Belmont Club

2005-06-01T10:27:00.000Z

Moved to another URL

The Belmont Club has moved to this URL: http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/. The underlying cause of the outage was probably that the blog had gotten too big. I finally got Blogger to publish through the expedient of deleting some very old and forgettable posts. But I won't push my luck. Henceforward, all new posts will be at the new site http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/

2005-05-24T01:55:00.000Z

Choose your Ghetto

KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, asks whether a de facto test of political correctness is being required of prospective teachers. In an article in Higher-Ed Views, Johnson writes:

The program at my own institution, Brooklyn College, exemplifies how application of NCATE’s new approach can easily be used to screen out potential public school teachers who hold undesirable political beliefs. Brooklyn’s education faculty, which assumes as fact that “an education centered on social justice prepares the highest quality of future teachers,” recently launched a pilot initiative to assess all education students on whether they are “knowledgeable about, sensitive to and responsive to issues of diversity and social justice as these influence curriculum and pedagogy, school culture, relationships with colleagues and members of the school community, and candidates’ analysis of student work and behavior.”

At the undergraduate level, these high-sounding principles have been translated into practice through a required class called “Language and Literacy Development in Secondary Education.” According to numerous students, the course’s instructor demanded that they recognize “white English” as the “oppressors’ language.” Without explanation, the class spent its session before Election Day screening Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. When several students complained to the professor about the course’s politicized content, they were informed that their previous education had left them “brainwashed” on matters relating to race and social justice.

Johnson argues that a required commitment to "social justice" is sometimes used as a proxy to require a set of political beliefs. But in a sense this requirement only sets the seal on a long-term trend. Citing a survey "of 1,643 faculty members at 183 four-year colleges and universities" by three political scientists, he noted that the great majority of faculty members were self-described liberals.

Faculty members in the study were asked to place themselves on the political spectrum, and 72 percent identified as liberal while only 15 percent identified as conservative, with the remainder in the middle. The professors were also asked about party affiliation, and here the breakdown was 50 percent Democrats, 11 percent Republicans, and the rest independent and third parties. The study also broke down the findings by academic discipline, and found that humanities faculty members were the most likely (81 percent) to be liberal. The liberal percentage was at its highest in English literature (88 percent), followed by performing arts and psychology (both 84 percent), fine arts (83 percent), political science (81 percent). Other fields have more balance. The liberal-conservative split is 61-29 in education, 55-39 in economics, 53-47 in nursing, 51-19 in engineering, and 49-39 in business.

Some reviewers of Johnson's work sharply disagree. One Modern Languages professor said "I have worked with many colleagues over the years whose political and religious affiliations remained unknown to me. When I recommended hiring candidates, I always did so based on their academic credentials." Another basically argued that conservativism is positively correlated with intellectual inferiority. Hence there was no bias.

I think that a more thorough and unbiased study will reveal that far fewer conservative Christians opt to pursue academic careers (outside of religiously affiliated schools) than other groups. This, as I’ve noted previously, is because scholarship in prestigious research universities IMPLIES skepticism, questioning, challenging assumptions, revising traditions, and subverting dominant ideologies—goals that the most conservative scholars and students resist. ... The real dispute is whether or not this isn’t the way that it’s supposed to be. Just as the media must remain “liberal” enough to question and challenge political authority, universities are, in fact, one of the remaining bastions of liberal thinking. Conservative beliefs and attitudes already dominate the political, religious, and social spheres in America (not to mention public school boards around the country), and it’s quite obvious that these recent attacks on “liberal academia” are an attempt to spread that dominant influence into our colleges and universities. So let’s be clear on where and why the battle lines are being drawn.

Another commentator also believed that self-selection was a factor in creating a liberal-conservative imbalance. But he did not put it down to 'smart people choosing a smart career'. He argued that liberals and conservatives diverged in their job choices because they valued different kinds of careers.

there also is the issue of the pool for recruitment. Why are there no conservatives? Probably because conservatives tend to seek private sector jobs that pay more. In every field, the liberals are those paid the least. In physics or political science or english, teaching faculty are paid significantly less than those finding either private sector jobs or those in academic administration. So, the pool for junior faculty is more liberal because conservatives get higher paying positions in the private sector. Inside the university, conservatives become administrators (and again, are paid more).

To this way of thinking, each political persuasion creates its own ghetto by self-selection in which a liberalism is as unlikely to be found in some settings as conservativism in others. But while this may be the case it would be different from formally requiring a political point of view as a pre-requisite for entering into a career.

2005-05-24T00:39:00.000Z

Gorgeous George Galloway 2

A number of readers (JG) and commenters have written to say that the Senate only posts prepared statements. Therefore under those terms, Galloway will not have submitted a statement and there is nothing unusual about it not being on the Senate Website and I apologize for the dramatic flourish. More interestingly, commenter Rick Ballard suggests (I think) that the Senate OFF hearings aren't really going anywhere. The Belmont Club post said, "Unless the Oil for Food hearings have come to a complete dead end, Coleman and Levin's examination of Galloway aren't the pointless thrashings of Senators at a loss to respond to the devastating wit of the British MP but tantalizing clues to the direction they wish the investigations to take," to which Rick Ballard said:

I rarely disagree with your analysis but I see zero evidence that calling Mr. Galloway in response to his taunting of the committee served any purpose whatsoever. Look at the lead up to his appearance and you see pure spotlight politics, if he comes the committee gets ink if he refuses, the committee gets ink. On top of that add the leak of the minority report to the Guardian prior to its publication but after the invitation to Galloway and all I see is Washington politics as usual.

To anyone thinking that the minority report was "innoculation" against charges that the Senate was ignoring American misdeeds wrt OFF I would ask - why did the Dem staff spend the majority of 128 pages on transactions that amounted to far less than 1% of the stolen OFF funds? Sen. Coleman may indeed be a bright and honorable man but Carl Levin hisses when he speaks and can slide through grass undetected. The Galloway/Pasqua report is here and the minority report is here. Until I see full exploration of the Strong/Desmarais/Paribas links by this committee I'm afraid that I'm going to regard it as a smokescreen. Don Kofi is a sottocapo figurehead being set up to take a fall for Mr. Big. The PowerCorp/Total/Final/Elf connections are where the real trail leads - that and the material supplier kick backs - not the oil surcharges.

Maybe they are headed for a dead end. It's entirely possible that Rick Ballard is essentially right about the Senate Committee, that it is hunting with blanks. In this scenario there are too many places that the Oil For Food scandal shouldn't go; owing to the extremely sensitive nature of the connections, so only low-hanging fruit like Kojo Annan, Zhirinovsky and George Galloway are going to take the heat. Galloway, with a kind of perverted sense of honor, may have felt the kind of outrage a small timer feels when being made to hold the bag and lashed out at the Senate investigation because he knows he was low man on the totem. It would be sad if Rick Ballard were right, though it is entirely possible. In the case the Oil For Food scandal isn't the road to justice, but simply a fuzzy glimpse into the corrupt world of international politics in the last years of the 20th century.

2005-05-23T11:46:00.000Z

Gorgeous George Galloway

Reader KM points out in a private email that the testimony of George Galloway before the US Senate has gone missing. According to VUNet:

The website for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs has removed testimony from UK MP George Galloway from its website. All other witness testimonies for the hearings on the Oil for Food scandal are available on the Committee's website in PDF form. But Galloway's testimony is the only document not on the site. ... Press representatives for the Committee had no comment.

The Senate Committee website itself has these terse entries, here reproduced verbatim which does not say that the testimony has been removed but that "Mr Galloway did not submit a statement".

Panel 1
Mark L. Greenblatt [View PDF] , Counsel , U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
Steven A. Groves [View PDF] , Counsel , U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
Dan M. Berkovitz [View PDF] , Counsel to the Minority , U. S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

Panel 2
George Galloway , Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow , Great Britain
Mr Galloway did not submit a statement

Panel 3
Thomas A. Schweich [View PDF] , Chief of Staff, U.S. Mission to the United Nations , U. S. Department of State
Robert W. Werner [View PDF] , Director, Office of Foreign Assets Control , U. S. Department of the Treasury
Peter Reddaway [View PDF] , Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs , George Washington University

The declaration that "Mr Galloway did not submit a statement" is curious given the fact that he spoke for 47 minutes before the Senate, a performance which Christopher Hitchens, no admirer of Galloway, believed was a rhetorical "humiliation" of the Senate. A verbatim transcript of Galloway's testimony, together with a video record of the proceedings can be found at the Information Clearing House. To account for the discrepancy between the factual existence of Galloway's testimony and its nonappearance in the Senate website raises the possibility that Mr. Galloway's oral testimony is considered distinct from a written statement by the Senate rules or it has been expunged from the record because it puts the Senators in a bad light. But there is a third possibility.

The really striking thing about the Galloway's testimony as transcribed by the Information Clearing House is how the Senators and the Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow were pursuing a non-collision course. Galloway had come to score press and public relations points at which, by all accounts, he was successful at doing. But Senator Coleman and Levin seemed totally uninterested in responding to Galloway's sharp political jibes. It was almost as if the Senators were deaf to his political posturing. Instead, they focused exclusively and repeatedly on two things: Galloway's relationship with Fawaz Zureikat and Tariq Aziz. Zureikat was a board member of Galloway's Mariam foundation who is also implicated in the Oil For Food deals. Tariq Aziz was Saddam's vice president.

SEN. COLEMAN: If I can get back to Mr. Zureikat one more time. Do you recall a time when he specifically -- when you had a conversation with him about oil dealings in Iraq?

GALLOWAY: I have already answered that question. I can assure you, Mr. Zureikat never gave me a penny from an oil deal, from a cake deal, from a bread deal, or from any deal. He donated money to our campaign, which we publicly brandished on all of our literature, along with the other donors to the campaign.

SEN. COLEMAN: Again, Mr. Galloway, a simple question. I'm looking for either a yes or no. Did you ever have a conversation with Mr. Zureikat where he informed you that he had oil dealings with Iraq, yes or no?

GALLOWAY: Not before this Daily Telegraph report, no. ...

SEN. CARL LEVIN (D): Thank you, Mr. Galloway.

Mr. Galloway, could you take a look at the Exhibit Number 12...

GALLOWAY: Yes.

SEN. LEVIN: ... where your name is in parenthesis after Mr. Zureikat's?--

GALLOWAY: Before Mr. Zureikat's, if I'm looking at the right exhibit--

SEN. LEVIN: I'm sorry. I was going to finish my sentence -- my question, though. My question was, where your name is in parenthesis after Mr. Zureikat's company.

GALLOWAY: I apologize, Senator.

SEN. LEVIN: That's all right. Now, that document--assuming it's an accurate translation of the document underneath it--would you... you're not alleging here today that the document is a forgery, I gather?

GALLOWAY: Well, I have no idea, Senator, if it's a forgery or not.

SEN. LEVIN: But you're not alleging.

GALLOWAY: I'm saying that the information insofar as it relates to me is fake.

SEN. LEVIN: I -- is wrong?

GALLOWAY: It's wrong.

SEN. LEVIN: But you're not alleging that the document...

GALLOWAY: Well, I have no way of knowing, Senator.

SEN. LEVIN: That's fine. So you're not alleging?

GALLOWAY: No, I have no way -- I have no way of knowing. This is the first time...

SEN. LEVIN: Is it fair to say since you don't know, you're not alleging?

GALLOWAY: Well, it would have been nice to have seen it before today.

SEN. LEVIN: Is it fair to say, though, that either because you've not seen it before or because -- otherwise, you don't know. You're not alleging the document's a fake. Is that fair to say?

GALLOWAY: I haven't had it in my possession long enough to form a view about that.

SEN. LEVIN: All right. Would you let the subcommittee know after you've had it in your possession long enough whether you consider the document a fake.

GALLOWAY: Yes, although there is a -- there is an academic quality about it, Senator Levin, because you have already found me guilty before you -- before you actually allowed me to come here and speak for myself.

SEN. LEVIN: Well, in order to attempt to clear your name, would you...

GALLOWAY: Well, let's be clear about something.

SEN. LEVIN: Well, let me finish my question. Let me be clear about that, first of all. Would you submit to the subcommittee after you've had a chance to review this document whether or not, in your judgment, it is a forgery? Will you do that?

GALLOWAY: Well, if you will give me the original. I mean, this is not -- presumably, you wrote this English translation.

SEN. LEVIN: Yes, and there's a copy underneath it of the...

GALLOWAY: Well, yes, there is a copy of a gray blur. If you'll give me -- if you'll give me the original ...

SEN. LEVIN: The copy of the original.

(CROSSTALK)

GALLOWAY: Give me the original in a decipherable way, then of course I'll...

SEN. LEVIN: That would be fine. We appreciate that.

GALLOWAY: Yes.

It is clear that Coleman and Levin were attempting to pin Galloway down on what he knew and when he knew it. They were also attempting to get him to categorically declare himself on the veracity of the Zureikat document. In the end, Galloway denied talking to Zureikat about oil deals with Saddam before it became a public issue. He also undertook to evaluate the veracity of the document which named him -- in parenthesis admittedly -- in one a document related to Oil for Food.

SEN. LEVIN: ... I wanted just to ask you about Tariq Aziz.

GALLOWAY: Yeah.

SEN. LEVIN: Tariq Aziz. You've indicated you, you--who you didn't talk to and who you did talk to. Did you have conversations with Tariq Aziz about the award of oil allocations? That's my question.

GALLOWAY: Never.

SEN. LEVIN: Thank you. I'm done. Thank you.

SEN. COLEMAN: Just one follow-up on the Tariq Aziz question. How often did you uh ... Can you describe the relation with Tariq Aziz?

GALLOWAY: Friendly.

SEN. COLEMAN: How often did you meet him?

GALLOWAY: Many times.

SEN. COLEMAN: Can you give an estimate of that?

GALLOWAY: No. Many times.

SEN. COLEMAN: Is it more than five?

GALLOWAY: Yes, sir.

SEN. COLEMAN: More than ten?

GALLOWAY: Yes.

SEN. COLEMAN: Fifteen? Around fifteen?

GALLOWAY: Well, we're getting nearer, but I haven't counted. But many times. I'm saying to you "Many times," and I'm saying to you that I was friendly with him.

SEN. COLEMAN: And you describe him as "a very dear friend"?

GALLOWAY: I think you've quoted me as saying "a dear, dear friend." I don't often use the double adjective, but--

SEN. COLEMAN: --I was looking into your heart on that.--

GALLOWAY: --but "friend" I have no problem with. Senator, just before you go on--I do hope that you'll avail yourself of this dossier that I have produced. And I am really speaking through you to Senator Levin. This is what I have said about Saddam Hussein.

SEN. COLEMAN: Well, we'll enter that into the record without objection. I have no further questions of the witness. You're excused, Mr. Galloway.

GALLOWAY: Thank you very much.

In the exchange above it is abundantly clear that both Coleman and Levin simply wanted to enter Galloway's denial of having discussed Oil for Food business with Tariq Aziz in the record. Levin immediately ends his questioning after eliciting Galloway's "Never". Coleman is content to merely establish that Aziz and Galloway were "friends" who had met "many times" before saying "I have no further questions of the witness".

Unless the Oil for Food hearings have come to a complete dead end, Coleman and Levin's examination of Galloway aren't the pointless thrashings of Senators at a loss to respond to the devastating wit of the British MP but tantalizing clues to the direction they wish the investigations to take. The question that must have been in Galloway's mind -- and which is uppermost in mine -- is what else did the Senators know? The persons named by the Senate investigation so far -- Zhirinovsky, Pasqua and Galloway -- reads less like a list of principals than a list of fixers. The truly remarkable thing about Galloway's many meetings with Tariq Aziz was how much time the Iraqi was willing to devote to an obscure British backbencher with no official power. The unspoken question is why Saddam should take the trouble to bribe Galloway, if it were Galloway who was being bribed. The Senators were building a causal bridge to something, but to what? I am in no position to say, but will guess that Galloway's testimony and its disappearance from the Senate website can only be understood in the context of what Coleman and Levin were trying to achieve. My own sense is that the investigations are cautiously nearing far bigger game than George Galloway; but that his evidence or his refusal to give it is somehow crucial to achieving this larger goal. Other pieces of the puzzle may exist but there are two the public know about which may cast an interesting light in hindsight on Galloway's words. The first is contained in the Volcker Commission files which investigator Robert Parton turned over to the Senate Committee and the second is the forthcoming trial of Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz. George Galloway may have appeared in the Senate but even he must be uncertain, until the missing pieces are played on the board, what he really said.

2005-05-22T08:00:00.000Z

The High Hand

Glenn Reynolds notes that the New York Times coverage of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan may not really be about prisoner abuse or even Afghanistan, but about maintaining the prestige of Newsweek. He calls it "circling the wagons", the idea being to teach press critics an object lesson in how expensive it is to humiliate the mass media by catching them at sloppy reporting by flooding the zone with stories similar to the one which was discredited . That may or may not be the case, but it is nearly undeniable that the effect of the media's coverage of American misdeeds has been to make the slightest infraction against enemy combatants ruinously expensive. Not only the treatment of the enemy combatants themselves, but their articles of religious worship have become the subject of such scrutiny that Korans must handled with actual gloves in a ceremonial fashion, a fact that must be triumph for the jihadi cause in and of itself. While nothing is wrong with ensuring the proper treatment of enemy prisoners, the implicit moral superiority that has been accorded America's enemy and his effects recalls Rudyard Kipling's The Grave of the Hundred Dead.

Kipling described how the 19th century Indian Army maintained the myth of the Raj and upheld his prestige to compensate for their small numbers and military weakness. When a Subaltern of the First Shikaris is slain in a jungle ambush, his men know that they must teach the Burmans, first and foremost, how blasphemous it was to hurt one of the elect. For the sake of their masters and themselves the Shikaris raid the home village of the foe and slay them to the last man. "And Sniders squibbed no more; for the Burmans said that a white man's head must be paid for with heads five-score". Kipling's verse finds its modern analogue not in punitive visitations against "insurgent" strongholds in Afghanistan or Iraq -- which would be eagerly reported by the press if they could at all find them -- but in calls for the arrest of the American President or the dismissal of the the Secretary of Defense for a handful of cases of prisoner abuse gleaned from a global battlefield.

For example, a court in The Hague turned down a demand by a dozen plaintiffs who wanted to force the Dutch government to arrest US President George W Bush when he visits the Netherlands. Donald Rumsfeld has been repeatedly asked to resign over 'widespread prison' abuse in Abu Ghraib. The point of these calls for lopsided retribution is to drive home just how dangerous it is to trifle with sacred person and belief system of the enemy. It aims to paralyze anyone who even contemplates such an act of lese majeste. The modern "grave of a hundred dead" isn't a pyramid of skulls over the tomb of British Subaltern: it's an American Secretary of Defense's head on a stake over a photograph of a jihadi wearing a pair of panties as a hat. It is front-page calls for an abject American apology for flushing a Koran down a toilet even if it was never flushed down a toilet at all, except on the pages of Newsweek. It is calls for an admission of guilt if only the mere possibility of guilt existed. And if that were not psychological domination at par with the worst the British Empire could offer in its heyday then nothing is. There are Empires today of a different sort, but they maintain the power by much the same means.

There'll be some who say that toppling Saddam was meant to be an object lesson to the Arab world. If so, it has sent mixed messages because it was never prosecuted with the kind of frightening brutality that some have advocated. The image of the US after OIF is one of a giant afraid to hurt or even give offense to its enemies. Even in the battles of the First and Second Fallujah there were always extraordinary efforts to preserve mosques and similar places, probably to the glee and wonderment of the enemy. If the Kevin Sites incident and the subsequent investigation proved anything it was that the Marines were no Shikaris.

But if the US has been at pains to avoid the image of ruthlessness, the enemy by contrast has made a special effort to magnify his brutality by attacking mosques, beheading women, mutilating children, etc. often on camera. And the really disappointing thing it is that the intended intimidation works. If George Galloway's standard response to his critics is a lawsuit and radical Islam's first recourse is a fatwa then terror's first answer to insult is always the Grave of a Hundred Dead. Intimidation brings them respect from the very people who style themselves immune to intimidation. It is plain to the lowliest stringer from the most obscure tabloid that to insult America is cheap but to insult the local 'militants' very, very expensive. Kipling's cynical dictum is proven again and the lesson not forgotten.

We live in a strange world where the Beslan story vanishes in weeks while Abu Ghraib lives on for years. Maybe it reflects the inherent importance of the stories but it more probably demonstrates the media's ability to prolong the life of some stories while ignoring others. I hope it is not impertinent to observe that the media's demeanor towards terrorism bears more than a passing resemblance to cheap cowardice; but though outwardly similar it really springs from a high-minded idealism, deep courage and profound learning. Or so I hope.

The Grave of a Hundred Dead

There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun;
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

A Snider squibbed in the jungle-
Somebody laughed and fled,
And the men of the First Shikaris
Picked up their Subaltern dead,
With a big blue mark in his forehead
And the back blown out of his head.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Jemadar Hira Lal,
Took command of the party,
Twenty rifles in all,
Marched them down to the river
As the day was beginning to fall.

They buried the boy by the river,
A blanket over his face-
They wept for their dead Lieutenant,
The men of an alien race-
They made a samadh in his honour,
A mark for his resting-place.

For they swore by the Holy Water,
They swore by the salt they ate,
That the soul of Lieutenant Eshmitt Sahib
Should go to his God in state,
With fifty file of Burmans
To open him Heaven's Gate.

The men of the First Shikaris
Marched till the break of day,
Till they came to the rebel village
The village of Pabengmay-
A jingal covered the clearing,
Caltrops hampered the way.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Bidding them load with ball,
Halted a dozen rifles
Under the village wall;
Sent out a flanking-party
With Jemadar Hira Lal.

The men of the First Shikaris
Shouted and smote and slew,
Turning the grinning jingal
On to the howling crew.
The Jemadar's flanking-party
Butchered the folk who flew.

Long was the morn of slaughter,
Long was the list of slain,
Five score heads were taken,
Five score heads and twain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back to their grave again,

Each man bearing a basket
Red as his palms that day,
Red as the blazing village-
The village of Pabengmay
And the "drip-drip-drip" from the baskets
Reddened the grass by the way

They made a pile of their trophies
High as a tall man's chin,
Head upon head distorted,
Set in a sightless grin,
Anger and pain and terror
Stamped on the smoke-scorched skin.

Subadar Prag Tewarri
Put the head of the Boh
On the top of the mound of triumph,
The head of his son below-
With the sword and the peacock banner
That the world might behold and know.

Thus the samadh was perfect,
Thus was the lesson plain
Of the wrath of the First Shikaris-
The price of white man slain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back into camp again.

Then a silence came to the river,
A hush fell over the shore,
And Bohs that were brave departed,
And Sniders squibbed no more;
For the Burmans said
That a white man's head
Must be paid for with heads five-score.

There's a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There's a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun;
And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

2005-05-19T10:41:00.000Z

The Great White North

The drama surrounding attempts by Canadian PM Paul Martin to hang on to power by ignoring a no confidence vote and then offering a Conservative oppositionist a Cabinet post to switch sides has taken an dramatic turn. Conservative Canadian MP Gurmant Grewal tape recorded an attempt by the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Tim Murphy to bribe him to change his vote. Andrew Coyne highlights some snippets of the recorded conversation which are best heard against the background of squeezebox music playing 'Speak softly, love, so no one hears us but the sky. ...'

Murphy: "if anybody is asked the question, 'Well is there a deal?' and you say, 'No.' Well you want that to be the truth. ... So you didn't approach. We didn't approach."

A recent Belmont Club post noted that 'victories' won by the Left with these tactics were more properly understood as acts of desperation by those who feared their long term decline, as if in slipping from the pinnacle, they despaired of ever regaining it again.

The survival of Paul Martin's government, shaken by scandal after scandal, has been bought at the price of violating the spirit of the Westminister system by ignoring what was effectively a vote of no-confidence until they could bribe someone to cross the aisle to square the count. Martin survived but only by bending the rulebook. A Canadian conservative victory without Martin's shennanigans would have been an unremarkable and narrow electoral triumph. But the Liberal Party of Canada's actions now mean that the issues dividing political factions in the Great White North are fundamental. By demonstrating a determination to hold on to power at all costs Martin is increasing the likelihood of a radical, rather than an incremental solution to the Canadian crisis.

Mark Steyn has more in his article A Constitutional Coup

In the forthcoming Western Standard , I make the point that “the big flaw at the heart of the Westminster system is that in order to function as intended – by codes and conventions – it depends on a certain modesty and circumspection from the political class.” Perhaps it was always a long shot to expect a man as hollow as Paul Martin to understand that. ... But the fact remains: by any understanding of our system of government, if the effect of “an extra week’s delay” is to maintain themselves in power by one vote they otherwise would not have had, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a constitutional coup. Like Robert Mugabe, Paul Martin has simply declared that the constitution is whatever he says it is.

What characterizes much of the Left today as exemplified by behavior from George Galloway to Paul Martin is the increasing necessity to maintain their position By Any Means Necessary. While that is dangerous and infuriating, it is a reliable indicator that they have lost control of the system. Things just aren't working the way they used to. And that, despite everything, is cause for hope.

2005-05-19T06:38:00.000Z

The Road to Perdition

Two factors that are normally considered in evaluating the outcome of a contemplated action are encapsulated in the notion of an expected value. An expected value is calculated from two independent components: the probability of an outcome and the 'payoff' of that outcome, where a 'payoff' can be negative: that is, a loss. But into the mathematics comes the human factor, expressed in our risk/return profile. People can choose between two mathematically equal expected values depending on their degree of risk aversion. For example, in making a wager, one might be willing to accept a large risk of losing a small amount and but be unwilling to take a small risk of losing a very large amount, even though they may have the same expected value. That's why few people are willing to play Russian roulette even for large sums of money.

In relation to the Newsweek Koran story fiasco, the existence of a wartime situation distorts the editorial process to the degree that it increases the consequences of a mistake. The probability of making an editorial mistake may be the same as it was ten years ago, given the same standards of news confirmation, but the consequences of an error may have drastically increased in a post-September 11 world where news is disseminated to distant combat zones in the blink of an eye. Newspapers are not alone in facing drastically changed payoff profiles for traditionally accepted practices. By the standards of World War 2 the modern US military has objectively reduced the probability of civilian casualties, prisoner abuse, etc to a degree that General Eisenhower or MacArthur would never have dreamed possible. Unfortunately, the political consequences of those events have grown to such an extent that their increase dominates the reduction in probability in the final product -- the expected value.

All of this is common sense, but it is easy to forget when one is blamed for doing what has always been done. The consequential difference between Woodward's 'Deep Throat' and Isikoff's 'anonymous source' is not necessarily the character or competence of one over the other; nor even the veracity of their informants. It's the thirty years between their stories: it's the fact that there's a war on. In the world of probability times payoff, good intentions are not a factor. Whether one means well or acts maliciously is irrelevant to changing the practical outcome of an event. Thus, the US military has learned it is not enough not to desire reducing collateral damage, it is important to create systems and procedures to achieve this. The small diameter bomb, special targeting software to reduce the footprint of blasts, training, and many other programs costing billions are a more serous proof that avoiding civilian casualties is a priority than any number of heartfelt declarations, however sincere. Because if the size of the payoff has grown, one had better damn well lower the probability to keep the expected value constant.

So when Newsweek went to press with the Koran story on the basis of an anonymous informant and no confirmation (other one denial from an official and the absence of a denial from another) it was not really doing anything untraditional, but it had failed to take into account the changed nature of the world. The US Air Force could well have argued that sending massed formations of heavy bombers to carpet-bomb the Muslim world was not any different from what Curtis Le May and Air Marshall Arthur Harris did during the 'Good War'; but that would have been absurd. The amazing thing is how long it took to understand how the times had changed for the Press as well. That may be in part because the Press is spared the immediate and terrible feedback of combat, to which the military is continuously subjected. The military effort to reduce collateral damage is driven largely by self-interest: the need to avoid unnecessary hostility from civilians in combat zones and to maintain political acceptability for its assigned missions. The requirements of survival have forced the military to evolve. But the Press in holding itself above responsibility has escaped into a kind of Lost World which is even now being shaken by a cataclysm.

2005-05-18T06:32:00.000Z

The Agent 2

The Drudgereport carried a report of this strangely shrill exchange at a press briefing between Bush spokesman Scott McClellan and reporters. The words in the exchange are important, but not nearly as significant as the atmospherics which evoke Edvard Munch's The Scream.

Q With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it's appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not telling them. I'm saying that we would encourage them to help --

Q You're pressuring them.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm saying that we would encourage them --

Q It's not pressure?

MR. McCLELLAN: Look, this report caused serious damage to the image of the United States abroad. And Newsweek has said that they got it wrong. I think Newsweek recognizes the responsibility they have. We appreciate the step that they took by retracting the story. Now we would encourage them to move forward and do all that they can to help repair the damage that has been done by this report. And that's all I'm saying. But, no, you're absolutely right, it's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report....

Q Are you asking them to write a story about how great the American military is; is that what you're saying here?

MR. McCLELLAN: Elisabeth, let me finish my sentence. Our military --

Q You've already said what you're -- I know what -- how it ends.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm coming to your question, and you're not letting me have a chance to respond. But our military goes out of their way to handle the Koran with care and respect. There are policies and practices that are in place. This report was wrong. Newsweek, itself, stated that it was wrong. And so now I think it's incumbent and -- incumbent upon Newsweek to do their part to help repair the damage. And they can do that through ways that they see best, but one way that would be good would be to point out what the policies and practices are in that part of the world, because it's in that region where this report has been exploited and used to cause lasting damage to the image of the United States of America. It has had serious consequences. And so that's all I'm saying, is that we would encourage them to take steps to help repair the damage. And I think that they recognize the importance of doing that. That's all I'm saying.

Q As far as the Newsweek article is concerned, first, how and where the story came from? And do you think somebody can investigate if it really happened at the base, and who told Newsweek? Because somebody wrote a story.

The resentment is palpable. Not the resentment of the spokesman of a Commander in Chief of a military vilified in an article that has already been retracted, but the resentment of reporters whose prerogatives have been questioned. "With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek?", one asks. McClellan actually cannot finish a sentence in answer, because one of the prerogatives of this particular reporter is to ask the questions. "You've already said what you're -- I know what -- how it ends." And the question, although put in different words each time, is monomanaically the same: when did you stop beating your wife? "As far as the Newsweek article is concerned, first, how and where the story came from? And do you think somebody can investigate if it really happened at the base, and who told Newsweek? Because somebody wrote a story." And because "somebody wrote a story" the presumption was that the story had to be true, the retraction notwithstanding, as if it never existed, as if the retraction were completely irrelevant from the discussion. In a sense it is, because there was never a retraction. There may have been words which resembled a retraction, but it was never, ever really made because it is absolutely impossible to ever make it.

2005-05-18T04:24:00.000Z

Three Weddings and a Funeral

Four apparently disconnected events in the past few days have served as the bellweather in the crisis called the Global War on Terror, a name now too narrow to be apt, because it has entailed a confrontation not only between terror and civilization but also Muslims and Christians, Left and Right, Democracy and Facism, the Old World and the New and much else. The four events are the George Galloway testimony before the US Senate; the survival through questionable constitutional tactics of the Liberal Government in Canada; the retraction by Newsweek of its Koran-flushing story and finally, the events in Uzbekistan.

The thread common to Galloway, the manuevers of the Canadian Paul Martin administration and Newsweek article is the extent to which the once-magisterial Left is now resorting to the shrillest and cheapest tactics as defensive maneuvers. Take George Galloway. His grandstand performance before the Coleman committee was brilliant employment of a weak hand. Galloway understood his weakness on substantive issues and turned his testimony into a screed, attempting to change the ground of the debate. It was wonderful theater, but still a weak hand. The Coleman hearings are about Oil For Food; lost in the noise is the essential fact that Galloway was a loose cannon under oath. In his blather he has connected some dots which are going to stay connected, long after Galloway's fifteen minutes of media fame have faded. I think George Galloway will see his theatrical performance replayed more often than he would like.

The survival of Paul Martin's government, shaken by scandal after scandal, has been bought at the price of violating the spirit of the Westminister system by ignoring after what was effectively a vote of no-confidence until they could bribe someone to cross the aisle to square the count. Martin survived but only by bending the rulebook. A Canadian conservative victory without Martin's shennanigans would have been an unremarkable and narrow electoral triumph. But the Liberal Party of Canada's actions now mean that the issues dividing political factions in the Great White North are fundamental. By demonstrating a determination to hold on to power at all costs Martin is increasing the likelihood of a radical, rather than an incremental solution to the Canadian crisis.

The Newsweek affair was, in its way, a demonstration of how the mighty have fallen. The Koran-flushing story can only be understood in the context of the media's unexpected failure to play is accustomed role in the shaping the agenda on the War on Terror, the debate over the United Nations and above all, the 2004 elections. Watching Newsweek build a vaporous story and getting caught out is like seeing a once great prize-fighter resorting to eye-gouging, headbutting and ear-biting on his inevitable slide down into the undercard. Like Galloway and Martin, the Newsweek performance is one of ferocity, but ferocity in decline. There was a time when the Left was represented by the Jaures and the Jean Paul Sartres. Franco Molina once wrote a line for a Para general in the Battle of Algiers: 'Why is it that the Sartres are all born on the other side?" The Left could afford to speak down to its critics. But if Solina had waited a few decades more he would have seen them replaced by George Galloway, Michael Moore, Robert Fisk and Ward Churchill, who now await only the arrival of Bozo the Clown to become the Five Amigos.

The bad news comes not from the headlines but the backpages, in Uzbekistan where it is possible that the United States, in throwing in with President Karimov, has entered into a tactical alliance with a tyrant against radical Islamism: making him an ally -- yes -- but a tyrant just the same. Dan Darling at Winds of Change lays the case out dispassionately for his quondam utility and possible future liability.

Karimov runs an exceedingly tight and draconian ship, but until quite recently ... the majority of the population was hesitant about standing up to him either because they thought that he may be a tyrant and a strongman, but that in so doing he held the country together and prevented it from descending into chaos. ... This is one of the reasons why this protest/rebellion, regardless of the cause, is such a significant development: it means that for a growing number of Uzbeks, the view of Karimov as being a necessary evil has now weakened to the point where large numbers of them are able to protest or even take up arms against his government, with the latter in particular being a pretty big indication that somebody in Uzbekistan thinks they have a chance of bringing down his regime. ... The willingness to stand up to Karimov (the fact that these protests are even occurring is a sign of the impotency of his fearsome police state) is probably a good thing in the long run in the sense of eventually producing a stable democracy in the country. On the flip side, it also provides some definite windows of opportunity for Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the IMU to exploit if they can move quickly, since both groups have been at the forefront of visible opposition to the regime.

This survey of events suggests (and it just my opinion) that the real strategic danger to the cause of freedom and democracy isn't from the noisemakers of the Left but from the temptation to betray principles for tactical gain. It lies on the very same path that Galloway, Martin and Newsweek, in their cunning, have taken. The Left hitched its wagon to the worst men of the 20th and 21st century and it is dragging them into the dustbin of history. Let's go the other way.

2005-05-17T06:48:00.000Z

The Agent

The Agency Problem arises when a conflict of interest arises between a principal and his agent. The press often represents itself as an 'agent' of the larger society, a seeker after the truth on behalf of the public. It is perfectly legitimate to ask whether a conflict of interest can arise between the media and the public. A moment's reflection is enough to establish it is not always the case that the press -- whether a newspaper or an individual blogger -- has interests which completely coincide with the general public because any media entity is a proper subset of the public: being a part it cannot be the whole. In the case of the Newsweek decision to print a poorly sourced story on the descreation of a Koran at Guantanamo Naval Base it is pertinent to ask how the costs and benefits of the magazine's action would be distributed; whether the interests of the agent substantially coincide with the principal -- the public -- in whose name the press often claims to act. But any boost in circulation would accrue benefits to the employees and stockholders of Newsweek and not to general members of the public unless they had shares. It is equally clear that any externalities arising from the Koran story would not normally be borne by Newsweek. Though people might die, places destroyed or riots occur they would not likely happen to people or places associated with Newsweek.

The fallacy in the argument, of course, is the premise that Newsweek acts as an agent for the general public. It isn't, and is free from any responsibility as a public agent in the uproar it has caused by its retracted story. Newsweek is not an agent, but the purveyor of a product for which there happens to be a market protected by the First Amendment. This should be clear, and there is nothing wrong with it. But the question arises: to what extent is a commercial organization free to dump the external costs of their business on others. For historical and political reasons, society has been reluctant to make the purveyors of this sort of information accountable for the full cost of their speech, reasoning it would be better for society -- the Commons -- to bear the externality than to risk restricting expression. As in any case where an economic actor does not bear the entire cost of its actions, there is a tendency to overexploit the capacity of the Commons; to privately appropriate the gains and leave the effluent on the village green to be swept up by everyone else.

In this specific case, it is possible to entirely dispose of the argument that responsbility is somehow the "Bush Adminstration's" because Newsweek itself has retracted the Koran story. Whatever else the "Bush Administration" may be guilty of, it is not guilty in this particular case; but since Newsweek will not bear the costs of its mistake (because it is under no agency obligation to do so) it is equally clear that the costs must be borne by someone else in this particular case also: by the Commons; in this instance largely by the elected agents of the public, i.e. the government and its representatives, that is, by someone in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The interesting question is what should prevent this from happening again and the answer, insofar as I can see, is nothing. The system works that way by design choice. One thing that may create pressure for change is the increasing cost of dumping such externalities onto the Commons. In a world where certain groups are likely to detonate car bombs or radiological devices in response to any real or imagined slight, the Commons may be unable to bear the external costs of news organizations mindlessly purveying inflammatory and poorly-sourced news products. That is essentially the argument for censorship in wartime. Yet censorship itself imposes such huge costs that it is questionable whether such a cure would be better than the disease. In the past the choice of evils was avoided by resorting to social pressure like appeals to patriotism or personal requests. A newsmagazine in 1944 would probably not even considered publishing the equivalent of the Koran story on the basis of the slightest of sources and without any collateral confirmation whatsoever. But we're not in Kansas any more. Without that self restraint there is nothing for it but for the Commons to keep bearing the full cost of Newsweek-type journalism until the system snaps, to the detriment of all.

2005-05-15T23:59:00.000Z

Not Good Enough

The error, according to the Washington Post, happened in this way:

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in a note to readers. In an issue dated May 9, the magazine reported that U.S. military investigators had found evidence that interrogators placed copies of Islam's holy book in washrooms and had flushed one down the toilet to get inmates to talk.

Whitaker wrote that the magazine's information came from "a knowledgeable U.S. government source," and before publishing the item, writers Michael Isikoff and John Barry sought comment from two Defense Department officials. One declined to respond, and the other challenged another part of the story but did not dispute the Quran charge, Whitaker said.

But on Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told the magazine that a review of the military's investigation concluded "it was never meant to look into charges of Quran desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them 'not credible.'" Also, Whitaker added, the magazine's original source later said he could not be sure he read about the alleged Quran incident in the report Newsweek cited, and that it might have been in another document.

Many ordinary bloggers, especially those with connections to the military, or those who have stumbled across significant open source information, self-censor themselves out of a sense of decency and caution whenever they come across information which may cause the loss of life. And they don't even make money from blogs, apart from a few bucks a month which go into expenses, the purchase of a few books or subscription to online information services. But not Newsweek, which is a professional and prestigious publication. Newsweek is admitting to starting an international political firestorm, which got actual people killed, caused civil disturbances, endangered the lives of American troops and significantly set back US efforts in the war on terror because they ran a story from an anonymous source who cannot even remember if he told them what they said he told them. Their efforts at "confirmation" yielded a denial and a non-denial from Defense officials, but no confirmation. In predicate calculus, Newsweek asserted P. Their attempts at confirmation yielded ~P and Null. Hence they concluded P, which is wrong, wrong and wrong. It is wrong from the pont of view of elementary logic. It would be wrong anywhere, even in the Andromeda Galaxy. But apparently it is right at Newsweek.

Newsweek magazine should forthwith compensate the Afghans who died as a result of their baseless, and I mean baseless, story. Even if it turns out, as result of further investigation, that a Quran has somewhere, somehow been flushed down a toilet by somebody, it will not alter the fact that as matters stand, their Guantanamo story hasn't got a leg to stand on.

Update

I agree with some of the commenters who say this Newsweek incident should not pass unpunished, though I am at a loss to see how retribution will be forthcoming. Lawyers would be in a better position to see what avenues of redress are open to those who have been substantially hurt by this pathetic and irresponsible reporting. The most obvious victims are those died in riots which were sparked by the Newsweek story. But there are probably still others who have not yet paid the price for this bungling, most notably US and allied troops in the field. Greater damage still is the ill-will that has wrongfully spread by this "news" magazine, which may indirectly cause or prevent the frustration of a future terrorist incident. The so-called apology offered by Newsweek, with its unreprentant undertones, falls far short of controlling the damage they themselves are responsible for; not merely to their reputation, of which there is little left to save, but to the lives that have been shattered and will yet be.

2005-05-13T05:25:00.000Z

The Acme Blogger Kit

Glenn Reynolds is designing the 'Acme Blogger Reporter' kit, for guys who want to be citizen reporters, just as an intellectual exercise of indicating what they should have. His kit includes a laptop, digital camera and video editing software. It's a good, capable suite, but somewhat expensive and heavy. Although good for covering press conferences, hosted events and meetings, it is less than ideal for events in which the blogger's physical mobility and inconspicuousness are essential. For example, I can't imagine myself carrying a laptop and a long-lens camera around in West Africa, although I admit that's a somewhat extreme example. An alternative setup, which might be dubbed the "Caveman Blogging Kit" would consist of the following:

a 4-5 megapixel point and shoot digital camera that will fit in your shirt pocket. It should take AA batteries and have some video and sound capture capabilities. With a half gig memory card this ought to cost about $400.
a one gig USB storage key. Cost, about $100, maybe less.
access to online file storage where you can dump files via FTP. Cost may vary. Say $10 a month.

For computers I would live off the land using internet cafes and coin-operated type arrangements because the real constraint on the road isn't finding a computer but finding one with a broadband connection. You can download stuff from the camera onto your USB key via adapters, so that in a pinch all you need to carry around is the USB key. You can empty the USB onto your domain subdirectory. This suite is unnecessarily unwieldy for covering conferences and similar events. You have almost no image processing capability. No video editing capabilty. But if you can make arrangements with someone at home base to process the stuff you leave in your online storage, the image editing limitations can be solved. In fact, there might a small business opportunity in processing dropped-off images and video.

Update

One of the readers recommends using a Treo 600 for the Cavemen Blogger role. It has a built-in QWERTY keyboard.

2005-05-12T22:09:00.000Z

Matdador 2

The Associated Press has this report originating from across the Syrian border on Operation Matador.

From their rooftops, Syrians in frontier towns watched airstrikes and battles on the other side of the Iraqi border, where U.S. forces are fighting insurgents in an offensive raging uncomfortably close to Syria's doorstep. Rawaf Hamad, a farmer in the village of Showaiyeh, said he was shaken awake at 3 a.m. Thursday by shelling about a mile away in the Iraqi town of al-Qaim. He heard the sound of warplanes. ''There was heavy gunfire that lasted until 6 a.m today,'' the 24-year-old said.

Readers will recall that Matador opened on Sunday. The report above is datelined Thursday recounting events at a local time of 3 a.m.

In Abu Kamal , a town of 70,000 about three miles from the border, residents could feel the ground shake from the fighting across the border. People took to rooftops to watch U.S. fighter jets and helicopter gunships bombard insurgents hiding in houses in al-Qaim. The Syrians said they could hear small arms fire from the ground, apparently insurgents returning fire. Heavy fighting broke out in the area at about midday Wednesday and continued through daybreak Thursday before it tapered off to sporadic exchanges in the afternoon.

The fighting has been going on for five days. A number of reports have suggested that the Marines have hit an empty sack and that the insurgents had escaped prior to the assault, leaving only those who chose martyrdom to stand and fight. The duration and intensity of the combat suggests otherwise. The Syrian townsfolk report US heavy weapons use (fixed wing, helicopter gunships and probably artillery) and return fire. This type of fire is significant, because heavy weapons are typically used against entrenched enemy fighters. Fixed-wing ordnance is often used to attack positions that cannot be harmed by helicopter missiles because the targets are too strongly built. The fact that many fires are delivered by night is also suggestive, because it recalls Marine tactics in Fallujah, when US forces exploited their superior night vision and surveillance capabilities to maneuver while the enemy was blinded. That in turn implies that the level of enemy resistance is such that individual positions have to be reduced by maneuver and destruction. Reports of return fire from enemy fighters imply they have prepared positions or ammunition caches because it is hard to keep shooting if they only started out with the ammunition in their personal bandoliers. The balance of probability is a significant number of enemy combatants have been caught up in Matador; that the area itself is liberally supplied with defensive positions and the enemy are fighting to the death.

2005-05-12T13:58:00.000Z

Matador

Due to problems with my image server, the maps will be down

I can't do much better than refer readers to Chester, who has carefully plotted all the known incidents of Operation Matador on a map, together with a chronology of when each happened. The enemy delivered mortar fire as the assault began on Sunday and delivered a night-time combined arms counterattack on Monday and made various attempts to escape by boat or vehicle on Tuesday. The list of incidents and chronology belie the assertion that the enemy was gone before the Marines arrived. Chester's map is reproduced below.

One gets the sense that the fluid part of the battle ended on Tuesday morning and that whatever enemy survived the initial confused hours have now hunkered down to sell their lives dearly. The use of AT mines, armor piercing ammunition, mortars plus the provision of enemy troops with body armor suggest the presence of above-average combatants. Chester concludes:

Analysis: The terrorists are dug in and fighting, or at this point, fought, in Ubaydi and Rammanah. The number of attacks on Hwy 12 leading to Al Q'aim suggests that terrorists fleeing to Syria are attacking and being attacked by an increased Marine presence on the Hwy. Those that escape this force must then make it past Camp Gannon to withdraw to Syria. All of these attacks are on the south side of the river, which may not be what was expected.

Fortunately, the Keyhole company has added a new dataset to their mapbase which allows for greater resolution of some of the key areas. If we focus on Rammanah, which is in the bight of the river above, we get the image below. You can clearly see the road as it departs from the marked GIS blue road line and goes into the village, which is apparently built on a low scarp overlooking the fields. The houses are white dots. One possible reason the Euphrates was bridged south was because the enemy probably anticipated an attack from the north, along the existing road. Note also that if Chester's plot is correct, the fierce fight in Ubaydi (approximately where the blue line forks) represents a defense of the crossroads and the northern road approach into the town. Visually at least it is hard to see how resistance can be prolonged very long in a place like this.

There are only sparse clusters of houses between Rammanah and Qaim/Qusabayah and that may explain the dumb-bell shape of the pattern of engagements, although the plotted incidents on Chester's map may not be precisely located. The second image is of the actual border town of Qaim/Qusabayah. It is quite an extensive, nearly urban place and it is easy to understand why insurgents should flee toward the border. Even if they could not actually cross into Syria, there was probably some expectation of being able to hide in the bigger town compared to fighting it out in a farming village like Rammanah above. Clearing the hundreds or thousands of houses in the area of suspects will take time and soak up the efforts of the Marines.

2005-05-11T11:01:00.000Z

Hearts and Minds

Bill Roggio and Chester have come up with a refined map of what they believe to have happened in Operation Matador. Their map reflects their common scenario, whose general characteristics, although speculative, are probably correct based on the terrain. In general, they believe the Marines have swept west along both sides of the Euphrates river, along the axis of the river, with blocking positions in the east. The purpose of these deployments is to basically trap enemy forces between a hammer and an anvil, the hammer being the forces sweeping west and the anvil being the blocking forces preventing escape.

For readers who may not have seen military map symbols before, the following guide to unit types and sizes may prove useful. Thus, in Bill and Chester's joint map, they believe a cavalry or recon platoon is on the ridge northwest of the area of operations and it is represented as a diagonally crossed box with three circles above it.

Cavalry. An oval in the box means mechanized.
Infantry. An oval in the box means mechanized.
Squad	o
Section	oo
Platoon	ooo
Company	I
Battalion	II
Regiment	III

Just a few comments. Both sides have been fighting for control of this border area from the beginning of OIF. As described in this very old Belmont Club post (April, 2004), it was a high intensity battleground even before the Marines took over from the 82nd Airborne. Opinion may differ over the relative importance of foreign support to the insurgency flowing along the Euphrates River line (see The Western Road and the River War). However, the fact that Operation Matador is taking place at all and is being fiercely resisted strongly suggests that both the Coalition and the insurgents regard controlling access to the Syrian border important. That it is contested is an empirical fact, but the really fascinating question is why should this be so. My own belief (speculation alert) is that the single most important requirement of the insurgency is not vast quantities of weapons but a supply of trained fighters and money. There is very little prospect of moving very large quantities of munitions and materiel into Iraq from Syria. Camp Gannon at Qusabayah has closed the road for some time now. But this is unimportant because there are huge amounts of loose explosive and weaponry lying around Iraq and the absolute quantities of these needed to wage a terrorist war is very low. But what is needed, above all, is a steady supply of trainers who will teach locals to build ever more sophisticated weapons from any available material; men who are absolutely committed, unwavering and ruthless; and who are well supplied with money to pay their way. It may be impossible to infiltrate trucks of materiel through the Syrian border, but it is perfectly feasible to trickle in terrorist technicians and pedagogues. Cash and small groups of men are easy to hide. The Counterterrorism Blog argues that the most important input of the Iraqi insurgency is trained militants; and that moreover, its most important output is trained militants as well.

Nowadays, Zarqawi's "martyrdom" volunteers aggressively prowl the streets of Iraq in dump trucks, fire engines, and even police cars laden with tons (literally) of makeshift explosives. Rather than striking at targets of opportunity, the suicide bombers are often used to kickoff coordinated attacks on major targets, as seen in recent Al-Qaida operations on the Al-Sadeer Hotel in Baghdad, Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, Camp Gannon in far western Iraq, a U.S. intelligence base in Tikrit, and (most recently) the "Battles of Omar Hadeed and Mohammed Jassem al-Issawi". Many of these attacks are recorded and subsequently distributed by Zarqawi's Media Wing; some of them are filmed from several different angles and at close enough range for the cameraman to be knocked down by the resulting blast. ... There are few tallies of precisely how many foreign fighters have joined the insurgency in Iraq since 2003, but the estimated number may now exceed 10,000. ...

While many of these men are quickly "martyred" in local combat operations (as has undoubtedly occurred frequently in Iraq), the survivors develop advanced combat experience in an urban environment. They learn in detail the arts of sabotage, assassinations, suicide bombings, and downing commercial aircraft with missiles. Eventually, the local conflict comes to an inexorable end, and the majority of the foreign mujahideen are forced to exfiltrate the area and return to their countries of origin--Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Kuwait, and even France and Italy.

The insurgency becomes a kind of interest-bearing machine in the investment of militants. That endows Zarqawi with a tremendous operational flexibility. Logistically, all he has to move is men and money, because the right kind of men provided by funds, can make weapons anywhere, especially in Iraq. The Euphrates River ratlines, are above all, a mechanism for moving men and disseminating deadly learning. For that reason the Syrian border and its approaches are vitally important to him and he will fight for them. (BTW in historical campaigns terrorists purposely killed far more local Muslims than their direct enemies. For example, in Algeria, terrorists killed almost 20 Algerians for every Frenchman. Terrorists learned that as long as they can maintain a hold on the population by intimidation it is actually not necessary to militarily defeat the army of the primary enemy. One point which I think the Counterterrorism Blog does not discuss is that the Iraqi insurgency is also a foundry for American militants of a different kind. It creates a mirror cohort of American experts who have fought Islamic terrorism and learned from it. The effect of hundreds of thousands of returning veterans whose views and careers will have been changed by the Global War on Terror is something whose effect has not yet been measured.)

The US military would at first glance appear to be at a tremendous disadvantage. Unlike Zarqawi's terrorist force, they must move uniformed men and vast quantities of materiel and must seem helpless against the Al Qaeda meme dissemination machine. But in reality it is not so. The US military forms the counterbackground against which its real maneuver assets, which are intelligence assets, can operate. Just as Zarqawi's terrorists move in a civilian sea from which they can improvise weapons, US intelligence assets maneuver in a battlespace dominated by the uniformed armed forces. In their own way, US intelligence assets can match Zarqawi's men for flexibility: once they find Zarqawi's men the American dominated battlespace can quickly kill them. They have a nimbleness of a different kind. From the US perspective, the Euphrates River ratlines are a human infrastructure to be disrupted, infiltrated and turned. For different, but equivalent reasons, the Syrian border and its approaches are an opportunity to bankrupt Zarqawi's investment in militants. Some indication the nature of the contest between US intelligence and Zarqawi's army of zombies, and the role of the uniformed military, which delivers the actual blow, can be seen in this statement by Col Bob Chase, operations officer of the 2nd Marine division. "The enemy, as you expect, once you hit them hard they have a tendency to go to ground ... There are some locations that we are waiting for the timing to be correct." From that it is reasonable to infer that we are not witnessing an isolated operation, but part of a campaign. In the coming months, both sides will probably attack and counterattack not only in geographical breadth, but in along the depth of each other's echelons.

2005-05-11T03:17:00.000Z

Bandwidth Low

I've used up about 8 of the 12 GB in bandwidth available to host the map images. That should be enough to last today. I've ordered more bandwidth so things should be OK.

2005-05-10T13:39:00.000Z

Battle on the Syrian Border

Due to problems with my image server, the maps will be down

The Marine Battle on the Syrian border at which nearly 100 enemy have been reported killed now turns out to be a heavily fortified area. The Los Angeles Times has correspondent Solomon Moore approximately 4 km northwest (Rabit) from where fighting is taking place referred to in accounts as the Ramana-Obeidi area. (The first map below from Microsoft Encarta shows variations of the place names) It is in the cultivated zone right on the edge of the Al Jazira desert, about 5 km from the Syrian border. From the LA Times account, the Marines approached on the south side of the river, and took mortar fire from towns on the north side of the Euphrates. The Marines crossed the river, using bridging and assaulted into the town.

In nearby Sabah, New Ubaydi, and Karabilah, insurgents fired mortar rounds at Marine convoys along the river's southern edge. Marines who pursued attackers in those towns took part in house-to-house combat against dozens of well-armed insurgents. One Marine was walking into a house when an insurgent hiding in the basement fired through a floor grate, killing him. Another Marine, who was retrieving a wounded comrade inside a house, suffered shrapnel wounds when an insurgent threw a grenade through a window.

The area is a few kilometers to the south of Qaim/Qusabayah, where a Marine border post has been the subject of repeated attacks. The Chicago Tribune and The Associated Press have more details on the degree of fortification of the towns in which fighting is now taking place.

At the vanguard of the assault, Marines who swept into the Euphrates River town of Obeidi confronted an enemy they had not expected to find — and one that attacked in surprising ways. As they pushed from house to house in early fighting, trying to flush out the insurgents who had attacked their column with mortar fire, they ran into sandbagged emplacements behind garden walls. They found a house where insurgents were crouching in the basement, firing upward through slits hacked at ankle height in the ground-floor walls, aiming at spots that the Marines' body armor did not cover

The situation described by the Los Angeles Times is plotted in the Keyhole map below. The Marines appear to have a blocking force in the desert between the towns and the Syrian border and are conducting operations against enemy in towns on the northern bank of the Euphrates.

(My apologies for having mislabeled Rabit as 'Ribat')

Update

Bill Roggio has many more details. The operation is codenamed Matador. Donald Sensing has some additional stuff.

2005-05-10T11:12:00.000Z

Search Box

In response to requests by readers for a search box, its probably good to point out that there's already a search box on the top left hand corner of this blog.

2005-05-09T10:50:00.000Z

Shorts

A mapgame by Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map.
The Private Military Industry by P. W. Singer of Brookings.
Preventing a War Over Taiwan, a Clinton-era Senior Director for Asia on the staff of the National Security Council.

Hat tip: the incomparable MIG

2005-05-09T10:29:00.000Z

Cries and Whispers

Bizarre news from Sweden. (Hat tip: M.S.) A preacher in Stockholm is under police protection after being threatened with death for calling the prophet Mohammed a pedophile. The newspaper Aftenposten reports:

Celebrity Pentecostal preacher Runar Søgaard is under protection by Swedish police after receiving death threats. A high-profile sermon where Sögaard called the prophet Mohammed "a confused pedophile" has triggered fears of religious war. ... "Even if I see Runar while he has major police protection I will shoot him to death," a radical Islamist told Swedish newspaper Expressen. Persons connected to the Kurdish group Ansar al-Islam claim to have received a fatwa, a decree from a Muslim religious leader, to kill Søgaard.

Swedish experts claim that Søgaard is at fault.

Islam expert Jan Hjärpe at the University of Lund told Expressen that such an assassination is a real risk, and he wondered if conflict was the motive for the sermon. ... "It was a statement from an odd man in an odd sect but the effect is stronger antagonism between different groups. It becomes a pure religious polemic and is extremely unpleasant," Hjärpe told the newspaper. Hjärpe saw the incident as a type of beginning of a religious war in Sweden. "It (Sögaard's sermon) has power and influence. It seems to have been Runar's intention to provoke and promote antagonism," Hjärpe said.

Blogger The Fjordman takes a different view. He regard's the Søgaard incident as part of a wider breakdown in the civility between Muslim immigrants and native Swedes. He paints a bleak picture.

Rock throwing and attacks against buses and trains are increasing problems in some suburbs. In Malmö the bus lines in the area of Rosengård have been cancelled. In Stockholm, the authorities went even further and stopped both the bus traffic in the Tensta suburb and the train to Nynäshamn. Head of the bus company in the city of Uppsala, Claes-Göran Alm, is considering doing the same, as the harassment is costing too much money and is putting their employees at risk. Benny Persson is selling window glass in the areas south of Stockholm. According to him, they sometimes have to jump into the car and leave the spot, as they are met with the harassment that some of the bus companies in the suburbs are experiencing: Stone throwing and threats. The same thing is reported from Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city. The company Hemglass are now attempting to run double crews in their cars to face the problems, but they still have had to completely abandon an area outside Södertälje. If you get stuck in an elevator outside Stockholm, you risk staying there for a long time. The repair personnel now demand security guards present when they arrive, since several of their employees have been physically attacked. The most serious problem, however, is the delay of ambulances and the fire department. According to the Emergency Central, attacks against them have become commonplace in the cities. Every Saturday, at least five to ten times emergency personnel are asking for police escort to be able to do their job.

Quoting a New York academic now living in Sweden, The Fjordman believes part of the problem is that Swedish public figures have been studiously avoiding noticing the elephant in the living room. "No debate about immigration polices is possible, the subject is simply avoided. Sweden has such a close connection between the various powerful groups, politicians, journalists, etc. The political class is closed, isolated."

These are powerful accusations. Part of the challenge facing the new Internet media is to find a robust method for collaterally confirming such reports, which are sparsely covered in the regular media. The Fjordman's post is liberally sprinkled with links (many of which are unfortunately, for me at least, in Swedish) so there is little doubt that many of the individual incidents he refers to are true. So it's a good start. But in order to really gauge the magnitude and severity of the situation there is really a need for more investigative blogging. It's a fair bet that the MSM, which still provides the bulk of primary reporting, has gaps in its coverage and there are some -- such as this one -- which are too important to miss.

2005-05-09T09:33:00.000Z

Freedom for the Bali Bomber?

American Expat in Southeast Asia reports that Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, the spiritual head of the Jemaah Islamiyah, may be released early -- before the end of the year -- as a consequence of increasing domestic pressure to absolve him of culpability.

Back on 3 March 2005 CNN reported that Abu Bakar Ba'asyir would recieved a jail term of 30 months for his involvement in the bombing. What they didn't cover or tell you then were the details of the case and what led to such a lenient sentence including captured members of Jemaah Islamiyah retracting statements and the testimony of an American citizen. ... by the name of Fred Burks who had been working as a translator for the State Department and had attended a meeting together with the CIA and the NSA at the residence of Indonesia's president Megawati Sukarnoputri.

This seems to be the same Fred Burks who authored a glowing review in Al Jazeerah of the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. Burks wrote:

This revealing BBC documentary digs deep into the roots of the war on terror, only to find that much of the widespread fear in the post 9/11 world has been fabricated by those in power for their own interests. The intrepid BBC team presents highly informative interviews with top officials and experts in combating terrorism who raise serious questions about who is behind all of the fear-mongering.

This eye-opening documentary shows that, especially after 9/11, fear has been used to manipulate the public into giving up civil liberties and turning over ever more power to elite groups with their own hidden agendas.

In my own experience as an interpreter for US and foreign presidents, I have personally witnessed some of the manipulations mentioned in the above documentary. Having worked as an Indonesian interpreter with the US Department of State for over 18 years, I recently testified to this in the widely publicized trial of Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir. Among other things, Mr. Ba'asyir is accused by US authorities of being the mastermind behind JI (Jemaah Islamiah), which is alleged to be a sister organization of Al Qaeda. Many Indonesians are quite skeptical of these allegations. Like me and the BBC video, they question whether JI was largely fabricated by powerful elite groups with hidden agendas.

At the trial, I testified about a Sept. 2002 secret meeting at which I interpreted for President of Indonesia Megawati Soekarnoputri, US Ambassador Ralph Boyce, National Security Council representative Karen Brooks, and a special assistant sent personally by President Bush (who revealed privately to me that she was a CIA agent). The "special assistant" pressured President Megawati to secretly capture and turn over Abu Bakar Ba'asyir to the United States. Yet US authorities have continually denied ever putting any pressure on Jakarta to act against Ba'asyir.

2005-05-08T07:43:00.000Z

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Paul Volcker has asked the UN to instruct a former investigator probing the Oil For Food Program not to comply with a Senate subpoena to provide it with information on the Oil for Food program . Fox News reports:

Volcker said Friday that Congress has to restrain itself from requiring certain acts and information from current or former IIC members as it conducts hearings into Oil-for-Food. "It is essential that it also protect the integrity and the confidentiality of the independent investigating committee," Volcker told reporters in New York, saying the probe involved "highly sensitive matters."

"Lives of certain witnesses are at stake," he added. "We're not playing games here, we are dealing, and let me just emphasize this, in some cases, with lives." In a later question-and-answer session, Volcker did not elaborate too much on who may be threatened if too much information about who has cooperated is publicized, saying, "I couldn't tell you specifically who was threatening witnesses."

The two reports so far issued by Paul Volcker have dealt with the formal remit of the Oil For Food Program; the procedures under which bids were let; the dubious relationship between Kojo Annan and Cotecna and the possible but isolated malfeasance of Benon Sevan. By his own account, Vocker found ineptitude but not criminality. While he cannot exonerate the Secretary General, nothing in the Volcker reports so far can put a smoking gun in Kofi Annan's hands. So far, it has been a story of incompetence without a crime or a criminal mastermind; of people who resemble conspirators without being members of a conspiracy.

Volcker's implicaton that the "lives of certain witnesses are at stake", though he would not name who specifically "was threatening witnesses" clearly indicates that despite his first two reports, something criminal, indeed murderous lies within the Oil for Food universe. Something that could get people killed. Having excluded the possibility of a criminal conspiracy in his first two reports, Volcker now wants to prevent former investigator Robert Parton from divulging certain undisclosed details to the US Congress because he fears that the "lives of certain witnesses are at stake". That which was denied is now invoked.

There are two possible scenarios at this juncture. The first is that Volcker himself intended to uncover the criminal elements he now warns against in his final report and fears that Parton will jeopardize his careful strategy. The second is that Volcker considered these criminally-related aspects irrelevant to investigation.

Volcker's appeal to the United Nations to prevent the Parton from testifying does not look good since he is asking Kofi Annan, the very man under investigation to prevent the release of information that is part of the probe. Was not the very purpose of the IIC to uncover possible criminal activity in the Oil for Food Program? The UN has only accepted the charge of incompetence, but not criminality in the management of the Oil For Food Program. At a UN press conference following the second Volcker report, Kofi Annan's chief of staff Mark Malloch Brown had this exchange with journalists, after Annan had left the room.

Question: Since you keep raising the “he’s-no-crook” defence, let me ask you about management. By now, the guy that he handpicked to run oil-for-food was found totally discredited; his Chief of Staff was cited in this latest report for doing something that the report finds not credible -- his explanation is not credible; the head of OIOS was found to be lacking in his investigation of oil-for-food; his son was found to be lacking; and his relatives were found to be lacking. Is the circle closing, and is it time -- is Mr. Annan, indeed, as Richard asked, the man to lead this huge undertaking of reform at the UN?

Mr. Malloch Brown: Let’s first agree: I’ll answer the question “Is the circle closing?” if you’ll answer the question “Has the ground moved?” Are you giving up on what I would characterize as the “he’s-innocent-so-lay-off” defence? He’s not a crook.

Question: That’s what Richard Nixon said, too.

Mr. Malloch Brown: Well, that’s why I’m saying -- in other words, let’s first agree that the story has probably moved decisively on today, from probably a final slaying of the ghosts on “there was corruption in this by the Secretary-General” to a second issue, which is, was the management effective enough? And on that, he’s the first to acknowledge it evidently wasn’t. A number of individuals have now been cited in ways which are enormously damaging to the Organization and to all of us who work for it.

But hence, again, the important bit of Volcker, which is the forward-looking bit of Volcker, which is, having disposed of any charges of criminality and corruption against the system as a whole and against the Secretary-General, but having pinpointed failings by others, how do we, moving forward, put in place the management reforms that address that? And I would argue, the kind of things we’re doing on more open, high-quality selection of senior staff, the reform of procurement and audit, the strengthening of OIOS going forward -- all of these issues are a very serious response to the issues raised and show that the Secretary-General takes this very seriously.

We have Annan's and Malloch Brown's categorical assurance on that Volcker found nothing criminal in combing through the UN system. What is there in Parton's box of documents that may be worth killing witnesses for?

2005-05-07T23:18:00.000Z

Yalta

The United States has apologized for several of its Second World War actions, most notably the internment of Japanese-Americans. However, George Bush's apology for the 'sellout' at Yalta is bound to rekindle debate over one of the foundational moments of the post-war world. ABC news reports:

Second-guessing Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Bush said Saturday the United States played a role in Europe's painful division after World War II a decision that helped cause "one of the greatest wrongs of history" when the Soviet Union imposed its harsh rule across Central and Eastern Europe. ... "Certainly it goes further than any president has gone," historian Alan Brinkley said from the U.S. "This has been a very common view of the far right for many years that Yalta was a betrayal of freedom, that Roosevelt betrayed the hopes of generations." Bush said the Yalta agreement, also signed by Britain's Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, followed in the "unjust tradition" of other infamous war pacts that carved up the continent and left millions in oppression. The Yalta accord gave Stalin control of the whole of Eastern Europe, leading to criticism that Roosevelt had delivered millions of people to communist domination. "Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable," the president said. "Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable."

Yalta marked the moment from when Winston Churchill first openly called the Soviet Union a menace to the Free World. With Nazi Germany clearly dying, Stalin had replaced Hitler as the principal menace to Britain. Interestingly enough, the United Nations was created at Yalta. It is the only one of the four major conference decisions whose writ history has not yet rescinded or made moot. The four decisions were:

divide Germany into four ‘zones’, which Britain, France, the USA and the USSR would occupy after the war.
hold elections in the countries of eastern Europe.
set up a government in Poland which would contain both Communists and non-Communists.
set up the United Nations.

Roosevelt was to die shortly afterward and Churchill would be evicted from office by Britain weary of war. Yet Stalin remained. But from his position as a private person, Churchill had one final word of warning to utter. At a speech in Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill said:

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an "iron curtain" has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."

When the Yalta conference was held, US forces were still West of the Rhine. Roosevelt was extremely sick. Britain all but exhausted. Yet so was the Soviet Union. And the United States was soon to be the sole possessor of the atomic bomb. Whether it was possible to prevent Stalin from taking over Eastern Europe without devastating it will always be an open question. In one sense, it is always futile to apologize for history. But George Bush's apology is really addressed toward his perception of American historical intent. He seems to be saying 'yes my predecessor intended to carve up the world with Josef Stalin. He had no right to deliver people into bondage and we will never do it again.' It is a moral apology, no less futile than regrets over slavery or the dispossession of the Indian tribes.

2005-05-07T03:39:00.000Z

Back to the Future

Max Boot describes on vision of 21st century US forces: the 19th century British Army. In Foreign Affairs article (hat tip: MIG), Boot argues that while Iraq has shown US forces to be masters at blitzkrieg, they were less than adept at handling guerilla war. To remedy that, he suggests looking to the past.

Whether or not the United States is an "empire" today, it is a country with interests to protect and enemies to fight all over the world. There is no finer example of how to do this cheaply and effectively than the British Empire. In 1898, it maintained only 331,000 soldiers and sailors and spent only 2.4 percent of its GDP on defense, considerably less than the 3.9 percent the United States spends today. This puny investment was enough to safeguard an empire that covered 25 percent of the globe. ...

The old British Army, he says enjoyed four advantages: a technological edge over their native opponents; an army optimized for colonial fighting; a system of native auxiliaries; and "an unparalleled group of colonial administrators, intelligence agents, and soldiers--many of whom would, in their spare time, double as linguists, archaeologists, or botanists. Adventurers such as Richard Francis Burton, Charles "Chinese" Gordon, T. E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), and Gertrude Bell immersed themselves in local cultures, operating to advance the empire's interests on their own, with scant guidance from Whitehall." One way to pay for the transformation, Boot suggests, is to abandon certain highly expensive weapons programs -- like the F-22 -- an investing in more and better ground troops and equipment, understanding that these ground troops will be better not merely as fighters, but as linguists and nation builders.

The immediate objection that comes to mind is the fate of the 19th century British Army itself. The splendid colonial force was shredded by its first encounters with a technologically equal enemy as it went to war against the Boers at the turn of the century, then later against the Germans in the First and Second World Wars. The British Army could not in the end prepare itself to fight against opposite ends of the spectrum with equal success. The close order tactics developed in the colonial wars (for force protection) were to spell their doom when confronted by the Mauser rifles and automatic cannon of the Boers. The real challenge is to transform the US military in ways that will make it effective both against terrorist tactics and a conventional threat, like China's, where an F-22 may have some worth.

2005-05-06T15:52:00.000Z

Egypt

Egyptian Special Operations have arrested four leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. According to the Washington Post:

Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, a senior Brotherhood member, said police arrested Essam el-Erian, one of the organization's most senior members, and three other leaders during raids on several homes in Cairo. "They took them to police cars waiting outside surrounded by masked members of the Egyptian special operations forces," Mahmoud said. Police also detained more than 130 Brotherhood members in Cairo and outside the capital, said Abdel-Galil el-Sharnoubi, editor of the group's Web site. ... Although banned since 1954, the Muslim Brotherhood is probably Egypt's largest opposition movement and the government tolerates some of its activities. Fifteen Brotherhood members hold seats in parliament, having been elected as independents.

The question is why. Ha'aretz suggests the arrests are not necessarily extraordinary: just a roundup of the usual suspects over the occasional political difference.

The Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1928 and banned since 1954, is used to intermittent government crackdowns. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in an interview with Egyptian television last month that he would not allow any religious group to become a political party but added that he would not object to Muslim Brotherhood members joining political parties.

But News24 and the BBC are more specific: they suggest that Mubarak is eliminating any roadblocks to an uncontested Presidential election.

The banned Muslim Brotherhood has been in open confrontation with Egyptian authorities for the first time in 24 years with its wave of protests demanding an end to President Hosni Mubarak's "dictatorship". ... Under growing domestic and international pressure, the 77-year-old Mubarak agreed last February to amend the constitution to allow multi-candidate elections for the first time in Egypt's history. The amendment is to be discussed in a parliament plenary session on May 10, but Mubarak has yet to announce whether he will run for a fifth six-year term in presidential elections in September. Under the proposed changes, a candidate would need the support of 10% of lawmakers and other members of regional and local councils, all bodies which are dominated by Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP). "The Muslim Brotherhood is using foreign pressure on the Egyptian regime to improve its own political and legal standing," said political analyst Nabil Abdel Fattah.

The BBC reports that it will be hard for the Muslim Brotherhood, or any other opposition party, to get the 10% support to field a candidate to run against Mubarak, though perhaps the Egyptian leader is not taking any chances.

Under the planned law an independent candidate would need to be endorsed by 65 of the 444 members of parliament. Correspondents say an independent is unlikely to get such backing as the ruling party has an overwhelming majority in parliament. Independents - including supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood - make up the most vigorous opposition in Egypt, but number fewer than the 65 needed to endorse an independent candidate.

But at any rate, the opposition may see this as their chance to unseat Mubarak. If so, the Muslim Brotherhood is ironically banking on the US-driven "Arab Spring" to obtain its share of power. Fouad Adjami in his recent Foreign Affairs article, The Autumn of the Autocrats argues that in general, the Arab dictators can no longer hold the line. (Hat tip: DL) The powerlessness of the Middle Eastern President's Club was ironically established first in Iraq and then Lebanon, when no one rode to Saddam's rescue or to Assad's. Who then will ride to Mubarak's?

Cairo will not intercede on behalf of Damascus. If the Egyptians attempt it, their intervention will come without conviction. U.S. policy owes no deference to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. If anything, the Bush administration's new emphasis on reform and liberty only highlights the inadequacy of Mubarak's own regime. ...

But suddenly it seems like the autumn of the dictators. Something different has been injected into this fight. The United States -- a great foreign power that once upheld the Arab autocrats, fearing what mass politics would bring -- now braves the storm. It has signaled its willingness to gamble on the young, the new, and the unknown. Autocracy was once deemed tolerable, but terrorists, nurtured in the shadow of such rule, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. Now the Arabs, grasping for a new world, and the Americans, who have helped usher in this unprecedented moment, together ride this storm wave of freedom.

The price of reaching for the prize of liberating the Middle East is the acceptance of the attendant dangers. That does not mean the goal is not worth striving for, only that in advancing, the sword and shield must be held at guard. The American wave that swept Saddam from power will logically shake the foundations in Cairo and Riyadh. In more ways than one, Iraq was a surprisingly decisive campaign; though what the decision will be, history has yet to reveal.

2005-05-05T12:08:00.000Z

The Prism of War 2

Bernard Lewis's Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East illustrates of how the significance of an event can be overlooked until it is too late. (Hat tip: MIG) He describes in exceptionally lucid prose the consensual roots of classical Islam and concepts which, although a little strange to Western eyes, are the functional equivalents of Liberty and Equality. This older, "libertarian" Islam died by slow degrees, first strangled by Oriental despotism, later by crude attempts at modernization to overtake the West in pursuit of which the Arab world finally imbibed in the worst poisons of Europe.

The second stage of political upheaval in the Middle East can be dated with precision. In 1940, the government of France surrendered to Nazi Germany. .. the governors of the French colonies and dependencies were free to decide: they could stay with Vichy ... Vichy was the choice of most ... this meant that Syria-Lebanon was wide open to the Nazis, who moved in and made it the main base of their propaganda and activity in the Arab world.

It was at that time that the ideological foundations of what later became the Baath Party were laid, with the adaptation of Nazi ideas and methods to the Middle Eastern situation. ... The leaders of the Baath Party easily switched from the Nazi model to the communist model... This was a party not in the ... sense of an organization built to win elections and votes. It was a party in the Nazi and Communist sense, part of the government apparatus particularly concerned with indoctrination, surveillance, and repression.

But these totalitarian systems, Lewis argues, were also fundamentally alien to the Arab-Islamic soil, a circumstance that political Islam exploited superlatively. Islamic preachers raised up their communities against the wannabee Hitlers and Stalins.

Political Islam first became a major international factor with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 ... what happened in Iran was a genuine revolution, a major change with a very significant ideological challenge, a shift in the basis of society that had an immense impact on the whole Islamic world, intellectually, morally, and politically. The process that began in Iran in 1979 was a revolution in the same sense as the French and the Russian revolutions were. Like its predecessors, the Iranian Revolution has gone through various stages of inner and outer conflict and change and now seems to be entering the Napoleonic or, perhaps more accurately, the Stalinist phase.

A tectonic shift was about to occur, though President Jimmy Carter might not have thought it significant at the time. Then a series of events then transpired whose importance was not immediately evident. The development of vast oil deposits in Saudi Arabia made an obscure Wahabist sect globally important and it soon set about exercising its vast power.

The first great triumph of the Sunni fundamentalists was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which they saw -- not unreasonably -- as their victory. For them the Soviet Union was defeated not in the Cold War waged by the West, but in the Islamic jihad waged by the guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. As Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have put it, they destroyed one of the two last great infidel superpowers -- the more difficult and the more dangerous of the two. Dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans would, so they believed, be much easier.

In Bernard Lewis' view immense and destructive forces crept unnoticed onto modern world stage until they manifested themselves on September 11 upon a nearly blind America. It was a witches' brew, compounded of the worst aspects of Nazism and Communism, which in turn fueled a reaction by political Islam, overlaid by the limitless ambitions of the Sunni Wahabists. Somewhere in all of this, Lewis calls out, like a father seeking a lost child, for the libertarian Islam: the Islam of justice and equality of centuries gone by. Whether he will find it is open to debate; and sadly observes that in the West, both freedom and the memory of its existence in the Islamic world are still being edited away.

2005-05-05T11:05:00.000Z

The Prism of War

Michael Yon's Battle for Mosul (he is an author currently in Iraq) is an account of 25th ID operations in that city. His account begins with the end of the Second Battle of Falluja, in late 2004, when "displaced fighters streamed from their nests in Falluja, scuttled into hiding throughout Iraq, and began spreading the disease of violence. Many landed in Mosul." For a time, they rampaged through the city and at one point infiltrated a suicide bomber into an American base, killing 22. They didn't spare the civilians either, and after killing every policeman they could, started on the firemen.

Yon focuses his story on the 1/24 of 25 ID, the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment "Deuce Four". As they hunted down the enemy, the men of the 1/24th were aware the enemy was also seeking them, in particular aiming to ram car bombs, known as VIEDs, into their Stryker armored vehicles, capable of killing everyone aboard. Then Yon describes an incident of some historical interest, which I'll get to in a moment. While accompanying the battalion commander, LTC Erik Kurilla, on April 23, 2005, a large explosion was heard in the distance. A VBIED had succeeded in hitting a Stryker. He narrates:

We loaded the four Strykers, closed the ramps, and rolled. The attack site was three minutes away. ... There might be follow-on suicide attacks, or IEDs planted on target, or perhaps dozens of insurgents with machine guns and rockets might be waiting to ambush us. ... Within minutes of our arrival, the men had wrestled out their severely injured friends and were climbing off the burning Stryker, separating into teams that shored up defensive positions while others scoured the area searching for other IEDs. ... Meanwhile, American sniper teams had found perches around the blast site, and Army attack helicopters circled low overhead, at times so close that I could practically see the patches on the pilots' uniforms ...

Just a few weeks earlier, when another of Kurilla's Strykers was hit by an SVBIED, a camera crew arrived on scene. As a man pumped an AK, an American sniper killed him, wounding the cameraman in the process. When it was later learned that the cameraman was a stringer for CBS who had close ties with the enemy, CBS apologized on the air.

Just as we pulled out, people arrived with cameras and began shooting footage of the scene. One of the men, whom we later learned was an Associated Press correspondent with known ties to the enemy, is dead now. The associate scavenging with him was seriously wounded.

As near as I can tell, Yon's reference to an event "a few weeks earier" is an incident described in the Guardian on April 7th involving a CBS photographer.

Reporters Sans Frontieres today called for an investigation after a freelance cameraman working for CBS in Iraq was shot by US troops who mistook his camera for a gun ... near the northern city of Mosul. It is the second time US forces have mistaken a camera for a weapon ... RSF called the shooting "unacceptable" and called for a "thorough and transparent investigation". "Once again the US forces have targeted a journalist just doing his job," the press freedom organisation said. "We again call on this same army to be more vigilant and discerning in order to avoid these unacceptable blunders." The cameraman (was hit) during an exchange of shots between Iraqi insurgents and members of the 1st brigade of the US 25th infantry division.

The "Deuce Four" is part of the 1st brigade of the 25 ID and it is more than likely that these two events are the same. The CBS cameraman was subsequently detained as a suspected insurgent according to the Associated Press.

BAGHDAD, Iraq Apr 8, 2005 — A cameraman carrying CBS press credentials was detained in Iraq earlier this week on suspicion of insurgent activity, the U.S. military said Friday. ... A spokesman for Task Force Freedom, Capt. Mark Walter, said the reporter suffered minor wounds and was with "a number of people" involved in the shootout. Walter said the reporter was detained immediately after the incident, in part because of statements from witnesses to the battle.

Correspondent Jim Stewart of CBS filed this followup story on April 8: "the military became suspicious when they examined the contents of the camera and found pictures of what appears to be the aftermath of four separate attacks by insurgents using IEDs, improvised explosive devices. The footage, taken so soon after the attacks, suggest the cameraman had to have foreknowledge that the attacks would take place, officials told Stewart."

Of all the incidents described in Yon's Battle for Mosul, the only incident which made the headline news for an extended period was the wounding and detention of the Associated Press photographer. The dramatic events related by Yon: the fights with the insurgents, the desperate rescues -- recede completely into the background in mainstream media stories. By a strange process of substitution what is merely a footnote in Yon's story, the account of the cameraman, becomes the staple of the wire news while the main events of Yon's story shrink to become footnotes in the newspaper coverage of the photographer's saga.

Every information consumer picks up a newspaper to learn the truth. But what is the truth in a situation where a story's message can so radically alter with the point of view? The existence of political 'bias' alone is an insufficient explanation because the conservative press just as gleefully dwelt on the CBS cameraman's dubious affiliations. I can only think that objects and events viewed through the prism of the media are distorted in some fundamental way, so that the death of millions in Darfur can dwindle to insignificance while the "wardrobe malfunction" of a singer at a sporting event assumes the proportions of an international event. Nor are there any easy transformations one can apply to restore matters to their correct relative importance because it is hard to contemporaneously judge what really matters. The intelligence analyst's curse is that he rarely knows which of the myriad facts before him are the truly important ones. He has the consolation of knowing that everything will be 20/20 in hindsight. One of the attractions of reading history is discovering the truth long after it might have helped.

2005-05-04T11:51:00.000Z

The Western Road

A Washingon Post article describes two separate engagements in Iraq in which 24 insurgents were killed. The first involved ground and air attacks which killed a dozen men believed associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi.

unidentified U.S. forces traced what were believed to be members of a Zarqawi cell to a tent and a shed in the desert of the remote, largely uncontrolled Qaim district, east of the Syrian border, the U.S. military said. Twelve of the men were killed in firefights and at least one airstrike, the military said. A 6-year-old Iraqi girl was wounded.

Not far from Qaim, a US helicopter was damaged by ground fire from unidentified forces engaged in fighting near Husabayah. No Americans were killed. (Qaim was formerly the site of a uranium yellowcake plant.) The Washington Post says that "the helicopter crew had been monitoring a gun battle between two unidentified groups when the battling sides spotted the helicopter and turned their fire on it". In a separate action, Marines killed 12 attackers on a checkpoint in the town of Ramadi.

Qaim, Husabayah, Ramadi: what these three engagements engagements have in common is that they all took place on the westbound road from Baghdad to the Syrian border.

It's all old ground. Husabayah or Qusabayah as it is sometimes called for example, was where a US Marine border outpost was attacked all day in early April by about 100 insurgents, including a fire truck converted into a bomb. Steve Fainaru of the Washington Post described the incident vividly:

HUSAYBAH, Iraq -- Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Butler shook himself from the rubble of a suicide truck bombing. He staggered to the ledge of his three-story guard tower and stared into a cloud of white smoke. Butler, 21, of Altoona, Pa., was temporarily deafened by the blast, but he recalled what came next with cinematic clarity. The white smoke parted to reveal a clean red fire engine. It sped past a mural bidding travelers "Goodbye From Free Iraq" and hurtled directly toward Butler, who shot at the fire engine until it exploded about 40 yards away from him.

From the Syrian border, moving eastward towards Baghdad, lie a string of towns along the Euphrates through which foreign fighters and insurgents move back and forth into Iraq. The Chicago Tribune's James Janega talks about the effort of 9 Marine battalions to control the vast swath of territory along this river road. The 'hook' of Janega's story revolved around an engagement in Haqlaniyah, a town about about halfway between the Syrian border and Baghdad where Marines employed a swarming tactic to engulf insurgents who had taken on a four Humvee unit. The unit, Kabar-6, had itself been pursuing a vehicle that had fired on a civil affairs patrol some time earlier and which had fled into a redoubt.

The reaction to the April 20 fight on the outskirts of Haqlaniyah may be a sign of things to come in Anbar province, the restive desert territory west of Baghdad where American military officials believe insurgents and foreign fighters gather, train and then move into the rest of Iraq. Hundreds of troops were directed at Haqlinayah soon after trouble started ... While the idea to swarm enemy fighters is not new to the Marines in Iraq, it is rare that they do it fast enough for more than a few dozen Marines to shoot back at the fighters, let alone to surround the fast-moving insurgency. ... Because several smaller units near Haqlaniyah were ready for other missions April 20, nearly 200 troops from the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines were able to respond to the shootout there within the first hour. The troops remained in town for the next three days.

The Marines eventually captured 40 suspected enemy, explosive, documents and weapons at Haqlinayah. The other engagement mentioned in the Washington Post article is Ramadi, where 12 insurgents were killed in checkpoint attack; it takes us further along the river road to Baghdad's western approaches. The map below (hat tip: DL) shows how Ramadi marks start of a series of infamous towns along the river road which eventually lead to Baghdad.

Qaim, Husabayah, Haqlinayah and Ramadi. This series of foreign-sounding battlefield names when laid out on a map becomes the visible path of the insurgency and their supporting foreign fighters, with one end beginning at the Syrian border and the other terminating in Baghdad. As the Chicago Tribune describes it:

Nine battalions now hold an area where 13 battalions had been stationed until February. In northern Anbar province, which includes Haqlaniyah, about 3,000 Marines are stretched among outposts in an area the size of South Carolina.

Addendum

This isn't to say that all fighters are pouring down from Syria, but does illustrate how the organism of the insurgency has one root within the Sunni populated riverine area and draws additional sustenance from roots reaching across the border. One of the reasons that most US troops are deployed in Northern Iraq is because that is where much of the enemy is.

2005-05-03T11:30:00.000Z

Notes From All Over

David Horowitz and Ben Johnson at Frontpage (hat tip: MIG) ask "who killed Marla Ruzicka?", the activist who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Horowitz doesn't answer the question but suggests that at the time of her death Ruzicka had parted, or was on the way to parting company with the radical Left.

In the last year of her short life, she had moved away from the agendas and organizations of extreme left that had originally directed her life path to the war zones in order to establish a path of her own. In her new endeavor she guided partly by her genuine concern for the defenseless victims of the conflict and partly by political forces that continued to exploit those concerns.

Unlike Rachel Corrie, who lost her life in Gaza serving a solidarity movement with terrorists and who consequently became a martyr for the anti-American cause, Marla Ruzicka was respected and mourned not only by the left but by supporters of the war who knew her, and even by members of the Bush administration and military whom she first harrangued and then petitioned and who ended up in a partially voluntary cooperation with her endeavors.

Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker interviewed UnderSecretary of Defense Douglas Feith in his library. Feith is famous as the man who Tommy Franks once called “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth”, though current JCS Chief Peter Pace likes him. Pace said, “early on, he didn’t realize that the way he presented his positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he changed his ways.” You could see how Feith could rub Franks the wrong way. Feith asked the New Yorker correspondent if he had read "the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1916" as if that's what people did in their spare time. Feith probably does. It was probably his obsession with history that kept him from the seductions of the antiwar movement in his youth.

Feith formed his views as a teen-ager in the Philadelphia suburbs during the Vietnam War. “I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot,” he told me. “Chamberlain wasn’t popular in my house.” Feith’s father lost his parents, three brothers, and four sisters in German death camps. “What I was hearing from the antiwar movement, with which I had a fair amount of sympathy . . . were thoughts about how the world works, how war is not the answer. I mean, the idea that we could have peace no matter what anybody else in the world does didn’t make sense to me. It’s a solipsism. When I took all these nice-sounding ideas and compared it to my own little personal ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ which was my understanding that my family got wiped out by Hitler, and that all this stuff about working things out—well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that ‘war is not the answer,’ are they making a serious comment? What’s the answer to Pearl Harbor? What’s the answer to the Holocaust?” He continued, “The surprising thing is not that there are so many Jews who are neocons but that there are so many who are not.”

For once, Henry Kissinger is stumped. In an interview with MSNBC Kissinger described why it is important to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Kissinger, like most men of his vintage, was steeped in the lore of Cold War deterrence, not just in its general principles, but in all the quasi-mathematical models, the game theoretics and mathematical calculations of choice which underlay it. He looked back almost wistfully at the Cold War as a time of relative certainties: "this was a two-power world" and recoiled in horror at the almost chaotic international situation of the present.

Now if you imagine a world of 30 nuclear powers, deterring each other by criteria, very hard to calculate, affecting us with their nuclear capabilities and the alignments they might cause. And the intentions they might generate from other observers of this situation. And if you add to it what we've already seen in the disposition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan, a friendly country. That, whose weapons in so-called private hands spread to Libya, North Korea, and we offer to Iran or we give them to Iran, then the possibilities of extreme action somewhere along the line, would rise.

Supposing a nuclear weapon went off anywhere in the world, New Delhi, New York, Europe, and 100,000 people got killed, not 3,000. The Trade Center was relatively tame. People got killed in one place. The civic structure of the city was barely affected. All hospitals were operating. All social services were intact. It was a terrible tragedy, but if much of a town is wiped out and all social services collapse, two things happen: one, the impact on that society. But impact on the consciousness of people everywhere. Even today families wonder what may happen to their children under conditions of terrorism. But not yet accurately. But supposing they have to think that they really might lose everything in one minute. Totally unpredictable. You will get new demands on international relations in my view, for which we're not prepared anywhere in any country and then you might get demands that these nuclear weapons have to be brought under some international control.

Which was Kissinger's roundabout way of saying that if war really broke out -- really broke out -- America might have to do something that few would like (what that might be was the subject of a very old Belmont Club post, The Three Conjectures) Kissinger hesitated on the brink of speculating what course of action lay at the end of a road in which first Iran and then others -- including 'so-called private hands' held nuclear weapons, and passed on the question. "I have no precise idea how to do all of this. ... So I’m more conscious of the problem than of the solution. I’m not saying I have a master plan for doing this."

2005-05-02T12:48:00.000Z

Non-State Belligerents

The bombing of a Baghdad ice cream parlor reminded George Will (hat tip: Donald Sensing) of a similar scene in Franco Solina's the Battle of Algiers (scene 65). In the late 1950s the Algerian FLN drove the French out of Algeria through a successful campaign of terror. George Will believes that similar methods will not work in Iraq because the Iraqi insurgency "does not have a fighting faith" of the FLN. While the Algerian insurgency "was fueled by the most potent 'ism' of a century of isms -- nationalism ... one of the strange, almost surreal, aspects of the Iraqi insurgency is its lack of ideological content."

Professor Max Manwaring of US Army War College (hat tip: Austin Bay) argues that it is precisely for that reason -- the lack of ideological content -- that modern insurgencies are so dangerous. The FLN was an insurgency aspiring to become a state; whereas many modern insurgencies are "nonstate belligerents" without such ambitions and they comprise most of the security threats in the world today.

While some international boundary disputes remain alive such as the Bolivian desire to regain access to the Pacific Ocean, and the chronic problems between India and Pakistan, the Koreas, and Ethiopia/Eritrea only a relatively few conventional formations of enemy soldiers are massing and preparing to invade the territory of a neighbor. What we see instead are numerous nonstate and transnational actors, including gangs, actively engaged in internal disruption and destabilization efforts.

Manwaring argues that security threats in the 21st century are less likely to come from invading armies than Osama Bin Laden's terrorists, cults, warlords, transnational criminal organizations, institutionalized West African crime and powerful street gangs. "Rather than directly competing with a nation-state" these Third Generation gangs "can use a mix of complicity, indifference, corruption, and violent intimidation to co-opt and seize control of a state or a portion of a nationstate quietly and indirectly" so that they can go about their rackets. From Central America, to Afghanistan and the Middle East, nation-states are being stalked by organizations which require chaos to thrive. Like terrorists in Iraq but unlike the FLN in Algeria, most of these "Third Generation Gangs" care nothing about traditional nationalism except as a public relations cover to justify their self-serving acts. For them "fighting faith" is not a creed but a talking-point.

In examining warlordism in Afghanistan LTC Raymond Millen of the US Army War College notes that the disintegration of the Afghan permitted the archetypical nonstate belligerent, the Al Qaeda/Taliban, to arise. Now having expelled the Taliban, America faces not a challenging army in Afghanistan, but a succession of gangs and gang alliances seeking to fill the vacuum.

Over 2 decades of incessant warfare destroyed Afghanistan as a functioning state ... In the maelstrom of incessant internecine fighting in the 1990s, the Taliban clawed its way to power and installed a medieval regime, providing stability through brutality. The Taliban regime likely would have ... continued its rule had Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda not provoked the United States into a war ... The swift expulsion of the Taliban and al Qaeda militants resulted in yet another regime change, but it did not ameliorate the fundamental malaise afflicting Afghanistan warlordism. Because of their power and wealth, Afghan warlords and their militias represent the greatest challenge to Afghanistan’s rehabilitation as a functioning state ...

In the western hemisphere, Central American gangs have by corruption and intimidation taken over large parts of their country's state apparatus. Manwaring cites among many examples the fact that "Guatemala’s Vice Minister of Defense, was operating a drug smuggling and robbery ring in conjunction with Colombia’s Cali cartel" and drily notes that the pupils have surpassed their teachers.

As a result, crime rates have increased dramatically to the point where the Honduran annual murder rate ... is double that of Colombia’s ... important because Colombia, with its ongoing internal conflict, is widely considered to be the most violent society in Latin America. ... A majority of those murders took place in public, in broad daylight, and many of the mutilated bodies were left as grisly reminders of the gangs’ prowess.

For this reason Manwaring terms such organizations "the new urban insurgency". He warns that waiting to for Third Generation Gangs to exhibit classic motivations such as 'nationalism' before regarding them as national security threats constitutes a dangerous failure of perception. Nonstate belligerents he says, will stick at nothing, including acquiring WMDs.

Thus, we reiterate that if third generation gangs look like ducks, walk like ducks, and act like ducks they indeed are insurgent-type ducks. ... Nonstate war involves criminal and terrorist actors who thrive among and within various host countries. This type of conflict is often called “guerrilla war,” “asymmetric war,” and also “complex emergencies.”

Manwaring's central insight is brilliant: he knows that Al Qaeda is as much about amassing money and power as about any tenet of the Islamic faith. It's is as much about private ambitions as ideology. It's not personal: it's business. George Will, on the other hand, persists in trying to understand the insurgency through nation-state theory. He compare the Iraqi insurgency to the FLN and wonders what they are about.

Iraq's insurgents are degenerate Hobbesians ...by promiscuously dispensing death, thereby creating the chaos of a Hobbesian state of nature, the insurgents hope to delegitimize the Iraqi government for its failure to provide the primary social good: freedom from fear of violent death. ... To escape such horrors, people would make a rational, if stark, social contract. They would consent to surrender their natural rights to empower a severely strong government that would at least release them from fear of violent death.

What they are about is local, private fiefdoms. Rather than a strong central government, the strategic goal of the Iraqi insurgency may in fact be chaos; the endpoint not a nation-state but warlord-power in an atmosphere congenial to criminal activity. The War College monograph Strategic Implications of Intercommunal Warfare in Iraq by Andrew Terrill points out that the major danger facing Iraq isn't that the insurgency will somehow defeat and expel the US Armed Forces, however devoutly the Left may wish that. The real danger is that the insurgency will ignite a civil war in the years after the US withdrawal.

Immediately following Saddam’s ouster, the U.S. leadership hoped that militias would not take root in the Iraqi political system ... this hope has now proven illusory, and senior U.S. officials acknowledge the need to tolerate some militia activity.... Senior U.S. policymakers currently suggest that militias will become unnecessary as legitimate governmental security institutions are strengthened, and militias are replaced or absorbed by national and regional governmental security forces. Most major Iraqi militias are associated with religious and ethnic political parties, although some are also tribal. As such, these militias would be expected to fight in the interests of their sectarian or ethnic communities, should relations among Iraqi communities decline or collapse.

But an collapse of Iraqi civil society might simply be one among many such failures worldwide. More than a few countries in Central and Latin America, the former Soviet Republics, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East are becoming or have become failed states. From their festering carcasses will crawl not armies but transnational criminal and terrorist organizations of the most vicious kind. The kinds of transformations operational necessity has imposed on US government institutions may hint at what is to come. The emphasis on homeland security, border control, tracking criminal funds flows, developing intelligence databases and the reworking of the Armed Forces so that it can fight mini-engagements in living rooms and alleyways suggest that it is unconsciously evolving to meet this new kind of enemy. But we continue to see the bombing of the Al Riadhy ice cream parlor in Baghdad through the prism of the fictional Cafeteria Rue Michelet in in the Battle of Algiers, the conscious part of the public mind lingering in the era before the challenge to the nation-state had emerged. Solutions to international security problems will continue to be sought through the ambassadors, ministers and representatives of states long after they have lost internal sovereignty; and the United Nations considered all the more important in proportion to its irrelevancy. The darkness will flow onward while we wonder in perplexity what has blotted out the stars.

2005-05-01T10:11:00.000Z

Open Post: Tolstoy on Savagery

Tolstoy argued that people living in every age were afflicted by the illusion of 'these days', as if people who had gone before them had never faced the same human dilemmas in their historical period. A mild flu is going to keep me from posting, but since I can't provide a Zen-like image to stimulate comments, I'll offer something better: Prince Andrei's monologue on the eve of the Battle of Borodino, after which both Moscow and Napoleon's Grand Armee were alike doomed. The speech foreshadows many of the themes that have attended the debate over torture in the 21st century: one of the things which try men souls 'these days'. The wonder of Prince Andrei's (here anglicized to Andrew) speech to Pierre Bezuhov is that it manages to be both a denunciation of war and a condemnation of the "laws of war" at one and the same time.

"So you think we shall win tomorrow's battle?" asked Pierre.

"Yes, yes," answered Prince Andrew absently. "One thing I would do if I had the power," he began again, "I would not take prisoners. Why take prisoners? It's chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me every moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals. And so thinks Timokhin and the whole army. They should be executed! Since they are my foes they cannot be my friends, whatever may have been said at Tilsit."

"Yes, yes," muttered Pierre, looking with shining eyes at Prince Andrew. "I quite agree with you!"

The question that had perturbed Pierre on the Mozhaysk hill and all that day now seemed to him quite clear and completely solved. He now understood the whole meaning and importance of this war and of the impending battle. All he had seen that day, all the significant and stern expressions on the faces he had seen in passing, were lit up for him by a new light. He understood that latent heat (as they say in physics) of patriotism which was present in all these men he had seen, and this explained to him why they all prepared for death calmly, and as it were lightheartedly.

"Not take prisoners," Prince Andrew continued: "That by itself would quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at war- that's what's vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kind-hearted that she can't look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It's all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people's houses, issue false paper money, and worst of all they kill my children and my father, and then talk of rules of war and magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed! He who has come to this as I have through the same sufferings..."

Prince Andrew, who had thought it was all the same to him whether or not Moscow was taken as Smolensk had been, was suddenly checked in his speech by an unexpected cramp in his throat. He paced up and down a few times in silence, but his eyes glittered feverishly and his lips quivered as he began speaking.

"If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended Michael Ivanovich. And when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored.

"But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards.

"They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?" exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. "Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn't do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.... Ah, well, it's not for long!" he added.

2005-04-29T13:21:00.000Z

The Vulcan Mind-Meld

Techdirt has a story on a concept called 'Napster' for news which describes a trend in which individuals have become to reporters as bloggers were to newspaper pundits.

With bloggers getting press passes, citizen journalists creating ambitious open source news networks, and Wikimedia trying their hand at news, newspapers are running scared. Instead of trying to squeeze money from these flailing members, Scripps general manager and editorial director propose that the Associated Press reinvent itself as a digital co-op, a sort of "Napster" for news.

One example it cites is Now Public, where ordinary guys file news and video stories: click a button to "email in footage" it says: and why not you? What has made this possible is widespread Internet connectivity and the availability of cheap consumer video cameras. Readers may recall how the really spectacular footage of the tsunami which swept the Indian was provided by tourists who happened to have been at the disaster sites. That demonstrated how anyone at the site of breaking news could become an instant correspondent. Now Public emphasizes video and has a surprisingly wide collection of stories. Many of those filed from the Middle East focus on the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. And did you know that Scott Ritter predicts a US attack on Iran in June 2005?

While professional journalists may be tempted to poke fun at these early efforts the quantity of these observer-provided stories is likely to grow and its quality likely to improve. The sheer volume of information that will become available is going to make the world both more and less opaque. More opaque because the relatively simple plot lines provided by the mainstream media will be replaced by a flood of filings telling literally all sides of story. Whereas one used to be able to "understand the world" by reading the New York Times lead and grooving into the standard world view, no such simple, consolidated tales will be served up by the oncoming news avalanche. There will be no suggestive lead, no magisterial peroration, no drastic simplification. Instead there will be detail in mind-boggling abundance. The good news is that the world will become more transparent to anyone with the tools and services needed to sift through that deluge of information. The existence of so much collateral information will make it very difficult to lie on any scale. It will be possible to "know" something about an event in detail inconceivable a decade ago. There will never again be a new Walter Duranty who can foist a fraud on a reading public for any length of time from the vantage of privileged access. In short, the world threatens to become a news reader's nightmare and an intelligence analyst's paradise.

The choice of the phrase 'Napster' for news to describe the ways information will flow between these decentralized nodes is extremely apt. When individual nodes are able to transfer information in a peer-to-peer fashion to any other node perception will propagate at rates never before seen. Original presence at an event will be as definite a concept as original music CDs in this age of digital reproduction. It will make the stock phrase "you are there" almost literally true. This surfeit of raw information will overwhelm even the most avid information consumer and will probably spur a demand for aggregation and analysis services of various kinds. Perhaps readers will clamor for the return of Walter Durantys to reinterpret the world in ways that they prefer. Illusion always gave the truth a run for its money. Information, like freedom, is a burden sometimes too great to endure.

2005-04-29T10:19:00.000Z

Pajamas

I'm reprinting this open letter from Roger Simon in toto.

April 28, 2005: An Open Letter to All Bloggers

Charles Johnson, Marc Danziger and I have been sneaking around over the last few months, trying to turn blogs into a business. We have enlisted some others with names familiar to you with the intention of working in two areas - aggregating blogs to increase corporate advertising and creating our own professional news service.

With respect to advertising, we do not wish to go into competition with Henry Copeland's BlogAds, which we fully support. (Some of us even have them!) We are working on another model that will sell ads en masse, not blog-by-blog. We expect this model to go live within a few weeks.

As for the Blog News Service, a lot of work needs to be done and a lot of questions answered. An editorial board consisting of Glenn Reynolds, PowerLine, Lawrence Kudlow, Hugh Hewitt, Marc Cooper, Wretchard of the Belmont Club and Tim Blair, as well as the founders, is already in place with other bloggers in many countries having signed on as contributors.

This is no way meant to be exclusive. We invite you all to join us. On the advertising end, any blogger -- whether political or not -- is welcome. We would be delighted to place ads on your blog and pay you for them. You may find out more and, we hope, join by simply emailing us at join@pajamasmedia.com.

If you are an advertiser, you may contact us at advertisers@pajamasmedia.com.

UPDATE: Besides, the US, blogs from the following countries have signed up as of now -- UK, Australia, Iraq, Egypt, Israel, Spain, Germany, France, India and Malaysia.

2005-04-28T22:24:00.000Z

Curveball 2

Former Former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John E. McLaughlin weighs in on Curveball, a source on Iraqi WMDs that was later described as suspect. In a statement on the subject on April 1 (hat tip: MIG) McLaughlin said:

With hindsight and the benefit of on-the-ground investigation in Iraq, we now know that the specific material in question - reporting from a source code-named Curveball, who alleged mobile production of BW was underway - cannot be substantiated. ... I was told that the source had produced close to a hundred reports - many highly technical in nature. The processes he described had been assessed by an independent laboratory as workable engineering designs. ... Although we did not have direct access to the source, who was handled by a foreign intelligence service, that service had joined US Intelligence Community officers and representatives of two other foreign intelligence services in a quadrilateral conference in 2001 which had judged the reporting credible. Finally, the foreign service handling the source had granted permission to cite the information publicly, indicating, we thought, that it must have confidence in the reporting.

In other words, he believed there were solid reasons to regard Curveball as credible at the time although Curveball's allegations about biological warfare "cannot be substantiated" in the light of on the ground findings.

I am at a loss to explain why accounts of this period vary so sharply. But if officers had confident knowledge of the source's unreliability, I am equally at a loss to understand why they passed up so many opportunities in the weeks prior to and after the Powell speech to highlight it and bring it forward.

McLaughlin is clearly raising the possibility that the doubts about Curveball were inflated in hindsight to tar George Tenet and everyone else with the brush of incompetence. He cites a chain of procedural reviews during which no one within the CIA raised questions about Curveball's reliability. 'How could we have known?' However, McLaughlin's own statement relates that in February 2003 doubts about Curveball's reliability began to surface within the CIA. To what extent, it is not known. McLauchlin said:

As doubts grew about Curveball's information, the Agency engaged in strenuous and ultimately successful efforts to gain direct access to Curveball in order to settle the issue. In the course of this, no one came forward to suggest that this was not worth doing. In other words, no one said the case should have been closed earlier because the source was a fabricator - neither Agency officers nor the foreign service involved.

No one brought internal operational traffic on this matter to the attention of myself or the DCI until late 2003 or early 2004 when an e-mail expressing skepticism about Curveball from a detailee who met him came to light in the course of internal reviews commissioned by the Deputy Director for Intelligence. This e-mail was written in February 2003, and anyone wishing earnestly to impress us with doubts about Curveball could have simply laid this on our desks at any time. This did not happen.

It can be reasonably inferred that lower ranking intelligence officers began to have private doubts about the source by at least February 2003 but were not certain enough to stand up and challenge the imprimatur that had been granted by the quadrilateral conference in 2001. The official line was that Curveball was a diamond and lower ranks probably felt they needed more evidence before pronouncing him paste. That would explain why they sought to see Curveball directly -- to check out their suspicions before taking it up the chain.

I am speculating here -- that the more Curveball was used in speeches by the DCI and the Secretary of State to allege specific facts about Iraq's WMD program, the more difficult it became for junior intelligence officers to tell their superiors that they had got the precious German source wrong from the start. Curveball's take became such an article of faith that no one wanted to come forward as a heretic -- that is until the whole thing crashed and burned.

In hindsight, the decision to take down Saddam Hussein was justified by a wide variety of reasons, some of which may have been individually invalid, but were sound taken as a whole. That Saddam was bad is not seriously challenged; the specifics of his badness will be debated by historians into the far future. Even today, after sixty years, the debate of the extent of Hitler's extermination program of Jews is still being debated. But the decision to "sell" OIF on grounds which would appeal to the peace camp ('to eliminate weapons of mass destruction') created the necessity to advance particular reasons -- a charge sheet -- to justify the 'warrant' that would be issued by the Security Council. That meant making specific claims based on intelligence sources thereby transforming those intelligence sources into articles of faith instead of hypotheses to be continually challenged and re-verified. Politics had corrupted the intelligence process, though not in the way most people had expected.

2005-04-27T22:33:00.000Z

Comments on Zarqawi's Laptop

Dan Darling at Winds of Change has some interesting snippets on what was found in Zarqawi's captured laptop. Some of Dan's comments are:

I've heard there's a fair amount of porn. Now that could be disinformation, but given all the drugs, beer bottles, and the like that were found among the Pious Mujahideen™ in Fallujah I'm certainly not going to dismiss it off-hand.

There's information on his medical condition, so we may finally get an answer on the issue of how many legs he has and what not.

There is at least some record of the correspondence between him and bin Laden. Basically, bin Laden gives him a broad outline as far as strategy is concerned and Zarqawi is in charge of implementing the tactical aspects of his plan together with his lieutenants and allies, such as the Baathists.

Dan says the laptop has been in US possession for some time but that the information has been kept from the press until now. This was indirectly corroborated by an International Herald Tribune report on raids resulting from information found in the laptop.

Using leads found on the computer, troops have taken into custody several suspected associates of Zarqawi in the past two months and have raided at least one location in Iraq where bomb-making materials were found, a Defense Department official said. A senior Pentagon official said, "It's been very valuable information."

The UAV-intel analysis -action loop implicit in the actions which nearly captured Zarqawi speak volumes about much tighter the link between intelligence and operations has become. According to the Daily Telegraph:

Following a tip off from inside the Zarqawi network about the meeting, members of the task force were waiting around Ramadi and Predator drones monitored the region from the air, the report said. The senior military official said that just before the meeting, troops pulled a car over as it approached a checkpoint and at the same time a pickup truck about a kilometre behind quickly turned in the opposite direction. The US believe the militant leader was in the truck.

"Zarqawi always has someone check the waters," the official was quoted as saying. US teams began a chase, but when the truck was pulled over Zarqawi was not inside. The senior military official said they had since learned that Zarqawi jumped out when the vehicle passed beneath a bridge and hid before running to a safe house in Ramadi.

The exploitation of the intelligence must have followed the broad outlines described in the post Spy Vs. Spy where DIA Strategic Support Teams prosecuted targets immediately in order to yield more information. It is this marriage between intel gathering and operations which makes it possible to go after elusive and mobile targets like Zarqawi.

Just three comments on this incident. First, there's more stuff on that laptop hard drive than Zarqawi can ever remmber putting there. Second, the US needs a lower flying slower UAV than the Predator (whose minimum speed is about 80 knots) to track evading individuals in urban terrain. Some of the micro-UAVs under development might have pursued him under the bridge had they been available. Third, compare this incident to Curveball.

2005-04-27T13:15:00.000Z

The Curveball

The last post, Iran 2 laid out the "indirect warfare" scenario against the Mullahs in Teheran in the light of Richard Perle's "lessons learned from Iraq". Mr. Perle expressed great disappointment in the quality of intelligence which guided US policy makers during OIF. "The third lesson is, by now, generally accepted: our intelligence is sometimes, dangerously inadequate." Just how inadequate was made clear by former DCI George Tenet's statement about a poisoned intelligence source codenamed Curveball, whose reports colored many of the perceptions about Saddam's arsenal. Before going to Tenet's statement, here's a background on the Curveball affair from CNN.

The CIA and members of Congress said they want to know how ... doubts were handled regarding a leading source on Saddam Hussein's alleged mobile biological weapons labs -- an Iraqi scientist who defected to Germany, codenamed "Curveball." ... Curveball was working with German intelligence, and U.S. intelligence had limited access to him. The report said Curveball met once with a defense official and seemed to have a hangover. The report said CIA officials contended that they tried to raise warnings about Curveball. One unnamed CIA division chief claims to have called Tenet at midnight the night before former Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his address to the United Nations, which provided the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq. The division chief recalled telling Tenet that foreign intelligence officials were concerned about Curveball's credibility.

But Tenet said he had heard nothing of it. In his statement, he expressed surprise and shock that he had never heard questions raised about the "Curveball" intelligence source before a Presidential Commission unearthed them. (Hat tip: MIG) Tenet said he had never been aware that Curveball's foreign agent handlers had described him as "crazy".

"The representative of the foreign service, it is now reported, responded to CIA’s division chief responsible for relations with the foreign service with words to the effect of “You do not want to see him (Curveball) because he’s crazy. Speaking to him would be “a waste of time.” The representative reportedly went on to say that his service was not sure whether Curveball was telling the truth; that he had serious doubts about Curveball’s mental stability and reliability; and that Curveball had had a nervous breakdown. Further the representative of the foreign service is said to have worried that Curveball was “a fabricator”. The representative reportedly cautioned the CIA division chief that the foreign service would publicly and officially deny these views if pressed, because they did not wish to be embarrassed. It is both stunning and deeply disturbing that this information, if true, was never brought forward to me by anyone in the course of the following events.

1. The coordination and publication of a classified National Intelligence Estimate
2. The declassification and publication of the NIE’s key judgments and findings
3. The production and publication of an unclassified White Paper on Iraq’s WMD capabilities
4. The preparation of testimonies both closed an open before the Senate Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees
5. The briefings provided to members of Congress in which Curveball’s information regarding Iraq’s mobile BW production capability was cited
6. The preparation of Secretary Powell’s speech to the United Nations
7. The White Paper CIA and DIA issued in May of 2003 regarding the trailer found in Iraq
8 CIA’s internal inquiry into Iraq WMD directed by the Deputy Director of Intelligence
9 My speech at Georgetown University in February of 2004 and subsequent appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session on March 4, 2004" (page 1 of Mr. Tenet's statement)

If Tenet's remarks reflect the truth, subordinate intelligence officers in the CIA and German intelligence sat back and watched the US Secretary of State and the DCI make jackasses of themselves time and again. Tenet's description of how he awaited "clearance" from the Germans before greenlighting Secretary Powell's speech is almost pitiful.

The responsible foreign government – the same government which allegedly said four months earlier that Curveball might be a fabricator -- formally cleared our use of the Curveball information. ... before Secretary Powell’s speech. From approximately 11pm until 2am, I was at my command post in my hotel in New York with a senior analyst from the DCI’s Counterterrorist Center reviewing the final text of Secretary Powell’s speech regarding Iraq and terrorism. We initiated numerous phone calls to CIA’s Operations Center in Langley Virginia seeking to contact Mr. Larry Wilkerson, Secretary Powell’s Chief of Staff, who was staying at another hotel in New York. We were seeking to get a final version of the terrorism section for final review.

I initiated a call to the CIA division chief in question in the late afternoon or early evening and well before Secretary Powell adjourned for the evening (around 8 pm) asking the division chief to have the senior representative of that foreign service in Washington call me immediately to provide the required clearance. The representative returned my call promptly with the necessary clearance. (pp 3-4 of Tenet's statement)

Command post at a hotel. Waiting for clearance to use a source that had never been directly seen. And nobody told me. Leaving aside the possibility that Mr. Tenet was set up by an allied intelligence service, nothing illustrates the poverty of the CIA's human intel than this reliance on a German controlled source to which the CIA did not have direct access yet used for one of its most critical assessments. The cupboard was bare. Given that level of failure, a certain amount of "indirect" confrontation with Iran is probably necessary to fill out an intelligence picture that is probably full of blanks before attempting anything further.

He who knows the enemy, knows self will never be at risk;
Does not know the enemy, knows self will win some and lose some;
Knows neither the enemy nor self will always be at risk.
-- Sun Tzu

2005-04-27T12:20:00.000Z

Iran 2

The earlier post Iran described some of the threats the Mullahs may pose to the United States. In general most of the direct threats are not very serious. The threat to 'set the Middle East ablaze' should the US pre-emptively strike Iranian WMD development facilities is pretty pathetic. Supposed instructions to "Revolutionary Guards sectors to respond swiftly - within no more than an hour and without waiting for orders - against pre-selected targets" will almost certainly rely on prepositioned terrorist cells in the absence of any real delivery systems and while this may kill a few hundred people it will hardly put a dent in the fighting power of the American armed forces. The threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack on the US by an Iranian nuclear weapon delivered by missile at high altitude is unlikely to materialize in the short term; and if it did, would originate from an identifiable source. As the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack noted on page 2 those threats are most dangerous when their origin cannot be traced.

EMP effects from nuclear bursts are not new threats .... The Soviet Union in the past ... are potentially capable of creating these effects ... mixed with ... nuclear devices that were the primary source of destruction, and thus EMP as a weapons effect was not the primary focus. Throughout the Cold War, the United States did not try to protect its civilian infrastructure against either the physical or EMP impact of nuclear weapons, and instead depended on deterrence for its safety.

An Iranian EMP device detonated at high altitude over the US lacks the chief advantage of a terrorist nuclear weapon: deniability. Its point of origin would be computed before it completed its flight and would easily be considered a nuclear attack on US soil to be met with massive retaliation. Whether through Revolutionary Guards or missiles, the Mullahs on the whole don't have many good ways of directly attacking the United States and they know this. Their efforts have therefore been focused on acquiring nuclear weapons as a deterrent so that they can safely pursue a program of indirect, terrorist warfare on the US. Their intent is being dictated by their capability.

The more capable US Armed Forces could directly attack the regime in Teheran but its deployments suggest otherwise. A map of the population densities of Iran is shown below (hat tip: Microsoft Encarta), with the more densely populated areas in darker red. The population centers of Iran are in an arc embracing the Caspian Sea behind the rampart of the Zagros mountains to the south and the Elberuz mountains to the north. The 3+ US divisions in Iraq are arguably in the worst place from which to open a land campaign against Iran because they are on the wrong side of Zagros mountain barrier relative to the centers of Iranian power. It might be possible to campaign across the Zagros, around Lake Urumia in the north, for example, and descend on the Tabriz-Teheran road, but it doesn't look easy. During the Iraq-Iran War, Saddam Hussein's forces never made a serious attempt to cross the Zagros into the Iranian interior but concentrated instead on attempting to secure Iran's access to the the Persian Gulf. But unlike Saddam, the US already controls Iran's access to the Gulf by naval force and has no real need to seize its port cities.

It is reasonable to speculate that while the US will improve its capability to attack directly, it is really deployed to confront the Iranian regime indirectly. US organizing efforts in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and in Central Asia have opened clandestine highways into Iran. The game of infiltration and counter-infiltration is apparent in Iraq. An earlier post described the activities of the Iranian-sponsored Badr Corps in Iraq through which the Mullahs may hope to wage an intelligence/terrorist campaign against the US. But just as the enemy has tried to subvert Iraq by infiltrating its security forces the Badr Corps also provides a pathway back into the Mullahcracy for US agents. Agent networks are doors which swing both ways.

As the fall of the Soviet Union and the Syrian retreat from Lebanon illustrated, indirect warfare can go on for a long time until a 'key' issue or event presents itself which precipitates the actual fall of a regime. It would be fair to say that no one could predict the precise place where the totalitarian system will break -- Berlin in the case of the USSR or the Hariri assassination in the case of Syria -- but that it was important to maintain continuous pressure and to be opportunistically ready to turn the 'key' when it presented itself. Perhaps the principal difference between Carter and Reagan; Clinton and Bush was that the latter of each pair was waiting for the lock to turn while the former were uninterested.

When Richard Perle testified before House Armed Services Committe in April 2005 he summed up what he had learned from the Iraq campaign. None of his regrets had to do with military shortcomings. The deficiencies in the American campaign were in the political sphere. He spoke of the need to create indigenous groups sympathetic to democratic aims before taking on a tyranny and of involving them immediately in the governance of the country.

First, it is essential that we are clear about, and carefully align, our political and military objectives. ... American forces, working with the indigenous opposition to the Taliban regime, went into Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, less than a month after the attack of 9-11. ... We went in with a small force--never more than 10,000--and despite the criticism that the force was too small and that we were facing a quagmire as a result, some of which appeared in as little as three weeks, we quickly achieved our objective. ... In Iraq we succeeded in driving Saddam Hussein from office in three weeks. And while we were received in Iraq as liberators in the days following the collapse of Saddam's army and regime, we did not enjoy the benefit of a close collaboration with the indigenous opposition to his brutal, sadistic dictatorship.

This brings me to my second lesson: In aligning our political and military strategy, we should make sure we have the support of a significant segment of the local population. Even more, we should work with those whose interests parallel our own, taking them into our confidence and planning to operate in close collaboration with them.

The third lesson is, by now, generally accepted: our intelligence is sometimes, dangerously inadequate.

Although Perle was ostensibly discussing the Iraqi campaign, his reflections were not made in the context of a disinterested academic inquiry into past events but as lessons meant to be applied to future campaigns; i.e. Iran. This suggests that long before the US attempts a direct assault on the Iranian regime it will probably attempt to achieve each of the three things Perle mentioned: a relationship with a partner Iranian group; the development of a popular desire to overthrow the Mullahs; and a commanding intelligence picture.

2005-04-26T17:55:00.000Z

Iran

The American Thinker (courtesty of RB) describes the Mullah's cheap version of Russian deterrence. Citing the London Arab daily Al-Hayat as translated by MEMRI it quotes:

"In recent months, commanders of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and armed forces have announced their complete preparedness for a possible military attack on Iran's nuclear installations and other sensitive sites. Iranian spokesmen have declared that Iran's response would be formidable. ...Iran's military command has taken into account the possibility of a disruption of [communications] between military posts and the central command... As a precautionary measure, the command has ordered all military and Revolutionary Guards sectors to respond swiftly - within no more than an hour and without waiting for orders - against pre-selected targets, [in light of anticipated] international political pressures that might force Iran to not respond. ... The objective is to deliver a harsh blow to the U.S. and its ally Israel at the outset, and then to expand the arena, in light of international efforts to contain the crisis and limit its scope and intensity, so as to ignite the whole region [emphasis added]. This way Iran will assure its right to respond."

Then there's this article from Joseph Farrah at WorldNet Daily (hat tip: MIG) that describes a devastating Iranian pre-emptive EMP strike on America, which is a related concept. Both articles deal with the extent to which the Iranian regime can threaten the US -- and anyone else -- and thereby resist any attempts to contain it.

The news that Iran has successfully tested missiles capable of detonating nuclear weapons at high altitude – thus creating a devastating electromagnetic pulse attack that could cripple the United States – should be a wakeup call to all Americans. ...Unless President Bush gets serious about homeland security by securing the borders and preparing the nation's infrastructure against an EMP attack, there's little point in continuing the charade of screening airline passengers for cigarette lighters.

This in turn raises the question implied in an earlier post: can the Mullahs be defeated indirectly, in the same way that the Syrians were recently forced from Lebanon, or is a direct confrontation with the regime in Iran inevitable? French negotiators representing European efforts to trade away Iranian nuclear weapons were not above threatening hellfire themselves -- American hellfire -- to which the Iranians said they would respond -- not against the French but the US. From MEMRI again:

According to Al-Hayat, Iranian military sources had reported that during a meeting between a French diplomat and Expediency Council Chairman Rafsanjani, the diplomat asked Rafsanjani whether Iran would relinquish its nuclear program, and was answered with an unequivocal "no." When the diplomat said that the U.S. had selected 325 targets within Iran as the first targets in any possible American attack, Rafsanjani explained to his guest that the Iranian counter-attack would be just as powerful and devastating.

And it's not as if the Apocalypse were everything the Iranians had to rattle. They had threats to brandish lower down the threat spectrum. According to a Juan Cole description of a BBC transcript of an Arabic newspaper article the Iranian-linked Badr Corps in Iran have just announced they will accept ex-Baathists into their fold. This suggests the beginning of a political united front to kick the US out of Iraq before it is quite ready to leave.

Badr is a jihadist movement, not a military unit. There are doctors, engineers, university professors, and women who are members of this organization. Besides, we have women associations in all parts of Iraq. Our organization represents all sects, ethnic groups, and religions in Iraq ... We agreed to incorporate Badr forces into the army and police and other state agencies ... We support the dissolution of the Ba'th party. However, we never were against its members who were forced to join the party organizations. Through you, we announce that the doors are open for them to return to the Iraqi people. We should unite to defend the Iraqi people.

More later.

2005-04-26T01:28:00.000Z

The Syrians Pull Back

The Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon appears to be real.

Lebanon heads down road to democracy as Syrians go home (Times of London)

Syrian Intel Agents Leave Lebanon Post (Guardian)

The Lebanon-watching blog Across the Bay writes:

Within the next 24 hours, the 30-year old Syrian "presence" will be over. The Lebanese are jubilant ... as Michael Young put it: "No doubt they will continue to try to play a role in Lebanon, but the structure of their system of authority in Lebanon has collapsed." An important sign of this collapse is the resignation of the notorious security chief Jamil as-Sayyed. Another sign was the disarray in the carcass of the pro-Syrian gathering, which has already split, long before the much-maligned opposition did.

And it probably is real because there is no point in dissimulation on this scale. Syria is withdrawing actual assets, that is to say the basis of its tangible strength from its former semi-colony. After the the successful destruction of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq weakened Syria's position internationally it's sole claim to hegemony over Lebanon were its secret service and army personnel. Now these are being pulled back. It is questionable whether what remains will be able to dominate Lebanese society if the much larger force, now being evacuated, could not. Once the bulk of the Syrian army is withdrawan across the border, there is no easy way they can be returned without creating an international cassus belli.

The most amazing aspect of this development is the demonstration of the power of indirect warfare. The US did not actually have to drive the Syrians out of Lebanon simply had to make their position untenable, in a manner analogous, but on a much grander scale, than the way a flanking operation turns a line. What do the Syrians gain by pulling back? They 'shorten their lines' by reducing their geopolitical vulnerabilities. The Syrian withdrawal, paradoxically, may be intended to make Damascus slightly less vulnerable. Yet because Syria depended so much upon Lebanon for easy money there are bound to be internal represcussions. For the moment Syria and Iran -- more on this later if I have the time -- are on the strategic defensive.

2005-04-24T11:00:00.000Z

Odds and Ends

Chester is back with a new post about the dramatic repulse of an attack on a Marine outpost in Qusabayah, which is on the Syrian border. He asks why the media doesn't give Marines credit for victories and suggests that asymmetric coverage is the result of high expectations from the USMC. In the same way that only 'dog bites man' is news; he argues that only a Marine defeat will merit front page coverage.

BTW, I subscribed to the Keyhole mapping service for $30 a year. It has very uneven coverage of the world. There's almost no detail for large parts of the world, such as for example, Latin America and extremely good detail for certain others. Maybe that will improve with time. You can zoom in on the Out of Town News kiosk in Harvard Square but can't see any detail of San Jose in Costa Rica. Fortunately, it has fair coverage of Iraq and other areas in the Middle East. For example, the image below is of Qusabayah, the scene of Chester's post. The yellow line is the Syrian border, the blue line is a GIS overlay of the road. One of the nice things you can do with it is 'tilt' the image and boost up the contour contrast so that terrain features stand out more, as you can see below. Because Keyhole hasn't got a place-name database search engine and takes a long time to build up an image, even with with broadband, it isn't very good for wide geographical surveys. So I normally pair it up with Microsoft Encarta, which allows placename search and gives the lat/long coordinates under the cursor. After finding the lat/long in Encarta, you can use instruct Keyhole to 'fly to' the point. But what you get when there is Keyhole data is extremely useful. You can see the actual road to the northeast of the town, which is not exactly coincident with the GIS road.

Also, there's an interesting site up on Chinese affairs in general run by Bruce Chang called Naruwan Formosa. His latest post is about France, China and Taiwan. Speaking of Taiwan, there's very little Keyhole data for the island and its environs!

2005-04-23T07:40:00.000Z

The Battle of Algiers

Reading the script of the Battle of Algiers is like a trip back through time.. It's the 1960s again and conceits and slogans which seem hackneyed today were then fresh and appealing. Take this line of dialogue between a terrorist leader and a French journalist:

1ST JOURNALIST
Mr. Ben M'Hidi ... Don't you think it is a bit cowardly to use your women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?

Ben M'Hidi shrugs his shoulders in his usual manner and smiles a little.

BEN M'HIDI
And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on unarmed villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.

2ND JOURNALIST
Mr. Ben M'Hidi ... in your opinion, has the NLF any chance to beat the French army?

BEN M'HIDI
In my opinion, the NLF has more chances of beating the French army than the French have to stop history.

Of course the fictional Ben M'Hidi's statement was exactly the reverse of the truth. A superiority in airplanes, tanks, missiles and mass armies proved useless to the Arabs in their 1947, 1956, 1965 and 1973 wars against Israel. It was the failure of Nasserism, with its trappings of modern warfare, that led terror to realize the truth: baskets were better than bombing planes. Scriptwriter Franco Solinas had misunderstood the situation entirely. The era of industrial armies fighting in open fields had ended a decade before. From the late 1960s onward war would largely mean urban warfare in which populations -- not bombing aircraft -- were the dominant battlefield factors.

But none of this was apparent when the Battle of Algiers was produced. It was then possible to speak without shame and irony of the irresistible tides of "history" which would bring forth a splendid Algerian independence, just as it had or soon would in the Congo, and Rhodesia and Ghana. But Solinas was remarkably perceptive about some things, such as the centrality of politics to the terrorist struggle. Much of the terrorist strategy revolved around forcing their agenda onto the notice of the United Nations. It is somewhat strange to read the script and recall with what reverence the "UN" was regarded nearly 40 years ago. We have one of those loudspeaker moments (remember loudspeakers?) when the insurgent organization issues this message to the inhabitants of the Casbah:

SPEAKER
"To all militants! After two years of hard struggle in the mountains and city, the Algerian people have obtained a great victory. The UN Assembly has placed the Algerian question in its forthcoming agenda. The discussion will begin on Monday, January 28. Starting Monday, for a duration of eight days, the NLF is calling a general strike. For the duration of this period, all forms of armed action or attempts at such are suspended. We are requesting that all militants mobilize for the strike's organization and success."

No veteran Marxist can read that paragraph without recognizing a dozen words which speak volumes of hidden meaning. Militants. Struggle. General Strike. Mobilize. Oh boy, oh boy. But, there's an indistinct point at which the world, even the recent world ceases to be what it once was. If the 'tides of history' were beyond the power of General Massu's 10th Para Division to stop, there is also a margin at which the post-colonial era, the world of Che Guevarra, Ho Chi Minh and Ben Bella ceases to be: when terrorism itself becomes as anachronistic as the District Commissioner with his barefooted askaris standing sentry.

For those who haven't read the script or seen the movie, the French under General Massu actually won the Battle of Algiers; but the War in Algria is subsequently lost both due to demographics and declining political support in Metropolitan France. The movie itself ends with another loudspeaker moment.

VOICE OF ENGLISH JOURNALIST
(off) This morning for the first time, the people appeared with their flags -- green and white with half moon and star. Thousands of flags. They must have sewn them overnight. Flags so to speak. Many are strips of sheets, shirts, ribbons, rags ... but anyway they are flags. Thousands of flags. All are carrying flags, tied to poles or sticks, or waving in their hands like handkerchiefs. Waving in the sullen faces of the paratroopers, on the black helmets of the soldiers.

SPEAKER
"Another two years had to pass and infinite losses on both sides; and then July 2, 1962 independence was obtained -- the Algerian Nation was born."

Massu died in 2002 at the age of 94.

2005-04-22T23:31:00.000Z

Roger Simon's Mystery 2

While the DNS name servers migrate the old wretchard.com domain to a new hosting site, which will enable me to get my graphic back up, there have been some new developments in the Roger Simon's mystery: the strange connections in the Oil for Food scandal. Readers will recall that an earlier post described the connections between the French-Canadian Demarais family and the oil for food bank BNP Paribas, the connections between Canadian diplomat and fixer Maurice Strong and Saddam bagman Tongsun Park. Now comes another development from the Canada Free Press. It is a very poorly written article, but I will try to lay out the main point, which is that Saddam Hussein invested in a company that is partially owned by the present Prime Minister of Canada.

Among Martin’s Public Declaration of Declarable Assets are: "The Canada Steamship Lines Group Inc. (Montreal, Canada) 100 percent owned"; "Canada Steamship Lines Inc. (Montreal, Canada) 100 percent owned"–Cordex Petroleums Inc. (Alberta, Canada) 4.6 percent owned by the CSL Group Inc."

(Maurice) Strong admitted that Tongsun Park, the Korean man accused by U.S. federal authorities of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, invested in Cordex, the company he owned with his son, in 1997. ... Two years after taking the Park-through-Saddam one million dollars, Cordex went out of business

Cordex was formerly known as "Baca Resources". Maurice Strong, in addition to being an investor in Cordex, owns the Baca ranch, apparently operated by the Crestone Institute.

Hanne and Maurice Strong acquired the big track of land knows as the Baca Ranch in 1978. Guided by the vision of Native American elders that his land had a great purpose, and her own desire to establish a sustainable, interfaith retreat community in North America, Hanne began to implement a new kind of development. She consolidated tracks of land and gave them to traditional religious and educational/intellectual organizations.

None of this is particularly strange in the context of Maurice Strong. Although he has large investments in petroleum he was also a principal moving force behind the Kyoto Protocol. In fact, he is known in the environmental movement as "Father Earth". But Renaissance figure that he was, Strong had no problem doing business with Tongsun Park. A synoptic view of the Cordex transaction is provided by the New York Post:

Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday acknowledged ties with a shady South Korean man indicted Thursday for bribery in the oil-for-food scandal. Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman who serves as Annan's special adviser for North Korea, said Tongsun Park invested in an energy company with which he was associated in 1997. ... A government witness has said Park told him he had invested about $1 million of Saddam's money in a Canadian company established by the son of a U.N. official in 1997 or 1998. He also claimed he used $5 million in Iraqi money to fund the official's business dealings. But there is no proof that the official was Strong, although the probe is continuing.

Update

The National Post of Canada has more information on the relationship between Maurice Strong, Tongsun Park and Cordex. It implies that it was highly unusual for Ambassador Strong to hook up with Tongsun Park.

Mr. Park has apparently admitted that he invested US$1-million in a Canadian company associated with the son of a UN official. Mr. Strong himself immediately came forward and declared that he was the official, and that the company was Cordex Petroleums. Intriguingly, other investors in the company included CSL Group Inc., the holding company controlled by Paul Martin (which was at that time being managed in trust). ...

Mr. Strong is a man of enormous informal power within the "international community." A lifelong self-confessed socialist, he espouses apocalyptic alarmism as a rationale for a much more powerful United Nations. Paradoxically, however, he has always kept one foot in the capitalist camp via an array of often messy business dealings. The fact that he would do business with the likes of Mr. Park has raised eyebrows. The Wall Street Journal wrote this week: "Even if Mr. Strong had the best of intentions, his decision as a high-ranking UN official to be involved in any business relationship with the star bagman of Koreagate suggests seriously odd judgment."

Strong claimed that Cordex needed the money because he neglected it, being preoccupied with environmental matters. The National Post continues: "In a personal interview seven years ago, Mr. Strong said the Cordex situation had placed him in 'financial difficulty.' ... owever, according to Mr. Strong in interviews this week, Mr. Park's money wasn't used as a cash injection but in order to buy out another investor. It will be intriguing to discover who that investor was." The ifs accumulate.

2005-04-22T21:32:00.000Z

Sorry for the bad graphics link

I had hosted that at my old hosting site, with whom I have had chronic, ongoing technical difficulties. I've just signed up with a new hosting site, and I hope they set me up soon. Regards, W.

2005-04-22T10:52:00.000Z

Roger Simon's Mystery

OK. It's tinfoil hat time. Roger Simon begins with a mystery. Where is the Oil for Food investigation going?

I know - this blog seems obsessed with the Oil-for-Food scandal, but it is one of the greatest mysteries of our time and this blog is written by a mystery writer. And, as with any good mystery, you never know the identity of Mr. Big until the very last minute. Of course, in this case it has seemed for some time that Mr. Big's initial (pace Kafka) would be K. But who knows? There are nooks and crannies as far North as Ontario now. Surprises could occur.

Ontario? Does anything spooky ever happen in Ontario? In this case, maybe. Here's a chart I drew up based on known connections. A Canadian high-ranking UN official named Maurice Strong has resigned after being accused to being one of two officials who Saddam bagman Tongsun Park met. According to the Washington Post:

UNITED NATIONS, April 20 -- The United Nations' special envoy to North Korea, Maurice F. Strong, decided Wednesday to step aside until U.N.-appointed investigators and federal prosecutors finish examining his financial ties to a South Korean lobbyist accused of trying to bribe U.N. officials. The move comes less than a week after federal authorities charged Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman, with lobbying U.N. officials as an "unregistered agent" of Saddam Hussein. A witness said Park in 1996 and 1997 invested $1 million in Iraqi funds in a Canadian company owned by the son of a high-ranking U.N. official, a federal investigator said. Strong, a Canadian entrepreneur and environmentalist, acknowledged Monday that Park had invested money in a business he was "associated with" in 1997 and later advised him on his dealings with Pyongyang.

However, this same Maurice Strong has connections to Paul Martin, the Prime Minister of Canada who is now being accused of presiding over a decades long corruption scandal and to the French-Canadian Demarais family which have strong monetary connections to Total Elf Aquitane, which is alleged to have dealings with Saddam Hussein and BNP Paribas, the official bank of the Oil-For-Food program. The Guardian reported on April 6, 2003:

An Anglo-Iraqi billionaire who has close links to the Blair government, built his financial empire on peddling his influence with Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime - the Observer can reveal. ... Auchi was arrested last week in connection with a £26 million kickback scandal involving the French oil giant Elf-Aquitaine. His arrest is the latest spectacular twist in a story that spans three continents and involves an attempted assassination, two of Europe's largest political corruption scandals and a series of multi-million pound oil and arms deals with Saddam Hussein. An Observer investigation can today reveal how a man who built his fortune on secretive deals with the Iraqi regime came to mix with ministers in the Blair government.

Here are a few other snippets which are bound to add to the mystery. While these associations are circumstantial and by no means conclusive, it does serve as a useful roadmap for connecting the dots.

"On Friday, Mr. Hunt reported that Mr. Volcker is a close friend and paid adviser to billionaire Paul Desmarais Sr., who owns the Power Corp. of Canada. Power Corp. shares control of a holding company that is the largest single shareholder of the multinational energy firm Total, which received $1.75 billion worth of oil from Iraq. Total was in discussions with Saddam Hussein to develop oil fields in Iraq if sanctions were lifted (which would have made them worth billions of dollars more). Mr. Demarais' son is currently a director of Total." -- Washington Times

Just a month before the Canada Free Press revealed that Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, is a member of Power Corp.’s international advisory board–and a close friend and personal adviser to Power’s owner, Paul Desmarais Sr.–a U.S. congressional investigation into the UN scandal discovered that Power Corp. had extensive connections to BNP Paribas, a French bank that had been handpicked by the UN in 1996 to broker the Oil-for-Food program. In fact, Power actually once owned a stake in Paribas through its subsidiary, Pargesa Holding SA. The bank also purchased a stake in Power Corp. in the mid-seventies and, as recently as 2003, BNP Paribas had a 14.7 per cent equity and 21.3 per cent voting stake in Pargesa, company records show. John Rae, a director and former executive at Power (brother of former Ontario premier Bob Rae), was president and a director of the Paribas Bank of Canada until 2000. And Power Corp. director Michel François-Poncet, who was, in 2001, the vice-chairman of Pargesa, also sat on Paribas’s board, though he died Feb. 10, at the age of 70. A former chair of Paribas’s management board, André Levy-Lang, is currently a member of Power’s international advisory council. And Amaury-Daniel de Seze, a member of BNP Paribas’s executive council, also sat on Pargesa’s administrative council in 2002. -- Canada Free Press

A UN official said Mr Strong was in the Dominican Republic recuperating from pneumonia and would be making no public comments. Mr Annan, asked if he had known of the relationship between Mr Strong and Park, said he was not aware of it. Mr Strong was also a member of the board of Air Harbour Technologies, along with Mr Annan's son, Kojo Annan, whom the UN is also investigating for possible conflicts of interest in the award of an oil-for-food contract to Cotecna, a Swiss company that employed him. -- Sydney Morning Herald

Maurice Strong 68, and his wife, Hanne, fancy themselves quite the environmental couple. He was chairman of the far-out Earth Council, earning the nickname Father Earth. In 1992 he orchestrated the United Nations Earth Sumniit, which called on the developed world to fork over, for its environmental sins, $600 billion to the Third World. Together the Strongs run the private Manitou Foundation. A gathering place for religious sects (Hanne is into "spiritual interests"), it backs, among other things, research into ethnobotany-the interactions between humans and plants. ... Nevertheless, Strong's a chap to be reckoned with. Congress says that without belt-tightening the U.N. can kiss good-bye $I.'3 billion in back U.S. dues. He is the driving force behind a U.N. reorganization plan aimed at dealing with Congress' objections. ... Strong is up to his eyeballs in Molten Metal Technology, a busted handler of hazardous waste notorious for its flaky technology and ties to presidential hopeful Al Gore (FORBES, Jan. 22, 1996 and Apr. 21, 1997). A big contributor to Gore's campaigns, Molten Metals has surfaced in the Senate hearings on corrupt campaign financing. ... So how did Strong come to be picked to reengineer the U.N.? The way we hear it, former secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali wanted to recruit someone close to the current Administration. Strong, Al Gore's pal, fit the bill. Boutros-Ghali was tossed out last year, but his successor, Kofi Annan, allowed Strong to stay on. Strong says he doesn't want the U.N.'s head honcho's job. His mission, he says, is to save the the planet from industry's depredations. Will the real Maurice Strong please stand up? Global Policy Org, 1998

2005-04-20T11:34:00.000Z

Spy Vs. Spy

Linda Robinson's compelling opening paragraph in US News and World Report is at once suggestive and accusatory. It is suggestive of what human intelligence gathering and analysis can achieve while subtly asking why it was not done before.

In the second week of December 2003, U.S. Special Forces captured an Iraqi man named Fawzi Rashid, a top insurgent leader in Baghdad. Rashid was carrying a letter from Saddam Hussein, U.S. News has learned, that was less than a week old. It would prove to be the key break in the 10-month manhunt for the Iraqi dictator. Military intelligence specialists, working with the Green Berets, persuaded Rashid to identify the courier who had delivered the letter. Two days later, the courier led U.S. forces to Saddam's grim spider hole. The lightning-fast sequence of events was the result of a decision to have intelligence analysts work side by side with soldiers, known in Pentagon-speak as "collectors." "Analysts were telling the collectors what they needed, and collectors were giving their collections right back to the analysts," says a senior Pentagon official, describing Saddam's capture. "What's new . . . is that you had analysts and collectors all under the same chain of command."

If the target in the story was Saddam Hussein, the target of the story was the Central Intelligence Agency. But the Washington Post describes the US military efforts to create a human intelligence gathering infrastructure in less glowing terms, depicting it as a Rumsfeldian dodge to conduct operations without Congressional oversight.

The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces. ... Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain accountable to Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence missions are subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors believed. ... Under Title 10, for example, the Defense Department must report to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations . . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of imminent combat.

At a Department of Defense briefing, an unnamed senior Defense official flatly denied these charges, emphasizing that these Strategic Support Teams were in fact lineal descendants of earlier units called "Human Augmentation Teams"; that they would operate directly under senior commanders -- but not the Secretary of Defense -- and that the tasks of the teams were coordinated with the Director of Central Intelligence. That hardly mollified some critics. AP writer Robert Burns reports "Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and other Democrats called for hearings, but Republicans balked. According to The Washington Post, the Department of Defense is changing the guidelines with respect to oversight and notification of Congress by military intelligence. Is this true or false?" Feinstein wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld." One key difference, according to the IHT was that ""DOD is not looking to go develop strategic intelligence," said one senior adviser to Rumsfeld who has an intelligence background. "They're looking for information like, where's a good landing strip?"

It appears that they are looking for slightly more than that. Global Security reports that the Pentagon is building up a constellation of human intelligence support systems including:

J2X CONOPS -- a system for providing analytic support to HUMINT operations at the strategic, theater, and tactical echelons;
ROVER -- a geospatial Information System-Palmtop- Digital camera system;
FALCON, FORUM and SMINDS -- which are automatic translation systems enabling people of different languages to speak to each other simultaneously or interpet documents in foreign languages while in the field.
WMD1st and Digital RSTA -- WMD analysis and a targeting tool; and
a HUMINT laptop system to house all the relevant tools.

This looks very much like a closed-loop system in which intelligence leads can be prosecuted iteratively until they lead to action, with no discernible boundary in between. But it is not the philosophical abolition of the barrier between thought and deed that really rankles. It is also about turf. Linda Robinson asserts that the scale of the Pentagon effort effectively threatens the CIA monopoly on spying, whatever the Department of Defense says.

A key flashpoint has been the recruitment and handling of sources. For many years, all intelligence sources recruited by U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon, were registered and maintained through the CIA's InterSource Registry. Now the Pentagon has begun registering the human sources it uses for military purposes under a separate registry, called J2X.

Whether or not the Pentagon succeeds in its endeavors remains to be seen. What is less debatable is the need to improve human intelligence operations. Marc Ruel Gercht in a Weekly Standard article described the CIA's currently human intelligence system as seriously broken. He believed that as presently constituted the Agency had no chance of significantly penetrating the ranks of the terrorist enemy.

One can, however, grade intelligence services on whether they have established operational methods that would maximize the chances of success against less demanding targets--for example, against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, which is by definition an ecumenical organization constantly searching for holy-warrior recruits. It is by this standard that ... the CIA will continue to fail, assuming it maintains its current practices. ... It was in great part structurally foreordained: Not only the promotion system but also the decision to deploy the vast majority of case officers overseas under official cover--posing as U.S. diplomats, military officers, and so on--set in motion a counterproductive psychology and methods of operation that still dominate the CIA today. ... And there is simply no way that case officers--who still today are overwhelmingly deployed overseas under official cover or, worse, at home in ever-larger task forces--can possibly meet, recruit, or neutralize the most dangerous targets in a sensible, sustainable way.

It is into that gaping breach that the CIA's rivals will sail.

2005-04-19T21:52:00.001Z

Pope Benedict XVI

The Times Online reports on the election of a new Pope:

At comparative speed and with moving ceremony, the 115 cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel have elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new spiritual leader of the world’s Roman Catholics. The selection of this scholarly and forceful figure will be portrayed as the “conservative” choice and one that favours continuity over change.

One indicator of Cardinal Ratziner's own self-image is his choice of title. Pope Benedict XV, his predecessor in name, came to the Petrine See at the outbreak of the First World War. The New Catholic Encyclopedia has this to say about him.

(Giacomo della Chiesa) (1914-1922) Born Pegli, Italy, 1854; died Rome, Italy. Nuncio to Spain, privy chamberlain, Archbishop of Bologna, and cardinal, he was elected directly after the outbreak of the World War, and maintained a position of neutrality throughout. He sent a representative to each country to work for peace, and in 1917 delivered the Plea for Peace, which demanded a cessation of hostilities, a reduction of armaments, a guaranteed freedom of the seas, and international arbitration. President Wilson was the only ruler who answered him, declaring peace impossible, though he afterwards adopted most of Benedict's proposals for establishing peace. At the close of the war France and Spain resumed diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and Great Britain retained permanently the embassy she had established during the war. Benedict promulgated the new Code of Canon Law, established the Coptic College at Rome, enlarged the foreign mission field, and in his first Encyclical condemned errors in modern philosophical systems. He denounced the violation of Belgium and gave freely to the victims of the war, widows, orphans, and wounded, and established a bureau of communication for prisoners of war with their relatives.

Like Pope John Paul, Ratzinger lived through the Second World War and served for a time in the German Army. Wikipedia notes that he joined the Hitler Youth at 14, where his biographer maintains he avoided attending meetings, was drafted at 16 and deployed as a raw recruit to Hungary at 18 where he deserted at the end of the war. In the seminary, which he entered after being processed out of POW camp, Ratzinger became interested in two great historical intellectuals of the Church, Augustine and Bonaventure. He then went on to a theological career within the Church -- he was colleague to Hans Kung at Tubingen -- then later went on to found a theological journal, before he became "prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which was renamed in 1908 by Pope Pius X." Ratzinger was an opponent of liberal trends within the Church from the 1960s, at a time when he would have been in his 30s and early 40s, making him a conservative "culture warrior" in the heyday of the counterculture.

Ratzinger comes at a time when his own native Western Europe is gripped with a crisis similar in some respects to that which divided Eastern Europe in John Paul's day. Like John Paul, he arrives at the Papacy in the midst of a global war: what the Cold War was to John Paul the War on Terror must be to Benedict XVI. He is an unknown quantity, without extensive pastoral experience; a philosopher Pope: the Pope of the Memes. And it is in this last where Benedict's historical significance may lie. He is the first Pope of the Internet Age and stands uncertain, as we all are, on its brink.

Update

The Guardian quotes a Vatican analyst as saying:

Vatican analyst John-Peter Pham said the cardinals clearly agreed with Ratzinger's assessment that ``John Paul confronted two totalitarianisms - Nazism and communism - and that what remains is the `dictatorship of relativism,''' as the new German pope put it.

There was also this addendum about his wartime membership in the Hitler Youth.

In his memoirs, he wrote of being enrolled in Hitler's Nazi youth movement against his will when he was 14 in 1941, when membership was compulsory. He says he was soon let out because of his studies for the priesthood. Two years later, he was drafted into a Nazi anti-aircraft unit as a helper, a common fate for teenage boys too young to be soldiers. Enrolled as a soldier at 18, in the last months of the war, he barely finished basic training. ...

If Ratzinger was paying tribute to the last pontiff named Benedict, it could be interpreted as a bid to soften his image as a doctrinal hard-liner. Benedict XV reigned during World War I and was credited with settling animosity between traditionalists and modernists, and dreamed of reunion with Orthodox Christians.

2005-04-18T21:57:00.000Z

Marla Ruzicka

Anyone who wants to remember Marla Ruzicka, the Bay Area activist who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, should first all remember how she died. Time gives this account of her death.

Ruzicka, 28, became a victim of the Iraqi conflict on Saturday, when a car bomb detonated beside her car on the perilous road from central Baghdad to the city's airport. Her longtime Iraqi aide and driver Faiz Ali Salim, 43, was also killed.

She didn't die while accompanying a military convoy. She wasn't killed at a US checkpoint or by American fire. She died on a road frequented by civilians killed by what was almost certainly a command detonated bomb; which didn't go off by itself but was set off by someone waiting patiently, at a distance, with his converted cellphone or garage door opener, until a likely victim came along. For Time to say that Marla Ruzicka was the 'victim' of an abstract Iraqi conflict is as misleading as to maintain that Iraqis who may have wrongfully died in US custody are 'victims' of 'international conflict'. To remember Marla Ruzicka it is important to remember that first and foremost she was murdered, murdered by insurgents.

It is also important to remember the invisible man, Mr. Faiz Ali Salim, who was as innocent as Ruzicka, and who because he lived there had even less choice in the circumstances of his death. If Ruzicka represents the idealistic activist Salim should stand for all the thousands of Iraqis who have been kidnapped, beheaded, car bombed while at mosque, blown up roadside bombs and thrown into woodchippers, perhaps by the same men who pressed the detonation button that killed them both. He didn't die from some nebulous Iraqi conflict, as Time likes to remember, but from the actions of men who had killed before and, with the help of those who help us to forget that fact, will kill again.

2005-04-17T11:08:00.000Z

Les Pied Noirs

While revisiting the history of the French-Algerian war in 1954, I stumbled on an extensive quote -- at second hand -- from Paul Johnson's Modern Times, which though written before 9/11 provided a valuable key to understanding 'terrorism' as it emerged from the chrysalis of anti-colonialism. Colonialism died in part, Johnson argued, because it provided the demographic basis for its own demise. (Hat tip: FreeRepublic)

Algeria was the greatest and in many ways the archetype of all anti-colonial wars. In the 19th century the Europeans won colonial wars because the indigenous peoples had lost the will to resist. In the 20th century the roles were reversed, and it was Europe which lost the will to hang on to its gains. But behind this relativity of wills there are demographic facts. A colony is lost once the level of settlement in exceeded by the growth rate of the indigenous peoples. 19th century colonialism reflected the huge upsurge in European numbers. 20th century decolonization reflected European demographic stability and the violent expansion of native populations.

Algeria was a classic case of this reversal. It was not so much a French colony as a Mediterranean settlement. In the 1830s there were only 1.5 million Arabs there, and their numbers were dwindling. The Mediterranean people moved from the northern shores to the southern ones, into what appeared to be a vacuum: to them the great inland sea was a unity, and they had as much right to its shores as anyone provided they justified their existence by wealth creation. And they did: they expanded 2000 square miles of cultivated land in 1830 to 27000 by 1954. ... But rising prosperity attracted others ... And the French medical services virtually eliminated malaria, typhus and typhoid and effected a prodigious change in the non-European infant mortality rates. By 1906 the Muslim population had jumped to 4.5 million; by 1954 to 9 million. By the mid 1970s it had more than doubled again. If the French population had risen at the same rate, it would have been over 300 million by 1950. The French policy of "assimilation", therefore, was nonsense ...

Algeria was lost to France even before the events of 1945, when the first troubles began. And because there is really no dividing line between colonialism and the counter-colonization Western Europe is experiencing today, Johnson's observation applies with at least partial validity to modern South Africa, Israel, France and the Scandinavian countries. Declining European birthrates and burgeoning Muslim immigrant fertility are making the policy of "assimilation" just as problematic in Western Europe as it was in Algeria five decades ago. One answer to this problem is to redefine political entities so that ethnic Europeans are once again the 'majority'. It is probably accidental that beginnings of the EU in 1957 coincided with the final withdrawal of the shattered colonial empires to the European shore. But it is not improbable to suggest that it represented an attempt to stem the decline in the core sources of European power. The rise of United States and Japan and the meant the Old Continent was no longer the sole technological powerhouse. And after a brief postwar boom, European population was once again trending flat. Consolidating markets was an obvious counter to the advantages of the United States. Yet the European enlargement project had a secondary effect. It was the most audacious act of Gerrymanderying in history. It provided the opportunity to sidestep the changing demographics in Western Europe by redefinition. Long after Frenchmen were a minority in France they could still belong to an ethnic European majority, providing Europe extended to the Dnieper. Instead of mending the hole in the hull, the problem could be ameloriated by making the ship bigger so that it would take longer to sink.

Although the economic aspects of the European constitution that will be presented to the French on May 29 have been the focus of debate, its demographic dimension is as important and more viscerally understood. Jean Marie-Le Pen's humorless parable about EU enlargement nevertheless has a certain truth to it.

The government will use every means possible and imaginable [for a "yes" win]. Now, in confidence, the prime minister tells us that … it’s a French Europe that we’re trying to build—a sort of French colony. It's like an old joke during the war: “Come quick! Come quick! I took 50 prisoners, but they won’t let me go!” [Laughs.] Well it’s exactly that, isn’t it? France took 24 prisoners, but they won’t let it go!

But if the EU is a really an attempt to turn the continent into a French colony it has once again run into Paul Johnson's observation that a "colony is lost once the level of settlement in exceeded by the growth rate of the indigenous peoples" except now it is in the context of Eastern European entrants. At the heart of French electoral resistance to the EU Constitution is an unwillingness to accept the free-market policies that non-French members want. Sylvain Charat at Tech Central Station writes:

The 1957 Treaty of Rome proclaimed four fundamental freedoms: the free movement of persons, capital, goods and services. This has been strongly restated in the Lisbon Agenda, which aims to make Europe the most competitive economic zone in the world by 2010. Convinced that liberalization of services would be an important source of wealth and jobs, the European Commission was asked by EU leaders to draft a directive ensuring it. This was done on January 13th, 2004 ... the two French commissioners at that time, Michel Barnier, now foreign minister, and Pascal Lamy, hoping to run the WTO, signed onto it. Additionally, the French government did not protest.

Those free market aspirations have come into shuddering collision with the French 'social model' where 25 percent of the workforce is employed by the government, 10 percent of the population is on welfare and French law calls for a 35-hour week. While European enlargement ordered British shopkeepers to sell wares in grams and kilos instead of pounds and ounces it was fine, but now that it lets "hairdressers, plumbers and accountants to work freely across Europe" as the Scotsman reports, it is no longer so fine -- and a French 'Non' is more than likely. This is bound to be met by the rueful echo of what one Muslim moderate, who was originally in favor of Algerian integration into Metropolitan France said five decades ago: "the French Republic has cheated. She has made fools of us ... why should we feel ourselves bound by the principles of French moral values... when France herself refuses to be subject to them?", except that it will be uttered in Polish, or worse, English.

Europe if not now then soon must accept that enlargement by itself can never fully compensate for the fundamental weakness of its demographics and economy. Even a ship as large as the Titanic eventually fills with water. French EU Foreign Minister Michel Barnier could not have spoken more eloquently of the dead-end French policy had become when he said the EU had no contingency plan in the event of a rejection. "We have no plan B. You cannot have a plan B. It is 'Yes' and that's the only way to discuss this item, so we go 100 percent for that outcome". If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.

Will Hutton in the Observer understands the real need to address Europe's weaknesses -- to avoid the belated repetition of Algeria on its soil -- by a means better than bankrupt French strategy, though he can't state it clearly.

Fifteen consecutive opinion polls during April have confirmed that the 'no' vote in the French referendum on the Constitutional Treaty stands at some 53 per cent .... An improbable alliance of right and left is tapping the mood that French travails in general, and unemployment in particular, are because France cannot be true to an idea of France. France has been locked in quasi economic stagnation for more than a decade; unemployment is 10 per cent and youth unemployment even higher.

The original Common Market was a French creation, in effect, an extension of the French state and the accompanying subordinate relationship of capitalism. Now that the EU is being transmuted into a network of European states, of which France is but one and in which the market has a much more central role, France is losing control of both the EU and an idea of France. And what's worse, it isn't delivering results. Vote 'no'.

There is a realistic chance that there could be a 'no' vote in both countries, in which case the treaty is stone dead. What to do? One option will be to muddle through, adapting the current European treaties where possible, but that ... Even if it doesn't happen ... the dark forces in both countries have got to be addressed, and that means rekindling growth and answering the question of how the European project is to be squared with an idea of Holland and France. It's a political quagmire, demanding high skills from Europe's wooden and unimaginative leadership.

After sixty years of retreat from its colonial heyday, Europe is an idea whose back is to the wall. What it needs now is a new vision and leadership, which with some American help, may address the core of its weakness: suicidal demographics; cultural self-loathing; its oppressive socialist economies. The hour is late and the ship captained by fools but hope still remains.

2005-04-15T21:22:00.000Z

The Berlin Wall Has Fallen On Us

As former chief of staff of the the Australian Labor Party's leader, Kim Beazley, Michael Costello could be expected to be less than sympathetic toward George Bush (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds).

It is entirely understandable that the Left is viscerally anti-Bush. His political strategy is not based on the democratic approach of seeking the middle ground, but on sharpening differences and divisions, of defaming and intimidating those who do not support him as appeasers, immoral and weak. His and his cabinet officers' contemptuous treatment of allies and the international institutional framework could not be better demonstrated than by his nomination of John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN. I have had direct experience of how Bolton works. He believes that when the US says "jump", others should ask "how high?" He tolerates nothing else.

But Costello goes on to note that Bush is nevertheless right in pushing for democracy around the globe. He ruefully says that his ex-chief has been wrong about the Iraqi elections and much else in the unfolding drama in the Middle East.

Some say, as did Kim Beazley, that the elections in Iraq have not had any influence on promoting democracy elsewhere in the region -- for example, in Lebanon. This is incorrect. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said recently of developments in Lebanon that "this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

For some reason, George Bush and his chimpoids have been unaccountably lucky. "Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Bolton - they too will pass." What is important, Costello argues, is for the Left to reclaim its rightful place in the vanguard of history, so accidentally usurped by the Neanderthals in Washington. "What will go on is the great human desire to be free, which should be at the core of our foreign policy." It would be interesting to see which personalities in the Left Costello can convert to his view. Christopher Caldwell wrote a retrospective of the great French political writer Raymond Aron. (Hat tip: MIG) He particularly understood the problem with the Left's ideal of "freedom".

A key theme in much of his work ... is that until very late in the 20th century, people were judging events according to 19th-century conceptions. Particularly intellectuals, who had an understanding of socialism that time had already shown to be largely mythological. "In theory," Aron wrote, "a revolution is defined as a liberation. Yet the revolutions of the 20th century seem, if not revolutions of enslavement, at the very least revolutions of authority." ...

Costello's notion of "freedom" is curiously identified with "the democratic approach of seeking the middle ground" as if the essence of freedom was the willingness to compromise. Raymond Aron understood the fallacy. As the Nazi menace began to rise in Europe, Argon argued that the Left made the fatal mistake of believing that the exercise of freedom lay in compromising with the aggressor. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Caldwell wrote:

In March 1936, Blum's government opposed Germany's re-occupation of the Rhine by calling it "unacceptable." This is a word that Aron held in particular contempt. As he put it, "To say that something is unacceptable was to say that one accepted it." Again, Aron deeply admired Blum. But he noted with dismay that he seemed proud of putting up no resistance. After the German re-occupation, Blum said, "No one suggested using military force. That is a sign of humanity's moral progress, and the socialist party is proud to have contributed to progress." Aron added: "This moral progress meant the end of the French system of alliances, and almost certain war."

We hear an echo of Blum's words in the self-congratulatory speech that Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero gave on the first anniversary of the March 11 Madrid bombings, which brought his Socialist government to power and caused the pullout of Spanish troops from the Iraq coalition. In the course of a speech in which he praised his government's "inimitable integrity," Zapatero condemned those who questioned his decision, warning that they would be forgotten. "We reserve our memory for those noble and beautiful things that unite us, that make us rise up and advance in the worst moments, and that earn the admiration of other peoples. Because anyone who looks at us with just and objective eyes cannot fail to recognize the merit of Spain's actions."

And there is a faint re-echo of Zapatero's oblationary speech in Costello's strange critique. The chimpoid may have lacked the ability to compromise; but that defect was trivial beside the blindness that has afflicted the Left through history. Freedom is ultimately inherent in man, as Costello noted. It is independent of the foreign policy of the Left.

2005-04-15T12:59:00.000Z

Big Trouble in Little China 2

Once China's real strategic imperative -- securing its energy and trade routes -- are grasped its activities are more easily interpreted. Increases in China's amphibious capabilities are usually seen as menacing Taiwan. But here's what the Navy League has to say:

The PLAN's evolving strategy has been described in terms of two distinct phases. The strategy's first phase is for the PLAN to develop a "green water active defense strategy" capability. This "green water" generally is described as being encompassed within an arc swung from Vladivostok to the north, to the Strait of Malacca to the south, and out to the "first island chain" (Aleutians, Kuriles, Ryukyus, Taiwan, Philippines, and Greater Sunda islands) to the east. Analysts have assessed that the PLAN is likely to attain this green water capability early in the 21st century. Open-source writings also suggest that the PLAN intends to develop a capability to operate in the "second island chain" (Bonins, Guam, Marianas, and Palau islands) by the mid-21st century. In the future, the PLAN also may expand its operations to bases in Myanmar, Burma. These bases will provide the PLAN with direct access to the Strait of Malacca and the Bay of Bengal.

These are very same island chains which so preoccupied the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War and for exactly the same reasons. Any attempts to positively control sealanes leading in and out of northeast Asia will involve dominating the Malay Barrier and the Bonins, Guam, Marianas, and Palau islands. As to the amphibious force, the Navy League has this assessment:

The PLAN's 7,000-man Marine ... Force's ... primary mission is to safeguard China's island holdings in the South China Sea during times of peace and to seize and defend islands in the South China Sea during times of war. (Here's where the Spratleys comes in. It sits across the route from the Malay barrier to the East China Sea -- Wretchard). The Marine Force also may be used for amphibious raids or for establishing beachheads in scenarios entailing a military confrontation with Taiwan.

Taiwan is the secondary mission. Keeping China's access to energy is the primary mission. The devil in the proposition is that as long as China is seen as representing a threat to Japan, any attempts to reach out to "the first island chain" (which includes the Aleutians) and the "second island chain" (which includes the Bonins, which is Japanese territory) will bring a reaction from Nippon. Like the Anglo-German Naval Race of the 1900s, any serious maritime rivalry will be fraught will grave consequences. One interesting thing about these developments is that for the first time in 500 years Europe is absent from the maritime strategic equation.

2005-04-15T11:53:00.000Z

Big Trouble in Little China

Defense Tech asks whether China will soon "have the teeth to chomp down on Taiwan" and concludes that it will, citing increases in China's amphibious warfare capability.

the PLA has shifted focus towards amphibious operations for a significant part of the ground forces ... this has included the reorganisation of two motorised infantry divisions in the Nanjing and Guangzhou Military Regions into amphibious infantry divisions and the transfer of another infantry division to the navy to form a second marine brigade in the late 1990s. ... round a quarter of all PLA manoeuvre units, which number around 20 divisions or brigades, plus supporting artillery and air-defence units, have participated in training exercises for amphibious operations…

The US intelligence community has reported that since 2001, the Chinese shipbuilding industry has produced 23 new amphibious assault ships and 13 conventional attack submarines. ... The PLA Navy (PLAN) is rapidly transforming itself from a coastal force into a bluewater naval power with a force modernisation drive that is unprecedented in the post-Cold War era. "The range and number of warships the Chinese navy is acquiring can be compared to the Soviet Union's race to become an ocean-going navy to rival the US in the 1970s," said a China-based foreign naval attaché.

But stop there a moment. "The PLA Navy (PLAN) is rapidly transforming itself from a coastal force into a bluewater naval power with a force modernisation drive that is unprecedented in the post-Cold War era." If China's strategic goal is to take Taiwan why should it need a Blue Water navy? Furthermore, why should Taiwan represent any strategic priority at all? The small island nation poses no credible threat to mainland. The real strategic center of Chinese interests is the South China sea through which the commercial and petroleum lifeblood of China flows. According to the Washington Times, China understands that the principle national security threat facing it is disruption of sea lanes bringing oil and commerce to its shores.

China believes the U.S. military will disrupt China's energy imports in any conflict over Taiwan ... Beijing's leaders see access to oil and gas resources as vital to economic growth and fear that stalled economic growth could cause instability and ultimately the collapse of their nation of 1.3 billion people. Energy demand, particularly for oil, will increase sharply in the next 20 years — from 75 million barrels per day last year to 120 million barrels in 2025 -- with Asia consuming 80 percent of the added 45 million barrels, the report said. Eighty percent of China's oil currently passes through the Strait of Malacca, and the report states that China believes the sea area is "controlled by the U.S. Navy." Chinese President Hu Jintao recently stated that China faces a "Malacca Dilemma" -- the vulnerability of its oil supply lines from the Middle East and Africa to disruption. Oil-tanker traffic through the Strait, which is closest to Indonesia, is projected to grow from 10 million barrels a day in 2002 to 20 million barrels a day in 2020, the report said. Chinese specialists interviewed for the report said the United States has the military capability to cut off Chinese oil imports and could "severely cripple" China by blocking its energy supplies.

As the Belmont Club argued in an earlier post, one USN riposte to a Chinese blockade campaign against Taiwan would be to shut the oil flowing to the People's Republic at the spigot, through its control of the Persian Gulf: a counter-blockade. This blue-water threat represents the true strategic threat to the Chinese commercial lifeline. For that reason, recent Chinese efforts to build naval intallations ("a string of pearls") along the route to the Persian Gulf in Cambodia, Rangoon, Burma and Pakistan and develop its oceangoing navy must be understood as going beyond its ambitions against Taiwan.

But even if the United States could be persuaded not to intervene in any dispute with Taiwan, China's peculiar geographic vulnerability to maritime disruption means that even Taiwan's small submarine force could pose a major threat. This map from Global Security underscores how vital the South China Sea is to China's economy. Virtually all VLCC traffic to China, Japan and South Korea pass through the Lombok and Malacca Straits. Traffic bound for the cluster of ports (run your mouse along the Chinese coast and the ports will pop up as circles) around Guangdong (Hongkong and related ports) can stop 600 km west-southwest of Taiwan, but traffic bound for the port clusters around Shanghai must pass east of Taiwan, through the Luzon straits before berthing 600 km due north of Taipei -- right past the Bonins -- including Okinawa. Should Taiwan respond to a Chinese threat by deploying its Zwaardvis class diesel electrics along the Bonin littoral, the northern Chinese ports would be blockadaded. Both the Guangdong and Shanghai ports themselves are well within range of the 9,000 nautical mile ranged Taiwanese diesel-electrics.

Here is where some military analysts may have it wrong with their scenarios of a triumphal Chinese descent on a hapless Taiwan. Taiwanese diesel electrics could respond to mainland saber rattling by taking station to the Bonins northeast of Taiwan and would be far better suited to littoral warfare than the nuclear attack boats Beijing is building. Moreover, any combat between Taiwan and China in this area would be exceedingly dangerous, because it would occur virtually within Japanese territorial waters. China would have to be very careful in naval operations or risk attacking Japanese fleet units by accident. Escorting tanker convoys east of Taiwan and through the Bonins would be a nightmare. In fact, Taiwanese naval action need only be threatened: any naval confrontation in the South China sea would almost certainly disrupt commercial and oil traffic not only to China, but to Japan and Korea as well. If that were not enough, the Taiwanese subs could head south as well. All Taiwan would need to do is torpedo one large VLCC in the Malacca straits to block it for months. None of these prospects have been lost on Taiwanese planners. The Taipei Times says:

"If Taiwan obtains the eight diesel-powered submarines we propose to purchase through the US, we will have the capability of blockading China's sea lanes in South China and East China seas," Minister of National Defense Lee Jye said yesterday at the legislature. He said the MND assessed that China will need to import 90 percent of its energy needs by 2020. He said China currently has 30 days of oil reserves, and that it wants to reach 50 days in 2010 and 90 days in 2020. He said, however, that even if China achieves that goal, its oil reserves would be insufficient in comparison with the US' 158-day reserves and Japan's 161-day reserves.

In addition, he said that the MND believes that by the year 2010, China will need to import 36.29 million tonnes of food, rising to 54.4 million tonnes in 2020 and 118 million tonnes in 2030. He said China therefore requires secure sea lanes, which the MND believes is one of China's big weaknesses should it go to war against Taiwan. Lee said the MND calculated that in 2020, Taiwan will require at least 10 submarines to patrol waters around Taiwan, including waters east of Taiwan, the East China Sea and the South China Sea. He said if China takes military action against Taiwan, the 10 submarines would be able to blockade the sea lanes and attack China's warships and civilian shipping.

The Taiwanese have done the numbers. They understand the capability of their boats is limited by their small numbers but know that if China precipitates a conflict in the South China sea it would run out of energy seventy days before the US and Japan -- though the US will only be inconvenienced because eastbound voyages to the US can be routed through the Torres Straits and the westward route to the East Coast through the Mozambique Channel and around the Horn of Africa will remain open. (See page 8 of this document for a thumbnail chart of world VLCC lanes) One final thought from the Indian Navy perspective:

the navy last month operationalised its first full-fledged UAV base in Kochi in Kerala ... four Heron crafts were ordered from Israel. ... The navy plans to induct at least a dozen Israeli UAVs and set up UAV bases in Port Blair and Lakshwadeep islands as well. In fact, a full-fledged base in the Andaman islands to monitor the Chinese movements in the seas is also being planned. China has, during the last decade, shown increasing eagerness to be present in the Andamans. It has eavesdropping equipment permanently placed in the Coco Islands.

China is the last nation that will want trouble in the Taiwan Straits.

2005-04-14T10:27:00.000Z

Faustian Bargain

Let's start from the source least likely to run the headline: the Guardian reviews newspaper reports which suggest that French voters may reject the proffered European Constitution, scheduled for ratification on May 29.

The French are becoming increasingly disenchanted with Europe and are ready to turn their backs on the EU, according to the latest opinion polls in the French newspapers Le Figaro and Le Parisien. Their polls, published yesterday and last Thursday respectively, show that more than half of French voters say they will vote no to the European constitution when the country goes to the polls on May 29.

Then let's go to the 'why' part of the disenchantment.

Why are the French "feeling sick of Europe", asked Eric le Boucher in Le Monde. "They regret the enlargement of the EU. They detest the idea that their public services are open to foreign competition. They complain about the liberal slant of the union." And they are peeved that the prosperity enjoyed by Britain, Scandinavia and eastern Europe has not been seen at home, he said. In France, the benefits of the EU are unclear, Le Boucher noted - "economic growth has stalled, unemployment is rising inexorably" - and pessimism reigns.

Historians in the far future will struggle to understand the convoluted inner logic of the Le Monde observation. "They regret the enlargement of the EU" which is that which they wanted. "They detest the idea that their public services are open to foreign competition" and yet they detest the benefits of the policy they most ardently oppose: "and they are peeved that the prosperity enjoyed by Britain, Scandinavia and eastern Europe has not been seen at home". But let us take it as datum and plainly say that the French are disgusted with the consequences of their own desires.

The Astute Blogger asks whether the French are, by a funny twist of fate, set to destroy their own creation: that having created their own Frankenstein monster, they are now in danger of being strangled by it. (hat tip: DA). The burden of trying to pursue two contradictory goals may prove too much. On the one hand, the French are committed to preserving the welfare state while on the other hand were creating the very conditions that undermine it. According to the International Herald Tribune:

At a meeting in Brussels, EU leaders took a strong turn toward entrenching Europe's high-tax social model by backing away from a radical deregulation of the Continent's services sector. They wanted to assuage fears among voters in France and Germany that cheaper workers from the free-market economies of Eastern Europe would steal their jobs. ...

It will mean a significant rewriting of the European Commission's services directive that was meant to allow businesses that provide services - from consultants to accountants to builders - to compete freely in all countries across the union. . The services directive had been blamed for the dramatic drop in French public support for the new constitutional treaty after two opinion polls showed a majority of French voters could reject it in May's referendum.

The price of forging ahead with a European Union in which France was allowed to play by special rules amounted to creating a "separate but equal" regime on the grounds that Europe 'needed France' in order to remain Europe, a regime in which some are more European than others.

Jean-Claude Juncker, current EU president, denied that Europe was splitting in two between the new free-market Eastern economies that joined the EU last year and an old Europe that wants to defend the west's high-tax social model. ... In rewriting the services proposals, France sought guarantees against social dumping by harmonizing social laws. Chirac also demanded special protection for public services such as health care and for cultural industries such as television. ... "This is about protecting uncompetitive workers in France, Germany and Belgium," said Ann Mettler of the Lisbon Council, a free market think tank in Brussels. She pointed out that EU unemployment stood at 90 million and that youth unemployment was at 18 percent. "That is not inclusive. It is not social." .

The alarm is genuine though the surprise should not be. The European project was in part originally conceived as an amplifier for French ambitions and the pretty flame of the fuse has lost its charm as it nears the primer. People are beginning to understand the document before them but the political salesmen are determined to offer any combination of rebates, coupons, special offers and financing to get the final signature on the contract of sale. Stephen Benet's "The Devil and Daniel Webster" speaks of the belated remorse that so often follows Faustian bargains, though like as not there will be no reprieve from the consequences of this deal.

It was about the last straw for Jabez Stone. "I vow," he said, and he looked around him kind of desperate -- "I vow it's enough to make a man want to sell his soul to the devil. And I would, too, for two centsl" ... But till you make a bargain like that, you've got no idea of how fast ... years can run. For every day, when he gets up, he thinks, "There's one more night gone," and every night when he lies down ... it makes him sick at heart.

But with France and the Netherlands close to rejecting the European Constitution, in spite of the blandishments, the referendum on May 29 is of critical importance because there really isn't a Plan B in case the European project is derailed. According to Financial Times, there are only plans to limit the scope of the catastrophe.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the veteran prime minister of Luxembourg and holder of the rotating EU presidency, is said by officials to be on standby to co-ordinate the EU's response if France or the Netherlands votes No. One senior EU official said: “We may want to issue a political statement quickly to try to limit the damage. Then we would try to pick up the pieces at the EU summit on June 16-17.” He said there were no formal contingency plans in place, and there were still hopes that both France and the Netherlands would endorse the treaty.

Which leaves the field open to the first European leader able to articulate a viable and alternative trajectory for the nations of the old continent.

2005-04-14T00:54:00.000Z

Dymphna at Gates of Vienna

During the outage of I Could Scream, Dympha will be posting at Gates of Vienna. The problem is at the service provider end, and we will do our best to keep content up under all circumstances.

2005-04-13T13:25:00.000Z

Taiwan and China

(This is a copy of content currently on the new site which is unavailable due to the outage)

James Dunnigan at the Strategy Page discusses the idea of an "out of the blue" (OOTB) attack by China on Taiwan.

What this means is that, during what appears to be peacetime maneuvers, the troops involved will suddenly move against a nearby nation and invade. ... The OOTB was most noticeably used, and successfully at that, when the Russian trained Egyptian army surprised the Israelis and recaptured the Suez canal in 1973. ... if the Chinese could get control of the air over Taiwan for a day or so, three Chinese airborne divisions could be dropped on Taiwan as well. Taiwan has always expected assistance from the U.S. Navy and Air Force. But without advance warning to get a carrier or two into the area, and a few hundred U.S. Air Force planes alerted for movement to Taiwan, Japan and Guam, the American assistance would be too late.

An OOTB attack necessarily trades velocity for mass. By compressing decisive operations within a very short time span China puts aside its greatest asset, which is numerical superiority. The total force China can immediately put ashore is limited by its amphibious lift: one heavy division plus up to four light divisions.

It is estimated that the large and medium amphibious ships in service with the PLA could lift a whole heavy armour division, or 1.5 to 2 light infantry divisions and their some equipment in the first wave of a regional amphibious assault. However, if take the sealift capabilities of smaller landing crafts and merchant ships into account, the aggregate lift of China’s amphibious forces could reach as many as five divisions (60,000 troops and their equipment).

An OOTB attack would be risky in the extreme. Because there are no landing areas on Taiwan's east coast, geography dictates that any amphibious assault be directed against the middle of the western coast. The five or so divisions, augmented by part of China's 3 airborne divisions would face Taiwan's 2 mech infantry and 10 infantry divisions, backed up by more than 7 armored brigades who know full well where they would land. Unlike the attacking troops, they will have armor on hand, artillery and plenty of ammunition. Taiwan has over 300 SP and 1,100 towed artillery pieces.

By process of elimination, the most attractive [though not most likely] target for an amphibious assault against Taiwan would be the coastal region between Tung-Hsiao and San-Wan. Midway between the northern Taipei urban agglomeration and the central populated region around Taichung, this coastal area is free of annoying mud-flats, and offers open terrain suitable for the build-up of a beach-head and subsequent decisive maneuver. A lodgement in this area would effective cut the island in half, and lay the foundation for subsequent operations to the north and south.

Because the prospect of overrunning the Taiwanese defense force in a short time looks so unpromising the standard scenario for attacking Taiwan as described in a document called The Security Situation in the Taiwan Strait imagines a deliberate and phased assault, with the island first being worn down by a naval blockade and prolonged bombardment. The actual invasion would be a "coup de grace".

An amphibious invasion of Taiwan by China would be a highly risky and most unlikely option for the PLA, chosen only as a last resort to force the total surrender of the island. It most likely would be preceded by a variety of preparatory operations to include a blockade, conventional missile strikes, and special operations on Taiwan. These operations would play a critical role in determining how China would pursue the coup de grace, with an amphibious assault only one facet of a multi-pronged invasion plan.

Yet a deliberate and phased attack has its attendant problems too; the biggest of which is that it allows the US time to mirror the Chinese buildup, something which the USN is precisely prepared to do. A Congressional Research Service document (RS21338) entitled Navy Ship Deployments: New Approaches available through CRS Gallery Watch describes a concept called the Fleet Response Plan, which rather than maintaining single battlegroups in three forward areas -- the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean/Persian Gulf region, and the Western Pacific -- will enable the Navy to surge a concentrated force to a threatened area.

In addition, the Navy is implementing a new Fleet Response Plan (FRP) that will improve the Navy’s ability to surge multiple formations in response to emergencies. ... Implementing the FRP, Navy officials say, will permit the Navy to deploy up to 6 of its CSGs within 30 days, and an additional 2 CSGs within another 60 days after that.

China's strategic choice then is between an OOTB pitting 5 or 6 lightly armed divisions against 12 Taiwanese to take advantage of surprise or to advance with a much larger force against up to 8 USN battlegroups. This is complicated by the fact that one US response to a Chinese blockade of Taiwan might include a counter-blockade of China's fuel imports. The growing Chinese dependence on Middle Eastern oil has a created a vulnerability that did not exist a decade ago. The Middle East Quarterly (hat tip: Kae) notes:

China's thirst for oil shows no sign of slackening. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, China is now the second-largest consumer of petroleum products in the world. Today, China imports roughly 2 million barrels of oil per day, half of which comes from the Middle East. The International Energy Agency predicts that within a quarter-century, China will import 10 million barrels a day, the current U.S. level. Beijing considers its Achilles' heel to be a U.S. naval blockade. ...

As a hedge against reliance on the U.S. Navy for sea-line protection, Beijing has constructed a naval base in Gwadar, Pakistan, not far from the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, facilities in Myanmar close to the Strait of Malacca, and the Kompong-Sihanoukville Port in Cambodia.

Yet America's dominant position in the Persian Gulf virtually ensures that no Chinese tankers would ever get so far as Hormuz, let alone Malacca if it came to that. Ironically, the bigger the Chinese economy becomes, the more vulnerable it grows to US countermeasures. And because any US-Chinese confrontation would be economically catastrophic for both countries, and to Japan and South Korea besides, Taiwan's real guarantee against invasion is that it is a poisoned pawn. It would cost China everything it worked for in the last two decades to swallow.

2005-04-13T13:22:00.000Z

The Business End

In article entitled Beyond Ruthless, the Washington Post describes what victory consists of: the physical destruction of the enemy. Writer Steve Fainaru follows Sgt. 1st Class Domingo Ruiz as he ambushes insurgents and chases them all around Mosul.

Ruiz's unit, the 4th Platoon, has killed at least 15 suspected insurgents in the past two months, according to soldiers. Commanders said the unit encounters more enemy contact than any other platoon in the battalion. The platoon calls itself the "Violators." Its patch depicts a leering skull clad in a green beret, blood dripping from its mouth. Its motto is "Carpe Noctum," or "Seize the Night," a reference in Latin to the platoon's propensity to operate after dark. A self-described "greaser," Ruiz wears a pencil-thin mustache and slicks back the dark hair on the top of his head with Rebound Activator Gel. The lower half of his scalp is shaved.

Which gives you an idea of the irreducibly violent nature of the job. The one psychological thing about the US presence in Mosul, which Ruiz exploits to effect, is the now accepted notion that they will stay until the insurgency is beaten. He uses it to drive the enemy not simply from the physical buildings of Mosul but from the mental landscape of the residents. Imperceptibly but steadily, the US military has come to intuitively understand the key features of human terrain. Although writers will attempt to capture that knowledge in field manuals and instructional material, its living repository is really in the memories and experience of men like Sgt. Ruiz.

To some extent, one can sympathize with pacifists who fear the very existence of that knowledge, who would prefer a world innocent of the craft of war. The structure of armies are themselves testaments to the destructiveness of what they must contain. The emphasis on discipline; the focus on control; even ceremony, are ways of keeping the lid on a genie which it is perilous even to regard. Armies parade to music so that we can forget what they are for.

Ruiz said the decision to pick up the skull fragment and take it back to the base was a "sarcastic" gesture to confirm the kill to the battalion. (Capt. Rob) Born, who was not present during the attack, said the soldiers picked up the fragment not as a trophy, which is prohibited under military regulations, but to confirm "that we had the remains of a terrorist."

By such distinctions is the sword kept within the sheath.

2005-04-13T11:04:00.000Z

Nightfall

Theodore Dalrymple describes the curious phenomenon which anyone, at one time or another, may have felt: the slow pull of evil. Human beings experience it in many forms; the shameful and surreptitious attraction to pornography, drink, cruelty or plain laziness: the subconscious knowledge that you are going to do something bad; and though you try to deceive yourself into imagining you will not succumb just yet, you let yourself approach the edge just near enough so that in a moment of weakness you will fall over as planned. Except, as Dalrymple argues in the City Journal, the human recognition of evil normally allows us to resist so it never has us wholly in its grasp. Looking back on 14 years of service in hospitals and prisons, Dalrymple realized he was witnessing the inexorable incapacitation of human discernment; the deadening of the ability to distinguish between good and evil which is so essential to survival.

My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? ... From the vantage point of one six-bedded hospital ward, I have met at least 5,000 perpetrators of the kind of violence I have just described and 5,000 victims of it ... Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil ... is that it is unforced and spontaneous. ... In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil ordinary men and women do they do out of fear of not committing it. There, goodness requires heroism. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, for example, a man who failed to report a political joke to the authorities was himself guilty of an offense that could lead to deportation or death. But in modern Britain ... the evil is freely chosen.

He goes on to describe a variety of human wreckage. Private torture chambers for those who have welshed on drug debts; self-destructive behavior; absolute selfishness and irresponsibility. In nearly every case the one thing the perpetrators and victims of evil were never allowed to do was to judge their own acts. That was absolutely forbidden. The universal course of treatment prescribed by all the organs of the Welfare State was to find ways to make them 'feel better about it'.

Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. ... A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place.

The avoidance of the obvious became a private joke between Dalrymple and his patients. He knew -- and they knew -- how they had gotten into the fixes that had disfigured their lives, but he only ever referred to it in jest. The beaten women had a specially ironic sense of humor and loved his good natured chaffing: "next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I'll tell you if you can go out with him."

This never fails to make the most wretched, the most "depressed" of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying "FUCK OFF" or "MAD DOG." And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they ... the men in these situations also know perfectly well the meaning and consequences of what they are doing. The same day that I saw the patient I have just described, a man aged 25 came into our ward, in need of an operation to remove foil-wrapped packets of cocaine that he had swallowed in order to evade being caught by the police in possession of them.

Dalrymple makes a strong case for the utility of morality as a survival skill. It is a craft, which like hunting and gathering, was once passed on to keep people from perishing in the wilderness. Now it is disparaged; the modern welfare state has no need of it.

As for the men, the state absolves them of all responsibility for their children. The state is now father to the child. The biological father is therefore free to use whatever income he has as pocket money, for entertainment and little treats. He is thereby reduced to the status of a child, though a spoiled child with the physical capabilities of a man ... But if the welfare state is a necessary condition for the spread of evil, it is not sufficient. ... Here we enter the realm of culture and ideas. For it is necessary not only to believe that it is economically feasible to behave in the irresponsible and egotistical fashion that I have described, but also to believe that it is morally permissible to do so. And this idea has been peddled by the intellectual elite in Britain for many years, more assiduously than anywhere else, to the extent that it is now taken for granted. ...

So while my patients know in their hearts that what they are doing is wrong, and worse than wrong, they are encouraged nevertheless to do it by the strong belief that they have the right to do it, because everything is merely a matter of choice. Almost no one in Britain ever publicly challenges this belief. Nor has any politician the courage to demand a withdrawal of the public subsidy that allows the intensifying evil I have seen over the past 14 years -- violence, rape, intimidation, cruelty, drug addiction, neglect -- to flourish so exuberantly. With 40 percent of children in Britain born out of wedlock, and the proportion still rising, and with divorce the norm rather than the exception, there soon will be no electoral constituency for reversal. It is already deemed to be electoral suicide to advocate it by those who, in their hearts, know that such a reversal is necessary.

By a strange process of summation the politicians of the welfare state become afflicted with the same blindness they wrongly believed confined to low-income housing estates. Suicidal public policies are pursued -- even when everyone knows they are suicidal -- because no one can remember how to behave differently.

A sharp economic downturn would expose how far the policies of successive governments, all in the direction of libertinism, have atomized British society, so that all social solidarity within families and communities, so protective in times of hardship, has been destroyed. The elites cannot even acknowledge what has happened, however obvious it is, for to do so would be to admit their past responsibility for it, and that would make them feel bad. Better that millions should live in wretchedness and squalor than that they should feel bad about themselves.

Read the whole thing.

2005-03-20T10:56:00.000Z

The New Belmont Club Site Is Up

It is sad to say goodbye to Blogger. The painfully slow response of the last weeks has gone and it seems its old sprightly self again. If things don't work out on the other site, there's always a home to come back to.

The Sitemeter was at 6,326,000 at the time of abandonment, which was a pretty good run.

The new Belmont Club site is at http://belmontclub.wretchard.com. Alternatively, you can use this url: http://www.wretchard.com/blogs/the_belmont_club/default.aspx See you there!

2005-03-17T22:15:00.000Z

Let the spinnin' wheel spin

The two stories were related somehow, the nomination of Paul D. Wolfowitz for presidency of the World Bank and news that after 20 years of investigation the Canadian investigation into the bombing of an Air India flight had come up dry. The question was how. Wolfowitz's nomination only makes sense if the primary cause of world underdevelopment is perceived as political failure rather than the mere lack of investment. Its narrative relationship to the Canadian acquittal of the Air India bombing suspects is one of contrast: the failure of the Crown prosecution to prove its case being cast in opposite terms; a lack of technique rather than political failure.

The really shocking thing about the Canadian decision was illustrating how two decades, $100 million in expenses and the best good will in the world could get no further than establishing there was a bomb aboard the plane the night it blew up. If the one air incident took that, what if, God forbid, some really serious terrorist action happened in Canada that required a rapid resolution? David Beatty's famous expression of disappointment at the underperformance of his squadron at Jutland captures the frustration perfectly. "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."

The same thought has probably occurred to anyhow who has watched the World Bank and other international development agencies flail their arms against the tide of poverty. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the best ways academia could conceive, five decades of development aid hasn't even established whether the effort was useful. 'Never in the face of human effort has so little been been accomplished by so much'.

But if insanity is expecting different results from the same actions then the asylum is larger than it seems. The development bureaucrats are outraged that Wolfowitz might try to do things differently. Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs reacted to Wolfowitz's appointment saying "we need someone with professional experience in helping people to escape from poverty. Mr Wolfowitz does not have that track record". Neither, he might have added, did anyone else. But that is nothing to the point.

The most damning charge against him was that he actually made something happen. "Wolfowitz's nomination aroused particular concerns in Europe because of his key role as an architect of the war in Iraq". Hence the danger is that he might do it again. Far more reassuring in these latter days if he had spent twenty years doing nothing at all. It has been long since Europe remembered what once it knew so well.

Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
-- Locksley Hall

2005-03-17T11:58:00.000Z

Let the spinnin' wheel spin

Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
-- Locksley Hall

2005-03-15T23:51:00.000Z

Reply to Comments

I'm can't reply to comments due to the extremely slow performance of Blogger, but the posting works a little better.

Baron Bodissey said...

The tactics the terrorists used -- the assault into the teargas, the fire and smoke, the locking up of the other prisoners -- were they something learned at jihad school, at the al-Qaeda camps, maybe? Or were they ad-hoc?

I don't know whether any of this is standard Jihadi doctrine. My guess is they're ad hoc. Philippine prisons are some of the weirdest places on earth. Greg Sheridan has an article in National Interest, the Jihad Archipelago, in which he makes these revealing remarks about the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf and its principal ally, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

The Philippines is the strangest nation in Southeast Asia and the one with the strongest Islamic extremist movement. It is predominantly Catholic (though with strong mystical influences) and more American than anywhere else in the region. Hispanic in political culture, it is schizophrenic at many levels of national identity.

The MILF is a very strange beast ... State Department officials would like to list it as a terrorist organization but don't because that would torpedo the peace process, such as it is. ... MILF-controlled areas of the south provide both the training camps and the vital rest and recreation hinterland for the region's Islamist terrorists, especially JI operatives from Indonesia ... there is no doubt that they have provided, and continue to provide, training camps for JI terrorists. This allows JI to constantly replenish its stocks through new training programs ...

At the same time, corrupt members of the Philippines armed forces have aided the MILF. ... The papers described in shocking detail the involvement of the Philippines navy in dozens of incidents of seaborne smuggling of military and other supplies to the MILF. A smaller Islamist terrorist outfit, the Abu Sayyaf group, is ... much more overtly linked to Al-Qaeda, and among its leaders are veterans of the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. The broader picture in the southern Philippines is of the failure of the state. Substantial Philippines military operations, backed at times by hundreds of U.S. troops in a so-called "advisory" role, have made little progress against either Abu Sayyaf or the MILF. Until its military becomes more effective, and numerous other arms of the state can deliver the services and order they are supposed to, the prospect is for more of the same. In many ways it is the most disturbing piece in the Southeast Asian jigsaw.

All of which you would have guessed from reading bits and pieces of the Belmont Club but Greg Sheridan puts it together in a respectable and scholarly way. Philippines prisons are places where inmates devote nearly limitless ingenuity to devising mind-boggling schemes. It's a place where inmates implant plastic pellets in their Johnsons using razor blades, merthiolate and ignorance; it's a place where inmates have passed messages to each other using cockroaches tethered to thread; it's a place where people play a game of 'attract the fly' by betting on which coin a fly will choose to light upon in the toilets. It's a place where your life depends on your shiv and the guys you've chosen as your friends. Poetry has been written and forgotten within its walls. It is a place of closely held ritual, where by tradition all prisoners beat their cups against the bars when a man is led to the electric chair. It is as alien to the Philippine ruling elite as the surface of Mars.

I can imagine the Abu Sayyaf assaulting the police raiders in the teargas clouds, running with that peculiar comedic gait characteristic of people sprinting in flip-flops, lighting up the mattresses with a spluttering match possessed with the indomitable spirit of Bahala Na (I don't give a damn) and the cops shooting them down in the same part. One day, after the action has died down in the Middle East, popular culture may turn its attention to the Second Front against terror in Southeast Asia. Instead of the desert the images will be of small boats flitting among islets under a whitening moon and of strange chases in stinking cities between grotesques that would do justice to the Army of Darkness. Kipling would have been the writer of choice to capture the atmosphere, only he is seventy years dead.

2005-03-15T20:03:00.000Z

At the Big House

Readers who are curious will find a detailed account of the assault on the Abu Sayyaf prisoner rioters here. The picture that emerges is that of a police unit (SAF) that has reached a respectable level of competence but may be a little rough at the edges.

plans had been drafted on how to assault the prison, outflank the superior firing positions of the gunmen and surprise them. Apparently to weaken the resolve of the enemy, SAF commander ordered all lights inside the jail compound turned off and the V-150 armored personnel carrier driven around the area. This was done every hour on the hour until daybreak yesterday. "We wanted them to stay awake and keep them guessing whether we would attack or not," said the SAF official.

Then there was the less than perfect entry strategy. "The SAF raiders positioned themselves at both sides of the main gate of the Abu Sayyaf cell at the ground floor and tried to pry open the lock. But they were met by sniper fire each time they tried to insert the key into the lock." Marines in Fallujah learned that it was worth one's life to spend an extended period of time making a breach; that if a lock could not be knocked in with a couple of blows, perhaps a breaching charge was in order.

To cover their entry, the SAF raiders flooded the darkened corridor with tear gas, breached and entered. The resourceful Abu Sayyaf rushed forward in the murk to grapple with the SAF, in the hopes of seizing more weapons. But the SAF had been trained to work in pairs and the grapplers were repelled. To complicate matters for the assault team, the Abu Sayyaf locked up regular prisoners in adjacent cells and had piled up flammable materials which they set ablaze in the corridors, so the flames and smoke would lay down a protective curtain. It was in this confused, darkened and choking atmosphere that Commanders Kosovo, Robot and Global conducted their last resistance. 'Kosovo' was apparently one of the grapplers and shot a raider in the face before being gunned down. 'Global' died in a fighting retreat to the third floor. How 'Robot' met his end is unknown.

The left-wing Philippine Inquirer, attempting to sound a note of seemingly sweet reason, says:

Their (the Abu Sayyaf ) deaths also mean that they have escaped trial and, more importantly, put any information that they possessed irretrievably beyond the government's reach. ... And the shrugging continued when other things were pointed out, such as the dangers posed by having firearm-bearing guards in close proximity to the Abu Sayyaf prisoners. ... Human rights activists, for one, have been battling for years against overcrowding in our jails, which puts underage offenders in close proximity to hardened criminals, and which makes it even more difficult to properly isolate dangerous inmates such as captured members of the Abu Sayyaf. ... The fact is that the Abu Sayyaf won yet another round against the government. Its captured members died with guns blazing, drawing the world's attention to their cause and their refusal to let their detention circumscribe their actions.

For another view we must turn to Max Soliven.

When the gunsmoke – and tear gas – cleared, the most notorious kidnappers-killers-and-bombers were dead: the bully Alhamzer Manatad Limbong, alias Bro. "Kosovo" who had been identified by Gracia Burnham as one of their cruel kidnappers, suspected of masterminding the SuperFerry 14 bombing which killed 110 helpless passengers, and triggered off the motorbike "bomb" in Magutay, Zamboanga City, which killed US M/Sgt. Mark Jackson, and seriously wounded US Capt. Mike Hummel in October 2002; Ghalib Andang, alias Commander "Robot" who had led the gang which kidnapped foreign tourists and Filipinos from the Malaysian tourist isle of Sipadan, and raped women hostages repeatedly, humiliating the Estrada government for months and collecting millions of dollars in ransom; and Nadzmi Sabdullah, alias Commander "Global", the noisy spokesman of the Sipadan kidnap caper. Also slain was ASG detainee Hasbi Dais alias Lando, who had conducted the Monday "negotiations" and rejected all the government’s calls for the group’s peaceful surrender.

2005-03-15T04:49:00.000Z

The End of the Road

KM mails to say that the Philippine police have stormed the prison the Abu Sayyaf had taken over in a failed jailbreak. Reuters says seventeen prisoners died in the assault, crucially including three of the top Abu Sayyaf honchos.

Philippine police have shot dead 17 prisoners as they stormed a jail in Manila to end a day-long stand-off with a group of Islamic militants who had snatched weapons from guards and killed three of them. ... Tear gas still shrouded the building as television showed hundreds of prisoners milling around on the top floor. Reyes said Alhamser Limbong, alias "Kosovo", Ghalib Andang, alias "Commander Robot", and Najdmi Sabdula, alias "Commander Global", were among the Abu Sayyaf leaders killed.

Although I can't prove it my own unfounded instinct says that the Philippine cops have made sure the Peace Lobby and the human rights lawyers aren't going to be taking these Abu Sayyaf commanders to any more press conferences. Of course, since the three top Jihadis, experienced men all, would have wielded the three firearms known to have been seized from the guards and five elite policemen were injured in the shootout, the cops can plausibly argue they used proportionate force.

2005-03-15T01:24:00.000Z

The Angel with the Fiery Sword

Remember how Philippine President Gloria Arroyo withdrew that nation's troops from Iraq to effect the release of a Filipino hostage? Well she didn't retreat far enough. Iraqi 'insurgents' have seized another hostage and Manila's officialdom has expressed 'gratitude' for their delay in beheading him.

The Philippines Saturday lauded the recent extension granted by Iraqi hostage-takers on the deadline by which they had threatened to kill a Filipino hostage. The kidnappers of accountant Roberto Tarongoy had earlier said they would kill him by March 11 but a Philippine team in Iraq had reported the kidnappers had given an indefinite extension to the deadline Because of this, Presidential Spokesperson Ignacio Bunye: declared, "We thank God for this reprieve."

The 'insurgents' have presented a new demand. The hostage's father "has appealed in a letter to Arroyo to 'heed the captors' demand' to free his son by making a statement withdrawing support for US policy in Iraq." The statement of repudiation may have to wait a while. Right now Philippine officialdom is busy finding dinners for the Abu Sayyaf who took over a maximum security jail after killing three guards.

How far does one have to retreat from evil to be truly safe? A letter writer to Michael Totten brought the inescapability of confronting evil home when he asked if Mr. Totten would rule out torture if the safety of his own child depended on applying it. Mr. Totten allowed it was a hard question; and yet the question was the right one to ask. Any real opposition to torture would be unwavering even if it involved sacrificing our own children. Volunteering those of others doesn't count. Ivan Karamazov famously asked Alyosha whether he would accept the edifice of Paradise if it were built upon the suffering of a single innocent child; Alyosha replied that he would not. Yet there are any number who would maintain a principled opposition to war, torture or hostage payments at the expense of the suffering of innocents. Did Saddam throw people into woodchippers? Regrettable but better that than violate the principle of collective international action. Are Blacks being massacred in Darfur? Sad, but unilateralism is worse. Surely the price of maintaining the no-ransom policy isn't worth the life of a Filipino hostage? Here the devil defeats the prospect of a free moral lunch. Not paying ransom kills, but paying it kills too. Breese Bull of the Washington Post takes it personally whenever ransom (a.k.a. 'go buy an IED') money is paid to 'insurgents'.

As a foreigner here, I feel threatened by the possibility that the Italian government may have rewarded the kidnappers. But Iraq is not about us foreigners. It is about Iraqis. And it is Iraqis who suffer most from kidnappings and from the transportation of the artillery shells and anti-tank mines that become roadside devices and car bombs. Kidnapping Iraqis has become an almost routine business transaction here. ... But since the Sgrena shooting, I've already sensed even greater reluctance to set up these dangerous checkpoints.

A long time ago I personally came to the conclusion that there was no way to live on earth without the stain of guilt, maybe the concept of Original Sin was a rueful recognition of this condition. Yet there is perhaps the chance that one may leave the earth forgiven. But that is another story.

2005-03-14T23:43:00.000Z

Fallout Shelter

To Newsweek's Paul Tolme, University of Colorado outgoing President Elizabeth Hoffman's problems with Ward Churchill were all about preserving Free Speech in a nation grown increasingly intolerant.

... earlier this year, ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill ignited a fierce debate over academic freedom because of a 2001 essay in which he called victims of the September 11 attacks "little Eichmanns." Hoffman and many members of the faculty defended Churchill's right to his opinions while outside of campus, and Colorado lawmakers called for his dismissal. ...

Hoffman seemed particularly concerned about the Churchill situation. ... "We are so deeply divided as a country." This division, she says, threatens the foundation of liberal higher education. "The modern research university is a big and complex place," she says, "but it ultimately is about the generation of new ideas and the transfer of those new ideas to students. ... What's tricky is sheltering new ideas without alienating the legislatures that control state budgets.

Two ideas are striving for primacy in Hoffman's construct. The first is her idea of the academy as a conservator of every specimen of mental life, the counterpart of a biological repository containing bacterial and viral samples; some virulent and some extremely beneficial. The second is the idea of the academy as a transmitter of ideas. In her words, "the modern research university is a big and complex place, but it ultimately is about the generation of new ideas and the transfer of those new ideas to students."

Logically, the chief problem inherent in this duality is less about 'sheltering new ideas' from a public reluctant to support them than about reconciling conservatory and scholarly functions with the pedagogical ones. Just as modern medicine trains physicians to distinguish between poisons and therapeutic drugs, the difference often being simply the size of the dose, the modern university must above all train its students to discerningly choose from the garden of concepts it so carefully cultivates, not simply engage in "the transfer of those new ideas to students" as if they were so many hotdogs in a cafeteria line.

Ironically, the public glare focused upon Ward Churchill's ideas in the aftermath of his "little Eichmanns" essay provided the scholarly scrutiny that the University of Coloardo itself neglected to supply. Did the US government actually specify a 'blood quantum' for Native Americans? Did US troops really distribute smallpox-impregnated blankets to tribes and with what precautions to themselves? Did Professor Churchill really provide the content of books on which his name appears or did he swipe it from some other scholar? Those are questions which have been dissected at length by persons "outside the campus" and even by "Colorado lawmakers". That they were not raised or even contemplated by academic departments at the University of Colorado constitutes a failure of its most basic mission. Universities not in the business of asking these these questions are arguably not institutions of higher learning at all. That neglect, not the discussion which her University went so far out of its way to avoid, "threatens the foundation of liberal higher education".

2005-03-14T19:55:00.000Z

The Carnival of Manila

Readers who think I exaggerate the incompetence of Manila should read veteran Filipino columnist Max Soliven.

Throughout the day the nation had to listen to the demands of people who had just killed three jail guards and were on trial for multiple murder and kidnapping. They even found allies in the usual publicity-hungry politicians and human rights advocates who were falling all over themselves to get into the picture and sabotage police negotiations. And we wonder why the country is turning into a terrorist paradise.

Not content with this summary disparagement, he added details in A murderous jailbreak try that turned into a disgusting circus. He describes how the mayor of the jail site, the Congressman representing the district of the jail site and a representative from the province the Abu Sayyaf suspects were born in began a bizzarre contest for the man best suited to represent their "constituents". Then a renowned "human rights lawyer", who had represented the Marcos family against US oppression showed up. Then things really started to go downhill. A press conference got going.

The ring-leader, "Bro." "Kosovo" alias Alhamzer Limbong, fat, muscular and bum-brawn* in aspect, was one of the cruelest captors of Missionary Gracia Burnham and her slain husband Martin, the suspected beheader of the other American "Dos Palmas" hostage, Guillermo Sobero, and is the chief suspect in the SuperFerry 14 "bombing" which sent more than 100 passengers in a fierce explosion to a watery grave. (*A local colloquialism which means low-life punk -- W.)

Nothing better exemplifies the politicized, NGO-influenced and UN-guided ideology of the Philippine ruling elite than this laughable performance. If the characteristic of madness is that it goes unperceived by the most insane, then Philippine officialdom qualifies. Soliven points out that the persons responsible are likely to be promoted, in a country where no good deed goes unpunished. The veteran columnist ends with an appeal to reason; much good may it do him.

The last radio dispatch I listened to last night, before switching off, was that the Abu Sayyaf hold-outs who were insisting on giving a "press conference" (an opportunity sought with equal eagerness by our "breaking news" hungry media) first asked to be served "dinner" because they were already famished.

If there were not so much blood on the floor, the entire slaphappy affair could have been described as a comedy. Yet we mustn’t forget these are bloodthirsty, kidnapping, homicidal, false Islamic hoodlums we’re talking about. They don’t deserve a hearing. What they deserve is a hanging.

2005-03-14T19:01:00.001Z

Harum Scarum

The incapacity of the Philippine State was on display today as Abu Sayyaf rebels grabbed a guard's M-16 at a chowline in a maximum security prison and used it to gun down three guards before taking over the whole hoosegow. The Abu Sayyaf is a terrorist organization affiliated with Al Qaeda. This simple hostage taking situation became an immensely complicated exercise because it had to be resolved within the paralyzing and Byzantine political world of Manila.

While lining up for breakfast rations at around 7 a.m., an unidentified bandit grabbed the M16 rifle of his guard and opened fire, Colonel Agrimero Cruz, Metro Manila police spokesman, said.

The Abu Sayyaf prisoners held the political initiative from start to finish. The BBC reports:

The prisoners later contacted a local radio station, demanding talks with two senior Muslim officials and film star Robin Padilla, a Muslim convert. Police said they believed the prisoners were led by Alhamser Limbong and Kair Abdul Gapar.

Among Alhamser Limbong's crimes were a mass kidnapping that included two Americans and sinking a passenger ferry with a bomb, drowning more than 100 people. Beside Limbong Atlanta's Brian Nichols was a small-time crook. After several hours of negotiations, the following agreement was supposedly reached between the Philippine authorities and the 'rebels'.

"The surrender plan is now ongoing. The negotiation is still ongoing," Senior Superintendent Leopoldo Bataoil told reporters. Bataoils said the rebels would surrender "anytime from now."

The rebels' requests, which were approved by the government negotiating team, include "no bodily harm" to the surrenderees, respect for their human rights, speedy disposition of their cases, redress of their “grievances,” and access to the media after their surrender.

"It's a win-win solution," Bataoil said.

By which he could only mean a win for the Abu Sayyaf and a win for the Abu Sayyaf. As if this were not enough, the Abu Sayyaf were granted legal representation by lawyers of their choice. Having wrung these concessions the Abu Sayyaf were prepared to lay down their arms -- still warm from the clutch of the dead guards .

Ironically, the jail officials had been warned of an impending escape. Naturally, it was ignored.

State prosecutor Leo Dacera said the authorities had intercepted a telephone conversation between Alhamser Limbong, the alleged leader of the prison revolt, and Abu Sayyaf leader Jainal Sali, who is at large, in which the detainee "requested that eight safehouses be prepared."

Lynne Stewart was convicted of passing messages from her terrorist client to his confederates at large. No wonder Stewart feels unfairly treated. In the Philippines, men like Limbong can simply dial their associates and order them to get safehouses ready so they can hole up after they escape. The Belmont Club pointed out how restrictions imposed by the Philippine Left have severely hampered the campaign against terrorism in that country. According to the Congressional Research Service paper Terrorism in Southeast Asia (available from Gallerywatch.Com):

In consideration of the Filipino Constitution’s ban on foreign combat troops operating inside the country, Washington and Manila negotiated special rules of engagement ... U.S. Special Forces personnel took direction from Filipino commanders and could use force only to defend themselves.

When US and the Philippine military had readied a campaign against the Abu Sayyaf it was deep-sixed by the 'Peace Lobby'. The Terrorism in Southeast Asia paper continues:

In February 2003, Pentagon officials described a plan under which the United States would commit 350 Special Operations Forces to Jolo to operate with Filipino Army and Marine units down to the platoon level of 20-30 troops. Another 400 support troops would be at Zamboanga on the Mindanao mainland. Positioned offshore of Jolo would be a navy task force of 1,000 U.S. Marines and 1,300 Navy personnel equipped with Cobra attack helicopters and Harrier jets. ...

The announcement of the plan caused immediate controversy in the Philippines. Filipino politicians and media organs criticized the plan as violating the constitutional prohibition of foreign troops engaging in combat on Philippine soil. Filipino Muslim leaders warned of a Muslim backlash on Mindanao.

The paralyzing effects of Philippine politics were highlighted in the handling of the prison hostage-taking crisis. Politics is what passes for the exercise of Philippine sovereignty, which in practice is indistinguishable from corruption and therefore creates a very high standard of patriotism among its public figures. But for the average Filipino minimum-wage prison guards the situation is subtly different. He knows he is guarding celebrities who can attempt a jailbreak, constitute the panel to negotiate with if it goes wrong, demand a direct response from the Philippine cabinet, get any legal aid they want; who can kill their warders, extract a guarantee of nonreprisal and give a national television press conference afterward. Little wonder that some guards accept the money offered by these 'rebels' to let them go. That gold can unlock a cell door was demonstrated in the manner in which Jema'ah Islamiyah representative Fathur Rahman Al-Ghozi escaped a Philippine jail in July, 2003. It is described in detail by the Asia Times.

On July 14, the Indonesian Jema'ah Islamiyah (JI) bomb expert, along with two other inmates, members of the Abu Sayyaf bandit group, apparently unlocked their cell with a set of spare keys, relocked it, walked out of the jail building and through the prison gates, and used a small guardhouse to vault over the compound wall. Of the four guards detailed in al-Ghozi's area, one was sleeping; another was out shopping. Nevertheless, the guards managed to register their hourly head count as complete. ...

Only when a new set of guards arrived five hours later was the escape discovered; and only hours after that - allowing al-Ghozi a full half-day head start - was the news reported to Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She had just met with Australian Prime Minister John Howard to discuss joint counter-terrorism initiatives.

But this craven behavior emboldened rather than weakened the Abu Sayyaf's behavior. The surrender that was expected "anytime from now" waited first upon a personal guarantee from the equivalent of the head of Philippine Homeland Security. Then "the deal appeared to collapse when the inmates demanded dinner before ending the standoff." As of this writing the Abu Sayyaf are holding off the entire Philippine Army with two rifles and pistol.

2005-03-13T09:57:00.000Z

Update on the New Site

First, I'd like to apologize for the inability of readers to reliable comment on the posts. Because we all go through the Blogger interface, any difficulties you may have experienced afflict me as well.

Here's the update on the new site. I've got a domain and a hosting service. It will host more than a blog, though I'm not sure I'll activate all the possible features because the administrative burden may spin out of control. The weblog itself will be run on a product with a much greater feature set than Blogger, but it will not be one which most will have heard of. The source code for the entire application is distributed with it and that was the major consideration in choosing it. However, it is one of these open source thingies and there's no deluxe documentation, so it's taking a little time to figure things out.

I finished getting something half decent up on my own web server -- that's been the focus of effort over the weekend -- but it's not behaving as expected on the hosting site. Something subtle. So I'll have to stay with Blogger for maybe a week more until the kinks get ironed out.

2005-03-11T17:02:00.000Z

A Tale of Two Worlds

Two articles paint radically different impressions of changes to United States strategic thinking. The first, by Mark Mazzetti of the Los Angeles Times, depicts a military establishment that has been hijacked by Operation Iraqi Freedom and the 'blunders' of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

With Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushing for a "lighter, more lethal and highly mobile fighting force," the Pentagon scrapped as outdated the requirement that the U.S. military be large enough to simultaneously fight two large-scale wars against massed enemy armies. And it spent little time worrying about how to keep the peace after the shooting stopped. Something happened on the way to the wars of the future: The Pentagon became bogged down in an old-fashioned, costly and drawn-out war of occupation. ...

Mazzetti's article goes on to emphasize that while the smaller forces favored by Donald Rumsfeld were sufficient to defeat a Third World conventional army like Iraq's, the burdens of occupation have made the United States increasingly dependent on allied help for pacification and nation building.

"There are smarter, more efficient ways to do regime change and occupation," said one senior civilian official at the Pentagon. "One of those ways is to rely much more on our friends and allies to do the back-end work."

The other article, by the Wall Street Journal (subscription only) describes a Donald Rumsfeld who not only does not regret giving up the large forces of the Cold War but wants to accelerate the process. It's most radical -- and possibly most controversial aspect -- is the idea that the US military should increasingly be used to prevent (here critics may see the word 'pre-empt') war from breaking out.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlines in a new, classified planning document a vision for remaking the military to be far more engaged in heading off threats prior to hostilities and serve a larger purpose of enhancing U.S. influence around the world. ... In the document, Mr. Rumsfeld tells the military to focus on four "core problems," none of them involving traditional military confrontations. The services are told to develop forces that can: build partnerships with failing states to defeat internal terrorist threats; defend the homeland, including offensive strikes against terrorist groups planning attacks; influence the choices of countries at a strategic crossroads, such as China and Russia; and prevent the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by hostile states and terrorist groups.

The WSJ article goes on to say that Secretary Rumsfeld's 'big push' is likely to meet opposition from certain quarters in the armed services because these changes will come at the expense of weapons systems like the F-22 and because they are a radical departure from many current missions.

... the classified guidance urges the military to come up with less doctrinaire solutions that include sending in smaller teams of culturally savvy soldiers to train and mentor indigenous forces. ... the Marines Corps right now is moving fastest to fill this gap and is looking at shifting some resources away from traditional amphibious-assault missions to new units designed specifically to work with foreign forces . To support these troops, military officials are looking at everything from acquiring cheap aerial surveillance systems to flying gunships that can be used in messy urban fights to come to the aid of ground troops.

Since the obvious danger to completely adopting this approach is the risk of reducing the US military to 'British Empire' troops, well suited for fighting 'natives' but unable to match a first rate enemy, there is a second track as well.

Although weapons systems designed to fight guerrillas tend to be fairly cheap and low-tech, the review makes clear that to dissuade those countries from trying to compete, the U.S. military must retain its dominance in key high-tech areas, such as stealth technology, precision weaponry and manned and unmanned surveillance systems.

If the outlines of the DOD planning document reported by the WSJ are accurate, they are an explicit acknowledgement of the strategic dilemma faced by the US in a post-Cold War world. During the Cold War, America only had to plan on meeting the military challenges of Great States. The oceans provided a barrier to threats from the Third World. For the first time in its history, the United States (and Europe too, had they the honesty to realize it) faces a two-front war, not spatially but dimensionally. At the one end, the DOD must face continuous challenges from asymmetrical opponents harboring in the hulks of failed, post-Colonial states. At the other, it must face conventional threats from rising Great Powers like China. America's enemies on these separate fronts will be naturally tempted to lend each other mutual aid. Terrorists can continue to expect new weapons from States whose foreign policy goals call for weakening America; and these rival States can expect those terrorist groups to tie down America while they pursue their geopolitical ambitions. Just as America was the Arsenal of Democracy in the Second World War, rival States have the potential to become the Foundries of Terrorism in the 21st Century.

Rumsfeld's response appears to be shaped by this reality. It is a search for systems, organizations and strategies which possess utility both against terrorism and rival states. In some cases a match will be easy to find. In others, most notably in the case of heavy divisions, manned aircraft and naval systems, there must be a trade-off between them. But implied within Rumsfeld's reported plan is the startling aspect of time: it is above all a preemptive approach aimed at shaping the political and cultural battlefield in advance of actual hostilities involving American troops. Although the concept is described by the WSJ in the traditional terms of "helping allies battle internal threats" it is impossible to separate it from the notion of creating a more functional world, which is related to the ideas of reducing disconnectedness and spreading democracy. How and whether this concept evolves into doctrine will be a fascinating process to watch. One suspects that the ultimate price of the Western European vacation from history will have been the transformation of the United States into the foremost revolutionary force of the age.

2005-03-11T05:02:00.000Z

Forward or Back? 2

In Forward or Back? I wrote:

One wonders what the Syrians will do if the Lebanese opposition simply refuses to cooperate with a new Karami government. It would then fall to the Mukhabarat to break passive resistance. ... One can imagine a scenario where the opposition calls a protest boycott; maybe people get money not to work. ... To rule requires a lot more resources than to disrupt. Therein lies the Syrian strategic weakness.

Events are still unfolding, but the noncooperation strategy is already being laid down. Whether it will succeed or not remains to be seen. The Financial Times reports that although the 'Syrian-backed' Karami has made conciliatory gestures, the opposition has so far rejected them.

"The difficulties we all know about cannot be confronted without a government of national unity and salvation. We will extend our hand without conditions and wait for the other side," he said. "I will not form a cabinet of one colour (but if the situation deteriorates) I will hold the side that does not participate in a national unity government responsible."

But Lebanon's opposition has already rejected the call, saying it was a trap meant to neutralise it. Opposition figures say they will not participate in any cabinet until their demands are met - this includes the formation of a neutral government, the resignation of top security chiefs in Lebanon whom the opposition holds responsible for the assassination of Rafiq Hariri last month, and the full withdrawal of all Syrian troops and intelligence agents before the May parliamentary elections. The opposition has now called for another demonstration on Monday, to mark one month after Hariri's assassination.

This defiant talk, coming against the background of low-level thugsterism against opposition supporters amounts to a call ("to place an amount of chips in the pot equal to the previous bet") on Hezbollah's earlier implied threat of civil war. From published reports, it is unclear whether Syria will raise or fold in response. According to the New York Times:

While in some corners of the country, Syrian soldiers could now be seen moving, in other places there were few signs that troops were in a rush to pack up. In Bois de Boulogne, a resort on a strategic hilltop linking Beirut and the Bekaa region, Syrian soldiers could be seen peering from the balconies in most of the fancy villas that line the main street. Russian-made transport vehicles driving along the main Beirut-Damascus axis were empty. "No one is gone here, and no one will ever leave," said Gabriel Germani, a property developer from a nearby village.

In earlier posts, I advanced the nonspecialist opinion that Syria and Hezbollah would be loathe to embark on a full scale civil war because they could not forsee the consequences. That assessment was based on the appreciation that Syria and Hezbollah were objectively weaker today than in 1975. Powerline rightly asks whether this assumption is valid. "Several readers question Wretchard's statement that Hezbollah are far weaker now than in 1975. They note that Hezbollah succeeded against Israel not that long ago." Fair enough question. But it is worth noting that strength is always comparative. The increase in American regional strength and the destruction of Saddam's regime may not have weakened Syria and Hezbollah in absolute terms but it has reduced them in relative terms. The transformative effect of Operation Iraqi Freedom consists precisely in that it has upset the balance of power that kept things in stasis; in that it has made groups like Hezbollah comparatively weaker. It is in that change that democratic opportunities lie, and the Lebanese opposition senses their moment.

Yet have Hezbollah and Syria been so weakened they dare not risk Civil War? While they might be reluctant to break the rack, they will do it in desperation. This is reflected in their tactics. Karami's conciliatory gestures and the ostensible pullback of Syrian troops show they would prefer it if people walked quietly back into line. But the low-level intimidation and veiled threats are meant to convey that if pressed, they can ultimately resort to brute force. 'Come along nicely or we'll turn Hezbollah loose' is the message of the past week. If the Lebanese opposition makes good on their threat of nonparticipation they will effectively be daring Syria to do its worst. And what would that be? Provided that conventional forces are kept out of Lebanon, it would amount to an attempt to maintain colonial rule via a militia and a secret service. I'll stop my train of speculation right here and simply repeat "the observation that no country has ever been able to maintain occupation over another using secret services alone."

Correction

Here's a correction from a reader. Told you I was a nonspecialist and my ignorance shows.

This has been driving me crazy since I read it earlier this afternoon.

Of course Hezbollah isn't weaker today. They didn't exist in '75. They started their organization in the 80s.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/terror_report_orgs.html

Also known as Lebanese Hizballah, this group was formed in 1982 in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, this Lebanon-based radical Shi’a group takes its ideological inspiration from the Iranian revolution and the teachings of the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

The Times article mentions 1975 due to the long-standing civil war, not due to Hezbollah's presence since then.

2005-03-10T22:33:00.000Z

"It Never Existed"

According to the Telegraph, French authorities have airbrushed the cigarette out of John Paul Sarte's photograph.

France's National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre's trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law. ...

The library's president, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, confirmed that the cigarette had been discreetly smudged to comply with the 1991 loi Evin - a law banning tobacco advertising - but also so as not to frighten away potential sponsors from the exhibition, which opened yesterday.

The practice of historical revisionism, which was a central theme to George Orwell's 1984, was extensively practiced by Joseph Stalin. The NewsMuseum documents the "before and after" photographs of Lenin with Leon Trotsky, among others, redacted from the image. But what if -- hypothetically now -- the NewsMuseum were in fact the forgery; what if Trotsky was digitally inserted into the picture. How would I know?

Asymmetrical Information has a fascinating link to a book called the Motel of the Mysteries, a book constructed in the best archaeological literary style, describing a hypothetically complete misunderstanding of an entire civilization.

It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.

The elevation of a motel toilet to the central cult object of a vanished civilization is one possible consequence of unintended historical misunderstanding. But so powerful a technique as historical revisionism would tempt others to purposeful use, not only for the relatively harmless purpose of eliminating cigarettes from the likeness of Jean Paul Sarte, but for political gain. Certainly the machinery was in place to do this. An Oxblog link to Wikipedia reminds us that the BBC's annual budget of $10 billion "rivals that of NASA. It is greater than the gross domestic product of more than half the world's nations and ranks behind the budgets of only the twelve governments of the wealthiest nations on the planet."

Who controls the past
Controls the future.
Who controls the present
Controls the past.

Has the Internet changed things all that much? Perhaps for most people born after today it will be a truism that Jean Paul Sarte didn't smoke; that Jean Paul Sarte never smoked.

2005-03-09T23:54:00.000Z

Forward or back?

The very large demonstrations in support of Syria sponsored by Hezbollah, whether forced or not, can be interpreted as the end of the "Cedar Revolution". There is certainly enough genuine nationalistic support for Syria within Syria itself. Syria Comment (Joshua Landis) says:

Family members called me from Latakia to ask me what I though and to tell me how proud they were and what a great man Nasrallah is. I was out doing errands much of the day and all the shops had the TV on. Store owners and errand boys alike were leaning over their counters watching the demonstration with amazement and gratification. “This was the true Lebanon,” they insisted. “People from every part and every religion,” they intoned, repeating the line that the Lebanese opposition has been using for the last two weeks to insist that it expresses the true Lebanon. “George Bush asked for democracy. This is the true democracy," I was told repeatedly.

Today, Syrians will demonstrate. Many have told me they will go. The school in which my wife teaches has closed for the day because it is in Mezze, the section of town where the demonstration is to begin; the director fears that the kids will not be able to get home because of the crowds. The UN offices are only opening for half the day. It would seem that all of central Damascus will be closing early today. This is the first demonstration of its kind that most Syrians can remember and they are excited.

Having stemmed the tide and survived the scare pro-Syrian forces have moved to reassert control. The Associated Press reports:

Lebanese legislators ignored the popular anti-government protests and decided to re-install the pro-Syrian premier who was forced to step down last week, a move ensuring Damascus' continued dominance but raising opposition denunciation. ... Outgoing Prime Minister Omar Karami was virtually assured nomination after 71 of 78 legislators put forward his name during consultations with President Emile Lahoud, according to announcements by the legislators as they left the presidential palace. ... The pro-Syrian parliament members apparently were emboldened in their choice by a thundering protest in Beirut the day before that showed loyalty to Syria, countering weeks of anti-government and anti-Syrian demonstrations.

Some would dismiss President Bush's call for a Syrian withdrawal by May as mere posturing or tilting at windmills.

President Bush demanded that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon before parliamentary elections in May. ... "All Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for those elections to be free and fair," he said. ... He said that freedom will prevail in Lebanon and sided with anti-Syrian protesters in recent weeks, who have demanded that Syria remove its 14,000 troops, following the February assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. In what he called a message to the Lebanese people, Mr. Bush said the world is witnessing a great movement of conscience.

In fact, Juan Cole believes the whole thing is set to blow up in President Bush's face, noting that anti-Syrian Jumblatt was recently anti-Wolfowitz.

The main exhibit for the relevance of Iraq to Lebanon is Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt's statement to the Washington Post: "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." It is highly unlikely that Jumblatt is sincere in this statement. He has seen Lebanese vote for parliament several times, and has campaigned, and Iraq was nothing new to his experience (like Lebanon, it is occupied by a foreign military power even during its elections).

I guess now that Jumblatt sees a way of getting the Syrians out of Lebanon by allying with Bush, all of a sudden America is no longer an imperialist cause of chaos. People who want to believe that remind me of PT Barnum's dictum that one is born every minute.

Nor is he alone in that appreciation. Richard Fairbanks, a former U.S. negotiator for Middle East peace and counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C. said:

"One, if it's seen as the West wants Syria out, that would not be helpful to swaying the minds of the Shia and perhaps some others in Lebanon. Second, these calls by the Europeans and Americans are not self-executing and there is not another counterforce on the ground. So as much as the majority of the people want this to happen it's not going to be so simple," he said. Political analysts also argue that Middle East reforms have been announced in the past, only to fizzle out before fundamental change took root.

My own nonspecialist opinion is that despite their apparent strength Syria is holding a losing hand. The train of reasoning begins with the observation that no country has ever been able to maintain occupation over another using secret services alone. Secret services must ultimately operate behind a shield provided by a secure border or conventional forces; otherwise their headquarters, safehouses and files will be vulnerable to the first foe that shows up with a tank. By sending those conventional forces back to the border while reinstalling Karami, Syria is attempting to restore the status quo ante under weakened circumstances. Can they do it?

One wonders what the Syrians will do if the Lebanese opposition simply refuses to cooperate with a new Karami government. It would then fall to the Mukhabarat to break passive resistance. With the Syrian Army moved back the contest comes down to a secret service war where the party with the most money usually wins. And if -- and even Juan Cole doesn't wholly deny this -- a majority want Syria out, what would prevent the US from providing the money to make it happen? One can imagine a scenario where the opposition calls a protest boycott; maybe people get money not to work. It would be a sight to watch the Mukhabarat collect garbage or force people to.To rule requires a lot more resources than to disrupt. Therein lies the Syrian strategic weakness.

It isn't necessary and probably unwise to send conventional forces into Lebanon to chase the Syrians out. It would be sufficient to gum the Mukhabarat up; to run interference for the opposition and provide them with technical support to achieve a decisive result because it is unlikely that Syria can maintain control of Lebanon unless the Lebanese want them to, whatever Juan Cole thinks. The problem with dictatorships is entropy; a lot of energy is needed to keep people in line against their will and that task is frankly impossible. So dictators cheat and create the illusion of omnipotence and a climate of fear to hustle people along. Dictatorships depend, as Cole says though he probably didn't mean it that way, on "PT Barnum's dictum that one is born every minute". If the Syrian conventional troops are moved out of Lebanon, its hold will depend utterly on smoke and mirrors.

2005-03-09T12:20:00.000Z

"When you call me that, smile!"

From the newsrooms.

The Toronto Star: Bush demands Syria quit Lebanon by May

George W. Bush, saying the time for delaying tactics and half-measures has passed, has set a May deadline for Syria's full withdrawal from Lebanon. ... "Today, I have a message for the people of Lebanon," Bush said. "All the world is witnessing your great movement of conscience. "Lebanon's future belongs in your hands, and by your courage, Lebanon's future will be in your hands. The American people are on your side."

Reuters: IRA "must go" after N.Irish shooting offer

The United States has demanded the IRA disband after the paramilitary group's astonishing offer to shoot the killers of a murdered Northern Ireland Catholic man. "It's time for the IRA to go out of business," said U.S. special envoy Mitchell Reiss on Wednesday. ... Reiss told BBC radio: "It's time for Sinn Fein to be able to say explicitly, without ambiguity, without ambivalence, that criminality will not be tolerated."

The Boston Globe:

Five sisters who have waged a rare public campaign against intimidation by the Irish Republican Army following the killing of their brother have been invited to the White House on St. Patrick's Day, the US envoy to Northern Ireland said yesterday. ... One of the slain man's sisters, Catherine McCartney, said she hoped President Bush could help bring his killers to justice. ''The case we'll put to Bush will be the same as it has been to everybody here in Ireland: that these men must be brought to justice, and he should use whatever influence he has to make that happen," she said.

The problem with trying to reconstruct events from historical records is that words taken by themselves convey a very partial meaning. A future historian might argue that Kofi Annan could have imparted the very same message of encouragement to the Lebanese people in far better style than George Bush. But would it have possessed the same semantic charge? Many a British politician has exhorted the IRA to close down with the complete force of logic behind them and the powers of unsurpassable rhetoric at their service -- and yet would they have the significance of the US special envoy's ultimatum? On the many occasions when victims of injustice have been invited by dignitaries for symbolic consolation, very few have at one and the same time managed to convey a veiled threat.

It would be a bold counselor who would advise President Assad to relax. Nor would it occur to Gerry Adams to jokingly inquire whether the words "explicitly, without ambiguity, without ambivalence" mean definitely. Jokes are something you make to the French. Things have got to be real simple for the Chimp. Or maybe the problem is that they have gotten too complicated for the sophisticates of the world when they should have been simple to start with. Historians know that beyond mere words there is context and it is to sentences what a fist is to a boxing glove. Maybe that's what Teddy Roosevelt meant when he said, "speak softly and carry a big stick".

2005-03-09T04:43:00.000Z

High Noon

Hezbollah's leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah came out openly in support for the Syrian-Lebanese special relationship -- a code word for the occupation of Lebanon -- at a well organized mass rally designed to counter the "Cedar Revolution" protests against Syrian occupation. He attempted to redefine the current Middle Eastern crisis, not as a contest between democratic aspirations and autocratic "Black Arabism" but as a struggle against 'US-Zionist' neocolonialism.

Banners held aloft read: "No to American-Zionist intervention. Yes to Lebanese-Syrian brotherhood." "Forget about your dreams of Lebanon," Sheik Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, said at Tuesday's rally, speaking to Israel's leaders. ... "What you did not win in war, I swear, you will not win with politics." Speaking to the Bush administration, he said: "You are wrong in your calculations in Lebanon. Lebanon will not be divided. Lebanon is not Somalia; Lebanon is not Ukraine; Lebanon is not Georgia."

ABC News implies that Nasrallah's decision represents a failure by anti-Syrian politicians to keep Hezbollah neutral.

Hezbollah, an anti-Israeli party representing Shiite Muslims, organized the rally as a way of demonstrating that it will remain a powerful force in Lebanon even if Syria leaves. The Lebanese opposition, which opposes Syria's presence, has been trying to persuade Hezbollah to remain neutral in the country's political crisis.

Austin Bay wonders if Syria -- via Hezbollah -- is willing to precipitate a new civil war if that will prevent its expulsion from Lebanon. "Will it become a shooting civil war? It already has, if those reports of “pro-Syrian gunfire” in East Beirut are true." On the other hand, there are those who don't think Syria is ready to mix it up. The New York Times quoted opposition politicians who felt that Hezbollah's support for Syria represented weakness rather than genuine strength.

"This is a goodbye party, not a show of support for Syria," said the opposition leader Jibran Tuweini, editor of the Lebanese daily An Nahar. "If they wanted this to be a challenge to us, they would have brought their party's yellow flags. But Hezbollah doesn't want to burn its bridges with anyone because ultimately they will have to return to the Lebanese people once everything is over."

The Lebanese-watching blog Across the Bay also sees the Hezbollah demonstration as a sign of weakness. Here is their reasoning.

There is little doubt that a majority of Lebanese--Christians, Druze, Sunni Muslims (particularly after the assassination of Rafik Hariri), and not a few Shiites (how I recall that the most violent postwar confrontations with Syria occurred between Syrian soldiers and Shiite soccer fans after matches in which Syrian and Lebanese teams competed)--want an end to Syrian domination. Today, the truth is clear: Hezbollah seeks to become the Praetorian Guard of a Syrian-dominated order in Lebanon for after Syrian soldiers withdraw. In that context, the killing of Hariri also becomes clearer: it was preparation for what Damascus understood would be an inevitable Syrian pullout, ensuring that a strong Sunni, with a national project for Lebanon (who could also have threatened the stability of the Alawite regime in Damascus), would be eliminated. The flip side of that strategy is giving Hezbollah ever more power in a post-Syrian-withdrawal Lebanese state. (Italics mine)

Can such a plan work? I rather doubt it, given the anger of Syria's Lebanese adversaries and international wariness, but unless Hezbollah refuses to get further sucked into such a project, it will both lose its national credibility and might carry Lebanon into a period of prolonged crisis as the party tries to protect its gains. On top of this, fears in Riyadh, Amman and Cairo of a so-called "Shiite crescent" stretching from Iran and Iraq to Lebanon (via Syria and its support for Shiite Lebanese power), will make the Sunni Arab states redouble their efforts to undermine the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. If that happens, where will Hezbollah be? Ultimately, the party's destiny is within Lebanon, not forever tied to the interests of Iran or Syria.

My own nonspecialist thinking on the matter is as follows. On the one hand, Syria would be anxious to shift the ground away from 'Cedar Revolution' events back toward "Hama rules", an area in which they excel. Across the Bay suggests that despite the huge numbers of persons attending the Hezbollah rally it had the air of contrivance and coercion. The democracy is one game Damascus does not play well, in contrast to car bombing, at which they are virtuosos.

Tomorrow, and on the eve of the “glorious” event that brought the Baath Party to power in 1963, more such recruits will gather in al-Jalaa Stadium to perform another sycophant song and dance about national honor and pride (a similar demonstration organized by Hizbollah will take place in Beirut). But the truth is, and the people know it, Baath rule brought nothing but shame and humiliation. It destroyed the very moral and civil fabric of our fledgling republic.

And the people know it. And the people know it. That’s exactly the problem. The people know it. This is not the time of ignorance anymore. We know. We are informed. We may not the whole truth about what is happening all around in us, but we really don’t need to. We just know enough not to be fooled by empty promises and gestures. We know enough to distinguish between victory and defeat, between a show of principles and a freak show.

So why not steer Lebanon back into civil war? I strongly suspect that while Hezbollah is prepared to threaten civil war, they are far less anxious to actually start it. It is true that the resurgence of sectarian fighting is widely feared and Hezbollah will play to that apprehension. As the New York Times writes:

Fears that the growing political tension will lead to a resurgence of violence have grown in recent days as Lebanon's political and sectarian fault lines have re-emerged. Lebanon's rival groups fought a vicious civil war from 1975 to 1990, leaving parts of the country in ruins. "This is a delicate situation but not a dangerous one," Mr. Tuweini, the opposition leader, insisted as he watched the demonstration on television from his office overlooking Martyrs' Square. "I'm not worried about the unity of the Lebanese, but I am worried that car bombs and assassinations will happen as we try to defend it."

Yet the fear of a civil war must extend to Hezbollah and Syria themselves because they are objectively far weaker in 2005 than they were in 1975. There is no guarantee that Syria and Hezbollah would emerge victorious from a full-scale civil war and every probability they would lose it, so why start something in which you are bound to be beaten? To use a cinematic metaphor, although Nasrallah has strolled all the way down Main Street and struck a pose, he hasn't made a move for his gun. Time was he would have cleared leather; what's different is this time is he's not so sure he's the fastest draw in town. My own instinct is that unless a series of unfortunate incidents throws things out of control, no one will be particularly anxious to start fighting. Syria may have made a fundamental miscalculation in playing the Hezbollah card because it puts Damascus' future in Lebanon in Nasrallah's hands. One wonders if the older Assad would have done this. If -- and I have no idea how -- Hezbollah can be convinced to double-cross Syria by showing them that direction has no future, Boy Assad will be up the creek without a paddle. What do you mean we kemo sabe?

2005-03-08T08:48:00.000Z

The New Belmont Club

A number of readers have complained about the execrable posting response of Blogger. There's nothing I can do about Blogger, which may be a victim of its own success, as it tries to serve a very large community of users. I thought I'd let the readers know that I am building a new site on a different domain. With any luck, it will be much more capable than the current site. That's all I'd like to say for now until I get it all up and running.

2005-03-07T11:15:00.000Z

Energy Futures

In one scenario, which the media and the United Nations say is just within reach, the world in 2050 will be producing smaller amounts of 'Greenhouse gases' as nations reduce their fossil fuels consumption.

French President Jacques Chirac called on Tuesday for developed countries to cut gas emissions to a quarter of current levels by 2050 -- exceeding targets set by the Kyoto pact to combat global warming. ... "We must go further -- divide by four by 2050 the greenhouse gas emissions of developed countries. The next G8 summit must be an opportunity for advancing in this direction," Chirac told a working group, according to the Elysee presidential palace.

But the investment dollars and great states are decisively betting the exact opposite will happen. A Congressional Research Service Report Rising Energy Competition and Energy Security in Northeast Asia (available from Gallerywatch.Com) shows that world consumption of petroleum will increase dramatically, driven by economic growth in North America and Asia Pacific. The projected US consumption for petroleum will grow from 24 in 2001 to 34 million barrels per day in 2020. In that period, Asian consumption will grow to equal that of the United States and will be poised to exceed it.

Although China still depends on coal to meet nearly 65% of its energy consumption, it surpassed Japan in 2003 to become the world’s second largest oil consuming country after the United States. ... If China reaches per capita consumption levels comparable to South Korea, its demand will be twice that of the United States and push up the worldwide demand for oil by at least 20%. (CRS 8)

This gigantic appetite for petroleum has had two immediate effects. It has made China dependent on ever-increasing quantities Middle Eastern oil and turned it into rival of Japan, and to a lesser extent the United States, for new sources of oil and gas. Over the same period European petroleum consumption is projected to remain unchanged, largely as a consequence of flat growth, a bystander to this unfolding drama. The two great Asian nation's need for oil has embroiled them in a rivalry for the reserves in Russian Siberia.

Although the Russian Far East’s promise is significant, many strategists have cast doubt on the commercial viability of tapping the Far East’s reserves. This has not discouraged China and Japan from engaging in a bidding war over Russian projects to bolster their energy security. ... The opening round of the contest centers around negotiations on proposed pipeline routes from the eastern Siberian oilfield of Angarsk. Beijing reportedly wants the pipeline to terminate at Daqing, China’s flagship oilfield with refining facilities in the industrial northeast, while Tokyo is lobbying for it to terminate in the Russian port of Nakhodka, near Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan and a short tanker trip away from Japan. (CRS 11)

The Sino-Japanese competition has all the hallmarks of a ding-dong NBA final going down to the wire.

An agreement between Russia and China, endorsed by both President Putin and President Hu, stalled, however, after the arrest of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chairman of Yukos, the company that had been selected to construct the pipeline. ... Although Beijing reportedly thought it had secured the deal, the most recent reports have indicated that Putin is leaning toward the Nakhodka option because of Japan’s generous pledge of infrastructure development assistance. (CRS 11)

To make matters more interesting, Russia has to contend with another great power in southern Central Asia -- the United States.

China’s thirst for oil has led to new partnerships with Central Asian states, an area of traditional rivalry between great powers. Moscow is challenged by Beijing’s inroads with members of the former Soviet empire, and both continental powers are aware of expanded American presence with the establishment of U.S. bases in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The three powers will likely remain very attentive to the sensitive issue of pipeline construction. (CRS 17)

Yet even the great reserves of Central Asia will be unlikely to satisfy the gargantuan demands of China. Between 2001 and 2020, Siberian oil field production is predicted to rise from 8 to 15 million barrels per day. In that period, Middle Eastern oil field output will climb from 22 to 36 million barrels per day and every drop of that will be required to meet the projected demand. (CRS 2). China, once capable of isolating itself from the world, will become dependent for its economic existence on oilfields in the distant Middle East and the ability to transport the fuel to its factories.

In March 2004, Saudi Arabia announced that, in a bid for stronger ties with China and Russia, it had granted contracts to oil companies from those countries to explore for natural gas reserves in the kingdom after talks with American firms collapsed. Some scholars have posited that Asian nations’ competition for energy supplies with the West could lead to an eventual Middle East-Asia nexus, in which Asian governments become more politically close with the Gulf states in order to secure long-term access, thereby marginalizing U.S. power. Other observers have envisioned dire scenarios that could emerge from a protracted U.S.-China struggle over oil, including an increasingly close China-Saudi Arabia relationship that could lay the groundwork for a world war-level conflict. (CRS 18)

Still others see China growing closer to the United States due to a commonality of interests. As the procession of tankers leaving the Persian Gulf bound for Chinese ports grows, the one nation that could instantly shut of the supply through maritime blockade would be the United States. A risk-averse China might see it in its interest to cooperate with Japan and the United States to create a stable and prosperous Middle East, essentially duplicating Japanese policy.

Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba was recently quoted as saying, “To have other countries...do all the unpleasant, hard things, while we take the oil after Iraq becomes affluent and peaceful through the painful efforts of the rest of the world, I don’t think that would be acceptable.” Prime Minister Koizumi has asserted that stability in the Middle East is in Japan’s national interest because of its dependence on the region’s oil. ... Japan’s unprecedented deployment of Self Defense Forces to Iraq, as well as its active encouragement of Southeast Asian nations to join the U.S.- led Proliferation Security Initiative, may be indications of this trend.

However that may be, the CRS report paints a picture of a world far, far different from that envisioned by the Kyoto Protocol: one in which a senescent Europe of uncertain composition dreams under the protection of the Pacific hemisphere. Which comes to pass depends on many things that cannot be foreseen, such as unanticipated technological breakthroughs and on the statecraft of the next two decades.

2005-03-07T05:11:00.000Z

Hormuz

Austin Bay discusses the possibility that Iran might close the Straits of Hormuz in response to US and European sanctions to prevent Teheran from obtaining nuclear weapons. The Iranians didn't actually threaten anything but simply warned of an "oil crisis" in the event they were pushed to the wall. ABC News Online says:

Iran's top nuclear official has warned the United States and Europe of the danger of an oil crisis if Tehran is sent before the United Nations Security Council over its nuclear program. ... "The first to suffer will be Europe and the United States themselves, this would cause problems for the regional energy market, for the European economy and even more so for the United States," he said.

The Iranians were at pains to distinguish between a 'reasonable' Europe and an intransigent United States. Teheran pointedly implied that if the whole region were destabilized the fault would lie squarely with the United States.

Mr Rowhani, who was speaking at a conference in Tehran on nuclear technology and sustainable development, however expressed optimism that an agreement would be reached with Europe over the development of Iran's nuclear program. ... Mr Rowhani warned the US that it could destabilise the region if it blocks an accord with Europe. If Washington brings the issue before the Security Council, "Iran will retract all the decisions it has made and the confidence-building measures it has taken", he said.

Actual speculation that Iran was threatening naval action was from the Persian Journal, which reported ominous statements from a senior member of the Iranian government.

"An attack on Iran will be tantamount to endangering Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and "in a word" the entire Middle East oil," Iranian Expediency Council secretary Mohsen Rezai said on Tuesday. About 40 percent of the world's crude oil shipments passes through the two-mile wide channel of the strategic Straits of Hormuz. ... Teheran could easily block the Straits of Hormuz and use its missiles to strike tankers and GCC oil facilities. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that oil tanker traffic through the Straits of Hormuz will rise to about 60 percent of global oil exports by 2025. Rezai, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps ... said such a significant increase in oil prices would also be sparked by international sanctions on Tehran.

The Iranians could blockade the Gulf, but for how long is the question. (DIA) Director Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby testified last month that

"Iran can briefly close the Strait of Hormuz, relying on a layered strategy using predominantly naval, air and some ground forces. Last year it purchased North Korean torpedo and missle-armed fast attack craft and midget submarines, making margin improvements to this capability."

The threat seems serious because he strait is only two miles wide in places. The World Tribune Com claims that "Teheran could easily block the Straits of Hormuz and use its missiles to strike tankers and GCC oil facilities, according to the new edition of Geostrategy-Direct.com. Within weeks, the rest of the world would be starving for oil and the global economy could be in danger." In fact, a blockade of the Persian Gulf has been attempted before -- by Iraq -- but went largely underreported in the pre-Internet days during the Tanker War of 1984-1987.

In 1981 Baghdad had attacked Iranian ports and oil complexes as well as neutral tankers and ships sailing to and from Iran; in 1984 Iraq expanded the socalled tanker war by using French Super-Etendard combat aircraft armed with Exocet missiles. Neutral merchant ships became favorite targets, and the long-range Super-Etendards flew sorties farther south. Seventy-one merchant ships were attacked in 1984 alone, compared with forty-eight in the first three years of the war. Iraq's motives in increasing the tempo included a desire to break the stalemate, presumably by cutting off Iran's oil exports and by thus forcing Tehran to the negotiating table. Repeated Iraqi efforts failed to put Iran's main oil exporting terminal at Khark Island out of commission, however. Iran retaliated by attacking first a Kuwaiti oil tanker near Bahrain on May 13 and then a Saudi tanker in Saudi waters five days later, making it clear that if Iraq continued to interfere with Iran's shipping, no Gulf state would be safe. These sustained attacks cut Iranian oil exports in half, reduced shipping in the Gulf by 25 percent, led Lloyd's of London to increase its insurance rates on tankers, and slowed Gulf oil supplies to the rest of the world ...

As the Tanker War spread to attacks on all shipping, the tankers were convoyed in and out the Gulf by naval vessels, resulting in one action where the FFG-7 class USS Stark was nearly sunk by a French built Exocet missile fired by an Iraqi warplane. Iran did not attack US naval vessels at the outset.

Iran refrained from attacking the United States naval force directly, but it used various forms of harassment, including mines, hit-and-run attacks by small patrol boats, and periodic stop-and-search operations. On several occasions, Tehran fired its Chinese-made Silkworm missiles on Kuwait from Al Faw Peninsula. When Iranian forces hit the reflagged tanker Sea Isle City in October 1987, Washington retaliated by destroying an oil platform in the Rostam field and by using the United States Navy's Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) commandos to blow up a second one nearby.

Within a few weeks of the Stark incident, Iraq resumed its raids on tankers but moved its attacks farther south, near the Strait of Hormuz. Washington played a central role in framing UN Security Council Resolution 598 on the Gulf war, passed unanimously on July 20; Western attempts to isolate Iran were frustrated, however, when Tehran rejected the resolution because it did not meet its requirement that Iraq should be punished for initiating the conflict.

In early 1988, the Gulf was a crowded theater of operations. At least ten Western navies and eight regional navies were patrolling the area, the site of weekly incidents in which merchant vessels were crippled. The Arab Ship Repair Yard in Bahrain and its counterpart in Dubayy, United Arab Emirates (UAE), were unable to keep up with the repairs needed by the ships damaged in these attacks.

Parallels with the earlier Tanker War are bound to be inexact. Most naval attacks were by Saddam Hussein's forces in the Northern Persian Gulf, where the waters are wider. Iraq did not enjoy Iran's geographical advantage of actual positions at the chokepoint. But the Iranians demonstrated the ability to fire missiles from land batteries at maritime targets owing to the extreme narrowness of the Straits and to mine it. Another FFG-7 class warship, the USS Samuel B. Roberts was seriously damaged when it struck an Iranian mine in April, 1988 and was so heavily damaged it had to be shipped home by heavy lift for a year's repair at Bath Iron Works.

Three days after the mine blast, forces of the Joint Task Force Middle East executed the American response - Operation Praying Manits. During a two-day period, the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Air Force units of Joint Task Force Middle East destroyed two oil platforms being used by Iran to coordinate attacks on merchant shipping, sank or destroyed three Iranian warships and neutralized at least six Iranian speedboats.

But the bottom line is that an Iranian blockade of the Gulf of Hormuz will probably fail to stop tanker traffic completely, just as it failed in the 1980s. US forces in the region have grown comparatively more capable, with facilities within the Gulf itself, both in Bahrain and in Iraq, for example. An Iranian blockade would however, disrupt tanker sailings, increase insurance premiums and generally drive the cost of crude upwards; it might even sink a number of tankers and naval vessels, but in the end the United States would prevail. Strangely enough, the Iran blockade threat is more powerful "in being" than in actual implementation. While it remains simply a threat, it can be used as a diplomatic lever to extract concessions. If actually carried out, Europe and China, whatever their political inclinations, would be forced by economic necessity to help break the blockade.

2005-03-04T04:34:00.000Z

The Foundations of Barad-Dur

The leniency of Bali bombing mastermind Abu Bakar Bashir's sentence -- 30 months for the murder of 202 people -- has shocked the Australian public, not in the least because after long labor the mountain has brought forth a mouse.

Former magistrate Brian Deegan, who lost his son Josh, 22, in the Bali bombing, said Bashir's sentence was outrageous. "It equates to a bit over a week (in jail) per man, woman and child that were hurt," Mr Deegan said today. "You get no closure out of this, it's absolutely insulting."

Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty is warning that the kid-glove treatment of Bashir has not satisified his supporters, who regard the slightest inconvenience to their 'spiritual leader' for the mere act of murdering infidels a mortal insult.

New terrorist attacks are possible in a backlash by supporters of Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir over his jailing, Australia's senior police officer said here Friday. Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty said intelligence agencies would be updating terror threat assessments, taking into account a possible violent response from Bashir's supporters.

Veteran newsman Max Soliven of the Philippine Star who has covered Indonesia since the Sukarno era in the mid-1960s talks about the shadow of fear that is spreading where it had never been seen before.

"This sends the message to us, who live fearfully on the perimeter of the JI venom this vicious agitator has been sowing among the pesantren, the thousands of religious schools (equivalent to our Muslim madrasas here) ... the government prosecutors acted like a bunch of nervous Nellies at the trial .... many witnesses refused to testify ... Only one witness, Nasir Abbas, has linked Bashir to terrorism, resolutely testifying that the cleric had personally pit him (Abbas) in charge of "terrorist activities in part of the Philippines".

Indonesia’s turmoil had never been about religion. ... Indonesia was a society in which women played a major role, free from the fetters of second-class status ... In my recent visits, I’ve seen – while some of the smiles remain spontaneous – a visible change. An increasing number of women are wearing head scarves, and even all-black covering (ala the Middle East’s structures). Christian churches are being bombed, Christian communities embroiled in civil war with their once-friendly and happy Muslim neighbors, with the ABRI (Armed Forces) too often siding with the militant Islamic jihadis.

Salamabit*, you don’t even have to go to Indonesia. A Vice-Governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao ... is now insisting on implementing a city ordinance ... which requires every Muslim female in Marawi City, yep in our own Mindanao, to wear the head-scarve, otherwise be penalized with a fine of thousands of pesos ... (* Sonuvabitch)

Soliven notes what most of the regular newspapers have missed: that Bashir was at the nexus of the Saudi madrassa system that is the assembly line of terrorism. It is the same system that produced Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a "former Virginia high school valedictorian ... accused in federal court Tuesday of allegedly conspiring with al-Qaida to assassinate President Bush." And it is a system that has proved too powerful to shut down or even criticize.

Lawyers for Abu Ali, who graduated at the top of his class from the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, said he would plead not guilty. Raised in nearby Falls Church, Va., he was enrolled at a university in Medina when he was arrested. ... According to the grand jury indictment, items found at Abu Ali's home in Falls Church a week after his arrest included a six-page document on how to avoid government and private surveillance, a document praising the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and the terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon, a copy of Handguns magazine with the name "Ahmed Ali" on the subscription label, audio tapes promoting violent holy war and the killing of Jews, and a book by Al Qaeda deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri criticizing democracy.

Presiding judge O'Grady issued the ritual apology which has become a standard part of treating with these men of the shadows. "I can assure you, you will not suffer any torture or humiliation while in the marshals' custody". Already the victims have become accustomed to craving pardon, in advance, for their unspeakable inferiority, before the emissaries of the madrassas. If US judges are halfway to their knees how likely is it that the Indonesians will hold themselves erect? Secretary Donald Rumsfeld provided the broadest description of the nature of the conflict and laid out what it took to defeat the enemy:

this struggle cannot be won by military means alone ... And since, ultimately, what they need to survive is the support of those who they can indoctrinate, this is an ideological battle as well. ... This war has required not only the vigorous pursuit of known terrorists, but finding ways to stop extremists from gaining recruits and adherents. It is this ideological component, I suggest, that is the essential ingredient for victory.

And it is in this essential area that Australia and by extension the United States, have lost a serious battle. Unless the foundations of the enemy's power are shaken there can be no victory against ever-growing tide that will come against us.

Who was it who said that all wars of consequence were conflicts of the mind? Without getting too metaphysical, it still makes sense to regard ideas as the foundation of historical struggles; the thing that animates the visible clashes. While an idea's potency remains it will find adherents.

The casual outside observer would conclude, from the apparent fact that the Western ideal can find no public defenders, that it is not worth upholding. Radical Islam, on the other hand, must self-evidently be an idea of great worth, as so many are publicly willing to die for it. And to a limited degree they would be right, for something must be terribly wrong with the West to cause such self-hatred.

America has shown itself apt at striking the visible parts of its enemy but seems unable to touch its foundations. On the contrary, every blow it deals seemingly reverberates within it, spreading cracks throughout its own base. Sometimes I think this is fortunate because I am beginning to suspect that the foundations of Barad-Dur lie within the West and not within Islam.

2005-03-03T22:34:00.000Z

New Comments Policy

In response to complaints about the tediousness of the Blogger registration requirements, unregistered commenters are now enabled. However, if we get an influx of trolls and other unsavory characters, the 'registered users' policy must come back on. Let's see how it goes.

Update

In deference to the wisdom of the commenters, who note that anonymous comments will attract trolls, things are back to their previous settings.

2005-03-03T12:22:00.000Z

Hanson Versus Edsforth

Victor Davis Hanson recently debated Dartmouth History Professor Ronald Edsforth on the subject of whether the war in Iraq or any war, for that matter, could ever be justified. (Hat tip: DL)

By attacking Iraq, Edsforth said, the United States had usurped the authority of the United Nations, in which the world community can take action to promote the common good. Since treaties like those that established the U.N. are held in the United States to be “the supreme law of the land,” he said, the American government has effectively abrogated its own Constitution. He noted, for example, that a White House lawyer drafted guidelines regarding torture, even though the U.S. is party to the Geneva Conventions. ...

“War is terrible,” Hanson agreed. But in a rebuttal, he said the United Nations has historically not intervened for the common good, even against the worst abuses. The U.N., much of which he said is “populated by thugs and brigands” like Syria, Iran, Sudan, and Cuba, failed to act against the Rwandan genocide of 1994, against the Serbian slaughter of Kosovars in 1998, or even against the ongoing genocide in Darfur—which only the United States has declared a humanitarian crisis. “Innocent women and children died waiting” for the United Nations to help them, he said. ...

Edsforth proposed that the human race has learned the dangers of war, especially after the blood-soaked twentieth century. “Evolution [of human behavior] is a fact,” he said. “It didn’t stop back in ancient times… We are capable of learning as humans and changing our environment in such a way that that which we abhor is less and less likely.” Indeed, he suggested that American foreign policy has over the past several decades been a reactionary effort to “turn back the clock” to the systems of the past. “We should lead the world in creating this new environment,” he said, “and not stand as a roadblock before its creation.” ...

Hanson, though, maintained that the human race has not changed significantly in the past several thousand years. “Human nature is set,” he said—it was “primordial, reptilian,” adding that man is always “governed by pride and fear and envy.” He cited Thucydides, who wrote that his works would remain valid through the ages precisely because human nature is unchanging. “We have not reached the end of history.”

It is well that we have not, as Dr. Hanson put it, "reached the end of history". While man struggles on, his final chapter is postponed for yet a little longer. Man may be reptilian, yet the snake was always destined to be crushed beneath his heel; pride and envy may rule yet always be at war with man's better nature. The more interesting philosophical question is whether we could abolish war without abolishing ourselves. The possibility of heaven is purchased at the risk of hell and the gift of fire balanced by the danger that we should set ourselves ablaze. The Leftist impulse is at heart a longing to be rid of the burden of freedom. What was the dreamed-of Worker's Paradise except the same old places repopulated by the New Soviet Man?

2005-03-03T06:18:00.000Z

The Beat Goes On

The Chicago Tribune describes a new method for detecting nuclear material. The Los Alamos-developed detector relies on measuring the interaction between cosmic rays and and the material being scanned. The different materials have interaction signatures which identify them.

By placing detectors above and below a vehicle, scientists can monitor muon interaction with different materials in the vehicle's cargo. The higher density a material is, the more muons will scatter when they make contact. A computer uses the scatter data to create an image of the different materials in the vehicle. High-density materials, such as plutonium or uranium, are flagged.

The system is said to require only 20 seconds to scan a shipping container and because it simply measures cosmic rays which are present in the everyday environment, the method does not pose a risk to users, even illegal immigrants who might be hiding within the container.

The Homeland Security site at Ohio State has more details on the actual application of this and other technologies.

Bolstering its assets to deter a dirty-bomb threat, the Bush Administration is expected to announce plans to considerably expand homeland security monitoring efforts for radioactive materials coming into and traveling within the nation, The New York Times reported 1 February. The plan reportedly calls for the establishment of the office of domestic nuclear detection, to be housed within DHS, to coordinate the consolidation of the presently fragmented network of radiation detection equipment. ... The security department is the biggest player in this field, installing more than 400 radiation monitors in the past two years at ports, border crossings and post offices that handle international mail. Cities like New York have also been buying detection equipment. "The threat is very real," said Representative Heather A. Wilson, a New Mexico Republican who led a recent study that called for better coordination of nuclear security efforts. "The possibility of nuclear material falling into wrong hands may be small, but it would have devastating consequences."

Recent -- and very real -- successes at spreading democracy in the Middle East, even coupled with impressive technological advances will not change the fact that widely available commercial technology has put enormous destructive potential in the hands of private groups. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, once the sole province of states, may become available to powerful nonstate organization or even individuals and we will always have to guard against them. General John Abizaid, during a trip to Baghdad covered by US News and World report used a curious term to describe the GWOT, as if he stood not in a particular place, but was the universal soldier standing on the timeless field of conflict.

The White House uses the term "global war on terror." With the military's well-known fondness for acronyms, this has, inevitably, been reduced to GWOT, but Abizaid tends to cast the conflict slightly differently, as the "war on extremism" or the "long war." ... "We didn't have the guts to get out in front of the fascists or the Bolsheviks. This time we have to get in front. This time we have a chance. If we don't fight this fight here, we will fight it at home. I would ask you to please talk to your captains, young gunnery sergeants, and tell them we need them. We need them to fight that long war."

A National Journal interview late last year with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker brought up much the same theme.

NJ: As you look forward, how long do you foresee the global war on terrorism lasting?

Schoomaker: In my view, the conflict we're now engaged in is not a short-term endeavor. I think we're into something that will entail some level of conflict for a great deal of time to come. Some people see war and peace as a light switch. When the lights are off, it's peacetime. When the lights go on, it's wartime. I see more of a dimmer switch. We'll see the intensity wax and wane, but there will always be some level of conflict going on.

George Santayana ridiculed Woodrow Wilson's ambition to fight a 'war to end all wars'. "Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war is over! Only the dead have seen the end of war." Some plagues are cured but for a season; though that is enough. Santayana was a brilliant philosopher, but he would have made a poor garbage collector.

2005-03-02T00:51:00.000Z

The theater widens

Austin Bay links to Mark Steyn and Christopher Hitchens' view of events sweeping across the Middle East: Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and possibly Syria. It is a reminder of why Iraq was commanded through CENTCOM. During the days when the overt action was centered on Iraq, it was easy to forget that it was one battlefield within a theater. Now the theater itself has come to the fore and the atmosphere is one of 'breakout and pursuit'.

The breakout creates a new set of opportunities and problems. These can be described as 'emergent phenomenon', -- the result of interactions between individual elements within the Middle East and Southwest Asian theater that are now bouncing off each other. Worse -- or more exciting -- is that these recent developments now have linkages into Europe and Russia. France and the EU, for example, are getting engaged in Lebanon while going in the other direction, Russia has declared interest in supplying technology to Iran. Just as it was important to recall that Iraq was part of the Middle East theater, the Middle East itself is part of action spanning the globe. In retrospect, events as disparate as the dismantling of of the Libyan nuclear program and the exposure of the AQ Khan atomic weapons mart played their part in leading up to current developments. As historical drama the GWOT's scope is staggering and may prove to be bigger in certain respects than that old yardstick, the Second World War.

'Militant' groups have often attempted to stabilize the front whenever events threatened to take a direction which they could not control. This usually took the form of a spoiling terrorist attack to re-mire things in blood, chaos and hatred as often happened during negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. It would not be surprising if the terror masters fell back on this old repertoire by staging attacks directed not only at Middle Eastern targets but at the United States to throw back the threatening psychological wave. The problem is that there is no longer any widespread confidence, even in the places like Lebanon, that terror tactics will prevail. To that extent even the most heinous attacks, like the carbomb which recently killed more than 100 in Iraq, have lost their bite. Psychologically speaking, the greatest contribution of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns is that they have shattered terrorism's myth of invincibility. The terrorists embarked on a maximum effort to dislodge the US from Iraq, employing every weapon of violence, political maneuver and propaganda they could muster and came up much the worse for wear. This lesson has not been lost to public perception and has emboldened dissidents all across the region.

The real challenge will be to find ways to respond to the campaign of spoiling terror which may be forthcoming. Unlike Iraq, where US forces can respond directly to challenge, the problem will be the ability of the US to affect events over the wider region in clandestine or indirect ways. Tempo is America's friend, but the enemy is even now looking for a place to stem the rot.

2005-03-01T00:06:00.000Z

Posting will be light

Real pressure at work these past days has left me with no time to post. Pretty exciting stuff is happening in Lebanon though. Go to the Syria Comment site for additional info. Across the Bay is another excellent site.

2005-02-27T01:21:00.000Z

Betrayals

The Denver Channel reports that 200 University of Colorado faculty members have published a petition in a local newspaper asking that the investigation against Ward Churchill be dropped.

The faculty members paid for the ad to run Monday in The Boulder Daily Camera. The ad says the review of the professor, expected to complete by the middle of March, should be stopped immediately. The ad says the inquiry is the result of political pressure and not based on "any prior formal complaint of specific professional or academic misconduct on his part." ...

CU's Arts and Sciences Council passed a resolution Feb. 10 protesting the investigation, and said administrators should know that faculty members are serious about their opposition to what some consider a witch hunt. Margaret LeCompte, an education professor, said, "It is going to be extremely difficult, if academic freedom is on the block, for us to hire and keep good faculty members.' LeCompte and the other teachers who signed the ad paid $1,600 to have it published. "We're all thinking twice about what we're saying," LeCompte said, recalling the climate in the McCarthy era when professors were fired for alleged communist ties.

The same story is being carried by the Rocky Mountain News on a feed from the Associated Press. Some newspapers are connecting this 'witch hunt' with the mandatory Loyalty Oaths the State of Colorado requires of teachers at institutions of higher learning. According to the Denver Channel:

State law requires anybody who teaches at a higher education institution to sign an oath affirming they will uphold the U.S. and Colorado constitutions. University officials said somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent of staff have signed loyalty oaths. Those who haven't, will be required to do so. Churchill was among the minority that hadn't before the controversy. But he subsequently has signed.

Dissent has long been described as a patriotic and legitimate activity and Professor Churchill's patriotism is a thing to behold. A transcript of a speech he gave on February 21, 2005 is provided by InfoshopOrg, an anarchist website, from a Counterpunch source.

Ward Churchill: Hello my relatives; you humble me. Bill Owens: do you get it now? [applause] If you can count on your toes, you'll be able to count the percentage points of contribution to the budget the University of Colorado you and your ilk have reduced the taxpayer contribution to. It comes to seven. I do not work for the taxpayers of the state of Colorado. I do not work for Bill Owens.....

Question #4: I'm glad I came here tonight; I've heard a lot more than I heard on the average sound bytes we've been hearing on the radio. I agree with some points, there are other points that I disagree with, but I do believe you have a constitutional right to say what you have to say. On the other hand, do you agree that the First Amendment rights for the people marching in the Columbus Day parade should be taken away, because that is their freedom of expression as well, and I'm one of those people.

Ward Churchill: Let me answer the man. No, I don't believe you have a First Amendment right because that bounces off against my Ninth Amendment right. You know what my Ninth Amendment rights are? Do you know what the Ninth Amendment says?

Question #4: No, sir.

Ward Churchill: Yeah. Do we have a law professor in here? I think this is a lesson for law school, because I addressed another university auditorium with about this many people in it last week, and I posed the same question to the whole group. Professors, students, townspeople and all, not a soul, including law professors, could tell me what the damn Ninth Amendment said. [laughter] S'pose there might be a reason for that?

Question #4: Sir, sir, sirdoes that negate the First Amendment?

Ward Churchill: No, no, wait a minute; let's get an answer to it.

Audience Member: Basically it says that whatever rights were not given to federal government are given to the states.

Ward Churchill: Actually, wrong, beep. [laughter] What it says, in very close paraphrase, is that all rights not otherwise enumerated herein that are inherent in people are retained by them, OK? You can have a real entertaining time looking at the nature of those rights as articulated, and it can be rather nebulous and it can be debatable, but I'll tell you one place you can look where it's not debatable at all and that's in black letter legal articulation. That goes to human rights, particularly the articulation of international human rights that take the form of ratified treaties. Under Article Six of the Constitution of the United States, those are the supreme law of the land, and among them, are fundamental human dignity, OK? And celebration of the conditions that I was describing as pertaining to native people as an outcome of the process initiated by Christopher Columbus, celebrating that guy in any respect at all is a celebration of those conditions. That's a denial of fundamental human dignity, that's a denial of my Ninth Amendment rights and you don't have a right to do that, and you know exactly what you're doing. [applause]

This exchange recalled an earlier Belmont Club post which said:

The implicit assumption underlying this discourse is that "we" -- and not you -- ask the questions. ... As Robert Kaplan pointed out in The Media and Medievalism, the most powerful tool of totalitarianism is to don the guise of righteousness and assume "the right to question and to demand answers, the right to judge and condemn, and the right to pardon and show mercy." It is in the end an attempt to usurp the wellsprings of legitimacy.

From that acceptance a tyranny follows from which even the dead have no escape. The victims of the World Trade Center may have spent their last moments imagining that they would be avenged. Wrong. Society cannot even undertake to preserve their memory from those who would call them "little Eichmanns". What is at stake is not even the remembrance. To paraphrase another Churchill, it is the universal human experience to be forgotten; but what is at stake now is incomparably greater: the ability to remember who we are, and to prevent, for those who trusted us on that September day, the extinction of their light, their memory and their story.

2005-02-26T12:47:00.000Z

A Teaching Moment

University of Colorado officials are considering offering Ward Churchill an early retirement package that could end an increasingly uncomfortable standoff with the controversial professor. ... David Lane, Churchill's attorney, said he has not been contacted about a buyout offer. But, he said, while his primary focus is on protecting Churchill's constitutional right to speak out, he would be willing to listen to a university proposal. "If they offer $10 million, I would think about it. If they offer him $10, I wouldn't," Lane said.

Freedom of speech is not priceless. It's worth ten million dollars and not a penny less. This, according to the Denver Post, is preferred way to get Professor Churchill off the campus. The alternative, it sources suggest, is far worse.

Typically such dismissals - even if done by the book - result in years of expensive lawsuits that Hoffman told legislators last week the university would like to avoid. Sources involved in the talks said if an arrangement could be made, it could get everyone off the hook, including Churchill, the subject of daily press revelations. The latest controversy is whether an artwork by Churchill titled "Winter Attack" was copied from a 1972 piece by Thomas Mails, "The Mystic Warriors of the Plains."

The Rocky Mountain News depicts the CU administration as practically paralyzed with fear at the possible retaliation Churchill could visit on them should they attempt to chastise him.

University of Colorado President Betsy Hoffman had some fairly strong words Tuesday for those who have argued that professor Ward Churchill should be fired. "The more talk there is about the need to fire him, the more difficult it becomes for us to do that, if that's what we decide to do," she told Republican lawmakers, urging them not to join calls for action. "If we approach this issue wrong," she said, "not only will every regent be sued personally, but every administrator will be sued personally and professor Churchill will win his lawsuit with triple damages and be back on the faculty, a very wealthy man at our expense."

This fear, whether real or pretended, is an impressive demonstration of the power of Political Correctness, a compound of legal menace, the threat of extralegal action and of retaliatory vilification that is not some figure of speech but an actual, material force. Even if Churchill is 'bought out' at $10 million -- should he stoop to accept such a beggarly sum -- he will have unambiguously demonstrated the value of leftist protection. That he could have survived repeated exposure as an ethnic identity thief, academic fraud and art forger; that he could have assaulted a newsman on television and withstood the personal opprobrium of the Colorado Governor, only to receive a fortune in compensation, can only add to his fame.

The perception of danger depends on one's perspective. Neville Chamberlain's Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, argued against opposing the Nazi aggression by asking "was any useful purpose served by treading on the landslide and being carried along with it"? Another Churchill, unrelated to Ward, counterargued that the danger lay entirely the other way: that capitulation mean stepping onto a "slippery slope" every bit as perilous as Halifax's metaphorical landslide; how each moment of procrastination increased the awfulness of the inevitable clash. The case, on smaller scale, describes CU's dilemma. From Hoffman's point of view, it is resisting Ward Churchill that is dangerous; from another standpoint it is not resisting him that constitutes the threat.