Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Thanks for that Buzwardo.

Now, here's this from
 
http://www.stratfor.com/

Highly recommended

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Terrorist Tactics: The Art of Disguise
Jul 29, 2004 1550 GMT
Security sources in southern California have told Stratfor about incidents involving "vehicle-spoofing" -- or the use of falsely marked utility vehicles. The markings -- said to be fairly professionally done -- were identified by investigators looking into drug-smuggling cases.

That said, the potential for vehicle-spoofing and other types of disguises as terrorist tactics is a cause for concern.

The use of vehicles disguised as official or corporate cars, vans or trucks is an old tactic among criminals and militants that still bears review. It has cropped up everywhere -- from Iraq and Saudi Arabia to Maryland and San Diego -- and is even used by U.S. law enforcement agencies during surveillance operations. Such vehicles arouse little suspicion among the public -- and from a mental awareness standpoint, the mind has a tendency to discount the obvious, such as a delivery truck parked in a fire lane.

Stratfor has long argued that observance and vigilance among citizens are the best defenses against terrorism; the difficulty -- particularly during periods of heightened alert -- is knowing what to be on watch for.

Spoofed vehicles are only one example: Sources have told Stratfor that those identified in southern California were reasonable facsimiles of company vehicles -- utility trucks, delivery vehicles or even fleet sedans with corporate markings -- that would not attract notice from casual observers (emphasis on "casual"). In the past, militants also have used taxis as cover for surveillance; this has occurred in New York City and New Orleans, where investigators disrupted a Sikh militant assassination plot against Indian diplomats.

Other tactics include:

Official uniforms that are copied or stolen: This tactic has been used in terrorist attacks in the past, including the May assaults against Westerners at the Oasis housing compound in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. In the United States, theft of official uniforms -- such as those for police, firemen or security guards -- can be difficult to prevent; the most effective countermeasure usually is speedily reporting the theft to authorities.
Theft or copying of identification cards and badges: Requiring employees to display identification badges in order to enter the workplace is an effective security measure for many government agencies and companies, but it also renders the workplace vulnerable: Employees often wear their badges outside the building -- where they inadvertently could reveal important information or be lost or stolen. That said, employers can protect themselves through measures such as proxy card/badge readers, which allow specific numeric identifiers on lost or stolen cards to be deleted in real-time from computer memory banks, keeping any impostors from accessing the facility.
Stolen utility vehicles: These could be used in car- or truck-bombing plots, a tactic al Qaeda has discussed in the past. In 1993, militants in New York City considered using stolen delivery vans to gain access to target venues in several scenarios, such as blowing up the Waldorf-Astoria or U.N. Plaza Hotel. Countermeasures that can help to prevent against such attacks include the use of global positioning systems or similar technology that allows companies to trace lost or stolen vehicles quickly. GPS systems routinely are installed in commercial tractor-trailers, where federal officials say they have been extremely effective in preventing theft of cargo-loads traveling U.S. interstates.

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The Vulnerability of the Passenger Rail Systems
Jul 16, 2004 1141 GMT
By Fred Burton

The FBI has ratcheted up its counterterrorism intelligence collection efforts as the U.S. presidential elections draw nearer, and both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security remain highly concerned that an attack could come at anytime.

Nevertheless, the United States still has many "soft targets" that are difficult or impossible to adequately protect against a militant strike -- and the nation's passenger rail system tops the list. In such an environment, a "Madrid-style" attack is entirely possible, whether involving improvised explosive devices hidden in a suitcase or satchel, a suicide bombing or even a biological/chemical attack using agents -- such as sarin gas or anthrax -- released inside a passenger rail car.

The security necessary to prevent such a strike would cause the passenger rail system to all but grind to a halt. Securing the rail lines is much more problematic than securing air travel because of the sheer volume of travelers and stops. The Sept. 11 hijackers exploited weaknesses within the nation's air-passenger screening system to carry out a well-orchestrated attack -- but nothing as elaborate as the Sept. 11 strikes is required for a highly effective, mass-casualty assault against the country's rail systems.

This threat is particularly relevant in the Washington-to-New York City corridor -- which counterterrorism officials refer to as "the X", or target zone. An attack within those cities proper could lead to massive casualties: On average, some 4.5 million passengers use New York City's trains and subways every weekday, as do 550,000 passengers in Washington.

Local officials are not completely blind to this threat, but they are not adequately equipped to defend against it either.

For example, the New York City Police Department -- which has a long history of fighting terrorism and has conducted more planning than any other major metropolitan police department for the possibility of another attack -- currently is on heightened terror alert. The NYPD is putting forth a visible show of manpower on the streets and fielding extra uniformed police around the exterior entrances to subways. Undercover officers also are deployed underground, as a further step to thwart attacks. However, inside New York's Penn Station rail hub, the police presence is smaller, in marked contrast to the show of force of force outside.

Though the NYPD has made a tactical decision about where to deploy its forces -- visibly and otherwise -- this likely does more to combat low-level street crime and provide psychological comfort to travelers and tourists than it would to deter an actual terrorist attack. All of al Qaeda's major attacks, including the African Embassy bombings, the attack against the USS Cole and bombing plots in New York City, have shown that the group factors visible police and security staff into their attack plans -- and into the overall casualty count of a strike. If militants opted for gunfire, a single officer with a pistol likely would be killed without gaining a chance to return fire. If bombs were to be placed on trains, the presence of police would be meaningless.

If an attack were to take place on a train or inside a terminal, likely scenarios include a "spray and pray" strike -- in which a suicide bomber sprays a crowd with gunfire before detonating his own explosives to maximize casualty counts -- placing improvised explosive devices on trains or releasing a deadly gas or chemical inside a passenger car. Any of these would be quite easy to carry out within the current security environment: Nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, no passenger or baggage screening systems are in place at Penn Station, or in Union Station or the subways in Washington. This is a serious concern.

In fact, Stratfor sources within the U.S. counterterrorism community are puzzled why an attack against a passenger rail system has not already occurred, in light of these factors. An attack involving a crowded passenger train could kill scores of people and have economic effects that might rival those of the Sept. 11 strikes -- for example, leading to a rail system shutdown and keeping thousands or millions of commuters from their jobs. Moreover, any strike need not be highly sophisticated or carried out by a large group: A lone militant could carry out such a plan, as seen in a lone Islamist gunman?s attack against the El Al terminal at Los Angeles Airport in 2002 or the killings by Mir Aimal Kansi at the front gate of the CIA in 1993.

Stratfor believes that Washington remains firmly atop al Qaeda's target list. The capital city's Union Station and Metro subways are under heightened threat, but security there is less substantial than on the rail systems of New York City -- something that makes no sense from a threat assessment perspective. In New York, bomb dogs and SWAT teams with submachine guns are deployed at key locations, such as the World Trade Center site. Standoff weapons would allow officer to at least return adequate fire in the event of a commando-style attack, and possibly save lives. However, in Washington there are no visible bomb dogs or police officers with standoff shoulder weapons.

That said, there are a few concrete steps rail travelers can take for protection:

Buy a flashlight and smoke hood for the daily commute.
Be aware of your surroundings.
Remain mentally prepared for an attack and walk through escape plans in your mind.
At the government level, aggressive threat information collection efforts -- coupled with passenger and baggage screening efforts -- are vital to prevent an attack involving the passenger rail systems. Police and Emergency Medical System response plans also play an important role. However, the practical steps involved in screening millions of passengers daily -- in a timely manner -- is simply not doable. Thus, the nation's rail systems remain a serious vulnerability, and are likely to be the next militant target inside the United States.
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The Vulnerability of the Passenger Rail Systems
Jul 16, 2004 1141 GMT
By Fred Burton

The FBI has ratcheted up its counterterrorism intelligence collection efforts as the U.S. presidential elections draw nearer, and both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security remain highly concerned that an attack could come at anytime.

Nevertheless, the United States still has many "soft targets" that are difficult or impossible to adequately protect against a militant strike -- and the nation's passenger rail system tops the list. In such an environment, a "Madrid-style" attack is entirely possible, whether involving improvised explosive devices hidden in a suitcase or satchel, a suicide bombing or even a biological/chemical attack using agents -- such as sarin gas or anthrax -- released inside a passenger rail car.

The security necessary to prevent such a strike would cause the passenger rail system to all but grind to a halt. Securing the rail lines is much more problematic than securing air travel because of the sheer volume of travelers and stops. The Sept. 11 hijackers exploited weaknesses within the nation's air-passenger screening system to carry out a well-orchestrated attack -- but nothing as elaborate as the Sept. 11 strikes is required for a highly effective, mass-casualty assault against the country's rail systems.

This threat is particularly relevant in the Washington-to-New York City corridor -- which counterterrorism officials refer to as "the X", or target zone. An attack within those cities proper could lead to massive casualties: On average, some 4.5 million passengers use New York City's trains and subways every weekday, as do 550,000 passengers in Washington.

Local officials are not completely blind to this threat, but they are not adequately equipped to defend against it either.

For example, the New York City Police Department -- which has a long history of fighting terrorism and has conducted more planning than any other major metropolitan police department for the possibility of another attack -- currently is on heightened terror alert. The NYPD is putting forth a visible show of manpower on the streets and fielding extra uniformed police around the exterior entrances to subways. Undercover officers also are deployed underground, as a further step to thwart attacks. However, inside New York's Penn Station rail hub, the police presence is smaller, in marked contrast to the show of force of force outside.

Though the NYPD has made a tactical decision about where to deploy its forces -- visibly and otherwise -- this likely does more to combat low-level street crime and provide psychological comfort to travelers and tourists than it would to deter an actual terrorist attack. All of al Qaeda's major attacks, including the African Embassy bombings, the attack against the USS Cole and bombing plots in New York City, have shown that the group factors visible police and security staff into their attack plans -- and into the overall casualty count of a strike. If militants opted for gunfire, a single officer with a pistol likely would be killed without gaining a chance to return fire. If bombs were to be placed on trains, the presence of police would be meaningless.

If an attack were to take place on a train or inside a terminal, likely scenarios include a "spray and pray" strike -- in which a suicide bomber sprays a crowd with gunfire before detonating his own explosives to maximize casualty counts -- placing improvised explosive devices on trains or releasing a deadly gas or chemical inside a passenger car. Any of these would be quite easy to carry out within the current security environment: Nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, no passenger or baggage screening systems are in place at Penn Station, or in Union Station or the subways in Washington. This is a serious concern.

In fact, Stratfor sources within the U.S. counterterrorism community are puzzled why an attack against a passenger rail system has not already occurred, in light of these factors. An attack involving a crowded passenger train could kill scores of people and have economic effects that might rival those of the Sept. 11 strikes -- for example, leading to a rail system shutdown and keeping thousands or millions of commuters from their jobs. Moreover, any strike need not be highly sophisticated or carried out by a large group: A lone militant could carry out such a plan, as seen in a lone Islamist gunman?s attack against the El Al terminal at Los Angeles Airport in 2002 or the killings by Mir Aimal Kansi at the front gate of the CIA in 1993.

Stratfor believes that Washington remains firmly atop al Qaeda's target list. The capital city's Union Station and Metro subways are under heightened threat, but security there is less substantial than on the rail systems of New York City -- something that makes no sense from a threat assessment perspective. In New York, bomb dogs and SWAT teams with submachine guns are deployed at key locations, such as the World Trade Center site. Standoff weapons would allow officer to at least return adequate fire in the event of a commando-style attack, and possibly save lives. However, in Washington there are no visible bomb dogs or police officers with standoff shoulder weapons.

That said, there are a few concrete steps rail travelers can take for protection:

Buy a flashlight and smoke hood for the daily commute.
Be aware of your surroundings.
Remain mentally prepared for an attack and walk through escape plans in your mind.
At the government level, aggressive threat information collection efforts -- coupled with passenger and baggage screening efforts -- are vital to prevent an attack involving the passenger rail systems. Police and Emergency Medical System response plans also play an important role. However, the practical steps involved in screening millions of passengers daily -- in a timely manner -- is simply not doable. Thus, the nation's rail systems remain a serious vulnerability, and are likely to be the next militant target inside the United States.

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The Sleeper Cell Threat: A Search in Unlikely Places
Jun 18, 2004 1706 GMT
Summary

An unfolding case against a man arrested in Tyler, Texas, points to potential threats posed by a combination of the United States' need for workers with specific qualifications, visa processes and the ability of sleeper cells to remain dormant -- and inconspicuous -- for years.

Analysis

A Pakistani man arrested in May in the small Texas town of Tyler has been accused of plotting to carry out terrorist attacks on the West Coast. FBI agents arrested Osama Haroon Satti after he bought a handgun and silencer from an undercover agent and asked where he would be able to acquire more. Satti allegedly has been linked to a group of men who were arrested in Virginia on suspicion of involvement with terrorist organizations.

There is little in Satti's background to mark him as an aspiring Islamist militant: He first entered the United States on a student visa in 1990, and worked in the computer industry before returning to Pakistan 11 years later. He holds an MBA from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Satti -- like many other foreign workers in the United States -- has been caught up in the nation's counterterrorism dragnet, as federal officials seek out members of dormant sleeper cells. If the allegations against Satti and others are true, authorities could be rooting out militants from some seemingly unlikely places.

Higher Education

Two characteristics that appear repeatedly in the backgrounds of suspected militants arrested by U.S. authorities are high levels of education and an interest in technology. Though millions of foreign workers with similar backgrounds -- and absolutely no connections to terrorism -- have entered the country for years, it is noteworthy that militant organizations easily could infiltrate by exploiting the visa process.

In fact, at least two of the Sept. 11 hijackers -- Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who entered the country on tourist visas -- were approved for M-1 student visas shortly before carrying out their attacks. Approval forms from the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrived at the al Qaeda members' Florida flight training school exactly six months after Atta and al-Shehhi died at the helms of the planes that plowed into the World Trade Center towers.

Consider also the following cases:



Maher "Mike" Mofeid Hawas: A naturalized U.S. citizen who worked as a lead engineer for Intel Corp. He was arrested in August 2003 after traveling to China and allegedly attempting to enter Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban. Hawas pleaded guilty in August 2003 to aiding terrorist organizations and was sentenced to seven years in prison.


Mohammed Atique: A Pakistani native who arrived in the United States in 1996 to study electrical engineering. Atique worked for a number of wireless communication companies before his arrest May 8, 2003. He is among the group of 11 men who have been dubbed the "Virginia Jihad," accused of colluding with militant organization Lashkar e Taiba (LeT). Atique was sentenced in December 2003 to more than 10 years in prison.


Khwaja Hassan: Another member of the "Virginia Jihad." Hassan is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan who holds a master's degree in business technology. He was arrested while working as a teacher in Saudi Arabia and extradited to the United States in July 2003 on suspicion of involvement with LeT. A federal court sentenced Hassan to more than 11 years in prison in November 2003.

These are only a few examples of men who have been accused of belonging to militant sleeper cells within the United States. Though the actual proof in many cases is open to question, the security threat posed by sleeper cells is not.

The case of the Virginia Jihad -- nine of whose 11 members ultimately were convicted -- is of interest, in part because it involves an eclectic assortment of suspects that includes native U.S. citizens, a Korean immigrant and a former U.S. Marine. These backgrounds, along with high education and stable employment histories, obviously would help sleeper cell members to blend into the populace while planning any attacks -- unlike those who are involved with document falsification or other crimes that can draw the attention of investigators. Sleeper cells might not be an exclusive club for foreign-born jihadists: Testimony during the trials of the Virginia Jihad suspects showed this group was not planted in the United States for militant purposes, but rather that its members were ideologically sympathetic to Islamist movements and were recruited into the LeT cause after living in the United States for years.

Given the level of sophistication that was evident in the Sept. 11 attacks -- and that likely is required to carry out further strikes within the United States -- it is logical to conclude that the leaders and members of militant sleeper cells are required to have a higher level of education than are the jihadist foot soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also is conceivable that they maintain stable, legal employment with American companies.

Additionally, it is worth noting that, in light of the current focus on counterterrorism, sleeper cells and locally grown Islamist movements likely are operating with minimal guidance from al Qaeda, and are planning or carrying out operations on their own. This makes it all the more difficult to identify and disrupt the cells.

Focus on Background Checks

The May 1 attacks in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, prompted many Western corporations to re-evaluate their own employees and security procedures. It is possible for dormant militants to remain in place for years before showing any signs of posing a threat: Some of the attackers in Yanbu were longtime employees of the targeted company, ABB Lummus -- they possessed access badges and enjoyed the confidence of their colleagues. Such a scenario is equally plausible within the United States, which places heightened emphasis on solid corporate security measures.

For privately held companies, conducting a thorough background check on workers can be extremely difficult. The required infrastructure in countries such as Pakistan and India, which contribute large numbers of workers to the United States, is practically non-existent -- heightening the potential for militants to exploit the L-1 visa process, which allows U.S.-based companies to import foreign workers with little diplomatic oversight.

Moreover, U.S. corporations do not have access to government-run counterterrorism databases -- making it difficult to know if an employee has been identified by federal officials as having links to militant groups.

Stratfor previously said Yanbu-style attacks -- or small-scale assaults involving well-trained, knowledgeable operatives -- would become more likely. Such attacks depend on militants having intimate knowledge of their target and the trust of coworkers and employers.

Though it is impossible to measure the number of people involved with sleeper cells in the United States or to give a definitive description of their backgrounds, a few facts are worth noting:


Because of a dearth of American workers with qualifications in math, science and engineering, large numbers of foreign workers have entered the United States to pursue careers in those fields -- frequently on student, or F-1/M-1, visas.


The high tech industry, which draws on workers with math, science and engineering degrees, offers an economic and social status that law enforcers tend to view as incompatible with public threats.


The number of visas awarded to foreign workers was reduced following the Sept. 11 attacks, after investigations showed that some of the hijackers entered the country legally with F-1/M-1 status. However, since the sleeper cell cycle is measured in years, it is entirely possible that militants who entered the country some time ago with student visas would only now be entering into an active attack phase.


Members of any new sleeper cells seeking to enter the United States likely would seek other forms of cover -- whether legal or illegal. The lack of a broad base of support for Islamist causes within the United States -- unlike in Europe, where there are large sympathetic populations with pre-existing communication channels and "safe houses" -- makes it less likely that cells would exist entirely of illegal immigrants and unemployed militants.



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The Militant Threat: Focus on Britain
Jul 27, 2004 1147 GMT
Elite British intelligence and counterterrorism teams reportedly have been deployed to northern England to investigate potential threats by Islamist militants there. Sources within the British intelligence community have told Stratfor that MI5 and law enforcement agencies have received specific information about groups that might be operating in northern cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield, as well as smaller cities such as York and Hull.

Operationally, these are logical areas for militants to be located. Most of the well-known radical and jihadist Islamist groups are centered around the London area: If there is a connection between these groups and real threats, it is in the interests of jihadists to maintain operational distance between their cheerleaders, who seek attention, and actual operatives, who do not.

British intelligence sources have told Stratfor they believe Islamist militant groups actively have been raising funds in northern England and perhaps even conducting limited training exercises in national park areas, such as the North York Moors, the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales. The Muslim population in northern English cities has been under observation for quite some time, following ethnic riots in Leeds in the summer of 2001.

Though it is not clear whether any groups that have fallen under the British intelligence eye have al Qaeda connections or are planning attacks, two things are clear: Islamist militants have yet to carry out an attack within the United Kingdom, and -- given al Qaeda's ideology, goals and recent statements -- the country likely ranks high on the list of potential targets.

According to our sources, the British intelligence community is particularly concerned about the possibility of attacks against industrial facilities near Manchester, port facilities in Liverpool and shipyards in Newcastle. Though the potential for such threats should not be discounted, Stratfor finds it far more likely that militants would attempt to mount a strike in London -- where the potential for economic and symbolic damage is far greater.

Recent threats issued by known jihadist groups -- such as the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades and the Islamic Monotheism Group -- have focused specifically on U.S. allies, and there is none more staunch than Britain. The United Kingdom has contributed more troops -- roughly 9,000 -- than any other U.S. partner in Iraq and long has been active in Afghanistan as well. Interestingly, mentions of Britain have been noticeably absent from recent threats against Europe, which tends to focus our attention there all the more.

It should be noted that Islamists view Britain as a longstanding nemesis -- responsible for the collapse of the Turkish caliphate in 1924 and a colonizer of vast tracts of the Muslim world.

Rife with tourist attractions and as the nation's financial epicenter, London is home to any number of sites that would make ideal targets for militants, ranging from Big Ben to Trafalgar Square to Parliament and Buckingham Palace. It also is crisscrossed by a massive public transportation center, more heavily used than even that in Madrid.

Not only do Stratfor sources within numerous international intelligence agencies believe London is overdue for a strike, but the nation's political posture heightens the threat to the city. There is speculation that Parliamentary elections could be called in less than a year; a finely timed terrorist attack -- such as that in Madrid -- could serve as an opportunity to unseat the Labor government, which has stirred domestic controversy over its support for Washington's Iraq policy.

That is not to say that strikes against smaller or "softer" targets elsewhere in the country should be ruled out.

For geographic reasons, the British Isles are more secure than countries within continental Europe -- but they are linked to the continent by ferry and shipping traffic that ingresses and egresses from more than 23 ports and, of course, the Chunnel rail system. Ferry and train passengers are subjected to customs inspections at both ends of their trips, but rail and port security measures are known for being less stringent than those at airports (in fact, that has served as a selling point for Chunnel rail tickets, which can be vastly more expensive than airline tickets).

In Britain, as elsewhere, the security scenario is less than airtight.


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Common-Sense Protection: From Tsunamis to Terrorism
Jul 26, 2004 1107 GMT
The British Home Office announced plans July 26 to distribute pamphlets outlining steps that citizens should take in the event of a terrorist attack. The 11-page, pocket-sized pamphlet will be mailed to every British household, and will be followed by a series of radio and television advertisements. Officials said the campaign is being launched as a general safety measure, rather than in response to any imminent or specific terrorist threats -- though the threat posture to the United Kingdom in general is high.

Interestingly, the International Association of the Red Cross said as recently as July 23 the United Kingdom is far more prepared in general than the United States to cope with a terrorist attack -- where other recent polls have shown that few Americans take warnings of an imminent threat seriously. Taking these events together, it is worthwhile to examine the U.S. and British counterterrorism preparation guidelines.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has published a document, comparable to the British pamphlet, titled "Are You Ready?" The document, which for the most part compromises longstanding guidelines issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was revised in September 2002 to include guidance for civilian responses to a terrorist attack. The American Red Cross also has a publication containing advice and guidance on how to respond in the event of an attack. All of these publications are available for download on the respective agencies' Web sites.

All three documents are similar in that they emphasize common-sense approaches. Because terrorism is inherently unpredictable, government agencies can distribute few other kinds of broad guidelines to the general public.

Moreover, all three rehash advice that governments and non-governmental organizations have distributed for years about general steps to follow in the event of emergencies. For example, the DHS document lists threats ranging from volcanic explosions and tsunamis to cyber-attacks and the detonation of a radiological dispersion device.

In almost all cases, the guidelines are quite clear.

Know evacuation routes for whatever building you are in.
Prepare a household emergency kit that contains, among other items, a flashlight, radio and fresh water.
Learn and know how to use basic first aid techniques.
These examples are sound advice in all situations, but certainly are not ground-breaking -- which might be one reason the British Home Office pamphlet is coming nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The most useful guidance given -- and it is best put in the Home Office publication -- concerns simple steps the average person might take to assist in preventing a terrorist attack. (Similar information can be found in the DHS document, though it is found on page 83 of the 108-page publication.)
Here again, common sense prevails -- but that is particularly useful and specifically applicable to counterterrorism efforts, which rely on vigilance among the public, as well as from official agencies. These guidelines -- which include items such as reporting "suspicious" people, activities or retail purchases, or calling security to investigate unattended baggage -- likely are familiar to any government employee, but serve as useful reminders for average citizens who might feel powerless to act on the strength of exceedingly vague warnings from the government.

Because successful acts of terrorism are, by nature, unpredictable, government warnings will always be vague and almost always will carry an alarmist tone. Patterns of attack become apparent only after the fact -- leaving government agencies hamstrung in distributing anything but the most general advice to the public. Though common sense will never capture headlines, it remains perhaps the most useful and available weapon to citizens in any emergency -- whether tsunamis or terrorism.


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Suggestions of Complacency
Jul 23, 2004 1727 GMT
A Land Rover that police believe was rigged with an improvised explosive device exploded July 22 outside the largest hotel and convention center in Nashville, Tenn. Although officials say they have no reason to suspect terrorism, they are investigating the incident -- in which one person, the vehicle's owner, died -- further.

This explosion came only a few days after a New York City police officer was wounded when a backpack stuffed with fireworks exploded in a subway station -- another incident that triggered fears of terrorism. In this case, officials say the officer who was wounded actually was responsible for the blast: He was to leave the police force on July 20 -- the following day -- on a disability pension related to what officials say were "psychological problems."

Despite the motivational disconnects between these two incidents, it is interesting that both explosions occurred in locations that Stratfor has identified as ideal "soft targets." The vulnerability of passenger rail systems and hotels has been amply backlit by the March 11 bombings in Madrid and the August 2003 attack against a Marriot hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. Within the United States, such targets remain quite open, despite ongoing warnings of potential terrorist threats.

It obviously is impossible for police and security guards to adequately guard all potential targets against attack. As a result, they rely to some degree on average citizens to act as their eyes and ears -- particularly in public venues such as hotels or subway stations.

However, at least two recent surveys suggest that the American public is less concerned about terrorist threats than is the government. A poll commissioned by the Council for Excellence in Government finds that only 34 percent of Americans believe another terrorist attack on U.S. soil is "very likely." Additionally, a survey conducted by the Red Cross found that only 42 percent of Americans have assembled home emergency kits and only 10 percent have taken the "three steps" outlined by the Red Cross -- creating emergency kits, laying family disaster plans and training in first aid techniques -- for responses to emergencies.

If anything, these surveys suggest that the psychological effects of the Sept. 11 strikes are fading within the domestic United States -- even amid the increasing government warnings, which lose impact with frequency and vague information -- and that many Americans do not incorporate the practical steps that can be taken to protect against another strike to their daily lives.

Coupled with details from the Nashville and New York incidents, it also appears that even those who are on watch may not always know exactly which indicators to look for.

For example, the Land Rover in Nashville exploded in a relatively isolated area of the hotel parking lot, near storage trailers -- an unusual place for a guest to leave his vehicle. Though the explosion likely could not have been prevented, such a detail -- particularly if the vehicle was left parked for any length of time -- might have excited suspicion.

In the New York subway incident, many factors could have provided cover to the policeman accused of planting the explosives -- the hustle and bustle of a busy transportation link; the tendency of passersby to mind their own business; the police uniform worn by the accused. However, none of these factors would make it impossible to suspect an attack if vigilance is applied: For instance, the bag was planted around 8 p.m., which is not exactly a peak rush-hour period. It also should be remembered that militants who carried out several recent attacks against Westerners in Saudi Arabia were wearing the uniforms of police or security guards -- reasonable facsimiles of which could be acquired within the United States also.

Nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, it is logical to expect that Americans would be "returning to normal" and again gaining confidence in the security of their country. The recent polls seem to reflect that this is the case, and that the nation's overall mood is one of ambivalence toward the increasing threat warnings. Among the general public, vigilance does not run high.

And as we have noted on several occasions during the past three years, complacency is a would-be attacker's best friend.

======================

 
Seeking Cover: The Problem of Western Converts
Jul 22, 2004 1740 GMT
Sources within the European and U.S. intelligence communities have told Stratfor that their agencies are growing increasingly concerned about the potential for Western converts to Islam to be used in carrying out terrorist-style attacks. These concerns are coming to the fore amid heightened tensions over potential terrorist attacks in both regions and a strong counterterrorism focus on young, Middle Eastern males.

Al Qaeda has shown itself to be a dynamic, intelligence and adaptive organization. Using operatives who are Western in appearance would be one way of increasing its chances for pulling off a successful strike in the current high-alert environment. Nor would such a scenario be without precedent -- as the examples of men like Jose Padilla, John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid and Australia's Jack Roche, among others, show.

However, we view such a scenario as only a potential threat to be noted, rather than as an emerging trend.

The vast majority of Western converts to Islam, whether in the United States or Europe, receive the faith at the hands of ?mainstream? Muslims, rather than from radical Wahhabis. There are madrassahs and mosques in the West that teach more radical forms of Islam, and they do wield a degree of influence, partly because of the Saudi wealth that funds them. And it should be noted that radical Islamic literature is available in many Western prisons, where several would-be operatives from the West have spent time. That said, the majority of Muslim schools and mosques in Western countries are run by subscribers to mainstream, non-Wahhabi forms of the religion.

Moreover, al Qaeda has not shown a penchant for proselytizing. Rather than acting as missionaries -- which likely would lead to unwelcome exposure -- the network draws from the conversion work of other radical, but non-militant, Islamist and Wahhabi groups such as al Mujahiroun in Britain, the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA) and Quran and Sunnah Society (QSS) in the United States.

Al Qaeda likely would not turn away a willing Western militant, but many factors serve to limit the potential pool. Though Islam teaches that there are no racial divisions among its children, Western converts do not embark upon their Muslim lives with a tabula rasa. Instead, they bring a history of cultural tenets and values that often cause other Muslims to question the quality of their faith. Moreover, radical jihadist groups such as al Qaeda reject any Muslims -- born or converted -- who do not subscribe to their own, much narrower, framework of ideology.

Though the vast majority of Western converts to Islam probably do not become radical Islamists, al Qaeda now is operating in an environment in which ethnic diversity would serve its aims. Correctly or otherwise, the ?profile? of a potential Islamist militant is that of a young, Middle Eastern man -- something that has prompted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warn airport security workers to be on watch for all Pakistani men who recently traveled to that country.

In all likelihood, actual militants are now seeking new forms of cover -- for which there also are several historical precedents. For years, Palestinian militant groups have employed women -- and more recently children -- as suicide bombers when Israeli security forces began to intensify their searches of Palestinian men. Other groups, such as Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also have histories of deploying female operatives -- in fact, one who officials say may have hidden explosives in her bra, killed herself and four police officers in Colombo on July 7. Reports also have circulated among the security and expatriate communities in Saudi Arabia that Saudi men are donning female garb as a disguise while conducting surveillance of potential targets. Most famously, Yasser Arafat dressed as a woman to escape capture by the Israelis while in Lebanon.

However, given al Qaeda prime's very conservative beliefs about women and the tactical complications of incorporating such a previously unused element into its plans, we view the possibility of female operatives being used in a major strike as extremely unlikely.

Al Qaeda, like any intelligent and successful organization, will do what works best. Within the current climate, it is certainly feasible that there could be a shift toward non-traditional operatives, such as Western converts. However, anxiety over this scenario easily could be overplayed: All factors still point to the emergence of Western Islamist militants as an exception, rather than a trend.


 
======================

 
NYPD Taking Initiative in Counterterrorism Fight
Jul 20, 2004 1711 GMT
The subway station at 43rd and 8th Streets in Manhattan was temporarily closed July 19 after a bag placed on the staircase exploded, burning a police officer. Officials have said the bag contained only fireworks, but that it was bundled to look like a bomb.

The blast drew a rapid response from the New York City Police Department -- and though the investigation is continuing, it is plausible that the faux bombing could have been planned as a non-lethal way of testing New York City's emergency response systems. Gauging responses and reaction times by the NYPD, emergency medical services and fire department could make it easier for terrorists to carry out a real operation in the future.

The July 19 incident put the NYPD -- already tense amid preparations for the Aug. 30 through Sept. 2 Republican National Convention -- further on edge. The department already is fielding 1,000 police officers on the streets daily as part of the war on terrorism -- something officials acknowledge is putting pressure on patrol strength and overtime costs, which this year are projected at a city-wide record of $345.9 million.

The threat environment -- with warnings of a possible al Qaeda attack in the domestic United States within the next few months -- has placed additional strains on many, if not most, U.S. law enforcement, intelligence and emergency agencies. The atmosphere has not been aided by their relations with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which -- with its communication process still evolving -- frequently is regarded as more of a hindrance than an ally in the war on terrorism.

In light of these circumstances, Stratfor has learned, many metropolitan police departments -- including those in New York and Los Angeles -- are taking the lead on counterterrorism efforts within their own cities and elsewhere.

Some of the methods employed by the NYPD of which Stratfor has learned include:



Since Sept. 11, NYPD has established close relationships with foreign law enforcement and security personnel. This move stems in part from threat information dissemination problems between federal agencies and their state and local counterparts: Because of security criteria, information cannot flow smoothly and freely from top to bottom.

The NYPD actively is reaching out to state and local police agencies throughout North America. These communication efforts are part of an overall attempt to generate good will and smooth cooperation at the local law enforcement level nationwide -- especially in high-threat cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago, among others.

The department is taking part in a program to train service personnel in some important locations -- such as doormen, maintenance workers and delivery people -- to recognize threats and take appropriate action.

With better communication, the NYPD also has improved response and contingency planning involving other agencies, such as the New York/New Jersey Port Authority.

The NYPD and possibly other agencies are taking a proactive approach to terrorism. That is not to say that local law enforcement agencies have completely eschewed the aid of the federal government: New York City and Boston still will employ a number of DHS assets, including the Secret Service, during the upcoming Republican and Democratic National conventions.

However, the DHS -- still in the growth and definition process -- has not yet established itself as a reliable administrator. For local law enforcement agencies, necessity has become the mother of invention.

 
========================

The TSA's Airport Security Conundrum
Jul 09, 2004 1715 GMT
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on July 7 launched a test of its registered traveler program in St. Paul, Minn. -- a program that allows frequent fliers to sidestep time-consuming security checks at airports by submitting biometric data and fingerprints and submitting to an extensive background check.

The previous day, however, the TSA had issued security guidance to all U.S. airports, calling for a system in which employees of airport vendors -- such as newsstands and restaurants -- must pass through security checkpoints when entering and leaving secure areas of terminals. Previously, such requirements were left to the discretion of individual airport authorities. A 30-day review period is under way before the guidance can be implemented.

On the surface, the two actions appear to contradict each other -- one apparently decreasing security, the other attempting to increase it. Taken together, however, these situations highlight the difficulties faced by the TSA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, in balancing post-9/11 security needs with practical measures and convenience for travelers.

The calls for security screening for airport vendor employees is not new: Both branches of Congress have pushed for the measures since the Sept. 11 attacks, but the TSA resisted, saying that background checks conducted by individual vendors were sufficient. The American Association of Airport Executives opposed the measures also. The rationale for the change, three years on, is not clear: TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield Jr. cited security reasons when he declined to explain to the Washington Post the motive or the specific language of the directive; he said only that it was issued as part of an ongoing TSA review of airport security.

In its own way, the TSA's registered traveler program is equally controversial: It has drawn fire from both the corporate security community and politicians, who say it is a loophole in airport security procedures or that it requires passengers to give up too much personal information to authorities.

Initially, the TSA is making the pilot program available only to travelers who fly more than once a week, though it later could be expanded to other applicants. Those who register their personal information will not go through mainstream security checks, but will be screened in a separate line. Secondary checks will not be conducted unless the TSA's Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS, software raises a red flag -- typically if a traveler purchases a ticket with cash or pre-purchases a one-way ticket.

Though these measures likely will be welcomed by frequent fliers, when coupled with its July 7 directive, it is clear that the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have a fight on their hands: They are attempting simultaneously to maintain their own relevance without crippling the airline industry with cumbersome security processes.

For the TSA, this need has been made all the more urgent by a congressional campaign to re-privatize airport security screeners and the loss of many security check personnel at smaller U.S. airports. And for the DHS, it comes in the wake of revelations about shortcomings in the air defense system: A congressional panel determined July 8 that the DHS was not in a position to interdict the plane of a former Kentucky governor that violated restricted air space while en route to the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan, had those aboard had hostile intent.

Tightening security processes within the airports themselves logically is one way to mitigate this weakness -- but in the face of the competing requirements faced by the agencies, success is not assured.

=================

A friend forwarded this to me.
==========================

2003 Newspaper Photographer of the Year Rick Loomis. Rick has written about his experience in Fallujah which I have received via email and posted in full below. Also check out his exceptional images he took in Iraq here.

I finally tried to wash the Marine's bloodstains from my pants the other day.  It had been nine days since the battle and a daily dose of dirt and dust had all but masked what I knew lay beneath.

>From the relative comfort of "Dreamland", a reasonably secure U.S. base of operations just outside Fallouja, I swirled my pants around in square metal pan containing four inches of precious water. With each spin around the pan, the water turned a deeper brown. And as the stains of Sgt. Josue Magana's blood became more apparent, I thought back to the day he was shot.

At zero five A.M, just before dawn on April 26th, the Marines of Echo Company was ordered to take two homes on the northwestern edge of Fallouja.  For the prior three weeks, since Marines had first moved to cordon off city, there had been constant exchanges of gunfire between U.S. forces and insurgents in the area known as the Jolan Heights. After all, this was Fallouja, heart of the notorious Sunni Triangle, home to the root of U.S. occupation resistance.

The Marines had hoped that theirs would be a 'hearts and minds' mission leading up to the June 30 deadline to hand power over to Iraqis. It turned sour after four American contractors were gruesomely killed on March 31st. Insurgents hung two of their burned and mutilated bodies from a bridge that crosses the Euphrates River.  And now the Marines found themselves in the position of battling Iraqi bodies instead of winning over Iraqi hearts and minds.


In their initial push into Fallouja, Marines fought to gain a toe hold in the city, and for Echo Company this consisted of three homes and a school, all within 300 meters of each other.  This was now Echo Company's base from which to do battle, and the company hoped to engage insurgents known to be operating in this city of 300,000.


Having gained their toehold, they worked to fortify their positions using sandbags, 24-hour a day watch posts, concertina wire and sniper positions. By the time I arrived to be embedded on the 22nd of April, the neighborhood around them was a ghost town. Most residents had fled the fighting, save for one blind Iraqi man next door whom was dutifully being fed by a Kurdish translator working for the Marines.

In the houses and school, Marines had parked themselves and their gear in every room. M-16 rifles delicately perched against the glass doors of a cupboard holding the family's finest dishware. The luckiest Marines claimed the couches; the rest sprawled out on the floors each night.

Walls that once separated neighbors were broken down to allow easy house-to-house access.  Doors were taken off their hinges and laid down to bridge the gaps between the roofs of the houses.

On the roof there were gun positions for M-240 machine guns, a larger .50 caliber machine gun and a Mark 19 grenade launcher.  Shoulder fired rockets were also stored on the roof for times of need.  Small 'mouse holes' were pounded out of the roof retaining wall allowing snipers to cover key positions as well, with the ability to pick off targets at great distances.

Through one such hole is a clear view down 'sniper alley.'  The remnants of battle are apparent.  A bullet-riddled car abandoned in the middle of the street.  Deep craters where parts of the road used to be.  Massive chunks of asphalt strewn everywhere and downed power lines sagging across the roadway.  The homes on either side were broken and battered by gunfire.  The stench of rotting cows and dogs, who met their deaths in a crossfire, could be detected if the breeze was just right. Nothing stirred on this street anymore.

Also in view from the sniper's nests, just across the cemetery, were objectives A and B, the targets of that tragic morning's raid. The two homes, known as A and B, had been in view for weeks, and it was from there that Marine commanders perceived a daily threat.

       *     *     *

One reinforced platoon of Marines crept through the darkened streets, lining both sides.  Only a wail could be heard breaking the silence in the distance - it was time for the Muslim call to prayer. Useless with my camera in the darkness, I fumbled to record the ominous sound with a digital recorder.  It was too dark to see the buttons so I gave up - the sum of me nothing but a complete liability at this point.

Up ahead, two squads of men were breaching the homes, breaking down doors to clear the buildings, which were directly across the street from each other.  Suspected of being used by insurgents, they approached with caution but discovered they were empty.  Marines poured inside objectives A and B, taking up defensive positions and on every floor, a set of eyes on guard from nearly every window. Dawn had come and the cobalt blue sky began to brighten.

It was all starting to seem too easy when an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) smacked the front of the house with a thunderous crash. The walls trembled. If the Marines had started to relax, it put them on alert that someone knew where they were. The Marines returned fire with their M-16's and then there was silence.

Once they knew their presence had been discovered, the men further prepared their defensive postures. Mattresses were upturned to cover windows, bags of rice stacked on top of one another to slow speeding bullets headed into open doors. Holes were sledge hammered through the walls at strategic points to make sniper positions.  Then, nothing. Sitting. Waiting . Resting. Drinking.  Eating. Nothing.  No shots. No enemy sightings.  Nothing.

Five hours had passed since the start of the mission and Marines were sprawled out on the floor, catching sleep when they could. I visited the roof briefly to eye the sniper positions. Then down to the bottom floor, looking in on sleeping Marines. Returning to the second floor, I spent many minutes trying to perfectly capture on camera the reflection of a Marine in a bullet -riddled mirror.  I too, was bored.


The sleeping Marines stirred a bit as shots rang off in the distance.  I sneaked a peek out the window, looking across the graveyard toward the mosque. Nothing.  There were reports of seven insurgents, scratch that, six insurgents (one was reported over the radio to have been shot by a U.S. sniper) in the area of the mosque. An incoming mortar round hit the house adjacent  to the one we are in and a fire starts to burn from within.

The Marine commanders decided that one squad, about 12 men, should respond to the mosque to the shooting from the mosque area and engage the remaining insurgents. So out of the houses and into the graveyard they flooded, keeping space between them as they slowly moved toward the minaret and the mosque on the other side of the cemetery.  The minaret loomed high above, offering an unobstructed view and perfect firing position for a sniper to shoot down on approaching Marines.  Short bursts of running, two or three men at a time, edged them closer to the mosque. They stopped for a time to take cover behind headstones, their eyes darted between the windows of the mosque and the minaret overlooking them.

There was no movement or firing as they made their approach.  It was bright and hot and quiet.  Marines quickly moved in to secure the mosque and the minaret, searching hopelessly for the reported insurgents. Curious, I looked around myself but found no shell casings left behind;  no blood and no body. There was only a partially damaged mosque, curtains moving in the breeze that was coming through blown out windows. I began to wonder if anyone had ever been there.

Nonetheless, the complex was thoroughly searched and the men trod back through the cemetery and made their way back to the two houses they had taken in the pre-dawn hours.  Things were still quiet at the houses and I felt much less exposed than in the moments prior as I had trailed Marines around and over graves at an accelerated pace. Running thorough a cemetery seems a violation of those lying beneath. I was glad to be back in the house.


It was about the moment I felt the most secure and had the least suspicion that the mission would get any more dangerous when all hell broke loose.  The Marines were under a coordinated, full-scale attack.  Insurgents had crawled and snuck into positions covering about three hundred degrees on all sides. They let loose a continuous barrage on the house.  Marines scrambled to their feet to fight back the ambush. "Roger, we are taking heavy fire. You need to orient to east, over the mosque complex," the confident company commander Capt. Douglas Zembiec barked into the radio without a hint of panic in his voice.

The sound was deafening at times. The rumble of machine guns and the returning loud crack of AK-47 rounds flying toward the building pounded in my eardrums. In the next room a Marine fired his machine gun from the second story window. I was watching the seriousness on his face as he fought the onslaught.  At that moment a flash of fiery orange enveloped the room.  An RPG had scored a direct hit at head level of the Marine I was photographing. So sudden and violent it was, I only have a blurry frame to serve as a reminder.  Only the wall of the home saved him from certain death.  He was shocked however, screaming as he was knocked to the ground, stunned from the concussion and deafening roar of the grenade.

He took only a moment to regain composure and assess his emotions. He was clearly pissed.  He stood back in the window and began firing with more determination than before.  It wasn't long until another RPG crashed into the same position. Insurgent forces were well aware of the Marine's position and were determined to score a kill. The barrels of two M-240 machine guns became so hot from the rapid succession of fire that they melted and seized.

On the roof, another battle was raging. Marines on the roof were in such close contact with the insurgents that the two were lobbing hand grenades back and forth. Shrapnel was shooting all over the roof tearing into Marines fighting there. At least one pickup truck full of 15 to 20 fighters was seen heading into the fight.


At this time, another Marine who had rushed out to a second floor balcony moments earlier yelled, "I'm hit." One of several thousands of rounds fired in the opening 30 minutes of the battle had found its target.  He gave an agonizing scream and yelled again that he was hit, hoping someone would rescue him.

Sgt. Nunez threw open the door and rushed out, returning moments later dragging Sgt. Magana across the floor by the grab handle on the back of his flak jacket.  Confusion ensued.  He was eventually dragged into the room where I was hunkered down. He had been shot through the back and was in severe pain.

While corpsman were concentrating on his injury, I could see that he was beginning to fade.  His eyes were empty and began to close. He was mumbling about a letter from his daughter and I'm sure he began to concede that his life could end right there on the floor.

I was compelled to grab his hand and assured him that he would see his daughter once again.  I looked him straight in his eye, telling him to look back at me, then squeeze my hand so I knew he was still with me. It was all I knew to do.

I felt caught between being an objective journalist and responding as a human being.  I apologized to a news crew that was sharing this horror with , "I have to be a human first,"  I heard myself saying awkwardly. It was a lesson I had learned early on from a photo professor that had a profound effect on my life.

I shot only a few frames to depict the scene; some right as he was being dragged into the room and then some after he began to stabilize. I felt satisfied that I had both done my job and also done what was right in a potentially life and death situation.

Rounds were cracking off all sides of the building and now a second wounded person made his way to the same doorway. Everything seemed to be unraveling.  Here were a group of men, 37 of them in all, that I viewed as courageous warriors, well-trained and well- equipped, and they seemed to be falling one by one right in front of me.  I began to wonder:  is this it? What if, by sheer numbers and the great desire of those opposed to them, these Marines and myself were about to be gunned down, right here.  The stairway to the bottom floor was unguarded from my view. I wondered if all the Marines on the bottom floor were fighting to their last bullets.

For an instant, I imagined the following scenario.  As I peered from the doorway, insurgents with AK's are rushing up the stairs, firing at those working on the wounded Sgt. Magana as he lay there in a lifeless state. Three easy kills for the insurgents. What would I do? Would I cower onto the ground, scream "sahafi, sahafi", meaning "journalist, journalist," and hope that at that instant I could separate myself from the Marines.  Would I find myself, the barrel of a gun pushing into my skin, begging for my life?  Would I be killed instantly, no distinction made, in a hail of gunfire. Or would I pick up a weapon myself and fight for my own life and for the rest of those around me.

These decisions are guttural, instinctive. Every move seems to be analyzed in some split second thought process. When the fight was raging, I was making decisions, based on saving my life and doing my job - in that order.

But at that moment I knew that photographing a gunfight can be like photographing a triple play in baseball.  While it's certainly a dramatic moment - a photograph sometimes can't serve to capture the essence of the drama you are witnessing. The pictures of the men shooting out of the window in the next room conveyed little of the life and death intensity of the moment, the sound of gunfire, the smell, the gulping sense of mortality.  They could have just as well been during a moment when they were shooting at tin cans in the alleyway.

I knew the bullets were aimed at people who were in turn shooting back at them. But my photographs did not depict the intensity that ultimate sense of risk. But was I going to make a target of myself when at least two men were already shot and RPG's were bouncing off the walls as fast as the men shooting them could reload.


The short answer was no, I would not risk it all for one frame. At this moment I thought of my mom, and how shattered she would be getting that phone call that no mother wants.  It would be early morning, in a tiny northern Michigan town, the phone ringing as my mom prepared for work that day.  Someone I don't even know would probably deliver the call.  No one frame was not worth it.

Just being in this country as a journalist is an elevated risk, I thought to myself.  And here I was feeling more exposed to danger than at any point in my career.

A momentary series of thoughts, contemplating the immediate future for myself and those around me, and I was snapped back to the reality of the moment I was already in.

The house was still taking a serious pounding, there were wounded in both the buildings and the insurgents were still bringing a vicious attack. Then I heard a familiar and welcoming sound----two tanks rumbling up the alley. I peered out the only window in that second floor room to photograph them. They were our ride out. But something was terribly wrong.  The main gun on one of the tanks was pointed right toward our window. For a split second I thought, "Oh shit, they think WE are the insurgents and they are going to fire on us!"

Friendly fire is a sad fact of warfare and I never believed it possible until I saw it with my own eyes during the march up from Kuwait just 13 months earlier. I wondered if the tanks had been talked onto the right spot, if they knew that those were 'friendlies' staring at them from the window above. I stepped back into the depth of the room, away from the window. A useless move as a main gun tank round would surely obliterate us all no matter where we were standing.

 "OK, we are punching out of here now, and we are punching out hard! We are getting everybody out of here ASAP!" yelled one of the commanders standing on the second floor. The tanks were giving us the time and firepower needed to run back down the same alley we had crept through in the pre-dawn hours earlier that day.

The call was made to bring everyone and everything from the top floors down to the first floor.  At the same time, the wounded from the building to the north were filtering into our courtyard.  Four Marines carried the limp body of Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin into the courtyard. He would be listed as "killed in action" from the fight that day.  His heroics would earn him official recognition for his actions - albeit posthumously.  Austin, an only son, was shot multiple times in the chest as he attempted to throw a hand grenade from one rooftop to another.  Making that throw was the last effort in his life.

Sgt. Magana was already lying on a broken door in the second floor bedroom. The others used it as a litter to carry him downstairs. It was creaking to the point of breaking but made the trip to the bottom floor. Everyone else cleared the rooms and the roof and began to gather in the foyer.

It was a bloody mess. Magana was lying on the door, a look of fear now appearing in his eyes.  And Lance Cpl. Lucas Sielstad, merely 18, a wiry but tough Marine by all accounts, had bandages on his right arm soaked through with blood. His pants were ripped by medical sheers from the waist down to treat a shrapnel wound on his leg and he was bleeding from his lip.  He looked tired and stunned, but there he was, still standing.

Another Marine came down from the roof with a haphazardly tied rag wrapped around his bleeding head. He was suffering from wounds in at least a couple other places.  Still, he was calm and alert, and oddly a bit saddened by not being able to finish the fight.

The move to evacuate called for us to trace our steps back the same way we came. One by one, we hustled through the door into the courtyard. For a moment, I felt like a skydiver taking his first leap out the door of the plane. I felt so vulnerable out there, wishing for the cover of darkness that had offered some protection earlier that morning.

The courtyard was hemmed in by walls 7 feet-high shrouding us from view to anyone on the streets outside.  But the Marines were an easy target for gunmen on the second story or rooftops of any of the surrounding houses.


Crouching low and near the wall, my instinct was to run for it. To break free and run, not wait behind all the Marines in front of me exiting in some sort of formation. We were all bunched up in the courtyard and it felt like time was of the essence for getting out of this.

What seemed like hours passed before my turn to exit was in reality probably less than two minutes.  One by one we filed out and hustled down the street.  I did not know exactly from what direction the firing was coming from - or how much was incoming or outgoing. I just knew it was heavy and I wanted to get back to a place of relative comfort.

My gear seemed so heavy and awkward as I approached the gate leading to the street.  And in addition, I was also asked to carry several 203-grenade rounds in a blood-soaked pouch that was taken off a wounded Marine. But when the two Marines in front of me finally moved, I bolted out behind them.

Along the wall we ran beside, about halfway down the block there was a 4-foot gap that offered anyone in the houses to the west a clear shot at us. Any sniper would have to anticipate when a Marine might pass this gap but it made me worry. A scene from the movie "Enemy at the Gates" popped into my head, which depicted celebrated WWII Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev popping off targets at will. Why a movie scene found its way to the front of my head I don't know.

What I do know is that when it was my turn to expose myself for that half second, I hesitated my step so as not to pass with exact same frequency as the Marines ahead of me. The well-trained and well-disciplined sniper waiting for the perfect shot was a figment of my imagination.  But the rest of the gunfire all around was real.

We were almost home free, as we had successfully run the gauntlet down the entire block.  I could see the school in my view, less than two hundred meters away. When I crossed the street there were three Marines struggling to carry a wounded comrade the rest of the way to the school. One of them motioned me over as I approached their position, slowing my run. He asked me to help carry him the wounded man. For a split second I thought, "Are you crazy, my job right now is to run like hell so I can live to do the job another day."

The split second happened about the time I was grabbing the injured Marine by his right shoulder and arm.  Along with three others we ran him to the schoolhouse, a fairly fortified structure.  His legs were inside the door two steps up, and I tried to ease him in but he was being pulled too fast from the other end. He escaped my grasp and the grasp of the Marine carrying his other arm. His limp head hit the concrete step with a thud, the least of his problems at the moment.

Several more Marines piled into the schoolhouse. The machine guns on the roof were already wailing away with everything they had.  With all the Marines piled back inside the building their fields of fire were clear and they were engaging everything in sight. Several more RPG's pounded the school, as did small arms fire from AK-47's.  It felt much safer in the school, with its two-foot thick walls and sandbagged shooting positions covering every corner.

The scene on the bottom floor was that of pandemonium, resembling an ant nest after it's been disturbed.  One Marine was running around barking orders "We need more M-16 rounds on the second floor!" Another was shocked, helmet off and head in his hands. The wounded were piled up until a transport Humvee could get through to get the rest of them out. I took a moment to catch my breath and take stock of everything that had happened up to that point.  Pure adrenaline had been pumping through my veins for two hours, and my body needed a break.

The wounded were hauled a kilometer or so away, fifteen in all, to a field hospital, which was nearly overwhelmed with the volume. Commanders started sorting out the chaos in the school, with their main mission being to keep their gun positions humming. Suppressive fire hammering enemy positions kept any insurgent advance at bay.

When the platoon stationed in a house 300 meters away gathered in the doorway of the school to make their run back, I joined them. One last run to safety.


As we approached our position I noticed something was missing from the scene. It had marked my landscape for the week that I had been in Fallouja. The minaret, the same one that loomed overhead as we ran through the graveyard earlier that morning, had completely vanished.  I was told later on that is was leveled by a tank round after a sniper was reported to be shooting from it.

Inside the house it was not the same optimistic group of people I had been with the day before. All of them looked exhausted. These men had seen battle, and they wore these looks in their eyes. It had silenced them for the moment and I gathered that it had changed some of them forever. They had seen a young man die that day, one of their own, in a brutal death that left his body torn and bloody. They had watched another of their comrades lose an arm from an enemy hand grenade.

It would be awhile before these men would laugh again. I knew these men to be tough and ready, but this shook them at their foundations. The physical and emotional scars would not be quick to heal.

As word of the battle and its damage spread, a Navy chaplain made a visit to the men of Echo Company that afternoon. The solemn faces of over fifty men crowded the room; at its center was simply a mound of dirt.  As the chaplain finished delivering words of encouragement, each Marine pushed a lit candle into place into the mound.  Soon the dank room was filled with candlelight and void of people as they withdrew to collect their thoughts.  I shot just one frame of the last man placing his candle.  He bowed his head in prayer as he did so.

That day I spoke with their Captain, Douglas Zembiec. From a roof overlooking the houses we were in that morning he said, "If is wasn't for the valor of those young Marines we would still be over there. They fought like lions. They kept their cool and evacuated the wounded. I get tears of pride when I think of them fighting like that." I could barely converse with him as two Marine Cobra helicopters fired their 3-barrel 20mm guns into those same houses. The clacking roar of the machine gun and firing of hellfire missiles surely demoralizing as well as demolishing any insurgents who might have been rejoicing about the reclaimed position.. Zembiec later added that,  "I've ordered men to their deaths, and that's a cross I have to bare."

I spoke with the mother of Lance Cpl. Austin several days after he died.  It took awhile to get the courage up to ring her at her home in New Mexico. There was nothing I could do to bring her son home. Would a phone call from someone in the media infuriate her?  All I had to offer her was a photo of her son reading the mail from home that I had shot the day before he died.  I thought she might want that as a memory of her son in a place she had perhaps imagined, but would never see.

She received my call and my unpolished speech about her son. "Hello ma'am," I said, "I was with your son on the day he died." She told me how proud she was of him and I started to break down when she told me how if she were there that day she would have carried his limp body out of the house herself.  She wanted to have any photo I had, to gather any scrap if information, conversations about him, anything she could hold onto. He was her only son.

A few days later I called Sgt. Magana as he lay in a hospital bed in Bethesda, Maryland. He spoke only in a whisper, and sounded very weak.  I was sure he did not remember me holding his hand or talking about his daughter but he seemed appreciative that someone would call him from Iraq.  He asked that I tell his comrades he was keeping them in his prayers while they were still on the battlefield. I told him I would.

Those Marines in battle were not the only ones certain to be changed by that day.  I liken my desires as a journalist to be similar to the way I like to live my life.  I want to get close enough to the edge of the abyss to look in but I don't want to go over. As I knelt over that square pan of water, scrubbing my pants vigorously, the bloodstains of that day did not fade away.  They now serve to remind me just how easy it can be to slip over the edge.

Guardian Angles
 
By Nikki Usher, Times Staff Writer


They were wearing their trademark red berets, white shirts and combat boots. But on Hollywood Boulevard, amid the throngs of tourists and street performers impersonating Marilyn Monroe, Superman and Batman, they barely stood out.

"I want a picture of you guys!" said Mike Cow, a tourist from San Diego. He turned to a bystander and added: "They're weird. I've never seen them before."


It was perhaps not the most auspicious reintroduction for the Guardian Angels, who this summer returned to the streets of Los Angeles for the first time in a decade.

The volunteer citizens brigade, using martial arts and citizen's arrests, gained national attention in the 1980s by patrolling inner-city neighborhoods that are plagued by crime.

While the Angels made their greatest mark in New York City, the group also had several hundred members in seven branches that patrolled neighborhoods from Venice to the San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s and early '90s. They left amid complaints from police and after several members had been attacked ? one fatally.

Back then, the Los Angeles Police Department "would treat us like we were the Bloods or the Crips. And since the police didn't respect us, the gangs didn't," said Curtis Sliwa, the group's founder.

Now they're hoping for a renaissance. The group has come back to a Los Angeles different from the one it left, where community policing has taken root and crime rates are generally lower. Sliwa said the Angels have changed with the times, working more closely with police and conducting more training for volunteers.

Sliwa said the group decided to come back to Southern California because of LAPD Chief William J. Bratton, who worked with the group when he was chief of the New York Police Department in the early '90s.

Bratton, who became L.A.'s chief two years ago, has offered a conditional welcome to the Guardian Angels. He said his experiences with the group in New York were largely positive.

But he's reluctant to see the Angels in some L.A. neighborhoods. He said patrolling Los Angeles is much more challenging because the city is spread out and there are fewer officers to back up the Angels. Moreover, he said, the group's conspicuous presence and aggressive tactics could backfire in the city's strongest gang enclaves.

"If they wear those red berets in the wrong area, the gangs will shoot them in a second," he said.

So far, about a dozen Guardian Angels have begun regular patrols along Hollywood Boulevard and at MacArthur Park.

Bratton said he's comfortable with the group's presence in Hollywood, a tourist district that already has strong police staffing.

"The visibility and eyes and ears they provide is fine, but just don't do it in areas where they are going to be in great risk and danger," the chief said.

Others aren't so sure.

L.A. City Councilman Bernard C. Parks, the police chief from 1997 to 2002, said that he couldn't support the Angels, and that professional police officers should be the only ones doing law enforcement work.

"It's hard enough to train police and keep them abiding by the law," he said. "These were people we knew nothing about."

Since the Guardian Angels left Los Angeles, the LAPD has tried to work more closely with community leaders to identify and target high-crime areas. Los Angeles also established a network of neighborhood councils that have a voice in law enforcement and other city policies.

But the Angels have yet to establish ties with the councils, according to community leaders in Hollywood and at MacArthur Park, who said they were surprised to hear that the group was back in town.

Sylvia Valle, a MacArthur Park neighborhood activist, said she worries that the patrols might make the situation in her neighborhood west of downtown less stable.

"There are four gangs in the radius of two blocks. This is just going to add fuel to the fire," she said.

Hollywood community activist Ferris Wehbe worked with the Angels when they helped patrol the Yucca Street area in the 1980s. He said that effort was effective because the group worked with neighborhood groups. This time, however, he doesn't see that partnership.

"We don't really need them here," he said. "The reason they worked in Hollywood was that they were connected to what the community was doing and really knew us?. I have had no indication of that happening this time."

In the 1980s, when the group was most active in Los Angeles, it had a decidedly mixed record.

It garnered praise when members patrolled the 1984 Summer Olympics. But a few years later, Sliwa was arrested for allegedly clubbing a man in an area of Hollywood the group had sealed off in an unofficial drug sweep. In 1993, in one of several attacks on group members, Angel Glenn Doser was shot to death when he tried to stop a robbery in Hollywood.

The Guardian Angels of the past, Sliwa and others said, could be aggressive and intimidating. They'd march into high-crime areas and ask tough questions, look for confrontations and try to break up drug deals.

"They were just these young guys and women, many of them ex-gang members, looking to rough someone up, get into a little trouble and feel like they were on the side of the right," said Todd Clear, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

The L.A. group has so far been drawn from veteran Southern California Angels and a few new recruits. There's a mix of young and old, and a few women. Sliwa says they're better trained than the Angels of old.

Under new policies, recruits undergo three months of standardized training, during which they learn martial arts and how to make citizen's arrests. They are also subjected to verbal abuse to see how they respond. Guardian Angels are not armed, though many carry handcuffs and cellphones.

Though they've been absent from Los Angeles, the Guardian Angels have remained a force in other cities, mostly on the East Coast. In Washington, D.C., members are working so closely with police, patrolling gang and drug areas, that the department gave them police radios.

Sliwa said the Angels want to pick "mild" targets in Los Angeles, building a record of success, before going into more hostile gang areas. So far, he said, members have encountered little action.

During a recent evening patrol in Hollywood, members didn't make any arrests or break up any drug deals, but they did help an elderly woman and her caretakers push a wheelchair over the curb at Hollywood Boulevard and Ivar Avenue.

An appreciative Vernadette Rebold smiled from her chair and thanked them. "We remember you from 20 years ago, in New York," she said.

Patrol leader Dave Eagle shrugs when asked about the lack of public memory about their Los Angeles days.

"Sure, we're remembered for New York, and maybe people don't remember us here, but we were here and we are here," said Eagle, who was with the group during its Los Angeles heyday. "It's hard to compete with where you started."

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

The IRR: Emptying the Cupboard
July 06, 2004
By George Friedman


Summary


The U.S. Department of Defense is now activating the Army's Individual Ready Reserve for combat duty. Given the inherent problems associated with such a move, it is clear that U.S. war planners were caught in a trap: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "revolution in warfare" has not evolved as expected.


Analysis


On July 6, 5,600 members of the U.S. Army's Individual Ready Reserve will start to receive notices that they are being recalled to active duty. Members of the IRR are generally soldiers who have completed their primary active-duty assignments. They are not part of the regular Reserves or the National Guard, but are simply kept on a list as available for recall. In general, this has been simply a formality. IRR members have been called up on only two occasions: Once was in 1968, following the Tet Offensive; the other was in 1991, in the context of Operation Desert Storm. There have already been some smaller call-ups of essential specialties, but this is the first large-scale mobilization. The Army has indicated that there likely will be more.


The recall is neither routine, nor what the Army would like to be doing.


First, the reactivated reservists will have been out of the Army for several years. They might not be in appropriate mental or physical condition for a tour in a combat zone -- where, according to the Army, most are going to be sent. Since the current plan is to keep them on active duty for no more than a year, there is little time for an extensive conditioning program if the troops are to spend much time in-theater. These are not the forces commanders want to lead if they have a choice.


Second, although this call-up might fix the Army's quantitative problem in the short run, it can wreak havoc in the long run. The volunteer army depends, obviously, on the willingness of people to join. That rests on a large number of variables, one of which is the idea that the volunteer can control his term of service, building it into his or her long-term plans. It has always been understood, in the fine print, that calling up the IRR was possible, and soldiers who are being recalled cannot complain that they did not know -- they can complain only that they did not expect it to happen. However, people who have already served and completed their tours -- and are busy with careers, children and mortgages -- are now going to be sent into combat zones. Their younger siblings, cousins and friends are going to be watching the chaos in their lives and could well decide that, while they would be prepared to serve a given term and even have that term extended during war, giving the Army control over their lives -- and those of their families -- for years afterward is simply not worth it.


The Army, the Defense Department and the Office of the President are all acutely aware of this problem. Nevertheless, they have chosen to go this route. Given the inherent defects of the choice and its obvious potential cost, they did not make this move frivolously; this was something that was absolutely necessary. That said, the question now is this: How did the U.S. Army get into the position of having to make this choice?


The call-up of the IRR in 1968 came in the midst of a crisis surrounding Vietnam. The United States had miscalculated troop requirements and found itself short of critical specialties that it could not make up from the pool of available conscripts. No one planned for the circumstances that presented themselves in 1968 -- or for those that prompted Desert Storm either. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait left little time to redesign the Army's force structure, and by 1991 it was dealing with a surprise. The IRR has been utilized twice, both times in the face of the unexpected. Sometimes it was mismanagement, sometimes reality, but always it was an attempt to cope with the unexpected -- and unwanted -- event. The 2004 call-up obviously fits into this category. The issue is what was unanticipated, and why it was not expected.


The Sept. 11 attacks certainly were unanticipated. This cannot be disputed, although whether they should have been is going to be an interminable debate. However, this large-scale activation of the IRR is taking place not six months after Sept. 11, but almost three years later. That indicates a much broader and deeper surprise than the attacks themselves.


The first surprise had to do with the nature of warfare. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was an advocate of what has been called "the revolution in warfare." This concept is the belief that as technology of all sorts comes online, the need for massed armies will decline. Few would debate that a revolution in warfare is under way. The issue is whether it has matured to a sufficient degree that policymakers can depend on it, or whether it still has several generations to go.


Throughout his tenure, Rumsfeld has been highly critical of the Army. He felt that it was too heavy, in the sense of relying on armor and artillery -- supply hogs that take a long time to get to the theater of operations. Rumsfeld's view of the war against al Qaeda was that it would require very small, very fast and very lethal forces to execute. Rumsfeld was right, but he failed to factor in two things.


The first was that while the deployment of small, fast, lethal forces potentially could take out al Qaeda units and could be used to destabilize nation-states, those units could not be used to take control of those nations. There is a huge difference between shattering a government and governing a country. Indeed, there is little value in destabilizing a nation unless it can be pacified; otherwise, destabilization opens the door to al Qaeda, rather than shutting down the network. Therefore, insufficient thought was given to the problem of pacification -- not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan. Denying terrain to al Qaeda means being present on the ground in sufficient numbers to make a difference. Rumsfeld constantly tried to find a way to transfer responsibility for the ground to an indigenous government -- failing to recognize that the high-tech destruction of the state creates a vacuum that either is filled with U.S. forces or left in chaos.


Rumsfeld focused on the first phase of the war: regime change. This phase was certainly amenable to the kind of war he favored. But the second phase -- regime construction -- is not at all influenced by the revolution in warfare. It requires a large security force -- and even that might not be enough. Rumsfeld's hostility toward the Army's cumbersome, traditional ways of doing things caused him to make a massive miscalculation: Rather than building up Army ground forces in 2002 and 2003, he restricted the growth of the Army, thereby leaving it short of troops for the prolonged second phase of the war.


Rumsfeld's second surprise was a persistent underestimation of the enemy. In particular, he seemed to genuinely believe that with the occupation of Baghdad, all organized resistance would cease. The idea that there would be people in Iraq who, out of support for the Baathist regime or simple patriotism, would resist the American occupation in an extended and effective way seems never to have been factored into plans. Indeed, when Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was very much concerned about extended resistance, argued before the war that in excess of 200,000 troops would be needed in Iraq for an extended period, Rumsfeld attacked him as being alarmist. Rumsfeld failed to plan for occupying a country of 25 million people or policing a city of 5 million people -- both in the face of resistance, albeit relatively light resistance.


Occupying a country or a city takes manpower. That is a requirement -- though not necessarily the only one -- for success. Rumsfeld's view of warfare did not take into account the complexities of occupation. The tension between Rumsfeld and the Army created a situation in which dramatically pyramiding responsibilities for the Army were not met with equivalent increases in manpower.


This is the first global war the United States has waged in which neither the command structure of the armed forces nor the force structure evolved dramatically in the opening years. The fact that there has not been a doubling or tripling in size of the U.S. Army is startling. In spite of the fact that it is involved in a variety of combat operations in remote areas of the world -- and that the enemy can choose to open new theaters of operation that are unexpected (such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan) -- the armed forces have not grown substantially in three years.


Rumsfeld apparently thought the war would be easier than it has been, and he believed that technology would be more effective than it possibly could be. The need to occupy, pacify and govern hostile nations was not built into the war plan -- nor is it there now. The fact is that the call-ups from the IRR are Band-Aids on a fundamental issue: The United States is involved in a land war in Asia again, and it is trying to fight that war with a military -- especially an Army -- that was designed for peacetime in the 1990s. It cannot possibly stretch.


The central conceptual problem in Vietnam was that the United States did not want to spend its resources on doing the things that might give it an opportunity to win the war. Having insufficient resources, the United States simply decided that they were sufficient.


In Vietnam, the military had recourse to a draft. It did not work very well. Not only did it create deep social tension between those who served and those who did not, but also a two-year term was not sufficient to master most of the specialties of warfare -- including rifleman skills. Between two years of service and a one-year tour in Vietnam, the military lost its people just when they were learning to do their jobs. The draft -- particularly as it was structured during the Vietnam era -- was the failure point, not the solution.


Two-year conscription is simply too short a period of time to master the specialties the military needs now. Today's military does not consist of cannon fodder, but of highly trained specialists who need two years to begin becoming proficient at their jobs. Moreover, another draft in which half the eligible candidates were exempt would rip the United States apart. Universal conscription creates too large a manpower pool. It creates more problems than it solves. What it needs is an expansion of the volunteer force.


For that, very large sums of money are needed, making it attractive to choose the military as a profession. The problem is that the United States is out of time. The time for this expansion should have been early 2002, when it became clear that al Qaeda would not be easily defeated and that other military campaigns would be coming. Had the Bush administration asked Congress for sufficient money to expand the volunteer Army, large numbers of well-trained troops would be coming out of the chute just about now.


No such request was made. Rumsfeld ignored Army requests for increased manpower, focusing instead on surgical tools for regime change. The force structure did not undergo a quantum expansion. As a result, when the worst-case rather than the best-case scenario came to pass in Iraq -- guerrilla war -- the United States was unprepared for it. It had to reach into the IRR for a few thousand men. The military is, in effect, cannibalizing itself, using up its reserves. Since this war is not likely to end soon, and the IRR is not a bottomless well, it is clear that something will have to be done.

Copyrights 2004 - Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://jihadwatch.org

If true, this is evil, wicked, mean, nasty, fascist and Orwellian.--Crafty
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http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078

LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER
Bush to screen population for mental illness
Sweeping initiative links diagnoses to treatment with specific drugs

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: June 21, 2004
5:00 p.m. Eastern

? 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

President Bush plans to unveil next month a sweeping mental health initiative that recommends screening for every citizen and promotes the use of expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs favored by supporters of the administration.

The New Freedom Initiative, according to a progress report, seeks to integrate mentally ill patients fully into the community by providing "services in the community, rather than institutions," the British Medical Journal reported.

Critics say the plan protects the profits of drug companies at the expense of the public.

The initiative began with Bush's launch in April 2002 of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, which conducted a "comprehensive study of the United States mental health service delivery system."

The panel found that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed" and recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children.

The commission said, "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders."

Schools, the panel concluded, are in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.

The commission recommended that the screening be linked with "treatment and supports," including "state-of-the-art treatments" using "specific medications for specific conditions."

The Texas Medication Algorithm Project, or TMAP, was held up by the panel as a "model" medication treatment plan that "illustrates an evidence-based practice that results in better consumer outcomes."

The TMAP -- started in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from the pharmaceutical industry, the University of Texas and the mental health and corrections systems of Texas -- also was praised by the American Psychiatric Association, which called for increased funding to implement the overall plan.

But the Texas project sparked controversy when a Pennsylvania government employee revealed state officials with influence over the plan had received money and perks from drug companies who stand to gain from it.

Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General says in his whistleblower report the "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that developed the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab."

Jones points out, according to the British Medical Journal, companies that helped start the Texas project are major contributors to Bush's election funds. Also, some members of the New Freedom Commission have served on advisory boards for these same companies, while others have direct ties to TMAP.

Eli Lilly, manufacturer of olanzapine, one of the drugs recommended in the plan, has multiple ties to the Bush administration, BMJ says. The elder President Bush was a member of Lilly's board of directors and President Bush appointed Lilly's chief executive officer, Sidney Taurel, to the Homeland Security Council.

Of Lilly's $1.6 million in political contributions in 2000, 82 percent went to Bush and the Republican Party.

Another critic, Robert Whitaker, journalist and author of "Mad in America," told the British Medical Journal that while increased screening "may seem defensible," it could also be seen as "fishing for customers."

Exorbitant spending on new drugs "robs from other forms of care such as job training and shelter program," he said.

However, a developer of the Texas project, Dr. Graham Emslie, defends screening.

"There are good data showing that if you identify kids at an earlier age who are aggressive, you can intervene ... and change their trajectory."



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Feeding the Minotaur
Our strange relationship with the terrorists continues.

As long as the mythical Athenians were willing to send, every nine years, seven maidens and seven young men down to King Minos's monster in the labyrinth, Athens was left alone by the Cretan fleet. The king rightly figured that harvesting just enough Athenians would remind them of their subservience without leading to open rebellion ? as long as somebody impetuous like a Theseus didn't show up to wreck the arrangement.

 
Ever since the storming of the Tehran embassy in November 1979 we Americans have been paying the same sort of human tribute to grotesque Islamofascists. Over the last 25 years a few hundred of our own were cut down in Lebanon, East Africa, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, and New York on a semi-annual basis, even as the rules of the tribute to be paid ? never spoken, but always understood ? were rigorously followed.

In exchange for our not retaliating in any meaningful way against the killers ? addressing their sanctuaries in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, or Syria, or severing their financial links in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia ? Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and their various state-sanctioned kindred operatives agreed to keep the number killed to reasonable levels. They were to reap their lethal harvests abroad and confine them mostly to professional diplomats, soldiers, or bumbling tourists, whose disappearance we distracted Americans would predictably chalk up to the perils of foreign service and exotic travel.

Despite the occasional fiery rhetoric, both sides found the informal Minoan arrangement mutually beneficial. The terrorists believed that they were ever so incrementally, ever so insidiously eroding America's commitment to a pro-Western Middle East. We offered our annual tribute so that over the decades we could go from Dallas to Extreme Makeover and Madonna to Britney without too much distraction or inconvenience.

But then a greedy, over-reaching bin Laden wrecked the agreement on September 11. Or did he?

Murdering 3,000 Americans, destroying a city block in Manhattan, and setting fire to the Pentagon were all pretty tough stuff. And for a while it won fascists and their state sponsors an even tougher response in Afghanistan and Iraq that sent hundreds to caves and thousands more to paradise. And when we have gotten serious in the postbellum reconstruction, thugs like Mr. Sadr have backed down. But before we gloat and think that we've overcome our prior laxity and proclivity for appeasement, let us first make sure we are not still captives to the Minotaur's logic.

True, al Qaeda is now scattered, the Taliban and Saddam gone. But the calculus of a quarter century ? threaten, hit, pause, wait; threaten, hit, pause, wait ? is now entrenched in the minds of Middle Eastern murderers. Indeed, the modus operandi that cynically plays on Western hopes, liberalism, and fair play is gospel now to all sorts of bin Laden epigones ? as we have seen in Madrid, Fallujah, and Najaf.

Much has been written about our problems with this postmodern war and why we find it so difficult to fully mobilize our formidable military and economic clout to crush the terrorists and their patrons. Of course, we have no identifiable conventional enemy such as Hitler's Panzers; we are not battling a fearsome nation that defiantly declared war on us, such as Tojo's Japan; and we are no longer a depression-era, disarmed, impoverished United States at risk for our very survival. But then, neither Hitler nor Mussolini nor Tojo nor Stalin ever reached Manhattan and Washington.

So al Qaeda is both worse and not worse than the German Nazis: It is hardly the identifiable threat of Hitler's Wehrmacht, but in this age of technology and weapons of mass destruction it is more able to kill more Americans inside the United States. Whereas we think our fascist enemies of old were logical and conniving, too many of us deem bin Laden's new fascists unhinged ? their fatwas, their mythology about strong and weak horses, and their babble about the Reconquista and the often evoked "holy shrines" are to us dreamlike.

But I beg to differ somewhat.

I think the Islamists and their supporters do not live in an alternate universe, but instead are no more crazy in their goals than Hitler was in thinking he could hijack the hallowed country of Beethoven and Goethe and turn it over to buffoons like Goering, prancing in a medieval castle in reindeer horns and babbling about mythical Aryans with flunkies like Goebbels and Rosenberg. Nor was Hitler's fatwa ? Mein Kampf ? any more irrational than bin Laden's 1998 screed and his subsequent grainy infomercials. Indeed, I think Islamofascism is brilliant in its reading of the postmodern West and precisely for that reason it is dangerous beyond all description ? in the manner that a blood-sucking, stealthy, and nocturnal Dracula was always spookier than a massive, clunky Frankenstein.

Like Hitler's creed, bin Ladenism trumpets contempt for bourgeois Western society. If once we were a "mongrel" race of "cowboys" who could not take casualties against the supermen of the Third Reich, now we are indolent infidels, channel surfers who eat, screw, and talk too much amid worthless gadgetry, godless skyscrapers, and, of course, once again, the conniving Jews.

Like Hitler, bin Ladenism has an agenda: the end of the liberal West. Its supposedly crackpot vision is actually a petrol-rich Middle East free of Jews, Christians, and Westerners, free to rekindle spiritual purity under Sharia. Bin Laden's al Reich is a vast pan-Arabic, Taliban-like caliphate run out of Mecca by new prophets like him, metering out oil to a greedy West in order to purchase the weapons of its destruction; there is, after all, an Israel to be nuked, a Europe to be out-peopled and cowered, and an America to be bombed and terrorized into isolation. This time we are to lose not through blood and iron, but through terror and intimidation: televised beheadings, mass murders, occasional bombings, the disruption of commerce, travel, and the oil supply.

In and of itself, our enemies' ambitions would lead to failure, given the vast economic and military advantages of the West. So to prevent an all out, terrible response to these predictable cycles of killing Westerners, there had to be some finesse to the terrorists' methods. The trick was in preventing some modern Theseus from going into the heart of the Labyrinth to slay the beast and end the nonsense for good.

It was hard for the Islamic fascists to find ideological support in the West, given their agenda of gender apartheid, homophobia, religious persecution, racial hatred, fundamentalism, polygamy, and primordial barbarism. But they sensed that there has always been a current of self-loathing among the comfortable Western elite, a perennial search for victims of racism, economic oppression, colonialism, and Christianity. Bin Laden's followers weren't white; they were sometimes poor; they inhabited of former British and French colonies; and they weren't exactly followers of the no-nonsense Pope or Jerry Falwell. If anyone doubts the nexus between right-wing Middle Eastern fascism and left-wing academic faddishness, go to booths in the Free Speech area at Berkeley or see what European elites have said and done for Hamas. Middle Eastern fascist killers enshrined as victims alongside our own oppressed? That has been gospel in our universities for the last three decades.

Like Hitler, bin Ladenism grasped the advantages of hating the Jews. It has been 60 years since the Holocaust; memories dim. Israel is not poor and invaded but strong, prosperous, and unapologetic. It is high time, in other words, to unleash the old anti-Semitic infectious bacillus. Thus Zionists caused the latest Saudi bombings, just as they have poisoned Arab-American relations, just as neo-conservatives hijacked American policy, just as Feith, Perle, and Wolfowitz cooked up this war.

Finally, bin Laden understood the importance of splitting the West, just like the sultan of old knew that a Europe trisected into Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism would fight among itself rather than unite against a pan-Islamic foe. Hit the Spanish and bring in an anti-American government. Leave France and Germany alone for a time so they can blame the United States for mobilizing against a "nonexistent" threat, unleashing the age-old envy and jealously of the American upstart.

If after four years of careful planning, al Qaedists hit the Olympics in August, the terrorists know better than we do that most Europeans will do nothing ? but quickly point to the U.S. and scream "Iraq!" And they know that the upscale crowds in Athens are far more likely to boo a democratic America than they are a fascist Syria or theocratic Iran. Just watch.

In the European mind, and that of its aping American elite, the terrorists lived, slept, and walked in the upper aether ? never the streets of Kabul, the mosques of Damascus, the palaces of Baghdad, the madrassas of Saudi Arabia, or the camps of Iran. To assume that the latter were true would mean a real war, real sacrifice, and a real choice between the liberal bourgeois West and a Dark-Age Islamofascist utopia.

While all Westerners prefer the bounty of capitalism, the delights of personal freedom, and the security of modern technological progress, saying so and not apologizing for it ? let alone defending it ? is, well, asking a little too much from the hyper sophisticated and cynical. Such retrograde clarity could cost you, after all, a university deanship, a correspondent billet in Paris or London, a good book review, or an invitation to a Georgetown or Malibu A-list party.

Nearly three years after 9/11 we are in the strangest of all paradoxes: a war against fascists that we can easily win but are clearly not ready to fully wage. We have the best 500,000 soldiers in the history of civilization, a resolute president, and an informed citizenry that has already received a terrible preemptive blow that killed thousands.

Yet what a human comedy it has now all become.

The billionaire capitalist George Soros ? who grew fabulously wealthy through cold and calculating currency speculation, helping to break many a bank and its poor depositors ? now makes the moral equation between 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. For this ethicist and meticulous accountant, 3,000 murdered in a time of peace are the same as some prisoners abused by renegade soldiers in a time of war.

Recently in the New York Times I read two articles about the supposedly new irrational insensitivity toward Muslims and saw an ad for a book detailing how the West "constructed" and exaggerated the Islamic menace ? even as the same paper ran a quieter story about a state-sponsored cleric in Saudi Arabia's carefully expounding on the conditions under which Muslims can desecrate the bodies of murdered infidels.

Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats ? Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry ? employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. "Lies," "worst," and " betrayed" are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon ? precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. Our diplomats court the Arab League, which snores when Russians and Sudanese kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims but shrieks when we remove those who kill even more of their own. And a depopulating, entitlement-expanding Europe believes an American president, not bin Laden, is the greatest threat to world peace. Russia, the slayer of tens of thousands of Muslim Chechans and a big-time profiteer from Baathist loot, lectures the United States on its insensitivity to the new democracy in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East, we see the same old bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings, the obligatory pause, the faux negotiations, the lies ? and then, of course, the bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings...

No, bin Laden is quite sane ? but lately I have grown more worried that we are not.

Abu Sayyaf and the Strait of Malacca
June 11, 2004   2019 GMT

Summary

Abu Sayyaf threats against passenger ferries in the Philippines raise the security threat across the region because of the group's contacts and possible cooperation with Jemaah Islamiyah.

Analysis

Philippine security forces arrested a man in Manila on June 10 suspected of attempting to put explosive materials aboard a ship headed for Zamboanga City. Authorities believe the suspect was linked to Abu Sayyaf, a militant Islamist group involved in attacks against Philippine ferries. Abu Sayyaf is loosely affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and al Qaeda, and personnel and tactics employed in attacks in the Philippines could be transferred to the strategically critical Strait of Malacca.

The explosives cache -- 30,000 nonelectric blasting caps, a detonating cord nearly a mile long and 2.4 miles of timing fuse -- was found by a bomb-sniffing dog. The materials could have been part of a planned attack or merely transported for future use, but their seizure follows at least one possible attack against a Philippine ferry and another foiled attack.

The Abu Sayyaf claimed responsibility for an explosion and fire on a Manila ferry Feb. 26 that killed more than 100 people. Philippine authorities are still investigating the case and have not ruled the ferry blast an attack. The Philippine military, however, said in late April it uncovered a plot to bomb ferries in Mindanao after arresting four Muslim extremists. One of the militants in custody allegedly said the explosion on the Manila ferry occurred after he stuffed TNT into a television set he placed aboard the ship. At the end of May, security forces seized homemade bombs on the southern island of Jolo, saying they prevented an attack on a ferry bound for Zamboanga.

Because the Abu Sayyaf is not an isolated group but jointly trains with the JI, which extends across Southeast Asia, its tactics and personnel can be transferred to other areas. JI and Abu Sayyaf agents working together could employ tactics similar to those used in the Philippines to attack ferries leaving ports in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. But the threat is not limited to ferry passengers in the region. The danger to the Strait of Malacca, one the world's most vital waterways, is also increased.

The 500-mile strait between Malaysia and Indonesia is the major shipping artery between the Middle East and East Asia. As many as 1,000 ships pass through it every week -- including tankers carrying approximately 80 percent of Japan's oil supply and nearly 40 percent of China's oil supply.

Attacking a ferry, or even a handful of ferries, probably would not severely interrupt shipping in the deepwater strait, but the political and economic shock from such an attack would be substantial. World oil prices already have risen after militant attacks in Saudi Arabia -- the world's largest oil supplier. If ferries in the strait were targeted, a similar risk premium would be placed on oil shipments.

But ferries would not necessarily be the only targets. Tactics similar to those used for smuggling explosives onto ferries could be used to place a bomb on a large container ship or tanker. Scuttling such a vessel in one of the narrowest sections of the strait -- only 1.5 miles wide at its narrowest point -- could seriously interrupt shipments.
 
www.stratfor.com

A quick comment:  I am struck by Strat's lack of reference to the Iranian efforts to complete going nuke-- and by its comment about the US increasingly being seen as reacting to pressure instead of having a coherent plan.


......................................................................

Geopolitical Diary: Monday, June 7, 2004

The realignment in Iraq continues to have expected political repercussions
in the region, particularly in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi events are
getting more notice in the media, but the events in Iran are both more
interesting and more ominous. Over the long run, they could pose a problem to the United States in this war that is substantially less manageable than events in Saudi Arabia -- which is saying quite a lot.

Despite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's reserved endorsement of the new
Iraqi government, Iran continues to leak ominous news. A few weeks ago, there was word that Iranian suicide squads were being trained to attack Western targets. That story went quiet for a while, but this weekend, the leaks began again. Agence France Presse moved a story on Sunday about a group called the Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the World Islamic Movement -- citing an Iranian newspaper, Shargh, as the source. This time, the group had a spokesman, Mohammad Samadi, who reported that he has signed up 2,000 for the martyrs campaign. According to Samadi, "Suicide operations are the best way to fight the oppressors, and they have already shown their worth in Lebanon and during the war between Iran and Iraq."

Two things appear to be going on. First, the Iranians are letting the United
States know that al Qaeda is far from the only concern Washington will have if events continue along their current trend in Iraq. If Tehran is not going to get the deal leaders thought they had nailed down -- a neutral to
pro-Iranian government in Baghdad -- Iran will respond in exactly the way the United States doesn't want: opening a new front with suicide bombings.

Iran is also delivering a message to al Qaeda and Saudi fundamentalists.
These groups have criticized the Iranians and the Shia intensely for
collaborating with the United States, and Iran's radical credentials have
been tarnished. With these announcements, the Iranians are reasserting their claims as leaders of Islamic fundamentalism and reminding the Sunni Wahhabis that Iranians were carrying out such operations 20 years ago, while the Saudis were the ones collaborating with the Americans.

The leaks pose a difficult problem for the United States. If Washington
moves along the line of realignment with Sunnis in Iraq, it really could
wind up with another, even more dangerous version of al Qaeda. If the United States tries to placate the Iranians, it will have even more problems in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have been doing all the things the Americans have  asked for, and they are now virtually in a civil war because of it. If the United States moves to placate the Iranian Shia, that would not only be another nail in the coffin of the Saudi government, but would increase the sense in the region that the United States is now simply responding to pressure and no longer has a serious plan.

Meanwhile, Fawaz bin Mohammed al-Nashmi, the leader of the Al Quds Brigade of the Arabian Peninsula, released a detailed description of the Khobar attacks that gave an interesting insight into the militants' thinking: "We were asking our brother Muslims, where are the Americans, and they showed us a building where companies have offices. We did find an American. I shot him in the head, [which] exploded. Then we found a South African and we shot him too. In our search for unbelievers, we had to exchange fire with the security forces."

It is important to note the use of the term "unbeliever." The primary
purpose of the attacks was an assault on Americans, but the mission extended to the execution of any nonbeliever. Al-Nashmi also discussed the killing of Philippine Roman Catholics and of Indians, referring to both as unbelievers. This is not new, but the intensity with which unbelievers are being targeted -- as opposed to Westerners or Americans -- is noteworthy. The language used matters.

If the view extends that al Qaeda's war is against all unbelievers, rather
than a war against American imperialism, and if it extends to include
Iranians and other Shia, things will get very interesting indeed. We are
getting the sense of a further radicalization in the Islamic world. We also
are sensing that this further radicalization might create non-Islamic
coalitions that do not currently exist. It is a process we will be watching
intensely.

......................................................................

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com

This is an article from Life Magazine Jan 7 1946.  
Title is "Americans Are Losing the Victory in Europe"


http://www.kultursmog.com/Life-Page01.htm

Wrong time of the month?

My second post today:
==================

Overdoing Chalabi

By George Friedman

On Feb. 19, in a piece entitled "Ahmed Chalabi and His Iranian
Connection," Stratfor laid out the close relationship Chalabi had
with the Iranians, and the role that relationship played in the
flow of intelligence to Washington prior to the war. This week,
the story of Chalabi, accused of being an Iranian agent by U.S.
intelligence, was all over the front pages of the newspapers. The
media, having ignored Chalabi's Iranian connections for so long,
went to the other extreme -- substantially overstating its
significance.

The thrust of many of the stories was that the United States was
manipulated by Iran -- using Chalabi as a conduit -- into
invading Iraq. The implication was that the United States would
have chosen a different course, except for Chalabi's
disinformation campaign. We doubt that very much. First, the
United States had its own reasons for invading Iraq. Second, U.S.
and Iranian interests were not all that far apart in this case.
Chalabi was certainly, in our opinion, working actively on behalf
or Iranian interests -- as well as for himself -- but he was
merely a go-between in some complex geopolitical maneuvering.

Iran wanted the United States to invade Iraq. The Iranians hated
Saddam Hussein more than anyone did, and they feared him. Iran
and Iraq had fought a war in the 1980s that devastated a
generation of Iranians. More than Hussein, Iraq represented a
historical threat to Iran going back millennia. The destruction
of the Iraqi regime and army was at the heart of Iranian national
interest. The collapse of the Soviet Union had for the first time
in a century secured Iran's northern frontiers. The U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan secured the Shiite regions of Afghanistan as a
buffer. If the western frontier could be secured, Iran would
achieve a level of national security it had not known in
centuries.

What Iran Wanted

Iran knew it could not invade Iraq and win by itself. Another
power had to do it. The failure of the United States to invade
and occupy Iraq in 1991 was a tremendous disappointment to Iran.
Indeed, the primary reason the United States did not invade Iraq
was because it knew the destruction of the Iraqi army would leave
Iran the dominant power native to the Persian Gulf. Invading Iraq
would have destroyed the Iraq-Iran balance of power that was the
only basis for what passed for stability in the region.

The destruction of the Iraqi regime would not only have made Iran
secure, but also would have opened avenues for expansion. First,
the Persian Gulf region is full of Shia, many of them oriented
toward Iran for religious reasons. For example, the loading
facilities for Saudi oil is in a region dominated by the Shia.
Second, without the Iraqi army blocking Iran, there was no
military force in the region that could stop the Iranians. They
could have become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, and
only the permanent stationing of U.S. troops in the region would
have counterbalanced Iran. The United States did not want that,
so the conquest of Kuwait was followed by the invasion -- but not
the conquest -- of Iraq. The United States kept Iraq in place to
block Iran.

Iran countered this policy by carefully and systematically
organizing the Shiite community of Iraq. After the United States
allowed a Shiite rising to fail after Desert Storm, Iranian
intelligence embarked on a massive program of covert organization
of the Iraqi Shia, in preparation for the time when the Hussein
regime would fall. Iranian intentions were to create a reality on
the ground so the fall of Iraq would inevitably lead to the rise
of a Shiite-dominated Iraq, allied with Iran.

What was not in place was the means of destroying Hussein.
Obviously, the Iranians wanted the invasion and Chalabi did
everything he could to make the case for invasion, not only
because of his relationship with Iran, but also because of his
ambitions to govern Iraq. Iran understood that an American
invasion of Iraq would place a massive U.S. Army on its western
frontier, but the Iranians also understood that the United States
had limited ambitions in the area. If the Iranians cooperated
with U.S. intelligence on al Qaeda and were not overly aggressive
with their nuclear program, the two major concerns of the United
States would be satisfied and the Americans would look elsewhere.

The United States would leave Iraq in the long run, and Iran
would be waiting patiently to reap the rewards. In the short run,
should the United States run into trouble in Iraq, it would
become extremely dependent on the Iranians and their Shiite
clients. If the Shiite south rose, the U.S. position would become
untenable. Therefore if there was trouble -- and Iranian
intelligence was pretty sure there would be -- Shiite influence
would rise well before the Americans left.

Chalabi's job was to give the Americans a reason to invade, which
he did with stories of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But he
had another job, which was to shield two critical pieces of
information from the Americans: First, he was to shield the
extent to which the Iranians had organized the Shiite south of
Iraq. Second, he was to shield any information about Hussein's
plans for a guerrilla campaign after the fall of Baghdad. These
were the critical things -- taken together, they would create the
dependency the Iranians badly wanted.

What the United States Wanted

The Americans were focused on another issue. The balance of power
in the Persian Gulf was not a trivial matter to them, but it had
taken on a new cast after Sept. 11. For the United States, the
central problem in the Persian Gulf -- and a matter of urgent
national security -- was the unwillingness of Saudi intelligence
and security services to move aggressively against al Qaeda
inside the kingdom. From the U.S. viewpoint, forcing Saudi Arabia
to change its behavior was the overriding consideration; without
that, no progress against al Qaeda was possible.

The United States did not see itself as having many levers for
manipulating the situation in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were
convinced that ultimately the United States would not be able to
take decisive action against the Saudis, and the Saudi government
was more concerned about the internal political consequences of a
crackdown on al Qaeda, than it was about the United States. It
felt confident it could manage the United States as it had in the
past.

The United States did not want to invade Saudi Arabia. The House
of Saud was the foundation of Saudi stability, and the United
States did not want it to fall. It wanted to change the Saudi
strategy. Invading Saudi Arabia could have led to global economic
disaster if oil shipments were disrupted. Finally, the invasion
of Saudi Arabia, given its size, terrain and U.S. resources, was
a difficult if not impossible task. The direct route would not
work. The United States would take an indirect route.

If you wanted to frighten Saudi Arabia into changing its behavior
without actually launching military operations against it, the
way to do that would be: (a) demonstrate your will by staging an
effective military campaign; and (b) wind up the campaign in a
position to actually invade and take Saudi oil fields if they did
not cooperate. The Saudis doubted U.S. will and military capacity
to do them harm (since Kuwait would never permit its territory to
be used to invade Saudi Arabia). The solution: an invasion of
Iraq.

The United States wanted to invade Iraq as an indirect route to
influence Saudi Arabia. As in any military operation, there were
also subsidiary political goals. The United States wanted to get
rid of Hussein's regime, not because it was complicit with al
Qaeda, but because it might later become complicit. Secondly, it
wanted to use Iraqi territory as a base to pressure Syria and
Iran as well.

Chalabi's claims about Iraqi WMD did not instigate the invasion,
because the United States did not invade Iraq to get rid of WMD.
An invasion would be the most dangerous route for doing that,
because the other side might actually surprise you and use the
weapons on your troops. You would use air strikes and special
operations troops. What Chalabi did by providing his intelligence
was, however, not insignificant. The administration had two
goals: the destruction of al Qaeda and protection of the United
States from WMD. By producing evidence of WMD in Iraq, Chalabi
gave Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz the tool they needed. By
introducing evidence of WMD, they triggered an automatic policy
against Iraq having them, which closed off an argument -- not
really a raging argument -- in the administration. It was
important, but not earth shattering.

There was a deeper dimension to this. The strategic planners in
the administration were old enough to remember when Richard Nixon
began the process that broke the back of the Soviet Union -- his
alliance with China against the Soviets. During World War II, the
United States allied with Stalin against Hitler, preventing a
potential peace agreement by Stalin. The United States had a
known policy of using fault lines among potential enemies to
split them apart, allying with the weaker against the stronger.
If the United States allying with Stalin or Mao was not
considered beyond the pale, then the Bush administration planners
had another alliance in mind.

The fault line in the Islamic world is between Sunni and Shia.
The Sunni are a much larger group than the Shia, but only if you
include countries such as Indonesia. Within the Persian Gulf
region, the two groups are highly competitive. Al Qaeda was a
Sunni movement. Following U.S. grand strategy, logic held that
the solution to the problem was entering into an alliance of
sorts with the Shia. The key to the Shia was the major Shiite
power -- Iran.

The United States worked with Iranian intelligence during the
invasion of Afghanistan, when the Iranians arranged relationships
with Shiite warlords like Ahmed Khan. The United States and Iran
had cooperated on a number of levels for years when it concerned
Iraq. Therefore there were channels open for collaboration.

The United States was interested not only in frightening Saudi
Arabia, but also in increasing its dependence on the United
States. The United States needed a lever strong enough to break
the gridlock in Riyadh. An invasion of Iraq would achieve the
goal of fear. An alliance with Iran would create the dependency
that was needed. The Saudis would do anything to keep the
Iranians out of their oil fields and their country. After the
invasion of Iraq, only the United States could stop them. The
Saudis were trapped by the United States.

What Chalabi Didn't Say

What is important to see here is how the Iranians were using the
Americans, and how the Americans were using the Iranians. Chalabi
was an important channel, but hardly the only one. It is almost
certain that his role was well known. Chalabi was probably left
in place to convince the Iranians that the United States was
naive enough to believe them, or he was there simply as a token
of good faith. But nothing he said triggered the invasion.

It was what he did not say that is significant. Chalabi had to
know that the Iranians controlled the Iraqi Shia. It is possible
that he even told the Pentagon that, since it wouldn't change
fundamental strategy much. But there is one thing that Chalabi
should have known that he certainly didn't tell the Americans:
that Hussein was going to wage a guerrilla war. On that point,
there is no question but that the Pentagon was surprised, and it
mattered a lot.

Chalabi did not share intelligence that the Iranians almost
certainly had because the Iranians wanted the Americans to get
bogged down in a guerrilla war. That would increase U.S.
dependence on the Shia and Iran, and would hasten the American
departure.

Iranian intelligence had penetrated deep into Iraq. The
preparations for the guerrilla war were extensive. Iran knew --
and so did Chalabi. The United States would still have invaded,
but would have been much better prepared, militarily and
politically. Chalabi did not tell the Pentagon what he knew and
that has made a huge difference in the war.

We suspect that the Pentagon intelligence offices and the CIA
both knew all about Chalabi's relation to Iranian intelligence.
The argument was not over that, but over whether this
disqualified his intelligence. The Pentagon had made up its mind
for strategic reasons to invade Iraq. Chalabi's intelligence was
of use in internal disputes in the administration, but decided
nothing in terms of policy. The CIA, understanding that Chalabi
was not really a source in the conventional sense but was a
geopolitical pawn, did not like the game, but didn't call the
Department of Defense on it until after DOD got into trouble in
Iraq -- and the CIA wanted to make certain that everyone knew it
wasn't their mistake.

Chalabi was a minor player in a dance between Iran and the United
States that began on Sept. 11 and is still under way. The United
States wants a close relationship with Iran in order to split the
Islamic world and force the Saudis to collaborate with the
Americans. The Iranians want to use the United States in order to
become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. Each wants the
other to be its hammer. In all of this, Chalabi was only an actor
in a bit part.

The one place in which he was significant was negative -- he kept
the United States in the dark about the impending guerrilla war.
That was where he really helped Iran, because it was the
guerrilla war that locked the United States into a dependency on
the Iraqi Shia that went much farther than the United States
desired, and from which the United States is only now starting to
extricate itself. That is a major act of duplicity, but it is a
sin of omission, not commission.

In a way, the Americans and the Iranians used Chalabi for their
own purposes. The Iranians used him to screen information from
the Americans more than to give false information. The Americans
used him to try to convince the Iranians that they had a
sufficient degree of control over the situation that it was in
their interests to maintain stability in the Shiite regions. At
this point, it is honestly impossible to tell who got the better
of whom. But this much is certain. Chalabi, for all his
cleverness, is just another used up spook, trusted by no one,
trusting even fewer. Geopolitics trumps conspiracy every time.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.stratfor.com

Geopolitical Diary: Friday, May 28, 2004

Muqtada al-Sadr has agreed to pull out of An Najaf without receiving any
official guarantee of amnesty on murder charges and without agreeing to
disband his militia. The withdrawal was not negotiated by the United States, but by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's representatives. This action
promotes the April rising that nearly wrecked U.S. strategy in Iraq toward
closure.

The rising -- both Sunni and Shia -- has created a new reality in Iraq. The
United States has refused to become deeply engaged in two cities: Al
Fallujah and An Najaf. In Al Fallujah, it has negotiated with the Sunnis,
allowing de facto control over the city and permitting guerrillas to
participate in governance. In An Najaf, a Shiite city, the United States has
refused to engage al-Sadr in any way that would damage Shiite shrines.
Instead, it has essentially created a situation where al-Sistani would
either take care of the matter or leave al-Sadr permanently in place. Now
that al-Sadr is withdrawing, we can expect forces under al-Sistani to take
control of the city.

The United States has created a similar situation on two occasions -- it is
no longer an isolated incident -- and is not prepared to take responsibility
for controlling urban areas in the face of sustained resistance. The United
States is prepared to allow local forces -- regardless of composition -- to
work out the political and security situation for themselves. Where there
are lower levels of resistance, the United States is prepared to take part
in patrolling, but it is no longer prepared to take responsibility for all
of Iraq under any and all circumstances.

This is a huge change in U.S. thinking about Iraq since this time last year.
This tactic also has become an inevitable change. There were no options. The United States was not in a position, politically or in terms of forces, to
engage in a massive urban counterinsurgency. The capitulation to reality -- which is precisely what this is -- relies on primary and practicable
missions, rather than on secondary and impossible missions. This shift
ultimately is far more important than any scheduled change in sovereignty June 30. The new Iraqi government will have no power over the situation on the ground; that will be in the hand of local forces.

The other change in strategy was al-Sistani's, who believed he had the
Americans in the bag when he stimulated the al-Sadr rising and then leaned back to watch Americans wipe him out. He was stunned when Americans refused to play their role in his drama, instead doing the unthinkable and negotiating a deal with the Sunni guerrillas. Al-Sistani's move caused the United States to completely reconsider its relationship with the Shia. The entire set of Iraqi National Congress official Ahmed Chalabi's revelations was designed to make it clear to al-Sistani that U.S. tolerance of his maneuvers had reached an end. Al-Sistani was left to clean up his own mess, with no better -- or no worse -- deal than the Sunnis received. But the core message was this: Al-Sistani will not have Iraq handed to him on a silver platter by the Americans. If he wants it, he will have to fight for it -- and not with the Americans.

We have seen two cycles in which attacks against the Americans surged and died away in Iraq. It is impossible to say that there will not be a third.
It is possible to say this cycle is being closed out. Given emerging
realities, the United States could reduce its exposure before the next wave can be organized.

Of potentially greater significance was the news that a top al Qaeda leader has called for an urban guerrilla war in Saudi Arabia, according to a statement on several jihadist Web sites. Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin offered a
detailed list of steps that militants should follow to succeed in a fight
against Riyadh. Depending on how this situation breaks in the coming months, the situation in Saudi Arabia could become far more important than the situation in Iraq.

......................................................................

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://www.stratfor.com

WSJ: PAGE ONE  
MEDAL OF HONOR

In Combat, Marine
Put Theory to Test,
Comrades Believe

Cpl. Dunham's Quick Action
In Face of a Grenade
Saved 2 Lives, They Say
'No, No -- Watch His Hand!'
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 25, 2004; Page A1

AL QA'IM, Iraq -- Early this spring, Cpl. Jason Dunham and two other Marines sat in an outpost in Iraq and traded theories on surviving a hand-grenade attack.

Second Lt. Brian "Bull" Robinson suggested that if a Marine lay face down on the grenade and held it between his forearms, the ceramic bulletproof plate in his flak vest might be strong enough to protect his vital organs. His arms would shatter, but he might live.

Cpl. Dunham had another idea: A Marine's Kevlar helmet held over the grenade might contain the blast. "I'll bet a Kevlar would stop it," he said, according to Second Lt. Robinson.

"No, it'll still mess you up," Staff Sgt. John Ferguson recalls saying.

 
It was a conversation the men would remember vividly a few weeks later, when they saw the shredded remains of Cpl. Dunham's helmet, apparently blown apart from the inside by a grenade. Fellow Marines believe Cpl. Dunham's actions saved the lives of two men and have recommended him for the Medal of Honor, an award that no act of heroism since 1993 has garnered.

A 6-foot-1 star high-school athlete from Scio, N.Y., Cpl. Dunham was chosen to become a squad leader shortly after he was assigned to Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment in September 2003. Just 22 years old, he showed "the kind of leadership where you're confident in your abilities and don't have to yell about it," says Staff Sgt. Ferguson, 30, of Aurora, Colo. Cpl. Dunham's reputation grew when he extended his enlistment, due to end in July, so he could stay with his squad throughout its tour in the war zone.

During the invasion of Iraq last year, the Third Battalion didn't suffer any combat casualties. But since March, 10 of its 900 Marines have died from hostile fire, and 89 have been wounded.

April 14 was an especially bad day. Cpl. Dunham was in the town of Karabilah, leading a 14-man foot patrol to scout sites for a new base, when radio reports came pouring in about a roadside bomb hitting another group of Marines not far away.

Insurgents, the reports said, had ambushed a convoy that included the battalion commander, 40-year-old Lt. Col. Matthew Lopez, of Chicago. One rifle shot penetrated the rear of the commander's Humvee, hitting him in the back, Lt. Col. Lopez says. His translator and bodyguard, Lance Cpl. Akram Falah, 23, of Anaheim, Calif., had taken a bullet to the bicep, severing an artery, according to medical reports filed later.

Cpl. Dunham's patrol jumped aboard some Humvees and raced toward the convoy. Near the double-arched gateway of the town of Husaybah, they heard the distinctive whizzing sound of a rocket-propelled grenade overhead. They left their vehicles and split into two teams to hunt for the shooters, according to interviews with two men who were there and written reports from two others.

Around 12:15 p.m., Cpl. Dunham's team came to an intersection and saw a line of seven Iraqi vehicles along a dirt alleyway, according to Staff Sgt. Ferguson and others there. At Staff Sgt. Ferguson's instruction, they started checking the vehicles for weapons.

Cpl. Dunham approached a run-down white Toyota Land Cruiser. The driver, an Iraqi in a black track suit and loafers, immediately lunged out and grabbed the corporal by the throat, according to men at the scene. Cpl. Dunham kneed the man in the chest, and the two tumbled to the ground.

Two other Marines rushed to the scene. Private First Class Kelly Miller, 21, of Eureka, Calif., ran from the passenger side of the vehicle and put a choke hold around the man's neck. But the Iraqi continued to struggle, according to a military report Pfc. Miller gave later. Lance Cpl. William B. Hampton, 22, of Woodinville, Wash., also ran to help.

A few yards away, Lance Cpl. Jason Sanders, 21, a radio operator from McAlester, Okla., says he heard Cpl. Dunham yell a warning: "No, no, no -- watch his hand!"

What was in the Iraqi's hand appears to have been a British-made "Mills Bomb" hand grenade. The Marines later found an unexploded Mills Bomb in the Toyota, along with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers.

 
A Mills Bomb user pulls a ring pin out and squeezes the external lever -- called the spoon -- until he's ready to throw it. Then he releases the spoon, leaving the bomb armed. Typically, three to five seconds elapse between the time the spoon detaches and the grenade explodes. The Marines later found what they believe to have been the grenade's pin on the floor of the Toyota, suggesting that the Iraqi had the grenade in his hand -- on a hair trigger -- even as he wrestled with Cpl. Dunham.

None of the other Marines saw exactly what Cpl. Dunham did, or even saw the grenade. But they believe Cpl. Dunham spotted the grenade -- prompting his warning cry -- and, when it rolled loose, placed his helmet and body on top of it to protect his squadmates.

The scraps of Kevlar found later, scattered across the street, supported their conclusion. The grenade, they think, must have been inside the helmet when it exploded. His fellow Marines believe that Cpl. Dunham made an instantaneous decision to try out his theory that a helmet might blunt the grenade blast.

"I deeply believe that given the facts and evidence presented he clearly understood the situation and attempted to block the blast of the grenade from his squad members," Lt. Col. Lopez wrote in a May 13 letter recommending Cpl. Dunham for the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for military valor. "His personal action was far beyond the call of duty and saved the lives of his fellow Marines."

Recommendations for the Medal of Honor are rare. The Marines say they have no other candidates awaiting approval. Unlike other awards, the Medal of Honor must be approved by the president. The most recent act of heroism to earn the medal came 11 years ago, when two Army Delta Force soldiers gave their lives protecting a downed Blackhawk helicopter pilot in Somalia.

Staff Sgt. Ferguson was crossing the street to help when the grenade exploded. He recalls feeling a hollow punch in his chest that reminded him of being close to the starting line when dragsters gun their engines. Lance Cpl. Sanders, approaching the scene, was temporarily deafened, he says. He assumed all three Marines and the Iraqi must surely be dead.

In fact, the explosion left Cpl. Dunham unconscious and face down in his own blood, according to Lance Cpl. Sanders. He says the Iraqi lay on his back, bleeding from his midsection.

The fight wasn't over, however. To Lance Cpl. Sanders's surprise, the Iraqi got up and ran. Lance Cpl. Sanders says he raised his rifle and fired 25 shots at the man's back, killing him.

The other two Marines were injured, but alive. Lance Cpl. Hampton was spitting up blood and had shrapnel embedded in his left leg, knee, arm and face, according to a military transcript. Pfc. Miller's arms had been perforated by shrapnel. Yet both Marines struggled to their feet and staggered back toward the corner.

"Cpl. Dunham was in the middle of the explosion," Pfc. Miller told a Marine officer weeks later, after he and Lance Cpl. Hampton were evacuated to the U.S. to convalesce. "If it was not for him, none of us would be here. He took the impact of the explosion."

At first, Lance Cpl. Mark Edward Dean, a 22-year-old mortarman, didn't recognize the wounded Marine being loaded into the back of his Humvee. Blood from shrapnel wounds in the Marine's head and neck had covered his face. Then Lance Cpl. Dean spotted the tattoo on his chest -- an Ace of Spades and a skull -- and realized he was looking at one of his closest friends, Cpl. Dunham. A volunteer firefighter back home in Owasso, Okla., Lance Cpl. Dean says he knew from his experience with car wrecks that his friend had a better chance of surviving if he stayed calm.

"You're going to be all right," Lance Cpl. Dean remembers saying as the Humvee sped back to camp. "We're going to get you home."

When the battalion was at its base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., the two Marines had played pool and hung out with Lance Cpl. Dean's wife, Becky Jo, at the couple's nearby home. Once in a while, Lance Cpl. Dean says they'd round up friends, drive to Las Vegas and lose some money at the roulette tables. Shortly before the battalion left Kuwait for Iraq, Lance Cpl. Dean ran short of cash. He says Cpl. Dunham bought him a 550-minute phone card so he could call Becky Jo. He used every minute.

At battalion headquarters in al Qa'im, Chaplain David Slater was in his makeshift chapel -- in a stripped-down Iraqi train car with red plastic chairs as pews -- when he heard an Army Blackhawk helicopter take off. The 46-year-old Navy chaplain from Lincoln, Neb. knew that meant the shock-trauma platoon would soon receive fresh casualties.

Shortly afterward, the helicopter arrived. Navy corpsmen and Marines carried Cpl. Dunham's stretcher 200 feet to the medical tent, its green floor and white walls emitting a rubbery scent, clumps of stethoscopes hanging like bananas over olive-drab trunks of chest tubes, bandages and emergency airway tubes.

The bearers rested the corporal's stretcher on a pair of black metal sawhorses. A wounded Iraqi fighter was stripped naked on the next stretcher -- standard practice for all patients, according to the medical staff, to ensure no injury goes unnoticed. The Iraqi had plastic cuffs on his ankles and was on morphine to quiet him, according to medical personnel who were there.

When a wounded Marine is conscious, Chaplain Slater makes small talk -- asks his name and hometown -- to help keep the patient calm and alert even in the face of often-horrific wounds. Chaplain Slater says he talked to Cpl. Dunham, held his hand and prayed. But he saw no sign that the corporal heard a word. After five minutes or so, he says, he moved on to another Marine.

At the same time, the medical team worked to stabilize Cpl. Dunham. One grenade fragment had penetrated the left side of his skull not far behind his eye, says Navy Cmdr. Ed Hessel, who treated him. A second entered the brain slightly higher and further toward the back of his head. A third punctured his neck.

Cmdr. Hessel, a 44-year-old emergency-room doctor from Eugene, Ore., quickly concluded that the corporal was "unarousable." A calm, bespectacled man, he says he wanted to relieve the corporal's brain and body of the effort required to breathe. And he wanted to be sure the corporal had no violent physical reactions that might add to the pressure on his already swollen brain.

Navy Lt. Ted Hering, a 27-year-old critical-care nurse from San Diego, inserted an intravenous drip and fed in drugs to sedate the corporal, paralyze his muscles and blunt the gag response in his throat while a breathing tube was inserted and manual ventilator attached. The Marine's heart rate and blood pressure stabilized, according to Cmdr. Hessel. But a field hospital in the desert didn't have the resources to help him any further.

So Cpl. Dunham was put on another Blackhawk to take him to the Seventh Marines' base at Al Asad, a transfer point for casualties heading on to the military surgical hospital in Baghdad. During the flight, the corporal lay on the top stretcher. Beneath him was the Iraqi, with two tubes protruding from his chest to keep his lungs from collapsing. Lt. Hering stood next to the stretchers, squeezing a plastic bag every four to five seconds to press air into Cpl. Dunham's lungs.

The Iraqi, identified in battalion medical records only as POW#1, repeatedly asked for water until six or seven minutes before landing, when Cpl. Dunham's blood-drenched head bandage burst, sending a red cascade through the mesh stretcher and onto the Iraqi's face below. After that, the man remained quiet, and kept his eyes and mouth clenched shut, says the nurse, Lt. Hering.

The Army air crew made the trip in 25 minutes, their fastest run ever, according to the pilot, and skimmed no higher than 50 feet off the ground to avoid changes in air pressure that might put additional strain on Cpl. Dunham's brain.

When the Blackhawk touched down at Al Asad, Cpl. Dunham was turned over to new caretakers. The Blackhawk promptly headed back to al Qa'im. More patients were waiting; 10 Marines from the Third Battalion were wounded on April 14, along with a translator.

At 11:45 p.m. that day, Deb and Dan Dunham were at home in Scio, N.Y., a town of 1,900, when they got the phone call all military parents dread. It was a Marine lieutenant telling them their son had sustained shrapnel wounds to the head, was unconscious and in critical condition.

Mr. Dunham, 43, an Air Force veteran, works in the shipping department of a company that makes industrial heaters, and Mrs. Dunham, 44, teaches home economics. She remembers helping her athletic son, the oldest of four, learn to spell as a young boy by playing "PIG" and "HORSE" -- traditional basketball shooting games -- and expanding the games to include other words. He never left home or hung up the phone without telling his mother, "I love you," she says.

The days that followed were filled with uncertainty, fear and hope. The Dunhams knew their son was in a hospital in Baghdad, then in Germany, where surgeons removed part of his skull to relieve the swelling inside. At one point doctors upgraded his condition from critical to serious.

On April 21, the Marines gave the Dunhams plane tickets from Rochester to Washington, and put them up at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where their son was going to be transferred. Mrs. Dunham brought along the first Harry Potter novel, so she and her husband could take turns reading to their son, just to let him know they were there.

When Cpl. Dunham arrived that night, the doctors told the couple he had taken a turn for the worse, picking up a fever on the flight from Germany. After an hour by their son's side, Mr. Dunham says he had a "gut feeling" that the outlook was bleak. Mrs. Dunham searched for signs of hope, planning to ask relatives to bring two more Harry Potter books, in case they finished the first one. Doctors urged the Dunhams to get some rest.

They were getting dressed the next morning when the intensive-care unit called to say the hospital was sending a car for them. "Jason's condition is very, very grim," Mrs. Dunham remembers a doctor saying. "I have to tell you the outlook isn't very promising."


Foto: A Marine kisses a helmet standing in honor of Cpl. Jason L. Dunham during a service at Camp Al Qaim, Iraq.

 
She says doctors told her the shrapnel had traveled down the side of his brain, and the damage was irreversible. He would always be on a respirator. He would never hear his parents or know they were by his side. Another operation to relieve pressure on his brain had little chance of succeeding and a significant chance of killing him.

Once he joined the Marines, Cpl. Dunham put his father in charge of medical decisions and asked that he not be kept on life support if there was no hope of recovery, says Mr. Dunham. He says his son told him, "Please don't leave me like that."

The Dunhams went for a walk on the hospital grounds. When they returned to the room, Cpl. Dunham's condition had deteriorated, his mother says. Blood in his urine signaled failing kidneys, and one lung had collapsed as the other was filling with fluid. Mrs. Dunham says they took the worsening symptoms as their son's way of telling them they should follow through on his wishes,.

At the base in al Qa'im, Second Lt. Robinson, 24, of Kenosha, Wis., gathered the men of Cpl. Dunham's platoon in the sleeping area, a spread of cots, backpacks, CD players and rifles, its plywood walls papered with magazine shots of scantily clad women. The lieutenant says he told the Marines of the Dunhams' decision to remove their son's life support in two hours' time.

Lance Cpl. Dean wasn't the only Marine who cried. He says he prayed that some miracle would happen in the next 120 minutes. He prayed that God would touch his friend and wake him up so he could live the life he had wanted to lead.

In Bethesda, the Dunhams spent a couple more hours with their son. Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee arrived and pinned the Purple Heart, awarded to those wounded in battle, on his pillow. Mrs. Dunham cried on Gen. Hagee's shoulder. The Dunhams stepped out of the room while the doctors removed the ventilator.

At 4:43 p.m. on April 22, 2004, Marine Cpl. Jason L. Dunham died.

Six days later, Third Battalion gathered in the parking lot outside the al Qa'im command post for psalms and ceremony. In a traditional combat memorial, one Marine plunged a rifle, bayonet-first, into a sandbag. Another placed a pair of tan combat boots in front, and a third perched a helmet on the rifle's stock. Lance Cpl. Dean told those assembled about a trip to Las Vegas the two men and Becky Jo Dean had taken in January, not long before the battalion left for the Persian Gulf. Chatting in a hotel room, the corporal told his friends he was planning to extend his enlistment and stay in Iraq for the battalion's entire tour. "You're crazy for extending," Lance Cpl. Dean recalls saying. "Why?"

He says Cpl. Dunham responded: "I want to make sure everyone makes it home alive. I want to be sure you go home to your wife alive."

Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com

......................................................................

1158 GMT -- IRAN -- Iran dismissed May 20 the possibility of an Israeli
attack against its nuclear facilities. Iranian Minister of Defense Rear Adm.
Ali Shamkhani said, "Israel is too vulnerable to materialize its threat."
The remarks from Shamkhani come after recent reports that Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon during his trip to Washington last month discussed
with U.S. President George W. Bush possible Israeli plans to attack Iran's
nuclear facilities if Tehran gets close to developing a nuclear weapon.


......................................................................

Geopolitical Diary: Thursday, May 20, 2004

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted today what everyone has known for months: The United States underestimated the determination of Saddam Hussein and his intelligence service to resist the occupation in Iraq. Wolfowitz said, "I would say of all the things that were underestimated, the one that almost no one that I know of predicted was to
properly estimate the resilience of the regime that had abused this country
for 35 years."

This is an extraordinarily important statement. Wolfowitz is one of the key
American strategists. Until Wolfowitz -- and by implication Rumsfeld --
publicly acknowledged their miscalculation of the regime's resilience, there
was no possibility of a serious adjustment of strategy. That and the
admission that the United States did not know how many troops would be
required and for how long set the two poles in place for a strategic
re-evaluation. Having been wrong about the enemy's capabilities and
intentions, prior strategic estimates are out the window. There is no valid
forecast at this point. In the world of strategy, the lack of a forecast on
something as basic as troop levels means there must be a comprehensive
review. No one can argue any longer that what the United States is doing is
working. That opens the door to the inevitable strategic re-evaluation.

While Wolfowitz's statement finally opens the door to the future, we will
permit ourselves one final look at the past. Wolfowitz said that almost no
one he knew "properly" estimated the level of resistance. That is certainly
true, if by "properly" you mean describing the nature of the guerrilla war.
But there were many -- Stratfor included -- who argued that the Hussein
regime was not going to go quietly into that good night if they had a
choice. We also argued that they had prepared for this moment for years, and certainly had a postwar plan.

The issue therefore is if the core question is whether others precisely
estimated the type of resistance, or whether they estimated that there would probably be substantial resistance. The criticism of the administration is not that it failed to anticipate the exact type of resistance, but that it dismissed the idea of significant resistance -- in the short and long term -- at all. Statements from the Department of Defense prior to the war were dismissive of the Iraqis in the extreme as a fighting force, and the kind of plans DOD made for the postwar world indicated it did not anticipate any serious problems.

There are two charges to be leveled at Wolfowitz. The first is that he
failed to allow for any resilience in the Iraqi resistance. The far more
serious charge is that he continued to deny the seriousness of the
resistance for months after it was a problem -- in fact, denying it publicly
up to this point. This directly led to a strategy that could not succeed
because it was based on a fundamental misreading of the situation.

With that said, let us now all agree that Wolfowitz has conceded the
obvious. The question therefore is: What will he do about it? Uncertainty is
embedded in war. The craft of the strategist, however, is to minimize
uncertainty using planning that begins with a precise estimate of the
situation on the ground and proceeds from that to a plan based on the
resources available. The uncertainty about troop levels is rooted at this
point in the fact that a precise appreciation of the situation is only now
developing, and that no strategy will emerge until that is in place.

The challenge is this. The appreciation of the situation must be developed
from U.S. intelligence services: CIA, Defense Intelligence and Army Military Intelligence. These are the same organizations that failed to provide an accurate appreciation of the situation in the first place. However blame is allocated among them, the collective outcome was unacceptable. The question that will have to be asked is this: In what way have these intelligence organizations changed their practices so that strategists can have confidence that their estimates are reliable? Or put differently, what changes is Wolfowitz making in his own staff to ensure, first, that the estimates are reliable, and second, that they are properly utilized?

We are now back where we began. What is the mission? What is the situation on the ground? What are the available resources? What is the strategy?  Wolfowitz said that he did not expect the current troop levels in Iraq at this point. An honest answer, but incomplete. The complete answer is that he did not expect to be grappling with these questions a year later. Wolfowitz is a student of Thucydides. A careful reading of "The History of the Peloponnesian War" would be appropriate, not so much to understand what will happen, but to understand what can happen when expectations and reality diverge.

Covert Searches Are Increasing Under Patriot Act
Civil liberties groups see a dangerous trend, but the Justice Department says added surveillance shows improvements in fighting terrorism.
   
By Richard Schmitt, LA Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON ? Underscoring changes in domestic surveillance allowed under the Patriot Act, the Justice Department said in a report released today that it had conducted hundreds more secret searches around the country last year.

The department said the use of covert search powers, which were enhanced under the Patriot Act, showed how federal investigators had stepped up the war against terrorism in the United States over the last 32 months.

     
 
 
   
     
 
But civil liberties groups expressed concern over the increase because the targets of the searches were given fewer legal protections than suspects in normal criminal cases. The process of obtaining approval and executing the searches and surveillance is also shrouded in secrecy.

In an annual report to Congress, the Justice Department said it obtained approval to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches in more than 1,700 intelligence cases last year. According to the department, the number of searches had surged 85% in the last two years; about 1,200 searches were authorized in 2002, and 900 in 2001.

The report did not identify or discuss specific cases.

U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said in a statement that the data illustrated how the Justice Department and the FBI were "acting judiciously and moving aggressively" to uncover and prevent terrorist attacks.

"These court-approved surveillance and search orders are vital to keeping America safe from terror," Ashcroft asserted.

The burst of activity was a direct result of the easing of standards for intelligence-gathering that was authorized by the Patriot Act, the terrorism-fighting law enacted by Congress six weeks after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Under the new law, the government can obtain secret warrants by showing that a significant purpose of the search has to do with intelligence-gathering, as opposed to a criminal investigation.

Before the change, the law was interpreted as requiring the government to show that intelligence-gathering was the primary reason for the request.

Many experts think the old rules were too restrictive, and unduly impeded the hunt for potential terrorists. The new procedures were upheld in court in November 2002. The search applications are reviewed by a federal tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court was set up in the mid-1970s as a check on government power amid revelations of massive illegal spying on political dissidents and other citizens by the FBI.

But the court, which conducts secret proceedings, has become a lightning rod for civil liberties concerns in the post-Sept. 11 era as the number of surveillance applications and the volume of the court's work has rapidly grown.

A major fear is that investigators are using the so-called FISA procedures to bypass the stricter requirements that cover the issuance of search warrants in criminal cases, in which the government must show probable cause that a crime was committed. The concern is that the process is enabling the government to chip away at protections afforded defendants under the 4th Amendment prohibition against illegal searches.

Information gleaned from the intelligence searches can later be used in criminal prosecutions, but defendants in such proceedings have fewer rights to attack the basis of the searches or to obtain intercepted information.

Moreover, if the intelligence searches do not lead to criminal prosecutions, the targets are never told that they were under surveillance; in criminal cases, suspects must receive notice of any surveillance even if they are never charged.

"The real mistakes never come to light" in intelligence cases, said James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington think tank. He said he was concerned that "an increasing number [of the FISA cases] are likely to end up in criminal prosecutions."

"I am troubled by the secrecy." Dempsey said. "There is no way to know whether the pendulum has swung too far."

Adding to the concern is the fact that the number of intelligence searches in recent years has come to rival and possibly exceed the number of searches in criminal cases, as the government has marshaled federal resources against fighting terrorism instead of other crimes.

According to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, federal and state courts authorized the use of wiretaps and other electronic surveillance in about 1,400 cases last year, compared with the 1,700 FISA warrants, which also cover physical searches.

"They are shifting the government apparatus for surveillance to a much more secret process with much less judicial oversight," said Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington.

By classifying cases as intelligence cases, he said, "they are doing an end run around the 4th Amendment."

By ANTHONY CARDINALE
News Staff Reporter
BuffaloNews.com
4/26/2004

Cpl. Jason Dunham of Allegany County jumped in front of a hand grenade to save the lives of two fellow Marines in Iraq on April 14.

Dunham, 22, of Scio, died Thursday in Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. His death brought to eight the number of Western New York servicemen to die since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Two other Marines were wounded but are recovering.

"All I can say is, this ain't nothing that I wouldn't expect of my son, because that's the kind of person he was," his father, Daniel Dunham, an Air Force veteran, said Sunday. Dunham read from documents received from the military about the circumstances surrounding his son's fatal injuries in Karbala, about 60 miles southwest of Baghdad.

"Preliminary reports are that an Iraqi hostile (fighter) departed a stopped vehicle with a hand grenade. When he deployed the hand grenade, Cpl. Dunham put himself between the grenade and his fellow Marines. The two Marines who witnessed the event were also medevaced, so the battalion is still gaining details."

Dunham began his second deployment in Iraq in September after extending his enlistment to serve as a squad leader with another Marine unit. He enlisted in the Marines after graduating from Scio Central School in June 2000. He was scheduled to complete his service in July.

"Jason's been my hero since the day he was born," his father said. "All my kids are. They never had to do anything to prove that to me."

The funeral will be scheduled later this week after the body arrives home.

Survivors, in addition to his parents, include two brothers, Justin, 21, of Butler, Pa., and Kyle, 15; a sister, Katie, 11; and his grandparents, Patricia Layton of Amity, Murray and Linda Dunham of Arkport, Gerald and Roberta Kinkead of Ridgeway, Pa., and Bernie and Sandy Jackson of Wellsville.

###


Marine dies with parents at his bedside
By Rick Davis
The Desert Sunbrown
April 27th, 2004

A corporal who last week became the 30th service member from Twentynine Palms to die in the Iraq war suffered his fatal injuries when he jumped in front of a hand grenade in an attempt to save the lives of his battalion mates, the fallen Marine?s father said Monday.

Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, who was serving his second tour of duty in Iraq, was injured critically April 14 when struck in the head by shrapnel from a grenade explosion during a confrontation with Iraqi hostile fighters near the city of Karbala, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad.

The 23-year-old Dunham was airlifted to a hospital in Germany, then to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. He died Thursday with his parents at his bedside. His death was announced Monday afternoon by the Department of Defense.

"All I can say is this isn?t nothing that I wouldn?t expect of my son because that?s the kind of person he was,"Daniel Dunham, his father, said by telephone from Jason?s hometown, Scio, N.Y., a town of 1,914 in southwestern New York.

Daniel Dunham said information regarding his son?s death came from documents supplied by the Defense Department.

He said the documents indicated the grenade was thrown by a suspected Iraqi insurgent and two other Marines who witnessed the incident were wounded, but are recovering.

The news of Dunham?s death came the same day another Marine from his battalion was buried in his hometown.

Funeral services were held Monday for Lance Cpl. Ruben Valdez in San Diego, Texas. Valdez was killed April 17 in Iraq, three days after Dunham suffered his wounds.

An Air Force veteran, Daniel Dunham said Jason, one of three sons, enlisted in the Marines following high school graduation in June 2000 because it seemed like a good fit.

"He's a little more rugged than me and needed to go where the rugged went," he said. "We're all very strong about the ilitary being good for young kids, for teaching discipline and responsibility. Jason?s been my hero since he was born. All my kids are. They never had to do anything to prove that to me."

Dunham, whose military occupational specialty was machine gunner, first served in Iraq last year while assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment based at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms.

He was transferred to another Twentynine Palms-based unit,3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, last fall and deployed with it to Iraq in February.

Daniel Dunham said he understood his son had extended beyond his July expiration of enlistment in order to be assigned duty as a squad leader this time.

"Jason was my son, and also my friend," said Debra Dunham, Jason's mother. "We loved him deeply and will miss him very much."

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, April 30, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

The photograph below was taken at Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base 38 miles north of San Diego. It shows Col. Robert Knapp and Spirit of America's Jim Hake in front of the television equipment that was bought with contributions from readers of this newspaper and others. It will be in the air tomorrow, bound for Al Anbar province in Iraq. There, Marines from the First Expeditionary Force will help Iraqis restore seven local TV stations.

This is a remarkable story of can-do. I think it is also the story of a nation willing to do more than it has been asked by the Bush administration. It is about the need for an Iraqi homefront.

The column describing Spirit of America's effort to raise $100,000 for the TV stations appeared in this space 14 days ago. Since then, the following has happened:

Jim Hake, Spirit of America's entrepreneur founder, says they have received $1.52 million. Some 7,000 donations have come from every state, and one from . . . France.

Mr. Hake purchased all the needed equipment and had suppliers ship directly to Camp Pendleton. Federal Express donated domestic shipping costs.

Stanley Hubbard at Hubbard Broadcasting Inc. in Minnesota has offered several hundred thousand dollars in state of the art digital television equipment. That equipment would provide satellite uplink and downlink capability, allowing the Iraqis' TV stations to get program content from elsewhere in the world.

Mr. Hake has received five new requests from military in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, the live war that faded from view until Pat Tillman, the former NFL player, was killed there. A Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan requested soccer equipment for a village team: "They compete regionally but have no equipment save a couple of soccer balls." The team's equipment will soon be shipped.

Sounds like small potatoes. But in the relatively alien worlds the U.S. now finds itself, represented by its soldiers, this is what must be done if we hope to extinguish terrorism and restore self-government in lands taken over by terrorist networks.

Tellingly, Mr. Hake has also received a request from a Coalition Provisional Authority office in Iraq. The CPA of course is the U.S. government agency officially tasked with restoring Iraq, and funded by Congress (i.e., the American people). That the CPA itself would ask Jim Hake for help suggests that peacetime rules and red tape are smothering a wartime effort--whether by the CPA, private contractors or the military. This is a good subject for another time (horror stories of bureaucracy run wild welcome at the address below).





Let us downshift a moment from this tale of real people giving their own money to do real good in Iraq to survey how the war appears more familiarly in the life of America. Just in the past week, amid televised scenes of U.S. soldiers fighting to defeat their killers and the killers of Iraqi innocents in Fallujah and Najaf, the homefront consisted of:
John Kerry sitting down Monday with ABC's Charles Gibson to parse "medals" and "ribbons" in panicked syntax that recalled Ralph Cramden's famous "hummina-hummina-hummina" routine; a debate over televising covered coffins; an appearance before the all-partisan September 11 commission by the President and Vice President; and tonight's scheduled naming by Ted Koppel of every U.S. soldier killed in Iraq the past year. Mr. Koppel said, "We felt that the impact would actually be greater on a day when the entire nation is not focused on its war dead." Not focused on its war dead?

 The war as it is presented in the U.S. and the war as it exists in Iraq seems to occupy separate spheres of reality. The political class and media treat the war as something whose "policy" details can somehow be revisited, even rethought. At home, the war is a political event, a normal partisan phenomenon. Its metaphors are borne out of Vietnam--quagmire, bogged down, body counts, Ted Kennedy.

Guess what? Vietnam isn't coming back. The people of this country tore the nation's fabric terribly over Vietnam. They are not going to do it again.

The grand response to the Spirit of America request says to me that the public understands that we are there in Iraq and the job now isn't to debate its value but to get the job done. Most Americans don't want to be one of the partisan bobbleheads on television. They want to be part of a genuine homefront, helping. One who responded to the Spirit of America appeal, Dick Kampa of Tucson, Ariz., put it this way:

"My sense is that there are many who would support civilian, home-front activity that would bolster troop morale and communicate to the Iraqi people that we really are their friends. Putting a political label on such activity would be counterproductive. I think Democrats and Republicans should, and many would, unite in these activities. Perhaps we need rallies or community meetings linked to constructive actions like funds for impactful projects in Iraq, adopt-a-communities, collection of goods, bandage rolling, etc., things that involve people across America."

You know for a fact that if Laura Bush undertook any such homefront effort, it would be dissected and mocked as hokey and irrelevant. Too bad. I don't think most Americans want to debate woulda, coulda, shoulda just now. They want to win. Spirit of America is a start, but someone high in the Bush administration ought to start thinking of ways to let more people pitch in.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
22 April 2004

The Al Fallujah Cease-Fire and the Three-Way Game

Summary

U.S. forces have reached a written cease-fire agreement with Sunni guerrillas operating in Al Fallujah. More than ending -- or at least suspending -- the battles in Al Fallujah, the cease-fire has turned the political situation in Iraq on its head, with the United States now positioned strategically between the majority Shia and the Sunni insurgents.

Analysis

The United States and the Sunni guerrillas in Iraq agreed to an extended cease-fire in Al Fallujah on April 19. Most media treated the news as important. It was, in fact, extraordinary. The fact that either force -- U.S. or Iraqi -- would have considered negotiating with the other represents an astounding evolution on both sides. For the first time in the guerrilla war, the United States and the guerrillas went down what a Marine general referred to as a "political track." That a political track has emerged between these two adversaries represents a stunning evolution. Even if it goes no further -- and even if the cease-fire in Al Fallujah collapses -- it represents a massive shift in policy on both sides.

To be precise, the document that was signed April 19 was between U.S. military forces and civilian leaders in the city. That distinction having been made, it is clear that the civilian leaders were authorized by the guerrillas to negotiate a cease- fire. The proof of that can be found in the fact that the leaders are still alive and were not executed by the guerrillas for betraying the purity of their cause. It is also clear that the Americans believe these leaders speak for the guerrillas in some definitive way; otherwise, there would have been no point to the negotiations. Thus the distinction between civilian and guerrilla in Al Fallujah is not entirely meaningful.

The willingness of the United States to negotiate with the guerrillas is the most significant evolution. If we recall the U.S. view of the guerrilla movement in May and June 2003, the official position was that there was no guerrilla movement, that there were only the uncoordinated remnants of the old regime, bandits and renegades. The idea of negotiating anything with this group was inconceivable for both ideological and practical reasons. A group as uncoordinated as Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld portrayed them could not negotiate -- or be negotiated with -- under any circumstances. We believed then that the Sunni guerrillas were an organized movement preplanned by the Iraqis, and we believe now -- obviously -- that their organization has improved over time. It has certainly become an army that can be addressed as a cohesive entity and negotiated with.

More important is the fact that both sides felt constrained -- at least in this limited circumstance -- to negotiate. In that sense, each side was defeated by the other. The United States conceded that it could not unilaterally impose its will on Al Fallujah. There are political and military reasons for this. Politically, the collateral damage of house-to-house fighting would have had significant political consequences for Iraq, the alliance and the United States. The guerrillas could not have been defeated without a significant number of civilian casualties. Militarily, the United States has no desire to engage in urban combat. Casualties among U.S. troops would have been high, and the forces doing the fighting would have been exhausted. At a time of substantial troop shortages, the level of effort needed to pacify Al Fallujah would have represented a substantial burden. The guerrillas had posed a politico-military problem that could not readily be solved unilaterally.

It was also a defeat for the guerrillas. Their political position has been unalterable opposition to the United States, and an uncompromising struggle to defeat the Americans. They have presented themselves not only as ready to die, but also as representing an Iraq that was ready to die with them. At the very least, it is clear that the citizens of Al Fallujah were ready neither to die nor to endure the siege the United States was prepared to impose. At most, the guerrillas themselves, trapped inside Al Fallujah, chose to negotiate an exit, even if it meant surrendering heavy weapons -- including machine guns -- and even if it meant that they could no longer use Al Fallujah as a battleground. Whether it was the civilians or the guerrillas that drove for settlement, someone settled -- and the settlement included the guerrillas.

The behavior of the guerrillas indicates to us that their numbers and resources are not as deep as it might appear. The guerrillas are not cowards. Cowards don't take on U.S. Marines. Forcing the United States into house-to-house fighting would have been logical -- unless the guerrillas in Al Fallujah represented a substantial proportion of the guerrilla fighting force and had to be retained. If that were the case, it would indicate that the guerrillas are afraid of battles of annihilation that they cannot recover from. Obviously, there is strong anti-American feeling in Iraq, but the difference between throwing a rock or a grenade and carrying out the effective, coordinated warfare of the professional guerrilla is training. Enthusiasm does not create soldiers. Training takes time and secure bases. It is likely that the guerrillas have neither, so -- with substantial forces trapped in Al Fallujah -- they had to negotiate their way out.

In short, both sides have hit a wall of reality. The American belief that there was no guerrilla force -- or that the guerrillas had been crushed in December 2003 -- is simply not true. If the United States wants to crush the guerrillas, U.S. troops will have to go into Al Fallujah and other towns and fight house to house. On the other hand, the guerrilla wish for a rising wave of unrest to break the American will simply has not come true. The forces around Al Fallujah were substantial, were not deterred by political moves and could come in and wipe them out. That was not an acceptable prospect.

Al Fallujah demonstrates three things: First, it demonstrates that under certain circumstances, a political agreement --however limited -- can be negotiated between the United States and the guerrillas. Second, it demonstrates that the United States is aware of the limits of its power and is now open, for the first time, to some sort of political resolution -- even if it means dealing with the guerrillas. Third, it demonstrates that the guerrillas are aware of the limits of their power, and are implicitly prepared for some solution short of complete, immediate victory. The question is where this all goes.

To begin with, it could go nowhere. First, the cease-fire could be a guerrilla trap. As U.S. forces begin the joint patrols with Iraqi police that were agreed to, the guerrillas could hit them, ending the cease-fire. Second, the cease-fire could break down because of a lack of coordination among the guerrillas, dissident groups, or a U.S. decision to use the cease-fire as a cover for penetrating the city and resuming operations. Third, the cease-fire could work in Al Fallujah but not be applied anywhere else. The whole thing could be a flash in the pan. On the other hand, if the Al Fallujah cease-fire holds, a precedent is set that could expand.

In 1973, after the cease-fire in the Arab-Israeli war, Israeli and Egyptian troops held positions too close to each other for comfort. A disengagement was necessary. In what was then an extraordinary event, Israeli and Egyptian military leaders met at a point in the road called Kilometer 101. In face-to-face negotiations, days after guns fell silent in a brutal war, the combatants -- not the politicians -- mediated by the United States, reached a limited technical agreement for disengaging forces in that particular instance, and only in that instance. In our view, the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt were framed at Kilometer 101. If disengagement could be negotiated, the logic held that other things could be negotiated as well.

There were powerful political forces driving toward a settlement as well, and the military imperative was simply the cutting edge.  But there are also powerful political forces in Iraq. The United States clearly does not want an interminable civil war in Iraq.  The jihadists -- the foreign Islamist militants -- obviously do want that. But the view of the Sunni guerrillas might be different. They have other enemies besides the Americans -- they have the Shia. The Sunnis have as little desire to be dominated by the Shia as the Shia have to be dominated by the Sunnis. In that aversion, there is political opportunity. Unlike the foreign jihadists, the native Sunni guerrillas are not ideologically opposed to negotiating with the Shia -- or the Americans.

The Role of the Shia

The United States has banked heavily on the cooperation of the Shia. It reached agreement with the Shia to allow them a Shiite-dominated government. After the December 2003 suppression of the Sunni guerrillas, Washington cooled a bit on the deal. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani demanded elections, which he knew the Shia would win. Washington insisted on a prefabricated government that limited Shiite power and would frame the new constitution, leading to elections. Al-Sistani suspected that the new constitution would be written so as to deny the Shia what the United States had promised.

Al-Sistani first demanded elections. The United States refused to budge. He then called huge demonstrations. The United States refused to budge. Then Muqtada al-Sadr -- who is either al-Sistani's mortal enemy, his tool or both -- rose up in the south.  Al-Sistani was showing the United States that -- without him and the Shia -- the U.S. position in Iraq would become untenable. He made an exceptionally good case. The United States approached al-Sistani urgently to intercede, but -- outstanding negotiator that he is -- al-Sistani refused to budge for several days, during which it appeared that all of Iraq was exploding. Then, he quietly interceded and al-Sadr -- trapped with relatively limited forces, isolated from the Shiite main body and facing the United States -- began to look for a way out. Al-Sistani appeared to have proven his point to the United States: Without the Shia, the United States cannot remain in Iraq. Without al-Sistani, the Shia will become unmanageable.

From al-Sistani's point of view, there was a three-player game in Iraq -- fragments notwithstanding -- and the Shia were the swing players, with the Sunnis and Americans at each other's throats.  In any three-player game, the swing player is in the strongest position. Al-Sistani, able to swing between the Americans and the Sunnis, was the most powerful figure in Iraq. So long as the Americans and Sunnis remained locked in that position, al-Sistani would win.

The Sunnis did not want to see a Shiite-dominated Iraq. So long as al-Sistani was talking to the Americans and they were not, the choice was between a long, difficult, uncertain war and capitulation. The Sunnis had to change the terms of the game. What they signaled to al-Sistani was that if he continued to negotiate with the United States and not throw in with the guerrillas, they would have no choice but to open a line of communication with the Americans as well. Al Fallujah proved not only that they would -- but more importantly -- that they could.

From the U.S. point of view, the hostility between Sunnis and Shia is the bedrock of the occupation. They cannot permit the two players to unite against them. Nor can they allow the Shia to become too powerful or for the Americans to become their prisoners. While al-Sistani was coolly playing his hand, it became clear to the Americans that they needed additional options. Otherwise, the only two outcomes they faced here were a Sunni-Shiite alliance against them or becoming the prisoner of the Shia.

By opening negotiations with the Sunnis, the Americans sent a stunning message to the Shia: The idea of negotiation with the Sunnis is not out of the question. In fact, by completing the cease-fire agreement before agreement was reached over al-Sadr's forces in An Najaf, the United States pointed out that it was, at the moment, easier to deal with the Sunnis than with the Shia. This increased pressure on al-Sistani, who saw for the first time a small indicator that his position was not as unassailably powerful as he thought.

The New Swing Player

The Al Fallujah cease-fire has started -- emphasis on "started" -- a process whereby the United States moves to become the swing player, balancing between Sunnis and Shia. Having reached out to the Sunnis to isolate the Americans and make them more forthcoming, the Shia now face the possibility of "arrangements" -- not agreements, not treaties, not a settlement -- between U.S. and Sunni forces that put realities in place, out of which broader understandings might gradually emerge.

In the end, the United States has limited interest in Iraq, but the Iraqis -- Sunnis and Shia alike -- are not going anywhere. They are going to have to deal with each other, although they do not trust each other -- and with good reason. Neither trusts the United States, but the United States will eventually leave. In the meantime, the United States could be exceedingly useful in cementing Sunni or Shiite power over each other. Neither side wants to wind up dominated by the other. Neither wants the Americans to stay in Iraq permanently, but the United States does not want to stay permanently either. A few years hardly makes a major difference in an area where history is measured in millennia.

The simple assumption is that most Iraqis want the Americans out. That is a true statement, but not a sufficient one. A truer statement is this: Most Iraqis want the Americans out, but are extremely interested in what happens after they leave. Given that, the proper statement is: Most Iraqis want the Americans out, but are prepared to use the Americans toward their ends while they are there, and want them to leave in a manner that will maximize their own interests in a postwar Iraqi world.

That is the lever that the Americans have, and that they seem to have been playing in the past year. It is a long step down from the days when the Department of Defense skirmished with the State Department about which of them would govern postwar Iraq, on the assumption that those were the only choices. Unpleasant political choices will have to be made in Iraq, but the United States now has a standpoint from which to manipulate the situation and remain in Iraq while it exerts pressure in the region. In the end -- grand ambitions notwithstanding -- that is what the United States came for in the first place.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.stratfor.com

Woof All:

This one is quite long.  I recommend it highly.

Crafty
=================

The Fruits of Appeasement
Victor Davis Hanson

Imagine a different November 4, 1979, in Teheran. Shortly after Iranian terrorists storm the American embassy and take some 90 American hostages, President Jimmy Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a legitimate response to the excess of the Shah but a new and dangerous fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he issues an ultimatum to Teheran?s leaders: Release the captives or face a devastating military response.

When that demand is not met, instead of freezing Iran?s assets, stopping the importation of its oil, or seeking support at the UN, Carter orders an immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and residences of its ruling mullocracy. The Ayatollah Khomeini may well have called his bluff; we may well have tragically lost the hostages (151 fewer American lives than the Iranian-backed Hezbollah would take four years later in a single day in Lebanon). And there may well have been the sort of chaos in Teheran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in 1979?and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the leveling of the World Trade Center.

The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler?s contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust, and the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of ?appeasement??a term that early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of ?deterrence? and ?military readiness.?

So too did Western excuses for the Russians? violation of guarantees of free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia only embolden the Soviet Union. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and nuclear deterrence?not the United Nations?and what destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagan?s assertiveness, not Jimmy Carter?s accommodation or Richard Nixon?s d?tente.

As long ago as the fourth century b.c., Demosthenes warned how complacency and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek liberty?and in a mere 20 years of creeping aggrandizement down the Greek peninsula. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any liberal society: we must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance, and enlightened self-interest.

Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn each generation, especially now that we contend with the sirens of the mall, Oprah, and latte. Our affluence and leisure are as antithetical to the use of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular action. The age-old lure of appeasement?perhaps they will cease with this latest concession, perhaps we provoked our enemies, perhaps demonstrations of our future good intentions will win their approval?was never more evident than in the recent Spanish elections, when an affluent European electorate, reeling from the horrific terrorist attack of 3/11, swept from power the pro-U.S. center-right government on the grounds that the mass murders were more the fault of the United States for dragging Spain into the effort to remove fascists and implant democracy in Iraq than of the primordial al-Qaidist culprits, who long ago promised the Western and Christian Iberians ruin for the Crusades and the Reconquista.

What went wrong with the West?and with the United States in particular?when not just the classical but especially the recent antecedents to September 11, from the Iranian hostage-taking to the attack on the USS Cole, were so clear? Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about our war dead, may now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were acts of war, not police matters. Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the bombing of the Khobar Towers and the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the American embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats (including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem, and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: that debacle is where we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy, and Middle East state terrorism?and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it, and go to war against it.

That lapse, worth meditating upon in this 25th anniversary year of Khomeinism, then set the precedent that such aggression against the United States was better adjudicated as a matter of law than settled by war. Criminals were to be understood, not punished; and we, not our enemies, were at fault for our past behavior. Whether Carter?s impotence sprang from his deep-seated moral distrust of using American power unilaterally or from real remorse over past American actions in the cold war or even from his innate pessimism about the military capability of the United States mattered little to the hostage takers in Teheran, who for some 444 days humiliated the United States through a variety of public demands for changes in U.S. foreign policy, the return of the exiled Shah, and reparations.

But if we know how we failed to respond in the last three decades, do we yet grasp why we were so afraid to act decisively at these earlier junctures, which might have stopped the chain of events that would lead to the al-Qaida terrorist acts of September 11? Our failure was never due to a lack of the necessary wealth or military resources, but rather to a deeply ingrained assumption that we should not retaliate?a hesitancy al-Qaida perceives and plays upon.

Along that sad succession of provocations, we can look back and see particularly critical turning points that reflected this now-institutionalized state policy of worrying more about what the enemy was going to do to us than we to him, to paraphrase Grant?s dictum: not hammering back after the murder of the marines in Lebanon for fear of ending up like the Israelis in a Lebanese quagmire; not going to Baghdad in 1991 because of paranoia that the ?coalition? would collapse and we would polarize the Arabs; pulling abruptly out of Somalia once pictures of American bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were broadcast around the world; or turning down offers in 1995 from Sudan to place Usama bin Ladin into our custody, for fear that U.S. diplomats or citizens might be murdered abroad.

Throughout this tragic quarter-century of appeasement, our response usually consisted of a stern lecture by a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton about ?never giving in to terrorist blackmail? and ?not negotiating with terrorists.? Even Ronald Reagan?s saber-rattling ?You can run but not hide? did not preclude trading arms to the Iranian terrorists or abruptly abandoning Lebanon after the horrific Hezbollah attack.

Sometimes a half-baked failed rescue mission, or a battleship salvo, cruise missile, or air strike followed?but always accompanied by a weeklong debate by conservatives over ?exit strategies? and ?mission creep,? while liberals fretted about ?consultations with our allies and the United Nations.? And remember: these pathetic military responses were the hawkish actions that earned us the resignation of a furious Cyrus Vance, the abrogation of overflight rights by concerned ?allies? such as France, and a national debate about what we did to cause such animosity in the first place.

Our enemies and Middle Eastern ?friends? alike sneered at our self-flagellation. In 1991, at great risk, the United States freed Kuwait from Iraq and ended its status as the 19th satrapy of Saddam Hussein?only to watch the restored kingdom ethnically cleanse over a third of a million Palestinians. But after the murder of 3,000 Americans in 2001, Kuwaitis, in a February 2002 Gallup poll (and while they lobbied OPEC to reduce output and jack up prices), revealed an overwhelming distaste for Americans?indeed the highest levels of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. And these ethnic cleansers of Palestinians cited America?s purportedly unfair treatment of the Palestinians (recipients of accumulated billions in American aid) as a prime cause of their dislike of us.

In the face of such visceral anti-Americanism, the problem may not be real differences over the West Bank, much less that ?we are not getting the message out?; rather, in the decade since 1991 the Middle East saw us as a great power that neither could nor would use its strength to advance its ideas?that lacked even the intellectual confidence to argue for our civilization before the likes of a tenth-century monarchy. The autocratic Arab world neither respects nor fears a democratic United States, because it rightly senses that we often talk in principled terms but rarely are willing to invest the time, blood, and treasure to match such rhetoric with concrete action. That?s why it is crucial for us to stay in Iraq to finish the reconstruction and cement the achievement of our three-week victory over Saddam.

It is easy to cite post-Vietnam guilt and shame as the likely culprit for our paralysis. After all, Jimmy Carter came in when memories of capsizing boat people and of American helicopters lifting swarms of panicked diplomats off the roof of the Saigon embassy were fresh. In 1980, he exited in greater shame: his effusive protestations that Soviet communism wasn?t something to fear all that much won him the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, while his heralded ?human rights? campaign was answered by the Ortegas in Nicaragua and the creation of a murderous theocracy in Iran. Yet perhaps President Carter was not taking the American people anywhere they didn?t want to go. After over a decade of prior social unrest and national humiliation in Vietnam, many Americans believed that the United States either could not or should not do much about things beyond its shores.

As time wore on and the nightmare of Vietnam began to fade, fear of the Soviet Union kept us from crushing the terrorists who killed our diplomats and blew up our citizens. These were no idle fears, given the Russians? record of butchering 30 million of their own, stationing 300 divisions on Europe?s borders, and pointing 7,000 nukes at the United States. And fear of their malevolence made eminent sense in the volatile Middle East, where the Russians made direct threats to the Israelis in both the 1967 and 1973 wars, when the Syrian, Egyptian, and Iraqi militaries?trained, supplied, and advised by Russians?were on the verge of annihilation. Russian support for Nasser?s Pan-Arabism and for Baathism in Iraq and Syria rightly worried cold warriors, who sensed that the Soviets had their geopolitical eyes on Middle East oil and a stranglehold over Persian Gulf commerce.

Indeed, these twin pillars of the old American Middle East policy?worry over oil and fear of communists?reigned for nearly half a century, between 1945 and 1991. Such realism, however understandable, was counterproductive in the long run, since our tacit support for odious anti-communist governments in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and North Africa did not address the failure of such autocracies to provide prosperity and hope for exploding populations of increasingly poor and angry citizens. We kept Russians out of the oil fields and ensured safe exports of petroleum to Europe, Japan, and the United States?but at what proved to be the steep price of allowing awful regimes to deflect popular discontent against us.

Nor was realpolitik always effective. Such illegitimate Arab regimes as the Saudi royal family initiated several oil embargoes, after all. And meanwhile, such a policy did not deter the Soviets from busily selling high-tech weaponry to Libya, Syria, and Iraq, while the KGB helped to train and fund almost every Arab terrorist group. And indeed, immediately after the 1991 Iraqi takeover of Kuwait, U.S. intelligence officers discovered that Soviet-trained Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abu Ibrahim had flocked to Baghdad on the invitation of the Baathist Saddam Hussein: though the Soviet Union did not interrupt Western petroleum commerce, its well-supplied surrogates did their fair share of murdering.

Neither thirst for petroleum nor fear of communists, then, adequately explains our inaction for most of the tumultuous late 1980s and 1990s, when groups like Hezbollah and al-Qaida came on to the world scene. Gorbachev?s tottering empire had little inclination to object too strenuously when the United States hit Libya in 1986, recall, and thanks to the growing diversity and fungibility of the global oil supply, we haven?t had a full-fledged Arab embargo since 1979.

Instead, the primary cause for our surprising indifference to the events leading up to September 11 lies within ourselves. Westerners always have had a propensity for complacency because of our wealth and freedom; and Americans in particular have enjoyed a comfortable isolation in being separated from the rest of the world by two oceans. Yet during the last four presidential administrations, laxity about danger on the horizon seems to have become more ingrained than in the days when a more robust United States sought to thwart communist intrusion into Arabia, Asia, and Africa.

Americans never viewed terrorist outlaw states with the suspicion they once had toward Soviet communism; they put little pressure on their leaders to crack down on Middle Eastern autocracy and theocracy as a threat to security. At first this indifference was understandable, given the stealthy nature of our enemies and the post?cold war relief that, having toppled the Soviet Union and freed millions in Eastern Europe, we might be at the end of history. Even the bloodcurdling anti-American shouts from the Beirut street did not seem as scary as a procession of intercontinental missiles and tanks on an average May Day parade in Moscow.

Hezbollah, al-Qaida, and the PLO were more like fleas on a sleeping dog: bothersome rather than lethal; to be flicked away occasionally rather than systematically eradicated. Few paid attention to Usama bin Ladin?s infamous February 1998 fatwa: ?The rule to kill Americans and their allies?civilians and military?is a sacred duty for any Muslim.? Those who noticed thought it just impotent craziness, akin to Sartre?s fatuous quip during the Vietnam War that he wished for a nuclear strike against the United States to end its imperial aspirations. No one thought that a raving maniac in an Afghan cave could kill more Americans in a single day than the planes of the Japanese imperial fleet off Pearl Harbor.

But still, how did things as odious to liberal sensibilities as Pan-Arabism, Islamic fundamentalism, and Middle Eastern dictatorship?which squashed dissent, mocked religious tolerance, and treated women as chattel?become reinvented into ?alternate discourses? deserving a sympathetic pass from the righteous anger of the United States when Americans were murdered overseas? Was it that spokesmen for terrorist regimes mimicked the American Left?in everything from dress, vocabulary, and appearances on the lecture circuit?and so packaged their extremism in a manner palatable to Americans? Why, after all, were Americans patient with remonstrations from University of Virginia alumna Hanan Ashrawi, rather than asking precisely how such a wealthy Christian PLO apparatchik really felt about the Palestinian Authority?s endemic corruption, the spendthrift Parisian Mrs. Arafat, the terrorists around Arafat himself, the spate of ?honor killings? of women in the West Bank, the censorship of the Palestinian press, suicide murdering by Arafat affiliates, and the lynching of suspects by Palestinian police?

Rather than springing from realpolitik, sloth, or fear of oil cutoffs, much of our appeasement of Middle Eastern terrorists derived from a new sort of anti-Americanism that thrived in the growing therapeutic society of the 1980s and 1990s. Though the abrupt collapse of communism was a dilemma for the Left, it opened as many doors as it shut. To be sure, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few Marxists could argue for a state-controlled economy or mouth the old romance about a workers? paradise?not with scenes of East German families crammed into smoking clunkers lumbering over potholed roads, like American pioneers of old on their way west. But if the creed of the socialist republics was impossible to take seriously in either economic or political terms, such a collapse of doctrinaire statism did not discredit the gospel of forced egalitarianism and resentment against prosperous capitalists. Far from it.

If Marx receded from economics departments, his spirit reemerged among our intelligentsia in the novel guises of post-structuralism, new historicism, multiculturalism, and all the other dogmas whose fundamental tenet was that white male capitalists had systematically oppressed women, minorities, and Third World people in countless insidious ways. The font of that collective oppression, both at home and abroad, was the rich, corporate, Republican, and white United States.

The fall of the Soviet Union enhanced these newer post-colonial and liberation fields of study by immunizing their promulgators from charges of fellow-traveling or being dupes of Russian expansionism. Communism?s demise likewise freed these trendy ideologies from having to offer some wooden, unworkable Marxist alternative to the West; thus they could happily remain entirely critical, sarcastic, and cynical without any obligation to suggest something better, as witness the nihilist signs at recent protest marches proclaiming: ?I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas.?

From writers like Arundhati Roy and Michel Foucault (who anointed Khomeini ?a kind of mystic saint? who would usher in a new ?political spirituality? that would ?transfigure? the world) and from old standbys like Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre (?to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time?), there filtered down a vague notion that the United States and the West in general were responsible for Third World misery in ways that transcended the dull old class struggle. Endemic racism and the legacy of colonialism, the oppressive multinational corporation and the humiliation and erosion of indigenous culture brought on by globalization and a smug, self-important cultural condescension?all this and more explained poverty and despair, whether in Damascus, Teheran, or Beirut.

There was victim status for everybody, from gender, race, and class at home to colonialism, imperialism, and hegemony abroad. Anyone could play in these ?area studies? that cobbled together the barrio, the West Bank, and the ?freedom fighter? into some sloppy global union of the oppressed?a far hipper enterprise than rehashing Das Kapital or listening to a six-hour harangue from Fidel.

Of course, pampered Western intellectuals since Diderot have always dreamed up a ?noble savage,? who lived in harmony with nature precisely because of his distance from the corruption of Western civilization. But now this fuzzy romanticism had an updated, political edge: the bearded killer and wild-eyed savage were not merely better than we because they lived apart in a pre-modern landscape. No: they had a right to strike back and kill modernizing Westerners who had intruded into and disrupted their better world?whether Jews on Temple Mount, women in Westernized dress in Teheran, Christian missionaries in Kabul, capitalist profiteers in Islamabad, whiskey-drinking oilmen in Riyadh, or miniskirted tourists in Cairo.

An Ayatollah Khomeini who turned back the clock on female emancipation in Iran, who murdered non-Muslims, and who refashioned Iranian state policy to hunt down, torture, and kill liberals nevertheless seemed to liberal Western eyes as preferable to the Shah?a Western-supported anti-communist, after all, who was engaged in the messy, often corrupt task of bringing Iran from the tenth to the twentieth century, down the arduous, dangerous path that, as in Taiwan or South Korea, might eventually lead to a consensual, capitalist society like our own.

Yet in the new world of utopian multiculturalism and knee-jerk anti-Americanism, in which a Noam Chomsky could proclaim Khomeini?s gulag to be ?independent nationalism,? reasoned argument was futile. Indeed, how could critical debate arise for those ?committed to social change,? when no universal standards were to be applied to those outside the West? Thanks to the doctrine of cultural relativism, ?oppressed? peoples either could not be judged by our biased and ?constructed? values (?false universals,? in Edward Said?s infamous term) or were seen as more pristine than ourselves, uncorrupted by the evils of Western capitalism.

Who were we to gainsay Khomeini?s butchery and oppression? We had no way of understanding the nuances of his new liberationist and ?nationalist? Islam. Now back in the hands of indigenous peoples, Iran might offer the world an alternate path, a different ?discourse? about how to organize a society that emphasized native values (of some sort) over mere profit.

So at precisely the time of these increasingly frequent terrorist attacks, the silly gospel of multiculturalism insisted that Westerners have neither earned the right to censure others, nor do they possess the intellectual tools to make judgments about the relative value of different cultures. And if the initial wave of multiculturalist relativism among the elites?coupled with the age-old romantic forbearance for Third World roguery?explained tolerance for early unpunished attacks on Americans, its spread to our popular culture only encouraged more.

This nonjudgmentalism?essentially a form of nihilism?deemed everything from Sudanese female circumcision to honor killings on the West Bank merely ?different? rather than odious. Anyone who has taught freshmen at a state university can sense the fuzzy thinking of our undergraduates: most come to us prepped in high schools not to make ?value judgments? about ?other? peoples who are often ?victims? of American ?oppression.? Thus, before female-hating psychopath Mohamed Atta piloted a jet into the World Trade Center, neither Western intellectuals nor their students would have taken him to task for what he said or condemned him as hypocritical for his parasitical existence on Western society. Instead, without logic but with plenty of romance, they would more likely have excused him as a victim of globalization or of the biases of American foreign policy. They would have deconstructed Atta?s promotion of anti-Semitic, misogynist, Western-hating thought, as well as his conspiracies with Third World criminals, as anything but a danger and a pathology to be remedied by deportation or incarceration.

It was not for nothing that on November 17, 1979?less than two weeks after the militants stormed the American embassy in Teheran?the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 female and black hostages, singling them out as part of the brotherhood of those oppressed by the United States and cloaking his ongoing slaughter of Iranian opponents and attacks on United States sovereignty in a self-righteous anti-Americanism. Twenty-five years later, during the anti-war protests of last spring, a group called ?Act Now to Stop War and End Racism? sang the same foolish chorus in its call for demonstrations: ?Members of the Muslim Community, Antiwar Activists, Latin-American Solidarity Groups and People From All Over the United States Unite to Say: ?We Are All Palestinians!? ?

The new cult of romantic victimhood became gospel in most Middle East departments in American universities. Except for the courageous Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Fouad Ajami, few scholars offered any analysis that might confirm more astute Americans in their vague sense that in the Middle East, political autocracy, statism, tribalism, anti-intellectualism, and gender apartheid accounted for poverty and failure. And if few wished to take on Islamofascism in the 1990s?indeed, Steven Emerson?s chilling 1994 documentary Jihad in America set off a storm of protest from U.S. Muslim-rights groups and prompted death threats to the producer?almost no one but Samuel Huntington dared even to broach the taboo subject that there might be elements within doctrinaire Islam itself that could easily lead to intolerance and violence and were therefore at the root of any ?clash of civilizations.?

Instead, most experts explained why violent fanatics might have some half-legitimate grievance behind their deadly harvest each year of a few Americans in the wrong place at the wrong time. These experts cautioned that, instead of bombing and shooting killers abroad who otherwise would eventually reach us at home, Americans should take care not to disturb Iranian terrorists during Ramadan?rather than to remember that Muslims attacked Israel precisely during that holy period. Instead of condemning Wahhabis for the fascists that they were, we were instead apprised that such holy men of the desert and tent provided a rapidly changing and often Western-corrupted Saudi Arabia with a vital tether to the stability of its romantic nomadic past. Rather than recognizing that Yasser Arafat?s Tunisia-based Fatah organization was a crime syndicate, expert opinion persuaded us to empower it as an indigenous liberation movement on the West Bank?only to destroy nearly two decades? worth of steady Palestinian economic improvement.

Neither oil-concerned Republicans nor multicultural Democrats were ready to expose the corrupt American relationship with Saudi Arabia. No country is more culpable than that kingdom in funding extremist madrassas and subsidizing terror, or more antithetical to liberal American values from free speech to religious tolerance. But Saudi propagandists learned from the Palestinians the value of constructing their own victimhood as a long-oppressed colonial people. Call a Saudi fundamentalist mullah a fascist, and you can be sure you?ll be tarred as an Islamophobe.

Even when Middle Easterners regularly blew us up, the Clinton administration, unwilling to challenge the new myth of Muslim victimhood, transformed Middle Eastern terrorists bent on destroying America into wayward individual criminals who did not spring from a pathological culture. Thus, Clinton treated the first World Trade Center bombing as only a criminal justice matter?which of course allowed the United States to avoid confronting the issue and taking on the messy and increasingly unpopular business the Bush administration has been engaged in since September 11. Clinton dispatched FBI agents, not soldiers, to Yemen and Saudi Arabia after the attacks on the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers. Yasser Arafat, responsible in the 1970s for the murder of a U.S. diplomat in the Sudan, turned out to be the most frequent foreign visitor to the Clinton Oval Office.

If the Clintonian brand of appeasement reflected both a deep-seated tolerance for Middle Eastern extremism and a reluctance to wake comfortable Americans up to the danger of a looming war, he was not the only one naive about the threat of Islamic fascism. Especially culpable was the Democratic Party at large, whose post-Vietnam foreign policy could not sanction the use of American armed force to protect national interests but only to accomplish purely humanitarian ends as in the interventions in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia.

Indeed, the recent Democratic primaries reveal just how far this disturbing trend has evolved: the foreign-policy positions of John Kerry and Howard Dean on Iraq and the Middle East were far closer to those of extremists like Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich than to current American policy under George W. Bush. Indeed, buffoons or conspiracy theorists like Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Al Franken often turned up on the same stage as would-be presidents. When Moore, while endorsing Wesley Clark, called an American president at a time of war a ?deserter,? when the mendacious Sharpton lectured his smiling fellow candidates on the Bush administration?s ?lies? about Iraq, and when Al Gore labeled the president?s action in Iraq a ?betrayal? of America, the surrender of the mainstream Democrats to the sirens of extremism was complete. Again, past decorum and moderation go out the window when the pretext is saving indigenous peoples from American oppression.

The consensus for appeasement that led to September 11, albeit suppressed for nearly two years by outrage over the murder of 3,000, has reemerged in criticism over the ongoing reconstruction of Iraq and George Bush?s prosecution of the War on Terror.

The tired voices that predicted a litany of horrors in October 2001?the impassable peaks of Afghanistan, millions of refugees, endemic starvation, revolution in the Arab street, and violations of Ramadan?now complain, incorrectly, that 150,000 looted art treasures were the cost of guarding the Iraqi oil ministry, that Halliburton pipelines and refineries were the sole reason to remove Saddam Hussein, and that Christian fundamentalists and fifth-columnist neoconservatives have fomented a senseless revenge plot against Muslims and Arabs. Whether they complained before March 2003 that America faced death and ruin against Saddam?s Republican Guard, or two months later that in bullying fashion we had walked over a suddenly impotent enemy, or three months later still that, through incompetence, we were taking casualties and failing to get the power back on, leftist critics? only constant was their predictable dislike of America.

Military historians might argue that, given the enormity of our task in Iraq?liberating 26 million from a tyrant and implanting democracy in the region?the tragic loss of more than 500 Americans in a year?s war and peace was a remarkable sign of our care and expertise in minimizing deaths. Diplomats might argue that our past efforts at humanitarian reconstruction, with some idealistic commitment to consensual government, have a far better track record in Germany, Japan, Korea, Panama, and Serbia than our strategy of exiting Germany after World War I, of leaving Iraq to Saddam after 1991, of abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban once the Russians were stopped, of skipping out from Haiti or of fleeing Somalia. Realist students of arms control might argue that the recent confessions of Pakistan?s nuclear roguery, the surrender of the Libyan arsenal, and the invitation of the UN inspectors into Iran were the dividends of resolute American action in Iraq. Colonel Khadafy surely came clean not because of Jimmy Carter?s peace missions, UN resolutions, or EU diplomats.

But don?t expect any sober discussion of these contentions from the Left. Their gloom and doom about Iraq arises precisely from the anti-Americanism and romanticization of the Third World that once led to our appeasement and now seeks its return. When John Kerry talks of mysterious prominent Europeans he has met (but whose names he will not divulge) who, he says, pray for his election in hopes of ending George Bush?s Iraqi nightmare, perhaps he has in mind people like the Chamberlainesque European Commission president Romano Prodi, who said in the wake of the recent mass murder in Spain: ?Clearly, the conflict with the terrorists is not resolved with force alone.? Perhaps he has in mind, also, the Spanish electorate, which believes it can find security from al-Qaida terrorism by refuting all its past support for America?s role in the Middle East. But of course if the terrorists understand that, in lieu of resolve, they will find such appeasement a mere 48 hours after a terrorist attack, then all previously resolute Western democracies?Italy, Poland, Britain, and the United States?should expect the terrorists to murder their citizens on the election eve in hopes of achieving just such a Spanish-style capitulation.

In contrast, George W. Bush, impervious to such self-deception, has, in a mere two and a half years, reversed the perilous course of a quarter-century. Since September 11, he has removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, begun to challenge the Middle East through support for consensual government, isolated Yasser Arafat, pressured the Europeans on everything from anti-Semitism to their largesse to Hamas, removed American troops from Saudi Arabia, shut down fascistic Islamic ?charities,? scattered al-Qaida, turned Pakistan from a de facto foe to a scrutinized neutral, rounded up terrorists in the United States, pressured Libya, Iran, and Pakistan to come clean on clandestine nuclear cheating, so far avoided another September 11?and promises that he is not nearly done yet. If the Spanish example presages further terrorist attacks on European democracies at election time, at least Mr. Bush has made it clear that America?alone if need be?will neither appease nor ignore such killers but in fact finish the terrible war that they started.

As Jimmy Carter also proved in November 1979, one man really can make a difference.

......................................................................

Geopolitical Diary: Tuesday, April 13, 2004

A tenuous cease-fire between U.S. forces and Sunni militants in Al Fallujah more or less held April 12, and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army pulled out of police stations in An Najaf, Karbala and Kufa. The slight reduction in clashes resulted from a series of bilateral negotiations -- arranged by members of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and other civic and religious organizations -- between the coalition forces and various Sunni and Shiite factions in Iraq.

For the United States, the respite is welcome after a week of intense
clashes across the country that appeared to be headed toward plunging the U.S. Iraq strategy into an abyss. But short-term solutions to the recently intensified fighting could have longer-term repercussions for U.S.
strategy -- an uncertainty Washington appears more willing to live with than the near certainty of chaos that was evolving last week.

For Washington, sending a clear, strong message to the militants in Al
Fallujah took a back seat to dealing with the rising of Shiite forces under
the leadership of al-Sadr. U.S. Marines last week surrounded Al Fallujah and were prepared to hunt down and kill those responsible for the late March deaths and mutilations of four U.S. civilian contractors. The message was to be clear and unmistakable: Such actions were unacceptable and anyone participating in them -- or sheltering those who participated -- would be punished to the maximum.

Just before U.S. forces moved into the city, clashes erupted elsewhere in
Iraq between al-Sadr's Mehdi Army and coalition forces. While the Al
Fallujah operation began, it was with a wary eye toward the larger threat of an apparent uprising among the Shia. In both cases, the U.S. military -- restricted by existing troop deployments and rules of engagement calling for minimal civilian casualties -- decided to call cease-fires and negotiate.

As Stratfor mentioned previously, the negotiations with the Sunnis -- via a
member of the IGC -- were a new step for the coalition, which had treated the Sunni militants as loosely organized bands of thugs with some foreign jihadists thrown in, not as a cohesive political-military entity with which it could negotiate. Even with the start of negotiations, it is not clear
that there is a cohesive unit representing the Sunni militants, much less
all of Iraq's minority Sunni population.

The point of negotiations is not so much to end all fighting with Sunni
militants -- no one expects that to happen anytime soon -- as to bring a
pause in the current fighting and to give the coalition forces a chance to
reassess the situation, particularly regarding al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani. U.S. forces could not afford to face down the militants in
Al Fallujah and all of Iraq's Shia if they had risen up over the weekend.
The trickle of signs that Shiite and Sunni forces were joining -- at least
on a neighborhood level in some areas of the country -- presented a serious potential challenge to U.S. operations.

Although the short-term need to stem the fighting required negotiations with the Sunnis in Al Fallujah, the message it sends could be counterproductive in the long run. When the Marines began the operation in Al Fallujah, they used a strong show of force, calling in AC-130 gunships, helicopters and an air strike that employed 500-pound bombs. There was a systematic movement of Marines into areas of the city, sweeping buildings and hunting down anyone believed to be linked to militants.

Going partway in and then offering a pause -- for humanitarian or other
reasons -- is likely to be interpreted by foreign jihadists and local Sunni
militants as a sign of weakness on the part of the United States. The
negotiations under way now do not appear to have any element of requiring the people or leaders of Al Fallujah to give up those responsible for the March attack on the U.S. contractors -- one of the stated reasons for the current operation -- nor do they seem to require the surrender of all foreign jihadists.

The message is clear in the city: The United States might threaten and come in hard, but its aversion to civilian casualties -- and to taking casualties of its own -- will leave it weak in the end. As Sun Tzu said in "The Art of War," "One who is at first excessively brutal and then fears the masses is the pinnacle of stupidity." While Sun Tzu was talking about the command of troops, and the U.S. was not "excessively brutal" in its assault on Al Fallujah, the sense is clear. If you are going to make a show of strength, don't follow it with the appearance that you fear the consequences.

While the militants in Al Fallujah could calm down with the involvement of
IGC negotiators, ultimately, the underlying issue has not been resolved.
There is still a city that serves as a haven for anti-coalition forces, and
punishment has not been meted out -- leaving the militants convinced that
the harder they hit the U.S. forces, the more averse the United States will
be to engaging in urban warfare. This could come back to haunt coalition
efforts in the future.

When al-Sadr's forces rose up over the last week, it was clear that he was
counting on U.S. fear to press his case. In October 2003, when his followers clashed with coalition troops, it took only the threat of his arrest to calm him down. This time around, the threat of arrest was taken as a challenge and a rallying cry. There was little belief by al-Sadr and his top team that the U.S. forces would go through with it this time because they did not follow through last time.

Beyond the battlefield, the joint bilateral negotiations have one more
significant impact on U.S. plans for Iraq. The deals being offered to the
Sunni and Shiite factions are being made with a short-term goal in mind: to stem the current flare-up of violence. But when it comes to negotiating the makeup of the transitional government, Washington is unlikely to be able to keep whatever promises it has made to both the Shia and the Sunnis -- rivals for political control of Iraq. That will leave Washington once again in a position where it is unwilling and unable to satisfy all sides -- and a repeat of last week's violence could be in the offing.

Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.

THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
08 April 2004

Gaming Out Iraq

Summary

The United States is involved in its greatest military crisis
since the fall of Baghdad a year ago. This is the convergence of
two separate processes. The first is the apparent re-emergence of
the Sunni guerrillas west of Baghdad; the second is a split in
the Shiite community and an internal struggle that has targeted
the United States. In the worst-case scenario, these events could
have a disastrous outcome for the United States, but there are
reasons to think that the worst case is not the most likely at
this point.

Analysis

The United States is experiencing its greatest military crisis in
Iraq since the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. On the one hand,
the Sunni guerrillas that the United States appeared to have
defeated after the Ramadan offensive of October and November 2003
have not been destroyed. Although their role in triggering the
March 31 attack against U.S. civilian contractors in Al Fallujah
is an open question, they have benefited politically from the
U.S. cordon around the city and have taken shots at distracted
U.S. forces in the area, such as the U.S. Marines in Ar Ramadi.
On the other hand, a Shiite militia led by young cleric Moqtada
al-Sadr has launched an offensive in Baghdad and in a number of
cities in Iraq's south. U.S. intelligence expected none of this;
L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, had scheduled a
trip to Washington that he had to cancel hurriedly.

The offensives appear to challenge two fundamental strategic
assumptions that were made by U.S. planners. The first was that,
due to penetrations by U.S. intelligence, the Sunni insurgency
was deteriorating and would not restart. The second, much more
important assumption was that the United States had a strategic
understanding with the Shiite leadership that it would contain
anti-American military action south of Baghdad, and that -- and
this is critical -- they would under no circumstances collaborate
with the Sunnis.

It now appears that these basic premises are being rendered
false.

Obviously, the Sunni guerrillas are still around, at least in the
Al Fallujah-Ar Ramadi corridor. U.S. efforts in that area of the
Sunni Triangle are aimed at finding those responsible for the
deaths and subsequent public mutilation of four U.S. civilian
contractors March 31. Current U.S. operations might be in
offensive mode -- suggesting that the Baathist guerrillas have
yet to fully regroup -- but as the siege of Al Fallujah drags on,
the potential grows for the insurgency to acquire sympathetic
recruits. Equally obviously, some of the Shia have taken up arms
against the United States, spreading the war to the region south
of Iraq. Finally, there are some reports of Sunni-Shiite
collaboration in the Baghdad area.

We might add that the outbreak west of Baghdad and the uprising
in the south could have been coincidental, but if so, it was one
amazing coincidence. Not liking coincidences ourselves -- and
fully understanding the contingent events that led to al-Sadr's
decision to strike -- we have to wonder about the degree to which
the events of the past week or so were planned.

If current trends accelerate, the United States faces a serious
military challenge that could lead to disaster. The United States
does not have the forces necessary to put down a broad-based
Shiite rising and crush the Sunni rebellion as well. Even the
current geography of the rising is beyond the capabilities of
existing deployments or any practicable number of additional
forces that might be made available. The United States is already
withdrawing from some cities. The logical outcome of all of this
would be an enclave strategy, in which the United States
concentrates its forces -- in a series of fortified locations --
perhaps excluding Iraqi nationals -- and leaves the rest of the
country to the guerrillas. That, of course, would raise the
question of why the United States should bother to remain in
Iraq, since those forces would not be able to exert effective
force either inside the country or beyond its borders.

That would force a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The consequences of
such a withdrawal would be catastrophic for the U.S. grand
strategy in the war against militant Islamists. One of the
purposes of the war was to disprove al Qaeda's assertion that the
United States was actually militarily weak and that it could not
engage in close combat in the Islamist world, certainly not in
the face of a mass uprising. An American withdrawal would prove
al Qaeda's claims and would energize Islamists not only with
hatred of the United States, but also -- and worse -- with
contempt for American power. It would create the worst of all
possible worlds for the United States.

It follows that the United States is going to do everything it
can to abort this process.

It also might well be that the process -- as we have laid it out
-- is faulty. The uprising in the Al Fallujah-Ar Ramadi corridor
might have peaked already. The al-Sadr rising perhaps does not
represent a reversal of Shiite strategic orientation, but is
primarily a self-contained, internal event about al-Sadr's
relationship with other Shiite clergy. The reports of
collaboration between Shia and Sunnis could be false or represent
a small set of cases.

These are the issues on which the conflict and the future of the
U.S. presence in Iraq turn. It is the hope of the guerrillas --
Sunni and Shiite -- to create a situation that compels a U.S.
withdrawal, either from the country or into fortified enclaves;
it is obviously the intention of the United States to prevent
this.

The Sunni Threat

The Sunni part of the equation is the least threatening. If Sunni
guerrillas have managed to regroup, it is disturbing that U.S.
intelligence was unable to prevent the reorganization. But there
is a very real silver lining in this: One of the ways the
guerrillas might have been able to regroup without being detected
was by doing it on a relatively small scale, limiting their
organization to hundreds or even dozens of members.

Certainly, they have many more sympathizers than that, but a
careful distinction must be drawn -- and is not being drawn by
the media -- between sympathizers and guerrillas. Sympathizers
can riot -- they can even generate an intifada -- but that is not
the same as conducting guerrilla war. Guerrillas need a degree of
training, weapons and organization.

The paradox of guerrilla war is that the more successful a
guerrilla offensive, the more it opens the guerrillas to
counteraction by the enemy. In order to attack, they must
communicate, come out of hiding and converge on the target. At
that moment, they can be destroyed and -- more important --
captured. Throwing a large percentage of a guerrilla force into
an attack either breaks the enemy or turns into a guerrilla
disaster.

The U.S. Marines west of Baghdad are not about to be broken.
Therefore, if our assumption about the relative size of the
guerrilla force and the high percentage that have been thrown
into this operation is correct, this force will not be able to
sustain the current level of operations much longer. If the
guerrilla force is large enough to sustain such operations, then
the U.S. intelligence failure is so huge as to be difficult to
comprehend. Protests and riots are problems and create a strain
on resources, but they do not fundamentally affect the ability of
the United States to remain engaged in Iraq.

The Shiite Threat

It is not the Sunni offensive that represents a threat, it is the
Shia. The question is simple: Does al-Sadr's rising represent a
fundamental shift in the Shiite community as a whole, or is it
simply a small faction of the Shia that has risen? The U.S.
command in Iraq has argued that al-Sadr represents a marginal
movement, at odds with the dominant Shiite leadership, lashing
out in a desperate attempt to change the internal dynamics of the
Shiite community.

For this analysis to be correct, a single fact must be true: Ali
al-Sistani, the grand ayatollah of the Iraqi Shia, is not only
opposed to al-Sadr, but also remains committed to carrying out
his basic bargain with the United States. If that is true, then
all will be well for the Americans in the end. If it is wrong,
then the worst-case scenarios have to be taken seriously.

The majority Iraqi Shiite population suffered greatly under the
regime of Saddam Hussein, which was dominated by the Sunni
minority. After the fall of Hussein, the Shia's primary interest
was in guaranteeing not only that a Sunni government would not
re-emerge, but also that the future of Iraq would be in the hands
of the Shia. This interest was shared by the Shia in Iran, who
also wanted to see a Shiite government emerge in order to secure
Iran's frontier from its historical enemy, Iraq.

The first U.S. impulse after the fall of Baghdad was that
Americans would govern Iraq indefinitely, on their terms -- and
without compromising with Iranian sympathizers. That plan was
blown out of the water by the unexpected emergence of a Sunni
guerrilla force. The United States needed indigenous help. Even
more than help, it needed guarantees that the Shia would not rise
up and render the U.S. presence in Iraq untenable.

The United States and the Shiite elites -- Iranian and Iraqi --
reached an accommodation: The United States guaranteed the Shia a
democratic government, which meant that the majority Shia would
dominate -- and the Shia maintained the peace in the south. They
did not so much collaborate with the Americans as maintain a
peace that permitted the United States to deal with the Sunnis.
The end state of all of this was to be a Shiite government that
would permit some level of U.S. forces to remain indefinitely in
Iraq.

As the Sunni rising subsided, the United States felt a decreased
dependency on the Shia. The transitional Iraqi government that is
slated to take power June 30 would not be an elected government,
but rather a complex coalition of groups -- including Shia, Kurds
and Sunnis, as well as small ethnic groups -- that would be
constituted so as to give all the players a say in the future. In
other words, the Shia would not get a Shiite-dominated government
June 30.

It was for this reason that al-Sistani began to agitate for
direct elections. He knew that the Shia would win that election
and that this was the surest path to direct Shiite power.
Washington argued there was not enough time for direct elections
-- a claim that was probably true -- but which the Shia saw as
the United States backpedaling on fundamental agreements. The
jury-rigged system the Americans wanted in place for a year would
give the Sunnis a chance to recover -- not the sort of recovery
the Shia wanted to see. Moreover, the Shia observed the quiet
romance between the United States and some key Sunni tribal
leaders after the capture of Hussein, and their distrust of long-
term U.S. motives grew.

Al-Sistani made it clear that he did not trust the transitional
plan and that he did not believe it protected Shiite interests or
represented American promises. The United States treated al-
Sistani with courtesy and respect but made it clear that it was
not planning to change its position.

In the meantime, a sea change had taken place in Iranian
politics, with a conservative government driving the would-be
reformers out of power. The conservatives did not object to the
deal with the United States, but they wanted to be certain that
the United States did not for a moment believe that the Iranians
were acting out of weakness. The continual hammering by the
United States on the nuclear issue with Iran convinced the
Iranians that the Washington did not fully appreciate the
position it was in.

As Iranian Expediency Council chief and former President Ali
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani bluntly put it Feb. 24: "They continue
to send us threatening messages and continue to raise the four
questions," referring to Washington's concerns about Iran's
nuclear program, opposition to the Middle East peace process,
alleged support of militant groups and human rights. "But they
are stuck in the mud in Iraq, and they know that if Iran wanted
to, it could make their problems even worse."

Al-Sistani did not want the June 30 transition to go forward on
U.S. terms. The Iranians did not want the United States to think
it had Iran on the defensive. A confrontation with the United
States under these circumstances was precisely what was in both
al-Sistani and Iran's interests. Both wanted to drive home to the
Americans that they held power in Iraq and that the United States
was there at the sufferance of the Shia. The United States had
forgotten its sense of desperation during the Sunni Ramadan
offensive, and the Shia needed to remind them -- but they needed
to do so without a rupture with Washington, which was, after all,
instrumental to their long-term plans.

Al-Sadr was the perfect instrument. He was dangerous, deniable
and manageable. U.S. officials have expressed surprise that al-
Sadr -- who they did not regard highly -- was able to create such
havoc. Obviously, al-Sistani could have dealt with al-Sadr if and
when he wished. But for the moment, al-Sistani didn't wish. He
wanted to show the Americans the abyss they faced if they
continued on the path to June 30 without modifying the plan.

The Americans have said al-Sistani has not been helpful in this
crisis. He is not ready to be helpful and won't be until a more
suitable understanding is reached with the United States. He will
act in due course because it is not in al-Sistani's interests to
allow al-Sadr to become too strong. Quite the contrary: Al-
Sistani runs the risk that the situation will get so far out of
hand that he will not be able to control it either. But al-
Sistani is too strong for al-Sadr to undermine, and al-Sadr is,
in fact, al-Sistani's pawn. Perhaps more precisely, al-Sadr is
al-Sistani's ace in the hole. Having played him, al-Sistani will
be as interested in liquidating al-Sadr's movement as the United
States is -- once Washington has modified its plans for a postwar
Iraq.

The worst-case scenario is not likely to happen. The Sunni
guerrillas are not a long-term threat. The Shia are a long-term
threat, but their interests are not in war with the United
States, but in achieving a Shiite-dominated Iraqi state as
quickly as possible -- without giving the United States an
opportunity to double-cross them. Al-Sistani demanded elections
and didn't get them. What he really wants is a different
transition process that gives the Shia more power. After the past
week, he is likely to get it. And Washington will not soon forget
who controls Iraq.

This will pass. But the strategic reality of the U.S. forces in
Iraq is permanent. Those forces are there because of the
sufferance of the Iraqi Shia. The Shia know it, and they want the
Americans to know it. With Washington planning an offensive in
Pakistan, the last thing it needs is to pump more forces into
Iraq. In due course, al-Sistani will become helpful, but the
price will be even higher than before.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.stratfor.com

Is Military Creeping
Into Domestic Spying
And Enforcement?
By ROBERT BLOCK and GARY FIELDS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


In a little-noticed side effect of the war on terrorism, the military is edging toward a sensitive area that has been off-limits to it historically: domestic intelligence gathering and law enforcement.

Several recent incidents involving the military have raised concern among student and civil-rights groups. One was a visit last month by an Army intelligence agent to an official and students at the University of Texas law school in Austin.

The agent demanded a videotape of a recent academic conference at the school so that he could identify what he described as "three Middle Eastern men" who had made "suspicious" remarks to Army lawyers at the seminar, according to the official, Susana Aleman, the dean of student affairs.

The Army, while not disputing that the visit took place, declined to comment, saying the incident is under investigation.

Last year, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the nation&s primary source of global maritime intelligence, demanded access to the U.S. Customs Service&s database on maritime trade, saying it needed information to thwart potential terrorist activity. Customs officials initially resisted the Navy&s demands but eventually agreed to give naval intelligence much of what it wanted.

In an interview earlier this month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection chief Robert C. Bonner said he shares data only after getting Navy assurances that the information won&t be abused. Navy spokesman Jon Spiers says the Office of Naval Intelligence first approached customs about sharing inbound foreign cargo information in December 2002, and he denies there is anything improper about the request. The agency "has not overstepped any authority or crossed the line dividing law enforcement from military operations," he says.

Lt. Spiers adds that when the Navy&s top spy agency gains access to data about American companies and individuals, the information will be "subjected to a meticulous legal review" and will be retained only if it is directly related to the agency&s mission to identify potential foreign threats.

In another sign of military interest in domestic information-gathering, the Defense Intelligence Agency&s new antiterrorism task force is looking to share information with law-enforcement officials in California and New York City, according to an August 2003 General Accounting Office report.

Historically, Americans haven&t trusted the military to do domestic police work. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, passed in response to abuses by federal troops in the South after the Civil War, prohibits the use of the military "to execute the laws" of the U.S. That&s been widely interpreted as a ban on searching, arresting or spying on U.S. civilians by federal troops.

But the law has been violated, notably during the Vietnam War, when Army operatives spied on antiwar activists on campuses. Meanwhile, Congress has eased the law&s limits to allow the military to help prosecute the war on drugs.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House sought to further loosen restrictions to allow the military to take on a new domestic-security role. It has mostly been rebuffed. In May the House refused to approve a White House-backed proposal to give the Central Intelligence Agency and the military authority to scrutinize personal and business records of U.S. citizens. And the Senate last year blocked funding for a Pentagon project known as the Total Information Awareness program, which was supposed to collect a vast array of information on individuals, including medical, employment and credit-card histories.

The issue of an expanding military role in domestic affairs also surfaced last year with the Pentagon&s creation of the Northern Command, or Northcom, based in Colorado Springs, Colo. The new command, the first such military command designed to protect the U.S. homeland from a terrorist attack, has responsibility for the U.S., Canada, Mexico, portions of the Caribbean and U.S. coastal waters. Northcom&s commander, Gen. Ralph "Ed" Eberhart, is the first general since the Civil War with operational authority exclusively over military forces within the U.S.

Gen. Eberhart has stoked concern among civil-liberties advocates by saying that the military and civilians should be involved in developing "actionable intelligence" for the government. In September 2002, he told a group of National Guardsmen that the military and the National Guard should "change our radar scopes" to prevent terrorism. It is important to "not just look out, but we&re also going to have to look in," he said, adding, "we can&t let culture and the way we&ve always done it stand in the way."

Northcom officials and other military leaders play down his remarks. "No one ran out after that speech and started snooping," one official says. Gen. Eberhart echoed that last September on PBS&s "News Hour": "We are not going to be out there spying on people, " he said, though he added, "we get information from people who do."

Further evidence of the blurring of the lines between the civilian and military worlds comes in a job-vacancy notice for a senior counterintelligence advisor to Northcom. The duties, according to the notice, include providing advice that goes beyond potential terrorism to include "other major criminal activity, such as drug cartels and large-scale money laundering" -- work usually under the purview of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service.

Another little-known Pentagon group, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, was set up two years ago. With 400 service members and civilians stationed around the globe, the CIFA was originally charged with protecting the military and critical infrastructure from spying by terrorists and foreign intelligence services. But in August, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, issued a directive ordering the unit to maintain a "domestic law-enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense."

The CIFA also works closely with the FBI and is conducting some duties for civilian agencies. For example, according to Department of Agriculture documents, the CIFA is in charge of doing background checks on foreign workers and scientists employed by the department&s agricultural-research service. The group also provides information to the Information and Security Command, or Inscom, the Army&s main intelligence organization, based at Fort Belvoir, Md.

The Army intelligence agent who investigated the law-school conference was assigned to Inscom. Army officials reviewing the Texas incident are investigating whether the agent may have overstepped his boundaries and whether may have tried to win the voluntary cooperation of the faculty and students. But they say that he was reacting to a possible counterintelligence threat to the military. It isn&t clear why there were Army lawyers at the conference in the first place, though some officials say the attorneys wanted to learn more about Muslim traditions and Islamic law.

Civil-rights advocates are skeptical. Robert Pugsley, professor of law at the Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, says the Texas incident is "a chilling example" of the military&s overreaching. "It&ll multiply like fleas on a dog" if left unchecked, he says.

"What we are starting to see is 50 years of legal refinement and revisions for oversight being quietly jettisoned," adds Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit, left-leaning think tank in Washington.

But James Carafano, a policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, says he believes the military has honored posse comitatus. His concern is that hard distinctions have been created between who has jurisdiction in homeland defense versus homeland security. It's distinctions terrorists might exploit, he says. "We may potentially be creating vulnerabilities."

Write to Robert Block at bobby.block@wsj.com and Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com

My second post of the day-Crafty
=================================

Race to Get Lights On
In Iraq Shows Perils
Of Reconstruction

Despite Stumbles, Attacks,
Corps of Engineers' Team
Is Finally Making Progress
Col. Semonite's Travel Tips
By NEIL KING JR.
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 2, 2004; Page A1

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- When Col. Todd Semonite arrived here last fall to direct a massive push to restore Iraq's electricity grid, his orders were simple: Stress speed over all else.

Hauling in some key generators from overseas proved too slow on ships, so he flew them on cargo planes at several times the cost. He riled Pentagon auditors by allowing his contractors to buy millions of dollars in parts without competitive bids. His haste extended to his armed drivers, who careened along Iraq's clogged highways in sport-utility vehicles at extreme speeds -- both to get around the country faster and to avoid danger.

 THE FIGHT FOR IRAQ

 
"The point is to always keep moving," Col. Semonite said on a recent trip north of Baghdad, as he chewed on a grape Tootsie-Pop, his typical lunch. "It is hard to trigger a bomb accurately to hit a Suburban going 100 miles an hour."

Col. Semonite's team is making significant progress in the race to rebuild Iraq's power system before the planned U.S. handover of power to Iraqis in June. But his experience shows how rebuilding Iraq is proving to be a far more dangerous and expensive task than the U.S. and its private contractors expected. That lesson was on gruesome display this week with the killing and mutilation Wednesday of four American contractors.

The U.S. originally tapped the engineering giant Bechtel Group Inc. to restore electricity in Iraq at a time when the military expected a swift victory and the administration foresaw a smooth reconstruction effort funded in large part by Iraqi oil revenue. Bechtel, like others, so misjudged the dangers of postwar Iraq that it set aside just $500,000 to hire six security guards, compared with the 169 it has today.

By last summer it was clear that the U.S. plan to rely on one civilian contractor with limited funding was not working. Thirteen aging power stations were in various states of disrepair, while looters and saboteurs undermined the system further.

In September, the U.S. sent in Col. Semonite of the Army Corps of Engineers to oversee three additional U.S. contractors armed with almost unlimited muscle and wads of cash -- mostly from Iraqi oil revenue. The group has since installed hundreds of megawatts of new power generation, erected 692 huge transmission towers and strung thousands of miles of high-voltage cable. The Corps' success on the electricity push is one reason the U.S. military, instead of the Agency for International Development, will now guide most of the $14 billion in additional rebuilding work slated for Iraq this year.

But that success has come at a high price. Attacks so far have killed 27 of the Army Corps' subcontractors and security guards, most in roadside ambushes similar to the one that killed the four American security guards in Fallujah on Wednesday. The Corps' work is costing about $900,000 per megawatt of production capacity, while Bechtel's more-deliberate power projects are costing about 30% less. Total spending on the power grid is expected to exceed $5 billion.

Bringing steady power to Iraq's cities is an urgent priority for the Bush administration, as thousands of new appliances pour into the country and factories come on line. For Bechtel, the job began just weeks after Baghdad fell on April 9, when dozens of the company's engineers streamed into Iraq to undertake a range of reconstruction work. It had a broad, $680 million contract from AID, the government agency the Bush administration picked to lead reconstruction.

Bechtel's first two months were devoted to compiling a detailed survey of Iraq's infrastructure, amid tussles with the country's barely functional ministries. Early lists of "vital needs" from the Electricity Ministry included demands for hundreds of Mercedes trucks with compact-disc players. "It was laughable," said Mike Robinson, head of the Bechtel electricity project in Iraq, who arrived in Baghdad May 15.

 
By late August, with tempers flaring across the country at the slow pace of rebuilding, Bechtel was still debating with the ministry and AID over which electricity projects to tackle. The company had ordered only $2 million in emergency spare parts for the country's dilapidated power stations. "We faced a big problem," said Randy Richardson, head of electricity for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Pentagon-led organization that functions as Iraq's de facto government.

Bechtel says it stands by its work. "People think we were sent to rebuild all of Iraq," says Cliff Mumm, Bechtel's Iraq project manager. "We weren't. We came with a very small pot of money to do very limited work."

Bechtel's work was also hampered by overlapping bureaucracies within Baghdad. Worsening security and the company's own intense caution also kept many of its engineers hunkered down in Baghdad.

On Aug. 25, Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the Pentagon's Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, convened a two-day summit on Iraq's infrastructure at CentCom headquarters in Tampa, Fla. Iraq's electricity woes posed a serious security concern, the unhappy general told the assembled CPA officials and Army brass.

Gen. Abizaid proposed a new approach. "The idea was to move in as we would after a major disaster and throw money and people at the problem to fix it in a hurry," recalls Major Gen. Carl Strock, a senior Army Corps official who attended the meeting.

The new strategy called for boosting Iraq's power generation to at least 6,000 megawatts by June. That's about as much as Washington and its immediate suburbs consume in a day, but nearly twice the country's output at the time. Bechtel's assigned targets -- 445 megawatts of new power and the same amount in revamping of old plants -- wouldn't even come close to the target.

So the group turned to the Army Corps of Engineers. Col. Semonite, a 45-year-old West Point grad who had just returned to the U.S. from a three-year deployment in Europe, got the nod a week later to be the project's on-the-ground leader. Leaving his wife and four children behind in Virginia outside Washington, he landed in Iraq Sept. 15 with about a dozen men. His Iraq team soon gave a nickname to the former ski racer from Vermont: the Energizer Bunny.

While the Corps' effort was getting under way, U.S. officials decided to make an all-out push at plants around the country to boost production above the prewar level of 4,500 megawatts by Oct. 9, the six-month anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Iraqis did most of the work with whatever they had on hand.

"We worked like crazy, but it was all too much," said Gazi Aziz, a plant manager at the Baghdad South power station, a huge, decrepit electricity plant on the edge of the capital. A few patches were made, and in early October all of the plant's six generators were revved to capacity for the first time in years. The rickety boilers spat out steam and water. Pipes sprang massive leaks. "It fell apart in five days," said Mr. Aziz.

 GETTING WIRED



? Despite dramatic progress, Iraqis will still suffer shortages in the hottest months.
 
? The Bush administration has hired four prime contractors to oversee a total of more than $5 billion in Iraq power work
 
? The companies, with dozens of subcontractors, have erected 794 huge 400-kilovolt transmission towers across Iraq and nearly 4,000 miles of high-voltage wire.
 
? Average power production nationwide this week still met only about 75% of the average demand.
 
? The biggest power gap is still in Baghdad, which may not have full-time electricity until sometime next year.
 

Source: U.S. Department of Defense; WSJ research
 
 
 
Still, on Oct. 9, a beaming Paul Bremer, President Bush's top envoy to Iraq, strode into a Baghdad press conference to tick off the accomplishments of the first six months. Topping the list was news that three days earlier, Iraq had produced 4,518 megawatts of power -- just above the country's estimated prewar level.

In reality, electricity production had hit what turned out to be a false peak and was falling fast.

About a mile from where Mr. Bremer made the announcement, Col. Semonite's team had set up shop in a white-marble mansion with a pool in the yard and gold fixtures in the bathrooms -- the former home of Saddam Hussein's spurned first wife.

To do the job, Col. Semonite's Restore Iraqi Electricity task force had $1.05 billion, most of it drawn from Iraqi oil revenue. The Corps also had three U.S. firms ready to go under open-ended contingency contracts signed before the war began. Eleven days after arriving in Baghdad, Col. Semonite issued orders for the companies to tackle 21 electricity assignments across the country, a list that soon jumped to 26.

Washington Group International Inc., a large Idaho-based engineering company, would handle projects in the north; Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo, Cal., the region around Baghdad; and Perini Corp. of Framingham, Mass., the southern third of the country.

Bob Spaulding, the wiry leader of Fluor's team in Iraq, said the pace from the start was unprecedented in his 15 years with the company. "We're being told to do work on a schedule that's twice as fast as we'd do it in the U.S.," he said.

Fluor's biggest job, the Qudas power station, lies at the end of a rutted road about 20 miles north of Baghdad. When the first Corps engineers arrived at Qudas on Oct. 18, it had two working Chinese-built power units producing 250 megawatts, or enough to power a town of about 50,000 people. Another two units sat in crates in the Jordanian port of Aqaba, bought in the late 1990s under the United Nations oil-for-food program but never delivered. Two days later, the engineers broke ground to dig foundations for four smaller units to add another 172 megawatts -- a $160 million project. Fluor's team arrived a week later.

The job would need nearly 12,000 tons of concrete, so Fluor had a concrete plant assembled that could churn out 800 tons a day and brought in a fleet of concrete trucks. The Electricity Ministry provided more than 200 Iraqi workers. The company leased five heavy cranes from Kuwait, including a massive 450-ton lifter that took 25 semitrailers to haul in.

Fluor then scoured the globe to find available generators and transformers for the four new units. The company tracked down two generators in Brazil and sent technicians to cut them off their foundations. Four huge transformers were found in Mexico. Fluor marshaled the rest of the heavy equipment from across the U.S. The company leased a ship, gathered all the equipment in Houston, and got it to the plant by early February.

Getting the two oil-for-food units to the site posed another challenge. Each required its own U.S. military-protected convoy stretching 19 trucks long. Conducted under intense secrecy, the two trips each took six days.

"God, is this beautiful," Col. Semonite said, surveying the Qudas site one morning as Iraqi workers scurried amid a welter of cranes and cement mixers.

Fluor and the Army Corps have cut a few corners in the interest of time, he conceded. They poured foundations in a matter of hours without testing the ground conditions. If equipment had to be airlifted in, they did it, without worrying about cost. "But so far, no snags," said Col. Semonite, whose tour of duty in Iraq ended last month.

In all, the Corps has orchestrated 41 airlifts for power supplies, 20 of which used chartered Russian-built Antonovs, the world's biggest cargo planes.

The Corps team, in its haste, has made blunders. Both the General Accounting Office and Pentagon auditors are now evaluating whether the Corps' contractors stayed within federal procurement rules when buying big-ticket items without competitive bidding or obtaining proper documentation for sole-source subcontract awards. Col. Semonite's deputies gave the work final billing approval, despite strong objections from Pentagon auditors. Officials declined to provide additional specifics on the continuing investigations.


One of 68 towers, 200 feet or taller, replaced to reconnect the southern city of Basra to Baghdad.

 
In Col. Semonite's trip from Qudas site to the Beiji power station in tumultuous northern Iraq the next day, speed would be of the essence. Getting there meant skirting Samara and Tikrit and driving straight through the town of Beiji, among the most dangerous byways in Iraq.

Bundled in a flak jacket and helmet, Col. Semonite traveled in an unarmored Chevrolet Suburban with two machine-gunners in the front seat, another SUV leading, and three more in back. Six of his eight bodyguards were Iraqis with wooden-handled AK-47 assault rifles. Col. Semonite always made a point of leaving on day trips, even long ones, after 9 a.m. or so on the logic that most roadside bombs were detonated in the early hours of the day. The other rule was to avoid stopping at all costs, even if that meant driving up the wrong side of the freeway or cruising along the shoulder of the road to avoid traffic jams.

South of Tikrit, he pointed out where two Korean subcontractors, working for the Washington Group, were gunned down along the road at the end of November. On Jan. 5, two other Corps subcontractors, both French, died in an ambush near Fallujah west of Baghdad. The task force has also lost 23 Iraqi security guards to other attacks.

"It's a horrible loss," Col. Semonite said, gripping his seat as the Suburban, skirting a traffic jam, nearly veered off the road. "But we can't let the dangers slow us down."

Beiji is Iraq's largest power station, tucked against bare mountains in one of the most dangerous areas of the country. Operating out of a ramshackle trailer with 10 Iraqi employees and one computer on site, Bechtel began small-scale work on the belching, 20-year-old plant in January after months of squabbles with Iraq's Electricity Ministry. The $30 million job is dirty and intricate, involving hundreds of spare parts not easily found on the open market.

Adnan Bashir, a former Beiji plant manager who is now head of Bechtel's Iraqi team at the site, said security worries kept Bechtel's own engineers away for months. Difficulties in tracking down needed parts have impeded the work, too. "It's not much," he said, standing in the Bechtel warehouse in front of a few motors and pumps on a shelf and stacks of insulation.

A team of Iraqi welders had just started refurbishing one of the plant's leaking boilers. Another group in greasy overalls was busy taking apart a turbine inside the main plant.

Bechtel officials don't dispute that the Beiji work was slow to get started but insist that the work will be completed on time this summer.

Up a muddy lane a few minutes walk from the plant, the Army team bustled among 28 trailers housing more than 40 workers from Washington Group and five subcontractors. All had arrived since October. Despite the occasional mortar round from across the river, work hooking up eight mobile generators and transformers was well under way. All of the equipment had been airlifted in from abroad on 14 huge cargo jets.

Col. Semonite, though, would like to see more progress. "OK, when are these going to start coming on line? Tomorrow?" he said, tromping through puddles as three Washington Group engineers tagged along.

The engineers exchanged glances and then one of them said, "Eight to 10 days."

"Oh, come on. Faster," Col. Semonite shot back.

Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com

1239 GMT -- PHILIPPINES -- Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said March 30 that government security forces seized 80 pounds of TNT and arrested four people who are believed to be members of the Abu Sayyaf Islamist militant group. Arroyo said the men planned to carry out Madrid-style bomb attacks against trains and shopping centers in the capital city of Manila. However, other government officials said the only evidence they had of any plans to carry out such attacks reportedly had come from some of the detained suspects during interrogation.