Four incidents of RPG w/ small arms ambushes, found four Iraqi's setting up IED's (now in paradise ) Some of the weapons we have found have been home made rocket launchers, SA-7, RPG's and AK's. We've had two multi company raids and a few smaller cordon and searches.We have detained some >40 locals but have released a majority of them after investigating their stories.

Three days ago (mother shot twice and is currently in the hospital), two daughters (late teens early twenties) and a small one (8-10 YO daughter) were killed on their way to the FOB where they worked in different capacities. The mother and the little one worked in the barracks area for the BN doing general cleaning of the common areas. The other two daughters worked in one of the common offices on the FOB. It appears to be a vendetta killing because the shooters were familiar to the family. They were shot on the bus they were in then dragged out to the street and shot again. (also the bus driver was killed) An IP who was nearby did absolutely nothing because he feared for himself and his family(so he says). We picked up three out of the four involved in that shooting last night. We'll turn them over to the IP in the next couple of days.

Another raid one of the companies conducted resulted in us finding some armor piercing incendiary rounds fired out of AK's. (it is reported that these will penetrate our current IBA) (not a good thing out to 100 meters) These rounds have filtered down here from Russia and Afghanistan through Al Queda and other channels.

Two days ago we walked through one of the neighborhood (pictures attached) seeing the kids and a vast majority of the locals react is about the only thing that's good about this region. Over 95% of the population understand and are glad we are here. The other 5% (of 850,000 in our sector) are pissed because we're here. That <5% are the ones we deal with on a nightly basis. We have had a few incidents but the vast majority is done at night either in setting up the IED's or setting up ambushes. The pictures of the soccer field and sports plex is what we're opening up tomorrow.

There are four major projects we are working on, I'll explain one today and get another one next time. The power facility. Currently non operational. The power our sector gets is rationed in blocks of time, three hours on - nine hours off. A lot of the schools and government building have their own generators. The power plant is part Russian, part German, part British. The plant is supposed to be 25% operational by this fall, 50% by next summer. At that point it should be putting out approx 600 MW of power.

We're still tight in the barracks because the sub contractors have not fulfilled their contact to KBR who has not fulfilled their contracts with us. The facilities here are not too bad, this compound was previously used by the republican guard as a maintenance facility. I live in the headquarters building upstairs. It has shower and lavatories but the plumbing is so poor that in order to "do a class 1 (food) download we have to use porta johns set up out side the building. Oh for the feel of porcelain. We have small PX, laundry facility (three day turn around), barbershop, coffee shop and a small Iraqi shop. The rest of the unit is in a building with rooms that are about 12 × 15. four to a room.

Our email is still sporadic so I'll get this off. Have a great day

Update: The photos are now online here.

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IRAQ BRIEFING

• IGC member Massoud Barzani, the powerful leader of the Kurdish KDP, is saying that the US has made mistakes in the post-war occupation, but is not pessimistic for the future.

• The US has told the new Iraqi government that even after the transfer of powert it will still have to delegate some of its duties to the coalition.

• US forces launched a major attack on insurgent forces based in the Julan neighborhood of Fallujah. A parallel strike near An Najaf appears to have killed a large number of Mahdi Army fighters.

• Iraqi insurgents have placed a bounty on the heads of Rumsfeld, Sanchez, and Kimmit.

• US troops looking for chemical weapons in Baghdad were apparently lured into an ambush in Sadr City.

• The Fox company of US Marine Corps is active in Fallujah and battling insurgent forces there.

• The insurgent group Green Brigade, which is holding 3 Italians citizens, is telling the Italian people to protest the more in Iraq or they'll kill the hostages.

• The motorcade of Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanovmade came under attack in Karbala, though there were no casualties.

• Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi has issued a communique on a jihadi website claiming responsibility for the recent attacks on Iraqi oil terminals. He doesn't seem too fond of the Australian prime minister, either ...

• The Scotsman provides a look at how the Mahdi Army is treating the residents of An Najaf since seizing control of the city earlier this month.

• Speaking of the An Najafi, they are apparently actively turning against Sadr and have formed a group called the Thulfiqar Army to drive the Mahdi Army out of the city.

• There appears to be some speculation that one of those bribed by Saddam Hussein was a former president of NATO.

• Ralph Peters believes that Iraqi Kurds may serve as an example to the rest of the nation for how to form a peaceful society in the new Iraq.

• The UK is considering boosting troop levels to take up the tab left behind by the Spanish withdrawl.

• The US is considering sending more armor to Iraq after fears that Humvees now being used may not offer enough protection against attacks on US forces.

IRAN REPORTS

• An Iranian opposition group is claiming that Iran is rushing to build nuclear weapons as soon as possible and says that the ayatollahs will have the bomb with 1-2 years.

• Iranian president Khatami has admitted that Iran has political prisoners, but claims that is only the case because Iran existed in the East rather than the West. Khatami has also taken to defending Hezbollah in recent days.

THE WIDER WAR

• 12 Hezb-e-Islami members have been busted in Kabul on the suspicion of planning attacks.

• Pakistan hopes that the amnesty deal will stem tribal support for al-Qaeda. I wish that I was as optimistic ...

• It seems that Nek Mohammed, one of the al-Qaeda supporters recently granted amnesty, formerly ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.

• Afghan president Hamid Karzai is courting rank-and-file to abandon the fight against the new government in return for reintegration into Afghan society.

• Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir has been yet again linked, this time by the Indonesian authorities, to the Bali bombing.

• In Europe, the call for jihad is still going out to self-professed supporters of Osama bin Laden, many of whom are based in the UK.

• One of those supporters, Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, is appealing his citizenship ruling, meaning that he'll remain in the UK for at least 9 more months.

• Russia believes that Saudi cash and Turkish jihadis are helping to fuel the continued fighting Chechnya.

• The Filippino military is carefully watching the moves of Abu Sayyaf leader Khadaffi Janjalani.

• Saudi terrorists have been disguising themselves as women in an effort to evade the authorities, who, incidentally, also believe they've cornered Abdul Aziz Isa Abdul Mohsin al-Muqrin, the highest-ranking al-Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia.

• Al-Muqrin is also denying any connection between al-Qaeda and the recent bombing in Riyadh. This is actually likely a credible claim, as the bombing was claimed by the al-Haramain Brigades, who were specifically formed to fight the Saudi royal family for al-Qaeda so that the organization could focus its efforts on killing Americans in Iraq.

• Sudan is ordering Syrian WMD out of the country over fears that their presence could hamper efforts by the NIF to free itself from US sanctions.

• Syria is fingering al-Qaeda for the recent incident in Damascus. Bashar al-Assad is said to have personally supervised the military operation that crushed the terrorist cell.

• Honduras fears that al-Qaeda may be recruiting Honduran converts to Islam to commit terrorist attacks upon their return.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. Iran appears to be experiencing a UFO craze of sorts these days. What's the Farsi for "Take me to your leader?"

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The service was a fitting tribute to this hero. When it was over, we stood as the casket was wheeled out with the family following. The casket was placed onto a horse-drawn carriage for the mile-long trip from the gym, down the main street, then up the steep hill to the cemetery. I stood alone and saluted as the carriage departed the high school. I found my car and joined Chance’s convoy. The town seemingly went from the gym to the street. All along the route, the people had lined the street and were waving small American flags. The flags that were otherwise posted were all at half-staff. For the last quarter mile up the hill, local boy scouts, spaced about 20 feet apart, all in uniform, held large flags. At the foot of the hill, I could look up and back and see the enormity of our procession. I wondered how many people would be at this funeral if it were in, say, Detroit or Los Angeles—probably not as many as were here in little Dubois, Wyoming.

I'm not sure that's true. But even the fact that it might be is a damn shame.

Regardless of how we feel about Bush or Kerry, regardless of whether we agree with the decision to go to war, we all owe the men and women in uniform our regard and affection.

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They're unhappy about Israel.

The decision by the USA, the EU, Russia and the UN to launch a "Road Map" for the settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict raised hopes that the major powers would at last make a determined and collective effort to resolve a problem which, more than any other, has for decades poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds. ... But the hopes were ill-founded. Nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence.

Well, the Israelis seem to have done a pretty good job of curbing the violence. Note the sharp dropoff in suicide bombings in the last 4 years.

Britain and the other sponsors of the Road Map merely waited on American leadership, but waited in vain.

No, they waited for Arafat to act like a statesman who wanted to found a nation, and not a kleptocratic thug. The U.S. played along with the fiction until recently.

Worse was to come. After all those wasted months, the international community has now been confronted with the announcement by Ariel Sharon and President Bush of new policies which are one-sided and illegal and which will cost yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood.

You mean the abandonment of the fictitious 'right of return' which was stupidly fuzzed over in the Oslo talks by these professionals?

Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land and which have been the basis for such successes as those efforts have produced.

And, looking at the facts on the ground in 2003, which successes, exactly, would those be? What 'principles', other than an overweening pride, and respect for the 'process of negotiation' for its own sake, would those be?

This abandonment of principle comes at a time when rightly or wrongly we are portrayed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as partners in an illegal and brutal occupation in Iraq. The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement.

No accurate plan, that's for sure. Here's the one valid criticism.

All those with experience of the area predicted that the occupation of Iraq by the Coalition forces would meet serious and stubborn resistance, as has proved to be the case. To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful.

Well, that's funny. Because if the masses of Iraqi people were rising up, the news would look somewhat different than it does, wouldn't it? Which means that - wait for it - the forces we oppose are terrorists, fanatics, and foreigners. The masses of people haven't, and aren't - the trick is going to be making sure they won't.

... The military actions of the Coalition forces must be guided by political objectives and by the requirements of the Iraq theatre itself, not by criteria remote from them.

It is not good enough to say that the use of force is a matter for local commanders.

Heavy weapons unsuited to the task in hand, inflammatory language, the current confrontations in Najaf and Falluja, all these have built up rather than isolated the opposition.

Thanks, guys but war under diplomatic control was tried several places by UN forces. Didn't work so well. Let's not do it any more, OK? Soldiers fight, and make those decisions - when the fighting is over, or has the chance to be over, let's let the diplomatic corps take the lead.

Here's a metaphor. If someone (my uncle, say) has pancreatic cancer for two years and doesn't know about it - is the surgeon who's excising that cancer causing a problem, or solving one?

The basic failure of this cohort of diplomats - in the UK, US, UN, and elsewhere - is that for twenty years, they were silent and ineffective while Islamism grew in power and hatred.

They believed that by negotiating the terms of 'stability' - because, after all, when you negotiate for a living, a successful negotiation is the major thing you're looking for - even as one side made it clear that stability wasn't what was being sought - they were accomplishing something.

What they were doing was selling my uncle Lydia Pinkham's Elixir as the cancer grew deeper into his body. These men (interestingly, it appears to be an all-male group) should be ashamed; ashamed of writing this letter, and more deeply, ashamed for having dined on the Queen's silver while allowing this problem to grow unchecked.

In fact, they not only let it grow unchecked, but stood by, supportive and silent, as any real peace process was undermined by oil bribes.

One of the keys of any successful negotiation is the willingness to simply go 'basta!' - no more - and get up and walk from the table.

The problem with a policy of engagement and continuous negotiation supported by this crew is that you preclude that possibility.

Bush and Sharon have done just that in Palestine, and Bush and Blair have done it in Iraq.

That's infinitely preferable to a policy in which diplomats confer in luxury while suicide bombers murder innocents.

My uncle had surgery two weeks ago, at Columbia-Presbyterian in New York. His surgery was successful, and he's recovering at home.

Look, I'm not a historian of the Middle East, nor someone who lives and breathes foreign policy.

But I do know failure when I see it.

And I'll quote an old reply of mine to Trent, who challenged my credentials in this area:

...the genius of the American system is that there certainly are experts on game theory, diplomatic history, and policy who have substantive and valuable expertise in these areas.

And they all work for guys like me. Our Congress and our President are typically business men and women, lawyers, rank amateurs when it comes to the hard games that they study so diligently at ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration). And that's a good thing, in fact, it's a damn good thing.

It is a good thing because the unique power of the United States comes from our willingness to diffuse power down into the ranks - to act in ways outside what a small cadre of mandarins sitting at a capital can envision.

I'll stand by those words, and voice a small appreciation that guys like the jittery fifty work for Tony Blair, and not the other way around.

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COLOMBIA

• President Uribe's amnesty plan for members of the right-wing terrorist group, the AUC (Spanish acronym for United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) is blowing away in the wind like so much dust.

• It started at the end of March when the AUC's high command named a ten man negotiating team that didn't include founder Carlos Castaño. Then, on Friday, April 16 Castaño was attacked and six of his bodyguards were killed, allegedly by a rival figure in the AUC - or were they? The only thing certain is that Castaño has not been seen and the possibility of the paramilitary terrorists - to say nothing of the FARC and ELN terrorists - laying down their weapons seems less likely.

• The other nascent concern is the very real possibility that narcotraficantes may have garnered total control of the AUC. While this would certainly be nothing new (Castaño himself is under indictment in the US for drug trafficking) the concern here is that peace is even further away and the brutality of the AUC may even be ratcheted up even higher.

• Uribe shouldn't be surprised. There has been infighting among the AUC for some time. The AUC has extorted land from landholders in anticipation of disarmament, they have worked overtly and covertly with the military and have used civilians as human shields. My sympathies lie squarely with the decent, law-abiding citizens of Colombia trying to live their lives amidst the terror. I truly hope that Uribe is placing their interests first and foremost.

DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA

• A report released this month by the United Nations in which 20,000 people in 18 Latin American countries were surveyed about their feelings toward democracy. The results were disturbing: only 43% of those surveyed supported democracy fully and 55% said they "preferred an 'authoritarian' regime over a 'democratic' one if it could 'resolve' their economic problems."

• As you can imagine, this has provoked a great deal of concern among Latin America watchers and the media. Andrés Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald links the findings to an even larger contempt that many Latin American citizens hold for their legislators and makes a compelling argument that congresses tend to represent the elite and do not represent indigenous groups very well; some of whom are in the majority in their countries (e.g. Guatemala and Bolivia).

• I cannot help but find this worrisome and I have neither easy nor swift answers to this problem. On a personal note, however, it certainly jibes with my experiences in conversations with my Brazilian family and friends. Last summer my father-in-law expressed a wish for a dictator to come in and straighten Brazil out. I hastily reminded him that Brazil had dictators, most recently for 21 years (1964-85) and they had driven the society deep into debt while fracturing it. He lamented that Brazil did not have a leader like Getúlio Vargas any more. I told him that Brazil had had too many leaders like Vargas and perhaps they should really break the cycle. I hear this sort of sentiment from many younger people, too. I truly hope it's not indicative of a larger trend, but I can't help but be concerned, especially with recent events in Bolivia, Argentina and Venezuela.

VENEZUELA

• A recent poll shows that Hugo Chávez would probably narrowly win if a referendum on his recall took place now. It's hardly a ringing endorsement of his rule as it illustrates more than anything else how badly fractured the opposition is. The results are broken down as follows: 35% would vote for Chávez, 31% per cent would vote against him and 34% said they opposed Chávez, but were too frightened to vote or had lost faith in the opposition.

• Francisco Toro of Caracas Chronicles essentially agrees with the polling company's methodology while acknowledging the results as "grim." He also points out the hypocrisy of a pro-Chávez website taking these favorable (to Chávez) numbers while having dismissed as biased previous results from the same company. Any port in a storm, I suppose.

• With 65% of the population opposing you only a madman would claim a mandate. Marcela Sánchez makes a convincing argument that Chávez may indeed be mad, although his one time psychiatrist with whom she spoke said that Chávez "only suffers from the 'mental deformations' common to any person in power." Deformations, hmm. Does that mean he's warped?

BOLIVIA

• Bolivian blogger Miguel Centellas has a post on Southern Exposure about rumors of a possible military coup in Bolivia.

• Some of this arises from rumblings among the different military branches as Miguel notes as well as recent plans to sell some of Bolivia's huge natural gas reserves to Argentina for fear some of it my be resold to Bolivia's hated neighbor, Chile. Bolivia lost its Pacific coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific 125 years ago and the resentment has been as big a a source of nationalist ignition as the natural gas reserves below Bolivia's soil. Bolivia could really use the revenue generated from the sale of the natural gas as it is estimated that it would take centuries for Bolivia alone to use it. What Bolivia cannot use is another coup. Let's hope cooler heads prevail.

HAITI

• Co-founder of the terrorist group, the FRAPH, convicted murderer and fugitive from justice, Louis-Jodel Chamblain has turned himself in to Haitian authorities and will have another opportunity to face charges in the murder of Antoine Izméry in 1993 and the Raboteau massacre in 1994. Take a look at the picture accompanying the article. In addition to bringing democracy and societal improvements to Haiti, perhaps the force there now can show the Haitian authorities how to conduct a perp walk . . .

GUATEMALA

• Guatemala's new president, Oscar Berger has taken a bold step forward to improve human rights in Guatemala. In a public ceremony in Guatemala City, and as part of the fulfillment of a decision issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, President Berger acknowledged the government's culpability in the murder of anthropologist and human rights worker, Myrna Mack. It's a small step, but an important one and the first step towards putting an end to impunity in Guatemala and opening the door to justice.

BOOK RECOMMENDATION

• One country in South America that seems to have been passed over by much of the world (myself included) is Paraguay. If you have always been curious about this landlocked nation, I recommend highly the new book At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay by John Gimlette. According to the book, the country is a mix of the curious and the bizarre, the quaint and the maddening. Gimlette interlaces his travels with the nation's history and it is entirely captivating. I never thought I'd want to travel there, but this book has roused my curiousity!

The next installment of Randinho's Latin America Briefing will be May 26. Meanwhile, regular updates concerning Latin American events can be found at Beautiful Horizons.

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"First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave.

Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities: 1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2) If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over..

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "...it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having an affair with her, then #2 above cannot be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and will not freeze over."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A."

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Still, the Mall could have used more sermons on Sunday, and fewer celebrities. It’s not fair to compare a Sunday spent listening to well-meaning activists with that day Martin Luther King called all God’s children to join hands and sing the words of the old spiritual, “Free at last.” But as we helped our children count the number of dogs at the march so they wouldn’t count the number of obscenities one entertainer was shouting from onstage, I couldn't help thinking about what has been lost along the way.

And how much longer it will take to get where we want to go without it. (emphasis added)

I'll drink to that.

I've followed the whole 'defending Howard Stern' discussion with a kind of sour grin. The only thing I like less than the coarsening of public behavior we're seeing now is the censorship proposed to cure it; that's as true of political discourse as entertainment.

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For me, the notion of "work" here is defined as Americans not being attacked by militant Islamic fundamentalist groups. What I think of immediately is the old laundry list of attacks we've suffered to date. The Embassy bombings, the Cole, The WTC bombing, and the most recent culmination in the 9/11 attacks. So, to "use the CIA and FBI to root out terrorists" doesn't seem like it has worked so far. I'm not saying it might not work in the future - I'm just saying it has clearly not worked so far.

Next, I wonder about "democratizing the middle east" and whether or not we have tried this before. Naturally, I can sense everyone's knees jerking with their examples of Japan or Germany, El Salvador or Vietnam, and so on. So far, I am unconvinced that any of the traditional examples square with what we're trying to do in the Middle East.

The folks that think that it's Japan/Germany all over again are missing just how thoroughly we pulverized those nations. We didn't RE-build them, we (and they) built something entirely new on top of the ashes and rubble. Similarly, the folks that think it's Vietnam (or pick your American colonialist conquest country du jour; and btw I'm only half mocking) are missing that we're trying to bring liberal democracy to an entire region, not just one country.

So as I see it, we tried to make it work one way and it demonstrably didn't work. Now we're trying to make it work a different way and we're hoping it works. Regardless of which 'side' you're on, if this current effort doesn't work - you are going to be in a still worse situation having tried two very expensive and difficult methods with still no solution.

As a right-leaning centrist, I support the war and consequently grudgingly support Bush. I know why I support the war and what I hope to see come from it. Where I live, Berkeley, naturally the war is extremely unpopular, and I've found myself retreating in conversations to the very question posed in this article, "what should be done instead?" It's not to get out of talking, it's because I truly do not know and am more interested in finding solutions than calling people names.

Sadly, I'm still waiting for an answer.

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Late April, 2004

His memories
have ascended already
snow falling up
into the starbright night
There he goes:
      a small boy pulls a wagon
      through a wintry Montana town
           he's with my mother
           in Cinncinatti
      in uniform in Hawaii
           fishing with his father
      a child sleeps
      in a parlour
      under a baby grand
      frightened of the noises in the barn
           he removes a splinter from my finger
           with a needle magnifying glass and iodine
      drives his burgundy Citroen
           plays Chopin Mazurkas while he waits
           for mother or me
He grows lighter
and lighter
until he is empty
His soul
released at last
my father
takes his compass
in hand
checks his bearings
and heads home.

© J.K.Leininger, 2004

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IRAQ BRIEFING

• Suicide bombers have mounted a maritime attack on Iraqi oil terminals near Basra, only the third such time in modern history that an attack of this nature has been successfully carried out.

• 20 members of the al-Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam have been captured in Suleimaniya.

• Members of Sadr's Mahdi Army in Basra are accusing the UK of masterminding the recent suicide bombings there. Back in the real world, the Basra police have arrested 5 al-Qaeda members in connection with the attacks.

• Sadr himself, meanwhile, has taken to threatening suicide attacks if the coalition attempts to arrest him in An Najaf.

• Tribal leaders in An Najaf don't seem too enthused by the prospect of being ruled by Sadr and are asking him to end his standoff with the US.

• Mahdi Army fighters in Karbala have clashed with Polish troops the Shi'ite holy city. No word if any baseejis were killed this time around or not ...

• The deadline for the residents of Fallujah to turn in their weapons has arrived, though junk appears to be all we're getting at this point in time.

• Speaking of Fallujah, the truce appears to have led to some favorable results as the various Iraqi insurgent factions active in the city (the al-Tikriti Baathists, the former Republican Guard Baathists loyal to al-Douri, al-Qaeda, the Iraqi National Movement, and the al-Dulaimi tribesmen) turn on one another over what to do next. This comes as the US is announcing the beginning of patrols in the volatile city.

• US administrator Paul Bremer is allowing low-level Baathists to return to positions previously occupied in both the military and the new Iraqi government.

• In the wake of the Spanish withdrawl, the UK, Japan, Italy, and Poland are reaffirming their commitment to the US-led coalition in Iraq.

• Japan is heeping scorn on the returning hostages from Iraq. While the Times account does not mention the internet rumor that the hostages were in cahoots with their kidnappers, I think that this may also account for some of the Japanese public's reaction to their return.

IRAN REPORTS

• Just one entry in the Iran Reports section today but it's well worth reading - an editorial by Constantine Menges outlining what Iran's objectives are in Iraq, who is doing what, and why. Menges also states that Iran doesn't plan on setting up Sadr as the Iraqi Khomeini - that dubious honor belongs to his mentor, Ayatollah Kazem Hussein al-Haeri.

THE WIDER WAR

• 50 Taliban have attacked an NGO in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province.

• Sydney architect Faheem Lodhi has been accused of belonging to the same Australian terrorist cell as Willie Brigitte. Lodhi, a member of the Pakistan-based al-Qaeda affiliate Lashkar-e-Taiba, was targeting Australia's energy supplies with Brigitte and other members of his cell.

• Yemen has arrested al-Nagar, who is described as being involved in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Seeing how everyone remotely connected to al-Qaeda in Yemen seems to share this trait, that much makes sense ...

• The Saudi al-Qaeda affiliate al-Haramain Brigades has claimed responsibility for the recent bombing in Riyadh.

• A risk assessment agency in Hong Kong claims that the counterfeit market is tied to JI as well to other terrorist networks, yet another convergence between crime and terrorism.

• Ansar al-Islam leader Mullah Krekar is writing a memoir from his safe haven in Norway.

• Finnish authorities have seized over 200 kilograms of explosives just outside of Helsinki.

• 5 Saudi al-Qaeda members have been killed in bin Laden's hometown of Jeddah. This comes as the general sentiment in the Magic Kingdom supports jihad in Iraq but is far less eager to engage in one back at home.

• Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali, who wounded 11 UN peacekeepers in Kosovo in a shooting spree, may have had ties to Hamas.

• 3 JI operatives have been arrested in Datu Odin Sinsuat, including members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. It seems a German robotic surgeon has been sued for maltinkering.

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Let's take three hypothetical cases:

1. Joe-Bob Bin Laden, Osama's Texan brother, who has been demonstrated to have financed the Hamburg Al Quieda cell, and is now living in a small villa on the beach in Lebanon.
2. Jessica Bin Laden, Osama's sister, who was videotaped unloading duffel bags into Mohammed Atta's car in August of 2001. She's living in a small village somewhere in Syria.
3. Juan Bin Laden, Osama's South of the Border brother, whose call phone triggered the explosions in Madrid. He's now vanished into Iran.

OK, let's toss this open.

• How do you find them?

• Once you find them what do you do?

• What do you require from their host country?

• How will their host country react when you do whatever it is that you do?

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Into the mirror of my cup the reflection of your glorious face fell And from the gentle laughter of love, into a drunken state of longing I fell

Struck with wonder by the beauty of the picture that within my cup I beheld
The picture of this world of illusion from the reflection of my mind fell

From the house of prayer into the house of drink I fell not of myself
From eternity it was meant to be you came to me and into drunkenness I fell

From the beginningless beginning beneath the veil your face was hidden well
but upon those with love and wisdom a ray from your most glorious face fell

All this world, reflected wonder, wine and love and song, in which we dwell
Is nothing but a fragment of the one whose reflection into my cup fell.

What is Hafiz telling us?

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IRAQ BRIEFING

• A horrific series of bombings have ripped through the Iraqi city of Basra, killing at least 68, including 18 children. It would appear that the Zarqawi offensive continues even as the terrorist himself remains in Fallujah.

• US administrator Paul Bremer is saying that Iraqi security forces will not be able to defend Iraq following the transfer of sovereignty, forming the basis for the US rationale to maintain troops in Iraq after the transfer.

• The World Tribune is reporting that US forces are engaged in a "silent war" against Syria-based foreign fighters.

• The US has reached a cease-fire with the Fallujah insurgents. The Pentagon is reportedly impatient, leading to an ultimatum to the insurgents. Strangely enough, the insurgents appear to share the Pentagon view of the situation. Looks like the cease-fire's over.

• Claudia Rosett warns in National Review that Saddam Hussein may have used the UN oil-for-food program to finance al-Qaeda, citing the involvement of the ASAT Trust and Bank al-Taqwa, two known al-Qaeda front organizations, with a UN-approved buyer of Saddam Hussein's oil. Given the players involved, these charges are extremely serious and should be investigated as part of the ongoing scandal.

• In the wake of the Spanish decision to withdraw from Iraq, Sadr is calling for an end to attacks on Spanish troops. Or not.

• AFP reports that some Spanish troops believe that Spain's honor has been tarnished by their sudden withdrawl. The same holds for Thailand, Romania, and Bulgaria.

• Despite some speculation, Poland is not planning to withdraw from Iraq any time in the near future.

• The Iraqi National Congress, formerly an Iraqi opposition group of dubious worth has announced plan to try Saddam Hussein.

• A mortar attack on a US-controlled prison in Baghdad has killed 21 detainees.

IRAN REPORTS

• Iranian president Khatami is warning the US against attacking Sadr's Mahdi Army in Shi'ite holy cities or killing the young cleric.

• Iran has arrested 2 atomic experts for passing information to "foreigners" concerning the nation's nuclear secrets.

THE WIDER WAR

• Afghan police have arrested a senior lieutenant of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami organization together with 7 suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Kabul.

• The Pakistani al-Qaeda affiliate Lashkar-e-Taiba is developing a medical unit to prevent its operatives from being exposed to civilian doctors.

• The pro-Russian Chechen Interior Ministry is verifying reports concerning the death of Abu Walid al-Ghamdi.

• Ingushetia Wahhabi leader Magomed Khashiyev has been killed with 3 bodyguards in the village of Sleptsovskaya. Khashiyev is a key lieutenant to the Arab al-Qaeda leader Abu Zeid, the leader of Ingushetia's Islamist insurgency.

• A GSPC bombing in Algeria has killed 2 soldiers, bringing the total of those killed so far this month to 12.

• Abu Sayyaf leader Khadaffy Janjalani trying to reinvent his group as an Islamic movement rather than a bandit gang, even going so far as to bring back their original name al-Harakat ul-Islamiyyah.

• Jordanian police have killed more 3 members of the Zarqawi cell that plotted to use chemical weapons against Jordanian and US targets in Amman.

• Middle East Online provides a summary of an article in a Moroccan newspaper that gives us our first look at the inner workings of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, also known as the Salafi Jihad.

• Italian investigators are tying Islamic terrorists to the Camorra, one of Italy's leading organized crime groups. According to the investigators, the Camorra is providing Islamic terrorists (read: al-Qaeda) with weaponry in return for drugs.

• Mullah Krekar is getting 45,000 euros from a Dutch court for damages.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi is seeking drastic legal reforms to his nation's totalitarian police state, including an end to his revolutionary court system as well as arrests without warrants. At this rate, one half expects him toss a shilling to a boy in the street and tell him to buy the biggest goose in all of Tripoli ...

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Brief background on al-Qaeda involvement in Chechnya

Al-Qaeda fighters first began arriving in Chechnya in 1991 when former Soviet Air Force General Jokar Dudayev declared independence from Russia. Many of the other Soviet republics had already broken free of Moscow's control by this point, and Dudayev likely figured that he had a good chance of duplicating their success, particularly in a region that has never had any love for Russian rule. It took the tsars decades to conquer Chechnya during the mid-1800s and during World War 2 Stalin deported the entire population to Siberia and Central Asia en masse over alleged collaboration with the Nazis, with the Chechens were not allowed to return home until 1957 when Khrushchev restored the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous SSR.

During the early part of the 1990s, al-Qaeda involvement of Chechnya was primarily limited to assisting their co-religionists in achieving independence from Russian rule and the organization does not appear to have held any direct influence or control over the upper echelons of the rebel hierarchy. That all changed, however, with the rise of Shamil Basayev to prominence within the rebel leadership.

As Sobaka notes (though I disagree with their unwillingness to admit Basayev's affiliation with the larger al-Qaeda network for reasons that will hopefully become clear from reading this analysis), Basayev was originally a commander in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia before going on to assist in the Azeri war against Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Al-Qaeda had a contingent of between 1,500-2,500 fighters assisting the Azeri military during the war it is quite probable that during this time Basayev first learned of al-Qaeda and became radicalized by the organization's ideology. Rohan Gunaratna's book Inside al-Qaeda (where much of this information comes from) states that Basayev was trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and my guess would be that it was during this time period that this took place. There also a number of reports stating that Basayev was trained at the Amir Muawia camp in Khost province of Afghanistan controlled by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and that upon graduation in July 1994 he met with senior members of the Pakistani military and the ISI.

At any rate, Basayev resurfaced again in 1995 as the leader of the al-Jihad Fisi Sabililah Special Islamic Regiment accompanied by a number of prominent Chechen radicals including crime boss Arbi Barayev and Amir ibn al-Khattab, a Saudi al-Qaeda leader who had previously fought in the Tajik Civil War. Thanks to Basayev's rise to prominence within Chechen circles as a result of his actions in Budennovsk, where his men held hundreds of civilians hostage at a hospital and thwarted a Russian commando raid to free them, al-Qaeda's involvement in Chechnya continued to grow and following the Dayton Peace Agreement many al-Qaeda fighters who had previously been killing Serbs in Bosnia traveled to Chechnya to assist their co-religionists in killing Russians.

Despite Basayev's rise to prominence in Chechen circles, he failed to win the newly de facto independent nation's presidency, instead accepting the post of prime minister. In the wake of the Russian withdrawl from Chechnya in November 1996, Basayev and al-Khattab established al-Qaeda training camps at Gudermes and Serzhen-Yurt as well as sending a steady flow of hundreds of Chechens to Afghanistan for further training, which is how so many of them ended up stationed at Kunduz and Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. Actual figures as to the numbers of trainees vary, but by the summer of 1999 there were enough for Basayev and al-Khattab to mount an invasion of neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan, leading to the beginning of the Second Chechen War.

Since al-Khattab's invasion of Dagestan and the subsequent Russian assault of Chechnya, the Chechen leadership has been increasingly dependent on foreign backing for assistance (Russia has at various times accused Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Lebanon of backing or financing the rebels) and hence became even more dependent on al-Qaeda for assistance. Predictably enough, all of the familiar al-Qaeda hallmarks appeared from suicide bombing to mass casualty attacks on civilian targets. For over two and a half years these connections were more or less ignored or pooh-poohed by Western policy-makers as the creation of Russian propagandists seeking to justify their nation's brutal conduct in Chechnya.

After the fall of the Taliban, however, dozens of al-Qaeda operatives fled to the Pankisi Gorge, a key stronghold for Basayev and al-Khattab's fighters, where they sought to establish an alternate base for the terrorist network with al-Khattab's assistance. Combined with the number of dead or captured Chechens in Afghanistan and the involvement of Chechen-trained al-Qaeda in terrorist plots in Europe, the connection could no longer be ignored.

In April 2002, al-Khattab, now the commander of the International Islamic Peacekeeping Brigade, was assassinated by the Russian FSB, the successor to the KGB, using a poisoned letter. In the interest of keeping the IIPB up and running as a viable force against the Russian military, another Saudi was appointed to lead the organization, one Abdul Aziz al-Ghamdi, better known as Abu Walid.

It is worth noting that Abu Walid's surname, al-Ghamdi, is shared by 3 of the 9/11 hijackers as well as the Saudi cleric who met with bin Laden while he gloating on videotape over the 9/11 attacks.

From Saudi Arabia to Chechnya

Being one of the most mysterious of the Chechen leaders, little information on Abu Walid's background was known prior to his death, leading to some speculation that he may not even exist or could even be many different men. According to this report (it's from Pravda, so it must be true), Abu Walid was originally from the Saudi city of Najran and served in the elite National Guard, which are responsible for the personal protection of members of the House of Saud. He is said to have met bin Laden during the late 1980s, which fits with reports of him being an Afghan Arab and possibly an early member of al-Qaeda as it grew out of the original Afghan Arab movement.

Fighting under al-Qaeda leader Abu Abd al-Aziz Barbaros's Kateebat al-Mujahideen Battalion of the Bosnian Third Army in the Balkans, Abu Walid distinguished himself to al-Qaeda's leadership and even sent a video to the organization's leaders in Afghanistan that depicted al-Qaeda fighters playing soccer with the severed heads of Serb soldiers.

In 1995, Abu Walid arrived in Chechnya as part of the al-Tanzim al-Haz association of the Muslim Brotherhood to spread Wahhabism in the Caucasus and according to a September 25, 2001 statement by the Russian foreign ministry, he was one of 5 senior Chechen commanders receiving direct financing from Osama bin Laden. Serving as al-Khattab's top lieutenant, Abu Walid was involved in much of the planning that led to the Chechen invasion of Dagestan and is accused by the Russian government of orchestrating the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow. Nor was his involvement with Khattab limited to merely Dagestan - during the First Chechen War, he had taken in part in one of the al-Khattab's more famous attacks in which Chechen insurgents successfully ambushed a column of the 245th Motorized Rifle Regiment in April 1996.

Unlike al-Khattab, who was quite familiar with the uses of video propaganda and frequently gave interviews to the jihadi and international media, Abu Walid was far more reclusive and less accessible to the media. What he lacked in terms of visibility, however, he more than made up for in body counts. As a result, after al-Khattab's death in the spring of 2002, he was the natural choice to succeed him as the leader of the IIPB.

Terrorist campaign

The first major terrorist attack attributed to Abu Walid was the suicide bombing of the headquarters of the pro-Russian government in Grozny in December 2002, which was masterminded by one of Abu Walid's deputies, Abu Tariq (Abu Tarik). Evidence of Abu Walid's considerable financial connections can be seen in this raid in Ingushetia in which Russian troops seized upwards of $2,000,000 worth of weapons, explosives, and equipment. My suspicion is that it was this development that prompted Russia to up the bounty on Abu Walid's head to $100,000 (3,000,000 roubles). If the rising bounty on his head appears to have worried Abu Walid, there is no visible sign of it - he was on al-Jazeera just months later threatening attacks throughout Russia.

In December 2003, Abu Walid carried out his threat, bombing a hotel in Moscow. It is interesting to note that a spokesman for the Russian interior ministry identified Abu Walid's financier as Abu Omar As-Sayf, a member of al-Qaeda's ruling council whose name has shown up in the past calling for attacks on US forces in Iraq. One of As-Sayf's couriers, Madina Atabayeva, was captured with $180,000 in cash on him. RIA Novosti via Pravda is reporting that al-Qaeda has set aside as much as $10,000,000 for the Chechen insurgents this year, roughly 1/8 of what Iran has reportedly pumped into Sadr.

Finally, Abu Walid is believed to have masterminded the most recent attack on the Moscow metro prior to his death. It was this attack that truly put made him a renowned international terrorist and led the Christian Science Monitor to list him alongside Abu Musab Zarqawi and Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin as part of the next generation of al-Qaeda leaders. Shortly after the metro attack, Abu Walid again took to al-Jazeera, threatening further violence if Russia re-elected Vladimir Putin. While the outcome of Russian election was never in doubt, I suspect that Abu Walid was laying the justifications for future terrorist attacks against Russian targets.

Freedom Fighters? Think again.

One of the things that must be understood regarding the current mentality of the Chechen al-Qaeda affiliates that is frequently misunderstood by Western analysts is that they are not simply fighting for their independence against Russian occupation of their homeland - they plan on spreading Wahhabism throughout the Caucasus. Nowhere is this better highlighted than in a Kavkaz Interview with Amir Ramzan, the commander of one of Chechen jamaats (Chechen al-Qaeda contingents) fighting in the North Caucasus, makes this much quite clear:

From your words I can assume that you operate not only in Chechnya but all over the North Caucasus.

Yes, very much so. Not only we carry out raids to various areas in the Caucasus, but we also form local Jama’ats, militant sabotage groups locally. We are joined by a lot of Kabardinians, Dagestanis, Karachaevans, Ingushetians and even Ossetians (Muslims).

That means that those in Russia who say that you want to create a caliphate in the Caucasus from sea to sea, are right?

Yes, it is so. Since they are unwilling to negotiate with us, then we’ll be doing what we can. And there is a lot we can do. Next year the war will seize the entire Caucasus from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. Apart from Ossetia and Ingushetia, this year another guerrilla war has already started in two areas of Dagestan bordering Chechnya. I swear by Allah, this is only the beginning. Russian authorities are well aware of this and this is why they are trying to organize formations of the local residents in the area who could resist us effectively. Similar process is taking place in Chechnya. But it will come to absolutely nothing. Having reached a certain level of confrontation inside Chechnya, Russia will sooner or later have to withdraw its troops beyond the Terek River, for instance. In that case we will need no more than two weeks to destroy all the pro-Russian puppet formations.

One might well keep in mind that what holds true for the mentality of the Chechen al-Qaeda is likely to hold true of their comrades-in-arms in Iraq as well.

In conclusion ...

While Abu Walid was directly tied to any specific attacks on American targets, this was more a matter of geography than it was ideology or intent. As an Afghan-trained Saudi al-Qaeda leader, he personified al-Qaeda's influence within the Chechen hierarchy, an influence that has by and large succeeded in transforming the Chechen struggle for independence into a jihad dedicated to the establishment of a Wahhabi theocracy in the Caucasus. While there is a great deal of entirely legitimate and necessary if not obligatory criticism regarding what the Russians have done and continue to do in Chechnya, the death of Abu Walid has served to deliver justice to his hundreds of innocent victims - this man is responsible for more deaths in the last five years than Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was during his entire career. As such, one can only hope that his death brings a sense of justice to his many victims as well as hope that his removal from the gene pool will bring the Second Chechen War closer to an end.

A note on terminology: Some readers may object to my labeling Chechen leaders like Basayev, al-Khattab, or Abu Walid as "al-Qaeda leaders" - I certainly suspect that several of the sources used would. For me, this is a fairly straight-forward matter and is largely a question of semantics. All 3 men are Wahhabi extremists who see no qualms about the use of organized violence against civilians in order to achieve political results, that much is clear. That their key financier is also a member of al-Qaeda's ruling council and that the organization has also received substantial financial, ideological, and logistical assistance from bin Laden is likewise reasonably clear, as is the role of Chechen-trained al-Qaeda in terrorist activities in the Middle East and Western Europe. Given that who holds the purse strings is generally the ultimate means of determining who one is working for, I see nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade.

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"A Grand Strategy for the Rest - The Unqualified Offerings Plan, not just for Iraq but for terrorism generally:

1) Stop borrowing trouble

OK, that makes sense. The problem of course is that - as in the oldest known form of drama, tragedy - the trouble we're paying for was borrowed generations ago. There's no 'ollie ollie oxen free'; no Original Position. So as a game-theory concept, it makes lots of sense. As a basis for real-world policy, it makes very little.

2) "Wait" for the people behind the trouble we've already borrowed to get old and tired or die off outright.

Right. First Rawls, then Kuhn; a full plate of philosophy's Greatest Hits. Sadly, the dynamics are little more complex than that. Yes, the changes are large largely generational, but - a big but - the dynamics making the new generation take positions can't be reset to zero, there are consequences for disengagement, and so there's little but hope that would lead one to believe that - absent some positive act - the next generations will be happier to coexist than the last.

No, they don't "hate us because we're free." Or put it this way, they may hate us because we're free, but very, very, very few people can get worked up enough about our freedom to dedicate themselves to ending it - absent concrete American interference in their business. There's a big difference between hating someone and troubling to cross the world to try to kick their ass.

Well, there are two problems.

The first one is, yes, they do - they do, because they are a part of an expansionist (as are all evangelical) religion that sees a unified worldwide church as is goal, and more important, because one of the strongest strains in that church was raised from stock created here in the West, and defines itself, not only internally through the Quran, but externally, against the West (see Qutb).

The second problem is that even if we tried, we couldn't cut the ties that are at the boundaries between our cultures. Trade, migration, media...the big three drivers that force their culture into contact with ours - even without the mechanisms of imperialism (stipulating for the moment that imperialism is as powerful as he suggests) force us to deal with each other. Does he somehow think that the Playboy Channel and MTV will somehow stop being watched in Riyadh? And that this itself won't be a threat to the established order?

And while he doesn't go so far as to suggest autarky, he seems to forget that in a progressive analysis of trade - the kind engaged in by people who see hegemony and fight it - the terms of trade are always slanted toward the developed world (the West) and the trade itself is thus a part of the problem.

I want to be perfectly clear that this policy does not instantly remove all dangers. The first law of organizations is self-perpetuation. The existing anti-American terrorist organizations, like Al Qaeda, are not going to call off their jihad just because we pull out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia and stop writing blank checks to the Likud. But absent fresh humiliations, fewer and fewer young Muslim men will find the tired old call to yet more jihad worth heeding.

What humiliations, exactly, did he have in mind? Because I think he's forgetting that OBL is talking about ancient colonial history, and battles in Andalusia and at the gates of Vienna. These folks have a much better sense of history than we do.

"Wait" is in scare quotes because it sounds more passive than the policy I intend. For one thing, I would continue to harry the men and organization behind the September 2001 atrocities to the ends of the earth. "Don't Tread on Me" is my policy, and that's what Al Qaeda did. Bite back hard. At the same time, don't pretend that everyone on earth doesn't respond to the same impulse - go tromping in the dens of others and they will bite back too. This country's conservatives of old were smarter about this kind of thing: they didn't think they were the only conservatives in the world. They didn't imagine that you could deploy trooin 150-odd countries without provoking a reaction. They wouldn't imagine that the reaction was noble, but they respected the force of nature that is the essential conservatism of the planet.

How the hell do we do this, given that we're supposed to leave the Arab countries alone? Sneak in and assassinate them? Use Predators and Hellfires? Does he think that the Arab world won't freaking notice when these guys suddenly start turning up dead? How does he think the sovereign countries that we're supposed to be so sensitive to will react when we kidnap or kill their citizens or guests without their consent?

More important, can I get some of what he's smoking?

For another thing, I believe the American system, as conceived if not always as practiced, is deeply attractive. So let's be American. Let's be free, for one thing. Kill the excresences on the Constitution the current administration as brought forth - the PATRIOT Act, the evisceration of habeas corpus, the asserted power to unreviewably revoke citizenship and declare someone an enemy combatant. Let's trade and travel and welcome visitors to our shores. Let us, in other words, have the faith that we are our own best advertisement. Thence comes your Muslim reformation.

Yes it is, and here for once we're largely in agreement. We're not selling what we've got, because in no small part, we're not living it.

"About those visitors. An obvious trend presents itself: young Muslim students who come to the West for a specifically technical education, who become radicalized politically by a poisonous combination of culture shock, homesickness, youthful hormones and - ironically - insularity (isolating themselves among other young Muslim men). America's university's are the glory of our educational system. And from what I've read, our graduate technical departments depend on a steady stream of foreign students to keep afloat. But I'd make it a requirement of a student visa that recipients take a heavy dose of humanities, especially American studies courses. I'd also have the State Department screen applicants better, though this would probably be of limited use. (I think the salient problem is students who are moderate at home and become radicals here.) Will cramming humanistic education down the throats of engineering students do any good? The college I dropped out of thinks so. MIT always bragged that it had the toughest humanities requirements of any elite school, glossing over the fact that it had to: it's the only way most of its students would take those courses. I don't for a moment believe the humanities requirement would convince every foreign student to love the United States. But it will help engage them with American culture in an open, nonviolent way. If nothing else, it's an opportunity to let off steam.

Humanities like the Palestinian Studies courses they teach at Berkeley? Henley doesn't realize or chooses not to see that it is a strong strain of self-hatred in the West that is reflected and amplified into Islamist hatred of the West. They've read Fanon, too. They took our own doubts and anger, planted them in much more fertile soil, and are growing the hate that we are dealing with now.

What about the oil? Buy it, same as we do now. Who's not going to want to sell it to us? Saddam Hussein himself would have sold us all the oil we could use, absent sanctions. You can't eat the stuff. It doesn't even make a good salad dressing.

Right. But as noted, they think we're screwing them by buying it, and we're supporting a kleptocracy in so doing.

And let's not forget that you can manipulate economies with it, and if you're willing to accea little pain, you can shapolicy by paying brokers and thereby making friends. When you deal in hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a small taste will buy a large number of greedy and corrupeople.

What about Iraq? Bring the major players together in one room - anyone with a constituency. Tell them, "fellas, we're out of here in time for Christmas. Start talking. You've got a chance to make your country something much better than you could have imagined. Or you can turn it into hell on earth. It'll be your doing one way or another." Stop paying non-Iraqis to do work Iraqis can do.

Right. You're on your own kids! Have fun storming the castle!! Declare victory and leave. That's a good plan. Our failure (of intention, planning, and execution) in Vietnam had significant negative consequences for our foreigh and domestic policies for decades.

Who will defend Iraq against its neighbors? Look at the place now. If you were the neighbors, would you want to bite that off? The real military estimated it would take a half-million US trooto secure the joint. You think Iran or Syria or Turkey dare to even try to scraup that kind of manpower?

What if Iraq becomes a weak state complete with Al Qaeda training camand weapons labs? See scare quotes around "wait" and the part about harrying the people behind the attacks on the US to the ends of the earth, above. If camset uwe pound hell out of them. It's not like we don't know how to bomb Iraq.

Hang on. Here we go again with the 'please pound the hell out of them - but do it while you leave them alone'. I think he has a different meaning for 'leave them alone' than I do.

What About Israel and the Palestinians? Pull them in and tell them two things. 1) Israel will be paying its own way from now on. They can have what military equipment they can buy. 2) But we also will not be restraining them from any action they may wish to take to safeguard what they imagine to be their security. If they really want to kill Yasser Arafat, we're not going to stop them. If they want to nuke Tehran, that's Tehran's lookout. Concentrates the mind. But Israel will have to stand on its own two feet, financially and politically. If Israel can't survive as an independent country without ceaseless American financial aid and political backing, then Israel has failed as a refuge for the Jewish people - it's simply a different version of the very dependence on powerful patrons that the early Zionists were trying to get beyond. I think Israel can survive, with prudent leadershiIronically, the key to the survival of the Jewish people is actually the diaspora: it's much harder to exterminate the Jews if they aren't conveniently gathered in one place.

So the end of Israel is AOK with our friend Jim; after all, the disapora will make sure that Jews survive. Who needs the only functioning pro-Western democracy in the Middle East? Ignoring the moral issues, this announcement is the trigger to the nuclear war scenario Trent seems to anticipate in the post below.

Some have feared that anti-Israeli terror grouwould make the US actually evicting Israel's Jews by armed force the price of peace. We would refuse, of course, and destroy those grouif they messed with us. See "Don't Tread on Me," above.

What about cooperation against international terror? I'm for it. For instance, I favor using American law to interdict fundraising and organizing for Hamas, Lashkar, the Tamil Tigers and the IRA within the United States. "Terrorism" will be strictly defined as war crimes by non-state actors, so say that we'll suppress fundraising for any armed rebellion - it's bad international relations juju. For the duration of our Al Qaeda problem, I'd keep bases at Diego Garcia, in Turkey, Oman and Qatar and Afghanistan. I'd be willing to provide American trooto help overmatched foreign governments against anti-American terror grouin their midst, but I'd do due diligence to make sure we weren't just being suckered into settling someone else's quarrel for them.

So first off, we've just frozen the political sphere, saying we'll support existing governments against rebels no matter what our interests may be. And we'll send out trooabroad to die - as long as a) they're attacking terrorists within countries (who will sit by and let our troooperate freely without military or diplomatic consequence); or b) it's not in our interest, but some higher calling.

What about NATO? Remember when you were a kid, and you had a really good friend, so you started hanging out together constantly, and staying over at each other's house all the time and suddenly you realized you were really getting on each other's nerves? That's us and continental Europe. And the way Iraq is going, I think there's a good chance it's us and Great Britain within one to five years. We all need some quiet time to ourselves, in a politico-military way.

Yes, it's America First, all over again. Let me go get my Lucky Lindy button...

What about Korea? Something like 50% of the South Korean population lives within artillery range of the North. I don't recall recommending that settlement pattern, do you? On the theory that South Koreans aren't stupid, I take it to indicate their true estimate of the danger from the North. South Korea is a rich, powerful country that can afford as much defense as it needs. Nevertheless, North Korea has to be watched carefully, since it is desperately poor and either on the verge of becoming a nuclear power or already one. We tell Kim Jong-Il that if he so much as glances in the direction of anyone remotely associated with Osama bin Laden, including the Pakistani ISI or the "government" of Saudi Arabia, we will make his country look like a jamboree of Osirak reenactors. And if we get the idea that he's trying to sell a nuke, we will provide him more than one of our own.

The Godfather defense. Right. If my kid catches a cold...I'll kill you. How do we do this with a high enough standard of proof to satisfy a Congressional hearing after the fact? How do we show that KJI is actually running a sale on tactical nukes? Do we rely on the classified ads?

Note that intelligence is an inexact science; he's willing to trigger the Seond Korean War if they do what we don't want them to do, as long as...hell, I'm confused. We've had such good luck making deals with KJI in the past, why not do it some more?

That's more or less the Grand Disengagement at a high level. Like I said, I see it taking a generation for the aftershocks to subside. That is, I'm solving the terror problem in no more time than the "reconstruct the entire Middle East" hawks, for a lot less money, with a lot less ammo and preserving a lot more freedom here. If they hate us because we're free, they'll really fucking hate us when I'm done.

Excethat it won't solve the terror problem, it will make it worse. It will either leave terrorists free to operate with impunity or trigger wars with nations whose soverignty we violate to 'hammer the bad guys' as we chase them to the ends of the earth.

What if there's another catastrophic terror attack? That will really suck. It will be important to summon up the resolve to stay the course

if that happens. Look, there are no guarantees in life. And if we get attacked tomorrow, do you think the uberhawks will tell you that this proves they were wrong all along? No. They'll say it proves how urgent it is that we reconstruct the entire Middle East and probably Venezuela when we get a chance, and they'll remind us that it's going to take a generation. Like I said before, Fine, but then non-interventionism gets a generation too. And then a third one, and a fourth one? And then we lose patience and nuke the fuckers...and we've brought my nightmare to life; we're genoicidal killers. Because Mr. Henley and his crew want to have clean hands while they live in the world.

It takes time for things to play out. The atrocities of September 11, 2001, were in many ways the culmination of two taste treats that decidedly did not go together - the US buildup of militant Islam against the Soviet Union in the latter days of the Cold War and Phase I and II of the US War Against Iraq. (Now in Phase IV.) Phase III of the Iraq War - the invasion that began in March 2003 - was the sort of hideous foreign policy mistake that a country simply can't avoid paying for in numerous ways. Pulling out will lead to a loss of prestige and will embolden our enemies. For a time. Dragging things out another year or five will cost even more prestige and foster even more emboldening. But we are not looking at the Apocalypse either. Losing Vietnam cost us prestige and emboldened our enemies. Within five years we were tightly cooperating with one of those enemies (China) against the other, and within 15, the other (the USSR) was no more. We cut and ran and won. The Soviet Union stayed the course in Afghanistan and bled to death.

Aha. It's our fault. Then again, to many, everything in the world is the fault of the West; kind of like those for whom everything in the world is their parent's fault.

I'm not inherently opposed to cutting and running, if what's at stake - as it was in Vietnam - is essentially national prestige. You can reclaim that.

But the interests here are (a) inseparable - we can't economically (or culturally) 'disengage' from the Islamic world; and (b) central to our well-being - it's not only the oil and the economy, but the fact that while the Vietnamese Communist Party signed up for the internationalization of Communism, we didn't need to worry about them, it was the USSR and China carrying that ball; Hanoi was happy to just bring Saigon into the fold. It was a nationalist manifestation of an international movement. Islamism isn't nationalist. It hasn't, doesn't, and won't stop at national borders.

Henley doesn't see that. And that's why the notion is stupid.
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South African elections

• Winds of Change notes some of the election-day expectations and issues.

• Head Heeb has the play-by-play.

• Southern Cross analyzes the results.

• Politics.za also has complete coverage.

• Meanwhile, Abiola laments the lack of a credible opposition party.

Rwanda

Several bloggers noted the 10 year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide during which nearly a million Rwandans were slaughtered.

• Head Heeb meditates on the effects of genocide.

• Winds of Change especially notes the role of the French.

• And of course, as Rich Lowry recounts, the US didn’t do much to stop the genocide either.

• Abiola notes that it’s not necessarily a simple case of victim and victimized.

• Black Star Journal contrasts myth and reality in Rwanda.

War on Terror

• Dan Darling discusses al Qaeda’s African connections in Algeria and beyond.

• But Calixte seems to think that the al Qaeda threat is mostly hype.

• At least some of the attacks against foreign aid workers in Somaliland are now believed to be linked to al Qaeda.

• A radical Muslim “cleric” has been arrested in Zanzibar in connection with a series of bombings last month apparently intended to disrupt the visit of German president Rau.

Libya

• Claudia Rosett reminds us that even in a disarmed Libya, the Libyan people are still not safe from their own government.

• On the other hand, Qaddafi’s son is now saying that democracy is good.

• A victory for the Bush doctrine? Too early to tell, but I’m curious to see if this pans out.

DDT

• As noted last time, the eco-imperialists’ resistance to the use of DDT is at least partly to blame for the deaths of more than a million Africans each year. Some people are wondering why…

• Abiola thinks that an anti-DDT policy that doesn’t address the problem of malaria prevention is pretty pathetic.

• Virginia Postrel is rightly outraged.

• And Roger Bate at TCS discusses how things got to this point. (Via Instapundit.)

Finally
Ever wonder what happens to all of that used clothing--like all the stuff that doesn't ever get sold at Goodwill? Well, as Ethan Zuckerman discusses, a lot of it ends up in Africa. He seems to think this is a bad thing, but Kenyan Pundit disagrees.

I report, you decide.

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So the Iraqi driver enters Heaven and the Sheikh Ali is next in line. He stands erect. Without being asked, he proclaims, "I am Sheikh Ali Imam of Jama in Baghdad for the last 33 years during the Saddam God bless him!"

Malak consults his list and says, "I'm sorry, you're on the waiting list. You have to pass some tests before you get entry to the Kingdom of Heaven."

Shikh says, "Just a minute. That man was a Mini Bus driver, and you issued him instant entry! But I have to go through more tests. How can this be? Please double check the names."

Malak says, "Up here, Imam, we go by results. While you preached, people slept; while he drove, people prayed."

Now there's a joke that would work in a lot of other places, from Egypt, Israel and Iran to Quebec and even Latin America. Definitely a good one to have on call if you travel abroad.

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TERROR IN UZBEKISTAN

• The nature of the Uzbek government's control of the media, coupled with the ignorance of the Western press when it comes to Central Asia, makes it very hard to know exactly what happened and where. In the words of one reporter questions outnumber answers. For the curious and adventurous, I refer you to EurasiaNet's Uzbekistan Archive, which contains numerous stories written by locals and knowledgeable experts. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Central Asia Report has a good report on the attacks and their aftermath.

• The diplomatic fallout from the Uzbekistan bombings could be enormous. EurasiaNet argues that Uzbekistan could increasingly turn towards Russia, who is much less critical than the United States. If talk is worth much, Karimov's visit to Moscow was packed with talk of growing Russo-Uzbek cooperation.

• It should also be noted that Uzbekistan and Russia may not reall walk off into the sunset together. Following the attacks in Tashkent, there was a nasty war of words between the Uzbek and Russian media.

• Following the attacks, every major newspaper in the world seemed to have storebought analysis ready. To find the wheat among the chaff is a challenge. In my opinion, Chris Seiple's analysis is the best you'll find. For another view, see Ariel Cohen's TCS column despite my extensive problems with it.

• The Uzbek government initially blamed Hizb ut-Tahrir, a nasty but peaceful group, and there was rampant speculation in the press about who was to blame. In a letter to Centrasia.ru (in Russian & Uzbek, here's a sloppy translation), a previously unknown group calling itself "Islamic Jihad" (not any of the other groups going by that name) took responsibility. Uzbek authorities have started referring to the guilty party as Jamoat ("society") and say they have 350-400 members, a quarter of whom have been trained as militants.

• The CSM looks at why Uzbekistan's suicide bombers were mostly women.

• There are reports that, having lost their refuge in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Tajik, Uzbek, and Chinese (I'm assuming Uyghur, actually) militants are returning home and establishing themselves in their old Tajik bases.

THE CAUCASUS

• President Saakashvili's National Movement-Democrats dominated the March 28 elections, winning about two-thirds of the vote.

• The failure of all but one of the opposition parties to pass the 7% threshhold for seats in parliament led to allegations of vote fraud on Saakashvili's part. For its part, the Saakashvili government found the vote to be so riddled with problems in Ajaria that an entirely new election was planned (and cancelled).

• Following the election, Saakashvili affirmed that restoring Georgia's territorial integrity is a top priority, a message mostly aimed at showing his resolve in the ongoing conflict with Ajaria. Strong denunciations of the nation's enemies shortly after the election indicated that bringing Ajaria back into line is one of Saakashvili's primary goals.

• Another major priority for Saakashvili is the Georgia's integration into the West, seeking closer ties with the EU and quick inclusion in NATO.

• Completing the troika of major policy goals of the Saakashvili government, Andy Young of Siberian Light brings us news from the fight against corruption in his new role as a contributor to The Argus.

• Though there has been news of some countries pulling troops out of Iraq in the wake of flare-ups in fighting, Georgia sent 159 additional soldiers, members of the 16th Mountain Battalion and graduates of the US military's Train-and-Equip Program. They will serve in Baghdad, Tikrit, and Baiji.

• The recently-dismissed (but refusing to go) general commanding the 25th Armored-Mechanized Brigade in Batumi has officially mutinied, proclaiming that Batumi, not Tbilisi, gives him orders.

• Armenia's opposition groups launched a permanent protest in Yerevan, demanding the resignation of President Robert Kocharian and giving rise to the hope that Georgia's "Rose Revolution" would blossom in Armenia.

• Blogrel, a blog maintained by a UK citizen living in Armenia, is following the situation closely and points out that the political situation is Armenia is significantly different than the one in Georgia last November. For more on this theme, see Richard Giragosian's article in RFE/RL (who also has impressive coverage).

• One glaring difference between Georgia and Armenia is that Kocharian feels confident enough to unleash the police on protesters, though it should be noted that the opposition still plans protests.

• The Agonist's Sean-Paul Kelley has a superb article on Georgia and Ajaria, where the Cold War is managing to stay alive.

• Tbilisi's tough talk towards Ajaria may be prompting a shift in the way that Russia deals with Georgia.

• Former Soviet Foreign Minister and President of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze has been offered a new job: advisor to Kofi Annan. He has accepted.

TURKESTAN

• China, seeking to meet growing energy needs and extend its regional influence, is pushing east into Central Asia. Stephen Blank has more, in a article covering China's Uyghurs and its Central Asia strategy.

• Though not a paradise by an stretch of the imagination, the fact that former fundamentalist warlords have traded fatigues for suits is definitely an achievement for Tajikistan.

• Kyrgyz merchants are protesting Chinese traders, primarily ethnic Uyghurs, selling in markets. Why? They sell at lower prices and pay their taxes.

• The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development announced changes to its Uzbekistan lending plans. As my co-blogger points out, the "plan" is short on specifics.

• When is a divorce and custody battle a major international issue? Drag a bunch of US Congressmen into a New Jersey case involving Gulnora Karimova, daugher of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, and you have yourself an enormous problem and a script for a very engaging soap opera.

• Uzbekistan has denied the registration of George Soros's Open Society Institute in Tashkent. Whether you love or hate Soros, OSI Uzbekistan was doing great work. (In the interest of full disclosure, I briefly worked with OSI Uzbekistan.)

• As if having a certifiably insane leader is not bad enough, Turkmenistan is flat broke. The government owes over $250 million in unpaid wages, making people wonder where the country's export earnings are going.

• The previous item really makes one wonder where Turkmenistan hopes to come up with the money to finance grandiose water projects such as the creation of a 2,000 square km lake in the middle of the desert and an artificial river in the capital.

• A draft law on the media in Kazakstan would apparently give so much control to the government that even the President's daughter's political party opposes it.

AFGHANISTAN

• Sgt. Hook, blogging from Afghan mountaintops, reports in with the news that the transformation of his tent city into a hut city is a boon to the local economy.

• Armed Pakistani tribesmen are hunting militants and their tribal protectors along the Afghan border following their failure to heed the demands of an ultimatum to surrender.

• Meanwhile, US, Pakistani, and Afghan officials agreed to work more closely together to prevent cross-border infiltration.

• With 5,000 peacekeepers providing intense security, representatives from Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, India, and Central Asian states are meeting in Kabul to help reintegrate Afghanistan in the economic life of the region.

• US officials note that this year's spring offensive by Taliban and al Qaeda fighters is the weakest yet and that enemy losses are very high while Coalition troops are escaping relatively unscathed.

• US Marines are ready to step up the fight against Taliban and al Qaeda forces.

• Hamid Karzai is calling for foreign troops to stay in Afghanistan for at least ten years.

• Speaking of security, Crisis Web looks at elections and security in Afghanistan.

• For the first time in Afghanistan's history, citizens will face an income tax. The overhaul the tax system will bring it closer to Western systems and decrease reliance on collecting customs duties. Interestingly, the only people who will pay the income tax are those making more than $200 per month. You have one guess what group of people in Afghanistan make that much...

LIGHTER FARE

• Coolio made an appearance in Baku. Yes, he of "Gangsta's Paradise" fame appropriately played a concert in Baku.

• A hilarious tribute to Saparumurat Niyazov--"Turkmenbashi"--the man who has successfully steered Turkmenistan into second place behind North Korea in the running for "it'd be funny if it wasn't true" pageant of nations. His latest advice? Chew bones for healthy teeth.

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Spoiling Attacks

A spoiling attack in military terms is when one side attacks the other while it is preparing to launch an offensive in hopes that its attack will disrupt and or permanently delay the inevitable. Spoiling attacks are normally aimed at major boundaries between units or forces as this causes the most confusion due to separate chains of command stepping all over each other trying to coordinate their superior forces to deal with the attack.

Napoleon was famous for winning this way over over. A modern and less successful example was World War Two's Battle of the Bulge, wherein Hitler intended to separate the British from their American allies and take back the major seaport of Antwerp. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor exploited the "unit boundary" split in America's Pacific chain of command between the Army and the Navy over the defense of Hawaii, and let them run wild for six months in the Pacific.

In Iraq we are seeing multiple "unit boundaries" struck by the Iranian inspired attacks at once. America's Spanish, Ukrainian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Italian allies have all been struck by either the Ba'athist remnants or the Sadr militia with the result being that the Spanish Socialist government is cutting and running. Many private military corporations have been hit with K.B.R., for example, suffering 30 dead, missing, or captured for future 'snuff video' production.

The ultimate "unit boundary" that the Iranians are striking isn't tactical, operational or even in Iraq. It is strategic - the "unit boundary" between American Presidential Administrations.

The Mullahs' Goal

Iran's Mullahocracy has been America's enemy since 1979. They have learned that America alternates between weak/malleable and strong/bold executive leadership, having faced both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The former President it held hostage for over a year while the latter President traded arms for hostages, then turned around and broke the Mullah's will to fight against Iraq with a "secret" naval war, the downing of an Iranian Airbus by an Aegis cruiser and intelligence assistance for Saddam's reconquest of the Iranian Al Faw peninsula with chemical weapons.

The one thing the Mullahs have leaned in all of this is that American Presidential Administrations have an extremely difficult time doing new foreign policy or national security policy an election year or during the first six months of a new Administration. They are now taking advantage of this to strike, and hopefully cripple, the Bush Administration's reelection chances or failing that make America abandon its plan to democratize Iraq and destabilize their theocracy.

As Amir Taheri notes in the New York Post:

"The Iranian analysis is simple: The Americans do not have the political stamina to stay the course in Iraq. Negative polls could force President Bush to withdraw his troops into bases in the Iraqi desert, allowing the cities to fall under the control of Iraqi armed groups.

In such a scenario, pro Saddam groups would seize control of the so called Sunni Triangle while Shiite groups beholden to Iran would dominate central and southern Iraq, leaving the Kurds cantoned in their two mountainous enclaves.

The Tehran leadership is also certain that John Kerry, if elected, will abandon Bush's plans for a "democratic" Middle East. "The United States has become vulnerable," Rafsanjani told his cheering audience in Tehran. "The Americans do not know which way to turn."

Behind the scenes of revolt in parts of Iraq lies the broader picture of the war that various brands of Islamism have waged against the United States for almost a quarter of a century.

Tehran leaders believe that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam enabled China to establish itself as the rising power in Asia. They hope that a U.S. defeat in Iraq will give the Islamic Republic a similar opportunity to become what Rafsanjani calls "the regional superpower."

The Khomeinist mullahs believe that an American defeat in Iraq will destabilize all Arab regimes, leaving the Islamic Republic as the only power around which a new status quo could be built in the region. "Here is our opportunity to teach the Americans a lesson," Rafsanjani said."

In short, the Iranians mean to defeat America, "Lebanonize" Iraq and dominate its various factions. Al Sadr was only the first Iranian sock puppet. There will be many others. Iraq cannot be pacified as long as terrorists attack us from secure bases in Iran, and the mullahs are both providing those and funding terrorists against us, including Al Qaeda as well as Al Sadr.

4th Generation Warfare

As Joe's piece on "Iran's Great Game" noted, the mullahs correctly believe they have to do this to retain power in Iran. America's goal of creating a successful democracy in mostly Shiite Iraq means the end of the mullahs' rule in Iran - they can't keep their own people from making religious pilgrimages to Shiite holy sites in Iraq, which means they can't stop the effects on their own unsettled population. Democracy next door is an immediate threat to tyranny. Russia's former Communist regime created the Iron Curtain to block freedom in Western Europe from menacing their Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe.

Joe Katzman and a number of others have made much of "4th Generation Warfare" and "asymmetric attack" as a way for the weak to defeat the strong. The key thing about the concept is that the stronger party has to submit to the ground rules of the weaker party in order to be defeated.

America does not have to play by those rules if it doesn't want to, so why are we?

First, Kerry and the Democrats want to believe that 9/11/2001 didn't happen and that everything wrong in the world is Bush's fault. They are worse than useless in facing up to the Iranians.

Bush on the other hand is playing the part of the Wizard of Oz, telling us not to see the Iranian Mullah behind the Iraqi curtain until after the election. When it comes to political choices about the war and the Presidential election, a friend of mine put it this way:

"Given a choice between a f*** up whose heart is in the right place and a Hamlet who hasn't got a program, Americans are gonna go with the f*** up."

So where does that leave the rest of us? Demanding "Faster, Please" will not cut it.

The Stakes

More than Iraq is at stake here there are other players, notably Israel.

Iran's mullahs are developing nuclear weapons, which they view as a magic shield against America and a sword to destroy the Jewish state. They have made overt threats to nuke Israel as soon as they have nuclear weapons, and said they believe Iran would survive any exchange of nukes with Israel. The mullahs do not at all understand that their inflammatory rhetoric intended for domestic political effect has a whole new meaning for other countries when backed up with nuclear weapons.

This brings up the following question:

Does anyone doubt for a moment that Israel will, absolutely, positively WILL preemptively destroy Iranian nuclear facilities, with nukes if necessary, to prevent another holocaust?

Since Iran has taken steps to see that an Israeli conventional air attack, such as that against Osirak, Iraq http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/facility/osiraq.htm can't work, Israel must use nuclear ground bursts, producing highly radioactive short term fallout, against Iran's hardened nuclear facilities.

But it won't be just against those. The remorseless logic of nuclear conflict with an irrational opponent will force Israel to eliminate Iran as a strategic threat for the long term. That entails hitting more targets than just those currently known to be working on Iranian nuclear weapons.

A Democratic President would create this worst of all possible worlds, where pre-emptive nuclear attack is used as a tool of state policy. It is not a world we want to live in.

Iranian casualties (@10 - 20% will be dead) would range from several hundred thousand to several million, depending on the target set, weapons selection and local weather patterns. In short, welcome to the world of Wretchard's "Three Conjectures." The EMP from this attack (high altitude bursts to disrupt Iranian C3I) will affect American forces in the area, including in Iraq, and devastate Persian Gulf oil production.

It is therefore unlikely that the USA will let this happen by doing nothing. A friend I spoke to thinks that Iran will have domestic nuclear weapon production capability by spring 2006. I agree. He is also in print that nuclear weapons will be used in anger by 1 Jan 2006 unless we invade Iran first. The only way I can see to prevent this future from coming to pass is with the near term conquest of Iran.

Bush will do this in time, if reelected. Kerry won't. Even Thomas Friedman of the New York Times recognizes the willingness of Bush foreign policy to destroy unacceptable status quos.

Given the certainty of Israel's nuclear preemptive attack on Iran, I don't see America waiting for an Iranian revolution. We will do it ourselves no later than my friend's fall/winter 2005 prediction. We both feel that the deal between Sharon and Bush on this has already been made. If a successful Iranian revolution makes the invasion unnecessary, fine, but we won't take the risk of delay.

Iran is at war with us whether or not we want to be at war with them. Nukes are on the table now, and they are not our nukes. We are on a count down to invasion to keep the nuclear genie from escaping.

Much more is at stake in November's presidential election than President Bush is willing to admit.

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• Imshin on Holocaust Rememberence Day.

• Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel whose web site Imshin recommends.

• The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

• More at the Virtual Jewish Library

• Black Triangle reprints Primo Levi's poem "If This Is A Man" (Hat Tip: Imshin).

• Omri of Dejafoo isn't optimisistic that those words will be heard. Read "The Railroads of Auschwitz." Until you understand this viewpoint - one shared by many Israelis, and not without justification - you can't really understand how to get from our present state to a durable peace. As I've said many times, the Israelis must also accept any peace deal (Hat Tip: Imshin).

• Meryl Yourish's post from 2003.

Thanks, Michele. Feel better!

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Reports from the Front Lines

• Sporadic gunfire broke out on Thursday between US marines and Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah despite the tentative cease-fire. The clashes appear to be turning into a duel of snipers for both sides.

• Judging from this story from the Washington Post, the insurgent forces in Fallujah appear highly organized.

• US troops fought with members of the Mahdi Army near the Iraqi city of Kufa.

• A mortar attack by insurgent forces near Mosul has killed 8 Iraqi civilians.

• Father Nizar Semaan, an Iraqi Catholic priest, is telling the Vatican news agency that he believes that al-Qaeda is behind the recent wave of kidnappings inside Iraq. Experts, however, believe them to be members of the al-Delemi tribe.

Iraqi Politics & Economy

• The Iraqi arms trade appears to be booming in the wake of the Sadr Revolt. Not all that surprising, if you ask me ...

• Journalist Dhiya Rasan believes that Sadr is trying to reenact his father's struggle against Saddam Hussein against the United States.

• The new Iraqi army is getting up and running, though Bremer believes they will be insufficient to handle the security situation following June 30.

• An Najaf's residents, meanwhile, don't seem to fond of Muqtada al-Sadr.

• Mohammed Ayyash al-Kubaisi's Sunni organization has thrown its lot in with Sadr. He was accusing Sadr of sectarian cleansing back in September.

The International Stage

• Dead Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi has become a national hero over his last words to his insurgent captors before they murdered him.

• US ambassador John Negroponte is urging troops for a UN force in Iraq.

• An Iranian diplomat has been shot dead in Baghdad while apparently trying to broker an end to the Sadr Revolt. No doubt the reason for his killing makes sense to somebody, somewhere ...

• One of Sadr's aides appears to be a Vancouver-area cleric (that's Vancouver, Canada).

• Jesse Jackson is offering to negotiate for the release of a US hostage in Iraq, for whatever it's worth.

• Support the Troops! Especially, support Spirit of America's efforts to set up T.V. transmitters in Iraq.

WMD

• Large elements of Iraqi nuclear-related equipment are turning up in Europe, often in scrap yards.

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IRAN REPORTS

• Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is criticizing the US for closing down Sadr's newspaper. Irony comes in many shapes and sizes.

• I've written before about the Iranian role in formenting unrest in Iraq. So just what do they want? Amir Taheri takes a look at some of the answers.

THE WIDER WAR

• It looks like al-Qaeda's won round 1 in Waziristan.

• The Utmakhel, Yargukhel, and Kakakhel clans have agreed to a joint operation against al-Qaeda operating in Pakistan. The tribes, however, want an extension on the government's deadline.

• In the wake of the destruction of the al-Qaeda infrastructure in Afghanistan, the Lashkar-e-Taiba has taken on the role of the group's de facto training providers at their camps in Pakistan.

• Taliban fighters have killed 10 in a hit-and-run attack in Zabul province.

• A key lieutenant of Hezb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is being held in Kabul by members of the ISAF.

• Spain is hunting for Amer Aziz, a Zarqawi lieutenant who appears to have ordered the 3/11 attacks.

• Australian terrorist suspect David Hicks was requested to serve as a suicide bomber for al-Qaeda.

• A 21 year-old Australian medical student is being charged with membership in the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba organization.

• Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti has issued a fatwa urging Muslims to exercise all means to stop coalition action in Fallujah.

• CSM is reporting that despite recent claims to the contrary, al-Qaeda still has fresh recruits in Saudi Arabia.

• The Filippino government has identified 2 JI hideouts in the North Cotabato mountains.

• Tunisia has arrest 7 in connection with a series of bomb plots.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. It seems the famous Star Trek communicator has now become a reality.

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Surely, nothing else can explain such consistent futility. And how could the Infinite Blogger not love a team representing the politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa, willing friends to all manner of terrorists, who were nonetheless content to let AllahPundit's beloved Saudis torture Canadian citizen William Sampson without significant protest? Now add red uniforms, helmets, and a penchant for violence; and you have worthy counterparts to his beloved Crimson Jihad in Boston!

And we all know what that means....

UPDATE: 2-1 Senators, in double overtime. You know we're just messing with your head by taking it to Game 7, don't you Big Guy?

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Take this recent home series (please!) 0 hits in 11 at bats with runners in scoring position over the last 2 games. Embarassing scores of 11-2 and 7-0, and one we lost 5-3 when we allowed 2 runs in the 9th. The crowd was booing today. The crowd should have been booing today. The whole game was just painful to watch.

The Batters Box has a valid point when it says (in rhyme) that all is not lost. Still, every game counts - and the Toronto Blue Jays are playing like a last place team on all levels. It's bad, bad baseball. This team should be better than that.

On the one hand, TBB is right. There's really no alternative but to stick with the plan (for the first half of the season, at least), see what we have this year, and try to identify some more building blocks that will make us competitive in 2005-2007. On the other hand, reputations tend to stick - and the 2004 team is building one that will make it hard to bring fans back to the SkyDome this year.

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Who do you blame when your kids are all crazed?
Killed to please others like old Baalite days
Training for murder and genocide, hate
Paid by dictators to keep their lives great
A useful distraction!

Oompa Loompa doompadee dar
Civilized peoples tend to go far
Oompa Loompa doompadah dee
If you are wise you will listen to me

Who do you get when you head up Hamas?
Judenrein future by bombs and not gas?
We are so sorry to disappoint you
Jews will fire missiles into your car too.
Hello, Jehannum!

Oompa Loompa doompadee doh
If you want a state then terror must go
You could live in happiness too
Like the Oompa Loompa doompadee do

And that's all I have to say about that.

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6. Colin EDWARDS, Honda, 1:33.859
7. Marco MELANDRI, Yamaha, 1:34.100
8. Makoto TAMADA, Honda, 1:34.177
9. Nicky HAYDEN, Honda, 1:34.208
10. Carlos CHECA, Yamaha, 1:34.540

Note that Roberts, Edwards, and Hayden are all Americans (although Edwards is a Texan, so some may disagree...). It's like the 1970's again in MotoGP...

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PAKISTAN AND INDIA

• This last month the United States made Pakistan a Major None NATO Allie (MNNA). This infuriated many people in Pakistan which has run a proxy war against India in Kashmir, training insurgents, as well as many of the very same Taliban and Al-Queda terrorists we are at war with today. The MNNA status allows Pakistan to purchase advanced weapon systems from the US such as the F-16 which many Indians worry might be used against them in a war. The US has offered to make India a MNNA but India seems to have rejected this idea

• US Politicians and officials have tried to down play the strategic and political ramifications of granting MNNA status to Pakistan. Yet some people already see a negative effect that US aid and favoritism have had on its stance on Kashmir.

• India and the US are discussing the possible relaxing of rules to allow India to enter the Nuclear Suppliers Group which would allow member countries to supply India with advanced Nuclear power and scientific equipment which currently many of them are banned from doing. In part this is scene as a conciliatory movement as well as a desire to create closer relations with India because of the MNNA status that was granted to Pakistan.

PROLIFERATION

• Dr Kahn recently said that he has seen nuclear weapons several years ago when he was in North Korea. While many people doubt his claims because of doubts that North Korea would have had enough material to make a weapon, the US and other countries have not had access to Khan to confirm his stories. The Parapundit provides a excellent round up and commentary but one has to ask what else is this man holding back and is Pakistan cooperating enough with the US to make it worth it?

• China has also decided to sell Pakistan another nuclear reactor. What is worse is that Japanese, European, and US Nuclear reactor vendors are falling over themselves trying to sell China advanced reactors knowing full well that China has been one of the major culprits behind nuclear proliferation!

ENEMY WITHIN

• March saw not only the horrible and tragic bombings in Spain but massive raids and disruptions world wide by governments in world wide terrorist round up. A world wide spring offensive, if you will, against terrorist cells in Europe, Canada, the Philippines, Spain, the UK and many more which involved the cooperation between governments like Pakistan and the UK as well as Indonesia and the Philippines with Spain to help each other stop new attacks and break up established cells. In the case of the plots in the UK and France involving the intent of using the chemical weapons, the terrorists are reported to have been in contact with cells in Paksitan. Terrorists that where involved in the Spanish bombings where probably trained by Jemaah Islamiah in Indonesia.

• Many of the Islamic Terrorists who where rounded up in various raids these last months were also citizens or legal residents of the countries where they planned to carry out their actions. Recently in the UK several successful raids found that the terrorist were British citizens who had originally come to the UK from Pakistan. This raises the deeply uncomfortable issues of why these people who went to the effort to become citizens of their host country would then turn on that country? The Parapundit offers some insights into the question as well as possible consequences and issues related to Islamic communities in Western Countries.

SOUTH AND SOUTH EAST ASIA

• With the recent kidnappings in Iraq many coalition members have started to feel further pressures to pull their troops out of Iraq. The Philippines President Arroyo has vowed to keep Philippine forces in Iraq even though some of the people in her government disagree.

• The Philippines have been a strong supporter of the US War on Terror in that most Filipinos suffer or experience the negative effects of Islamic terrorism all to often. The US Navy has been working with the Philippines in the War on Terror to help with interdiction and stop sea born terrorists threats such as JI using a crude nuclear weapon against shipping lanes. Malaysia is a more problematic partner and they recently rejected US plans to help protect sea lanes from this very threat.

ETCETERA

• The Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) is looking for a few good Spies. If you are interested you can apply here.

• Some people believe that governments and intelligence agencies are getting better at finding terrorists and tracking them due to increased focus, new technologies, as well as cooperation between various agencies but it should be over looked the tremendous pressures that the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and various efforts in Pakistan and South Asia have put on Al-Queda’s resources. Most of Al-Queda’s professional terrorist have been killed or captured James Dunnigan suggests that in part what we saw in Europe in the wave of recent arrests was a new generation of terrorists who lack the training and skills to make attacks with out being noticed and are relying on a shotgun effect of continuous attacks to pay off.

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While he is expected to coast to an easy victory, President Mbeki has come under sharp criticism from opponents because of his repeated denials of both the extent to which AIDS has spread in South Africa, and of the existence of a link between the HIV virus and AIDS. Mbeki has been quoted as saying publicly “personally I don’t know anyone who has died of AIDS.” For its part, the opposition Democratic Alliance has promised free anti-retrovirals for all South Africans and hopes to increase its share of the vote.

South Africa presently is in an early nationalist phase of its political existence, with the ANC after securing an end to apartheid emerging quite easily as the nation’s dominant party, a political configuration which is likely to continue until new generations of voters with weaker links to the party enter voting age.

This year’s elections come as the country grapples with unemployment rates which exceed 40%. Democracy in South Africa is now solidly grounded, with a robust free press, a liberal and respected constitution, plentiful opposition parties and civil society organizations, and a legal system which is clean, if slow. Strong unions and wage controls, however, have discouraged firms from hiring, and a black middle class still has yet to emerge. Daily life continues to be largely segregated by race, a fact which also is true for political parties – such as the Xhosa-dominated ANC, the predominantly Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party, the English-speaking white Democratic Alliance, and the Afrikaans-speaking New National Party. But promisingly, the political violence of the country’s first post-independence years has waned, and relations among race communities have been bolstered significantly by the work of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

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A single-party socialist state held power since independence with the support of the military, and had left the imams as its only credible opposition. The clerics and their supporters, looking to Iran as a model of Islamic democracy, in turn swept parliamentary elections when the government finally attempted to adopt liberal reforms amid criticism and economic failure in 1991. With the Islamic Salvation Front promising to adopt Shar’ia and easily having gained the requisite two-thirds majority to amend the constitution, the military stepped in to cancel the election’s result and outlaw the ISF.

Algeria’s civil war followed.

Holding on to power, the military-backed government banned members of the Islamic Salvation Front from taking part in politics and amended the Constitution to prohibit the formation of political parties based on religious belief. It also successfully encouraged formation of moderate Islamic parties to draw away much of the radicals’ support, a major such party being the Movement of the Society for Peace.

With the Islamist parties successfully marginalised, Abdelaziz Bouteflika ('Abd al-'Aziz Abu Tifliqa) was handily reelected (campaign website). Bouteflika, who enjoys the support of the military, was a leader in the Algerian War of Independence and also a former foreign minister.

The lesson to be learned from Algeria’s experience of democratization, some analysts say, is that in 1991 the country picked the wrong moment to open the doors to pluralism and then opened them too wide. This year, these observers say, reflected a more wisely chosen moment for holding elections, and a restriction of participation to parties which supported liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy still remains weak in Algeria - nearly three-quarters of Algeria's population is under the age of 30, and half of those below the age of 25 are unemployed. The Islamist movement enjoys particularly broad support among young unemployed males, and among the state’s greatest challenges will be to find a way to secure their support for, and participation within, the liberal democratic system.

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...

...infinite vigilance is not possible. Negligence in any specific case needs to be compared with the normal rate of negligence for all possible events at the time of the tragedy — including those events that did not take place but could have. Before 9/11, the risk of terrorism was not as obvious as it seems today to a reasonable person in government (which is part of the reason 9/11 occurred). Therefore the government might have used its resources to protect against other risks — with invisible but perhaps effective results.

...

The greatest flaw in the commission's mandate, regrettably, mirrors one of the greatest flaws in modern society: it does not understand risk. The focus of the investigation should not be on how to avoid any specific black swan, for we don't know where the next one is coming from. The focus should be on what general lessons can be learned from them. And the most important lesson may be that we should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible. After a black swan like 9/11, we must look ahead, not in the rear-view mirror.

I think we desperately need to learn to identify and respond to black swans, and that we need to build systems in our society and government that will let us do so. The swans are getting bigger and more deadly.

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IRAQ BRIEFING

• There's a little bit more information on the suicide bombmaking factory that US forces have discovered in Fallujah.

• Following Prime Minister Berlusconi's visit to Nasiriyah, Italian forces stationed in the Shi'ite city have demolished Sadr's offices and increased patrols in the surrounding area.

• Contrary to prior media reports, it appears that the SCIRI Badr Brigades and the Ansar al-Sistani are in control of Karbala along with coalition Polish and Bulgarian troops, having forced the Mahdi Army either underground or out of the city altogether.

• It appears that Sadr has joined forces with the Fallujah insurgents. Too bad ideological or sectarian disagreements aren't keeping them from working together way they did al-Qaeda and the Baathists ...

• Sadr has pulled the Mahdi Army out of police and government buildings in An Najaf in an effort to placate US demands. Perhaps he's preparing to flee the quagmire ...

• On the other hand, 2,500 US troops have been deployed outside of An Najaf in case Sadr's decides not to go down so quietly.

• NoLeftTurns makes an observation about the Sadr indictment that most of the mainstream media seems to be missing.

• Members of the Jaish Mohammed (Army of Mohammed) are vowing to fight on. The Jaish Mohammed is a Fallujah-based insurgent group tied to Saddam Hussein and is led by a Saudi al-Qaeda leader and two former senior members of the Iraqi Mukhabarat. It receives most of its financing (and I know this'll just shock you all!) from Saudi Arabia.

• Perhaps there's also a Saudi connection to all of weaponry that is being smuggled into Fallujah under the pretext of humanitarian aid? Keep in mind that our problems there first started when all those Saudi charities set up shop in town ...

• In case, the Iraqi insurgents appear to be performing in atypical fashion, attacking aid convoys and killing hostages.

• Soundfury has a round-up of the Iraqi blogger reaction to the ongoing violence in Fallujah.

IRAN REPORTS

• Iranian Expediency Council head Rafsanjani is reportedly telling Iranian radio that Iran needs to settle accounts with the US in addition to voicing support for the Sadr Revolt.

• Iranian defector Haj Saidi is telling the Arab press that Iran is pumping as much as $1,000,000,000 into efforts to thwart US efforts to set up a democracy in the country (thus raising the question of where all this cash is going if Sadr's only getting $80,000,000) and has sent over 300 VEVAK operatives into the southern Shi'ite areas to stir up trouble.

• Speaking of which, it turns out that the Iranian "pilgrims" killed in Karbala were in fact members of the Baseej, the Iranian government's favorite brownshirts.

• Iranian president Khatami has withdrawn 2 key reforms bills from the Iranian legislature. I'm finding myself more and more in agreement with Joe's characterization of the man - he does act just like a labor boss who's been bought off by the mob.

• Iran has ended talks with the US over how to best restore order in Iraq.

THE WIDER WAR

• See our Eyes on Korea briefing for complete coverage of affairs in and around Asia's nuclear madhouse.

• The Washington Post is reporting that a top European al-Qaeda leader, Amer Aziz, put the late mastermind of the 3/11 attacks, Sarhane bin Abdelmajid Fakhet in touch with Jamal Zougam, who constructed the bombs used in the attacks.

• Speaking of Fakhet, he and his cohorts phoned a British imam named Ben Salawi to get permission kill themselves before blowing up the building they were holed up in rather than be taken prisoner by the Spanish authorities.

• According to a video discovered in the rubble of the building, al-Qaeda was planning to hit Spain again because of the aggressive law enforcement response to 3/11 as well as Zapatero's pledge to redouble his troop commitment to Afghanistan. Guess that means the truce is off.

• Spanish authorities have arrested 2 more suspects in the 3/11 bombings, which appears to have been financed through drug sales.

• Members of the Yadokhel tribe are refusing to help Pakistan hunt down al-Qaeda members along the Afghan border.

• Contrast their attitude with that of the Janikhel tribe, who are quite willing to chat with the Pakistani military.

• Unemployed potenate Ex-Afghan despot and al-Qaeda ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is calling for a Sadr-style uprising in Afghanistan. If this pans out, we may soon see Hekmatyar pinned down in a single city trying to beg, threaten, or cajole his way out in one piece ...

• Taliban fighters claim to have killed an Afghan intelligence chief and seized control of 3 border districts. I'd take the district claims with a grain of salt, but the intelligence chief does indeed appear to be MIA, if not KIA.

• Indonesia is sending hundreds of police to Sulawesi after gunmen opened fire on a Christian Easter service. The Mujahideen KOMPAK, a JI affiliate, is active in the area.

• 2 Thai rubber workers have been killed in Yala province in what appears to be the latest attack by the JI affiliate Pattani Mujahideen.

• 3 senior members of the al-Qaeda affiliate Lashkar-e-Taiba have been killed by Indian security forces.

• Filippino president Gloria Arroyo has given permission to seal off an entire province in order to recapture 53 escaped prisoners, including at least 8 Abu Sayyaf.

• Abu Sayyaf has attacked a Malaysian tugboat near Sabah and taken 3 crew members hostage.

• Australia and Singapore are repeating earlier reports that Mindanao is a terror haven even as Filippino authorities confirm the existence of JI cells on the island.

• Afghan forces have started a new al-Qaeda hunt near Khost.

• Middle East Newsline is reporting that Syria is shipping WMD components to Sudan, though no word on whether they were being sent abroad for safekeeping or to help out with the ongoing genocide fighting in Darfur. Given what all Sudan is up to in the region, the latter could easily be the case.

• MENL is also reporting that Arafat personally approved of an attack on a US convoy last year that killed 3 Americans.

• The Indian website Rediff has an interesting interview with Mullah Omar available for reading.

• 4 Saudi cops have been killed in a suburb of Unaizah.

• The FBI is questioning Khalid Madani, a suspected member of the Hamburg cell that carried out the 9/11 attacks.

• Hungarian authorities have thwarted a plot to bomb a Jewish museum in Budapest 2 days before the visit of the Israeli president.

• Debye takes a look at the case of Mohammed Momin Khawaja and the role of Muslim moderates in combating the extremists, among other things.

• The Art of Peace has some interesting notes from a Saudi blogger as well as more fascinating commentary from Safa Haeri on the Iranian role in Iraq.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. One of the more persistent cynical comments on the subject of American democracy is the joke that the other party will bring out the dead to vote in the next election. Well, the dead may well vote in some US elections, but to the best of my knowledge they have yet to field a candidate.

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Aljazeera earlier described the tape as "too bloody" and said it will not air it "in order not to upset viewers sensitivities".

In a statement accompanying the tape, the abductors of the four Italians justified the killing.

"When your president says pulling the troops out of Iraq is non-negotiable then this means he does not care for the safety of his citizens as much as he is concerned with satisfying his masters in the White House," the statement said.

"We have killed one of the four hostages we have in order to teach a lesson for those who are involved. We know they are guards working for the American occupation in our country.

"We ask you one more time to revolt once again in the face of your leaders and reject this unjust war on us so that we can protect your citizens. We are waiting for that from you or else we will kill them one by one," added the Green Brigade.

Who are we to judge, you ask?

If you have to ask, you aren't going to understand my reply.

UPDATE: More here - a show of true bravery by the executed hostage.

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That's not quite the case. Let me offer up a few tidbits, so that you'll understand how hard things were - and how much had to be done - between June 5, 1945 and, say 1950.

Here's what the economy looked like in 1946 and 1947:

After World War II the German economy lay in shambles. The war, along with Hitler's scorched-earth policy, had destroyed 20 percent of all housing. Food production per capita in 1947 was only 51 percent of its level in 1938, and the official food ration set by the occupying powers varied between 1,040 and 1,550 calories per day. Industrial output in 1947 was only one-third its 1938 level. Moreover, a large percentage of Germany's working-age men were dead. At the time, observers thought that Germany would have to be the biggest client of the U.S. welfare state.

and this:

The winters of 1945/46 and 1946/47 were the worst Germans can remember. They were cold, and as many houses were still damaged, there was a lack of fuel (coal) and people were undernourished, many starved or froze to death. The British and the Americans, in their respective zones, did their best to alleviate the situation. The US Red Cross distributed addresses of German families to US citizens who were descendants of German emigrants and, in many cases, relatives of those in need. The American relatives than sent CARE PARCELS containing durable goods extremely scarce in war-torn Germany. The British efforts to prevent the German population from starvation stressed the country's economy (which had not recovered from 5 years of war either) to the limit. During this process, the population of West Germany began to regard the British and Americans as liberators rather than occupants.

In large part, this was both the result of the extraordinarily destructive war, but also of deliberate policy on the part of the victorious Allies:

With surrender came the time for retribution. In the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Directive 1067 of April 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was instructed to occupy Germany "not...for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation." Allied occupation was to bring "home to the Germans that Germany's ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance have destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves."

...

Such a shift in policy from retribution to rebuilding, from collective guilt to assistance, also meant a renunciation of reparations and of the dismantling of factories: Draining financial and industrial resources from Germany was hardly beneficial to its economic recovery. In early 1946, less than a year after V-E Day, this was a hard pill to swallow for most Americans. But Truman agreed with Churchill, and on May 25, Truman halted all reparations from the U.S. Zone. The punitive Reparations and Level of Industry Plan for the four zones—agreed upon only after months of haggling on March 27, 1946—was quietly scuttled.

To an extent, it was a result of inadequate planning. In his essay rebutting James Bacques' charges that Eisenhower deliberately starved a million Nazi POW's, Stephen Ambrose says:

After the first week of May, all of Eisenhower's calculations as to how many people he would be required to feed in occupied Germany became woefully inadequate. He had badly underestimated, for two reasons. First, the number of German soldiers surrendering to the Western Allies far exceeded what was expected (more than five million, instead of the anticipated three million) because of the onrush of German soldiers across the Elbe River to escape the Russians. So too with German civilians - there were millions fleeing from east to west, about 13 million altogether, and they became Eisenhower's responsibility. Eisenhower faced shortages even before he learned that there were 17 million more people to feed in Germany than he had expected.

No food shortage? This is the report of the Military Governor for Germany in July 1945: "The food situation throughout Western Germany is perhaps the most serious problem of the occupation. The average food consumption in the Western Zones is now about one-third below the generally accepted subsistence level." The September report declares, "Food from indigenous sources was not available to meet the present authorized ration level for the normal consumer, of 1,550 calories per day."

Mr. Bacque says that the prisoners were receiving 1,550 calories a day, and he contends that such a ration means slow starvation. He apparently never looked at what civilians were getting, in Germany or in the liberated countries. In Paris in 1945, the calorie level was 1,550 for civilians. It was only slightly higher in Britain, where rationing continued. It was much lower in Russia, where rationing also continued. As noted, the official ration for German civilians was 1,550, but often not met. In Vienna in the summer of 1945 the official ration sometimes fell to 500.

There is such a thing as common sense. Anyone who was in Europe in the summer of 1945 would be flabbergasted to hear that there was no food shortage.

As we realized the inadequacy of the Morgenthau plan, which intended to 'pastoralize' Germany as a way of ending the militant nature - and capabilities - of the German people. By all accounts, the plan was a disaster in conception and execution. In reaction, elements of the U.S. Government reacted with their better natures.

I need not tell you that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth, and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world.

In considering the requirements for the rehabilitation of Europe, the physical loss of life, the visible destruction of cities, factories, mines, and railroads was correctly estimated, but it has become obvious during recent months that this visible destruction was probably less serious than the dislocation of the entire fabric of European economy. For the past 10 years conditions have been highly abnormal. The feverish preparation for war and the more feverish maintenance of the war effort engulfed all aspects of national economies. Machinery has fallen into disrepair or is entirely obsolete. Under the arbitrary and destructive Nazi rule, virtually every possible enterprise was geared into the German war machine. Long-standing commercial ties, private institutions, banks, insurance companies, and shipping companies disappeared, through loss of capital, absorption through nationalization, or by simple destruction. In many countries, confidence in the local currency has been severely shaken. The breakdown of the business structure of Europe during the war was complete. Recovery has been seriously retarded by the fact that two years after the close of hostilities, a peace settlement with Germany and Austria has not been agreed upon. But even given a more prompt solution of these difficult problems, the rehabilitation of the economic structure of Europe quite evidently will require a much longer time and greater effort than has been foreseen.

George Marshall - June 5, 1947

And they showed results:

During the last 10 months notable progress has been made in Western Germany, which is apparent to all the world. An entirely new atmosphere of hope and creative activity has replaced the lethargy and despair of a year ago. Dean Atcheson - April 28, 1949

It took 4 years from the end of hostilities to start the turnaround of the German economy.

We started to implement a plan that would have turned Germany into Southern France, and turned 180 degrees and helped Germany reindistrialize.

That's how things work in the real world. They progress in fits and starts, change and turn, and most of all, they take time.

The forces that oppose us are convinced that they are more patient than we are. They are convinced that if things in Iraq aren't perfect - if the power isn't on and unemployment ended and all the Iraqi women listening to NPR by September - well, it'll be a quagmire then. And then what'll we do?

Dean Atcheson and George Marshall were probably worried about quagmire as well. But they simply put their heads down and worked, and experimented, and tried things until - at the end of the day - they outlasted the problem.

They were leaders. We need some too.

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"Once again, my warmest Passover greetings (it is heartily meant while I would have preferred if Egypt would have been able to accommodate happily this wonderful expatriate community and motivate them not to flee to Sinai some 34 centuries ago and deprive us from their wonderful skills and peerless talents!!)."

It would have been nice if it all could have been settled amicably... but absolutist despotisms of any stripe are rarely good at that sort of thing. Which brings us to the central points of Passover.

The Point

In one sense, Passover is really about preparation for the giving of the 10 Commandments on Mt. Sinai. Abraham is the first major break: belief in the existence of one G-d, without shape or form. His acceptance of G-d's existence creates ethical monotheism, but its real impact is not felt until the second major break. For the corrollary of ethical monotheism is the idea that good and evil have an existence independent of earthly agents or representatives, and untouchable by earthly authority.

This idea will change the world - and the Passover story is both its grand entrance and its clarion call.

Which is great, but how does that relate to the Egyptians?

The Egyptians

Some Jewish sages believe that G-d wished to make a serious example of an absolutist earthly ruler, to convey with utmost clarity that now and forever, no human was equal to or above G-d, and that moral law was not something dictated by societal conventions or the pronouncements of human "authorities."

In other words, Egypt's Pharaoh was simply being used to make a divine point. A very very important divine point with enormous future implications, but one that could also have been made anywhere else in the world at that time. Slavery? Almost universal. Belief in idols? Ditto. Cruelty? Then, as now, the rule not the exception. Absolutist rulers claiming divine descent or status? Pharaoh isn't the first, and won't be the last by any means.

We focus on the Egyptians during Passover (and both Islam and Christianity made it part of their stories too), but really, there was nothing especially blameworthy about Egypt as a society that didn't apply equally to most of its neighbours.

Which brings us to the spilling of the 10 drops of wine.

Drops of Freedom

I've always seen the spilling of the 10 drops of wine while the names of the plagues are recited as being about basic human compassion for anyone's suffering. That still applies, I'm sure, but the more I talked to Tarek, the more I wondered if I was missing something. Something big.

As noted above, the 10 Plagues could have happened to so many other societies. Most of humanity was like that at the time... and many people even today live under systems no less absolute. Yet all Egyptians suffered in the Plagues, because of decisions that many had no part in. Granted, many would also have been involved - but without a moral framework that separates morality from a God-King's dictates, it isn't even possible to talk about complicity. The concept would be meaningless.

That's why it was not Israel alone who was redeemed at Passover.

Indeed, it's only after Exodus and Sinai that the world can even begin to talk about the prospect of a different future - for the Egyptians themselves, and for all mankind, as well as for the Israelites.

And so we spill the drops of wine in sorrow every year. Not only for the Egyptians' suffering, but also for the lack of freedom that led to it - and which remained after the Israelites has left. Because after the 10th Plague, Israel went free. But the Egyptians, too, were slaves, subject to Pharaoh's absolute authority. Their lives remained his even after Israel's Exodus, to be snuffed out at a whim or a word.

Who cries for them? We do. Every year.

We drink the Passover wine to commemorate our freedom, and - and yes, we spill it in compassion. But maybe we also spill it to remind ourselves of those we left behind, unable to share in the wine of freedom because they were still unfree.

And as long as that remains the case, our cup of freedom is never really full.

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INTERNATIONAL

• It is widely expected that Cheney, in his trip to Bejiing later this week will pitch the sale of a nuclear power plant to the PRC. Meanwhile Asia general is leading a resurge in the sector.

• A small group of miscreants sailed to a group of tiny, resource-rich, but nationless islands called Diaoyu (Fishing Islands, or Senkaku islands in Japanese) and planted a Chinese flag only to be met by (according to them, anyway) three Japanese warships. The result is yet more anti-Japanese feelings, and Shanghai Eye points out some of the recurring players in such movements.

TAIWAN

• A BBC article dissects all the conspiracy theories associated with the assassination attempt, and systematically debunks them.

• Lien's credibility has been largely discredited as a result of his inciting the population to reject the results of the election, and other, various absurdities.

• The aftermath of the election has seen various protests and light skirmishes with police. Wayne of A Better Tomorrow has a good round up of some of the more recent ones.

• Cyril H. Wecht, a US forensics expert famous for debunking the "magic bullet" theory associated with JFK's assassination, is on board to investigate the crime.

ZHAO ZIYANG'S IMPENDING DEATH

• Zhao Ziyang, liberal-minded and purged communist leader who was last seen 15 years ago warning Tiananmen student leaders of the impending crackdown, is on his death bed. The PRC has been arresting Tiananmen activists for some time now and the blocking of various blog communities might have some connection. Government officials are concerned that with his death might come with renewed calls for reform, as what happened when Hu Yaobang passed away that initially sparked the student movement.

• China Digital News carries a translation of a Chinese politician reflecting on Zhao Ziyang and the plight of human rights in China.

DOMESTIC AND OTHER

• Those who are carriers of hepatitis B in China cannot be employed, Some China bloggers have recently noted. For a window into the kind of reaction by locals to the issue that you usually only see in obscure chat rooms, check out the comments to this Asian Labour News post (they're in English).

• Lucent Technologies fired four of its executives in the China branch, claiming that they violated US law against offering bribes to government officials while overseas. The event reminds us that doing business in the Middle Kingdom often means getting your hands dirty.

• A 17-year-old boy wins a BMW, is declared the winner, pictures are taken, and the next day he's notified that his ticket was a fake. In anger he scaled a wall and became the hot story in the Chinese-language press for a day.

• Finally, Asian Labour News has the inside scoop on the hidden messages in one pro-Kerry commercial that's appeared on the airwaves lately.

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He says:

This was one of Clarke's most compelling points. In his book, testimony, and several TV interviews, Clarke has argued that the Clinton administration thwarted al-Qaida's plot to set off bombs at Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium because intelligence reports of an impending terrorist attack were discussed at several meetings of Cabinet secretaries. Knowing they'd have to come back and tell the president what they were doing to prevent an attack, these officials went back to their departments and "shook the trees" for information. When Bush came to power, Rice retained Clarke and his counterterrorism crew, but she demoted their standing; terrorism was now discussed (and, even then, rarely) at meetings of deputy secretaries, who lacked the same clout and didn't feel the same pressure.

This is a key point, and is, in fact the only fact-based argument he makes.

And, from all the information I've seen, it's completely full of it.

I haven't read Clarke's book (yet), but I do remember the news accounts both at the time and afterward of the arrest of Ahmed Ressam, was that he had acted hincky when at the border checkpoint, and a normal border patrol officer hunch caused them to pull him in for close inspection. They searched his car - for drugs - and he tried to run and was chased down.

I missed the part in this story where - like at Waco - senior government officials stood by an open phone line and communicated closely with the troops on the ground. No one took credit for it in 2000, when it would have made a difference in an election.

And I've got to believe that if Clarke is taking credit for it now - claiming that good senior staff work foiled the Millennium Plot - either he's puffing like a freaking blowfish, or there's some data out there that hasn't made it to the public record.

Here's the story from the Seattle Times:

The Coho arrived in Port Angeles in the dark, just before 6 p.m., the last boat of the day. Customs inspector Diana Dean stopped each car as it rolled off, asking the drivers a few basic questions and wishing them a good trip.

The last car in line was a green Chrysler 300M with British Columbia plates.

"Where are you going?" "Sattal."

"Why are you going to Seattle?" "Visit."

"Where do you live?" "Montreal."

"Who are you going to see in Seattle?" "No, hotel."

The driver was fidgeting, jittery, sweating. His hands disappeared from sight as he began rummaging around the car's console. That made Dean nervous.

She handed him a customs declaration to fill out, a subtle way of stalling while she took a closer look. He filled out the form and handed it back. By this time, Dean observed, he was acting "hinky."

She asked him to turn the car off, pop open the trunk and step outside. Noris was slow to respond but complied.

At this point, the other customs inspectors were finished and waiting to go home. They came over to help process the last car of the day. Dean told them this might be a "load vehicle" ... code for one used for smuggling. Inspector Mark Johnson took over the interrogation.

"Habla español?" he asked.

"Parlez-vous français?" the man replied, handing over his ID. Not a passport or driver's license, but his Costco card.

"So you like to shop in bulk? You know, the 120-roll pack of toilet paper?" Johnson joked. He escorted Noris to a table, where he asked him to empty his pockets.

Inspector Mike Chapman searched the suitcase in the trunk. As he was doing that, inspector Danny Clem reached in and unscrewed the fastener on the spare-tire compartment. He opened the panel, looked inside and called out to Johnson.

Johnson, grabbing Noris by the shoulders, led him over to the trunk. At a hefty 240 pounds, Johnson had no trouble maneuvering the slim Noris. They peered in and saw no spare tire. In its place were several green bags that appeared to filled with white powder, as well as four black boxes, two pill bottles and two jars of brown liquid. A drug dealer, perhaps?

Johnson felt Noris shudder. He escorted Noris back to the table and patted him down for weapons. Inside Noris' camel's-hair coat was a bulge. As Johnson was slipping off the coat to take a closer look, he was suddenly left holding an empty garment. Noris was fleeing.

By the time it sank in, Noris was nearly a block away. Johnson and Chapman took off on foot, yelling, "Stop! Police!"

With his head start, Noris escaped. The inspectors couldn't find him. Then Chapman noticed movement under a pickup parked in front of a shoe store. He squatted down, saw Noris, drew his gun and ordered him to come out with his hands up.

Noris stood up, arms raised, and looked at Chapman, just 20 feet away with his gun drawn. Then he turned and ran. "Stop! Police!"

Johnson joined Chapman on Noris' tail. Noris bounced off a moving car but continued running. When he got to the middle of a busy intersection, he reversed direction, headed for a car stopped at the light and grabbed the driver's door handle. The woman behind the wheel, startled, stepped on the gas, ran the red light and sent Noris spinning. Chapman and Johnson swarmed him.

They took him back to the terminal and handed him over to the Port Angeles police, who put him in the back seat of a patrol car.

Johnson took a sample of the white powder from the trunk to test. Was it heroin, speed, cocaine? Negative on each. As he shook the jars of brown liquid, Noris, who could see Johnson from the patrol car, ducked down to the floor.

Within a couple of days, the inspectors would learn that the brown liquid Johnson had shaken was a powerful, highly unstable relative of nitroglycerin that could have blown them all to bits.

Funny, I don't see Richard Clarke's name anywhere in that story.

Fred, care to shed some light on it for us?

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US-ROK Relations

• Koreans on US: Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em? Also see RAND's report, Ambivalent Allies: A Study of South Korean Attitudes Toward the U.S.

• The U.S.A. will stop patrolling the Korean border's DMZ (demilitarized zone) very soon. Oxblog reports, and discusses both reactions in the region and U.S. strategic options.

• You've heard the mantra before, but here it is again -- a major U.S. military realignment in the region is in the works. See this post, too.

South Korea (ROK)

• Well, we've got the parliamentary elections coming up on April 15, and the pro-Roh Moo-hyun Uri Party is set to become the nation's majority party, although the conservative Grand National Party is recovering somewhat from the backlash it suffered following Roh's impeachment. The GNP's selection of Park Keun-hye -- late President (and military dictator) Park Chung-hee's daughter -- as party chairwoman has generally been well received, especially by voters in the party's traditional stronghold of Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province, while some very ill-advised statements by Uri Party chairman Chung Dong-young concerning elderly voters has caused his party problems, particularly in Korea's Confucian heartland of, well, Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province. Still, it looks like in the Seoul area, the Chungcheong provinces and Jeolla provinces, the Uri Party will do quite well for itself. This may or may not have a big impact on US-ROK relations and issues involving North Korea, depending on who you ask (and whose blog you read).

• With a general election coming up, there has been a lot going on in South Korea -- much of it interesting. If you want to get you're monthly, weekly, or daily fix of South Korean politics/social news, the relevant blogs you want to check out are Oranckay's Weblog, Flying Yangban, It Makes a Difference to the Sheep, Ruminations in Korea, Kamelian X-Rays, Seeing Eye Blog, The Rathbone Press, Cathartidae and Hunjangui karuch'im and The Marmot's Hole.

ROK and the War on Terror

• AP had a very interesting piece on the Korean military's "Little Iraq" training ground.

• A number of Korean nationals have been kidnapped in Iraq. First two aid workers were kidnapped by Shia militia in Nasiriyah on April 7. Then, on April 9, eight Korean missionaries were kidnapped but released later after they posed as doctors and gave their captors massages.

• The Polish ambassador to Korea tells the country "nowhere in Iraq is safe," but there's still good reasons for sending troops.

North Korea

• The North Korea Freedom Coalition has designated April 28 "North Korea Freedom Day."

• North Korea watcher Aidan Foster-Carter takes a look at the North Korean budget and doesn't like what he sees. Fascinating read.

• North Korea's reforms may be irreversible, says IIE economist Marcus Noland, but at the same time, they haven't been successful, and what's more, they may be destabilizing.

• North Korea isn't giving tourist visas to Americans. Bummer.

• North Korean Internet users may be chatting up a storm

• Bored? How about some North Korean TV?

North Korea: The International Stage

• Brent Choi wrote a very interesting essay for the Joongang Ilbo in which he argues for a "middle way" in dealing with North Korea.

• Rebecca MacKinnon asks if the North Korea's recent offer (perhaps) to trade its nuclear program for "appropriate corresponding measures" really means anything.

• The Asahi Shimbun talks about why Japan's sanctions might not be worth a hill of beans if South Korea and China continue their roaring trade with the DPRK.

• The Civil Network for a Peaceful Korea also discusses why the Bush Administration may not be applying the Libyan model to North Korea.

• The Civil Network for a Peaceful Korea (in OhMyNews) blames the United States discusses the "external factors" in North Korea's human rights situation. Uh huh.

• On a related note, we gove you the U.S. Group for the Study of Songun Politics. For some background on the group, check "More on the DPRK's supporters in the U.S" out at NKZone.

« ok, I'm done now

IRAQ BRIEFING

• US forces are using AC-130 gunships against the Fallujah insurgents, whose ranks include foreign fighters and suicide bombers. The new Iraqi special forces are fighting alongside US troops in an effort to defeat the insurgents in the area.

• The US is planning Operation Resolute Sword in response to the Sadr Revolt. Sadr, whose followers murdered Abdel Majid al-Khoei, has taken to recruiting Palestinian suicide bombers and taking hostages.

• As I have noted before, the Sadr Revolt is hardly a popular Shi'ite rebellion. Wael al-Rukadi, the Vice Secretary-General of the Council of Iraqi Tribes, seems to concur in this regard.

• Grand Ayatollah Sistani is calling for an end to fighting between the Mahdi Army and coalition forces.

• Polish troops in Karbala have killed Murtada al-Mussawi, the head of the Mahdi Army in Karbala.

• The US contractors whose bodies were mutilated in Fallujah were lured into an ambush by people they thought were members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

• The Boston Globe has a fairly nice summary of major events in Iraq for April 9.

• The US is seeking a bilateral cease-fire in Fallujah following mediation efforts by Iraqi officials.

• Speaking of Fallujah, it looks like there's a suicide bomb factory in the city.

• Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is visiting Italian troops in Iraq, most of which are stationed in the Shi'ite city of Nassiriyah.

• Sadr's Mahdi Army is bracing itself in Kufa and An Najaf for the US assault that they believe will come at the end of Arbain.

• Knight-Ridder has a fairly good round-up of today's events in Iraq, though as I noted on my blog some of it doesn't jive with what I've heard from people here on base, particularly with regard to Karbala.

IRAN REPORTS

• Iran has reportedly dumped $80,000,000 into funding the Sadr Revolt, which would at the very least explain where Sadr is getting all of his money.

• Rafsanjani is praising Sadr's actions, while noted dissident Grand Ayatollah Montazeri isn't too thrilled with the Mahdi Army.

• Khatami, by contrast, is distancing himself from Sadr. Given the nature of Iranian politics, it is not entirely surprising to have Rafsanjani supporting Sadr and Khatami opposing him. It is also useful to recognize the split within the Iranian leadership with regard to how to deal with the US in Iraq.

THE WIDER WAR

• Karzai is sending troops into Maimana to quell the violence there following an apparent coup d'etat in Faryab province by warlord Rashid Dostum. There is still a lot unclear as to what exactly happened, but order was restored as of April 10.

• Top Abu Sayyaf leader Hamsiraj Sali has been killed with 5 followers in a clash with the Filippino military.

• Unfortunately, it appears that many of Sali's fellow travelers have escaped from Filippino prison in a major jailbreak. Of those 8 are dead and 19 recaptured.

• The Spanish al-Qaeda cell members who blew up their own building (an al-Qaeda video was found in the rubble) rather than be taken prisoner were planning an attack on the Parquesur mall just outside of Madrid. There also seems to be a Bosnian link to the 3/11 bombings, with a top European al-Qaeda leader tied to the beginnings of the plot.

• A message purportedly from the Hungarian branch of al-Qaeda is offering cash in return for the withdrawl of Hungarian troops from Iraq.

• Russian North Caucasus anti-terrorism czar Colonel Ilya Shabalkin says that al-Qaeda is financing the Chechen jihad based on information gained from captured rebels.

• Uzbek authorities say that the architects of the recent violence in Tashkent were trained by Arab instructors and took their orders from a "Great Amir" from abroad. The Uzbeks are also citing Pakistan as one of the places where the terrorists were trained, which fits with other published reports of

• Wanted Pakistani tribal leader Nek Mohammed is refusing to surrender to the authorities despite the new April 20 deadline from the Pakistani government.

• Police in Zanzibar have arrested the leader of UAMSHO, a radical Islamic group tied to a series of firebombings against churches, moderate Islamic leaders, and government buildings.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have found the perfect neocon T-Shirt, with a gracious tip of the hat to growler over at Rantburg.

« ok, I'm done now

Afghanistan's Taliban (really, al-Qaeda) government is gone, and al-Qaeda can no longer use it as a secure base. So, we did that. Most of the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists we faced in Afghanistan now live in Pakistan.

America went in with a small number of forces because going in with overwhelming numbers was impossible given the supply lines, and because it would just repeat the Soviet approach in Afghanistan. You'll recall how poorly that turned out. So we have bases with mobile forces that can appear to crush any groups of Taliban, and go out on sweeps, while maintaining a fairly low profile. It's not like we have lots of infrastructure to protect or anything.

The warlords are being dealt with by slow political maeuvering and a slow build-up of national Afghan institutions (incl. an Afghan Army) instead of major US military operations for the same reason - you don't want them uniting against you.

Sometimes, more gets you less. This would be true no matter who was in charge back in America.

On the other hand, Tora Bora proved that the Afghans can be unreliable allies, so we're trying to use more U.S. forces in critical engagements. NATO is pledged to help, and they are helping, but not as much as they promised and requests for more international troops never got us much action even though we're talking relatively small numbers. Even if we got that aid, though, it wouldn't really change our strategy.

Bottom line: What you see is about all you can expect in Afghanistan, though a bit more aid might be nice. The "Provincial Reconstruction Team" model of paramilitary aid teams is also worth following with interest.

Pakistan already has nukes. Their ISI's links to the Taliban and al-Qaeda are a matter of record, and large sections of its "lawless frontier" provinces feature widespread support for al-Qaeda. The government is reluctant to confront the jihadis too openly, as this is dangerous for them. Especially because when they do, jihadi infiltration of the military and intel apparatus results in the jihadis being tipped off in advance. You won't get much overt help there, or permission to operate in their territory.

You're the President. Your plan to decimate al-Qaeda there, ma'am?

"Yes, it's wonderful that we got rid of a murderous dictator -- and if that's our standard for waging war on a country, there's a long list of other murderous dictators in front of us. If it's WMD we're after, well Kimmy's sitting on a bunch of nukes over there in Korea, but we're not doing too much about that."

Ah, Korea... Given that the South Koreans prefer a policy of enablement (that's "enablement" in the friend-of-alcoholic sense) toward North Korea, we have very few options there. The only thing we do know is that negotiating any more "agreements" just pays Kim et. al. to go ahead and break them, and so makes no sense at all. Current efforts are focused on drawing in the Chinese, Russians, and Japanese, but especially the Chinese who may see several new nuclear powers in their backyard (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) if they don't find a way to put pressure on Kim. And there we sit, because it's a slow process.

If you have an idea that no-one else in the world has come up with, please share. Frankly, this one baffles everybody.

The Ideological/Financial Nexus & The Saudis

Now that you've got Afghanistan and Korea as under control as they're going to get, you have the larger problem to deal with of widespread support in the Islamic world for terrorism, an ideology of carefully cultivated hatred for West fostered by their regimes and institutions in order to distract attention from their massive societal failures, and the perception of same as a cost-free approach for regimes and other organizations that sponsor it.

If you refuse to grapple with these issues, then even destroying the Taliban will net you nothing, and the source of the decade-long war against America remains untouched. So, what do you do?

The Saudis' funding of religious extremism including al-Qaeda and many of the world-wide madrassas who teach ignorance and hate and recruit for AQ is a huge problem. Past experience with the Khobar Towers bombing and other incidents has shown that they really have no interest in dealing with this, or cooperating with America in any meaningful sense in this area. Indeed, there seems to be a quid-pro-quo deal that makes Saudi Arabia itself immune from attack in exchange for this funding and support, and the weakness of their regime means they won't give that deal up except under the most extreme pressure.

You can't isolate the Saudis because they have too much oil (they'll just buy other allies, and no sanctions will stick), and if you invade then the rallying cry of "save Mecca and Medina" will touch off an all-out war with most of the Islamic world. America would win that one, but you probably don't want to kill 100 million people or so unless you absolutely have to. Right?

Oh, and the USA has troops in Saudi Arabia, just in case Saddam decides to invade again. This is a major bone of contention in parts of the Islamic world, and as long as they're needed there your options for confronting the Saudis over their other behaviour are very limited.

Your plan for dealing with them?

Armageddon Calling

Then there's the problem of a world in which a number of Islamic regimes, answerable to no-one but themselves and with clear state ties to Islamic terrorism, are developing chemical, biological, and nuclear capabilities. They explicitly support a mentality of suicide bombing, too, which kind of throws the concept of deterrence out the window.

Take Iran. The #1 world sponsor for terrorism, including terrorist atacks far beyond the mideast. Some of their client groups have openly vowed that chemical and biological attacks are part of their long term strategy. Rafsanjani, a major figure in Iran, has openly mused that even if it resulted in the nuclear destruction of Iran, taking out Israel would be acceptable because there are other Muslims elsewhere and so this would constitute victory. They have an active nuclear and chemical weapons program, plus they're building ballistic missiles. There's discontent over there, but it isn't at the rebellion stage. Furthermore, the nation still remembers the last war with Saddam in the 80s, and sees him as a problem if they ever become weak or divided. Add one more disincentive to revolution.

There's no way that any of your Gulf allies will provide bases for an attack on Iran, because they have large Shia populations. It might be possible for the Marines to land, set up a beachhead, then bring in other forces slowly by sea. But that would be very, very risky in military and political terms. Especially since the EU is very cosy with Iran's mullahs for business reasons.

What do you propose to do about this, Mme. President?

Syria is Iran's ally. Has WMD. Major supporter and sponsor of terrorism, including several major terrorist acts against Americans. Your only routes to Syria, however, are through Turkey, Israel, or Lebabon. Turkey almost certainly won't let you. Going through Israel has problems that are self-evident. And the LAST place you want to touch is the eternal quagmire of Lebanon. Plus, Syria is run by Alawites, who are only 10% of the population. Take their Ba'athist regime out, and you'll be trying to police the remnants of 2 utterly failed, anarchic states.

You could do it, Mme. President. Do you want to?

Iraq

Technically, you're still at war - and Iraq has violated the ceasefire terms. It's also refusing to cooperate with efforts to keep tabs on its WMD program. You're getting intelligence that suggests possible links to the 1993 WTC bombings, an assassination attempt on a US President, and even al-Qaeda. Like all intelligence, it's uncertain - but what if it's true? Connections with some terrorist groups are certainly a known quantity, and Saddam has a long history of making disastrous miscalculations fed by overconfidence and underestimation of risk (Iran, Kuwait, etc.).

In the "Evil Mideast dictators club," this guy is in a class by himself. Torture, mass murder on a unique scale even in that part of the world, ecocide, you name it. Plus, there are real questions about the country's stability and succession - Saddam's sons are less rational than he is, and more brutal.

The Kurds have a quasi-state under protection of a no-fly zone that costs billions to maintain. That may prove helpful, as will your bases nearby in Kuwait. The souther Shi'as have risen in revolt at least once, so they're a wild card. And Saddam's conventional military is much weaker now. That's helpful. You're certainly in a better starting position here, if you want to start somewhere (or, you can rest on your laurels after Afghanistan - your call).

The Risks of Inaction

Less helpful is the fact that the sanctions that were supposed to keep Saddam bottled up are being undermined by the Russians and especially the French, and the UN is typically ineffective in enforcing them. Pretty soon, Saddam will have a free hand again. This will be seen, widely, as a major failure of U.S. policy, will and prestige in the region.

That's a dangerous outcome.

ALL parties already question the U.S. commitment to dealing with Islamic extremism (or indeed, any threat), since there's a general belief that the USA will not risk major efforts that may result in casualties. The operation in Afghanistan, while impressive, is still seen in many quarters as proof of that because of the way it was conducted. This belief stunts their cooperation with you. As a result, very few are inclined to take risks, or end the lack of civil freedoms coupled with quiet incitement against non-Muslims that forms much of the political culture of the Middle East.

So, don't expect a whole lot of cooperation in tracking or going after al-Qaeda within those countries. Especially if efforts to contain Saddam are seen to fail.

In fact, barring something to change the equation the understated non-cooperation from the Arab world that has characterized the past decade is your best prediction. Probably coupled with quiet suggestions to radical elements that they should go off and make trouble elsewhere. Problem is, YOU'RE the elsewhere.

Iraq: Action's Potential Gains

On the other hand...

• Iraq is very central.
• Coup attempts against Saddam have consistently failed. There have been several of them. Volunteers are now rather hard to find.
• Overthrowing Saddam would eliminate the dangers of Saddam's regime, currently a partly-known but dangerous variable.
• It would also end the need for troops in Saudi Arabia.
• In fact, overthrowing the regime and giving the Shi'ites there greater freedom would stir Saudi Arabia's Shi'ite population across the border to demand more rights of their own.
• This could force the Saudi rulership to confront their Wahhabi clerical establishment, who will oppose this, or face increasing Shi'ite unrest. Win-win situation if you think the Saudis aren't our friends.
• IF we can succeed in giving the Iraqi Shi'ites greater freedom. Or should we just pick a military strongman who won't give us trouble in future and isn't as brutal as Saddam? The State Department favours that latter option. Do you?
• Iraq back in full production makes the world less dependent on Saudi oil. (Note: you can also do this the French way, via a sweetheart deal for American oil firms linked to the lifting of all sactions. Do you try?)
• Syria and Iran would face a USA with a land bridge into their countries, and so much greater opportunity for military action or power they must respect, if you so choose.
• A successful Iraq - and it has a history of modernity and secularism - could be a magnet for a very different kind of trend in the Arab world, as opposed to other responses to modernity which have all been based on dictatorship (socialism, clan ruled dictatorships, Islamism). This could create an Arab society that's successful on its own terms, thus mitigating the overwhelming sense of societal failure and pointing toward a different option.

Iraq: Action's Potential Risks

Of course, you could also fail. That is always a possibility in statecraft.

• Iraq is very tribal. That will make things complex.
• Saddam's rule will have left deep scars. Can civil society be put back together, or is it a Humpty-Dumpty situation?
• Syria and Iran's regimes in particular will see your efforts as a life-or-death threat, and do all they can to ensure that you fail.
• Nor can you expect much support in the rest of the Arab world. They're less dangerous dictatorships, even tentative 'allies' at times, but still dictators with no interest in having a different model take root in the region. Their ideal is Saddam gone, followed by chaos in Iraq. That's perfect from their point of view - the threat gone, the West's attention focused on Iraq not them, and no alternative model.
• Europe would rather pay off dictators under the table. They won't be much on board either, especially the French who are openly bought.

Yes, you could definitely try and fail here.

So, I ask again... Mme. President, what do you want to do?

« ok, I'm done now

At Thursday's hearing before the 9/11 commission, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, gave a triumphal presentation. She was a spectacular witness.

I was a tough critic of some of her answers and assertions, though I believe I was at least as tough with the national security adviser for President Clinton. At the beginning and end of every criticism I have made in this process, I have also offered this disclaimer: anyone who was in Congress, as I was during the critical years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, must accept some of the blame for the catastrophe. It was a collective failure.

Two things about that failure are clear to me at this point in our investigation. The first is that 9/11 could have been prevented, and the second is that our current strategy against terrorism is deeply flawed. In particular, our military and political tactics in Iraq are creating the conditions for civil war there and giving Al Qaeda a powerful rationale to recruit young people to declare jihad on the United States.

I'm sorry - they didn't have a powerful recruiting presence in 2000? The videos of the USS Cole and the ruins in Manhattan weren't good recruiting tools? What - you're afraid they're going to get pissed off at us? Here's a question for you, Senator: How would we tell the difference?

Of course the attacks on 9/11 could have been prevented. So could the assassination of JFK, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the battle at Little Big Horn. History is contingent, and the chains that lead to large events are themselves fragile. The problem is that we have only partial information at any time, and that we're selective in what we look at. Looking forward, we're usually looking at the wrong information, and don't have all of it.

How many Arab men flew on 9/11? Which ones do we look at, which ones do we devote resources to, which ones do we detain?

How the hell do we know? Today, we know because we had the passenger manifests (and brave members of the cabin crews identified the hijackers by seat in their calls from the doomed planes). We know because we spent millions of investigator-hours poring over the trails left by those 19 men. But how do we do it moving forward in time?

The case for the first conclusion begins with this fact: On 9/11, 19 men defeated every defense mechanism the United States had placed in their way. They succeeded in murdering 3,000 men and women whose only crime was going to work that morning. And they succeeded at a time of heightened alert ... long after we recognized that Al Qaeda was capable of sophisticated military operations.

I've said in the past that what we had was largely a failure of doctrine and imagination. We allowed people to freely fly with knives (I flew with a Spyderco Delica for eight or ten years). The only sophisticated thing they did was to find four people who knew they would die and were willing to learn to fly, and 15 thugs who went along for the ride.

Remember, the attack occurred after President Clinton had let pass opportunities to arrest or kill Al Qaeda's leadership when the threat was much smaller. It occurred after President Bush and Ms. Rice were told on Jan. 25, 2001, that Al Qaeda was in the United States, and after President Bush was told on Aug. 6, 2001, that "70 F.B.I. field investigations were open against Al Qaeda" and that the "F.B.I. had found patterns of suspicious activities in the U.S. consistent with preparation for hijacking." Once again I know that President Clinton, President Bush and Ms. Rice all faced difficult challenges in the years and months before 9/11; I do not know if I would have handled things differently had I been in their shoes. It has been difficult for all of us to understand and accept the idea that a non-state actor like Osama bin Laden, in conjunction with Al Qaeda, could be a more serious strategic threat to us than the nation-states we grew up fearing.

But here's the nub of the question: would Al Quieda have been a serious threat as a non-state actor without the explicit and tacit support of states?

But this recognition does not absolve me of my obligation to ask those who were responsible for our national security at the time what they did to protect us against this terrorist threat. One episode strikes me as particularly important. On July 5, 2001, Ms. Rice asked Richard Clarke, then the administration's counterterrorism chief, to help domestic agencies prepare against an attack. Five days later an F.B.I. field agent in Phoenix recommended that the agency investigate whether Qaeda operatives were training at American flight schools. He speculated that Mr. bin Laden's followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil aviation system as pilots, security guards or other personnel.

Yes, and I'll bet we can find memos from other FBI field agents worried that Aryan Nation supporters are planning to break members out of jail, abortion clinic murders are prepared to attack ... and so on. It the process of setting priority that's critical, and sadly, we're human and sometimes don't have the right ones; and when we do have the right ones, it's often for the wrong reason.

Ms. Rice did not receive this information, a failure for which she blames the structure of government. And, while I am not blaming her, I have not seen the kind of urgent follow-up after this July 5 meeting that anyone who has worked in government knows is needed to make things happen. I have not found evidence that federal agencies were directed clearly, forcefully and unambiguously to tell the president everything they were doing to eliminate Qaeda cells in the United States.

As opposed to all the other competing priorities (white supremacist cells, organized crime, drug smugglers, etc.) which were as high on the radar before 9/11? In reality, at that time the Bush administration was focussed on the 'long game' in taking the attack to Al Quieda, from what I've read. It was one of many foreign policy issues cooking in the background, and yes, the failure to move it up was a horrible one - but as Greg Easterbrook pointed out - I'm not sure it's one that could have been changed.

My second conclusion about the president's terrorism strategy has three parts. First, I believe President Bush's overall vision for the war on terrorism is wrong. ... military and civilian alike.

OK, here's a conclusion. Let's see where it goes.

Second, the importance of this distinction is that it forces us to face the Muslim world squarely and to make an effort to understand it. It also allows us to insist that we be judged on our merits ... and not on the hate-filled myths of the street. Absent an effort to establish a dialogue that permits respectful criticism and disagreement, the war on terrorism will surely fail. The violence against us will continue.

Yes, that's absolutely true. We need to be judged on our merits; but the state controlled and sponsored media, and the state sponsored religious institutions are the ones spreading hatred about us. How does he suggest that we pick that puzzle apart?

Such a dialogue does not require us to cease our forceful and at times deadly pursuit of those who have declared war on us. Quite the contrary. It would enable us to gather Muslim allies in a cause that will bring as much benefit to them as it does to us. That's why President Bush was right to go to a Washington mosque shortly after Sept. 11. His visit ... and his words of assurance that ours was not a war against Islam but against a much smaller group that has perverted the teachings of the Koran ... earned the sympathy of much of the Muslim world.

One of us - he or I - is completely wrong in our understanding of the nature of the Arab and Muslim political world right now. In my understanding, the governments in the much of the Arab (and non-Arab Muslim) world are faced with increased pressure from fundamentalist religious movements that want to see sh'aria imposed and see the Muslim world in a conflict with the secular West. Who, exactly, does he think he can gather in to think kind of constructive mutual dialog? How do we have such a dialog with diplomats from a country where we are pursuing 'those who have declred war on us'? When the act of pursuing them is itself an act of war on the host country?

That the sympathy wasn't universal, that some in the Arab world thought the murder of 3,000 innocents was justified, caused many Americans to question whether the effort to be fair was well placed. It was ... and we would be advised to make the effort more often. Third, we should swallow our pride and appeal to the United Nations for help in Iraq. We should begin by ceding joint authority to the United Nations to help us make the decisions about how to transfer power to a legitimate government in Iraq. Until recently I have not supported such a move. But I do now. Rather than sending in more American forces or extending the stay of those already there, we need an international occupation that includes Muslim and Arab forces.

OK, so the UN has been a cesspool of corrupt (or inept while others corruptly took advantage) oversight of the Iraqi export economy for the last decade. In addition, it is essentially the creature of forces who see themselves in opposition to or desiring to extract something from the West - an international version of the 'poverty pimps' of the urban programs of the 1970's. And we're supposed to hand the keys over to them? Their effectiveness in Palestine aside, let's add Bosnia, Rwanda, and a number of other spots on the tourist maps in Hell as places where the blue-helmeted smurfs have shown themselves to be at best ineffective and at worst, a fig leaf for disaster.

Time is not on our side in Iraq. We do not need a little more of the same thing. We need a lot more of something completely different.

Time only isn't on our side if we say it isn't, and so demonstrate to the world that we can't stick with this long enough to win. Pronouncements like that are basically idiotic. Should we broaden diplomatic efforts both within the West and outside it? Of course. But our basic diplomatic position should be borrowed from the Civil Rights days, when people sang "We Shall Not Be Moved."

More later...

« ok, I'm done now

When the guests enter the house and see the place set aside for sitting in, they ask: 'What is this?' They are told 'This is a place where we sit.' So they sit down on chairs, only dimly conscious of the function of the chair.

The host entertains them, but they continue to ask questions, some irrelevant. Like a good host, he does not blame them for this. They want to know, for instance, where and when they are going to eat. They do not know that nobody is alone, and that at that very moment there are other people who are cooking the food, and that there is another room in which they will sit down and have a meal. Because they cannot see the meal or its preparations they are confused, perhaps doubtful, sometimes ill at ease.

The good host, knowing the problems of the guests, has to put them at their ease, so they will be able to enjoy the food when it comes. At the outset they are in no state to approach the food.

Some of the guests are quicker to understand and relate one thing about the house to another. These are the ones who can communicate to their slower friends. The host, meanwhile, gives each guest an answer in accordance with his capacity to perceive the unity and function of the house.

It is not enough for a house to exist - for it to be made ready to receive guests - for the host to be present. Someone must actively exercise the function of host, in order that the strangers who are the guests, and for whom the host has responsibility, may become accustomed to the house. At the beginning, many of them are not aware that they are guests, or rather exactly what guesthood means; what they can bring to it, what it can give them.

The experienced guest, who has learned about houses and hospitality, is at length at ease in his guesthood, and he is then in a position to understand more about houses and about many facets of living in them. While he is still trying to understand what a house is, or trying to remember rules of etiquette, his attention is too much taken up by these factors to be able to observe, say, the beauty, value or function of the furniture."

Your mission, should you choose to accept it... relate any part of this description to either the process of Sufi discipleship, or the Passover Seder. In the latter case especially, if you think about it you'll find some personal experiences that ring bells - this doesn't have the be highfalutin' stuff.

« ok, I'm done now

"Tribal leaders in Kut -- apparently opposed to the violence incited by militant Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- fought with his milita and plan to hand the southern Iraqi city over to U.S. forces, a U.S.-led coalition source close to the situation said Friday.

The tribal leaders have seized al-Sadr's office in Kut and have called on U.S. troops to help them push his Mehdi Army fighters out of the city, the source said."

Now Kut is one of the 2 cities that was under Sadr's control at this same time yesterday after the Ukrainian contingent retreated back to their base outside of town after a clash with the Mahdi Army. In the absence of any discernable coalition support, these Shi'ite tribal leaders' decision to move against Sadr was an exceedingly dangerous move for them - as the Iraqi blogs make extremely clear, a lot of Iraqis are afraid of Sadr and he's currently holding Grand Ayatollah Sistani as his de facto prisoner in An Najaf. In the aftermath of the tribal action against Sadr, coalition forces have since retaken the city, likely with Iraqi help. So this whole notion that the Iraqi general population or even just the Iraqi Shi'ites are going to just roll over and accept Sadr as their new Maximum Leader would appear to be misleading at best.

One other item of note is that thus far the Mahdi Army has been unable to expand its sphere of influence in any discernible fashion outside of Sadr's traditional power base. All of the other major southern cities remain under coalition control for the most part without incident - an attempted Mahdi Army attack on the Polish/Bulgarian contingent in Karbala seems to have failed miserably. The inability of the Mahdi Army to spread to other Shi'ite areas is a clear demonstration of its own weakness and lack of support among the Iraqi Shi'ites outside of Sadr's traditional power base in Sadr City (reports suggest that the An Najaf contingent is being reinforced by and is at least partially composed of a combination IRGC and Hezbollah) - in short, this is not a viable or even widespread Shi'ite uprising in any sense of the term and is certainly nowhere near the apparent media perception that we're just minutes away from losing control of 1/3 of the country. With the loss of Kut, the only town still under Mahdi Army control is Kufa and I have my doubts that that'll be the case for much longer.

In closing, it is worth noting that Radio Farda is citing the Italian intelligence and media reports that Sadr is receiving in excess of $70,000,000 in funding from Iran to carry out this little uprising in addition to corroborating other reports about him being reinforced by the IRGC and Qods Force, the latter being an elite division of the Iranian military answerable only to Ayatollah Khamenei. If this is in fact true, then there is no way for anyone conclude that Sadr isn't being backed at the highest levels of the Iranian military-intelligence establishment or that Khamenei is at the absolute least providing tacit assistance to attacks on US and coalition forces in Iraq.

UPDATE: MEMRI has a nice round-up of Iranian involvement inside Iraq, as well as a good look at just how isolated Sadr is in terms of his power base. We also have Rafsanjani (a name that should be familiar to anybody who knows anything about the Iranian hierarchy) coming out in support of Sadr's uprising.

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One Border Patrolwoman stopped the Millennium Plot to blow up LAX:

At Victoria, U.S. immigration pre-clearance agents were mildly suspicious of Ressam. They made him open his trunk, but saw nothing. He presented his fake Canadian passport, and the computer check turned up no previous convictions or warrants in the name of Benni Noris. Ressam drove his rental car, with its concealed bomb, onto the ferry heading for Washington state. Upon his arrival at Port Angeles, a U.S. customs agent became suspicious of his hesitant answers to her questions, and she asked for identification. Agents began searching the car. As they discovered the explosive materials -- which they at first took to be drugs -- in the trunk of the car, Ressam tried to run away. He was caught and arrested.

Flight 93 did not hit the Capitol because the passengers - the 'little people' Kos dismisses - stopped it. In his interview in the Atlantic, Security expert Bruce Schneier points out that

"The trick to remember is that technology can't save you,” Schneier says. “we know this in our own lives. We realize there’s no magic anti-burglary dust that we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don't provide much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people.” (emphasis added)

There are a lot of things to criticize the Bush Administration for. There are a lot of things to criticize Condi Rice for.

But Kos has picked the wrong horse here.

The reality is that we would all be better served by pushing down the role of securing our country against terrorism to the 'little people', rather than to large, rigid, unresponsive policy-driven organizations.

Go read the Atlantic article for more on why, or better still go read Schneier's book, 'Beyond Fear'.

Back to Kos, I think, simply that the root issue remains that Bush et al decided to respond to the sponsors of the terrorist acts, rather than the individual actors. That's a legitimate policy distinction, and one where, as I've said in the past, I fall on the side of the White House.

But to somehow assume that the President and National Security staff will personally foil every plot (although the image of Condi Rice dressed up as Wonder Woman might be pleasing to some) - or even manage the response to every plot is ludicrous.

It's up to us; not as vigilantes or even armed defenders, but just alert neighbors. And baggage handlers.

One approach to the War on Terrorism is to built giant formally structured security systems, backed by massive, centralized technology, and as the complex, ‘wicked’ world keeps asking questions the system can’t ask, add pages and pages to the three-ring binders of regulations and policies the minimum-wage front-line employees must follow. You can hire and retain them based on their ability to follow the rules, even when it means taking the wire clippers away from a uniformed Special Forces soldier—who has his mouth wired shut because he’s wounded, and needs the cutters to cut the wires in the event he has to throw up. Or who want to take away the Congressional Medal of Honor from an 80-year old man flying to give a speech at the Air Force Academy.

It will involve a massive investment in machines that will be rushed into production and still be obsolete long before we have finished paying for them.

I obviously don’t think much of this model in this application. I think it is based on old, Taylorian models in which you attempt to break the process into a finite series of discrete steps, and train the human portions of the system in performing these exact steps as precisely and efficiently as possible. It also removes the necessity for any kind of judgment or expertise on the part of the employee.

Update: Praktike busts me for not reading the byline, and thinks I'm completely wrong

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Conservatives are strongly lined up behind the "we never knew!!" and were shocked, just shocked, to find that the reports that terrorists planned something in the US were true. Of course, Rumsfeld had stopped flying commercial by that point, so someone in the security apparat took it seriously.

The reality is that Bush and his team weren't looking for this, and so as the pattern emerged, they didn't see it. It is human nature to look for patterns, and particularly to look for patterns we have already observed. While sitting at the side of the track, I read a wonderful book called 'Complications,' by surgeon Atul Gawande. In it, he tells the harrowing story of suspecting and then diagnosing flesh-eating streptococcus in a young woman's leg, and then saving her leg through heroic surgery and treatment.

He suspected it only because he had just participated in another, failed surgery, in which a man infected with this disease died, so he was obsessed by this disease.

But let's share the blame.

The left and the Democrats are also to blame for 9/11, and not because it was the culmination of eight years of events under Clinton's administration (although in the histories, that has to be considered as well).

The reality is that had Bush responded to the warnings, the logical responses - to preclude Arab men from flying, from taking flight schools, or to have disarmed them (note that pre-9/11 it was perfectly legal to fly with a 3-1/2" Spyderco Delicia, as I did on every flight. I pretty much have one around all the time; they are quite useful).

So, imagine of you would, the response from Senator Kennedy, from the academic Left, from the ACLU.

On vague, unspecified intelligence, we would have detained, inconvenienced, embarrassed, and enraged any number of men - mostly innocent.

And the odds are that most of the 9/11 hijackers would have been able to fly - and act - unchecked.

If not that day, than someday soon when the intense pressure from the Democratic side had forced this 'profiling' program to stand down.

So while we're apportioning blame for 9/11 - and, personally, I'd like to see the entire national leadership stand up and take some - let's do it correctly.

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IRAQ BRIEFING

• Saddam Hussein had the ability to produce "just in time" WMD according to Charles Duelfer, the new head of the Iraqi Survey Group.

• The French government was apparently willing to stand by and let the US go to war with Iraq - provided that we did so without a second UN resolution.

• Two US senators, Richard Lugar and Joe Biden, are calling for greater US-European cooperation with regard to Iraq, including a new UN Security Council resolution on the subject.

• US and coalition forces have attacked members of Sadr's Mahdi Army in al-Showla, Kufa, . Clearly, the threat posed by Sadr is coming to a head.

• Sadr, predictably enough, is telling al-Jazeera that he'll go down fighting. Grand Ayatollah Sistani seems to have a different idea that Muqtada might be well advised to take.

• Fortunately, most Iraqi Shi'ites do not appear to want Sadr lording over them any time soon.

• Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi has released a new audio message railing against the US and Iraqi Shi'ites.

• 8 American security contractors in An Najaf foiled an attack by as many as 70 members of the Mahdi Army.

• Italy plans to keep its troops in Iraq despite clashes with Muqtada Sadr.

• The Mahdi Army briefly surrounded the Polish military headquarters south of Baghdad for several hours before retreating. Polish forces also killed a top Sadr aide in Karbala.

• A major clash has left 12 US troops dead in the Sunni city of Ar Ramadi as Operation Vigilant Resolve begins in Fallujah.

• For the confused, here is a full summary of US military actions in Iraq for April 6, 2004.

• There are indications in Baghdad that Sadr's appeal has spread beyond his traditional support base in Sadr City and even into the Iraqi Sunni population.

IRAN REPORTS

• While this shouldn't be any real surprise, Iran and its proxy arm Hezbollah are backing Sadr against the US-led coalition.

• Iran is promising to show the IAEA that they aren't building nukes by mid-May.

• Meanwhile, Iran is starting production on a new heavy water reactor in Arak.

THE WIDER WAR

• Saudi Arabia is opposing Pakistan's planned terrorist amnesty program - likely out of the fear that any Saudi al-Qaeda who agree to the amnesty may return home to carry out attacks in the Kingdom.

• Singaporean JI leader Ibrahim Maidin is offering to stop terrorist attacks - provided the city-state sets him free.

• Wanted by India and the United States, South Asian mob boss and al-Qaeda supporter Dawood Ibrahim is looking to get some plastic surgery in the near future.

• Former IMU member Uigun Saidov believes that an Islamist revolution in Uzbekistan is just around the corner. WoC Central Asia correspondent Nathan Hamm has more.

• Uzbekistan, meanwhile, claims to have rounded up most of the perpetrators of last week's violence.

• The War on Terrorism has taken its toll on Abu Sayyaf. Once at 1,200, the Philippines-based al-Qaeda affiliate is now down to just 400 fighters.

• A renegade faction of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is harboring JI and Abu Sayyaf according to the Filippino government.

• Speaking of JI, according to hostage accounts they were training Abu Sayyaf on Mount Buod Bagsak.

• French authorities have arrested 15 Moroccans suspected of involvement in the Casablanca bombings.

• Spanish authorities are examining a fax from the suspected representative of al-Qaeda in Europe as they hunt down the remaining perpetrators of the Madrid bombings.

• US forces in Afghanistan have captured a key aide to renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

• Saudi al-Qaeda leader Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin is calling for death of moderate Muslim clerics.

• Al-Ittihad al-Islamiyyah, the main al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, is believed by officials in the autonomous region of Somaliland to be responsible for the attacks on Western NGO workers in the counry.

• The pro-Russian president of Ingushetia has survived an apparent assassination attempt, likely by Chechen jihadis seeking to eliminate a key ally of Vladimir Putin.

• An apparent dynamite theft in Norway is raising fears that it could be used to carry out an al-Qaeda attack similar to that seen in Spain.

• A French court has linked David Courtailler to both 3/11 and the Casablanca bombings.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. It seems a vodka-flavored ice cream is causing quite a stir in Australia ...

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There is more to life than your own petty domestic politics ...

One of the most annoying factors that one encounters within blogosphere, shifting only back and forth depending on which side of the ideological spectrum that a blog in question is located on, is that US foreign policy in general and success or failure in Iraq in particular is viewed solely through the lense of which US political party will benefit from it. I'm not particularly certain when this point of view became prevalent and to be quite frank, I really don't care. US success in Iraq is a good thing for the United States as a whole, not just for George Bush. Similarly, a US failure in Iraq will be an unparalleled disaster for us all, not simply for all of the chickenhawk warbloggers like myself who supported the invasion.

Taking this into perspective, I view declaring the situation in Iraq hopeless or civil war in the country inevitable to be little more than a tacit admission of US defeat as well as a justification of al-Qaeda's combat doctrine - the United States, for all its vaunted prowess, can be defeated through protracted guerrilla warfare. As Rohan Gunaratna notes in Inside al-Qaeda, bin Laden has long sought to entrap the US in a protracted guerrilla conflict out of the belief that his minions can defeat us in the same manner they did the Soviet Union. That is precisely why al-Qaeda is pulling resources from Afghanistan or calling in the international brigades of the Harakat ul-Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba, as well as fighters from Chechnya. And in case this issue is brought up, the much-maligned refusal of the US to place Afghanistan under direct military occupation but rather to subcontract that duty to the Northern Alliance is the only reason they haven't done it there. Ultimately, this is more about defeating the United States than any particular location, which is why resources previously allocated to the Taliban in Afghanistan are now being diverted to Iraq just as Mullah Omar's thugs were starting to have some semblance of success in briefly retaking a few border districts (think counties) in Zabul province.

In short, the situation is such that should the US lose badly in Iraq, al-Qaeda wins and this cannot be allowed if we hope to prosecute a successful war on terrorism, quite independent of who wins the US elections in November.

Villain #1: Muqtada al-Sadr

The first of two sources of the current unrest is the Iraqi Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Some of the biographical information on the man is rather sketchy and I've seen him listed as being between 22 and 31 years old, but all accounts agree that he is the son of late Shi'ite ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, who was assassinated by Saddam Hussein in 1999. Prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, he was the leader of the Jamaat-e-Sadr Thani.

He first appeared after the invasion of Iraq in connection with an attempt to seize control of the Shi'ite holy city of An Najaf from Grand Ayatollah Sistani, at which time he likely assassinated the pro-US Shi'ite leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei. While the situation was resolved when Sadr backed down, the young firebrand next showed up demanding the establishment of sha'riah and arguing in favor of the Khomeinist principle of velayet-e-faqih or rule by men of religion, which as we all know has worked out just peachy in Iran. This was also one of the first major indications of Sadr's main support base in the Sadr (formerly Saddam) City, a slum Shi'ite quarter of Baghdad whose inhabitants were brutalized by the former regime. These first signs of Sadr flexing his political muscle coincided with the return of the previously underground al-Dawaa political party, which was founded by one of Sadr's predecessors. Al-Dawaa advocated the formation of an Islamic state in Iraq and opposed the US occupation, but opted for a non-violent resistance for the time being.

Sadr's next major appearance came in mid-May when Sadr's supporters disrupted the return of Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim to Iraq. Al-Hakim was one of the leaders of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an Iranian-backed organization designed to counter-balance Saddam Hussein's own support for the Mujahideen-e-Khalq. It is somewhat unclear whether or not Sadr was involved with the Iranians at this point or not, though my own view of the situation is that he was from the very beginning, but was backed by a different faction within the Iranian leadership that favored a much more direct method of confrontation with the US than the kind of gradual control of the Shi'ite regions that SCIRI would have enabled. Amir Taheri listed SCIRI among one of the Iranian front groups controlled by the more accomodationist members of the civilian government, so clashes between the two might be expected as their ultimate backers due the same in Tehran.

The question of who Sadr was working for, however, became much more clear following his meeting in Tehran with members of the Iranian leadership in June. Upon his return, Sadr banned trading with Kuwaitis and formed the Mahdi Army as his own independent military force. One of the more interesting things to note with regard to Sadr is that his initial objective of kicking the US out of An Najaf is something that he and his Mahdi Army have to this day been unable to accomplish, a point to be noted to anyone who wants to over-estimate the threat posed by Sadr and his jackboots.

The first sign that Sadr and his Mahdi Army were starting to move beyond mere anti-American rhetoric came in August, when the Shi'ite residents of Sadr's support base Sadr City demanded an end to the US presence in the Baghdad suburb. Shortly thereafter, Sadr formed an alliance with the anti-Western Sunni cleric Ahmed Kubeisi, whose power base has greatly expanded in the Sunni Triangle since the fall of the Baathist Party. As a result, Sadr was able to expand his influence and his agenda into the old Baathist heartland - not that it stopped him from instigating sectarian cleansing in An Najaf and Karbala. More stand-offs in Sadr City soon followed, including a clash with the Mahdi Army in Baghdad that killed 2 American soldiers. In my view, it was this incident that marked Sadr and his thugs as a threat to the US occupation in Iraq that would have to be dealt with sooner or later.

Sadr's announcement of a creation of his own alternate government complete with a Ministry for Preservation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice combined with his ill-fated attempt to drive Sistani from Karbala. Now Sistani, unlike numerous other Iraqi political figures, has chosen not to maintain his own private army, so he had to rely on his followers using small arms. It was this event, in my opinion, that led Sistani to be so critical of the CPA and so insistent of direct elections in Iraq as well as a crackdown on small arms.

Following several tentative confrontations with both the US and Sistani, Sadr drifted back into obscurity until March 2004, when he declared 9/11 an act of God and announced his support for Hamas and Hezbollah, the latter being one of his most disturbing statements to date given that ICT believes him to be the head of Iraqi branch of the latter organization.

One of the more popular fallacies now being argued is that it was the closure of his newspaper that led Sadr into his current period of radical activities - in fact, his Mahdi Army had already demolished the village of Kawlia a full day earlier. To date, US forces have been engaging Sadr's followers in Baghdad as well as in and around An Najaf, but he still commands a formidable force of anywhere between 1,000-7,000 fighters, with a number of media reports and Healing Iraq claiming that he is being supported in these efforts by Iran and its proxy arm Hezbollah. Ignoring that this is arguably an act of war against the United States, so long as Sadr continues to receive support from his Iranian backers he is likely to remain a threat for the near-term future.

Villain #2: Abu Musab Zarqawi

While a lot of media commentary has focused on the prospect of Iraqi Baathists having staged the recent attacks against US forces in Fallujah and Ar Ramadi, few have discussed the very likely possibility of an al-Qaeda connection to the recent attacks there. There have been claims of an al-Qaeda cell operating in Fallujah since at least July 2003 and an al-Qaeda operative was captured in Ar Ramadi in October 2003 with 11 SAM missiles, suggesting that the organization also has a presence in the area - the US destroyed a terrorist training camp in the general area for foreign jihadis back in June.

In the case of Fallujah, the US has long been aware of an active al-Qaeda cell in the city and killed one of Zarqawi's lieutenants there little more than a month ago. Combine this with intelligence reports that non-Iraqi Arabs were involved in the brutal slaying of 4 US military contractors and an al-Qaeda connection becomes even more likely. Many commentators have suggested that the brutal mutilation of the contractors (for which al-Qaeda has posted a justification on one of their Yahoo! groups) was designed after the killing of 18 US servicemen in Somalia, yet not one commentator has raised the possibility that the killers might be one and the same as or have trained under the very same people responsible for that carnage over a decade ago.

What is even more disturbing is the way in which Moqtada Sadr and Abu Musab Zarqawi appear to be accomodating one another in terms of rhetoric. Sadr's actions and sectarian cleansings play to Sunni fears that the Shi'ite will retaliate against them en masse for decades of oppression under the Baathists, while Zarqawi's latest rant (the claims of a former Indian intelligence chief that Zarqawi was once a member of the SeS and LeJ certainly appear a lot more credible in light of the rhetoric he is employing) plays directly to Shi'ite fears that they will soon be persecuted again by their Sunni bretheren. The events of the Ashura Massacre in particular play into this perception and the result is that both the Shi'ites and the Sunnis are more than radicalized enough to provide a ready supply of cannon fodder for the likes of Sadr and Zarqawi. I am have no direct evidence that the two are actively in cahoots, but this strikes me as far too convenient (particularly with regard to the timing of Zarqawi's latest denunciation of the Shi'ites now that Sadr's feeling the heat from the US) a coincidence to ignore. Reports of an alliance across sectarian lines in support of Sadr would seem to strengthen this position.

One more thing to keep in mind about the remaining Iraqi Baathists - those still loyal to the cause are split in 3 arguing over who gets to be the next Maximum Leader now that Saddam Hussein is behind bars. Most the rank and file as well as the attendant cannon fodder have been absorbed into the jihadi infrastructure in the wake of Saddam Hussein's capture because they now recognize, for better or worse, that Zarqawi represents their best hope of regaining their former livelihoods.

The Iranian Game Plan

As Joe noted in Iran's Great Game, Iran seeks to undermine coalition efforts in Iraq, particularly in the Shi'ite areas, because they understand that an Iraq that is either unstable or ruled by Sadr is an Iraq that won't pose an ideological threat to the future of the Iranian regime. I think we can safely expect another move by Sadr against Sistani in the near future, Sistani's firm rejection of velayet-e-faqih poses too great an ideological threat to the underpinnings of the Islamic Republic to be allowed to fester in the long-term.

In addition, Zarqawi, like most of the surviving al-Qaeda leadership, has received refuge inside Iran despite his apparent sectarian views and is dependent on the IRGC for weaponry and support to his Ansar al-Islam cadres. These ties simply cannot be ignored when one takes into consideration Iran's imperialist designs with regard to Iraq and how to combat them. The attackers in Ar Ramadi sought to take advantage of the perceived US inability to retaliate against them while our forces were busy dealing with Fallujah and Sadr and in the event that Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army is decisively dismantled it should not be at all surprising to see the Sunni areas flare up again in some of the more traditional hot spots in the Triangle.

A self-fullfilling prophecy?

Ultimately, claims that this is the beginning of the end for the US occupation in Iraq or the start of the long-anticipated sectarian civil war (the latter being particularly odd in light of apparent cooperation across Shi'ite/Sunni divide) are inaccurate at this phase. Ultimately, the success or failure of the Iranian strategy with regard to the US in Iraq will depend on whether or not the United States and its allies retain the collective national will to defeat the insurgents. The question of whether or not Iraq will become a second Vietnam (i.e. a US defeat) is probably best answered, "No, and it won't be as long as we don't let it."

As most historians will tell you, the Tet Offensive was a resounding failure for the Viet Cong from a military perspective. Nevertheless, it served as the catalyst for the US withdrawl from South Vietnam and its subsequent conquest and oppression by their northern kinsmen. In the case of Iraq, we have already screwed the general population over once - in 1991, when we left the Iraqi people to rot in the midst of their own rebellion against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Now, for better or worse, we have overthrown the tyrant and I don't think it's arrogant to say that we owe them one this time around before we turn around declare our efforts there an abject failure.

More to the point, the implications for Iraq in regard to the larger war on terrorism are enormous. Whether or not one accepts (and I do) Iraqi complicity with regard to al-Qaeda, there can be little doubt that the terrorist network and its satellite groups are there in force now and is seeking to defeat us in a protracted guerrilla war in order to forcibly evict the United States from the country. Should they succeed in this objective, the propaganda as well as strategic implications for the entire Middle East are enormous. In addition, to emboldening Islamic radicals throughout the Gulf (Sunni in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and Shi'ite in Bahrain), a Taliban-esque enclave in central Iraq ruled by Zarqawi would easily be in a position to topple the Jordanian government, bringing al-Qaeda and its affiliates directly to the Israeli border. An Iranian-controlled (either de facto or de jure) southern Iraq would provide the Iranian regime with a great deal more economic muscle than it currently possesses (particularly if al-Qaeda's backers in Saudi Arabia due seize direct power over the Kingdom and put an end to its pro-Western veneer) and the loss of Bahrain would deprive the US of its naval bases in region, leaving Qatar isolated.

These are just some of possible scenarios that a US collapse in Iraq, which is why I feel that Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle probably said it best on the Senate floor:

"America will not be intimidated by barbaric acts whose only goal is to spread fear and chaos throughout Iraq," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, said in a moving floor speech last Thursday after the initial attacks that began the weeklong string of violence.

"Yesterday's events will only serve to strengthen America's resolve and seal America's unity. The brave people who lost their lives did not die in vain. Americans stand together today and always to finish the work we started and bring peace and democracy to the citizens of Iraq," he said.

Indeed.

UPDATE: More links and background from Instapundit.

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Overall, I'd say that Charles' other readers (for I am one too) did a fine job. I was especially impressed by the postings from LGF's "contrarian caucus" of commenters who regularly disagree and criticize there. For them to show up here and defend his blog the way they did is a testimonial that should not be ignored. Ditto for the several Arab & Muslim commenters who posted here as regular LGFers, and of course thoughtful Winds regulars like Sam Barnes et. al.

Bottom Line: Do I believe that LGF is a valuable, informative site? Absolutely. Will I continue to link to it, and encourage other team members to do so? Yes. Are LGF's readers as a body an important resource? Yes. Are they also a problem for his site? Again, yes. Do I believe that Charles can fix this problem? No, not with the tools at his disposal - incl. some that he custom built in order to try.

Candidly, that has me worried for Winds of Change.NET's sustainability, because I believe we're looking at a side effect of the "power law" phenomenon.

More on these subjects, the place of LGF in the blogosphere, and my own thoughts on the "Anger, Hatred & War" controversy in my next post. Which, given my time constraints, probably won't happen until next week.

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These allegations suggest that the government of France condoned kickbacks — bribes, in effect — from French companies to the Iraqi regime in return for further contracts. They say Paris turned a blind eye to these activities.

Let me be absolutely clear. These aspersions are completely false and can only have been an effort to discredit France, a longtime friend and ally of the U.S.

As the former French ambassador to the U.N., let me explain how the oil-for-food program worked. Created in 1996, it was intended to provide Iraqis with essential goods to alleviate the humanitarian effect of the international sanctions that remained in place. The program authorized Iraq to export agreed-on quantities of oil, and allowed money from the sales to be used for food and other necessities. The program was managed by the U.N. and monitored by Security Council members.

Between 1996 and the end of the program in 2003, every contract for every humanitarian purchase had to be unanimously approved by the 15 members of the Security Council, including France, Britain and the U.S. The complete contracts were only circulated to the U.S. and Britain, which had expressly asked to see them and would have been in the best position to have known if anything improper was going on. Though a number of contracts were put on hold by the American and British delegations on security-related grounds, no contract was ever held up because malfeasance, such as illegal kickbacks, had been detected.

Was there corruption and bribery inside the program? Frankly, I don't know. Iraq was not a market economy; it was under sanctions at the time. Customs experts had little choice but to assume that the prices set by outside companies were "reasonable and acceptable," a criterion of acceptance used by the U.N. secretariat, and they had no way of checking whether some contracts were overpriced.

That is why France fully supports the independent inquiry set up by the U.N. The truth must come out.

Was France a major beneficiary of oil-for-food contracts, as several conservative columnists have claimed recently? Definitely not. From the beginning of the program to its end, French contracts accounted for 8% of the total. We were Iraq's eighth-largest supplier.

In addition, throughout the program a sizable proportion of the contracts dubbed "French" were in fact contracts from foreign companies using their French branches, subsidiaries and agents. Among them were U.S. firms providing spare parts for the oil industry (including several subsidiaries of Halliburton). They submitted contracts through French subsidiaries for more than $200 million.

It is also suggested that the money from the oil-for-food contracts passed exclusively through a French bank, BNP Paribas. Wrong again: 41% of the money passed through J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, which, like BNP, was contracted by the U.N. with the approval of Security Council members.

This leaves us with one remaining accusation: that the French positions on the oil-for-food program and Iraq in general were driven by the lure of oil. Yet France was never a major destination for Iraqi oil during the program. In 2001, 8% of Iraqi oil was imported by France, compared with 44.5% imported by the U.S., which was the No. 1 importer all along.

At a time when the U.N. is considering a return to Iraq, and we all agree on the need for close international cooperation to help a sovereign, stable Iraq emerge, I don't understand this campaign. Or the hidden agenda behind it.

No tome to research and comment now, but I'm sure a few of you folks have some time on your hands...

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From the 3rd edition of Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars:

Overriding the Rules of War

The Decision to Bomb German Cities (note: during WWII - rkb)

The decision to bomb cities was made late in 1940 ... What had once been called indiscriminate bombing (and commonly condemned) was now required ... The purpose was explicitly declared to be the destruction of civilian morale.

... A number of reasons had already been offered for the British decision. From the beginning, the attacks were defended as reprisals for the German blitz. This is a very problematic defense, even if we leave aside the difficulties of the doctrine of reprisals (discussed earlier in the book - rkb) ... Nor was it Churchill's purpose, once the blitz began, to deter German attacks or to establish a policy of mutual restraint.

"We ask no favor of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight the people of London were asked to cast their votes whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of all cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, 'No, we will mete out to the Germans the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us.'

...Reprisal was a bad argument; revenge was a worse one. We must concentrate (then - rkb) on the military argument. ...(long analysis of Britain's military posture in 1940 here - rkb) ... Today many experts believe that the war might have ended sooner had there been a greater concentration of air power against targets such as the German oil refineries. But the deicsion to bomb cities was made at a time when victory was not in sight and the specter of defeat ever present. And it was made when no other decision seemed possible if there was to be any sort of military offensive against Nazi Germany.

Bomber Command was the only offensive weapon available to the British in those frightening years. .... 'The bombers alone', Churchill had said as early as September 1940, 'provide the means of victory.'

The bombers alone - that poses the issue very starkly, and perhaps wrongly, given the debates over strategy to which I have already referred. Churchill's statement suggested a certainty to which neither he nor anyone else had any right. But the issue can be put so as to accomodate a degree of skepticism and to permit even the most sophisticated among us to indulge in a common and a morally important fantasy: suppose that I sat in the seat of power and had to decide whether to use Bomber Command (in the only way that it could be used systematically and effectively) against cities. Suppose further that unless bombers were used in this way, the probability that Germany would eventually be defeated would be radically reduced.

... the more certain a German victory appeared to be in the absence of a bomber offensive, the most justifiable was the decision to launch the offensive. it is not just that such a victory was frightening, but also that it seemed in those years very close; it was not just that it was close, but also that it was so frightening. Here was a supreme emergency, where one might well be required to override the rights of innocent people and shatter the war convention.

Given the view of Nazism that I am assuming, the issue takes this form: should I wager this determinate crime (the killing of innocent people) against that immesurable evil (a Nazi triumph)? Obviously, if there is some other way of avoiding the evil or even a reasonable chance of another way, I must wager differently or elsewhere. But I can never hope to be sure; a wager is not an experiment. Even if I wager and win, it is still possible that I was wrong, that my crime was unnecessary to victory. But I can argue that I studied the case as closely as I was able, took the best advice I could find, sought out available alternatives. And if all this is true, and my perception of evil and imminent danger not hysterical or self-serving, then surely I must wager. There is no option; the risk is too great. My own action is determinate, of course, only as to its direct consequences, while the rule that bars such acts is founded on a conception of rights that transcends all immediate considerations. It arises out of our common hsitory; it holds the key to our common future. But I dare to say that our history will be nullified and our future condemned unless I accept the burdens of criminality here and now.

This is not an easy argument to make, and yet we must resist every effort to make it easier. ...

This argument says: sometimes it is right to decide an emergency exists which requires us to do things we otherwise judge to be illegal and wrong. Do them we must, if the risk is sufficiently great and sufficiently immediate. But we should never kid ourselves that they were right - just that they were necessary.

Does this argument provide us with a way to distinguish between the murder and desecration of the contractors in Fallujah and casualties inflicted by the Marines there afterward?

And does it provide a useful way to critique terrorism as opposed to war?

UPDATE: I have a few minutes free right now and would like to expand on my questions here, in response to some of the comments so far.

One strength of the argument I quoted is that it accounts for two different, and conflicting, factors at work during war - factors which I believe differentiate just war from terrorism.

First and foremost, this argument ties the loss of civilian life to a pressing danger which cannot be handled (insofar as the decision maker can judge) in any other effective way.

This argument was made about the invasion of Iraq. Can the mob in Fallujah make the same claim about the Blackwater contractors? Can the perpetrators of the Madrid bombs, or of 9/11, do so?

My own belief is that they not only CANNOT do so, they do not even care to try.

Second, this argument acknowledges that the loss of civilians and innocents is deeply regretable and cannot be swept aside as inconsequential.

In other words, the Islamacist terror networks fail to do 2 things that the Coalition forces are doing in Iraq. First, they fail to claim that they face a massive risk which necessitates their actions. And second, they fail to show remorse or concern for having commited acts which might be considered immoral or regretable.

Now, how does this apply (if at all) to the controversy about Kos and lgf?

One way we might apply it is to say something along the following lines:

"Strong emotions and harsh judgements may be the only way to get at the stark realities in a horrible situation.

However, it is regretable when we use this language, because it inevitably makes important discourse impossible, it does serious injustice to those whom we dehumanize this way and it undercuts our own credibility and judgement.

Therefore, extreme rhetoric may occasionally be justified, but it carries with it a true cost. Use it very rarely and very carefully, lest you become what you criticize."

« ok, I'm done now

Because, in truth, they serve as an engine for the human reluctance to confront or to risk and commit violence.

When faced with confrontation, hatred, or violence, part of our human nature is to withdraw, to look away, to act like prey - not predator. Another part reacts aggressively.

The question in any instance is which is the appropriate reaction?

In this case, we're taking about the anger in response to the events in Falluja - and let's make one thing clear; the events are not simply the attack on and killing of the civilian guards. That's tragic, but in most of our worlds would have been a blip. It was the brutal treatment of their bodies once they were helplessly dead, in defiance of Islam, which like most religions, requires a certain respect for the dead.

So we're angry. And to an extent, it's important that we have some anger, because otherwise we would be helpless.

And to that extent, when we see things like suicide bombings, when we remember the images of 9/11, anger's not a bad thing. It is, as Cooper says, far better than fear.

But in the actual conflict, in the actual decision to fight and fighting, I'll take Cooper's 'concentration' and Musashi's 'settled yet unbiased' spirit. Showing anger - standing in front of the enemy or potential enemy, and frothing at the mouth in rage - does two bad things. First, it helps create a fight where it might have been possible to avoid one. And second, if your enemy is at all strong, it shows weakness.

One of the things that the Arab media shows me, with their constant displays of rage, is how weak the Arab world really is.

That doesn't mean we have nothing to fear from them, and it's not a suggestion that we ignore them.

Because, as I've noted, an eleven-year old with a shotgun still warrants your attention and reaction.

But if we want to win - which I'll define as coming out on top without turning the Arab world into rubble - we'll do it in the spirit of Jeff Cooper and Musashi.

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One guy I chatted with was the father of an AMA professional road racer who has recently retired, whose son - a 15-year old - was interested in following in his father's footsteps. The boy had a successful career in other kinds of motorcycle racing, and was ready to start roadracing, and so was at the class polishing his skills (he was, thank God, in a more advanced group than TG was). The grandfather was an unbelievably neat guy; he called me on my anxiety when TG was out on the track, and got me to sit back and relax and enjoy myself, and we chatted about racing and kids and marriage and life for much of the day.

At the end of the day. when we'd packed the bikes onto the trailer and were headed home, I stopped by his motor home and said goodbye, and wished him and his grandson success. I complimented him grandson, pointing out that he was amazingly polite, helpful, and just overall a good kid.

"Yeah, he is," the grand-dad said proudly. Then his face changed, and he added, "but I worry that he's too nice to succeed as a racer, and that's something he really wants to do."

Too nice to succeed. An interesting thought. But it makes sense to us; you automatically understand what it means, and it helps me put a frame around the questions that I've been wrestling with for the last few days.

Looking at the discussion we're having - the criticism I leveled at Kos, and the responses from commenters here, Nathan Newman and others - it seems like we're really talking about three things.

First, why is it OK for us to be cruel, and not OK for them?

Next, what is the place of anger in conflict?

Finally, is it legitimate for us to be angry at the Arab world or elements of the Arab world?

This is turning out to be longer and messier than I'd intended, and I don't have time to do as good a job of editing as I'd like, so let me just jump into the first question today, and follow up with the others tomorrow.

Nathan Newman challenged those who criticized Kos by posting a graphic image of a dead child and asking why that child's death didn't spur the same level of outrage as the deaths of the American civilian guards, and by extension, why the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the crossfire in Falluja last week didn't outrage us.

The answer to Nathan's question is, in no small part, that we're not that nice. We don't value all lives lost the same way; we value ours more than theirs, those murdered more than those killed in accidents, and so on.

And the reality is that it's impossible to value all lives equally.

If we did, we could never go to war. Some people might think that's a good thing; but there are other people in the world who aren't that nice, and they would then win; they would force us to do their will and we'd be back where we started. I believe that; others disagree; they see our not-niceness as the cause of the conflicts, not a defense against them, and in large part, that defines the boundary between the two sides in the conflict over this war.

But it's not only war. If we valued all lives, no one would smoke, or drink, or engage in risky sports, or eat anything except tofu and lentils.

Every decision we make kills someone. Every dollar we spend is a dollar that doesn't save a starving child, everything we buy leaves a trail of pollution, exploitation and death behind.

My father built high-rise buildings. He probably lost a worker on every third or fourth project; he was devastated when it happened. We would go to the funerals. But it isn't possible to build buildings like that without risk.

I ride motorcycles; in my circle of fifty or so riding acquaintances, we've had 4 deaths in six years.

My oldest son wants to join the military and fly jet fighters. In reality, flying them is riskier than fighting in them.

I value TG more than myself; I know that I would die to protect her. And yet I sat by when she took her motorcycle out onto a racetrack and rode. I did that because there are some things more important than life itself; the freedom to express yourself and to act, for one.

So we do accept deaths as a consequence of what we do.

Making political decisions involves accepting deaths, too.

How much will we spend on emergency medical care versus home heating subsidies? How much will we spend on food stamps for the elderly versus prescription drugs? How much energy will we spend on creating jobs and how much on preserving the environment? Each decision means deaths; from disease or injury, from cold, from malnutrition (the elderly poor still suffer from that); from uncontrolled illness, from unemployment and descent into poverty, from illness caused by environmental conditions.

I've made a point of criticizing much of the modern left because of it's desire for purity; for the belief that they can, somehow, stand apart from what Sartre called 'the filth and the blood' of living in the world. I said:

A long time ago, I talked about the moral importance of hunting… that I felt it somehow wrong for people to both eat meat that they buy in the store and yet somehow they deny their responsibility for the life that was taken for their consumption. For me, having hunted somehow solves this problem…I have taken the responsibility, I have had my hands up to the elbows in the bloody mess, and changed something from an animal to meat for my table.

But when I read much of what comes from the left, I'm left with the feeling that they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.

We enjoy this life because a number of things happened in the world’s (our) history. Many of them involved one group dominating (or brutalizing or exterminating) another, or specific actions (Dresden, Hiroshima) whose moral foundation is sketchy at best.

"Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood," Hoederer says in Sartre’s ‘Dirty Hands’.

Part of political adulthood is the maturity to realize that we are none of us innocents. The clothes we wear, money we have, jobs we go to are a result of a long, bloody and messy history.

I see my job as a liberal as making the future less bloody than the past.

But I accept the blood on my hands. I can't enjoy the freedom and wealth of this society and somehow claim to be innocent. I don't get to lecture people from a position of moral purity. No one spending U.S. dollars, or speaking with the freedom protected by U.S. laws gets to. I want to make the future less bloody than the past; that may mean accepting my responsibility for the blood shed today.

That's not a nice position to take.

But it doesn't put me on a par with Islamists, and that matters.

It doesn't for two reasons. First, because on a basic level, the world is divided into teams. One point I've also made in the past is the attachment of the modern left to cosmopolitan values, as opposed to patriotic ones.

On one level, that's a good thing. Sharing the humanity of the rest of the world means something, and means something good. But as I've also talked about, there is a real value in patriotism, particularly the unique patriotism of America, which is based on shared values and not blood and soil.

Many on the left reject it, as Schaar pointed out:

Opponents of patriotism might agree that if the two could be separated then patriotism would look fairly attractive. But the opinion is widespread, almost atmospheric, that the separation is impossible, that with the triumph of the nation-state nation. Nationalism has indelibly stained patriotism: the two are warp and woof. The argument against patriotism goes on to say that, psychologically considered, patriot and nationalist are the same: both are characterized by exaggerated love for one's own collectivity combined with more or less contempt and hostility toward outsiders. In addition, advanced political opinion holds that positive, new ideas and forces--e.g., internationalism, universalism; humanism, economic interdependence, socialist solidarity--are healthier bonds of unity, and more to be encouraged than the ties of patriotism. These are genuine objections, and they are held by many thoughtful people.

And those thoughtful people, by virtue of their attachment to the wider world, cannot take sides; they can't view the tragedy of an American soldier's death as deeply different than the tragedy of an Iraqi soldier's death. They are one and the same; and so are paralyzed. They can't make a decision because all deaths weigh the same.

They don't weigh the same to me.

I value ours more than I do theirs; I value them most of all because they are fighting for me and the values which have created me and given me the life I enjoy. Yes, I value them because they are 'like me' as well, but the Pakistani troops who die fighting Al Quieda are, in the context of their own politics, fighting for me and my values as well. I don't see the sides as morally equivalent, and even if I had opposed the invasion of Iraq - which I almost did - I wouldn't see them as morally equivalent.

I feel for the deaths done to innocents; to children, woman, and men whose only wrong was to be in the wrong place in the wrong time. To me the enterprise of war is inherently tragic, and that tragedy is nowhere more represented than in these deaths.

But like the deaths we choose when we decide on healthcare policy - which are no less tragic for being less visible and shockingly photogenic - they are an inevitible consequence of the decisions we make. I've read a lot of history, some of which was military history, and I'll point out that in all wars, from Attic Greece forward, innocents have suffered.

I'm proud of our military that they work so hard, and take such risks to minimize that suffering.

I'll note here that there's an interesting (if frighteningly depressing) theory that one reason why we will have so much trouble rebuilding Iraq is that we didn't damage the civilian infrastructure enough, and that the civilians didn't suffer enough. I'm a ways away from that position, but at some point, it'll be something worth discussing.

But the reality is that there's no way to pick apart what we want (and I think need) to accomplish and some quantity of suffering. Personally, I want to minimize the aggregate quantity of it.

But if there is a trade between ours and theirs, I'll take theirs. Because I do believe that there is a 'them' and an 'us'.

Next, the place of anger.

« ok, I'm done now

This was in reply to my message:

I'm breaking the issue into two basic areas:
Is our violence better than their violence? And if so, why?

What is the place of hate in conflict?

I've met Charles, and he's a liberal who was shocked by 9/11 into reading Arab media, and shocked by what he saw there. I really do think he's provided a service in opening that up to wider discussion, and I think he's damaged the service that he does by allowing his comments to be as bile-filled as they are.

I think that the good thing about our side is that we're willing to accept the humanity of everyone - including our enemies, which is why we grieve, not cheer, at the picture on Nathan's site. When we stop doing that - as Kos did, and as many of Charles' commenters do, we erode our own standing.

A.L.

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Also appearing on "Meet the Press," Karen P. Hughes, one of Mr. Bush's closest political advisers and an important strategist for his re-election campaign, rejected the suggestion that the attacks could have been prevented.

"I just don't think, based on everything I know, and I was there, that there was anything that anyone in government could have done to have put together the pieces before the horror of that day," Ms. Hughes said. "If we could have in either administration, either in the eight years of the Clinton administration or the seven and a half months of the Bush administration, I'm convinced we would have done so."

While reading that, don't under any circumstances forget to go check out Phil Carter's take on Clarke:

As for Mr. Clarke's argument regarding Iraq, I closed his book without having been persuaded by his argument. He did not marshal enough evidence to persuade me that the Bush Administration had deceived the American public to march towards war, or that it had considered (and disregarded) all of the strategic costs of the war. That's not to say that these things aren't true -- only that Mr. Clarke's book didn't do a good job of making these arguments. Similarly, I was unimpressed by Mr. Clarke's argument that the war in Iraq has been a distraction from the war on terrorism. With his knowledge of this issue, I expected a detailed breakdown of all the ways that the war in Iraq took away resources, political capital, and focus from the domestic and foreign war on terrorism. I found that argument to be lacking as well. He did not, for example, discuss how intelligence assets devoted to finding Iraqi WMD might have been devoted to finding Al Qaeda personnel and equipment. Nor did look at the resource-allocation problem with his NSC-trained eye, in order to make the argument the billions spent on Iraq might have been otherwise programmed for homeland security.

Damn. Now I have to go read it.

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IRAQ BRIEFING

• The Brigades of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin the Martyr have claimed responsibility for the mutilating of US military contractors in Fallujah.

• US administrator Paul Bremer has ordered an investigation to determine who was responsible for the Fallujah killings, which seem to have had an additional effect on the attitude of US forces in the area.

• The Fallujah incident appears to have been a pre-planned ambush by a combination of Saddam Fedayeen and foreign fighters (read: jihadis). It is worth noting that if these jihadis were al-Qaeda members, some of them may very well have been at Mogadishu in 1993 and seen what a powerful image like a mutilated body can do to the US general public.

• Confirming earlier reports of Pakistani jihadis operating in Iraq, US forces have captured a known Lashkar-e-Taiba member near Baghdad.

• While this is very likely false, an Iraqi exile using the pseudonym Rashid says he knows where Iraq's chemical weapons are being stored in secret bunkers in and around Baghdad.

• Moqtada al-Sadr is throwing his support behind Hezbollah and Hamas, even as his Mahdi Army leveled the village of Diwaniya with mortars and sledgehammers in reprisal for the village's reputation of being a den for prostitutes and dancers. Sadr appears to have been galvanized by the US closure of his paper, al-Hawza.

• In addition, members Sadr's Mahdi Army have killed 4 Salvadoran and 7 US soldiers in the last 24 hours. If you ask me, it's long past time to tell the would-be Khomeini that play time is over ...

IRAN REPORTS

• The Iranian Organization of Combatant Youth is taking Khamenei to task for his recent praise over the "large turnout" in the recent Iranian elections.

• Activist Chat is reporting more civil unrest, this time in the Iranian city of Esfahan.

• The IAEA has discovered more weapons-grade uranium at additional sites not named by the Iranian government. The uranium as been enriched to point where it contains 90% of the U-235 isotope needed to produce an atomic bomb.

THE WIDER WAR

• Al-Qaeda military chief Saif al-Adel is instructing followers to carry out attacks against Canadians both at home and abroad.

• Abu Sayyaf leader Khadaffy Janjalani and his spokesman Abu Soliman have made their demands to the Filippino government, including the release of their captured followers as well as the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Abu Sayyaf is also training Muslim converts to assist them in carrying out attacks.

• The Afghan National Army has moved into Herat province following a recent outbreak of violence between a local military commander and reigning warlord Ismail Khan.

• International warrants have been issued for the suspected masterminds in the Madrid bombings. Spanish investigators have identified the mastermind as well as learning that the Madrid bombings were planned back in 2003.

• Canadian computer specialist Mohammed Momin Khawaja has been arrested in connection with the apparent al-Qaeda bomb plot in the UK.

• Speaking of the plot, the would-be UK bombers' e-mail trail leads back to Pakistan. What a surprise ...

• In the wake of the Madrid bombings, Germany is monitoring the estimated 2-3,000 Muslim radicals willing to use violence within its borders.

• State Department counterterrorism official J. Cofer Black says al-Qaeda is still reeling from the US-led campaign against it.

• Confessed Jemaah Islamiyyah members in Malaysia claim that they were acting in accordance with bin Laden's fatwas.

• 4 Turkish Arabic teachers have been arrested in the Philippines on the suspicion of being Jemaah Islamiyyah members planning attacks.

• A memo by al-Qaeda Gulf operations chief Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin is outlining Western targets for the group's members and sympathizers to attack.

• A number of al-Tawhid members have been arrested in Jordan. Al-Tawhid is Abu Musab Zarqawi's personal organization.

• European police have arrested 63 members of the Marxist Turkish organization Devrimci Sol in 5 countries.

• Polish president Aleksandr Kwasniewski is possibly being targeted by al-Qaeda for his nation's support of the US-led war in Iraq.

• US general David Barno is once again linking al-Qaeda and the international drug trade. General Charles Wald is says that the same is true with regard to the blood diamonds trade.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. It seems that the New Zealand town of Te Kuiti is trying to copy the Spanish tradition of the bull-run - with sheep. Somehow it's just not the same ...

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The big thing is simple; in my view, there's good and bad. Good involves peace, justice, liberty (from exploitation as well as oppression), and the fundamental acceptance of the humanity and value of everyone - and bad involves the opposite. In my view, the constructive dialogs are ones among people who have different views of how to attain Good, and different visions of exactly what it looks like, manifested in the messy world of reality.

Was invading Iraq the best path from here to there? Were there better alternatives? What are the alternatives today, and how do we decide among them? Those are things that I believe people on the side of Good can discuss - even debate heatedly and struggle over politically.

But, in my mind, there's a pretty clear line between Us and Them. Being with Them is about supporting blowing up busses and pizzerias - not as criminal acts, not as errors of negligence or simple chance, but as core acts; acts that define who you are and what you do. Being with Them is about torturing and murdering captives, not fattening them up and teaching them to snorkel (and yes, I know Guantanamo is worse than that - but it's better than the fate of the soldiers in the Ramallah police station).

On this blog, one of our co-bloggers crossed that line with a comment extolling the terrorist bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq. Joe, to his credit, asked Trent to step away from the blog for a while because the sentiments he expressed were so deeply against what Joe and this blog (and by extension, I) stand for that no other reaction was possible. Trent was (and is) a valuable member of this community, as much as he and I may disagree, but with that comment...

And similarly, Kos stepped neatly across the line with his comment, and has only walked further away from it with his actions since (redirecting the link to the comment, pulling the post it was attached to off his blog, his non-apology, and his most recent response, in which he says something stupid and the evil minions of the underworld attack him for it).

Does that mean we're better than he is?

I'll step up and say yes.

Look, we all say and do stupid things on occasion (some more than others, of course). But what's missing in Kos is the notion that what happened to him is anything except a political ambush by his enemies.

And that, in turn matters because Kos is plugged deeply into current Democratic electoral politics, as one of Joe Trippi's advisors in the Dean campaign, in the Clark campaign, in the Joe ("it's the Jooos") MBNA Moran campaign.

I've said in the past - and been harshly criticized by people who probably agree with most of my policy beliefs (except Iraq, no doubt) - for criticizing the left for 'not loving America'. I've talked about what a left that does love America might look like - or what it's philosophical roots might be.

And I'm told, over and over again, that I'm setting up straw men.

No, I'm not.

And that matters, both because many of those I oppose are, I believe, on the wrong side of the divide above - but because they have and will take the left down with them.

Reading the comments on the Kerry blog about the delinking of Kos is informative.

If I were a GOP tactician (and I assume they already are, because they do this for a living) I'd be planting the seeds about the cash Kos had bundled for Kerry, and asking 'will it be returned?'

And if it is, we're about to see an internecine battle which will guarantee the White House to Bush.

(it's late, and I'll add links in this tomorrow morning)

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* His incredible skill on a motorcycle; * His outrageous antics - and I do mean antics. He once won a Grand Prix race, then pulled to the side of the track and ran into a portajohn set up for the track workers, and came out dressed as Robin Hood. He doesn't seem to take it quite as seriously as him competitors do; * His general joie de vivre - as opposed to the mechanical seriousness from most professional athletes, he comes across as a guy who just can't wait to wake up tomorrow and go do it some more. The pressure of a $17 million contract must have some effect, but it isn't an obvious one. And this year, he's done the wildest thing of all. After winning 125cc and 250cc World Championships for Aprilia, he went to the big leagues for Honda in 2000 - at the age of 21. In 2001, he won the World Championship, as he did in 2002 and 2003, all riding Hondas. And this year, he changed brands and teams, and will be riding a Yamaha. Yamaha's best finish last year was, I believe, fourth place. Honda motorcycles dominated the series (with Ducati maintaining some presence, while Yamaha, Suzuki, Aprilia, Kawasaki, and Proton lagged behind). So he left a team that would have essentially guaranteed him another World Championship for one that had not yet had a competitive motorcycle. An Australian journalist writes:

Why would a man who has just won his third world championship leave the team that had brought him such dominance in favour of an inconsistent, underachieving operation that had not produced a world champion in 11 years? The most recent time a Yamaha rider had dominated the tracks was back in 1992 (Wayne Rainey), and in the ensuing years, a succession of Hondas, ridden first by Mick Doohan and then Alex Criville, and finally Rossi himself, had taken the championship. The only interruption to the Honda reign was Kevin Schwantz's 1993 title and Kenny Roberts jnr's triumph in 2000, both riding a Suzuki. Roberts' victory came in the year that a then 20-year-old Rossi was making his debut in the 500cc class, then motorcycling's top category. Rossi finished second in the title race that year, but never again was Roberts, or anyone else for that matter, to give him much trouble as he became the last 500cc title winner in 2001 and the first man to take out the new four-stroke 1000cc MotoGP category in 2002 and 2003. At the time of his departure last year, Rossi simply said he was bored with the domination he had achieved on his Honda, and needed a fresh challenge. Some believed he was chafing at the demands being made on him by Honda. Others -- including his former mentor and boss of Honda Racing Corporation, Doohan -- suggest the reportedly $17 million a year pay cheque had prompted his desire to switch camps. Rossi disagrees. In an interview on his personal website, he said: "There was nothing to prove. It was just that the motivation riding for Honda had finished, we won three world championships in a row, we won at favourite tracks, at my least favourite tracks, and in all conditions, so what was left to do?

Hemingway made a simple distinction between sports and games; a sport can kill you. I have a more than healthy respect for the risks racers like Rossi take; but to me the sportsmanship shown in his latest decision - to walk away from a sure thing and give himself a new challenge - is really far more wonderful than the daring he shows on the track. Now for the Good News. Last weekend, the teams had a final shakedown before the first race of the season. April 17 in South Africa. On the track at Catalunya, Spain, all the leading teams came out to test their machines and setup. The final results? 1. Valentino ROSSI, Yamaha, 1:44.571 2. Alex BARROS, Honda, 1:44.631 3. Nicky HAYDEN, Honda, 1:44.634 4. Colin EDWARDS, Honda, 1:44.653 5. Sete GIBERNAU, Honda, 1:44.669

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Well, it's good that he did feel something ...it's just not clear he felt anything for the four people killed and brutalized; so from his point of view, the operative point isn't the "screw them," it's the "I felt nothing." It's a characteristic of the people I oppose in this whole Bad Philosophy thing that feelings are what matters - that one's emotional state is all-important; it's how it makes you feel that matters, and whether your feelings are genuine.

I was angry that five soldiers -- the real heroes in my mind -- were killed the same day and got far lower billing in the newscasts. I was angry that 51 American soldiers paid the ultimate price for Bush's folly in Iraq in March alone. I was angry that these mercenaries make more in a day than our brave men and women in uniform make in an entire month. I was angry that the US is funding private armies, paying them $30,000 per soldier, per month, while the Bush administration tries to cut our soldiers' hazard pay. I was angry that these mercenaries would leave their wives and children behind to enter a war zone on their own violition. So I struck back.

So by attacking - striking back at - the dead civilians, he somehow felt he could remedy an injustice - the disregard by the media of the soldiers who were killed that day.

Unlike the vast majority of people in this country, I actually grew up in a war zone. I witnessed communist guerillas execute students accused of being government collaborators. I was 8 years old, and I remember stepping over a dead body, warm blood flowing from a fresh wound. Dodging bullets while at market. I lived in the midsts of hate the likes of which most of you will never understand (Clinton and Bush hatred is nothing compared to that generated when people kill each other for politics or race or nationality). There's no way I could ever describe the ways this experience colors my worldview.

And, by extension, there's no way any one of us who hasn't shared his experiences can judge Here he wraps himself in the accusation-proof flag of victimhood, spins, and bows to the audience.

Back to Iraq, our men and women in uniform are there under orders, trying to make the best of an impossible situation. The war is not their fault, and I will always defend their honor and bravery to the end of my days. But the mercenary is a whole different deal. They willingly enter a war zone, and do so because of the paycheck. They're not there for humanitarian reasons (I doubt they'd donate half their paycheck to the Red Cross or whatever). They're there because the money is DAMN good. They answer to no one except their CEO. They are dangerous, hence international efforts (however fruitless they may be) to ban their use.

I'll skip over the whole "we have a volunteer army" argument as too obvious, and point out that the motivation of the contractors - like the motivation of the soldiers, or the motivation of the private contractors charging hazard pay to work in Iraq - is probably a little more complex than that. And that - as with the overarching importance of his feelings above, the fact that he besmirches the dead by challenging their motivations - rather than their actions - speaks volumes.

So not only was I wrong to say I felt nothing over their deaths, I was lying. I felt way too much. Nobody deserves to die. But in the greater scheme of things, there are a lot of greater tragedies going on in Iraq (51 last month, plus countless civilians and Iraqi police). That those tragedies are essentially ignored these days is, ultimately, the greatest tragedy of all.

It's funny; many of us are debating the issues around the war and around what to do. I certainly don't feel that I am ignoring the deaths that happen in Iraq every day (I do, however, believe it is important to put them into context, so that we are able to make intelligent judgments about where we are and what to do).

The reverence for life of the antiwar movement would be funny if it were not so wrapped up in the issues of Bad Philosophy. What matters isn't whether the world as a whole or even the set of people we're taking about is better or worse off - what matters is whether you can make sure you are morally isolated from any taint of blame.

I don't think you can live in the world and be isolated that way. Kos does. And, of course, that attitude helps as he takes money from Jim Moran, friend of the Jews (and MBNA) to help run his campaign.

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The archetypical example is related to the War on Terror on its domestic front. In the case of José Padilla, the Bush Administration has torn up literally eight centuries of Anglo-American law that established the right of citizens to trial before a neutral tribunal. The Bush Administration's position is that American citizens may be detained incommunicado, indefinitely, without any recourse to the courts, entirely at the President's pleasure. I start with this example because even a number of conservative lawyers [Volokh, link is audio file; Viet Dinh] are opposed, as are some of the pro-war readers of this blog.

The Iraq War is the first implementation of the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive War, and Iraq is to the doctrine of casus belli as Padilla is to the Bill of Rights. There have been several blog arguments on whether the Administration claimed that Saddam constituted an "imminent threat". The pro-war position, oddly enough, is in the negative. Now, it's beyond question that the Administration portrayed Saddam as all manner of terrifying threat: "grave and gathering", "immediate", "mushroom cloud". (Donald Rumsfeld on "Meet the Press" denied ever using "immediate threat" and was then left looking silly when Thomas Friedman read his own words back to him.) Given that we were going to war—war!—with Saddam, what exactly was the problem with calling him an imminent threat? The answer, I believe, is that "imminent threat" is a term-of-art in international law, and acting against such a threat is as justified as self-defense after an attack is already underway. (See in particular, 1967 Israeli attack on the Egypt.) So if we called Saddam an "imminent threat" then there would be nothing novel, no bounds broken, in the Bush Doctrine. The faulty intelligence isn't the reason Bush avoided this one specific word, because the Iraq we actually invaded was neither imminent, nor grave, nor capable of mushroom clouds, nor very threatening to American security at all.

Bush, in campaign mode, ridicules the idea of multilateralism as holding America's security hostage to France. But the interesting thing is, when Al Qaeda attacked us, even though we hardly needed permission from the world to take out the Taliban, not only permission but all sorts of aid were given to us freely. Doesn't the refusal of so many of our allies to do likewise for Iraq tell us something? (The idea that it tells us they are cowards founders, since they, too, were at little risk from Iraq.) The truth is, this Administration, especially VP Cheney, disdain multilateralism—at least they did until we started to need help extricating ourselves from Iraq. I opposed the Iraq War in part, then, because bad as multilateral institutions are, they are still better than the alternative. I also opposed it because I think that the greatest success of the American Revolution was to give us a government of laws and not of men, which I take to mean that our democratic system succeeded because it is designed to survive times when incompetent (Harding) or even malevolent (Nixon) men are in charge, unlike the rival monarchies which alternated between enlightened princes and despots. I think we should be doing everything possible to replicate this arrangement in the international sphere, and organizations like the UN and the EU must be part of this process. And certainly the Padilla case shows that Bush understands nothing of this dynamic at all.

Point: The Iraq War was sold with falsehoods and lies, and should have been opposed on that basis if no other.

Let's be blunt: even though I find the humanitarian argument for the Iraq War insufficient, it's much, much better than the argument by the Administration at the time. That argument was based almost entirely on the putative threat, and on spurious connections between Saddam and the 9/11 attack (largely by VP Cheney), and there can't be any force to an argument whose premisses are not true. Out of the rival threat assessments available to the Administration before the war, they chose to be deceived utterly by a convicted grifter, Ahmad Chalabi, whom we are still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly. This was no innocent error. Chalabi told the marks what they wanted to hear: not only about WMD, but about his internal resistance movement ready to create a pro-American and pro-Israel (!) Iraq. Better intelligence was available from the United Nations team under Hans Blix, whom we literally chased out of Iraq at the beginning of the invasion. We insulted our allies (but, again, this was seen as a side benefit) with Secy Powell's Power Point show, not one slide of which has been verified. When the inspectors reported that our Chalabi-based WMD tips, detailed to the level of GPS coordinates, didn't work out, we didn't re-evaluate our intelligence. Instead, Cheney announced we would "discredit" the inspectors. It's safe to assume he hasn't apologized.

Those of you who don't think that knowingly false propaganda contributed to public acquiescence in the war: something like half of the country believes that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi, when of course the correct number is zero. On 9/12, what reason would anyone have for this erroneous belief? None. I suspect at that time those Americans who could answer the question at all would remember that nearly all of the terrorists were Saudi. The error came from frequent and deliberate juxtaposition of Saddam and 9/11 in repeated speeches that (with the exception of an egregious statement by Cheney that Bush was forced to repudiate) were not literally untrue, but which were designed to leave a false impression.

Here I must admit that my pre-existing animus against George W. Bush probably contributed to my belief that most of his WMD allegations weren't true. Even in my dreams, though, I didn't guess that they had simply decided on WMD as an expedience because the Administration was divided on other rationales. And those other rationales would never have gotten enough support in the Congress and in the American public to support a war. I don't think that sending the President (State of the Union), the Vice President, and much of the Cabinet out to snow the American people is healthy for our democratic political system, nor is insulting the intelligence (pun intended) of our allies good for our position in the world, and I think that the war should have been resisted on these grounds alone.

Point: Even before the war, there were reasons to believe we were entering a quagmire.

Here I have to admit, I was one of the war's opponents who overestimated the difficulty of taking Baghdad. I knew it would happen, but I expected it to take many more months. (I suppose it's an open question whether the Ba'ath militants conceded the conventional battle more quickly in order to preserve themselves and their ammunition for guerrilla tactics.) Hence, when I criticize the Administration for its dreadful planning for the aftermath, it must be discounted by the fact that they were right and I was not about the conventional battle. However, it appears as if the serious misjudgment of what Iraq would be like the Day After was systemic, originating to a great degree in over-reliance on Chalabi [another link]. Now even proponents of the war are left wondering how we are going to get out of Iraq without a civil war following our departure, and without remaining as sitting ducks. Too late.

Point: What we could do now.

Armed Liberal suggested that besides rehearsing why I opposed the war (which is something of a moot point, except to the extent that I think the Administration responsible for this error should not be returned to office), I mention how I think the situation can be improved.

• Apologize publically to our allies for the falsity of the Powell slide show and for the way we pressured them on the basis of forged and faked "intelligence". We need to restore our working relationship with our allies (we also need their money, cooperation from their police forces, and contributions of troops).
• Have the IRS review Chalabi's tax returns, and on finding his 1040 omits bribes and kickbacks, bring him back to the USA for trial. First, just as with the death of Saddam, it's good to punish the wicked. Second, we will be sending a message that we do not wish to set up yet another corrupt and eventually brutal leader who just happens to be better aligned with our geopolitics (see under: Karimov). Third, having fleeced us with tall tales of his connections inside Iraq, Chalabi is now fleecing the Iraqis with tales, not all tall, that he possesses indispensable influence with the American overlords.
• We need Arabic speakers in our armed forces desperately, enough that we can stop discharging the ones who are homosexual. Seriously, we need to increase the existing strategic language initiatives.
• Offer Jordan a Marshall-type Plan for infrastructure development contingent on continued liberalization.
• Sharon, for his own political reasons, seems to have gotten the hint that we won't tolerate any more settlement expansion. However, he's gotten into unrelated trouble. If he's replaced by Benjamin Netanyahu, we make a public insistence that there are no more expropriations of Arab lands in the Territories for eventual Jewish Israeli civilian use. (We back it up with monetary threats.)
• Increase armed presence (not necessarily USA) in Afghanistan with an eye to stopping the deterioration there. All those warlords can change sides back to the Taliban, if it ever seems to be in their best interests.
• Fire anyone who doesn't perform. Kofi Annan just sacked people he held responsible for not protecting the UN mission in Baghdad. Has Bush ever fired anyone for incompetence, as opposed to leaking uncomfortable but true facts? (Answer: Yes, the former head of the INS. Any others?)

We can't follow Spain out of Iraq. For them, it was a contribution to America, more than a token gesture, but hardly mission-critical. Also, Spain leaving is their way to repudiate Bush's policy. Defeating George Bush is itself such a repudiation, so it isn't necessary for us to withdraw and make matters worse. (Of the Democratic candidates, only Kucinich and perhaps Sharpton called for immediate withdrawal.) Perhaps if we cede control of the reconstruction to the UN, even though our own personnel would be most at risk, we can get Spain and other countries to return or commit new troops. Recall, experts in occupation in the former Yugoslavia say that we have no more than half the necessary number of troops. Do you still think Rummy knows better? I realize if we are unable to negotiate such an arrangement, none of my suggestions outlines any other way we are going to get out of Iraq with our pride and the Iraqi nation intact and not in civil war. If there were some program, any program, to guarantee this, frankly, I think at this point George Bush would implement it, too. As Max Cleland put it, "Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance."

 

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Fortunately, there are many others in the blogosphere with a bit of decency, and a penchant for pointing out what should be obvious to civilized human beings. Tacitus has a series of excellent responses to Kos; and Judith Weiss' article offers the best collection of those links, while drawing the same parallel A.L. saw yesterday and highlighting 2 solid pieces from Donald Sensing re: America's best response. By the way, this is who Kos was dissing.

This incident is changing some minds, however. Fallujah, plus the Madrid bombings, has shifted the views of at least one previously anti-war blogger. Iraqi blogger Ali adds some perspective of his own in "Crime and Punishment," while his countryman Fayrouz is just disgusted and disheartened:

"I know most Iraqis are like the Iraqi bloggers, who are trying to make a difference in this world. I know bad news makes more noise than the good news. I know I still have faith Iraq will have a great future. Then, I get depressed from time to time and wonder if this is just a fantasy, or it may become a reality in the near future."

Keep the faith, Fayrouz. We will, too. And we'll win. Together. It's the best answer to the Ba'athists... and to people like Kos as well.

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One angle is accountability, or rather its consistent, systemic lack within the EU. I've expressed serious concerns about this before, and noted its tendency to lead to much worse things down the road. Suffice to say that my fears are not quieted by this recent episode.

In an interesting sidenote, the OLAF anti-fraud office that performed this "investigation," recently ordered the arrest of a leading investigative journalist, holding him for 10 hours without a lawyer and seizing his computers, his address books and archive of files. What was Hans-Martin Tillack, the Brussels correspondent for Germany's Stern magazine, investigating? Corruption in the OLAF. Wonder how many of those files will ever be returned?

Good thing that those enlightened Euros are too sophisticated to put a troglodyte like John Ashcroft in charge. Otherwise, they might have problems with abuse of basic freedoms.

What this incident also highlights a larger geo-political pattern of EU hostility to Israel, a hostility that is transferring to Jews in general via revival of old prejudices, immigration from states that preach and teach that hate, political trends among the worldwide Left, and more official coverups in response to the growing tide of anti-Semitism.

EU Comissioner Chris Patten's steadfast refusal to investigate no matter what evidence was supplied, followed by this grudging farce, makes it abundantly clear that this investigation into terrorist financing was never serious. Instead, this was about "plausible deniability" for an EU policy that has made them quiet co-belligerents against the Jewish state. While America's support for Israel and global War on Terror limits the EU's freedom of action by attaching real costs to open hostilities and support, these policies will nonetheless be pursued by diplomatic, economic and covert/deniable means. LGF pretty much sums this one up in EU Hits Bottom, Digs:

"...they examined the voluminous Israeli evidence, then talked with Palestinian officials and decided to believe the Palestinians.

What can you say?

In other news:

14:08 European Parliament calls for suspension of EU-Israel trade agreement if Israel's assassination policy continues

14:51 Dutch foreign minister predicts Syria, EU will soon reach compromise on economic partnership agreement"

Ah, yes, those noted respecters of human rights the Syrians, who would never think of supporting assassinations and terrorist killings and are therefore an excellent trade partner for the EU. Maybe they could dip into their own vast experience, and offer the Euros some useful tips on how to treat meddling journalists. And Jews.

Remember all this next time some snotty European politico offers their services as a "mediator" for the "Mideast Peace Process".

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Note the dateline: Marietta, GA, 1915. That's where Leo Frank was brutally lynched.

In case you think those horrors are in our distant past, I'll suggest that Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner would probably feel differently - if they were alive.

While some might disagree, I think I can safely say that the American South is, today, civilized.

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On 9/11, the United States suffered a dastardly attack masterminded by a transnational guerrilla movement with hundreds (perhaps thousands) of members organized into cells in at least half a dozen countries. Their leader was Osama bin Laden, and their headquarters was, roughly speaking, Afghanistan, which they controlled through their allies, the Taliban. This attack followed several other Al Qaeda operations against other American targets. This organization is unquestionably the greatest threat to American lives, and we got off to a great start by attacking it on several fronts. First, we used a combination of our own military, our ally (the Northern Alliance), and a combination of threats and bribes with the various warlords of Afghanistan, to overthrow the Taliban. (We promised the Afghans a better life, which we are delivering very, very fitfully, notwithstanding their splendid new constitution.)

Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack, and the defeat of the Saddam government does nothing to disrupt Al Qaeda's command structure, which is elsewhere. It does nothing to seize Al Qaeda's financial assets, which instead are being located by the much-derided law enforcement methods. It does nothing to deprive Al Qaeda of war materiel. It does nothing to discover the identities of sleeper agents, who were not controlled from Iraqi soil (with the possible exception of Ansar Al-Islam, over which the Saddam government had no control). Iraq was not even a source of Al Qaeda operatives.

Meanwhile, every dollar we spend on the Iraq War is a dollar we don't spend on finding Osama bin Laden. Every soldier we commit to Iraq is a soldier who is not in Afghanistan, including crack Arabic-, Pashtun- and Dari-speaking special forces whom we redeployed from the Osama search to the Saddam search. What I find most incredible is that the response of the Spaniards to the ability of Al Qaeda to commit a terrorist act in Europe (as well as other acts in Asia and Africa) without any difficulties imposed by the Iraq War is taken as "appeasement". The theory that Western security can be vouchsafed by attacking a third party (evil as it was) has been tried, and found wanting. The Spanish punished a government that was unable to protect them because it didn't try.

Faced with the obvious, that none of whatever success we have enjoyed in locating Al Qaeda agents and frustrating their plans is in any way related to anything captured or interdicted in Iraq, proponents of the war propose various grandiose general theories to explain why the Iraq War has made us safer.

The flypaper theory posits that by attracting Islamoterrorists to Iraq, we are first distracting them from conducting further attacks in the United States, and second localizing them where our superior conventional military strength can annihilate them. The first argument is weak. For one thing, on 9/10/2001 we could have made a similar, mistaken, claim about the success of the Clinton and Bush anti-terrorism policies pursued until then. Even more important, this line of reasoning falters on Al Qaeda's post-Iraq attacks in Europe. The second argument is scarcely any better, for while it might apply to a traditional army being lured to a strongpoint and destroyed, it makes no sense in talking about a fairly small terrorist movement which will not attack in massed formation, and which moreover can abandon Iraq for other countries if the heat is too great.

More realistic than the flypaper theory is the theory that Arab governments everywhere will be so awed by the American military might in Baghdad, and the bases we will establish there with or without the consent of the Iraqi government, that they will cooperate in the fight against terrorism. (Why the fate of the Taliban isn't sufficient example is unclear to me.) Perhaps it is because, as Rumsfeld said, Iraq has better targets. There is evidence of a weak effect along these lines, although Libya and Syria were both seeing some liberalization before 9/11. Overall, the collapse of the Tunisia meetings and the lack of any forward motion for Bush's Middle East Initiative suggests that the benefits are limited. Perhaps the anti-American forces inside and outside of these governments have done the addition and decided that we simply have no troops to spare to occupy any more countries. Or perhaps the country most closely linked to Al Qaeda, namely, Saudi Arabia, figures its close personal friendship with the Bush family will continue to exempt it.

And last, and most ridiculous, is the triple-bank-shot theory that we will establish such a wonderful democracy in Iraq (doing what, I ask, with Fallujah?) that flowers begin to bloom over the entire region. Instead, the popularity of the United States is at low ebb both in Europe and the Arab countries. The existing democracy in Spain, much less any democratic states that might arise in the Middle East, has just repudiated our program. It says something about the PR capabilities of people like Richard Perle that they are seen as "realists" with this millennial fantasy, while antiwar liberals seeking to work in the realm of the possible are dismissed as fools.

To follow.

Point: The Iraq War was not worth the damage to international structures. Point: The Iraq War could not be sold to Congress and the American people on the basis of humanitarian arguments (even though these were to some extent valid) and was therefore sold on the basis of exaggerations, unproven assertions, falsehoods, and outright lies, and should have been opposed for the damage it caused to the American political structure.

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IRAQ BRIEFING

• Most everyone by now is aware of what happened in Fallujah yesterday. A number of bloggers, myself included have made references to Mogadishu and given that there is said to be an al-Qaeda cell operating in Fallujah I'm not entirely uncertain that the resemblance is unintentional.

• Iraqi public works minister Nisreen Berwari has narrowly escaped an assassination attempt near Mosul.

• Insight magazine tells the story of how USAID is making a difference in the reconstruction of post-war Iraq.

• Saddam Hussein has not been forthcoming to US interrogators, at least so far.

IRAN REPORTS

• Khamenei's representative Hojjatoleslam Mohammed Hassan Akhtari is claiming that the assassination of Sharon will cause an Israeli civil war while at a memorial service for the late Hamas supremo Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Tehran.

• Iran has stopped producing centrifuges in an effort to win over the IAEA to its cause. Guess that means they have all the ones they need ...

• Speaking of which, Western diplomats are saying that Iran is concealing key elements of their nuclear program from IAEA inspectors.

• Did the US blow the cover of Iranian spies in repayment for the Khobar Towers bombing? Dick Clarke says yes, though one might note that according to his book this hasn't prevented Iran from harboring al-Qaeda's surviving leadership in the wake of Operation Enduring Freedom.

• Iraqi university staff and students say that religious groups are imposing themselves on campus and threatening those who disagree with them. Now all they have to do is secularize them and they'll fit in just fine over here ...

THE WIDER WAR

• Pakistan is declaring victory in its operation in Waziristan, a move that I believe to be exceedingly stupid for a number of reasons. The highest-ranking al-Qaeda operative was initially believed to be Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah (Abu Mohammed al-Masri), but subsequent reports have listed the man as simply the head of al-Qaeda's intelligence in South Waziristan. His name is given as Abdul Wahab.

• Despite the Pakistani withdrawl, al-Qaeda still executed 2 Waziri district officials while releasing their other hostages.

• Captured al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has revealed the full scope of the 9/11 plot, including carrying out multiple attacks on the West Coast.

• Australian computer experts are helping Indonesian police to decrypt files found on the computer of suspected JI member Oman Rahman.

• Russia gave Pakistan intelligence about the presence of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in South Waziristan.

• Unemployed potenate Taliban leader Mullah Omar has been injured in a US attack in Zabul according to a report in an Urdu-language newspaper.

• The first 1,000 militiamen in southern Afghanistan are being disarmed as part of a drive to demobilize the nation estimated 40,000 militiamen before the presidential elections in June 2004.

• Geostrategy Direct is reporting that the Saudi princes are continuing to supply millions to al-Qaeda through the al-Haramain Foundation. This comes as 2 known al-Qaeda fronts are identified as having links to the Saudi intelligence agency and its long-time head Prince Turki al-Faisal.

• A handful of Ottawa Muslims are being questioned in connection with an international terrorism probe.

• Al-Qaeda operatives have traveled through Romania from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan according to a new report by the Romanian Special Services.

• Chechen al-Qaeda leader Shamil Basayev is vowing revenge for the death of former Chechen president Yandarbiyev and threatening attacks outside of Russia. Meanwhile, Basayev's fighters appear to be trying to regroup in Ingushetia to stage new attacks inside of Chechnya after suffering some heavy losses over the course of the last year.

• Were Pakistani ISI officers killed during the US cruise missile assault on Afghanistan in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings? Geostrategy Direct seems to think so.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. It seems that AOL is in the middle of an online raffle of a spammer's seized Porsche. I wish them the best ...

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The Genesis of Algerian Extremism

The origins of Algerian extremism are fairly common knowledge, though Fred Pruitt has theorized that one of the reasons that extremism is so prevalent in Algerian is that as a result of the sheer brutality of the nation's war for independence against France that barbaric violence became ingrained as an element of the national culture. As a result, Fred sees the Algerian Islamists' decision to orchestrate their war against the civilian government as being an entirely logical decision given the violent tendencies of the culture. Whether or not he's right I can't say, although that would certainly explain the equal levels of brutality with which the Algerian military has responded against the extremists ...

In any case, in December 1991 the Algerian political party Front Islamique de Salut (Islamic Salvation Front or FIS) won 188 seats in the National People's Assembly during the first round of elections, with the National Liberation Front (FLN) that had governed Algeria ever since its independence winning only 15. FIS had already declared its intention to dissolve the Assembly and implement the sha'riah upon being elected and a quote from FIS leader Ali Belhadj ("When we are in power, there will be no more elections because God will be ruling") is one of the origins of the phrase, "One man, one vote, one time." The second round of elections was never held as a state of emergency was declared, FIS was banned, and a military junta took control of the country through the Higher Council of State that is today commonly referred to by Algerians as simply le Pouvoir or "the Power." FIS leaders Abassi Madani and Ali Belhadj were arrested, though several other key leaders including Abdelkader Hachani, Rabah Kheir, and bin Laden's ally Khamareddine Kherbane managed to escape to Europe, where the organization established an executive branch and a military council in exile in Germany.

Back in Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Army and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) emerged to fight the Algerian military for control of the country. The latter, formed in 1993, was particularly ruthless with its assassination campaigns against Algerian diplomats, priests, industrialists, intellectuals, feminists, Sufis, and foreigners. Razing entire villages and claimed that its actions were motivated by jihad, the GIA hacked its victims to death with swords, axes, and chain saws as a means of saving ammunition. Those believed to be guilty of apostacy were doused with petroleum and set on fire. To further compound the violence, the Algerian military was known to wipe out villages on its own accord, claiming the destruction to be the work of the GIA, in order to turn the public against them.

I am uncertain as to when exactly the GIA first became an al-Qaeda affiliate, though it is known that one of the group's first emir-generals, Abdel Haqq Layada, was himself a member of the terrorist network so it would have had to have been prior to his rise to power. In any event, the GIA under Layada and his successors staged one of the most ruthless terrorist campaigns ever conceived and over 120,000 Algerians civilians have died since the carnage first began in 1992. Antar Zouabri, who assumed the emir-generalcy of the GIA in June 1996 following the death of his predecessor, even proceeded to issue a 60-page fatwa that declared the entire Algerian general population to be kufr for failing to support his campaign against the government as well as justifying indiscriminate attacks against civilians.

It was this fatwa, despite its blessing from Abu Qatada, bin Laden's ambassador in Europe and the editor of the GIA propaganda tract al-Ansar, that earned Zouabri bin Laden's disapproval. In addition to doing a great deal of damage to the support for Islamist revolution in Algeria, Zouabri was also spending too much of his time killing villagers and not enough fighting the Algerian government. As a result, al-Qaeda contacted Hassan Hattab, the head of the GIA's European arm and convinced him to form a separate organization - the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, better known by its French acronym as the GSPC.

Al-Jamaa al-Salafiyyah al-Dawaa

Under Hattab and his pledge not to attack civilian targets (though the GSPC still does so on a regular basis), the GSPC has flourished as al-Qaeda's chosen proxy in Algeria as well as developed ties to Sudan and Iran from which to receive training and weaponry in order to destabilize the Algerian government. Most of the "North Africans" arrested in Europe for involvement with al-Qaeda belong to this organization.

Some analysts will tell you that the Algerian government "exaggerates" the links between al-Qaeda and the Algerian extremists in order to get its hands on Western military assistance and to be quite frank that's patently untrue. The GSPC has been part of bin Laden's terrorist coalition for years and the difference between al-Qaeda and GSPC operatives, particularly in Europe, is at best a form of semantics.

Among some of the more recent examples of collaboration between al-Qaeda and the GSPC:

• A deputy of Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan, the head of al-Qaeda's operations in North Africa, was killed by the Algerian military while working as an advisor to the GSPC.

• Alwan's deputy, a Yemeni national, was killed near Bouira while preparing for a meeting with Hassan Hattab.

• 3 Saudi al-Qaeda operatives traveled to Niger to deliver a message from bin Laden to GSPC leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar.

• That same Mokhtar Belmokhtar plotted to blow up the US embassy in Mali several months later.

• The GSPC kidnapped 32 European tourists in Algeria earlier last year, with the first 17 being freed by Algerian commandos and the last 14 only freed in return for $5,500,000 in ransom, which is an exceedingly large amount of money in Africa.

Clearly, the GSPC's ties to al-Qaeda (or Sudan and Iran) should not be disregarded just because the government that they are fighting happens to be a fairly nasty military junta. The same should be said of the governments of Uzbekistan or the Russian-backed administration in Chechnya.

Signs of a Broader Agenda ...

Al-Qaeda has long sought to exploit the poor security and weak central governments that exist throughout West Africa in order to establish an enclave there and forged ties to the governments of Liberia and Burkina Faso both before and after 9/11 to assist in their global financing operations. After being driven from Afghanistan, the network set up enclaves in Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Nigeria in the hopes of compensating for the loss of their main base and as this UPI commentary explains, the region is extremely fertile ground for the terror network if a little bit further away from their main staging area of the Middle East.

In early June 2003, a coalition of Islamic militants and Baathists (thank goodness we know they'd never work together!) led by Colonel Lamine Ouhd Ndeiane and Colonel Salah Ould Hananna attempted to overthrow the government of Mauritanian dictator Maaouiya Ould Taya. While the coup failed and loyalist forces quickly regained control of the capital, US ambassador Vicki Huddleston recently disclosed US fears that the coup plotters led by Colonel Hananna, most of whom fled to northern Mali, could link up with the GSPC for a second attempt to depose Ould Taya.

While it is hardly my intention to defend Ould Taya or his thug government (which, among other things, still tolerates slavery), the establishment of an Islamist military government similar to the NIF in Sudan in Mauritania would be an unprecedented gain for the GSPC and their al-Qaeda backers, as it could serve as a base from which to support instability throughout West Africa, just as Afghanistan was for al-Qaeda from 1996 until 2001. If the GSPC was involved in even a peripheral role with the Mauritanian coup plot, it should only serve to underscore their ambitions in this regard.

The Merger and the Management Shuffle

Al-Qaeda has suffered some exceedingly high losses in terms of leadership as a result of the US-led war on terrorism since September 11 and has increasingly had to call upon affiliate groups to fold back into the core network in order to for it to remain a viable entity. As a result, as part of the network's reorganization involved the GSPC folding back into the core network along with two Yemeni and also a Saudi affiliate group in September 2003.

This process also coincided with an interesting shift in leadership within the GSPC, with Hassan Hattab being deposed in favor of Nabil Sahraoui due to anger among the GSPC rank and file over a lack of terrorist attacks. Sahraoui, whose inner circle of advisors includes 15 Libyan and Tunisian al-Qaeda operatives, openly declares his allegiance to al-Qaeda as well as his hatred of the West. Since Sahraoui assumed control of the group, the organization has definitely adopted much more of a transnational character, as can be seen in this plot by GSPC commander Abderrazak el-Para to attack the Paris-Dakar Rally and kidnap several of the participants. The plan, which sounds like a bad movie plot, involved over 100 GSPC fighters, or between a fourth to a twentieth of the total GSPC force depending on which statistics one uses, suggesting that this was a major delegation of resources in a strike that has little if anything do to with the GSPC's stated goal of overthrowing the Algerian government.

My contention is that events like the thwarted Paris-Dakar Rally plot begin to paint a clearer picture that al-Qaeda is attempting to use the GSPC to create something similar to Jemaah Islamiyyah in West Africa: an autonomous affiliate with a pan-regional outlook that crosses numerous national borders and serves as almost a miniature version of al-Qaeda on its own right. The ultimate goal, I would speculate, is to create enough large transnational regional or continental affiliates as a means of ensuring that the organization will survive even if the core network is completely destroyed at some future date. We have already seen what they have been able to accomplish in Southeast Asia operating virtually unchecked for nearly a decade - this process cannot be allowed to proceed in Africa as well.

Further Expansion and the US Response

Fortunately, it appears that these developments in Africa are not being neglected by Washington. From Mali to Algeria, US troops are training North Africa's ill-equipped militaries to fight the GSPC. In addition, at least one report from a somewhat dubious source claims that US Special Forces are already on the ground in Algeria battling the GSPC near the southern border with Mali.

The most recent major engagement between local governments and the GSPC occurred in late February, starting in Niger and then spilling over into Chad with the US providing support in the latter case. GSPC commander Amari Saifi (the real name for Abderrazak el-Para) was rumored to have been killed during the battle, but more recent reports have suggested that he survived to lead his fighters back into Algeria.

More ominously, however, is the fact that the majority of the GSPC fighters killed during the battle were not Algerians but rather from Nigeria, Niger, and Mali. That first mention should definitely set off some alarm bells for those of us who have followed the situation in northern Nigeria, mostly notably with regard to the Miss World riots and the rise of the Nigerian Taliban back in December. It's been an open secret for some time now that bin Laden has supporters in Nigeria, but it's quite another thing to learn that they have gone as far as to actively join the nearest al-Qaeda affiliate.

Not Just An African Problem

To be certain, Africa is a continent full of problems and has been for sometime now - it's kind of like the situation in Haiti on a much larger scale in many ways. However, because of its connections to al-Qaeda and growing reach across Africa, the GSPC is rapidly becoming a global problem with regard to prosecution of the war on terrorism and, as we saw with the Taliban before 9/11, ignoring these problems a sure way to make certain that they can and will come back around for even more trouble down the line.

For example, al-Qaeda bases in the Sahara have been public knowledge since at least the summer of 2002 and until recently no one has been serious about doing anything about them, not even the regional governments that Sahraoui likely plans to overthrow later down the line. The result? According to the Washington Times, al-Qaeda has established a rear base in the Sahara for staging attacks in Europe - such as the attacks we saw just last month in Madrid.

Faster, please.

« ok, I'm done now