurds at Syrian Border

The red dot marks the approximate area of the four explosions. This is about as far as one can get from our counterinsurgency and still remain in Iraq.

We're fighting heavily in Anbar province in the west; in Najaf in the southwest; in Diyala and Baghdad in the east; and we have a lot of forces in Sulaymaniyah in the northeast, hard up against Iran. The Kurds are very strong in Kirkuk in the north; and the Brits have not yet left Basra in the southeast.

Just about the only place left for al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) to operate with any degree of impunity is in the northwest, in the remote desert inhabited by a smattering of Yazidis. In fact, even the New York Times has noticed this geographic reality, though they try to spin it into a negative:

All three towns [Sinjar, Amerili, Tal Afar] lie north of the main areas affected by the increase in American troop strength that began in March, supporting the notion that, as in numerous earlier American offensives, insurgents have moved from where they are being attacked and restarted their operations elsewhere....

Asked why insurgents would pick such simple villages in the desert for such a colossal attack, General Bergner said: “Perhaps their vulnerability. Perhaps they were a target that they could attack.”

The Times wants readers to believe this shows that the "surge" is a failure. After all, al-Qaeda is simply moving "from where they are being attacked" and "restart[ing] their operations elsewhere."

But that is precisely what the counterinsurgency aims to do: Unlike the previous "attrition" strategy, we don't just attack higgledy-piggledy following the terrorists, allowing them to set the operational tempo; instead, we began by defining an area of control -- the "white" area, using the terminology of French Lt.Col. Galula in Algeria, one of the recent architects of modern counterinsurgency theory. Then we expand from the "white" areas into the adjacent "pink" (contested) areas.

As we invest pink areas and turn them to white, that automatically makes what had been adjoining, enemy-controlled (red) areas into contested pink areas. That is, rather than chase al-Qaeda up and down Iraq, we start in one or two spots and expand outward -- like oil expanding across troubled waters.

"Victory" occurs as we push the enemy farther and farther away from the military, political, and economic centers of the country... which is precisely what we see happening in Iraq today. This attack is a perfect example.

Propinquity

Even more interesting about the geography of this attack: It's virtually on the Syrian border, over which AQI has been smuggling weapons, fighters -- and suicide bombers -- for several years. From the AP story linked above:

"This is way out by the Syrian border, an area where we do think in fact some suicide bombers are able to come across the border. It's an area that is very, very remote - quite small villages out there - and it was disheartening for us, too, obviously," [Gen. David] Petraeus told The Associated Press in an interview.

In the past, prior to the Coalition's new offensive strategy, al-Qaeda had little trouble smuggling suicide bombers across the Syrian border -- either in Anbar or Nineveh provinces -- and then transporting them to Baghdad, or any other location in central Iraq, where the blasts can be more spectacular (and, they hope, visible to the American elite news media parked in the Green Zone) and affect far more mainstream Iraqis. But in this bombing, while they likely got the murderers across from Syria, they were unable to move them very far. So instead, they tried to make lemonade by bombing a tiny sect that lives right at the border: the Yazidi.

I'm absolutely certain that al-Qaeda in Iraq would much rather have killed 250 people in Baghdad (capital of Baghdad province), Ramadi (capital of al Anbar), or Baqouba (capital of Diyala), where our counterinsurgency is actually focused... rather than a pair of villages in Nineveh so tiny, they're not even represented on most maps of Iraq. For that matter, al-Qaeda would almost certainly have rather blown up Kirkuk or Mosul... which, while not being part of the "surge," are at least major cities in the north and eponymous provincial capitals.

The only thread AQI can hang their rampage on (other than "that's the best we could do") is the infamous Yazidi stoning on April 7th, 2007. On that day, between one and two thousand Yazidi men stoned to death a 17 year old Yazidi girl, Du’a Khalil Aswad, for the crime of loving a Moslem boy and planning to elope (and possibly convert to Islam; that part is unclear). After Aswad was murdered, her body was burned and buried with the remains of a dog.

In "retaliation," AQI launched a reprisal massacre of 23 Yazidi men on a bus 13 days later... but that was in Mosul, the capital of next-door Mosul province. Since then, the Yazidi have not been singled out by AQI.

Again, I find it very unlikely that this was planned all along for two obscure Yazidi villages. We know the plan is at least a week old, because AQI distributed leaflets warning about it; but that was likely after they had already smuggled in the bombers... and realized they couldn't move them anywhere where an attack would be more visible and intimidating.

The overwhelmingly likely explanation is that the target was picked primarily for propinquity: The bombers could get to those villages; they could not get even as far as Mosul, let alone Baghdad... the American Army and Marines were in the way.

Religious profiling

Another reason the Yazidi are a curious target is that they are not, in fact, considered Islamic. They are an offshoot of an offshoot of an amalgamation of the pre-Islamic Middle East, archaic Levantine (descended from Crusaders) and Islamic religions, Kurdish culture and language, and bits and pieces of Sufism. They seem to me to occupy a similar position in the Middle East to the Mormons here... I don't mean the mainstream, late 20th-century Mormonism of Mitt Romney; I'm referring to the violent, polygamous version of Mormonism in the 19th century -- the Mormons that initiated the Mountain Meadows massacre, for example.

Those Mormons were driven from pillar to post in the United States; typically, they tried to immigrate west, out of the country (which did not yet extend "from sea to shining sea;" there was a big gap of wilderness in between Missouri and California). But as America kept catching up to them, they found themselves more and more in conflict. Christians tended to consider them heretics back then; some remnant of that prejudice exists today, with many otherwise ecumenical Christians angrily asserting that even present-day Mormons are not Christians.

Similarly, as AP puts it:

Some Muslims and Christians consider an angel figure worshipped by Yazidis to be the devil, a charge the sect denies. The Islamic State in Iraq, an al-Qaida front group, distributed leaflets a week ago warning residents near the scene of Tuesday's bombings that an attack was imminent because Yazidis are "anti-Islamic."

Why is this significant? Because typically, AQI wants to target its ghastly and spectacular bombing attacks against mainstream Shiite targets... such as the al-Askari "Golden Dome" mosque in Samarra. In a pinch, they may punish "rebellious" Sunni tribesmen in Anbar or Diyala. But what impact would result from bombing an obscure, non-Islamic sect that most Iraqis only associate with the stoning of Ms. Aswad? Iraqis (even mainstream Kurds) will likely just shrug. And the distance from there to the nearest front in the war is so great that it will be hard even for Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%) to argue that this constitutes a failure of Gen. Petraeus's strategy.

Bottom line

Again, I think this shows that AQI is reduced to striking whatever target is nearest to hand, out by the Syrian border, where they're hiding; and they must take "pot luck" when selecting victims. More than anything else, this reminds me of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, where rampaging bands of black and Hispanic youths burned down a thousand buildings -- almost all locally-owned and run businesses in their own neighborhoods. Why? Because those were the only buildings they could get at. Buildings in Beverly Hills, the west side, Palos Verdes, and even many Korean-owned stores and restaurants were too heavily guarded by homeowners and shopkeepers.

This is not to say that AQI will never get lucky again with a terrible attack on an important target in the heartland of Iraq. But such attacks have become fewer and fewer as the counterinsurgency continues:

The number of truck bombs and other large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50% since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago, according to the U.S. military command in Iraq.

The high-profile attacks -- generally large bombs hitting markets, mosques or other "soft" targets that produce mass casualties -- have dropped to about 70 in July from a high during the past year of about 130 in March, according to the Multi-National Force - Iraq.

In 2006, AQI destroyed the al-Askari mosque; in April of this year, they bombed the Iraqi parliament; in June, they knocked down the two remaining minarets of the al-Askari mosque (which few realized were still standing anyway). And yesterday, they bombed an obscure pre-Islamic sect of Kurds living right on the Syrian border, in the extreme northwest corner of the country.

In the counterinsurgency war we're fighting, that's exactly what victory looks like.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 15, 2007, at the time of 6:23 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

August 14, 2007

One Block at a Time

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Wesley Morgan, writing at the Fourth Rail, has a fascinating report on a different kind of ambush in Sadr City. Morgan is an embedded reporter accompanying American troops, led by Lt. Col Jeffery Peterson, along their patrol on the infamous Haifa Street, in the Sadr City slums of Baghdad, in the wake of a massive Shiite pilgrimage -- a "four million man march."

Col. Peterson and his men made a point of dismounting from their Strykers from time to time to chat with the locals. Morgan found the Iraqi people by and large friendly -- which is amazing, considering where they were: It was on this very Haifa Street in 2004 that a pair of election officials were brutally executed in broad daylight, during rush hour; the murders were photographed by an Iraqi stringer.

The "stringer" was later taken into custody as an al-Qaeda collaborator; the American who received the photos got a Pulitzer Prize.

Morgan writes:

The main difference [from Delhi in 2004], it occurred to me after a moment (besides the heat and the presence of a squad of formidably armed and armored US soldiers) was that the people seemed more welcoming: as Peterson walked down the sidewalk, greeting shop owners and residents with a well pronounced Salaam aleikum, I was struck by the people's demeanor.

Scrawny, white-haired, jagged-toothed men smiled up at the colonel from their seats, responding with a pleased-sounding Aleikum as-salaam, and middle-aged men did the same. The women, mostly wearing black robes that covered everything but their face, either greeted us as we walked by or simply smiled back at our greetings. Among younger men there was more of a split: some were enthusiastic, recognizing the colonel or his soldiers and greeting them in English, while others kept their expressions stonily cold, offering us no recognition whatsoever. Children of every age, both boys and girls, clustered around each of us, calling out "Hello mister!" or "Chocolata mister!" and grinning hopefully; many stuck out their hands for high-fives, fist-pounds, or handshakes.

A video report I viewed today at Matt Sanchez’s site confirms this impression (Sanchez is also embedded near Sadr City). Children “ambushed” Matt, clustering around him to have their picture taken, shouting out their own names after Matt named himself. Other children mobbed a female soldier who was giving away chewing-gum.

The scene reminded me of another that I know only from bedtime stories from my mother. It was not Iraq but Japan, 62 years ago today; and different children crowded around American Marines and soldiers, who drove not Strykers but Jeeps.

But it was the same story: Japan had just lost the war, during which they were told that American soldiers were so evil, they literally had horns growing from their foreheads. My mother was a small child, and she was terrified at the image. But when the American keito ("hairy foreigners") finally arrived, the children quickly realized that GIs were not demons... they were kind men whose hearts bled for the starving kids.

Seeing the desperate situation, GIs started to toss candy bars and chewing-gum from their own pockets; it was the only food they had with them. After a while, everywhere the soldiers went, they were inundated by friendly (and hungry!) children. Some, such as my mother’s older brother, quickly learned a few words in English: “Give me chocolate!” and “chewing-gum, please!” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You may argue that the children in Iraq are not being friendly... they're just hungry, like their earlier "ancestors" in Japan. If so, we're feeding them (and not just chocolate this time). I remember hearing from an Iraq veteran that when patrolling an area, if the children gather around the soldiers or Marines without their mothers objecting, it was a good sign. When the children disappear as soon as they see the troops, it's a warning that something bad is about to happen.

Col. Peterson made a cogent observation to Wesley Morgan:

Another encouraging sign, and a surprising one, that the colonel remarked on and asked the jundis about was the scarcity of posters of Muqtada al-Sadr -- Badr-type posters of ageing, moderate Shiite clerics were everywhere, but we saw Sadr's puffy form only here and there. Even more strikingly, there was very little trash.

It was clear that this was one of the streets that 1-14, and the colonel himself, patrolled regularly. "You have to dismount, get out there on the ground, and talk to people," the colonel had told me earlier in the day – "There is no other way." On these few blocks, it could not have been more obvious that the squadron's soldiers were following this guidance, straight of classical counterinsurgency doctrine, and to good effect.

The part about the lack of trash is more important that we might at first realize; James Q. Wilson's "Broken Windows" theory applies even in Iraq. When Iraqis trouble to pick up the trash in their neighborhoods, especially in such a poor neighborhood as Sadr City, it means that they see themselves as part of that society, not outsiders looking in.

The most important determinant of whether a person is likely to commit violence is whether he sees himself as integrated into the community; typically, only those who see themselves as fundamentally different and apart from the community can callously butcher innocents. If one feels a part of the whole, mass violence is almost impossible.

Morgan’s report is not entirely positive; it's not all Pollyannas and cream. Despite the eagerness of the Iraqi security troops to safeguard the Pilgrims’ march, Morgan is not confident that they have the capability or the equipment to back-up the will.

But taken all in all, this is a good report. We must pacify Baghdad and Iraq one street, one block at the time. Haifa street is not just any old road; it has a dark and vengeful history and mythology all its own. But we will pacify it in the end, just like every other street: one block at a time.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 14, 2007, at the time of 11:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 9, 2007

The "Don't Make Waves!" Theory of Iraqi Politics

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Or, who needs a grand unified political "settlement" in Mess o' Potatoes anyway?

Congress, and even to a lesser extent the Bush administration, have recently begun demanding a written, codified political settlement of issues in Iraq -- enacted by the Iraqi parliament -- before they'll admit that we're winning the war. The demand is unreasonable; I have thought for some time that that's the wrong way to go about pacifying the country.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I believe the most important elements of the Iraq democracy project are military: denying the enemies of freedom and democracy the ability to enforce their ideology by gun and bomb. Political "reconciliation" is academically interesting but ultimately non-essential to our victory conditions... an Iraq that is no longer a threat to the United States, not a haven for terrorists, and more or less free and democratic, at least enough so that Iraqis feel themselves a part of society, not apart from society.

It doesn't matter whether the society to which they feel a sense of belonging is Iraq as a whole or just their region. In only matters that they realize that they must defend against invasion and infiltration in all parts of Iraq in order to safeguard their own, just as Texans would still fight against an invasion of New York, knowing that if NY fell, so eventually would Texas.

Thus, we must work closely with the Iraqi security forces (ISF) on security issues, defending against both al-Qaeda and affilliates in the Sunni areas and against Iranian-backed militias in the Shiite areas (and against Turkish incursion into Kurdistan, which means stopping Kurdish separatists operating out of that region to avoid giving provocation)... while at the same time, allow political "settlement" and "reconciliation" to spontaneously arise at the local level and percolate upwards from individual to tribe to province. Only then, years down the road, should we worry about parliamentary laws... if they're even needed.

One consequence of this new way of looking at Iraq -- I call it the "don't make waves" theory -- is that we shouldn't be that much concerned about intertribal warfare within a region; for example, we needn't care about various Shiites squabbling over who will control Basra after the Brits leave. Let 'em fight it out. [This paragraph and two others contain a correction; I wrote "Mosul" but mean "Basra." Hat tip to commenter Brian H!]

So long as all political parties reject Iranian sock puppetry (and fight against those militias that are Iranian puppets), it doesn't matter to us which tribe or group ultimately controls Basra. If they allow free transit out of the province for those who don't like it, that's democracy... in fact, it's federalism; and we should have more of it here, too!

Civilized countries with long histories of rule of law and reasonably honest federal administration often make the serious mistake of assuming that top-down enforcement of political rights should be the short-term goal of every country. But just because it works fairly well for us doesn't mean that's the ideal form of democracy for everyone else. When the long history is instead of centralized repression, tyranny, and corruption that would beggar the imagination of most Americans, the level of trust required for a top-down solution is simply unattainable, probably for decades to come.

In such countries and societies, trust resides much lower; in Iraq's case, trust resolves as low as the tribe: Most Iraqis primarily think of themselves as members of a tribe, and secondarily as Iraqis, distinct from other Arabs or Persians. Many people understand this much, but they don't take the next leap of logic: If that's where trust is found, then that's where solutions must be found as well.

This needn't be done, in fact shouldn't be done, by passing a law through the Iraqi parliament. The way to resolve outstanding problems, such as distribution of oil revenues, anti-de-Baathification, and sectarian violence, is to start at the tribal level and work upwards:

  • Provincial government authorities, even in Shiite territory, should start awarding oil-drilling and extraction contracts to local or nearby Sunni tribes, not just Shiite tribes; and Sunni governors could invite teams of American or British geologists to Sunni lands to hunt for oil, shale, and natural gas reserves: Having their own revenue stream is the greatest guarantee that Sunnis could have. Rather than verbal promises from the Shiite-controlled parliament, Sunnis would begin seeing actual cash money flowing into their communities.
  • Provincial governments, Sunni, Shia, and mixed, could simply start hiring ex-Baathists in defiance of the de-Baathification laws; if the federal government forbears prosecuting anyone, then you have de facto anti-de-Baathification.
  • If Shiite tribes began policing their own members, stopping the sectarian killing -- this can start with tribes that have both Sunni and Shia as members -- that would be more convincing than if parliament "passed a law" outlawing militias. A "Basra Salvation Council," patterned after the Anbar Salvation Council but aimed at Shiite terrorists, especially those controlled by Iran, would also encourage Sunni tribes to turn on al-Qaeda and other foreign Sunni terrorist groups... which in turn would make it easier to expand the anti-militia movement on the Shiite side.

The virtue of each of these suggestions is that none requires either side to stand up in a national forum and loudly support the other side -- at the expense of the speaker's own. Instead, reforms can be carried out quietly, behind the scenes, and at a local enough level that everybody knows everybody else.

Demanding that the current crop of dunderheads in the Iraq parliament cobble together a grand unified theory of Iraqi constitutional law is at best shortsighted, at worst feeding the "fatal conceit" that in a tribal country like Iraq, decisions should nevertheless be made from the top down. Rather, democracy and freedom should begin from tribe to tribe, then spread to village, town, and city. It cannot be imposed from above when the only experience Iraqis have with top-down government is the crushing Baathist and Saddamite repression.

And for Allah's sake, can't we just stop yammering about "political progress?" The best way to talk about something when nobody agrees with anybody else -- is not to talk about it at all.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 9, 2007, at the time of 5:36 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

August 6, 2007

Democrat Inadvertently Blurts Out Truth

Afghan Astonishments , Hippy Dippy Peacenik Groove , Iraq Matters , Pakistan Perplexities , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

A spokesman for the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL, 95%) accidentally let slip an inconvenient truth... and nobody noticed! (Except the lizards, of course; the lidless eye sees all.)

Defending Obama's feckless threat to invade Pakistan if their war against al-Qaeda doesn't proceed fast enough for Obama, Bill Burton spake:

“The fact that the same Republican candidates who want to keep 160,000 American troops in the middle of a civil war couldn’t agree that we should take out Osama bin Laden if we had him in our sights proves why Americans want to turn the page on the last seven years of Bush-Cheney foreign policy.”

The problem with this puffery is that it's simply not true that "Americans want to turn the page." Some do, some don't; in the most recent USA Today/Gallup poll on the war, 57% say we shouldn't have invaded (i.e., want to "turn back the page"); but 57% is not a consensus. However, a simple substitution makes the statement absolutely true and virtually a tautology. Consider this version with one word rewritten:

The fact that the same Republican candidates who want to keep 160,000 American troops in the middle of a civil war couldn’t agree that we should take out Osama bin Laden if we had him in our sights proves why Democrats want to turn the page on the last seven years of Bush-Cheney foreign policy.

Yes it does; it indicates ("prove" is too strong a formulation) that to Democrats, the war on global hirabah begins and ends with Osama bin Laden: To the congressional majority, we can win everywhere else; but if bin Laden isn't captured and prosecuted, we have lost. But even more ominously, we can lose everywhere else; but so long as we capture bin Laden and put him on trial (in the U.N.'s International Court of Justice at the Hague, of course), then we've won!

Such juvenile thinking permeates the Democratic party more thorougly than Shiite militias have penetrated the Iraqi National Police. Another example, just enunciated by Max Boot in an interview on Hugh Hewitt: the unreasonable demand put upon Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki to ram reforms through the Iraqi parliament... when we, ourselves, deliberately wrote their constitution to weaken the prime minister, back when our greatest fear was another Iraqi "strongman" rising to replace Hussein. We weaken the prime minister, then imagine that if only we replace Maliki with another guy, he'll be able to solve the political problems ("Daddy fix!").

The gravest problem facing America today, in my never particularly humble or hesitant opinion, is the fact that a huge chunk of the electorate suffer from -- and an entire major political party is now based upon -- Peter Pan Syndrome: They've never grown up, living instead in a perpetual state of adolescence and "teen logic":

  • They make unreasonable, truculent demands;
  • They have no idea how such demands could possibly be met, no strategy or even vague suggestion;
  • Yet they promise vast retribution if the magical president doesn't make it so;
  • When thwarted, they fly into a rage;
  • They blurt out horrid things they never meant to say -- then defend their misstatement with the ferocity of Howard Dean defending his latest verbal gaffe;
  • And when the policies they demand (or inflict upon the American people) collapse, leaving a shattered industry or sector as testament to Democratic fecklessness... their only explanation is to shrug and say, "it seemed like a good idea at the time."

Republicans and GOP-leaning independents have it in their power to prevent another Peter Pan presidency. And the first step is to stop forming a circular firing squad at the drop of a disagreement. To quote that great small-f federalist, one of the authors of the Constitution, and perhaps the greatest epigrammatist in American history -- I refer to Benjamin Franklin, of course -- "gentlemen, we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 6, 2007, at the time of 5:25 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 30, 2007

CAIR's Congressman Ellison Praises Key Elements of Counterinsurgency Strategy

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

This is fascinating... Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN, no ADA rating yet), CAIR's puppet in Congress, recently went to Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in Iraq. There he met with a pair of sheikhs. (CAIR is the Council on American Islamic Relations, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and longtime supporter of Hamas and praiser of al-Qaeda.) [Fixed a small mistake here; thanks, CDQuarles!]

"They were very upset and concerned that al-Qaeda is misrepresenting Islam," Ellison told reporters on a conference call Monday from Germany, on his way back to the U.S. "And they were talking to me about what I can possibly do to work with them to give a clearer, more accurate picture of what Islam is all about."

The sheikhs are evidently members of the Anbar Salvation Council (or at least support the council's goals and tactics), and they begged Ellison to go back to the United States and tell the American people that Iraqi Sunnis have allied with American soldiers and Marines to fight against al-Qaeda, and that al-Qaeda does not speak for the Sunnis in Anbar province.

Ellison also met with Gen. David Petraeus and MG Walter Gaskin and claims, at least, to be very impressed, both with the generals and the strategy itself. Given what we know about Keith Ellison, this is simply extraordinary:

The group met with Iraqi and U.S. military officials, including Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Ellison said that local leaders in Ramadi told him of how they partnered with U.S. and Iraqi military officials to virtually rid al-Qaeda from the city. Although the lawmakers had to travel in flak vests and helmets, "we did see people walking around the streets of Ramadi, going back and forth to the market." [Keith Ellison applauds our joint patrols with Iraqis.]

There have been fewer anti-U.S. sermons as the violence has been reduced, Ellison said, and religious leaders meet regularly with U.S. military officials. [Ellison admits that the "surge" (counterinsurgency strategy) is working, reducing violence.]

"The success in Ramadi is not just because of bombs and bullets, but because the U.S. and Iraqi military and the Iraqi police are partnering with the tribal leadership and the religious leadership," he said. "So they're not trying to just bomb people into submission. What they're doing is respecting the people, giving the people some control over their own lives." [Ellison endorses the core element of counterinsurgency: working with local forces to protect the population, allowing normalcy to spread; this will starve the insurgents of recruits.]

Ellison said he was particularly impressed watching Maj. Gen. Walter Gaskin, U.S. commander in the Anbar province, greeting people with "as-salama aleikum," meaning peace be upon you.

"And they would respond back with smiles and waves," Ellison said. "I don't want to overplay it. There were no flowers. There was no clapping. There was no parade. But there was a general level of respect and calm that I thought was good."

Partnering between American military forces and Iraqi security forces is an essential component of our new counterinsurgency strategy -- and is fundamentally at odds with the current semi-withdrawal plans being pushed by the Left. Democrats demand (via amendments to legislation) that we cease patrolling with the Iraqis, retreat into some big American Fortress of Solitude, and only sally forth to fight al-Qaeda, as if the latter is going to mass up and challenge America to a North-Africa-style tank battle, rather than operate by stealth, infiltration, and suicide car bombings, as they always have.

Does Ellison realize his praise of the Joint Security Stations (JSSs) puts him on the side of conservative Republicans against Democrats and RINOs? Is he deliberately breaking with Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%), who supports the traditional Democratic defeatist line? Or has Ellison simply not been following the debate all this time and inadvertently stumbled into apostasy?

It makes no difference: There are three possibilities going forward, each of which cuts in favor of war supporters:

  1. Ellison returns to D.C. and continues to praise our joint operations with the Iraqi Army and National Police, thus serving as a lonely bastion of sanity in the House, to match Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 75%-D, 17%-R) in the Senate.

In this case, Ellison becomes a fracture point in the otherwise monolithic defeat-mongering among Democratic members of the House.

  1. Ellison returns to D.C., talks to his masters at CAIR (and his secondary boss, Nancy Pelosi), and suddenly discovers that he actually hates the idea of Americans patrolling and allying with Sunni anti-al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq.

If he tries this, his own previous quotation can be thrown back in his face; we can ask him, "When CAIR says frog, do you jump?" Are your constituents in Minnesota -- or Waziristan?

  1. Ellison decides not to return to D.C. but to turn around and head back to Iraq, join the Anbar Salvation Council, and fight al-Qaeda.

Well... in that case, more power to him. Presumably, whoever replaced him in Congress would not be a CAIR congressman (at least not quite so directly!)

We shall watch Ellison's future progress with great interest. Let us hope he continues to grow in office.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 30, 2007, at the time of 3:00 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Miracle On Sand

Iraq Matters , Sporting Gents
Hatched by Dafydd

I recently rewatched the movie Miracle for the first time since I saw it in the theater. I remain convinced that without that "miracle" win against the Soviet Union hockey team in the 1980 Olympics -- the so-called "miracle on ice" -- Amercans might never have elected Ronald Reagan president.

My reasoning is subtle but not, I hope, specious: What Reagan sold more than anything else was hope -- hope that the evil empire could be not just contained but destroyed, hope that the economy could be not just suspended above the brink but driven forward full-throttle. Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford before him, and Richard Nixon before that, and every president back to Harry Truman, offered nothing better than limbo... the vague promise that things wouldn't get worse, or at least not much worse. But Reagan offered realistic hope that they would improve and improve tremendously.

But what you cannot believe you will not buy. If Americans did not first believe in hope, they would not have invested in a presidential candidate who peddled it. (Today's Democrats believe in nothing, nihil, as in nihilism; to "Pinky" Reid, hope is a four-letter word.)

What made us believe in hope in November 1980? What broke the charm of the inevitability of American decline? Remember where we were in that year and the preceding eight (in case you forgot, the movie helpfully reminds viewers in the opening collage): the loss in Vietnam, Watergate, the resignation of a president, oil embargos, the fall of Saigon, inflation, stagflation, soaring interest rates that killed business, strikes, the perception that Japanese automobile imports would destroy the American automobile industry, just as Soviet sports teams destroyed American Olympic hopes, serial killers, the Iranian hostage crisis (in which we appeared so helpless)... the dirge sounded relentlessly.

I remember being politically adrift (I was at UCLA at the time), certain I was an American but unsure whether that meant anything anymore. I don't think I was unique.

I was no hockey fan; I'm still not. But I watched that game out of stubborn hatred of Communists; and I was so stunned when we won it that I just sat still and quiet before of the TV screen for perhaps a half an hour, just absorbing and digesting what that meant.

It meant we interrupted our march into the dustbin of history; suddenly we felt brash, strong, American again. Many have remarked that the US-USSR game was the first time they ever heard the chant "USA! USA!" I watched the Olympic gold-medal game that followed (the first and last such I have ever watched), and I felt an elation that another part of me thought was absurd: I didn't even like hockey!

Later that year, when I moved up to Santa Cruz to attend UCSC, I took a new outlook with me. I became profoundly disliked by the leftie students there; but my persona prior to that match would not have aroused any political enmity, because I was politically a tabula rasa. I was never a liberal; I have never considered myself a conservative; but in 1980, I went from being "an American" to being American.

It didn't extend to voting for Reagan, alas; my greatest political regret is that I decided he was the greatest president of the 20th century -- only after my last chance to vote for him in 1984. But I knew I despised Carter in a way I had not before (I had merely been apathetic about him). I did not vote for him either; I wrote in candidates in both elections.

I believe this change to be true of others: That victory introduced many cynical Americans to the audacity of hope, to swipe a book title from a far lesser man than either Ronald Reagan or Herb Brooks, the coach of the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team. Without it, would we have elected the "hope-filled man" as president? I don't think we would have. The "what's the use" drug would have suppressed our traditional American response to travail.

Why am I telling you this? It should be obvious: I desperately hope for a "miracle on ice" effect in Iraq because of yesterday's win in the Asian Cup, beating Saudi Arabia, of all countries. I don't anticipate a Kumbaya moment, where Shia, Sunni, Kurds, and Turkomen come together in a cluster-hug. But I expect, at the very least, an embrace with the final inadvertent gift of Pandora, after all the evils had escaped her box... Hope remained, and she kept it tight and safe.

I want Hope to begin to creep across Mesopotamia; not the wicked hope of empire or caliphate, not the vile hope of slaughtering those whose God is a different shade of doctrine from one's own, but the deep hope that Iraq can pass through this dark night of the soul to emerge reborn on the flip side. The hope that it can shake off the dead, skeletal hands of enmity, resentment, vengeance, and fourteen centuries of arrested moral development and burst forth, fully formed, from Bush' brow as a modern country in at least the periphery of the Functioning Core.

I believe in miracles -- the kind that human beings make for themselves, with perhaps a touch of the divine, God or Muse, behind them. Talking oneself into hope and courage is 90% of the trick; I hope the Iraqis will allow themselves to believe in a miracle on sand.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 30, 2007, at the time of 5:21 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 28, 2007

British Withdrawal From Basra: Is They Is, or Is They Ain't?

Buck Up, Old Chap , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The British are beginning to withdraw from patrolling and policing Basra province, starting with the capital city of Basra; the question is whether the Shia there are or are not ready for self rule.

First of all, this clearly is more fallout from what the lads at Power Line call "the Browning of Britain," the replacement of Tony Blair by new Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown, like the rest of the Labour Party, has never been as gung-ho about the Iraq war as was Blair; so it was inevitable that with the passing of the Blair-era (the Blaira?), Britain would begin easing out of Iraq.

But that's not necessarily bad. After all, neither we nor the Brits ever intended 2003 to presage the colonization of Iraq -- no matter what the Democratic rabble thought (or hoped). What would be bad, however, is if it turns out the Brits are leaving too soon, based upon political rather than military calculation. And on that question, there is no consensus:

As American troop levels are peaking in Baghdad, British force levels are heading in the opposite direction as the troops prepare to withdraw completely from the city center of Basra, 300 miles to the south.

The British intend to pull back to an airport headquarters miles out of town, a symbolic move widely taken by Iraqis as the beginning of the end of the British military presence in southern Iraq....

Skepticism is widespread in Basra, as in Baghdad, about whether Iraqi forces are ready to take over. Both the British and Americans will have to assuage the fears of Iraqis that they are being abandoned to gunmen and religious extremists. And both are likely to face intensified attacks from propaganda-conscious enemies trying to claim credit for driving out the Westerners.

Basra is much more culturally monochrome than, say, Baghdad, where our counterinsurgency is centered; the former is almost entirely Shiite. This means there is little of either the specifically sectarian violence (Iraq Shia killing Iraq Sunni for supposed collaboration with al-Qaeda) or of al-Qaeda style mass-casualty bomb attacks. But they have their own problems, summed up by one British civilian official:

“Basra is a totally different environment from what the Americans are facing,” said a British official in Basra. “The problem here is gangsterism, not violent sectarianism. And a foreign military is not the right tool for closing down a mafia.”

Iraqis expressed the same view, saying that militia leaders in Basra typically act more like bandits and extortionists, lining their pockets rather than instituting a Taliban-style religious state. But an unchecked "mafia" can be just as deadly:

“Right now the militias are busy concentrating on getting the British Army out of Iraq,” he said. “After that is done they will turn on the people and try to control them in a very difficult way.” ["He" is "Riyadh, a 22-year-old Iraqi and Basra native who is an interpreter for the British."]

“They will kill people who don’t do what they want,” he added. “There will be no punishment by courts; they kill people on the streets.”

But he acknowledged that if British troops stayed they would be sucked into further deadly confrontations with militias using civilians as cover, leading to inevitable innocent casualties and more hostility.

“If they leave, the militias will eventually fall apart,” he said. “There will be no reason to join them because they will not be fighting the British Army.”

This is what the British hope, but cannot guarantee, will happen.

And that's what makes the withdrawal from Basra so interesting, anent the Iraqi security forces: "Is they is, or is they ain't" ready to take over?

This will be an excellent, if scary, test of the Iraqi National Police and the local police; I do not expect them to pass with the proverbial flying colors; but at least we'll learn whether they're headed in the right direction and what areas still need improvement. The question is, can the Iraqi police, likely infiltrated by Shiite militias, clean up the corruption caused by those same militias?

If so, that would be an incredibly hopeful sign. If they can make at least some progress, that would be encouraging; but if they gleefully join in the looting of the oil-rich province, then that would be a flashing neon warning sign that the Iraqis are not yet ready for prime time.

So keep watching the skies...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 28, 2007, at the time of 5:49 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

July 23, 2007

Democrats Snub Vets for Freedom: Look What You Made Me Do!

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

During Democrats' slumber party last week, thirty some young veterans gathered on the Hill. They were members of a group called Vets for Freedom, which comprises Afghanistan- and Iraq-war veterans. The vets' aim was to appeal to senators to support the war: They hoped to let them know that a majority of servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan want to finish the job and give Petraeus' strategy a chance to work.

Alas, Democratic leaders were so busy chanting "Bring the troops home" that they couldn't be bothered with actual vets, the very people about whom they so passionately claim to care. The MSM tried to ignore the Vets too; but it became impossible to completely freeze them out when the President of the United States spent a long hour talking with them. (Hat tip Power Line)

Thus it became necessary to crush VFF. When a pro-war group like them becomes visible, the anti-war crowd must pull out all the stops to discredit them. Besides, there was also the fine motive of retaliation driving the Left onward: When anti-war "veterans" groups, such as An Appeal to Redress, started demanding American defeat, they were ripped to shreds by milbloggers. So it's "only fair" that left wing bloggers take a club to the VFF like a fur hunter to a baby seal.

The anti-GOP-war crowd seems to be especialy ticked off by VFF's claim to non-partisanship. This criticism by the Center for Media Democracy, a leading anti-VFF group, is typical:

Who and what is behind the organization Vets for Freedom, a lobby group for staying the Administration's course in the war in Iraq? Contributors to our investigative website SourceWatch are wondering exactly that.... Its supposedly non-partisan patriotic agenda is looking rather suspect. Will it become to the 2006 Congressional elections what the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were in 2004? A Republican front for waging ad hominem attacks, this time on politicians like John Murtha who are calling for an end to the US occupation?

In fact the CMD has dedicated an entire section of its webzine SourceWatch to discrediting the VFF, alleging they were a "front organization" for the Republican Party. But in the process of trying to prove rampant partisanship, the CMD accidentally makes the case instead that Democrats simply don't support our troops.

Let us take a little journey into the strange world of left-liberal conspiracy mongering...

(Please follow the "slither on" for the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey says.)

The SourceWatch article on VFF begins by referring to them as "a Republican front group managed by Republican-affiliated public relations, media, legal, and political consultants."

Let us first clarify what being a "Republican front group" means: It means that your primary goal is to advance a the GOP's political agenda. Merely receiving most of your support from Republicans is not proof of GOP partisanship; nor does it make you a front group if more Republicans happen to agree with your agenda than do Democrats. Political-party partisanship means that your agenda is the advancement of one party, rather than an independent goal, such as ending legal abortion or rolling back gun prohibition.

Why is this important? Because the CMD calls Vets for Freedom a front group; but the only evidence they produce is that more Republicans than Democrats are aligned with these soldiers and Marines... which the CMD wants you to believe is the same thing.

It's not. For one example, the National Rifle Association usually supports Republicans; but that's just because more Republicans than Democrats support gun rights. But they will support a pro-gun Democrat over anti-gun Republican... so they're not just a Republican front group.

VFF's sole agenda is the full-hearted completion of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; for that reason, they strongly support Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 75%-D, 17%-R), even though he is not a Republican. Bearing that definition in mind, let us examine some of the criticism the Center for Media Democracy hurls against VFF.

Claim: members of VFF are "neocon lobbyists"

The CMD's SourceWatch article on Vets for Freedom states that some members of VFF are "affiliated" with neocon Weekly Standard publisher Bill Kristol; by this, they mean that some VFF members sold pro-war articles to Kristol's Weekly Standard, rather than to Time, Vanity Fair, or the Nation:

Non-partisan, bi-partisan or neocon lobbyists?

VFF member Alex Gallo, a West Point graduate who served in 2004 as an infantry officer in Samarrah, Iraq, wrote a pro-war in Iraq article[6] that was published July 18, 2007, by the National Review Online owned by neoconservative Bill Kristol, "the No. 1 cheerleader for the Iraq war." [What the heck? Bill Kristol "owns" NRO? I've never heard that before; NRO is edited by Kathryn Jean "K-Lo" Lopez and supported by donations. Kristol doesn't even write for them, having his own competing conservative magazine.]

Gallo is currently a "masters in public-policy candidate" at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government[8], where he is "course assistant" for Kristol's "Can America be Governed?"[9] In 2006, Kristol assisted VFF-AF in its pro-war in Iraq campaign support of Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.)....

In 2006, former White House spokesman Taylor Gross's public relations firm the Herald Group helped VFF co-founder Wade Zirkle and "fellow Iraq veteran David Bellavia approach mainstream newspapers to offer dispatches from the two as war correspondents embedded with the military. The two eventually got press credentials through the neoconservative Weekly Standard, whose editor, Bill Kristol, became an informal adviser to the group and helped put it in touch with" Republican strategist Dan Senor, who was "on retainer to help with fundraising.

The truth: What do we learn from this? That Kristol -- who supports the war -- publishes writers who support the war. Shocking! It does not make VFF "lobbyists" (who are they supposed to have lobbied -- private citizen Dan Senor, private citizen Taylor Gross, or private citizen Bill Kristol?)

Typically, the word "lobbyist" means a paid advocate for somebody else's position; VFF members talked to congressmen on behalf of their own beliefs, not anybody else's. And of course, nobody paid them to do so. We already have a phrase for such nefarious activity, and it's not "lobbying": It's "petitioning Congress."

Claim: VFF is a "right-wing" organization

By similar reasoning, the CMD leaps upon the fact that right-wing bloggers, magazines, and one supposedly conservative newspaper (the Wall Street Journal), but no left wingers, reported VFF's call for a rally on the Hill on July 17th:

On July 13, 2007, Hegseth issued a second urgent call to action, which was reposted on a number of right-wing-leaning blogs, as well as by the conservative [promoted from "neoconservative?"] online publication The Weekly Standard, in which he asked "every Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who believes in supporting the mission -- and defeating America's enemies -- to converge on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, July 17. It's time the fighters in this war tell their representatives -- face to face -- that now is no time to betray the mission."

The truth: Anti-war left-wing bloggers and editors evidence no interest in promoting VFF's pro-war effort; surprise, surprise on the Jungle Cruise tonight. I'm certain that if Kos or Juan Cole or the New York Times had offered to help spread the word, VFF would not have refused.

Instead of rooting around for some hidden conspiracy behind the VFF swarm on Capitol Hill, the Center for Media Democracy should ask one simple question: Why did only one mainstream news organization -- the Wall Street Journal -- cover the events in Washington D.C.? If it's newsworthy when An Appeal for Redress talks to members of Congress on behalf of retreat, defeat, and surrender, why isn't it equally important when a pro-war group of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan talk to Congress on behalf of victory?

What is the CMD proving? Only that when it comes to actually supporting our troops -- which includes supporting the mission that they believe is so urgent -- Democrats, RINOs, and other liberals are deserters under fire.

Claim: VFF was only interested in meeting Republican lawmakers

SourceWatch describes Vets for Freedom's meetings with various senators in the Capitol in a way that makes it sound as if VFF were only interested in meeting with Republicans -- with the Left's favorite whipping boy, Joe Lieberman, being the only exception:

Hegseth wrote in his July 16, 2007, update that VFF "will also have a group meeting with Senate leaders to discuss Iraq war policy. In addition, be on the lookout for our afternoon press conference, which will take place just off the Senate floor."

On July 16, 2007, VFF issued a press release stating that it would hold its press conference at 3:00pm on July 17, 2007, in the Mansfield Room (S-207) at The Capitol with "Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Republican Conference Chairman Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), other senators."

This was confirmed in part by a local South Carolina TV news report that stated Senator Lindsey Graham "will join Vets for Freedom and a bipartisian group of senators who support the new strategy in Iraq." It should be noted that the only non-Republican named is Sen. Lieberman.

The truth: So why weren't there any Democrats present at the press conference? SourceWatch leaves us with the impression that VFF only invited "Republicans."

But this is complete nonsense, and the authors of the SouceWatch article clearly know that. The CMD knows very well that VFF did not go to the Hill just to talk to Republicans; rather, their request to meet with Speaker of the House Nancy Perosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) and Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) for five minutes each was summarily rejected. Neither would any other Democratic or even squishy Republican lawmaker agree to meet with them.

But wait... how do we know that SourceWatch was aware of this? Couldn't it have been an honest mistake? Hardly: SourceWatch itself confirms this fact, without evidently noticing that it completely undermines their narrative:

VFF's "mission", Aoife McCarthy reported in The Politico, was "to reassure the GOP lawmakers supporting President Bush's war strategy as they endure a pummeling at home in TV ads and automated telephone calls from anti-war groups. And maybe, the veterans hoped, they could change the minds of other lawmakers...

"The only senators who would meet with the pro-surge veterans were those who already shared their view. The real targets -- war opponents or wobbly supporters -- sent a first wave of senior aides to shield themselves from the pitch," McCarthy wrote.

Neither Democratic leaders nor RINOs have the least interested in what actual veterans of the very wars in question have to say. This is what makes VFF a "Republican front group managed by Republican-affiliated public relations, media, legal, and political consultants"... at least according to SourceWatch.

Claim: VFF has questionable funding sources

From the begining, the Center for Media Democracy has claimed that VFF's funding comes from questionable sources. As of June, 2006, CMD had found nothing more than the following (from the CMD link above):

  1. The VFF has a "rather fancy website."
  2. At one time, but no longer, the VFF's privacy notice on its website stated "We may from time to time share the information our visitors provide with other Republican candidates and other like-minded organizations."
  3. "The organization contests and condemns the views of Democratic Congressman John Murtha, the Democrat calling for the United States to pull troops from Iraq."
  4. "Virtually no information is available about the funders and organizations behind Vets for Freedom"

One year later, their investigation has not progressed much (from the SourceWatch link):

A disclaimer on the bottom of each VFF web page states "Vets for Freedom is a nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization. Contributions are not deductible for federal income tax purposes."

Originally, the organization's precise tax status (501c3, 501c4, 527 committee) was not stated and virtually no information was available on the Vets for Freedom website about the funders and organizations behind Vets for Freedom, making it difficult to evaluate the degree to which the organization might have been part of a war propaganda campaign interacting with the Bush Administration, the Pentagon, the American Legion and/or other ideologically-driven public relations and lobbying efforts that have exploited for political purposes the issues of US war veterans and their families, such as Move America Forward and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. [Not that SourceWatch, or their parent organization the Center for Media Democracy, would ever engage in propaganda by inuendo...!]

The truth: In other words, CMD has no information whatsoever indicating that VFF is funded by the Republican Party, or is a front for Richard Melon Scaife, or is even owned by that well-known proprietor of National Review Online, Bill Kristol.

But perhaps the very absence of evidence is sinister evidence of presence: After all, if VFF didn't have something to hide, why would they go to such extraordinary lengths to cover up all that evidence?

Ergo...

So what do we have here? CMD cannot prove that VFF is a "front group" of the GOP. They cannot demonstrate that VFF is partisan. They cannot even find anything funny about the funding.

CMD set out to discredit these war veterans, presumably on the grounds that nobody who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan could possibly support those wars (they're all loser high-school dropouts stuk in Irak anyway). Instead, they proved the very point which we pro-war, right-leaning bloggers have been making for years: That Republicans care about the troops... and Democrats don't.

Bravo, CMD; kudos, SourceWatch... keep up the good work!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, July 23, 2007, at the time of 4:29 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 19, 2007

A Vietnam Reeducation

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Near as I can make it out from this video clip, here is what Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, 95%) said on C-Span today:

Let me just say to the first part of your question with respect to Boat People and killing... everybody predicted a massive bloodbath in Vietnam. There was not a massive bloodbath in Vietman. There were reeducation camps, and they weren’t [garbled]. Nobody likes that kind of outcome, but I’ve met a lot of people today who were in those education camps who are thriving in the Vietnam of today.

There you go, no bloodbath in Vietnam (no word about Cambodia, land of the Magic-Hat People), just education camps... sort of like combination job-training and day-care centers.

The clip ends rather abruptly, so perhaps Kerry went on to bring up Cambodia and how the killing fields there utterly undercut his own demand that we pull out from Iraq just as precipitously as we did from that Southeast Asian country that didn't have a bloodbath. Anything's possible... but I doubt it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 19, 2007, at the time of 2:41 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

July 13, 2007

Warner, Lugar Draft Bill to Oust President, Declare Congress Commander in Chief

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

[Correction added; see below.]

Republican Senators John Warner (VA, 64%) and Richard Lugar (IN, 64%) have introduced a bill into the Senate that would remove the president as Commander in Chief of the military, requiring him to report to Congress instead and implement battle plans at their direction:

Two prominent Senate Republicans have drafted legislation that would require President Bush to come up with a plan by mid-October to dramatically narrow the mission of U.S. troops in Iraq.

The legislation, which represents a sharp challenge to Bush, was put forward Friday by Sens. John Warner and Richard Lugar, and it came as the Pentagon acknowledged that a decreasing number of Iraqi army battalions are able to operate independently of U.S. troops [because they have been decimated in both men and materials by valiant combat with al-Qaeda and Shiite militias -- as explained deep in the story]....

The legislation would direct Bush to present the new strategy to Congress by Oct. 16 and suggests it be ready for implementation by Dec. 31. [Regardless of what Gen. David Petraeus reports in September, one presumes.]

The proposal also would seek to make Bush renew the authorization for war that Congress gave him in 2002. Many members contend that authorization - which led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 - was limited to approval of deposing dictator Saddam Hussein and searching for weapons of mass destruction.

Fortunately, Warner and Lugar explained in great detail why legislation requiring the president to draft a battle plan at the pleasure of Congress -- a plan that would mandate a return to the strategy of 2005-2006 (which was working so well) -- would actually lead to victory in Iraq:

"Given continuing high levels of violence in Iraq and few manifestations of political compromise among Iraq's factions, the optimal outcome in Iraq of a unified, pluralist, democratic government that is able to police itself, protect its borders, and achieve economic development is not likely to be achieved in the near future," the Warner-Lugar proposal said....

The Warner-Lugar proposal states that "American military and diplomatic strategy in Iraq must adjust to the reality that sectarian factionalism is not likely to abate anytime soon and probably cannot be controlled from the top."

Accordingly, Warner and Lugar say Bush must draft a plan for U.S. troops that would keep them from "policing the civil strife or sectarian violence in Iraq" and focus them instead on protecting Iraq's borders, targeting terrorists and defending U.S. assets.

In short, the "surge," not quite a month old, has failed miserably, so we must retreat, surrender, and declare defeat. Well a day! That's certainly compelling... who could argue with that?

But let no one accuse either gentleman of being an "armchair general." Sen. Warner served in the United States Navy during World War II for a solid year, rising to the rank of PO3. He joined the Marines later during the Korean War, then stuck it out for ten years in the reserves, eventually skyrocketing to the rank of captain. Sen. Lugar's career was even more illustrious: After graduating college, he served for three years in the peacetime Navy. Lugar was also an Eagle Scout. He has 34 honorary doctorate degrees.

[Corrected previous paragraph to add Warner's Marine Corps experience. - The Mgt.]

Legal experts, speaking on condition of anonymity because they have not been consulted, do not appear in the article, and in fact know absolutely nothing about the Warner-Lugar proposal, expressed skepticism that it was even constitutional for the United States Congress to order the President of the United States to craft and implement a specific battle plan.

But what do they know? To paraphrase Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%), Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%), and, well, nearly every other Democrat and RINO Republican... all three branches of government are coequal; but some are more coequal than others.

We shall watch Congress's future antics with great interest.

(One more point needs elucidation, giving me the opportunity to play "sea lawyer" again -- a chance I rarely pass up! But I'll save it for the "slither on.")

Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer; I never graduated law school; I never attended law school; I never applied to law school; I know absolutely nothing about the law, probably less than the butcher at the Armenian meat market down the street opposite Ralphs Fresh Fare. But I enjoy playing lawyer on this blog. Try and stop me!

The AP article also contains this:

The proposal also would seek to make Bush renew the authorization for war that Congress gave him in 2002. Many members contend that authorization - which led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 - was limited to approval of deposing dictator Saddam Hussein and searching for weapons of mass destruction.

Curiously, however, the actual operational language in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq Resolution of 2002 mentions neither Saddam Hussein nor weapons of mass destruction. It says:

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) Authorization.--The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to --

(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and

(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

A dizzying array of "whereases" lurk at the beginning, some of which do discuss WMDs; but there are also numerous whereases that talk about the danger of terrorists from al-Qaeda and other groups operating in Iraq; for example:

Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;

Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens;

Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations;

This seems, at least prima facie, to justify continued combat in Iraq even after Saddam Hussein is deposed in order to prevent al-Qaeda and "other international terrorist organizations" from remaining in Iraq. And then there is also this:

Whereas in December 1991, Congress expressed its sense that it "supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 as being consistent with the Authorization of Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1),'' that Iraq's repression of its civilian population violates United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 and "constitutes a continuing threat to the peace, security, and stability of the Persian Gulf region,'' and that Congress, "supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688'';

UNSC Resolution 688 "condemns the repression of the Iraqi civilian population" and "demands that Iraq... immediately end this repression" and "ensure that the human and political rights of all Iraqi citizens are respected"-- which seems a pretty open-ended call to create a democratic state in Iraq and not allow any group -- including the majority Shia -- to impose theocratic, dictatorial rule.

While I don't want to get too far out on a limb or express an opinion before the many lawyers (and sea lawyers!) in Congress have spoken, it sure seems as if the 2002 AUMF authorizes rather more than simply removing Saddam Hussein and bringing in international inspectors to look for WMD.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 13, 2007, at the time of 3:03 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 12, 2007

Iraq Preliminary Benchmark Assessment: Pretty Good, Could Be Better

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

Elite media reporting: not so good, vast room for improvement.

The White House has released its first, preliminary assessment of Iraq's progress during the counterinsurgency, Operation Phantom Thunder; and considering how short a time the operations have been fully manned and actually under way (only since June 15th), Iraq has already made quite remarkable progress. (The report can also be downloaded in HTML, rather than pdf.)

Nevertheless, there are areas -- mostly political -- that are lagging. This is exactly what we would expect: The purpose of the new strategy is to give Baghdad "breathing room" to enact the necessary legislation: oil and natural gas revenue sharing; initiating local elections; un-de-Baathification (letting former Baathists who do not have blood on their hands back into government and society); removing police units from sectarian, even militia control; and stopping political interference with military operations. Obviously, political gains will all come towards the end, after security has been reestablished. That's the whole point of the security operation.

By Big Lizards' independent count, seven of the 18 benchmarks are making satisfactory progress, five are not, and the last six are indeterminate for one of several reasons. Let's start with the good news...

Satisfactory

Overall, of the 18 benchmarks established by Congress, Iraq has made clear, unambiguous, satisfactory progress on seven (39%):

  • (i) Forming a Constitutional Review Committee and then completing the constitutional review;
  • (iv) Enacting and implementing legislation on procedures to form semi-autonomous regions;
  • (viii) Establishing supporting political, media, economic, and services committees in support of the Baghdad Security Plan;
  • (ix) Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations;
  • (xii) Ensuring that, as Prime Minister Maliki was quoted by President Bush as saying, “the Baghdad Security Plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation;”
  • (xiv) Establishing all of the planned joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad;
  • (xvi) Ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected.

Unsatisfactory

They have made clearly unsatisfactory progress on five benchmarks (28%):

  • (ii) Enacting and implementing legislation on de-Ba’athification reform;
  • (iii) Enacting and implementing legislation to ensure the equitable distribution of hydrocarbon resources to the people of Iraq without regard to the sect or ethnicity of recipients, and enacting and implementing legislation to ensure that the energy resources of Iraq benefit Sunni Arabs, Shi’a Arabs, Kurds, and other Iraqi citizens in an equitable manner;
  • (x) Providing Iraqi commanders with all authorities to execute this plan and to make tactical and operational decisions in consultation with U.S. Commanders without political intervention to include the authority to pursue all extremists including Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias;
  • (xv) Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces units capable of operating independently;
  • (xviii) Ensuring that Iraq’s political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of the ISF.

Mixed or inappropriate measures

The remaining six benchmarks (33%) either show mixed results, or else facts on the ground indicate that they are not appropriate metrics at this time:

  • (v) Enacting and implementing legislation establishing an Independent High Electoral Commission, provincial elections law, provincial council authorities, and a date for provincial elections.

This is a multi-part benchmark; the first part -- establishing the electoral commission -- is proceeding satisfactorally, but establishing the law for local elections has not yet happened. Thus, parts 3 and 4 cannot yet be implemented, as they await the law.

  • (vi) Enacting and implementing legislation addressing amnesty [of those who fought against the Coalition or against the new Iraqi government].

The White House and Pentagon believe that the conditions on the ground are not yet ripe for a general amnesty; it's more important to continue to turn more and more Sunnis against al-Qaeda and Shia against the miltias. Once the fighting is over, then it may be time to talk about a general amnesty; but not while the war still rages.

  • (vii) Enacting and implementing legislation establishing a strong militia disarmament program to ensure that such security forces are accountable only to the central government and loyal to the constitution of Iraq.

Again, the Pentagon, the State Department, and even the U.N. do not believe this is the right time to enage in DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration):

Assessment: The prerequisites for a successful militia disarmament program are not present. In fact, international experts, including the U.N., have expressed reservations to advancing this proposal at the present time. The U.N. DDR Advisory Mission to Baghdad Report (April 25 - May 2, 2007) stated, “The Iraq environment makes it most unlikely that traditional DDR can take place, and planning should take this into account.” Likewise, a State Department internal review has shown that the timing is not right for a full-scale DDR program in Iraq. Given the absence of the necessary conditions for DDR, the absence of legislation on militia disarmament has had no effect. The current plan and strategy calls for the passage of such legislation when the necessary conditions are present.

It is silly to count as "unsatisfactory" a benchmark that was premature to begin with; such an assessment does not adequately convey what is actually happening.

  • (xi) Ensuring that Iraqi Security Forces are providing even-handed enforcement of the law.

In this case, much progress has been made; but because we have set such a high standard, they had to say "unsatisfactory."

However, simply saying progress has not been satisfactory gives entirely the wrong impression. As the report says:

Assessment: The Government of Iraq has not at this time made satisfactory progress in ensuring that Iraqi Security Forces are providing even-handed enforcement of the law; however, there has been significant progress in achieving increased even-handedness through the use of coalition partnering and embedded-transition teams with Iraqi Security Force units. The presence of Coalition Forces in JSSs and Combat Outposts (COPs) has had a positive effect on ensuring a more even-handed approach, and Iraqi officials continue to communicate the importance that all terrorist organizations be targeted, regardless of their affiliation or ethnic background. ISF performance has generally been adequate, particularly when partnered with Coalition Forces.

This is another mixed benchmark: They're making progress, but the standard for measuring the benchmark was set much too optimistically. Simply saying they're not making satisfactory progress masks the extraordinary progress they have made, especially considering the starting point last year.

  • (xiii) Reducing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq and eliminating militia control of local security.

Another two parter: The level of sectarian violence in Iraq is down substantially; but there are still too many local security units infiltrated by Shiite or Sunni militias.

  • (xvii) Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis.

This benchmark has subtlely mixed results: Iraq has made satisfactory progress in allocating the $10 billion; but infrastructure is not yet present for them to spend it.

Elite media disinformation campaign

The final score is thus 39% positive, 28% negative, and 33% mixed or inappropriate measures. This is actually a remarkably good score, considering conditions in 2006.

But that's not what the drive-by media wanted to see. It's not even what their double-secret sources told them: They predicted that the assessment would be "gloomy," would show a lack of progress, and would be more fodder for the Democrats' psalm of surrender.

Thus, they reacted as one would expect from people whose overriding interest is saving the world -- meaning "saving the world from George Bush and the Republicans" -- not reporting facts: They simply ignored the differences between their expectation and the reality... and reported the expectation.

Thus, virtually every news source, from AP to the New York Times to the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times, and even the Fox News report, falsely claims that there were eight satisfactory benchmarks, eight unsatisfactory ones, and only two mixed -- instead of the seven sats, five unsats, and six mixed one gets from a realistic assessment of the assessment.

I suspect many media sources simply played follow-the-leader without doing their own independent count (as we do above); but the ringleaders knew exactly what they were doing... they were lying.

What is the point of this falsehood? Simple: If the score is 39% to 28%, then clearly the report is overall positive. But if instead it's 44% to 44%, then it's at best disappointing, and perhaps overall negative, if the media decide (as most do) that a tie goes to the cut-and-runner.

As usual, the LA Times is the most aggressive, heading their story "Iraq's failure on benchmarks is fodder for Democrats." The others have more neutral headlines, through they emphasize the negative in the story itself. For example, here is the lede from the WaPo piece:

Iraqi progress on political and military goals sought by Congress has been mixed during the past several months, with slow advances toward some of the targets and paralysis or even reverses in other areas, the White House said today in a much-anticipated assessment.

What, nothing is actually going well? Did we read the same report? (Answer: No; Big Lizards read the report... the Post reread their stories from yesterday, before the report was released.)

AP summarizes (or caricatures) the report thus:

The report said that despite progress on some fronts by the government of Nouri al-Maliki, "the security situation in Iraq remains complex and extremely challenging," the "economic picture is uneven" and political reconciliation is lagging.

Considering this is a preliminary report compiled less than a month after Operation Phantom Thunder began, it's hardly surprising that security would still be "complex and extremely challenging." (All three vague charges could also apply to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and even Israel!)

Even the New York Times, which makes a faint effort to be even-handed, betrays its bias. They allow a number of hard-core Democratic leftists to negatively characterize the preliminary assessment -- Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%), Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL, 90%), Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%), and Sen. John Kerry (D-Harvard, 95%) -- but did not ask the opinion of even a single Republican on Capitol Hill.

They also trot out a shopworn Democratic talking point:

Asked why he was resistant to the idea of a change of course in Iraq, which has found wide support among Americans in recent polls, Mr. Bush said he was not surprised that there was deep concern. “I believe we can succeed,” he said, “and I believe we are making security progress that will enable the political track to succeed as well.”

Mr. Bush has said repeatedly that he is willing to be flexible on Iraq strategy and tactics, but that he will be guided by his military commanders, not by opinion surveys.

But what they fail to quote is the long section after the first part of Bush's answer in which he argues that he did change course, disputing the fundamental premise of the Democratic position (and their elite-media water carriers):

I went to the country and said, I have made this decision. I said, What was happening on the ground is unsatisfactory in Iraq.

In consultation with a lot of folks, I came to the conclusion that we needed to send more troops into Iraq, not less, in order to provide stability, in order to be able to enhance the security of the people there.

And David asked for a certain number of troops. David Petraeus asked for a certain number. General Petraeus asked for a certain number of troops. And he just got them a couple of weeks ago....

Since the reinforcements arrived, things have changed.

For example, I would remind you that Anbar province was considered lost. Maybe some of you reported that last fall.

And yet today, because of what we call bottom-up reconciliation, Anbar province has changed dramatically.

The same thing is now beginning to happen in Diyala province.

There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where violence is down. There are still car bombs, most of which have the Al Qaida signature on them.

But they're declining, you know. So there's some measurable progress.

So the Times is still up to its old tricks; but even they were forced to admit much progress, according to the report that yesterday they predicted would report virtually no progress at all.

Their wannabe namesake, the LA Times, has the most absurd take: They imagine that the very idea of measuring benchmarks was a "costly blunder", leading to fury among unnamed administration or military "officials":

The Bush administration's decision to set benchmarks for measuring the progress of the Iraq mission is now seen by some U.S. officials as a costly blunder that has only aided the White House's critics in Congress and its foes in Iraq.

When they began publicizing the benchmarks a year ago, administration officials saw them as realistic goals that would prod the Iraqi government toward reconciliation, while helping sustain political support for the effort at home. The yardsticks include steps vital to Iraq's stability: passage of a law to divide oil revenue among the key communities, reforms to allow more members of Saddam Hussein's party back into the government, and elections to divide power in the provinces.

Yet now, with the major goals still out of reach, the administration is playing down their importance. Administration officials instead are emphasizing other goals -- some of which are less ambitious but have been attained....

In private, many officials were more scathing in their critique, saying that defining the goals in such a way galvanized resistance in Iraq and gave war critics a way to argue that the U.S. mission was falling short.

"You better believe it was a mistake," said a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity when criticizing administration policy. "In any armed conflict, trying to predict the future is folly. You are setting up some degree of failure."

So all in all, if I had to give Iraq a letter grade on the benchmarks established by the administration, I would have to allocate a B-. It would be a C+, except that three of the six "mixed or inappropriate" benchmarks shouldn't be counted at all. Thus, the proper percent is 7 satisfactory assessments out of 15 valid benchmarks, or 47% positive, compared to 5 out of 15 (33%) negative, which is signficantly more positive than negative.

But grading the elite media's coverage, I have to give them a D+... they didn't so much report on what was actually in the interim report, as repeat and justify what they expected and predicted would be there; they warped their coverage to justify what they wrote earlier, rather than just reporting straight.

So a B- for Iraq and a D+ for the media; looks like both have shown improvement!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 12, 2007, at the time of 5:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 11, 2007

"Victory Is Silence"

Afghan Astonishments , Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Driving home from my épée lesson today, I was listening to the second hour of Hugh Hewitt's show. He was only taking callers who were current active-duty military who had either been in Afghanistan or Iraq; but he made one exception. That exception was such an exceptional call, I simply must share (before Dean Barnett does, I hope!)

The caller's name was Bruce, and he was a civilian. His son is active duty in Iraq right this minute, and Hugh let him on to speak on behalf of the son. What follows is not verbatim quotation; I don't have a transcript, of course, because it was just broadcast less than an hour ago. But the substance is pretty accurate, as any subsequent transcript will prove.

"Your son is currently in Iraq, right?" asks Hugh; "how's he doing?"

"He's going out of his mind with boredom... because he's stationed in Ramadi, and he hasn't heard a shot fired in combat for the last six weeks."

Bruce went on to explain that Ramadi is so peaceful, the residents and Coalition members are rebuilding all the damage caused by years of al-Qaeda infestation. Then he returned to the lack of gunfire in what used to be al-Qaeda central... and Bruce said the following:

"This is what I want to tell all those people in Washington. This is what Victory is; Victory is silence."

He said he had just heard CNN journalist Michael Ware on some news show say that Ramadi was the home base of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Bruce wished Ware would just go there and see for himself what it was really like. But that's unlikely, even though Ware is based in Baghdad. And it wouldn't have much effect on the debate in D.C. anyway: There are none so deaf as those who will not hear.

The Democrats (and some renegade Republicans) hear nothing; nothing penetrates, nothing rattles round their skulls like dried-out knucklebones. But in Ramadi, there is Nothing to hear; and that is exactly what we're looking for: Not a signing ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri, but just simple peace, quiet, and Nothing.

Victory is silence.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 11, 2007, at the time of 5:38 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

July 9, 2007

Funny Looking Cousin of 'Lay Low, Sweet Sadrite'

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Bill Roggio reports: Muqtada Sadr has left the building. In fact, he has emigrated from Iraq (again) for Iran (again).

Muqtada al Sadr, the leader of the Shia Mahdi Army and the Sadrist bloc in parliament, has left Iraq and is in Iran, military sources told Reuters. An anonymous U.S. military intelligence official and a military officer stationed in Iraq told The Fourth Rail the Reuter's report is accurate, but would not say when they believe Sadr left Iraq. Sadr's flight from Iraq and return to Iran comes as Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki issued an unusually strong statement calling for Sadr's Mahdi Army to disarm, and Iraqi security forces continue to battle his Mahdi Army in southern Iraq.

When I heard about him returning to Iraq last May, I knew he would never wield the same influence he used to over the Mahdi Militia: These thugs have no discipline; without the pack leader's constant presence, he cannot keep the dogs in line.

Rumor had it that, despite the plummeting attendance at Sadr's last two "demonstrations," he was organizing yet another. According to Roggio, it didn't quite materialize:

Sadr held two rallies, both of which had poor showings, and had to cancel a July 5 march to Samarra to protest the attack on the Shia holy site of the al Askaria mosque. Sadr's spokesman claimed the Iraqi government wouldn't provide security, but based on the past poor showing of his demonstrations, there are questions that Sadr may have harmed his image with another poor showing.

Remember what happened last protest? I summarized the noisome nabob's predicament thus:

We have a terrorist group that used to have six members in the Iraqi cabinet itself... but now they're gone.

The terrorist leader issues a call for a colossal rally... but only 15,000 show up; and that number includes many who wouldn't have come, had they known the leader himself would not be present at his own rally.

And the reason the terrorist leader didn't dare attend the rally is that he's currently hiding inside Iraq's greatest enemy, Iran, because he's so afraid he'll be seized if he returns to his "home" country.

Sadr realized his boneheaded mistake, so came back to reclaim his power; but per Roggio, it was too little, too late, too bad:

Since his return, Sadr has attempted to position himself as a moderate, nationalist leader, but with little success. He has flirted with the Anbar Awakening movement, and negotiated with Sunni political parties. His Sadrist bloc withdrew from Prime Minister Maliki's government, and abandoned its six cabinet level positions. The Sadrist bloc's 30 members have also boycotted parliament.

Let's run through the episodes so far in the Sadr serial:

  • At Muqtada's order, the Sadrites pull out of the government; the government didn't fall;
  • Sadr tries to make himself middleman between the Anbar Salvation Council and the Maliki government; everyone just stares at him, as at a ring-tailed piglet trotting on stage at the ballet, squealing for attention;
  • Participation at his rallies, demonstrations, protests, disturbances, annoyances, irritations, rashes, and general smirks shrinks from 400,000 to 55,000 to 15,000, to, well, zero;
  • He flees to Iran, then returns, only to find his lieutenants squabbling over his earthly remains as if he were already dead. So he toddles back off to Iran. Smooth move, ExLax.

What does all this remind me of? Oh yes, an old English nursery rhyme:

The King of France went up the hill
With twenty thousand men;
The King of France came down the hill,
And ne’er went up again.

Like the grand Dixie Chicks concert and revival-tent tour, the venue was just a wee sma' bit too big; and Muqtada Sadr -- the Prince of mince -- had to cancel his appearance. Well, Mr. S., I could have told you so. In fact, I did!

Groups like the Mahdi Militia or the Badr Brigades Organization have no natural hegemony; they rule by violence and intimidation. Like the Mafia, once gone, they're forgotten...

[W]hile the death squads are hiding out and laying low, the Iraqi Army and National Police -- and the local police, who are probably even more accepted in these neighborhoods -- will move in and establish themselves as the hegemonic authority. The longer they stay unopposed by the extremists, the more Iraqis come to perceive the elected government as having "fitness to rule," which is the actual definition of hegemony.

I believe this serial has come to its end. There was no climax; it just faded away. In a few months, everyone will be asking "Muqtada Who?" This time, perhaps Sadr will finally read the handwriting on the Babylonian wall and just stay in Iran. At least until they get tired of his odious presence and kick him out as well.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, July 9, 2007, at the time of 11:41 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 8, 2007

High Noonan

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Opinions: Nasty, Brutish, and Shortsighted , That Was Then, This Is Now , Unuseful Idiots , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

In a comment on a previous post, commenter Terrye said the following:

I know I am an Independent and I voted a straight Republican ticket in 06 while real true blue Republican conservatives like Noonan were telling people to stay home and let the Democrats win.

This started me thinking. This post began as a comment; but like Topsy, it "just grew," and I decided to promote it to the rank of blogpost. So here goes...

First, a whiff of heresy to start the day: Peggy Noonan is not a "true blue Republican conservative;" she is instead a "Reagan conservative," and thereby hangs a tale...

I cannot tell what her political position was BR (before Reagan), but I wouldn't be surprised if she grew up much more liberal than she became later. Regardless, she glommed onto Reagan during his 1980 campaign (or perhaps a little earlier) and hasn't let go since.

Now, many Republicans will argue that conservatism is entirely defined by WWRD ("what would Reagan do?") The problem is that Ronald Reagan -- who was himself eclectic -- chose to define his presidency on only two big (urgent) ideas:

  • Economic policy reform: lower taxes and lower interest rates, though he never carried through to privatizing "entitlement" programs such as Social Security and MediCare, and he never quite understood the importance of small business -- especially independent (non government-subsidized) technological innovation;
  • Confronting Communism around the globe.

Strangely, his eagerness to engage in "foreign adventures" to hit Communism never seemed to spill over into a general theory of active military and diplomatic engagement on behalf of other urgent foreign-policy goals. For example, after Libya committed the Berlin disco bombing, Reagan decided a response was necessary; but his response was limited to a single bombing raid. He made no attempt to get at the root cause -- in Libya, Arabic nationalism rather than extreme Islam -- and resolve it.

Qaddafi pulled in his horns, but not for long; and his subsequent attacks on America (such as the Lockerbie bombing) were more subtle than the Berlin attack had been. He also waited until Reagan was nearly out of office: Because Reagan had set in place no anti-pan-Arabist policy that would survive his own presidency -- he thought Libya a nuisance, not a new anti-American front -- Qaddafi simply outwaited him.

Reagan treated pan-Arabism, and the pan-Islamism of Iran, as annoying distractions to the "real" problem of stopping Communism, rather than as separate, distinct, and very serious threats to America in their own ways. Destroying the Soviet Union was vital, and Reagan was both prophet and general (like Mohammed!) on that front. But he was AWOL on the Arab/Moslem threat.

Today, there is a strong strain of conservatism that loyally plays follow the leader down that same blind trail; they typically oppose the Iraq war as the very sort of "foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues" that George Washington warned against in his farewell address.

That was good policy... in the 18th century. But that was then, this is now: 2007 is not 1796, and the world is far too interconnected and integrated today to retreat behind the walls of "Fortress America" and let the rest of the world rot. (See the Pentagon's New Map, by Thomas P.M. Barnett, for further information.)

Such Reagan conservatives were willing to go along with the first stage of the Iraq war, invasion followed by the swift collapse of Hussein and the Baathists; but when the war evolved to the counterinsurgency, reconstruction, and diplomacy of today, they lost interest.

For some reason I cannot ken, many "Reagan conservatives" are allergic to an activist foreign policy -- except insofar as it applies to Russia, Red China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and now Venezuela (anyone detect a pattern here?) In particular, they deride any response anywhere that goes beyond "killing people and breaking things," as if America were a blundering ogre whose only weapon is a massive tree trunk in one hand.

Thus, many -- most definitely including Noonan -- hated the post-war attrition strategy, and now they hate the counterinsurgency strategy... or even the fact that we have a post-war strategy at all. Their preferred plan would have been to smash Iraq flat, bounce the rubble, and then toddle off with a quiet glow of satisfaction at a job well done. Putting the rubble back together again makes the job seem overdone, in their minds, like trying to put the firecracker back together after exploding it.

They deride swamp-draining as "nation-building," which appears to be a term of opprobrium: Either they believe building something is inherently inferior to tearing it down, or they believe our enemies do not deserve (e.g.) the Marshall Plan or the rebuilding of Japan, or else they judge America to be utterly incompetent at doing so... which is a harsh and ahistorical judgment to make, considering our mixed but not at all catastrophic record of achievement at reconstructing the conquered in our own image.

Curiously, this reticence does not carry over to the remnants of the former Soviet Union; we are expected to make them capitalist democratic republics. I believe this to be an example of taking a prophet's action (or inaction), which may have been driven entirely by personal, secular, human considerations, and imbuing it with almost religious significance: We visit the house where George Washington once slept the night; we avoid broccoli because the prophet always hated it.

Reagan never took seriously any foreign policy threat beyond world Communism... so who are we mortals to run where the great man feared to tread? Remember, Khomeini took over Iraq the year before Reagan was elected; yet in Reagan's entire eight years in office, he never did a thing about the rise of the regional superpower and its terrorist arm Hezbollah -- not even when they attacked us and killed 241 Marines and 58 French paratroopers in Beirut in 1983.

For many Reagan conservatives, Reagan himself becomes not merely the greatest president of the twentieth century, which most of us would agree he was, but a Mohammed-like figure who both defines and limits modern American conservatism: Just as many extreme Moslems will not do anything unless the prophet did it first, it seems that a typical Reagan conservative like Peggy Noonan is suspicious of any action that goes beyond what Reagan did -- and what she imagines he would do today, were he only still alive.

Thus, at core, Peggy Noonan is angry at George W. Bush for not allowing the Salafist and Shiite fever swamp to fester, as "the prophet" did: To move beyond the divine master is to become apostate.

Because Bush has actively tried to dismantle the irhabi hirabah infrastructure by a combination of war, diplomacy, and reconstruction or "nation building," which the entire region desperately needs, Noonan feels he has abandoned Reaganism and become just like George H.W. Bush, the first man to jilt her at the ideological altar. (Unlike Jeanne Kirkpatrick -- whom Noonan wishes she were -- Noonan is more of a "feeler" than a "thinker.")

Bush-41 personally betrayed her: She wrote his "read my lips, no new taxes" speech. I think Noonan, like many Reagan conservatives, was always chary of Bush jr., breathlessly waiting for him to "betray the legacy," just as his father did. Thus, at the first sign of deviancy -- whether it's nation-building, immigration reform, or a more robust integration with the outside world, working with other countries rather than dictating to them (as Reagan conservatives falsely remember Reagan doing) -- Noonan, et al, instantly cried "havoc" and let slip the dogs of Reagan orthodoxy.

I have never had much respect for Noonan as a thinker; now I despise her as a spineless defeatist. I fully expect her eventually to find a home in Pat Buchanan/Bill O'Reilly socially conservative populism (as Buckley appears to be doing), thus completing the dawn-to-dusk cycle from naif to Reagan acolyte (Noonan's high) to aging Mother Superior of the First Church of Fundamentalist Reaganism.

She will end her days as an embittered Maureen Dowd of the Right, endlessly railing against the modern and clinging to her narrowing tunnel-vision of Reaganism as if it were poor King Charles' head.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 8, 2007, at the time of 3:25 PM | Comments (47) | TrackBack

July 6, 2007

News Flash: Another RINO Has It Both Ways!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , So What Else Is New?
Hatched by Dafydd

So yet another Republican who is much more liberal than the mainstream of the GOP conference, Pete Domenici (R-NM, 75%), has broken ranks with the president and come out against the Iraq war... though he cautions he won't vote to end it, either.

Domenici joins such Republican conservative stalwarts as Dick Lugar (IN, 64%), George Voinovich (OH, 56%), Olympia Snowe (ME, 36%), Susan Collins (ME, 48%), Arlen Specter (PA, 43%), Chuck Hagel (NE, 75%), Norm Coleman (MN, 68%), and John Warner (VA, 64%). Remember, the percentages above represent how many times the senator voted with the American Conservative Union.

To the elite media, a senator like Pete Domenici represents a "GOP stalwart":

In another setback to President Bush's increasingly unpopular war strategy, GOP stalwart Sen. Pete Domenici said he wants to see an end to combat operations and U.S. troops heading home from Iraq by spring.

The longtime New Mexico senator is the latest of several party loyalists and former war supporters to abandon Bush on Iraq in the past 10 days. They have urged a change sooner rather than later and further isolated the GOP president in his attempt to defend the unpopular war.

Here is the deep reasoning behind Domenici's content-free announcement:

"I do not support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or a reduction in funding for our troops," Domenici said. "But I do support a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to coming home...." [Something like, say, a counterinsurgency strategy?]

"I have carefully studied the Iraq situation and believe we cannot continue asking our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress to move its country forward," he said.... ["Measurable progress" would be, say, enacting an oil-revenue sharing bill? Alas that they're making no progress on that front...]

The senator said the situation in Iraq is getting worse. [Yes, the news clearly indicates the "surge" (I'll bet Domenici calls it that) has failed.] He said he now supports a bipartisan bill that embraces the findings of the independent Iraq Study Group. [Which, queerly enough, include initiating a "surge" (the ISG's term) to secure Baghdad and other vital areas (p. 50 of the pdf). Go figure!]

Hard as it is to fathom, Sen. Domenici doesn't appear to have read Big Lizards at all.

This is what passes for "carefully stud[ying] the Iraq situation" in RINOland: a misinterpretation of a misreading mistakenly missing the mission, followed by an indecisive and ineffective independence from individual initiative in the year 2007 Anno Domenici.

"I don't have a clue what's going on, but I know what I must do about it: nothing! And I'll do it good and hard, too."

Wake me when Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY, 84%) or one of the "Big Four" Republican presidential candidates calls for retreat and withdrawal to nearby Okinawa. Or heck, even when Pete Domenici does.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 6, 2007, at the time of 3:02 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

July 2, 2007

Media Breakthrough: Finally Admits We're In Proxy War With Iran

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

I believe we're starting to see the first cracks in the media dike.

This New York Times story about the announcement by Multinational Force - Iraq today, directly tying Iran to the January attack on American troops in Karbala, is remarkable... Not for the accusation itself, which every reader of this blog or any other in the dextrosphere already knows about; but for the simple, straightforward way it is reported -- without evasion, defeat-mongering, or snideness:

In effect, American officials are charging that Iran has been engaged in a proxy war against American forces for years, though officials today sought to confine their comments to the specific incidents covered in their briefing.

When the Karbala attack was carried out on January 20 this year, American and Iraqi officials said that it appeared to be meticulously planned. The attackers carried forged identity cards and wore American-style uniforms.

One American died at the start of the raid, but the rest of the American soldiers were abducted before they were killed.

Some officials speculated at the time that the aim of the raid might have been to capture a group of American soldiers who could have been exchanged for Iranian officials that American forces detained in Iraq on suspicion of supporting Shiite militants there.

But while Americans officials wondered about an indirect Iranian role in the Karbala raid, until today they stopped short of making a case that the Quds Force may have been directly involved in planning the attack.

Even the headline is non-evasive: "U.S. Ties Iran to Deadly Iraq Attack."

The story is not written with the certainty that the elite media reserves for discussions of the guilt of Republicans charged but not yet convicted of crimes; but it's still a couple of parsecs away from the usual reportage, where this story would be titled "Iranians Refute 'Wild Accusations' of Complicity in Attack." A month ago, this story would have begun and ended with a large number of quotations from unnamed "Middle-East experts," who would mock the American claims as the pathetic flopping of a landed fish; and would abruptly shift on paragraph four to a lengthy recitation of every American soldier or Iraqi civilian who had died, been wounded, been frightened, or had a sprained nose in the previous 24 hours... what I call the Generic Litany of Defeat.

Rather, the Times reports neutrally, giving the evidence a fair shake; they devote a couple of paragraphs to the pro-forma Iranian denial, but again report it with verbal neutrality... and the paper even interrupts the Iranian pish-toshing to lob another accusation:

Previously, Iranian officials have said that the United States is fabricating evidence to back up its accusation that Iran is sending bombs and weapons into Iraq. Some critics have cast doubt on the American military statements about the penetrator bombs, saying the evidence linking them to Iran was circumstantial and inferential.

In remarks that were reported over the weekend, Iran’s defense minister, Mohammad Najar, denied American claims of Iran’s “military interference” in Iraq. “We have many times announced that we are ready to cooperate with the Iraqi government so to restore security and stability to that country,” Mr. Najar was quoted as saying in a July 1 report by the Iranian student news agency, ISNA. It did not make clear which remarks he was responding to. Today’s assertions by the American military spokesman, which were presented at a news briefing here, marked the first time that the United States has charged that Iranian officials have helped plan operations against American troops in Iraq and have had advance knowledge of specific attacks that have led to the death of American soldiers.

I believe we're near a tipping point, though I'm not sure which side of we're on yet. Here is the other coverage of this American charge against Iran that I've found...

Assocated Press:

U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner said the Quds Force, part of Iran's elite Republican Guards, was seeking to build an Iraqi version of Hezbollah to fight U.S. and Iraqi forces - and had brought in Hezbollah operatives to help train and organize militants.

U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner said the Quds Force, part of Iran's elite Republican Guards, was seeking to build an Iraqi version of Hezbollah to fight U.S. and Iraqi forces - and had brought in Hezbollah operatives to help train and organize militants.

"Our intelligence reveals that the senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity," Bergner told a Baghdad news conference. He said it would be "hard to imagine" that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not know about the activity.

The AP story still includes the Litany; but this time, readers must read all the way to the end to find it. And when they do, they also discover this buried nugget:

An American soldier was killed Monday by an explosion in Salahuddin province, a center for Sunni insurgents northwest of Baghdad. The U.S. military also reported the deaths of five U.S. service members killed in fighting a day earlier, in attacks in Baghdad and western Anbar province.

But violence appeared sharply down in Baghdad and other parts of the country, amid an intensified U.S. security sweep aimed at uprooting Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias in the capital and areas to the northeast and south.

Reuters:

Bergner said the Qods Force was involved in a brazen attack in the city of Kerbala in January when gunmen disguised as Americans made their way into a government compound and killed one U.S. soldier and seized four others whom they later killed.

Washington has long accused the Qods Force of arming and training Shi'ite militants who attack U.S. and Iraqi soldiers but previously it said it was not clear whether these actions were carried out with the full knowledge of Iran's leadership....

"Our intelligence reveals that senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity," Bergner told a news conference. "We also understand that senior Iraqi leaders have expressed their concerns to the Iranian government about the activities."

Reuters includes the Litany, but it's short and shoved to the very bottom of the story.

Washington Post:

The briefing by U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner laid out what he described as an extensive program coordinated by Iran's elite Quds Force, the militant wing of the Revolutionary Guard, to provide armor-piercing weapons, funnel up to $3 million a month to extremist groups and train Shiite militiamen in three camps near Tehran.

While U.S. officials have repeatedly alleged that sophisticated Iranian-made weapons are killing Americans in Iraq, and that the Quds force is complicit in the violence, today's briefing offered the most specific accusations to date of direct Iranian involvement in specific attacks against U.S. forces.

The general also drew a new link with Hezbollah, saying an operative arrested in March had spent the previous 10 months worked [sic] with the Quds force to train Iraqis after years of commanding a Hezbollah special operations group.

The Post does not include either the Litany or even any specific denials from Iran.

Could the elite media finally have concluded that the state of permanent denial of global terrorist threats, coupled with nakedly partisan assaults on the president, the military, and all Republicans and cheerleading for the Democrats, are the major culprits in the catastrophic drop in readership of American newspapers? If so, it would see they have also finally concluded that their own survival as media institutions is more important that solidarity with the leaders of the Democratic Party -- the Harry "Pinky" Reids and Nancy Pelosis of Congress, the Democratic presidential candidates, and most important... the screaming meemies in the sinister side of the blogosphere.

Elements of the bigfoot media at last admit that:

  • Iran is fighting a proxy war against America in Iraq;
  • That Iran and Hezbollah are intimately connected in a mini-Axis of Middle-East Evil;
  • And that there has been a tremendous reduction in civilian deaths as we have shifted from chasing terrorists to protecting the Iraqi population per counterintelligence strategy.

Can an admission be long coming that the Iraq war is also an intense battle in the war against al-Qaeda?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 2, 2007, at the time of 3:05 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

COINs and Moles and Stuff; a Round-Up

Good News! , Grand Strategy , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Let's start with the good news (sorry, no bad news this time; so this can't be mainstream News!) Baghdad pacification proceeds apace, and we now firmly control half of the city that all agree is the linchpin of Iraq (or, with the recent executions, perhaps the lynchpin):

In the face of stiffening insurgent resistance, U.S. and Iraqi security forces now control about half of Baghdad, the American commander overseeing operations said Friday.

Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil, Jr., commander of Multi-National Division Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon that progress in securing the capital has been steady and that while he could use more U.S. troops he believes he has enough -- with the recent arrival of reinforcements -- to complete his mission....

Fil said American and Iraqi security forces now control 48% to 49% of the 474 neighborhoods in Baghdad. That is up from 19% in April, he said. Two weeks ago his boss, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, said about 40% of the city was under control.

Fil defined "control" as "where we have our security forces there and we're denying that space to enemy forces." [In Col. David Galula's lexicon, these would be "white" areas.]

U.S. and Iraqi forces are conducting clearing operations in 36% of the capital's neighborhoods ["pink" areas] -- about the same percentage as in April, he said. In neighborhoods that are neither under control nor in the process of being cleared ["red" areas -- now down to 15% of Baghdad], coalition forces are "disrupting" insurgent forces, Fil said.

And it's not just Sunni areas we're holding, clearing, or disrupting: We have commenced moving heavily into Sadr City, much to the public chagrin (and temper tantrum) of Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned a U.S. raid Saturday in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City slum - a politically sensitive district for him - in which American troops searching for Iranian-linked militants sparked a firefight that left 26 Iraqis dead.

The U.S. military said all those killed in the fighting were gunmen, some of them firing from behind civilian cars. But residents said eight civilians were killed in their homes and angrily accused American troops of firing wildly during the pre-dawn assault.

It's odd that we're always "firing wildly;" and yet in these gunfights, there typically are major enemy casualties -- and hardly any Americans shot.

Al-Maliki last year banned military operations in Sadr City without his approval after complaints from his Shiite political allies. The ban frustrated U.S. commanders pushing for a crackdown on the Mahdi Army, blamed for sectarian killings.

Al-Maliki later agreed that no area of the capital was off-limits, after President Bush ordered reinforcements to Iraq as part of the Baghdad security operation.

And now he's whining again. Fiddle-de-dee! I suspect it's more for internal theater than any real objection to our raids: Muqtada Sadr, still nominal head of the Mahdi Militia, represents a rival Shiite power source; it's hard to imagine Maliki's loyalty to his old friend would slop over into carrying water for the renegade, virtually illiterate "cleric"... who himself is carrying water (or perhaps Uranium) for the Iranian mullahs.

Maliki's faux anger reminds me of Groucho Marx ("Otis P. Driftwood") in a Night at the Opera. He's having lunch with a floozy he picked up, when he sees rich patron of the opera Margaret Dumont (Mrs. Claypool) -- with whom he was supposed to lunch -- waiting in annoyance at the next table. The waiter brings the check for the meal that Driftwood and his girl du jour just ate, and he picks it up...

Otis P. Driftwood: Let me see that... 9 dollars and 40 cents? This is an outrage! If I were you I wouldn't pay it.

Then Groucho promptly switches tables and begins sweet-talking Mrs. Claypool. I strongly suspect that after declaring our raid to be an outrage, Maliki too will quietly switch tables and suggest a few more Sadr-City oases to hit. (Another movie quote, this time from Casablanca, that is apropos: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!")

The U.S. military said it conducted two pre-dawn raids in Sadr City, killing 26 "terrorists" who attacked U.S. troops with small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs. But Iraqi officials said all the dead were civilians.

Of course... technically, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri are also "civilians;" they're certainly not in anybody's official army, navy, or air force. So let's say both sides are right: We killed 26 civilian terrorist combatants -- sorry, make that "terrorists," scare-quotes and all.

But what's all this in service of? Where are we really going with this counterinsurgency? Who better to instruct us but retired Australian Lt.Col. David Kilcullen. Who is David Kilcullen, some might ask? Well, Wikipedia is usually fairly reliable for simple biographical details of newsmakers:

David Kilcullen, Ph.D. (born 1967) is a leading contemporary practitioner and theorist of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. A former Australian Army officer, he left the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2005 and is now a senior civil servant, seconded to the United States State Department. He is currently serving as Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser, Multi-National Force - Iraq, a civilian position on the personal staff of American General David Howell Petraeus.

Currently based at the US State Department, Dr Kilcullen, 39, has a doctorate in political anthropology, focusing on the effects of guerrilla warfare on non-state political systems in traditional societies. (His thesis was on the political power-diffusion effects of successful and failed counter-insurgency operations in Indonesia.) He has served in several counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare campaigns in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, as well as in peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations. While based at the U.S. State Department he has served as Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and has worked in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and South-East Asia. He has also written several very influential papers on the insurgency in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

(He also advises Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which I find surprisingly unsurprising.)

He wrote one of the most fascinating explications of the general purpose behind a counterinsurgency strategy ("COIN") and how it differs from ordinary warfare. Here is the most important point from Kilcullen's important summation of the important purpose and method of the urgently important counterinsurgency in Iraq:

When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation. If we don't get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that's OK. The point of the operations is to lift the pall of fear from population groups that have been intimidated and exploited by terrorists to date, then win them over and work with them in partnership to clean out the cells that remain -- as has happened in Al Anbar Province and can happen elsewhere in Iraq as well.

The "terrain" we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain. It is about marginalizing al Qa’ida, Shi’a extremist militias, and the other terrorist groups from the population they prey on. This is why claims that “80% of AQ leadership have fled” don’t overly disturb us: the aim is not to kill every last AQ leader, but rather to drive them off the population and keep them off, so that we can work with the community to prevent their return.

Kilcullen notes that this isn't due to kind-heartedness; rather, the purpose of the strategy is fourfold:

  1. To separate the terrorist enemy from his most potent weapons: the Iraqi people;
  2. "The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed." That is, we know where to find the population, but we cannot distinguish the insurgents from the citizens who just want to live, work, and trade. We cannot kill all the enemy; that's impossible. But we can protect the population and drive out the insurgency. So we do what we can and not what we can't.
  3. By cutting the insurgents off from their captive populations, we "asphyxiate" them:

    [The enemy] has either to come out of the woodwork, fight us and be destroyed, or stay quiet and accept permanent marginalization from his former population base.
  4. Finally, we know who the population is but not who the insurgents are:

    [W]e know who the population is that we need to protect, we know where they live, and we can protect them without unbearable disruption to their lives. And more to the point, we can help them protect themselves, with our forces and ISF in overwatch.

(I know, I know, some of the differences between these points are subtle; don't worry, I don't get them either.)

So if our goal is to protect the population, rather than kill some target number of terrorist insurgents, is it working? Are we protecting the population better than we have been in the past?

We certainly don't know for sure yet; the actual COIN operations have barely begun (they started in earnest about two weeks ago). But even so, already civilian casualties are dropping like a stone; here's Power Line's John Hinderaker, my favorite blogger from my favorite blog:

Iraqi government figures suggest that civilian casualties nationwide were down something like 36% in June, for the lowest total this year. I don't know how reliable these numbers are, but the trend clearly seems to be positive. American military commanders said it is too soon to credit the "surge," since the full complement of troops has only been in place for a couple of weeks and operations are ongoing. Again, though, the cause and effect relationship appears pretty clear.

But it's not just the government; even the elite media agree. The website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count keeps track of all media reports of civilian deaths and woundings in Iraq; it's certainly not influenced by the governments of either Iraq or the United States, and it's a completely different count than the one from the Iraqi government.

Yet it shows virtually the same result:

The civilian death toll shows that in May of 2007, there were 1,782 civilian deaths in Iraq reported by the MSM. In April, it was 1,521, and in March, 2,762.

But last month, June of 2007, the elite media reported only 1,146 civilian deaths: that's a drop of 36% from last month (just as the government figures showed by a different count), a 60% drop from this year's high (February, 2,864 deaths), and the lowest rate of civilian deaths since last July.

So to put it on a nutshell...

  • We now control 50% of Baghdad;
  • We're moving hot and heavy in both Sunni and Shiite enclaves;
  • Our purpose is less to kill insurgents than to protect the population from the terrorists' wicked depredations;
  • And in point of fact, there is hard (albeit early) evidence that we're succeeding at just that.

And that is the very definition of -- good news!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 2, 2007, at the time of 5:51 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 29, 2007

Operation Arrowhead Ripper Far Ahead of Schedule

Good News! , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

According to Stars and Stripes, Operation Arrowhead Ripper -- the battle for Baqouba, capital of Diyala province, and the self-declared "capital city" of the Islamic State of Iraq (the umbrella group that subsumed al-Qaeda in Iraq) -- is going amazingly well; in fact, commanders on the ground believe they have passed the major-combat phase and now enter the phase where they must purge the population of al-Qaeda support and sympathy, and induce the rest of the citizenry to start outing them:

That sort of information could prove vital as U.S. and Iraqi forces move into the next phase of operations in Baqouba. With almost no hostile fire reported in days, combat operations are winding down. The focus of the effort now is to consolidate control and persuade local residents to begin cooperating with U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces.

The overall intent of this phase of the Baqouba operation, said Capt. Issac Torres, commander of Company C, is to “lock down the local population and keep pressure on them” until they begin turning in al-Qaida and other insurgents who remain in the city.

Col. Steve Townsend, the commander of 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, says that "about half of the estimated 300 to 500 fighters" fled Baqouba; of the remaining 200 or so, we killed 60 and captured 74 (see the sidebar to the article), for a total of 134. We assume the remaining 65 are still hiding in the city somewhere... which is exactly why the new phase of the operation needs to win, if not the hearts and minds, then at least the self-serving cooperation of citizens sick of losing fingers for smoking or being beaten for allowing vegetables potentially to fornicate. (From Michael Yon, hat tip to Power Line.)

The second phase of the operation is the critical component of counterinsurgency (COIN) that was missing at the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq back in May of 2003:

Two years ago, the Islamic State of Iraq declared the city, about 40 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, to be its capital. Fighting in the city and surrounding areas has worsened since last January when insurgents flocked into Diyala province after President Bush announced a plan to send additional U.S. forces to secure Baghdad.

Although fighting to retake Baqouba proved much easier than expected, the next 60 days will prove crucial as U.S. and Iraqi government forces try to win over the local population and restart the economy and government services. [Amazing that everywhere Wahhabi or Twelver terrorists rule, all government functions come to a grinding halt. What bad luck to have so many decades of bad luck!]

The difference this time from 2003? Both the commander of MNF-I (Gen. David Petreaus) and of CENTCOM (Adm. William Fallon) thoroughly understand that we're fighting a COIN strategy -- not a "war of attrition;" in Vietnam terms, we're emulating winner Creighton Abrams, not loser William Westmoreland.

We enter now the most delicate and difficult phase: We must convince the Baqouba Sunnis that al-Qaeda, instead of being mujahadeen and martyrs fighting holy war, are actually terrorist apostates engaging in unholy war -- "irhabiyoun murtaddi" committing "hirabah," to use the "new lexicon" for the war against global jihad (or rather, global hirabah) suggested by Jim Guirard at Small Wars Journal... and assuming I'm getting the endings correct.

(I think I'll change our category "War on Global Jihadism" to "War on Global Hirabah," just to inaugurate the anti-terrorist newspeak. That will take place a few hours from now, after I rebuild the database.)

If once a big enough minority of Iraqi citizens admit that the butchers among them (Shia and Sunni) are not fighting a holy but an unholy war, and that they're terrorists and apostates, not martyrs and faithful, the job will finish itself. So fingers crossed (how Crusader like!) that the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team is as successful in Phase II as they have been in Phase I.

If so, then even Majority Leader Harry "we've already lost" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) and Squeaker of the House Nancy "the surge has already failed" Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) will be hard-pressed to enunciate a convincing reason for immediate panic and withdrawal.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 29, 2007, at the time of 5:19 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

June 27, 2007

Avoid Labor-Day Rush; Panic Today

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

A number of Republican senators and representatives seem to be in a powerful hurry to declare the "surge" a failure -- nearly three months before the military assessment of its success. It truly makes one wonder what they fear most: defeat or victory?

The newest to join the parade of victory deniers (who predict doom and defeat but refuse to vote for timetables for withdrawal) are Sens. Richard Lugar (R-IN, 64%) and George Voinovich (R-OH, 56%). Previous timorous lawmakers include Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME, 36%), Susan Collins (R-ME, 48%), Chuck Hagel (R-NE, 75%), Gordon Smith (R-OR, 72%), Norm Coleman (R-MN, 68%), and Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee John Warner (R-VA, 64%).

Hm... odd: Something seems to stand out about that group of Republicans, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Something about those little numbers after their party and state identification -- the number that measures Republican partisanship.

Oh, wait, maybe this is it: The mean average "Republicanness" of the group of knee-knockers appears to be 60%; the mean average of the rest of the Republican conference is 87%.

Think maybe that could explain it?

Oh, and here's another amusing example of the "multiple layers of editing" that is the hallmark of the elite media. According to the New York Times:

For months, Mr. Lugar has kept his skepticism about the president’s Iraq policy largely to himself, seldom offering anything beyond a hopeful wait-and-see statement. A soft-spoken cardinal of foreign policy, Mr. Lugar is known to his colleagues as anything but a bitter partisan, which made his remarks all the more stinging. [Defeatism is "more stinging" because Lugar is a wishy-washy RINO?]

And according to AP:

Earlier this year, Voinovich and Lugar said they doubted the troop buildup in Iraq would work. But they declined to back a resolution expressing opposition to the troop increase because they said it would have no practical effect. The two senators also refused Democratic proposals to set a timetable for troop withdrawals.

I suppose the only way to reconcile the two is to assume that when Lugar expressed his doubts, he must have been talking to himself. I picture an argument between the two halves of Dick Lugar -- somewhat like the one between Smeagol and Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movie... alas, Gollum appears to have won.

Lugar and Voinovich insist they will still vote against timetables, withdrawals, and defeat; but they simply cannot resist kicking the American military at the least opportunity.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 27, 2007, at the time of 5:32 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 26, 2007

Wacking the Moles, Sealing the Holes

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Warning, this post contains no great analysis, no brilliant insights, and no genius-level discovery of hitherto unrealized connections. In other words, it's a great departure from typical Big Lizards fare.

Instead, I assume the smart-man's burden of straight reporting (more or less) of what you might not have seen, depending on how deeply you bore down into the boring world of mainstream journalism.

First, a bit from AP about Operation Marne Torch in Diyala province:

Newly arrived U.S. troops southeast of Baghdad are destroying boats on the Tigris River and targeting networks believed to be bringing powerful roadside bombs from Iran as the military cracks down on extremists from all directions, military officials said.

But a top U.S. commander warned on Monday that three or four times more Iraqi security forces are needed to sustain the progress in clearing the area and stanching the flow of arms and makeshift bombs into the capital....

The brigade commander, Col. Wayne W. Grigsby, Jr., said 21 boats had been destroyed on the river and in the reeds on the banks since the operation began in force on June 15, most with secondary blasts indicating many were filled with explosive material.

He also said the military had gained intelligence from a local sheik about networks bringing armor-penetrating explosively formed projectiles, known as EFPs, on a major road that travels from the border with Iran through Shiite areas to Baghdad. The U.S. has accused Iran of supplying mainly Shiite militias with EFPs, but Tehran has denied the allegations. [EFPs are also sometimes called explosively formed penetrators; even the Pentagon can't seem to make up its mind which phrase to use!]

Lynch said the area had two battalions from the 8th Iraqi army division but added "there needs to be three or four times more Iraqi security forces than are currently present to provide for sustained security. That's the critical piece in all of this."

From June 15th to the 26th is 11 days; that's two boats per day average, though I'm sure it varies day by day. Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail gives a for-instance:

In Northern Babil province, Operations Marne Torch and Commando Eagle continue. On June 23, Coalition forces detained four suspects, destroyed two trucks and two barges used to transport insurgents and equipment, and found two weapons caches during operations south of Salman Pak. Coalition forces also detained 19 members of an IED cell near Mahmudiyah. The cell is believed to have brought down a bridge in northern Babil....

Maybe I just haven't heard about it before, but I think this riverine campaign is new: attacking boats that insurgents have been using to transport explosives. Obviously, a barge can hold tremendously more cargo than a truck; thus every barge destroyed is the equivalent of at least a "weapons cache," perhaps two -- judging from the size of most such caches that we see on TV. Killing these barges is a very big deal: As Col. Grigsby said, each of those "secondary explosions" was the sound of insurgent munitions dumps going up in smoke.

As for the "networks bringing armor-penetrating... EFPs... from the border with Iran through Shiite areas to Baghdad," mentioned without much comment or analysis by AP, Roggio again has deeper information:

Coalition forces maintain pressure on the Iranian backed "secret cells" of the Qazali Network. A raid in Sadr City resulted in the death of "four Secret Cell terrorists."

In earlier posts, Roggio has extensively discussed Qazali:

Over 20 members of the network were killed, 6 wounded and 1 captured in the raid against “the secret cell terrorist network known for facilitating the transport of weapons and explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, from Iran to Iraq, as well as bringing militants from Iraq to Iran for terrorist training” in Amarah and Majjar al-Kabir....

The raids in Amara and Majjar al-Kabir are the latest in a series of Coalition and Iraqi operations designed to dismantle the Qazali and the Sheibani networks, which are Iraqi manned and led networks operated by Iran’s Qods Force. Coalition and Iraqi forces killed at least 47 members of this network and captured 88 since major operations began in April 27, 2007.

These networks also have deep ties with Muqtada al Sadr’s Iranian backed Mahdi Army. “The dead are believed to be Shiite militiamen loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who is a dominant force in Maysan province,” Fadhel Mushatat reported from Amara.

Multinational Forces Iraq has essentially taken off the gloves with identifying Iran’s involvement in backing the Qazali and the Sheibani networks. “Intelligence reports indicate that both Amarah and Majjar al-Kabir are known safe havens and smuggling routes for Secret Cell terrorists who facilitate Iranian lethal aid,” noted the Multinational Forces Iraq press release. Qods force is directly identified. “Reports further indicate that Iranian surrogates, or Iraqis that are liaisons for Iranian intelligence operatives into Iraq, use both Amarah and Majjar al-Kabir as safe haven locations.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times explicates a brutal tactic -- houses rigged with bombs -- to which al-Qaeda in Iraq has increasingly turned, as they fail and fail, and fall and fall to American and Iraqi forces.

This story is very well written, almost novelic -- which is not surprising, as the author, Michael R. Gordon, has written at least two narrative histories: The Generals' War : The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf, and Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. Here is one platoon's adventures on a single day, in a single neighborhood of one city, Baqouba, capital of Diyala province:

The enemy was a phantom who never showed his face but transformed a neighborhood into a network of houses rigged to explode....

Tracer rounds zipped through the air as the soldiers fired antitank weapons, mortar shells and machine guns at the abandoned houses they planned to inspect across the street.

They calculated that the firepower would blow up any bombs the insurgents might have planted in the houses, while providing cover so the first squads could move south across the thoroughfare.

The use of house bombs is not a new trick, but as the soldiers were to learn, the scale was daunting. The entire neighborhood seemed to be a trap.

For those who remember our post about Cougers and Buffalos and other "MRAPs," here is a blast from the past:

Enter the MRAP: the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected class of vehicles. The Marines and the Army have more or less settled on the Couger H-series of MRAP and the Buffalo H-series of Mine Protected Route Clearance (MPCV) vehicles, both manufactured by Force Protection Inc... the latter being a somewhat larger version of the Cougar, equipped with a fork-toothed arm for explosive ordnance disposal (the Buffalo's nickname is "the Claw"):



Couger H-series MRAP    Buffalo H-series MPCV

Couger H-series MRAP (L) and Buffalo H-series MPCV (R)

The great innovation of the MRAP is to redesign the undercarriage itself... and to correct the flaw that made our earlier combat vehicles so vulnerable: their underbelly flatness. MRAPs have a V-shaped hull that channels blast effect to the sides of the vehicle, graphically demonstrated here. Even EFPs have trouble penetrating the undercarriage of an MRAP:



MRAP taking blast

MRAP taking blast; explosive force is redirected to sides of vehicle

You'll be tickled to see that our new toys are already being used in combat in Iraq -- saving American lives and helping to win the Iraq war. From the Times article:

But there were a few early indications that the bomb threat in the area might be more challenging than the Americans had expected. The street the soldiers had raced across was strewn with slender copper wires, which the insurgents used to set off buried bombs powerful enough to upend armored vehicles.

As the platoon watched from its new foothold south of the road, a Buffalo vehicle, a heavily armored truck with a V-shaped body to dissipate bomb blasts and a giant mechanical claw, began to scour the nearby roads for bombs. It found three, which were exploded by American combat engineers.

“Controlled dets,” a soldier called out, referring to a deliberate detonation of a discovered bomb. The good news was that the buried bombs had been found and neutralized. But some had been deeply buried on the road the platoon had just crossed.

One interesting point about Americans is that we take our sense of humor with us wherever we go. Even when clearing houses and streets that have been turned into a weird, live-action videogame of explosives, springtraps, and other deadly snares:

To blast a path through the next bomb-ridden stretch of road, combat engineers brought in a mine-clearing device. A bright fireball appeared over the street and a cloud of gritty dust engulfed the platoon’s house as the soldiers huddled in the back and plugged their ears.

Afterward, as Sgt. Philip Ness-Hunkin, 24, walked to the house next door, he saw copper wires leading to the home. The gate was unlocked and the front door was invitingly open.

“Right in the front door there was a pressure plate under a piece of wood,” he said, referring to a mine that is set to blow when it is stepped on. “Over in that neighborhood there were wires going all over the place.”

“H-BIED,” a soldier called out, using the military’s acronym for a house-borne improvised explosive device.

"House-borne" improvised explosive devices! Only from Americans.

In the end, the platoon commander, 1LT Charles Morton, asked for the entire block of houses to be destroyed by artillery, since it was virtually impossible to move the platoon forward through the maze of munitions and copper-wired mines:

The next morning, an M1 tank arrived. The neighborhood reverberated with enormous booms as soldiers blasted the homes suspected of containing bombs with antitank missiles, artillery and tank fire. The platoon’s advance had been stymied for a day, but there were no American casualties and more bombs had been cleared out.

I have great faith in American military ingenuity; I predict that in just a few weeks, we'll have a much faster and more effective way to stymie such HBIEDs without having to blow up entire city blocks. But in the meanwhile, we are allowing nothing to stop our counterinsurgency operations: Phantom Thunder, Arrowhead Ripper, Marne Torch, and all the ancillary battles they spawn.

All we need now are more -- and more trustworthy -- Iraqi National Police to supplement the Iraqi Army. I am confident we'll get them; we're finally making incredible progress, and the Shiite Maliki government has no interest in handing Iraq back to Sunni insurgents.

They had a bellyful of that for forty years.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 26, 2007, at the time of 4:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 20, 2007

Dividing and Conquering, or Dancing With the Devil?

Blogomania , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Two posts over on my favorite blog, Power Line -- one by Scott Johnson, the other by Paul Mirengoff -- appear to be at war with each other.

In the first, Brothers Grim at Foggy Bottom, Scott links to an article by Eli Lake at the New York Sun. Lake reports that the Bush administration is at least mulling the prospect of opening more direct relations with the Muslim Brotherhood -- "the party that founded modern political Islam," as Lake puts it, and the umbrella organization to many Islamist organizations.

The hope is that, if (a big if) the Muslim Brotherhood -- or a significant element thereof -- can be convinced that violence, murder, terrorism, and the mass slaughter of fellow Moslems is counterproductive (if not morally wrong, which may be a stretch for them), then they could serve as a counterideology, which we desperately need, to al-Qaeda, Hamas, EIJ, and other terrorist groups that more or less spun off from the Brotherhood. (Even a Shiite terror ogranization, such as Hezbollah, could be hurt by such a turn, as a "quietist" version of the Muslim Brotherhood would surely increase the appeal of Najaf Quietism itself in Iraq and even Iran, as a counterweight to Khomeini-ism.)

Scott does not offer a direct attack on the idea, but he seems to weigh in against such a move, quoting from a skeptic but not from anyone actually defending the idea. The very title of Scott's post, while a nice pun, also clearly implies that he thinks such a strategy is a fairy tale.

But just four posts later on the same page, Paul offers his own thoughts in Some Sunni Tribes Turn Against al-Qaeda in Baghdad:

Even the MSM has reported, however grudgingly, our military's success resulting from having enlisted Sunni tribes in the fight against al Qaeda in Anbar province. Attacks there have decreased by 60 percent and al Qaeda is on the run.

Now we are having some success in persuading Sunni tribes to help us against al Qaeda in Baghdad. USA Today reports that more than ten such tribes have signed on. Some of them have members who previously have fought alongside al Qaeda. As Lt. Col. Rick Welch explains, this means "they know where they live... who they are... [and] how they operate."

This tactic is working extremely well in Iraq, as Big Lizards has reported a number of times. A strong case can be made that a similar approach can work internationally... and that clearly is what President Bush has in mind for serious consideration; he has not yet made a final decision.

We've often said in other contexts that "you can't beat something with nothing." This is particularly true when fighting an ideology-based threat such as global jihadism: Its power comes from strong, principled, religious belief; those who sign aboard are looking to live their faith more fully than possible in the typical Arab or Moslem cult-of-personality dictatorship.

In Iraq, for example, many are moved by the thought of self-rule and modernity; but for those who are not, for those who crave a deeper spiritual life, it's useless to say "don't follow radical, militant Islam -- follow democracy instead!" It is far more effective to give these people an intense and all-encompassing religious option that emphatically rejects murder, violence, and coercion... such as the Quietism of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for Shia or the Indonesian Sunni Islamist anti-terrorist group Nahdatul Ulama (NU), which has a membership in the tens of millions.

Can the Muslim Brotherhood become such a force? That is, one presumes, just what the administration is exploring, inviting two Islamic scholars on opposite sides of the question to the White House for discussion and debate -- which, by the way, is a technique Ronald Reagan often used to try to understand a contentious issue.

Certainly, there is no question that members of the Brotherhood have engaged in terrorism in the past, and the Brotherhood has spun off several horrific terrorist groups (including Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led by Ayman Zawahiri of later al-Qaeda fame, and Hamas). One can argue that the Brotherhood radicalizes some people who then split away and form Islamist groups more radical than the Brotherhood.

But it's also true that the organization has denounced many terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda. The Brotherhood supports the idea of sharia law and a world-wide caliphate; but if we could appeal to elements within the organization that reject violent coercion as the path to that caliphate, we might have a serious line of attack in the propaganda war for the ummah... a vital front we have by and large neglected, ignored, even actively shunned so far.

I don't know if the Muslim Brotherhood will turn out to be the proper vehicle for such a front; they may, in the end, prove too radical, too devoted to Islamic rule to balk at the mass killing of innocents. But without exploring the idea in depth, we won't know whether such an alliance would divide and conquer our jihadist enemies -- or fool us into dancing with the Devil, giving aid and comfort (and some cheap laughs) to those very same enemies.

Still, I enthusiastically applaud such "sideways thinking" outside the normal channels of the D.C. political ideological complex, which currently offers only three paths forward, none of them very promising:

  • The "Realism" of Kissinger and Scowcroft, which cuddles up to Arab strongmen to maintain order and security;
  • Incessant military intervention in every potentially troublous Moslem country;
  • Or cowardly and foolhardy retreat to "Fortress America" to contemplate domestic policy and our navels.

I won't say there's "no harm" in investigating this front, because we could be sucked into doing the wrong thing. But I do argue there is a powerful upside that we can no longer afford to overlook. So as Ronald Reagan's mother (he assured us) used to tell him while pushing him around in his pram, "trust but verify."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 20, 2007, at the time of 2:35 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 19, 2007

Why I Won't Call the Iraq Violence a "Civil War"

Iraq Matters , Opinions: Nasty, Brutish, and Shortsighted
Hatched by Dafydd

I noted in the previous post that Michael Yon used the phrase "civil war" to describe what is happening in Iraq; a commenter to that post, BigLeeH, suggests that the definition used (when Democrats hurl the term) is very simplistic:

When the American left applies the term "civil war" to a modern conflict the operative definition is "any war that is none of our d**n business and we should just butt out."

BigLeeH went on to suggest that when conservatives argue that it is too our business, they in essence foment "a needless conflict with the plain meaning of the words."

I have repeatedly objected to that definition of civil war. It's not "the plain meaning of the words;" it's one side's definition of the term, a definition I reject:

  • Neither al-Qaeda nor the Shiite insurgents have fielded an army;
  • Neither of them controls any significant territory;
  • Neither has formed a national front;
  • And neither has set up a shadow government.

These four elements are critical to any civil war, by my definition. I offer for my examples England in the 1640s, America in the early 1860s, and Spain in the late 1930s.

Nothing like that is happening in Iraq, which is why I dispute Michael Yon's conclusion that there is a civil war there:

  • Rather than fight to install a different government, al-Qaeda is fighting to destroy all government in Iraq, leaving it a wasteland of chaos -- in which environment al-Qaeda thrives.
  • And the Mahdi Militia is fighting, not to install a different goverment, but instead to crush Iraq so that Iran can take over.

What is happening in Iraq is no more a civil war than Chicago in the 1920s or Colombia in the 1980s -- or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the Red Army Faction in Japan. Those conflicts, in fact, suggest the correct term (rather, pair of terms): Iraq is suffering a simultaneous gangland war and insurgency.

It's a gangland war, sez I -- like the Medellin and Cali Cartels' violence against the Colombian government -- coupled with a classical insurgency, as in Algeria, the Philippines, or Kashmir.

This is not to minimize the violence in Iraq; but fighting a civil war requires a completely different strategy than fighting a gangland war -- which is an expanded law-enforcement operation -- or an insurgency, which requires a counterinsurgency strategy.

Labels should clarify rather than obscure. The "civil war" label is used far more often to obscure critical differences than to consolodate different elements of a single class.

Thus, Democrats say, "it's a civil war, so obviously the Iraqis don't want us there. Let's leave!" But in fact, if it's a gangland war and an insurgency, they very likely do want us there to help. The Democrats deliberately cover up the distinction so that they can trick us into withdrawal.

As for Michael Yon, he's just being sloppy; I don't think he has any ulterior motive.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 19, 2007, at the time of 6:51 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

Yon On Baqouba

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Michael Yon has a new dispatch up about the fighting in Diyala province (northeast of Baghdad) and in the southern outskirts of Baghdad. (Hat tip to Scott Johnson and Power Line.)

As always, there are parts I disagree with: Yon continues to beat the "civil war" drum in Iraq; and he states, several times, echoing a long-time Democratic meme, that "al Qaeda and associates had little or no presence in Iraq before the current war."

I have no idea whether he is a Republican, a Democrat, or something else (or nothing!)... but while arguing that al-Qaeda had no presence in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, it's pretty hard to get around Musab Zarqawi's Ansar al-Islam compound/training camp -- which operated in Kurdish Iraq years before the invasion. Zarqawi, of course, soon changed the name of his group to al-Qaeda in Iraq and had many juicy exchanges with al-Qaeda number two, Ayman Zawahiri.

But the meat of Yon's dispatch is that, while we made terrible mistakes at the beginning that allowed events in Iraq to deteriorate, we have since rectified and refined our operations there... particularly by appointing Gen. David Petraeus to command of all forces in Iraq:

Throughout 2006, my belief grew that Petraeus should be running this war. And though I had reached my own conclusions, others thought the same....

These words flow on the eve of a great battle, but are on hold until the attack is well underway. Nothing is certain. I am here and have been all year. We are in trouble, but we have a great General. The only one, I have long believed, who can lead the way out of this morass. Iraq is not hopeless. Iraq can stand again but first it must cast off these demons. And some of the demons must be killed.

Where Yon's writing truly lifts off is when he describes battles and campaigns, either post-hoc or anticipatory. Here he talks about the struggle that is to come in Diyala province and its capital Baqouba, and what it will entail. (This is the only long quote from Yon's long article; you should read it all. Yes, I know everybody who quotes from a source says "you should read it all"... but in this case, you really should. All the other times I said it, I was deliberately and perversely misleading you, just to waste your time. But this time, I promise I'm telling the truth!)

Northeast of Baghdad, innocent civilians are being asked to leave Baquba. More than 1,000 AQI fighters are there, with perhaps another thousand adjuncts. Baquba alone might be as intense as Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah in late 2004. They are ready for us. Giant bombs are buried in the roads. Snipers -- real snipers -- have chiseled holes in walls so that they can shoot not from roofs or windows, but from deep inside buildings, where we cannot see the flash or hear the shots. They will shoot for our faces and necks. Car bombs are already assembled. Suicide vests are prepared.

The enemy will try to herd us into their traps, and likely many of us will be killed before it ends. Already, they have been blowing up bridges, apparently to restrict our movements. Entire buildings are rigged with explosives. They have rockets, mortars, and bombs hidden in places they know we are likely to cross, or places we might seek cover. They will use human shields and force people to drive bombs at us. They will use cameras and make it look like we are ravaging the city and that they are defeating us. By the time you read this, we will be inside Baquba, and we will be killing them. No secrets are spilling here.

Our jets will drop bombs and we will use rockets. Helicopters will cover us, and medevac our wounded and killed. By the time you read this, our artillery will be firing, and our tanks moving in. And Humvees. And Strykers. And other vehicles. Our people will capture key terrain and cutoff escape routes. The idea this time is not to chase al Qaeda out, but to trap and kill them head-on, or in ambushes, or while they sleep. When they are wounded, they will be unable to go to hospitals without being captured, and so their wounds will fester and they will die painfully sometimes. It will be horrible for al Qaeda. Horror and terrorism is what they sow, and tonight they will reap their harvest. They will get no rest. They can only fight and die, or run and try to get away. Nobody is asking for surrender, but if they surrender, they will be taken.

The writing is riveting, but more important is what Yon tells us: That despite earlier mistakes -- mistakes about which I am less condemnatory than Michael Yon, since we were in terra incognita, while hindsight is... you know -- today, we are doing things far more right than wrong. We are winning and turning the tide of battle, even according to the previously gloomy Michael Yon.

But he warns of a brutal campaign to come: Steel yourselves, he says, for mass-media reports of mass "civilian" deaths (because terrorists and insurgents are technically civilians... get it?) and horrific, ungentlemanly conduct from our troops. Imagine, surrounding a city, cutting off all escape routes, and then systematically exterminating thousands of al-Qaeda operatives without even giving them a chance to save face by relocating to the province next door. Outrageous!

We often hear of some "neocon" (which the drive-by media now appears to define as any Republican who supports the Iraq war) who used to be a cheerleader for Operation Iraqi Freedom but now repents, confesses that it is not only unwinnable but the greatest war crime in human history, and has joined up with Mother Sheehan to call for all Republicans to be purged from office. Rarely do we hear of the opposite, a person more optimistic today than he was yesterday. The systemic bias of the elite media does not recognize that such people exist, even when confronted by them.

They will not recognize Michael Yon, both because of his message of hope, when they preach only despair; but just as important, because Yon is that most wretched of creatures: a true "citizen journalist." He didn't go to Columbia or any other J-school; he simply writes, in common-sense but compelling prose, what he sees (and as often photographs it as well, which ticks off yet another batch of newspaper folks). Worse, he is a former Special Forces soldier himself... so how could he possibly (argue the elites) cover Iraq objectively?

(For that kind of objectivity, you need someone who graduated from an accredited journalism school and is an active anti-Iraq war protester.)

It's not that Yon flies below the media's radar; rather, they have deliberately tuned their radar so that it cannot pick up people like Yon... like wearing special glasses that filter out the color red. Thus their narrative -- being uninformed by trenchant observers and brilliant wordsmiths like Yon -- floats disconnected and incomplete above the battlefield, struggling to see through the haze of gunsmoke...

The anointed journalist peers through the shifting smoke, and he manufactures fantastic visages of gods and demons (or often a duckie and a horsie). He writes, not about what he has seen (which isn't much beyond the insides of Green Zone bars and mess halls), but what he confabulated in place of real data. His narrative becomes a convenient fairy-tale that just happens, by sheer coincidence, to reinforce everything he always believed about the war before leaving the New York office.

I love Yon for the same reason that the J-school media hates him: He brings to his stories a new organizational principle that generates a unique story line. I disagree with much of what he says; but he says it with zest and sincerity, and he tries hard to back it up.

And that's why you should read it all. It's time better spent than watching reruns of the Sopranos or 24.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 19, 2007, at the time of 2:10 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

June 17, 2007

Even MSM Agrees: Barely Started Counterinsurgency On a Roll!

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

The elite media doesn't realize it yet, but they have given the new counterinsurgency strategy the best review they possibly could -- by admitting that, though it has barely begun, we already now "have full control" of 40% of Baghdad (our target), plus an additional 30% somewhat under control but not fully, leaving only 30% fully in insurgent hands.

In other words, Baghdad is now 40% white, 30% pink, and 30% red. Not bad for a "surge" that just began operations this week:

Odierno said there was a long way to go in retaking the city from Shiite Muslim militias, Sunni Arab insurgents and al-Qaida terrorists. He said only about "40 percent is really very safe on a routine basis" - with about 30 percent lacking control and a further 30 percent suffering "a high level of violence...."

"There's about 30 percent of the city that needs work, like here in Dora and the surrounding areas," Odierno said. "Those are the areas that we consider to be the hot spots, which usually have a Sunni-Shiite fault line, and also areas where al-Qaida has decided to make a stand."

Naturally, this being the Associated Press, they chose to see the Persian slipper as half-empty of tobacco, headlining their piece "US: 60 Pct. of Baghdad Not Controlled." But you don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to be able to do the math.

Most of the article dwelt upon the kidnapping and possible deaths of a few American soldiers a few weeks ago (airborne troops found the victims' ID cards; no word yet whether they're alive or dead) and upon the rise in American casualties that, oddly enough, seems to accompany our increased willingness to engage the enemy. As you can see, these issues fit perfectly with the theme of the article: the percent of Baghdad we control.

And frankly, the verified fact that we control or exert strong influence over 70% of the Iraqi capital, after merely preparing for a campaign, followed by one week of actual combat, is pretty darned good news presaging eventual victory.

Even if the drive-by media can't quite see beyond their front bumpers to realize it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 17, 2007, at the time of 4:31 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 14, 2007

Counterinsurgency Strategy Working So Far - Even Though It's Just Beginning

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

This is very good news that the Washington Post is trying to spin as bad news (yes, I know you're too stunned to speak).

Let's start with a brief primer of what the counterinsurgency strategy actually entails (blue text represents preparation of the field of battle):

  1. Five new American brigades into Baghdad;
  2. Three additional Iraqi army brigades into Baghdad;
  3. Several new American battalions into Anbar;
  4. The objective is first to restore security to Baghdad and Anbar by driving insurgents out of the capital and out of al-Qaeda in Iraq's home province;
  5. After security is restored to those two provinces, the second objective is to expand that security to adjacent provinces (turning "red" to "pink" and "pink" to "white") by again driving insurgents outward (and killing or capturing them whenever possible);
  6. Continuing in this fashion, "expanding security outward," means that eventually, the insurgents have nowhere else to go in Iraq, and the country will be as pacified as any Arab Moslem country can be.

The fifth and final U.S. Army brigade is now in Baghdad and being readied, along with the Iraqi battalions; while the battalions have moved into Anbar. Thus we have completed prepping the battlefield and are just about to commence the actual security operation.

The Pentagon has just issued a report titled Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq, June 2007; the report covers the three-month period from February to mid-May. It reports... but no, let us allow the Washington Post to characterize the report first, in an article they aggressively title "No Drop in Iraq Violence Seen Since Troop Buildup" (hat tip to Paul Mirengoff at Power Line):

Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday.

In other words, without even realizing it, the WaPo reports that the Pentagon reports that the insurgents are being driven out of Baghdad and Anbar -- before the main combat of the counterinsurgency has even begun.

...Which happens to be exactly the victory we want to see in bullet-point 4 above.

This is to be a "clear and hold indefinitely" operation (or as I have dubbed it, "whack a mole and seal a hole"): As we and the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) clear the insurgents out of Baghdad, neighborhood by neighborhood, we move forward -- and the Iraqis stay, holding the liberated regions of the capital against reinfiltration by insurgents and terrorists. That is precisely the plan, as developed and implemented by Gen. David Petraeus, Commander MNF-I.

Clearly, it is working: The Pentagon reports significant drops in attacks in Baghdad and Anbar provinces already.

The good:

Insurgents and extremists are unable to operate as freely in Baghdad because of FAQ [Operation Fardh al-Qanoon, the Arabic name of the current Baghdad security operation] and in Anbar Province because of growing tribal opposition to AQI. Accordingly, many insurgents and extremists have moved operations to Diyala, Ninewa, and the outlying areas of Baghdad Province....

Since January 2007, Coalition reported murders in Baghdad proper have decreased by 51% as militia activity was disrupted by security operations....

In Anbar province, anti-AQI sentiment is widespread, with growing tribal influence as the primary driver of decreasing violence levels. The total number of attacks in Anbar has dropped 34% since December 2006, with Ramadi -- where attacks are at a two-year low -- accounting for the largest decline in violence levels. Attacks in Anbar have dropped from 35 per day in the previous reporting period to just under 26, dipping below average daily attacks in Salah ad Din Province.

The phrase "growing tribal opposition to AQI" in Anbar province refers to this phenomenon, about which we have written a number of times: Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders have gotten fed up with the mindless thirst for blood among al-Qaeda members, and they have declared war on al-Qaeda... and are slowly but inexorably driving them out of the Sunni belt -- Anbar, Diyala, Salahadin, and Baghdad.

The bad:

The overall level of violence in Iraq this quarter remained similar to the previous reporting period but shifted location. Insurgents and extremists are unable to operate as freely in Baghdad because of FAQ and in Anbar Province because of growing tribal opposition to AQI. Accordingly, many insurgents and extremists have moved operations to Diyala, Ninewa, and the outlying areas of Baghdad Province. Outside Baghdad and Anbar, reductions in Coalition force presence and reliance upon local Iraqi security forces have resulted in a tenuous security situation. Sectarian violence and insurgent attacks still involve a very small portion of the population, but public perceptions of violence have adversely affected reconciliation and contribute to population migration.

In other words, the report shows insurgents being driven out of Baghdad (due to Operation FAQ) and Anbar (due to Sunni tribes rising against al-Qaeda, with our help and encouragement; we're fighting side by side with Sunni Iraqis against al-Qaeda!)... exactly the direction we hoped to achieve with the counterinsurgency strategy.

This is what victory in Iraq looks like -- and will continue to look like: It is messy, it's violent, but we can discern actual movement towards the final elimination of al-Qaeda in Iraq as a viable terrorist force and of Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM, Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Militia") as a rallying point for Shiite insurgency.

The WaPo's bean-counting take is that, since there is no overall reduction in violence yet (before we begin our offensive) -- merely a shift from our areas of operation to outlying provinces -- therefore the "troop surge" is a failure. But contrarywise, what the Pentagon report demonstrates, and the Post unwittingly reports, is the beginning of victory in exactly the way Gen. Petraeus expected.

As always, I wonder whether the Post writer (Ann Scott Tyson) is simply ignorant of the strategy, what it entails, and what it expects to do... or whether she knows very well that it's working, and she just wants to help Majority Leader Harry "we've already lost" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) in his urgent task of thwarting the counterinsurgency before it has a chance to succeed... and ruin everything!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 14, 2007, at the time of 6:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 13, 2007

It's Like Déjà-Vu All Over Again...

Congressional Calamities , Dhimmi of the Month , Iraq Matters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

...Why do I have the feeling I used that line before?

I'm actually starting to lose track of how many times we've lost the Iraq war; at least, according to Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%). But he's at it again. I don't think I've ever before seen a feller so anxious to see his own side lose:

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi challenged the president over Iraq by sending him a letter, ahead of a White House meeting later on Wednesday.

"As many had forseen, the escalation has failed to produce the intended results," the two leaders wrote. [The troops are just now in place, and the new counterinsurgency strategy is just about to begin.]

"The increase in US forces has had little impact in curbing the violence or fostering political reconciliation. [Even before the new strategy begins, violence in Baghdad is down significantly; some has moved outside the capital, but that was the plan: Secure Baghdad, then expand the security outward.]

"It has not enhanced Americas national security. The unsettling reality is that instances of violence against Iraqis remain high and attacks on US forces have increased. [By "attacks on US forces," you of course mean "casualties suffered as US forces take the fight to the terrorists and insurgents, increase the tempo of engagement, and obliterate al-Qaeda in Anbar, Salahadin, Diyala, and Baghdad.]

"In fact, the last two months of the war were the deadliest to date for US troops." [So let's make all those deaths meaningless by retreating just as we're about to launch the full-scale attack!]

Of course, t'other way of looking at it is -- the side he's anxious to see lose isn't his own side at all. Has anybody seen any photos of Harry Reid sitting astride an al-Qaeda anti-aircraft gun? And does anybody know if a Special Forces guy ever gave Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) a "magic hat?"

Is this really the image the Democrats want to project? When the going gets tough, the Democrats have another panic attack. How many more of these spasmodic breakdowns will we have to suffer through before the 2008 elections?

They have become the George Constanza party:

  • They lurch from one crisis to the next;
  • They're crude;
  • They're cowardly;
  • Their normal emotinal state is hysterical overreaction;
  • And they're "unusually good liars."

I grow weary of pointing out every time Reid or Pelosi or some other dysfunctional Defeatocrat (not to mention any names, such as John Murtha, D-PA, 65%) informs us that we've lost, there's no point in continuing, we've learned a difficult lesson, and it's time to crawl away, lick our wounds, and negotiate surrender with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar Assad, Grand Kleagle of al-Qaeda in Iraq Ayyub al-Masri, and Iranian Puppet Muqtada Sadr.

You know who "Pinky" Reid has always reminded me of? In Aliens (a.k.a., Alien II) -- anybody remember that great movie? -- one of the Colonial Marines, Hudson, spends the entire movie whining, "That's it man, game over man, game over! What the [expletive deleted] are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do? We're toast, man, we're history!"

But that's really unfair, and I'm sorry I made the comparison. After all, in the end, Hudson actually did his duty and mowed down a bunch of alien monsters.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 13, 2007, at the time of 11:01 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

June 11, 2007

Shades of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Heroes of the Revolution , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Terrorism Intelligence , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Sachi

In January this year, terrorists pretending to be American troops got through Iraqi security in the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center (Karbala JCC), managing to kill one US soldier and kidnap four. All four soldiers' bodies were eventually recovered; there was no sign of torture or post-mortem mutilation, which ruled out al-Qaeda.

The sophisticated nature of the operation clearly implied that perpatrators were Iranian Qods Force; but it seemed odd that they would kidnap soldiers from the center and then kill them, instead of either keeping them for interrogation and to try to trade for the al-Qods members we're holding -- or else just killing them outright at the Karbala JCC without attempting a difficult kidnapping.

But when Iranian forces directly kidnapped British sailors, all became clear: The first attempt was indeed intended to take American prisoners... but the Americans fought back; and the Iranians -- unable to transport them -- finally had to kill them. The Brits were a second-best choice; but they were more willing to give Iran the propaganda coup it so desperately wanted. And most important, the British sailors could be counted upon not to fight for their freedom, as Americans always do.

To paraphrase the Lord of the Rings, open war was upon us, whether we risk it or no.

Now, according to Bill Rogio, satellite imagery has discovered a mockup of the Karbala JCC inside Iran... conclusively proving that the murderous assault upon American soldiers was planned and carefully executed by the Revolutionary Guards and Qods Force and with full knowledge and approval of the ruling mullahs (reparagraphed for easier reading):

The January 20 attack the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center by the Iranian backed Qazali Network, which resulted in the kidnapping and murder of five U.S. soldiers, has long been known to be a Iranian planned and sponsored strike.

While Iran has insulated itself with its cutouts in the Qazali Network, Multinational Forces Iraq has captured members of the network as well as found documentation which proved Iran's complicity in the attack.

And now it has satellite imagery as well. Aviation Week and Space Technology reported in the June 4 edition that Iran build a mockup of the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center inside its borders, which was used to train the attackers. The "training center" was discovered by a U.S. spy satellite surveying Iran.

The Qazali Network exists -- existed -- within Iraq; a part of a larger, Iranian-controlled Iraqi network, Qazali was set up to receive money, arms, and training from Qods Force. But we have broken it since the Karbala JCC attack:

On May 19, Coalition forces killed Azhar al-Dulaimi during a raid in Baghdad's Sadr City. Dullaimi was described as the "mastermind" and "tactical commander" of the Karbala attack. In March, U.S. forces captured Qais Qazali, the network's leader, his brother Laith Qazali, and several other members.

Multinational Forces Iraq has been heavily targeting the Qazali Network's "secret terror cells" as well as those of the Sheibani Network. Coalition and Iraqi forces killed 26 members of this network and captured 71 since April 27, 2007. Three more members of the "secret cell" were captured and another killed today.

The Sheibani Network the overarching organization that receives support, weapons, advice and targeting from Iran's Qods Force. Senior members of the Qazali and Sheibani Networks are members of Iran's Qods Force.

We don't know for sure, of course; but it seems likely that these satellite pictures were part of the evidence that persuaded Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT, 75%D) to call for the Pentagon to draft plans to attack Iran:

"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," the Connecticut independent said during an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation." "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

There is no question but that Lieberman is right about one thing: We are currently in a hot war with Iran -- and we are fighting back hard against Iranian proxy forces in Iraq. The only question is whether we should expand the fight into Iran itself, giving the mullahs a taste of the whip themselves in their home turf.

Other Democrats still don't get it; they live in a perpetual September 10th world. But Lieberman has the right idea, and I wish we had him on our side:

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who is running for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, said sanctions are the most effective tool against the Iranian regime.

"I would talk to them, but I would build an international coalition that would promote and push economic sanctions on them," he said during an appearance on CNN's "Late Edition." "Sanctions would work on Iran. They are susceptible to disinvestment policy. They are susceptible to cuts, economic sanctions in commodities."

Mr. Lieberman said he would leave any such strategy to military generals, but that it could be accomplished through an air campaign. He said failure to stand up to Iranian aggression would further weaken the U.S. position in Iraq and raise the likelihood of acts of domestic terrorism.

"We cannot let them get away with it," he said. "If we do, they'll take that as a sign of weakness on our part, and we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region and ultimately right here at home."

There is nothing wrong with economic sanctions and "disinvestment policy"... as an economic attack concommitent to a physical (air) attack.

Regardless of the risk -- such escalation would enrage the Iranians and might even serve to drive the Persian people closer to their mullah masters; Hezbollah could strike inside the United States; Iran could launch a massive attack against Israel -- we cannot sit idly by and allow a sovereign nation to attack the United States without directly retaliating.

So we support the rest of Lieberman's call as well... once again, we're forced to say, go, Joe!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 11, 2007, at the time of 7:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 3, 2007

Salvation à la Mode

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Power Line continues the saga of the incredible shrinking terrorist front in Iraq; we ourselves previously blogged about this in several previous posts, beginning in March:

The Anbar Salvation Council of Sunni tribes in Iraq's Anbar province has not only launched a full-scale war against al-Qaeda in what used to be the terrorists' own home town, they have opened franchises in three other Iraqi provinces as well: Baghdad, Salahadin, and Diyala, all of which used to be under al-Qaeda management. More and more, Iraqi nationalism is beating back sectarian identity, and a desire for peace and good governance is rising up against the tolerance for terrorism and theocracy that accompanies any deal with the "Great Satan" of al-Qaeda.

The most recent Power Line post on the subject (linked above) quotes from the New Straits Times of Indonesia; alas, the link appears to be dead. But the incomparable Bill Roggio -- an American national resource -- had an article up yesterday on the WeeklyStandard.com that covers much of what we know:

The battle between al Qaeda in Iraq on one side, and the residents of the Baghdad district of Amariyah, the Islamic Army of Iraq, and the 1920 Revolution Brigades on the other, dominated the headlines late yesterday and this morning. The Washington Post reported that the battle began Wednesday "over accusations that al-Qaeda in Iraq had executed Sunnis without reason," and portrayed the conflict as one pitting the residents of Amariyah against al Qaeda....

The Anbar Salvation Council has formed a "clandestine SWAT unit" that is capable of operating outside of the western province, an American military intelligence official close to the operations of the group told us. These are the "secret police" described by of [head of the Anbar Salvation Council] Sheikh al-Hais.

Roggio notes that the Anbar Salvation Council has engaged in previous "expeditionary" operations in Salahadin and Diyala, as well as the current fighting in Baghdad. And the American military is cautiously encouraging the movement:

The fighting in Amariyah comes just as Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, the commander of Multinational Corps Iraq, discussed the prospects of reconciliation with insurgent groups, with the exclusion of al Qaeda. "I believe there are elements [of the insurgency] that are irreconcilable, but I believe the large majority are [reconcilable]," said LTG Odierno in yesterday’s press briefing. "The figures I use, I believe, about 80 percent are reconcilable, both Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Sunni insurgents. I believe little, very few of al Qaeda are reconcilable, but there might be a small portion."

To conduct reconciliation talks, each insurgent group will first need to establish a political wing. This is where the Anbar Salvation Council, and its political arm, the Anbar Awakening, came into play in the province. "The Awakening is the face of reconciliation for all practical purposes in Anbar," the American intelligence official familiar with the group informed us.

According to the counterinsurgency strategy developed by Gen. David Petraeus, we must eventually do exactly this; so it appears we are, if anything, ahead of schedule. This bodes well for the report on the counterinsurgency due to Congress in September.

I have heard several people recently, one of them the Senate majority leader, misquoting Petraeus (deliberately or foolishly) about the role of the military in the Iraq counterinsurgency. For example, here is a video clip of Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) proclaiming that "General Petraeus has said the war cannot be won militarily." He clearly implies that Petraeus meant that "the war is lost" (as Reid had already announced), or at least that it cannot be won.

But what Petraeus really said was that the war cannot be won by military force alone; the most important element is political. Reid professed not to understand the distinction, but it should be clear to all except those who swim in currents of ignorance so strong, their brains turn to oatmeal (to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill).

The "politics" that Petraeus means is precisely the sort of community retail politics we're now seeing in the Anbar Awakening (the political arm of the Salvation Council): one city, one province at a time. Such "townhall" politics must necessarily precede the macro-politics of the Iraqi parliament; the parliament cannot lead the way.

Our own federal government has a federal bias: Members of Congress tend to assume all political progress in Iraq must come from the national-level on down. But Gen. Petraeus and other military leaders must, of necessity, deal with Iraq at the level of neighborhood, district, and city; convincing neighbors to turn against al-Qaeda (or against Shiite death squads) is what determines whether we get good intel or not. Our soldiers understand, even if Sen. Reid does not, that the strength of Iraq -- and America and every other country -- resides in the people and the communities they form, not in the parliament; the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a lagging indicator of how the war against global jihad is going.

In short, what the Anbar (or Diyala, or Baghdad, or Salahadin) Salvation Council does is a lot more important than what the Sunni members of parliament do; and what these Sunni tribal leaders are doing more and more nowadays is and killing al-Qaeda's leaders and fighters.

This is what victory in Iraq looks like; this is how counterinsurgency strategy wins. The revulsion by Iraqi Sunnis against the bloodthirst and power madness of al-Qaeda, and their willingness actually to go to war against terrorism, leads them to ally even with Americans to defeat the monsters. The forces of nationalism thus triumph over chaos and human sacrifice.

Clearly, not all Moslems (not even all religiously zealous Sunni Moslems) are violent jihadis. The Salvation Councils and Anbar Awakening may not be "Moslem Methodists," like Indonesia's Nahdatul Ulama (NU); but 'twill serve.

And for everybody except Democrats who were counting on picking up "five extra seats" in the Senate "when we lose the war," it's very, very good news.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 3, 2007, at the time of 1:09 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 29, 2007

Strange Betrayal

Blogomania , Confusticated Conservatives , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Nowadays, it seems that whenever President Bush says or does anything, conservatives hunt like crazy for the most disreputable, disloyal, and cowardly possible interpretation -- then cling to it like a sick kitten to a warm brick, even when perfectly reasonable (and much more likely) interpretations are available.

Each excursion into spurious accusation becomes more "evidence" to buttress the next, until they build a gigantic "indictment mountain" of tapioca, which they treat like Mount Rushmore. Every absurd attack makes the next, equally absurd attack easier to hurl: Today, even a single word in a notoriously left-leaning newspaper is enough evidence to prove another Bush betrayal. Hey, where there's smoke...

This must be a relative of the normal Bush Derangement Syndrome, or BDS, suffered by lefties; Bush Betrayal Syndrome (BBS), perhaps. It is rapidly becoming an epidemic among American conservatives...

Rich in Iran-y

Case in point: Scott Johnson, writing on my favorite blog Power Line, sees the complete collapse and betrayal of the Bush administration position on one member of the Axis of Evil, Iran:

The Bush administration appears to me to have thrown [away] its stated policy for dealing with Iran in favor of beseeching the mullahs for "a decent interval" in which to withdraw American troops.... [To avoid confusion, let me note that Scott's term "decent interval" quotes Henry Kissinger, not President Bush or US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker.]

Perhaps yesteday's meeting is to be followed by one in which we ask the mullahs politely to give up their beloved nuclear program....

I would love to know what the Bush administration has in mind for the mullahs' nuclear program. My guess is runs more along the lines of a whimper than a bang.

Scott bases this entire impeachment of the president's policy upon a single source -- in fact, a single line -- or rather, a single word in a single line of a single source... and that source is the Boston Globe. Here is the evidence of betrayal:

In the highest-level public talks between the United States and Iran in nearly 30 years, US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker yesterday reached out to his Iranian counterpart for help in improving Iraqi security and asked that Iran stop supplying arms to Iraqi militia groups.

Note that this is not a quotation; it's is a characterization offered by the Globe reporter, Farah Stockman; based upon other articles of hers I skimmed, she seems to have the political viewpoint typically associated with that far-left newspaper. Yet this one word is the only one that could possibly give rise to Scott's own characterization of the exchange as "beseeching." Scott continues:

Is a story like the Boston Globe's account of yesterday's meeting between Ryan Crocker and his Iranian counterpart to be taken at face value? The Globe reports that Crocker asked that Iran stop supplying arms to Iraqi militia groups. I trust that Crocker remembered to say "please."

Alas, Scott never answered his own question... and of course, the answer is No, a political characterization by the Boston Globe which just happens to fit perfectly with the Democratic agenda of making Bush look feckless and cowardly is not to be "taken at face value;" just as I wouldn't take at face value the declaration by an ardent Evangelical Christian that Mormonism is a cult.

But this accusation of pending betrayal against Bush is even more puzzling; further down on the very same page, the very same exchange is characterized very differently:

On the American side, Crocker reiterated the US demand that the Qods Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, stop funneling weapons to Sunni insurgent groups and extremist Shi'ite militias, particularly factions of Madhi Army, which is loosely controlled by radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

US officials previously had been reluctant to make the claim that Iran supports Sunni as well as Shi'ite insurgents. But yesterday Crocker said he made the case forcefully.

Isn't demanding that Iran stop fueling the terrorists (on both sides) and stop killing Americans exactly what we want our ambassador to do? This seems a far cry from merely "asking" them to give us a Kissingerian "decent interval" in which to surrender. Why is Scott so angry?

But BBS appears to be a much larger problem than just this possible instance would imply:

A mighty hot wind

Conservatives now regularly refer to the "complete collapse" of the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.

This has been a Democratic talking point since before the hurricane even struck. It was fueled by monstrously misleading media messaging during the crisis -- crazy talk of dead bodies stacked like cordwood in the Superdome's freezer, of cannibalism, of roving rape gangs, of rescue workers being shot at, and of as many as 10,000 people drowned because of "Brownie's incompetence," referring to former Undersecretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response Michael D. Brown.

We thoroughly debunked this Democratic fairy tale in 13 Ghosts. But that hasn't stopped a number of conservatives I've read recently from slapping it onto the gooey mountain of "Bush betrayal."

Miers-ed in betrayal

When President Bush nominated Harriett Miers to the Supreme Court, to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, conservatives went from "we don't know enough about her" to "she's a stealth liberal activist that Bush is sneaking onto the Court to undo the Reagan revolution" in about 2.4 seconds.

It was a perfectly legitimate point to say that Miers didn't have enough of a track record for us to be sure she would practice judicial restraint. Even Hugh Hewitt, who, alone among conservatives, defended her nomination, admitted that he was troubled by her lack of a paper trail.

But that is a far cry from the increasingly bizarre and unsourced accusations that she was a closet fan of expanding affirmative action, that she would "absolutely" vote to expand abortion, and that her main function was to overturn the Patriot Act. When I pointed out that Bush said he knew her well and she was a conservative, rather than partially exonerate Miers -- the response was to push Bush into the same quagmire... it proved he was the Great Betrayer!

The nomination was revealed to be part of Bush's secret plan to betray conservatism.

Bush is selling our ports to al-Qaeda!

The administration approved a deal for Dubai Ports World, an international port-management company headquartered in the United Arab Emirate nation of Dubai, to purchase the company that was managing cargo operations at most large American ports. Initially, the sale didn't even rise to the level of direct presidential decision-making.

The hue and cry from the Right was immediate and almost hysterical. At first, and for some time before it was finally debunked, conservative commentators and bloggers charged that Bush was "handing over port security" to the A-rabs. Once it was finally made clear this affected only cargo handling, not cargo inspections or any other aspect of port security -- and it only changed the managers, not the actual workers (who would remain American dockwallopers) -- then the same voices beavered away finding some obscure reason why this really was a terrible betrayal of American national security anyway. (The conclusion remained the same; they just jacked it up and ran a whole new structure of fact beneath it.)

Honestly, it seemed to me that proving another "Bush betrayal" had become more important to the disputants than than the truth: Evidence that the deal would not affect security at all was rejected out of hand, while even the faintest rumor that Dubai Ports World was infiltrated by al-Qaeda was cited with the same confidence that one might say the Taliban was infiltrated by al-Qaeda.

The rallying cry became 'American ports must be controlled by Americans, not by foreigners.' Lost in the cacophany was the fact that no American port-management company was big enough to take on the job... and also that the company that had been running port ops earlier, the company bought out by Dubai Ports World, was the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O)... chartered in Great Britain, not the United States.

Bush had to be guilty of yet another ludicrously "betrayal" (the most urgent task): this time, that he wanted to turn American ports over to jihadists.

The United States Attorney betrayal

Conservatives have searched high and low for occult signs of "Bush betrayal" in the case of the "fired" U.S. Attorneys (none was fired; the administration chose not to renew their contracts when they ran out).

At the beginning, the dextrosphere rightly noted that there was nothing illegal about the firing; and that the miscommunication by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his staff, while irritating, was also not a deliberate attempt to mislead Congress.

But the longer Sen. Pat Leahy's (D-VT, 95%) Judiciary Committee hearings pounded on Gonzales and on Pat McNulty, Monica Goodling, et al, and the more the elite media gleefully covered the fishing expedition (which has caught so few fish, they're already digging into the Spamwiches they brought along) -- the more conservatives, smelling blood in the water, turned on Gonzales and Bush.

Now we have the odd spectacle of conservatives using liberal code words to indict Gonzales and the president without actually having to produce evidence of wrongdoing: They say the "timing" of this or that non-renewal of contract was "suspicious," then cast a significant look, as if to say 'if you know what I mean, and I think you do.'

Thus again, conservatives, acting on a strange agenda of their own, lend gravitas and support to the wildest liberal charges against the Republican president. (How long until conservatives begin decrying the "stolen election" of 2000?)

Immigration immolation

The obsession with finding some way to declare that Bush is the Great Betrayer has hit its apocalyptic apogee -- so far! -- in the response by the Right to the immigration bill. There are certainly elements of the compromise that could be changed for the better; but good heavens, conservatives have accused Bush of everything from wanting "completely open borders" to plotting to merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico into some fantasy nightmare called "the North American Union" (whose currency, tied to the peso, of course, would be the "amero").

The most common wild exaggeration is to say that the bill contains "no border security provisions whatsoever;" this utterly discounts the triggers, including the fence, the doubling of the Border Patrol, the tamper-resistant SSN card, and the increase (by orders of magnitude) of employer penalties for hiring illegals... none of which evidently counts. Some of those who oppose any comprehensive bill whatsoever argue that these programs would be good; but it is a "fact" that they will never be implemented. Bush plots not to enforce them, allowing "a hundred million" illegals to swarm in for "amnesty."

The word "amnesty" itself is conveniently redefined to include a plea bargain with a legal penalty -- while still retaining the frisson of the original meaning of forgiveness without any penalty. Argument by redefinition is a tactic pioneered by leftists, who routinely say, for example, that we have "murdered" 30,000 civilians in Iraq... redefining "murdering civilians" to mean "undertaking an invasion to which terrorists respond by killing civilians."

Just a few moments ago, Carol Platt Liebau, sitting in for Hugh Hewitt, accused Bush of saying that anyone who opposed the bill doesn't "want to do what's right for America." Translation: Bush has become as great a betrayer as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ, %), to whom she explicitly compared the president.

Perhaps she didn't read very far into the AP story before her blood began to boil and her vision clouded up; what the president actually said was this:

"Those determined to find fault with this bill will always be able to look at a narrow slice of it and find something they don't like," the president said. "If you want to kill the bill, if you don't want to do what's right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it.

"You can use it to frighten people," Bush said. "Or you can show leadership and solve this problem once and for all."

One may agree or disagree with the compromise bill; but there is no question that the subject of the paragraph is "those determined to find fault with this bill," not everyone who doesn't accept it or is skeptical that it can succeed. Plenty of people oppose this particular bill but are willing to consider other realistic solutions, rather than making demands they know are impossible. They are not included among those who "don't want to do what's right for America," according to President Bush.

He attacks those for whom no bill is acceptable -- other than pure enforcement and deportation, which they know very well will never pass Congress. He castigates people who want to see any regularization plan crash and burn, even if it takes the entire Republican Party with it, leaving the Democrats with total power. "At least then," such bitter-enders say, "we'll know who to blame when the country is destroyed!"

Feeding the energy creature

This is not simply a distasteful and vulgar repudiation of a man who has done, on the whole, a very good job making very tough decisions in response to a terrible national threat. It is also a tragic example of political self-euthanasia.

Conservatives appear determined, if unknowingly so, to put the GOP out of the Democrats' misery: They act as if they can surgically destroy George W. Bush and the "neocons" (however they define them), while leaving the rest of the Republican Party intact. In fact, they seem to believe that once they thrash the president to death, the country will rally behind a "true conservative."

I'm not sure who they have in mind, and I don't think they know, either. The only option offered is to exhume Ronald Reagan.

"Politics is the art of the possible" -- a saying often attributed to Otto von Bismark, though I doubt he ever actually said it. If one rejects that, one is left saying that politics should include elements that are impossible... which, by definition, is impossible. For whatever reason (and I think it likely that BBS played a great role), we lost the 2006 elections; Democrats captured both the House and Senate, albeit narrowly.

But however narrow their majority, they still control both the committees and the agenda; and they can stop cold any of the GOP's remaining agenda items... unless Republicans stick together and peel off a few Democrats. Republicans alone, without a single Democratic defection, can prevent Congress from enacting a Democratic agenda: But they must rely upon a presidential veto (from the man they are determined to call the Great Betrayer); and again, they must stand firm and united, retaining even the votes of moderate Republicans, who are easily disgusted by the disloyalty of their fellow party members.

We court catastrophe when we join the Democratic dogpile atop the president; and we make fools of ourselves when we imagine we can isolate the damage just to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, without having it slop over onto the 2008 Republican nominee for president and Republicans running for election or reelection to the Congress. You don't win a fight by clubbing your own head.

It is time for conservatives to focus on the areas where they agree with the fellow Republican in the White House, and on areas where a change can make a compromise bill better, yet not act as a poison pill to kill it altogether. I beseech you, in the bowels of Oliver Cromwell, to leave the Bush bashing to the professionals in the other party.

Unless, that is, conservatives actually crave the freedom from responsibility of the New Deal era!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 29, 2007, at the time of 5:28 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

May 24, 2007

Bowing to the Inevitable

Afghan Astonishments , Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Big Lizards -- and a whole lot of other folks -- has said repeatedly that, in the end, the Democrats would have to give President Bush the money he needs to keep fighting the war against global jihad... and give it to him without timetables for surrender, without absurd and bogus "readiness rules" that would prevent fresh units from replacing combat-weary veterans, and without 535 "little generals" issuing tactical commands to the troops in the field.

(We tried that last during the Civil War, but it was fewer than 535 back then. Still didn't work.)

The Democrats, for their part, swore that they would never, ever pass such funding without a timeline for withdrawal -- a date certain for American defeat.

Well...

Bowing to President Bush, the Democratic-controlled Congress lined up reluctantly Thursday to provide fresh billions for the Iraq war without the troop withdrawal timeline that drew his earlier veto....

Five months in power on Capitol Hill, Democrats in both houses coupled their concession to the president with pledges to challenge his war policies anew. "Those of us who oppose this war will be back again and again and again and again until this war has ended," said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass.

"I hate this agreement," added Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee who played a key role in talks with the White House that yielded the measure....

Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, alone among the Senate's Democratic White House hopefuls, pledged in advance to oppose the bill. Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware said he supported it.

That left Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois publicly uncommitted in the hours leading to the vote, two leading White House rivals tugged in one direction by the needs of 165,000 U.S. troops - and in another by party activists demanding rejection of the legislation.

After the previous bruising veto battle, Democratic leaders said they hoped to clear the bill for Bush's signature by this Memorial Day weekend.

I know I already talked about this; but it's one of the most important inflection points in prosecuting the overall war, as well as the battles of Iraq and Afghanistan within it: For the first time since last November, we now know for certain that today's Congress hasn't the will to cram defeat down our throats, the way yesterday's did in 1974.

That is a monumental revelation. As much as I have always believed it to be true, it's a tremendous relief to see it verified by actions under the dome.

This also points up the huge distinction between domestic policies, like immigration -- where Congress is typically willing to compromise -- and foreign policy, especially war, where one side must win and the other must lose. As a political (not military) battle, war is a zero sum game: Either you support it, or you don't; you cannot "split the difference" and half-support it.

The congressional kabuki dance also demonstrates the immense superiority of our system of government, a constitutional republic with a strong chief executive, over that of any parliamentary democracy... a more primitive and generally failed form of government that is basically institutionalized tribalism.

To the extent parlimentarianism works at all, it only does when one party seizes so much power that the prime minister more or less apes an American president... as with Tony Blair recently or Winston Churchill during World War II.

But a president has inherent power and the "energy" (as the Federalist Papers put it) to act decisively, while Congress dithers. Even when President Bush's own party wavered, frightened and sweating, Bush stood firm; and by his own force of personality (or mulishness, as you prefer), the plenary powers of the presidency, and the "bully pulpit," he forced Congress to bow to his will.

If this were a parliamentary democracy, he would have been removed as head of the party or his government would have suffered a vote of no-confidence. Bush would have been replaced by an isolationist from the House, who would have pulled out of the war in disgrace and defeat; and if the Democrats won the subsequent election, Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) would now be that "First Speaker."

(Say, maybe that's why lefties so very much prefer parliamentary democracies to our federal republic: Mob rule is much easier in the former.)

Fortunately, we had Founding Fathers who were geniuses, and we shall continue fighting this existential war:

Bush ordered the deployment of an additional five brigades to Iraq in January to try and quell sectarian violence, and he said summer would be critical to the fate of the new strategy.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, has pledged to report to the administration and Congress in September on the progress made in the war, and Bush conceded that al-Qaida terrorists and illegal militias will make sure there is heavy fighting in the interim to try and sap the will of the United States.

"And so, yes, it could be a bloody - it could be a very difficult August," he said.

He said he wants to see American troops "in a different configuration at some point in time in Iraq." He said that meant moving from mostly combat to training, border security and special forces anti-terror operations.

"However," Bush said, "it's going to require taking control" of Baghdad.

I wonder how many Democrats (or even Republicans) will remember in August that back in May, Bush warned it would be bloody, violent, and would probably kill a lot of American heroes. Not many, I would guess; they'll claim that Bush said it would be a "cakewalk" (which he never said, nor did anyone in command authority in the administration), and they'll call it another "Bush lie."

But take Baghdad we must, by any means necessary. That's the game on a nutshell; and now that the Democrats caved, we have a real chance of achieving exactly that.

I wonder how the nutroots are taking the collapse of "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?" Even less certain, I wonder how the nutroots will react if we actually manage to secure victory in Iraq? Will they demand we return the "stolen property" -- the Iraqi population -- to the Baathists?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 24, 2007, at the time of 4:06 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

May 22, 2007

Dems Agree to Allow Possibility of Victory In Iraq

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Staving off the feverish Democratic attempt to force defeat on America, President George W. Bush held firm, threatened vetos, and backed up the threats by actually vetoing a troop-funding bill that included a timetable for surrender.

And today, the Democrats finally blinked, as we knew they eventually must:

Flinching in the face of a veto threat, Democratic congressional leaders neared agreement with the Bush administration Tuesday on legislation to pay for the Iraq war without setting a timeline for troop withdrawal.

Several officials said the emerging compromise bill would cost about $120 billion, including as much as $8 billion for Democratic domestic priorities - originally resisted by the White House - such as disaster relief for Hurricane Katrina victims and farmers hurt by drought.

I cannot see how this can be spun, without inducing laughter, as anything but victory for Bush and the mainstream of the GOP and defeat for the defeatists in Congress. But that doesn't stop Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) from trying:

Despite the concession, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters that the legislation would be the first war-funding bill sent to Bush since the U.S. invasion of Iraq "where he won't get a blank check."

Reid and other Democrats pointed to a provision that would set standards for the Iraqi government in developing a more democratic society. U.S. reconstruction aid would be conditioned on progress toward meeting the goals, but Bush would have authority to order the money to be spent regardless of how the government in Baghdad performed.

If Democrats want to claim "victory" for forcing the president to decide whether to condition reconstruction funds on political progress -- which he already has authority to do -- let them, so long as they cease trying to force a U.S. surrender in Iraq. But look at it this way: Sen. Reid has now agreed to continue funding, and sending men and women to die in, a war that Reid said we have already "lost."

This should tell us just how much Reid actually believed what he said when he said it.

And for what have the Democrats sold out the nutroots, thrown in the towel, and agreed to allow the war to continue? Why, for a great and noble purpose that certainly transcends the trivial matters of war and peace:

Several officials said the emerging compromise bill would cost about $120 billion, including as much as $8 billion for Democratic domestic priorities - originally resisted by the White House - such as disaster relief for Hurricane Katrina victims and farmers hurt by drought....

[So] Republicans paid a price, too, in terms of billions of dollars in domestic spending that Democrats wrung from them and the administration....

The bill would also include the first increase in the federal minimum wage in more than a decade.

Well! I can see how such a momentous victory as increasing the minimum wage and adding $8 billion to the previous many billions of dollars for the whiny Hurricane Katrina victims would certainly justify the dreadful step of allowing American victory in Iraq -- as horrible a prospect as that might be.

However, in the House (but not the Senate), Democrats even have a solution for that angst-ridden requirement, for those Democrat representatives whose souls would be pained by having to break faith with their constituents... to whom the Democrats promised a horrific American defeat. Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) appears to have decided to split the authorizing legislation in the House (not Senate) into two pieces: one funding bill for all the urgent domestic spending and the minimum-wage increase, the other for the troops.

The House (not Senate) Democrats would enthusiastically vote for the first. But for the second bill, all but the most conservative Blue-Dog Democrats (in the H., not S.) would vote against funding the troops... which would still allow it to pass, albeit by a narrow margin, with the expected, near-unanimous Republican support. Thus in the House of Representatives at least -- if not in the Senate -- "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," as the late Sen. Paul Wellstone used to say, needn't taint its dainty fingers by being on the same side as America.

Then both bills would be merged when they arrive at the Senate, leaving Harry Reid without succor for his bruised conscience; but by great good fortune, his scruples have harder calluses than hers.

The really interesting question is whether the Republicans who have been pushing defeat for so many months will vote for this bill... or whether they will turn out to be more liberal (and un-American) than even the Democratic Party leadership. Only time...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 22, 2007, at the time of 4:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 16, 2007

Pressure Mounts for Clinton, Obama, Feingold, Biden, Reid to Resign From Senate

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Today's humiliating vote on the bill by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%) to set a hard date for American withdrawal from Iraq -- the bill needed 60 votes to break the Republican filibuster; it got 29 votes, a scant 31 votes short -- puts more pressure on the 28 Democrats who voted for it, including all Democratic presidential candidates still in the Senate, to resign from that august body in disgrace.

The proposal lost 29-67 on a procedural vote, falling 31 votes short of the necessary votes to advance. Of the 67 senators who opposed Feingold's proposal, there were 19 Democrats, 47 Republicans and Connecticut Independent Joseph Lieberman. Of the 29 supporting, 28 were Democrats and Vermont Independent Bernard Sanders.

(Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, 100%, is undisgraceable, so is excused from the calls for mass resignation.)

Everyone knew that the bill wouldn't be able to clear the 60-vote hurdle; but Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) was stunned by how little support he actually had within his own Democratic conference: The bill passed among Democrats by only 60% - 40%. In contrast, Republicans were solidly united against it; not even Sens. John Warner (R-VA, 64%), Olympia Snowe (R-ME, 36%), Susan Collins (R-ME, 48%), Charles Grassley (R-, 88%), or Chuck Hagel (R-, 75%) voted in favor. Sources within the Senate who do not wish to be identified say this signals an impossible task for the pro-surrender wing of Congress.

In a clear sign of a dangerous divorce from reality, Majority Leader Reid announced that a 60-40 split is an example of party unity:

"We stand united.... in our belief that troops are enmeshed in an intractable civil war," said Reid, D-Nev.

A number of independent observers have long raised concerns about Sen. Reid's mental stablity. This worry adds to many others in a rising tide of anti-Reid sentiment that threatens to force his resignation from the Senate, from politics, and perhaps from the world, were he to retire to a life of religious study and monkdom.

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%), who once harbored dreams of being elected president (or at least nominated), joined a number of other rats swimming towards the sinking ship:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democratic presidential front-runner, previously opposed setting a deadline on the war. But she said she agreed to back the measure "because we, as a united party, must work together with clarity of purpose and mission to begin bringing our troops home and end this war."

As it became clear that Democrats are only united in their disunity, she found herself twisting slowly, slowly in the wind -- which, to be fair, is generally her preferred residence; she's not called "the weathercock of the Senate" for nothing. As pressure mounts for her to end her presidential run and leave public life, she may eventually find such a course more palatable than the increasingly untenable alternative.

Presidential formerly hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL, 95%) cast his lonely vote for the bill in order to send a message:

Sen. Barack Obama, another leading 2008 prospect, said he would prefer a plan that offers more flexibility but wanted "to send a strong statement to the Iraqi government, the president and my Republican colleagues that it's long past time to change course."

Instead of a message, he should have sent a sausage: It would have been more easily consumed. But he is right; it is time for Obama and his fellow Democratic candidates and the Democratic majority in Congress to "change course" -- perhaps to supporting American victory, rather than agitating for American defeat.

Even perennial defeatist Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI, 100%), a veteran of such campaigns against victory, appears to have scented the shift in the prevailing winds; he voted against the Feingold bill, ironically remarking:

'We don't want to send the message to the troops' that Congress does not support them, said Levin, D-Mich. 'We're going to support those troops.'

Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE, 100%), proudly and enthusiastically supported the failed effort on the Senate floor; however, this blog was unable to find a single source, even anonymous, who cared. Many believe that Biden intends his current presidential campaign to be a "swan song" to his overly long political career.

As the ripples spread from the crushing Democratic defeat, Sen. Warner's own surrender bill -- setting benchmarks with troop-withdrawals attached -- also failed. Sen. Levin, seeing the handwriting on the wall and reluctant to join the Democratic exodus out the door, withdrew his demand for defeat without allowing it to come to a vote.

Seeing nothing but "miserable failure" on all his anti-victory bills, Majority Leader Reid has evidently given up; he is now likely to admit the Democrats cannot pass any of the troop-abandonment bills that relentlessly burble up from the chamber on the other side of the Capitol Dome:

The Senate must take the next step by passing its own measure. Given the political forces at work, that legislation will be a placeholder, its only purpose to trigger three-way negotiations involving the House, Senate and Bush administration on a final compromise.

As a result, officials said Tuesday that Reid and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell had discussed jointly advancing a bill so barebones that it would contain no funds and do little more than express congressional support for the troops.

This non-bill bill, intended to be written entirely in the joint conference, has led to the suggestion from a number of voices that the majority leader should change his nickname (for however long he can withstand calls for him to step down) from Harry "Pinky" Reid to Harry "Fill In the Blank" Reid.

Even the majority leader himself appears to recognize the drubbing his party just took:

Negotiations on the final compromise are expected to take days.

Wednesday's votes on Feingold and other proposals "will provide strong guidance to our conferees and help shape the conference negotiations we have ahead of us," said Reid.

Let us hope so.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 16, 2007, at the time of 2:00 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

"Surge" - Yet to Begin - Produces Mere 15% Drop So Far

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

A fascinating glimpse into the defeatism mindset: The so-called "surge" (that is, the counterinsurgency strategy), which has not actually started yet (they're still prepping the ground and waiting for the final brigade to take its place), has already produced a 15% drop in attacks... and AP dismisses that as "little effect":

A U.S. government report released Tuesday showed that the recent U.S. troop increase and security crackdown has had little effect on the high number of attacks in the country.

The average number of attacks rose from 71 a day in January 2006 to a high of 176 per day in October, according to the report from the Government Accountability Office. In February, when the troop increase began to take effect, daily attacks dropped slightly to 164. Daily attacks averaged 157 in March and 149 in April, the report said.

Pulling out my rusty calculator, Iraq attacks have dropped by 27 per day... which is more than 15% of what they were. In other words, before the counterinsurgency operation has even begun, attacks -- we're talking attacks from al-Qaeda here -- have already dropped by 15%. And we likewise know that sectarian violence has plummeted.

So you'd expect that civilian deaths would have dropped as well, right? Well, AP wasn't sure; the one report they looked at didn't tell them; so they decided not to bother trying to find out:

The report, which cited the U.S.-led forces in Iraq for the figures, did not measure the numbers killed and wounded in the attacks.

Military officials have said that since the security crackdown in the Baghdad region began more than 12 weeks ago, Sunni insurgents have hit back with powerful, and extremely deadly, car bombs that often cause more casualties than the types of attacks used previously.

Often? But are more or fewer people being killed now than back in 2006? To this question, the author, Thomas Wagner -- or perhaps the author, Hamid Ahmed, and the white guy who takes credit, Thomas Wagner (we'll never know!) -- shrugs his shoulders in journalistic helplessness. What can he do?

He could trundle all the way over to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count to see what could be seen... as Big Lizards did. They're not the best source; but they do thoroughly count every slain Iraqi civilian reported by the elite media (along with many other statistics); so let's give it a shot:

  • In the last half of 2006, an average of 1,978 "civilian deaths" per month were reported;
  • In January 2007, before the counterinsurgency buildup began, there were 1,711;
  • In February, just as the operation was announced, there were 2,864 (more than in any month in 2006 except September);
  • In March, this dropped to 2,762;
  • In April, it was 1,521;
  • In May through the 15th, it's 729, for a projected 1,507 civilian deaths.

Or to put it into percentages, from the local peak in February, civilian deaths have dropped by 1,357 per month, or 47%.

But perhaps that's not really fair; we shouldn't count from a "surge" of al-Qaeda attacks right before we began inserting the brigades into Baghdad and Anbar provinces. All right, let's count instead from the average of the latter half of 2006.

In that case, civilian deaths have dropped by only 471 per month... which is a drop in civilian killings of a "scant" 24%. What was it AP said again?

Sunni insurgents have hit back with powerful, and extremely deadly, car bombs that often cause more casualties than the types of attacks used previously.

Evidently not that often.

So let's tote up the statistics: The counterinsurgency has so far produced a drop in the monthly number of attacks in Iraq of about 15%, and a drop in the monthly toll of civilian killings of about 24%... and the actual operation hasn't even begun yet.

If that is what AP calls "little effect," I wonder what the heck they'll say when the full counterinsurgency actually gets rolling, and the drops are even steeper than that. Perhaps, after some sleepless nights pondering their diction, they'll upgrade the rhetoric... and declare that the reduction in dead Iraqis has gone from "little" to "modest effect."

I modestly submit that, were we talking about homicide-rate reductions in any American city with a Democratic mayor, the elites would be cheering and cutting capers in the streets.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 16, 2007, at the time of 6:02 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

May 13, 2007

The War: Plus Ça Change, Plus Ce N'est Pas la Même Chose

Afghan Astonishments , Future of Warfare , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Much ado is made of a point -- a cliche, in fact -- that I thought should be fairly obvious: The longer we fight, the more -- and the faster -- the enemy adapts to our methods; but so too, the more and faster we adapt to the enemy's adaptations.

Some Democrats appear to find great cause for rejoicing in the first part of this truism; they hope it signals imminent defeat, allowing them to get on with the urgent task of capturing more seats in Congress and electing a Democratic president. However, by ignoring the second part of the truism, they set themselves up for the catastrophic possibility of America winning.

Let's take a single example: When the enemy realized that we mostly moved soldiers around the battlefield on Humvees, they began attacking them with great effectiveness; IEDs account for most of the 3,300 deaths of our servicemen in Iraq. We responded by switching to the Light Armored Vehicle (LAV) Stryker at the end of 2003 (and by "up-armoring" the Humvee, but that was never particularly satisfactory). The Strykers proved extraordinarily resistant to rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and even to the small improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that had killed so many Humvees during the months following the rise of the insurgency in late 2003.

There is no question that the Stryker offered far more protection than the Humvee and troop-transport trucks; and since it was never intended to replace M1 main battle tanks or M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, it's counterproductive to compare them. Alas, by late 2006/early 2007, the insurgents in Iraq -- with much help from Iran -- started effectively killing Strykers (and sometimes the men inside) in a number of ambushes. They had learned to buried heavy explosives, shaped charges, and explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), which the Strykers were never designed to repel:

A string of heavy losses from powerful roadside bombs has raised new questions about the vulnerability of the Stryker, the Army's troop-carrying vehicle hailed by supporters as the key to a leaner, more mobile force.

Since the Strykers went into action in violent Diyala province north of Baghdad two months ago, losses of the vehicles have been rising steadily, U.S. officials said.

A single infantry company in Diyala lost five Strykers this month in less than a week, according to soldiers familiar with the losses, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to release the information. The overall number of Strykers lost recently is classified.

Clearly, the enemy has "gotten the Strykers' number," at least if he has a chance to prepare a big enough bomb in advance and plant it deep enough not to be spotted: The Stryker's undercarriage is not heavily armored, and its flat surface makes it an ideal target for EFPs.

The insurgents also apparently are becoming better at hiding the devices - the IED that killed the six soldiers and the journalist was believed hidden in a sewer line. To add potency, insurgents surrounded the device with cement to channel the blast force up into the tank, according to soldiers familiar with the investigation.

Supporters of the Strykers say all that proves that it's the lethality of bombs in Iraq - not the Strykers themselves - that are the problem: The bombs are now so powerful that even Abrams main battle tanks are vulnerable to some of them.

The natural tendency for proponents of tracked vehicles is to point to the Stryker's wheels and say, "Well there's yer problem right there, lady!" Unfortunately, the Abrams MBT and the Bradley have also been killed at somewhat disturbing rates lately; we're fighting a completely different kind of warfare than the Gulf War, during which those two tracked vehicles received their baptism of fire. I honestly think the wheels vs. tracks controversy is a false herring.

The real problem is simply that the most common method of attacking any vehicle in Iraq today -- and in Afghanistan tomorrow, I'm sure -- is from below; and until very recently, no American combat vehicle was specifically designed to counter such attacks... which are not very common in "force on force" warfare. (This is another instance where counterinsurgency strategy differs from the strategy when opposing an enemy army.)

There simply is no way to put enough armor on the undercarriage of a Stryker (or Humvee, Abrams, or Bradley) to prevent a big enough EFP punching through it; the culprit is the flat surface of the undercarriage itself... it's like smashing a wall with a battering ram: Hit hard enough, and you're going to punch right through, because there's nowhere else for the force to go. (It helps that the EFP is also white hot, melting the steel enough to reduce material strength.)

But don't forget the second half of the truism above; the enemy had his inning, and now it's ours...

Enter the MRAP: the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected class of vehicles. The Marines and the Army have more or less settled on the Couger H-series of MRAP and the Buffalo H-series of Mine Protected Route Clearance (MPCV) vehicles, both manufactured by Force Protection Inc... the latter being a somewhat larger version of the Cougar, equipped with a fork-toothed arm for explosive ordnance disposal (the Buffalo's nickname is "the Claw"):



Couger H-series MRAP    Buffalo H-series MPCV

Couger H-series MRAP (L) and Buffalo H-series MPCV (R)

The great innovation of the MRAP is to redesign the undercarriage itself... and to correct the flaw that made our earlier combat vehicles so vulnerable: their underbelly flatness. MRAPs have a V-shaped hull that channels blast effect to the sides of the vehicle, graphically demonstrated here. Even EFPs have trouble penetrating the undercarriage of an MRAP:



MRAP taking blast

MRAP taking blast; explosive force is redirected to sides of vehicle

The design of the MRAP actually dates back more than three decades to counterinsurgency operations in South Africa. The basic idea of a V-shaped hull to channel radiant energy is even older, being the same principle used in "radar-deflecting" airplane hulls, which have been in development at Lockheed's "Skunk Works" since the early 1970s (they won the actual contract for development of the F117A stealth attack aircraft in 1978); and in a sense, the very idea of the prow of a boat being "pointy" is the same principle in action on the surface of the water.

The Army and Marines have currently ordered 7,774 Cougers, and the program has the very enthusiastic support of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:

Well, I think the first thing that caught my attention, as is often the case, was a newspaper article that indicated that, out of something like 300 incidents involving IEDs, where these MRAP vehicles were involved, no Marines had been killed. And that certainly got my attention.

But the actual buy will likely be much higher, as Multi-National Corps-Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, has ordered the entire fleet of Humvees in Iraq to be replaced by MRAPs over the next two years, according to the Army Times:

Acting Army Secretary Pete Geren confirmed today that the Army is set to substantially increase the number of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles it had planned to buy, replacing within two years the 17,700 Humvees now in Iraq....

The Marine Corps already has more than 100 MRAPs on the ground in Iraq, and the Army will field the first of its 2,500 MRAPs in Iraq beginning in August, 700 of which are already in hand, Geren said.

The MRAP program has moved quickly and is a joint procurement effort between the Army and Marine Corps.

What has held back fielding of more MRAPs is not a "hidebound" military culture or the unwillingness to adapt to changing circumstances. Like upgrading personal body armor for soldiers, the real roadblock is that there aren't enough assembly lines to turn out MRAPs at the speed we need them. That will be the biggest hurdle we'll have to overcome to completely replace the fleet of Humvees (and possibly even Strykers) in the timeframe demanded:

As of July 2006, more than 200 Buffalo and Cougar vehicles were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan without a fatality, despite more than 1,000 mine detonations and IED attacks (see DefenseTech for an especially hilarious example). With more orders in the pipeline from American, Iraqi, and now British customers, meeting production demand has become a challenge for a firm that had just 12 employees at the beginning of 2004.

Force Protection, Inc. hired its 500th employee in July 2006, and a July 17, 2006 release noted that they are engaged in efforts to triple their internal manufacturing capacity. A second and third Cougar production line is being put in place following $41 million of equity financing, and production of its Buffalo variant is also slated to double.

Despite a bit of a slow start, the point carries, I believe. The second half of our cliche above continues to hold true: The enemy adapted to our Humvees and started killing them; we responded by up-armoring them and introducing Strykers. Then the insurgents figured out how to attack our vehicles from below with heavy explosive force... and again we responded, this time with a whole new (for us) class of vehicles, the MRAPs.

In the innovation race, we have the choice to place our money on the United States military and the militaries of our allies -- or on a bunch of Iranian fanatics and their flying monkeys in the Mahdi Militia.

I know where my bet is going.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 13, 2007, at the time of 11:50 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

May 11, 2007

The "Surge" - Which Hasn't Actually Started Yet - Is Petering Out!

Blogomania , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The rush to despair really gets my goat... forcing me, once again, to criticize my all-time favorite blog.

Paul Mirengoff on Power Line wrote a post today fretting that "the surge" (as he insists upon calling it) may be "too little too late." Here is the excerpt in which he defends this military analysis:

It is true that the surge is not complete. But it sounds like the additional forces will concentrate on the outskirts of Baghdad. Though it's possible that progress there will bring benefits to Baghdad, it seems at least as likely that what we're seeing now in Baghdad is roughly what we will get during the remainder of the year.

Where to begin? Oh, I know where...

The urge to "surge"

First, the term "surge" is both misleading and unfortunate. I think it comes from the Iraq Study Group's final report, where they wrote (page 50):

Because of the importance of Iraq to our regional security goals and to our ongoing fight against al Qaeda, we considered proposals to make a substantial increase (100,000 to 200,000) in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. We rejected this course because we do not believe that the needed levels are available for a sustained deployment. Further, adding more American troops could conceivably worsen those aspects of the security problem that are fed by the view that the U.S. presence is intended to be a long-term “occupation.” 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.

I don't know where they got it; some chowderhead in the Pentagon, most likely. But applying this term to Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy is like calling the Battle of the Philippines in World War II a kafuffle: It's non-descriptive, pejorative, and dismissive.

I really wish both those in the news media and secondary sources like bloggers would stop describing our complete change of strategy as a "surge." A surge would mean just squirting a few more troops into the existing strategy.

Instead, we have fundamentally changed everything about our approach to Iraq. It's time to move on from any initial misconceptions we had in 2006 to what we now understand (if we've kept up with our Big Lizards reading) was the complete replacement of a failed "attrition" strategy to a new strategy of counterinsurgency -- which has been effective in similar situations in the past (e.g., Algeria and Vietnam) -- coupled with replacing the entire top leadership of the war, from the commander of MNF-I (Gen. George Casey) to the commander of CENTCOM (Gen. John Abizaid) to the Secretary of Defense himself (Don Rumsfeld).

Those positions are now held by Gen. David Petraeus (commander MNF-I), Adm. William Fallon (commander CENTCOM), and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. I'm not sure whether Fallon was unanimously confirmed by the Senate, but both Petraeus and Gates were.

It may or may not work, but it stands a tremendously greater chance than would a mere "surge;" and it was a monumental about-face by the Bush administration. (Thus proving that the president does indeed listen to criticism and take it seriously.)

Once upon a time...

My next point of demur is this sentence from Paul's post: "It is true that the surge is not complete."

Yes, that is correct. But it's roughly like saying "it is true that the 2008 campaign is not complete"... it has barely even begun!

We discussed this point back in April, more than two weeks ago; according to Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, former professor of military history at the the United States Military Academy of West Point and one of the actual creators of the strategy, the "heavy lifting" of the counterinsurgency has not even begun yet. It's scheduled for "late May or June." All we have done so far is prepare the battlefield for counterinsurgency:

Most of the military operations of recent months have been laying the groundwork for clear-and-hold operations that will be the centerpiece of the new plan. Coalition and Iraqi forces have targeted al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgent cells in Baghdad, in their bases around the capital, and in Anbar, Salahaddin, and Diyala provinces. They have established positions throughout Baghdad and swept a number of neighborhoods in a preliminary fashion. They have begun placing concrete barriers around problematic neighborhoods to restrict access and change traffic flow to support future operations. Targeted raids have removed a number of key leaders from the Shiite militias as well, reducing the effectiveness of Sadr's organization, which was already harmed by his hasty departure for Iran early this year....

Major clear-and-hold operations are scheduled to begin in late May or June, and will take weeks to complete, area by area. After that, it may be many more weeks before their success at establishing security can be judged.

In fact, we just conducted a successful series of raids in Baghdad and north of the capital against al-Qaeda car-bomb "factories." Naturally, the headline of the news story is that two car bombs exploded at checkpoints on bridges in Baghdad today... the underlying message from AP being, see? All for nought... nothing has changed!

I think this is the message Paul is channeling. But at least in this story, it's absurd: the car bombs detonated today were obviously not assembled today; they were, in fact, products from some days ago of exactly the sort of "factories" that we smashed in the raids today.

Clearly a raid cannot unmake a VBIED (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device) that was already assembled and distributed to suicide bombers; the object is to make future VBIEDs harder and harder to manufacture. But again, this is all preliminary to the actual counterinsurgency strategy.

Preassessing the assessment

For that reason, it is quite frankly absurd to make the prediction Paul made: "It seems at least as likely that what we're seeing now in Baghdad is roughly what we will get during the remainder of the year."

Since we have not actually started the counterinsurgency yet, upon what does Paul base that prediction? He has no data whatsoever of the effect of a strategy which is still in its preliminary, "laying the groundwork" phase.

I almost get the feeling that Paul can't understand why we keep monkeying around with all these preliminary, preparatory operations; why haven't we started the counterinsurgency yet? Why didn't the first new combat brigade to arrive just jump right into it?

Imagine a massive fire at a chemical factory. The initial fire station's trucks arrive. What is the first thing they do?

My many years of research on fire-suppression techniques -- religiously watching every episode of Emergency! when I was a kid -- tell me that upon arrival, Capt. Stanley is certainly not going to immediately order, "All right, everybody, run into the burning building! Don't stop, don't look around, don't make any preparations... just run into the friggin' building!"

This is silly. Before sending anybody into a conflagration, the fire department must carry out a lot of preparations:

  • They must find a hydrant, since the tanks in the engine itself won't be enough;
  • Locate where the fire actually is (there may be more than one flamepoint);
  • Locate critical areas (like petrochemical storage tanks) that they must, at all costs, keep the fire away from;
  • Determine what chemicals are burning and whether an evacuation of nearby residences is needed;
  • Determine whether anybody is trapped inside and needs immediate rescue;
  • Communicate their assessment to the other engine companies arriving and with the fire chief, if he's on his way;
  • Start wetting areas to keep the fire from spreading;
  • Start wetting down possible entrances, so the firemen don't have to literally run through a hundred yards of burning chemicals;
  • And of course, don oxygen tanks and other protective gear.

I'm sure I've missed a number of other steps; but the point stands: You don't simply dart, pell-mell, into a structure fire... there are a number of critical prepatatory tasks to perform first.

To use another analogy that a lawyer would certainly understand, you don't go directly from signing up a client to trying the case in court; you must plan a legal defense or prosecution like a military campaign... and there are a great many preliminary steps to take, from interrogatories to locating witnesses to subpoenaing documents to prepping witnesses to deposing witnesses, and so forth, right up to voir dire -- all before you give your opening statement.

And in each example, during that preparation time, someone not intimately familiar with the process might complain that nothing is getting accomlished:

Look, the fire still rages, and not a single fireman has even entered the building yet!

Judging from what's happened so far, it seems at least as likely that what we're seeing now in the burning chemical factory is roughly what we will get during the remainder of the day. It's too little too late!

So when should we assess the success?

Let's take Gen. Petraeus at his word when he says that we won't have a clear idea how well the counterinsurgency is working until September, when next the Bush administration returns to Congress for future funding. At that point, the general has promised to return to Congress himself to testify about the strategy: how well it's doing and what we can do to make it succeed even better -- or, if the news is bad, what we can do to extract ourselves with as little damage as possible.

Making offhand predictions today based upon a strategy that has not yet begun is silly; but worse, it's self-destructive and may even become (if the most radical Democrats have their way) a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I can understand why Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) and Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) would do such a thing: It's good for their political prospects in 2008 -- or so they imagine (though I think they're horribly mistaken about that).

But it's difficult to explain why patriotic, America-loving, conservative bloggers follow the lead of the Washington Post's "analysis of the situation on the ground," which appears to be Paul's primary source. For heaven's sake, we know the Post has made itself the enemy of the Bush administration, and in particular, of the war in Iraq; should we listen to "helpful" analysis and advice from those who desperately want to see us fail?

Would Paul Mirengoff accept campaign advice for Republicans -- from Paul Begala and James Carville?

I have the terrible feeling that what we're seeing is a "surge" of traditional -- and unseemly -- Republican despair. The danger is that the Republican anchor of despair has enormous weight, and it can sink a ship of state as thoroughly as the Democratic anchor of defeatism.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 11, 2007, at the time of 5:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 10, 2007

Shock and Awe: a NYT Iraq Article That Gets It Right!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Predictions
Hatched by Dafydd

We have reached an epoch of media madness in America; it is the age of insanity when the mere fact that a news analysis story in the New York Times, the Great Gray Lady, is neither irrational nor unpatriotic sends shock waves through the Lizard's nest.

The article simply lays out, in a straightforward manner, the situation between the president and Congress on Iraq:

  • Congress demands some set of benchmarks (both military and political), so they can follow whether we're winning or losing in Iraq, which seems eminently reasonable to me;
  • President Bush is willing, so long as failure of the Iraqis to meet them is not tied to withdrawal of troops, training, or reconstruction money. The incentives should be positive, not negative, the president argues (this isn't mentioned in the NYT article, but Bush has said it before);
  • Separately, "moderate Republicans" have bluntly told Bush that "conditions needed to improve markedly by the fall or more Republicans would desert him on the war."
  • The Democrats are pushing a "piecemeal" funding of the war... funding through July and forcing Bush to return, hat in hand, for the last two months of funding at that time;
  • Bush will veto that bill (if it even passes), and Congress will again sustain his veto.

The best paragraph in the entire article is this one, which finally puts a rational "spin" on the angst of the American voter, and how it affected the 2006 election:

“The American people are war-fatigued,” one participant in the meeting, Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois [R, 80%], told CNN today. “The American people want to know that there’s a way out. The American people want to know that we’re having success.”

That's it; that's it exactly: Americans hate to lose, but they love a winner. What disturbs them is not that we invaded. They're not upset that we toppled Saddam Hussein -- Bush's approval rating shot upward when that happened, as it did later when we captured the tyrant. Nor are they sad that the Iraqis held three honest votes and now govern themselves; all of that is good, not bad.

But Americans are angry that since the end of 2004, the "nation-building" part of our operation has lagged terribly; our "war of attrition" worked no better in Iraq under Gens. George Casey and John Abizaid than it did in Vietnam under Gen. William Westmoreland.

Americans are starting to think not only that our strategy (then) was a failure, but that the Iraqi leaders betrayed us, using American troops to overturn the Baathist tyranny, only to institute a majority Shiite tyranny instead.

Bush sold them on a war to create a stable, democratic state, one that can defend itself, in the heart of the Arab Middle East; and they bloody well want to see that, not just replacing King Log with another log, or worse, with King Stork (if Iraq becomes an Iranian puppet state).

Back to the funding bill. A separate AP story adds that, while the "installment plan" funding bill will likely pass in the House, it's very unlikely to pass in the Senate; so Bush won't even get the chance to veto it:

Defiant House Democrats advanced legislation Thursday to pay for military operations in Iraq on the installment plan, ignoring President Bush's veto threat in a complex test of wills over the unpopular war....

But in an increasingly complex political environment, even that measure was deemed to be dead on arrival in the Senate, where Democrats hold a narrow advantage and the rules give Republicans leverage to block legislation.

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. has met privately in recent days with White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the beginning of talks aimed at producing a compromise funding bill that the president would sign.

And I believe that at last, we're seeing the shape of things to come. This is what I predict to happen anent funding our troops in battle:

  1. The House will pass the installment-plan funding bill, sending it to the Senate.
  2. While the Senate debates it, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY, 84%) will continue to discuss benchmarks, eventually crafting a short list of events without timetables attached. The White House will be intimately involved in the agreement and will sign off on the compromise.
  3. The party leaders will then jointly introduce a separate funding agreement that includes the list of benchmarks and attaches positive-reinforcement measures to them... big, fat carrots whenever the Iraqis meet one of the goals.

    The compromise will fund the troops through September 30th, the end of the fiscal year, the next time funding could be sought -- and not coincidentally, the time Gen. David Petraeus said he would be able to make a thorough preliminary assessment of how well the counterinsurgency plan is working.

    If "conditions" are going to "improve markedly," that's when we'll know it. If things are no better, if the counterinsurgency isn't working at all, then it's time to reevaluate our remaining options... and to hunker down for a bitter, defensive war against global jihadism.

  4. When the president announces that he will sign it (assuming no poison pills), the full-funding, benchmark-containing bill will be co-sponsored by more than 70 senators, strongly bipartisan.
  5. The overwhelmingly Senate will vote to replace the installment-plan funding bill with the benchmark bill, while still keeping same name and bill number; this is a trick to get around the constitutional requirement that funding bills originate in the House... technically, it will have. The Senate will simply jack up the title and run an entirely new bill underneath.
  6. The House, after much melodramatic hysteria, will pass the same bill... albeit much more reluctantly and with much more of a "Republican" vote; there will probably be just enough Democrats to ensure passage, and none of them from "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."

    Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) will ensure that no liberal will have to vote for it, but that it will pass nonetheless; she is desperate both to assuage MoveOn ("Those traitorous conservative Democrats betrayed us!") -- but not weak for the reelection of House members in red and purple districts ("See? We funded the troops!").

  7. The president will sign the bill, and Congress can get back to the crusade that the American people elected them to fight: endless investigations of every, single individual in the Bush admininstration, from Attorney General Gonzales and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice down to the White House janitors and PFC. Schlimazel in advanced mess school in the Army.

I will continue my unbridled optimism and hope; try and stop me! I believe that by the end of September, Gen. Petraeus will be able to report -- honestly and candidly -- that we have seen a stunning improvement in Iraq, and that we can begin withdrawing significant numbers of troops.

I may be wrong; I was wrong about the 2006 election (but not about 2004, even back in 2003, when everyone and his monkey's paw was predicting President Dean). But if I'm right, just see what happens to (a) Bush's approval rating, (b) the percent of Americans who say the Iraq war was "worth it," and (c) the "head to head" matchups between Republican and Democratic candidates. Oh yeah, I almost forgot: let's see how victory in Iraq affects the war on global jihadism, too.

I refuse to believe that the Western world will commit cultural suicide; not while I have breath and hope. Emily Dickinson wrote that "hope is the thing with feathers." We need hope to fight; hopelessness breeds only despair and surrender.

The surrender wing of Congress is "the thing that should be tarred and feathered."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 10, 2007, at the time of 4:20 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 9, 2007

We Found the "Moslem Methodists!"

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Moslem Miscellany , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

The day after the debut of Big Lizards, we published a post titled "Where Are All the Moslem Methodists?"; we weren't actually seeking some bizarre Christian-Moslem hybrid -- we sought an Islamist alternative to militancy... something like the Quietism school of Shiism, historically associated with the scholars of Najaf, in Iraq. Quietist ayatollahs, such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, stand in stark contrast to the radical Shia who follow Khomeiniism (which is more associated with the holy city of Qom in Iran).

I described what I would call a "moderate" Moslem: This is a person who does not believe force should be used to enforce sharia law and who does not support violent jihad against others, merely because they are "infidels." The acid test of a "moderate" Moslem would be this: Even if he hates the Jews, he cannot support terrorism against them. That is not the only criterion, but it's clearly the hardest!

The problem, I argued, is that, while most Moslems are "moderate" as I defined the term in that earlier post, nearly all Moslem organizations in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas are radicalized, strident, and militant; this is true of secular as well as religious organizations:

I don't have data on this; but my gut feeling is that the majority of Moslems are moderate as I have described it... but nearly all national or international Moslem organizations, whether overtly religious (like a mosque) or more secular in purpose (like CAIR), are strongly inclined towards militant Islamism and therefore dangerously tolerant of Islamic terrorism. If all that a moderate Moslem sees around him as the public face of Islam are groups that call for jihad, either overtly or slyly, he may well feel that there must be something wrong with him not to feel that same rage and hate. He'll probably fall silent, afraid to object, both because of physical threat, and more important, fear of social shunning....

Maybe if moderate Moslems would concentrate on creating Islamic organizations that give a sense of solidarity to "Moslem Methodists," showing them they're not alone, the natural tendency toward laziness would take over: hating is hot, hard work.

I think I was onto something.

It turns out, however, that this has already been done; there are a number of moderate Islamic organizations... including one Indonesian whopper of a group called Nahdatul Ulama (NU), which claims a membership of around 40 million, but is more likely closer to 30 million... which still makes it the largest Moslem organization in the world.

What amazes me about NU -- mostly because we hear so little about it here in the United States and evidently Europe as well -- is that this very conservative Sunni Moslem organization is pro-Israel, pro-West, and totally opposed to Islamic terrorism against anybody. In fact, the more I read about it, the more convinced I become that NU holds the key to actually winning the war against global jihadism: demonstrating how to be a strong, conservative, religious Sunni without having to slaughter women and children... or even Jews. From the Wall Street Journal opionion piece by Bret Stephens linked above:

Suppose for a moment that the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world openly says "I am for Israel." Suppose he believes not only in democracy but in the liberalism of America's founding fathers. Suppose that, unlike so many self-described moderate Muslims who say one thing in English and another in their native language, his message never alters. Suppose this, and you might feel as if you've descended into Neocon Neverland.

In fact, you have arrived in Jakarta and are sitting in the small office of an almost totally blind man of 66 named Abdurrahman Wahid. A former president of Indonesia, he is the spiritual leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Islamic organization of some 40 million members. Indonesians know him universally as Gus Dur, a title of affection and respect for this descendant of Javanese kings. In the U.S. and Europe he is barely spoken of at all -- which is both odd and unfortunate, seeing as he is easily the most important ally the West has in the ideological struggle against Islamic radicalism.

I think everybody reading these words would agree that we're never going to win the war against global jihadism unless we engage Islamism, not only with military muscle, not only with diplomacy and economics... but in the realm of ideology: We must convince militant Moslems (red) to become more moderate (pink) and convince "moderate" Moslems to join the fight on our side (white). If we fail to convert red to pink and pink to white, the war will go on and on ad infinitum; Americans will not be safe in the Middle East, in Europe, or even here in America (remember the soldiers at Fort Dix).

I deliberately invoke the counterinsurgency strategy of Col. Galula and Gen. Petraeus, because it's the same core idea: You win by converting enemies to neutrals and neutrals to friends. But how do we go about doing that? You can't beat something with nothing, and we can't beat militant Islamism with a pocketful of secular humanism.

I have seen many people argue that Islam is inherently violent, intolerant, bigoted, and completely incompatible with democratic ideals. But Robert Spencer notwithstanding, the mere existence of the powerful voices of Quietism among the Shia, the colossal NU within conservative Sunnism, and the democracy-ready Kurdish versions of Shafi-Sunnism, Shiism, and Sufism prove that there is nothing inherent in Islam -- or even Islamism -- that demands militancy.

We desperately need a great communicator who can speak to America about the need for moderation among Moslems. And we need a great Islamic communicator, one who can reach those Moslems who do not support jihad and sharia (except as personal goals within their own souls)... but who feel alone and threatened by the militant groups they see all around them.

None of this can possibly come from the Bush administration, I am convinced; but one advantage of the accelerated campaign schedule is that President George W. Bush will very shortly cease to be the loudest voice of the Republican Party. He will be supplanted by Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and possibly others who will jump in... and possibly shoot past these three.

This is very good, because each of the big three (and several second-tier GOP candidates) is a far better communicator than the current president. I just hope that they all realize -- and soon -- that our national conversation about Islam and democracy is long overdue. Our counterinsurgency strategy depends upon it, as does much of our diplomacy and even our military posture in the war against global jihad.

We have the arguments; we even have powerful allies. All we have lacked for is the voice. Speak up, Republicans... let yourselves be heard! If the (small-d) democratic majority stays silent long enough, it will cease to be a majority.

And that, as we're now starting to see, would be all the more tragic because it is so avoidable.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 9, 2007, at the time of 6:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 8, 2007

Should We Deal With the (Lesser) Devil?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

AP raises a fascinating question: Should we allow members of the Mahdi Militia to guard a very important Shiite mosque from al-Qaeda attack? (They overtly phrase it as a "dilemma," turning a question into a covert attack on the counterinsurgency strategy, in my opinion.)

In Kazimiyah, a densely packed [northern Baghdad] neighborhood of wooden shops and cheap hotels for Shiite pilgrims, the Americans and their Iraqi partners have opted for militia help to protect the shimmering, blue-domed shrine [of "the mosque of Imam Kadhim"].

With tacit American approval, plainclothes militiamen loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr set up impromptu checkpoints and patrol alleys day and night near the mosque.

The Americans believe that tolerating a discreet role for the Mahdi Army, which U.S. officers refer to by its Arabic acronym JAM [for Jaish al Mahdi, army of the rightly-guided one, or of the 12th Imam -- probably the latter], is better than either picking a fight with the militia or taking the blame if Sunni extremists manage a repeat of the February 2006 bombing of another Shiite shrine in Samarra.

Note that in areas like Kazimiyah and Sadr City, it's virtually impossible to wield any community influence without joining either the Mahdi Militia or the Badr Organization... just as in Germany in the 1930s, there were many civilians who joined the Nazi Party because it was the only way to get ahead (think Oskar Schindler).

Thus we must carefully distinguish between militia members who are actually bloody assassins -- and those who are just "go along to get along" businessmen with no overarching violent agenda.

That caveat accepted, I say it's a very close call... but in these particuar circumstances, with the horrific response that the destruction of that mosque would generate, I must side with the commanders on the ground and say Yes.

Let me convince you...

First, we already have an example of just this sort of "conspiracy of shared interest" -- in Anbar province. There, the American and Iraqi forces have allied with Sunni tribal leaders who, until quite recently, avidly supported al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In fact, several of the tribes that originally backed and supported Musab Zarqawi now fight against AQI as part of the "Anbar Salvation Council." They fight AQI viciously, relentlessly, and effectively; and they're even starting to venture outside al-Anbar into neighboring provinces, such as al-Salahadin:

What is clear is that a battle between forces of the Anbar Salvation Council and al Qaeda in Iraq occurred in the town of al-Nibayi, near Taji in Salahadin province, al Qaeda took casualties and U.S. and Iraq security forces, along with the tribal fighters of the Anbar Salvation Council are securing the scene of the fight in an attempt to find al Masri's body.

While is seems increasingly unlikely that the Council managed to kill Ayyub al Masri, the current head of AQI, the take-away point is this: Al-Qaeda has a strong competitor for the hearts and minds of Iraqi Sunni in Anbar and Salahadin: the Anbar Salvation Council.

The New York Times also noted the strange-bedfellows alliance today:

Ramadi, in Anbar Province, has been at the center of a fight between Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and its supporters and Sunni Arab tribes opposed to the extremist organization....

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, once the dominant force in Anbar, began to lose support after it started attacking civilians and other insurgent groups there. Although many of the Sunni Arab tribes in Anbar had opposed the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, they decided to form the Salvation Council and send tribesmen to join the army and police force to take back control of the province from Al Qaeda.

American troops have tried for four years to stem the insurgency in Anbar, and several times have instituted new strategies to remove insurgents from Ramadi, the provincial capital. None have [sic] shown appreciable results until this most recent effort with the Salvation Council.

They are our most important allies in the region, which used to be AQI's home base. And they're taking casualties; the recent AQI bombing in Ramadi, the capital city of al-Anbar, was aimed squarely at the tribal members of those "rebellious" tribes in the Council, as were many, many other bombings. The shift in Anbar is so pronounced, even Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%) has taken judicial notice:

We are making some progress it turns out, in what is called Al Anbar province against al Qaeda, and the reason we are is that our military leaders have learned a lot in the last several years there and they have made common cause with some of the tribal leaders, who don't like Al Qaeda any more than we do because Al Qaeda is also going after them.

In the cases of both Hillary Clinton and the Times, they've reversed time's arrow, of course: AQI didn't begin bombing Ramadi and other Sunni tribal areas until the tribes tired of Taliban-style totalitarian theocracy and broke from al-Qaeda. Trust Democrats to reverse causality.

But... how does this apply to the Shia? The Shia protecting the mosque of Imam Kadhim are not anti-Sadr; in fact, they're at least peripheral members of the Mahdi Miliia! It's not analogous to the situation in Anbar at all... is it?

It is; but like most analogies, it's not a perfect model. It matches in one particular way, however.

Take a step back in the Anbar situation and look at a wider view: The Anbar Salvation Council is not merely fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq; on a more general basis, they're fighting against chaos and in support of the nation of Iraq.

That's why it's so important to note, as the Times does above, that the tribes comprising the Council "opposed the Shiite-dominated government," but fight alongside it anyway: They rightly understand that the Iraq war is not a "civil war" among Iraqis or a "sectarian war" within Islam; it's an epic, existential struggle between the flying monkeys of jihadism and the defenders of civilization itself. And in that fight, as the president said just nine days after the 9/11 attacks, "God is not neutral":

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

The Shia in Kazimiyah are fighting the same shadow war as their brothers in the Anbar Salvation Council. They, too, fight against the terrorists -- the very same terrorists, in fact, al-Qaeda in Iraq -- who thrive amid collapse, revel in destruction, and celebrate bloody chaos.

Were AQI to succeed in destroying the Imam Kadhim mosque (they've tried unsuccessfully several times), the reaction could be as explosive as when they destroyed the Golden Dome mosque of Samarra: a massive, nation-wide wave of truly horrific sectarian slaughter, with Sunni being slain in every Iraqi city merely for the crime of being Sunni... hence suspected (often rightly suspected) of secretly supporting al-Qaeda.

Such a reaction by the Shia would undo much of what we have accomplished so far in Iraq and immensely complicate our future counterinsurgency... and don't think that AQI is unaware of that fact. It's worth risking a great deal to prevent such a calamity.

Thus, we're in the same fight and on the same side as these local Kadimiyah militiamen -- in this particular case. And even while still fighting against the more violent, activist wing of JAM in other neighborhoods of Baghdad and the cities in next-door Diyala province.

Yet we still must be vigilant, because it's all too easy for Shia with connections to the Mahdi Militia to slide from fighting for Iraq to fighting over Iraq, from confederation to conquest. That is certainly the path chosen by their now exiled leader, Iranian puppet Muqtada Sadr.

This is why I say it's a close call: On the whole, we need Iraqis defending their own neighborhoods -- but also their own country, including the far-flung parts in other provinces. It's all one nation, and Sunnis are right to demand assurance that it will not (and cannot) be split into three separate, ethnically and religiously cleansed pieces, as some Democrats advocate -- now joined by GOP presidential candidate Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS, 87%). That is a prescription for absolute disaster... which I'm sure somebody has already told Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE, 100%). (Whether he won't listen or whether he prefers absolute disaster in Iraq is anybody's guess.)

From the Times article:

The explosion came as tension over a proposed walkout by Iraq’s leading Sunni bloc in Parliament and the Cabinet seemed to ebb after a meeting Monday night between the Shiite Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and Tariq Al-Hashimi, the Sunni vice president.

Both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Hashimi issued statements declaring that their meeting had helped move the political process forward. Mr. Hashimi had threatened to lead the boycott unless there was a clear move to change the Constitution so that the country could not be partitioned into separate Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish states.

Bottom line: So long as these militiamen remember that they're Iraqis first and Shia second; so long as, like the Minutemen on the American border, they remember that their job is purely defensive, not offensive; they are a security asset. In fact, they're part of the counterinsurgency strategy, the core of which is bringing more and more Iraqis into the defense of Iraq. If we're willing to bring formerly terrorist Sunni into the fight against al-Qaeda, why not formerly insurgent Shia?

We're absolutely right not only to "tolerate" a role for moderate members of the Mahdi Militia but to encourage even more such cooperation, especially with Sadr's passing over the eastern hills to Teheran. But as Ronald Reagan's mother always told him when he was a young child, in their frequent discussions about international arms-control treaties, "trust... but verify."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 8, 2007, at the time of 4:06 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

May 7, 2007

Americans With Discivility Act

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Presidential Campaign Camp and Porkinstance
Hatched by Dafydd

Huh. I found this partially written post in the "vault," circa a couple of days before Bush vetoed the troop-funding bill shackled to a time-release surrender. Waste not, want not: I changed the most obviously dated sentences, and here it is!

~

From now on, I reckon we'll have to start calling Sen. "Slow" Joe Biden (D-DE, 100%) Macho Joe Biden instead:

Biden is asked what he'll do when Bush, as is expected, vetoes the Iraq funding bill.

First, he talks about his son, and the equipment soldiers need -- "The idea that we're not building new Humvees with the V-shaped things is just crap. Kids are dying that don't have to die."

And: "Second thing is, we're going to shove it down his throat."

And where Macho Joe goeth, can the Pink Sapphire, alias the Silky Pony, be far behind?

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said Monday [just before vetoing the Democratic surrender bill -- the Mgt.] he believes President Bush will capitulate if Congress continues to confront him with bills to pull troops out of Iraq. [Yeah, that'd be my guess, too... remember all those times he backed down on the Iraq war? -- the Mgt.]

"The president is just ignoring what the Congress is saying and ignoring what the American people want," Edwards said in an interview in Las Vegas. "He just doesn't care. He's just going to do whatever he wants, and he has to be stopped."

The fiend... the very Devil himself! So the president wants to play rough, eh? So he won't take Congress' whip for an answer?

Although Bush said Monday he would work with Congress on an alternative, Edwards said legislators must not compromise.

Instead, Edwards said Congress should continue to pass similar bills. "They need to submit another bill to him with a timetable, and they need to continue doing it until he finally signs one," he said. Asked whether he believed Bush would back down in such a showdown, he said, "Eventually."

Whew! Tough talk from a guy who was originally known as the Breck Girl before he picked up his other two monikers.

This is real "taunt the caged lion" stuff: Two guys whose only previous demonstration of courage is moving faster than the speed of light to kow-tow to Kos and MoveOn.org on everything from Iraq withdrawal to rejecting the tax cuts to refusing to debate other Democrats in a forum sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus... because it's also sponsored by (cue the melodramatic music) the Fox News Channel.

Great Scott, they might have to field a question from Britt Hume! Maybe he'll take his cue from Chris Matthews: "What is the thing that you like best about America?" That'll stump the Democrats.

Mockery aside, what irritates me most is that Democrats only seem to show feistiness when there is nothing on the line: The president is not going to physically attack them, as al-Qaeda would; he won't even force them to make a decision and accept accountability for it; but if Democratic candidates for president are insufficiently uncivil and insolent, they incur the wrath of the nutroots... and that sets their knees a-knock.

So instead of showing some spine by joining Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 75%) and actually supporting the war against a quasi-Fascist fundamentalist theocracy -- which you and I and Chris Hitchens think should be the essence of liberal democracy -- they emit belicose, schoolyard threats to someone they know will simply ignore them.

There is little I despise more than cowardice. I wonder how many independents -- and even center-left Democrats -- have sufficient manliness to be as creeped out by this poltroonery as I?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 7, 2007, at the time of 3:52 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 3, 2007

Counterinsurgency Funding: the Good, the Bad, and the Weird

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The Washington Post has a window into the negotiations ongoing between the Bush administration and the Congress anent funding our troops in the field (hat tip to Patterico, of all people).

Good news...

According to the Post, the Democrats have already caved on the surrender timetables. No, really:

President Bush and congressional leaders began negotiating a second war funding bill yesterday, with Democrats offering the first major concession: an agreement to drop their demand for a timeline to bring troops home from Iraq.

Democrats backed off after the House failed, on a vote of 222 to 203, to override the president's veto of a $124 billion measure that would have required U.S. forces to begin withdrawing as early as July.

Yes, we're all blinking in shock. We knew they would eventually have to either drop the poison-pill... or else go whole hog and brazenly declare that the Democratic Congress intends to abandon our troops in the middle of a war.

But I don't think anyone expected such a quick exit (stage right) for the shibboleth that separates what Paul Wellstone used to call "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- now exemplified by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%) -- from the corrupt and unprincipled party machine: Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%), Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%), and especially House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee Chairman "Mad Jack" Murtha (D-PA, 65%). Evidently, nearly all the Democrats fall into the latter category... quelle surprise!

Bad news...

Alas it's time, as Larry Elderberry so often says, for the big butt: Congressional Democrats have not given up their insistance that they have some sort of operational control over military strategy and the president's foreign policy:

But party leaders made it clear that the next bill will have to include language that influences war policy. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) outlined a second measure that would step up Iraqi accountability, "transition" the U.S. military role and show "a reasonable way to end this war."

Even more unfortunate, a handful of Republicans have been seduced by the siren song of "congressional power," and they're siding with the Democrats... not to the extent of demanding troop withdrawals, but on the touchy subject of how to "enforce" all the myriad "benchmarks" for the fledgling Iraqi government to achieve:

But a new dynamic also is at work, with some Republicans now saying that funding further military operations in Iraq with no strings attached does not make practical or political sense. Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.), a conservative who opposed the first funding bill, said, "The hallway talk is very different from the podium talk...."

Just four Republicans supported the first version of the spending bill: Sen. Gordon Smith (Ore.), Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.), Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (Md.) and Rep. Walter B. Jones (N.C.). But a growing number of GOP lawmakers want language that would hold the administration and the Iraqi government more accountable.

"The general sense is that the benchmarks are critical," said Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), a moderate who opposed the original bill but supports some constraints.

White House officials are also looking to benchmarks as an area of compromise, but they want them to be tied to rewards for achievement, not penalties for failure.

This actually is a pretty good idea: If you want to incentivize the Iraqi government, carrots make much more sense than sticks. Did I actually just use the Dick Gephardt word "incentivize?" I don't think I did; if you thought you heard it, your audio track needs maintenance.

Well, all I can say is that it's a good thing for our congressmen such benchmarks are not applied to the American Congress... else there might be some severe punishment for, e.g., the complete failure of the last Republican Congress to enact critical bills such as immigration reform, Social Security reform, making the Bush tax cuts permanent -- oh, and the 2007 budget; and even more severe punishment for the complete failure of the new Democratic Congress to enact... well, anything.

The idea of "rewards for achievement" of various benchmarks, instead of "penalties for failure," is a pretty good idea: If you want to provide an incentive for the Iraqi government, carrots make much more sense than sticks. The best carrot is handing over more Iraqi territory to the Iraqi government; but other incentives for achievement would include:

  • More money for infrastructure -- hospitals, schools, dams, pipelines, power generating plants, libraries, and especially communications and internet connectivity programs.
  • Pressing for Iraqi membership in international trade organizations.
  • Allowing Iraq to buy near top of the line military helicopters, fighters, anti-IED MRAP armored vehicles, and Predator drone aircraft -- which are useful not only for fighting terrorists and insurgents but also to defend Iraq against its next-door enemies, Iran and Syria.
  • Pushing Arab neighbors and our allies around the world to recognize Iraq and negotiate treaties, accords, and oil and other trade agreements with them.

Each of these motivators would be dual-use, to expropriate a term that used to have a much more sinister meaning in that country: It would certainly give Iraq a strong incentive to step up movement towards full responsibility; and it would simultaneously ensconce Iraq deeper into the Functional Core, as Thomas P.M. Barnett calls the group of highly connected (economically, politically, and via communications), civilized nations of the world in his book the Pentagon's New Map.

The more thoroughly connected Iraq or any other country is to the community of civilized nations, Barnett convincingy argues, the less likely it will behave aggressively towards its neighbors, harbor terrorists, or finance jihadist groups around the world. Contrariwise, the deeper a country is in the Non-Integrating Gap -- isolated, hermetically sealed, radicalized -- the more likely it is to serve as a base of operations for strikes against the Great Satan and our allies. (Think of Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sudan, the Palestinian Authority, North Korea, and Venezuela.)

News of the weird...

So the Democrats' idea of benchmarks isn't too ghastly; benchmarks (or milestones) are useful to see how you're progressing, and you can use positive incentives to encourage the country to pick up the pace.

But what is truly bizarre is the the Democrats don't want to use positive reinforcement: they're absolutely dying to enact a bill where failure to achieve these benchmarks would be "punished" by cutting off civilian funding:

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) indicated that the next bill will include benchmarks for Iraq -- such as passing a law to share oil revenue, quelling religious violence and disarming sectarian militias -- to keep its government on course. Failure to meet benchmarks could cost Baghdad billions of dollars in nonmilitary aid.

The absurdity is that every benchmark requires a huge outlay of money: Building up the Iraqi army and national police takes gold; quelling violence and disarming militias require a strong army and police; passing the oil-revenue-sharing bill demands a strong government, which can only be achieved by quelling violence and disarming militias.

Thus, punishing failure by cutting off civilian funding simply ensures that all of the achievement gaps will simply get worse and worse. Here is a good analogy:

A huge corporation buys a small company in Kalamazoo; they want to turn it into a subsidiary (the company, not Kalamazoo itself). They hire a new CEO and order him to retain the product designers and hire a lot more staff; for this purpose, they allocate a significant budget for the new subsidiary.

But after a while, the Board of the big corporation decides that the CEO isn't moving fast enough: Too many of the senior designers are talking about leaving, and it's hard to get more low-level employees for the money the subsidiary is offering.

The corporation decides to "send a message" to the CEO... so they slice the subsidiary's budget by one third. They threaten that if the CEO is still unable to retain top people and hire new personnel, they'll slash the budget even further!

Yeah. That'll work out. With even less money available, surely employee retention and recruiting will skyrocket...

Bottoms up!

All in all, considering that the ink of Bush's veto has barely dried, I think we've come a long way back towards wartime sanity. But it's an equally long road ahead; and like a skittish donkey, it doesn't take much -- a funny colored rock, a squirrel darting across the path -- to cause the Democrats to freak out entirely, dig in their hooves, and refuse to budge another inch.

Keep your garters crossed.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 3, 2007, at the time of 5:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 2, 2007

We Win, They Lose Inc.

Blogomania , Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Patrick Ruffini has a cool new site called We Win, They Lose. (The line is taken from Ronald Reagan's well-known description of his basic strategy for dealing with the Soviets.)

He has a petition up that I just signed, and I think you all should, too. So there.

Ruffini graciously allows us bloggers to embed the petition in our own blogs. Everyone who signs through Big Lizards earns us "credit," though I'm not sure towards what; I'm hoping there's a free lunch at Souplantation in here somewhere, but it might just be towards getting a little silver star on my permanent record.

In any event, here you go:

So sign away, and be sure to include your blog URL, if you have a blog. If you don't, then use this one, which I randomly pulled out of a hat: http://biglizards.net/blog.

(I'm not exactly sure when I took to carrying around the Big Lizards URL in my hat, but now I'm glad I did.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 2, 2007, at the time of 6:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Letting the Beans Out of the Cat

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I have charged the Democrats for months with mandating surrender in Iraq, not because they're afraid we'll lose, but because they are afraid we might accidentally win.

I believe my thesis has just gained a little traction. Here is a seemingly minor snippet from a longer AP article on the House of Representatives, which (as expected) failed to override the president's veto of the withdrawal timetable masquerading as a troop-spending bill:

Numerous possible compromises are being floated on Capitol Hill, all involving some combination of benchmarks. Some would require Bush to certify monthly that the Iraqi government is fully cooperating with U.S. efforts in several areas, such as giving troops the authority to pursue extremists.

The key impasse in Congress is whether to require redeployments of U.S. troops if the benchmarks are not met.

Under one proposal being floated, unmet benchmarks would cause some U.S. troops to be removed from especially violent regions such as Baghdad. They would redeploy to places in Iraq where they presumably could fight terrorists but avoid the worst centers of Sunni-Shia conflict.

I believe the strands of the web are just beginning to fit into place: As a "compromise," the Democrats now propose that if they can't get all the combat troops to come home... they should at least be allowed to disrupt Gen. Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy!

The counterinsurgency is 80% focused on getting control of Baghdad, on an obvious Iraqi-based principle: Who controls Baghdad controls Iraq, and who controls Haifa Street and Sadr City controls Baghdad.

By insisting that failure to live up to unrealistic "benchmarks" must, at the very least, lead to canceling the counterinsurgency -- thus returning to the failed Rumsfeldian strategy of a "war of attrition," which never works against an outside-financed insurgency -- the Democrats show their tails: Their core goal is to ensure that we cannot win, hence are defeated.

You can tell a lot about a man's priorities, in the midst of negotiation, by the compromises he offers when he cannot get everything he wants; you learn not only his priorities but, more important, his estimation of your intelligence. This Democratic counter-offer speaks volumes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 2, 2007, at the time of 5:15 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

April 29, 2007

"And Why the Sea is Boiling Hot, and Whether Pigs Have Wings"

Iraq Matters , Wordwooze
Hatched by Dafydd

Just a small point to make in this story, which is mostly about a speech Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%) made to leftist activists in California.

I pass lightly over her fabrications about President Bush -- she seems to believe that Bush's people put up that "Mission Accomplished" sign on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in order to claim (prematurely) that the entire Iraq War was finished -- to commence taking victory laps. She is belied by Bush's speech itself, the transcript of which is readily available:

In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

He gave the speech, as its very words proclaim, to commemorate the end of "major combat operations" -- that is, the force-on-force part of the war; and indeed, he was accurate about that: The Iraqi Republican Guard was broken, Hussein's tank divisions were shattered, and his favorite palaces stood in ruins. His sons were dead, and he himself was on the run (he would be plucked from his "spider hole" on December 13th, 2003, and executed just three years later).

But the fact that Hillary Clinton is willing -- eager? -- to prevaricate to achieve her goals is hardly even news... so I won't even mention it. Forget I said anything; erase, erase, erase. This is, after all, the woman who claimed for years that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest... which he did when Ms. Clinton was five and a half years old -- conjuring up the charming image of a little girl with no name, awaiting some knight to perform a deed daring enough to finally supply her a moniker.

Instead, I want to focus for a moment on a statement made by John Edwards. This single sentence perfectly encapsulates the disordered thinking (in a clinical sense) of the Democrats:

Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential nominee, said the world needs to see that "America can be a force for good."

"What their perception is that America is a bully and we only care about our short-term interests," Edwards said. "The starting place is to end the bleeding sore that is the war in Iraq."

Let's pull that apart a bit. How can the Iraq war possibly be an example of America only caring about "our short-term interests?" What conceivable short-term interests could be found in going to war with Saddam Hussein and the Baathists?

  • If all we wanted was the oil -- which I suppose is the only feeble ratiocination that flickers like a birthday-cake candle in the oxygen-deprived brain of the former senator -- then why didn't we just cut a deal with the dictator, as France, Russia, and others did?

    If nothing else, Hussein had proven himself amenable to selling off oil leases at bargain rates to avoid being attacked by great powers. Or even France.

  • And if we didn't just want the oil... then whatever we did want, for good or for ill, is necessarily a long-term interest!

I'm tempted to say "that's so Edwards." But really, such mental confusion goes far beyond the politician known as the Pink Sapphire (formerly known as the Silky Pony). It has become almost canonical for Democrats to say, "Under the criminal Bush regime, A has occurred... and the first thing I'll do as president to fix that problem is B" -- where B is a complete non sequitur to A, of course.

Examples:

  • Under the criminal Bush regime, America's economy has completely tanked, and the the federal deficit is spiraling out of control, higher and higher every year. That's why, when I'm elected president, my very first order will be to completely divest America from all investments in Israel.
  • Under the criminal Bush regime, terrorism around the world and especially within our very own borders has skyrocketed since 9/11. When I'm president, I will take the necessary steps to safeguard our country... starting with a promise in writing to ensure that all Americans, regardless of skin color, have a level playing field when it comes to jobs, education, and government contracts.
  • Under the criminal Bush regime, our air has become unfit to breathe, our water unfit to drink, hundreds of children die of tobacco-related illnesses every day, and the earth's temperature has risen so high that most people now boil their eggs in their swimming pools. America needs a president who can actually solve our terrible environmental problems... and I pledge to you that my very first executive order, on January 20th, 2009, will be to establish a living wage that will provide a decent lifestyle to every American citizen, resident, transient, and bum -- regardless of race, color, national origin, or legal status.

Thus, it became clear to me several months ago that some clever entrepeneur has created Democratic speech-synthesizing software: The candidate (or rather, his campaign's computer consultant) enters his favorite stump-speech slogans, catch phrases, and pithy, rhyming sing-song into the database, along with the general themes of the campaign.

(This database is kept updated throughout the campaign; if a particular saying starts to be ridiculed on Jon Stewart's show, it can be replaced by something eerily similar but distinct enough to pass.)

When a talk is needed, the speechwriter selects the audience from a drop-down menu: Anti-war veterans, Militant gays, Unionistas, CAIR, La Raza, or NPR. Mousing over the "gasbag" icon pops up a menu with varying speech lengths: Sound Bite, Press Statement, Stump Speech, Commencement Ceremony, Denial of All Charges, and Multi-Hour Keynote Address.

Once the writer finishes selecting options, a full speech is randomly generated by stringing together poll-tested, trite-and-true phrases from the most recent (1998) edition of the Lexicon of Liberal Liturgies, spiced by selections from the candidate database -- and complete with the word "(Applause)" arbitrarily inserted after several of the paragraphs. (That last is for consumption by the elite media: They can count them and announce -- in advance -- that the speech was interrupted that many times for sustained hosannas.)

Nothing else could explain the bizarre periphrasis and linguistic contortion that litters the Democratic campaign trail like condoms after a gay-pride parade.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 29, 2007, at the time of 2:02 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

April 27, 2007

"Who Controls the Past Controls the Future..."

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

"...Who controls the present controls the past."

I'm getting angrier and angrier about the brazen attempt by the elite media -- all of them -- to rewrite history... history that is so recent, the ink has barely dried. I was perusing the New York Times article on George Tenet's spit-and-tell biography, and I stumbled across this paragraph:

Mr. Tenet hints at some score-settling in the book. He describes in particular the extraordinary tension between him and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, in internal debate over how the president came to say erroneously in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.

"Erroneously?"

Just in case anybody here missed it the last time, here is the quotation from the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the pre-war intelligence, released in 2004. As before, scroll to page 8 on the pdf:

The intelligence report based on the former ambassador’s trip was disseminated on March 8,2002....

The intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mavaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware’of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999, [name redacted] businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted “expanding commercial relations” to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that “although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq.”

I have now seen the same pugnaciously ignorant pronouncement of falsity from AP, Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and several other newspapers; and it has become clear that this is no accident: I am now convinced that the elite media editors have literally conspired with each other to rewrite the past. They pretend that the Intel Committee report said that Bush lied and Joe Wilson was right about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa -- when in fact, it was the other way 'round.

The media rely upon the fact that the vast, vast majority of their readers no not remember that the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a lengthy, extensive, detailed, and bipartisan examination of pre-war intelligence; and that the readers would not have access to the report even if they should vaguely recall it. The drive-by writers and editors know they won't be called on their deliberate disinformation campaign... so they have no check of conscience to stop them.

This is utterly despicable. They will do more damage to the First Amendment by their thuggish, irresponsible lying than a hundred McCain-Feingold bills and a thousand Patriot Acts could ever do.

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.
-- George Orwell, 1984, chapter 3.

Bear in mind, this entire article is nothing but an advertisement for Tenet's book, a puff piece that assumes throughout that Tenet's version is simply the truth, hence any competing view is biased, irrelevant, and ultimately ignorable. For example, on the claim that the "sixteen words" were "erroneous," the Times never even once bothers to ask anyone else: neither the White House nor the British MI6 (who made the original claim); they don't quote from the 2003 State of the Union speech; and God knows they never mention the Intelligence Committee report.

The article makes its pronouncements in the same spirit as one would say "Bill Clinton said erroneously that he never had sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." (But of course, the Times today would never say that.)

In fact, they don't even put a single question to George Tenet himself! The article takes as its only source Tenet's holy writ.

Thus, we have the spectacle of a major newspaper that won't even go so far out on a limb as to say that Hamas is a terrorist group (it's only alleged); but they know for a fact that Iraq never, ever, ever tried to obtain uranium ore from Niger or any other country on that continent.

On another point, George Tenet now claims that he only used the term "slam dunk" to say that a good job of salesmanship would "sell" the war:

During the meeting, the deputy C.I.A. director, John McLaughlin, unveiled a draft of a proposed public presentation that left the group unimpressed. Mr. Tenet recalls that Mr. Bush suggested that they could “add punch” by bringing in lawyers trained to argue cases before a jury.

“I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context,” Mr. Tenet writes. “If I had simply said, ‘I’m sure we can do better,’ I wouldn’t be writing this chapter -- or maybe even this book.”

Even while recounting this, the Times couldn't even be bothered to interview Bob Woodward, in whose book Plan of Attack the exchange occurs, as CBS News reported:

”McLaughlin has access to all the satellite photos, and he goes in and he has flip charts in the oval office. The president listens to all of this and McLaughlin's done. And, and the president kind of, as he's inclined to do, says ‘Nice try, but that isn't gonna sell Joe Public. That isn't gonna convince Joe Public,’” says Woodward.

In his book, Woodward writes: "The presentation was a flop. The photos were not gripping. The intercepts were less than compelling. And then George Bush turns to George Tenet and says, 'This is the best we've got?'"

Says Woodward: “George Tenet's sitting on the couch, stands up, and says, ‘Don't worry, it's a slam dunk case.’" And the president challenges him again and Tenet says, ‘The case, it's a slam dunk.’ ...I asked the president about this and he said it was very important to have the CIA director -- ‘Slam-dunk is as I interpreted is a sure thing, guaranteed. No possibility it won't go through the hoop.’ Others present, Cheney, very impressed.”

Not "strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’" as Tenet now says he said... just "it's a slam-dunk case."

Which version should we believe? The one Tenet tells in his book, defending his career, now that he knows no stockpiles of WMD were found in Iraq (not counting all the stuff we found that was the wrong kind of WMD)? Or should we buy the version that everybody else in the room told to Bob Woodward in 2004?

For heaven's sake, the version that Tenet retails today doesn't even make semantic sense. What on earth does it mean to say "strengthening the public presentation [is] a ‘slam dunk’?" I can't even parse the sentence. It's like saying "adding more cayenne pepper to the stew is a home run": It might make the stew into a home run, but the act of adding a particular spice is not itself a home run.

Nor does the Times tell us who George Tenet is. As a young man, Tenet worked three years for Republican Sen. John Heinz (Teresa Heinz Kerry's first husband). But from 1985 on, he was a Democratic wunderkind.

In that year, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT, 95%) brought Tenet into the committee as director of the committee's oversight of all arms-control agreements. In 1988, the chairman of that committee, then Democratic Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma, made him Staff Director of the committee.

Sometime in early 1993, President Clinton invited Tenet to join his national-security transition team; and when the transition was complete, Clinton appointed Tenet Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council. Two years later, Clinton elevated him to Deputy Director of the CIA; and a year later, the president made him acting Director of Central Intelligence, to which position he was confirmed in 1997.

We are not talking about a career civil servant here; Tenet was never a bipartisan, neutral, above-the-fray kind of guy... he was a golden boy, a protégé first of Pat Leahy, then David Broder, and finally Bill Clinton. The Times mentions none of this.

They do slightly hint at the fact that he might have somewhat of an axe to grind, since he believes he was blamed in part both for 9/11 itself -- he was DCI for four years before the attack -- and for the CIA claims of huge stockpiles of WMD that filled the various intelligence estimates that were partially responsible for our decision to invade Iraq.

Tenet in particular is aware that Vice President Dick Cheney and then National Security Advisor, now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both advocated dumping Tenet early in the first term. But the Times does not really address the point that Tenet definitely has a dog in the tree: When he lambastes Cheney and Rice, he is getting even with people he sees as having thwarted him (for example, on the inclusion of the sixteen words in the 2003 SOTU).

Even so, I strongly suspect that the New York Times reads into Tenet's book what it wants to read, ignoring much that might mitigate the anti-Bush charge the Times wants Tenet to make.

For instance, this Sunday, Tenet will appear on 60 Minutes as part two of his publicity tour (part 1 was the puff piece in the New York Times and other, lesser advertising broadsheets). In the CBS interview, according to Matt Drudge, George Tenet says the following (hat tip to Friend Lee):

The High Value Detainee program uses “enhanced” techniques said to include sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, and water boarding, in which suspects are reportedly restrained as a steady stream of water is poured over their faces, causing a severe gag reflex and a terrifying fear of drowning. In Sunday’s interview, Pelley challenges Tenet on the “enhanced interrogations,” a topic that gets little play in his much-anticipated book, At the Center of the Storm. “Here’s what I would say to you, to the Congress, to the American people, to the President of the United States: I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots,” he tells Pelley. “I know this program alone is worth more than [what] the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together, have been able to tell us.”

Evidently, the Times writers and editors don't read the Drudge Report. Of course, they probably think it's a blog. They do reluctantly admit that Tenet sometimes defends Bush, generally speaking:

Despite such sweeping indictments, Mr. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Mr. Tenet a Presidential Medal of Freedom, is portrayed personally in a largely positive light, with particular praise for the his leadership after the 2001 attacks. “He was absolutely in charge, determined, and directed,” Mr. Tenet writes of the president, whom he describes as a blunt-spoken kindred spirit.

But even here, the paper tries very hard to put a quid-pro-quo interpretation of Tenet's defense: After all, Bush did award him a Medal of Freedom... what do you expect Tenet to say? And then they return to prune-picking more attacks on Bush administration stalwarts.

I truly believe that the American mainstream news media are drifting back in time, back to the days of the 19th or even 18th century. Back then, newspapers chose up sides in joyous abandonment of any shred of impartiality, referring to John Adams as a "tyrant" and depicting Abraham Lincoln as a "hairy ape." And the media appear to remain blithely unaware that, as their credibility goes, so go their subscribers.

But what's a few million dollars in lost advertising revenue? It's just so much rubbish; at least, compared to the urgent work of saving the world... from Republicans.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 27, 2007, at the time of 7:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2007

Go, Joe!

Heroes of the Revolution , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I've been reading the speech that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT, 75%D) gave on the Senate floor, passionately arguing against the surrender bill that the fatuous Democratic majority in Senate and House have just passed (Power Line has the complete transcript). And I came across this passage that quite literally made my mouth fall open.

It's so obvious once Lieberman points it out... but I must confess, I never realized it until I read Lieberman saying it. You will be as stunned as I, I predict (all emphasis added):

In his speech Monday, the Majority Leader described the several steps that this new strategy for Iraq would entail. Its first step, he said, is to "transition the U.S. mission away from policing a civil war -- to training and equipping Iraqi security forces, protecting U.S. forces, and conducting targeted counter-terror operations...."

There is another irony here as well. For most of the past four years, under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the United States did not try to establish basic security in Iraq. Rather than deploying enough troops necessary to protect the Iraqi people, the focus of our military has been on training and equipping Iraqi forces, protecting our own forces, and conducting targeted sweeps and raids -- in other words, the very same missions proposed by the proponents of the legislation before us.

That strategy failed -- and we know why it failed. It failed because we didn't have enough troops to ensure security, which in turn created an opening for Al Qaeda and its allies to exploit. They stepped into this security vacuum and, through horrific violence, created a climate of fear and insecurity in which political and economic progress became impossible.

For years, many members of Congress recognized this. We talked about this. We called for more troops, and a new strategy, and -- for that matter -- a new secretary of defense. And yet, now, just as President Bush has come around -- just as he has recognized the mistakes his administration has made, and the need to focus on basic security in Iraq, and to install a new secretary of defense and a new commander in Iraq -- now his critics in Congress have changed their minds and decided that the old, failed strategy wasn't so bad after all.

What is going on here? What has changed so that the strategy that we criticized and rejected in 2006 suddenly makes sense in 2007?

Uh... yeah. What?

What has changed, of course, is that President George W. Bush has changed! He was finally persuaded that we could not win a "war of attrition" (to use a term that might resonate with older readers); it failed under Gen. William Westmoreland, and it was failing under Gens. George Casey and John Abizaid. Rather, Bush was finally convinced by Fred Kagan, Gen. Jack Keane, and Gen. David Petraeus that we needed a true counterinsurgency strategy, one that focused on restoring basic security to Iraq area by area... that is, turning red to pink and pink to white.

And -- like a weathercock with its arrow reversed -- the Democrats in Congress instantly and automatically point the opposite direction from the prevailing winds from the White House.

When Bush supported the war of attrition, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) and Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) were totally opposed to it, pointing out that such wars had never worked. But when Bush comes around and finally admits the point, rejecting a war of atttition... then Reid and Pelosi embrace it with both arms and one leg!

I'm not entirely comfortable with the United States Congress turning into Monty Python's "argument clinic." (Perhaps the president should publicly denounce NAMBLA, just to see what happens.)

How long can Joe Lieberman continue the farce of caucusing with the Democrats, while they shamefully reject their duty to fight the war against a vicious, expansionist, theocratic ideology -- which Lieberman himself considers the greatest issue facing America today? At some point, doesn't something break?

Bear in mind, there is nothing that Lieberman can do to make Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY, 84%) the majority leader of the Senate. As Scott Keyes notes at Political Insider, by the nature of the organizational vote that began the 110th Congress last January, the Democrats will control both the committee assignments and the Senate agenda until the 111th Congress convenes on January, 2009. (Hat tip to lefty blogger Hilzoy.)

So how did it flip when Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-VT, 90%D) jumped? Let Keyes explains:

What's the difference between now and 2001? A small but important distinction. When the 107th Congress was convened on January 3, 2001, Al Gore was still the Vice President and would be for another two-and-a-half weeks. Therefore, because of the Senate's 50-50 tie, Democrats had nominal control of the chamber when the organizing resolution came to a vote. With Dick Cheney soon to come in, however, Democrats allowed Republicans to control the Senate in return for a provision on the organizing resolution that allowed for a reorganization of the chamber if any member should switch parties, which Jeffords did five months later. There was no such clause in the current Senate's organizing resolution.

That provision never existed in any previous Congress, and it does not exist in the current organizing resolution for the 110th. Alas, Lieberman can jump all he wants, but Reid will remain majority leader at least until noon, January 3rd, 2009. Still, Joe Lieberman is a man of principle; and I believe that if he jumped ship, it would send shock waves through the moderate Democratic community.

As Lieberman has already proven, he has a personal rapport with voters that extends far beyond his identification as a Democrat: When the Democrats ran nutroots nominee Ned Lamont against Lieberman in Connecticut, independent Lieberman crushed Democrat Lamont 50% to 40% -- or by 11%, if you consider only the two viable candidates and ignore distant Republican Alan Schlesinger.

I believe that most of Lieberman's personal constituency, not just in his state but in the country as a whole, would follow him to the Republican Party. Even without being on the ticket, just as a campaigner, he might very well be able to throw some close Senate races in 2008 to the Republicans... and possibly some close states in the presidential vote, as well. He cannot stop the Democrats from running amok for the next twenty months, but he might be able to threaten their majority so seriously, he forces them to serious-up about the war.

Go, Joe! Go across the aisle; you will find more kindred spirits than you may imagine.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 26, 2007, at the time of 4:42 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

April 25, 2007

The Mything Link

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

So the Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in a snit, have subpoenaed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: They demand she some and testify about pre-Iraq war intelligence -- and about one element in particular:

Republicans accused Democrats of a "fishing expedition." But Democrats said they want Rice to explain what she knew about administration's warnings, later proven false, that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for nuclear arms.

Ah, we come around once more, in the fullness of time, to arguing over President Bush's famous "sixteen words" from his 2003 State of the Union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

But in the meanwhile (since the last go-round) -- did I miss some huge revelation? Has the claim that Iraq "sought" yellowcake from Niger been "proven false?" Did I miss some great and powerful bombshell that was dropped subsequent to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report of July 7th, 2004?

Perhaps my memory fails, but I was under the distinct impression that that massive report on pre-war intelligence in fact found that those words were true -- not just literally (the Brits were reporting such), but in the deeper sense as well... that Iraq really had tried to obtain uranium from Africa. Oh yes, here is it... page 43 (page 8 on the pdf):

The intelligence report based on the former ambassador’s trip was disseminated on March 8,2002....

The intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mavaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware’of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999, [name redacted] businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted “expanding commercial relations” to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that “although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq.”

The "former ambassador" referenced above, from whose debriefing this "intelligence report" was prepared, was some guy named Joe Wilson. (Scooter Libby hinted to me that the former ambassador's wife was in the CIA at the time and may have had something to do with his trip to Niger.)

But according to the impeccably credentialed Reuters News Service, the warnings "that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for nuclear arms" were "later proven false." And if you can't trust Reuters, well, who can you trust?

Therefore, the only possible conclusion is that the president and his entire administration, including Condoleezza Rice, must have lied; and the Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans -- presumably due to Condi's bullying -- must have conspired to slip that supposed confirmation into the 2004 report.

Secretary Rice should be dragged before Chairman Henry Waxman's (D-CA, 95%) committee and interrogated about her Iraq lies and deceptions!

...And about the firing of those U.S. attorneys.

...Oh, and Katrina, and the Pat Tillman cover-up.

...And isn't it about time we got to the bottom of yet another scandal? What did Condi know (and when did she know it) about Bush stealing the 2000 election? It's the most urgent question facing our country today, and all else must stop until we finally get some answers... under oath!

Thus is born the great and powerful mythic lore that sustains the American Left.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 25, 2007, at the time of 2:10 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

April 24, 2007

Ruminations On the State of Things In Iraq

Congressional Calamities , Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Most of this post derives from several sources:

  • Historian Arthur Herman's article in the Wall Street Journal, "How to Win In Iraq (and How to Lose);"
  • Weekly Standard contributing editor and AEI scholar Fred Kagan's article in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, "Friends, Enemies and Spoilers." (Hat tip to frequent commenter Tomy for drawing our attention to this article.)
  • Previous posts by Big Lizards or articles by Bill Roggio and Michael Yon (as linked at the time);
  • What I see in the mainstream media, including Fox News, filtered through the knowledge base formed by the sources above.

Just as the title indicates, I'm simply looking at the current state of things in Iraq -- which is not only not "deteriorating," as the elites would have us believe; it's pretty good and is getting better; at the end, I'll mention a few things we can all do to help keep things moving in the right direction...

So what is this "new strategy" anyway?

We have already discussed, in How to Win/Lose In Iraq (based upon the Herman article), that the new counterinsurgency strategy envisions a very different way of fighting a war. First and foremost, in counterinsurgency, the emphasis is upon maintaining everyday security on the streets -- "clear and hold" -- rather than on hunting down and killing bad guys (the "search and destroy" tactics we used unsuccessfully early in the Vietnam war).

Sometimes clear and hold demands searching out and destroying a particular enemy; but on other days, it may demand adjudicating disputes between neighbors or neighboring tribes, engaging in simple policing in some dangerous areas, reconstruction and clean-up, police and army recruiting, training Iraqis in modern economics, marketing, and business practices, and so forth.

A second element of counterinsurgency is to deliberately mingle Iraqi and American forces to a tremendous degree, at Joint Security Stations (JSSs), as Kagan explains in the Weekly Standard article:

The new plan pushes most U.S. forces out into the population. Americans and Iraqis are establishing Joint Security Stations and Joint Combat Outposts throughout Baghdad. U.S. and Iraqi soldiers eat, sleep, and plan together in these outposts and then conduct mounted and dismounted patrols continually, day and night, throughout their assigned neighborhoods. In Joint Security Stations I visited in the Hurriya neighborhood, in the Shiite Khadimiya district, American and Iraqi soldiers sleep in nearly adjoining rooms with unlocked and unguarded doors between them.

Being constantly seen in and among the Iraqi population, while we're doing everything we can to maintain the security of ordinary Iraqis and help them in their daily lives, we obtain far more intelligence tips; Americans are seen more as "part of the solution" than "the big problem." Kagan notes that since the counterinsurgency operation began, "[intelligence] tips have gone up dramatically over the past two months, from both Sunnis and Shiites."

Second, the basic strategy of counterinsurgency, as developed by French Lt.Col. David Galula, envisions a particular way of looking at the war in order to concentrate our forces:

Galula divided his own district into zones: "white," where government control was complete or nearly complete; "pink," where insurgents competed with the government for control; and "red," where the insurgents were in complete control. A successful counterinsurgency involved turning pink zones into white zones, then red into pink, through a block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood struggle to force the terrorists into the shadows.

Besides a continuous and visible military presence and the red-pink-white model, the third element of counterinsurgency is a sense of inevitability about our eventual victory -- so more and more terrorist supporters jump ship and come to our side instead. The large number of Sunni tribal leaders who have broken from al-Qaeda and now fight against it, along with the formation of an explicitly anti-al-Qaeda Sunni political party (see below), are strong signals that the third element is working as well.

So how goes it, mate?

Drive-by media sources I read earlier said that three of the projected five new brigades have now been deployed to Iraq, and Kagan and Roggio confirm this.

Now, if a person imagines that the "surge" consists of nothing more than adding a few troops to the same failed strategy -- I name no names, but refer you to a senator whose initials are Harry "Pinky" Mason Reid -- he might be tempted to believe that the "surge" is 60% completed, and that the 40% reduction in sectarian violence is all that it will accomplish.

That opinion betrays ignorance of the counterinsurgency strategy itself. Kagan notes that the real heavy lifting has yet to begin:

Most of the military operations of recent months have been laying the groundwork for clear-and-hold operations that will be the centerpiece of the new plan. Coalition and Iraqi forces have targeted al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgent cells in Baghdad, in their bases around the capital, and in Anbar, Salahaddin, and Diyala provinces. They have established positions throughout Baghdad and swept a number of neighborhoods in a preliminary fashion. They have begun placing concrete barriers around problematic neighborhoods to restrict access and change traffic flow to support future operations. Targeted raids have removed a number of key leaders from the Shiite militias as well, reducing the effectiveness of Sadr's organization, which was already harmed by his hasty departure for Iran early this year....

Major clear-and-hold operations are scheduled to begin in late May or June, and will take weeks to complete, area by area. After that, it may be many more weeks before their success at establishing security can be judged.

In other words, the very significant drop in sectarian murder we have seen in the last two months has not been due to the actual clear-and-hold strategy, turning red to pink and pink to white, because that phase has not even started yet. Rather, the drop in murders is the result of mere preliminaries, "laying the groundwork" for the major operation to come.

This bodes very, very well: When we shift from groundwork-laying to insurgent clearing, the bad guys will face an assault many times harder than what they have experienced to date... and they're already being disrupted and dispersed!

Evolution in action

Naturally, as with any battle plan, this one has not survived first contact intact: We are already making changes as the enemy responds. Fortunately, Gen. Petraeus's strategy is flexible enough to accomodate.

When al-Qaeda in Iraq reacted to the troop buildup by fleeing Baghdad to the southern suburbs and nearby towns, and also northward into Diyala province, we responded by redirecting some of the American and Iraqi Army troops to reinforce those areas.

When the leaders of both the Mahdi Militia (Muqtada Sadr) and the Badr Organization (Abdul Aziz al-Hakim) ordered their terrorist groups to stand down and not fight us, we seized the advantage to make more thorough pre-sweeps through Shiite areas, such as Sadr City, a neighborhood within Baghdad.

And as Iran began to take a more aggressive and explicit role in the fighting in Iraq -- shipping explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) to Shiite militias, training insurgents to build their own EFPs, and even sending the Iranian Revolutionary Guards "Qods Force" into Iraq to train and even fight alongside Iraqi insurgents -- we began methodically hunting them down, capturing a number of high-ranking Iranians and infuriating President Ahmadinejad... a sure sign that those operations were successful.

What about more generally?

The Iraqi Assembly of Representatives is not only stable, it's growing stronger as more and more Sunnis come to accept it as the legitimate government. There is no sign of any popularly supported attempt to overthrow it; no Hussein-like "strongman" looks likely to seize control.

When the six members of the government who were also top players in the Mahdi Militia resigned their portfolios, on Muqtada Sadr's orders, Sadr announced that this would cause the government to collapse. It did not, and there is no sign of a motion of no confidence.

Rather, the Shia-dominated government has moved to take firmer control of the Iraq National Police, which used to have a serious problem with Shiite-militia infiltration. From the Kagan article (reparagraphed for clarity):

[S]ectarian killings have dropped because of dramatically increased partnership between the Iraqi police, the Iraqi army, and American forces. The Iraqi police were heavily implicated in the killings; the Iraqi army less so.

U.S. forces do not tolerate such behavior. The partnership has helped American units identify individuals within the Iraqi police and army who have participated in atrocities. As these individuals are identified, U.S. and Iraqi leaders work to prepare evidence packets to support their arrest, detention, and conviction.

As a result, the Baghdad Security Plan is supporting efforts to weed out the worst elements from the Iraqi Security Forces. In some cases, entire police units have been pulled off line, vetted, and "re-blued"--that is, retrained after the removal of known felons and militia infiltrators. In this way, the security plan is improving the quality of the Iraqi Security Forces, which is essential to giving these forces legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people.

This can only occur through the close cooperation of American and Iraqi forces at all levels.

The Iraqi demand that we create courtroom-ready "evidence packets" to go after the infiltrators, rather than just using military intelligence to pick them up as enemy combatants, is actually a very good sign: It means that the Iraqis no longer think of Iraq as a country under occupation, but rather as a sovereign nation that must operate under the rule of law, not "military expediency."

In my opinion, the same is true regarding Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's decision to stop the construction of the ugly, prison-like wall surrounding the Sunni Baghdad community of Adhamiya, which is next to the radical Shiite community of Sadr City: While such "barriers" certainly are effective -- there's no denying that -- you cannot wall off all the dangerous areas of Baghdad or Iraq, because then you have de facto partitioned the country.

Maliki called for "other means of protection for the neighborhoods." I suspect what will actually result is a compromise: less intrusive fencing with sensors, better gating to isolate approaching vehicles and minimize the impact of a car bomb exploding at the gate itself, and more cross-neighborhood patrols of national and local police. I believe this would better serve to bring Iraq together than would a series of walled-off "Baghdad bantustans." (Bill Roggio disagrees, seeing the wall as "a crucial component of the Baghdad security plan.")

The same Roggio piece above notes the formation of a new Sunni political party that is specifically anti-al-Qaeda:

In Iraq's Anbar province, the Anbar Salvation Council continues to gain steam in its fight against al Qaeda. Seven new tribes have just joined the Anbar Salvation Council's political movement, the Anbar Awakening. Last week, the Anbar Salvation Council announced it was forming the Iraq Awakening, a national political party which would "oppose insurgents such as Al Qaeda in Iraq and reengage with Iraq's political process." The Iraq Awakening is scheduled to meet in May, and will be the first Sunni political party to openly oppose al Qaeda in Iraq.

The oil-revenue-sharing bill continues to work its way through the Iraqi parliament. This is the most critical economic compromise that must be wrought, determining whether the Sunnis of Iraq will have any access at all to the Iraqi economy: Needless to say, if they don't, they will have no incentive whatsoever to remain bound by ties of nationalism to the rest of Iraq. Failure to enact this bill would be a death-blow to a free and democratic Iraq.

Fortunately, the Shia and the Kurds -- who control all the oil -- recognize this necessity, and the party leaders have agreed upon a plan (the one mentioned above). There also appears to be broad general agreement on the principle of "un-de-Baathification," allowing former members of the Baath Party who have no blood on their hands to rejoin society... just as Germany eventually had to allow low-level ex-Nazis, most of whom only joined because it was necessary to conduct business, to eventually rejoin German society.

We are still waiting, however, for significant movement towards nationwide local elections.

Democrats gone wild

Looking ahead, there is very little that the Democratic majority in Congress can do to prevent us from fighting this war for at least the next two years:

  • Unlike in 1973 and 1975, Congress does not have a cowed or compliant president to sign its defeatist bills; President Bush has promised to veto any bill that seeks to impose an artificial timetable for withdrawal or undercut the authority of the Commander in Chief to conduct war;
  • Also unlike the end of Vietnam, there is no significant number of Republicans so anxious to surrender that they are willing to defy their own president to override a veto; there is virtual Republican unanimity on that point;
  • The Democrats in Congress, while they have the majority, do not have the overpowering majority they did in the mid-70s; in fact, their margin in each house is slim: in the Senate, 49 Democrats and two Independents who caucus with the Democrats (51%); and in the House, 232 Democrats (53%). By contrast, back in the 94th Congress (elected in 1974), the Senate was 60% Democratic, while the House was one representative shy of 67% Democratic.
  • Many of the Democrats in both House and Senate were elected or reelected from fairly conservative districts in 2006... districts that certainly don't favor enforced defeat in the Iraq war;
  • The Democrats' willing accomplices in the humiliation of America -- the elite media -- no longer enjoy an information monopoly, as they did back in the 70s; there is no "Uncle Walter" to tell Americans that we have already lost the war... just an Ugly Stepfather Harry Reid;
  • Despite the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Bush administration about what would happen if supplementary war funding weren't approved by April 15th, in reality, the president has a wide latitude of spending power within Congressional appropriations: He can shift funds around from elsewhere in the military budget to cover ongoing operations for more or less the entire remainder of his term;
  • But he won't have to do -- since the Democrats do not dare do anything to get the "anti-military" label slapped across their mugs again; not with a tight election coming up! The public attitude towards our military is very, very different today than it was in the mid-70s;
  • And even the longer-term future looks brighter than it did at the end of the Vietnam "tunnel": While some conservatives are disenchanted with George W. Bush and less than enthusiastic about Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and especially John McCain, conservative despair is nowhere near the depths it was during the Watergate-dominated periods of the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. Conservatives will vote -- which they did not do in 1976, once Ford defeated Ronald Reagan for the GOP nomination. There is, thus, a very good chance that the tide will turn again, and Republicans retain the presidency, retake the Senate, and maybe even retake the House as well;
  • Finally -- and most important -- today, we have the horrible example of Vietnam and what happened in the aftermath of our shameful surrender, which we can throw in the faces of those counseling just such a betrayal in Iraq.

But what can I do?

All those who support the war can do their part to help win it by refraining from, on the one hand, schoolmarmish hectoring of every wartime decision the Commander in Chief makes, and on the other, Edvard Munch-like despair at every setback. (Republicans are especially prone to the latter.) Remember that we still get most (not all) of our news from the elite media, and they have a vested economic and class interest in forcing a humiliating loss for America. Don't trust them to tell the truth.

Send or raise money for organizations like Soldiers' Angels that support our troops in the field. Press your local churches, synogogues, mosques, and civic groups to similarly support the troops, whether or not they support the war.

Keep abreast of what is happening in both the larger war on global jihad and the individual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by reading books, newspapers and magazines, and especially non-MSM sources such as Bill Roggio and Michael Yon (now sometimes carried by Dean Barnett at Hugh Hewitt's blog).

The next time Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Silvestre Reyes doesn't know -- or care -- whether al-Qaeda is predominently Sunni and Shia, I want every questioner at the townhall meeting to be able to educate him. Maybe it will eventually stick.

If you have a Republican representative or senator, write him immediately and repeatedly, demanding that he support the war effort and refuse to join with Democrats who want to see us defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Use your superior knowledge base to point out the terrible catastrophe premature withdrawal would create.

If you have a Democrat in both positions, but you live in a nominally conservative or patriotic district, then write them both anyway. Who knows? Our pal above, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, actually supported a troop increase of 20,000 - 30,000 men, back in December, 2006.

If you live in San Francisco or Boston, write to fence-sitting members of Congress on either side of the aisle. If they're cowardly enough to be afraid of the war, they should be cowardly enough to be afraid of an outraged electorate, too!

Blog (or at least comment) in favor of fighting the war by the smartest means possible (which I personally think is Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy at the moment, but that's up to you).

Talk to your liberal friends about the war (yes, you "have to"). It's not enough to preach to the choir; you must preach to the anti-war "sinners." Don't hector them; but let them know that it is not a given that the war is "lost," that in fact it's going pretty well; that the Iraqis and the United States are both much better off with Saddam dead; that this is an existential fight; that the Democratic leadership really does want us to lose (look at Majority Leader Harry Reid); and so forth. Not every liberal wants to commit cultural suicide... look at Mort Kondracke and Joe Lieberman.

The biggest danger is if Republicans in Congress lose heart or misplace their courage, and the bulwark against despair or cowardice is a high morale. It would be humiliating indeed if those not even under fire sank into low morale at the very time our troops' morale is high. So don't do it, and don't let your congressional representatives or your governor do it.

Hold your head high; you're not being shot at. Be the eyes, the ears, and especially the mouth of reason and courage.

And that's the way it is, April 24th, 2007, in what is still the greatest nation that has ever existed on this planet.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 24, 2007, at the time of 5:38 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

April 21, 2007

"Not Responsible for Advice Not Taken"

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

The title, of course, is a wonderful aphorism by science-fiction writer Larry Niven that I have used (with attribution) many times. But it is particularly poignant in this case.

When Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) declared that the Iraq war was "lost" -- and even presumed to read the minds of the Secretaries of State and Defense to pronounce that they agreed with him -- Reid cited, as his only evidence, the multiple suicide and car bombings that occurred on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007. Those five bombings on one day proved that the counterinsurgency strategy was a "failure," Reid pronounced.

On that day, nearly 200 Iraqi civilians died (hat tip to Eason Jordan blog IraqSlogger -- and my apologies for mistaking it for a milblog earlier!) Within hours, Sen. Reid rushed to the microphone in palpable glee at being able to declare defeat and squirt insults, like a squid squirts ink (and for the same reason), at President Bush and Gen. David Petraeus. Petraeus is commander of Multinational Force - Iraq (MNF-I) and architect of the 60%-implemented counterinsurgency that Reid, with his solid history in military studies, has dismissed as doomed.

Most of the deaths that occurred on Wednesday came from a single suicide truck bombing in the parking lot of the Sadriya market in Sadr City, a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad. That explosion alone killed at least 140 people; the other four bombs together killed about 50 more (the exact death toll is subject to some dispute). The Sadriya market bombing accounts for more than 70% of Wednesday's fatalities.

For Reid's conclusion of "failure" to be valid, he must assume that the Sadriya market bombing occurred because of a systemic failure of Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy. Reid must show that the bombing occurred because of some flaw implicit, or at least implicate, in the strategy itself... not because of either a freak chance or somebody failing to do his job.

(Shorthand distinction: A flaw is implicit if it's already present in the strategy but unseen or unrecognized; a flaw is implicate if it arises as a natural consequence of the strategy. Thus, a yolk is implicit in an egg, but a chicken is implicate.)

To un-generalize my point, suppose your strategy for reducing energy costs in an apartment building you manage comprises:

  • Insulating the whole building;
  • Replacing the ancient cooling and heating systems with much newer, more efficient units;
  • Replacing all the incandescent bulbs in the common areas with fluorescent lights;
  • And replacing the old refrigerators with new ones.

Your cost-saving strategy is not discredited if you get socked with a huge electricity bill one month -- because a tenant went AWOL, leaving his electric stove set to 450 degrees!

So what about the Sadriya bombing? It turns out it was only successful because of exactly the kind of idiocy in the analogy above; the explosives-laden truck could not even have gotten into the parking lot -- except that Iraqis removed the concrete barriers that would have forced it to pass through a guarded gate and be searched:

As part of the new Baghdad security plan -- which Petraeus helped design and is in charge of implementing -- large concrete barriers were brought in to restrict access to the parking area after a military "red team" determined that area too was vulnerable. But on April 15, three days before the deadly attack, Iraqi officials ordered the 12-foot "Texas barriers" pulled away after local residents complained about the obstruction.

Clearly, then, the problem the led to the massive death toll last Wednesday was not systemic to Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy; it was neither implicit nor implicate... unless one assumes that Iraqis will always rebel against security measures, though it means their own suicide, and will never be able to learn the routine caution that Western nations pracice. The suggestion seems terribly bigoted to me.

The flaw was in individual and local Iraqi officials, who listened to the immediate complaints of Sadr City merchants about inconvenience instead of explaining the long-term value of security to their constituents. But that lesson was made, with brutal emphasis, by al-Qaeda itself last Wednesday. Perhaps it will now sink in.

Anybody have Harry Reid's cell-phone number? I would love to ask him whether he really argues that a strategy should be considered a "failure" if even a single Iraqi screws up a smallest piece of it on an isolated occasion.

If so, then can we consider the Congressional Democratic majority likewise a failure? Several of them have signally failed to do their jobs in the past 90 days -- starting with Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) and Majority Leader Harry "Pinky" Reid, who have yet to pass a single major bill or indeed do anything at all, other than launch scurrilous and ill-advised attacks upon every Executive official from the lowly assistant to Alberto Gonzales to our military commanders in the field.

Harry Reid: doomed failure who has already lost. Kind of like the sound of that...!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 21, 2007, at the time of 11:25 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

April 19, 2007

Into Every Life, Some Reid Must Fall

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Today's lily-livered belly crawling by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%), flatly announcing that "this war is lost," should disqualify him from the "leadership" position he now occupies, say I... since he is no longer leading but deserting.

Reid triumphally pronounced defeat in a press conference he called shortly after leaving the White House and his discussion with President Bush. Reid particularly singled out the counterinsurgency strategy -- which of course he belittled as "the surge" -- as having been an abject failure... because there were some big bombings yesterday:

"Now I believe myself ... that this war is lost, and that the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday," said Reid, of Nevada....

Well, who could argue with that? I also conclude that, since it was chilly yesterday, therefore global warming is false.

People of at least ordinary intelligence understand that both global warming theory and the counterinsurgency strategy must be evaluated after a reasonably long period of time: ten years or so for the former, six or seven months for the latter. In both cases, a single day is void of meaning.

I have had my suspicions about Reid from the git go. Consider the biography of Harry "Pinky" Reid. First, Reid is one of those politicians who has never held any other job in his life besides -- politics. And even at that, he has never held a political job that had any actual performance standards, no administrative job like governor or even mayor. He served as lieutenant governor; but of course, that has fewer administrative responsibilities than being a dormatory R.A. at UC Santa Cruz, or even being Vice President of the United States.

(Oh, but let me be precise here: Reid allegedly worked as an attorney for two years in the mid-1960s, between when he received his J.D. and when he first ran for the Nevada state assembly. No idea if he actually argued any cases -- unlikely -- or whether he simply clerked for some local judge or worked as a junior peon in a Searchlight law firm. And then, there is that odd, three-year gap between when he failed to be elected senator in 1974 and when he turned up as Nevada gaming commissioner in 1977, during which he must have done something. Maybe he worked as a Pai Gow poker dealer or pit boss at a craps table. But that about covers it.)

During Reid's entire, illustrious, forty-year political career -- as state legislator, lieutenant governor, Nevada state gaming commissioner, U.S. representative, and senator -- with attendant array of "leadership" positions -- he has never once distinguished himself, never stood out, never brought himself to public attention. I suspect that virtually nobody in America except for political junkies could name the majority leader... unlike his counterpart, the Squeaker of the House.

Even Reid's "scandals" have been little and insignificant peccadillos: some land deal trifle in Nevada, having contacts with Jack Abramoff, free boxing tickets, and earmarking a bridge that would marginally help his bottom line -- bagatelles all. He can't even be spectacularly corrupt. One might guess that no crook in his right mind would concoct a spectacular scheme that depended upon somebody like Harry "Pinky."

Reid is like Sir Joseph, the Lord Admiral in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta H.M.S. Pinafore: a man who rose from "office boy to an attorney's firm" to "ruler of the Queen's Navee" without ever once having set foot upon the deck of a ship:

Now landsmen all, whoever you may be,
If you want to rise to the top of the tree,
If your soul isn't fettered to an office stool,
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule--
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea,
And you all may be rulers of the Queen's Navee
!

One might also compare Sen. Reid to a eunuch in a harem: He is aware of something wonderful going on all around him, but he is unequipped by nature to participate.

But we crave more illumination from the majority leader from Searchlight:

"The (Iraq) war can only be won diplomatically, politically and economically, and the president needs to come to that realization," Reid said.... [Once we withdraw our troops in defeat, as Sen. Reid would counsel, then how strong of a diplomatic, political, or even economic "hand" does he think we would have?]

Reid said he did not think more U.S. troops could help. "I think it's failed, I say that without any question," he said of the troop increase.

The "troop increase," which is how Reuters avoids mouthing the words "new counterinsurgency strategy," has been under way for less than two months; and only half of the projected troops have yet been inserted. It will take several more months before we really have an idea how well it will work.

But even so, even with only a fraction of the force we intend to bring to bear turning red to pink and pink to white, and even including the attacks yesterday, the death rate in Baghdad over the past two months is dramatically lower -- about 40% lower than the two previous months.

And that also includes the annual Islamic religious celebration of massacring pilgrims on the road to Karbala, some of which spilled over into Baghdad (killing more people than were killed yesterday).

Good Lord, imagine being adrift in a lifeboat with Harry "Pinky" Mason Reid. He would announce that we were toast and suggest we capsize the boat -- within sight of the Port of Long Beach!

Reid is a reedy drudge, a drab, little man in a drab, little suit, toiling away in a drab, little office in the bowels of an ineffectual body of Congress, which has itself become a mere footnote in the march of destiny. Reid is Walter Mitty without the saving grace of imagination:

  • He waves his abnormally small fist -- former amateur boxer! -- and announces "we killed the Patriot Act!" But of course, he did no such thing. All he managed was to delay its reauthorization for a short bit by filibuster; it was reauthorized intact a couple of months later.
  • He bemoans that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was replaced by Justice Samuel Alito, because that allowed to Court to uphold a federal law banning partial-birth abortion -- a law for which Reid himself actually voted!
  • He cannot decide whether he is for or against immigration, for or against gun control, for or against abortion.

"Pinky" Reid is the Director, from C.S. Lewis's seiminal novel That Hideous Strength, the third of his Perelandra series: the man who was never quite awake yet never entirely asleep, never found in broad sunlight nor yet in starry night; always betwixt and between, never actually deciding anything -- but ruling N.I.C.E. (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments) as a perpetually ambiguous demonstration of the philosophy of perpetual twilight.

There is, however, one silver lining to the dark cloud Reid uses to rain defeatism and despondency on Gen. Petraeus's parade; this one nugget of information jumped out at me, perking me up immeasurably:

"I know I was like the odd guy out yesterday at the White House, but at least I told him what he needed to hear, not what he wanted to hear," he added. ["Him" means the president; that "him."]

It is indeed heartening to read, from Reid himself, that his delusion that we have already lost the war is not shared by his fellow Democrats in the House and Senate delegations; Reid was, as he put it, "the odd guy out."

Odd indeed; and thankfully, more or less out -- of the reckoning. And by his own withdrawal. I suppose that even footnotes must have their footnotes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 19, 2007, at the time of 3:02 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

April 17, 2007

The Soundering of Floundering

Afghan Astonishments , Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

That sound you hear -- is the sound of Democrats running just fast enough to miss the train. "By jingo, what rotten luck!" I doubt their more radical constituents will be fooled.

For some reason known only to Eris, Goddess of Chaos, the Democrats seem to have convinced themselves that, no matter what President Bush said, he would sign their troop-handcuffing funding bill in the end. But as it becomes increasingly clear that he will veto it instead, just as he promised... it turns out that the Democrats never did have a "Plan B."

So what are they going to do? They don't know. It's obvious they can't simply proceed with the defunding of the war; they simply don't have the votes even to pass such a bill, let alone override a presidential veto. The House surrender bill passed by a bare majority, 218 to 212... and surprise, so did the Senate version, 51 to 47.

If even one, single Democrat refuses to go along with cutting off the troops and leaving them to the tender mercies of al-Qaeda and the Mahdi Militia, if a solitary member crosses the aisle in either house, the bill goes down in flames.

Congressional Democrats say there is no doubt President Bush will soon be confronted with legislation calling for an end to the Iraq war.

But the new majority must decide how far to go in trying to tie Bush's hands and what will happen after the president's inevitable veto.

The debate is likely to expose fissures among Democrats, who remain divided on whether to cut off money for the unpopular war and risk leaving troops in the lurch.

"My feeling is at a certain point we're going to have a 'come-to-Jesus' moment in the caucus and talk about whether you fund (the war) or not," said Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash.

"Baghdad" Jim McDermott (D-WA, 95%), you'll recall, visited Saddam Hussein in 2002 to show solidarity and received a $5,000 payoff from a Saddam insider, Shakir al Khafaji. It would be a miracle indeed if Baghdad Jim were to have a "come-to-Jesus" moment. He was reluctant to vote for the bill pushed by Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%), not because it would hogtie our military commanders, but because it actually appropriated money to fight the war.

McDermott is trembling with excitement at the thought of making America lose. I suspect it's as close to a religious experience as he is ever likely to feel.

But there are other Democrats who would recoil from a troop-funding cutoff as from a leper's kiss: Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE, 35%), for example, or several of the Senate and House freshmen.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters Monday that should Bush veto the bill as expected, Democrats would likely opt to replace the withdrawal language with a "softer version" that ties U.S. aid to political progress made by the Iraqi government....

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters Monday he was open to the idea.

"The president is not going to get a bill that has nothing on it," Reid said.

No; but he's likely to get a bill that may as well have "nothing on it." What will eventually land on the desk of the Commander in Chief will be a bill that fully funds the wars and includes vague "goals" and "benchmarks" that the Iraqis ought to meet... but no firm deadlines for withdrawal, and no "triggers" for withdrawal if X, Y, or Z isn't done by time T.

In other words, a clean bill with a little face-saving Democratic window dressing. And Reid and Pelosi will look even more like a pair of jackasses, braying out their defiance as they continue to pull the cart.

Thank goodness for Democratic cravenness. Just think of the fix we'd be in if the congressional Democrats had as much chutzpah as their insurgent allies.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 17, 2007, at the time of 7:42 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 16, 2007

What Goes Up...

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

I never cease to be astonished at how an event can flip from good to bad in a nanosecond -- depending on which way it needs to be spun to hurt George W. Bush.

Two fascinating stories out of Iraq in the last few days. Both would seem, at face value, to be good news. But in the hands of the skillful propagandists in the elite media, both turn into "proof" that the counterinsurgency isn't "working" (by "working," they mean "working perfectly without the slightest back and forth," like turning on a light):

  • In response to a large number of arrests of top leaders of the Mahdi Militia by the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, forcing renegade cleric Muqtada Sadr himself to flee to Iran -- and to a series of sweeps through Mahdi Militia strongholds in Sadr City, forcing the terrorist group to exit Baghdad and flee south -- Sadr has now ordered those members of the Mahdi Militia who were ministers in Maliki's government to resign their portfolios in "protest." Thus, Muqtada Sadr's followers no longer infest the Iraqi cabinet.
  • Sadr called a "massive" rally in Najaf, his original stronghold -- and only 15,000 showed up (media sources across the world said "tens of thousands" attended, but none offered any source for that claim);

Those who have ever had the pleasure of going on a cruise (they're quite reasonable these days) are well aware of the old saying: Cruise-ship entertainers are either young kids on their way up or old has-beens on their way down. What you never see are established and popular acts; they're playing in New York or Los Angeles at $120 per ticket or more.

So using this analogy, does it look as though Muqtada is on his way up -- or dropping like a brick? I think the answer is obvious... and it couldn't happen to a viler guy.

Slither on to have your wisdom confirmed...

Giving up territory is never a sign of strength

The biggest objection people have had about Maliki over the past couple of years is that he is too close to Sadr, to the point of including members of the Mahdi Militia in his actual cabinet. For more than a year now, the United States has tried to get Maliki to sever ties with the terrorist group, to begin a crackdown on Shia as well as Sunni, and especially, to boot the militia out of the government.

Now he has done so -- and the elite media spin it as more evidence of failure! In fact -- honestly, I'm not kidding -- they now embrace Muqtada Sadr as their unofficial spokesman against the Bush administration's refusal to set a firm withdrawal date:

Cabinet ministers loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr quit the government Monday, severing the powerful Shiite religious leader from the U.S.-backed prime minister and raising fears al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia might again confront American troops....

The political drama in Baghdad was not likely to bring down Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government, but it highlighted growing demands among Iraqi politicians and voters that a timetable be set for a U.S. troop withdrawal - the reason al-Sadr gave for the resignations.

What a selfless guy, that Sadr; he joins hands across the ocean with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) and Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) to demand a specific "timetable" for Americans to declare defeat and go home.

And notice how AP tries to stigmatize Nouri al-Maliki by giving him the new title of "U.S.-backed prime minister"... as opposed to, say, "prime minister chosen by the majority of the Iraqi parliament, who were legitimately elected in a free and fair vote by the citizens of Iraq themselves." Is AP sinking so low that they're trying to encourage paranoid conspiracy mongers in Iraq (and America) who believe that Maliki is nothing but an American agent?

Well... yeah; that's exactly what they're trying to do:

The departure of the six ministers also was likely to feed the public perception that al-Maliki is dependent on U.S. support, a position he spent months trying to avoid. Late last year he went so far as to openly defy directives from Washington about legislative and political deadlines.

Why were Sadr's acolytes in the government in the first place? Obviously, because he believed their presence would influence, or even control, government policy. They threatened to leave several previous times, hoping that their departure would bring Maliki's government down.

Thus, Sadr believed he could ensure that the Shiite government would never go after the Mahdi Militia, and in fact would continue to stroke Sadr himself -- who might even at some future date deign to run for prime minister directly.

Might not the sudden failure of that scheme, as Maliki finally turned on them, be a more logical reason behind the resignations than the dubious idea that Sadr, from his hideout in mullah-controlled Iran, is just worried about the freedom and liberty of everyday Iraqis? (You know, just like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.)

So what will be the effect of the Mahdi Militia members quitting the cabinet? Simple: They will be replaced by ministers who actually care about Iraq, not about the elevation and aggrandizement of one man:

Sadiq al-Rikabi, an adviser to al-Maliki, told The Associated Press that new Cabinet ministers would be named "within the next few days" and that the prime minister planned to recruit independents not affiliated with any political group. The nominees will need parliament's approval.

The media want to stoke fears that this means the Mahdi Militia will go on a rampage again; and it's very likely they will try. But in the meantime...

  • We have dramatically diminished their ranks, both leadership and street thugs.
  • We have severed their ties with the Shiite residents of Iraq.
  • We have humiliated their leader and forced him to flee to Iran -- thus confirming his continuning status as Ahmadinejad's sock puppet.
  • We're finally moving against the Mahdi Militia's trainers and suppliers, the Iranian Qods Force; we have captured Qods leaders, intercepted a large number of Iranian-built explosively-formed penetrators (EFPs), and broken up factories where militia members, under Iranian mentoring, were building their own EFPs.
  • And we've already swept through and invested large parts of Sadr City, reducing the militia's territory and denying them safe haven from which to launch attacks.

There will be a spasm of violence for a while; Muqtada Sadr knows that his allies in the American Congress are begging for enough bad news to enable them to force the United States to give Sadr -- and al-Qaeda -- the greatest gift possible: our absence. Indeed, it has already begun:

With the political link severed, there are signs al-Sadr's pledge to control the militia might be broken as well. Forty-two victims of sectarian murders were found in Baghdad the past two days, after a dramatic fall in such killings in recent weeks. U.S. and Iraqi officials have blamed much sectarian bloodshed on Shiite deaths squads associated with the Mahdi Army.

They'll try; what else can they do, having "severed" their "political link" with the prime minister? (In fact, it was the other way around: Sadr's ministers resigned because we finally persuaded Maliki to sever his political links with them.)

But the counterinsurgency never expected -- or depended upon -- Sadr's continued presence by proxy in the Iraqi cabinet. In fact, it's best that all Iranian agents, including Muqtada Sadr, be booted out of all government positions. We want former Iraqi radicals to lay down their arms and join the political system... but we absolutely cannot tolerate Iranian lapdogs running Iraq. That is a prescription for national suicide.

Clearly, losing power in the cabinet cannot possibly be a sign that Sadr is on his way up. But how about the fizzled Najaf rally? What does that tell us?

What if they gave an uprising and nobody came?

Soon after we wrote about The 15,000-Man Million-Man March called by Sadr, Zeyad of Healing Iraq questioned that figure; he believes that there were actually many more people present, and that this proves Sadr's strength is growing, not shrinking. (We cannot figure out the permalink of any of Zeyad's posts; you'll just have to scroll down and try to find it. Sorry! It has no title, but it begins with a photo of a medium-sized gathering of people.)

He objects that "bloggers" (a small number who reposted from the original article on Gateway Pundits) posted what they thought was a picture of the rally in Najaf, but which turned out to be a photo of a 2005 rally in Baghdad. The photograph -- clearly a news-type photo taken from a nearby helicopter or small airplane, not aerial surveillance -- was posted by Multi National Force - Iraq (MNF-I) to accompany the article about the rally.

MNF-I never said that the posted photo was of the Najaf rally, and certainly it was not one of the "aerial surveillance pictures" that the military intelligence officers used to determine the total number of attendees: It doesn't look anything like that sort of aerial photography, as can clearly be seen in this comparison of surveillance of Iran's Natanz nuclear-weapons facility and the photo that appeared on Gateway Pundits and other blogs:



Aerial surveillance of Natanz    rally in Baghdad

Aerial surveillance of Natanz (L), news photo of Baghdad rally (R)

More than likely, it was simply added by the MNF-I webmaster as "eye candy," and he stupidly pulled a file photo of a different rally at a different city at a different time. (As my old DI would say, "yeah, just do it any old way.") But Zeyad is properly irked:

Some bloggers have taken this photo, published in a U.S. military report on the Sadrist demonstration in Najaf, and are running with it as proof that the demonstration was not as large as the media made it to be. And now the photo is all over the blogosphere.

Except that it's not really in Najaf. It's actually a photo of central Baghdad just outside the Sheraton Hotel. Ironically, the misleading photo was posted by bloggers who routinely attack the media for its perceived bias and sloppy reporting.

Zeyad used to be such a pro-America optimistic guy; but ever since he came to the US, he has been poisoned by Democratic "doom and gloomism." But in this case, he was right to point out the mistake, but not to leap to the conclusion that this means the rally was huge.

In fact, we do have a good idea of its actual size, notwithstanding the photo mixup. We quoted from Reuters in our previous post:

Reuters journalists estimated the size of the crowd at tens of thousands, while organizers said the number was far greater. The U.S. military said aerial surveillance pictures showed that 15,000 took part.

However, attacking bloggers who used this photo is unfair. Unlike Zeyad, most of us have never been to Iraq, and we wouldn't know a picture of Baghdad from one of Najaf.

But the main point is that most bloggers do not have the skills or the equipment to properly estimate the size of crowds simply by looking at a picture or two, and that includes Zeyad himself; if he had such training, he would have told us. He is no more able to gauge the size of the rally by looking at the photos he linked than he is to estimate the size of the Baghdad rally in the photo the bloggers posted.

But the intelligence officers at MNF-I do have that skillset, and they have the specialized software to help them: that's their job, estimating the size of, for example, an enemy military unit.

In any event, it doesn't really matter which photograph was posted on the web site, as long as the MNF-I MI officers used the correct aerial surveillance photographs to determine the figure; and as you can see above, it would be impossible for them to confuse the one with the other.

So far, I have not seen any other aerial-surveillance estimate other than 15,000 as originally reported. The elite media have never explained where they got their own claim of "tens of thousands of people."

By the way, here are another pair of photos for you to compare and contrast:



Najaf march    Karachi march

The photo on the left is of the march from Kufa to Najaf that preceded the rally last Monday. The photo on the right is of a march in Karachi, Pakistan, protesting against a hard-line Islamist school. Yes, an anti-al-Qaeda/Islamist march.

Here is what Reuters' caption to this photograph says:

Supporters of Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), a coalition partner in Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's government, attend a rally in Karachi April 15, 2007. Tens of thousands of people rallied in Pakistan's biggest city of Karachi on Sunday to show their opposition to a radical religious school which has begun a Taliban style anti-vice campaign in the capital, Islamabad.

I wonder... does Reuters simply have a key-press macro that reads "tens of thousands of people?"

Nearly all mainstream media described this 15,000-man march as "massive," or "impressive." They desperately want to prove that Sadr is still a force to reckon with in Iraq... because they believe that will force us to embrace defeat and redeploy our troops to nearby Okinawa. Certainly, that is what Zeyad the pessimist believes; he links to actual pictures from the Najaf rally that he appears to believe prove it was massive and impressive (this is the set from Iraq Slogger, from which I copied the picture above on the left).

But is it really? If this were a local blood drive, it would definitely be considered "massive." But for a rally called by Sadr, it falls well short of his previous efforts -- and therefore shows a falling, not a rising star.

Let's recall what kind of crowds Sadr used to regularly gather. Back in August 2006, Zeyad's old school mate, Omar from Iraq the Model, reported on a rally held in Sadr City:

After all, popularity polls do not necessarily reflect the truth and today's demonstration indicates that as well; see, instead of the million figure that Sadr was aspiring to see in Baghdad and out of supposedly 2 million Shia residents of Sadr city only 100 000 showed up and that's only after Sadr summoned demonstrators from the southern provinces and sent busses to fetch them and let's not forget that the demonstration took place in Sadr's own stronghold where it's supposed to take no effort from supporters to show up and march; technically they were asked to march in their own front yard.

A hundred thousand! That is seven times as large as this Najaf rally. And in the past, Sadr has managed to orchestrate rallies of 400,000 plus supporters. So he has gone from nearly half a million, to about a hundred thousand, to fifteen thousand. Which way -- up or down -- would you say that indicates?

Some might argue that since Baghdad is a much bigger city, you would expect a much bigger rally ("Sadr City" is a slum suburb of sprawling Baghdad). But remember, Najaf was Sadr's original stronghold; that was where his 2004 "uprising" erupted. Even though Sadr City was named after Muqtada Sadr's father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, the Mahdi Militia was not a large force in Sadr City back then. As Muqtada Sadr's strength grew, he moved his organization into the capital city of Iraq -- and that was a sign that he was on his way up.

But now, after three years of fighting, and after the expanding crackdown on the Mahdi Militia's insurgency, Sadr is back to calling rallies in Najaf, to which he can barely gather 15% of the strength he could muster a scant eight months ago... and he is too frightened to show up to his own demonstration.

I wonder how many fewer people would have come, had they known beforehand that Sadr himself wasn't going to show his face?

Going... down?

So let's review the seqence of events:

  • We have a terrorist group that used to have six members in the Iraqi cabinet itself... but now they're gone.
  • The terrorist leader issues a call for a colossal rally... but only 15,000 show up; and that number includes many who wouldn't have come, had they known the leader himself would not be present at his own rally.
  • And the reason the terrorist leader didn't dare attend the rally is that he's currently hiding inside Iraq's greatest enemy, Iran, because he's so afraid he'll be seized if he returns to his "home" country.

Sadr and his Mahdi Militia -- it pleases him to call it an "army" -- are not just on their way down; they're swirling around the bowl, about ready to be flushed. They'll remain dangerous to individual victims for some time to come; but their days of glory, when it looked as though they might end up ruling Shiite Iraq, are gone... and such days do not come again.

Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
Then some one said, "We will return no more";
And all at once they sang, "Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam."

Alfred Lord Tennyson, "the Lotos-Eaters," 1833, rev. 1842

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 16, 2007, at the time of 6:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 13, 2007

AP Quantizes Counterinsurgency Success

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Grudgingly -- peevishly -- truculently, the Associated Press has started to report figures that show us just how successful Lt.Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency has been so far:

Figures compiled by the AP from Iraqi police reports show that 1,586 civilians were killed in Baghdad between the start of the offensive and Thursday.

That represents a sharp drop from the 2,871 civilians who died violently in the capital during the two months that preceded the security crackdown.

Outside the capital, 1,504 civilians were killed between Feb. 14 and Thursday, April 12 compared with 1,009 deaths during the two previous months, the AP figures show.

Let's put this into perspective. In Baghdad, civilian deaths dropped 45% in the last two months; throughout all Iraq, 20% fewer civilians were slain. The rise in killings was in parts of Iraq still in the red zone -- or red zone transitioning to pink -- while the drop in killings was in areas transitioning from pink to white.

Just to remind folks of what these terms mean, I refer you to the Arthur Herman article from the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if subscription is required, so let me quote the relevant portion (you can read more, along with our analysis, in How to Win/Lose In Iraq):

Galula divided his own district into zones: "white," where government control was complete or nearly complete; "pink," where insurgents competed with the government for control; and "red," where the insurgents were in complete control. A successful counterinsurgency involved turning pink zones into white zones, then red into pink, through a block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood struggle to force the terrorists into the shadows.

Before the counterinsurgency operation began, Baghdad comprises a relatively small red zone (consisting of Sadr City, completely controlled by the Mahdi Militia, and Haifa Street, a.k.a. Sniper Street, controlled by Sunni extremists including al-Qaeda in Iraq, "AQI"); a very large pink zone, where nobody really controlled the streets -- and where most of the violence on both sides occurred; and a tiny white zone -- confusingly called the "Green Zone," which I'll call the GZ to avoid perplexity -- which Coalition forces controlled.

Today, both Haifa Street and Sadr City have become pink zones, and parts of them are actually white (under the control of Iraqi government forces). The white zone around the GZ has expanded markedly, and many pink-zone areas are now much whiter.

Before continuing, let's quickly discuss one controversy, to which this very article contributes:

On Thursday, extremists managed to penetrate the most secure part of the capital - the Green Zone - and launch a suicide attack in the building where the Iraqi parliament meets.

In yesterday's attack on the Iraqi parliamentary, extremists did not "penetrate... the Green Zone," for the simple reason that the parliament building is not in the Green Zone, and hasn't been since 2006 -- at lease according to a State Department official quoted in Black Five.

The Iraqis evidently decided that all the security measures we had implemented when we controlled that building were too intrusive; they didn't like being searched, so they ended the searches and other "intrusive" protections. That building was less secure than the county courthouses in Los Angeles. Surprise, surprise, the building was attacked!

This says nothing at all about the counterinsurgency strategy; the only thing it illustrates is Larry Niven's famous maxim: "Not responsible for advice not taken."

Speaking of the counterinsurgency success, let's get back to it...

In Anbar, the change is even more marked: With 14 of the 18 Sunni tribal chiefs flipping from supporting al-Qaeda to fighting al-Qaeda, that whole province shifted from very reddish pink to very whitish pink. It's not a white zone yet, but it's moving very strongly in that direction.

This shift in Anbar resulted in a lot of civilian deaths during the last two months, because red zones that were fairly firmly under AQI control suddenly became pink zones, where (by definition) the two sides are fighting. In this case, AQI started bombing its own former supporters to try to intimidate them into neutrality. It didn't work, and AQI is on the run from their former stronghold:

The rise in deaths outside Baghdad may also be partly a result of clashes in Anbar province between al-Qaida extremists and Sunni tribes that have broken with the extremist movement.

For example, at least 52 people were killed Feb. 24 when a suicide truck bomber struck worshippers leaving a Sunni mosque in Anbar after the mosque's preacher spoke out against al-Qaida.

Al-Qaeda attacks Sunni worshippers leaving a Sunni mosque -- does that not smack of desperation?

Common sense dictates that when you push vermin out of one area, they will flow into an adjacent area; that is the underlying genius behind Galula's counterinsurgency strategy, which Big Lizards characterized many months ago as not Whack-a-Mole, but rather Seal-a-Hole:

  1. You clear an area of vermin;
  2. You hold that area in perpetuity;
  3. Then you expand control to adjacent areas.

Note that step 2 requires native forces, since otherwise, Americans would have to stay in control of volatile areas forever. But since Iraqis generally plan to live in Iraq for the rest of their lives anyway, that's the job for them. Oh, did we mention who took over the responsibilty of training the Iraqi Army after our early debacle? Some feller named Lt.Gen. David Petraeus. I suspect we're in pretty good shape on that front.

As you can see, we expect the Sunni and Shia terrorists expelled from the red zones (Sadr City or Haifa Street, i.e.) to show up in red or pink zones outside of Baghdad. But when we expand into those areas as well, we force them to flee still further out. And eventually, they run into the Gulf, the rivers, or Iraqi and Coalition forces in the outlands -- where they're trapped between hammer and anvil and ground into dust.

So not only is increased violence outside the white zone not a sign that the "surge" (a woefully inadequate term for counterinsurgency) is failing, it's a nearly infallible sign that it's succeeding: When pink zones are turning white and red zones turning pink, there is always accompanying violence (which is why you need an army), but that still means you are winning.

AP doesn't like to admit it; they spend much of their article trying to mitigate it; but the news of the countersurgency so far is spectacularly good. It is proceeding exactly as planned. And that's as good as warfare ever gets.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 13, 2007, at the time of 4:36 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

April 12, 2007

Was McCain Really an Early Advocate For "Counterinsurgency?" Actually - Yes!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ, 65%) has recently been claiming that he was an early advocate of the counterinsurgency strategy we're now using so effectively in Iraq. For example, during his speech to the Virginia Military Institute:

After my first visit to Iraq in 2003, I argued for more troops. I took issue with the statements characterizing the insurgency as a few dead-enders or being in its last throes.

I criticized the search-and-destroy strategy and argued for a counterinsurgency approach that separated the reconcilable population from the irreconcilable population.

That is the course now followed by General Petraeus and the brave Americans and the coalition of troops he has the honor to command.

It is the right strategy.

But I confess, that statement left me puzzled, because I didn't recall any such specific criticism. I knew McCain was a forceful advocate of the Iraq war, and I knew he had repeatedly called for "more troops" in Iraq... but that's the not the same thing, is it? That's all I ever heard in the sound bites that the TV and radio news chose to air; that's all I read in the brief McCain quotations in the MSM print medium.

So I Googled around a bit -- and lo and behold, I discovered that McCain is actually telling the literal truth here: He really did advocate a counterinsurgency strategy eerily similar to what we've just embarked upon under Lt.Gen. David Petraeus.

It just wasn't covered by the mainstream news... only by a few blogs and other web sources.

I don't know the first time he did -- I can't say for sure it was in 2003, right after the Saddam Hussein government fell -- but it was certainly well developed as far back as 2005. See what you think about this McCain position paper on GlobalSecurity.org from November 2005:

To build on what has been accomplished, and to win the war in Iraq, we need to make several significant policy changes.

Adopt a military counterinsurgency strategy. For most of the occupation, our military strategy was built around trying to secure the entirety of Iraq at the same time. With our current force structure and the power vacuum that persists in many areas, that is not possible today...

The battles of Tal Afar, like those in other areas of Iraq, have become seasonal offensives, where success is measured most often by the number of insurgents captured and killed. But that’s not success, and “sweeping and leaving” is not working.

Instead, we need to clear and stay. We can do this with a modified version of traditional counterinsurgency strategy.... Rather than focusing on killing and capturing insurgents, we should emphasize protecting the local population, creating secure areas where insurgents find it difficult to operate. Our forces would begin by clearing areas, with heavy force if necessary, to establish a zone as free of insurgents as possible. The security forces can then cordon off the zone, establish constant patrols, by American and Iraqi military and police, to protect the population from insurgents and common crime, and arrest remaining insurgents as they are found.

In this newly secure environment, many of the things critical to winning in Iraq can take place – things that are not happening today. Massive reconstruction can go forward without fear of attack and sabotage. Political meetings and campaigning can take place in the open. Civil society can emerge. Intelligence improves, as it becomes increasingly safe for the population to provide tips to the security forces, knowing that they can do so without being threatened. The coalition must then act on this intelligence, increasing the speed at which it is transmitted to operational teams. Past practice has shown that “actionable intelligence” has a short shelf life, and the lag involved in communicating it to operators costs vital opportunities.

As these elements positively reinforce each other, the security forces then expand the territory under their control. We’ve done this successfully in Falluja. Coalition and Iraqi forces cleared the area of insurgents, held the city, and today Iraqi police and soldier patrol the streets, with support from two American battalions. And when the Iraqi forces are at a level sufficient to take over the patrolling responsibilities on their own, American troops can hand over the duties. Falluja today is not perfect, but our aim is not perfection – it is an improvement over the insecurity that plagues Iraq today.

In fact, McCain even singles out Gen. Petraeus, complaining that he isn't being used:

Keep senior officers in place. The Pentagon has adopted a policy of rotating our generals in and out of Iraq almost as frequently as it rotates the troops. General Petraeus, a fine officer who was the military’s foremost expert in the training of Iraqi security forces, now uses his hard earned experience and expertise at Fort Leavenworth.

I really was quite surprised. I had never heard him say any of this before, despite paying close attention to war-related news.

This fascinates me, because McCain also talked about the need to explain our strategy to the American people and keep them up to date on how it's doing; he is very emphatic about that. Yet the same forces that cripple the president's efforts to explain the purpose of the war to the American people also interfered with McCain's effort to explain the strategic difference between a counterinsurgency operation and other types of warfare.

The fact that I -- and presumably others; I don't believe myself to be uniquely ignorant about this -- were not aware of what McCain, himself, was advocating for at least the last year and a half (and possibly the last four years, if he is correct about the timeline) reinforces just how difficult such communication is... and that the elite media is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

But why is the media so unhelpful? Several forces contribute:

  • Bias against the war (of course);
  • Reluctance to get "into the weeds" of military strategy -- or indeed, any other technical subject;
  • Finally, simple ignorance: the media's complete inability themselves to understand the strategic distinction.

Of the three problems, I suspect the last is most determinative in this case:

  • There is always a market for long, detailed articles on various subjects of interest, and our military strategy during a war is certainly one such subject;
  • It would have been very easy to spin such an article in 2004, 2005, or 2006 against the Bush administration's conduct of the war by focusing on the fact that they're not fighting the sort of counterinsurgency strategy they should have been... thus it could be fit into the standard, anti-war, anti-Bush bias.

That leaves only one insurmountable obstacle: The vast majority of reporters working in the elite, big-box, drive-by media have no military experience, no interest in military matters, and -- to put it bluntly -- don't understand the differences between counterinsurgency, force on force, search and destroy, clear and leave, and clear and hold strategies.

I don't mean they're not up to the level of someone who has actually attended the Army or Navy War Colleges; who would be? Even Tom Clancy is woefully out of date; he doesn't even understand the enunciated purpose behind the Iraq war -- a necessary first step, even if you plan to disagree with it.

I mean reporters are not even up to the level of the average John Q. Public, who has at least enough interest in military matters to watch a few war movies (and who probably knows a soldier or two). We Were Soldiers (the Mel Gibson movie) did a great job of explaining the ROE problems in Vietnam, for example.

Most of us here at home -- and even most soldiers and combat veterans -- couldn't have explained exactly how each one worked (until recently, when several military strategists and historians have done a great job laying them out for us -- particularly Arthur Herman, as we wrote about last week). But we at least all knew that there were such things as different strategies, and that a military campaign was victorious or defeated primarily on the basis of whether it adopts the correct one.

We could easily have guessed that you use a different strategy to fight an enemy nation's opposing army than you would use to fight a terrorist group (which rarely has tanks, air support, ICBMs, or a blue-water navy). I sincerely doubt most in the news media know even that much. I base this judgment on the stories they have written... particularly now, anent the misleadingly named "surge."

For example, from everything I read, journalists really do think that the "surge" consists entirely of sending an additional 21,500 troops into Iraq -- and that's all. They simply don't get the main point, that we changed strategies from search and destroy (which failed in Algeria and Vietnam) to counterinsurgency (which succeeded in both).

The increase in troops is a byproduct of that change, not its core: The core of the strategy is turning pink zones to white and red zones to pink (see our Arthur Herman post linked above). Everything else -- the change in rules of engagement (ROEs), redeploying the troops, better integrating American and Iraqi forces in Joint Security Stations (JSSs), and yes, the "surge" in troops by five brigades -- is just the means to the end of turning red to pink to white.

I honestly believe that if reporters had understood what John McCain and others were saying in 2005 or earlier, they would have written article after article explaining it -- and explaining why the strategy of Gens. George Casey (former commander of Multinational Force - Iraq, MNF-I) and John Abizaid (former commander of CENTCOM) simply wasn't working in Iraq.

They would have published those analyses to bash Bush. Fine; he can take it. Maybe it would have alerted him to the problem earlier, and we could have switched to a counterinsurgency strategy a year or two ago.

Elite-media ournalists who understood military strategy the way Michael Yon and Bill Roggio do could have done a much better job of getting out the message of John McCain and others: They would have published detailed analyses in the Sunday New York Times and explicated the strategic differences during a lengthy interview with McCain or Petraeus on CBS 60 Minutes... remember, the context would have been to bash Bush, so bias would be no bar.

We're just starting to see such articles now -- for example, the Arthur Herman piece on the Algerian counterinsurgency of French Lt.Col. David Galula appeared in the Wall Street Journal. But it's still rarer than an honest Senate Democrat.

As bad as media bias is for the nation -- and I agree it's very, very bad -- the damage it wreaks simply doesn't compare to that wrought by media ignorance and stupidity.

I remember the famous comment by Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, speaking of the execution of the Duc d'Enghien, Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon-Condé on trumped-up charges, and upon the direct order of Napoleon Bonaparte. This nasty bit of business set up the bitter and enduring enmity between the Bonapartists and the House of Bourbon. Boulay said:

It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder. (C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute.)

Letting ignorant elite journalists set the "story" of the Iraq war is worse than mere bias... it is a blunder of monumental consequence.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 12, 2007, at the time of 2:43 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 10, 2007

Oh Yeah, We Almost Forgot...

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

To me, it seems that the "elite" media has gotten worse at reporting the war against global jihadism with every passing month; but this may be the nadir. Today's AP story goes beyond merely being surly about success or trying to shoehorn everything into a "gloss" of failure and defeat. This is positively brazen in its bias.

The story is 25 grafs long, and it's a typical hodgepodge of everything up to the kitchen stink, all crammed together and overcooked like my grandmother's tsimmis. It discusses:

  1. A gunbattle in Baghdad; notice what is missing from the account:

    U.S. and Iraqi soldiers fought a daylong battle with insurgents in a violent area of central Baghdad on Tuesday, leaving four Iraqi soldiers dead and 16 U.S. soldiers wounded, the military said.

    The U.S. and Iraqi forces came under fire by insurgents early Tuesday in the predominantly Sunni Fadhil neighborhood - a criminal stronghold in the center of the capital.

    A U.S. helicopter was hit by ground fire after it strafed the insurgents, but it returned safely to its base, the military said in a statement.

    Two Iraqi soldiers and a child were also wounded.

    Let's see... how about any information on enemy casualties, captures, or whether we got the attackers? Or even who won.

But that's not all; there's plenty more bad news to report!

  1. A woman who set off a suicide bomb among some police recruits, killing 16 Iraqis.
  2. Another account of a gunbattle; the story is written so badly, it's impossible to figure out whether it's the same one described in the first paragraph (likely) or a different but strikingly similar battle elsewhere (possible, I suppose).
  3. Artillery fire that "rang out across Baghdad at midday." But we must be losing, because according to the Associated Press, "the target was unclear." Withdraw the troops immediately!
  4. A car bomb that was targeting Baghdad University but which exploded at a checkpoint instead. (Pssst... doesn't that mean the security forces did their jobs?)
  5. A Katyusha rocket fired at a grade school, killing a first-grader.

Now we come to AP's favorite part, judging from how often they find a way to squeeze it into stories, whether it fits or not:

  1. The daily litany of how many Americans died in a war that (we all know) is hopeless...

    The U.S. military announced the deaths Monday of four U.S. soldiers - three killed by a roadside bomb and a secondary explosion in southeastern Baghdad and another killed in combat in western Anbar province.

    The unit with the three dead soldiers had been conducting raids against militants in the area, and had recently captured five suspects, it said....

    At least 3,285 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.

Oh, but we're not done yet... bad news all around! It might at first seem like good news, but AP takes up the anointed-man's burden to find the much more important negative counterpoint:

  1. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is against timetables for withdrawal; but on the other hand, there was a "massive rally" called by Sadr. Naturally, then, we can discount Maliki's opposition to timetables.

Let's pause a moment to catch our breath here. Remember, this is all one story. (Perhaps AP should simply publish a column titled the Daily Lamentation.)

We're almost done; the end is in sight. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and the story is within measurable distance of ending.

We've reached the point where boring, pointless trivia is appended to the nearest handy Iraq story, since they can't figure out where else to put it. Such as Maliki's travel itinerary:

  1. "While he was in Japan, al-Maliki's office issued a statement saying he would travel to Egypt on April 20 for talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa."

...And curious facts about world geography:

  1. "It would be al-Maliki's first visit to Egypt - the Arab world's most populous nation." [AP neglects to mention the pyramids, the Sphynx, and Howard Carter's amazing discoveries, financed by Lord Carnarvon, in the Valley of Kings.]

The foregoing accounts for 24 of 25 grafs. In the very last paragraph, AP suddenly remembers something they almost forgot. I think they found it in a shoebox, inside a locked filing cabinet, in a disused lavoratory, with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard."

Grudgingly, having nowhere else to put it, they tack it onto the end of this otherwise urgent liturgical recitation of sour news, ranging from dismal to dire. As an afterthought:

Also Tuesday, the U.S. military said it captured more than 150 suspected insurgents in a nearly two-week operation north of Baghdad. Rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, automatic machine guns, sniper rifles and anti-tank mines [probably more Iranian-made explosively-formed penetrators -- the Mgt.] were also seized, it said.

Oh well; I suppose journalistic standards insisted that they mention it somewhere...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 10, 2007, at the time of 1:59 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The 15,000-Man Million-Man March

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

Renegade "cleric" Muqtada Sadr, still in hiding in Iran, called for a Million Man March to protest the fourth anniversary of the American occupation of Iraq... a huge show of force that would stagger the crusader infidels and send them fleeing in terror from Allah's land between the two rivers.

Yesterday in Najaf, his prayers were answered. But the fates are fickle with prayer, and sometimes the answer is "No."

The mighty al-Mahdi Militia gathered, along with its acolytes, camp followers, groupies, hangers on, and sunshine allies. They gathered to demonstrate Sadr's strength in the Shiite community and show contempt for America. But while the precise number of people gathered was... dicey, it turned out to be embarassingly small.

The elite media couldn't seem to get their testimony straight. The protest drew "tens of thousands," according to AP; but then they quoted a source who claimed an order of magnitude higher:

Tens of thousands of Shiites - a sea of women in black abayas and men waving Iraqi flags - marched from Kufa to Najaf on Monday, demanding U.S. forces leave their country on the fourth anniversary of fall of Baghdad. Streets in the capital were silent and empty under a hastily imposed 24-hour driving ban.

Demonstrators ripped apart American flags and tromped across a Stars and Stripes rug flung on the road between the two holy cities for the huge march, ordered up by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a show of strength not only to Washington but to Iraq's establishment Shiite ayatollahs as well...

Brig. Abdul Kerim al-Mayahi, the Najaf police chief, said there were as many as 600,000 in the march, although other estimates were significantly lower. He said 30 lawmakers made the hike and there was no American troop presence except surveillance from helicopters hovering above.

(We have no word yet on whether Police Brigadier Abdul Kerim al-Mayahi is related to Police Captain Jamil Hussein, but we're still searching for the latter -- who is "a person of interest" in the killing of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman -- on every golf course in Southern California.)

Bill Roggio found some different numbers (neither "tens of thousands" nor "600,000"); the crowd size continued to shrink:

The demonstration in Najaf has been muted. While the Middle East Online claimed "hundreds of thousands of Shiites burned and trampled on US flags," the reality is the protest was far smaller than Sadr would have liked. Reuters puts the protest size in the thousands, and during a press round table briefing today, Rear Admiral Mark Fox noted the Coalition is closely monitoring the protest, and put the numbers at 5 to 7 thousand. The protest is monitored both on the ground and via air, which allows for a relatively accurate count of the numbers of protesters.

Reuters chimed in with a hearty "me too!" on the AP guesstimate ("tens of thousands"). Well, that's quite a range of guesses! But the definitive estimate was that based upon aerial photography by Multinational Force - Iraq:

Reuters journalists estimated the size of the crowd at tens of thousands, while organizers said the number was far greater. The U.S. military said aerial surveillance pictures showed that 15,000 took part.

Naturally, Sadr himself was a no-show for his own protest. Instead he issued series of written statements, including this message to the Iraqi police and army -- almost as if he were live-blogging his Not-Quite-a-Million Mahdi March from a remote location in Tehran:

"And here we can see in ... (Diwaniyah), a civil strife the occupier planned, to drag the brothers into clashing, fighting and even killing... Oh (Mahdi Army) and my brothers (Iraqi forces) enough of this clashing and killing. This is success for your enemy ... and (Iraqi army and police) don't be dragged behind the enemy... God has ordered you to be patient in front of the enemy and to unify your efforts against it, not against the sons of Iraq."

Bill Roggio aptly describes this as a "plea." Certainly, these are not the words of a defiant, winning leader; they read more like a desperate man who sees la rêve slipping away.

What, Sadr, desperate? Why, the man can still call a... well, not quite so large a protest march, but bigger than CAIR can get nowadays. And badness knows, the Mahdi Militia can still put up a fight; well, sort of.

But let's examine Sadr's original plan, how he dreamed the war would play out.

Back in January, when the Coalition and the Iraqi Army initiated the current counterinsurgency operation, Sadr actually ordered his men to stand down. He ordered them not to resist, even if they were arrested. At that time, he made several unfortunate assumptions:

  • That Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was no more serious about this "crackdown" on the Shiite militias than he was about the previous ones. Maliki will just make a token effort, he thought, to appease the Americans and relieve some of the pressure on President Bush.
  • That the American surge wouldn't last. Sadr assumed he could hunker down, hide in Iran, and wait it out. After Congress forced Bush to retreat, Sadr would triumphantly ride back into Baghdad atop a flying carpet, the savior and true Mahdi.
  • And finally, that Sadr could use the "crusaders" to rid himself of dangerously insubordinate followers. He would set them up, deliberately leaking intelligence to the Coalition, which would be so good as to take care of a few potential rivals.

Well... that was the plan, anyway.

Sadr turned out to be a dreadful prophet. First of all, miraculously enough, Maliki was serious this time. Who woulda thunk it? The Shiite-dominated Iraqi government started really cracking down on the militias, especially including Sadr's own.

The omnipotent Mahdi Militia was driven out of the Sadr City slums of Baghdad and forced to run southward... where the American and Iraqi forces were waiting. Caught between the Devil and the deep, blue anvil, they were rolled up and ground down, slain via air strikes if they stood and captured by the dozens if they ran. Again from Bill Roggio:

Operation Black Eagle, the security operation against Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army in the central Shia city of Diwaniyah, has entered its fourth day. The last news from the city indicates 39 fighters have been captured and "several" killed. Two known insurgent leaders have also been captured during the operation.

Diwaniyah is the city where large segments of Sadr's Mahdi Army fled to after the commencement of the Baghdad Security Plan, a U.S. intelligence official told us.

It's almost never a clever strategy to hand your territory over to the enemy. Now that the Iraqi Army with their embedded Coalition allies have dug in to hold what they have captured -- an important element of Lt.Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency -- it's dramatically more difficult for the Shia to attack it than to have defended it in the first place.

In addition, it is none so easy to control a wild bunch like the Mahdi Militia, who are more or less a confederation of teenaged thugs. They have neither the discipline nor the patience of a real army. Without Sadr's constant presence, they will wander off to sniff every tree and fire hydrant they pass.

In fact, some of Sadr's men are already trying to reconcile with the Iraqi government. So it goes.

Sadr evidently has suddenly realized his gross miscalculation. He calls for an all-out war against the "occupier." But it is too late; Sadr's moment has passed, and it will not come again, it will not come, ever again.

The fact that he is too frightened to materialize for his own protest stinks of weakness. The miserably small demonstration stinks of more weakness, as does his rapidly disintegrating Mahdi "Army" and his loss of control over its remnants.

What was supposed to demonstrate Muqtada Sadr's strength instead illuminates his increasing irrelevance to the new and democratic Republic of Iraq.

And yes... that certainly is "good news."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 10, 2007, at the time of 5:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 6, 2007

Al-Qaeda in Iraq Committing Institutional Suicide

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Another day, another suicide bombing in Iraq... launched by al-Qaeda in Iraq against their own erstwhile supporters in Anbar province.

This is so self-destructive, driving even more Iraqi Sunnis into the Iraqi military and police, that the only logical conclusion is that AQI realizes that it gambled and lost. It will never regain the trust and support of the Iraqi Sunni tribes, and there is nothing left now but a desperate, eleventh-hour "Hail Mary" (if that's really the phrase I want): They hope to terrorize the Sunni tribal leaders to the sidelines, so at least they will not fight on the side of Iraq and the Coalition.

But it won't work. By killing and eating its own, like the titan Kronos, AQI will merely spawn even more rage against itself, leading ultimately to its own destruction -- at Sunni hands. Al-Qaeda has become so obsessed with gathering the blood and flesh to feed their hungry god that they can no longer live even among their coreligionists; they have become anathema:

A suicide bomber driving a truck loaded with TNT and toxic chlorine gas crashed into a police checkpoint in western Ramadi on Friday, killing at least 27 people and wounding dozens, police in the Anbar provincial capital said....

The bombing in Anbar province marked the ninth use of suicide chlorine bombs in the sprawling, mainly desert territory that has been a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency.

Recently, however, many Anbar tribes have switched allegiance, with large numbers of military-age men joining the police force and Iraqi army in a bid to expel al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. Suicide bombings are an al-Qaida trademark.

Strange as it may seem to call a suicide gas attack "good news," it truly is: It means that AQI has abandoned all hope of forming any sort of "national front," even among the Sunnis, and now believes that every man's hand is against them. It means that Iraq will never be an al-Qaeda base, no matter what happens in the future; beyond hatred, they are despised; no one in Iraq will aid and supply them anymore.

It's also heartening to know that the Iraqi police did their duty: The bomb detonated at a security checkpoint, after the police opened fire on the vehicle. Had it gotten through, it could have killed a hundred people or more.

In more good news, Iraqi and Coalition forces continue to grind up the Mahdi Militia; so even if Muqtada Sadr decides to return one day, he will come home to very little in the way of the private army that was his only source of political power in the first place:

South of Baghdad, Iraqi forces backed by American paratroopers swept into a troubled, predominantly Shiite city before dawn, and the U.S. military said as many as six militia fighters had been killed.

Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a U.S. military spokesman, said eight others were wounded and five detained. There were no reports of civilian casualties in the assault on Diwaniyah, he said.

Residents reported heavy fighting between the U.S. and Iraqi forces and gunmen of the Mahdi Army militia in the city, 80 miles south of Baghdad.

It has also become clear that the Mahdi Militia is fleeing Baghdad, taking its fight to the south, towards Basra. The four British soldiers killed yesterday were blown up by an explosively formed penetrator (EFP), a sophisticated anti-tank weapon which creates a blob of molten metal in a "spear" shape that can penetrate vehicle armor.

EFPs were developed by Western countries as anti-tank weapons in the 1960s or 70s, I believe, and have been used by terrorists at least as far back as 1989 (by the Red Army Faction in West Germany). The models now being found in Iraq come from Iran; in fact, that is exactly what the fifteen kidnapped British sailors and marines were searching for, along with other munitions from Iran, on their routine patrols in the Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq.

In the deep south of the country, the Basra police commander said the type of roadside bomb used in an attack that killed four British soldiers on Thursday had not been seen in the region previously. Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Moussawi's description of the deadly weapon indicated it was a feared Iranian-designed explosively formed penetrator.

Two more of the bombs were discovered planted along routes heavily traveled by U.S. and British diplomats in Basra. Weeks earlier, the American military had claimed Iran was supplying Shiite militia fighters in Iraq with the powerful weapons, known as EFPs. They hurl a molten, fist-sized copper slug capable of piercing armored vehicles....

The Basra region police commander, al-Moussawi, said two similar bombs had been discovered Friday morning; one was discovered on the road leading to Basra Palace, the compound that houses a British base and the British and U.S. consulates. A second was uncovered in the western Hayaniyah district where Thursday's attack occurred. The area is known as a stronghold of the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

So let us take stock:

  • AQI has become so fearful of their former friends among the Sunni tribes that they have turned virtually their entire homicidal attention to them, rather than the rest of Iraq;
  • Meanwhile, the Shiite death squads are being driven southwards, away from the capital and away, therefore, from power; they are being driven into the south, where they are being ground up like pork sausage;
  • And Iran has planted a number of "gifts" to the British people -- in the form of EFPs now being supplied to the Shiite extremists in Basra province -- along roads frequented by British and American diplomats.

That last point is most worrisome. The EFPs were found in Basra province, which is most easily reached via the very waterway in which the British have now suspended boarding operations since the kidnapping (page 3 of the article):

[The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Jonathon] Band also confirmed that the Navy had suspended all boarding operations in the northern Gulf while it carried out a “complete review” of the incident which led to them being seized.

Our British allies need rather to step up patrolling and boarding; I hope that the "complete review" leads to beefing up the British naval forces in the Persian Gulf and the Shatt al-Arab waterway, and that future British boarding parties are much more heavily armed -- and more willing to fight, rather than passively allow themselves to be plucked like overripe limes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 6, 2007, at the time of 2:38 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

April 5, 2007

Dems: Do As We Say, Not As We Said!

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Our commenter Tomy directed my attention to this breath of fresh air on the Iraq supplemental funding bill... an opinion piece in today's Washington Post.

What is most astonishing is that it came from the pen -- word processor -- of former Bush-41 Secretary of State James A. Baker III, the fellow who successfully fought the Florida election debacle in the Supreme Court on behalf of his old boss's son, the current president. Oh yes, and the co-chair of the Iraq Study Group.

I rise in astonishment, because Baker has been pretty much of a pain in the tuchus for some months now, demanding more "diplomacy" with Iran and Syria (he does it again in this Op-Ed, but it's still worth reading).

You remember the Iraq Study Group, right? Evidently Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) does not. They were the bipartisan group (the other co-chair was former Democratic dauphin of the House Lee Hamilton) which produced a series of recommendations anent Iraq. Way back in the dim mists of January, it pleased the Democrats to declare those recommendations the single most important blueprint for moving that thorny problem forward... and they insisted, nay demanded, that President George W. Bush follow every last jot and tittle of that report.

Well today, Baker reminds us of one of the most important of the ISG's recommendations -- one that appears to have slipped Mr. Reid's mind:

The best, and perhaps only, way to build national agreement on the path forward is for the president and Congress to embrace the only set of recommendations that has generated bipartisan support: the Iraq Study Group report...

The report does not set timetables or deadlines for the removal of troops, as contemplated by the supplemental spending bills the House and Senate passed. In fact, the report specifically opposes that approach. As many military and political leaders told us, an arbitrary deadline would allow the enemy to wait us out and would strengthen the positions of extremists over moderates. A premature American departure from Iraq, we unanimously concluded, would almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence and further deterioration of conditions in Iraq and possibly other countries.

In addition, many of the provisions of Lt.Gen. David Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy embrace the unanimous recommendations found in that document. For example:

The president's plan increases the number of American advisers embedded in Iraqi army units, with the goal that the Iraqi government will assume control of security in all provinces by November. It outlines benchmarks and indicates that the Iraqi government must act to attain them. He has approved ministerial-level meetings of all of Iraq's neighbors, including Syria and Iran; the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council; and other countries.

Well how about it, Sen. Reid? Do you -- or do you not -- wish us to follow the ISG's bipartisan recommendations?

If so, you and Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 90%) surely cannot insist upon timetables for surrender and defunding the troops! As Chairman Baker of the Iraq Study Group writes...

An important way to encourage Iraqis to work together is to hold them to the type of benchmarks that Congress, President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have all considered. If the Iraqi government does not meet those benchmarks, the United States "should reduce its political, military, or economic support for the Iraqi government," the report said. But we did not suggest that this be codified into legislation. The report doesn't recommend a firm deadline for troop removal unless America's military leadership believes that the situation warrants it.

Nothing has happened since the report was released that would justify changing that view. Setting a deadline for withdrawal regardless of conditions in Iraq makes even less sense today because there is evidence that the temporary surge is reducing the level of violence in Baghdad. As Baghdad goes, so goes Iraq.

I can only say -- and I know I'll hate myself in the morning -- that the Democrats were for the Iraq Study Group recommendations before they were against them.

I sure hope Tony Snow is in good enough shape to call a bigger than usual press conference, invite the entire White House press gang -- and hurl the Baker Op-Ed right in their fat, pasty, moon faces.

And thanks, Tomy... that was a great comment.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 5, 2007, at the time of 12:45 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 4, 2007

Cutting Off Your Dough to Spike Your Race

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%), in a snit that the president will exercise his constitutional authority to veto a congressional bill micromanaging the surrender, now vows to cut all funding for the war.

Perhaps Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) will take her hijab off long enough to tell Harry Reid to "calm down."

As a quick aside, I had no idea just how fatuous Pelosi's entire statement was. First, President Bush explains why he will veto the bill:

"The consequences of imposing such a specific and random date of withdrawal would be disastrous," he said. "Our enemies in Iraq would simply have to mark their calendars. They'd spend the months ahead plotting how to use their new safe haven once we were to leave. It makes no sense for politicians in Washington, D.C. to be dictating arbitrary timelines for our military commanders in a war zone 6,000 miles away."

Perhaps I'm just viewing everything he says through red-state-colored glasses; but honestly, he doesn't sound either hysterical or out of control -- the times when it might make sense for someone to say "calm down." To me, it sounds like a calm, simple, and straightforward recitation of what would likely happen were he to sign that bill.

Then the Squeaker responds:

"On this very important matter, I would extend a hand of friendship to the president to say to him, calm down with the threats," Pelosi told reporters on Capitol Hill. "There's a new Congress in town. We respect your constitutional role. We want you to respect ours.

"When the president says he wants to veto this bill he says, I am vetoing accountability - accountability of my own administration and of the Iraqi government," she added. "He says, I forbid. He told me, I forbid, I forbid accountability. I forbid additional assistance and meeting the health needs of our military and our veterans. I forbid meeting the needs of the people struck by Katrina. I forbid [SCHIP] helping the poorest children in America get healthcare. I forbid disaster agriculture assistance to farmers and cattlemen across the country who need this help."

I forbid? Again, I'm hardly Mr. Even-Handed... but this sounds exactly like Violet Beauregarde pitching a tantrum because she can't have a clown, a pony, a tattoo, and the Harajuku Girls on her eighth birthday party. "You don't ever let me have anything! You don't want me anymore, and I'm going to throw myself in the trash!"

Anyway, back to the annoying Sen. Reid and his puppet friends, who actually seem mature by comparison:

Reid's new strategy faces an uphill battle because many of his colleagues see yanking funds as a dangerous last resort. The proposal increases the stakes on the debate and marks a new era for the Democratic leadership once reluctant to talk about Congress' power of the purse.

"In the face of the administration's stubborn unwillingness to change course, the Senate has no choice but to force a change of course," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who signed on Monday as a co-sponsor of Reid's proposal with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

What fascinates me is the Democrats' stubborn unwillingness to admit that the appointment of Lt.Gen. Petraeus is a strategic change of course: It marks the first time the American military has treated the Iraq war as a counterinsurgency, rather than a traditional force-on-force engagement of one national power against another.

At the beginning, it was entirely a standard invasion: Our enemies was the Iraqi Army of Saddam Hussein and especially the feared Republican Guard (which turned out not to be as bad as they looked on paper); it was a classical manuever-war of regiment vs. regiment. But that phase quickly ended in total victory for the Coalition, as the Baath Party government completely collapsed.

Then we had an interregnum of several months, during which nobody really knew what to do: There was no replacement government, but the insurgency had not yet started. The Coalition Provisional Authority made some progress (and some regress) at rebuilding the country... but nothing done during this time, no matter how clever or thoughtful, would have prevented the rise of a dueling pair of insurgencies: an al-Qaeda-backed Sunni terrorist insurgency, and an Iranian-backed Shiite militia insurgency.

There was a power vacuum in Iraq, and both of the ascendant powers of the Middle East rushed to fill it. In response, we had to rush back in ourselves, this time into a proxy war between Iran, the transnational Sunni jihadis, the ex-Baathists (who still fantasized returning to power), and the Iraqi Ex-Pats -- Achmed Chalabi and that lot, who had little but the title of "interim Prime Minister."

After that shook out, the Iraqi people voted in three successively more successful elections to create a government... at that moment, the enemy's focus shifted to a true insurgency, à la the Algerian FLN.

Alas, our own strategy was not as nimble; we remained committed to the earlier strategy of force on force... so we were stymied.

We killed lots of bad guys but never seemed to make headway, which is exactly what happened to France in Algeria. Finally, Lt.Col. David Galula realized the dreadful mistake France was making and devised a counterinsurgency strategy instead. The war turned completely around within a year... but the politics at home did not, and the French poodles pulled the plug -- by pretending that nothing had changed, there was no "change of course," and everything was hopeless.

The point is that Petraeus is doing the same thing in Iraq that Galula did in Algeria and will likely have the same impact on the war. Rather than admit this, however, the Democrats continue to insist that the president displays a "stubborn unwillingness to change course." There are two macro-explanations for this rhetoric:

  • Majority Leader Reid, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, 95%), Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and a strong majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress sincerely cannot see the difference between a force-on-force strategy and a counterinsurgency strategy... so they're being honest (but stupid) when they say nothing has changed;
  • They do understand that Bush appointed Petraeus precisely in order to make a major strategic change; but for some occult reason, the only "change of course" the Democrats will accept is 180 degrees about... from moving forward to a strategic rearward redeployment to next-door Okinawa.

I would ordinarily find the first explanation sufficient for Reid, Kerry, and Pelosi, whose intellects are -- let's face it -- not quite first-class. But I cannot believe that their Defense aides are that stupid. And generally, senators don't simply blow off their top aides and start freelancing their most important positions. So I have to assume that, at the very least, they have been informed about the distinction between then and now in Iraq.

So that brings us back to explanation 2: that they know, but either they don't care or, more disturbingly... that they actually fear victory more than they fear defeat.

Mindful that they hold a shaky majority in Congress and that neither chamber has enough votes to override a presidential veto, Democrats are already thinking about the next step after Bush rejects their legislation.

Reid said Monday that if that happens, he will join forces with Feingold, one of the party's most liberal members who has long called to end the war by denying funding for it.

Reid has previously stopped short of embracing Feingold's position. When asked whether he would ever consider pulling funds for the troops, Reid said Congress would provide troops what they needed to be safe.

Reid's latest proposal would give the president one year to get troops out, ending funding for combat operations after March 31, 2008.

"If the president vetoes the supplemental appropriations bill and continues to resist changing course in Iraq, I will work to ensure this legislation receives a vote in the Senate in the next work period," Reid said in a statement.

This line makes the entire argument sound like a power struggle between two branches of the government. It's certainly true that both the Squeaker and the Majority Mouse seem quite intent upon aggrandizing the power of Congress at the expense of diminishing the office of the presidency itself. This actually makes sense for them, no matter who wins in 2008:

  • If a Republican wins the presidency, then naturally the Democrats in the Senate and House would prefer he arrive already emasculated;
  • But the Democrats almost certainly believe that the Democratic nominee will be Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 95%); so if she wins... well, let's just say there can only be one queen-bee in a hive.

    I don't think the Divine Ms. P. would appreciate suddenly playing lady-in-waiting to Her Hell-to-payness; and I'm sure that Mr. R. will side with Ms. P. on any issue of relative power between the legislative and the executive branches.

Thus I might be tempted to believe the worst -- that the congressional Democrats want to pull out before the Petraeus counterinsurgency can bear fruit because victory in Iraq is the very last thing they want to see -- were it not for this one argument, which the Democrats appear sincerely to believe... and which certainly boosts the meme that Democrats really are that dense:

Reid's proposal is unlikely to pass. But Democrats say they believe with each passing week - as the violence in Iraq continues and voters grow increasingly tired of the war - they pick up additional support.

This argument presupposes, as an axiom not subject to debate, that the strategy will fail, that Iraq will just get worse and worse, and that defeat is preordained by Gaia.

If the Democrats thought, no matter how secretly, that the counterinsurgency had any chance of success, they would not follow their current course: After all, if six months pass and Reid and Pelosi are still struggling to yank us out of Iraq -- at the very same time that Iraq is looking better and more winnable with every passing day -- that cannot possibly be anything but catastrophic for Democratic congressional and presidential chances in 2008.

Instead, if the majority Democrats thought there was even the smallest possibility of success, they would back away, say "we're going to give President Bush one last chance to turn this around," and then wait and see which way to jump when the outcome becomes a little less hazy.

If it failed, then they would be well-positioned to begin passing defeat-and-retreat bills in October, still long before the first primaries in January (unless New Hampshire gets caught up in a game of "can you top this" and changes their primary date to this coming July).

But if the strategy succeeded, then the Democrats could pat themselves on the back, crow with triumph about how their own forbearance gave Petraeus enough time to pull it out, and find some way to minimize the damage.

Therefore, they must truly believe our efforts are doomed. And that means that when the Petraeus strategy actually works, the Democrats are going to end up looking like Charlie Brown when someone line-drives one of his pitches: upside-down with shoes and clothes flying off in all directions.

Now... here is the take-away from this story: There is one remarkable point that has eluded all the "pundants" in the big-box media:

Reid spokesman Jim Manley said if legislation to cut off funding for the war fails, Reid will try again with the hopes of getting new supporters. "It is the next in a series of steps to try to ratchet up the pressure to try to get the administration to change its policies," he said.

The bill to cut off funds for the war would likely be introduced as standalone legislation and would not be tied to the supplemental spending bill, Manley said.

That tells me that Reid is resigned to giving the president a clean troop-funding bill after Bush vetoes the current bill. To a poker player as savvy as George W. Bush, this "tell" may as well be a neon sign flashing "busted flush, busted flush."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 4, 2007, at the time of 5:57 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

April 2, 2007

How to Win/Lose In Iraq

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Arthur Herman, he of the "Herman Option" -- which may be less effective now, as Iran tries desperately to convert vehicles to natural gas, than when Herman first proposed it -- has a new article up on the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com: "How to Win In Iraq."

(Be aware; the sub-head is "And how to lose.")

The article is long, so I will summarize its main points, peppering them with my own few thoughts en route, rather than waiting until the end.

Herman not only points the way to military success in Iraq, he also warns of the most imminent danger threatening to turn that victory in defeat. But in the end, I demonstrate why we will likely prevail after all, dodging that deadly peril. At the end of the political steel-cage death match, Democratic defeatism will be the loser (and will have to leave town in November 2008).

So slither on, friend readers...

I intersperse my thoughts amid a quick abstract of the Arthur Herman article. Note that throughout this post, I define "insurgent" as anyone who actively works to undermine and overthrow the current government, whether by corruption, terrorism, death squads, or by open, armed insurrection.

De profundis ad astra

Arthur Herman begins his essay by analogizing the current insurgents in Iraq to the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, in French) in Algeria a half-century ago -- a Moslem, anti-Western, antisemitic, totalitarian, collectivist, terrorist group that was trying to drive the French out of that colony.

But then he demonstrates that the French army, after repeated failures over many years to come to grips with the Moslem insurgents, hit upon a strategy that was extraordinarily successful, crushing most of the resistance in just a couple of years.

This is the first shocker of the article: Herman, a historian, points out that in fact, we in the West do know how to fight an insurgency; we have done so on many occasions:

In fact, the historical record is clear. The roots of failure in fighting insurgencies like the one in Iraq are not military. To the contrary, Western militaries have shown remarkable skill in learning and relearning the crucial lessons of how to prevail against unconventional foes, and tremendous bravery in fighting difficult and unfamiliar battles. If Iraq fails, the cause will have to be sought elsewhere.

This is more subtlely subversive of the dominant worldview today than anything else he could say. The Democrats -- and most of the world -- flatly say that "there is no military solution." This mantra underpins the entire Democratic policy of forcing American troops out of the "unwinnable" war in Iraq and instead, focusing on "diplomacy," as Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) is doing right now in Syria.

But there is another term for diplomacy undertaken after an aborted attempt to use force: conditional surrender. If we follow this path, the message we send is, "We know we've lost; we just want to negotiate a slightly less abject defeat than our enemy wants to inflict."

But since we do know how to fight against this sort of insurgency, since other countries (and even our own) have done so successfully in the past, then contrary to the Left's assertion, there is a military solution after all. That solution will certainly involve other aspects than the use of force; but military might is a critical element... and we know the road to victory in that element.

Therefore, the failure to vigorously and determinedly pursue victory demonstrates nothing less than cowardice, sloth, or the Stockholm Syndrome on the part of the appeaser: "Peace at any price" is the root of slavery.

Three cheers for the red, white, and pink

The winning strategy in Algeria was developed by Lt.Col. David Galula of the French army, following many years of increasing French military involvement to little effect. Galula managed to turn the war around in just a year or two by his new approach to fighting against the Algerian insurgency, the FLN.

So what is this strategy? First of all, Galula realized that counterinsurgency warfare was unlike ordinary conventional warfare:

Galula's subsequent book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," laid out the blueprint for success in this form of warfare. From the start, Galula had discarded the assumptions governing conventional conflicts. A decisive battlefield victory of the kind familiar from World War II, he saw, would never work against indigenous, loosely organized but deeply committed insurgencies like the FLN. As he had learned from watching the British mount successful counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Greece, neither heavy casualties, nor the loss of weapons and bases, nor even the loss of leaders, would stop the rebels. Ultimately, indeed, "military action [was] but a minor factor in the conflict."

This is hardly controversial today, but it was a very different world in 1956; then, just a decade after World War II ended, it was virtually heresy to say that France should fight the Algerian war using means completely different from those that had achieved unconditional victory in the greatest war in all of human history.

But of course (as we see now), fighting insurgents in Algeria is vastly different from fighting Panzer divisions in the Rhineland.

Galula likewise realized that civilians played a much greater roll in counterinsurgency than they did in the second war to end all wars, where they were mainly bystanders (or by-victims). Civilians, both government and private individuals, are the counterinsurgent's secret weapon:

Without the help or at least the passive acquiescence of the local population, the government would be doomed. In a crucial sense, it did not matter how many guerrillas were killed, or how many regular soldiers were on the ground; the center of gravity was the opinion of the local community.

Thus, the key to success lay in bringing to the surface the portion of the populace that hated the guerrillas, and then turning that minority into a majority by a combination of political, social and cultural initiatives.

In other words, the successful counterinsurgent needs to win, not necessarily the hearts and minds of the populace, but at the very least, their consent and support -- however grudgling. The people must prefer us to the insurgents.

But this itself requires a strong military effort; Lt.Col. Galula was certainly not dismissing the military side. He was noting that military action was the prelude to the real work: getting the entire country engaged in "fighting" (isolating) the terrorists through civic, economic, religious, and social means.

Galula advocated three basic strategic "stages", beginning with a method of concentrating his forces where they were most needed:

The first was concentration of force. Whereas terrorists were able to do much with little (witness, in today's Iraq, the improvised explosive device or the lone suicide bomber), government forces could do but little with their much. Even after having expanded in number to 450,000 men--nearly one soldier for every 23 Algerians--French forces could not confront the elusive FLN everywhere. So Galula divided his own district into zones: "white," where government control was complete or nearly complete; "pink," where insurgents competed with the government for control; and "red," where the insurgents were in complete control. A successful counterinsurgency involved turning pink zones into white zones, then red into pink, through a block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood struggle to force the terrorists into the shadows.

This is important, because it allows you to track progress easily: If the white areas are growing, you are winning; if the pink areas are growing while the red areas shrink, you are winning. But if the pink grows at the expense of the white, and if the red grows, then you are losing, and you had better refocus your efforts on the pink zones.

The pink zones are the linchpin: As they go, so goes the war. Every time a pink area comes under your control, becoming white -- that automatically makes all adjacent red areas more pinkish, because now your forces are directly able to take the fight to enemy territory. The insurgents' "complete control" turns into competition... forcing the enemy to draw scarce resources from where he would rather they remain.

This winning strategy was also used successfully in Vietnam by Gen. Creighton Abrams, who assumed command of the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam (MACV) on June 10th, 1968 -- just two days after the Tet Offensive ended in the crushing defeat of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Abrams' counterinsurgency warfare (using far fewer troops than the hapless Gen. William Westmoreland had used during his tenure as commander of MCAV) is now largely credited with destroying the Vietcong as an effective insurgency.. while Abrams simultaneously stopped the advance of the NVA and even turned them back. As Herman puts it:

By 1972, the American military there had broken the back of the Viet Cong insurgency, had fought the North Vietnamese army to a standstill, and had forced the government in Hanoi to the bargaining table.

Thus, we already know that the Galula strategy works. This is a crucial point.

Galula's other two stages of victory against an insurgency were "a visible and continuous military presence, in order to build civil institutions of support and trust;" and "a sense of inevitable victory" (emphasis in original). About the first, Herman explains:

In counterinsurgencies, the classic Clausewitzian dictum--that war is the continuation of politics by other means--turned in on itself. Through constant policing and patrolling, by running down insurgents and punishing them on, if possible, "the very spot" where they committed a terrorist attack or outrage, and above all by visibly supporting and rewarding allies, the military occupation would itself become a political weapon: outward and conspicuous proof that supporting the government translated into increased security, peace of mind, prosperity, and eventually social and political advance.

(This sparks an interesting thought: Should we encourage the Iraqis, whenever they sentence a terrorist to death, to erect the gallows exactly where he carried out the terrorist attack that got him condemned? And even if he only gets prison time, maybe he should serve it in the very city he attacked.)

The "sense of inevitable victory" requires the increasing use of native forces... for the obvious reason that a foreign force will eventually leave. When the country is increasingly under the control of the local government, which (by definition of insurgency warwar) is on our side, the populace sees that they will be the eventual winner. Since most people prefer to back the strong horse over the weak horse, to use Osama bin Laden's own analogy, they will increasingly back the government.

In practice, this means they will rat out the insurgents, cease giving them aid and comfort, and (as we see in Anbar province in Iraq), increasingly take up arms on behalf of the government they once opposed.

"Here and now, boys; here and now."

It is one thing to recognize the unique counterinsurgency genius of Lt.Col. David Galula; it is quite another to implement it in the present war... which, while similar to the Algerian insurrection, is also very different in many ways. That success reveals the unique genius of the other David, Lt.Gen. Petraeus:

Herman next shows how the current counterinsurgency strategy of Lt.Gen. David Petraeus, newly elevated to commander of all Multinational Force ground troops in Iraq (MNF-I), consciously matches the Galula strategy almost point by point... and thus stands an excellent chance of producing exactly the sort of victory that Galula achieved in Algeria in the late 1950s.

Lt.Gen. Petraeus understands Galula's strategy better than any previous commander of MNF-I, and he has done a magnificant job of applying it to the present insurgency... starting with the first stage, concentrating his forces where they are needed most:

The current surge of 21,500 troops in Baghdad is a textbook example of Galula's lessons in action. First, as in the northern city of Mosul in 2003-04, where he used a similar grid system, Gen. Petraeus aims to turn things around in the single most vital "pink" zone--namely, Baghdad and its environs, within whose 50-mile radius 80% of the violence in Iraq takes place.... As he has said, "The idea is to end each day with fewer enemies than when it started." Anything more ambitious leads to overreaching, disenchantment, and ultimately failure.

In other words, Petraeus has divided the map into three zones, white, pink, and red, and has focusing on making progress by concentrating his forces in the pink areas. By turning them white, he automatically turns adjacent red areas pink. Thus, stage one.

Stage two is a "visible and continuous military presence."

The nation itself must be seen as the victor when the insurgents are defeated; that means significant movement towards life becoming more normal the more the government has control. If government control is associated with horror, mass executions, kidnappings, and vicious suppression of dissent -- as under Saddam Hussein -- then the people rightly wonder what the difference is between the government and the insurgents.

But when government control means roads, schools, hospitals, banking, commerce, and the people being by and large let alone to be their potty, little selves, then more and more does the populace turn away from the insurgency and long for -- and strive for -- a government victory:

"Increasing the number of stakeholders is crucial to success," writes Gen. Petraeus, again self-consciously following both Galula's model and his own prior experience. In the northern district of Kabylia, for example, Gen. Petraeus had his men operating schools for 1,400 children, including girls, offering free medical support, and helping with building projects and road construction. One of his proudest accomplishments was the help given by troops of the 101st Airborne in rebuilding and opening Mosul University.

Gen. Petraeus's field manual states: "Some of the best weapons do not shoot." They come instead in the form of meetings held with local leaders, wells drilled, streets repaired, soccer leagues organized.... forcing the bond between insurgent and citizen to give way to a new bond between citizen and government.

Stage three requires creating "the sense of inevitable victory." This means the increasing use of Iraqi forces, rather than American forces, to make the counterinsurgency seem less like an occupation and more like a living nation fighting for order against anarchy:

In counterinsurgency terms, [native troops] were more than just auxiliaries in the fight; they were also signposts of the future, of a secure post-insurgency order around which the local populace could rally.

Note that Petraeus's previous Iraq command before being named Commander MNF-I -- was the training of native troops. It was his success at that very job, coupled with his successful counterinsurgency fight in Mosul, that caused the president to select him to that command in the first place.

Petraeus has further applied Galula's "stage 3" to the Iraq situation, beyond merely training the new Iraqi forces, by a move that seems at once bold and bizarre: He has ordered the creation of a number of Joint Security Stations (JSSs), where Iraqi and American troops live together, eat together, and patrol together, completely intermixed.

Besides more deeply incorporating the native troops into the fight, it also embeds Americans into every Iraqi unit -- both army and national police -- leading to reform and the purging of insurgents from the Iraqi forces. This is more than even Galula did to give the fight an Iraqi "brand," and draw a distinction between the government and insurgents, as the latter are exposed and cast out.

The enema within

So does winning the war on the ground, and even winning the active or passive acquiescence of the Iraqi population, inevitably mean victory in the war? Sadly, no. Arthur Herman drops the other hammer in the part of his essay characterized by the subtitle, "and how to lose."

While the French army followed the Galula strategy and systematically wiped out the Algerian resistance, the elite, effete, leftist intellectual poodles led their own insurrection at home.

Led by Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, they turned the French citizenry decisively against their own army, convincing them that all the violence in Algeria was the fault of France -- not the FLN -- and turning the war, in the minds of the French populace, in to a war of colonial imperialism, rather than a war to destroy a jihadist movement.

The mission of the Left in human events has always to confound truth with lies, freedom with slavery, and democracy with totalitarianism. In this case, the French Left was led by the man who famously rejected reason as the source of meaning, and who believed that reason itself was a bad-faith attempt to impose order on a fundamentally chaotic world.

The poodles effectively argued that violent Moslem leftist extremists were merely attempting to create more "freedom" for the Algerians to determine their own lives... disregarding the fact that these putative freedom-fighters were in fact great believers in totalitarianism and had nothing but contempt for liberal, Western democratic ideas -- such as freedom, reason, and silly exercises in intellectual self-abuse -- such as Existentialism.

This "revolution" in France itself, Herman recounts, led to the government yanking all the French troops out of Algeria, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The poodles, many of them literal Communists, demanded "self-determination" for Algeria... which in practice, turned out to mean absolute victory by the hard-line Moslems.

Who then proceeded to butcher anyone even suspected of collabortation with the French, turned Algeria into a vast killing field, a crucible to melt the colony into a collectivist dictatorship. The FLN believed in raw power. To quote a great Communist who finally awoke, Eric Arthur Blair (a.k.a. George Orwell)...

When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.’

When the "ACE" coalition of Anarchists, Communists, and Existentialists forced the French to abandon Algeria, colonization was replaced, not by freedom and happiness, but by collectivism and horror. Quelle surprise! So of course, the coalition that had supported the pullout immediately recanted, admitted it was in the wrong, and called for the actual liberation of Algeria... right?

If you believe that, you'll probably vote to reelect President Al Gore next year. In fact, the French poodles wallowed in an orgy of self congratulation. They not only cast Algeria into an abyss of totalitarianism, from which they have yet to emerge; they also brought down the Fourth French Republic itself. The yappy Leftists were top dogs again! Scratch an Anarchist, scratch an Existentialist, and you'll find a Stalinist lurking beneath the epidermis.

I think we all know where Herman is going by this point... the parallels are again startlingly exact, for we have our own coalition of Sheehanites, CAIR-mongers, and weak Reids. Herman convincingly argues that the elite, effete American Democratic intellectual pit yorkies are also following the Algerian playbook.

But rather than Galula's book about how to defeat a Moslem insurgency, the book followed by Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 95%) is that written by the "ACE" French poodles, who pulled the plug on the Algerian counterinsurgency war at the very brink of victory.

Just as their ideological cousins -- and the ideological forbears of today's Democratic majority in Congress -- did in Vietnam 15 years later (35 years ago): The "peaceniks," chanting "Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh," crammed defeat down the throats of our victorious troops... thus crippling American military morale and effectiveness for a generation.

The dangerous analogator

But this is no reason to despair. There are a number of differences between us and the French -- and even between us and the United States of 1973 -- that may be determinative in allowing us to escape Santayana's curse of repeating history.

  • First and most important, we are not the French. We are Americans; we are exceptional... so it takes far more exceptional circumstances to force us to act like cravens.
  • The French Left in 1959 managed to get President Charles DeGaulle, the first president of the Fifth Republic of France, on their side; the American Left has no hope whatsoever of gaining the agreement of President George W. Bush to pull out of Iraq before victory.
  • France was fighting to maintain a colony; Iraq has never been a colony of the United States, and we have never attempted -- for all of the Democrats' absurdist rhetoric -- to "colonize" Iraq. We have always fought for a free and independent Iraq.
  • The French military was, in fact, guilty of using horrible acts of actual torture against the FLN in Algeria to gain intelligence -- the primary claim of the poodles. Although Lt.Col. Galula personally opposed (and thought ineffective) such tactics, they were quite widespread within the army.

    By contrast, there is no evidence of American forces using techniques that most Americans would call "torture" on any widespread basis, or with Pentagon approval. Even the claim that Americans "tortured" prisoners at Abu Ghraib are controversial, as few Americans think making male prisoners wear women's panties is in the same league as stretching on the rack, crushing feet, or using cattle prods on the genitals.

    We are simply more decent than were the French... and the necessity of holding the political home front is precisely why we cannot become as vicious and indiscriminate as some loons demand.

  • In 1973, the Democratic, anti-Vietnam-war Congress was negotiating with a wounded presidency and a paranoid president desperate to stave off impeachment and removal. The Democrats very effectively extorting Richard Nixon into caving on Vietnam -- in exchange for Congress agreeing to back off the Watergate investigation. (So much for trusting a Democrat's promise.)

    President Bush is neither paranoid nor desperate, and his presidency is neither wounded nor weak. He has plenty enough Republican support in Congress to sustain his vetos.

  • By 1973, we had lost over 50,000 Americans (0.025% of the population) in Vietnam... and most of them were conscripts, sent involuntarily and unprepared into combat. To date, we have lost 3,255 soldiers in Iraq (0.001%, or only 1/25th the deaths in Vietnam as percent of population)... and every, last one of them volunteered to join the military, because we have not had a draft for over 30 years.
  • And last but by no means least, Americans have a much stronger and deeper connection with our military, more of a martial tradition, and much more communications with our ordinary soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines than did the French in 1959... so it will prove virtually impossible to convince a voting majority of citizens that our men and women are all vicious thugs who revel in war crimes, atrocities, and torture... which was the idea pitched successfully by the poodles about their own troops in the Algerian war.

So read the article -- it's very important -- and take heart; the future of Iraq, the Middle East, and in a sense America itself, is in our own hands. If we maintain the will and refuse to allow our own Republican congressmen (those of you lucky enough to have such) to rabbit on us, we will prevail; and the Democrats can stuff their defeats and appeasements in a sack.

If that happens, then 2008 can be a very good year indeed for world freedom and democracy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 2, 2007, at the time of 6:36 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 28, 2007

Britannia No Longer Rules the Waves

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

On Friday, March 23rd, while British Royal Marines and sailors were inspecting a fishing boat for contraband in Iraqi waters, "a number of Iranian boats" swarmed up and kidnapped the British military personnel. Iranians "interrogated" the uniformed sailors and marines (violating the Geneva Conventions) and are currently holding them hostage. Iran has just released propaganda video of the hostages, in which they are coerced to confess and to praise their kidnappers (more violations of the Geneva Conventions).

Needless to say, the Brits were not "unlawful combatants," and there is no question that the Geneva Conventions cover them.

The sailors and marines were on inflatable boats -- similar to Zodiacs -- that had been dispatched from HMS Cornwall, a Type 22 Corwall class frigate. Thus, here is the first question that should be answered at the inquiry -- the one where the captain of the Cornwall stands in the dock in a maritime court of inquiry:

Captain So-and-so... the Cornwall has excellent radar and surveillance systems. For God's sake, why didn't they detect those Iranian gunboats closing in on their position?

What if it had been a suicide attack instead of a kidnapping? How close would those little boats have gotten to HMS Cornwall herself before you noticed them? Was it... was it tea time?

The Iranian boats should never have been allowed to approach the dispatched boarding party without a fight. The moment the Cornwall detected them, they should have sent the Lynx helo aloft and radioed for air support. The ship was about 50 km from Basra, where the British have a sizeable contingent -- including Harriers.

At a relatively sedate 360 knots (667 km/hr), well within the Harrier's operational range, it would take a squadron about 4.5 minutes flight time. Add in 10 minutes to scramble (they should actually be faster, if they're doing their jobs right)... and a quick radio call when the Iranians first entered Iraqi waters would have gotten air support overhead before the Iranians even reached the marines and sailors.

When the Iranians began firing guns and threatening the British sailors and marines, it would have been child's play for three or four Harriers to sink the Iranian vessels in Iraqi waters. (What would the Iranians try to claim -- that the Brits actually sank those patrol boats in Iranian waters, then airlifted the wrecks two nautical miles to the Iraqi coast?)

Thus, question 2:

Captain So-and-so... with air support just minutes away, why in God's name didn't you call for backup?

But what about the Cornwall herself? Please click on the HMS Cornwall link above; look at the right sidebar, scan down to "armaments" and "aircraft." The Cornwall can sink any ship in the Iranian navy.

Also, at 32 knots capability, it can catch any ship in the Iranian navy except for their "Karman class missile boats," which certainly were not the vessels that attacked. From witness descriptions, the Brits were intercepted by Iranian coastal-patrol vessels, the equivalent of our Vietnam-era Swift Boats, and probably max out at 25 knots.

Such boats could easily be caught and disabled by the Lynx helo that the Cornwall carries on her flight deck, or even the Cornwall herself, even if they fled into Iranian waters: Entering territorial waters of a country in hot pursuit of a military unit from that same country which has just attacked you has always been allowed under the laws of war.

If Iranian Qods Force units attacked us directly in Iraq, then fled back into Iran with us right on their tail, we would be perfectly justified in entering Iran and destroying the unit that attacked us. (It might be unwise, if we suspected a trap; but we would have "international law" on our side, to the extent that such a thing exists.)

The "hot pursuit" rule doesn't cover a third-party attacker; so when al-Qaeda attacks us out of Syria, we cannot simply follow them into Syria... that's a more complicated case. But in the present circumstance, an Iranian naval unit attacked a British naval unit, then fled to Iranian waters; so "hot pursuit" applies.

Thus question three:

Captain So-and-so, when you realized what was happening, why in God's name didn't you order the Cornwall herself into pursuit and at least put up a fight?

And why didn't your men being kidnapped fight back? Self-defense is always a legitimate defense, under any rules of engagement, except one: Fighting is never allowed by troops in the process of surrendering.

So Captain... at what point in this engagement did the Royal Navy surrender? Was it before the first Iranian shot was fired?

Unless the captain of the Cornwall can show a maritime court that he was under secret orders to allow the kidnapping to take place -- in other words, that the sailors and marines were actually spies from MI-6, and this is an intelligence operation, which I highly doubt -- he should be cashiered.

Any person up the chain who promulgated ROEs that led to this humiliation should be sacked. The ROEs should immediately be changed, and Great Britain and the United States should blockade Iranian ports and overfly Teheran -- flying very low at supersonic speeds -- until all the hostages are released unharmed. If Iran wants to fight... well, then it's time to implement the Herman Option.

And the British sailors and Royal Marines themselves should not be lauded as heroes when they return; they should have to face inquiry themselves about why they surrendered to a tin-pot, third-world dictator like Ahmadinejad without even the faintest semblance of resistance.

Evidently, Britons ever, ever, ever shall be slaves.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 28, 2007, at the time of 2:38 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

March 27, 2007

Double Secret Withdrawal Date

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The most bizarre and grotesque suggestion -- risible, actually -- anent the Senate version of the emergency supplemental funding bill for the troops in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan comes from Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR, 75%)... who should win the Northern Alliance's vaunted "Loon of the Week" award, if there's any justice.

Pryor bravely stood up and voted against the previous Democratic attempt to cripple our troops. But he's feeling the heat -- the molten lava -- from "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," as the late Sen. Paul Wellstone used to call his beloved nutroots. Pryor is desperate to find some accomodation that will allow him to vote for the bill.

But he cannot vote to have a firm timetable and simply announce it to the enemy: "Just hold on until this date, and you're home free!" He knows, as does every other Democrat, that this is a prescription for miltary defeat; but unlike the rest of them (including former political hero Ben Nelson, D-NE, 35%, this time), Mark Pryor actually doesn't want us to be defeated.

So he has come up with what he imagines to be a compromise:

Unlike the plan's Republican opponents, Pryor wants a withdrawal deadline of some kind. He just doesn't want anyone outside the White House, Congress and the Iraqi government to know what it is.

"My strong preference would be to have a classified plan and a classified timetable that should be shared with Congress," Pryor said yesterday. A public deadline would tip off the enemy, "who might just bide their time and wait for us to leave," he said. "Then you'd have chaos and mayhem and instability."

There you go! We have a firm withdrawal date... but we keep it a secret: It would only be known by the president, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, many people working in the Departments of Defense and State and in the CIA, all the generals, colonels, and many of the majors in Iraq -- and the entire United States Congress -- plus staff!

I make that out to be somewhere north of 1,500 people. So it's a secret that's only shared among the population of a small town. But wait -- Sen. Pryor has already thought of that, ah, potential source for leaks. He has an answer:

Pryor said a classified plan would be provided by the president, shepherded by Senate committees and ultimately shared with Congress and Iraqi leaders. He is confident that the plan would remain secret, because Congress is entrusted with secrets "all the time."

Yup... secrets such as the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program, the SWIFT financial tracking program, spy satellite programs -- or for that matter, the fact that we had captured and interrogated some of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro.

Do we know for sure that each of these blown secrets was leaked by members of Congress (or their staffs, who would also know)? Some of them, yes; but not all of them. Some were blown by Democratic members of the CIA or the State Department (same thing)... and only confirmed by members of Congress. And in the end, it makes no difference whether the double secret withrawal date is blown by Congress or disgruntled bureaucrats in the administration; it'll be blown by somebody.

In fact, you wouldn't even need a direct leak to the New York Times. All it would take to blow this one would be a congressional budget that showed a sharp decline in Iraq war funding starting in a particular quarter. Hm... I wonder what that could mean?

Suppose Congress and the president did enact this double secret classified withdrawal date. Suppose you are a reporter for the Times, the Washington Post, CNN, or any other elite news agency. What would be you number-one priority? With hundreds of reporters calling every, single person they know to get that date, I cannot imagine that the "secret" would last longer than three days -- classified or not.

And if Pryor doesn't know that -- he ought to; he's been around D.C. since he was three years old.

Mark Pryor may be unique among Senate Democrats in actually feeling a slight twinge of regret at the thought of Congress forcing America to lose the Iraq war; but he certainly shares with his colleagues (left and right) the general congressional inability to follow a chain of events to its logical conclusion.

And in the end, it made no difference; the Senate has just voted 50-48 not to strip the timetable from the Senate bill; Pryor voted to strip the timetable... but in the end, he will vote for the final bill. Bush will veto it, and the veto will easily be sustained.

And the kabuki dance goes on, while our troops twist slowly, slowly in the wind.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 27, 2007, at the time of 3:16 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack

March 23, 2007

Imagine...

Afghan Astonishments , Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd
Imagine there are no Republicans,
It's easy if you try...

This is quite remarkable: The Washington Post, normally a pretty good newspaper, published a front-page article about the Democratic House and Senate caucuses wrangling with their wayward members. They tussled over how to enact legislation that would begin to force an American surrender in Iraq within the next few months -- by hanging that legislation like an albatross around the neck of the president's emergency supplemental war-funding bill.

The Post managed to get all the way through the story... without ever once mentioning the Republicans in the Senate, who will almost certainly filibuster the bill to death. In fact, the Post seemed unaware that Republicans in either chamber would get to cast a vote.

For that matter, they never even mentioned that President Bush fellow, who would naturally veto it, if it ever came to his desk. Rather, the Post implied that passing the Mount Everest of roadblocks -- getting the liberals to agree with the Blue Dogs to agree with Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%) -- meant that the bill would immediately become law!

What, have we suddenly become invisible?

"Liberal opposition to a $124 billion war spending bill broke last night," begins the story...

...when leaders of the antiwar Out of Iraq Caucus pledged to Democratic leaders that they will not block the measure, which sets timelines for bringing U.S. troops home.

The acquiescence of the liberals probably means that the House will pass a binding measure today that, for the first time, would establish tough readiness standards for the deployment of combat forces and an Aug. 31, 2008, deadline for their removal from Iraq.

A Senate committee also passed a spending bill yesterday setting a goal of bringing troops home within a year. The developments mark congressional Democrats' first real progress in putting legislative pressure on President Bush to withdraw U.S. forces.

Progress? Oh, please. They managed to get nearly all the Democrats to agree; I suppose that's progress of a sort... but it's like me saying I'm making "real progress" towards winning the Pullet Surprise this year because I convinced a few of my friends that I really deserve one.

This isn't the FDR era, when we had essentially one-party rule, and even Bob Hope (D-Hollywood, 120%) joked that there must be a Republican hiding in the bushes somewhere. "After all, somebody's buying all that caviar!"

Here is the only mention of the word "Republicans." It's not in the context of the Senate; they only mention House Republicans, who are powerless. I don't have a print edition in front of me, but I wouldn't be surprised if even this pair of grafs comes after the jump:

To the surprise of many antiwar activists, House Democratic leaders have been able to keep their conservative Blue Dog members largely onboard as they ratcheted up the bill's language. But with Republicans virtually united in opposition, Democrats can afford only 15 defections.

Bush and congressional Republicans have done their best to exploit the divisions, repeatedly mentioning that the Democrats are not united.

The editorial board of the WaPo aside, they still have to pass the bill in the United States Senate... where, contrary to the Post's fantasy, Republicans are still allowed to vote on the issue. There are 49 Republicans, 50 Democrats, and one Independent, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT, 75%); but Lieberman is certain to vote against the timelines and readiness standards and forced troop withdrawals. That makes the score 50-50... and since Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD, 85%) is likely still medically unable to vote, that makes it 50-49 against passage.

On the last go-round, one Republican senator, Gordon Smith (R-OR, 72%), voted in favor of Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Caesar's Palace, 90%) previous attempt to surrender. But two Democrats, Sens. Mark Pryor (AR, 75%) and Ben Nelson (NE, 35%), voted against the bill. (Had Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, 65%, voted, it would have been 51 to 48 against, for an absolute majority.)

If the Democrats manage to get both Pryor and Nelson to flip back, and if they retain the vote of turncoat Smith, the absolute best they can manage is 51 to 49 in favor. But the vote will never even occur, because the Republicans will filibuster it. And the Democrats are lightyears away from the sixty votes needed to break a filibuster.

So just like every other Democratic attempt to starve the troops out of Iraq, binding or non-binding, the result will be a possible victory in the House -- swallowed up by the Senate. No bill will even reach the president's desk for him to veto.

But you'd never realize that from the Washington Post article. If that were all you read, you'd think it was a done deal, and the troops were already on their way home!

The more intriguing question is what will happen after the supplemental funding bill dies in the Senate. Will the House Democrats have the guts to refuse to bring up a clean funding bill? I'm skeptical that they're willing to face the American people and say, "Yes, b'gad, we are cutting off all funding to the troops in the field! Screw them; let 'em all die." If they did that, they certainly could never claim any credit for a victory... but boy, would they own the defeat.

The Democrats are poltroons. They know that if they cut the troops off at the knees, the Democrats would hemorrhage seats in 2008, likely losing one or both chambers of Congress and the presidency. And Bush would find a way to keep the war going anyway. The Democrats are not willing to go to the mattresses for their "ideals;" not if it means sacrificing their majority.

Look at the ADA ratings for Pryor and Nelson: 75% and 35% (!) respectively, and they both represent red states; Ben Nelson is the Democrat's version of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME, 36%). What is the advantage for either of them in throwing away everything, just in order to force a defeat and withdrawal on America?

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi may have the burning desire to recreate the Vietnam debacle, but I doubt Pryor and Nelson do... especially when there is zero chance of it passing -- but a 100% chance of a vote against the troops coming back to haunt them. Nelson is much more conservative, and he's safe until 2012; but Mark Pryor is up for reelection in 2008.

How many times are the Democrats going to go replay this commedia dell'arte farce? Have they enacted any substantive legislation through both chambers of Congress yet? I suppose they plan to gallop pell-mell through the entire 110th Congress, doing nothing but trying to cram defeat down the throat of victory in Iraq.

That's fine with me. They won't succeed in doing anything but pâté-ing their own foie gras... and I can live with that.

But next time, maybe Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY, 84%) can give Washington Post Executive Leonard Downie, Jr. a call and sort of, you know, jog his memory a bit. I'm sure forgetting the very existence of Republicans was just an oversight.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 23, 2007, at the time of 4:15 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 18, 2007

At Last - a Real Iraqi Civil War!

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Presidential Pomp and Circumcision
Hatched by Dafydd

A funny thing happened on the way to the civil war...

Since about three hours after the invasion of Iraq began on March 20th, 2003 (yes, the fourth anniversary is this Tuesday), the anti-war peaceniks have insisted that Iraq is in a "full-blown civil war." If that's true, then for consistency, we would have to say the same about Los Angeles during the 1970s gang violence between Crips and Bloods.

But the Left has been disappointed time and again by its arms-length allies, who consistently fail to field opposing armies, capture territory, enunciate a national front, set up a shadow government, or any of the other requirements of a civil war. It's getting increasingly hard for even the elite media to keep a straight face when they report that Iraq in 2007 is in the same boat as Spain in the 1930s, America in the 1860s, or England in the mid-17th century... or even Haiti in the 1990s. Hoi polloi insist upon going about their normal lives; don't they know there's an American election looming in a scant twenty months?

But recently, a bona-fide civil war has erupted in Iraq... in fact, two of them. And the Democrats would be applauding -- except that, just like all the WMD we've found, "it's the wrong kind" of civil war!

First, we read about Sunni tribal leaders throwing in their lot with the American and Iraqi forces, joining the battle against al-Qaeda. In response, the terrorists have begun to direct their car-bombs and "martyrdom operations," not against the Americans or even the Shia, but against their own people, Sunni Iraq:

Al Qaeda's activities in Diyala are stirring up local resistance to the terror group. Al Sabaah reports Local sheikhs in Diyala are organizing against al-Qaeda and its Islamic State in Iraq, "which [is] spreading corruption in the province districts." The Iraqi government [is] beginning to plan military operations in Diyala as well. The Diyala sheikhs are beginning to organize, and are said to be forming a anti al Qaeda group akin to the Anbar Salvation Front, a grouping of former insurgents and tribes that oppose and fight al Qaeda's presence in western Iraq.

As a sign al Qaeda is concerned about this development, the terror campaign against hostile tribes is now underway. The homes of Sunni and Shia tribesmen who oppose al Qaeda are being burned to the ground on the city of Muqdadiya. Unconfirmed reports indicate 30 to 100 homes have been torched in the city. Two days ago, a police station in Hibhib in Diyala province was overrun. One policeman was killed, 3 wounded and 10 have been reported missing.

And Thursday, we learned the same sort of "red on red" violence had begun among the Shia:

Gunmen opened fire on the convoy carrying [Muqtada Sadr loyalist] Rahim al-Darraji Thursday in eastern Baghdad, seriously wounding him and killing two of his bodyguards on Thursday, police and a local official said.

Al-Darraji was the principal negotiator in talks with U.S. officials that led to an agreement to pull fighters off the streets in Sadr City, a stronghold of the feared Mahdi Army, and a local commander said suspicion fell on a group of disaffected militiamen who are angry about the deal....

He said the attack has created tension within the ranks of the militia and renewed a debate on the merits of allowing the Americans to operate in Sadr City without resistance during a security sweep aimed at ending the sectarian violence that has raged since a Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.

In January, when we first heard about Muqtada Sadr's plan to "stand down" his Mahdi Militia during the US and Iraqi forces' new security operation, then "return to power" when the coast is clear, it was plain Sadr had not really thought this through: the Mahdi Militia and their rivals, the Badr Organization (ne Badr Brigades) are not regular armies; they have no military dicipline and no patience to wait quietly for very long.

Rather, they're gang-bangers with AK-47s and explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) supplied by Iran's Qods Force. In addition, Sadr is hiding in Iran, and his orders from so far away cannot carry much weight, in contrast to the direct orders of "commanders" on the ground in Iraq.

Sadr ordered his men not to resist even if they were arrested; but we also know Sadr sold out some of his less-than-loyal followers, fingering them to the Americans and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's forces (Sadr is using us to punish his rivals). So imagine you're one of Sadr's men who is in imminent danger of being arrested during this security crackdown; what would you conclude?

Is Sadr going to rescue you, as he promised? Or is he going to sell you to the highest bidder between the U.S. Marines and the Iraqi Army?

If you think the latter (for which you have good justification), it would make more sense for you to rebel against Sadr now, rather than wait until he returns to power -- and until you get a change of address to the Sadr-City Sing-Sing.

"Sadr is weak," you would argue; "he's not fit to rule. He fled when he was needed the most, and he's cooperating with the infidel invaders!" He cannot sit on everybody's head at once; somebody is going make a move... and now, somebody has

So let's review the betting. Since the 2006 elections, which "crippled" President Bush, turning him into "the lamest of lame ducks," we have see the following:

  • Bush's enemies among al-Qaeda and the Sunni rejectionists have begun to battle each other, wasting time and ammunition that could have been used against us;
  • Bush's enemies among the Shia death squads have fallen upon each other hammer and tooth, initiating a war to choose a successor to Muqtada Sadr -- who is shocked, as he was unaware he was in such urgent need of succession;
  • And Bush's enemies on Capitol Hill are locked in internecine warfare over how quickly to surrender in Iraq.

Thus, all the president's nemeses are busy locking horns with each other, leaving him free to jet around South America and look presidential. Not a badly played hand for the man that the dean of American political thought, Donald Trump, has called "the worst president in the history of the United States."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 18, 2007, at the time of 5:39 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

March 15, 2007

Democrats In the Dental Chair

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

One of the weirdest -- and funniest -- segments of the original Roger Corman movie the Little Shop of Horrors is when dental patient Wilbur Force (Jack Nicholson in a very early role in his career) demands that the dentist, Phoebus Farb, drill Force's teeth without anaesthetic: Wilbur Force is a masochist, you see, and that's how he gets off. (When first we see him, he's sitting in the waiting room, reading an issue of Pain Magazine -- and giggling.)

Whenever the Democrats throw another handful of defeatist red meat onto the floor of Congress, I always think of Jack Nicholson squirming in the dental chair, laughing in masochistic glee. I'm not sure why I have that association...

The latest volley of dueling Democratic defeat-o-ramas -- one in the House, three in the Senate -- raises my earlier question to greater urgency: Does the 110th Congress plan to do anything besides making symbolic gestures of surrender?

Do the Democrats have any agenda at all, other than to bring the troops home in failure and disgrace? They seem to believe that if only America can be "chastened" and "humbled," if we stop acting as though we're somehow "better" than other countries, then maybe the rest of the world will love us again. It might be true: The reaction to 9/11 proved that the world loves America when America is on its knees.

But as usual, the result of these non-binding (or binding but unpassable) resolutions outside of the liberal fantasyland is just more pain and humiliation for the Democrats. As witness today, when the House Appropriations Committee only narrowly passed along an emergency supplemental surrender bill to the full House... and the Senate actually rejected a similar cut-and-run bill by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%), 50-48.

Yup: The Democrats needed 60 votes; they couldn't even get 50. And if both McCain and Johnson had voted, it would have been an absolute majority against, 51 to 49.

Only one Republican, Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon [72%], voted in favor of the measure. Two Democrats, Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas [90%] and Ben Nelson of Nebraska [55%], voted against it, as did Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut [80%]. Senators Tim Johnson, a Democrat from South Dakota [95%] who is ill, and John McCain, an Arizona Republican [65%] who is in Iowa, did not vote.

(The House bill was passed by the committee with one fewer vote than there are Democrats on the panel: Rep. Barbara Lee -- D-Berkeley, 95% -- decided it was too pro-Bush and too right-wing, since it didn't call for an immediate pull-out... not today, man, yesterday!)

Meanwhile, a pair of -- wait for it -- non-binding resolutions in the Senate, each promising that funding would not be cut for troops in the field, passed overwhelmingly, according to Paul at Power Line:

The [Sen. Judd] Gregg Amendment, which I understand calls says that Congress should not eliminate or reduce funds for troops in the field, has passed 82–16. The [Sen. Patty] Murray Amendment, which I understand calls for Congress to provide funds for training, equipment and other support for troops in the field, has passed 96-2.

How many holes can we drill before the Democrats are left utterly toothless?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 15, 2007, at the time of 8:03 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The New Anti-War Math

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Everybody is already talking about the new Democratic Iraq surrender plans (I think this makes numbers 16 and 17, according to the count by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY, 84%), and we have little to add -- just one amusing giggle that symbolizes the lucklessness of the Democrats as they struggle through les cent jours...

The Democrats are desperate to lose the war, quick, before we accidentally win it. But they've already wrong-footed, judging from the boneheaded response by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%) to McConnell:

But Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said passage of the withdrawal measure "would be absolutely fatal to our mission in Iraq" - and he sought to rebut Democratic supporters with their own words.

He quoted Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada as saying in 2005 that setting a timeline was "not a wise decision because it only empowers those who don't want us there, and it doesn't work well to do that."

That was McConnell's jab plus right cross; here is Reid's attempted block:

"To take a statement that I made five years ago, to think that things haven't changed in five years is without any degree of sensibility," he responded to McConnell a few moments later on the Senate floor.

Five years? From 2005 to 2007? I think Harry Reid must be punch drunk!

The judges just called that round for the Right corner. Now let's see whether the Democrats can even get a bare majority on the House bill, let alone get anywhere near 17 Republicans, like last time. (The Senate is drawing dead on its own plan, to muddle up the boxing metaphor; there is no way they can even get 60 senators to shut down debate and call a vote.)

Has the 110th Congress passed any actual legislation? I don't believe they've even raised the minimum wage yet, as far as I know.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 15, 2007, at the time of 7:06 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 13, 2007

Expect to See Much More of This In Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

According to Bill Roggio, the security operation is having an excellent effect in Baghdad; but some of the Sunni terrorists have shifted the launching-point of their attacks from Baghdad to Diyala province, which stretches northeast of Baghdad to the Iranian border.

But this isn't sitting well with many of the tribal leaders there -- who are reacting more or less the way their fellow anti-al-Qaeda tribal leaders are reacting in Anbar province, on the other side of Iraq:

Al Qaeda's activities in Diyala are stirring up local resistance to the terror group. Al Sabaah reports Local sheikhs in Diyala are organizing against al-Qaeda and its Islamic State in Iraq, "which [is] spreading corruption in the province districts." The Iraqi government [is] beginning to plan military operations in Diyala as well. The Diyala sheikhs are beginning to organize, and are said to be forming a anti al Qaeda group akin to the Anbar Salvation Front, a grouping of former insurgents and tribes that oppose and fight al Qaeda's presence in western Iraq.

As a sign al Qaeda is concerned about this development, the terror campaign against hostile tribes is now underway. The homes of Sunni and Shia tribesmen who oppose al Qaeda are being burned to the ground on the city of Muqdadiya. Unconfirmed reports indicate 30 to 100 homes have been torched in the city. Two days ago, a police station in Hibhib in Diyala province was overrun. One policeman was killed, 3 wounded and 10 have been reported missing.

This year has seen a tipping point in the emphatic rejection of al-Qaeda by the very people it purports to "protect" and whom it desperately needs for its continued survival. More and more Sunni tribal leaders are not just walking away from al-Qaeda murderers; they're taking up arms against them.

In response, we've seen a dramatic increase in "red on red" violence, where Sunni al-Qaeda attacks Sunni tribal chiefs because the terrorists are just not getting any support from "their" populations.

American forces have already built sufficient flexibility into our security operation that the remaining three brigades yet to enter Iraq may choose to head to the Baghdad 'burbs, like Diyala and Karbala, instead of the city itself. And unlike previous "surges" (which this is actually not), we're not just clearing and leaving. This time we're clearing and staying.

Roggio also notes that the 23 Joint Security Stations (JSSs) we've already established around Baghdad are so successful, we've decided to double them from the original plan of about 35 up to at least 70. JSSs are stations where American and Iraqi forces live together, eat together, sleep in the same barracks, and in general share the space as if they were a single military unit, instead of two different units from two separate and quite disparate countries.

(And pssst... it also significantly helps the embedding process, allowing us to train the Iraqis to take over for us at an accelerated pace.)

Finally, Iraq is finally beginning to understand the symbolism of leadership, along with the brute-force aspect. Tell me if this doesn't sound like something George W. Bush or Don Rumsfeld would do. From AP:

Iraq's Shiite prime minister on Tuesday made a groundbreaking and unannounced visit to Ramadi, the Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, a senior staff member told The Associated Press.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had flown to the insurgent bastion Tuesday morning.

An AP reporter in Ramadi said police in the city told him al-Maliki was meeting tribal leaders and the Iraqi chief of security for the province at a U.S. base.

Maliki could of course have simply sent a surrogate, even a Sunni surrogate: There is a Sunni vice president, for example. But he decided that he could not resist the propaganda coup of marching right into the capital of Anbar province -- home of al-Qaeda In Iraq -- like he owned the whole country (which increasingly he does, or rather the Iraqi citizens do).

Good news is just busting out all around Iraq these days. Somebody better break out the smelling salts; I'm afraid Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 100%) has got the vapors again.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 13, 2007, at the time of 6:13 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 5, 2007

Let's Not Be Overly Hasty...

CIA CYA , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Weapons of Mass Disputation
Hatched by Dafydd

You want a perfect example of what is wrong with American journalism -- and the CIA -- today? Can't find a better one than this.

As we moved in force into Sadr City yesterday, one of the serendipitous effects was a raid that turned up a Sunni torture-beheading room. We even found two living victims:

Lt. Col. Valery Keaveny described breaking through a double-locked door to find an Iraqi police officer and another Iraqi man who had undergone "considerable torture." The policeman had been shot in both ankles and the other man had been dangling from the ceiling and "beaten severely by a pipe for a good deal of time," Keaveny told reporters.

The captives told U.S. soldiers they had been convicted to death [sic] by an insurgent court at the site - about 18 miles west of Baghdad near the village of Karmah - and had the choice of either beheading or a fatal gunshot, said Keaveny.

They were spared immediate death, Keaveny said, because the insurgents' video camera didn't work and they had gone to get a new one to film the executions. "(The insurgents) said they would be back in the morning," he said. "And that's when we came in, that night."

But that's not all that we found at that site; we seized something a bit more alarming: one million pounds (500 tons) of bomb-making chemicals.

AP, however, does not want to leap to any conclusions...

The site also contained a huge stockpile of more than 1 million pounds of aluminum sulfate, which can be used as a component in nitrate-based fertilizer explosives. But it also has other commercial uses, including water purification.

Gentlemen... a million pounds of "water purification?" What are they trying to do, make the entire Euphrates River potable?

This absurdist attempt to latch hold of any possible benign explanation, to avoid having to conclude that these torturers and beheaders may have been up to no good, follows the pattern laid down by the CIA anent WMD: No matter what components we find -- including 55-gallon drums of Cyclosarin sitting in the same camouflaged ammo dump as a big pile of empty chemical rockets and artillery shells -- the Iraq Survey Group always had a great story of how it could possibly be used for civilian purposes... so it didn't count as WMD. (Saddam Hussein was very anxious that his troops have pest-free ammunition dumps.)

And whenever they found something that was undeniably WMD... well, as Mark Steyn said, it was always the wrong kind.

The job of the CIA is not to cover for Hussein; it is to report intelligence and fairly analyze it, so that the civilian policy makers have the best available information. But as this AP article shows, if your standard is not "reasonable doubt" but "any conceivable doubt whatsoever," you can always find some wild story that ends with the bad guys really being misunderstood.

That proves nothing, except the obvious fact that unreasonable premises yield irrational results.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 5, 2007, at the time of 6:09 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Maliki No Longer Malingering

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

This AP article is extremely encouraging -- not just because of the good news it contains but because of the trend it represents: more and more elite-media news stories are admitting that the security operation is going very, very well so far... and we haven't even inserted the last three or four brigades yet (I'm not sure whether two or only one have gone in to date).

Though there is an amusing and somewhat telling mistake that somehow slithered through the six layers of editorial oversight: while discussing our attempts to move Maliki to split with Sadr, and how reluctant he has been until now, one of the paragraphs reads thus:

But pressure for change has mounted since President Bush ordered 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq last January despite widespread opposition in Congress and among the U.S. public - weary of the nearly five-year-long war.

That would be the "five years" from March 20th, 2003 until March 3rd, 2007, I suppose. Perhaps AP uses some really, really bad lunar calendar...

But on the whole, the article is much fairer and more accurate than we've grown accustomed to seeing over the last four years. (Or five years, if you prefer.)

The good news bits:

  • The prime minister is going to "shake up" his cabinet... which evidently means giving the boot to the six Sadrites in his cabinet and shuffling some other offices around;
  • Maliki also says he will start arresting "top officials" and members of parliament for aiding and abetting the Shiite death squads.

That last part is going to be especially welcome to the Sunni in Iraq, whose cooperation we need in order to bring Iraqis together as a nation, instead of allowing them to disintegrate into discrete groups separated by sect -- or even by tribe.

The government must convince Sunni Iraqis that it's not the Shiite Iraqi government, but a government for all Iraqis. Everyone knows that high-ranking Shia have been funneling money and weapons to the death squads, which use those resources to butcher Sunnis (who may or may not have any connection to al-Qaeda); thus, the only way to convince the Sunni that Prime Minister Maliki is finally serious is to start busting top Shia and chucking them into la calabooza:

Last month, U.S. and Iraqi troops arrested Deputy Health Minister Hakim al-Zamili, an al-Sadr ally, for allegedly diverting millions of dollars in government funds to the Mahdi Army and allowing death squads to use ambulances and government hospitals to carry out kidnappings and killings.

During the interview, al-Maliki said other top officials would face prosecution for ties to insurgents, sectarian militias and death squads - including members of parliament.

"There has been coordination between us and the Multinational Forces ... starting at the beginning of this year ... to determine who should arrested and the reasons behind arresting them," he said.

Al-Maliki did not elaborate on the U.S.-Iraqi coordination but said Iraqi judicial authorities were reviewing case files to decide which to refer to an Iraqi investigative judge, who must decide whether there is enough evidence to order a trial.

This problem is quite serious, and Iraqi authorities estimate as many as 100 government officials could end up in the dock.

One example is MP Jamal Jaafar Mohammed:

One Shiite parliament member, Jamal Jaafar Mohammed, is believed to have fled to Iran after U.S. authorities learned that he was convicted by a Kuwaiti court in absentia and sentenced to death in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait.

Mohammed fled Kuwait for Iran before he could be arrested and returned after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. U.S. officials have alleged he was a conduit for Iranian weapons and supplies smuggled to Shiite militias.

All in all, this news is excellent... and coming on the heels of the drop in homicides (even including the big blast today that killed 20-30 innocent civilians at a market), it definitely shows Iraq's significant movement towards becoming a stable democracy, able to handle its own defense with little help from us.

But of course, the Democrats in Congress are still determined to "stop the surge." More and more, however, it becomes clear they're not worried we might fail...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 5, 2007, at the time of 5:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 3, 2007

Did We Chop the Chopper-Killers?

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The "U.S. military" -- Reuters isn't any more specific than that -- says we killed several "senior insurgents" yesterday suspected of shooting down some of the eight helicopters we recently lost:

A U.S. air strike killed senior insurgents suspected of targeting American helicopters in Iraq, and the Iraqi government said 39 militants had been killed in volatile western Anbar province in recent fighting.

The U.S. military said on Saturday the air strike took place on Friday north of Baghdad near the town of Taji, which is home to a major U.S. air base. It said weaponry, including a vehicle mounted with anti-aircraft artillery, was destroyed.

"Coalition forces believe key terrorists were killed during the air strike ... Intelligence reports indicated this network is responsible for threats to coalition aircraft," the military said in a statement without elaborating. [Maybe it has something to do with the "anti-aircraft artillery" we destroyed.]

AP doesn't mention the "39 militants," but they have a few more details about the raid against the anti-aircraft artillery terrorists:

Also Saturday, the U.S. military said American warplanes bombed an area near Taji, on Baghdad's northern outskirts, killing "key terrorists" who were using anti-aircraft artillery to fire at military helicopters.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman, told The Associated Press that insurgents near Taji had been firing at U.S. helicopters with heavy machine guns mounted on the back of truck.

"It's mobile and it can inflict damage to our helicopters," Garver said. "Anything that can threaten our helicopters, we're going to try to get it off the battlefield," he said of the Friday air strike.

Not much to say about this one; we'll just have to wait and see. But AP mentions another raid of interest:

In a separate raid in the Taji area on Saturday, nine suspected insurgents were captured, including two believed to be responsible for recruiting and helping foreign militants join the insurgency in Baghdad, the U.S. military said. The suspects were also accused of harboring al-Qaida in Iraq leaders, it said.

Iraq's defense ministry said Saturday that Iraqi troops killed three suspected militants in Khan Bani Saad, a mixed town northeast of Baghdad. Two men were arrested in the raid, the ministry said in a statement. Seven others were captured in Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, it said.

The 39 terrorists killed in Anbar died in a long-running firefight by "Iraqi security forces." (Don't you just love the precise specificity of the elite media? We don't even know if the terrorists were killed by the Iraqi Army or the Iraqi Police Commandos.)

In Anbar Province, a number of Sunni tribal leaders have turned against al-Qaeda and are helping us fight them. Enjoy it while it lasts; tribes can be fickle.

Regardless of the missing specifics, clearly the security operation is working very well at the moment. I wonder if the Democrats are as pleased as I.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 3, 2007, at the time of 7:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 2, 2007

Romney Confronts the Gap - Though Not by Name

Iraq Matters , Shrinking the Gap
Hatched by Dafydd

I just read Mitt Romney's speech that he gave at CPAC 2007, the conservative convention. I was particularly struck by this section, which I have reparagraphed for greater clarity (it's a transcription of an oral speech; my paragraphing is no less authentic than the transcriber's!):

We will defeat the violent jihad with a two-part strategy. First, an unquestionably strong military. The best ally peace has in the world is a strong America. We need more men and women in the military, better armaments, and a Strategic Defense Initiative.

And there's a second aspect of our strategy: we must bring together all the civilized nations of the world in what might be called a Second Marshall Plan. Together with them, and with volunteers, businesses and NGOs, we must support moderate Muslim nations and peoples.

They need public schools that are not Wahabi schools, the rule of law, property rights, modern banking and agriculture and pro-growth economic policies. In the end, it is the Muslim people themselves who will eliminate radical jihad.

I have several orchids for this prescription, but one onion as well. First the flowers...

Let's start with the simplest point made by this section of the speech:

  • At last, a conservative American politician is forthrightly defending the idea that our country needs to do more than just "kill people and break things" in Iraq and elsewhere.

After destroying the evil governments (and transnational terrorist groups) that strangle a third of the population of the planet, we must also help them build better, freer, and more economically sustainable institutions, from governments, to churches or mosques, to corporations. We cannot just break the bad and then walk away, shrugging: "Hey, it's your mess, not ours!"

  • It's also spectacularly helpful that Gov. Romney has clearly identified this nation building with America's own national security: "a second aspect of our strategy."

A friend of mine has not actually read Thomas P.M. Barnett's book the Pentagon's New Map, but has only heard one of Hugh Hewitt's eight interviews with Barnett. When Barnett's name came up recently, my friend raged at me that Barnett was "just another f-----g altruist!"

(My friend is a dyed-in-the-wode, small-l libertarian, for whom "altruist" is as vile an epithet as "statist" or "neocon." He often quotes the Ayn Rand definition of altruism: a man who would take food from his own starving child to give to a stranger's starving child.)

I immediately diagnosed the problem: The interview my friend heard must have been one where Barnett was talking about "shrinking the Gap," about rebuilding the nations in the Non-Integrating Gap to be more interconnected economically, legally, and culturally with the rest of the world, and about introducing them to individualism, liberty, and capitalism (henceforth, IL&C). But what my friend did not hear from earlier interviews -- or read, as yet, in Barnett's writings -- is that Barnett's motivation is only partially compassion.

He also believes, and I agree (and agreed with intellectually even before ever hearing of Barnett or his Core-Gap thesis), that it's absolutely critical for American national security to shrink the Gap... because that's where all of our enemies come from nowadays.

For exactly the same reason, I believe -- and my friend emphatically agrees -- that besides confronting and defeating Communism by force of arms during the Cold War, it was also vital that we confronted them ideologically, that we dealt head-on with the claims of Marxism and socialism and rigorously demonstrated why IL&C not only allow you to eat better -- they were more just.

In contrappunto, the gap between Gap and Core is not an ideological divide, though certainly ideologies (both Islamism and also plain, old Communism) "carpe diem" anent the divide. The yawning gulf is actually one of implementation, not theory.

Jerry Seinfeld, talking to Kramer; Jerry comes back and finds he's been burgled, and Kramer confesses he left the door wide open:

KRAMER: How can you not have insurance?

JERRY: Because I spent my money on the Clapgo D. 29. It's the most impenetrable lock on the market today. It has only one design flaw: the door...[shuts the door] must be closed!

I believe just as strongly today as I did 20 years ago in the power of IL&C to convert cringing masses into self-actualized actors for their own enlightened self interest. But there is only one design flaw: the target population must actually be exposed to IL&C for the recruitment to work as advertised.

The danger of disconnectedness is precisely that it exploits that "design flaw": governments and terrorist groups seek to prevent integration between Gap populations and the globalized world, so that the former never get to see what they're missing. By treating whole populations like mushrooms -- keeping them in the dark -- the Gapsters can also feed them the offal of jihadism or Communism. It's too easy to sell future paradise to those currently living in hell.

Thus, after battering down the walls erected by the Gapsters, we have to complete the sequence by bringing in our own moral axioms of IL&C, so the starving, brutalized masses can see that they're not just more just, which is of little consequence to people who are born with one foot in the grave; they also allow you to eat better.

That is how we destroy jihadism, as Romney said: we not only show them we're the strong horse, we show them how our system can pull them out of hell and into, if not paradise, then at least into the twenty-first century. That is clearly in our national-security interest.

  • Finally, it is good to see a presidential candidate clearly state that "it is the Muslim people themselves who will eliminate radical jihad."

While this is the one area that President Bush has communicated well with the American people, there are many other putative "conservatives" who seem to believe that Arabs have a genetic predisposition towards tyranny and jihadism, or at least that the only way we can destroy jihadism is to "convert [the ummah] to Christianity."

This is dangerous defeatism: One flavor of defeatism is to insist that victory requires a policy that you know, deep down, is impossible... thus covertly implying that victory itself is likewise impossible.

Moslems do not need to convert to Christianity; Islam needs to have a Reformation followed by an Enlightenment. Gov. Romney understands this point and expresses it vividly.

As much as modern-day Christians may wish to forget, Christianity used to be just as violent, expansionist, intolerant, antisemitic, and bloodthirsty as Islam is today. Think of the crusades, which may have started as a defensive move to restore the Holy Land to Christian control, but which resulted in the mass murder of Jews they happened to encounter along the road and the looting and burning of Christian Constantinople, and other Christian cities whose wealth beckoned and tempted. Think of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Think of the autos-da-fé, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the religious wars and persecutions in England, France, the Netherlands, and so forth. And there were Christian justifications for slavery, just as there were Christian denunciations of the "peculiar institution."

The movement that changed all of this began with the 16th-century Protestant Reformation and culminated with the 18th-century Age of Englightenment (including the American Revolution). Western society did not cease being Christian; but it did utterly change how it viewed Christianity. From a Mediæval concept of religion as the source of all law, the West shifted to the idea of religion as the source only of inspiration, while law, like all governance, comes ultimately from the consent of the governed.

All that "moderate Moslems" need do is bring about a similar transformation of Islam, forcing it to evolve from primitivism to modernity. It was done in Christianity, and "what Man has done, Man can aspire to do."

But of course, the last time, it took more than 200 years!

Let's hope that with that example behind us and a much brighter yet more challenging future ahead of us, we can shorten that transformation down to a few decades. Whether we can or not, however, this bold strategy is yet another reason to "shrink the Gap."

So what is the one onion?

  • Romney makes the classic mistake of thinking that "the Gap" consists entirely of Moslem cultures: his prescription is applied only to stop "jihad."

Barnett calls this the "arc of instability" fallacy... and it's simply not true. The Non-Integrating Gap includes much of Southeast Asia, the African interior, and large tracts of South America -- none of which is especially Moslem. Islam was not a factor in the horrific massacre of Tutsis and Hutus by each other, nor does it enter into the narcocratic hell of Colombia and Peru, the bestial depredations of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or the brutal, disconnected dictatorship of Kim Jong-Il in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The ummah and the Gap are not coterminous; and the non-Moslem parts need to be evolved and rebuilt every bit as much as do the traditional fundamentalist Islamic countries.

That is one reason I'm pretty sure Mitt Romney has not read Barnett... or at least not much and not attentively.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 2, 2007, at the time of 8:52 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Dividing the Tar Baby

Civics 101 , Econ. 101 , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Shrinking the Gap
Hatched by Dafydd

Or, the text and subtext of black gold

This AP story amazes; it manages to encapsulate, in a very few words, the essence of what is happening overall in Iraq; what America's role in the transmutation; and even points to the challenges and achievements still to come.

This is a tale of shrinking the Non-Integrating Gap, one country at a time; and this is exactly how it will be done:

The Iraqi Cabinet approved draft legislation Monday to manage the country's vast oil industry and divide its wealth among the population, a key U.S. benchmark for progress in this country. The legislation now goes to parliament for approval....

All major parties [of the Shia, the Kurds, and the Sunni] have agreed to work for approval of the measure by May, but there are no guarantees in Iraq's fractious, sectarian political system.

There it is in a nutmeg: Representatives of the entire country of Iraq have finally agreed that their own economic and political interests are best served by constructing a national rule-set for divvying up the oil leases, oil contracts, and oil revenue -- rather than every Arab for himself.

We all hope it will pass parliament; but even if it does not, the impetus is there: The government will simply amend the bill to take the objections into account and try again, and eventually it will pass.

That's not Gap thinking; that's Core thinking. And it's beautiful to see.

But wait, what exactly is the deal? Is it really fair and just to every province?

Under the measure, revenues will be distributed to all 18 provinces based on population size -- a concession to the Sunnis whose central and western homeland has relatively few proven reserves. Most of Iraq's oil is in the Kurdish north and Shiite south, and many Sunnis fear they would be cut out of a fair share....

Under the oil legislation, regional administrations will be empowered to negotiate contracts with international oil companies. The contracts will be reviewed by a central government committee in Baghdad headed by the prime minister.

Note the strong appeal to an almost American-style Federalism: the central government does not control how the provinces or regions distribute their oil revenues, nor is the ultimate power to negotiate held close by parliament. Instead, the regions or provinces can negotiate deals, subject only to a veto by the national government. This is a huge improvement from the traditional parliamentary system, which is Nationalist, not Federalist (the central government decides everything and tells the states, provinces, or prefectures what to do).

All Iraqi provinces get a per-capita share of the revenue, whether they actually produce oil or not. This represents the long-awaited recognition by Iraqis that they'll all in this game together. The Sunni may not have any oil, but they carry out other services (anything high tech, for example) that enables the oil to flow... and without the cohesion of a unified national state, there would be no oil to pump or sell.

But why is it so important to come up with a new economic rule-set for oil revenues and contract negotiation? Why don't the majority Shia just seize all the oil revenues from the southern fields and let the Kurds keep all the revenue from the north? Why not just have warlords and tribal leaders control everything, using oil as a way to bribe the West, as Saddam always did?

Because they desperately want foreign investment, which further integrates Iraq into the global economy:

A new law is needed, most outside experts believe, to encourage international companies to pour billions into Iraq to repair pipelines, upgrade wells, develop new fields and begin to exploit the country's vast petroleum reserves, estimated at about 115 billion barrels.

According to Iraqis familiar with the deliberations, the draft law would offer international oil companies several methods to invest, including production-sharing agreements. Those would give U.S. and other international companies a substantial share of the oil revenues to recover their initial investments and then allow them big tax breaks.

The correlation is absolute: Iraq needs the huge Western companies, with their staggering financial and engineering resources, to heavily invest in the oil fields in order to fully exploit their potential value. But such companies as Exxon-Mobile and Royal Dutch Shell will not invest any significant money at all -- unless they are assured that there is a just, fair, and predictable rule-set that will ensure Iraq doesn't treat them like Hurricane Hugo in Venezuela:

  • There must be strict rules governing who gets what from each deal;
  • The rules must be in writing and known in advance;
  • The interpretation of rules must be consistent from contract to contract; you cannot have a tax of 10% suddenly become a tax of 30% because a creative judge decided the government needed more revenue;
  • There must be a civil-court system that has actual teeth and will treat all litigants with fairness and justice;
  • Above all else, business wants stable growth: they hate surprises... and a system like Iraq had under the late and unlamented dictator was full of 'em. Every time Saddam's mood changed, so would change the contracts, like a weathervane.

This new law -- when passed by parliament -- will go a long, long way towards reassuring "big oil" that they will make a profit, that they will be able to predict the profit, and that the profit (or even the original investment) won't be "nationalized" away from them, and that they won't be forced to pay a bribe at the drop of a turban.

But did the United States have anything to do with this? Are we doing anything in Iraq besides killing people and breaking things? I'm glad you asked:

The tortuous negotiations are reminiscent of the intense American arm-twisting, public pressure and backroom dealmaking that have pushed nearly every step in Iraq's political transformation since the U.S.-led invasion nearly four years ago.

The process sometimes has produced agreements that enabled Washington to declare success but ultimately created a new set of problems -- such as a divisive 2005 election that invigorated the Sunni insurgency, and a new constitution that the U.S. now acknowledges must be amended substantially to bring peace.

Hey, how about that? Is this perhaps the first time that the Associated Press has admitted that America has been working just as hard to build a nation, where once there was only a criminal state, as we have to kill the bad guys?

And notice now negatively AP sees this process: How else do they expect a nascent country like Iraq to make the painful transition from tribalist, traditionalist Gap state to Core state but by being dragged, kicking and screaming all the way? And that "new set of problems" they worry about is akin to the new challenges faced by a child when he transitions to being a teenager.

We are giving Iraq a future; we are slowly raising them to Core status. In a generation, Iraq will be a free, stable democracy with a very significant per-capita GDP... and they will be our allies. How do I know this? Because fellow Core nations always end up allied against states and transnationals in the Gap.

(Yes, even France: they're not doing any fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan because they're incapable of doing so, due to decades of neglect of their military obligations. But they are helping us in many other ways, from intelligence gathering to police training to helping with technological upgrades.)

There are problems; traditionalists (religious and nationalist) will fight against Iraq integrating with the global economy, the global legal assumptions, and most especially the global communications grid. They'll scream and lash out against internet porn and trashy Hollywood movies. Heck, Tipper Gore did a pretty good job lashing out herself against smutty rap lyrics, right here in the United States.

And as far as amending constitutions, of course Iraq will have to do so! As major problems or challenges arise, they must change their operating system to take them into account. For heaven's sake, we ourselves have amended our own Constitution twenty-seven times -- the last time as recently as 1992. (We even used one Genie wish to unwish a previous wish.)

This is a spectacular breakthrough... but AP is so mired in Bush Derangement Syndrome and so terrified that a Republican might win the presidency in 2008 that they don't even recognize what is happening right under their collective proboscises. (Or worse: They do, but they hope that we don't!)

This single act is just as important as our security operation, the enactment of the Iraqi constitution, and the parliamentary vote... because it's the first really big example demonstrating that the constitution and the government actually work to benefit the Iraqi people, all of them, in "real time." Their rule-sets are not purely ornamental, as with the "constitution" of the old Soviet Union (whose only function was to serve as a Potempkin document.)

Similarly, in our own history, the four "Organic Laws of the United States of America" comprise four documents:

  • The Declaration of Independence;
  • The Articles of Confederation;
  • The Constitution;
  • And the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

Why that last? Because that act of Congress created the Northwest Territory... the first expansion of the United States beyond the foundational thirteen states. The Northwest Ordinance was the first real demonstration that America was to be a real country, not simply a historical quirk, stifled in its cradle by the inability to grow and eventually reabsorbed back into Mother England.

For a country to thrive (or even exist) in actuality, it needs not only an intellectually rigorous set of rules; it must also demonstrate that those rules can actually operate for the good of its citizens in the crucible of the real world. Because of the Nothwest Ordinance, and because of the new oil-sharing law (when it's finally approved), we can honestly say that the United States and Iraq are more "real" than the United Nations -- which consists of unbridled intellectualism deliberately divorced from any real-world application.

I say that's a hell of an achievement by our "decider" in la Casa Blanca, one with which he is not generally credited, even by Republicans.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 2, 2007, at the time of 4:05 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 1, 2007

Democrats' NEW New Peacenik Position

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Ooh, this one is really good:

House Democratic leaders have coalesced around legislation that would require troops to come home from Iraq within six months if that country's leaders fail to meet promises to help reduce violence there, party officials said Thursday.

Let's see if I can unpack this: In other words, if al-Qaeda strikes, creating "violence" in Iraq... then under the newest Democratic proposal, our response would be to pull our troops out! That'll scare the robes off Mr. Masri.

"All right, young man, one more snotty remark about my driving and I'm going to stop this car right now, get out, and hand you the keys! Don't make me do it!"

The Democrats also tossed this into the bill, kind of offhandedly, as if it were no big deal:

The legislation also would require Bush to seek congressional approval for any military operations in Iran.

Think about that one: If Iran sent bombers into Iraq, and they directly attacked American troops then scurried back across the border -- we could not respond until we first got a congressional authorization for the use of military force... which of course would require:

  • Six weeks of hearings on the WMD question in Iraq;
  • A post-resignation performance review of Donald Rumsfeld;
  • Impeachment proceedings against the president and vice president (spearheaded by Squeaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Haight-Ashbury, 100%, of course);
  • Revisiting the confirmation hearings of Roberts and Alito, with an eye towards a revote;
  • "Living Wage" legislation of $25 per hour;
  • Free drugs for everyone at government expense;
  • The repeal of the Patriot act, to be replaced by the Diplomatic Engagement Furthering Efforts Against Terrorism act;
  • And lengthy consideration of the Kerry bill to ban all commercial advertising by Vietnam veterans who refused to join the Winter Soldier project when they had the chance, those scoundrels.

By which point, Iran and southern Iraq would have merged; independent Kurdistan would be formed from pieces of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran; and the erstwhile Sunni portions of Iraq would be renamed Independent Wahhabistan.

I suspect this legislation will squeak through the House; but there is no way it's going to get even a majority in the Senate, let alone the 60 votes needed for cloture -- and let even further alone the 67 votes necessary to override President Bush's predestined veto.

Isn't there some point beyond which doomed-to-fail "protest" votes simply become legislative self-abuse?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 1, 2007, at the time of 6:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 28, 2007

Desperate Dems Declare Dastardly Deal

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Congressional Democrats, still struggling for attention from an increasingly bored and impatient electorate, have decided upon a new attempt to humiliate the president, undercut the troops, and perhaps finally, finally satisfy the nutroots that the elected leaders really are radicals and not just poseurs. If you can figure out what they're trying to do, my hat is off to you, because I can't make heads or teakettles out of it:

House Democratic leaders are developing an anti-war proposal that wouldn't cut off money for U.S. troops in Iraq while requiring President Bush to acknowledge problems with an overburdened military....

The tactic is more likely to embarrass Bush politically than force his hand on the war. He would have to sign repeated waivers for units and report to Congress those units with equipment shortfalls and other problems.

All right, show of hands... how many can honestly say they have any idea what the Democrats' plan actually entails? Isn't this AP story even more uninformative than usual? Why can't they just tell us what the Democrats plan to do?

A curious thought just occurred to me: many Democrats thought that the plan pushed by Rep. John "Mad Jack" Murtha (D-PA, 75%) was "brilliant": to enact a binding resolution putting all sorts of restrictions on the deployment of troops, each one supposedly for the good of the troops themselves.

For example, one element of the plot guaranteed, by law, one full year of "rest" between deployments -- followed by many months of training before they could be sent back. This would have made it virtually impossible to send reinforcements or relieve forces that had been in Iraq for a long deployment. The Democrats believed that they would be able to put the Republicans between Iraq and a hard peace, forcing them either to vote with the Democrats, or to vote against "helping out" the troops.

But then Murtha went and shot his mouth off on some internet interview site; he actually let the beans out of the cat about his real purpose: to strangle the new security operation a-borning, to kill it with kindness. This confession was picked up and bruited all about the internet, then all about conservative talk-radio, and finally all around the entire communications grid... and the Democrats had to call it off.

So now, with the warning firmly in cheek that "loose lips sink ships," along comes AP -- which runs a story about a new Democratic strategy, but fails to go into any details at all about it!

Coincidence? We report, you decide.

In any event, I doubt this will succeed any better than the other schemes. Here is the rapid-reaction Republican response:

The House Democrats' plan brought a sharp response from Brian Kennedy, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

"If this is the Democrats' last ditch effort to appease the ultraliberal wing of their party while appearing to support the troops at the same time, I don't think they are going to convince either one of any commitment whatsoever," Kennedy said. "This appears to be political posturing at its worst and yet another attempt to undermine the mission of our troops in harm's way. The American people are going to see right through it."

Tagged, bagged, and released back into the wild with a microburst transmitter up the drainpipe.

The Democrats (and the Bigfoot media) consistently misunderestimate the capacity of the American public to see through their little Kabuki dances. Just because Murtha didn't lurch to the mike to broadcast his too clever by half scheme this time doesn't mean that the voters will fail to see that this ruse is just the same as the earlier attempt to micromanage the war. Once bitten, twice shy.

Or to haul out another hoary quotation: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. The third time, Mr. Bond, is enemy action."

Don't let us meet for a third time, Mr. Murtha.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 28, 2007, at the time of 4:32 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

February 27, 2007

Chuck Hagel on Viet-raq... Revelation Included!

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Chuck Hagel (R-For Now, 96%) hints that he may want to run with a Democrat on the Unity08 ticket (oh sure, I've heard of them!). One presumes that Hagel wants to sufficiently damage the Republican nominee -- whoever he may be -- that the Democrats win; then he can say "if only they had listened to me."

That should tell us just about everything we need to know about Chuck "Swift Surrender" Hagel:

Hagel joked during the interview about teaming up with New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a moderate Republican, and also floated the possibility of joining a bipartisan unity ticket with a Democrat -- with his name first, of course.

Hagel clearly admires Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and calls him "a star," but he doubts the two could ever team up given the vast difference in their parties' principles. "I don't know if it gets to that point, but there is a shift going on out there, and there's nothing like a war that does that," Hagel said.

That was a month ago. A few days later, he made a tepid denial of the possibility in a recent "hagelographic" Newsweek profile (the February 5th issue), calling the possibility "ludicrous" (page 4) -- but not stating categorically that he would not go for it anyway if his quest for the Republican nomination appeared hopeless.

Before this climax, however, some unintended insight breaks through on pages 2-3, as the Hagel brothers (Chuck and Tom) discuss their Vietnam experiences:

Chuck and Tom were both sent to Vietnam.... It was 1968, America's bloodiest year in the war, and on the ground the brothers were hardened by a grisly conflict they tried not to think of as futile. "You see it today in Iraq," says Tom. "We go in, kill all these insurgents, lose all those people. Then we leave town and they just move back in. Same damn thing we did every day over there."

[Chuck Hagel] recalls making a vow to himself: "If America were to go to war again and I was in a position to influence things, I would do everything I could to understand the reality and not allow another Vietnam to occur."

I think we have finally found what makes Chuck Hagel tick like a time bomb about the Iraq war: He and his brother hated their time in Vietnam and came to see it as utterly futile (Tom immediately, Chuck some time later). So today, perhaps in cosmic expiation of their sins, they simply matte "Vietnam" over "Iraq" and react accordingly.

What need have they to investigate what is actually happening in Iraq? Why bother following our evolving tactics -- or how we now hold the towns and cities we take, denying the terrorists easy return? And what's the point of seeing how different Iraq is from Vietnam?

Even more basic, this simplistic identification means Hagel has neither the need nor the desire to honestly consider the argument that Vietnam was voluntary but Iraq is mandatory. He has his one-to-one mapping of Vietnam onto Iraq. And since the first was an exercise in futility, surely the second must be just the same! Thus the obsessive desire to stop the war at any cost.

I am neither psychologist nor psychiatrist... and in my inexpert and uninformed opinion, Sen. Chuck Hagel is not a rational man when it comes to the war: He suffers from the delusion that history is repeating itself exactly all over again; and like a bad Outer Limits episode, Hagel is determined to change history this time.

He is demented about the most important issue facing America today... not a good characteristic in a powerful senator. Earth to Nebraska: Do you think it might be time to start recruiting candidates for a primary fight -- even if Hagel runs for reelection to the Senate at the same time as he runs for president?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 27, 2007, at the time of 5:24 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Security Operation Moves Decisively Into Sadr City

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

After nibbling about the edges of the Shiite stronghold of Muqtada Sadr, the Coalition and Iraqi Army have begun conducting targeted raids of not-so-safehouses in Sadr City -- named after the current Sadr's much more widely respected father and father-in-law, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir As-Sadr:

U.S. and Iraqi forces staged raids in Baghdad's main Shiite militant stronghold Tuesday as part of politically sensitive forays into areas loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Troops have held back on broad sweeps through the teeming Sadr City slums since a major security operation began earlier this month, targeting militant factions and sectarian death squads that have ruled Baghdad's streets.

Al-Sadr withdrew his powerful Mahdi Army militia from checkpoints and bases under intense government pressure to let the neighbor-by-neighbor security sweeps move ahead. [Sadr also withdrew himself and his top lieutenants to Iran.] But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and others have opposed extensive U.S.-led patrols through Sadr City, fearing a violent backlash could derail the security effort.

The pre-dawn raids appeared to highlight a strategy of pinpoint strikes in Sadr City rather than the flood of soldiers sent into some Sunni districts.

Why is the precise tactic so important? The Shiite death squads and the Sunni terrorists are two different enemies; why shouldn't we employ different tactics in dealing with them?

Sunni citizens in Iraq are much more likely to be "rejectionists" and to refuse to cooperate with American and Iraqi Army forces during raids than are the Shia, who seem more anxious for the new democracy to succeed (because the Shia see themselves as the probable victors in future elections, while the Sunni see themselves as likely losers).

Thus, Sunnis are more prone to clam-up and protect the terrorists than are Shia... which accounts for the differing tactics used in each area.

There are many fascinating tales buried in this hodgepodge of a news story; let's try to tease a few of them out (the alternate color indicates the story line that AP could have followed, had they not been busy portraying the war as already lost):

  • U.S. and Iraqi special forces busted 16 people in Sadr City in the raids; their relatives say they're innocent: Security operation moving deep into Sadr City;
  • Iraqi police have arrested one suspect in the attempted killing of Shiite Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi yesterday (we covered that here): Iraqi National Police developing investigative skills;
  • Struggling with the paucity of violence in the wake of the security operation, AP was only able to count 28 war-related homicides in the last 24 hours: Murder decrease continues as the crackdown proceeds.

Important point to remember... Then, 100 per day; Now, 20-30 per day.

The Democrats in Congress prefer the "then" numbers to the "now" numbers, since that helps their electoral chances in 2008; that should tell us just about everything we need to know about the Democrats.

See? If you dig deep enough (like with a bunker buster), you can always find the good news from Iraq somewhere inside the elite-media stories. Don't accuse them of failing in their duty!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 27, 2007, at the time of 5:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 26, 2007

Another Amazing Coincidence...

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Far be it from me to tell anybody what to think. I can barely articulate what I think (assuming whatever it is I do can pass as "thinking").

But I can at least note a few dots that cry out to be connected:

  1. Muqtada Sadr flees to Iran in advance of the strategic change of course in Iraq;
  2. He orders the top Mahdi Militia killers to do a quick fade to Iran as well; all the capos of Mahdi are now alibied up the wazoo. (What is a wazoo anyway? A kazoo from Waziristan?)
  3. From a safe distance, Sadr seemingly orders the Mahdi Militia to stand down, pulling all the black-clad death squads off the streets;
  4. By an amazing coincidence, a series of high-profile car bombs -- and one "building bomb" aimed at assassinating the Shiite vice president of Iraq, Adel Abdul-Mahdi -- all explode in Shiite areas of Baghdad;
  5. Sadr issues a statement crowing that the "occupiers" have been unable to stop the "Sunni" attacks on the Shia, despite the security crackdown: "Here we are, watching car bombs continue to explode to harvest thousands of innocent lives from our beloved people in the middle of a security plan controlled by an occupier."

    (Of course, it's not "thousands" of lives; it's less than a hundred. And we're not "in the middle" of the new strategy; we're barely at the beginning, only 12 days in -- and only one new brigade, about 20% of the additional troops, has arrived so far. While I don't like to judge before all the facts are in, it appears as though Muqtada Sadr may have exaggerated some critical facts for rhetorical effect.)

  6. Finally, Sadr, Iran, and the American drive-by media all agree that this completely refutes any notion that the security operation will resolve the situation in Iraq. May as well just cut it off at the knees. Avoid the rush -- redeploy before the plan even comes fully online!

Note how subtlely AP hints at this conclusion:

The statement - read in Baghdad by an aide to al-Sadr - nearly coincided with a suicide bombing that killed at least 42 people at a mostly Shiite business college. Al-Sadr's sharply worded comments could signal serious strains ahead for the security effort.

Let's take a step back and look at the big picture. The number bandied about earlier was that Sunni and Shiite terrorists combined were killing about 100 Iraqi civilians every day; over the twelve days of crackdown, that means the baseline would have been about 1,200 horrific murders.

But there was not anything like 1,200 murders. In fact, since the beginning of the security operation, combining everything, I doubt there has been even as many as 250 killings. This means that the rate of butchery in Iraq has dropped by about 80% since the operation began... and we're still just getting started. I don't like to go out on a limb, but that does seem at least a little better than a "miserable failure," as Dick Gephardt used to say about, well, virtually everything related to George W. Bush's presidency.

But yesterday and today, a few bombs blew up in Shiite areas, just as Sadr was announcing that the Americans couldn't provide security like the Mahdi Militia did. What a fortuitous turn of events for those who want to force American troops out of Iraq!

Either Sadr's luckstone is working overtime... or else -- dare we imagine it? -- perhaps it was something other than pure random chance that caused those bombs to go off at a time and place that couldn't have been better for Sadr if he had planned it himself.

I note without necessarily drawing any conclusions that Sunnis are not the only sect who can put explosives in an automobile.

Of course, such dark imaginings are absurd. It would require Sadr and the Mahdi Militia to be willing to kill their own people, the Shia, just to further their own power and kick out the American forces. Surely they would have more patriotism towards their own countrymen than that, wouldn't they?

And would they really try to assassinate Shiite Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi? (There is also a Sunni vice president.) Abdul-Mahdi is one of them, isn't he?

Well... not exactly. According to Wikipedia, Adel Abdul Mahdi is a member of the SCIRI. But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, widely rumored to be a close ally of Sadr, if not Sadr's puppet (as Sadr is Iran's puppet), is a deputy chief of the Islamic Dawa Party.

The SCIRI and Dawa are like the Crips and the Bloods: they both appeal to the same demographic (religious Shiite Iraqis), but they are the bitterest of rivals. The SCIRI is more powerful, but Dawa has the prime minister -- and Sadr controls the prime minister, as well.

Abdel-Mahdi is a leader of the powerful Shi'a party the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI. Long based in neighboring Iran, the group opposed a United States administration but holds close ties with the other U.S.-backed groups that opposed Saddam Hussein, including the Kurds and the Iraqi National Congress.

In other words, Sadr is currently working through Dawa... but the vice president who was nearly assassinated was a top official of Dawa's political competitors, the SCIRI -- coincidentally enough.

I wonder why we haven't found even a trace of these elusive "Sunni terrorists." And how could "Sunnis" maneuver car bombs and truck bombs through the narrow streets of Sadr City and other Shiite slums in Baghdad -- without being spotted by any of the Shia, who are constantly on the lookout for just such incursions?

But heavens, I wouldn't want to imply anything underhanded here; I don't intend to cast Persians at Muqtada Sadr. Perhaps I've just read too many Tom Clancy novels.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 26, 2007, at the time of 5:32 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 24, 2007

Iraq Working Its Way Into the "Functioning Core"

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I was reading Iraq the Model's discussion of the security operation (from an Iraqi -- in fact, Baghdadi -- point of view), and this particular section especially caught my eye. It's a sign that Iraq is truly becoming a nation fully integrated into what Thomas P.M. Barnett calls the "Functioning Core" -- nations that have integrated their economies, their communications, and their legal systems into the mainstream of the civilized world, something that never could have happened under Saddam Hussein:

In this regard it's worth mentioning that the judiciary is already trying to provide the required legal component to the operation, al-Mada reports:

The supreme judicial council assigned nine judges, nine representatives of the general prosecutor and fifteen magistrates the task of visiting designated detention facilities to interrogate suspects. The source added that the council demanded that the interior and defense ministries commit to show detainees before a magistrate within 24 hours of the arrest…when the magistrate orders keeping the detainee in custody no other authority has the right to release him, and when the magistrate orders releasing the detainee through paying a bail no other authority shall continue his detention, unless the detainee is wanted for other charges.

Calling for halting the operation isn't realistic and is of no good to us, I think asking for more judges and a bigger role for the judiciary in supervising the work of the military would've been a better demand; one that can really help the people.

In the end, this is exactly what Iraq needs most: an independent, functioning, and fair judicial system that the citizens of Iraq can all trust, whether they're Sunni, Shia, or Kurd; Moslem, Christian, or Jew; rich or poor, Iraqi or foreign. Without that, Iraq can never be anything but a loose confederation of tribes.

But with a modern, Western-style judicial system -- one that respects the rights of the accused, but also protects the community from predators and thugs -- Iraq can be a great nation... and a "model" of modernization and global interconnection for the rest of the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and Iran.

I have always rejected the bigoted idea that Arabs are somehow incapable of embracing democracy, freedom, liberty, Capitalism, and individualism. No people on Earth should be barred from joining in the increasing globalization of economies, communications, and law... provided they're willing to accept those "rule-sets," even when they conflict with the traditional ways.

I'm very much looking forward to the day that Iraq joins the World Trade Organization, signs an extradition treaty with Western nations, joins its banking system with the Western world's, and joins NATO (if Turkey can be a member, why not Iraq?)

The first step after 9/11 was clearly for us to drive al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, which we did. But I believe that one reason President Bush decided that step 2 would be liberating Iraq is that he knew, even back in 2001 or 2002, that Iraq was sophisticated and mature enough, despite decades of Saddam (and the Baath Party before him), to serve as a template for all the other Arab countries... and even for Persia, the gateway to Southwest Asia.

Nobody with the serious intent to democratize the world could resist starting with Iraq, a country with vast oil reserves and an educated people with (by and large) a modern understanding of religion and its role in society. I can't think of any other nation that could withstand both Sunni terrorists and Shiite death squads trying to foment a civil war -- yet not fall into one.

That's why it's vital that Iraq succeed as a democratic nation. That, more than anything I can think of, would cripple al-Qaeda and make them the laughingstock of the entire ummah.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 24, 2007, at the time of 6:12 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

February 23, 2007

The Desperate Perversity of al-Qaeda

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has a new tactic: they have begun recruiting suicide bombers to "avenge" the as-yet unsubstantiated charges that Iraqi security forces are raping Sunni women.

But are the accusers themselves part of the conspiracy, or are they telling the truth about their victimization? It's awfully peculiar that in a Moslem-Arab society like Iraq -- where rapes are rarely disclosed, even when the victim is utterly blameless, for fear of being ostracized -- that Sunni women would level the charge of rape on television:

Sunni insurgent groups including al-Qaida in Iraq have called for revenge attacks after second rape allegation against the Shiite-dominated security forces.

The second rape allegation to be made in a television interview -- an unusual development in Iraq, where the crime is rarely reported or spoken of -- is putting more pressure on the Iraqi government, its army and police in their desperate fight against the country's enduring Sunni insurgency and sectarian violence.

The al-Qaida in Iraq leader, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, purportedly called on his followers Thursday to step up attacks on Iraqi security forces to avenge the alleged rapes in Baghdad and the northern town of Tal Afar near the Syrian border.

As usual, the elite media has seized upon the charges and shoehorned them into "the story" they've been telling since Day 0 of the invasion: That Iraq is a quagmire, that it's just like Vietnam, that we're destined to be defeated:

At least six groups, including al-Qaida in Iraq, have called for revenge.... The latest rape allegation, made by a 50-year-old woman from Tal Afar, is likely to further undermine.... Sunni Arab politicians opposed to the Shiite-led government have seized on the charges.... Harith al-Dhari, the head of the hardline Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, told Iraq's Al-Sharqiya television that he knew of hundreds of rapes...

We can state several points with certainty:

  • On the one hand, with some 200,000+ members of the Iraqi Army and National Police, the odds that at least one has committed a rape at some point approach 100%. The same can be said about any American unit of similar size -- or a collection of a similar number of male teachers or bakers or rabbis;
  • But on the other hand, the old feminist mantra that "women never lie about rape" is demonstrably false; women file thousands of false rape allegations every year... the Tawana Brawley case was only the most visible. Women lie about rape to avoid taking blame for an affair, for ideological reasons, during divorces and custody battles, and of course for money;
  • On the third hand, if a woman really were raped by police, she would probably be reluctant to report the rape to the same police, even at a different precinct. In such a case, the unusual step of making the accusation publicly, via press conference or interview, might actually make sense as a form of self-defense;
  • On the fourth hand, we know that al-Qaeda and other Sunni and Shiite combatants in Iraq are prone to make wild and false accusations in order to stir up opposition to Coalition forces and the fledgling Iraqi government. Iraq has its own version of "Pallywood," and there are plenty of Iraqi stringers who will say anything for money, for fame, or for ideological reasons. "Jamil Hussein" springs to mind (whose name, in fact, is positively not Jamil Hussein), as does Bilal Hussein (now in American custody), the photographer who took those pictures of al-Qaeda murders on Haifa Street;
  • But on the fifth hand, some of the worst allegations against American soldiers appear to have some truth to them... such as the rape and murder of a teenaged girl in Haditha, for which several American soldiers have actually pled guilty and offered to testify against others. So just because a charge is extraordinary doesn't mean it's automatically false... but it does require extraordinary evidence.

All of which adds up to a great big "Maybe" about the specific rape charges in question. I have no trouble believing that some Iraqi soldiers might consider rape a privilege of conquest; but contrariwise, it certainly is convenient for al-Qaeda On the Ropes, which can use the horrific allegations to stir up more resentment and hatred against the government and recruit more fanatics to the cause.

(After all, as any Iraqi can tell you, it's a thousand times worse for a Sunni woman to be raped than for a Shiite woman to see all of her children blow up by a suicide car bomb... al-Qaeda's specialty in Iraq.)

[Ayyub Masri] also claimed in an audio tape that 300 followers have volunteered for suicide missions within hours of hearing news of the alleged rape in Baghdad, which the woman said took place in a police garrison.

Is this really true? Even if the rapes actually occurred, that doesn't mean that al-Qaeda's recruitment has really been this successful -- or that it has increased at all, for that matter. To paraphrase Charles Bronson in Breakheart Pass, if a man is a terrorist and mass murderer, he may also be a liar.

In fact, there is yet a third possibility regarding the rapes: whenever we raid an al-Qaeda not-so-safehouse, in addition to weapons, explosives, deadly chemicals, computers, and jihadist literature, we always seem to find an entire wardrobe of fake or stolen uniforms -- from the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi National Police, or our own Army or Marines. Even assuming the rapes actually occurred, do we really know the perpetrators were actually policemen? Could they not have been al-Qaeda themselves, disguised as Iraqi police?

If a Sunni terrorist is willing to murder scores of innocent people, including Sunnis, to slake the thirst of his death god, he may be even more willing to rape Sunni women for the same purpose. For that matter, members of the Mahdi Militia or the Badr Organization might also don police uniforms and go on a rape spree, just for the thrill of pure evil.

The problem is that Iraq is still a primitive country. In America today, when something terrible happens and people leap to a conclusion about who is guilty, we can usually still rely upon our deep trust in the jury system: When a popular person is convicted or an unpopular one acquitted, we very rarely see mass violence as a result.

But even now, it happens here occasionally: for example, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of four police officers in the Rodney King beating case, ended with 53 people killed and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage from arson and looting.

In Iraq, such mini-uprisings are common. There are plenty of unemployed, young vaqueros just standing around, looking for any kind of excitement they can find (or make themselves). It seems inevitable that these accusations -- which I predict will accelerate massively over the next few weeks -- will lead to protests, riots, and mass murders.

The only thing we can do about it is to ride it out. Investigate cases, severely punish anyone found guilty, but heavily publicize any case where there is proof that a Sunni woman lied about a rape allegation (especially if we can prove she has an al-Qaeda connection)... and crush the riots as they spring up. Rioters and murderers must be prosecuted, and the defense of "rape rage" must specifically be banned. Eventually, information overload will set in, and people will simply stop reacting to such charges by going on a rampage.

President Jalal Talabani, breaking his silence on the political storm swirling around the rape allegations, has appealed for calm, saying the courts were the only place where such cases should be settled.

"Today, we need to trust one another and avoid whatever shakes that trust, stokes sensitivities or fill hearts with malice," Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, said in a statement issued by his office late Thursday.

The tactic, whether the original accusations are true or false, is another indication that our enemy is vicious, ruthless, and utterly perverse (as if we needed such). But as a country becomes civilized, interconnected with the rest of the world, and joins what Thomas P.M. Barnett calls "the Functioning Core," this is a cultural change is must eventually confront: that justice is best handled by a civil and criminal court system, not tribal warfare.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 23, 2007, at the time of 3:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 22, 2007

Bleached Bombs

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Wending our weary way through the wretched reporting in this New York Times piece -- which can't make up its mind whether to be a news article about a deadly, new tactic of the terrorists or a finger-wagging condemnation of the strategic change of course in Iraq -- we do at least learn that terrorists have started using chemical weapons in the outskirts and suburbs of Baghdad and in Anbar -- bombs with that little something special... chlorine gas:

A truck bomb that combined explosives with chlorine gas blew up in southern Baghdad on Wednesday, and officials said it might represent a new and deadly tactic by insurgents against Iraqi civilians.

It was at least the third truck bomb in a month to employ chlorine, a greenish gas also used in World War I, which burns the skin and can be fatal after only a few concentrated breaths. The bomb killed at least two people and wounded 32 others, many of them sent to hospitals coughing and wheezing, police and medical officials said....

The bombing involving chlorine gas on Wednesday followed an explosion on Tuesday north of Baghdad of a tanker filled with chlorine that had been rigged to explode, killing nine people and wounding 148, including 42 women and 52 children. At least one other attack with chlorine took place on Jan. 28, according to the American military’s statements. Sixteen people were killed in that attack, in the Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, when a dump truck with explosives and a chlorine tank blew up in Ramadi.

Thus, in terms of military strategy and technology, the Iraqi terrorists have now worked themselves nearly all the way up to 1914.

But fortunately, not quite to the modern world; they haven't yet figured out that you must choose... either it's a chemical attack, or it's a big, fiery explosion; you can't have both:

The attacks seem to have been poorly executed, burning the chemical agent rather than dispersing it, but more sophisticated weapons involving chlorine could injure hundreds and cause mass panic.

The Times article is long on ominious descriptions of an elusive, "adaptive" enemy -- shooting down helicopters, using chemical weapons -- but somehow fails to note that United States forces are considerably more adaptive than Sunni terrorists or Shiite death squads.

This is similar to the phenomenon of obsessive news reports of American deaths and woundings, while the same reporters have little interest in reporting how many terrorists have died. As we noted in an earlier post, for example, the Times announced that 4,000 people were killed in Afghanistan in war-related deaths last year. What they failed to explain, however, was that "over three fourths of the 4,000 'people' killed in Afghanistan in 2006 were Taliban."

Approximately 190 of the remainder were American deaths that year. This leaves only about 760 civilian war-related deaths in Afghanistan in 2006. Shouldn't these "details" make a difference in how we interpolate the original death report?

In response to the gas attacks, we've stepped up our targeted raids; and although there is nothing in any report I've read to indicate it, I'm sure we're diligently searching through sales receipts of chlorine, fertilizer, and other caustic or explosive chemicals to catch the terrorists before they can deploy any more such weapons:

U.S. troops raided a car bomb factory west of Baghdad with five buildings full of propane tanks and ordinary chemicals the military believes were to be used in bombs, a spokesman said Thursday, a day after insurgents blew up a truck carrying chlorine gas canisters.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said the chlorine attack Wednesday - the second such "dirty" chemical attack in two days - signaled a change in insurgent tactics, and the military was fighting back with targeted raids.

"What we are seeing is a change in the tactics, but their strategy has not changed. And that's to create high-profile attacks to instill fear and division amongst the Iraqi people," he told CNN. "It's a real crude attempt to raise the terror level by taking and mixing ordinary chemicals with explosive devices, trying to instill that fear within the Iraqi people."

In fact, Caldwell noted that the tactic appears to be blowing up in the terrorists' faces: intelligence tips to American and Iraqi forces have "doubled" in the past six months:

One of those tips led U.S. troops to a five separate buildings near Fallujah, where they found the munitions containing chemicals, three vehicle bombs being assembled, including a truck bomb, about 65 propane tanks and "all kinds of ordinary chemicals," Caldwell said. He added that he believed the insurgents were going to try to mix the chemicals with explosives.

We're not asking the drive-by media to stop reporting on explosions or casualties among American soldiers or Iraqi civilians. But we do demand that they balance "if it bleeds, it leads" sensationalism with a better sense of the actual progress of the war... rather than hit-pieces crafted for the purpose of trying to save the world by making the war appear hopeless. This aids the Democratic Party policy of premature withdrawal, a sort of "rhythm method" of stopping the war. (A piece at any price?)

I am convinced that this sort of flawed reporting is what has made victory smell like pungent defeat and is more responsible than any other anti-war action for damaging the war effort. The urge to save the world by stopping the war appears to coil in the heart of many, probably most reporters who have written on the subject; to give the Devil his due, the elite media has been extraordinaily successful in this "conspiracy of shared interests."

But I still believe that the real meaning of "information wants to be free" is not that "songs want to be ripped and downloaded from Napster," but rather that information cannot be suppressed forever. Mark Twain famously wrote (or else he didn't -- how do I know?) that a lie travels halfway round the world before truth laces up its boots.

But the second half of that aphorism, which Twain inexplicably left off, is this: But once Mr. Truth finishes monkeying with those boots, he overtakes Mr. Lie and stomps him flatter than a liberal's conscience.

So hurry up, Mr. Truth; we're always ready to lend you an extra hobnail boot!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 22, 2007, at the time of 4:34 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 16, 2007

The Bigg Fizz

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Once again, the Democrats tried to slap President Bush -- and got bushwhacked.

The "big news" as far as the media cares is that the House passed a meaningless resolution "refuting" Bush's troop buildup in Iraq.

(Yes, "refutes" was the word local radio station KRLA kept using; they're the station that carries Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt. Although "to refute" can mean "to deny the accuracy or truth of," the more common usage is "to prove to be false or erroneous; overthrow by argument or proof." In either case, you cannot "refute[] Bush's decision to send 21,000 troops to Iraq.")

But the real news is that only 17 Republican representatives voted for it -- and 2 Democrats, Jim Marshall (D-GA, 70%) and Gene Taylor (D-MS, 60%), actually crossed party lines and voted with the Republican majority against the resolution:

Seventeen Republicans voted for the resolution. Two Democrats, Jim Marshall of Georgia and Gene Taylor of Mississippi, voted against it. Mr. Marshall is the son and grandson of Army generals and was wounded in combat in Vietnam, according to The Almanac of American Politics. Mr. Taylor has a generally conservative voting record and is “strongly pro-defense,” the almanac says. Six representatives cast no vote.

The final vote was 246 to 182; six representatives did not vote (two Democrats and four Republicans, I believe), and of course conservative Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-GA, 100%) passed away a few days ago. But as recently as two days ago, Democrats were predicting that from 30 to 60 (!) Republicans would defect. Most analysts said the minimum would be "dozens."

The seventeen "white-flag Republicans" are:

  • Michael Castle (DE, 28%)
  • Richard (Ric) Keller (FL, 96%)
  • Timothy V. Johnson (IL, 52%)
  • Mark Kirk (IL, 36%)
  • Wayne Gilchrest (MD, 42%)
  • Frederick Stephen Upton (MI, 80%)
  • James Ramstad (MN, 46%)
  • Howard Coble (NC, 84%)
  • Walter Jones (NC, 80%)
  • James T. Walsh (NY, 65%)
  • Steven C. LaTourette (OH, 71%)
  • Philip Sheridan English (PA, 88%)
  • Robert Inglis (SC, 84%)
  • John J. Duncan Jr. (TN, 92%)
  • Ron Paul (TX, 76%)
  • Thomas M. Davis (VA, 57%)
  • Thomas Petri (WI, 72%)

What is so encouraging about this vote is that those voting in favor of a non-binding (meaningless) resolution came nowhere near the number needed to override a presidential veto, which is 290 (2/3rds of 435). Although this has no meaning in a non-binding resolution, which needs no presidential signature, it has great significance in the next round of the Democrats' assault upon America's war effort: the attempt by Rep. John Murtha (D-PA, 100%) to cut off funding for the troops in Iraq, which would prevent them from being reinforced or relieved by new troops, leaving them in a perilous position.

This has wide support among Democratic lawmakers; but there are not enough of them (only 233 in the House, 51 in the Senate, assuming Sen. Tim Johnson, D-SD, 95%, is well enough to vote) to override Bush's certain veto. But such a scheme will certainly get fewer Republican votes -- and probably fewer Democratic votes as well, considering the opposition by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD, 95%) -- than the meaningless exercise in symbolism they just passed.

That means that there is no chance at all that the Murtha scheme can ultimately succeed, which requires overriding a presidential veto... and in fact, depending on how many Democrats follow Hoyer, who opposes the Murtha scheme, even though he supported the non-binding resolution, they might not even get a simple majority to pass the Murtha scheme in the first place.

So how long will the anti-war Democrats continue along this march to futility? It would actually make much more sense, not just militarily (of course) but even politically, for the majority caucus to say something like the following: "While we have reservations about the president's current strategy, we'll support it for now and give it a chance; if it succeeds where all his other strategies have failed -- wonderful! But if it fails, then Congress will have to step in and decide whether continuing down this road is in the best security interests of the United States." (It doesn't matter whether they believe it; it's still in their best political interests to say it.)

That way, if it fails, they get credit for allowing Bush "one last-ditch effort" to salvage the war (I'm speaking from the perspective of Democrats; I actually think the war is going much better than the media pretends). But if it succeeds, which could happen -- failure is always an option, but so is victory -- then the Democrats can bask in the glory along with the GOP.

As it stands now, with their repeated and increasingly shrill attempts to sabotage the war, they will inherit some of the blame if we lose (because they "handcuffed" our troops, and so forth). But if we win, they will get no credit whatsoever... because they predicted nothing but defeat and dishonor.

The Democrats think they're in a win-win situation... but in fact, it's lose-semi-lose. Welcome to the "majority" of a closely divided Congress.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 16, 2007, at the time of 3:58 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

Not A-Feared We're Gonna Lose...

Congressional Calamities , Congressional Corruption , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The more success we have in our new strategic change of course in Iraq -- the more desperate the Democrats become to stop it in its tracks. The dynamic has become as crystal: the Democrats are not afraid we'll lose... they're frantic that we might somehow win.

Their entire political strategy is based upon the assumption that Iraq in 2008 will be even more a catastrophe than today (and they have very funny ideas of how bad it is today).

Thus, I am hardly shocked that the Democrats in Congress, perhaps stunned by the speed with which President Bush's new strategy appears to be bearing fruit, have gone back on their word... and now openly threaten to cut off funding to end the war, a tactic which only a couple, three weeks ago was dismissed by both Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%) and Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 100%) as Republican paranoia:

Democrats are challenging President Bush's power to wage war, contending they've found a way to block a troop increase in Iraq and prevent any pre-emptive invasion of Iran....

"This country needs a dramatic change of course in Iraq and it is the responsibility of this Congress to consummate that change," said Rep. John Murtha, who chairs the House panel that oversees military spending.

Murtha, D-Pa., is preparing legislation that would set strict conditions on combat deployments, including a year rest between combat tours; ultimately, the congressman says, his measure would make it impossible for Bush to maintain his planned deployment of a total of about 160,000 troops for months on end.

The Fox News "All-Stars" had a lively discussion of Rep. John Murtha's (D-PA, 100%) scheme on Brit Hume yesterday: The basic idea is to set up a series of "benchmarks" -- not for the Iraqis to achieve, not even for the soldiers and Marines to achieve in the field; the benchmarks are "readiness" and "rest" standards that American units must meet in order for the Commander in Chief to be allowed by Congress to send them to Iraq.

(And the scheme is probably an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers.)

The standards are ludicrous. For example, units cannot be deployed to Iraq if they have been in the United States less than one year, no matter what. They cannot be deployed if they have not received some very high level of training. Troops' tours cannot be extended; stop-loss extensions are forbidden; equipment must be up to some impossible standard... and all these must be reported, certified by the president, and (presumably) agreed to by Congress before the president is allowed to deploy any troops.

To Iraq, that is; none of this nonsense on stilts would apply to units being deployed to Afghanistan.

In an interview on the website MoveCongress.org (in a passage now "sanitized" from the site), Murtha made his intentions clear -- and it's not simply to prevent the so-called "surge" in Iraq:

The Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense has begun consideration of the president’s $93 billion supplemental appropriations request for Iraq. Action on the request will be the first opportunity for the new Congress to exercise its “power-of-the-purse” over the Iraq war.

Chairman Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq but undermining other aspects of the president’s foreign and national security policy. Chairman Murtha discusses these steps in a videotaped conversation with former Congressman Tom Andrews (D-ME), the National Director of the Win Without War coalition, sponsor of MoveCongress.org.

In the discussion on Special Report, Hume, Fred Barnes, Mort Kondracke, and Nina Easton (no Mara yesterday) all agreed that the actual effect of the Murtha bill, if it were passed into law, would be to prevent reinforcements from arriving to relieve the augmented troop levels that will already be in country long before that point. They also all agreed that the bill has no chance at all of actually being enacted: It will never make it through the Senate and might not even pass the House, if the Republicans were to expose and attack it for what it really is.

Nina Easton thought it was good politics for the Democrats: They appear to be "pro-troops," looking out for their welfare, when in fact their real intent is to block the strategic change of course in Iraq. But both Fred and Mort, the "Beltway Boys," thought it would in fact turn out to be terrible politics for the Democrats, and I agree:

  • Even many of those who oppose the troop increase (a small but necessary part of the change of course) will balk at the idea of cutting off funding after the troops have already arrived, which is what the Murtha scheme would do;
  • This feeds directly into the traditional weakness of the Democrats on national defense, that they are so allergic to war that they actually prefer us to lose rather than win;
  • Even those who won't go that far might still think it feckless for Congress to try to micromanage the exact level and location of future troop deployments;
  • Since the FY 2007 budget is already appropriated, funding the DoD through September, President Bush can simply move funds from other DoD projects to fund the war; the Supreme Court has already ruled that this is within the Executive's authority; thus, Congress cannot cut off funds until at least October;
  • But by October, the Democrats' worst fears may be realized: it may already be obvious that the new strategy is working, and working so well that even the big-box media cannot cover it up.

Thus, it's almost a given that the Murtha scheme is doomed to fail -- which will make it all the more likely that moderate Democrats in the House will defeat it, led by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD, 95%), who beat John Murtha out of that post and still bears ill will, and who has already come out against the Murtha scheme.

When the Democrats are unable to act on the supplementary budget request for the troops, they will have to scramble to accept it as is, without the Murtha scheme attached. This will humiliate and disempower Murtha within the Democratic caucus, relative to Hoyer.

What is most likely to happen then is that the frustrated Defeat Caucus in the House, having failed to enact the Murtha scheme, will push something even more radical... possibly a naked cut-off of funding to the troops in the field, essentially telling our soldiers and Marines in combat to "dry up and blow away."

By then, unless the liberal Democrats come to their senses somewhere in the middle and stop themselves, they will finally restore the natural distinction between Republicans who support victory in the war and Democrats who support only defeat, dishonor, and disaster. (The distinction had grown blurry with the small number of "white-flag Republicans" infesting the Congress.)

As always, the lizards are optimistic: I still bet on George W. Bush to keep up the good, very good fight in Iraq against both al-Qaeda and also the millenarian cult of Shiite death squads -- rather than betting on the antics of the defeatist Democrats in House and Senate. The fight is not just good for the GOP; it's vital for the future of Western civilization.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 16, 2007, at the time of 5:18 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

February 15, 2007

Iraq Security Crackdown Proceeding Faster Than Expected

Iraq Matters , Predictions , Presidential Campaign Camp and Porkinstance
Hatched by Dafydd

According to AP, after several days sealing off the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City (a slum area in Baghdad) and searching house to house for weapons and militants, we have now also moved heavily into the Baghdad headquarters of the Sunni terrorists:

U.S. and Iraqi forces pushed deeper Thursday into Sunni militant strongholds in Baghdad - where cars rigged with explosives greeted their advance - while British-led teams in southern Iraq used shipping containers to block suspected weapon smuggling routes from Iran. Early Friday, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was wounded and an aide was killed in a clash the previous day with Iraqi forces north of Baghdad.

So far, the claim that we wounded Ayyub Masri, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, and killed one of his top aides (Abdullah Majemaai) comes only from the Iraqi forces -- and they've been wrong before. But if true, this is a very nice and somewhat serendipitous benefit:

The announcement about the wounding of al-Masri, the al-Qaida in Iraq leader, came from Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman. He said the clash occurred near Balad, a major U.S. base about 50 miles north of the capital, and identified the dead aide as Abu Abdullah al-Majemaai.

We met a number of terrorist ambushes but evidently suffered no casualties in Baghdad (deaths or woundings); however, one Marine was killed in combat in the Anbar province -- also a Sunni-terrorist hellhole.

At the same time (hat tip to Sachi, who dug up the links), Bill Roggio reports that we haven't slackened our aggression against the Mahdi Militia of Muqtada Sadr:

Coalition forces also are maintaining the pressure on Sadr, and working to dismantle the Mahdi Army from underneath him while he is in Iran. In Baghdad, two more operatives of Jaish al-Mahdi, or the Mahdi Army, were detained over the past 24 hours. Iraqi Special Forces captured a "weapons supplier and financier of sectarian violence conducted by rogue Jaysh Al Mahdi cells," along with "an additional person for questioning." Another Mahdi cell member who is "believed responsible for kidnapping, torture and murder of Iraqi citizens and security forces in the area" was captured by Iraqi Special Forces.

MultiNational Force - Iraq has slightly more information on the two captured members of JAM: the Iraqis picked up a top Mahdi Militia bagman and broke up a kidnapping-murder death squad.

(Actually, MNF-I says "rogue" elements of JAM; but I think that is just because we're being overly cautious before connecting the dots to Muqtada Sadr -- still in hiding in Iran -- before formally fingering him sometime later.

(I think we should be more aggressive in our propaganda right now... but that's just me.)

I am actually surprised at how well the strategic change of course in Iraq is going in its early stages; I'm very, very optimistic about the effect overall as it proceeds into its larger and more thorough stages, when the rest of the 90,000 troops (21,500 Americans, the rest Iraqis) descend upon Baghdad and start truly owning the territory.

Unlike many -- Mark Steyn, James Lileks, and a number of actual heavyweights, including some generals -- I believe that success in Iraq will become so brutally clear, that even the drive-by media will be forced to admit it.

I believe also that the 2008 election will take place in a political atmosphere where Iraq will look a heck of a lot better than it looked in 2006... and that this will have a major impact on the election itself. If my prediction turns out to be true, then an awful lot of Democrats (and even a few white-flag Republicans) are going to look like hyserical poo-flinging monkeys.

(That last isn't a prediction, because it's too easy: no matter what happens, most of the Democrats and some Republicans will fit that image. It's kismet.)

Any of the Big Three candidates on the GOP side would be well positioned to take advantage of that change of atmosphere, assuming I am correct about Iraq. No Democrat will, because every last one of them shall spend this entire year campaigning on the theme that we've already been defeated, we're helpless, and we should simply run away and abase ourselves until we're forgiven by the world community.

Should be an interesting year-plus.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 15, 2007, at the time of 6:50 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 13, 2007

Red Rover, Red Rover, Let Sadr Come Over!

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd
"Ladies and gentlemen -- Elvis either has or has not left the building."

A few weeks ago, Iranian puppet Muqtada Sadr may have fled Iraq... straight to Tehran:

Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr fled Iraq for Iran ahead of a security crackdown in Baghdad and the arrival of 21,500 U.S. troops sent by President Bush to quell sectarian violence, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday.

Al-Sadr left his Baghdad stronghold some weeks ago, the official said, and is believed to be in Tehran, where he has family. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. monitoring activities, said fractures in al-Sadr's political and militia operations may be part of the reason for his departure. The move is not believed to be permanent, the official said.

Or else, he may not have:

Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr said Wednesday that the radical Shiite cleric was still in Iraq, denying a report that he fled to Iran ahead of a security crackdown targeting his militia.

An Iraqi government official said al-Sadr was in the Shiite holy city of Najaf Tuesday night, when he received delegates from several government departments. The official, who is familiar with one of those meetings, spoke on condition of anonymity because he has no authority to disclose information on his department's activities.

UPDATE 5:13 am PST:

"Tag, you're it!"

The chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq said Wednesday that Muqtada al-Sadr has left the country and is believed to be in Iran, despite denials from the radical Shiite cleric's supporters.

The most likely scenario (to me, at least) is that Sadr did in fact flee Iraq to Iran a few weeks ago; but then he decided to return, possibly because he feared he was losing control of the Mahdi Militia and thought that his direct presence would frighten some of his gangland rivals: it's hard to run a terrorist organization by remote control.

(The real question is, did Sadr leave voluntarily... or was he Marcotted?)

In any event, Sadr is in trouble, and it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Two of his top lieutenants were "gunned down" last week; five others were either killed or captured by Coalition forces. So many of his top aides have been removed that there is a serious question now whether Muqtada Sadr is even still in command.

Asharq Alawsat -- an English-language Arabic daily newspaper -- has more about the two Sadrites who just went to Paradise to get their box of 72 raisins:

Two key members of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's political and military organization were gunned down just days before the U.S. and Iraqi forces planned to open a massive security drive in Baghdad.

Ali Khazim, who ran al-Sadr's political organization in volatile Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, was killed Sunday by U.S. forces at his home in Howaider village, 12 miles east of Baqouba, Saleh al-Ageili, a spokesman for the Sadr Movement's parliamentary bloc, said on Monday. Provincial police confirmed al-Ageili's account....

The second official, Khalil al-Maliki [probably no relation to the Iraq prime minister - the Mgt.], a key figure in al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in Basra, was killed by three gunmen in a drive-by shooting on Sunday in the southern city of Basra, police reported. He survived an assassination attempt in the city last year.

As many as seven key figures in the al-Sadr organization have been killed or captured in the past two months, at least three of them by U.S. forces, after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, also a Shiite, dropped his protection for the organization -- a crucial backer in his rise to power.

We seem to have a multi-part Baghdadi fire drill in progress:

  • Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has withdrawn his protection from Sadr and the Mahdi Militia;
  • Sadr probably fled Iraq to Iran;
  • Sadr probably returned from Iran to Iraq;
  • Sadr probably fretted that he could not command his troops from Tehran;
  • Somebody or somebodies unknown are bumping off top Sadrites;
  • Coalition troops are also killing and capturing Sadr's top lieutenants at an alarming rate;
  • Coalition troops are also killing and capturing Iranian "Qods Force" soldiers inside Iraq.

The strategic change of course in Iraq hasn't really even started yet, but already it appears to be paying dividends.

On the Sunni terrorist front, a new "umbrella organization," Islamic State in Iraq, which has now absorbed al-Qaeda in Iraq, has been beavering away at shooting down American helos. Upon further investigation, the Marines now say that the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter that went down with all hands a week ago was indeed shot down; it was not mechanical failure, as they thought at first.

ISI has circulated a video supposedly showing the helo being splashed. I haven't watched it (and won't; I don't watch enemy propaganda); but with the Marine Corps' admission that the Sea Knight was actually shot down, we'll probably have to conclude that the video is genuine.

So we have some action items on our agenda:

  1. Find out for sure where Muqtada Sadr is lurking;
  2. If he's outside the country -- don't let him back in!
  3. If he's in Najaf, consider deporting him;
  4. Continue capturing and killing his lieutenants; make it an unpopular job title;
  5. Strike hard at Islamic State in Iraq; umbrellas can be folded up.

I would love for the putative "surge" to bear sweet fruit... right after the Democrats pass a resolution, largely along party lines, to support the troops but condemn everything they're doing.

Let's see the Democrats get out of that one.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 13, 2007, at the time of 11:54 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Democrats and the Media: The "Big Tet" Party

Blogomania , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In this AP story, the big-box media tries valiantly to enlist Sen. John McCain (R-AZ, 80%) into the anti-war camp. How? By twisting out of context his recent comment fearing another "Tet Offensive," this time in Iraq:

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said Monday he fears an offensive by Iraqi insurgents similar to the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong that sent U.S. casualties soaring in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago....

In the GOP presidential field, McCain is one of the strongest proponents of President Bush's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq by some 21,500.

"By the way, a lot of us are also very concerned about the possibility of a, quote, 'Tet Offensive.' You know, some large-scale tact [sic; I'm sure he actually said "attack"] that could then switch American public opinion the way that the Tet Offensive did," the Arizona senator said.

Great Scott! Even the "strongest proponent" of the strategic change of course in Iraq is worried about a Tet Offensive. But, uh, what's a Tet Offensive anyway, Bob?

The Associated Press helpfully explains what McCain must have meant:

Tet, a massive invasion in 1968 of South Vietnam by Communist North Vietnamese, inflicted enormous losses on U.S. and South Vietnamese troops and is regarded as a point where public sentiment turned sharply against the war.

Well... yes. But there seems to be something missing from that thumbnail description...!

In the real world, the Tet Offensive was a military disaster -- for the Vietcong and the NVA. While we (Americans and South Vietnamese) lost maybe 4,500 soldiers during that two-month offensive, the enemy lost about ten times that number... as many as 45,000.

The Vietcong (who the NVA used as cannon-fodder) were devastated; never again were they to be a significant factor in the war. They Communists did not end up holding even a single yard of the territory they grabbed; everything was seized back from the North Vietnamese by the American and ARVN counteroffensive.

However, here comes what Larry Elderberry always calls "the big but": Tet was a public relations bonanza for the Communists, largely because the elite media simply decided, in a "conspiracy of shared interest," to pretend that it was a tremendous military victory for the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong... and an unmitigated defeat for America.

"Uncle" Walter Cronkite led the way with his despicable, lying broadcasts from Vietnam:

Probably the most well-known example of an anti-war statement in the press is Walter Cronkite's special report on the war of February 27, 1968. After touring the ruined streets and battlefields of the Tet Offensive and interviewing discouraged soldiers and officers in the field, he directly criticized the military leadership and the Johnson administration: "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest cloud." He concluded by saying that the U.S. was "mired in a stalemate" and called for a negotiated end to the conflict.

Whether one believes that the press accounts drove down public support for the war or not, clearly a huge number of Vietnam veterans believe it... and in particular, we know that John McCain believes it, because he has said so:

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: So it's not the same but what is a parallel there are a couple. One, the reason why the Tet offensive was a military failure for the North Vietnamese but a psychological tremendous victory is because of the expectations the American people had about Vietnam. They were told the light was at the end of the tunnel and it wasn't there.

Which brings us back to McCain's statement. In light of this history lesson, McCain's meaning is clear: he fears that the enemy will attack, will ultimately be defeated -- but that the anti-war press will portray victory as defeat, just as they did after Tet. McCain is clearly not worried that a massive attack by the jihadists (either Shiite or Sunni) will "inflict[] enormous losses on U.S.... troops."

No matter what AP wishes he meant.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 13, 2007, at the time of 8:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 12, 2007

We've Got the Goods on Qods

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

In a dramatic, fact-filled presentation today, military and intelligence analysts presented overwhelming evidence that Iran has been arming the Shiite militias in Iraq and killing American servicemen since June of 2004. Congressional Democrats and their unindicted co-conspirators in the press were underwhelmed... but forced to make concessions:

[Senior United States military officials] spread out on two small tables during a news briefing an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers that the officials said link the weapons directly to Iranian arms factories. But by far the most potent item on display was a squat canister designed to explode and spit out a molten ball of copper that cuts through armor. That bomb is perhaps the most feared weapon faced by American and Iraqi troops here.

Never before displayed in public, the canister, called an explosively formed penetrator, or E.F.P., arrives in Iraq in what the officials described as a “kit” containing high-grade metals and highly machined parts, like a strangely shaped, concave lid that folds into the ball while hurtling toward its target.

This presentation represents just the tip of the iceberg; I am convinced that this is going to be the next "shot heard round the world;" and that, far from being a one-off PR stunt, this briefing is the prelude to much more dramatic action against Iran... either diplomatically or militarily, depending upon the reactions of our competitors at the U.N.

Bill Roggio, as usual, has more details:

"Iran is involved in supplying explosively formed projectiles or EFPs and other material," such as "explosive charges, booby traps, mortar shells of different calibers and remote controls" to detonate IEDs to "multiple" insurgent groups...."

"We have evidence that Iran provided insurgents with explosive devices and trained them to use these weapons, produced between 2004 and 2006," Said MG Caldwell....

Evidence was also unveiled that Iranian agents are actively planting explosive. MG Caldwell displayed identification cards of Iranians captured while "involved in acts of violence...."

"We assess that these activities are coming from the senior levels of the Iranian government," the defense official said, "noting that the Al-Qods brigade reports to Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamanei...."

The Irbil raid in early January netted the most significant evidence, as well as a senior member of the Iranian Qods Force. Six Iranians were detained in Irbil, including Mohsin Chizari, the operational commander of the Qods Force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps specialized force that is equivalent to U.S. Special Forces.

Evidently, we have been accumulating the evidence since June of 2004, when the first U.S. soldier was killed by an Iranian manufactured EFP; the total now is 120 American soldiers and Marines killed by Iranian forces in Iraq. But until now, we have kept the actual evidence under wraps, leaking only rumors and hints. So why call a press conference and do an info-dump now?

I've been mulling that question for a couple of days now... and I believe President Bush is setting up an ultimatum he plans to deliver... to Europe: either they handle the situation by allowing heavy, meaningful, biting sanctions to be imposed against Iran -- or else we'll handle the situation with our military.

No further discussion, no need to get a permission slip from the U.N., and no veto authority for France, Russia, or China. This won't be a U.N. operation, nor even a NATO incursion: I think we're talking about a Kosovo-style air war.

But the danger is that it might be more like Operation Desert Fox, in which we bombed Iraq intensively for 70 hours in 1998, but succeeded only in "hardening" the Hussein regime and convincing top Baathist leaders that they could survive the worst that America could dish out.

Derided at the time as a "Wag the Dog bombing," the attacks were neither intensive enough nor widespread enough to seriously threaten Saddam Hussein's control over Iraq. According to an interesting analysis by Dr. Mark J. Conversino of the Air Force's Air War College...

In the end, DESERT FOX was a militarily effective use of airpower. Terminating the already very brief operation short of a change in either Iraqi behavior or leadership, and limiting targets to a relative handful, however, was a political decision. Yet the lure of achieving a bloodless yet devastating military victory while making a rapid exit possible, if necessary -- what Eliot Cohen called "gratification without commitment" -- ultimately, perhaps inevitably, led to the misapplication and abuse of airpower. Many airpower theorists had long cautioned against using airpower in penny-packets or in hyper-constrained political environments. "When presidents use it," Cohen wrote, "they should either hurl it with devastating lethality against a few targets (say, a full-scale meeting of an enemy war cabinet or senior-level military staff) or extensively enough to cause sharp and lasting pain to a military and a society." The 70-hour operation became what Cohen cautioned against: an attack on Saddam with a "sprinkling" of air strikes that would merely "harden him without hurting him and deprive the United States of an intangible strategic asset", an asset that Cohen called the post-Gulf War "mystique of American airpower...." [emphasis added]

Moreover, DESERT FOX lacked clear political goals, an omission for which no amount of firepower could compensate [emphasis in original].

We need to have those "clear political goals," as Dr. Conversino argues, fully worked out before striking Iran; and the strikes themselves should be designed to further those goals. At a minimum, those goals should include the following:

  • Either an end to Iran's nuclear weapons research, or at the very least, setting Iran back by a number of years;
  • A complete cessation of Iranian interference in Iraq, either directly (Qods Force) or by proxy (Muqtada Sadr and the Mahdi Militia, the Badr Organization, etc.); we cannot compromise on this one -- Iran must draw a bloody stump back from Iraq;
  • A continuing threat to Iran's energy supply by U.S. control of Iranian gasoline imports and destruction of Iran's domestic gasoline refinery capacity;
  • Severing of the ties between Iran and Syria by giving the former a more urgent goal to worry about and the latter a taste of what might be in store for the Baathists in Damascus;
  • A clear signal to the rest of the Middle East that the days when we would indulge the ludicrous and dangerous global ambitions of failed oppressor states are gone, and the new world order includes no room for nations exploiting the chaos of the "Non-Integrating Gap" to wage terrorist war against the "Functioning Core," to use Thomas P.M. Barnett's phraseology.

If we sustain the bombing and missile campaign until all known nuke sites are obliterated, and if we carry through the rest of the plan, and -- this is the biggie -- if we move quickly to exploit the diplomatic opening that such a devastating blow naturally creates, we can have a very different and very much better world by the time of the 2008 elections. This would be grand, not only for Americans but also for the rest of the world... especially that large portion of it that must live in the Non-Integrating Gap.

Meanwhile, in a separate briefing, a major general dropped another bombshell: that dreadful string of American helicopters being shot down recently was not the result of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, as many had speculated, but from small-arms fire instead:

The military command in Baghdad denied, however, that any newly smuggled Iranian weapons were behind the five U.S. military helicopter crashes since Jan. 20 - four that were shot out of the sky by insurgent gunfire.

A fifth crash has tentatively been blamed on mechanical failure. In the same period, two private security company helicopters also have crashed but the cause was unclear....

In a separate briefing, Maj. Gen. Jim Simmons, deputy commander of Multinational Corps-Iraq, said that since December 2004, U.S. helicopter pilots have been shot at on average about 100 times a month and been hit on an average of 17 times in the same period....

The major general said Iraqi militants are known to have SA-7, SA-14 and SA-16 shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles but none of the most recent five military crashes were caused by those weapons. He said some previous crashes had been a result of such missiles but would not elaborate.

Once again, it's always a good idea to measure six times before you leap.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 12, 2007, at the time of 6:19 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 10, 2007

Iran Strategies 7: Is the Game Afoot?

Hezbollah Horrors , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

The left-wing U.K. Guardian newspaper -- formerly the Manchester Guardian -- is banging pots and pans, warning that U.S. plans to attack Iran are "well advanced;" and that even if we don't attack, our military posture could cause us to drift into "accidental war."

Please, let it be true!

Our previous posts in this series examining our options anent Iran are:

  1. Iran Strategies 1: the Guillotine Gambit
  2. Iran Strategies 2: Beachhead Bingo
  3. Iran Strategies 3: Re-examining the "Default Assault"
  4. Iran Strategies 4: the Econostrike
  5. Iran Strategies 5: the Joint-Stike Attack
  6. Iran Strategies 6: Preparing For the "Herman Option?"

The last link above is the most important, as it details the strategy whose components we appear to have emplaced already (as soon as the carrier battle group of the USS John Stennis arrives in the Persian Gulf).

Let's serious consider the Guardian's factual claims, while not succumbing to their existential angst over the dreadful idea that we might actually strike back at an enemy that has attacked us repeatedly and has been threatening us with death and destruction since the Iranian revolution.

The Guardian is desperately trying awaken us, Paul Revere-like, to the terrible danger that President Bush may order a strike against Iran. But to me, at least, the screeching has the opposite impact: I rest easier in my sleep, knowing we may go to war against Iran sooner, when they are weak, rather than later, when they are strong:

US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington.

The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before Mr Bush leaves office.

Certainly we have casus belli; there now appears to be no dissent among the intelligence agencies that Iran is at the very least supplying Shiite death squads in Iraq "the most lethal weapon" in their arsenal... and that Iran knows this explosive, manufactured in Iran and sold or given to the Shiite militias, is killing American troops:

The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.

The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete....

In interviews, civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided specific details to support what until now has been a more generally worded claim, in a new National Intelligence Estimate, that Iran is providing “lethal support” to Shiite militants in Iraq.

But I don't think many people even dispute Iran's role helping the anti-democracy forces in Iraq; I'm more interested in what we're going to do about it... so back to the Guardian!

The paper (which is very leftist, anti-American, anti-Iraq War, and even more stridently anti-war against Iran) claims that there is a split within the Bush administration, with the Pentagon and the State Department opposed to any attack on Iran, while the vice president and the "neo-conservatives" supporting just such an attack.

But this distinction seems particularly facile in light of their similar description of the recent strategic change of course in Iraq, which they portray thus:

One of the main driving forces behind war, apart from the vice-president's office, is the AEI [American Enterprise Institute], headquarters of the neo-conservatives. A member of the AEI coined the slogan "axis of evil" that originally lumped Iran in with Iraq and North Korea. Its influence on the White House appeared to be in decline last year amid endless bad news from Iraq, for which it had been a cheerleader. But in the face of opposition from Congress, the Pentagon and state department, Mr Bush opted last month for an AEI plan to send more troops to Iraq. Will he support calls from within the AEI for a strike on Iran?

As readers of Big Lizards (or any other decently competent center-right blog) already know, the new strategy is not simply "to send more troops to Iraq" but a complete change of course. And the Pentagon was not uniformly against the inaptly named "surge;" some top generals were against it, others were for it.

The actual plan was substantially based upon the new official Army counterinsurgency manual that written by then-Lt.Gen. David Petraeus while he served as commanding general of Fort Leavenworth -- which manual itself was based upon strategies and tactics that Petraeus developed fighting in Mosul, when he commanded the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq.

Petraeus, who takes over from Gen. George Casey as Commander of Multi-National Force - Iraq, and Adm. William Fallon, who takes command of Central Command from Gen. John Abizaid, represent one faction within the Pentagon; Casey and Abizaid represent another; and there are other factions as well (including, I suppose, a very small faction that just wants to declare defeat and go home). But to say "the Pentagon" opposed the strategic change of course is as simplistic as saying "Congress" did; in both bodies, some opposed while others supported the president's decision.

Thus, I don't take it very seriously when the same newspaper says that...

The state department and the Pentagon are opposed [to striking Iran], as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans.

More properly, as with the Iraq changes, some but not all members of the State Department and some but not all Pentagon officials likely oppose an Iran strike. About the only thing we can state with certainty is that the Guardian itself is opposed:

But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources' assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. "Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place."

He added: "We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous."

I would say precisely the opposite: what's "incredibly dangerous" is not to plan for a war, but simply to blunder into one... or be dragged, kicking and screaming, by the enemy, as in 1941. Rather than sit around with mouths agape, waiting for Iran to launch the full-scale war, we must plot it very carefully. And if we decide that war is ultimately inevitable, then we should start it ourselves -- at a time and place of our choosing, not Ahmadinejad's.

Where the Guardian article gets really peculiar is when the journalists try to psychoanalyze President Bush, presumably hoping to tap into the traditional leftist meme that Republican "warmongers" are mentally disturbed as well as stupid:

Mr Bush is part of the American generation that refuses to forgive Iran for the 1979-81 hostage crisis. He leaves office in January 2009 and has said repeatedly that he does not want a legacy in which Iran has achieved superpower status in the region and come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. The logic of this is that if diplomatic efforts fail to persuade Iran to stop uranium enrichment then the only alternative left is to turn to the military.

In fact, President Bush is of the generation that recognizes that Iran declared war on us in 1979 -- and they have been fighting that war as strongly as they can for the last 28 years. They certainly struck a horrific blow against us in Beirut in 1983, when they killed 241 American Marines, 58 French paratroopers, a Lebanese custodian, and the wife and four children of a Lebanese janitor (the infamous Beirut barracks terrorist bombing).

Iran's current bloody-handed actions in Iraq are further proof that they consider themselves at war against us, even if we haven't yet accepted that we are at war against them:

  • Sending arms and explosives to the anti-democratic forces, both Shia and Sunni;
  • Giving advanced military training to Shiite terrorists, in order to attack Americans and Iraqi government forces;
  • Supporting Muqtada Sadr during the period he was actually fighting against American troops in Najaf and in Sadr City;
  • Sending actual members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards into Iraq (Qods Force) to launch direct attacks on American and coalition forces;
  • And green-lighting Hezbollah to attack our ally Israel, unprovoked, to draw them into a war in Lebanon.

Iran has been threatening us with horrific retaliation if we do attack; but realistically, there is little they can do. Their most effective response would be to use mines to try to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which a huge percentage of the world's oil passes; but that is precisely what the "Herman Option" is designed to prevent. And in fact, two British minesweeping ships have already been dispatched to the Gulf, along with American submarines.

(Via the Discovery Channel show FutureWeapons, we also have some very new and strikingly good anti-mine technology available to us now; see Krakatoa.)

The Guardian article concludes on what must, for them, be a very sober note:

If it does come to war, [Josh Muravchik, a Middle East specialist at the AEI] said Iran would retaliate, but that on balance it would be worth it to stop a country that he said had "Death to America" as its official slogan.

"We have to gird our loins and prepare to absorb the counter-shock," he said.

Unlike the guardians of the Left -- including the Guardian -- I don't believe that "counter-shock" is going to be anywhere near as bad as we have suffered in Iraq, for the simple reason that we will not invade Iran; that is, we will not send troops to occupy the country and force regime change, as we did in Iraq. That part would be up to the Iranian people themselves, who by all accounts detest the ruling mullahs and hate how they are trying to push modern Persia back into the 7th century.

The strike will be primarily an airstrike against the nuclear targets, and also (if we implement the full Herman Option) against Iran's gasoline refineries and docks, shutting off their supply of fuel. Since we will not have tens of thousands of soldiers in Iran as convenient targets, it will be next to impossible for Iran to retaliate other than by terrorism... and I'm absolutely certain that if they had the capability to strike us via Hezbollah (or some other proxy), they would already have done so: Iran is not exactly scrupulous about international norms of behavior.

But if we wait until Iran is much stronger, especially if they have functioning nuclear weapons, then the specter of retaliation becomes vastly larger. It would be a strategic blunder of colossal enormity to dither until such an attack as the Herman Option becomes impossible, because we're too afraid that a Hezbollah nuclear suicide-boat attack will, e.g., sink one of the two carriers we have in the Gulf, the USS Eisenhower or the USS Stennis, killing 6,000 American sailors and Marines -- and projecting a $5 billion force-projection platform to the bottom of the sea.

If we are ever going to strike, the time to do so is sooner rather than later. And I hope that we strike sooner than "just before Mr Bush leaves office," as the Guardian rather snidely predicts.

Just as it would be wildly irresponsible for Bush not to do something about Iran before he leaves office, it would be cowardly, I believe, to wait until just before leaving... thus saddling Bush's successor, Democrat or Republican, with the consequences of his decision, rather than accepting them himself.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 10, 2007, at the time of 7:44 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

February 6, 2007

The Grand Petraeus Brain Trust and Marching Society

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

File this under "odd but true."

First, I wasn't even aware that Gen. David Petraeus has a PhD in International Relations from Princeton University. Were you? (If only he had studied harder, he might not be stuck in Iraq!)

Now he has put together a "brain trust" of colonels and other mid-level officer advisors who have doctorates from major universities, and who also have extensive combat experience in Iraq and other God-forsaken hellholes:

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals -- including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders -- in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.... [Whence comes this obsessive insistance that the current strategic change of course in Iraq is a "last ditch" or "eleventh hour" Hail Mary? Suppose this doesn't work as well as hoped; does anyone believe George W. Bush is just going to give up?]

Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents, who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way.

Sounds good to me; frankly, we haven't been doing as well as we ought. Of course, we haven't been losing -- but we haven't obviously been winning, either... and that's the name of this game.

From 2003 through 2005, we won a series of stunning victories, from killing Saddam Hussein's spawn of the Devil to overthrowing the tyrant to pushing the Iraqis to enact a constitution and finally elect the first freely chosen government in that land's history. Things started to fall apart in February 2006, when Musab Zarqawi, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, destroyed the Al-Askiri Golden-Dome Mosque in Samarra.

It wasn't all bad in 2006; in June of that year, we killed Zarqawi. But apart from a few high points, 2006 was a very bad year for Iraq and a moderately bad year for us, mostly driven by al-Qaeda's attempt -- finally successful after the destruction of the Golden-Dome Mosque -- to force the Iranian-backed Shiite militias into a "gangland war" with the Sunni terrorists. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani could no longer restrain them, and Iranian puppet Muqtada Sadr grew in power and influence.

So it looks like, however good the Casey-Abizaid strategy was in 2003, 2004, and 2005, it fell apart in 2006; something new and different is needed.

Enter the Petraeus Brain Trust. The senior advisors, all colonels and light colonels (no establishment generals or politicians), are an eclectic bunch:

  • Col. Michael J. Meese will be Gen. Petraeus' chief economic advisor. He is the son of Reagan's Atty.Gen. Edwin Meese; Col. Meese "will coordinate security and reconstruction efforts, trying to ensure that 'build' follows the 'clear' and 'hold' phases of action."
  • Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, an anthropologist, will be chief adviser on counterinsurgency ops; Kilcullen saw extensive action in Cyprus, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor, and was recently lent to the State Department as chief counterterrorism strategist. From the MSNBC piece:

    His 2006 essay "Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency" was read by Petraeus, who sent it rocketing around the Army via e-mail. Among Kilcullen's dictums: "Rank is nothing: talent is everything" -- a subversive thought in an organization as hierarchical as the U.S. military.
  • Col. Peter R. Mansoor will be Petraeus's XO in Baghdad; Mansoor and McMaster were both part of the "secret panel" convened by Gen. Peter Pace, Commandant of the Marine Corps, in October 2006, to advise him on Iraq.
  • Col. H.R. McMaster, who ran the campaign that recaptured Tal Afar from an al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist group, is the author of Dereliction of Duty, a study critical of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War and their foibles and failings. McMaster will be Petraeus' long-term strategic advisor. (If McMaster's name sounds familiar, he was a hero of Tom Clancy's non-fiction book Armored Cav, for his exploits as an armored cavalry (tank) regiment in the Gulf War.

One strategy Petraeus will incorporate was developed and promoted by another member of the Brain Trust, Lt.Col. Douglas A. Ollivant: eschewing the Vietnamesque "Forward Operating Bases" in favor of living and working with the Iraqi Army units that will form a large part of the counterinsurgency force... living among the Iraqi people and interacting with them on a daily basis, not as lords of the land but as fellow soldiers. The idea is to get the Iraqis really involved in the war -- which is, after all, to protect them and their government:

Lt. Col. Douglas A. Ollivant caught Petraeus's eye last year by winning first prize in an Army "counterinsurgency writing" competition, sponsored by the general, with an essay that scorned the U.S. military's reliance in Iraq on big "forward operating bases." "Having a fortress mentality simply isolates the counterinsurgent from the fight," he wrote.

Ollivant, a veteran of battles in Najaf and Fallujah who earned a political science PhD studying Thomas Jefferson, argued that U.S. forces should instead operate from patrol bases shared with Iraqi military and police units. That is exactly what Petraeus plans to do in the coming months in Baghdad, setting up about three dozen such outposts across the city -- which isn't surprising, considering Ollivant has become a top planner for the U.S. military in Baghdad

Naturally, the jilted establishment military academics, in shock at their abandonment by the Brain Trust, are full of reasons why this attempt will fail. (How many of them have commanded troops in the field, as the Brain Trust members all have?)

"Petraeus's 'brain trust' is an impressive bunch, but I think it's too late to salvage success in Iraq," said a professor at a military war college, who said he thinks that the general will still not have sufficient troops to implement a genuine counterinsurgency strategy and that the United States really has no solution for the sectarian violence tearing apart Iraq.

"It's too late to make a difference in Iraq," agreed Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University expert on terrorism who has advised the U.S. government on the war effort....

"It wouldn't surprise me if Congress pulled the rug out or the Iraqis blocked major revisions in strategy," said Erin M. Simpson, a Harvard University counterinsurgency expert. "I think they're going to be a very frustrated group."

So the Democrats in Congress hope... because if they succeed, an awful lot of defeatists and doomsters will begin taking on a decidedly simian appearance. (The Democrats already have hands over eyes and ears; too bad they didn't complete the sequence by putting their hands over their mouths.)

I have always recoiled from the noisome slurs that Iraqis are "inherently incapable" of comprehending modernity, or that "insurgencies always win," or that Arabs can never "administer a democracy." They have always stunk like elitism verging on racism to me. The only question is whether we really want victory enough to achieve it.

The Petraeus Brain Trust is lean, hungry for victory, and jumping out of their skins for a chance to smash up the conventional unwisdom on Iraq. I think they're destined for the history books, on the same page as Gen. George Patton, who fought the unbeatable Erwin Rommel -- and beat that "magnificent son of a bitch."

But we'd better buckle our seat belts: it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 6, 2007, at the time of 3:52 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

February 5, 2007

Mahdi Mania - a "Stealth Rewrite" by the New York Times

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

This is a funny story that suddenly got much funnier.

I was all set to write about a New York Times story that took 27 paragraphs to tell us that 9 out of 10 Sadrites prefer the Mahdi Militia to the United States Army; the story began thus:

Naeem Al-Kaabi, Baghdad’s deputy mayor, nodded toward the gunfire outside his seventh floor office, a few hundred yards from the market where a one-ton truck bomb killed at least 130 people on Saturday and wounded hundreds more. The shots, he said, signaled another body -- another son, another daughter -- being carried from the rubble. [Note the description of Naeem Al-Kaabi as simply "Badhdad's deputy mayor."]

“The terrorists chose this spot three months ago and again yesterday so they could kill as many people as possible,” said Mr. Kaabi, a Shiite from Sadr City. “Trucks are not even allowed in the small alleys of the market. I wonder how the truck made it in.”

It was a question that traveled through much of Baghdad today, in the wake of the deadliest single bomb blast since the American invasion in 2003. Shiites in particular came prepared with an answer. They said the looming American-Iraqi security plan for Baghdad had weakened the Mahdi army, the Shiite militia loyal to the militant cleric Moktada Al-Sadr, emasculating the Shiites’ only reliable source of security.

The story meandered along these lines for quite some time. While reading it, I noticed something peculiar -- and quite humorous: every, single person quoted as lamenting the loss of the Mahdi Militia -- "the Shiites' only reliable source of security!" -- was subsequently identified as a follower of Muqtada Sadr or a longtime supporter of the Mahdi Militia itself.

That's not a tyop: the New York Times published a piece extolling the virtures of the primary source of Shiite death squads, the Mahdi Militia, and its Iranian-puppet leader, the slimy Sadr... and its sources were almost entirely Mahdi Militia supporters. This after literally months of the drive-by media whining that we weren't going after Shiite death squads and only focusing our attacks on Sunni terrorists.

Here are some more excerpts:

While the American military put out a statement saying that an Iraqi Army unit and members of an Iraqi police brigade had secured the bomb site, the area closest to the bomb crater was controlled by the Mahdi Army. About 8 to 15 men dressed in black, carrying AK-47s, waved reporters away this morning and again in the afternoon.

When two American Humvees and an Iraqi patrol passed just after 1 p.m. local time, one of the Iraqi men in black called the soldiers “apes and cowards.”

“They’re the ones who brought us the catastrophe,” one of the Iraqis said. “If they were not here, such a thing wouldn’t happen to us.”

And again:

“The Jaish al-Mehdi are like protectors, but with the announcement of the start of the security plan the Americans really chased them, so they withdrew from these places and now we don’t see them,” he said. “They don’t want to confront the Americans.”

And at last, in the final two paragraphs, the Times dropped the other Persian slipper about Deputy Mayor of Baghdad Naeem Al-Kaabi:

Mr. Kaabi , the deputy mayor and a senior Sadr official, said the American military, with the approval of the Iraqi government, has made an enemy of a group that could have been a partner. Nearly three years after bloody battles against Americans in the southern city of Najaf, the Mahdi Army no longer wanted to fight, he said. They simply wanted to defend and control their own sect’s areas.

“If the Mahdi were given the freedom to move, they could have coordinated with the Iraqi Army and the police,” Mr. Kaabi said. “They could have made it safe.”

Heh. I think it is just exactly that sort of "coordination" between the Iraqi National Police and the Mahdi Militia -- following the February, 2006, destruction by al-Qaeda of the Al-Askari "Golden Dome" Mosque in Samarra -- that most directly contributed to the huge surge of violence in Baghdad last year.

The headline of the piece was After Deadly Blast in Iraq, Shiites Assail U.S. Policy; I was set to note that the article would actually be perfectly fine if they simply changed the head to something more descriptive... such as, After Deadly Blast in Iraq, Mahdi Militia Supporters Support Mahdi Militia.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the presidential palace: when I took another look at the link... I didn't even recognize what I was reading.

This was not a brain seizure on my part: it turns out that the Times had made a small, er, "stealth correction." Well, the more accurate term would be a complete stealth rewrite... the New York Times had quite simply jacked up the URL and rolled an entirely different story underneath it.

It starts with the headline -- which has transformed into: Iraqis Fault Delayed U.S. Plan in Attack. And so you can see what I'm talking about, I'll put corresponding paragraphs (discussing similar topics, I mean) side by side in a table, starting with the two ledes:








Side by side comparison: original vs. stealth rewrite
Original story Stealth rewrite
Naeem Al-Kaabi, Baghdad’s deputy mayor, nodded toward the gunfire outside his seventh floor office, a few hundred yards from the market where a one-ton truck bomb killed at least 130 people on Saturday and wounded hundreds more. The shots, he said, signaled another body -- another son, another daughter -- being carried from the rubble. A growing number of Iraqis blamed the United States on Sunday for creating conditions that led to the worst single suicide bombing in the war, which devastated a Shiite market in Baghdad the day before. They argued that slowness in completing the vaunted new American security plan has made Shiite neighborhoods much more vulnerable to such horrific attacks.

Instead of making the city safer, they said, recent American efforts have opened Shiite areas to bombs that have left more than 450 dead since Jan. 16.

“A long time has passed since the plan was announced,” Basim Shareef, a Shiite member of Parliament, said today. “But so far there security has only deteriorated.”

In advance of the plan, which would flood Baghdad with thousands of new American and Iraqi troops, many Mahdi Army checkpoints were dismantled and its leaders are either in hiding or under arrest. With no immediate influx of new security forces to fill the void, Shiites say, Sunni militants and other anti-Shiite forces have been emboldened to plot the type of attack that obliterated the bustling Sadriya market in central Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 135 people and wounding more than 300 from a suicide driver’s truck bomb.

“A long time has passed since the plan was announced,” Basim Shareef, a Shiite member of Parliament, said Sunday. “But so far security has only deteriorated.”

While the American military put out a statement saying that an Iraqi Army unit and members of an Iraqi police brigade had secured the bomb site, the area closest to the bomb crater was controlled by the Mahdi Army. About 8 to 15 men dressed in black, carrying AK-47s, waved reporters away this morning and again in the afternoon.

When two American Humvees and an Iraqi patrol passed just after 1 p.m. local time, one of the Iraqi men in black called the soldiers “apes and cowards.”

“They’re the ones who brought us the catastrophe,” one of the Iraqis said. “If they were not here, such a thing wouldn’t happen to us.” [This scene was pushed to the second page and has a couple of new paragraphs inserted, changing it to the new "plan delayed" focus.]

With much of Baghdad devolving further into chaos, many Iraqis have begun to question whether the security plan has ambled along too slowly, setting up a situation in which American and Iraqi troops will be greeted with hostility rather than welcomed as protectors.

Also, they made another change. Remember how, in the original story, Naeem Al-Kaabi -- who bemoaned the loss of the security provided by the Mahdi Militia -- was described (in the lede graf) only as Baghdad's deputy mayor? It was only in the penultimate paragraph that we found out he was also "a senior [Muatada] Sadr official."

Evidently, somebody had a come-to-Jesus meeting with the writers; in fact, this may be the explanation of what on Earth happened to the story. In the rewritten version, this is how Al-Kaabi is described in the lone paragraph that cites him:

Iraqi and American military officials said the command structure of the Iraqi side had still not been resolved, although the plan is supposed to move forward this coming week. Naeem al-Kabbi, the deputy mayor of Baghdad and a senior official loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the powerful cleric who leads the Mahdi Army, said he believed the plan had been delayed “because the Iraqi army is not ready.”

(His name has also changed from Kaabi to Kabbi, but that could be a typo.)

I wonder if the original story, which probably went out with the early-morning print run of the Times, was finally read by somebody who noticed that it was virtually a paean to the glorious Mahdi Militia, complaining about the fact that, as part of our security crackdown in the capital, we have driven the militia out of totalitarian control of Sadr City and other Shiite sections of Baghdad (and out of Najaf in the south, as well). Some grownup may have read the original story... and after his secretary peeled him off the ceiling with a spatula, he may have called up the writers (Damien Cave and Richard A. Oppel, jr.) and asked them if they knew anything about Sadr and the Mahdi Militia other than what they have been told by their Shiite stringers.

Pirouetting on a dinar, the writers seem to have shifted the focus -- from "the criminal Bush drove the only reliable defenders of Shia out of control, so the violence is all our fault" to "the criminal Bush announced the strategic change of course nearly a month ago, but we haven't even sent all of the 21,500 troops in yet... so the violence is all our fault."

I'll bet it changed by the later edition. Perhaps somebody with access to both the actual, physical dead-tree products can check and see.

I must say, the new story is somewhat better than the old; its upshot is (if one were really to think about it) that we should accelerate the new strategy... and not undercut it by frivolous and insulting non-binding resolutions sending our troops out with a firm "you're going to lose" behind them.

And in some news, the first cloture vote on the Warner-Levin-Hagel resolution (which combined Surrender Slow with Surrender Swift to produce Surrender Synthesis) has failed miserably.

The Senate Democrats and the cringe-wing of the Republican Party needed 60 votes to progress. They got 49 -- 11 votes short. The only two Republican senators to vote for cloture were Norm Coleman (MN, 64%) and Susan Collins (ME, 32%). In a breathtaking act of political betrayal of their followers, original sponsoring GOP senators John Warner (VA, 88%) and Chuck Hagel (NE, 96%) hung their two colleagues out to dry, voting against their own sponsored resolution!

I wonder... did they call the role alphabetically? Were Coleman and Collins unaware, when they cast their votes, that the two Republican sponsors planned to yank the Persian carpet out from under their frozen feet?

Might this make the two pie-in-the-face victims a little reluctant to support any such resolutions in the future? Too bad; but as Larry Niven says, "not responsible for advice not taken."

One hopes so. Just as one hopes that the humiliation of the New York Times having to regurgitate a rewrite the runs the gamut from soup to nuts might make them somewhat reluctant to force such a quandry again... by not cheerleading for terrorists in the first place. Contrary to what seems the central core of liberalism, the enemy of my enemy (George W. Bush) is not necessarily my brother.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 5, 2007, at the time of 4:45 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 1, 2007

Democrats, Hagel Back Down on Surrender Resolution - Slight Correction

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

Correction: See below.

...But you would never realize it simply from reading the New York Times.

Here is the headline; when you read this, ask yourself whether that means attacks on the president's troop reinforcement are becoming harsher and more virulent -- or damping and diminishing:

Senate Critique of Bush’s Iraq Plan Wins New Support

Anybody reading just the headline would reasonably conclude that the big, anti-reinforcement snowball rolling downhill is picking up more and more support with every passing day. But wait... read the lede and second paragraphs:

A revised Senate resolution criticizing President Bush’s troop buildup in Iraq, offered by Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, drew new support today as two of the authors of a sterner resolution of disapproval said they would accept the Warner compromise.

Senators Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, and Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, said they would back Mr. Warner’s new wording, which among other changes removed language that Democrats saw as creating a potential loophole. [How do you get a "loophole" in a non-binding resolution?]

In other words, the "new support" for the "Senate critique of Bush's Iraq War plan" consists of the sponsors of the Biden-Hagel "Surrender Swift" resolution shifting their support to Sen. John Warner's (R-VA, 88%) less confrontational "Surrender Slow" resolution.

Previously more radical reinforcement opponents are now somewhat less radical; and the Times headline portrays this as another hammerblow against President Bush's strategic change of course in Iraq.

Nor is this just a rhetorical exercise -- "oh yeah, I support that one too, if ours doesn't pass." Contrariwise, the Democrats at the moment appear to have abandoned the harsher "Surrender Swift" resolution:

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was the third author of that plan ["Surrender Swift"]; on Wednesday night he had agreed to support Mr. Warner, the ranking Republican on that committee.

The Democratic leadership of the Senate now intends to use Mr. Warner’s proposal, co-sponsored by Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, as the basis for the debate that will unfold next week, though Republicans could still raise procedural obstacles. [That is, they could -- and should -- and will filibuster.]

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT, 100%) is hopping mad, issuing a statement trashing "Surrender Slow" for not explicitly opposing the "escalation" (the Democrats' contrived word for the reinforcement and change in the rules of engagement, ROEs; it's a wonder they don't simply start referring to Sunni terrorists and Shiite death squads as "the VC").

He also charged that it doesn't explicitly demand that the United States go to Iran, hat in hand, and beg them to take over security in Iraq... an offer I'm sure Iran would be eager to accept. Their economy isn't doing very well right now, and selling off some other country's oil would be a big shot in the arm for the mullahs and President Ahmadinejad.

Finally, the Times is already preparing us for what I think is increasingly likely: that none of these resolutions can gain the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Republican filibuster:

Backers of the new Warner resolution will likely need to attract at least a dozen Republicans to reach the 60-vote total required to overcome a filibuster or other procedural obstacles. Six Republicans have so far voiced their support.

Yesterday it was five Republicans, with one supporting "Surrender Swift"; then Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE, 96%) backed away from the Democrats' version and instead will support the milder version ("Surrender Slow") pushed by Sen. Warner.

Not one single Republican beyond the original list has joined this "bandwagon;" in fact, two of the GOP senators who were "flirting" with signing aboard "Surrender Slow" -- probably Sen. Sam Brownback (KS, 100%) and Sen. George Voinovich (OH, 68%), but I can't be certain -- have so far refused actually to pull the trigger.

One more point, which is either sloppy writing on the Times' part -- or else a backdoor admission of further erosion. The paragraph quoted above says that "at least a dozen" GOP votes would be needed to overcome a filibuster.

But wait: There are 51 Democrats, but Sen. Joe Lieberman (R-CT, 80%) is voting against both "Surrender" resolutions. That means the Democrats start with a presumed base of 50 votes for cloture, cutting off debate and anding the filibuster. They should only need ten GOP votes to make the magic number of 60.

Correction: As Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD, 95%) is still hospitalized and cannot vote, the Democratic majority should need 11 Republican votes to break a filibuster, not 10. Correction made throughout.

Why does the Times say a dozen? Has one more Democratic senator come out against Warner -- possibly Dodd or Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%) -- on the grounds of honesty, arguing that if the Senate isn't going to cut off funding, it shouldn't even bother with non-binding monkeyshines? If so, that would make it even harder to pass anything in the poisonous congressional atmosphere that the Democrats inherited... and promptly made more noxious and noisome.

So the New York Times' headline has it exactly backwards: not only is opposition to the reinforcement and change of ROEs not growing, it's actually diminishing, from hysterical screaming down to mere grumbling. There is now less chance than before that even the Warner "Surrender Slow" resolution will pass muster in the Senate; after all this wrangling and arm-twisting, the Democrats are still six votes short of cloture.

And that is very good news indeed!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 1, 2007, at the time of 2:42 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 31, 2007

Democrats May Become Critics of President Bush

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Of all the stupid things written in all the stupid drive-by media sources, this has to rank as one of the stupidest...

AP breathlessly reports:

The hearing [about our "botched" (AP's word) training of the Iraqi National Police] comes as lawmakers increasingly line up against President Bush's escalation of the unpopular war in Iraq, many citing the findings of the Iraq Study Group as they urge an end to U.S. involvement there.

Then AP lists the lawmakers finally coming out of the closet as opponents of the strategic change of course in Iraq:

  • Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT, 100%)
  • Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 95%)
  • Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%)

Oh, no, we've lost the Democratic leadership! They now oppose Bush's Iraq plan. Quelle horreur!

Next week's breaking news: Sen. John Kerry (D-Kennedy, 100%) thinks he should have won in 2004. Remember, you read it here first...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 31, 2007, at the time of 8:30 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 30, 2007

The Little Generals - 535 of Them

Congressional Calamities , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In a burst of audacity and ingenuity that one wishes were aimed at America's enemies instead of the president, congressional Democrats now assert the sweeping authority to be co-Commanders in Chief; and in the case of one constitutional-law "expert," to dictate strategic and tactical military policy to the president, who in this scenario must simply salute and say "Yes sir."

This goes far beyond what they did during their successful effort to turn the Vietnam victory into defeat; in that shameful episode, Congress merely utilized the power of the purse, which everyone (even George W. Bush) agrees they have. Nay, one must go all the way back to the Civil War, when Congress routinely issued marching and battle orders to Union generals, to find a comparable moment of hubris in congressional history.

The first shot across the bow comes from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA, 63%), ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee began laying the constitutional groundwork today for an effort to block President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq and place new limits on the conduct of the war there, perhaps forcing a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

They were joined by Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who led the panel for the last two years, in asserting that Mr. Bush cannot simply ignore Congressional opposition to his plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq.

“I would respectfully suggest to the president that he is not the sole decider,” Mr. Specter said. “The decider is a joint and shared responsibility.”

Back a few days ago, in our previous post None Dare Call It Cowardice, I pegged Specter as likely to join the efforts to seize command of the military away from the president:

[T]he only other Republican senator who scores lower than the top of this liberal group (Voinovich, 68%) is Sen. Arlen Specter (PA, 63%)...

(In this case, I based my semi-prediction not only on Specter's liberalness but also upon his vanity and tendency to preen before an audience.)

But what exactly is Specter saying here? Nobody denies that Congress is the "decider" when it comes to funding the military; the president's power is entirely negative: he can veto the funding legislation. And Bush's "decider" remark -- actually, he said "decision maker" in the most recent incarnation -- was very clear about what he was deciding: he said he was the decision-maker about implementing the plan, not funding it.

Thus, when Specter says “The decider is a joint and shared responsibility," he is literally saying that Congress has as much say as the Commander in Chief over determining the rules of engagement, repositioning the troops within Iraq, and sending U.S. forces from point A to point B. If Congress had any role at all in those types of decisions, it was whether to authorize the use of military force in the first place... which they did in 2002, with no time limit and no restrictions about exactly how they could be used in the upcoming war (though such restrictions would probably have been unconstitutional anyway).

Specter is not unaware of the enormity he's trying to pull off; he knows this is not our traditional understanding of the relationship between the branches... he is very much aware that he is trying to seize the most important power of a republic, the strategic and tactical specifics of waging war, away from the president and into Congress:

Mr. Specter said he considered a clash over constitutional powers to be “imminent.”

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%) is behaving more honorably than Specter: he is brazenly trying to cut off all funding for the war, which is at least a bona-fide congressional power. But even he is drunk on Congressional power, at the expense of the presidency, that goes beyond unseemly to the realm of the imperial:

Senator Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who acted as chairman for the hearing, said he would soon introduce a resolution that would go much further. It would end all financing for the deployment of American military forces in Iraq after six months, other than a limited number working on counterterrorism operations or training the Iraqi army and police. In effect, it would call for all other American forces to be withdrawn by the six-month deadline.

“Since the President is adamant about pursuing his failed policy in Iraq, Congress has a duty to stand up and prevent him,” Mr. Feingold said.

Mr. Feingold was joined by only two other Democrats at the hearing, Senators Richard Durbin of Illinois and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, perhaps reflecting the wariness in the party’s caucus about any direct attempt to thwart the president’s strategy.

When did they inherit this duty? I see nothing in the Constitution to justify it: Congress has these powers anent war:

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.

U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 8

By contrast, the president has the following powers:

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.

U.S. Constitution, Art. II, Sec. 2

I don't want to judge before all the facts are in, but I'd have to say that being "commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" trumps any congressional wartime power on the narrow issue of who gets to move around the pieces on the chessboard.

It's important to realize that not all Republicans are involved in trying to sabotage our efforts in Iraq; so far, the effort is still limited to a subset of the group we listed in None Dare Call It Cowardice:

  1. Sam Brownback (KS, 100%)
  2. Susan Collins (ME, 32%)
  3. Olympia Snowe (ME, 32%)
  4. Norm Coleman (MN, 64%)
  5. Chuck Hagel (NE, 96%)
  6. George Voinovich (OH, 68%)
  7. Gordon Smith (OR, 58%)
  8. John Warner (VA, 88%)

Not even Specter has come out and said he will support the Warner "Surrender Slow" resolution; and Hagel was the only Republican to support the Biden-Hagel "Surrender Swift" resolution. At the moment, the only GOP supporters of Surrender Slow, according to Daily Kos, are Hagel, Collins, Smith, Coleman, and Warner.

But Specter and Feingold have come as close as one could imagine to coming right out and saying that Congress, not the president, is the "decider":

Mr. Specter read the results of a survey of service members conducted by The Military Times, which found that only 35 percent of respondents approved of Mr. Bush’s handling of the war. The senator suggested that in that light, the military might be “appreciative of questions being raised by Congress.” [Yes, I'm quite sure the military appreciates being told they're on a fool's errand and are destined to be defeated by the terrorists.]

Mr. Feingold insisted that his resolution would “not hurt our troops in any way” because they would all continue to be paid, supplied, equipped and trained as usual -- just not in Iraq.

I'm quite certain that Feingold is blissfully ignorant of how offensive this comment really is to servicemen and servicewomen: he sees our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines as nothing more than contractors whose only concern is that they get paid; Sen. Feingold is unequipped by nature to understand how important is the mission itself, success and victory, to the military.

The most breathtaking power-grab came not from a senator but from an "expert" in constitutional law. (And let's all guess which side called him to testify!) If this doesn't make your mouth gape, you have no astonishment left in you:

Other experts testifying at the hearing said that Congress had the power not only to declare war, but to make major strategic and policy decisions about its conduct. Louis Fisher, a specialist in constitutional law for the Library of Congress, said, “I don’t know of any ground for a belief that the president has any more special expertise in whether to continue a war than do the members of Congress.”

He said that the title of “commander in chief” was meant by the framers to emphasize unity of command and civilian control over the military. “The same duty commanders have to the president, the president has to the elected representatives.”

"The same duty" would be the duty to obey orders, no matter what he thinks of them. I'm virtually certain that Mr. Fisher was called by Russell Feingold (who served as acting chair for Sen. Pat Leahy, D-VT, 100% during this hearing). But I wonder whether Arlen Specter didn't have at least the faint trace of a Cheshire-Cat smile on his lips, as he envisioned future Congresses issuing marching orders to future Subcommanders in Subchief. (And by the way... when did the president cease being considered an "elected representative?")

Naturally, the subject slopped over from Iraq to Iran; the Democrats simply couldn't contain themselves, any more than a monkey can stop itself from dropping one handful of nuts to grab another:

Even as the panel discussed issues from past conflicts, Senator Kennedy used the session to focus on a possible future conflict, asking the panel about what authority Mr. Bush would have to attack Iran. The panel’s members agreed that he had the power to take what actions he saw fit to deal with any short-term threat that Iran might pose to American troops in Iraq, but that he would need some form of Congressional authorization to begin any large-scale or long-term conflict.

(Of course, under the War Powers Act, President Bush has even more power than that: he can attack Iran, so long as the entire engagement lasts 60 days or less; then he has to report to Congress. This means that the "Herman Option" is easily within the authority of the president to order without bothering to gain permission from (or even consult) Arlen Specter, Russell Feingold, or Nancy Pelosi. Or Nancy Sinatra, for that matter.)

Sticking with Iran, the Democrats also harangued the president on his refusal to kowtow to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the Baker-Hamilton ISG report recommended:

Republican and Democratic senators warned Tuesday against a drift toward war with an emboldened Iran and suggested the Bush administration was missing a chance to engage its longtime adversary in potentially helpful talks over next-door Iraq.

"What I think many of us are concerned about is that we stumble into active hostilities with Iran without having aggressively pursued diplomatic approaches, without the American people understanding exactly what's taking place," Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told John Negroponte, who is in line to become the nation's No. 2 diplomat as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

It's hard not to laugh at the spectacle of Barack Obama (100%) -- a fellow who has served as a U.S. senator for two whole years -- lecturing John Negroponte, a man who has spent his entire adult life, since before Obama was even born, working his way up the State Department's ladder of responsibility (except for the two years he served as the first Director of National Intelligence) on the basics of diplomacy and negotiation. I wonder... did Obama tap his head during this speech, as if urging Negroponte to think it through?

At least in this case, so far no Republican has hurled himself against the barracades, bringing about the very intervention by Iran that he professes to be trying to stop. This time, even GOP mavericks wisely left that job to the Democrats, who have more experience at anti-Americanism. This is the absolute juiciest that AP can muster:

Senators including Hagel, George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., sounded frustrated with the administration's decision not to engage Iran and fellow outcast Syria in efforts to reduce sectarian violence in Iraq.

Even so, we appear, as in the 1860s, to have 535 spare generals on Capitol Hill, each of them having his headquarters in his congressional seat. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln (R-IL, 100%), they appear to have their headquarters where their hindquarters ought to be.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 30, 2007, at the time of 8:54 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

200, 250, 350, 400, 470, and Counting...

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

Before the "surge" has even begun, Iraqi and the US troops are taking it up a notch, engaging in fierce battles near Baghdad. The battles reveal Iranian influences on both Sunni insurgents and Shiia militia -- and show that under the right circumstances, the two groups can work hand in hand to oppose peace and democracy.

We have long suspected that the long arm of Iran was behind much of the violence in Iraq; but until last fall, the American military downplayed their influence, possibly in the vain hope that the threat of exposure might be a lever to use against Iran. But starting sometime between July and September, we became more willing to expose the Iranian connection... which probably means that we have given up the idea that Iran cares what the world thinks of it.

So let's start with some good news over the weekend in Baghdad. (As usual, AP larded up the story of a huge victory against a murderous cult with a maze of irrelevant and unrelated bad news; the New York Times did the same today -- we'll get to it in a minute -- but so amusingly, you almost want to let them get away with it.)

U.S.-backed Iraqi troops on Sunday attacked insurgents allegedly plotting to kill pilgrims at a major Shiite Muslim religious festival, and Iraqi officials estimated some 250 militants died in the daylong battle near Najaf.... [That estimate has been superceded by several higher counts.]

Authorities said Iraqi soldiers supported by U.S. aircraft [and ground troops] fought all day with a large group of insurgents in the Zaraq area, about 12 miles northeast of the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

Col. Ali Nomas, spokesman for Iraqi security forces in Najaf, said more than 250 corpses had been found. Iraqi army Maj. Gen. Othman al-Ghanemi also spoke of 250 dead but said an exact number would not be released until Monday. He said 10 gunmen had been captured, including one Sudanese.

Provincial Gov. Assad Sultan Abu Kilel said the assault was launched because the insurgents planned to attack Shiite pilgrims and clerics during ceremonies marking Ashoura, the holiest day in the Shiite calendar commemorating the 7th century death of Imam Hussein. The celebration culminates Tuesday in huge public processions in Karbala and other Shiite cities.

Officials were unclear about the religious affiliation of the militants.

"Unclear" means that the group, Soldiers of Paradise (or Heaven), seems to have had both Shia and Sunni members; all were willing to butcher thousands of Shia pilgrims, if they could.

On Monday, Bill Roggio reported that the total number of insurgents killed was actually 350; they appear to be a mix of Sunni and Shia and included some foreign fighters. They were remarkably well-equipped and organzied, having at least two anti-aircraft Stinger-type missiles and some heavy machine guns.

Early reports indicated there were both Sunni terrorists and Shia cultist involved in the fighting. "Governor Asaad Abu Gilel as saying that the militants, who included foreign fighters, had arrived in the city disguised as pilgrims in recent days and based themselves in the orchards, which he said had been bought three or four months ago by supporters of Saddam Hussain."

Today, the New York Times has more information. This stupendous victory -- as many as 470 terrorists slain (!), ten captured, and only 25 Iraqi security forces killed, for a kill ratio of nearly 19 to 1 -- is of course presented by the Times as raising "troubling questions" about the Iraqi forces. (Perhaps the Times is disappointed that we just missed a 20 to 1 kill ratio):

Iraqi forces were surprised and nearly overwhelmed by the ferocity of an obscure renegade militia in a weekend battle near the holy city of Najaf and needed far more help from American forces than previously disclosed, American and Iraqi officials said Monday.

They said American ground troops -- and not just air support as reported Sunday -- were mobilized to help the Iraqi soldiers, who appeared to have dangerously underestimated the strength of the militia, which calls itself the Soldiers of Heaven and had amassed hundreds of heavily armed fighters.

Iraqi government officials said the group apparently was preparing to storm Najaf, a holy city dear to Shiite Islam, occupy the sacred Imam Ali mosque and assassinate the religious hierarchy there, including the revered leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, during a Shiite holiday when many pilgrims visit....

The Iraqis and Americans eventually prevailed in the battle. But the Iraqi security forces’ miscalculations about the group’s strength and intentions raised troubling questions about their ability to recognize and deal with a threat.

I'd hate to see what the Times would write if we had lost the battle! Maybe if we wait long enough, it will turn out that we killed more terrorists in Najaf than the total number of protesters who showed up for the D.C. anti-war rally.

In any event, surely the Times and Congress are at cross-purposes: Congress says we should pull our troops out and leave the war to the Iraqis; but the Times says they're all a bunch of miserable incompetents who can't do anything without American help. I wish the anti-war Left would just pick one story and stick to it; these goalposts are walking around on chicken-legs, like Baba Yaga's hut.

This battle reminds me of ealier incident in Kabala, where terrorists disguised as American troops managed to fool Iraqi security forces. They got close enough to the Americans, who were conducting a meeting with locals, that twelve terrorists killed one American and kidnapped four, all of whom were later found dead.

The sophisticated nature of these attacks suggests highly trained and deadly terrorist forces; and that in turn suggests Iran's infamous "Qod's Force."

In fact, Iran has been operating in Iraq for years. They have aided, armed, and trained both Sunni jihadis and Shiite militias. A recent document we found during a raid of Iranian forces lays out their plan to cause absolute chaos in Iraq. So much for the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Survey Group's charming notion that Iran did not want to see civil war in Iraq.

An American intelligence official said the new material, which has been authenticated within the intelligence community, confirms "that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups." The source was careful to stress that the Iranian plans do not extend to cooperation with Baathist groups fighting the government in Baghdad, and said the documents rather show how the Quds Force -- the arm of Iran's revolutionary guard that supports Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni Hamas, and Shiite death squads -- is working with individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sunna. [And so much for the equally charming notion that Shia and Sunni terrorists would never work together.]

Another American official who has seen the summaries of the reporting affiliated with the arrests said it comprised a "smoking gun." "We found plans for attacks, phone numbers affiliated with Sunni bad guys, a lot of things that filled in the blanks on what these guys are up to," the official said.

It turns out Iran had its own "Iraqi Study Group" which came up with this "recommendation" to foment a civil war, if possible, in Iraq. Ironically, on Monday, Iran announced a plan to "help" Iraq:

The ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, said Iran was prepared to offer Iraq government forces training, equipment and advisers for what he called “the security fight.” In the economic area, Mr. Qumi said, Iran was ready to assume major responsibility for Iraq reconstruction, an area of failure on the part of the United States since American-led forces overthrew Saddam Hussein nearly four years ago. [Here, the Times uses "failure" in its little-known alternate definition to mean "wild success."

“We have experience of reconstruction after war,” Mr. Qumi said, referring to the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. “We are ready to transfer this experience in terms of reconstruction to the Iraqis.”

Mr. Qumi also acknowledged, for the first time, that two Iranians seized and later released by American forces last month were security officials, as the United States had claimed. But he said that they were engaged in legitimate discussions with the Iraqi government and should not have been detained.

So Iran has very kindly offered to supplant the United States and Coalition forces to provide both security and reconstruction in Iraq. How selfless of them; we cannot imagine any ulterior motive on the part of the ruling mullahs.

Here is an alternative take: Because Americans are now blatantly accusing Iran of meddling in Iraq's affairs, Iran is feeling the pressure. They know that once Americans level an accusation (as with our we--founded accusation that Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by Syria), we will not just back down, like the Europeans do. Thus, Iran must come up with some plausible explanation why their intelligence officers are in Iran.

Since they cannot do so, this is the best they can manage.

This tells me that Iran will never negotiate in good faith. The Baker-Hamilton recommendation is revealed as the idiocy the blogosphere has called it from the very beginning.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 30, 2007, at the time of 5:02 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

January 26, 2007

Eat Or Be Eaten

Hezbollah Horrors , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Democrats have charged that President Bush changed his mind about how well the war was going in Iraq after -- and in response to -- the November election losses. But now it seems that one of the most important changes, the new rules of engagement (ROEs, or new "rule-sets," as Thomas P.M. Barnett would have it), was actually made before that dreadful event... raising the specter that the "decider" might actually have made the decision on its merits, not because of crass political calculation.

Thus it might have come from the military, as Bush said -- not from Karl Rove, as the Democrats say. Great Scott!

As long ago as last fall, the Bush administration authorized our forces to kill or capture any Iranian intelligence agents or members of the Revolutionary Guards sent into Iraq (Qods Force):

The move, approved last fall, is aimed at weakening Iran's influence in the region and forcing Tehran to abandon its nuclear program that the West believes is for nuclear weapons and not energy, the newspaper said, citing the unidentified officials.

For more than a year, U.S. forces have held dozens of Iranians for a few days, taking DNA samples from some as well as photographs and fingerprints from all those captured, the report said [DNA samples allow easy and exact identification of remains after missile strikes -- a delicious prospect].

Several Iranian officials have been detained in three U.S. raids over the last month. Outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters on Wednesday that details of accusations against them would be made public in the coming days.

This coincides with Bush's decision to send two carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf, to pack a bunch of ABM missiles into friendly countries in the area (such as the United Arab Emirates), and to arm-twist the Brits into sending a pair of minesweeping ships there as well.

I like these moves. In the face of aggressive posturing by Iran and Syria, I have always believed we're far better off confronting and escalating -- reraising the bluffer -- than folding -- withdrawing, apologizing, or trying to come to some diplomatic accomodation ("how about if you only take half of Iraq, and we'll call it even?")

Hezbollah is currently threatening the elected Lebanese government; the proper response is for Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to escalate to the brink of civil war, knowing that if Hezbollah "calls," there is at least a 50-50 chance Hezbollah will be destroyed (especially if the Israelis return, this time under new management); but if Siniora sits back and lets Hezbollah set the pace, then the Lebanese government will assuredly be destroyed and Siniora himself killed, no matter what promises Bashar Assad makes.

Syria has also been representing that it's about to pour across the border again; the United States should call that bluff by overflying the Syrian-Lebanese border with warplanes, making it plain that we're not going to allow Syria to roll south, as they did in the late 1970s: Damascus is not immune, and Teheran cannot protect them from American air power.

We did not destroy the Soviet Union by pulling back when they threatened, or by passively letting them seize more territory; we destroyed them by constant confrontation, containment, and a relentless pro-freedom, pro-liberty propaganda campaign waged through the 1980s.

And that is exactly how we can first contain, then roll back global jihadism: confrontation, coupled with alleviating the conditions that spawn people eager to become martyrs for jihad -- "shrinking the Gap." (Barnett's main thesis.)

You win a war by aggression, not passivity.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 26, 2007, at the time of 2:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 25, 2007

The Urge to Surge - UPDATED

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATED with illuminating analogy... see below!

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line has an interesting argument -- but it ultimately fails of its logic:

I've always believed that Senators have an obligation to vote their conscience on matters of war and peace....

So where does that leave a Republican Senator who thinks it's a mistake to "surge"?.... Many conservatives who aren't running for office have said that the surge is a bad idea. (I have expressed my reservations about it). Thus, the law of averages tells us that, political calculation aside, there will be more than a few Republican Senators who have that belief....

Most of the "wobbly" Republicans appear to be trying to balance their conviction that the surge is a bad idea against their concern over the impact of an anti-surge resolution on the war effort. This is a responsible approach.... In my view, the best resolution for those who don't want the surge but aren't prepared to block it, would be one that expresses their skepticism, but also their hope that the surge succeeds and their willingness, now that it has been decided upon, to give it a fair chance.

Paul himself touches on the point that nullifies his argument. His point would hold -- only if Congress were in a position to stop the surge; and only then if they did so privately, not as a public rebuke.

Given the powerlessness (and rightly so!) of Congress to decide upon the particular strategies and tactics used by our military forces to fight the war (that clearly being an area where the Constitution clearly gives the Executive full control), Congress has no business smashmouthing the decisions of the generals or the Commander in Chief, a.k.a. the president.

It is functionally the same as when Gen. Douglas MacArthur was insubordinate to President Harry Truman anent the Korean War and whether we should invade China: once the decision is made, it is the duty of all those who do not have the power to reverse that decision to do everything they can to support it and help it succeed.

Nothing that Congress is doing in these resolutions helps the war in any way. And while conservatives who are not in public office always have the right, under the First Amendment, to express disapproval, however vehemently they choose to do so... such a "right" does not extend to the Congress of the United States in its official actions: the Congress, as a branch of the government, cannot morally or ethically repudiate wartime decisions in a way that will undercut the war effort itself. That's not patriotic; it's puerile.

And nobody has yet articulated any reasonable way in which these resolutions would help the war effort. Paul tries, gamely but vainly, to do so:

On the other hand, some say that such resolutions signal to the Iraqi government that our patience is not limitless and thus will induce it to improve its behavior.

But that is not the signal these resolutions of irresolution send: rather, they send the message that we a are a government divided, that we will pull out and abandon our allies in Iraq, that we have no stomach for the fight. If Congress wants to send a message, they should send it to the president... not try to conduct ad-hoc foreign policy by long-distance proxy. They can tell President Bush that they will not endlessly vote funding if there is no measurable progress on the ground.

But these resolutions are the worst of all worlds -- expressing fear and loathing without lifting a finger to do anything about it. "You're going to lose, you're going to lose! But don't expect me to stop you." (And neither of the two resolutions, so far as I have seen, expresses any hope at all that "the surge succeeds.")

Thus, much as I understand Paul's reluctance to support the Kagan strategy, and his discomfort at telling off senators for supporting what he, himself proposed a couple of months ago, he must take into account that the decision has already been made: and there is nothing honorable left but for Congress to support it, whole-heartedly and full-throatedly, until such time as they have an actual, constitutional decision to make.

There is never a good enough excuse to vote an extra-constitutional slap in the face to the American military in the midst of a difficult war, especially when the only possible motivation is to vent one's spleen -- having nothing better to contribute.

UPDATE, a few minutes later: Here is an analogy to demonstrate why I think Paul's argument fails...

Suppose you have a serious illness -- cancer. You discuss it with your doctor and your family, and you decide that surgery is your best option.

You arrange for the date, you show up at the hospital, and you're all prepped. Then, just before they wheel you into the operating room, your next-door neighbor shows up -- she has no familiarity with surgery, with surgeons, with this particular surgeon, or with the various medical treatments for your type of cancer -- yet she says, "surgery is against your health interest; you're just going to die in there!"

Now, she may have the sincere conviction that surgery is bad; after all, she once had an aunt who died in surgery -- in 1974. But that makes no difference; the decision is already made, and you're not going to change your mind because some random, uninformed acquaintance thinks surgery is barbaric.

Which means the only possible result of her outspoken resolution is to scare the living daylights out of you at just the moment you most need emotional support. In fact, she might even make it less likely you survive, because you'll be in such a fright that you might not react well to the anaesthesia.

Is there any imaginable scenario under which her action would be anything but despicable?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 25, 2007, at the time of 7:24 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

A New Liz-ard?

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

I just devoured a killer OpEd piece in the Washington Post that reads so brilliant, so clear and concise, and so inarguable that it could have been a Big Lizards post. The author is a former "principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs;" she heads the Iran-Syria Operations Group (ISOG), which uses its $80 budget to promote democracy (that is, regime change) in Iran and Syria; and she is married to Phil Perry, the General Counsel of the United States Department of Homeland Security. This gal has gravitas.

In fact, she is even a "Liz-ard," so to speak; her Christian name is Elizabeth, and she goes by Liz... some young gal named Liz Cheney.

I believe she has a famous father, but I don't think I've heard of him.

There are so many great quotes from this piece, I hardly know where to begin. Dang, I sure wish she were a senator, governor, or president! Here are a few excerpts, beginning with, well, the very beginning:

Sen. Hillary Clinton declared this weekend, "I'm in to win." Anyone who has watched her remarkable trajectory can have no doubt that she'll do whatever it takes to win the presidency. I wish she felt the same way about the war.

A few more, just to give you a taste of the joy you'll experience savoring this piece:

We are at war. America faces an existential threat. This is not, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed, a "situation to be solved." It would be nice if we could wake up tomorrow and say, as Sen. Barack Obama suggested at a Jan. 11 hearing, "Enough is enough." Wishing doesn't make it so. We will have to fight these terrorists to the death somewhere, sometime. We can't negotiate with them or "solve" their jihad. If we quit in Iraq now, we must get ready for a harder, longer, more deadly struggle later....

Beware the polls. In November the American people expressed serious concerns about Iraq (and about Republican corruption and scandals). They did not say that they want us to lose this war. They did not say that they want us to allow Iraq to become a base for al-Qaeda to conduct global terrorist operations. They did not say that they would rather we fight the terrorists here at home. Until you see a poll that asks those questions, don't use election results as an excuse to retreat....

Our soldiers will win if we let them. Read their blogs. Talk to them. They know that free people must fight to defend their freedom. No force on Earth -- especially not an army of terrorists and insurgents -- can defeat our soldiers militarily. American troops will win if we show even one-tenth the courage here at home that they show every day on the battlefield. And by the way, you cannot wish failure on our soldiers' mission and claim, at the same time, to be supporting the troops. It just doesn't compute.

This is a rousing bitch-slapping of Sen. Hillary, but also of Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe (ME, 32%) and Susan Collins (ME, 32%); and it's a bastard-slapping of Republican Sens. Warner, Hagel, Coleman, Brownback, Voinovich, and Smith. All of these Republicans (everyone listed above except Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, 100%) collectively form the Cowards Corps.

I listened to Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN, 63%) on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday, and I was rather amused that he did not spend one, single minute explicating why it would help the war effort to send our troops into battle accompanied by the announcement that they're sure to be defeated. (St. Crispin's Day, it ain't.) Rather, Coleman spent the entire interview desperately (and laughably) arguing that the Warner amendment does not say the surge won't work.

Doddering octogenarian Sen. John Warner's (R-VA, 88%) resolution calls, instead of the strategic change of course that the president has already selected, that instead we should announce that we'll be withdrawing by 2008, and that instead we should negotiate with Iran and Syria, begging them to "stabilize" Iraq when we leave.

At the most, it forsees a really tiny surgelet, and only in Anbar province to fight Sunni terrorists... to heck with Baghdad, to heck with democratizing Iraq, to heck with everything else. It's about as anti-surge as the Biden-Hagel amendment, except it doesn't use the Vietnamesque word "escalation." Has Coleman even read it?

Perhaps Mrs. Cheney-Perry could telephone the Cowards Corps and personally tell them just how clownish they are being. (She certainly seems to have more testosterone than any of the males in that group. Well, more than Snowe and Collins, too, of course; but that's not as funny.) Not only are they damaging the country, but even worse from their perspective, they're damaging their own political careers: being a cowardly Republican won't help if their constituents actually want a principled, anti-American Democrat.

Speaking of which, Power Liners John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson followed Coleman on Hugh Hewitt's show, and they tried manfully to find some way to harmonize his current antics with his former stand-up attitude on the war. The best Scott could do was suggest that Coleman's "political viability" in Minnesota politics would be damaged if he did not nakedly undermine our troops. (Evidently, the typical Minnesotan is praying that we lose the war, so America will be humbled and broken.)

I would send a message to Mr. Coleman: dear Senator; if the only way you could maintain your political viability would be to sell out your country during a war -- then you have a duty to sacrifice your political career by doing the right thing instead.

I know it's giddy optimism, but I think there really is a chance that some of these Republican senators will come to their senses -- before they put Congress on record saying we're going to lose the war, and it's too late.

(For comparison's sake, here is how King Henry Vth of England sent off his troops on St. Crispin's Day -- with himself at the head of them... at least according to that Shakespeare fellow; click the "Slither on.")

From King Henry the Vth, Act IV, Scene 3:

KING HENRY V
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 25, 2007, at the time of 4:13 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

January 24, 2007

Cautiously Optimistic...

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

In the first (easy) test today, some of the Republican cowards found just enough courage to reject the worse, Democratic version of the defeatism resolution today, Joe Biden's (D-DE, 100%) "surrender swift":

The Democratic-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee dismissed President Bush's plans to increase troops strength in Iraq on Wednesday as "not in the national interest," an unusual wartime repudiation of the commander in chief.

The vote on the nonbinding measure was 12-9 and largely along party lines.

"We better be damn sure we know what we're doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder," said Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, the sole Republican to join 11 Democrats in support of the measure.

There are two other weak-kneed Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee: Norm Coleman (R-MN, 64%) and George Voinovich (R-OH, 68%); when an attempt by Coleman to amend the bill to make it more like Sen. John Warner's (R-VA, 88%) slightly less repulsive and dishonorable defeatism resolution ("surrender slow") was defeated in a bipartisan rejection, 17-4, both Coleman and Voinovich refused to sign aboard the Biden version.

In a defeat for Democrats that heartens me a bit, an amendment by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT, 100%) went down 15-6; it would have capped the number of American forces in Iraq, saying they "may not exceed the levels" we had before President Bush gave his speech announcing the strategic change of course. As there are only ten Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee, that means that at least five Democrats voted against capping the troops. (AP did not deign to tell us whether Sen. Chuck Hagel voted for or against the Dodd amendment, but I suspect he voted against it.)

Speaking of not telling, here is the entirety of what Reuters said about the actual vote on the resolution in committee:

On a bipartisan vote of 12-9, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution expressing clear disapproval of Bush's Iraq policy, a day after he asked Congress to give it more time to work. The vote is nonbinding, but supporters hope it will convince the president to reconsider.

Note how "largely along party lines" (AP) becomes "a bipartisan vote" (Reuters). Reuters does not see fit to mention that by "bipartisan vote," they meant 11 Democrats and one Republican.

A later Reuters story corrected that bizarre mischaracterization (the first story was kneejerk; the second was perhaps written after consulting their "public editor," if they have one):

The 12-9 vote by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee drew less Republican support than expected, given growing doubts in Congress about the wisdom of Bush's decision to add 21,500 troops in Baghdad and Anbar province. [By "growing doubts," they mean that liberals of both parties are increasingly against the war; only three non-liberal Republicans support any of these measures.]

Only one Republican, resolution co-author Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, voted for it, after accusing the Bush administration of playing "ping-pong" with American lives.

I'm cautiously optimistic... but the real test comes later, when the Senate is ready to vote on the Warner "surrender slow" resolution: where will Coleman and Voinovich stand then? Will they come to their senses enough to realize that, if they're worried about their constituents' dislike of the war, they can always vote against the resolutions (saying they undercut the president) -- but still badmouth the war back home?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 24, 2007, at the time of 1:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

None Dare Call It Cowardice

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Here is the most current list of Republican cowards that I can put together:

  1. Sam Brownback (KS, 100%)
  2. Susan Collins (ME, 32%)
  3. Olympia Snowe (ME, 32%)
  4. Norm Coleman (MN, 64%)
  5. Chuck Hagel (NE, 96%)
  6. George Voinovich (OH, 68%)
  7. Gordon Smith (OR, 58%)
  8. John Warner (VA, 88%)

The first thing to note is that, apart from Brownback, Hagel, and Warner, the rest are RINOs with an average "Republican partisan score" of only 50.4%; the only other Republican senator who scores lower than the top of this liberal group (Voinovich, 68%) is Sen. Arlen Specter (PA, 63%)... every other Republican senator is more Republican than these five, according to the American Conservative Union ratings.

All right, but what about the three we singled out first? What's up with them? Chuck Hagel has been against the war almost from the very beginning; he appears to be simply opposed to the very concept of American troops being sent anywhere for any reason.

Sam Brownback is running for president -- and he appears to have drunk the media Flavor-Aid that says the American people are desperate to lose in Iraq and are just begging us to turn tail and flee. Having neither principles nor brain cells, Brownback naturally tailors his message to what CBS tells him Americans want to hear.

John Warner is a strange case, however; I can only conclude that his very advanced age -- he turns 80 years old in 25 days -- has driven him into timidity and fear; Warner has become Grandpa Simpson... "oh no, we're all doomed!" What a sad, pathetic old man. If he had any decency, he would resign from the Senate, rather than disgrace his years of fine service with end-of-career hysteria and panic.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN, 88%) is trembling in his boots a bit, but he has not yet completely jumped the shark. And of course, the shining honor roll of Democrats supporting the president on his strategic change of course in Iraq -- exactly what they have pretended to demand for months now -- has but a single member: Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT, 80%).

If the roll-call stays as it is now, and if Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY, 100%) has enough brass to pull the trigger, then the GOP should be able to filibuster both these insulting, defeatist, and unAmerican resolutions to death: Even if every one of the eight poltroons listed above votes for cloture, along with all 50 Democrats not named Joe Lieberman -- assuming someone channels Tim Johnson's (D-SD, 95%) vote -- that would only give the forces of darkness and despair 58 votes... not enough.

But if two more Republicans defect, or if McConnell is made of Jell-O, then we face the prospect of sending our troops into combat... with the United States Congress shouting after them, "it'll end in tears -- you'll poke your eye out!"

There are times I despise politicians so much, I want to pass a law preventing anyone being elected who actually wants the job.

Too many people grow in office these days. Was it always this bad?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 24, 2007, at the time of 5:35 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

January 22, 2007

Warner Blithers

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Republican Sen. John Warner (R-VA, 88%), former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on the desperate need to garner more support for the Iraq war:

Mr. Warner said that while he saw “no direct parallels” between the Iraq situation and the United States involvement in Vietnam, he said that he vividly recalls the decline of American public and political support for the Vietnam war, when he was Navy Secretary. Restoring support for the Iraq mission and assuring American success there is essential, he said.

...And that's why he's co-sponsoring one of the two Senate resolutions saying the president's plan is doomed to fail!

John Warner: rocket scientist.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 22, 2007, at the time of 3:58 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Lay Low, Sweet Sadrite

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

President Bush's strategic change of course in Iraq was initially received with a lot of skepticsim. The Democrats' reaction was predictable; more disturbing are the craven retreats of a number of Republican senators -- the "Beltway Boys" (Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke) put up a graphic Saturday of some seven or eight squishy Republicans who indicate they will climb aboard one of the two defeatist resolutions circumnavigating the Senate: either Sen. John Warner's (R-VA, 88%) "surrender slow" or Sen. Carl Levin's (D-MI, 100%) "surrender swift."

The biggest disappointment has got to be "conservative" Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS, 100%): he announced his candidacy for president on Saturday, and they immediately joined the rat pack. That has to be some kind of a record: to inaugurate and immolate your candidacy on the same day!

Even some sevicemen in Iraq have voiced their concern; but in their case, the reason appears to be concern about our old "rules of engagement" (ROE) and whether they will actually change.

The problem in Iraq is not a lack of men; it's a PC driven set of cumbersome regulations that hogtie our soldiers and Marines. According to an active duty serviceblogger, Buck Sargent, the Mahdi Militia has been operating quite brazenly in recent days: They stage fake checkpoints to disrupt traffic and terrorize residents; they roam the streets of Baghdad in black uniforms and toting weapons openly; and they roust ordinary citizens, point guns at them, and threaten to kill them for the least bit of real or imagined "dissing." Buck Sergeant says that "residents call driving to work 'Iraqi Roulette.'"

Under the old ROE, even when known militia men walked around with military weapons on full display, American troops could do nothing unless Americans or Iraqi citizens were physically threatened:

[I]t's our own ROPE (Rules of Previous Engagements) that have us really tied down in the desert.... But they (Islamists) do recognize cultural squeamishness for what it is: a fundamental weakness to be exploited.

• Insurgent revolving door justice

• Mosque armory sanctuaries

• Politically connected untouchables

• Failure to identify, protect, and fully develop civilian sources

• Over-reliance on local sources with their own agendas

This is practically a ready-made recipe for how to blow a counterinsurgency war at the buzzer.

That is why we have argued that the actual "surge" of 5 brigades of Americans and 18 brigades of Iraqis is really the least important element of President Bush's plan: the main point is to change the restrictive ROE.

That change will serve as a "force multiplier" for the extra troops -- about 70,000 total focused in specific neighborhoods in Baghdad and thousands more in the al-Qaeda stronghold of Anbar province. Not only will we have many more forces to call upon, but they will be allowed to hit harder and won't have to get a "permission slip" from the Shiite government. Nor will they be released whenever a member of parliament calls and says "that guy is my cousin... let him go!"

However, the success of the plan still depends a lot upon Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's commitment. Fortunately, preliminary indications are that our ROE really has changed -- along with Maliki's attitude. In "the past few weeks," Multinational Forces - Iraq (MNF-I) captured 420 Mahdi fighters... including "several dozen senior members;" they were seized during 56 separate operations, starting three months ago.

The new "facts on the ground" are clearly rattling Sadr's men; they actually confess to developing a seige mentality:

Two Shiite militia commanders said Thursday that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stopped protecting radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Madhi Army under pressure from Washington, while the fighters described themselves as under seige in their Sadr City stronghold.

Their account of an organization now fighting for its very existence could represent a tactical and propaganda feint [right -- they're trying to fool people into believing they're cowards and weaklings who will flee rather than fight], but there was mounting evidence the militia is increasingly off balance and has ordered its gunmen to melt back into the population. To avoid capture, commanders report no longer using cell phones and fighters are removing their black uniforms and hiding their weapons during the day.

And on Friday, Sadr's top aide was arrested... which is especially encouraging. We seized Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji, whom Captain Ed has dubbed "the Mouth of Sadr" (it's a Lord of the Rings reference -- read the books or watch the movies!)

Here is the best part of that operation:

An adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, however, denied the government knew in advance about the raid, in which Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji was captured and said the detention was not part of the new operation aimed at quelling Baghdad's sectarian violence.

"There was no coordination with the Iraqi political leadership and this arrest was not part of the new security plan," the adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, told Al-Arabiya. "Coordination with the Iraqi political leadership is needed before conducting such operations that draw popular reactions."

In other words, we no longer feel bound to warn the Iraqi government before moving against a senior Shiite militia commander -- which before, inevitably resulted in the Iraqi government warning the target.

Speaking of Captain Ed, he reports this excellent piece of news:

The change has had an effect on the streets of Baghdad. Where the militias operated openly as late as October, most of the militia members have faded out of sight. Checkpoints run by the Mahdis have disappeared, and weapons no longer get flashed on the street. The luckier ones now try to get passports to get out of Baghdad and Iraq altogether, and the poorer fighters have worked to stay out of the way. Most impressively, all of this has happened while hundreds of Mahdis sit in jails; normally, that would start street fighting and massive protests, but the Mahdis have suddenly discovered discretion.

And all this before the first troop of the "surge" has arrived.

Many skeptics have predicted -- as if this invalidated the entire operation -- that the militia members would "melt back into the population" until the new troops went away... then just move right back into their old positions of control. However, these critics beg the most obvious point: you pay a severe price for making yourself invisible for 12 to 18 months.

Groups like the Mahdi Militia or the Badr Brigades Organization have no natural hegemony; they rule by violence and intimidation. Like the Mafia, once gone, they're forgotten.

Even better, while the death squads are hiding out and laying low, the Iraqi Army and National Police -- and the local police, who are probably even more accepted in these neighborhoods -- will move in and establish themselves as the hegemonic authority. The longer they stay unopposed by the extremists, the more Iraqis come to perceive the elected government as having "fitness to rule," which is the actual definition of hegemony.

When we start withdrawing troops, and the militiamen pop out of their holes and caves and saunter down the streets to take back what they see as rightfully theirs, they're going to get the surprise of their lives: the cops and soldiers aren't going to give up the power, and the citizenry is going to resent the return of the swaggering bullies. More than likely, such a long interregnum will destroy the last shred of legitimacy the militias now enjoy. They'll probably be ridden out of town on a rail.

We cannot let Republicans acting like lily-livered cowards (and Democrats acting like, well, Democrats) to throw away our best chance for actual victory in Iraq. When Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-NE, 96%), Olympia Snowe (R-ME, 32%), Susan Collins (R-ME, 32%), Sam Brownback, John Warner, and the rest of the fleeing-rat pack stop quaking in their boots, we absolutely must hold their feet to the grindstone: they must give the president's plan time to work; if they sign aboard either of the two surrender-resolutions, we will no longer consider them Republicans.

They can go join the ghouls, the eaters of the dead, over in the other party.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 22, 2007, at the time of 5:32 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 18, 2007

General Who? (Minor Attributional Update)

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATE: We should have provided a link to the policy paper "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq" (hat tip to commenter Tomy); also, Gen. Jack Keane was not the primary author but one of the secondary authors. Everything said about the plan itself is accurate, however, as is Keane's advocacy of the plan to the president, and the fact that it formed the basis of the president's final decision.

Today, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- now chaired by noted moderate Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE, 100%) -- called several retired generals to testify that increasing our troop strength in Iraq was exactly the wrong thing to do... that we should be decreasing them instead.

The generals who testified were:

  • Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, Commander in Chief of Central Command from 1991 through 1994, after the Gulf War;
  • Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, Commander in Chief of Southern Command from 1994 through 1996;
  • Army Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Headquarters, Department of the Army 1981-1985 and Director of the National Security Agency 1985-1988. Odom is mostly known for saying we should not have deposed Saddam Hussein; for demanding our "immediate withrawal" of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2005; and for opposing the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program;
  • Army Gen. Jack Keane, Vice Chief of Staff and Acting Chief of Staff of the United States Army (ret. 2003). Keane's views on the surge were not reported by the New York Times... likely because he is the one of the authors of a policy paper this month titled "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq" [the principal author is Frederick W. Kagan, not Keane, as we incorrectly reported yesterday]. This paper was instrumental in persuading President Bush to adopt the change of course in our Iraq strategy that included building up our troop strength in Baghdad and Anbar provinces.

    The Times notes only that Keane said that if we start pulling out -- as the other retired generals advocate -- “We will be shot at as we are going out;” they more or less imply that he joins the others in testifying against the policy that he, himself persuaded Bush to adopt... which is rather underhanded practice on the Times' part, I must say!

Note that not a single general (except Keane) has any military experience post-9/11; in fact, Gen. Odom has no military experience after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Conspicuous by their absence are such previously celebrated retired military officers as Gen. Eric Shinseki, former Chief of Staff of the United States Army; and Gen. Anthony Zinni, former Commander in Chief of United States Central Command. They were earlier trotted out (by anti-Bush Democrats) as the cream of the cream of military advisors -- back when Bush had rejected increasing the troop levels, and Shinseki and Zinni forcefully argued that we needed to do just that to win the war.

Is that why they appear to have gone from sine qua non to personae non gratae in one quick election?

Say, here's a thought: wouldn't it be effective were the president to set up a video conference between Shinseki, Zinni, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, President Bush -- and Commander of Multinational Forces - Iraq, Lt.Gen. David Petraeus, to explain the entire strategic change of course... and see if we can enlist Shinseki and Zinni to promote it?

What would Slow Joe Biden say then, I wonder...?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 18, 2007, at the time of 5:53 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

January 16, 2007

Idiot Sevan

Iraq Matters , Untied Nations
Hatched by Dafydd

There is a type of indictment I call a "draft-dodger" -- because it's an indictment that's never served. (Ba-dum BUM!)

Here is an example: former head of the United Nations Oil for Food Fraud program, Benon Sevan, has been indicted by an American federal court for bribery and conspiracy, having accepted a boatload of money ($160,000) from Iraq via one Ephraim Nadler, the brother-in-law of former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (the former Secretary General is best-known today for being a punchline on an episode of Seinfeld):

Michael Garcia, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement that Sevan, a Cypriot, allegedly received about $160,000 from Nadler on behalf of the Iraqi government.

Garcia said the United States had issued warrants for the arrest of Nadler and Sevan and will seek their arrest and extradition to New York.

I cannot envision how that warrant will ever be served. Sevan is not enough of an idiot to wander back to New York; thus, we would have to extradite him from his native country, the island-nation of Cyprus.

However, the extradition treaty we have with Cyprus does not obligate that country to extradite its own nationals to the United States (Article 3, Section 1); we can request, but Cyprus can (and almost certainly will) refuse: Sevan is a very powerful and important man in Cyprus, and they're not going to hand hm over -- bribery or no bribery.

So that's that. The best we can do is use the power of the indictment to restrict his travel and keep him from returning to his beloved U.N.

Is that enough? I suppose it will have to be.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 16, 2007, at the time of 6:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 15, 2007

Polling Dos and Don'ts

Iraq Matters , Polling Keeps a-Rolling
Hatched by Dafydd

Immediately after President Bush's speech on the change of course in our Iraq strategy, pollsters at both AP/Ipsos and ABC/Washington Post released surveys -- mostly conducted before Bush even spoke -- that purportedly showed huge public opposition to increasing troop levels in Iraq.

The Democrats seized upon these polls (which was the whole point) to rally Congressmen of both parties to do something, anything, to stop Bush's plan for victory before it could be implemented -- and possibly succeed.

The problem is that the very polls used as a basis of opposition by the Democrats were fundamentally flawed.

Since contemporary American pollsters -- most recently, AP/Ipsos and ABC/Washington Post polls -- evidently have a continuing problem with the basics of the science of polling, I thought I should issue a small primer (speaking as a complete non-expert in statistics and polling):

DON'T wildly overpoll members of one party, especially when asking about the policy of the other party.

The AP/Ipsos poll, to its credit, actually includes a question about party affiliation. The answer is illuminating:

Do you consider yourself a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent or none of these?

Republican ....................................... 24%

Democrat.......................................... 35%

Independent ..................................... 26%

None of these................................... 12%

Not sure.......................................... 3%

Note that the largest group among respondents is Democrat, followed by Independent; Republican is dead last; note also that the number of Democrats polled was 46% larger than the number of Republicans. It seems rather self-evident that if you poll such a huge bunch more Democrats than Republicans about a Republican policy, you're going to get a lobsidedly negative response.

Most contemporary pollsters insist this sort of question does not measure party registration, merely party identification: the purpose of this argument is to deflect criticism that they're deliberately overpolling Democrats. "No," they argue; "the Republicans' stupid policies are just causing more people to identify with the Democrats... it's really measuring a surge of support for Democrats!"

The problem with this argument is twofold:

  1. If this were true, we would see such a surge in actual votes. And yet, despite the 2006 vote, no such surge is apparent: the country remains divided almost 50-50, moving sometimes left, sometimes right -- which it has been since about 1992.
  2. If this were really true... then why did Ipsos shift, for this question alone, from polling "adults" to polling "registered voters?" For no other question on this poll were responses limited to registered voters.

An "adult" may well take the question to mean which party he currently likes more; but a person who is a registered voter is far more likely to take it as asking under which party he is actually registered. So in this case, I think it very likely that what we're seeing is, indeed, a huge overpolling of Democrats.

The ABC/Washington Post poll does not tell us who they polled; but considering that another question had respondents saying that they trust Democrats, by a 47% to 36% plurality over Republicans, "to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq" -- when in fact, the Democrats have never enunciated any plan at all... I think it's awfully likely that, like AP/Ipsos, they overpoll Democrats.

DO ask party affiliation -- and then DO publish the cross-tabs, so we know who is driving the response

What is the point of asking party affiliation if they're not going to bother telling us how each response broke down by party? There is a very big difference between having 70% of everyone thinking we shouldn't send more troops, and having Republicans split 50-50, Independents split 55-45, and Democrats split 99-1 (with that one being named "Joe").

DON'T poll on a technical question that respondents are simply not equipped to decide

Such as, for example, complicated strategic military questions that require several years study of military history and philosophy in order to have an informed opinion.

It's like polling people to find out whether Boeing or Lockheed Martin should build the Joint Strike Fighter... how the heck would the average American know?

DO try to include all the main points of a plan in your summary... not just those you hope will be unpopular.

In both polls, the only element of the new strategy they inquire about is the troop build-up; as AP/Ipsos phrases it:

Would you favor or oppose sending more troops to Iraq?

Surprise, surprise, when put that bluntly, 70% of respondents said "oppose," and only 26% said "favor." (In the similar ABC/WaPo poll, the response was 61% to 36% negative). But as we noted in our last post, this is actually the least important part of the change of strategic course.

It's also the most controversial... and taken in isolation, without all the other elements, even I would probably oppose it. But it should not be taken in isolation; consider this analogy:

You're a major stockholder in a company that is losing money hand over teakettle, $100 million in the last quarter alone. You determine that the problem is a VP in charge of technology who simply cannot get the new product out the door; the prototype is working great, but he's afraid to send it to production. So you go to the BoD and suggest the following:

  • Sack Vice President of Technology Hammond Cheese;
  • Promote his top manager, Flash Groton, who was actually in charge of the project and has been champing at the bait to send it to production;
  • Accelerate testing and release of the product;
  • Pour $10 million some money into advertising and promoting it, to try to recoup the company's losses.

But then, when the BoD puts it to a vote, this is how they phrase it:

Do you favor or oppose resolving our problem by spending an additional $10 million on advertising?

'Nuff said.

DON'T precede the vital question with a series of questions designed to put people in a bad mood

What is -- or should be -- the point of this poll? To determine what Americans think about the president's new strategy -- not to see what people think of President Bush in general, or how Bush has handled Iraq up to this point, or whether the country is headed in the right or wrong direction. Those questions are of marginal interest (given that Bush is term-limited, and we'll have a new president in 2009, come hell or high ball); but this isn't the place for them.

And especially not when AP/Ipsos knows in advance that the eight questions they ask before getting to the point will prejudice the response decidedly against President Bush... just before asking the most important question about the new policy by President Bush. Regardless of what people might have thought of the policy at the beginning of the poll, by the time they've been asked these eight questions, they wouldn't support a Bush policy to encourage the Pledge of Allegiance!

Here is what they asked before troubling to inquire about "sending more troops to Iraq":

  1. Is the United States on the right track or wrong track? (67% negative)
  2. What's our most important problem (an entirely negative question to make people think about problems, not solutions)
  3. Bush's job approval (65% negative)
  4. How is Bush handling the economy? (55% negative)
  5. How is he handling domestic issues? (59% negative)
  6. How is he handling foreign policy and the war on terror? (60% negative)
  7. How is he handling Iraq? (68% negative)
  8. Congressional job approval (62% negative)
  9. "Would you favor or oppose sending more troops to Iraq?" -- 70% negative.

Yes, we get it, we get it: Bush isn't very popular right now; and I have no doubt AP/Ipsos knew exactly what the response on those first eight questions would be. But what does that have to do with the change of course in our Iraq strategy?

We're changing the rules of engagement, reworking the entire Iraq strategy, and in that context, increasing our troop level to actually win this war. The efficacy and wisdom of these steps have absolutely nothing to do with Bush's popularity.

So why ask them first -- other that to sour the pool before hitting them with the real question?

Rather than honestly engage the policy itself, asking about each element of it and doing so without prejudicing the sample, AP/Ipsos chose instead to use a sleazy pollster's trick: If you want a big negative response on some message, precede it by five or six -- or eight, as in this case -- questions that will get respondents angry, depressed, and bitter about the messenger. Et voilà! Instant trashing of the message itself.

Because AP/Ipsos begins numbering the questions anew with the troop-increase question (calling it number 1 again), I thought perhaps this was a separate poll separately conducted. But the poll report only mentions the total number and type of respondents once, at the very beginning; and the dates are the same for all questions.

There is no indication that they split the sample and asked one half the political questions and the other half the "strategery" questions. And the AP write up of the poll mingles responses to both parts in the same paragraphs -- in fact, the same sentences -- making it quite clear that all questions were asked of all respondents.

The only conclusion, from a mathematical standpoint, is that this was a deliberate, cold-blooded attempt to bias the sample. The ABC/WaPo poll pulled the same trick, though to a lesser degree (and they got a less negative response -- interesting). Before asking any questions about the new policy, they first asked the following:

  1. Bush's job approval (64% negative)
  2. Was the Iraq war worth fighting? (58% negative)
  3. Who do you trust, Republicans or Democrats, to handle the Iraq "situation"? (47% - 36% Dems)
  4. Did you listen to any of Bush's speech? (58% none)
  5. "Do you support or oppose Bush's proposal to send approximately 22,000 additional U.S. military forces to Iraq?"

This is not quite as bad as AP/Ipsos, as there are fewer negative questions (four instead of eight); but it's worse in the sense that ABC/WaPo makes a point of calling it "Bush's proposal," more firmly tying the strategy to the man -- after reminding respondents how much they dislike the man right now.

All in all, a shabby (and overused) trick designed, not to probe the public's response, but to push it firmly against the new strategy.

DO construct a poll that elicits real information; DON'T release a divisive push-poll in the middle of a war

The very science of polling is under fire today in America; and this kind of polling is one big reason why. Most people understand exactly what Mark Twain meant when he wrote:

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

Autobiography of Mark Twain, 1904 -- though nobody has found any record of Disraeli remarking this.)

We all know instinctively that pollsters can manipulate questions and reponses to get whatever answers they (or more accurately, their clients) desire. But the discrediting of polling in American politics stems not from the knowledge that political pollsters can manipulate polls -- but rather from the deep suspicion that they do manipulate them, nearly every time.

Similarly, we don't distrust the media because it's possible for them to lie, but because most of us believe they lie like a Persian rug every blessed day. And why, in both cases? Because liberals believe they, the "Anointed," are so much smarter than we, that we simply must be led, like children, for our own good... otherwise, we might draw the wrong conclusions, acting against "the Vision," thus falling into mortal sin.

It is utterly clear that the editors and publishers at the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and ABC, along with the pollsters and polling directors, share belief in a number of leitmotifs about the Iraq war:

  • Iraq has nothing to do with the larger War Against Global Jihad;
  • Terrorism is not a major threat to the United States;
  • Bush and the GOP suffer from "Islamophobia;"
  • We went to war in Iraq to steal their oil;
  • We failed to steal any oil, therefore we've already been defeated;
  • We must admit defeat and get out, having learned a hard lesson about trying to steal other people's oil;
  • "Changing course" can only mean withdrawal from Iraq; adding troops, no matter what other strategic changes we make, constitutes "staying the course" -- which has already been discredited;
  • If enough Americans demand that we get out, Bush will have to comply;
  • The most urgent goal is for Democrats to win the presidency: all other goals, including national security, take a back seat.

They see polliing, not as a scientific or mathematical tool to understand the electorate (or the citoyens) -- what they think, what they want -- but as a political tool to shape and mold public opinion to support Democratic and liberal goals and initiatives. As we have noted many times before, if these errors and mistakes in polling were random, they would favor the Right as often as they favor the Left. Instead, they always line up to promote Democratic policies and damage Republican policies (the Restaurant Check Fallacy: errors in toting up the check always favor the restaurant, never the customer).

Rather than turning polling into the scientific-political tool the Left wants, however, they have only succeeded in tainting all polling as disreputable -- today, even good polling must scale a wall of incredulity to be heard. That is the natural outcome when ordinary people -- who may not have specialized training but are much smarter than the elites think they are -- realize how they have been bamboozled and beguiled by polling in the past.

This is a sad turn of affairs, and it will take many years to undo. But the healing can only begin when the self-inflicted injuries cease.

Shame on AP/Ipsos and ABC/Washington Post pollsters, for allowing liberal politicos to make fools of them.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 15, 2007, at the time of 5:05 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

January 11, 2007

Building a Case for Casus Belli

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

President Bush Speaks - FAQ

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The more important changes are:

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

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

Q: What are "rules of engagement?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 11, 2007, at the time of 4:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 7, 2007

So Where IS Lieutenant Kije?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 7, 2007, at the time of 4:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 6, 2007

Media Matters In the Meme Streets of Baghdad - iii

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Continued yet again from previous post...

The great mosaic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, Boehlert certainly has a point in one respect:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bloodthirsty warbloggers

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

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

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

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

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

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

The conspiracy of shared vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here was a Boehlert! when comes such another?

And that's the last word.

(Dafydd ab Hugh contributed to this post.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 6, 2007, at the time of 2:46 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Media Matters In the Meme Streets of Baghdad - B

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Continued from previous post...

You put your left foot in...

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

Go ahead; I'll wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believing is seeing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So are they all. All honorable men.

Continued yet again next post...

(Dafydd ab Hugh contributed to this post)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 6, 2007, at the time of 2:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 5, 2007

Media Matters In the Meme Streets of Baghdad - 1

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But of course, Eric Boehlert is an honorable man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The blogosphere -- threat or menace?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what Confederate Yankee writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baghdad mosques are burning down, burning down, burning down

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

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

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

Shakespeare weeps with envy.

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

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

Continued next post...

(Dafydd ab Hugh contributed to this post)

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 5, 2007, at the time of 9:07 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 3, 2007

All Right, He Died Like a Man

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In the end, Saddam Hussein died like a man.

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

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

MacBeth, Act V, Scene VIII

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

I wonder if Hussein had seen the movie?

~

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 3, 2007, at the time of 2:44 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 1, 2007

Saddam's Execution "Upsets" Saddamites

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

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

No, really:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, here is how they phrased it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 1, 2007, at the time of 3:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 29, 2006

Clinton Judge Has Opportunity to Shine! - UPDATED

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATE: see below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE December 29th, 2006, 7:23:

Consummatum est

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 29, 2006, at the time of 2:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 27, 2006

Careful What You Threaten; You Might Have to Deliver

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 20, 2006

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

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

So John over at Power Line sez,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 20, 2006, at the time of 6:10 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

December 13, 2006

Jefferson Would Be Ticked...

Blogomania , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 13, 2006, at the time of 4:02 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 11, 2006

President Bush's Way Forward

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 11, 2006, at the time of 3:48 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

December 7, 2006

Does Robert Kaplan Read Big Lizards?

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Syrian Slitherings
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

That that, Hugh.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 7, 2006, at the time of 4:34 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Important Readers Note

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Syrian Slitherings
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 7, 2006, at the time of 2:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 6, 2006

Skip the Dicta; Read the Recommendations - Part Zwei

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Syrian Slitherings
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

Watcha gonna do about me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Withdrawal from fancies of withdrawal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds good to me!

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

The police are there to preserve disorder!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 6, 2006, at the time of 8:05 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Skip the Dicta; Read the Recommendations - Part Uno

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Syrian Slitherings
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "diplomatic offensive"

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

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

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

i. Support the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dealing" with Iran (oh, and Syria)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F--- the Jews

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

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

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

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

Now can we get on with it?

Afghanistan

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

Iraq milestones and suchlike

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

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

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

Come together

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

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

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

Um... okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued next post...

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 6, 2006, at the time of 8:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 5, 2006

Not "Last" - Try "Next of Many"

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 5, 2006, at the time of 7:15 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

XVOA

Cultures and Contortions , Future of Civilization , Hezbollah Horrors , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 5, 2006, at the time of 5:16 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

December 4, 2006

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

Cultures and Contortions , Hezbollah Horrors , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

Transforming jihad

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

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

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

Ideology and counter-ideology

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

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

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

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

Ideological synthesis: Americanism

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

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

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

What else can we say about the power of Americanism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

American culture as Borg culture: resistance is futile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way forward

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 4, 2006, at the time of 5:54 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Reading Between the Steyns: Little Endians and Big Endians

Cultures and Contortions , Hezbollah Horrors , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 4, 2006, at the time of 4:30 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

November 29, 2006

Nancy Drew She Ain't

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

Blink. Blink blink.

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 29, 2006, at the time of 5:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hostile Takeover

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations , Syrian Slitherings , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

I've been thinking about Iraq lately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Gates may be just the fellow:

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 29, 2006, at the time of 5:26 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 21, 2006

Good Hunting in Ramadi

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two major reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 21, 2006, at the time of 7:01 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 20, 2006

Four "Conservatives" In Search of an Ideology

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 16, 2006

Take Him At His Word

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guardian Spills the Beans

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

The basic thrust is here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The four points are:

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

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

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

Here is the neo-leftist take on the choice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 16, 2006, at the time of 2:00 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 15, 2006

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

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New York Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heh again.

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 15, 2006, at the time of 4:42 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

November 13, 2006

More Evidence Bush HASN'T Changed His Mind About Iraq

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surprise!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 13, 2006, at the time of 7:57 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

November 12, 2006

In-BEDDD Bloggers

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well! Who could argue with that?

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

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

Yet we believe them!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Wow, three historic legislative revolutions there!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 11, 2006

Bush's Iraq Speech Next January

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Americans wanted several things anent Iraq:

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

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

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

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

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2006, at the time of 10:18 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

November 6, 2006

Maliki's Life of Quiet Desperation

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

In the wake of Saddam Hussein's death sentence, we should be jubilant; but we are not, because a dark, uncertain cloud still hovers over our heads.

Last week's joint operation with Coalition (American) and Iraqi troops in Baghdad caught many high-value-targets. This is the good news; Bill Roggio reports:

On Saturday, Iraqi special forces, backed by U.S. advisers, conducted a raid inside Sadr City, the Baghdad bastion of Iranian proxy Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army. Three members of a "murder, kidnapping cell" were detained during the raid, and the Mahdi Army fired on Iraqi forces with small arms and RPGs as they departed.

This is the first operation inside Sadr City after Prime Minister Nouri Maliki ordered the lifting of the week-long cordon around Sadr City last Tuesday. On that same day, an operation inside Sadr City netted three terror cell suspects. The order to lift the cordon was hotly opposed by the U.S. military, and Iraqi's vice president also strongly disagreed with the decision. Serious questions have been raised about Maliki's commitment to quell the violence in Baghdad and suppress the power of Sadr's Shiite death squads.

The questions arise from the fact that Prime Minister Maliki heavily leans upon Sadr's political support to remain in office. He may not be wholly owned subsidiary of Sadr (as Sadr is surely an agent of Iran); Maliki shows occasional signs of independence, unlike his predecessor. But at the very least, he is torn between two teams of horses pulling in opposite directions.

The bad news is that Maliki is getting increasingly obstructionist against our effort to curb sectarian and tribal fighting. I'm sure readers heard about Maliki's controversial demand:

Mr. Maliki’s public declaration [lifting the Sadr City blockade] seemed at first to catch American commanders off guard. But by nightfall, American troops had abandoned all the positions in eastern and central Baghdad that they had set up last week with Iraqi forces as part of a search for a missing American soldier. The checkpoints had snarled traffic and disrupted daily life and commerce throughout the eastern part of the city.

The language of the declaration, which implied that Mr. Maliki had the power to command American forces, seemed to overstep his authority and to be aimed at placating his Shiite constituency.

The withdrawal was greeted with jubilation in the streets of Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite enclave where the Americans have focused their manhunt and where anti-American sentiment runs high.

I understand that Maliki is walking a tightrope, to use a different metaphore. He needs to look tough for the benefit of his constituency; he dares not be seen as an American puppet. But when the prime minister of Iraq is incapable of even trying to disarm the Shiite militas (either the Mahdi Militia or the Badr Brigades), he is hardly in the position to dictate terms to American forces.

And we shouldn't be obeying him as if he were an actual, functioning head of state: he is at best a junior partner in this enterprise; if Iraq wants us to respect their sovereignty, then they should act so as to deserve respect.

I get the feeling that Maliki is not expecting Americans to stay much longer. I wonder where he could have gotten that idea? He's banking on the idea that Sadr will survive and become a powerful political player in Iraq... but that American troops will soon redeploy over the horizon to Okinawa.

When that happens (reasons Maliki), he wants to be on the side of the Pit Bull, not the Pekingese: acting like a swaggering leather-boy against the mighty Americans probably seems like necessary performance art.

But like many others who underestimated Americans, Maliki is dead wrong. No matter what happens tomorrow, we're not leaving before we settle with Sadr and his Mahdi Militia, and then the Badr Brigades. The president has a lot of plenary power, even against a hostile Congress... as Ronald Reagan proved again and again: he, not the Squeaker of the House or the Majority Leader of the Senate, is the Commander in Chief; the president, not Congress, orders the troops around... especially as we already have an authorization for the use of force, which has the same legal consequence as a declaration of war.

I don't know why everyone underestimates our troops; yes, if you look at old history (in Clinton's time), America had a disturbing habit of bugging out... but that has not been true since the current president was elected. Why look to history when contemporary reality belies it?

We win battle after battle, and yet everyone (especially everyone with a "D" after his name) imagines defeat is always around the next corner (see today's astonishing paean to defeatism in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, via Power Line).

Of course, if you believe the Democrats' rhetoric -- and you believe they're going to win control of both houses of Congress -- then you would have to conclude that we'll engage in a "strategic rearward advance" before the job is done. All the elite media say so!

Al-Qaeda and Muqtada Sadr believe that if (when!) our congress turns Democratic, the terrorists will win. And they believe that the more people they slaughter, the more likely Democrats will take the control of Congress.

In fact, it's precisely the opposite: the more we are attacked, especially if we're attacked again in our homeland, the angrier Americans will get. Voters are hincky about the Iraq war, not because they're frightened of being attacked, but because the defeatists have convinced the American people that we're losing the war (by the timeworn technique of shouting it long enough and loudly enough that people start to believe it).

Maybe it will take a new president in 2009 to convince Americans that we really are winning (and some demonstrable, visible, and undeniable progress on the ground in Iraq); see Victor Davis Hanson's brilliant opinion piece on his blog yesterday, about which more later. For now:

Long forgotten is the inspired campaign that removed a vicious dictator in three weeks. Nor is much credit given to the idealistic efforts to foster democracy rather than just ignoring the chaos that follows war — as we did after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, or following our precipitous departure from Lebanon and Somalia. And we do not appreciate anymore that Syria was forced to vacate Lebanon; that Libya gave up its WMD arsenal; that Pakistan came clean about Dr. Khan; and that there have been the faint beginnings of local elections in the Gulf monarchies.

But in spite of all this, all Nouri al-Maliki cares about is his personal political future. How did Iraqi get stuck with this oaf? (Oh, that's right: because they were desperate to get rid of the previous Sadrite: Ibrahim al-Jaafari!)

Maliki is wrong about another point, too: Sadr will not last too much longer. Someone kill him long before we leave Iraq. And very soon now, Maliki and the rest of the Shia will have to decide whether to fish or get off the pot... because if he is still tied to Sadr when Sadr goes down, he'll drag Maliki to the bottom of the Euphrates River like a Jersey canary with a lead weight chained to his ankle.

Hm... not a bad image!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 6, 2006, at the time of 5:54 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

November 3, 2006

Will Saddam Get the Drop?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The tribunal trying Saddam Hussein and many of his lieutenants expects to announce the verdict Sunday, the London Times reports; and most expect it to be guilty with the death penalty for "crimes against humanity" -- which might be the first time such a sentence has been handed out for that charge since the Nuremburg Trials. Or were there any others in between?

Saddam, his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Taha Yassin Ramadan, his Vice President, and Awad al-Bandhar, a judge, face possible death sentences for the execution of 148 Shia villagers from the town of Dujail after a failed 1982 assassination attempt on the then Iraqi leader. Four others face lighter sentences. Saddam is likely to win the right to appeal against any death sentence.

Meanwhile, lots of folks are expecting Sunni terrorists to launch a horrific wave of violence when Saddam is sentenced to death; but frankly, I doubt it: such predictions are predicated upon the idea that until now, the terrorists have been "holding back," but now they'll really be hopping mad. I think that's rot: these murderous butchers been going flat out for three or four months now; the pedal's to the metal, and I don't think there's any more horsepower in that engine.

But the real question for me is, even assuming Saddam is sentenced to death... will he ever actually be executed? Or will the Europeans or the U.N. or the Humane Society meddle to prevent it, on the grounds that:

  • We don't know for absolute, 100% certain that Saddam really ordered mass executions in the town of Dujail, or that he was really the dictator of Iraq. He could have had an evil twin.
  • Even if he did it, maybe he was insane; look at him before the invasion: he must have been inhaling junk food! (Hey, it worked for Dan White.)
  • Finally, even if Hussein personally ordered the executions and was in his right mind when he did so, we can't execute him because it would be a barbaric and un-Christian to put to death a man merely because he slaughtered between 300,000 and 5,000,000 people over a few decades. And it wouldn't be fair; you're singling him out... after all, nobody ever executed Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or Nicolae Ceauşescu. (All right, maybe Ceauşescu; but that was more like a revolution -- a people's revolution! -- so it doesn't count.)

As much as I doubt there will be "civil war" if Saddam is sentenced to death, that's just how much I doubt he will ever actually dance on air, be fried, gassed, needled, or given a haircut. I expect that, yet again, la Belle France will ride to the rescue of another mass-murdering dictator.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 3, 2006, at the time of 11:48 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

October 30, 2006

Time Flies When Killing Nothing But Innocent Bystanders

Blogomania , Elections , Iraq Matters , Polling Keeps a-Rolling , Science - Bogus
Hatched by Dafydd

By now, everybody and his unkie's monkle knows about the Lancet survey that purports to show that the Iraq invasion has killed about 655,000 extra Iraqis -- nearly all of them innocent.

Actually, since the Lancet's survey only went through July 2006, and assuming the rate is unabated, a total of more than 704,000 "extra deaths" should have occurred by now, the end of October 2006. I shall accordingly use this figure hence.

They arrived at this figure by interviewing a small number of grieving survivors (2,000 households) and asking them, offhand, how many members of their family have been killed by the wicked infidels (actually, they asked how many had died since the invasion; I doubt the significance escaped the respondents' notice).

Then they projected this figure throughout the entire population of Iraq to get a figure that is about 14 times the (likely inflated) "maximum" figure on Iraq Body Count, 49,760, and more than 20 times the more commonly accepted figure of 35,000.

Oddly enough, however, they must not be burying their dead, because mortuary records don't show anywhere near that many burials over the last 43 months, a fact at which even the Lancet hints.

Amazingly enough, it appears that half of all extended families in Iraq have lost someone -- assuming no overlap at all: I assumed that an extended family in Iraq would consist of a mother and father, an average of three kids, an average of three living grandparents (recall that grandparents in such a society could easily be in their late thirties or early forties), an average of five living aunts and uncles, who between them would have produced about eight cousins.

I'm probably underestimating much of this -- which would mean even more families would have to have lost members to evil, wicked Coalition soldiers, in order to arrive at Lancet's (reprojected) 704,000 figure. If there is overlap, that would increase the number of families that would have had deaths: each death would kill a father, an uncle, and a cousin, of three different households, perhaps.

To put it another way, if this guess were true, the war would have considerably more than doubled the national annual death rate of Iraq (5.37 per 1,000 per year), according to the latest figures from the CIA's World Factbook (or even 5.5, as Lancet calculates it).

What would it have taken to produce such a staggeringly huge death rate? The Belmont Club can help with that; they note that the Israelis bombed the heck out of Lebanon for 34 days, and only managed to kill 1,300 Lebanese (all of them innocent, once again; it's remarkable how luckless the innocent are in these Moslem countries, while the guilty seem to lead charmed lives... perhaps somebody down there likes them).

Whenever I see numbers, I have to whip out my calculator and play. It's a nasty habit, I know; but I'm too old a dog to change Spot now.

The Lebanese death rate works out to about 38 per day -- and that's with heavy, continuous bombing, shelling, and massive, daily assaults. Let's assume that same rate of death in Iraq; how long would it take to kill 704,000 people? A simple division: it would take 18,526 days, or approximately 50 years and 9 months.

Hm. Well, that doesn't quite work out, does it!

On the other hand, we have a lot more soldiers in Iraq than the Israelis had in Lebanon... so let's look at it the other direction: assume that we have killed 704,000 people in Iraq since the invasion, which began on March 19th, 2003; what is the daily rate of killing we would have to be seeing? (Lancet concluded that 601,000 of the 655,000 deaths were violent; projected forward, that would mean 646,000 of the 704,000.)

Again, it's a simple calculation, complicated only because we must first figure out how many days it's been: from invasion to March 19th, 2006 is 1,096 days (because 2004 was a leap year), plus 225 days since then, for a grand total of 1,321 days.

704,000 divided by 1,321 equals 533 innocent civilians dying each and every day, Sundays and holidays included. (Actually, since this is an Islamic country, we would expect to see more deaths during the Sabbath -- which is actually Friday, not Sunday -- and during holiday periods, like Ramadan.) If we restrict it to violent deaths, that's 487 violent deaths per day.

There was a lull from the end of major combat operations, May 1st, 2003, until the insurgency and terrorist activity really started to uptick, say about April 4th, 2004 with First Fallujah. But on the other hand, we would assume a very much increased daily rate during the month of MCO; even if they don't quite balance, it probably doesn't change much... we can assume the daily rate after the insurgency and terrorism started to be somewhere between 550 and 650 extra deaths per day.

I doubt even the wildest-eyed anti-war fanatic sincerely believes that all the reporters, non-governmental organizations, government departments, and the other medical researchers in Iraq (who actually check physical evidence, rather than relying upon surveys) could possibly have missed an additional 500 civilians dying per day, 460 of them killed violently -- and nearly all by Coalition forces, if you can believe the Iraqi respondents. But of course, figures don't lie!

The researchers assure us that asking Iraqi respondents how many have died is perfectly sound methodology. They don't need to look at death certificates, hospital records, or mortuary records; first, those hard data may be unavailable... and second, they don't yield a high enough number of extra deaths:

When death certificates were not available, there were good reasons, say the authors. "We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded. Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths," they write.

Fabricating deaths simply isn't done in Iraqi culture... quick, somebody, alert the Green Helmet Guy!

But I still want to know where the weekly quota of 3,731 bodies is being stashed; I should think that by now, every graveyard in the country would have been filled up, and the bodies would have to be packed into warehouses (refrigerated, one hopes) until the country can decide where to put them. Sort of like nuclear waste, I reckon.

If somebody can show me a photograph of a warehouse with bodies stacked like cordwood, or else dozens of mass graves dug post-Saddam, then I will believe it. Until then, I'm afraid I'm going to have to maintain a bit of skepticism about the Lancet's figure. It's conceivable that their methods are unsound.

So how does this relate to the election, as the category list indicates? Well, just an example of the goofy results that you can get from a poll when you deliberately disconnect it from any external, reality-based cross-checking.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 30, 2006, at the time of 6:06 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Sadr Off!

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line makes a good point about the efficacy of putting Muqtada Sadr down. But it started a flock of seagulls in my brain.

Jack Kelly, national-security writer for the the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade, penned (phosphored?) a column forthrightly titled "We must get rid of al-Sadr." First, I must note that I'm very, very unimpressed by both the writing and thinking of Mr. Kelly. His column is written about at the level of a typical blog (Power Line is far more literate); it's conclusory and dismissive and drips with such sweeping opinion-mongering as "and people wonder why U.S. policy in Iraq is failing," and "it will be embarrassing for President Bush to admit the failure of the Iraqi government."

(Generally, Kelly thinks very little of the Iraq government; I certainly get the sense he thinks we'd all be better off if Iraq were our colony, much as the Congo belonged to France and Belgium.)

What's more, the only source he cites for anything is an anonymous "Army sergeant in a Baghdad intelligence unit," who e-mailed -- not Jack Kelly -- but the WSJ's James Taranto! Presumably, Kelly doesn't even know himself who the sergeant is or how qualified he is to make observations. Mr. Sergeant says just what Kelly longs to hear; to nobody's amazement, Kelly quotes Mr. Sergeant.

Nevertheless, the idea that we should kill Sadr is a good one. But I really wish I didn't have Mr. Kelly on my side, for he makes no particular argument at all how killing Sadr would help anyone -- nor does he consider any consequences other than Bush's "embarassing" admission of putative failure and a glib reference to an "uprising," as if that were of no consequence.

Paul has noticed this lack as well:

I wonder whether bringing down a given milita and/or its leader would make much difference at this point. My understanding is that the Shia militias exist mainly to inflict harm upon, and do battle with, the Sunnis. Given the "demand" for such units, it's questionable whether we can cut off the supply.

So let me fill in the missing argument that Mr. Kelly could not seem to articulate.

First, on the basic level, Paul is correct: killing Sadr would not put the Mahdi Militia out of existence. Actually, I would suggest killing not just Sadr, but the number two and number three guys, all more or less simultaneously (within a few days of each other). This would leave the lower tier people wondering which of them would become the new leader.

Let 'em fight it out.

Second, Paul asserts that there is a fixed "demand" on the part of Shia for killing Sunnis; but I'm not persuaded. Iraq has always been more tribal than sectarian. Many of the biggest tribes include both Sunni and Shiite members; and until Saddam came along and set the two sects at each other's throats (quite deliberately), they knocked together quite decently in Iraq.

I don't think the war between Shia and Sunni has gone on long enough in Iraq to have become the new norm. I don't even think the Shia thought of Saddam's as a "Sunni" dictatorship... more likely as the dictatorship of the Tikriti tribe, which included Shia, Sunni, and even a prominent Christian (Tariq Aziz).

I don't see this "demand" for continued butchery among most Iraqis... else we'd see Baghdad levels of sectarian slayings in the rest of the country. Were such demand universal, we would see armies of tens of thousands of Shia (and Sunni) fanning out across the country; it would be an actual civil war, not a tit for tat series of spree killings.

Rather, I suspect the killing continues because a small but very determined group of people thinks the gang-war is "winnable," and each person sees himself as the victor. It's less like the Civil War and more like the Mafia wars of mid-20th-century New York City: those, too, went on for decades... yet at no time could one say that the Italian population of that city "demanded" such killings.

If the leadership of that small cadre which is carrying out the slaughters were to be removed (by any means necessary), I cannot imagine that the Shia and Sunni residents of Baghdad would pine for the good old days of death squads committing 100 murders a day.

But what other effects would there be? Kelly casually mentions an "uprising" that would follow us snuffing Sadr; but he doesn't seem to lose any sleep over it:

If we act against Mr. Sadr, there will be an uprising. It will be bloody. But continued inaction pretty much guarantees slow motion defeat.

Well, yeah; but nobody is calling for "continued inaction." The Bush administration is not inactive; it's just active doing things other than what Mr. Kelly wants them to do.

But would there really be an uprising? Why? And who would lead it? Sadr, whatever his deficiencies in intelligence and theological knowledge (and they seem to be legion), has an immense personal charisma... obviously, otherwise that fat, unlettered slob wouldn't be the head of the strongest militia in Iraq. The Mahdi Militia gives all the appearance of being a cult of personality revolving around Muqtada Sadr's head.

By the same reasoning, Musab Zarqawi must have been astonishingly charismatic (it's a local function; he might not have impressed a gathering of Elks in Minnetonka). Zarqawi led al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia in two major uprisings in Fallujah... yet when we killed him, I recall no massive uprising in his honor or memory.

Uprisings rarely happen sponteneously; riots happen spontaneously, but uprisings need leadership. The Badr Brigades are not going to mourn the passing of Sadr; nor will the Shia, and the Kurds won't care. The secularists under Iyad Allawi will be glad to see the back of him. So the only group we must fret over is the specific sect of Shiite militiamen who owe allegiance to Muqtada Sadr himself.

I'm sure some of them may try to take revenge; but if the Badr Brigades are doing their job, as soon as they realize Sadr has been whacked, they will launch an attack on their greatest enemy -- meaning those Iraqis closest to them in belief, custom, and history, the Mighty Mahdi Militia. What with the external attack and the War of the Roses going on to decide succession to Sadr, I doubt anybody in al-Mahdi will have much energy to devote to attacking Americans for a while.

But I still haven't articulated the good that would come of this... that is, aside from the sheer schadenfreude of seeing Sadr's earthly remains. First and foremost, Sadr is Iran's toehold in Iraq: he is Iran's go-to guy. Of course they would get someone else; but it would take time, they would be in disarray until they did, and he would not likely be as powerful and charismatic as Sadr.

But here is the hidden charm. I believe Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would actually like to see the militias disarmed. Not because he's a good guy; don't mistake my point. Rather, I think Maliki reasons thus:

  1. I am the titular tribal warlord of Iraq.
  2. Yet I control no personal forces: the army and police belong to the state, not me personally; and I control none of the large militias.
  3. Now that I'm on top, it's time to blow the whistle and end the game. If the militias would all just "softly and suddenly vanish away," then there would be nobody who could challenge my military authority (except the infidels, and they don't really care anyway).
  4. But I cannot actually go after the militias... because that would require me to crack down on Moqtada Sadr, and I desperately need his voting bloc to stay in power.

Kelly referred vaguely and in passing to this point:

To maintain this fiction [of the Iraqi government], we won't take actions Mr. Maliki doesn't approve of. But he depends upon the 28 votes Mr. Sadr controls in the Iraqi parliament in order to maintain his tenuous grasp on power. Prodding from the United States has so far been insufficient to get him to give them up. Mr. Maliki has declared which side he's on, and it isn't ours.

True; but it's not Sadr's side, either. Maliki is on one and only one side: his own.

If Sadr were killed, and if Maliki were clearly not involved, then what would the "28" do? I can't see them allying with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), for they control the Badr Brigades. And they're certainly not going to support a Sunni or a Kurd.

This leaves the Dawa Party as the only other powerful Shiite political party. The head of Dawa is Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and his principal deputy is (ta da!) Nouri al-Maliki. Jaafari cannot be prime minister again; he was the one chucked out last time and is completely unacceptable to SCIRI, to the Sunnis, to the Kurds, and to the secularists.

So the only choice left for the 28 seats currently controlled by Sadr, in the event of his untimely demise, would be to continue supporting Maliki, as they have been doing all along.

Thus, were the Coalition to kill off Sadr, Maliki would still have the 28 votes of Sadr... but no Sadr sticking his hand up Maliki's badonkadonk (eew) to work the PM's mouth. Not only that, but with Mahdi in such distress, Maliki would have the green light to crack down hard on the Badr Brigades... the other Shiite party's militia. After all, Mahdi would be out of commission for a while.

So we would get a "twofer" -- the Mahdi Militia would be bereft of its leadership, leaving it to flop around like a beheaded snake; and the government of Iraq would likely move heavily against the Badr Brigades... and maybe even against the Mahdi Militia, once Maliki is sure of his power base in the absence of Muqtada Sadr.

Sometimes, when a situation has crystalized in a very unuseful position, the best thing we can do is vigorously shake the box: whatever we end up with will probably be better than what we have now.

I think this is one of those times. Rolling my eyes at the rest of Mr. Kelly's column, I second his call for us to put Sadr down.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 30, 2006, at the time of 3:11 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 19, 2006

Jonah and the Wail: the Virtue of Ignorance

Blogomania , Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae
Hatched by Dafydd

This is one of those rare moments when I must vehemently disagree with Patterico, one of the people who got me into blogging in the first place (quite literally: Patterico's Pontificaitons was the first of two sites that allowed me on as a guest blogger). He gives a one-handed round of applause to neocon columnist Jonah Goldberg -- who now reverses himself, arguing that going into Iraq was "a mistake."

Interestingly, Goldberg, and by extension Patterico, make a pretty big whopper of a mistake themselves.

Here is Goldberg, as linked by Patterico:

I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.

But that's no excuse. Truth is truth. And the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003.

Oh, I quite agree: if Congress had known in 2002 that Iraq was only twenty minutes to midnight, instead of two minutes to midnight, it would have punted on the invasion. Congress would instead have settled upon a really, really, really strong letter to Saddam, asking him to be nicer.

But that's not the definition of a mistake, Jonah Goldberg notwithstanding. After all, had Congress known just how bad the Civil War would get, with 600,000 dead Americans and a nation ravaged by all four horsemen of the Apocalypse, it's very likely they never would have voted to go to war; they would have accepted the secession of the Confederate States of America instead.

I do not believe it was a mistake for the Union to fight the Civil War. So thank God they didn't know what was going to happen.

Suppose we'd had perfect knowledge of what would transpire in Iraq, and therefore, as we all (Jonah, Patterico, and I) conclude, we did not invade Iraq. What would have happened then? This is the question that neither Goldberg nor Patterico essay to answer... but I will.

  1. The Iraq sanctions regime would have collapsed.

This was already well on its way, as the sanctions were routinely circumvented and outright violated by European powers, even while the U.N.-mandated regime was still in place. Doesn't anybody remember that this was exactly what the Oil for Food scandal was all about?

European nations were already applying heavy pressure on the U.N. to drop the sanctions, which were "killing millions of Iraqi children" (remember? doesn't anybody remember?) Even Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group agrees that the sanctions were likely going away very quickly, certainly de facto and likely de jure as well:

Saddam was surprised by the swiftness of Iraq’s defeat. The quick end to Saddam’s Regime brought a similarly rapid end to its pursuit of sanctions relief, a goal it had been palpably close to achieving.

With increasingly shrill and bizarre claims of the death and destruction caused by sanctions, and the hundreds of oil deals Saddam cut with various countries that would only be implemented once sanctions were lifted, pressure to do so would have been irresistable.

And even if we used our veto power to keep them on the books, that is the only place they would exist: in the real world, sanctions only work when other countries cooperate. Europe had long ceased cooperating.

  1. When sanctions did collapse -- even if simply de facto, by rampant cheating and by European "inspectors" turning a blind eye -- Saddam was set to resume WMD development, using the knowledge, personnel, and WMD programs he had carefully retained from 1991 to 2003.

The ISG says this, too:

The Regime made a token effort to comply with the disarmament process, but the Iraqis never intended to meet the spirit of the UNSC’s resolutions. Outward acts of compliance belied a covert desire to resume WMD activities. Several senior officials also either inferred or heard Saddam say that he reserved the right to resume WMD research after sanctions.

I think, after the revelations of Oil for Fraud, few reading this post think it at all farfetched that sanctions were already on life support and would have died entirely... probably in months, not years; and that when they did, Saddam Hussein had no intention of turning over a new leaf and becoming a peaceful member of the community of nations.

  1. Having once lifted sanctions, it would be politically impossible to reinstate them -- as France and Russia both have veto power as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council;

Does the picture become clear? It's true that we almost certainly would not have invaded Iraq had we "known then what we know now" about the cost in blood and treasure... and that failure would have been a dreadful mistake of historic proportions -- far worse, in retrospect, than the decision not to oust Hussein in 1991, following the Gulf War.

  1. There is very strong evidence of an increasing tempo of cooperation between Hussein and al-Qaeda, as well as cooperation with more traditional terrorist groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Evidence even from the 9/11 Commission (which admitted a few connections), but much more elsewhere, including here, for example.

  1. Saddam Hussein would have recreated his chemical and biological weapons, but this time attaching them to longer-range missiles that could strike any country in the Middle East.
  2. He probably would not have been able to develop working nukes on his own; but he could eventually have bought them from North Korea or perhaps Pakistan;
  3. He would have become the dominant player in the the region, and would very likely have funneled WMD to terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, with the international reach to strike in the United States.
  4. We would have had an American intifada -- and our response to further WMD attacks within our own country would have been a draconian clampdown on civil liberties here that would truly undercut the Constitution... unlike the minor and trivial "infringements" of the USA Patriot Act.

It amazes me that neither Goldberg nor Patterico even considers the question of what would have happened had we not invaded Iraq in March of 2003. Both buy into the idea that, if we would have made a different decision then, knowing how hard it would be, that the other decision would necessarily be better than the one we made.

We stumbled into the Iraq War by our own ignorance: but this was another one of those astonishingly fortuitous accidents that lead people like Michael Medved to believe that God directly intervenes in human affairs. While I wouldn't go that far, I will say this, echoing what I said above about the Civil War:

Thank God we didn't know in 2002 what we know now about the Iraq War! The "rational" response to that knowledge would have been a catastrophe for American security... and indeed for the entire war against jihad.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 19, 2006, at the time of 5:18 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

October 18, 2006

Bush Is Right: Iraq Is Like Vietnam

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

...But not quite the way George Snuffleupagus meant it, and likely not the way other Democrats mean when they hurl the charge.

What am I talking about? (Do I know?) Oh, yes, it's this interview by Snuffleupagus of the president, which includes this exchange of which ABC makes much:

President Bush said in a one-on-one interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that a newspaper column comparing the current fighting in Iraq to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which was widely seen as the turning point in that war, might be accurate.

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.

"He could be right," the president said, before adding, "There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."

Oh no! Bush is comparing Iraq to Vietnam! That means even he thinks we're doomed, right? What else could it possibly mean?

Well, it might mean that George W. Bush knows considerably more about the history of the Vietnam War than do George Snuffleupagus, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Harry "Invasion of the Landsnatchers" Reid, or any of a number of lefty bloggers.

Let's start with the basics. We all agree that, in the end, taking everything (including the politics) into account, we lost the Vietnam War. But that's about as much agreement as we're likely to get.

It is an article of deeply held faith among Democrats that the obscenely powerful North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their allies in the South, the invincible People's Liberation Armed Forces (Vietcong, or VC), crushed and annihilated the American forces, sending us reeling back like the Nazis (that would be us) from the gates of Leningrad and Stalingrad, torn to pieces by the Mighty Red Army -- that would be the NVA and the VC.

That is, Democrats believe (the way Christians believe in the resurrection of Jesus) that we Fascist, American, running-dog imperialists were militarily beaten by the people's revolution, and that was why we lost Vietnam.

The vision Democrats have of Vietnam is of mobs of hundreds of thousands of cowardly American troops fleeing in panic, deserting by the tens of thousands, being gunned down from behind by the victorious NVA. I'm not exaggerating; talk to any Democrat about the Vietnam War, and you will quickly realize that is exactly the picture that is seared, seared in his imagination.

The "proof" they offer for this bizarre fantasy is the Tet Offensive, a desperate attack by the NVA and the VC, which Wikipedia describes thus:

The Tết Offensive (January 30, 1968 - June 8, 1969) was a series of operational offensives during the Vietnam War, coordinated between battalion strength elements of the National Liberation Front's People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF or Viet Cong) and divisional strength elements of the North Vietnam's People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), against South Vietnam's Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and United States military and other ARVN-allied forces.... The offensive began spectacularly during celebrations of the Lunar New Year, and sporadic operations associated with the offensive continued into 1969.

So divisions of the NVA poured across the border, while simultaneously, battalions of VC launched vicious attacks on virtually every major city in Vietnam. The idea was that, since (the Communists believed) the Americans and the government of South Vietnam were so unpopular, such an attack would trigger a nation-wide uprising, a revolution that would sweep the hated Capitalist pigs into the sea.

When Democrats say "Iraq is this generation's Vietnam," that is the context they mean: that Iraq is "unwinnable," as they claim Vietnam was; and that the Iraqi freedom-fighters have won battle after battle against the Fascist American imperialists. Soon, the Democrats fervently hope, America will be beaten and humbled (like on September 11th), and their own guilt at not being born poor, or at least black, will be mildly assuaged.

Well, the Tet Offensive didn't quite work out the way that the Commies planned -- or that the Democrats believe:

The Tết Offensive can be considered a crushing military defeat for the Communist forces, as neither the Viet Cong nor the North Vietnamese army achieved any of their tactical goals. Furthermore, the operational cost of the offensive was dangerously high, with the Viet Cong essentially crippled by the huge losses inflicted by South Vietnamese and other Allied forces.

Ah, but there is one other major pro-Communist force in 1968 that we haven't reckoned with yet: the American elite media, which desperately hoped for a catastrophic defeat of the American forces by North Vietnam and the National Front. Led by "Uncle" Walter Cronkite, the news media brazenly lied about the hammerblows that disintegrated the revolutionary forces; they reported instead that the attack was a historic victory for the Communists:

Many people, both at the time and in retrospect, have criticized the U.S. media for the negative light in which it portrayed both the war in general and the Tết Offensive in particular. Earle Wheeler, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained of "all the doom and gloom we see in the U.S. press" after Tết.

The most famous example of an anti-war attitude on the part of an influential press figure was Walter Cronkite's special report on the war of February 27, 1968. After touring the ruined streets and battlefields of the Tết Offensive and interviewing discouraged soldiers and officers in the field, he directly criticized the military leadership and the Johnson administration: "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest cloud." He concluded by saying that the U.S. was "mired in a stalemate" and called for a negotiated end [that is, for an American surrender] to the conflict.

While the Tet Offensive was a military defeat of colossal proportions for the Communists, our own media turned it into a equally huge Communist victory via their relentless propaganda:

Nevertheless, the Offensive is widely considered a turning point of the war in Vietnam, with the NLF and PAVN winning an enormous psychological and propaganda victory.... The Tết Offensive is frequently seen as an example of the value of propaganda, media influence and popular opinion in the pursuit of military objectives.

It is clear from the context of the interview, even in the snippets that ABC chose to highlight in their online story, that President Bush is well aware of the real meaning of Tet; he makes it quite plain in the next thing he says after the bit quoted at the top of this post:

"George, my gut tells me that they have all along been trying to inflict enough damage that we'd leave," Bush said. "And the leaders of al Qaeda have made that very clear. Look, here's how I view it. First of all, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. They are dangerous. They are lethal. They are trying to not only kill American troops, but they're trying to foment sectarian violence. They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause [the] government to withdraw."

In other words, the president correctly understands that the only sense in which the enemy in Iraq is "winning" is in the propaganda that they inspire and provoke among the persistently anti-American news media... as represented in this case by one George Robert Snuffleupagus, late communications director for President Bill Clinton -- now the victorious strongman of what used to be This Week With David Brinkley.

And its only victory would be if the antique media terrified enough people that they forced us into premature withdrawal of our troops, before they finished the job.

The Democrats want to negotiate a treaty with the terrorists determining how fast we hand Iraq over to al-Qaeda; this puts the Dems in the position of defeatists who declared in 1943 that we could never win the Pacific or European wars -- and who demanded that we negotiate a "settlement" with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan over how quickly they would be handed the entire eastern hemisphere.

And President Bush is absolutely correct: in the sense of political theater masquerading as warfare, Iraq indeed is very like unto Vietnam.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 18, 2006, at the time of 11:25 PM | Comments (22) | TrackBack

October 5, 2006

Sadr and Masri: the Final Embrace

Good News! , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

Excuse me, does anybody remember that there's a war on?

There is a lot to talk about in Iraq. So let's not lose focus; there is a lot more serious stuff going on than some stupid Republican creep and a bunch of Democratic political creeps.

It may be noble for us to keep our moral standard high (to the point of absurdity). But the bottom line is, if we lose this election, we will lose the war. It is just that simple; the Democrats have promised us a shameful defeat if they're elected, and this is one Democratic promise I believe!

Now, the important news. As Dafydd pointed out yesterday on Iraqi Police Bust Iraqi Police Brigade , there are several operations going on to clean out the militias. Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail reports that Coalition forces -- "CF" -- are finally cracking down on Moqtada Sadr's Mahdi "army" in the city of Diwaniyah, outside of Baghdad.

While much of the public's perceptions of the efforts against Sadr are shaped by operations in Sadr City in Baghdad, the Coalition and Iraqi government are chipping away at his power base outside of Baghdad. The series of raids and clashes, often masked as efforts against “criminals,” “thugs,” “death squads,” and “kidnappers,” are being conducted against the extreme elements of Sadr and his Mahdi Army. The goal is to remove Sadr from a position of influence, either by force or his surrender, and split his power base. Sadr's lieutenants are being systematically targeted, which will drive him to either fight or withdraw.

A window into these operations is available in the city of Diwaniyah. A joint U.S. and Iraqi operation, dubbed Constant Solidarity has been announced at the end of September. The operation is made up of elements of the 8th Iraqi Army Division, supported the soldiers of the Fires Brigade (artillery), 4th Infantry Division. The purpose is to “weed out more than 2,000 terrorists in and around the city of Diwaniyah.” Diwaniyah is a Sadr stronghold, the “terrorists” being referred to here are the Madhi Army. To demonstrate the seriousness of the operation, the U.S. has deployed MLRS launchers (Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System) in the region to hit back at the Madhi Army.

The operation, Constant Solidarity, has been going on since the beginning of September. But the first battle with the Mahdi army occurred on August 27th and 28th, when Iraqi Army forces killed 50 Sadrites, with a loss of only 20 of their own soldiers. Since then, CF has conducted various raids, including raiding the office of one of Sadr's top clerics.

In another action, according to Roggio, Operation Wilderness captured 32 of Sadr's death-squad terrorists. "On the 21st, another raid netted 'Salah al-Obeidi, a close colleague of firebrand Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, [who] was picked up from his home in Najaf along with cleric Bassim al-Ghuraifi,' according to Sadr's own office."

All this is designed to paint Sadr into a hole (as Dafydd says), and it is working: Sadr and his close allies are now calling for a "peaceful fight." Obivously, Sadr wants to survive politically; but I'm not so sure his militia members agree. They didn't join up for peace and reconciliation; they just want to kill Sunnis on behalf of Iran.

I have heard that Muqtada Sadr is losing control of his Mahdi milita. Without Sadr's Iranian connection, the rest of the militia won't have access to all the logistic help they need (intelligence) to conduct death-squad operations. That is a good thing -- for the good guys; but the Mahdi killers, none of whom have much chance of ending up in the government themselves, are seeing their happy, little excuse for serial torture and murder floundering... and they're not obeying Sadr's orders to quit fighting and start supporting his political ambitions instead.

Meanwhile, back at the al-Qaeda chicken ranch, CENTCOM's press release announced that "Coalition forces detained a former driver and personal assistant of Abu Ayyub al-Masri [the current leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq] along with 31 others during a series of 11 raids targeting al-Qaida in Iraq activities in the Baghdad area Sept. 28":

This is the second close associate of Abu Ayyub al-Masri captured in September, also believed to have been one of his personal drivers. Intelligence indicates his participation in the 2005 bombings of the Sheraton and the Al Hamra hotels in Baghdad that killed a total of 16 people and injured 65 others.

Three days after this operation, the Iraqi government released a video of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the al-Qaida in Iraq leader, instructing terrorists on how to build vehicle borne improvised explosive devices from the inside of a tanker truck. Intelligence indicates the suspected terrorist captured was working directly for Abu Ayyub al-Masri when the video was created.

Now, the game is afoot in the hunt for al-Masri himself. There was an earlier unconfirmed report on al-Arabiya TV, which the U.S. never bought, that al-Masri was killed during a raid; but subsequent DNA testing showed it was not he. However, just as with Musab Zarqawi -- who was finally killed after a series of his subordinates were captured and turned into singing canaries -- Masri's days on Earth can be measured in very small numbers.

So, folks, let's keep at it. Things are looking up. But we still have a lot to do in Iraq; this is no time to get distracted by the Foley Bergere.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 5, 2006, at the time of 5:19 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 4, 2006

Iraqi Police Bust Iraqi Police Brigade

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Stealing a march on my colleague in crime here, I'm going to scoop Sachi on a piece of good news:

Iraqi authorities have taken a brigade of up to 700 policemen out of service and put members under investigation for "possible complicity" with death squads following a mass kidnapping earlier this week, the U.S. military said Wednesday....

The Iraqi police officers were decommissioned following a kidnapping Sunday when gunmen stormed a frozen food plant in the Amil district, abducted 24 workers and shot two others. The bodies of seven of the workers were found hours later but the fate of the others remains unknown.

The action appeared aimed at signaling a new seriousness in tackling police collusion with militias at a time when the government is under increased pressure to put an end to the Shiite-Sunni violence that has killed thousands this year and threatened to tear Iraq apart.

That last paragraph is no hyperbole. Everyone has known for some time that the Shia-dominated Iraqi National Police was at least turning a blind eye to Shiite militias massacring Sunnis (and rival Shia) in their relentless, sub-rosa campaign of murder and revenge; at worst, many assume that police units were actually engaged in such mass murder themselves. But the general feeling among nearly all Sunnis and even a great many Shia who actually care about their country was that the Shia-controlled government would never crack down on their "allies" in the police.

But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has finally realized that the survival of his government, indeed, the survival of Iraq as a nation, depends upon stopping the tit-for-tat butchery from breaking out into a full-scale civil war. He offered a new "security plan" a few days ago that was praised and widely accepted by all parties... and this is the first bit of "earnest money" in that plan:

The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said the Iraqi police brigade in the area had been ordered to stand down and was being retrained.

"There was some possible complicity in allowing death squad elements to move freely when they should have been impeding them," he told a Baghdad news conference. "The forces in the unit have not put their full allegiance to the government of Iraq and gave their allegiance to others," he said....

The Iraqi Interior Ministry said Tuesday that the commander of the unit, a lieutenant colonel, had been detained for investigation and the major general who commands the battalion that includes the brigade had been suspended temporarily and ordered transferred.

Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the chief ministry spokesman, said a random selection of troops in the suspended unit were being investigated for ties to militias.

This is major-league serious stuff. The investigated soldiers who turn out to have such militia ties will be prosecuted; if found guilty of killings, they may be executed under Iraqi law (which has the death penalty available). I don't know if this is likely, but it's certainly my preferred punishment.

And the commander of the brigade himself, if found to be complicit, should -- in my opinion -- also be executed. Hanged, in a proper legal way. In fact, even if there is no evidence that he knew about any militia ties, he should still be convicted in a court-martial of criminal malfeasance for failing to stop his own troops from participating in or enabling death-squads. At the very least, he should spend at least 5-7 years in a military penitentiary... Abu Ghraib, newly restored to Iraqi control, springs to mind.

That new security plan I mentioned sounds very promising, too. It includes several new ideas, of which one of the most intriguing is the creation of joint Sunni-Shiite "neighborhood watch" style committees to track violence. I firmly believe most Sunni and Shia just want the killings to stop; they're not interested in "defeating" the other -- they just want to live in peace.

While this is characterized as "vague" by the New York Times, it's actually perfectly clear. They even explain it themselves... once you get past all the defeatism, death-triumphalism (more dead Iraqis, more dead Americans, hoo-hah!), and attempts to drive away readers before reaching the good stuff. The negative occupies about two-thirds of the entire piece; once you get back to the actual story promised by the headline, see if this makes sense:

In an effort to make some strides against militias, Mr. Maliki’s security plan would create local committees of political leaders, tribal sheiks, clerics and members of the security forces that would monitor security in every Baghdad neighborhood....

The committees would have no control over the security forces and would instead function as arbitrators of local sectarian disputes, intelligence gatherers for security forces, and as a bridge between civilians and the police and army, according to lawmakers involved in drafting the plan.

“These commissions will never have any authority to lead or command security forces,” said Jalaladin al-Sagheir, a Shiite member of Parliament. “It will just let the people know that they are a part of their district’s protection.”

The local committees will report to a “central commission for peace and security,” which will work with Iraqi armed forces. There will also be a new commission for monitoring the news media, but no other details were available. The plan will be reviewed by lawmakers every month.

(That last point is probably to ensure that a supposed "news" organization isn't simply a communications relay from terrorist leaders to their troops in the field. Hm, tempting...)

This pretty specific plan actually addresses the "root cause" of much of the violence: I believe both the insecurity that makes people join or support militias and the license they think they enjoy to do anything they want (which also contributes to recruitment) stem from a single catastrophic problem: alienation. When people feel alienated from their own government -- not a part of society, disconnected from those who live around them -- they become afraid of those others, and they simultaneously see them as less than human, easily killed without a pang of conscience.

That sort of alienation from society is the major factor behind crime in the United States -- the criminal's idea that he's not really part of society, a predator on the outside looking in.

Thus, the best solution to terrorism, mass killings (whether "sectarian" or part of a power-struggle), and yes, even ordinary crime is to include as many people as possible into the arc of society. When people feel they truly belong to the society, and that the government is as much a part of society as they, they are enormously less likely to take up arms to kill their fellow countrymen.

Thus, to the extent that neighborhood-watch style committees comprising both Sunni and Shiite representatives can bridge that yawning chasm between the average Iraqi and his government, they will significantly diminish the number of borderline cases who ultimately decide to join death squads. Changing the center typically changes the margin; and if you retract the extremity of the margin, eventually you reach a tipping point where being in a death squad makes a person feel more alienated, not less.

At that point, roving death squads become unsustainable... as in the United States and other civilized countries.

(Note that in France, the riots were driven by the sense of alienation from French society by the rampaging youths of Algerian descent; this analysis is pretty universal. And no, I didn't invent it... I'm not that smart!)

Thus, I see great cause for optimism. I think that al-Maliki, whether by design or fortuitous accident, has hit upon a strategy that has a very good chance of success. Couple it with Operation Together Forward, where the U.S. concentrates more and more of its resources to Baghdad to reclaim it from the hard-core terrorists and militiamen and our systematic campaign against Muqtada Sadr outside of Baghdad (to disrupt his power base), and the basic plan emerges:

  1. Kill the current "irredeemables;"
  2. Cut power to the main militia leader, Muqtada Sadr;
  3. Undermine the sense of alienation that drive ordinary Iraqis to support death squads.

There's the plan; looks like a winner from here.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 4, 2006, at the time of 3:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 1, 2006

Ribbons and Strings and Lots of Nice Things

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

I was looking for more good news from Iraq; believe me, there's plenty for this post.

First from Bill Roggio, al-Qaeda's "Emir of Anbar" was killed by Task Force 145:

Task Force 145, the global hunter-killers of high value al-Qeda targets, is conducting a full court press in Iraq. The Kuwaiti News Agency reports al-Qaeda's Emir in Anbar province, Khalid Mahal, and Nasif Al-Mawla, his aide, were killed during an operation in the Thar Thar region. An American intelligence source will not comment on Mahal's death but did state “operations are ongoing."

Bill Crawford has a must-read recap of recent good news from Iraq at National Review Online. Here are some headlines:

  • 1,500 people attended the Iraq national reconciliation meeting;
  • Iraqi Kurds paid for a series of television ads thanking America for removing Saddam Hussein;
  • Iraqi security forces now number more than 300,000; nearly 70 percent of Iraqi battalions have the lead for security in their area of operations;
  • Tourism is returning to Dhi Qar province, which has many archeological sites; under Saddam, the area was closed to tourists and scientists;
  • Marines (with local assistance) captured a high-value insurgent leader during a raid in Saqlawiyah. Residents in the area cheer the Marines;
  • A top al Qaeda terrorist was arrested in Mosul; two others blew themselves up after being surrounded;
  • Thanks to modern insecticides, Iraqi farmers in Diyala had their best date harvest in years;

And congratulations to 1st Lt. Neil Prakash, who received the Silver Star for his part in the battle of Fallujah.

There is plenty more. But I want to talk about this ribbon cutting event:

Soldiers from Company B, 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, took part in a ribbon cutting ceremony Sept. 15 celebrating the re-opening of the Al Bawasil School in Muelha, a town in the northern Babil province, south of Baghdad.

Why is this important? A commenter on my last post said that good news -- such as opening a school -- is simply not "hot news." That may be... but when you look beyond the headlines, each case is unique in how our soldiers overcame the daily obstacles and bridged the divide between two cultures.

Al-Bawasil has many problems; for example, it needed a new middle school, since the closest was 10 miles away. In addition, the unemployment rate was very high in this area: people were eager to work, but there were no jobs.

Under ordinary circumstances, the solution would be obvious: hire all these out of work people to build a new school. But the local area insurgents wouldn't stop the violence against Coalition forces (CF) long enough to let them even start. Roadside bombs and terrorist attacks prevented the CF from getting involved at all in the civil affairs of al-Bawasil.

So what to do? Instead of just walking away in disgust (as most of us would have), the CF called upon the town council and negotiated a deal:

During a meeting with the town council in the spring, CF civil affairs officers brought up the school problems to the council and asked for a stop to the violence in exchange for refurbishment of the school.

“When the people in the area noticed we made the school a priority, the violence stopped,” said [Capt. Aaron] Scheinberg, (civil affairs officer, 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment.) “People in the town are excited and surrounding regions are envious of the improvements made in Muelha.”

Rather than the CF dictating to the council what would happen, they bargained with them, making it appear as if the school were a payoff for stopping the violence. Then they hired the locals to do the actual work, of course, giving them jobs. The council members saved their faces and could even brag to the locals what a hard bargain they drove, forcing the Americans to build a school and give work to the local lads.

“Everything we used for the school is made in Iraq and is of the highest quality available in the country,” said Abdul Raza, Iraqi project contractor. “We took our time with this project and I ensured it received the best materials because the project is for the kids and the kids will be the future of Iraq someday.”

Coalition Forces (CF) prefer to hire local contractors and workers from the area because it is in their best interest to do a good job because they live there, said Capt. Aaron Scheinberg....

“It was easy for me to find workers because most of the people here do not have steady jobs,” said Abdul. “The people actually thanked me for giving them a job. A lot of times we had to split the work between two different groups because there were so many people willing to work to make some money.”

In Iraq, community involvement has its own unique dynamic: Americans supply the money, the Iraqis do the actual work, and the city elders get all the credit!

It's frustrating to me that the people in Al Bawasil have to be told that it's beneficial for them to stop shooting and bombing us while we're trying to help them; it seems so obvious. We can help Iraqis, and we do -- when they let us. One region at a time, we must convince them to help themselves.

After so many decades of brutal infantilization, it's not easy to suddenly grow up in a couple of years.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 1, 2006, at the time of 9:09 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 28, 2006

The New Tora Bora Bazora

History , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

I'm listening to Hugh Hewitt, who (after a completely inaudible "interview" with Mark Steyn via bad cellphone) is now broadcasting the Senate blathering of Sen. Patrick "Leaky" Leahy (D-VT, 100%) about the military tribunals bill. And this is what Leahy just said, word for word, near as I can recollect (and it is seared, seared in my memory):

Even though they [the Bush administration] had him [Osama bin Laden] cornered at Tora Bora, they yanked the special forces out of there to send them into Iraq.

Is it just me?

I was evidently misinformed that the Battle of Tora Bora took place sometime in December of 2001. There was not even a resolution on the table to invade Iraq at that time... the resolution was not even introduced into the Senate until October 2nd, 2002; it passed the Senate without amendment on October 11th, and was signed by the president on the 16th. And we did not send troops there until March of 2003.

So in the consensus reality -- rather than in Leahy's own private version of history -- more than two solid years elapsed between the battle of Tora Bora and the call-up of troops for an invasion of Iraq. Whatever caused us not to kill or capture bin Laden in 2001, it certainly had nothing to do with the not-yet-extant invasion of Iraq.

Has this been the Democrats' plan all along, why they took over the government schools: to so damage Americans' knowledge of history that demented demagogues like Pat Leahy can make risible claims like this on the Senate floor and not be laughed out of Congress?

I eagerly await the transcription in the Congressional Record, to see whether he decides to "revise and extend his remarks."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 28, 2006, at the time of 3:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 27, 2006

Weak Leak Soup, Ctd: Evolution of a Punk Job

Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

I was going to put a post up here noting that the president saw fit Tuesday to declassify the "key judgments" of the National Intelligence Estimate from April (the one we discussed here too early Tuesday morn, before the announcement). If you'll recall, on Saturday, the New York Times published a story that claimed -- falsely, we now discover -- that the NIE concluded that the Iraq War had "worsened" the threat from terrorism:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

But when the document itself was released Tuesday, it turns out the key findings were far more mixed and balanced; and nowhere did the NIE say that the Iraq War had made terrorism worse: to use the phrase Hugh Hewitt used all afternoon, the Times got punked. Its sources sold it a bill of goods; and like the Sy Hersh travesty on Abu Ghraib, its reputation (heh) lies in tatters. Tatters.

So the MSM came out swinging, here, here, and here: with grim determination, as soon as the document was made available by the NID, they slapped up their stories saying: it confirms eveything we said before! Don't look! Just take our word for it! We wouldn't lie to you 365 days in a single year, would we? (They're nothing if not persistent!)

So I was going to write a post quoting from AP, Reuters, and the New York Tombs, then quoting from the NIE itself, to make them all look like the farkakte macacas they are. Alas, I spent too long on my hobby of painting extra zeros on all my $10 bills... and you-know-who slithered in ahead of me, posting exactly the article that I was going to post (except mine would have been better; no, really). If only I posted it. Or wrote it. Or came out of my digestive torpor soon enough.

So I'm just posting to let you know I won't be posting on this topic. I think, where one's friends are concerned, it's only polite to keep them apprised of one's good intentions, for future reference.

Well... maybe just a little. This is a brief sketch of what I might have said, if I'd said anything (which I didn't, and I'm not).

Prior to the release, the elite media tried to play the Sy Hersh game of creatively (and tendentiously) misinterpreting classified intelligence someone leaked to them, confident that the "secretive" Bush administration would never dare declassify and release it... thus proving them liars. When Bush double-crossed them, they found themselves like a Wile E. Coyote, when he runs off a cliff but doesn't fall... until he looks down.

For God's sake, don't look down! The MSM's instinctive reaction was to double-down and pretend that the law of gravity had indeed been repealed. Here is how AP began their first story after the publication of the NIE showed the entire world that they had relied upon sources who lied to them (the first link in the "so the MSM came out swinging" paragraph above); this was from late Tuesday morning, shortly after the release:

The war in Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that probably will get worse before it gets better, federal intelligence analysts conclude in a report at odds with President Bush's portrayal of a world growing safer.

In the bleak report, declassified and released Tuesday on Bush's orders, the nation's most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al-Qaida, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach.

Bush and his top advisers have said the formerly classified assessment of global terrorism supported their arguments that the world is safer because of the war. But more than three pages of stark judgments warning about the spread of terrorism contrasted with the administration's glass-half-full declarations.

Note the specific word "bleak," which they used in their story before the release. In fact, this by and large is the same story they ran before the release; all they did was pop the hood and install an aftermarket clause noting that the report had been "declassified and released."

Don't look down!

By early Wednesday, the AP had added a bit more to their article, softening the hard line that the full document completely vindicated their clumsy hit job:

White House release of a previously secret intelligence assessment depicting a growing terrorist threat gives both political parties new ammunition in the election-season fight over the Iraq war.

For Republicans, the excerpts of the document - declassified under orders from President Bush on Tuesday - are more evidence that Iraq is central to the war on terrorism and can't be abandoned without giving jihadists a crucial victory.

For Democrats, the report furthers their argument that the 2003 Iraq invasion has inflamed anti-U.S. sentiments in the Muslim world and left the U.S. less safe.

In a bleak National Intelligence Estimate, the government's top analysts concluded Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists, who are growing in number and geographic reach. If the trend continues, the analysts found, the risks to the U.S. interests at home and abroad will grow.

For the first time, AP recognized that there were points on the side of those supporting the Iraq War; but they refused to get all radical on us and actually quote any of those findings. That would have been asking too much.

And note that the NIE is still characterized as "bleak," which is interesting; throughout these permutations, they cling to that word as a liferaft... despite the fact that it never appears in the NIE key conclusions themselves, and the fact -- easily ascertainable by reading them -- that they present a picture that is neither bleak nor rosey but simply a list of challenges and assessments.

Later on Wednesday afternoon, AP put up this story -- still written by the same reporter, Katherine Shrader. It begins thus:

The White House refused Wednesday to release the rest of a secret intelligence assessment that depicts a growing terrorist threat, as the Bush administration tried to quell election-season criticism that its anti-terror policies are seriously off track.

Note the counterattack; AP begins to lay the groundwork here for an infamous argument made popular in the days of bulletin-board systems: the lurkers support me in e-mail. (I think it even became a "filk song" -- not a typo.) That is, the Bush administration is suppressing secret evidence that would actually prove we were right all along. Over the next few days (or weeks), this argument will take shape within other branches of the Democratic Party besides the antique media:

Oh, sure, the portion that Bush chose to release doesn't explicitly say that the Iraq War was a fiasco that made the world more dangerous for America... that part is in the sections he deliberately chose to leave classified! We demand he release every section, every paragraph, every line -- including the names of all the sources, all the top-secret intel we got from foreign spy agencies, and the names of every intelligence analyst who worked on this report... and if Bush refuses, then you know he's got something he's still hiding!

After a few paragraphs wasted arguing with Tony Snow over the release of the really heavily classified portions of the report, AP continues:

In the bleak National Intelligence Estimate, the government's top analysts concluded Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists, who are growing in number and geographic reach. If the trend continues, the analysts found, the risks to the U.S. interests at home and abroad will grow.

Peppered with questions Wednesday about the report, he [Snow, we presume] said the NIE report was "not designed to draw judgments about success or failure, it's an intelligence document, it's a snapshot."

Snow said the report confirms the importance of the war in Iraq as a bulwark against terrorists. "Iraq has become, for them, the battleground," he said. "If they lose, they lose their bragging rights. They lose their ability to recruit."

He said that a bleak intelligence assessment depicting a growing terrorist threat was only a "snapshot" - not a conclusion

The last line I quote above is especially illuminating; no, I didn't accidentally cut off the period; it's missing in the original. It's clearly an editing mistake; she rewrote the line and separated "bleak" and "snapshot" onto two different lines, then forgot to go back and erase the original (so much for the vaunted "multiple layers of editing!") But note how important it was for Shrader, hence AP, to keep that word "bleak" prominently in the story. She was only dithering whether to place it lower or higher -- and she chose the latter.

AP picks up the Tony Snow argument again:

"The American people deserve the full story, not those parts of it that the Bush administration selects," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned, however, that releasing more of the intelligence assessment could aid terrorists. "We are very cautious and very restrained about the kind of information we want to give al-Qaida," Hoekstra said....

A separate high-level assessment focused solely on Iraq may be coming soon. At least two House Democrats - Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Rep. Jane Harman of California - have questioned whether that report has been stamped "draft" and shelved until after the Nov. 7 elections.

An intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the process, said National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told lawmakers in writing only one month ago that he ordered a new Iraq estimate to be assembled. The estimate on terrorism released Tuesday took about a year to produce.

AP rejects that obviously concocted explanation that an intelligence assessment might take longer than a month to prepare; it's patently obvious to Ms. Shrader that this is just a dodge to avoid releasing a report that would completely vindicate her -- oops, I mean vindicate the Associated Press -- along with the happy side-effect of bringing about the downfall, ah, defeat of the Republicans in the 2006 election. (Secret evidence that would support me...)

It ends with a couple of rollicking quotes from Joe Biden (D-DE, 100%) and John D. Rockefeller (D-WV, 100%), savaging the president and the war without allowing supporters to confuse matters by participating in the discussion. And once again, AP does not quote those paragraphs that actually make Bush's case about the war -- the complete quotation from which the snippet "cause celebre" was cherry-picked:

We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

  • The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

By contrast, here is how the Iraq War's effect was described in the original New York Times story about it that was published when the elite media still thought the NIE would remain forever classified and uncheckable:

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

Clearly, the Times' source is describing an earlier section before the "key judgments" that come later; but equally clearly, that earlier section cannot have concluded that "the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," as the anonymous source smirked; because if it had, then the corresponding key judgment would not have been so supportive of continued fighting in Iraq.

At worst, the early sections might have quoted one official saying such a thing (possibly Jay "100%" Rockefeller). But that is why we don't release the entire NIE: it's like a packet of court filings that contain arguments from both the plaintiff's attorney and the defendant's attorney... you can't just grab a claim from one and act as if it's been proven in court.

If there were such an assessment by one specific person -- and we don't even know that much -- clearly it was not accepted in the final analysis, not even for a candid document that none of the principals thought would ever be released.

So far, most of the mainstream news stories about the released NIE have shied away from quoting this paragraph in full... likely because it so clearly argues the case for the Bush policy: if, at the end of the day, the jihadis are seen to be winner in Iraq, they will be emboldened and their recuitment will soar; contrariwise, if they are seen as failures -- if Iraq remains as a democratic state in control of its own destiny, rather than a Somalia-like failed state full of terrorist training camps -- then the jihadis will suffer a terrible blow, and their recruitment will drop off.

So the real conclusion of the NIE anent Iraq is that we must win at any cost; cutting and running is not a viable option, no matter what Joe Biden and Jay Rockefeller -- or Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francsico, 95%) and John Murtha (D-PA, 75%) -- say.

Eventually, the media will be forced to admit this; it's been widely quoted in blogs and on the radio, and even in a few television programs. It's possible they've already snuck it into a few stories, buried deep.

But it won't help: they've been exposed, as Hersh was, not only as rampant partisans... but as DNC house organs so partisan they're willing, even eager, to lie, or at least pass along lies in reckless disregard for the truth, to further the political ambitions of their Democratic friends in Congress.

In Othello, the Moor of Venice, Shakespeare wrote:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

How much poorer then is a person, an entire organization, that throws its own century-old reputation into the sewer, merely to help elect its favored party into power?

I actually feel sorry for them. What must it be like to live behind those eyes?

Anyway, that's more or less what I would have written. Except I'm not going to post on this topic.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 27, 2006, at the time of 3:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 26, 2006

The Gatekeeper Effect, or, If Iraq Is Getting Better, Why Does the News Keep Getting Worse?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

During the interview with in Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS, Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), said the situation in Iraq is getting better. But how can that be, when the news reports sectarian violence is getting worse everyday?

Just this morning, I heard on the radio that the last two months were "the worst for the Iraqis since the Iraq war started." This sentiment is reflected in the recent USA Today/Gallup poll, which showed that 72% of likely voters believe that "civil war" is occurring in Iraq right now (in the link, scroll down to Gallup).

If things are getting better, why do we hear so much about the violence? Gen. Abizaid explains.

Baghdad's really the key problem. As a matter of fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of the sectarian difficulties that take place in Iraq take place within a 30-mile radius of Baghdad.

In those areas that we've been operating with U.S. forces and Iraqi forces -- and we continue to operate -- there is a decrease. But we're not everywhere. We're moving step by step, section by section, and it will take some time. We will begin to really see whether or not we're being successful in a month or two....

And it certainly -- look, it's a program that involves not just putting military forces on the street, but it also requires that Iraqi and U.S. special forces go after the death squads. We have to target them. We have to do the intelligence work necessary to know where they are. Then we've got to go after them and take them out of action, whether it's by direct military action or some other form.

Guess where 80% to 90% of the reporters in Iraq happen to be? That's right: in Baghdad, right where 80% to 90% of the attacks occur. This is probably not a coincidence; the terrorists know where their natural allies work, and they know the old newspaper adage, "if it bleeds, it leads."

In other words, what we've been hearing about all this time is the violence occuring within the immediate environs of Baghdad, and almost nothing about the rest of Iraq -- which is getting much better almost day by day: Iraq takes charge of Dhi Qar province .

“Today’s transfer of security responsibility in Dhi Qar province from the Multi-National Force – Iraq to the Government of Iraq and civilian controlled Iraqi Security Forces is another sign of progress toward a stable and secure Iraq. Dhi Qar is the second of 18 Provinces to be transitioned. This is an important milestone along the successful path toward Iraq’s capability to govern and protect itself as a sovereign nation.

Another example:Iraq chiefs vow to fight al-Qaeda

Tribal leaders and clerics in Ramadi met last week to decide how to confront the daily bloodshed in their city.

"People are fed up with the acts of those criminals who take Islam as a cover for their crimes," Sheik Fassal al-Guood told the Associated Press news agency on Monday.

He said 15 of the 18 tribes in Ramadi "have sworn to fight those who are killing Sunnis and Shiites", and had put together "20,000 young men".

In fact throughout Jim Lehrer's interview with Gen. Abizaid (remember that? that's what we're talking about), Lehrer's questions reveal his (willful?) ignorance in this subject:

JIM LEHRER: I'm sure you're aware, General, that there's been a lot of commentary back here that the U.S. hasn't put enough effort into the training of Iraqi forces.

Lehrer should have been reading Big Lizards instead of listening to PBS news! We've followed this issue for more than a year:

A well-connected journalist such as Lehrer should know what the coalition forces have been doing and the success they've had; it's his business to know. But most journalists live their waking lives sealed into an elaborate cocoon of left-liberal, anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and anti-Iraq-War propaganda, until it seems as natural an environment as the air. Everyone they know believes the same as they; if they ever hear a discouraging word, it's only when they interview some "Repuglican" -- and you know what they're like.

So maybe Lehrer is simply puzzled: since everyone knows that the Iraq War has been one colossal failure from beginning to end, why doesn't the president just "declare victory" and yank out the troops? All of Lehrer's friends say that's what Bush has to do, in order to avoid being impeached next year when the Democrats control supermajorities in the House and Senate.

His question to Gen. Abizaid has nothing to do with trying to find out what is really happening, and everything to do with making an impression on the audience's mind: the training of Iraqi troops has turned out to be a complete failure, gosh darn it! Why don't you just admit it, General?

Needless to say, Gen. Abizid -- who actually does know what is happening in Iraq -- completely rejects Lehrer's starting premise:

GEN. JOHN ABIZAID: Jim, I really disagree with that. We have put an enormous effort into training and equipping the Iraqi armed forces and security forces. But it's also an enormous effort. It is literally building an institution from the bottom up.

So who is right, Lehrer or Abizaid? Per Bill Roggio's Fourth Rail, the Iraqi Army just arrested a top leader of Ansar al-Sunnah Shura, an Iraqi terrorist group with strong ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq:

The Iraqi government has arrested Muntasir Hamoud Ileiwi al-Jubouri, who the Associated Press describes as a “leader of Ansar al-Sunnah.” But al-Jubouri is not just an average leader in Ansar al-Sunnah, he sits on the terrorist organization's military Shura (or council), the decision making body for military operational issues. Al-Jubouri was captured in Al-Taeyh along with two aides. There is no information at this time if documents or computer equipment was seized along with al-Jubouri. Regardless, his arrest can potentially be a treasure trove of information for Task Force 145 and Iraqi counterterrorism commandos. [Note: Ansar al-Sunnah denies al-Jubouri was captured.]

The Iraqi army also arrested the leader of an insurgent group called the 1920 Revolution Brigades:

Iraqi troops arrested a neighborhood leader of a nationalist insurgency group early on Sunday, a military spokesman said.

Brigadier Qasim al-Musawi would not reveal the suspect's name but said he was the leader for western Baghdad of the 1920 Revolution Brigades insurgent group, which has claimed responsibility for attacks on U.S.-led forces.

"We captured him at 5 a.m. (0100 GMT) this morning, along with seven of his aides, following accurate intelligence information in the Abu Ghraib district," he said. "It was an Iraqi army operation."

Although I don't like to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look as though Gen. John Abizaid, the Commander-in-Chief of CENTCOM, knows more about the Iraq Army than even noted PBS journalist and liberal activist Jim Lehrer.

Speaking of good intelligence, based on a tip, our good friends the Brits have killed an important al-Qaeda operative hiding in Basra, Iraq:

British forces have killed a senior al-Qaeda fugitive in a raid on a house in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, security sources say. Officials named the dead man as Omar al-Farouq, a top lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden in south-east Asia.

Farouq was captured in Indonesia in 2002 but escaped from a US military prison in Afghanistan last year.

British military spokesman Maj Charlie Burbridge said Farouq, whom he called a "very, very significant man" had been tracked across Iraq to Basra. He said about 200 troops surrounded the house, from where they came under fire. A gun battle erupted and Farouq was killed in the exchange.

So if Iraq is getting better, why do we keep hearing nothing but bad news? The problem is the gatekeeper effect: the gatekeeper controls what information is allowed through and what information is kept away from the eyes and ears of the American people. An honest gatekeeper allows information through based upon its reliability; but a partisan gatekeeper never thinks any news is "reliable" if it contradicts what we call The Story -- the predetermined story-line that animates nearly all newspaper and broadcast coverage.

The Story is that Iraq has been a complete pig's breakfast, just as the elite media all predicted it would be. Oh, maybe we didn't get bogged down in the "quagmire" during the initial assault, as they said; but look, now we're trapped in the quagmire of the Iraq Civil War!

The Story provides the framework, and every piece of information is evaluated by how well it fits into The Story. Every fact is compared to this framework; if it fits -- dead American soldiers, dead Iraqi civilians -- the gatekeeper allows it through.

But if it doesn't fit -- peaceful provinces being turned over to the Iraqis, terrorists being captured or killed -- the gatekeeper knows that it must be unreliable... so he spikes it. And the worst part is, he believes he is actually doing his proper job as a journalist; he doesn't think of himself as a partisan... he thinks of himself as one of the "reality-based party" which is interested only in the truth ("just gimmie some truth!")

Jim Lehrer, along with scores of other elite liberals, is not really a journalist: he is a liberal gatekeeper, on the same moral level as the security guard at the gates of a country club, whose job to make sure that only the right kind of people get inside.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 26, 2006, at the time of 5:31 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Weak Leak Soup

Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

In keeping with the madly egotistical Big Lizards motto -- Never first, always final -- I've been pondering Saturday's New York Times story about the impact of the Iraq War on the global war on terrorism (GWOT) ever since, er, Saturday. (Maybe Sunday; Saturday, I think I was pondering whether to raise the pot on the strength of a king and a trey with a queen-jack-eight on the flop.)

There is a powerful lot that the Times failed to tell us about that story; my idol, John Hinderaker at Power Line, has a great story up quoting several other passages from that same national intelligence estimate (NIE) (enough with the alphabet soup already!) that tend to undercut, to say the least, the spin put on the thing by the Times, as well as their sidekick and pale shadow, the Washington Post.

But craven that I am, I shrink from duking it out with Power Line, who has the actual factual response pretty well covered. Oh, I could think of better arguments to make against the bizarre claims in the media; but I'd just be making them up, so I'd better not.

Let's instead focus on the problems and deficiencies in the two main antique-media stories... by an amazing coincidence, the two I already linked above. Slither on, dude.

Journalistic clairvoyance

Let's start with a startling admission against interest on the part of the "elite" media:

  1. Neither the New York Times reporters nor the Washington Post reporters have actually seen the NIE. Or any portion of it; they rely entirely upon their various sources' characterization of the NIE.

In other words, they do not actually know if the report "has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks," as the Times puts it in a traditionally quaint run-on sentence; they have absolutely no idea. All they know is that one or more of their (anonymous and undescribable) sources claims that's what it says.

Von Unaussprechlichen Külten

Here's another good one:

  1. Neither the Times nor the Post deigns to name even a single source. Not one. O, for the good old days of Watergate, when Ben Bradlee demanded at least two sources for every claim -- only one of which could be anonymous! (Were that rule in effect today, both the Times and the Post would have to shut down and convert operations to printing vacation brochures and cereal boxes.)

They don't even characterize these sources; for all we know, they could be Oompa-Loompas. Here is how the Times introduces the presumed humans upon whom the entire shebang depends, which they finally get 'round to doing in paragraph 6:

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

So let's see... a senior CIA analyst would count, but so would a junior-grade employee of the Department of Agriculture. An "official" might be an aide to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI, 100%) or Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%), both of whom sit on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (hence could have access) -- or for that matter, an aide to the disgraced, corrupt liar, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL, 90%), who sits on the House equivalent.

But we do know one thing about some of them, courtesy of the Washington Post; we know that some, at least, of these "officials" have a partisan axe to grind:

"It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. "It's stating the obvious."

If this source begins with the idea that it's "obvious" that the Iraq War has caused us to be less safe, then he's hardly an unbiased source for relaying what the NIE has to say about that subject.

Past the expiry date

  1. The assessment was begun in 2002, before the Iraq War began -- and it was completed back in April of this year... five months ago.

An awful lot has changed in the past five months... much of it for the better, including the increasing tempo of turning provinces over to the Iraqis, the stunning buildup of the Iraqi military and national police forces, and of course the death of Musab Zarqawi. But this NIE cannot have taken those changes into account, because they hadn't happened yet when it was written.

The school for wives

Here is a minor point that is emblematic of how easy it is to get so lost, you can't see the forest for the weeds:

The Times notes, in a paragraph notable mainly for being oddly out of place in the article, that one danger is that jihadis fighting in Iraq can learn techniques that they subsequently pass along to others:

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

The implication is clear, if rather unbalanced:

  1. The Times frets that all we're doing in Iraq is training the next generation of jihadis, who will be faster, stronger, and more deadly because of the skill they learn from encounters with American forces.

But this discounts two very important points:

First, that it's the United States, not the jihadis, which has learnt the most from the Iraq War. The American military of 2003 was the most powerful and effective that had ever existed... but that is no longer the case: today, they could get their butts kicked -- by the American military of 2006. We have learned from every encounter, every battle, every victory, and even from the occasional defeat.

Our own effectiveness has grown much faster than that of the jihadis... that's why the death rate of our troops has dropped by nearly 1/3 from "period 3" (from the turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqis to the first set of elections) to "period 5" (from the last set of general elections to today) -- and dropped even further in the last year.

Second, this argument presumes that large numbers of Iraq-based jihadis survive their encounters with the Americans, so that they can pass their experience along to others. In fact, most of those who leave Iraq and head back to their home countries never actually engaged American forces, because we kill or capture a very high percentage of all the terrorists we engage.

In hock to post hoc

Finally, here is the most glaring omission -- whether from the NIE itself or merely from its mischaracterization by the elite media's "sources," we cannot possibly say without seeing the document itself:

  1. The storyline does not consider what might have happened had we not invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein.

A lot would have happened: most analysts believe that Hussein was on the verge of cutting a deal with the Europeans (via the corrupt U.N. "Oil for Fraud" program of direct and indirect bribery) to end the sanctions and inspections. As Charles Duelfer and the Iraq Survey Group (ISG... more letters, I'm afraid) assessed in its final report:

There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise.

Instead of considering this possibility and exploring which American action would have been better for the terrorists -- attacking Iraq or not attacking Iraq -- the argument of both these articles is strictly "post hoc ergo propter hoc": after the fact, therefore because of the fact. The Leftist, anti-war leakers in the CIA or NSA argue (through their sock puppets in the Times and Post) thus:

  1. We invaded Iraq, deposed Hussein, and occupied the country;
  2. Jihadi websites now cite the war to try to drum up recruits;
  3. Therefore, the Iraq War was a boon to jihadis!

But this is logical gibberish: if, after ranting on and on about Hussein, we had let him stay and even lifted sanctions, then that would be cited by jihadi websites to drum up recruits... just as they cite our failures in Somalia and Sudan, our refusal to retaliate for the Cole bombing, and so forth. The jihadis cite anything that shows us either running away or standing and fighting: either way, they'll spin it to their advantage.

If this is the central conceit of the NIE, as opposed to the media's misinterpretation, then this signals a fatal flaw still extant in the ratiocination of our top intelligence services: they are still thinking linearally, as if al-Qaeda and its spinoffs and wannabes are really just funny-looking Europeans in headscarves, using Western two-value logic and classical game-theory analysis of their own actions and our responses.

If we keep thinking that way, Western civ will fall.

Moslems in general, and especially Middle-East Moslems, and most especially Middle-Eastern jihadis, think in very different, apocalyptic terms. They don't perform a rational calculus to decide whether, say, to try to explode a nuclear weapon in the middle of a Western city: in fact, the "Hidden Imam" theory of players like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that Mohammed al-Mahdi will arise when the jihadis have precipitated the final battle -- and are losing it badly!

In other words, Ahmadinejad expects to start World War III (or IV, if you count the Cold War), and he expects his side to lose; after which the Mahdi will come, leading the heavenly host of Allah, and wipe away all the infidel armies, ushering in the age of Islam. How do we threaten a man who believes that? Should we threaten not to fight, allowing them to win, and thereby failing to fulfill the conditions that will activate the 12th Imam's return?

If the media's understanding of this not-very-momentous NIE is accurate, then the CIA is still fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War; and we're in desperate trouble indeed!

As the Bangles sang, we've got to "Walk Like an Egyptian" (or a jihadi) to have a prayer of winning this last crusade. Doesn't mean we have to act like they; only that we must be able to think like they, lest we be surprised again and again by their unconventional and unexpected moves.

So nu?

What's wrong with this "report," at least as recounted in the mainstream media? Virtually everything. It's vague, unsourced, unbalanced, and shows clear signs of mental sclerosis.

But if this is not the NIE's real view, then how low the American media has sunk, if this is the best hit piece on the president and the GOP that they can muster in the last weeks before the election.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 26, 2006, at the time of 5:15 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

September 22, 2006

VegasBlogging 1: "Milestones," Or Media Millstones?

Afghan Astonishments , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

This AP story is one of the most maddening, infurating examples of elite-media manipulation I've seen in months. We start with the bizarre, defamatory, and demented headline:

War Price on U.S. Lives Equal to 9/11

Now the death toll is 9/11 times two. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America's history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.

The latest milestone for a country at war comes without commemoration. It also may well come without the precision of knowing who is the 2,973rd man or woman of arms to die in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, or just when it happens [what, no picture for the Wall of Martyrs?]. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

In the first place... huh? What's the point of this article? I was about to note that we lost fewer than 2,500 at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941; while a quick glance at the right sidebar to this very blog tells you that during the war for which that attack was the starting gun, 400,000 brave American sailors, Marines, soldiers, and airmen (then still part of the Army) were killed.

There is no relation, cause-effect, or connection between the number of people who died in a precipitating incident and the number killed in the war it precipitates. For heaven's sake, wasn't the War to End All Wars "started" by the death of a single arch-duck?

But then I discovered I didn't even need to make the argument -- because Calvin Woodward, the writer of this very article, made the same blasted argument himself... completely undercutting any point the piece itself might have had:

The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more men in each of a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor in the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan. The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.

...But then, immediately he admits he has no point whatsoever, he beetles on, as if he hadn't just shot himself in the mouth:

Despite a death toll that pales next to that of the great wars [another stunning admission against interest!], one casualty milestone after another has been observed and reflected upon this time, especially in Iraq.

[And who's doing the observing and reflecting?]

There was the benchmark of seeing more U.S. troops die in the occupation than in the swift and successful invasion. And the benchmarks of 1,000 dead, 2,000, 2,500.

Now this.

"There's never a good war but if the war's going well and the overall mission remains powerful, these numbers are not what people are focusing on," said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. "If this becomes the subject, then something's gone wrong."

You bloody well bet your bippy "something's gone wrong," Professor Zelizer... but it's not a failure of nerve of the American people: it's that, unlike any other war we fought prior to Vietnam, the post-Vietnam media has eschewed both the principle of "a search for the truth" and even the previous war principle of "may she always be right, but our country, right or wrong."

The new media motto is "Amerika, scourge of the world!" I want to make it absolutely clear that I don't question the media moguls' patriotism. I nakedly assert they have none.

I don't know if Woodward (any relation?) wanted to write this revolting article, or if some AP editor assigned it to him. But he clearly embraced his task with enthusiasm, an almost obscene gloating in the deaths of American military personnel. Perhaps I'm overreacting; but read this and tell me there's no trace of cock-crowing:

As of Friday, the U.S. death toll stood at 2,693 in the Iraq war and 278 in and around Afghanistan, for a total of 2,971, two short of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Pentagon reports 56 military deaths and one civilian Defense Department death in other parts of the world from Operation Enduring Freedom, the anti-terrorism war distinct from Iraq.

Altogether, 3,028 have died abroad since Sept. 11, 2001.

The civilian toll in Iraq hit record highs in the summer, with 6,599 violent deaths reported in July and August alone, the United Nations said this week.

Woodward reels off each number with the gusto of a sports fan reciting stats of his favorite baseball team. I almost get the impression he had them memorized already. (And don't forget, he already admitted that such milestones were meaningless; but not, evidently, to Calvin Woodward.)

The problem is not America. It's not the American people, or the right-wingers, or President Bush, or the neocons.

The problem is AP, Reuters, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the news division of the Wall Street Journal (which is as liberal as all the rest, in contrast to the editorial pages). The problem is Woodward himself, and all those like him -- arch grotesques who dance a little Snoopy dance when they can announce another "milestone" of death... and the milestones become millstones around our country's neck, trying to drag us from victory towards defeat like one of Tony Soprano's enemies sinking slowly into the Hudson River with a pair of cement overshoes.

Look at the language of Calvin Woodward:

  • He tells us each American death statistic in precise detail; but he says nary a word about enemy casualties, which have been staggingly higher.
  • He fails to mention the ouster of the Taliban and of Saddam Hussein, the democratic votes in those countries, the freedom of the people, successes such as the abandonment of nuclear weapons by Lybia's Qadaffi, or the many, many nations that have changed their spots in the last five years and now fight against the terrorists they once tolerated.
  • He triumphantly announces that civilian deaths in Iraq "hit record highs in the summer," without troubling to mention that after that peak, they receded very significantly.
  • And he uses misleading statistics to suggest comparisons of Iraq to WWII (to Iraq's detriment), when in fact the situations are incomparable.

That last point bears looking at:

A new study on the war dead and where they come from suggests that the notion of "rich man's war, poor man's fight" has become a little truer over time.

Among the Americans killed in the Iraq war, 34 percent have come from communities reporting the lowest levels of family income. Half come from middle income communities and only 17 percent from the highest income level.

That's a change from World War II, when all income groups were represented about equally. In Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, the poor have made up a progressively larger share of casualties, by this analysis.

The accusation is clear from the first paragraph above: "rich men" started the war, but they're sending "poor men" to fight it for them. I'm sure the statistic he cites is accurate; but I'm equally sure it's meaningless. What difference does it make whether a recruit comes from a community "reporting the lowest" or "the highest income level?" If you really want to argue that rich men are sending the poor to their deaths -- you need to look at the income level of the actual soldiers, not the "communities" from which they come.

And who chooses what constitutes a "community" anyway? If you draw the lines tendentiously enough, you can call any community either poor or rich, depending which is needed for the argument.

And of course, one reason that WWII, Korea, and Vietnam had greater participation by rich "communities" like the wealthy, liberal enclaves in New York, Connecticut, and Hollywood, California is that for those other wars, we had the draft. Does Woodward propose we bring it back, as liberal Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem, 100%) has repeatedly demanded?

The modern, all-volunteer, American military draws disproportionately from the South, not because the South (as a region) is "poor," but because its moral values are more traditional, and because it has a tradition of military service unlike any other region in America. When young men and women in San Francisco, Chicago, Bangor, Philadelphia, and especially Chappaqua are allowed to choose, they tend not to choose to enlist.

Very well; that's freedom for you. But don't, for God's sake, use freedom as a bludgeon against Republicans. There's a limit even to the liberal aphorism "any stick to bash a conservative."

Well... in a decent world, there would be.

It really is time for the antique media to pull up its pants and choose sides (those of them who haven't long ago chosen the side of America's enemies). Until they do, we should not let them get away with standing on the sidelines making snide comments and pulling sarcastic faces. Even New York Times readers deserve better.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 22, 2006, at the time of 7:29 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

September 15, 2006

Whack-a-Mole -- or Seal-a-Hole?

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

The antique media is infamous for burying the lede: not understanding the real point of a story -- or else not wanting us to understand it! -- and instead hiding it deep within the article, where they know few eyes dare to scan (the eyes usually wandering off after the first two or three paragraphs of wretched writing).

In this case, an AP article focuses on a new tactic of digging trenches around Baghdad. The trench idea is interesting and probably smart; anything that makes it tougher for bad guys to creep like moles in the night into Baghdad can't help but be good for the war effort.

But AP lets slip a far more important point 22 paragraphs (out of 31) into the article: that Operation Together Forward, while being the worst-named operation in recent military history (which is saying a lot), designed to clear Baghdad of sectarian militia murders, is in fact working literally like gangbusters:

Both the Bush administration and military have said sectarian killings and violence are surging around Iraq and in the capital, although the military has said the attacks are limited to parts of Baghdad not yet included in the security operation.

In other words, it's working great in those areas where it has been used; and the violence is only spiking in areas that have not yet been subjected to the house-to-house searches and interrogations by the Iraqi Army and National Police and the American soldiers and Marines.

I later confirmed this unsourced claim by referring to a CENTCOM release:

This approach appears to be working in the focus areas, where violence is down, [Army spokesman Maj. Gen. William] Caldwell said.

However, he acknowledged that violence in other parts of Baghdad experienced a “spike” yesterday and noted that terrorist death squads “are clearly targeting civilians outside the focus areas.”

“Overall, Baghdad’s level of sectarian violence has been reduced,” he said, “but remains above the levels of violence we saw before the Golden Mosque bombing in Samarra in late February.”

It's glib and easy to say, "gee, there's still violence in Baghdad -- nothing has changed -- the war is a failure -- let's declare defeat and head home." In fact, that pretty much describes the Democratic Party's “Real Security Act of 2006.” Alas, even some Republican jellyfish, such as Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT, 20%) have wriggled aboard that bandwagon.

Shays doesn't entirely buy the Democratic defeatism; he does not advocate the Democratic position of cutting and running, for example. But the central conceit for all the defeatists is that, "since January of this year there has been no progress," as Shays claims.>

Fortunately, this position is nonsense on stilts.

If you see somebody playing a game where he keeps whacking plastic moles on the head with a mallet over and over again for hours, it would be easy to conclude he's playing Whack-a-Mole. In that game, the moles pop up again and again from the same holes; every time you whack one, it goes down, only to be resurrected moments later.

But when you look closer, you discovered that every time the player whacks a mole, the mallet stays stuck in the hole, permanently blocking it. The player grabs a new mallet and whacks the next one, sealing off another hole. You notice that the moles never come popping up through the sealed holes, only through the holes that are still open... and you also notice that there are a finite number of holes -- and the player is rapidly sealing them up.

This is a new game called Seal-a-Hole, and it has a very different dynamic from Whack-a-Mole: the normal game is one of futility; the game continues until the player gets tired and quits or he runs out of money. But Seal-a-Hole actually has a victory point: when all the holes are sealed, the game is over -- and the player, America, has won.

Even though Seal-a-Hole is not futile, it nevertheless requires a great deal of patience; there are many, many holes, and each hole has a mole who must be whacked. Some of the holes, such as Sadr City, are very big and will require many mallets to properly seal. But if we have the courage and fortitude of our American forebears, we will seal those holes... and we will win.

Like all analogies, this one doesn't "prove" anything. But I hope it gives you a different perspective from which to view the actual evidence of success emanating from the penumbra of Baghdad.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 15, 2006, at the time of 4:47 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 12, 2006

Because We Trusted Bush... Yeah, That's the Ticket!

Elections , Iraq Matters , Logical Lacunae
Hatched by Dafydd

The story that Democrats are attacking President Bush over his magnificent, almost Churchillian speech last night is already being adequately covered by many other excellent bloggers. Oh, and also by those guys in the elite media, if anybody still reads them (besides us excellent bloggers, I mean). But I think we've found just a tiny hook that has not yet been exploited. (I was going to say "just a tiny nipple that has not yet been sucked," but I thought that unduly vivid.)

Check out this line from the Reuters story:

Top Democrats on Tuesday accused President George W. Bush of exploiting the September 11 anniversary to boost his faltering Iraq war policy and his party's sagging popularity in an election year. [Good, good -- squeezed two Democratic memes into the very first sentence!]

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said Bush should have tried to recapture a spirit of national unity in a televised Oval Office address on Monday night.

Reid told reporters Democrats had been so confident the Republican Bush would be nonpartisan that they had not sought equal time on television to offer their party's response.

Uh...

Uh...

Uh...

Say what?

Reid told reporters Democrats had been so confident the Republican Bush would be nonpartisan that they had not sought equal time on television to offer their party's response.

...Is it just me? Or does this sound roughly like Danish King Hrothgar saying "I was so confident that Grendel wouldn't come back and slaughter my warriors sixty-five times in a row, that I didn't bother posting any guards around Heorot last night."

(What do you mean, "what the hell are you talking about, Dafydd?" Couldn't you guys manage to stay awake during your high school English Lit classes?)

Considering that the primary meme of the Democrats is that Bush is all politics and no policy, what do you think are the odds that anybody in the DNC thought "the Republican Bush would be nonpartisan" in his prime-time speech on September 11th?

Of course, in reality, he was nonpartisan; he never even mentioned the Democrats (which is probably what really torqued them off). But this is a question of perception: if the Democrats think of Bush as the ultimate political-party animal (tomorrow, Bill Clinton sues for trademark infringement), then how risible is it for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Mirage Hotel and Casino, 100%) to claim it never occurred to them that he would be political?

(Friend Lee reminds me that Charles Krauthammer, in the commentary after that speech on Fox News Channel, correctly distinguished between a speech being political -- which it must be, if it's to talk at all about policy -- and the same speech being partisan, which requires not merely saying "this is my policy" but also "and here's the stupid policy of my opponent.")

So what's the real reason the Democrats didn't ask for equal time -- which I noticed and wondered about myself? Simple: for all the wrangling going on in the GOP these days over immigration, troops levels, and such, it's the Democrats who are in complete policy disarray. Look at their pathetic “Real Security Act of 2006,” where all they could get their caucus to agree on were three bland, vague platitudes -- and that Don Rumsfeld should be canned!

That's it; that's their entire defense + anti-terrorism plan for the looming November elections.

They didn't request equal-response time because they had no idea what they were going to say. An insider who must remain anonymous, but who was privy to the hastily arranged response conference, and who has secretly informed Big Lizards, reports the following minutes from yesterday afternoon:

3:08 PM EDT: Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gaveled the response conf. to order, after a brief struggle with Minority Leader Harry Reid over who controls the gavel, which Rep. Pelosi won by repeatedly kicking Sen. Reid in the chest.

Rep. Pelosi: Shut up. Shut up you in the back, whoever you are. And stop clutching your chest like you're having a cardiac arrest. I took off my shoes before kicking you.

Now we all agree that Bush is essentially Hitler in all important points. But we can't say that. No, I will not recognize you, Russ; trust me, we can't say that. You shut up too, Bernie. We can't say that yet, so what do we say?

8:58 PM EDT: Meeting adjourned following five hours and fifty minutes of discussion; the 87 motions made were all tabled until next week by general consensus. Sen. Reid returned from Bethesda Naval Hospital just seconds before Rep. Pelosi banged the gavel down. No cause-effect should be inferred from the time relation between those two events.

See? No matter how long the media chickens have pecked at the story, there are always a few grains left to digest. I'm sorry, was that too vivid as well?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 12, 2006, at the time of 6:18 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Newsflash: There's Violence in Iraq

Elections , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

As part of the campaign by the antique media to demonstrate "the deteriorating situation in Iraq," which leads directly to "President Bush's plummeting poll ratings" and "the widespread expectation that Democrats will capture one or both houses of Congress in November," Associated Press sent out the following dire story:

Violence killed at least two dozen people across Iraq on Tuesday, including six who died when a car bomb blew up in western Baghdad.

The gist of the story is that, when AP toted up all the reports of killings they received on Tuesday, which is already over in that nation of 26.8 million people, it totaled 24. If this is the norm, then it works out to an annual homicide rate of 32.7 per 100,000... which is more than in the United States but less than Colombia and most other South and Central American countries.

I picture the AP Iraq editors sitting around misty eyed, reminiscing: "Remember the good old days, when we could rely upon a solid triple-digit death toll each and every day?"

What is the world coming to, when newsmen cannot even count upon Iraq, of all places, to yield actionable campaign material for the Left? Perhaps they should remember the stirring words of one of their own, William Randolph Hearst:

"You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war."

AP and Reuters had better get cracking: so little time, so much staging to do!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 12, 2006, at the time of 3:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Sprint for Defeat!

Elections , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The Democrats, after years of threatening, have finally enunciated their own defense/anti-terrorist policy; it appears to be modeled on a pell-mell dash towards the exits, overturning the ottoman and the teakettle in their mad rush:

Mr. Reid and several colleagues offered what they called the “Real Security Act of 2006,” calling for the beginning of a phased withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by the end of this year, a heightened effort to enlist more countries to take part in building a new Iraq, the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and a faster adoption of the recommendations of the independent commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks.

Whew, a blueprint for victory if ever I saw one! Though it loses points for the lack of originality, having a disturbing similarity (approaching plagiarism) to their earlier plans for Vietnam and Somalia, and their mentors' plans for defending la belle France during the late unpleasantness with Germany.

Let's take these one at a time...

"A phased withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by the end of this year"

There are exactly 117 days left until the end of the year, and there are about 150,000 American troops in Iraq. That means the Democrats want a "phased withdrawal" of forces at the rate of 1,282 soldiers every day. (Perhaps more, if they require the Pentagon to stick to the unions' 35-hour work week.) Call it the "battalion a day rout."

Withdrawing 1,300 soldiers a day from Iraq is probably about as fast as we reasonably could do it. So by "phased withdrawal," what they actually mean is yanking them all out at breakneck speed, pedal to the metal, as fast as humanly possible.

When Ehud Barak ordered the mass exodus of Israelis out of Lebanon, he made them flee so fast, they left armor behind; the IDF actually had to send helicopters in to destroy the Israeli Merkava tanks left in Lebanon, lest Hezbollah snatch them up and use them against Israeli towns. I wonder if the American Democrats want us to do that with our Abrams tanks, just for the heck of it?

At that speed, it would be absolutely impossible for the Iraqi Army to keep pace with our hysterical retreat. Vast stretches of Iraq would be left utterly unguarded; they would quickly fill up with militias and terrorists, leaving Iraq rather like Lebanon. Are the Democrats confused about which Western defeat they're trying to recreate?

Perhaps al-Qaeda could supply us extra transports to use to flee in disgrace. No doubt Sen. Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%) would immediately take to the TV screens, with his floppy wrist and weak, ineffectual -- dare I say "reedy" -- voice, crowing that he told us all along that it would end in tears.

If he meant it would end in a Democratic victory in 2006, then yes, the nation would soon be in tears.

"A heightened effort to enlist more countries to take part in building a new Iraq"

What, off in a corner? I'm unsure where exactly this "new Iraq" is supposed to be built: most of the territory in the Middle East is already spoken for... perhaps in the Australian Outback? I understand that's mostly unoccupied, and it's barren enough that the Iraqis might go for it.

Seriously, what on Earth does Harry Reid mean this time? How does he plan for us -- or rather, other countries -- to "build a new Iraq?" Will France depose the current government of Monsieur Maliki?

Who -- besides those "other countries" enlisted -- gets the oil? It seems as if the Iraqis have by and large already decided what sort of government they want: a parliamentary democracy, along with eighteen provinces headed by provincial governors. It's somewhat tribal and somewhat federalist... but I don't think they're anxious to rip it apart and rebuild it.

And certainly not to satisfy Mr. Reid's whim to be seen as the "founding father" of a brand, spanking new Iraq, the model of a major Middle Eastern state as the Democratic Party see the region: caliphates and satrapies controlled by Iran, the Democrats' favorite "Arabic" "republic."

Pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical, but I'm not completely persuaded that Mr. Reid can get the Iraqis to throw over their own political constructs for his.

"The ouster of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld"

Come to think on it, this is the only part of the Democrats' Real Security Act of 2006 that is actually specific, concrete -- and non-negotiable.

Has Donald H. Rumsfeld made mistakes? Sure; he's trusted Democrats to put the country first, for example. Has he made decisions that the American people don't like? Certainly... especially after the unhelpful Democratic Party and their willing accomplices in the elite media get through chewing their newscud.

Has he screwed up so spectacularly that he needs to be removed? Of course not; he's won two major wars and is doing as well against the terrorist/insurgent/sectarian militia challenge as almost anyone could. Have we lost the Iraq War? Only if we elect the Democrats, would could snatch victory from the jaws of a crocodile.

Does Donald Rumsfeld frighten the Democrats? Evidently so.

Have we finished interviewing ourselves? I think so.

"And a faster adoption of the recommendations of the independent commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks"

All right, I'll bite. What "recommendations of the independent commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks" in particular does Mr. Reid mean?

The 9/11 Commission -- sorry, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- offered a huge bunch of recommendations, which were followed by add-ons from numerous other commissions and groups:

  • The Gilmore Commission
  • The Bremer Commission
  • The Joint Inquiry of House and Senate Intelligence Committees
  • The Hart-Rudman Commission

You can read the entire schmear here, if you're really masochistic.

But for those of you who, like me, have the attention span of mayfly, here's the Campbell's Condensed Cream of Commission:

9/11 Cmsn Recs
  1. The U.S. government must attack terrorists and their organizations;

    Afghanistan. Iraq. Al-Qaeda. Got it... check. So how strongly do the Democrats support those attacks today? I'm just asking...

  2. The United States should be willing to make the difficult long-term commitment to the future of Pakistan;

    Pervez Musharraf; foreign aid; joint anti-terrorist operations. What more would Harry Reid do? Hm, maybe a case of bubble bath.

  3. The United States and the international community should make a long-term commitment to a secure and stable Afghanistan;

    NATO -- say, that's a good idea! Why didn't Bush think of that? Oh, wait...

  4. The problems in the U.S.-Saudi relationship must be confronted, openly;

    Hm... I'm sure there must have been a Democratic proposal in the House or Senate to work with Saudi Arabia to reform all the madrasses that preach nothing but hatred towards America, Israel, and the West; but I can't quite bring it to mind.

    Of course, the Bush administration has actually moved the House of Saud pretty significantly in the direction of shutting down al-Qaeda and some of the more radical clerics. I'm going to have to give the Republicans another upcheck on this one.

  5. We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors;

    Let's see: leash-wielding, prisoner stripping, sex-obsessed guards at Abu Ghraib tried and convicted of crimes... check. Soldiers accused of rape or homicide arrested and threatened with the death penalty... check. Official policy opposing torture... check. Allow Red Cross to inspect prisons... check. All right, what more exactly would the Democrats offer, aside from cable TV (with the naked channel) and a high-speed internet connection?

  6. Just as we did in the Cold War, we need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously;

    Er... what is Nancy Pelosi's position on full funding for Voice of America anyway?

  7. The U.S. government should offer to join with other nations in generously supporting a new International Youth Opportunity Fund;

    If this is anything like the Boy Sprouts, we're probably already doing it -- and the Democrats are probably already suing it.

  8. Economic policies that encourage development, more open societies, and opportunities for people to improve the lives of their families and to enhance prospects for their children’s future;

    I think that would be called "Capitalism"... which to the Democrats is "the unknown ideal."

  9. Engaging other nations in developing a comprehensive coalition strategy against Islamist terrorism;

    I think that would be called "Democracy"... which to the Democrats is "the failed policy of the current administration."

  10. The United States should engage its friends to develop a common coalition approach toward the detention and humane treatment of captured terrorists;

    If that means America must move to embrace the average of the interrogation procedures of Europe, then that would mean we should expand our list of acceptable techniques to include the rack, the thumbscrew, and crucifixion.

  11. The U.S. should make a maximum effort to strengthen counterproliferation efforts against weapons of mass destruction by expanding the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Cooperative Threat Reduction program;

    Uh...

    "The Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) is an international effort led by the United States to interdict transfer of banned weapons and weapons technology."

    "The Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program of the United States assists the states of the former Soviet Union in controlling and protecting their nuclear weapons, weapons-usable materials, and delivery systems."

    Now, I don't want to judge before all the evidence is in, but the fact that these are two long-term, ongoing programs of the United States would tend to imply that we're already doing this. But perhaps I've been misinformed.

  12. The U.S. should engage in vigorous efforts to track terrorist financing.

    Unless I miss my guess, that would be the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) terrorist-tracking program. And as I recall, but correct me if I'm wrong, the Democrats demanded it be killed after it was outed by the New York Times.

The American Left is not going to lie on the ground and merely play "speedbump" for the American response to terrorism; they're determined to rear up like underwater reefs and wreck the entire ship of state!

“Five years after Sept. 11, 2001, the American people deserve a government that has learned the lessons of the terrorist attacks,” the Democrats said in a statement. “Bush Republicans have talked tough but failed to protect this country.”

Given that the phrase "protect this country" in this context means protect it from violent attack, I can only conclude that there has been some significant terrorist attack since September 11th, 2001, on the American mainland -- or at least on our embassies, Marine barracks, or the USS Cole -- that Mr. Reid is privy to but which has been successfully concealed from the rest of us. I encourage the minority leader to file an FOIA request to liberate that information, so the Times or the Washington Post can publish it.

Either that or... do you think it possible that the Democrats (I know this is absurd) might finally have snapped, and are having a feverish argument with their own fantasy version of reality, like Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey? (More important, is Jimmy Stewart's character related in any way to Maureen?)

Oops, I might be in trouble under the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 for posting this so close to the November election.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 12, 2006, at the time of 4:50 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

September 10, 2006

No Difference Between Democrats and Republicans? Think Again

Elections , Iraq Matters , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

According to CBS News, Democratic Senator John D. "Jay" Rockefeller (D-WV, 100%) -- who has announced to the world that he's a dimwitted "dupe" of the idiot evil genius George W. Bush -- still thinks that we'd be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in charge of Iraq:

Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq — even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.

He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, "because it is called the 'war on terror.'" [Say, that's pretty hard to refute!]

Does Rockefeller stands [sic] by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn't invade?

"Yes. Yes. [Saddam] wasn't going to attack us. He would've been isolated there," Rockefeller said. "He would have been in control of that country but we wouldn't have depleted our resources preventing us from prosecuting a war on terror which is what this is all about."

It's almost as if Karl Rove has been sending his mind-control beam directly into Jay Rockefeller's head, the latter having forgotten to wear his tinfoil hat. Are the Democrats actually trying to lose the election? If so, I certainly don't want to get in their way; but isn't if awfully precipitous for Rockefeller to rip the mask off before November 7th?

And is Rockefeller the only bloke in the Senate who doesn't understand that if we hadn't invaded Iraq in 2003, then today, in 2006, there wouldn't be any sanctions anymore?

Hussein would not be "isolated;" au contraire, he would be more powerful than at any time in the past fifteen years: he would have restarted his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs; both the Iraq Survey Group and the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report say that was Hussein's intent all along. And European and Latin American representatives would be beetling to Baghdad to genuflect to the great man, hands out for oil allocations.

This is what Rockefeller considers "a better scenario, and a safer scenario" for America. And you want to know the worst part? If the Democrats win the Senate in the upcoming election, Jay Rockefeller will be the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Stick that in your pipe and step on it.

So Jay Rockefeller, nutty as a Froot Loop, would chair the Senate Intelligence Committee -- and spend the next two years investigating Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld... rather than al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Iran. All because some Republicans insist there's "not a dime's worth of difference" between Republicans and Democrats, which means between Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS, 88%) and Chairman Jay Rockefeller.

Yeah, stay home and sulk instead of voting. Better yet, vote for a third-party candidate to "teach the Republicans a lesson." Great idea!

I'm sure hard-core conservative Republicans will be elected in droves in 2008. And their first order of business will be to begin the task of rebuilding half a dozen major American cities that were destroyed by al-Qaeda, while Congress was busy impeaching Bush for intercepting al-Qaeda phone calls.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 10, 2006, at the time of 5:11 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 7, 2006

Deteriorata

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

I've read at least five articles in the antique media in the last week that included some variant on the phrase "the deteriorating situation in Iraq." It was almost as if the entire MSM held a meeting and picked that week's buzz words.

According to the internationally accepted English-language dictionaries, "deteriorating" means "getting worse," of course; evidently, the media is using its own strange, new definition of which we were previously unaware.

In fact, we have several very good measures of how well or ill the Iraq strategy is working. Let's start with the easiest: how do American military personnel in Iraq fare these days?

Not too badly, actually; a lot better than in the previous two years. According to Iraq Coalition Casuality Count, the years 2004, 2005, and the first 250 days of 2006 have seen the following service deaths:

Deaths of American servicemen
and servicewomen in Iraq
Year Deaths Days Average per day
2004 848 366 2.32
2005 846 365 2.32
2006 480 250 1.92

That's a drop of 17% over 2005; and as the handoffs from Coalition forces to Iraqis continues, that number will continue to drop, as fewer American troops will be patrolling dangerous sections of Iraq. That may not be a stunning drop; but it sure as shootin' isn't any kind of an increase. Thus, by the standard of deaths (and the broader category of casualties) of our troops, Iraq is getting better, not worse.

Another metric is the number of civilians killed, wounded, or even attacked; after all, the whole purpose of an army is to do the fighting for the civilian population. If more and more Iraqi civilians were being killed every month, then that would inarguably be an example of things getting worse.

And we all know that things certain did get worse in July: Sunni and Shia militias turned on each other and began a wave of brutal "executions" and other murders. But July was more than a month ago; and the Iraqi security forces (the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi National Police, and the local, provincial police), along with their Coalition partners, responded to the spike in violence.

But was the response successful, or are the killings still proceeding apace? Alas, the website we just used doesn't report this number; instead, it combines Iraqi civilians and Iraqi military deaths into one lump sum -- which is rather useless when we're trying to separate the two.

The reality is that Operation Together Forward, despite its rather unfortunate name, has been quite successful, according to the best possible source: Multi-National Force -- Iraq, the Coalition itself.

MNF-Iraq spokesman, Maj.Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, gave a presentation and slide show to the press yesterday demonstrating how casualties, homicides, and attacks against civilians have all dropped markedly in Baghdad. But I haven't seen one word of this show up in the elite media today... so evidently, it didn't take.

(That's hardly a departure for them; as Sachi notes, they ignored the steady political and reconstruction progress made up to July, and they are ignoring the entire recovery after the July spike in violence. They focus like a laser beam, as Clinton used to say, on one bad month and pretend that's the norm.)

But in fact, we have some very cool slides from Caldwell's presentation that demonstrate this improvement in the Iraq endeavor (hat tip to Soldier's Dad; see the rest of the slides at the MNF-Iraq link above).

First, civilian killings in Baghdad -- the worst of the three provinces that are lagging the other 15:



Comparing sectarian casualties in Baghdad from July to August 2006

Comparing sectarian killings in Baghdad from July to August 2006

Gen. Caldwell, in his presentation, explains this slide:

This is what it was in density, with red being the most dense, the highest number of those who have been murdered executed being found in this location here, and then somewhat more right in the center, right up here, and to where it's less dense, down. This is across the entire Baghdad city area. These are deaths that are reported, that are recorded, that we know about. And this is what it looked like in July. This is what it looked like in August, based on the casualty figures, as reported.

And then up in the Kadhimiya and the Mansour areas, you can see literally almost down to nothing here and then a little bit here.

As easily seen, sectarian and terroristic homicides have plummeted since Operation Together Forward began. That's not a "deterioration," that's a strong improvement... and you can see it graphically with your own eyes.

"All right, Mr. Lizard," I hear you kvetch, "so much for actual deaths; but what about attacks themselves? Aren't they still rising, even if killings are decreasing?"

All right, let's take a look at another slide:



Comparing sectarian casualties in Baghdad from July to August 2006

Here is Caldwell on this slide (reparagraphed for clarity):

One more indicator that operations are in fact reducing the amount of attacks on civilians is shown here on this graph. What I'd like to do is talk you through.

This is the baseline in March. Without getting into specific, exact casualty figures, this is the casualty figures as we reported them, as we tracked them during the month of March.

We found in the month of April we had about a 3-percent increase over that baseline of March, and in the May time frame we had about a 39 percent increase from, again, the baseline in March. By the July time frame, we had experienced a 73 percent increase in the number of casualties -- these are murders, execution, indirect fire, IEDs, whatever it was -- attacks that were being levied on civilians within the Baghdad area.

And then in August, August 7th is when you saw that the operations commenced, Operation Together Forward phase two. This month at the end of the month it's an 8 percent increase from the baseline back in March.

That is a 38% drop in attacks in a single month of Operation Together Forward. (The only bad thing about this operation is the name; couldn't they change it to Operation Guardian Angel, or something?)

Caldwell continues:

Again, what this shows is the cycle of retaliatory violence has been slowed in the target areas as we have specifically focused our efforts here within the Baghdad area. Again, we remain very cautiously optimistic about these figures, but we also recognize that the real measurement of this progress isn't just this month's but rather the sustainment of this over the long period of time. As we said many times before, this operation is going to be conducted over many months, not over several weeks.

This is part of the greatest story never told: the increasing tempo of our success in Iraq. The antique media is terrified of reporting on any of this... because it utterly undermines the Story, which is -- here comes what we in the writing biz dub the "callback" -- which is "the deteriorating situation in Iraq."

Oh, how I wish I could lock the mainstream news anchors, the elite newspaper editors, and the wire-service presidents in a room and ask them a few questions, then just keep asking and asking until they finally broke down and answered. (All right, maybe just a soupçon of waterboarding.) For people who yammer endlessly about "the public's right to know," they're remarkably unforthcoming about anything that might hurt their patrons, the Democrats.

I'm still trying to sort out which newsmen are actively evil... and which are just useful idiots.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 7, 2006, at the time of 8:13 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

Good Hunting Over the Weekend

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Headlines in the various wire services during the weekend were still the same old recycled Democratic talking points: Another U.S. soldier killed in action! Setbacks, quagmire! The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have failed... it's time to declare defeat and head to Okinawa!

Sometimes I feel the media ghoulishly enjoy counting bodies, especialy our own guys and gals. But even AP could not ignore this remarkable achievement of Canadian troops in Afghanistan:

NATO: 200 Taliban, 4 Canadians Killed

PASHMUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Warplanes and artillery pounded Taliban fighters hiding in orchards Sunday during a big Afghan-NATO offensive that the alliance said killed more than 200 militants in its first two days. Four Canadian soldiers also were killed.

Oh, Canada! The Taliban has attacked the NATO forces from time to time; but it always ends the same way: lopsided defeat. I don't understand why they keep on doing thing that don't work... unless it's just a mass expression of "suicide by soldier."

Given that the terrorists believe "death is a promotion" (as Ralph Peters puts it, paraphrasing Cal Thomas), we really do need to consider the possibility that the Taliban knows their attacks will fail, and they'll die in droves -- yet they continue anyway as an act of martyrdom.

Meanwhile in Iraq, we had quite a weekend, according to CENTCOM. I wonder if you saw these headlines in the antique media:

Iraqi and US Security Forces Capture 30 Insurgents, 38 Suspected Insurgents, Over Weekend Ops in Western al-Anbar Province

Iraqi police and soldiers, along with U.S. Marines and soldiers from Regimental Combat Team 7, detained 30 confirmed insurgents and 38 suspected insurgents over the weekend throughout the western Al Anbar Province, Iraq.

Over the weekend, Iraqi and Coalition forces carried out numerous operations throughout Iraq, and the results were spectacular:

  • "In Rawah, 50 miles east of the Iraqi-Syrian border, Iraqi police identified and detained 18 of the 38 captured suspected insurgents."
  • "In Hit, 70 miles northwest of Ramadi, Iraqi and U.S. soldiers detained one known insurgent and 10 suspected insurgents Sunday."
  • "Through a variety of counterinsurgency operations Saturday and Sunday, Iraqi police, Iraqi soldiers, and U.S. Marines captured 27 known insurgents and four suspected insurgents in the Haditha Triad, a cluster of three cities -- Haditha, Barwanah, and Haqlaniyah."
  • "In Sa'dah, a town just east of the Iraqi-Syrian border, U.S. Marines captured six more suspected insurgents Saturday. Marines also discovered an ordnance cache near the border on Saturday. The cache consisted of 120 mm rockets, 155 mm rockets, and 122 mm rockets."

We've got even more good news from Camp Fallujah, according to Maj.Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, spokesman for Multi-National Force -- Iraq.

During recent clearing operations in Adhamiyah - as part of Operation Together Forward - Iraqi forces and Soldiers from the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Multi-National Division – Baghdad, captured an improvised-explosive device-making facility. The find included a supply of bomb-making components, three mortar caches and engineering manuals.

On the heels of success in Adhamiyah, Marines from Regimental Combat Team 5, moving as part of Operation Rubicon, recently uncovered hundreds of weapons and combated insurgents in running gun battles in the town of Mushin, west of Habbaniyah.

If you'll recall, I promised that some of the security responsibilities were going to be handed over to Iraqis this month; but there was a brief delay. The elite media portrayed this as a "setback" for President Bush, implying the hand-over was never going to happen.

But of course, it turned out to be just what the Pentagon said it was: a brief miscommunication about certain duties and responsibilities. And now it's gone through with no problem:

Iraqi Soldiers Take the Lead

Soldiers of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division transferred responsibility of security for the majority of the Kirkuk Province to two battalions of the Iraqi Army during a ceremony at an Iraqi military compound just outside of Kirkuk, Aug. 31.

“With this ceremony, we complete the transfer of security responsibilities from our friends, the Coalition Forces, to our Brigade,” said Maj. Gen. Anwar, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 4th Iraqi Army Division. Two battalions in the multi-ethnic (Arab, Kurdish, Turkomen) 2nd Brigade had previously assumed security responsibilities in other sectors of the Kirkuk Province. This ceremony, with the final two battalions assuming responsibility, demonstrates the readiness of Iraqi Army forces in the province....

The event marks the third time this year that Coalition Forces have transferred responsibility to Iraqi Security Forces in the 1st BCT’s area of operations in and around the Kirkuk Province. The ceremony now places the majority of the province in Iraqi control. The city of Kirkuk and the village of Hawijah remain under the control of coalition forces.

And finally, the Coalition (which means the United States) has begun the process of handing over complete control of the New Iraqi Army, which we built, to the Iraqi government, which was elected by the Iraqi people. Today we handed over control of one of the ten Iraqi divisions, plus the Iraqi Air Force and Navy:

Iraq Takes Over Command of Armed Forces

On Thursday, Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed a document taking control of Iraq's small naval and air forces and the 8th Iraqi Army Division, based in the south....

Handing over control of the country's security to Iraqi forces is vital to any eventual drawdown of U.S. forces here. After disbanding the remaining Iraqi army following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, coalition forces have been training the new Iraqi military.

The nine other Iraqi divisions remain under U.S. control, with authority gradually being transferred. U.S. military officials said there was no specific timetable for the transition but U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said Wednesday the Iraqis have "talked about perhaps two divisions a month."

AP, however, was far more enthused about a row that erupted between Sunni and Shiite members of the Iraqi parliament, which began when Sunni legislator Saleh al-Mutlaq accused the Shia of seeking "the division of Iraq." AP devotes more than half the story to that irrelevant non-news, instead of the hand-over in the headline.

(And I'm certain it's only a coincidence that such uncontrollable outbursts of unrelated, spurious copy in news stories -- "Spurrette's Syndrome," as Dafydd calls is -- always act to undermine any good news for President Bush, the Republicans, and the country. It's just "the luck of the draw" that Spurrette's Syndrome never interrupts or undermines bad news!)

So, folks, things are looking good. Let's stay the course, even if that means tacking back and forth a bit, to respond to changing conditions and enemy tactics.

Good hunting.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 7, 2006, at the time of 4:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 1, 2006

That (Not So) Gloomy Pentagon Report

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Or, Sen. Harry Reid Demands America Declare Defeat and Go Home

The wires and the antique media are abuzz with the report they've been salivating for; here are their headlines:

Meanwhile, Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%), reacted with his usual brand of triumphal defeatism:

In response to the Pentagon's report Friday, the Senate's top Democrat, Harry Reid of Nevada, said it showed the Bush administration is "increasingly disconnected from the facts on the ground in Iraq."

"It is time for a new direction to end the war in Iraq, win the war on terror, and give the American people the real security they deserve," Reid said.

The report covers the period from Nouri al-Maliki becoming prime minister (late May) to August 11th; but that means it misses the period of declining Iraqi violence that we discussed in Disconnections, It's Time For Maliki to Sadr Off, and more generally in "The Last Men Standing".

Here is AP on the new report, just to give you a flavor of the excited coverage:

Sectarian violence is spreading in Iraq and the security problems have become more complex than at any time since the U.S. invasion in 2003, a Pentagon report said Friday.

In a notably gloomy report to Congress, the Pentagon reported that illegal militias have become more entrenched, especially in Baghdad neighborhoods where they are seen as providers of both security and basic social services.

The report described a rising tide of sectarian violence, fed in part by interference from neighboring Iran and Syria and driven by a "vocal minority" of religious extremists who oppose the idea of a democratic Iraq.

Death squads targeting mainly Iraqi civilians are a growing problem, heightening the risk of civil war, the report said.

Well, you get the idea. Naturally, not a single one of these sources links to the report itself; I still haven't found such a link, and I'd be grateful to any Lizardite who can supply one in the comments section.

But if we don't have the report, we do have a story about the report on the Pentagon's main web page. In it, we find that the report contains several positive points undiscussed by the elite media:

  • The Iraqi government is "getting on its feet," having filled the entire cabinet during this period. The government also has a lot of support from rank and file Iraqis and is doing a good job assuming command and control of the New Iraqi Army and other Iraqi security forces (the National Police, under the control of the Interior Ministry, and local police under the control of provincial governors).
  • "The Iraqi economy is moving along. Estimates put gross domestic product growth in the country at about 4 percent for the year."
  • Oil exports are up, electricity is flowing, water is potable, sewage facilities are operational, and the rest of the country's infrastructure is rapidly recovering... not only from the war but from decades of decay during Saddam Hussein's repellant dictatorship.

The only major problem is security -- though of course that is a huge element of the equation. However, even there, the Iraqis themselves are responding, as the Pentagon story makes clear:

Violence is up, with most of the incidents being Iraqi-on-Iraqi attacks in and around Baghdad. Most of the attacks are in only four of the 18 provinces, the report notes. Fourteen provinces remain fairly peaceful and in one – Muthanna in the south –no coalition forces are operating.

Sullivan said training and equipping of Iraqi forces continues on track. Iraqi security forces are at about 278,000 trained and equipped in the Iraqi Army, National Police and local police. This is an increase of about 14,000 since the May report, he said. [Rear Adm. Bill Sullivan is the Joint Staff’s vice director for strategic plans and policy.]

What’s more, Iraqi forces are assuming the lead in their areas. This allows coalition forces to take a more supporting role. “There are currently five Iraqi divisions, 25 brigades and 85 battalions that are in the lead in their areas,” Sullivan said. “This is a 32 percent increase since the last report.”

Coalition trainers in Iraq are now focusing their attention on combat support, combat service support capabilities – medical, logistics, maintenance and so on. “That will allow the Iraqis to be more independent in their operations,” Sullivan said. “There is also a focus on improving the capabilities of the Ministry of Defense and the Interior Ministry which is required over the long [haul] for the Iraqis to assume full responsibility.”

And the plan is working; civilian casualties declined dramatically, starting just after the period of this report ended... another point the ever-so-fair elite media report only grudgingly, buried deep within the story. The Times:

The period of the study does not cover either a surge in bloody attacks during the past week nor a relatively low number of civilian casualties earlier in the month; a joint American-Iraqi security campaign in Baghdad is expected to contribute to a relatively low civilian death toll for all of August.

And AP:

Col. Thomas Vail, commander of a 101st Airborne brigade operating in the mostly Shiite areas of eastern Baghdad, told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday that an intensified effort to root out insurgents and quell sectarian violence in the capital is bearing fruit, leading to a decrease in sectarian murders in recent days.

And to be strictly fair ourselves, while Reuters doesn't mention this decline in violence in the article on the report, they do have a separate story out now that discusses the highly encouraging drop in violence the last few weeks -- even taking this week into account:

Iraq deaths down despite new carnage
Sep 1, 2006
by Alastair Macdonald

Violent deaths among civilians in Iraq may have fallen by a quarter last month, statistics indicated on Friday, despite a bloody week in Baghdad that ended with 70 dead in a series of explosions late on Thursday.

The partial data, provided by Iraq's Interior Ministry and based on figures from the Health Ministry, tend to confirm U.S. military confidence that a crackdown in the capital has slowed the bloodletting but also that dozens are still dying every day.

Yet the Times also illustrates an annoying tendency towards dissembling. Exhibit:

The assessment provides bad news on a variety of fronts.

It said that Al Qaeda [in Iraq] is active despite the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, because of the group’s “cellular structure,” that the Sunni insurgency is strong and that militias are undiminished.

The implication is that al-Qaeda in Iraq is just as strong as ever, despite us sending Musab Zarqawi on to meet Allah. But that isn't what the report says at all; in fact, it says precisely the opposite. From Reuters:

Conditions that could lead to a civil war exist in Iraq, the Pentagon said in a new report on Friday, as the "core conflict" has changed into one pitting Sunni Muslims against Shi'ites, with the Sunni Arab insurgency [al-Qaeda in Iraq] overshadowed.

But wait... wouldn't a general civil war be even worse than what Zarqawi was doing? Perhaps; but on the other hand, a civil war is primarily dangerous to Iraq, while Zarqawi -- having a wider vision of jihad via his close connection to Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri -- was more dangerous to the United States.

Since our purpose in invading Iraq was not to liberate Iraqis but rather to protect America, even a civil war in Iraq is preferable to a strong al-Qaeda presence there. But in any event, there is no indication that such a war has started; indeed, even Reuters admits the report makes that clear:

"Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq," the report stated, adding that concern about civil war has increased within the Iraqi civilian population.

"Nevertheless, the current violence is not a civil war, and movement toward a civil war can be prevented," added the report, which said the security environment was at its most complex state since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 that toppled President Saddam Hussein.

The Pentagon story underlines this critical point:

The fact that the national government is functioning is “one relevant data point” that shows Iraq is not engaged in a civil war, he said. ["He" is Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.]

So the real bottom line is that:

  • There was a big surge of sectarian violence in Baghdad --
  • Though it fell short of a civil war --
  • And was partially mitigated by a collapse in al-Qaeda in Iraq's terrorist war --
  • That started with the formation of the government...
  • But a major counteroffensive by Coalition and Iraqi forces in recent weeks has started to quell this violence --
  • Even taking into account several major massacres by Sunnis these last few days.

And brief though that summary is, it's deeper than anything you'll read in today's newspapers.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 1, 2006, at the time of 5:51 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 31, 2006

"The Last Men Standing"

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Progress in Iraq is slow, and sometimes it's difficult to discern any at all. All we hear everyday is that another bomb exploded, killing a few dozen more Iraqis.

So how do we tell whether the overall strategy is working? One way is to see how much of the country is ready to be handed over entirely to Iraqi security forces.

The target goal for new (post-Saddam, post Baath) Iraqi security forces is 325,000. This force will mostly be in place by year's end, according to Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who, as commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq (MNSTC-I), is ultimately responsible for all training in Iraq. This is a remarkable achievment... but even so, training the Iraqi forces has not gone as smoothly as we hoped it would.

David Ignatius, who traveled around Baghdad recently with Gen. John Abizaid, Commander of the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), discusses the huge difficulty of this process (re-paragraphed, to make it readable to ordinary humans):

A visit to Iraq leaves me thinking that the right answer is tough love. We don't need radical new plans for federalism, or sharp deadlines for withdrawing American troops, as anxious members of Congress have recently recommended.

Instead, America and Iraq need to agree on a reasonable timetable for the transfer of military control around the country - and stick to it. When provinces meet the schedule, they should be rewarded with more economic assistance. When they miss their deadlines, they should get fewer resources.

For most of the country, that transfer should be possible within six to 12 months. In Baghdad and in Anbar Province, it will take longer. But everyone should understand that America isn't prepared to keep writing a blank check.

Ignatius doesn't pull any punches; there clearly are some areas where the training is making little headway. And throughout Iraq, we're having a tougher time than anyone expected beating some of this thinking into the heads of Iraqis, who come from such a totally different culture than we:

The Iraqi Army was supposed to take control of Qadisiyah and neighboring Wasit Province from coalition forces in September. But that timetable recently slipped to January or February because of worries that the Iraqis aren't yet fully ready. So Iraqi officials here continue to avoid making tough decisions about resources, and local insurgents keep lobbing mortar rounds into the compound where Polish and other coalition troops are working with the United States to maintain order.

Training Iraqi forces has turned out to be not only the most important task, but the most difficult as well. During major combat ops, Coalition forces rolled across Saddam's pathetic military like a Humvee over a sandbox. But taking territory is one thing; holding it is a totally different animal.

The grand strategy of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has turned out to be the only workable solution: the Coalition cannot stay indefinitely; we cannot write Iraq a "blank check," as Ignatius put it. In the end, only Iraqi forces can hold Iraq and keep it from the terrorists.

But that means that the United States trainers and advisors will have to stay in Iraq long after the regular fighting troops have left. Ignatius continues:

[Lt Gen.] Dempsey tells me that next year he hopes to consolidate [the Iraqi security force], teaching the Iraqis mundane skills such as logistics management that make a modern army work. He quotes what was said of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on the need for steady nerve in this process: "Now is the time for 2 in the morning courage." He says the timing of transition "is an art, not a science"....

"The chances of success are good, if we give ourselves time to succeed," says Abizaid.

The Iraqi forces are well equipped; we've seen to that. Their level of combat skills are high and growing; already, they're the strongest Arab military force in the world.

So what is holding them back? The main problem is the Iraqi soldier's mindset and his lack of dicipline, and these derive directly from military deficiencies in Arab culture. Some soldiers still don't get the idea that they are Iraqi soldiers, not tribal militiamen, says Army Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard in a CENTCOM press release:

Pittard confirmed that 100 members of an Iraqi battalion had refused to redeploy to Baghdad. The soldiers were part of the 10th Iraqi Army Division, in southern Iraq’s Maysan province....

“The majority of this particular unit was Shia, and… the leadership of that unit and their soldiers felt like they were needed down there in Maysan in that province,” [Pittard] said.

In a way Iraq as a country is fictional... and I mean that literally. Civilization has always existed in Mesopotamia (literally, "land between the rivers"); in fact, it's considered the cradle of civilization. But it existed as independent caliphates for centuries, and independent city-states for thousands of years before that. The Ottoman Turkish Empire crushed the caliphates in the late 13th century and ruled the region for six hundred years, until the Turks' ill-fated decision to side with the Germans in the Great War brought the Ottomans down.

The region that would become Iraq was later cobbled together by the British from three Turkish regions: Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra. In the 1930s, the new country of Iraq was granted limited liberty by the Brits, who then reoccupied it during the Even Greater War. A series of coups d'etat in the 1950s and 1960s culminated with the Baath Party seizing power in 1968.

In 1979, Saddam Hussein murdered his way to the top of the Party. But his rule over Iraq itself was sustained by controlling a number of different tribes (with his own tribe from Tikrit being the boss) via bribes, threats, and the occasional bloody massacre as demonstration.

But many "Iraqis" never really had an identity as Iraqis; rather, they thought of themselves as the Tikrit tribe or the Mosul tribe, and beyond that, as Sunni, Shia, or Kurd. Given this centuries-old culture, it's very difficult for many Iraqis to grasp the concept that the army is for Iraq, not just to protect one's own region. In trying to democratize Iraq, we've run straight into the Bronze Age wall of essential primitivism.

But the good news is that only a few soldiers refused to be deployed. Most accepted the necessity... and that means that our years of training are truly starting to have an effect. Just today, I read another story about a successful provincial hand over:

Iraqi forces will take over security of a southern province from coalition troops next month, and will have control of most of the country by the end of the year, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Thursday

Dhi Qar will be the second province to come under the full control of Iraqi troops. British troops handed over control of southern Muthana province in July....

On Wednesday, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, said Iraqi troops were on course to take over security control from U.S.-led coalition forces within the next 12-18 months "with very little Coalition support."

Because of these transfers of power from the Coalition to the Iraqis, our allied forces, such as Italy's 1600 troops and Romania's 628 troops, will be able to leave Iraq by the end of this year.

So it seems we take three steps forward then two back. But that's not surprising, nor a sign of failure, considering that we're doing something nobody has ever done before: we are actually taking a pre-modern people and wrenching them into the "now" -- by patience, by demonstration, and even by what David Ignatius would call "tough love" over the long haul. The CENTCOM release continues:

[G]eneral (Pittard) said he sees a long-term job for Coalition training teams with the Iraqi forces.

“Our major mission is to help develop and support the Iraqi security forces, and of course to advise them.… U.S. forces will be here as long as the Iraqi government wants us here,” he said.

“But I'll tell you … after the majority of U.S. forces leave, we'll still see some level of advisory teams that'll still be here. In fact, I feel like we'll be the last men standing at the end of the U.S. presence here."

Slowly but surely, we are making progress. It's not as fast as we wanted, but it is happening. We've been amazingly patient for a country in such a hurry as America!

It would be a dreadful shame if the Democrats were to take control, then simply cut and run -- just when Iraqis need us the most to achieve full self-sufficiency.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 31, 2006, at the time of 11:50 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 29, 2006

It's Time For Maliki to Sadr Off

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

When Sadr arose from the ashes of his failed rebellion of 2004, still sucking air and still in command of a diminished al-Mahti militia in Najaf, many of us suspected he would continue to make trouble. Two years later, we now know he is the trouble.

But first, some good news

Insurgent attacks within Baghdad province averaged about 23 per day during the past week, Caldwell said. He noted that Baghdad’s average daily murder rate dropped 46 percent from July to August.

“And, if you look to just the past few weeks, from the 7th through the 25th of August,” he said, “the murder rate has dropped 50 percent over the daily rate for July.”

Vehicle-bomb attacks also have decreased in recent weeks, up until the renewed enemy improvised-explosive-device attacks that occurred today and over the past weekend, Caldwell said...

Iraqi and U.S. security forces began a stepped-up security campaign across Baghdad Aug. 8 to curtail deadly sectarian violence that had plagued the Iraqi capital city. As of yesterday, Caldwell said, Iraqi troops, with U.S. forces supporting them, had cleared more than 30,000 buildings, found 19 caches, seized more than 700 weapons and detained 70 suspects.

Also the New York Times slipped up yesterday: they actually reported the enemy deaths during the clash between the Mahdi militia and Iraqi troops. The editor must have been asleep at the switch to let this information slip through; but I'm sure a correction will be up on the Times website shortly...

At least 20 gunmen and 8 civilians were killed Monday when the Iraqi Army battled fiercely for hours with members of a militia loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric, in Diwaniya, Iraqi officials said.

The violence, which one Iraqi general said included militiamen executing Iraqi soldiers in a public square, amounted to the most brazen clashes in recent memory between Iraqi government forces and Mr. Sadr’s militia.... [In this case, "recent memory" means less than two years, one presumes]

So how did this start? Often, readers have the mistaken impression that American and Iraqi soldiers simply set out on patrol, and then they're ambushed by the wily militiamen, like the Americans attacking the hapless British during the Revolutionary War. The way the elite media usually (and deliberately) report the encounters, it's not surprising if Americans think that the enemy always sets the operational tempo, always controls the time and place, and that we're just getting shot up for no good reason.

But that's not how it usually happens at all. In fact, it's the Coalition and the Iraqi Army and police that usually force the issue:

General Ghanimi and other Iraqi Army and police officials said several militias were involved, not just the Mahdi Army. But they said the seed of the violence on Monday was planted a week ago when a roadside bomb they believe was planted by the Mahdi Army killed at least two Iraqi soldiers. Two days later, the Iraqi Army arrested a member of the Mahdi Army....

General Ghanimi, a Sunni, denied torturing the Mahdi detainee, noting that Sadr representatives visited him on Saturday and found him healthy. He said they asked for the accused bomber’s release and when the army refused, fighting broke out as the militias sought [unsuccessfully] to free him from custody.

It was in that fighting, initiated by the Iraqi Army's capture of a top Sadr bombmaker, that the Mahdi militia lost twenty men and were driven off without seizing their prisoner back -- a total defeat.

Gunfire riddled the streets from around 2 a.m. to the early afternoon. Polish troops responsible for the area helped Iraqi soldiers encircle the most violent areas, as American helicopters hovered overhead without dropping bombs, according to an American official who declined to be identified because the information is supposed to be released by the Iraqi Army.

This article does not mention it, but I read in a Japanese newspaper yesterday that ten Iraqi troops were killed; this is a ratio of 2:1 in favor of the Iraqi Army; considering that there are "in excess of 267,000" members of the New Iraqi Army and at most 20,000 members of al-Mahdi, this doesn't end well for Muqtada Sadr.

The problem with Sadr and his Mahdi "army" is not really the strength of the militia but the strength of their political machine within the ruling Shiite coalition. This leads to a lack of political will on the part of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of the Dawa Party to confront Sadr -- who is, in fact, his ally against the other major Shiite group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI:

With sectarian violence soaring, American generals and the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, say that militias are now the single greatest threat to the stability of Iraq and that the Iraqi government must disband them.

But Mr. Maliki has yet to introduce any new policy, and has refrained from strong condemnations of Mr. Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army. Mr. Maliki relies on Mr. Sadr, who is enormously popular among poor Shiites, for political support against rival Shiite politicians. Mr. Sadr controls several ministries and at least 30 seats in Parliament, and he maintains close ties to Mr. Maliki’s political group, the Islamic Dawa Party.

Maliki has objected whenever Coalition troops -- or even the Iraqi Army -- uses heavy force against Sadr and his militia; for example, he denounced the air support we supplied to a raid by the Iraqis on a "Sadr stronghold in Baghdad" in early August.

Yet Mr. Sadr and the Mahdi Army remain an obstacle. Prime Minister Maliki, a Shiite who depends on support from Mr. Sadr’s allies in Parliament, has not confronted Mr. Sadr publicly. Sadr City, a Mahdi bastion, has not been searched or raided in a thorough manner, even though it is one of the capital’s most violent areas.

But his objections are mostly oral and probably for voter consumption. And while he hasn't himself confronted Sadr, he has also not stopped the Iraqi Army from fighting al-Mahdi. There is no indication whether it was Maliki or the Iraqi and Coalition military leaders who have deferred a direct assault on Sadr City until later in the campaign.

Even so, Sadr is still causing problems; and if it turns out that Maliki cannot do it, then perhaps it is time that he should go. But we shall see.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 29, 2006, at the time of 4:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 28, 2006

Disconnections

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

To most of us, the following two statements seem somehow, you know, connected:

  • Deaths of American, Coalition, and Iraqi soldiers, along with civilians, have risen somewhat in the past week or so;
  • The Iraqi Army, with U.S. air support, initiated a major offensive against the mighty al-Mahdi militia of Muqtada Sadr in the past week or so.

But to elite, new-school journalists, these two observations are completely discrete from each other; there is no connection, and the first is only explicable by concluding that we must be losing (or have already lost) the war. Why, what other possible explanation could there be?

A suicide car bomber killed 14 people and wounded 43 outside the Interior Ministry in downtown Baghdad Monday, police said, a day after an upsurge of violence left more than 50 people dead across the country.

In one of the deadliest weekends for the U.S. military in recent months, the U.S. military said seven U.S. soldiers died between Saturday and Sunday night.

Also at least 34 people were killed and dozens injured in gunbattles between Iraqi troops and Shiite militiamen loyal to a popular cleric in the southern city of Diwaniyah, officials said Monday....

[T]he renewed violence undercut Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's claim that government forces were prevailing over insurgents and sectarian extremists.

Despite the deaths, British Defense Minister Des Browne, visiting Baghdad on Monday, said the situation was improving.

Reuters is no better:

Six American soldiers were among more than 60 people killed on Sunday that challenged assertions by Iraqi and U.S. officials that their forces were gaining the upper hand.

Both these quotations contain the same odd meme: that the measure of whether one is "prevailing" is entirely how many of one's own soldiers died that week. No measure of territory captured or secured, plots thwarted, nor provinces handed over to Iraqi forces; not even a comparison count of the number of enemy killed.

Instead, the antique media offers this simplistic formula: if the number of Coalition and civilian casualties rises one week, that is proof that we're no longer "prevailing" or "gaining the upper hand." (Does that mean if it drops the next week, we're back on course? Then how come the media never report that paradigm?)

Back in the real world, we pajama-clad amateurs (I'm actually wearing acceptable streetwear as I type this) realize that when we embark upon a powerful offensive against enemy forces -- in this case, the Iran-backed militia of Sadr -- we're going to incur more casualties than if we just hunkered down in dug-in positions and didn't show an eyebrow above the trenches. Is this really that difficult a concept to grasp?

Is anybody unaware that we lost far more soldiers during the D-Day invasion of Normandy than we did in 1942; but would anyone seriously maintain that we were doing better right after Pearl Harbor than we were while crashing onto Omaha Beach?

Neither of these two stories, nor any others that I read in the MSM, so much as hint at how many of Sadr's men were killed in the same combat. But surely that is needed for the metric above to make any sense: if we lost seven soldiers over the weekend, but we managed to kill several score of the enemy, wouldn't that change the conclusion of whether we're winning or losing?

Evidently not. Nor does the fact that July saw the lowest rate of U.S. troops dying since the Fall of 2003, except for the aberrant month of March, 2006: only 1.48 soldiers, airmen, seamen, or Air Force-men died per day.

In the previous month, it was 2.10 per day; and before that it was 2.55/day; and before that it was 2.73. So far this month, 51 American soldiers and one British soldier have died in Iraq, over a space of 28 days, an average of 1.86 per day -- higher than July, but still well below the average for 2006, for the last two years, and for the entire war (2.27/day).

Civilian and Iraqi Security Force deaths are also down. In July, there was an average of 41.3 per day; but almost all the way through August, the average so far is 31.8 per day, a drop of 23%.

But all it takes is a single flare-up of deaths, due to an offensive initiated by the Iraqis that aims at driving Sadr out of the militia business -- or failing that, out of Iraq itself -- for the news bureaus to begin shrieking and jumping on chairs as if they just spotted a mouse. ("It takes but a single match to set the woods ablaze!")

Can't we get some older correspondents who at least know the most basic characteristics of war?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 28, 2006, at the time of 5:17 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

August 24, 2006

Read All About It! (Just Not In the MSM...)

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

The training of Iraqi security forces, both the New Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police, seems to have fallen off the front pages of the antique media. There is a good reason for this: it's going very well.

"If it bleeds, it leads;" but that means that if it's good news, newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news just aren't interested. Don Henley was right: it's "give us dirty laundry!"

But if you hunt hard enough, you can actually find out what's going on around town... kind of like finding a really good movie hidden among all the theaters showing Snakes On a Plane. Fortunately for you, Big Lizards does the theater-crawling so you don't have to. Here are four great stories about Iraq, all of them very, very good news: one from the Department of Defense's website; one from the website of the Multi-National Force -- Iraq; one from Captain's Quarters (yet another obscure site!); and one from, of all places, USA Today. Enjoy.

Baghdad is still a dangerous place. Just the other day, a group of gunmen open fired on a large crowd of Shiite worshipers, killing 20 and wounding 300. But a quick response from the Iraqi security forces controlled the situation, demonstrating their improved capabilities:

“This was a tremendous demonstration of the increased capabilities of the Iraq security forces and the leadership of the government of Iraq,” Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, a spokesman for Multinational Force Iraq, told reporters during a Baghdad news briefing....

Iraqi security forces quickly responded to these attacks, controlling the situation and killing six of the terrorists and detaining 19 others, Caldwell said....

Iraqi and coalition forces continue to pursue people intent on using violence to impose their beliefs on others. For instance, operations by Iraqi and coalition forces over the past week resulted in the capture of more than 100 known and suspected al Qaeda terrorists and associates and multiple weapons caches....

Iraqi and coalition forces also continue to target death squads. There have been 20 different operations just in the past week conducted specifically against these groups, he said.

Iraqi police forces have had a lot of problems, as we all know. But many months of US training have started to pay off. The first full Iraqi Army division will soon be operating without the mentoring of U.S. advisors, a U.S. Army official who oversees Iraqi security forces’ training; and for the first time, we're seeing the same sort of improvement in the Iraqi police that we saw some time ago in the Iraqi Army:

Brig. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard discussed the formation of the Iraqi National Police and security concerns throughout Iraq in a briefing to reporters....

The INP is a relatively new command in the Ministry of Interior force structure. It was formed from the Police Order Brigade and Commando Brigade.

To become an officer in the INP, a candidate must successfully complete the initial 10-week training program and then train an additional four weeks of follow-up training.

Pittard looked back on his first deployment in Iraq as a point of reference for the Iraqi security forces’ progress, and commented on how much better they are doing now.

“The Iraqis fight and fight well,” he said. “It’s not the same as it was at all two years ago.”

Pacifying Baghdad is still a dangerous job. Policemen are often targeted by both terrorists and radical militiamen. But the Iraqi police department has no shortage of recruits:

More than 500 Iraqi men have joined the police in restive Anbar province -- a focal point of the Sunni Arab insurgency -- in the most successful recruiting drive in the region by U.S. and Iraqi forces, the U.S. military said Tuesday....

U.S. Marines screened thousands of applicants earlier this month in various regions along the western Euphrates River valley before shortlisting the recruits for the Anbar police force, said a statement by the U.S. command…

To combat the insurgency, and sectarian and criminal violence in Baghdad, the Iraqi government and Coalition announced Operation Together Forward. USA Today provides a simplified breakdown of the operation. "The offensive is planned in stages and is designed to avoid an all-out attack. In the first phase, launched July 9, Iraqi security forces positioned checkpoints throughout the city. In the second phase, launched last week, Iraqi forces supported by U.S. troops began isolating and clearing parts of the city block by block. Iraqi security forces will remain to provide security once areas are cleared. When areas are stable, the government will bring economic assistance into blighted neighborhoods." This strategy is essentially what the Marines call the "3 Block War."

Operation Together Forward is focusing on four of the most violent neighborhoods of Baghdad: Doura, Mansour, Shula and Azamiyah. These are neighborhoods where the sectarian violence has been at its worst. Coalition forces have begun operations in Doura and Ameriya. In both cases, the neighborhoods were cordoned off, and each building was searched. "Kilometer after kilometer of barriers emplaced, building what some may call the semblance of a gated community, affording them greater security with ingress and egress routes established and manned by Iraqi security forces with coalition forces in support," as the Multinational Forces - Iraq press release describes the operation in Doura.

A similar strategy of cordon, search, secure and rebuild was successfully executed in Tal Afar, and is currently being executed in the Sunni insurgent stronghold city of Ramadi. Tal Afar, with populations of 170,000 was secured in less than a month, while Ramadi, with a population of 400,000 is still up for grabs.

And here is the new face of the Iraqi police:

The Humvee has barely rolled to a stop, and Iraqi army Col. Talib Abdul Razzaq is already out of the vehicle.

He moves like a politician, stopping on the sidewalk to playfully cuff a young boy on the head and joke with a man selling shoes. He quizzes several people about violence and militias in the neighborhood. Most say the streets have been quiet.

"I'm trying to make people believe in the Iraqi army," Razzaq says at the next stop, where a sidewalk vendor gives him a complimentary sandwich from his cart. "They will feel more safe." Razzaq hands the sandwich to an aide and keeps moving.

Twice a day, Razzaq patrols the troubled neighborhoods in his battalion's sector of Baghdad. He's checking on his troops, who have set up checkpoints in the area. And he's listening to what merchants, local leaders and ordinary people have to say about security in their neighborhoods.

"I am an officer, but my job is like a tribal leader," says Razzaq, who in this polarized society refuses to say whether he is a Shiite Muslim or a Sunni.

So there you have it; we promise, we deliver. I wonder -- how many of these stories made the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post? Maybe they were too busy telling us how Iraq was a lead-lined catastrophe, an utter disaster, how it has collapsed into a full-blown civil war "by any definition" (just like 1864!); so we should just declare defeat and redeploy over the horizon... say, in the Philippines.

I guess tales like these just don't fit The Story.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 24, 2006, at the time of 4:56 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

Peaceful, Easy Baghdad Feeling?

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Has anybody else heard anything about this before today? Or on any other news service besides what we used to call "al-Reuters?" Reuters reports that Baghdad has seen a marked decline in deadly violence in the past fortnight:

Violence in Baghdad has declined in the past two weeks and all but ended in some formerly deadly neighborhoods, the U.S. military said in a cautiously upbeat report on Tuesday on a major security clampdown in the city....

A day after President George W. Bush said he was concerned about civil war and was not about to withdraw U.S. troops, the chief military spokesman in Iraq said he saw no sign of such a conflict but U.S. forces were focusing on breaking sectarian "death squads" from both Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim communities.

Twenty-two raids in the past week against such groups in the capital had led to 37 arrests, Major General William Caldwell told a news conference. He presented statistics showing a 16 percent drop in the daily average of attacks in Baghdad since August 7, at 21 compared to 25 in the preceding two months.

"What we have seen in August is a downturn," Caldwell said, two weeks after beefed up U.S. forces and thousands of Iraqi troops and police launched a new phase of what Iraqi and U.S. leaders have called a make-or-break operation to pacify Baghdad.

The decline is specifically in those areas that were hardest hit by horrific attacks:

Attacks in Dora had dropped to virtually none from 20 to 30 a day, [Caldwell] said, after U.S. and Iraqi forces flooded the area, forcing out militants and sought to win over people with offers of cash and help with municipal projects like collecting trash.

"Most of the shops are still closed," 30-year-old laborer Sabah al-Shujairi said of his part of Dora. "But security is getting better. Before, we used to hear gunshots all over but now you rarely notice a thing. There is a relative calm."

And for those still believing that the perennial leakers of classified information are merely public-spirited whistleblowers with no political axe to juggle, let's read between the lines here:

Figures leaked from the Pentagon last week indicated that the number of bombs planted to hit troops or civilians in July was almost double that in January, a record since the invasion. But Caldwell said there had been a decline since last month.

I notice that the leakers rushed to let news organizations know that July was the bloodiest month in some time, with a death rate that exceeded 100 Iraqi civilians per day; but those same leakers -- still unlocated, still with the same access to new figures -- found no particular urgency in leaking figures showing a significant decline in the death toll this month.

I wonder why not?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 22, 2006, at the time of 3:39 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

August 21, 2006

Politics by Other Means

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Sachi

Bill Roggio at Counterterrorism blog outlines how al-Qaeda in Iraq is trying to win the hearts and minds of Sunni Iraqis by bribes and threats.

The late Musab Zarqawi tarnished the image of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda in Iraq by killing too many innocent Iraqis... and often personally cutting off the heads of victims. Even Sunni Iraqis, who had seen Sadam Hussein's treatment of the Shia, were nauseated by the brutality of al-Qaeda.

Zarqawi's successor -- Abu Ayyub al-Masri -- has recognized that killing innocent Iraqis does not gain popularity for al-Qaeda. Recruitment for suicide bombers is not meeting the quota; although they can kill people by the bus load, threats alone are not enough to control the Iraqi people. In order for them to turn Iraq into terrorist haven, they need support from the local community.

In other words, al-Qaeda in Iraq has decided to enter politics. Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, spokesman for multi-naitonal force, explains:

The sectarian violence in and around Baghdad defines the framework of the ongoing conflict in Iraq. Within Baghdad, death squads and terrorists are locked into a mutually reinforcing cycle of sectarian strife, with Sunni and Shi'a extremists portraying themselves as the defenders of their respective sectarian groups.

In regards to al-Qaida in Iraq, their leadership has outlined the end state towards which their propaganda efforts are currently working. Specifically, as given to us by those who have been detained over the last two months, they seek to portray al-Qaida in Iraq as a legitimate political organization to be viewed as the alternative to the legitimate, duly-elected government of Iraq.

Their primary goal in discrediting the government of Iraq is the expulsion of the U.S. from Iraq in order to remove support for the government of Iraq and impose themselves, al-Qaida in Iraq, as the power.

This is yet another reason why it is critical that we stay at least long enough to build up not only the New Iraqi Army (already ready to assume complete authority in 16 of Iraq's 18 provinces), but also the Interior Ministry forces -- the Iraqi police. Once both these groups, plus the national government, are able to function entirely on their own, we can pull most of our troops out, leaving only a small force to assist the Iraqis if need be and also to serve as a platform from which to strike elsewhere in the region.

In mirror-image form, it is equally critical for al-Qaeda to boot us out before the job is done. But aside from influencing the Democratic Party with predigested propaganda distributed through the elite media, how exactly does al-Qaeda plan to acheive this goal?

Al-Qaida in Iraq is making a concerted effort to gain legitimacy by marketing itself to the Iraqi people as a credible, helpful organization that appeals to Iraqis in desperate social and economic situations while projecting a civic-minded image. [That is, by doing in Iraq exactly what Hezbollah does in Lebanon: replace government assistance with their own, so that Iraqis will come to think of al-Qaeda as their "tribe."] They have produced propaganda that blames coalition forces and the Iraqi government for problems such as unemployment, security, government corruption, gas prices and the lack of power, in hopes that this will empower them to take on the role as their protectorate....

In regard to recruitment, al-Qaida in Iraq offers money, cell phones and vehicles to prospective recruits. These items appear somewhat attractive to young men. However, placement and access into the inner circles is won through personal associations, demonstrated loyalty and vetted experience. Key personalities are known associates of trusted members. Abu Uzman (sp) stated that his recruiting plan for the Umar (sic) Brigade relied on his associates talking with people they knew, who then talked to others and so on.

Americans and Coalition forces by and large destroyed the Sunni "resistance" movements against the occupying forces; however, new sectarian violence, instigated by al-Qaeda and fueled by Muqtada Sadr and his al-Mahdi "Army," cannot be so easily wished away.

To create a stable Iraq, we need the support of Iraqi Sunnis, as well as the Shia; Iraq cannot be seen by the Sunnis as a sectarian State. Too, we must be vigilant against al-Qaeda propaganda, and we must purge Shiite extremists; in other words, Sadr must die and the Mahdi Militia be obliterated. Maj. Gen. Caldwell concludes thus:

However, Iraqi security forces, with coalition forces in support, continue to degrade the al-Qaida in Iraq network by removing key to mid-level leadership and aggressively targeting the internal foreign fighter facilitator networks.

As al-Qaida in Iraq attempts to recover from this degradation, they continue to be a primary instigator of sectarian violence in Iraq. A significant portion of detained terrorists are providing clear, actionable intelligence for Iraqi and coalition forces to continue the methodical, deliberate efforts to eliminate terrorism here in Iraq. Iraqi and coalition forces will continue to work closely with each other and with the Iraqi citizens to establish peace and security throughout Iraq.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 21, 2006, at the time of 4:00 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

August 12, 2006

Good News from Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Mysterious Orient
Hatched by Sachi

Recently, I found myself getting too discouraged to write about good news from Iraq -- simply because I hear too much about bloodshed everyday. But then it got me thinking: hasn't it always been like this? Wasn't this the very reason I decided to start reporting good news in the first place?

Yes, folks, there is plenty to report. Just because we don't hear much about it in the elite media doesn't mean there isn't any.

First, some news from Samawa. Don't bother following the link -- it's all in Japanese! I'll translate it for you:

Orphanage Completed With Private Donations
August 9, 2006, Asahi.com

In Samawa, in southern Iraq, an orphanage was completed using private donations collected from Japan....

The facility is 360 square meters and can hold 240 students. The Lions Club in Saitama prefecture collected the "lion's share" of the 23 million yen building cost ($200,000)....

According to Mr. Ohno [of the Middle East Research Institute of Japan], Iraqi orphans were normally raised by their tribes. But due to the lengthy war, the economical situation had gotten difficult. "It is not safe in Iraq. There are too many deaths. I wanted to help people who are trying so desperately to live," Mr. Ohno said.

On another front, it was widely reported that after three years of deployment, the Japanese Self-Defense Force withdrew from Iraq. However, the Japanese Air Force is still there, still transporting supplies and wounded. Japanese forces have not left Iraq! Not yet, at least.

Meanwhile in Baghdad and Ramadi, US and Iraqi forces captured 60 Shiia militiamen and killed 34 Sunni insurgents. From Reuters :

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. troops rounded up 60 suspected militants overnight in a security clampdown to stem violence in the capital and killed 26 insurgents in a rebel Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad [they mean Ramadi -- the Mgt.]....

The sweep through the southern Baghdad district of Arab Jabour targeted a suspected bomb-making cell linked to attacks across the city of seven million.

"The group has been reported to be planning and conducting training for future attacks, like the attack in Mahmudiya July 17 that killed 42," the U.S. military said in a statement.

In a separate operation in a south Baghdad district called Um al-Maalif, Iraqi soldiers killed eight militants.

Beefed-up U.S. and Iraqi forces this week began a systematic operation to claim back Baghdad's most dangerous rebel strongholds in an attempt to restore security and shore up confidence in the new Shi'ite-led government.

We are completing a lot of great jobs in Iraq... let's keep it up! Murtha or no Murtha, we won't cut and run. "No retreat, no surrender."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, August 12, 2006, at the time of 11:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 29, 2006

Good News from the Front Lines - News Roundup

Afghan Astonishments , Good News! , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Sachi

There is a lot of good news from the two main fronts, Iraq and Afghanistan; but you're not likely to have heard of any of these small victories unless you read a lot of milblogs.

First, Iraqi Army forces took down six death squad suspects. From ThreatsWatch:

Iraqi Army forces conducted a pre-dawn raid in Baghdad on July 25, capturing six targeted insurgents, all of whom are believed to be involved in ‘death squad’ activities.

As coalition force advisers looked on, Iraqi forces raided an objective in southwest Baghdad consisting of four separate buildings and captured the cell leader and five other key members of an insurgent ‘punishment committee.’

Iraqi forces also seized two AK-47 assault rifles, one pistol, and one set of body armor.

The operation occurred without incident; there were no Iraqi or coalition force casualties.

Hm... that's not good: we captured six bad guys but didn't lose any of ours. Does this violate the Fairness Doctrine?

Second, "Capt. B" at Milblogs reports that the U.S. Marines rescued three kidnap victims in Fuhuylat, Iraq:

Marines from 1st Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment rescued three hostages and uncovered a large weapons cache, including a fully-assembled suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, during Operation Spotlight.

The intelligence-driven operation was conducted alongside Iraqi Army soldiers from 2nd and 4th Brigades, 1st Iraqi Army Division recently. The three hostages were personal assistants of Dr. Rafa Hayid Chiad Al-Isawi, an Iraqi government official in Baghdad. They were held by al-Qaeda insurgents for 27 days....

Marines also recovered IEDs and IED-making material, mortar tubes and round, artillery rounds, machine guns, bulk explosives, anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, AK-47 assault rifles, small-arms ammunition and video cameras.

I think I can hear Sen. Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace, 100%) already, calling our Marines bullies for not giving the Iraqis a chance. At least, given recent Democratic comments about Israel's "disproportionate" response, I assume that's what Reid would say, if he knew about this raid. Fortunately, he gets his news from the elite media, so he hasn't heard anything. At all.

The situation in Iraq is serious, but Iraqi forces are stepping up to the plate. Alongside American forces, they are raiding and arresting bad guys, not caring whether they're Shia death squad or al-Qaeda combatants.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, coalition forces killed seven terrorists who attacked them. From CENTCOM:

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan – A Coalition patrol killed seven extremists on July 25 after they attacked Coalition forces in the Garmser District of Helmand Province.

There were no Coalition casualties in the fight. The Coalition unit received small arms, rocket-propelled grenade, machine gun and sniper fire from a group of extremists. The Coalition force returned fire, killing five insurgents

Later in the same area, insurgents fired small arms at an Afghan National Army mortar team, with a Coalition embedded tactical training team attached. The combined unit responded with machine gun fire and killed the remaining two insurgents.

“If enemy extremists fire upon Coalition forces, we will respond with deadly accuracy,” said Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, Combined Joint Task Force -76 spokesman. “If they attack Afghan civilians, we will respond just as forcefully. We remain committed to engaging any threats to the peaceful future of the Afghan people.”

Afghan National Security forces continue to maintain a strong presence in the area of Garmser and provide security that will enable reconstruction and humanitarian aid projects to be delivered that will improve the lives of the Afghan people.

I don't know, it sounds awfully disproportionate to me: we inflicted seven deaths, six captures, and released three hostages from those poor, honest terrorists just doing their jobs (kidnapping and terrorizing, butchering the innocent, the usual stuff), without losing a single one of our guys.

Is that allowed under the New international Proportional-War Theory?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, July 29, 2006, at the time of 6:31 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 10, 2006

Not Puppets

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Today, John Hinderaker of Power Line posted a heart-felt demand that we find and execute the terrorist swine who first killed Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas Tucker in Iraq and then mutilated their bodies:

In this instance, [President Bush] should put that reticence behind him and commit the full resources of this nation to avenging our soldiers' murders. And I'm not talking about capturing the perpetrators and feeding them three religiously appropriate meals a day in Guantanamo Bay.

With great respect and unaccustomed humility, I fully understand exactly how he feels; but I think that's about the worst damned idea I've heard in years.

Weak countries are ruled by national sentiments and emotions. Great ones are driven by national interests.

I understand Hindrocket's "cold fury," and he has every right to be furious: these jihadis behave like rabid dogs, then turn around and demand the full panoply of "rights" that properly belong only to actual prisoners of war from countries that fight with honor -- not dishonorable, subhuman targeters of the innocent and eaters of the dead. Still and all, it would be a mistake of almost cosmic proportions for Bush to follow John's advice this time.

Not because of any moral issue. I would happily put a pistol against any terrorist's head and squeeze the trigger, and I would not feel even a single, momentary pang of guilt or grief. However, in this case, committing the "full resources of this nation" to hunting down these barnyard animals is wrong for the same reason that torturing captured terrorists is wrong: because it's an ineffective and counterproductive way to fight this war.

I don't want to lop off the terrorists' hands; I want to waterboard them -- because that actually works.

Right now, the terrorists do not control the targets of the Coalition. They do not control the tempo; they don't control the time, the tools, or the level of tension. They control nothing; they have been reduced to being purely reactive... we pick a time, place, and target to launch an attack; the terrorists try to survive, then try to retaliate.

But they can't, not really; they cannot stand up to us in battle, and they know it. Instead, they're reduced to the cowardly shame of attacking defenseless Moslem women and children; and the whole ummah now considers them a sick in-joke, a thing that is either nauseating, pathetic, or laughable.

Terrorists would love nothing better than to become relevant again, to control the world around them. And what Hindrocket proposes would have exactly that effect: whenever terrorists feel neglected and ignored, all they need do is mutilate a U.S. soldier's corpse, and we rush to "commit the full resources of this nation to avenging our soldiers' murders."

It's structurally similar to paying ransom: we become puppets on a jihadi string, performing a herky-jerky jitterbug whenever they yank on the cords. "Look how weak and impotent the Crusaders are!" they will cry; "we can draw them here, we can draw them over there, we can tie them up for month after month!"

Far better, but very difficult, to do just what President Bush is doing: ignore provocation and go about the inexorable business of grinding them up like summer sausage... at a place and time of our choosing, at a tempo that we dictate, using whatever tools and allies we select. This response takes guts and willpower; but it's frighteningly effective for whomever has the tenacity to see it through.

That is the greatest revenge and will hurt them far more than a bootless hunt through the wilderlands of Anbar and Ninewah, which would probably be about as effective as our futile hunt for Osama bin Laden through the crags and clefts of the Tora Bora Mountains.

We have control right now; we are the wind, they are the sand. Like the old Outer Limits TV show:

We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We can reduce the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear.

That is what I want to see, John. That is why we are prevailing now and will continue until our job here is done.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 10, 2006, at the time of 7:47 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

July 7, 2006

Great News Just Keeps On Coming in Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Iraqi Security Forces, accompanied by U.S. air power, captured two high-ranking commanders in Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Militia yesterday -- though one of the captured lieutenants may have been trying to create his own militia. The ISF also killed or wounded more than thirty of Sadr's fighters.

The two unfortunates are "Abu" Diraa, captured in eastern Baghdad, and Adnan al-Unaybi, arrested 60 miles south of Baghdad, near Hillah. On a cheery note:

An al-Sadr aide, Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji, denounced the Baghdad raid, saying 11 civilians were killed and dozens wounded as U.S. jets fired on the area as people were sleeping on their roofs because of the searing summer temperatures and electricity shortages.

Perhaps Rep. John Murtha (D-PA, 75%) will rise, balancing precariously on his hind legs, and demand an immediate court martial for the pilots and flight officers who committed these war crimes against humanity.

And on an even more cheerier note:

There were no casualties among U.S. or Iraqi soldiers, the Americans said.

There, that's what I'm talking about -- a kill ratio of infinity to one. All right, as you were. Just thought you'd like to hear about these raids. If we don't point these things out -- who will?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 7, 2006, at the time of 4:35 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 2, 2006

Teleblogging 1: Finding Even More of the Wrong Kind of WMDs In Iraq

Iraq Matters , Weapons of Mass Disputation
Hatched by Dafydd

Proving themselves utterly without shame or humility, American forces have insisted upon finding even more chemical weapons in Iraq:

The U.S. military has found more Iraqi weapons in recent months, in addition to the 500 chemical munitions recently reported by the Pentagon, a top defense intelligence official said on Thursday.

Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, did not specify if the newly found weapons were also chemical munitions. But he said he expected more.

"I do not believe we have found all the weapons," he told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, offering few details in an open session that preceded a classified briefing to lawmakers.

He may not have specified, but I doubt he would have bothered telling the Armed Services Committee about finding a cache of AK-47s, IEDs, or cherry bombs -- which he knows nobody on that committee cares about.

At the Armed Services Committee, Maples also asserted that the rockets and artillery rounds that had been found were produced in the 1980s and could not be used as intended.

Ah -- this must be what the pooh-poohers mean by saying (in Mark Steyn's memorable phraseology), that no matter how much WMD we find, it's always the wrong kind. LG Maples' key qualifier, of course, is "used as intended."

Sadly, such autonomic gainsaying is not the exclusive reaction of Democrats or even of Democrats, the State Department, and the CIA; now we have to add the top brass at the Pentagon to the list of those who find it more urgent to find nothing than to find something, even if something is actually there to be found. (I'm probably being too harsh to LG Maples. Consider him a stand-in for the generals I really want to yell at.)

For example, even if the WMD found could not be used "as intended" (that is, being fired from and artillery piece), could it be used not-as-intended to cause death and destruction anyway? Judge for yourself. After first enunciating the soundbite above, he added the following, which completely undercuts the obvious point of the first statement:

If the chemical agent, sarin, was [sic, subjunctive case] removed from the munitions and repackaged, it could be lethal. Its release in a U.S. city, in certain circumstances, would be devastating, Maples said.

Devastating! So is it the wrong kind of WMD or the right kind? To me, it sounds like the right WMD but the wrong delivery system... and I'm very, very glad we got it away from the terrorists before they repackaged it.

Oh, and an addendum. In the category "shouldn't there be an IQ test before someone can run for Congress," here is the entry from Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA, 90%):

"It's very difficult to characterize these as the imminent threat weapons that we were told we were looking for," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a California Democrat.

It has become a full-time profession, with a corner office and a pension plan, to inform Democrats that indeed, Bush never once said that Iraq posed an "imminent threat." Those words were never uttered -- except by shifty politicians and dunderheaded journalists looking to score a cheap knockout of a straw man.

For those who have forgotten, here is what Bush actually said about imminent threats:

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

Readers Digest translation: we can't wait until Iraq becomes an imminent threat, because by then it will be too late to stop it. So let's strike now -- when the threat is not yet imminent.

That is why we needed a new doctrine, the Bush Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Warfare. If Iraq really were an imminent threat, attacking it would have been uncontroversial. It was controversial precisely because we admitted the threat was as yet inchoate -- like a felon stocking up on heavy-duty firearms -- and argued that in today's world, an imminent threat is a realized attack, because once you discover it, it's too late to stop it.

Got it now, Ms. Tauscher?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 2, 2006, at the time of 5:10 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 30, 2006

Mahdi Militia + Iranians = Big Fat Target

Good News! , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Here is an interesting story to wake up to yesterday morning:

Iraqi and U.S. troops battled Shi'ite militiamen in a village northeast of Baghdad on Thursday, and witnesses and police said U.S. helicopters bombed orchards to flush out gunmen hiding there.

Iraqi security officials said Iranian fighters had been captured in the fighting, in which a sniper shot dead the commander of an Iraqi quick reaction force and two of his men. They did not say how the Iranians had been identified.

Let's run through the points of interest:

  • Iraqi Security Forces (police) fighting side by side with Coalition (American) troops. Well, not too interesting; such cooperation has become so routine, it's almost blasé.
  • ...Fighting against a Shiite militia: in fact, Muqtada Sadr's mighty al-Mahdi "Army."

Now that's worth some attention: one of the most urgent tasks facing the Shia-dominated government in Iraq, under Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, has been to persuade Sunni semi-rejectionists that even though the prime minister and the interior minister are both Shia, the country's police forces will still confront the Shiite militias that have terrorized and butchered so many Sunni.

We know that the Iraqi Army and the Interior-Ministry police forces are willing to go toe-to-toe with the Sunni terrorists; but until the ordinary Iraqi Sunni -- like, for example, Mohammed and Omar at Iraq the Model -- can be persuaded that the government cares about their lives, too, it will be very hard to reel in the Sunni hardliners.

This battle will go a long way towards reassuring the Sunni that the police are not just militias with uniforms.

  • And among the militiamen captured were a number of Iranian fighters. This is a very important discovery, since it's clear evidence that Iran is meddling with its neighbor to the west... and also more evidence that Muqtada Sadr, regardless of his denials, is in fact in the Ayatollah's pocket.

This is really great news, as the Iranian deception is coming unraveled. With every passing month, it becomes clearer that Iran is directly trying to seize control of the Shiite areas of Iraq... and harder for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei to pretend otherwise, even to "impartial" European observers.

The story exhibits hallmarks of slovenly writing and muddled thinking:

[The Interior Ministry forces] did not say how the Iranians had been identified.

Uh... perhaps because they spoke Arabic with a Persian accent and were carrying Iranian identification cards? Really, doesn't Reuters suspect that Iraqi Arabs can identify Persians in their midst? They really are very different in language, culture, and even food.

The United States and Britain have accused Shi'ite Iran of meddling in Iraq's affairs and providing military assistance to Iraq's pro-government Shi'ite militias. However, there have been few instances of Iranians actually being captured inside Iraq.

Some Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, are quick to label Shi'ite fighters as Iranian agents. And among the militants are Iraqis who grew up in refugee camps in Iran, speak Iranian-accented Arabic and, in some cases, carry Iranian identity papers.

If they grew up in Iran, speak Persian (Farsi) as their native language, and have Iranian idenfication cards... then what the heck makes them Iraqi? Their ancestory? It's amazing to see the mainstream media embrace the racist position that one's nationality is completely determined by one's blood, not one's allegiance. These fighters are Iranian in outlook, language, and citizenship... but Reuters clearly thinks of them as "Iraqis" because that is the nationality of their progenitors!

Does that mean that my nationality is actually Polish, German, and Welsh, instead of American? With this attitude, it's no wonder that so many lefties are resurrecting the old libel about Jews having "divided loyalties." "The blood is the key!" as a mad scientist in some old horror movie said (I should ask Brad Linaweaver which flick).

If it looks, quacks, and smells like a duck, it's probably not a lampshade.

And of course, this being the antique media, the Ubiquitous Invisible Analyst makes an appearance:

Many analysts are skeptical of the feasibility of disarming large paramilitary groups linked to the most powerful political parties. Without that, however, persuading the Sunni minority to lay down their arms will also be difficult.

And these analysts' names are...? Whoops, sorry, can't reveal our anonymous sources. That's an important secret that we'll never reveal. But we have a great deal on some classified intelligence information!

But the big story is the cooperation between Americans and Iraqis under the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry duking it out with Shiite militiamen -- and capturing Iranian infiltrators in the bargain. All else is dicta.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 30, 2006, at the time of 6:18 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 28, 2006

Samarra Bomber Captured?

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Omar at Iraq the Model reports that the Iraqi Security Forces (we don't know whether it was the army or the police or both) have captured a terrorist who has confessed to bombing the Golden Mosque at Samarra -- the single terrorist attack that stands out for its perfidy, the vile, naked attempt to ignite a civil war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq. (Hat tip to the Belmont Club.)

In a news conference currently being broadcast on TV, Iraq's national security advisor Muwaffak al-Rubaie says Iraqi security forces arrested Abu Qudama al-Tunisi in a raid in the suburb of al-Dhuloiya north of Baghdad.

15 other foreign terrorists were killed in the raid according to al-Rubaie.

The terrorist of Tunisian origin confessed that he was responsible for the attack that destroyed the Askari Shrine in Samarra back in February 22 of this year.

Muwaffak al-Rubaie said the security forces are still searching for Haitham al-Badri who is believed to be the field commander under whom Abu Qudama was operating.

If this is true, then this will probably rival the death of Musab Zarqawi, he should only rot in hell, alava shalom, tied for second behind the capture of Saddam Hussein -- as far as Iraqi Shia are concerned. Qudama's trial (assuming he makes it that far) should be illuminating indeed: did the bomber himself know the possible consequences of such a terrible attack?

Did the Sunni "rank and file" of al-Qaeda in Iraq -- foreign or Iraqi, they're still Sunni -- actually want to see a civil war in which, not only would tens of thousands of Iraqis die (perhaps hundreds of thousands)... but which the Sunni were virtually certain to lose badly? I thought that was one of the most insane acts in this entirely mad campaign of arbitrary assassination and meaningless mayhem.

[Iraq National Security Advisor Muwaffak] al-Rubaie described Al-Badri is a terrorist with connections to elements in the past regime who later became one of the leaders of Ansar al-Sunna and later al-Qaeda organization in Iraq....

Al-Rubaie described ho the bombing was organized and says details were taken from the confessions of the captured Abu Qudama:

4 Saudis, two Iraqis and one Tunisian entered the mosque at night, handcuffed and locked up the guards in a room and spent the night planting the bombs all around the mosque. Next day they kidnapped and murdered Atwar Bahjat while she was trying to cover the news of the bombing.

Bahjat reported for al-Arabiya.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 28, 2006, at the time of 3:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Spare This Man Or We'll Shoot This Country

Iraq Matters , Laughable Lawyers
Hatched by Dafydd

Former American Ramsey Clark, now one of Saddam Hussein's defense lawyers, threatened more murder, mayhem, and anarchy in the streets unless his client is spared the death penalty:

Executing Saddam Hussein would fuel more sectarian violence in Iraq, a U.S. lawyer for the deposed Iraqi leader said on Tuesday.

"That execution would inflame a country that's already incinerating," former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said. "I hope the American people can realize that if there is ever a time to call for an end to executions, it is in this case."

"It'd sure be a shame if something were to, you know, happen to ya... capice?"

Well, now that Ramsey Clark's courtroom antics include blatant extortion -- publicly signalling the Fedayeen Saddam that a massive show of violence might spare the Dear Leader's life -- what is the next level of basement he can fall into? Will he smuggle an IED into the courthouse and hold everyone hostage unless his client is released? Or will he merely tamper with the evidence, as his colleague Leslie Abramson did in the Menendez Brothers trial?

How many defense lawyers suffer from some variant of Stockholm Syndrome, getting so involved in defending their clients -- guilty or innocent -- that they actually become accessories after the fact themselves?

At the end of this trial, I would dearly love to see Counselor Clark arrested... by the Iraqis. After all, we try the consigliere of the Mafia family right alongside the Don; why should the Iraqis let slip this golden ticket to do the world such a favor?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 28, 2006, at the time of 3:20 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 27, 2006

Iraqi Marsh 60% Restored

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

We have been following the progress of the Iraqi Great Salt Marsh, which was systematically drained in the early 1990s by Saddam Hussein as punishment for the Shiite rebellion shortly after the Gulf War. We talked about it before in Swamp Samurai and Swamp Samurai On the Marsh.



Iraq Great Salt Marsh: 1985 to 2000

Shrinkage of the Iraq Marsh: 1985 area (red) to 2000 area (blue)

BBC News, the only elite news source following up on this issue, has an update. According to Abdul Latif Rashid, Iraq's minister for water resources, 60% of the area has been restored. BBC reporters have overflown the area, and this is what they saw:

There were fisherman easing their narrow boats along reedbeds.

In places, we saw traditional marsh Arab villages, floating on thick mats of reeds, water buffalo wallowing alongside.

It sounds pretty good. But here comes "the big but": BBC continues: "the reality for the Marsh Arabs of today is not quite as romantic. Although the water is coming back, they have little else."

Of course, this is the antique media after all; they can't talk about good news without "balancing it" with a leavening of bad:

The government says it has now allocated millions of dollars for the marsh region - aimed at giving people "better services, education, health care and communications", says Mr Rashid, the minister.

But Kamel Mezher and other villagers say they have seen none of these funds....

[T]here are complaints [substantiated? the Beeb doesn't say] that some of the money set aside for marshland development has been misused.

When we are dealing with a country like Iraq, we must face the reality that their local politicians, civil servants, and ordinary Achmeds and Mohammeds are corrupt and incompetent. We shouldn't imagine that everything will run smoothly; it's a miracle when it runs at all!

Violence between small tribes, a lack of developmental planning, and misuse of funds hover always in peripheral vision, waiting to rise up and engulf any good project. For example, how does Iraq balance the needs of real people with the "needs" of nature?

Mr Rashid says some areas could be declared as a national park, to protect the unique wildlife....

He also talks of plans to allow small scale industry in some areas, to provide jobs. He denies there would be a conflict between "environment and development".

Despite the problems, I am encouraged by the progress. If they're to the point of arguing about preserving the environment versus developing the land, that is definitely good news indeed.



Marsh Arabs    Marsh Dwellings

Arab fisherman on the Great Salt Marsh (L); typical Marsh-Arab village (R).

And that's still a pretty picture, too.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 27, 2006, at the time of 11:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 23, 2006

Could We Start Again, Please?

Iraq Matters , Weapons of Mass Disputation
Hatched by Dafydd

Is it Captain Kidd's treasure-hold or Al Capone's vault?

At last, the New York Times has finally deigned to notice that we found a huge bunch of chemical munitions -- WMD -- in Iraq... though only in the context of a story about "hobbyists" who keep alive the search for WMD. Amazingly enough, however, once you finish wincing at the patronizing theme, the story itself isn't half bad. Maybe only 0.25 bad.

Mr. [Dave] Gaubatz, an earnest, Arabic-speaking investigator who spent the first months of the war as an Air Force civilian in southern Iraq, has said he has identified four sites where residents said chemical weapons were buried in concrete bunkers.

The sites were never searched, he said, and he is not going to let anyone forget it.

The Times, they are a-changin'. But why now? I suspect the reasoning of "Pinch" Sulzberger and Bill Keller now embraces two points:

  1. As more and more WMD are found in Iraq, it becomes untenable to continue pretending not to see it. Eventually, the logo of the New York Times will have to encorporate the famous three monkeys.
  2. But -- if the Iraq Survey Group failed to find WMD that was there to be found, and if Bush ran the CIA (via his appointee, George Tenet), hence the ISG... then the "miserable failure" to find WMD can be laid at Bush's feet.

The Times has evidently arrived at the conclusion that the meme "Bush lied about Hussein having WMD" is pretty much played out... but there's still a vein of pure gold in the meme "Bush lied about Hussein not having WMD."

Admittedly, the second meme has more truth to it than the first; the only fly in the soup is that the Democrats, by pushing Meme 1 for so long and so stridently, have disqualified themselves from ever arguing Meme 2: they would have to denounce each other as liars before they could attack President Bush.

Still, that may be too subtle a point for young Pinch, as it requires a universe more than seven days wide, from three days in the past to three days in the future, with a day of rest every "today." (And Bill Keller is reportedly on vacation, ducking the angry response to the Times having outed yet another program to track terrorists.) Certainly, the Times manages both to disparage the WMD hunters while still embracing their main arguments:

Some politicians are outspoken allies in Mr. Gaubatz's cause. He is just one of a vocal and disparate collection of Americans, mostly on the political right, whose search for Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons continues....

The proponents include some members of Congress. Two Republicans, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania held a news conference on Wednesday to announce that, as Mr. Santorum put it, "We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

American intelligence officials hastily scheduled a background briefing for the news media on Thursday to clarify that. Hoekstra and Mr. Santorum were referring to an Army report that described roughly 500 munitions containing "degraded" mustard or sarin gas, all manufactured before the 1991 gulf war and found scattered through Iraq since 2003.

Such shells had previously been reported and do not change the government conclusion, the officials said. [That is, discovering 500 unaccounted-for chemical munitions in Iraq does not change the conclusion that there were no unaccounted-for chemical munitions in Iraq. -- the Mgt.]

Even Fox News gets some favorable press in the press:

Such official statements are unlikely to settle the question for the believers, some of whom have impressive credentials. They include a retired Air Force lieutenant general, Thomas G. McInerney, a commentator on the Fox News Channel who has broadcast that weapons are in three places in Syria and one in Lebanon, moved there with Russian help on the eve of the war.

And they have even had some successes, at least in moving the administration off of its parrot-like repetition that there were no WMDs in Iraq:

The weapons hunters were encouraged in February when tapes of Mr. Hussein's talking with top aides about his arsenal were released at the Intelligence Summit, a private gathering in northern Virginia of 600 former spies, former military officers and hobbyists....

In March, under Congressional pressure, National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte began posting on the Web thousands of captured Iraqi documents. Some intelligence officials opposed the move, fearing a free-for-all of amateur speculation and intrigue.

But the weapons hunters were heartened and began combing the documents for clues.

Mr. Gaubatz, 47, now chief investigator for the Dallas County medical examiner, said he knew some people might call him a kook.

So let's consider the themes in this excerpt: there are bunch of sincere kooks and hobbyists, including retired lieutenant generals and CIA officers, who are still looking for WMD in Iraq -- the existence of which is being denied by the incompetent Bush administration. (Got 'em coming and going.)

But at least they are finally placing before the American people the fact that there was a lot more WMD in Iraq than we were ever told by the Iraq Survey Group -- run by the CIA, which is a child of the State Department. If the ISG could miss 500 artillery shells and rockets loaded with chemicals such as Sarin and mustard gas, couldn't they also have missed jugs of VX and vials of Smallpox and Anthrax?

The entire edifice of "Bush lied about WMD" is crumbling. I doubt that many Americans will be mollified by the Democrats, the antique media, and the State Department (through surrogates in the CIA) saying, "It's all right, Saddam's WMD was from before the Gulf War and is only 80% or 75% as deadly as it was back then... so it doesn't count."

Naturally, the Times continues the charade that weapons of mass destruction were the only reason we went to war with Iraq; lost down the memory hole are all the other casus belli:

  • Repeated violations of the truce agreement that suspended (not ended) the Gulf War;
  • Failure to disclose disposition of WMD (this is different from merely having it; Iraq lied again and again what they did with it);
  • Defiance of multiple U.N. resolutions, most especially United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, but also Resolutions 660, 661, 678, 686., 687, 688, 707, 715, 986, and 1284;
  • Repeated attacks on United States military forces -- including firing upon American aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone;
  • The attempted assassination of a former president of the United States;
  • Ongoing crimes against humanity -- mass murder, ethinic cleansing, and environmental crimes;
  • Harboring international terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda, wanted for committing murderous acts against America (triggering the Bush Doctrine);
  • And most important, that Iraq was an illegitimate military dictatorship whose replacement by democracy and rule of law will start to drain the swamp of jihad in the heart of the ummah.

But the same Times story also touts several impressive achievements of these "hobbyists": not only did they get the NID, John Negroponte, to start putting on the web captured Iraqi intelligence and military documents; not only did they force the release of the report we talked about here; but recently, Gaubatz also got a meeting with officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency to try to persuade them -- at long last -- to start searching sites where residents claim WMDs were buried.

There is no question that most of such claims will fail to pan out. That is the nature of such a hunt... and if David Kay and Charles Duelfer were not in such a blasted hurry to declare defeat and head home, they would have understood that.

We should never have stopped purposefully looking; look how much we've found completely by accident. It's my understanding that the National Ground Intelligence Center is primarily tasked with investigating possible hazards to our troops; when soldiers or Marines stumble across a find that they think might be dangerous -- chemical, radiological, or biological -- they call the NGIC to come out, investigate, and dispose of the dangerous materials.

The NGIC is not out combing the hills and sand dunes, looking for WMD. That was the job of the ISG, which quickly disbanded itself after just a few months in the field.

What if they had they been sent out with a mandate to stay so long as our troops were in Iraq, searching continuously; would they have found these shells? Would they have found the other stuff that Iraq claims but cannot prove to have destroyed? Could they have investigated new claims of Syrian or Sudanese complicity in moving WMD out of Iraq?

Would the CIA have been so quick to dismiss all the WMD we found as "the wrong kind," as Mark Steyn put it, if that attitude were not a ticket to get them back home almost as fast as John Kerry's bogus Purple Hearts?

We'll never know... unless we bite the chemical shell and restart the search. But this time, leave the pathetically political CIA out of the loop. This search is a military matter, and it should be conducted by the Pentagon, using whatever military intelligence or force assets they need.

Mr. President -- could we start again, please? And this time, do it right: no time limit, no geographical limit, and without starting from the assumption, as the ISG did, that "there's no there there."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 23, 2006, at the time of 5:46 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

June 22, 2006

Those Darned 500 Chemical Artillery Shells That Shouldn't Exist

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

So far, besides the Cybercast News System (CNS) article cited in our previous post on this subject, I've found only a few other MSM reports on the WMDs that have been found in Iraq since 2003. Here's the story by Fox News; it's well written and gives us both sides -- actually "fair and balanced," if you like.

(It even links to the 4-page declassified summary of the original document, though it's not particularly informative.)

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

This is, of course, the "bombshell" (sorry) lede of the story... a story that AP, Reuters, and the New York Times have chosen not to even bother covering. Not even to debunk it! The antique media has for the most part left "the liberal man's burden" to tireless lefties, such as Weldon Berger at Betsy the Crow and Ellen at News Hounds, and to the Washington Post (more on that later).

The Santorum argument is that finding WMDs in Iraq means there were WMDs in Iraq to be found... but that the myriad international inspectors and the Iraq Survey Group failed to find; This seems pretty reasonable on its face and hard to counter.

The gist of the argument against is about what we predicted: these are chemical shells from before the 1991 Gulf War, so they don't count.

I'm not sure why they don't count; BTC seems to believe that "degraded" is the same thing as "disintegrated," and therefore these shells are harmless toys. This is preposterous enough that I'm sure Berger doesn't really believe it himself; it's just something you say to calm your troops, reassure them that (as Timothy Leary used to say) "situation normal, nothing has changed."

In fact, we don't know that all of the 500+ shells we found are unfirable; we don't know whether they could be used to deadly effect as IEDs; we don't know whether terrorists are clever enough to extract the Sarin or mustard gas and make their own WMDs; and we don't know how many of these shells have already been sold or given to terrorist groups -- to al-Qaeda In Iraq, for example. So it's a bit thick to dismiss their existence with an airy wave of the hand and a Scroogian "bah, humbug!"

Back to the elite media: the Washington Post is the only representative of that club to lumber forward with a debunking article. Alas, fantasy (literally) collides with reality in a self-indulgent dream world, and fantasy gets the better of it. Here, read this; you wouldn't believe me if I just told you about it:

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered....

The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

This is astonishing on several levels:

  • How on earth does Dafna Linzer (the writer, one of the most anti-Bush writers for the Post) imagine he knows whether or not the Iraqis had "long forgotten" about those hundreds of chemical shells? The translated Iraqi documents make frequent reference to such caches.

    It's clear that Linzer simply added that line -- unsourced -- to make it appear as though the chemical munitions were no threat.

  • In an inversion of the normal rules of evidence, Linzer's point in the first graf above appears to be that we can't have found these chemical shells -- the official DoD report notwithstanding -- because the Pentagon said, back in 2004, that we hadn't found any WMD. Except for the pesky fact of "several crates of the old [chemical] shells" containing Sarin, found that same year... but which don't count, according to unnamed "intelligence officials" and Dafna Linzer.

Look, either we found the 500 shells or we didn't. If we did, then the Pentagon was wrong to close the books in 2004. If we didn't, then the Pentagon is wrong to report today that we did. Either way, whether we found them is not determined by what the Defense Department or the CIA said years ago. This one is a real head-scratcher; does Linzer really believe such nonsense?

The New York Sun has a more straightforward news article:

Since the formal search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was called off in January 2005, the American military has found more than 500 shells of ordinance containing Sarin or mustard gas.

While the shells are believed to date from the Iran-Iraq war, two Republican lawmakers are saying it raises enough questions for the president to order a new search for the biological, chemical and nuclear weapons program he said Saddam Hussein was concealing from the international community before the invasion of Iraq.

Particularly with the wealth of information we've gained from translated Iraqi military and intelligence documents, which were not available or not translated and sorted through in January, 2005... at least some of which refer to specific caches of WMD in specific sites.

The lefty bloggers keep saying the Pentagon has dismissed this report. What they refer to are unidentified "Pentagon officials" who say that these chemical shells were "not the weapons we were looking for." The Sun:

Indeed, unexploded chemical ordinance dating from before 1991 are different from the stockpiles of anthrax and other toxins the then Secretary of State, Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council in January 2003 was awaiting inspectors in Iraq.

Yes, they are different: anthrax and "other toxins" (they mean VX and other nerve agents, as well as biological cultures) are significantly easier to hide than big, heavy artillery shells made out of metal.

And why, exactly, wasn't the Iraq Survey Group looking for Sarin-filled chemical artillery shells in small caches, scattered around the country? Isn't that exactly how we would expect to find an Iraqi WMD "stockpile?" If the ISG wasn't even looking for these, then we certainly should start a new search... and this time, look for everything -- not just for a big warehouse in Tikrit with a sign reading "Achmed's WMD -- Get 'Em While They're Hot!"

The Sun acknowledges the real point -- unlike the Washington Post, which is too busy pooh-poohing:

The latest information about the chemical weapons shells, however, is most damaging to those who suggest the work of former weapons inspectors David Kay and Charles Duelfer have provided the definitive word on the whereabouts of the suspected WMD, according to the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

"Duelfer after 18 months was not able to find this stuff," Mr. Hoekstra said. "We made this determination that hundreds [of weapons] were found. I think this is a significant quantity. What does this say about all of the other issues that continue to be raised [such as] stuff transported to Syria. I don't believe everything that is out there is credible, but it shows how much we still don't know."

That, of course, is the real lesson here: the ISG searched for a year and a half, after Saddam had been deposed... and they didn't find any of this. But since then, our soldiers and Marines have stumbled across more than five-hundred shells actually loaded with deadly chemicals... does that not speak volumes about the effectiveness of weapons inspectors in general?

If the ISG couldn't find these, under the ideal condition of actually occupying the country they were searching, then it's brutally clear that inspection regimes simply do not work.

Bear that in mind for future engagements.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn on Hugh Hewitt just perfectly encapsulated the line of attack by the Democrats:

No matter what WMD we find, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 22, 2006, at the time of 2:24 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

June 21, 2006

Possible News Flash: WMD Found In Iraq?

Iraq Matters , Weapons of Mass Disputation
Hatched by Dafydd

I can't find any information about this yet -- evidently, it just broke within the last hour or so -- but supposedly, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA, 96%) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI, 100%) just held a presser and announced that we have found a large number of chemical shells (Hugh said "500") filled with Sarin gas in Iraq. This according to Hugh Hewitt, who just announced it during his interview with Chris Hitchens.

Big Lizards has no, zip, zero, nought, nada information about this; in fact, consider this post a plea for further information from anyone who can scrounge something up. We're left saying "wha-? huh-? who ordered the veal cutlet?"

I'm a little skeptical; Hoekstra is chairman of the House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence, but Santorum is only chairman of the Senate Republican Conference -- a leadership position but nothing specifically to do with intelligence or armed services (Santorum's committees are Agriculture, Banking, Aging, and Finance). I understand why Hoekstra would deliver such a presser, but why Santorum? It always makes me suspicious when a stunning announcement is made by someone who does not, on paper, have any business making such an announcement.

Neither pol has anything about this on his website, at this moment. And we've been burned before by premature announcements of WMD finds.

We have argued for some time, here at Big Lizards (most recently in Mahmoud, Son of Xerox), that indeed we have found WMD in Iraq: empty chemical shells and rockets sitting in the same camouflaged ammo dump with 55-gallon drums of Cyclosarin is a "chemical weapon" in the same sense that an unloaded 9mm in the same house as a bunch of ammunition is a "firearm," and any felon caught in the second situation would be just as guilty as if the pistol were actually loaded. However, the Iraq Survey Group repeatedly refused to call such finds evidence of WMD.

But this -- if true -- would be a stunning development; not even the CIA would be able to argue that a bunch of shells loaded up with Sarin didn't constitute WMD. But as I said, I'm "Sgt. Schultz" at this moment.

As Matt Drudge likes to say, "developing..."

Help us out here... enquiring minds very much need to know!

UPDATE 4:11 pm: A bit more from Hugh... Santorum and Hoekstra are not talking about a single find; they're saying that since 2003, we have found "over 500" chemical weapons containing either mustard gas or Sarin (more likely, Cyclosarin, in our Lizardly opinion; Iraq was one of the few countries to use Cyclosarin, a pesticide, in chemical weapons... in fact, used in combat).

These are "pre-Gulf War" weapons; but their existence today obviously proves they existed before the current Iraq War began... hence, Bush was right that Iraq had CBW -- and the CIA was wrong about being wrong about WMD. Not only that, but the sacred "inspectors" of UNMOVIC and UNSCOM all failed to find these hundreds of chemical weapons... but I suspect Saddam Hussein knew where they were.

Hugh is interviewing Sen. Santorum right now: evidently, this comes from a partially declassified report from the National Ground Intelligence Center, possibly under the U.S. Army. Evidently, Santorum heard a tip about the existence of this classified report (secret, not top secret); he contacted Hoekstra, who had not heard of it (!) Hoekstra nosed about and found it; then he prevailed upon the "intelligence community" (I guess that would be the NID and the various service heads) to produce an unclassified version for release.

It was finally released at 4:30 pm EDT, and the intelligence committees were briefed a half-hour later; Hoekstra then told what he could legally tell to Santorum, and they called their press conference... which only 4-5 reporters bothered to attend. (That's not "the story," you understand.)

Santorum said that a version of the report was either published on a blog or at least discussed, but he could not remember which one or when that was.

But if we couple this report with several recently declassified and translated documents that, er, document ongoing Iraqi efforts, right up until the current war started, to conceal, disperse, and hide chemical and biological weapons and the nuclear program, then I think we are reaching a point of near certainty: Bush was right after all about WMD in Iraq.

We should eventually be able to find information about this here; but it's not there yet, at least not that I can find.

Commenter Mike has given us a link to a preliminary news report from Cybercast New Service (CNS) about this document. Thanks, Mike!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 21, 2006, at the time of 3:46 PM | Comments (23) | TrackBack

June 20, 2006

Revenge Killing? Hardly

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Sachi

In the last couple of days, al-Qaeda in Iraq killed one soldier, then kidnapped and killed two others. It's sad but expected: this is a war, and we're fighting terrorists whose interest in killing goes beyond mere revenge or warfare to a bizarre form of ceremonial cleansing and death worship.

The new leader of AQI, Egyptian-born Hamza Muhajir, a close friend of AQ number two Ayman Zawahiri, took credit for the killings. Big Lizards strongly suspects that sending a close friend and ally of Zawahiri to take over the organization founded by the now-dead Zarqawi is Osama bin Laden's and Ayman Zawahiri's way of regaining the control over al-Qaeda that they lost when Zarqawi, for a long time, became the most brutal and efffective player under the al-Qaeda ("the base") banner.

The home office is trying to recapture the rogue branch office. Zawahiri complained to Zarqawi that the latter's obsession with killing Iraqis was destroying the organization in the hearts and minds of Iraqis and even other Arabs. Zawahiri demanded that AQI focus more on killing the "crusaders" (Americans)... and the first set of killings by Muhajir indeed seem to be following the Zawahiri line, not the pattern set by Zarqawi.

It won't last; Zarqawi turned to killing Iraqi civilians because he discovered just how hard it is to kill Americans, and the same dynamic will force Muhajir down the same bloody road.

There is no guarantee the home office will succeed, even if Muhajir can stick to the Zawahiri plan; there are many more local butchers who will fight to keep control of al-Qaeda in Iraq in Iraq, and not let it return to Waziristan (or wherever OSM is hiding) -- though one major ally of Zarqawi, "Sheikh Mansour," was just killed (see below).

Some call the brutal torture-murder of the American soldiers a "revenge killing" for our successful attack on Musab Zarqawi; but that is ridiculous. Does anyone seriously argue that if we hadn't killed Zarqawi, AQI wouldn't have kidnapped or killed those two American soldiers?

That is what they do. They kidnap westerners and Iraqis alike, then kill them by brutal torture. This was an attack of opportunity, and it didn't start on June 7th.

My heart goes out to the families and friends of fallen soldiers. But please, our boys did not die in vain. Just before the ambush on these soldiers, a U.S. air strike killed a key AQI leader -- described (as usual) as a "religious emir."

Mansour Suleiman Mansour Khalifi al-Mashhadani, or Sheik Mansour, and two foreign fighters were killed as they tried to flee in a vehicle near the town of Youssifiyah, in the so-called Sunni "Triangle of Death."

U.S. coalition forces had been tracking al-Mashhadani for some time, American military spokesman William Caldwell said in announcing his death. He said al-Mashhadani was an Iraqi, 35 to 37 years old, and that one of the men killed with him was an al-Qaida cell leader identified as Abu Tariq.

(Yet another al-Mashhadani! It does seem to be a common Iraqi name: in addition to Ali al-Mashhadani -- the Iraqi "journalism student" and former terrorist suspect who first claimed the US Marines massacred civilians in Haditha; Abdul Rahman al-Mashhadani -- head of the previously unknown Hammurabi Organization for Human Rights and Democracy Monitoring who handed the suspect video to Ali; and the recently killed Mansour Suleiman Mansour Khalifi al-Mashhadani -- see above -- there is also Mahmud Dawud al-Mashhadani, president of the Iraqi Parliament. Perhaps it's a tribal name.)

One more fascinating point about "Sheikh Mansour":

A document seized from an al-Qaida hideout and released by National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie that portrayed the Iraqi insurgency as being in "bleak" shape was directly linked to Mansour, Caldwell said.

Now there's food for thought.

But that attack, wonderful though it was, was not all that we've been up to. While Coalition forces were searching for our two missing solders, we managed to kill or capture even more insurgents:

Caldwell said that Iraqi and American troops involved in the search for the missing soldiers killed three suspected insurgents and detained 34 in fighting that wounded seven U.S. servicemen.

And elsewhere in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - U.S.-led forces killed 15 terror suspects and detained three others during raids Tuesday in a village northeast of Baghdad, the military said. Residents said 13 civilians also were killed.

The military said the raid targeted individuals linked with a suspected senior al-Qaida in Iraq member, but it did not identify him....

Coalition forces found 10 AK-47 assault rifles, a shotgun, a pistol and a crate of explosives at the site, the military said.

So, they killed three of our guys; and meanwhile, we killed 21 and captured 37. If the ambush was to avenge Zarqawi, then incoming AQI leader Hamza Muhajir is off to a grinding halt.

Oh, by the way, the terrorists who fled the US forces were found hiding behind the skirts of local women:

The detained suspects had fled but were found hiding amid nine women, the military said. It said one of the suspects was wounded, but the women were not injured.

How typical. This is the real picture of the "brave" enemy forces we face.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 20, 2006, at the time of 4:29 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Veteran Reporters

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

We have many reporters in Iraq; the major news organizations all send someone (usually many "someones") over there. Yet we rarely get accurate pictures of the battleground. Why?

The most frustrating thing about the antique media's coverage is the lack of perspective. It's true that most reporters are biased against our military; but the reality is much dumber: the reporters are simply too ignorant about the military and warfare to be coherent.

Many reporters have no basic knowledge of the armed services: not only have they never served in the military, they don’t even have a friend who has. Consequently, they don't understand how military operations work, what to expect, how missions are carried out, how long it takes, the overall strategy, or how one battle relates to another. That is why we hear random reporting of a battle here, an engagement there, without anyone ever engaging the reader. We "news consumers" have no idea if we are making any progress, because the media has never told us what "progress" would even look like.

Decades ago, we had a draft. While an army of conscripts has a lot of problems (just ask the Soviets), near universal conscription had one benefit: every male in America had either served himself or at least had close friends, relatives, and coworkers who served; and every woman had brothers, sons, or husbands who were in the military... so everybody knew who the servicemen were; they were not "others" or "outsiders;" the men on the wall peopled our own communities, from doctor to grocer to banker.

Most Americans have lost that connection; a huge chunk of those who serve are now professional, career warriors, and they hang with their own (as do the civilians). Fortunately for us, however, there are some extraordinary people who themselves had distinguished military careers, who then turned to reporting from the frontline after being honorably discharged.

For example, we already know Michael Yon, a former Green Beret who has been in Iraq and Afghanistan since Day 1. And we've followed the exploits of our fellow blogger Bill Roggio, also a former Army Special Forces soldier, once of Fourth Rail but now in Afganistan reporting on the Counterterrorism Blog.

Now we can add two more names to the list: Wade Zirkle, a former Marine Lieutenant who served two deployments to Iraq; and David Bellavia, a former Army Staff Sergeant, one of the many heroes of Second Falluja. (Hat tip Black Five)

Zirkel and Bellavia are the executive director and vice chairman (respectively) of Vets For Freedom, a non profit organization composed of Iraq and Afganistan veterans dedicated to telling the truth about the war. Lest we quote Pontius Pilate, "the truth" is what they, as soldiers and Marines, actually saw and participated in... not the rude caricature that slouches through the halls of Congress, led around by Murtha, Kerry, and Pelosi.

Vets for Freedom was founded by a group of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans who believe in the mission of freedom in the Global War on Terror, but who have become frustrated with the way the operation has been politicized and reported to the home front.

Zirkel and Bellavia have just gotten back to Iraq as journalists and started their reporting. Bellavia is amazed by his completely different perspective as a reporter, rather than a soldier whose sole focus is his own mission:

Baghdad is absolutely beautiful. I mean shockingly majestic. This is a city for years we have been told is unsalvageable and I was amazed to see this level of cleanliness…

I feel that is the first time I have visited Iraq. Deploying to a place during a time of war and playing a part of that offensive operation, it is impossible to have any point of view besides the constant assessment of threat and responsive force. You can't appreciate landscapes or city streets. You are more preoccupied with observing the fine elements of city life and not the larger picture of community and family. You could deploy me to the Guggenheim and I wouldn't comment on anything other than the job at hand. Infantrymen are vigilant, quick tempered toward the enemy and always focused. Today I feel none of those things and that really is a great feeling.

Please read on. And salute when you're finished!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 20, 2006, at the time of 6:34 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 16, 2006

Intrigued, Not Convinced

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

Michael Ledeen over at NRO believes the "planning document" seized in a raid shortly before we killed Musab Zarqawi is a "terribly done...shockingly amateurish...unbelievable" forgery by the Iranians.

I'm not convinced; but he does raise some intriguing questions that beg for answers.

The conceit of the piece is that Ledeen is consulting his Ouija Board to channel the spirit of James Jesus Moreno Angleton, a former CIA counterintelligency guy who died in 1987; in the "dialog," JJA refers to this disembodied spirit -- which is Ledeen's way of raising the questions. (Don't ask.)

For example, here is an early exchange:

JJA: Well, the assumption about this piece of paper is that it reflects the thinking of at least one important terrorist leader, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be important.

ML: Obviously.

JJA: So how come this terrorist leader makes so many mistakes? I mean, blatant factual errors. Let’s start with his statement -- #5 in the first set of numbered paragraphs -- that there has been “a decline of the resistance’s assaults.”

ML: Well, our casualties are certainly down, aren’t they?

JJA: Not really. May was one of the worst months since the fall of Saddam. Recently there’s been a dramatic increase in assaults and the number of dead innocents. Precisely the opposite of what the unnamed “leader” says.

May was bad, but April was a lot better. The document itself bears no date; so my first question for Ledeen would be, when does he think it was written? (Note the Breitbart.com has the wrong origin for the document; it came from a raid that preceded the death of Zarqawi.)

In the end, Ledeen concludes that it's a deliberately clumsy forgery by the Iranians in order to sow FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about any other papers we might find. But this still requires the document not to be a blatant fraud, else it wouldn't sow anything but laughter.

E.g., the fake evidence of Iraqi attempts to obtain yellowcake was only effective insofar as it was good enough to be believed; that way, some governments might have based all or part of their analysis on it. Then, when it's shown to be a fake, their entire intelligence structure is discredited. Those countries which rejected the fraud from the very beginning, notably the United Kingdom, were unscathed.

Thus, Ledeen's basic theme is inherently goofy: if it were a fraud by an advanced intelligence agency like Iran's, they wouldn't have put so many mistakes into it; however, we have certainly seen documents from, for example, the Iraq Intelligence Service prior to the invasion, that were sweeping in their inaccuracy... yet still provably authentic. It is entirely possible that a particular terrorist writing a particular document might be behind the times and not know that they had launched more attacks in May; he might well still be operating off of April's numbers, no matter when he wrote it.

So mere mistakes are not convincing to me. Let's move on to Ledeen's other criticisms.

JJA: And then — #6 in that first batch — he says that there’s been “an increase in the number of countries and elements supporting the occupation.” I guess he doesn’t read Italian, does he? And even the Brits have announced they’re going to leave. Again, the opposite of the facts. I could go on, but you get the point, don't you?

I think this is just a clumsy mistake on Ledeen's part (see? anyone can do it!) Probably, the writer of the document is referring to increased support from the ummah, from the Arab Moslem countries:

However, here in Iraq, time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance for the following reasons....

6. By allowing an increase in the number of countries and elements supporting the occupation or at least allowing to become neutral in their stand toward us in contrast to their previous stand or refusal of the occupation.

Over the last year or so, a number of countries, particularly Arab countries -- and especially particularly Jordan and Saudi Arabia -- have offered a lot more help to the US in the GWOT in general and even in matters related to the terrorist threat in Iraq. That is most likely what the writer here is talking about, and Ledeen's claim of factual error in the document is simply wrong itself.

Here is another line of attack where I think Ledeen just plain misunderstands the point of the writer of this document:

JJA: Look at #2 in the second group of numbered paragraphs, the ones that make recommendations. It says that the terrorists should “infiltrate the ranks of the National Guard..... In fact they've done it, as everybody knows. The Iraqi people trust the army but they are terrified by the national guard, precisely because there are so many terrorists and terrorist agents in it.

First of all, Ledeen makes a very elementary mistake: the forces of the Interior Ministry are not called "the National Guard." That word in the document comes from the translation supplied by the Iraqi government; as it is not the standard word used for either the New Iraqi Army (Ministry of Defense) or the Iraqi Police (Interior Ministry), we know that it is a mistranslation.

What we do not know off the bat is what is should have read. But we can deduce; here is the description from the document itself:

1. By allowing the American forces to form the forces of the National Guard, to reinforce them and enable them to undertake military operations against the resistance.

That does not sound like a description of the Iraqi Police; they are more or less intact from the Saddam era. But after we toppled the Baathists, one of the first things we did (it was controversial, but I think necessary) was to disband the Iraqi Army and begin forming a New Iraqi Army. And it is the Iraqi Army, not the Iraqi Police, that we have spent so much time training to "enable them to undertake military operations against the resistance."

Thus, when the translator uses the term National Guard, he clearly refers to the New Iraqi Army -- not the Iraqi Police. Once you realize that, the statements about the "National Guard" make perfect sense, coming from a Sunni terrorist:

Such a study is needed in order to show the best means to accomplish the required goals, especially that the forces of the National Guard have succeeded in forming an enormous shield protecting the American forces and have reduced substantially the losses that were solely suffered by the American forces....

2. To assist some of the people of the resistance to infiltrate the ranks of the National Guard in order to spy on them for the purpose of weakening the ranks of the National Guard when necessary, and to be able to use their modern weapons.

Substitute "New Iraqi Army" for "National Guard" above (instead of substituting "Iraqi Police"), and it all falls into place.

Finally, there is what Ledeen evidently considers his killer argument:

JJA: Aha! It emerges bit by bit, but the whole thrust of the document is that Iran is a sweet innocent, actually an ally of the United States in Iraq, and that the terrorists should do everything possible to foster conflict between Iran and the Americans.

Here is what the document says:

It is not known whether American is serious in its animosity towards Iraq [sic -- Iran], because of the big support Iran is offering to America in its war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Hence, it is necessary first to exaggerate the Iranian danger and to convince America and the west in general, of the real danger coming from Iran, and this would be done by the following.

But again, there is a ready explanation: the Iranians are helping the resistance... but they're mostly helping the Shia, not the Sunni; in fact, Iran-backed Shiite militias (notably that of Muqtada Sadr) are infiltrating the Iraqi Police in order to massacre Sunnis in the centrals areas of Iraq.

Sunni terrorists may well consider this "big support" to the Americans -- who they see as being in league with the Shia.

Thus, nearly all of Ledeen's objections are at least themselves questionable. This is why I say his column intrigues, but it does not convince.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 16, 2006, at the time of 6:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 15, 2006

Untrustworthy Narrator

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

Dafydd's post below about the "treasure trove" of information we seized from al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia before Zarqawi's death missed one interesting point: AP, which reports on the document, doesn't seem to be sure it's really authentic:

The language contained in the document was different from the vocabulary used by al-Qaida statements posted on the Web. For example, it does not refer to the Americans as "Crusaders" nor use the term "rejectionists" to allude to Shiites.

Much of what is in the statement from al-Rubaie echoes results that the U.S. military and the Iraqi government say they are seeking. It also appears to reinforce American and Iraqi arguments that al-Qaida in Iraq and its operatives are a group of imported extremists bent on killing innocent civilians.

I guess they think that U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell might have written it himself, the way they believe our military is always running around planting evidence.

I sure wish they would apply the same level of skepticism to the Haditha accusations.

Dafydd replies: Oops, good catch. My media skept-o-meter is broken today!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 15, 2006, at the time of 4:43 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

That hit on Musab Zarqawi turns out to have been the first shot of a new offensive that has already netted staggering gains, making it one of the most effective operations of the period following the capture of Saddam Hussein:

American and Iraqi forces have carried out 452 raids since last week's killing of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and 104 insurgents were killed during those actions, the U.S. military said Thursday.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the raids were carried out nationwide and led to the discovery of 28 significant arms caches.

He said 255 of the raids were joint operations, while 143 were carried out by Iraqi forces alone. The raids also resulted in the captures of 759 "anti-Iraqi elements."

I make that 863 bad guys we no longer have to worry about... just in the last week.

Meanwhile, the so-called "insurgency" is not just on the ropes... it's in despair. A document which was actually found before the Zarqawi hit portrays a terrorist campaign desperate to turn the Shia against Americans, to foment a war between the United States and Iran, to jump-start the Muqtada Sadr insurgency... anything to take the heat off of themselves:

A blueprint for trying to start a war between the United States and Iran was among a "huge treasure" of documents found in the hideout of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi officials said Thursday. The document, purporting to reflect al-Qaida policy and its cooperation with groups loyal to ousted President Saddam Hussein, also appear to show that the insurgency in Iraq was weakening....

Although the office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the document was found in al-Zarqawi's hideout following a June 7 airstrike that killed him, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said the document had in fact been found in a previous raid as part of an ongoing three-week operation to track al-Zarqawi.

The document makes clear that we are winning this war. There is no way that Zarqawi's replacement, Egyptian terror boss Ayyub Masri (a buddy of Ayman Zawahiri, bin Laden's "spiritual leader" and founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad), can possibly hold al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia together as well as Zarqawi, its founder. They will certainly continue plotting terrorist attacks; but they will likely be smaller and less effective, and more likely to be disrupted by Iraqi forces or by Coalition forces. The "director" is dead, and the second unit can't finish the movie.

Amazingly, even the elite media is being forced to report on the increasing tempo of victory. While Anne Frank was hiding in an attic from the Nazis (they would eventually find and murder her and her family), she wrote what is probably the greatest testament to optimism ever penned: "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

My God, what an moving paean for that girl to write in those circumstances.

I don't know if I could go that far; but to paraphrase Frank, in spite of everything, I still believe in the innate rationality of the American voter. He can be fooled for a time, especially when one party has nearly all of the mainstream print and television media in its pocketses... but "you can't fool all of the people all the time," to quote another great optimist.

It's said that a lie can get halfway round the world before Truth finishes lacing up its boots. But here's an addendum that's often forgotten: when Truth finally gets out the door, it stomps the speedy lies as flat as roadkill. The American people will come to their senses in time, just as they did in 2000, 2002, and 2004.

And then we'll find out whether the Democrats exemplify yet another saying: "insanity is doing the same thing in the same way with the same outcome a hundred times, but expecting a different result the hundred and first."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 15, 2006, at the time of 4:17 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

John Kerry's "Murtha Moment"

Congressional Calamities , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, 100%) has been reflecting on his presidential campaign: on the one hand, he did better in the primaries than former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who ran on a radical anti-war platform; on the other hand, Kerry was dogged throughout the general election season by demands to know why he had voted for the war.

But on the other hand, he came up with an answer to why he was still supporting it: "I actually voted against the $87 billion before I voted for it." But on the other hand, that answer didn't sit well with the electorate.

But on the other hand, in his upcoming campaign for the 2008 presidency, he has Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Carpetbag, 100% -- "have war chest, will travel") running incongruously to his right; but on the other hand, the Democratic primary voters seem even further to the left than they were in 2004.

Having run out of hands, Kerry finally decided that this time, he will take the Al Gore route: he will run far, far to the left. Accordingly, he has denounced himself for voting for the Iraq War and for supporting it all these years. (We'll see whether Kerry will vote against the $94.5 billion compromise funding legislation next week -- which includes $68.5 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan; "I actually voted against the $68.5 billion before I voted for it.")

And in expiation for his sins, Kerry demanded that the Senate vote on his proposal to withdraw all but the most essential troops from Iraq "by year's end."

Kerry began working on submitting a formal version of this bill. Alas, he was a laggard... and he allowed Assistant Majority Leader (Majority Whip) Mitch McConnell (R-KY, 100%) to get the jump on him:

The Senate vote unfolded unexpectedly as the second-ranking leader, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., introduced legislation he said was taken from a proposal by Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and war critic. It called for Bush to agree with the Iraqi government on a schedule for withdrawal of combat troops by Dec. 31, 2006.

Kerry protested in his angriest airy monotone, but to no avail:

Democrats sought to curtail floor debate on the proposal, and the vote occurred quickly.

Kerry and other Democrats accused Republicans of political gamesmanship, and promised an authentic debate next week.

And of course, the result fell out just as did the House vote on the Murtha Amendment to "redeploy" U.S. forces in Iraq to "over the horizon" positions (that is, outside the country): on the Kerry amendment, the Senate voted 93 to 6 to reject setting a timetable for U.S. troops to be out of Iraq. Murtha tried to save face by voting against his own resolution; Kerry, however, is made of sterner stuff: he joined with five other Democrats (and no Republicans) to vote in favor of his own proposal:

  • Barbara Boxer (CA, 100%);
  • Tom Harkin (IA, 100%);
  • Edward M. Kennedy (MA, 95%).
  • John Kerry (MA, 100%);
  • Russ Feingold (WI, 100%);
  • Robert Byrd (WV, 95%);

Remember those names, gentle readers; they are the face of today's Democratic Party... the face of retreat and surrender.

In the meanwhile, the Democrats are not yet out of the woods:

The [Senate] vote came alongside a daylong debate in the House, where Republicans defended the war as key to winning the global struggle against terrorism while Democrats excoriated President Bush and his policies.

"We must stand firm in our commitment to fight terrorism and the evil it inflicts throughout the world. We must renew our resolve that the actions of evildoers will not dictate American policy," House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said in remarks laden with references to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The war was "a grotesque mistake," countered the Democratic House leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California. "The administration continues to dig a hole. They refuse to come up and see the light," she said.

The political subtext was clear from the outset.

"Is it al-Qaida or is it America? Let the voters take note of this debate," said Republican Rep. Charles Norwood of Georgia, attacking war critics as defeatists who do not deserve re-election.

Republicans in both the House and the Senate are finally starting to wake up to the fact that an election looms, and that it will be bitterly contested on both domestic and foreign-policy fronts. For the latter, no foreign issue is as politically important (at the moment) as the Iraq War: unless Republicans can turn around some public sentiment on that war, at least among wayward Republicans, they could lose heavily on November 7th.

So they have begun to stage a series of votes that will force Democrats and Republicans to state firmly where they stand. In the Senate, they forced Democrats to repudiate en masse two of their likely presidential candidates: Feingold and Kerry. The alternative was for the Democrats to acquiesce in labeling themselves the "cut and run" party.

And in the House, after the "impassioned" debate, Speaker Denny Hastert (R-IL, 100%) will force a vote on whether the Iraq War is or is not part of the Global War on Terror:

Republicans arranged for the House debate to culminate in a vote either late Thursday or Friday on legislation - a [sense of the House] resolution - that labels the Iraq war part of the larger global fight against terrorism and says an "arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment" of troops is not in the national interest.

This is excellent work so far. You know it's effective for the Republicans by the squeals of outrage from Democrats, accusing the GOP of playing "partisan games." But we need a series of such votes on domestic wedge-issues, too -- from taxes to same-sex marriage to partial-birth abortion to federal control of the schools vs. school vouchers.

The purpose of such votes is to show the differences between the parties... or in some cases, as with the Iraq votes, to show that however much the Democrats may bluster about having better ideas, in fact they have no ideas at all and are reduced to parroting the GOP. Armed with that information, voters can choose whether to vote Republican or Democratic for their own representatives and senators.

This vote, like every vote, is a choice -- not a "referendum."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 15, 2006, at the time of 3:30 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

June 12, 2006

Provenance

Iraq Matters , Israel Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations , Palestinian Perils and Pratfalls
Hatched by Sachi

[Dafydd also contributed extensively to this article.]

We often describe a situation where different parties are saying completely different things, and there is no way to tell which is right, as a case of "he said, she said."

But to the antique media, when the "he" in this equation is a Moslem jihadi, then "he said, she said" usually turns into "he said, and that's good enough for us!"

Take the recent attack at the beach in Gaza, where seven (or eight) Palestinian civilians, including children, were killed by... by what? Palestinian spokesmen who were not present at the time insisted it was by an Israeli shell... and that's good enough for the UK Times online:

Israeli artillery fire killed a Palestinian family who were picnicking on the beach in Gaza yesterday, as the shoreline was packed with people on a Muslim holiday.

Body parts, bloodstained baby carriages and shredded holiday tents were left strewn on the sand near Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, after the late- afternoon strike that killed at least seven people, thought to include the parents and children of one family.

They seem awfully certain it was Israeli artillery fire, and not an errant Qassam rocket, that killed the civilians; but why? What is their source for saying so? They never say; in the entire article, not once does the UK Times online tell us how they know it was the Israelis and not Hamas that fired the deadly weapons.

The New York Times weighs in on the same story -- and takes the same line. After all, just because Hamas is a terrorist organization that specializes in killing innocent men, women, and children, wants to see Israelis all driven into the sea, believes Jews are responsible for all the ills afflicting the Palestinian and Arab peoples, and which has lied many times in the past, doesn't mean we can't take their word when they say that they know for certain that the family was killed by Israeli shelling (that's what the Ouija Board said):

Hamas fired at least 15 Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel on Saturday, ending a tattered 16-month truce with Israel, a day after eight Palestinians were killed on a Gaza beach, apparently by an errant Israeli shell.

"Apparently?" What does that mean? Apparent to whom?

Israeli officials said they regretted any casualties among the innocent as Israel tried to stop the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel by shelling the areas from which they were launched. Defense Minister Amir Peretz sent a message expressing regret to Mr. Abbas, who called the incident "a bloody massacre" and declared three days of mourning.

On Friday, the Israeli Army was shelling a target area popular with rocket launchers 400 yards from the beach. The army believes that a shell fell short or that a dud, previously fired, exploded.

The "army" believes? I guess they mean the Israeli Defense Force... but who exactly within the IDF told them that? Where did they get such information? The New York Times is no more willing to reveal a source for unraveling this mystery than their namesake in London was.

Here is a very interesting pair of sentences from the NYT story. Maybe somebody can figure out "what is wrong with this picture":

Hamas fired at least 15 Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel on Saturday, ending a tattered 16-month truce with Israel....

Since the beginning of the year, Palestinians have fired hundreds of largely inaccurate missiles toward Israel, while Israel has fired more than 5,000 shells into Gaza.

That's a very interesting "truce" Hamas has been observing! What did they do, promise to limit the number of missiles fired at Israel to only "dozens of the inaccurate but potentially deadly Qassam rockets each month," as the UK Times put it?

And if the Qassam is so "inaccurate but potentially deadly" -- it has no guidance system at all -- then isn't it at least equally likely that the explosive thing that killed those eight (or seven) Palestinians on the beach was a Qassam, not an Israeli artilly shell gone awry? How do the two Timeses know to such certainty that the family were accidentally killed by Israelis (a "war crime"), rather than accidentally killed by Hamas militants (a tragic error?)

Associate Press has its own version of the story (this is starting to sound like the movie Rashomon), but it adds an interesting twist:

Pounding on the sand, Houda Ghalia shrieked for her father after he was killed with five of her siblings at a seaside picnic by what Palestinians said was an Israeli shell.

Footage of the 10-year-old screaming "Father! Father!" has played over and over again on television, driving home the devastating impact of what Palestinian leaders are calling "genocidal" and "a war crime...."

Israel expressed regret Saturday for the killing of eight civilians, but stopped short of taking responsibility, saying an investigation was under way.

Israel's military chief said the killings may have resulted from a misfired Palestinian rocket. Palestinians insisted they were caused by an Israeli artillery shell.

So maybe the IDF doesn't think that "a shell fell short or that a dud, previously fired, exploded." At least, the part of the IDF that spoke to AP doesn't agree with the part (if any) that spoke to the New York Times. Never let your AP hand know what your Times hand is doing.

And everybody ignores the undisputed fact that previously, someone from Gaza was shooting Qassam rockets into Israel, despite a supposed "cease fire." Isn't that significant in deciding whether something was a "war crime," let alone "genocide?" (Do Palestinians even know what the word "genocide" means? Palestinians, other Arabs, and most Israelis are actually the same "race": Semites.)

As in Rashomon, we can never know for sure whose errant whatever actually fell on the beach and killed those seven or eight civilians. Even if the Israeli investigation shows that whatever fell left Qassam pieces, not artillery pieces, behind, who will believe them? The world would rather believe Hamas terrorists than Jews.

The same thing can be said about the Haditha "massacre." All we have are the words of anti-American "civilians" who may be in cahoots with the terrorists themselves... and a questionable videotape that only proves that somebody died violently somewhere in Iraq more or less around the time of the claimed "massacre." We don't even know whether those bodies in the video go with that incident or some other incident days earlier or later.

The MSM ignores the not so hidden agenda of the "witnesses" and "reporters;" after all, why bother investigating when you have handy Marines to blame?

This battle is being waged with very sophisticated propaganda tools: on Special Report with Brit Hume Friday night, during the "Grapevine" segment, Jim Angle showed a photograph that was run by the London Times, and later picked up by the Chicago Sun-Times. It showed a number of dead Iraqis stacked up against a wall; the victims' hands were all bound behind their backs, and the wall was riddled with machine-gun bullet holes.

The London Times claimed that the photo showed Iraqis murdered by the US Marines in Haditha. Days later (maybe weeks), it was evidently pointed out to them that the photo did not match any of the witness statements about what supposedly had happened -- even from the Iraqis' point of view. The magazine investigated and discovered that the picture they'd run was actually of a group of Shia who were murdered by Sunni terrorists; it had nothing to do with Haditha or with the Marines.

The London Times (and the Chicago Sun-Times) eventually ran a correction and apologized. But that begs the question: how could a supposedly respectable newspaper editor and publisher look at such a photograph and say, "oh yes, that jolly well looks like just the thing the American Marines would do." What would make them think such a thing?

They might say "where there's smoke, there must be fire." But they, themselves are the ones who put all the "smoke" there in the first place. The only reason people keep thinking that US forces engage in massacres is that the elite media keeps saying so; they say so because it's so obvious to them, everyone knows it; and it's so obvious because, after all, look at all those other unsubstantiated stories of massacres in other newspapers.

It's the most circular of all circular arguments.

But finally, our side is speaking up.

A sergeant who led a squad of U.S. Marines accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha told his lawyer the unit did not intentionally target civilians, followed rules of engagement and did not try to cover up the incident, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The newspaper said Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, 26, told his lawyer several civilians were killed in November when the squad went after insurgents firing on them from a house. But Wuterich said there was no vengeful massacre and described a house-to-house hunt that went awry in a chaotic battlefield, his lawyer said.

"It will forever be his position that everything they did that day was following their rules of engagement and to protect the lives of Marines," said Neal Puckett, who represents Wuterich in the investigations of the deaths.

"He's really upset that people believe that he and his Marines are even capable of intentionally killing innocent civilians," he said.

I am not saying we should blindly believe what SSGT Frank Wuterich says. But we should understand it is still "he said, he said" -- not "he said, and that's good enough for the Times."

I will refrain from expressing my own opinion as to whom I would believe. We should wait for the investigation to be completed... in both incidents.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 12, 2006, at the time of 3:19 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 8, 2006

Musab Zarqawi Dead

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

According to Associated Press, Reuters, and the New York Times, confirmed by Iraqi officials and by the United States military by fingerprints and a direct look at his dead face, the erstwhile leader of al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia has officially attained room temperature.



Zarqawi RIP

Exit Musab Zarqawi

I thought that would be a nice day-brightener for breakfast. Go, team!

From the Times:

Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in an American airstrike on an isolated safe house north of Baghdad at 6.15 p.m. local time on Wednesday, top U.S. and Iraqi officials said on Thursday.

At a joint news conference with Iraq's prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., said Zarqawi's body had been positively identified by fingerprints, "facial recognition" and other indicators. He said seven of Zarqawi's associates had also been killed in the strike.

Reuters explains why it matters that we finally "terminated" Zarqawi (Prime Minister al-Maliki's word):

"Zarqawi didn't have a number two. I can't think of any single person who would succeed Zarqawi.... In terms of effectiveness, there was no single leader in Iraq who could match his ruthlessness and his determination," said Rohan Gumaratna from the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore.

Oh and here's an extra bit of good news (She Who Must Be Obeyed is sleeping now, the more fool she, or she would have gotten to make this announcement): we haven't heard much about this, but the Iraq government has finally filled the two critical ministries that they'd been dithering about for weeks now, Interior (police) and Defense. Still Reuters:

Iraq's parliament approved on Thursday Maliki's candidates for new defense and interior ministers.

By a clear majority, it approved Jawad al-Bolani, a Shi'ite, as interior minister and General Abdel Qader Jassim, a Sunni and until now Iraqi ground forces commander, as defense minister.

Out of 198 deputies present in the 275-seat assembly, 182 voted for Bolani while 142 supported Jassim, the speaker said.

The two key security jobs were left temporarily vacant when Maliki's government of national unity took office on May 20 because of intense wrangling among his coalition partners.

Over at Iraq the Model, Omar has one other piece of information that is interesting:

Al-Maliki said that among the 7 killed with Zarqawi were two women who were responsible for collecting intelligence for the al-Qaeda HQ cell.

I guess even militant Islamist jihadis are forced to make affirmative-action hires...!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 8, 2006, at the time of 4:10 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 5, 2006

Swamp Samurai On the Marsh

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

Back in February, we discussed the Great Salt Marsh in Iraq, home of the Marsh Arabs, in our post Swamp Samurai. Saddam Hussein systematically destroyed the marsh by building numerous dykes and dams, displacing many Marsh Arabs who resided in the area -- first, before the Gulf War, simply to siphon off more water for the Sunni farms; then later to punish the Shiite Marsh Arabs for their rebellion against Hussein in 1991. (That was the rebellion encouraged -- but then not supported -- by President George H.W. Bush, "Bush-41.")

When the Coalitiion ousted Hussein, local Arabs destroyed the dykes. Coalition forces, particularly the Japanese, began restoring the marsh. Those efforts are showing a remarkable result.

Last time we reported that, as of August of 2005, 37% of the Great Salt Marsh had recovered. Now the June issue of BioScience has an update (hat tip Belmont Club):

Reflooding of Iraq's destroyed Mesopotamian marshes since 2003 has resulted in a "remarkable rate of reestablishment" of native invertebrates, plants, fish, and birds, according to an article in the June issue of BioScience.…

Richardson and Hussain report that 39 percent of the former extent of the marshes had been reflooded by September 2005. Despite incomplete data, the researchers found that in many respects the restored marshes they studied are functioning at levels close to those in one marsh that remained undrained. The fast recovery of plant production, overall good water quality, and rapid restoration of most wetland functions seem to indicate that the recovery of ecosystem function is well under way.

There is no way to know whether the increase in reflooding will proceed linearally; but it might give us a thumbnail guess of how long it will take to restore the marsh completely. From August to September 2005, an additional 2% was restored. That is a rate of 24% per year; as a very rough estimate, by September 2006, we might see 63% of the marsh restored, with full restoration by April, 2009.

But there are one-time events that may not reoccur, including a greater than normal snowmelt into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, leading to greater than expected river flows. It's probable the rate of reflooding will slow during the future, drier months:

Richardson and Hussain are not complacent about the marshes' future, however. The researchers point out that water inflow is unlikely to be sufficient to maintain the encouraging trends in coming years.

What we really don't know is how much of the marsh needs to be restored before the Marsh Arabs begin moving back in larger numbers. 90%, or 80%, or even 75% of the marsh may be able to support the full population of Marsh Arabs; we don't know how well it was utilized before the Baathists and Saddam Hussein destroyed it.

It also brings up a point that "environmentalists" never like to admit: nature is incredibly resilient. Anybody who has ever visited a jungle environment, from Africa to South America to Southeast Asia to the mangrove swamps of the Southeast United States -- understands how greedy nature is, always grabbing the land the moment humans turn their backs. Far from being fragile, nature is so powerful that it takes constant maintenance to keep it from encroaching on cities and homes.

We can't really say how long it will take to fully restore the marsh. But for the moment, at least, the work is going very well... not that you would know much about it from the popular press. For some unaccountable reason, "good news" stories out of Iraq seem to bore antique media editors and producers to tears.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 5, 2006, at the time of 3:42 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 4, 2006

The Skeptical Enquirer

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The video report by CNN's Ryan Chilcote is interesting (click on "Watch a Marine's anguish over death").

The video of three child "survivors" of the alleged attack in Haditha was not taken by CNN reporters; they were not allowed to speak to any of the supposed witnesses. Iinstead, a representative of an unidentified human rights organization (which might have been the same Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy, which produced the first videotapes of the supposed witnesses) "went back" to Haditha and videoed the three children.

But unlike CNN's usual uncritical acceptance of any narrative by supposed "victims," Chilcote's seems somewhat skeptical of the children's account. He says they have obviously told the story many times, which implies to us that they were coached. They did not need any probing.

Chicote noted that one of the girls made a very puzzling claim:

I knew the bomb was going to explode. So I covered my ears.

The Iraqi reporter does not follow-up to find out how she knew, or if she really did have foreknowledge; instead, the person from the "human rights group" dismisses it by saying the little girl was just "confused."

That may be true. But it's surprising that a CNN reporter would raise that point, that he was not satisfied with the explanation. If he were there, he would certainly have asked more (and more probing) questions.

I, myself have a question: the surviving children described the "massacre" in detail as a deliberate spree of premeditated, "execution style" murders.

But if that is how it happened, why were these child "witnesses" allowed to live? I can understand if the family members were killed during the fog of war, or in a fit of anger; I could understand that if the Marines were shooting at things in random, the chidren might survive. But if the report is correct, the Marines are supposed to have killed people methodically and at point-blank range... including several other children. In that case, why would they leave anybody alive, especialy witnesses?

We know that children can be coerced to say almost anything; see the McMartin case. Children have only a tenuous grasp of the essential difference between reality and fantasy or the consequences of bearing false witness. They can be browbeaten into falsely accusing their own parents of child molestation just to please the total stranger who is interrogating them. They can be threatened, either directly or by proxy (threatening their survivng relatives).

We also don't know the relationship between the children and the reporters. Children's relatives can be terrorists, terrorists sympathisers, or could have been threatened by terrorists; and "human rights groups" can be front groups for Musab Zaraqawi's al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia group. Each incongruity or unexpected connection forces us to examine the chilredn's stories carefully for internal consistency and consistency with the forensic evidence, as it develops.

Everything yields to the physical evidence; the supposed eyewitness testimony is less than useless, because they cannot be qualified as witneses and they cannot be relied upon to be honest: the city of Haditha is a terrorist stronghold, and many people might come forward and claim to have witnessed the American "atrocity."

If the DNA and ballistics evidence shows conclusively that the bullets which killed the civilians came from the guns used by the Marines -- or alternatively, that they did not -- then any inconsistency of the eyewitnesses' account is irrelevant. Similarly, if the physical evidence itself is inconclusive, the eyewitnesses accounts alone, questionable as they are, cannot be deteminative of the findings.

We must, of course, wait and see. What else can we do? But it's interesting that at least one CNN reporter, who has seen the complete footage of the interviews with the children, is starting to have doubts.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 4, 2006, at the time of 5:19 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

June 2, 2006

Questions? Who Cares? It Bleeds, So It Leads

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Now that the first wave of hysterical overreporting is past -- where antique media sources casually tossed around phrases like "U.S. military officials have since confirmed to Reuters that that version of the events of November 19 was wrong and that the 15 civilians were not killed by the blast but were shot dead" (which "military officials" were those? why can't we find any such confirmation on the record?) -- we are finally starting to get a little skepticism... at least some probing questions.

Alas, aside from one CNN reporter who became suspicious about some of the children's Haditha testimony (which Sachi is working on a post about), all of the questioning is coming from the blogosphere.

But that's actually not bad: I've thought for some time that the best us of blogging is not to engage in original reporting (most of us have no access to the resources necessary to chase down stories), is not opinion-mongering (yeah, get in line, pal!), but rather applying actual skepticism to claims of certainty by the major media.

For example, Sweetness and Light has noted two interesting points about Iraqis involved in the Haditha story:

  • Ali Omar Abrahem al-Mashhadani, the reporter who conducted the video interviews of the supposed survivors and witnesses, was just released in January after being held for five months at Abu Ghraib on suspicions that arose in connection with photographs he had in his camera (possibly of terrorists setting up IEDs) and other evidence that connected him with terrorist groups.

    Al-Mashhadani also wrote the major Haditha story for Time Magazine on March 21st, which is still being used by news services today as the template: claims, accusations, even entire phrases are still being lifted from this story... written by an Iraqi stringer who, whether you believe he was innocent or guilty, has more than enough reason to hate the American Marines.

    Additionally, al-Mashhadani shares a last name with the head of the Hammurabi Organisation for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy, Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani; Hammurabi is the group that first brought the supposed Haditha "massacre" to Time's attention. Sweetness and Light notes this may not mean much, if it's a tribal name; but the reporter sharing an unusual last name with his primary source should have been investigated by Time before running the story... if only to add "no relation to," if that's the case.

  • Dr. Walid Al-Obeidi, the Haditha doctor who claims to have examined the bodies of the victims of Haditha and claims that they were all "shot in the chest and the head -- from close range" also claims to have himself been tortured by U.S. Marines back in October. Again, regardless whether this is true or false, if he actually believes it, it gives him ample reason to very much want to find that the Marines executed innocent people in November. (And if he doesn't really believe it, but he's saying it anyway, that's even worse.)

(Hat tip for the above to Little Green Footballs, and to commenter MTF, who first brought this to our attention in the comments of another post on this blog. Thanks, both!)

This must be set against the background of a previous claim of American forces -- soldiers, this time -- "massacring" innocent women and children in Ishaqi (north of Baghdad)... a claim that has now been emphatically refuted by a U.S. military investigation of the incident:

U.S. officials described a nighttime raid aimed at finding a specific guerrilla, who then fled the building but was later caught.

U.S. forces at the site began taking direct fire from the building, and the commander at the scene "appropriately reacted by incrementally escalating the use of force from small arms fire to rotary wing aviation, and then to close air support, ultimately eliminating the threat."

A defense official said an AC-130 gunship was called in to help.

As with the Haditha incident, local police forces and local "civilians" (scare-quotes because we really don't know, do we?) had claimed that the troops intentionally massacred the victims at Ishaqi:

Police in Ishaqi [said] five children, four women and two men were shot dead by troops in a house that was then blown up.

They said all the victims were shot in the head, and that the bodies, with hands bound, were dumped in one room before the house was destroyed. Television footage showed the bodies in a morgue. Their wounds were not clear, although one infant had a gaping head wound.

This sounds eerily reminiscent of what is claimed about Haditha; but it turns out to be a complete fabrication. Which is not, of course, evidence that the Marines behaved appropriately at Haditha; we await the forensic evidence to draw any conclusions about that.

But these three points together do make the case that eyewitness testimony and even "expert" opinion are not necessarily as reliable in a country like Iraq, with its tribal affiliations and serious terrorism problem, as they might be in a more civilized country with more institutional safeguards against officials and witnesses simply making stuff up, either due to collusion or because they have been threatened into doing so by the very people who benefit most from these charges: Musab Zarqawi's "al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia" organization.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 2, 2006, at the time of 5:21 PM | Comments (25) | TrackBack

June 1, 2006

Haditha vs. Abu Ghraib

Atrocious Analogies , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

I want to make perfectly clear what I'm talking about in this post: in the real world, the allegations (no proof or even evidence yet) of what was done at Haditha are of course infinitely worse than what we know happened at Abu Ghraib. A series of deliberate murders of children, women, and non-combatant men is obviously far more horrific than mere humiliation.

That aside, let's turn to the lesser question of politics... which could turn out to be of more moment than the reality.

The politics of Haditha may well determine whether we continue in the Global War on Terrorism. If the anti-war, anti-Bush maniacs can spin this into a Nuremburg trial, where the entire military is indicted for war crimes and atrocities, then the 110th Congress (which begins next January) may severely curtail the war effort... and if there is a Democratic president in 2009, he or she may simply pull us out, willy-nilly. So as sad as it may be to admit, the politics and the policy are inextricably intertwined.

So it's fair to ask, what will the politics of Haditha be?

If a thorough investigation ends up exonerating the Marines, then I believe there will be little problem: the usual suspects (here, in Europe, and in the Middle East) will scream cover-up; but theyr'e always crying "wolf!" anyway. We've already factored in that reaction.

So for analytical purposes, the only case that needs to be looked at is the awful possibility that the charges are at least partly true: that some Marines did, indeed, deliberately kill civilians, possibly even including children.

I am not saying that happened; I am saying that is the only case where we really have to ponder how it may affect the war effort. Any lesser result of the investigation will have no particular effect at all.

Surprisingly, I believe that even if the essential Murtha charge turns out to be true, Haditha will not have as big an impact on public support for the war as Abu Ghraib did. We have spent so much time thinking about the substance, which is much worse than Abu Ghraib, that we've failed adequately to address the politics... which would be much less destructive than Abu Ghraib.

I know a lot of you are incredulous, but walk a few steps with me first.

What was it that caught our attention most about Abu Ghraib? It wasn't concern for the prisoners; we know they're most likely terrorists or at least terrorist supporters. They have killed innocents, and not many Americans care one way or another if they are tormented.

It was not the claim that prisoners were being beaten or threatened with dogs; we all understand that imprisonment is force, and war is deadly force -- and sometimes, those who administer force go too far. We punish them when they do; but we also understand why they did.

No... what stunned and infuriated voters was the sheer perversion of those American troops. Stripping Iraqi prisoners naked? Dressing them in women's clothing? Having a woman dance around and jeer at -- and publicly fondle -- their genitals? This is just weird, disgusting, sick, lurid stuff that belongs in the pages of the National Enquirer, not the playbook of military prison guards.

It was creepy: one of the rumors was that Lynndie England spent a lot of time prancing around the prison nude herself... not only in front of prisoners, taunting them, but the other American soldiers themselves. This claim of exhibitionism, whether true or false, is the kind of abnormal sexuality that preys upon the American sense of decency and morality. We desperately do not want to think of our soldiers as the sort of people who hang out in public restrooms and expose themselves. Any scandal that forces us to do so -- Tailhook, for instance -- outrages the American people more than almost anything imaginable.

It's weird; it's decadent. Worse... it's French.

Americans can understand mere murder, but sensationalism and sexual depravity freak us out. Even after being released from prison, we make convicted flashers register whenever they move into a community; but not criminals convicted of mere murder.

Logical or not, that's how we look at it. Maybe Europeans are different; certainly the U.N. appears to be, considering how blasé they are about allegations that "peacekeepers" and aid workers in Africa forced famine victims to give them sex in exchange for food.

Such debauchery and decadence outrages us far worse, I believe, than would a scandal where some Marines might have snapped under the pressure and turned into the sort of "Ghengis Khan" barbarians of the fevered imagination of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. (Such people certainly were found occasionally in Vietnam; but there is not a shred of evidence John Kerry ever met any among the Swift Boat crews.)

And for that very reason, I believe the public will be far more willing to accept that such things happen in war: it's only the tiniest of minorities (perhaps five Marines out of 950,000 military personnel who have cycled through Iraq, 0.0005%); they will receive the maximum punishment if convicted -- probably death by hanging or firing squad; yet we still must move on with the war, not throw in the towel because some mentally deranged individuals killed civilians without reason.

I do not believe that Haditha will have the same grip on the American psyche that Abu Ghraib did (and still does today). Not because it's not as bad; it's worse in the cosmic sense. But because it's a more understandable kind of "bad."

Any honest person who isn't a dyed-in-the-mud pacifist can think of circumstances where he or she would contemplate committing murder. But how many Americans can even imagine themselves stripping prisoners naked and lovingly slipping women's panties over their heads?

Murder is evil. Abu Ghraib was grotesque.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 1, 2006, at the time of 6:21 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

May 30, 2006

A Warrior's Perspective

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Sachi

Black Five referred us to Owen West's Op Ed piece in the New York Times. Owen West, a reserve Marine major who served in Iraq, is the founder of Vets for Freedom.

He thinks the warriors who are actually doing the fighting are tired of mean-sprited political bickering by both sides:

One party is overly sanguine, unwilling to acknowledge its errors. The other is overly maudlin, unable to forgive the same. The Bush administration seeks to insulate the public from the reality of war, placing its burden on the few. The press has tried to fill that gap by exposing the raw brutality of the insurgency; but it has often done so without context, leaving a clear implication that we can never win.

I don't think West is being fair to the president; rather, he seems to bend over backwards to blame both sides equally -- even when one side is clearly more culpable than the other. Although Bush has refused to take the MSM bait to expound on "the fifty most deadly errors you've made in your presidency," he has certainly been willing to change strategies and tactics in the Iraq War.

For example, by uparmoring Humvees and then substituting Strykers wherever possible; by changing commanders who were not getting the job done; by vigorously prosecuting those who engaged in crimes (such as at Abu Ghraib); and most especially, by completely revamping the training for the New Iraqi Army and for focusing at last on equivalent training for the Interior Ministry police forces.

Still, I can certainly understand West's frustration. He thinks the reason ordinary Americans are not rallying behind the troops like they did during WWII is that our military is too insulated from public. Our troops are all volunteers... which means a few sectors of the country (such as the South), where military service is a tradition, contribute the lion's share of the troops. Many people, especially in the more liberal districts that we most desperately need to bring into the fold, don't even know a single serviceman:

In the past, the American public could turn to its sons for martial perspective. Soldiers have historically been perhaps the country's truest reflection, a socio-economic cross-section borne from common ideals. The problem is, this war is not being fought by World War II's citizen-soldiers. Nor is it fought by Vietnam's draftees. Its wages are paid by a small cadre of volunteers that composes about one-tenth of 1 percent of the population -- America's warrior class.

The insular nature of this group -- and a war that has spiraled into politicization -- has left the Americans disconnected and confused. It's as if they have been invited into the owner's box to settle a first-quarter disagreement on the coach's play-calling. Not only are they unprepared to talk play selection, most have never even seen a football game.

In the past, we relied upon the draft to force even those who would not ordinarily think of military service into the Army. While it led to terrible conflicts (in Vietnam, but even in World War II), it also created a shared experience of service to society. Everyone in the country had either served himself or had relatives or close friends who had served. Everyone knew who the soldiers were: the soldiers were we, ourselves.

But today, in many parts of the country, soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors are aliens from another planet: most people living in San Francisco or Chicago or the entire state of Vermont don't know what a soldier is or what he (or she!) does; they don't know why he does it; and they certainly can't imagine what he thinks and worries about while doing it.

In a related vein, people have no idea how modern war is fought. All they see are bits and pieces of confusing, bloody pictures; if you probed, you would probably find that 50% of Americans think that war means the indiscriminate killing of everyone in some geographical area. If they think about military aviation at all, they imagine jet-powered B-29s obliterating entire cities in a single night.

But we don't fight like that anymore. We have conventional ordnance (MOABs, Massive Ordnance Air Blast, a.k.a., the Mother Of All Bombs) that can destroy 10 city blocks; but what we actually do nearly all the time is call down Hellfire and brimstone on a single building, leaving the structures on either side virtually untouched. Our weapons are smart; our targets are targeted. It's not that we're the most moral people in the world (though we are)... we don't want to waste explosive power on people who aren't threatening us.

Americans don't know soldiers; and too often, they don't know us. When we read about American troops being killed, we don't find out what killed them until two thirds of the way through the article; only then do we read that two American troops were killed in a terrorist ambush -- in which, by the way, 80 terrorists were slain, 30 wounded, and a dozen high-value targets captured.

America's conscience is one of its greatest strengths. But self-flagellation, especially in the early stages of a war against an enemy whose worldview is uncompromising, is absolutely hazardous. Three years gone and Iraq's most famous soldiers are Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England, a victim and a criminal, respectively. Abu Ghraib remains the most famous battle of the war.

Soldiers are sick of apologizing for a sliver of malcontents who are not at all representative of the new breed. But they are also sick of being pitied. Our warriors are the hunters, not the hunted, and we should celebrate them as we did in the past, for while our tastes have changed, warfare -- and the need to cultivate national guardians -- has not. As Kipling wrote, "The strength of the pack is the wolf."

I wish West had completed that couplet from Kipling's "the Law of the Jungle," from the Jungle Books:

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back --
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

It signals that as much as America needs her warriors, they need, just as desperately, an American culture that accepts and understands them. We cannot allow the "warrior class" to exist as anything but rhetoric; if they become an actual "class" separate from ordinary Americans, then it's only a short leap until they believe that they're better than "Americans."

Contrariwise, it would take only a little shift in perspective for American civilians to believe that the "wolves" are too wild to live. Our only salvation is if everyone is a wolf, and the pack comprises all of us.

This was always the case in America from the Revolution, and it's still true today... though the silver thread that connects "the men on the wall" to those within the city gates is stretching very thin indeed.

Finally, today's debates are not high-spirited so much as mean-spirited. To allow polarizing forces to dominate the argument by insinuating false motives on one side or a lack of patriotism on the other is to obscure long-term security decisions that have to be made now.

We are clashing with an enemy who has been at war with us in one form or another for two decades. Our military response may take decades more.

West is being too short-sighted here: our enemy has been at war with us for more than a dozen centuries!

Our enemy is a militant jihadi version of Islam that believes it has the moral duty to put everyone on Planet Earth to the choice of "convert or die;" they are at war not just with America, not even just with the men of the West; they are at war with modernity itself. For our enemies, they are always riding across the desert of the world "in perilous fight," with Mohammed himself leading the charge.

This is not all Islam; but it is a piece of Islam that cannot be reconciled with the rest of the world, and which seems to grow stronger with every passing year... and will continue to do so until we deal it the decisive blow that sends it reeling backward -- for a few decades. Until the next time.

If we do not understand and embrace those who defend us today, there may be no one left to defend us tomorrow. Let's sweep all the partisan bickering under the rug and focus on what all real Americans support: the defense of the West and modernity -- the virtues and values of this culture -- against those for whom history ended more than a millennium ago.

Surely that's a fight worth prosecuting; even for Democrats.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 30, 2006, at the time of 11:59 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Deliberating On Mistakes

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

According to Omar at Iraq The Model, a CNN report on May 27th that quoted Iraq's foreign minister about Iran's nuclear program seriously mistranslated the comments from Arabic to English.

Here is what CNN reported:

Iran has a right to develop nuclear technology and the international community should drop its demands that Tehran prove it's not trying to build a nuclear weapon, Iraq's foreign minister said Friday....

"Iran doesn't claim that they want to obtain a nuclear weapon or a nuclear bomb, so there is no need that we ask them for any guarantee now," Hoshyar Zebari said after meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki.

But Omar listened to the audio, and he says this is completely wrong. He supplies his own translation:

We respect Iran's and every other nation's right to pursue nuclear technology for research purposes and peaceful use given they accept [giving] the internationally required guarantees that this will not lead to an armament race in the region…

This is almost the polar opposite of what CNN reported, raising the dilemma of whether we trust Omar of Iraq the Model -- or the scion of Ted Turner. (Silly question.)

If it turns out CNN mistakenly reported, out of sheer incompetence, the opposite of what Zebari said, they should fire the translator.

But if the mistranslation were deliberate, rewriting the official statements of Iraqi officials to hew more closely to what CNN would prefer they said, then -- well, then that's just the traditional MO of the mainstream media, isn't it?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 30, 2006, at the time of 4:55 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

May 26, 2006

Big Lizards Has No Opinion. Yet. UPDATED - Hey, It's a Fast-Breaking Story!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

But plenty still to say...

UPDATED: See bottom of post.

Everyone by now must be aware of an investigation by the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service of a number of possible civilian deaths in Haditha last November. Alas, nearly everyone is leaping to a series of conclusions before the investigation is complete.

Some conclude that the Marines committed a war crime, a massacre of up to two dozens civilians, including women and children, just because the Marines got angry. Others conclude that the whole charge is a slanderous lie invented by anti-war activists like Rep. John Murtha (D-PA, 50%). Both sides are drawing conclusions far beyond the available data.

The fact is that we don't yet know the facts. The dribs and drabs we've gotten from Murtha, from the Los Angeles Times, and from other antique media are anything but illuminating; they critically depend upon anonymous sources, and they conceal weasel-words like "may be," "could be" behind a veil of unfounded certainty:

U.S. Marines could face criminal charges, including murder, over the deaths of up to two dozen Iraqi civilians last year, a defense official said on Friday.

The case could prove a further setback for President Bush who described the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal as America's "biggest mistake" and admitted saying "bring 'em on" to insurgents in 2003 may have "sent the wrong message."

Note two arrows in the quiver of journalism's jihad against Bush and the war:

  • First, that the Marines "could" face murder charges. Here is what Reuters' "defense official" actually said -- though you only get this by reading a different article; the explanatory context is dropped from the first article linked:

    The defense official noted that criminal investigations into deaths could lead to murder charges, but was not more specific about possible charges.
  • Second, the usual Tourette's-like eruption of irrelevant but negative commentary about Bush, designed to taint the sample... and therefore make people more likely to believe the worst.

(I've come up with a neologism to describe that last tendency: I shall call it Spurette's Syndrome, a portmanteau word formed by combining "spurious" and "Tourette's.")

What the Defense Department official clearly said was that one of the possible charges resulting from such an investigation would be murder... which should be obvious, as the claim (by an Iraqi "human rights" organization) is that the Marines wantonly killed unarmed women and children. Clearly, if -- a very big "if" -- if the investigation reveals that this is even partially true, all those involved should be charged with murder... and if they're convicted, I want to see them swing.

Yes, even if they are Marines; and even if they were upset by the IED-death of one of their own, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas. There is no excuse, no mitigating factor, no conceivable rational explanation for executing children in front of their parents -- which is what the Hammurabi Organization for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy alleges they did.

Any Marine who did such a thing -- if any of them really did -- has so dishonored the uniform and the Corps that he should first be dishonorably discharged and then hanged by the neck until dead... and everybody in the unit, indeed every Marine we have (via closed-circuit TV), should be forced to watch the hanging.

I don't know when is the last time we executed a member of the military; but if this allegation turns out to be true (I'm still very dubious), we should resurrect the practice.

But how likely is it? What do we actually know? Darned little:

  • So far, we have Iraqi civiilans who died, though the number is disputed;
  • We have a politician (John Murtha) claiming it was a massacre, but who is also known as a serial liar whose primary purpose has become to accuse American military personnel of committing atrocities and war crimes on a Kerryesque campaign;
  • And we have a videotape.

Reuters says it received a videotape of the alleged victims from the abovementioned Hammurabi human-rights group:

A video of people killed in the incident, given to Reuters in March by Iraq's Hammurabi Organization for Monitoring Human Rights and Democracy, showed corpses lined up at the local morgue with bullet wounds in the head and chest.

The video showed houses with bullet holes in the walls, pieces of human flesh, pools of blood, and clothes and pots scattered on floors. Residents described a rampage by Marines.

That's what we know (I don't believe Reuters is lying). But what don't we know?

  • We do not know whether the corpses in that video are actually from the incident at Haditha.
  • We do not know whether the gunshots are actually executions -- or shots fired from a distance that hit innocent bystanders.
  • We do not know whether the "bullet holes in the walls, pieces of human flesh, pools of blood, and clothes and pots scattered on floors" betoken deliberate executions or a massive firefight.
  • We do not even know whether those bullet holes were made by M-16s or some other American weapon -- or whether they were made by AK-47s.

None of this information has been released, and no MSM report that I have seen even attempts to show evidence filling these vital lacunae. Here is how the Los Angeles Times luridly describes the supposed incident... and note especially how they characterize the provenance of their information:

Marines from Camp Pendleton wantonly killed unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, and then tried to cover up the slayings in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha, military investigations have found.

Officials who have seen the findings of the investigations said the filing of criminal charges, including some murder counts, was expected, which would make the Nov. 19 incident the most serious case of alleged U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

Which officials are those? Would they include Rep. Murtha and others of his ilk? Note that the LA Times does not even go so far as to say "military officials," which implies to me that the officials are not military; the Times is perfectly capable of using the longer term when they choose, to make their point stronger -- as here:

Marine officials also confirmed Thursday that an investigation had been opened into an April 26 incident in which troops allegedly killed a civilian in the town of Hamandiya, west of Baghdad.

Though the Times admits -- once -- that their entire source for the content of the report is the Ubiquitous Anonymous Informant, who did not even show editors or writers a copy of the report (the article is based upon what "officials said"), the entire rest of their piece is written in simple, declarative, absolute statements, expressing utter certainty about their story:

An administrative inquiry overseen by Army Maj. Gen. Eldon Bargewell found that several infantry Marines fatally shot as many as 24 Iraqis and that other Marines either failed to stop them or filed misleading or blatantly false reports.

The report concludes that a dozen Marines acted improperly after a roadside bomb explosion killed a fellow Marine, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas.

Looking for insurgents, the Marines entered several homes and began firing their weapons, according to the report.

What they actually mean is, "according to what some civilian somewhere in the government said about the report, which he claims to have read, but won't show us." But besides being cumbersome, that wouldn't fit the "story" as the LA Times conceives it.

Again, we want to caution: Big Lizards is certainly no more prepared to say that the Marines are innocent than we are to say that they are guilty. We're agnostics on this... but we're militant agnostics: we don't know, and neither do you, dang it!

And neither will anyone know, save a handful of people, until the reports are actually released. Until then, as you read increasingly tabloidesque stories in the elite media, bear in mind not only what you have been told but what you haven't been told... particuarly about the source or sources of this story.

UPDATE, a few minutes later: a story in the New York Times gives more specificity to the allegations, though it adds nothing to the provenance: all is still attributed to anonymous "officials":

Congressional and military officials say the Naval Criminal Investigative Service inquiry is focusing on the actions of a Marine Corps staff sergeant serving as squad leader at the time, but that Marine officials have told members of Congress that up to a dozen other marines in the unit are also under investigation. Officials briefed on the inquiry said that most of the bullets that killed the civilians were now thought to have been "fired by a couple of rifles," as one of them put it....

All of those who discussed the case had to be granted anonymity before they would talk about the findings emerging from the investigation.

So it emerges that the investigation is centered around one or two rogue Marines who may have gone on a several-hour long rampage, and also upon several other Marines, probably to determine whether they tried to cover up the incident -- which would of course depend on whether they knew (or reasonably should have known) that what they were reporting was false. Assuming, that is, that it was false.

If true, this is still an atrocity; but rather than indicting the entire Marine Corps, the investigation appears to have narrowed the focus.

I still believe that if this is true (we're no further on that question), those convicted should be hanged and the rest of the Corps forced to stand at attention and watch. But we're still going to wait for the results to be released, and they certainly will be released publicly, before leaping to either conclusion.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 26, 2006, at the time of 5:50 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

May 25, 2006

Beautiful Pictures from Iraq

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Black Five featured several photographs taken by Staff Sergeant Russell Lee Klika. His photographs are simply amazing. The first feature is here, and the second here. Enjoy.

To whet your appetites, here are a couple samples....



UAV at Sunset    Kids of Iraq

"Soldiers of Charlie Troop, 1st Squadron, 33rd Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, launch a UAV prior to a mission from Camp Hope near Sadr City, Iraq" (L); children of Iraq (R) -- courtesy Black Five

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 25, 2006, at the time of 1:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 22, 2006

Maines Vs. Texas

Iraq Matters , Make Mine Music , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Sachi

Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines is digging the hole deeper and deeper. After three years of backlash and a stunted career, she is even more defiant. In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, Maines hijacked a Dixie Chicks concert in Great Britain to announce -- to cheers from her audience -- that she was "ashamed" that President Bush came from Texas.

NEW YORK (AP) - The Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines apologized for disrespecting President Bush during a London concert in 2003. But now, she's taking it back. "I don't feel that way anymore," she told Time magazine for its issue hitting newsstands Monday. "I don't feel he is owed any respect whatsoever."

In fact, Maines never really did "apologize" in the first place. She said something along the lines that the office of the presidency should be respected, no matter who holds it. I don't consider that an apology; and she didn't even mean that much. Now, Maines is repudiating even that half-hearted non-apology (which fooled nobody, by the way.)

To tell the truth, I really don't care what three dumb Chicks think of the president or the war. But I am angry at the relentless attacks on country singers, their fans, country western music, and the American spirit itself. Listen to what Martie Maquire, another band member, thinks of country western fans:

"I'd rather have a small following of really cool people who get it, who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith," Maguire said. "We don't want those kinds of fans. They limit what you can do."

We know what Maines thinks of Toby Keith; but now Reba's fans are also uncool? I take that personally.

The mainstream press has clearly taken the Dixie Chicks side of this "debate;" they even imply that other country stars made death threats against the chicks:

[Natalie Maines' anti-Bush] remarks led to death threats and a backlash from other country stars, including a high-profile spat with Toby Keith. It also stalled what until then had been the group's smashingly successful career.

Now, that also sentence could also be read to mean that Maines' remarks led to death threats -- and they also (separately) led to a "backlash" by other country singers. But it's carefully crafted so that it's equally proper to read it as saying that "other country stars" reacted with "death threats and a backlash." I think the ambiguity is deliberate: it's a "dual use" smear, like Hussein's WMD arsenal, to make it possible to deny bad intent when called to account.

So how about that "high-profile spat with Toby Keith?" This is true; there certainly was one. But what this story ignores is that the feud was started by Maines herself, who deliberately provoked it a year before her 2003 London smear -- possibly because the Chicks considered Toby Keith their biggest rival in country music at the time, and they may have wanted to piggyback on his success and celebrity to promote their own multiple nominations at the upcoming Country Music Awards. Specifically, both the Chicks and Keith were up for Entertainer of the Year in 2002, and only one could win. (Hint: it wasn't the Texas tornado.)

Toby Keith is actually from Oklahoma (though from Clinton and Moore, not from Muskogee); and interestingly, he is a Democrat -- in the Zell Miller mold -- and he opposed the Iraq war (from an isolationist standpoint). The Chicks never "got" Toby Keith, just like they never "got" country music itself: to this day, they seem to think Keith is a right-wing Republican war supporter.

Toby Keith originally did not say a single thing to Maines about her 2003 comment in London (let alone any death threats). But that wasn't when the "feud" began; in fact, it started well before 2003... but the attacks have mostly come from the Dixie Chicks, mainly from Natalie Maines herself.

Back in August of 2002, Natalie Maines made her first public, gratuitously nasty comment about Toby Keith's song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue":

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (LA Daily News) - ABC News Anchor Peter Jennings is apparently not the only celebrity to take issue with Toby Keith's chart-topping country hit, "Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)." Now, the Dixie Chick’s lead singer, Natalie Maines, freely shares her dislike of the song.

"Don't get me started," Maines told the Los Angeles Daily News. "I hate it. It's ignorant, and it makes country music sound ignorant. It targets an entire culture - and not just the bad people who did bad things. You've got to have some tact. Anybody can write, 'We'll put a boot in your ass.' But a lot of people agree with it. The kinds of songs I prefer on the subject are like Bruce Springsteen's new songs."

To which Toby Keith said, "you've got to be in my league as a songwriter before I'll even respond to you."

Since then, he's projected images of Maines and Saddam Hussein on big screens behind the stage when he's performing concerts.

But the most infantile attack after Maines' 2003 comment in London came not from Keith, but from the Dixie Chicks themselves:

On May 21, Maines performed on television at the AMC Awards wearing a F.U.T.K. tee shirt – which viewers declared a definite telling off of T.K. (Toby Keith). According to a Dixie Chicks rep, "It’s my understanding that according to chatter on their web site, Natalie’s T-shirt stands for FREEDOM, UNDERSTANDING, TRUTH, AND KNOWLEDGE."

Yeah. Right.

Around this time, a friend's child, whom Keith was very close to, died of cancer. Suddenly the feud between Maines and him just seemed really trivial, and he started ignoring them. Maines may have thought this meant she won; but the reality is that the Dixie Chicks simply ceased to matter in the world of country music: they lost all their award nominations and their CD sales plummeted.

Toby Keith, meanwhile, went on to become one of the greatest forces in the genre in decades. He now owns his own label and has become an institution.

I think at first the Chicks picked on Keith because they percerved him as a rival. They might have thought that attacking him would create the buzz they needed to sweep the CMA awards and launch a huge career in country.

But they wildly misjudged their audience. Toby Keith was not just a musical rival; after 911, and especially after "Courtesy," Toby Keith had become something much larger... and the Chicks never "got it." Keith came to symbolize the angry, defiant American: defiance of Osama bin Laden, of terrorism, and of European-style appeasement. To many Americans, he came to symbolize the spirit of America itself. Keith, the Okie from Clinton, was more Texan than those three dopey Texans.

Natalie Maines clearly understood the defiance part; that's exactly what angered her about Keith's song. Rather than accepting 9/11 as a just rebuke, rather than being humbled and apologetic for all the horrible things we were doing that brought 9/11 on ourselves, Maines understood that Keith's song -- and it's overwhelming reception across the country and especially among the military -- signalled that Americans did not accept the diminished role in the world that Leftists ordered for us. Instead, we made it plain that we were going to fight back -- violently, just as we'd been attacked violently. Keith was a powerful symbol of that resolve.

The Dixie Chicks gambled -- and they lost. They gambled that country fans were just like most rock fans: uncomfortable with the idea that there was something special and essentially good about America, compared to other countries. Maines and the other Chicks thought country fans were basically like the French.

They did not realize what country western music meant to many Americans. Thinking they were attacking American arrogance, they were really attacking the core values of real America. In doing so, the Dixie Chicks have alienated themselves from real Americans.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 22, 2006, at the time of 1:46 PM | Comments (27) | TrackBack

May 13, 2006

The 18½ Minute Gap

Iraq Matters , Scaley Classics
Hatched by Dafydd

Originally posted on Patterico's Pontifications, May 30th, 2005 -- a blast from the past! Now reprinted here courtesy the Big Lizards Scaley Classics series. Collect the whole set!

Interesting note: while researching my earlier post, I noticed that my very first blogpost anywhere was on Patterico: Sneaking Apples From the Great Wealth Tree, May 27th, 2005. That means my (Dafydd's) first blogospheric anniversary is coming up in only twelve days! In celebration, I will repost that first post of mine here on Big Lizards, for all to see.

(And how many readers will swiftly comment, "say, you've sure gone downhill in the last twelvemonth... what happened?")

The first anniversary of Big Lizards itself is not until September 16th.

Without further uninteresting ado....

~

If you enjoy arguing with Democrats about the validity of the Iraq War (do you also like to dart in front of a bull wearing long, red, flannel underwear?), you will discover that every such discussion always ends the same way: because we didn't find pyramids of carefully labeled nuclear missiles from the Acme WMD Warehouse, the whole war was a "complete fraud"... we had "no reason at all" for going into Iraq; consequently, the exercise was utterly "futile" and a "miserable failure."

(And how did that bull get into red, flannel underwear in the first place?)

It does little good to point out what nobody now denies: that Hussein had many ongoing programs to develop such chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; they just weren't as advanced as we were afraid they were. Given how little intelligence we had about that secretive country, the choice was to trust in Saddam Hussein's restraint and good judgment, or trust in the United States military. "You should have just waited a few more months," the lib invariably intones; "maybe a year. Then we would have known for sure."

In other words, they wanted us to wait until two minutes to midnight. Then we could have moved... unless it turned out our watch was slow.

But now we know that it was not just on WMD that the clock was ticking. As Claudia Rosett, George Russell, and others pointed out, the oil-for-fraud program was already starting to produce the nightmare scenario of terrorist groups with their own revenue streams, independent of individual donors and fundraisers. Articles written for Fox News and National Review Online revealed that at least one company linked to al-Qaeda was already involved in kickback schemes to make millions in profits from the U.N. program -- money that would be directly available to fund al-Qaeda operations, now that Osama bin Laden's personal fortune is long since spent. And it was not just al-Qaeda; several other terrorist organizations also wound up with oil leases, right under the noses of Benon Sevan, Executive Director of the Iraq Programme (Oil for Food), Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and his spawn-of-the-devil Kojo (or is that Cujo?)

Had we waited just a few more months -- waited until two minutes before midnight -- even more high officials in Security-Council governments would have been corrupted; it's entirely possible that, in the end, even Britain would have bowed to international pressure and pulled out of the Operation Iraqi Freedom. Would we still have gone to war, then? I don't think anyone can really say for sure.

So the Left is actually right, for a change: we miserably failed to wait until two minutes to midnight to strike against the tyrant. We struck at twenty till, instead. Maybe even twenty and a half minutes before the witching hour.

Which would make it the second time in history that an 18½ minute gap saved the presidency... and this time, possibly the entire Global War on Terrorism as well.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 13, 2006, at the time of 7:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 10, 2006

An Iraq Death Squad Leader Arrested

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

As Iraqi's new cabinet shapes up, the most challenging task is to rid the country of the violent militias which have infiltrated the Iraqi Security Forces, the police. So it's very good news indeed to hear that a high-ranking general in the Interior Ministry, which controls the Iraqi police, has been arrested for involvement in the infamous Shiite "death squads":

Iraq's interior minister said on Sunday his police had arrested a general in the ministry on suspicion of involvement in kidnaps and death squads.

Bayan Jabor, who is fighting to keep his job in a new government in the face of criticism that he has tolerated Shi'ite militias inside his ministry, made the announcement in an interview on Al Jazeera television.

"We have arrested an officer, a major general... along with 17 people who kidnapped citizens and in some cases killed them. He is now in jail and under investigation," he said.

"We also found a terror group in the 16th brigade that carries out killings of citizens," he added.

Although Reuters is saying that the Interior Minister is fighting to keep his job," that may not be exactly true. A few weeks ago, Jabor said in a TV interview, when it became clear Ibrahim al-Jaafari was being ousted, that he too was retiring as soon as a replacement could be found. But it's possible he changed his mind, or he was only posturing in the first place.

The former prime minister, Jaafari, was hand-picked by Iranian-backed renegade cleric Muqtada Sadr and was long suspected of secretly supporting the death squads of fundamentalist Shia militias (the Badr Brigades and Sadr's own Mahdi Militia) which had thoroughly penetrated the security forces. If that is true, then Jabor must have been complicit as well:

The U.S. ambassador, a key player in the negotiations, has made no secret of the fact that Washington would prefer a new face to lead the ministry.

Mohammed at Iraq the Model reports that the United Iraqi Alliance (the main Shiite bloc of parties that controls the lion's share of seats in the parliament) and the Iraqi National Accord (the primary secular party headed by ex-Baathist, rebel against Hussein, and former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi) agreed that both the Interior Minister and the Defense Minister should come from outside those two blocs.

Since Bayan Jabor is a member of the SCIRI, a Shiite party that is under the UIA umbrella, he will almost certainly not be chosen to remain as Interior Minister.

In any event, the ministry is beginning to clean up itself. Let's hope they succeed.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 10, 2006, at the time of 1:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 4, 2006

Sadr the Gamester

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The most important agenda item for the new Iraqi government's incoming Interior Minister -- not yet chosen -- is to dismantle the militias and incorporate their members into the regular police forces. Not only has the Interior Minister not been picked yet -- according to Iraq the Model's Omar, no one seems eager to take the job... for the precise reason that going after the militias is a daunting prospect!

The biggest obstacle, of course, is the Iranian sock puppet, Muqtada Sadr. His Mahdi Militia is the only one openly refusing to integrate. The May 6th issue of Newsweek contains an interview of Sadr, talking about the future of his so-called "resistance movement."

I do not like the way Newsweek treats Sadr with such deference, describing him as "part of the political establishment." However, he does have power: Sadr was the cause of that four-month gridlock in forming a government, pushing his divisive candidates, such as Ibrahim al-Jaafari. I suppose we must grudgingly admit that, while he is not a part of the "establishment," he is a force with which Iraq must reckon.

In the interview, Sadr insists that his aim has always been to kick the American and other Coalition forces out of Iraq. He argues that his "powerful, loyal, political and military force" will "take Iraq to safety" (by which he means "take Muqtada Sadr to the Caliphate of Iraq").

At the same time, I reach out my hand [to the political parties] to cooperate to make peace in Iraq, to drive away the shadow of the armies of darkness [somebody call Bruce Campbell, quick!] The occupation is the creator of all problems. I pray to Allah to take away the problems and their creator.

Sure. That's why Sadr's Mahdi Militia has been killing Sunnis and Shiite political rivals... just their way of "make[ing] peace in Iraq."

Sadr divides his "resistance" into three "stages":

  1. Peaceful resistance;
  2. His two violent uprisings (in Najaf, the Sadr City slums of Baghdad, and across the Shiite areas);
  3. And now the stage of "political resistance, which we attained by reaching political posts and demanding a timetable for the departure of U.S troops."

Maybe it's just me, but I don't quite recall Sadr ever conducting a "peaceful resistance" stage; but maybe I just missed it. The first we heard of him was when he was credibly accused of assassinating Imam Abdul Majid al-Khoei when he entered the Shrine of Imam Ali; then the next thing we heard was the Najaf takeover, timed to coincide with First Fallujah.

As for the political resistance, his normal method of operation is to "intimidate" rivals -- by murdering them. In other words, Sadr's only known "stage" of resistance is lethal violence.

In the interview, Sadr reached out to Sunni Iraqis, urging them to fight against the occupation forces (that would be us). But before he cooperates with the Sunni, he has few things to say to them:

I address the Sunnis through NEWSWEEK. One, they should specify their stance toward attacks on civilians. After the attack in Samarra, the Sunnis didn't have a clear stance. Two, their stance toward Takfiris [a name for followers of the extremist ideology espoused by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi] is not clear. Three, they should specify their stance toward the Shia. Are we Muslims or not? We will not be satisfied with anything less than that. Four, they should demand the execution of Saddam Hussein. And five, they should specify their stance toward [returning] families who have been displaced [by sectarian violence].

This might all sound reasonable... if we didn't know what Sadr himself has been doing all this time. But he does not even acknowledge the fact that the Mighty al-Mahdi Army is a militia, let alone that it's responsible for many of Sunni (and probably some Shiite) citizens done to death in Iraq. What, me militia? asks Sadr.

Newsweek: The Mahdi Army is supposedly the only faction that hasn't signed on to an agreement to incorporate militias into governing bodies. Can you explain why?

Sadr: The Mahdi Army is not a militia. You can't describe it or specify it as a militia. I issued a statement recently limiting the Mahdi Army personnel to cultural, social and religious acts....

Newsweek:Many people claim that Mahdi Army members have been responsible for sectarian attacks in recent weeks. Others say they're simply defending their neighborhoods that the government cannot defend. What do you say? (Sachi: What a softball question! You just gave him an out!)

Sadr: The Mahdi Army personnel are not sinless. But they are integrating themselves despite the harsh circumstances they live in. (Sachi: What's that supposed to mean?)

Newsweek: Do you think that some people dressed as or appearing like Mahdi Army members have carried out reprisal or vengeance attacks of a sectarian nature?

Sadr: And what are the clothes of the Mahdi Army? So that I can distinguish them from others. They don't have a specific uniform. They are people gathered by love, and faith is their weapon.

Ooh, stop, stop. I can't take anymore; I'll go into sugar shock.

Why are we listening to this palaver? Muqtada Sadr couldn't tell the truth even if his life depended on it, and he were pumped so full of Sodium Pentothol it was squirting out his ears. The only honest sentiment he says is that he hates America and wants American forces to leave... not because he wants peace and stability in Iraq, but because it's easier for him to control Iraq without the Coalition spoiling things. Sadr is nothing but trouble.

Newsweek: Do you recall that at one point the U.S military and political spokesmen said it was their aim to "kill or capture" you? Your reaction now?

Well, my reaction is -- "darn it, I sure wish we still had that plan!"

Hatched by Sachi on this day, May 4, 2006, at the time of 4:33 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 3, 2006

Barry Bends

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Wretchard has an important, fascinating, but interminable post up about retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey -- he who commanded the 24th Mechanized Infantry during Desert Storm, later became Bill Clinton's Drug Czar (Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy), and is currently an adjunct professor at West Point.

The Belmont Club post is essential reading; but it's very long. So as long as this post here is, consider this the CliffsNotes version of the Belmont Club post!

First, it's important to note that Gen. McCaffrey was not an Iraq-War supporter. In fact, he was quite a critic from the very beginning; and he's quite antagonistic towards Donald Rumsfeld.

This is important to note before going in: McCaffrey has developed an increasingly optimistic outlook on the war, a complete turnaround from his opinion in 2003, and especially intriguing in light of a New Republic article, written by Lawrence Kaplan, that makes clear McCaffrey's attitude as recently as 2004 towards Rumsfeld -- especially over his planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

(The New Republican article is only available to subscribers from their website; but you can read it at the site of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council here.)

Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey, who has become Rumsfeld's most outspoken critic, asked, "Why would you do this operation with inadequate power?" To McCaffrey, the answer is obvious: "Because you have such a strong ideological view, and you're so confident in your views that you disregard the vehement military advice from, particularly, Army generals who you don't think are very bright."

But in spite of this history, when McCaffrey visited Iraq on a fact-finding mission in June of 2005 -- and even more so when he returned in April of this year -- he was extremely optimistic about the war and its successful outcome.

Did the antique media even bother to report this? Isn't it rather more newsworthy when a widely respected and very experienced critic of the war admits that it has gone a lot better than he expected -- even in the "winning the peace" category -- than it is when long-time critics of the war, such as Weasley Clarke or Anthony Zinni, continue to sing the same defeatist ditty, despite never having gone to investigate its progress?

Shouldn't the McCaffrey memo of April, 2006, have been major, headline news? I reckon not: he came to the wrong conclusion.

In particular, McCaffrey found "simply awe-inspiring" the "morale, fighting effectiveness, and confidence of U.S. combat forces." He also heavily praised the New Iraqi Army:

The Iraqi Army is real, growing, and willing to fight. They now have lead action of a huge and rapidly expanding area and population.... The recruiting now has gotten significant participation by all sectarian groups to include the Sunni.... This is simply a brilliant success story. [Emphasis in Belmont Club post.]

McCaffrey noted "marked improvement" in the previously poorly performing Iraqi Security Force (police). First, the bad:

The police are heavily infiltrated by both the AIF [Anti-Iraqi Forces -- the foreign terrorists] and the Shia militia. They are widely distrusted by the Sunni population. They are incapable of confronting local armed groups. They inherited a culture of inaction, passivity, human rights abuses, and deep corruption.

Now the good:

The Iraqi police are beginning to show marked improvement in capability since MG Joe Peterson took over the program. The National Police Commando Battalions are very capable - a few are simply superb and on par with the best U.S. SWAT units in terms of equipment, courage, and training. Their intelligence collection capability is better than ours in direct HUMINT.

And the future:

This will be a ten year project requiring patience, significant resources, and an international public face.... We absolutely can do this. But this police program is now inadequately resourced.

McCaffrey is, on the whole, very pleased with the job done by his old nemesis from the Gulf War days, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; the general is less sanguine, oddly enough, about the contributions (such as they are) from the State Department:

The U.S. Inter-Agency Support for our strategy in Iraq is grossly inadequate.... U.S. consultants of the IRMO [Iraq Reconstruction Management Office] do not live and work with their Iraqi counterparts, are frequently absent on leave or home consultations, are often in-country for short tours of 90 days to six months, and are frequently gapped with no transfer of institutional knowledge.

McCaffrey seems to believe the problem arose back in 2003, under Secretary of State Colin Powell (or perhaps earlier, in the decades of the State Department's institutional intellectual lethargy). In his 2005 memo, he described the tenure of Paul Bremer as U.S. Administrator of Iraq (head of the Coalition Provisional Authority) thus:

The transitional Bremer-appointed Iraqi government created a weak state of warring factions.

But I think this is overly harsh against Bremer. It's not as if he had anything to work with, after the sudden and complete collapse of the Iraqi-despised Baathist regime, leaving a power vacuum... and the less than stellar performance of the first American "proconsul" of Iraq, retired Gen. Jay Garner. I think that Bremer did the best he could:

  • He formally disbanded Saddam's army, which had fallen apart anyway and was plagued by incompetence, cowardice, and corruption even before the invasion;
  • He ordered full-scale de-Baathification, which was urgently needed if the new government were ever to have credibility with the 80% of the country that was Shiite or Kurdish;
  • And he helped create -- and then handed power to -- the Iraq Interim Governing Council, marking the very first time that majority Shia and Kurds (and women) had a say in their own governing: before the Baathists, Iraq was briefly ruled by a military dictatorship, which had toppled the Sunni Hashemite kingdom, which had taken over from the Ottoman Turks.

(Although Bremer's position was under the Department of Defense, and he reported directly to Rumsfeld, Bremer himself was a career State Department offiical, a protégé of "Hammerin' Hank" Kissinger, and was thoroughly imbued with the State ideology of stability über alles.)

McCaffrey makes two profound and inarguable points in his 2006 memo. Here is the first:

The bottom line is that only the CIA and the U.S. Armed Forces are at war.

...Meaning, of course, that the State Department and other departments of the government (Treasury, Energy, et cetera), as well as all of Congress and the Judiciary, still live in a September 10th world. It is critical to internalize this point if you want to understand the war.

McCaffrey worries about the public's taste for the task flagging, if they don't see us as actually "at war." This might cause the funding to run dry; if we do not sustain our own will to fight here, then as the adage goes, it is entirely possible for us to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:

Iraq cannot sustain the requisite economic recovery without serious U.S. support. The Allies are not going to help. They will not fulfill their pledges. Most of their pledges are loans not grants.

But perhaps even more important is the yawning Grand Canyon of distrust that has separated our own military from the American press... a press which, if it came aboard, could educate the American people (as they did during World War II) and keep their attention riveted on Iraq, where history is being made.

As he notes in the memo from 2005, the difficulties of reporting out of Iraq (coupled with the media's knee-jerk reaction -- unmentioned by McCaffrey -- that the war is illegal, immoral, fattening, and a sign that we live in a Fascist dictatorship) result in the news media sending only "the second team" to Iraq.

The reporters have little to no experience with war, have typically never served in the military, dislike (or even hate) soldiers and military values, report in a facile and tendentious manner, misquote sources, rely upon native sources of unknown provenance (or even known sympathy for the enemy), and in general, hamper, not help, the military effort. It's hardly surprising that, as McCaffrey noted in 2005:

Military leaders on the ground are talking to people they trust instead of talking to all reporters who command the attention of the American people. (We need to educate and support AP, Reuters, Gannet, Hearst, the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc.)

Nearly a year later, and this aspect of the war has actually deteriorated, leading McCaffrey to note that "there is a rapidly growing animosity in our deployed military forces toward the U.S. media. We need to bridge this gap."

The general then writes his other profound inarguability:

Armies do not fight wars - countries fight wars. We need to continue talking to the American people through the press. They will be objective in reporting facts if we facilitate their information gathering mission.

But he is far more optimistic about the Iraqi political scene:

[I]n my view, the Iraqis are likely to successfully create a governing entity. The intelligence picture strongly portrays a population that wants a federal Iraq, wants a national Army, rejects the AIF as a political future for the nation, and is optimistic that their life can be better in the coming years. Unlike the Balkans -- the Iraqis want this to work.

In conclusion, Barry McCaffrey is extremely optimistic -- especially for a guy who was against the war from the git-go:

There is no reason why the U.S. cannot achieve our objectives in Iraq. Our aim must be to create a viable federal state under the rule of law which does not: enslave its own people, threaten its neighbors, or produce weapons of mass destruction. This is a ten year task. We should be able to draw down most of our combat forces in 3-5 years. We have few alternatives to the current US strategy which is painfully but gradually succeeding. This is now a race against time. Do we have the political will, do we have the military power, will we spend the resources required to achieve our aims?

That question at the end of this paragraph is the whole enchilada: to persevere is to prevail; to falter is to fail. It's as simple as that.

(But read the whole thing at the Belmont Club.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 3, 2006, at the time of 7:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 1, 2006

Internal Powell Struggle

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Over the weekend, Colin Powell -- in a thoroughly expected surprise -- joined the revolt of the former generals complaining that we didn't follow the "Powell doctrine" when we invaded Iraq.

The Powell doctrine holds that:

  1. No military action should be undertaken unless the international community -- and especially France and Russia -- applaud it;
  2. And at least twenty Arab nations join it;
  3. And the goal of keeping the coalition intact supercedes all military goals;
  4. And Israel is ordered not to respond even if they're attacked;
  5. And the State Department runs it;
  6. And we first raise an army of "overwhelming force," as determined by Colin Powell, to utterly crush the enemy... until the Europeans get cold feet; at which point we abandon the conflict, declare victory, and head for home.

President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld failed to listen to Colin Powell; so he retaliated yesterday in an interview on a British television network, ITV, by attacking the execution of the war and calling everyone else's competence into question:

Just back from Baghdad and eager to discuss promising developments, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice found herself knocked off message Sunday, forced to defend prewar planning and troop levels against an unlikely critic - Colin Powell, her predecessor at the State Department.

For the Bush administration, it was a rare instance of in-house dissenter going public.

On Rice's mind was the political breakthrough that had brought her and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to Iraq last week and cleared the way for formation of a national unity government.

Yet Powell sideswiped her by revisiting the question of whether the U.S. had a large enough force to oust Saddam Hussein and then secure the peace.

Despite AP's feeble attempt at humor -- "a rare instance" indeed! -- this is a serious, yet all too typical, phenomenon today: the Left has settled upon the tactic of openly trying to wreck the Iraq War in an effort to discredit George W. Bush and the whole idea that countries have national interests that sometimes dictate going to war with other countries that threaten them.

In Colin-land, if we absolutely had to overthrow Saddam... then we should simply have made Iraq a colony, darn it, forever ruled by American colonial governors. Rather than try to build up democracy in the Middle East, we should have -- under the Powell doctrine -- just created an American empire that would control all the oil. (Powell has never been a big fan of democracy, preferring to deal with emirs and presidents-for-life, who can supply "stability" -- entertain him with lavish State functions held in palaces.)

It seems his model is the British Empire of the nineteenth century (or the Russian Empire of the twentieth). Of course, those didn't work out too well in the modern era; but perhaps if we just redouble our efforts, it will all be different this time.

Reuters is somewhat less tendentious about Powell's criticism:

In an interview with a private British television station, Powell said there had been debates about the size of the force and how to deal with the aftermath.

"The aftermath turned out to be much more difficult than anyone had anticipated," said Powell, adding he had favoured a larger military presence to deal with the unforeseen.

Ordinarily, "anyone" would include Powell himself; I'm not sure if he gives himself an exemption, but at least he doesn't overtly claim psychic powers, like some of the other generals. And he makes it plain here that his views were considered... they were just not accepted:

"I made the case to General (Tommy) Franks, to (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld and to the president that I was not sure we had enough troops," he said.

He argued, however, that his view was not ignored but that those responsible for the troop levels believed they had the appropriate number.

I am most amused by the casual assumption of the antique media that if only we had sent two, three, four times the number of troops, then everything would have been much better. It's more than an assumption; they act as if everyone knows this, everyone accepts this, there are no demurs.

They seem oblivious to the fact that more is not always better in warfare: the Soviets spent a force of 100,000 men in a futile effort to conquer and hold Afghanistan; we successfully ousted the Taliban and created a nascent democracy with less than a twentieth of that by relying upon Northern Alliance forces and our own air power; during Operation Anaconda, the American troop presence rose to no more than 10,000. And at virtually no time since, except for one brief spike in 2003, have we kept more than 12,000-15,000 soldiers in that country.

Oddly, nobody seems to complain that we should have used the Powell doctrine in Afghanistan.

Even so, the media has an idée fixe that if only we had sent 500,000, 750,000, or a million men to Iraq -- instead of a paltry 200,000 -- there never would have been any insurgency. Do they imagine that we would leave such a large force (a very significant portion of our entire armed forces) tied down in one country in the Middle East indefinitely? And if not -- what do they think would happen when 80% of those forces left Iraq?

Yet the decision made by Rumsfeld, with extraordinary consultation with the entire warfighting senior staff under Tommy Franks, is offered as à priori proof of incompetence, as if it were mathematically proven to be wrong and need not even be discussed.

In reality, going to war with the army we had, Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party were ousted from control in three weeks, and "major combat operations" ended after forty days.

Since then, there have been three major elections, each gaining a larger turnout than the last; 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces are almost completely peaceful, and only one of the remaining four (Anbar) is actually considered critically violent.

We have built an amazingly professional New Iraqi Army of 200,000 plus, an Iraqi Air Force, and an increasingly honest and effective Iraqi police. Oil is flowing; electricity and water are running better in most parts of the country than they were under Saddam. And the Iraqi economy is already better than it was in the last ten years of Saddam Hussein.

But according to Wesley Clarke, Anthony Zinni, Colin Powell, and a half-dozen other malcontents and whiners, everything would have been much better if only we had listened to them -- and followed the Soviet example.

Why now? Why are all these people coming forward today, rather than last year? That's easy to explain, and AP inadvertently does so:

Rice, Bush's national security adviser during the run-up to the war, neither confirmed nor denied Powell's assertion. But she spent a good part of her appearances on three Sunday talk shows reaching into the past to defend the White House, which is trying to highlight the positive to a public increasingly skeptical in this election year of the president's conduct of the war and concerned about the large U.S. military presence.

Simple as that: the grousing generals are coming forward today because the midterm elections will be held in just six months, and the Democrats and September-10th Republicans see an opening to destroy Bush.

The bipartisan Left has six months to convince Americans that the whole war was a catastrophe; that we accomplished nothing; that we might have had a chance were it not for the "incompetence" of Bush and Rumsfeld (if only they had listened to me!); and that our only option at this point is, as Joe Biden suggests, to partition Iraq into three separate regions -- just like Clinton and Clarke did in the success story of Bosnia! -- then declare victory, cut, and run.

Come on in, Colin; the water's fine.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 1, 2006, at the time of 3:30 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

April 24, 2006

Kerry Me Back to Old Baghdaddy

Iraq Matters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

I just heard this on Hugh Hewitt (guest-hosted by the perpetualy bemused Jed Babbin). Surely this must rank right up there with "I actually voted for the eighty-seven billion before I voted against it," if not quite up to the caliber of his "Genghis Khan" accusation of war crimes against the entire Vietnam-era military.

I wish I knew what show this was on; anybody out there in Lizardland who can point me to a transcript, I will be very appreciative and will correct any mistakes in the quotation below [quotation corrected; the comments have the two versions side by side, so readers can judge how close my remembered version was to the actual words. The show was This Week With George Snuffleupagus]. But here is what I heard him say to the best of my recollection, in his very own Boston-Brahmin, ersatz-Kennedy monodrone:

But there is no excuse three and a half years later for American troops to be driving by IEDs and getting blown up. Are you telling me that they can’t drive a truck?

Yeah, that's the problem -- the soldiers are getting blown up by IEDs because they have poor "defensive driving" skills.

If only we had listened to Sen. John Kerry (D-Beacon Hill) and shipped a few thousand high-school Drivers-Ed teachers over to Iraq, the whole problem would be cleared up before you could say "Boston baked beans." When the explosion began, our boys could simply swerve dexterously around it, just like in the movies.

Say, you do know that JFK is making another run for la Casablanca in 2008 (or perhaps starting this year), right? Boy, that gives us Republicans a nice, warm feeling.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 24, 2006, at the time of 5:21 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

April 22, 2006

What's Out Of Place In This Picture?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Iraqi National Assembly meets, everyone more or less agrees on a unity government. This is really good news, though I'm still a bit suspicious about soon-to-be-prime-minister-elect Jawad al-Maliki. The other top slots are filled, nearly all by acclamation.

There is a government now in Iraq. This is deeper than the antique media want to admit; this is what we've been waiting for these last four months. Did we mention Ibrahim al-Jaafari is out?

But what about that mainstream media? Take a look at the first few paragraphs of the AP story. See if you can spot the incongruity, the Thing That Doesn't Belong. I hope I'm not giving too big a hint:

After months of political deadlock, Iraq's parliament convened Saturday to select top leadership posts, launching the process of putting together a new government aimed at pulling the country out of its sectarian strife.

Before the session, Shiite lawmaker Ridha Jawad Taqi said all sides were agreed on a package deal for the top spots: Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, would remain as president for a second term, with Sunni Arab Tariq al-Hashimi and Shiite Adil Abdul-Mahdi holding the two vice-president spots.

Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni, would become parliament speaker with two deputies - Khalid al-Attiyah, a Shiite, and Aref Tayfour, a Kurd.

Suspected insurgents, meanwhile, set off two bombs in a public market in northern Iraq, killing at least two Iraqis and wounding 17. The second blast was timed to hit emergency crews arriving at the scene.

On Friday, the Shiite alliance nominated a tough-talking Shiite politician, Jawad al-Maliki, as prime minister in a move that broke the long impasse over forming a new government.

Sunni Arab and Kurdish politicians signaled they would accept al-Maliki, clearing the way for parliament to elect top leadership positions, including the president.

Did you spot it?

All right then, riddle me this. The headline of the story is Iraqi Lawmakers Meet to Choose New Leaders. It's 27 grafs long.

Nine of the first ten paragraphs are, in fact, about the Iraqi politicians meeting and electing people to various positions. One paragraph is about a couple of Iraqis being killed in "northern Iraq" -- that is, 60 miles from Baghdad, where the parliament is meeting.

What does that paragraph have to do with the story? It's like saying Mandy, who lives in Colorado Springs, had a trigonometry test today; she had studied well, and she earned an A-, which was her best grade all semester. She told all her girlfriends about how well she did. A man was murdered in Tampa, Florida. Mandy's parents were so proud of her score on the trig test that they celebrated by going out to dinner.

Just as an experiment, I ploughed through this boring story about early voting in the city elections in New Orleans. Can you guess what I didn't find? Right you are: I didn't find a single word about the guy in Los Angeles who shot himself yesterday after a high-speed pursuit. Oddly enough, not a word about that in the New Orleans vote story.

Is it just me?

About halfway through the Iraqi parliament story, Qassim Abdul-Zahra (the writer) plunges into a dizzying fugue that attempts to catalog every single death that occurred in Iraq on the same day the National Assembly met. The only purpose I can imagine for this is to reassure AP's natural audience that they needn't worry -- no matter how much progress was made forming a unity government, it was still a wretched, horrible day in Iraq. Thank goodness!

Then the story abruptly lurches back onto the rails, discussing the actual subject for the remaining nine grafs.

This is the execrable tactic of the antique media: no matter how good the news from Iraq is, it must be leavened with layers of awfulness, regardless how incongruous they may be to the subject at hand. Like Mr. Dick in David Copperfield, the newsies may set out to write a straight news story; but sooner or later, poor King Charles's head must creep into it... leaving them puzzled and a little sheepish, since they don't even remember how they ever thought they were going to tie together parliament meeting in Baghdad with a firefighter killed in Muqdadiyah.

What seems to be misplaced is the lost journalists' ethic of simply conveying the relevant facts -- rather than trying to force a certain reader reaction (of despair, in this case), no matter how inappropriate it may be.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 22, 2006, at the time of 7:07 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

April 21, 2006

Maliki On the March - Maybe

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

According to the BBC, the UIA has chosen Jawad al-Maliki, the deputy leader of the Islamic Dawa party, as its new nominee for prime minister of Iraq:

Mr Maliki, a close ally of Mr Jaafari, recently headed a committee which purged members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party from public life, raising fears his nomination might be rejected by Sunni factions.

He has been acting as spokesman both for the Daawa party and for the broader coalition of seven Shia factions which make up the strongest parliamentary bloc and, therefore, has the right to nominate the premier...

He has been in charge of the Daawa party's internal political organisation and has taken an active part in helping formulate the four agreements which Iraqi politicians have already reached on the platform and other structures to underpin a new national unity government.

I think the BBC is being disingenuous here. While it's true that Maliki might be rejected (see below), it wouldn't be because he "recently headed a committee which purged members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party." That's a snide and churlish suggestion, implying that all Sunni were big fans of Saddam and wish the Baathists were back... and quite typical of the British "yellow journalists," who are, if anything, even more desperate to see a real civil war in Iraq than their American counterparts -- as well as perhaps just a bit too cozy with Iran themselves.

Great that Jaafari is gone; but I'm a little concerned about that "close ally of Mr Jaafari" jazz. Does this mean that Maliki is also a close ally of Muqtada Sadr? Did Jaafari get permission from the master to throw in the towel because he knew the fix was in for another Sadr sock puppet to rule?

The best indicator will be the response of the Kurds and the Sunni. They certainly know better than any of us whether an Iraqi politician is controlled by Sadr -- or directly by Sadr's own bosses in Teheran.

Iraq the Model is skeptical:

However, the question remains that; will the real problem be solved by this agreement on the top posts?

I guess not because if any of the two new candidates gets to be the new PM, Iraq will–in my opinion-continue to descend for the next four years in the same way it's been doing since the interim government was installed last year. And after all, the UIA's decision to replace Jafari with al-Adeeb or al-Maliki is a solution designed for preserving the brittle unity of the UIA and not for the creation of a unity government because they know very well that the rest of blocs were hoping to see Abdul Mahdi replace Jafari and maybe the UIA is twisting arms with this new nomination and betting on splitting the lines of the anti-Jafari mass thinking those would not be willing to prolong the deadlock by refusing the new candidates.

Will we see a surprise in tomorrow's session? Will the deadlock remain? Could it be that the Kurds, Sunni and secular blocs are just trying to trick the UIA into approving a presidency council and get the dispute to the parliament to overthrow the UIA's candidate(s) and force their own candidate?

This is what we'll find out tomorrow.

Let's assume Omar is right; how would this work? The National Assembly might vote on all the other positions first, stocking the government except for the prime minister.

If they then reject Jawad al-Maliki, the nominee of the plurality party (the UIA), it's my understanding that other parties are then free to nominate their own candidates. Suppose the Sunni, the Kurds, and the secular Shiite parties were all to nominate the same guy -- Adel Abdul Mahdi of the SCIRI? Even though the SCIRI is a part of the UIA, and Abdul Mahdi was not the UIA nominee... they may decide to vote for their own party member anyway, reasoning that Maliki had his shot and was rejected; he wouldn't be elected in any case.

If the SCIRI joined the Kurds, Sunni, and seculars, that would probably be enough to elect Abdul Mahdi over the objections of the Islamic Dawa Party. But since he is still Shia, presumably he should still get strong support as the elected prime minister from Dawa and the other parties in the UIA. He could be a true "unity leader."

Best of all, Abdul Mahdi is well known as about the bitterest opponent of Sadr and Iran among the well-known Shiite politicians.

As Omar says, we should have a good idea what's happening tomorrow.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 21, 2006, at the time of 4:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Shia Voting on Next PM Candidate

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

It looks like nearly everyone in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the 130-seat Shiite bloc in the Iraqi National Assembly, is more or less assuming that the next candidate for the UIA will be somebody other than Ibrahim al-Jaafari:

Representatives of the seven parties within the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition, were to meet after Friday midday prayers to discuss a replacement for al-Jaafari, whom the Sunnis and Kurds refused to accept to lead a unity government.

Shiite officials said it was unlikely the alliance committee would agree on a single candidate at the meeting and would instead focus on the mechanism for choosing a nominee. If the choice is made by the 130 Shiite parliament members, the committee must decide whether the winner needs two-thirds support or simply a majority, officials said.

Such a vote would probably take place Saturday before an afternoon session of parliament.

Everyone, that is, except Jaafari's "senior advisor":

Adnan al-Kadhimi, a senior adviser to al-Jaafari, said the prime minister was still a candidate. "It is up to the alliance to decide who is its candidate, but that does not mean that the alliance will not nominate al-Jaafari again, " al-Kadhimi told The Associated Press.

Well... yes it does, Mr. Kadhimi; that's pretty much exactly what it means.

Stay tuned to Big Lizards -- same moonbat time, same moonbat URL -- for all the latest moves in the Mesopotamia Mambo!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 21, 2006, at the time of 6:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2006

Clinic Budget Shortfall in Iraq

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Last night, I was watching the ABC evening news (sorry, I like to flip). They were talking -- finally -- about American reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

That's a nice change isn't it? We've been complaining about the near blackout of coverage of all the good things that are happening in Iraq. But then, since ABC is still part of the antique media, they dropped the hammer: they didn't talk about how many schools were built or how many clinics were opened. Instead, they focused like a laser beam on how Americans have squandered reconstruction money by bad planning and incompetency.

This seems to be the media's new counterattack on our criticism. Early this month, the Washington Post reported that we are running out of money to build clinics in Iraq... after "only" completing 20 out of 142 planned clinics:

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A reconstruction contract for the building of 142 primary health centers across Iraq has run out of money, after two years and roughly $200 million, with no more than 20 clinics now expected to be completed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says.

The contract, awarded to U.S. construction giant Parsons Inc. in the flush early days of reconstruction in Iraq, was expected to lay the foundation of a modern health care system for the country, putting quality medical care within reach of all Iraqis.

Parsons, according to the Corps, will walk away from more than 120 clinics that on average are two-thirds finished. Auditors say its failure serves as a warning siren for other U.S. reconstruction efforts coming due this year.

But wait -- we did build twenty clinics as part of this one project... right? When was that reported? I sure don't remember seeing anything about it; at least, not until it could be framed as another American failure.

And more to the point... while the Post clearly wants us to believe that those clinics will never be built -- "walk away from more than 120 clinics" -- what about this statement that immediately follows the one above?

Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Corps of Engineers commander overseeing reconstruction in Iraq, said he still hoped to complete all 142 clinics as promised and was seeking emergency funds from the U.S. military and foreign donors.

"I'm fairly confident," McCoy said.

So we're not talking about a failure; we're talking about a potential failure... one that the federal government is already aware of, already tracking, and already moving to turn into another success. So why all the anger and defeatism?

According to the Post, the reason for the money shortage is that our initial plan did not account for the high cost of security:

Violence for which the United States failed to plan has consumed up to half the $18.4 billion through higher costs to guard project sites and workers and through direct shifts of billions of dollars to ramp up Iraq's police and military.

Granted, we did not correctly assess the danger and cost associated with the security measures. We went overbudget.

But what defense contract doesn't go overbudget? (The entire DOD computer system comes to mind, something about which I'm personally familiar, as well as those multi-hundred-dollar toilet seats... which I'm not personally familiar with!) After all, Iraq is a war zone; nothing is predictable. It's unreasonable to expect us to anticipate everything.

True: some people "predicted" that there would be a huge "insurgency" that would overwhelm us and drive us out of Iraq (Saddam Hussien predicted it, for example). But those same people also predicted that we would be stuck in a "quagmire," that tens of thousands of our soldiers would be killed, and that the urban warfare, the house-to-house fighting would eat our Army alive: they didn't (and still don't) have a good track record, but even a broken clock can be right twice a day.

An editorial in the New York Times argues that we should have forseen everything:

There appears to be plenty of blame to go around for the health clinics fiasco. High on the list comes the Bush administration's stubborn refusal to factor the deteriorating military situation into reconstruction planning. By the time this contract was awarded, in the spring of 2004, it should have been clear that special security measures would be needed in many areas.

But we know about those increased costs now; we've known about them -- and been "factor[ing]" them into "reconstruction planning" -- since 2004, more than a year and a half before the Times' editorial from Monday.

This is what happened: for about a year in 2003-2004, we were trying to train the New Iraqi Army to stand on its own feet; the training was under the direction of Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, and it was a disaster -- not necessarily because of any failing on Eaton's part. But the Iraqi Army was pathetic, incompetent, corrupt, prone to desertion, and especially likely to flee in the face of the enemy or let enemy fighters slip through the noose even when they were surrounded.

This was the period during which the terrorist threat grew, and also the threat from home-grown (but Iranian controlled) "insurgents" like Muqtada Sadr. The response of the Iraqi Army at First Fallujah (April 2004) was typical: many soldiers panicked and fled, and the terrorists were allowed to slip away.

It is totally false for the Washington Post to say that we "failed to plan" for post-war violence. We did plan; our plan was to train-up the New Iraqi Army... it just went badly at first.

We made some adjustments, and now it's working much better; but the damage had been done. By Spring of 2004, the security situation in Iraq had become a lot worse.

We recognized that our training system had completely broken down; in May of 2004, shortly after First Fallujah revealed the deep problems in the Iraqi Army, the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team (CMATT) was rolled into the new Office of Security Transition (OST). Maj. Gen. Eaton retired, and Maj. Gen. David Petraeus (commander of the 101st Airborne during major combat operations in Iraq) was promoted to Lt. Gen. and put in command of the OST. The OST expanded to include not only training the New Iraqi Army but also the police forces.

(Ironically, Maj. Gen. Eaton is one of the retired generals demanding Defense Secretary Rumsfeld resign. Is it possible that Eaton's own replacement and retirement in 2004 was not completely voluntary? I don't know, but it's probably worth thinking about, since some of the other "griping" generals have personal grudges against Rumsfeld.)

Either because of these changes, or maybe just because the Iraqis themselves started to realize their own survival depended upon the Iraqi Army becoming professional, from that moment, the training began to turn around. The difference was easily seen just six months later, in November 2004, when the Iraqi Army performed so much better at Second Fallujah.

Once the Iraqi Army began to flourish, grow, and become much more effective, the "deterioration" of security leveled off, and now things are getting better. Not only are U.S. casualties and deaths lower, so are civilian deaths in Iraq. So maybe Brig. Gen. William McCoy of the Army Corps of Engineers has good reason to believe the rest of those clinics will be completed.

Even the Washington Post had to admit (at the very end of the article) that we've had many notable achievements:

The Corps of Engineers says the campaign has renovated or built 3,000 schools, upgraded 13 hospitals and created hundreds of border forts and police stations.

So, what does this all mean? Despite difficulities, our guys are doing a heck of a job. OK, so we need more money. But now that the new Iraqi security forces are becoming more and more reliable, and the new government is finally -- I hope! -- going to be formed, the prospect is good. From NYT:

Let it not be said that thousands more Iraqis died needlessly because America walked away from its promise of health clinics with less than 15 percent of the job done.

Hey, the New York Times and I finally agree on something!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 20, 2006, at the time of 5:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Ibrahim al-Jaafari Ready to Muck His Hand?

Elections , Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Today, Transitional Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari as much as threw in the towel.

Although he has not resigned, nor has he taken his name out of contention, he agreed to send his nomination back to the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) for a revote.

The dramatic announcement was made shortly before a planned session of the Iraqi parliament to try to jump-start formation of a new government. The Shiites asked that the session be postponed until Saturday or Sunday, after they resolve the issue of al-Jaafari's nomination, said Shiite official Ridha Jawad Taqi.

Jawad al-Maliki, spokesman for the prime minister's Dawa party, told reporters that "circumstances and updates had occurred" prompting al-Jaafari to refer the nomination back to the alliance "so that it take the appropriate decision."

Al-Maliki said the prime minister was not stepping down but "he is not sticking to this post."

This is a stunning breakthrough. I wonder who was big enough to lean on Jaafari and push him outside the tent?

The nomination of Jaafari is what has held up the formation of a permanent government for four months after the December elections, in which a National Assembly was chosen. Fixing a permanent government is the first giant stride in stabilizing Iraq: with a real, elected government and an Interior Ministry not corrupted and controlled by Jaafari's puppetmaster, Muqtada Sadr, all the forces of order -- military and police -- can be focused on stopping the tit-for-tat violence and killing or driving out the terrorists.

The move represents the first sign that al-Jaafari has abandoned his quest to keep the prime minister's post, only a day after he had repeated his steadfast refusal to step down.

Last time, Jaafari won the nomination within the party by a single vote... and that was before the Sunni, the Kurds, the seculars, and even the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) -- the largest party within the UIA itself -- decided that Jaafari was utterly unacceptable under any circumstances.

With a revote, it's virtually impossible that he will be renominated: I firmly believe the nomination of Ibrahim al-Jaafari to be prime minister of Iraq is dead... and with it, the caliphate ambitions of the barely-literate, untutored, barbaric "cleric," Sadr -- he and his al-Mahdi Militia. The nomination will go to someone else in the Islamic Dawa Party (Jaafari's group):

[Jawad] Al-Maliki and another leading Dawa politician, Ali al-Adeeb, have been touted as possible replacements for al-Jaafari.

It won't be Adel Abdul-Mahdi of the SCIRI, the man Jaafari barely edged out last time; that would be too humiliating to the Dawa Party. Dawa and the SCIRI have more or less come to a tacit agreement that if Jaafari leaves, his replacement will also be from Dawa; this is to prevent the UIA from splitting apart at the seams.

Once it's clear Jaafari is sidelined, that clears the decks for various other appointments:

Resolution of the prime minister issue could smooth the way for filling other posts, including the president, two vice presidents, parliament speaker and the two deputy speakers. The Shiites could block Sunni and Kurdish candidates for those positions in retaliation for the standoff over al-Jaafari.

They could, but they won't; fewer Sunni voted in the last election than their percent of the population... and if the UIA cannot form a government, that task will either devolve to one of the other, non-Shiite parties -- or else there will be another election. If there is another election, the Sunni will probably get more seats at the expense of the Shia... and that's the last thing the UIA wants. They won't do anything to rock the boat after Jaafari leaves.

Let's wait until there is a formal announcement, possibly Saturday or Sunday (Iraq time), before popping the champers. The fat lady hasn't actually sung yet... but it sure sounds like she's warming up the old voicebox.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 20, 2006, at the time of 4:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 19, 2006

Still Strong Iraqi Spirits

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

This morning I read an article titled “Two teachers killed in front of students” A subsequent article changed the claim to a school security guard and a teacher being killed; but the most recent news is that both the local Iraqi police and U.S. forces investigated, but neither could find any evidence that such killings had taken place at all:

The Iraqi government said militants killed two people at elementary schools in a mainly Shiite district of Baghdad on Wednesday, but police in the neighborhood denied any attack occurred.

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson also said American military teams went to both schools and found no evidence that any violent incident had taken place at either. It was unclear why the ministry released the statement.

How fleet of foot is rumor, especially when the tall tale is music to the ears of the antique media: horrific violence in Iraq! Bush a miserable failure! Video at eleven!

Then I read this tragic news from Iraq the Model: their brother-in-law was assassinated.

The victim was a doctor who received a degree in a foreign country, then came back after Hussein’s regime fell. He could easily have stayed on safe foreign soil, making a comfortable living with his wife and two children. Instead, he came back to help rebuild his country; he worked at a clinic for poor people who otherwise cannot afford medical care.

Since I started reading Iraq the Model, I cannot help feel like we're friends, even a large extended family. I feel great empathy towards the brothers, Mohammed and Omar; through their blog and others like it (including the blog of their other brother, Ali, which I couldn't get to today), I started to think of the Iraqi people as our brothers and sisters.

They are no longer just strangers in a strange and far-away land. So when something like this happens, it hurts me personally, almost as if I actually knew him.

He was not affiliated with any political party or movement and spent all his time working at the hospital or studying at home and he was dreaming of building a medical center for his specialty to serve the poor who cannot afford going to expensive private clinics.

We didn't know or anticipate that cruel times were waiting for a chance to assassinate the dream and kill the future.

These victims of terrorism -- doctors and schoolteachers (if not the fictional schoolteachers of the Ministry's announcement, there are plenty of others who were real) -- had nothing to do with politics. They were killed for no reason, just for doing something good for the Iraqi people.

Terrorists cannot allow Iraqis to have a stable society; they worship only death, chaos, and destruction. We cannot afford to lose people like Mohammed, Omar, Ali, and their brother in law. Iraq security forces must protect the citizens of Iraq... and for that, we need a stable government immediately, like yesterday!

A good news is that the Iraqi people are strong. Certainly our friends Mohammed and Omar are not giving up; they will continue to fight for Iraq's future.

The terrorists and criminals are targeting all elements of life and they target anyone who wants to do something good for this country…They think by assassinating one of us they could deter us from going forward but will never succeed, they can delay us for years but we will never go back and abandon our dream.

We have vowed to follow the steps of our true martyrs and we will raise the new generation to continue the march, these children of today are the hope and the future.

Unfortunately we cannot say the same thing about Iraqi politicinas. Acting Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari obstinately refuses to step aside, and the gridlock continues. There is something very peculiar about his obsession; Jaafari must know he can never be confirmed, even if every Shia voted for him (which they will not all do). So why is he so adamant in his refusal to withdraw his name?

We believe it has something to do with the future plans of Jaafari's boss, renegade cleric Muqtada Sadr, who controls the largest private militia in Iraq, the Mahdi. For some reason, Sadr seems terrified of somebody else gaining control of the government... including the Ministry of the Interior, which controls the police and prosecutors.

We can all draw our own conclusions... but there is still that untried murder charge hanging over Sadr's head. If the Iraqis wanted him out of the way, and if someone other than Sadr's sock puppet controlled the criminal-justice system, wouldn't that be a convenient way to do it?

The brothers refuse to arm themselves, but I hope they change their mind. There is no shame in protecting their lives with a little help from Colonel Colt. Even so, may God protect our friends in Iraq.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 19, 2006, at the time of 6:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 18, 2006

Politics As Unusual

Future of Warfare , Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Military Machinations , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

The newest wrinkle in the "Seven Days In April" (Tony Blankley's term) conspiracy of generals to unseat Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and hurt Republicans in the November elections) brings the essentially political nature of the rebellion into sharp focus. Oddly, though it's a day old, it's still not being reported in American mainstream news media -- at least not as I write this.

Brit Hume mentioned on Special Report yesterday that the newest addition to the Griping Generals is none other than former NATO commander and former Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark. But I can't find that news on any American news feed (via Google News search; I don't subscribe to the hideously overpriced LexisNexis)... not even on FoxNews.com.

It's reported in foreign news sources, however. ABC News Australia:

A former commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, has joined six other retired United States generals in calling for the resignation of the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

He says Mr Rumsfeld has also lost the confidence of some serving officers, because of his handling of the war in Iraq and because they believe Mr Rumsfeld does not listen to advice.

General Clark, who was a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2004, said Mr Rumsfeld had pushed the US into war in Iraq, before the diplomatic process had ended.

But you won't find it by searching abcnews.go.com here.

The Guardian has it, though they fail to note the political significance:

Mr Rumsfeld's position became more tenuous after six retired generals called for him to quit, followed by the revelation he was "personally involved" in "degrading and abusive" treatment of a Guantánamo Bay detainee, according to an internal military inquiry. On Saturday General Wesley Clark became the seventh ex-commander calling for him to go.

The Guardian misses the fact that Clark is not just an "ex-commander," he was also a candidate for president on the Democratic ticket.

And here's the Beeb, which highlights what the Guardian skipped:

Ex-Nato commander Gen Wesley Clark, who ran for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2004, backed calls for Mr Rumsfeld to resign....

Gen Clark said in a television interview: "I believe secretary Rumsfeld hasn't done an adequate job. He should go."

Gen Clark said he believed Mr Rumsfeld, along with Vice-President Dick Cheney, had helped push the Iraq invasion when there was "no connection with the war on terror".

Gen Clark said the secretary had lost the confidence of some officers in the military who were asking for "somebody in the military chain of command who will listen".

Gen Clark has been a frequent critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

So what is the political component here? Why do we say the addition of Candidate Clark changes the complexion of the criticism? Because it makes it clearer than ever that this is a political revolt against Republican policy, driven by the Democratic Party -- not the concerns of unbiased military professionals.

The leadership role played by Gen. Anthony Zinni -- who, according to Fred Barnes, organized this political stunt by actually telephoning generals to talk them into joining the rebellion -- already pointed towards the real core of dissent, as opposed to the stated reasons: they're unhappy with the 2004 election results and hope to do better in November.

Big Lizards has noted the intensely political nature of Gen. Zinni's opposition to Rumsfeld from our first post on this subject. Zinni is widely expected to be Rumsfeld's replacement if John Kerry wins election in 2008; other Democrats might also consider him. Zinni opposed the "unnecessary" Iraq War from Day-1; he has repeatedly said that sanctions against Saddam Hussein were working and keeping him "in his box."

In 2000, Zinni himself said that Iraq had WMD, active WMD programs, and that there was a danger that terrorists could get WMD from Iraq and other state sponsors of terrorism. But starting just before the 2004 election, Zinni began claiming the opposite, that the Bush administration manipulated pre-war intelligence on WMD to manufacture casus belli.

We noted how the Democrats immediately began using the talking points generated for them by the Gripers to attack the Bush administration. And now the mask is off: a once and Democratic candidate openly joins the ranks of the Gripers.

I believe the Democrats have once again overplayed their hand, as at the Paul Wellstone memorial. When the Gripers only comprised generals who had actually served under Rumsfeld, they could be portrayed as simply worried and concerned that Rumsfeld was screwing up the war.

When General Zinni emerged as the ringleader, however, that started to make clear the political motivation of the group (as well as making the generals themselves seem like sock puppets)... but only to those who followed politics closely enough to know who Zinni was in the 1990s and could be in 2009.

And with the emergency of Wesley Clark, light dawns. Even the most casual follower of current events should remember that Clark ran for president as a Democrat in 2004 then withdrew and campaigned for John Kerry; that he was the preferred candidate of Michael Moore and most of the Hollywood lefties; that he opposed the Iraq War even before it began, testifying against it before Congress in 2002; and that he touts himself as a "progressive" from Little Rock, Arkansas.

Clark should now seize the mantle of "spokesman" from Zinni; Clark is unquestionably the best-known member of the Grumbling Gripers, and one would think that he can get "face time" more easily than Zinni. But the curious reluctance of the antique media even to mention that Clark is now part if the mob seems peculiar... does it mean the MSM realizes how this changes the tenor of the revolt from concerned-but-loyal troops to partisan hacks feeding talking points to the Democratic Party? Or are they just being slow on the uptake, as so often in recent years?

Since the 1960s, the New Left has followed a deliberate policy of infiltration and subversion of great American institutions, twisting them into front groups for "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party": newspapers and television news, movies and television entertainment, schools (public and private), the clergy of several major religions, the Girl Scouts (they're still trying to get inside the Boy Scouts), corporate America, the Civil Rights movement, the AMA and APA, and so forth.

In this, they are only following in the footsteps of the Master, for such subversion was an integral part of the worldwide Communist subversion of the 1930s through the 1950s, the Stalinist period. (The red-diaper babies of the New Left, from the Port Huron Statement on, have basically been Luddite Stalinists, more radical than their pro-industry Communist parents. Their "useful idiots" are progressives, such as Zinni, Clark, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI), and the like.)

It is now clear that they have infiltrated and subverted at least some portion of the military, reaching all the way up to the highest rank (Zinni and Clark are both four-stars). There exists now a slice of the United States Army and the United States Marine Corps that is in fact the military branch of the Democratic Party. They serve the Party, not the country; although the public face comprises entirely retired general officers, they claim they have many allies within the active-duty ranks... and there is no reason to doubt that they do.

Certainly Tony Blankley buys it, per a column from which I got that catchy phrase "Seven Days In April" up top (hat tip, Scott Johnson at Power Line). Blankley references and quotes from a Washington Post column by former ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke:

First, it is clear that the retired generals -- six so far, with more likely to come -- surely are speaking for many of their former colleagues, friends and subordinates who are still inside.... Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who was director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the planning period for the war in Iraq, made this clear in an extraordinary, at times emotional, article in Time magazine this past week when he said he was writing "with the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership." He went on to "challenge those still in uniform . . . to give voice to those who can't -- or don't have the opportunity to -- speak."

Holbrooke is a relentless Democratic campaigner; President Clinton seriously considered him for Secretary of State to replace the retiring Warren Christopher (Clinton picked Madeleine Allbright instead). Holbrooke goes on in that column to insist the generals "are not newly minted doves or covert Democrats." He does not claim, however, that they are not overt Democrats; and indeed, the two ringleaders assuredly are. The rest repeat earlier Democratic talking points (such as that there was "no post-war planning"). [Hat tip to commenter jd watson, who spotted an error in the succession order of Clinton's two Secretaries of State. - the Mgt.]

Holbrooke makes clear his own sympathy with this group of revolting retired and active-duty generals:

The major reason the nation needs a new defense secretary is far more urgent. Put simply, the failed strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be fixed as long as Rumsfeld remains at the epicenter of the chain of command.

Tony Blankley wonders whether a conspiracy among active-duty generals to retire, one by one, and then immediately denounce the Bush administration and the Secretary of Defense, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and Republicans in general might constitute a crime, either under the federal civilian law or the UCMJ:

A "revolt" of several American generals against the secretary of defense (and by implication against the president)? Admittedly, if each general first retires and then speaks out, there would appear to be no violation of law.

But if active generals in a theater of war are planning such a series of events, they may be illegally conspiring together to do that which would be legal if done without agreement. And Ambassador Holbrooke's article is -- if it is not a fiction (which I doubt it is) -- strong evidence of such an agreement. Of course, a conspiracy is merely an agreement against public policy.

Big Lizards is less concerned about that aspect (does Blankley suggest that Alberto Gonzales begin issuing arrest warrants?) than we are curious whether anyone will actually believe in such a drip, drip, drip of sudden and "independent" resignations and denunciamentos -- or whether, with each new "falling star," the public will grow more and more skeptical of the political independence of the group.

Especially when it is led by Wesley Clark, the man who would be president.

Big Lizards anticipates the latter: as we implied a few posts ago and mention supra, the Democrats have yet again overplayed their hand. But then, like the scorpion and the frog, it is their nature to do so.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 18, 2006, at the time of 4:51 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

April 17, 2006

All Right, Shinseki Can Keep His Epaulettes

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Upon reading this story in the New York Times, I will revise my previous statement that Gen. Shinseki should have been drummed out of service for blabbermouthing to Congress his personal position on how many troops were needed for "peacekeeping" in Iraq.

First, the set-up. Everybody agrees on this much:

General Shinseki, who commanded the NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia, testified before Congress in February 2003 that peacekeeping operations in Iraq could require several hundred thousand troops, in part because it was a country with "the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems."

Why was Shinseki wrong to say this?

First of all, generals and other staff (civilian and military) express their opinions privately; they are privately evaluated, and then the President of the United States (POTUS) decides. The content of such privileged communications cannot be divulged: what happens with POTUS stays with POTUS. Without such privacy, policy advisors will be reluctant to give their candid assessments, because they might leak out with unpredictable results.

Second, once a decision is made, the generals do not have the right to tell Congress that the decision is wrong. (And telling Congress is functionally equivalent to calling a press conference and telling the world, because somebody in Congress is sure to do so.)

Such congressional testimony inevitably becomes a political meme that will cause no end of problems forPOTUS and his entire administration. The opposition party will seize upon it (right or wrong) as "evidence" that the Commander in Chief is incompetent, use it to undermine his leadership and stir up anti-war sentiment across the country... which in turn can severely undercut congressional support for the mission.

The Pentagon planners, the service secretaries, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and President George W. Bush had already determined that we needed a smaller peacekeeping force (for good reason: see below) than Gen. Shinseki wanted.

Shinseki's congressional testimony called all that into question, as 535 "armchair Commanders in Chief" got to hear Shinseki's views -- but not the reasons why they were ultimately rejected.

For, third, as it happens, Gen. Shinseki's position was flatly wrong. He was only looking at the immediate military goal. There was a reason why Bush and Rumsfeld decided to do it the way they did.

Bush's overall plan -- enunciated in the January, 2003 State of the Union speech and other speeches before the Iraq war began -- was to democratize the Middle East, starting with Iraq. He believed, and rightly so, in my opinion, that there was no other way to drain the fever swamps, the centuries of accumulated moral filth, poverty, hopelessness, despair, and desperation that bred terrorism the way literal filth breeds disease.

For decades, we followed a policy of "stability, not liberty." But Bush came to believe (again, rightly) that the lack of liberty had not led to stability but its opposite -- chaos and madness, which had its demonic Omega in the 9/11 attacks.

Bush chose, as president, to follow instead a path of liberty -- not stability. Hence, the goal of Iraqi self-reliance was equally or more important than crushing a post-Hussein "insurgency."

You cannot set a country on the path to self-reliance by colonizing it. Had we inundated Iraq with "several hundred thousand troops," not only would that have offered many more American targets without a corresponding increase in effectiveness (we would be sending less-trained personnel and couldn't properly rotate them out, forcing them to stay for much longer tours)... but also, it would infantalize the Iraqis, leading not to self-reliance but greater dependency. We would simply substitute one despotic, condescending ruler for another... ourselves.

I'm sure we would have been an improvement over the Baathists. But we would not have advanced one iota towards the urgent goal of democratizing the region.

So what Gen. Shinseki said was wrong on three counts:

  • He had no authority to reveal the privileged communications between the Commander in Chief and his military and civilian staff;
  • Because Shinseki's recommendation was at odds with the final decision, it became a political football and damaged the president's leadership and public and congresssional support for the mission;
  • And the advice Shinseki gave was simply wrong, because he only understood the military goal... not the equally important, long-term political goal.

What he did was insubordinate. But I now think it likely that he was merely stupidly insubordinate, rather than mendaciously so. This, in particular, is the passage that caught my eye and slightly softened my stance:

General Myers said he believed that news media coverage had overblown the confrontation and had failed to take note that General Shinseki had been "put in a corner" in questioning before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"General Shinseki was forced to make that comment under pressure, pulled a number out, wasn't wedded to it," General Myers said. He also said General Shinseki did not push for more troops after giving his Congressional testimony.

All right, Myers was presumably there; he probably knows the sequence of events. But he is wrong in one particular: Gen. Shinseki was not "forced" to answer that question. He could have refused... just as he would have had some Congressman asked for operational details of the upcoming invasion.

There are some questions you do not answer... and a four-star general who is the Army Chief of Staff is expected to know what those questions are.

I suspect Myers likes Shinseki and is miffed that one of his colleagues got (mildly) chewed out for doing something really stupid. But he still got off easy. As I now believe it was not deliberate politicking but simple dumbth, I agree he should not have been fired (as he was not).

He should have been reprimanded.

Shinseki should have gotten a letter in his file. No one else need see it; he was retiring anyway. But he should have retired knowing that he did something really, really stupid that damaged support for the war by making it seem futile and mismanaged, when in fact all the decisions made were reasonable and had right reason behind them.

Instead, all he got was a mild oral rebuke:

Days later, Mr. Wolfowitz, then the second-ranking official at the Pentagon, called the estimate "wildly off the mark," a sentiment that Mr. Rumsfeld repeated in comments that were widely interpreted in Washington and within the Pentagon as a rebuke of General Shinseki.

Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld then had to go to Congress and do damage control. And to this day, the president still has to defend himself against disingenuous accusations of sending too small a force... mostly from people who wouldn't have invaded Iraq at all.

I believe I understand why everybody behaved the way they did: Shinseki had a brain fart; Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were trying to undo the damage Shinseki's brain fart caused; Bush felt loyal to Shinseki and did not want to damage his career or push him into premature retirement; Myers is in a loyalty tug-o-war between his duty to his former commander and his friendship with Shinseki.

But the reality is that Gen.Shinseki got away with a "senior moment" that should have exacted payment more dear.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 17, 2006, at the time of 5:02 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

April 16, 2006

"Retired Generals," Democrats Join Forces Against Bush

Iraq Matters , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

In a move that shocked exactly no one, Democrats have run with the ball that the "retired generals" handed off to them, accusing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush of incompetence and mismanagement of the war -- and citing the generals, of course, as representing the entire active-duty military:

"My view is that the secretary should step aside," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a potential Democratic presidential candidate, told CBS's "Face the Nation" program. "Besides the fact that the Iraq war has been mismanaged... we should listen to what these generals are saying...."

Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, said the critical comments from the retired generals could be considered a reflection of current senior officers not permitted to criticize Rumsfeld or Bush.

"We need a new direction in Iraq," he said. "We're looking at some incompetency in addition to the arrogance issues that have been raised. ... (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice talked about a thousand tactical mistakes the other day in Iraq the other day. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement."

Once again, we're offered a proxy measurement for morale -- rather than simply asking soldiers about their morale. This is very similar to what the Zogby poll did in February (and which Big Lizards discussed here and here). Dodd assumes that the retired generals who criticize Rumsfeld are representative of "current senior officers" -- but those retired generals who praise Rumsfeld speak only for themselves.

If anybody were in any doubt about the crassly political aspect to those "retired generals," we need only wait a few days to see if any of them now speaks out against having his deeply held, a-political convictions hijacked by the Democratic Party. Since we know they're not shy about voicing their opinions, if they say nothing about Democrats seizing upon their carping to urge people to vote against the Republicans, I think we will have our answer.

Anybody making book on whether a single one of these six retired generals will say, "hey, wait a minute -- I didn't mean everyone should vote Democratic; I just want us to send another 300,000 men to Iraq, even if we have to draft them!"

A man (or woman) who makes general is not stupid... and he is not a political naif. He knows how his words and deeds will be interpreted, because if he didn't, he would have been weeded out long before.

When a bunch of generals, led by persistent Bush critic Anthony Zinni, come forward and all demand that Donald Rumsfeld be fired, they are well aware that the Democrats and the press will seize the golden opportunity. When Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) then do exactly what everyone expected them to do, it's difficult not to conclude that the griping generals have gotten just what they wanted.

But Richardson may have pushed his attack a little too far for credulity:

"What you're seeing is deep frustration in the military," he said, "deep frustration within our troops who are not getting enough armor. ... It is obvious that Secretary Rumsfeld did not listen to them. ... That's why we're in this morass."

Yes, Governor, that's it; the Iraqis have been unable to form a unity government so far because our troops have to muddle along with last month's body armor.

Look for more of these stunts as the election looms, each one dutifully reported by the media as yet another example of the military rising up in righteous rebellion against the hated tyrant.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 16, 2006, at the time of 11:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 8, 2006

Dogfight In the O.K. Mosque

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

"Sectarian" (meaning "al-Qaeda") violence kills scores!

That's what newspaper headlines scream. But wait; something seems a little peculiar about this specific mosque attack:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Three suicide bombers dressed as women killed at least 71 people at a Shi'ite mosque on Friday, the bloodiest attack in Iraq for at least three months.

At least 140 people were also wounded in the attack in north Baghdad, the latest proof of how Iraq's leaders have been unable to tackle sectarian violence as they struggle to form a government.

But why assume the violence is "sectarian" (Shia vs. Sunni)? There's no evidence of that; and there is a simpler explanation the Reuters story fails even to consider. (Good thing the mainstream media don't have a bias.)

What's odd is that this mosque is not one of the million or so "holiest sites in all of Iraq," not like the Golden al-Askariya Mosque in Samara. It is, nevertheless, an important gathering place, though more for political than religious reasons: imporant to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to be specific. This mosque is one of the SCIRI's headquarters.

The SCIRI is the largest Shiite party in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA); they are rivals of the Islamic Dawa Party, whose candidate, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is the appointed prime minister and is running for election under the new, permanent government.

We've had a thing or two to say about Jaafari before:

Iraq the Model explains the connection:

But that's not the most important thing because this mosque is of considerable political significance, the preacher in this mosque is Jalal Addin al-Sagheer, a cleric from the SCIRI who was the first SCIRI member to publicly urge Ibrahim al-Jafari to withdraw his nomination for office.

This mosque is one of the headquarters of the SCIRI and its clerical wing in Baghdad, even that Abdul Aziz al-Hakeem's son Ammar al-Hakkem preaches occasionally in this mosque when sheikh Jalal is not available.

Well, taking that into consideration, we cannot simply assume the culprits are al-Qaeda. It looks like there might be a stronger suspect. Consider the way the attacks were organized (again from Iraq the Model):

Let's also take a look at the planning for the attack that is very well studied too, the suicide bombers did not start striking during Friday prayers when the place is usually heavily guarded and security personnel are at high alert but the first strike came more than 15 minutes later when an attack is less expected and after guards felt they accomplished their mission in protecting the worshippers during the main ceremony to be followed by the other two bombings that took advantage of the state of panic created by the first bombing. This in addition to the use of disguise has of course made the breach easier to make.

It seems that the killers, those who organized the bombings, knew entirely too much about the practices and procedures of a Shiite mosque. They knew just when the guards would relax, allowing them to strike for maximal damages.

We cannot say for sure, of course; but if we had to guess who really is responsible for this attack, renegade Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr actually stands to gain more from an attack on SCIRI headquarters than does Musab Zarqawi, still the military head of al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia (Iraq). Sadr, and his sock-puppet Jaafari, have openly threatened the groups which did not support Jaafari, especially the SCIRI. Could this be a message that they're deadly serious about this power struggle? “Don’t oppose Jaafari!”

But if this is true, this is all the more reason not to confirm Jaafari. If his method of running for office includes killing off the opposition, we can guess how he would rule the country. Iraqis and Americans cannot afford to have this man to become full prime minister.

The Iraqi authorities must vigorously investigate who is behind this attack; if it turns out to be the Mahdi Militia, not al-Qaeda, it would help Iraqis understand that Sadr ain't nothing but a pooch for Iran -- and Jaafari is just Sadr’s lap dog.

Call this case the dogfight at the O.K. mosque

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 8, 2006, at the time of 11:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 5, 2006

When Civil War Is Too Darn Civil

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I had thoughts about the supposed "civil war" in Iraq, but I decided not to bother posting them. I thought nobody would be interested, because -- I assumed -- the claim was so tortuous that it would just be a passing fad.

Boy howdy, was I wrong about that. Here's former Democratic nominee John Kerry, that man who would have been president (but for three hundred thousand votes), tooting the "civil war" horn in his op-ed piece in today's New York Times:

We are now in the third war in Iraq in as many years. The first was against Saddam Hussein and his supposed weapons of mass destruction. The second was against terrorists whom, the administration said, it was better to fight over there than here. Now we find our troops in the middle of an escalating civil war.

So maybe I was also wrong that nobody would be interested in my civil-war ruminations. Here was my point:

What bothers me most about the claim that Iraq is in a civil war is the mendacious motive behind it all. If a fellow were using a consistent definition of civil war for some sociological, political, or military purpose, and that definition was a little looser than I would like, it wouldn't really irritate me. But those who sling around the claim, like Sen. Kerry (D-MA), have a very shifty purpose in mind.

The technique is to redefine some common but horrific term to scoop in far more cases than it ought... but still rely upon the frisson of the original meaning to make readers think the situation is more dire than it is.

For example, the late gender-feminist Andrea Dworkin (Rush Limbaugh would definitely call her a "feminazi") redefined "rape" to include all heterosexual sex. PETA routinely redefines the word "murder" to include the killing of animals, even for food. Both rely upon the very real horror people feel when the contemplate the normal and usual definitions of those words to manipulate them into feeling the same horror for perfectly ordinary activities.

And now "civil war;" I have seen some very wide, obtuse definitions that could apply to virtually any conflict on any level, so long as the fighting takes place all in one country. One writer I know even claims that America in the late 1960s was in a "civil war."

(He refers to the protests and street action against the Vietnam War -- for example, the ructions surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which spawned this infamous mangled explanation by Mayor Richard Daley the elder: "The police in Chicago are not here to create disorder, they are here to preserve disorder!")

In some circumstances, such open-ended definitions can be useful. We can talk about infighting within a club as a civil war, or we can say "John and Mary's divorce turned into a civil war." We could talk about the Basque terrorism in Spain as being a "low-level civil war." And if we made plain how we were using the word and didn't try to imply anything stronger, we'd be on terra firma.

But the Democrats know very well what most people will imagine when they hear that "Iraq is in an escalating civil war": they think of Rwanda, with its hundreds of thousands butchered by machetes. They think of Bosnia or Kosovo; they think of Vietnam, where millions were killed.

Perhaps the more historical minded think of the bloody civil war in Russia after the Czar was deposed, the war between White and Red Communists, or the terrible civil war in Spain between the Fascists, the Communists, and the Anarchists. Americans probably think of Antietam and Shiloh and Gettysburg.

Clearly this is what John Kerry wants us to think, for in his very next breath, he is espousing near defeatism and calling on us to threaten to pull out immediately -- and in any event to leave by the end of the year:

Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America's leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion.... [that we might win]

Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military....

If Iraq's leaders succeed in putting together a government, then we must agree on another deadline: a schedule for withdrawing American combat forces by year's end.

When John Kerry says "civil war," he may have in his mind something like what France is undergoing right now -- riots and general strikes -- plus some terrorism. But it's what he knows is in your minds that is offensive: deliberately relying upon the revulsion that average Americans feel towards actual, full-blown civil war, which would imply total failure of our effort, is undeniably a lie by inuendo.

It's like saying a man is a rapist and murderer, when what you really mean is he beds his wife, and he sometimes kills his own chickens for eats.

It's a vile, craven, boorish debater's trick that plays upon people's natural assumption that distinguished senators don't lie... and it makes me shake with retroactive terror at the thought that Kerry very nearly found himself ensconced in the Oval Office.

I know it's a tiny point, the logical fallacy of using one peculiar meaning of a word, knowing your audience will infer a quite different and much more apocalyptic meaning. There probably isn't even a Latin phrase for it. It's cheap and shoddy; it's the ultimate in "gotcha" arguments. And it is meaningless, except insofar as it may mislead the mentally weak.

So was it even worth bringing up at all? I'm still not sure.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 5, 2006, at the time of 11:59 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

April 3, 2006

Shiite Alliance Splits

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

A couple of weeks ago, Dafydd reported in Al-Jaafari - Teetering On the Edge? that there was a strong indication that the Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), may split over the controversial nomination of Muqtada Sadr's ally, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, as prime minister.

Jaafari is currently the prime minister by appointment, but still under the old Transitional government; he was not elected under the recently approved Iraq constitution. Sadr is, of course, the renegade "cleric" whose Mahdi Militia has gone to war against the Coalition many times in the past three years.

SCIRI (Abdul-Mahdi's party within the UIA) may be about to split from [the Islamic Dawa Party] (al-Jaafari's party) on the question of the prime minister nominee, joining with Kurds and Sunni to form a majority coalition that can nominate Abdul-Mahdi and elect him to the post. This would break the logjam, were it to occur, and the government could finally form.
It seems we were right about that. On Sunday afternoon, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw paid a surprise visit to Iraq, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) announced the split:

It was not clear whether the joint visit by Ms. Rice and Mr. Straw, the top emissaries of the two countries that led the invasion of Iraq three years ago, played a direct role in the fracturing of the Shiite bloc and whether that split would lead to forward movement on forming a new government, which has been stalled for months.

But the developments suggested a new phase in Iraq's convulsions may have started by opening a possibly violent battle for the country's top job between rival Shiite factions, which both have militias backing them up. The incumbent prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, has said he will fight to keep his job, and his principal supporter is Moktada al-Sadr, a rebellious Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army militia has resorted to violence many times to enforce his wishes

I do not believe their visits directly influenced the split, since the SCIRI was never happy with the nomination; Jaafari won by a single vote within the UIA party caucus, amid many violent threats by Sadr against anyone who opposed his candidate. But pressure from both the American and British governments might have been the last straw for Shia who are fed up with a nominee who has no interest even in unifying the Shia, let alone all Iraqis.

Of course the splintering will cause problems for the Shia, especially the religious ones. The UIA does not have a majority of seats in the National Assembly (it has 128 out of 275 seats), but it's the biggest kid on the block. If it fractures, with its largest piece (the SCIRI) pulling out, it will become just another minority party... particularly so if the SCIRI takes the closely allied Badr Organization (Badr Brigade) with it when it leaves.

The SCIRI will have to form an alliance with Kurdish, Sunni, and secular Shiite parties -- such as the Iraqi National Accord, led by Dr. Iyad Allawi, another former prime minister (this time of the Iraq Interim Government, which predated the Transitional National Assembly government).

The eruption among the Shiites could also completely redraw Iraq's political coalitions, if some Shiite politicians leave the bloc amid the feuding to side with other groups in the 275-member Parliament. That would weaken the religious Shiites.

The most likely candidate arising out of such a realliance would be current Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, the man Jaafari barely beat in the UIA caucus. Both Kurds and Sunni have signalled acceptance of Abdul Mahdi. If one or both of those parties could be persuaded to withdraw their current nominees and send Abdul Mahdi's name up, then the anti-Sadrites within the UIA could vote for him without having to split the party itself. If not, then the SCIRI will have to break away and nominate him.

Sadr’s faction will not stand by quietly as their power base erodes further. They will step up the violence and may even try to assassinate candidates opposing Jaafari, such as the SCIRI's Abdul Mahdi or the Iraqi Democratic Movement's Kassim Daoud (the IDM is another party within the UIA bloc).

Sadr's only power is his ability to kill and threaten to kill; he has considerably less of an ideological following today than he did while he was carrying out his (briefly) successful "rebellion" against the occupying forces in Najaf. Take away that ability, and Sadr will fall.

One possibility is that Coalition and Iraqi forces could keep Sadr's Mahdi Militia busy by raiding even more of the Mahdi thugs’ offices. Once an Iraq unity government is established with a more patriotic and moderate prime minister -- one not beholden to Sadr, as Jaafari is -- Sadr might see the writing on the wall (a very appropriate metaphor, since ancient Babylon was where Iraq is now) and flee to his patron, Iran.

If Sadr splits, I am convinced his Mahdi Militia will disband. Some of the members will surely follow Sadr into exile; others will slide seamlessly into other militias (such as the Badr Brigade, now called the Badr Organization), so they can continue fighting against the Sunni terrorists led by the Jordanian Musab Zarqawi. The rest will probably just fade into the background and try to pretend they were never there.

But that constitutes the best-case scenario, which means the odds are against it: it's the Middle East, after all. Let's keep our fingers crossed that at the very least, Jaafari is forced out as prime minister, and someone else takes over who can actually rally all the democratic factions behind him.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 3, 2006, at the time of 2:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 1, 2006

Jill Carroll Now Says Statement Was Coerced

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter who was taken captive in Iraq in January and just released on March 30th, now says that the statement she made saying her captors had never threatened her was coerced, and that she spoke out of fear for her life.

She now says they threatened her life many times:

In a video, recorded before she was freed and posted by her captors on an Islamist Web site, Carroll spoke out against the U.S. military presence. But Carroll said the recording was made under threat. Her editor has said three men were pointing guns at her at the time.

"During my last night in captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video. They told me I would be released if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. So I agreed," she said in a statement read by her editor in Boston.

"Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not."

The kidnappers then "released" her... but what they literally did was transport her to the offices of the Iraqi Islamist Party in Baghdad, a Sunni political party. My guess is that she felt there might be some sort of connection between the party and the terrorists -- in which she is probably correct and probably has better information than any of us, being a reporter working in Iraq. When the Iraqi Islamist Party interviewed her, seeking her statement that the kidnappers had treated her well, she likely believed that the wrong answer might put her right back where she was before:

"At any rate, fearing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear I said I wasn't threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times," she said. "Also, at least two false statements about me have been widely aired: That I refused to travel and cooperate with the U.S. military and that I refused to discuss my captivity with U.S. officials. Again, neither is true."

I hope that all those in the blogosphere who criticized Ms. Carroll for praising her captors even after she was supposedly "free" will correct themselves, noting that she was, in fact, not yet free when she made those statements. (Of course, if anyone can find similar statements she made after she got into the Green Zone or Germany, those would be much harder for her to justify; but I haven't seen any such evidence yet.)

If it turns out that she was condemned solely on the basis of statements made while still in the clutches of the Iraqi Islamist Party -- which might have been a party to the original kidnapping -- then she was very shabbily treated indeed... by American blogs.

Every time something like this happens, it's another slice in the 'sphere. It's another little piece of evidence the Antique Media can trot out to make blogs look less professional. So that we don't end up suffering the death of a thousand cuts, please, let's try to "think a second time" before posting! I know some of you have very itchy trigger fingers; but accuracy is more important than raw speed.

We're never likely to beat the time of the MSM; they have correspondents under every bed. So let's make up for our slower pace by being the thoughtful ones.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 1, 2006, at the time of 3:04 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

March 28, 2006

The Strolling Dead

Iraq Matters , Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

Here is a bizarre update on our three posts of yesterday: AP's Mainscream Media Bias, Iraq Army, Coalition Begin Mahdi Militia Campaign, and Who Is Policing the Police? We Are.

The American military is now flatly asserting that Sadr-linked Shiite leaders in Iraq moved the bodies and staged the scene to falsely accuse Americans of committing a massacre in the Mustafa "mosque." (This presumably would include gruesomely handcuffing some of the bodies post-mortem, to make it look like execution rather than combat, though the article doesn't get into that level of detail.)

U.S. commanders in Iraq on Monday accused powerful Shi'ite groups of moving the corpses of gunmen killed in battle to encourage accusations that U.S.-led troops massacred unarmed worshippers in a mosque.

"After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was. There's been huge misinformation," Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said.

He rejected the accusations of a massacre that prompted the Shi'ite-led government to demand U.S. forces cede control of security but declined to spell out which group he believed moved the bodies.

Well, Big Lizards has no such reticence. All one need do is look at who is screaming the loudest -- and who has the most to gain. "Cui bono?" as the Romans asked: who benefits?

Actually, while LG. Chiarelli wouldn't point a finger (likely because he knows that's beyond his pay grade), he rather roundly hinted:

Chiarelli stood by the U.S. account, disputed by Sadr aides and other Shi'ite leaders but which is broadly in line with police reports and some local witnesses who spoke of a fierce gun battle around the site....

Though he declined to be drawn on the possible involvement of Sadr's Mehdi Army militia, whose political leaders have led condemnation of the raid, Chiarelli said: "I think the backlash has been caused by the folks who set the scene up."

That is, 'the folks who set the scene up are the Sadrites causing the backlash.' Another way to phrase that last sentence is, 'the Sadrites causing the backlash are the folks who set the scene up.' So I think -- like the immortal Barry Goldwater -- in Chiarelli's heart, he knows Big Lizards is right!

Nowadays, we routinely videotape most engagements (many soldiers have helmet cams), so I suspect we can easily prove our case. The only question is -- will Transitional Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari -- the "cui" who most obviously "bonos" -- allow us to?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 28, 2006, at the time of 4:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 27, 2006

Who Is Policing the Police? We Are.

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The New York Times published an amazingly balanced and informative article Friday on our effort to train-up the Iraqi police to the same professional standard that we've trained the Iraqi Army.

Well, "balanced" is a relative term; we are still dealing with the Antique Media, after all. The Times begins by noting the cases where things aren't going well, such as with Firas Sabri Ali, who is admittedly being detained by the Iraqi police (under the Interior Ministry) as "collateral" for his brother, the one the police really want.

"I hope they catch him, because then I'll be released," said Mr. Ali, 38, a soft-spoken man who until his arrest worked for a British security company to support his wife and three sons. "They said, 'You must wait.' I told them: 'There's no law. This is injustice.' "

But with that pro-forma shot out of the way -- I believe such anti-Iraq-democracy anecdotes are formally required by the Sacred Canons of Journalistic Bona-Fides -- the article settles down and shows that American forces actually take seriously such questions of justice and integrity:

Such is the challenge facing the American military as it tries to train the Iraqi security forces to respect the rule of law. Three years after the invasion of Iraq, American troops are no longer simply teaching counterinsurgency techniques; they are trying to school the Iraqis in battling a Sunni-led rebellion without resorting to the tactics of a "dirty war," involving abductions, torture and murder....

The Americans are pushing the Shiite-dominated Iraqi forces to ask judges for arrest warrants, restrain their use of force and ensure detainees' rights.

Couple this policy with the campaign against Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Militia and the political pressure we're bringing to bear on the Shia-dominated Iraq government, and it is very clear that the focus of our attention has shifted from the pre-governmental phase of Iraq's development -- where foreign terrorists like Musab Zarqawi and home-grown insurgents setting off bombs and other terrorist attacks were the chief threat -- to the post-governmental phase, where the most urgent problem is to ensure that the government itself is sustainable as a democratic, representative, just, and inclusive institution.

Much of the problem is due to a simple shortage of judges and facilities. After decades of rule by Saddam Hussein -- and decades more by the Baath Party before that -- there are very few people with actual judicial experience who are not tainted by torture and corruption.

Camp Justice [a makeshift court and police base in northern Baghdad] was never meant to hold prisoners for more than a few weeks. Iraqi law says prisoners to be tried are to be transferred to a Justice Ministry penitentiary after interrogation. But the ministry has been unable to build enough jails to keep pace with arrests. It has 10 centers across Iraq, which hold 7,500 detainees, and an additional 7 are expected to be built, a ministry spokesman said.

So the detainee population at temporary police prisons like the one here, separate from those of the Justice Ministry, has ballooned to more than 10,000 in Baghdad alone, spread across a shadowy network of about 10 centers, an Interior Ministry official said.

But some cases, such as Ali above, are clear cases of abuse themselves.

"The tradition in this country of a law enforcement agency that had absolute power over people, we've got to break them of that," said Maj. Andrew Creel, the departing joint operations officer here. "I think it'll take years. You can't change a cultural mind-set overnight."

But we are making progress. Police recruits at the Public Order Forces acadeny now receive twenty hours of training in respecting the human rights of detainees, two and a half times what they used to get. And we have replaced a number of police and police commanders at units where we have discovered brutality or abuse of prisoners... for example, we replaced the commanders of the Second Public Order Brigade and of the notorious Third Brigade based in Salman Pak.

Col. Gordon Davis Jr., the head of Camp Justice's departing advisory team, praised the Iraqi commander here, Maj. Gen. Mehdi Sabih Hashem al-Garawi, for showing a willingness to embrace human rights....

"I won't say he's gone 180, but he's realized that the best way of getting information is not to beat or abuse detainees," Colonel Davis said as he stood in the operations room, the walls plastered with maps of Baghdad.

"The current generation has been brought up with a certain code and a certain tolerance for abuse," he said in another interview. "They've got to be constantly worked on."

That, alas, is the lasting legacy of Saddam: the Shia are like adults who were abused as children; like them, they imprint the normalcy of abuse and fear -- and inflict them upon others when they have the power. It's very hard to break that cycle, but it must be done if Iraq as a democratic nation is going to endure and serve as a model for others in the Middle East to copy.

The increased attention is paying off in results. In the fall of 2005, American troops made the decision to move in and live with with the Iraqi police units, rather than living separately and simply coming by to inspect once in a while. Now the rate of abuse is much lower, and the Iraqis are more receptive to what we are teaching them about restraint, justice, and rights.

Colonel Davis says the warrant policy has had some effect. Because of it, and because the Iraqis are improving their intelligence gathering, the Public Order Forces no longer round up hundreds of people on each raid, he said. On a typical operation, he added, they may take in a dozen.

After being brought here, the detainees are fingerprinted and have their retinas scanned. A photograph is taken, partly to record their condition at the time of arrest. The Americans have asked the Iraqis to deliver a daily report accounting for all detainees held throughout the division; one recent printout listed 896.

Our strategy is two pronged: on the one hand, we train-up the Iraqi police forces just as we trained up the Iraq Army; and we are seeing the beginnings of the same improvement in professionalism.

On the other hand, we have begun a military campaign against the militias and tribal chiefs who continually try to infiltrate the police and turn them into private armies. Between the two, the Iraq experiment will likely succeed better than nearly anybody today is willing to predict.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 27, 2006, at the time of 6:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Iraq Army, Coalition Begin Mahdi Militia Campaign

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

As Big Lizards reported over the weekend, the Iraqi Army with American advisors clashed with (it is now clear) a unit of Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Militia. From the New York Times:

The country's Shiite political leadership on Monday angrily denounced an American-backed military raid on a Shiite compound that left at least 16 people dead, as political leaders suspended talks over the formation of a new government....

In a statement on Monday about the raid, the American command did not vary much from its original public account Sunday night. It maintained that Iraqi and American troops had raided "multiple structures" but not a mosque, as Shiite leaders have contended, and that troops received fire from "several buildings near the target area." The troops killed 16 insurgents, wounded three, detained 18 other people, discovered a weapons stockpile and released a dental technician who had been taken hostage, the statement said.

But Iraqi government officials and political leaders vociferously disputed the American command's version of events, insisting that Iraqi and American troops had raided the Mustafa mosque, in the Ur neighborhood, as worshippers gathered for evening prayer.

We have highlighted the new information since yesterday: that we and the Iraqi Army discovered a weapons "stockpile" and that we detained eighteen people from the raid. Naturally, Iraqi Shiite officials dispute our version; but they cannot even keep their own stories straight:

But even among Iraqi government and political officials, there were significant differences in their accounts of Sunday's events. Some said the death toll was higher than 20, though there appeared to be consensus that the majority of the victims were members of the Iraq Branch of the Islamic Dawa Party who were meeting at the time of the raid in a party office attached to the mosque.

Khudair al-Khuzaie, the spokesman for the Iraq Branch of the Islamic Dawa Party, said he knew of 16 victims, all of whom were killed in the party's office, which is accessible through a doorway from the mosque's courtyard. Of the victims, he said, 13 were party members and three were civilians visiting the office. None of those 16 victims were [sic] in the mosque to pray, he added. [Note that this actually verifies the U.S. version, as do the statements of residents who witnessed the firefight. -- the Mgt.]

[Haydar al-Abadi, a top advisor to Transitional Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari] said that at least 17 people died, and that there was no armed resistance to the raid. "The executions took place in cold blood," he said.

[Yet witnesses who live in that neighborhood described a furious gun battle that went on for more than an hour, and we recovered a "stockpile" of weapons. -- the Mgt.]

In the hours after the attack, an official in the office of Moktada al-Sadr, the renegade and anti-American Shiite cleric, claimed that members of his Mahdi Army were among the victims. But on Monday, another Sadr representative said no Mahdi Army fighters died in the raid....

At a funeral procession today for victims of the clash, the mood was tense and members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, kept their weapons on prominent display.

The quote from Abadi raises an interesting point. So far, we have heard denunciations of this raid from Abadi, the "top advisor" for Ibrahim al-Jaafari; Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, hand-picked by Jaafari for the position; and Jawad al-Maliki, an "ally" of Jaafari. Jaafari was put into power partly through the support of Muqtada Sadr (which is one reason so many Sunni and Kurish Iraqis oppose his candidacy for prime minister); Sadr has also denounced the raid -- which appears to have been directed against his Mahdi Militia, who controlled that "mosque."

It's actually in dispute whether it was truly a mosque or just an unofficial gathering place for the Mahdi Militia. From Reuters:

One source of confusion over the site may be that the mosque in question, close to Sadr's Sadr City stronghold in northeast Baghdad, was not a traditional religious building but a compound of former Baath party offices converted by Sadr followers.

Do we detecta pattern here? So far, the only "officials" who have been quoted denouncing this raid as a massacre with Americans "entering the Mustafa Shiite mosque and killing worshippers" have been politicians closely connected with Muqtada Sadr -- who controlled the armed compound and whose militia was the target of the raid.

Healing Iraq's Zeyad recounts the incident. (Hat tip Belmont Club)

American forces clashed with Mahdi army militiamen at the Ur district (Hayy Ur), west of Sadr city in Baghdad. It seems an American force attempted to raid a husseiniya in the area and was resisted by militiamen inside.

Between 18 and 21 militiamen have been killed, and the Al-Mustafa Husseiniya was reported to be badly damaged in the ensuing firefight.

This battle has long been coming. The tempo of events makes very clear that there has been a long-expected shift in the Coalition and Iraqi Army strategy:

  • In mid-March, we reported that "the Iraqi Army's 3rd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 6th Iraq Army Division has just taken over security in Sadr City." Sadr City is Muqtada Sadr's stomping ground, named for the renegade cleric's far more respected (and respectable) father.
  • On March 23rd, we posted about an incident in which U.S. forces prevented Sadr's Mahdi militamen from rescuing Shiite pilgrams who were attacked by al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead, the Iraq Army pursued the attackers:

    The United States is pointedly preventing Muqtada Sadr from positioning himself as the savior of the Shia. A senior Shiite cleric, Hazem al-Aaraji, said on the Iraqiya television network that militiamen from the Mahdi Army had been dispatched to save the pilgrims, but that American forces had stopped them.

  • And now, an Iraqi Special Forces unit, with American advisors, has actually raided a "prayer room" controlled by the Mahdi Militia, directly confronting Sadr and his forces for the first time in more than a year.

The conclusion is unmistakable: we have decided that the capacity of foreign Sunni terrorists under Musab Zarqawi to affect the destiny of Iraq has been more or less neutralized; they can still kill people, as they did today, but they are powerless to prevent Iraq from becoming a democratic nation.

Instead, we now conclude that the Shiite militias are the graver danger: they threaten to undermine the legitmacy of the nascent government itself, particularly because of the likely connivance of Transitional Prime Minister al-Jaafari in the increasing murders committed by the Mahdi Militia and the Badr Brigades, the other major Shiite militia.

If indeed the forces of Muqtada Sadr and Ibrahim al-Jaafari are behind much of the "sectarian" violence (which looks more and more like political violence), as most now believe, then it's hardly surprising that Sadr and various allies of Jaafari are the loudest and shrillest voices condemning this raid as a "massacre" of innocent Moslems at prayer in a "mosque"... and playing down the Iraqi Army, who actually conducted it, in favor of blaming the Americans.

We have always believed that Muqtada Sadr is more dangerous to Iraq's future than Zarqawi; Sadr must be stopped... which probably means that he must eventually be killed. He will never give up his ambition to become Caliph of Mesopotamia or his ties to Iran, and both are challenges we cannot ignore. However, Sadr is still a popular figure among poor Shia. Killing him or destroying his mitila will not be well received by many Shiite Iraqis, who see him as a crusading hero.

Usually not-so-anti-America Al-Iraqiya TV is already putting a spin on the story. Zeyad explains.

Al-Iraqiya TV just aired some images from the husseiniya. 17 'guards' were killed. One of the corpses carried a Da'wa party (Iraq organisation) ID, and another carried an ID issued by the Islamic Conference of Iraqi Tribes.

Someone in the background was asking the cameraman to film grenades lying around the corpses, to which the cameraman responded: "I can't show our guys' grenades."

"No, these are American grenades," the man in the background explained.

"Oh, okay I'll film them."

Naturally, even the more moderate Shiia politicians are demanding full investigation; the raid caused a great deal of turmoil, and it must be fully explained to the Iraqi people.

President Talabani said at a news conference that Gen. George W. Casey Jr. agreed to the formation of the joint investigative committee. "I will personally supervise, and we will learn who was responsible," the president said. "Those who are behind this attack must be brought to justice and punished."

While this may sound ominous, like he had already made up his mind that the raid was unlawful, a fuller quotation from the Reuters article is more heartening:

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, who has been hosting the negotiations said: "We have to know the truth about what happened, and we must not be driven by rumours. This is a very dangerous incident which we must investigate."

Omar, a Sunni who blogs at Iraq The Model, wonders what the real motivation is for this investigation/inquisition:

Actually the reactions to this incident are so intense compared the reactions when 30 or 40 beheaded or strangles [Sunni] bodies are found on nearly daily basis in Baghdad in a way that it makes me question the intentions of this part of the government even more...

The raid on the husseiniya is not going to be investigated because those killed were Iraqis or Shia, the government will open an investigation because those killed were Sadrists and because Muqtada feels this raid was targeting his militia and fears that letting this one go without making enough noise will probably encourage the Americans to carry out more raids.

Actually, it is already too late to pressure the Iraqi Army and the Coalition into easing attacks on the Mahdi Milita and the Badr Brigades. The strategy is set and we are implementing it with increasing operational tempo. I doubt we and the Iraq Army will quit until both paramilitary death squads are thoroughly suppressed.

Bill Roggio has a detailed account of the incident.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 27, 2006, at the time of 3:56 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 23, 2006

Good News Unsuppressed

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Gateway Pundit has a wonderful story about the lady who asked the president what to do with a DVD-full of footage her Army broadcast-journalist husband Kent Taylor collected in Iraq during his tour. (Hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power Line, who asks us to spread the word. So we will.)

Kent and. Gayle Taylor attended a recent townhall meeting where President Bush answered questions from ordinary citizens about Iraq and other topics. Taylor complained about the fact that none of the Antique Media was interested in showing the DVD, which included much footage of successful reconstruction in Iraq. She asked the president how she could share this information with America... and he suggested using blogs!

CNN also took note. Last night, Mrs. Taylor and her husband Kent were on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 and able to share some of the DVD (Expose the Left has some of the video). Note that Cooper also had Hugh Hewitt on the show the night before last, and last night he added Michael Yon (along with a returning Hugh) to the mix. It appears that some, at least, in the MSM are starting to realize there really is another side... that it's not just sense vs. nonsense, which has been their position until now.

Kudo to Cooper for picking up the story, even though it took Mrs. Taylor's face to face appeal to the President of the United States to catch Cooper's attention!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 23, 2006, at the time of 4:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Fool Me Once...

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Two days in a row, al-Qaeda terrorists attacked police stations in Iraq. Tuesday's attack in Muqdadiyah was a partial success for the terrorists: they killed 18 Iraqi police and four innocent bystanders, while freeing 30 of their own number who were being held in that jail. But the Iraqi security force killed 10 of the terrorists.

One of Musab Zarqawi's al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia groups, the Mujahaddin Shura Council, took credit on their website, though there is no independent verification that it was indeed they. However, the governor of Diyala province had the police commander and other officers arrested for suspicion of complicity in the attack, which may well be accurate, considering how corrupt the police have been in the very recent past.

One of the major goals of the current training by American forces is to weed out those Iraqi cops who are either corrupt in the old-fashioned sense of taking bribes to turn their backs (or aid a jailbreak) -- or in the really old-fashioned sense of being pure tribalists, seeing their uniforms as license to attack rival tribes under color of authority.

Unlike Tuesday, however, Wednesday's attack was decidedly unsuccessful. In fact, it was a total disaster for the terrorists.

Insurgents attacked a police station Wednesday for a second day in a row, but U.S. and Iraqi forces captured 50 of them after a two-hour gunbattle.

About 60 gunmen attacked the police station in Madain, south of Baghdad, with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles, said police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammadawi. U.S. troops and a special Iraqi police unit responded, catching the insurgents in crossfire, he said.

Four police were killed, including the commander of the special unit, and five were wounded, al-Mohammadawi said. None of the attackers died, and among the captives was a Syrian.

This time, over 80% (50 out of 60) of the attackers were captured. Under interrogation -- perhaps none too gentle, if we let the Iraqis handle it, as we should -- any one of these fifty may reveal vital, operational intel about the cell that launched the attack and possibly others (including, perhaps, Tuesday's attack), and about Syria's involvement in smuggling jihadis into Iraq.

If the foreigner were Yemeni or Jordanian, he would almost certainly be a renegade; but Syria is the only other country in the world run by the Baath Party, it had close ties to Saddam Hussein, and it has an unavowed but obvious policy of interfering in Iraq. Every Syrian capture is a potential treasure-trove of intelligence.

The New York Times also carried this story; some of their facts differ slightly, though the thrust was the same:

Insurgents laid siege today to the headquarters of a police paramilitary unit near the capital, lobbing a volley of mortars that killed at least one senior officer and injured at least five, Interior Ministry officials said.

The police fought back, killing at least five insurgents, a commander in Baghdad said. By nightfall, the police were holding at least 76 people for questioning.

The predawn attack, on an infamous paramilitary force, unfolded as 14 mortars pummeled the former governorate center in the Sunni Arab-dominated town of Salman Pak, 12 miles southeast of Baghdad.

According to Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes, Salman Pak is where one of the terrorist training camps was located during the era of Saddam Hussein. This claim is the subject of a determined, almost desperate push-back by anti-war writers, who take Saddam's word that the camp was really a counter-terrorist training camp.

They have some allies, including Seymour Hersh -- who was caught red-fingered in 2004, lying in the New Yorker about Maj. Gen. Taguba's report on the Abu Ghraib abuses -- and Scott Ritter, the disgraced former U.N. weapons inspector whose views on Iraq made an abrupt 180-degree turn in 1999, and who then received $400,000 from Hussein-connected Detroit businessman Shakir al Khafaji to produce a documentary defending the Iraqi dictator.

The Iraqi police in Salman Pak, even today, have a deserved reputation for ruthlessness and brutality -- which is both good and bad. In this case, that character may have served them well; but they bear watching. At least, they have already mastered fairly sophisticated investigative techniques; referring to the second attack, the New York Times notes:

The police initially detained 146 people, all Iraqis, and then released 70 after testing them for traces of explosives, said Maj. Gen. Mehdi Sabih Hashem al-Garawi, the commander of the 7,700-strong Public Order Forces, which has four brigades operating in Baghdad and the Salman Pak area.

(This may not contradict the AP version, since not all of the 146 people attacked the station; the Times reports that the Third Public Order Brigade in Salman Pak detained only 76 people for explosives residue following the attack, which is not that different from the AP claim that "about 60 gunmen" participated and fifty were detained.)

Al-Qaeda has attacked police stations before. They suffer terrible losses whenever they find themselves up against U.S. troops; but now, at last, the Iraqi police are beginning to catch up to their Iraqi Army counterparts. The police lost one engagement, but they clearly won in the second: the net effect of the two was thirty terrorists freed from jail -- but sixty incapacitated, either by death or capture. A few more "successes" like this, and al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia may be out of business.

In a purely military strategic point of view, the Iraqi police got the upper hand in this two-day exchange. However, the "Tet-lite" propaganda value of the attacks was a big win for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has demonstrated two things for their eager audience in the press corps:

  • The Iraqi police are still distinctly weaker than the Iraqi Army -- not surprising, since "we've only just begun" to train the former.
  • The attacks also showed that al-Qaeda is alive and, if not exactly well, at least functional and able to mobilize large number of personnel. We can't pull a Murtha and send our troops on a strategic rearward advance just yet.

The Times, naturally, finds great cause for optimism that the whole operation to train the Iraqi police is collapsing. Referring to the first strike, they opine:

That highly coordinated strike raised serious questions about the effectiveness of the Iraqi police forces, at a time when President Bush and American commanders are touting the growing capabilities of the police.

Others might note that in a war, battles are both lost and won: what the Times and other media should look at is the overall picture. Clearly, the terrorists are not winning, even against the police (let alone the Iraqi Army).

Although al-Qaeda overwhelmed the police station on Tuesday with 200 people, they still evidently needed inside help to pull it off. On Wednesday, without the help from inside, they were crushed. This tells us something else: when the police (with American help) manage to clean out the bad eggs and develop true esprit de corps, as the Iraqi Army has, the police will become a very effective fighting force, even under the Interior Ministry.

Some other events that the Times inadvertently reports, but to which they give insufficient attention:

  • The Iraqi police have become very proactive.
This afternoon, insurgents in Baghdad attacked two busloads of Shiite pilgrims in two different parts of the city. In all, at least 2 pilgrims were killed and 46 injured. Policemen rushing to the scenes fought the insurgents, and at least two policemen were killed and four injured.

The Times does not tell us how many "insurgents" (terrorists, of course -- they attacked unarmed pilgrims, for heaven's sake) were killed or captured; that doesn't fit the story.

  • The United States is pointedly preventing Muqtada Sadr from positioning himself as the savior of the Shia.
A senior Shiite cleric, Hazem al-Aaraji, said on the Iraqiya television network that militiamen from the Mahdi Army had been dispatched to save the pilgrims, but that American forces had stopped them.
  • The only displacement of populations from Iraq comprise a handful of pro-Saddam Palestinians.
The border between Jordan and Iraq remained closed today, as the two governments tried to deal with scores of Palestinian refugees fleeing sectarian violence in Baghdad. The refugees had left Iraq by the busload last weekend, but were stopped by Jordanian border officials, stranding them at the frontier.

Note "scores," not thousands or even hundreds. The Times notes the Palestinians were "favored by Saddam Hussein," which must rank as one of the understatements of the year.

But each of these sidepoints in the Times article indicate not only that there is no "civil war," but also that the entire war is going our way. Donald Rumsfeld's small-footprint strategy, much disdained by the self-styled Jacksonians in the Republican Party, is actually working quite well.

Perhaps we shouldn't throw him under the bus just yet.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 23, 2006, at the time of 3:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 21, 2006

AP: Saddam, the Frustrated Innocent Victim

Fiskings , Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

An Associated Press laugher today from Charles J. Hanley introduces a "frustrated" Saddam Hussein, appealing Iraq's innocence of WMD-related charges to his inner circle, unable to understand why the meanies at the UN and the United States won't believe that Iraq long before gave up any ambition to develop WMD.

Mr. Hanley subsequently asserts -- perhaps forgetting the bright line AP always maintains between commentary and news reporting -- that this is all true: the assertion that Iraq maintained WMD programs (if not "large stockpiles") was a dreadful mistake (or lie) all along, Hussein was innocent, and (Mr. Hanley insists) the Iraq Survey Group's final report completely vindicated Saddam Hussein:

In his final report in October 2004, Charles Duelfer, head of a post-invasion U.S. team of weapons hunters, concluded Iraq and the U.N. inspectors had, indeed, dismantled the nuclear program and destroyed the chemical and biological weapons stockpiles by 1992, and the Iraqis never resumed production.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

-- Wm. Shakespeare, the Tempest

The final dispatch of Charles Duelfer's ISG investigation? Good; let's take that as our "gold standard." Let us compare it to the sheer audacity of Mr. Hanley's misstatements, sly inuendo, and outright fabrications. The result may astonish anyone not familiar with AP's modus operandi.

All right, let's kick on the afterburners and get this crate airborne....

(I know some readers dislike long posts; but sometimes, especially with fiskings, you just gotta do it. Apologies in advance.)

Exasperated, besieged by global pressure, Saddam Hussein and top aides searched for ways in the 1990s to prove to the world they'd given up banned weapons.

"We don't have anything hidden!" the frustrated Iraqi president interjected at one meeting, transcripts show.

At another, in 1996, Saddam wondered whether U.N. inspectors would "roam Iraq for 50 years" in a pointless hunt for weapons of mass destruction. "When is this going to end?" he asked.

Huh... can we figure out any reason -- other than pure anti-Saddam bigorty and prejudice on the part of the international community -- why the UN would intensify inspections in 1996, despite the fact (as Mr. Hanley sees it) that Iraq was not hiding anything, because (he states) they had nothing to hide?

Perhaps we can turn to the gold standard, the final Duelfer report. This is the section discussing the infamous "chicken farm" documents... which Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel had hidden in his chicken ranch, and which he revealed when he defected.

Kamel was one of Saddam Hussein's sons in law. He defected in August 1995 along with another son in law, Col. Saddam Kamel al-Majid; both began cooperating with UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission). Although Kamel insisted that he had ordered all the pre-Gulf War WMD destroyed, the fact that there was so much more than anyone had suspected, more than the UN had found, and tremendously more than Iraq had ever revealed, shook the confidence of the UN that they could rely in any way upon Hussein's cooperation.

(Later, both Kamel and al-Majid were lured back to Iraq, where they were both slain "resisting arrest" by the Iraq security forces.)

When Saddam discovered that Kamel and al-Majid had gone over, he panicked. The Iraqis had no idea what Kamel was telling UNSCOM, but they knew that he knew a lot. They also knew they had to get out in front of the information. Since it was compromised anyway, Saddam believed that they could quickly release the evidence themselves and make some PR gains -- all oriented towards getting the sanctions, including the inspection regime, permanently lifted.

In February 1996, the Iraqis "discovered" the chicken-farm documents and released them to UNSCOM. But Saddam's hopes were dashed that this would help the case to lift the sanctions:

Although Iraq’s release of the “chicken farm” documents initially created a more positive atmosphere with UNSCOM, the relationship grew strained as UNSCOM and the IAEA inspections became more aggressive. The release destroyed the international community’s confidence in the credibility of follow-on Iraqi declarations of cooperation. UNSCOM concluded that it had been successfully deceived by Iraq and that the deception effort was controlled and orchestrated by the highest levels of the former Regime. UNSCOM therefore directed its efforts at facilities associated with very senior members of the Regime and designed inspections to uncover documents rather than weapons. The situation eventually reached an impasse then escalated to crisis and conflict. From this experience, Iraq learned to equate cooperation with UNSCOM with increased scrutiny, prolonged sanctions, and the threat of war. In response, Baghdad sought relief via a weakening of the sanctions regime rather than compliance with it.

Might that possibly explain why UNSCOM increased the frequency and intensity of their inspections in 1996?

Let's see what else Mr. Hanley has to say....

[Inspections] ended in 2004, when U.S. experts, after an exhaustive investigation, confirmed what the men in those meetings were saying: that Iraq had eliminated its weapons of mass destruction long ago, a finding that discredited the Bush administration's stated rationale for invading Iraq in 2003 - to locate WMD.

This is the familiar trope: that the only reason the Bush administration ever enunciated prior to the invasion was WMD... and now that we haven't found "large stockpiles" of WMD, that has "discredited" the "rationale" for the war.

But in fact, each of the following was offered before the war as casus belli:

  • The WMD programs;
  • To enforce UNSC resolutions, particularly 1441;
  • Because of his non-compliance with his treaty obligations, primarily in refusing to cooperate with UNSCOM inspections;
  • Hussein's links with terrorist organizations -- including al-Qaeda, whose members he gave sanctuary to after they were routed from Afghanistan; but also including Hamas and Hezbollah, and (we now discover) al-Qaeda affilliate Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines;
  • Because of his staggering record of crimes against humanity;
  • In order to liberate the Iraqi people from the dictator; these first six can be found, e.g., in the president's 2003 State of the Union Addressed (January 28th);
  • In order to establish a democracy in the heart of the Middle East to serve as a model for other Moslem countries (February 2003);
  • Because Iraq had repeatedly attacked American fighter jets patrolling the no-fly zone and had tried to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in 1999 (both put forward September 2002).

Well, quite a number of enunciated reasons other than WMD, all promoted extensively and very publicly prior to the invasion, which began March 19th, 2003. Yet Mr. Hanley seems completely unaware of, even oblivious to, their existence. Either he has forgotten (most reporters have the memory of a mayfly), or else he never even noticed at the time. I wonder which he would claim?

Here he comes again:

Even as the documents make clear Saddam's regime had given up banned weapons, they also attest to its continued secretiveness: A 1997 document from Iraqi intelligence instructed agencies to keep confidential files away from U.N. teams, and to remove "any forbidden equipment."

Since it's now acknowledged the Iraqis had ended the arms programs by then, the directive may have been aimed at securing stray pieces of equipment, and preserving some secrets from Iraq's 1980s work on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Thus are great nonsense arguments promulgated. Like the King of Hearts in Alice In Wonderland, we begin with the verdict -- that "Iraqis had ended the arms programs by [1997]" -- and any subsequent evidence that they had not (the warning to remove "forbidden equipment") is reinterpreted in light of the preexisting conclusion. It's magic!

What does Mr. Hanley's gold standard say about this time period?

Throughout 1997-1998, Iraq continued efforts to hinder UNSCOM inspections through site sanitization, warning inspection sites prior to the inspectors’ arrival, concealment of sensitive documentation, and intelligence collection on the UN mission.

Pretty odd behavior for a regime that had ended their arms program long before and sought only to preserve a few "secrets" from their WMD efforts a decade earlier.

Saddam's inner circle entertained notions of reviving the programs someday, the newly released documents show. "The factories will remain in our brains," one unidentified participant told Saddam at a meeting, apparently in the early 1990s.

At the same meeting, however, Saddam, who was deposed by the U.S. invasion in 2003 and is now on trial for crimes against humanity, led a discussion about converting chemical weapons factories to beneficial uses.

When a subordinate complained that U.N. inspectors had seized equipment at the plants useful for pharmaceutical and insecticide production, Saddam jumped in, saying they had "no right" to deny the Iraqis the equipment, since "they have ascertained that we have no intention to produce in this field (chemical weapons)."

Not that Mr. Hanley would ever editorialize in the middle of a news story, but -- converting bio-chem factories "to beneficial uses"? Doesn't he actually mean converting to civilian use? How do we know the uses were "beneficial," when there is a persistent charge that what Iraq really did, following the Gulf War, was convert their WMD programs to dual-use capability, military and civilian -- and then argued that having at least a potential civilian capability meant the stockpiles could not be considered WMD.

In the end, the Iraqis persuading the CIA... which of course desperately wanted to be persuaded, since that would damage Bush. And we did find tremendous stockpiles of potential (dual-use) WMD: for example, drums of cyclosarin-based "pesticides" concealed in camouflaged bunkers and ammo dumps, where they sometimes sat within feet of empty chemical rockets and shells. Iraq, by the way, is one of the few countries that used cyclosarin as a chemical weapon (for example, during the Iran-Iraq war). Other countries used the related but far more effective (and impossible to hide as "dual-use") sarin instead of cyclosarin.

Kenneth Timmerman has documented this extensively, for example in his piece in Insight Magazine -- which alas has exceeded its expiry date and is no longer available on Insight's website. It is available on Timmerman's own site, however (though in annoyingly large type).

And in fact, Duelfer himself reported that the Iraqi chemical-weapon scientists had been retained at "civilian" pesticide production facilities, such as the Tariq Company in Fallujah. I wonder why?

So what Mr. Hanley reports, with a straight face, as "converting chemical weapons factories to beneficial uses," actually means, though he may be ignorant of it, converting chemical weapons factories to dual-use capability, knowing this would mean the international community (which includes the American CIA and State Department) would rush to exonerate Saddam Hussein if the dictator gave them even the smallest hook to hang their hats on. As Pat Collins, the Hip Hypnotist, proved, the easiest thing in the world is to hypnotize those who urgently want to be hypnotized.

Repeatedly in the transcripts, Saddam and his lieutenants remind each other that Iraq destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s, and shut down those programs and the nuclear-bomb program, which had never produced a weapon.

The image of Hussein and his top regime officials loudly and emphatically "remind[ing] each other" -- at a meeting they themselves were videotaping -- that they had destroyed all their banned WMD reminds me of the lousy science fiction writing that frequently appeared in magazines edited by Hugo Gernsback in the early 1930s...

"Golly, Will-X2283, it is amazing that today, in 2034, we can sit in comfort while traveling at more than one hundred miles of an hour in this evacuated subway tube."

"Why yes, Jon-K1119! If a traveler from one hundred years ago were to be magically whisked to this time period, he would be amazed not only at our transportation innovations but also by the fact that our underground hydroponics fields can feed four thousands in the same space that, in his day, would only feed four hundreds."

It doesn't seem to occur to Mr. Hanley that videotaped meetings at which people vigorously "remind each other" of facts they all know are probably meant for eventual public consumption... or at least later legal cover.

In any event, Charles Duelfer himself -- Mr. Hanley's gold standard -- noted that Saddam Hussein was very suspicious even of his own top people and concealed from them much of the WMD work that was ongoing. He was contradictory and contrary, often telling a person they had no WMD on one day, and a few days later telling the same person that they had superweapons that would drive the infidels and crusaders from the land.

In any event, whatever top regime officials may have "remind[ed] each other" of during those meetings, the fact remains that in the early 1990s, Saddam had every intention of maintaining and reconstituting his WMD. Duelfer reports in the section "Decline (1991-1996)":

Many former Iraqi officials close to Saddam either heard him say or inferred that he intended to resume WMD programs when sanctions were lifted. Those around him at the time do not believe that he made a decision to permanently abandon WMD programs. Saddam encouraged Iraqi officials to preserve the nation’s scientific brain trust essential for WMD. Saddam told his advisors as early as 1991 that he wanted to keep Iraq’s nuclear scientists fully employed. This theme of preserving personnel resources persisted throughout the sanctions period.

Since the next section of the final report is titled "Recovery (1996-1998)," the alert reader can probably surmise Duelfer's conclusion.

Two quick hits show the extraordinary depth and subtlety of Mr. Hanley's reasoning:

"We played by the rules of the game," Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said at a session in the mid-1990s. "In 1991, our weapons were destroyed."

Why yes... by us. Aziz is quite correct: Iraq's weapons were destroyed in 1991 -- by the Coalition forces operating under UN authority. That is, we destroyed what we found.

But did we find it all? Mr. Hanley has an answer to that, too:

Amer Mohammed Rashid, a top weapons program official, told a 1996 presidential meeting he laid out the facts to the U.N. chief inspector.

"We don't have anything to hide, so we're giving you all the details," he said he told Rolf Ekeus.

Mr. Hanley says that Rashid in fact "laid out all the facts" to Ekeus... but then he quotes Rashid saying only that he told Ekeus that he'd laid out all the facts. Evidently, Amer Mohammed Rashid's word is good enough for Mr. Hanley. After all, the mere fact that a man is a tyrant, a terrorist, and guilty of crimes against humanity is no reason to impugn his character, is it?

And at last we come full circle, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, to where we began, with Mr. Hanley's remarkable claim about the final report of the Iraq Survey Group, written by the CIA's Charles Duelfer:

In his final report in October 2004, Charles Duelfer, head of a post-invasion U.S. team of weapons hunters, concluded Iraq and the U.N. inspectors had, indeed, dismantled the nuclear program and destroyed the chemical and biological weapons stockpiles by 1992, and the Iraqis never resumed production.

So what does Charles Duelfer say for himself about the latter period leading up to the war?

Saddam invested his growing reserves of hard currency in rebuilding his military-industrial complex, increasing its access to dual-use items and materials, and creating numerous military research and development projects. He also emphasized restoring the viability of the IAEC and Iraq’s former nuclear scientists. The departure of UN inspectors and Iraq’s refusal to allow their return permitted MIC to purchase previously restricted dual-use materials and equipment that it needed for both weapons development and civilian applications. In addition, MIC had greater flexibility in adapting civilian technology to military use....

There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise. In addition to preserved capability, we have clear evidence of his intent to resume WMD as soon as sanctions were lifted.

Perhaps I'm not adept at reading between the lies, but that really doesn't look much like saying the WMD programs "never resumed production." To me, it looks more like Iraq was gearing up to go back into full production the moment sanctions were lifted -- and even earlier, using dual-use technologies.

But then, it's Associated Press. Perhaps that's all I really needed to say.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 21, 2006, at the time of 9:28 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Al-Jaafari - Teetering On the Edge?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Earlier this month, Sachi posted Al-Jaafari Must Step Down to Unify Iraq, in which she argued that Interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari is the major reason there has not yet been agreement on a permanent government.

Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), is the leading candidate for next Iraqi Prime Minister; but he is stirring up a hornet's nest across Iraq: the Kurds don’t like him; the Sunnis hate him; and secular Iraqis fear him. Even the top Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- a strong proponent of a unified Iraq -- is suggesting al-Jaafari step aside....

Many believe al-Jaafari is behind a series of killings targeting prominent Sunni clerics and former Baath members, under the guise of the Interior Ministry’s Security Forces, which are infested with Iranian influenced militiamen. Al-Jaafari, of the Islamic Dawa Party (within the UIA coalition), was strongly backed in the Shiite caucus by militia leader Muqtada Sadr, the anti-American militant who occupied Najaf, Sadr City, and Basra during a failed "uprising" in March of 2004, timed to coincide with a similar surge of violence in Sunni Fallujah.

In the "primary" of the UIA, al-Jaafari beat Interim Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) by a single vote; thereafter, the entire UIA insisted that al-Jaafari must be the nominee for prime minister in the permanent government. Boiled down, that is the block in forming a government in Iraq.

But there are persistent and growing indications that the UIA is splintering on this issue now. According to the website AdnKronosInternational -- whose accuracy and veracity is completely unknown -- SCIRI (Abdul-Mahdi's party within the UIA) may be about to split from Dawa (al-Jaafari's party) on the question of the prime minister nominee, joining with Kurds and Sunni to form a majority coalition that can nominate Abdul-Mahdi and elect him to the post. This would break the logjam, were it to occur, and the government could finally form. (Hat tip to Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail.)

Baghdad, 17 March (AKI) - The representatives of the Kurdish list, the Sunni Iraqi Concord Front and much of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) have reportedly reached an accord on a new prime minister. Their agreement not to reconfirm Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister and instead nominate Abdel Mahdi, a leading SCIRI figure and currently vice president, was reported by the al-Arabiya network and confirmed by Sunni deputy, Salman Jumeiri. The nomination of a new prime minister is the main sticking point in efforts to forge a new government in Iraq after the elections in December....

The line-up of those endorsing Abdel Mahdi - who lost narrowly to Jaafari in an internal vote on a prime ministerial candidate - may well exclude MPs from the faction of radical Shiite imam Moqtada al-Sadr and those of the Islamic party Dawa, led by Jaafari.

Ordinarily, we would not put much faith in an unknown website's claim; but this rumor has circulated for several days now, and more people seem to be believing it. For example, Hugh Hewitt mentioned it on his radio show last week, though he gave no specifics. (Of course, Hugh might just have gotten it from the Fourth Rail, as we did!)

Logically, it makes sense: al-Jaafari is Dawa's candidate, and he polled essentially equal with Abdul-Mahdi, being pushed ever so slightly over the top by Muqtada Sadr's powerful influence. If SCIRI can do an end-run around Dawa to get their own guy in the top spot and also be hailed as the saviors of the December election, they would be stupid to turn it down.

I doubt that Dawa will try to punish SCIRI later; Dawa needs the UIA as much as SCIRI, if the Shia are to have their majority. In fact, as Dawa is generally less militant and fundamentalist than SCIRI (though the individuals involved this time reverse that tendency), many Dawa members might be secretly pleased that al-Jaafari -- and the invisible hand of Sadr -- are out of the picture.

And they do, of course, want to light the candle and get the government going; the Iraqi people are getting restless with the bickering.

So let's keep fingers crossed that this isn't just a wild rumor that spread out of control like a California wildfire.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 21, 2006, at the time of 4:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 20, 2006

Iraqi Battalion's First Independent Operation

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Sachi

We have talked about the readiness of the Iraqi Army for months. So it's nice to read a story like this one from the 1st Marine Regiment and the Military Transition Teams (MTTs) who train the Iraqi troops. Iraqi soldiers from the "2-2-7" recently conducted their first independent counterinsurgency operation in the Anbar district:

More than 100 soldiers from the Iraqi Army’s 2nd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 7th Iraqi Army Division conducted their first independently-executed mission to disrupt insurgent operations here March 14.

The soldiers, who were accompanied by a handful of Marines, patrolled through and cleared three kilometers of village just south of the town of Haqlaniyah along the Euphrates River in western Al Anbar Province, northwest of Baghdad. The Marines, outnumbered by the Iraqi soldiers 10 to one, were on hand in an advisory role only.

“It’s good for the Iraqi people not to see us out there and to see the Iraqi Army doing all the work in keeping their community safe,” said Capt. Quintin D. Jones, a Memphis, Tenn., native and member of the Military Transition Team (MTT) here. MTTs are groups of Coalition servicemembers assigned to logistically assist and guide individual Iraqi military units’ transition to independent operations.

The Iraqi-led mission was part of the latest counterinsurgency operation, dubbed “Raging Bull,” conducted by Coalition forces in western Al Anbar Province.

Despite relentless negative reporting from the MSM, I cannot help feeling optmistic about Iraq. That is because I focus on progress, not setbacks.

Of course we need to look at the serious reality of the war; but there must be balance. "Reality" in Iraq has three legs: progress, promise, and cost. But the media teeters precariously on a one-legged stool.

Remember the first Falluja offensive, where Iraqi troops abandoned their posts and fled in the face of the enemy? Today, no Iraqi soldier will show his back to the terrorist vermin infesting his country. These soldiers (we can definitely use that proud term now) are eager to prove their courage and the skills they learned from the best in the world: our own United States Marines.

And today the 1st Marines are proud to count the Iraqi Army as comrades.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 20, 2006, at the time of 2:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Mullahlogging

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line frets that our talks with Iran about Iraq can only spell trouble:

My sense is that such talks are a bad idea. Iran is involved in Iraq because it perceives an interest in supporting our enemies there. To talk Iran into changing course, we would have to offer it an incentive larger than the one that's pushing it to cause trouble now. The only such incentive I can imagine is backing away from our efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

I can think of another. I suspect our talks are more along the lines of Marshall Matt Dillon "talking" with the latest boozed up, sadistic outlaw who thinks he and his gang of five or six dissolute drifters can take over Dodge and do bad things to Miss Kitty... and the "incentive" Bush is offering is the mullahs' continuing residence in this world, rather than the next.

Why, after five years of a president whose fault has more often been talkin' too Texan than crawling on his belly, do worried conservatives still think that any moment now, George W. Bush is going to turn into Neville Ehud Clinton?

This is a very bad habit of the Right (note that I don't mean Paul here; my focus now shifts to the hysterics in the sliver of the Antique Media that leans conservative): they spent so many years in the wilderness, they've homesteaded defeat. The spasm of Right-wing media despair that precedes every election is wearying, and it can prove a self-fulfilling prophecy if allowed to go too far.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 20, 2006, at the time of 2:24 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 19, 2006

Anti-American Protests "Fizzle" On War Anniversary

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Update: See below.

A newspaper headline from years ago is such a marvel of oxymoronia, it is perfection:

Million Mom March Draws Thousands

Keep that headline in mind as you read about the massive, worldwide anti-war protests.

Today, March 19th, 2006, marks the third anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq. Not surprisingly, since the liberation was conducted by the United States, there were coordinated anti-war protests planned across the globe. Record high numbers of people flocked to major cities to protest against the Great Satan... well, not exactly....

In Sydney Australia, back in 2003, 250,000 protesters rallied against the war. Yesterday, a whopping 500 people showed up. Australia has 20 million people, so this is a turnout of 0.0025% of the population.

Around 500 protesters marched through central Sydney, chanting "End the war now" and "Troops out of Iraq." Many campaigners waved placards branding President Bush the "World's No. 1 Terrorist" or expressing concerns that Iran could be the next country to face invasion.

The Associated Press did not let the fizzly turnout dampen their enthusiasm:

Opposition to the war is still evident in Australia, which has some 1,300 troops in and around Iraq. Visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was heckled by campaigners in Sydney this week, who said she had "blood on her hands."

(It's interesting to note that the total number of protesters in Australia was just over a third the number of troops they have in Iraq.)

Perhaps things looked better in London or Tokyo; let's take a peek:

Authorities shut down streets in the heart of London's shopping and theater district for the demonstration, which organizers had predicted would attract up to 100,000 people, but police estimated the crowd was about 15,000 people....

In Tokyo, about 2,000 people rallied in a downtown park, carrying signs saying "Stop the Occupation" as they listened to a series of anti-war speeches.

Great Britain saw a turnout of 0.02%; but Tokyo was truly galvanized, with nearly 0.0016% marching in the streets for World Peace Now!

Japan currenty deploys about 600 troops from the Self Defense Force to Iraq. Japanese polls show that a majority of Japanese still oppose the war; however, since the Iraq War and Japan's deployment began, the Japanese people have shifted very significantly in favor of changing their officially pacifist constitution to one that allows Japan to maintain a regular standing army. Largely due to the precedent set by the Self Defence Force, the Japanese now support the new constitution by nearly two to one (over 60% support).

The second-largest protest was in Turkey. Some 5,000 protesters showed up. Considering it is a Moslem country, 5,000 may seem rather small and insignificant... but still, it represents a staggering 0.007% of the Turkish population. The Turkish government had better watch out: if all these people chose to seize control to express their displeasure at a war that Turkey is not involved in, the Turks might have to mobilize one of their 200 regiments to put them down.

Not to be left out, the mighty Swedes mobilized 1,000 protesters to surround the American embassy. That's 0.01%... a small country, but a doughty batch of protesters!

In Sweden, about 1,000 demonstrators gathered for a rally in Stockholm before a march to the U.S. Embassy. Some protesters carried banners reading "No to U.S. warmongering" and "USA out of Iraq," while others held up a U.S. flag with the white stars replaced by dollar signs.

Yeah, yeah... but does anybody actually care?

Update: Meanwhile, back at le chateau, a few students are up in arms in France (or at least up in les cocktails Molotov). Hat tip Power Line:

The protests, which drew 500,000 people in some 160 cities across the country, were the biggest show yet of escalating anger that is testing the strength of the conservative government before elections next year.

Wow, half a million people. This was by far the biggest protest demonstration of them all, drawing 0.82% of the French population -- more than 40 times the London demonstration in terms of population -- more than 33 times the size in actual numbers.

Alas, we can't really count it -- because they're not protesting the Iraq war. Their boeuf is entirely domestic: the "conservative" government in France wants to change the law to allow employers to fire incompetent employees within first two years, which is currently illegal. (Evidently, the potential of being incompetent is a besetting fear among French youths. Possibly because they spend all their time at l'Université rioting instead of studying.)

In an apparent effort to set fire to a police van serving as a blockade, protesters instead torched the entrance of a nearby Gap store, apparently by accident, engulfing the small porch in flames.

(And before we forget... the "conservative government?" In France? Only in the sense that socialists are slightly to the right of Communists. The Communist Party is very strong in France, by the way, and the French Communist Party has 21 seats in the National Assembly. In fact, adding together the eight radical-left parties, they control 177 of the 577 seats, or 31%. Radical left candidates for president received more than 12.5 million votes in the first round, or 44%. The government of France is not "conservative" by any stretch, and Yahoo is lying again.)

Maybe the French government should expand the military to alleviate the unemployment problem. Oh, wait -- do we really want rampaging French youths to have les fusils?

Best to let sleeping chiens lie, I suppose. As Emily Litella would say....

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 19, 2006, at the time of 1:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 17, 2006

Operation Swarmer: a "Pyrrhic Failure?"

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

The Antique Media's ability to spin a successful operation into a failure never ceases to amaze me.

In an article in today's Time Magazine, Brian Bennett and Al Jallam claim that Operation Swarmer -- the operation just undertaken by the Iraqi Army and the 101st Airborne -- "fizzled," simply because it did not live up to the exciting fantasy that Time mistakenly expected.

Evidently, Time anticipated a spectacular fireworks show that could make a four-color cover, with missiles and Willie Pete and maybe a couple of MOABs (or at least puny, little Daisy Cutters).

But contrary to what many many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war.... In fact, there were no airstrikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op. What’s more, there were no shots fired at all and the units had met no resistance, said the U.S. and Iraqi commanders.

Time complains that planes and helicopters didn't come screaming in like a World War II strafing run. But this operation was never supposed to be an airstrike; it was an air assault, a fact that even Time itself supposedly understood. The part I clipped out above with the elipses is this parenthetical explanation:

("Air Assault" is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.)

In other words, Time already knew that we weren't planning a huge, Clintonian barrage of missiles all over the place, blowing up wedding parties and Boy Sprout jamborees with glorious abandon. Operation Swarmers was, according to Wretchard of the Belmont Club, a cordon and search operation... which is exactly what the Iraqi Army and the Americans did. And they found a bunch of weaponry and a lot of potential insurgents, making this a very, very successful "fizzle":

Iraqi and U.S. troops on the ground had netted 48 suspected insurgents, 17 of which had already been cleared and released.

This means 31 suspects are still in custody, formerly dangerous terrorists who now are nothing more than intelligence sources for us. Plus, they made it clear that no place in Iraq can be considered "safe" for terrorists... that we and the Iraqi Army can hit anybody anywhere.

The operation, which doubled the population of the flat farmland in one single airlift, was initiated by intelligence from Iraq security forces, says Lt Col Skip Johnson commander of the 187 Battallion, 3rd Combat Brigade of the 101st Airborne. "They have the lead," he said to reporters at the second stop of the tour....

With the Interior Ministry's Samarra commando battalion, the soldiers had found some 300 individual pieces of weaponry like mortars, rockets and plastic explosives in six different locations inside the sparsely populated farming community of over 50 square miles and about 1,500 residents. The raids also uncovered high-powered cordless telephones used as detonators in homemade bombs, medical supplies and insurgent training manuals.

Note that in this air assault, the Iraqi Army and the Iraqi police (the "Interior Ministry's Samarra commando battalion") raided together, just as promised as part of the brokered deal to regain control of the police. As we reported Wednesday:

As for the Shiite militia attacking Sunni citizens, there has been an amazing new development: the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries announced yesterday that from now on, anti-terrorist raids will be conducted with the Iraqi Army and the police operating together:

So what is this nonsense about "no shots fired at all?" Is Time saying that the mission "fizzled" because we didn't get shot at and didn't have to return fire? It's a failure when the enemy is overwhelmed by our presence and flees, abandoning its weaponry, equipment, and personnel?

Perhaps "some skeptical military analysts" see Operation Swarmer as a failure, nothing more than a "photo op." But in fact, it was a perfect demonstration of how capable the Iraqi Army has become. They've demonstrated that they are capable of collecting accurate intelligence, dropping into the target area, and efficiently nabbing suspects and weaponry without taking any casualties at all. They only need help with air transportation, not having much of an Air Force yet.

A few more "pyrrhic failures" like this, and Iraq may end up a stable democracy after all!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 17, 2006, at the time of 10:09 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 16, 2006

The Grand Tale of Tal Afar

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Sachi

I am sure readers must remember this thank you letter from Tal Afar Mayor Najim Abdullah Abid al-Jibouri to the commanders and men of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, who, with the 1st Brigade, 3d Division of the Iraqi Army, finally liberated Tal Afar. The letter was widely reported in blogsphere back in February.

Last Sunday,(March 12, 2006, the CBS show 60 minutes featured the current situation in Tal Afar. Much to my surprise, the report by Lara Logan was amazingly balanced.

You should be able to view the video from here (click the "60 Minutes" link in the left sidebar, then click on the link titled "Al Qaeda's Town"); but when I tried, it stopped in the middle. It's RealPlayer: "abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

The quick take: the retaking of Tal Afar is a model for how we will fight such wars in the future... and a great vindication of the vision of President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the other architects of small-footprint warfare.

Tal Afar is located at the Syrian border, in the Ninewa province (sometimes called Nineva). It had been used for years as a conduit for terrorists entering Iraq from Syria. Back in 2004, U.S. troops kicked out the terrorists; but like in Fallujah, there were not enough American toops to hold the town; and the Iraqi troops back then proved unreliable. Inevitably then, when we left Tal Afar, the terrorists came roaring back -- literally with a vengence. The town was overrun by Musab Zarqawi's group al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, who began a spree of revenge killing, torture, and brutal, thuggish rule.

Sharia law as enforced (on the citizens; the terrorists seemed to have special dispensation). And 200,000 citizens of Tal Afer were held hostage. Mayor Najim describes the situation in his letter:

Our city was the main base of operations for Abu Mousab Al Zarqawi. The city was completely held hostage in the hands of his henchmen. Our schools, governmental services, businesses and offices were closed.

Our streets were silent, and no one dared to walk them. Our people were barricaded in their homes out of fear; death awaited them around every corner. Terrorists occupied and controlled the only hospital in the city.

Their savagery reached such a level that they stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young.

After a year of training and building up the Iraqi Army, so that we would have a force that could actually hold a city like Tal Afar (or Fallujah) after we liberate it, we decided in September, 2005, that we were ready at last to recapture the town.

Col. H.R. McMaster is commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry and Multinational Force-Northwest; he now also serves as one of the military's top advisers on fighting the Iraqi insurgency. He described to 60 minutes what the 3d Cav found when they entered Tal Afar.

Masked gunmen led by al Qaeda roamed the streets of Tal Afar at will, publicly executing and kidnapping people. Col. McMaster told 60 Minutes some of the terrorists were foreign fighters, but many were Iraqis from the area. Pictures of their attacks were circulated in videos like one in which you can hear them chanting a call to jihad.

"They had schools for snipers. They had kidnapping and murder classes that were attended by people on the best techniques," says McMaster.

The terrorists they encountered were far more sophisiticated than anyone imagined. Aside from foreign fighters, there were many former soldiers and officers from Saddam's army, men with actual combat experience and training. The enemy organized well, both for combat and extreme brutality:

The colonel says he was surprised to learn the enemy in Tal Afar was so organized. "You had this blending of former military expertise and organizational ability with, with a radical Islamic ideology, and it was fertile ground here."

On September 3, 2005, the fight began. After three days of heavy ground fighting and air strikes, the fire was ceased for two days in order to let citizens escape. But then, three more days of delay were ordered by the Iraqi goverment, allegedly because they were concerned about civilian casualties. However, the recent exposure of "several ranking Defense Ministry officials" as allied with al-Qaeda -- either for money or ideology -- certainly suggests other explanations.

Regardless, this extra respite allowed many of the terrorists to escape as well. Michael Ware, Baghdad bureau chief for Time Magazine, who was embedded with the 3d Cav, explains what happened:

"The al Qaeda presence in Tal Afar was surrounded. And the attack was primed. And then it was stopped dead in its tracks. And so, as the troops I was with battled throughout the day and into the night with al Qaeda fighters so close you could throw a stone and hit them, when we woke up the next morning -- poof -- they were gone!" says Ware....

When the troops finally entered the Sarai section of Tal Afar on the ninth day of the battle, they used tanks to blast holes through buildings so the soldiers could move forward without being exposed.

But after waiting so long, Michael Ware says the momentum was gone; and — so it seemed — was the enemy.

"Where an entire al Qaeda society had existed, the troops that I was with found one body," Ware recalls.

To prove they were not defeated, al Qaeda unleashed 12 suicide bombers in a day of bloodshed in Baghdad. They publicly called it revenge for the loss of Tal Afar, where the U.S. Army calculated enemy dead at 151. Eight Iraqi soldiers and one American were also killed. But Col. McMaster told 60 Minutes that using numbers to measure victory is a mistake.

"Body counts are completely irrelevant. I mean, what is relevant is, 'Is the population secure so that political development, economic development can proceed?'" he explains.

But what happened after the battle is more important: American troops began training the local police, recruiting both Shia and Sunni, and reopened schools and markets. Their success at winning the hearts and minds of the Tal Afar citizens is obvious from the 60 Minutes segment video.

American soldiers like Capt. Jesse Sellars have taken on added responsibilities. On regular patrols through the city, he is part politician and part policeman.

These days, he walks the streets like the pied piper, with crowds of Iraqi children chanting his name. They're the same streets he fought for just a few months ago.

I was struck by the children chanting Capt. Sellars first name like a cerebrity: "Jesse! Jesse!" This raises an important question: Is it actually legal for CBS to show footage favorable to President Bush, Republicans, or the U.S. military? Isn't there something in the Constitution against it?

The segment ends on an upbeat note:

"If anybody tries to operate in Tal Afar, they're gonna be detected and …" the colonel replied.

"But is that a yes, colonel? Are they trying to come back?" Logan asked.

"Oh yes. Of course the enemy is trying to come back. In an insurgency, there’s not going to be a big decisive battle and then the white flags come out and it’s over, OK," says Col. McMaster. "But what we have here is as close to that as you really can get."

The terrorists will come again; it's the Middle East, and they always come. They will slither back into Tal Afar and Fallujah and the Anbar province.

But this time, when they come, they will face Iraqi troops defending the town, province, and country. Training-up the Iraqi Army has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of any of the Democrats -- or Republicans -- in Congress; but the actual boots on the ground, the generals, the service secretaries and Donald Rumsfeld, and of course George W. Bush himself always knew it would turn the tide in the end.

The sentiments of the citizens of Tal Afar toward the American soldiers are summed up in the Mayor's letter. Let's let Mayor Najim have the last word:

God bless this brave Regiment; God bless the families who dedicated these brave men and women.

From the bottom of our hearts we thank the families. They have given us something we will never forget.

To the families of those who have given their holy blood for our land, we all bow to you in reverence and to the souls of your loved ones. Their sacrifice was not in vain. They are not dead, but alive, and their souls hovering around us every second of every minute. They will never be forgotten for giving their precious lives. They have sacrificed that which is most valuable. We see them in the smile of every child, and in every flower growing in this land.

Let America, their families, and the world be proud of their sacrifice for humanity and life.

Finally, no matter how much I write or speak about this brave Regiment, I haven’t the words to describe the courage of its officers and soldiers. I pray to God to grant happiness and health to these legendary heroes and their brave families.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 16, 2006, at the time of 4:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 15, 2006

"One Signature Away"

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

In testimony before Congress today, General John Abizaid, CENTCOM commander, confirmed that the Iraqi military intelligence and intelligence agencies uncovered and thwarted a plot by al-Qaeda to infiltrate 421 terrorists into the Iraqi Army -- where they would be stationed at the gates and inside the Green Zone. Their mission would have been to launch a brutal terrorist attack to kill as many Americans and Iraqis and kidnap hundreds of hostages.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, in an interview with The Associated Press, said the 421 Al Qaeda recruits were one bureaucrat's signature away from acceptance into an Iraqi army battalion whose job is to control the gates and main squares in the Green Zone. The plot was discovered three weeks ago.

But the point is that the plot was broken by the Iraqi Army... even though members of the Ministry of Defense were implicated:

A senior Defense Ministry official said the 421 Al Qaeda fighters were actually recruited to storm the U.S. and British embassies and take hostages. Several ranking Defense Ministry officials were jailed in the plot, the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

The fact that the Iraqi Army can operate for the good of Iraq and even arrest its own bosses shows that they are independent, patriotic, and -- as we've said before -- tough as nails. If anything saves Iraq not only from a "civil war" but from pure, unadulterated chaos, it will be the New Iraqi Army.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 15, 2006, at the time of 6:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Iraq's Non-Sectarian "Sectarian" War - New Development

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Yesterday Dafydd talked about the number of young military age men's bodies found in Iraq. Many of them had been toutured and killed execution style. Dafydd suggested this could be a result of vigilantism by Iraqis against the foreign terrorists and their Iraqi allies in Musab Zarqawi's al-Qaed In Mesopotamia group.

The captured Death List of Al Qaeda (hat tip to commenter Jim from California) and an announcement from Sunni Insurgents might shed some light on this issue. First, the "Death List":

Coalition forces in Iraq are believed to have captured some very sensitive al Qaeda documents. Apparently, one of these is a "Death List," giving the names of prominent Iraqis of all factions whom al Qaeda believes opposes its efforts to establish an Islamist state in the country. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the names on the list are of Sunni tribal and religious leaders who have been less than enthusiastic in their support for al Qaeda. Sadly, a number of those on the list have already been slain.

Probably not coincidentally, given that Iraqis are likely to know who is on al-Qaeda's "hit" parade even without having to see documents, Sunni insurgents -- Iraqis still fighting against Americans and until recently allied with Zarqawi -- announced yesterday that they killed a number of foreign terrorists in the Anbar province.

"We have killed a number of the Arabs including Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, Kuwaitis and Jordanians," London Daily Telegraph quoted an insurgent representative in the western province of Anbar as saying.

We have heard about the developing gulf between Zarqawi's Al-Qaeda-in-Irag and Sunni Insurgents for quite some time. But what I did not know was that Sunni Insurgetns formed a special group to combat Al Qaeda.

It became an outright split when a wave of bombings killed scores of people in Anbar resulting in a spate of tit-for-tat killings.

In reaction, the Sunni tribal leaders formed their own anti-al Qaeda militia, the Anbar Revolutionaries. The group has a core membership of about 100 people, all of whom had relatives killed by al Qaeda. It is led by Ahmed Ftaikhan, a former Saddam-era military intelligence officer, the Telegraph reported.

The group claims to have killed 20 foreign fighters and 33 Iraqi sympathizers. The United States has confirmed that six of Zarqawi's deputies were killed in the city of Ramadi in the province.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that an Anbar-based group has claimed it killed five top members of al Qaeda and associated groups in Ramadi.

The claim was posted on an Islamist Web site and attributed to the Anbar Revenge Brigade, the AP reported.

It listed the names of four suspected al Qaeda leaders. The fifth man, it said, was from Ansar al-Sunnah, a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda.

(Tip of the hat to Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail.)

So it is possible that at least some of the bodies found could be of terrorists killed by Sunnis -- either Sunni insurgents or Sunni patriots (which groups may have a large intesection). The "sectarian" war we thought we were witnessing may not be what it seems.

As for the Shiite militia attacking Sunni citizens, there has been an amazing new development: the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries announced yesterday that from now on, anti-terrorist raids will be conducted with the Iraqi Army and the police operating together:

Yesterday, the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries said they have reached an agreement requiring them to conduct all raids jointly, in a bid to stop the operations of death squads masquerading as police commandos.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who controls Iraqi police, is a Shi'ite. Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi is a Sunni Muslim.

This should prevent overly "enthusiastic" Iraqi police from abusing, kidnapping, and even killing Sunnis, as many Sunnis believe, with good reason, has been happening. They trust the Army much more that the police for several reasons:

  • The Iraqi Army was directly trained by the Americans, while we are only just now starting to train the police.
  • The Army is run by a Sunni Iraqi; while the police are under the Interior Ministry, which is run by Bayan Jabr of the United Iraqi Alliance, who is closely allied with the Muqtada Sadr-supported Interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
  • The Iraqi police have been heavily infiltated by Iranian-supported Shiite militias in some areas (notably in Basra and in the Sadr City slum section of Baghdad)... particularly by Muqtada Sadr's al-Mahdi militia; the police are also corrupt and incompetent; and many police stations are simply tribal strike forces, who actually launch attacks on other Iraqi police stations controlled by "enemy tribes."

Joint raids between police and Army would greatly reassure nervous Sunnis, many of whom were just as opposed to Saddam Hussein as were Shia and Kurds... but who have been lumped together with the Tikrit tribe as "Saddamists" by the ruling Shia and often treated as incipient terrorists solely because they are Sunnis and secular, rather than being Shia who want to follow sharia law.

And have we already forgotten that "Death List" from the beginning of this post? It's hard to dismiss the idea that the real reason Shiite "men in black" abuse the Sunnis is that so many Sunni tribal leaders are secularists who oppose "efforts to establish an Islamist state in the country" -- whether a Wahabbist state established by al-Qaeda, or an Iranian-style mullahcracy imposed by radical Shia.

Let us hope that this new policy succeeds.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 15, 2006, at the time of 5:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

SF Vet to Murtha: How can you ask us to leave?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham read a letter on her show that had been sent by an unretired Special-Forces soldier to Congressman Murtha, the veteran and representative who calls for the "immediate redployment" of our troops from Iraq to "over the horizon" positions -- in other words, our immediate withdrawal (which he later amended to say that we start immediately, and it will actually take six months to get out).

The letter is from retired, 60 year old Army paratrooper, Dave Rockwell. Rockwell left the Army in 1992, after 24 yeas in the Special Forces and Airborne Infantry units; but he recently reenlisted and is now deployed with the 10th Mountain Division (former Sen. Bob Dole's old outfit) fighting in Iraq. It was there that he handed the letter to Ingraham, who was doing a morale visit to Iraq at the time (where she was very well received).

The Antique Media -- which ferrets out any disgruntled serviceman who wants to complain -- somehow missed this incredible guy. Here are some excerts from his letter to Murtha; but read the whole thing... it will inspire you.

Although it is difficult to keep up with politics from over here, your comments on immediate withdrawal have been noted by all of us. I cannot tell you the overall sense of discouragement, sense of betrayal and the feeling that few appreciate our efforts your comments have created. 1BCT [1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division] has been frequently deployed in support of the War on Terrorism and we believe it is the correct fight and we believe we are winning. We have seen a significant improvement on the ground since we began combat operations in Baghdad three months ago....

I sincerely believe General Marshall as deeply as I believe your statements have undermined the morale of these young soldiers. I have watched intently as your political party has attempted to use this war for political advantage and find it to be repugnant in the extreme....

How can you ask us to leave? Must we forget all the sacrifices, the deaths, lost limbs, lost marriages and the daily struggle to win?...

Make no mistake, we are winning here. It ain't easy and it may be difficult for you to see from your elevated position. But day in and day out, 24/7 we are pushing out combat patrols, taking the initiative away from the beheaders, limiting their ability to move, resupply and detaining and killing them. We are going to win here. We are going to leave this country far better off than when we started and American is going to be more secure for it. We will make the sacrifice, will you, will America?

Remember 9/11.

The "General Marshall" reference above is to a quotation about troop morale that Rockwell includes, which ends:

With it all things are possible; without it everything else,
planning, preparation, and production, count for naught.
Gen. George C. Marshall

Take a read, Congressman Murtha -- and then shut up.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 15, 2006, at the time of 2:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2006

Who Goes There?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The "Iraq is collapsing into civil war" story du jour is the discovery of somewhere north of eighty bodies in the last twenty-four hours, all killed execution style and dumped in various mass graves:

Police in the past 24 hours have found the bodies of at least 87 people killed by execution-style shootings - a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian reprisal slayings, officials said Tuesday.

The dead included at least 29 bodies stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad.

The bloodshed - the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since bombers destroyed an important Shiite shrine last month - followed weekend attacks in a teeming Shiite slum in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.

But it's important to realize that we're talking about two entirely separate modes of killing in these first three paragraphs:

  1. Young, military-aged men found executed either by gunshot or by garrotte and dumped into mass graves, mostly in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad;
  2. The "weekend attacks" of random people of all ages slain by bomb blasts clearly set by Sunni terrorists, with or without Sadr's connivance; such bombings have been carried out by both Sunni radicals associated with Musab Zarqawi and by Shiite radicals associated with "kingmaker" Muqtada Sadr and his al-Mahdi militia.

Why does the mode of killing make a difference? Killing is killing, right?

Not so fast: it's easy to label Mode-2 killing as terrorism, because the victims comprise anyone who has the terrible luck to be near the bombsite when the device goes off. But it's not at all clear who is being killed by Mode-1 -- and it may be the case that some significant portion are actually known militants and terrorists being killed by citizen vigilante groups.

Here is a piece of information included in the Reuters story but absent from the AP story:

Sadr himself called publicly for restraint on Monday. But in Sadr City, the bodies of men labeled "traitors" were hung from telegraph poles and officials say privately that Shi'ite militia commanders are no longer all heeding clerical appeals for calm.

The standard media assumption is that these killings, even Mode-1, are examples of "sectarian violence," meaning people killed simply for being Shia or Sunni in the wrong neighborhood. But how do the newswriters know that? What evidence is there why those particular people were killed? Do they even know how many of those killed were even Iraqi, and how many were foreign Arabs or even non-Arabs?

Some points to note:

  • So far, I haven't seen a single report of a mass grave containing women and children shot or strangled. Only military-aged men.
  • Although Reuters mentions that some of the bodies were found "bearing signs of torture," they don't actually tell us what "torture" they mean; past misuse of the word (for example, referring to what happened to detainees at Abu Ghraib as "torture") means I cannot simply accept the Antique Media's claim without specifics: for example, does this abuse look more like punishment -- or like abuse during interrogation? Recall that in much of the world, certainly including Iraq, inflicting pain and injury in order to get information is considered normal.
  • The bodies are nearly always dumped in groups, as if a batch of people had been rounded up from the same location and killed together. This could be "people worshipping at the wrong mosque," but it could also be "militants captured in a safehouse."
  • There are persistent reports that the "kidnappers" are often Interior-Ministry police or "men in black." Whether honest or militant themselves, such people might have access to police files of known Sunni militants.

Each of these suggests at least the possibility that some portion of Mode-1 killings are not terrorism but rather vigilantism. Vigilante justice has a very bad reputation, some of it deserved; but even the most anti-vigilante activist has to agree that at least some of the people who have been lynched throughout history were, in fact, guilty of whatever crime was urged against them. Others were innocent... but the moment one accepts that some were guilty, the questions become more pointed: what percent were guilty? how was supposed guilt determined? and what safeguards were in place to prevent innocents being killed?

Most of those lynched are not strangers; they are known within the community -- and known to be violent, dangerous people. Often there are witnesses to the crime, but for whatever reason (standing of the accused, absence of a sitting court, insularity of a minority population, the local courts known to be corrupt or slapdash) it's not practical to try the accused in a court.

Without question, many innocent people have been murdered by vigilante justice. "Known in the community" can also include the guy who owns the land you want to steal, or the surly black ranch hand who can be blamed for "raping" the daughter who in fact had consentual sex with some lowlife white ranch hand. It's impossible to deny that such murders were (and still are) committed under color of vigilantism.

But many innocents have also been killed by constituted justice: Bruno Hauptmann, for example, executed in 1936 for the kidnapping and murder of the child of aviator Charles Lindbergh; or Caryl Chessman, executed in 1960 for being the "Red Light Bandit." For both men, there is at least a strong and very reasonable doubt that he was guilty of the crime. Similarly, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (executed 1927) may or may not have actually been guilty of the murder of Alessandro Berardelli, but their trial certainly cannot be called a model of justice. In most times and places in history, such arbitrary sentences of death are found as often in constituted justice as in vigilante justice.

In Iraq, there is not even a question: orders of magnitude more innocent people were executed legally under court sentence in the days of Saddam Hussein, even measured per month, than have been killed by vigilantism since Hussein's removal -- even if one assumes that every, last person found killed by Mode-1 was innocent, itself a dubious claim.

What we really need for understanding is for the media to begin identifying those killed by Mode-1 and determining which of them is known or strongly suspected to be a member of a terrorist organization, whether Shiite or Sunni. This cannot be determined, by the way, by asking local Shia whether some Shiite fellow tribesman is a "terrorist," because that is a question that can almost never be answered No. At least not safely.

Rather, photographs of the dead taken while they were still alive (if families can be talked into supplying them) should be gathered and mixed in with photos of others clearly not involved; then these photos should be shown in a "photo line-up" to victims and witnesses. Let them pick out anybody they recognize -- and see which such "witness identifications" match up with those who were killed and dumped into mass graves (or left in the back of a pickup truck). And then report honestly on the results.

But of course, that would involve actual journalistic work; and it's so much easier simply to label every death an "apparent sectarian reprisal slaying" and move on to the next piece of bad news. Besides -- "sectarian violence" fits the Iraq civil war story so much better than does the execution of terrorists!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 14, 2006, at the time of 2:25 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

Who Wants Civil War?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Over the weekend, I was going to write about this good news from Iraq, that the Iraqi Army's 3rd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 6th Iraq Army Division has just taken over security in Sadr City. But before I had a chance, I heard this bad news: multiple car bombs (accounts differ as to how many) exploded in Sadr City, killing 58 and wounding more than 200. These bombings have al-Qaeda's and Zarqawi's fingerprints all over them.

It is curious though, why al-Qaeda would choose to bomb that particular place at just such a time.

Sadr City is the stronghold of the notorious Muqtada Sadr and home-base of his militia, the Mahdi "army." In fact, Sadr City is actually (unofficially) named after Sadr's father, who is far more respected, even revered, than Sadr himself has ever been: Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr. The city is practically run by the militia, since the locals do not trust the Iraqi army or the police.

Saadoun al-Sahl, a furniture shop owner, said he counted on private militiamen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to shield him from a recent surge of sectarian killing that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.

“They protect us better than any security agency,” he said. “If I or anyone has a problem, we go to the Mahdi Army to solve it.”

(The similarity to how the Mafia used to "rule" Italian neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, taking the place of police, is striking.)

Right after the Februrary 22, 2006 bombing of the al-Askariya Mosque (the Golden Mosque) in Samarra, Sadr's "men in black" took up arms and launched a number of attacks on Sunni mosques -- some of which used to be Shiite mosques but were forcibly converted by Saddam Hussein. Yet, the Interior Ministry made a deal to have the Mahdi Army to secure the city:

The Shiite-led Interior Ministry, which oversees police, agreed to work with the Mahdi Army in the aftermath of the shrine bombing. Al-Sadr followers in black trousers and yellow button-down shirts manned checkpoints and searched pedestrians with metal detector wands during an unusual daytime curfew that helped curb the worst of the violence.

It is hardly coincidental that the Interior Ministry is run by interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari, also the UIA candidate for permanent prime minister... and who is strongly backed by (surprise!) Muqtada Sadr.

It looks like the Mahdi Army has gained quite a bit of prestige and power, thanks to Zarqawi's group al-Qaeda In Mesopotamia. But now that the Iraqi Army is here, the Mahdi must step aside or be pushed aside. The American-trained army is tough -- unlike the Iraqi police. In fact Col. Hussain Muhsein, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the Iraqi Army, insisted there would be no deals with Mahdi Army:

“The Iraq army does not cooperate with any militias,” Muhsein said. “We follow the orders of the Ministry of Defense.”

Then the Monday bombings occurred. Perfect timing, is it not? If anyone wanted to embarrass the Iraqi Army and increase the appeal of the Mahdi militia, he could not have planned it better. In fact... it's almost as if al-Qaeda and Muqtada Sadr are in cahoots with each other. How is it that multiple car bombs could slip through the cordon of the Iraqi Army surrounding Sadr City? Could this be an inside job carried out by Shia, not Sunnis?

After all, the Mahdi militia needn't slip past anyone: they already control those streets.

Scott from Security Watchtower is asking the same questions:

This attack specifically targeted civilians at markets and is clearly intended to provoke further sectarian fighting and a Shiia response against Sunnis. My initial reaction is to question how four car bombs could've been driven into Sadr City when (1) there is security in and around the Shi'ite neighborhood, (2) there is somewhat limited road accessibility and (3) security forces would have to be in a heightened state of alert due to the sectarian fighting and realize the neighborhood was a target. Amer al-Husseini, a cleric who serves as an aide to al-Sadr, is quoted in Sunday's Independent Online saying "after Sadr City's reaction to the bombing of our holy shrine we were expecting attacks."

One of the terrorists is reportedly an African. How could such an obvious foreigner be free to drive a car filled with explosives through such a close-knit community without the Mahdi miltia noticing?

It is a given that al-Qaeda wants civil war in "the land between two rivers" (Mesopotamia, another name for Iraq). They thrive on chaos and discord. They don't even care who kills whom, so long as Iraq is thrown into turmoil; al-Qaeda can hide and bide and operate in the shadows. Plenty of time to seize control when order collapses... as they did in Sudan and during the civil war in Afghanistan.

That is why they have been trying so desperately to start a sectarian war; but no one has taken the bait. No one, that is, except Muqtada Sadr.

Civil war is also good for Sadr. He doesn't care how many Sunni die, nor even how many Shia: his aim all along has been to become the new Caliph of the Shia, if not all Iraq. Mind, Sadr has denied ordering the attacks on the Sunni mosques; he even called for calm after Monday's attacks (which especially makes sense if he were complicit in them). But such doubletalk is Sadr's stock in trade. As Charles Bronson says in Breakheart Pass, "if a man is a thief and a murderer, it follows he may be a liar as well."

What is happening in Iraq is nothing like a real civil war. There are no armies taking the field against each other. Contrast it with the American civil war, where more than three and a half million troops deployed against each other -- and over half a million soldiers died -- at a time when the American population was only 1.3 times the size of Iraq's population today.

What we see in Iraq is instead a strange and creepy dance between Zarqawi and Sadr. They both want the same thing for now: Armageddon in Iraq. But just as Sunni "insurgents" have leant a bitter lesson, Sadr will also soon discover that Zarqawi destroys everything he touches.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 13, 2006, at the time of 2:59 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Brits to Reduce Its Forces in Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Polling Keeps a-Rolling
Hatched by Sachi

According to a recent Zogby poll, 72% of U.S. troops believe we should withdraw from Iraq within an year. As Dafydd said, I wish they had asked the troops why.

Today, Britain announced that they are reducing the forces in Iraq by 10 percent. Why?

Because, says Defence Secretary John Reid, "This is a significant reduction which is based largely on the ability of the Iraqis themselves to participate and defend themselves against terrorism, but there is a long, long way to go."

LONDON (AP) - Britain said Monday it will cut its forces in Iraq by 10 percent - a reduction of about 800 troops - by May because Iraqi security forces are becoming more capable of handling security. Defense Secretary John Reid said Britain's commitment to the Iraqi people "remains total"....

Britain had 46,000 military personnel in Iraq during combat operations in March and April 2003. That dropped to 18,000 in May 2004, and to 8.500 at the end of 2005...

At the time of the last withdrawal of British troops in October, Reid said there were 190,000 members of Iraqi security forces trained and equipped. Now the total is 235,000, and 5,000 more joined every month, he said.

Had Zogby troubled to ask the follow-up question, our troops might have said the same thing. Ah, but that's not what they wanted to hear, was it?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 13, 2006, at the time of 2:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 8, 2006

Wanted: Sunni Police Recruits

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Following up on our earlier post, Year of the Police , we continue our look at the American effort to shape up the militia-infested Iraqi police force. The New York Times reports that this task has turned out to be rather difficult.

But it's still good news, because whenever we recognize a problem and "focus like a laser beam," it's well on its way to being solved. "Well begun is half done," as Mary Poppins said.

During last week's sectarian skirmishes, the Iraqi Army, trained by Americans, brought order back to the streets. The army behaved in such an exemplary fashion that Iraqis were both impressed and relieved all across the nation. Not a single soldier abandoned his post and joined the mobs.

By contrast, however, many Iraqi Security Forces -- the police under the Interior Ministry -- stood by and did nothing:

After the bombing, mobs led by Shiite militiamen attacked dozens of Sunni mosques and left hundreds dead. Many police units stood aside, either out of confusion or sectarian loyalties, according to Iraqi witnesses. Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, said Friday that police officers had allowed militiamen through checkpoints in eastern Baghdad, where much of the violence occurred.

We had made a conscious decision to train the army first, leaving the police for later. But "later" is now, and Americans are beginning to implement a number of changes to shape up the Security Force:

  • We are implementing quotas to recruit more Sunnis into the police academies. At the moment, although Shia are only 60% of the population of Iraq, virtually the entire Security Force (99%) are Shiite. This leads to the belief among Sunni and Kurd that the Security Forces are really just the Shiite Forces, and that they will not enforce the law against the Shia -- just against everybody else.
  • We are forcing the Interior Ministry to start "firing Shiite police commanders who appear to tolerate militias." This is a no-brainer; it would be like having captains in the Los Angeles Police Department who have strong ties to the Crips or Bloods. Obviously such people have to go, and they have to go immediately. And humiliatingly... they need not only to be ousted but to lose face; otherwise, they'll be back as soon as our backs are turned.
  • We are forming at least 200 "training teams" of American MPs and retired civilian police. These teams will be sent to Iraqi police stations, even those in locations so remote, they think of themselves more as warlords or tribal chiefs than national police.

The American effort to balance the police forces has met with strong oposition from Shia in the Interior Ministry, which is controlled by Interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, nominated by the Islamic Dawa Party of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) to be permanent prime minister. Al-Jaafari bristles at the idea that the Americans might reform the Security Forces... though he appears happy that we reformed the Iraqi Army:

There is no quick or painless fix. The efforts risk alienating Shiite politicians, who have fiercely resisted attempts to wrest away their control of the security forces. The moves may appeal, though, to recalcitrant Sunni Arabs, whom the Americans want to draw into the political process...

Officials at the most powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI, also part of the UIA], which oversees the Interior Ministry, have lashed out at the Americans, arguing that the majority Shiites had every right to control security, because Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government had used the army and the police to abduct, torture and kill Shiites.

This attitude raises the disturbing possiblity that many in the Interior Ministry see the police as their mechanism for taking revenge against Sunnis in general for decades of tyranny by the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein. Such a program of vengeance would almost certainly cause Iraq to splinter into warring factions... particularly since renegade "cleric" Muqtada Sadr is behind much of the militia infiltration -- and is also responsible for al-Jaafari being nominated as the UIA's candidate for permanent prime minister.

The police units most plagued by militas are the paramilitary forces. No coincidence, the paramilitaries are the units that Shiite politicians are especially keen on personally controlling. The paramilitaries, equivalent to the FBI combined with nationwide "SWAT" teams, operate all over Iraq; they do not have specific districts or jurisdictions.

Sunnis accuse the Interior Ministry of sponsoring secret death squads, who may not actually be police, but who have the disconcerting ability to get hold of paramilitary uniforms when necessary. These death squads -- who also often wear all black and are typically referred to as "men in black" by Sunnis -- kill Sunni clerics, seize Sunni mosques (frequently mosques that used to be Shiite until they were seized and converted by Saddam Hussein) and terrorize ordinary Iraqi citizens, both Sunni and Shia who dare to speak up against them.

In a perfect illustration of the problem, just today, a number of these "men in black" -- again this time wearing police "commando" (paramilitary) uniforms -- kidnapped as many as fifty Iraqi Sunni members of a security company that guarded many businesses in Iraq, including a major cell-phone company:

Gunmen in Interior Ministry commando uniforms stormed the offices of a private security company and kidnapped as many as 50 employees Wednesday, while U.S. and Iraqi patrols reported the discovery of 24 shot or garroted bodies in the capital....

Unidentified attackers hit the al-Rawafid Security Co. at 4:30 p.m. and forced the workers into seven vehicles, including several white SUVs, said Interior Ministry Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi. The victims, including bodyguards, drivers, computer technicians and other employees, did not resist because they assumed their abductors were police special forces working for the Interior Ministry, al-Mohammedawi said.

Interior Ministry Undersecretary Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Khefaji denied any involvement by his department, saying: "It is a terrorist act."

It may well be "a terrorist act;" and the kidnappers may be militia members, likely working for Sadr, and not actually police paramilitaries. But where did they get the uniforms? And without Interior Ministry support, or at least sympathy, why have such militias not been broken up?

When the new police force was formed, the Americans did not require monitoring of the police recruits' religious sect. The Shia took advantage, and the Security Force is now 99% Shia. This staggering overrepresentation of Shia is a festering problem that must be addressed:

American officers say that when they try to talk to Iraqi commanders about the religious or ethnic breakdown of the forces, the commanders tend to shy away from those conversations, as most Iraqis do, saying they prefer to think of themselves as one people rather than in terms of sect.

They may be shy of talking about it, but they are certainly not shy of acting according to their sect's interest.

For much of last year, the Second Public Order Brigade had a particularly bad reputation. It was accused by many Iraqis, especially Sunni Arabs, of detainee torture and illegal killings. Its ranks were filled with men recruited from eastern Baghdad who were loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shiite cleric who had led two rebellions against the Americans.

This year, we are dramatically increasing the number of American advisors embedded in each Iraqi police batallion, both in the cities and the remote police outposts. I am hopeful that this mentoring program will work; however, the core problem is not the police -- it is the Interior Ministry itself.

The Shiite politicians in the ministry are terribly corrupt with strong ties to militias such as the Mahdi "Army" of Sadr. Until those politicians can think outside of their tribal and religious affiliations -- "as one people rather than in terms of sect" -- fixing the police alone will not solve the problem. If we and the Iraqis don't also fix the Interior Ministry itself, then as soon as the Americans leave, the police will go right back to their old ways.

We urgently need to help the Iraqis institute a culture withing the Security Forces that respects rule of law, not tribal rule. They must deploy a merit system and eschew nepotism. In the old Iraqi Army and police of the Tikriti Saddam Hussein, the ranks were filled with relatives and friends of influential politicians. This is the culture we must eradicate. There is no room in the modern world for "Hutu and Tutsi"-ism.

But in order to do that, the Interior Ministry itself must start hiring more Sunni politicians and cease being the personal fiefdom of "leaders" like al-Jaafari. That will certainly be even harder than reforming the police.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 8, 2006, at the time of 2:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 6, 2006

Al-Jaafari Must Step Down to Unify Iraq

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), is the leading candidate for next Iraqi Prime Minister; but he is stirring up a hornet's nest across Iraq: the Kurds don’t like him; the Sunnis hate him; and secular Iraqis fear him. Even the top Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- a strong proponent of a unified Iraq -- is suggesting al-Jaafari step aside.

Now that Iraq transitional President Jalal Talabani has decided to call the newly elected permanent parliament into session, starting the countdown for forming the government, the UIA has only a short period of time to decide whether to fight to install al-Jaafari over the objections of everyone else or compromise with al-Jaafari's rival, current Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), who is widely acceptable among the various sects in Iraq.

Iraq's president said Monday he would convene the new parliament for the first time next week, beginning a 60-day countdown for lawmakers to elect a new head of state and sign off on a prime minister and Cabinet.

After nightfall, nine key Shiite parliamentarians rushed to an emergency meeting at President Jalal Talabani's Baghdad home to try to change his mind about forcing a showdown in the deepening political crisis and further inflaming sectarian tensions.

Talabani openly opposes al-Jaafari's nomination and is likely forcing the Shia's hand, hoping they will blink.

Talabani, a Kurd, said al-Jaafari was too divisive a figure.

"We want a prime minister who can gather all the political blocs around him, so that the government would be one of national unity," he told a news briefing in Baghdad.

Many believe al-Jaafari is behind a series of killings targeting prominent Sunni clerics and former Baath members, under the guise of the Interior Ministry’s Security Forces, which are infested with Iranian influenced militiamen. Al-Jaafari, of the Islamic Dawa Party (within the UIA coalition), was strongly backed in the Shiite caucus by militia leader Muqtada Sadr, the anti-American militant who occupied Najaf, Sadr City, and Basra during a failed "uprising" in March of 2004, timed to coincide with a similar surge of violence in Sunni Fallujah.

Sadr opposed the Iraqi constitution, supports a "sharia" state, and has consistently been connected with Iran -- and just as persistently, his spokesmen have denied it. However, less than a month ago, Sadr threatened another uprising if the U.S. were to attack Iran:

"If America attacks Iran, there will be a reaction in Iraq, and also if America stays in Iraq, there will be another uprising," he warned.

This does not prove that al-Jaafari follows Iran's lead, of course. And as Omar of Iraq the Model notes, even the main rival Shiite party within the UIA, the SCIRI, has a strong Iranian connection:

I'm not sure if you're familiar with this but did you know the internal charter of the SCIRI states that the party reports to the Murshid, who currently is Khamena'i?

"Khamena'i" refers to Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader of Iran. This isn't exactly surprising, as the SCIRI was formed in 1982 under exile in Iran, where the Iranians recognized it as the "legitimate" rulers of Iraq during the war with Iran. For more than twenty years, the SCIRI was based in Teheran.

Yet despite that, secular Shiia prefer the SCIRI candidate, Abdul-Mahdi; he is equally strong within the Shiite caucus as al-Jaafari but not connected to the notorious Muqtada Sadr.

Abdul-Mahdi lost in the Shiite caucus by one vote to al-Jaafari, who won with the support of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Abdul-Mahdi is backed by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a powerful Shiite leader who is frequently at odds politically with al-Sadr. Both have strong militias behind them.

Underlining the divisions within the Alliance, some Shiite leaders are troubled by al-Jaafari's ties to the radical and openly anti-American al-Sadr.

And the most influential Shia in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has indicated (through an anonymous spokesman, to distance the cleric from the political nature of the announcement) that he would prefer it if al-Jaafari voluntarily withdraw his candidacy:

Two lawmakers from al-Jaafari's Dawa Party hinted Saturday that they got an endorsement for their leader during a meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric.

But a senior al-Sistani aide, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the dispute, said Sunday that the spiritual leader indirectly suggested al-Jaafari step aside.

Abdul-Mahdi may well be a better man to be prime minsiter than al-Jaafari, despite belonging to the SCIRI: although he was exiled from Baathist Iraq, it was in 1969, thirteen years before the SCIRI was formed; and he spent his exile in France, not revolutionary Iran. France is not exactly friendly to American interests; in fact, Ayatollah Khomeini himself was exiled in France before the 1979 Iranian revolution brought him back to rule his home country. But Socialist France is certainly less radical than the Iranian mullahcracy.

The SCIRI is controlled by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim; and the entire al-Hakim family hates Muqtada Sadr (and his followers, including al-Jaafari). Because of the pre-existing rivalry, some of them hold Sadr responsible, or at least complicit, in the 2003 assassination of al-Hakim's brother, the revered Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, who ran the SCIRI until his death.

(The U.S., on the other hand, believes the massive car-bomb was actually planted by Musab Zarqawi and his al-Qaeda In Iraq; the Iraqis claim that Zarqawi's bombmaker -- Abu Omar al-Kurdi -- has confessed to the bombing while in U.S. custody since January 2005.)

Regardless, Adel Abdul-Mahdi opposes Sadr, supports a unified Iraq and the Iraqi constitution, and is more friendly to America than Ibrahim al-Jaafari. I believe many Iraqi politicians are members of political factions based more upon tribal connections than actual ideological agreement; Abdul-Mahdi is probably closer in philosophy to al-Dawa, and al-Jaafari would probably feel more at home in the SCIRI -- sort of like Zell Miller vs. Lincoln Chafee.

Of course, the UIA does not have the two thirds majority in the incoming Iraqi parliament required to push their candidate through; they would need votes from Kurds, Sunnis, and secular Shia (who themselves would likely prefer Achmed Chalabi -- who has also been connected with Sadr, and who also denies it). Even so, the UIA so far seems quite determined to try, and that frets many people, including Omar:

What really worries me here is that the UIA knows this mechanism which is stated in the constitution yet they refuse to change their mind which makes one suspect they have no intention to compromise and they want to do some arm-twisting telling the others to 'either accept Jafari or face the danger of halting the entire political process'. [Emphasis added]

They're playing a very dangerous game that only those who don't care for the unity of the country would dare play.

If the UIA withdraws al-Jaafari and substitutes Abdul-Mahdi, he would likely sail through with little opposition. This would unify Iraq behind the nascent government, surely the best response to the bombing of the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra -- likely engineered by Zarqawi in order to shove Iraq into civil war. Zarqawi has already failed in the civil war plan: if the bombing of the Golden Mosque didn't do it, then neither will anything else that Zarqawi can do. But still, it would be a wonderful blow to the Iraq-War doubters were the Shia to put together a respected and widely accepted government that unified the country and was even pro-America.

Contrariwise, a candidate like al-Jaafari, who divides Iraq into nearly hysterical opposing camps, is very, very bad not only for Iraq but for America's plan to democratize the Middle East.

The UIA is quite open about preferring Sharia to secular law, though they also insist they do not want Iraq to be controlled by Iran. But do they support a unified Iraq? Omar worries that they may be planning for a country divided along sectarian grounds:

The UIA have made it clear that what they want is to either rule the whole country in the way like or rule part of Iraq in the way they like; more precisely in the way their religious references in Najaf and Tehran.

Omar is concerned that the UIA would be perfectly willing to break Iraq into a Shiite sector, a Kurdish sector, and then a weak and economically crippled "Saddamist" sector in the middle -- Omar notes that the UIA uses "Saddamists" the same way they use "Shia," implying that all Sunnis are Baathists.

Now that the power of foreign terrorists is waning in Iraq, Iraninan influenced domestic militias are becoming a more serious problem for Iraq and America. Just as there are Baathist Sunni "bitter enders," who really do want Saddam back, there are also Iraqi Shia who want to see a Teheran-style regime enforcing Shiite sharia on everyone... and they may be willing to settle for a piece of Iraq under sharia rather than the whole under a secular government.

We are going to have to clean up the Interior Ministry and their Security Forces very soon now; we need a "come to Jesus" meeting with the Shia in Iraq. And of course, we must get rid of the vile Muqtada Sadr by any means necessary.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, March 6, 2006, at the time of 5:22 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 3, 2006

Lessons Learned In the Propaganda War

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

After last December's flap over the Coalition paying Iraqi newspapers to plant "propaganda" -- which is what the New York Times labeled truthful, pro-democracy stories -- even an optimist could be excused for thinking we would, quite naturally, abandon this necessary tactic, due to the drubbing the administration took at the hands of the Antique Media.

(You should remember; this was the biggest scandal of the century, until the NSA al-Qaeda intercepts became the biggest scandal of the century, which was right before the renewal of the Patriot Act became the BSotC, followed quickly by the Dubai Ports deal and the "new" videotape of Bush not being warned that the New Orleans levees would breach.)

The press howled in idealistic outrage, perhaps fretting that we were violating the Iraqis' sacred First Amendment rights; and I, along with most, sighed and assumed that, just like data mining (à la Able Danger), here was one more tool from our toolbox that we would throw into the dustbin of history.

Well, not so! The U.S. military, under Rear Adm. Scott Van Buskirk, actually investigated what we were and were not doing. This is a radical step that the media could not steel themselves to take, preferring to base their stories on rumor and inuendo; they printed many irresponsible and counter-factural howlers, which Big Lizards, among others, documented, here and here).

Lo and behold, after reveiwing RADM Van Buskirk and his report, Army Gen. George Casey, commander of all forces in the region, has decided to continue the practice (and he probably told Buskirk to shine his shoes):

The U.S. military will continue to pay Iraqi media to publish reports favorable to American forces following an investigation into the controversial practice, the top U.S. general in Iraq said on Friday....

Casey said he had not issued an order to halt the payments.

"And, right now, based on the results of the investigation, I do not intend to in the near term," he said.

At a time when everyone agrees al-Qaeda and other terrorists in Iraq are winning the propaganda war (that we keep declining to fight), it was literally deranged for the American news media to demand that we stop the only small bit that we were doing, paying for some good and truthful press. Evidently, the Los Angeles Times (which broke the story) and the New York Times (which wrote up a wider examination of it) thought that, if only we would stop planting stories, that would make the Iraqi press more "free"... beause then, only the anti-democratic terrorists would be paying for stories. (The New York Times will want to charge you $3.95 to read the old article... but you can read the Big Lizards discussion of it for free!)

I don't quite follow the logic of that, but I'm sure there must be some.

In any event, we will continue paying for publication, a standard practice in the Moslem world, for the forseeable future; and perhaps at last we're getting off the mark -- winning victories for the vaunted "hearts and minds" as well as on the battlefield.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 3, 2006, at the time of 5:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 1, 2006

On That Doggone ZogOn Poll

Iraq Matters , Polling Keeps a-Rolling
Hatched by Dafydd

Correction: see below.

Hugh Hewitt is all exercised about the new Zogby poll that leads off with the shocker-header:

U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006!! [Silly exclamation points added, of course, but are in keeping with the Zogby writeup. -- the Mgt]

Hugh seems to support the idea that this poll was deliberately skewed -- well, certainly Zogby's writeup was! -- and might even have been invented out of whole cloth. But we don't need to go anywhere near that far; and indeed, Occam's Razor warns us not to overreach for an explanation.

It does bring to mind an aphorism, however, aimed directly at liberals who plan on using this "data" in their crusade for immediate withdrawal: when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

I am quite certain that Zogby's strengthened all the "anti-war" findings and downplayed those that might be considered "pro-war," took great liberties in interpretation, and heavily weighted the sample to pre-select for specific results; such slovenly polling has been Zogby's stock in trade ever since the Bush administration began... and it shows in his poor prognostication: Hugh points us to an article on Cybercast News Service (which leans right) shortly after the 2004 election that highlighted Zogby's ludicrous "prediction" that Kerry would win 311 electoral votes, possibly including Virginia, thus winning the election in a landslide.

But in fact, in this case, I absolutely believe his poll results might be exactly correct... with one caveat, below. Here are the major results that Zogby announces:

  • Only 20% of the troops want to "heed Bush call to stay 'as long as they are needed'
  • 42% say the U.S. mission is unclear, "hazy"
  • A plurality believes most of the "insurgents" are native Iraqis, but they don't blame ordinary Iraqis for the violence
  • 90% think a major purpose of the war is retaliation for "Saddam's role in 9/11"
  • Most troops oppose using "harsh prisoner interrogation"
  • A plurality are satisfied with their weapons and armor

Stunned? Think the lizard is shedding his scales? What we all have to understand is that you can get any poll result you want -- provided you ask the right questions. The exact wording of the question matters; changing the wording even slightly can flip the results.

For example, consider the difference between asking, "do you believe the president has the right, all on his own, to spy on American citizens without a warrant?" -- versus asking, "do you believe the administration has the authority to intercept phone calls and e-mails from suspected al-Qaeda agents to targets in the United States?"

I put it to you that the first question would receive an overwhelming No response, while the second would receive an equally resounding Yes... yet the first can be spun into, "Americans strongly oppose the NSA intercept program," while the second would yield, "Americans strongly support the NSA intercept program."

That is why it is so critical that we learn the exact questions asked. I will now play a little game... I will construct a series of questions that are reasonable, seem to fit the context of the responses -- yet which could easily yield the exact result spread that Zogby reported, even among our military in Iraq. Ready?

  1. Should American forces remain at the current levels indefinitely, or should we begin drawing down our troops as the Iraqi Army grows more effective? If the latter, when do you expect we should start drawing down our forces? (Immediately/Six months/One year/Longer)
  2. Do you, personally, plan to stay "as long as it takes," even if that means years? Or do you hope to rotate out sooner than that? When do you hope to return home? (Immediately/Six months/One year/Longer)
  3. Has the long-term military strategy been explained to you, or are you only really familiar with your area of operation?
  4. Do foreign fighters constitute a majority of insurgents, or are the insurgents mostly Iraqis?
  5. Which of these are the major reasons for our military presence in Iraq? You may check as many as you wish: (To prevent Saddam Hussein from helping terrorists/To secure and remove any WMD/Because Iraq was in violation of the cease-fire agreement that ended the Gulf War/Because Iraq was firing upon our airplanes/Because Iraq was in violation of U.N. resolutions/Because Iraq played a role with al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks/To stabilize the Middle East/To establish a democracy after the occupation)
  6. Do you believe we should interrogate insurgents using techniques banned by the Geneva Convention?
  7. Do you believe your weapons and armor are adequate to your mission, or would you prefer heavier weapons and thicker armor?

Notes

The first question would be interpreted by some soldiers as what they think we ought to do, come what may; by others as what ought to happen, assuming things continue on the path they're going now; and by other others as what they expect to happen.

Some will interpret "drawing down our troops" as a gradual reduction: "as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Others will think it means yank everyone out precipitously.

Or alternatively, Zogby's analysis -- "Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll shows just one in five troops want to heed Bush call to stay 'as long as they are needed'” -- could refer entirely to question 2, whether the individual soldier personally wants to stay that long, or whether he hopes to rotate home sooner than that.

Until and unless we see the exact wording, we have no way even to guess what individual soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines thought they were answering when they picked a timeframe.

~

As far as being hazy about the overall strategy... well, perhaps this comes as a shock to Mr. Zogby, but the military rarely briefs the grunts about overall strategy of each phase of a military operation.

They're briefed on their own piece of the pattern, probably more thoroughly today than at any time in our history. But I doubt the guys in the South are given a full briefing on the Anbar campaign, and those guys don't get a high-level lecture on exactly what we're doing in the Kurdish north. Since most members of the military are enlisted or junior officers, not flag-rank officers, most won't have been told by the military what the overall strategy is.

That means their only method of finding out is the same way we do: by reading or watching the MSM, by listening to talk radio, and by reading blogs. But our boys and girls over there are probably somewhat busy... and I'll bet they don't have a lot of time to do any of those. So it's actually amazing to me that as many as 58% think they have a pretty good handle on our strategy. I'm sure that number would have been less than half that during World War II!

~

And of course most of the "insurgents" are Iraqis... because the Secretary of Defense has carefully drawn a distinction between native insurgents, like the Sadrites, and foreign terrorists, like Musab Zarqawi. This is a no-brainer: the troops just answered the way they had been taught (and I'll bet Zogby used the word "insurgents," too -- since that is the word he used in his writeup).

~

Some of our troops probably believe that Saddam Hussein was specifically complicit in 9/11; others (including myself, though I'm not a "troop") believe Iraq was in bed with al-Qaeda in many ways and may even have known about the 9/11 attack in advance, and are therefore accessories. Some might read "9/11" and mentally translate that to "terrorist attack;" since Iraq has, indeed, attacked us using terrorism. Or it's possible that the Zogby question didn't even specify the 9/11 attack, but just referred to al-Qaeda or terrorist attacks. We don't know, because John Zogby won't tell us.

~

All of the above is why I consider this poll worthless: not because it was paid for and undertaken on behalf of the Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies; not because Zogby is a notorious liberal and Bush-basher; not because his brother James Zogby is an even more notorious Arabist; and not because Zogby might have just made the whole thing up (I think that is extraordinarily unlikely). [This paragraph contains a correction; James Zogby is an Arabist, not an Islamist; he is a Maronite Christian... but he is the founder and president of the Arab-American Institute.]

It is valueless because, without knowing the exact questions, the order in which they were asked, the demography of the respondents, the time period during which the poll was conducted, and what background information they gave or asked commanders to give, we have no context by which to understand what the responding military personnel meant by their responses.

Until Zogby is more transparent and forthcoming, there is no point in dwelling on this silly poll... though I agree with Hugh that it will be the lead story for at least a week in the Antique Media. When it comes up in conversation, all you need do is fix the liberal who cited it with a steely gaze and ask, "what were the exact questions they asked, please?"

When he admits he has no idea, you say, "then just like in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you can't possibly know what the answer '42' means, can you?"

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, March 1, 2006, at the time of 6:42 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 27, 2006

Saddam's WMD - the Company Strikes Back

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

The information in our previous post, which came proximately from the Investor's Business Daily, appears to have begun with an article by Kenneth R. Timmerman on NewsMax last Sunday, February 19th (based upon a talk the previous day by John A. Shaw at the Intelligence Summit, a non-governmental convention).

Ordinarily, I wouldn't trust NewsMax; but I do trust Timmerman, who has done bravura work in this area and is a very reputable journalist. Timmerman is the author of several well-received books, most recently Countdown to Crisis : The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

John A. Shaw is hardly a partisan, a radical, or a bomb-thrower:

Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the events he described [on February 18th, 2006] occurred [shortly after major combat operations ended in 2003].

Shaw was originally tasked with figuring out what happened to the weapons and WMD programs that Saddam undeniably had after the first Gulf War. But as he was tracking these weapons, he began to develop sources independent of the CIA- and State Department-controlled Iraqi Survey Group:

But as Shaw's office increasingly got involved in ongoing intelligence to identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he also got "a flow of information from British contacts on the ground at the Syrian border and from London" via non-U.S. government contacts.

"The intelligence included multiple sightings of truck convoys, convoys going north to the Syrian border and returning empty," he said. [All emphasis added, here and elsewhere.]

Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British ambassador who had decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed Ukranian-American who was directly plugged in to the head of Ukraine's intelligence service.

The Ukrainians were eager to provide the United States with documents from their own archives on Soviet arms transfers to Iraq and on ongoing Russian assistance to Saddam, to thank America for its help in securing Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union, Shaw said.

Shaw passed along what he was learning to the CIA... and according to Shaw, the CIA not only brushed off the data, they smeared everyone responsible for passing it along, including Shaw himself. In fact, the CIA dismissed it as "Israeli disinformation."

They accused Shaw of having "eaten from the DIA 'rice bowl,'" meaning Shaw had stepped into the turf of the Defense Intelligence Agency. But the sly insinuation that Israelis were behind it all makes me think that elements of the CIA have eaten from the Arabist "rice bowl": Arab spokesmen, and American and British officials in Arab countries who have "gone native," invariably attribute anything they don't want to hear to Zionist propaganda.

I find this very disturbing, as well as efforts by Bush administration officials (such as Larry DiRita, DoD spokesman) to trash Shaw and his sources, according to Shaw:

"Larry DiRita made sure that this story would never grow legs," Shaw said. "He whispered sotto voce [quietly] to journalists that there was no substance to my information and that it was the product of an unbalanced mind."

We'll discuss a possible reason for the actions of the CIA and sub-cabinet level members of the administration later. First, let's get to the meat fo what Shaw reported.

The information Shaw passed along to the CIA and the administration included the following major points:

  • A Soviet general with a close working relationship with Saddam Hussein, Yevgeni Primakov, traveled to Iraq in 2002, leaving shortly after the U.S. invasion began.

    Primakov orchestrated the execution of secret agreements Hussein had concluded with Russia, years earlier, to remove the Russian-supplied and otherwise obtained WMD from Iraq, along with all traces of its existence, in the event of a probable American attack. This would allow Russia to guarantee Iraq was "WMD-free," thus delaying or even stymying Operation Iraqi Freedom.

    American intelligence officers knew about these agreements, which were dubbed Sarandar, or "emergency exit."
  • Primakov brought out two trusted, retired Soviet-era generals -- Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev -- who, as "commercial consultants," supervised GRU (the independent Main Intelligence Directorate of both the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation) and Spetsnaz (SpecOps) troops, along with other Russian military and civilian personnel. The forces operated in civilian clothing, disguised as contractors.

    Maltsev and Achatov had visited Baghdad "no fewer than 20 times" since 1997, and U.S. intelligence was well aware of their connection to Hussein, the GRU, and Spetsnaz. They had all gathered earlier at a planning conference in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan; the conference was "chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu."
  • Sarandar comprised truck convoys, possible Russian commercial air flights, and a pair of Russian ships, which sailed from Umm Qasr to dump "stockpiles of Iraqi WMD" into the Indian Ocean.

The purpose of Sarandar was quite explicit, according to Shaw:

The goal of the clean-up was "to erase all trace of Russian involvement" in Saddam's WMD programs, and "was a masterpiece of military camouflage and deception."

Now back to the burning question. This is explosive stuff that would, were it verified, completely vindicate President Bush's decision to invade Iraq... even for those who believed that Iraq's supposed possession of WMD was the sole legitimate reason to attack. So why would not only the CIA but even the spokesman of the Department of Defense, Larry DiRita, have gone to such pains to trash the intel, smear anyone involved, and try to fob off all the information and all the sources as Israeli stooges?

Shaw suggested that the answer of why the Bush administration had systematically "ignored Russia's involvement" in evacuating Saddam's WMD stockpiles "could be much bigger than anyone has thought," but declined to speculate what exactly was involved.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was less reticent. He thought the reason was Iran.

"With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear programs," he told NewsMax, "the administration needed the Russians, the Chinese and the French, and was not interested in information that would make them look bad."

McInerney agreed that there was "clear evidence" that Saddam had WMD. "Jack Shaw showed when it left Iraq, and how."

If Shaw's claims about the CIA reaction are accurate, then there is an eerie parallel to claims of CIA stifling of another urgent story that also involves Iran: the level of Iranian involvement in the 9/11 attacks themselves. Half of Big Lizards (Dafydd ab Hugh) first discussed this issue on Captain's Quarters back in July, in a post titled It Ain't Even the Quarter; this is a piece that should have been reposted here as a Scaley Classic, but evidently was not... an omission I will remedy in the next two posts, That Ain't the Half of It and It Ain't Even the Quarter.

Kenneth Timmerman, in the Iran book linked above, reports that the CIA went on a rampage of character assassination to quash the idea that there were any high-level meetings between the mullahs of Iran and senior officials of al-Qaeda, including Ayman Zawahiri and even Osama bin Laden's eldest son and heir, Saad bin Laden.

It should be clear by this point that our problem with the CIA's war against the Bush administration has drifted far beyond mere political chicanery and into an actual threat to the United States itself. It is unconscionable that CIA operatives and Bush administration officials should be engaged in actively suppressing intelligence because we're afraid of its effect upon a country that can only be viewed as an enemy of the United States -- an absurdity of bending over backward to accomodate a thuggish, boorish remnant of the Evil Empire.

It is long past time for Bush himself to take the reins, prevent any further attempts to circumscribe acceptable intelligence, and get to the bottom of this bloody affair... not only to exonerate the president's own reputation, but also to protect and secure our nation -- which George W. Bush swore an oath to do.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 27, 2006, at the time of 5:11 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 26, 2006

Saddam's WMD -- Moved to Syria by Russian Special Forces?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

John at Power Line has an incredibly important post up linking an editorial at the Investor's Business Daily -- a very fine newspaper even for political and world events, in addition to its extensive financial listings. From the editorial:

Inconveniently for critics of the war, Saddam made tapes in his version of the Oval Office. These tapes landed in the hands of American intelligence and were recently aired publicly.

The first 12 hours of the tapes — there are hundreds more waiting to be translated — are damning, to say the least. They show conclusively that Bush didn't lie when he cited Saddam's WMD plans as one of the big reasons for taking the dictator out.

Nobody disputes the tapes' authenticity. On them, Saddam talks openly of programs involving biological, chemical and, yes, nuclear weapons.

On the tapes, Hussein is heard being briefed by the scientists responsible for the programs... scientists that the United Nations Special Commission, UNSCOM, were unaware even existed:

Indeed, as late as 2000, Saddam can be heard in his office talking with Iraqi scientists about his ongoing plans to build a nuclear device. At one point, he discusses Iraq's plasma uranium program — something that was missed entirely by U.N. weapons inspectors combing Iraq for WMD.

This is particularly troubling, since it indicates an active, ongoing attempt by Saddam to build an Iraqi nuclear bomb.

"What was most disturbing," said John Tierney, the ex- FBI agent who translated the tapes, "was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission (or UNSCOM, the group set up to look into Iraq's WMD programs)."

Perhaps most chillingly, the tapes record Iraq Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz talking about how easy it would be to set off a WMD in Washington. The comments come shortly after Saddam muses about using "proxies" in a terror attack.

We now believe that the WMD were moved out of Iraq and into Syria and Syria-controlled Lebanon in the months before the war by Russian special forces:

So how was Saddam able to use his "cheat and retreat" tactics without being found out? He had help, according to a former U.S. Defense Department official.

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," said John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense, in comments made at an intelligence summit Feb. 17-20 in Arlington, Va.

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special ops) units out of uniform that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.

This is pretty stunning news... so of course, it's going to be the lead story on all the networks and in every major American newspaper, right? I mean, surely it's more important than Bode Miller's failure to make good on his boasts at the Winter Olympics or whether Bush should have allowed A-rabs to lease cargo operations at six American ports, right?

Let's give it a couple of days and see how many members of the Antique Media pick up on the IBD editorial and start actually reporting on real-world events -- events which retain their currency, not only because claims that "Bush lied, people died" still infect the political dialog like a contagion; but also because if the claims are accurate, then Syria now has access to nuclear, chemical, and biological materials and the ongoing programs and scientists weaponizing them.

Any predictions? My own is that by early next week, Fox News Channel will have reported on this; and by next Sunday, Fox News Channel will have reported on this.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 26, 2006, at the time of 6:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

February 25, 2006

Iraqi Army Improving, Unless You Read CNN

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

An article Friday on CNN.com falsely implies that the general readiness of Iraqi battalions are dropping:

The only Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded to a level requiring them to fight with American troops backing them up, the Pentagon said Friday....

The battalion, according to the Pentagon, was downgraded from "level one" to "level two" after a recent quarterly assessment of its capabilities.

CNN briefly explains what these levels mean, but they miss the main point:

"Level one" means the battalion is able to fight on its own; "level two" means it requires support from U.S. troops; and "level three" means it must fight alongside U.S. troops.

But the fact is that virtually no foreign military units in the world rise to the standard of "Level One" -- even many British units would not be called Level One. The best armies in the world mostly comprise Level Two battalions. Remember, Level One means the battalion can supply its own logistics, intel, air support, MedEvac, administration, and every other aspect of a modern army. An Iraqi Army battalion can be superb fighters, but still require a US satellite uplink to be done by Americans for targeting purposes -- and that alone would make them Level Two.

The reason that the lone Level One Iraqi unit was downgraded was mostly due to a change of command:

Though officials would not cite a specific reason for downgrading the unit, its readiness level has dropped in the wake of a new commander and numerous changes in the combat and support units, officials said.

The battalion is still deployed, and its status as an independent fighting force could be restored any day, Pentagon officials said.

So by saying "the only Iraqi battalion capable of fighting without U.S. support has been downgraded," what CNN really means is that the unit is still Level Two, but we're not sure how independent it is until the new commander has been "blooded." That's considerably different from the implication CNN clearly intends us to take away.

And wait, haven't we read this before? Yes, indeed, I blogged about it nearly half a year ago, back in Septermber 2005, in a post titled "Slowly But Surely."

In it I wrote:

[A]ccording to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the level of readiness rating keeps on changing depending on a variety of factors.

For example, initial readiness standards two years ago measured numbers of Iraqi troops. Later, those standards were based on the number of trained troops. Later yet, those standards were based on troops who were trained and equipped. As the bar continued to rise, the numbers dipped a bit, giving an impression that readiness was declining, the secretary explained.

Back in September, there were only one or two Level One battalions. Considering that the bar is raised constantly, the fact that the lone Level One battalion in January was downgraded to Level Two in February is not really bad news; it just reflects the changing nature of war and standards.

The really important metric is not how many elite Level One battalions the Iraqi Army has, but the number of competent Level Two battalions. CNN mentions that as an aside, as if it's of no real importance:

According to the congressionally mandated Iraq security report released Friday, there are 53 Iraqi battalions at level two status, up from 36 in October. There are 45 battalions at level three, according to the report.

Level two battalions have increased from 36 to 53, a 47% increase! Isn't that a tremendous achievement? Wars are won by Level Two battalions; Level One is extraordinary.

There is more; according to the same article,

Overall, Pentagon officials said close to 100 Iraqi army battalions are operational, and more than 100 Iraq Security Force battalions are operational at levels two or three. The security force operations are under the direction of the Iraqi government.

The training level of the Iraqi Security Force, which is under the control of the Iraq Interior Ministry, was considerably behind the level of the Iraqi Army under the U.S. Military's control. But even the Iraqi Security Force now has over 100 battalions of Levels Two and Three. That is great news indeed, for all that CNN wants to focus on what it simplistically sees as the negative.

Here is the best news of all: not a single unit of the Iraqi Army has even been accused of participating in the spasm of violence that followed al-Qaeda's destruction of the Golden Dome mosque. Not one.

Some witnesses have claimed that Iraqi Security Force (police) have been spotted attacking Sunni mosques, but not a single unit of the highly professional, American trained, and non-partisan Iraqi Army. Rather, the army acts as a stabilizing influence on the whole country, instead of the instigator of coups or atrocities, as it was in the Baathist era.

William F. Buckley, jr., is simply wrong. He is an old man, he has not been to Iraq, and he is simply wrong. We have won, not lost; and our Iraqi Army program has been the most successful reconstruction project of all. We turned a band of thugs, torturers, and murderers into a professional and civilized military; who, in history, can say as much?

And that is the best news of all.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, February 25, 2006, at the time of 11:53 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Uncivil Streetwar

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Still no sign of actual civil war in Iraq; but Wretchard at the Belmont Club quotes from Zeyad at Healing Iraq (how's that for stacking links?) about some frightening mini-battles that were raging right around Zeyad's neighborhood between Sunni mosque defenders and "men in black" -- which groups might or might not include Shiite members of the Interior Ministry (cops).

Fortunately, the battles were more like skirmishes, and there were not that many confirmed fatalities or casualties. Wretchard concludes (boldface emphasis added):

Thanks to readers data is coming in, such as the update from Zeyad's site and analysis thereof. The value of collateral confirmation and building a timeline is amply demonstrated. Just a few comments:

  • as per Whit, Fox is reporting a peaceful Baghdad with 10,000 Sunnis, Shi'ites marching for peace in Basra.
  • it's probably good to treat Zeyad's report as a series of unconfirmed reports which are being reported verbatim.
  • What can we say for sure or nearly sure?

    • Mosques are a focus of fighting

    • The fighting in his neighborhood has ended for now.

    • The authorities are trying to keep the lid on

    • Reported incident casualties are fairly low.
  • What can we say as probable?

    • There are small groups racing around fighting actions against each other.
  • What's a maybe?

    • Maybe some units of the National Guard are doing their job

    • Maybe some units of the Interior Ministry are in cahoots with militias

Overall what would be reasonable to conclude? There's some unrest, but Baghdad is not burning -- yet -- and the trends while still unclear are not clearly in the direction of all-out fighting.

It sounds like it's still exciting times in Iraq... but they're not quite ready to re-enact Les Miserables yet. The fragile nationhood still holds.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 25, 2006, at the time of 5:40 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 24, 2006

Civil Peace In Iraq - More of the Story

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

As an update of sorts to Sachi's post, Civil War In Iraq? Not So!, we draw your attention to this Power Line entry by Scott Johnson.

With the day-and-night curfew imposed by the government, the violence has by and large ceased. In fact, Iraq has seen a tremendous outpouring of national unity -- surely the very last thing the venomous terrorists expected or wanted.

From Power Line:

Reader Haider Ajina has forwarded us his translation of a two articles and provided his own commentary on the mosque bombing that John wrote about last night. First Haider provides the translations....

"People of Samarah started local campaign to clean up ruble and start rebuilding the bombed Shrine, while other residence joined a demonstration calling for national unity. The crowd chanted 'Not Sunni Not Shiite...one one national unity.' The governor of Salahudien province announced that the province had received four billion Iraqi Dinars (2,800,000 USD) from the National Government & the Sunni Endowment party to help with rebuilding efforts. Local police reported that thousand of residences have voluntarily gathered at the damaged shrine to clean up debris since sun up. [Emphasis added]

"Local police further reported that thousands of local residences formed a demonstration, which headed to city hall. Demonstrators were chanting 'Not Sunni Not Shiite...one one national unity.' The demonstration dispersed by noon with out incidents.

Ajina goes on to say that:

This bombing in Samarah has brought more unity amongst Iraqis than any other incident since the stampede on the Kahdumiah bridge (when Felujans [mostly Sunni] donated blood for the wounded in Kahdumiah [mostly Shiite] in Baghdad). Iraqi political parties, community leaders, religious leaders, political leaders all are strongly condemning this bombing and asking for national support and help for the people of Samarah. This outpouring of compassion, support and help is what is not being reported.

I believe the terrorists took their last, desperate gamble: bombing the Golden Dome mosque was what they had dreaded doing all along, worrying that instead of fomenting uncivil war, they would bring about the very civil peace they fear. And it appears (so far at least) that the jihadis have lost that bet. After the initial spasm of hysterical violence, peace is now busting out all over Iraq.

And that is good news indeed.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 24, 2006, at the time of 6:50 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 23, 2006

Civil War In Iraq? Not So!

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

I never like reporting bad news. But we must face this serious situation in Iraq. In the last 48 hours, already 130 Iraqis have been killed and numerous Sunni mosques bombed. This wave of violence was sparked by the al Qaeda bombing and destruction of the holiest Shiite shrine in Iraq. It seems that Many Shia -- though not necessarily ordinary Shia -- decided to take law in their own hands.

President Talabani condemned attacks on both sides and invited the political leaders of the Iraq factions to attend a meeting; but so far, Sunnis are boycotting:

The U.N. envoy also stepped in, asking Iraqi leaders to join him in a meeting: "I have invited political, religious and civil leaders to discuss confidence-building measures to ensure the situation remains under control," Ashraf Qazi told Reuters.

But the main Sunni political group said it had pulled out of U.S.-backed talks on forming a coalition following December's parliamentary election and leading clerics traded unusually frank sectarian criticisms that may do little to calm passions.

The iraqi government officially declared a curfew from 8pm to 6pm. Shiite leaders are calling for restraint, but to little effect. Mohammed of "Iraq the Model describes the situation in his neighborhood:

In our neighborhood the Sadr militias seized the local mosque and broadcast Shia religious mourning songs from the mosques loudspeakers. In several other cases, worshippers were turned away by "gunmen in black" who surrounded the closed mosques. Other mosques are encircled by razor-wire to stop anyone from approaching them.

So, is this a beginnig of a civi war? Is al-Qaeda's three year campaign finally going to pay off?

Not so fast, I say. To quote Dennis Prager's favorite expression, let's "think a second time." Mohammed continues:

The sense in the streets and the statements given by some Shia clerics suggest that retaliation attacks are organized and under control and are focusing on mosques frequented by Salafi and Wahabi groups and not those of ordinary Sunnis.

Looking at the geographic distribution of the attacked mosques, I found they were mostly in areas adjacent to Sadr city forming a line that extends from the New Baghdad district in the southeast to al-Hussayniya in the northeast.

The Association of Muslim Scholars is accusing the Sadrists in particular, actually it's not only the Association that accuses the Sadrists, most people here in Baghdad point out the role of Mehdi army of Sadr in carrying out most of the attacks.

The Association is trying to remind Sadr of the their times of solidarity during the battles in Najaf and Fallujah yet they are condemning his message to his followers in which he called for keeping up and escalating the "protests".

So, this is Sadr once again. The ever opportunistic Muqtada Sadr and his al Mahdi "army" are taking advantage of the situation. I always thought letting Sadr go after the Najaf offensive was a mistake; this man and his militia must be dealt with once and for all.

If Iraqi citizens are to have any trust in the new government, they must punish Shia as well as Sunni. The Iraqi government must punish Sadr and his militia. They should treat these men the same way they treat al Queda terrorists and Sunni insurgents. This is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that law and order applies to every Iraqi.

The encouraging thing is that Shiite leaders are condemning these acts of violence. Sadr is not getting any support from ordinary Shia. Even Sunni insurgents are not responding with violence, at least so far.

Bill Roggio of the Fourth Rail has an important set of criteria that would signal a full blown civil war in Iraq:

By all indications, the situation in Iraq is tense, and the threat of continued violence is real. The possibility of a full-scale civil war is quite real as emotions are running high over the destruction of the revered Shiite shrine and the retaliation against Sunni mosques.

But the media has not asked or answered the following question: what exactly are the leading indicators for a full blown civil war - meaning the political leadership of the main Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties no longer wish cooperate, and an open and organized battle between the parties ensues?

The following list contains the main lead indicators a full scale civil War in Iraq is underway....

[Long list omitted; you really should read Roggio's post.]

Iraq has yet to encounter any of the problems stated above. [Emphasis added]

This is a terrible test for all Iraqis: if they are to survive as a democratic country, they are going to have to solve this cricis in a firm but restrained and civilized manner, just as Bush calls for in the Reuters article linked above:

"The voices of reason from all aspects of Iraqi life understand that this bombing is intended to create civil strife," Bush said as the military reported seven more U.S. soldiers had been killed in two separate attacks on Wednesday and American forces in Baghdad adopted a low profile.

Let us pray that Iraqi people will continue to respond with reason and the extraordinary patience they've shown so far.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, February 23, 2006, at the time of 5:03 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 4, 2006

Swamp Samurai

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

When we think of Iraq, we typically think of vast deserts torn by vicious sandstorms. But actually, there used to be a huge swampy area in Iraq -- the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial salt marsh, also known as the Iraqi Marsh, or "Eden of Mesopotamia." (Some Biblical archeologists believe this was the actual historical site of Eden in the Bible; and anthropologists agree it certainly was one of the cradles of human civilization.) Around the marsh, all kinds of plants and animals used to flourish... along with an whole culture that Saddam Hussein tried to wipe out: the Marsh Arabs.

The marsh was systematicaly drained by the Baath Party starting in the 1950s, likely to supply aquaduct water to the more favored Sunni farmers (the Marsh Arabs are Shiite). But in 1991, Saddam Hussein escalated the program in retaliation for a massive Shiite uprising against his rule:

[A] more serious threat emerged in 1991, when Saddam Hussein's regime began building an extensive network of dykes and channels to take water away from the marsh area, which originally extended for almost 9,000 sq km.

Satellite images showed that by 2002, the area had shrunk to only 760 sq km; an estimated 70,000 people were forced into camps in Iran.

The displacing of the Marsh Arabs into refugee camps and the destruction of the marsh itself is one of the "crimes against humanity" with which Hussein is charged and will eventually be tried.

When the marsh was destroyed, so was the livlihood and the culture of the Marsh Arabs. However, immediately after the Coalition invasion brought down Hussein's regime, local Marsh people rushed to destroy the dykes. As soon as reconstruction started, one of the earliest goals of the Coalition was to rechannel the river water back to the Iraqi Marsh to reaquify it. The Coalition got the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) involved; and according to the UNEP, by August of 2005, 37% of water had returned to the marsh.

“The near total destruction of the Iraqi marshlands under the regime of Saddam Hussein was a major ecological and human disaster, robbing the Marsh Arabs of a centuries-old culture and way of life as well as food in the form of fish and that most crucial of natural resources, drinking water," said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP Executive Director. “The evidence of their rapid revival is a positive signal, not only for the environment and the local communities who live there, but must be seen as a contribution to wider peace and security for the Iraqi people and the region as a whole.”

One of the forces leading this marsh revival effort is Japan. The government of Japan has already donated 2 million dollars to the project and plans to spend a total of $11 million. According to my online friend Silverlining, who participated in the recent UNEP conference held in Osaka, Japan is allocating an additional one million dollars to the project this year.

Japan's contribution is not just money. Japanese troops have been in southern Iraq since the end of 2003, many months before the UNEP got involved in July of 2004, helping the locals to restore clean water. (The Japanese troops are also helping open medical clinics in Iraq, something Americans rarely hear about: Iraq the Model's Omar once mentioned that the new clinic in Samawa was opened largely due to Japanese troops' direct efforts. Alas, it was some time ago, and we don't have the link.)

A major problem is that the Iraqi Marsh is a salt marsh with a very high sodium content, moreso now than when it was in its prime. In order to alleviate this problem, Japan employs highly technological desalinization equipment, equipment that needs constant maintenance and occasional repairs. (One of the best desalinization programs in the world is in Israel; but for reasons which should be obvious, Israelis cannot be involved with the program in Iraq.)

The good news is that there are many educated Iraqi civil engineers that the UNEP can reliably task to operate and maintain the desalinization plants. One Japanese official candidly told Silverlining that such a program could not possibly work in a place like sub-Saharan Africa, because there simply are not enough people who could keep it running.

Because of the abdication of the Antique Media from any news reporting about Operation Iraqi Freedom (other than an obsession with death counts), Americans and Europeans know virtually nothing about the numerous reconstruction (and construction) projects going on in Iraq. You would think that the American environmentalist groups would be ecstatic that we're busily restoring wetlands in Iraq; but then, as Ann Coulter says, they would have to be on the same side as the United States.

I have known a little about the marsh project due to my Japanese friends; but the details are not easy to ferret out. I am in contact with Silverlining, trying to extract more information from him, and I will keep you posted.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, February 4, 2006, at the time of 5:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 1, 2006

He Said/They Said

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

All the news on Iraqi reconstruction is grim.

Note that I didn't say "Iraqi reconstruction was grim"... I said all the news was grim, that is, the news from the antique media....

Associated Press:

Insurgents Thwarting Iraq Reconstruction
by Jim Krane
Feb 1, 2006

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - Guerrilla attacks in Iraq have forced the cancellation of more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects, in part because American intelligence failed to predict the brutal insurgency, a U.S. government audit said.

American goals to fix Iraq's infrastructure will never be reached, mainly because insurgents have chased away contractors and forced the diversion of repair funds into security, according to an audit of the Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Program released last week.

The New York Times:

Because of unforeseen security costs, haphazard planning and shifting priorities, the American-financed reconstruction program in Iraq will not complete scores of projects that were promised to help rebuild the country, a federal oversight agency reported yesterday.

Washington Post:

As much as 60 percent of all projects aimed at improving Iraq's water supply, including work on sewer systems and drinking water supplies, will remain unfinished because more than $2.1 billion originally allocated to that purpose was shifted away, according to the report.

Projects related to drinking water that were expected to benefit about 8 million people will now benefit about 2.75 million, the report said. And only two of 10 planned sewerage projects will be completed, though they will serve an additional 4.5 million people.

More than 125 of a planned 425 electricity projects will also be left unfinished, a total that reflects a steep reduction, announced previously by U.S. officials, in the goal for increasing Iraq's generating capacity.

Wow, that must have been some humdinger of an indictment of the wretched, corrupt, feckless, and incompetent Bush administration, right? Well take a look at what the actual report from Stuart W. Bowen, Jr., the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction, actually said:

The SIGIR October 2005 Quarterly Report initially examined the “reconstruction gap”— the difference between what was originally planned for reconstruction in the various sectors and what will actually be delivered. This is not an alarm bell but merely an observation of a current reality: changing conditions in Iraq, including deteriorating security conditions and evolving political and economic priorities required IRRF [Iraqi Relief and Reconstruction Fund] reprogramming that altered sector funding levels and projected outcomes....

These shortfalls are substantially attributable to the autumn 2004 IRRF reprogramming, which reduced the allocations to the Water sector from $4.3 billion to $2.1 billion (down 51.2%). The Electricity sector dropped from $5.560 billion to $4.309 billion (down 22.5%). Allocations to certain other sectors concomitantly increased: the Private Sector Development sector grew by 420%, and the Justice, Public Safety, Infrastructure, and Civil Society sector rose by 70%.

In other words, we had some initial plans at the time of the invasion, March 2003; those plans were solidified in November that year; but as the face of the terrorist campaign in Iraq became clearer, we corrected course, "reprogramming" plans from major projects involving the water and electricity supplies to more basic infrastructure: first and foremost, the development of a private sector in Iraq (which never existed under Saddam Hussein or the Fascist Baath Party), basic justice, and the development of an Iraqi army that -- contrary to the extraordinary claim today by Nanci Pelosi on Anderson Cooper 360 -- was not set up to brutalize the Iraqi people.

Why are these priorities more basic? Because when they are satisfied, Iraq will be able to quell the terrorism itself (as we're now starting to see, particularly in the Anbar province and in Baghdad), thus will be able to pay for its own reconstruction... but if they are not satisfied, then nothing can be done. Period.

Part of the problem with Iraqi reconstruction efforts is the endemic corruption of the Middle East:

SIGIR remains committed to intensifying U.S. efforts to promote an effective anticorruption system within the Iraqi government and commends the U.S. Mission’s efforts thus far to support anticorruption institutions in Iraq. In the October 2005 Quarterly Report, SIGIR urged the Ambassador to hold an anticorruption summit, which he did in November 2005. The summit resulted in a proposal for a joint U.S.-Iraqi Anticorruption Working Group and initial agreement on the need for more training for officials from the Board of Supreme Audit, the Commission on Public Integrity, and the Inspectors General of the Iraqi ministries. The Embassy Anticorruption Working Group previously identified several major priorities, including:

promoting market reforms and reducing subsidies
helping to reinforce the weak law enforcement structure
• creating a public education campaign on the corruption issue

Note that two of the three anti-corruption "major priorities" are exactly what the administration shifted its own priorities to implement: market reforms (a private sector) and beefing up the Iraqi law-enforcement, which requires training not only police but army units as well.

That is to say, as the facts on the ground have changed, we've shifted our priorities to meet the new challenges. Far from being an indictment of the administration, all that this report actually does is clarify how much progress has been made and is likely to be made in the future, identify the continuing challenges, and set priorities and more refined goals for the administration to meet.

It isn't an attack at all; it's nothing more than a normal interim report.

Some of the news stories more or less acknowledge this -- buried deeper in the article, after first tainting the reader's impression with unsupported implications of corruption and incompetence:

"The United States' reconstruction efforts have shown tangible results in improving the Iraqi infrastructure," Inspector General Stuart W. Bowen Jr. wrote in the report, some of which he previewed in testimony to Congress last year but much of which was presented for the first time Thursday. "However, the significant funding change means that many of the originally planned projects will not be completed."

Projects related to drinking water that were expected to benefit about 8 million people will now benefit about 2.75 million, the report said. And only two of 10 planned sewerage projects will be completed, though they will serve an additional 4.5 million people. (Washington Post)

Only 49 of the 136 projects that were originally pledged to improve Iraq's water and sanitation will be finished, with about 300 of an initial 425 projects to provide electricity, the report says ["only!"]....

The report, by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, adds that the overall rebuilding plan was also devised without a clear understanding of the decrepit state of Iraq's infrastructure after decades of war, United Nations-imposed penalties and sheer neglect....

The biggest change in priorities in the rebuilding program came when John D. Negroponte, then the American ambassador to Iraq, shifted $3.46 billion from the reconstruction fund to support projects involving the training of Iraqi security forces, building democratic institutions and developing the private sector in fall 2004. But the report notes that month after month, new shifts took place, amounting to $2.12 billion in additional spending changes through October 2005. (New York Times)

The Times sees an inconstant administration constantly changing course; I see an administration that is flexible and can correct the course when the facts on the ground change. Which do we prefer -- rigid adherence to plans drawn up before the reconstruction had really begun? Or flexibility and the willingness to adapt to the reality that we found in Iraq?

Naturally, if the report had found instead that Bush had done the former, the same newspapers would be excoriating him for not being flexible and adaptable, just as the same Democrats who attacked Bush for his "unilateral" approach to Iraq now attack him for "outsourcing" our response to Iran by bringing in Great Britain, Germany, and France.

I believe the entire Democratic Party has only one principle in common: whatever George W. Bush does, it's wrong!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 1, 2006, at the time of 9:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 29, 2006

New Iraqi Judge Takes Saddam, Lawyers In Hand

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

After the previous senior judge in the trial of Saddam Hussein, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, left in a snit, following intense criticism across Iraq that he had allowed Hussein to seize control of his own trial and use it as a platform for his semi-coherent rants about how badly he was being treated, the new judge who replaced Amin appears to be a "new broom."

Raouf Rasheen Abdel-Rahman began his tenure by expelling one defendant and one of the defense lawyers for shouting at the court. When the entire defense team threatened to walk out, rather than placate them, Abdel-Rahman let them go, appointed temporary defense counsel for that day, and continued with the trial in the absence of one of the defendants and the defense team:

The session, which was the first since Dec. 22, rapidly degenerated into chaos. [Barzan] Ibrahim [Saddam Hussein's half brother] called the court "the daughter of a whore" and refused to sit down. Abdel-Rahman ordered him removed, and Ibrahim scuffled with two guards before they dragged him out of the courtroom.

Then defense lawyer Salih al-Armouti, a Jordanian, was forcibly removed from the court for yelling at Abdel-Rahman.

The entire defense team walked out in protest. "This is an unjust and illegitimate court," Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam's chief lawyer, told the judge on the way out.

At that point, Saddam Hussein began to rant, so he, too, was calmly ordered removed by the new judge. Three witnesses to Hussein's brutality gave their testimony, as the trial proceeded in relative peace. I suspect this entire charade was deliberately staged, in order to test the new judge and see if he would be as pliant as the old. Alas for the defense team, Judge Abdel-Rahman passed with flying colors.

I am much happier with this new judge than I was with Judge Amin -- who I felt gave Hussein and his grandstanding defense lawyers (including American traitor Ramsey Clark) too much latitude to turn the trial into a three-ring circus, or whatever Arabs say when they mean to say a circus... a forty-tent bazaar?

Hussein and his seven co-defendants face a possible sentence of death by hanging:

Defense lawyers criticized the tough approach, saying it was preventing Saddam and his seven co-defendants from getting a fair trial. The eight could face death by hanging if convicted in the killing of at least 140 Shiites after a July 1982 attempt on Saddam's life in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad.

Naturally, "critics" of the trial -- which means the Left in America and Europe -- are already denouncing the new Judge Abdel-Rahman for not giving the defendants a fair trial. They see the trial as a forum for their new innocent martyr, Saddam Hussein, to "testify" (by outbursts) against the "real villain," who should actually be in the dock instead of Hussein, in many leftists' opinions: George W. Bush. But clearly, Abdel-Rahman plans to keep the focus where it should be... on the question of whether Hussein and his henchmen tortured to death nearly a gross of innocent citizens of a town that had the unfortunate distinction of being the location of one of the assassination attempts of the dictator.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who is part of Saddam's defense team but did not attend Sunday's session, denounced the court as "lawless" and repeated calls for it to be moved out of Iraq. [To where... the Hague? Or the International Court of Leftist Opinion at Harvard? - the Mgt.]

"Now the court is seated without the defendants' counsel of choice. This is wrong," Clark said, speaking from New York....

Richard Dicker, the head of the International Justice Program at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the failure to question the witnesses was "probably the most disturbing part of the day."

"The events take us further away from the basic practices of fairness that are necessary in any trial and especially in a trial of this significance," he said.

Ibrahim's comments were "clearly provocative and disrespectful," but Abdel-Rahman was "a little too trigger-happy," he told The Associated Press....

Critics have said the turmoil gives credence to claims that Saddam cannot get a fair trial in a country torn apart by ethnic, religious and tribal divisions and an insurgency comprising large numbers of his supporters.

Michael Scharf, an international law professor who helped train judges for the trial, said Abdel-Rahman has to walk a "tightrope" between maintaining order and fairness.

"The risk is that the judge's tactics will be viewed as too heavy-handed and therefore unfair," said Scharf, head of the international law center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Note that, despite Yahoo's insinuating description above, Michael Scharf does not appear to be one of those "critics." He has been blogging on the Case School of Law website, and his comments seem quite even-handed and temperate. See this entry from January 17th, for example:

This changing of the guard [after Amin quit but before a successor was named] should not be seen as a sign that Judge Amin had bungled the trial (as his critics have asserted). Despite the frequent (and sometimes successful) attempts by the defendants to disrupt and derail the proceedings, in just five trial days (October 19, November 28, December 5, December 21 and December 22), the prosecutor completed an opening statement, and fourteen witnesses testified and were cross-examined by the defense -- a very efficient pace even by American judicial standards. With forty witnesses still to go, the prosecution has already proven the scale of the atrocities, the direct involvement of several of Hussein's co-defendants, and the command hierarchy - the key elements necessary for a conviction in this case. And especially for those who understand Arabic, the testimony of Saddam's victims has been both moving and compelling....

Judge al-Hamash [originally thought to be likely to replace Amin, until al-Hamash came under suspicion of having himself been a secret member of the Baath Party] can use his new position to instill a greater degree of control on the proceedings. He can, for example, insist that for now on Saddam Hussein only speak through his lawyer, rather than address the court and the witnesses directly, except when it is the defendant's turn to testify as a witness on his own behalf. And Judge al-Hamash can enforce this by removing the microphones from the defendants' dock, so that the televised coverage does not pick up any disruptive outbursts....

In taking such actions, Judge al-Hamash must be extremely careful not to appear too heavy handed. If Judge al-Hamash yells at the defendants, for example, as Judge Richard May did during the Milosevic trial at The Hague, it will only play into the defense strategy of trying to cast the proceedings as unfair and illegitimate. As Judge Amin understood, in the long run, it is far more important that the trial be seen as scrupulously fair than for the judge to be seen as winning the battle of the wills against Saddam Hussein.

This strikes me as very fair commentary -- and not as the words of a mere "critic" of the trial, as Yahoo News painted Scharf.

So it appears that the trial is now back on course, after former Judge Amin showed himself a bit too accomodating to Hussein's erratic behavior. Hussein clearly imagines himself still president of Iraq. From the Yahoo News story:

When the [new] judge [Abdel-Rahman] ordered guards to remove him, Saddam — holding a Quran under his arm — became indignant, saying he was choosing to go and referring to his time in power.

"For 35 years I led you, and you say, 'Eject him?'" Saddam said.

"I am a judge and you are a defendant," Abdel-Rahman replied. "And you have violated order in the court. I am implementing the law."

I'm sure Hussein will not quit, however, nor will his unseemly defense team. Hussein will keep energetically trying to derail the proceedings. But as the expression goes, he can rest when he's dead.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 29, 2006, at the time of 4:38 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 25, 2006

Iraq Rebuilding Is Either Going Badly -- Or It Isn't

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Reading through this New York Times article is like decoding a secret document... a secret document that was somehow leaked to the Times (of course).

The New York Times believes the rebuilding effort in Iraq is "badly hobbled;" but the picture that actually emerges from the article (once one decrypts it) is a royal mess that still somehow managed to finish most of the projects it planned, even while dodging terrorist activity, Shiite uprisings, and bureaucratic infighting.

The leaked document is a "highly preliminary" report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, formerly known as the Coalition Provisional Authority Office of Inspector General (CPA-IG). The spokesman from the IG's office, Jim Mitchell, says the report is "incomplete.... It could change significantly before it is finally published." But caveats will never deter the Times from reporting some bad news, when it thinks is has some.

Lost in the article, however, is any context. We've rebuilt countries before, notably Japan and Germany. By all accounts, the former went much better than the latter; which, if either, does the current effort most resemble?

In fact, it's a hybrid: in terms of having to deal with a persistent terrorist and insurgency factor, it's closer to what happened in Germany under international control; but in terms of effectiveness and rate of completion, it resembles the Japanese reconstruction, which was almost entirely American. This seems like quite a remarkable success story, given the environment.

So what exactly is the problem?

In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program.

The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the "ambiguous legal status" of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO.

Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding.

So there are too many competing authorities: State versus DoD, Army versus Navy, NATO versus American officials. In addition, Iraqi ministries got into the contracting game as well, handing out contracts to be paid for with other people's money (ours, mostly).

Basically, there are too many captains on the boat, and it's easy to see why this is a problem. However, this is hardly news; the same conclusion could be drawn about hurricane relief, intelligence gathering, and the normal operation of the United States Congress.

And surprisingly, even before this story saw the light of day, President Bush had already taken measures to address this very issue:

The Corps of Engineers has been given command of the severely criticized office set up by President Bush to oversee some $13 billion of the reconstruction funds.

The shift occurred days before Mr. Bush said the early focus of the rebuilding program on huge public works projects - largely overseen by the office, the Project and Contracting Office - had been flawed.

So what exactly does the NYT want to tell us? First, that the significant problems were in the contracting phase, not in the actual "construction and completion." And second, that there were too few personnel in the main contracting authority, the CPA.

"The impression you get is of an organization that had too little structure on the ground over there, that it had conflicting guidance from the United States," Mr. Hamre said. "It had a very difficult environment and pressures by that environment to quickly move things."

A situation like that, Mr. Hamre said, "creates shortcuts that probably turn into short circuits."

Hamre is president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a sort of "Council on Foreign Relations Lite," with very "State Department/September 10th" thinking. And naturally, by "shortcuts," Hamre means the Left's favorite shibboleth:

The Army appropriated $1.9 million in November 2002 to create a "contingency plan" for what to do if Iraqi forces damaged or destroyed the nation's oil complexes and pipelines. That "task order," under a running contract, went to Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary. The Army later used that task order as a justification for awarding the company a new $1.4 billion noncompetitive contract to restore oil equipment, a program that became one of the most criticized moves of the conflict partly because Vice President Dick Cheney was once the top executive at Halliburton.

Nobody complains about the job they did, by the way; it always boils down to the fact that the job of restoring oil equipment wasn't put up for public bidding... but was instead restricted to the handful of companies that could actually do it, like KB&R. That's like complaining that the contract to put out the oil-well fires after the Gulf War was handed to Red Adair, rather than allowing the wells to burn while McDonalds, Microsoft, and Mercedes-Benz bid on it.

What we are trying to do in Iraq is a huge task in the great unknown, complicated by Zarqawi, Sadr, and other forces of chaos. We need to constantly adjust to the fluid situation in Iraq, and it's hardly surprising that our initial approach to rebuilding was inadequate: nobody really knew how to go about it, because undertaking a Marshall Plan while still fighting high-tech terrorists and unstable Shiite imams has never been done before. But we're working on it, and we're learning: that's all this report is really saying.

And yet, despite all those problems, 1,636 projects of 2,265 originally planned by the office have been completed. That should be the real story... but of course, that would require the Times to stop looking for trouble and start seeing the ongoing solutions.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 25, 2006, at the time of 12:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 17, 2006

The Year of The Police - a Follow-Up

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

In my earlier post, Who Polices the Police?, I noted that the American military was increasing the number of military-police advisors to embed with and train the Iraqi Police.

The Iraqi army was our first priority; but now that we're closing in on our goal there, it's time we turned our attention to the Iraqi cops: while the army is most important for pursuing and destroying terrorist cells, rolling up the foreign jihadi invaders, and sealing the border, the police are essential to follow investigative leads internally, keep the peace, and restore a semblance of justice in Iraq that has not been seen since the days of the British-established Hashemite kingdom -- before first the Iraqi army took over in 1958, then the Baath Party in 1963.

Todays New York Times reports a little more in this subject:

About 80,000 local police officers across Iraq are now certified as trained and equipped, more than halfway toward the goal of 135,000 by early 2007.

But senior commanders, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American officer in Iraq, have vowed to make 2006 "the year of the police" in a tacit acknowledgment that corruption, ineptitude and infiltration in the Iraqi police forces stand in the way of any plan by the Americans to draw down troops this year...

Soldiers from the 49th Military Police Brigade, an Army National Guard unit with headquarters in Fairfield, Calif., will be assigned to police stations in nine major Iraqi cities - Baghdad, Ramadi, Falluja, Najaf, Babil, Kirkuk, Baquba, Samarra and Mosul - as well as to dozens of provincial and district headquarters.

We're ramping up our embeds among the Iraqi police from today's "500 international civilian police advisers" by adding 2,000 MPs -- a fourfold increase. This will of course put a lot more Americans in harm's way, but the danger still pales compared to the danger of allowing Iraq, through corruption, to sink back into the terrorist haven it was under Saddam Hussein. Safety is important, but we do have a mission to perform.

Quite a few of our reserves and National Guardsmen's civilian jobs are with the police, making a perfect mesh. The Iraqis can learn about rights and duties, treating people with respect, but never allowing personal feelings, corruption, or tribal affiliation to get in the way of the disinterested administration of justice.

Lets hope the Iraqis will learn the true meaning of universal law that constrains both prince and peon alike. That is what transformed the ancient Hebrews from a tribal to a national culture, and there is no reason to suppose that it won't have the same effect on another group of nomads wandering the great deserts of the Middle East.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 17, 2006, at the time of 10:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 16, 2006

Talking Sunnis Down From the Ledge

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

You wouldn't know it from reading the American mainstream news, but for the last year or so, the U.S. military has quietly been negotiating with various militant Sunni tribes in Iraq to give up their arms and participate in the political process.

We've known for some time that a rift is growing between the Sunni rejectionists and the foreign al-Qaeda terrorists. Our military has exploited this rift to isolate the jihadis.

Our rationale is that the more militant Sunnis give up fighting and join the democratic Iraqi community, the fewer enemies we ultimately have to face in the final confrontations. At a bare minimum, the Sunni won't interfere while we exterminate those al-Qaeda, Zarqawi and his cohorts, who make a last stand -- which we all know must come eventually. If we could convince some of the militant Sunni that it is to their tribe's benefit to cooperate with us, they may give us valuable intelligence on their erstwhile allies... or even fight alongside us, as their brother Iraqis who accept democracy are doing today.

The strategy is paying greater dividends than we imagined. The Belmont Club has compiled a list of recent conflicts between al-Qaeda and Sunni rejectionists; the fault line between them has widened so much that some formerly militant Sunnis are actually helping the U.S. and Iraqi armies conduct military operations.

The Albu Mahal tribe is now an ally of the Iraqi government, and provides the majority of the troops for the Desert Protection Force, which is a organization of the local tribal fighters that provide for local security and act as scouts for Iraqi Army and U.S. Marines operating in the area.

Unsurprisingly, the international media considers this successful strategy of ours to be a betrayal of President Bush's “stay the course” policy. Through an absurdly literal reading of the metaphor, in which "the course" must always be a straight line, and any deviation left or right is tantamount to a complete repudiation, the Asian and European press agencies crow that America has surrendered -- when in fact, we stand on the threshold of historic victory.

For example, Gereth Porter opines in Asian Times that if the world "understood" our current strategy of persuading former Sunni rejectionists to throw down their guns and support democracy in Iraq, it would cause us "serious political problems":

The Republican Party has just unveiled a new television ad attacking Democratic Party chair Howard Dean for suggesting that the war in Iraq cannot be won.

Renouncing victory over the Sunni insurgents therefore undercuts the president's political strategy of portraying his policy as one of "staying the course" and attacking the Democrats for "cutting and running"…

The new soft line toward the Sunni insurgents is a belated administration response to the conclusion of the US military commanders in Iraq last summer that the Sunni insurgents could not be "defeated" and that there must be a political settlement with them.

Of course, what the commanders actually concluded was that they could not be defeated by military means alone, that there had to be a political component to the push; not only is Bush not "belatedly" accepting this idea, it has been the administration's plan from Day One of the invasion: we always planned to democratize Iraq as the long-term goal for rendering it no longer a threat to America.

In a stunning speech delivered on November 6th, 2003 to the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush made explicit the Bush Doctrine, which calls for democratizing the hellholes of the world -- in particular, the Middle East -- as a way of securing America and liberating the captive peoples across the globe.

In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council are also working together to build a democracy -- and after three decades of tyranny, this work is not easy.... And we're working closely with Iraqi citizens as they prepare a constitution, as they move toward free elections and take increasing responsibility for their own affairs....

This is a massive and difficult undertaking -- it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

We do not come late to the table of Middle-East democracy.

Contrary to Porter's overwrought accusation, negotiating the terms of your enemy’s surrender is not a sign of defeat. It is a sign of victory. We are not the ones giving up fighting in favor of peaceful participation in the political process. We are not the ones outing our former allies' hideouts and attack plans.

To see who is winning and who is losing, let's apply the simple test of asking "cui bono?" Who benefits? Clearly it is the American policy of democratizing Iraq, not the jihadi cause of returning Iraq to tyranny, that benefits from rejectionists giving up the fight and running for office.

Mr. Porter makes like he does not understand that in war, the wise general has many different plans working in parallel. Many are secret; we certainly don't make a habit of sharing our plans with the world -- unless some CIA or NSA snitch drops a dime to the New York Times! (Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would call that strategy "unhelpful.") But that doesn't mean we have no plans.

Cajoling the enemy into abandoning the fight, even while we engage in battle, is not a contradiction: unless our intention is to kill every last Sunni who has ever opposed us, which is absurd on its face, neutralizing the enemy by negotiation is always in order.

One more reason Mr. Porter considers our policy to be proof of "defeat" is that the militant Sunni keep trying to suggest a timetable for our withdrawal:

The insurgents can also increase the pressure on Bush by making public their offer, reportedly made by insurgent leaders to Arab League officials in Cairo last month, to deliver al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Zarqawi, to the Iraqi authorities as part of a peace agreement involving a US withdrawal timetable.

But the Sunni can offer anything they want; it's up to us to decide whether the offer is good enough for us to accept. If we do, it will be because what we gain is more valuable than what we give up; this is no more a "defeat" than it is when you and some seller come to an agreement on a piece of real estate: neither of you is a loser; you're both getting something more valuable to you than you had going in... it's a win-win situation, just as it is when the Sunni propose various incentives for us to leave, and we weigh each one and decide to accept or reject the offer. The final decision is ours, not theirs.

We still have the winning hand, and the rejectionists know it. Last December, when President Bush had pointedly refused to issue any timetable for Coalition withdrawal, the Sunnis still showed up at the polls in unexpectedly strong numbers (a higher percentage of all Iraqis, Sunni, Shia, and Kurd, than showed up for our own vote a month earlier). The Sunni flatly rejected Zarqawi’s threat to escalate his terrorism if Iraqis voted.

Most Sunni rejectionists now understand that they are not in a position to make demands; the best they can do is cushion their fall somewhat. In the fight against the American military, the rejectionists, both Sunni and Shia, have been defeated. They know we can continue this war for at least the next three years, reducing their tribal lands to rubble if we so choose. Therefore, timetable or not, they will in the end have to meet our terms; they must choose whether to live -- or to die.

By and large, they are choosing to live. And that is the ultimate vindication of our winning strategy in Iraq.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 16, 2006, at the time of 1:49 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 11, 2006

"Softly Softly" Accuses U.S. of "Harshly Harshly"

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

Does anyone else see the irony in this Reuters story, British officer blisters US Army in Iraq critique?

The U.S. Army has displayed damaging cultural insensitivity in Iraq, while being blinded by unrealistic optimism and predisposed to use maximum force, a senior British officer wrote in a blistering appraisal in a U.S. military publication.

The essay by British Army Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who served with U.S. forces in Iraq from December 2003 to November 2004, appeared in the latest edition of the magazine Military Review, published by the U.S. Army.

(Just as an aside, was it culturally sensitive enough of us to allow Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster to hock and spit in our own Army publication? Would the Brits have returned the favor?)

The British Army's primary area of responsibility has been southern Iraq, and in particular, Basra Province. But Basra is precisely the area where Iranian-backed Shiite militias have taken over the police forces, right under the noses of the Brits.

Back in September, pro-Iranian militiamen in Basra kidnapped two British soldiers and held them hostage. In a daring and successful raid that defied the normal "softly, softly" approach by Great Britain -- hence, in all likelihood, was planned and executed at a level below flag rank -- British troops stormed the Basra police station to rescue their comrades. They discovered they had been moved to the militia headquarters in the city; so the troops then stormed that location and successfully rescued the hostages, killing several Shiite terrorists and arresting others in the process.

Whereupon the British government promptly apologized to the Iran-connected city council and agreed to pay extortion money to keep the council from instigating an anti-British riot. (The AP links have expired, alas; but they can probably be resurrected via Google's cache facility, if one is so inclined.) As we reported back in October:

The joint statement said: "We regret the incidents that took place in Basra on 19 September 2005 at the Serious Crimes Unit.

"We also regret the casualties on both sides and the material damage to public facilities.

"The British government is prepared to pay valid claims for compensation for casualties and material damage in the well-established manner."

The British "softly, softly" policy -- which is just chock-full of cultural sensitivity, brimming over with European pessimism (sorry, "realism"), and predisposed to humbly apologize for any use of force against the enemy -- has been by and large a disaster. They allowed Iranian controlled militias and actual Iranian agents to infiltrate Iraq all the way from Basra to Sadr City; they were next to useless in dealing with Muqtada Sadr; and they wasted a lot of time and squandered moral clarity by complaining that American troops were "insensitive" by, e.g., wearing helmets instead of berets.

I have heard from many sources that the ordinary British soldiers and the junior to mid-level officers are terribly frustrated by their weak posture and wish that their own brigadiers had as much spine as ours... or even as much as their own majors and colonels.

Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster is a textbook example of what is wrong with Europe today -- and of how creeping Euroism is making significant inroads into Great Britain's military, particularly at the senior officer (political) level.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 11, 2006, at the time of 2:31 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 8, 2006

A Shiite Sandwich

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

Sometimes, spelunking through a mainstream-media report on Iraq to locate the real story requires a helmet, headlamp, pick, rope, and other caving gear; it's a major expedition into the deepest, darkest depths of the media closet.

The classic technique for burying good news which should be the lede is the mirror image of what a blunt friend of mine, a master of the delicate phrase, always referred to as (I sink into euphemism) a "turd sandwich." (You can guess what he actually said, but please don't post your guesses here, thanks!) When you want to criticize someone, but you want him not simply to tune you out, you must encase the criticism within a sandwich of praise on each side: "your screenplay has excellent character development and flows well; if it has any flaw, it would be that the plot completely falls apart in act three... but I really liked your visual imagery."

The MSM uses the reverse technique: all of the good news is buried in the middle, unmentioned in the headline, and surrounded on both sides by as bad a set of facts as they can report with a straight face. In print, the media will use what media critic Patterico calls the Power of the Jump™: they put nothing but bad news on the first page of a story, saving any good Iraq news for after "the jump," the part following the phrase "continues on page 23," knowing most readers won't.

I call as my fortieth witness the following article from AP.

The most urgent and important news in this story is that the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds have already reached general agreement on a tripartisan government that will be formed by the middle of February, much faster than back in January, 2005 -- and with none of the rancor that marred the earlier election:

Iraq's fractious political groups, meanwhile, could form a coalition government within weeks, Talabani said Saturday....

[Note and remember that I elide one paragraph here; I will return to this point at the end.]

Meeting with Straw in Baghdad, Talabani said Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political groups had agreed in principle on a national unity government that could be formed within a few weeks. Western diplomats in Baghdad have speculated that a government could be in place by the second half of February.

Notice the telltale word "meanwhile" in the first quoted paragraph above. That is a dead giveaway that this was not the first graf of the article, as it should have been. This is great news! But you wouldn't know it unless you read into the middle-end of the story... because the headline is actually a completely unrelated story: 12 Thought Dead After Copter Crash in Iraq.

Sachi was the first to point out this technique to me. When the Associated Press (or any MSM source) wants to bury the lede, their most common technique is to surreptitiously shoehorn it, in the dark of a moonless night, into an article that would give no clue to the reader of the guilty, little nugget of good news buried inside. (Congress uses a similar technique, hiding a provision to spend $300 million of taxpayer money on the Sen. Ima Tachs Hogg Congressional Library within an agricultural bill for Nebraska locust relief.)

The AP story opens describing the terrible deaths of twelve brave Americans whose Blackhawk helicopter crashed; no word yet whether it was due to mechanical failure, weather, or enemy action, and no word as of this writing whether it was full of soldiers or civilians. (The New York Times reports that "Bad weather was thought to have played at least some role.")

AP then segues seamlessly into an account of the three Marines killed today and the two slain yesterday, lingering over the current American military death clock.

The story next dwells with some relish upon the various civilians killed in Iraq today (five), and upon a mosque that we raided (complete with an accusatory quote from the Association of Muslim Scholars, a group that often works hand-in-glove with the terrorists). It discusses a French hostage who was just released and waxes rhapsodic over the number of civilians who have been kidnapped in Iraq since the war began.

Oh, did you know the United States and the Iraqi government have been talking to a very large number of Sunni rejectionists, and that there has been "a recent 'uptick'" in the number of such groups now willing, since the December elections, to enter into discussions to rejoin the greater Iraqi community and turn their backs on the terrorists, further isolating the latter? You'd never know it unless you read deep into this completely unrelated story about a helicopter crash.

And only after all this do we finally come to what should be the real lede, the only piece of actual "news" in this entire article (unless you count the "uptick" as a newslet): negotiations on forming the new, elected government are going much better than anyone expected -- and better than anyone has hitherto reported. AP casually drops the good-news bombshell in paragraph twenty-nine out of thirty-seven.

But then, at the very end -- just to make sure to leave a bad taste even in the mouths of those hardy souls who read deep into what appears, at first glance, to be a typical "bad day in Baghdad" story -- the AP piece ends with the phrase "In other violence Sunday:"... followed by a list of various people shot today.

And there you have it: a good-news sandwich, where the surrounding bread is made up of every piece of bad news AP can find to disguise, bury, and minimize the real story -- the imminent creation of Iraq's first truly democratic, inclusive "national unity government," and the uptick in the number of militant Iraqi groups willing to lay down their arms and join the political process instead.

Oh, and the elision I committed in the quoted paragraphs above, marked by the "...." ellipsis? AP was so bubbling over with bad news they considered more important than the remarkable political story, they even found occasion to insert some right into the middle of the few grafs describing the formation of the government:

Talabani, a Kurd, offered a timeframe on the formation of a government after meeting with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who said Iraqis remain optimistic despite a violent week that saw nearly 200 people killed in two days.

...Just in case you'd forgotten in all the excitement.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 8, 2006, at the time of 1:02 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 4, 2006

Who Polices the Police?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The Romans asked, Qvis Cvstodiet Ipsos Cvstodes.

A number of people who visited Iraq recently said that they were impressed by the quality of Iraqi Army.
For example, CNN's Anderson Cooper, who was in Iraq during December 2005 election, noted on Laura Ingram’s radio show how impressed he was with the Iraqi army units he accompanied.

The Iraqi army excels because they were trained by the U.S. military. Although they don't have as much equipment as we, they make up for it with training, confidence, coolness under fire, and a positive attitude. (See A Few Good Iraqi Men.) Cooper felt safe with them in an unarmored truck with just a single 50-caliber machine-gun mounted on the back.

However, the Iraqi police, under the control of the Interior Ministry, are a totally different story. Cooper got the distinct impression that the police were not professional at all and did not seem to know what they were doing. Corruption and abuse have been serious problems among the Iraqi police since long before Saddam Hussein; it was the Iraqi police, not the army, that ran those wretched Shiite prisons where the U.S. military discovered Sunnis being routinely abused and even tortured -- in the correct meaning of that word -- by Shiite police commandos.

Finally, the American forces have decided to tackle these problems. I don't think they were dilatory; they consciously decided that it was more important to focus first on the army, and only when that was functioning smoothly did they turn to the police problem: law-enforcement requires a functioning nation of consistent laws, which was only possible after the Iraqi and Coalitiion armies gained control of the country.

Dec. 29 - American commanders are planning to increase significantly the number of soldiers advising Iraqi police commando units, in part to curtail abuse that the units are suspected of inflicting on Sunni Arabs, a senior commander in Iraq said Thursday.

Under the plan, which the officer said he expected would be formally approved in a few weeks, the number of advisers working with the Iraqi units would be greatly expanded. The advisers themselves would be under the command of American officers.

American advisers now accompany commando units as part of the vast effort to train and equip security forces to take over the fight against the insurgency and to maintain order.

At first blush, this might seem to contradict our policy of turning more control over to the Iraqi security force. But before we can hand anything over, we first must make sure that Iraqis are capable of assuming that responsibility. That is our primary duty, as only a functioning and responsible Iraq can keep up the fight against international terrorism.

Currently, only seven of the nine police commando units have advisors and none in the regular police stations. Under the new plan, all the units, commando (SWAT teams) and regular police, will have advisors. Also, the total number of advisors will increase by several hundred; in one case, an entire American battalion with more than 500 soldiers will be attached to one particular Iraqi police brigade.

This raises an obvious question: if we're going to be drastically reducing the number of troops in Iraq this year, how can we simultaneously increase the number of police unit advisors by such large numbers? The answer is that we are going to fundamentally shift our tactics, now that we have entered the end-game of nation-building.

The Fourth Infantry Division, which is now preparing to deploy in Baghdad and central Iraq, is being given a substantially larger piece of Iraqi territory than the unit it is replacing, and with fewer troops. The Americans are hoping that Iraqi units can pick up the slack; Iraqi forces operating more or less independently now are in charge of securing 60 percent of the capital.

The troops who are freed up from going on anti-terrorist patrols, thanks to newly trained Iraqi army units, will now be available to become advisors to the police units. I suspect we will see U.S. troop responsibility shift from active combat towards an advisory position, as the Iraqi government stabilizes. This is good for several reasons: first, less combat means fewer American and Coalition casualties; second, a less visible foreign presence (and consequently more Iraqi units patrolling instead) will calm fears that Iraq will be turned into an American colony... the Iraqis can begin to feel free not only from the crushing yoke of Saddam but also from the much milder leash of the "crusaders." Presumably, fewer Iraqi youths will feel alienated and driven towards terrorism and jihad if they don't see as many foreign soldiers walking the streets.

The toughest challenge our military advisors face is the culture of Iraqi police. Unlike the army, the police are often an extension of local tribes, more used to keeping the peace in the local community and supporting the local tribe than enforcing national Iraqi laws. The difficulty comes when local custom and national law clash, or when different tribes go to war -- as we have seen recently in the Gaza strip, where police from one tribe attacked a police station held by another tribe. Tribalism rivals jihadism as the major problem of the Arab (and Persian) Middle East.

Many years ago, I heard an odd story: two immigrants here in America from a third world country got into a fight, and one man killed the other. The killer was arrested and charged with murder; but a few days later, the victim’s family showed up in the police station and said "everything's all right now, you can release him."

Surprised, the DA asked why they didn't want the man who killed their loved one prosecuted. "Because," they patiently explained, as if speaking to an idiot, "the assailant’s family paid compensation for the death, and the whole incident is settled."

Neither family ever did understand why the American police refused to release the suspect... because they simply did not understand that it wasn't just a crime against the tribe, it was a crime against all of the people of the state -- and it could not be "settled" with a monetary payment. He had to stand trial.

This is going to happen over and over in the next few years, as Iraq suffers the slow and often painful growth from a collection of warring tribes to a modern nation-state. The only thing we can do is remind them again and again why they need to make a commitment to nationhood: because losing control over the police means a replication all over Iraq of the situation in Basra, where militiamen with strong ties to Iran and Moqtada Sadr terrorize the citizens and rule as cruelly as the Baath Party did. (Sad to say, the British troops, who had responsibility over this area, really dropped the ball; their "softly, softly" approach was perceived as "weakly, weakly," and they lost their face.)

In the end, the Iraqi people will have to make that choice: tribalism or modern nationhood. But I am confident that with the example of the United States before them, Saddam behind them, and Syria and Iran on either side, they will choose wisely.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 4, 2006, at the time of 12:05 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

January 3, 2006

Keep Talking, Rep. Big-Moutha!

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

On Friday, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), saved another couple of seats for the Republicans in 2006.

He was once again denouncing the Iraq War, which he has called both unwinnable and morally wrong, and the following exchange occurred, per Reuters:

"Would you join (the military) today?," he was asked in an interview taped on Friday.

"No," replied Murtha of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees defense spending and one of his party's leading spokesmen on military issues.

"And I think you're saying the average guy out there who's considering recruitment is justified in saying 'I don't want to serve'," the interviewer continued.

"Exactly right," said Murtha, who drew White House ire in November after becoming the first ranking Democrat to push for a pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq as soon as it could be done safely.

Perfect. Excellent. So not only are the Democrats opposed to this war and want us to yank the troops out -- quickly, quickly, before we accidentally win -- but they're also now urging Americans not to join the military.

I particularly love this snide aside by Reuters:

Murtha did not respond directly when asked whether a lack of combat experience might have affected the decision-making of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their former top deputies.

This "chickenhawk" charge by a party that has been nakedly anti-military for decades is becoming the biggest running joke of now four electoral cycles. First, I suppose the fact that Donald Rumsfeld's service as a fighter pilot in the Navy began in 1954, the year after the Korean War ended, means it doesn't count for anything.

Second, would Reuters ever dare suggest that President Franklin Roosevelt's "lack of combat experience" -- or indeed any military service whatsoever -- affected his "decision-making" in World War II? Of course not: this is a charge reserved for the handful of leftist Democrats with some military background to hurl indiscriminately at every Republican they dislike, including those who served honorably (I don't recall it coming up in 1996, when Bill Clinton ran against Bob Dole, or in 1992, when Clinton ran against George H.W. Bush).

Republican Party chair Ken Mehlman couldn't have scripted the Murtha interview any better. Between Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Caesar's Palace), and Rep. John Murtha, the Republicans won't have to actually write a single campaign commercial before the election: all they need do is just playback the hundreds of bitterly anti-military, anti-defense, anti-American comments made by prominent Democrats and applauded by the rank and file members of the Party.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 3, 2006, at the time of 3:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 2, 2006

Back Lot Iraq

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

When mountaineers climb a mountain, they begin by setting up a base camp, then a series of camps at higher altitudes, so that they can acclimate to the thin air and the cold. For the same reason, US soldiers headed for Iraq spend two or more months training in Kuwait, in order to get acclimated to the brutal environment before heading into the area of operations.

But in fact, by the time they head for Kuwait, our troops have already gone through a much more intense "acclimation" back home in the U.S.: they must first immerse themselves in the Iraqi culture that will soon surround them like water around a fish.

At Fort Dix, New Jersey, the Army runs a 30-acre re-creation of Iraq:

For two months, the group of 157 veterans and rookies has lived on Tiger Base, a 30-acre re-creation of Iraq at Fort Dix, one of two bases in the United States that offers an immersion course for new security forces, said Lt. Col. Norberto Cintron, who is in charge of the training.

They awaken before 5 a.m. and hear Muslim prayer calls five times a day. They eat flavorless food, use portable toilets and sleep on cots, 12 to a tent. In military exercises, simulated grenades and improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, explode, and soldiers like Specialist Kavanaugh dramatize severe or fatal wounds.

I first heard about this training camp a couple of years ago. At that time, the Army hired American actors to play the roles of Iraqi citizens. Our soldiers were mainly training for crowd control in confusing urban situations then. Evidently, that part of the training is still ongoing:

Every day, convoys from the 654th roll through a makeshift Iraqi city with hidden threats. When the men see the sign "The City of Balad Welcomes You," gunners grasp their M-249's and 50-caliber machine guns.

The convoys pass a blue mosque and aluminum shipping containers made to look like buildings, each spray-painted with Arabic or English phrases like "Go home USA." Sometimes snipers shoot blanks at the Humvees, inciting a simulated firefight.

Civilians, including Iraqis living in the United States, occasionally linger in the streets like movie extras. Some are instructed to look friendly and wave, others to grimace and yell in Arabic.

The camp at Fort Dix has improved its simulation, making it both more accurate and immersive since it was first created. We now have many returning servicemen who can contribute their own "lessons learned," as well as more Iraqi-born Americans to stock the town.

I am always amazed by our military's ability to adapt and improve. This seems to be a hallmark of a free society, that the military leaders (uniformed and civilian) value the opinions not only of the officers but also the men and women with stripes on their sleeves. Contrast this attitude to the heirarchical, top-down Russian command... how many years have they been losing the same war in Chechnya? They seem to have learned nothing from that combat; in fact, they still haven't learned the lessons from Afghanistan -- why they lost, and why we won.

I believe that this kind of innovation is exactly why our military will stay on top: America looks to the future, not the past.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, January 2, 2006, at the time of 6:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 28, 2005

Terrorists' "Human Shield" Tactics Take Toll on Civilians

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Sachi

That is what the title of this article should be; instead, the Washington Post misleadingly titled it U.S.Airstrikes Take Toll on Civilians, as if to say that the U.S. military is killing Iraqi civilians indiscriminately.

In recent days, the US military has increased the number and tempo of airstrikes. Terrorists, rapidly losing local support, have taken to hiding amongst unwilling civilians. The terrorists barge into civilian houses, either hoping to use the family as human shields -- or simply to kill them and blame it on Americans.

"I wholeheartedly believe the vast majority of civilians are killed by the insurgency," particularly by improvised bombs, said Col. Michael Denning, the top air officer for the 2nd Marine Division, which is leading the fight against insurgents in Anbar province.

In an interview at a Marine base at Ramadi, Anbar's provincial capital, Denning acknowledged that a city was "a very, very difficult place to fight." He said, however, that "insurgents will kill civilians and try to blame it on us."

Many civilians have been directly killed by the terrorists, and many others have been killed by the US response to terrorist attacks from populated locations. In either case, the root cause is terrorism itself, not the United States.

We don't know the exact number of civilian casualties. Numbers we get from local civiilians, witnesses, and hospital workers, like that "100,000 dead civilians" canard of a few months ago, are notoriously unreliable. Anderson Cooper of CNN, reporting an interview he conducted in a hospital, said that one hospital worker refused to discuss anything in Arabic because he did not want the local policeman to hear what he said; he was afraid for his life if the cops heard him saying what he said. Many local citizens' testimony can be tainted, either by sympathy for the terrorists, or simply by fear of them.

And yet some still think it is important to track down those elusive civilian casualties.

Sarah Sewall, deputy assistant secretary of defense from 1993 to 1996 and now program director for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, said the military's resistance to acknowledging and analyzing so-called collateral damage remained one of the most serious failures of the U.S. air and ground war in Iraq...

"In a conflict like Iraq, where civilian perceptions are as important as the number of weapons caches destroyed, assessing the civilian harm must become a part of the battle damage assessment process if you're going to fight a smart war," she said.

Such numbers might be useful in an academic sense; they might even be beneficial, so long as the're reported in the correct context. However, civilian casualty statistics are almost invariably reported by mainstream American media as the result of American aggression towards the Iraqi people. If civilian perceptions were that important, then announcing civilian casualty numbers out of context would do far more harm than good to the country... assuming anyone at the Post cared about that.

In general then, it is a very bad idea to start reporting civilian casualties; if we did, then the nightly news would report, "in heavy fighting in the Anbar province of Iraq today, two Maines were killed. Following American airstrikes, eight civilians were found dead." They might just forget to add -- "dead, with their throats slit by the terrorists. Oh, and did we mention that forty-eight terrorists were killed by those airstrikes?"

People in Iraq are not stupid. They know that whenever terrorists come to their town, it's bad news. When civilians are killed, the families typically know exactly who to blame.

Near the town of Qaim one day last month, a man who identified himself only as Abdul Aziz said a separate U.S. airstrike killed his grown daughter, Aesha. Four armed men were also found in the rubble of her house, he said.

"I don't blame the Americans. I blame Zarqawi and his group, who were using my daughter's house as a shelter," said Abdul Aziz, referring to Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of the foreign-dominated group al Qaeda in Iraq.

I hope the great majority of Iraqi civilians are like "Abdul Aziz."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 28, 2005, at the time of 11:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Just a Reminder of What We're Fighting FOR: the Gift of Life

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

A story like this warms my heart. Four Iraqi children who had likely fatal heart defects were brought to New York by a U.S. military program; at the Montefiore Medical Center, they were given life-saving heart surgeries.

Wsam is one of four Iraqi children who underwent surgeries in the last week to repair life-threatening congenital heart defects, in a joint effort by an international humanitarian organization and the U.S. military.

Last week a pediatric cardiac team at New York's Montefiore Medical Center performed a complicated procedure to increase blood flow to Wsam's heart and a major aortic artery.

Wsam was discharged this morning from the hospital in good condition, along with two other boys and one girl who also underwent critical heart surgery.

Wsam is 11 years old; the other three kids are Sivar Mohammad (6), Asaid Sibreai (14), and Ashjan Khaled (12). The surgeries were the first of many that will be performed on desperately ill Iraqi children, courtesy of Rotary International's Gift of Life organization; while in America, they stayed at Ronald MacDonald House and local host families. Part of the cost is also borne by the Rachel B. Cooper Foundation.

And who is responsible for bringing all these people together as a Christmas miracle for Moslem children?

The children arrived in New York City from Amman, Jordan, earlier this month after an Army reservist assigned to the U.S. military's Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Center put their families in contact with the Gift of Life International....

In September, Staff Sgt. Marikay Satyrano, a Bronx school teacher stationed in Amman, identified 60 Baghdad children as potential candidates for heart surgery. Working with the Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Center, Satyrano organized trips to Amman for the children and their families so that they could be screened by a Jordanian pediatric cardiologist.

Yes, I know; the primary function of the military is to "kill people and break things." But that is its function, not its purpose. Its purpose, as defined by the American people, is to pursue and defend American interests around the world... and one of America's interests has always been humanitarian relief, whether that takes the form of billions of dollars of monetary and food relief for a dozen countries devastated by a massive tsunami -- or four small surgeries for four young kids who would not have survived to adulthood otherwise.

Darned neocons -- they're everywhere!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 28, 2005, at the time of 8:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 27, 2005

Pangs of Birth

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

UPDATE and bump:

Some of my online nemeses have said that this Iraqi election was a "total failure." Because, they say, as the results of the election started to come in, the minority candidates started to complain about voter fraud. "The Ballots were stuffed with non-residents votes!" "Ballots stolen!" "They cheated!" Angry protesters marched in the streets demanding a recount or even a complete "Mulligan," redoing the election entirely. Some are talking about lawsuits, and an APB was issued for David Boies.

Well... that sounds like every danged election held in the United States where the Democrats lose, doesn't it? If this is the extent of the "failure," I'd call the election a ringing success!

Opponents of the election, the war, and everything say that since religious Shia won so many seats, Iraq will automatically become an Iranian-like theocracy. Encouraged by the Shia victory, some religious extremists (such as Moqtada Sadr's militha) will surge and begin terrorizing the secular Iraqis. Angry Sunnis will take up weapons and start a civil war. It will all end in tears, let me tell you.

Wait, don't panic folks. A few angry words are to be expected: we're talking about the birth of the Iraqi nation here... Iraq and its people have never experienced the democratic process before. If everything went smoothly, without a hitch , that would be a Christmas miracle: as Sgt. Garcia said, if things did not go wrong, it would not seem right.

Although the main Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, got the largest number of seats, they fell short of getting an outright majority. The New York Times explains:

Iraqis voted 10 days ago in a national election to choose members of a four-year Parliament, which will form a government. According to preliminary election results, the Shiite alliance won the single largest chunk of votes, but fell short of the majority required to form a new government by itself. Consequently it will likely need to form an alliance with one or more of the other groups that won a significant amount of votes - the parties of Kurds, Sunnis and secular Iraqis. [Emphasis added]

That means it won't be easy for the UIA to simply govern Iraq as they wish or walk all over everybody else. Also, in some cities, such as Basra in the South, people are already experiencing the Iranian influence up close and personal: Islamist militias with strong ties to Iran have been terrorizing the citizens for quite some time. If the secular parties are smart, they'll use this example to warn the citizens how bad their lives would be if they let Islamists rule.

As for a possible uprising by Sunni terrorists -- what more can they do than they're already doing? Their violent "resistance" had not worked at all. The alliance with al-Qaeda has deteriorated, and some Sunnis simply gave up violence altogether. By now, many Sunnis must have realized that if they get the civil war they've been pushing for, that will be the end of the Sunnis.

The weakened foreign terrorists and small remainder of Sunni rejectionists by themselves cannot possibly overthrow the new Iraqi government; all they can do is anger the Shia enough that they'll sit on the Sunnis' heads. The new and improved Iraqi army will not allow the rebellion to turn into a full-scale civil war.

It's true that corruption within the Iraqi police in the South is a serious problem; but perhaps the Iraqi army can deal with the Iraqi cops!

The government must constantly fight against Iranian influence, Sunni/Wahabbi Islamists, and even secular extremists. But these are the normal pangs of birth, a nation's birth, that every free country had to go through once.

UPDATE December 27th, 2005:

Leaders of the Shia and the Kurds, whose parties won large blocks of seats in the December 15th election, are now reaching out toward Sunni and secular parties to form a coalition government:

The visit of Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim of the Shi'ite Islamist Alliance to the Kurdish capital Arbil opened a series of planned meetings among rival factions intended to ease friction over election results which Sunni and secular parties say have been rigged and to begin building a consensus administration.

"We agreed on the principle of forming a government involving all the parties with a wide popular base," Kurdish regional leader Masoud Barzani told a joint news conference after talks with Hakim, the dominant force in the Alliance.

This bodes well for the Iraqi people -- and badly for the eternal pessimists.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 27, 2005, at the time of 1:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 21, 2005

Air Power Over Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

We've long known that our attacks against the terrorists in Iraq intensified leading up to last Thursday’s election. But we're just starting to find out how much air power was utilized. This AP story has the figures:

The number of U.S. air strikes increased in the weeks leading up to last Thursday's election, from a monthly average of about 35 last summer to more than 60 in September and 120 or more [per month] in October and November. The monthly number of air missions, including refueling and other support flights, grew from 1,111 in September to 1,492 in November, according to figures provided by Central Command Air Force's public affairs office. [Emphasis added]

One of the most effective weapons against the terrorists -- beloved by the troops but considered a "war crime" by former attorney general and current Saddam Hussein defender "Ramzi" Clark -- are the unmanned, remotely controlled Predator drones. While their surveillance capability is pretty well known, many Americans have no idea they're also used for air-to-surface attacks. The RQ-1 Predator (and the Navy/Marine version, the Mariner) carries a pair of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, which have a range of up to five miles and can fly nearly 1,000 mph.

The Hellfire -- yet another silly, reverse-engineered acronym, standing for Helicopter-launched fire-and-forget, even though most models are not fire-and-forget, requiring someone on the ground to continuously "paint" the target with a laser -- is primarily an anti-tank weapon, but it can be used against any fortified position. It typically carries a HEAT (High-Explosive Anti-Tank) warhead, which, despite being designed to destroy Sovet armor, still manages to work pretty well on pickup trucks, SUVs, and VBIEDs (Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices) -- which quickly become Airborne Already-Exploded Devices (AIRBALED).



An RQ-1 Predator Drone    The Hellfire missile fired by the Predator

RQ-1 Predator drone (l) and one of the two Hellfire missiles it carries (r)

From the Associated Press:

The role of the Air Force Predator is not secret but has been largely lost in the clutter of violence on the ground. At least five times this month an unmanned Predator flown remotely by airmen at flight consoles at an Air Force base in Nevada has struck targets in Iraq, mostly in insurgent strongholds in western Anbar province.

Gen. Michael T. Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, said in an interview with reporters at the Pentagon last Tuesday that Predators are attacking targets in either Iraq or Afghanistan "almost every day." He gave no details.

The training of the Iraqi ground and mechanized army has been largely successful. However, Iraq still has virtually no air force. When the American troops finally begin to leave Iraq, we will still need to give the Iraqis air support for some time; but the good news is that training of Irqi airmen has already started.

The action by U.S. aircraft comes with the nascent Iraqi air force having no offensive strike capability. Late last month the crew of one of Iraq's three U.S.-donated C-130 cargo planes flew a mission without a U.S. instructor aboard for the first time.

Hence, previous missions did have American instructors on board; we have been training Iraqi pilots and flight officers for an unknown period of time. The next step is to build up the Iraqi Air Force, probably relying to some extent upon former Saddam Hussein pilots and other aviation officers. If we're worried about the loyalty and reliability of such men, it's easy enough to restrict their role to that of flight instructors and instructors in basic aviation intelligence, meteorology, ground ops, communications, maintenance, and other vital elements that do not put them in the position to fire missiles at anyone.

Iraq also needs a patrol-boat navy to stop terrorists from landing in the Umm Qasr region on the Persion Gulf and to patrol up and down the riverways in Iraq (perhaps Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and his magic hat could pop round and give them some advice and a pep-talk). But an Iraqi navy is a subject for a later post.

Looks like the US still has a lot of work ahead. Thankfully, the longer we're there, the less actual ground combat we will be seeing... and the more our mission will shift to mentoring, training -- and of course, close air support.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 21, 2005, at the time of 6:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Saddam's Temper Tantrum

Crime and Punishment , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Saddam Hussein, who terrorized the citizens of Iraq for over 30 years, is now, in captivity, whining like a spoiled child. He and his attorney have used every trick in a book to delay the trial: the latest is playing the torture card.

The court is simply wasting time by bothering to listen to Hussein's childish lie about being "beaten" by his American captors; it's simple blame-shifting, throwing sand in our eyes. I doubt I'm alone in thinking that, even if it were true, so the hell what? Not that I believe a word from Hussein, considering what he did to so many millions of people for so long -- but even if it were true, do we care if he were roughed up a bit? Does that in any way mitigate his crime? Is bad treatment in jail an ex-post-facto "defense" to crimes against humanity?

"I want to say here, yes, we have been beaten by the Americans and we have been tortured," Saddam said, before gesturing to his seven co-defendants around him, "one by one."

Hussein is still sucking air. He's still balanced on his hind legs. He doesn't have any visible injuries, he isn't in hospital, he is not disfigured: if it were true that he was slapped around, it couldn't possibly be enough to amount to "torture," as Hussein of all people should know.

Evidently, Hussein has a serious problem with memory loss. He would do well to listen to the stories of his own victims. Then perhaps he would know what the word "torture" means.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 21, 2005, at the time of 1:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 15, 2005

"Civilianizing" Is Savage Duty

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

A few days ago, I came across an article about homeless OIF veterans. I thought of blogging about it, but reading passages like these really bothered me:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era.

"When we already have people from Iraq on the streets, my God," said Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. "I have talked to enough (shelters) to know we are getting them. It is happening and this nation is not prepared for that...."

[Seabees Petty Officer Luis Arellano, 34] said that after being quickly pushed out of the military, he could not get help from the VA because of long delays.

"I felt, as well as others (that the military said) 'We can't take care of you on active duty.' We had to sign an agreement that we would follow up with the VA," said Arellano.

"When we got there, the VA was totally full. They said, 'We'll call you.' But I developed depression."

He left his job and wandered for three months, sometimes living in his truck.

That is why I was rather reluctant to discuss it. However, while I was looking for news about the Iraqi election, I came across Sgt. Ron Long's December 8th post. Sgt. Long was one of the ten soldiers who were interviewed by president Bush during the teleconference just before the October vote on the Iraqi constitution.

Sgt. Long served as an Army Combat Medic with the 278th Regimental Combat Team (RCT) in Iraq; he's now safely back in Tennessee. He writes that he is having some difficulties adjusting to a civilian life.

I will be the first to tell you that the transition from combat-life back to day-to-day civilian-life has been tougher than I had expected. The "small" things are the difference. I think that it may only be something that another combat veteran would be able to understand. Don't get me wrong...it is great to be home, but it's just tough adjusting back into normal life. In combat, you tend to have to separate yourself from your emotions or feelings at the time and it may be hard to re-acquaint yourself with your emotions once your home, back with your family. I love my family more than words can describe but I have just pushed myself back into their lives; Lives and routines that they've been used to without a husband or a father. And it works both ways.

So maybe it's time to take a deep breath and take a sympathetic but dispassionate look at the problem.

It's difficult for a civilian like me to imagine what a soldier or Marine goes through on a combat deployment. Shot at and bombed, witnessing the violent deaths of close friends -- "brothers" -- and innocent civilians, including women and children -- unless he learns to detach his emotions, to lock them away somewhere, I think he couldn't get through the day. He cannot allow himself to feel every sorrow and pain, or he would go insane (living in such daily insanity). He can't react to every death the way a civilian would react to seeing a pedestrian killed by a car right in front of his eyes, because the soldier may see that everyday during a battle.

It's not normal for a person to step off to work knowing the chances are pretty good that someone will seriously try to murder him before he goes back "home" to the barracks. The soldier didn't grow up killing bad guys; he has to learn to adapt to the new, obscene reality of days of intense boredom broken up by sudden life-or-death combat. Or rebuilding destroyed buildings, if he's lucky (at least then, he can see creation, instead of just destruction).

He simply has to do his job, because he has no choice. People's lives depend upon him -- not just his buddies in the unit, but tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqi civilians and an unknown number of regular folks back home in the United States, whose lives and freedom could be at risk if the soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine screws up.

A friend of mine, a civilian volunteer who spent some time in Iraq in a non-governmental organization, told me once that she saw so many dead children, women, and old folks blown up by suicide bombers, she couldn't even cry anymore. She felt nothing at the time, while she was in Iraq; she couldn't afford to "feel."

But when she came back home, she suddenly became temporarlily deaf, for no organic reason. Her hearing came back eventually; but that may have been the only way she could deal with the parts of her "tour" that she had suppressed: she had to listen to herself for a while, to the thoughts she couldn't allow herself to think while she and her Iraqi "clients" were still in danger, before she could start listening to her ordinary friends and relatives back in the States.

For someone who goes through such a life-changing experience, it must be hard to adjust to an everyday, simple life back home, in college or at a normal job. Even I, who occasionaly ride a Navy ship for a few weeks, during which I cannot communicate with my husband except via occasional, unreliable e-mail, have difficulty shifting gears to a normal life at home; and that's after only a month and a half of absence. Returning to the world is definitely not a trivial problem; you'd have to expect a certain amount of adjustment problems, even including some homelessness.

At any given moment, we have (more or less) 150,000 troops in Iraq -- sometimes a little more, like now; sometimes a little less. Considering rotation, there must be at least three times as many who have gone through Iraq at some time during the war. That means we likely already have about a half a million Iraq vetrans. Even among ordinary civilians, you would expect to find some homeless people in a city of 500,000.

So it's truly remarkable how few homeless Iraqi vets there are, compared to how many there were among the returning Vietnam veterans:

Interviews and visits to homeless shelters around the Unites States show the number of homeless veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan so far is limited. Of the last 7,500 homeless veterans served by the VA, 50 had served in Iraq. Keaveney, from New Directions in West Los Angeles, said he is treating two homeless veterans from the Army's elite Ranger battalion at his location. U.S.VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans, found nine veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan in a quick survey of nine shelters. Others, like the Maryland Center for Veterans Education and Training in Baltimore, said they do not currently have any veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan in their 170 beds set aside for emergency or transitional housing.

I don't want to minimize the problem; any homeless vet is a tragedy. And like any other bureaucracy, I'm sure the Veterans Administration (VA) is not as efficient as it should be, and many veterans must be frustrated by its slow and complicated procedures. But there's just not much that can realistically be done to change things; when you have to deal with hundreds of thousands of people, personal interaction is impossible; bureaucacy is the only way to handle the caseload.

Having had to deal with Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), I've had more than my share of agony with government idiocy: waiting in line from 3:00 a.m. until noon, then told to come back some other day, because all the slots for counselling for the day were filled; paperwork that goes missing; finally working my way to the front of a forever-line, only to be told I need some other form, not the one the last INS agent gave me. I still deal with it somewhat as a civilian working in the Navy (that cursed Defense Travel Service!) If a veteran has to go through anything like that, that alone can drive you crazy, for sure!

The good news is that the military has improved drastically since the Vietnam days.

I've heard more than once that a soldier in Vietnam who's term was up was plucked from the middle of a battle by a helicopter and 24 to 36 hours later, dropped off back in his hometown... and that was all the "help" he got. How can a man go from killing enemies and being targeted by unseen snipers in the jungle to scooping ice cream or keeping books -- in just one day?

During World War II, it took long enough to get the troops back home by boat from Europe or the Pacific that they had at least some time to adjust from wartime to peacetime thinking. But in Vietnam, they had helos, C-130s, and then passenger jets back to San Francisco or Detroit or Atlanta. Boom, there they were.

Some years ago, Pentagon planners actually sat down and earned their pay by taking a hard look at the end point of a soldier's enlistment, when he would transition back to the world. They decided it was better to have a staged reintroduction back to civilian life following a combat tour, rather that the instant reintroduction during Vietnam. (At least, that's the way it's supposed to work; PO Arellano's experience shows that the system isn't perfect.) Thanks to the changes made between the late-60s, early 70s and today, returning veterans are treated much better.

Peter Dougherty, director of Homeless Veterans Programs at the VA, said services for veterans at risk of becoming homeless have improved exponentially since the Vietnam era. Over the past 30 years, the VA has expanded from 170 hospitals, adding 850 clinics and 206 veteran centers with an increasing emphasis on mental health. The VA also supports around 300 homeless veteran centers like the ones run by U.S.VETS, a partially non-profit organization.

"You probably have close to 10 times the access points for service than you did 30 years ago," Dougherty said. "We may be catching a lot of these folks who are coming back with mental illness or substance abuse" before they become homeless in the first place. Dougherty said the VA serves around 100,000 homeless veterans each year.

It would be very helpful if each returning trooper could get some kind of counselling before he gets back to civilian life. Not everyone has transition problems, but enough do that the service has a moral obligation to help them readjust.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are being fought with a lot of National Guard units... which means that entire units return home as a group; the soldiers are surrounded by people they know from their own home town; and they get a staged withdrawal from the military: they may stay on active duty for a while, even back stateside, before shifting back to the one weekend a month, two weeks a year duty. If veterans can get together and share their experiences during and after their deployment, that must help them a lot.

(I'm not sure how reserve units work; are they more like National Guard -- a bunch of people from the same general geographical area who deploy and then return as a group? Or are they more like the regular services?)

Military clergymen can also help. Sgt. Long links to this article:

"One of my major preparations for being here was to receive the CAV back," Lt. Col. Kevin Wilkerson, joint forces full-time support chaplain with the Tennessee Guard, referring to the 278th RCT which, before it was deployed, was known as the 278th Armored Calvary Regiment.

Wilkerson has worked very closely with the unit and the Family Readiness Group staff in providing support to members and families of the 278th while they were deployed, and now, while they are transitioning back home "to make their return home successful and make their transition easier," he said...

"The soldiers that are having difficulty, they identified them, and then they were referred to various places for assistance," Wilkerson said. The key is, the soldiers that are referred must follow through to get the help in the end.

Regular Army and Maine Corps personnel don't have the advantage of being surrounded by people who grew up in the same small town in Idaho or Connecticut, but at least entire units rotate in and out, I believe, giving them some continuity. And there are many, many more services developed to help them cope with the change of life necessary to detach from the military and rejoin the civilian world once more.

Help is indeed available for returning vets, so they can get back into a life and be just as comfortable watering the lawn and eating at Hometown Buffet as they learned to be patrolling the streets of Mosul and training Iraqi soldiers how to sweep a building.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 15, 2005, at the time of 12:53 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 14, 2005

Persian Slipups

Good News! , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Couple this story --

Police Seize Forged Ballots Headed to Iraq From Iran
by Dexter Filkins
New York Times
December 14th, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 13 - Less than two days before nationwide elections, the Iraqi border police seized a tanker on Tuesday that had just crossed from Iran filled with thousands of forged ballots, an official at the Interior Ministry said.

The tanker was seized in the evening by agents with the American-trained border protection force at the Iraqi town of Badra, after crossing at Munthirya on the Iraqi border, the official said. According to the Iraqi official, the border police found several thousand partly completed ballots inside.

-- with this one (courtesy John at Power Line, who takes the opposite position from what I argue below):

Ex-general says Iranian led torture of detainees
by Paul Martin and Maria Cedrell
The Washington Times
December 13, 2005

BAGHDAD -- An Iraqi general formerly in charge of special Interior Ministry forces said yesterday that a senior Iranian intelligence officer was in charge of a network of detention centers where suspected insurgents were routinely tortured and sometimes killed.

Gen. Muntazar Jasim al-Samarrai spoke to The Washington Times just as Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said he had widened an urgent investigation into complaints of abuse and torture in the country's detention facilities.

...and I say that if they're both true, it all adds up to good news, not bad, for Iraq and the future of the Middle East.

What? How can I say that?

Elementary, my dear Whalid: because we already knew that the Iranians were a bunch of evil theocrats plotting to seize control of the Moslem ummah... whereas, had it turned out that the Iraqi Shia were running those torture centers, or that they had engaged in a massive ballot-stuffing operation, we would have a true political crisis on our hands; because it is precisely the Iraqi Shia who will end up the most powerful block of the four largest that will survive this vote.

The fact that the worst betrayals of freedom are being committed, not by Iraqis betraying their fellow nationals and all the words of democracy and freedom, but rather by the Iranian mullahs who are already Number One on the list of people we want to kill someday soon, is actually a wonderful relief. It's like the episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show where Rob Petrie discovers that his expensive, new watch was stolen, not by one of his close friends, but instead by a professional burglar who had broken into the house. What a relief!

Iranian infiltration and interference is expected and can be dealt with -- not just by us, but by patriotic Iraqis, including Shia. It may be hard; the Iranians may even win some rounds (two other trucks full of ballots are said to have made it past the border guards). But in the end, we're looking for foreign infiltrators, perhaps with some Iraqi traitors supplying the local connection. We're not facing a bona-fide insurgency (which we have not seen to date) that wants to break away from the nation of Iraq and form part of Greater Iran.

On the secret prison-camp story, the Washington Times continues:

Gen. al-Samarrai said the Iranian intelligence officer, Tahseer Nasr Lawandi, works directly under the Kurdish deputy minister, Gen. Hussein Kamel, and is known throughout the ministry as "The Engineer."

"The Engineer was behind the torturing and killing in the ministry and was also in charge of Jadriya prison," said Gen. al-Samarrai, who left the ministry after a dispute with superiors and is now living in Jordan....

Mr. Lawandi, who had been a colonel in the Iranian Mukhabarat intelligence service, was granted Iraqi citizenship May 12, 2004, and awarded the rank of general, Gen. al-Samarrai said by telephone from Amman, Jordan, where he moved his family after two attempts on his life....

The general said Mr. Lawandi had worked with the minister and deputy minister to form a special security service to run the detention and interrogation operation and a separate group called the Wolf Brigade to capture suspects and bring them to the secret locations -- usually under cover of darkness....

Gen. al-Samarrai, a 46-year-old career officer, was ousted from the Interior Ministry in a purge of about 600 staff in July. Many were replaced by hard-line loyalists to new Interior Minister Bayan Jabr Solagh and his allies in the Badr Brigade, a militia affiliated with Iraq's largest Shi'ite religious party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The general said the minister had brought 17,000 Badr organization fighters into the ranks of Interior Ministry forces after Iraq's militias were officially disarmed. Most had received military training in Iran and were infiltrated into Iraq soon after the defeat of dictator Saddam Hussein.

If this story is both true and accurate, it would appear that Interior Minister Solagh would be one of those "Iraqi traitors" I mentioned above; but we don't yet know how much of this is correct, so tread cautiously: there certainly is a great temptation to put all the onus on the foreign jihadis and none on the locals who aid them or even simply turn a blind eye.

It's still a dangerous, deadly situation; but it's aways better to face off against foreigners trying to grab power than a significant portion of one's own population turning traitor. Let's hope the Iraqis and our own forces crack down hard on Iran (and also upon the Iraqis who accept such "allies"), not only by stopping future adventurism but also by punishing Iran for these two schemes. Something permanent, embarassing, and debilitating, perhaps involving Hezbollah, the enforcement arm of the mad mullahs of Iran.

Let them eat sand. But make sure the Iraqis know their real enemies are across their borders -- not across the parliamentary aisle.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 14, 2005, at the time of 7:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 11, 2005

Dario, Fo of the World

Art - Good, Bad, and Bogus , Iraq Matters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

Dario Fo, an überleftist playwright, Nobel Prize winner -- say, where have I heard that combination before? -- and candidate for Mayor of Milan, has rushed into production a play about the lonely vigil of Cindy Sheehan (and presumably her rather massive and worshipful entourage, though I'm not sure whether any of them has a speaking part):

"Peace Mom" received its world premiere in London on Saturday night, starring British actress Frances de la Tour, with both Sheehan and Italian dramatist Fo in the audience.

The one-woman show is based on extracts from Sheehan's letters to Bush and other writings. De la Tour delivered the monologues beneath large pictures of Sheehan's son Casey and a tank in the Iraqi desert in front of a plume of fire....

The play was rushed into production to conclude a day-long conference of activists opposed to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, with de la Tour reading some passages from a script.

But relax; I'm sure the play will be every bit as fair and even-handed as his other farces and satires, which have gotten him kicked out of virtually every theater group he has ever joined, banned (off and on) in most countries, and have drawn death threats from the Italian Left, the Fascisti, condemnation by the Church, and a tear-gas grenade hurled during a performance of one of his plays. (Another play exalted the PLO... and actual members performed in its cast).

"Frances did such an amazing job of conveying my feelings of anger and betrayal," a tearful Sheehan said after the play.

She said she hoped the play would help "put a human face" on the war.

There is a peculiar belief among leftists that if a person manages to enrage people on all sides of the political spectrum, that must mean he is telling the truth (perhaps even speaking it to power). This is, of course, utter nonsense: it is entirely possible to offend everybody merely by being a big enough fugghead. (I just blurted the name "Bill Burkett" out loud, Tourette's-like, for some inexplicable reason.)

Fo, the leftist playwright who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature, said his wife and artistic partner Franca Rame would star in a longer final version of the play in Italy.

I can barely contain my anticipation. I am giddy with excitement.

I suspect "Mother Sheehan," having evidently abandoned her family (including her surviving son), has finally found her ideological soulmate: a man who hates everyone and everything. Surely this must be minute seventeen or eighteeen for Cindy Sheehan by now... I wonder when the bill for overtime will come due?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 11, 2005, at the time of 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 10, 2005

What Has the Times Got Against Coercion Anyway?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

Now the New York Times is on a tear because some of the information we obtained about al-Qaeda came (surprisingly enough) from terrorist prisoners who really didn't want to talk to us -- and who therefore required coercion to loosen their tongues. Even more staggering, after ratting out their friends, some of these terrorists claimed that everything we had extracted from them was a lie, and they accused us of torturing them:

Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim
by Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
December 9, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them to escape harsh treatment, according to current and former government officials.

What is it with the Times and prisoner claims? They seem to believe that the Bush administration cannot be trusted about the war on Islamic jihadism because we have an interest in the issue... but a prisoner who unquestionably has interests at stake is still trusted implicitly by the Times. Note how "said he had fabricated them" above transubstantiates into casual certainty just two paragraphs later:

The new disclosure provides the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted partly from the administration's heavy reliance on third countries to carry out interrogations of Qaeda members and others detained as part of American counterterrorism efforts. The Bush administration used [Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi's] accounts as the basis for its prewar claims, now discredited, that ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda included training in explosives and chemical weapons.

By "now discredited," what Mr. Jehl means is "now recanted." But the fact that a prisoner recants is not a refutation of his earlier claims... a fact that seems to elude the CIA, as they immediately withdrew the intelligence they garnered from those claims. Or did they have another reason to withdraw?

Libi was captured in Pakistan in late 2001, and he was at the time the highest ranking leader of the terror group al-Qaeda. This is not a man unfamiliar with interrogation techniques and how to resist them; but he would also know that nobody is so stupid as to believe without evidence anything said by a prisoner with an agenda to lie -- whether in distress or resting easily in a comfy chair. Libi must have known that anything he said would be thoroughly checked out before it was accepted; so the idea that he just spun wild fantasies to avoid being tortured by the Egyptians (to whom we had rendited him in January of 2002) is absurd on its face.

But this is not the first time the CIA has chosen to accept implicitly and absolutely the words of a terrorist prisoner over and above any other evidence: to this day, the primary reason the CIA refuses to buy the claim by Czech intelligence that 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta met with a top officer of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Prague is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh both deny, from U.S. custody, that such a meeting took place... despite the fact that they do not claim to have been out of the country during that time, nor to have personally seen Atta during that period: only that his movements do not match the timelines that Mohammed and Binalshibh gave to the CIA.

(The other main reason is that Atta's cell phone was used during the period he would have been gone. Considering that his cell phone would likely not have worked in Prague anyway, and that he had roommates, this doesn't exactly leap out as a killer alibi to me.)

The claims of al-Qaeda learning from Iraq how to build and use chemical and biological weapons were almost certainly evaluated in light of other intelligence gleaned from other sources; they may be right, they may be wrong -- but their accuracy is not determined by whether Libi later recanted.

From where I'm sitting (in my living room, actually), it appears as though Libi gave little intelligence until he was rendited to Egypt. Then, after some coercion and intelligence interrogation (of Libi and others), he spilled his guts about the Iraq/al-Qaeda connections.

More than a year later, after we invaded Iraq, when al-Qaeda declared Iraq the line in the sand with the West -- then and only then did Libi suddenly retract his claims, according to Mr. Jehl of the Times:

The fact that Mr. Libi recanted after the American invasion of Iraq and that intelligence based on his remarks was withdrawn by the C.I.A. in March 2004 has been public for more than a year. But American officials had not previously acknowledged either that Mr. Libi made the false statements in foreign custody or that Mr. Libi contended that his statements had been coerced.

(Note again the dead certainty in the Times account: the statements may well be controversial or even questionable -- but there is no evidence presented here, or even hinted at, to prove them "false.")

Last, here is a fascinating question-and-answer pair from the article... which Mr. Jehl presents in reverse order and separated by many paragraphs and a page jump, which serve -- perhaps accidentally -- to obscure the fact that the first answers the second.

The question of why the administration relied so heavily on the statements by Mr. Libi has long been a subject of contention. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, made public last month unclassified passages from the February 2002 document, which said it was probable that Mr. Libi "was intentionally misleading the debriefers."

The document showed that the Defense Intelligence Agency had identified Mr. Libi as a probable fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda involving illicit weapons.

And the answer, which appears before the question:

A government official said that some intelligence provided by Mr. Libi about Al Qaeda had been accurate, and that Mr. Libi's claims that he had been treated harshly in Egyptian custody had not been corroborated.

I have often wondered: I can't possibly be the only person able to add a pair of integers to get a third. The solution to Carl Levin's conundrum seems pretty clear to me:

Libi is a serial fabricator; of course he is. To quote from the wonderful Charles Bronson movie Breakheart Pass (screenplay by Alistair MacLean, from his novel), "if a man is a thief and murderer, it follows he may be a liar as well." All al-Qaeda leaders are fabricators.

But one doesn't fabricate from nothing. Interrogators already know some information, and they will check out other things the prisoner claims before relying upon them. If he lies, the prisoner will be punished -- probably very harshly.

So what do fabricators do? They tell part of the truth... just not the whole. They lie about some things but not all. And that is how you crack them: you separate and interrogate many people who each have some piece of the puzzle. Then you combine narratives and eliminate obvious lies. You come back to each prisoner with information he likely knows -- information he knows he did not tell you; he believes you know more than you actually do, so his lies will become smaller, and more of what he says is the truth.

Lather, rinse, repeat -- many times, over a space of months. You use coercive techniques to wear him down, not to torture him into screaming out anything he thinks you want to hear, because that is useless to you.

Almost certainly, Libi lied as best he could; equally certainly, he let slip much that was true. His "recantation" therefore is probably designed more to make us doubt what is true than help us eliminate what is false. Why would Libi feel any regret at having misled us, his enemy? Why try to set straight a narrative that is in his interest to keep ambiguous and obscure?

The CIA knows this; they're not utter fools. So they, too, have an agenda: they do not want Libi's confessions to be true, or at least not proven true, because that would help justify the invasion of Iraq... and we already know the CIA is willing to move heaven and earth, and even leak data to smear itself, in order to damage George W. Bush on his signature issue. So after their assessment has been used to justify that invasion, they seize upon the opportunity of Libi's "recantation" to withdraw their own intelligence, thus leaving Bush twisting slowly in the wind.

I may have some details off, but I think the basics are sound. And if that is the case, we have answered the question in the title of this post: the Times, like the CIA, doesn't like rendition and coercive interrogation not because they're seriously worried about the civil liberties of al-Qaeda leaders, but because such tactics can actually wring the truth out of terrorist prisoners.

And they can't handle the truth.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 10, 2005, at the time of 2:39 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 7, 2005

Another Day, Another Life

Everyday Heroes , Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

During my daily surf of MilBlogs, I stumbled onto this one: 365 and a Wakeup. 365 and a Wakeup is one of the finalists in the 2005 Weblog Award's Best Military Blog category. When you read a post like this one, you can easily see why. (I'm working my way through all the MilBlog nominees so I can vote intelligently.)

Thunder6, "Deputy Commander of A Co, 1-184 IN, 3ID in Southern Baghdad," describes a recent encounter with a young mother and her disabled son.

During our last patrol through the shantytowns a young mother waited patiently outside the bustling throng of children hopping back and forth between our vehicles. I don’t remember seeing her arrive, she just suddenly appeared on the outskirts of the roiling flock of children. In that sea of motion she stood as still and resolute as a obsidian tower, her black burkha providing a mute contrast to the gaudy kaleidoscope of children’s clothing. She was clutching a toddler tightly to her chest, and I reflexively assumed she was trying to secure some candy for her child.

It turn out she wasn't there for candy. Her son was feeble and couldn't stand, let alone walk. She was desperately hoping that the Americans could somehow cure him.

Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do medically to help. The child suffered from a congenital birth defect that left him frail and sickly. “Sir, we couldn’t help him even if we were in the States," said the company medic. But the sight of the poor little boy gnawed at Thunder6.

The memory of that wisp of a boy stayed with me, and after a few days I asked SSG Spite if he could think of anything we might be able to do for the family. SSG Spite said that he would see what he could do and then disappeared for the rest of the day. The following day I knocked on SSG Spite’s door and when I walked in I almost dropped my coffee mug in shock. There sat SSG Spite quietly cleaning his weapon… sitting in a wheelchair. SSG Spite seemed to sense my agitation without even turning around and after a pregnant pause he said “Don’t worry sir, I’m fine. The wheelchair is for the kid”. Then he turned around, gave me a sly grin and said “But I had you worried, didn’t I?”. We laughed for a few minutes and then SSG Spite said “If I didn’t feel sorry for the kid I’d keep the wheelchair – this is the best seat in the barracks”.

What kind of "occupiers" would stop and think to help a helpless child? The American kind, that's what.

The next time A-Company patrolled in the area where the woman and her son lived, they brought the wheelchair with them. After struggling their way through mobs of Iraqi children, who were ecstatic to receive the little Iraqi flags that they handed out, they knocked at the door of the woman. They brought her and her son out to their Humvees.

When we arrived SGT Bard opened one of the doors and pulled and tugged until the wheelchair slid through the armored door. I wish I could describe the womans face when we gently picked up her son and placed him in the wheelchair - but there are some emotions words cannot hope to touch.

The Howard Deans, John Kerrys, and Jeff Engelhardts of the world can call our guys and girls any despicable, schoolyard name they want and smear them from now until next November; they can call on us to cut and run and say the world would be better off if Saddam were still in power in Iraq. But the fact of the matter is that guys like Thunder6 are the norm, not the exception; and he and his men are making a world of difference over there. One child, one life at a time.

What's John Kerry done lately?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 7, 2005, at the time of 4:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Big "White" Lie

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

UPDATED: See below.

The American White-Phosphorus War Crime in Fallujah....

This story of a supposed American war atrocity -- a crime against humanity -- has circulated stealthily through the left-wing blogosphere since an Italian TV documentary Fallujah:The Hidden Massacre claimed that the US military used a banned chemical weapon, white phosphorus, to massacre civilians in Fallujah in November of 2004. The documentary aired early last month, marking the first anniversary of the second (and successful) US Fallujah offensive, Operation al-Fajr (translation, "Dawn"), but originally called Phantom Fury, which commenced November 8th last year. [We should note at this point that it is the documentary and the person discussed below that call white phosphorus a "chemical weapon," not Big Lizards. See update at the end of this post. -- BL]

The key, self-proclaimed "witness" to this extrordinary atrocity claim is a "former American soldier" named Jeff Engelhardt. He participates on a group blog, Fight to Survive, a "MilBlog" of a strange sort: the contributers are all supposedly soldiers, all bitterly opposed to the war. In Fight to Survive, "hEkLe" (Engelhardt) claims that he served in the Army in Iraq from February 2004 through February 2005. His unit, he says, was "3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division in Baquba, Iraq." He may well be telling the truth (though I'm skeptical; remember the Winter Soldier project and see below). But sadly, even if he is a legitimate soldier, wearing the uniform doesn't always mean loyalty to the country.

From the anti-Bush retoric in his blog -- venomous even by left-wing standards -- it is obvious that he has been a bitter enemy of the Commander in Chief and the Iraqi war from the beginning. But agenda aside, there are some curious dicrepancies between his interview in November 2005, in which he publicly accused his fellow soldiers of committing war crimes, and the contemporaneous blog account a year earlier of what he saw and did in the last two days of the offensive.

One I noticed right off: Engelhardt refers at one point to a "Bradley tank."

However, upon reaching the front lines, a safety standard was in effect stating that the urban combat was extremely intense. The lightest armored vehicles allowed in sector were Bradley tanks.

Obviously, I was never in the Army, and my husband was Navy. But isn't that thing called a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, or maybe just a Bradley? Maybe in Army slang, soldiers refer to a Bradley as a tank... can anyone who was in the Army confirm or refute this? I've just never seen that term before.

He also refers to Humvees as "trucks," and he writes that "fighter jets" flew in to make "a series of massive air strikes" "terminating whole city blocks at a time." I have no idea whether Army personnel know the difference between fighters and bombers; or maybe he meant F/A-18 Hornets. But the terms just seems a little... off. And has anyone else ever heard of Cobras and Apaches sporting "chain gun missile launchers?" I Googled the term, and the only hits I got were to various reprints of Engelhardt's own post.

A conservative blogger, Michael Moynihan of Stambord: the Stockholm Spectator blog, has pointed out some other discrepancies. However I noticed something else that might have been overlooked, by and large, by those focusing on Engelhardt's repulsive, anti-American rhetoric. (I think I may have seen a brief mention of this point on another MilBlog; unfortunately, I didn't note which one it was at the time, and now it's gone from my memory.)

While Engelhardt's bitter slanders against the United States have caused most decent Americans to discount his claims, this one discrepency is almost conclusive evidence that Engelhardt is making up the whole story: in his contemporaneous blogpost, Engelhardt does not even so much as mention the supposed "massacre" he describes so vividly a year later.

Engelhardt says he drove to Fallujah as an escort during the last couple of days of the operation. He did not participate in the combat itself but just observed from the city limits. In the Italian interview, he says he heard orders issued over the radio to drop white phosphorus, or "Whiskey Pete," on civilian areas of the city:

REPORTER: Were any chemical weapons used in Fallujah?

JEFF ENGELHARDT: From the U.S. military, yeah, absolutely. White phosphorus. Possibly napalm may or may not have been used; I do not know. I do know that white phosphorus was used, which is definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, a chemical weapon.

REPORTER: Is he sure of it?

JEFF ENGELHARDT: Yes. It happened.

REPORTER: How can he be certain?

JEFF ENGELHARDT: Well, it comes across radio as a general transmission. When it happens like that, you hear it on the radio through -- we have speakers in our trucks -- speakers and then the transmission goes to the speakers, so it's audible. And as they'd say, “In five [inaudible], we're going drop some Whiskey Pete.” “Roger. Commence bombing.” I mean, it just comes across the radio, and like, when you hear “Whiskey Pete,” that's the military slang.

Sounds quite definitive, doesn't it? But his contemporaneous account shows he was not so sure at the time...

And as always, the artillery—some rounds were high explosive, some were illumination rounds, some were reported as being white phosphorus (the modern day napalm) [reported? reported by whom? -- BL]. Occasionally, on the outskirts of the isolated impact area, you could hear tanks firing machine guns and blazing their cannons. It was amazing that anything could survive this deadly onslaught. Suddenly a transmition came over the radio approving the request for “bunker-busters”.

How did "reported as being white phosphorus" became "definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, a chemical weapon" one year later? Also notice he writes white phosphorus and a radio transmission in the same paragraph. And yet, he does not mention the order to drop "whisky pete." Instead he writes he heard an oder to drop "bunker-busters," which are completely different animals.

Wouldn't this have been the ideal place to mention the "Whisky Pete" radio transmission -- if he had actually heard such a thing?

Let's continue. In the interview, Engelhardt said that he had seen the evidence of chemical weapon use in Fallujah:

NARRATOR: Contrary to what was said by the U.S. State Department, white phosphorus was not used in the open field to illuminate enemy troops. For this, tracer was used. A rain of fire shot from U.S. helicopters on the city of Fallujah on the night of the 8th of November. [inaudible] will show you in this exceptional documentary, which proves that a chemical agent was used in a massive and indiscriminate way in districts of Fallujah. In the days that followed, U.S. satellite images showed Fallujah burned out and razed to the ground.

[Yet amazingly, photos of Fallujah today show that it must have been completely rebuilt in a single year! -- BL]

JEFF ENGELHARDT: The gases from the warhead of the white phosphorus will disperse in a cloud. And when it makes contact with skin, then it's absolutely irreversible damage, burning of flesh to the bone. It doesn't necessarily burn clothes, but it will burn the skin underneath clothes. And this is why protective masks do not help, because it will burn right through the mask, the rubber of the mask. It will manage to get inside your face. If you breathe it, it will blister your throat and your lungs until you suffocate, and then it will burn you from the inside. It basically reacts to skin, oxygen and water. The only way to stop the burning is with wet mud. But at that point, it's just impossible to stop.

REPORTER: Have you seen the effects of these weapons?

JEFF ENGELHARDT: Yes. Burned. Burned bodies. I mean, it burned children, and it burned women. White phosphorus kills indiscriminately. It's a cloud that will within, in most cases, 150 meters of impact will disperse, and it will burn every human being or animal.

Whether he is qualified to judge the cause of death by simply observing a corpse is an interesting question, but beside the point. The reality is that he never saw those corpses he described... not in Fallujah, anyway, which is what the documentary and his interview were about.

In his blog post, he said he was not involved in the fight. He was far enough away that his superior thought they were safe. He could see a massive amount of bombs being dropped. But the closest they came to his position was about one kilometer away.

Engelhardt in 2004 never mentions he saw any person being killed or body being blown up. In fact his description of the air raid is nothing like that experienced by my father, whose village was bombed by American planes during WWII, when he was a little boy. My grandfather's house was blown to pieces in the raid; the family, including my father, only survived because their bomb shelter was built in the middle of a bamboo grove. (The next-door neighbors' shelter was built underground but in a bare field. None of them survived.)

Engelhardt's description tells me that he was close enough to see buildings being destroyed, but too far to see any individual person being killed. So when was he supposed to have seen these "burned bodies?"

Perhaps he means he saw them later, the aftermath of the bombing. Earlier in the same post, he wrote that his superior was planning on going into the city the next day to access the damage. But Engelhardt's next post is months later, on February 20th, 2005 -- and he never mentions any subsequent visit to Fallujah. Jeff "hEkLe" Engelhardt doesn't mention "Falluja" again until a post on September 14th, 2005... which, coincidentally, is also the next time he mentions the word "phosphorus." But even in this post, he says nothing about having witnessed people burned to death by white phosphorus (or "Whiskey Pete," which term he never uses even once on the Fight to Survive group blog).

Had Engelhardt accompanied the officer the next day -- and if he were telling the truth about the supposed atrocity -- he would have seen many "burned bodies." And had he seen such bodies, there simply is no question that he would have written extensivly about it right there and then in his blog. He seemed to recall in such vivid detail a year later; wouldn't the nightmare of a phosphorus-holocaust have been seared, seared in his memory a few days, not 365 days, after seeing them?

Perhaps, you might suggest, he did see it; but he was afraid to write about it because he was worried he might be arrested and court-martialed if he called his fellow soldiers war criminals or accused the president of ordering a crime against humanity. Such an extordinaly claim could create a backlash. Or maybe he just didn't want to say bad things about America; maybe he's a superpatriot who never thinks ill of his country.

Really? Just read though his blog. He clearly was not afraid to call the commander in chief obscenities and various other slurs. He was not afraid to talk about how brave the "insurgents" were. He was not afraid to write that Americans were conducting massacres in Iraq.

As Stambord quotes....

That veteran—the star witness—is one Jeff Englehart [sic], identified only as a “former soldier” that can “absolutely” confirm that such weapons were deployed in Fallujah. On his blog, written during his time in Iraq, Englehart [sic] quotes Che Guevara (he pompously urges his commanders to read him, to learn the true nature of an insurgency), beseeches his readers to “remove a lying fascist crook from office”, a “lowly criminal scumbag” who is the reincarnation “of John Wayne/Adolph Hitler (sic), the man “responsible for “Operation Iraqi Oppression,” which made use of “’final solution’ type missiles.” On the other hand the “resistance” (Englehart’s [sic] description) in Fallujah was “boldly fighting” his comrades. “What determination!” While some call the “resistors”—who constructed roadside and car bombs and suicide belts from within the city of Fallujah—cowards, Engelhart [sic] “call[s] them brave.” In other words, an unimpeachable witness with no political axe to grind. (After returning from his tour of duty, Engelhart [sic] has signed up with the Cindy Sheehan circus)

In fact, in the very same "hEkLe" post quoted above, Engelhardt writes the following:

Every time an atrocity is revealed through our news outlets, our grasp on this once secular nation slips away. As America grows increasingly disturbed by the images of carnage and violent death of her own sons in arms, its government loses the justification to continue the bloody debacle. Since all these traits are the conventional power’s unavoidable mistakes, the guerrilla campaign will surely succeed. In Iraq’s case, complete destruction of the United States military is impossible, but through perseverance the insurgency will drive us out. This will prove to be the inevitable outcome of the war.

This is not a man afraid to accuse his government and his comrades of committing "atrocities." If Engelhardt had actually seen then what he claimed a year later he saw, he would have written about it on November 19th, 2004. If he had tried to hold it in, he would have exploded like one of those “'final solution' type missiles." He would have cited it as Exhibit A of American war crimes. He would have crowed about it. He would have found an appropriate Che Guevera quote.

Besides, if the US actually used a banned chemical weapon, shouldn't it be investigated? Why didn't Engelhardt report this to the authorities, instead of waiting a year, and telling it to an Italian TV interviewer? (As usual, Leftists wait until they're abroad before bearing false witness against their own country and comrades.)

This entire story is a crock of baloney. I'm pretty sure Engelhardt never even set foot in Fallujah. In fact, he parses his words so carefully, he can honestly claim that he never actually said he personally witnessed an atrocity in Fallujah; he can even claim he never technically said he saw those "burned bodies" in person. Maybe he saw them on television while watching Point of View!

Engelhardt never saw burnt bodies in Fallujah; he never heard any radio transmission ordering white phosphorus to be dropped (commit a war crime -- over an open radio channel?). He is a fraud and a liar.

Even if it turns out he is a soldier, as well.

UPDATE 11:22 by Dafydd:

Commenter Tony B notes that:

It wouldn't be investigated because using willie pete ISN'T a war crime. I'm quite certain we did use it. There are so many things that point to this guy simply not knowing what he's talking about that I am suspicious whether he was even a soldier at all. If he was, he had very little experience with combat equipment.

Tony B turns out to be absolutely correct -- as I suspected when I was editing Sachi's post (we both read all posts that appear on Big Lizards). I checked carefully to make sure that we never made the statement ourselves that WP was a chemical weapon... we simply let Mr. Engelhardt and the Italian interviewer speak for themselves.

Here is GlobalSecurity.Org speaking to the subject:

White phosphorus is not banned by any treaty to which the United States is a signatory. Smokes and obscurants comprise a category of materials that are not used militarily as direct chemical agents. The United States retains its ability to employ incendiaries to hold high-priority military targets at risk in a manner consistent with the principle of proportionality that governs the use of all weapons under existing law. The use of white phosphorus or fuel air explosives are not prohibited or restricted by Protocol II of the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention (CCWC), the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects.

Several commenters have confirmed what Sachi and I thought: terms like "Bradley tank" and "chain gun missile launcher" are not terms that an infantryman would use. Both of us have experience only with the Navy, so we were a little uncertain what the Army terms were... but those just sounded weird. I'm still curious myself whether soldiers refer to their Humvees as "trucks," or whether the word truck is exclusively used to refer to the Army trucks that haul things, those 2-ton or 5-ton things that actually look like real trucks. But again, although I've never heard a soldier refer to a Humvee as a truck, I'm not familiar with Army slang, and maybe it's more common than I thought. Anybody?

Note also that Engelhardt is the only person associated with Fight to Survive who used the phrase "whiskey pete" to refer to white phosphorus, and he only did so in the Italian documentary -- not on the blog itself (as Sachi noted). There is at least one reference from some other FTS author to "willie pete," which a couple of commenters noted is the correct slang.

I wonder if the other blog-authors on FTS have ever actually met Jeff Engelhardt, or if he is just another poster to them? Do they know anything about him other than what he, himself has written?

The more I read, the more suspicious I get about Mr. Engelhardt.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 7, 2005, at the time of 4:06 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

December 6, 2005

The Dean Drive

Elections , Iraq Matters , Politics - National , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

In the 1950s, a crackpot named Norman Dean "invented" what he called, with characteristic modesty, the Dean Drive. This device supposedly produced linear momentum without any reaction mass: that is, Dean claimed it would just zoom off in a straight line without having to expel anything behind it, like a jet or rocket must.

The fabled John W. Campbell, jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction, the best science-fiction magazine ever published, had by then entered his crank phase, championing such cockamamie ideas as the the Hieronymous Device and Dianetics. Campbell siezed upon the Dean Drive as the epitome of his almost religous faith in the ability of backyard inventers to circumvent the fundamental laws of the universe. Like, you know, gravity.

Today, we have a new Dean Drive: the drive by Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean to circumvent the fundamental laws of electoral politics. In this case, by getting the entire Democratic Party to run on a platform of higher taxes at home and defeatism abroad... and imagining that this will levitate the party to victory in 2006 and 2008.

Dean's descent into utter crackpottery began during the 2004 elections, but it continues apace as he desperately battles to bring about a great defeat in Iraq, for which he presumably will claim credit as he runs for president in 2008 (hat tip to the enigmatic eloi, Michelle Malkin). Some samples for your election delectation:

Dean: US Won't Win in Iraq
Posted By: Jim Forsyth
San Antonio WOAI.com
December 5th, 2005

(SAN ANTONIO) -- Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democratic Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years....

"I've seen this before in my life. [From the sidelines, he means. -- the Mgt.] This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

Aha, so the Murtha-Pelosi Proposal is about to become the new sailing orders for the Democratic Party... excellent! (Imagine this said in my best impersonation of Monty Burns.) What other suggestions does Mean Howard Dean have to offer?

"The White House wants us to have a permanent commitment to Iraq. This is an Iraqi problem. President Bush got rid of Saddam Hussein and that was a great thing [that's mighty white of him -- BL], but that could have been done in a very different way. [Perhaps levitating him out of the country by use of the Dean Drive! -- BL] But now that we're there we need to figure out how to leave. 80% of Iraqis want us to leave, and it's their country."

Translation: been there, done that. Time to go. Who's on Letterman tonight? I really love that turn of phrase: "now that we're there we need to figure out how to leave." For such a short trip, we could have walked.

Here's a rather startling claim:

And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion.

Gosh, that will come as a great shock to the Kurdish victims of Zarqawi's terrorism during his (formerly presumed) year running Ansar al-Islam in northern (Kurdistan) Iraq from 2002 to 2003 -- a year before "this invasion," while Saddam Hussein was still firmly in charge. Starting right after Zarqawi received medical treatment in a Baghdad hospital restricted to leading members of Hussein's inner circle.

Governor Doctor Dean seems not only "stuck on stupid" but stuck in the 70s. First, there are the incessant Vietnam comparisons; and now this:

Dean also compared the controversy over pre-war intelligence to the Watergate scandal which brought down Richard Nixon's presidency in 1974.

"What we see today is very much like what was going in Watergate," Dean said.

Well! Who can argue with that?

All I can say, contemplating four more years of Harry Reid (D-Las Vegas) running the Democratic caucus in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as Minority Leader in the House, and Howard Dean as the philosophical mentor of the party as chairman, is "bring -- it -- on!"



Mad How Disease
Victim of Mad How Disease? Dean puts his finger on the root of the problem.

Norman Dean never had any success selling his "Dean Drive": his secretiveness, lying, and raging paranoia always got in the way. That plus the fact that Dean's idea was a nonsensical pile of junk to begin with. I doubt that his contemporary namesake will do any better... and mostly for the same reasons.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 6, 2005, at the time of 4:36 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

A Few Good Iraqi Men

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Finding a real success story disguised as a catastrophe is becoming a hobby of mine. When I go through the familiar pessimistic headlines, I often stumble onto good news hidden in the corners. Take a look at this story from Reuters, which tries so hard to play the Iraqi Army as good, but not, well, good enough. Trying so hard, they don't even notice that they prove exactly the opposite: that the Iraqi soldiers are really as good as it gets.

The success of Iraqi Security Force training is undeniable. More and more Iraqi forces are taking over operations and leading attacks. Even the MSM have to admit the readiness of the Iraqi forces. But being the MSM, they also have to find some way to give it a negative spin. If they can't attack the Iraqis' ability, what can they pick on? Ah, lack of equipment, that's what!

Equipped with little armour or ammunition, [Iraqi Army] soldiers can often be seen wearing balaclavas and toting AK-47 rifles as they ride around in the back of Nissan trucks.

This sounds familier. Weren't the MSM complaining about lack of armored vehicle for the US troops not too long ago? But wait, there is more.

Iraqi soldiers could storm the village, conduct house-to- house searches and round up suspects, but with only a few unarmoured Nissan trucks to ride in, they'd never get out alive.

"We'll need the American military to lead us out of there," he said, noting that the route out of the village would probably be booby-trapped with improvised explosive devices and the Iraqi army didn't have vehicles that could withstand them.

But what's the real story? That Iraqi troops are now capable of leading a raid with the US troops serving only as backup. They just don't have enough Humvees. Well, actually they are short of something even more important:

Even as a group of [Colonel Mohammed Najem] Kharye's men prepared for the village raid by scrutinising a map drawn in the sand and marked with smooth stones, others squatted nearby, still waiting for identification badges.

They can map up and plan the raid, but they don't have enough ID badges! Actually, I wasn't kidding when I said this was "something even more important." But I'll wait until the end of the post to explain what I mean.

Shortage of equipment or lack of logistical support is nothing new. Every army suffers from such problems at one time or another. What's important is the troops' ability to solve the problem by improvising with what they have, to come up with a workaround. The Iraqi army is doing exactly that; this is where Reuters doesn't even understand the real story behind the superficial story they're reporting.

Though attacks on Iraqi forces are frequent, the soldiers do not have the armoured Humvees, Bradley fighting vehicles or tanks that are capable of withstanding bullets and some blasts.

In an attempt to make their Nissan trucks safer, Iraqi soldiers at Khamiss have welded sheet metal to the sides. AK-47 rifles and rocket propelled grenades are their main weapons -- they have not even been given mortar rounds.

Obviously, the better an army is equipped, better off they are. But if the army is not skilled, all the weaponry in the world can't bring a victory. And without the "heart" for combat, neither training nor equipment can make soldiers stick out a fight.

Saddam's army was armed to the teeth and even trained, after a fashion. After the fall of the regime, we found thousands of weapons' caches filled with state of the art weapons (side by side with virtual antiques). How well did that army fight? Confronted with the enemy (us), Saddam's soldiers simply threw away their guns and fled.

Within weeks of Saddam's fall in April 2003, U.S. authorities disbanded Iraq's 400,000-strong armed forces. U.S. officials said this simply formalised the fact that the army had evaporated in the aftermath of the war, with soldiers deserting en masse.

Weaponry and equipment are nice, but they don't make an army. Men (and women like Sgt. Hester) with the will to fight and the training to make it a good one make an army. From the looks of it, the new Iraqi Army has plenty of both -- now.

Even soldiers sometimes forget that; Americans -- heck, Westerners -- have had that kind of "heart" for such a long time, they sometimes forget it's a rare and precious thing. That more than anything else is why Western civilization dominates the world.

I was looking at the website Soldiers For the Truth, and I read a piece by former intelligence officer Michael Gifford. It's a great article; Captain Gifford says the road to getting out of Iraq leads through victory in training up the Iraqi Army... he's definitely no John Kerry! But then he falls into a trap that catches many others:

I spent 6 months training the police of the restive Al Anbar Province of Iraq in the winter and spring of 2004, and that was after 6 months of fighting in the streets along side them. For the few first months, we were wondering why they were deserting in huge numbers, why they were running from firefights. I realized very quickly that we were asking them these questions from inside our armored humvees and from behind our bulletproof vests. No wonder these guys were turning tail and running! I put myself in their shoes, and started to see just how bad they had it.

But wait... if that's the problem -- then why didn't the American Marines run from Iwo Jima? They didn't have any armor then, either. What about Col. Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine Volunteers on Little Round Top at the battle of Gettysburg, repulsing attack after attack from the Confederate forces? At the end of the battle, as the Grays massed for a final attack, Chamberlain realized his men were out of ammunition... so he ordered a bayonet charge which shattered the Confederate ranks.

The 20th Maine didn't have any uparmored Humvees. Neither did the 250 men who defended the Alamo, buying time for Sam Houston to raise a Texican army against Santa Anna.

For that matter, what about the 300 Spartans and their 4,000-5,000 Greek allies who held the gates of Thermopylae against the two-million-man Persian army of Xerxes, led by King Leonidas? At the end, the Spartans sent their allies away to live; but none of the Spartans survived.

The armor doesn't make the man; the man makes the armor.

And then came the body armor--my God, you should have seen the looks on their faces when we issued them new bulletproof vests in the winter of 2003. We went as far as to show them the actual test plates from the vests we were issuing--the plates that we took out to the range and shot--proving that they were able to stop both 9mm and AK47 rounds. A few weeks after their issue, I heard reports from Fallujah that the Iraqi police were really showing some cajones - much, much more confidence.

I don't think Captain Gifford understands what really happened, because it isn't a military question. It wasn't that the Iraqis were no longer afraid of dying. That body armor was a magic spell, the spell of acceptance: they had professional equipment, so they started thinking of themselves as professionals.

The same with the armored Humvees and the improved ammunition. Here is the proof:

Their morale began to increase with the equipment we began to provide. And once we began to outfit them with better uniforms, leather jackets and patches, you could really see their pride begin to swell. And anyone who's worked with the Iraqi Police or Army knows that pride is a huge factor in their morale.

New uniforms and leather jackets aren't the keys to destroying the insurgency, but it shows we give a damn about making sure they're safe and professional looking.

It showed that we treated them as equals -- and they began to perform as equals. And that is what I meant by saying that giving the Iraqi solders ID badges really was more important than Humvees: the badges (the Los Angeles Police Department calls them "shields," which reminds us of the Spartans again) were like the Wizard of Oz giving the Cowardly Lion a medal; the courage was there within him all the time... he just needed someone to help him find it.

Back to Col. Kharye's Iraqi troops and why they really have become "as good as it gets."

But Kharye says morale is high -- especially among soldiers who remember life in Saddam Hussein's army....

"In the past if you made a mistake, you were executed immediately, no questions asked," Kharye said. "Now we can debate the positives and negatives of operations. It's a big difference."

Saddam's army led from the top but the U.S. military is teaching Iraqi officers to encourage lower ranking soldiers to make decisions and take charge, said Arrington.

That is the real story... the one that Reuters missed because their big, fat agenda got in the way again.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 6, 2005, at the time of 2:26 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 5, 2005

Ask The 3/25

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

An all too familiar headline spreads across the AP news stream: Ten Marines Killed by Roadside Bomb. "Worst in Iraq since Aug." it crows. God, they are so giddy to report the deaths of American troops, aren't they?

A couple of months ago, I stumbled across a MilBlog whose author was a soldier writing from Iraq. He had just lost five of his comrades within 48 hours in two separate incidents. He was devastated, morose and angry. But the one thing he was not was despairing: he was proud of his buddies who sacrificed their lives to protect our country.

I don't know which unit (if any) Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) was talking to, but the warriors I read about are not "broken." If anything, after living through the deaths of their friends, they are more detemined than ever to finish what they started.

The Belmont Club frequently introduces such soldiers; for example, Wretchard links to this post:

"We know we made a positive difference," says Cpl. Jeff Schuller of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, who spent all but one week of his eight-month tour with Mayer. "I can't say at what level, but I know that where we were, we made it better than it was when we got there."

It is the simplest measure of success, but for the marine, soldier, or sailor, it may be the only measure of success. In a business where life and death rest on instinctive adherence to thoroughly ingrained lessons, accomplishment is ticked off in a list of orders followed and tasks completed. And by virtually any measure, America's servicemen and women are accomplishing the day-to-day tasks set before them.



Cpls. Jeff Schuller and Stan Mayer
Cpls. Jeff Schuller and Stan Mayer

The 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines -- the "3/25" -- is the unit that lost 15 marines in less than a week - nine of them in one of the deadliest roadside bombings against U.S. forces during the war.

The 3/25 has seen the worst of the war. But the yarns they want to tell us are not stories of loss and futility but fond memories of the Iraqi people whose lives have turned around because of Americans like these soldiers.

Their conversation could be a road map of the kind of stories that military folks say the mainstream media are missing. One colleague made prosthetics for an Iraqi whose hand and foot had been cut off by insurgents. When other members of the unit were sweeping areas for bombs, the medics made a practice of holding impromptu infant clinics on the side of the road.

They remember one Iraqi man who could not hide his joy at the marvel of an electric razor. And at the end of the 3/25's tour, a member of the Iraqi Army said: "Marines are not friends; marines are brothers," says Lt. Richard Malmstrom, the battalion's chaplain.

In Hit, where marines stayed in force to keep the peace, the progress was obvious, say members of the 3/25. The residents started burning trash and fixing roads - a sign that the city was returning to a sense of normalcy. Several times, "people came up to us [and said]: 'There's a bomb on the side of the road. Don't go there,' " says Pfc. Andrew Howland.

For Mayer, who joined the reserves because he wanted to do something bigger than himself, and for Schuller, a third-generation marine, Iraq has given them a sense of achievement. Now when they look at the black-and-white pictures of marines past in the battalion headquarters, "We're adding to that legacy," says Schuller.

This is what they wish to share with the American people - and is also the source of their frustration. Their eight months in Iraq changed their lives, and they believe it has changed the lives of the Iraqis they met as well.

One example of the progress we should focus on is that more and more Iraqi citizens are opening up to American troops. I read a similar story in Bill Roggio's report from Husaybah --

On the way to Hue, 1st Platoon encountered a possible IED. Buried in the ground, tail up, was a mortar round. An Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was called in to destroy the device. The round was not rigged to explode. “Lots of times the locals find rounds and bury them in clear view so we can find them”, said Corporal Gauls.

Ask The Soldiers, which lets ordinary soldiers post thoughts unedited, also talks about this phenomenon.

[A]s far as how do ppl [sic] respond to us, they seem to warm up to us as each passing day. They now realize that we are not here for any other reason but for their independence and for them to be able to be free and have a voice.

Another contributer wrote:

[M]ostly all Iraqi citizens like having us here for example the waving hello as opposed to the finger. Yet, most of them understand that we are here for them not against them.

But the MSM is too busy reporting al-Qaeda's anti American "demonstration" to ask the American soldiers themselves what they think:

An AP Television News video showed the insurgents walking down a shuttered market street and a residential neighborhood, as well as firing four mortar rounds. The masked men, however, appeared relaxed, and the U.S. command dismissed the video as little more than a publicity stunt. [Emphasis added]

If you were actualy in Iraq like this next Marine, you could have seen yet another "publicity stunt" in progress:

Oh, there was a story a few months ago about this "huge protest" in the streets of Ramadi demanding that America leave Iraq forever. To tell the truth about that one; it was about 40-50 bad guys grouped in front of cameras to make the "crowd" seem much bigger than it was and as soon as Humm-Vee's rolled up to the scene, they scattered and seemingly vanished. Yeah, tough dudes alright.

So if mere civilians, who only catch a glimpse of this reality, are frustrated by the MSM's negative crusade against the war, how do you think the troops who are actual eyewitnesses to history? Ask The Soldiers answers that rhetorical question:

If you just read the daily paper and watch the MSM, you would think that we are losing this war on terror and that we are making no progress whatsoever. I say BULL****! Everyday that passes we make progress. We are training the Iraqi soldiers and police forces so that they can deal with this insurgency and the normal problems of a country. [Expletive deleted by Big Lizards.]

As for Murtha's broken-army comment, one more Marine, Major John Tamms, has this to say: (Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds for the quote):

Unmitigated crap. And I don't say this out of defensiveness or service pride - I'll tell you about how far we have had to come in a bit. First, though, a little material for you to mull over. . . .

The constant stream of re-enlistments was a revelation to me. When I was the Executive Officer of the garrison at Bagram Airfield (a job I gladly traded away after 5 months) I had to find room to more than double the size of the Retention Office. I personally administered the oath of re-enlistment to an E-5 and an E-7. The E-5 was a mother of two young children and the E-7 was eligible to retire when we got home!

Broken? Hardly. Is it difficult work? Yes.

Do not mistake hard work for foundering. Respectfully, Rep. Murtha - you are wrong. Dead wrong. [Emphasis added.]

If you really want to know how the war goes, send not for the politician, the protester, or the newspaper man. Just ask the 3/25.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, December 5, 2005, at the time of 2:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 3, 2005

Ace of Aces

Iraq Matters , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

Ace over at Ace of Spades linked our post Which Hand Do You Choose; as I always do, I read the post that linked us... and boy, am I glad I did.

Ace's own post (below the part where he links us) is just about the clearest, most succinct, and most devastating critique of the entire liberal "cheerleaders for defeatism" clique I've read. Definitely better than our own post that he linked! (Note, this is not simple modesty, because I have none.)

Just a sample to whet the appetite:

Their careers, political and media, depend upon an American defeat in Iraq. They cannot hope for an actual Al Qaeda military victory; that's simply an impossibility. They need Bush to concede defeat in the jaws of victory, and to do that, they need to convince the American public that a war moving towards full victory is actually doomed to certain defeat.

They need this. They cannot recapture power without it. And if convincing the American people to save their asses by forcing Bush to surrender requires them lying about white phosphorus, "propaganda" in Iraqi newspapers, and the like, they'll do so, gladly.

Read the whole post: if this doesn't put it all on a nutshell for you, you're too reductionist!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 3, 2005, at the time of 5:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Buy an Ad, Go to Liberal Heck

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

I've refrained from commenting on the "evil military destroying freedom of the press in Iraq" story because -- unlike the mainstream media -- I actually wanted to get the facts before throwing myself off the Conclusion Cliff. And now we have some.

Recall that the charge, leveled by a group of anonymous "military officials" and published in the Los Angeles Times, was that the American military, as part of a devious, underhanded PsyOps program, was bribing Iraqi newspapers to publish propaganda pieces that were actually written by intelligence officers; the poor newspaper editors, the charge went on, had absolutely no idea that they were being covertly manipulated by their American spymasters, in blatant violation of the Rights of Man, international law, and the Iraqis' sacred First-Amendment rights.

After actually investigating the facts of the case, however, the Pentagon has explained what was really going on. From "Military Explains News Propaganda in Iraq," by Lolita C. Baldor

"If any part of our process does not have our full confidence, we will examine that activity and take appropriate action," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman in Iraq. "If any contractor is failing to perform as we have intended, we will take appropriate action."

Johnson did not specify what changes, if any, might be considered.

The remarks came after days of reports and criticism that the military was covertly planting in the Iraqi media stories that, while factual, gave a slanted, positive view of conditions in Iraq. [One presumes that a slanted, negative view of conditions in Iraq -- which we see every day from the same Los Angeles Times that breathlessly broke the tendentious version of this story -- would have been perfectly fine. -- the Mgt.]

U.S. military officials in Iraq said articles had been offered and published in Iraqi newspapers "as a function of buying advertising and opinion/editorial space, as is customary in Iraq."

Coalition forces compiled the material, and the Washington-based Lincoln Group was authorized to pay Iraqi papers to run the articles, which were supposed to be identified in that way, said Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Warner, who went to the Pentagon Friday for an explanation, said the program was carefully monitored by military leaders and was reviewed by attorneys to ensure it complied with the law.

In other words, the huge "scandal" is that Coalition forces commissioned American soldiers to write "factual" accounts (nobody disputes that they were factual) of military engagements and rebuilding efforts, to counter the malicious lying by the terrorists and the American and international MSM. These accounts were handed to a third party in order to protect the Iraqi newspapers from reprisals by Zarqawi. The stories written by the soldiers were run as ads and paid commentary, which is a normal way to get your message out in Iraq; and they were supposed to have been identified as having been written by American soldiers.

But somehow, attribution didn't always get attached. Who could be responsible for that? Was it deliberate "propaganda," as the Associated Press has taken to calling it?

In fact, the Times even admitted that typically, the stories were identified as adverts, and were sometimes run in special fonts, typographies, and colors. But evidently, not every Iraqi stringer working for the Lincoln Group identified the purchaser as the Coalition when he sold the stories.

Why might they not do this? The answer is easily deduced from the Los Angeles Times story that started the whole "scandal" investigation, "U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press":

After he learned of the source of three paid stories that ran in Al Mada in July, that newspaper's managing editor, Abdul Zahra Zaki, was outraged, immediately summoning a manager of the advertising department to his office.

"I'm very sad," he said. "We have to investigate."

The Iraqis who delivered the articles also reaped modest profits from the arrangements, according to sources and records.

Employees at Al Mada said that a low-key man arrived at the newspaper's offices in downtown Baghdad on July 30 with a large wad of U.S. dollars. He told the editors that he wanted to publish an article titled "Terrorists Attack Sunni Volunteers" in the newspaper.

He paid cash and left no calling card, employees said. He did not want a receipt. The name he gave employees was the same as that of a Lincoln Group worker in the records obtained by The Times. Although editors at Al Mada said he paid $900 to place the article, records show that the man told Lincoln Group that he gave more than $1,200 to the paper.

Al Mada is widely considered the most cerebral and professional of Iraqi newspapers, publishing investigative reports as well as poetry.

Zaki said that if his cash-strapped paper had known that these stories were from the U.S. government, he would have "charged much, much more" to publish them. [Emphasis added -- here, there, and everywhere]

And there you have it. Let's apply Occam's Razor to this conundrum.

  1. The Coalition decides to counter the agitprop of the enemy by employing the powerful engine of the truth.
  2. For this truth, they turned to the actual soldiers in the field, who wrote stories.
  3. Coalition media folks handed them over to the Lincoln Group to be placed with attribution in newspapers.
  4. The Lincoln Group decides the best way to do this is to use Iraqi stringers, just as AP, the L.A. Times, and every other non-Arab news source in the Middle East uses.
  5. The stringers discover that when they inform the newspapers the ads are being bought by the Coalition, they get charged a lot more. They hit on a scheme: they don't tell the newspapers and don't get receipts. The newspapers charge $X dollars to place the stories as ads; the stringers inform the Lincoln Group that they had to fork out $Y, where Y is significantly larger than X. The stringers pocket the difference.

But of course, this reality doesn't make for a good scandal-mongering story; and it also doesn't fulfill the urgent task of portraying the American military and the war effort as sleazy, disreputable, and distasteful. So the Los Angeles Times works itself into a lather of moral indignation -- and Hurricane Plantgate forms off the southwestern coast.

Some of the charges in the L.A. Times story are unintentionally just hilarious. Here are my favorites:

  • "Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said."

    [Hm....]

  • "According to several sources, the process for placing the stories begins when soldiers write "storyboards" of events in Iraq, such as a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid on a suspected insurgent hide-out, or a suicide bomb that killed Iraqi civilians.

    "The storyboards, several of which were obtained by The Times, read more like press releases than news stories. They often contain anonymous quotes from U.S. military officials; it is unclear whether the quotes are authentic."

    [Note: the very same story making this accusation contains not a single named primary source; every source is anonymous! They are identified only as "military officials."]

  • Finally...

  • "'Absolute truth was not an essential element of these stories,' said the senior military official who spent this year in Iraq."

    [Quelle horror!]

So it goes. The whole imbroglio turns out to be a tempest in a molehole. But in the meantime, the Los Angeles Times dumps yet another shovelful of Shinola on the heads of the American military. And the Pentagon now must waste weeks explaining to the allies, the Iraqis, and the American people that no, they were not engaging in some horrible, Soviet-style propaganda campaign; that they're not against freedom of the press; that they're not anti-American; and that they're not fighting dirty, even though the terrorist enemy is and always will.

But that's the way the liberals' covert war against America has always been fought: another day, another slander.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 3, 2005, at the time of 12:03 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 2, 2005

The Dogs That Didn't Bark

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Yesterday, I was talking with a liberal (because I must, Miss Coulter!) about Iraq, and the fact that it has become Ground Zero in the war against Islamic terrorism. I received the standard rejoinder, but I stymied him with a simple question:

Mr. Liberal: But it wasn't "Ground Zero" before we invaded. It was our invasion that drew a huge terrorist army to Iraq.

Mr. Lizard: Then why didn't our presence in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia draw huge terrorist armies to those countries?

Granted, our presence on the "holy soil of Mecca" was the major reason cited by Osama bin Laden why he authorized the 9/11 attacks, though I doubt it really had much to do with the attack (we were actually way out in the desert, at the Prince Sultan Air Base, not Mecca; but one shouldn't expect much geographical accuracy from Osama). But they didn't pour into either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, did they? Well... why not?

The reason is pretty clear: because we were not in either of those two countries to democratize them. There was no danger that we would transform either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait from totalitarian dictatorship to a free country. Therefore, the defenders of the faith had nothing to fear.

It would be easy to understand if al-Qaeda had made Afghanistan its do-or-die last stand: that was their home, and we booted them out. But funnily enough, they haven't. Where are they? The Taliban keeps on fighting there, hoping to seize control once again; but al-Qaeda appears to have abandoned them and that poor, old sod, Mullah Omar -- anybody still remember him? -- to their fates.

But Iraq was another story. All informed Americans still capable of rational thought agree on two propositions: there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but al-Qaeda did not run that joint the way they ran Afghanistan; Hussein did, and nobody else. Iraq was a one-man band before 2003. Nor was it an Islamist state. Yeah, yeah, Hussein added "Allahu Akbar" to the flag; but it was nothing like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan.

So on paper, there is no reason in the world why a Wahabbist, Islamist group-of-groups like al-Qaeda would care one jot what befell Saddam Hussein. In fact, to the extent that kicking out the secular tyrant Hussein could possibly (at least in the mind of an Islamist) lead to the Shiite portions of Iraq joining or at least allying with Iran, an undeniably Islamist state, wouldn't one imagine that the terrorists would welcome the fall of Hussein?

So something else must have drawn them to try to destroy the nascent nationalism in Iraq.

"You will not apply my precept," [Sherlock Holmes] said, shaking his head. "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. When, then, did he come?"
-- Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan; "the Sign of Four;" 1890.

Obviously, in real world induction we can't eliminate all possibilities but one. But in this case, we're on pretty safe ground concluding that what distinguishes Iraq from all those other countries that al-Qaeda could have poured into and made the last stand for militant Islamism but didn't is that Iraq is the only Arab country in the Middle East where America is deliberately and with goodness aforethought trying to establish a functioning Islamic democracy atop the ruins of a military dictatorship. Al-Qaeda and its ideological brotherhood cannot allow liberty and democracy to flourish in the Middle East because that would indeed be the doom of militant Islamism -- whose central precept is totalitarian obedience.

Which was, of course, what was to be proved; quod erat demonstrandum.

So Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and of course George W. Bush are absolutely correct: the terrorists decided to make Iraq the line in the sand between civilization and barbarism, so we must treat it as such as well and drive them out. If we lose in Iraq, we lose across the world; but when we win, that domino will topple the rest -- pulling down not merely Arab dictatorships or even just Islamic theocracies, but tyranny from North Korea and Vietnam, to Zimbabwe and Somalia, to Cuba and Venezuela. People everywhere will see that it's possible to have democracy without having to jettison traditional culture and become Americans.

They attacked -- but we will decide.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 2, 2005, at the time of 5:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 1, 2005

Which Hand Do You Choose?

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Here in the right hand, we have this:

  • Iraq suicide blasts at lowest level in 7 months

    Major General Rich Lynch, top spokesman in Iraq: “In the month of November: only 23 suicide attacks; the lowest we’ve seen in the last seven months, the direct result of the effectiveness of our operations.”

  • 11.5% drop in U.S. fatalities in November

    Fatalities dropped from 96 in October to 85 in November, despite the fact that November was the month of the phenomenally successful Operation Steel Curtain in Anbar and Ninawa, driving the terrorists out of their somewhat-less-than-safe houses along the Syrian border.

  • There are now more than 120 Iraqi Army and Police combat battalions actively fighting against the terrorists

    President Bush: "Of these, about 80 Iraqi battalions are fighting side-by-side with coalition forces, and about 40 others are taking the lead in the fight. Most of these 40 battalions are controlling their own battle space, and conducting their own operations against the terrorists with some coalition support.... At this moment, over 30 Iraqi Army battalions have assumed primary control of their own areas of responsibility. In Baghdad, Iraqi battalions have taken over major sectors of the capital -- including some of the city's toughest neighborhoods."

  • We've officially transferred 90 square miles of the Baghdad province to the Iraqis

    Bush again: "Over a dozen bases in Iraq have been handed over to the Iraqi government -- including Saddam Hussein's former palace in Tikrit, which has served as the coalition headquarters in one of Iraq's most dangerous regions." The current policy of clear and hold has liberated 28 cities from terrorist control; those cities, including such major urban centers as Fallujah and Ramadi, are now controlled by pro-government Iraqis.

  • The Iraqis have held two successful, national, free elections in the past year

    The first in January, electing an interim parliament; number two on October 15th, ratifying the new Iraqi constitution. And a third will be held -- and will doubtless be even more successful than the first -- on December 15th, choosing the first freely elected parliament under a constitution ratified by the people in any Arab (or Persian) country in the Middle East.

  • The terrorists and the Baathist bitter-enders have been unable to hold any territory whatsoever

    Not only that, they have been unable to get a national front off the ground -- a national front is a unified and cohesive ideology that engages the support of a substantial portion of the population. But the goal of the die-hards (Saddam Hussein back on the throne) is rejected even by the Sunnis; and the terrorists' goal (a Mesopotamian caliphate with Zarqawi ruling the joint) is so terrifying to nearly all Iraqis that even with the very significant number of murders of police and army recruits, they continue to flood in... and more and more are Sunnis.

    About the only thing everyone in Iraq agrees on is that eventually the Americans, the British, and other foreign Coalition forces should leave. But since "everyone" includes the Americans and the Brits, this is hardly a problem.

But on the left hand, we have this:

  • To show they are still in charge, terrorists have left some litter and graffiti on a street in the Anbar capital of Ramadi

    After an unsuccessful attack on the U.S. base, in which only one granade was fired with no casualty in our part, "the insurgents [sic] left behind posters and graffiti saying they were members of al-Qaida in Iraq and claiming responsibility for shooting down a U.S. drone. There were no reports of any U.S. drones being shot down, though." (The so-called "insurgency" actually isn't, however; Reuters is simply illiterate. See the continuation of this post for an explanation why.)

  • The foreign terrorists still retain some ability to randomly kill women and children by blowing themselves up

    I'm not sure exactly how this is supposed to help Zarqawi; most Iraqis seem to be less impressed than appalled, and they're deserting the terrorists (and turning them in) in droves. I don't think the two facts are unrelated.

  • The anti-Iraq forces do still maintain their strategic alliance with the U.N. bureaucracy, the internationalist nationalists in much of Europe, Africa, and in Venezuela, and with the American and international mainstream media, film community, and academe

    Again, whether this will ultimately help them is questionable: if a Democrat is elected president, it will likely be a decisive coalition; but the mere fact of its existence works against any Democrat being elected president. Ever.

  • Finally, the cut-and-run policy of cowardice dictated by the gaggle of terrorists, mobsters, and once-weres in Iraq is rapidly becoming the majority position of the Democratic Party

    Although this means the Democrats will likely not win control of any body of the government anytime soon, they can still make mischief by rolling the Republicans whenever they can gather enough cheerleaders for catastrophe to block a vital war bill via the filibuster, or to amend some critical piece of legislation into its mirror opposite by voting en banc, while the right remains fractured over some other, trivial contention.

On this last point, we have House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) coming out firmly in favor of Vietnamizing the Iraqi War, following closely on the heels of famed fair-weather feather Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) lending the shreds and patches of his tattered credibility to the same cause. Today, in an effort to rally the troops, Murtha offered more of his insightful military analysis:

Murtha Says Army Is 'Broken, Worn Out'
Associated Press
Dec 1, 2005

LATROBE, Pa. (AP) - Most U.S. troops will leave Iraq within a year, and the Army is "broken, worn out" and may not be able to meet future military threats to the country's security, Rep. John Murtha said....

Murtha predicted most troops will be out of Iraq within a year.

"I predict he'll make it look like we're staying the course," Murtha said, referring to Bush. "Staying the course is not a policy." [It isn't? -- the Mgt.]

Murtha, 73, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, expressed pessimism about Iraq's stability and said the Iraqis know who the insurgents are, but don't always share that information with U.S. troops. He said a civil war is likely because of ongoing factionalism among Sunni Arabs, and Kurds and Shiites....

Murtha, a decorated Vietnam war veteran, said the Pennsylvania National Guard is "stretched so thin" that it won't be able to send fully equipped units to Iraq next year.

(We don't know how the administration responded to this bizarre rant because AP didn't see fit to ask for comment from anyonewho disagreed with Murtha.)

Democrats in the Senate are nervously shuffling in this same direction, with many a backward look; like Lot's wife, some of these reluctant fainthearts stand a good chance of being turned into a pillar of salt next November... which, contrary to confident prophecies by triumphalist Democrats and dolorous Republicans alike, I predict will be a very good month for Bush and the conservatives.

So... which hand do you choose? The right or the left? Asking myself what I always ask in such cases of moral dilemma -- WWZD? (no, the Z doesn't stand for Zarqawi, Zawahiri, or Zarathustra) -- I think I shall have to lead with the right, Señor.

How about you?

(If you're interested to learn why Rumsfeld was correct and Reuters churlishly wrong about the meaning of insurgency, read on.)

On the all-important diction front, the word "insurgent" does not mean "anyone fighting against any government." Even Reuters admits this -- though they don't understand they have admitted away their whole case.

Nov 29, 2005: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued on Tuesday that the guerrillas fighting U.S.-led foreign forces and the American-backed government in Iraq do not deserve to be called an "insurgency."Rumsfeld instead referred to the guerrillas in Iraq as "the terrorists" and "the enemies of the government." U.S. military statements also have referred to insurgents as "anti-Iraqi forces...."

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines an insurgent as "a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government."

God preserve us from truncated internet definitions!

The next step is to ask, well what is a revolt then? A real dictionary, such as my Websters Third New International, defines a revolt thus: 1 a casting off of allegiance : an uprising against legitimate authority : a renunciation of allegiance and subjection (as to a government). And an uprising is: 1 an act or instance of rising up.

Put them together, and you have the indisputable requirement that an insurgency, revolt, or uprising requires those who formerly accepted allegiance to a government rising up, surging in support of a positive agenda against the policies of the government, then renouncing their allegiance to the government because it won't mend its ways. The impetus must come from within the people themselves, not be foisted upon them by foreigners; a discontent with the government that bubbles up from the heartland of an oppressed people yearning for release.

But neither Zarqawi nor the ex-Baathists hiding out in Syria ever professed allegiance to the current Iraqi government; nor do either of them lift the Iraqi people up on wings of a positive ideology... they simply kill them for daring to side with freedom. Nor do the people have any expressed grievance with the current government, which certainly is not oppressing them; the only grievance among some Iraqi Baathists is that they're no longer in charge, like they used to be.

Words have meanings; and those meanings are not created by dictionaries but merely chronicled (well or badly). The terms insurgency, revolt, and uprising have never been used to mean a case as in Iraq, where a foreign military coalition is fighting to protect the Iraqis from a foreign conglomeration of terrorists, while the remnants of the old, ousted government plink around the edges, hoping to sidle back into power.

The American Revolution was all three. It comprised folks who saw themselves and were seen by all as Englishmen. They first request more freedom, then begged for it, then demanded it -- only revolting from the crown when mad King George III refused even to hear their just demands. The American revolutionaries carefully nurtured the American people along by explaining the concepts of freedom and democracy and how they differed from tyranny and mob rule alike; they journeyed around the colonies preaching liberty and self-determination; and they were joined by at least a third of the entire population (about as many loyalists opposed them, and the rest were neutral and confused).

The Zarqawistas and the Saddamites have done none of this. They have not even tried. Therefore, Rumsfeld is correct: they don't deserve the honorable title of "insurgents." They are terrorists, aristos, and tatterdemalion baby-slayers, nothing more.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 1, 2005, at the time of 5:18 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

November 30, 2005

Ignatius's Flatulent Fatuity

Fiskings , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I must confess, I don't particularly follow David Ignatius's column in the Washington Post. A quick romp through some of his archives tells me I haven't missed much: Ignatius appears to be an off-the-shelf anti-Bush liberal in the mold of, say, Joe Biden; not all the way over to Pat Leahy or Ted Kennedy, but definitely farther left than Joe Leiberman. If you know what I mean.

I could have skipped the trip down memory lane and learned everything I needed to know about Ignatius from today's column, linked by Power Line's Paul Mirengoff: "Rice's Rising Star." Paul boils it down to saying that "if Colin Powell didn't exist, the MSM, in conjuction with the State Department, would have to invent him." He's right, as usual; Ignatius's piece simply simpers over the little nuggets that he thinks indicates Condoleezza Rice is more Kissingeresque than Wolfowitzian (the nuggets are carefully plucked from a bucket that contains a lot of contrary indicators, but no matter). But I think it's worse than that: with its evasiveness, misleading implications, and downright fabrications, it reminds me of the worst of -- well, of Robert Fisk of the inaptly named Independent in the U.K.

Let's dive in, shall we?

While President Bush continues to talk about "staying the course" in Iraq, the nation's top diplomats and military commanders have in fact been changing the course this year to fit changing circumstances. They are planning on significant reductions of U.S. troops once a permanent Iraqi government is chosen in the Dec. 15 elections.

Now, what could the implication of this bit be? I suppose what Ignatius means is that when Bush says "stay the course" he means "never make even the slightest change in troop levels, deployment, personnel, location, mission, or diet. Everything in stasis. Nothing can ever change. Ten years from now, we'll have the same troop level... in fact, the very same soldiers! Nobody will even be allowed to visit the toilet."

I suppose that must be what Ignatius takes from the phrase "stay the course," because elsewise, the predicate would be a grand non-sequitur. I'm not sure what is Mr. Ignatius's native tongue, but the univerally accepted definition of "stay the course" allows for "slighly changing the course to fit changing circumstances, so long as you're not making an inexplicable U-turn in the middle of the road." Similarly, if you're driving along Glendale Avenue, and I tell you to "stay the course," you are still allowed to turn your steering wheel sufficiently to follow the street as it bends; and you can even stop at red lights along the way.

The real question is whether "planning on significant reductions of U.S. troops once a permanent Iraqi government is chosen in the Dec. 15 elections" is or is not the very course that Bush set upon in the first place. In Bush's speech to the Anapolis midshipmen today, he said "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." This phrase caused a slight shiver of déjà-vu... has he ever said that before?

August 2005: As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

June 2005: Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

February 2005, State of the Union Address: We will not set an artificial timetable for leaving Iraq, because that would embolden the terrorists and make them believe they can wait us out. We are in Iraq to achieve a result: A country that is democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors, and able to defend itself. And when that result is achieved, our men and women serving in Iraq will return home with the honor they have earned.

(He should have just thought of saying "as Iraqis stand up, we will stand down" last February; he could have saved himself a lot of wind.)

I must say, that seems pretty consistent to me, Dave. Almost like, I don't know, staying the course.

What is intriguing is that the administration's emerging position isn't all that different from the critique offered last week by Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden. Both are talking about cutting U.S. troop strength, relying on Iraqi security forces and brokering a compromise among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Aha, Ignatius has latched onto the dirty, little secret of the Bush administration: the president always looks to Joe Biden for a lead! I'm not sure how exactly this fits into the timeline above; what was Joe Biden (D-DE) saying about our Iraq strategy prior to the State of the Union address nearly a year ago?

On the other hand, I suppose we should consider the faint possibility that the arrow of causality may point the other direction... that Joe Biden (and John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, and all the other Democrats who still make some effort not to appear as mad as a hatter) simply parrots the current Bush agenda -- but whines a lot about it. I'm sure there must be some other explanation, however; one certainly wouldn't expect as distinguished a statesman as Joseph Biden to plagiarize someone else's thoughts.

Rice stands at the intersection of the Iraq debate. Watching her try to find a balance among Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites, not to mention Democrats and Republicans, I am reminded that in her younger days, she was a figure skater.

Another illuminating metaphor from Captain Left-Turn. But what is its purpose?

The Gaza agreement was Rice's first real "Kissingerian" moment, and in some of her public comments, she's sounding like a realist in the Kissinger-Scowcroft tradition. The idealistic, belligerent approach of the neoconservatives isn't much in evidence in her State Department.

Oddly, it's also not much in evidence among the neoconservatives. One mostly finds an "idealistic, belligerent approach" among left-liberals in academe, Hollywood, and at the mainstream media... particularly in op-ed columns in the Washington Post.

Colleagues say that she's running the department with confidence and that she's as good at administering her own agency as she was bad at coordinating interagency disputes when she was national security adviser.

Do these "colleagues" give any examples of the latter? How did Condi stack up to, say, Sandy? With colleagues like these....

Oh, wait. I get it: the "colleagues" Ignatius means are his own co-workers at the Post. Foolish me.

Bush doesn't do nuance on foreign policy, but that's not so at Rice's State Department.

Bush appointed Rice and evidently is happy with her "nuance." Do I detect a faint whiff of "Smirky the Wonder Chimp"-ism from Mr. I? Any "nuance" emanating from Bush's foreign policy must of course come from the dame, not from the president.

The Bush-is-a-moron meme is so usefully self-referential: because Bush is a moron, any cleverness in his policies comes naturally from the cabinet official, not Bush; but lo! If the president can't even define his own policies, doesn't that prove that he's a moron after all?

This reminds me of the passage in Mark Twain's wonderful account in Roughing It; but nothing else of this column reminds me of great literature. Twain visited Salt Lake City and obtained a copy of the Book of Mormon. The book professes to be "AN ACCOUNT WRITTEN BY THE HAND OF MORMON, UPON PLATES TAKEN FROM THE PLATES OF NEPHI" (the caps are Twain's). And if that is not sufficient pedigree, the testimony of three witnesses is attached. Twain responds:

Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a man tells me that he has "seen the engravings which are upon the plates," and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either.

Following which is yet another testimonial, this time by eight more witnesses who testify to the veracity of the first boxed set of three witnesses. A total of eleven witnesses (five of them Whitmers) to say they've seen the plates -- which subsequently vanished. Twain again:

And when I am far on the road to conviction, and eight men, be they grammatical or otherwise, come forward and tell me that they have seen the plates too; and not only seen those plates but "hefted" them, I am convinced. I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified.

I think that's the proper approach to take when reading a new column by David Ignatius (did he change his name from Whitmer?) -- make sure you have three witnesses to testify to its veracity... say, Robert Scheer, Paul Krugman, and Gore Vidal. Then scrounge up eight more assorted editors of the Nation, the New Republic, and Mother Jones. And ensure that the original manuscript of the column is inscribed on copper plates that subsequently stroll off.

At that point, even I would be prepared to believe it!

Back to the Angel Ignatius:

Rice's biggest test as secretary of state will be Iran, the center of the volcano that has been shaking the Middle East for the past 30 years. Here again she is pursuing a policy more nuanced than administration rhetoric might suggest. While maintaining a hard line toward the mullahs in Tehran, she is also trying to draw Iran into a network of cooperation on regional security issues.

There he goes again. Is there anybody in the room buying this idea of Condi Rice, Rogue Secretary? (Or should that be Rouge Secretary?) Does anybody truly believe that she's out there, on her own, with no controlling legal authority -- some starkly beautiful but mad concatenation of Al Gore and Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now? I stir. I shift in my seat. I grow restive.

Rice has authorized her ambassadors in Iraq and Afghanistan to meet with their Iranian counterparts to discuss overlapping interests.

She didn't order them killed and eaten? Where was her neocon mind?

In an administration that has been in the doldrums lately, to put it mildly, Rice has been an unusual success story. The figure skater who learned to stay upright on a thin blade is gliding into a perilous new year as the problems of Iraq, Iran and Syria converge.

Aha, now I see why this strained metaphor was used earlier: so it could be used again later, producing equal gibberish. But familiar gibberish we remember from way earlier in the column. Alas, he didn't tell us a third time; if he had, then under the Snark rule, we should be obliged to believe it.

Does she truly speak for this administration on foreign policy? Can she make the Iraq balancing act work? The next few months will give us the measure of the Bush administration's second-term star.

Does David Ignatius truly speak for the quality of columnists in this once great newspaper? Can he figureskate the fine line between vague and vacuous without taking a spill onto the ice of absurdity? Will one more metaphor chill the entire discussion, leaving us wrecked on the rocks?

The problem with this entire column is that it seems vague but is in fact meaningless. The entire piece could be boiled down to Ignatius's fervant desire to see Bride of Powell in the State Department. But even Colin Powell wasn't the Colin Powell that Ignatius remembers: whatever Powell might have done behind the scenes, arguing for delay, inaction, and passivity, in public he always stood up and saluted when the president gave him his marching orders.

Condoleezza Rice is far closer to George W. Bush than Colin Powell ever was, and he is likely closer to the president and his vision than any head of State in my lifetime. She is not just close politically but has been a personal friend, almost part of the family, for years. She is certainly closer than Madeleine Albright was to Bill Clinton or George Schultz and Al Haig were to Ronald Reagan. James Baker did mangle a couple of George H.W. Bush's failed political campaigns, but surely Baker was no closer to Bush than to the many other Republicans whose campaigns he mangled. And Warren Christopher is not close to anybody, except perhaps Keith Richards, from whom he was evidently separated at birth.

Jimmy Carter and Cyrus Vance were not exactly buddies before 1977; likewise for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Dean Rusk was a career State Department man when Kennedy tapped him in 1960, and he stayed on through the Johnson administration; doesn't appear to have been close to either man.

Nope, as far as the best-buddies sweepstakes between presidents and their secretaries of state, Condi Rice and George Bush are it. To imagine that she is "growing in office" and defying President Bush is just cracked: to the extent that she is carrying out more diplomatic policies than she did as National Security Advisor, that simply reflects Bush's own decision, not hers.

Mr. Ignatius, like the brother in the poem, seems to have forgotten an important (if sore) point: the president's "kitchen cabinet" these days simply reflects the whim of the man in the Oval Office -- whoever he is. Gone are the days of William Henry Seward, who conducted his own foreign and military policy as Lincoln's secretary of state, often completely at odds with that of the president. Whatever Condi does is done for the good of the country, as determined by George W. Bush. And if David Ignatius thinks different, he had better tend more to his fiction than his "fact."

From deep 'neath the crypt of St. Giles,
Came a shriek that resounded for miles;
The vicar said "gracious!
Has Brother Ignatius
Forgotten the bishop has piles?"

 

(And now, having thoroughly alienated all LDS and Catholic readers, and having completed the sequence by admitting I ate bacon this morning, I lay down my pen. Keyboard. Whatever.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 30, 2005, at the time of 10:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

It's Official: House Democrats Are Cowards

Iraq Matters , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

Today, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) "came out."

She came out as a craven, an appeaser, a "cheese-eating surrender monkey." One might have thought, from the lopsided vote on cutting and running last week (403 to 3 against, and read all about it here), that the Democrats would at least maintain the facade of moral courage through the next election.

Evidently, that was a bit beyond their powers; for today, Pelosi announced that she now supports the Murtha Madness: an immediate withdrawal, commencing before the December 15th vote in Iraq, that would have all U.S. troops out of Iraq within six months... and to hell with what happens next!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - House of Representatives Minority leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday backed a call by Democratic Rep. John Murtha to quickly start the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

"I will be supporting the Murtha resolution,'' Pelosi said of Murtha's resolution calling for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq at the earliest practicable date.

Naturally, this being Reuters, they had to repeat the canard that John Murtha (D-PA) was a war hawk and a conservative:

Murtha, of Pennsylvania, is a decorated Vietnam veteran and one of Congress' most hawkish Democrats who had supported the Iraq war although he criticized President George W. Bush's handling of it.

The reality, as has been ably demonstrated by Captain Ed and by Paul at Power Line, is that John Murtha was always a fair weather feather. On those deployments that he deigns to support at all (he never supported the mission in Somalia, even back under Bush-41, when it was simply famine relief), he supports military involvement up until the moment we start taking casualties. Then he turns against the deployment and demands the boys be brought home.

Veterans for Common Sense notes that Murtha was already bad-mouthing the Iraq War six months before it even began [Kaus to Patterico to Big Lizards]. And in response to a Washington Post headline, the About-Face of a Hawkish Democrat, Captain Ed wrote:

But that isn't an "about-face" at all. Eighteen months earlier, in May 2004, Murtha had already started demanding that the US pull out of Iraq, although he did it outside of the halls of Congress. As Murray herself reports -- in the sixteenth paragraph -- he told CNN in an interview that further mobilization was impossible, and that made Iraq unwinnable. He started talking up a pullout eight months before the Iraqis held their first election, seventeen months before their constitutional plebescite, and nineteen months before their upcoming elections to elect their first permanent, constitutional republican government.

Even worse, Murray fails to do any research at all on her subject, accepting the Democratic-hawk line without question. Had Murray looked into Murtha's record, she would have found that the Pennsylvania Democrat has a record of only supporting military operations until the first casualties get reported. In fact, the only time prior to 9/11 that America's military faced off against terrorists and warlords in battle, Murtha demanded that Bill Clinton withdraw them immediately from Somalia -- and got what he wanted.

And now Nancy Pelosi has hitched the Democrats' wagon to the plummeting meteor of Jack Murtha. I suppose congratulations are in order: it's always astonishing when a Democrat is actually willing to come out and speak truth to cower!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 30, 2005, at the time of 3:38 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

A Month In the Life

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Bill Roggio from the Fourth Rail is now in Iraq (and now blogging at ThreatsWatch, as Dafydd mentioned). He linked up with the 1st Platoon of Lima Company of the 3rd Marines, 6th Battalion, call sign Jackal 1. Roggio reports an uneventful patrol and having tea with local sheikhs in Husaybah. Yep! You heard me right, in Husaybah.

Both Lieutenant Oren and Corporal Hall explained the successful patrol in Husaybah this afternoon would have been unheard of just three weeks ago prior to Operation Steel Curtain. “Over three weeks ago, we wouldn’t have gotten 200 feet into this city without taking fire”, said Cpl Hall.

Let's flash-back a few weeks to the Battle of Husaybah, courtesy of -- well, of Bill Roggio in a different incarnation:

Saturday, November 5th (Guy Fawkes Day): Operation Steel Curtain in Husaybah

Steel Curtain is directed at the town of Husaybah, and the objectives are to "restore security along the Iraqi-Syrian border and destroy the Al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist network" on the Syrian border. Steel Curtain is a subordinate operation to Hunter, whose objective is to bolster the U.S. and Iraqi presence in the western Anbar region from Qaim to Haditha and deny al Qaeda in Iraq the ability to establish safe havens in the region....

In a recent interview, Maj.Gen. Richard A. Huck, the commanding general of the 2d Marine Division discussed Operation Hunter and the importance of involving the Iraqi Security forces in the fight.

“The Marines and Soldiers assigned to the 2nd Marine Division understand that we won’t be the ones who win this counter-insurgency, it will be the Iraqi soldiers... We do this by partnering our battalions with Iraqi battalions. This is the way we’re going to win. By partnering with Iraqi Security Forces we are gaining a lot of insights previously denied to us... We could walk down the same street ten times and not notice anything out of place, but an Iraqi soldier will notice something his first time on the street. It is not uncommon for them to stop a patrol and say ‘those men over there have Syrian accents’ or ‘that graffiti is anti-government propaganda’. Having the ISF out with us is truly a force multiplier.”

Later That Night: Steel Curtain Update

Coalition forces are wisely using the Desert Protection Force, which is comprised of local tribesmen from the region, to provide intelligence on al Qaeda's activities; "Members of the Iraqi scout platoons, specially recruited soldiers from the Al Qa’im region, are embedded with U.S. and Iraqi infantry companies and are helping to identify insurgent strong points and areas known to contain these homemade bombs."

There are no casualties reported among U.S. or Iraqi forces, and enemy casualties are as of yet unknown. Nine airstrikes have been directed at insurgent safe house, and six IEDs have been neutralized, along with a car bomb.

CNN's Arwa Damon is embedded with the RCT-2, and reports on the estimated size and nature of the enemy resistance; "Soldiers believe insurgents in Husayba -- both foreign and home-grown -- will be the type that will fight to the death. Hundreds of insurgents are suspected to be in the city. Husayba insurgents are believed to be smarter and more experienced, survivors of other battles that move in squads of 12 to 15."

Sunday, November 6th: Steel Curtain and the Anbar Campaign

Day one of Operation Steel Curtain, which is aimed at dislodging al Qaeda from the border town of Husaybah and estabishing a permanent presence of Iraqi troops, has ended....

The street fighting has been reported to have been intense in the center and southwest corner of the city. Over thirty roadside bombs and booby trapped homes have been uncovered, along with two car bombs. "Dozens" of insurgent have been reported to have been killed. No Coalition deaths have been reported....

The avenues to the cities along the Euphrates have been closed, or made vastly more difficult and dangerous to travel with Coalition troops now permanently stationed in Husaybah, Sadah, Qaim, Rawah, Haditha, Haqlaniyah, Barwana, Khan Al Baghdadi, Hit, Ramadi, Habbaniyah, and Fallujah. This is the Anbar Campaign.

Today; now; a new Husaybah, and let's try this again:

Roggio reports an uneventful patrol and having tea with local sheikhs in Husaybah.

Without context, the savage magnitude of the Anbar Campaign is void of meaning. This is what the mainstream media does to truth, squeezes it dry of all context and content and reduces the war to an insipid "one American soldier was killed by an IED today" level. The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

But Roggio is in a Husaybah so calm that patrols are "uneventful" and he can sit and drink tea (was it sweet mint tea, I wonder?) with sheikhs that just a few weeks ago might have been on the other side, for all we know. That's progress!

Roggio also glows about how professional the Iraqi troops were:

They understood and responded to hand signals, maintained their intervals and guarded intersections during crossings. All the while talking to the residents of Husaybah. Other than their uniforms, they were virtually indistinguishable from their Marine counterparts - no small feat.

But of course, Roggio is just one man. His impression alone, informed as it is, is not "best evidence" of the Iraqi troops' competence. But Roggio is not alone. His observation is backed up by the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's discussion during a recent press conference, and by President Bush himself. First Secretary Rumsfeld:

On Tuesday, Rumsfeld gave a preview of the administration's argument that Iraqi security forces are improving. He said about 29 military bases have been turned over to Iraqi control; the Iraqi army has seven division and 31 brigade headquarters in operation, compared with none 16 months ago; the number of Iraqi army battalions "in the fight" is now 95, compared with five 15 months ago, and there are now over 212,000 trained and equipped security forces, compared with 96,000 last year.

Secretary Rumsfeld was not just talking through his hat. The president just delivered a major speech to the midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy at Anapolis this morning, and he echoed Rumsfeld's point (and gave more backing to Bill Roggio's on-the-ground assessment):

At this time last year, there were only a handful of Iraqi battalions ready for combat. Now, there are over 120 Iraqi Army and Police combat battalions in the fight against the terrorists -- typically comprised of between 350 and 800 Iraqi forces. Of these, about 80 Iraqi battalions are fighting side-by-side with coalition forces, and about 40 others are taking the lead in the fight. Most of these 40 battalions are controlling their own battle space, and conducting their own operations against the terrorists with some coalition support....

At this moment, over 30 Iraqi Army battalions have assumed primary control of their own areas of responsibility. In Baghdad, Iraqi battalions have taken over major sectors of the capital -- including some of the city's toughest neighborhoods....

Our coalition has handed over roughly 90 square miles of Baghdad province to Iraqi security forces. Iraqi battalions have taken over responsibility for areas in South-Central Iraq, sectors of Southeast Iraq, sectors of Western Iraq, and sectors of North-Central Iraq. As Iraqi forces take responsibility for more of their own territory, coalition forces can concentrate on training Iraqis and hunting down high-value targets, like the terrorist Zarqawi and his associates.

We're also transferring forward operating bases to Iraqi control. Over a dozen bases in Iraq have been handed over to the Iraqi government -- including Saddam Hussein's former palace in Tikrit, which has served as the coalition headquarters in one of Iraq's most dangerous regions. From many of these bases, the Iraqi security forces are planning and executing operations against the terrorists -- and bringing security and pride to the Iraqi people.

The reason we started to hear from the Pentagon and Condoleezza Rice's State Department about an "event" table (with some projected times attached) -- not a time table -- for US troops' partial withdrawal is the readiness of the Iraqi troops themselves. The military has always had an event-driven victory strategy with projected times; but until now, they kept it private, because it has to be flexible, not certain. Events and milestones are more important than dates.

But the general public -- and more important, the terrorists -- don't always understand the flexible nature of such plans, and they might have taken any announced "time table" as carved in stone. What President Bush just said to the middies at Anapolis about a time table for withdrawal (as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, now advocates) applies to any date certain by which we promise to be gone:

Some are calling for a deadline for withdrawal. Many advocating an artificial timetable for withdrawing our troops are sincere -- but I believe they're sincerely wrong. Pulling our troops out before they've achieved their purpose is not a plan for victory. As Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman said recently, setting an artificial timetable would "discourage our troops because it seems to be heading for the door. It will encourage the terrorists, it will confuse the Iraqi people."

Senator Lieberman is right. Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would send a message across the world that America is a weak and an unreliable ally. Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would send a signal to our enemies -- that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run and abandon its friends. And setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would vindicate the terrorists' tactics of beheadings and suicide bombings and mass murder -- and invite new attacks on America. To all who wear the uniform, I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your Commander-in-Chief.

To allow cabinet members and top generals to openly discuss how we will be withdrawning some of our forces over the next year, the White house must be very confident that the Iraqi Army can handle the terrorists even after the US have left. It is not like the terrorists are holding back; what more could they do, even if they knew we were leaving? Evidently, the president has decided we're doing so well that there is no longer any danger in talking about a responsible, event-driven withdrawal... not the cut-and-run that the Democrats in Congress (including the Minority Leader in the House) are calling for, but a true phased, milestone-driven draw-down.

Of course, this has been the plan all along, which President Bush announced more than two years ago -- to anyone who was actually listening!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 30, 2005, at the time of 2:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 29, 2005

The Anbar Effect

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

A decade or so ago -- oh wait, it was only last Friday; how flime ties -- I somehow accidentally came up with an idea I think is pretty good: the "Afghanistan Effect." One earmark that I may be onto something is the existence of corollaries. Consider the parallel principle I'll now call the Anbar Effect and its impact on future Iraqi politics.

Currently, most Iraqi politicians still more less hate America. Even the ones who should be grateful: after all, we booted out their quarter-century dictator, handed them their country for free (the politicians didn't have to pay), and we're still fighting the terrorists for them. Nevertheless, they still hate us, even as they grit their teeth and call for us to stay another year.

And it makes sense on at least two levels: politically, most Shiites have a problem with us because we're a secular government and a Christian people; most Sunni have a problem with us because they used to be in charge, and we've forced democracy down their throats; and any politician too heavily associated with the United States stands in danger of being assassinated. Psychologically, what is the most natural human reaction to unearned charity? Hint: it's not gratitude. Any psychologist will agree that when you bail someone out when he has done nothing to solve his own problems, the normal reaction is that he will resent and despise you, especially if he's still a beggar and must publicly thank and praise you.

So we're going to have to live with that infuriating irritation... for now. But let's look to the future. All of the ill effects above apply only when the recipient of largess sees himself as just that: a beggar, someone who cannot shift for himself, so the hairy, hidden hand of the rich man must work the machinations behind the scenes and give him what he cannot earn for himself.

None of which applies to the Iraqi Army.

Far from being beggars, the Iraqi Army were trained by Americans, fight alongside the Americans, and have increasingly been in charge of battles, campaigns, and holding cities recaptured from the terrorists. Everything they now know about modern combat they learned from us. And they have learned extremely well: Bill Roggio, once and future proprietor of the Fourth Rail and now blogging from Iraq over at ThreatsWatch, who is currently in Husaybah -- say, wasn't that a combat zone just a couple weeks ago? How (son of) flime ties -- described the performance of the Iraqi Army troops occupying Husaybah thus: "Other than their uniforms, they were virtually indistinguishable from their Marine counterparts. [Emphasis added]"

(For more about Roggio's current venture and the truth he is witnessing first hand, read here.)

They take casualties -- and take cities. They've earned their tremendous respect, not just in blood but in victories. The new Iraqi Army are not the recipients of American charity. Rather, they are our protégés.

The distinction is colossal. A beggar completely lacks self respect because he feels powerless over his fate. He resents and despises his benefactors because he resents and despises himself. But a protégé is anything but helpless: because his benefactor taught him how to fish, rather than simply giving him a fish, he can now provide for himself and his own. He is just bursting with new self-respect (note that I distinguish between earned self-respect and self-confidence and unearned "self-esteem"). And at the deepest level of his psyche, he sees his benefactor, not as an oppressor, but as a liberator.

In contrast to the current crop of Iraqi politicians, who hate America as a fat cat handing out charity, from what I've read Iraqi soldiers see us as mentors who have given them the tools to defend their own country. They feel about us the way those who have been in the military typically feel about their drill instructors: they may hate them during basic, but once they graduate, they're profoundly grateful to them for the rest of their lives. (Especially when the DI doesn't try to remain in control after basic training and become the Thing That Would Not Leave; let's hope we get out quickly -- except for air support as necessary -- after the Iraqi Army is able to defend the country without us.)

Now the final key. What sort of democracy will Iraq eventually resemble? Some have suggested Turkey, but I think that's wrong: Turkey has been a republic since 1923, for one thing. For another, the origins of the Republic of Turkey are almost mirror-opposite that of the Republic of Iraq.

Prior to the Republic, Turkey was the heart of the Ottoman Empire, a six-century empire that at its peak was the most powerful Moslem empire in history, stretching from North Africa all the way around the Mediterranean Sea to besiege Vienna, Austria -- twice. But what eventually destroyed it was losing World War I. That is, the Republic of Turkey was formed from the remnants of an empire whose military was crushed by the "crusader" Allies. Licking their wounds, the Turks formed a modern (and surprisingly free) republic, which is still going strong eight decades later.

Now, it's certainly true that the Iraqi dictatorship was crushed by the "crusader" coalition. But in between that humiliating military loss and the founding of the real Republic of Iraq, that losing army was disbanded and a new army created from scratch. For all the Democratic braying that this was a terrible mistake by Bush, that we should have just kept the old (losing) Iraqi Army under new management, this was in fact one of the most briliant moves by the Bush national-security team, headed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: we fired a losing Saddamite army and instead created and trained-up a winning Iraqi Army. Rather than Iraqis having to be ashamed by the lousy combat performance of Saddam's goons against the Iranians, against the crusaders in the Gulf War, and against the crusaders again in 2003, they can be proud and joyous at the brilliant performance of the new Iraqi Army against the foreign terrorists and Saddamite dead-enders in 2004 and 2005, leading up to a constitution and (next month) the first freely elected Iraqi parliament installed under a freely elected constitution.

With such good feelings abounding for the Iraqi Army, I suspect that the Middle-East democracy that Iraq will most resemble in form is Israel, perversely enough. And in Israel, the fastest and surest route into political power is via the military. Out of eleven male prime ministers, seven got their start either in the resistance to the British prior to Israel's founding in 1948 or in the Israeli Defense Force. Four were actually generals, counting Manachem Begin, leader of Irgun, and Yitzhak Shamir, one of the leaders of Lehi. (The others were Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon; after some hesitation, I decline to include David Ben-Gurion, even though he sorta kinda led Haganah in 1947, because I'm not entirely sure how official this was.)

I suspect this will happen again in Iraq: in later elections, it will surely be a major campaign advantage to be able to say "I commanded the brigade of the Iraqi Army that took and held Fallujah," or Tikrit, or Husaybah. And at that point, the Anbar Effect will kick in: Iraq's second generation of leaders will be heavy with army veterans, returned from the war, who will be strong supporters of the United States.

This doesn't mean they will always vote with us; Israel doesn't always do so, either. But it does mean a major turn-around in how Iraqis see America... driven, I predict, by the attitude of returning Iraqi soldiers who have worked side-by-side with American soldiers and Marines... just as I also predict a turn-around in American attitudes about the Iraq war when the American troops begin coming home in great numbers and telling about how well we did, regardless of what stories the MSM told.

The effect is the same in both cases: the powerful voices of those who actually undertook to defend their nation from harm overpower the purely political barnyard noises against America, freedom, and democracy. And the anti-Americans who have become allies of convenience -- the "insurgents" in Iraq and the mainstream media in the United States -- can become allies in defeat as well.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 29, 2005, at the time of 5:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 28, 2005

Zarqawi: Planting IEDs or Pushing Up Daisies?

Iraq Matters , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

We're still waiting for final word on whether any of the bodies found after the gunfight we discussed here more than a week ago was that of Musab Zarqawi. Last we heard, the Pentagon was testing the DNA... but we haven't heard any results.

Do any of you readers have any more recent information? A definitive answer? You'd think we would have heard one way or the other by now.

Thanks, folks!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 28, 2005, at the time of 2:18 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Know Thine Enemy

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

How can we tell the difference between foreign terrorists, militant Sunnis, and Shiite insurgents? My initial answer to that question is, “who cares?” If they are attacking us, they are our enemies. It doesn’t matter what name they call themselves.

However, our top military spokesman, commenting on the last week’s Iraq Reconciliation conference, tells us that we should understand the difference between these groups in order to know how to fight each type.

"We understand the capabilities, the vulnerabilities and the intentions of each group of the insurgency - the foreign fighters, the Iraqi rejectionists and the Saddamists," said Major-General Rick Lynch....

"The group in the middle, the Iraqi rejectionists - (which) includes the Shia rejectionists and the Sunni rejectionists - we believe that deliberate outreach will allow them to participate in the political process and allow them to become part of the solution and not part of the problem," he said.

In other words, we must separate the various types of Iraqi and foreign fighters and treat them differently. But treat them differently how, and why should we? What is the difference between a Sunni Iraqi setting an IED ambush of an American military convoy and Musab Zarqawi ordering a car-bombing of a Shiite marketplace?

In the Iraqi Reconciliation Conference in Cairo, which brought together Iraqis who support democracy and the new government and the rejectionists who still fight against it, the participants concluded that resistance against occupation is legitimate, but that terrorism is never acceptable:

Although resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent legitimate resistance. Accordingly, we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing and kidnapping that target Iraqi citizens, civilian, humanitarian, governmental institutions, national wealth, places of worship and we call for confronting terrorism immediately. [Emphasis added]

Asked about this language, which clearly implies that violent resistance against Coalition troops is not terrorism, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack seemed reluctant to deal with the issue:

"Although resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent legitimate resistance...I think that, you know, inasmuch as this statement talks about the right -- the legitimate right to peaceful protest, peaceful expression of differences -- absolutely, the United States has no quarrel with that idea.

Mr. McCormack is dancing around the point: the statement does not say that only peaceful resistance is acceptable; it draws a distinction between resistance and terrorism.

So let me answer the question that McCormack ducked: resisting a foreign military occupation force is not an act of terrorism; it is an act of war. The small number of former Saddam supporters and other anti-American Iraqi militants still left are actually attempting, however ham-fistedly, to build a native "insurgency."

Since we are occupying for a good purpose and with the consent of the most legitimate government Iraq has had in recent memory, one can argue that these Saddamites are misguided. We still have every right to fight back against the resistance to protect our own interest (and our own men and women). But the Reconciliation statement is correct: this kind of resistance against an armed and deadly military force is not the same thing as blowing up innocent civilians. The merely misguided can be persuaded to resist peacefully, via the ballot box and in parliament (see Sadr On the Rise, As the Times Sinks to a New Low). The terrorists can only be killed or driven into the desert.

It's clear how native Iraqis resisting the Coalition troops have the support of many other Iraqis who hide them and scrounge food and ammunition. But what about the bloodthirsty foreign terrorists, led by Zarqawi -- the ones who specialize in murdering ordinary Iraqis? How can they be tolerated?

In order for foreign terrorists like al-Qaeda to operate in Iraq, they need local support. No matter what the MSM says, local Sunnis must be actively providing logistic and military support to al-Qaeda. Disrupting this relationship would deal a tremendous blow to the foreign terrorists' operation.

At first, Iraqis must have thought the foreign fighters were there to support the ex-Baathists, under the command of Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, vice-president of Iraq and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, the highest ranking Baathist still on the loose after Saddam Hussein was captured (al-Duri is reported to have died of leukemia on November 11th, 2005; but this has not yet been publicly confirmed by the Pentagon).



The grinning mug of Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri

But as the tide of battle flowed, the Baathists withdrew from the field (to Syria, the other Baathist state, most likely), leaving the terrorists -- primarily Zarqawi's group al-Qaeda in Iraq -- in the driver's seat of the resistance. It seems very clear that as "resistance" more and more began to be synonymous with blowing up Iraqi Shia and occasionally Sunnis, rather than attacking Coalition forces, ordinary Iraqis began to be repelled by the vicious and indiscriminate butchery of their fellow citizens by the foreign terrorist organizations, led by Jordanian Zarqawi.

Thanks to the very successful attacks on al-Qaeda safe houses along the Syrian border and in Baghdad by Coalition and Iraqi forces, local support for the terrorists is waning; Arab culture does not encourage support for losers. Many of the recent attacks on terrorist safehouses were possible only because of tips received from local Sunni citizens, who clearly no longer support the foreign terrorists. Some Sunni tribes went so far as to actively fight against Zarqawi’s men.

This trend is so significant, even an America-hater like Juan Cole had to admit it:

[M]any Iraqi guerrillas are deeply dismayed at the al-Zarqawi group's tactic of targeting civilians and Shiites, and that significant numbers have deserted him to join the Iraqi group, The Islamic Army. Al-Zarqawi's "Qaeda in Mesopotamia" is angry about the desertions and refers to such Iraqis as "apostates." Nevertheless, The Islamic Army provides security to those who have left Zarqawi.

Iraqi insurgents have seen al-Qaeda being utterly defeated whenever they engage American or Iraqi government units. Everyone around the world now knows that the terrorists can do nothing aside from blowing up innocent civilians. The purely Iraqi insurgents, Saddamites and Shia, must have realized by now that they have no hope of winning militarily against the Americans; and the moment is rapidly approaching (if it hasn't already passed) where they have no hope even of defeating the Iraqi Army alone, even if we were to pull a John Murtha and "redeploy" out of Iraq immediately.

If we can convince the Sunni and Shiite insurgents (not the foreign terrorists) that the only way for them to have any kind of power at all is to join the political process, al-Qaeda will be further isolated in Iraq. Without the local support, they cannot possibly survive. They will be forced to flee Iraq as they fled Afghanistan when the Taliban fell, and as they fled Sudan before that.

So it seems we should care whom we are fighting against!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 28, 2005, at the time of 2:14 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 27, 2005

Give Me That Old Time Religion

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Uh oh, now we're really going to get it!

In another bizarre twist, the pitiful remnants of the Baath Party in Iraq have remade themselves as -- holy warriors. Mujahideen. They have changed the name of their party from the Arab Socialist Baath Party to the Arab Baath al-Takfireen: a.k.a., "Arab Bath Moslems-who-declare-fellow-Moslems-to-be-infidels." I'm guessing their new rallying cry will be God is Great! Let us fight holy war to put that socialist atheist back on the throne!

Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, has gone into full panic mode, wailing:

"This is very dangerous. These people now have broader appeal among angry Iraqis and money from Arabs in regional states," he told Reuters in an interview.

"It could take years to defeat them."

Oy vey ismier! What will we do now? Forgive my flippancy, but I have a hard time buying the idea that Iraqis will be fooled into thinking that the anti-Islamic secular internationalst socialists of the Baath Party have suddenly got that old time religion. Religious Sunni and Shia are about as likely to follow the Baathists into jihad as the College of Cardinals are to elect Ted Kennedy Pope, or the Navy to give command of an aircraft carrier to Captain Kangaroo. The Baathists are Islamists like President Nixon was a Quaker.

Here is the timeline of events, as limned by Michael Georgy of Reuters:

Saddam and his pan-Arab socialist Baath party imposed secularism in Iraq throughout decades of iron-fisted rule. Muslim militants either kept their beliefs to themselves or were jailed, or worse.

But Islamic fundamentalism has gained a foothold since a U.S.-led invasion toppled the former president in 2003, with a proliferation of Sunni Arab militants opposed to the Shi'ite- led government backed by Washington. [It's all Bush's fault that there are now Moslems all over Iraq.]

FROM SOCIALISTS TO HOLY WARRIORS

Al Qaeda stepped in, forming loose alliances with Saddam's former Baathists as the insurgency evolved into daily suicide bombings and assassinations that have killed tens of thousands of civilians and security forces.

Shockingly enough, Reuters found occasion to forget that the Shia were already Islamists by most definitions before Saddam fell; that Saddam was already kowtowing to the Islamic Fundamentalists -- by changing Iraq's flag to include the words "Allahu Akbar," for example, as far back as 1991; and that there were already extensive contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda even in Saddam's day. I'm sure over the next few days, they'll find occasion to forget that we did, in fact, find WMD in Iraq, and that Saddam was butchering the Iraqis to the tune of 12,500 per year or 125,000 per year, depending whose figures you believe.

"By embracing militant Islam, Saddam's people have appealed to fellow anti-American Muslims who also want the American troops to leave." [trembled Mowaffaq al-Rubaie]

Saddam, whose trial resumes on Monday, first appeared before his judges clutching an old Koran in his hand. Officials who met Saddam before the last session said he appeared demoralised.

But the national security adviser does not hold the same view of his followers, who are armed with much more than zeal in their new holy war.

"They have very good intelligence," he said.

I was planning to go see Chicken Little tomorrow, but why bother? I can save $8.50 X 2 by just staying home and reading more of the mainstream media.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 27, 2005, at the time of 5:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 26, 2005

Sadr On the Rise, As the Times Sinks to a New Low

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

This New York Times story is both troubling and hopeful, and I'm not sure which is ascendant. Moqtada al-Sadr is back -- actually, he never left, just bided his time and kept his "al Mahdi Militia" -- only now he is throwing himself wholeheartedly into the Iraqi political process... while still maintaining at least some control over his militia.

The al Mahdi Militia seems to have splitered into factions, almost like the IRA splitting into the (Marxist) Official IRA and the (militant) Provisional IRA in the late 1960s. While Sadr remains the spiritual leader of the more violent factions of the terrorist army, it's unclear how much operational control he still has: he claims, through a spokesman, Sheik Abbas al-Rubaie, that he is not involved in the various kidnappings and other terrorist activities of some factions of the al Mahdi militia, and the Times seems to support that view: alas, the Times's main source for that argument is none other than ultra-leftist blogger Juan Cole!

More likely, in my opinion, he has the same sort of control that Yassir Arafat had over the PLO: total control over one faction, influence over most of the others, and perhaps one or two that war with the other al Mahdi factions and actively seek Sadr's death... just as the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine routinely attacked other Palestinian terrorist groups and tried to kill Arafat.

What is undeniable, however, is that Moqtada al-Sadr has become the caliphmaker among the Shia in Iraq -- and that he maintains disturbingly close ties to Iran.

Even as that battle [in which al Mahdi militiamen fought Sunni terrorists] raged on Oct. 27, Mr. Sadr's aides in Baghdad were quietly closing a deal that would signal his official debut as a kingmaker in Iraqi politics, placing his handpicked candidates on the same slate - and on equal footing - with the Shiite governing parties in the December parliamentary elections. The country's rulers had come courting him, and he had forced them to meet his terms.

Wielding violence and political popularity as tools of his authority, Mr. Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has defied the American authorities here since the fall of Saddam Hussein, is cementing his role as one of Iraq's most powerful figures.

Just a year after Mr. Sadr led two fierce uprisings, the Americans are hailing his entry into the elections as the best sign yet that the political process can co-opt insurgents.

The Times does not cite a single piece of evidence that "the Americans are hailing" Sadr's political rise; and considering that one of the few "background expert"-type sources they cite is Cole, I'm suspicious. Did that line get tossed in there because of something Cole told them?

An earlier Knight Ridder story by Matthew Schofield, Once-targetted al-Sadr positions himself to be political kingmaker, was clearly the unacknowledged basis for the Times story -- in fact, so close was the November 6th Schofield story to the November 26th Edward Wong story in the New York Times that it borders perilously on plagiarism, in my opinion. But the Schofield story hits every one of the themes of the later Times story except for the "Americans are hailing" claim, the only new idea in the Wong story. I personally do not recall hearing that Bush administration sources were saying it's wonderful that Sadr was entering into the political process while maintaining his private army, but's possible the Times got it from someone more reliable than Juan Cole.

In any event, it's hard to know what to make of this. On the one hand, it's quite unhelpful that that dreadful man still maintains his terrorist militia, using it to threaten his way into the political process. On the other, if we truly believe in the redeeming force of freedom and democracy, then we must have faith that the very election Sadr bullies his way into will ameliorate the violence and alienation among the poor Shia who currently support him, as they see that democracy can embrace even someone as anti-American as this radical "cleric" (he is considered only semi-literate and nothing to match his father by most Iraqi observers). This will undermine Sadr's military base, even if it buttresses his political base.

On the third hand, his connection with Iran -- some al Mahdi factions have been using Iranian technology to build roadside bombs -- should be enough to worry us, since we certainly don't want the southern part of Iraq to become part of Greater Persia. But on the fourth hand, there is no particular evidence that Iran has managed to inject itself into the election in any significant way, nor that it understands well enough how elections work that it would even know how to do so. I don't know how many hands this monster has, but I'm sure there are at least two or three more.

All told, however, I'm still optimistic: I do have faith in the transformative power of real democracy (not the ersatz variety on display in the Palestinian Authority), and I believe that every terrorist movement is fueled by social alienation and disassociation from governing power: that is its natural manure, as Jefferson wrote about "the blood of patriots and tyrants alike" and "the tree of liberty." To the extent that the hurricane of freedom (and the quite respectable constitution that the Iraqis voted in) blows down the tyranny to admit the seabreeze of capitalism and trade, I believe it will likewise gust away the sands of hate that support a Moqtada al-Sadr. He will find that there is, in fact, no room in a free Iraq for the mighty al Mahdi Militia.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 26, 2005, at the time of 2:43 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

November 20, 2005

Has Zarqawi's Luck Run Out at Last?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Musab Zarqawi has had an amazing number of close scrapes and stunning escapes. The most dramatic was when he was in a car being pursued by American forces, and his driver stopped under a bridge, allowing Zarqawi to leap out and evade apprehension (he had to leave his laptop behind in the car, which was captured with the driver; both yielded much valuable intelligence). He's had such a run that it seems the only explanation is that somebody down there likes him.

But it's possible -- not proven, not even yet claimed by our military, but possible -- that Zarqawi has finally gone to Allah to be sent downstairs to meet his benefactor. (Note that this has been claimed before, and rumors of Zarqawi's death have always been exaggerated in the past.)

All that we really know is that either we or the Iraqis received a tip that very high-value targets of al-Qaeda In Iraq were in a not-so-safe house; the house was surrounded by "U.S. forces" (the particular unit is not named in the article). There was heavy resistance from inside the house, the sort that often characterizes the presence of HVTs.

When the Coalition and Iraqi forces tried to force their way inside, one or more of the occupants set off explosives that destroyed the house, killing everyone inside (eight bodies, one of them female) -- but sadly, also four Iraqi soldiers and ten policemen, according to Omar at Iraq the Model, who cites (and links to) the news site Al Mada. Alas, the site is in Arabic, so I can't read it; if any reader here reads Arabic, please tell me what it says!

(Hat tip to Mudville Gazette for the Iraq the Model link.)

Al Mada has sources that believe one of those killed was Musab Zarqawi, but the United States has not yet conducted DNA tests (or if we have, we have not yet released the results). Let's all keep our fingers crossed that the house turns out to be Zarqawi's tomb.

I have believed for some time that al-Qaeda In Iraq has become a cult of personality, if indeed it was ever anything but. Typically, as in the Palestinian Territory, you have not one but a number of different terrorist groups who spend as much time fighting each other as fighting against the decent. But I have not heard of any other Sunni terrorist groups in Iraq besides Zarqawi's... which leads me to believe that Zarqawi has become an iconic figure to the Sunni-side terrorists, enough so that nobody dared challenge his authority.

If indeed he has been killed, he will be considered a martyr; there's no getting around that. But -- while a dead martyr may be revered, he cannot keep the terrorists from splitting into warring factions the way a living Zarqawi has done. The dead cannot recruit as well as the living, nor can they plot and plan horrific attacks with the same boldness and gut-sense of their victims' vulnerabilities.

If Zarqawi has been slain, the effectiveness of the Iraq jihad will be shattered. Within a few weeks, they will run out of Zarqawi-created operations; they may splinter even sooner than that. In any event, al-Qaeda In Iraq cannot survive the death of its cultic figure, I believe, not in its present form and effectiveness (effective only at slaughtering innocent Iraqi civilians -- but that's bad enough).

So let's hope the evil doer is no longer sucking air. As I have found many occasions to say, all human life has value... but sometimes that value is a negative number.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 20, 2005, at the time of 3:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 19, 2005

Did GOP Blow Murtha Vote?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Over on Power Line, John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson each separately come to the conclusion that the Republicans screwed up by voting, not on the exact wording of the Murtha proposal, but on a nearly identical simplification of it: Much Ado About Nothing, I'm Afraid and Friends, Romans, Clowns, respectively:

John: The House leadership had a golden opportunity to make the Democrats put up or shut up tonight, and I'm afraid they blew it. Rep. John Murtha offered a resolution demanding surrender in Iraq within six months (at least, that's how the New York Times describes it; I haven't seen the actual text, and news reports have varied.) If the House leadership had precipitated a vote on what Murtha actually proposed, we could have had a useful moment of clarity. Instead, however, they scheduled a vote on a resolution calling for immediate withdrawal, which was how Murtha's resolution was widely reported, but, apparently, not quite what it said. That gave the Democrats an easy out; they opposed it, and it failed overwhelmingly (403-3 is the last tally I've seen.)

Scott: Why didn't the Republicans just use Murtha's language? If all but three Democrats wanted to claim that "is hereby terminated" means something other than immediate withdrawal, fine. I think what would have emerged is that the only distinction is that logistics will require that the withdrawal take a certain amount of time, and will not, in that sense, be "immediate." The Democrats would have had to say what they really think about Iraq, or at least pretend to. Instead, they were given an easy out. Since the Republican resolution wasn't the same as Murtha's, they could credibly denounce it as a "sham" and their orchestrated votes against it mean nothing at all.

I disagree, and I believe John and Scott, so caught up in the politics of the vote (as was I until this bleary-eyed moment of clarity this afternoon) have lost sight of the purpose of the vote.

I now believe the purpose was not to humiliate the Democrats, though it certainly succeeded serendipitously at that: look not at the actual vote but rather at the hysterical denunciations of the war, the Republicans, the president, and indeed everyone who didn't believe we should cut and run. Assuming Ken Mehlman was bright enough to have the VCRs rolling, there is fodder here for TV commercials all across America in 2006. Dennis Kucinich's rant, which ended with him shrieking in unintelligible falsetto, like an out-of-control teenage girl in a raging hormone attack, will all by itself be worth at least 7% to Ken Blackwell next year!

For John's and Scott's positions to make sense, they would have to have been hoping that many more Democrats would have voted for the version that Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) actually proposed:

Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.

Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S Marines shall be deployed in the region.

Section 3 The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.

Rather than an attempt to seize political advantage by portraying the Democrats as feckless and irresponsible (which indeed was my original proposal), I believe the Republicans' purpose was to mitigate the damage to troop morale and the psychological boost to the morale of al-Qaeda in Iraq by instantly showing that the United States was not about to withdraw precipitously from that country -- which is how al Jazeera and all the major news sources here had (accurately) reported Rep. Murtha's original proposal.

If this is correct, then what the Republicans did was rise above the instant gratification of watching the Democrats damage their chances in 2006 -- and damage the nation's credibility in the process -- and put the troops' and the country's interests ahead of the GOP's own political interests: the troops were likely shocked and stunned by Murtha's original proposal and may have been terrified they were going to be "Vietnamed" by Congress. Rather than rack up a tidy 50 or 100 Democratic votes for just this policy, thus rattling the troops even further (and giving the terrorists the idea that if only they help the Democrats win in 2006, everything their hearts desire will come to them), the Republicans instead went for an overwhelming rejection of the underlying idea -- demonstrating not only to the terrorists but also our allies and our own military that Congress has absolutely no intention of cutting our soldiers' shanks from under them.

Perhaps it is we pundits who should be embarassed at allowing our desire to see the the Democrats damaged blind us to the very real damage that would concomitantly be done to the war effort itself. I think the Republicans did just fine.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 19, 2005, at the time of 2:06 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

November 18, 2005

Lies and the Lying Congressliars Who Lie Them

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I'm listening to Hugh Hewitt, who keeps cutting to the floor of the House to listen to Liberals Gone Wild (if they hold a wet T-shirt contest, I'm out of here). I heard a rapid-fire, one-two punch of mendacity from the Democrats that I just had to share.

First, I don't know who it was (we didn't hear the announcement), but Democrat 1 said that 15,000 soldiers had been "grievously wounded."

This was followed immediately by Rahm Emmanuel, that paragon of honesty who used to be a top aide for that other paragon of honesty, Bill Clinton; Emmanuel said that we had seen "25,000 wounded" in Iraq.

I found this a fascinating synchronicity, because just last night, I read this Mudville Gazette post:

In [Rep. Murtha's] speech demanding our immediate surrender in Iraq he cited this statistic on casualties over there: "Over 15,500 have been seriously injured".

He's been visiting them in the hospitals, and that's awesome. But he may have gotten that bit of numerical intel from British sources - specifically the UK's Telegraph, who recently claimed

While much was made of the US death toll recently reaching 2,000, little has been said of the 15,000 who have returned home mutilated.

You see, that's not quite right.

There have indeed been over 15,500 wounded. But of those, 8375 returned to duty within 72 hours - so although those wounds weren't funny perhaps those wounds weren't quite serious either. Still, 7347 troops have been wounded severely enough to require over 72 hours recuperation. Furthermore, 2,791 Soldiers were wounded seriously enough to require evacuation to Stateside Army Medical facilities. And 280 amputees have been treated in Army facilities as a result of the war. A lot of unscrupulous types who just want to pretend to "support the troops" ignore these facts in favor of the less correct (and more impressive) claim that 15,500 troops have been seriously wounded, or maimed, or mutilated. The real numbers are big enough - I just can't understand why some feel the need to pad them.

At this point, on Iraq policy, the Democrats have dropped barren reason and left themselves only fury (Rahm Emmanuel), hysteria (Dennis Kucinich), sarcasm (Nancy Pelosi), and bile (the normally gentlemanly Tom Lantos). Speaker after speaker arose from the left side of the aisle claiming that nameless Republicans had "questioned the patriotism" of John Murtha (the "uncheckable anecdote" again).

Samuel Johnson said that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." If so, accusing your opponent of questioning your patriotism, when all he has questioned is your judgment and sanity, is the last refuge of the tongue-tied. Resorting to easily disproven lies about the number of "grievously wounded" is the mark, not of desperation, but of just not giving a damn anymore. Resorting to the infantile attack of calling the president a "liar" and the vice president a "chickenhawk" and "vice president of torture," because you would fight the war differently (if at all), is what Rudyard Kipling called "the mark of the beast."

I am so tired of this Democratic Party. It has never been worse than it is today. I am so tired of the lies, the smears, the hysterical fear mongering, the faux tears, the ersatz outrage at imagined slights. I am so tired of Nancy Pelosi's snide asides; she literally said today that John Murtha had shown "great courage" by "speaking truth to power." I rib you not: she used those very words. She has become a walking parody of a radical San Francisco feminist.

I am tired of the rot that reaches out and touches every member of that party, no matter how sane he was before the 2000 election. The miasma of corruption that follows Democrats around, like the cloud of dust permanently hovering over Pig Pen, has reached out a tendril and struck again... and I am utterly disgusted by it, never more so than today.

I held off on this post until I saw the final vote on the Murtha proposal. Here is the tally:

Republicans: 0 Yea, 215 Nay (16 not voting, probably already home for Thanksgiving);

Democrats: 3 Yea, 187 Nay, 6 voted "present" (6 not voting).

Bernie Sanders: 1 Nay

Well, the Murtha episode is all over but the shouting now... and expect plenty of that, as Republicans take to the weekend talk shows pointing out that the Democrats may talk a good fight about "a war we shouldn't even be in," but when actually put to a vote, they had to suck it up and admit the Republicans are right to stay the course.

And the Democrats will take to the airwaves whining that it was a totally unfair ambush to force them actually to vote on their defeatist and increasingly reality-challenged rhetoric.

So it goes.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 18, 2005, at the time of 8:48 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Denny Hastert Finds a Spine

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Or perhaps he simply rented one. In any event, he has wisely scheduled a vote on Mad-Eye Murtha 's document of surrender.

House Republicans, sensing an opportunity for political advantage, maneuvered for a quick vote and swift rejection Friday of a Democratic lawmaker's call for an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq.

"We want to make sure that we support our troops that are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. "We will not retreat."

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi had no immediate reaction to the planned vote.

Quelle surprise. She's already chewed through most of the rugs in her congressional office suite and is commencing on the furniture. The absolute last thing the Democrats wanted at this juncture was actually to be put in the quandry of going on record about what to do in Iraq -- stay and fight or cut and run, abandon our allies, and lunge at American defeat as if it were the brass ring on the merry-go-round.

The "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" is in raptures over the Murtha proposal. MoveOn, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, our old friend Stansfield Turner (who calls Dick Cheney "vice president for torture"), Ramsey Clarke, Noam Chomsky and the like are always overjoyed when they can make America lose a war; and the fact that we would then assuredly be attacked over and over again by terrorists would just be icing on the cake, since they believe we could only respond then by becoming more socialist, more appeasing, weaker... more like France.

But the AP story has the other horn of the dilemma exactly backwards:

By forcing the issue to a vote, Republicans placed many Democrats in a politically unappealing position - whether to side with Murtha and expose themselves to attacks from the White House and congressional Republicans, or whether to oppose him and risk angering the voters that polls show want an end to the conflict.

Yeah, they wish. There has been no poll whatsoever that has ever showed a majority of the American voter (or even a sizable minority) wants us to bolt from Iraq and make all the Democrats' dreams about Vietnam come true. Not a one. Every poll shows that, regardless of whether they support the war or now believe it was not worth fighting, whether they believe the president was correct, wrong but truthful, or that he "lied us into war," Americans nevertheless recognize that the war has become a war against the most evil forces of terrorism and must be won before we can withdraw. Iraq must be left as a functioning democracy that has the ability to defend itself.

And that is the other side of the coin for Democrats: they can either vote against Murtha and infurate the leftmost branch of the party, which happens to be the only branch left with political energy (and necessary cash)... or they can vote with Murtha and reinforce, all over again, exactly why they can never again be trusted with the reins of power. "The Democrats were absolutely right to compare Iraq to Vietnam," the Republicans should argue: "because in both cases, the Democratic Party wants America to surrender to evil and withdraw from the world, hoping that appeasement causes our enemies to take pity on us. They were wrong to cower before Ho Chi Minh in 1974 -- and it's just as despicable to crawl before Zarqawi in 2005."

The other excellent outcome of this vote today -- and I truly hope the argument stretches on over the weekend and into next week, so we can milk this terrible error by the Democrats for all it's worth -- is that it will put all House Republicans on record as well: and I expect that each and every one, the entire 232-member extended family (weird uncles and crackpot cousins included), will vote to defeat John Murtha's craven proposal. They have no need to appease appeasers, as there is no MoveOn wing of the GOP.

This gives them a golden opportunity to get that "mulligan" we all want on the stupid Senate vote: the House can redeem the other side of Capitol Hill. And just because they're not voting, don't expect the Senate Republicans will keep their mouths shut about this; they can erase by their denunciation of this bill the taint of their slap at President Bush a few days ago.

Finally, the Bush administration had better pounce on this over the weekend and beat the Democrats like a taiko drum for the next several months. The meme is obvious: "For three years now, the Democrats have been obsessed, even possessed, with trying to prove that the president lied us into the war, despite all the evidence that convinced even the Democrats themselves just three years ago. And what is the result of this derangement? They become so intent upon making their 'Iraq equals Vietnam' rhetoric into a self-fulfilling prophecy, they're now actually demanding that America surrender to the terrorists, just to enhace the Democrats' political prospects in 2006 and 2008."

Speaker Hastert has shown the excellent political instincts that propelled him into the big chair in the first place. Go, dawg, go!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 18, 2005, at the time of 2:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Who Is John Murtha?

Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

The fact that a man steps up, joins the Marines, and does his duty in Korea (one year) and Vietnam (one year) makes him a brave, resourceful, and responsible citizen.

It doesn't necessarily make him bright.

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) has a BA in economics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania -- a minor degree from a minor university. He went into politics at age 36 and has been there ever since (he's 73 now). His seat appears to be totally safe: Wikipedia says his only two close electoral calls were both in primaries; he took the seat from the Republicans in 1974, but that was in the depths of Watergate... since then, it has been a totally safe Democratic seat.

Although he has been in Congress for thirty-one years, his highest rank has been chair/ranking member of an appropriations subcommittee; that is, his subcommittee votes on spending bills. He has never been in the House leadership, minority or majority.

For all of John Murtha's website boasts about his "first-hand knowledge of military and defense issues" that made him "a trusted adviser to presidents of both parties and one of the most effective advocates for the national defense in Washington," I don't see anything in his background that would mark him as particularly knowledgeable about high-level strategy: he seems never to have commanded any unit larger than a company; he doesn't claim to have been through the Naval War College; he has never been Secretary of Defense or a service secretary.

There are twenty-nine Democrats who are members of the House Armed Services Committee (including Loretta Sanchez and Cynthia McKinney), but John Murtha is not one of them.

John Murtha appears to be a reasonably well-respected back bencher, one of the innumerable nomenklatura that litter the halls of the Capitol.

His attack on Dick Cheney as a chickenhawk is fascinating from a psychological standpoint: it seems excessively defensive. In reality, Cheney has had a much more successful career at virtually every level, and in particular in military matters: he was White House Chief of Staff to Gerald Ford at age 34 (the youngest in history); in the House of Reps, he was chairman of the Republican Conference and then Minority Whip (same position as Tom DeLay, except the Republicans were then in the minority).

As Secretary of Defense under Bush-41, Cheney actually sat in the War Room in the Pentagon with the top flag officers, planning strategy for Operation Just Cause (Panama) and Operation Desert Shield/Storm (Kuwait). Murtha, of course, has never done this. In fact, Murtha never served in any administration, so he has no strategic command experience in any way or form.

During the Clinton years, Cheney headed one of the largest companies in the world, Halliburton (currently ranked 654th in the world on the Forbes 2000), market cap around $20 billion, revenues about $20 billion, nearly 100,000 employees under Cheney's management; Halliburton is primarily an energy-construction company, but they do a lot of military contracting... so Cheney saw that side of military strategy as well. And he has now been vice president for five years, intimately involved at every stage with both the Commander in Chief and the current SecDef, his old boss, Don Rumsfeld, during two significant wars and scores of U.S. military involvements around the world.

Murtha is not privy to any highly classified intelligence; Cheney of course sees virtually all of it.

Yes, true: Dick Cheney signed up for a draft reclassification to 3-A (married with children) in 1965, and he was not drafted into Vietnam. He was already twenty-four at the time, just two years from likely not being draftable anyway. BFD.

John Murtha's background -- even in military matters -- doesn't begin to approach Cheney's, and Murtha knows it. The fact that he spent two or three years on active duty (and thirty-five years in the reserves) doesn't alter that essential fact: Murtha has never had any experience with, let alone responsibility for, military strategy... he simply did what he was ordered to do, first as an enlisted Marine, then as a Captain. This is honorable, but it is not a qualification for passing judgment on the strategic progress of a war.

Rep. John Murtha has no qualification to judge whether a war is "unwinnable" or should be abandoned. Dick Cheney does. End of story.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 18, 2005, at the time of 5:01 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

November 17, 2005

"Cut and Run" -- the Slap Back

Iraq Matters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

Antimedia writes in the comments to "Cut and Run" Now Out In the Open that the White House has already responded to Rep. Murtha's call for capitulation to Musab Zarqawi and the merry men of al-Qaeda in Iraq:

Statement by the Press Secretary on Congressman Murtha's Statement

Congressman Murtha is a respected veteran and politician who has a record of supporting a strong America. So it is baffling that he is endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party. The eve of an historic democratic election in Iraq is not the time to surrender to the terrorists. After seeing his statement, we remain baffled -- nowhere does he explain how retreating from Iraq makes America safer.

"The policy positions of Michael Moore... surrender to the terrorists... retreating from Iraq" -- no-siree, this is not the president's father's administration anymore!

This spills more wind into the sails of those of us who desperately want to see Bush really start to fight back against unuseful idiots like Rep. Murtha.

Thanks, Antimedia!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 17, 2005, at the time of 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"Cut and Run" Now Out In the Open

Iraq Matters , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

It's good to know that even the Democrats have a few folks who never get the memo.

Hawkish Democrat Calls for Iraq Pullout
Nov 17, 2005
By Liz Sidoti

WASHINGTON (AP) - An influential House Democrat who voted for the Iraq war called Thursday for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, another sign of growing unease in Congress about the conflict.

"It is time for a change in direction," said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., one of Congress' most hawkish Democrats. "Our military is suffering, the future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf region."

House Republicans assailed Murtha's position as one of abandonment and surrender, and accused Democrats of playing politics with the war. "They want us to retreat. They want us to wave the white flag of surrender to the terrorists of the world," Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said in a statement.

Murtha estimated that all U.S. troops could be pulled out within six months. A decorated Vietnam veteran, he choked back tears during his remarks to reporters.

And I suspect the Democratic leadership was choking back rage and fury: here they are, desperately trying to convince the American people that the Democrats can be trusted with national-security policy, that we don't have to worry that they'll cut and run from Iraq if they get into power... and along comes "an influential House Democrat," "one of Congress' most hawkish Democrats," and "a decorated Vietnam veteran" who nakedly says exactly that!

Note that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) refused even to attend Murtha's press conference and was at pains later to distance herself from his tearful offer to surrender the United States to Musab Zarqaqi.

And this is not just some wackjob back-bencher, either... Murtha is about as good as it gets in Democratic circles; he has what passes for gravitas there:

The top Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, Murtha has earned bipartisan respect for his grasp of military issues over three decades in Congress. He planned to introduce a resolution Thursday that, if passed by both the House and the Senate, would force the president to withdraw U.S. troops.

This is about the greatest present that the Democrats could give Bush and the Republicans, and coming at such a critical moment, too! Every Democrat in the House and Senate will once again have to go on record as advocating either an immediate, John-Kerryesque surrender in the global war on terrorism -- thus infuriating the American people -- or else advocating that we follow Bush's strategy of staying the course... thus enraging their paymasters at MoveOn.org, International ANSWER (another stupid acronym), and the Tides Foundation!

Could this possibly get any better?

By the way, two pet peeves of mine. Number one:

First elected to Congress in 1974, Murtha is known as an ally of uniformed officers in the Pentagon and on the battlefield. The perception on Capitol Hill is that when the congressman makes a statement on military issues, he's talking for those in uniform.

The fallacy of using proxy measurements instead of just measuring the actual event of interest

We also see this in the liberal "proof" that there is pervasive "right-wing bias" in the media: the media consist of big corporations -- Knight Ridder, Columbia Broadcasting System, and so forth; but we all know that corporations are right wing; therefore, the New York Times and the Washington Post, being corporations, must be biased towards the right wing.

In law, the principle is that of "best evidence," at least if Perry Mason (my main source of authoritative legal knowledge) knew what he was talking about: the best evidence of what is in, say, a will is the will itself, not someone talking about what he read in the will. You can only introduce the latter when the former is unavailable. In our mass-media example, we have only to look at how they treat liberals vs. conservatives in the actual articles they publish, and we see that they are in fact biased to the left -- as are many corporations. That is the best evidence.

In the Murtha case, surveys of soldiers are readily available; they get polled all the time. And I have never seen a single one where a majority of soldiers or sailors advocated the surrender for which Murtha here calls. So instead of reporting the "perception" that "he's talking for those in uniform," why not simply note that the best evidence indicates he decidedly is not?

Second peeve:

His voice cracked and tears filled his eyes as he related several stories of visiting wounded troops, including one who was blinded and lost both his hands but had been denied a Purple Heart because friendly fire caused his injuries.

"I met with the commandant. I said, 'If you don't give him a Purple Heart, I'll give him one of mine.' And they gave him a Purple Heart," said Murtha, who has two.

The fallacy of the uncheckable anecdote

Name, please? So we can check out whether this really happened as Murtha relates, or whether it's a fabrication, like the atrocity stories of Jimmy Massey (or John Kerry, for that matter), now proven (by testimony of five embedded journalists) to be utter fakes.

This is astonishing... the mainstream Democrat who advocates turning Iraq into Vietnam is the political gift that just keeps on giving! If Ken Mehlman is on his game, we should start seeing Rep. Murtha in Republican television commercials about May or June of next year.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 17, 2005, at the time of 2:53 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

The Torture Club

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

It should hardly be a shock to discover that the so-called Shiite torture prison was in fact run by militias who had infiltrated the local police and security services. Sachi blogged about that general problem more than a month ago, here and here.

Simply put, the same rules that apply to Sunni Arabs in Iraq must apply to the Shia as well: just as the Sunni must reject Zarqawi and other terrorists, the Shia must also reject Sadr and his ilk. But it's unsuprising that they would not be exactly rushing to cast out those who abuse suspected car bombers while the Sunni still aid, abet, conceal, and apologize for those same car-bombers in the first place.

We cannot allow this to be a deal breaker in Iraq. Support for armed extremists -- on both sides -- will gradually diminish as Iraqis come to have more faith in the democratic system with its constitutional protections for the minority and majority populations. But this is something that comes with experience in democracy; it cannot be made to be a precondition of democracy, because then neither will ever happen.

The Iraqis are following the right course here: break up such Shiite gangs when they run across them, get them out of the security services -- but don't delay the elections or other democratization, even though some areas may be voting under a cloud. The vote itself is more important than perfection in the vote.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 17, 2005, at the time of 2:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 16, 2005

Pentagon Needs a Librarian

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Steven Hayes in the current Weekly Standard reports that there are literally millions of pages of seized Iraqi documents we have not yet translated and read, some with very suggestive titles:

  • Locations of Weapons/Ammunition Storage (with map)
  • Formulas and information about Iraq's Chemical Weapons Agents
  • Denial and Deception of WMD and Killing of POWs
  • Chemical Agent Purchase Orders (Dec. 2001)
  • Correspondence between various Iraq organizations giving instructions to hide chemicals and equipment
  • Cleaning chemical suits and how to hide chemicals

And my favorite:

  • IIS reports on How French Campaigns are Financed

These are all titles of documents that have been entered into the HARMONY database, run by the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM); but there is a literal mountain of other documents we have not yet even "eyeballed."

Want to bet that somewhere among those millions of pages are locations of actual "large stockpiles of WMD" that we'll eventually find? If we do, I will make another prediction: no matter where we find them, no matter how well sourced and authenticated the document that leads us there, the Democrats will argue (a) they were planted by Bush; (b) even if they're genuine, they don't count because it's possible to use them for peaceful purposes... a chemical rocket can also be used as a paperweight, for example; (c) they also don't count because the statute of limitations has expired; and (d) why is the Bush administration still obsessing about the past, about the lies they used to lie us into the war, instead of marching boldly into the future, as Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, and Harry Reid want to do?

Read the whole article; it's pretty staggering.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 16, 2005, at the time of 2:39 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 15, 2005

Employment Disincentive

Iraq Matters , Ludicrous Lawsuits
Hatched by Dafydd

Ooo-rah! I have internet connectivity again, don't know for how long.

I have to share this one with y'all; it's too delicious to consume all by myself.... (Hat tip to Lee Porter.)

From the Associated Press:

1,100 Lawyers Leave Saddam Defense Team
By Jamal Halaby, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Amman, Jordan (AP)

Some 1,100 Iraqi lawyers have withdrawn from Saddam Hussein's defense team, citing insufficient protection following the slayings of two peers representing co-defendants of the ousted Iraqi leader.

Yes, isn't it odd? After their client murdered hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of Iraqis, these lawyers are shocked, shocked to find that some Iraqis don't take kindly to the rush of law jockeys to defend the monster. (What is the defense going to be... that it was somebody else, not Saddam Hussein, running Iraq all that time?)

However, the head of the investigative judges in Saddam's dozen cases, Raid Juhi, said Sunday the withdrawal of the defense team "will not affect the work of the court and it will continue its legal measures."

Translation: this is not particularly a trial to discover whether the accused actually did bad things; we pretty much know that. This is a show trial designed to demonstrate to ex-Baathists, once and for all, that they are no longer in charge and never will be again.

There are times when a show trial is the most proper and correct form of judicial proceeding.

After the killing of the first lawyer, defense attorneys announced they would not cooperate with the court and would refuse to appear at the next session until they were satisfied with security.

Laith Kubba, spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said the lawyers twice turned down invitations to move to the Green Zone, where they could be protected by U.S. and other international troops.

The law jockeys demand complete security -- but not from the Americans. Who do they expect to protect them, the Red Crescent? Al Jazeera? Ramsey Clark?

I find this hilarious. 1,100 attorneys can't wait to sign aboard to defend Saddam Hussein; his rights must be protected! But not if their own lives might be in jeopardy (since they refuse our protection).

I reckon these lawyers think more highly of their own skins than they do of the 148 Shiites of Dujail. Who would have imagined it?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 15, 2005, at the time of 11:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Killer Arg

Iraq Matters , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

Apologies in advance; I can only post my own speculation and opinion here, sans any supportive links. You just gotta take my word for it!

On this increasingly infantile argument by the Democrats that "Bush lied us into the war" because he said Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and we supposedly "failed to find any WMD" -- the killer argument here doesn't even need evidence.

Every explosive in Saddam Hussein's arsenal was a "weapon of mass destruction." Every artillery shell, every rocket, every missile of whatever range; each could be used -- and had been used in the past -- to butcher masses of innocent people. I don't know who first said it, but it's again so obvious it needs no specific citation: Hussein was himself a weapon of mass destruction.

So we thought it was "two minutes to midnight" when we attacked him, and it turned out to be maybe twenty minutes to midnight. He wasn't as far along as we thought in developing the really nasty stuff... chemical weapons, biological weapons, nukes. So the hell what? How does this affect the moral question?

Ramsey Clark, former LBJ attorney general and current pain-in-the-neck traitor to the United States, makes the absurd argument that when America fights a war, and the casualty ratio is lopsidedly in our favor, that constittutes a war crime; we have to suffer and bleed just as much as the enemy, or we're morally guilty. Take my word for it; this is pretty much the definitional example of being "stuck on stupid," in Lt. Gen. Russel Honore's memorable phrase. I prefer the tack taken by Gen. George S. Patton, in the words of Francis Ford Copolla's screenplay to the movie Patton: "No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

Broaden it out: it means you take your advantages where you find them. We had no obligation to wait until Hussein was just about to deploy Anthrax and VX rockets, just so we didn't have too great an advantage. The morality of a war isn't determined by how many casualties you suffer: the war is either righteous or it is wrong; it is either worth the risk or it is not; and we have a moral obligation to our soldiers to reduce the risk as far as we possibly can... yes, even by attacking before politely giving the enemy time to kill more American soldiers.

So long as we labored under the delusion that nobody was targeting the United States especially, we could get away with ignoring Hussein: he shot at our planes, we took out his fire-control radar.

But 9/11 changed everything. It became as obvious as the smirk on Howard Dean's lips that we were targetted, that Osama bin Laden was deadly serious when he publicly declared war on us some years ago. And that meant the rules had changed: by the basic law of war, we had the right to defend ourselves, including taking pre-emptive action (which Iraq was not, by the way) against allies of our enemy who posed a specific and credible threat to America or her interests.

The existence of WMDs was irrelevant to the larger moral question; it was just a way to explain the situation to people at the U.N. who don't understand moral arguments, having long since abandoned the belief in right and wrong. What mattered was the intent... and even the Democrats (even today!) admit that Hussein intended to develop any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon he could. No "lie," no "manipulation," no trick: Hussein had the intent and the means, he had the al-Qaeda contacts and the hatred, he was rolling in petrodollars, and "his brain was squirming like a toad."

Maybe he hid them; maybe he was just trying to develop them. Who the hell cares?

Saddam Hussein became a dead man walking the moment the second plane plowed into the second tower. He should have picked better friends.

He could no longer be coddled; he could no longer be tolerated; like John Dillinger, he was too wild to live. We had a moral obligation to America and to the rest of the free world to take the bastard out. Since we're humane folks, we decided to invade and put our own troops at risk, rather than bomb Iraq into rubble and then bounce the rubble, killing hundreds of thousands of relatively innocent civilians. But that was just us being nice.

We suddenly realized Hussein posed an existential threat to the America we grew up in... therefore, after we took care of the Taliban, we moved his name to the top of the list. We attacked at the end of March 2003, and he was ousted a few weeks later.

All else is dicta.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 15, 2005, at the time of 11:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 14, 2005

Off With the Gloves!

Iraq Matters , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The demigods over at Power Line are just going to be ecstatic about this. John Hinderaker worried that Bush's speech a few days ago, defending himself and his administration from the destructive and absurdist "Bush lied, people died" meme was just a one-off, and that the president might decide that, since he had "answered" the charge, he could then just "move on to other things."

This is a pretty good beginning, but it means nothing unless Bush and his surrogates keep up the counter-attack. My fear is that Bush will think that now that he has responded, he can move on to other things. This would be a serious mistake. I think Bush and his surrogates should give the same speech more or less every day for the next month or two. The administration has a lot of catching up to do, and a single speech, or a handful of speeches, won't have any impact.

But today, AP calms our fears:

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (AP) - President Bush, heading to Asia with hopes of improving his image on the world stage, hurled a parting shot at Iraq war critics on Monday, accusing some Democrats of "sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy."

"That is irresponsible," Bush said in prepared remarks he planned to deliver to U.S. forces during a refueling stop in Alaska. Excerpts from the remarks were released by the White House as Bush flew to Elemendorf Air Force Base on the initial leg of an eight-day journey to Japan, South Korea, China and Mongolia.

"Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," Bush said in his prepared remarks.

"Only one person manipulated evidence and misled the world - and that person was Saddam Hussein," Bush added.

The president continues the powerful centerpunching he finally began last week:

In his prepared Alaska remarks, Bush noted that some elected Democrats in Congress "have opposed this war all along.

"I disagree with them, but I respect their willingness to take a consistent stand," he said. "Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are playing politics with this issue and sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy."

Rem acu tetigisti, as the Romans said; Bush has touched the point with a needle. Congress does not have access to every jot and tittle of intelligence information that the president does; but the Senate and House Intelligence Committees did, in fact, have access to all of the major conclusions -- and all of the disagreements and caveats -- available to the White House.

Yet twenty-nine Democrats in the Senate (and most Democrats in the House, though that was a voice vote, not a roll call) voted on October 11th, 2002, to authorize the use of force in Iraq, including all of the presidential candidates of 2004 in Congress except for Bob Graham of Florida -- then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), John Edwards (D-NC), Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), and nominee John Kerry (D-MA) -- and several expected candidates for 2008, including Joe Biden (D-DE) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY).

Despite supporting the war in 2002, Edwards, Kerry, Biden and other Democrats (such as Charles Schumer) are leading the pack charging that Bush "lied us into the war." I suppose what they're really claiming is that they voted to send America to war without even having read the relevant intelligence. I don't believe it, but that's what they must be saying.

The minority Republicans (except for Lincoln Chafee) read the intelligence reports and concluded that Saddam Hussein had to go. Some Democrats read the same intelligence reports (or didn't bother) and decided it wasn't enough to go to war; these folks -- Dick Durbin (D-IL), Pat Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), for example -- at the very least have the virtue of consistency: they were agin' it then, they're agin' it now.

But the Democratic Party has a terrible problem: they desperately want to paint Bush as a mindless warmonger who was in possession of credible intelligence that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (despite the fact that we actually found those "large stockpiles" that were promised -- see here and here, most recently), but who "lied" about it just to get us into that war. But they have no answer for the large number of very big-profile Democrats who either looked at the intel and agreed with Bush -- or who couldn't even trouble themselves to look at the intel before voting.

I visualize John Hinderaker standing atop his desk and doing the "Dilbert dance" at the thought that Bush has finally awaked from his year-and-a-half slumber and picked a fight with the lying slime who have done him and the Republican Party -- and the country -- so much damage already.

If John has room up there, I'd like to join him. Now if only Bush would also finally take on the numbskulls who insist that a chemical rocket isn't a chemical weapon if the chemicals are not actually loaded, just sitting alongside in a 55-gallon drum inside the same camouflaged bunker.

Yup. And a gun isn't a gun if you just unload it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 14, 2005, at the time of 4:25 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

November 7, 2005

Post to the Post

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

I wonder if Deborah Orin reads Big Lizards? Somehow I doubt it... though it's a nice thought to contemplate. In any event, I must rise to correct one small point in her otherwise excellent New York Post column on the Joseph Wilson scam, flagged by my favorite blog, Power Line. Actually, though it's a small point in her column, easily corrected, it's a monumental, colossal point in the history of the Iraq war and aftermath.

The column lays out, with perfect clarity, the case that far from wanting to keep the lid on Joe Wilson, the CIA actually encouraged his repeated lies about his trip and what he found (and "didn't find"), even though it knew this would jeopardize the career of his CIA employed wife, Valerie Plame Wilson. In the course of the column, Ms. Orin found occasion to wonder why they would be so complicit in Wilson's attacks on the president; she concluded, with admirable straigtforwardness rare in the MSM, that the CIA was in full CYA mode by the time Wilson went public in mid-2003:

But then, all this came at a time when the CIA division where Wilson's wife worked had an intense need to cover its rear: Remember — they were the ones who (along with every other intel agency in the world) had insisted that Saddam had WMDs — but no WMDs were being found.

The irony of this could choke a horse. The reason that "no WMDs were being found" is that the Iraq Survey Group, a creature of the CIA as well as the Pentagon and the IAEA, was headed at that time by David Kay; and Kay had made a conscious decison not to count as WMD any item that had a dual civilian use. Read how carefully Kay parsed his words when he resigned in January 2004 (via Wikipedia):

I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarized chemical weapons there.

Note that this would elegantly rule out any chemical weapon that was not "deployed" -- that is, rockets made to accept chemical payloads but which were currently empty, even if they were found twenty-five feet away from 55-gallon drums of cyclosarin-based "pesticides" in a camouflaged ammunition bunker. This is akin to cops searching a convicted felon's home and refusing to arrest because all the guns they found were unloaded, thus not "deployed" and "militarized."

So if the CIA was in the doghouse, as clearly it was, its embarassment was entirely of its own making... both for predicting (one can only presume) that we would find warehouses of carefully labeled WMD, all loaded up and ready to fire -- and then after the war, for allowing David Kay to construct a definition of WMD so crabbed and narrow that virtually nothing would qualify except the cartoonish scenario above.

That in turn causes me to wonder whether there were some in the CIA so anti-Iraq War, so anti-President-Bush, that they were willing to sacrifice even the good name of the Company itself, so painstakingly rebuilt from the nadir of the Carter era, if only that would hurt President Bush's reelection chances. If so, all we would have shown (alas) is that the liberal rot was no less advanced within the CIA than within the State Department, academe, and the mainstream media.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2005, at the time of 1:07 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Oil for Blood

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

NOTE: This story was developed in collabortion between Sachi and Dafydd.

Is the United Nations trying to change the subject from its own complicity -- for literally years -- in the massive theft from the Iraqi people that is the Oil for Food scandal?

According to the New York Times on Saturday, a UN-sponsored auditing board, called the "International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq," is recommending that the United States should "repay as much as $208 million" to Iraq for alleged overcharges by Kellog, Brown and Root (KB&R), a subsidiary of Halliburton that has come under fire before by the Democratic Party and their allies in the press and the UN.

An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary.

The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work. [all emphasis here and elsewhere added]

Even the Development Fund Board isn't quite sure just how much actual money they think should be forked over:

The monitoring board, created by the United Nations specifically to oversee the Development Fund - which includes Iraqi oil revenues but also some money seized from Saddam Hussein's government - said because the audits were continuing, it was too early to say how much of the $208 million should ultimately be paid back.

In other words, it could be $208 million... or it could be zero. Or anything in between. But such irrelevant questions won't stop the UN from playing "let's you and him fight."

Let's open a tab: the UN Board recommends that the United States pay "as much as" $208,000, but doesn't actually know how much of that money is actually overcharge and how much is perfectly legimate; and they also criticized KB&R workmanship but couldn't point to any specifics. They just dropped the last charge without going through all the fuss and bother of finding actual evidence of any wrongdoing.

A spokeswoman for Halliburton, Cathy Mann, said the questions raised in the military audits, carried out in a Pentagon office called the Defense Contract Auditing Agency, had largely focused on issues of paperwork and documentation and alleged nothing about the quality of the work done by K.B.R. The monitoring board relied heavily on the Pentagon audits in drawing its conclusions.

"The auditors have raised questions about the support and the documentation rather than questioning the fact that we have incurred the costs," Ms. Mann said in an e-mail response to questions. "Therefore, it would be completely wrong to say or imply that any of these costs that were incurred at the client's direction for its benefit are 'overcharges.'"

I wonder... how much thought has the Board given to the actual costs of working in Iraq during the chaos starting right after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government? Civilian workers had been subjected to roadside bombings, kidnappings, and even beheadings. In order to attract workers to work in such a hostile environment, KB&R would have to offer much higher salaries than other companies -- not mention enormous insurance premiums and the cost of a large number of security personnel. Since KB&R is a private company, not a government organization, they had to provide security for their own employees.

But there is no evidence the Board considered any of these explanations for the high cost. The Times says they "relied heavily on [earlier] Pentagon audits" in preparing these recommendations; but it does not quote from any of those previous audits; so we have no way of knowing whether the Board's recommendation agrees with the Pentagon's audits or contradicts them.

Why is the United Nations releasing this report, with its hearsay and inuendo, at this particular moment in time? Several reasons leap out: First, there is the continuing investigation into the UN's Oil for Food bribery scheme. With both its own investigation by Paul Volcker and the investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations nipping at the heels of Secretary General Kofi Annan, his family, and cronies over the billions of dollars stolen from the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein with the connivance of the United Nations heirarchy (who took their own bribes and kickbacks), they desperately need someone else to be the villain for a while. Since there seems no way to blame Israel for any of this, the United States is elected.

Second, for those who have always opposed the war to remove Saddam, there is the urgent task of getting more Iraqis to hate the United States and perhaps demand our immediate withdrawal, while there is still time for the Baathists to return:

The monitoring board authority extends only to making recommendations on any reimbursement. It would be up to the United States government to decide whether to make the payments, and who should make them. But Louay Bahry, a former Iraqi academic who is now at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said the board's findings would stoke suspicions on the street in Iraq, where there had always been fears that the United States invaded the country to control its oil resources.

"Something like this will be caught in the Iraqi press and be discussed by the Iraqi general public and will leave a very bad taste in the mouth of the Iraqis," Mr. Bahry said. "It will increase the hostility towards the United States."

And finally, most in the UN would much prefer to see the Democrats in charge in the United States, rather than "warmongers" like George W. Bush and the Republicans. Anything that will further that cause is always in order.

The audits may also come at a bad time for the Bush administration, since Vice President Dick Cheney's former role as chief executive of Halliburton has led to charges, uniformly dismissed by Mr. Cheney and the company, that it received preferential treatment in receiving the contracts. The early Kellogg, Brown & Root contracts in Iraq were "sole sourced," or bid noncompetitively.

"The Bush administration repeatedly gave Halliburton special treatment and allowed the company to gouge both U.S. taxpayers and the Iraqi people," Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a statement on the new audits. "The international auditors have every right to expect a full refund of Halliburton's egregious overcharges."

Speaking of "a full refund," when will the UN pay back all the money they helped loot from Iraq in the last years of Hussein's bloody rule? Perhaps after they do that, we can talk about this tendentious audit.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 7, 2005, at the time of 2:16 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 6, 2005

Go Ahead -- Be Silly!

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

I think this is good news. Or maybe it's just silly news.

BlackFive reports that soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, who have problems with houses that have been booby trapped with tiny tripwires (so small they're invisible in the dark) attached to explosives, have found an amazing way to find those tripwire threads: Silly String!

Evidently, they spray the stuff into dark areas; when it floats down, it allegedly is caught by the tripwires, dangling from them. Since Silly String is bright, it makes the booby traps easy to spot and avoid, or to detonate from a safe distance.

Now, I caution that this could be a hoax; I have no way of knowing. It seems pretty reasonable on its face. BlackFive links to this website (not a blog), which has authentic-looking photos of the site author testing the theory in his home. And there's nothing inherently preposterous: Silly String is much, much lighter than a human brushing against a wire: it seems unlikely that it would have enough weight to trip the explosion.

I wonder how old this idea is? Silly String was around in the early seventies; supposedly, it was invented in 1969 -- so theoretically, it could have been used in Vietnam. But you'd think if this trick were a mainstay, BlackFive would have heard of it before. So is this new? Anybody out there use Silly String in previous military engagements to find invisible tripwires?

This is either a spectacularly clever practical joke -- or else it's a spectacular example of American ingenuity and sideways thinking, coming up with a brilliant solution using a child's toy to prevent Coalition and Iraqi forces from being killed by terrorists.

Either way, I reckon it's good news!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 6, 2005, at the time of 2:51 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 5, 2005

American Rambette

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

I was reading "old" history of Operation Iraqi Freedom and remembered the story about Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester. Something suddenly occurred to me that I haven't seen anyone mention so far. The award itself isn't really "news," because the MilBlogs were all over it at the time. But there is a special point to note that I'll get to a few paragraphs down.

Sgt. Hester is the first American woman awarded the Silver Star since World War II. The Silver Star is awarded for "gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force." But what is most interesting about Sgt. Hester is that I think she is the first American woman to be awarded that medal for actually attacking and killing the enemy!

Other recipients all received their medals (sometimes posthumously), whether Silver Star, Navy Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, or even Medal of Honor, for heroically performing their duties during air raids or under fire. But those duties were almost all as nurses (the Medal of Honor winner was a Civil-War surgeon, Dr. Mary Walker), except for a couple of pilots. They bravely stuck to their posts and did their duty despite bombs and gunfire. But their duty was to heal, not to kill.

Sgt. Hester is a Military Policewoman. She was assigned to Raven 42, 617th MP Co, Kentucky National Guard, assigned to the 503rd MP Bn (Fort Bragg), 18th MP Bde. She got her Silver Star on June 16th this year for her gallantry during an ambush on a convoy of supply trucks some months earlier. Raven 42 saw the convoy stopped and they charged directly towards the sound of the gunfire.

After her Humvee came under fire, Sgt. Hester grabbed an M4 carbine and an M203 grenade launcher, jumped into an irrigation ditch being used by Iraqi terrorists to fire on her Hummer crew, and killed at least five jihadis. She had to return to her vehicle once to reload, then ran back to the trench to continue clearing it out. She is America's first medal-winning Rambette!

You can read the After Action Report about her engagement at Blackfive.

Of course, until recently, women were not allowed to carry weapons into combat zones (even as MPs). As time passes, we will probably see more and more awards like Sgt. Hester received. Eventually, a woman will be awarded the Medal of Honor for the same reason Audie Murphy received his: for killing bad guys!

Here is Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester receiving her Silver Star:

Anwrmap.jpg

Hatched by Sachi on this day, November 5, 2005, at the time of 6:29 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 3, 2005

Little Demo In Slumberland

Iraq Matters , Politics - National , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

John over at Power Line (easily the second snappiest dresser of those three) mulls the motive behind the Democrats' hysteria -- now -- over pre-war intelligence:

Democratic activists desperately want to block Judge Alito from ascending to the Court, but the reality is that Senate Democrats are powerless to achieve that goal. Alito's qualifications are unassailable, the Democrats are a minority party, and the Republicans are united in the conviction that Alito deserves a vote. A filibuster isn't out of the question, but if the Dems try it, it will fail.

So the Senate Democrats can't come through for their party where it counts. I doubt that the timing of the Month of Valerie is a coincidence; I suspect it is intended mostly to distract the Democratic base from the reality of the Senate Democrats' impotence.

I don't mean to be fip, but I think John has hold of the means, not the motive. He has to grab the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face.

Ever since the catastrophe of 1994, the Democratic Party has lived in a fantasy world of its own devising. Unable to face the reality of losing the House and Senate in 1994, then the presidency in 2000, then the Senate again in 2002 (after Jumpin' Jim Jeffords' defection was discounted), and most recently the 2004 reelection, they have been unable to recover sanity, daily drifting deeper into political schizophrenia... to quote Adam Savage, "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

I don't need a psychiatrist like Charles Krauthammer or Thomas Szasz; the signs are manifest. Most overtly and trivially, there are the two distinct TV shows set in fantasy universes where the Democrats are in charge of everything: the West Wing and Commander In Chief. Arguably, many Democrats demanded a show like CinC because they were unsatisfied with the West Wing -- because they had a few Republican characters who were not totally corrupt raving lunatics.

But the dementia manifests in uglier ways, too: many Democrats still, to this day, refuse to admit that Bush won the election in 2000 or in 2004. A U.S. senator, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), actually tried to prevent the Ohio electoral votes for Bush from being certified in January of this year, presumably on the grounds that John Kerry was the "real" winner there.

Democrats have wallowed in increasingly occult conspiracy theories and nightmarish fantasies, from George W. Bush conspiring with Arabs on the 9/11 attacks to Republicans and the Army Corps of Engineers plotting to blow up the New Orleans levees "to kill the black people." Karl Rove has assumed monstrous significance, as if he were an incarnation of Ernst Stavro Blofeld (for the younger set, Dr. Evil). Creepy cartels of neocons (read "Jew-o-cons") secretly seize control of the world for their nefarious Zionist plans.

Many left-liberals now live in a world that is as thrilling and horrific as the H.P. Lovecraft "Cthulhu" Mythos *, full of dark, eldrich gods, nameless cults, and unspeakable rites. Reliable, old, secret-society paranoia has resurged, of course: the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, even the Illuminati; but new and bizarre cults have formed around the basic template of "Famous Right-Winger X is secretly in league with Evil Villain Y"... for example, Osama bin Laden is actually a Mossad agent working for Ariel Sharon, Bush-41 started the Gulf War in order to build an oil pipeline for Mullah Omar, and Saddam Hussein is actually a mole who has been under Donald Rumsfeld's thumb since the early 1980s. Other brand new (tired old) cult archetypes include the specter of "globalization," with the World Trade Organization taking the place of the Knights Templar or the Hashishim "Assassins;" and the omnipotent, omnipresent Haliburton standing in for Wolfram & Hart in the Buffy spinoff Angel.

Let's be clear about this. Reality does not come packaged in stories; but our brains are hardwired to comprehend events in dramatic form, with heroes, villains, a climax, and a denouement. So we (all of us) dream up "the story of our lives," in which the dreamer is the protagonist, someone or some group is elected to be antagonist, and life becomes a series of chapters, each ending in a cliffhanger.

For Republicans and conservatives, who are in the ascendency and generally happy with life, the tale is a modern-day adventure-romance, typically with a happy ending. But for Democrats and liberals, who have seen nothing but dark chapters for years now, the tome is a Clive Barker bloodfest, a King Lear tale of madness and woe, a science-fiction black comedy like the Matrix, or a Walter-Mitty fantasy of easy triumph and cheap, childish victory, depending how much angst the tale-singer can take before breaking from reality entirely. Read the New York Times quickly, then ask yourself whether it wouldn't have even more verisimilitude with a wicked stepmother and a dragon.

The Democrats have no "plan" for how to use pre-war intelligence against Bush... no more than John Nash (Russell Crowe) had any well thought out purpose for hallucinating "Agent Parcher" (Ed Harris) and his machinations in a Beautiful Mind. They are demon-driven to expose the evil, just as D.A. Jim Garrison was driven to expose the massive conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK (a plot that required the connivance of Lyndon Johnson, the FBI, the Soviets, and the 82nd Airborne). And it doesn't matter that nobody will listen anymore, that Democrats have "no one left to lie to," in Christopher Hitchens' memorable phrase. Like Dr. Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) in Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they are condemned to stagger forever along the street, flagging down cars and screaming the warning: "They're already here! You're next!"

* Spellchecker attempted to correct this to the "Chihuahua Mythos."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 3, 2005, at the time of 11:22 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

November 1, 2005

Weapon of Mass Media Deception

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

The absurdity of Harry Reid's tantrum today, forcing the Senate into a rare closed session as a stunt to draw attention to the Democrats' claims that the entire Iraq war was cooked up by Karl Rove and the neocons and sold to Americans by lies and distortions (see virtually any speech by John F. Kerry in 2004) has been ably covered already today by Power Line and by Captain's Quarters. I have little to add to the main points of Paul and Ed.

I'm more interested in the way that the mainstream news media manipulate the story in order to support the Democrats' side of the dispute. Let's start with the easiest to document, the slam dunk. Here is the Associated Press today:

Democrats contend that the unmasking of Valerie Plame was retribution for her husband, Joseph Wilson, publicly challenging the Bush administration's contention that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Africa. That claim was part of the White House's justification for going to war.

Missing in action from this report is the fact that the Butler Report from Great Britain completely affirmed this very contention (actually, Bush said that the British had such evidence), and also that the final, unanimous report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that Joseph Wilson himself told his CIA debriefer that the Nigerien prime minister (and former minister of mines) had stated that the Iraqis conducted secret negotiations to buy something from Niger -- and that the prime minister believed that "something" was yellowcake uranium (as opposed to animal hides or cowpeas, Niger's other exports).

But lying by omission is not the worst of the reporting. In its zeal to cheer the Democrats on, AP has yet again exaggerated beyond the evidence to blatant falsehood about what we actually found in Iraq:

Reid's move shone a spotlight on the continuing controversy over prewar intelligence. Despite administration claims, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and some Democrats have accused the White House of manipulating the information.

While it is true that under the crabbed definition of WMDs used by the U.N. inspectors no "large stockpiles" of chemical or biological weapons have been found, it is completely false to assert, as AP does, that none were. Washington Post, July 3rd, 2004, in a story written by Walter Pincus:

Yesterday's coalition release also said that two other 122-milimeter rounds, found by the Poles on June 16 with help from an Iraqi informer, tested positive for small quantities of sarin but were "so deteriorated" that they would have had "limited to no impact if used by insurgents against coalition forces."

...

Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, told Fox News on June 24 that "some" old sarin and mustard rounds have been discovered in scattered places, demonstrating "that the Iraqi declarations were wrong at least in . . . amount." But Duelfer cautioned he was not ready to make any judgment whether there were any "still concealed" military-capable stockpiles.

Even by the overly strict definition of the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG), these all qualify as "weapons of mass destruction." But more to the point is the definition itself: for Walter Pincus, the Associated Press, the entire mainstream media, the official line of the Democratic Party, and evidently the CIA and State Department themselves, the rockets found (or purchased) by the Poles in 2004 do not count as chemical munitions because the warheads, while manufactured to accept chemicals, were not filled.

Bear in mind that the ISG was led first by David Kay, then by Charles Duelfer. Kay was pushed by the State Department and by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei; and Duelfer was appointed by then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet: all three of these groups have waged relentless political warfare against George W. Bush, against Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in particular, against the conclusion of the "neocons" that Iraq posed a grave and gathering threat to the United States.

Each has persisted in this war-against-the-war long after the major-combat phase of the war itself was won, and the peace began to be waged with such intensity. The primary tactic they have used during this latter period has been to dispute every single WMD find as being something benign -- or at least potentially civilian -- instead of military.

Many times, we found huge drums of cyclosarin-based "pesticides" hidden in camouflaged ammunition bunkers... and many times we found empty chemical rockets and artillery shells, often at the same ammo dumps. But evidently, that doesn't constitute chemical weapons according to the ISG. But if Hussein's regime had actually poured the first into the second, then and only then would they be defined as chemical weapons.

Does this mean that a gun is not a gun if it's not loaded?

Captain Ed discussed this also, way back in April of 2004. He quotes extensively from Kenneth Timmerman's investigative piece in Insight Magazine, April 26th, 2004:

In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors....

But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English? Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory? In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA's) intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order - but found all the same....

But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" [Douglas] Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble. "Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."

(Hanson was an "atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer" who was a civilian analyst in Iraq in summer 2003 working on WMD issues.)

It is well known that the staggering extent of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs was only discovered after he lost the Gulf War. Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons by the tens of thousands were unearthed (often literally) and destroyed by the coalition. Afterward (we have known this for some time from defectors), Hussein decided that Iraq would take a new tack in its never-ending quest for WMD: from then on, all of Iraq's programs were designed to be "dual use": each would have an ostensibly civilian purpose (pesticides, medical research, nuclear power generation) but could quickly -- in some cases within minutes -- be converted to military use.

Therefore, when looking for "stockpiles" of WMD, the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) should have been looking, not for a warehouse full of shells pre-filled with sarin or mustard gas or anthrax, but rather for the precursor components of such: shells and rockets built to accept such chemicals or biological agents in close proximity to the agents themselves... even if they're not actually loaded into the warhead yet.

A rocket that can accept toxic chemicals into its warhead near a 55-gallon drum of cyclosarin-based "pesticide" is a chemical weapon, and it should be defined as such.

At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters - with unpleasant results. "More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump - evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."

That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin - a nerve agent. Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. "Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'" [Emphasis added]

Coalition troops have found mortar shells filled with a mystery liquid that tested positive in the field for being a blister agent (mustard gas, used so horrifically in World War I, is a blister agent); subsequent testing (redefinition) by the ISG disputed that finding. But lost in the shuffle was the question that should have leapt out at everyone: what conceivable purpose is served by placing a liquid inside a mortar shell in the first place?

Putting any sloshing substance inside a ballistic object would obviously throw off the accuracy -- so there must be some advantage that offsets that problem. Can we put our heads together and think of some possibility, a reason why a man like Saddam Hussein would order some liquid to be poured into a rocket or a mortar round?

Even by the most tendentious definition of WMD, we have found some; so AP's overreach is just flatly wrong. But more important, the definition of WMD stockpile itself is wrong. When assessing threat, you dare not take the most benign view that all those drums of cyclosarin, "reference strains" of Anthrax and botulinum, and those empty chemical and biological munitions are unrelated and only coincidentally situated right next to each other in camouflaged bunkers and ammo dumps. You must use the most expansive defintion that takes into account the avowed intent of the Iraqi WMD programs to produce "dual use" chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. And by that definition -- which the ISG would have used in any other context than the CIA's attempt to thwart the Bush Administration's foreign policy -- we have indeed found "large stockpiles" of WMD.

Even if the Democrats -- and their allies in the MSM and the CIA -- don't want to admit it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 1, 2005, at the time of 4:57 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

October 31, 2005

Calling for Iraqi Bill of Rights

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Dafydd

Omar on Iraq the Model reports on a conference he just attended. It was called Oath of Iraq (Ahd Al-Iraq), organized by a number of prominent Iraqi women and including powerful members of the national and tribal governments:

The event was attended by more than a few female Assembly members as well as several tribal sheiks and representatives of other political entities and organizations…one can fairly say that a wide range of social and political the spectrum of Iraq population was well represented in the event.

The group seems to be an attempt to enact an Iraqi bill of rights as the first amendments to the Iraqi constitution. The conferees initially proposed five amendments:

  • A requirement for the explicit definition of the term of art "public order and ethics," which the constitution allows as a limit on certain basic rights and freedoms (speech, press, assembly, peaceful protest). Otherwise, individual judges can invoke it whenever they don't like the free exercise of freedom.

(Someone should warn Omar that even defining it doesn't always work... as we've found out with regard to the Second Amendment, the "interstate commerce" clause, and too many others!)

  • An amendment "to return back to the civil law legislated back in 1959 and to prevent Shareat [Sharia] laws from replacing that law."
  • Clarifying the qualifications of the supreme federal court, the requirement that Sharia judges not outnumber legal judges, and the demand for at least 25% of the court to be female.
  • Requiring the Committee to review all laws to ensure they do not violate the Iraqi constitution.
  • Requiring the Higher Human Rights Committee to review all laws to ensure they do not violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

They had better tread carefully with that last amendment, and with the constitutional invocation (explicit and implicit) of the Universal Declaration. It is a bludgeon used by the United Nations to force conformity with European social-welfare policies and includes such whoppers as....

  • No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
  • Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
  • Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
  • Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
  • Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

And so forth. All these look nice on paper -- but the first is so vague as to justify anything, while the last is out and out Socialism; the others more or less boil down to the requirement that the productive labor on behalf of the unproductive... which seems to violate Article 4:

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

One more amendment was proposed by a tribal sheikh of Sadr City, and this one seems eminently reasonable. As Omar puts it in the post from Iraq the Model:

The entire crowd welcomed the notes of one tribal Sheik from Sadr city who raised an objection to one clause in the punishment law which states that teachers and husbands should not be persecuted if they use disciplinary beating against their students or wives respectively. in his unexpected note, the sheik asked the committee to include correcting this clause in its agenda. [Emphasis added]

Given the abuse of both women and students that is endemic in the Arab Middle East, such an amendment is vital.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 31, 2005, at the time of 2:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 30, 2005

Iraqi Kumbaya

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Togetherness is breaking out all over Iraq... and I understand that some sort of election might be about to be held. (Pssst! Nobody tell the Democrats... Carville and Begala might head out to drum up support for Hillary in 2008.)

Since the victory of the Iraqi constitution, an amazing thing has happened: in the midst of a terrorist war, Shia, Kurds, and even Sunni have begun to act like civilized people gearing up for an election: they're campaigning, making alliances of political convenience, giving speeches, and I wouldn't be surprised if they kissed a baby or two.

This is remarkable, because less than three years ago, they lived in a dictatorship that had never held a real, contested election in their lifetimes. The success of Iraq gives this skeptic of "nation building" a lot to ponder.

Islam Online reports that it's not just the Iraqi Islamic Party, but all three of the biggest Sunni parties have joined together to urge Sunnis to vote in the December elections -- and to warn them against boycotting this time.

The Conference of the People of Iraq (CPI), the Islamic Party and the Iraqi National Dialogue (IND) joined the political fray in Iraq on October 14 as one entity on October 14 to run in parliamentary elections.

"We want to run as a political bloc in the next elections in order to obtain the best results," IND head Sheikh Khalaf Alayan told reporters on Wednesday.

CPI chief Adnan Al-Dulaimi criticized those who might call for a boycott of the vote, saying they "sought to destroy the country".

"We hope that those who oppose this consultation will not place obstacles in our path," added Islamic Party number two Tareq Al-Hashimi.

In related and very odd -- and probably good -- news, even Muqtada Sadr, renegade functionally illiterate Shiite "scholar" and great disappointment to his revered father has, for the moment at least, given up his Mighty al-Mahti Militia and joined with the Sunni Arabs in Anbar province to present a joint slate of candidates for the Iraqi parliament:

NAJAF, Iraq, October 26, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Shiite leader Moqtada Al-Sadr said Wednesday, October 26, he would present a joint list of candidates with Sunni Arabs in Al-Anbar province to contest the December 15 legislative elections.

The office of the anti-occupation firebrand said it decided to ally itself with the Sunnis due to "the difficult situation facing the country, to prevent the occupier and enemies of Iraq from attaining their goals, to consolidate national identity and to reaffirm its unity," reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Sadr's deputy, Fattah Al-Sheikh, joins eight Sunni candidates on a list for the Anbar representation. While we're not great admirers of the buffoon Sadr (as you can probably tell), at least it's a step in the right direction that he wants to run for Parliament instead of holing himself up in a mosque in Najaf and threatening to destroy the 6,225th most holy site in the entire ummah.

In really unalloyed good news, the largest Islamic association in Iraq, the Association of Muslim Scholars (Hayat Al-Ulama Al-Muslimin), has decided not to call for a boycott this time -- at least for now. With all the major Sunni political groups in Iraq now calling for Sunnis to vote, not boycott, it's likely this Sunni association will do so too.

Regardless of whether we like or dislike various political parties in Iraq, it's just plain better that they fight against each other with political campaigns and parliamentary votes than Kalashnikovs and car bombs.

Let me give over the floor to Mohammed of Iraq the Model; he wrote some stirring words today at the end of a post describing all the new parties and alliances and political factions lining up for the election. It's like there's suddenly politics going on in heart of the Arab Middle East! Western style politics, as in Spain or France. Iraq has made amazing strides in just two and a half years... which is a tribute not only to the Iraqis themselves (of course) but also to a man named George W. Bush.

Here's Mohammed:

[I]t has to be acknowledged that the political experiment in Iraq has matured by far during these two and a half years and the political language slowly began to take more realistic dimensions and we can sense a growing faith in the ways of democracy giving some sort of special divinity to the ballot box which shall remain the only base for building a new Iraq. The more Iraqis believe in elections and in voting as a way to express themselves, the weaker violence becomes and the more isolated the terrorists will be. Iraqis will prove that they do believe in democracy and they do want liberty and justice and the[y] will show the region an example of how partners can work out their differences in spite of all the hardships. [Emphasis added]

Well, he ought to know!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 30, 2005, at the time of 12:38 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 27, 2005

Double Sourced, Double Trouble

Iraq Matters , Kriminal Konspiracies
Hatched by Dafydd

It is well known that Sens. Norm Coleman and Carl Levin believe that Respect Party MP George Galloway lied under oath when he testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs; when Galloway was being questioned by the two -- and he was unfurling his usual sneer and condescension -- he seems to have forgotten that in addition to sitting on that committee, the two were also the chair and ranking member of one of its subcommittees: the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Galloway has responded with predictable bravado, practically daring Investigations to refer him for indictment. Per the Belmont Club: "I am ready to fly to the US today, if necessary, to face such a charge because it is simply false," he boasted. But perhaps he'll cash in those plane tickets and plan an extended holiday in Switzerland instead after reading the upcoming report by Paul Volcker, who has hardly been considered a serious investigator of U.N. corruption -- given that he reports directly to Kofi Annan, one of key suspects in the case. Surprisingly, however, Volcker's report strikes hard against a number of targets that the Turtle Bay Illuminati would have preferred be protected... including a certain Respect Party MP from Bethnal Green and Bow (HT Dirty Dingus for correcting Galloway's district):

Among those named in the report as receiving oil vouchers that could be sold for a commission were British lawmaker George Galloway, former French UN Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and Russian ultranationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

So it's not just those radical right wingers, Norm Coleman (R-MN) and Carl Levin (D-MI)... it's former Chairman of the Federal Reserve and current Elliot Ness of the United Nations, Paul Volcker. Maybe it's time for George of the Bungle to drop the ludicrous posturing and raspberry blowing and simply confess his guilt and expiate his sins, else he may get the opportunity to see how his rhetoric falls on the ears of an American jury.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 27, 2005, at the time of 3:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Who Are We Fighting For Anyway -- Déjà Vu

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

In Lizard's Tongue number 3, I asked the question "who are we fighting for anyway?" If America is the champion of liberty everywhere but guardian only of our own, then why are we fighting in such far-flung lands as Iraq, Afghanistan, Columbia, the Horn of Africa -- and the Philippines?

My answer is the same as President Bush's: because if there ever was a time when we could retire behind the walls of Fortress America, counting on the two oceans to more or less protect us from attack, that era vanished in a blaze of bombings more than thirty years ago.

And today, we see just what the president meant by that. In Suspected Muslim Militants Caught in Philippines, from AP via FoxNews.com, we learn that seven Islamic terrorist converts were just captured in Zamboanga City, at the tip of the Zamboanga penninsula (south) on the island of Mindanao. This is an area of the Philippines that has seen almost continuous battles for a number of years between the terrorist groups Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah (both affilliated with al-Qaeda) on one side and the Philippine Marines and American forces on the other. (The Moro Islamic Liberation Front, MILF, is another Islamic terrorist organization based in Mindanao; but it's currently in peace talks with the Philippine government in Manilla. It does, however, give save haven to members of Abu Sayyaf and JI, from which they can strike against targets across the South Pacific.)

The group whose leader and six other members were just captured, the Rajah Solaiman Revolutionary Movement, is small compared to the two above; but it is also linked to both of them and to al-Qaeda as well. In fact, Philippine authorities on terrorism believe Rajah Solaiman was deliberately recruited and trained by Abu Sayyaf in order to take the terrorist campaign to new level... because the leader of Rajah Solaiman, Hilarion del Rosario Santos III, and most of his followers are Christians who converted to Islam, presumably in order to join the jihad.

This is truly bizarre. They are not Arabs, of course; they are not even natively Islamic. Why on earth would people convert to a religion and immediately begin planting bombs and massacring the innocent in the name of that religion? This indicates that the appeal of lawlessness to the hopeless spans culture and religion: militant Islamism has become the "lingua franca" of barbarity. Anybody or any group with a grievance and smouldering hatred can convert to Islam and receive an immediate terrorism indulgence.

Here is more on Rajah Solaiman from Newsweek International Edition from May 2005:

[Wally] Villanueva calmly entered the office of Norberto Gonzales, national-security adviser to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and in the presence of a NEWSWEEK reporter, surrendered himself.

The nondescript young man, it turns out, was a radical Muslim convert, one of dozens wanted on an arrest warrant in connection to deadly terrorist attacks and recently planned bombings in the Philippines. Filipino authorities hope his ongoing interrogation will reveal the whereabouts of other converts believed to be lurking in Manila, waiting to strike. "This is a bigger threat [than past terrorist plots]," says one official from the government's new antiterrorism task force. "Muslim converts are now one of the strategies that [terrorist groups] like to employ." [Emphasis added]

...

Abu Sayyaf, which dates back to the early 1990s, has promoted its goal of a Muslim state through repeated terrorist attacks and kidnappings. But a previously little-known Islamic group called the Rajah Solaiman Movement, whose membership consists of Filipino Christians who have converted to Islam, is now one of the top worries for the country's intelligence services.

Filipino authorities say the group's members have been trained, financed and directed by Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiah, a regional terrorist group with links to Al Qaeda, for at least two years. They claim the movement has dispatched dozens of its operatives to Manila to plan and carry out terrorist attacks.

The AP story makes clear the American military implications of this arrest:

Santos' group allegedly hid about 1,322 pounds of explosives, including TNT, that the military seized in a hideout in Manila's Fairview residential district in March. Soldiers arrested a brother of Santos in connection with the seizure, military officials said.

National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales said the explosives appeared to be intended for a 2,204-pound truck bomb that militants planned to use against the U.S. Embassy. That plot, along with other planned bombings by the group in the capital, was foiled with the seizure of the explosives, he said. [Emphasis added]

This is exactly why "Fortress America" cannot work. There simply is no way to tell whether someone entering the United States is a Filipino Christian -- or a recent convert to militant Islamism bent on jihad. Unless we have a workable plan to hermetically seal-off our borders (including all 12,000 miles of coastline), we cannot rely upon stopping these demonically possessed, sociopathic, "ticking time bombs" at the border. Unless we are forward-deployed, disrupting their plans at the source, we will lose this war.

That is why it is so vital to keep the reins of government out of the hand of the unserious, such as Howard Dean, John Kerry, or even Hillary Clinton, for all that she talks a great fight. Certainly, neither she nor her husband had any plan for aggressively assailing these terrorist groups in their heartland... so instead, we had to deal with them in ours.

It was there in the Philippines that the first glimmerings of the 9/11 attacks were planned. From Robert D. Kaplan's essential Imperial Grunts, about America's forever-war with terrorism around the globe:

It was in Afghanistan that AbuSayyaf's founders, Abduajak Janjalani and Abdul Murad, befriended Mohammed Jamal Khalifa -- Osama bin Laden's brouther-in-law -- and Ramzi Yousef, the organizer of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. In 1995 in Manila, Abdul Murad and Ramzi Yousef planned an attack on Pope John Paul II during the pontiff's upcoming visit to the Phiippines.

Following a fire that erupted as they were mixing explosives, Murad was captured; the Philippine security services are believed to have tortured him.

Murad gave Philippine investigators the password to his computer that was recovered from the burned-out apartment. On the hard disk they found the details of several terrorist plots, including one to use eleven jetliners to crash into CIA headquartes and other prominent buildings in Washington and New York. [Emphasis added]

It was this plot, hatched in Manila, that evolved into the most horrific act of terrorism ever committed on American soil.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 27, 2005, at the time of 6:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 26, 2005

Who Are We Fighting For Anyway? The Lizard's Tongue 3

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

I found occasion in the previous post to quote from Major E., a frequent corresponder on Power Line... and it struck me that the question in the title above demands an answer: who are we fighting for in Iraq?

I hope those reading this will make the connection between the sacrifice of the troops and the ever-expanding freedom of the Iraqi people.... Every American deserves to know that the sacrifice made on the streets of Fallujah by US servicemembers last year is what made possible last week the jubilant dancing of Iraqis waving their ink-stained fingers after they had cast the first vote of their lives. The Iraqi people know and appreciate what we have done for them, and I hope that the American people will come to know it more and more as well.

Are we fighting for good of the Iraqis? Should we demand appreciation? Do they owe us a debt they can never repay? Or are we really fighting for ourselves, our own land, our own people?

There is an old saying that America is the champion of freedom everywhere but guardian only of our own. The thought might occur to many that we seem to be guarding the freedom of an awful lot of other people lately -- should we be? Are the neocons right that it's in America's interest, or should we listen to the paleocons who want us to withdraw our troops from all these "foreign entanglements" and just defend the dadblamed country?

For a long time, George W. Bush was simply not making the case. I reckon it seemed so obvious to him that he didn't realize that lots of folks may agree that freedom is good but just plain disagree that the United States is reponsible for dispensing it. But lately, he has done a much more conscientious job of defending his position; and it's time for us to really start to listen. Even when the president's strategery is being misunderestimated, he really does make a whole lot of sense.

I thought to write a post to delve more deeply into the president's argument; but it turned out to be too long for a blog post. So instead, it has become the third instance of the Lizard's Tongue column.

Hence, to see what sense we may make of the grand strategy of George W. Bush, read on to the Lizard's Tongue, o wise!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 26, 2005, at the time of 4:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 25, 2005

Fightin' Room With a (New) View

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

Scott at Power Line has much more on the attempted attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad; their frequent correspondent Major E. has an eyewitness account, and he states that it was clearly a failed attempt at a much larger and more sinister operation than merely setting off some bombs:

The number of terrorists involved and the follow-on small arms attacks make it clear that the overall goal was to use suicide vehicle bombs to breach the security perimeter, then take over the hotel and hold the international guests as hostages. Instead, they failed to achieve those objectives and the attackers were killed.

(SmallTownVeteran is also on top of this story.)

Yes, this wasn't just a failed terrorist attack: it was an attempt to pull off another Beslan Massacre, except instead of children, the hostages would be a bunch of journalists (no jokes, please).

Major E. has a truly insightful pair of paragraphs about the dilemma the Commander-in-Chief faces trying to get more public support for the war (emphasis mine):

Many Americans seem to know the bad news from last year, but not the good news from last week. While I am glad that the public knows that many gave life and limb for Fallujah, I am saddened that so few know the incredibly positive result of that sacrifice. There is so much good happening in Iraq in terms of rebuilding the society and offering the people the priceless opportunity of freedom and democracy, yet so little of the good is being reported in the media. I hope those reading this will make the connection between the sacrifice of the troops and the ever-expanding freedom of the Iraqi people.

Every American deserves to know that the sacrifice made on the streets of Fallujah by US servicemembers last year is what made possible last week the jubilant dancing of Iraqis waving their ink-stained fingers after they had cast the first vote of their lives. The Iraqi people know and appreciate what we have done for them, and I hope that the American people will come to know it more and more as well.

All this by way of introduction to my next post....

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 25, 2005, at the time of 7:37 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Great News for Iraq...

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Predictions
Hatched by Dafydd

...But not-so-great for my petty, vainglorious self: I missed my prediction by one province!

From AP via Fox News:

Iraq's Constitution is Adopted
Tuesday, October 25, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq's landmark constitutional was adopted by a majority of voters during the country's Oct. 15 referendum, election officials said Tuesday.

Results released by the Independent Electoral Commission (search) of Iraq showed that Sunni Arabs, who had sharply opposed the draft document, failed to produce the two-thirds "no" vote they would have needed in at least three of Iraq's 18 provinces to defeat it.

The commission, which had been auditing the referendum results for 10 days, said at a news conference in Baghdad (search) that Ninevah province, had produced a "no" vote of only 55 percent.

The New York Times has some more. Don't forget the new deal they have, where you have to suffer through an advert on your way to the story. Just click the "skip" button in the upper right corner. ( Why can't the ads hide behind the firewall along with the "premium" columnists?)

Alas for me, I had predicted that only one province would muster the necessary two-thirds to reject; Salahaddin messed me up -- but next-door Ninevah saved the day for Iraq.

Still, I had been confident throughout that the Sunni would not get their three; and on that prediction, I was correct. (Shoulda quit while I was ahead... but that doesn't suit my cheerful, optimistic nature!)

A great day for Iraq, and since I had no money riding on my prediction, I'll laugh it off and say a great day for me, too!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 25, 2005, at the time of 5:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Son of Secret Polling Man

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Polling Keeps a-Rolling
Hatched by Dafydd

Omar at Iraq the Model has also blogged about that "secret military poll" reported in the Telegraph. He comes to pretty much the same conclusions as we while adding a caveat that only a local would know...

And by the way, I almost forgot to tell you this; when Iraqis are performing a poll they tend to do so while trying to keep as low a profile as possible for concerns about being misidentified as spies or intelligence gatherers for the coalition, the terrorists or even the government so they try to interview the first person they meet and think is safe to interview forgetting about all the known standards and requirements of correct sample choosing. This alone is enough to weaken the validity of the poll results.

Bottom line, I will personally ignore the results as a whole as I think it cannot add anything of value to a view of the situation here in Iraq, which is a shame, as it might have done so, had they framed the questions in a more scientific manner. I tend to recommend that you not take it seriously as well for these reasons.

Iraq the Model -- which we have blogrolled on the starboard side of your Big Lizards window -- is Sachi's favorite Iraq blog (and she reads four or five Iraqi blogs every day).

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 25, 2005, at the time of 3:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

NOW Will Ya Gimmie Some Fightin' Room?

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

Uh oh, Zarqawi's in for it now. The mainstream media thirsts for his blood.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Suicide bombers including one in a cement truck packed with explosives launched a dramatic attack Monday against the Palestine Hotel, where many foreign journalists are based, sending up a giant cloud of smoke and debris over central Baghdad. American troops and journalists escaped without serious injury but at least a half-dozen passers-by were killed....

The cement truck was the last of three vehicles trying to break through the wall outside the hotel. The first car drove up to the wall and exploded, blasting out a section of the concrete. According to the U.S. military, the second car was headed for the fresh breach in the wall but exploded near the 14th Ramadan Mosque when it was engaged by civilian security forces.

Within minutes, the truck made it through the breach but apparently became stuck on a road between the Palestine and the neighboring Sheraton hotel. The truck rocked back and forth and then blew up after a U.S. soldier opened fire on it. Had the truck traveled 20 or 30 yards farther and blown up at the hotel entrance, it could have killed many people inside the Palestine.

So after "a U.S. soldier" saved the lives of countless precious and vital journalists in the Palestine Hotel, do you think they'll start cutting the troops some slack on the endlessly manufactured torture/murder/stealing-Iraqi-oil stories? Or will this be another case of "no good deed goes unpunished?"

For some perverse reason, I'm fascinated by the description of the journalists inside the hotel:

There was minor damage to the hotel, which was last hit in an insurgent rocket attack on Oct. 7, 2004. Moments before the second blast, journalists, photographers and technicians were walking up and down hazy corridors in a state of confusion, urging each other to remain calm, put on flak jackets, and to stay away from windows. Thicker clouds of smoke filled the far end of one hallway, with many people coughing and waving their hands.

The second explosion shook the building momentarily. Confusion and panic again set in, with those inside debating whether to exit, but all eventually deciding to stay in the corridor and sit propped against walls, most in flak jackets. Sounds resembling gunshots could be heard outside.

Strips of floorboards were strewn about and air vents were blown in.

"The impact pushed us forward in our chairs," he said.

He noted that the journalists at the Palestine often can hear the distant blast of other attacks. "But I've never felt blasts as strong or as loud as the ones Monday," [AP journalist Thomas] Wagner said.

Did I misread? Is Wagner actually shocked that blasts right next to his location are louder and stronger than distant blasts? All right; so now he knows what the soldiers and Marines must go through every day. What will he do with that information? Will it change how he and his cohorts report the war?

Our newfound allies will surely fight like demons, swinging their cameras and flinging 3/4-inch tape cassettes at future terrorists.

"These appalling attacks are fresh reminders of the myriad dangerous [sic] facing those who continue to report from Iraq," [the Committee to Protect Journalists] Executive Director Ann Cooper said....

"By attacking the Hotel Palestine, which is commonly known to be home to many foreign journalists, those behind this cowardly attack sought to deliberately target the Western media," the press freedom organization [Reporters Without Borders] stated.

We may have entered uncharted waters here: this could be the very first time the press has condemned a suicide bombing in Iraq. The world is topsy-turvy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 25, 2005, at the time of 2:53 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 24, 2005

And How Are You, Mr. Wilson?

Iraq Matters , Politics - National , Unuseful Idiots
Hatched by Dafydd

I am remiss in posting this; Scott from Power Line had this up more than a week ago!

But it's worth noting: the best timeline of the Plame-name blame-game imbroglio is by (no surprise) Stephen Hayes, writing in the Weekly Standard: "The White House, the CIA, and the Wilsons".

Note that the "unuseful idiot" of the category is creepy liar Joseph Wilson -- not Stephen F. Hayes!

Read it and shriek.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 24, 2005, at the time of 4:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Gen. Pace: Thirty-Nine Iraqi Battalions "In the Lead"

Good News! , Iraq Matters , Military Machinations
Hatched by Dafydd

U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was just this moment a guest on the Hugh Hewitt show, with Jed Babbin (of NRO fame) sitting in for Hugh. Gen. Pace dropped a rather stunning bombshell.

Babbin asked Gen. Pace for an assessment of the Iraqi fighting forces, and the chairman made the following points:

  • There are now over 200,000 Iraqis either in the Iraqi army or the Iraqi police forces.
  • There are over 100 battalions of Iraqi army now considered battle-ready; Gen. Pace said he believed it was actually 117 battalions (which matches other reporting).
  • And in breaking news, the chairman stated that fully one-third of these battalions are already "in the lead" in fighting the terrorists. The other two-thirds are fighting alongside American troops but not yet ready to assume the lead.

Assuming that last figure is correct, that would mean at least thirty-three Iraqi battalions and as many as thirty-nine battalions of the Iraqi army (as many as 39,000 men) are actually taking the lead in fighting for their own country. This is incredibly good news... and even though Sachi is traveling, it deserves to be reported.

I doubt I'll be able to scoop the MilBlogs (some of which you can see blogrolled to the right) -- they probably got this same information weeks ago during one of their weekly breakfast briefings with Gen. Pace -- but at least I have the forlorn hope of scooping Prof. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit!

(I will of course scoop the MSM with this good news... but that would still be true if I sat on it until Shrove Tuesday.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 24, 2005, at the time of 3:44 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

MPM From the MSM

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Plame Blame Game , Terrorism Intelligence
Hatched by Dafydd

Misinformation per minute from the mainstream media, that is. AP has an incredible story up -- with the word "incredible" meant literally: it's hard to count the number of misstatements, malicious manglings, myopic maunderings, and just plain mental missteps. If the author's name were not "Nancy Benac," I would assume Paul Krugman wrote it. (Maybe he has a secret identity.)

Let me just run through a few; but you really should read the original, lest I spoil the best parts.

NOTE: Bulleted points are quotations from the Benac story.

  • CIA officials asked [Joe Wilson] to travel to Africa in February 2002 to check out a report that Niger sold uranium to Iraq in the late 1990s for use in nuclear weapons. Wilson quickly concluded the report was bogus. (Documents related to the purported sale later were exposed as a forgery.)

Actually, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Wilson quietly concluded the opposite... at least, that is what he told his CIA handlers. I'm sure that was just an honest mistake from Ms. Benac, who is an honorable woman. They are all honorable men (and women) at the Associated Press.

Clifford May is the man-on-the-spot at the National Review to debunk this first set of -- misunderstandings (for Nancy Benac is an honorable woman). (And a tip of the hat to Power Line for the link.) From July 12th, 2004:

First:

Ironically, Senate investigators found that at least some of what Wilson told his CIA briefer not only failed to persuade the agency that there was nothing to reports of Niger-Iraq link — his information actually created additional suspicion.

A former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, told Wilson that in June 1999, a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations." Mayaki, knowing how few commodities for export are produced by impoverished Niger [basically just yellowcake and animal hides --DaH], interpreted that to mean that Saddam was seeking uranium.

Second:

Yes, there were fake documents relating to Niger-Iraq sales. But no, those forgeries were not the evidence that convinced British intelligence that Saddam may have been shopping for "yellowcake" uranium. On the contrary, according to some intelligence sources, the forgery was planted in order to be discovered — as a ruse to discredit the story of a Niger-Iraq link, to persuade people there were no grounds for the charge. If that was the plan, it worked like a charm.

But that's not all. The Butler report, yet another British government inquiry, also is expected to conclude this week that British intelligence was correct to say that Saddam sought uranium from Niger. [And so it did. --DaH]

  • The Times' Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days before sharing with the grand jury what she knew. After [I. Lewis "Scooter"] Libby personally assured her that he had waived her pledge of confidentiality, Miller told the grand jury about three conversations with him.

In fact, Libby had "waived her pledge of confidentiality" a year before she reported to la calabooza. If she were in any doubt about his seriousness, she had only to pick up the phone and call him or have her attorney do so. Whatever is the reason for her curious decision to don prison gray, like Joan of Arc, and suffer for the cause -- and speculation is delicious -- it was not uncertainty whether Libby had really, truly, actually waived confidentiality when he signed a document waiving confidentiality.

I'm sure that Nancy Benac knew all this and simply thought it too tedious to bring up, for they are all honorable men. Women. Whatever.

  • One important question is what Bush and Cheney might do if top aides like Rove or Libby are found to have been the leakers. Bush initially pledged to fire any leakers but later gave himself more wiggle room by promising to fire anyone who is found to have committed a crime.

This is pure invention from the MSM, though certes, they are all honorable. Nobody has found any quotation from Bush where he said he would "fire any leakers," or fire anyone who spoke to reporters about Mrs. Wilson, or any other such prejudicial nonsense.

This all stems from a reporter who started asking a question of the president at a press conference. I don't recall the exact wording, but he said as preamble that Bush had promised to fire any leakers, and did he still stand by that pledge.

President Bush tried to answer, but the reporter kept talking, forcing the president to repeat his answer. In a move eerily presaging what was done later to Laura Bush to falsely make it appear as though she were calling Miers critics "sexists," the reporter seized upon the word "yes" that began Bush's answer -- and clearly referred to another point of the question -- to claim that Bush had therefore agreed with the reporter's premise that Bush earlier said he would fire any leakers... notwithstanding the fact that Bush had said no such thing.

Note how this asinine claim has progressed: nobody can find an original quotation of Bush saying he would "fire any leakers;" so the reporter's premise, at least as publicly provable, was factually wrong. But by tacking it onto a question that would certainly draw a "Yes" response (Bush responding that no one convicted of a crime in this affair would have a place in his administration), the reporter could later claim that Bush had retroactively made the reporter's false premise true!

And after that bit of legerdemain, all the news media may take it as read that "Bush initially pledged to fire any leakers." See how easy that was? Though we must absolve Ms. Benac of blame, for she is an honorable woman.

  • In a way, the whole Wilson saga can be traced back to Cheney and Bush. It was Cheney's interest in the alleged Iraq-Niger deal that led the CIA to dispatch Wilson to Africa.

Well, so sayeth Mr. Wilson. He claims that:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report.

But Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor and now Secretary of State, and a hot tomato in both positions, begs to demur. From a CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer, posted by JustOneMinute a couple of years ago:

BLITZER: Who sent [Wilson]?

RICE: Well, it was certainly not a level that had anything to do with the White House, and I do not believe at a level that had anything to do with the leadership of the CIA.

BLITZER: Supposedly, it came at the request of the vice president.

RICE: No, this is simply not true, and this is something that's been perpetuated that we simply have to straighten out.

The vice president did not ask that Joe Wilson go to Niger. The vice president did not know. I don't think he knew who Joe Wilson was, and he certainly didn't know that he was going.

It's still possible that the CIA simply misled poor Joe Wilson into thinking the VP really wanted to know; but if so, why would they send a retired ambassador with no expertise in either Iraq or WMD, no experience as an investigator, and who did not even work for the Company? Heck, they could at least have sent the man's wife instead. In any event, official denials of the administration should disallow AP -- for they are all honorable, all honorable persons -- from stating as fact what is still in dispute.

  • And it [was] Bush's use of the debunked claim in his State of the Union address that led Wilson to publish his doubts.

Just in case you missed it the first time; for being honorable men, they could not do otherwise than to remind you. And women... honorable women.

I'm afraid I have spoilt it for you after all, those intrepid few who read to the end of this post. But don't fret: I'm sure these honorable persons, variously male and female, will give us another incredible story to digest tomorrow!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 24, 2005, at the time of 2:06 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

October 23, 2005

Secret Polling Man

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Polling Keeps a-Rolling
Hatched by Dafydd

Yes, Virginia, there should be a Sanity Clause.

The headline nearly bellows its bias: Secret [Ministry of Defence] poll: Iraqis support attacks on British troops. It's enough to make you leap up off your chair, full five feet up and higher.

But the harder we look, the more elusive the actual data... providing a salutory lesson why we demand a great deal of disclosure before taking any poll seriously. This "survey" is less about finding the truth than it is about creating a truth more palatable to the Telegraph than the actual facts on the ground in Iraq: military cooperation -- a rush of new intelligence tips to American troops -- and that minor election a week ago.

In today's Telegraph, this article alleges that a "secret military poll" conducted by "an Iraqi university research team" (otherwise unnamed for "security reasons") on behalf of Great Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) shows a catastrophic collapse in support for Coalition forces, a huge rise in the number of radicalized Iraqis -- a country on the verge of an explosion of violent attacks on British and American forces by ordinary civilians, who now hate our guts:

Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed.

The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.

You know your poll is in trouble when the results fly in the face not merely of previous polling but of the very actions taken by the people you are attempting to model. In this case, we are asked to believe that "fewer than one per cent" think that Coalition presence helps improve security.

Yet it's pretty clear that the Iraqi Army and police likely think that being trained up to superior fighting units helps security... and if you add up the number of Iraqi military and police who are trained, equipped, and deployed throughout Iraq, you have nearly 200,000, according to MG Rick Lynch, the spokesman for Multi-National Force Iraq:

Between the Iraqi police force and the Iraqi Army for the January elections, there were about 138,000 trained and equipped members of the Iraqi security force. Now the Iraqi police service and the Iraqi Army is over 195,000 trained and equipped and deployed across Iraq.

Add in those who are still being trained and equipped but who are very enthusiastic about their mission and the American trainers, such as the Iraqi mechanized-infantry division that MG Bob Scales (ret) discussed on Brit Hume, which we blogged about here, and you already have over one percent of the Iraqi population without even considering civilians, surely some of whom must support the Coalition. Already, the main claim is dubious -- not a good sign for a survey that somebody -- we're never told who -- demands remain "secret."

Read the Telegraph article and note what they do not tell us: who conducted the survey? Who was surveyed? How many, and how many from each province? What was the margin of error? What were the exact questions? Where did the respondents live? How did the pollster assure a representative sample of Iraqi citizens?

Did they ask about "suicide attacks," or simply "attacks?" The Telegraph article uses both terms almost indistinguishably. What were the conditions of the question about attacks on Coalition forces... was this question in the form "if Coalition forces were to do X, would you then support attacking them?" And if so many Iraqis hate us -- then why do they cooperate so enthusiastically with the security training, intelligence tipping, and constitutional voting that we helped them set up?

Can't the Telegraph give us something? Anything?

Contrast the deafening silence on the entire methodology of this alleged "secret military poll" with the transparency of this poll, conducted by SurveyUSA anent the upcoming special election in California. We blogged it here, because we can be confident of the findings -- since SurveyUSA told us nearly everything we need to know to evaluate or "qualify" the poll itself, as an attorney might say about a witness. And a poll is a sort of witness, as it purports to tell you what people would say if you got them in a room and pumped them full of truth serum.

And what the heck does the Telegraph mean by saying the results were "seen by" the Sunday Telegraph? Did the Ministry of Defence hold up the results and let the reporter, Sean Rayment, glance through the survey? Did he see results, or just a summary? How long was he allowed to look? Did they let him take home a copy? As exactly none of these vital questions were answered, I suspect we can guess what the answers would have been.

A dubious claim does not suddenly become plausible when tarted up by an equally dubious "survey"... especially when we're told nothing about the methodology, when the results fly in the fact of not only previous polling but also the attitudes implied by the increasing level of cooperation we're getting from Iraqi military and civilians (see the previous post, US kills 20 Terrorists in Western Iraq), and the poll itself is allegedly a state secret.

There is a lot less here than meets the eye. Just as a good DA can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, a clever pollster can produce a poll showing anything he wants.

Without a track record for the pollster and full access not only to the survey methods but also a complete list of the questions (in order asked) and raw responses, the "results" reported by the Telegraph are utterly meaningless.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 23, 2005, at the time of 2:57 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

US kills 20 Terrorists in Western Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

On Saturday, American forces conducted a series of raids at the Syrian border. In western Iraq, the Anbar province, 20 terrorists were killed during raids on houses believed to contain foreign al-Qaeda fighters. The U.S. is continuing the offensive, not giving terrorists any breathing space.

A statement said U.S. forces found two large caches of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and bomb making materials, during the raids in the western town of Husayba. It said one insurgent was captured in the operation.

In another raid near Qaim, Coalition forces detained five terrorists and seized a large cache of weapons in an al-Qaeda not-so-safe house. The best news about this good news is how we obtained the intelligence in the first place... from ordinary local Iraqi citizens, who are turning against the foreign al-Qaeda invaders at an astonishing rate:

Intelligence sources and tips from local citizens led coalition forces to the location. Coalition aircraft, using precision guided munitions, destroyed the safe house and weapons cache after coalition forces left the scene.

Elsewhere in Iraq, quick thinking by Iraqi police officers attached to the Khalis Iraqi Police station thwarted a potentially devastating attack on the station.

Shortly after noon, a semitrailer approached the Khalis traffic circle and failed to slow and stop as directed. Guards fired on the vehicle, which then veered to the south. Its payload of explosives detonated when it hit a brick wall, killing a police officer.

A short time later, four mortars were fired at the traffic circle, seriously injuring two children in a nearby field. The children were taken to an Iraqi medical facility for treatment.

As the pace of our offensives increases, more and more foreign fighters have been targeted. This year alone, 376 foreign fighters had been captured and over 400 killed. The Fourth Rail reports:

With an estimated 150 terrorists entering the country monthly, well over half of the year’s total have been killed or captured, an exceedingly high attrition rate. General Lynch also points out that al Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership is often of foreign origin.

Okay, okay: 776 out of 1800 is only 43%, not "well over half." Minor arithmetic errors aside, al-Qaeda’s foreign invaders are clearly losing this war -- "big time."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 23, 2005, at the time of 12:27 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 22, 2005

Zarqawi's Golden Parachute

Iraq Matters , Terrorist Attacks
Hatched by Dafydd

Am I the only one who thinks like this? I hope not....

AP is carrying an item titled U.S.: Zarqawi's Terror Network Growing. The first thing that pops into the reader's head, of course, is that US officials are claiming that there are now more terrorists, that we're losing the war (I'm certain that was just the idea they intended to convey). The article claims no such thing, however, only that Musab Zarqawi is expanding his influence and contacts into other terrorist groups in other countries.

WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. intelligence officials say Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has expanded his terrorism campaign in Iraq to extremists in two dozen terror groups scattered across almost 40 countries, creating a network that rivals Osama bin Laden's....

In figures not made public before, counterterrorism officials say that Zarqawi's network of contacts has grown dramatically since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and now includes associates in nearly 40 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Those Muslim extremists are members of at least 24 groups, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to much smaller organizations in Indonesia.

Since this is the Associated Press, there is the obligatory swipe at President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld, albeit subtlely:

He also is helped, said one U.S. intelligence official, by the fact that there is not a large, constant American military presence in Anbar, but rather pockets of forces that are bolstered during operations. Iraq's largely Shiite security forces do not want to go to the Sunni-dominated area, either.

Translation: an anonymous "intelligence official" says We're losing! We're history, man! Bush should have sent in a million soldiers, like we have argued all along -- except for the time we were arguing he shouldn't have gone in at all!

Naturally, those interviewed in the article, when they express an opinion at all, opine that this means his strength is growing.

In interviews, U.S. government officials said the threat to U.S. interests from al-Zarqawi compared with that from bin Laden, whom al-Zarqawi pledged his loyalty to one year ago....

Al-Zarqawi is now seen as the top general who is putting in place al-Qaida's long campaign to establish an Islamic society throughout the Middle East, with Iraq at its heart....

The persistence of their attacks and subsequent media exposure have made al-Zarqawi the public face of al-Qaida and the broader insurgency. He has become so central to al-Qaida's operations that some evidence suggests he is providing money to bin Laden.

But I have own theory, probably idiosyncratic: I think Zarqawi is setting up bolt holes, international affiliations to whom he can flee when he inevitably has to bug out of Iraq... just as Osama bin Laden and his cronies fled to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan when they were booted from Sudan. I suspect that Zarwawi, a streetwise thug who has murdered his way to being capo di tutti capos of the biggest mob in the Arab Middle East, sees the noose tightening around his neck, and he is preparing to escape to some other country... probably simply abandoning all his followers in Iraq except for his closest cadre.

But then, I always was an optimist. We shall soon see.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 22, 2005, at the time of 1:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 19, 2005

This Bloody Teleconference Is Rigged!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness
Hatched by Dafydd

The same Power Line post linked below also pointed me to a nice column from the brilliant and beautiful Michelle Malkin. On the subject of the president's teleconference with American and Iraqi troops anent preparations for the Iraqi elections, Malkin takes up the thread where Sachi and I left it here, here, and here. Perhaps now the MSM will begin to pay attention to the actual questions and answers, which show that it was no accident that the election ran as smoothly as it did.

She also blogged it here; alas, she didn't link Big Lizards -- can't have everything! Besides, her post came some hours before our third one, where we linked to Sgt. Ron Long.

Oops, maybe we should have linked to Michelle! (Actually, we independently read Sgt. Long's post.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 19, 2005, at the time of 5:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 18, 2005

Soldiers' Answers Weren't Scripted

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Politics - National
Hatched by Sachi

When we wrote about the so-called "staged" teleconference between the president, ten American soldiers, and one Iraqi soldier, we introduced Sgt. Ron Long, who actually participated in the conference. We e-mailed Sgt. Long to ask if the soldiers themselves actually wrote their own answers, or if the answers were supplied by (or even edited by) the White House.

Sgt. Long did not respond personally, but he answered the same question in his blog. The blogpost quotes a fellow soldier from the 278th Regimental Combat Team, Lt. Gregg Murphy, who was interviewed by the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Murphy was chosen for the Tikrit teleconference because he had spent the last three months leading an Iraqi army training program near the Iranian border. The article is titled "Soldiers' questions weren't scripted, participant says," by Edward Lee Pitts.

"We wanted to give President Bush a no-kidding assessment of what we have all been working 14- (to) 18-hour days on for the last 11 months," said Lt. Gregg Murphy, of Chattanooga. "We gave him the God’s honest truth as we know it."

Although the soldiers themselves gathered before the teleconference to "brainstorm" what questions President Bush was likely to ask and how best and most accurately they could answer, there was no coercion, suggestion, or even editing by administration personnel.

[Lt. Murphy] said the only guidance the solders received was to avoid using military jargon that would confuse the general public and to write out bullet points to keep their comments concise and clear. Lt. Murphy said writing out key points kept the soldiers from being nervous.

"[Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Allison Barber] did not orchestrate the interview," Lt. Murphy said of the Defense Department employee. "We were nervous, and she put us at ease. Nothing more."

As for the reharsal, Lt. Murphy has this to say:

[T]he military rehearses all the time. "We do that so that when we actually have to execute, there isn’t any confusion," he said. "Rehearsing is why we are so good at what we do."

This should be the final refutation of the initial knee-jerk and entirely predictable -- scripted, if you will -- response by the Associated Press, reprinted in the Washington Post, that smarmily implied (without quite saying) that the soldiers were either too dumb or too intimidated by the president to give honest answers, and that the White House had scripted the entire event.

On the one hand, you can believe the nod-and-a-wink insinuations of a reporter whose only connection to the teleconference is that he saw some of the rehearsal inadvertently broadcast -- footage that does not show even one single reported instance of the White House altering a soldier's answer. Or you can believe the straightforward words of two of the actual participants in the teleconference, a lieutenant and a sergeant who have each spent many months fighting in Iraq (the latter as a combat medic) and are still there on the ground, dealing with Iraqi citizens, Coalition forces, and terrorists on a day-to-day basis.

It's your choice.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 18, 2005, at the time of 3:25 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 17, 2005

US Seizes al-Qaeda Webmaster, Hacks al-Qaeda Website

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The US military captured Abu Dijana, a top propaganda agent for Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Abu Dijana was the Webmaster of a "members-only" website called Al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was responsible for blogging the day-to-day operations of al-Qaeda, such as bombing American convoys, Iraqi police, or citizens exiting from a mosque.

Abu Dijana was so efficient that, within minutes of some brutal act of terrorism, Al-Qaeda in Iraq would take credit on the website, posting video clips and triumphant boast-posts. Intelligence officers and major American media regularly used the site to make official determinations of responsibility.

In one typical case, just three hours after an attack, the site showed video of a man identified as the suicide bomber Abu Musab al-Iraqi, who says, "I have dreamed about this moment. I am sure if my family is watching this they will be more proud of me."

Musab's words are followed by a video of a car he is said to be driving, blowing up in the midst of an American convoy. The incident is replayed again and again with more of Musab's speech superimposed over the ball of flames and smoke rising above the U.S. convoy. "Thank God this day I went to kill many crusaders." His declaration ends, "Today I will be in heaven."

Not only are the attacks themselves coordinated, so is the recording of them. Abu Dijana gathered information of impending attacks and provided equipment to his cell members to record attacks. After each attack, the collected photographs and video were swiftly uploaded to the website.

The most obvious purpose of the website is to webcast terrorist attacks as a propaganda tool, but al-Qaeda also uses the site to recruit volunteers for more suicide bombings and intimidate local citizens. Al-Qaeda members use the site as a communication system as well, to coordinate attacks, train the recruits, and just to report the daily dish for jihadists. It's so popular, it's a wonder they don't have SiteMeter and a listing in the TTLB Ecosystem.

That's why the "al-Qaida in Iraq" site, available to members only, features highly detailed tutorials on bomb-making, strategy for assassinations, and even a workshop on hacking into secret American government Web sites. The Web site claims it has 4,000 members.

For reasons of security, each new member of the site must be approved by a committee of existing members. "It's full of intelligence information and the enemy might use it against us," one member said. With as many as 1,500 members logging on in a single day, the Web site is also an effective security tool for al-Qaida. When its operatives get word of an impending U.S. raid, it puts out flash security warnings to fighters who might be targets.

Evidently this precaution was not sufficient: the webmaster, Abu Dijana himself, was caught in just such a raid.

There are more unsecured websites in Iraq. Americans are closely monitoring such sites and hacking them for information gathering. Not only are we winning the war on land, sea, and air, we're beating them like a dozen eggs in the blogosphere, as well!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 17, 2005, at the time of 9:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

US Air Raid Kills 70 Terrorists

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

On Sunday, several different military operations involving U.S. warplanes, helicopters, and ground troops (both American and Iraqi) killed a total of 70 terrorists.

An American F-15 spotted a group of terrorists burying a roadside bomb in Ramadi; the Eagle dropped a single bomb, killing twenty. Subsequently, according to Reuters:

Another 50 militants were killed in a series of separate strikes, the statement added, saying military commanders had no indications of any U.S. or civilian casualties in the operation.

The military said separately that 18 insurgents had been killed in three separate clashes elsewhere in western Iraq.

Iraq's Defense Ministry said separately U.S. and Iraqi troops had killed 12 insurgents south of Baghdad on Sunday.

The Reuters article is poorly enough written that it's impossible to say whether the thirty deaths detailed above are part of the fifty mentioned earlier, or whether a total of 100 jihadis, not seventy, were killed.

Of course, being the MSM, they had to throw in this kicker:

However, Ramadi police Lieutenant Karim Salim said 20 of those killed were civilians, including some children as young as 11. Doctors in the city had made a similar assessment on Sunday.

I wonder how exactly a doctor can look at a patient brought to a hospital -- alive or dead -- and determine that he was a "civilian?" And what kind of civilian? A terrorist who isn't a member of the armed forces is a civilian, even if he is still a terrorist.

As far as the children who may have died, that is, of course, a despicable evil. But those deaths are the full responsibility of the jihadis who hide among children to fight, using them as human shields. God may have mercy on them, but America should not.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 17, 2005, at the time of 7:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 15, 2005

Bush's Teleconference: the Actual Q&A

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

In the comments section of an earlier post, AP Response to Bush Teleconference Staged!, I asked, “and what WERE the questions and the answers?” All we have heard from the MSM is speculation about whether the TV conference between President Bush and the toops was "staged," meaning scripted; but we have heard nothing about the conference itself. What did the president and the soldiers say? Does anybody know?

After some digging, I found a transcript. As I read it, I understood why the AP had to divert our attention to the trivial non-issue: once again, the MSM is determined to hide "good news from Iraq."

Since they're not going to tell, here are the actual questions and the answers, with commentary.

The ten American soldiers and one Iraqi soldier who participated in this conference are stationed in Tikrit, overseeing the security of the constitutional referendum vote. The purpose of this conference was for President Bush to learn how ready the Coalition and Iraqi security forces were to ensure security during the election.

After President Bush gave a short speech about how important it is for us to stay the course and bring democracy to Iraq, he began asking questions about pre-election operations: what Coalition forces had been doing, what their strategy was, and what was their assessment of Iraqi Army readiness.

Captain Brent Kennedy, who is responsible for coordinating the security response in the area of operation, responded:

Good morning, Mr. President, from Tikrit. I'm Captain Brent Kennedy. To my right is Sergeant Major Akeel from the 5th Iraqi Army Division. We're working together here with the Iraqis in Task Force Liberty for the upcoming referendum. We're surging an operation, called Operation Saratoga, that includes the securing of over 1,250 polling sites. We're working right alongside with the Iraqis as they lead the way in securing these sites.

Captain Dave Smith added that Iraqi forces have been "conducting battalion and brigade-size operations since April." The local Iraqi military themselves coordinated with other Iraqi forces, such as police and local government agencies, Smith added; the Coalition forces took only a supporting role.

When President Bush asked them to assess the security forces’ readiness, Captain Steven Pratt responded:

The Iraqi army and police services, along with coalition support, have conducted many and multiple exercises and rehearsals. Recently we've conducted a command post exercise in which we brought together these Iraqi security forces with emergency service units, and the joint coordination center, in which we all sat around a model and discussed what each one would do at their specific location and what they would do at the referendum.

It was impressive to me to see the cooperation and the communication that took place among the Iraqi forces. Along with the coalition's backing them, we'll have a very successful and effective referendum vote.

Captain David Williams said that voter registration in North-Central Iraq was up 17 percent. “That’s 400,000 new voters in North-Central Iraq, and 100,000 new voters in the al-Salahuddin province.” He said. Captain Williams said that he spoke to his Iraqi counterpart, who told him the Tikrit locals were “ready and eager to vote in this referendum.”

Considering the extremely high turnout for this election (66%), and the extraordinarily low rate of successful violent attacks by the terrorists, it's clear that the information that Bush got from these soldiers was quite accurate on all counts: they and the Iraqis had done a very good job of securing the polling places... and the Iraqis (even the Sunni) were definitely "ready and eager to vote."

Master Sergeant Corine Lombardo reminded the President that she met him in New York, on November 11th, 2001, at Ground Zero, when he recognized the Rainbow Soldiers -- the 42nd Infantry (Rainbow) Division of the Army National Guard. Bush took the opportunity put the soldiers at ease with a bit of ribbing, saying "I thought you looked familiar."

SERGEANT LOMBARDO: Well, thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: I probably look familiar to you, too.

Sergeant Lombardo praised the improvement in the Iraqi forces over the past 10 months.

We've been working side-by-side, training and equipping 18 Iraqi army battalions [in the Tikrit area]. Since we began our partnership, they have improved greatly, and they continue to develop and grow into sustainable forces. Over the next month, we anticipate seeing at least one-third of those Iraqi forces conducting independent operations.

Coalition forces have captured over 50 terrorists and detained thousands, she added.

Then President asked the only Iraqi participant in the conference, Sergeant Major Akeel, whether he had anything to add:

SERGEANT AKEEL: Good morning, Mr. President. Thank you for everything. Thank very much for everything.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, you're welcome.

SERGEANT AKEEL: I like you. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that.

Finally, First Lieutenant Gregg summed up the situation. I can't improve on his words:

Back in January, when we were preparing for that election, we had to lead the way. We set up the coordination, we made the plan. We're really happy to see, during the preparation for this one, sir, they're doing everything. They're making the plans, they're calling each other, they've got it laid out. So on Saturday, sir, we're going to be beside them, we're going to be there to support them through anything. But we can't wait to share in their success with them on Sunday.

In closing, the commander-in-chief thanked the troops -- not only his own, but the Iraqis as well:

I wish I could be there to see you face-to-face, to thank you personally. It's probably a little early for me to go to Tikrit, but one of these days perhaps the situation will be such that I'll be able to get back to Iraq to not only thank our troops, but to thank those brave Iraqis who are standing strong in the face of these foreign fighters and these radicals that are trying to stop the march of freedom.

Finally, as for what kind of “rehearsal” and “staging” went on before the conference, you should read the account of Sergeant Ron Long of Tennesse who was actually there at the conference.

[W]e were told that we would be speaking with the President of the United States, our Commander-in-Chief, President Bush, so I believe that it would have been totally irresponsible for us NOT to prepare some ideas, facts or comments that we wanted to share with the President.

The MSM knows very well that everyone rehearses before a live TV interview, and this was no exception. Participants had to know who would speak when, who would answer which questions, and practice passing the microphone to avoid "strangling" their neighbors with the microphone cord. They practiced speaking out loudly and clearly, both to be audible to the mikes and also to relieve the anxiety of junior officers and non-coms speaking directly to the commander-in-chief.

But that was as far as it went; nobody has managed to find any example of the White House scripting the soldiers' answers or changing what they wanted to say. It is terribly irresponsible of the mainstream media to hint at some sort of administration conspiracy, particularly by using inuendo and ambiguous phrasing. If that is what the Associated Press and the Washington Post want to charge, they should just do so straightforwardly... if they have any actual evidence, that is.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 15, 2005, at the time of 8:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 14, 2005

Scales of Military Justice

Good News! , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

On Tuesday the 11th, Special Report With Brit Hume had a truly inspiring interview with Major General Bob Scales, whose assessment of the Iraqi Army was very good news indeed. They made the transcript available the next day, but I've been dilatory in putting it up here.

First the setup. General Scales went to Iraq to evaluate with his own eyes the combat-readiness of the Greater Iraq Army. He had no particular expectations either way, since he had heard both positive and negative assessments.

We were there for six days. We spent time in Baghdad. And then we went up to a place called Taji, which is the headquarters of the Ninth Iraqi Mechanized Division.

We specifically asked not only to see our American men and women but, "Let's just go up north and talk to the Iraqis, look them straight in the eye, and get a sense of their military readiness," not readiness in terms of readiness reporting, you know, how many vehicles have you got, what's your percent filled and all that.

Instead, we wanted to look at things like, you know, their training, their will to win, the courage factor, bonding, and cohesion, and leadership, and all those intangibles that really make an army effective, rather than just, you know, "How are you equipped?" And, frankly, what I saw was very encouraging.

Scales discussed a particular unit he interacted with extensively while there, a self-created mechanized infantry division, I believe (actually, I'm just assuming infantry, since he didn't say armored cavalry). The unit was only partially formed, but already it was patrolling and fighting the Sunni terrorists around Baghdad. Significantly, 75% of the unit comprised combat veterans. And although they had American embeds, they only numbered a dozen -- in a division that already had eight or nine thousand soldiers.

All in all, General Scales said that the Iraqi Army had 117 battalions, of which 80 were currently fighting alongside American forces, sometimes taking the lead (as in Operation Restoring Rights in Tal Afar).

Scales gave a vivid example of the progress that has been made in just a few months:

SCALES: Remember about eight months ago, Bill Cowan was in here talking about the BIAP [Baghdad International Airport] road, you know, the airport road?

HUME: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, the alley of death.

SCALES: Right. I drove the BIAP road, five miles along that road. And it's clear of the enemy. It's full of commerce. And who's protecting it? The Iraqi Sixth Infantry Division.

And in many ways, they're better than we are, in the sense that they're better able to gather intelligence. I mean, they can spot insurgents by their body language and by how they act and the language they use. They can spot foreigners far better than our soldiers can.

And they're better able to engage these terrorists when they find them oftentimes than our own soldiers are. You know, being part of the culture really means a lot when you're fighting an insurgency.

General Scales' final assessment was tremendously upbeat:

The insurgency is on a steady downward trend, mainly because U.S. forces and Iraqi forces have been successful in cleaning out the ratlines.... But I think the greatest hope is Iraq, Iraq units, the regular army, building them up very quickly so that they can take over the fighting and increase the probability of coming out of this OK.... It's happening.

"Cleaning out the ratlines?" Say... I wonder if MG Scales has been reading Big Lizards? Nah; probably just reading something a little more worthwhile, like the Fourth Rail, instead!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 14, 2005, at the time of 5:36 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 13, 2005

Dawn Breaks Over Iraq - Photos

Blogomania , History , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Black Five has incredible photos of operation River Gate.

We previously blogged about the overall Anbar Campaign here.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 6:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

AP Response to Bush Teleconference Staged!

Iraq Matters , Media Madness , Politics - National
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATE 18:23: See below.

Now the AP has taken to attacking the president for supposedly "staging" a teleconference with soldiers... because they rehearsed in advance which soldier would answer which question.

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged
Oct 13, 2005
by Deb Riechmann

WASHINGTON (AP) - It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

When I first read that paragraph, my Skept-O-Meter™ went off like the Queen Mary's foghorn. What did Ms. Riechmann mean, the questions were "choreographed?" Aren't the questions always choreographed?

During an interview, for example, the interviewer always knows in advance the major questions he will ask, the order he will ask them, and to whom they will be directed (if multiple subjects are being grilled simultaneously). Often the subject also knows, to allow him to do whatever research is necessary to come up with a more detailed answer. Typically, major questions spawn follow-up questions; we have no clue from the AP story whether this happened this time, even though that would reveal much about the charge of being "staged."

So what the heck does Ms. Riechmann mean? How is this different from any other interview situation? Remember, the president is the interviewer, not the subject; he's playing Brit Hume, for a change of pace.

"I'm going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me," [Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Allison] Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued.

"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"

"Captain Smith," Kennedy said.

"Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?" she asked.

"Captain Kennedy," the soldier replied.

And so it went.

Yes... it went, rather than crashed, because the soldiers actually knew in advance the order in which they would speak! They didn't talk over each other or tussle for the microphone. Will Bush's perfidy never stop?

"If the question comes up about partnering - how often do we train with the Iraqi military - who does he go to?" Barber asked.

"That's going to go to Captain Pratt," one of the soldiers said.

"And then if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit - the hometown - and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?" she asked.

And here at last we have the substance of the charge of "choreographing" the questions: that the soldiers knew in advance which of them was the expert in a particular area -- hence who would actually answer the questions pertaining to that area.

This is what the Associated Press is trying to pass off as another "scandal" in the Bush administration. This barely even counts as a college try; Ms. Riechmann may as well have just used the pre-existing template titled Bush the Lying Liar Version 23.

Does even the Left doubt any longer the bias of the press against this president and against Republicans in general? Or do they just go through the motions occasionally, tossing a bit of tainted, gray meat to their base, more or less as a hobby?

Of course, they had to close with an eyebite from somebody hostile to Bush:

Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."

I don't know what branch of the service Mr. Rieckhoff served in (if any), but it's evidently one where junior officers stay at the Pentagon and only privates and non-coms actually venture into the field.

I wonder whether he applies that same scorn to a certain fellow who was a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam, the exact equivalent rank to "captain" in the Army or Marines: Lt. John F. Kerry.

UPDATE: I have now listened to the 4:26 audio that National Public Radio made available (hat tip to Octavius), and contrary to some of the commenters to this post and some lefty blogs, such as This Divided State, there is not one, single instance of anybody "coaching [the soldiers] along the way" (as Bryan at TDS claims).

Allison Barber asks one question and listens to Captain Kennedy's answer; she does not tell him to change anything or give him any feedback whatsoever. She runs through a couple of other questions but doesn't wait for the soldiers to answer.

Let me repeat something I said above, because it may not have sunk in. When you are evaluating verbal acuity or mental quickness, you don't want to reveal the questions in advance; you prefer to watch the subject squirm. But when you want to gather solid information, you do give him the questions in advance, so he will be prepared with complete and accurate answers.

President Bush was not giving these soldiers a pop quiz, for heaven's sake. He wanted to hear what they had to say when they'd had a chance to think about it. And even if every one of them had been given an opportunity to rehearse speaking his answer -- on national TV and before the Commander In Chief -- it is neither "staged" nor "choreographed," except in the most technical meaning of those words, and there is no example at all of "coaching."

These are the real opinions of real soldiers who know what the hell they're talking about. Even if half of them are captains.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 5:02 PM | Comments (35) | TrackBack

Dawn Breaks Over Iraq

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Dafydd and Sachi conspired on this post.

Bill Roggio's military blog, the Fourth Rail, has several detailed analyses and descriptions of the Anbar Campaign, an overarching military strategy that includes both Iron Fist and River Gate as recent operations. (Hat tip to commenter Terry Gain.) From Recent Operations on the Euphrates:

The current operations must be looked at in the context of the Anbar Campaign, which began in November of 2004 when U.S. and Iraqi forces executed Operation Dawn in Fallujah. Fallujah was al Qaeda’s easternmost headquarters, a safe haven where thousands of terrorists and their insurgent allies operated freely and directed attacks towards the heart of Iraq. Over one thousand terrorists and insurgents were killed and fifteen hundred were captured. Operation Dawn ejected the insurgency from Fallujah, but it was only the beginning of the Anbar Campaign.

The Anbar province is the poinky part in the middle-left (west) of Iraq, roughly hexagonal, which points at Jordan; the northwestern border of Anbar is Syria, and the Euphrates River runs near the northeastern edge. Big city: Ramadi.

The section of Iraq in between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers comprises Salahuddin, spreading northwest from Baghdad, with the Tigris running northwest through it; big city: Samarra; and Ninevah, almost the very north of Iraq; upper Tigris runs right along the big city here, Mosul.

If we understand an earlier post on the Fourth Rail, the Anbar Campaign focuses on these three provinces... basically, in and around the two rivers and the land between them. This is where we find the "ratlines" connecting Syria in the northwest and the terrorists in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad; it is through here that al-Qaeda elements in Syria and Syria itself ship jihadis and weapons: this is one of the two areas we must bring under control if we are to defeat the enemy (the other being the South, where Shiite militias receive arms and terrorists from Iran).

Operation Dawn was aptly named, for it began a year-long squeeze-play that first saw a number of search-and-destroy missions and battalion-sized or smaller operations, coupled with air strikes on al-Qaeda safe houses (or not-so-safe houses, to be more accurate); these were punctuated by some very large operations (corps-sized or larger).

The tempo is increasing. From Operation Dawn (Fallujah in November 2004) to River Blitz (Ramadi, Hit, Baghdadi and Hadithah in February 2005) was three months; another quarter-year elapsed before there was a flurry of operations in May. Since then, not a month has passed without multiple operations.

Not only is Operation Anbar squeezing the terrorists farther and farther west, right to the border with Syria, and seizing both banks of the two rivers, it's also the baptism by fire of the Greater Iraqi Army. From Recent Operations:

The Iraqi security forces have taken an increasingly larger role as operations progressed over the summer. They have a strong presence in Fallujah and Habbaniyah, and are beginning to appear in battalion strength in the Euphrates cities of Ramadi, Hit, Haditha and Rawah. In Tal Afar, the Iraqi Army took the lead and outnumbered U.S. troops three to two.

Through the Anbar Campaign, the Iraqi Army and Coalition forces are isolating the terrorists, ripping up their ratlines, driving them back into Syria, and seizing or destroying bridges that are crucial to the enemy being able to maintain his strength and resources. If that's not good news, I don't know what is!

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 13, 2005, at the time of 5:15 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 12, 2005

British Policy Still Clueless

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Sachi

Earlier I wrote that "the [British] lion may be old, but it is not toothless." But I might have written in haste.

Yesterday, the UK Government announced that they will pay for the damage they caused during the September raid to rescue two British soldiers, according to BBC.

The joint statement said: "We regret the incidents that took place in Basra on 19 September 2005 at the Serious Crimes Unit.

"We also regret the casualties on both sides and the material damage to public facilities.

"The British government is prepared to pay valid claims for compensation for casualties and material damage in the well-established manner."

This announcement came after British troops arrested twelve insurgents last Friday without the cooperation of the corrupted Basra police, according to an October 7th AP article.

On September 21st, AP reported that after the September rescue raid, the governor of Basra Province, Mohammed al-Waili, publicly "threatened to end all cooperation with British forces unless Prime Minister Tony Blair's government apologizes for the deadly clash with Iraqi police."

The British government has already issued an apology. But Basra's provincial council continued to demand compensation. From the September 21st AP article:

In a statement, the council demanded Britain apologize to Basra's citizens and police and provide compensation for the families of people killed or wounded in the violence.

Why did the Brits choose to reward the terrorists? They decided they needed the cooperation of the officials in Basra Province; it was extortion, plain and simple. The Basra police are largely terrorists themselves now, thanks to the previous "softly, softly" strategy of Great Britain. We haven't heard much about this growing problem, but it has been brewing for a long time now.

Since the beginning, the British prided themselves in their soft approach in Basra and other areas under their jurisdiction. The relatively peaceful situation seemed to justify this strategy, exemplified by their insistance on wearing cloth berets instead of helmets while on patrol. But beneath the surface, Shia militiamen with strong ties to Iran, including the infamous "Mahdi Army" of Mugtada Sadr, slowly (but not so secretly) have taken over the Basra police. By May of this year, the Basra police chief said only one quarter of his men could be trusted.

According to our correspondent Silverlining, there was a bombing near the Iran border last June that killed three British soldiers. The bomb used was very similar to those that Iran provides to Hezbollah. This prompted the British to bring in their Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) for investigation.

Silverlining, who has proved to be an accurate source before, speculates that the kidnapped soldiers were SRR members investigating the Iranian connection inside the Basra police, and that they had been directly responsible for arresting two members of Sadr's terrorist army. In the comments to a previous Big Lizards post, Silverlining wrote:

Sheik Ahmed Majid Farttusi and Sayyid Sajjad are believed to be senior leaders in the police mafia at al-Jameat and commanders of a terrorist group receiving funding and weaponry from Iran.

My own speculation is that British soldiers were kidnapped for retaliation as well as for bargaining chips; they were responding to anger on the part of Iran-supported Shia, and they also intended the British histages to be used as bait in a hostage exchange.

With all this going on, what purpose does it serve the British to kow-tow to the Basra provincial council? True, we need their cooperation; but this is equivalent to paying ransom to kidnappers. What was the point of rescuing them in such a dramatic way, if they then turn around and pay for the damages?

The British have fumbled the ball here. The Basra police and the provincial government are totally corrupt. I don’t know if the British can straighten this out on their own; but the more they show weakness, the more British soldiers will be attacked.

Tony Blair insists that Great Britain will not pull out of Iraq, and the British do continue to make arrests. Just yesterday, Defence Secretary John Reid praised the troops involved in the very raid for which Great Britain now pays compensation and apologizes; so all is not lost by any means.

If the UK does indeed prove true and stays the course, then I would have to say that the lion's gums may be getting a bit mushy, but his fangs haven't fallen out quite yet.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 12, 2005, at the time of 6:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 11, 2005

Big Lizards' Commenter Scoops NYT!

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

Back on October 6th, one of our Japanese commenters, Silverlining, noted in the comments to Were British Soldiers Hostages From the Start? that the militiamen who had infiltrated the Basra police were a gang of thugs called "the Jameat."

Some Iraqi policemen in Basra have been acting like gang, indeed: assassination, murder, smuggling, and extortion. Such gang-like policemen, with connection at ministerial level in Baghdad and allegedly funded by Iran, is allowed to carry on with impunity and remains at large and in uniform.

Specifically, the al-Jameat police headquarters in southwestern Basra is the base for about 200 Iraqi policemen and included units of the Internal Affairs Directorate and Serious Crimes Unit, both heavily implicated in a series of abductions and killings in Basra.

The identical information was featured three days later in this October 9th story in the New York Times, In Basra, Militia in Control After Infiltration of Police.

The most feared institution in Iraq's third-largest city is a shadowy force of 200 to 300 police officers known collectively as the Jameat, who dominate the local police, who are said to murder and torture at will and who answer to the leaders of Basra's sectarian militias.

Do we have the greatest commenters, or what?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 11:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Iraqi Constitution Deal Reached

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

AP is reporting that at the last minute, the Iraqi assembly has finally reached agreement between all three major ethnic groups, Shia, Kurd, and Sunni, on the new constitution (hat tip to John at Power Line). The agreement is only with one Sunni group -- the Iraqi Islamic Party -- but it's the first crack in the solid wall of Sunni rejectionism.

Iraqis Reach Breakthrough Deal on Charter
Oct 11, 2005, 8:53 PM (ET)
by Lee Keath

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraqi negotiators reached a breakthrough deal on the constitution Tuesday, and at least one Sunni Arab party said it would now urge its followers to approve the charter in this weekend's referendum. Suicide bombings and other attacks killed more than 50 people in the insurgent campaign aimed at intimidating voters.

Under the deal, the two sides agreed on a mechanism to consider amending the constitution after it is approved in Saturday's referendum. The next parliament, to be formed in December, will set up a commission to consider amendments, which would later have to be approved by parliament and submitted to another referendum.

The most significant addition only changes how future constitutional amendments will be considered. Sunni leaders are worried that the current federalist constitution gives too much autonomy to Shia and Kurds:

The central addition allows the next parliament, which will be formed in Dec. 15 elections, to form the commission, which will have four months to consider changes to the constitution. The changes would be approved by the entire parliament, then a referendum would be held two months later.

That is no guarantee that Sunnis will be able to make the changes they seek. They are likely to have a stronger representation in the next parliament, but would still face a strong Shiite and Kurdish majority that would likely oppose major changes.

This is indeed great news, assuming the agreement holds at least through Saturday's vote. No matter how hard the terrorists try to frighten the Iraqis out of freedom, the people are determine to have their constitution. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope rest of the Sunnis will vote "Yes."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 6:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Thirteen to One

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The other day, I read a familiar headline about US troops getting killed in Iraq: “Six Marines Killed in Iraq Bomb Attacks,” the AP article said. If all we read are the MSM headlines, we almost can’t help feeling a sense of dread. It seems like we are losing, and losing badly.

In our two most recent major offensives in Iraq, Iron Fist and River Gate, we first were told that 1,000 US troops were fighting near the Syrian border; then the next thing we heard was that six soldiers were killed in those operations -- nothing in between! We fought; we died. Is that all?

What did we achieve? What did we win in return? Surely our troops did not die for nothing, no matter what Cindy Sheehan says.

The reality is that our troops have done an incredible job, though you have to hunt hard to find this information. Our troops' achievements are routinely buried in the middle of articles, sandwiched in between accounts of roadside bombs and ambushes. From the AP article linked above, fifteen paragraphs into the story:

On Thursday, warplanes dropped four precision-guided bombs on an abandoned three-story hotel seized by militants in the town of Karabilah, near the Syrian border, the focus of the Iron Fist assault. Twenty militants were killed in the bombardment, the military said. Seven more insurgents were killed when planes destroyed three buildings from which gunmen were firing on Marines, and two gunmen were killed in fighting in Karabilah.

The 29 deaths raised the insurgent death toll in Iron Fist to 71. At least six insurgents have been reported killed in River Gate offensive.

Wait a minute. 77 bad guys verses six good guys. That’s a 13 to 1 kill ratio. Isn’t that a remarkably successful operation? Shouldn’t the headline actually be “Iron Fist’s great success,” or “77 terrorists slain,” or something like that? That is the way the very same news agencies would have written the very same articles during World War II or Korea.

Why are we so shy about telling the American people how many terrorists we are killing or capturing? If we only hear about the cost but not the payoff, how in the world will the American people realize that we are winning, and winning big? Ever since the Korean War, the MSM has been determined to spin every engagement as an American loss, no matter what actually happened.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Iraq, Black Five reports that US Army troops raided two houses of terrorists and captured numerous bomb making devices:

triggerdevices.jpg

How many Army and Marine lives saved does this successful raid represent? You'll never find out by reading the Associated Press.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 11, 2005, at the time of 2:10 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

October 7, 2005

Zawahiri to Zarqawi: Your Lifestyle's Too Extreme

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

When the number-two guy in al-Qaeda tells you that you're over the top, you might want to sit down and do some serious rethinking.

The United States recently intercepted a copy of a "letter of instructions and requests" sent in July, 2005 from bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In it, Zawahiri first articulates the al-Qaeda vision of the future:

The letter of instructions and requests outlines a four-stage plan, according to officials: First, expel American forces from Iraq. Second, establish a caliphate over as much of Iraq as possible. Third, extend the jihad to neighboring countries, with specific reference to Egypt and the Levant -- a term that describes Syria and Lebanon. And finally, war against Israel.

For al-Qaeda, kicking the "crusaders" out of Iraq is only a means to an end. Zawahiri understands that in order to realize this grand vision, al-Qaeda needs to win hearts and minds in the Moslem world, starting with the Iraqis; yet he fears that Zarqawi's brutal treatment of hostages is alienating the entire ummah. His sadistic bloodthirst is unhelpful, to use a Rumsfeldism.

Ayman Zawahiri… warns Abu Musab Zarqawi against alienating the Islamic world, and virtually reprimands the Iraqi branch of al Qaeda for beheading hostages and then distributing videotapes…

[H]e rebukes the leader of Iraq's insurgency for its brutal tactics -- noting that hostages can just as effectively be killed with bullets rather than by beheading.

Zawahiri the moderate! Zarqawi does not seem much perturbed by this warning though; he beheaded more hostages only two weeks ago, two months after presumably receiving the letter.

In a perverse way, Zarqawi’s insane urge to torture and kill has actually helped us. Because of his brutishness, no American soldier will ever surrender; they know that, unlike when we fight civilized people, surrender to Zarqawi means disgrace and a horrible death without honor. This makes for very determined warriors indeed.

Even though some Iraqis still cooperate with al-Qaeda, either through fear or powerlust, no one in Iraq, not even the Sunnis, wants to be ruled by Zarqawi; the cost in blood and freedom is too high. In economic terms, al-Qaeda has priced itself right out of the market!

Against this blood-red backdrop, even to the Sunnis, self-rule must seem a real bargain.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 7, 2005, at the time of 6:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

A Tale of Two Stories

Iraq Matters , Polling Keeps a-Rolling , Predictions
Hatched by Dafydd

I have clenched in my reptillian jaws a pair of stories. Both about Iraq; both about the prospects for the constitutional referrendum on October 15th. Both MSM: one is Reuters, the other Associated Press.

Night. And. Day.

(A tip of the hat to Pajamahideen, in the comments of Harry Reid's Babysitting Service, for calling the Reuters story to my attention.)

Here is the Reuters story:

Pollster says weary Iraqis back constitution
04 Oct 2005
Reuters
By Andrew Quinn

BAGHDAD, Oct 4 (Reuters) - Iraqis are exhausted by the country's descent into chaos and most pin their hopes on a new constitution as a first step toward order, the director of one of Iraq's few opinion polling agencies said on Tuesday.

Mehdi Hafedh of the Iraqi Centre for Development and International Dialogue said his latest poll showed support for the draft constitution going into a vote on Oct. 15 was widespread -- even in areas where Sunni Arab groups fighting a bloody campaign to derail the new charter are strong.

Hafedh believes the constitution will be approved. But he's not speaking from a gut feeling or wishful fantasy; unlike anybody else I have read, he actually polled Iraqis on the question.

Hafedh's poll of 3,625 Iraqis between Sept 14-19 showed 79 percent in favour of the new constitution against eight percent opposed. The remainder did not answer the question.

While support was particularly high in the northern Kurdish areas and southern regions dominated by Shi'ites, Hafedh said it also ran at over 50 percent in central provinces known as the heartland of Sunni Arab unrest -- a sign, he said, that the Sunni-Shi'ite split was not as wide as many fear.

"This is exaggerated by political elites who are seeking power and by Western media and analysts," Hafedh said.

"If you go down to the streets, you can't tell who is Sunni and who is Shi'ite. We are all mixed." [emphasis added]

Nobody imagines that the constitution will pull less than 50% of the voters, not even the Sunni "political elites" who are frantically rounding up Sunnis to vote against it. The constitution will only be derailed if any three of the eighteen provinces of Iraq vote against it by a two-to-one majority (more than 66%).

There are four provinces that are majority Sunni; but from what I have read, only three where the Sunnis are so overwhelming a majority that a two-thirds No vote is plausible. Even those provinces, however, are not 100% Sunni. If even 10% of the population are Shiite, and if the Shiite there vote at least as strongly for the constitution as their brethren elsewhere (which would be at least 86%, if Hafedh's poll is accurate among the Shia), the Sunni in that province would need about a 73% No vote to get the overall two-thirds to count for a "rejection" province.

But Hafegh's poll indicated there was "over50 percent" even in those provinces. So the only way the constitution can be rejected is if the poll is stunningly in error -- or if there is a huge turn-around in the next week.

It's not a done deal by any means; but there is great cause for optimism.

(I do actually have a dog in the fight; in a recent post here, I made a prediction:

Dafydd the Great, wearing turbin and holding back of hand to forehead, predicts that no more than one province will muster the necessary 67% rejection. (Actually, I believe none will; but I'm hedging my prediction slightly.)

We'll see if this one works out, or if blows up like my Judiciary-Committee prediction!)

But wait; what about the other story?

This one is so boilerplate, it could have been phoned in from the New York offices of AP:

Many Sunnis to Vote No in Iraq Referendum
Oct 7, 2005
by Thomas Wagner

BAGHDAD (AP) - Like many Sunni Arabs in Iraq, Faleh Hassan opposed the U.S.-led invasion, boycotted the election that brought the interim government to power and plans to vote "no" in the Oct. 15 referendum on the country's draft constitution.

As far as he's concerned, ever since U.S. forces drove Saddam Hussein, a fellow Sunni, from power, Iraq's Kurds and majority Shiites have used democracy to grab an unfair share of power and to penalize the Sunni minority for the many abuses Shiites suffered under Saddam. [emphasis added]

Several things to note: first, there is no quantification; this story is pure "feelings" and no thought: clearly, we are supposed to draw the conclusion that the constitution is going down in flames... despite the fact that nowhere does Wagner explicitly quantify how many Sunnis are likely to vote against it in the Sunni provinces -- which is, of course, the only relevant question in deciding whether it will be adopted.

Second, note the extraordinary number of sources of information Wagner drew from for his literary endeavor: four, counting himself! Much of the story is Wagner's personal recollection of the last Saddam Hussein "referendum," when Hussein was the only candidate on the ballot, and with the Fedayeen Saddam looking over the ballots before they were put into the box. From that wealth of data, we learn that:

Iraq's Sunni Arabs are mobilizing in large numbers to defeat the referendum. Many Sunni politicians believe the document would give Kurds in northern Iraq and Shiites in the south virtual autonomy, control of Iraq's oil wealth in both regions, and leave Sunnis powerless and poor in central and western Iraq.

And one other point is glossed over. Wagner casually admits that in the past, he was willing to report pro-Saddam "news" under duress:

To show off this "democratic reform" to the world, [Saddam Hussein] opened Iraq to hundreds of foreign journalists, including this reporter.

All of us were assigned "a government minder" to monitor the few interviews we won with the frightened general public and to make sure we didn't try to visit any of the many off-limit palaces that Saddam and his family owned.

So for "weeks" in 1995, Thomas Wagner filed stories from Iraq while he was being carefully controlled by Saddam's "government minder[s]." I wonder: during all that time, or even in the eight years between that sham election and the fall of Saddam, did Wagner ever once reveal to his readers that those stories he filed were actually orchestrated by Saddam Hussein to make a democratic silk purse out of the pig's ear of Saddam's tyranny?

I don't find very much charity in my heart for Thomas Wagner. Nor do I feel any great impluse towards believing him now.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 7, 2005, at the time of 4:06 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 6, 2005

Iraqi Children Thank Iraqi Troops

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

The Iraqi blog Friends of Democracy organized a touring gallery in many elementay and high schools in Iraq. The gallery displayed childeren's drawings and letters that show their appreciation and love for the Iraqi troops. Some of the heart warming pictures are shown here.

The words and drawings had a wonderful positive effect on the morale of our soldiers and policemen who received them with overwhelming happiness and tears of joy “we’re not going to let them down and these paintings will take their place on the walls in our base” these were the words of one grateful soldier to whom we handed some paintings while his unit was patrolling the streets of Baghdad, the next day we received a call from the officer in command asking for more of these paintings which he described as “a proof on national unity in this confrontation with the powers of evil”.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 6, 2005, at the time of 7:41 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Harry Reid's Babysitting Service

Fiskings , Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , Politics - National , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

This morning, President Bush delivered yet another exceptionally good speech on the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), this time to the National Endowment for Democracy in D.C. Bush candidly explained where we are now, what our strategy is for the future, how Iraq fits into the plan, and what specifically we're doing to continue winning that smaller war, as well as the larger GWOT itself.

In response Sen. Harry Reid (D-Las Vegas) issued a terse and Kennedy-esque -- Ted Kennedy-esque, that is -- "response" that did not respond to anything the president said; in fact, it clearly was written before the speech, comprising nothing but boilerplate invective from the disloyal opposition. But even so, I will take up the smart man's burden and let you know what Sen. Reid said. It's a tedious task, but somebody gotta do it.

Reid: The Rhetoric Doesn't Match The Reality
Thursday, October 6, 2005

Washington, DC – Democratic Leader Harry Reid released the following statement today on Bush’s continued failure to talk straight to the American people about the war in Iraq:

Failure to "talk straight?" What about Harry Reid's continued failure to use the English language with clarity and precision? What on earth does that phrase, "talk straight," mean anyway? I'm really getting sick of this argument-by-illiterate-catch-phrase... and yes, I do include McCain's "Straight-Talk Express."

"Talk straight" is quite evidently a placeholder phrase, like a movie stand-in: you insert it into a sentence to take the place of what you really mean to say, so you can get the lighting and camera angles right without wasting the real term's time. The problem arises when, after you polish up the sentence, you forget to go back and replace the placeholder with the real words!

In that case, you end up with nothing but airy persiflage: things are looking bad, because the president won't bite the bullet and just do what needs doing. It's gut-check time, Mr. President! It's now or never! The American people eagerly await the straight talk, the real deal... but all you give us is the same-old, same-old. Our patience is not limitless, sir! For the last time, the American people demand to know just exactly where you stand: are you going to stick with the failed policies of the past? Or will you finally, at long last, move forward boldly into the future?

Once again the president had an opportunity to lay out for the American people the facts on the ground in Iraq and his strategy to achieve the military, political and economic success needed in order to bring our troops home.

Uh... yes; exactly like that.

Once again, he failed to do so. Instead, the president continued to falsely assert there is a link between the war in Iraq and the tragedy of September 11th, a link that did not and does not exist.

He did? I just read the speech, and I don't see anything like that in what I read. Of course, I have an unfair advantage over Sen. Reid... I actually did read the speech before attempting to comment on it.

Here is what Bush actually said on this subject, as opposed to what Harry Reid imagined Bush would say a couple of days ago, when Reid actually write his "response":

We know the vision of the radicals because they've openly stated it — in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites. First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions. Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate, quote, their "resources, sons and money to driving the infidels out of their lands." Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993 — only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

Second, the militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments. Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and Jordan for potential takeover. They achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan. Now they've set their sights on Iraq. Bin Laden has stated, "The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It's either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation." The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.

Third, the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.

I'm curious which part of this Reid rejects. Does the good senator argue that al-Qaeda doesn't really mind us being in the Middle East, that they've decided democracy and peace are pretty cool after all, and that they've given up their Blofeldian ambitions of world domination?

Or maybe it's the second paragraph that Reid disputes: perhaps Harry Reid argues that if we pulled out of Iraq instanter, then Zarqawi and his butt-monkey brigade would be mollified and would likewise leave Iraq to return to certain arrest and execution in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Egypt. Or that they would emmigrate out of Iraq to Iran, Syria, Sudan, or Cechnya, but they would retire from the mindless mass murder biz; perhaps they would become shrimp farmers or start a cotton plantation.

If it's Bush's third point that Harry Reid pooh-poohs, then I can only conclude that Nevada's favorite son believes in the power of Islamist jihadi redemption: sure, the terrorist killers may have claimed they want a globe-spanning caliphate from "al-Andaluz" and the Moorish North Africa, the Persian Caliphate eastward to India, the deserts of Arabia, then following the old Ottoman Sultanate through Algiers, Tripoli, Egypt, through Mesopotamia right up against the Caspian Sea in Russia, up around into Europe, across Hungary, and right up to the gates of Vienna, Austria, plus the new elements of the ummah -- Indonesia (the largest Moslem country), Micronesia, the Philippines, and everything in between Australia and China.

Sure, maybe that's what they say; but it's just trash-talk (not straight talk, as Harry Reid gives us). They don't really want nukes, chemical weapons, or biological agents. And Israel? Heck, the jihadis are willing to "live and let live" alongside all those Jews and Crusaders. Don't harsh their mellow, man!

Show of hands: anybody here persuaded by Sen. Reid's read on the Jihadi mindset?

Once again, he failed to do so. Instead, the president continued to falsely assert there is a link between the war in Iraq and the tragedy of September 11th, a link that did not and does not exist.

Harry Reid's homework list:

(The official version of the document from the 9/11 Commission is unsearchable; they seem to have messed up something in the pdf. Here is a searchable version of that same document.)

The truth is the Administration’s mishandling of the war in Iraq has made us less safe and Iraq risks becoming what it was not before the war: a training ground for terrorists.

"Made us less safe." Hm. We're safer with an avowed and bitter enemy of America in charge of the world's second-largest known oil reserve, a military machine that includes missiles and chemical artillery shells, active and ongoing programs to develop nuclear and chemical/biological weapons, and who has deep, extensive, and rapidly expanding alliances with al-Qaeda and other international terrorist groups that desperately desire to destroy America -- than we are with 140,000 American troops in Iraq protecting a democratic state that is about to vote on a constitution (and if they reject it, upon another, and another until they get their democracy)?

Yeah, I can see that... if the pronoun "us" in "made us less safe" stands for "Democrats in Congress," and "safe" refers to their electoral prospects. Indeed, Bush's entire prosecution of the GWOT has made Democratic seats in Congress very unsafe indeed, as the last couple of elections -- and the prospects for 2006 -- have shown. So in that sense, Harry Reid is right about this claim. Ten points for Slytherin!

I do note, however, that while Iraq may have become a training ground for terrorists, what it has mainly trained them to do is to be killed by the thousands by Coalition forces. And it has unquestionably become a training ground for American forces, turning us into the premier urban-terrorist warfare-fighting military on the face of the Earth.

It is clear our window of opportunity is closing in Iraq and the president continues to fail to provide a strategy for success in order to prevent this outcome.

See above, long discussion of Reid's obsession with torturing the English language until it converts.

My Democratic colleagues and I submitted four specific questions to the president about his strategy for Iraq that the American people demand be answered.

Which particular American people would those be? I don't recall being asked. Then again, statistical probability suggests that the vast majority of the people will not, in fact, be questioned for any particular poll. I'm willing to believe that Reid, Kerry, Leahy, Schumer, and Kennedy (and any other colleagues Reid has left) all got together and commissioned Gallup or Pew Research to poll the American people on which particular, specific four questions they demand the president answer, which turned out to be the very four that Reid asks below... so if he could give us a link or even a citation of this poll, it would be very helpful.

Instead of answering those questions, the president offered the same failed approach, stay the course. We cannot continue to stay the course, we must change the course. The American people and our brave men and women in Iraq deserve better.

It's like déjà-vu all over again!

Ah... here come those four questions that were determined by extensive polling among statistically weighted representative samples of the American people:

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE’S KEY QUESTIONS ON IRAQ

  1. How many capable Iraqi forces do we need before we can bring our troops home?
  2. What is the administration doing to forge a political consensus?
  3. What is the administration doing to make Iraq’s neighbors a part of our strategy?
  4. What progress is being made on the reconstruction in Iraq and how do we know taxpayers dollars are being spent wisely?

Let's see if we can answer the senator's questions; then he can say "my job here is done" and head back to the video-poker slots.

How many capable Iraqi forces do we need before we can bring our troops home?

I have no idea how to answer this. What is a "force?" If he means "how many individual soldiers," that's a much larger number than if he means "how many battalions."

And what does he mean by "capable?" Wretchard of the Belmont Club has done a bravura job of analyzing just what we have done so far in building up a free Iraqi army, composed of volunteers led by officers who actually care about democracy and freedom, to take the place of the Saddam's old army, led by would-be military dictators (such as Col. Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, the King of Clubs on my quasi-official Iraqi Deck of Death) and largely manned by wretched Shiite and Kurdish conscripts who desperately didn't want to be there and would flee at the first opportunity.

First the raw numbers. Secretary Rumsfeld reports there are "technically 194,000 Iraqis" in the security forces. In terms of what may properly be referred to as the Iraqi army, General Casey said there were 100 battalions in all. These were divided, in terms of their capability into three categories: Category 1, 2 and 3 -- with Category 1 being the most capable [and available, per Wretchard's update].

The widely circulated report in the press that of 3 Iraqi battalions that were formerly combat ready, only one is currently rated in that status is an example of how the 'quantity of men' issue has been misunderstood. That number turns out to be the number of Iraqi battalions in Category 1, which as we shall see later, is not the critical category at all.

When Democrats disparage the capability level of the Iraqi troops, they refer only to the paucity of "Category 1" battalions; but Category 1 refers to a capability nearly equal that of the United States; and by this measure, virtually no other nation in Christendom has more than one or two such battalions, most not even that. Even Israeli units don't come up to our present capability to fight an urban war against terrorists... though we certainly couldn't have said that prior to the Iraq War. It is the units in the middle capability level, Category 2, that form the backbone of the fighting force in Iraq, as Wretchard explains:

The eightfold increase in company-level operations in five months (from 160 company level operations in May rising to 1,300 in September) is one crude way to estimate the rate of training of Iraqi battalions . If operational tempo has not increased, this suggests that since there are 100 battalions now then there were only about 12 in May and the US military transition teams have been training about 18 new battalions each month. This is a very crude estimate, but it should in the correct order of magnitude.

Of these 100 battalions the truly important number are those in Category 2 (not the Category 1 batts the press was interested in) because it is on these that the operations over the next six months will be fought. The members of Press realized this in the course of the briefing and attempted to get the speakers to state this number without success.

All right, let's pick one measure that Reid might have meant and run with that. What does he mean by asking "how many capable Iraqi [battalions] do we need before we can bring our troops home?" Does he imagine that is the goal: as soon as there are X number of operational Iraqi battalions, we splitski?

This is a perfect example of Democratic illogic. Bush has enunciated a perfectly comprehensible "exist strategy": as soon as the Iraqis begin to be able to take over their own defense, we begin to pull out. This could be accomplished with the 100 battalions in place now, if they improve their capabilities. Or we could raise another fifty battalions who are at the same level as today. Or we could degrade the terrorist ability so much that a mere seventy Iraqi battalions would be enough to drive them out... there are many routes to the victory condition.

Look at it this way. You're driving to the Grand Canyon. When is the trip officially finished -- when you arrive at the parking lot of Bright Angel Lodge? Or do you pull over and park when you have traveled exactly three and a half hours or 210 miles, no matter where you actually are?

What is the administration doing to forge a political consensus?

Among whom? Is this question left over from a previous set of four about, say, Social Security reform?

What is the administration doing to make Iraq’s neighbors a part of our strategy?

Well, we're telling Saudi Arabia to stop exporting jihadi materials to American mosques; we're welcoming Kuwait's and Jordan's recognition of Israel; we're trying to bring Iran's nuclear program before the UN Security Council; we're supporting Turkey's bid to join the European Union; and we're pressuring Syria to pull its intelligence agents out of Lebanon and fighting a riverine campaign along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to seal the Iraq border against Syrian terrorist incursion. Why do you ask, Sen. Reid... has your newspaper been stopped?

What progress is being made on the reconstruction in Iraq and how do we know taxpayers dollars are being spent wisely?

First question in this double-question, reconstruction progress: ca. September 29th, 2005, see this post from Good News Central.

Second question, how we know taxpayer dollars are being spend wisely: we know, obviosuly, because they're being spent by the Bush administration, not by the Democratic Congressional caucus. Was this a trick question?

And that appears to cover the entirety of Sen. Reid's "response." I suspect I'll never have to write this again... because the next time President Bush gives a speech about Iraq -- or about Hurricane Rita, the repeal of the death tax, or the Patriot Act -- Harry Reid will send out this same general, all-purpose "response," and I can just link back to this post.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 6, 2005, at the time of 7:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 5, 2005

Changing Rules in the Middle of the Game - UPDATE and bump

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

UPDATE: See below.

Whenever I hear frustrated Americans complaining about the seemingly slow process of Iraqi democratization, I tell them, "give Iraq a chance; they are not used to this democracy thing; it will take time; they have a lot to learn from us." Well, they might have learned a bit too much from Democratic election committees of Florida 2000.

Over the weekend, the Shia dominated Iraqi parliament changed the rules of the upcoming election. They rigged it so that no matter how the Sunnis vote, the referendum will pass.

Iraq's parliament made a ruling on Sunday determining that for the October 15 referendum to pass, half of those who turn out to vote across the country would have to say, "Yes." However, a clause setting a two-thirds "No" vote in at least three of 18 provinces as a veto on the charter would be interpreted to mean two-thirds of all registered voters, rather than voters on the day. In other words, parliament was interpreting the word "voters" in the interim constitution in two different ways in the same article. [emphasis added]

In other words, the meaning of the word “voters” will be interpreted depending on how the voters voted! "Yes" voters are measured against other voters, while "No" voters are measured against all potential voters. This is just as bad as the infamous hanging chads.

This of course does not sit well with Sunnis.

Sunni Arab moderates threatened Tuesday to boycott the voting after the Shiite-led parliament passed new rules over the weekend that make it effectively impossible for Sunnis to defeat the charter at the ballot box. "Boycotting the referendum is a possible option... because we believe that participating in the voting might be a useless act," said Saleh al-Mutlaq, a leading Sunni politician.

Even the United Nation is perturbed, saying this does not follow international standards.

The United Nations also expressed concern about the new electoral rules, saying they don't meet international standards. U.N. officials have been meeting with Iraqi authorities and are confident that Iraq will ultimately agree to sound electoral rules, spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

The UN is negotiating with the parliament right now. But I don't have much faith in the UN. The United States government echoes the concern, but I don’t know what we can do.

"Ultimately, this will be a sovereign decision by the Iraqis and it's up to the Iraqi National Assembly to decide on the appropriate electoral framework," Dujarric said. "That being said, it is our duty in our role in Iraq to point out when the process does not meet international standards."

This is outrageous. You can't change the rules in the middle. It was wrong when Democrats did it in Florida 2000, and it's still wrong now in Iraq.

What the Iraqi parliament must realize is that Democracy constitutes the rule of law, and the law must apply equally to everyone. That’s the basis of Democracy. The Constitution is the cornerstone of that democracy: if you rig the election to ratify it, what kind of beginning is that?

I put no stock in the UN. They can negotiate all they want; but at the end of the day, the only voice Iraqis listen to is America's. The United States government has to do more than express its "deep concern" and "strongly suggest" that they change the rules back to the original. Hey, we've got the guns; we got to ram this democracy thing down them Iraqis' throats whether they like it or not!

Omar at Iraq the Model sums up my feeling.

I wasn't worried at all when the final draft came with several articles I didn't agree with since I thought my voice would count and could change things in either direction but now? Now I feel like I'm facing a challenge of having my voice ignored and hijacked again and that is something I cannot accept.

Any rules change that causes even the pro-democracy bloggers at Iraq the Model to back away is a terrible miscalculation. Rules are rules -- leave them alone, and just trust the Iraqi people.

UPDATE from Dafydd, 12:40 pm October 5th:

Sachi just e-mailed me that the Iraqi parliament has changed the rule back to the original (hat tip to Matoko Kusanagi and Terry Gain, who noticed and commented around the same time Sachi found the AP article). Via AP:

Sunnis Drop Threat to Boycott Referendum
Oct 5, 12:51 PM (ET)
by Qassim Abdul-Zahra

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraq's parliament voted Wednesday to reverse last-minute changes to rules for next week's referendum on a new constitution after the United Nations said they were unfair. Sunni Arabs responded by dropping their threat to boycott the vote and promised to reject the charter at the polls.

The United Nations, which was supervising the referendum, and U.S. officials had pressed Iraqi leaders to drop the rule change, which would have made it nearly impossible for the constitution to be defeated and jeopardized efforts to bring Sunnis into the political process.

One might, of course, conclude that American opposition to the rule change might perhaps have played slightly more of a role here than the objections of the toothless U.N., which fled Iraq after a single bombing of the U.N. facility there and have only crept back when assured of protection by the United States.

After a brief debate Wednesday, the National Assembly voted 119 to 28 to restore the original voting rules for the referendum. Only about half of the 275-member legislative body turned up for the vote.

The text approved by parliament Wednesday confirmed that the word "voters" throughout the election rules in the interim constitution has a single meaning: those who cast votes.

"The word 'voters' in paragraph (c), article 61 of the Transitional Administrative law, means registered voters who actually cast their votes in the referendum," reads the text, according to deputy speaker Hussain al-Shahristani....

Wednesday's vote came after intensive talks by U.N. and American officials to pressure the Iraqis to reverse the rule change as Sunnis accused the Shiite-led government of fixing the rules to guarantee a victory.

The Sunnis may "promise" to reject the new constitution, but they may find it harder to deliver. Mustering a two-thirds majority against the referendum in three separate provinces will not be as easy as they imagine: for one reason, more Sunnis than Sunni leaders care to admit actually support the constitution, believing that they can change clauses they don't like by subsequent amendment. The bloggers at Iraq the Model fall into this category, as seen in the post today by Mohammed:

Although I have my objections to several articles of the draft constitution, I will certainly respect my people’s choice and I do believe that half a step forward is still better than many steps backward. I still see this constitution as an upgradeable project that can be improved for better performance in the future and it’s much better than the no-constitution-state and the chaos that would accompany that.

UPDATE 2:

Captain Ed is all over this on Captain's Quarters, as well.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 5, 2005, at the time of 12:58 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 2, 2005

Al Qaeda's Plan. What Plan?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

In today’s Reuters’ article, I found this passage:

Interior Minister Bayan Jabor told Reuters that documents seized after troops killed a purported aide to al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, indicated a plan to spread Islamist violence to other Arab countries.

Whenever I hear about a “plan” by al-Qaeda, I have to ask “What plan?” I have no doubt al-Qaeda has the capability to spread Islamist violence thinly around Arab countries. As Army Gen. John Abizaid said, al-Qaeda is like McDonalds -- a franchise: they can always find some local extremists willing to blow people up under the al-Qaeda umbrella. But that is just a mode of operation, a tactic. What is “spread[ing] Islamist violence” supposed to achieve? What is their strategy and ultimate goal? And, how exactly does random violence help achieve that goal?

Gen. Abizaid seems to know the answer:

"They believe in a jihad, a jihad to overthrow the legitimate regimes in the region," he said. "In order to do that, they first must drive America from the region."

Al Qaeda believes the most important prize is Saudi Arabia, which is home to the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. If al Qaeda terrorists manage to take control of Saudi Arabia, they will try to create and expand their influence in the region and establish a caliphate, Abizaid said.

The term harkens back to the immediate successors of Muhammed and means a land led by a supreme secular and religious ruler. Al Qaeda insists that re-establishing a caliphate would mean that one man, as the successor to Muhammad, would possess clear political, military and legal standing as the global Muslim leader.

That sounds more like a daydream than a cohesive plan.

Take Iraq for example. Al-Qaeda has been trying to "spread Islamist violence" there ever since Zarqawi arrived in Northern Iraq ("Kurdistan") in May of 2002, nearly a year before the American invasion; and they have been spreading it at a fierce pace, especially since Hussein’s regime fell, killing an awful lot of people.

But what have they achieved? Have they gained territory? No. Have they succeeded in kicking out the "Crusaders?" No. Have they stopped or even delayed Iraq’s democratic progress? No. Have they won the Iraqi people’s hearts and minds? NO!

In fact they are losing ground. Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabor said.

Foreign Arab militants now numbered fewer than 1,000, compared to between 2,500 and 3,000 six months ago....

(I don’t necessarily believe the exact number the minister states; after all he has his own agenda. But you get the drift.)

We should expect more terrorist attacks as the October 15 referendum on a post-Saddam constitution approaches. But that threat is not likely to deter the Iraqi people; they have shown themselves to be hard to intimidate.

After an opinion poll forecast turnout would be as high as 80 percent, one of Iraq's electoral commissioners said voter registration had gone well, including among the once dominant Sunni Arab minority, which largely boycotted a January election.

Al-Qaeda has overplayed their hand. Their relentless attacks have only hardened the Iraqi people’s determination: they have nothing left to lose by resisting the terrorists' demands. As Minister Jabor put it:

"What can the insurgents do that's worse? There are already car bombs every day."

This reminds me of a philosophical observation by Ann Coulter, which I paraphrase: the terrorists hate us and want to kill us; but if we fight against them, then they will hate us and want to kill us!

Well then, we might as well fight; because unlike Al Qaeda, we do have a plan to win.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, October 2, 2005, at the time of 3:41 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 30, 2005

Slowly But Surely

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

I posted earlier that Iraqi troops are slowly but surely taking over Iraq's security, one city at the time. The latest example is in and around Karbala, at Forward Operating Base Lima, where Coalition forces and the Greater Iraqi Army (and Iraqi police) just held a transfer ceremony Wednesday.

Iraqi security forces took responsibility for Forward Operating Base Lima from U.S. forces Sept. 28.

Iraqi police, army commanders and government representatives, U.S. representatives, including Army Lt. Col. James Oliver, commander of the 1st Battalion, 198th Armored Brigade, attended the ceremony transferring local security responsibilities to the Iraqi police and the 4th Brigade, 8th Division, Greater Iraqi Army.

American troops had been in Karbala since January this year, providing security and infrastructure support.

(American) troops from the 2nd Battalion, 114th Field Artillery, have assisted the people of Karbala since mid-January, providing security and infrastructure support. Approximately 68 projects, totaling $21.5 million, have been completed to improve the city. The projects included water, sanitation, education, electrical, medical and humanitarian aid.

Some of this work is likely to continue, even after the transfer. But this is now the second Iraqi province where security responsibilities were officially handed over to the Iraqi military.

Good news keeps on coming!

Update:

In testimony before Congress on Thursday, the senior American military commander in Iraq testified about the readiness of the Greater Iraqi Army battalions:

Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who oversees U.S. forces in Iraq, said there are fewer Iraqi battalions at "Level 1" readiness than there were a few months ago.

(Hat tip to wilsonkolb, in the comments.)

But that does not tell the whole story. According to the Department of Defense:

In May, Iraqi security forces conducted about 160 combined or independent operations at the company level and above, Casey said. By September, that number was up to 1,300.

Some 60,000 to 70,000 more Iraqi security forces will be available to provide security during the Oct. 15 referendum than during the January 2005 elections, he said. And by the time the next elections take place, Jan. 15 [2006], Casey said he expects to have about 100,000 more Iraqi security forces.

The growth is so significant, the general said, that he's had to ask for only 2,000 additional coalition troops to help protect the referendum and election progress this year, compared to 12,000 in January [2005].

But then what about that readiness, you may ask? As RBMN pointed out, according to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the level of readiness rating keeps on changing depending on a variety of factors.

For example, initial readiness standards two years ago measured numbers of Iraqi troops. Later, those standards were based on the number of trained troops. Later yet, those standards were based on troops who were trained and equipped. As the bar continued to rise, the numbers dipped a bit, giving an impression that readiness was declining, the secretary explained.

If you just look at the raw numbers, it looks like things are getting worse; but in fact, the situation is actually improving. The “bar” rises or lowers as the needs of the situation change, and as we learn more about the sort of urban terrorist war we’re fighting in Iraq.

The number of Iraqi army troops that are considered in a state of “readiness” will certainly fluctuate up and down for the next several months, until the DoD settles on a single metric to use across all troops in the field.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 30, 2005, at the time of 5:10 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 27, 2005

Were British Soldiers Hostages From the Start?

Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

My online friend who posts as "Silverlining," a Japanese MSM journalist who spent some time in Iraq and still has contacts there, offered an interesting speculation regarding the two British soldiers who were arrested by the Basra Police, then handed over to al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi "Army," and were finally rescued by the British Special Forces.

Silverlining thinks that the Mahdi militiamen, who had infiltrated the Basra police, kidnapped those two soldiers to be used as hostages from the very beginning, in retaliation for the British capturing two militiamen. On September 18th, the day before the British soldiers were apprehended, the British had arrested two key figures of al-Sadr's militia.

Sheik Ahmed Majid Farttusi and Sayyid Sajjad were detained in an early morning raid and are accused of being involved in attacks that killed at least nine soldiers, according to a statement from coalition forces.

This caused quite a stir in the area. The next day, during a demonstration by Sadr's supporters demanding their comrades’ release, the British soldiers were “arrested.” Although the police claimed these soldiers were conducting some sort of special undercover operation, the way these soldiers were dressed, Silverlining thinks they were simply a part of the British force, which was trying to contain the demonstration.

As Dafydd posted earlier, three different sects of militia have heavily infiltrated the Basra police. It is not so hard to imagine that some of Sadr’s men in the police got an order for this kidnapping. The fact the police casually handed them over to the militia seems to support his speculation. Perhaps Sadr's men intended to use the soldiers as barganing chips to release the militiamen.

What they did not consider was that the British army does not take kidnapping kindly. They should have known that the lion may be old, but it is not toothless.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 27, 2005, at the time of 11:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 26, 2005

Talk to the Terrorists?

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

We Americans do not negotiate with terrorists. No, we should kill them not to talk to them, shouldn't we?

Well, not exactly. I found this interesting article in Space War.com through Good News Central.

Lt. Col. Bradley Becker who leads 2nd battalion of the 8th Field Artillery Regiment explains. Just before he came to Quayyarah in northwestern Iraq, eleven months ago, Iraqi police and the Army were in a sorry state. He did not think his seven platoons could possibly cover the whole area.

"Anyone who comes to a counter-insurgency thinking it's about killing terrorists is missing the boat," said Becker. "It's really about winning the people. You can kill all the terrorists but then you've pissed people off and created 100 more,"

Since his platoons cannot be everywhere at the same time, he needed to effectively attack certain hot spots, and kill a small number of very key people. This required intelligence. They needed cooperation from the local residents.

I have always thought that, in order for terrorists to freely conduct their activity, they must have local Sunni help, whether through empathy or intimidation. But these people themselves are not necessarily terrorists. If the American military or Iraqi police could show them we are on their side and we can protect them, then some of these people can tell us where the terrorists are. And that is exactly what is happening in Iraq.

Connecting with local leadership is the only way a counter-insurgency campaign can work -- even if the leaders are part of the insurgency.

Time and again, U.S. officers say after a show of real force -- the kind of effectiveness that makes the shieks and imams and villagers think they might be safe if they throw their hat in with the Americans -- tips start to dribble in.

"Then they say 'the real guy you should be going after is X' and we follow another target," Gibler said. "The cycle is never ending. When you kill a bad guy he is going to be backfilled. But as you target these guys eventually they can't rebuild, and then you have real, no kidding security."

We don’t know who the terrorists are. But the people who live there do. It is essential that the security force gains the trust of the local Sunni shiekhs and imams, even if that means talking to marginal terrorist supporters. I am glad our commanders are doing just that.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 26, 2005, at the time of 12:12 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 25, 2005

Iraqi Troops Take Over

Good News! , Iraq Matters
Hatched by Sachi

A round up of good Iraq news posted on other blog sites.

It is hard to believe, I know. But there is tremendous progress being made in Iraq. The American military has trained up to 200,000 Iraqi troops, much more and sooner than expected; as Captain Ed noted, a large number of these Iraqi troops now have battlefield experience. It is even possible we can significantly reduce the number of forces in Iraq by early spring next year.

After bombing two bridges near the Syrian border and severely damaging the infrastructure of terrorists in Najaf, the US military handed over the city’s security to Iraqi forces. In the Belmont Club, Wretchard quotes a September 6th story in the Washington Post about the Najaf battle:

The U.S. military pulled hundreds of troops out of the south city of Najaf on Tuesday, transferring security duties to Iraqi forces and sticking to a schedule that the United States hopes will allow the withdrawal of tens of thousands of its forces by early spring…Other cities in the heavily Shiite south, and in the Kurdish north, are likely to be next.

The Tal-Afar operation was conducted by a combined coalition of Iraqi and American forces. However, it was the 5000 Iraqi troops who conducted house-to-house searches and arrested over 200 terrorists. According to Iraqi officials, 141 rebel fighters were killed as well. In a different post, Wretchard quotes from the Telegraph:

Iraq's prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, announced the start of the offensive in a statement yesterday morning.

"At 2am today, acting on my orders, Iraqi forces commenced an operation to remove all remaining terrorist elements from the city of Tel Afar," he said. "These forces are operating with support from the Multinational Force."

The readiness of Iraqi troops may have overly encouraged the Iraqi president. From the Washington Post (hat tip Captain’s Quarters):

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said in an interview yesterday that the United States could withdraw as many as 50,000 troops by the end of the year, declaring there are enough Iraqi forces trained and ready to begin assuming control in cities throughout the country.

Of course this does not mean we have any kind of timetable for withdrawal. But it is good to know we are in fact getting ready for it.

The successful operation of Tal-Afar offensive was felt in other parts of Iraq. The Iraq Defense ministry is considering sending Iraqi troops to several Iraqi cities including Samarra, according to Iraq the Model. During a negotiation with Sunni delegate from Samarra, the defense minister had stated that Iraqi troops’ success is encouraging many youths to join the Iraqi Defense Force. He encouraged Sunnis to cooperate with the government as well. In fact, with the memory of Tal-Afar being still fresh in mind, Sunni tribes are peacefully negotiating with the IDF, according to Omar of Iraq the Model.

Iraqi troops are slowly but surely taking charge of Iraqi security; Bush’s nation building concept may well be working here.

Hatched by Sachi on this day, September 25, 2005, at the time of 4:43 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 21, 2005

Shia Need Come-to-Jesus Meeting

Iran Matters , Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

This is profoundly disturbing. We all cheered -- well, except for Cindy and George -- when the Brits raided a jail (and then a private residence) in Basra to rescue their two special-forces comrades.

But the more details come out about the jailing and what happened to the soldiers afterward, the more it appears a reckoning is due between the Coalition forces and the Shia in the Iraqi South.

According to the governor of Basra province, the British soldiers were handed over by Iraqi authorities to Muqtada al-Sadr's terrorist forces, which it pleases him to call the "al-Mahdi Army." Via AP, "Iraqis in Basra Slam 'British Aggression'," September 21st, 2005:

Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr disputed the British account of the raid that followed. He told the British Broadcasting Corp. the two soldiers never left police custody or the jail, were not handed over to militants, and that the British army acted on a "rumor" when it stormed the jail.

But Basra's governor, Mohammed al-Waili, said the two men were indeed moved from the jail. He said they were placed in the custody of the al-Mahdi Army, the militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

"The two British were being kept in a house controlled by militiamen when the rescue operation took place," al-Waili said. "Police who are members of the militia group took them to a nearby house after jail authorities learned the facility was about to be stormed."

These are the same terrorists who tried to rebel against Iraqi authority in mid-2004, seizing the city of Najaf at the same time the Sunni terrorists under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarwawi grabbed Fallujah, killing four American contractors and mutilating their bodies for the TV cameras. This was the worst insurrection of the entire war, the only one that threatened to start an actual national front of resistance to Coalition forces; it was thwarted by the controversial but ultimately successful strategy of abandoning Fallujah for a time while we focused on Najaf and Basra. Once Sadr's "army" was crushed, we eventually returned to Fallujah, this time with a joint Coalition-Iraqi force that could not only conquer the city but hold it in Iraqi hands.

So after all that trouble, why on Earth are Iraqi police in Basra handing captured British soldiers off to Sadr's terrorists?

Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shiite politician who has criticized the British raid as "a violation of Iraqi sovereignty," acknowledged that one problem coalition forces face is that insurgents have joined the ranks of security forces.

"Iraqi security forces in general, police in particular, in many parts of Iraq, I have to admit, have been penetrated by some of the insurgents, some of the terrorists as well," he said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday night.

Officials in Basra, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared for their lives, said at least 60 percent of the police force there is made up of Shiite militiamen from one of three groups: the Mahdi Army; the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and Hezbollah in Iraq, a small group based in the southern marshlands.

The militias have deep historical, religious and political ties to Iran, where many Shiite political and religious figures took refuge during the rule of Saddam Hussein.

This is grim news indeed; but it need not be catastrophic. Basra clearly needs a thorough sanitizing; and respected Shiite leaders, such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest ranking and most respected Shiite cleric in Iraq, must make it very clear to Iraqi Shia that they must choose. They can either be militiamen, or they can be Iraqis; they cannot be both, as the militias do not have the interests of Iraq at heart.

In fact, there are persistent claims that Sadr himself is an agent of Iran; certainly the Badr Brigade and Hezbollah In Iraq are fully creatures of that vengeful, bloody theocracy. From the Asia Times, "Iraq goes courting in Iran," July 19th, 2005:

If sincere, Tehran could help both Iraqi and US-led forces to better fight the largely Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq by engaging the 15,000 to 20,000 al-Badr Brigade, the military wing of the Shi'ite Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution of Iraq, formed, trained and equipped by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to oppose Saddam.

This astonishing action on the part of Basra police who are also members of the "al-Mahdi Army" terrorist group is a shot across the bow at the Bush administration's handling of the war. We cannot allow Shiite terrorist militias to take over the Iraqi South or North Baghdad any more than we can allow Sunni terrorists to take over the center of Iraq. President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had better take this event seriously and start working with Shiite authorities to cleanse Shiite police forces of terrorist elements. The alternative may be to witness the birth of "Greater Iran."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 21, 2005, at the time of 7:33 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 18, 2005

Predictions, Predictions: the Iraqi Consitutional Vote

Injudicious Judiciary , Iraq Matters , Politics - National , Predictions
Hatched by Dafydd

UPDATE: Crash and burn on the prediction about the vote in the Judiciary Committee! Read all about it here.

One of my favorite thrillseeking pastimes is making high-level predictions. Unlike those by psychics, mine are specific and near enough that everyone will remember to check -- thus I dance on the high-adrenaline tightrope between, as Charlie Brown would put it, being a hero or being a goat.

(I actually have a fairly good track record, because I do not make my predicions anywhere near as randomly as I pretend.)

The Iraqi constitution, which their parliament just voted to be put to the Iraqi people, can only be derailed by either a majority vote against (not politically possible) or by its rejection by three provinces, each with more than two-thirds against.

This time, I'll just flip a coin *: Dafydd the Great, wearing turbin and holding back of hand to forehead, predicts that no more than one province will muster the necessary 67% rejection. (Actually, I believe none will; but I'm hedging my prediction slightly.)

In an earlier, unrelated prediction posted on Captain's Quarters about the vote on John Roberts' nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee, I prognosticated that every Democrat on the committee except Ted Kennedy will vote to support Roberts in the vote recommending his nomination to the full Senate.

All of my predictions will have the primary category "Predictions," to make for easy tracking. After each is decided by the quantum vicissitudes of time, I will update it, scoring Dafydd the Great either a hit, a miss, or a mixed result (a wash).

* I'm lying again, as I warned you I might. I don't make my predictions by flipping a coin. I've been following this upcoming election for some time. My thinking was also influenced by this post by Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarters. So there.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 18, 2005, at the time of 5:16 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 17, 2005

Victory Conditional

Iraq Matters , War Against Radical Islamism
Hatched by Dafydd

This story on Fox News raises -- and begs -- the most fascinating question about the GWOT, the Global War on Terrorism; or as I prefer it, the war on militant Islamism.

The story -- "Baghdad Terror Campaign Claims More Lives" -- reels off the usual litany of brutish attacks by the troglodytes who call themselves al-Qaeda In Iraq. Being Fox News, the story also recites a number of military successes that the Coalition has had recently, particularly the Tal Afar and Haditha campaigns along the Syrian border that Wretchard at the Belmont Club has analyzed.

But there is a larger question here: what exactly constitutes victory or defeat in "this" war, whether the referrant of "this" is Iraq or the GWOT itself? To put it in military terminology, what are the victory conditions?

Without knowing the victory conditions, it's impossible to decide whether we're winning or losing. But the Bush administration has done a wretched job articulating just what these are. Come on, guys, we're tough; we can take it!

They've done a better job communicating the goals of the Iraq phase of the GWOT: the victory conditions are (1) a free and democratic Iraq that (2) does not threaten its neighbors or the United States and (3) stands on its own feet, both economically and militarily to (4) deny sanctuary to international terrorism.

But what about the larger war, of which Iraq is only a part? What are the victory conditions anent Iran, for example? Must the mullahs be overthrown for us to have "won," or would permanently preventing them from developing nuclear weapons be sufficient?

And how about our quasi-allies, such as Pakistan or Egypt? Need they become true democracies, at least at the level of Turkey? Or is it enough if they're still ruled by strongmen, but those autarchs fight alongside America to destroy terrorist infestations?

The Pentagon and the White House need to butt heads and come up with a clear set of victory conditions, understandable to the average citizen, by which we can measure success and failure in today's struggle... which is every bit as consequential as the Cold War against Communism or World War II against Fascism.

And perhaps the blogosphere can lead the way... suggestions, anyone?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 17, 2005, at the time of 1:13 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

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