Fire Hydrant of Freedom

The end of civilization was a joke

By Kathleen Parker

Feb 8, 2006

What if the world went up in a mushroom cloud over a cartoon - or because of a photograph of some reveler dressed up like a pig?

Well, of course, that would be absurd, a comedy, a Clouseauean flick about a bumbling inspector, right? No, that would be a documentary about the end of civilization circa 2006 - unless we come to our senses.

The cartoon implosion now rocking the Muslim world - featuring embassy burnings, threats of 9-11 sequels and the Arab street equivalent of the Terrible Twos - is based on equal parts fake photographs and a default riot mode looking for an excuse. Extreme propaganda on one side and a lack of fortitude on the other have brought us near the brink of extinction through a global act of accidental self-mockery.

The world isn't mad over cartoons; the world IS a cartoon.

The dozen Danish drawings everyone by now has heard about - but not necessarily seen thanks to our own media's sanctimonious sensitivity to insanity - were mild by modern satirical standards. In brief, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten last September published 12 cartoons that depicted Muhammad in various poses. The worst of them showed the Prophet wearing a bomb-turban.

Naturally, the Muslim world has gone insane.

And unnaturally, much of the Western world has retreated into fetal repose. Only in Europe did a few newspapers republish the allegedly offensive cartoons, while most American papers have genuflected to the altar of multiculturalism.

One after another, editors have explained their decision not to run the images for fear of offending American Muslims. Never mind that the same papers, notably The Boston Globe, felt no such compunction in the past when they defended "Piss Christ," a photograph of crucifix submerged in urine. Or the Virgin Mary covered in feces.

Meanwhile, querulous Americans still reliant on traditional media are left in the kind of darkness admired by Islamic states. How are they to debate and make a judgment about the cartoons without seeing them?

They can go to the blogosphere, that's how.

The Internet is now the only place Americans can view the cartoons and, as a bonus, learn that much of the outrage now seething through the Middle East was stoked not by the cartoons in question, but by three bogus photographs circulated by the (peace-loving) Islamic Society of Denmark. A spokesman for the group said they circulated the photos to demonstrate Denmark's Islamophobia.

Except that the photographs weren't published in Denmark or elsewhere on terra firma. One of them, allegedly depicting Muhammad dressed like a pig, is in fact a photo of Frenchman Jacques Barrot as he participated in last August's annual French Pig-Squealing Championships in Trie-sur-Baise. And that's no joke.

The pig photograph, lifted from an MSNBC story, is posted at neanderNews.com, where other blogs (Gateway Pundit and Counter Terrorism Blog) also are credited with reporting the photoscam. The other photos (origins unknown), including one of a man dressed in Arab garb being mounted by a dog, are the sort of images bored college students Photoshop in dorm rooms late at night.

Whether Islamophobia inspired any of these images is a question for documentarians to explore. Meanwhile, fear for our future is an appropriate response to mass insanity. But potentially more dangerous than short-fused fanatics is our own cowardice in declining to treat this madness as anything but inexcusably barbaric.

Instead, we kneel in apology for our own hard-won principles. Newspapers especially deserve contempt for their spineless refusal to deal honestly with this controversy. Instead of publishing the cartoons and explaining why free expression is central to the West's survival, editors with few exceptions have swaddled themselves in the blankie of "sensitivity."

Kudos and curtseys to Philadelphia Inquirer editor Amanda Bennett, who published one of the cartoons along with a story about the controversy. For her trouble, she has been visited by Muslim protesters who promise to return if the paper doesn't apologize. Bennett deserves not just congratulations, but solidarity from other newspapers that have a fresh opportunity to prove their mettle.

Incensed Iranians are preparing to lob a few cartoon bombs of their own with a Holocaust cartoon competition. Fine. All comers are welcome to the free-speech fray. Far better that we wage the war of ideas with words and images than with bombs and bullets.

That's the beauty of free expression, in honor of which - and as an opportunity to teach - American newspapers surely will print the Iranian cartoons. Won't they?

Kathleen Parker is a popular syndicated columnist and director of the School of Written Expression at the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion in Camden, South Carolina.


http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/kathleenparker/2006/02/08/185589.html

87-year-old woman fatally shoots man in her home
By Doug Moore
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
02/07/2006


An 87-year-old East St. Louis woman fatally shot a man early this morning as he was trying to break into her house.

Police said they found the man, Larry D. Tillman, 49, of East St. Louis on the enclosed front porch of the woman?s house in the 2100 block of Gaty Avenue. He had pulled the telephone wires from the side of the house, then removed security bars from a porch window.

As the man was breaking through a storm door that leads into the house itself, the woman fired several shots through her front door, striking Tillman once in the chest.

Police said the shots were fired from a pistol, most likely a gun that her daughter had given her after a man broke into the elderly woman?s house in December, battered her and stole some items.

The man may have been dead for as long as four hours before police arrived. Police said that the woman was not sure that she had hit Tillman when she fired the shots about 2 a.m. However, she was too afraid to go outside to check and could not call for help because the telephone lines were dead.

When the woman?s daughter arrived about 6 a.m. to bring her mother breakfast, she found the dead man on the porch, police said.

Illinois State Police Master Sgt. Jim Morrisey said evidence taken from the December home invasion would be compared to the break-in today to see if Tillman was responsible for both crimes.

My biggest pet peeve is recycling, a lamebrained scam by any objective measure. The day they start issuing tickets for how I sort my trash is the day I start dropping Dr. Pepper cans into the garbage of the local sweetness and light Nazis.

Recycle This!
Separating tin cans and pizza boxes and exposing the facts about the High Church of Recycling.
by James Thayer
01/26/2006 12:00:00 AM


ELIAS ROHAS is a garbage hauler in Seattle. He works for Rabanco/Allied Waste Industries and his beat is Magnolia, the city's tony westernmost neighborhood. According to the Seattle Times, Rohas has been on the job 14 years. He slowly cruises Magnolia streets, using his truck's mechanical arm to lift and dump curbside garbage bins.

Since the first of the year Rohas has enjoyed a new responsibility, one shared by Seattle policemen: he can officially determine who is breaking the law, and issue a ticket.

On January 1, placing more than 10 percent recyclable materials into a garbage bin became illegal in Seattle. An offending bin is tagged with a bright yellow slip that announces, "Recycle. It's not garbage anymore." The un-emptied bin is then left at the curb in hopes that the homeowner will learn the lesson and remove the reusable material by next week's collection. Businesses that offend three times are fined $50.

Seattle's proudly progressive leaders were alarmed when, almost two decades after voluntary recycling programs were initiated in the city--recycling rates had stalled at about 40 percent of the total amount of waste. Too many bottles and too much paper were still finding their way to the eastern Oregon landfill that receives Seattle's garbage.

So after a year-long $450,000 television, radio and newspaper education campaign, the mandatory recycling law went into effect at the first of the year. The goal is to raise the percentage of recyclables to sixty percent of total waste. Seattle is not alone, of course; many other cities, from Philadelphia to Honolulu, also have mandatory recycling programs. But these laws are based on myth and followed as faith.


RECYCLING FEELS RIGHT. Echoing widespread Seattle sentiment (85 percent of the city's citizens approve of curbside recycling), the Seattle Times editorial board has concluded that "Recycling is a good thing." After all, using a bottle twice must be better than using it once, saving resources and sparing the landfill.

The truth, though, is that recycling is an expense, not a savings, for a city. "Every community recycling program in America today costs more than the revenue it generates," says Dr. Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute.

A telling indicator is that cities often try to dump recycling programs when budgets are tight. As Angela Logomasini, director of risk and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, points out in the Wall Street Journal, every New York City mayor has attempted to stop the city's recycling program since it was begun in 1989. Mayor David Dinkins tried, but changed his mind when met with noisy criticism. Rudy Giuliani tried, but was sued by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which won the case. Mayor Bloomberg has proposed temporarily ending the recycling program because, as Logomasini notes, it costs $240 per ton to recycle and only $130 per ton to send the material to a landfill. The numbers for other areas are roughly comparable. The net per-ton cost of recycling exceeds $180 in Rhode Island, while conventional garbage collection and disposal costs $120 to $160 per ton.

The funds go for trucks and collectors and inspectors and bureaucrats. Clemson professor Daniel K. Benjamin points out that Los Angeles has 800 trucks working the neighborhoods, instead of 400, due to recycling. Radley Balko at aBetterEarth.Org, a project of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, writes, "That means extra wear and tear on city streets, double the exhaust emissions into the atmosphere, double the man hours required for someone to drive and man those trucks, and double the costs of maintenance and upkeep of the trucks." Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute says costs include "the energy necessary to deliver the recyclables to the collection centers, process the post-consumer material into usable commodities for manufacturers, and deliver the processed post-consumer material to manufacturing plants." Franklin Associates, which provides consulting services for solid waste management, estimates that curbside recycling is 55 percent more expensive, pound for pound, than conventional garbage disposal.


CITY BUDGETS aren't the only victims of recycling. Citizens also have a significant cost--their time. Seattle Public Utilities researchers (in collaboration with University of California, Davis) conducted a survey in 2005 that indicated 98 percent of Seattle households participate in the curbside recycling program, and that 16 minutes are spent recycling per household. The city contains 260,000 households, which means each week Seattleites spend almost 8,500 work days recycling. Working days lost in traffic jams are commonly cited by proponents of HOV lanes, bike paths, and light rail. Nary a word is heard about lost time when the topic is recycling.

And what are those 16 minutes spent doing? Sorting, extracting, rinsing, bundling, and stomping. In Seattle, household batteries can be put into the garbage, but not rechargeable batteries. Plastic soda bottles can be recycled, but not plastic flower pots. Plastic shopping bags go into the recycle bin (bundle them first), but not plastic produce bags or plastic freezer wrap bags. Plastic cottage cheese tubs, yes, but not plastic six-pack rings. Frozen food boxes go into the recycle bin, but not paper plates. Cardboard, sure, but not if a pizza came in it, and make sure to flatten the box. And remove any tape. Cereal boxes, yes, but pull out the liner. Typing paper, of course, but sort out the paper punch holes, as those little dots can't be recycled. Hardback books, okay, but wrestle off the covers. Metal hangers, yes: aluminum foil, no. Tin cans, you bet, but rinse them, and push the lid down into the can. No loose lids can go in the recycle bin. And no confetti.

So at least it's a fun 16 minutes. There are out-of-pocket expenses, too: Rod Kauffman, president of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Seattle and King County, says this sorting will add 10 percent to a building's janitorial bills.


IF WE WEREN'T RECYCLING, wouldn't the landfills soon overflow? Al Gore certainly thinks so, as he claimed we are "running out of ways to dispose of our waste in a manner that keeps it out of either sight or mind." Nonsense. Clemson Professor Daniel K. Benjamin notes that rather than running out of space, overall capacity is growing. "In fact," he says, "the United States today has more landfill capacity than ever before." He adds that the total land area required to contain every scrap of this country's garbage for the next 100 years would be only 10 miles square. The Nevada Policy Research Institute's numbers are even more dramatic: an area 44 miles square and 120 feet deep would handle all of America's garbage for the next millennium.

America's image of landfills was fixed decades ago, and is that of Staten Island's Fresh Kills, a vast swampy expanse of detritus, with huge Caterpillar tractors trundling over it, and clouds of seagulls obscuring everything above ground. Fresh Kills received New York's garbage for 53 years before it was closed in 2001. Modern landfills have nothing in common with the place. Benjamin says that new landfills are located far from groundwater supplies, and are built on thick clay beds that are covered with plastic liners, on top of which goes another layer of sand or gravel. Pipes remove leachate, which is then treated at wastewater plants. Escaping gas is burned or sold. A park or golf course or industrial development eventually goes over the landfill.

Fresh Kills also looked dangerous, a veritable soup of deadly poisons and nasty chemicals, seeping and dissolving and dispersing. But that's not the case with new landfills. Daniel Benjamin writes, "According to the EPA's own estimates, modern landfills can be expected to cause 5.7 cancer-related deaths over the next 300 years--just one death every 50 years. To put this in perspective, cancer kills over 560,000 people every year in the United States."

But what about saving precious resources by recycling? Almost 90 percent of this country's paper comes from renewable forests, and to say we will someday run out of trees is the same as saying we will some day run out of corn. According to Jerry Taylor, we are growing 22 million acres of new forest each year, and we harvest 15 million acres, for a net annual gain of 7 million acres. The United States has almost four times more forested land today than it did 80 years ago.

Are we running out of that other staple of recycle bins, glass? All those wine and beer bottles are manufactured from silica dioxide, the fancy term for sand, which Jay Lehr points out is the most abundant mineral in the earth's crust.

Nor will we ever suffer a shortage of plastic, which is made from petroleum byproducts. Today more petroleum reserves are being discovered than are being used up. And plastics can now also be synthesized from farm products. Lehr concludes, "We are not running out of, nor will we ever run out of, any of the resources we recycle."

Why then do we go to all this trouble for so little--or no--reward? Lehr says it's because "we get a warm and fuzzy feeling when we recycle." Richard Sandbrook who was executive director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, said, "Environmentalists refuse to countenance any argument which undermines their sacred cow."

The Seattle Times concludes, "Recycling is almost a religion in Seattle." An irrational religion, says Professor Frank Ackerman, who specializes in environment policy at Tufts University. But his arguments cut little weight here in the Northwest. We attend the church of recycling, where perfervid faith compensates for lack of factual support.

Seattle Public Utilities estimates that 1 in 10 garbage bins will contain too much recyclable material, and so will be left full on the curb. Hauler Elias Rohas said they aren't hard to spot. "We can tell right away," he told the Times. He said the sound of glass is unmistakable, and that paper adds bulk without weight. "You can tell even when it's in the bag."


James Thayer is a frequent contributor to The Daily Standard. His twelfth novel, The Gold Swan, has been published by Simon & Schuster.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/603wxcce.asp

Go to the URL at the end for a well annotated version of this piece.


Folk Beliefs Have Consequences [Locke-ism v. Marxism]
TCSDaily.com ^ | January 23, 2006 | Arnold Kling


The views of important thinkers become distilled into folk beliefs that shape our societies. John Locke and Karl Marx are two thinkers whose enormous influence can be described using this model.



            "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute"
-- Maureen Dowd, the New York Times

Maureen Dowd's statement is Marxist. No, she did not advocate revolution by the proletariat. She did not say that we ought to have a Communist state. But her famous remark that someone in a particular class of victims has "absolute" moral authority is derived from "folk Marxism," as will be explained below.

In my previous essay, I talked about the process by which the views of important thinkers become distilled into folk beliefs. I argued that it is these folk beliefs that shape our societies. I suggested that John Locke and Karl Marx are two thinkers whose enormous influence can be described using this model. In this essay, I want to elaborate on the folk beliefs that followed Locke and Marx.

Folk Locke-ism

Seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke's theory of government influenced America's founders. It has become deeply embedded in our culture. Beliefs that Locke helped to encourage include:

-- individuals have inalienable rights
-- those who govern have obligations to the governed (and not just vice-versa)
-- government's rightful powers are limited, not absolute

At the level of folk beliefs, Locke's views have been distilled into a jaunty defiance of tyrants, whether they are actual, potential, or imagined. This can be seen in expressions such as Give me liberty or give me death! or Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade. or "You'll have to pry this gun from my cold, dead fingers."

As Americans, we cannot conceive of ourselves submitting meekly to tyranny. We cannot picture a regime like that of North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq taking root in our soil.

By maintaining our Lockean tradition, we have built a vibrant society and a prosperous economy. Limited government has allowed innovation to flourish in a peaceful, gradual, evolutionary way.

Folk Marxism

Folk Marxism looks at political economy as a struggle pitting the oppressors against the oppressed. Of course, for Marx, the oppressors were the owners of capital and the oppressed were the workers. But folk Marxism is not limited by this economic classification scheme. All sorts of other issues are viewed through the lens of oppressors and oppressed. Folk Marxists see Israelis as oppressors and Palestinians as oppressed. They see white males as oppressors and minorities and females as oppressed. They see corporations as oppressors and individuals as oppressed. They see America as on oppressor and other countries as oppressed.

I believe that folk Marxism helps to explain the pride and joy that many people felt when Maryland passed its anti-Walmart law. They think of Walmart as an oppressor, and they think of other businesses and Walmart workers as the oppressed. The mainstream media share this folk Marxism, as they reported the Maryland law as a "victory for labor."

The folk Marxist view of Iraq is that the United States is the oppressor, and the groups fighting the United States are the oppressed. At the extreme, Michael Moore and Ted Rall have made explicit statements to this effect. However, even reporters in the mainstream media who are not openly supporting the enemy take this folk Marxist view when they refer to "the insurgency."

If you think about it, the forces fighting America in Iraq consist of former oppressors and would-be future oppressors. But because America is a rich, powerful country, the folk Marxist instinct is to romanticize ("insurgency") the real oppressors and to demonize ("occupation") the real liberators.

I am not saying that only a folk Marxist would oppose the way we went to war in Iraq or the way that the war has been conducted. However, I would say that it is striking that the basic narrative of the war coming through the mainstream media is folk Marxist. This is particularly true in Europe, where the folk Marxist view of America's presence in Iraq appears to be broadly and deeply held.

The rationale for tax cuts -- "It's your money" -- makes sense to folk-Locke-ism. It drives folk Marxists crazy. Folk Marxists ask What's the Matter with Kansas?. They cannot understand why the oppressed do not see the advantages of higher taxes on their "rich" oppressors.

Folk Marxism can explain why some environmentalists do not like using taxes to control pollution. If you think of polluters as the oppressors and everyone else as the oppressed, then merely taxing pollution is not morally satisfying.

The Consequences of Locke and Marx

The contrast between the results of following Locke and those of following Marx could not be sharper. Marxist countries have murdered millions, imposed a regime of fear and repression on their citizens, and impeded economic development. Where the "natural experiment" was performed of splitting one culture into Communist and non-Communist regions (North and South Korea, East and West Germany), well-being in the non-Communist country ended up several times higher than in the Communist country. People fled Communist countries by the millions, while barely a trickle of individuals chose to emigrate in the other direction.

The differing consequences of Locke and Marx are not an accident. Under folk Locke-ism, each individual has moral standing. We all are endowed with rights, and we all are obligated to follow the law. It should be no surprise that the principle of equality before the law would lead individuals to focus on mutually advantageous interactions. It should be no surprise that inequality before the law, such as the Jim Crow South of 50 years ago, would come to be regarded as a blot and a national disgrace.

Under folk Marxism, the oppressed class has inherent moral superiority to the oppressor class -- recall the quote which opens this essay. Class membership trumps individual character in determining moral standing. It should be no surprise that this belief could lead to tyranny and wanton murder by government. It should be no surprise that this belief has failed to improve the lot of those regarded as "oppressed." It inverts Martin Luther King's call to judge people by the content of their character.

Even when Marxism does not lead to tyranny, it retards economic growth, as the stagnation of continental Europe indicates. If you believe that the poor are oppressed and the rich are oppressors, then your impulse is to penalize work, risk-taking, innovation, and saving -- the engines of economic progress. As entrepreneur Paul Graham put it,

"So let's be clear what reducing economic inequality means. It is identical with taking money from the rich...It sounds benevolent to say we ought to reduce economic inequality. When you phrase it that way, who can argue with you? Inequality has to be bad, right? It sounds a good deal less benevolent to say we ought to reduce the rate at which new companies are founded. And yet the one implies the other."

Marx and the Academy

The vast majority of college professors are folk Marxists, even though they do not advocate for Communism. Their folk Marxism is dangerous because they do not even realize the extent to which it colors their world view. Although the academy is also the last bastion of avowed Marxists, it is not the overt Marxists who trouble me. They are not winning converts.

Every day, in big and small ways, academic speech reinforces the view that the world consists of oppressor classes and oppressed classes. In a way, the controversy over Lawrence Summers as President of Harvard reflects his defiance of folk Marxist orthodoxy. Folk Marxism is so automatic and so pervasive that it effectively goes unnoticed.

I would consider it a great step forward for liberals in the academic community to acknowledge the existence of folk Locke-ism and folk Marxism. If my liberal friends want to express support for folk Marxism, that is fine. If they want to criticize folk Locke-ism, that is all right, too. If they would like to give a less loaded name than "folk Marxism" to the oppressed/oppressor paradigm, I have no problem using a different label.

My concern with what I call folk Marxism is substantive, not rhetorical. To me, the danger of folk Marxism in the academy today is that it is implicit and unrecognized -- and therefore unquestioned.

Arnold Kling is author of Learning Economics.

(Editor?s Note: This article is part of a series on the effects of ideas on the popular mindset. You can read Part One here.)

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=012206D

Not quite a rant so filed here by default. Next time someone tells you we are running out of oil, or play the "no blood for oil" card, point 'em at this piece.

"Estimates of the world's oil reserves have risen faster than production."   
Oil is a nonrenewable resource. Every gallon of petroleum burned today is unavailable for use by future generations. Over the past 150 years, geologists and other scientists often have predicted that our oil reserves would run dry within a few years. When oil prices rise for an extended period, the news media fill with dire warnings that a crisis is upon us. Environmentalists argue that governments must develop new energy technologies that do not rely on fossil fuels. The facts contradict these harbingers of doom:

World oil production continued to increase through the end of the 20th century.

Prices of gasoline and other petroleum products, adjusted for inflation, are lower than they have been for most of the last 150 years.
Estimates of the world?s total endowment of oil have increased faster than oil has been taken from the ground.

How is this possible? We have not run out of oil because new technologies increase the amount of recoverable oil, and market prices ? which signal scarcity ? encourage new exploration and development. Rather than ending, the Oil Age has barely begun.

    History of Oil Prognostications
   
The history of the petroleum industry is punctuated by periodic claims that the supply will be exhausted, followed by the discovery of new oil fields and the development of technologies for recovering additional supplies. For instance:

Before the first U.S. oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, petroleum supplies were limited to crude oil that oozed to the surface. In 1855, an advertisement for Kier?s Rock Oil advised consumers to ?hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature?s laboratory.?1
In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation?s leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation?s kerosene lamps burning for four years.2

   "Warnings of U.S. oil shortages were made before the first well was drilled in 1859."
   
Seven such oil shortage scares occurred before 1950.3 As a writer in the Oil Trade Journal noted in 1918: At regularly recurring intervals in the quarter of a century that I have been following the ins and outs of the oil business[,] there has always arisen the bugaboo of an approaching oil famine, with plenty of individuals ready to prove that the commercial supply of crude oil would become exhausted within a given time ? usually only a few years distant.4

1973 Oil Embargo.

    "After the revolution in Iran, oil prices returned to the long-term average of $10 to $20 a barrel, in real terms."   
The 1973 Arab oil embargo gave rise to renewed claims that the world?s oil supply would be exhausted shortly. ?The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here,? warned an article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs.5 Geologists had cried wolf many times, acknowledged the authors of a respected and widely used textbook on economic geology in 1981; ?finally, however, the wolves are with us.? The authors predicted that the United States was entering an incipient 125-year-long ?energy gap,? projected to be at its worst shortly after the year 2000.6

The predictions of the 1970s were followed in a few years by a glut of cheap oil:

The long-term inflation-adjusted price of oil from 1880 through 1970 averaged $10 to $20 a barrel.7

The price of oil soared to over $50 a barrel in inflation-adjusted 1996 U.S. dollars following the 1979 political revolution in Iran.8 [See Figure I.]
But by 1986, inflation-adjusted oil prices had collapsed to one-third their 1980 peak.9

   "When projected shortages failed to appear, doomsayers made new predictions."   


When projected crises failed to occur, doomsayers moved their predictions forward by a few years and published again in more visible and prestigious journals:

In 1989, one expert forecast that world oil production would peak that very year and oil prices would reach $50 a barrel by 1994.10
In 1995, a respected geologist predicted in World Oil that petroleum production would peak in 1996, and after 1999 major increases in crude oil prices would have dire consequences. He warned that ?[m]any of the world?s developed societies may look more like today?s Russia than the U.S.?11

A 1998 Scientific American article entitled ?The End of Cheap Oil? predicted that world oil production would peak in 2002 and warned that ?what our society does face, and soon, is the end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all industrial nations depend.?12

Similar admonitions were published in the two most influential scientific journals in the world, Nature and Science. A 1998 article in Science was titled ?The Next Oil Crisis Looms Large ? and Perhaps Close.?13 A 1999 Nature article was subtitled ?[A] permanent decline in global oil production rate is virtually certain to begin within 20 years.?14

1990s Oil Glut.

However, rather than falling, world oil production continued to increase throughout the 1990s. Prices have not skyrocketed, suggesting that oil is not becoming more scarce:

Oil prices were generally stable at $20 to $30 a barrel throughout the 1990s. [See Figure I.]

In 2001, oil prices fell to a 30-year low after adjusting for inflation.
Furthermore, the inflation-adjusted retail price of gasoline, one of the most important derivatives of oil, fell to historic lows in the past few years. [See Figure II.]

    Reserves versus Resources   
Nonexperts, including some in the media, persistently predict oil shortage because they misunderstand petroleum terminology. Oil geologists speak of both reserves and resources.

Reserves are the portion of identified resources that can be economically extracted and exploited using current technology.
Resources include all fuels, both identified and unknown, and constitute the world?s endowment of fossil fuels.

Oil reserves are analogous to food stocks in a pantry. If a household divides its pantry stores by the daily food consumption rate, the same conclusion is always reached: the family will starve to death in a few weeks. Famine never occurs because the family periodically restocks the pantry.

Similarly, if oil reserves are divided by current production rates, exhaustion appears imminent. However, petroleum reserves are continually increased by ongoing exploration and development of resources. For 80 years, oil reserves in the United States have been equal to a 10- to 14-year supply at current rates of development.15 If they had not been continually replenished, we would have run out of oil by 1930.

    How Much Oil Is Left?
   
Scaremongers are fond of reminding us that the total amount of oil in the Earth is finite and cannot be replaced during the span of human life. This is true; yet estimates of the world?s total oil endowment have grown faster than humanity can pump petroleum out of the ground.16

The Growing Endowment of Oil.

Estimates of the total amount of oil resources in the world grew throughout the 20th century [see Figure III].

In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world?s total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels.17
In 1950, geologists estimated the world?s total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.

From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels.

In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment.

By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced.18 Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels.19 If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world?s oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.

    "Oil shales may hold another 14,000 billion barrels -- a 500 year supply."   

Additional Petroleum Resources.

The estimates above do not include unconventional oil resources. Conventional oil refers to oil that is pumped out of the ground with minimal processing; unconventional oil resources consist largely of tar sands and oil shales that require processing to extract liquid petroleum. Unconventional oil resources are very large. In the future, new technologies that allow extraction of these unconventional resources likely will increase the world?s reserves.

Oil production from tar sands in Canada and South America would add about 600 billion barrels to the world?s supply.20
Rocks found in the three western states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone contain 1,500 billion barrels of oil.21
Worldwide, the oil-shale resource base could easily be as large as 14,000 billion barrels ? more than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.22
Unconventional oil resources are more expensive to extract and produce, but we can expect production costs to drop with time as improved technologies increase efficiency.

    The Role of Technology   

With every passing year it becomes possible to exploit oil resources that could not have been recovered with old technologies. The first American oil well drilled in 1859 by Colonel Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pa. ? which was actually drilled by a local blacksmith known as Uncle Billy Smith ? reached a total depth of 69 feet (21 meters).

Today?s drilling technology allows the completion of wells up to 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) deep.

The vast petroleum resources of the world?s submerged continental margins are accessible from offshore platforms that allow drilling in water depths to 9,000 feet (2,743 meters).

The amount of oil recoverable from a single well has greatly increased because new technologies allow the boring of multiple horizontal shafts from a single vertical shaft.

Four-dimensional seismic imaging enables engineers and geologists to see a subsurface petroleum reservoir drain over months to years, allowing them to increase the efficiency of its recovery.
New techniques and new technology have increased the efficiency of oil exploration. The success rate for exploratory petroleum wells has increased 50 percent over the past decade, according to energy economist Michael C. Lynch.23

    Hubbert?s Prediction of Declining Production   

Despite these facts, some environmentalists claim that declining oil production is inevitable, based on the so-called Hubbert model of energy production. They ignore the inaccuracy of Hubbert?s projections.

Problems with Hubbert?s Model.

In March 1956, M. King Hubbert, a research scientist for Shell Oil, predicted that oil production from the 48 contiguous United States would peak between 1965 and 1970.24 Hubbert?s prediction was initially called ?utterly ridiculous.?25 But when U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, he became an instant celebrity and living legend.

    "Environmentalists now tie their predictions of declining energy supplies to M. King Hubbert's model of energy production -- which has been consistently inaccurate."
   
Hubbert based his estimate on a mathematical model that assumes the production of a resource follows a bell-shaped curve ? one that rises rapidly to a peak and declines just as quickly. In the case of petroleum, the model requires an accurate estimate of the size of the total oil endowment.26 His best estimate of the size of petroleum resources in the lower 48 states was 150 billion barrels. His high estimate, which he considered an exaggeration, was 200 billion barrels.

Based on these numbers, Hubbert produced two curves showing a ?best? estimate of U.S. oil production and a ?high? estimate. The claimed accuracy of Hubbert?s predictions are largely based on the upper curve ? his absolute upper limit [see Figure IV].

Hubbert set the absolute upper limit for peak U.S. oil production at roughly 3 billion barrels a year, and his best or lower estimate of peak future U.S. crude oil production was closer to 2.5 billion barrels.
As early as 1970, actual U.S. crude oil production exceeded Hubbert?s upper limit by 13 percent.

By the year 2000, actual U.S. oil production from the lower 48 states was 2.5 times higher than Hubbert?s 1956 ?best? prediction.
Production in the 48 contiguous states peaked, but at much higher levels than Hubbert predicted. From about 1975 through 1995, Hubbert?s upper curve was a fairly good match to actual U.S. production data. But in recent years, U.S. crude oil production has been consistently higher than Hubbert considered possible.

    "U.S. oil production has been higher than Hubbert thought possile."   
Hubbert?s 1980 prediction of U.S. oil production, his last, was substantially less accurate than his 1956 ?high? estimate.27 In the year 2000, actual U.S. oil production from the lower 48 states was 1.7 times higher than his 1980 revised prediction [see Figure V].

In light of this, it is strange that Hubbert?s predictions have been characterized as remarkably successful. While production in the United States is declining, as Hubbert predicted, it is doing so at a much slower rate. Furthermore, lower production does not necessarily indicate the looming exhaustion of U.S. oil resources. It shows instead that at current prices and with current technology, less of the remaining petroleum is economically recoverable.

Hubbert?s Prediction for Natural Gas.

In 1998, Peter McCabe of the U.S. Geological Survey showed that energy resources do not necessarily follow Hubbert-type curves, and even if they do a decline in production may not be due to exhaustion of the resource.28

For example, Hubbert also predicted future U.S. natural gas production. This prediction turned out to be grossly wrong. As of 2000, U.S. natural gas production was 2.4 times higher than Hubbert had predicted in 1956.29

The Production Curve for Coal.

Production of anthracite coal in Pennsylvania through the 19th and 20th centuries followed a Hubbert-type curve more closely than any other known energy resource. Production started around 1830, peaked around 1920, and by 1995 had fallen to about 5 percent of its peak value. However, the supply of Pennsylvania anthracite coal is far from exhausted. If production were to resume at the all-time high rate of 100 million short tons per year, the resource base would support 190 years of production. Production declined not because the resource was depleted but because people stopped heating their homes with coal and switched to cleaner-burning oil and gas.30

    "U.S. production in 2000 was 1.7 times higher than Hubbert projected in 1980."   

The primary problem with a Hubbert-type analysis is that it requires an accurate estimate of the total resource endowment. Yet estimates of the total endowment have grown systematically larger for at least 50 years as technology has made it possible to exploit petroleum resources previously not considered economical. Hubbert-type analyses of oil production have systematically underestimated future oil production. This will continue to be the case until geologists can produce an accurate and stable estimate of the size of the total oil endowment.

    Is an Oil Economy Sustainable?   

In the long run, an economy that utilizes petroleum as a primary energy source is not sustainable, because the amount of oil in the Earth?s crust is finite. However, sustainability is a misleading concept, a chimera. No technology since the birth of civilization has been sustainable. All have been replaced as people devised better and more efficient technologies. The history of energy use is largely one of substitution. In the 19th century, the world?s primary energy source was wood. Around 1890, wood was replaced by coal. Coal remained the world?s largest source of energy until the 1960s when it was replaced by oil. We have only just entered the petroleum age.31

    "Without innovation, no technology is sustainable."   

How long will it last? No one can predict the future, but the world contains enough petroleum resources to last at least until the year 2100. This is so far in the future that it would be ludicrous for us to try to anticipate what energy sources our descendants will utilize. Over the next several decades the world likely will continue to see short-term spikes in the price of oil, but these will be caused by political instability and market interference ? not by an irreversible decline in supply.

David Deming of the University of Oklahoma?s School of Geology and Geophysics is an Adjunct Scholar with the NCPA.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/bg/bg159/

Anyone seeking a little light reading (300+ page .pdf) can find it in an Army War College publication titled "GETTING READY FOR A NUCLEAR-READY IRAN."

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB629.pdf

A synopsis can be found at:

http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/01/coming-of-bomb.html

Scary stuff. Always fun to watch American politicians posture for the next election cycle while our islamicist foe positions itself for the long haul.

Wow. Amazing sweep and scope. I am awestruck.

World War IV As Fourth-Generation Warfare

By Tony Corn
Tony Corn served as a political analyst at the U.S. embassies in Bucharest, Moscow, and Paris, and in public diplomacy at the U.S. Missions to the EU and to NATO in Brussels. He is currently the Course Chair of Latin Europe Area Studies at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute. The opinions expressed in this essay are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the point of view of the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. government.


Four years after the September 11 events, while many of the initial assumptions of the global war on terrorism (GWOT) have undergone an agonizing reappraisal, a new Washington consensus about the nature of the challenge facing the West and the moderate Muslim world has yet to emerge. Can the notoriously dysfunctional interagency process ever be fixed by organizational tinkering alone, without the elaboration of a common conceptual ground? However lively it may be at times, the Beltway?s ongoing ?Operation Infinite Conversation? is no substitute for strategizing.

Does it make sense to keep framing the issue in terms of ?terrorism? when the enemy itself, taking a leaf from the book of the most advanced American strategists, talks about ?fourth-generation warfare?? At the working level, federal agency officers from DOD, DOS, DHS, AID and the intelligence community come to the GWOT with heterogeneous concepts, doctrines, lenses, frames of reference, metrics, etc. and talk past one another ? when they don?t end up working at cross purposes.

Contrary to what is often argued, the main problem lies not so much in the difference of organizational culture between law enforcement and national security agencies as in the disconnect between the two lead foreign affairs agencies ? the Pentagon and the State Department. In a nutshell: While there is no shortage of area expertise and cultural intelligence among U.S. diplomats, the State Department as an institution appears unable to make the transition from a bureaucratic to a strategic way of thinking.1 Similarly, there is no shortage of strategic brainpower and literacy among members of the U.S. military, but the Pentagon as an institution appears equally unable to shift from a network-centric warfare to a culture-centric warfare paradigm.2 The following twelve propositions constitute a provisional attempt to provide a common conceptual basis for more effective interagency coordination.

 

I.

The challenge confronting the West today is at once less than a full-fledged clash of civilizations and more than some unspecified war on terrorism: It is first and foremost an insurgency within Islam, which began in earnest in 1979, and for which the West remained, at least until 2001, a secondary theater of operations.3 From 1979 on, the revolution in Iran, the invasion of Afghanistan, the re-Islamization from above in Pakistan, the surge of Saudi activism in the Broader Middle East and the concurrent marginalization of Egypt within the Arab world (following the Camp David accords) combined to give birth to a qualitative and quantitative change of paradigm whereby pan-Arabism ? the main movement in the Middle East since 1945 ? was supplanted by pan-Islamism. But precisely because this insurgency within Islam is an insurgency, the terrorism paradigm ? with its traditional focus on the criminal nature of the act and its exclusion of the political dimension ? is largely irrelevant, save at the tactical level. The West is no more at war with terrorism today than it was at war with blitzkrieg in World War II or revolution during the Cold War. The West is at war with a new totalitarianism for which terrorism is one technique or tactic among many. At the operational and theater-strategic level, then, counterinsurgency is a more relevant paradigm than counterterrorism; and at the national-strategic level, the nexus between insurgency and weapons of mass disruption will have to be given at least as much importance as the much-discussed nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.4

If the form of this insurgency owes in part to the tradition of Arab warfare, it mainly owes to the revolution in guerrilla affairs of the twentieth century that culminates today in what postmodern strategists refer to as ?netwar? and/or ?fourth-generation warfare.?5 While still in their evolving stages, these two concepts highlight the nonhierarchical structure of the enemy?s organization, the asymmetric nature of their operations, and the focus on targeting the enemy?s political will rather than its military forces. The challenge for the West can hardly be overestimated: Even if only 1 percent of the world?s 1.2 billion Muslims were to end up being seduced by the global jihad, the West and moderate Muslim regimes would still have to deal with some 12 million jihadists spread across more than 60 countries. And if only 1 percent of these 12 million were to opt for ?martyrdom operations,? the West would still have to deal, for a generation at least, with some 120,000 suicide bombers.

 

II.

While Islam is undoubtedly no monolith, it is not the pure mosaic complacently portrayed by some, either. In the past 30 years, one particular brand ? pan-Islamic Salafism ? has been allowed to fill the vacuum left by the failure of pan-Arab Socialism and, in the process, to marginalize more enlightened forms of Islam to the point where Salafism now occupies a quasi-hegemonic position in the Muslim world. The West is obviously not at war with Islam as such and its traditional Five Pillars; but it is most definitely at war with Jihadism, a pure product of Salafism, which posits that jihad is the Sixth Pillar of Islam. From the point of view of threat assessment, the much-discussed theological distinction between a greater (spiritual) and lesser (physical) jihad is utterly irrelevant, and the only thing that matters is the praxeological distinction between three modalities of jihad as practiced: jihad of the sword, of the hand, and of the tongue.

Today, the most effective jihadist networks are precisely those that ? from Hamas to Hizbullah ? have combined these three modalities in the form of urban warfare, relief work, and hate media. At the theater level, the best military answer to this three-pronged jihad to date remains the concept of ?three-block war? elaborated by the Marine Corps, which posits that the Western military must be ready to handle a situation in which it has to confront simultaneously conventional, high intensity war in one city block, guerrilla-like activities in the next, and peace-keeping operations or humanitarian aid in a third. Yet, the West?s answer cannot be mainly military in nature. When, as in the aftermath of the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, 45?65 percent of the Muslim world ends up having a positive image of a Bin Laden, even a U.S. military victory at the theater level can lead to a political defeat at the global level. Since the end of the Cold War era, the U.S. has enjoyed an unprecedented ?command of the commons,? but as the 2003 Iraq war made painfully clear, in contrast to the 1991 Gulf War (during which CNN had a global monopoly), the U.S. no longer enjoys the ?command of the airwaves.? Throughout the 1990s, the emergence of global satellite televisions in Europe (Euronews) and the Arab world (Al-Jazeera) have combined to create a new correlation of forces; and while the Pentagon has recently traded the traditional concept of ?battlefield? for the more comprehensive concept of ?battlespace,? military planners and commanders alike have yet to fully realize that ours is as much the age of the ?three-screen war? as that of the ?three-block war.?6

 

III.

Analytically, the ongoing global jihad is best defined as a three-layered phenomenon. At one level, it is an anachronistic, pre-Clausewitzian Holy War, and U.S. diplomats will have to significantly increase their level of theo-political literacy if they ever want to make the most effective use of ijtihad (the battle of interpretations) as counter-jihad.

At another level, it is a postmodern, post-Clausewitzian netwar, not only in the organizational sense (i.e., network vs. hierarchy), but in the sense that the media networks are at once actors and vectors, platforms and weapons systems, front lines and theaters of operations. If the U.S. military is to conduct smart ?info ops,? the Pentagon will have to dispense with crude and misleading slogans (like ?disconnectedness defines danger?), to undertake a rigorous mapping of the Muslim media terrain, its electronic empires and satellite kingdoms and their respective orders of battle, and develop a crisper understanding of the grammar and logic of cross-cultural communications.

At a third level, the global jihad is but the latest manifestation, in the age of globalization, of the timeless phenomenon known as warlordism/piracy; here, an interdisciplinary understanding of the political economy of warfare will be required of all players if the interagency process is ever to succeed.7 This three-layered character of the global jihad at the macro-political level holds true at the micro-political level as well. A phenomenon like suicide-bombing is likely to endure so long as there are: a) a theological incentive (the proverbial 72 black-eyed virgins in Paradise); b) glamorization of ?martyrdom ops? by the Muslim media; and c) significant financial incentive for the family of the ?martyr? ? the $25,000 reward offered by the Saudis to families of Palestinian suicide-bombers being the equivalent of $600,000 in the West in terms of purchasing power.

 

IV.

Ideologically, Salafism is to Jihadism what Marxism is to Leninism, even though psychologically, the jihadist disease appears closer to Nazism (i.e., pathological fear of, rather than faith in, modernity, along with virulent anti-Semitism). Just as the communist project of yesterday was summed up by the proverbial slogan ?the Soviets, plus electricity,? the jihadist project today is best captured by ?the sha?ria, plus WMD.? Like the Communist International, the Salafist International has its Bolsheviks and its Mensheviks, its Bernsteins and its Kautskys, and even its Leninesque What Is to Be Done? (Qutb?s Milestones). As for the debates over what priority to give to the ?far enemy? vs. the ?near enemy,? they are but the equivalent of yesterday?s clashes between Trotskyite partisans of ?permanent revolution? and Stalinist supporters of ?socialism in one country.?

Yet, Jihadism differs from communism in three ways. 1) Since fitna (dissension) is as old ? and as central ? a tradition in Muslim history as jihad itself, Salafism is even less monolithic than Marxism. For the West and its Muslim allies, then, the first order of business is to exploit systematically all rivalries and dissensions, be they strategic, operational, tactical, doctrinal, organizational, ideological, personal, generational, national, confessional, or ethnic/tribal. 2) While communism was merely a ?secular religion,? jihadism ? however heretical it may be ? cannot but appear to many Muslims to be rooted in a genuine religion, and religiosity has never been defeated with a communications strategy based on rationality alone. To be effective, the battle for hearts and minds will have to focus as much on emotion as on intellection, on seduction as on persuasion, on images as on ideas, on memories as on policies, on identity as on democracy ? in short, as much on hearts as on minds. The communication mix (messengers/messages/media) will have to be radically different from that of the Cold War and that, in turn, will require the kind of radical transformation of public diplomacy and information operations called forth by both Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. 3) Finally, dawa (nonviolent activism) is not to jihadism what Euro-Communism was to Soviet Communism. While professing to reject violence, dawaist networks (Hizb-ut-Tahrir) are in fact in symbiosis with jihadist networks (al Qaeda), each playing its part in the Islamist version of the ?good cop, bad cop? routine. In short, dawa is not so much a reformist alternative to revolutionary jihad as the first phase (Trotskyite institutional infiltration coupled with Gramscian cultural hegemony) of a jihad that, ever since Muhammad, has always been conceived as a three-phased struggle.8

 

V.

Strategically, the fact that the global jihad does not have one single master plan or one single mastermind in no way means that the enemy lacks clearly identifiable centers of gravity. At the risk of considerable simplification, the global jihad can be said to actually rest on five asymmetrical ?pillars?: al-Saud, al-Azhar, al Qaeda, al-Jazeera ? with the proverbial ?fifth column? in the role of fifth pillar. In a nutshell: In the past thirty years, through clever manipulation of financial, educational, and informational levers, Saudi Arabia has used its soft power to alter the theo-political balance of power in the Muslim world and to turn itself into a virtual Caliphate, using Muslim IOs and NGOs as force multipliers. The concurrent transformation of the Cairo-based al-Azhar University during the same period is possibly the most overlooked element in the global jihad; more than just the oldest Muslim university, al-Azhar is the closest thing to an informal Supreme Court of the Muslim world, denying or granting legitimacy to a peace treaty with Israel (1965 and 1979 respectively) or calling for jihad against the American presence in Iraq (March 2003). In the past 30 years, the Saudi takeover of al-Azhar has so shifted the center of gravity of the Muslim political discourse that the rhetoric of al-Azhar today is indistinguishable from that of the Muslim Brotherhood, its former nemesis. Al Qaeda and Al-Jazeera, though more recent phenomena, have managed in less than two decades to become the recruiting, training, and advertising bases of the global jihad. Last but not least, the academic Fifth Column in the West, ever faithful to its historical role of ?useful idiot? (Lenin), is increasingly providing both conceptual ammunition and academic immunity to crypto-jihadists, making Western campuses safe for intellectual terrorism.9

Taken together, these five pillars constitute something halfway between the ?deep coalitions? theorized by contemporary Western strategists, and an informal command-and-control of global jihad. If only in a metaphorical sense, then, command-and-control warfare (C2W) offers the best template for a counter-jihad at the level of grand strategy. The identification of these five pillars as centers of gravity is meant to remind us that the destiny of 1.2 billion Muslims is today inordinately shaped by a few thousand Saudi princes, Egyptian clerics, and Gulf news editors, and that therefore the guiding principle of the war of ideas should be the principle of economy of force. Don?t say, for instance, ?Islam needs its Martin Luther,? if only because his 95 theses ushered in a 150-year-long bloody insurgency within Christendom. Say instead, ?The Saudi Caliphate needs to undertake its own Vatican II.?10

 

VI.

Logically and chronologically, a forward strategy of freedom cannot but give priority to religion-shaping and knowledge-building over democracy-building proper. Religion-shaping will not aim at the Protestantization of the global umma, but rather at the de-Salafization of the global ulema. Don?t say, ?Unlike Christianity, Islam does not recognize the distinction between public and private spheres.? Say instead, ?So long as there is no adequate knowledge base, any religion in any society will occupy a hegemonic position in the public sphere.? Be it ethnic or religious, identity-shaping is not rocket science. Since U.S. marketers do that routinely every day, it can be outsourced to a large extent by the public diplomacy bureaucracy. Knowledge-building will require a three-pronged approach. Now that the famous 2002 UNDP Arab Development Report has revealed that the number of books translated by the whole Arab world over the past thousand years is equivalent to the numbers of books translated by Spain in one year, the most urgent program will have to be an old-fashioned, if massive, book-in-translation program, which will contribute to the shrinking of the role of religion in the public sphere.11 Additionally, putting an end to rote learning will allow factual knowledge to lead to critical thinking, while containing the current Muslim brain-drain to the West will help create a critical mass for a knowledge-based civil society.

Religion-shaping and knowledge-building are the two logical prerequisites for Phase II: state-shrinking and market-building. While attempting to turn ?scimitars to plowshares,? U.S. policymakers will do well to keep two things in mind. First, in the Middle East, not only is political power in the hands of the military, but the armed forces are also economic actors in their own right, and incentives will have to be found if we ever want to see the military disengage from economic life. Second, the promotion by the West of a Russian-style ?shock therapy? approach would not only alienate the Muslim Street (and thus undermine the battle for hearts and minds), but it would also be the surest way to contribute to the emergence of new mafia states.12 One thing is sure: Between phase one (religion-shaping and knowledge-building) and phase two (state-shrinking and market-building) of a forward strategy of freedom, the two crucial target audiences of public diplomacy and information operations will have to be not women and youth (the current fashion), but the Muslim clergy (first line of offense) and the Muslim military (first line of defense). When it comes to the battle for hearts and minds in the Middle East, the old Clausewitzian trinity (government, people, military) will have to give way to a more focused mullah-media-military trinity.

 

VII.

In the context of the Middle East, it is simply impossible to overestimate the centrality of ?defense diplomacy? for a forward strategy of freedom.13 Yet, Beltway debates over the respective merits of hard vs. soft power invariably ?misunderestimate? the importance of military soft power, be it called military diplomacy or security cooperation, and be it conducted at the multilateral level (the various NATO schools) or at the bilateral level (the joint DOD-DOS International Military Education and Training program). At the multilateral level, the NATO Partnership for Peace format, until now reserved for new allies and partners from Eurasia, should gradually be extended to member-countries of the NATO Med dialogue. At the bilateral level, the IMET program, traditionally long on training and short on education, will need a major overhaul if it is to become synonymous with genuine ?Edu Ops.? Rather than peddle a Western theology of civil-military relations (of the kind elaborated fifty years ago by Samuel Huntington in his classic The Soldier and the State), IMET programs should be based on the reality of mullah-military relations on the ground and take into account both the political and economic role of the military in Muslim societies. Then, and only then, can a useful praxeology of civil-military relations for democratic transition be developed. What the Muslim military needs most is a compass, not a catechism ? and it may well be that, for a generation at least, the most useful/realistic model of civil-military relations will have to follow the Turkish rather than the American model. If exporting democracy is to be the name of the game, then it will be necessary to intellectually empower the Muslim military with a knowledge of successful strategies of democratization (and the specific role of the armed forces in the ?operational art? of democratic transitions) in the past three decades in Latin Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. If exporting security (a more minimalist policy) is to be the preferred U.S. policy, then it will be best to keep in mind that there is nothing more culture-specific than the notion of security, and that any attempt to export a purely American concept of security (as if it were universal) would only create the mother of all security dilemmas.

 

VIII.

The return of Islam in history after a three-century-long eclipse (1683?1979) does not necessarily mark the beginning of the desecularization of the world. It does, however, mark the end of the ?End of History.?14 Contrary to some utopian expectations at the end of the Cold War, History is on the move again, and the magnitude of the jihadist challenge is no less universal than that of the communist challenge in its time. De jure, to be sure, the appeal of jihadism would appear to be limited to 1.2 billion Muslims; but due to the combination of mass migration and mass communication, the sociopolitical umma is no longer confined to the geopolitical dar-al-Islam, and this globalization amounts to a de facto universalism. In the coming decades, strategic immigration (hijra) will continue to be promoted by Islamic states and nonstate actors alike. Since it is now established that the experience of expatriation is the single most important factor in the conversion to jihadism, and that the Internet as a medium favors Salafism as a message, the combination of alienation (due to expatriation) and escapism (made possible by the existence of an e-umma) can only result in an exponential increase of potential jihadists in the West. Though suicide-bombing as such (i.e., extreme jihadism) is likely to remain the choice of a minority, the multiplication of so-called ?third-generation? gangs will increase the likelihood of suburban warfare in Western cities (for which the November 2005 Parisian intifada may well have constituted a dress rehearsal of sorts). In short, given the combination of the most primitive (demographic warfare, suicide-bombing) and the most sophisticated (4GW, WMD) modes of warfare,15 the threat represented by jihadism for the West is in fact significantly greater than that of communism in the previous century. Back in 1992, the former head of the French Intelligence Service Alexandre de Marenches had already raised the specter of a ?Fourth World War.? In the aftermath of 9/11, the concept was given a new currency by former CIA Director James Woolsey and others, both in the U.S. and abroad. So long as it is clearly understood that ?World War IV-as-Fourth-Generation Warfare? will not be a copycat either of War World II or the Cold War, it is indeed no exaggeration to speak in terms of a fourth World War.16

 

IX.

World War IV being only in its early stages, reports of the failure of political Islam are therefore worse than premature. Western essayists who, in the early 1990s, argued that the failure of political Islam was there for everyone to see were guilty of the classic rationalist fallacy. By the early 1920s already, the failure of communism was also equally ?obvious? to anyone who cared to look; yet the communist disease continued to spread throughout half the world during the next 50 years. The bottom line: Not only is the logic of collective epidemiology distinct from that of individual rationality but, unlike communism, which took place in the pre-information age, jihadism today can count on the global electronic media as force (and speed) multipliers.

The illiteracy rate in the Middle East being around 38 percent, television is the most common source of information ? and disinformation. Granted, not all the 120 existing Muslim satellite television stations are jihadist; but thanks to those that are (from al-Manar to al-Jazeera), the percentage of Palestinians endorsing suicide bombings has already jumped from 20 percent to 80 percent between 1996 and 2002. In Iraq itself, and for similar reasons, the number of suicide bombings has jumped from one a week to 20 a week in the past 18 months; and 12 months after the beginning of the Iraq war, the percentage of Muslims worldwide supporting suicide bombing against U.S. forces in Iraq ranged from 31 percent in Turkey to 70 percent in Jordan, according to a Pew survey. As it now stands, the Middle East is at once undereducated and over-(dis)informed. Saudi Salafism is today spreading in Europe and America faster than the elusive Euro-Islam is spreading to the Greater Middle East; and while disinformation continues to travel at the speed of light, the effects of education will be felt only in a generation. Against the backdrop of the rapid proliferation of WMD, these two chronopolitical asymmetries are today the main challenge in the battle for hearts and minds, and will require the right balance between hard power, soft power, and stealth power projection.

 

X.

Now that the new National Defense Strategy (March 2005) has replaced pre-emption with prevention, a strategy of containment of global jihadism should become the logical complement to a forward strategy of freedom. In its original form, the doctrine of containment was never meant to be synonymous with a defensive or reactive posture. For George Kennan himself, containment was no ?siege warfare? but, if anything, the continuation of ?protracted maneuver warfare? by other means. While containment was lambasted by the partisans of rollback (e.g., James Burnham) as the continuation of appeasement by other means, Kennan himself was actively ? if secretly ? promoting a rollback strategy through covert action.17 Unlike outsiders like Burnham, Kennan understood that it is always better to speak softly (overtly) and carry a big stick (covertly). Kennan also knew that a certain restlessness in foreign policy can quickly become synonymous with recklessness. Hence his decision to put time (i.e., the change of generations in Russia) rather than space, and staying power rather than speed, at the center of his containment policy. However, restlessness was to become official policy during the so-called Second Cold War (1979?1989), and the effects of the unqualified U.S. empowerment of the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War are still being felt today.

Similarly, throughout the 1990s ? and much to the dismay of Europe ? an impatient America ended up giving legitimacy to Muslim forces in the Balkans known to have been heavily involved in drug, arms, and human trafficking, and of having links to al Qaeda. Despite this record of recklessness in Afghanistan and the Balkans, covert action remains more indispensable than ever, if only because public diplomacy is by definition an overt activity and, since America?s image is at an all-time low, there are today systemic limits to what overt advocacy can accomplish (even with a larger budget). But as during the early Cold War, covert action today will have to take the long view and stick to a ?strategy of truth? rather than succumb to the post-Cold War temptation of the quick fix and of spin control.18

 

XI.

Muslim outreach ? the latest buzzword in Washington ? should under no circumstances become synonymous with intellectual capitulation. All too often, the same Western lumpen-intelligentsia that embraces a constructivist interpretation of Christianity is only too willing to subscribe to the essentialist view of Islam promoted by the Salafists. The same academics who deride the American, British, or French ?nation? as a mere ?imagined community? are only too prone to reify the idea of a fantasmatic ?Arab Nation? (not to mention a ?Palestinian Nation? ? an imagined community of recent vintage). Public diplomacy professionals would do well to remember that in the Middle East, dialogos is but the continuation of polemos by other means, and that the Arabs ? good Mediterraneans that they are ? have nothing but contempt for the twin temptations of Anglo-Saxon public diplomacy: sanctimonious preaching and political correctness.

If neoconservatives got only one thing right in the past three years, it would have to be this: It is simply ludicrous to argue that nothing can change in the Muslim world so long as the Palestinian question is not settled. Let?s get real: In the 1970s, Catholic Europe (Spain, Portugal) and Latin America embarked on their own democratic transitions without waiting for the fate of their Catholic brothers of Northern Ireland to be settled. In the 1990s, similarly, Orthodox Europe (Romania, Bulgaria) and Russia followed suit without second thoughts for the fate of their Orthodox brothers in Bosnia. Whatever the current plight of the Palestinians (which owes less to the indifference of Crusaders and Jews than to the deliberate callousness of Arab leaders), the same should apply for the Muslim world.

Both Europe and the United States have a definite share of responsibility in the empowerment of the Salafists in the 1979?89 decade, and the West should all the more readily acknowledge this fact that it has little else to apologize for. Rather than legitimize the jihadist jeremiad over Palestine,19 Western policymakers and opinion leaders would do well to keep the agenda of any dialogue with Islam on the main issue, namely, Middle East exceptionalism.

Bluntly put: Back in 1945, the Middle East was at the same level of development as South Asia; where are, today, the economic ?dragons? of the Muslim world? It is not the fault of the West if the Middle East is now the only region of the world that has not undertaken regional economic integration; if the oil monarchies have invested $500 billion in the West instead of the East; if Arab governments spend the highest percentage of GDP on military hardware, and the lowest percentage on nonreligious education; if half the workforce (women) is used in reproductive rather than productive tasks; if the population of the Arab world has doubled since 1980 while its share of world trade has fallen by two-thirds during the same time; if only 19 percent of Muslim countries have democratically elected governments, in contrast to 77 percent in the non-Muslim world; and ? oh yes ? if Palestinian Arabs can become citizens of just about every Western country, but have been denied this right by every Arab country (Jordan excepted) for the past 50 years.

The Palestinian issue will undoubtedly continue to be the pet issue of a professional chattering class more representative of Arab governments (which subsidize them) than of the genuine Muslim Street (which cares little for the issue); but when all is said and done, the Palestinian question is a sideshow at best, a diversion at worst, compared to the two defining features of twentieth-century Middle East history: on the one hand, the kind of negative Middle East exceptionalism outlined above; on the other, the rise of a Saudi Caliphate which now spends more on propaganda than the Soviet Empire in its heyday.

 

XII.

The Sino-Islamic connection is not the fruit of some fertile neocon imagination, but a fundamental fact of international life for anyone who cares to take a closer look at China?s energy policy. The ?it?s about oil? mantra heard in some Western quarters is indeed not unfounded ? so long as one remembers that in little more than a decade, China has changed from a net exporter of oil into the world?s second largest importer, and that in the not-so-distant future, the energy needs of 1.2 billion Chinese will dwarf those of 300 million Americans. The oil factor does indeed explain why China has a more proactive policy than the U.S., and a more reckless one as well. As the most populated country in the world, China is also the country that cares the least about the danger of nuclear proliferation involved in some of its more Faustian bargains.

But there is more than oil at stake in China?s strategic relations with Muslim countries. If 1979 marks the return of Islam in history, it also marks (more significantly than 1949 ever did) the return of China in history. Throughout the 1980s, China experienced phenomenal growth rates and was catching up fast with the West, when the advent of the information revolution widened the gap anew. Since the Chinese leadership cannot go into overdrive without destroying the social fabric (and ultimately its own power base), it can only hope to narrow the gap by slowing down the West. For Western historians, all this has a deja-vu all over again feel. Just as imperial latecomers like Germany and Japan did not hesitate to play the Islamic card for all it was worth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, today China has ? to put it mildly ? no reason to be a priori hostile to the idea of using jihadism as a weapon of mass disruption against the West.

The congruence between the Islamic 4GW jihad and China?s own Unrestricted Warfare20 doctrine is therefore no surprise. This Sino-Islamic connection has been largely ignored by European elites too busy indulging in anti-American posturing instead. In the EU media, China is invariably portrayed as being all (economic) opportunities and no (political) threats; from the Spanish and French media in particular, one would never guess that China in fact has a rather proactive ? and sophisticated ? policy in Spain?s and France?s former colonies. As for the Islamic question, EU elites continue to believe that it can best be solved by keeping as much distance as possible between the U.S. approach (Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative) and the EU approach (Euro-Med Partnership).21

The recent referenda on the EU Constitution have proven, if anything, how disconnected EU elites have become, not just from world realities, but from their own constituencies. It should now be clear to all that the intra-European gap between elites and public opinion is greater still (and in fact older) than the transatlantic gap between the U.S. and the EU. For Washington, there has never been a better time to do ?European Outreach? and drive home the point that the existence of a ?Sino-Islamic Connection? calls for closer transatlantic cooperation and a reassertion of the West. In short, if the Atlantic Alliance did not exist, it would have to be invented.22

 

The chronopolitical challenge

Four years after the September 11 events, and barely two years into the occupation of Iraq, there are signs that the Beltway talking heads are once again having the vapors. Yes, Iraq has been costly in both blood and treasure, and conducted in a sub-optimal manner. But Iraq was a necessary war,23 and it was worth it: For the first time in their history, Iraqis have the opportunity to draft their own democratic constitution. But while the U.S. ought to stand ready to do its part (regime change) when need be, the responsibility for nation-building ultimately rests on the shoulders of local elites. In that respect, either the Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd elites will realize that their respective interests are best served by some sort of Spanish-style federalism, and Iraq ? a country rich in human and natural resources ? stands a good chance of becoming a modern-day al-Andalus; or Iraqi elites will revert to tribal infighting, in which case they ? not America ? will bear the historical responsibility for the transition of Iraq from rogue state to failed state. One way or the other, Arab elites cannot go on blaming everyone but themselves for the Arab predicament.

Whatever the outcome in Baghdad, the Iraqi tree should not be allowed to mask the jihadist forest. In that respect, there is something vulturesque in the doves? recent assault on the hawks. Though in the past four years the neoconservatives, confronted by a ?new kind of war,? have indeed at times come up with the wrong answers, the fact remains that in the previous decade, the same neocons, more consistently than any other group, came up with the right questions ? and nobody listened. And while some military paleo-cons undeniably showed early on a better grasp of tactical and operational realities at the theater level, the civilian neocons overall continue to have a crisper perception of the real challenges at the strategic level ? and yes, that includes Iran.24

In retrospect, if neoconservatives got only one thing wrong, it would have to be this: The greatness of a policy is not measured by the breadth of a geopolitical vision or the boldness of its goals and objectives; ultimately, it is measured by the mastery of the chronopolitical dimension in the course of policy implementation. For the past four years, Time, in all its manifestations ? duration, sequencing, timing, tempo, but also memory25 ? has been the single most neglected strategic dimension of the Bush administration.

That said, it is far from clear that a different administration would have done any better. Since the end of the Cold War, the strategic management of time seems to have eluded U.S. elites, whose timelines now rarely extend beyond the 24/7 news cycle, the quarterly financial report, and the midterm elections. Economic ?shock therapy? and military ?shock and awe? are the twin results of the same impatience, the same short-sightedness. The coming World War IV will make for interesting times indeed, for if the grammar of guerrilla warfare has significantly evolved over the centuries, the strategic management of time, from Muhammad?s three-phased jihad to Mao?s three-phased people?s war and beyond, will always constitute the logic of insurgency.26

When it comes to fighting power and thinking power, the lone remaining superpower is still in a better position today than at the end of World War II; but when it comes to staying power (to use J.F.C. Fuller?s trinity), U.S. elites lately have come across as a pale shadow of the ?greatest generation.? If the project of converting a mere ?unipolar moment? into a New American Century is ever to succeed, not only will U.S. elites have to develop the same staying power as their forefathers27, but the neo-Wilsonian messianism (be it Democrat or Republican, economic or military) of recent years will have to morph into a cultural realism attentive to the rhythm of civilizations and the chronopolitical dimension of statecraft.

Notes

1 It is no surprise that the 20-some reports on ?re-inventing public diplomacy? that have appeared since 9/11 have invariably focused on empowering the bureaucracy rather than on devising a grand strategy. Between 1989 and 1999, USIA?s budget was slashed by 30 percent, and academic and cultural exchange programs worldwide dropped from 45,000 to 29,000; by 2003, the U.S. government was spending only $150 million a year on Muslim-majority countries, and the overall public diplomacy budget amounted to a mere 3 percent of the intelligence budget, and less than one-third of 1 percent of the defense budget.

2 Briefly stated, network-centric warfare is technocentric, while culture-centric warfare is anthropocentric. See Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, ?Network-Centric Warfare,? Proceedings, U.S. Naval Institute 24:1 (January 1998), and Major General Robert H. Scales, ?Culture-Centric Warfare,? Proceedings, U.S. Naval Institute (October 2004).

3 David W. Lesch, 1979: The Year that Shaped the Modern Middle East (Westview, 1992).

4 On the similarities and differences between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, see Ian O. Lesser et al, Countering the New Terrorism (RAND, 1999), and Bard O?Neil, Insurgency and Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse, Second Edition (Potomac Books, 2005). On the use of weapons of mass disruption in asymmetric warfare, the focus of research has so far been on technological means (cyber-warfare) rather than on economic-financial goals. Yet, ?bleeding the West financially? is one of al Qaeda?s stated goals, and while the terrorist network has spent on average less than $50,000 on each of its operations, the costs to local business have run in the tens or hundreds of millions.

5 At the tactical-operational level, some of the most salient features of the Iraqi insurgency (?tribalism,? ?vendetta,? ?honor,? etc.) are in fact neither specifically ?Islamic? nor ?Arab,? but common to the ?Mediterranean? culture as such. On Tribalism, see Richard L. Taylor, Tribal Alliances: Ways, Means, and Ends to Successful Strategy, Carlisle Papers in Security Strategy (August 2005), Montgomery McFate, ?The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,? Joint Forces Quarterly 38 (Summer 2005), and David Ronfeldt, ?Social Studies: 21st Century Tribes,? Los Angeles Times (December 12, 2004). On Netwars, see John Arquilla and David Ronfelt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy (RAND, 2001). On Fourth-Generation Warfare, a concept first developed in 1989, see William S. Lind et al.: ?The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth-Generation,? Marine Corps Gazette (October 1989). The concept has now gained currency not only among Western strategists, but also within the jihadist leadership itself (see Chuck Spinney, ?Is 4GW al-Qaida?s Official Combat Doctrine?? www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c438.htm (February 11, 2002). For a brief introduction to 4GW, see Thomas X. Hammes?s Insurgency: Modern Warfare Evolves into a Fourth Generation, Strategic Forum 214, INSS, NDU (January 2005) www.ndu.edu/inss/strforum/SF214/SF214.pdf. While the concept of 4GW itself was developed the year of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, all the elements of 4GW were already present in the French-Algerian war of 1954-1962. See Matthew Connelly?s remarkable A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria?s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2002).

6 On the Sixth Pillar, see Johannes J.G. Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat?s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East (Macmillan, 1986), and Walid Phares and Robert G. Rabil, ?The Neglected Duty: Terrorism?s Justification,? In the National Interest 31:18 (May 2004). On the ?Jihad of the Hand? carried by Islamist NGOs, see Abdel-Rahman Ghandour, Jihad Humanitaire ? Enquete sur les ONG Islamiques (Paris: Flammarion, 2002) and Velko Attanassof, ?Bosnia and Herzegovina:Islamic Revival, International Advocacy Networks and Islamic Terrorism, Strategic Insights 4:5 (May 2005). On the ?Jihad of the Tongue,? see Avi Jorisch, Beacon of Hatred: Inside Hizballah?s Al-Manar Television (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004). On the concept of Three-Block War, see General Charles C. Krulak, USMC, ?The Three-Block War: Fighting in Urban Areas,? Vital Speeches of the Day (December 15, 1997), and by the same author, ?The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three-Block War,? Marines Magazine (January 1999). On the global commons, see Barry Rosen ?Command of the Commons: the Military Foundations of American Hegemony,? International Security 28, no1, summer 2003, and my forthcoming ?Command of the Airwaves: the Revolution in Guerilla Affairs from Ho Chi Minh to Osama.?

7 On the need to re-open the interpretation of the Quran (officially closed for the past five centuries), the clearest introduction is Ijtihad: Reinterpreting Islamic Principles for the Twenty-First Century (U.S. Institute of Peace, August 2004). See also Brian M. Jenkins, ?Strategy: Political Warfare Neglected,? San Diego-Union Tribune (June 26, 2005) (www.rand.org/commentary/062605SDUT.html). Symbolically, ?Ijtihad as Counter-Jihad? may be said to have begun on the first anniversary of the Madrid bombing (03/11/05), when the official Spanish Islamic Commission issued a fatwa against al-Qaeda. Since the London bombings of July 2005, Tony Blair has increased pressure on the Europe-based Muslim community to take a more proactive stand in the counter-jihad (see Joseph Loconte, ?Fatwa Frenzy,? Weekly Standard (August 18, 2005). For a preliminary mapping of the Muslim media ?terrain,? see Naomi Sakr, Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2002); Gary Bunt, Islam in the Digital Age ? E-Jihad, Online Fatwas and Cyber Islamic Environments (Pluto Press, 2003); Mark Frohardt and Jonathan Temin, Use and Abuse of Media in Vulnerable Societies (U.S. Institute of Peace, October 2003); Gabriel Weiman, WWW.Terror.Net: How Modern Terrorism Uses the Internet (U.S. Institute of Peace, March 2004). Beyond the mediasphere proper, smart ?info ops? will have to take into account that the most effective means of communication ? including the all-pervasive ?rumor? ? outside the media and the mosque include the bazaar and the coffee shop. On the ongoing ?clash of civilizations? within the Pentagon between the numerates and the literates, suffice it to say here that the network-centric approach has so far produced two ideas dangerously disconnected from real life: the Gospel of World Peace through Global Connectivity (see Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon?s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century [Putnam, 2004], and a narrow vision of military soft power centered on Infowar (Leigh Armistead, ed. Information Operations: Warfare and the Hard Reality of Soft Power [Potomac Books, 2004]). The culture-centric approach, by contrast, is more promising in that it tries to connect the dots (in an interagency perspective) between cultural intelligence and strategic communication. See the U.S. Marine Corps? Small Wars Manual for the 21st Century (www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil) and the Defense Science Board Task Force?s Report on Strategic Communication (September 2004) (www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2004-09-Strategic_Communication.pdf). On the political economy of warfare, see Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford University Press, 1999) and Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks (Seven Stories Press, 2005).

8 In Europe today, the essayist Tariq Ramadan (who is none other than the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) is considered the leading representative of this Trotskyte-Gramscian tactic. See Caroline Fourest, Frere Tariq: Discours, Strategie et Methode de Tariq Ramadan (Grasset, Paris, 2004), Paul Landau, Le Sabre et le Coran:Tariq Ramadan et les Freres Musulmans a la Reconquete de l?Europe (Paris: Rocher, 2005) and the report of the Dutch Ministry of Interior, From Dawa to Jihad: The Various Threats from Radical Islam to the Democratic Legal Order (December 2004) (www.aivd.nl/contents/pages/42345/fromdawatojihad.pdf). On violent and non-violent ways of spreading Sharia, see Paul Marshall, Radical Islam?s Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

9 On the Saudi Caliphate, see Dore Gold, Hatred?s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Regnery, 2003), and the Center for Religious Freedom Report, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques, (Freedom House, January 2005); on the use of Muslim IOs, NGOs, and News Agencies by the Saudis, see Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization (Clarendon,1990). On the Saudi doctrine of soft power, see former Saudi Minister of Petroleum Hisham M. Nazer, Power of a Third Kind: The Western Attempt to Colonize the Global Village (Praeger, 1999). On the Saudi/Al-Azhar connection, Franklin Foer, ?Moral Hazard: The Life of a Liberal Muslim,? New Republic (November 18, 2002), and Laurent Murawiec, ?The Saudi Takeover of Al-Azhar University,? Terrorism Monitor, (Jameston Foundation, December 2003). For a detailed study of Al-Azhar, see Malika Zeghal: Gardiens de l?Islam: Les Oulemas d?Al-Azhar dans l?Egypte Contemporaine (Paris: Fondation des Sciences Politiques, 1996). (Among its many functions, Al-Azhar is the training school for would-be imams from 100 countries, its Islamic Research Council has a major say in what can and cannot be published in Egypt, its alumni sit on the board of all Muslim banking networks, its fatwas influence legislators throughout the Muslim world.) On the influence of Saudi money in U.S. universities and think-tanks, see Jon Kyl, ?Terrorism: Growing Wahhabi Influence in the United States,? FrontPageMagazine.com (July 3, 2003); Lee Kaplan, ?The Saudi Fifth Column on Our Nation?s Campuses,? FrontPageMagazine.com (April 5, 2004); and, more recently, the refreshingly candid GAO Report, Information on U.S. Agencies? Efforts to Address Islamic Extremism (September 16, 2005).

10 However thorough and objective they try to be, sociopolitical analyses of the jihadist phenomenon (e.g., Gilles Kepel?s Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam [Belknap, 2003]) cannot but present a flawed picture of the jihad given the marginal attention paid to the geopolitical dimension as such (in particular to the leading role of Saudi Arabia and its various fronts). The methodological parti-pris favored by Western academics (intra-national approach, focus on ?civil society? rather than state apparatus) both downplays the manipulation from above and especially from abroad, and gives the phenomenon of re-Islamization an authenticity (?revolution from below?) that it does not have in real life. At its worst, this kind of sociologism (e.g., Olivier Roy?s Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Umma [Columbia University Press, 2004]) leads to the implausible claim that ?there is no such thing as a geostrategy of Islam? ? a conclusion not supported by Roy?s own findings. (Among ?area studies? specialists, a disturbing gap is developing today between their ever-increasing cultural expertise and their ever-shrinking strategic literacy.) On the concept ? so relevant for the Middle East ? of ?deep coalition? between state and nonstate actors in contemporary strategic thinking, see Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds., In Athena?s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (RAND, 1997).

11 On identity-shaping, see Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (Schocken, 2000), and Richard Cimino and Don Lattin, Shopping for Faith: American Religion in the New Millennium (Jossey-Bass,1998). Identity-shaping in the Arab world itself is made easier by the multiplicity of competing tribal/ethnic/national identities (see Bernard Lewis, The Multiple Identities of the Middle East [Schocken, 1999]). On the sorry state of translation in the Arab world, see the much-discussed UNDP Arab Development Reports of 2002. On religion-shaping and knowledge-building, two studies stand out: Cheryl Benard, Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies (RAND, 2004), and Robert Satloff, The Battle of Ideas in the War on Terror: Essays on U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Middle East (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004).

12 Hossein Askari, Rana Atie: ?Scimitars to Plowshares,? National Interest (Fall 2004). For anyone involved in nation-building, Samuel Huntington?s classic Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press, 1968) is still required reading ? as surely as Daniel Pipes? The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996) should be required reading for anyone involved in the Battle for Hearts and Minds. On the perils of the shock-therapy approach, see Marshall Goldman, The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry (Routledge, 2003). On the Ulema, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulema in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton University Press, 2002), and Gibreel Gibreel, ?The Ulema: Middle East Power Brokers,? Middle East Quarterly (Fall 2001). On the Muslim military, see John Walter Jandora, Militarism in Arab Society: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Handbook (Greenwood Press, 1997); Mehran Kamrava, ?Military Professionalization and Civil-Military Relations in the Middle East,? Political Science Quarterly, 115:1 (Spring 2000); and Paul A. Silverstein, ed. Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (forthcoming).

13 As Joseph Nye himself hinted: ?The military can also play an important role in the creation of soft power. In addition to the aura of power that is generated by its hard power capabilities, the military has a broad range of officer exchanges, joint training, and assistance programs with other countries in peacetime. The Pentagon?s International Military and Educational Training programs include sessions on democracy and human rights along with military training.? Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (PublicAffairs, 2004). On the need to re-think defense diplomacy, see also Timothy C. Shea, ?Transforming Military Diplomacy,? Joint Forces Quarterly 38 (July 2005).

14 Peter Berger, ed. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999); Fareed Zakaria, ?The End of the End of History,? Newsweek (September 24, 2001), referring to Francis Fukuyama?s best-selling The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992). As Fukuyama himself reluctantly conceded recently: ?The War on Terror is, in other words, a classic counter-insurgency war, except that it is being played out on a global scale. There are genuine bad guys out there who are much more bitter ideological enemies than the Soviets ever were, but their success depends on the attitudes of the broader population around them who can be alternatively supportive, hostile, or indifferent ? depending on how we play our cards.? ?The Neoconservative Moment,? National Interest (Summer 2004).

15 On Expatriation and Escapism, see Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), particularly 160?163. On the ?third-generation gang? phenomenon, see John P. Sullivan, ?Gangs, Hooligans, and Anarchists: The Vanguard of Netwar in the Streets,? in Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars, 99-126; Max G. Manwaring: Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency (U.S. Army War College, March 2005); and Robert Leiken, ?Europe?s Angry Muslims,? Foreign Affairs (July/August 2005). On demographic warfare ? the most neglected subfield of security studies ? Milica Zarkovic Bookman?s The Demographic Struggle for Power: The Political Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World (Frank Cass Publishers, 1997), is a useful introduction. Demo-war, which goes beyond natalist policies (?the battle of cradles?) and ethnic cleansing, and includes strategic emigration and human trafficking, is the least understood aspect of the Global Jihad. See Keith Johnson and David Crawford, ?New Breed of Islamic Warrior is Emerging,? Wall Street Journal (April 28, 2004), and Robert Leiken, Bearers of Global Jihad? Immigration and National Security after 9/11 (Nixon Center, 2004).

16 On the idea of ?WWIV?, see Alexandre de Marenches, The Fourth World War: Diplomacy and Espionage in the Age of Terrorism (William Morrow, 1992). As military analyst Eliot Cohen pragmatically remarked in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, ?The Cold War was World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multi-million man armies or conventional front lines on a map. The analogy with the Cold War does, however, suggest some key features of that [new] conflict: that it is, in fact, global, that it will involve a mixture of violent and non-violent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise and resources, if not of vast number of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots.? (?World War IV,? Wall Street Journal [November 20, 2001]). Andrew Bacevich?s contrived effort to debunk the concept (?The Real World War IV,? Wilson Quarterly [Winter 2005]) only succeeds in demonstrating that a fine military analyst, when blinded by parochial passions, can morph into a lousy diplomatic historian.

17 ?Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.? George Kennan, ?The Sources of Soviet Conduct,? Foreign Affairs (July 1947). On early covert operations, see Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America?s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). On covert action during the 1980s, see Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration?s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994). For a sample of covert operations in the GWOT, see David Kaplan, ?Hearts, Minds, and Dollars,? U.S. News and World Report (April 18, 2005).

18 To this day, U.S. policymakers remain surprisingly unaware that a leading cause of the transatlantic estrangement throughout the 1990s was the perception, widespread in Europe, that America?s Balkan policy was an attempt to appease the Muslim world at Europe?s expense. America?s heavy-handed ?media management? about the Balkans became the subject of a record number of bestselling books in Europe, and that the Balkan precedent explains in no small part the mood of European public opinion over Iraq in March-April 2003. In fairness, the infatuation of the U.S. chattering class with Balkan Muslims in the 1990s was not any more (or any less) irrational than the infatuation of the EU chattering class with Palestinian Arabs since the early 1970s. In the wake of both 9/11 and 3/11, though, it is to be hoped that both the U.S. and the EU will realize that ?appeasement? of the Muslim Street at each other?s expense simply does not pay.

19 Demographically, Palestinians constitute less than 1 percent of the Muslim world. Historically, their plight owes more to the callousness of successive generations of Arab leaders than to ?Jews-and-Crusaders? who, to this day, contribute more aid than the whole Arab world combined. Politically, the whole Palestinian question boils down to this alternative: 1) either by ?Palestine? one means the Greater Palestine of the 1922 Mandate, in which case it is hard not to notice that a Palestinian state already exists at 78 percent (and Jordan can learn to live without the West Bank the same way Hungary and Romania learned to live without Transylvania and Bessarabia respectively); 2) or one means the current state of Israel and the Territories (i.e. the remaining 22 percent), in which case we are talking about a geographic unit the size of New Jersey ? and any sane person will have to admit that, from communism and fascism to Pol Pot and Rwanda, the twentieth century has known worse tragedies than the ?exodus? of 600,000 people from Trenton to Hoboken (53 miles). It is worth remembering that, at roughly the same time as the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, 10 million Germans were forcibly displaced from Central Europe and Russia, and that the partition of India and (West and East) Pakistan led to the displacement of 17 million people.

20 On Germany and Islam, see Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization (Clarendon Press, 1990). On Japan and Islam, Selcuk Esenbel, ?Japan?s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1900-1945,? American Historical Review 109:4 (October 2004). On Chinese Fourth-Generation Warfare doctrine, see Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing, 1999). For a comparison between China?s ?Unrestricted Warfare? and America?s ?Shock and Awe,? see Michael G. Dana?s lucid Shock and Awe: America?s 21st Century Maginot Line (Naval War College, 2003). On China?s energy/arms policy in the Greater Middle East and Africa, see Jin Liangxiang, ?Energy First: China in the Middle East,? Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2005); Irwin M. Stelzer, ?The Axis of Oil,? Weekly Standard (February 7, 2005); Dan Blumenthal, ?Providing Arms: China and the Middle East,? Middle East Quarterly (Spring 2005); Thomas Woodrow, ?The Sino-Saudi Connection,? Jamestown Foundation (October 2002); Richard Russell, ?China?s WMD Foot in the Greater Middle East?s Door,? The Middle East Review of International Affairs (September 2005). On China?s ventures in Africa, Princeton Lyman, ?China?s Rising Role in Africa,? Presentation to the U.S.-China Commission (July 21, 2005), www.cfr.org.

21 Though excessively polemical at times, Bat Ye?Or?s analysis of the Euro-Arab Dialogue that has been going on between the EU and the Arab League since 1973 (Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis [Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005]) has the merit not only of shedding light on this little-known aspect of the EU?s Common Foreign and Security Policy, but also of showing that, within a generation, what began as an inter-civilizational ?Dialogue? has resulted not so much in the Europeanization of the Arab Mind as in the creeping Islamization of the European Mind. Before engaging in a similar ?American-Arab Dialogue,? U.S. policymakers would do well to give serious considerations to what the optimal ?rules of engagement? should be.

22 In a justly celebrated essay published in 2002, Robert Kagan pointedly reminded Europeans that their Kantian zone of permanent peace was underwritten by the U.S. military (?Power and Weakness,? Policy Review [May-June 2002]). More recently, Tod Lindberg sought to move beyond the ensuing debate by reminding ?Martian? Americans and ?Venusian? Europeans alike of this all-too-often overlooked reality: As much as the EU itself, the Alliance is ?a permanent peace treaty among its own members.? (Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership, Routledge, 2004). Because it includes the two halves of the West, and because it is both a military alliance and an ?ethical community,? the Alliance indeed remains to date the only expression of the West-as-Will-and-Representation. Given the changing security environment, though, NATO?s most urgent task is not so much to beef up its military capabilities (important as that may be) as to strengthen its antiquated political decision-making process and deepen its common strategic culture. On the increasing salience of ?strategic culture? in international relations, see the special issues of International Security 19:4 (Spring 1995) and Strategic Insights 4:100 (October 2005). For fresh thinking on NATO on the European side, see former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar?s NATO: An Alliance for Freedom (FAES, November 2005) (www.fundacionfaes.org/documentos/Informe_OTAN_Ingles.pdf).

23 Robert Kagan, ?Whether this war was worth it,? Washington Post (June 19, 2005), and Tod Lindberg, ?Are we creating more terrorists?,? Washington Times (August 16, 2005).

24 For an eerily prescient prognosis on Iraq, see William S. Lind?s ?Occupation and Iraqi Intifada? (April 23, 2003) (www.counterpunch.org/lind04262003.html.). Regarding Iran, it is noteworthy that arch-realist Henry Kissinger himself agrees that military action should not be ruled out if negotiations fail. Kissinger: ?Don?t Exclude Military Action Against Iran if Negotiations Fail,? Council on Foreign Relations (July 14, 2005).

25 As Gerit W. Gong pointed out recently: ?Those who assume Time heals all wounds are wrong. Accelerated by the collision of information technology with concerns of the past, issues of ?remembering and forgetting? are creating history. They are shaping the strategic alignments of the future. . . . In East Asia, Europe and other places where history extends further into the past than in the United States, memory, history and strategic alignments are inextricably linked.? ?The Beginning of History: Remembering and Forgetting as Strategic Issues,? Washington Quarterly (Spring 2004). In last instance, the hold of Global Jihad on the imagination of a significant segment of the Muslim population is not so much due to the Jihadists? stated goals regarding the future (i.e., restoration of the caliphate and/or extension of the sharia) as to the collective memory of the Umma regarding the recent past: namely, that while the Muslim world in the previous century has invariably lost every conventional war even against the smallest powers (Israel), it has often been successful in unconventional warfare, most recently against a superpower (Soviet Union). Needless to say, collective memory (particularly in the Muslim world) often has little to do with factual history; from the point of view of strategic communication, ?memory-shaping? (i.e., setting the historical record straight) is therefore as important as ?theology-shaping.? On t

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Dissecting the 'Chinese Miracle'

By Peter Zeihan



The "Chinese miracle" has been a leading economic story for several years now. The headlines are familiar: "China's GDP Growth Fastest in Asia." "China Overtakes United Kingdom as Fourth-Largest Economy." "China Becomes World's Second-Largest Energy Consumer." "China Revises GDP Growth Rates Upward -- Again." Everywhere, one can find news articles about China, rising like a phoenix from the economic debris of its Maoist system to change and challenge the world in every way imaginable.

But just like the phoenix, the idea of an inevitable Chinese juggernaut is a myth.

Moreover, Western markets have been at least subconsciously aware of this for a decade. More than half of the $1.1 trillion in foreign direct investment that has flowed into China since 1995 has not been foreign at all, but money recirculated through tax havens by various local businessmen and governing officials looking to avoid taxation. Of the remainder, Western investment into China has remained startlingly constant at about $7 billion annually. Only Asian investors whose systems are often plagued (like Japan's) by similar problems of profitability or (like Indonesia's) outright collapse have been increasing their exposure in China.

Once the numbers are broken down, it's clear that the reality of China does not live up to the hype. While it is true that growth rates have been extremely strong, growth does not necessarily equal health. China's core problem, the inability to allocate capital efficiently, is embedded in its development model. The goals of that model -- rapid urbanization, mass employment and maximization of capital flow -- have been met, but to the detriment of profitability and return on capital. In time, China is likely to find itself undone not only by its failures, but also by its successes.

The Chinese Model

Until very recently, China's economic system operated in this way:

State-owned banks held a monopoly on deposits in the country, allowing them to take advantage of Asians' legendary savings rate and thus ensuring a massive pool of capital. The state banks then lent to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This served two purposes. First, it kept the money in the family and assisted Beijing in maintaining control of the broader economic and political system. Second, because loans were disbursed frequently and at subsidized rates -- and banks did not insist upon strict repayment -- the state was able to guarantee ongoing employment to the Chinese masses.

This last point was -- and remains -- of critical importance to the Chinese Politburo: they know what can happen when the proletariat rises in anger. That is, after all, how they became the Politburo in the first place.

The cost of keeping the money circulating in this way, of course, is that China's state firms are now so indebted as to make their balance sheets a joke, and the banks are swimming in bad debts -- independent estimates peg the amount at around 35-50 percent of the country's GDP. Yet so long as the economic system remains closed, the process can be kept up ad infinitum: After all, what does it matter if the banks are broke if they are state-backed and shielded from competition and enjoy exclusive access to all of the country's depositors?

This system, initiated under Deng Xiaoping in 1979, served China well for years. It yielded unrestricted growth and rapid urbanization, and helped China emerge as a major economic power. And so long as China kept its financial system under wraps, it would remain invulnerable.

But the dawning problem is that China is not in its own little world: It is now a World Trade Organization member, and nearly half of its GDP is locked up in international trade. Its WTO commitments dictate that by December, Beijing must allow any interested foreign companies to compete in the Chinese banking market without restriction. But without some fairly severe adjustments, this shift would swiftly suck the capital out of the Chinese banking system. After all, if you are a Chinese depositor, who would you put your money with -- a foreign bank offering 2 percent interest and a passbook that means something, or a local state bank that can (probably) be counted on to give your money back (without interest)?

The Chinese are well aware of their problems, and perhaps their greatest asset at this point is that -- unlike the Soviets before them -- they are hiding neither the nature nor the size of the problem. Chinese state media have been reporting on the bad loan issue for the better part of two years, and state officials regularly consult each other as well as academics and businesspeople on what precisely they should do to avert a catastrophe.

The result has been a series of stopgap measures to buy time. Among these, the most far-reaching initiative has been a partial reform of the financial sector. The government has founded a series of asset-management companies to take over the bad loans from the state banks, thus scrubbing them free of most of the nonperforming loans. The scrubbed banks are then opened up so that interested foreign investors can purchase shares.

So far as it goes, this is a win-win scenario: Foreign banks get access to assets in-country before the December jump-in date, and the state banks avoid meltdown. In addition, a measure of foreign management expertise is injected into the system that hopefully will teach the state banks how to lend appropriately and -- if all goes well -- lead to the formation of a healthy financial sector. At the same time, the deep-pocketed foreign companies come away with a vested interest in keeping their new partners -- and by extension, the Chinese government -- fully afloat.

The only downside is that central government, through its asset-management firms, assumes responsibility for financially supporting all of China's loss-making state-owned enterprises.

But this rather ingenious banking shell game addresses only the immediate problem of a looming financial catastrophe. Left completely untouched is the existence of a few hundred billion dollars in dud loans -- linked to tens of thousands of dud firms for which the central government is now directly responsible.

Which still leaves for China the unsettled question: "Now what do we do?"


Two Opposing "Solutions"

As can be expected from a country that just underwent a leadership change, there are two competing solutions.

The first solution belongs to the generation of leadership personified by Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, and could be summed up as a philosophy of "Grow faster and it will all work out." It could be said that during Jiang's presidency, while the leadership certainly perceived China's debt problem, they -- like their counterparts in Japan -- felt that attacking the problem at its source -- the banking system -- would lead to an economic collapse (not to mention infuriate political supporters who benefited greatly from the system of cheap credit).

Jiang's recommendation was that everyone should build everything imaginable in hopes that the resulting massive growth and development would help catapult China to "developed country" status -- or, at the very least, raise overall wealth levels sufficiently that the population would not turn rebellious. In the minds of Jiang and his generation of leaders, the belief was that only rapid economic growth -- defined as that in excess of 8 percent annually -- could contain growing unemployment and urbanization pressures and thus hold social instability at bay.

The second solution comes from the current generation of leadership, represented by President Hu Jintao. This solution calls for rationalizing both development goals and credit allocation. The leadership wants to eliminate the "growth for its own sake" philosophy, consolidate inefficient producers and upgrade everything with a liberal dose of technology. Key to this strategy is a centrally planned effort to focus economic development on the inland areas that need it most -- and this entails tighter control over credit. Hu wants loans to go only to enterprises that will use money efficiently or to projects that serve specific national development goals -- narrowing the rich-poor, urban-rural and coastal-interior gaps in particular.

There are massive drawbacks to either solution.

Regional and local governors enthusiastically seized upon Jiang's program to massively expand their own personal fiefdoms. And as corporate empires of these local leaders grew, so too did Chinese demand for every conceivable industrial commodity. One result was the massive increases in commodity prices of 2003 and 2004, but the results for the Chinese economy were negligible. China consumes 12 percent of global energy, 25 percent of aluminum, 28 percent of steel and 42 percent of cement -- but is responsible for only 4.3 percent of total global economic output. Ultimately, while "solution" espoused by Jiang's generation did forestall a civil breakdown, it also saddled China with thousands of new non-competitive projects, even more bad debt, and a culture of corruption so deep that cases of applied capital punishment for graft and embezzlement have soared into the thousands.

Yet the potential drawbacks of the solution offered by Hu's generation are even worse. In attempting to consolidate, modernize and rationalize Jiang's legacy, Hu's government is butting heads with nearly all of the country's local and regional leaderships. These people did quite well for themselves under Jiang and are not letting go of their wealth easily. Such resistance has forced the Hu government to reform by a thousand pinpricks, needling specific local leaders on specific projects while using control of the asset management firms as a financial hammer. After all, since the central government relieved the state banks of their bad loan burden, it now has the perfect tool to strip power from those local leaders who prove less-than-enthusiastic about the changes in government policy.

Or at least that is how it is supposed to work. Local government officials have become so entrenched in their economic and political fiefdoms that they are, at best, simply ignoring the central government or, at worst, actively impeding central government edicts.

Hu's team is indeed making progress, but with the problem mammoth and the resistance both entrenched and stubborn, they can move only so fast for fear of risking a broader collapse or rebellion. And this does not take into consideration Beijing's efforts to strengthen the Chinese interior -- where the poorest Chinese actually live. Complicating matters even more, Hu's strategy relies upon the central government's ability to wring money out of the wealthy coastal regions to pay for the reconstruction of the interior.

That has made the coastal leaders even more disgruntled. However, they have come upon a fresh source of funding, replacing the traditional sources of capital that now are drying up as a result of the personnel changes in Beijing: the underground lending system, which was spurred by the official government monopoly over banks in years past. The central government now estimates that the underground banking sector is worth 800 billion yuan, or some 28 percent of the value of all loans granted in country.

Dealing with Failure -- And Success

The question in our mind is which strategy will fail -- or even succeed -- first. If Jiang's system prevails, then growth will continue, along with the attendant rise in commodity prices -- but at the cost of growing income disparity and environmental degradation. The likely outcome of such "success" would be a broad rebellion by the country's interior regions as money becomes increasingly concentrated in the coastal regions long favored by Jiang. And that is assuming the financial system does not collapse first under its own weight.

Local rebellions in China's rural regions have already become common, but two of are particular note.

In March, the villagers of Huaxi in the Zhejiang region protested against a local official who had used his connections to build a chemical plant on the outskirts of town. When rumors of police brutality surfaced, some 20,000 villagers quite literally seized control of the town from 3,000 security personnel. Before all was said and done, the villagers invited regional press agencies in to chronicle events in the town that had told the Politburo to go to hell, and started burning police property and parading riot control equipment before anyone who would watch. They actually sold tickets to their rebellion. Huaxi marked the first time local officials actually lost control of a town.

Then, in December, protests erupted against a local official in Shanwei, who had similarly lined his pockets with the money that was supposed to have been made available to farmers displaced by his expanding wind-power farm. The local governor figured that since he was investing not just in an energy-generating project in energy-starved China, but a green energy project, that he would have carte blanche to run events as he saw fit. He was right. When the protests turned violent, government forces opened fire -- the first authorized use of force by government troops against protesters since the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989.

Such events are, in part, evidence of a degree of success for the strategy espoused by Jiang's generation. The grow-grow-grow policy results in massive demand for labor by tens of thousands of economically questionable -- and typically state-owned -- corporations. This, in turn, draws workers from the rural regions to the rapidly expanding urban centers by the tens of millions. The dominant sense among those who are left behind -- or those who find their urban experiences less-than-savory -- is that they have been exploited. This is particularly true in places like Shanwei, on the outskirts of urban regions, when urban governors begin confiscating agricultural land for their pet projects.

But for all the complications created by Jiang's solution to China's economic challenges, it is Hu's counter-solution that could truly shatter the system. In addition to dealing with all the corrupt flotsam and high-priced jetsam of Jiang's policies, Hu must rip down what Jiang set out to accomplish: thousands of fresh enterprises that are unencumbered by profit concerns. A steady culling of China's non-competitive industry is perhaps a good idea from the central government's point of view -- and essential for the transformation of the Chinese economy into one that would actually be viable in the long term -- but not if you happen to be one of the local officials who personally benefited from Jiang's policies.

The approach of Hu's generation is nothing less than an attempt to recast the country in a mold that is loosely based on Western economics and finance. Even in the best-case scenario, the central government not only needs to put thousands of mewling firms to the sword and deal with the massive unemployment that will result, it also needs to eliminate the businessmen and governing officials who did well under the previous system (which did not even begin to loosen its grip until 2003). And the only way Beijing can pay for its efforts to develop the interior is to tax the coast dry at the same time it is being gutted politically and economically.

The challenge is to keep this undeclared war at a tolerable level, even while ratcheting up pressure on the coastal lords in terms of both taxation and rationalization. But just as Jiang's "solution" faces the doomsday possibility of a long rural march to rebellion, Hu's strategy well might trigger a coastal revolution. As the central government gradually increases its pressure on the assets and power of China's coastal lords, there is a danger that those in the coastal regions will do what anyone would in such a situation: reach out for whatever allies -- economic and political -- might become available. And if China's history is any guide, they will not stop reaching simply because they reach the ocean.

The last time China's coastal provinces rebelled, they achieved de facto independence -- by helping foreign powers secure spheres of influence -- during the Boxer Rebellion. This resulted, among things, in a near-total breakdown of central authority.

Hmm, wonder if this piece and the one posted above are indicitive of an emerging pattern.

From the Los Angeles Times
A Home Boom Busts
Shanghai's hot housing market has fizzled after a run-up fed by speculators, threatening a significant part of China's economy.
By Don Lee
Times Staff Writer

January 8, 2006

SHANGHAI ? American homeowners wondering what follows a housing bubble can look to China's largest city.

Once one of the hottest markets in the world, sales of homes have virtually halted in some areas of Shanghai, prompting developers to slash prices and real estate brokerages to shutter thousands of offices.

For the first time, homeowners here are learning what it means to have an upside-down mortgage ? when the value of a home falls below the amount of debt on the property. Recent home buyers are suing to get their money back. Banks are fretting about a wave of default loans.

"The entire industry is scaling back," said Mu Wijie, a regional manager at Century 21 China, who estimated that 3,000 brokerage offices had closed since spring. Real estate agents, whose phones wouldn't stop ringing a year ago, say their incomes have plunged by two-thirds.

Shanghai's housing slump is only going to worsen and imperil a significant part of the Chinese economy, says Andy Xie, Morgan Stanley's chief Asia economist in Hong Kong.

Although the city's 20 million residents represent less than 2% of China's population of 1.3 billion, Xie says, Shanghai accounts for an astounding 20% of the country's property value. About 1 million homes in Shanghai alone ? about half the number of housing starts for the entire United States in 2004 ? are under construction.

"They'll remain empty for years," Xie said, adding that a jolting comedown also was in store for other Chinese cities with building booms ? including Beijing, Chongqing and Chengdu ? though other analysts say the problem is largely confined to Shanghai.

Shanghai's housing bust comes after a doubling of prices in the previous three years, a run-up fueled by massive speculation. With China's economy booming and Shanghai at the center of worldwide attention, investors from Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere were buying as fast as buildings were going up. At least 30% to 40% of homes sold were bought by speculators, says Zhang Zhijie, a real estate analyst at Soufun.com Academy, a research group in Shanghai.

"Ordinary people had no option but to follow the trend," Zhang said. "Worrying that prices would be even more unaffordable tomorrow, many of them borrowed from relatives and banks to buy as soon as possible."

The Shanghai government only pushed the market higher, he added. "Many of the officials said Shanghai's property market was healthy and wouldn't drop before the World Expo" in 2010.

For Wang Suxian, the tale of two lines illustrates how the bubble has burst.

When home prices were at the tail end of the boom in March, Wang hired two migrant workers to stand in line for a chance to buy units in what the developer said was modeled after an apartment community on New York's Park Avenue.

The workers waited 72 hours, including cold nights, but the 35-year-old was thrilled to come away with two apartments, one for $110,000, about the average price for a new home in Shanghai, and another for $170,000. They were among Wang's four investment properties.

And for a short period, Wang believed she was raking in hundreds of dollars a day for doing nothing, as property prices in the city kept soaring.

But today, prices at the complex have fallen by a third, and the lines of frenzied buyers are gone. Wang is among dozens who are fighting the developer to take the apartments back.

On a recent frosty morning, she stood in a line herself with about 40 other buyers outside the builder's headquarters, demanding that it negotiate a deal to return their money. "This is ridiculous," Wang huffed.

The company, Da Hua Group, invited Wang and other homeowners inside, served them hot tea, then told them to forget it.

"I think it'll take at least three years before the property market becomes healthy again," said Zhu Delin, a finance professor at Shanghai University and former head of the Shanghai Banking Assn.

The typical home being built is in a high-rise complex, with two bedrooms and about 850 square feet of living space.

Developers say many of Shanghai's homes are valued at about $70,000 or less, and price drops haven't been as steep for those units.

Some still see promise in the Shanghai market. Incomes are rising and droves of people are relocating from the inner city to outlying areas, said Richard David, managing director at Macquarie Property Investment Banking China in Shanghai.

What's more, he says, the Shanghai government ? which owns all the land ? has auctioned off few lots in the last two years, which will limit the number of housing units in the future.

But that's little solace for homeowners who have seen inventories rise even as buyers show no hurry to come back into the market.

In Shanghai, people blame the popping of the housing bubble on the central government, which has applied one measure after another in the last year to quash excessive speculation and price increases.

Banks were ordered to raise their best rate on home loans to 5.5% from 5%. Home buyers were required to make down payments of at least 30%, up from 20%. A 5.5% capital gains tax on home sellers' profits was imposed. Beijing also levied a 5% tax on the sale price of homes sold before two years of ownership.

"It's killed the speculators," said David Pitcher, a Shanghai developer and former head of CB Richard Ellis' office here.

Before the market swooned, buses would bring investors from the southeastern coastal city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province on home-buying missions here. They no longer come.

Wang, the woman battling Da Hua, is one of tens of thousands of Shanghai home buyers from Wenzhou, known for its wealth and business prowess.

But it's not just speculators who have bailed out of the market. A lot of potential Shanghai buyers have been scared off by numerous reports of sinking home prices and desperate action by some owners.

Internet chat rooms recently were abuzz with a story that a Taiwanese man had jumped from the 33rd floor of an apartment tower about 15 miles northeast of downtown. Many people suspect that he killed himself because he was drowning in debt after his home investments went sour.

Managers at the complex refused to comment, but brokers indicated that the price of some units there have plummeted by more than 50% since March, when a home fetched as much as $250 a square foot, similar to housing prices in some Southern California communities.

Zhang Wei, an editor at Imagine China, a photography agency in Shanghai, was close to buying an apartment in the new Pudong development area last year.

The 25-year-old planned to use his $1,250 in savings, and his parents ? a policeman and a doctor ? agreed to contribute about $30,000. The family of three currently lives in a 550-square-foot apartment in an industrial district that was provided by his father's employer, the Police Bureau.

Zhang walked away from the deal after the central government stepped up its campaign to cool Shanghai's market. He noticed prices beginning to drop. "When two of the four real estate agencies near our home finally closed, I decided not to buy for at least two years," he said. "Even a 1% drop in prices is a lot of money for us."

For Shanghai, prolonged weakness in the housing market could be very painful. Like Los Angeles, Shanghai relies heavily on real estate to drive its economy. Morgan Stanley's Xie calculates that property sales directly accounted for about half of $31 billion of the growth in Shanghai's annual economic output from 2001 to 2004.

Construction cranes still fill the skyline of Shanghai, an area of about 2,200 square miles ? a little more than half the size of Los Angeles County. But there's sparse development in the center of the city, where strong sales of high-end homes and luxury office suites, in large part by foreigners, belie the losses around it.

Shanghai's government is relocating inner-city residents to new suburban areas, where entire towns are going up as part of a plan to build distinct industries that ring the city.

It's unclear how many of these new homes are sitting empty. Sales and inventory figures aren't provided by the government. But analysts say they can see the surplus of housing when they drive past housing complexes and there are few lights on at night.

Few analysts are betting on a quick turnaround. Yin Zhongli, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, says a housing crash takes time to clean up. He worries that the financial sector will be crippled by the real estate fallout. Last year, he said, 76% of all bank loans in Shanghai were in real estate.

"Now is the time to swallow a bitter pill," Yin said.

That's what Huang Xiaolei is doing. The 25-year-old Shanghai native nabbed a 1,700-square-foot apartment from Da Hua during the heady times last spring. The unit wouldn't be completed until the end of the year, but as is customary in China, Huang had to secure a loan and make the down payment right away.

She and her parents pooled their life savings of about $80,000 and put 30% down on the $270,000 home. In April, they began making monthly mortgage payments of $1,100 on a 30-year loan with a 5.5% interest rate.

In November, Huang decided to stop the monthly payment, and this month she filed a lawsuit against Da Hua, claiming her contract allowed her to rescind the purchase before the house was completed under special circumstances, with a 3% fee.

"We have over 40 cases like this at our firm," said Du Yuping, Huang's lawyer.

Huang regrets that she got caught up in the frenzied market, and says that even if she wins the lawsuit, she'll suffer a hard financial loss.

"I was cheated," she said.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi
chinabubble8jan08,0,7585034.story?coll=la-home-headlines&track=morenews

A couple extremist links and a Scientific American piece about Islamofascist use of the web.

http://jihadwatch.org/
http://www.extremistgroups.com/links.html


December 26, 2005
   

Virtual Jihad
   

The Internet as the ideal terrorism recruiting tool
   

By Luis Miguel Ariza
   

If you read Arabic and want a degree in jihad, click on www.al-farouq.com/vb/. If you're lucky--the site disappears and reappears--you will see a post that belongs to the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF). It announces the "Al Qaeda University of Jihad Studies." According to Ahmad al-Wathiq Billah, the GIMF "Deputy General Emir," students "pass through faculties devoted to the cause of the caliphate through morale boosting and bombings," and the site offers specialization in "electronic, media, spiritual and financial jihad."

The Internet has long been essential for terrorism, but what has surprised experts is the growth of such Islamist (radical Islam) and jihadist sites. Their continuing rise suggests that recruitment for a "holy war" against the West could proceed unabated, despite capture of key leaders.

According to Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communications at the University of Haifa in Israel, the number of all terrorist Web sites--those advocating or inciting terrorism or political violence--has grown from a dozen in 1997 to almost 4,700 today, a nearly 400-fold increase. (By comparison, the total number of Web sites has risen about 50- to 100-fold.) The enumeration includes various Marxist, Nazi and racist groups, but by far the dominant type, according to Weimann, is the Islamist-jihadist variety, which accounts for about 70 percent.

The war in Iraq provides plenty of motivation for radicals, and the Internet appears to be facilitating them, even if legitimate governments shun them. "We are talking about groups that are opposed and persecuted all over the Arab and Muslim world, so the Internet becomes the only alternative to spread their messages," says Reu ven Paz, director of PRISM (Project for the Research of Islamist Movements), a watchdog group in Herzliya, Israel. The spread "is like an attempt to create a virtual Islamic nation."

Scott Atran, a research director at the Jean Nicod Institute of the CNRS in Paris, studies the group dynamics of terrorists. He notes that the attackers of Madrid, London and Bali were autonomous groups, like "swarms that aggregate to strike and then vanish." The open, anarchic structure of the Internet supports this "chaotic dynamics" modus operandi as a way for militants to recruit new members and look for goals or inspiration. "Without the Internet, the extreme fragmentation and decentralization of the jihadi movement into a still functioning global network just would not be possible," Atran argues. "I think we can expect more independent attacks by autonomous groups because of the Internet."

Atran cites the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004, as a good example: a computer of one of the attackers showed evidence of systematic downloading from the same site that delivered a document entitled "Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers," which had circulated on the Net some months before the massacre. Among other charges, the document called for attacking Spain to force a withdrawal of that nation's troops from Iraq.

Atran, who has interviewed several radical jihadists, says that the Internet has spread a homogenized, flat notion of Islam, one that has little to do with Islamic tradition. The militants express a message of martyrdom for the sake of global jihad as life's noblest cause. "I was very surprised to find, from the suburbs of Paris to the jungles of Indonesia, that people gave to me basically the same stuff, in the same words," Atran says.

Combating the problem might come at the expense of the freedom expected on the Internet. Weimann has argued that data mining could sniff out jihadists or remove information before would-be terrorists see it. Marc Sageman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a former CIA officer, notes that the nature of Islamist-jihadist sites could be turned against them. "In jihad, with so many Web sites, you have many potential messages, and you do not know what is true," he remarks. This lack of authenticity, he notes, could serve as a basis for a misinformation campaign to foil jihadists.

Atran thinks it may be possible to fight the virulent ideas not just with a fist but also with an outstretched hand. The chat room could serve as a forum for life-affirming ideas as it does for terrorist ones. Convincing jihadists of alternative values would be a long process, he admits. But "I have seen groups of mujahedeens" transformed from fighters to community helpers. If that conversion works in physical space, he says, "I do not see any reasons why we cannot do that in cyberspace."

No doubt misfiled here as it's not a rant, but this qualitative approach appears eliminate subjective variables. Think it's interesting to note that Fox News is not as far to the right of center as say CBS News or NY Times is left.


http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4353049,00.html

UCLA political science professor Timothy Groseclose, and University of Missouri at Columbia economist Jeffrey Milyo collaborated on a study of bias in the media.
Kopel: New study detects media's liberal tilt
Professors find most media 'significantly to the left of the average U.S. voter'

December 31, 2005

People argue a lot about whether the national mainstream media is politically biased, but such arguments are often impressionistic. Earlier this month, professors Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo of the University of Missouri published the results of an investigation using rigorous quantitative analysis.

In A Measure of Media Bias, the authors start by examining the ratings of members of Congress, according to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Founded in 1947 by liberals such as Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Schlesinger, the ADA is an excellent gauge of mainstream liberal opinion. The average ADA rating for a member of Congress is 50.1, so a person with a 50 percent ADA rating is almost exactly in the middle of the current American political spectrum.

Groseclose and Milyo looked at how often members of Congress cited the 200 leading think tanks and interest groups in their speeches in Congress. Congresspersons with a lower ADA rating were more likely to cite groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Christian Coalition, and the National Taxpayers Union. Congresspersons with a higher ADA rating were more likely to cite groups such as the Economic Policy Institute and the Children's Defense Fund.

For example, the average ADA score of a congressperson who cites the American Conservative Union is 16 percent. The average ADA score of a congressperson who cites the National Organization for Women is 79 percent.

Notably, the Groseclose and Milyo study did not require anyone to put a label on a think tank - such as whether the Brookings Institution is liberal, moderate, or conservative. (Its congressional citers have a 53 percent average ADA score.) Rather, the study simply observes which groups are cited by which members of Congress.

Next, the researchers and their assistants counted citations to these same groups in the media, and calculated an ADA rating for each media outlet based on the citations. So if a newspaper cited a mix of groups very similar to groups cited by Sen. John Kerry, the newspaper would have the same ADA rating as Kerry: 88 percent.

Two major media outlets were to the right of the American political midpoint: The Washington Times, at 35 percent, and Fox (the nightly news with Brit Hume) at 40 percent.

Three outlets were slightly left, but still close to the center: The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABC's Good Morning America - all at 56 percent.

The majority of the media clustered in the 60 to 69 range - significantly to the left of the average U.S. voter. These outlets were (in order of increasing leftishness) ABC's World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, USA Today, the Today show, Time, U.S. News & World Report, NPR Morning Edition, Newsweek, CBS Early Show, and The Washington Post. Every one of these outlets was further from the American political midpoint than was Fox News.

At the far left of the major media spectrum were the Los Angeles Times (70), CBS Evening News (74), The New York Times (74), and The Wall Street Journal (85). The ratings were based only on news stories, so the left-leaning opinion pages at the Los Angeles Times and right-leaning opinion pages at The Wall Street Journal had no effect.

The authors conclude: "Our results show a strong liberal bias." Even so, most of the media are much more moderate than Congress itself, where the average Democrat has an 84, and the average Republican a 16.

The study, which builds on previous work by Groseclose and Mil- yo, appears in the November issue of The Quarterly Journal of Economics. It is available online at www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Media.Bias.pdf.

You can read various critiques of the study, and its previous iterations, on the Internet. The authors address and refute many of these arguments in their paper.

In any case, no critique undermines the relative rankings of the media outlets - that, for example, The New York Times is much further left than The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, or that the three major newsweekly magazines are nearly identical ideologically.

The study did not cover all the sources from which the Denver dailies draw their national and international stories. But of the sources which were studied, every source which supplies a significant amount of news content to a Denver paper (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times) has a major leftward bias. The finding suggests that the Denver papers could improve their overall balance by including some stories from The Washington Times or from other sources without such a pronounced leftward tilt.

By the way, my left-leaning counterpart on this column, Jason Salzman, and I calculated our ADA scores based on 2003-2004 Senate votes. I scored a 16 percent, while Jason got a 91. We agree, however, that there are objective standards by which media bias can be judged. That's one reason we often agree with the critiques that the other raises in our columns.

Dave Kopel is research director at the Independence Institute, an attorney and author of 10 books. He can be reached at davekopel@RockyMountainNews.com.

December 29, 2005, 8:21 a.m.
The Plague of Success
The paradox of ever-increasing expectations.
Victor Davis Hanson


After September 11 national-security-minded Democratic politicians fell over each other, voting for all sorts of tough measures. They passed the Patriot Act, approved the war in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein, and nodded when they were briefed about Guantanamo or wiretap intercepts of suspect phone calls to and from the Middle East.

After the anthrax scare, the arrests of dozens of terrorist cells, and a flurry of al Qaeda fatwas, most Americans thought another attack was imminent ? and wanted their politicians to think the same. Today's sourpuss, Senator Harry Reid, once was smiling at a photo-op at the signing of the Patriot Act to record to his constituents that he was darn serious about terrorism. So we have forgotten that most of us after 9/11 would never have imagined that the United States would remain untouched for over four years after that awful cloud of ash settled over the crater at the World Trade Center.

Now the horror of 9/11 and the sight of the doomed diving into the street fade. Gone mostly are the flags on the cars, and the orange and red alerts. The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia, and as beneficiaries of the very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention al Qaeda very little and Islamic fascism hardly at all.

Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a relieved Left ? deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby.

Afghanistan in October, 2001, conjured up almost immediately warnings of quagmire, expanding Holy War at Ramadan, unreliable allies, a trigger-happy nuclear Pakistan on the border, American corpses to join British and Russian bones in the high desert ? not a seven-week victory and a subsequent democracy in Kabul of all places.

Nothing in our era would have seemed more unlikely than democrats dethroning the Taliban and al Qaeda ? hitherto missile-proof in their much ballyhooed cave complexes that maps in Newsweek assured us rivaled Norad's subterranean fortress. The prior, now-sanctified Clinton doctrine of standoff bombing ensured that there would be no American fatalities and almost nothing ever accomplished ? the perfect strategy for the focus-group/straw-poll era of the 1990s.

Are we then basking in the unbelievable notion that the most diabolical government of the late 20th century is gone from Afghanistan, and in its place are schools, roads, and voting machines? Hardly, since the bar has been astronomically raised since Tora Bora. After all, the Afghan parliament is still squabbling and a long way from the city councils of Cambridge, La Jolla, or Nantucket ? or maybe not.

The same paradox of success is true of Iraq. Before we went in, analysts and opponents forecasted burning oil wells, millions of refugees streaming into Jordan and the Gulf kingdoms, with thousands of Americans killed just taking Baghdad alone. Middle Eastern potentates warned us of chemical rockets that would shower our troops in Kuwait. On the eve of the war, had anyone predicted that Saddam would be toppled in three weeks, and two-and-a-half-years later, 11 million Iraqis would turn out to vote in their third election ? at a cost of some 2100 war dead ? he would have been dismissed as unhinged.

But that is exactly what has happened. And the reaction? Democratic firebrands are now talking of impeachment.

What explains this paradox of public disappointment over things that turn out better than anticipated? Why are we like children who damn their parents for not providing yet another new toy when the present one is neither paid for nor yet out of the wrapper?

One cause is the demise of history. The past is either not taught enough, or presented wrongly as a therapeutic exercise to excise our purported sins.

Either way the result is the same: a historically ignorant populace who knows nothing about past American wars and their disappointments ? and has absolutely no frame of reference to make sense of the present other than its own mercurial emotional state in any given news cycle.

Few Americans remember that nearly 750 Americans were killed in a single day in a training exercise for D-Day, or that during the bloody American retreat back from the Yalu River in late 1950 thousands of our frozen dead were sent back stacked in trucks like firewood. Our grandparents in the recent past endured things that would make the present ordeal in Iraq seem almost pedestrian ? and did all that with the result that a free Germany could now release terrorists or prosperous South Korean youth could damn the United States between their video games.

Instead, we of the present think that we have reinvented the rules of war and peace anew. After Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the three-week war to remove Saddam, we decreed from on high that there simply were to be no fatalities in the American way of war. If there were, someone was to be blamed, censured, or impeached ? right now!

Second, there is a sort of arrogant smugness that has taken hold in the West at large. Read the papers about an average day in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Detroit, or even in smaller places like Fresno. The headlines are mostly the story of mayhem ? murder, rape, arson, and theft. Yet, we think Afghanistan is failing or Iraq hopeless when we watch similar violence on television, as if they do such things and we surely do not. We denigrate the Iraqis' trial of Saddam Hussein ? as if the Milosevic legal circus or our own O.J. trial were models of jurisprudence. Still, who would have thought that poor Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a mass-murdering half-brother of Saddam Hussein, would complain that Iraqi television delayed lived feeds of his daily outbursts by whimpering, "If the sound is cut off once again, then I don't know about my comrades but I personally won't attend again. This is unjust and undemocratic."

A greater percentage of Iraqis participated in their elections after two years of consensual government than did Americans after nearly 230 years of practice. It is chic now to deprecate the Iraqi security forces, but they are doing a lot more to kill jihadists than the French or Germans who often either wire terrorists money, sell them weapons, or let them go. For what it's worth, I'd prefer to have one Jalal Talabani or Iyad Allawi on our side than ten Jacques Chiracs or Gerhard Schroeders.

Third, our affluent society is at a complete disconnect with hard physical work and appreciation of how tenuous life was for 2,500 years of civilization. Those in our media circus who deliver our truth can't weld, fix a car, shoot a gun, or do much of anything other than run around looking for scoops about how incompetent things are done daily in Iraq under the most trying of circumstances. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that our technologies and wealth give us a pass on the old obstacles of time and space ? as if Iraq 7,000 miles away is no more distant than Washington is from New York. Perhaps soldiers on patrol who go for 20 hours without sleep with 70 pounds on their back are merely like journalists pulling an all-nighter to file a story. Perhaps the next scandal will be the absence of high-definition television in Iraq ? and who plotted to keep flat screens out of Baghdad.

The result of this juvenile boredom with good news and success? Few stop to reflect how different a Pakistan is as a neutral rather than as the embryo of the Taliban, or a Libya without a nuclear-weapons program, or a Lebanon with Syrians in it, or an Iraq without Saddam and Afghanistan without Mullah Omar. That someone ? mostly soldiers in the field and diplomats under the most trying of circumstances ? accomplished all that is either unknown or forgotten as we ready ourselves for the next scandal.

Precisely because we are winning this war and have changed the contour of the Middle East, we expect even more ? and ever more quickly, without cost in lives or treasure. So rather than stopping to praise and commemorate those who gave us our success, we can only rush ahead to destroy those who do not give us even more.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200512290821.asp

I always enjoy these tounge in cheek ouija board channelings of reknowned spook James Angleton, but I never know what to make of them.


December 19, 2005, 8:33 a.m.
The Truth About Tenet
James Jesus Angleton explains it all.
Michael Ledeen


"Oh, come on! You expect me to believe that?"

I was recently back at the ouija board with my old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton, once upon a time the head of CIA Counterintelligence. I had wanted to talk to him about the latest warnings from the interminable 9/11 Commission, a.k.a. The Monologue That Will Not Die, that we hadn't done enough with homeland security. I knew his view of the commission was much like mine ? namely that these guys need a day job. Or maybe a Caribbean cruise. Or maybe a proper spanking. But he didn't want any of it, he was all worked up over Iran, and he had a wild theory about what was going on.

JJA: "Be logical for once, don't always assume that the CIA is totally incompetent. You only hear about the bad things, the screw-ups, the accidents. No one's going to tell you about the brilliant operations."

ML: "All right, everybody knows that. But to suggest that somehow the CIA maneuvered the Iranian elections, and got Ahmadi Nezhad into the presidency, that's just wacky."

JJA: "Has anyone ever doubted CIA's ability to manipulate the Iranian populace? How did the shah get to power in the first place?"

ML: "Yeah, but only the craziest Iranians think that CIA has accomplished anything there since the 1950s."

JJA: "Good news. But some day this generation's Archie Roosevelt will tell the inside story of how the CIA managed to recruit this guy from central casting, the perfect person to get the West to take the Iranian threat seriously, the perfect person to terrify undecided Iranians and get them ready to take desperate measures, into office."

ML: "Is there any evidence at all?"

JJA: "You bet there is. There's Tenet."

ML: "Tenet's gone, fired."

JJA: "The hell you say. He left surrounded by glory and adulation. He got the damn medal, didn't he? You think the president didn't know what he was doing?"

ML: "What was he doing? I thought it was a disgrace."

JJA: "He was giving the award in advance, because he knew he wouldn't be able to praise Tenet afterwards, if the operation worked."

ML: "So you think that Tenet..."

JJA: "Tenet pretended to leave. He had to. He and the president realized that the only way to generate public support for a vigorous campaign of regime change in Iran, was if everyone was totally frightened. But the mullahs were too smart to let that happen, they had all these sly reformers who pretended to be somehow ready to make a nice deal with us. You know, Rafsanjani, Khatami, all those smooth talkers with their clever slogans tailor made for Western intellectuals, "dialogue of civilizations," etc. etc..."

ML: "And so, you're saying, CIA spotted Ahmadi Nezhad, recruited him, and..."

JJA: "And ran him. And bought off enough mullahs to get him named president."

ML: "And now?"

JJA: "And now they're running him. That is, Tenet's running him. That's what Tenet is doing. Forget all that nonsense about writing a book. He'll never write a book. He's too busy sabotaging Iran."

ML: "Let me try to follow this, please. Are you also saying that those guys that left when Goss came in are part of the scheme?"

JJA: "Well, obviously. I mean, a new guy comes in and the top two officers from the Operations Directorate just pack up and leave? Give me a break. It was all coordinated, all staged, the usual disinformation for a gullible public. And they went for it, didn't they?"

ML: "Yes, it all made perfect sense. It was time to clean house and so Goss was brought in to do the dirty work."

JJA: "Hahahahaha, you went for it too. Hahaha. The two most important guys in the building had their feelings hurt by that nasty old congressman, and they just couldn't bear it, and they left. Let's see, how many directors had they survived already? Four? Five? Six? I can't count them all. But this one was just too much. And where did they go to work, did anyone notice that?"

ML: "Yeah, they went to work for Scowcroft."

JJA: "Exactly, the buddy of George H. W. Bush, the former director of what?"

ML: "You're turning into a conspiracy-theory nutcase."

JJA: "What do you mean, turning into? What do you think counterintelligence is, anyway?"

I couldn't stand it anymore. You're of course free to believe whatever you want, I think it's ridiculous. Even if it does somehow explain everything.

? Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute

Follow up to a post a couple pages back where CA cops took down a woman who did not want to leave her intact LA home.

Hurricane Katrina Survivor Victimized Again: Injuries from Police Use of Excessive Force Required Surgery

12/14/2005 8:00:00 AM

To: National and State Desk

Contact: Ashton R. O'Dwyer, Jr., 504-561-6561

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 14 /U.S. Newswire/ -- A New Orleans woman is recovering from surgery this week from injuries resulting from when she was roughed-up by authorities who forced her to leave her home a week after Hurricane Katrina. Patricia Konie, 58, has filed a Federal lawsuit over the injuries and other violations of civil rights.

"My client was severely injured in a needless removal from her home," stated attorney Ashton O'Dwyer. "Patricia Konie had food, plenty of water, and a roof over her head. The police who illegally entered her home and imposed their will on a frail, middle-aged female should have been out apprehending armed, male looters instead."

Konie was greeting a reporter and photographer from a San Francisco TV station and a journalist from the London Times when police unexpectedly entered her home. When she refused to leave as ordered, they confiscated a firearm used for defense and according to Konie, "slammed" her to the ground, both displacing and fracturing her left shoulder.

After remaining in custody for several hours without charges being filed against her by authorities, she was flown alone to South Carolina where she remained for more than a month before returning to her native New Orleans.

A Federal lawsuit was filed claiming that authorities assaulted and knocked her to the ground when she refused to leave her New Orleans home on September 7th, 2005. Konie also alleges numerous civil rights violations including assault and battery by police in her suit against several Louisiana and California State Police officers who took her into custody. She also alleges authorities violated her Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

"Hurricane Katrina was horrible, but there is no excuse for what happened to this nice lady", said O'Dwyer. "Police caused her months of pain and suffering and she still faces months of physical therapy. This suit will hold the individuals responsible for their misdeeds."

Konie had her surgery early on Monday morning, December 12. She is still recovering in the hospital, and lives alone on a limited budget of Social Security benefits. She is devastated by what happened and has not had her seized property returned.

"Sadly, Patricia Konie is only one of many examples of police going too far in the wake of Hurricane Katrina," said O'Dwyer. "Already one court has ruled against their strong-arm tactics, and we look forward to our day in court."

http://www.usnewswire.com/

-0-

/? 2005 U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/

Murder stats broken down in various useful manners. Check it out at:

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html

I lived in Madison Wisconsin for several years, arriving as a left-leaning Libertarian and departing as a right leaning one. The ideological homogeneity demanded by the left there and then was the major reason for my migration: seemed like the left was only able to sing from the hymnal ever more shrilly while vigorous informed debate could be found on the right. This piece further explores that schism.


December 07, 2005, 8:32 a.m.
Debate Amongst Yourselves
Free advice for liberals.
Jonah Goldberg


Liberals have been suffering from conservative envy for several years now. Oh, they don't envy us our evil ways, our penchant for extreme cruelty or the fact that we smell like cabbage. They envy us our toys and success.

The liberal Center for American Progress was founded explicitly to be the Left's answer to the conservative Heritage Foundation. The lefty radio network, "Air America," was launched to copy the success of Rush Limbaugh & Co. Today, deep-pocketed liberals are scrambling to copy conservative foundations, even though liberal foundations have always had more money.

Most conservatives I know snicker at all this. It's not that talk radio, think tanks, and foundations haven't been essential to the rise of American conservatism in the last five decades. They have been (see my colleague John Miller's excellent new book, A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, for a window into that effort). But liberals are emphasizing hardware because they don't want to question the validity of their very outdated software.

Look, conservatives would love to switch places with liberals. We'd get the universities, Hollywood, the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and Pew Foundations, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the New York Times, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, CBS, including 60 Minutes and Dan Rather's thousand-fingers massage chair, and so forth. Liberals, meanwhile, would get the Washington Times and Fox News, along with a few conservative foundations. I guess National Review and The New Republic would switch offices, which is fine by me. It'd make my commute easier.

And that sort of makes the point: Not only does the Left have better stuff, but even if that weren't the case, the Left's problem isn't a lack of mechanisms to "get their message out." Megaphones matter, but not as much as what you say into them.

If liberals really want to emulate conservative successes, I have some advice for them: Get into some big, honking arguments ? not with conservatives, but with each other. The history of the conservative movement's successes has been the history of intellectual donnybrooks, between libertarians and traditionalists, hawks and isolationists, so-called neocons and so-called paleocons, less-filling versus tastes great. Liberals would be smart to copy that and stop worrying how to mimic our direct mail strategies.

Liberals have a tendency to mistake political tactics for political principles, and vice versa. Exhibit A is the Left's fascination with "unity." Unity is often useful in politics, but it's often a handicap if you haven't figured out what to be unified about. Just as the Socratic method leads to wisdom, big fights not only illuminate big ideas, but they force people to become invested in them. Unfortunately, liberals define diversity by skin color and sex, not by ideas, which makes it difficult to have really good arguments.

Of course there are arguments on the Left and there are individual liberals with deep-seated convictions and principles. But most of the arguments are about how to "build a movement" or how to win elections, not about what liberalism is. Even the "Get out of Iraq now!" demands from the base of the Democratic party aren't grounded in anything like a coherent foreign policy. Ten years ago liberals championed nation-building. Now they call it imperialism because George W. Bush is doing it.

A good illustration of the fundamental difference between Left and Right can be found in two books edited by Peter Berkowitz for the Hoover Institution, Varieties of Conservatism in America and Varieties of Progressivism in America. Each contains thoughtful essays by leading conservatives and liberals. But while the conservatives defend different ideological philosophical schools ? neoconservatism, traditionalism, etc. ? the liberals argue almost exclusively about which tactics Democrats should embrace to win the White House.

Bill Clinton was the only Democratic president elected to two terms since Franklin Roosevelt. One of the reasons for his success was that he was willing to pick fights with his own party. One can argue about the sincerity of some of those fights. But we remember the Sista Souljah moment for a reason.

Right now Washington is marveling at how the Democratic party has simultaneously made the Iraq war the central and defining political issue of the decade while at the same time having no clue what it is they want to do about it. Worse, it's looking increasingly like the Democrats' position on the war is based largely on the polls, not principles.

One of the most important events in the rise of conservatism was the 1978 Firing Line debate over U.S. control of the Panama Canal. William F. Buckley favored giving it up. The governor of California, Ronald Reagan, favored keeping it. Reagan's side lost the argument, in Congress at least, but conservatives once again demonstrated our willingness to duke it out on such issues. And Reagan's career hardly suffered. If liberals were smart, they'd do something similar. Have Joe Lieberman debate Nancy Pelosi, or John Murtha. Make liberals get past their passion and explore what they think. My guess is it would be good for liberalism in the long run ? and even better for America.

http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200512070832.asp

December 02, 2005, 8:15 a.m.
A Moral War
The project in Iraq can succeed, and leave its critics scrambling.
Victor Davis Hanson

Almost everything that is now written about Iraq rings not quite right: It was a ?blunder?; there should have been far more troops there; the country must be trisected; we must abide by a timetable and leave regardless of events on the ground; Iraq will soon devolve into either an Islamic republic or another dictatorship; the U.S. military is enervated and nearly ruined; and so on.

In fact, precisely because we have killed thousands of terrorists, trained an army, and ensured a political process, it is possible to do what was intended from the very beginning: lessen the footprint of American troops in the heart of the ancient caliphate.

Save for a few courageous Democrats, like Senator Joe Lieberman, who look at things empirically rather than ideologically, and some stalwart Republicans, most politicians and public intellectuals have long bailed on the enterprise.

This is now what comprises statesmanship: Some renounce their earlier support for the war. Others, less imaginative, in Clintonian (his and hers) fashion, take credit for backing the miraculous victory of spring 2003, but in hindsight, of course, blame the bloody peace on Bush. Or, better yet, they praise Congressman Murtha to the skies, but under no circumstances go on record urging the military to follow his advice.

How strange that journalists pontificate post facto about all the mistakes that they think have been made, nevertheless conceding that here we are on the verge of a third and final successful election. No mention, of course, is ever made about the current sorry state of journalistic ethics and incompetence (cf. Jayson Blair, Judy Miller, Michael Isikoff, Bob Woodward, Eason Jordan). A group of professionals, after all, who cannot even be professional in their own sphere, surely have no credibility in lecturing the U.S. military about what they think went wrong in Iraq.

Of course, the White House, as is true in all wars, has made mistakes, but only one critical lapse ? and it is not the Herculean effort to establish a consensual government at the nexus of the Middle East in less than three years after removing Saddam Hussein. The administration?s lapse, rather, has come in its failure to present the entire war effort in its proper moral context.

We took no oil ? the price in fact skyrocketed after we invaded Iraq. We did not do Israel?s bidding; in fact, it left Gaza after we went into Iraq and elections followed on the West Bank. We did not want perpetual hegemony ? in fact, we got out of Saudi Arabia, used the minimum amount of troops possible, and will leave Iraq anytime its consensual government so decrees. And we did not expropriate Arab resources, but, in fact, poured billions of dollars into Iraq to jumpstart its new consensual government in the greatest foreign aid infusion of the age.

In short, every day the American people should have been reminded of, and congratulated on, their country?s singular idealism, its tireless effort to reject the cynical realism of the past, and its near lone effort to make terrible sacrifices to offer the dispossessed Shia and Kurds something better than the exploitation and near genocide of the past ? and how all that alone will enhance the long-term security of the United States.

That goal was what the U.S. military ended up so brilliantly fighting for ? and what the American public rarely heard. The moral onus should have always been on the critics of the war. They should have been forced to explain why it was wrong to remove a fascist mass murderer, why it was wrong to stay rather than letting the country sink into Lebanon-like chaos, and why it was wrong not to abandon brave women, Kurds, and Shia who only wished for the chance of freedom.

Alas, that message we rarely heard until only recently, and the result has energized amoral leftists, who now pose as moralists by either misrepresenting the cause of the war, undermining the effort of soldiers in the field, or patronizing Iraqis as not yet civilized enough for their own consensual government.

We can draw down our troops not because of political pressures but because of events on the ground. First, the Iraqi military is improving ? not eroding or deserting. The canard of only ?one battle-ready brigade? could just as well apply to any of the Coalition forces. After all, what brigade in the world is the equal of the U.S. military ? or could go into the heart of Fallujah house-to-house? The French? The Russians? The Germans? In truth, the Iraqi military is proving good enough to hold ground and soon to take it alongside our own troops.

Despite past calls here to postpone elections, and threats of mass murder there for those who participated in them, they continue on schedule. And the third and last vote is the most important, since it will put a human face on the elected government ? and the onus on it to officially sanction U.S. help and monetary aid or refuse it.

Saddam?s trial will remind the world of his butchery. Despite all the ankle-biting by human-rights groups about proper jurisprudence, the Iraqis will try him and convict him much more quickly than the Europeans will do the same to Milosevic (not to mention the other killers still loose like Gen. Mladic and Mr. Karadzic), posing the question: What is the real morality ? trying a mass murderer and having him pay for his crimes, or engaging in legal niceties for years while the ghosts of his victims cry for justice?

More importantly, we can also calibrate our progress by examining the perceived self-interest of the various players, here and abroad.

The Sunnis ? no oil, a minority population, increasing disgust with Zarqawi, a shameful past under Saddam ? will participate in the December elections in large numbers. They now have no choice other than either to be perpetual renegades and terrorists inside their own country or to gain world respect by turning to democracy. The election train is leaving in December and this time they won?t be left at the station.

Zarqawi and the radical Islamicists are slowly being squeezed as only a war at their doorstep could accomplish. Critics of Iraq should ask if we were not fighting Zarqawi in Iraq, where exactly would we be fighting Islamic fascists ? or would the war against terror be declared over, won, lost, dormant, or ongoing, with the U.S. simply playing defense?

Instead, what Iraq did is ensure that al Qaeda?s Sunni support is being coopted by democracy. Jordan, the terrorists? old ace in the hole that could always put a cosmetic face on its stealthy support for radicals, has essentially turned on Zarqawi and with him al Qaeda. Syria is under virtual siege and its border sanctuary now a killing zone. Bin Laden can offer very little solace from his cave. And somehow Islamists have alienated the United States, Europe, Russia, China, Australia, Japan, and increasingly Middle East democracies like those in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Iraq, and reform movements in Lebanon and Jordan.

Decision day is coming when Zarqawi?s bombers will have to choose either to die, or, like a Nathan Bedford Forrest (?I?m a goin? home?), quit to join the reform-seeking majority. That progress was accomplished only by the war in Iraq, and without it we would be back to playing a waiting game for another 9/11, while an autocratic Middle East went on quietly helping terrorists without consequences, either afraid of Saddam or secretly enjoying his chauvinist defiance.

Kurds and Shiites support us for obvious reasons ? no other government on the planet would risk its sons and daughters to give them the right of one man/one vote. They may talk the necessary talk about infidels, but they know we will leave anytime they so vote. After the December election, expect them ? and perhaps the Sunnis as well ? quietly to ask us to stay to see things through.

Europe is quiet now. Madrid, London, Paris, and Amsterdam have taught Europeans that it is not George Bush but Islamic fascism that threatens their very existence. Worse still, they rightly fear they have lost the good will of the United States that so generously subsidized their defense ? an entitlement perhaps to be sneered at during the post-Cold War ?end of history,? but not in a new global war against Islamic terrorists keen to acquire deadly weapons.

Our military realizes that it can trump its brilliant victories in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein by birthing democracy in Iraq ? or risk losing that impressive reputation by having a new Lebanon blow up in its face. China, Japan, India, Russia, Korea, Iran, and other key countries are all watching Iraq ? ready to calibrate American deterrence by the efficacy of the U.S. military in the Sunni Triangle. Our armed forces have already accomplished what the British and the Soviets could never do in Afghanistan; what the Russians failed to accomplish in Chechnya; and what we came so close to finishing in Vietnam. They won?t falter now when they are so close to winning an almost impossibly difficult war, one that will be recognized by friends and enemies as beyond the capability of any other military in the world.

The Left now risks losing its self-proclaimed moral appeal. It had trashed the efforts in Iraq for months on end, demanded a withdrawal ? only recently to learn from polls that an unhappy public may also be unhappy with it for advocating fleeing while American soldiers are in harm?s way. Another successful election, polls showing Iraqis overwhelmingly wishing us to stay on, visits by elected Iraqi officials asking continued help, and a decreasing American footprint will gradually erode the appeal of the antiwar protests ? especially as triangulating public intellectuals and pundits begin to quiet down, fathoming that the United States may win after all.

The administration realizes that as long as it stays the course and our military remains confident we can win, we will ? despite defections in the Congress, venom in the press, and cyclical lows in the polls. In practical political terms, only the administration, not the Congress or the courts, can choose to cease our efforts in Iraq. Rightly or wrongly, the Bush administration will be judged on Iraq: If we lose, the president will be seen as a tragic LBJ-like figure who squandered his initial grassroots support in a foreign quagmire; if we win, he will be remembered, in spirit, as something akin to a Harry Truman, and, in deed, an FDR who won a critical war against impossible odds, and restored the security of the United States.

George Bush may well go down in history as a less-effective leader than his father or Bill Clinton; but unlike either, he may also have a real chance to be remembered in that select class of rare presidents whom history records as having saved this country at a time of national peril and in the face of unprecedented criticism. Bush?s domestic agenda hinges on Iraq: If he withdraws now, his proposals on taxes, social security, deficit reduction, education, and immigration are dead. If he sees the Iraq project through, these now-iffy initiatives will piggyback on the groundswell of popular thanks he will receive for reforming the Middle East.

Strangely, I doubt whether very many would agree with much of anything stated above ? at least for now. But if the administration can emphasize the moral nature of this war, and the military can continue its underappreciated, but mostly successful efforts to defeat the enemy and give the Iraqis a few more months of breathing space, who knows what the current opportunists and pessimists will say by summer.Will they say that they in fact were always sorta, kinda, really for removing Saddam and even staying on to see democracy work in Iraq?

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

    
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200512020815.asp

November 29, 2005, 8:32 a.m.
White (Phosphorous) Lies
Antiwar accusations aren?t as hot as critics think.

By Michael Fumento

Time again to try to cripple the U.S. military effort in Iraq. It's not enough that it sometimes seems like whenever we bomb a terrorist safe house we're accused of killing 40 civilians and no terrorists. (Why is it always 40?) Nor that we're told we must turn the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay into genteel facilities fit for Martha Stewart. Now the defeat-niks are screaming about our use of white phosphorus during the bloody battle for Fallujah last year.

Capable of being packed into a huge array of munitions, WP burns on contact with air and is highly useful for smoke-screening, smoke-marking, and as an anti-personnel weapon.

WP is hardly new, having been first used in the 19th century and subsequently in both world wars. Nor should it be news that it was used at Fallujah. An article in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery explicitly details the use of WP during the battle.

Yet it's being treated as a major new revelation because of an Italian documentary, now available on the Internet, titled Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre." It's as if the use of WP necessarily involves a massacre, or as if there haven't been awful massacres in recent years using nothing but machetes and clubs.

Further, there's no proof of any wrongdoing in the video itself. Rather it relies on "explanations" exclusively from the narrator and other anti-war zealots.

This includes the infamous Giuliana Sgrena, the reporter for the Italian Communist-party newspaper Il Manifesto, allegedly seized by courteous kidnappers. In turn for her release they conveniently demanded what she had also been demanding: Italy's withdrawal from the war. Her articles are so viciously anti-American they'd make Al Jazeera blush.

There are several accusations against our WP usage.

Some allege that it is outlawed by the Geneva Convention as a chemical weapon. Therefore our using it puts us in the same category as Saddam Hussein ? or so claims the hugely popular far-left blogsite Daily Kos. But according to the more authoritative GlobalSecurity.org, "White phosphorus is not banned by any treaty to which the United States is a signatory."

Is it a chemical? Sure! So is something else you may have heard of called "gunpowder." And those chemicals used in high explosives? Yup, they're chemicals too.

Another charge is that contact with WP can cause awful and sometimes fatal burns. But painless ways of killing and destroying such as Star Trek's beam weapon phasers have yet to be developed. On the other hand, the vipers we cleaned out of Fallujah were just days earlier sawing off civilian heads with dull knives. Sound like a pleasant way to die?
Fact is, the soldier's weapon of choice remains high explosives. WP's best uses aren't against personnel at all, but to the extent it is employed this way its most practical application is flushing the enemy out of foxholes and trenches so that they can either surrender or be killed.

It's also claimed that civilians were "targeted" with WP, and the Italian video does display dead civilians. But how does this show they were the intended victims, rather than accidental casualties? It's not like when terrorists detonate bombs in crowded marketplaces or at weddings, where the intent is pretty clear.

Regardless of the weapon, how can you possibly avoid noncombatant deaths when the enemy not only hides among civilians but hides as civilians ? in total violation of the Geneva Convention, for those of you keeping track?

Further, the dead civilians in the video are wearing clothing. Both the film's narrator and another of those defeat-nik "experts," former Marine Jeff Englehart, try to explain this away by saying WP can burn flesh while leaving clothes intact. But true weapons experts, such as GlobalSecurity.org Director John Pike, say there's no such black magic. "If it hits your clothes it will burn your clothes," he told reporters.

As daily news reports illustrate in brilliant red Technicolor, the greatest threat to Iraqi civilians are the terrorists. If we want to save civilians, our soldiers must be free to use the best legal equipment available to kill those terrorists and to continue liberating Iraq.

? Michael Fumento is a former paratrooper who was embedded with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force this year at Camp Fallujah. He's also a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/fumento200511290832.asp

November 18, 2005, 8:18 a.m.
War & Reconstruction
For Bush?s critics, even hindsight is cloudy.
Victor Davis Hanson

This is the mantra of the extreme Left: "Bush lied, thousands died." A softer version from politicians now often follows: "If I knew then what I know now, I would never have supported the war."

These sentiments are intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible for a variety of reasons beyond the obvious consideration that you do not hang out to dry some 150,000 brave Americans on the field of battle while you in-fight over whether they should have ever been sent there in the first place.

Consider the now exasperating (and tired) argument that almost anyone who looked at the intelligence data shared the same opinion about the threat of weapons of mass destruction ? former presidents, U.S. congressmen, foreign governments, Iraqi exiles, and numerous intelligence organizations.

The prewar speeches of aJay Rockefeller and Hillary Clinton sparked and sizzled with somber warnings about biological and chemical arsenals ? and, yes, nuclear threats growing on the horizon. Politicians voted for war at a time of post-9/11 furor and fear, when anthrax was thought to have been scattered in our major cities and the hysteria over its traces evacuated government buildings. In response, the Democrats beat their breasts to prove that they could out-macho the "smoke-em-out" and "dead-or-alive" president in laying out the case against Saddam Hussein, especially after the successful removal of the Taliban.

To argue recently, as Howard Dean has, that the president somehow had even more intelligence data or additional information beyond what was given to the Senate Intelligence Committee can make the opposite argument from what was intended- the dangers seemed even greater the more files one read attesting to Saddam's past history, clear intent, formidable financial resources, and fury at the United States. If the Dean notion is that the president had mysterious auxiliary information, then the case was probably even stronger for war, since no one has yet produced any stealth document that (a) warned there was no WMDs, and (b) was knowingly withheld from the Congress.

A bewildered visitor from Mars would tell Washingtonians something like: "For twelve years you occupied Saddam's airspace, since he refused to abide by the peace accords and you were afraid that he would activate his WMD arsenal again against the Kurds or his neighbors. Now that he is gone and for the first time you can confirm that his weapons program is finally defunct, you are mad about this new precedent that you have established: Given the gravity of WMD arsenals, the onus is now on suspect rogue nations to prove that they do not have weapons of mass destruction, rather than for civilization to establish beyond a responsible doubt that they do?"

Even more importantly, the U.S. Senate voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein for 22 reasons other than just his possession of dangerous weapons. We seem to have forgotten that entirely.

If the Bush administration erred in privileging the dangers of Iraqi WMDs, then the Congress in its wisdom used a far broader approach (as Sen. Robert Byrd complained at the time), and went well beyond George Bush in making a more far-reaching case for war ? genocide, violation of U.N. agreements, breaking of the 1991 armistice accords, attempts to kill a former U.S. president, and firing on American aerial patrols. It was the U.S. Senate ? a majority of Democrats included ? not Paul Wolfowitz, that legislated a war to reform and restore the wider Middle East: "...whereas it is in the national security of the United States to restore international peace and security to the Persian Gulf region".

So read the senators' October 2002 resolution. It is a model of sobriety and judiciousness in authorizing a war. There are facts cited such as the violation of agreements; moral considerations such as genocide; real worries about al Qaeda's ties to Saddam (e.g., "...whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq"); fears of terrorism (" ...whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of American citizens."

No doubt many Democrats in the Senate who voted to authorize the war took their cue from Bill Clinton's own November 1998 indictment of bin Laden (still, how does one indict an enemy that has declared war on you?) that explicitly stressed the connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein: "In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

Thus the honest and moral argument for the now contrite would be something like: "I know now that Saddam did not try to kill a former president, did not commit genocide, did not attack four of his neighbors, did not harbor anti-American terrorists, did not ignore U.N. and 1991 peace accords, and did not attack Americans enforcing U.N.-mandated no-fly zones ? and so I regret my vote."

Or if the former supporters of the war had character, they would be more honest still: "Yes, Saddam was guilty of those other 22 writs, but none of them justified the war that I voted for, and I should not have included them in the resolution."

Or they could be more truthful still: "I didn't really want a war, and only threw in the bit about al Qaeda and Saddam. So I just voted for the authorization in case some crisis emerged and the President had to act swiftly."

I doubt any will ever say, "I voted to cover myself: If the war proved swift and relatively low-cost like Bosnia or Afghanistan, I was on record for it; if it got bad like Mogadishu or Lebanon, then I wasn't the commander-in-chief who conducted it."

Given such an incriminating record, what then is really at the heart of the current strange congressional hysteria?

Simple ? the tragic loss of nearly 2,100 Americans in Iraq.

The "my perfect war, your messy postbellum reconstruction" crowd is now huge and unapologetic. It encompasses not just leftists who once jumped on the war bandwagon in fears that Democrats would be tarred as weak on national security (a legitimate worry), but also many saber-rattling conservatives and Republicans ? including those (the most shameful of all) who had in earlier times both sent letters to President Clinton and Bush demanding the removal of Saddam and now damn their commander-in-chief for taking them at their own word.

In the triumphalism after seeing Milosevic go down without a single American death, the Taliban implode at very little cost, and Saddam removed from power with little more than 100 fatalities, there was the assumption that the United States could simply nod and dictators would quail and democracy would follow. Had we lost 100 in birthing democracy and not 2,000, or seen purple fingers only and not IEDs on Dan Rather's nightly broadcasts, today's critics would be arguing over who first thought up the idea of removing Saddam and implementing democratic changes.

So without our 2,100 losses, nearly all the present critics would be either silent or grandstanding their support ? in the manner that three quarters of the American population who polled that they were in favor of the war once they saw the statue of Saddam fall.

In short, there is no issue of WMD other than finding out why our intelligence people who had once missed it in the First Gulf War, then hyped it in the next-or what actually happened to all the unaccounted for vials and stockpiles that the U.N. inspectors swore were once inside Iraq.

So the real crux is a real legitimate debate over whether our ongoing costs-billions spent, thousands wounded, nearly 2,100 American soldiers lost-will be worth the results achieved. Post facto, no death seems "worth it". The premature end of life is tangible and horrendous in a way that the object of such soldiers' sacrifices-a reformed Middle East, a safer world, enhanced American safety, and freedom for 26 million-seems remote and abstract.

Nevertheless, that is what our soldiers died for: a world in which Middle East dictators no longer murder their own, ruin their won societies, and then cynically use terrorism to whip up the Arab street and deflect their own self-induced miseries onto the United States. This is the calculus that led to 9/11, and the reason why Saddam gave sanctuary to 1980s terrorists, the killer Yasin who failed in his first attempt to take down the twin towers, and the likes of Zarqawi.

While the U.S. military conducts a brilliant campaign to implement democratic reform that is on the eve of ending with an Iraqi parliament, while there has been no repeat of promised 9/11 attacks here at home, and while the entire dictatorial Middle East from Lebanon and Syria to Egypt and Libya is in crisis ? baffled, furious, or impressed by a now idealistic United States pushing for something different and far better ? our intellectual and political elite harp on "WMD, WMD, WMD..."

Sadder still, they stay transfixed to this refrain either because polls show that it is good politics or it allows them a viable exit from an apparently now unpopular war.

But no, not so fast.

History has other lessons as well ? as we know from the similar public depression during successful wars after Washington's sad winter at Valley Forge, Lincoln's summer of 1864, or the 1942 gloom that followed Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Philippines, Singapore, and Wake Island. When this is all over, and there is a legitimate government in the Middle East that represents the aspirations of a free people, the stunning achievement of our soldiers will be at last recognized, the idealism of the United States will be appreciated, our critics here and abroad will go mute ? and one of the 23 writs for a necessary war of liberation will largely be forgotten.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
   
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200511180818.asp

Wow, an amazing piece.

November 11, 2005, 8:22 a.m.
I Never Knew His Name
The true face of Muslim martyrdom.

By Chaplain Carlos C. Huerta

Mosul, Iraq ? It is October 11 as I write this, the day before Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement is supposed to be a day of fast, reflection, and prayer for the Jews: a time when I reflect on my own actions and intentions from the previous year. But the images I carry into my fast are sad ones, of someone else?s child, a Muslim child. There is blood spattered on my uniform despite the fact that I haven?t been hit or wounded. And yet it is B-positive blood, my own blood, mixed with the blood of a nine-year old Iraqi boy who was observing his fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Today there was a terrorist attack at a place most people have never heard of. Unless you?re a soldier stationed here, the name Tal Afar would probably be insignificant to you. But Tal Afar means a lot to me.

Today some terrorists decided to kill some Iraqi citizens ? good Muslims ? in order to discourage them from voting on Saturday on the new constitution. These terrorists called themselves Muslims and claimed that what they did was for Allah. But their connection to Islam is about as true and strong as Timothy McVeigh?s connection to Christianity. What they did is so contrary to the holy teachings of the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) that to say their name in the same breath as Islam is considered sacrilege.

I was at the Combat Support Hospital ? known as CASH ? when the call came: Terrorists had hit, no American casualties, but 22 Iraqis wounded, five of whom were children under the age of twelve. I stood on the tarmac watching as the MEDEVAC choppers came in one at a time to deliver the wounded. Many of the wounded had no legs, or deep chest, head, and abdominal wounds. I noticed the children, two in particular who had severe head trauma. I followed them into the ER and then watched our physicians struggle in the OR to stabilize them. After the physicians did what they could, the children were taken to the ICU. I helped carry their stretchers into the ICU and stood by to see if I could help. I had a serious conversation with G-d and pleaded with him to take care of these kids ? kids who should be playing soccer, or doing their homework for school the next day, or helping their parents get ready for supper. Both of these children had skulls so badly shattered that their heads needed to be bandaged to keep their brains in. I watched as the nurses and medics gave them pint after pint of blood and as their head bandages turned from white to red. I held the youngest one?s hands, reassuring him to the extent I could.

As they were giving the youngest his third pint of blood, I heard the nurse say that they were running low on O Positive, the universal donor, and that due to the tremendous internal bleeding, this child would need more. I asked what blood type he was, and it turned out both children were B Positive, my own blood type. I went to the head nurse and asked if I could donate blood for the youngest child and they quickly hooked me up and took a pint. After giving it, I went back to see him; he already my blood hooked up to him and surging in his veins.

I held his tiny hand and watched as the monitors told the story: His heart was in trouble owing to the brain trauma. I watched as he fought for his life, fighting to breathe. But I knew he was dying and there was nothing I could do. This innocent Muslim child, who had been observing Ramadan the way a child does, was now dying despite the fact that my blood was moving though his veins, despite the fact that I pleaded with G-d to do what I thought was right, to keep him alive. But G-d had other plans.

I didn?t want this boy to die hearing the strange sounds of a hospital and a foreign language. I wanted him to be comforted by the last sounds he heard, by words that were close to his heart, words that spoke of home and faith. I started to recite the Holy Koran to him.

My close friend, a fellow clergyman, Imam Burgos, the imam for the United States Military Academy, had helped me learn Surahs of the Holy Koran, and I chanted these out to the boy in Arabic. As I chanted, I heard the monitor go flat-line. I held his little hand, as my blood moved through his tiny pure heart that could no longer bear the evil of this world.

I held his hand and cried ? cried for a boy whose name I didn?t know, for an innocent Muslim child who gave his life for his G-d, Allah, for his country. He was the true face of Muslim martyrdom. With tears streaming down my face, I looked down and noticed blood on my uniform. His blood, my blood, our blood had dripped from his open head wound onto my uniform.

An hour or so later I walked away into the waiting area as they prepared his body for transport. There I met Chaplain Mark Greschel, a Catholic priest. He looked at me and knew that I was in trouble. He sat with me, somehow knowing that the pain we felt was best not mixed with words. He quietly put his arms around me, and we both sat there in silence. I thought to myself, isn?t this the kind of world we are fighting for ? a world where an Imam teaches a Rabbi words from the Holy Koran to comfort a young Muslim boy, and that rabbi himself is comforted by a Christian, a Catholic priest.

On this day before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Fast Day, the Day of Atonement, I ask myself: What is Ramadan all about? Is it about killing, or is it about seeking out G-d through fasting and prayer? For those of us who choose not to carry hatred and prejudice in our hearts, the answer is simple. For the holy Islamic community, Ramadan is a time of introspection, of hope, of belief that if we all work together, we can truly build a better world for all our children, even those whose names we don?t know. There is so much that we can learn about faith and G-d through other religions; there is so much that our Muslim brothers and sisters can teach us about our Creator, about personal sacrifice and selfless service. But if we consider their faith only with mistrust, hatred, and indifference, then this nine-year-old angel with his faith in G-d means nothing. Then we have diminished our own faith in G-d. If we objectify the Muslim people as well as those who don?t share our exact views on the nature of G-d, if we see them as less than our brothers and sisters, then we as a human race are lost.

There are many Americans who ask why we?re here. Why are we sacrificing so many American lives and placing so many in harm?s way? What is the purpose of it all? Well, I don?t really know the big picture. But from my small sector of the battlefield, the reason I am here is to give ?the least of these,? my children over here, a shot at ?life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? ? just like my other children living in America.

I didn?t give birth to him, but on this fast day in Ramadan, on this day before Yom Kippur, I lost a son, someone who had my blood coursing through his body. And for him, I choose not to hate, I choose to follow the path that the great Sheik Ibn Arabi followed when he said, ?Love is my Faith and my religion and wherever its caravans take me, that is where I shall follow, for love is my religion and faith.? Let us join hands with our Muslim brothers and sisters and let this be the message of Ramadan that we carry in our hearts and take with us. G-d has a new Muslim angel in Paradise. I hope to tell you his name one day when I meet him again.

? Chaplain Carlos C. Huerta is Jewish Community chaplain in Mosul, Iraq.

    
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/huerta200511110822.asp

Reconsidering the Bush Doctrine
By Arnold Kling    Published     11/08/2005


Recently, Commentary magazine put together a fascinating symposium on the Bush Doctrine, which includes the use of pre-emptive attacks and the strategy of bringing democracy to the Middle East. I strongly recommend reading the symposium, as well as other recent thoughtful pieces by Francis Fukuyama, Theodore Dalrymple, and others cited in the blogs Winds of Change and Belmont Club.
Commentary's editors kicked off the symposium with a number questions about the Bush Doctrine. Participants were asked to comment on the doctrine and its implementation to date.
 
I am skeptical of the Bush doctrine. However, I want to be clear from the outset that my purpose is not to endorse the main alternative, which is the Mush Doctrine. To proponents of the Mush Doctrine, phrases like
 
-- international community
-- multilateral
-- moral leadership
-- hearts and minds
-- treating root causes
 
are phrases that carry positive connotations. Such phrases make me want to spit. For more on the Mush Doctrine, see my essay on George Lakoff, the Berkeley linguistics professor influential in Democratic Party intellectual circles.
 
Speaking of linguistics, the conflict in which we are engaged has suffered from vagueness of definition. President Bush first described it as the "global war on terror." Since then, many people have argued that this formulation fails to face up to the role of Islam. For example, Newt Gingrich suggests that we call this the "Long War" against the "irreconcilable wing of Islam." That terminology will do. However, terrorism is important, because attacks on civilians are the modus operandi of Islam's irreconcilable wing.
 
The Three Theaters
 
In a complex global war, it can be useful to view the conflict as a combination of several theaters of operation. I think of this war as having three theaters: cultural, technological, and conventional military. Each theater provides a potential for victory or defeat.
 
The cultural theater is the contest between American values and the ideology of what Gingrich calls the irreconcilable wing of Islam. We could win in the cultural theater if Muslim moderates were to assert themselves strongly, so that the radical wing shrinks and loses viability. On the other hand, our society has its own internal divisions and weaknesses. We can lose in the cultural theater if our fighting spirit gives way to feckless appeasement. Another possibility would be for the majority of the world's Muslims to become radicalized, while the Western democracies coalesce in self-defense. That would set the stage for spectacular bloodshed.
 
The technological theater is one where each side has the potential to alter the balance of power in a dramatic way. We would win in the technological theater if we were to establish Surveillance Supremacy, meaning the ability to track with confidence the movement and threat potential of terrorists. We would lose in the technological theater if terrorists are able to deploy weapons of mass destruction on American soil.
 
The conventional military theater is the set of places where Americans and others in the "coalition of the willing" are fighting Islamic militants. In addition, Victor Davis Hanson identifies four countries -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Syria -- that are potentially in the conventional military theater, because their governments have an attitude toward terrorists that is ambivalent, to say the least. We can win in the conventional military theater if we kill a large proportion of terrorists and deny them access to funding, supplies, and training. We can lose in the conventional military theater if terrorists are able to carry out major operations routinely without effective disruption.
 
In the cultural theater, we are trying to change the attitudes and behaviors of Muslims around the world. The Bush Doctrine focuses on using democracy as the lever to achieve such change. Supporters of the Mush Doctrine believe that America can, by playing more nicely in the international schoolyard, achieve victory in the cultural theater.
 
My question about strategies focused on the cultural theater is this: Even assuming that we choose the best strategies and they work as well as one could possibly hope, when is the soonest that we could expect victory? 2040? 2050?
 
On the other hand, my guess is that within ten or fifteen years of today, weapons of mass destruction will be easier for terrorists to access. (The technology for surveillance also is advancing rapidly.) Given the increased risks of proliferation, unless we achieve surveillance supremacy or defeat the terrorists conventionally, we will have lost the war technologically long before the wave of radical Islam recedes. From this assessment, it follows that:
 
The war is likely to be decided in the technological theater.
 
Until the decision in the technological theater is reached, I think that our goal in the conventional military theater should be to apply as much pressure as possible. We should try to hold the line in the cultural theater, but it is futile to rely on a decision there.
 
Revisiting Iraq
 
We made a number of mistakes prior to the war in Iraq. One mistake was attempting to utilize the institutional forum of the United Nations.
 
We have many helpful allies. We ought to consult with them and involve them. However, our message to people in other countries should be that they can influence our policy constructively, not through obstruction and betrayal. Going to the UN undermines our standing with our friends, because it reduces their influence. Instead, it increases the influence of countries that are willing to vote against our interests.
 
Another problem with the UN, and with international elites in general, is their tendency to substitute empty gestures for real action. Economic sanctions are empty gestures, and they should be dispensed with. In the case of Iraq, they were worse than empty gestures -- they led to the "oil-for-food" program, which strengthened Saddam's regime both domestically and internationally.
 
What about the invasion itself? At various times, the invasion of Iraq has been alleged to offer benefits in all three theaters of the war against the irreconcilable wing of Islam. In the technology theater, it was supposed to address the threat of weapons of mass destruction. In the conventional military theater, there was a period when people spoke of a "flypaper" strategy, in which we would use Iraq as a killing field for terrorists. In the cultural theater, it was supposed to showcase the plan for democracy in the Middle East.
 
Concerning weapons of mass destruction, we made a big mistake by essentially promising to find WMD's. It would have been far better to go in saying the opposite -- that we did not necessarily expect to find WMD's, but we were going to war over the principle of unimpeded inspections. That is, in today's world, our alliance must be able to send teams of weapons inspectors anywhere that a potential WMD threat exists. Refusal to accept inspectors ought to be a legitimate grounds for war. Certainly, that is the message that one would have wanted to send to Iran and North Korea. It was the principle embodied in the UN resolution leading up to the war, a fact which the world's anti-American elites have conveniently chosen to forget.
 
The net result of transforming the WMD issue from a question of unimpeded inspections into a question about our intelligence estimates is that we are now more timid about enforcing an inspections regime going forward. By the same token, rogue nations are less timid about flouting the principle of nonproliferation. Overall, then, this has to be regarded as a setback in the technological theater.
 
Another rationale for the war is in the cultural theater, where we hope to gain by changing Iraq from a dictatorship to a democracy. In my view, the weakest pillar in the Bush Doctrine is the plan for democracy. As Fukuyama and others point out, it is difficult to execute. Moreover, as noted above, I believe that the conflict with the irreconcilable wing of Islam is likely to be decided, for better or worse, in the technology theater.
 
In post-war Iraq, the Bush Doctrine is bound to over-promise and under-deliver. Certainly, some ethnic group or sub-group is going to be justifiably bitter about the way that democracy plays out over the next several years. We should not have put ourselves in the position of taking responsibility for producing a successful democracy where everyone lives happily ever after.
 
If the Iraq war provided any benefits, those would have to be in the conventional military theater. Here, I have more questions than answers.
 
What alternative uses would have been made of the American troops?
 
Perhaps the American forces now occupied in Iraq would instead have been deployed to one of the other rogue nations, such as Pakistan or Iran. If that is the case, then one might argue that they were wasted in Iraq. I find it implausible that our troops would have been used in other countries, but this assumption is implicit in much of the scornful rhetoric used by some war critics.
 
What would the jihadists who came from other countries to fight in Iraq have done otherwise?
 
Another implicit assumption made by war critics is that the foreigners became jihadists spontaneously in response to our invasion. The extreme alternative hypothesis is that the Iraq invasion was a "flypaper strategy" that attracted existing militants from elsewhere. My guess is that the truth includes some of both. My guess is that there are somewhat fewer trained militants in Saudi Arabia and Europe today, because they were killed by our troops in Iraq.
 
Did the invasion help "tip" Saudi Arabia in the direction of cracking down on the irreconcilable wing of Islam?
 
George Friedman, in America's Secret War, argues that the Iraq war may have helped in this regard. In his view, the Saudis needed to see that America was willing and able to fight in the Middle East before they would take action against Al Qaeda.
 
Did the invasion help "tip" Iran in the opposite direction -- further radicalizing and emboldening that regime?
 
Friedman says that invasion of Iraq probably did have this adverse effect. If so, then this has to be counted as a point against the invasion policy.
 
Did removing Saddam reduce the number of countries that support terrorists?
 
Supporters of the war say that under Saddam, Iraq was involved in aiding terrorism. They also point to a change in Libya's policy. If Victor Davis Hanson is correct that we now have four countries to worry about, he might argue that prior to the invasion there were six. Other analysts would disagree.
 
Going Forward
 
Going forward, my recommendations for the Bush Doctrine would be to try to rejuvenate the pre-emption doctrine while lowering expectations for democratic transformation. In particular, I would recommend:
 
1. Build on the concept of a "coalition of the willing" by creating a formal alliance against the irreconcilable wing of Islam. Members of the alliance will be consulted on strategy and will enjoy the prestige that comes with active participation in the long war. If some countries prefer tacit support or neutrality to membership in the alliance, then so be it. A new war calls for a new alliance, which is not necessarily the same as the alliance that was left over from the Cold War.
 
2. We need a new institutional mechanism for determining when pre-emption is justified. The ex post effort to delegitimize the invasion of Iraq is terribly corrosive. At this point, it does not matter whether the problem is that Bush lied or that Democrats are airbrushing history. Either way, we are signaling to the rest of the world that we might never again muster the political will to engage in pre-emptive military action.
 
In the future, there may be a compelling need to use force against another country. If so, then we need a process that allows us to do so. I am thinking of some sort of independent, bipartisan intelligence review commission, whose job is to evaluate rogue nations on an ongoing basis and to advise Congress and the President when to go to war. There may even be a role on this commission for other countries in our alliance.
 
3. Finally, we need powerful internal audits of our key agencies, both for effectiveness and for conformity to Constitutional protections of individual rights. For example, Gingrich writes,
 
"The office of the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] could have an advisory board, functioning as a corporate board of directors, which would meet at least monthly to represent the President, the Congress and the American people, provide a review function and sound and practical guidance. These directors could include individuals with a national reputation as successful managers in government or the private sector. They might include a former mayor or state governor, a corporate CEO, or someone who has effectively run a governmental program in an area outside of intelligence."
 
I have thought along similar lines. A few months ago, I wrote, "What needs to be watched most closely? Our airports? Our rail systems? Our government buildings? Our borders? Radical Muslims? I think that the top security priority should be to set up a system to monitor the Department of Homeland Security. I am not kidding."
 
Overall, my sense is that we have reached a point where the Bush Doctrine no longer serves as a sufficient basis for addressing the long war against the irreconcilable wing of Islam. The three institutional changes listed above could bolster our ability to conduct the war in the future.

http://www.techcentralstation.com/110805B.html

Dang, can this guy ever seperate the wheat from the chaff.


November 04, 2005, 8:40 a.m.
The Real Global Virus
The plague of Islamism keeps on spreading
Victor Davis Hanson


Either the jihadists really are crazy or they apparently think that they have a shot at destabilizing, or at least winning concessions from, the United States, Europe, India, and Russia all at once.

Apart from the continual attacks on civilians by terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the West Bank, there have now been recent horrific assaults in New Dehli (blowing up civilians in a busy shopping season on the eve of a Hindu festival), Russia (attacking police and security facilities), London (suicide murdering of civilians on the subway), and Indonesia (more bombing, and the beheading of Christian schoolgirls). The loci of recent atrocities could be widely expanded (e.g., Malaysia, North Africa, Turkey, Spain) ? and, of course, do not forget the several terrorist plots that have been broken up in Europe and the United States.

The commonalities? There are at least three.

First, despite the various professed grievances (e.g., India should get out of Kashmir; Russia should get out of Chechnya; England should get out of Iraq; Christians should get out of Indonesia; or Westerners should get out of Bali), the perpetrators were all self-proclaimed Islamic radicals. Westerners who embrace moral equivalence still like to talk of abortion bombings and Timothy McVeigh, but those are isolated and distant memories. No, the old generalization since 9/11 remains valid: The majority of Muslims are not global terrorists, but almost all such terrorists, and the majority of their sympathizers, are Muslims.

Second, the jihadists characteristically feel that dialogue or negotiations are beneath them. So like true fascists, they don?t talk; they kill. Their opponents ? whether Christians, Hindus, Jews, or Westerners in general ? are, as infidels, de facto guilty for what they are rather than what they supposedly do. Talking to a Dr. Zawahiri is like talking to Hitler: You can?t ? and it?s suicidal to try.

Third, there is an emboldened sense that the jihadists can get away with their crimes based on three perceptions:

(1) Squabbling and politically correct Westerners are decadent and outnumber the U.S. Marines, and ascendant Islamicism resonates among millions of Muslims who feel sorely how far they have fallen behind in the new globalized world community ? and how terrorism and blackmail, especially if energized by nuclear weapons or biological assets, might leapfrog them into a new caliphate.

(2) Sympathetic Muslim-dominated governments like Malaysia or Indonesia will not really make a comprehensive effort to eradicate radical Islamicist breeding grounds of terror, but will perhaps instead serve as ministries of propaganda for shock troops in the field.

(3) Autocratic states such as Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran share outright similar political objectives and will offer either stealthy sanctuary or financial support to terrorists, confident that either denial, oil, or nuclear bombs give them security .

Meanwhile, Westerners far too rarely publicly denounce radical Islam for its sick, anti-Semitic, anti-female, anti-American, and anti-modernist rhetoric. Just imagine the liberal response if across the globe Christians had beheaded schoolgirls, taken over schoolhouses to kill students, and shot school teachers as we have witnessed radical Muslims doing these past few months.

Instead, Western parlor elites are still arguing over whether there were al Qaedists in Iraq before the removal of Saddam Hussein, whether the suspicion of WMDs was the real reason for war against the Baathists, whether Muslim minorities should be pressured to assimilate into European democratic culture, and whether constitutional governments risk becoming intolerant in their new efforts to infiltrate and disrupt radical Muslim groups in Europe and the United States. Some of this acrimony is understandable, but such in-fighting is still secondary to defeating enemies who have pledged to destroy Western liberal society. At some point this Western cannibalism becomes not so much counterproductive as serving the purposes of those who wish America to call off its struggle against radical Islam.

Most Americans think that our present conflict is not comparable with World War II, in either its nature or magnitude. Perhaps ? but they should at least recall the eerie resemblance of our dilemma to the spread of global fascism in the late 1930s.

At first few saw any real connection between the ruthless annexation of Manchuria by Japanese militarists, or Mussolini?s brutal invasion of Ethiopia, or the systematic aggrandizement of Eastern-European territory by Hitler. China was a long way from Abyssinia, itself far from Poland. How could a white-supremacist Nazi have anything in common with a racially-chauvinist Japanese or an Italian fascist proclaiming himself the new imperial Roman?

In response, the League of Nations dithered and imploded (sound familiar?). Rightist American isolationists (they?re back) assured us that fascism abroad was none of our business or that there were conspiracies afoot by Jews to have us do their dirty work. Leftists were only galvanized when Hitler finally turned on Stalin (perhaps we have to wait for Osama to attack Venezuela or Cuba to get the Left involved). Abroad even members of the British royal family were openly sympathetic to German grievances (cf. Prince Charles?s silence about Iran?s promise to wipe out Israel, but his puerile Edward VIII-like lectures to Americans about a misunderstood Islam). French appeasement was such that even the most humiliating concession was deemed preferable to the horrors of World War I (no comment needed).

We can, of course, learn from this. It?s past time that we quit worrying whether a killer who blows himself up on the West Bank, or a terrorist who shouts the accustomed jihadist gibberish as he crashes a jumbo jet into the World Trade Center, or a driver who rams his explosives-laden car into an Iraqi polling station, or a Chechnyan rebel who blows the heads off schoolchildren, is in daily e-mail contact with Osama bin Laden. Our present lax attitude toward jihadism is akin to deeming local outbreaks of avian flu as regional maladies without much connection to a new strain of a deadly ? and global ? virus.

Instead, the world?if it is to save its present liberal system of free trade, safe travel, easy and unfettered communications, and growing commitment to constitutional government?must begin seeing radical Islamism as a universal pathology rather than reactions to regional grievances, if it is ever to destroy it materially and refute it ideologically.

Yet the antidote for radical Islam, aside from the promotion of democratization and open economies, is simple. It must be militarily defeated when it emerges to wage organized violence, as in the cases of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Zarqawi?s terrorists in Iraq, and the various killer cliques in Palestine.

Second, any who tolerate radical Islam should be ostracized. Muslims living in the West must be condemned when they assert that the Jews caused 9/11, or that suicide bombing is a legitimate response to Israel, or that Islamic immigrants? own unique culture gives them a pass from accustomed assimilation, or that racial and religious affinity should allow tolerance for the hatred that spews forth from madrassas and mosques ? before the patience of Western liberalism is exhausted and ?the rules of the game? in Tony Blair?s words ?change? quite radically and we begin to see mass invitations to leave.

Third, nations that intrigue with jihadists must be identified as the enemies of civilization. We often forget that there are now left only four major nation-states in the world that either by intent or indifference allow radical Islamists to find sanctuary.

If Pakistan were seriously to disavow terrorism and not see it as an asset in its rivalry with India and as a means to vent anti-Western angst, then Osama bin Laden, Dr. Zawahiri, and their lieutenants would be hunted down tomorrow.

If the petrolopolis of Saudi Arabia would cease its financial support of Wahhabi radicals, most terrorists could scarcely travel or organize operations.

If there were sane governments in Syria and Iran, then there would be little refuge left for al Qaeda, and the money and shelter that now protects the beleaguered and motley collection of ex-Saddamites, Hezbollah, and al Qaedists would cease.

So in large part four nations stand in the way of eradicating much of the global spread of jihadism ? and it is no accident that either oil or nuclear weapons have won a global free pass for three of them. And it is no accident that we don?t have a means to wean ourselves off Middle East oil or as yet stop Iran from becoming the second Islamic nuclear nation.

But just as importantly, our leaders must explain far more cogently and in some detail ? rather than merely assert ? to the Western public the nature of the threat we face, and how our strategy will prevail.

In contrast, when the American public is still bickering over WMDs rather than relieved that the culprit for the first World Trade Center bombing can no longer find official welcome in Baghdad; or when our pundits seem more worried about Halliburton than the changes in nuclear attitudes in Libya and Pakistan; or when the media mostly ignores a greater percentage of voters turning out for a free national election in the heart of the ancient caliphate than during most election years in the United States ? something has gone terribly, tragically wrong here at home.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

    
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200511040840.asp

November 03, 2005, 7:59 a.m.
Myth Busting
Getting at truths in the war on terror.

Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Everything you know about the war on terror is false? Well, not quite. But Rich Miniter has homed in on 22 myths, which comprises his new book, Disinformation : 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror. He recently talked about some of them with National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Osama isn't on dialysis? How the heck would you know? Seen him lately? Care to draw a map to the cave?

Richard Miniter: I tracked down nearly everyone who met bin Laden in the past 20 years. Every one that I was able to speak to said that bin Laden has no kidney troubles. My investigation took me to Egypt, Sudan, and put me in touch with leading journalists and officials in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

In Khartoum, I interviewed a man who lived with bin Laden for six years in both Sudan and Afghanistan. He emphatically said bin Laden had no health problems of any kind. He thought the dialysis story was propaganda put out by the CIA to depress the spirits of Muslims.

Bin Laden's personal physician, Dr. Amer Aziz, was arrested in Pakistan on October 21, 2002, and interrogated extensively by Pakistani intelligence officials as well as by CIA and FBI officials. When he was released in November 2002, he wasn't shy about talking to reporters. The doctor said that he had given bin Laden a "complete physical." "His kidneys were fine. If you're on dialysis, you have a special look. I didn't see any of that . . . I did not see any evidence of kidney disease . . . I didn't see any evidence of dialysis. . . .When I see these reports I laugh. I did not see any evidence."

Indeed the first reporter to write that bin Laden was on dialysis was Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, who said his sole source for that nugget was Pakistani intelligence. They provided him with no evidence. Even Mir seems to doubt the story now.

In chapter three of Disinformation, I give the surprising reason that Pakistan wanted to spread rumors about bin Laden's health in 1998.

Lopez: And the CIA isn't to blame for him?

Miniter: I guess '80s music has made a comeback, but memories of 1980s history are fading fast. Yes, the CIA funded Afghans fighting for their country against the Soviets, but virtually all of that CIA money went through the ISI, Pakistan's feared intelligence service. The money was earmarked for seven different factions of the resistance ? all of them Afghan. Meanwhile, the Saudis funded a separate and parallel program for Muslim radicals drawn from across the Muslim world. Bottom line: Bin Laden was funded by the Saudis, not by us. I interviewed all three of the CIA station chiefs responsible for managing the Afghan war. All denied that any CIA money went to any Arabs, let alone bin Laden. I also pored over every bin Laden interview conducted in any language from the 1980s to today. In every single instance bin Laden is asked about CIA money, he denies it.

Maybe bin Laden did not get the Talking Points Memo or the e-mail from the DailyKos crowd, and doesn't know he's bucking the antiwar party line.

Lopez: Everyone knows the Mossad had a hand in 9/11. And now you report that the first 9/11 hero was an Israeli?!

Miniter: Yes, Daniel Lewin died a hero. He actually slugged it out with Mohammed Atta and was dead before his plane hit the tower. It's an incredible story really. In a better world, Hollywood would be lionizing this guy. But he'll have to settle for a chapter in my book. He was a champion bodybuilder, an Israeli commando who went to MIT and invented software to improve the way the Internet works. Briefly he was a billionaire and I think, once you read his incredible story, you'll agree that he should live in our memory as a hero.

Lopez: Still, aren't you just a little bit paranoid to blame myths on anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism?

Miniter: C.S. Lewis once said that the greatest advantage that the devil has is the belief that he doesn't exist. We need to realize that anti-Semitism, which has been declining for decades on these shores, is making a comeback on campuses, websites, and even in Upper West Side dinner chatter. As these views become acceptable ? as they already have in Europe ? they threaten to divide America against itself. Much of the disinformation spread by Arab state-run media is basically an appeal to anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment. We have to be honest about the threat we face. Or as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace said the other day, in this war, ideas "are as important as bullets." That means we have to knock down even the nutty ideas of our enemies.

Lopez: Iraq isn't Vietnam? But 2,000 of our military men and women have died.

Miniter: There are so many differences between the Vietnam War and the Iraq war that I had to write a 10,000-word chapter just to present all of the evidence. Basically, Iraq is Vietnam in reverse. Vietnam began with a small but growing insurgency and ended with tanks and division-strength infantry assaults on our forces. In Iraq, we destroyed the tanks and vanquished the army in a few weeks. The insurgency in Iraq is estimated today at 20,000 men. In 1966, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars had combined troop strength of 700,000. By 1973, they had 1 million men under arms. North Vietnam had two superpowers supplying cutting-edge weapons; the most the insurgents in Iraq can hope for is car-bomb expertise from Iran and Syria. Ho Chi Minh was a compelling leader whose propaganda promised a better life for peasants. Al-Zarqawi is a Jordanian street thug who gets no respect in Iraq and offers no vision of a better life. I could go on and on about all of the important differences. Once you read this chapter, you will be able to shoot down liberals at cocktail parties for the next 20 years.

As for the 2,000, why does the press treat brave men and women as mere statistics? Instead of merely telling us that they died, don't we owe it to these fallen soldiers to say how they died? Many of them died heroically, saving the lives of others.

Lopez: Speaking of deaths . . . we haven't killed 100,000 innocent Iraqis?

Miniter: When I investigated the 100,000 dead-civilians claim, I was surprised at how quickly it fell apart. The 100,000 figure is based on a single study in a British medical journal published just days before the 2004 elections. The authors were open about their anti-Bush bias. They got the 100,000 by knocking on doors in 33 neighborhoods across Iraq. They simply asked Iraqis how many civilian deaths they knew about. They did not take any steps to avoid double counting. They didn't demand any proof, such as a funeral notice or a newspaper clipping. Instead they decided to just trust Iraqis to give them straight dope. So if you interview Baghdad Bob you know what kind of answers you're going to get. In that chapter, I also uncovered four other major technical flaws with that study. The 100,000 dead civilians claim is provably false.


Lopez: You've been to Iraq. How do some of these war myths affect our troops?

Miniter: I don't think it hurts morale, but I wish I had a dollar for every time a soldier asked me why the media never reports on the Iraq they see everyday: a booming economy, skyscrapers going up, free elections, a free press, and an increasingly effective new Iraqi army. When I saw General Barbeio in Tikrit, I noticed that all the television sets were tuned to Fox News. One officer told me that the soldiers couldn't stomach CNN. I'm sure that there is no Army policy on what channel the soldiers can watch; but the men have clearly voted with their remotes.

Lopez: How much information is the fault of foreign sources ? with agendas? And lazy American journalists picking them up?

Miniter: Quite a bit. The myth that bin Laden is on dialysis came from Pakistan's intelligence service via its newspapers. Pakistan also gave us the myth that Mossad warned the Jews to stay home on 9/11. That is classic disinformation. The media generates a lot of these myths by giving credence to ideologically motivated critics ? and they have grown too lazy to check. A lot of what we think about as liberal bias is really just poor editing. Editors don't push reporters to present evidence or to evaluate what anonymous sources are telling them. A simple question from a single editor could have saved Newsweek a lot of embarrassment: Can a U.S.-issued Koran actually fit down the bowl of an Army toilet? And 60 Minutes could have saved itself some grief by asking just how credible the claims of General Lebed that Russian suitcase-sized nuclear devices had gone missing. Lebed was known for his wild stories, and U.S. officials had monitored the destruction of such portable nukes years before the story broke.

Lopez: Speaking of foreign entryways, why do you pile on Canada?

Miniter: Because the Canadian border is the real threat, at least from al-Qaeda terrorists. No al-Qaeda operatives have been captured along the southern border, but a number have slipped in from Canada, including Ahmed Ressam, who planned to blow up Los Angles International Airport in 1999. When you read all the evidence, you will know why the FBI worries more about the threat from the north . . .

Lopez: Why do you sell your soul to Halliburton?

Miniter: And all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Actually, it is a great story ? with many important details that have been ignored by the mainstream media. Halliburton's profit margin in Iraq last year was 2.4 percent. Even municipal bonds are better investments than that. That's one reason that Halliburton wants to sell the division with the Iraq contracts. Oh, and did you know that Halliburton got the big contract before Bush and Cheney were elected?

Lopez: Which myth most surprised you?

Miniter: Several ones really surprised me. The notion that terrorism is caused by poverty especially. It turns out that the average al-Qaeda member is from an intact family, has at least a college degree, is more likely to be married than not, and was not particularly religious until he joined a terror cell. A former CIA officer who is now a forensic psychiatrist lays out fascinating information about what really causes terrorism in chapter 16 and describes the techniques used to keep these otherwise promising people on the path to murder. That was an eye-opener to me, and I have been interviewing intelligence officers for years.

Another surprise was that we did find some WMDs in Iraq. Okay, no stockpiles, but artillery shells loaded with sarin gas as well as other chemical weapons. The antiwar crowd always says "no evidence" ? nada, zip, zero ? and they are provably wrong.

Lopez: You should get these myths on postcards. Have them at the door at the bar down the block. Think of the impact on public opinion!

Miniter: Getting the myth onto a postcard is easy. Getting all of the evidence against it on a postcard would require really small font. We'd have to give all patrons little magnifying glasses.

Lopez: If people don't have the time for all 22 myths, what would you like them to grab from your book? What's most important?

Miniter: That's like asking which one of your children is your favorite. Even if there is an honest answer, it is tactless to give it.

On the other hand, most people tend to think that the chapters on WMDs found in Iraq, the voluminous connections between Iraq and al Qaeda and the Halliburton are important. I particularly like the chapters on suitcase nukes, that Iraq is not another Vietnam, and the one about terrorism not causing poverty ? partly because they take the reader into new and unexpected directions.

Lopez: Is this war ? the Iraq part in particular ? salvageable? Katie Couric makes me feel like it's not.

Miniter: Yeah, she's my favorite military expert too. I have been to Iraq and I think that we are winning. The press simply doesn't play up allied victories; they save that precious air time for the next car bomb. Consider the recent campaign in a place called Tall Afar, near the Syrian border. An Iraqi-American force (with more Iraqis than Americans) took on dug insurgents in A series of battles in September 2005. The enemy was quickly beaten and more than 100 terrorists were taken prisoner. Tall Afar was important because it cut a key enemy supply route from Syria to Baghdad and drove the enemy out of its desert strongholds. Or consider that the al-Zarqawi master bomb-maker was recently captured in Northern Iraq, as well as a bomb factory. And so on. Nor has it escaped the notice of Iraqis that most of the victims of the insurgency are civilians and most of suicide bombers are foreigners, some 60 percent hail from Saudi Arabia according to the death notices posted on jihadist websites. The war reporting from Iraq is shockingly one-sided, partly because some of the fixers and translators employed by some Western journalists once worked from Saddam's regime.

   
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/miniter200511030759.asp

Interesting, counterintuitive piece on Rosa Parks, government, the private sector, and segregation.

Rosa Parks and history

By Thomas Sowell

Oct 27, 2005

Syndicated columnist

The death of Rosa Parks has reminded us of her place in history, as the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in accordance with the Jim Crow laws of Alabama, became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

 Most people do not know the rest of the story, however. Why was there racially segregated seating on public transportation in the first place? "Racism" some will say -- and there was certainly plenty of racism in the South, going back for centuries. But racially segregated seating on streetcars and buses in the South did not go back for centuries.

 Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

 Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.

 These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit -- and you don't make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about.

 It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process.

 It was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of the white voters to demand racial segregation. If some did and the others didn't care, that was sufficient politically, because what blacks wanted did not count politically after they lost the vote.

 The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. Private owners of streetcar, bus, and railroad companies in the South lobbied against the Jim Crow laws while these laws were being written, challenged them in the courts after the laws were passed, and then dragged their feet in enforcing those laws after they were upheld by the courts.

 These tactics delayed the enforcement of Jim Crow seating laws for years in some places. Then company employees began to be arrested for not enforcing such laws and at least one president of a streetcar company was threatened with jail if he didn't comply.

 None of this resistance was based on a desire for civil rights for blacks. It was based on a fear of losing money if racial segregation caused black customers to use public transportation less often than they would have in the absence of this affront.

 Just as it was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of whites to demand racial segregation through the political system to bring it about, so it was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of blacks to stop riding the streetcars, buses and trains in order to provide incentives for the owners of these transportation systems to feel the loss of money if some blacks used public transportation less than they would have otherwise.

 People who decry the fact that businesses are in business "just to make money" seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.

 Black people's money was just as good as white people's money, even though that was not the case when it came to votes.

 Initially, segregation meant that whites could not sit in the black section of a bus any more than blacks could sit in the white section. But whites who were forced to stand when there were still empty seats in the black section objected. That's when the rule was imposed that blacks had to give up their seats to whites.

 Legal sophistries by judges "interpreted" the 14th Amendment's requirement of equal treatment out of existence. Judicial activism can go in any direction.

 That's when Rosa Parks came in, after more than half a century of political chicanery and judicial fraud.

Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2005/10/27/173033.html

Perhaps a bit too inside baseball, this piece provide a good overview of Posse Comitataus, and argues against making the military first responders.


October 26, 2005, 8:24 a.m.
Maintaining the Divide
Posse Comitatus should stay as is.

Mackubin Thomas Owens


I see that my good friend and Naval War College colleague Derek Reveron has climbed aboard the military-should-be-the-lead-agency-in-domestic-catastrophes bandwagon. He's in good company. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the president, members of Congress, editorial writers, and pundits have been making the case for increased use of the military in domestic affairs. The only folks that seem to be opposed are the governors, but we can write off their opinion as an attempt to defend their own turf.

I certainly agree with Derek that the military is extremely well equipped to act as the lead agency in disaster relief. If we are looking for efficiency and respect, the military outshines most other agencies, whether at the local, state, or federal level. After all, generals and admirals become generals and admirals because they are good at getting things done ? and often being outspoken. Who didn't love it when General Honore blasted a reporter for being "struck on stupid"?

But why stop at disaster relief? The American political system is messy and inefficient, but if efficiency is the main criterion in deciding who does what domestically, why not let the military take the lead in everything? The most obvious response is that there is a little document called the Constitution that established a federal republic. Domestic affairs are primarily the concern of the states, not the federal government, and most assuredly not the U.S. military.

Of course there are many things the military can do on the domestic front, especially during natural disasters. But before we take steps to further involve the U.S. military in domestic affairs, we need to answer two fundamental questions: Do we really want the American public turning to the military for solutions to the country's problems? And do we really want to saddle the military with a variety of new, non-combat missions, vastly escalating its commitment to formerly ancillary duties?

If we do, we will find that we have involved the military in the political process to an unprecedented and perhaps dangerous degree. These additional assignments will also divert focus and resources from the military's central mission of combat training and war-fighting.

The United States has avoided such extreme manifestations of "bad" civil-military relations as coups and military dictatorship. Nonetheless, some observers have argued that the state of American civil-military relations has deteriorated seriously since the end of the Cold War. They fear that current trends will result in a large, semi-autonomous military so different and estranged from society that it will become unaccountable to those whom it serves. They are also concerned about the politicization of the military, and the increased employment of the military in domestic affairs will only exacerbate this trend.

Indeed, concern about politicization of the military was the catalyst for passage of the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878. A perusal of recent articles reveals the undeniable fact that most commentators do not understand the Posse Comitatus Act at all: It does not constitute a bar to the use of the military in domestic affairs. It does, however, ensure that such use is authorized only by the highest constitutional authority: Congress and the president.

Posse Comitatus has a Valuable History
The Constitution itself does not prohibit the use of the military in domestic affairs. Indeed, the U.S. military has intervened in domestic affairs some 167 times since the founding of the Republic. In the Anglo-American tradition, the first line of defense in enforcing the law is the posse comitatus, literally "the power of the county," understood to be the people at large who constituted the constabulary of the shire. When order was threatened, the "shire-reeve" or sheriff would raise the "hue and cry" and all citizens who heard it were bound to render assistance in apprehending a criminal or maintaining order. Thus, the sheriff in the American West would "raise a posse" to capture a lawbreaker.

If the posse comitatus was not able to maintain order, the force of first resort was the militia of the various states, the precursor of today's National Guard. In 1792, Congress passed two laws that permitted implementation of Congress's constitutional power "to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions": the Militia Act and the "Calling Forth" Act, which gave the president limited authority to employ the militia in the event of domestic emergencies. In 1807, at the behest of Pres. Thomas Jefferson, who was troubled by his inability to use the regular Army as well as the militia to deal with the Burr Conspiracy of 1806-07, Congress declared the Army to be an enforcer of federal laws, not only as a separate force, but as a part of the posse comitatus.

Accordingly, troops were often used in the antebellum period to enforce the fugitive slave laws and suppress domestic violence. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 permitted federal marshals to call on the posse comitatus to aid in returning a slave to his owner, and in 1854, Franklin Pierce's attorney general, Caleb Cushing, issued an opinion that included the Army in the posse comitatus:

A marshal of the United States, when opposed in the execution of his duty, by unlawful combinations, has authority to summon the entire able-bodied force of his precinct, as a posse comitatus. The authority comprehends not only bystanders and other citizens generally, but any and all organized armed forces, whether militia of the states, or officers, soldiers, sailors, and marines of the United States.

Troops were also used to suppress domestic violence between pro- and anti-slavery factions in "Bloody Kansas." Soldiers and Marines participated in the capture of John Brown at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
After the Civil War, the U.S. Army was involved in supporting the Reconstruction governments in the southern states and it was the Army's role preventing the intimidation of black voters and Republicans at southern polling places that led to the passage of the Posse Comitatus Act. In the election of 1876, Pres. Ulysses S. Grant deployed Army units as a posse comitatus in support of federal marshals' maintaining order at the polls. In that election, Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Samuel Tilden with the disputed electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. Southerners claimed that the Army had been misused to "rig" the election.

If It Ain't Broke
While the Posse Comitatus Act is usually portrayed as the triumph of the Democratic Party in ending Reconstruction, the Army welcomed the legislation. The use of soldiers as a posse removed them from their own chain of command and placed them in the uncomfortable position of taking orders from local authorities who had an interest in the disputes that provoked the unrest in the first place. As a result, many officers came to believe that the involvement of the Army in domestic policing was corrupting the institution.
And this is the crux of the issue. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the use of the military to aid civil authorities in enforcing the law or suppressing civil disturbances except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or by an act of Congress. As the foremost authority on the use of the military in domestic affairs writes:

All that [the Posse Comitatus Act] really did was to repeal a doctrine whose only substantial foundation was an opinion by an attorney general [Caleb Cushing], and one that had never been tested in the courts. The president's power to use both regulars and militia remained undisturbed by the Posse Comitatus Act. . . .But the Posse Comitatus Act did mean that troops could not be used on any lesser authority than that of the president and he must issue a "cease and desist" proclamation before he did so. Commanders in the field would no longer have any discretion but must wait for orders from Washington. [Italics added.]

Do we really want to return to the days when "lesser authority" than the president could use the military for domestic purposes?
Derek observes that the U.S. military is respected and trusted by the American people. But what happens to this trust and respect the first time a soldier shoots an American citizen? As it is, the U.S. military has had to fend off attempts by domestic law-enforcement agencies to rope them into cooperation that could have resulted in the death of U.S. citizens. For example, an Army officer observed that "had legal advisers to Joint Task Force 6 [the military's counter-drug taskforce] which supported the BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms] during the siege at the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, not questioned that agency's request for support, the Armed Forces would have been inappropriately and illegally involved in an operations that ultimately led to the deaths of U.S. citizens."

Even so, the fact is that Congress may at any time authorize the president to employ the U.S. military for domestic purposes, including law enforcement. Separately, the president has all the power he needs to employ the military in domestic affairs if he needs to do so. It is the so-called Insurrection Act. Although intended as a tool for suppressing rebellion when circumstances "make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State or Territory by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings," presidents used this power on five occasions during the 1950s and 60s to counter resistance to desegregation decrees in the south. Reports indicate that President Bush chose not to invoke the Insurrection Act in the case of Katrina because of concerns that such an action would have been viewed as federal bullying of a southern Democratic governor.

Posse Comitatus is Still Relevant
Derek's comments notwithstanding, increasing the use of the military for domestic purposes will adversely affect its ability to wage war. The U.S. military is structured to play "away games." It is good at protecting the United States by threatening the sanctuary of our adversaries abroad. There are, of course, things the military can do to enhance the security of the American homeland, but we should not be blurring further the distinction between military activities and domestic affairs. To paraphrase what Casper Weinberger said in opposition to the use of the military in the drug war, further weakening the Posse Comitatus Act in response to terrorism makes for terrible national security policy, poor politics, and guaranteed failure in the terror war.

The response to Katrina indicates that procedures at all levels of government must be streamlined. But the maintenance of both healthy civil-military relations and a combat-ready force dictates that we don't repeal or modify the Posse Comitatus Act or give the president power beyond that of the Insurrection Act. And by no means should we expect the military to go beyond its current mission of supporting civil authorities in the event of domestic emergencies.

? Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.

    
http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens200510260824.asp