True Believers

Reader DL sends an excerpt from Paul Berman's recent Terror and Liberalism who "puts his liberal credentials on the line ... by critiquing the left while presenting a liberal rationale for the war on terror". Berman believes the Left should have arrived at a logical opposition to radical Islamism independently because:

... Islamism (is) a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and communism ... Berman delineates how all three movements descended from utopian visions (in the case of Islamism, the restoration of a pure seventh-century Islam) into irrational cults of death.

In a word the Left would logically be expected to oppose Osama Bin Laden because it represents everything Berman thinks the Left has fought against since it's inception. The question Berman tries to answer is why the precise opposite has happened. To get a handle on the problem he dissects the failure of the 1930s French Left to resolutely oppose Hitler. On pages 124-128 Berman says:

Blum and his supporters regarded Hitler and the Nazis with horror ... But mostly they remembered the First World War ... They grew thoughtful, therefore. They did not wish to reduce Germany in all its Teutonic complexity to black-and-white terms of good and evil. ... And, having analyzed the German scene in that manner, the anti-war Socialists concluded that Hitler and the Nazis, in railing against the great powers and the Treaty of Versailles, did make some legitimate arguments ... Why not look for ways to conciliate the outraged German people and, in that way, to conciliate the Nazis? ...

The anti-war Socialists of France did not think they were being cowardly or unprincipled in making those arguments. On the contrary, they ... regarded themselves as exceptionally brave and honest. They felt that courage and radicalism allowed them to peer beneath the surface of events and identify the deeper factors at work in international relations-the truest danger facing France. This danger, in their judgment, did not come from Hitler and the Nazis, not principally. The truest danger came from the warmongers and arms manufacturers of France itself ... who stood to benefit in material ways from a new war. ... But the political arguments rested on something deeper, too -- a philosophical belief; profound, large, and attractive ... that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable.

The belief underlying those anti-war arguments was, in short, an unyielding faith in universal rationality. ... And, stirred by that antique idea, the anti-war Socialists gazed across the Rhine and simply refused to believe ... in a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories, blood-curdling hatreds, medieval superstitions, and the lure of murder. At Auschwitz the SS said, "Here there is no why."

That grimly hilarious punchline was not exclusive to Auschwitz. Piers Brendon recalls in Dark Valley, his history of the 1930s, that the most common scrawl left by doomed Old Bolsheviks at Lubyanka prison were the words "What For?" But more poignant yet was the refusal of some Party members, exiled to Magadan, the worst camp of the Gulag, to smuggle news to their comrades of their fate. One said,  'at least now they still have hope in Communism. If I let them know the truth then they will have nothing'. Even in Magadan the Left's deepest need was to believe. Having abolished the God of their forefathers and finding themselves prostrate before the false god they fashioned for themselves, as between extinction and despair they chose extinction. But back to Berman.

... among the anti-war Socialists, a number of people, having voted with Petain, took the logical next step and, on patriotic an idealistic grounds, accepted positions in his new government, at Vichy. Some of those Socialists went a little further, too, and began to see a virtue in Petain's program for a new France and a new Europe-a program for strength and virility, a Europe ruled by a single-party state instead of by the corrupt cliques of bourgeois democracy, a Europe cleansed of the impurities of Judaism and of the Jews themselves, a Europe of the anti-liberal imagination. And, in that very remarkable fashion, a number of the anti-war Socialists of France came full circle. They had begun as defenders of liberal values and human rights, and they evolved into defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition, and mass murder. They were democratic leftists who, through the miraculous workings of the slippery slope and a naïve faith in the rationalism of all things, ended as fascists. Long ago, you say? Not so long ago.

Shadow of the Past

Robert Mayer at Publius Pundit says argues that the key provision dividing ethnic groups over the Iraqi Constitution is federalism. Particularly contentious are the provisions which would preserve local militias at the expense of diminishing the national army.

There are two main issues regarding this. For one, the Iraqi government isn’t allowed to deploy the army to the region without express permission from the regional parliament ... the local militias affiliated with political parties in parliament that want to keep power by suppressing freedom and intimidating people. This happens to a large degree in the south, in places like Basra, where the religious Shiite and Iran-affiliated Badr militia has been known to harass people for doing things “unIslamic.”

The other problem is the distribution of resources, which is another reason why many people of different ethnic and sectarian backgrounds oppose the current federalism. ...  all undeveloped resources will remain the sole propriety of the regions ... concerns that the federal government won’t be able to stop the resource-rich north and south from seceding, leaving them high and dry.

Mayer doesn't say how these issues should be resolved or even whether they can be resolved. But he was convinced that US domestic political considerations required that the Iraqi Constitutional process be perceived as moving forward. He had hoped that Sunnis and Shi'ites could agree to defer the decision over federalism until a new election could be held to constitute an assembly undistorted by a Sunni boycott. It wouldn't solve the problem, but off the evil hour when the hard choices had to be made. He quotes a Guardian article showing this was precisely the 'compromise' urged on the disputants by President Bush. "Following Bush’s call, Shiite officials submitted compromise proposals to the Sunnis, agreeing to delay decisions on federalism and the status of members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party until a new parliament is elected in December."

But in the event, the Sunnis have rejected the compromise and turned their efforts to stopping the draft Constitution's ratification. According to the Boston Globe.

In recent days, Shi'ites and Kurds made what they said was a final compromise offer. It retained the principle of federalism and enshrined the Kurds' long-held autonomy in the north, but deferred decisions about how and when new federal states could be formed to the next legislature. It also removed the ban on the Ba'ath Party while prohibiting the party's ''Saddamist" branch and symbols. The Sunnis submitted additional demands Saturday, and negotiations ended. ...

''We will not stay on the sideline this time, and I think we can make the constitution fail in Anbar, Salahuddin, Nineveh, and Diyala," said Jabouri, referring to four provinces where Sunnis are believed to be a majority.

Ali al-Dabbagh, a Shi'ite member of the constitutional committee, expressed concern that violence could result if Sunni attempts to block the document fail. ...  If the Sunnis ''feel they are outside of Iraq and want to cause problems, that is up to them." Peter Galbraith, a former US diplomat and an adviser to the Kurds, said that if the referendum fails, the Kurds may push for full independence from Iraq. ''If this constitution is rejected, the next negotiations are going to be about the partition of the country," he said.

Each behind his Mason-Dixon Line. Of course it can hardly stop there. With a Shi'ite state in southern Iraq and an independent Kurdistan, fueled by vast oil reserves, the wrecker ball may keep on rolling. Syria and Turkey, with their large Kurdish minorities would soon have to reckon with the new Kurdish state. Iran may try to dominate southern Iraq, but a new Shi'ite state could just as easily become a rival as a client.

The referendum over the Iraqi constitution is, ironically enough, a long-delayed partial plebescite on the Sykes-Picot agreement, which created Iraq out of the shards of the Ottoman Empire, (follow this link to see historical maps of the region before Iraq was created in 1916 by a secret treaty between French and British diplomats.) and the subsequent partitions of the Middle East among European powers, which eventually involved Italy, Greece, France and Soviet Russia, leaving boundaries which remained unstable even beyond Yalta.

(Speculation alert) In this context it would be a mistake, I think, to judge success or failure of the Iraq constitution by the standard of whether that document prescribes some end condition preferred by the current State Department. The real test must be whether the peoples of Iraq can construct a polity of their choosing and whether it is one that leads to a stable and prosperous region. The fact, as Robert Mayer points out, that the principle issue dividing the proposed Constitution's proponents is federalism suggests that national identities have survived the Ottomans, the European Mandate System and the Ba'ath more strongly than many would care to admit. Although those who would have preferred to see the status quo ante preserved under Saddam and those who would have liked to see a unitary multiethnic successor state emerge may be disappointed in a devolution, the United States, alone among the great powers that have entered the region, has approached the problem of Mesopotamia by asking the people what they want. It may not be what we want. But that is beside the point.

Time After Time

A number of readers have linked to Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr.'s How To Win In Iraq in Foreign Affairs, in which he puts forward a number of metrics which he claims are not being used by current strategists. 

Without a clear strategy in Iraq, moreover, there is no good way to gauge progress. Senior political and military leaders have thus repeatedly made overly optimistic or even contradictory declarations. ... To date, U.S. forces in Iraq have largely concentrated their efforts on hunting down and killing insurgents. ... Instead, U.S. and Iraqi forces should adopt an "oil-spot strategy" in Iraq, which is essentially the opposite approach. Rather than focusing on killing insurgents, they should concentrate on providing security and opportunity to the Iraqi people, thereby denying insurgents the popular support they need. Since the U.S. and Iraqi armies cannot guarantee security to all of Iraq simultaneously, they should start by focusing on certain key areas and then, over time, broadening the effort -- hence the image of an expanding oil spot. Such a strategy would have a good chance of success. But it would require a protracted commitment of U.S. resources, a willingness to risk more casualties in the short term, and an enduring U.S. presence in Iraq, albeit at far lower force levels than are engaged at present.

David Brooks takes up the Krepinevich theme in the New York Times and suggests that policymakers at least consider the possibility that he may have some points to offer. 

Krepinevich calls the approach the oil-spot strategy. The core insight is that you can't win a war like this by going off on search and destroy missions trying to kill insurgents. There are always more enemy fighters waiting. You end up going back to the same towns again and again, because the insurgents just pop up after you've left and kill anybody who helped you. You alienate civilians, who are the key to success, with your heavy-handed raids.

Instead of trying to kill insurgents, Krepinevich argues, it's more important to protect civilians. You set up safe havens where you can establish good security. Because you don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere at once, you select a few key cities and take control. Then you slowly expand the size of your safe havens, like an oil spot spreading across the pavement.

Krepinevich cites Lieutenant General Sir Gerald Templer's successful counterinsurgency campaign in the Malayan Emergency of how to conduct an "oil spot" strategy. There are many valuable lessons to be found in the Malayan Emergency, but also a few things differences with Iraq which deserve highlighting. Some of the most important are the following:

First, the British strategy took a long time to get things right: the Emergency ran a dozen years from 1948 to 1960. This despite the fact that the British enjoyed certain implicit advantages that Americans lack, which enabled them to shorten the duration. The British as the former colonial power of Malaya had literally tens of thousands of Britons who knew the language and culture of the country and had a pre-existing intelligence network. In contrast, Iraq was dominated by a Baathist regime for decades. It is they who have the pre-existing intelligence network.

Second, the enemy in Malaya were a relatively small, visible ethnic Chinese minority without a cross-border sanctuary in a supportive state. The tension between the ethnic Chinese and the Muslim Malays were such that it contributed to the formation of the Republic of Singapore  in 1963. In Iraq, the Sunni triangle, without the borders can be conceived as an extension of Syria abutting upon Shi'ite and Kurdish areas. The insurgency is occurring primarily within the Shi'ite area, where they are the majority.

Third, the international context of the Malayan emergency was the Cold War. There was widespread support, especially in the early 1950s for a confrontation with Communism, especially following the Berlin crisis and the invasion of South Korea. Europe, facing a Soviet enemy at its doorstep rose more readily to the challenge than today. Today it is psychologically confident in its security, never mind that this security is not of its own making and maintenance.

One campaign which more nearly paralleled the Malayan insurgency was the Huk insurgency in the Philippines. Although the enemy was ethnically indistinguishable from the population (which should have made them harder to fight), the US had the same familiarity with local culture than the British had, notwithstanding the fact that it had been in American possession for much less than than Malaya had been under the Brits. The US and Philippine governments beat the Huks handily, a task the Japanese Imperial Army had never been able to achieve during the Pacific War. The Japanese were operating in about the same time frame and US is in Iraq and with the same handicaps as to culture.

But the central problem, of course, is that America has lost the battle for time in the Global War on Terror. It has implicitly conceded, both to its domestic and international constituencies, the unacceptability of prolonging the process for more a few more years. In short, it has taken Krepinevich's scenario, if ever it were valid, off the table. To be fair, part of the blame must lie with the Bush administration itself, which implied that the process of defeating the enemy was shorter than it was. But if George Bush did not manage public expectations, his opponents certainly did. By repeatedly raising the specter of Vietnam, they implicitly engendered the counterassertion that all post-Vietnam American overseas commitments had to be casualty-free and of short duration. For example in the drafting of the Iraqi constitution, delays of a few days are described by newspapers as major setbacks. I wonder what Templer would have thought of that.

Mosul 2005

In case you haven't already, read Michael Yon's description of a car chase through Mosul's streets, continued on foot through its mazes, concluding in a wild shootout in a dusty alley. Yon has action photos of close quarters combat, which if they didn't exist, would render any account of the actual sang froid of both American troops and the enemy open to disbelief. See for yourself. Men shot firing back on the way down. An enemy fighter who'll pull your helmet down over your eyes, with four rounds already in him, like some lethal member of the Three Stooges. A Command Sergeant Major straight out of central casting engaging the enemy so closely that he went hand-to-hand; wins -- and then comes out dragging his quarry still wearing his Oakleys -- mad that someone had left toothmarks on his wristwatch. It brought to mind Osama Bin Laden's taunting assessment of his American enemy.

But your most disgraceful case was in Somalia; where -- after vigorous propaganda about the power of the USA and its post cold war leadership of the new world order -- you moved tens of thousands of international force, including twenty eight thousands American solders into Somalia. However, when tens of your solders were killed in minor battles and one American Pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you. Clinton appeared in front of the whole world threatening and promising revenge , but these threats were merely a preparation for withdrawal. You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew; the extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the "heart" of every Muslim and a remedy to the "chests" of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut , Aden and Mogadishu.

American troops seem to be OK, so what part of it did Osama get wrong? Maybe he kept reading the papers, because without people like Michael Yon it would all have gone down the Memory Hole.

Update

One part Yon saved from the memory hole was the fact that the man who shot LTC Kurilla, Khalid Jasim Nohe, as pointed out by Desert Rat in comments, had earlier been caught only to be released.

The Cancer Ward

Donald Sensing writing in Winds of Change, compares Islamic terrorism to a virus. 

We need to understand how the terrorists operate and sustain themselves. Al Qaeda is not like any enemy we have ever faced and therefore our national responses will be unlike any we have ever given. While Al Qaeda is obviously capable of great violence, it may be likened to a virus that has already infected the world's systems of commerce, travel, finances, politics and communications.

Extending the metaphor of the world as a body afflicted by a virus, consider its circulatory system: world trade. The Singapore Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies describes why ports like Singapore and choke points like the Straits of Malacca have become targets for terrorism.

Containerization has made it possible for the carriers to shift from a port-to-port focus to a door-to-door focus. This process has also benefited from 'intermodalism', or the interchangeability of the various modes of transporting the container by road, sea or rail. Intermodalism has made it possible for goods to move from the point of production, without being opened, until they reach the point of sale or final destination.

No more perfect way to transport bombs, propaganda and weapons to any point on earth can surpass the unmindful creations of the kuffar.  In consequence, the Singaporean Navy has invested in sophisticated port scanning devices, radiological detectors and even created Accompanying Sea Security Teams, armed naval personnel who "ride shotgun" on merchant vessels transiting the Straits of Malacca. Not just transportation hubs, but centers of finance and mass media have also proved irresistible draws for Jihadis. Consider Londonistan.

Londonistan is a pejorative sobriquet referring to the British capital of London, used by French counter-terrorism agents since the late 1990s, owing to the number of exiled Islamist groups that established political headquarters in the city, and from where they sought to overthrow governments they considered oppressive or heretical, as well as planning terror attacks on other European countries.

Britain's attractions for Islamist dissidents included its tradition of granting asylum to victims of political repression and commitment to freedom of speech. London itself had a reputation as the centre of the Arab press corp, with leading newspapers such as Al Hayat and Al Quds al Arabi published in the city. Relatively unimpeded by the British authorities, the British capital became the international headquarters for such Islamic groups as Takfir-wal-Hijra, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia headed by the controversial Sa'ad Al-Faqih, Bahrain Freedom Movement and Algerian Armed Islamic Group.

The interesting thing about these examples is that they stand conventional wisdom completely on its head. London in the 1990s was the complete antithesis of Iraq. The Straits of Malacca was nothing but a sea corridor, with Muslim-majority countries, Malaysia and Indonesia, on both sides. Yet both London and the transportation arteries of the Malay barrier were or subsequently became terror targets purely because of their value to the malignancy. The process is similar to angiogenesis in cancer, where a tumor takes over control of the body's ability to produce blood vessels for the sole purpose of nourishing itself. One way doctors spot tumors is by finding unusual concentrations of blood vessels feeding the growing malignancy. Sensing's comparison of Islamic terrorism to a virus, if correct, makes a nonsense of claims that that Islamic militants are infiltrating the West in retaliation for Iraq or even the supposed provocations of Israel. The infiltration is occuring for entirely independent reasons: to provide nutrients for the malignancy or to turn ordinary systems to their purposes.

If the comparison  to of Islamic terrorism to disease had any validity, one would expect to see a growing use of the world's own "healthy" systems for the pathogenic purposes. And we do: for example, what would normally be regarded as a mode of transportation, such as a widebodied airplane, Islamic terrorism sees as a bomb. Things will be observed in continuous inversion: pharmaceutical industries being developed in order to create a chemical and biological warfare capacity; countries without any civilian nuclear power industry embarked on frantic centrifuge manufacturing programs; a horde of students studying engineering, chemistry and computer science in the West who have no intention whatsoever of building a bridge, developing a detergent or writing an entertainment game. There would be a large demand for handheld ratios, not for talking but for use as bomb triggers; video cameras to record beheadings etc. Consequently, in reverse of expectations, the more material one provides to the disease -- Islamic terrorism by analogy -- the less ameliorative its effects. Welfare benefits would be received, not with gratitude but to fund militancy; council housing used to host bomb factories; UN relief grants used to pay for Hamas banners that say "Gaza Today. The West Bank and Jerusalem Tomorrow". A story from the Guardian, for example, describes how insurgents in Haditha have put this principle into practice.

In Haditha hospital staff and teachers are allowed to collect government salaries in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, but other civil servants have had to quit. Last year the US trumpeted its rehabilitation of a nearby power plant: "The incredible progress at Haditha is just one example of the huge strides made by the US Army Corps of Engineers." Now insurgents earn praise from residents for allegedly pressuring managers to supply electricity almost 24 hours a day, a luxury denied the rest of Iraq. ... DVDs of the beheadings on the bridge are distributed free in the souk. Children seem to prefer them to cartoons. "They should not watch such things," said one grandfather, but parents appeared not to object. One DVD features a young, blond muscular man who had been disembowelled. He was said to have been a member of a six-strong US sniper team ambushed on Aug. 1. Residents said he had been paraded in town before being executed. The US military denied that, saying six bodies were recovered and that all appeared to have died in combat. Shortly after the ambush three landmines killed 14 Marines in a convoy which ventured from their base outside the town.

Donald Sensing quoted some advice in his Winds of Change post, "standard counterterrorism responses, such as improving intelligence sharing and law enforcement cooperation, are indispensable but insufficient. Likewise, military force is sometimes required, but it cannot be the primary response." Why? Because like viral infections and cancer, Islamic terrorism is fundamentally a condition of malignant information. One of the most far-reaching benefits to Al Qaedaism of its alliance with the Left is how easily it allowed it to move astride the media, the academe and the liberal religious establishment. The information disease infiltrating the information stream of its victim. Not only does this feed Islamic militancy, in a process analogous to angiogenesis, it also puts its core code, which contains the instructions to reproduce and destroy, beyond the reach of counter-information under the banner of political correctness. Truly the perfect storm.

IEDs

Two DOD briefings discussed the subject of IEDs in Iraq which provide food for thought. The first comes off a briefing given by Secretary Rumsfeld on August 23.

Q Mr. Secretary, the U.S. casualties from IEDs [improvised explosive device] over the last four months have been -- have been at their highest levels that we've seen since the invasion. I'm wondering what you attribute that to. Do you think it's going -- we're going to see it continuing? And I mean, do you attribute it to Iran, to this increasing sophistication of IEDs? What's your --

SEC. RUMSFELD: You're talking about Iraq.

Q I'm sorry; yes.

SEC. RUMSFELD: The -- I mean, the number of incidents, you know where that is, that level. And it's been going up, as it has in every other instance prior to an event like the constitution or an election in Afghanistan and so forth. We've tended to expect that. The number of provinces that it's occurring in Iraq are relatively few, three or four or five, not 18; relatively modest numbers in the remainder. The -- as you point out, the lethality, however, is up. Interestingly, however, of the number of incidents, the overwhelming majority are not effective at all; there are no casualties. I'm going to say like 80 percent of them --

ADM. GIAMBASTIANI: Is it about -- about 75 (percent)?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Yeah, 75 percent of them there are no casualties. So how -- I don't know quite how to characterize that except that they're hitting maybe one out of four where they're able to accomplish what they'd like. On those, the lethality has been greater, which is the point of your question. I don't know quite what I would attribute it to other than the fact that they obviously are becoming more sophisticated in developing in large measure explosive devices which have greater lethality.

The second comes off a briefing given by Maj. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, commander, Multinational Force Northwest and Task Force Freedom on August 19.

Q General, Sandra Erwin with National Defense. Can you tell us what kind of IED -- what is the level of IED attacks that you see in your area? We heard from General LaFontaine last week that the attacks have doubled. Can you give us a sense of what kinds of threats do you see now in your area from the IEDs?

GEN. RODRIGUEZ: I think the question is about IEDs. And we have, of course, had a tremendous effort ongoing to combat the IEDs, which are the most prevalent weapon that has been used against us. Over the last three months, they have decreased in both number and effectiveness by about 20 percent. This has been a combination of several things. One, of course, is the tactics, techniques and procedures that we're using as we conduct our operations. The disruption in the senior leadership that we've been able to have on the leadership of the insurgency, they've been a little bit less complex because of the pressure that we've been able to keep on them. And also, we continue to get a large number of tips from the Iraqi people to help us discover them and get the word when they're putting them in, as well as the impact of several large caches that were seized throughout the last three months. So we continue to use all available technology, tactics, techniques and procedures to decrease the impact and effect of IEDs on our forces.

Q A follow-up on that. Some of the other officials we talk to say the IED sophistication has been increasing; but you're saying the opposite; you're saying that they're going down in numbers and sophistication?

GEN. RODRIGUEZ: Yes. Right now in this area they are going down in number as well as in sophistication. For example, there have not been as many buried and camouflaged, covered or concealed as had been in the past. And I think I explained why we thought that was.

Q Thank you.

The list for August shows the cause of 74 deaths sustained by US forces in Iraq (as of today) distributed as follows:

Cause	Number
IED	33
VBIED (car bomb)	7
IED and Small Arms combined	6
Small Arms	16
Other explosion	2
Rocket	1
Non combat related	9

The number of casualties in 2005 have been higher than totals for the same months in 2004, largely as a consequence of a much higher level of enemy effort: "it's been going up" -- Rumsfeld; "attacks have doubled" -- attributed to Gen. La Fontaine. The level of enemy effort has been variable in the past and reached local peaks in March 2004 and January 2005. The current uptick has been attributed by Secretary Rumsfeld to the Iraqi constitutional discussions and the forthcoming referendum. However, an alternative explanation is to attribute the upswing to a general increase in enemy strength. Which of the two it is will emerge in due course.

Comment		2004	2005
Iraqi elections 2005	Jan	47	107
	Feb	19	58
	Mar	52	36
Height of Sunni/Shiite uprising in 2004	Apr	135	52
	May	80	79
	Jun	42	77
	Jul	54	54
	Aug	66	68*
			*unfinished month
		495	531

 

However that may turn out, it seems fairly clear that the enemy effort is not homogenous as to quality. Seventy five percent of IED attacks produce no casualties. This is an interesting "cliff" function which suggests that only a proportion of enemy techniques are truly effective. Enemy capability also seems to vary by locality. Multinational Force Northwest (aka Task force Freedom) operates in "the most northern region of Iraq, which includes the city of Mosul" has seen a decrease "in both number and effectiveness by about 20 percent" in IEDs, so presumably the enemy has been experiencing setbacks there. The real increase in attacks must be in the other command areas, i.e. Baghdad, North-Central and West.

The Last of the Missing Recon Team

Froggy Ruminations has a postmortem of the mission in which a SEAL team ran into superior numbers near Asadabad, Afghanistan. A helicopter carrying a quick reaction force was subsequently lost in an attempt to extract them. Froggy Ruminations believes it was fundamentally due to bad luck that the team was discovered.(Hat tip Peg for discovering a mistake in the earlier version of this post).

I have received an unofficial “debrief” account of what happened on the SR mission and the subsequent actions of the QRF that went in to save them. I am not going to go into that here in an open forum, but I do want to address the broader issues of the operation. ... My understanding of how they were compromised amounts to basically a freak occurrence.

As to the issue of whether the commander of the quick reaction force misjudged the dangers of attempting a rescue, he argues that although the SEAL commander knew the odds, he nevertheless did everything possible to extract his men and led the mission himself.

Chances are good that the TF Commander had some kind of UAV surveillance in the area, and he therefore knew essentially how grave the SR team’s situation really was. Since LCDR Kristensen was on the bird that crashed, it is clear that the SEAL leadership element at the TF had no qualms about going in to get the SR team. Since the Nightstalkers flew the mission, it is clear that their leadership element was willing to take the risk of a daytime insertion in order to rescue their SEAL brothers. And since the QRF did in fact launch, it is clear that the TF Commander decided in his experience that he had to make the attempt to get his men out of there. The fact that people died as a result of those decisions does not make them incorrect. Soldiers and Sailors die in war, that’s just the way it is.

The Dark Frontier

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's press conference enroute to Paraguay is interesting for a number of reasons -- the first being Paraguay itself. The Power and Interest News summarizes the region's strategic importance to the US. South America is wracked by a confluence of resurgent Marxism, fueled by Venezuela and Cuba; failing states and coca. Of particular interest is the Tri-Border area, centered on the town of Ciudad del Este in Paraguay on the border of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. The Associated Press described it as "a key South American point for Islamic terrorist fund raising to the tune of $100 million a year." The Tri-border area is sometimes described as the Muslim Triangle and is alleged to be one end of a conveyor belt leading to the US southern border.

So great is the supposed US interest in the Tri-Border area that the Vermont Guardian hinted at the planned establishment of an American military base in the vicinity, an allegation that Paraguay later denied. The Vermont Guardian echoed the characterization of Tri-Border area a possible springboard for Islamic terrorism.

The triple border between Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil has been long been rumored to be an “Islamic terrorist training ground.” According to New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, the area is “one of the most lawless places in the world … also the center of Middle Eastern terrorism in South America.” In 2002, Goldberg reported that Hamas and al-Qaeda are associated with the terrorists in this region.

But Vermont Guardian journalist Benjamin Dangl noted that some sources felt that the perception of Al Qaeda in South America were the fevered imaginings of an agent of Zionism, just as was the connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

As the U.S. was gearing up for a war in Iraq, Goldberg also wrote an article linking al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used by the Bush administration to further their argument for war. Muckraking writer Alexander Cockburn found various inaccuracies in the article, and also noted that “Goldberg once served in Israel’s armed forces, which may or may not be a guide to his political agenda.”

Whatever the truth to these rumors, Rumsfeld's press conference produced another gem on the arming of the Iraqi insurgency by Iran. After the media asked precisely one question about the Tri-Border area ("Q: Will you be talking about the tri-border issue in Paraguay? A: I think the cooperation that the countries in the tri-border area have demonstrated has been a useful and constructive thing. It's been good. ...") they skipped straight to the subject of the Middle East.

Media: There have been reports about Iran specifically facilitating -- I mean you've addressed them a little bit. But over the weekend there was an even more detailed report in Time Magazine about Iran’s Revolutionary Guards setting up a specific unit in Iraq to carry out car bombings against Coalition forces. Are you aware of those kinds of reports? Do you think Iran's involvement is getting more intensive as the process of writing the constitution goes along?

Rumsfeld: I've not seen that report. I see intelligence reports and we know that we're finding Iranian weapons inside of the country. They don't just get there by accident. They don't fly there. And we know that Iran has a system of government it would like to replicate in Iraq, and we know the system of government they have with a handful of clerics running the place and telling everyone want to do is fundamentally inconsistent with the kind of a constitution that's currently being drafted in Iraq. And an Iraq that is democratic and representative will stand in stark contrast to Iran.

So one ought not to be surprised that they're engaged in the kind of activities that they're engaged in. They're making a mistake, in my view. I think they're going to have to live with their neighbors like any country does over time.

Media: -- Iranian weapons on more than one occasion?

Rumsfeld: I've got another [inaudible] secure videoconference --

Media: These discoveries in the past couple of months -- What do you think it indicates?

Rumsfeld: What I just said.

Some Belmont Club readers have repeatedly written to ask why Secretary Rumsfeld would be at pains to downplay Iranian intervention in Iraq -- both before and after Operation Iraqi Freedom -- when these revelations would serve to strengthen the linkage between terrorism and it's state sponsors, a connection whose existence has been repeatedly denied. (Speculation alert) One possible reason for turning a public blind eye to Iranian belligerence is that any administration which very strongly emphasized it would logically be compelled to do something about it, a step which the Bush administration may be unprepared to take or believes cannot be sustained by domestic political consensus.

One interesting historical parallel to the refusal to acknowledge Iranian aggression was the ignorance feigned by Britain, France and Russia to Italy's torpedoing of neutral merchant shipping en route to Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War.  Both Germany and Italy operated U-Boats against shipping and one Italian submarine even sank a Republican warship, the submarine C3. Despite the fact that no major power would acknowledge belligerent acts by Italy and Germany against neutral shipping, the "international community" of the 1930s went on to negotiate the Treaty of Nyon proscribing acts of "piracy" without naming the pirates. The text of that treaty (which you can read by following the link) says:

Whereas arising out of the Spanish conflict attacks have been repeatedly committed in the Mediterranean by submarines against merchant ships not belonging to either of the conflicting Spanish parties; and

Whereas these attacks are violations of the rules of international law referred to in Part IV of the Treaty of London of 22 April 1930, with regard to the sinking of merchant ships and constitute acts contrary to the most elementary dictates of humanity, which should be justly treated as acts of piracy ... the British and French fleets will operate up to the entrance to the Dardanelles, in those areas where there is reason to apprehend danger to shipping in accordance with the division of the area agreed upon between the two Governments.

In order to prevent matters from being brought a to a head, Britain and France simply pretended they didn't know who was sinking neutral shipping and instructed their naval forces to conduct a secret war at sea against an enemy they would not acknowledge until two years later. Nor were they alone in this charade. The US Naval Institute has an interesting article describing FDR's undeclared naval war on Germany in 1940.

On the day of the 29 December 1940 "fireside chat," the world waited in anticipation of what the President of the United States would say about national security. Unknown to the public was that months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy was secretly hunting German and Italian warships in the North Atlantic.

Divided Western public opinion on the subject of Islamic terrorism has prevented the issues from being faced definitively. Neither the liberals nor the conservatives -- like the isolationists and interventionists of the 1930s -- have been able to establish a consensus for their point of view. Policy is consequently being made in fits and starts in the tug-o'-war between the sides, essentially awaiting events before taking a categorical direction. Whether that direction will be a genuine "peace for our time" or a new Pearl Harbor is unknown. Until history resolves the dilemma the twilight struggle will continue all over the world, from the Tri-Border area to the Iranian frontier.

Domine Quo Vadis?

Here's the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's speech to Muslims on the subject of combating terrorism in the world today. Benedict's verbatim speech should be read because it is almost certain to be misinterpreted and distorted in the coming days to suit competing political agendas. (Speculation alert) Benedict, in giving this speech on his first trip back to his homeland as Pope, may be deliberately reprising John Paul's first visit to his homeland Poland in 1979. On that occasion, as Peggy Noonan writes, John Paul asked the one question which any Communist regime is unwilling to answer or even discuss. But it hung in the air in despite of the commissars, and set the agenda for the coming decade. Eastern Europe was never the same again. And the issue, of course, was whether man had an inherent transcendence and a right to be free.

Is it possible to dismiss Christ and everything which he brought into the annals of the human being? Of course it is possible. The human being is free. The human being can say to God, "No." The human being can say to Christ, "No." But the critical question is: Should he? And in the name of what "should" he?  ... You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death. ... Never lose your trust, do not be defeated .... Never lose your spiritual freedom.

The erudite Benedict is certainly aware of the parallel. He asks in turn, 'can we survive, except as brothers?' Whether he has found the fulcrum of history, as John Paul did, remains to be seen. But like his predecessor he has put the unmentionable on the table and must now, as John Paul did, accept the danger that comes to all who do business with serious memes. Although the Pope's speech was delivered to Muslims, his real audience is inevitably going to be the West in general and Christians in particular. Realistically, Benedict's message will reach ordinary Muslims only at third hand in a heavily distorted way; it can hardly be expected to sway them. But the signal it sends to the West, at least to those who look up to him as a moral and religious leader, is that here is something we cannot look away from. Ambiguous though it may be, his message has run the PC blockade.

Some commentators may view Benedict's remarks as inflammatory, akin to mentioning the old feud in a room of Hatfields and McCoys. It may have the opposite effect. Perceptive Muslim leaders will understand that the West is awakening, and that the time to speak clearly is nigh.

Text	Comments
Dear Muslim Friends! It gives me great joy to be able to be with you and to offer you my heartfelt greetings. I have come here to meet young people from every part of Europe and the world. Young people are the future of humanity and the hope of the nations. My beloved predecessor, Pope John Paul II, once said to the young Muslims assembled in the stadium at Casablanca (Morocco): “The young can build a better future if they first put their faith in God and if they pledge themselves to build this new world in accordance with God’s plan, with wisdom and trust” (Insegnamenti , VIII/2, 1985, p. 500). It is in this spirit that I turn to you, dear Muslim friends, to share my hopes with you and to let you know of my concerns at these particularly difficult times in our history.	This is the "pastoral" passage, emphasizing the brotherhood between people of all religions.
I am certain that I echo your own thoughts when I bring up as one of our concerns the spread of terrorism. Terrorist activity is continually recurring in various parts of the world, sowing death and destruction, and plunging many of our brothers and sisters into grief and despair. Those who instigate and plan these attacks evidently wish to poison our relations, making use of all means, including religion, to oppose every attempt to build a peaceful, fair and serene life together. Terrorism of any kind is a perverse and cruel decision which shows contempt for the sacred right to life and undermines the very foundations of all civil society. If together we can succeed in eliminating from hearts any trace of rancour, in resisting every form of intolerance and in opposing every manifestation of violence, we will turn back the wave of cruel fanaticism that endangers the lives of so many people and hinders progress towards world peace. The task is difficult but not impossible. The believer knows that, despite his weakness, he can count on the spiritual power of prayer. Dear friends, I am profoundly convinced that we must not yield to the negative pressures in our midst, but must affirm the values of mutual respect, solidarity and peace. The life of every human being is sacred, both for Christians and for Muslims. There is plenty of scope for us to act together in the service of fundamental moral values. The dignity of the person and the defence of the rights which that dignity confers must represent the goal of every social endeavour and of every effort to bring it to fruition. This message is conveyed to us unmistakably by the quiet but clear voice of conscience. It is a message which must be heeded and communicated to others: should it ever cease to find an echo in peoples’ hearts, the world would be exposed to the darkness of a new barbarism. Only through recognition of the centrality of the person can a common basis for understanding be found, one which enables us to move beyond cultural conflicts and which neutralizes the disruptive power of ideologies.	Here the Pope depicts terrorism -- the 'new barbarism' -- as a common threat and suggests that collective action against it is possible. "We can succeed in eliminating" ...  "There is plenty of scope for us to act together in the service of fundamental moral values."
During my meeting last April with the delegates of Churches and Christian communities and with representatives of the various religious traditions, I affirmed that “the Church wants to continue building bridges of friendship with the followers of all religions, in order to seek the true good of every person and of society as a whole” (L’Osservatore Romano, 25 April 2005, p. 4). Past experience teaches us that relations between Christians and Muslims have not always been marked by mutual respect and understanding. How many pages of history record battles and even wars that have been waged, with both sides invoking the name of God, as if fighting and killing the enemy could be pleasing to him. The recollection of these sad events should fill us with shame, for we know only too well what atrocities have been committed in the name of religion. The lessons of the past must help us to avoid repeating the same mistakes. We must seek paths of reconciliation and learn to live with respect for each other’s identity. The defence of religious freedom, in this sense, is a permanent imperative and respect for minorities is a clear sign of true civilization.	We get a rare glimpse into how the Catholic religious bureaucracy works -- through councils, delegations, meetings, etc. That is the operational way in which the Pope manages his message. This paragraph is also an mea culpa for actions of violence the Catholic Church has performed in the past, but interestingly and explosively, it contains the e tu -- "with both sides invoking the name of God". Benedict says, 'we have sinned, but so have you'. Although Benedict is doing nothing more than state an historical fact, this paragraph crosses an invisible line that no head of a major Christian Church has crossed before. It is the mildest of je accuses, tempered by an admission of equal historical guilt. But it is indicative of how charged today's atmosphere is that merely to utter these words is so difficult.
In this regard, it is always right to recall what the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council said about relations with Muslims. “The Church looks upon Muslims with respect. They worship the one God living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to humanity and to whose decrees, even the hidden ones, they seek to submit themselves whole-heartedly, just as Abraham, to whom the Islamic faith readily relates itself, submitted to God . . . Although considerable dissensions and enmities between Christians and Muslims may have arisen in the course of the centuries, the Council urges all parties that, forgetting past things, they train themselves towards sincere mutual understanding and together maintain and promote social justice and moral values as well as peace and freedom for all people” (Declaration Nostra Aetate, No. 3).	The Pope proposes that religious enmity between Christian and Muslim become a thing of the past in classic ecclesiastical language. Note in passing the immense historical memories of both Islam and the Catholic Church. When Benedict speaks of the "new barbarism" he is making reference to Attila and Hulagu Khan, not speaking figuratively.
You, my esteemed friends, represent some Muslim communities from this country where I was born, where I studied and where I lived for a good part of my life. That is why I wanted to meet you. You guide Muslim believers and train them in the Islamic faith. Teaching is the vehicle through which ideas and convictions are transmitted. Words are highly influential in the education of the mind. You, therefore, have a great responsibility for the formation of the younger generation. As Christians and Muslims, we must face together the many challenges of our time. There is no room for apathy and disengagement, and even less for partiality and sectarianism. We must not yield to fear or pessimism. Rather, we must cultivate optimism and hope. Interreligious and intercultural dialogue between Christians and Muslims cannot be reduced to an optional extra. It is in fact a vital necessity, on which in large measure our future depends. Young people from many parts of the world are here in Cologne as living witnesses of solidarity, brotherhood and love. They are the first fruits of a new dawn for humanity. I pray with all my heart, dear Muslim friends, that the merciful and compassionate God may protect you, bless you and enlighten you always. May the God of peace lift up our hearts, nourish our hope and guide our steps on the paths of the world.	Therefore, the Pope seems to say to the Muslims in the room, survival is in our hands and that means yours too. "You guide Muslim believers and train them in the Islamic faith. Teaching is the vehicle through which ideas and convictions are transmitted. Words are highly influential in the education of the mind. You, therefore, have a great responsibility for the formation of the younger generation."

Memory Lane 2

One of the forgotten things about Hitler's rise to power was that up until about 1938, many of his foreign policy demands were just. The Treaty of Versailles, imposed by the Allies after the Great War deprived Germany of "about 13.5% of her territory, 13% of her economic productivity and about 7 million of her inhabitants". So when in 1935 the Saar voted to return to Germany, after being a French coalmine for 15 years, many Britons were sympathetic.  German troops marching into the Rhineland in 1936 were greeted by deliriously happy crowds in Essen, Frankfurt and Cologne. When Germany asserted her right to full sovereignty and re-armed, as was the due of every nation, not simply the Germans but many in the world gave three cheers. Auden in his famous poem September 1, 1939 felt it necessary to apologize for Versailles even as the Panzers were rolling across Poland.

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

The return of Gaza to the Arabs, replete with UN funded banners proclaiming "Gaza Today. The West Bank and Jerusalem Tomorrow" underlines the historical parallel. Looking back on the 1930s, at the last moment when Second World War could have been averted, the problem never consisted of whether to return the Rhineland to Germany; but in whether the Rhineland should have been handed to Hitler. The issue of letting Germany rearm without restriction, at one level simply ceding her sovereign due was indistinguishable from giving the Nazis the key to Europe. It was a subtle difference which only a few statesmen, like Winston Churchill, appreciated.  The Popular Front, a coalition of Leftist parties in French power up to the eve of the war, never grasped the distinction.

One wing of the party under it's leader Leon Blum saw early on that the new German Chancellor whose thugs had been smashing windows and brawling in the street for years was a potential threat and argued that France had to get ready to do something about him, the other wing argued against viewing Hitler in black and white terms. They had a more nuanced view of Herr Hitler. The latter faction were so eager to avoid another war that they ended up sabotaging France's ability to fight. It won't surprise those familiar with French history that a number of the anti-war Socialists ended up in the collaborationist Vichy Regime under German occupation. Or that Leon Blum ended up in Dachau.

Leon Blum was a Jew. But he was also heir to the Left's legacy of the search for root causes; it's attachment to pacifism at all costs, even when in Blum's case, it meant abandoning Spanish Communists to Hitler in the Civil War. The British and French policy of the 1930s is appeasement only in hindsight. Back then it was a roadmap to peace -- "peace in our time". Nor was it the case that Hitler compelled concessions from the reluctant statesmen of the West; on the contrary, they fell all over themselves to expiate their own guilt: the guilt of Versailles, the embarrassment of colonial empires. One historian notes:

Premier Blum’s appeasement has sometimes been overlooked by earlier historians. Thomas does not make this mistake, criticizing Blum for offering Hitler’s Economic Minister, Hjalmar Schacht, concessions in the African colonies taken from Germany at Versailles in 1919. The optimistic Blum still professed to believe, as late as January 1937, that Hitler would sign a disarmament agreement with Britain and France ... Yet Thomas also believes that Blum had no choice but to humor the British on the Non-Intervention policy toward Spain. Blum, according to the author, became an appeaser to avoid Chamberlain’s greater appeasement. Blum experimented with peaceful suggestions to prevent Chamberlain from making a bilateral deal with Hitler behind Paris’s back.

The return of Gaza to the Arabs is at one level simple justice -- not to mention a shrewd tactical move by the Israelis. One wishes it were not also a cession of territory to Hamas and Fatah, which unfortunately it is. And yet, as Churchill understood, the question of who one is dealing with is not altogether irrelevant. Pacifists of 1930s who watched Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which "opens with Hitler's plane flying through the clouds ... descending like a new messiah to the waiting throngs of people gathered to meet him" may have felt a moment of unease at dealing with this man -- but only for a moment. But this generation is also unable to see the Nuremberg rallies of its day. Ronald Jones, in his monograph for the Army War College entitled Terrorist Beheadings: Cultural and Strategic Implications warns an agnostic age that we ignore the ritual and ceremony of the enemy only at our peril. It is a window on his soul and a gauntlet in our face.

Taking hostages and ritually beheading them has recently emerged as a popular terrorist tactic for radical groups. ... The terrorists’ actions also have tremendous cultural and symbolic significance for their audience. Killing hostages is not new, but the growing trend of the graphic murder of noncombatants impels us to study this tactic.

And the message in those rituals, in the many incidents like the one in which shows Nick Berg, a "26-year-old Philadelphia businessman in an orange jumpsuit, with his hands tied behind his back" being beheaded under the caption "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Shown Slaughtering an American" is not reassuring. In our search for root causes, we have blinded ourselves to the most basic of all: the content of the human heart.

Memory Lane

When  Hitler's troops reoccupied the Rhineland in violation of its treaty obligations to restore German dignity, stormtroopers parading before the Reichschancellery sang "for today we own Germany and tomorrow the entire world". The echo of that refrain reverberates in the United Nations. The Jerusalem Post has this Associated Press story:

The United Nations is embroiled in a dispute with American Jewish organizations over the funding of Palestinian banners in Gaza, and US Ambassador John Bolton on Wednesday protested the "unacceptable" payments.

The dispute centers on the UN Development Program's payment for materials produced by the Palestinian Authority for Israel's disengagement from Gaza which include banners saying: "Gaza Today. The West Bank and Jerusalem Tomorrow."

The irony is exact. The French Left remained passive in what Churchill called the last moment in which Second World War could have been prevented. Instead it allowed that Hitler had a legitimate grievance and met him with renunciations of militarism and expressions of understanding. For what, they asked, could be more German than the Rhineland? One could have rhetorically asked whether a Nazi Rhineland was the same thing. But then:

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Essential and Invisible to the Eye

Michael Tucker (of Gunners Palace) has started blogging again and will be heading back to Iraq in a fortnight. He recently attended a Directors Guild of America discussion on how Iraq should be depicted in fiction such as in JAG or ER and was struck by the absurdity of the subject.

At risk of sounding like a TV critic, I can say that it was odd sitting in an airconditioned theatre watching fictional representations of a subject that is so close to me--knowing that in two weeks I'd be back in Baghdad. At the same time, I realized that in this war, like in any other, fiction will play an important role is shaping perceptions of the conflict. Will we get it right? Only time will tell.

Except that it isn't absurd. For most people, the depiction of war is all they will ever know of it. Fiction will be their reality. Because it is so important, one of the issues Hollywood is wrestling with is how to portray Iraq without discussing it. Tucker quotes a Hollywood Reporter  story "about a WGA moderated event in LA entitled 'Televison Goes to War' hosted by Michael Kinsley".

Panel moderator Michael Kinsley, editorial and opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times, suggested that the lack of explicit discussion of the politics of the war in Iraq among the main characters in "Over There" was in and of itself an anti-war statement given the show's gritty portrayal of the chaos and carnage enveloping those grunts. But Bochco and Gerolmo disagreed.

"It seems to me that if we make an overt political statement in 'Over There' about the war ... then immediately the debate becomes not only about policy, but it becomes about our politics, Chris' and mine, as opposed to a discussion or a provocation about the human consequences of war," Bochco said. "The moment we become overtly political, half the audience dismisses us and doesn't pay attention to us because they disagree with our politics. And the other half discuss us ... in the context of our political leanings. And that's just not what my goal is with this show."

Grit and chaos without a neat storyline may be an indictment of war, but Kinsley's logical error is to assume anti-war necessarily means anti-American. Sometimes the bad guy is the enemy and sometimes reality just sucks. Tucker relates a message he got from a friend in-theater in a private email. "Today there were two car bombs explosions in one bus station. I mean who could be there except poor people who can't afford to travel by taxis, buses drivers, or tea sellers. You know what I mean? It just really made me hopeless. I feel that this war made me grow old." The power of documentary coverage -- of journalism in its truest sense -- is that it makes you grow old by narrating events without a script. And maybe that's why Michael Tucker is headed for Iraq: because he wants to see how it will turn out without knowing the ending in advance.

Michael Yon's widely covered interview on radio (hat tip: Greyhawk) repeatedly revolved around the proposition that on-the-ground 'citizen journalists' were necessary to provide a balance to standard press coverage. If Kinsley believed in the necessity to convey reality through fiction, Yon believed in the necessity of keeping fiction from being passed off as reality. Greyhawk flags an incident will illustrates the debate -- the struggle over perception.

From the NY Times, August 15 2005:

Rosemary Goudreau, the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune, has received the same e-mail message a dozen times over the last year.

"Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq?" the anonymous polemic asks, in part. "Did you know that 3,100 schools have been renovated?"

"Of course we didn't know!" the message concludes. "Our media doesn't tell us!"

Ms. Goudreau's newspaper, like most dailies in America, relies largely on The Associated Press for its coverage of the Iraq war. So she finally forwarded the e-mail message to Mike Silverman, managing editor of The A.P., asking if there was a way to check these assertions and to put them into context. Like many other journalists, Mr. Silverman had also received a copy of the message.

Ms. Goudreau's query prompted an unusual discussion last month in New York at a regular meeting of editors whose newspapers are members of The Associated Press. Some editors expressed concern that a kind of bunker mentality was preventing reporters in Iraq from getting out and explaining the bigger picture beyond the daily death tolls.

"The bottom-line question was, people wanted to know if we're making progress in Iraq," Ms. Goudreau said, and the A.P. articles were not helping to answer that question.

The interesting thing is that the battle for perception would never have occurred without the emergence of a competing meme. For the first time in the history of the mass media, some of the coverage is about the coverage.

The Belt of Orion

When Richard Rogers wrote Beneath the Southern Cross for the sound track of the 1950s documentary Victory at Sea he must have known its music would evoke more than combat in the South Pacific. It would bring the palm-fringed islands themselves to life, changing as the day wore into a landscape of surf-pounded beaches under a starry sky. This magical piece became a hit single under the alias, "No Other Love", under false colors probably because nobody wanted to remember its true provenance: a momentary vision of beauty in the Pacific war.

TE Lawrence often achieved the same effect in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It is the story of a campaign to evict the Ottomans from Arabia by guerilla warfare and mayhem. Yet Lawrence manages to invest the scenes with a degree of timeless beauty; a beauty not wholly due to his great literary skill. In one passage he attempted to convey the impact of the desert on the Arab mind.

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose’.

But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. ‘This,’ they told me, ‘is the best: it has no taste.’ My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.

We can be thankful to milblogs for helping preserve the impressions of an American helicopter pilot operating over Iraq. He understood that the war itself was a thin veneer over the currents of life; and that however much the headlines denied it, both enemy and friend lived beneath the same sky. Hurl describes a night mission over Iraq.

The last three nights here in central Iraq have been beautiful. The sky has been much less dusty than it usually is. The stars are brilliant. Orion pops up around 4am - Taurus a couple of hours before that. Mars is very clear after midnight. Normally the visibility is pretty poor - usually less than 3 miles. Sometimes less than 1 mile. Flying in these conditions can be quite challenging - especially at night.

By FAA standards, anything under 3 miles is technically considered IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) as opposed to VFR (Visual Flight Rules) and require Instrument flight plans to be filed. But this is Iraq, not Kansas. Flight plans would be useless anyway since there is no Air Traffic Control system. Depending on the mission, we routinely find ourselves flying in low visibility - i.e. IFR conditions.

2 nights ago I flew into Baghdad at about 3:30am. It was a very clear night and I could see for dozens of miles in all directions. It looked like it could be anywhere in America - lights were on EVERYWHERE. Whatever electricity problems there were in the past, they certainly seem to be fixed now.

There are also numerous gas flares from various refineries in operation. One huge refinery right in Baghdad would put any Gulf coast refinery to shame. I know Iraqi oil production is almost where it was prior to the war - currently 2.5 million barrels a day. It appears that their refinery capability is rapidly improving as well. In spite of countless terror attacks on the Iraqi infrastructure, the builders seem to be prevailing.

Situated on the Tigris River, Baghdad is a beautiful city at night. The slums don't look as slummy. Palm trees grow like weeds. There are no skyscrapers, but there are numerous high-rise buildings in the downtown area, many with very interesting architecture. There are several very nice multi-story hotels where the incestuous media hang out by the pools, sipping cocktails and plagiarizing one another. They wait like vultures for news of the next suicide attack so they can smear the blood and shove the latest body count in our face. I wouldn't be surprised if they have betting pools on when, where, and how many will die....

This past night at 3:30 am all was quiet. There wasn't a single car on any road. Nobody shooting or blowing anybody up. The city was completely lit up and so.... peaceful. I know it will be short-lived, but I can't help but hope that it will someday be as peaceful as this one night most of the time.

One Day at a Time

Chris Muir of Day by Day asks that readers click on this link: Cancer Ablation, to increase visibility for a procedure which provides a way of operating on tumors which can't be reached any other way. It's a specific application of a generic method which uses cryogenics, radiowaves and even chemicals to deliver tumor-killing agents to hard to reach places.

Law vs. War

Two items of interest from reader DL. The first from AP news:

WASHINGTON (AP) - An Army intelligence officer says his unit was blocked in 2000 and 2001 from giving the FBI information about a U.S.-based terrorist cell that included Mohamed Atta, the future leader of the Sept. 11 attacks. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer said the small intelligence unit, called "Able Danger," had identified Atta and three of the other future Sept. 11 hijackers as al-Qaida members by mid-2000. He said military lawyers stopped the unit from sharing the information with the FBI. The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks left the Able Danger claims out of its official report.

The second is from the New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly. ...

"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001. He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.

Belmont Club readers may also wish to read the US Army War College's recent monograph, Law versus War, whose subject is described as follows:

The authors address one of the fundamental assumptions underlying the conduct of the War on Terrorism - the nature of our enemy, whether perpetrators of terrorist activities are criminals or soldiers (combatants). Although the United States recognizes that terrorist acts are certainly illegal, it has chosen to treat perpetrators as combatants; but much of the world, including many of our traditional allies, have opted for a purely legalistic approach. Disagreement about assumptions is not the only basis for divergent policies for confronting terrorism, but certainly explains much of our inability to agree on strategies to overcome what we recognize as a serious common and persistent international problem. Their insights into how our respective cultures and histories influence our definitions, assumptions, and subsequent policy decisions can assist us to respect and learn from competing strategies. They correctly surmise that our current international struggle is too important for us to ignore assumptions underlying our own and competing ideas.

Update

I wonder whether I should have included this quote attributed to former President Clinton in the New York Magazine, but only directly available by secondary citation.

"I desperately wish that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole," Clinton tells New York magazine this week. "Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early." "I don’t know if it would have prevented 9/11," he added. "But it certainly would have complicated it.”

Despite his failure to launch such an attack, Clinton said he saw the danger posed by bin Laden much more clearly than did President Bush. "I always thought that bin Laden was a bigger threat than the Bush administration did," he told New York magazine.

What's striking is the use of the word "officially", which suggests President Clinton may have 'known' Osama Bin Laden was a danger with intellectual certainty without being able to assert it officially. That in turn suggests that Osama Bin Laden was implicitly or even subconsciously provided with the protection of due process by a President who felt he would have to defend any action he took against OBL. Those who followed the Army War College monograph will have seen the distaste of legal scholars for applying the concept of war to counterterrorism because it implies action on a "switch that is either on or off." The legal ideal is "violence on a dimmer switch." (page 7) Clinton it would seem, at least subconsciously preferred the dimmer switch.

Dollars and Cents

The paper, US Defense Strategy After Saddam authored by Dr. Michael O'Hanlon of the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute examines how the War on Terror will affect US military expenditures in the coming years. (Hat tip: MIG) O'Hanlon, a Senior Fellow at Brookings, makes a number of surprising points in his analysis. The first is that military expenditures will be lower, as a percentage of GNP, than at any time in the past. On page 8 of his paper, O'Hanlon gives the following figures from the Office of Management  and Budget.

Decade	Percent of GNP
1960s	10.7
1970s	5.9
1980s	5.8
1990s	4.1
2000-2009 (projected)	3.4

However, the size of the military budget in absolute terms will continue to be huge because the American economy itself is so gigantic. O'Hanlon puts it this way:

America’s defense budget is staggeringly high. Depending on how one estimates the spending of countries such as China and  Russia, U.S. defense spending almost equals that of the rest of the world combined. In 2002, prior to additional U.S. budget increases as well as the added costs of the war in Iraq, American defense spending equaled that of all the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Russia, China, and Japan, combined. That said, judging whether U.S. defense spending is high or low depends on the measure. Compared with other countries, it is obviously enormous ... Relative to the size of the American economy, by contrast, it remains modest by modern historical standards at about 4 percent of GDP (half of typical Cold War levels, though nearly twice the current average of most of its major allies). Compared with Cold War norms, it is high in inflation-adjusted or constant dollars, though not astronomically so.

Although Defense is spending more dollars, it has not greatly expanded  in numbers of personnel. "Still, one might ask why an active duty military of the same size as the Clinton administration’s has grown in cost by more $100 billion a year during the Bush presidency". The answer is surprising. Examining the 2005 budget request O'Hanlon found that "even adding up all these pieces, less than 20 percent of the $100 billion real-dollar growth in the annual Pentagon budget is due to the direct effects of the war on terror." Twenty seven percent of the requested increases were for higher salaries for military personnel, reflecting the need to retain personnel who might be lost to the service. Much of the rest was required to "to restore funding for hardware to historic norms after a 'procurement holiday' in the 1990s". Most of the pressure comes from "the main combat systems of the military services, which are generally wearing out. Living off the fruits of the Reagan military buildup, the Clinton administration spent an average of $50 billion a year on equipment, only about 15 percent of the defense budget in contrast to a historical norm of about 25 percent. This 'procurement holiday' must end, and is ending."

However, spending more money on the same number of troops was not enough. The War on Terror required adding men to the ground forces and more money had to be found to support them. The uncertain duration and progress of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the possibility of action elsewhere meant that unanticipated expenses might occur. The Congressional Budget Office believed it possible that a 17% real increase in the Defense budget might be necessary to fight the War on Terror, threatening to push the military share of GNP back to its 1990s levels.

Expectations are for continued annual increases of about $20 billion a year -- roughly twice what is needed to compensate for the effects of inflation (or to put it differently, real budgets are expected to keep rising at about $10 billion a year). By 2009, the annual national security budget would total about $500 billion, in rough numbers -- about $450 billion when expressed in 2005 dollars. Indeed, given the administration’s plans, that is a conservative estimate of what its future defense program would cost the country (not even including any added costs from future military operations or the ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, to fully fund the Pentagon’s current plans, average annual costs from 2010 through 2020 would exceed $480 billion (in 2005 dollars) and perhaps as much as $530 billion.

Dollars and cents provide part of the framework in which to examine strategic options. It's all very well to say "there are not enough troops in Iraq" or "we must teach Syria a lesson" or "we must continue to deter North Korea". But in the final analysis, the means to these proposed ends must be provided or the goals themselves adjusted to the resources at hand.

Memento

The Congressional Research Service (available via Gallery Watch) summarizes the progress of negotiations to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons (from Iran’s Nuclear Program: Recent Developments Order Number RS21592).

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections of Iran’s nuclear program since 2003 have revealed significant undeclared activities with potential application for nuclear weapons, including uranium enrichment facilities and plutonium separation efforts. Ever on the brink of being declared in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has allowed IAEA inspectors access only when pressed. Iran agreed to suspend its enrichment and reprocessing activities in exchange for promises of assistance from Germany, France, and the UK (EU-3). Negotiations with the EU-3 are ongoing, although on August 1, 2005, Iran told the IAEA of its plans to resume uranium conversion, regardless of what the EU-3 offer.

The Guardian recently said that Iran had 25 times more uranium refining capacity than it has admitted to the UN, according to an Iranian who runs Strategic Policy Consulting, a Washington-based think tank. Alireza Jafarzadeh, an exiled Iranian dissident who in 2002 helped to uncover almost two decades of covert Iranian nuclear activity, said the centrifuges - rotating machines used in separation processes - were ready to be installed at Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz. ... The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is holding an emergency meeting on Iran later today, did not comment on the centrifuge allegations. ...

"These 4,000 centrifuge machines have not been declared to the IAEA, and the regime has kept the production of these machines hidden from the inspectors while the negotiations with the EU have been going on over the past 21 months," Mr Jafarzadeh told the Associated Press.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization which monitors and translates open news sources published in Arabic and other regional languages provided this transcript of an "interview withIranian chief negotiator on nuclear affairs, and member of the Iranian Supreme Council for National Security Hosein Musavian, which aired on Iranian Channel 2 on August 4, 2005".

Musavian: Those (in Iran) who criticize us and claim that we should have only worked with the IAEA do not know that at that stage -- that is, in August 2003 -- we needed another year to complete the Esfahan (UCF) project, so it could be operational. ... The regime adopted a twofold policy here: It worked intensively with the IAEA, and it also conducted negotiations on international and political levels. The IAEA gave us a 50-day extension to suspend the enrichment and all related activities. But thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year, in which we completed (the UCF) in Esfahan.

Esfahan's (UCF) was completed during that year. Even in Natanz, we needed six to twelve months to complete the work on the centrifuges. Within that year, the Natanz project reached a stage where the small number of centrifuges required for the preliminary stage, could operate. In Esfahan, we have reached UF4 and UF6 production stages. ...

Thanks to our dealings with Europe, even when we got a 50-day ultimatum, we managed to continue the work for two years. This way we completed (the UCF) in Esfahan. This way we carried out the work to complete Natanz, and on top of that, we even gained benefits. For 10 years, America prevented Iran from joining the WTO. This obstacle was removed, and Iran began talks in order to join the WTO. In the past, the world did not accept Iran as a member of the group of countries with a nuclear fuel cycle. In these two years, and thanks to the Paris Agreement, we entered the international game of the nuclear fuel cycle, and Iran was recognized as one of the countries with a nuclear fuel cycle. An Iranian delegate even participated in the relevant talks. We gained other benefits during these two years as well.

None of these revelations matter because virtually no Western politician can ever use force again to prevent a regime, even one openly dedicated to terrorism, from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The subject is verboten because the Left has declared it so. Unless something radically changes, it is only logical to prepare for the consequences of this head-in-the-sand policy, a possible catastrophe beside which September 11 will diminish into insignificance. Perhaps this event is already inevitable and those future victims beyond saving. But even so, it is important to begin the work of opening our eyes now, so that we might avoid the blindness which took the world of the 1930s and the 1990s over a cliff. Some mental disease in Western culture has allowed it to stand idly by while evil grew to monstrous proportions around and within it; an infirmity dignified with the name of pacifism. Perhaps it has already killed some of us reading this post; and the least we can do, if our final moments come, is to realize why we died.

The Arsenal of Democracy

You may want to read Daniel Bergner's colorful New York Times account of private security contractors in Iraq: The Other Army. (Hat tip: DL) The account is vivid and packed with incident. The author repeatedly refers to the private security contractors as "gunmen", but he is clearly ambivalent about them, repelled by their roughness yet attracted by their ingenuity and enterprise. Describing a meeting with a Triple Canopy company "gunman", Bergner writes:

He had jowls and loose swells of flesh beneath his T-shirt. ''Don't let the package fool you,'' the ex-Delta colonel who introduced us had told me. ''He's a commando from way back.'' After a career in Special Forces, the man said, he hadn't seemed able to survive in the civilian world. Work in construction fell apart. He drank heavily. He took a job as a cashier in a convenience store -- ''till I found out I had to smile at the customers.'' He laughed ruefully at his inability to adapt. ...

And back in the Chicago suburb where I visited the company in May, in its new, sprawling offices (which Triple Canopy would soon be exchanging for a similar setup outside Washington, in order to be closer to its main source of income, the U.S. government), I heard Matt Mann talk exuberantly about ''creating a national asset.'' It would have been easy to be exuberant merely because of the profits he was taking in; it would have been easy to be downright giddy.

But his enthusiasm seemed to come, as well, from other things. He spoke about the waste of Special Operations stars, ''men whose intelligence is equal to the best attorneys, the best doctors,'' men who had survived the harshest training, who had learned to operate on their own in alien cultures, who ''don't know how to fail.'' Their talents, he said, were going unrecognized and unused when they left the military and entered civilian society.

Although Bergner likes to believe the "gunmen" are in it solely for the money he is too intelligent not to see that Mann is telling at least a partial truth: that the hardest thing for a compulsive warrior in civilian life isn't getting a job, but forgetting his sense of specialness. Part of that specialness comes from living in a world of exotic experiences, dealing in things a cashier at a convenience store would strain to understand.

A few months later, (Hendrick) was riding in a convoy, in the back seat of a pickup's cab, escorting an Army Corps of Engineers team to a spot out in the desert, where they would blow up captured munitions. Across the desolate terrain, according to Hendrick and a colleague who was present that day, a white S.U.V. appeared from behind a berm. It was on Hendrick's side, 200 yards away. Hendrick wore a black helmet, tinted goggles and a black shirt, with a kaffiyeh wrapped around his neck and taupe-colored shooting gloves. He leaned out his window clutching a belt-fed light machine gun. The distance kept closing. ''He's coming in! He's coming at us!'' he heard someone on his team call out. He thought, Idiot farmer. He had the best angle; he fired warning shots. He could see the driver dressed all in white. The distance shrank to less than 30 yards. He aimed into the wheels. ''Idiot farmer turned to No, this isn't happening in a fraction of a second,'' he said. All was instinct. He riddled the driver's door and shot into the driver's window. The S.U.V. jerked to the side -- it exploded, ''went from white to a ball of bright orange,'' so close that the blast demolished a vehicle in the convoy, though the men inside weren't hurt. The S.U.V. all but vaporized. It had been packed with explosives -- a suicide bomber. The largest trace left was a scrap of tire. A bit of the bomber's scalp clung to one of the vehicles in the convoy.

Bergner worries about Iraq precisely because it is minting men like Hendrick: "with so many newly created private soldiers unemployed when the market of Iraq finally crashes, aren't some of them likely to accept such jobs -- the work of mercenaries in the chaotic territories of the earth? ... We may know less and less how to feel about a state that is no longer defended by men and women we can perceive as pure",  an ironic characterization, if ever there was one, to apply in a theater where unemployed Iraqi thugs are paid thousands of dollars by Wahabi moneymen for every American soldier they kill. The bright side is that "the United Nations will soon hire the companies to guard refugee camps in war zones" instead of the assortment of Zambians and Bangladeshis the press can always portray as pure.

An interesting companion piece to this might be entitled The Other Military-Industrial Complex. A DOD briefing on the newest technologies being deployed to Iraq include items like the MARCBOT made by the Exponent Corporation, the TACMAV folding UAV of ARA and Z-Medica's Quickclot. Numerous items are being supplied by businesses no one would have heard of. Because of the nature of the war a large number of small companies are supplying critical equipment instead of the traditional aerospace contractors. Analysts have long known that the market (e.g. AQ Khan) responds to terrorist demand. It would have been surprising if the market had remained indifferent to the multi-billion dollar US war effort. Bergner's article suggests that official deployments are simply the tip of the iceberg. The US is more deeply mobilized than is evident, its politicians more tentative than its entrepreneurs.

Untitled

In February 1945, a woman now dying of lung cancer grabbed two of her children and jumped out the window to escape Imperial Japanese Marines crashing through the door intent on bayoneting everyone in the burning house. Finding no one, they went on to the next house to continue their massacre on a street not far from the Rizal Memorial ballpark, where Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth both played in sunnier days before the forgotten Battle of Manila. The 100,000 civilians who died in the largest urban battle of the Pacific War -- more than at Hiroshima -- are not remembered in beautiful candles floating down darkened rivers or in flights of doves soaring into the blue sky; there is no anti-American significance to their deaths. But they still live in the fading memory of that woman, who hid for two days in the smoldering ruins of the neighborhood until the first American patrols came into view.

I saw my aunt last as she stood in a window of a Sydney hotel and waved goodbye. I hope to see her again.

I bruise you
You bruise me
We both bruise too easily
Too easily to let it show
I love you and that's all I know

But the ending always comes at last
Endings always come too fast
They come too fast
But they pass too slow
I love you and that's all I know
-- Jimmy Webb and Art Garfunkel

The Provincial West

Terrorism Unveiled describes the growth of Islamism in Central Asia. Expansionist Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union, temporarily established a land empire over traditionally Muslim Central Asia. The collapse the Soviet Union began a process of decolonization second in size only to the liquidation of European empires in Asia and Africa following the Second World War. It was an emerging entity in search of a unifying consciousness, which Islam was determined to provide.

Central Asia could very well be the next large breeding ground for Islamist terrorists. Islam was suppressed during the years of the Soviet Union, but the mujahideen in the 1980s found many supporters in the Central Asian states with the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It is alleged and logical that the "stan" states would serve as a springboard to a degree, and certainly a place for routes of travel, over and down through Iran and Afghanistan. The Central Asian states' strong governments have generally suppressed Islamist sentiment, because the sentiment has called for an overthrow of their ruling regimes---and called for the creation of an Islamic Caliphate where the state is run completely by Islamic law. In a way, it's a vicious cycle. When the government has to protect its position of power from calls for changes in regime, it oppresses the population for control, but that only leads to more radicalization of the populace calling for those changes.

The Terrorism Unveiled article linked to a four-part series by Radio Free Europe describing the history of Islamism under the Soviet Union and its revival following its fall. Osama bin Laden may have sensed the opportunity to unlock a vast Muslim region, not just Afghanistan, following Soviet defeat in the 1980s. It is a feat he may hope to repeat on a global scale by defeating the United States. One Radio Free Europe segment says that talk of an "Islamic Caliphate" isn't simply idle chatter.

Across Central Asia, governments have coped with the Islamic revival by asserting their control over the religious establishment and banning groups that refuse to cooperate. The governments are motivated by fears that uncontrolled Islam could be a potent force for political opposition. But despite these government efforts, homegrown and foreign-inspired militant Islamic groups have arisen to challenge the status quo. The most widespread is Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organization that calls for the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate to replace the region’s existing governments.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is not confined to Central Asia. It was recently banned in Britain, following the London subway attacks. Australia had considered banning the group but decided against. The notion that September 11 was somehow the manifestation of a criminal act, an act of vandalism by individuals on a large scale, was to misunderstand the problem entirely. In a 2002 article in Parameters, Ralph Peters argued that groups like radical Islamism had to be understood as a geopolitical force that went beyond the Middle East and a few radical centers in Europe. It also spanned Central and South Asia. Peters wrote:

"In terms both of population density and potential productivity, wealth, and power, Islam’s center of gravity lies to the east of Afghanistan, not to the west. The world’s most populous “Muslim” countries stretch far to the east of the Indus River: Indonesia, India, Bangladesh . . . Pakistan . . . and other regional states, such as Malaysia, make this the real cockpit of crisis."

Osama Bin Laden did not regard himself as some petty criminal but an inspirational leader on a global scale. But just as demonstrating Soviet impotence in Afghanistan was the key to Central Asia, Islamists may hope that an American failure in Iraq will establish the unstoppability of a universal Caliphate. What Kabul signified to the 'stans Baghdad could represent to the world. Although Islamic arms in Iraq have met only with military defeat, they have been much more successful in showing that the Western world lacks the will to resolutely oppose the emergence of a Global Caliphate. The Sunday Times says it is because President Bush declared war while refusing to name the enemy.

Under siege last week at his holiday ranch in Crawford, Texas, from the peace activist Cindy Sheehan, one of the military’s “gold star” mothers whose son died in Iraq, and under pressure from opinion polls showing dwindling American support for the war, Bush is on the defensive. Blair by contrast is getting credit for naming the enemy as Muslim extremists and for criticising the Wahhabi ideology spreading from Saudi Arabia, which remains a leading American ally. Although faulted for allowing “Londonistan” to grow into a haven for terrorism in the first place, the prime minister is regarded as going on the offensive while the Bush government dithers.

However the Scotsman observed that the proscription against self-defense had been baked into the structure of the Western political system itself. Describing the obstacles facing Tony Blair's attempts to deport murderous Muslim clerics from Britain, it wrote:

Guy Goodwin-Gill, a barrister and senior research fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University, summed up the mood within the legal camp. "I think Mr Blair has lost the plot," he said. "For a lawyer, he says some of the daftest things. It is simply not serious." Lawyers like Goodwin-Gill now contend there is no way on earth that the crackdown will survive the courts.

The problem for ministers is the array of legislation now enshrined within British law which offers protection to the very foreign extremists they are trying to expel. It is now 50 years since Britain signed up to the Refugee Convention, which, as the European Convention on Human Rights, was then incorporated into British law in 1998. Signatories must ensure "freedom from torture, inhuman and degrading treatment"; "the right to liberty"; and "freedom from discrimination."

While Islamist leaders have grasped the situation in the broadest strategic outlines, Western political systems continue to conceive the problem in the narrowest possible terms. The enemy consists of a few troublemakers within the 'Religion of Peace'; the war is confined to Iraq, or at least to that portion of the Sunni Triangle where most fighting takes place; the legitimacy for any force consists solely of denying Saddam Hussein arsenals of weapons of mass destruction under UN resolutions. Lawyers wrangle over whether it is appropriate to commingle intelligence investigations with criminal probes. Great Britain asks whether it is allowed to expel those sworn to destroying it.

Historically, most catastrophic defeats -- at Gaugamela or France in 1940 -- have not been consequent to inferiority in arms but to infirmity of concept. Defeat occurs first of all in the mind. By that standard the Global Caliphate is well on its way to imposing its will on Western politics which is intent, like some demented person, on rearranging objects on a green baize table.

Unintended Consequences

The VT or proximity fuze, which some rate at par with radar and the Atomic Bomb in Second War importance, emerged in response to the difficulty of stopping determined attacks by high speed enemy aircraft. Although the US had the best dual-purpose heavy antiaircraft weapon of the war in the 5"/38 gun, it was still woefully inadequate against threats like the Kamikaze because the shell had to directly hit its target to destroy it or hope that the mechanical fuze would detonate the shell close enough to do the job. But the proximity fuze enabled an AAA shell to detonate when it passed near enough to its target to damage it. The improvement was dramatic: whereas it used to take an average of 1,162 5-inch rounds to bring down an aircraft with a mechanical fuze, VT-fuzed shells were achieving one kill per 310 rounds expended. Anti-aircraft efficiency was quadrupled at a stroke. Radar too evolved in response to the need to strip the cloak of night or weather from enemy aircraft and submarines. As the Second War progressed, these three important weapons were combined for greater effect. The Atomic Bomb was a perfect example of this synergy. It combined nuclear physics, a proximity fuze to sense the height of bomb over the ground and possibility of aiming the whole via radar. That these three weapons represented a technical advance is unquestionable; whether they contributed to civilization is quite another.

X-ray backscatter technology may some day be viewed with the same ambivalance. American Science and Engineering's Z-Backscatter Van, now being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, allows any van, equipped with the right equipment, to surreptitiously look right through the skins of cars, vans and trucks to find contraband and car bombs.

American Science and Engineering of Billerica, MA received a $9.5 million firm-fixed price contract for eight Z-Backscatter Vans to meet U.S. Central Command requirements for Afghanistan and Iraq. AS&E's Z Backscatter Van (ZBV) is a low-cost, extremely maneuverable screening system built into a commercially available delivery van. The ZBV employs AS&E's patented Z Backscatter technology, which offers photo-like images that reveal contraband that transmission X-rays miss - such as explosives (including car bombs), people and plastic weapons - and provides photo-like imaging for rapid analysis.

What's new is the ability of these vans to "drive by" whole streets at normal speed and examine each and every vehicle it passes. The manufacturer's website describes this capability in more detail and provides a video, complete with cheerful music, showing how the equipment can turn everything it passes into the opacity of clear glass. The backscatter X-ray is tuned to organic wavelengths, enabling it to find hidden people and explosive. But this is not all it can do. For an optional extra, the Z-Backscatter Van can also find those pesky dirty bombs and nuclear weapons that every well-managed city wants to be rid of, all at a low price and in an environmentally responsible manner: getting frisked by the Z-Backscatter Van only requires an exposure equivalent to a fifteen minute flight on a commercial aircraft.

Early models of the World War 2 proximity fuze were bulky affairs powered by commercial dry-cell batteries. But under the pressure of war, 1940s technology produced "radio components rugged enough to withstand an accelerative force 20,000 times stronger than gravity and a centrifugal force set up by approximately 500 rotations per second, yet small enough, together with the other three components, to be contained in a space approximately the size of a pint milk bottle." It is conceivable that X-ray backscatter technology, as one example of the many developed in response to the challenge of asymmetrical warfare, will eventually be miniaturized and integrated with other weapons systems to the point where like the shipboard AAA systems of the late Pacific War it produces an exceedingly lethal system. As the one decimated the poet-warrior of Bushido, unafraid to die yet doomed withal, what happens when swarming robot insects, able to see through walls, can call down directed energy fires over a networked battlefield? Not just the Jihadi, but man himself is inevitably diminished by his own creation. Islamic terrorism, by threatening ruthless destruction, has provoked 21st century technological civilization into responding without limit; every scientific advance, every mathematical discovery, every material, method or craft will be brought to bear at a geometric rate on the Jihadi problem until it is solved.

This may overstate the case, but only just. The principal problem following the Second World War was how men could coexist with their own creations. Not until a half century from Hiroshima was there was some sense of coming to grips with the monumental forces unleashed in 1945. And then came September 11. Osama Bin Laden and Zaraqawi may feel that they have nothing to fear from X-ray backscatter technology. Perhaps not; but it is what comes after, and after, and after that will be truly terrifying.

The Unstoppable IED

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are more than physical objects, they are symbols of asymmetrical warfare, along with the suicide bomb and the sniper. They are exemplars of 'insoluble' threats against which resistance is supposedly futile and to which surrender is the only viable response. In times past, the submarine and bombing aircraft occupied the same psychological space. In the late 19th century, Alfred Thayer Mahan theorized that sea control, exercised through battlefleets, would be the arbiters of maritime power. But rival theorists believed weaker nations using motor torpedo boats and above all, the submarine, could neutralize battlefleets. The way to checkmate global superpower Britain, so the theory went, was through asymmetrical naval warfare.

In the early days of World War 1, three British armored cruisers HMS Aboukir, HMS Hogue and HMS Cressy were patrolling the North Sea making no attempt to zigzag. The German U-9 fired a single torpedo into the Aboukir which promptly sank. HMS Hogue gallantly raced up to rescue survivors, believing the Aboukir was mined and came right into the U-9's sights. She was sunk in turn. The HMS Cressy, believing both were mined, sped like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery into another one of the U-9s torpedoes. In under an hour the asymmetrical weapon had killed 1,459 British sailors and sunk three cruisers.

In the 1930s the bomber airplane took the place of the U-boat as the unstoppable weapon in the public's imagination. Fired by the concepts of Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet, many interwar policymakers believed that bomber aircraft alone could bring a nation to its knees. The destructive capacity ascribed to the biplane bombers of the day approached that later attributed to nuclear weapons during the Cold War and so terrified politicians that it fueled the policy of appeasement. According to Wikipedia:

The calculations which were performed on the number of dead to the weight of bombs dropped would have a profound effect on the attitudes of the British authorities and population in the interwar years, because as bombers became larger it was fully expected that deaths from aerial bombardment would approach those anticipated in the Cold War from the use of nuclear weapons. The fear of aerial attack on such a scale was one of the fundamental driving forces of British appeasement in the 1930s.

Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons in words calculated to convey the futility of war that "the bomber will always get through. The only defense is in offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves." From there, as with those who ascribe the same irresistibility to the suicide bomber, it was natural to turn to appeasement. And that was what Baldwin did. Yet in an ironic twist of history, it was not the 'weaker' nations which successfully turned the submarine and the bombing airplane into decisive weapons but their intended victims. The USN presided over the only ultimately triumphant submarine blockade in history against Japan, while the Army Air Corps fielded the Enola Gay over Hiroshima. One possible reason for this reversal of fortunes is that neither the submarine nor the bombing aircraft existed in a state of ultimate perfection, invincible per se. Rather, they were effective relative to the countermeasures that could be deployed against them. They were one thread of an arms race spiral and their advocates found these weapons neutralized and ultimately turned against them by the very nations they sought to destroy.

IEDs have grown from relatively weak and simple devices into sophisticated demolitions weighing several hundred pounds in response to American countermeasures which began with uparmoring vehicles to monitoring patrol routes for disturbances in the roadway. As American countermeasures have improved, so has the IED, but not to the same degree. Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force said that while the incident rate of IED attacks has gone up, the probability of death per attack has declined from 50% in 2003 to about 18% in early 2005. The Iraqi insurgency may be detonating more IEDs than ever but their yield per attack is not what it used to be. USA Today reported: "While IED attacks have increased, U.S. casualties from them have gone down. From April 2004 to April 2005, task force spokesman Dick Bridges said, the number of casualties from IED attacks had decreased 45%."

To regain effectiveness, the enemy has turned bigger explosives and better triggering devices and aimed them at more lucrative targets. David Cloud of the New York Times describes what this means.

The explosion that killed 14 Marines in Haditha, Iraq, on Wednesday was powerful enough to flip the 25-ton amphibious assault vehicle they were riding in, in keeping with an increasingly deadly trend, American military officers said. ... on July 23 ...  a huge bomb buried on a road southwest of Baghdad Airport detonated an hour before dark underneath a Humvee carrying four American soldiers. The explosive device was constructed from a bomb weighing 500 pounds or more that was meant to be dropped from an aircraft, according to military explosives experts, and was probably Russian in origin. The blast left a crater 6 feet deep and nearly 17 feet wide. All that remained of the armored vehicle afterward was the twisted wreckage of the front end, a photograph taken by American officers at the scene showed. The four soldiers were killed.

In response, USA Today reports the deployment of more (and presumably better) electronic jammers and new directed energy weapons.

The Pentagon now has about 4,200 portable electronic jamming devices in Iraq and more are on the way, Bridges said. The military is about to test a new device at its Yuma, Ariz., proving ground that is capable of exploding bombs by sending an electrical charge through the ground. That device, called a Joint Improvised Explosive Device Neutralizer (JIN), could be deployed to Iraq sometime this year if tests prove successful, Bridges said.

Many bomb jammers work by preventing the triggerman from sending his detonation signal to the explosive device. Other equipment relies on detecting the electronic components of bombs, which echo a signal from a sniffer. The JIN neutralizer, now being test fielded to Iraq is an interesting application of directed energy weaponry. It works by using lasers to create a momentary pathway through which an electrical charge can travel and sending a literal bolt of lightning along the channel. A link to a Fox News video report on the manufacturer's website shows a vehicle equipped with a strange-looking rod detonating hidden charges at varying distances, some out to quite a ways.

Just as the enemy has resorted to bigger bombs to defeat better armor, so too will they seek ways to defeat the new American countermeasures. Yet it seems clear that the IED, like the submarine and bombing airplane before it, is not some mystically invincible device, but simply a weapon like any other caught up in a technological race with countermeasures arrayed against it. One consequence of this development is that while the enemy may employ larger numbers of IEDs against Americans, the number of effective IEDs -- the bigger and better ones -- available to them may actually have declined. The penalty for raising weaponry to a higher standard is making existing stock somewhat obsolete.

Yet a more fundamental problem may be in store for the enemy. By engaging America in a technological arms race of sorts they are playing to its strengths. The relative decline in IED effectivity suggests the enemy, while improving, has not kept up. The move to bigger bombs may temporarily restore his lost combat power, but the advent of new American countermeasures plus increasing pressure on the bombmakers, means he must improve yet again. It is far from clear whether the insurgents can stay in the battle for innovation indefinitely. The logic of asymmetric warfare suggests the enemy will at some point abandon the direct technological weapons race and find a new paradigm of attack entirely. That is essentially what they did when they abandoned the Republican Guard tank formation in favor of the roadside bomb in the first place.

One way to achieve this (and they have been perfecting their skills by attacks against Iraqi civilians) is to switch to other targets. In this way, they can find employment for weapons and skills which are no longer effective against American combat forces. The other is to invent some other surpassingly vicious method of attack; to create the successor to the IED. Whatever that new paradigm turns out to be, it will be probably be regarded as an unanswerable weapon, like the biplane bombers of the 1930s.

The Wizard War

Michael Yon's ongoing account of the battle in Mosul is worth reading. He begins with an extended James Mitchenerish description of the effects of explosive on armor and unprotected human beings as a way of setting the stage about a bomb towards which his Stryker is rolling. You keep reading wondering how it will all turn out.

Forty three Americans have died in Iraq over the last 10 days, including Pvt. 1st Class Nils G. Thompson in Mosul, but 24th infantry has killed 150 in just one neighborhood in the last 10 months. So who's ahead, we ask, but keep reading. But Yon's hasn't written his last dispatch; the unit he's with detects the bomb. The triggerman is spotted, but inexplicably not killed, even though the gunner has him in his sights. He is captured. Enemy snipers covering the IED area exchange fire with Deuce Four. Rotary wing shows up immediately. An EOD unit arrives with a robot but fail to blow up the bomb. It detonates some nights later perhaps as some of the enemy attempt to retrieve it. At least there are some car parts scattered all over the block.

Deuce Four takes the IED triggerman back to his neighborhood and Americans strike a conversation with his mom. Then they take him to the local police station, but decline to turn him over to the local cops and keep custody. A couple of nights go by. Yon ends the post just as Deuce Four are closing in on a house where they think more car bombs are being assembled.

What Yon omits is as tantalizing as what he describes. A lot is happening offstage that we are not allowed to see; we are given only glimpses. There are staged IED attacks to lure out the enemy into the sights of snipers. The are constant meetings with the Iraqi police whose subject matter is never described. Inexplicable things happen, like the the IED triggerman being taken back to his neighborhood right even while fire is being exchanged at the failed ambush site by Army officers who are certainly too busy to just shoot the breeze or idly wander around town. Bombs are left on the road and just happen to blow up when the insurgents attempt to retrieve them later. Large explosive caches are discovered in ways that are never divulged. A car bomb factory is about to be raided as Yon ends the post, in the cliff-hanger manner of the Republic Serials, and we are left not only to wonder what will happen, but how the raiders came to that very door.

(Speculation alert) We are probably going to have to wait a decade to find out how the battle of Mosul was fought out. But I think it is probable that a large role will have been played by electronic warfare in particular and information warfare in general. Both sides are trying to get inside the decision cycles of their opponents and Yon's description of the failed IED ambush at the traffic circle is a case in point. The enemy covers the IED amush site with snipers and the Americans cover the area with rotary wing. Yon is afraid mortars will hit the traffic circle but lets on that the mortars are afraid of counterbattery. So they disengage. Ambush counter ambush. The enemy makes a special target of EOD troopers but maybe the EOD guys have a few tricks up their own sleeves. The bombmakers target Americans and Americans target the bombmakers. The Americans refuse to leave the IED triggerman with the Mosul cops, after trailing him all over his neighborhood.  After the raid whose outcome we'll know in the next Yon installment, that triggerman may want to change his address and maybe get some plastic surgery into the bargain. I'm going to guess that Mosul is one of those engagements which will make the word 'database' a synonym for weapon and 'cover story' equivalent in certain situations to overhead cover.

Comments Policy

I've adopted a hands-off policy towards comments at the Belmont Club because the vast majority bring valuable insight to the discussion. Occasionally I'll get mail complaining about offensive comments; and fair enough, there are some which are pretty tasteless and a few which are downright offensive. Since I'm ultimately responsible for maintaining the 'tone' of this site the choices open to me are:

1. To appeal to everyone to avoid making comments which a reasonable person may consider to be anti-Arab, anti-Semitic etc. or comments of a scatological nature.
2. Confine posts to "safe" subjects which are unlikely to generate controversial comments.
3. Disable comments.

I've decided to try #1 for a bit and to see how it goes. Failing that, it's on to numbers 2 and 3.

Update

Comments contribute much, perhaps even most, of this site's value. Threads at their best are very good indeed and that vitality needs to be protected. Often the best part of the discussion comes in the first 70 or so comments and the quality of the thread seems to depend on how well the first 20 do. But sometimes the discussion gets hit by an early "thread killer" and never reaches its potential. One way to prevent this, I think, is to try to keep from commenting more than twice on the same thread (myself included) and making a conscious effort to stay civil.

The choice of post topic may in some way be related to ensuing discussion, as Geraldo and Rikki Lake doubtless knew; and it is the only variable I can directly control. All I'm saying is I'll do my best to keep the Belmont Club and its threads at the level its commenters deserve.

Rest In Pieces

Nick Cohen explains why he abandoned the church of the Left in a Guardian article where he argued it was about to betray its principles for a second time within living memory. The first was when it sold its soul to Stalin in exchange for the debased coin of pacifistic self-righteousness. Its second embrace of totalitarianism is today, exchanging the labels "Islam" for "Communism" and "Arabia" for "Russia". Cohen compared the two betrayals.

Auden noticed a retreat from universal principles in the 1930s - communism was fine in 'semi-barbaric' Russia but would have been a screaming outrage in a civilised country. He should have been alive today. With no socialism to provide international solidarity, good motives of tolerance and respect for other cultures have had the unintended consequence of leading a large part of post-modern liberal opinion into the position of 19th-century imperialists. It is presumptuous and oppressive to suggest that other cultures want the liberties we take for granted, their argument runs. So it may be, but believe that and the upshot is that democracy, feminism and human rights become good for whites but not for browns and brown-skinned people who contradict you are the tools of the neo-conservatives. On the other hand when confronted with a movement of contemporary imperialism - Islamism wants an empire from the Philippines to Gibraltar - and which is tyrannical, homophobic, misogynist, racist and homicidal to boot, they feel it is valid because it is against Western culture. It expresses its feelings in a regrettably brutal manner perhaps, but that can't hide its authenticity.

But it is the incidental argument in Cohen's chain reasoning that is most significant. He knows that socialism as an ideology with scientific pretensions is dead: all that is left is manner.

I'm sure that any halfway competent political philosopher could rip the assumptions of modern middle-class left-wingery apart. Why is it right to support a free market in sexual relationships but oppose free-market economics, for instance? But his criticisms would have little impact. It's like a religion: the contradictions are obvious to outsiders but don't disturb the faithful. You believe when you're in its warm embrace.

And manner is not enough. The collapse of the Left's rigor and militant core means it is vulnerable to the erosive effects of militant Islam. The Belmont Club argued in September, 2003 that:

The hollowing out of the Left -- the death of its Bolshevik core -- is one of the great unwritten stories of the late twentieth century. The decline of the cadre of professional revolutionaries at its center was simultaneously matched by the inrush from the periphery of the network of sympathizers, fellow travelers and "useful fools" which it once adopted as protective coloration. It was a classic case of the inmates taking over an asylum from which the keepers had fled. ... the freak show of autonomists, zapatistas, rage-against-the-machine cultists, transgender spokespersons, abortion rights activists, militant gay and lesbians and tattered academics that characterize today's Left. ... To experience any real militancy, today's Left wing activists must attach themselves as pathetic dogs to Islamic causes like the International Solidarity Movement. There, they can indulge their fantasy of advancing world socialism while objectively dying for Osama Bin Laden or Yasser Arafat. The circle is complete. The roles have been reversed. The heirs to moribund Bolshevism have now become the "useful fools", the protective coloration of a dynamic militant Islamism.

As Cohen puts it, "with no socialism to provide international solidarity", all that is left is "good motives of tolerance and respect for other cultures" -- even when that culture is sworn to destroy the Left itself -- like some association of morons intent on carrying out a function whose purpose no one can remember. Cohen ends on a note of hope. "My advice to my former comrades is to struggle out of your straitjackets and get off at the next station. It would be good to see you on this side of the barrier." I wouldn't hold my breath.

Eyeless in Gaza

Israeli finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resigned, citing his opposition to Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza. According to the Boston Globe:

Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the highest-ranking figures in Israel's government, quit yesterday to protest next week's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and, sometime afterward, from parts of the West Bank, saying it would create an ''Islamic base" on Israel's doorstep. ... ''I'm not willing to be a party to a step that endangers our security, divides the nation, and reinforces the principle of withdrawing to the 1967 lines," Netanyahu, who is Sharon's main rival in the ruling Likud party, said during a news conference in Jerusalem hours after quitting. He said he had been ''torn inside" for months but decided he did not want to go down in history as an accomplice to the unilateral withdrawal. ''A leader must ask himself . . . 'What do you represent?' " he said.

The Israeli withdrawal plan had its genesis, not as part of the "Road Map" to a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace settlement but as a unilateral action by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. According to a Congressional Research Service study (made available through a US State Department link. It is also available through CRS Gallery Watch)

In early December 2003, Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that Israel would give up its Gaza settlements.3 On December 18, 2003, Sharon stated if the Palestinians were not meeting their commitments as outlined in the “Road Map” peace proposal,4 Israel would disengage unilaterally from the Palestinians “within a few months.” (page 2)

It lurched on, by fits and starts until it reached its present form. One of the most common reasons for advocating withdrawal is that it will shorten Israel's defense lines. The Gaza strip is home to 7,500 Israeli settlers, most in settlements which are not contiguous to Israel proper, living among 1.325 million Arabs, circled wagons if you will, which the IDF must always be ready to rescue. A withdrawal would free up forces for other duties. Another reason given is the hope that these concessions may create a wave of goodwill among the Palestinians which will further a comprehensive peace settlement, a suggestion that is often met with ridicule. Even the Congressional Research Service reports concedes that withdrawal is only likely to increase, not decrease Palestinian ambitions.

For the most part, Palestinians accepted the Sharon plan, but only because they saw the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as a first step to full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967. Most Palestinians distrust Sharon and the Israelis and do not believe that Israel will adhere to the timetable, and most Palestinians are concerned that Israel’s unilateral steps will bypass the peace process.

The more likely political target of the withdrawal is the Western Europeans, many of who see Israel as illegitimate. By unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, Israel may take some of the wind from the sails of Europeans who support more aid to the Palestinians and tighter sanctions on Israel. Both in terms of economy of force and political positioning, the withdrawal is presented as a tactical sacrifice in exchange for strategic gain.

But Netanyahu argued in an August 4 interview with Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post that a withdrawal from Gaza would open up a highway into Israel's vitals, becoming to its western settlements what the Euphrates insurgent ratline is to Baghdad. Although Sharon maintained his intention to retain control over Gaza's external borders, Netanyahu argued that it would be understood -- correctly -- as the first step to the total crumbling of control over the entirety of Gaza.

Q: Will the withdrawal from Gaza affect the western Negev? If so, how?

A: First of all, we allocated NIS 300 million in order to protect communities in the western Negev. The very fact of the allocation in the wake of the withdrawal shows that there is a realistic possibility that there will be a deterioration in the security situation because, after all, we did not need to protect these communities beforehand. ... 

Q: Will there be consequences from the opening of Gaza to the Sinai through the IDF's withdrawal from the Philadelphi corridor and from the opening of Gaza to the world through the operation of a seaport and an airport after thewithdrawal?

A: Not only is Hamas getting stronger in front of our very eyes, and not only are they openly announcing that they will move their missiles from Gaza to Judea and Samaria in order to rain them onto the suburbs of Tel Aviv. There exists an additional problem of outside terrorists and deadly weapons far worse than what we have seen so far that are liable to stream in from the Sinai to Gaza the minute we abandon our control of the boundaries of the Strip. ... Everyone remembers the Karine A [the weapons ship the Palestinian Authority purchased from Iran, that Israeli naval commandos intercepted in the Red Sea in January 2002]. If that ship had managed to penetrate, it would have brought in arms that could have easily threatened Ashkelon and Ashdod. Now there will be a Karine A, Karine B, Karine C and Gaza will be transformed into a base for Islamic terrorism adjacent to the coast of the State of Israel.

Leaving aside the political rivalry between Sharon and Netanyahu, the question is which of the two has correctly anticipated events. The Boston Globe quotes political scientist Shmuel Sandler's summary: ''If the withdrawal turns into a big mess, Netanyahu has a chance. If not, he'll look like the bad guy." Netanyahu seems willing to bet on the villainy and treachery of Israel's foes, saying in his Jerusalem Post interview:

It's true that people think this withdrawal will help calm the region. If it were to take place as part of an agreement with a responsible party capable of stabilizing the area, it would be possible to argue this case. But that is not the situation we have today. Because of this, the real danger is the transformation of Gaza into a base for global Islamic terror and it doesn't have to happen immediately.

In 1993, in the midst of the euphoria over the Oslo agreement, I warned that terrorism would plague us from all the areas we transferred to the Palestinians and that there would be missiles shot at us from Gaza. It didn t happen immediately. It took time.

In 1995, I warned that Muslim zealots would bomb the World Trade Center in New York. It didn't happen immediately. It took time. But it happened. Today as well, when I warn about the establishment of a base for Islamic terrorism in Gaza, the realization of the danger doesn't have to happen immediately but, sadly, the possibility that it will happen is very tangible and only increases as time passes.

I would be very happy if this prognosis were proven wrong for a change. I would be very happy if we saw thousands of members of the peace camp in Gaza demonstrating with banners reading, "Thank you Israel for the just peace" and releasing thousands of doves into the sky.

But this isn't what we are seeing. We are seeing thousands of new members of Hamas who are waving their rifles in the air and crying out, "Today Gaza, tomorrow Tel Aviv."

On a Weekend

I was intrigued by a snippet in the National Journal which referred to Joseph Stalin's plans for a final Terror.

Stalin was planning his own version of the Holocaust to rid the U.S.S.R. of its Jewish citizens. ... Newly discovered documents show that in February 1953, Stalin authorised the construction of four large prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north. Officially they were for all classes of dangerous criminals, but it is far more likely that Stalin was preparing for a second Great Terror - aimed at the millions of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent. ...

A search led to a book review of Brent and Naumov's Stalin's Last Crime, largely about Uncle Joe's abortive project to launch a new wave of repression so huge it would put his efforts of the 1930s into the shade.

Though the Great Terror of the late 1930s is widely viewed as the height of Stalin's purges, the number of arrests actually peaked in the early 1950s, and Stalin was planning hundreds of thousands more on the eve of his death in 1953. These arrests were spurred by the "doctors' plot," a supposed conspiracy among Jewish doctors to kill members of the government and destroy the U.S.S.R. at the behest of the Americans. Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, and Naumov, executive secretary of Russia's Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Repressed Persons, trace how Stalin himself put together ... (a plan) ... to accomplish several goals: to purge his Ministry of Security and upper ranks of government; to defuse the potential threat posed by Soviet Jews, many of whom had ties to the U.S. and the new state of Israel; and to provide fuel for an armed conflict with the U.S.

This was pretty heavy stuff, but then Stalin had the dubious distinction of killing many more people than Adolph Hitler, so anything was possible. As I didn't have the book, I scoured its book reviews until I found the location of the four giant planned death-camps where Stalin intended to succeed where Hitler had failed -- Kazakhstan, Komi, and Irkutsk. The final Final Solution. The attraction of exploring Communist archaeology is based in part on the fascination for the grotesque. It is what morbid minds study in the absence of real alien monster artifacts. It is a tableau of the inconceivable, made all the more startling because it was real. Stalin even attempted to master time by mandating a five-day week (after he had tried a six-day week) reasoning there was no earthly reason why it should run to seven. The Economist explains Stalin's point of view.

Most people greet the weekend with gratitude. But some economists view it with puzzlement. Why, they wonder, does the bulk of the population rest on the same two days each week? Why does everyone's week end at “the” weekend? From an economic point of view, it would surely be more efficient to stagger days of rest throughout the week. That way, expensive pieces of equipment would not lie idle for two days in seven, and infrastructure would be less congested the other five.

One person impressed by this logic was Josef Stalin, who rationalised the Soviet calendar in 1929. Workers were given every fifth day off, but their shifts were staggered, so that factories could run without interruption. The staggered week appealed rather less to the people who worked it, however. According to Witold Rybcynski's 1991 book about leisure, “Waiting for the Weekend”, Stalin's four days on, one day off, was unpopular, even though it was less onerous than the six-day week that preceded it. Families and friends rarely had the same day off; administrative staff rarely worked at the same time. After less than three years, the staggered working week was abandoned.

There's a boutique tourist market for traveling the "Road of Bones" -- a road to a mooted gold mine ordered by Stalin which conveniently killed those who built it from starvation. (An enterprising fellow called Milford posted photos he took on motorcycle journey along the route, where it is said, building each meter cost one prisoner's life. ) Here was a place, as the Telegraph puts it, where:

Armed only with pickaxes and wheelbarrows, prisoners, among them the founder of the Soviet space programme, generals and intellectuals side by side with common criminals, hacked and hewed at permafrost in the hunt for gold.

The landscape of Communism from East Germany to Cambodia, from North Korea to Cuba deserves to preserved as a monument to the greatest act of hypnotism in history. Piers Brendon, writing in the Dark Valley, described the pilgrimage of Western intellectuals to this palace of horrors, intent upon discovering paradise. And discover it they did.

Before setting off for Moscow in 1932 to experience "the veritable future of mankind", Malcolm Muggeridge made a bonfire of bourgeois trappings, including his dinner jacket. Arthur Koestler endorsed the slogan at the frontier  -- "Change trains for the twenty first century". ... Muggeridge ... soon perceived the truth and mocked the gullibility of other visitors. Lord Marley denied that official lies could have been told about the Five Year Plan -- "Think how ashamed the Soviet Government would be if it were discovered that their statistics had been falsified" -- and believed that the authorities permitted food queues in Moscow because they "provided a means for inducing the workers to take a rest". Edouard Herriot was convinced that the milk shortage was due to the large amount allocated to nursing mothers. George Bernard Shaw expressed his confidence that the Soviet Union was free from hunger by declaring that he had thrown his supplies of Western tinned food out of the train window ..." (from the chapter Stalin's Revolution)

But the El Dorado wasn't there; and the really big historical question is why it took the best minds of the West more than 50 years and countless lives to discover that elementary fact. This monumental self-hypnosis calls into question our collective ability to know; and when politicians and media talking heads speak with perfect assurance about "religions of peace" or alternatively, about a "death cult" with bloody borders, how certain are we that our epistemology is any better than that of the 20th century intellectuals?

Operation Quick Strike

UPI says Operation Quick Strike has been launched against "insurgents and foreign fighters in western Iraq's Anbar province".

Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, director of the U.S.-led Combined Press Information Center, said the offensive was not in response to the three insurgent attacks that killed 21 Marines this week. On Friday, Iraqi special operations forces directed a Marine airstrike on insurgents firing from buildings near Haqliniya, southwest of Haditha.

The most interesting information on the current operations comes form Bloomberg. The standard description of the operation's objectives was given: "to interdict and disrupt insurgents and foreign terrorists' presence in the Haditha, Haqliniyah, and Barwanah area". But Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said in an interview that:

"This (assault) is part of a pattern of offensives to deny the insurgents sanctuary along the Euphrates River to match ongoing operations along the Tigris" ... Cordesman said the coalition's goals in the Euphrates valley are to make harder for foreign insurgents to infiltrate from Syria and find "stable sanctuary'' in the region. Another aim is to put pressure on Sunnis to join the political process, he said. "The political and military effects will play out over months, not days,'' he said in a telephone interview.

Cordesman's remarks suggest that Quickstrike's context is far larger than to disrupt the local insurgents in Haditha. They are certainly not a reprisal or reaction to the loss of 21 Marines in Haditha. (I speculated that they were lost in carrying out the offensive operation of which Quickstrike is a part). Together with General Ham's comment that these operations go "all the way out to the border" and the New York Times story that the US is mounting operations north of the Euprates in the direction of Mosul, Cordesman's statement that Quickstrike is "part of a pattern of offensives to deny the insurgents sanctuary along the Euphrates River to match ongoing operations along the Tigris" is nothing short of astounding.

(Speculation alert). My own guess is that the US decided that letting insurgents dig in, as they did at Fallujah, resulted in very expensive, publicly visible major operations. Even smaller ops like Matador showed that the enemy could turn individual villages into mini-forts which could create statistical casualty bumps (of say, more than six Americans killed). Readers will recall how one Marine AAV was destroyed in Matador because it had to proceed down a mined road. Therefore it was desirable to strike the enemy at many points at once, never allowing their cadres to re-group and re-connect with other cells. Forcing movement has already resulted, as the LA Times reports, in the abandonment of RPGs, mortars and mines, stuff you can't carry on the run.

The logistical key to successfully accomplishing this was to create the ability to strike on both banks of the Euprates and across the plain to the Tigris with armored vehicles. (The NYT article mentioned in passing that helicopter-borne raids were already common) The establishment of a base in Rawah facilitated this. Another important component was deploying Iraqi government forces in cleared areas to prevent, or at least slow down, the reconstitution of insurgent cells.

The Battle for the Border

Commenter CJR draws our attention to the following New York Times report as a collateral indication that a major operation against insurgents along the Euphrates line is in progress.

Most of those fighters are believed to enter the country north of the where the Euphrates river crosses into Iraq. Because the American military presence has until recently been on the south side of the river, the north side has become something of a sanctuary for insurgents moving foreign fighters south along the river to Baghdad and north across desert tracks to Mosul. There are only a few bridges across the Euphrates between the Syrian border and Haditha ... even fewer of the bridges are substantial enough to allow coalition forces to safely move armored vehicles from one side of the Euphrates to the other.

The United States military began addressing the flow of foreign fighters in May with a major operation along the Syrian border north of the Euphrates. The number of insurgents encountered in those operations ... convinced Gen. George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, that it was time to focus on the north bank in order to stem the flow downriver. ... 

"Now we own the Rawah bridge and they can't move across the river," a senior intelligence officer in Baghdad said Wednesday, adding that "the operations are making it harder and harder for them to move around."

Meanwhile, the Marines based at Haditha have begun a major hunt for insurgents south of the river. Operations and intelligence officers say they don't believe there are more than a few dozen insurgents operating in the area but that the new military presence north of the river has triggered a rabid response. "We struck a nerve," the intelligence officer said. "All along the river we're seeing an upsurge of activity."

Much of this information was reported earlier on July 31 in the LA Times (hat tip: Joshua Landis) which emphasized the logistical preparation for the campaign. 

American troops have established the first long-term military base along a major smuggling route near the Syrian border in a new effort to block potential suicide bombers from reaching targets in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities. A force of 1,800 U.S. troops, responding to continuing concerns that foreign fighters are crossing the Syrian border into Iraq, recently began an operation that includes setting up the base, three miles from the crossroads town of Rawah. ... 

The American forces began arriving July 16 in the region, where they occasionally have carried out incursions in the last two years to fight insurgents. ...  As the operation unfolds, Marines would continue to hold the region south of the Euphrates, while the Stryker Brigade, which has been based in Mosul, pushes south, putting insurgents in a "vice," a senior U.S. military strategist said. The unfamiliar whoosh of helicopter rotors and the sight of the Army brigade's Stryker vehicles engaged in battles along largely rural roadways have prompted hundreds and possibly thousands of the estimated 20,000 people in Rawah to flee in fear of an attack similar to the one in Fallouja, officials said.

Rawah is located at 34 28 N 41 55 E, almost exactly halfway between the Syrian border and Haditha. A main road runs on the south bank of the Euphrates but a bridge at Rawah gives onto a crossroads on the opposite side, from where a number of  roads radiating like spokes on a wheel provide access to the Syrian desert crossings, Mosul, Tharthar Lake and other points on the north bank of the river. Bill Roggio has a map and more information on the Rawah operation at his site together with a compendium of all the operations that have taken place along the Euprates River line. Visit each of Roggio's links in his enumeration of the river operations and it will be abundantly clear how every one is aimed at pruning the routes along the Euphrates and horizontally across Iraq towards the Tigris.

Making it harder for the enemy to move around while making it easier for US units has the effect of lowering apparent enemy numbers while correspondingly increasing apparent American troop strength; but this is only a means to an end. Another LA Times report on the Rawah operation, Rebels on the Run, Locals Too describes some of its effects as observed by the correspondent.

Since arriving in mid-July, the 2nd Infantry Division's 2nd Squadron of the 14th Cavalry Regiment has defeated the fighters here and will now spread out to seal the border with Syria, said Lt. Col. Mark Davis, the unit's commander. ... Having wrested control of Rawah, the division's Stryker Brigade Combat Team now hopes to press westward toward the border and, for the first time, gain control of a broad swath of the land north of the Euphrates that has eluded the U.S.-led coalition for more than two years. On Thursday and Friday, soldiers searched every one of the town's estimated 3,000 to 5,000 homes, capturing some suspected insurgents and a bounty of weapons, including mines, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, bomb-making equipment, sniper rifles and rockets.

"Since then, there has been no enemy attack, no explosions, nobody shooting at us in Rawah," Davis said. The town might be quiet now, but it's not necessarily friendly. On an outer school wall, spray painted in Arabic, is a note of defiance: "Praise the people of Fallouja" — a former insurgent stronghold where U.S. and Iraqi forces prevailed in November. Davis acknowledged that most Iraqis had left town but said they didn't leave under instructions from U.S. troops. The insurgents apparently had held the town hostage, American officials said. There were no police, a dormant city council, a compound of schools with no children and no teachers inside.

(Speculation alert) There are probably many similar operations that are taking place along the river and to its north, as per the Di Rita briefing. One of them may have been undertaken by the US Marines at Haditha, during which 21 Marines were killed. One possible reason why this operation has been kept low key, despite its size, is that it may be literally ripping up the insurgent base of support along the upper Euphrates. If the LA Times article is accurate, the insurgents essentially took the whole population of Rawah with them; if the phenomenon is being repeated elsewhere, the displacement of the Sunni population must be huge. To the north there is the unsustaining desert; to the south across the river there is the sweep of the Marines; for the insurgents to leave the population in place would risk leaving intelligence in the hands of the Americans. This has got to hurt and it is only the beginning. The LA Times notes the abandonment of RPGs, sniper rifles, mortars -- stuff you wouldn't leave behind -- not willingly. The whole point of strangling the enemy lines of communication while building support bases is to set up the stage for pursuit. And they will be pursued. The focus of newspaper coverage in the coming days may abruptly shift from 'poor helpless Marines from Ohio' to 'we're slaughtering them! We're killers!' These are the hard choices of war, and as Hemingway once wrote "all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

A Briefing at the DOD

The following are excerpts from a Department of Defense news briefing. They've been edited to focus on remarks dealing with operations in Haditha, Iraq, with my running commentary along the right hand side.

Transcript	Commentary
GEN. HAM: This morning at about 06:30 local time in Iraq, a mounted U.S. Marine element operating near Hadithah was attacked by an explosive device. Initial reports are that 15 personnel were killed in the attack: 14 United States Marines and one interpreter. One Marine was wounded and has subsequently been medically evacuated from the scene. Multinational Force West, which you know is the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force Forward, is investigating this incident. Notification of next of kin is underway, but has not yet been completed. The attack this morning occurred in the same general area as an attack, which occurred yesterday in which six U.S. Marines were killed.	This is the first indication that an operation may be underway.
Q General, what do these attacks over the past couple of days, in which 20 -- actually, 21 Marines were killed, because there was another Marine from that same unit who was killed by an IED two days ago -- what does that say about the state of insurgency in that region? What information do you have about the status of the insurgents, what they're up to there, and what the U.S. Marine Corps has been trying to do over the past couple of months in trying to root them out? GEN. HAM: Well, it is, I think, very important to always remember that this is a very lethal and unfortunately adaptive enemy that we are faced with inside Iraq. It's important, I think, to put this in a larger context: that if you look along the Euphrates River and the number of towns and villages along the river that have previously been locations from which insurgents have operated. Multinational Force West is conducting a number of operations in a number of those towns simultaneously, in an effort to deny the enemy freedom of movement, to deny them safe haven. And so I think what we're seeing here is a concerted effort to assert control -- ultimately Iraqi control in those towns, and there's resistance that is coming from the insurgents in those towns. Perhaps previously they may have had an opportunity to move. For example, if there was pressure in Hadithah, they could perhaps move someplace else. Well, now because of the simultaneity of operations that Multinational Force West is conducting, they don't have that freedom of movement, and I think that's one of the contributing causes to this -- to these number of direct contacts that are occurring. ... Q Can I ask -- I just wanted to make it clear because I'm not sure we're on the same wavelength here. I think the point that I tried to make was that because of attacks over the past couple of days, it appears that the insurgents' capability to operate has not been diminished. Is that the case? Are they still able to operate pretty freely in that region?  GEN. HAM: Well, I think not. Again, they are dangerous, and they certainly have a capability. But as to whether they are not -- whether they have an ability to freely operate throughout the area, I think not. And that's specifically the focus of Multinational Force West's operation.	Here's the first hint that this operation is qualitatively different from anything previous. The implication of Gen. Ham's statements is that in the past the coalition only had the ability to drive out insurgents locally, like chasing a soap bar around a tub. He strongly suggests that this time, there is no place to hide and the loss of the 21 Marines was in line with this new and offensive goal.
Q General Ham, can you -- there have been reports by Ansar al-Sunna that they may have beheaded one of these Americans. Their bodies may have been mutilated. Can you -- number one, are all Americans and Marines at least in these operations accounted for? Is there anybody missing? And do you have any credible reports that any of the bodies that have been recovered have been mutilated, beheaded, anything like that?  GEN. HAM: We do not have any indication of the latter. And Multinational Forces Iraq has recently conducted an accountability, and now all forces are accounted for.	This provides an insight into the kind of homework the press does prior to attending the briefings. They have access to collateral sources of information -- Jihadi websites -- possibly tips from people they know.
Q Are there any Iraqis involved in these operations, these simultaneous operations that are going on in these towns, the Euphrates River Valley, in conjunction with the Marines, and if so, can you describe those?  GEN. HAM: The Iraqi security forces are involved. They were not specifically involved in this particular operation in Hadithah, but in the next town to the northwest, if you will, in Rawah, the Iraqi security forces have been significantly involved. On the 1st of August they discovered with -- based on local tips from a local Iraqi, they discovered a fairly sizeable weapons cache in that area. So the Iraqi security forces are clearly operating in that area, as they are throughout the country.  Q General, the details of the six who were killed, the snipers, is still sketchy. Can you fill in any blanks about what happened? Was it an enemy force that found their location, or was it perhaps some people that were thought to be friendly forces that ended up killing the Marines?  GEN. HAM: There's certainly no indication of the latter. As you might understand, I'm not desirous of talking about specific tactics, techniques and procedures that are employed by various units. But I think, as you all understand, we have a variety of capabilities, ranging from very small units to very large units. This was a unit that was properly prepared, trained and equipped for their operation. They came under attack, and as we know today, that the six U.S. Marines were killed in that attack.  Q But you're kind of ruling out that they thought they were Iraqi friendlies and then were killed by them?  GEN. HAM: What I think I said was there's no indication that that was the case.	Finally the penny drops and the press are trying to press for details on what must be an ongoing operation. Gen. Ham finally hints at where the access of coalition manpower came from -- Iraqi troops. Almost instantly he senses the next question: were the Marines betrayed by the Iraqis and pre-emptively answers it.
Q Sir, have any troops been moved into that Euphrates River valley? And can you talk a little bit, for people who might not understand that area, of that line that runs from Baghdad all the way up to al Qaim, how important that is to you and your goals in Anbar province?  GEN. HAM: Well, certainly western Anbar province has been an area of concern for a very long time. And the Euphrates River and the towns and villages along it are likely locations for the movement of insurgents either cross-border from Syria or inside Iraq itself. There have been additional forces that have deployed from other parts of Iraq, and specifically from Multinational Force Northwest, to assist in this effort along the Euphrates River.	The press now talks about the River War and the role of this line of communications in supporting enemy fighters in Iraq from sanctuaries in Syria.
Q Sir, have any troops been moved into that Euphrates River valley? And can you talk a little bit, for people who might not understand that area, of that line that runs from Baghdad all the way up to al Qaim, how important that is to you and your goals in Anbar province? GEN. HAM: Well, certainly western Anbar province has been an area of concern for a very long time. And the Euphrates River and the towns and villages along it are likely locations for the movement of insurgents either cross-border from Syria or inside Iraq itself. There have been additional forces that have deployed from other parts of Iraq, and specifically from Multinational Force Northwest, to assist in this effort along the Euphrates River. Q Can you describe like how many forces, what the -- I mean, is this a -- I mean, I understand Operation Sword had been going on and that was completed. I mean, is there a name for this operation? Are there -- is this, you know, running from, you know, Hadithah all the way out to the border? You have a large operation that's going on right now, and can you tell us how many troops are involved? GEN. HAM: I don't know in their entirety. It's about a battalion strength from Multinational Force Northwest that is assisting in this effort, and they have -- I'm trying to -- at least a battalion strength of Iraqi army with them. Q This is just in the Hadithah corridor area, or is this going all the way out to the border? GEN. HAM: This is all the way out to the border.	Now questioning turns to the "adequacy of troops issue", a subject to which the briefing will return again and again. It turns out from the answer that the ongoing operation, which has no public name, is quite large. This operation runs all along the Euphrates River line "all the way out to the border".
Q Until the last couple of days, Iraqis have borne a lot of the recent casualties. Of course, the last two days there have been heavy American casualties. Does this represent any kind of change in strategy on the insurgents to target Americans more forcefully?  MR. DI RITA: To target Americans?  Q To target American troops -- a shift of emphasis?  GEN. HAM: Not that we're able to discern. We don't think so. We think the insurgent effort remains very much focused on discrediting coalition presence, and discrediting the Iraqi security forces, and discrediting the Iraqi transitional government. So I don't think -- we haven't seen a particular waiving of effort, if you will, on the insurgents that says, "Okay, now we're going to go after coalitions." It just -- we think they remain focused on each of those three entities.  Q And these recent casualties are because American troops have been in harm's way to a greater degree recently with these operations?  GEN. HAM: In this particular operation, which the operation in Hadithah was largely conducted by the U.S. Marines, I think just a -- it was just a fact of that circumstance, not any discernible change in the tactics used by the insurgents.	This is exchange which suggests a tendency -- perhaps only a rhetorical tendency -- to assign the role of the offensive to the enemy. The fact that fewer Americans have been recently killed is put down to the fact that the enemy has stopped targeting them. Gen. Ham suggests that the Americans died because they were operating against an enemy stronghold.

The most interesting questions remain unanswered. The unnamed operation must be large -- and ongoing. Just what is happening? Recently, retired General Jack Keane kicked up a public relations hornet's nest  by saying that US forces had killed or captured 50,000 insurgents in 2005. That enormous lethality would suggest that, despite the loss of the Marines, the ongoing fighting must be lopsided. Nothing to do but await events.

Unreasonable Doubt

David Adesnik of Oxblog has a round-up on the pros and cons of profiling, featuring the arguments and counter-arguments of Colbert King (anti) and Charles Krauthammer, Paul Sperry and Haim Watzman (pro). These arguments don't all meet head on. Colbert inveighs against racial profiling. But Paul Sperry's argument isn't primarily based on race at all. He says we know from experience who the high risk groups are and would be fools not to use what we know. He takes pains to distinguish "young Muslim men of Arab or South Asian origin", who he suggests constitute a high risk group, from Muslim grannies, who he says don't. The sort of profiling Mr. Sperry suggests relies on several attributes, the principal one of which isn't race, but religion. But since religion is a nonphysical attribute, the secondary but visible characteristics of ethnic origin and age are likely to predominate in actual application. King's raises the objection of the false positive, pointing out that racial descriptions would cover a homeland security officer he knows and people like his own son. And what, he asks, is the sense of that?

It appears to matter not to Sperry that his description also includes huge numbers of men of color, including my younger son, a brown-skinned occasional New York subway rider who shaves his head and moustache. He also happens to be a former federal prosecutor and until a few years ago was a homeland security official in Washington. Sperry's profile also ensnares my older brown-skinned son, who wears a very short haircut, may wear cologne at times, and has the complexion of many men I have seen in Africa and the Middle East. He happens to be a television executive.

The justification for profiling derives from statistics. Insurance companies use it to set your premiums. Customs inspectors use it to identify drug mules. A geologist who is looking for oil sinks his drill near certain structures. The enemy uses profiling all the time, the false positives be damned. Robert Fisk was beaten by Afghans on the mistaken assumption that he was a Westerner.  BBC correspondent Frank Gardner was shot by Islamists in Riyadh even as he cried "I’m a Muslim, help me, I’m a Muslim, help me".

Even using his geological profile, the prospector will drill many a dry hole, analogous to pulling over a King's federal prosecutor or television executive son. Yet that does not alter the fact that he is well advised to play the likelihoods or go broke. Rejecting profiling in principle is tantamount to throwing away information. The argument against any sort of profiling, especially racial profiling, cannot be based on the false positive. It must instead rely on the assertion that it costs will offset its benefits. The potential public relations disaster of profiling people like Lieutenant Neil Prakash, for example, who won the Silver Star in Iraq, must be set against whatever benefits the policy would yield. On a net benefit basis, racial profiling may very well be a bad move.

It is also a frank admission of the want of a better tool. I've often argued that mass categorizations are what is left after we've denied ourselves the means to precisely target perpetrators protected by political correctness. You screen everybody who comes out of the Finsbury Park mosque when you cannot deport its notorious imam. A policy which forswears fighting terrorism abroad will imply you are going to screen everyone who arrives at the border. If nobody wants to find Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan they will sooner or later do house to house searches in Leicester. The inability of the "moderate" Islamic community to discourage terrorists in their midst may mean you can't separate the sheep from the goats and one day everyone of certain persuasion will be presumed to be goat. Political correctness is the process of shutting our eyes; profiling is the groping that we do afterwards.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

George Galloway is declaring victory for the insurgency in Iraq. (Hat tip: The New Editor) The Middle East Language translation service MEMRI renders Galloway's speeches on Arab TV in the following way:

Galloway (on Syrian TV, July 31, 2005): Mr. Blair is using this crime and all these dead people as a justification for this absurd idea of a war on terrorism. "Terror" is a word... Terror is a tactic, it's not a strategy. The idea that Muslims have some kind of sickness in their bodies, which must be cured, which is the idea behind Bush, behind Mr. Blair, and behind Mr. Berlusconi's government in Italy - It must be resisted. It's not the Muslims who are sick. It's Bush and Blair and Berlusconi who are sick. It's not the Muslims who need to be cured. It's the imperialist countries that need to be cured.

The real question is, after the evidence of Sykes-Picot 1, are you ready to accept Sykes-Picot 2? What does Sykes-Picot mean to the Arab world? Nothing except division, disunity, weakness, and failure. Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it. So this is what Sykes-Picot will do to the Arabs. Are you ready to have another hundred years like the hundred years you just had?

Sykes-Picot, for those who are unfamiliar with it, was a division of the Middle East into spheres of influence by France and Britain during the First World War. Galloway neglects to mention that Iraq itself -- one of the two beautiful 'daughters' he mentions -- was created by Sykes-Picot, from a compound of Kurds, Assyrians, Shi'ites and Sunnis, lately under the absolute diktat of his former friend Saddam Hussein, from whom he received money. From a commercial point of view, Sykes-Picot was a godsend to George Galloway. As for Sykes-Picot2, that is still being discussed by representatives of all Iraqi ethnic groups who are preparing a constitution that will be submitted for approval to the Iraqi voters and hence, may not be entirely to Mr. Galloway's liking. But Galloway had other things to say:

Galloway (on Al-Jazeera TV, July 31, 2005): This started out as a wish to terrorize the world with American power, or as Sharon would say: "Terrrrrrorize" the world with American power. But in fact it ended demonstrating the exact opposite. They can control the skies, but only if they don't come within range of an RPG, but they can't control one single street in any part of occupied Iraq. Not one street. Not one street anywhere. These poor Iraqis - ragged people, with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest and most basic of weapons - are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day, which has made the country ungovernable by the people who occupy it. We don't know who they are, we don't know their names, we never saw their faces, they don't put up photographs of their martyrs, we don't know the names of their leaders. I'm sure, for all the times I spent in Iraq, that I never met any of them before. They are not the comfortable in the former regime, they are not the leaders, with maybe one exception: Izzat Ibrahim Al-Durri. They are the base of this society.

Unfortunately, most of the people being killed by the "145 military operations every day" aren't the hated American 'terrrrorrists' but Iraqi security guards, commuters, election workers, children and the like. Violence in Iraq is less and less about killing Americans and more and more about Sunnis killing Shi'ites and vice versa -- the conscious policy of the very men who are writing "the names of their cities and towns in the stars" -- in the ink of blood, of course. Yet would that not constitute another form of victory? Those who argue that America is being defeated in Iraq because it cannot prevent a civil war are making the saddest of arguments: 'the Arabs have won because America cannot keep them from killing each other'. Shorn of his posturing, it is Galloway himself who assumes that "Muslims have some kind of sickness in their bodies, which must be cured"; he speaks not as one man to another, but as a snake-oil salesman to his mark.

Stephen Vincent

Steven Vincent, a freelance reporter who also has a blog In the Red Zone, was shot dead in Basra. (Courtesy of reader JK). The BBC carries this report:

A US freelance reporter, Steven Vincent, has been shot dead by unknown gunmen in Basra, southern Iraq, police have said. ... Mr Vincent had been in Basra in recent months working for the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times. In a recent New York Times article, Mr Vincent wrote that Basra's police force had been infiltrated by Shia militants. He quoted a senior Iraqi police lieutenant saying some officers were behind many of the killings of former Baath party members in Basra. Mr Vincent also criticised the UK forces, who are responsible for security in Basra, for ignoring abuses of power by Shia extremists.

Although every life and loss of life is unique, Mr. Vincent's work shares certain points in common with Michael Tucker (the producer of Gunner Palace, who accompanied his film subjects on patrol for two months) and Michael Yon, who describes himself as "an independent, informed observer chronicling the monumentally important events in the efforts to stabilize Iraq. His dispatches have the benefit of his life experiences without drawbacks based on deadlines or demands of marketplace." In the strange and recursive network of the Internet, Mr. Yon filed this dispatch on Mr. Vincent's death.

On Wednesday, an American freelance journalist was found dead in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the U.S. Embassy said. Police said Steven Vincent had been shot multiple times after he and his Iraqi translator were abducted at gunpoint hours earlier. I had just contacted Stephen asking when he might come to Mosul. Stephen Vincent was an author and the popular blogger of "In The Red Zone." Stephen had been writing most recently from Basra.

CNN characterized Mr. Vincent and his work in this way:

Vincent was in Basra writing a book about the history of the city. He also maintained a Web blog about life in Iraq, and most recently had an op-ed piece in The New York Times on Sunday. According to the Web site of his publishing company, Vincent's work appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, The Christian Science Monitor, Art and Auction, and National Review Online, along with other art and political journals. He was a resident of New York for 25 years, the site said.

This is not the place to speculate why this murder occurred, but the tragedy serves to underline the discussion in the previous post which discussed, among other things, the rising tensions between Sunni and Shi'ite in Iraq. It's interesting to note that the BBC linked Mr. Vincent's murder to his interest in the sectarian conflict. It would have been ironic if Vincent had been killed not because he was an American, but because he came too close to a story.

What compelled him to cover a battlefield of the war on terror "traveling without security or official connections, living by his wits," according to the Spence Publishing site? CNN gives the answer in Vincent's own words.

"I stood that morning on the roof of my building in lower Manhattan and watched United Airlines Flight 175 strike the south tower of the World Trade Center," Vincent said in a December 2004 interview with Frontpage Magazine. "At that moment, I realized my country was at war -- because of the 1993 attack on the Trade Center, I figured our enemy was Islamic terrorism -- and I wanted to do my part in the conflict. I'm too old to enlist in the armed services, so I decided to put my writing talents to use."

In that interview Vincent described the weapons with which he intended to fight.

"Words matter. Words convey moral clarity. Without moral clarity, we will not succeed in Iraq. That is why the terms the press uses to cover this conflict are so vital. For example, take the word “guerillas.” As you noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms “insurgents” or “guerillas” to describe the Sunni Triangle gunmen, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liberation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase “paramilitary death squads.” Same murderers, different designations."

Whether Sunni killed Shi'ite or Shi'ite killed Sunni, Mr. Vincent knew murder when he saw it. It will be interesting to see whether the media will attribute Mr. Vincent's death to "guerillas" or to "paramilitary death squads". But in a sense it will not matter. He was witness to the necessity for honesty and the survival of outrage; conscious of how near death stands to all of us in the workaday world without watchful men ready to give the alarm with just words.

All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

A remark by General Jack Keane, former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army who consults on Iraq, started off a controversy about the size, nature and location of the enemy. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Lawrence Di Rita was recently questioned about Keane's remarks. A Department of Defense News transcript reports:

Q General Conway, General Jack Keane, the former vice chief of the Army has apparently just come back from Iraq. And he has said at a luncheon yesterday that U.S. forces had either captured or killed some 50,000 insurgents so far this year. Is that number accurate? Can you tell us how many were captured or how many were killed? And whether or not -- you know, what that says about the size of the insurgency?

GEN. CONWAY: I just saw the article this morning, and I accept the fact that General Keane has been in-country certainly since I have. I can't speak to his source of the figures. I can tell you that we don't keep that metric here. So I'm afraid I can't confirm or deny the accuracy of those figures.

Q Well, I mean -- U.S. forces are constantly rolling up -- and Iraqi forces are rolling up suspected insurgents. Some are held, some are released. Do you not -- can either one of you give us any idea of how many are being held now, and does the numbers seem reasonable? And setting the number aside for a moment, what does it say about the size of the insurgency if there have been numbers in that range?

MR. DI RITA: Well, you know, it's something that commanders have been asked on many occasions. I think the secretary has certainly been asked it. It's an interesting thing to understand, you know, what's the size of the adversary that we're facing. And the estimates have ranged from a few thousand on the low end to many tens of thousands on the high end -- this now -- this comment that General Keane has made. It's not a number that we do track. It's -- there is -- we are capturing or killing a large number of bad guys in Iraq. We are detaining a large number of people who are under investigation either as criminal elements or potential insurgents from whom we can gather additional information.

But, you know, we don't tend to count. Nobody's maintaining a count of the size of the insurgency or the numbers that we're capturing because, as we've discussed from here and elsewhere -- before Congress -- it's not a -- first of all, it's not a metric that has a lot of meaning by itself. And secondly, it's a difficult thing to do, and for the effort that would be expended, one would have to wonder what we'd have at the end of the day if we were able to count it with precision. ... 

Q General Keane also said that the U.S. has a pretty good idea of the leadership of the insurgency. He mentioned that eight to 10 leaders occasionally meet and that that was something that was known. Can you comment on that, and whether that's accurate? Is there a -- do you know if there's a core of eight to 10 leaders? Have they met?

GEN. CONWAY: I think those statements are accurate. We're starting to get into some classified type of material at this point. But we have an index, we think, on who the leadership is, and we do know that they occasionally meet. That doesn't portend, I think, other views that it is a very well commanded or controlled insurgency, but we do know that they meet from time to time to talk organization and tactics.

Keane amplified some of his views on the insurgency at a presentation at the Washington Institute, which provided the following summary of his remarks.

The Iraqi insurgency is overwhelmingly Sunni Arab based and can be divided into two main branches: former regime elements and Sunnis opposed to the occupation. The approximately 150,000 thugs and secret police from the former regime are the core of the problem. They have no political agenda for the country, nor are they fighting for a political ideology. Foreign terrorists constitute a small but critical part of the insurgency. Syria, which would like to see the Baath Party to return to power in Iraq, has made it a national objective to help the insurgency. As a result, the insurgents are well-financed and capable of maintaining a level of violence that creates instability and discourages reconstruction efforts. ...

Given the insurgents’ focus on provoking sectarian violence, the absence of all-out civil conflict is remarkable. Of note is the political maturity of the Kurds and Shiites, especially the remarkable restraint demonstrated by the latter in not retaliating on a large scale against Sunnis for attacks clearly calculated to foment civil war. Watching Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani deal with elements within his own community (e.g., Muqtada al-Sadr) has been instructive. Although civil war would be a tragedy, with immense costs, it would at least force a definitive outcome to the ongoing struggle in Iraq. But there are no signs of that happening at this time.

The best indicator of success in Iraq will be the political process. Many ministries and government institutions are effectively being rebuilt from scratch, and that takes time, particularly given the insurgency’s intimidation campaign. If the political transition is stymied, U.S. public support for the war will erode. That is the goal of the insurgents. They believe they can break the will of the American public as occurred during the Vietnam War, when a premature U.S. withdrawal led to military defeat. Indeed, if the United States withdraws from Iraq before the ISF is capable of sustaining itself, it would lose there as well. That, however, is not likely to happen.

Two other speakers, Francis West and Jeffrey White, (both former officials in Defense and intelligence) shared the podium with General Keane. The Washington Institute provided these excerpts of their speech.

West: 'When U.S. forces invaded, they avoided Sunni areas and thus never actually eliminated the Sunni Arab threat. ... The insurgents show no signs of weakening; in fact, they have begun to adopt tactics that are difficult for coalition forces to counter. These fighters learned their lesson in Falluja; they now favor bombs over direct attacks on coalition troops. They have also mastered the art of wrapping their efforts in religion. Accordingly, anti-sedition laws should be passed so that those who incite violence in mosques and schools can be held accountable. ... Regarding Syria, the country is essentially a safe haven for insurgents. The coalition should not allow this. Despite the many obstacles, victory is achievable. When will the coalition know it has won? The day an Iraqi soldier can sit on a bus in uniform and not worry about being a target.'

White: 'The United States has forced Sunni Arabs to make serious decisions about their future. Many of them now appear to be cooperating with the new Iraqi government and participating in the political process. ... The insurgency is growing in intensity and can be expected to continue at its current level for at least six to twelve months. It has endured despite coalition offensives designed explicitly to eliminate it. ... For example, it has reemerged in Falluja despite two major offensives that ostensibly eliminated the insurgent presence there. Even more disturbing, the insurgency enjoys popular support in Iraq. ... Overall, several signs indicate that a civil conflict is under way in Iraq; the Sunnis certainly seem to see it that way. As the ISF assumes more responsibility, the increased targeting of Sunnis in security operations will run an even greater risk of transforming the counterinsurgency into a war against Sunnis. The insurgents are obviously targeting Shiites, while the growing frequency of low-level attacks on Sunnis and the seizure of Sunni mosques indicate further escalation. Unfortunately, these sorts of situations tend to get worse. The upcoming referendum on the Iraqi constitution will give the insurgents a chance to inflict damage on the political process. They may find it easier to enforce a boycott than to compel Sunnis to vote their way. Once people are in the voting booths, the insurgents will not be able to prevent them from voting their conscience.'

(Personal note: I interpret the sentence attributed to Jeffrey White's that "the insurgency enjoys popular support in Iraq" to mean 'the insurgency is becoming or has become a Sunni national war' in the context of his overall depiction of the insurgency as a civil war between Sunni and Shi'ite. Clearly an insurgency which is actually a civil war cannot be gaining popularity among Shi'ites and Kurds as it is directed against them.)

One of the interesting implications of Keane's remarks and its subsequent press fallout, only fleetingly amplified by the forum at the Washington Institute, is how greatly politics has distorted the public face of operations in Iraq. It offers a momentary glimpse into the internal strategic debate. The remarks, let slip by Keane in a fit of supposed absentmindedness, suggest the US cannot admit to inflicting huge numbers of losses on enemy forces because it would imply the insurgency was bigger than earlier described -- at least to Congress. It hints at resistance to recognizing the belligerent role of Damascus. It indicates the Islamic religious establishment, at least of the Sunni variety, has become belligerent itself. It implies that politics prevents recognizing the 'insurgency' not as a struggle between 'Iraqis' and invading Americans, nor even a duel between Al Qaeda and America, but a civil war between Sunnis and Shi'ites and Kurds: in other words, between the ancien regime and a new client ethnic group supported by the US in lieu of the old masters.

(Speculation alert) It hints at the strategic decisions America has taken, not always with success. Direct attacks on Syria may have been vetoed in favor of efforts to detach the insurgency from its Syrian rear, such as Operation Matador. The US apparently continues to build a workable Iraqi unitary state despite the temptation to unleash the Shi'ites on the Sunnis. ('Although civil war would be a tragedy, with immense costs, it would at least force a definitive outcome to the ongoing struggle in Iraq.' -- Keane) America tries not to tar Islam, or even certain sects of Islam, with the brush of terrorism, despite open incitements in mosques. ('anti-sedition laws should be passed so that those who incite violence in mosques and schools can be held accountable.' -- West). Yet the Iraqi operation is adjudged winnable despite these limitations. ('Indeed, if the United States withdraws from Iraq before the ISF is capable of sustaining itself, it would lose there as well. That, however, is not likely to happen.' -- Keane. 'Despite the many obstacles, victory is achievable.' -- West. 'Once people are in the voting booths, the insurgents will not be able to prevent them from voting their conscience.' -- White).

But what sort of victory would it be? Perhaps a shadow victory like that achieved in Korea 50 years ago. A Syria belligerent but not really; Islam still the 'religion of peace' -- whenever it is not inciting attacks against America; Bin Laden in Pakistan but only when he is actually spotted; an Iran with nuclear weapons which they will be bribed not to use. A West partially mobilized against enemies it cannot bring itself to name or destroy, a display of aggression from the civilized herd to prevent further attack from the circling pack of predators serving in lieu. Iraq dozing in an uneasy peace. An act of faith really; faith that things will work out if only we can keep the world spinning on its axis.

Metropolis

The monumental Palace of the Soviets, slated for construction in a starving Soviet Union in the years before the Second World War was the material representation of the ideal of Communism which so captivated Western intellectuals in the 1930s. It was intended by Stalin to be the largest building in the world, constructed for effect on the site of Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was demolished for the purpose in an act of heavy-handed symbolism.

The total height of the building was planned at 415 meters (1365 feet), taller than the Empire State Building, the tallest building at that time. The Palace would have housed several museums, the main and secondary auditoriums, with lower and underground levels given to the traffic handling, storage, and technical equipment. The building was supposed to give an impression of an enormous ladder to the sky. The utilitarian purpose of the building was to house Congresses of Soviets, likely the World Congress of Soviets.

The Palace was only a small part of the proposed reconstruction of Moscow. A display of totalitarian art at a Northwestern University website shows how the building would have looked along a monumental avenue leading to it. The avenue, apparently wider than a football field and many miles long, would shrink trucks and buses into insignificance. Even a zeppelin, itself longer than an ocean liner, is shown hovering the distance no larger in comparison than a hyphen, swallowed up in a cityscape that would have done justice to Coruscant. The Eiffel Tower placed beside it would hardly reach the pedestal of its crowning statue of Lenin which would rise to more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. Stalin's vision was a rival to Hitler's plan to rebuild Berlin on an equally epic scale.  It would not be hard to imagine the Star War's Galactic Senate assembled in Hitler's planned Grosse Hall. There is an air of inhuman evil about these architectural plans. They remind us of a future that never happened despite the efforts of the cleverest intellectuals in Europe. It is a representation of what the capitals of Eurasia would actually have looked like without England's stubborn heroism and America's might.

But the foundations of these huge structures would not in a sense, consist of mighty piles driven into the earth by countless slaves, nor even of the mounds of corpses in concentration camps scattered through the dark forests and grimy little industrial towns of those nightmare empires. Totalitarianism is ultimately founded on an idea; the exact reverse of the notion that all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. How much of this idea still lives on in visions of a new European superstate whose constitution runs to thousands of pages is hard to say. But it is not unfair to assert that the greatest scar inflicted by the totalitarianisms of the 20th century was not on the material landscape, but on the soul of the West. The Communism and Fascism which abolished God and disabused civilization of the sacredness of human life in the name of enlightened progress also destroyed much else. If we are lucky Islam is simply progressing through a Western vacuum that has not yet been filled, stepping over a population still mesmerized by the illusions of the 20th century. If we are unlucky it is coming to build the cities that we ourselves have dreamed, the necropolis over the ruins of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.