Welcome! Our goal at Winds of Change.NET is to give you one power-packed briefing of insights, news and trends from the global War on Terror that leaves you stimulated, informed, and occasionally amused every Monday & Thursday. In addition, we also have our in-depth Iraq Report. Today's Winds of War briefing is brought to you by down-under blogger Alan E. Brain, and his British associate "Max".
TOP TOPICS
- The resignation of CIA chief George Tenet has raised more questions than it's answered. The additional resignation of James Pavitt, the Deputy Director of Operations, raises even more. Instapundit has a roundup of who's saying what. I'm inclined to take things as they appear until there's data to the contrary. And Once is Happenstance, Twice is Coincidence, Three times is Enemy Action. So far it's only twice.
- Focus on Shipping : With International Summits to Individual Threat Statements in the news, a major hole in our defences is gradually being plugged. The Next Big Thing in the War against Terror is to increase surveillance of merchant ships that possibly carry WMDs, either for delivery to third parties, or detonation in Western Ports. The first step in this is to decrease the number of merchant vessels pirated in the SE Asian region.
Other Topics Today Include: Big Name Terrorist Captures in Chad and Iraq; Moderate Islam in Britain; UK Terror Group List; Repression in Iran; First-hand reports from Iraq.
IRAN REPORTS
- Former Canadian PM Chretien gets slammed by Zahra Khazemi's son.
- An Iranian student and former political prisoner describes the structure of Iranian repression that keeps the mullahs in power.
(Hat Tip : BlogIran!)
DOMESTIC SECURITY BRIEFINGS
- Not In Our Name! Moderate Muslims of the UK Speak out (pdf)
- I've got a Little List... A Guide to Terrorist Groups proscribed in the UK.
THE WIDER WAR
- Umar Baziyani, a Major Terrorist is arrested in Iraq
- ...and another Big Name is taken in Chad. Amari Saifi has raised over 6 million dollars for Terrorist groups, by kidnapping Europeans and ransoming them. Oddly enough, the payments by the German government didn't seem to discourage him from repeating the offence.
- APEC starts to get serious about bogus passports. Australia has already re-booted one 'failed state' in the region that used to sell genuine documents to the highest bidder: this just continues the policy by other means.
- Maj. Dave Bellon of the U.S. Marines is reporting directly from Fallujah, and his Dad is blogging the letters. The Marines are fighting and staying in the nearby towns... and inside Fallujah, some very interesting things have started happening since the Marines left. Al-Qaeda," he says, "is here".
(Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan)
- And on the subject of doings in Iraq, a mate of mine recently stated the following in a private e-mail :
Well, a lot of my information is dated. And the grand picture is way above my paygrade. For attributed publication I don't want to say much at all.
What I can say is that the agressive way the 4th Infantry Division operated in the Tikrit area had largely pacified the sector. It was not until our replacements arrived and took over (with a minimal changeover period) that things went to pot. The 4th Infantry Division was not trying to make friends--we have been labelled 'triggerhappy cowboys' by our illustrious replacements who wish to cast aspersion on us to cover the fact that they lost control of the situation. We agressively raided and patrolled and kept the insurgents reacting to us, not the other way around. That's just plain common sense.
The biggest failure I see is that the new units being rotated in (3/2, 1CAV, 1ID) did not approach this deployment as a warfighting mission, but as a peacekeeping one. The minimal changeover did not allow us to adequately give them a trainup period in-country. There's an interesting article in a Soldier magazine from a while back that illustrates this failure in Samarra during the changeover between one of our infantry units and the Stryker's RSTA squadron.I think he means Soldiers magazine rather than Soldier magazine.- We try to close on a lighter note if possible. Proving that there's a humourous side to everything, including Wahabism, here's a Saudi Blog The Religious Policeman, Sunni Side Up.
Thanks for reading! If you found something here you want to blog about yourself (and we hope you do), all we ask is that you do as we do and offer a Hat Tip hyperlink to today's "Winds of War". If you think we missed something important, use the Comments section to let us know.
I just got back from five weeks with 1Cav in Baghdad; I watched the CG briefings every day (BUB in the morning, brigade updates in the evening). Anybody who claims that 1Cav isn't treating this as a warfighting mission ought to spend some time in Sadr City, preferably behind several inches of steel.
That said, I don't think it would be accurate to say that MG Chiarelli is taking this as wholly a peacekeeping or wholly a warfighting mission. There's a great WaPo interview with Chiarelli where he points out that in a security operation, winning hearts and minds is most important. The goodwill of the populace does five times as much for you than your entire MI section -- you get informants coming to you and begging to be heard. We see this in the Baghdad neighborhoods where we've done the most to provide jobs and infrastructure to the local population -- incidents plummet, because the locals start actively cooperating with CF to nail the bad guys.
In short, there's more than one way to fight a proactive war. Kicking down doors only gets you so far.
>>The goodwill of the populace does five times as much for you than your entire MI section -- you get informants coming to you and begging to be heard. We see this in the Baghdad neighborhoods where we've done the most to provide jobs and infrastructure to the local population -- incidents plummet, because the locals start actively cooperating with CF to nail the bad guys.
Yes, YES. If victory is achieved, this is how it will be done. The goal here is to lower the price of buying the cooperation of the locals in ratting out the troublemakers, esp. the terrorists. If the general population likes and trusts us, AND we provide the population an efficient mechanism for ratting out the terrorists, victory will be relatively cheap and easy.
If the population dislikes or distrusts us, OR the infrastructure needed to justly process the leads we receive from the population fails, then victory will be very expensive. The danger of a downward spiral of violence exists as well.
The critical factor here is the discipline and training of MP battalions, (or whichever units are pressed into an ad-hoc MP role.) Clearly the Iraq campaign should have had far more MPs who knew the language during the initial phase of the invasion. Hopefully this failure will be corrected in any future campaigns.
Mr Katzman is obviously a fan of Ian "Happenstance" Fleming.
"Clearly the Iraq campaign should have had far more MPs who knew the language during the initial phase of the invasion."
Yes, but the unfortunate problem is that they don't exist.
The guys who implemented this war knew it was coming years ahead of time. Why didn't they spend some of that time training MPs?
"The guys who implemented this was knew it was coming years ahead of time."
How many years ahead of time? I thought the US was being accused of just deciding we were going to attack Iraq one day and willy nilly throwing soldiers over the fence without a plan?
How long does it take to teach an MP to speak Arabic?
I was trained by the Army in Russian and that took over a year. Arabic is a much more difficult language to learn.